Tonight on The Brian Crombie Hour, Brian is first joined by Neil Seeman, entrepreneur, researcher, columnist, and one of Canada’s clearest thinkers on innovation and the economy. Neil argues that Canada doesn’t have a creativity problem, but a commercialization problem. Together they explore why Canadian ideas struggle to scale, why young talent is leaving, how global capital is shifting, and what Canada must do to compete in an AI- and clean-tech-driven world. Neil breaks down the psychology of innovation, the power of honest collaboration, and what it will take to turn Canadian invention into Canadian prosperity.
Brian is then joined by STEEP Daniels (Jesus Guggenheim) painter, filmmaker, cultural catalyst, and 2025 Resident Artist for the Ekran Polish Film Festival. STEEP shares how a spontaneous artistic tribute to Prince launched his connection to the festival, leading to a decade-spanning exhibition and the creation of this year’s festival trailer. They explore how his paintings become cultural movements, how Polish storytelling shapes his work, and why giving back, particularly to SickKids, is woven into everything he creates. The result is a rich, heartfelt conversation about art, identity, and using creativity as a force for community and change.
Brian is then joined by STEEP Daniels (Jesus Guggenheim) painter, filmmaker, cultural catalyst, and 2025 Resident Artist for the Ekran Polish Film Festival. STEEP shares how a spontaneous artistic tribute to Prince launched his connection to the festival, leading to a decade-spanning exhibition and the creation of this year’s festival trailer. They explore how his paintings become cultural movements, how Polish storytelling shapes his work, and why giving back, particularly to SickKids, is woven into everything he creates. The result is a rich, heartfelt conversation about art, identity, and using creativity as a force for community and change.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views expressed in the following program or those of
the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Saga nine sixty am or its management.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the bran cromeby radio Wire.
So a gentleman that I've had the privilege of interviewing before,
Neil Seman wrote a really interesting article column in the
paper just a week or two ago, and it's titled
Summer Camp for Entrepreneurs. Why real talk around a muscoca
bonfire beats a conference every time real talk around a
(00:39):
muscoca bonfire for entrepreneurs. You know a lot of us
think about, you know, the innovation agenda, the prosperity, the productivity,
the issues that we've got in Canada. We need to
have better tax deductions, we need to have more government investment.
We need to have shreds or flow through shares or
ecosystems or anchor companies, or you know, import more immigrants
(00:59):
of high you know, a whole bunch of things. And Neil,
you're talking and we should all go to camp, summer
camp instead of all that stuff, Like seriously, really.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Well I am talking about that, but Brian, I must say,
I'm really impressed by rhymed Off. I think two three
four decades of Canadian policy speak in what sixty seconds,
that's exactly right. All of those things have been debated
furiously on op ed pages and talk shows across this country.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
You're telling us we should go to camp roast some
schmores in sinkumbaya.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Well, what I'm saying is that we should have honest,
frank talk among ourselves and not you know, chess thump about,
whether on social media or at often government funded conferences,
blobbing about how great we are, and talk more about
failure and that kind of frank talk and discussion and
(01:56):
intimacy around ideas. It often does have up and more
around campfires or or coffee breaks, more so than on
big stages.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I read this one line at one point in time
that there's more deals done in the coffee shops and
the main floors than there are on the boardroom tables
on the top floors.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Yeah, I'm I'm not sure how many deals get made
the conference floors. I'm not sure how many attendees even
want to go to keynotes anymore. I think that's that's
sort of common vernacular now. People go and plan and
they meet at the adjacent coffee shops, and it's kind
of an excuse to me as opposed to the destination
(02:41):
many for many attendees. And I think we really need
to ask ourselves why that's happening. And also more fundamentally, hey,
what do we mean when we when we talk about
innovation and how does it really happen versus versus spending
oodles with money on often government subsidized conferences.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Well, two of the things that you and there's lots
of stuff that you've got in this article, but two
of the things that really resonated with me is the
first is that you talk about authentic connection. Innovation starts
with authentic connections. I'd like you to describe to me
what's an authentic connection versus a non authentic connection, because
so many of us have experienced, you know, the guy
(03:24):
or the person at the conference that you think is
just collecting business cards because they've probably got a contest
back to the office about who can collect more business
cards that you certainly don't have a connection, let alone
an authentic connection. But the second thing is, and you
say this on numerous occasions, trading tales of what has
gone ridiculously wrong and willingness to admit challenge. So there's
(03:47):
something about that you think about admitting failure, about admitting challenge,
about being vulnerable, about being open to suggestions about how
to do things better? Is that the case?
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I think we only get to the first problem about
what makes an authentic connection? Uh, if we if we
open ourselves on the on the on the vulnerability side,
and I'll give you concrete examples that that.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
That speak to me.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
When I learn about a new startup company, I tend
to be a lot less interested, dramatically less interested in
its technological wonders than in its sales capture strategy and
its business capture strategy.
Speaker 5 (04:32):
And you know, how.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Did it, how did it take off?
Speaker 4 (04:35):
How did it fly?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
How did it go from zero to one? In Peter
Thiel's language, or you know, make its first million? And
h I find oftentimes the answer to that question is
very boring and or or just not the answer that
someone would give on a stage. And it's only the
(04:59):
kind of answer that they'd give you when you say, hey, look,
you know I've been working at this and all my
sales strategies didn't pan out. But tell me how did
you get that app to go viral? And and you know,
and then then then somebody will say, hey, look, I
don't talk about it often. I've had my share of failures.
(05:19):
But what I did is I was wired for for
for two days, two nights straight, and I put up
these uh sort of you know, funny little ads on
Facebook mom chat boards, and that made all the difference.
But they're, hey, they're a tech company, and they don't
they don't want to talk about that. Or I was,
(05:41):
you know, I was wrestling in the weeds with with
our lawyers over over our, I p our our, I
p strategy and and and that really made all the difference.
So point being is that what makes a company scale
is often not the kind of thing people like to
(06:02):
hear about. And sometimes it's just hey, I got really lucky.
I got really lucky who you know, and that timing
was beautiful. I met you know, I met someone who's
a decision maker at this company, and I pulled it off.
And so only when you reveal your own challenges I find,
particularly on the sales side, do you do you learn
(06:24):
how other people hacked that process?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
You know, it's interesting you said in this article something
that really resonated with me again that you signed up
for this summer camp in Muskoka and you talk about
what struck me were the candidate missions with leaders reflecting
on failure, talking about the year spent building ideas and
basements and stumbling that's not a storyline you hear much
on main stages or at sponsored breakfast chats with speakers
(06:49):
spiffed up and plush chairs. You don't just grow your network,
you grow your circle of allies, collaborators and friends.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, there's a few points in there. Thank you Brian
for mentioning that. Yeah, these are big shots that were there.
I mean, you know, we had Eldensbergerhoff, co founder of
East Entaire it's a Canadian unicorn, Mike Dermott Fresh Books,
both very open, authentic people spoken openly about the different
(07:17):
challenges they've had. And this is cultivated, I should say,
from the very top, from Chris Adams at at Reignite,
himself a serial entrepreneur in terms of you know, and
it's self selectivity in terms of who comes, I guess
because at the end of the year, at the end
of the day, year after year, people come who are
(07:38):
prepared for this kind of sort of you know, etherization
where you put yourself out there and you tell people
where you've where you've messed up. But your your second point,
the language around circle of allies is important and it
goes to your earlier question about about vulnerability, because what
you're doing right is when you're opening up and talking
(08:00):
about your wounds and think your missteps, is you're building
allies that you can go into battle with together, as
opposed to the transactional networking, which everybody knows doesn't really
you know, it doesn't really pay off in terms of
collecting business cards or QR codes or anything like that.
It might make you feel after you've come back from
(08:22):
the conference that you've accomplished something because you've collected whatever,
six hundred and two business cards, but that doesn't actually
translate into into sales or real meaningful progress.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
It almost sounds like you're talking about, you know, going
to an AA meeting or therapy or something like that.
Let me quote again from your article. A twenty twenty
three review of twenty seven studies found that entrepreneurs benefit
significantly from the emotional comfort and trust that peer relationships provide.
Three mechanisms drive these benefits informational learning from others' experiences,
(08:58):
inspirational scene what's possible, and emotional feeling supported through uncertainty.
Sounds like we all need an a meeting or therapy
or something like that.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
You know, I have great admiration for AA, and until
recently it's been a kind of a black box, and
now we're learning a great deal more about how they
work now. And there are certainly parallels with the entrepreneurship journey.
As we know, entrepreneurs have much higher rates of addiction,
et cetera, substance abuse, and a whole range of mental
health that challenges. The entrepreneurship journey is in many ways
(09:34):
a spiritual journey. You you have to dig inside yourself
because it is so hard. You know, Elon Musk talks
about it being like walking on glass, and that's a
pretty extreme expression. But and you you know, often don't
know if you'll be able to make ends meet in
a month. That's you know, standard entrepreneurship. And so it
is kind of spiritual in the sense that, like AA,
(09:56):
you need to you need to have hope. And so
when you're surrounded by by people who look like like titans,
like icons in terms of their accomplishments. When you see
their their lacerations, their missteps, and how they've how they've
admitted to defeat, you can see them. You can see
(10:16):
yourself as more like them, and they become they become allies,
they become goalposts for you. Uh and and you can
you can get that hope that I think is similarly
derived in an analogous context in an AA meeting. So
I don't think the uh, the analogy is far off.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Fascinating conversation, So we should all go to entrepreneurship camp
and go to less conferences downtown and the Metrotronic Convention Center.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (10:42):
You know? I think it depends on the conference I
go to. I've been to Carla, We've all been to
everyone in business and the professions, trades, every everything that
has been to conferences, and some are tremendously successful, no
matter what the venue itself is. But there's certain elements
of the ones that that succeed I think that that
(11:05):
hold together and the ones that you know, the ones
that succeed I think are the ones that do enable
the neurons to fire. I mean inherently, if you think
about it right, going to a conference is a one
to many experience the way they present it, right, somebody
comes on stage and they they dance around and they
(11:28):
they show you through prezzy presentation all the great accomplishments
or other that they've that they've done and how they've
gotten there, and it's a pret you only see one
layer into under the hood. But what you need to
have is a many to many. It's really hard to
have a many to many if you got ten thousand attendees,
So smaller is often better. Workshops where you can communicate
(11:49):
a little more authentically is often better. Sort of you know,
maybe facilitated workshops where people can admit to missteps, those
things often work better.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
We're going to take a break and come back in
two minutes with our guests because I want to challenge
him on this idea of entrepreneurship being sort of a
group activity, because you know, that's not what a lot
of people think. They think it's the genius that's got
a light bulb in a shower or something like that.
Actually that's a bad analogy because if a light bulb
but it was in a shower, you'd have some big problems.
(12:24):
But a light bulb or an idea in the shower
and and what you're suggesting, Neil is something different that
it's a collaborative kind of process. Stay with it everyone,
We're going to come back in just two minutes. I'm
going to challenge our guests and where have good ideas
come from? Stay with us, everyone back in two.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot C.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
A welcome back everyone to the Brian Cromby Radio are
I've got a guest with us tonight who's an author,
a publisher, a health policy scholar at the Inish of Toronto.
(13:10):
He specializes in mental health and entrepreneurship. And he's written
a really interesting column in the paper called Summer Camp
for Entrepreneurs. Why real talk around him? A scope of
bonfire beats a conference every time. I want to ask
you about this idea that do you talk about in
your column about open conversation, whether you ever hate the
(13:32):
ideas creates growth for you And you go on to
say creativity demands freedom, serendipity, and humility, not formulas. You know,
most of us I think think that great ideas for
entrepreneurs are a light bulb or you know, an idea
that you get, you know, in the shower. It's a
loan activity. And I want to challenge you if I could,
(13:53):
with sort of three books that I've read to see
what you think about it.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
One was something called Youeography of Genius that that said
that some of the times where we had the most
innovation was when you had these different disparate people that
would get together and argue and debate. And they talked
about you know Vienna, where where Jews and Gentiles and
UH and and and you know desparate you know, Freud
(14:21):
and a psychologists and UH and musicians and Mozart they
all got together and they they they cultivated together the
old you know, fertile Crescent where trade routes and people
from different religions and different cultures got together and and
those cultures uh mixed. I loved the one book that
talked about Edinburgh where different people went to gentlemen's clubs
(14:42):
and at the time they were just gentlemen's clubs. But
you had to do two things to be successful there.
You had to argue like crazy, and then you had
to drink so you could have fun afterwards, so that
everyone would, you know, have camaraderie as well as the arguments.
So that's one idea that that there's specific cities or
places or ecosystems or class or whatever you call them,
but there's diversity of something in that, and there's tension
(15:06):
and argument and conversation that takes place. Another one was
I used to work for the Walt Disney Company. Michael
Eisner wrote a book called partners and he said, you
know a lot of people think it's all about one guy,
one person, and that he originally thought it was. But
his biggest successes were when he joined up with Frank Wells,
the president, and Gary Wilson, the CFO, and the three
of them really changed what Disney was all about. And
(15:26):
he went and tracked through a whole bunch of other companies.
Berkshire Hathway was one where he talked about it wasn't
just Warren Buffett, it was Warren Buffett plus Charlie Munger,
and he went through numerous different examples and he said,
partnership is far more important than that one person, even
though he initially thought it was the one person and
then the last one and I really want to challenge
you on this. One was called Idea Sex and it
(15:48):
said that ideas are like reproduction. They got to clash,
they got to mutate, they got to reproduce. And it's
ideas that have sex that end up being really great ideas.
They're not just born to the one And so I
guess my question to you is where do great entrepreneurship
ideas come from? Are they a one person thing or
(16:09):
is it really this collective?
Speaker 3 (16:12):
So they're in my experience, in my experience and based
on the literature that I'm familiar with, they're predominantly a
one person thing. Yes, But we need to parse out
what we mean by great ideas. I think a little
bit so on the one person thing, like we think
about our we think about our brains. In our brains,
(16:32):
I think we have about five hundred million, maybe a
billion yearons that interact, right, and you hear the term
neural network, and they network their network together and they're
they're constantly interacting such that you have greater synapses in
your brain than in all the grains of sand in
the world. So inside your brain you may have ideas.
You may have ideas and they circulate, they circulate. You're
(16:54):
mudey on an idea, and maybe it's not the shower,
but maybe you sleep on it. Maybe you go for
a walk, and then an idea is spirited, an idea
is birthed, so the idea, but an idea is really fragile,
and what makes that idea become a business? And this
is where you get into some really interesting research by
(17:16):
folks like Gary hamilt at Mit who splits up different
types of innovation technological innovation, business model innovation, management innovation,
and he and others have proven pretty powerfully that business
model innovation, for example, you know Elon Musk, a lot
(17:37):
of his innovations like Tesla SpaceX are really about distributing
the assembly of the products, not so much of the
products themselves. So business model innovation is that which is
often generally spirited not in the shower, not after the walk,
but in teams of people of diverse perspectives, with different
(17:59):
skill sets on one side, marketing on the other, getting together.
So I think different parts of the innovation process depends
sometimes on the solo individual, sometimes on the group. So
I'm kind of in the middle here, but just generally
kind of with you on the idea sex I think.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
So let's just.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Say the the embryo can hatch within the singular individual
but the community that takes others. And then if you
want to really scale into a city, into a country,
you need other people around you. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (18:39):
It does? So do we need to go for more
solo walks or do we need oh?
Speaker 3 (18:45):
I definitely think so, I well, solo plus dog.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Or do we go to more camps or do we
go to more conferences?
Speaker 3 (18:54):
I think it's the meditative capacity here, and I'm getting
even more spiritual with you here. I think again, the
entrepreneurship journey is deeply meditative. And you can have that
meditative experience in a camp, in a quiet space while
you're walking some you know where that those ideas can
(19:18):
percolate and then and then all of a sudden, you know,
idea meets sales business opportunity. And that's often what happens
in a collaborative, quiet setting, not when you're being spoken
at loudly at a conference on stage, especially when that
person is only browbeating about their about their success.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
So, Neil, I think you know, it's pretty accepted today
that we got a productivity problem in Canada. We're forty
percent below the United States. When a decade ago or
fifteen years ago, we were equal to the United States.
We've got a prosperity issue. We've got a productivity problem,
a prosperity problem, a meetia an income problem where our
(20:01):
meeting income is stagnant versus you know, substantial growth in
the United States and versus inflation. Given all that and
lack of innovation, lots of you know, great ideas going
south of the border, brain drain, et cetera, company drain.
What do we do? Does government tell us all to
(20:22):
go for walks sponsored a lot of camps?
Speaker 5 (20:24):
What do we do?
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Yeah, I mean this is a larger meta question, also spiritual.
But yeah, in Canada, Look, we have precious resources fleeing
the country at rapid pace, the most precious resource being
our young people. And and you know, population of California
has many hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have moved
(20:49):
down to raise capital to enable their company to flourish
in ways that they couldn't hear. There's a lot of
quick paths to action that a lot of interesting economists
have talked about. I do think our I do think
we need to aggressively reduce certain of our taxes. And
(21:11):
I do believe that we need to think seriously about
how we sustain an environment where young people want to
build want to build businesses. I think we have to
think as a as a if you, if I was
a policy maker, right, I would really want to understand
(21:31):
what outcomes matter. And this is where we're spending you know,
tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on conferences. Doesn't really
make sense, okay, because so if your outcomes that matter
are boasting to other Canadians that our government cares about innovation,
that's great.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
We know that.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Governments of all types care about innovation. But if your
outcomes that matter are are seating more companies, so not
only do we have more shots on net to use
the hockey analogy, but we have more skates on the ice,
we have more people with sticks on the ice. Then
(22:14):
we might invest a lot less of that in hackathons
where we invite lots of people to solve a brutal
problem like how do we how do we get data
centers at scale in Canada by spending you know, a
fraction of the amount that they're spending in the United
States in order to get sustainable sovereign AI in this country.
(22:36):
So these are different ways of thinking about the problem set.
I think we were focusing on the wrong outcomes often.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
How do we get governments, people business to focus on
the right outcomes? You know? One of the other challenges
we have. I think a lot of us have seen
the statistics Canadian businesses are, to a certain extent to blame.
We invest collectively far less and repairs and maintenance in
machinery and productivity means in research and development than are
(23:08):
American counterparts.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Yeah, one statistic that really on that point, just to
take it up notch in terms of scale, is corporate
venture capital in Canada is something like one fortieth the
amount in the United States, and to the extent that
it exists in Canada, it's really fickle, so you'll have
a few big corporates moving in and out of corporate
(23:31):
venture capital. And corporate venture capital is different than traditional
venture capital because it's not only investment, but it's also clients.
So it just really enables companies to scale really elegantly.
In the United States, so we don't have that advantage
that startups have in America. So that's just taking again
it's sort of R and D, but not in yourself,
(23:54):
but in an ecosystem of startups.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
Around you.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
So that's one thing I think that we could we
get easily enable, and then we could also enable such
that that corporate venture capital that was invested is subject
to a different kind of tax regime. That's very attractive
to lure people or big corporates into investing in startups.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
So in the United States, you know, in two successive administrations,
we've seen very different strategies. You know, the current one
is reduce taxes and create tariff barriers to protect industries
and try to incentivize onshoin. And the last administration was
more about the Chips Act and the Infrastructure Act, trying
to do industrial policy and provide government grants and incentives
(24:38):
to growth. Are either those a recipe for success or failure?
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Well, I think we're you know, we're in a seismic
change now where a lot of the prior policies need
to be evaluated through a new lens. I mean, there's
two things that I think matter more than ever before.
One is, you know, supply chain disruption, where we have
(25:05):
we have Jina on one side, America on the other,
and Canada is sort of squeezed in the middle, and
so we need to think, you know, Canada needs to
think very opportunistically about how we situate ourselves, and so
it is different. The second thing that's just dramatically different
is the AI race right now. So the A I
(25:26):
mean America's economy right now, it is really dependent on that.
They're they're resisting a recession only because they are there.
They their AI is just torquing through their data center economy.
And and this is not just America. Other other countries
(25:46):
around the world, UH with much lesser means, Indonesia and
others are also investing in this AI space race. So
this is, in my view, in many people's views, sort
of the greatest wealth creation moment in our time. And
how is Canada play? So we're at a different time now,
and I think there are a lot of interesting ways
(26:06):
Canada can play, but I think that that's our quickest
path to opportunity is thinking about where we are situated
in the AI supply chain.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Neil, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate
you joining us, Thanks so much. I got one last
important question. Why do you inviting me over for a
campfire and some mushmores in the backyard.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Let's Brian come come with me, Well, come with me
certainly to reignite next fall.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
You'd love it.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
I think you'd be a great participant. Uh and and
let's let's do it.
Speaker 4 (26:38):
Let's do it.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
We can have a pre event before the event, you
and I invite some others and uh and we'll have
that fertile crescent environment.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Neil Seman, thank you so much for joining us, and
thank you for your provocative column. It was really interesting.
I look forward to hearing about your next column as
soon as you up post it. That's our show for tonight. Everybody,
we're chatting about innovation, and I think it's a it's
a real challenge. We having candidates a real opportunity. And
I think that Neil has really talked about a lot
of the issues that we need to address, and you know,
(27:07):
he's come forward with a bunch of solutions, and one
of them is that we've got to have authentic relationships.
We've got to have frank conversations. We had to learn
from failures as well as successes. We need that inspiration,
we need the guidance from other people, and we need
the creativity that comes from that honest, open, inspirational conversation
that Neil was talking about Thanks.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
We're going to take a break back in two minutes.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Stay with us, everybody, No Radio, No Problem.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Stream is live on SAGA ninety sixty AM dot CAA.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Welcome back to the Brian Crombie Radio hoire on Saga
nine sixty. So there's an interesting film festival coming up
and I've been inundated by people wanting to talk about
it and tell me about it, and I've got one
of the artists with us tonight. Steve Daniels is his name.
He has an aka called Jesus Guggenheimer. He's a multidisciplinary artist.
(28:11):
He's a painter, he's a filmmaker. His paintings evolve into
larger scale cultural projects, from multimedia experiences and social experiments
to philanthropic initiatives like raising a nearly one hundred grand
for children's initiatives like tickets the hospital that interesting Enough
saved his life and first put crayons into his hands,
(28:31):
leading to a life of overcoming problems through art. Art
creates action, creates values, creates story, he says, and that
your paintings are not just artworks, they're starting.
Speaker 4 (28:42):
Points of all your projects.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
So welcome to the show. How are you.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
I'm doing Gray.
Speaker 5 (28:48):
I'm really excited to be here, and thank you so
much to yourself, Brian as well as our publicist danielle
Iverson for Ekron as well for making this interview possible.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
My pleasure. Do you say each pain acts like a seed?
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Well, you know.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
A lot of times you start with like a vision,
and it's probably easiest before you have the whole vision
of actually creating something. You first start with like a sketch.
You know, before you make a great, a bigger painting,
you make a sketch. And it's the same way with these,
like you know, long term initiatives of sorts.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
It kind of usually just starts with.
Speaker 5 (29:31):
A painting, a drawing that leads to an idea that
leads to, you know, people jumping out of planes, like
we did with Jump for Sick Kids, you know, which
just kind of started off as a joke like hey,
I want to get kids to jump out of planes.
You know, it just start off as like I think,
even a drawing, and then it literally led to creating
a Sick Kids Hospitals first group skydiving event. And that
(29:53):
was during the pandemic, so you could imagine how challenging
it was to throw people out of planes during that
time and just to organize anything. So that's kind of
how it starts, and you know how things take take off.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
And you know, I think that's interesting because I've heard
lines about how, uh, you know, comics, comedians are the
gestures of today who can call out political power. I've
heard about how every protest has a song that ends
up being the anthem for that protest or that era
in our life. You know, we've often talked about how
(30:28):
every summer has a song and anthem for the summer.
And what you're talking about, which is really interesting, is
that each painting actually a seed. The image becomes a story,
the story becomes a cultural action, lives are inspired, action
is taken, and the results are life inspiring, leading action
into others' lives. It's beautiful that that art can inspire action,
(30:50):
and you know, I think there is some art that
really does that, and so the fact that you're trying
to do that is wonderful. How did painting become the
core of who you are, what your identity is?
Speaker 5 (31:00):
Well, it's actually it's a it's there's several stages to this,
but like My first introduction to the idea of physically
painting or drawing or expressing yourself came at a point
in my life where I was on the operating room
tables at the sickest hospital and they, I guess, just
(31:21):
because I was going through so much pain, they they
just kind of gave me some crowns to occupy my
time with. And then that led me that led to
creating drawings and you know, little sketches, you know, just
doodles really, you know, it looks like you know, abstract
you know, Jackson Pollock or something like that. And then
(31:41):
it led to at the age of seven, I walked
into my first game's workshop at Canada in a Square
one mall, which was a which is a model and
figurine hobby, and I would, you know, start painting soldiers.
And around that time, when I was seven, I walked
into the Gouggenheim at the New York in the New
(32:01):
York City, at the museum, and I saw paintings on
the walls. And that was the first time in my
life that I witnessed paintings being celebrated to the point
of where they're hanging inside of on a wall, inside
of a humongous building inside the biggest city in the world.
(32:22):
And that's when they kind of clicked to me that
I want to be an artist when I saw those
big paintings on those walls at the Guggenheim, and that's
kind of what led me to like, you know, saying
to myself, like, at that moment in time, I said
to myself, like, I want to hang my paintings here
on these walls one day.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
But obviously, when.
Speaker 5 (32:41):
You're seven years old, you don't understand the bureaucracy of
what it means to hang a painting in the Gugenheim Museum.
So you know, it just kind of went from there
to like a lifelong pursuit of becoming an artist and
expressing myself through visual means. And you know it led
to my scholar ships at the New York Film Academy
(33:01):
and then lived in New York City for nearly ten years.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Fantastic And are you exhibiting some of your art at
this festival coming up?
Speaker 4 (33:11):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (33:11):
So at the Toronto Polish Film Festival. It's called Ekran,
which means scream in Polish. Ekran. I am this year's
twenty twenty five Resident Artist and so they selected me
to showcase my works, and I chose to make an
exhibition of about fifteen paintings from the last ten years
(33:34):
of my life living back in Toronto.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Really sounds interesting, And I understand you've got this multimedia
approach where paintings lead to films, events and real experiences
that impact others beyond the canvas. Can you explain that?
Speaker 4 (33:49):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (33:50):
You know?
Speaker 4 (33:52):
You know, it's.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
Like, you know, one of the most interesting ways that
I could put like the simplest ways I could put it.
Like just recently, one of my colleagues, he got a
full time position job in Whitby at I Fly, which
is a sky indoor skydling facility, and him and I
we started working on our projects for sick kits hospitals
(34:20):
about seven years ago. And through my paintings and through
these ideas of you know, creating these initiatives with the
skydiving and so forth, I see how it's like impacted
certain people in their lives where like now this great
friend of my Trenton Stammel, my co founder of the
(34:40):
World Skateboarding Health Foundation and the Overcoming Arts Initiative for Children,
which I'm a founder of, he is now moving to
He's has moved to Calgary, tel Bert to Calgary, and
you know, it's incredible to see how like people's lives
are impacted to the point of like getting up and
(35:01):
physically moving out of our province. And this all started
with you know, us wanting to do projects and then
him and his life kind of leading further down a
professional path with skydiving. But it all started with just
a silly idea and a sketch to want to throw
kids out of planes, you know, during this pandemic, and
(35:21):
wanting to give children the opportunity to feel this feeling
of flight. Eventually, no kids were allowed to skydivee for
this project, just as a disclaimer, and we ended up
having adults emulating this same form of bravery that the
children show us on a daily basis at the hospital.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
I understand that you've had some of your own challenges
that you've had to overcome setbacks, and you've built, as
was subscribed to me, a path of your own. What's
been your greatest overcoming moment and why and how?
Speaker 5 (35:54):
It's hard to really pinpoint and I think, like you know,
the way with like overcoming overcoming something that we all
have to do in our own lives in so many
different ways. And I feel like overcoming is like a
theme in a lot of my artwork and a lot
of my initiatives. You know, my nonprofit is called the
(36:14):
Overcoming Arts Initiative for Children. It's about overcoming through extreme sports.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
Film and art.
Speaker 5 (36:25):
Hence you know, the skydiving, which is athletic and you
know combining. I've made a film about this whole process,
and we did a whole public relations tour where we
tried to known as Drake, to jump out of the
plane with us, and we you know, we berated him
(36:46):
with all sorts of different public relations stunts and he
had never ended up skydiving with us. But some of
the artwork, which some of the artwork which we made
for this whole endeavor now hangs in his bedroom hall.
So it's interesting how like you know, ideas, you know,
it all kind of intersects like ideas with like creating films,
(37:11):
creating initiatives, and then making artwork about the initiative about
it goes in different cycles and waves. In additionally, start
off as a painting. Sometimes it starts off as an
idea to like, hey, let's get people to jump out
of airplanes for this hospital, and then it led leads
to all sorts of other moments of overcoming in other
(37:31):
people's lives. And you know, Drake putting a nail into
his wallet in his mansion and hanging a painting.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
On his But you personally, you personally, did you have
a big challenge that you had to overcome?
Speaker 4 (37:43):
Well, yeah, I.
Speaker 5 (37:44):
Mean just just just growing up as a teenager and
growing up as a as an artist is as a
feat of itself, I believe, you know, just being an
artist is. I'm a full time artist, So this is
not like something that I do as a hobby or
on the side. It's like my full time thing which
I dedicated my whole life to and it's something that
(38:07):
I'm very proud of. But it's a double edged sword,
and there it always, there's always, you know, challenges and
decisions you have to make, whether you're going to go
down a more commercial path where whether you're going to
make paintings that come from the heart that are about
you know, that are maybe more personal, you know, whether
there are paintings about your faith or experiences. You know,
(38:30):
we all face many challenges in this life. And I
choose to express my my my my overcomings and my
challenges through my art, But specifically to say about one
specific moment, I couldn't really say. I would say this
(38:51):
whole life is like, you know, a big battle of
overcoming in a sense, and we just have to do.
Speaker 4 (38:56):
It with a smile on our face and have the.
Speaker 5 (38:58):
Best attitude that we can and when we set out
on any initiative or creative endeavor.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
I understand that humor and rebellion and storytelling play a
role in your art.
Speaker 4 (39:10):
How does that play well?
Speaker 5 (39:16):
Humor? I think it's like, you know, the the quickest
way to someone's heart in a sense. And so I
like being humorous in some of my artistic expressions, like
mostly towards leaning more towards the films that I make,
that there is humor within my films, not so much
(39:39):
my paintings. I don't really make funny paintings. My girlfriend
makes funny paintings Rosie Olivetto, but I don't make any
funny I make more serious paintings.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
Like in the back over here, we have a.
Speaker 5 (39:51):
Praying saint dressed in a polish wardrobe, and it's inspired
by the by Saints Dint, which is an Irish Saint
and so I've I've you know, they're not I don't say,
like my pins are not funny, but it's more of
my films that have that kind of.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
And rebellion. Excuse me, are you rebellious?
Speaker 4 (40:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (40:18):
Definitely, I mean I'm definitely rebellious. I definitely, you know,
like I definitely like like stirring the pot, as they say,
and I feel like if you don't stir the pot,
you don't eat, you know, so you gotta sometimes be
rebellious in the sense of like not taking no for
an answer, and you know, you know, just to get
(40:39):
this skydiving initiative off the ground, you know, we had
to pitch Sick Kids Hospital for two years, you know,
during that pandemic, and you know let them, you know,
getting you know, Drake's attention was like you know, damn
near impossible.
Speaker 4 (40:52):
But you know, we went to the banks.
Speaker 5 (40:53):
We you know, we asked for large figures of money
for them to participate. They laughed at it, but then
it got to the point where we were having meetings
with like, you know, directors at Scotia Bank about this project,
and you know, it was people were laughing at it,
but it was also serious too, right, you know, we
wanted to get Drake to jump out of the plane,
but you know, due to insurance reasons, we weren't able
(41:16):
to do such a thing. But I think just the
idea alone is humorous and that's what kind of got
people interested and and it leads to you know, it's
that humor leads to other things, you know, when you're
not so uptight and serious. And I think, as you know,
you have to be a bit rebellious nowadays as an
artist because everything.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
You know.
Speaker 5 (41:38):
Is like really politically correct nowadays, and you got to
go by the books and follow the bureaucracy and follow
the steps. And sometimes I feel like if you want
to get things done, you got to just kind of,
you know, put it into your own hands and make
things happen. And that takes action, that takes asking, that
takes building this kind of momentum and belief of other
(42:01):
individuals that are you know, in and around your circle.
That then kind of leads to like a snowball effect
and then before you know it, the director of the
hospital says, yes, okay, we're gonna let you do this event.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
So tell us a little bit about Ekron, which is
this Polish Film Festival. When does it take place and where? So?
Speaker 5 (42:18):
AKRONN is the Toronto Polish Film Festival and ecnon stands
for screen and it's taking place at several locations in
the GTA. This year we have the Rivu Cinema which
is located in Ronsisvilles, and we also have screenings at
Innestown Hall as well as the Living Arts Center of
(42:43):
Mississauga and as well as a location in Hamilton. Everything
is able to be viewed on the showtimes and all
the information about the films and everything that is being
featured is able to be screened, is able to be
viewed at akron dot CEM so ww dot E k
(43:03):
r A N dot ca A. That's where you can
seal the showtimes and yeah, we have films playing for
the next six days. We have several screenings of Chopin Chopin,
which is the new film that came out about Poland's
most celebrated artist, Chopin. And there's still two screenings for
that Living Arts Center this Wednesday as well as on
(43:26):
the thirtieth in Hamilton. And this year, when I was
selected to be the resident artist, I decided to make
a painting of Chopin at the gala and the opening
night reception. So I made a painting of Chopin and
I also have, like I mentioned, fifteen paintings at the
(43:48):
four h nine ron Cisbels, which is a hub for
the Economic Film Festival.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Is this going to be of interest to just Polish
people or more than that?
Speaker 4 (43:59):
Oh? Oh, definitely not.
Speaker 5 (44:01):
This is like there's a lot of people who come
there who are not even Polish. Like you know, every
year it gets bigger and bigger. I've been a part
of this festival now this is the seventh year. I've
been participating since twenty eighteen in different capacities. And in
twenty eighteen I had a film called Overcoming Steep that screened,
(44:21):
which was the film of Me Meeting which was the film.
It was a film about me meeting a homeless preacher
in New York City named Rodney Cliff and Macclark Junior
the third and he essentially told me that the projects
that I'm working on are going to lead to inspiring
the children of the world. And at this point I
was not even involved with any children's initiatives. I was
(44:42):
like strictly like chasing celebrities. I was really like, you know,
going to nightclubs. I was in my mid twenties. I
was like all about the fame, the glory, all that
kind of stuff. And he kind of like humbled me
and kind of brought me back down to earth and
kind of made me realize how like, using my talent
to inspire children is something that is quite possible.
Speaker 4 (45:05):
And he told me that, you know, we're gonna be.
Speaker 5 (45:08):
Going to Barack Obama and the White House and all
this stuff, and it sounded like a bunch of crazy stuff.
But then, funny enough, Barack Obama's primary financier Warm Buppets
and main partner Charlie Monger, his son ended up becoming
the largest contributor to this film. And then that kind
of snowballed into me moving back to Canada. That snowball me, uh,
(45:30):
that snowball to me launching the Overcoming Arts Initiative for children,
And that's snowball to one hundred people jumping out of planes.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
So this homeless preacher had it right.
Speaker 5 (45:40):
He was right, and you know, but he planted the
seed in my heart and inspired you. He inspired me
to you know, he always taught me that faith is
an action word. So you got to put some legs
and some arms on that faith and you got to
move out.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Faith is an action word. That's uh, that's inspiring.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
It really is. And it's like I live by it.
You know. I lived by that for many years in
my life. Every time like I kind of think that something.
Speaker 5 (46:05):
Is challenging or it's hard, I kind of bring myself
back to that time in my life and I remember
those words, and I, you know, I am. And you
know he's no longer homeless too. You know, I actually
got to visit him just this year. I visited him
and he's no, he hasn't been homeless for several years now.
He has his own apartment. I seen him open the
(46:26):
doors to his home with his keys. It was like
one of the most beautiful moments in my life to
see this man who is like, you know, down and
out living on the street to then owning his own apartment.
Because like, this is something that I always talk to
him about when I was during that time when he
was homeless. It's not really easy to like just you know,
(46:47):
no matter how much he loves someone, no matter how
much money you can give them, it's a lifestyle, you know,
being homeless is a lifestyle for many and they they
kind of choose it. Not everyone, I don't want to
you know, that's not the case for that everyone. But
in his case, in his scenario, based on his challenges
and what he had to overcome, it was a personal
decision to stay away from his family and to you know,
(47:09):
stay on the streets.
Speaker 4 (47:10):
That's what he liked.
Speaker 5 (47:11):
He liked singing and being in the streets and going
to do his his things in and out in about
in you know, New York City. But it came to
a point where he decided no more of this, and
you know, he laid down the you know, whatever he was,
you know, the challenges that he was facing.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
This movie sounds interesting. Where can we see it? Not
at the film Festival, incredibly, but not at.
Speaker 5 (47:34):
The film festival. This film is not playing at the
film festival, but it is available on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
And this Chopin Chopin, you recommend it.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
Chopin Chopin.
Speaker 5 (47:43):
Yeah, absolutely incredible film. It was really you know, it
was about the last the last few years of Chopin's life.
It was more about the you know, the eclectic music
that he wrote and the bourgeois that he had performed
for and but also more to do with him having
(48:05):
to deal with his tuberculosis and which was like centered
during the time of the Black Plague and so like
it was, it was an emotional film and it was
you know, it was not like your regular kind of
like cookie cutter Canadian American Will Ferrell slapstick kind of film.
It was like a real tumultuous, emotional gripping film that's
(48:32):
about life, love and death.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
Life, love and death. You wrote to me that you say,
the Polish cinema has a long tradition of visual symbolism,
surrealism and emotional intensity.
Speaker 5 (48:45):
Oh of course, why well, I mean, you know, it
all goes back to the overcoming. You know, Poland in
the last one hundred years has gone through like major
wars and both you know, my grandfather they fought as
children's soldier, children's soldiers in the actually in World War too.
Speaker 6 (49:07):
Like right over here, second, I got an actual This
is an actual leather bag that my grandfather carried through
the trenches.
Speaker 5 (49:18):
As you know, bombs were exploding this, friends were being
blown to bits and as you could see over here,
there's an actual hole missing from this. And believe it
or not, this hole was actually they carved this out
so they could eat it because this is leather, this
is genuine leather. So when they were hungry they ran
out of food, they had to eat it. So Holand's
(49:39):
history is steeped in overcoming and a lot of the
films that they make come from like a really deep
emotional place because of the I believe, the the history
where we are on the map in terms of the world,
and just all of the families and the grandparent and
(50:00):
the parents who were affected by this kind of deep
emotional trauma, which expresses itself in many ways in different
people's lives. Some people decide to do different things with that,
you know, some people decide to use it in creative
ways and some people.
Speaker 4 (50:18):
In different ways.
Speaker 5 (50:19):
But you know, this Polish cinema which we're discussing, is something.
Speaker 4 (50:23):
That is it's emotional.
Speaker 5 (50:26):
You could see it in the lighting, you know, in
the lighting, the way that the directors of photography choose
to light their films. There's always a darkness to it.
It's like a ying and a yang, and it's really evident.
I find in Polish cinema it's very intense and meaningful.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
So something like over fifty percent of us in the
Greater Toronto area have come from somewhere else, first generation Canadians,
so we're an incredibly diverse community. But at the same time,
we all want to become Canadian and to integrate. Do
you think it's important to keep your connection to where
you come from.
Speaker 5 (51:04):
I think it's absolutely important, and it's the most important
thing I think. I think that, you know, Canada, we
celebrate people for their values. It's not just the melting
pot where they tell you to forget about your values
and your culture. It is a strong place with a
lot of cultures coming together. But I always encourage people
(51:28):
to celebrate their culture. I encourage parents to teach their
children how to speak their mother tongue. I encourage parents
to have their grandparents speak to their grandchildren because you know,
then it leads to being able to express yourself in
that language, to understand that culture. And I think that's
(51:50):
what makes Canada Canada, is the fact that people are
celebrating their individual cultures. Obviously, we have certain values and
ethics here in Canada which we like to promote, you know,
like Remembrance Day, and you know, we like to discuss
the important values that Canada stands for But I'm really
(52:11):
happy that I was able to learn Polish.
Speaker 4 (52:13):
As a child.
Speaker 5 (52:13):
It was my first language even though I was born here,
and you know, it's the only reason why I'm actually
able to participate in this festival. You know, it's if
I didn't know the Polish language, I wouldn't be as
connected to this emotion of being Polish and going back
to you know, this festival. All of the films, they're
(52:37):
all they all have subtitles, you know, all the Q
and a's, they have translators, so there's like a it's
it's just another way to explore cinema. You know, once
you get bored of watching all of these cookie cutter
American films and all these things that they show us
on Netflix, what's the next step, Well, watch films with subtitles,
(53:00):
films with other from other languages, and you know Poland.
Polish people have like a real true grit about themselves.
Speaker 4 (53:07):
So like if you're into.
Speaker 5 (53:11):
Strong emotions, grit, celebration, overcoming, these are the kinds of
themes that you will find in Polish cinema and that
you will find econom If people.
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Want to check out Ekron, is there a website they
can go to to get the schedule and the locations
and the events.
Speaker 5 (53:26):
Yes, yes, Brian, there is so. The website is ww
dot e k r A N dot C a econ dot.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Ca Stee Denis. Thanks so much for joining us. I
really appreciate it. This has been an interesting conversation and
I love you, know your your conversation about the importance
of humor and emotion and being a little bit rebellious
as part of your art and your cinema, and of
course and I love your line faith is an action word.
That's right.
Speaker 5 (53:54):
I wanted to just before we end, I just wanted
to let everyone know thank you for tuning in, thank
you for listening, and if anyone is interested in looking
at any of my artwork, you could follow me on
Instagram at Steve Daniels, which is s T E E
P Daniels d A N I E L S. And
the website is the same ww dot Steve Daniels dot com.
(54:15):
I'm just getting ready to leave to Miami right now.
I'm going to Miami Art Basil, so I'm getting some
pennies ready of South Beach right now.
Speaker 4 (54:23):
So thank you and thanks so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 5 (54:26):
Thank you so much, Brian, I really appreciate your time
and thank you to our PUBLISHERT.
Speaker 4 (54:29):
Daniel Everson.
Speaker 2 (54:30):
That's our show for tonight. Thank you everyone for joining us.
I'm on every Monday through Friday at six o'clock on
nine to sixty am, and you can stream me online
the Triple W Saga ninety sixty am dot ca A.
You can you get all my podcasts videocasts on Brian
Crombie dot com, on YouTube, on Facebook and Instagram, and
on Audible podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and on speakeasy. Thank
you check me out.
Speaker 5 (54:51):
Good night everybody.
Speaker 1 (54:56):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot c
The views expressed in the following program or those of
the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Saga nine sixty am or its management.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the bran cromeby radio Wire.
So a gentleman that I've had the privilege of interviewing before,
Neil Seman wrote a really interesting article column in the
paper just a week or two ago, and it's titled
Summer Camp for Entrepreneurs. Why real talk around a muscoca
bonfire beats a conference every time real talk around a
(00:39):
muscoca bonfire for entrepreneurs. You know a lot of us
think about, you know, the innovation agenda, the prosperity, the productivity,
the issues that we've got in Canada. We need to
have better tax deductions, we need to have more government investment.
We need to have shreds or flow through shares or
ecosystems or anchor companies, or you know, import more immigrants
(00:59):
of high you know, a whole bunch of things. And Neil,
you're talking and we should all go to camp, summer
camp instead of all that stuff, Like seriously, really.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Well I am talking about that, but Brian, I must say,
I'm really impressed by rhymed Off. I think two three
four decades of Canadian policy speak in what sixty seconds,
that's exactly right. All of those things have been debated
furiously on op ed pages and talk shows across this country.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
You're telling us we should go to camp roast some
schmores in sinkumbaya.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Well, what I'm saying is that we should have honest,
frank talk among ourselves and not you know, chess thump about,
whether on social media or at often government funded conferences,
blobbing about how great we are, and talk more about
failure and that kind of frank talk and discussion and
(01:56):
intimacy around ideas. It often does have up and more
around campfires or or coffee breaks, more so than on
big stages.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I read this one line at one point in time
that there's more deals done in the coffee shops and
the main floors than there are on the boardroom tables
on the top floors.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Yeah, I'm I'm not sure how many deals get made
the conference floors. I'm not sure how many attendees even
want to go to keynotes anymore. I think that's that's
sort of common vernacular now. People go and plan and
they meet at the adjacent coffee shops, and it's kind
of an excuse to me as opposed to the destination
(02:41):
many for many attendees. And I think we really need
to ask ourselves why that's happening. And also more fundamentally, hey,
what do we mean when we when we talk about
innovation and how does it really happen versus versus spending
oodles with money on often government subsidized conferences.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Well, two of the things that you and there's lots
of stuff that you've got in this article, but two
of the things that really resonated with me is the
first is that you talk about authentic connection. Innovation starts
with authentic connections. I'd like you to describe to me
what's an authentic connection versus a non authentic connection, because
so many of us have experienced, you know, the guy
(03:24):
or the person at the conference that you think is
just collecting business cards because they've probably got a contest
back to the office about who can collect more business
cards that you certainly don't have a connection, let alone
an authentic connection. But the second thing is, and you
say this on numerous occasions, trading tales of what has
gone ridiculously wrong and willingness to admit challenge. So there's
(03:47):
something about that you think about admitting failure, about admitting challenge,
about being vulnerable, about being open to suggestions about how
to do things better? Is that the case?
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I think we only get to the first problem about
what makes an authentic connection? Uh, if we if we
open ourselves on the on the on the vulnerability side,
and I'll give you concrete examples that that.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
That speak to me.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
When I learn about a new startup company, I tend
to be a lot less interested, dramatically less interested in
its technological wonders than in its sales capture strategy and
its business capture strategy.
Speaker 5 (04:32):
And you know, how.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Did it, how did it take off?
Speaker 4 (04:35):
How did it fly?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
How did it go from zero to one? In Peter
Thiel's language, or you know, make its first million? And
h I find oftentimes the answer to that question is
very boring and or or just not the answer that
someone would give on a stage. And it's only the
(04:59):
kind of answer that they'd give you when you say, hey, look,
you know I've been working at this and all my
sales strategies didn't pan out. But tell me how did
you get that app to go viral? And and you know,
and then then then somebody will say, hey, look, I
don't talk about it often. I've had my share of failures.
(05:19):
But what I did is I was wired for for
for two days, two nights straight, and I put up
these uh sort of you know, funny little ads on
Facebook mom chat boards, and that made all the difference.
But they're, hey, they're a tech company, and they don't
they don't want to talk about that. Or I was,
(05:41):
you know, I was wrestling in the weeds with with
our lawyers over over our, I p our our, I
p strategy and and and that really made all the difference.
So point being is that what makes a company scale
is often not the kind of thing people like to
(06:02):
hear about. And sometimes it's just hey, I got really lucky.
I got really lucky who you know, and that timing
was beautiful. I met you know, I met someone who's
a decision maker at this company, and I pulled it off.
And so only when you reveal your own challenges I find,
particularly on the sales side, do you do you learn
(06:24):
how other people hacked that process?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
You know, it's interesting you said in this article something
that really resonated with me again that you signed up
for this summer camp in Muskoka and you talk about
what struck me were the candidate missions with leaders reflecting
on failure, talking about the year spent building ideas and
basements and stumbling that's not a storyline you hear much
on main stages or at sponsored breakfast chats with speakers
(06:49):
spiffed up and plush chairs. You don't just grow your network,
you grow your circle of allies, collaborators and friends.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, there's a few points in there. Thank you Brian
for mentioning that. Yeah, these are big shots that were there.
I mean, you know, we had Eldensbergerhoff, co founder of
East Entaire it's a Canadian unicorn, Mike Dermott Fresh Books,
both very open, authentic people spoken openly about the different
(07:17):
challenges they've had. And this is cultivated, I should say,
from the very top, from Chris Adams at at Reignite,
himself a serial entrepreneur in terms of you know, and
it's self selectivity in terms of who comes, I guess
because at the end of the year, at the end
of the day, year after year, people come who are
(07:38):
prepared for this kind of sort of you know, etherization
where you put yourself out there and you tell people
where you've where you've messed up. But your your second point,
the language around circle of allies is important and it
goes to your earlier question about about vulnerability, because what
you're doing right is when you're opening up and talking
(08:00):
about your wounds and think your missteps, is you're building
allies that you can go into battle with together, as
opposed to the transactional networking, which everybody knows doesn't really
you know, it doesn't really pay off in terms of
collecting business cards or QR codes or anything like that.
It might make you feel after you've come back from
(08:22):
the conference that you've accomplished something because you've collected whatever,
six hundred and two business cards, but that doesn't actually
translate into into sales or real meaningful progress.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
It almost sounds like you're talking about, you know, going
to an AA meeting or therapy or something like that.
Let me quote again from your article. A twenty twenty
three review of twenty seven studies found that entrepreneurs benefit
significantly from the emotional comfort and trust that peer relationships provide.
Three mechanisms drive these benefits informational learning from others' experiences,
(08:58):
inspirational scene what's possible, and emotional feeling supported through uncertainty.
Sounds like we all need an a meeting or therapy
or something like that.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
You know, I have great admiration for AA, and until
recently it's been a kind of a black box, and
now we're learning a great deal more about how they
work now. And there are certainly parallels with the entrepreneurship journey.
As we know, entrepreneurs have much higher rates of addiction,
et cetera, substance abuse, and a whole range of mental
health that challenges. The entrepreneurship journey is in many ways
(09:34):
a spiritual journey. You you have to dig inside yourself
because it is so hard. You know, Elon Musk talks
about it being like walking on glass, and that's a
pretty extreme expression. But and you you know, often don't
know if you'll be able to make ends meet in
a month. That's you know, standard entrepreneurship. And so it
is kind of spiritual in the sense that, like AA,
(09:56):
you need to you need to have hope. And so
when you're surrounded by by people who look like like titans,
like icons in terms of their accomplishments. When you see
their their lacerations, their missteps, and how they've how they've
admitted to defeat, you can see them. You can see
(10:16):
yourself as more like them, and they become they become allies,
they become goalposts for you. Uh and and you can
you can get that hope that I think is similarly
derived in an analogous context in an AA meeting. So
I don't think the uh, the analogy is far off.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Fascinating conversation, So we should all go to entrepreneurship camp
and go to less conferences downtown and the Metrotronic Convention Center.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (10:42):
You know? I think it depends on the conference I
go to. I've been to Carla, We've all been to
everyone in business and the professions, trades, every everything that
has been to conferences, and some are tremendously successful, no
matter what the venue itself is. But there's certain elements
of the ones that that succeed I think that that
(11:05):
hold together and the ones that you know, the ones
that succeed I think are the ones that do enable
the neurons to fire. I mean inherently, if you think
about it right, going to a conference is a one
to many experience the way they present it, right, somebody
comes on stage and they they dance around and they
(11:28):
they show you through prezzy presentation all the great accomplishments
or other that they've that they've done and how they've
gotten there, and it's a pret you only see one
layer into under the hood. But what you need to
have is a many to many. It's really hard to
have a many to many if you got ten thousand attendees,
So smaller is often better. Workshops where you can communicate
(11:49):
a little more authentically is often better. Sort of you know,
maybe facilitated workshops where people can admit to missteps, those
things often work better.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
We're going to take a break and come back in
two minutes with our guests because I want to challenge
him on this idea of entrepreneurship being sort of a
group activity, because you know, that's not what a lot
of people think. They think it's the genius that's got
a light bulb in a shower or something like that.
Actually that's a bad analogy because if a light bulb
but it was in a shower, you'd have some big problems.
(12:24):
But a light bulb or an idea in the shower
and and what you're suggesting, Neil is something different that
it's a collaborative kind of process. Stay with it everyone,
We're going to come back in just two minutes. I'm
going to challenge our guests and where have good ideas
come from? Stay with us, everyone back in two.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot C.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
A welcome back everyone to the Brian Cromby Radio are
I've got a guest with us tonight who's an author,
a publisher, a health policy scholar at the Inish of Toronto.
(13:10):
He specializes in mental health and entrepreneurship. And he's written
a really interesting column in the paper called Summer Camp
for Entrepreneurs. Why real talk around him? A scope of
bonfire beats a conference every time. I want to ask
you about this idea that do you talk about in
your column about open conversation, whether you ever hate the
(13:32):
ideas creates growth for you And you go on to
say creativity demands freedom, serendipity, and humility, not formulas. You know,
most of us I think think that great ideas for
entrepreneurs are a light bulb or you know, an idea
that you get, you know, in the shower. It's a
loan activity. And I want to challenge you if I could,
(13:53):
with sort of three books that I've read to see
what you think about it.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
One was something called Youeography of Genius that that said
that some of the times where we had the most
innovation was when you had these different disparate people that
would get together and argue and debate. And they talked
about you know Vienna, where where Jews and Gentiles and
UH and and and you know desparate you know, Freud
(14:21):
and a psychologists and UH and musicians and Mozart they
all got together and they they they cultivated together the
old you know, fertile Crescent where trade routes and people
from different religions and different cultures got together and and
those cultures uh mixed. I loved the one book that
talked about Edinburgh where different people went to gentlemen's clubs
(14:42):
and at the time they were just gentlemen's clubs. But
you had to do two things to be successful there.
You had to argue like crazy, and then you had
to drink so you could have fun afterwards, so that
everyone would, you know, have camaraderie as well as the arguments.
So that's one idea that that there's specific cities or
places or ecosystems or class or whatever you call them,
but there's diversity of something in that, and there's tension
(15:06):
and argument and conversation that takes place. Another one was
I used to work for the Walt Disney Company. Michael
Eisner wrote a book called partners and he said, you
know a lot of people think it's all about one guy,
one person, and that he originally thought it was. But
his biggest successes were when he joined up with Frank Wells,
the president, and Gary Wilson, the CFO, and the three
of them really changed what Disney was all about. And
(15:26):
he went and tracked through a whole bunch of other companies.
Berkshire Hathway was one where he talked about it wasn't
just Warren Buffett, it was Warren Buffett plus Charlie Munger,
and he went through numerous different examples and he said,
partnership is far more important than that one person, even
though he initially thought it was the one person and
then the last one and I really want to challenge
you on this. One was called Idea Sex and it
(15:48):
said that ideas are like reproduction. They got to clash,
they got to mutate, they got to reproduce. And it's
ideas that have sex that end up being really great ideas.
They're not just born to the one And so I
guess my question to you is where do great entrepreneurship
ideas come from? Are they a one person thing or
(16:09):
is it really this collective?
Speaker 3 (16:12):
So they're in my experience, in my experience and based
on the literature that I'm familiar with, they're predominantly a
one person thing. Yes, But we need to parse out
what we mean by great ideas. I think a little
bit so on the one person thing, like we think
about our we think about our brains. In our brains,
(16:32):
I think we have about five hundred million, maybe a
billion yearons that interact, right, and you hear the term
neural network, and they network their network together and they're
they're constantly interacting such that you have greater synapses in
your brain than in all the grains of sand in
the world. So inside your brain you may have ideas.
You may have ideas and they circulate, they circulate. You're
(16:54):
mudey on an idea, and maybe it's not the shower,
but maybe you sleep on it. Maybe you go for
a walk, and then an idea is spirited, an idea
is birthed, so the idea, but an idea is really fragile,
and what makes that idea become a business? And this
is where you get into some really interesting research by
(17:16):
folks like Gary hamilt at Mit who splits up different
types of innovation technological innovation, business model innovation, management innovation,
and he and others have proven pretty powerfully that business
model innovation, for example, you know Elon Musk, a lot
(17:37):
of his innovations like Tesla SpaceX are really about distributing
the assembly of the products, not so much of the
products themselves. So business model innovation is that which is
often generally spirited not in the shower, not after the walk,
but in teams of people of diverse perspectives, with different
(17:59):
skill sets on one side, marketing on the other, getting together.
So I think different parts of the innovation process depends
sometimes on the solo individual, sometimes on the group. So
I'm kind of in the middle here, but just generally
kind of with you on the idea sex I think.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
So let's just.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Say the the embryo can hatch within the singular individual
but the community that takes others. And then if you
want to really scale into a city, into a country,
you need other people around you. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (18:39):
It does? So do we need to go for more
solo walks or do we need oh?
Speaker 3 (18:45):
I definitely think so, I well, solo plus dog.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Or do we go to more camps or do we
go to more conferences?
Speaker 3 (18:54):
I think it's the meditative capacity here, and I'm getting
even more spiritual with you here. I think again, the
entrepreneurship journey is deeply meditative. And you can have that
meditative experience in a camp, in a quiet space while
you're walking some you know where that those ideas can
(19:18):
percolate and then and then all of a sudden, you know,
idea meets sales business opportunity. And that's often what happens
in a collaborative, quiet setting, not when you're being spoken
at loudly at a conference on stage, especially when that
person is only browbeating about their about their success.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
So, Neil, I think you know, it's pretty accepted today
that we got a productivity problem in Canada. We're forty
percent below the United States. When a decade ago or
fifteen years ago, we were equal to the United States.
We've got a prosperity issue. We've got a productivity problem,
a prosperity problem, a meetia an income problem where our
(20:01):
meeting income is stagnant versus you know, substantial growth in
the United States and versus inflation. Given all that and
lack of innovation, lots of you know, great ideas going
south of the border, brain drain, et cetera, company drain.
What do we do? Does government tell us all to
(20:22):
go for walks sponsored a lot of camps?
Speaker 5 (20:24):
What do we do?
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Yeah, I mean this is a larger meta question, also spiritual.
But yeah, in Canada, Look, we have precious resources fleeing
the country at rapid pace, the most precious resource being
our young people. And and you know, population of California
has many hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have moved
(20:49):
down to raise capital to enable their company to flourish
in ways that they couldn't hear. There's a lot of
quick paths to action that a lot of interesting economists
have talked about. I do think our I do think
we need to aggressively reduce certain of our taxes. And
(21:11):
I do believe that we need to think seriously about
how we sustain an environment where young people want to
build want to build businesses. I think we have to
think as a as a if you, if I was
a policy maker, right, I would really want to understand
(21:31):
what outcomes matter. And this is where we're spending you know,
tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on conferences. Doesn't really
make sense, okay, because so if your outcomes that matter
are boasting to other Canadians that our government cares about innovation,
that's great.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
We know that.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Governments of all types care about innovation. But if your
outcomes that matter are are seating more companies, so not
only do we have more shots on net to use
the hockey analogy, but we have more skates on the ice,
we have more people with sticks on the ice. Then
(22:14):
we might invest a lot less of that in hackathons
where we invite lots of people to solve a brutal
problem like how do we how do we get data
centers at scale in Canada by spending you know, a
fraction of the amount that they're spending in the United
States in order to get sustainable sovereign AI in this country.
(22:36):
So these are different ways of thinking about the problem set.
I think we were focusing on the wrong outcomes often.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
How do we get governments, people business to focus on
the right outcomes? You know? One of the other challenges
we have. I think a lot of us have seen
the statistics Canadian businesses are, to a certain extent to blame.
We invest collectively far less and repairs and maintenance in
machinery and productivity means in research and development than are
(23:08):
American counterparts.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Yeah, one statistic that really on that point, just to
take it up notch in terms of scale, is corporate
venture capital in Canada is something like one fortieth the
amount in the United States, and to the extent that
it exists in Canada, it's really fickle, so you'll have
a few big corporates moving in and out of corporate
(23:31):
venture capital. And corporate venture capital is different than traditional
venture capital because it's not only investment, but it's also clients.
So it just really enables companies to scale really elegantly.
In the United States, so we don't have that advantage
that startups have in America. So that's just taking again
it's sort of R and D, but not in yourself,
(23:54):
but in an ecosystem of startups.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
Around you.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
So that's one thing I think that we could we
get easily enable, and then we could also enable such
that that corporate venture capital that was invested is subject
to a different kind of tax regime. That's very attractive
to lure people or big corporates into investing in startups.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
So in the United States, you know, in two successive administrations,
we've seen very different strategies. You know, the current one
is reduce taxes and create tariff barriers to protect industries
and try to incentivize onshoin. And the last administration was
more about the Chips Act and the Infrastructure Act, trying
to do industrial policy and provide government grants and incentives
(24:38):
to growth. Are either those a recipe for success or failure?
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Well, I think we're you know, we're in a seismic
change now where a lot of the prior policies need
to be evaluated through a new lens. I mean, there's
two things that I think matter more than ever before.
One is, you know, supply chain disruption, where we have
(25:05):
we have Jina on one side, America on the other,
and Canada is sort of squeezed in the middle, and
so we need to think, you know, Canada needs to
think very opportunistically about how we situate ourselves, and so
it is different. The second thing that's just dramatically different
is the AI race right now. So the A I
(25:26):
mean America's economy right now, it is really dependent on that.
They're they're resisting a recession only because they are there.
They their AI is just torquing through their data center economy.
And and this is not just America. Other other countries
(25:46):
around the world, UH with much lesser means, Indonesia and
others are also investing in this AI space race. So
this is, in my view, in many people's views, sort
of the greatest wealth creation moment in our time. And
how is Canada play? So we're at a different time now,
and I think there are a lot of interesting ways
(26:06):
Canada can play, but I think that that's our quickest
path to opportunity is thinking about where we are situated
in the AI supply chain.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Neil, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate
you joining us, Thanks so much. I got one last
important question. Why do you inviting me over for a
campfire and some mushmores in the backyard.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Let's Brian come come with me, Well, come with me
certainly to reignite next fall.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
You'd love it.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
I think you'd be a great participant. Uh and and
let's let's do it.
Speaker 4 (26:38):
Let's do it.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
We can have a pre event before the event, you
and I invite some others and uh and we'll have
that fertile crescent environment.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Neil Seman, thank you so much for joining us, and
thank you for your provocative column. It was really interesting.
I look forward to hearing about your next column as
soon as you up post it. That's our show for tonight. Everybody,
we're chatting about innovation, and I think it's a it's
a real challenge. We having candidates a real opportunity. And
I think that Neil has really talked about a lot
of the issues that we need to address, and you know,
(27:07):
he's come forward with a bunch of solutions, and one
of them is that we've got to have authentic relationships.
We've got to have frank conversations. We had to learn
from failures as well as successes. We need that inspiration,
we need the guidance from other people, and we need
the creativity that comes from that honest, open, inspirational conversation
that Neil was talking about Thanks.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
We're going to take a break back in two minutes.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Stay with us, everybody, No Radio, No Problem.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Stream is live on SAGA ninety sixty AM dot CAA.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Welcome back to the Brian Crombie Radio hoire on Saga
nine sixty. So there's an interesting film festival coming up
and I've been inundated by people wanting to talk about
it and tell me about it, and I've got one
of the artists with us tonight. Steve Daniels is his name.
He has an aka called Jesus Guggenheimer. He's a multidisciplinary artist.
(28:11):
He's a painter, he's a filmmaker. His paintings evolve into
larger scale cultural projects, from multimedia experiences and social experiments
to philanthropic initiatives like raising a nearly one hundred grand
for children's initiatives like tickets the hospital that interesting Enough
saved his life and first put crayons into his hands,
(28:31):
leading to a life of overcoming problems through art. Art
creates action, creates values, creates story, he says, and that
your paintings are not just artworks, they're starting.
Speaker 4 (28:42):
Points of all your projects.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
So welcome to the show. How are you.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
I'm doing Gray.
Speaker 5 (28:48):
I'm really excited to be here, and thank you so
much to yourself, Brian as well as our publicist danielle
Iverson for Ekron as well for making this interview possible.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
My pleasure. Do you say each pain acts like a seed?
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Well, you know.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
A lot of times you start with like a vision,
and it's probably easiest before you have the whole vision
of actually creating something. You first start with like a sketch.
You know, before you make a great, a bigger painting,
you make a sketch. And it's the same way with these,
like you know, long term initiatives of sorts.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
It kind of usually just starts with.
Speaker 5 (29:31):
A painting, a drawing that leads to an idea that
leads to, you know, people jumping out of planes, like
we did with Jump for Sick Kids, you know, which
just kind of started off as a joke like hey,
I want to get kids to jump out of planes.
You know, it just start off as like I think,
even a drawing, and then it literally led to creating
a Sick Kids Hospitals first group skydiving event. And that
(29:53):
was during the pandemic, so you could imagine how challenging
it was to throw people out of planes during that
time and just to organize anything. So that's kind of
how it starts, and you know how things take take off.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
And you know, I think that's interesting because I've heard
lines about how, uh, you know, comics, comedians are the
gestures of today who can call out political power. I've
heard about how every protest has a song that ends
up being the anthem for that protest or that era
in our life. You know, we've often talked about how
(30:28):
every summer has a song and anthem for the summer.
And what you're talking about, which is really interesting, is
that each painting actually a seed. The image becomes a story,
the story becomes a cultural action, lives are inspired, action
is taken, and the results are life inspiring, leading action
into others' lives. It's beautiful that that art can inspire action,
(30:50):
and you know, I think there is some art that
really does that, and so the fact that you're trying
to do that is wonderful. How did painting become the
core of who you are, what your identity is?
Speaker 5 (31:00):
Well, it's actually it's a it's there's several stages to this,
but like My first introduction to the idea of physically
painting or drawing or expressing yourself came at a point
in my life where I was on the operating room
tables at the sickest hospital and they, I guess, just
(31:21):
because I was going through so much pain, they they
just kind of gave me some crowns to occupy my
time with. And then that led me that led to
creating drawings and you know, little sketches, you know, just
doodles really, you know, it looks like you know, abstract
you know, Jackson Pollock or something like that. And then
(31:41):
it led to at the age of seven, I walked
into my first game's workshop at Canada in a Square
one mall, which was a which is a model and
figurine hobby, and I would, you know, start painting soldiers.
And around that time, when I was seven, I walked
into the Gouggenheim at the New York in the New
(32:01):
York City, at the museum, and I saw paintings on
the walls. And that was the first time in my
life that I witnessed paintings being celebrated to the point
of where they're hanging inside of on a wall, inside
of a humongous building inside the biggest city in the world.
(32:22):
And that's when they kind of clicked to me that
I want to be an artist when I saw those
big paintings on those walls at the Guggenheim, and that's
kind of what led me to like, you know, saying
to myself, like, at that moment in time, I said
to myself, like, I want to hang my paintings here
on these walls one day.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
But obviously, when.
Speaker 5 (32:41):
You're seven years old, you don't understand the bureaucracy of
what it means to hang a painting in the Gugenheim Museum.
So you know, it just kind of went from there
to like a lifelong pursuit of becoming an artist and
expressing myself through visual means. And you know it led
to my scholar ships at the New York Film Academy
(33:01):
and then lived in New York City for nearly ten years.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Fantastic And are you exhibiting some of your art at
this festival coming up?
Speaker 4 (33:11):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (33:11):
So at the Toronto Polish Film Festival. It's called Ekran,
which means scream in Polish. Ekran. I am this year's
twenty twenty five Resident Artist and so they selected me
to showcase my works, and I chose to make an
exhibition of about fifteen paintings from the last ten years
(33:34):
of my life living back in Toronto.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Really sounds interesting, And I understand you've got this multimedia
approach where paintings lead to films, events and real experiences
that impact others beyond the canvas. Can you explain that?
Speaker 4 (33:49):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (33:50):
You know?
Speaker 4 (33:52):
You know, it's.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
Like, you know, one of the most interesting ways that
I could put like the simplest ways I could put it.
Like just recently, one of my colleagues, he got a
full time position job in Whitby at I Fly, which
is a sky indoor skydling facility, and him and I
we started working on our projects for sick kits hospitals
(34:20):
about seven years ago. And through my paintings and through
these ideas of you know, creating these initiatives with the
skydiving and so forth, I see how it's like impacted
certain people in their lives where like now this great
friend of my Trenton Stammel, my co founder of the
(34:40):
World Skateboarding Health Foundation and the Overcoming Arts Initiative for Children,
which I'm a founder of, he is now moving to
He's has moved to Calgary, tel Bert to Calgary, and
you know, it's incredible to see how like people's lives
are impacted to the point of like getting up and
(35:01):
physically moving out of our province. And this all started
with you know, us wanting to do projects and then
him and his life kind of leading further down a
professional path with skydiving. But it all started with just
a silly idea and a sketch to want to throw
kids out of planes, you know, during this pandemic, and
(35:21):
wanting to give children the opportunity to feel this feeling
of flight. Eventually, no kids were allowed to skydivee for
this project, just as a disclaimer, and we ended up
having adults emulating this same form of bravery that the
children show us on a daily basis at the hospital.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
I understand that you've had some of your own challenges
that you've had to overcome setbacks, and you've built, as
was subscribed to me, a path of your own. What's
been your greatest overcoming moment and why and how?
Speaker 5 (35:54):
It's hard to really pinpoint and I think, like you know,
the way with like overcoming overcoming something that we all
have to do in our own lives in so many
different ways. And I feel like overcoming is like a
theme in a lot of my artwork and a lot
of my initiatives. You know, my nonprofit is called the
(36:14):
Overcoming Arts Initiative for Children. It's about overcoming through extreme sports.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
Film and art.
Speaker 5 (36:25):
Hence you know, the skydiving, which is athletic and you
know combining. I've made a film about this whole process,
and we did a whole public relations tour where we
tried to known as Drake, to jump out of the
plane with us, and we you know, we berated him
(36:46):
with all sorts of different public relations stunts and he
had never ended up skydiving with us. But some of
the artwork, which some of the artwork which we made
for this whole endeavor now hangs in his bedroom hall.
So it's interesting how like you know, ideas, you know,
it all kind of intersects like ideas with like creating films,
(37:11):
creating initiatives, and then making artwork about the initiative about
it goes in different cycles and waves. In additionally, start
off as a painting. Sometimes it starts off as an
idea to like, hey, let's get people to jump out
of airplanes for this hospital, and then it led leads
to all sorts of other moments of overcoming in other
(37:31):
people's lives. And you know, Drake putting a nail into
his wallet in his mansion and hanging a painting.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
On his But you personally, you personally, did you have
a big challenge that you had to overcome?
Speaker 4 (37:43):
Well, yeah, I.
Speaker 5 (37:44):
Mean just just just growing up as a teenager and
growing up as a as an artist is as a
feat of itself, I believe, you know, just being an
artist is. I'm a full time artist, So this is
not like something that I do as a hobby or
on the side. It's like my full time thing which
I dedicated my whole life to and it's something that
(38:07):
I'm very proud of. But it's a double edged sword,
and there it always, there's always, you know, challenges and
decisions you have to make, whether you're going to go
down a more commercial path where whether you're going to
make paintings that come from the heart that are about
you know, that are maybe more personal, you know, whether
there are paintings about your faith or experiences. You know,
(38:30):
we all face many challenges in this life. And I
choose to express my my my my overcomings and my
challenges through my art, But specifically to say about one
specific moment, I couldn't really say. I would say this
(38:51):
whole life is like, you know, a big battle of
overcoming in a sense, and we just have to do.
Speaker 4 (38:56):
It with a smile on our face and have the.
Speaker 5 (38:58):
Best attitude that we can and when we set out
on any initiative or creative endeavor.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
I understand that humor and rebellion and storytelling play a
role in your art.
Speaker 4 (39:10):
How does that play well?
Speaker 5 (39:16):
Humor? I think it's like, you know, the the quickest
way to someone's heart in a sense. And so I
like being humorous in some of my artistic expressions, like
mostly towards leaning more towards the films that I make,
that there is humor within my films, not so much
(39:39):
my paintings. I don't really make funny paintings. My girlfriend
makes funny paintings Rosie Olivetto, but I don't make any
funny I make more serious paintings.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
Like in the back over here, we have a.
Speaker 5 (39:51):
Praying saint dressed in a polish wardrobe, and it's inspired
by the by Saints Dint, which is an Irish Saint
and so I've I've you know, they're not I don't say,
like my pins are not funny, but it's more of
my films that have that kind of.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
And rebellion. Excuse me, are you rebellious?
Speaker 4 (40:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (40:18):
Definitely, I mean I'm definitely rebellious. I definitely, you know,
like I definitely like like stirring the pot, as they say,
and I feel like if you don't stir the pot,
you don't eat, you know, so you gotta sometimes be
rebellious in the sense of like not taking no for
an answer, and you know, you know, just to get
(40:39):
this skydiving initiative off the ground, you know, we had
to pitch Sick Kids Hospital for two years, you know,
during that pandemic, and you know let them, you know,
getting you know, Drake's attention was like you know, damn
near impossible.
Speaker 4 (40:52):
But you know, we went to the banks.
Speaker 5 (40:53):
We you know, we asked for large figures of money
for them to participate. They laughed at it, but then
it got to the point where we were having meetings
with like, you know, directors at Scotia Bank about this project,
and you know, it was people were laughing at it,
but it was also serious too, right, you know, we
wanted to get Drake to jump out of the plane,
but you know, due to insurance reasons, we weren't able
(41:16):
to do such a thing. But I think just the
idea alone is humorous and that's what kind of got
people interested and and it leads to you know, it's
that humor leads to other things, you know, when you're
not so uptight and serious. And I think, as you know,
you have to be a bit rebellious nowadays as an
artist because everything.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
You know.
Speaker 5 (41:38):
Is like really politically correct nowadays, and you got to
go by the books and follow the bureaucracy and follow
the steps. And sometimes I feel like if you want
to get things done, you got to just kind of,
you know, put it into your own hands and make
things happen. And that takes action, that takes asking, that
takes building this kind of momentum and belief of other
(42:01):
individuals that are you know, in and around your circle.
That then kind of leads to like a snowball effect
and then before you know it, the director of the
hospital says, yes, okay, we're gonna let you do this event.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
So tell us a little bit about Ekron, which is
this Polish Film Festival. When does it take place and where? So?
Speaker 5 (42:18):
AKRONN is the Toronto Polish Film Festival and ecnon stands
for screen and it's taking place at several locations in
the GTA. This year we have the Rivu Cinema which
is located in Ronsisvilles, and we also have screenings at
Innestown Hall as well as the Living Arts Center of
(42:43):
Mississauga and as well as a location in Hamilton. Everything
is able to be viewed on the showtimes and all
the information about the films and everything that is being
featured is able to be screened, is able to be
viewed at akron dot CEM so ww dot E k
(43:03):
r A N dot ca A. That's where you can
seal the showtimes and yeah, we have films playing for
the next six days. We have several screenings of Chopin Chopin,
which is the new film that came out about Poland's
most celebrated artist, Chopin. And there's still two screenings for
that Living Arts Center this Wednesday as well as on
(43:26):
the thirtieth in Hamilton. And this year, when I was
selected to be the resident artist, I decided to make
a painting of Chopin at the gala and the opening
night reception. So I made a painting of Chopin and
I also have, like I mentioned, fifteen paintings at the
(43:48):
four h nine ron Cisbels, which is a hub for
the Economic Film Festival.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Is this going to be of interest to just Polish
people or more than that?
Speaker 4 (43:59):
Oh? Oh, definitely not.
Speaker 5 (44:01):
This is like there's a lot of people who come
there who are not even Polish. Like you know, every
year it gets bigger and bigger. I've been a part
of this festival now this is the seventh year. I've
been participating since twenty eighteen in different capacities. And in
twenty eighteen I had a film called Overcoming Steep that screened,
(44:21):
which was the film of Me Meeting which was the film.
It was a film about me meeting a homeless preacher
in New York City named Rodney Cliff and Macclark Junior
the third and he essentially told me that the projects
that I'm working on are going to lead to inspiring
the children of the world. And at this point I
was not even involved with any children's initiatives. I was
(44:42):
like strictly like chasing celebrities. I was really like, you know,
going to nightclubs. I was in my mid twenties. I
was like all about the fame, the glory, all that
kind of stuff. And he kind of like humbled me
and kind of brought me back down to earth and
kind of made me realize how like, using my talent
to inspire children is something that is quite possible.
Speaker 4 (45:05):
And he told me that, you know, we're gonna be.
Speaker 5 (45:08):
Going to Barack Obama and the White House and all
this stuff, and it sounded like a bunch of crazy stuff.
But then, funny enough, Barack Obama's primary financier Warm Buppets
and main partner Charlie Monger, his son ended up becoming
the largest contributor to this film. And then that kind
of snowballed into me moving back to Canada. That snowball me, uh,
(45:30):
that snowball to me launching the Overcoming Arts Initiative for children,
And that's snowball to one hundred people jumping out of planes.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
So this homeless preacher had it right.
Speaker 5 (45:40):
He was right, and you know, but he planted the
seed in my heart and inspired you. He inspired me
to you know, he always taught me that faith is
an action word. So you got to put some legs
and some arms on that faith and you got to
move out.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Faith is an action word. That's uh, that's inspiring.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
It really is. And it's like I live by it.
You know. I lived by that for many years in
my life. Every time like I kind of think that something.
Speaker 5 (46:05):
Is challenging or it's hard, I kind of bring myself
back to that time in my life and I remember
those words, and I, you know, I am. And you
know he's no longer homeless too. You know, I actually
got to visit him just this year. I visited him
and he's no, he hasn't been homeless for several years now.
He has his own apartment. I seen him open the
(46:26):
doors to his home with his keys. It was like
one of the most beautiful moments in my life to
see this man who is like, you know, down and
out living on the street to then owning his own apartment.
Because like, this is something that I always talk to
him about when I was during that time when he
was homeless. It's not really easy to like just you know,
(46:47):
no matter how much he loves someone, no matter how
much money you can give them, it's a lifestyle, you know,
being homeless is a lifestyle for many and they they
kind of choose it. Not everyone, I don't want to
you know, that's not the case for that everyone. But
in his case, in his scenario, based on his challenges
and what he had to overcome, it was a personal
decision to stay away from his family and to you know,
(47:09):
stay on the streets.
Speaker 4 (47:10):
That's what he liked.
Speaker 5 (47:11):
He liked singing and being in the streets and going
to do his his things in and out in about
in you know, New York City. But it came to
a point where he decided no more of this, and
you know, he laid down the you know, whatever he was,
you know, the challenges that he was facing.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
This movie sounds interesting. Where can we see it? Not
at the film Festival, incredibly, but not at.
Speaker 5 (47:34):
The film festival. This film is not playing at the
film festival, but it is available on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
And this Chopin Chopin, you recommend it.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
Chopin Chopin.
Speaker 5 (47:43):
Yeah, absolutely incredible film. It was really you know, it
was about the last the last few years of Chopin's life.
It was more about the you know, the eclectic music
that he wrote and the bourgeois that he had performed
for and but also more to do with him having
(48:05):
to deal with his tuberculosis and which was like centered
during the time of the Black Plague and so like
it was, it was an emotional film and it was
you know, it was not like your regular kind of
like cookie cutter Canadian American Will Ferrell slapstick kind of film.
It was like a real tumultuous, emotional gripping film that's
(48:32):
about life, love and death.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
Life, love and death. You wrote to me that you say,
the Polish cinema has a long tradition of visual symbolism,
surrealism and emotional intensity.
Speaker 5 (48:45):
Oh of course, why well, I mean, you know, it
all goes back to the overcoming. You know, Poland in
the last one hundred years has gone through like major
wars and both you know, my grandfather they fought as
children's soldier, children's soldiers in the actually in World War too.
Speaker 6 (49:07):
Like right over here, second, I got an actual This
is an actual leather bag that my grandfather carried through
the trenches.
Speaker 5 (49:18):
As you know, bombs were exploding this, friends were being
blown to bits and as you could see over here,
there's an actual hole missing from this. And believe it
or not, this hole was actually they carved this out
so they could eat it because this is leather, this
is genuine leather. So when they were hungry they ran
out of food, they had to eat it. So Holand's
(49:39):
history is steeped in overcoming and a lot of the
films that they make come from like a really deep
emotional place because of the I believe, the the history
where we are on the map in terms of the world,
and just all of the families and the grandparent and
(50:00):
the parents who were affected by this kind of deep
emotional trauma, which expresses itself in many ways in different
people's lives. Some people decide to do different things with that,
you know, some people decide to use it in creative
ways and some people.
Speaker 4 (50:18):
In different ways.
Speaker 5 (50:19):
But you know, this Polish cinema which we're discussing, is something.
Speaker 4 (50:23):
That is it's emotional.
Speaker 5 (50:26):
You could see it in the lighting, you know, in
the lighting, the way that the directors of photography choose
to light their films. There's always a darkness to it.
It's like a ying and a yang, and it's really evident.
I find in Polish cinema it's very intense and meaningful.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
So something like over fifty percent of us in the
Greater Toronto area have come from somewhere else, first generation Canadians,
so we're an incredibly diverse community. But at the same time,
we all want to become Canadian and to integrate. Do
you think it's important to keep your connection to where
you come from.
Speaker 5 (51:04):
I think it's absolutely important, and it's the most important
thing I think. I think that, you know, Canada, we
celebrate people for their values. It's not just the melting
pot where they tell you to forget about your values
and your culture. It is a strong place with a
lot of cultures coming together. But I always encourage people
(51:28):
to celebrate their culture. I encourage parents to teach their
children how to speak their mother tongue. I encourage parents
to have their grandparents speak to their grandchildren because you know,
then it leads to being able to express yourself in
that language, to understand that culture. And I think that's
(51:50):
what makes Canada Canada, is the fact that people are
celebrating their individual cultures. Obviously, we have certain values and
ethics here in Canada which we like to promote, you know,
like Remembrance Day, and you know, we like to discuss
the important values that Canada stands for But I'm really
(52:11):
happy that I was able to learn Polish.
Speaker 4 (52:13):
As a child.
Speaker 5 (52:13):
It was my first language even though I was born here,
and you know, it's the only reason why I'm actually
able to participate in this festival. You know, it's if
I didn't know the Polish language, I wouldn't be as
connected to this emotion of being Polish and going back
to you know, this festival. All of the films, they're
(52:37):
all they all have subtitles, you know, all the Q
and a's, they have translators, so there's like a it's
it's just another way to explore cinema. You know, once
you get bored of watching all of these cookie cutter
American films and all these things that they show us
on Netflix, what's the next step, Well, watch films with subtitles,
(53:00):
films with other from other languages, and you know Poland.
Polish people have like a real true grit about themselves.
Speaker 4 (53:07):
So like if you're into.
Speaker 5 (53:11):
Strong emotions, grit, celebration, overcoming, these are the kinds of
themes that you will find in Polish cinema and that
you will find econom If people.
Speaker 2 (53:20):
Want to check out Ekron, is there a website they
can go to to get the schedule and the locations
and the events.
Speaker 5 (53:26):
Yes, yes, Brian, there is so. The website is ww
dot e k r A N dot C a econ dot.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Ca Stee Denis. Thanks so much for joining us. I
really appreciate it. This has been an interesting conversation and
I love you, know your your conversation about the importance
of humor and emotion and being a little bit rebellious
as part of your art and your cinema, and of
course and I love your line faith is an action word.
That's right.
Speaker 5 (53:54):
I wanted to just before we end, I just wanted
to let everyone know thank you for tuning in, thank
you for listening, and if anyone is interested in looking
at any of my artwork, you could follow me on
Instagram at Steve Daniels, which is s T E E
P Daniels d A N I E L S. And
the website is the same ww dot Steve Daniels dot com.
(54:15):
I'm just getting ready to leave to Miami right now.
I'm going to Miami Art Basil, so I'm getting some
pennies ready of South Beach right now.
Speaker 4 (54:23):
So thank you and thanks so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 5 (54:26):
Thank you so much, Brian, I really appreciate your time
and thank you to our PUBLISHERT.
Speaker 4 (54:29):
Daniel Everson.
Speaker 2 (54:30):
That's our show for tonight. Thank you everyone for joining us.
I'm on every Monday through Friday at six o'clock on
nine to sixty am, and you can stream me online
the Triple W Saga ninety sixty am dot ca A.
You can you get all my podcasts videocasts on Brian
Crombie dot com, on YouTube, on Facebook and Instagram, and
on Audible podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and on speakeasy. Thank
you check me out.
Speaker 5 (54:51):
Good night everybody.
Speaker 1 (54:56):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot c
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.