5. Chris Kahn - Entrepreneur, Personal Trainer, and Writer

I had a mentor years ago and I was complaining about not having anything made and he said just keep writing, produce content, because you never know when that content is going to be in vogue. And sure enough, the very first novel I wrote between 96 and 2000, quantum Prophet is the name of it that is being looked at as a potential streaming series now, now. Now, oh, wow, because the themes of that novel then were proper stewardship of the planet, right, very relevant now. The theme of the book is that the Earth is a sentient organism, it has its own consciousness and it deplores the parasite known as mankind.

And so it speeds up all the evolutionary processes, the tectonic plates crashing against each other, hurricanes, storms, electromagnetic interference, so the Earth is basically remaking itself, trying to destroy mankind. And you have a hero character, a female who has these special gifts, that understands why this is happening and she trots the globe throughout the novel to help, you know, restore the balance and the earth.

And so that was the novel back in the late 90s welcome back to my perfect path, a show about chasing dreams and developing careers.

Today we have a special guest entrepreneur, chris khan. His journey has taken him from personal training to screenwriting, to launching his own startup, and along the way, he's worked with some of Hollywood's biggest names. Chris is the founder of Trever, a messaging app with a fresh approach. Over the years, he's worn many hats, from fitness to tech to storytelling. He's also a dedicated cyclist, riding an incredible 250 miles a week, with a lifetime total of over 300,000 miles, and if that's not impressive enough, he's trained high-profile clients like Steven Spielberg, all while pursuing his passion for screenwriting. In today's episode, we'll dive into how Chris balances his diverse career and lessons he's learned along the way.

Whether you're interested in writing, entrepreneurship or just looking for inspiration, this episode has something for you. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Welcome to today's episode, my Persistent Path, featuring a very special guest, chris Khan. Chris, welcome to my Perfect Path. I'm thrilled to have you here. Thank you, just to kick things off on a high level to have you here. Thank you, just to kick things off on a high level. Can you describe your current state of your career?

Well, it's unwinding in many ways. I have a background in fitness and that fitness has led me to in my personal training business has led me to a lot of clients who are very interesting and connected and I built a robust network out of all those years of training and that allowed me to a lot of clients who are very interesting and connected and I built a robust network out of all those years of training and that allowed me to move into the technology side of things, because these people were connected to Silicon Valley and I realized that I could translate my skill set from interpersonal capabilities to deep research on subject matters and then understanding the marketplace for technology. So I've sort of transitioned from that to being a startup founder and building a messaging product that we're pretty excited about.

So the product itself is called Treever, Correct? Could you tell us a little bit more about Treever and how it works?

Yeah well, one of the things that struck me in my musing it's actually the genesis of this actually comes out of a screenplay that I wrote because I've been a writer all along the way as I've had my training business of novels and screenplays and I had an idea for a comedy where someone like Melissa McCarthy invents the next big thing tech app. And my idea was that you could have an app that was sort of a hybrid of Snapchat and Instagram and Musically at the time, which become TikTok. And I wrote a movie about somebody who invents this app and all of the shenanigans that go along with not being technically savvy, not being a coder but having an idea and how would you go about building a team. And she gets her ex-boyfriend to help with the coding and all this and it becomes sort of like the wedding crashers meets the social network. So I wrote this script and we got it to Melissa McCarthy and she was attached to the movie. It never got made. It's all in development still.

But I ran into a friend of mine on the bike path who I knew was a high level engineer at Oracle and I was telling him about writing this movie and I told him what the app was and what it could do and he said why don't we go build that?

And so that's how my journey began to build this messaging app, and because we realized right away that there was a niche between native texting and messaging and making TikToks essentially right. So native messaging itself iOS and Android has not evolved that much and it's still the most used messaging format in the world. And it's still the most used messaging format in the world. Something like 90% of text messages are still sent over the native platforms on those iOS and Android, and that hasn't evolved much past GIFs and Bitmojis and things like that. So we thought we could find a way to build very quickly, assemble from the content, which is image content, music content and the message itself, and an animation component. With a couple of steps you could integrate all those things into a multimedia micro montage that contained your text message and we could just push that through that pipeline of native texting. So we thought we recognized an opportunity in that marketplace and that's what we're building.

I think this is definitely the coolest start of an app idea I've ever heard, and I'm very excited to see what comes of it and actually to be able to use it. How do you envision people using this app in the future?

Well, I've always said that Treever could be very, very successful because it makes texting more emotionally gratifying. So a lot of texting is transactional, telling somebody you're going to meet them here, you're going to meet them there, whatever, you're going to put something together or you're sharing something that you just snapped a picture of or whatever, and I think by adding the music component, you make that message more emotionally rewarding, and so I think that's where we can position ourselves in the marketplace of more emotionally gratifying texting, I see.

So it's making boring text more engaging, correct, just like TikTok made Instagram posts more engaging. I think maybe that's where we're going at. Yeah, thank you so much for the explanation. I do want to get into how you built up your career as well, and for today's episode we've picked the adjective persistent. Can you tell me a little bit why you picked this adjective?

You can tell from the preliminary bits of information that I've been a jack of many trades, to say the least.

Yeah, and I'm still working on being a master of one or two of them.

But each time that I do something, a path or a journey. Stephen Covey has the great book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and one of those is begin with the end in mind, and I always liked that idea and so that sort of stuck with me, because when I start on something I can see where I want to be, and so that resonated with me pretty significantly. And you'll find out as anybody goes on these journeys, the obstacles that present themselves can be formidable, and it was always a question of how much am I going to let the hurdles deter me? And I guess I just have the kind of personality where I said that's not going to stop me, that's not going to stop me, that's not going to stop me, that's not going to stop me. I mean the whole Universal Music licensing thing. My first meeting at Universal Music with the head of business affairs, jeff Harlston, they wanted a million dollar advance from us to use their catalog because they're the most robust catalog in the world, right? Best music, best artists.

And at this point, did you have a lot of experience dealing with these deals? No, not at all.

No, no, but I've dealt with the players who most of my personal training clients were very successful high profile executives or celebrities or business CEOs. So on a daily basis I'm interacting with those people. So I'm not afraid, I'm not intimidated by those people. And so when I went in there and they demand this huge upfront fee, we got into a whole long discussion about how punitive that was to entrepreneurs and I said there are going to be other people besides me coming in here with ideas about how to use music and if you're going to demand this big upfront payment from them, you're going to discourage all the entrepreneurs and they're not going to be able to give you a value add on your music, on your catalog. You need that out there in the world generating revenue for you. So you need to completely flip your position on how you're going to deal with entrepreneurs. And that led directly to them creating this innovation licensing department, which so, in some ways, my persistence on not letting them say, no, okay, no, you can't have it.

Snapchat, which what was trying was using the music and not paying for it. So they wanted to be punitive to everybody else because they weren't getting Snapchat to play fairly. So I said well, there's a reason, and if you can change this, this and this, you will probably open up a whole new set of revenue streams for yourself.

And this API would kind of open it up to entrepreneurs to use it more progressively and then have a pricing model where it's easier to create and that's SongClip.

I don't know if you know that app SongClip. That's what ultimately came out of it, so you now, as an entrepreneur, can have access to the most popular music if going through the SongClip app. So that was a combination of the universal publishing and business affairs and marketing working with another set of entrepreneurs. Yeah, that's awesome.

You've basically, by being persistent, you've gave them actually a lot of innovation as well. Exactly, can you tell me a little bit about your background, maybe a little bit about your childhood and what was it like growing?

up. Sure, I feel very, very fortunate about my formative years. I grew up in San Luis Obispo, which is Central Coast, halfway between LA and San Francisco. My father moved out from New York. He had an engineering degree from Manhattan College and he was hired to be part of the construction of the 101 freeway and so that's yeah, and so his whole family's in New York and a lot of them are still there, and he and my mom packed a trailer and my little brother and my mom was pregnant with me and they came and they settled in San Luis Obispo and they stayed there for all the way through and I grew up there and it was an idyllic childhood. I went to Catholic school up until ninth grade because it only went K through nine and was involved in the Catholic church. My dad was a Knights of Columbus. He was also the scoutmaster. I went through scouting. I was an Eagle Scout youngest Eagle Scout in California at the time.

Oh, amazing.

Yeah, but so I was great and I had great friends played sports. We grew up in the era where on a Saturday you'd get on your bike in the morning with your friends and you wouldn't come home until dinner and your parents didn't care. So it was great. So I had fantastic friends, fantastic schooling, didn't really have a lot of trouble growing up. And then I got a scholarship to UCLA and I left San Luis Obispo and came down and I knew that San Luis Obispo is slow town, slo, right, and it is slow Although it's grown quite a lot since then but you don't have the opportunities that you do in a bigger urban environment. But yeah, that's my background.

So you've had three distinct careers that you've had almost in parallel. First, your writing career, which includes your work as an author and also a movie writer. Your personal training career, which has basically been throughout your whole life, and this tech founder role. Could you tell us a little bit about the timeline of how that happened and perhaps how they may or may not have helped each other? Well?

I've always been a writer. I wrote in high school and I was actually published poetry in high school and short stories and even poetry in high school and short stories, and even wrote a musical in high school as a senior project. Essentially I was a big elton john fan at the time and he has an album called tumbleweed connection which is a brilliant masterpiece album I think. But it didn't have any really popular hits on it, so the mainstream listeners don't have much of an idea of that album unless you're really an Elton John fan. But there was a total story in that album. It was kind of a themed album and at the time I thought you know this, I could craft a whole musical with these songs and I'd been. You know, my family was very musical and I grew up in the theater and so that was my senior project and ultimately down the road I was able actually to get that musical into development 30 years later as a result of my relationships and personal training. So the writing part was always there.

I've always been passionate about telling stories and characters and situations are always in my head. But I was also wanting to go to law school. I was at UCLA in the early 80s and I thought you know, I'll do a practical thing, I'll go to law school, get a law degree. But I was training a lot at the time myself personally, for triathlon. I was racing triathlon. I knew I had a good level of talent. I wasn't sure how talented I could be. What major did you study in UCLA? Communications, because it was the most broad. You know, it was cross-discipline, it included mass media, it included sociology, it included English and writing and political science.

So did you have a lot of friends that were trying to go to law school A lot?

yeah, and that was sort of the direction I expected I would head. But then training for the triathlon. The triathlon itself was just beginning to grow and it was just introduced into the Olympics in 1984. And I thought, okay, between 1984 and 88, I'll just allow myself to train, see if I can be at Olympic caliber.

Ultimately I didn't reach that highest of levels but in my own effort to be better I was learning the science of exercise physiology for myself and I realized that a lot of people wanted to know what I knew. So that's how I transitioned into training. It became coaching, then it became personal training and then I got some high-profile celebrity clients and then it turned into a very successful personal training business. So I was still working out myself, potential high-level athlete to transitioning to coaching or educating, and then continue to write all the way through that period of time. You know, in the evenings I would do a lot of writing and in the early 90s I optioned my first script and so I've been writing and been hired to write, to adapt books I've been hired to, I've done some pilot episodes for people rewrites so, and I'm in the writer's guild. So that tracked my personal training business very successfully for quite some time.

I want to talk about how you made the decision to not go to law school, because I know there's a lot of listeners just like me, where law school has lots of points of ingress. So basically, you have engineering, you have communications, you have so many other majors that can go to law school and kind of work in a very specific capacity. So, which means a lot of people will consider law school because it has a very defined career path and a lot of attorneys will make a very good living right. How did you decide not to go to law school and what did you do instead?

Well, right. So after I graduated from UCLA, I took the time. I said I'm going to give myself two years to train, see how good I can be. And in that period of time I would, you know, occasionally run into people who were in law school or who had graduated and were now at a firm, and they were all so miserable and I realized, oh my god, I'm going to set myself up for a decade of being inside and working 80 hours a week and I won't be able to ride and run and, you know, be outside. And that actually was a very big deterrent for me, because I couldn't imagine a life where I wasn't able to be physically active as much as I wanted and race and and just train and just being outdoors. I'm a very outdoors person.

Yeah, just for reference. How many miles per week did you do cycle?

Well, now I used to cycle about 250 a week, but I've dialed it down to about 120 or so a week.

Yeah, yes 120 is dialed down. Yeah, dialed down.

Well, I did a rough calculation at one point because my wife is also a cyclist and she's the numbers noggin, so she likes to have all the numbers and at this point in my cycling career I'm not interested, I just want to be on the bike. But she has all the numbers and we together, as a couple, have ridden almost 150,000 miles. Oh, my goodness and I had probably another 150,000 before I even met her, so I think I've logged about 300,000 miles on the bike, oh my gosh, that's some good mileage.

You're getting out of the bike and out of your legs. That's incredible. Okay, so your main reason for not wanting to go to law school was you couldn't really imagine yourself going through that kind of lifestyle.

Yeah, exactly so. It's very important. But the visualization we were talking about begin with the end in mind, right, and I hadn't read Stephen Covey's book at that time, but I'm very big on visualization of things. I really try to imagine it happening. You know, on visualization of things, I really tried to imagine it happening, you know, act as if and then manifest it.

So I had those visions of not being, you know, bogged down by the work instead of being impassioned by the work, so I didn't feel the passion for it as well. I mean, that was a left brainbrain decision. Right, it's a very strategically, it's a very smart thing to get a degree. It can go like we were talking about the different applications a law degree has in career paths. It's a very smart move if you want to be in politics, if you want to be a diplomat, if you want to be a developer or a real estate person right, there's all sorts of applications for law school. So the left brain part of me was thinking that, and then the right brain, creative part of me was imagination, was envisioning the misery of it and the sacrifices that were made. Ultimately, if you think about it, I didn't want to sacrifice a certain lifestyle that I wanted.

Actually, one thing I've heard from lawyers is that the only good thing about being a lawyer is that you can say that you're a lawyer and that's pretty much it.

Right, and not to bash on the career, but it's certainly an intense line of work, right, and I can definitely see that being a deterrent. So, instead of going to law school, was there anything else that you gravitated towards too? Because usually, if you're moving away from a certain path, there's another path that basically enables them to pour their passion and pour their hours. Was there something like that for you?

Well, there was about 15 years into my career, I really started doing a lot of reading on biotechnology, and I knew that was going to be a really huge and lucrative future. This was in the late 90s, early 2000s, and I thought at one point about going into biotech, because that was something that I thought would satisfy my intellectual appetites as well as being able to perhaps be in the cool kids table for what's coming in technology terms. But that didn't materialize. I just think at that point I was just beginning to get some success with my writing. So then I focused a little bit more on cranking out screenplays.

Then we can talk about the screenplay as well. What was your very first one and how was that process?

Well, I think what happens when anybody has some success at something, they continue to go at it right Because it gives you the right dopamine and serotonin neurochemical stew. It creates a cycle of success.

One of the first scripts I ever wrote. It was a finalist in the Nichols Fellowship, which is a screenwriting competition sponsored by the Academy, and that script got optioned and I was excited. We went through the process of getting directors attached and Kevin Bacon was attached at one point, so that was so all of a sudden you get into that and that's what. That's what keeps people coming back to that trough, right? Because because you get excited about these things and, oh my, this could be the movie, and I've been. This has happened to me dozens and dozens of times with my projects and the frustrating thing is that none of them have ever been made into the big screens. But the process, again, if you like the process and I do, I like the process of storytelling it's, in some ways, it's like chess with emotional characters, right, you have to figure out if you have an idea.

Like one of the first scripts I wrote, I had an internal theme about gun violence and I thought, well, how can I tell a story that shows the importance of the fact that picking up a gun is not a good choice to resolve a problem? So I have a deeply emotional attachment to an issue and then I think about. Well, how can you highlight the both sides or the aspects of that issue through the means of storytelling platform? And so then you have to have strategic thinking about okay, well, what's the plot and how do they get from A to B and how does that change the character and what would the relationships? How will those relationships be altered? So I like that part of writing and storytelling is figuring out the whole of it and, at the same time, bringing forth something that's emotionally gratifying, something that's compelling, might have some theme to it, some message. I try not to write message movies, but there's always some type of a message, I'm sure. Yeah.

There needs to be some sort of driving force for the story.

Yeah, like I have a script right now. It's interestingly enough, just on Wednesday that we might have a major director getting attached to. It's called Glass Bullets, and I was so outraged by the financial crisis of 2008, how they perpetrated this tremendous fraud that wiped out so many people, and none of the perpetrators of this fraud, this Derivatives scam, went to jail none of them there. All they all still have their homes in the Connecticut and their apartments in Manhattan and their big salaries, and they went on to work for other Wall Street firms or private equity. The little guys were devastated All the mortgages that went under right. Right Now some of them deserve it because they used liar loans and they didn't really have the means to own a house. But the system itself was a little bit flawed. The system was rigged. It wasn't flawed, it was rigged and it made me so mad.

So I wrote this screenplay and it's a really kind of an action movie. You, this screenplay, it's a really kind of an action movie. You know the ex-Special Forces sniper that was dishonorably discharged for a nuclear suitcase deal that he was supposed to stand down on. But he executed the deal and he got court-martialed, finds him and blackmails him into assassinating the seven heads of the too big to fail banks when they make this big announcement down on Wall Street about repaying the TARP money. Basically, I read all three of Tony Gilroy's screenplays for the Jason Bourne movies and I said, OK, I'm going to write this like it's the fourth Bourne movie and so it was all very much written. If you were looking at the style of the screenplay and you read it in sequence, you'd think, okay, this is pretty close to what Gilroy does with Bourne. So I wrote that. But the whole point of that was it was a catharsis for me. It was like you paid no consequences for ruining the lives of hundreds of millions of people. You're going to get shot.

I think that really shows the creative side of you and I see a lot of artists trying to really draw on from their own lives and that's really interesting that you have such a creative outlet there that turns into movies and scripts like that. Can you tell us a little bit about how writing like a fiction novel and screenwriting, how that's different?

Yeah, there's almost like two schools of thought. Like, I write under a pseudonym for novels, ck Brewster, and I chose that intentionally because the literati in New York, the publishing world, the publishers, tend to think that screenwriters can't be novelists. And then the screenwriting community thinks that novelists can't be screenwriters. Oh, classic, right. So in order to avoid that trap, I said I'll just use a pseudonym. So I write novels as CK Brewster, but the novel, the form of the novel, remember.

So this is a really easy thing for writers or potential writers out there. The screenplay is a blueprint and you're really telling the audience. In your writing you're only showing and telling what's going to be on the screen. So in the writing of that you don't have the chance to get into any internal monologue of the character. That's not in a screenplay. That's what's in a novel is that you get to understand the inner workings of your characters through the book and you have the liberty of super intense description and dense description or kinetic description. You've got to keep all that out of the screenplay because that just boggles down the read and remember who reads the screenplays Producers, studio executives, actors and actresses and directors. They want to see the movie, that's it. They don't need any extra description.

Oh, interesting. Okay, yeah, that actually reminds me of. I've read some of Dostoevsky's work and the internal dialogue or actually I mean their monologues really is extensive and the novels are so long just to really accurately describe what the character is going through. But I guess that doesn't really show up in movies, as you said. No, it doesn't.

And that's two things. Number one the talent of a novelist is to be able to clearly and compellingly deliver that part of it, the depth of understanding the character and why they're doing what they're doing. And in novel writing there's a saying that plot is character. So a lot of Dostoevsky. He doesn't lean on that too much because he's spending a lot of time on internal monologue, whereas John Grisham is spending a lot of time on plot. Okay, but whatever the characters choose to do, it tells you a lot about who they are. So plot is character.

But in the novel you have the chance to extrapolate on the richness of character. And you could say the same thing about a script, because what people do in the movie tells us a lot about who they are. But the reason streaming series have become so popular is because they've kind of been able to do a little novelistic thing cinematically, because they have more time to develop the character. So you see longer scenes and more establishment of atmosphere. If you take a Bridgerton, they take a lot of time to build that world for you Would have been different if it was a movie.

you're saying yes because you have two hours. I really like this movement because I know a lot of my favorite movies. I wish there was just more of it, you know, and I guess that's.

And that's what makes you know how many times you've heard people say oh, the book was so much better than the movie, exactly Right. Well, that's because they don't have enough time really to give you all the goodies from the novel. So that's why streaming is fabulous. I mean, you're young, you're growing up in the era this is the golden era of storytelling, and it all started with the Sopranos, the Sopranos and the Wire. So it's really only 22, 23 years. You can go back and see all those great movies from the second half of the 20th century, but the best storytelling is on these great series now, do you?

plan to write scripts for TV shows as well, if you get the chance.

What's happening now, getting back to persistence, is, even though I didn't meet with success, really huge success. I kept writing and I had a mentor years ago and I was complaining about not having anything made and he said just keep writing, produce content, content, because you never know when that content is going to be in vogue. And sure enough, the very first novel I wrote between 96 and 2000 quantum profit is the name of it that is being looked at as a potential streaming series now, now. Now, oh wow, because the themes of that novel then were proper stewardship of the planet, right.

Very relevant now the theme of the book is that the Earth is a sentient organism, it has its own consciousness and it deplores the parasite known as mankind.

And so it speeds up all the evolutionary processes, the tectonic plates crashing against each other, hurricanes, storms, electromagnetic interference, so the Earth is basically remaking itself, trying to destroy mankind.

And you have a hero character, a female who has these special gifts, that understands why this is happening and she trots the globe throughout the novel to help restore the balance in the earth. And so that was the novel back in the late 90s and I read again my passion. I read Bill McKibben's book the End of Nature, and then another book by James Lovelock called Gaia, and those books really resonated with me and I thought well, those are academic books, right, those are very dry, talking about the status of things and with evidentiary presentation. Very few people are going to read that kind of a book and get anything out of it. So if you want to try to tell people that we need to be better stewards of the planet, you got to tell it through a compelling story, something that people can emotionally connect to. And so I created this novel as a way to put these themes into an emotionally encompassing, identifiable arena.

I must say that story is actually very ahead of its time. I feel like it's something that I could definitely see as a movie now, or even a TV show.

So I'll tell you a really interesting tidbit about that book. One of my clients at the time was Ray Manzarek. This is your personal training.

My personal training clients.

He was the keyboardist for the Doors right, and so those guys in the 60s, acid, lsd, right, all that stuff. So he was one of the first guys to read the book, the first draft, and I remember he came in. I gave it to him on a Thursday. He came in on Monday morning for the workout and he looked right at me and he goes Were you on?

What the hell were you on?

when you wrote this book, I said nothing. And he goes you're kidding. That's the way your imagination works. Extremely creative yeah, so I see that as a very backhanded compliment.

No, I think, as a writer and a creative, I think that's one of the best things you can hear. I want to talk about your mentor that you've mentioned. I was going to ask about were there any influences in your life for your writing career and how you were able to be persistent for that career?

I had a good screenwriting teacher at UCLA. It's very difficult to finish a script. I mean because you just get bogged down and it just gets frustrating. I can't tell you how many thousands of hours I've been staring at a computer screen waiting for the inspiration to come. And they always tell you about all these tricks. Well, just start writing something right, and never. Here's another trick for writers is when you're finishing up on something and you've written three, four pages, stop in the middle of a sentence. All right, right, just think and then pick it up from there. The next day.

It's much easier to continue from a mid sentence right, full right yeah, another great thing that I was taught by my by Bob Adams, might you still a screenwriting teacher was amateur screenwriters. They tend to think that a scene has the beginning and an end. But but he said wherever your story's going, whatever you think the first two or three bits of information that are necessary for your audience, just eliminate them. Jump right in, okay, and let the audience catch up to what's happening in the scene, instead of trying to set the table for them with the scene. Jump into the scene and let them catch your coattail and go through it right.

I see those are some strategies that potential writers who are listening, I think could really take advantage of.

It just makes things more concise too, because you just eliminate the unnecessary buffering and the bulk of something and you get right into the nitty gritty of what's happening.

So I think for your writing career it seems like it's always been there and always being kind of persistent, as we say. But I think it being like that, I bet there's a lot of moments where it was discouraging and maybe would have felt a little bit of imposter syndrome. Did you ever face that kind of challenge All the time?

Yeah, I mean, I can't tell you any time. Why am I even trying to do this?

What's something that helped you get over it and keep on pushing?

Well, I'll tell you a really interesting story. I met a guy who was an agent for years and years and he was in packaging and I was expressing my frustrations to him. Interestingly enough, I was meeting with him for potential investment in Treever, oh Right. And then we were talking about the screenplays. And I was meeting with him for potential investment in Treever, oh Right. And then we were talking about the screenplays and I was expressing my frustrations and he said well, send me a script and I'll read it. And so he read the script. And then the next time I saw him, I talked to him. He looked right at me and goes this script is amazing. Why the fuck aren't you JJ Abrams? And you know, it was one of those moments where, okay, yeah, I can do this.

There are people in your life that are directly complimenting your work. I mean yes.

I've had enough compliments and success along the way getting into the Writers Guild, having some deals done, being hired to write something, All that stuff tells you that, yes, you're talented enough, right, but I haven't been able to make a living as a writer. But I'm fortunate Again, all by sort of accident, random accident, having the base of a very successful personal training career as an income has allowed me the liberty to continue to pursue writing.

So for writers, what's a kind of success metric? Because for writers, when you sell a movie script, you're completely losing control of the script.

Most of the time, that's what happens, yeah.

So how does a writer kind of measure their success in the movie industry?

Well, I think what happens is you sell something and you get sort of an entry-level position and then you get a quote, right. So it was this kind of a movie. It was for a streamer or it was for a studio. It had this budget If it was $2 million budget, the WJ had certain scale, like the minimums you can be paid for certain type of product that you're creating.

If your budget for your movie is 100 million, different scale, right. So based on the scale, payment for the project, you get a quote. So measuring your success is that each subsequent thing that you write, you get paid more, so your quote goes up. I see, and I think the ultimate is when you and I haven't gotten here and I hope some point I might be able to break through to this is when you get hired to rework somebody else's script and and these the guys at the top of the business they can get paid a million bucks just to take some journeyman writer's script who had a great story and some great characters, but it's got plot holes or whatever. But we know you can deliver, we know you have that skill, so we'll give you a million bucks just to rework that. Now, that's the top of the level, but a couple of successes, that I could conceivably be in a situation where there'd be a couple hundred thousand dollars for a few weeks work Right.

That's amazing. I think that's definitely something that people can look forward to as kind of a North star when they're starting out their writing career. We can get into how you're balancing personal training, career and writing and being a founder. So what is your day-to-day kind of schedule look like?

Well, I'm very fortunate that I start very early with very high net worth clients and I'm done by about 11 o'clock every day, so I've made my nut right Right in the morning.

In the morning and I have the rest of the day, so then it's writing and it's researching, writing and taking a lot of meetings. There was a period of time putting Treever together where I was going up to Silicon Valley and meeting with people in New York a couple times some of those founders events, networking events, et cetera and that ultimately, when I look back on it, was quite a lot of waste of time. But you know, I learned and I got a chance to talk to people and I have an idea of how it works. So we're in a position now where we're very close to getting a significant amount of funds where we'll be able to get to really ramp up the team now.

To kind of backtrack from your personal training career. How was being a triathlete and really pushing as an athlete like, and how did that kind of give you lessons on how to live your life in the future?

Well, the interesting thing about that is you spend a lot of time planning your strategy for improving as an athlete. So there's a lot of goal orientation there. So you want to do a certain time. You have a certain set of protocols that you have to do X amount of your heart rate for this period of time. This much recovery, right? So physical execution for being able to achieve the goals along the way, set the goals and work towards the goals. But that's also for anything. Same thing for screenwriting, you know, trying to get through that scene and trying to solve that problem. Same thing for business. You know what I mean. We have a goal of raising X amount of money. Well, how are we going to get to that goal? These things. So the physical fitness part of the triathlon, it had the goal setting. Part of it, it had the discipline because you got to get out there and do it. And the other big thing is you're putting yourself into distress on a regular basis.

So how are you? Yeah, on purpose, voluntarily right.

So by learning to handle a physiological stress, it helps you, I think, handle other stresses too.

I think that's really true. I have a mentor who used to be my manager actually, interestingly enough, he's one year younger than me, but he's a great resource for engineering career right and I think during his college years he tried to cycle in the Tour de France. So when he was training he was incredibly tenacious, like he trained so much every day and, as we know, tour de France is a couple of weeks of cycling and you know, hundreds of miles a day. So I see a pattern for a lot of athletes being really having a lot of perseverance and being persistent. I think that's really interesting. So one thing that was interesting was you mentioned you trained Steven Spielberg and his family. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, that was a great experience. So I had been training entertainment industry people and ended up training Stephen's wife, kate, for a couple of years at that point and got involved in the Spielberg family because it had a lot of little ones at the time and I'm pretty good with kids, so you know they'd come into the gym here and there. And when Stephen decided to make Schindler's in Poland they wanted to know if I would go with them, because Kate's daughter, jessica, and her friends they were going to do a semester in Europe kind of thing. So they were going to be finished their junior year in high school in Poland with traveling around on the weekends to different cities and getting sort of a historical flash party in Europe, and so they knew I could handle some physical activity for the kids as well, because the whole family went. So we had two nannies and I was there for the personal training for Kate and Stephen when he wanted to train, which was very seldom and then doing some activities for the kids. So they hired me specifically to do that and so I went over in advance and set up a gym. They had a big compound in Krakow that they rented for the six months and I went over there early and set up a gym in that compound.

Wow yeah, and because this was just after this was 93. So you know, 89, the wall came down and so Poland was still Eastern Europe and there was no real cutting-edge industry. So all of the equipment had to come from West Germany and we put it in there and I was there to train Kate, do the activity for the kids and Stephen and any principal actor who wanted to work out as well. So I ended up working out with Ralph Fiennes and the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and that was great. But it was great because I would have a certain amount of obligation for everybody's physical fitness and then the rest of the time I was on the set watching Stephen make the movie, and so for me it was like the ultimate film school and I got to meet a lot of the creative people, the editors and the production designers. Because I was Stephen's person, they actually had to talk to me. So it was like it really truly was a very immersive kind of film school.

How do you find all of these high net worth individuals and how do you grow your network?

It's all word of mouth. So whoever's listening to this in your life, if you do a really good job at what you're doing and you're really skilled at what you do and you're really passionate about it and intelligent about it, people will want to hire you and they'll want to work with you, and so I think that's really only it, that I was doing a great job with client after client after client. I haven't had to solicit a personal training client in 30 years. They just come.

Did you have a mentor in the personal trainer career and what were some of the challenges that you faced and how did your mentor help you through?

that? That's a good question. I don't know that I had a direct mentor. I had a, I guess, a friend of mine.

Kevin at the Phoenix Athletic Club is where I kind of started that. So he was in charge of the fitness program there and he was very knowledgeable, he had a physiology degree and so I just sort of picked his brain and my very first client was over there. That Kevin knew I was working out there myself and he knew that I knew all that stuff and so he introduced me to somebody that I trained there. So I actually got my first taste of training somebody before I even came back to LA. So I actually got my first taste of training somebody before I even came back to LA.

So I would say that Kevin was very influential in encouraging me and I think at one point he said that when you have knowledge, people will pay for it. Right, and he was actually very prescient because this was in the mid 80s and he was saying that health and fitness oriented service industry is just just going to explode and I think that stayed with me. And then when I came back to LA I was just working in a gym and then I saw the beginning of the personal training program happening. And then I was very lucky because I was working at a sports connection in Encino and the owners of the sports connection they wanted to build the most premier gym and health fitness facility in the United States and that was the Sports Club LA. And they interviewed all the trainers from all the different clubs around Southern California and they picked the 10 best to come and launch their flagship fitness and I was one of those 10.

Right, Wow, yeah, I guess the skills kind of speak for themselves and that's how you're able to kind of push that. So the skills kind of speak for themselves and that's how you're able to kind of push that. So, as we kind of near the end, I want to ask a couple of questions. So the question is around to whom would you not recommend this career or, I guess, in this case, careers and to whom would you recommend this career? And maybe I think we could talk about even having this like split career, as well as the individual, the three careers you've had in parallel, right.

So I think it takes a certain kind of personality. I read a Deepak Chopra. I read him years and years ago and I remember one of the biggest lines that stuck out to me was he said learn to live with uncertainty. And that is so true. It's very powerful, powerful, and people who can't live with uncertainty, they're not going to be able to handle all of the anxiety that comes with these three. Trying to spread myself out too thin, perhaps some people might say I can hear my mom saying that right now. Or just not knowing like a personal training career.

When the pandemic came, we were freaking out because we weren't going to be able to be with our clients in person. Our income could have gone to zero, right. But again, the pivot, persistence right. We convinced, I think, about 80% of our clients that we could train them effectively through Zoom, and so we worked very hard, and the most interesting lesson about that was we had to become super effective and efficient communicators, because you're not doing for them in the gym. They have to do for themselves, but you have to give them the instructions, not just what muscle groups they're focusing on and their breathing. And all that. No, when you pick that dumbbell up off the rack, make sure your knees are bent Right. I mean you have to get that specific when you're training somebody over Zoom. So we were able to pivot like that, thanks God, and we were able to maintain that income.

So, anxiety, that's an uncertainty. Boom, tomorrow there could be a pandemic and your personal service job could be gone. Now that's anxiety. And then writing a script that goes to a studio and there's a lot of anxiety. Are they going to like it? Is it going to come together, all of that stuff. So there are plenty of people whose personalities should be indicative of them. In a corporate job where there's benefits Like all of my sisters have jobs where they have benefits. They're teachers and they're administrators, so they have set hours, everything's sort of laid out for them. They have benefits. None of that works for me. It doesn't work for entrepreneurs.

Do you believe that a lot of these skills are innate, or did you feel like you developed them over time?

I think I'm always an 80-20 guy 80% genetics, 20% work and 20% lifestyle and 20% choices. Right, I mean, my efforts to be a high-level triathlete were absolutely that I had a certain amount of genetics and the 20% where I was going to apply every possible scientific and training advantage to myself because I knew what they were and how to implement them. It still didn't make up for that shortfall in my genetics.

To summarize some of the things that we talked about today. I think persistence has really been a key movement throughout your life and we can see it in every part of your journey. And something I personally learned is, you know, having that perseverance and being able to really push through until, even though there's no immediate reward, you know there's I mean call it delayed gratification or perseverance, but I feel like if you have a vision in mind and constantly pushing towards that, even though there's no something immediate, that takes a lot of work, but I think it really gives you a massive reward. I think later you know.

I'll add one thing to that when certain situational things come up, my wife, before a social gathering, she'll say well, chris, tell us how the brain works. And because it's like, why do they do that? Or whatever, because I'm a lay student of neurobiology and the interesting thing is that we as human beings are dopamine-seeking creatures. That's it. Whatever you're doing, you're seeking dopamine. And we religion, we have sex, we have drugs, you have carbohydrates. But one of the least appreciated dopamine producers is goal achievement. And what the interesting thing about goal achievement is that it secretes a little bit of dopamine over a long period of time. So each time you get a little closer to your goal, you you do get that dopamine rush right, and because you're getting closer and closer. So it's just some sort of elongated dopamine delivery. So goal orientation is a big part of that. Again, that's persistence is clearly necessary if it's a long-term goal, I guess.

To wrap things up a little bit, I want to ask you for one last piece of advice. Is there something that you would like to tell the listeners? To kind of wrap it up.

Probably the most famous student or a teacher, I should say of mythology and understanding mythology is Joseph Campbell, hero with a thousand faces, and one of his constant invocations is follow your bliss. And that's great, and I have lived a life of following my bliss because these things have all mattered to me, but at the same time I'd put an addendum to that Follow your bliss, but be smart about it.

Well, thank you so much for joining the podcast. I really appreciated all of your insights and also your time, my pleasure.