The Currency of Happiness

Have you ever hit a goal you worked years for, and felt almost nothing? I remember the exact night our net worth crossed our biggest milestone. I sat there waiting for something to hit me, relief, pride, some kind of internal celebration. Instead I opened a new tab and started calculating the next number. Two minutes, and my brain had already moved the finish line. That pattern has followed me my...

What does it actually cost to walk away from something you spent eighteen years building? Dr. Tristin Brisbois has spent her whole career, in wildly different settings, chasing the same underlying question: what makes people well? It started with her PhD at the University of Alberta, a clinical trial giving cannabis to cancer patients to see if it could restore something chemotherapy had taken fro...

Are you actually done when you walk through your front door, or does it just feel that way because you're exhausted? Justin Whitmel Earley finished a 10K Tough Mudder dead last among his peers, sixty seconds behind a twenty-two-year-old who collapsed into a chair the moment he crossed the line. But Earley didn't get to stop. His kids ran up. One of them said, "Now it's the kid...

Ever wonder what actually happens before and after we hit record on this show? For this episode, I sat down with Dion Wiebe, the filmmaker behind The Currency of Happiness, to pull back the curtain on how this podcast really comes together. Dion isn't just running a camera. His whole approach starts with something he calls Storyfinding, a process of listening and understanding before a single...

Are you happier now than you were ten years ago? Not richer. Not further along. Happier. Harvard professor Dr. Arthur Brooks has spent years studying that question, and his research reveals something uncomfortable: the people with the best jobs, the nicest homes, and the most real accomplishments are often privately struggling the most. Not because they lack success, but because they're missi...

What do you do the night you've decided this is either going to be the night you get help, or the night you don't wake up? Darryl Wilkie is the executive director of the Red Deer Dream Center, a residential addiction recovery facility built inside a former downtown nightclub, the same kind of building where many of his clients first tried the drugs that would go on to define years of the...

What do you need to let go of to get to the next level of your life? There's a kid in Washington state lying in the dark, listening for the sound of the front door. Waiting for his dad to come home from work. His dad was a good man who worked hard and provided for his family. But the job owned him. The schedule owned him. And that kid made himself a quiet promise, the kind you make before you...

Most small business owners aren't bad at marketing. They're doing random acts of marketing, spending before strategizing, chasing trends, trying things without a plan, then wondering why none of it sticks. The problem almost never is the budget. It's that the strategy was never there to begin with. Peter DeWit is the owner of EDGE Marketing and Design, a strategist with 25 years of...

What is the one thing you would not give up, even if it meant losing everything you have built? In February 1928, Walt Disney sat across a table in New York from Charles Mintz, expecting to negotiate a bigger budget. Instead, he learned Universal Pictures now owned Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, his hit character, and that Mintz had already signed away most of Disney's own animators behind his back...

Have you ever waited to feel motivated before you did the hard thing? Keith Weber says that's backward. Keith Weber, known to most as Kettlebell Keith, found his first kettlebell in a bodybuilding magazine before the internet existed. He ordered a VHS tape and a book, waited months for the bells to ship to Canada, and taught himself the basics before becoming one of the first people in Canada...

Have you ever worked as hard as you possibly could for an entire year and ended up exactly where you started? I was staring at a spreadsheet at the end of the year, twelve months of work laid out in rows and columns, and the ranking hadn't moved an inch from where it sat twelve months earlier. My response was to work even harder. Not because I had a new strategy. Because I needed to prove som...

What happens when you stop treating a food bank like a food bank and start running it like a business? Mitch Thompson has spent five years turning the Red Deer Food Bank into something most people wouldn't recognize. What used to be a dusty stove and a handful of community barbecues is now a food distribution hub with three Red Seal chefs, a 40-foot hydroponic growing container, a mushroom fa...

In 1943, Edwin Land was on a family trip in New Mexico when his three-year-old daughter Jennifer asked why she couldn't see the photographs he had been taking. Not in a frustrated way. In the way that only small children ask questions, with complete sincerity and no assumption that the current reality is the only possible reality. Land couldn't stop thinking about it. Three years later,...

Stephen Van Santen lost his brother Phil to a drug overdose on November 11, 2022. Andrew lost his brother Simon in July 2025. A few weeks after Simon passed, Stephen called. That conversation is why this episode exists. This is not an interview. It is two people who have loved someone they could not save sitting down to tell the truth about what that actually costs. Phil and Stephen were 1.5 years...

I was cleaning out my closet when I found a notebook from my early twenties. A list of things I wanted to accomplish before I turned 30. Practical things, specific things, personal things. Some of them felt impossible when I wrote them. I had done all of them. Including the rental properties, everyone told me a young person couldn't afford. Including the book. Including the Jeep, which turned...

Most people become parents and then figure it out as they go. Jonathan Brozozog has spent over 20 years arguing that there is a better way. Jonathan is America's #1 Christian parenting coach, Lead Pastor of Creative Church in Minnesota, father of eight, and author of Raising Parents alongside his wife Joanne. His central argument is that the most important variable in how you parent is how yo...

A few years ago I heard a speaker describe how he writes a letter to each of his kids every Father's Day. A reflection of who he saw them becoming over the past year. I thought it was one of the most intentional things I'd ever heard a father do. So I tried it. I wrote from the heart. I got a little emotional putting it together. Then Father's Day morning arrived and I looked at my...

On October 20, 2025, Cindy Jefferies found out she had been elected Mayor of Red Deer by watching a TV screen at a press conference. The people who had run against her were standing in the same room. That moment is where this conversation starts. But the real story started decades earlier. Cindy has served Red Deer for nearly 30 years across school board, city council, and now the mayor's cha...

In 1948, David Ogilvy arrived in New York City with $6,000, no clients, no credentials, and no experience writing advertisements. He was 38 years old. What came before that moment was seventeen years of getting expelled from Oxford, working in a hotel kitchen preparing meals for customers' dogs, selling stoves door to door in the Scottish Highlands, farming with the Amish in Pennsylvania, and...

In September 2015, a 22-year-old named Lindsey More died by suicide. She had been close friends with Mark Jones's daughter. She had spent time in his home. And when she was gone, Mark, a former teacher and principal with 35 years in public education, decided he had to do something. What followed was seven years of coalition building, fundraising, institutional battles, and refusing to stop. O...

Before Emily and I were married, she had a goal. Free by 23. Financially free before her twenty-third birthday, done working for money, living life on her own terms. Twenty-three came and went. I watched that dream get quieter. And it did something to me I didn't have words for at the time. So I made a decision. I was going to retire my wife. I didn't tell her how serious I was. I just g...

Most people don't feel stuck with money because they're lazy or irresponsible. They feel stuck because they're overwhelmed. They don't know where to start, they're afraid of making the wrong move, and the longer they wait, the heavier it feels. Ryan Gaunce is a financial advisor and wealth planner who helps people build plans that actually fit their real lives. He's s...

November 21st, 1915. Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton is standing on the ice watching his ship sink. The expedition is over before it ever started. Twenty-seven men are stranded over a thousand miles from any other human being with no radio, no rescue coming, and no plan left to follow. What he said in that moment, and what he did over the next nineteen months, is one of the most extraordinary leader...

Most people think joy is something you find when life finally gets easier. Steve Moser learned it's something you choose when it doesn't. Steve has walked through betrayal, single parenthood, rebuilding, remarriage, and opening his home to children who needed one. In this conversation, he doesn't talk about joy as a feeling or a mood. He talks about it as a decision, made repeatedly...

My wife was in active labour with our third child. My phone buzzed. It was my realtor. I waited a reasonable amount of time before looking. Maybe two minutes. We made an offer before the baby arrived. I walked through the front door a few days later and found carpet stains, layers of wallpaper stacked like geological sediment, and a bathtub in a shade that hasn't existed since 1974. It was no...