Pivots, Peace, and Betting on Yourself with Calvin Trieu

Welcome to the Ambiguous Truth. I'm your host, Anthony Mistretta, and we're exploring my journey from a desk job into something a little bit more passion oriented, purpose driven. And today we're talking with a friend of mine, Calvin Trieu. Calvin Trieu is a strength and conditioning coach. He has trained NFL athletes at the Combine in January. He's also getting his PhD currently. He has some research published, and he's actually transitioning to a new job as we speak. Tomorrow you said is your first day?

Monday.

Monday. Monday's your first day. Without further ado, Calvin Trieu.

Hey everybody.

So Calvin and I met at the gym that I currently go to, that Calvin's now leaving. And I don't really know when we first started talking. I think you may have came up to me at like one of the cable machines and we just started chatting. You were new, if I remember correctly.

Yeah.

That's just one of the things of just being an adult, making friends.

Yeah.

Initiating the conversation — it's not normal for people anymore, which I don't like. And I'm trying to be like that kid, because I have this distinct memory. I remember back in seventh grade when I moved to a new middle school after my parents broke up — whole childhood stuff happening — and I remember this girl came up to me and introduced herself, and that moment is just ingrained in my head. It was like the one moment where it just made me feel so seen by another human. It was so pure, so adorable. And so every time — I try to think about that and remind myself, whenever I'm about to go shake someone's hand, just don't make it any deeper than it needs to be. Just be like that seventh grader going out to another seventh grader, new in the class. Just say, "Hey, wanna join?"

So pure.

Yeah. So I try to remember that.

So meaningful. I appreciate that.

And, like, saying hi in passing too, or just smiling at someone — I find that especially in Denver, people don't tend to make as much eye contact or wave. You're from Southern California?

Yeah, so from California, but I grew up in Nebraska for like 20 years.

Okay, 'cause I was gonna say — Southern Cali, whenever I'm in San Diego, people are super friendly, super smiley. Back in the Southeast, obviously you get Southern hospitality, people are very smiley and friendly. Out here, not so much — like not when you're passing. But you gotta change that.

Or I guess I have to change that.

You know, you're the one who's gonna affect it.

Yeah, a hundred percent.

All we gotta do is just remember. So anyway, tying back to when we first met — I think from that point on we just had a couple conversations, and every time at the gym the conversations just got longer and longer. And I was like, all right, we cannot — I have an hour and a half to work out, I can't spend the whole time chatting, shooting the shit — so I figured we would hop on the show and talk about some of the concepts that you brought up. I have a couple of bullet points that I wanted to hit based on some of the conversations we've had in the past. But to kick things off — I'm making a big pivot in this podcast, away from — well, really the first season was just an utter lack of identity, no idea what I was doing, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck. And now I'm realizing — it's a little bit meta, a little bit of dogfooding — I want to shift away from my desk job and find people who are in more mission-driven industries, who have more of a passion behind their work, that comes with a bit more of an entrepreneurial spirit compared to, you know, a nine-to-five desk job. Did you always know that you wanted to pursue something like fitness, that you had a passion for it, or did you ever fall to the cry of the siren towards a more traditional, secure, stable job?

So the funny thing is I landed here completely by accident. I wanted the stable job. I wanted — so, to spin the clock back — I always wanted to be a physical therapist since I was a kid. It just made sense. So I've had three left knee surgeries — fun fact. The first one happened sometime in high school. I was around fifteen or sixteen years old. So I've had two ACL surgeries, two meniscus surgeries, and one bone surgery. And my best friend at the time — we ran track, everything, just like any teenage boy wants to do.

Yeah, is — they just want to work out and hang out with girls and drive cars very fast. That's every teenage boy, I don't know what you're talking about.

And skateboard everywhere. So, going through the rehab process and just trying to do push-ups in my bedroom, run track — and with that, did something stupid. We were long-jumping in his living room to impress some girls. And, you know, the way his living room layout was — I don't want to make this story too long, but it's a long layout, from dining room to kitchen to a step ledge, and he had a couch. So we just kept inching it further, launching off of it and over the couch, and just sticking the landing — almost like a Superman landing — while the girls are watching. We're like, yeah, let's just keep inching this back, let's go. And I stuck the furthest, in the Superman landing, but then you hear the pop noise. Have you ever torn an ACL?

I have not, no. But I've heard people say that—

Yes.

So, yes.

Yeah. So that pop happened and I knew. I was like, dang. So, anyways, I've had three left knee surgeries and through the process—

You had ACL?

ACL, yeah. It was my whole knee.

Okay.

I blew the whole thing.

Dang.

So because of that, started PT, and then got the idea of, you know what, this is kind of cool. I like exercise. It makes sense, I can teach other people exercise — at 16, cool, maybe this could be a career path. And so for the longest time I actually wanted to go to PT school. That was my career path from high school to college. And then things got really rocky — more so because I wasn't in a frat, and I just had fun. And so I did undergrad for five years, actually, and didn't have everything I needed for PT school, so I did my master's program while doing the prereqs. And once I finished that, I actually couldn't get into any PT school that I applied to, because they calculate their GPAs a little differently — they took into account every single class I've ever taken and all the retakes. So even though I ended my undergrad with like a 3.1, and then my master's with like a 3.5, because I'd retaken so many classes, they said no.

They said no?

And I was like, really?

Wow. Right.

And so from there I was like, okay, what do I do? I need to be in fitness somehow. And at that point — after I finished my master's back in Omaha, then I moved to Kansas City, and I've been there for the last three to four years now. And then just moved to Denver seven months ago. It was during that first year — the first six months after applying to so many programs — I learned that mathematically I cannot get in. I had a huge crisis. I was like, what am I gonna do? And during that time, started coaching online and trying to make some money, figure out this whole entrepreneurial stuff. Started working at a gym, learned — I don't know how to sell myself online at first — and then I started working for a gym, and that just didn't really bear the fruit I was hoping for. I learned some stuff, but then I needed an actual big-boy job, because money. So then I worked at a hospital, working with people, bariatric patients — so people getting medical weight-loss surgery and different interventions. And I was the sole exercise physiologist there for like three years, until I quit about early last year. And during the whole time I was still building my business and everything. So, hopefully answering your question right — I actually wanted the job first, but things just kept pushing me over, and then somehow I landed here, doing a remote PhD program, working for myself the last year and a half, until this guy I met at the NFL Combine prep — he was in Denver also — reached out to me last week, 'cause we'd kept in contact, and he was like, "Calvin, we need new trainers, you are a killer, we need people." I was very flattered. And then I was like, okay, let's go.

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing. What percentage of your work now is in-person through a gym, versus your own clients, versus online, versus whatever miscellaneous stuff?

Okay, so I'll be completely transparent — all of my clients — I am down to just zero clients now. So this is just the ebbs and flows of the business side of coaching. I've had high months, up to like six, seven thousand, and then now I'm down to zero, because the one client I have doesn't — she wants in-person, but she can't transfer over, because I'll be charging so much more, the dues, the travel and everything. And, yeah, this whole thing has been a huge learning process.

So how do you deal with those fluctuations?

It's hard. It's hard, because I feel very torn across everything — at the same time, putting this on the plate, and I was gonna tell you a little bit before — so, I'm also doing a PhD program. I'm the first in my family to ever finish college, finish a master's, and do a PhD program. All of my family — they're from Vietnam, or they own their own business, but it's in the beauty side. My mom owns a nail salon, my grandma did hair, my aunt sells purses, in California. And so I'm the only one that's doing it this way, in the performance space, with online stuff. And I'm like, okay, let me figure this out. I'm also the oldest of seven. And so, trying to figure all this out. But doing a remote PhD program — we moved out here because of my girlfriend's work, and we didn't know this, but she had to travel basically ninety percent of the time. So I only saw her on the weekends. So that was really tough on our relationship. And now she just transitioned back home, but didn't have a car because she had to give back the company truck. So I've been driving her to work and from work, which eats away about almost three hours a day.

Damn, how far is work?

Well, it's the fact that I have clients at the gym — we live in Wheat Ridge—

Okay.

—she's in Golden. So it's just going through that whole thing, and it depends on what time she goes off during the day — it could be big traffic time, five o'clock, or a little earlier.

Yeah.

So managing — okay, so, how do I show up and be a PhD student, learn how to do this process by myself, while trying to build an online business, trying to build an in-person business, trying to make content, trying to record a podcast, trying to learn all these different things, speak to the right person, charge appropriately so that I can actually get paid — because when I was undercharging, I had a full client roster, but now I've basically 5x'd my prices. I'm getting way better quality clients, but it's tougher, because now I'm not serving everybody. While trying to learn how to speak science and do a dissertation. So all of this is a lot of different identities, new things all at once, while making sure I keep my head straight.

Yeah, yeah, that's a lot.

And everything I'm doing requires me to cognitively be there and mentally be there. And since I'm so forward-facing with shooting content online, everything — it shows if I'm not fully present. There's a duality to that, because I can't just sit back and clock in on a computer and grind. So it's not — not to make an excuse — but just presenting the whole picture.

Yeah. So how do you think that comes across in the content that you create — the podcast, the videos, the reels, TikTok, and stuff? Do you feel like that embodies the whole slew of things that you're juggling in your life, or do you feel like you're good at laser-focusing on one, executing that one, and then moving — I guess, are you good at compartmentalizing, or do you find that it all sort of becomes blended together?

It all blends together. I feel emotions very deeply. So, fun fact — I had a father that left me, which I learned just three years ago he wasn't actually my biological father. And he was abusive, physically.

Three years ago?

Three years ago.

Wow.

So a lot of life is happening fast while I'm trying to adapt to the next thing immediately.

Yeah, gotta stay on your toes.

But yeah, so, fun fact with all that stuff — I feel emotions very deeply. And as a kid, I had a lot of anger issues. I didn't know how — I was never taught how to regulate or express anger, or different emotions. My mom — my mom's awesome, she did great, family's great — but Vietnamese, first generation, the way people know how to express things is just loud, and not very — the advice translates very generic. So even though I feel things, I'm not very good at compartmentalizing, so I have to really sit with it. So as a kid, I would punch things — I've broken my hand like three to four times, just punching things, self-inflicted pain, just to — I didn't know how to let it go. So, now I've managed it better, everything like that. But I can feel like it shows up in my content, because I do get confused, and I try not to put so much pressure — but there is a lot of pressure being like, this has to work, this has to work, this has to work. And, just as a side thing, I've tried to apply to probably tons of side jobs — it's kind of funny. Anytime I try to go to the normal path — I'm sharing the completely messy middle. This is the unsexy part that no one — people want to hear, "I made it, I'm at ten K, twenty, fifty K a month, I did it." No — I am in the thick of all of this, identity-confronting myself, all the depth and crevices of myself, with what I want to do, all these different things at once. And I know very few humans on the planet doing a PhD, trying to do business, trying to show up online, podcast, all of these at the same time, while training for big things. It's a lot. So I feel like it does show across in my content, being — I can be like, am I talking to this person, am I talking to this, what's too much, what's not too much, do they already know this — it's a tough game. And trying to show up the best I can each day and lean into it, even though — for a hot minute there, my sleep, for the last six months, for a hot minute, it dropped down to two to three hours a night. My testosterone dropped about two hundred nanograms per deciliter.

Wow.

Do you think that's obviously not sustainable?

No.

How are you okay with those nights of two to three hours? Like, are you just that focused?

No, so, definitely not okay. So, took a lot — a lot of things have changed. So now I did therapy — I couldn't afford to go to in-person therapy, so I did some of the therapy apps, and it did help regulate my sleep. I did things — I tried to block my phone. I started journaling a lot more.

Were those two to three hours a function of anxiety, stressors on your mind, or you just had a lot of stuff to get done and needed twenty-two hours a day to get it all done?

Anxiety.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. And then just the fact that my girlfriend's not here for that — like, that really thick of it. My girlfriend not being here, and her being stressed about money, stressed about living out of random Airbnbs with her coworkers, because she was doing door-to-door sales. So her brother works part of a roofing company here, and we moved out here — she did a career pivot, and we didn't know she was going to be doing door-to-door in Grand Junction. So she drove out there three-and-a-half hours every single week — Monday morning, come back Friday — and then we have the weekend together. But on the weekend she's so dead tired.

Of course.

So I can't really do much stuff with her. But I'm alone with my thoughts, by myself, all day throughout the week. And so I get to spend time with her, but she's stressed. So it's like both of us going through a lot of life changes. And I hope this is like — actually everyone has messy lives, so I'm just sharing the exact — I know right now, at the bottom of my heart, this is one of the most pivotal moments of my life, right now, and we're leaning into it. It's messy, it's ugly, nothing makes sense if you look at it. But this is where — I feel like this is a moment where a lot of people crack, because people want certainty, want things to work out, want to make sure they're financially gonna be okay. But I believe that there's something pulling me, and I want to get as aligned as I can, because I know the future I can have, I know the cool life that's possible. And so I'm gonna keep sinking my teeth into this, no matter how much it's gonna keep — I'm going through like the eleventh round right now, and I'm hanging on by a tooth. But I don't care, because I know that the one thing I have undeniable belief and evidence of within myself, is that I will stand back up, no matter how — if I show up and there's like one percent of me, and it's not the greatest, I have all the thoughts telling me, "you are sucking, you didn't say that right, you didn't do that right, it's not good enough" — all those thoughts are very, very present. But I know I will stand right back up.

Yeah. Resilience — you just gotta endure it.

Yeah, that's — if you're gonna have endurance for anything, you will make it through.

Yeah, yeah. I was watching one of your reels either yesterday or today, about — you said something along the lines like, "I have to succeed, this is what I want." And I guess, how did you find the direction that you wanted to chase? For a little bit of context — I feel like I'm starting to peel back the layers of the onion and understand what does Anthony, core Anthony, want out of life, but the last ten years have just been, I think, chasing other people's dreams, more or less. How did you get to a point where you could know deep down in your core, "Calvin, I need this thing," of what I'm chasing right now?

I stopped feeling alive. Because at the end of the day, we're all chasing a feeling — if you boil everything down, it's a feeling. What do you want to feel when you buy that house, when you see your parents, when you make that accomplishment, when you do something nice — everyone's chasing a feeling. It's not right or wrong, it's neutral, it's just a feeling. And I got a taste of what that feeling was like when I was working at the hospital, in the middle of America, working in a hospital, making average money — I felt so dead. People didn't see — I just — it was so lifeless. I've seen the parts of me living, working a job that was so lifeless — I was angry, I started becoming resentful, I started becoming that person: when I see someone successful, I would have those negative thoughts, being like, "must be nice," or "they didn't do it because of this." I caught myself and I was like, I don't want to be that person. I've seen the worst parts of myself, I've been the worst parts of myself, I have seen all those shades, and I do not want that. I know what the opposite is — the opposite is I want to lean into the other direction. So what do I have to do right now to go towards that way? Because nobody's path makes sense when you're looking forward — it only makes sense when you can look back, and you can connect the dots, being like, "that was how it was supposed to unfold the way it did, I would have never saw that coming, but I'm so glad I kept pivoting." I was okay, and I accepted pivoting over and over, even though it didn't feel good in the moment — I just knew there's something here, even if it's a spec.

Pivot.

Yeah.

So this concept, pivot versus persevere, is a common one in the early-stage company world. You face the question of pivot or persevere often — we're hitting a hurdle here, is that indicative of a failure and we need to choose a different customer segment, a different feature set, or do we have enough conviction that we need to tuck our head and keep going? That extends to life in general. I feel like, tracing the last ten years of my career, pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, continuously — I am searching for an opportunity to persevere. And it sounds like you are in a place now where the pivots are done — I mean, not to say they're ever fully complete in a micro sense, but in a macro sense, you have a better gist of what you're looking for, you understand it's time to just tuck your head and go forward. What is it that made you certain that you're ready to start persevering — that you're ready to keep pushing and you do not want to pivot anymore?

You're never certain about any decision you're about to make — you just have to make it the right decision. You just make a decision. I have no idea if this is right — me doing this PhD program, I don't know if this is right; me going a lifetime to work with clientele over there, I don't know if this is right; moving to Denver, I didn't know this was right. You never know if something's right, and I think that's where people get stuck — they want so much certainty. And of course you have to play the long game, calculating the odds — like, is this gonna work out, of course I make sure I calculate that — but really, a lot of things paralyze people because they overthink it. You just gotta make a decision. It only comes down to a decision, and you have to make it the right one, because you can play all the angles, you can convince yourself down, you can negotiate yourself up — we are so good at internally painting a picture in any narrative we want. You just make a decision and go. And the faster you can make those decisions, and the more aware you are of them, you can examine them, then you can look for the patterns — you're like, wait a minute, if I make this side of decisions, these are the type of things that happen, but if I wait so long to make these decisions, the feedback is so much slower. It kind of comes back to training — I pull a lot of life references back to physiology and training, it's kind of all the same thing. So if you want to make faster progress, just make more decisions.

Yeah, and lean into it, whatever it is — there's that adage that's like, "if you're only ten failures away from success, how quickly can you fail," or something like that.

Exactly, exactly that same type of mindset — how much can you compress? Like when it comes to training, if I'm training somebody and they want to see progress, coming from zero — sure, they'll make progress coming in two times a week, or if they just go all in and I see them five, seven times a week, they're gonna learn things so much faster. The rate of progression, the iteration — you need that feedback to know. You just learn faster.

Yeah. And I just want to kind of nutshell another point you made, to make sure I fully get it — I think what you were saying about just making the decision, correct me if I misunderstand, but this is my takeaway: it's sort of like you just need to have confidence in yourself and have conviction behind the choice, regardless of what that choice is. If you make a choice and you stick with it, and you go balls to the wall, that's going to either bring about success or bring about some failure — that's going to be one step closer to success. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Kinda, yeah. The one point you said that just made me think — you said making a decision and having the confidence and conviction there — it's okay to make decisions without the conviction or confidence. There's so many times in my life where I don't believe in myself, I am scared, I don't have the conviction, I feel like the smallest version of myself. But if you can even have a shred of belief in yourself to make that decision, just to lean in — honestly, even if you strip everything, there could be an absence of everything, just lean. That's the mental picture in my head — if I'm in a moment where everything's stripped, I have an absence of everything, for some reason it's just not there today, I just picture me falling forward, and I just lean. And so I'm like, okay, let me just make this a decision — can I break this down to just, let me lean into this one decision, okay, what's the next decision, lean in, what's the next decision, lean in. So yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Decision paralysis is your worst enemy — it's not that you make the wrong decision, it's effectively that you don't make a decision, and you don't choose to go forward anywhere. One of the things that we talked about at the gym a while ago was this concept of a volume knob. Do you remember — dials and switches?

Yeah, dials and switches.

Yeah, yeah — 'cause I just heard about the concept of dimmers and switches, and you talk about dials and switches. Can you just briefly share that concept for anyone listening, and then we'll dive into it — I really enjoyed listening to that.

Yeah, so — Dials and Switches. I got the two words from a Navy SEAL, his name is DJ Shipley, and he calls it a thousand switches. And I love that concept, because there's so many areas in life where sometimes you have to just flip — you have to flip a switch. But I think too many people take things too binary, or live in that binary world for too long. You gotta be very fluid and dynamic with all the different tools that you've acquired along life, and use them in the next context, next situation. So, how many tools can you acquire, and how flexible can you be? It's like any beliefs or thoughts and things you have — don't be so married to them, loosely hold them, be open to updating your thoughts. But when it comes to certain things — sometimes getting up and going to work, for example, it doesn't matter how you feel, you gotta go do it. But how you do it, you can do it with a presence of compassion, grace for yourself — it doesn't have to be from a place of shame or guilt or self-inflicted whatever to drive the behavior. And so many people, when it comes to driving their behavior, they only live in "how can I be as mean and aggressive and self-deprecating to myself as humanly possible to drive the behavior" — it can work, it's like getting a rocket off the ground, it could be the activation energy you need, depending on the context. But to keep that rocket afloat in the air, you gotta dial that throttle back and find something sustainable, a sustainable fuel source. So that's where I like the dial concept. So the way that DJ communicates it — and I love the way he does it — is, especially in his extreme context at the Navy SEAL — when he goes to work, he needs to flip a switch, when he's out there he can't be thinking about his family, he has to be a full-on SEAL operator, he cannot be anything else but that one identity, otherwise life is on the line. But now that he works as a business owner, coming home to his kids, his family doesn't need him to be the operator, they need dad, they need DJ. And I love in his story, when he comes home, he parks in the driveway, he sits there for one song, and he down-regulates and turns the dial back. And I love that, and I try to apply it to myself, more in a training context and life context — my girlfriend doesn't need me to be a business owner, a coach, when I'm talking to her, she needs me to be a boyfriend, she needs me to just listen to her and not try to solve her problems, for example, which I'm still working through. So I just love that concept of understanding — there's a time and place for you to step on the gas and be black-and-white, but at the same time, you must be able to flip that switch over to, can we just turn the dial. And just be very fluid, like water. So it's just knowing the right time and place to be what you need to be in that context, so it doesn't blow up in your face.

Yeah, yeah, because — I mean, you were talking about all the different avenues that you're facing, that you're experiencing, with work, school, relationships — I feel like there's so many masks that we put on on a daily or weekly basis, of all the different things that we do. And trying to be all those things at one time can be extremely overwhelming. Sometimes you just have to really go into, you know, all right, I'm the CEO of an early-stage company, I'm pitching investors, I need to raise money, nothing else matters in that hour, in that meeting — the only thing that matters is how successful can I be in this conversation. But then once you leave, maybe you change a little bit — not at your core, right — but there's some part of you that you leave in that office, in that conference room, so that you can show up best for whoever you're experiencing next, whether that's going home, or coworkers — they need a slightly different version of you, your employees need a different version of you than an outside investor, things of that nature. Yeah, I really like that. We also talked a little bit about pendulum swinging — and, you know, I fall victim to the pendulum swing really strongly, where I experience A, and then somehow my eyes are open to the exact opposite, and I go full-on in that other direction, and then I eventually come to find this sort of middle ground. And I feel like there's sort of two camps of people — there's the people who need a strong pendulum swing in order to find their middle ground, and then there's people who can just kind of walk slowly towards that middle ground — that's not, I don't think, ever gonna be me. And I think you were saying you're similar to me, in that you find the pendulum swing is powerful, and I think you said something along the lines of — if I remember the conversation correctly, 'cause it's been a couple months now — you feel that you sometimes need to experience one hundred percent in the opposite direction for you to really understand. Is that how you feel, or am I misremembering?

I'm remembering back from our conversation, and the first thing that comes to mind is a training reference — it's like RPE, or RIR. So, like anybody on a gym floor — if it's the first time working with somebody, just like normal people, if you ask them, "give me a seven out of ten effort on this," they'll give you what they believe is a seven out of ten effort, but they don't know what their full capacity is, they don't know what it feels like to really push a weight — you don't know what you don't know. And so sometimes it's a good idea to know your boundaries within a controlled, safe manner.

I see. So if you ask them for an RPE seven, they might actually give you an RPE four?

Exactly, because they think that their seven is their ten. And then right there, it doesn't really — people blur it, this is where you have to separate things out. They think they're giving a seven out of ten effort by psychologically being there, or thinking, "I'm really thinking about this" — no, you're not pushing this. Let me put in the constraints, set up the environment for you to just explore — go, find out. So it's almost like you have to fly close to the sun, kind of like the Icarus story.

Yeah.

You gotta fly close to the sun to know where your boundaries are. And that kind of comes back to entrepreneurship, or just going out on your own — boy, you do not know how far you will have to push yourself if no one is writing your checks. You don't know how far you'll push yourself if you're not in a relationship anymore, and all these different things — there's no safety nets, there's no accountability for somebody. If you put yourself into the right conditions and place the right constraints, you will learn so much more about yourself.

I like that. All right — you mentioned entrepreneurship a couple of times, so I feel like in the training world it's probably impossible not to have an entrepreneurial mindset and be a trainer. Do you agree with that?

Not impossible, but it blows up in people's faces. A lot of this is, people come into training because they like exercising — who doesn't want to wear shorts and cozy oversized tees and help people work out? But then you learn the whole business side of it, and then you learn the whole behavior-change side of it, and most people don't make money — this is not very sustainable for them, because they're not learning the business side of it. There's so much that comes into it.

What was your question again — sorry, go ahead.

I didn't ask a question yet, quite.

Okay, sorry.

No, no, don't apologize.

I — the reason why I was going with this is, my background being more desk-jobby, corporate-y, software-y — there's a very clear-cut, upward trajectory, and the ceiling is really — there's not much of a clear ceiling, because you can take so many different branches. You can go into more of the business side, take on upper management, C-suite roles, you can start a company — there's all these different avenues. Where I'm getting to with training is, it seems like there's a bit more of a perceived ceiling in terms of in-person training, where at a certain point you're probably not gonna be able to charge a whole lot more, and you only have so much time you can actually dedicate to training people without going crazy. So it feels like it's a space where the impetus is on you as a trainer to find additional income streams, to find opportunities where you can have residual income, or seek things out that are higher-yielding compared to just in-person training — because obviously, as you get more experience, you're going to be able to command a higher rate than someone who just started, naturally, but at a certain point you kind of cap out, is what it feels like. So my question is, how do you honestly maintain sanity while — 'cause you've got a lot of forks in the fire? What is it — things in the oven — my gosh, expressions.

What, my buddy literally just said it — I'm from Nebraska, I should know all these things. But I get it, I have a lot of things going on.

Yeah, we're gonna cut all that.

Keep it, this is raw.

Actually, on that note — one of the things I mentioned, like the identity crisis with the podcast — one of the things that I didn't love is like the overly produced podcasts, and I felt like mine, there was so much production gone into it — so much trimming and music, and like all the animations and visuals — and it's like, at the end of the day, I get that we need video, but it's a podcast. I don't know what the percentage is of people who just listen versus people who watch. I like to watch podcasts, but — anyway, this is a long tangent. I realized, I think, in order for this to become more authentically my show, the production just has to plummet, just leave it the way it is.

Yeah, it's not AI, this is so human.

Yeah, yeah, yeah — well, we can get into that a lot. Yeah, I cannot for the life of me remember — there's like, "irons in the fire"?

Irons in the Fire? I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I don't think I've heard of that one. Okay, but—

You have a lot of irons in the fire.

Yes, sir.

I am also sort of trying to — I can't multitask very well, so that's hard for me to do — but as I'm navigating a career pivot and trying to break away completely from a desk job and have ideally this become a source of income, but then hopefully that also opens up doors for other things that could be income-generating — how do you maintain sanity through all the different avenues? At what point does it get too much? Has it become that for you yet, where it's just too much to manage and you feel like you're going insane?

That's a fair question. So it makes sense for me, because everything comes back to the one main thing: I am coaching people, everything falls under the umbrella of human performance. It's just getting people results, faster, stronger, more fit, physically, cognitively. I just want to turn people into an absolute unit — be the best, get results. And so if I spread things out, looking at it — because I have thought about, is this too much? No, it's all little elements of the main thing.

Can you define that main thing?

The main thing is exercise, it's training. So, okay — I have my PhD, so this is where I burrow into — okay, I'm learning the things I want to learn: physiology, metabolism, hypertrophy training, down to the molecular level, exercise science — I get to go deep in learning this. Coaching people in person, I translate, I do the thing in person. Online, I do the thing online. Now, content — I talk about the thing. So: I read about the thing, I talk about the thing, I do the thing. The main thing is all exercise, these are just different channels. It's not like I'm doing five different businesses — if I was doing a business in solar, a business in roofing, a business in coffee shops, that would be five different domains, but then one domain is performance, and these are just different elements of it, and these are the things I want to get better at. And this is the lifestyle, this is where I want to take my career. So, I'm technically living the life I want to live, I'm just trying to get it to a higher scale, and obviously the bank account to reflect that. But essentially, this is the lifestyle — I want to be able to talk about the thing online and share about the thing I love so much, but also do a little bit of the research stuff, and the in-person and online. My big limiter — not big limiter, but comes with all this — it's basically like I'm doing three to four different startups, it feels like, at the very beginning: learning the things I didn't know, that's the thing that will generate the — whatever the conversion is — how do I write copy, how do I attract people, how do I stop people from scrolling and get them to watch my stuff, because I have evidence to show that I do well when I work with people, people get good results, this and that. But my biggest bear right now is, how do I get people to know who I am and to stick — and that's all the business-marketing stuff that I obviously was never taught, but I'm learning how to do that: writing copy for a website, email, newsletter, things like that. So I hope I answered the question.

Yeah, and I really like that framing, that it's not that maintaining your sanity is derived from the quantity of things you're doing, it's an alignment problem — as long as what you're doing aligns with the bigger picture you have for yourself and the direction you want your life to go, everything's okay. But perhaps as soon as you start to break away from things that are out of alignment — as in, you do a solar business just for shits and giggles — that's when things become a little muddied. And that's one of the directions I wanted this podcast to go — the reason why I specifically mentioned more purpose-driven, meaningful careers is because I feel like it's easy to become excited about an opportunity purely because there's money to be made. I don't know why that just — I think I do know why. I think when I've pursued opportunities purely because there's been a financial incentive, the financial incentive is never strong enough for me to actually give a shit about what I'm doing, and at the end of the day I quit, because there's no deeper core motivation — it's an external motivation, a motivation for increasing my bank account, which is all good and well, not to say that's a bad thing to have a desire to increase your yield, but it's never been sufficient for me. And so I think finding people who agree with that, who feel similarly — that, no, I need to find a career that aligns with what I want in the bigger picture of things — that's the type of people I want to talk to, and the people I want to align my life around.

There's something — I like that you brought that up, because that was a huge reminder that was given to me when I was at the NFL Combine prep, working with those athletes. Because — I was back in Omaha for a wedding, for my girlfriend's family, and we saw one of our old friends, and he asked me about the experience, because he's in the training world too, and he loved that stuff, and he was asking what was my biggest takeaway from it — just asking questions like any other guy would be excited about — and I thought about it. The biggest thing I always took away from that experience wasn't the fact that, hey, I worked with NFL athletes — no, it was the mindset. Imagine this: you're in a building where every other person in this building had to fight and file their teeth, and it took them years, even decades, to get into this one building at this one time with everybody, and everybody there has a story. Nobody walked in there by accident. Everyone is there to work, everyone is chasing a dream, everybody is risking their financial future, their family, their sanity, their perception from other people — thinking, "you should have stayed in whatever, whatever." People are in debt, people are — everyone in there, from the athletes, from the clinicians, from the coaches, from the agents, from the college kid working the front desk — everyone in that building is fighting to be in that room, in that space, at that one time. There's an aura, there's an energy to that. It's a place of real professionals. And when you get to be in places where people just exude that — it doesn't have to be super confident, it doesn't have to be like they know it — there's a mission, there's something they're going after, and they're willing to put everything on the line, and they will show up because they give a shit. Being around people who give a shit is everything. Just like you said about the money part — yes, financial stuff has to be part of the equation, but like you said, it's not sustainable, it won't carry you forever. For some people, sure, but then other parts of life might not go too well. So, yes, it's there, but it's the fact that — what I'm doing right now, where I'm going, I feel something inside of me, I feel this is it. If you take a snapshot of the entire landscape of everything, it looks so messy — if you look at the texture of my mind right now, it may look so messy. But I know — I will regret this if I don't, because I don't want to make it to the end of the line and face that part of me that could have been. I will not do that. I've seen all the other worst parts of me, I will not do that. I will bet everything under the sun to lean into whatever this direction is, and however it unfolds, step by step, because after being reminded, being in a place like that — that's real. I want to be around more people who give a shit, and those are typically people at the top of whatever their game, whatever the craft — it's all a craft, I think people miss the picture of the work they do, it's not just clocking in, clocking out. What's your craft? What's the thing you're willing — just like you told me about the light that you built over there, the second you set that, I had my level of respect for you go even more up. I saw something right there — it's that kid who is curious, who explored a curiosity, no matter the financial cost or whatever — and you just leaned in and built shit because it was fun, and you have a smile on your face because of it. That's worth more than anything. You have a story — because at the end of the day, all you have left at the very end are stories, memories, yourself, from the day you take your first breath to the day you take your last, the only person you have with you is you. And so — can you be friends with you, can you be okay with you, can you be okay with the stories you've carried along the way, with all the scars and everything, with all the decisions? And so, me thinking about the end in mind — how do I want, who do I want to meet along the line — I don't want to make it to the very end and see all the possibilities that didn't happen because I was too afraid, because I allowed the crowd in, I allowed the old-man thought in — those, nobody ever paid my bills. So let me just lean into this, because the stories that I love — when I watch movies, I love watching movies, 'cause I love the stories, and I love the stories of people who just bet on everything, people who just go for it — and you don't have to bet everything, people who just work normal jobs, but if there's a fire, if there's passion, if there's something there — people who just give a shit about whatever they're doing, I love that, 'cause you can see the humanness, you can see the non-roboticness. So many people are so conformed to whatever, and everyone is just dampened. So many people just walk around looking down, not saying hi — I'm like, I don't want that life. Maybe that's the part of my childlike self I'm still trying to keep alive, but I want to embody that kid on the playground, on the skateboard, who just wants to explore and see what's gonna happen — am I gonna try this kickflip and nick myself in the shin thirty billion times until I have a huge bump? Yep — but the second I land that tre flip, I still remember the first time I did it, I want that story. So I'm gonna keep chasing it, no matter how messy this looks — but this is where everything happens, it's the messy middle, you just have to get messy and do the thing, and it's going to work out — because if you were hungry, and you were undeniable with yourself, and you chose to endure, it will work out — because how many talented people did you know growing up, in school, that you're like, "that person's probably gonna go pretty far," or how many rich kids did you go to school with, and people didn't get that far? The people who make it really far are the ones who give a shit.

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Because when you meet people day to day, and just you meeting me here — and I'm thankful you asked me to be on — you saw something human in me that I liked. And I just care, and I just want more, and just want to live a cool life and do it with cool people. You brought me here. And so, if you want to get farther in life — give a shit about what you do, master your craft, be that kid, and then just keep going.

Yeah, it's sort of like — is it Shakespeare who said, "better to have loved and lost than never loved at all"? Better to have tried and failed than never tried at all. I feel like that's the "man in the arena" — don't be the guy, the critic, don't get off the sidelines, get in life, go live life, go do it. And I really like that, 'cause I think there's a lot of examples in business and personal success stories where truly the deciding factor of success was just perseverance, and caring, and just doing it — it wasn't anything magical, it's simply, "I never gave up," and now I have something to show for it.

And it's so true — I think back to the people who were high achievers in high school, college, and you're like, "wow, they're gonna be something," and then there'd be the people who never in a million years did you think they were gonna make it, and then they did — you're like, "why, how did that happen?" Well, because that person gave a shit. At the end of the day, anyone I've seen in my younger years who has turned out to become — like my buddy Austin — we all knew he was a little bit of a different character, because he's one of the most talented people I've ever seen — singing, acting — we all knew he was gonna make it pretty far, and he is making it very far, but he gave a shit, that's all he cared about — acting, singing, dancing — from the time I knew him in elementary school, or maybe middle school, that's all he cared about, and he's crushing it. And then there are other people I can think about who, in high school, were such a different person, but then they just came out of the woodwork with a deep passion, and now they're killing it — it's awesome to see.

And I think that reminds me a little bit of my career, 'cause I just haven't given a shit about a lot of the stuff I've done in the past — it just felt like I should be doing this, I should be working for this company, I should be doing this job, and it becomes just mind-numbing, banging your head against the wall. I remember when I had my last full-time job, there were days where I would just lay on the couch and sob during work, because it was just so utterly meaningless to me. And I'm just tired of doing that, tired of replaying that narrative and repeating it day in and day out with my work. And you see so many counterexamples of people who are just making jobs out of something completely ludicrous — or at least it seems ludicrous compared to more traditional jobs out there — but they're making it work. Why not me? Why not you? Why not us? And I think we're living in a weird world where a lot of people are waking up — you couple the benefits depreciating for full-time employees, the cost of living going up significantly — the things that historically worked really well for creating a life of meaning and comfort are suddenly breaking apart. And so it's like, well, if I'm not gonna get to achieve my goals within this realm of comfort and security, let me at least chase a fucking moonshot and see where it gets me. And who knows — maybe it'll get me a hell of a lot further, and if not, you have a great story to tell from it, and you at least went through life giving a shit.

There's — have you heard of it, in the ultra-running space, Cocodona?

I'm not super familiar with the ultra-running space.

It's okay, there's this really big one — it was like Cocodona two-fifty. There's this girl — she's the first — wait, is Cocodona the race?

Yes.

Okay, okay. So it's recent, about a month or two ago — I'm sure my sister would know, she does that stuff. She's like the first woman that won it — and she didn't just win it, she won it by hours, by the second person. And what she said — I love it — is, right there, you said, "well, no, why not you" — and what she said is, "someone has to win this, so it might as well be me." And it's like, adding that in — it's like, okay, why not you? But also remembering, someone has to go do the thing, someone has to win, someone has to be in those positions, do that craft, whatever, has to be somebody. Why not you? So someone has to do it. And so, just remembering that — just hearing those reminders of those types of people, I just love thinking, because so many people — we'll always — people are like, okay, what's the average, what's the average performance someone does in the sales role, what's the average person make per year — so many people just reorient their mind to what's the average, average, average. But then, how about — why don't you think about how much this person is making? Like, when I went to the Lifetime interview, and they were telling me, this is like the average — a trainer charges like one-forty an hour. I'm like, what's the — who's the guy that makes the most? Two hundred. Okay, I'm gonna go make two hundred. Why make the average? Because by setting your standards there, you lower all your standards, all your ambitions, you lower everything. So if you want more, go — 'cause somebody has to be that two-hundred-dollar-an-hour guy. I want to be that. Let's go.

Yeah, I feel like we live in a world where it's really easy to conform, and we're encouraged to conform, and that's — to a certain extent, I don't get it. I feel like I don't do well with authority, I don't do well with conformism.

Dude, I had it at thirteen on the ACT, and I'm getting a PhD now. How does that work?

Because you care.

I think that's really what it is. Think of how many identity shifts I had to keep stretching through. There has to be the first of something. And, I'll be a hundred percent transparent — I don't think I'm the smartest person in the world — if you look at my transcript, I've had so many F's, I feel like — I shouldn't have had this many F's, D's, C's, I've had every letter, at every stage. But someone has to keep showing up, someone has to keep taking that class, and eventually you'll learn it, because it's all made up. And so many people have this, like, "yeah, I had the perfect transcript growing up, and then I became a mediocre person because I just conformed," and whatever — okay, you fucked up, you did drugs, you failed, you cheated, you did all these things, you failed, you lost money — it's all made up, everything is made up. So if you made up your problems, let's go make up some solutions. Let's go, because for me, I just need to know that one motherfucker did it. My girlfriend's brother — like I said, he's in the construction company — before he got into that role, he was eighty K in debt, and now he's fine, he owns — he has a beautiful five-year-old, and he has like a million-dollar house, or something, an expensive house in whatever, Colorado. And I'm like, okay, cool — how many people have gone so deep and crawled right back out? And that doesn't mean all of it's not real. But I also see, like, from us still being young, so many people in our age group are like, "oh my god, I have this much student loans, it's gonna take me forever" — I'm like, no, dude, this is a different world, there's a way. And that's the biggest thing, if I can instill anything in anybody — what I always say to myself is, there's a way, there's always an option, there's always — get fucking scrappy in this life. There's always an option. If there's not an option, you make an option. There's never one option not on the table for you to make. If you can remember that — and, hey, I mean, we've all gone through hard things, every single person here has had some type of disadvantage, some type of sad story. If you went through that at twelve, at ten, at twenty — who says you can't go through that again at forty, at fifty? If anything, you have more resources, knowledge, experiences, you have so much more to pull from. There's always a way. You mentioned Icarus earlier in the conversation—

There's a — Matthew McConaughey was on Modern Wisdom, if you're familiar with that show, and he was saying — I actually think people don't fly close enough to the sun, people don't take enough chances. And he's like the king of taking chances — he nearly threw away his acting career to dive more into dramas, more serious roles. He's like, "no, I'm tired of being pigeonholed into this pretty-boy, rom-com bullshit — no, I want real acting, I want real things." And people are telling him, "you're gonna fuck up your entire career for that," and he's like, "great, I'd rather fuck up my entire career, but still do something that I feel so deeply called to." And obviously that worked out very well for him, but I think that's something that's really stuck with me — that mindset, that we're encouraged in so many ways to be safe and play by the rules, but you look at anyone who is successful, who has quote-unquote "made it" in this world — none of them played by the rules, none of them played it safe. Everyone flew close to the sun and figured out what they could and couldn't do. And maybe we need a little bit more of that mentality — let's see how close we can actually make it.

Two words that came up in my head are "audacity" and "peace." How audacious could you be? And the other word is — you know, like my mom asks me all the time, "Calvin, are you happy?" And your parents probably ask you that too, friends — but nobody ever asks, "are you at peace?"

What do you mean, what is happiness?

Highs and lows. Feeling things very high, feeling things very low, ebbs and flows. I think I'd rather have peace. And to me, words matter, the words you say matter — just like how we were talking about my podcast name — "Demand More," "demand better" — what's the philosophy, what are the mechanisms behind that word you're about to use? 'Cause right now it's nothing, but who says it won't be nothing forever — it might mean something, to where somebody might tattoo it on their body, and it might save them, it might carry them. And so, I think about the word "peace" over "happy" — just because life is kind of made up, and I might be going off here, but life is really just made up of — like, you went to Ecuador, so, so sick — I'm sure you were like, clout, not happy for sure, yeah, the whole time, for sure. But life — you have those moments, those stories that you'll carry with you forever, but life is not made up out of those stories. Life is made up of how many good Tuesdays can I have — Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays — how many just normal good days can I string together, and that's my life. And me going through my days, how I reset my mind each morning is: can I just be at peace with this day? If life were to end right now — I know movies are like, if you say you got some terminal disease and you gotta go do a bucket list and go do all these crazy things — but at the end of the story, they always go back to, what type of peace can I just have? Can I just grab my partner, sit on the porch, have a cup of coffee, watch the sunrise while petting my dog's head, and the breeze hitting me, and you just had a good meal in your belly, and you're having good conversations that day — it's just the little things. And I'm trying to frame it, and remind myself to pursue more of — how can I string together more of these days, because that is my life, that is what I will replay when I die. And at the end of the day, when my head hits the pillow, can I say that was a peaceful day. And if I don't wake up tomorrow, somehow I just die right now — I do get kind of morbid sometimes, but remember, there's the stoic Latin, memento mori — you will die, any moment you can die, get hit by a car, anything can literally happen any moment. So I try to remind myself in the present — how can I make this day just be, I'm at peace, if this was it, this was enough.

The chase of happiness is an interesting thing, because we are a society that's obsessed with chasing happiness. And there's a book called The Power of Meaning — it's changed, it's subtext, but the book I have, which is boxed up currently, otherwise I would grab it — it's Power of Meaning: Finding Purpose in a World Obsessed with Finding Happiness. And the whole book is about how happiness is more or less a byproduct, a side effect of a lot of other things, and it's nearly impossible to chase, because you'll have happiness, you'll have sadness — it's an emotion, right, and emotions stem from your response to experiences. You can't really chase emotions, you can experience them, but it's a side effect, a consequence of things in your life. And the book's argument is — and a little bit of background on the book — it was research done on patients who were in a hospital near death, typically older people, and he asked them — the interviewer asked them questions about, basically, first, to understand if they're okay with passing, and then secondly, if they're okay, what makes them okay. And overwhelmingly, the ones who were very content with their passing was because they had meaning in their life, not because they were happier — and they also experienced sadness, they also experienced a whole slew of emotions, but they found meaning, they found purpose. And I think that it's definitely different than peace.

Maybe they're two sides of the same coin — like, you're able to achieve peace through feeling like you've done something meaningful with your life.

But to your point, I think that breaking away from a search, an endless quest for happiness, and focusing more on a tangible achievement of gratitude in your life currently — you know, no outcome is ever gonna make you feel better about yourself. You see this all the time with plastic surgery, and body modification — how it's just one thing leads to the next, the next, and the next, and it's like, well, it's not actually solving the core problem of, you're not content with who you are — it's just changing who you are, and you're gonna continue to be not content with who you are, and you're just gonna continue going down that road. At the end of the day, it's a decision — just like you have to be okay with the decisions that you make through your career, and you're not gonna have a hundred percent conviction that you're making the right choice, but when you make a choice, you must know it is the right choice because you made it — therefore, it is the right choice. Similar thing with finding peace in your life — I think you just have to be, "this is what I want, I'm grateful for what I have, I'll take peace" — and just moved into a new place, very grateful to have this, really soak up the sun quite literally and enjoy the balcony, and be grateful for this, just as I'll be grateful for the next place, the next place, the next place, and so on.

Something really cool that I learned recently that you just brought to the surface — if — and this kind of comes to a lot of behavior-chain, psychology stuff too — is, so many people make emotions, and they make that emotion their entire identity. And something I heard from someone is, if you look at other religions and other cultures, how they say they're feeling a feeling, they don't feel it — they phrase it differently, they don't feel it, it's passing through them, like a gust of wind. So I love that, because you don't have to make your feeling your entire identity, and that way it drives the entire narrative, the perception, and the reality — because that is how — people's perception is based off of your feeling. And so many people go back to the dials and switches thing — like, black and white, do I feel happy? No. Something's wrong. And so all these feelings that people feel — okay, you'll feel happy, you feel sad, you feel uncertain, you feel whatever — it's just passing through you, you don't have to create an entire identity around that type of thing.

Yeah.

And so that was huge for me, when I learned it like that — kind of how what you just shared brought up the whole feeling stuff.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. 'Cause I mean, I've heard that, like, you're not anxious, you have anxiety.

Right. It's just passing through — a step further.

Yeah, exactly — like, passing through a step further is, like, well, it's not that I have it, it's that I am currently experiencing it, it's going through me.

Which just separates you even further away from that emotion, so that way you can hold on to yourself and your own identity, and not feel like that emotion is who you are, 'cause your emotions — it's neutral, it's not a bug, it's a feature, it's just a human experience. There's nothing wrong with feeling sad sometimes, or certain things, it's just hard.

Yeah. But they're helpful, they're helpful as indicators and feedback.

Exactly. But you don't have to create an entire identity around it, and craft a story, and make it a whole big thing, which most of us do.

A hundred percent. And you were talking about your podcast, and I think that might have been in the prior recording, but talking about the name of your show, and some questions you had about renaming it — and words are so powerful. I had a friend — I met her at a festival in Australia, and she got on everyone, especially me, because I had a tendency to say things like, "I'm so stupid." And she's like, "Anthony, you're not stupid, you may have done something that wasn't the smartest, but do not say that, because even if you say it once to yourself, you're gonna start to believe it." Right? And words are extremely powerful. So, with that said, I'm curious to hear about the show, your podcast, a little bit — also tell people where to find you, and how they can connect with you, and all that jazz, before we part ways.

Yeah, so the podcast — before, it was just my name, the Calvin Trieu Podcast. I didn't know what to name it, all that stuff. And I was thinking to myself, what do I want people to feel — 'cause it comes back to just feeling. And I am my own ICP. So, what do I want to feel, and when do I listen to podcasts? And the feeling that I loved the most — there was a long span where, when I lived in Kansas City, I lived downtown, every Monday morning — Nick Bear, do you know who Nick Bear is? He owns this up-and-coming company, and a big online presence too — a lot of personal development, fitness stuff. His company is like a hundred-million-dollar company now. So he gives a lot of good insight and wisdom from his perspective, and I really liked it. And so what I loved was the feeling — every Monday morning it would come out, and Monday was like my day, where I kind of treated it like my Sunday — I would go for a run, middle of the day, during last summer, spring to summer to fall — run out of my apartment, shirt off, put the headphones in, I'm running down the city — 'cause our apartment was on a hill, down over to the riverfront — and I just felt like main-character energy. I listened to something that's just giving me something, I felt very — it was good, running in the sun, getting tan, listening to it, I'm being my best self. And I was like, I want that feeling, I want to give other people that feeling, I want to create a show where somebody around the world can go have that experience, and it adds something positive into their day, their life. And I was like, okay, now I know what the end product I want people to feel — to learn, and to be inspired by something. Now, what do I want the name to be — from a branding and business perspective, you want the name to be sticky, the stickier the name, the shorter it is, the more likely somebody can remember it, talk about it, think about it themselves. And I was like, wait, there's a couple brands — also, back to Nick Bear, he has the slogan "go one more" — there's a whole thing with it, it was by accident, but now people actually get it tattooed on them, there's a philosophy, there's something about it, and you can apply that to your life, being like, "can you go one more in this, yes or no, yes, let's go." And I was thinking, I want to give people some type of internal command, something they can take away — even if they just never listen to my podcast again, and only get maybe seven episodes or something, they remember the name, and maybe that name I can put in the back of their mind and they can start using those words — kind of like a kid who learns words from their parents. And so it's like, "demand more." 'Cause so many — I was like, something that's not generic — can you demand more out of yourself right now, out of this, out of your programming, out of your life, out of your partner, out of something — can you demand more? Okay, that's kind of where I was going, and from a branding-marketing perspective, it's stickier, it's two words, and if someone can remember "demand more," I'm like, I like that. So that's the name of the podcast.

But — answer the other one — where can people find you?

I'm on all platforms — podcasts, Instagram, YouTube, newsletter — all underneath my name, CalvinTrieu.co, and the podcast Demand More, and then, yeah.

Cool, I'll put that in the show notes too. Dopeskis. Calvin, thank you so very much.

Thanks, dude, thanks for having me here, this was fun.

Yeah, likewise, it was a blast, I learned a lot. And I feel like — just to touch on your podcast — I definitely feel very inspired to hit the ground running with the show, following, pursuing this passion, and largely thanks to all the wisdom that you've been sharing today. So it makes perfect sense that you have an inspirational, motivational podcast of your own. Is it interviews, or solo, or both?

It's gonna ebb and flow based off everything, but right now, probably just on my own.

Cool. And we'll go from there. Sweet. Amazing, thank you.

Thanks, dude.