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 from them: the simple pleasure of tasting food. From there, she spent over a decade inside PepsiCo's Global R&D organization, climbing from scientist to Chief of Staff to director, optimizing that same pleasure at a global scale.

Then, this April, just five months after winning a seat on Red Deer's city council on her first try, she left PepsiCo to focus on civil service.

In this episode, we go back to the beginning and walk the whole arc:

🔹 THE SCIENCE — What her cannabis-and-appetite research actually taught her about pleasure and quality of life
🔹 THE CLIMB — PepsiCo Canada to New York, and the version of success she was chasing along the way
🔹 THE LETTING GO — What it means to continue adapting to a career

This isn't a policy interview, and it isn't a résumé. It's a conversation about ambition, appetite, and what's actually left once you stop chasing the next rung.

⏱️ What's Inside:
00:00 – A hometown kid who climbed a global ladder
— The PhD: cannabis, cancer, and the pleasure of eating again
— The climb: PepsiCo Canada to New York
— The five months of carrying both worlds
— The week she chose to serve her community
— What happiness looks like to her now

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#TristinBrisbois #RedDeer #Happiness #CareerChange #Purpose

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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 race, Dad," and he picked his son up and ran the whole course again on his shoulders.

In this episode, we unpack why that image says something uncomfortable about most driven men: we've trained our whole lives for one race: career, deadlines, deals, spreadsheets, and completely neglected the second one waiting at home. Somewhere around 6 p.m., we cross what feels like a finish line. But to our families, that front door was never the finish line. It's the starting gun.

We talk about why "work-life balance" is the wrong framing from the start, because it treats work and family as competitors instead of what work was actually supposed to be: the tool you use to invest in the people you love.

🔹 THE SIXTY SECONDS — A short driveway practice to transition from producer to servant before you walk inside
🔹 THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES — Why picking up three things off the floor teaches your kids more than any lecture on leadership
🔹 THE REFRAME — Why "I'm too exhausted" is often immaturity dressed up as fatigue, not the truth

By the end, you'll have one small, concrete practice you can try tonight — before you even walk through your own door.

⏱️ What's Inside:
00:00 – The Tough Mudder finish line
— The two races every man is running
— Why "balance" is the wrong goal
— The 60-second driveway prayer
— The first five minutes set the tone
— This week's practice

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#Fatherhood #Marriage #Presence #Purpose #FaithAndFamily

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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 frame is shot. That mindset shapes everything about how this show gets made, from the questions we ask in prep to the way an episode gets cut together at the end.

We walk through both sides of the process: what it takes on the production side to plan, shoot, and edit an episode, and what it takes on my side as the host to prepare, show up, and have a real conversation instead of just reading questions off a page.

🔹 STORYFINDING - Why Dion refuses to pick up a camera until he understands the story space and finds the right people to carry it
🔹 THE PRODUCTION SIDE - What goes into planning, shooting, and editing an episode before you ever see it
🔹 THE PREP SIDE - How I get ready to host a conversation that actually goes somewhere, instead of following a script
🔹 WHY IT MATTERS - The difference between a podcast that just gets made and one that's built to mean something

If you've ever been curious about what's happening off-camera, or you're thinking about starting something like this yourself, this one pulls back the whole process.

⏱️ What's Inside:
00:00 - Why we wanted to show this side of the show
- Storyfinding: listening before creating
- The production side, start to finish
- The prep side: how I get ready to host
- What makes an episode actually work

🔔 Subscribe for more conversations on purpose, meaning, and building a life worth living.

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