ISAAC PINO INTERVIEW – Beating the Market With Alternative Investments

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to help you bring your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm Chris Larsen.

And I'm Caleb Welborn.

You can get our free book Next.

Level income@nextlevelincome.com Our guest today is Isaac Pino. Isaac is a partner at Huckleberry Capital Management, which is an alternative investment manager serving individuals, wealth managers and institutions. He's had an interesting path to where he is today, including working as a forensic CPA with Deloitte and a senior industry analyst with the Motley fool and was the head of a family office for an ultra high net worth family. Isaac, thank you for joining us on the show.

It's good to be here.

Isaac, can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up with Huckleberry Capital? And I also want to hear about what a forensic accountant is, so maybe you can dive into that. That sounds like some CSI auditor. Sounds like some CSI stuff, man.

Yeah, yeah. So I'll start with that.

Please do.

My, my past. I started working as a CPA out of school and I figured that's the route I was going to go. And some of that was influenced by my interest in investing. So, you know, a couple years into to business school, which I ended up doing my undergraduate degree with my master's degree, got turned on to Warren Buffett, you know, and he had always said that accounting is the language of business. Right. And it was also a very good job market for accountants at the time. That was what year roundabout 2007 is when I ended up graduating. Yeah, 2006 was very good. 2007 was, was still very strong in the market we were in. I was down and graduated from Oklahoma and was looking at the Dallas office for Deloitte. And so I went and worked at Deloitte as an auditor. And I thought, you know, I might be banging my head against the wall if I do this for much longer than an intern. And I had a good relationship with a couple partners and they said, oh, this forensic litigation area is really booming right now. And fortunately, you know, did a good enough job to be selected to join their financial advisory services group. And what we did is we investigated large corporations that were involved in some form of accounting misstatement. So it could be, you know, without intent, like Enron. Well, Enron would be fraud. So it could be, you know, forensic and implies that there's a crime or something like this. But a lot of times it's just like a misled negotiation between companies, you know, contract gone poorly.

Gotcha.

Recognizing expenses in a way that. That pushes the financial statement forward to collect that revenue. And then there were some cases that would be on the other end of that spectrum. So we'd be looking at active fraud within a company. Wow. Yeah. So it's a good place to cut your teeth and. And probably went too far, you know, with Buffett saying, you need to understand the language of business all the way down.

Yeah. You live the country.

Yeah. Like, dissect some faz accounting standard, which, you know, you end up getting so narrow that you're like, well, where does my career go from here? Like, am I going to be the expert on this standard? So I at some point decided, you know, this was good. It was a good experience, but I wanted to change directions after that. Yeah.

So where'd you go after that?

Yeah. So winding journey after that. But at that time was 2007, and I was working out of the Dallas office, and we were starting to outsource a lot of our projects. I say outsource. I mean, we weren't really working in house. We weren't even working in the Dallas market a lot of times. So I found myself in Louisiana doing support for FEMA and all the contract managements related to Hurricane Katrina. And then Hurricane Rita hit. We were down there when the hurricane was hitting, like it was all hands on deck. We couldn't leave our building for a while. And so you get these very varied projects when you're working in this group. And so at some point I thought, well, I want to go to a major city. You know, hanging out in Baton Rouge is one thing, but try to get out and do something on the other side of the country. So I went and did bankruptcy work in D.C. that started to grow, as you can expect, about 2008. You guys know the time frame?

Yeah. Wow. And I was. I was up there.

Right. You were living there.

Yeah. We crossed paths.

Like Clarendon or.

Yeah, yeah.

Somewhere around there.

You were on the way, and I was on the way out.

Moving down here. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Okay. So I started in 2008 down there, and I worked for an agency called the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. They were right there, 13th and K. And it was great. It was analyzing distressed companies that needed some kind of backstop for their insurance, their pension insurance plan. And a lot of people have never heard of this agency, but if they receive any kind of private pension, you know, from their corporation, whether it's IBM or ge, one of the airlines, you know, we were there stepping in to understand what the company was capable of paying and really backstopping the pension, you know, employees for the last 50 years, that they would receive their benefits in retirement. And so, you know, that wasn't the investment world that I was looking for, but it was kind of the polar opposite, like, finding out what went wrong at these companies and how the financial statement analysis would detect that. Yeah.

So how'd you end up in private equity? You have a kind of interesting story with the family office and. Yeah, it was very. I remember when you told me when we hadn't had lunch the first time, it was. It's kind of. Kind of unbelievable when you tell me, like, find an ad in the paper almost.

Yeah. I mean, I'm a big believer in serendipity to an extent. So some things just happen because you reconnect with people in your career and you really appreciated the things that you did with them five, ten years ago, and something crops up, and you've always talked to them about, you know, maybe we can do something together in the future. With the family office, it was more just complete, you know, fortuitous luck. But I was. My wife decided and convinced me that DC didn't offer the outdoors adventures that she was looking for.

I think I concur. I think I concur with her on that one.

So living here, Asheville, we're spoiled. Yeah, you kind of forget. It took us two hours to go camping when we were living in the middle of the city, but so she and I decided, let's try the west coast out for size. And she got into University of Oregon. And. And that, in and of itself, is a bit of a crazy story. You know, I kind of convinced her to go out there and check out the small city of Eugene, Oregon. And, yeah, I was working for the Motley fool at the time. You may have heard of the Motley Fool.

I love them, man. I spent countless hours when I was in college. That's how I cut my investing teeth back in the late 90s. I was probably one of the, you know, early adopters there. Maybe one of the first thousand. Yeah, definitely. There's like six people there when I was starting to read them.

That's so funny. Yeah, they had. If people started investing in the late 90s, they knew the Motley Fool.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Hands down, it was one of the top five Internet brands in the world. Yeah.

It's incredible.

It's just crazy. And they've. It's been a long journey for them, but they're they're going strong here.

25 killing. Yeah.

It's so great now.

I just. It's, you know, obviously with our. With our mission on the show of educating investors and, you know, all the. All the educational resources that they had, it was just. To me, it was amazing. You know, I read. Was it Tom's first book? They wrote. The brothers wrote it together. Right. Their first book, the Motley Fool.

It's a Motley fool investment guide. And then Rule breakers, rule makers.

Yep.

I was. I was before that when I started reading them. So it's really cool. Really smart story too. Yeah.

Yeah, fantastic. Never thought I would end up going to work there when I was, you know, up two in the. Two in the morning reading their blog. Right, right. Yeah. So then I went there and they have a phenomenal culture. That's their whole thing. Thing is just, you know, getting inspired. People like you and I that are so passionate about what it is that they bring to the forefront, which is education and investing, but then the culture kind of trickles down and. And they allow people to work from remote, you know, So I guess this is a long way of saying I kind of had that flexibility to work remote for them. And so when my wife wanted to move to the west coast, we went and worked something out that I was able to keep doing my job from Eugene, Oregon. So we took the leap of faith and we were there for about a year. I continued to write articles for them and continued to help with the senior industry analyst role and, you know, in a. In a roundabout way, started getting involved in the local investing community. And I wanted to really sink my feet into it. I didn't think in Eugene there would be anything that would be compelling enough for me to. To leave the Motley Fool. But I came across an ad posting, like you mentioned, and it was nondescript and cryptic. And it was a real estate firm. I mean, not too unlike what you're familiar with. You know, I didn't have the real estate background, but they were describing about buying and selling properties, and I was like, oh, they need a controller. That's not really the hat I'm wearing. And I went and met with a guy, and he worked at Deloitte in the past life, and he had experience that very much overlaid what I was doing. He said, we have an eye here with this family to pivot from this last generation and kind of the. Keep the wheels turning to making acquisitions and building something unique. And so I had to quickly learn how to be a controller and then try to reorient what was, you know, the past generation's legacy vision to something. Creating something new for the. The new generation of family members. So, yeah, Craigslist dad. That had no, That's.

That's crazy. That's crazy.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's not the usual typical way of getting into the family office world, but they really appreciated new perspectives.

Yeah.

On things. And so they thought that we. We brought that to the table. He was out from out of the state, and I was from out of the state and looked at things with a whole different lens.

Yeah, go ahead.

And you ended up heading up the whole office, right?

I did. I did. So it was in a nutshell, it was a turnaround exercise because we had, you know, it goes back to the forensic accounting thing, but there were a vast number of hard copy accounting records and older systems that needed to be modernized. And we also needed to understand how decisions were made for the last decade when all we had was one or two accountants that had been around and kind of keeping that memory in their head. So we went through that phase, and then after about a year, we got to a point where we could kind of move forward. And the individual that I was working for had, for family reasons, wanted to move back to the Denver area. He was from the wealth management side of things, and he kind of felt like, oh, you know, it's mostly an operational gig at this point, and Isaac's in a good position to take that over. And so, you know, I have to give credit to the board and everyone who's involved in that. But they took a leap of faith because I was relatively young and managing their family's money.

So wait, you were just. For the audience, you were how old managing a family office?

I was 33.

That's pretty impressive.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's an impressive story. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it was a good team. You know, we had people that were probably 33 years into their career.

Yeah, yeah.

That were a sounding board, you know, the trustees and the directors. So there was that. Great. You know, bring the energy and we'll bring the wisdom. Right.

Well, I'll tell you. So one of our first guests on the show was Richard Wilson, and he works. He's got the family office club. He works exclusively with family offices, and he was on when he released his book, Sent to Millionaires. So family's worth 100 million or more. And, you know, so talking to Richard and learning about how these families operate again, I think your story is incredible. How you ended up there and having that opportunity. It's really cool to hear how you got there.

Yeah, it's kind of like a startup. You learn as fast as you can, right?

Absolutely.

What would you say were some of the main lessons you learned working with an ultra wealthy family like that? And how would you say someone listening could take those lessons and apply it to their own life?

That's a great question. Yeah. I think the first part of what we did in the family office is just getting extremely organized about where we were being able to make decisions that were rooted in. Here's what the numbers tell us and kind of here's where we can look at our balance sheet and understand what we're working with. Right. You don't want to get too far ahead in your thinking. Probably all three of us would rather talk about investing than like the nuts and bolts of putting aside money on a monthly basis by not spending it or whatever. But there was a good amount of getting a clear picture of where we were as a group. And in a family office, it's more complex. I think it's a lot easier for most individuals to, you know, they don't own a variety of LLCs and a variety of entities. They're kind of looking at maybe a tool like mint.com or something that can actually organize everything for them and get a clear sense. We talked a lot about, you know, what we were trying to measure on that side, like what our target returns were, but we also talked a lot about what our values were. And so for the family, it was very much preserving the wealth for the next generation, making education a part of that. And I think these are all conversations that any individual investor could have. And then you get more into the portfolio management, which is maybe where you guys want to go. But there's a diversification strategy that most family offices employ that investors have. One, not had a ton of access to, but two, are rightfully skeptical of doing anything that's not plain vanilla in a way. But I think the market's moving in that direction where if I want to learn about what it is that you guys do, I can watch this podcast and I can get so knowledgeable on what it is that you do that it takes away that black box element of it. And so it's private market, which I think people by and large are hesitant to move away from because it ties up their funds or what have you. But that's, you know, the best investors in the. The wealthy world, they look at those alternatives because when the market takes a dip, you know, they're sitting there on something that's driven by the fundamentals of what they've invested in. And it does shortchange on the liquidity side. But we're all long term investors, right? And so we're willing to sit back and then we don't have to fret when the market doubles because we really know that underlying value is still there and the market's going to return five, seven years down the road and we're going to be sitting pretty.

That's great. It's a great thing. And we'd love to hear more about the specifics of what you do at Huckleberry Capital. But you mentioned something about values, Isaac, and one of our core values is investors first. So maybe you can share a little bit about how you've taken what you've learned and the values from the family office to Huckleberry Capital and then just dive in. Tell us a little bit more about the details and what you're, what you're doing with them here in Asheville.

Okay, great. The, the thing that appealed to me about Huckleberry, a friend of mine called me up and we used to work at the Motley fool together. He said, you know, you're running this family office. A lot of times family offices are interested in alternative strategies, you know, and so would you guys want to hear pitch from us? Because I've got this boutique registered and independent advisory practice and it's a long way of saying, you know, it's not a mainstream advisory provider, it's a financial advisory shop, but it's, it's a small scale and allows them to have the flexibility to offer a variety of things to investors. And so to, to your point about being investor first, well, that was just second nature at the Motley fool, right? If you ever really dug into their content and especially their services, I think if you skim the Motley fool, you get one impression, I think once you dig in and you're active with their community, reading their board posts and seeing that the founders are actively posting and corresponding, it's a very investor first, as tailored as it can possibly be to that individual's needs. And so the founder of Huckleberry kind of brought that ethos forward at Huckleberry. And it appealed to me because I looked at the family office, I said, I'm not going to leave here unless I can give them the tailored experience that they would want. Right. Because they're used to that. They have wealth managers. You know, people might think, oh, they have this family office, so they can manage that diverse array of investments. But you Know, it's really about doing the things that are right to offset, you know, the risk of their different investments. And so at Huckleberry, we are, you know, when I say alternative, I think of two things. I think of a business focused. You know, we're looking at the fundamentals of a business or real estate fund. And number two, we're looking to prioritize the offering to clients. We're not tied to a single broker, and beyond that, we're not even tied to something that's offered under our umbrella. So, you know, we might put together a fund, but we wouldn't necessarily recommend that fund anymore that we would one of the funds you guys put together, because at the right time and with the right people involved, that could be a better fit for clients. And there's very few advisors out there, I think, that can say that.

I agree. That's. No, that's awesome. And you know, I think a lot of, you know, I'd say like consumer investors, like your typical mainstream retail investor, they don't really know the differences. My MBA is in portfolio management. And when I did research into the industry, what I learned was a lot of these quote, unquote, financial advisors are really salespeople and they're selling a product from their company. Whereas, you know, like you said, it's a lot different to work with an advisor or registered investment advisor that doesn't have a tie to a specific product. And they can, they can give the client or the investor the right, the specific fit for their need. And now it's, it's really, it's, it's still rare, but I love the fact that it's growing in availability in the investment world.

What would you say that or how would you explain to someone the main differences between alternative investments and traditional investments? And what was it about alternative investments that led you to focus on.

Was part that the interests of the family I was working for were that they wanted to understand more about what they were invested in. You know, we would listen to what you might call like bulge bracket investment advisors come in there and I won't name any names, but they are Switzerland based or New York based and, and are in the news quite often.

Big shops.

Big shops. Big shops, exactly. And at a, at a high level, they could kind of tell you about what the portfolio was made up of. And so they'd start with their small cap stocks and start with mid cap, and they kind of just work through the portfolio and then compare it to the benchmark. And if you ever asked about a specific underlying Security. And. And it wasn't just me. It was the family that was kind of like, well, you know, you know, we're seeing this one month and then we're seeing something else. What. What's the difference here? And why are we holding, let's say, you know, Salesforce one month, and then all of a sudden it's gone. And that's a company that's grown 20% on the compound annual rate for 20 years. Why are we day trading that? You know, essentially. And so then they'd send you a report that an analyst on Wall street put together, and it would be so cryptic and jargon filled. It was the exact opposite of the motley full. Right. Like, who wants to read these reports that are, you know, revenue basis points. We're up 0.5. And it's just I could barely read these reports and. And take much away from them. And so that was important to me that Huckleberry would write about the investments we were. We were deploying capital into in a way that anyone could understand. And so the alternative space appealed to me for that, but also the alternative. I just mean not tethered to a broker dealer in a lot of ways. And kind of what he. What Chris was pointing to is, you know, most shops are just set up to offer these products and they all have their, you know, their white label on them, but they're not much different than what the next shop is offering.

Yeah, yeah. So what are some of the biggest challenges you've had, Isaac, as you've. As you've made this transition with Huckleberry Capital, and, you know, maybe you can share what the challenges have been and, you know, how you've. You've turned that into your current success with them.

Okay, sure. Biggest challenge is, is not having that expertise on the advisory world. When I started, so it's like, you know, I came from the due diligence side in a way. And, you know, we're. We're. Which we love. Yeah. Which we love. Right. It's working in bankruptcy. I'm just turning over companies, understanding what's going right, what's going wrong, and working the motley fool going through stocks, writing. You know, we publish like 25 articles a day, and I'm reviewing every single one of those. Wow. Always thinking about, you know, what are the drivers, what am I seeing? That's someone writes a take on a company and it resonates with me. But then the stock responds in a different way. Kind of what is going on in that narrative? There's. And so to come to the advisory world having kind of built those products and thought about those products a lot. And a lot of people come from the sales side. The hard thing was me, was for me to understand what everyone else was offering because having never stepped foot in an advisor office and the Motley fool even saying why would anyone have an advisor? You know, like they're not the biggest fans there. If you've ever read.

Yeah, they're big. Yeah, do it yourself. And that's, it's really cool because they basically said like everybody can be an investor like Warren Buffett. And there's a lot of power in that. You know, there really is. Which is, which is cool. But we've said this on the show in the past and we do work with, with some advisors, but your average investor actually gets more value out of an advisor than they lose in fees with a good advisor just because so many people don't really know what's going on. So I think, you know, most listeners on the show, they're, they're at a little bit of a different level. They're a little further along in their investing career. So, you know, it may be, it may be a little different. So I guess that's a good question. You know, who, what type of investors do you guys cater to?

At Huckleberry Capital, we started out catering to high net worth investors. For the most part. Coming from a family office made sense, was building relationships in that world. We've gotten to a point where we can bring something to the table that's not necessarily a high net worth investor. So we'll start around 50,000 to, you know, get an account up and running. And we might start by investing in the public stock market. That is our background at the Motley Fool. And again, we're going to practice a long term buy and hold. So people open an account with us. It's going to look a lot like private equity.

Right.

Like it's going to look a lot like locking it up and kind of checking the fundamentals of the business so often. And yes, we have the ability to, to sell on a daily basis, but we, we are, we don't have a preference for action is what we would call it. And I think in, in the finance world there's a lot of, you know, motion for the sake of motion.

So you're not paid to churn, Is that what you're.

We're not.

You're not paid.

Yeah, that's a great point. And it's not common. Yeah, it's a fee only advisory shop and so we're not paid to trade on commission.

Yeah, I know, like the operators that we work with at, you know, with our investors, same thing. We don't, we're not looking for operators that are, you know, taking money, selling deals. Taking money selling deals. You know, it's more long term, like you were saying, you know, buying for the fundamentals, long term period, you know, stable, cash flowing businesses, you know, or real estate. And it's a different philosophy than, you know, what you see out there. And again, I think a lot of people are just ignorant to this, unfortunately as investors. So yeah, again, Motley Fool's done a lot for investors. Kind of not exposing but just, you know, expanding people's knowledge of, of what goes on. And it's, you know, you see ETFs now, I think that they're bred out of that. People realize, oh, you know, you can just buy an ETF and pay a quarter of a percent and, and sit there or you want to get some more performance, you can work with a group like yours.

Exactly. Yeah, they definitely have that for years do it yourself mentality. But they are not going to say that the John Bogle Vanguard passive approach is a bad one. Right. So they're kind of like in the Warren Buffett territory where he says, do it like me if you have the experience that I have. Otherwise just set it and forget it. And so that's Somali fool's background too. Now they have their own funds and they practice that philosophy. But I would say to an investor getting an early start, if they find an advisor that can help them to, you know, set up a plan and kind of get things off the ground, that's a good one. If they want to start with a Vanguard etf, that's a great way to start too. And then you get to a certain level and you get to a point where you think you can do something that is truly unique, unique and outperform the market. Then you switch over to what we call the active side, you know, and anything that's not an ETF that matches the market is active investing. Right?

Yep, absolutely.

So how would you break down your investment philosophy philosophy with Huckleberry into just a few sentences?

Few sentences. Business first. Long term, you know, we focus on leadership a lot of. So those are the fundamental characteristics. And I would say those three. Business first. We had quotes on the wall to Motley Fool. Things of the nature. Buying a stock is not like buying a lottery ticket. You're a part owner in an enduring business. And so I believe it was Trying to attribute that. I can't think of it at the moment, but I will. And I think that there's a vast majority of the market that looks at it and says, oh, we're going to trade on these indicators and we're going to trade on the emotions of the market. And so then it can become a lottery ticket. And then you buy one and you wonder, it might not go down, it might not go up, it's just stagnant. But you start to get this feedback and you start to realize, oh, well, the drivers of the business aren't really what's going on in the chart symbols, it's what's happening inside the company. So you and I have talked about economic moats, and economic moats would be the first tenet of the business first philosophy. And so you get into some of the characteristics that might be in common with real estate. You know, what is a unique differentiator for the asset. And so it could be anything like, you know, rights to operate. So it's government mandated rights to run a railroad. Right. And that limits competition, which Warren Buffett loves railroads. He does, he does, yeah. Not many people can buy Burlington Northern right out, but he did. But you can invest in it in a small part.

There you go.

Buy some shares. Not Burlington Northern, but any of the other ones. So, yeah, we look at a lot of the same things that you guys might look at. So it's that right to operate. So it's like an intangible asset of the company that no one else can come in there and say, we have that, or it's an intangible asset that Nike has in its brand. You kind of go on down the list. And Buffett has written about these time and again where he looks at, he used to look at companies on a pure value basis. And so it'd be like for you guys buying a property that's just incredibly undervalued, but that might take a lot of turnaround effort to even get it livable. Right. And so he calls that cigar butt investing. Where have you ever heard that reference before?

I think I have heard it, but I don't remember exactly what it means.

It's basically, you know, you look at something and you say, I can get one more puff out of that. But it's on its last leg. You're not going to enjoy it for 10 years. Going to enjoy it for that brief moment in time, you're going to get it cheap because you pick it up off the street. And so we tend to look for more driven by the underlying value of the business, that it's going to be around for 10 years. And not that we're buying it incredibly cheap, but we want to flip it here in the next few months, but we want to buy it and hold it for a long period of time.

Yeah. What we would call value add investing. And that's what we've really focused on in our real estate portfolios in the past. You're buying stable businesses, and I tell investors we like real estate, and it's kind of like the Warren Buffett strategy. Real estate, stable business. Maybe it could be run better. Maybe it needs some investment to bring it up to the next level. No pun intended.

Yeah, I caught that.

So we talked about the Motley fool, and people are probably listening to you thinking, well, how do I learn more about, you know, alternative investments? And a lot of the guests we have on the show obviously specialize in that. What resources can you point people to, Isaac, when it comes to alternative investments?

Sure, sure. So Motley fool is a good place to start reading about the business ideas that we have behind our approach. You know, I would go and read some of their articles. I would also recommend one of the writers that left the Motley fool and now works at a, at a venture capital fund. His name is Morgan Housel. He's a. I don't know if you guys have ever come across his stuff, but, you know, wrote for the Wall Street Journal for a time and now writes under the Collaborative Fund and speaks more to what are the emotional factors that go into investing. And you have to kind of master those over time before, you know, before you can really have an idea and execute on that idea. You have to know that you're going to stick with your principles and not bring emotions to the front. Yeah. So I think Morgan Housel is a great writer. Phenomenal. Some other, you know, we write our letters. We typically publish those quarterly. We, we've been doing more and more monthly basis because the market has a lot to. A lot to kind of convey to us. Right. Lately. And as far as the alternative investment space, specifically, it's, it's. They're very unique. You know, every, every operator in that alternative world has something that they're offering. But I would say kind of going back to that core, you know, we think in terms of Buffett. So, you know, take a look at his documentary Becoming Warren Buffett. It's very interesting. One of the best documentaries I've seen in years. And then I agree that his, the book written about him, Roger Lowenstein's Buffet, the amazing American capitalist. That's a great one. And then you get this element of his approach, but also the mental, you know, the mental focus to be a long term investor during stretches that are profoundly volatile. Right. So I think those are great places to start and then kind of build up from there and then you can get more focused and things that you guys are off the cuff about, like asset based lending, you know, we don't want to go in too much depth on that. Sure. But you can kind of start to narrow. This is what interests me. After you have that underlying foundation.

Interesting. Yeah. I've actually been watching a lot of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings. They've been putting them on YouTube and I think some of them are even back from like the, maybe as early as like the 80s and they have some from like as recent as the Steers meeting. And so you can just watch these videos of him and Charlie Munger talking. Super interesting. They get all these interesting questions. And you had mentioned earlier, like remembering you're actually buying like basically a physical share of like a business when you're buying a stock or anything or when we buy properties, things like that. And he had said his light bulb moment came like in his eyes, he wasn't very successful early on when he was investing. I think he was still doing well when he was young, but he wasn't that successful. And he said, I'm pretty sure I'm attributing it to him, but when he was working with Benjamin Graham, or at least when the guy was his professor, the light bulb moment was when he realized you're not buying a piece of paper or a stock tick or any of that. You're actually buying part of this business and you're actually an owner in this business. And he's like, it sounds super obvious but he's like, but you know, a lot of people don't grasp that. And so I was like, wow, that's super interesting. That like even for him, it took a little bit for him to like get that formulated in his mind and he was able to move forward from that. So Isaac, if you could go back and Talk to your 25 year old self and with everything that you've learned along the years, just give your 25 year old self one piece of advice, what would that piece of advice be?

That's a great question. The piece of advice I would have is identify what is very interesting to you and go after that. But also pick apart the edges of that and understand what different directions you can Go. Buffett often talks about the circle of competence, and so knowing that circle of competence is very important, but I think at different times, he pushed the boundaries, and so that's kind of how he learned that. And I see this a lot in. In everything. You know, you guys being athletes, might be able to relate to that, but you look at. There's a great book out right now called Range, and it's breaking down success stories and how they might have focused on a field, but what they did is they experimented with other fields that were very near and, you know, relevant to that. And so they use Roger Federer, big tennis player. So, of course, my ears perk up as an example.

Amazing, amazing player.

Yeah. Couldn't quite pull it off recently at Wimbledon, but, yeah, he'll get another one. But, yeah. So the. The point is that for the last couple decades, we've. We've kind of heard the idea that you really need to focus and be laser focused. And. And he makes a comparison to Malcolm Gladwell saying that, you know, a chess player needs to focus on chess only, and. Or a golfer needs to focus like Tiger woods on golf. And I think if you look at someone like Buffett or Federer, he brings up Federer as an example and says he played so many different sports. He was in archery, I believe. I think he was definitely in soccer. Being in Switzerland and Europe, he did badminton. Just kind of like an array of sports. Had a mother that was a tennis coach. So you would be thinking, she's just kind of drilling that home. But she was like, no, let's do everything. Let's get that skill set expanded. And. And then, you know, you look at Buffett and he says, you know, I'm a better investor because I'm a business person. You know, I'm a better business person because I'm an investor. And so just wearing one of those hats can create an error. You know, a situation where you're kind of narrow in that field. You know, if I just went into financial advisory, I can't imagine what. What, you know, what that would look like and whether I'd even be saying what I'm saying right now. You know, probably be like, thinking through, these are the products we need to get to market. I don't really understand those products, but we need to get them out to the investors. And having that diversity of experiences, but within that same realm, I think that's very helpful down the road.

I think that's cool. And you think of it from Caleb and I. We raced together on the same team as a Cyclist, you're very specific and you're really in this unilateral motion, one dimensional motion, essentially, or 2D motion, you're not moving laterally. You know, when you're on a bike. And there's a lot of cyclists that develop injuries over a period of time. And you see more of the professional teams now, they're kind of doing other things. They're doing yoga or they're off season. They're, you know, moving weights and doing stuff to make them more durable as an athlete. And that was always my philosophy when I kind of reignited my career. It's like, well, if I can be injury free, that means I'm going to be more consistent training. I might not train as many hours on the bike, but I might be able to train more consistently. And, you know, especially as you get into as an older athlete, it makes a big difference. So I'm looking forward to reading that book. Range, you said it was range.

Yeah, very, very highly recommended. I think it's going to catch, catch on. And, you know, there's certain places where might not be as applicable. But I think to your point, you know, do it for longer because you, you have that diversity.

I love it. So if people want to get a hold of you, Isaac, how can they do that?

Oh, pretty easy to find. I'm right next door to this guy. All right, how about if they don't.

Walk by their office, how can they get in touch with you?

Yeah, so we are. I'm out of here, out of Asheville. And you can reach out to me@isaacinvesthuckleberry.com. you know, we publish a letter and would love to have more subscribers. So. And you know, invest huckleberry.com is our website. We have advisors on the East Coast. We have one who's hanging out in Texas, in Marfa, Texas, of all places. So we try to bring our experiences together under one umbrella. But having three different places that we call home.

Excellent. Well, we're going to have that in the show notes along with Next Level Income, our newly updated book. And we really appreciate you being on the show today, Isaac.

It's been a pleasure. It's awesome.

Yeah. Thank you for joining us.

Appreciate it.