We don't talk about the Moose

Years ago I went to Minnesota. When I came home, my son said something funny about a moose. I gave him the only reasonable answer a father can give.

We don’t talk about the Moose.

That was four years ago. He has asked me every single day since. “Dad, will you tell me about the moose?” And every day I give him the same answer, though eventually I got creative and upgraded it.

Not until you’re 18.

Every day. It is a thing of love. It warms my damn heart every time.

Anyway.

What started as something funny turned into a mission. I wanted to turn the moose into something real, something that actually happens when he turns 18. I did not know what. I just knew a promise that runs four years deep deserves a payoff bigger than a punchline.

Here is the part I did not see coming: chasing that turned into changing the way I think and operate. All of it.

The machine I was working with

Let me be honest about it. I chase squirrels all day long. I always have. I start things with my hair on fire and have a genuinely hard time closing them, because focus and I have an arrangement where it leaves early and I cover the shift. For most of my life the plan was to just work harder than the problem. GenX, never gave many f*cks. Turns out I don’t think I had any to begin with.

So when I finally sat down with all these new tools everyone would not shut up about, I did not ask the question everybody asks. I did not ask what they could do. I asked a different one.

What if I took all of this and applied it to how my brain works. And, more importantly, to how it does not.

Fill in the missing pieces. Reinforce the existing bits. Build the thing that closes the loops I leave open, remembers what I drop, and finishes the shift when focus walks out. Not a tool. A second brain, in the most literal sense I could manage.

That is when everything clicked, and it has been an absolute sprint ever since.

What it turned into

It became real the minute I made something real with it. That turned into wovely.app, a genuine product, out in the world. While I was learning on that, I started pointing the same method at problems at work. Then bigger ones. Every time I pushed to go bigger, it has not pushed back yet.

So I kept going. I replicated entire organizations of little robots that all have jobs to do. A marketing department. A finance desk that does the math. An intelligence unit. At one point I made Shark Tank the board of directors of a PDF, because I needed my business plan argued with and nobody was awake.

Somewhere in there I also lost the weight I had been meaning to lose for a decade. I am down to 179 pounds. I am not saying the robots did that. I am saying that when the noise in your head finally has somewhere to go, you get a surprising amount of yourself back.

At two in the morning a few nights ago I wrote my sons a letter. The short version said: no matter your age or your struggles, you have the tools and the talent. Believe in yourselves. Take the swing. Somewhere down the line, this will make sense.

The moose is the long version.

What I do now

I run a practice built on one idea, and it is not a technology idea. Most people do not need superpowers. They need the pile to get smaller. The mom who needs the budget to finally work, the bills to pay themselves on time, the family calendar to stop being a group hallucination. The owner who needs the follow-up sent, the schedule handled, the thing they keep meaning to fix actually fixed. That is what I build, and I hand it over, and then I break it in front of you so you know where it fails before it fails on you.

Every Thursday at 9:00 PM ET I do it live, for free, on whatever real problem somebody brings me. Lately I have been doing it at night too, on camera, granting wishes. If you have a task you hate, bring it. Watch it die. It costs nothing and you keep what gets built.

One more thing, for the record. My family signed off on this story on conditions. My older son wishes to be identified henceforth as G-Money. Jack, a purist, will be Jack. My wife approved on the sole condition that she be referred to as Snake Lady.

These are the people I work for.

G-Money turns 18 soon. The moose is almost ready.

Written by Adam LaBare. The family names in this piece are the family’s own conditions for telling it. Published on 2ndbrainway.com, August 27, 2026.