They run a commercial kitchen with Red Seal Chefs. They operate food trucks and a catering company that books nearly 300 events a year. They have a culinary classroom open to the public. They grow their own produce year-round in hydroponic sea-cans and a greenhouse. They just added a mushroom farm. They run a market where clients choose their own products because the data shows it cuts waste by 30 percent. They serve a region of 20,000 square kilometres, six days a week.

What kind of business is that?

It's the Red Deer Food Bank. And Mitch Thomson rebuilt it.

I toured this facility about nine months ago. My wife thought I was going to quit my job and volunteer there full-time because I could not stop talking about what I had seen. Today you're going to hear why.

Mitch is the Executive Director of the Red Deer Food Bank Society, and this is not a charity episode. It's a conversation about what happens when someone takes a nonprofit most people associate with canned goods and drop boxes and builds a functioning multi-stream enterprise inside it. Andrew and Mitch get into the strategic thinking behind the social enterprise model, the September 2024 moment when Mitch posted photos of nearly empty shelves and said "this is as bad as it gets," what it actually costs to lead an organization that people depend on when they have nowhere else to go, and the question nobody has asked him: what a career spent this close to human fragility does to a person over time.

This is one of the most important conversations about business, community, and leadership this show has had.

Money isn't the main currency of a good life. This podcast gives you the tools to build a life of meaning and fulfillment.

Free Ultimate Goal Setting Framework → thecurrencyofhappiness.com

Subscribe on YouTube → youtube.com/@thecurrencyofhappiness

Instagram → instagram.com/thecurrencyofhappiness

Support the Red Deer Food Bank → reddeerfoodbank.com | @reddeerfb

Catering & Food Trucks → rdfb.ca | @rdfb_catering | @rdfb_kitchen49

Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts → Search "The Currency of Happiness"

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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, he unveiled the instant camera. At its peak, Polaroid was enabling people to make about a billion photographs a year. Steve Jobs called him a national treasure.

It started because a father took a simple question seriously enough, actually to answer it.

This episode is about what happens when you stop accepting that's just how it works as a sufficient answer. Land's story runs from dropping out of Harvard to sneaking into Columbia labs at night, building Polaroid into one of the most recognized brands in the world, getting pushed out by his own board after 43 years, and spending his remaining years still working, still building, still answering questions that hadn't been answered yet. He held 535 patents when he died in 1991.

Andrew uses Land's story to ask a harder question about the problems sitting right in front of us that we have stopped seeing because we have been inside them long enough that they started to feel like the floor. The friction at work we have explained away. The tension in a relationship we have normalized. The gap between how things are and how they could be that we have stopped noticing.

You don't have to invent the instant camera. You just have to stop walking past the questions that everyone around you has already accepted.

What question have you stopped asking because you accepted the answer too easily?

Money isn't the main currency of a good life. This podcast gives you the tools to build a life of meaning and fulfillment.

Free Ultimate Goal Setting Framework → thecurrencyofhappiness.com

Subscribe on YouTube → youtube.com/@thecurrencyofhappiness

Instagram → instagram.com/thecurrencyofhappiness

Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts → Search "The Currency of Happiness"

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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 apart. They grew up close, partied together, and genuinely bonded. Stephen moved to Red Deer and built a new life. Over the decade that followed, Stephen became the person Phil called when he was lonely, when he needed to laugh, when he needed someone to hold space without judgment. Phil had grace for everyone except himself.

Simon was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. He lived with severe cerebral palsy and functioned at the level of a three-month-old his entire life. He moved into full-time care when Andrew was 13. Nearly a decade passed without a visit. Andrew carried that guilt for years. In December 2024 he flew back and spent three days in the hospital with Simon, not knowing if Simon could hear him. Simon passed away in early July 2025.

This episode goes into who these brothers were before anything else, what it costs to be someone's safe place for a decade, what the call feels like when it comes, where the guilt lives, and where the good news actually is. Not manufactured hope. Earned hope.

If you have ever loved someone you could not save, or carried a grief you have never said out loud to anyone, this one is for you.

Money isn't the main currency of a good life. This podcast gives you the tools to build a life of meaning and fulfillment.

Free Ultimate Goal Setting Framework → thecurrencyofhappiness.com

Subscribe on YouTube → youtube.com/@thecurrencyofhappiness

Instagram → instagram.com/thecurrencyofhappiness

Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts → Search "The Currency of Happiness"

If this episode hit home, share it with one person who needs to hear it. Every share helps build what comes next.

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