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

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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"

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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 out to be a bad financial decision. I had written the list down, forgotten about it, and my life had moved toward it anyway.

I went and found Emily and showed her. She looked at the list, looked at me, and said: "You should have made your income goal higher if you knew it was actually going to happen."

We laughed. Then we sat down and wrote a new list.

This episode is the actual goal setting framework Andrew and Emily use to build their life together, including the six areas of life worth examining before you set a single goal, why SMART goals aren't quite enough and what the two extra letters change, the difference between outcome goals and process goals and why most people focus on the wrong one, and why the goals that feel most uncomfortable to write down are usually the ones most worth writing.

This isn't a theory. It's the real thing, including the parts that are messy and imperfect.

If you found a notebook ten years from now with everything you wanted your life to look like, what would be on that list? And what's stopping you from writing it down today?

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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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 you were parented, and that most parenting books focus on child behaviour when the real work happens in the parent's own formation first.

This episode is a parenting masterclass. Andrew sits down with P. Jonathan to work through the practical tools behind his framework: how to identify and break generational patterns before they repeat in your own home, what it means to raise the whole child across body, soul, and spirit, what grace and redemption actually look like in a real parenting moment rather than a teaching illustration, how to stay ahead of your child's developmental stage instead of falling behind it, and how to hand a child technology without handing them something they're completely unprepared for.

P. Jonathan also created Cell Phone Permit, the only standalone phone education course in America, after his oldest son Alexander wanted a smartphone and no preparation course existed anywhere. That origin story is in this episode.

And for the parent who feels like they've already missed their window: there is a direct answer to that question here too.

This is a conversation worth returning to.

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
Learn more about Jonathan → jonathanbrozozog.com
Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts → Search "The Currency of Happiness"

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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 audience. A four year old, a two year old, and a baby. The four year old lasted about ninety seconds. The two year old was never in. I stopped reading to a room that had already moved on and sat there in the quiet feeling something I hadn't expected.

That moment sent me back to the drawing board. And what came out of it was the Father's Day Awards: printed invitations delivered weeks in advance, a living room set up with their favourite snacks, Oscar music playing when they walked in, a slideshow on the TV, and award certificates decorated with unicorns and dinosaurs and sports. Each child nominated alongside their favourite stuffed animals. Each one called up to the stage to receive their award while I gave a short, honest, specific speech about who I had watched them become that year.

They were locked in. They were proud. I went to bed that night feeling more fulfilled as a father than I had in a long time. Not because I got something. Because I gave something that actually landed.

Father's Day has quietly become a day about dads. The sleep in, the breakfast in bed, the round of golf. And there's nothing wrong with being appreciated. But the days our kids remember are rarely the days we rested. They're the days we made them feel seen.

What's the one word you'd use to describe each of your kids this year? And have you told them?

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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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 chair. She ran for mayor in 2013 and lost. She went back to the council chamber, worked another decade, and ran again. She co-founded 100+ Women Who Care Red Deer, which has raised over $640,000 for local charities. She became a grandmother in 2024 and ran for mayor six months later.

This is not a political interview. It's a conversation about what it looks like to build something slowly, persistently, and with genuine heart over 30 years. About what keeps someone coming back after a loss. About relational leadership and what that actually means in practice. About homelessness, economic development, and what Red Deer deserves. And about the personal life underneath all of it, including what it cost, and what it means to finally be sitting in the chair.

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. Every share helps build what comes next.

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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 failing at most of it.

Eleven years after opening his agency, he had every client on his wish list. Time magazine called him the most sought-after wizard in advertising. He became known as the Father of Advertising. And when people asked how he did it, he pointed back to the years that looked like nothing and said none of it was wasted.

Andrew believes him. Because over the last decade he has started a merchant services company, a financial blog he stopped at five articles, a vehicle wrap business called Dryvr that signed up over a hundred drivers and never found a single paying client, a solar domain name venture that earned him a hundred dollar deposit and a lesson, a follow-up email business that worked but wasn't worth building, and two Amazon number one bestsellers that felt significant and then quietly faded.

This episode goes back through every one of those failures, not for the story but for what each one actually built. The skill, the self-knowledge, the judgment, and the internal capacity that made everything that followed possible, including this podcast.

What season are you in right now that feels like a detour? What if it isn't?

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. Every share helps build what comes next.

Support the show