In this conversation, Andy lays out his core idea: mental fitness is trainable. He uses the image of an arena — a structure with character as its foundation, the four C’s as its pillars, connection as the frame, and culture as the dome. Around that image he draws a sharper distinction: most people are either lost between arenas, watching from the spectator seats, or actually in the arena, willing to try and fail in public. The invitation of the episode is to step in.

The turn comes when Andy talks about his own hardest battles — not combat, but the eight inches between his ears. He’s candid about imposter syndrome at West Point, the voice that attacked him daily, and the mentor (Captain Carl Olsen) who first taught him that confidence and focus are skills, not gifts. From there he gives the listener something practical: a thirty-second daily check-in (surviving, resilient, or thriving), the question “what can you do to fight to the right,” and the Four C’s framework for navigating change.

He also pushes back on the cult of grit. There’s a glass ceiling, he says — a time to grit, a time to quit, and a time to pivot — and he tells the story of a minor-league ballplayer hanging on to a dream at the cost of everything else. The conversation closes where YouPotential always returns: identity, money, and what happens when your whole sense of self is tied to the scorecard.

Key Topics Covered

• The Arena as operating system: A visual model for character, mental fitness, connection, and culture.
• Three kinds of people: The lost, the spectators (and critics), and the performers in the arena.
• Identity in transition: Leaving a twenty-year military identity and asking “who am I?” not just “what’s next?”
• The real battlefield: Why the hardest fights are internal, not external.
• Mental fitness is trainable: Treating the mind like the body — reps, recovery, repeat.
• The daily check-in: Surviving, resilient, or thriving — and “what can I do to fight to the right?”
• The Four C’s: Confidence, control, commitment, challenge — with control as the entry point.
• Grit’s glass ceiling: When to grit, when to quit, when to pivot.
• Money and identity: What happens when self-worth is tied to being the breadwinner.

Memorable Quotes

“The hardest battles you fought weren’t in Iraq or Afghanistan. They were in the eight inches between your ears.”

Timestamp: [17:33] (host frame, Andy affirms)

“I thought that it made me automatically mentally tough and I was wrong.”

Timestamp: [18:25]

“Everybody’s fighting this war for mental fitness.”

Timestamp: [22:14]

“The credit belongs to the performers who are in the arena.”

Timestamp: [06:33]

“To develop black belt skills you have to have a white belt mindset.”

Timestamp: [01:04:04]

About Andy Riise

Andy Riise is a mental performance coach who works at the intersection of behavioral science and lived experience. Before coaching, he served twenty years in the U.S. Army, beginning at West Point and including combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, along with work supporting elite special operations units.

After the military, Andy moved into performance coaching — first in Major League Baseball with the Cincinnati Reds, then in the NFL with the Chicago Bears. His philosophy is built around the idea that mental fitness can be trained like the body, using assessments, skills, and repetition rather than slogans or hacks.

He’s the host of the Skull Sessions Podcast, the founder of Design to Perform, and is writing a book with the working title Step Into the Arena. He lives with his wife and four children, and names service as his principal core value.

Connect With Andy Riise

• Website: andyriise.com
• Podcast: Skull Sessions Podcast
• Coaching: Design to Perform

Resources Mentioned

• Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” (from the “Citizenship in a Republic” speech)
• The Four C’s model of mental toughness (confidence, control, commitment, challenge)
• Ford v Ferrari (referenced on the mind–body / man–machine relationship)
• The Pantheon in Rome (the architectural metaphor for Andy’s model)
• “The measure of a life is in its service” — motto of Sam Houston State University

About YouPotential

YouPotential explores what it means to live a meaningful life — through conversations about money, purpose, relationships, and becoming. Hosted by Shaun Maslyk.

“Sometimes it’s not the answers we learn from — but the questions.”

Jodie Cook has lived several lives most people would be happy with just one of: founder of a social media agency she scaled and sold, author, Forbes columnist, competitive powerlifter for Great Britain, and now the founder of an AI company, Coachbox. But this conversation isn't a highlight reel. It's an excavation of the mental operating system underneath the wins — the framings and beliefs that let her keep moving when most people would freeze.

We start with Charlie Cole, the alter ego she invented to catch herself in the act of “good girl conditioning” — the inherited training to be polite, agreeable, and small. From there the conversation moves through the stories that shaped her: a self-employed mother who taught her what work looked like, fifteen jobs before she was twenty-one, and an early decision that the words you use to describe yourself are the words you eventually become.

The emotional center is March 2020. Jodie had built an agency that ran without her — she traveled four months a year, and her team pulled rocks out of her backpack rather than putting them in. Then COVID took a quarter of her clients in a week, and she had to decide who she was when the thing she'd built was on fire. What she did next, and what it taught her about when to hold on and when to let go, is the heart of this episode.

For anyone who has built something successful and quietly wondered “is this it?” — or who suspects the story running their life was written by someone else — this is a conversation about taking the pen back.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

• Good girl conditioning & the alter ego: why Jodie invented Charlie Cole, and how an alter ego is permission to be more yourself.
• The power of self-naming: calling it “my business” when it was just her — the label comes before the identity.
• Money as freedom: how a purple Kia Picanto at 17 wired a belief that money equals freedom and travel.
• A business that doesn't need you: rewarding self-sufficiency and getting your ego out of the team's way.
• Reframing fear as “go time”: a childhood framing of nerves as excitement that became a lifelong advantage.
• Adlerian psychology: why she believes you chose your problems — and why that's liberating.
• “Living in the end”: the nightly visualization practice she uses before competitions and big decisions.
• The personal success system: why everyone has a repeatable recipe for their wins.
• Playing your ace cards: the things that come easy to you that you've been taught to hide.

MEMORABLE QUOTES

“I think that everyone's alter ego is just them. It's just who they would be if they weren't afraid of something or if they didn't need permission.”

📍 03:24

“take your power back. Who are you waiting for? Like no one cares, they're all doing their own stuff.”

📍 07:01

“my job is to never put out the same fire twice.”

📍 16:42

“I love the idea that nothing in my past had any power at all over who I am now. I chose it. Because you do take your power back.”

📍 34:36

“trying is a confession of absence. So as soon as you're trying to get something, you're like basically saying, I don't have it.”

📍 35:32

ABOUT JODIE COOK

Jodie Cook is a British entrepreneur, author, and athlete. She founded a social media agency at 22 and sold it ten years later, then spent time helping other agency owners navigate their own exits. She is a Forbes columnist, the author of several books including Ten Year Career, and competes for Great Britain in bench press.

Her latest venture is Coachbox AI, a platform that lets coaches, consultants, and founder-led businesses build their own AI version of themselves — a company that grew, fittingly, out of people simply asking her to make one for them. A committed digital nomad, she travels the world with a single suitcase and a clear philosophy: that the words you use to describe yourself shape who you become, and that almost everything you need to succeed, you already have.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga — the Adlerian book Jodie travels with
• Alfred Adler / individual psychology — goal-based vs. cause-and-effect thinking
• Neville Goddard — the “living in the end” philosophy
• Akira the Don & “Meaning Wave” — introduced her to Goddard (album: Stop Trying)
• Dr. Wayne Dyer — “see someone's highest potential and treat them like that's all you see”
• Coachbox AI — Jodie's current company

ABOUT YOUPOTENTIAL

YouPotential explores what it means to live a meaningful life — through conversations about money, purpose, relationships, and becoming. Hosted by Shaun Maslyk. “Sometimes it's not the answers we learn from — but the questions.”

In this Deep Cuts, I pull the parenting threads out of my YouPotential conversation with Dr. Todd Kashdan — Professor of Psychology at George Mason University and one of the most cited researchers in the world on curiosity, psychological flexibility, and well-being. Todd grew up without a father. His mom died when he was twelve. He had almost no model for what an engaged dad looked like. So he built one — three principles his kids could recite by age five.

We get into post-traumatic growth, the cult of high-achieving kids, the financial cost of the optimized childhood, the 10% retirement concept, psychological flexibility as a unified theory, and a practice called strengths-spotting that changed how I show up with my own son. It's not a how-to. It's a re-frame of what the job actually is.

Key Topics

• Todd's three principles — what to stand for instead of what to forbid
• Post-traumatic growth and the name tag we don't have to wear
• Beach Week — intel over interrogation
• The cult of high-achieving kids and what we're really buying
• Path A vs Path B — Todd's framework for teenagers
• Why relationships predict happiness more than credentials
• The 10% retirement — quietly stepping off the achievement treadmill
• Psychological flexibility — meeting the moment instead of repeating yourself
• Principled rebellion — how kids become adults who change institutions
• Strengths-spotting — bolding and italicizing who your kid is becoming

Memorable Quotes

"Since my kids were five years old, they could recite the three principles of Todd as their dad. One, I'm going to make you laugh. Two, I'm gonna teach you stuff. Three, I'm always gonna be there."

📍 00:54

"I think all of us should basically try not to be enslaved by our past, but use it as a comparator of — this will not take place again on my watch."

📍 14:25

"We do know that this is the number one predictor cross-culturally of what predicts happiness — lasting, significant, meaningful interactions and relationships."

📍 40:39

"Everyone has this jagged profile of skills, abilities, personality traits. You have to figure out what dimension is going to work best in the situation that I'm in right now."

📍 1:21:06

"Consistency doesn't mean saying the same thing over and over — a lot of activists get this wrong."

📍 1:04:02

About Todd Kashdan

Dr. Todd Kashdan is Professor of Psychology at George Mason University and director of the Well-Being Laboratory. He's one of the world's leading researchers on curiosity, psychological flexibility, and well-being — over 225 peer-reviewed articles, cited more than 35,000 times. He's the author of The Art of Insubordination, Curious?, The Upside of Your Dark Side, and Designing Positive Psychology. He writes the popular Substack Provoked. He's a father of twin daughters (plus one more).

Connect With Todd

🌐 Website: toddkashdan.com

📚 Substack: toddkashdan.substack.com

📖 Books: The Art of Insubordination · Curious? · The Upside of Your Dark Side

Resources Mentioned

VIA Character Strengths Survey — viacharacter.org (Peterson & Seligman)

Post-traumatic growth research — Tedeschi & Calhoun

The 10% Retirement — Jay Van Bavel

Joseph pulls from 200 years of American history to make a case that almost no one in modern personal finance is making — that marriage was once considered the single most important financial decision a person could make, and the data still backs it up today. He shares the stats: married men retire with ten times the wealth of single or divorced men. Married women earn twice what single women earn. Married Black men out-earn single white men. And yet we have quietly traded that wisdom for spreadsheets and stock picks.

The conversation takes a turn when Shaun asks what changed when Joseph hit his financial independence number. Joseph's answer is more honest than expected — almost nothing changed. Hitting the number did not deliver the identity shift he thought it would. To make the point real, he tells the story of the day he literally made himself a billionaire by issuing his own cryptocurrency. His wife's response is the punchline of the whole episode.

What you walk away with is a quietly radical idea: net worth is a recent invention, and chasing it might be costing you the things that history says actually matter — the relationships, the second life you get to live in your sixties and beyond, and the small, ordinary moments like watching Bluey on the couch with your six-year-old.

Key Topics Covered

• The scantily clad budget summit — how a Jimmy Buffett-themed weekend became the moment Joseph asked his wife for permission to bet the family on a business
• Marriage as financial superpower — why old business manuals taught young men how to pick a spouse before they taught them how to calculate interest
• The card game of the 1840s — how families used to teach their kids about partnership and trade-offs
• The myth of net worth — why this number did not exist in American life until the 1910s and why chasing it is a modern trap
• Joseph's billionaire experiment — the day he made himself worth $1.1 billion and what happened next
• The Bluey moment — his book hits number one and his daughter does not care
• You live two lives — why Warren Buffett made 99% of his wealth after age 60 and what that means for the rest of us
• The two-income family is ancient — why the idea that women just started working in the 1960s is historically wrong

Memorable Quotes

"Capitalism is a team sport. And that makes marriage a superpower."

— Joseph Moore — 02:38

"Marriage is the single most important financial decision of your entire life."

— Joseph Moore — 03:09

"I was a billionaire, but it didn't mean anything."

— Joseph Moore — 07:46

"My net worth is a lot less valuable than my willingness to go coach seventh grade girls basketball."

— Joseph Moore — 10:32

"You don't live one life, you live two."

— Joseph Moore — 13:36

"You will ultimately choose your attitude and you will be the one who decides if you think things are filled with blessings or filled with curses — and choose the blessings."

— Joseph Moore — 21:14

About Joseph Moore

Joseph Moore is a historian and author who walked away from an academic salary in his forties to test a single idea from American economic history. He spent years reading the old stuff — the manuals, the ledgers, the letters — and what he found pushed him to write a book.

He is a father, a writer, and a self-described optimist in a culture that rewards cynicism. His new book is How to Get Rich in American History. He runs a Substack at josephmoorebooks.com where he shares his research and gives away the first chapter for free.

Connect With Joseph

• Website: josephmoorebooks.com
• Book: How to Get Rich in American History

Resources Mentioned

• Warren Buffett and the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Omaha)
• William Wells Brown — the formerly enslaved man who issued his own currency
• Jane Austen novels (as references for "estate worth" vs. "net worth")
• HGTV (referenced as a financial cautionary tale)

The argument, in one sentence: we've confused being productive with being a contribution.

Act 1 — The Idea. There are two kinds of contribution. The visible kind that produces status. The generative kind that produces something specific. Mike Steger names the three dimensions of meaning — coherence, purpose, and significance — and identifies the one most successful professionals are missing.

Act 2 — The Tension. The work isn't to do more. The work is to focus. Seth tells the story of a wealth manager who built half a billion dollars in assets by sending clients to competitors when they asked for the wrong thing. Then comes the line of the episode: Grabbing things is how you drown.

Act 3 — The Action. A two-week exercise. Seven evenings of noticing. Two if-then plans. Drawn from Steger's research on how meaning actually gets noticed and Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions — replicated across more than ninety studies.

If you've been quietly empty at the peak of your career, this one is for you.

▶ Full takeaway worksheet at the link in the description.

▶ Original episodes with Seth Godin and Dr. Mike Steger linked below.

Subscribe for new YouPotential conversations every other Thursday — alternating guest episodes and Deep Cuts distillations.

What's striking about Paula isn't the resume. It's the clarity. Fifteen years into running Afford Anything, she has thought longer and more carefully about what money actually buys than almost anyone in this space. And what she's landed on isn't a number. It's a capacity. The capacity to sit next to someone you love in a hospital, and not check your bank account before you book the flight.

This conversation moves through a lot — the Harvard study on what predicts long-term happiness, the difference between residual income and financial independence, the arrival fallacy, why she thinks consumer sentiment is so disconnected from economic performance. But the throughline is calling. Paula believes most people end up in misaligned careers because they were chasing security, and that financial independence — even partial financial independence — gives you the leeway to do the work you'd actually want to do until you're ninety-nine.

If you're somewhere in the middle of building wealth and wondering what the number is for, this is the conversation.

Key Topics Covered

• The Harvard study on happiness: Why quality of relationships is the #1 predictor of long-term well-being
• Two mental models: Growing up between Nepalese survival logic and American consumer-economy possibility
• "Your education is incomplete": The price of taking risks your parents can't see
• Breaking a lineage: Child marriage, illiteracy, and what doesn't have to get passed down
• The actual definition of financial freedom: Why it's about being able to absorb a black swan, not afford Michelin restaurants
• Residual vs. passive income: Why the semantics matter less than the math
• The arrival fallacy: Why your FI number is based on a single volatile data point
• The pursuit, not the goal: Why financial independence is for choosing your calling, not retiring from work
• Radical authenticity in content: Why leading beats following your audience
• Thinking in decades, not quarters: How time horizon changes every decision

Memorable Quotes

"I am the first in my direct lineage to not be a child bride."

📍 Timestamp: [23:50]

"I think the human nature is to build and contribute. If we are only consuming and not creating, that does lead to distress."

📍 Timestamp: [39:23]

"You just need a basic, decent human standard of living."

📍 Timestamp: [35:30]

"There are a lot of people who, in their early life, they get into the wrong career — and by wrong I mean misaligned."

📍 Timestamp: [41:25]

"When you are in the work that you see as the thing you want to do until you're ninety-nine years old, then naturally you're going to think in decades."

📍 Timestamp: [1:00:10]

About Paula Pant

Paula Pant is the founder and host of Afford Anything, a podcast and media brand exploring what she calls the Five Pillars: financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. Afford Anything has been downloaded over 45 million times.

Born in Kathmandu and raised in the United States, Paula spent her early twenties working as a newspaper reporter before quitting at 27 to travel out of a backpack for over two years. She returned with $25,000 in savings, the seeds of a brand, and a thesis that has held up for 15 years: you can afford anything, but you can't afford everything.

She is one of the clearest thinkers on money mindset working today — and one of the rare voices who treats financial independence as a means, not an end.

Money buys security. Past that, it amplifies whoever you already are.

Through five clips from his conversation with travel writer Rolf Potts — author of Vagabonding and a man who has spent thirty years watching what people in seventy countries actually do with their money — Shaun braids together Brad Klontz on money scripts, Richard Rohr on the two halves of life, Ashley Whillans on choosing time over money, and Ellen Langer on mindlessness. The episode lands on a story Rolf told about his own thirty acres in Kansas, and a bird he didn't know was there.

A reflection to carry into the week, not an assignment.

New episodes of Deep Cuts every other Thursday on the YouPotential Podcast.

EPISODE SUMMARY

Rolf Potts grew up in Wichita, Kansas — middle of the country, middle class, no passport until his mid-twenties. He didn't think travel was something people like him were allowed to do. Then he saved £7,000, got on a bicycle, and spent four years riding around the world on almost nothing. What happened to his relationship with money during those years is at the center of this conversation.

The concept Rolf keeps coming back to is time wealth — the idea that the richest generation in human history has somehow engineered itself into lives with almost no time to actually live in them. We spend less time with our families than people in impoverished countries. We accumulate possessions we don't have time to enjoy. We defer the life we want to some more appropriate future moment that rarely arrives.

But this conversation isn't a lecture about minimalism or a call to quit your job and travel. Rolf is more nuanced than that. He talks about the first half and second half of life — building the vessel versus filling it. He talks about coming home to his 30 acres in Kansas and realizing he can't identify the bird calls on his own land. He talks about his wife Kiki, who within months of arriving had more local friends than he did after years of living there.

And in a moment that landed differently because Shaun had spent that same morning with Dr. Ellen Langer — Harvard's first tenured woman in psychology, whose new book is entirely about noticing — Rolf started talking about attention as the real currency. Not money. Not time. Attention. The two conversations, separated by hours, were saying the same thing from opposite ends.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

• Why Rolf didn't have a passport until he was 25 — and what that means for anyone who thinks they've started too late
• The two ways to live a rich life: earn more or need less
• Time wealth: why the wealthiest generation in history feels time-poor
• What his grandfather's retirement taught him about the cost of deferring your life
• First half vs. second half of life — the Richard Rohr framework and what it means to fill the vessel you spent years building
• Traveling like a local vs. purchasing access to local culture
• Attention as a form of wealth — and how algorithms are harvesting yours
• Becoming a traveler at home: noticing your own 30 acres
• What we get wrong about money and well-being
• The front porch question: what book would you write at the end of your life?

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"There's two ways to live a rich life. Either earn more or need less. And the result is similar."📍 10:11

"We're not really sure how much money we actually need. We live in a country where billionaires have four houses, one in each time zone, but no time to enjoy them."📍 26:17

"Generationally, we're the most wealthy generation in world history. Yet somehow we don't live lives that are fully rich in time." 📍 13:52

"You should pay attention to that travel urge — because that is your life telling you something that you should listen to." 📍 52:00

"Dare to be lonely, lost and bored — because those are the kinds of friction that in our home life we've had trained out of us." 📍 55:48

"The well-being as the root of wealth — because that's absolutely what it's about."📍 28:13

ABOUT ROLF POTTS

Rolf Potts is a travel writer, author, and one of the most thoughtful voices on what it means to live a life with real intention. He's best known for Vagabonding, a book that has sold continuously for over twenty years and continues to be passed from friend to friend among people who feel like they're allowed to live differently.

He's written for National Geographic, The New Yorker, Outside, and dozens of other publications. He teaches travel writing in Paris every summer. He lives with his wife Kiki on 30 acres of Kansas grassland, where he's just beginning to learn the bird calls on his own land — which he considers, with some amusement, his most ambitious journey yet.

CONNECT WITH ROLF POTTS

• Website: rolfpotts.com

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Vagabonding by Rolf Potts — the original long-term travel philosophy book
• The Vagabond's Way by Rolf Potts — 366 daily meditations on travel and attention
• Falling Upward by Richard Rohr — wisdom for the second half of life
• The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker — exercises in paying attention
• The Mindful Body by Dr. Ellen Langer — noticing as the foundation of health (mentioned in passing by Shaun)
• Who Needs Friends by Andrew McCarthy — on male friendship and loneliness

The problem is that later has a way of staying later.

In this episode of Deep Cuts, Shaun Maslyk,— CFP®, FBS®, and MAPP — takes his conversation with Alastair Humphreys and goes below the surface. Alastair has biked around the world, rowed the Atlantic, and walked across Spain playing a violin he barely knew. But it’s not the expeditions that stayed with Shaun. It’s what Alastair said underneath all of them.

This is a 15-minute episode about the cost of The Deferred Life — the quiet operating system most high-achievers run on without ever consciously choosing it. And what the research, the philosophy, and one coin in a Spanish plaza all say about how to step off it.

In This Episode

00:29 — Alastair on the happiest nights of his life — not what you’d expect

07:35 — The admission that changes everything: the ordinary life might have been more contented

12:00 — Hedonic adaptation — why the raise, the house, and the milestone never feel the way we thought

18:30 — Seneca on time, and Jon Kabat-Zinn on the version of you that arrives at someday

22:00 — Two ways to live a rich life — what Alastair figured out rationing gum in Africa

28:00 — Badlands by Springsteen — the hedonic treadmill set to music

35:00 — The Spain story: empty pockets, busking badly, and one coin

47:02 — The most honest moment: completely nothing for the first time in his life

54:04 — The tree: once a month, first Wednesday, fifteen minutes

60:00 — The closing question: what is the tree in your life?

The Story That Will Stay With You

Alastair had been walking across Spain for weeks. Hundreds of miles. Sleeping on hilltops, cooking on campfires, busking — playing a violin he’d taught himself over seven months, badly — because it was the only way he could eat.

One morning, before he left, he emptied his pockets. Every last coin. Left it on a park bench. And walked out into the plaza with nothing.

He stood there for hours playing badly while strangers walked in wide circles around him. Humiliated. Terrified. Wanting to go home. And then one old man dropped a single coin in his case.

“Eventually this old gentleman gave me one coin and my heart just sang. The generosity of that man, the kindness of strangers, the empathy, the kindness, the hope.”

— Alastair Humphreys, 48:00

That moment — not the Atlantic, not the four continents — is the heart of this episode. Because it’s not a story about poverty or adventure. It’s a story about what presence actually feels like. And how rarely most of us let ourselves feel it.

Three Things You’ll Take Away

1. The Deferred Life is running your life

The Deferred Life isn’t a choice most people make consciously. It’s an operating system — installed early, rarely questioned. The research on hedonic adaptation (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon & Schkade, 2005) shows we return to a stable baseline of happiness regardless of what we accumulate. The raise becomes the baseline. The house becomes the floor. And we reach — again — for the next thing. Not because we’re greedy. Because nobody told us the deal had a flaw in it.

2. Sustainable happiness doesn’t come from circumstances

Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research at UC Riverside found that lasting well-being comes from intentional activity — small, deliberate, repeated acts of genuine engagement with your own life. Not the big milestone. Not the right number in the account. Change your actions and the gains last. Change your circumstances and you adapt right back.

3. The tree only happens if it’s scheduled

Alastair has a calendar reminder. First Wednesday of every month. It says: go climb a tree. Same tree. Fifteen minutes. He’s done it for three years. And he says sitting up there, watching the seasons change, is one of the most grounding practices of his life. Psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff call this savoring — the deliberate act of being present in a positive experience as it’s happening rather than only in memory. It’s one of the highest-leverage practices in well-being science. And it doesn’t happen unless it’s on the calendar.

Memorable Quotes

“I suspect I’d probably also be happier and more content with life, but who knows?”

— Alastair Humphreys, 07:35

“There’s two ways to live a rich life. You can either have loads of money or you can not spend much money. And the overall result was similar.”

— Alastair Humphreys, 54:04

“The universe is going on. The seasons are changing. It helps you just pause and notice that. And maybe helps me remember that sending yet more emails is probably not the most important thing I need to do in life.”

— Alastair Humphreys, 33:52

“Someday has a way of staying someday.”

— Shaun Maslyk

“The tree only happens if it’s scheduled. And so does most of what actually matters.”

— Shaun Maslyk

About Alastair Humphreys

Alastair Humphreys is a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, author of more than a dozen books, and the man who coined the concept of microadventures. He spent four years cycling around the world, rowed the Atlantic Ocean, and has walked across multiple continents — including Spain, where he busked with a violin he taught himself to play.

But what makes Alastair worth listening to isn’t the expeditions. It’s the honesty about what they cost — and what they couldn’t deliver. His work is really about one question: what does it mean to live a life that’s actually yours?

• 🌐 Website: www.alastairhumphreys.com
• 📸 Instagram: @alastairhumphreys
• 📺 YouTube: Alastair Humphreys [NEED LINK]
• 📖 Book: Microadventures — [NEED LINK]
• 📖 Book: My Midsummer Morning — [NEED LINK]

Research & References

Every episode of Deep Cuts grounds the conversation in research. Here are the sources referenced in this episode:

1. Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K.M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111–131. — The foundational paper on hedonic adaptation and why circumstantial changes don’t produce lasting happiness.
2. Sheldon, K.M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2006). Achieving sustainable gains in happiness: Change your actions, not your circumstances. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7(1), 55–86. — The research showing that intentional activity produces lasting well-being gains where circumstances don’t.
3. Bryant, F.B., & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. — The research behind what Alastair is doing in the tree: being deliberately present in a positive experience as it happens.
4. Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Letter I, c. 65 AD. Translation: “Everything is alien to us; time alone belongs to us.” — The Stoic philosopher who watched Rome’s wealthiest men accumulate everything and still feel like something was missing.
5. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion Books. — Jon Kabat-Zinn is the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
6. Springsteen, B. (1978). Badlands. Darkness on the Edge of Town. Columbia Records. — “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied ’til he rules everything.”
7. Sam Roberts Band (2003). Brother Down. We Were Born in a Flame. Universal Music Canada. — “Rich man’s crying cause his money’s time.”
8. Ware, B. (2012). The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Hay House. — Informing the concept of The Deferred Life.

About Deep Cuts

Deep Cuts is a podcast format from YouPotential. Every episode takes one conversation with a notable thinker, doer, or creator — and goes below the surface. The universal themes. The research applied. The wisdom distilled down to fifteen minutes of practical takeaways.

Not more information to consume. A thinking tool. Something that helps you build the life you actually want.

About Shaun Maslyk

Shaun Maslyk is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®), Financial Behaviour Specialist (FBS®), and holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP.

His work sits at the intersection of money and meaning. He believes financial well-being belongs inside positive psychology — not outside it. And he thinks the most important financial decisions most people haven’t made yet are the small recurring ones.

Dr. Ellen Langer has been asking that question for over 40 years. As the first woman tenured in Harvard's psychology department and the author of 13 books — including Mindfulness and The Mindful Body — she has built one of the most compelling bodies of research in modern psychology. And her central argument is both simple and quietly radical: most of us are sleepwalking through our own lives, operating on autopilot, following rules we never wrote, and accepting limits we never tested.

In this conversation, Ellen and Shaun explore what it actually means to be mindful — not in the meditation-cushion sense, but in the radical, moment-to-moment act of noticing. She shares the now-famous Counterclockwise Study, where elderly men lived as their younger selves for one week and showed measurable improvements in vision, hearing, strength, and memory. She describes her Attention to Symptom Variability treatment for chronic illness — a protocol so simple it can run on your smartphone. And she unpacks why forgiveness, as most of us practice it, actually requires blame — and why understanding someone is a far more powerful alternative.

There's also the story that changed everything for Ellen: a horse that ate a hot dog. It's the moment she realized that what we're certain of is often just a conclusion we stopped examining. From that insight, she built a career around one principle — everything is always changing, and the moment you notice that, your whole relationship with health, identity, limits, and possibility shifts.

If you've ever followed a rule without knowing who wrote it, accepted a verdict without questioning whether it still applies, or assumed you know what you know — this episode is going to shake something loose. In the best possible way.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

• Mindfulness without meditation: What it actually is and why uncertainty is the entry point
• The Counterclockwise Study: How one week of living 'younger' changed measurable physical outcomes
• Behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective: The reframe that transforms relationships
• Why forgiveness requires blame — and what to do instead
• Attention to Symptom Variability: Ellen's treatment for chronic illness you can run on your phone
• The horse and the hot dog: The moment Ellen's research trajectory changed forever
• Mindful finance: Why the rules around money may not have been written for you
• Mindful schools: Ellen's current mission to flatten the vertical hierarchy of intelligence

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"I don't want you to forgive me. I want you to understand me." 📍 00:10:51

"Everything I thought I knew could be wrong. And for me, since I know I'm bizarre, that was actually a fun thought — because it meant all sorts of things were possible." 📍 00:16:55

"Virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time." 📍 00:41:39

"When you're mindless, you're no different from robots. And if you say to yourself, is a robot happy? Of course not." 📍 00:46:44

"The most important thing is that it's very easy to be mindful. All you need to do is know you don't know — and that's okay. And then you learn." 📍 00:54:13

ABOUT DR. ELLEN LANGER

Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the first woman to be tenured in Harvard's psychology department. For over four decades, she has studied the profound costs of mindlessness — and the equally profound benefits of what she calls mindfulness: not a meditation practice, but a way of being in the world defined by active noticing and an appreciation of uncertainty.

Her research has touched everything from aging and chronic illness to business, education, and the mind-body connection. In her landmark Counterclockwise Study, she demonstrated that the mind's perception of age could reverse measurable physical decline in elderly men over just one week. Her current work includes building mindful schools and developing psychological treatments for chronic conditions including MS, chronic pain, Parkinson's, and TBI — all grounded in the simple act of paying attention to what changes.

She is also a gallery-exhibiting painter, the author of 13 books including the bestselling Mindfulness (25th anniversary edition), Counterclockwise, and The Mindful Body — and someone who, by her own admission, wakes up happy every single day.

CONNECT WITH DR. ELLEN LANGER

• Website: https://www.ellenlanger.me/
• The Mindful Body — available at Penguin Random House
• Counterclockwise — available at Penguin Random House
• Mindfulness (25th Anniversary Edition) — available on Amazon

That's the thread running through this conversation. Alastair spent his twenties chasing scale — the bigger, the harder, the more extreme. Now at 49, he's after something different: depth. Noticing. The difference between knowing a place and actually seeing it.

We talk about money in a way most financial conversations don't. What happens when a million dollars becomes worthless? (He knows — it happened in the middle of the Atlantic.) What does voluntary poverty teach you about what you actually need? And what does it mean to live a rich life if money isn't the only currency?

This is also a conversation about what we're afraid of. Not the ocean. Not the bears. But the Tuesday. The obligation. The sense that the life we've carefully built might be the one thing standing between us and the life we actually wanted. Alastair doesn't push anyone to walk off a cliff. He suggests something harder: start smaller. Go outside. Climb a tree. Notice the season.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

• The Bruce Springsteen opening — what concerts reveal about community and joy
• The difference between what adventures teach you vs. what repetition teaches you
• The gain/loss framework: what you find and what you leave behind on a 4-year solo journey
• Why a million dollars was worthless in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
• Perceived risk vs. real risk — and the one thing that actually keeps you safe
• Microadventures and the 5-to-9 framework for reclaiming everyday life
• The tree he's been climbing once a month for three years — and what it taught him
• Walking across Spain with a violin he couldn't play — and the one coin that changed everything
• Money as freedom: the two ways to live a rich life
• Home as an unanswered question — and the book it might become

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"I gained a huge amount of skills and general knowledge facts for pub quizzes... But I very much enjoyed the reduction part of going from having a normal life at home to then just all the stuff I could fit on my bicycle." 📍 13:19

"I would have paid a million dollars. Literally a million dollars... for that pillow and that fan. But equally, if I had suddenly had a million dollars of cash on that boat — completely and utterly worthless." 📍 16:08

"A lot of us who are not really living each day as though it's a ticking down finite number of days. We're sort of trundling along, assuming that at some point we will suddenly burst into life." 📍 25:23

"I think a more useful question is what would the old version of you say to you today? Because that's actionable wisdom that you can actually do something about." 📍 07:57

"There's two ways to live a rich life. You can either have loads of money or you can not spend much money. And the overall result was similar." 📍 54:04

"I want to be out in a beautiful, wild place now — but I can't because I've got to go to the supermarket. So the way I've been trying to help myself cope with that is by having what you mentioned as micro adventures." 📍 30:29

ABOUT ALASTAIR HUMPHREYS

Alastair Humphreys was named a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and has spent the better part of two decades doing things that sound impossible until he explains why they aren't. He cycled around the world for four years starting at age 24, rowing the Atlantic, crossing deserts, and walking across India. He has written more than 13 books on adventure, mindset, and the human need to explore.

But what makes Alastair's work matter beyond the expeditions is the Microadventures movement — his argument that adventure is not a privilege of the extreme, the wealthy, or the fit. It's available to anyone, from their own front door, in the hours between 5pm and 9am. His upcoming book, Unwilded, extends this philosophy into the natural world: how we reconnect to the land we live on before it disappears.

He lives in England with his family, climbs a tree once a month, and still hasn't satisfactorily answered what he's going to do for the next 60 years of his life.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• A Squash and a Squeeze by Julia Donaldson — the children's book Alastair references about learning to appreciate what you have
• As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee — the book that inspired his violin-in-Spain adventure
• Stoicism (Marcus Aurelius, Seneca) — the philosophy Alastair returns to when frustrated with ordinary life
• deathclock.com — the website Alastair uses as a deadline reminder (he has his death date in Google Calendar)
• Bruce Springsteen's South by Southwest keynote speech — worth reading online

What emerges in this conversation is a portrait of a man who has spent his entire life operating from a simple and radical belief: if you can see it before it exists, you can build it. Not as a motivational slogan — as a daily practice. DDP describes turning down a teaching career at 24, attempting to break into wrestling in his early 30s through sheer creative persistence (including a homemade tape that got him noticed by Paul Heyman), and eventually rebuilding his body and career after a devastating back injury at 42.

The conversation moves through territory most Hall of Famers don't touch. DDP talks openly about energy as a finite resource, about the cost of always being 'on,' and about why he still does what he does even though he's made more money than he'll ever spend. The answer — that helping others change their lives is the most selfish thing he does, because it fills him up — is one of the most honest things said on this show.

He also talks about time. Standing under the stars in Bora Bora for his 70th birthday, watching satellites move across the sky, thinking about how brief all of this is. 'We're a blip,' he says. And yet the work continues. Because the work, for DDP, is the point.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

• The Jersey Shore music scene: How watching Springsteen and Bon Jovi night after night taught DDP everything about energy, commitment, and leaving it all on the stage.

• Building the Diamond Dallas Page character: How a leopard skin jacket, a local TV segment, and a radio appearance to meet Captain Lou Albano became the unlikely origin of one of wrestling's most beloved personas.

• Starting at 35: The homemade tape, Paul Heyman, and the AWA — and why DDP's late start made him more relentless, not less.

• Belief before evidence: The philosophy that separates people who build things from people who only watch — 'I believe it because I see it' vs 'I'll believe it when I see it.'

• DDP Yoga origin: Breaking his back at 42 and creating a program that now has over 500 workouts and has helped hundreds of thousands of people reclaim their mobility.

• What the work gives back: Why DDP says helping others is 'selfish' — because nothing fills him up the same way.

• Time, money, and energy: A rare honest accounting of how DDP thinks about his finite resources as he approaches 70 — and why time is the only one he actually guards.

• The long game: Eight years of building before it became an 'overnight' sensation — and what that teaches about discipline, consistency, and commitment.

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"There's only one person that has to believe in you at anything and that's you." 📍 17:13

"The people who say I believe it when I see it — those people never see shit. But the people who say I believe it because I see it — those are the game changers." 📍 1:10:15

"Never underestimate the power you give someone by believing in them. More importantly, never underestimate the power you give yourself by believing in you." 📍 1:20:08

"I've never gotten off the mat and thought to myself, phew, I wish I didn't do that." 📍 1:21:35

"You can get whatever you want as long as you're willing to help people get what they want." 📍 1:16:34

"It took eight years for DDP Yoga to become an overnight sensation." 📍 1:11:12

ABOUT DIAMOND DALLAS PAGE

Diamond Dallas Page spent his twenties and early thirties running some of the most successful nightclubs in New Jersey and Florida. He was a natural entertainer — a connector, a performer, a man who knew how to read a room. But there was something else he wanted, something that seemed, by any reasonable measure, impossible. He wanted to be a professional wrestler. At 35.

What followed was not an overnight success story. It was eight years of creative persistence, several false starts, a broken back, and a complete reinvention — not once, but twice. DDP became a WWE Hall of Famer on his own terms. Then, at 42, he broke his back and was told it would define the rest of his life. Instead, it became the origin of DDP Yoga — a program that has since reached hundreds of thousands of people, including Jake 'The Snake' Roberts and Scott Hall, whose transformations are documented in the viral documentary 'Change or Die.'

Today, approaching 70, DDP is still on the mat every morning. Still building. Still helping people get off the couch, out of wheelchairs, and back into their lives.

CONNECT WITH DDP

• 🌐 Website: https://www.diamonddallaspage.com/

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• 'Change or Die' — documentary series featuring Jake The Snake Roberts, Scott Hall, Mick Foley

• Zig Ziglar — 'You can get whatever you want as long as you're willing to help people get what they want'

• Stone Pony, Asbury Park NJ — legendary venue in the Springsteen story

That dissonance sent Elizabeth on a 20-year journey — from studying economics at Tulane, to teaching indigenous women in Oaxaca how to build savings cooperatives, to a moment of being completely lost in a remote Mexican village where she first felt what “enough” actually feels like in the body. It wasn’t an intellectual insight. It was somatic — a shift beneath the fear, beneath the panic, into a deeper holding she didn’t know existed.

That experience led her to Schumacher College in the UK, where an elder named Satish Kumar told her to go back to the root word of economics — “management of the household” — and go within. She’s been sitting with that instruction ever since. She built a career as a financial advisor, co-founded Peak 360, wrote The Power of Enough (with a foreword by Lynn Twist), and developed the Wealth Mandala — a practical tool that maps human needs far beyond the financial stability slice of the pie.

This conversation is for anyone who has “enough” on paper but feels poor somewhere they can’t name. Elizabeth doesn’t offer platitudes. She offers a mirror — and a practice. Because as she puts it, you don’t go to the gym on January 1st and say you’re done for the year. Your relationship with money works the same way.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

1. Lynn Twist & The Foreword: How Elizabeth spent 20 years tracking down her mentor, joined a six-month workshop, traveled to the Amazon, and ultimately sat in Lynn’s living room on launch day to record her reading the foreword aloud.
2. Growing Up in New Orleans: How a city that celebrates everything — crawfish fest, jazz funerals, po’boys on the porch — taught her about non-monetary wealth before she had the words for it.
3. Oaxaca & The Reversal: Going to Mexico as the economics expert to teach indigenous women about savings cooperatives, and discovering they were richer than anyone she knew back home.
4. The Moment of Being Lost: A walk outside a remote village that turned into a panic — and then a somatic awakening about what lies beneath scarcity when you let yourself soften.
5. Financial DNA & Inherited Scarcity: How her grandfather’s wartime survival instinct became her father’s “no before yes” and her own complicated relationship with money as an entrepreneur.
6. Conversations With Money: The gestalt chair exercise where you speak to money, money speaks back, and you discover whether your relational style is anger, avoidance, or grasping.
7. The Wealth Mandala: A free tool that maps 12 human needs — not just financial stability — so you can see your actual wealth portfolio and where you feel poverty beyond money.
8. The 30-Day Satiation Challenge: A simple nightly practice of writing three things that satisfied you, building awareness of what’s already working before trying to fix what isn’t.

MEMORABLE QUOTES

“I had the privilege of knowing what enoughness felt like in my body before I understood what it meant in my brain.”

“Wealth and money are not the same thing. Money’s a tool. Wealth is a state of well-being.”

“God damn it, money, where have you been my whole life?”

“There was a sense of scarcity that had nothing to do with financial stability, but had everything to do with the need for safety. The need for belonging.”

ABOUT ELIZABETH HUSSERL

Elizabeth Husserl is a registered investment advisor, Certified Money Coach, and co-founder of Peak360 Wealth Management — a boutique wealth planning firm built on the radical idea that wealth is a state of well-being, not a number. She holds a B.S. in Economics from Tulane University and an M.A. in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she also served as an adjunct professor. She holds the Series 6, 63, and 65 licenses.

Her book, The Power of Enough: Finding Joy in Your Relationship with Money, is a 20-year distillation of what she learned about scarcity, satiation, and what it actually means to feel wealthy — informed by her multi-generational story spanning Austria, Colombia, New Orleans, and the Bay Area. Lynn Twist, author of The Soul of Money, wrote the foreword. The book has been featured in Forbes, Oprah Daily, The Guardian, Yahoo Finance, and WBUR’s Here and Now.

Elizabeth is a highly sought-after speaker who has presented at Wisdom 2.0 (Los Angeles and San Francisco) and led workshops at Airbnb, Unity, and Google. She brings a mandala to a spreadsheet industry. She dances Zumba every Thursday morning during work hours because she knows that’s the strategy that keeps her grounded. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

CONNECT WITH ELIZABETH HUSSERL

1. Website: https://elizabethhusserl.com/
2. Book: The Power of Enough (also available as an audiobook read by Elizabeth)
3. Instagram: @elizabethhusserl

RESOURCES MENTIONED

1. The Soul of Money by Lynn Twist
2. Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher
3. Manfred Max Neif — Chilean economist, work on human needs and satisfiers
4. Satish Kumar — activist, writer, and founder of Schumacher College
5. The Wealth Mandala — free download at elizabethhusserl.com
6. Abraham Maslow — hierarchy of human needs
7. Sophia Sisters — workshop program by Lynn Twist
8. The Remarkable Women’s Journey — immersive journey to the Amazon with Lynn Twist
9. Vandana Shiva — environmental activist mentioned at Schumacher College

Dr. Mandich holds three degrees from Western University — all three hooded by her mother, who earned her own PhD while raising seven children in nine years and then went on to serve as Vice Provost and Dean of Health Sciences at Western. The image of those two women standing together in matching regalia, same institution, same arc — tells you everything about where Gillian's sense of what's possible comes from.

But this conversation isn't a credentials parade. It opens with Jocko — her 41-pound French bulldog who models for Canada Pooch, refuses to walk in boots, and volunteers in crisis and critical care at CAMH every Tuesday. And through Jocko, Gillian surfaces something the research keeps confirming: that the moments we rush past are often the ones that matter most. Savoring. Weak ties. The chin rest of a dog who somehow always knows when you need him.

The harder conversation is about happiness itself — and what the research actually says, which turns out to be more complicated than most people want to hear. Trying to be happy all the time makes you less happy. The struggle isn't an obstacle to a good life; it might be the mechanism. And money — which she calls 'a Trojan horse into a much bigger conversation' — is something she's personally wrestled with: the guilt of non-linear income, the story she inherited about what work is supposed to cost, the first vacation in her adult life where she didn't open her laptop for ten days.

She's now integrating happiness research into CBT at the University of Manitoba's psychiatry department — arguing that well-being is more than the absence of mental illness — and writing a book she keeps rethinking, because the more she sits with it, the more she believes that telling someone how to be happy is actually disempowering. What she can do is point the compass. The rest is yours.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

• Jocko's two jobs and what a dog teaches a happiness researcher about slowing down

• Savoring: Barbara Fredrickson's micro moments and why little things aren't small

• Her mother hooding her three times at Western — and the layered meaning of that moment

• Ikigai and what happens to identity when work ends

• The dark side of happiness: why trying too hard backfires

• Post-traumatic growth as a reframe for what struggle can do

• Broaden and build: the 1998 theory that changed how we understand resilience

• The morning routine trap and the grace she finally gave herself

• Integrating happiness with CBT in psychiatry — and why that's still a radical idea

• Her personal relationship with money: guilt, non-linear income, and the first real vacation

• Happiness as a practice, not a destination — and what that reframe changes

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"I'm a happiness researcher and I am not happy all the time, but nor do I wish to be." 📍 00:18:03

"A happy life doesn't mean that hard things don't happen. It means that as we start to build our happiness muscle, our highs get higher." 📍 00:19:03

"It's not that the weights get lighter. You get stronger." 📍 00:19:41

"Happiness is a Trojan horse into a much bigger conversation about emotional resilience and psychological flexibility." 📍 00:44:17

"I had this constant, like, gingivitis-level guilt — that low-grade guilt about I should be doing more all the time." 📍 00:48:46

"I think I'd be like, in a committed relationship — not married yet." 📍 00:59:30

ABOUT DR. GILLIAN MANDICH

Dr. Gillian Mandich is a happiness researcher, founder of the International Happiness Institute, and one of Canada's most prominent voices on the science of living well. She holds three degrees from Western University in health science — and her mother, a former Vice Provost and Dean at Western who earned her own PhD while raising seven children in nine years, hooded her at all three convocations.

Gillian started her career studying childhood obesity, pivoted when she discovered happiness was a science, and spent the next decade building the case that emotional wellbeing and physical health are inseparable. She's appeared on The Social, Breakfast Television, and two TEDx stages, and is now integrating happiness research with CBT in the psychiatry department at the University of Manitoba.

She lives in downtown Toronto with Jocko — a 41-pound French bulldog who volunteers in crisis and critical care at CAMH every Tuesday, models for Canada Pooch, and has his own calendar. She started at a grocery store cashier at 15. She still knows the code for bananas. It's 4011.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Barbara Fredrickson — Broaden and Build Theory (1998)

• Daniel Kahneman — 'happy in your life' vs 'happy with your life'

• Ikigai — Japanese concept meaning 'reason for living'

• CBT Hub, University of Manitoba — free 6-week CBT course (Manitoba residents)

• Melissa Leong — referenced from a previous YouPotential episode

• Hawksley Workman — musician, previous YouPotential guest

• Angela Duckworth — mentioned (new book referenced)

• Canada Pooch — dog brand (Jocko's modeling client)

This conversation traces the invisible thread from a wartime restaurant kitchen to a PhD in Elizabethan drama to one of the world’s leading voices on coaching and positive psychology. Along the way, Christian reveals how the Japanese concept of Mizushobai (“water business”) encoded a scarcity mindset he still carries, how his mother’s insistence on a chest freezer in England told the story of a lifetime of uncertainty, and how saving five-pound notes for fifteen years became a permission ritual he didn’t know he needed.

The emotional center of this episode is a single coaching question: “What’s stopping you?” When Christian’s coach asked him why he hadn’t ridden Route 66 on a Harley Davidson — a dream he’d held since age thirteen watching CHiPs in Beirut — he eliminated every excuse until only the real answer remained: he wasn’t giving himself permission. The man who teaches others to live their best life almost didn’t live his.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re waiting for someone to tell you it’s okay to do the thing you’ve always wanted to do — this conversation is for you.

MEMORABLE QUOTES

“I grew up in a war zone. I grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, and there’d be shelling and bombing and whatever else going on. And I just loved the way that music can transport you.”

02:24

“When I’m thinking or speaking in Japanese, I think differently. I think with more humility. I think with more care about how my words are gonna land with others.”

11:42

“She said, if you want this restaurant, it’s yours. But she also said, if you want to do your own thing, you can do it. And without that conversation, I would have never done anything else.”

18:50

“I always have had this idea of we need every opportunity, I have to take it. You can’t turn down an opportunity. It affects me even today.”

35:48

“She did say, I’ve brought this with me, haven’t I? This idea of just in case, make sure you’ve got enough stuff to keep you going.”

38:36

“I wasn’t giving myself permission. The only thing stopping me.”

59:09

“Investing or looking after our own wellbeing is not an indulgence. And that’s probably why I wasn’t doing Route 66. It sounded too selfish.”

01:15:18

RESOURCES MENTIONED

1. Mizushobai — Japanese concept: “water business” (the unpredictability of restaurant income)
2. Moktainai — Japanese concept: “use everything, waste nothing”
3. Joyce, B. & Showers, B. (1983) — Coaching increases implementation by ~80%
4. CHiPs (TV series) — California Highway Patrol
5. The Lotus of Thriving (forthcoming) — Buddhism and coaching
6. Radical Listening — with Robert Biswas-Diener
7. Coach on a Motorcycle YouTube Channel

Her six-year-old whispered it in the dark: "Mommy, I think there's something wrong with me." He didn't love his old stuffies anymore. This episode will change how you think about every dollar you spend — and every dollar you don't.

EPISODE SUMMARY

Melissa Leong is one of Canada's most respected voices at the intersection of money and psychology. A journalist, speaker, and author of Happy Go Money, she's spent years unpacking why smart people make irrational financial decisions — and she starts with herself.

In this conversation, Melissa opens up about her inherited scarcity mindset — rooted in her Chinese-Canadian family's history of war, immigration, and a 70-year-old restaurant in Winnipeg's Chinatown. Her grandfather helped build that community and quietly funded a pagoda in one of Winnipeg's biggest parks. Her mother taught her that money was scarce, that you worked for every dollar, and that the expensive toilet paper was not for your family. These stories didn't stay in the past. They followed Melissa into adulthood, into her marriage, and into how she eats breakfast (leftover toast crusts, if you're wondering).

But the heart of this conversation isn't about scarcity. It's about the pause. Melissa makes a case that our spending is often not a budgeting failure — it's a neurological response to a system designed to hijack our reward systems. Dopamine doesn't reward having, it rewards seeking. One-click buy, frictionless spending, personalized ads that never sleep. And in the middle of all this, a six-year-old kid is already feeling the pull of hedonic adaptation — he just doesn't have words for it yet.

Shaun and Melissa explore how couples with opposite money stories can stay connected (her husband's abundance mindset vs. her scarcity lens), what it means to feel "enough" in a world that profits from your dissatisfaction, and why the happiest time of her life involved cockroaches, five dollars, and dollar dumplings in a basement apartment in Taiwan. This is one of those episodes that sneaks past your defenses and sits with you for days.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

1. Hedonic Adaptation in Real Time: How a six-year-old's stuffie confession reveals what's happening to all of us
2. The Dopamine Trap: Why spending isn't a willpower problem — it's a neurological one
3. Inherited Money Stories: How war, immigration, and family restaurants shape financial behavior generations later
4. The Grandfather's Legacy: Philanthropy, Chinatown, and what generosity really looks like
5. Couples and Money Conflict: When scarcity mindset marries abundance mindset — and the ongoing negotiation
6. The Pause: Why friction in spending is actually a health practice
7. Financial Socialization: What your kids learn about money from watching you (not from any course)
8. Enough: What it feels like, why we can't find it, and the meditation of okayness

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"When I get new stuffies, I don't like my old stuffies anymore."

Timestamp: [02:20]

"We are swimming in this system that is designed to hijack our reward systems."

Timestamp: [03:30]

"I don't think that you are being irresponsible. I think you're tired. I think you're overwhelmed. I think you are stressed. I think you're overstimulated."

Timestamp: [06:18]

"Money is just an accelerant. Money shows you who you are because you use it to navigate this world."

Timestamp: [11:08]

"Right now, in this exact moment, I am okay."

Timestamp: [51:12]

"I love you forever. My love is forever, which means wherever I am, and even if I'm not here, you will feel my love."

Timestamp: [01:17:01]

ABOUT MELISSA LEONG

Melissa Leong is a journalist, author, and speaker who has spent her career making money conversations feel human. She's the author of Happy Go Money, a book that bridges personal finance and the science of happiness. A former Financial Post reporter, she's appeared on screens across Canada bringing warmth and wit to a topic most people avoid.

But what makes Melissa different isn't her credentials — it's her honesty. She openly talks about eating her kids' leftover toast crusts instead of buying herself breakfast, about the scarcity mindset she inherited from immigrant parents who survived war, and about the ongoing money arguments with her husband that she expects will never fully resolve. She's not teaching from a pedestal. She's teaching from the kitchen table.

Melissa grew up in Winnipeg, where her grandfather helped build Chinatown and ran a restaurant for 70 years. She now lives with her husband and two kids (ages 6 and 10), a collection of stuffies in various states of abandonment, and an arcade game with a price tag that may never be fully disclosed.

CONNECT WITH MELISSA LEONG

1. Website: melissaleong.com
2. Book: Happy Go Money

RESOURCES MENTIONED

1. Happy Go Money by Melissa Leong
2. Daniel Kahneman's research on money and happiness
3. Hedonic adaptation research
4. Study: Living next to a lottery winner increases bankruptcy risk
5. 2020 study: Giving $10K to 200 people — those who spent on others were happier
6. Viktor Frankl — "Between stimulus and response there is a space"

ABOUT YOUPOTENTIAL

YouPotential explores what it means to live a meaningful life — through conversations about money, purpose, relationships, and becoming. Hosted by Shaun Maslyk.

"Sometimes it's not the answers we learn from — but the questions."

But this conversation goes deeper than career highlights. Craig opens up about what it feels like to be told your culture doesn’t matter—on Day 1, and then repeatedly over 40 years. He talks about the tension between the art he loves and the business that profits from it, and why he believes the industry has traded culture for content and creativity for process.

We explore how growing up in Toronto while spending formative years in Antigua gave him the cultural fluency that would later become his superpower. How fatherhood changed his lens on everything—including music. And what led him to co-found ADVANCE, Canada’s Black Music Business Collective, to ensure the next generation doesn’t face the same barriers he did.

The episode closes with Craig’s definition of a good life—borrowed from a friend’s simple but devastating observation: go to bed easy, wake up excited. It’s a conversation about what you refuse to compromise when the machine asks you to trade in everything you believe.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

1. Fatherhood and Legacy: How becoming a father at an older age reshaped Craig’s priorities and his relationship with golf, music, and time
2. Music vs. Music Culture: The critical distinction between what you hear and the lifestyle, community, and meaning that surrounds it
3. Cultural Roots: How formative years in Antigua and Toronto created a unique lens for navigating the music business
4. Industry Gatekeeping: Being told on Day 1 that Black music wouldn’t succeed in Canada—and proving them wrong with Wu-Tang, Biggie, and Sean Paul
5. The 10% Rule: Why the music industry runs on a 10% success rate for new signings and what that means for patience and vision
6. ADVANCE and Systemic Change: Co-founding Canada’s Black Music Business Collective and changing internship policies across the industry
7. The Culture Erosion: How stripping culture from music turns art into noise—and why the future belongs to bespoke, mid-level companies
8. Hip Hop and Money: The evolution from aspirational to layered—and the financial education gap that still plagues artists

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"I’m not going to put on skates. I’m not going to play basketball. But I’ll golf with you. And so that’s what we did." 📍 Timestamp: 01:23

"Once you have people handling it that don’t respect the culture around it, it just becomes noise." 📍 Timestamp: 08:41

"We’re selling art here. It’s much more nuanced than that. This is art. It’s living, breathing." 📍 Timestamp: 09:24

"Every successful artist you see right now charting, they had a 3 to 5 year journey to get there. I guarantee it." 📍 Timestamp: 21:13

"My series isn’t canceled." 📍 Timestamp: 01:05:27

ABOUT CRAIG MANNIX

Craig “Big C” Mannix is a Toronto-based music industry executive with over 30 years of experience shaping the Canadian music landscape. His career spans Virgin Records, EMI Music, Sony Music, and Universal Music Canada, where he rose to Vice President of Black Music—integrating marketing and A&R to champion Black Canadian artists.

Beyond his corporate career, Craig is a founding member of ADVANCE, Canada’s Black Music Business Collective, and co-chairs The Remix Project’s Board of Directors. He sits on the boards of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall and represented Canada on Universal Music Group’s Task Force for Meaningful Change.

In 2025, Craig joined the CMRRA as an Industry Relations Consultant for Community Engagement while running Big Consulting, his own firm focused on artist development, marketing, and protecting the culture he’s spent a lifetime championing. He’s a father, a golfer, and a man who wants to go to bed easy and wake up excited.

ABOUT YOUPOTENTIAL

YouPotential explores what it means to live a meaningful life—through conversations about money, purpose, relationships, and becoming. Hosted by Shaun Dwyer Maslyk.

“Sometimes it’s not the answers we learn from—but the questions.”

What began as technology for tracking jelly bean flavor preferences became a tool for political micro-targeting — suppressing paragraphs in newsletters based on a voter's tracked behavior. When John refused to sell to Philip Morris, his sales team learned a simpler lesson: don't ask the boss. And when the White House called asking for 24-hour tech support so they could send an email at 2 a.m. to declare war in Iraq, John knew he'd crossed a line he couldn't uncross.

This conversation traces the full arc — from a childhood watching his parents buy a Porsche with a legal settlement while facing bankruptcy, to making $100,000 in shareware donations by age 18, to selling Lyris and creating Magnatune, a fair trade music company with legal provisions so radical his own lawyer resisted. Now in Hong Kong, John builds high-end espresso machines with Decent Espresso, trying to create something that outlives him — not because it makes money, but because it matters.

What emerges is a portrait of someone who has wrestled with money, morals, and meaning across a dozen companies and three decades — and arrived at a deceptively simple philosophy: always be ready to die next year.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

1. The White House call: How building email software led to being part of the war effort — and the moral reckoning that followed.
2. The slippery slope: How small compromises — feminist porn, political newsletters, tracking dots — compound until you wake up somewhere you never intended to be.
3. The Porsche story: A childhood financial flashpoint — watching his parents buy a Porsche with a legal settlement while facing bankruptcy — that shaped everything.
4. The $3 million rule: A VC's advice on the number you need to never work again, and why John didn't listen until it was almost too late.
5. Fair trade music: Building Magnatune with legal poison pills so no acquirer could corrupt its mission — and convincing his lawyer to draft agreements that screwed the founder.
6. Decent Espresso: Why giving someone a better cup of coffee in the morning became John's most meaningful venture.
7. BookMooch: Creating BitTorrent for books, processing 10 million books a month, and receiving three lawsuit threats from Amazon.
8. "Why employees suck": John's contrarian argument that productive people should quit and sell the fruits of their labor instead of their time.
9. The immigrant mindset: Growing up in France until age 10, arriving in the US without English, and choosing to be a nobody again in Hong Kong.
10. Legacy and enough: Trying to build something that lasts five years after you leave — and why that's harder than it sounds.

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"And I realized at that moment, I was gonna be part of the war effort." 📍 Timestamp: 05:39

"It is absolutely a slippery slope. So I had a rule, which was no porn, no politics. That was our rule. Otherwise, freedom of speech." 📍 Timestamp: 08:49

"They're about to go bankrupt. And they got a settlement and they bought a Porsche." 📍 Timestamp: 21:19

"I've got the moving quality outlook of a Frenchman, but the business acumen of an American. And thank God it's not in reverse." 📍 Timestamp: 29:44

"I'm glad I found my limit. It's much, much worse to have that, could have been a contender." 📍 Timestamp: 01:06:35

"Always be ready to die next year." 📍 Timestamp: 01:12:07

"You gotta live well now. Even if you're working your brains out, if you're having a bad day, you gotta figure out how to get out of that because this might be all you got left." 📍 Timestamp: 01:12:30

ABOUT JOHN BUCKMAN

John Buckman is a serial entrepreneur who has started over a dozen companies across email technology, music, publishing, and coffee. He built Lyris, email software that at its peak powered one third of the email on the internet, and sold it after the moral compromises of scale became untenable. He then created Magnatune, a fair trade music company with legally binding ethical provisions, and BookMooch, a book-swapping platform that processed 10 million books a month and drew legal threats from Amazon.

Now based in Hong Kong, John runs Decent Espresso, a high-end espresso machine company competing with billion-dollar Italian families. He has served on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons. He grew up in France until age 10, didn't speak English until arriving in the US, and describes himself as having the quality-of-life outlook of a Frenchman with the business acumen of an American.

His guiding philosophy: always be ready to die next year.

But in this conversation, Dave reveals something unexpected: the retired teachers in his life seem happier than the ultra-wealthy. And he wouldn't trade places with any of them.

What unfolds is a masterclass in gratitude, grounding, and what Dave calls "enoughness" — a disposition he admits he was lucky to be born with, but one we can all cultivate. He shares how his 93-year-old father's philosophy of radical acceptance shaped him, why he never changed his friend groups despite his success, and the one thing that still "knocks him backward" after all these years: the speed of time.

This isn't a conversation about money management. It's about what money can never manage — our relationships, our contentment, and our sense of enough.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

1. Tiger Stadium and three-generation bonding: How Dave's most powerful memory involves his father, grandfather, and the Detroit Tigers
2. The speed of time: Why this is the only thing that disrupts Dave's positive disposition
3. Great parent privilege: Dave's reflection on the advantage of loving parents
4. Staying grounded through success: Why he never changed friend groups and what that taught him
5. Billionaires vs. retired teachers: His observation that moderate wealth + good relationships = more happiness
6. The enoughness mindset: Why Dave has no interest in becoming a billionaire
7. His father's acceptance philosophy: "What has happened has happened — get to acceptance quickly"
8. Homeschooling and parenting: Trading opportunity for presence with his kids
9. Friends are family: The frame that's guided his most important relationships
10. Spending summaries: Why this simple tool creates the biggest ripple effect in financial planning

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"I've got friends who are ridiculously wealthy, like literally billionaires in some cases. And then I've got all my friends who tend to be teachers, retired teachers. I find that the latter group tends to be happier." 📍 Timestamp: 17:02

"I wouldn't even want to be a billionaire, by the way. I have no interest in that. I don't want a lot. I find stuff weighs you down." 📍 Timestamp: 18:42

"The only thing that tends to knock me backward is the speed of time. I do find it dismaying." 📍 Timestamp: 04:08

"You never lose your temper ever and are glad after the fact you did." 📍 Timestamp: 38:27

"Friends are family. And that's how I've always thought of my friends — that we're a family." 📍 Timestamp: 01:12:03

ABOUT DAVE CHILTON

Dave Chilton is a Canadian author, entrepreneur, and financial educator best known for The Wealthy Barber, which has sold over 3 million copies since its original publication in 1989. The book pioneered a storytelling approach to personal finance that made complex concepts accessible to everyday readers.

Dave appeared as a Dragon on CBC's Dragons' Den from 2011-2015 and has invested in numerous Canadian businesses. Despite his success, he still lives in a small house in Wellesley, Ontario, drives a Jeep with 120,000 kilometers on it (full of dog hair, he'll tell you), and measures his wealth primarily in relationships.

His 2025 updated edition of The Wealthy Barber brings his timeless principles to a new generation facing very different financial realities — and reminds us all that the psychology of money matters more than the math.

CONNECT WITH DAVE CHILTON

🌐 Website: thewealthybarber.com 📖 Book: The Wealthy Barber (2025 Updated Edition) — available at Indigo, independent bookstores, and thewealthybarber.com 🎧 Audiobook: thewealthybarber.com (read by Dave himself)

RESOURCES MENTIONED

1. The Wealthy Barber (2025 Updated Edition) by Dave Chilton
2. The Wealthy Barber Returns by Dave Chilton
3. Spending summaries — the simple tool Dave calls "the best starting point"

ABOUT YOUPOTENTIAL

YouPotential explores what it means to live a meaningful life — through conversations about money, purpose, relationships, and becoming. Hosted by Shaun Dwyer Maslyk.

"Sometimes it's not the answers we learn from — but the questions."

She had the beach house, the golden parachute, and all the time in the world. By 40, Marianne Oehser was living the dream. So why did it nearly destroy her marriage — and send her running back to work?

EPISODE SUMMARY

Marianne Oehser doesn't like the word "retirement." And after hearing her story, you'll understand why.

At 40, Marianne and her former husband both received golden parachutes after a hostile takeover. They had just built a house in Southwest Florida — a short walk to the beach, wide open water views. It was everything they'd dreamed of. Within months, she was bored, her mind was getting dull, and the conflict that followed ended their marriage.

That experience sent Marianne on a journey to understand what actually makes life meaningful after work ends. She became a relationship coach — and discovered that couple after couple was showing up at her door on the brink of divorce, all telling the same story: "We had a great relationship. Now all we do is bicker and fight." The problem wasn't the relationship. It was the transition.

In this conversation, Marianne shares her framework — the Happiness Portfolio — which breaks life into eight "asset classes" that matter as much as your financial portfolio. She talks about her father holding up his business card the weekend before retirement and saying, "Today, this card opens many doors. Tomorrow, it won't be worth the paper it's written on." And she challenges the listener with a question that stopped me cold: "At what cost? And how much is enough?"

If you're building a career, approaching a transition, or wondering what comes next — this one will make you think.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

1. The retirement honeymoon: Why the first 6-18 months feel great — and what happens when it ends
2. Inner kill: Richard Leiter's term for what happens when you lose your sense of purpose ("It's like you're dying and you don't even know it")
3. Gray divorce: Why divorce rates for people over 50 have more than doubled — and tripled for those over 65
4. The business card moment: Marianne's father's quiet warning the weekend before his retirement
5. The Happiness Portfolio: 8 areas of life that need conscious attention — not just your finances
6. Assumptions in relationships: The "laundry story" about a couple on the brink of divorce over unspoken expectations
7. Living on autopilot: Why Marianne now insists on intentional choices after realizing she spent years doing what she "thought she was supposed to"
8. The cost question: "The more time you spend, the more money you generate. But at what cost?"

MEMORABLE QUOTES

"He calls it inner kill. He said it's like you're dying and you don't even know it." 📍 Timestamp: 05:01

"today, this card opens many doors. Tomorrow, it won't be worth the paper it's written on." 📍 Timestamp: 14:13

"I'm bored. I'm not contributing in any way. My mind is getting dull." 📍 Timestamp: 08:09

"a whole bunch of my life I lived on autopilot doing what I was doing because I thought I was supposed to do it." 📍 Timestamp: 39:14

"But then I would say, at what cost? and how much is enough." 📍 Timestamp: 28:48

"you have to grieve that loss of that business card. No question about that. But you have to recognize also that you are much more than just that." 📍 Timestamp: 16:42

"It was the mindset that I had bought into. And so therefore, I thought it was the right way to do it." 📍 Timestamp: 40:09

ABOUT MARIANNE OEHSER

Marianne Oehser is a retirement coach, relationship specialist, and author who helps people design what she calls their "next chapter" — the decades after a career ends.

She's not your typical retirement expert. Marianne retired twice — and failed spectacularly the first time. At 40, with a beach house in Southwest Florida and a golden parachute, she thought she'd made it. Instead, she found herself bored, unfulfilled, and watching her marriage fall apart. She went back to work, eventually became a relationship coach, and discovered that couple after couple showing up in crisis had the same root cause: they hadn't prepared for the non-financial side of retirement.

That insight led her to create the Happiness Portfolio — a framework with eight "asset classes" for life. She's now on the faculty of the Exit Planning Institute, where she helps advisors and their clients plan for meaning, not just money. She holds a Master's of Management from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, and she's been happily married to "a wonderful man" for 25 years.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

1. The Power of Purpose by Richard Leiter — The book where the concept of "inner kill" originates
2. Live Long, Die Short by Roger Landry — Research on how 70% of physical aging is determined by lifestyle choices
3. Nancy Schlossberg — Marianne's mentor and expert on adult transitions (96 years old and still publishing)
4. Exit Planning Institute — Organization where Marianne serves on the faculty

ABOUT YOUPOTENTIAL

YouPotential explores what it means to live a meaningful life — through conversations about money, purpose, relationships, and becoming. Hosted by Shaun Dwyer Maslyk.

"Sometimes it's not the answers we learn from — but the questions."

Susan shares the story of Alan—a financially free retiree whose dream retirement in Florida fell apart—and contrasts it with people who thrive because they proactively make a plan. Along the way, we explore time, identity, money as an enabler (not the goal), and what it really means to live a “RichLife.” 

In this deeply human conversation, Daniel shares how a childhood surrounded by basement studios, tape decks, and a musician father evolved into a global career designing soundscapes for some of the world’s most iconic spaces.

From DJ booths and record labels to luxury hotels and creative leadership, Daniel reflects on music as memory, mood, and meaning — and how learning to curate experiences became both an art and a business. Along the way, he opens up about mentorship, resilience, being let go, starting again, and what it truly means to build a life that feels good from the inside out.

This episode is a powerful exploration of creativity, leadership, money, identity, and the quiet courage it takes to trust your instincts.

This week on the YouPotential podcast, Al shares what wrestling can teach us about belief, identity, and perseverance, especially when the path forward isn’t clear. Drawing on a 40+ year career shaped by rejection, reinvention, and unforgettable moments, Al shares why success isn’t built on confidence or certainty… but on commitment when things get uncomfortable.

This episode isn’t just about wrestling. It’s about what it takes to keep moving when the dream is still alive, but the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

If you’ve ever wondered whether to stay the course, pivot, or walk away altogether… this conversation is for you.

This episode of the YouPotential podcast weaves together special moments from every conversation in 2025. The voices, insights, and stories that left a lasting impact, peeling back layers to reveal deeper meaning beneath the surface.

As we turn the page to 2026, we are grateful for what’s been shared and excited for the stories still to come.

Follow along for the ride, there’s so much more ahead. 🎙️

In this deeply honest conversation, Adam traces the origins of his drive back to childhood approval, cultural expectations, and the fear of not being enough. He shares how running on what he calls “dirty fuel” helped him succeed—but at a real cost to relationships, emotional health, and alignment. A relationship breakdown, years of inner work, and a re-examination of money ultimately led Adam to re-aim his life, not away from ambition, but toward usefulness, family, community, and intention. 

This episode is for anyone who’s achieved a lot—and quietly wondered why it still doesn’t feel like enough. 

In this conversation, Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar gently but firmly dismantles that story. 

Tal shares how chasing squash championships and academic success led him to a painful realization: the “arrival” he was pursuing didn’t exist. That dissatisfaction became the spark for his life’s work on happiness, meaning, and what it really means to become happier over time — not perfectly happy once and for all. 

Together we explore the “arrival fallacy,” anti-fragility, his SPIRE model of whole-person well-being, the power of relationships and community, and why letting our kids struggle might be one of the greatest gifts we can give them. We also touch on money as a “hygiene factor” — something that can make us miserable when it’s missing, but can’t deliver a meaningful life on its own. 

If you’re a mid-career professional who has “checked the boxes” but still feels like something is missing, this episode will land close to home. 

In this heartfelt and practical conversation, Shaun sits down with organizational psychologist and author Dr. Zach Mercurio to explore the science of mattering: being seen, heard, valued, and needed. Zach shows how the smallest interactions—not big initiatives—transform culture, confidence, motivation, parenting, and human relationships. His stories from workplaces, youth sports, customer service environments, and everyday life will change how you lead and how you show up for the people around you. 

In this week’s episode of YouPotential, Shaun sits down with Dr. Paul Zak — neuroscientist, best-selling author, and pioneer of the “trust molecule” oxytocin — to explore the brain science behind human connection. From gorilla encounters in Uganda to taking blood samples at weddings, Dr. Zak reveals why shared, immersive experiences don’t just feel good — they rewire us in lasting ways. 

If you’ve ever wondered why great conversations, adventures with friends, or even live music leave you changed — you’ll want to listen to this one. 

In this week’s episode, Shaun sits down with legendary marketer, author, and teacher Seth Godin to unpack his latest book, This Is Strategy, and explore the deeper forces that shape how we work, create, and connect. From why we chase status and fit in with “people like us,” to how our culture tricks us into debt, conformity, and mediocrity — Seth offers a powerful reframing of what it means to be strategic in a world full of noise. 

Through stories about chocolate, systems, and finding your smallest viable audience, Seth invites us to rethink everything from how we learn, how we lead, and even how we spend our money. At its core — this is a conversation about becoming: Who are you becoming through the work you do? And what contribution are you willing to make that people would truly miss if it didn’t exist? 

Seth Godin is one of the most influential voices in modern marketing, creativity, and leadership. He’s the author of 21 international bestsellers, including Purple Cow, The Practice, This Is Marketing, and his newest book, This Is Strategy. Seth has written over 10,000 blog posts, created The AltMBA and The Marketing Seminar, and taught millions of people how to make work that matters through his books, courses, and talks. He’s a two-time TED speaker, a creator of iconic ideas like "permission marketing," and a hero to countless creators, leaders, and change-makers worldwide. 

In this episode, Dr. Susan Campbell — clinical psychologist, relationship coach, and author of 11 books including From Triggered to Tranquil — breaks down the science and psychology of conflict, emotional triggers, and self-compassion. We explore how childhood patterns shape adult relationships, why nervous system awareness matters more than “good communication,” and how truth-telling can become a pathway to intimacy, not rupture. 

Whether you’re a partner, parent, leader, or friend — this conversation gives you tools to repair faster, love better, and build the kind of relationships that support a meaningful life. 

Emile Studham is the Founder of EDS Education Inc. and Head Coach at Cooperation Works, where he helps organizations engineer environments that optimize human cooperation. With roots in kinesiology, teaching, NLP, and behavioral science—and a decade playing semi-pro Aussie Rules—Emile blends movement, mindset, and management into pragmatic systems teams actually use. He co-founded Aussie X and X Movement (Dragon’s Den S6), and today coaches leaders to turn culture into a compounding asset through clear codes, shared language, and repeatable rituals. 

If you’re a mid-career professional or founder who’s “done everything right on paper” but still feels restless, George offers a practical lens: meet the moment, then build a path you can’t ignore, and push for institutions that earn your trust. It’s a playbook for aligning time, energy, and money with a life—and a world—you’re proud to be part of. 

If you’ve “done everything right on paper” but still wonder what winning really looks like, Michael’s lens is refreshingly simple: focus on today, be kind, and use money to expand options for yourself and your people. 

Who this is for: mid-career leaders and business owners who look “successful” on paper but still wonder, is this it? 

Her insights will resonate with anyone who has ever asked: What really matters when everything changes? 

For leaders navigating money and meaning, Matt makes a simple, profound case: bet on yourself, iterate relentlessly, and remember that real wealth shows up at home. The metric that matters most isn’t attendance or AUM—it’s the kind of dad, partner, and human your family remembers. 

In this conversation, we unpack how leaders can use their voice, make good trouble with integrity, and why rest, reflection, and community aren’t luxuries—they’re leadership essentials. 

In this episode, Shaun Maslyk sits down with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener — researcher, author, and one of the world’s top executive coaches — to explore why listening may be the most important leadership skill of our time. Robert introduces the concept of Radical Listening, a way of engaging that goes beyond active listening and creates deeper trust and connection. 

From rediscovering creativity in midlife to navigating parenting in a tech-driven world, Robert shares insights that challenge how we think about communication, connection, and true success. 

If you’ve ever felt that relationships are your greatest asset — at work or at home — this conversation will change how you listen. 

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener is a researcher, author, and globally recognized executive coach whose work spans 30 countries and countless cultures. Known as the “Indiana Jones of Positive Psychology,” Robert has written more than 75 academic articles and several influential books, including Positive Provocation, The Upside of Your Dark Side, and Happiness. 

Recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the top 50 executive coaches worldwide, Robert has trained and advised organizations from Deloitte to the World Bank. His expertise spans happiness, strengths, leadership — and now, the art of listening as a pathway to connection and success. 

John breaks down his influential framework of the four ways of knowing, explains how self-deception drives the modern “meaning crisis,” and shows how cultivating humility, wisdom, and shared practices can transform both our leadership and our lives. 

If you’ve ever felt caught in the cycle of achievement but still wondered, “Is this all there is?” — this conversation will help you slow down, rethink what really matters, and lead with more clarity, presence, and connection. 

John Vervaeke, PhD, is an award-winning cognitive scientist, philosopher, and professor at the University of Toronto. He is best known for his groundbreaking YouTube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and his work on wisdom, relevance realization, and the science of meaning. John has published widely in cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, and his teaching has inspired global audiences to rethink the role of wisdom in modern life. 

From hospital night shifts to international stardom with Glass Tiger, Alan Frew has lived many lives. But behind the fame, awards, and sold-out arenas, Alan’s story is one of resilience, reinvention, and a relentless commitment to creativity. In this deeply personal conversation, Alan shares how identity shifts under the weight of stardom, the life lessons that shaped his book The Action Sandwich, and why acceptance, loyalty, and creativity have been his guiding principles through adversity—including a stroke that nearly ended his career. 

This episode blends music, meaning, and money in ways that illuminate the human side of success. For anyone navigating life transitions or wondering what “success” really means, Alan offers timeless insights that will stay with you long after the episode ends. 

Alan Frew is the iconic frontman of Glass Tiger, a Grammy-nominated, Juno Award–winning Canadian rock band known for timeless hits like Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone). Beyond the stage, Alan is a painter, writer, speaker, and the author of The Action Sandwich, a book that distills his philosophy of receptivity, desire, belief, intention, action, and passion into a practical recipe for living. After surviving a stroke in 2015, Alan continues to inspire through music, storytelling, and a commitment to creativity in all its forms. 

Along the way, we dive into Finland’s value of quiet satisfaction, the role of autonomy and contribution in organizations, the cultural acceptance of negative emotions, and the resilience of Sisu. Listeners will walk away with science-backed tools, cultural wisdom, and practical actions to bring more meaning into their own lives. 

Frank Martela, PhD, is a philosopher and researcher at Aalto University in Finland, specializing in motivation, well-being, and the science of meaning. Known internationally for his expertise on why Finland consistently tops global happiness rankings, his work blends psychology, philosophy, and cultural insight to help people live more self-chosen and purposeful lives. 

Together, we explore what it means to live a self-authored life, how to embrace uncertainty, and why doing “your thing” matters more than any external benchmark. This is a conversation about money — but even more, it's about life, purpose, and finding beauty in the mess. 

Carl Richards is a financial planner, keynote speaker, author, and the creator of the Behavior Gap — a movement that blends financial advice with simple, powerful sketches. His work demystifies the complex emotional landscape of money. He’s the author of The One-Page Financial Plan, co-author of Your Money and Freedom, and founder of the Society of Advice. Carl’s mission is to spark one million meaningful money conversations. 

But beyond the penalty minutes and highlight reels, Barnaby shares the real story — of identity, perseverance, and finding meaning beyond the ice.

From growing up with adversity to carving out a 14-year NHL career, Matthew unpacks how deeply held beliefs about who he was helped him overcome the odds, stay grounded through fame and money, and find purpose in life after hockey.

This episode is about more than just sports. It’s about the power of choosing your identity — and the challenge of letting it go when the jersey comes off.

In this week's episode of YouPotential, Shaun Maslyk sits down with Tamara Myles, speaker, author, and expert in workplace flourishing, to explore how meaning at work is shaped not just by what we do, but how we experience it.

Together, they unpack the “Three C’s” of meaningful work and why psychological safety is the often-overlooked key to building thriving, high-performing teams.

Award-winning psychologist, founder of the Well-Being Lab, and bestselling author (The Art of Insubordination, Curious?, The Upside of Your Dark Side, among others). Todd’s research and insights have appeared in HBR, NYT, Forbes, Fast Company, and more. He translates rigorous psychological science into practical, everyday tools.

In this raw conversation, Thomas opens up about losing his career, family, and money to alcoholism, then finding unexpected healing through cold therapy and Bruce Springsteen's music. He shares his philosophy of "meliorism" — creating beauty from life's darkest moments — and why he believes "money is a false idol." Most importantly, he reveals how surrendering everything led him to discover his most authentic self. 

This isn't just another comeback story. It's about what it really means to live a life you're proud of. 

Thomas G. Waites is a Juilliard-trained actor who studied alongside Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve. He's known for cult classics "The Warriors" and "The Thing," plus extensive work with Al Pacino in "…And Justice for All" and on Broadway.

After losing everything to addiction, Thomas transformed his pain into purpose, becoming an advocate for authentic living and mental health. He now focuses on art, music, and the philosophy of meliorism — finding beauty in life's hardest moments. 

We explore the psychology behind wealth-building, how to develop a truly "rich mindset," and the harsh truths about financial success. Brad shares why experiences matter more than stuff, how childhood money scripts shape our futures, and why believing "if they can do it, I can do it" is the most important financial decision you'll ever make. 

Tune in for a powerful conversation about breaking generational patterns, building real wealth, and transforming not just your life, but your entire family's future.

Nathan shares insights on his unique comedic style of "positive anger" and his critical views on technology and AI, emphasizing their potential threats to humanity. The discussion touches on the importance of money and meaningful work in people's lives, highlighting the need for human connection and purpose in an increasingly automated world. From performing at iconic venues like the Comedy Cellar to appearing on late-night shows, Nathan reflects on the balance between satisfaction and the drive to create, concluding with thoughts on living a meaningful life centered around human connections.  

Nathan Macintosh is a stand-up comedian, writer, and social commentator who has performed on comedy's biggest stages, including Conan, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (three times). Originally from the Maritimes, Nathan moved to Toronto at 19 to pursue comedy - a decision he once called "completely stupid" but has led to acclaimed comedy specials including "Money Never Wakes" and "Down With Tech." 

Known for his sharp social commentary and unique philosophy of "positive anger," Nathan transforms everyday frustrations into insightful comedy that challenges audiences to think critically about technology, money, and what it means to live meaningfully. His work explores the intersection of humor and human connection, making him a distinctive voice in contemporary comedy who uses laughter as both entertainment and social critique. 

We explore how childhood experiences from the backseat of a car can shape adult relationship patterns, why the quiet partner often wields the real power, and how to transform destructive dynamics into deeper connection. Debra shares insights from her transition from high-stakes trading floors to therapy rooms, offering hope for couples caught in cycles they don't understand. 

Tune in for an eye-opening discussion about the forces that can make or break relationships - and how to master them for genuine intimacy and fulfillment. 

Bio:  

Debra L. Kaplan, MA, MBA, LPC, CSAT-S is an author, speaker and licensed therapist. Debra transitioned from a successful career on Wall Street, where issues of sex, money, and power are prominent, to a focus on psychology, exploring relationships, money and related dynamics. She authored "For Love and Money: Exploring Sexual & Financial Betrayal in Relationships" and "Battle of the Titans: Mastering the Forces of Sex, Money, and Power in Relationships." In 2023, Kaplan co-authored "Coupleship Inc: From Financial Conflict to Financial Intimacy," a comprehensive guide praised for helping couples resolve money conflicts and fostering emotional and financial wellbeing. This work inspires her intensives and workshops, where she helps individuals and couples build emotional and financial intimacy in their relationships. 

Mike shares how the pursuit of meaning, if misunderstood, can actually create anxiety rather than happiness. He also questions whether current practices in positive psychology are enough to meet the demands of a changing world. The conversation dives into the tension between materialism and self-transcendence, how wealth has become a scorecard, and why the way we spend our moments shapes our experience of a life well lived.

Michael Steger 

• Website: http://www.michaelfsteger.com/ 
• LinkedIn: Michael F. Steger 
• Center for Meaning and Purpose at Colorado State University: Center for Meaning and Purpose 

We explore how challenges can reveal our true selves and why embracing vulnerability is key to thriving. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about courage, creativity, and the human spirit with Peter Katz.

From being labeled 'too much' as a kid to becoming a global creative force, James shares how embracing his so-called weirdness became his greatest strength. He talks about the emotional cost of choosing creative freedom over conventional success—and why it’s worth every penny.

This is not your typical career advice episode. It’s a manifesto for living out loud, reclaiming your voice, and leading a life that’s unmistakably your own.

Hawksley emphasizes the need to navigate dark times and the power of storytelling in shaping our lives, ultimately advocating for a life rich in self-value and personal fulfillment. He also reflects on the complexities of money, expressing a keen awareness of economic changes and their implications for personal finance.

Join us as we explore the intersection of creativity, resilience, and the pursuit of a life well-lived, guided by Hawksley’s unique insights and fearless approach to both art and life.

We explore how lies can actually serve a social purpose, why body language and storytelling are essential tools for influence, and how our early experiences shape the way we show up in the world. From his creative roots to becoming a trusted advisor to some of the world’s most powerful people, Mark opens up about failure, resilience, and what it really takes to live a meaningful, successful life.