Little did Carol know that it would take seven years for her to get her first opportunity to step out of the cockpit of a Stearman biplane and climb up onto the top wing. It was a life changing moment for her—she knew at that precise second it was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.

But the wild ride on the top wing was not the only wild ride she would encounter. For seventeen years, she has waged a day-to-day, moment-to-moment campaign to stay out there in the slipstream. After working with other teams for a time, Carol eventually concluded the only way she could control her future was to own her future. She bought her own plane—in fact, the very plane used for her wingwalking debut—and she and her bright red Stearman have been on the airshow circuit ever since. You may also recognize Carol as the main characters from the 2015 Discovery Channel series Airshow, in which she was prominently featured.

You’re going to love Carol’s story and she is a great storyteller. It’s all about the tenacity, perseverance, persistence and downright stubbornness it sometimes takes to do what you were born to do. It’s a wild ride in so many ways.

Thank you so much for listening and, by all means, please leave a comment below with any thoughts you have. We love listener feedback. Also, we have a companion publication on Medium, which has its own unique material related to this and all of our episodes. (photo: Martine Giroux)

Scratch Mitchell joined the Royal Canadian Air Force right out of school and in doing so, became a third generation fighter pilot: his grandfather had flown over 400 missions in Spitfires in World War II, and is father had flown CF-101 Voodoos in the Seventies. But even with this pedigree, it was still with some trepidation and a hint of rebelliousness that he signed up. That was to kickstart a series of events that would eventually lead him to become an RCAF CF-18 Hornet demonstration pilot – the pilots of rare skill that would be called up on to show off the aircraft at the very limit of its performance.

It would also lead him to two tours with the RCAF Snowbirds, one of the best and most respected precision jet aerobatic teams in the world. He served first as a team member and then eventually returned as Team Lead. He quickly found out that this new role would not only require the absolute best of his flying skills, but also demanded his natural leadership abilities in a very difficult period for the team in the face of tragedy. By every account Scratch was well on his way to becoming a ‘lifer’ in the military from whence he would retire at a very senior rank. All of his professional efforts, both in the air and on the ground, pointed clearly in that direction.

Stunningly, Scratch then made a totally counterintuitive decision – he had discovered during his time as an air show performer had awakened a passion that was to eventually prove every bit as compelling as his early desire to fly. He wanted to act, produce and direct for television and the movies. He was contemplating walking away from a perfectly great military career where the future was certain – if not a little predictable. He was walking into the unknown, into territory that while intriguing was completely new territory for him. At that critical fork-in-the-road, he unpredictably chose the path less travelled.

He initially took on the duties of First Officer at a well-known commercial airline. He figured he was embarking on a likely decade-long pursuit of that ‘second chapter’ in his life where he would have to find a steady income to cover the uncertainty of his new career. To his surprise and delight, he waited just nine months: Discovery Channel picked up Airshow, a documentary series about life on the commerical airshow circuit, in which Scratch not only produced, but featured heavily as a member of the Patriots Jet Team. He was instantly captivated by the process and catapulted into the entertainment business where he remains to this day.

We covered a wide range of subjects with Scratch: from that amazing day when three generations of Mitchell fighter pilots flew together in the skies over Cold Lake, Alberta. We talk about his tours with the Snowbird and the CF-18 demontration team, and then move on to his decision to wind up his career with the RCAF and become an entertainment polymath: actor, producer and director. We also talk about his plans for the future and what advice he might offer to those who want to live the life he has led. We even talk about the pitfalls of celebrity, like the he was stalked down in an airport parking lot by a zealous podcast producer who wanted him on his show. Scratch is a highly articulate storyteller who possesses that rare combination of superb technical skill and the soul of a poet. It’s a discussion you really don’t want to miss.

To understand what makes this talented filmmaker tick, we chose three of his films as a means of exploring his remarkable career in this in-depth interview:

We start with Urban Outlaw, Moscovici’s profile of Magnus Walker, an iconoclast of the Porsche world and a legend in his own right. Moscovici knew he had the subject for his next project the instant he saw Walker profiled on the pages of Total 911, a Porsche magazine based in the UK. Tamir was instantly drawn to the fact that Walker didn’t look like any Porsche guy he had ever seen before  —  he was more like somebody he would find on the set of one of his films rather than restoring highly sought after sports cars in downtown Los Angeles. The resulting film has wide audience appeal, well beyond the usual gear-heads you would expect. It’s what Moscovici intended  —  a mere car film was too easy. The result illustrates Walker’s philosophy which mirrors the filmmaker’s: you can do what you love and still put bread on the table. And then some.

Kaz: Pushing the Virtual Divide is Moscovici’s feature-length documentary about Kazunori Yamauchi, the ghost-like genius behind the Gran Turismo driving simulator franchise. As with Walker, the appeal of this film goes well beyond the video game community that is was largely intended to attract. Kaz is the story of a beautiful obsession and quest for perfection in a digital world, bringing the same zen-like qualities and dedication to craftsmanship usually reserved for more traditional Japanese arts. Moscovici knits together a dazzling array of diverse elements for a finished film which is mesmerizing, thought provoking and highly entertaining. And Moscovici returns to the theme of work that goes beyond a mere means of earning money and paying the bills — it can be a calling.

We complete our study with the curiously named Painting Coconuts the film about David Beattie who, at mid-life, was forced to re-think his whole life plan after being laid-off from his conventional Detroit desk job. Once again, Moscovici focuses on the passion that Beattie infused into the next chapter of his life, which was to return to a boyhood obsession of his own: slot car racing. But these are not the usual, snap together, black plastic variety from our Christmases as kids. Rather Beattie’s tracks are superbly detailed, entirely bespoke works of art that are simply stunning to behold. Beattie can’t keep up with demand from a global customer base. He also talks about the importance of finding a vocation as opposed to just a job. Do what you love and the rewards — monetary and otherwise — will eventually come.

Watching these films and in talking with Moscovici about them, we finally had that ‘ah-ha’ moment  —  Tamir consistently returns to the theme of a passion for craft as a way of life and as a way of making a living. Moscovici’s philosophy, as articulated by the subjects of his films and his making of them, is that you can do both in a seemingly effortless manner.

Dr. Sean Morrison at the Children’s Medical Research Insitute in Dallas, Texas. In his case, the one-hundred-and-fifty large  ones— and two empty floors of an office tower — were the resources he received to start an entirely new organization, the Children’s Medical Research Institute at UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. It was one of the largest offers in the history of academia. More importantly, it was an entirely blank canvas onto which he could paint the research institute of his remarkable imagination. When asked what he thought about the enormity of the challenge that lay before him at that time, he remembers coming up with just one word:

“Cool!”

It succinctly and yet accurately sums up both the man and his work. It all started, when he was just a kid, with an award-winning high school science project catalyzed with a summer science program called SHAD. That eventually resulted in the agricultural biotech startup Endogro Systems which Sean co-founded with his friend Brent Walker. They were so young that while they had signed a shareholders agreement, they were too young to be legally bound by it. Endogro’s promise was enormous  —  to change agriculture by replacing chemical fertilizers with a biological equivalent to increase crop yields. He continued with that work as he entered Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia to study biology and chemistry. However, Endogro was eventually dealt a cruel blow by the 1987 stock market crash. With that, there was no way to raise the necessary capital to take Endogro to the next stage of growth.

This inflection point gave Sean the opportunity to think deliberately about where he wanted to take his career next. He came to a startling conclusion: if he was going to devote his life to being the best he could be at something, it was going to be in a field that engendered a truly “visceral” reaction in the public it served. For him, that meant just one thing: medical research. If that wasn’t a sufficiently hard target, he decided to focus on the most intractable problems of cancer therapies and in particular the groundbreaking use of stem cells in that fight. After Dalhousie, he studied first at Stanford with Dr. Irv Weissman and then at Caltech with Professor David Anderson, both world-renowned experts in the field. He spent more than a decade at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor continuing the work as a member of the faculty. He was happy there not only in the work he was undertaking and its impact but, as he half-jokingly says, “there is more hockey in Ann Arbor than there is anywhere else in the world.”

Then the call from UT Southwestern came and eventually the dream offer to start his own lab — from scratch. We sat down with Dr. Sean Morrison at his now up-and-running, built-out lab. The interview is a highly engaging story of a remarkable career. What’s more, you get a strong sense that you’re catching Sean mid-arc; that there is so much of the story yet to be told.
 
Sean Morrison is endowed with many talents but it’s the intersection of three that make him unique: he’s a gifted scientist endowed with amazing technical skills coupled with an ability to attract top talent to form teams “optimized for discovery and innovation.” Add to that a lifelong history of entrepreneurship rooted in the belief that science for its own sake doesn’t help humanity; discoveries have to get out into the public and solve real, human problems. Finally, Sean is an extraordinarily articulate communicator. Not only is he able to take his enormously complex field of study and make it understandable for anybody, he does it was an enthusiasm you can almost feel.
 
Join us for our in-depth interview with Dr. Sean Morrison. He makes science, well, as he says…“Cool!”

In a serendipitous turning point at the end of high school, he was first accepted to Canada’s National Theatre School which would have likely put him on the path to more formal live theatre. In a seemingly cruel turn of events at the time, he was contacted a week later and told the coveted spot had been eliminated due to budget cuts. In a move that was to become a hallmark of his highly successful career, he did not dwell on the disappointment but rather made a quick, positive pivot to attend Studio 58 in Vancouver. It was to lead him to a decade of steady work on stage and screen in his home town.

In a second turn of seemingly random events, Yorke headed to Los Angeles  —  Hollywood  —  not with a dewey-eyed dream of stardom but rather just the simple need to get away for a while after a heartrending breakup. A few months in the California sun seemed to be the right prescription to get him back on track. More than twenty-five years later, he’s still there, married with two kids and a veteran of feature films, hit television shows, over 150 television commercials and many projects on the stage. By every conceivable definition, Wayne Yorke is a true rarity —  somebody who went to Hollywood and made it.

In this wide ranging interview, we talk with Wayne about his career journey including his early discovery and subsequent, lifelong fascination with Hollywood’s Golden Age: the one populated with Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and the Marx Brothers. We go on to talk about his early days learning the craft, through to his first professional engagements and then to international recognition in television and movies. Along the way, we talk about the keys to success and happiness in Hollywood. We also talk about the changing nature of the entertainment business as it struggles to keep up with changes in technology, the business environment and consumer tastes. He also provides great advice for aspiring actors considering the same path.
 
Wayne is quick to credit good fortune for the amazing life he has led. But in talking with him, you get a much stronger sense that he has a vision uncluttered by competing professional ambitions. He knew what he wanted and has never lost that focus over the course of his life. Every gig, no matter how big or small, he throws himself into abandon and infectious joy and we are all the richer for it.

Join us as we talk with Wayne Thomas Yorke, and take a little bit of that journey with him.