The Kook Jester Show

Welcome Persha to the show. She produces electronic dance music and has performed for 20,000 people, all after having released her first song at 36. There are some epic anthems in her catalogue. Check it out! We chat about releasing something new to the world, the discipline you need in creative careeers, and why our dark and scary sides need to be set free. Enjoy. Persha | Spotify

Welcome leading fear expert, Kristen Ulmer, to the show. She wrote The Art of Fear, and in a former life spent 12 years as the top ranked big mountain, extreme skier. She has spent the better part of 4 decades understanding our primal and ancient emotion - Fear: where it comes from, how it flows through our bodies, and what happens when we ignore it or push it away. Great stuff! Kristen Ulmer webs...

Math • Teacher • Author Ben Orlin joins the podcast. He is a mathematician and teacher, and through his books - Math With Bad Drawings, Change is the Only Constant, and the upcoming Math for English Majors - he illuminates how math intersects with daily life. We chat about academic struggles, tutoring your kids, and even how the antics of one of sports' greatest duos - Henrik and Daniel Sedin...

Welcome Ameet Shukla to the show, Head of Content at 1 Community. Beyond discussions about the wonder that is Beyonce, we hit on making impactful movies, the magic and storytelling, and things the up and coming generations do incredibly well. Thanks for listening! 1 Community RESPECT Trailer Just Mercy Trailer In the Works - Winner, King Leopold's Ghost, In the Shadow of the Mountain, Lewis Ha...

Welcome Simone Lovell, founder of Total Body Transformation in Vancouver, Canada. What began as a way to earn college beer money, has morphed into 25 years of helping people transform their lives through fitness, nutrition, and wellness. Like starting your day right, any conversation that opens with breakfast is bound to be good. We also hit on strong modelling for our kids, quitting moments, curs...

Yasmin Gandham, reporter for CTV News in Vancouver, joins the show today. She chats about her journey into broadcasting, that began with weather forecast drops into her Mom's voicemail as a kid. We also look at how to find good people to learn from, graduating during a worldwide pandemic, and those experiences that only come from being a recognizable face in the community. So much good stuff i...

Welcome, practicing radiologist and emtelligent founder, Dr. Tim O'Connell to the show. Based in Vancouver Canada, emtelligent directs advanced AI technologies to finding key insights buried in patient medical histories. We get into this, along with solving your own problems, the breakneck speed of change in the Artificial Intelligence space, and flipping the collective adage - Life is Short -...

Please welcome, ultrarunner and author of Perhaps Joy is the Reward, Randy Klassen to the show. Framed through hard fought victories and devastating heartbreaks out on the trails, he recounts the connected community of runners, his late start to the sport, and a solid instruction for life: just keep skating. Perhaps Joy is the Reward (Amazon link) Keep track of Randy's adventures and upcoming...

Welcome Rowan Minnion to the show. In 2011, he founded the sports nutrition company Blonyx, built around real-food ingredients and committed to supporting athletic ambition. We chat about being coachable and knowing who you are as a player, his early days in the lab, and Rowan even offers some advice on how 'not' to start a company. Thanks for listening. https://blonyx.com/

Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi, Second Deputy Leader to the BC Green Party, joins the show today. In our wide-ranging conversation, he reflects on a career dedicated to pediatric heart surgery, challenges in the current healthcare system, and his jump into the unfamiliar waters of provincial politics. We even detoured into his brief stop at culinary school this past year. Please pardon, the audio quality from...

Today's guest is ethical hacker and cyber-security expert, Vernon Joseph D'Souza. As managing partner of Forecight CyberSecurity in Vancouver, smashing firewalls, stolen pin codes, breaking into server rooms, and corporate espionage is nothing other than a typical Tuesday. We get into hacker objectives, how to be safer online, and the skill-set one needs in order to excel as a hacker. Spec...

Dr. Sunny Harris visits the Kook Jester Show. Mathematician, programmer, and entrepreneur, she has actively traded the capital markets for over 42 years. Author of seven books, including Trading 101 and 102, her website Money Mentor is an incredible resource for investors who want to learn the craft of trading as well as understand why markets behave as they do. We chat about life's serendipit...

Welcome the talented, versatile, and ever-so lovely Anna Galvin to the show. Knowing what she wanted to become at 5, her career spans the theatre, commercials, multi-season series, and feature films. We chat about her favourite roles (the covers shot provides a clue), an amusing blunder from the red carpet, and the piece of advice she once received from, none other than, Russell Crowe. Work begets...

Welcome Emily Dolan Davies to the show, and she absolutely loves to play the drums. She made albums with The Darkness (Last of Our Kind) and Bryan Ferry (Olympia), recently toured with Kim Wilde, is the drummer for The Voice Kids UK, and was even featured in the Netflix documentary Count Me In. However, more importantly and above all of that, she is such a nice person, one who truly wants to make...

Dan Flores joins the show today. Author of ten books, his works include the bestsellers American Serengeti and Coyote America. His latest, Wild New World, is a big history deep dive into the relationship between people and animals in North America. Starting at the Chicxulub Impact–the giant space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago–Wild New World shows how our belief in human ex...

Writer and director, Raul Sanchez-Inglis, joins the show today. His work includes: Vice, Transparency, American Heist, and his most recent project, crime-thriller Crimson Point. He chats about transformative movies, getting the most out of your people on set, the band Badfinger, and the game which kicked off a career in storytelling. Really he hung out with his friends and let his imagination go t...

Today's guest is Karl-Mikael Syding, hedge fund manager at Antiloop in Sweden. He is also a writer, podcast creator (25 minuter, Future skills, Outsiders), and a seriously deep thinker. I came to know of him through his Sprezza Blog at mikaelsyding.com where he explores effortless nonchalance, the art of making hard things look easy. We chat about big picture thinking, how to find meaning and pass...

Ben Frederick, the 2021 National Singlespeed Cyclocross Champion, joins the show today. Back in 2016, he suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). We talk about what happened, the dark periods that followed, and coming out the other side. He has since founded The Small Monsters Project , aiming to remove the stigma around mental health struggles which can result from a TBI. All proceeds support the...

Author and freelance copywriter Sarah Townsend joins the show today. She gets into what inspired her two bestselling books - Survival Skills for Freelancers and The Little Book of Confusables - as well as clears up any confusion about what copywriting is and what good copy should do. We also touch on her WordNerdiness, loving your work, and even lessons learned from accidentally cracking social me...

Writer and professor, Tamas Dobozy, joins me today. I had the pleasure to read two of his books. Siege 13 and Ghost Geographies are beautifully written and entertaining short story collections. His characters - complex, memorable, and sometimes despicable - struggling through the murk of being human, mirror back our own experience on to us in unexpected and often funny ways. During our chat, Tamas...

Brent Disbrow, Game Director at BKOM Studios , joined us today. I absolutely loved our chat. He is freaking funny and I learned a ton. He opens by breaking down the Justice League movie, talks changing careers and everything video game related, and finishes with a counter take on the buzz surrounding NFTs and blockchain technology. Awesomely entertaining. Thanks Brent!  Sunday Gold Trailer&nb...

Director of the Centre of European Studies at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Bowers packs a ton of learning into this interview. Among other topics, we touch on why Russia’s printing culture was slow to develop, what is meant by the Petersburg Text, and the paradoxical nature of many Russian writers. A word of warning - your reading list will have expand considerably after listening. I al...

If you know the waters around Vancouver, BC, you will undoubtably have come across the purple swim-caps worn by the students of today's guest, Stewart Scott. Everyone calls him Coach Stewart. We chat about his early days in northern Scotland, the common mistakes self-trained athletes make, tricking the water, and his strong desire to swim alongside the Orcas. Thank-you Stewart. This was awesome.&n...

Today’s guest is actor, John Emmet Tracy. You will know him as Ellis Steele from Yellowstone, the modern western epic on the Paramount Network and Amazon Prime. We chat about his character’s adaptive qualities, artistic moments versus story momentum, and playing villains—aka the misunderstood. He kicks off our interview by sharing a story that his dad told him. The opening: glove and bat in hand,...

My guest is Maïa Tarasoff. Aiming to make architecture more accessible to kids, she founded Petit Architect in 2017. Through her classes and workshops she encourages kids to ask big questions about how they live, in the hope of inspiring them to create truly beautiful spaces and buildings. We talk about the importance of art and how starting Petit Architect allowed her to spend more time with her...