Jake Brown: Alright, at the end of every episode we talk about changing the rules. We say let's change the rules. Let's unpack what that means to us. All right, before we dive in, we're not therapists, we're not doctors. ⁓ I need to put this into the bumper so that we don't have to say it every time. But ⁓ we're just two guys figuring this out, ⁓ figuring out this podcast too. ⁓ figuring out running businesses, growing businesses, and serving other business owners and leaders that have ADHD. ⁓ all right, Caleb, we're talking about changing the rules today. And you've told me a couple of stories. ⁓ but one, you were telling me about cheating while playing Capture the Flag. so so walk us through that.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah, man, a absolutely. And ⁓ this is part of what we were talking about, just an observation that I I've deemed the cornucopia strategy or the cornucopia play. And, you know, we talk about cornucopias. Like, try spelling that word. It's gonna give you a hard time. Like when I wrote it out, I'm like, have I been saying this incorrectly for all of my life? It looks like it's supposed to be cornucopia, because it's a you up there. It's like corn you copia or like I I don't know, you try to say it with like a Deep Southern like cornucopia or something like that. It's just a goofy word.
Jake Brown: Yeah, don't don't read words. As soon as you start reading words, you like don't know how to say them. It's like ⁓ Worships Worcestershire. Like I used to know how to say Worcestershire sauce. I I saw the word on the label one time and it's like, it's gone. It's gone.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. I I think those like New England towns you go to, like, ⁓ this is like Chestershire. ⁓ that's ⁓ Glosseter. Nope, that's yeah, it just it gets weird quickly. ⁓ so yeah, cheating playing capture with the flag. ⁓ all these summers growing up, I'd go down to there's this state park in Delaware called Cape Henlopen, and it's these like beautiful pine lands and the beach, like right where the ocean meets the bay. But it used to be home to this huge army base. And it was these like massive artillery cannons just hiding underneath in the the sand dunes in these bunkers, basically just to protect Philadelphia and the gunpowder industry in Wilmington from Nazi attack. It was built just before World War Two. And they actually got to use them like once on a U-boat out there. They got to surrender. Really cool, just at the end of the war. Like they would shoot artillery shells bigger than cars today out of these boats that were cover. So fascinating place.
Jake Brown: Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: But I'd go there every year as a kid for this camp and we just play hours of Capture the Flag. Because it was a World War II themed camp. I mean, this history nerd absolutely ate that up. But I realized something pretty quickly. I was just ⁓ I was overweight. I was clinically obese by the time I was twelve, not like morbidly, but definitely technically and asthmatic and l looking back now, knowing what I know about my neurotype being both Asperger's and ADHD, like There was no way if I tried to like run through the middle of the line to go get no
Jake Brown: Y y you weren't doing the hero play. Like carrying the American flag, running through as the hero, yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Gosh, my like lack of coordination, my reaction time, my ability to outrun anybody, none of that was there. So I realized pretty quickly if I want to have any chance possible of winning this, I really need to take a different approach here. I need to change the game instead of just running through the middle. And so I set out to really figure what were the boundaries of the map that I was playing or this area. And it would kind of differ sometimes, like you'd literally be around these old historic artillery cannons or mini bunkers. It was so cool. And I would like go all the way to the edge of the map as possible and like hide, crawl, army crawl, whatever. Sometimes, yes, I I would cheat and go a little bit completely outside of it. Well, I went through like an office building holding water. I was like, I need to win this game. Exactly. Yeah, they're like, what is this kid doing? This like 10-year-old boy. And so then the magic
Jake Brown: Stop at the water fountain, get a little drink. Hey Sarah, walk on out. ⁓ I just imagine an episode of the office where you come walking through with your like paintball gun or whatever. Anyway.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: I think Dwight would be just very confused about it. And so I the the point is I would show up somewhere along the back of the lines and I would have like a while to look for the flag before anybody would see me because nobody's guarding it. Nobody thinks anybody's back there. And you arrive at a place that the enemy is under prepared. There's no competition, it's uncontested. And if you arrive there over prepared, then that's when you win. That's when I would grab the flag and ideally just retreat right back into the shadows I came from and make it back over to my base and win. Occasionally I'd get caught and you'd have to like run for it. I'd I'd lose or you know.
Jake Brown: Yeah. Yeah, I thought of as you're explaining that, ⁓ I was thinking like X-Men, you know, Nightcrawler. ⁓ I don't know if you're familiar, but he's the one that's like, he's over here and all of a sudden he's like and he like shows up over here and it's like that's what it looks like to everybody else. Like all of sudden they're like, Wait, how'd how'd Caleb get where'd he come from? Yeah. Who is that guy?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Like, where how the how does that dude get over here? He's like wheezing as he's running away. Yeah, it was always super fun. And airsoft, I did that too with a sniper and a ghillie suit. And ⁓ but so I realized that as a kid, and then as I looked further along in life, there were just different times when that pattern showed up in business and elsewhere that the same exact features were present. Like I I noticed a market that was underserved. There was a lack of competition there. And then I just dove into it ⁓ at at first, kind of without without checking with anybody else to say like, ⁓ is this a good fit or not? Like, no, I see an opportunity and we have to take a sideways approach. So I I call it the cornucopia play because like we all can think about the hunger games, right? That's the only thing besides Thanksgiving that triggers the word cornucopia in our brains. Yeah, a hundred percent.
Jake Brown: That in you know, spelling tests apparently, 'cause we would fail.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Hundred percent. And so like I I've only ever seen the one Hunger Games movie. It it was pretty good. Nothing against it. I just haven't gotten around to seeing the others. And ⁓
Jake Brown: 'Cause you know, kids, you don't have time to watch movies when you have kids.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ my gosh, yeah, they're they're coming out my ears over here. I think I hear one actually now. And so yeah, dude, they're they're a huge blessing. They're a huge blessing. But so the first Hunger Games movie, right, you get all the different tribute people from all their different places that they're coming from and they're trying to battle it out to see who survives. And the only people who what is it, like one or two are allowed to survive at the very end of it from like a given
Jake Brown: ⁓ I love it, man. Kids are part of life. Yeah, it's supposed to be one, yeah. Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Right, it's one. And so there's this cornucopia right where everybody starts, just full of all these weapons and survival gear and stuff, and everybody just runs for it except for Katniss. She looks at it, she sizes it up and says, Whoever wins this is very likely to win the whole thing. However, the odds of winning this are so low, the odds of mortality here are ridiculously high. I have a better chance at outright survival if I just go run the opposite way right into the woods. Take my chances there, just try to outlast and then sneak up on people eventually over time. And that's what wound up doing it. But yeah.
Jake Brown: Yeah. Yeah, real real quick, ⁓ can I un can I interrupt kind of say something that like dawned on me? Yeah. ⁓ so as you're explaining that Chronicopia, like the in the Hunger Games, the idea is Katniss had a long-term goal that didn't match other people's short-term goals. Like if her long-term goal is to survive, which I think everybody probably they were like trying to win to win or whatever, they're but they're all trying to survive. So they dive into the mess.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ dude, yeah, totally. Let's look back this.
Jake Brown: Because it's like, I gotta get a weapon so that I can survive. And she's like, Yeah, so that's not act that that pit stop isn't actually on my path, you know? And I think that for so many of us, like you were mentioning earlier, the same thing with, you know, anytime you play Capture the Flag, that messy middle where everybody just kind of attacks and runs and everything, you go, That actually doesn't work for me. I'm gonna just kinda Come over here in the shadows, barely outside. You know, I've been places where it's like they got the floodlights on this space where you're playing at night, and you're like, how can I skirt just under the floodlights? Actually, I'm thinking of like all of the movies and everything that I love, man. ⁓ all those like great action films where they're like walking around you know, along the fence under the line and you're like, Surely this multi-million dollar facility would know that their light was not shining on the engine. ⁓ but anyway, so back in, you're talking about that finding this
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ yeah.
Jake Brown: this path where you go, ⁓ I want something. The the path that somebody laid in front of me, the one that is the popular one, the one that is, you know, that everybody's doing, you just kind of look and go, Yeah, that didn't fit. Like
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Right. Yeah. You just figure out like this isn't gonna work for me. Maybe this is gonna work for somebody else, but it's not gonna be my path to success there. And that's not to have necessarily a self doubt attitude to be like, I don't know if I can really pull this off unless I do this other approach here. I feel like that's a bad way of looking at it. There's much more positive way to say, I'm really competitive. I really wanna win this thing, but the odds are just so low, like i if any kind of loss is unacceptable, maybe this is a different reframing. So like when you look at the stakes of something, losing in the Hunger Games means you die. That's an unacceptable stake. Like it's not just that you want to win, it's that you want to avoid failure. And I I think in business, like what even is winning at the end of the day? Like most people really can't define that. But I I think defining losing is a little bit easier. You can say, all right, losing means going broke.
Jake Brown: Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: losing my house, losing my family because of the stress that I just put them through, whate whatever that is. Exactly. And if you're looking for ways to try and minimize the chances of failure, taking that really oblique angle into whatever you're doing, showing up unexpected it in an over prepared way, like I I mean that's classic military strategy too. I I think we talked a little here at the start. I
Jake Brown: Yeah. Yeah. Can't can't feed kids, yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: I I used to go to back in high school, it was a full time junior ROTC school. I I was on path to go to Naval Academy. That was what I wanted to do. ⁓ I I have no idea how the threat has met.
Jake Brown: So you you were in with the ladies. You were in with the ladies, right? Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: With a lake. I don't I don't think I talked to any in those days. And still that list is very small for me. It's my wife and three daughters. But no, you're good. That but really though, that's ⁓ that that was where I wanted to go. But I made some changes one summer, went decided I wanted to be a pastor and came back and was like, Hey, I know I'm like top five in my class on this trajectory to go to the academy.
Jake Brown: Ha ha ha. I'm just teasing you, I'm sorry.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Listen, give that opportunity to somebody else. I d I don't want a role in the regimental command structure this year. Pass that to somebody else. And that happened. But then by the time I ended at school, even though that was still the path that I was on, was saying like I I want to go into the ministry, not the military. I I wound up somehow getting ranked thirteenth in the five hundred and thirty student regiment, but in a like totally different thing that nobody else wanted. They're just like, Caleb, c can you do this for us? Like, can you come be the public affairs officer guy? And I did the announcements every day. I welcomed like senators, governors, like all kinds of crazy people to the school and and that's it. Yeah.
Jake Brown: Which like you're explaining this. Now this is everybody listen, this is the second time I've heard this, and I'm still like, this is amazing. So what's funny is you took a different path. You're like, and you got to do all this other just wild stuff that probably was better for your brain anyway. You know, like you got to meet these really cool people, all these stories, you had all these great experiences that you wouldn't have had if you were just in line, right? So then the other thing is, yeah, and you went out of line and did this weird stuff over here, and then at the end of the day, you showed up and people are like.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah. Hundred percent and there's none of that under the gun press.
Jake Brown: Wait a minute, where'd this guy come from? Just like on Capture the Flag, just all of a sudden you're in the you're top ranking in the top again and they're like, wait a minute, where'd this guy come from? You're over here doing your weird thing and just show up and so here's a question for you. I don't even know if you remember this. If you think back when you were doing the hard work in line to cry climb the ranks and everything, and when you did the weird job with public affairs and everything, and then you just ended up at the front of the line, which one felt harder?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ my gosh. The the corporate grind. A hundred percent. Yeah, trying to go be a platoon leader, then a battalion leader, regimental commander. That that was just a big grind. You always had to be on point, you always had to be perfect. You there was no room for creative freedom, creativity, production, whatever. But going to be a public affairs officer at the battalion level, like, hey, nobody really does this. And I showed up there, like, I I wanna do a really great job of this. And then that's how I got the regiment role. And then I'd like I I basically changed the game on how
Jake Brown: That's awesome.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: That role was conducted henceforth. Like the announcements were just a really drab thing for a long time. And I twisted them up, made them fun. I I did the whole Robin Williams good morning Vietnam thing. Literally, yeah. The school initials were DMA, Delaware Military Academy. And I would just shout it into the the microphone there a couple days away. Good morning. And it was like 7 30 AM. And yeah. Yeah, not a hundred percent. People loved it though.
Jake Brown: ⁓ Yes! Good morning Vietnam! That's what I was gonna ask. Love it! Nice. ⁓ okay, so not nice, but that's great. Okay. So I have a couple man, my brain is running so many things. Like, first off, I just keep imagining you like just like walking through an office building playing after the flag. ⁓ but so I wanna thinking back on business, ⁓ I have a couple ideas where was thinking the idea of following the rules that the way that they're laid out for everybody else, I think
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: Neurotypicals are drawn toward the if you do this, it will work. They're drawn toward that systematic ⁓ way that things work, cause and effect, just constant cause and effect, to where we need more experimentation in what we're doing. And sometimes the r the right way, the system for us, is one that takes us out of the way, you know? That takes us ⁓ on a different path so we can figure out something. We actually learn a little bit more about ourselves as we go. ⁓ in one way that ⁓ like an example that I have used in my like in my coaching business now and consulting right now is when I was on LinkedIn, I was trying to figure out how to grow my LinkedIn presence more. I wanted more followers, I want to engage with more people. And it just ⁓ one of my friends, ⁓ Paul introduced me to this concept of micro weirds. He's like, don't share your macro weirds because that scares people. But what are the micro weirds? What are the little nuanced things that if people saw three of them together, they would know it was you? And he said, what happens if so we talked about it's like take your micro weirds a little bit public so people start to recognize you, you know, they start to see it. What are the things that you do that are you? What are the things that and I started thinking, what are the things that I did that were disruptive, the things that I was known for that were problematic?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Mm.
Jake Brown: And I thought in school I was always doodling and sketching because kept my hands busy so I wasn't bothering other people. So I was the kid who sat in the back of the room, I doodled, and made snarky comments. Like that was kind of my space. ⁓ and then like you, it's like, like I did that and I graduated college sumo cum lade. Like I graduated college perfectly because I didn't participate. Like I I sat in the back like I knew how to not stand out in the wrong ways, but I knew how to get to where I needed. Well. Same thing in business. Well, I'm sitting at LinkedIn and I realize, hey, how do I stand out on LinkedIn? How do I let my micro weird show up? And I just didn't have anything to post. I went on this, you know, challenge thing where it's like, ⁓ we're gonna post every business day for the next month or something. And I had nothing to post. And I just was like, I don't know anything about like nothing business-y today, guys, but I doodled this and I took a picture and I posted my doodle. And that thing, like, was one of my first to take off. Another one was Hey, I didn't feel like working, and I went and jumped in this puddle. And it's a video of me just like jump squats splashing in a puddle like I'm a toddler. And that thing blew up. And I was like, like thousands of people like interacting with that thing. And I'm like, okay, so that was my first like win on LinkedIn. And then the doodle took off. And I was like, wait a minute. The more things that I actually do about what I like and I enjoy, and I can put comments on there. So I started doodling. And now I've done it a couple times where I do 31 days of doodles. And I take the number. And I just make a doodle. I turn that number into a dinosaur, a robot, something like that, and I just post them. And those things have blown up my following on LinkedIn. I have way like thousands more people just start following me when I put those out there. They have nothing to do with what I'm actually trying to do, but it gives me access to more people and it gives me into more conversations and it kind of breaks the algorithm because I'm not following the rules the way that businesses tell us to, you know? It's like I I'm the guy who shows up and doodles on LinkedIn. Like I need to do another round of it, honestly coming up. But it's like that has worked really well for me. I've met so many people. ⁓ through that and through connections and then knowing, you know, the second connections, and it's drawn more people in, had tons of conversations with really interesting people, hearing their stories, ⁓ gotten business out of it even. ⁓ I've even been brought in at events to teach people how I doodle to calm my mind.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: ⁓ and I've taught that. I've done groups and I've actually created some small books that people can get where it's just like how to doodle, how to the actual the science behind calming your brine so you can be more present. ⁓ all stuff I learned from my grandpa when I was a little kid. ⁓ but anyway, that's just another weird example where it's like, well, this is what I do on LinkedIn, and it's like I it worked. I wasn't necessarily I knew what I wanted to grow, but when I saw it working, I ran the experiment when the experiment worked. I took it to, you know, a month long scale and then I've run that month a couple of times now. ⁓ so think of that, think of like if you're trying to get exposure, if you're trying to get in front of other people, if you're trying to get behind people, if you're trying to like if there's a gauntlet at work that you're trying to get through, like growing your business or whatever. ⁓ one of my favorites is just pay somebody else. Like if you can, if you can figure out a way to like Have somebody else do so it does so you don't have to like the legal or some of the you know the taxes planning like what's if you can pay somebody to keep you out of jail, do it. Like you will be happier, your kids will enjoy the evening with you more if you don't have to do your own taxes. ⁓ so to bring this back in, ⁓ a couple things. So I talked about a way that I have used it for getting work. ⁓ as far as doing work, yeah, the path of just like.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓
Jake Brown: Can you do it different ways? ⁓ another example I ask people is like, what part of your work is expected? And there's a book called Unreasonable Hospitality. And I think when you're delivering work, what parts of it are a low experience for you and your client? And which ones are just a mundane experience? And you think, can I remove stuff? Can I give it to somebody else? Like, how can you make that experience better just by taking a different path? ⁓ I think that that would be a quick way to look at it. ⁓ And then obviously getting paid and stuff, I just say automate that because it's junk. Like chasing money is not nobody wants to live there. ⁓ unless that is your business, you know. I guess if you're a collection agency or something. ⁓ but then I'm sitting here thinking, growing wealth, what is a a way that we could, you know, use this cornucopia ⁓ play and go, everybody else is running here.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah.
Jake Brown: I'm looking at going, okay, Bitcoin, everybody ran there and that didn't turn out so well. another thing, when we're looking at investment and growing our wealth, what are some things that instead of like running in, some things that we could do where we go, Okay, maybe we step back and we look to the side.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, we we talked about this this cornucopia game, like you're looking ahead and say, There's just a bloodbath here, high likelihood of losing. And if failure is unacceptable, then then where are we at, right? So it's not even that we're trying to win necessarily. We're trying to give a probably better chance of winning, but really lowering your chances of losing. Right. If I'm understanding how we're are batting this around correctly. And
Jake Brown: Yeah, yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: So obviously if we're looking at growing wealth, what's the way to like win the biggest? ⁓ you look at the hedge funds on Wall Street and how the billionaires who own those made their money. It's interesting. Most of them have underperformed the stock market over and over and over again. Like Warren Buffett has bet many of them lots of money years and years on end. These famous, very publicized bets. He said, I'm just gonna put some money in the SP 500 and we're gonna see how it does against your hedge fund. And he's won plenty of times.
Jake Brown: Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: The difference is those guys got as rich as they did from running the businesses of investing other people's money to get into that. But then they took that, they made one leveraged bet. That's usually it for all of them. They just got really lucky one time. They like bought Amazon for a dollar a share in like the early 90s, right? Or they Bitcoin back in like 2012 or something. Yeah, exactly. And
Jake Brown: Yeah. Like Intel at a dollar. Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: And they happen to use like a ton of leverage when they did it. They borrowed a bunch of money to buy this thing and then it went to the moon and then they just really cashed out of it. And then they've just been investing off of that money plus their business revenue forever. And that's really the story of it for most of them. So I would look at that as like the pinnacle of the cornucopia. If you're that like
Jake Brown: Yeah. So I would say I can't I can't do that because, you know, my kids need to eat and I I really like having a house. So if I'm not gonna steal somebody's money, borrow their money, leverage it, take a huge gamble, roll the dice, ⁓ what is the cornucopia play?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. I don't Exactly. I don't need a billionaire. I just need to not be broke at the end of the day. I don't need to be a billionaire. I just need to not go broke. And how you look at that, ⁓ obviously everybody talks about the S P five hundred and index funds. And I think that that's a really great start if you're looking before that and more of a Robin Hood type play or that's not to say anything bad. I actually happen to love the the platform and what it's done for the industry. Just the the meme stock trading frenzies that have been so popular there.
Jake Brown: Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: kinda through not too much fault, a little bit of fault of its own, but more by what happens over on Reddit. You know, you think of five years ago, the GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry. ⁓ today it's crypto and AI. ⁓ back in the nineteen twenties it was anything attached to the radio. So like RCA was the NVIDIA of its day back then before the Great Depression hit. It it's always been something. There's always been some kind of massive shiny object bubble. Like pets dot com of the year two thousand, AOL, y you name it. Any of these ⁓ There's been different seasons, different things. I'd say number one, contrarian based investing. So being contrary to the the group consensus around this is the hot thing that's going to propel itself to this dollar amount or percentage gain or whatever. ⁓ but so just taking a i it's not really a contrarian play, strictly speaking, of just going with the market, right? If you just say, I'm gonna get away from all that speculative active management, stock picking.
Jake Brown: Yeah. You know, yeah. Real quick, you're you're saying like I don't think it's so much that we're being contrary, like we're running away from it or we're being like against it, like we're not being competitive. It's just one of the things that our brains do is something's happening and we look up and we go, What about that? Like you're saying, be open to the what about that's. ⁓ I'll tell you, one of one of my friends pulled a s like
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: bunch of a a good chunk of his retirement money and said, okay, I'm not going to invest it in stocks and everything that everybody else does. What he actually did is he started investing in storage facilities. Now, I personally it I I'm not okay investing in storage facilities because I'm like I just have this thing where it's like, we're putting boxes because people have too much stuff. So that bothers me. I I just I don't feel okay with that. ⁓ same thing. Anyway, there's lots of things that just personally I'm like, I don't know that I want to support that. ⁓ but He did this, and it has, ⁓ he started in man, I mean, it was like he's probably pushing 15, 16 years now. ⁓ in ⁓ he started with some ⁓ multifamily housing, like apartment complexes that were getting like refreshed, like they were getting, you know, cleaned up and everything, and then the storage units. That's kind of where a lot of his investment went. And let's just say at the time people laughed at him, and I'll say, He's doing okay. ⁓ he ⁓ last time I talked to him, we had to have a really short call because he was getting in his helicopter. ⁓ it like that's how okay he's doing. Yeah. And with with ADHD, we are tend to we we tend to be more risky. We we don't feel the risk the way other people do. So I hear what you're saying is like, hey, be willing to look and see the other things.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah, because even stuff that other people laughed at years prior. I I mean the
Jake Brown: Don't ignore them because other people are. If you have question question, look at it. But at the same time, how would you advise somebody who maybe is looking at a thing and going, hey, nobody's heading that direction? Because a lot of times I look at it and think, I have to remind myself, okay, is there a reason nobody's heading that direction? ⁓ are they just all heading this direction because that's where somebody's said to go? Or is nobody heading that direction because they know there's a cliff over there that I don't know about? ⁓ so how would you advise like say me or somebody with ADHD were coming in going, Hey, all the well, you know, I eat this burrito and I want to invest in like all subs gas stations 'cause they have really great burritos. Like, whatever the thing, ⁓ what whatever weird idea we're fixated on or we're thinking, how would you advise somebody to just like think through that and make sure that they're, you know, balancing the idea of chasing your your your mind, your brain, but not ⁓ you know,
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: But regulating a little bit.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah, I tend to let people have a sandbox, roughly five percent of the portfolio, if they want it, they can just play around there. That's where their crypto can go. That's where whatever kind of speculative trade they want to do. They want to do options, they want to do a little bit of margin, go right ahead. You know, I I'm not gonna do that for them. Frankly, I'd have to pay a lot more on my errors and emissions insurance policy if I did do options margin for them. Which tells you about the nature of those products, right? It tells you about the risks there.
Jake Brown: Yeah. You gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's kinda like the science lab. They they say, ⁓ yeah, I'm gonna sit over here. This is where they get to tinker, this is where they get to experiment. Or ⁓ even if you think about kids growing up, like we had to sit still in a box a lot of time, but then think about how much science and even math and stuff we actually learned on the playground. Like, I mean, I knew a lot about gravity before we learned about it in school. Like, I had fallen a lot of times and I knew that when you drop something, like, it's going faster at the end. Like, because I never lived in a vacuum. But the idea of like I knew how things worked because I had lived it a little bit. And I hear kind of what you're saying is like if you have a you said the sandbox, it's this idea where if you have a plan to say, Yeah, risk and splash and do fun stuff right here and figure it out. Like enjoy that but at the same time, you know that future you still has this. Now, if you're playing in
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. In a way that's not gonna blow up your situation.
Jake Brown: something goes fun. I know in business I tell people this all the time, especially with product. Test something. Let's test the market. Let's see how it goes. If you're playing and you figure out something and it's working, then are you kind of talking to them and going, well yeah, you had five percent and ⁓ that five percent just became eight percent. Like that's catching your eye, right? You're going, wait a minute, let's let's let's keep it up. Like, ⁓ maybe we make our sandbox a little bigger this time.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ that's a constant battle. So many people I've talked to, they have so much NVIDIA and and it's like a half of their overall portfolio, but it started as ten percent. And they're like, ⁓ I don't know. They're like I should have been dumping more into this all along. Like, maybe that would have worked, but I I think there there's all kinds of reasons that is not going to be amazing going forward, unless it's really great.
Jake Brown: When one comment that I heard somebody make the other day, I was in a group of ADHD business owners and we were talking about like ⁓ productization, like coming up with a product, here's a new product, and somebody's like, Man, this product is really doing well. I feel like I should have been doing this. I wasted all my time and energy, all my resources on the other stuff, and I should have done this one. And the guy was like, But how many products have you killed along the way? Cause it was this guy'd been in business for 20 years. And it's like, how many products didn't make it? He goes, well, why didn't you go in all in on one of those early on? It was kind of that idea where it's like, yeah, we have to prove. We still have to prove it. It's just we are very quick to forget about the things that didn't prove. And then when something does work, you know, it's exciting, man. We blow up like hotter and faster than anybody else.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess just to to tether back a little bit to like specifically if you're trying to grow wealth with the ADHD brand with the cornucopia strategy, like running away from just again what I'd call like the really speculative stuff that's popular out there to buy, most people's portfolios that I look at for the first time, different prospects or just one off reviews, people have way too much exposure to the S P five hundred, which is just the biggest five hundred companies in the country. Which gives them a massive overconcentration to big tech, AI, just really frothy stuff, quite frankly. And if you look back over the last 100 years, the biggest winning category in all of the stock market is small cap value, which nobody guesses. Like just yeah. Small cap value is just like the tiny companies that are still publicly traded, but they're like the smallest ones that are out there available for anybody to buy.
Jake Brown: So define this. Because I don't even know what that means.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Not like your local gas station or whatever. ⁓ but
Jake Brown: So yeah. So I would say this this goes back to your cornucopia play where it's like it's it's the it's the small guys that are skirting the system, nobody's watching them, and they're just walking down the field getting ready to grab the flag. So w what I hear you saying is if you're in the game and you're looking around, like maybe don't watch the heroes. Know where the heroes are, know where like the big athletes, know where those players are on the field. Like look up and see ⁓ but look for that scrappy guy.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Nobody. Yeah.
Jake Brown: on the outside and go, hey, I'm gonna watch these scrappy guys. Because the other thing is, if you think of ⁓ like supply and demand, if everybody's screaming about the big guys right in the middle of the field, then they're gonna their prices are gonna get run up. And then the the quiet guys that are just walking down the sideline like nobody's looking to buy those maybe. And you go, hey, I want some of that.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Correct. Mm-hmm. ⁓ my gosh, yeah. Yeah, you watch Microsoft in the middle of the field, but then watch the guy who is helping them build all the data centers to house the AI projects on the side. It's ⁓ yeah.
Jake Brown: Yeah. Well, that's one of I have ⁓ I have a client that I really just love working with. And one of the things like they are in the construction industry working with data centers, like helping build data centers and stuff like that. And it is just really cool to see them because they are ⁓ reaping the wards of being a part of this massive wave that's happening. But they're not in the spotlight and they're not in the crosshairs. You know what I mean? It's like I'm like I joke, I'm kinda like, man, they're they're like crushing Mondays and Saturdays. Like this is so cool for them.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah, they get to go to the golf course and not be hated by other people. You're the ones building that data center, right?
Jake Brown: Yeah. Well, I mean, even the fact it's like it's already anyway, I I see what you're saying. I like this idea of the cornucopia thing because it's like look for in investments and in business opportunities. Know where the big players, know where everything's happening. Like, don't be completely oblivious. But at the same time, like be aware. We have ADHD. We're we're always seeing the things that are flying around. The bugs that are over there. We're seeing the cars that are going by. I had to close my curtain earlier because I like, it was trash day and like everybody's like things are fly, you people are driving by all the time and stuff, and I'm just like, ⁓ my gosh, I can't focus. ⁓ wow, that was the most ADHD ramble ever about ADHD. ⁓ so use our ADHD, be aware of what's happening, the surroundings, look to the periphery, like look out there and say, what's skirting? What's what's going down this side? You know? I love that.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah. Right. Just take a diversified approach. I I think that's what's missing. Even though it's old school conventional wisdom, most people are just way too heavily concentrated in their investments these days and it's gonna inhibit their ability to grow with wealth over the coming decades. When if you look at last year just as proof positive, the emerging markets, so that's like your India, Indonesia, Vietnam, places like that, they returned something like thirty six percent when the S P only did fourteen percent last year. And small cap did really well also.
Jake Brown: Man. So ⁓ here's okay, I got another example, actually a financial advan ⁓ example from our ⁓ life. So there was this company that our kids, ⁓ when our oldest son was young, we ended up we were looking for bikes ⁓ because we did live in Europe for a while and it was just kind of like different lifestyle modes of transportation. So we came back to Texas and we wanted to bike more as a family, move around our town on bikes. ⁓ and people did. Like there were people who know us as the biking family for a while. ⁓ but our young our oldest was learning to ride a bike. And we found this company called ⁓ VOM. ⁓ it's W O O ⁓ It's like some German brothers who were like engineers, and they redesigned a bike, not to be, we're gonna take an adult bike and make it smaller for kids, but they actually did the measurements and redid all of the angles. So kids learn to ride a bike, but they're sitting straight upright. They're not leaning forward, they're upright, and then they can steer without having to move anything below their shoulders. Right? They can actually just steer just using their kind of elbows and stuff. ⁓ and so we found this company, we liked them, and they were like, hey, we're projecting, we're looking for investors, but we want to go to our customers first and see if we can raise the funds to, you know, do this new factory type thing. Almost a Kickstarter but investor, like own shares in the company type thing. And we were like I mean, we looked at the doc. I they they put everything together because they were looking to get capital investment, but they didn't want to give away that percentage of the company ⁓ to get the investment. So they just turned around and said, Hey, you guys love this. ⁓ what if we didn't get a big guy involved who's gonna try? We're afraid that they're gonna break what we've built. They're gonna try and make money off of this instead of make bikes that make kids love biking. And that that's the approach they took. And we took it as like, this can't fail. So we took a
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Wow.
Jake Brown: Portion our risky bucket and said, Yeah, we're in. You know, so we did that. And here's the thing: it they gave us the projections of like a seven-year investment or something like that, right? Where they're like, this is what it, this is what we project. As long as our plan holds and we go, this is what we project that we're gonna have. ⁓ well, they end up getting to the point where it's like, I think it was like three years in or something like that, they were done. They could actually buy back all of our shares, pay us all what they owed us. So What they projected that they were hoping to pay us at the seven year, it was like three or four years in. So, like in less than half the time, because they went a different route, their different route got more people interested in what they were doing. And then we had more skin in the game to like tell everybody about the bikes and everything as well. And then it was like, I mean, still all of our kids that that's still the brand of bikes that we we use. ⁓ but it just got you see, like they took a different path. And then we took a different path of our investing. And then the fact is. It came back. I mean, it was a it was an aggressive plan that they had. It was like on seven years, it's gonna return this. And I'm like, well, that's better than anything else we're doing. And then it came back in half that time they were able to turn around. So it was like it worked out really well for us. But again, back to what you said earlier, we had a sandbox that we were willing to risk. You know, it wasn't everything. We didn't bet the farm. We didn't bet the farm. We might have bet that like the farm door, but you know, that was kind of ⁓
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: But it was just that idea where they were doing something different and we I mean, we looked at it and we believed in them and we were like, this can't fail. Like there's no we had seen that how the product worked, how it affected us. ⁓ and we did a weird thing because it was like nobody else at the time, our age, was like, Yeah, we're gonna go ahead and invest in a company. Like, that wasn't a thing. Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Right. Nobody else is doing private equity deals like that. Well, and honestly, that's its whole other category. I didn't mention 'cause I was trying not to go too deep into the nerd wheel on finance, which is way too easy for me. But specifically private equity, there's been so many of those companies that have just crushed the stock market. Like I I don't know about the returns that you got from them, but I would not be surprised to hear that at all that it beat what the public market did.
Jake Brown: It was ⁓ yeah, it was amazing. So all that I was what I want to say is depending on the part of your business, remember we talk about externalizing. Like how much can you take and just get out of your own mind, out of your own emotions? Like what can you just what can we put out there and work on it as an external thing? And with money, it's the same thing. And this idea of having a plan, having some that's safe and working the system, the plan that is more calculated, and then How much can you experiment? Can there be the fun part over here? Can you do wild things that you just believe in and you don't know why? Because with ADHD, there are times that we are right. We know that we know that we're right. You can't convince us that we aren't right, but we don't have any proof. It's just, it's right. It's the only thing that makes sense. And you know, it's hard for me to gamble on that a lot with a wife and family, you know, kids and everything in tow. But at the same time, there's this phrase I've seen me do it. Where I trust my intuition and my pattern, like my pattern recognition more than I do other people's. ⁓ so there are times that I look at something and I go, This always happens. Or, you know, the last 30 times this has happened, I'm feeling pretty good about this, you know, like I I feel that, but I won't gamble everything. But if I have that space, whether it's finances or in my business, even like product, ⁓ if I have a new product or a new service.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: You know, it's hard ⁓ to not burn everything down and jump on this new idea that has all of the dopamine flowing. It's all all the novelty. ⁓ I wanna do this, I wanna do wanna do like I'm all in on this. And people are like, like A lot of times we will chase that, but that idea of having the system that you can trust and almost ignore. ⁓ because like with our finances, it's like we go a quarter to sometimes, depending on how we're busy and how things are going, sometimes a full year ignoring what's happening because the system is playing out. And it's like my wife keeps more tabs on it, and if we don't need to talk about it, it just keeps rolling. And we have our meeting where we go, ⁓ yeah, everything, we still know where everything is.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: But there are some more fun things. It's like, okay, well maybe we tinker this. Maybe we try this. You know, we have our science lab over here doing stuff. Okay. I love this cornucopia thing.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: I think it's huge to have a good partner for that too. Yeah. Like I I always encourage that for clients. I think that's something I hear consistently when people come over to me. Is like my old advisor always laughed when I asked about different things, or he said that it was gonna be too complicated, too risky, too high chance of failure. Like if you don't try it, you're never gonna know if it works. If you never try to invest in the the boom bikes, then how would you ever get the reward from it? Right, like you You have to have somebody who's willing to not even just laugh at you, but to sit there and help you analyze the deal and say, Yeah, I think this could make sense and on occasion jump into something with you too. I've seen that play out plenty of times.
Jake Brown: Nope. And I we use the word what if a lot, ⁓ because it takes out a lot of the arguments or that shame and that like judgmental parts of it where you say, Well, what if we do this? Well then when you create the sandbox, what happens, like I say, hey, what if I do this crazy thing? And you go, Well, what if we take this portion into the science lab, everything else we keep running as we know it is, and we experiment with the beta test. And that idea of as long as we stay curious and lean into the what if, well, what if?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Mm-hmm.
Jake Brown: then it's safe. But as soon as, you know, it's like, well no. As soon as they like start shutting stuff down, then that's the point where first off, we s we we don't like it. ⁓ and if you're a service provider and you're working with people that like they should enjoy working with you. They shouldn't dread having a conversation with you. Yeah. It's like, ⁓ I'm going to the it's like going to detention. I'm going to the principal's office again. ⁓ he's gonna tell me about my money. ⁓ all right.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ yeah. Are you just gonna shoot down all my fun ideas again? That's not cool. Yeah. Well that's literally what they frame us against. Yeah. Yeah. I I guess just to to wrap it up, I'd say like these things are probably things that you're doing already if you're neurodivergent. There's a fair chance that you've already been on the outside of a crowd for most of your life and unable to to really see a path forward of competing, whether that's a social hierarchy, becoming the the popular, the the whatever type of kid you were trying to back in the day. Like you you naturally likely
Jake Brown: So
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Taken some of these oblique paths to success here. Or you turn around from the cornucopia and run the other way because you found there was a better way that you could do. I would just say tune into that more. Recognize that as one of your neurodivergent superpowers, the pattern recognition, the outsider-ness of it, and the ability to just pivot, implement, make it up as you go along and find some really good successes.
Jake Brown: Yeah, I love it. ⁓ a couple things right there. I love what you said, Caleb. I just wanna for listeners, hey, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening with us. This podcast is an example of us just going, what if? And then we took like a hard left and ran around the outside of stuff. ⁓ and we want to invite you and reach out to us. We'd love to hear conversations. We'd love to hear how you've maybe taken paths around. Like what have been your cornucopia plays? So as you're thinking, look ahead. If there's an opportunity where you're you're looking ahead or you're planning, and maybe the path ahead that others have prescribed or what looks like the standard path. If it doesn't fit, you know, maybe look up, turn, turn left, look. ⁓ maybe there's something skirting the outside of the bounds. ⁓ maybe look up and see it, consider it. ⁓ not saying do it, but consider it and allow yourself to consider it, because that is how we are wired. And then also, as we're wrapping up, I want you to have a very vivid image of Caleb running through an oatmeal colored Pope office building between cubicles. Some old lady is there getting, you know, her little blooploop water machine. Somebody's standing over here at the Keurig. He's got his air rifle, whatever. And he just comes sprinting through there, getting carrying a red flag, coming back with it. ⁓ just remember, that's what your business can look like. You can have that moment. And people are like, what on earth is that guy doing? He's winning. That's what he's doing. He's winning.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: They're they're not sure if he's supposed to be there. He's playing it cool. He's just kinda walking normally and try not to make eye contact. And yeah, that can be that can be you too. You too can have an amazing moment where you're like, I know the game I'm playing, other people just don't get it, but I'm gonna win, baby.
Jake Brown: Ha ha ha. ⁓ I love it. All right. ⁓ anything else? Sign off? All right, like, subscribe, tell your friends, tell your mom. ⁓ we'd love moms listening to us. And ⁓ yeah, just remember it's your business. Change the rules, capture the flag.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: All I got. Tell your mom's friends.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah, man, a absolutely. And ⁓ this is part of what we were talking about, just an observation that I I've deemed the cornucopia strategy or the cornucopia play. And, you know, we talk about cornucopias. Like, try spelling that word. It's gonna give you a hard time. Like when I wrote it out, I'm like, have I been saying this incorrectly for all of my life? It looks like it's supposed to be cornucopia, because it's a you up there. It's like corn you copia or like I I don't know, you try to say it with like a Deep Southern like cornucopia or something like that. It's just a goofy word.
Jake Brown: Yeah, don't don't read words. As soon as you start reading words, you like don't know how to say them. It's like ⁓ Worships Worcestershire. Like I used to know how to say Worcestershire sauce. I I saw the word on the label one time and it's like, it's gone. It's gone.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. I I think those like New England towns you go to, like, ⁓ this is like Chestershire. ⁓ that's ⁓ Glosseter. Nope, that's yeah, it just it gets weird quickly. ⁓ so yeah, cheating playing capture with the flag. ⁓ all these summers growing up, I'd go down to there's this state park in Delaware called Cape Henlopen, and it's these like beautiful pine lands and the beach, like right where the ocean meets the bay. But it used to be home to this huge army base. And it was these like massive artillery cannons just hiding underneath in the the sand dunes in these bunkers, basically just to protect Philadelphia and the gunpowder industry in Wilmington from Nazi attack. It was built just before World War Two. And they actually got to use them like once on a U-boat out there. They got to surrender. Really cool, just at the end of the war. Like they would shoot artillery shells bigger than cars today out of these boats that were cover. So fascinating place.
Jake Brown: Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: But I'd go there every year as a kid for this camp and we just play hours of Capture the Flag. Because it was a World War II themed camp. I mean, this history nerd absolutely ate that up. But I realized something pretty quickly. I was just ⁓ I was overweight. I was clinically obese by the time I was twelve, not like morbidly, but definitely technically and asthmatic and l looking back now, knowing what I know about my neurotype being both Asperger's and ADHD, like There was no way if I tried to like run through the middle of the line to go get no
Jake Brown: Y y you weren't doing the hero play. Like carrying the American flag, running through as the hero, yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Gosh, my like lack of coordination, my reaction time, my ability to outrun anybody, none of that was there. So I realized pretty quickly if I want to have any chance possible of winning this, I really need to take a different approach here. I need to change the game instead of just running through the middle. And so I set out to really figure what were the boundaries of the map that I was playing or this area. And it would kind of differ sometimes, like you'd literally be around these old historic artillery cannons or mini bunkers. It was so cool. And I would like go all the way to the edge of the map as possible and like hide, crawl, army crawl, whatever. Sometimes, yes, I I would cheat and go a little bit completely outside of it. Well, I went through like an office building holding water. I was like, I need to win this game. Exactly. Yeah, they're like, what is this kid doing? This like 10-year-old boy. And so then the magic
Jake Brown: Stop at the water fountain, get a little drink. Hey Sarah, walk on out. ⁓ I just imagine an episode of the office where you come walking through with your like paintball gun or whatever. Anyway.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: I think Dwight would be just very confused about it. And so I the the point is I would show up somewhere along the back of the lines and I would have like a while to look for the flag before anybody would see me because nobody's guarding it. Nobody thinks anybody's back there. And you arrive at a place that the enemy is under prepared. There's no competition, it's uncontested. And if you arrive there over prepared, then that's when you win. That's when I would grab the flag and ideally just retreat right back into the shadows I came from and make it back over to my base and win. Occasionally I'd get caught and you'd have to like run for it. I'd I'd lose or you know.
Jake Brown: Yeah. Yeah, I thought of as you're explaining that, ⁓ I was thinking like X-Men, you know, Nightcrawler. ⁓ I don't know if you're familiar, but he's the one that's like, he's over here and all of a sudden he's like and he like shows up over here and it's like that's what it looks like to everybody else. Like all of sudden they're like, Wait, how'd how'd Caleb get where'd he come from? Yeah. Who is that guy?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Like, where how the how does that dude get over here? He's like wheezing as he's running away. Yeah, it was always super fun. And airsoft, I did that too with a sniper and a ghillie suit. And ⁓ but so I realized that as a kid, and then as I looked further along in life, there were just different times when that pattern showed up in business and elsewhere that the same exact features were present. Like I I noticed a market that was underserved. There was a lack of competition there. And then I just dove into it ⁓ at at first, kind of without without checking with anybody else to say like, ⁓ is this a good fit or not? Like, no, I see an opportunity and we have to take a sideways approach. So I I call it the cornucopia play because like we all can think about the hunger games, right? That's the only thing besides Thanksgiving that triggers the word cornucopia in our brains. Yeah, a hundred percent.
Jake Brown: That in you know, spelling tests apparently, 'cause we would fail.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Hundred percent. And so like I I've only ever seen the one Hunger Games movie. It it was pretty good. Nothing against it. I just haven't gotten around to seeing the others. And ⁓
Jake Brown: 'Cause you know, kids, you don't have time to watch movies when you have kids.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ my gosh, yeah, they're they're coming out my ears over here. I think I hear one actually now. And so yeah, dude, they're they're a huge blessing. They're a huge blessing. But so the first Hunger Games movie, right, you get all the different tribute people from all their different places that they're coming from and they're trying to battle it out to see who survives. And the only people who what is it, like one or two are allowed to survive at the very end of it from like a given
Jake Brown: ⁓ I love it, man. Kids are part of life. Yeah, it's supposed to be one, yeah. Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Right, it's one. And so there's this cornucopia right where everybody starts, just full of all these weapons and survival gear and stuff, and everybody just runs for it except for Katniss. She looks at it, she sizes it up and says, Whoever wins this is very likely to win the whole thing. However, the odds of winning this are so low, the odds of mortality here are ridiculously high. I have a better chance at outright survival if I just go run the opposite way right into the woods. Take my chances there, just try to outlast and then sneak up on people eventually over time. And that's what wound up doing it. But yeah.
Jake Brown: Yeah. Yeah, real real quick, ⁓ can I un can I interrupt kind of say something that like dawned on me? Yeah. ⁓ so as you're explaining that Chronicopia, like the in the Hunger Games, the idea is Katniss had a long-term goal that didn't match other people's short-term goals. Like if her long-term goal is to survive, which I think everybody probably they were like trying to win to win or whatever, they're but they're all trying to survive. So they dive into the mess.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ dude, yeah, totally. Let's look back this.
Jake Brown: Because it's like, I gotta get a weapon so that I can survive. And she's like, Yeah, so that's not act that that pit stop isn't actually on my path, you know? And I think that for so many of us, like you were mentioning earlier, the same thing with, you know, anytime you play Capture the Flag, that messy middle where everybody just kind of attacks and runs and everything, you go, That actually doesn't work for me. I'm gonna just kinda Come over here in the shadows, barely outside. You know, I've been places where it's like they got the floodlights on this space where you're playing at night, and you're like, how can I skirt just under the floodlights? Actually, I'm thinking of like all of the movies and everything that I love, man. ⁓ all those like great action films where they're like walking around you know, along the fence under the line and you're like, Surely this multi-million dollar facility would know that their light was not shining on the engine. ⁓ but anyway, so back in, you're talking about that finding this
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ yeah.
Jake Brown: this path where you go, ⁓ I want something. The the path that somebody laid in front of me, the one that is the popular one, the one that is, you know, that everybody's doing, you just kind of look and go, Yeah, that didn't fit. Like
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Right. Yeah. You just figure out like this isn't gonna work for me. Maybe this is gonna work for somebody else, but it's not gonna be my path to success there. And that's not to have necessarily a self doubt attitude to be like, I don't know if I can really pull this off unless I do this other approach here. I feel like that's a bad way of looking at it. There's much more positive way to say, I'm really competitive. I really wanna win this thing, but the odds are just so low, like i if any kind of loss is unacceptable, maybe this is a different reframing. So like when you look at the stakes of something, losing in the Hunger Games means you die. That's an unacceptable stake. Like it's not just that you want to win, it's that you want to avoid failure. And I I think in business, like what even is winning at the end of the day? Like most people really can't define that. But I I think defining losing is a little bit easier. You can say, all right, losing means going broke.
Jake Brown: Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: losing my house, losing my family because of the stress that I just put them through, whate whatever that is. Exactly. And if you're looking for ways to try and minimize the chances of failure, taking that really oblique angle into whatever you're doing, showing up unexpected it in an over prepared way, like I I mean that's classic military strategy too. I I think we talked a little here at the start. I
Jake Brown: Yeah. Yeah. Can't can't feed kids, yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: I I used to go to back in high school, it was a full time junior ROTC school. I I was on path to go to Naval Academy. That was what I wanted to do. ⁓ I I have no idea how the threat has met.
Jake Brown: So you you were in with the ladies. You were in with the ladies, right? Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: With a lake. I don't I don't think I talked to any in those days. And still that list is very small for me. It's my wife and three daughters. But no, you're good. That but really though, that's ⁓ that that was where I wanted to go. But I made some changes one summer, went decided I wanted to be a pastor and came back and was like, Hey, I know I'm like top five in my class on this trajectory to go to the academy.
Jake Brown: Ha ha ha. I'm just teasing you, I'm sorry.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Listen, give that opportunity to somebody else. I d I don't want a role in the regimental command structure this year. Pass that to somebody else. And that happened. But then by the time I ended at school, even though that was still the path that I was on, was saying like I I want to go into the ministry, not the military. I I wound up somehow getting ranked thirteenth in the five hundred and thirty student regiment, but in a like totally different thing that nobody else wanted. They're just like, Caleb, c can you do this for us? Like, can you come be the public affairs officer guy? And I did the announcements every day. I welcomed like senators, governors, like all kinds of crazy people to the school and and that's it. Yeah.
Jake Brown: Which like you're explaining this. Now this is everybody listen, this is the second time I've heard this, and I'm still like, this is amazing. So what's funny is you took a different path. You're like, and you got to do all this other just wild stuff that probably was better for your brain anyway. You know, like you got to meet these really cool people, all these stories, you had all these great experiences that you wouldn't have had if you were just in line, right? So then the other thing is, yeah, and you went out of line and did this weird stuff over here, and then at the end of the day, you showed up and people are like.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah. Hundred percent and there's none of that under the gun press.
Jake Brown: Wait a minute, where'd this guy come from? Just like on Capture the Flag, just all of a sudden you're in the you're top ranking in the top again and they're like, wait a minute, where'd this guy come from? You're over here doing your weird thing and just show up and so here's a question for you. I don't even know if you remember this. If you think back when you were doing the hard work in line to cry climb the ranks and everything, and when you did the weird job with public affairs and everything, and then you just ended up at the front of the line, which one felt harder?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ my gosh. The the corporate grind. A hundred percent. Yeah, trying to go be a platoon leader, then a battalion leader, regimental commander. That that was just a big grind. You always had to be on point, you always had to be perfect. You there was no room for creative freedom, creativity, production, whatever. But going to be a public affairs officer at the battalion level, like, hey, nobody really does this. And I showed up there, like, I I wanna do a really great job of this. And then that's how I got the regiment role. And then I'd like I I basically changed the game on how
Jake Brown: That's awesome.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: That role was conducted henceforth. Like the announcements were just a really drab thing for a long time. And I twisted them up, made them fun. I I did the whole Robin Williams good morning Vietnam thing. Literally, yeah. The school initials were DMA, Delaware Military Academy. And I would just shout it into the the microphone there a couple days away. Good morning. And it was like 7 30 AM. And yeah. Yeah, not a hundred percent. People loved it though.
Jake Brown: ⁓ Yes! Good morning Vietnam! That's what I was gonna ask. Love it! Nice. ⁓ okay, so not nice, but that's great. Okay. So I have a couple man, my brain is running so many things. Like, first off, I just keep imagining you like just like walking through an office building playing after the flag. ⁓ but so I wanna thinking back on business, ⁓ I have a couple ideas where was thinking the idea of following the rules that the way that they're laid out for everybody else, I think
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: Neurotypicals are drawn toward the if you do this, it will work. They're drawn toward that systematic ⁓ way that things work, cause and effect, just constant cause and effect, to where we need more experimentation in what we're doing. And sometimes the r the right way, the system for us, is one that takes us out of the way, you know? That takes us ⁓ on a different path so we can figure out something. We actually learn a little bit more about ourselves as we go. ⁓ in one way that ⁓ like an example that I have used in my like in my coaching business now and consulting right now is when I was on LinkedIn, I was trying to figure out how to grow my LinkedIn presence more. I wanted more followers, I want to engage with more people. And it just ⁓ one of my friends, ⁓ Paul introduced me to this concept of micro weirds. He's like, don't share your macro weirds because that scares people. But what are the micro weirds? What are the little nuanced things that if people saw three of them together, they would know it was you? And he said, what happens if so we talked about it's like take your micro weirds a little bit public so people start to recognize you, you know, they start to see it. What are the things that you do that are you? What are the things that and I started thinking, what are the things that I did that were disruptive, the things that I was known for that were problematic?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Mm.
Jake Brown: And I thought in school I was always doodling and sketching because kept my hands busy so I wasn't bothering other people. So I was the kid who sat in the back of the room, I doodled, and made snarky comments. Like that was kind of my space. ⁓ and then like you, it's like, like I did that and I graduated college sumo cum lade. Like I graduated college perfectly because I didn't participate. Like I I sat in the back like I knew how to not stand out in the wrong ways, but I knew how to get to where I needed. Well. Same thing in business. Well, I'm sitting at LinkedIn and I realize, hey, how do I stand out on LinkedIn? How do I let my micro weird show up? And I just didn't have anything to post. I went on this, you know, challenge thing where it's like, ⁓ we're gonna post every business day for the next month or something. And I had nothing to post. And I just was like, I don't know anything about like nothing business-y today, guys, but I doodled this and I took a picture and I posted my doodle. And that thing, like, was one of my first to take off. Another one was Hey, I didn't feel like working, and I went and jumped in this puddle. And it's a video of me just like jump squats splashing in a puddle like I'm a toddler. And that thing blew up. And I was like, like thousands of people like interacting with that thing. And I'm like, okay, so that was my first like win on LinkedIn. And then the doodle took off. And I was like, wait a minute. The more things that I actually do about what I like and I enjoy, and I can put comments on there. So I started doodling. And now I've done it a couple times where I do 31 days of doodles. And I take the number. And I just make a doodle. I turn that number into a dinosaur, a robot, something like that, and I just post them. And those things have blown up my following on LinkedIn. I have way like thousands more people just start following me when I put those out there. They have nothing to do with what I'm actually trying to do, but it gives me access to more people and it gives me into more conversations and it kind of breaks the algorithm because I'm not following the rules the way that businesses tell us to, you know? It's like I I'm the guy who shows up and doodles on LinkedIn. Like I need to do another round of it, honestly coming up. But it's like that has worked really well for me. I've met so many people. ⁓ through that and through connections and then knowing, you know, the second connections, and it's drawn more people in, had tons of conversations with really interesting people, hearing their stories, ⁓ gotten business out of it even. ⁓ I've even been brought in at events to teach people how I doodle to calm my mind.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: ⁓ and I've taught that. I've done groups and I've actually created some small books that people can get where it's just like how to doodle, how to the actual the science behind calming your brine so you can be more present. ⁓ all stuff I learned from my grandpa when I was a little kid. ⁓ but anyway, that's just another weird example where it's like, well, this is what I do on LinkedIn, and it's like I it worked. I wasn't necessarily I knew what I wanted to grow, but when I saw it working, I ran the experiment when the experiment worked. I took it to, you know, a month long scale and then I've run that month a couple of times now. ⁓ so think of that, think of like if you're trying to get exposure, if you're trying to get in front of other people, if you're trying to get behind people, if you're trying to like if there's a gauntlet at work that you're trying to get through, like growing your business or whatever. ⁓ one of my favorites is just pay somebody else. Like if you can, if you can figure out a way to like Have somebody else do so it does so you don't have to like the legal or some of the you know the taxes planning like what's if you can pay somebody to keep you out of jail, do it. Like you will be happier, your kids will enjoy the evening with you more if you don't have to do your own taxes. ⁓ so to bring this back in, ⁓ a couple things. So I talked about a way that I have used it for getting work. ⁓ as far as doing work, yeah, the path of just like.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓
Jake Brown: Can you do it different ways? ⁓ another example I ask people is like, what part of your work is expected? And there's a book called Unreasonable Hospitality. And I think when you're delivering work, what parts of it are a low experience for you and your client? And which ones are just a mundane experience? And you think, can I remove stuff? Can I give it to somebody else? Like, how can you make that experience better just by taking a different path? ⁓ I think that that would be a quick way to look at it. ⁓ And then obviously getting paid and stuff, I just say automate that because it's junk. Like chasing money is not nobody wants to live there. ⁓ unless that is your business, you know. I guess if you're a collection agency or something. ⁓ but then I'm sitting here thinking, growing wealth, what is a a way that we could, you know, use this cornucopia ⁓ play and go, everybody else is running here.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah.
Jake Brown: I'm looking at going, okay, Bitcoin, everybody ran there and that didn't turn out so well. another thing, when we're looking at investment and growing our wealth, what are some things that instead of like running in, some things that we could do where we go, Okay, maybe we step back and we look to the side.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, we we talked about this this cornucopia game, like you're looking ahead and say, There's just a bloodbath here, high likelihood of losing. And if failure is unacceptable, then then where are we at, right? So it's not even that we're trying to win necessarily. We're trying to give a probably better chance of winning, but really lowering your chances of losing. Right. If I'm understanding how we're are batting this around correctly. And
Jake Brown: Yeah, yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: So obviously if we're looking at growing wealth, what's the way to like win the biggest? ⁓ you look at the hedge funds on Wall Street and how the billionaires who own those made their money. It's interesting. Most of them have underperformed the stock market over and over and over again. Like Warren Buffett has bet many of them lots of money years and years on end. These famous, very publicized bets. He said, I'm just gonna put some money in the SP 500 and we're gonna see how it does against your hedge fund. And he's won plenty of times.
Jake Brown: Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: The difference is those guys got as rich as they did from running the businesses of investing other people's money to get into that. But then they took that, they made one leveraged bet. That's usually it for all of them. They just got really lucky one time. They like bought Amazon for a dollar a share in like the early 90s, right? Or they Bitcoin back in like 2012 or something. Yeah, exactly. And
Jake Brown: Yeah. Like Intel at a dollar. Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: And they happen to use like a ton of leverage when they did it. They borrowed a bunch of money to buy this thing and then it went to the moon and then they just really cashed out of it. And then they've just been investing off of that money plus their business revenue forever. And that's really the story of it for most of them. So I would look at that as like the pinnacle of the cornucopia. If you're that like
Jake Brown: Yeah. So I would say I can't I can't do that because, you know, my kids need to eat and I I really like having a house. So if I'm not gonna steal somebody's money, borrow their money, leverage it, take a huge gamble, roll the dice, ⁓ what is the cornucopia play?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. I don't Exactly. I don't need a billionaire. I just need to not be broke at the end of the day. I don't need to be a billionaire. I just need to not go broke. And how you look at that, ⁓ obviously everybody talks about the S P five hundred and index funds. And I think that that's a really great start if you're looking before that and more of a Robin Hood type play or that's not to say anything bad. I actually happen to love the the platform and what it's done for the industry. Just the the meme stock trading frenzies that have been so popular there.
Jake Brown: Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: kinda through not too much fault, a little bit of fault of its own, but more by what happens over on Reddit. You know, you think of five years ago, the GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry. ⁓ today it's crypto and AI. ⁓ back in the nineteen twenties it was anything attached to the radio. So like RCA was the NVIDIA of its day back then before the Great Depression hit. It it's always been something. There's always been some kind of massive shiny object bubble. Like pets dot com of the year two thousand, AOL, y you name it. Any of these ⁓ There's been different seasons, different things. I'd say number one, contrarian based investing. So being contrary to the the group consensus around this is the hot thing that's going to propel itself to this dollar amount or percentage gain or whatever. ⁓ but so just taking a i it's not really a contrarian play, strictly speaking, of just going with the market, right? If you just say, I'm gonna get away from all that speculative active management, stock picking.
Jake Brown: Yeah. You know, yeah. Real quick, you're you're saying like I don't think it's so much that we're being contrary, like we're running away from it or we're being like against it, like we're not being competitive. It's just one of the things that our brains do is something's happening and we look up and we go, What about that? Like you're saying, be open to the what about that's. ⁓ I'll tell you, one of one of my friends pulled a s like
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: bunch of a a good chunk of his retirement money and said, okay, I'm not going to invest it in stocks and everything that everybody else does. What he actually did is he started investing in storage facilities. Now, I personally it I I'm not okay investing in storage facilities because I'm like I just have this thing where it's like, we're putting boxes because people have too much stuff. So that bothers me. I I just I don't feel okay with that. ⁓ same thing. Anyway, there's lots of things that just personally I'm like, I don't know that I want to support that. ⁓ but He did this, and it has, ⁓ he started in man, I mean, it was like he's probably pushing 15, 16 years now. ⁓ in ⁓ he started with some ⁓ multifamily housing, like apartment complexes that were getting like refreshed, like they were getting, you know, cleaned up and everything, and then the storage units. That's kind of where a lot of his investment went. And let's just say at the time people laughed at him, and I'll say, He's doing okay. ⁓ he ⁓ last time I talked to him, we had to have a really short call because he was getting in his helicopter. ⁓ it like that's how okay he's doing. Yeah. And with with ADHD, we are tend to we we tend to be more risky. We we don't feel the risk the way other people do. So I hear what you're saying is like, hey, be willing to look and see the other things.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah, because even stuff that other people laughed at years prior. I I mean the
Jake Brown: Don't ignore them because other people are. If you have question question, look at it. But at the same time, how would you advise somebody who maybe is looking at a thing and going, hey, nobody's heading that direction? Because a lot of times I look at it and think, I have to remind myself, okay, is there a reason nobody's heading that direction? ⁓ are they just all heading this direction because that's where somebody's said to go? Or is nobody heading that direction because they know there's a cliff over there that I don't know about? ⁓ so how would you advise like say me or somebody with ADHD were coming in going, Hey, all the well, you know, I eat this burrito and I want to invest in like all subs gas stations 'cause they have really great burritos. Like, whatever the thing, ⁓ what whatever weird idea we're fixated on or we're thinking, how would you advise somebody to just like think through that and make sure that they're, you know, balancing the idea of chasing your your your mind, your brain, but not ⁓ you know,
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: But regulating a little bit.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah, I tend to let people have a sandbox, roughly five percent of the portfolio, if they want it, they can just play around there. That's where their crypto can go. That's where whatever kind of speculative trade they want to do. They want to do options, they want to do a little bit of margin, go right ahead. You know, I I'm not gonna do that for them. Frankly, I'd have to pay a lot more on my errors and emissions insurance policy if I did do options margin for them. Which tells you about the nature of those products, right? It tells you about the risks there.
Jake Brown: Yeah. You gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's kinda like the science lab. They they say, ⁓ yeah, I'm gonna sit over here. This is where they get to tinker, this is where they get to experiment. Or ⁓ even if you think about kids growing up, like we had to sit still in a box a lot of time, but then think about how much science and even math and stuff we actually learned on the playground. Like, I mean, I knew a lot about gravity before we learned about it in school. Like, I had fallen a lot of times and I knew that when you drop something, like, it's going faster at the end. Like, because I never lived in a vacuum. But the idea of like I knew how things worked because I had lived it a little bit. And I hear kind of what you're saying is like if you have a you said the sandbox, it's this idea where if you have a plan to say, Yeah, risk and splash and do fun stuff right here and figure it out. Like enjoy that but at the same time, you know that future you still has this. Now, if you're playing in
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. In a way that's not gonna blow up your situation.
Jake Brown: something goes fun. I know in business I tell people this all the time, especially with product. Test something. Let's test the market. Let's see how it goes. If you're playing and you figure out something and it's working, then are you kind of talking to them and going, well yeah, you had five percent and ⁓ that five percent just became eight percent. Like that's catching your eye, right? You're going, wait a minute, let's let's let's keep it up. Like, ⁓ maybe we make our sandbox a little bigger this time.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ that's a constant battle. So many people I've talked to, they have so much NVIDIA and and it's like a half of their overall portfolio, but it started as ten percent. And they're like, ⁓ I don't know. They're like I should have been dumping more into this all along. Like, maybe that would have worked, but I I think there there's all kinds of reasons that is not going to be amazing going forward, unless it's really great.
Jake Brown: When one comment that I heard somebody make the other day, I was in a group of ADHD business owners and we were talking about like ⁓ productization, like coming up with a product, here's a new product, and somebody's like, Man, this product is really doing well. I feel like I should have been doing this. I wasted all my time and energy, all my resources on the other stuff, and I should have done this one. And the guy was like, But how many products have you killed along the way? Cause it was this guy'd been in business for 20 years. And it's like, how many products didn't make it? He goes, well, why didn't you go in all in on one of those early on? It was kind of that idea where it's like, yeah, we have to prove. We still have to prove it. It's just we are very quick to forget about the things that didn't prove. And then when something does work, you know, it's exciting, man. We blow up like hotter and faster than anybody else.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess just to to tether back a little bit to like specifically if you're trying to grow wealth with the ADHD brand with the cornucopia strategy, like running away from just again what I'd call like the really speculative stuff that's popular out there to buy, most people's portfolios that I look at for the first time, different prospects or just one off reviews, people have way too much exposure to the S P five hundred, which is just the biggest five hundred companies in the country. Which gives them a massive overconcentration to big tech, AI, just really frothy stuff, quite frankly. And if you look back over the last 100 years, the biggest winning category in all of the stock market is small cap value, which nobody guesses. Like just yeah. Small cap value is just like the tiny companies that are still publicly traded, but they're like the smallest ones that are out there available for anybody to buy.
Jake Brown: So define this. Because I don't even know what that means.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Not like your local gas station or whatever. ⁓ but
Jake Brown: So yeah. So I would say this this goes back to your cornucopia play where it's like it's it's the it's the small guys that are skirting the system, nobody's watching them, and they're just walking down the field getting ready to grab the flag. So w what I hear you saying is if you're in the game and you're looking around, like maybe don't watch the heroes. Know where the heroes are, know where like the big athletes, know where those players are on the field. Like look up and see ⁓ but look for that scrappy guy.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Nobody. Yeah.
Jake Brown: on the outside and go, hey, I'm gonna watch these scrappy guys. Because the other thing is, if you think of ⁓ like supply and demand, if everybody's screaming about the big guys right in the middle of the field, then they're gonna their prices are gonna get run up. And then the the quiet guys that are just walking down the sideline like nobody's looking to buy those maybe. And you go, hey, I want some of that.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Correct. Mm-hmm. ⁓ my gosh, yeah. Yeah, you watch Microsoft in the middle of the field, but then watch the guy who is helping them build all the data centers to house the AI projects on the side. It's ⁓ yeah.
Jake Brown: Yeah. Well, that's one of I have ⁓ I have a client that I really just love working with. And one of the things like they are in the construction industry working with data centers, like helping build data centers and stuff like that. And it is just really cool to see them because they are ⁓ reaping the wards of being a part of this massive wave that's happening. But they're not in the spotlight and they're not in the crosshairs. You know what I mean? It's like I'm like I joke, I'm kinda like, man, they're they're like crushing Mondays and Saturdays. Like this is so cool for them.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah, they get to go to the golf course and not be hated by other people. You're the ones building that data center, right?
Jake Brown: Yeah. Well, I mean, even the fact it's like it's already anyway, I I see what you're saying. I like this idea of the cornucopia thing because it's like look for in investments and in business opportunities. Know where the big players, know where everything's happening. Like, don't be completely oblivious. But at the same time, like be aware. We have ADHD. We're we're always seeing the things that are flying around. The bugs that are over there. We're seeing the cars that are going by. I had to close my curtain earlier because I like, it was trash day and like everybody's like things are fly, you people are driving by all the time and stuff, and I'm just like, ⁓ my gosh, I can't focus. ⁓ wow, that was the most ADHD ramble ever about ADHD. ⁓ so use our ADHD, be aware of what's happening, the surroundings, look to the periphery, like look out there and say, what's skirting? What's what's going down this side? You know? I love that.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah. Right. Just take a diversified approach. I I think that's what's missing. Even though it's old school conventional wisdom, most people are just way too heavily concentrated in their investments these days and it's gonna inhibit their ability to grow with wealth over the coming decades. When if you look at last year just as proof positive, the emerging markets, so that's like your India, Indonesia, Vietnam, places like that, they returned something like thirty six percent when the S P only did fourteen percent last year. And small cap did really well also.
Jake Brown: Man. So ⁓ here's okay, I got another example, actually a financial advan ⁓ example from our ⁓ life. So there was this company that our kids, ⁓ when our oldest son was young, we ended up we were looking for bikes ⁓ because we did live in Europe for a while and it was just kind of like different lifestyle modes of transportation. So we came back to Texas and we wanted to bike more as a family, move around our town on bikes. ⁓ and people did. Like there were people who know us as the biking family for a while. ⁓ but our young our oldest was learning to ride a bike. And we found this company called ⁓ VOM. ⁓ it's W O O ⁓ It's like some German brothers who were like engineers, and they redesigned a bike, not to be, we're gonna take an adult bike and make it smaller for kids, but they actually did the measurements and redid all of the angles. So kids learn to ride a bike, but they're sitting straight upright. They're not leaning forward, they're upright, and then they can steer without having to move anything below their shoulders. Right? They can actually just steer just using their kind of elbows and stuff. ⁓ and so we found this company, we liked them, and they were like, hey, we're projecting, we're looking for investors, but we want to go to our customers first and see if we can raise the funds to, you know, do this new factory type thing. Almost a Kickstarter but investor, like own shares in the company type thing. And we were like I mean, we looked at the doc. I they they put everything together because they were looking to get capital investment, but they didn't want to give away that percentage of the company ⁓ to get the investment. So they just turned around and said, Hey, you guys love this. ⁓ what if we didn't get a big guy involved who's gonna try? We're afraid that they're gonna break what we've built. They're gonna try and make money off of this instead of make bikes that make kids love biking. And that that's the approach they took. And we took it as like, this can't fail. So we took a
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Wow.
Jake Brown: Portion our risky bucket and said, Yeah, we're in. You know, so we did that. And here's the thing: it they gave us the projections of like a seven-year investment or something like that, right? Where they're like, this is what it, this is what we project. As long as our plan holds and we go, this is what we project that we're gonna have. ⁓ well, they end up getting to the point where it's like, I think it was like three years in or something like that, they were done. They could actually buy back all of our shares, pay us all what they owed us. So What they projected that they were hoping to pay us at the seven year, it was like three or four years in. So, like in less than half the time, because they went a different route, their different route got more people interested in what they were doing. And then we had more skin in the game to like tell everybody about the bikes and everything as well. And then it was like, I mean, still all of our kids that that's still the brand of bikes that we we use. ⁓ but it just got you see, like they took a different path. And then we took a different path of our investing. And then the fact is. It came back. I mean, it was a it was an aggressive plan that they had. It was like on seven years, it's gonna return this. And I'm like, well, that's better than anything else we're doing. And then it came back in half that time they were able to turn around. So it was like it worked out really well for us. But again, back to what you said earlier, we had a sandbox that we were willing to risk. You know, it wasn't everything. We didn't bet the farm. We didn't bet the farm. We might have bet that like the farm door, but you know, that was kind of ⁓
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: But it was just that idea where they were doing something different and we I mean, we looked at it and we believed in them and we were like, this can't fail. Like there's no we had seen that how the product worked, how it affected us. ⁓ and we did a weird thing because it was like nobody else at the time, our age, was like, Yeah, we're gonna go ahead and invest in a company. Like, that wasn't a thing. Yeah.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Right. Nobody else is doing private equity deals like that. Well, and honestly, that's its whole other category. I didn't mention 'cause I was trying not to go too deep into the nerd wheel on finance, which is way too easy for me. But specifically private equity, there's been so many of those companies that have just crushed the stock market. Like I I don't know about the returns that you got from them, but I would not be surprised to hear that at all that it beat what the public market did.
Jake Brown: It was ⁓ yeah, it was amazing. So all that I was what I want to say is depending on the part of your business, remember we talk about externalizing. Like how much can you take and just get out of your own mind, out of your own emotions? Like what can you just what can we put out there and work on it as an external thing? And with money, it's the same thing. And this idea of having a plan, having some that's safe and working the system, the plan that is more calculated, and then How much can you experiment? Can there be the fun part over here? Can you do wild things that you just believe in and you don't know why? Because with ADHD, there are times that we are right. We know that we know that we're right. You can't convince us that we aren't right, but we don't have any proof. It's just, it's right. It's the only thing that makes sense. And you know, it's hard for me to gamble on that a lot with a wife and family, you know, kids and everything in tow. But at the same time, there's this phrase I've seen me do it. Where I trust my intuition and my pattern, like my pattern recognition more than I do other people's. ⁓ so there are times that I look at something and I go, This always happens. Or, you know, the last 30 times this has happened, I'm feeling pretty good about this, you know, like I I feel that, but I won't gamble everything. But if I have that space, whether it's finances or in my business, even like product, ⁓ if I have a new product or a new service.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: You know, it's hard ⁓ to not burn everything down and jump on this new idea that has all of the dopamine flowing. It's all all the novelty. ⁓ I wanna do this, I wanna do wanna do like I'm all in on this. And people are like, like A lot of times we will chase that, but that idea of having the system that you can trust and almost ignore. ⁓ because like with our finances, it's like we go a quarter to sometimes, depending on how we're busy and how things are going, sometimes a full year ignoring what's happening because the system is playing out. And it's like my wife keeps more tabs on it, and if we don't need to talk about it, it just keeps rolling. And we have our meeting where we go, ⁓ yeah, everything, we still know where everything is.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Yeah.
Jake Brown: But there are some more fun things. It's like, okay, well maybe we tinker this. Maybe we try this. You know, we have our science lab over here doing stuff. Okay. I love this cornucopia thing.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: I think it's huge to have a good partner for that too. Yeah. Like I I always encourage that for clients. I think that's something I hear consistently when people come over to me. Is like my old advisor always laughed when I asked about different things, or he said that it was gonna be too complicated, too risky, too high chance of failure. Like if you don't try it, you're never gonna know if it works. If you never try to invest in the the boom bikes, then how would you ever get the reward from it? Right, like you You have to have somebody who's willing to not even just laugh at you, but to sit there and help you analyze the deal and say, Yeah, I think this could make sense and on occasion jump into something with you too. I've seen that play out plenty of times.
Jake Brown: Nope. And I we use the word what if a lot, ⁓ because it takes out a lot of the arguments or that shame and that like judgmental parts of it where you say, Well, what if we do this? Well then when you create the sandbox, what happens, like I say, hey, what if I do this crazy thing? And you go, Well, what if we take this portion into the science lab, everything else we keep running as we know it is, and we experiment with the beta test. And that idea of as long as we stay curious and lean into the what if, well, what if?
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Mm-hmm.
Jake Brown: then it's safe. But as soon as, you know, it's like, well no. As soon as they like start shutting stuff down, then that's the point where first off, we s we we don't like it. ⁓ and if you're a service provider and you're working with people that like they should enjoy working with you. They shouldn't dread having a conversation with you. Yeah. It's like, ⁓ I'm going to the it's like going to detention. I'm going to the principal's office again. ⁓ he's gonna tell me about my money. ⁓ all right.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: ⁓ yeah. Are you just gonna shoot down all my fun ideas again? That's not cool. Yeah. Well that's literally what they frame us against. Yeah. Yeah. I I guess just to to wrap it up, I'd say like these things are probably things that you're doing already if you're neurodivergent. There's a fair chance that you've already been on the outside of a crowd for most of your life and unable to to really see a path forward of competing, whether that's a social hierarchy, becoming the the popular, the the whatever type of kid you were trying to back in the day. Like you you naturally likely
Jake Brown: So
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: Taken some of these oblique paths to success here. Or you turn around from the cornucopia and run the other way because you found there was a better way that you could do. I would just say tune into that more. Recognize that as one of your neurodivergent superpowers, the pattern recognition, the outsider-ness of it, and the ability to just pivot, implement, make it up as you go along and find some really good successes.
Jake Brown: Yeah, I love it. ⁓ a couple things right there. I love what you said, Caleb. I just wanna for listeners, hey, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening with us. This podcast is an example of us just going, what if? And then we took like a hard left and ran around the outside of stuff. ⁓ and we want to invite you and reach out to us. We'd love to hear conversations. We'd love to hear how you've maybe taken paths around. Like what have been your cornucopia plays? So as you're thinking, look ahead. If there's an opportunity where you're you're looking ahead or you're planning, and maybe the path ahead that others have prescribed or what looks like the standard path. If it doesn't fit, you know, maybe look up, turn, turn left, look. ⁓ maybe there's something skirting the outside of the bounds. ⁓ maybe look up and see it, consider it. ⁓ not saying do it, but consider it and allow yourself to consider it, because that is how we are wired. And then also, as we're wrapping up, I want you to have a very vivid image of Caleb running through an oatmeal colored Pope office building between cubicles. Some old lady is there getting, you know, her little blooploop water machine. Somebody's standing over here at the Keurig. He's got his air rifle, whatever. And he just comes sprinting through there, getting carrying a red flag, coming back with it. ⁓ just remember, that's what your business can look like. You can have that moment. And people are like, what on earth is that guy doing? He's winning. That's what he's doing. He's winning.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: They're they're not sure if he's supposed to be there. He's playing it cool. He's just kinda walking normally and try not to make eye contact. And yeah, that can be that can be you too. You too can have an amazing moment where you're like, I know the game I'm playing, other people just don't get it, but I'm gonna win, baby.
Jake Brown: Ha ha ha. ⁓ I love it. All right. ⁓ anything else? Sign off? All right, like, subscribe, tell your friends, tell your mom. ⁓ we'd love moms listening to us. And ⁓ yeah, just remember it's your business. Change the rules, capture the flag.
Caleb Bogia-Curles, CFP: All I got. Tell your mom's friends.
