November 18, 2023 • 57 mins
Dive into the intricate world of personal branding and content creation with Kris Krug and Chris Perillo, as they unravel the secrets to maintaining authenticity and fostering community engagement in the digital landscape.
In this episode, Kris and Chris discuss:
- The art of developing a compelling personal brand.
- Innovative approaches to content creation that truly reflect your identity.
- Navigating the challenges of maintaining authenticity in a crowded digital space.
- Effective strategies for building and nurturing a community.
This podcast is a treasure trove for anyone eager to understand the dynamics of creating a meaningful online presence and cultivating genuine connections.
Stay tuned for a deep dive into the digital realm, where authenticity and engagement are the cornerstones of success.
Follow us for more insights into personal branding, content creation, and community building:
- Kris Krug: [Your Podcast/Website Link]
- Chris Perillo: [His Podcast/Website Link]
#PersonalBranding #ContentCreationExpert #AuthenticEngagement #DigitalCommunity #Podcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey, what's up, Internet? It's Chris Krug.
(00:02):
I'm checking in here today with Chris Perillo.
What's up, man?
I'm on my second cup of decaf.
What's up with that? Decaf?
Because apparently I can no longer buy caffeinated beverages.
I realized I was too excitable, and I said that.
You're done.
You are one of the highest energy guys.
I know you can't kick the morning ritual of the coffee or something.
Yeah, that's the problem.
(00:23):
My body couldn't take caffeine anymore a couple years ago,
and it is the ritual.
I just enjoy that.
I've always wondered who decaf exists for.
I'm like, get in or get out, but...
For me, I'm vegan.
And so I have it with a heavy cream alternative.
Like, it's made of coconut milk, and it's just a nice, rich, hearty beverage
(00:43):
that I have in the morning.
I'm so intrigued by that.
You're a vegan?
Yeah, I flipped about six years ago.
I've been hanging out with some vegans lately.
You guys are an interesting bunch.
We're stealthy like that.
You don't realize it until we pick up a carrot.
And you know we're vegan, because we'll tell you.
Cross-fitting veganism, right?
(01:03):
And AI.
You're a prompt ending, and you're an cross-fitting vegan, man.
Are you one of those kind of vegans that actually eats real food?
Carrots and stuff?
No.
I'm a junk food vegan, right?
I'll eat if it's not animal-based.
The reason, or the primary reason I switched was I was 44 or 45
and just realized that I'm not getting younger
(01:24):
and had always been worried about my heart health specifically.
And that was the one thing I'd never tried.
And my cholesterol came into normal levels,
and I was able to balance it.
I still eat a lot of garbage that I shouldn't eat.
It's without the guilt.
And it's knowing that I'm on a better path now
than I was five years ago.
I'm vegan for life.
I went to this vegan dumpling place last night.
(01:46):
In the middle of the night, it was a Speakeasy.
It was the craziest place.
It was an all-vegan dumpling place.
And then we ordered pork shumai, essentially.
It was so realistic and so incredible
that the vegan that I was with couldn't even eat it at all.
They got meated out on how not vegan it was.
I'm telling you, you could have something that is,
quote unquote, vegan, right?
(02:07):
Or plant-based or whatever the marketing term is of the day
and not know it.
I could give someone a fully plant-based food product, right?
And they wouldn't know.
If you didn't tell them, they wouldn't know.
And I can guarantee here in the States,
they're very much of the mindset,
it's vegan, therefore it's evil.
You don't realize just how much garbage you eat
(02:28):
that you wouldn't realize that by replacing it
with something that might be just maybe a little better.
And the complaint is, well, that's all processed food.
And I do the whole, remember the animated GIF
of the pug that's sitting there and it goes,
that's my reaction.
Hang on, you're getting on my case
about eating processed food, Mr. McDonald's?
Okay.
Totally.
Okay.
Hilarious.
(02:49):
All right.
My big epiphany this week has been like,
you don't gotta be a vegan to eat vegan food.
Eating vegan food sometimes or vegetarian food.
And that doesn't make you anything other than an omnivore.
That's it.
I feel like it's the right path for me.
And I've got my body, I've got proof that it works.
Yeah, the proof is in the pudding,
(03:10):
you are like 85 years old.
Now you look better than ever.
That's the cryogenic chamber.
The proof is in the pudding, but I can't eat pudding.
I haven't found an on dairy pudding yet.
Oh, hooves and snouts?
Yolans, yeah.
Can't do gelatin.
This has been the longest, most meandering pre-roll
for a video that's about tech.
But the reason why I invited Chris on the show,
(03:32):
I went to his conference in 2006 called Gnome Dex.
It was a fucking amazing community.
But dude, who is the locker gnome and what was Gnome Dex?
I keep wondering that myself.
I keep wondering that myself.
I've been on such a...
As old as I am, because I just turned 50 this year,
(03:55):
in internet years, I feel like I'm even older.
Because yeah, I did start...
You are absolutely 10,000 years older in internet years.
That's true.
In the mid 90s, that's how locker gnome came to be,
an email newsletter.
I would find interesting websites.
We've come full circle.
I'm still finding interesting websites.
It's just they happen to be...
AI can do this, AI can do that.
And you can do this and that.
(04:17):
I was doing that back in the mid 90s.
Yeah.
Not AI, but discovery.
I'm all about putting these stories down on the permanent record.
This historical stuff.
So no, tell me again the story of who is the locker gnome?
Me.
I have no other way of defining it apart from...
It was a high school nickname and I needed a web domain.
(04:37):
And I was stupid and registered locker gnome instead of a single word domain.com.
And I could have been retired eons ago.
I started podcasting in 2006 and then gave it up for 17 years.
I totally know what you mean.
Yeah.
Chris has been around since the beginning,
he's building websites in the 90s,
lived through the web 2.0 content revolution.
(04:59):
Here you are again messing with AI and all the kind of newfangled shit coming out
and reinventing yourself once again.
You have to though.
And I don't see... AI is just a buzzword.
Let me take a step sideways here.
I don't catch every single trend that comes down the pike.
I just totally ignored crypto and blockchain and NFTs and web 3.
(05:27):
I get it.
I understand its value, but it didn't resonate with me.
When I...
Some people pivoted, right?
They went from yay crypto to yay AI.
A lot of people.
I don't know where you're going with this.
I walked the same path and I believe the reason is probably because you're more of a content creator than an entrepreneur.
I was watching your thing on Geekwire the other day where you were talking about never receiving investment and bootstrapping the ground up.
(05:53):
You're like, I wouldn't even know what to do with the money if it came and they gave it to me.
I think the people that pivoted from web 3 straight into AI were guys trying to build internet businesses specifically more than people who are just like producing content for the love of it.
AI woke me from my slumber.
Pandemic was ending.
I was starting to reinvent myself as a photographer.
(06:13):
AI comes around and completely woke me because of its ability to specifically around creating stuff, putting it out there, finding my voice, building an audience around that, getting it out into the world.
It was the stuff that really got me going again.
That's something that always excites me about technology.
I don't get excited for the sake of it, right?
A new iPhone comes out.
I don't get all that excited.
(06:34):
I'm using an iPhone right now connected to the Mac by way of continuity camera, but hardware doesn't do it for me.
Software does it for me.
And specifically what that software does, what it enables.
Don't tell me a feature.
Tell me its impact.
That's where the excitement in me is.
And you're right.
I feel like in the past, I used to be very content minded.
Everything I looked at, I figured out, OK, that could be content.
(06:56):
This is before the term, quote unquote, influencer was around.
Sure.
And if you want to label me that, fine.
I'm not saying you will.
If I bridle at it because I feel influence is a byproduct of creation and I'm not being all.
Who you tweeting about it?
I know Kardashian, that's for sure.
It does bring with it some kind of negative connotations of like,
(07:17):
you know, can I speak to your manager?
Don't you know I'm a restaurant critic influencer here?
Yeah, that doesn't rub me the right way.
I fell into entrepreneurialism as a way to make the content work.
Chris, you're talking about reinventing.
I don't. It's hard to do.
And I've tried over and over again.
(07:38):
And, you know, the world has changed.
The Internet has changed.
And I've had people ask, you know, going all the way back, even before we knew each other,
say, hey, why don't you do something like you did at tech TV?
Because I used to host a cable television show two decades ago.
And then I remind people, I said, that was two decades ago, dude.
They're like, what?
No, like it was two decades ago.
(07:59):
Yeah, you're wrong, Rob.
But they ask, why can't it be that way again?
I'm like, because the Internet exists.
And you've got YouTube and Twitch and Kicknow and so many algorithms,
either accelerating or punishing you for how you do things.
And that is where I have been tripped up for the longest time.
I know. I've heard you ranting a lot lately about the algorithm.
(08:21):
For the people who get it, I get it.
And I understand how it forces everybody to up their game,
but it becomes that much more of a challenge to play the game.
And the enjoyment of the game is not me.
You're explaining everybody else into what we're talking about here.
So let me try to set the stage.
You tell me where I'm wrong.
So to be an Internet guy and influence our YouTube sensation,
to do the thing, the reinvention that you're talking about now
(08:43):
requires like doing serious SEO keyword monitoring
and making videos based on what people want to watch
as opposed to what you are passionate about or interested in or whatever.
So you're literally doing two hours of research in the morning
trying to figure out what people are searching for on YouTube
before you make your videos and you're making videos
that adapt directly to those people.
That's the model these days, right?
(09:04):
Generally speaking, although I'll go a step further,
it's not so much even that because there's stiff competition,
but the video itself, at least in relation to YouTube,
engagement time is everything because if you can have,
I've got like three hundred and thirty thousand subscribers on YouTube.
But the problem is, if the first few people who see that video
don't engage with the video,
most of those subscribers will never see it hit their feet
(09:26):
because YouTube will basically punish you
if you do not create a video that improves engagement
because that's what YouTube wants.
It wants engagement.
It doesn't want creators.
It wants engagement.
And there's a difference.
So pardon, but I don't really swallow the tripe of
we're all about creators.
I'm like, no, you're all about money, dude.
Creators just so happen to be the way that you make your money.
Let's just put it on the table.
(09:47):
That's the way it is.
Because otherwise, I would not have had to basically stop
because I just couldn't years ago. This would have been about it.
Ten years ago is really when algorithmic feeds became the norm in social media.
And you might remember you reference 2006 blogs, podcasts.
You very much had to roll your own audience.
(10:08):
You had to press the flesh and you had to get out
and you had to make legitimate connections and build relationships.
Now it's turnkey and now it's scalable.
And now that's what made these companies like Facebook, X or Twitter back then.
Right.
Even though the beginning of Twitter, there was no algorithm.
It was just this home feed where you were following literally everybody on Twitter.
(10:33):
It was different.
And creating content, I just fell naturally into social media.
I'm like, this is great.
This is wonderful.
Oh my God.
And then they turned it off.
Here, like Facebook, come on in.
Come on, build your audience here.
Build it here.
I'm like, yeah, okay, that's great.
This is awesome.
Oh my God, this is so great.
And then they turned it off and you wonder what the hell happened.
(10:55):
And I would say there for me, there has been a dark period for a number of years
and it's taken a lot for me to get my bearings again.
I've done a lot of soul searching to figure out what it is that I want to do,
what it is that I can do, what it is that I do well.
And went working for Intel for about four years.
(11:15):
And I'm still on the job market because I feel like I could
got a lot of experience to lend someone or something.
But until that happens, I've got to invest in myself.
And the best way to invest in myself is to double down on the assets that I have
and play the game the way it needs to be played.
So I'm basically having to dive into savings
and pay for what needs to happen in order to make what it is that I want to do happen.
(11:38):
Totally.
In the sense that I might be good in front of the camera,
but I'm not good at figuring out the YouTube thing the way it's played right now.
So I've got to outsource editing.
I've got to outsource a lot of that optimization and trajectory.
I've got to even outsource writing despite being a writer
because writing is all about the engagement that you get.
You have to hit certain points in order to flatline, which is good with the engagement.
(12:02):
You want that.
You need that because that's the only way.
The only way I'm going to be able to take hold again.
It's no longer sufficient just to do a video.
That's the bare basis.
Wow.
So you are being very strategic about the videos you're making.
Talk to me a little bit about the strategy that you piece back to.
Actually, before you do, I wanted to say one thing.
The pandemic for me was very much, I think, what it was for you as well.
(12:23):
I was able to do some soul searching.
I was pretty much a perpetual motion machine right up until the pandemic started.
I came back from a six-month trip doing photo shoots in Africa
a month before the pandemic started and everything went from 60 to just zero overnight.
And I rented a farm and I grew some vegetables and some animals and some ganja.
(12:44):
And I had a great time, but I really, things dried up all the way.
And I did do some soul searching during that time.
And I wasn't even sure things were ever going to fire back up like they had before.
I literally had given up the idea of being a world travel photographer,
traveling around doing stuff.
I just, I wasn't sure if that was ever going to happen again.
(13:04):
And as it has started to fire back up, I'm going to say since last December for me and stuff,
it's been a process of very intentionally putting the pieces back together in a way that like
I feel a little bit more in control of instead of like it controlling me or whatever.
Chris, man, I feel that pain.
I so much, I've got a family to support, right?
(13:25):
A wife, child.
And I was always, I was an entrepreneur, right?
I carved out my own career path before there was a career path.
That's not braggadocious.
It's just flat fact.
It's undeniable for 25 years.
It's just, it's what I did or tried to do.
Yeah. You've been an independent, creative publisher on the internet for 25 years.
There's no way.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, but that's, that was the hardest part is like the wanting to tether myself,
(13:52):
not to a previous success, because there's always what can I do next?
What can I do?
How can I do this differently?
The games changed.
How do I play it now?
And what's the best way to do it?
And so that's hence the idea of again, going to work for Intel, which is great.
It was steady income, which I never had.
In my life, but it helped pay the bills.
And that's where coming back to doing things.
(14:15):
How could I do things on my terms instead of the world forcing me to deal with it on
their terms?
And that's what I found even working on LinkedIn or working through LinkedIn.
I hate LinkedIn.
I absolutely loathe it.
There's absolutely nothing I liked about it.
I hate it.
I absolutely hate LinkedIn because it's just, it's not my place.
(14:35):
There's nothing warm about it.
I feel like I have to wear a tie every time I scroll on the feed.
I'm like, people actually enjoy this.
I'm like, I am not that guy.
OK, I agree with you for the most part.
But in the last six months, as it started to take off again, I found that I've been
able to insert my pirate messages into what's usually a pretty stuffy environment and
finding like it works for engagement.
(14:57):
Like it might not be the best representation of my professional brand.
But I'm hopping in there without my suit and tie on and just being my renegade pirate
self, I feel like maybe I am injecting a little bit more awesomeness into the LinkedIn
world or something like that.
So here's what I'm doing.
Feel free to take the ball and run with it.
But like I was doing, I still am doing these little shorts where like the tech news of
(15:20):
the day, Amazon announces something or Microsoft does this or heaven for Elon Musk decides
to whatever.
And I'll do a shoot it live to tape.
I'll set up my my phone and just shoot 60 seconds done.
It's a package.
I could upload it to this channel that whatever I could put it, whatever.
So I'm putting that despite it not really being linked any.
(15:40):
Yeah, it is more like career building and whatnot.
Sometimes I hit a hot button topic and it resonates and then you get responses, which
of course drives engagement.
And what I'm doing with that is less about I'm not making any money doing these little
video shorts, but there's a chain.
My thinking is, again, controlling your own destiny with content.
I'm thinking someone's going to hit that.
(16:03):
They don't know who I am or maybe they haven't seen me in a while.
And they just so happen to find there's a career opportunity or job opportunity or a
for hire opportunity.
I'm like, we'd be really good for being a spokesperson or helping us engage with this
guy.
And I will have put out instead of continuing to send out resume only to be rejected by AI
or having a resume that honestly, my resume is garbage.
(16:27):
It is hot garbage.
And people say, oh, you got to optimize.
I'm like, I the last job I might have had was was like in the mid 90s, I was doing Pizza
Hut deliveries.
That doesn't play well.
If you look at an entrepreneur's resume, like it just looks like they did 25 years of nothing
(16:48):
when they did 25 years of survival, which is everything.
But to translate that and cram it into a job opportunity, it's difficult to go through
a hiring manager who doesn't have the context when they're looking at this sheet of paper.
It just doesn't add up.
It just I'm going to put myself in the shoes of the hiring manager.
I know I've been like sitting ringside on this path that you've been on there for a
(17:09):
while.
I've been listening to you talk about your search and your frustrations with it and trying
to put your round peg in the square hole.
Don't you think that maybe those hiring managers are just thinking that you're a bit of a wild
card and or your brand and your personality is bigger than almost anybody that could hire
you, I think might possibly have been a part of it.
(17:30):
Whereas you're like, yo, I'll bring my three hundred thousand subscribers to your world.
Think about how much intrinsic benefit there is to me doing something like that.
They're like, whoa, you're always going to be bigger than us.
No, I've never.
No, I've never used that on the resume.
At least I've always put down practical experience
that I feel is applicable to any particular role that I might apply for, whether it's
(17:54):
content, community.
Like, I don't want you to be my spokesman for my company, but I'd be afraid the first
time I tell you something that you don't like, you're just going to bounce back into your
old amazing world anyway, because you're fucking good.
At least that's the impression that people might have from the outside.
So welcome to the problem.
Yeah, I know.
It's like I'm either under qualified or overqualified.
Now I know I'm running into ageism.
(18:15):
So it's an issue.
But what else am I going to do?
I've had this discussion with my dad recently.
You're going into savings.
I'm like, savings is going to be gone at some point.
And if I if I'm sitting here a year from now still wondering what's happening next, I will
have lost all that time.
(18:37):
Then the money would it may be dwindling faster, but at least there's an opportunity to turn
a thousand dollars into ten thousand.
And that's the best opportunity that I have with my resources right now is specifically
to reinvest in myself.
Absolutely.
In the thing that I feel is the most viable.
And that is specifically YouTube is where a lot of that's made.
(18:57):
And talk to me about the physical community stuff, too.
So I noticed you started convening people in Seattle again.
Yeah.
Again, when you're in between and you're trying to figure out where things going.
I've been fascinated by technology and being a creator and working with technology and
entrepreneurialism, all these things.
(19:18):
And I thought there's got to be other people who are equally as fascinated by these kinds
of conversations.
So effectively, yeah, I figured out if I just put a finer point on it, I could host an event
somewhere in Seattle, bring people together and have conversations.
So I've done two of them.
The next one's happening tomorrow.
It's free.
Hosted at the Microsoft Redmond reactor, free parking, free admission, free beverages.
(19:43):
Like it's not.
So my impression is, dude, you're bringing a lot of people together who want to talk
about stuff and share common interests.
Isn't that isn't there a business in there?
Yeah, there is.
But the thing is, you're like small potatoes.
It's not where you're going.
Yeah, it's not right now.
We're nowhere near escape velocity.
There were nowhere near what it might need to be.
(20:06):
And so if in many ways, I'm testing the waters, I'm like Jeremiah Owens doing down the Bay
Area, the Bay Area is known to be the Bay Area and things are happening in the last
two weeks has just exploded onto the scene.
He started holding those llama events or whatever.
He's getting a thousand people to sign up for him.
All of a sudden now he's publishing an A.I.
(20:27):
events around the world newsletter that's got thousands of subscribers.
He launched a Slack Slack channel.
All of a sudden, it's fucking blowing up and shit.
Like it feels like there is a bonafide value in bringing folks together around this shit.
And that's what I'm trying to lay the foundation for.
Talk to me about the other prongs of that strategy.
So you're doing YouTube, you're doing live events.
(20:47):
What are these other things that you feel like it's worthwhile investing yourself and
as you said, your savings in right now?
Yeah, I would say primarily the events.
I'm not really investing savings in them.
I'm trying to do that smart.
Yeah, but you're investing your life force in your life.
In a time in which you're reinventing yourself.
Yeah.
But I would say that in terms of that, if I had a focus, it would probably be YouTube and or video.
(21:12):
Talk to me about the strategy.
I want to know like what are you going to do?
Yeah.
People have always known me for on YouTube for doing YouTube video and framing me as they'll say I'm an OG because I was there in 2006 when everything kicked off.
You absolutely are the oest of genius.
I am.
But I have over the years have had other tech YouTubers like reference me is like this guy, Chris is the inspiration, whether it's Marquez Brownlee or Linus Sebastian on down the line.
(21:43):
I floated away from that because I just didn't double down on tech.
Honestly, I just didn't.
I didn't take the same path for better or for worse.
It just didn't.
It stopped working for me and it could have been that I was just burnt out on it at the time.
I just didn't do it the same way that other people did.
I didn't see it the same way other people did.
And I did not put as much emphasis on production as I should have.
(22:06):
And I tried my way to do things the way that I thought they were to be done.
And it just didn't work.
But where I work for a sec, what did you not when you said you didn't put enough emphasis on production?
What do you mean?
Back when again, you could just turn on a camera and then record a video and upload.
It's fine.
Anybody could do it.
But then almost overnight, people were up in their production game.
(22:28):
A lot.
Everything you see now is so super tight, so super highly edited, man.
My shit's all these one take, blah, blah, blah.
Let's have a conversation.
Yeah.
But even then, YouTube, it wants longer content.
But at the cost of choppy.
It's so it's I did not do what I should have done.
(22:53):
I don't regret doing what I did because ultimately I ended up here.
I do regret not thinking differently or thinking that it was always going to work the same way it always had.
And it clearly did not.
Now I'm thinking, OK, I know the problems I faced before I recognize and even the videos because this is only started in the past two weeks.
(23:17):
I found an editing team and an optimizer to help at least see if we produce a video.
Can we produce a video that people are interested in watching?
Are the existing subscriber base still active in the feedback that we've received from the great watch?
It's been very it's given me at least some amount of hope.
(23:40):
So the next stage is hiring a writer who is key on retention.
It uses humor, who does research, we're talking because I would rather write right here like a script writer.
Yeah, script writer.
And then basically the idea would be pick a topic that might be either relevant contemporaneously or have some evergreen value.
(24:03):
I could basically say to her, OK, let's go with this topic.
Let's try to shoot for 500 words, a thousand words, whatever it is, because the length of time is dependent on the content.
And then I do the idea would be I intro the video and then I launch into the voiceover and to do so to do that, it's less stressful because someone's done the writing to do that.
(24:26):
It's less stressful because someone else is doing the B roll.
And then all I'm able to then what I can do if on an economy of scale is I could theoretically crank out and.
Voiceovers a day and have that foundation, that's where have that the foundation is being laid or it is there.
Trying to rebuild on top of that is where I am now.
(24:48):
So I'm trying to move rapidly, but the way that gets scaled up is I'm just doing voiceovers.
And then at some point I'm able to hand off the baton to have another person also doing voiceovers or doing other content on top of that to introduce other personalities or other people.
You follow Philip DeFranco?
Oh, yeah, way back.
Didn't he do a switch like this where he he used to put his face on the screen and all the visuals were here next to him.
(25:13):
But then didn't he swap it out for a while where he took his face out and had only the quote unquote B roller visual wouldn't surprise me.
But I don't. But I think he went backwards.
I think he brought his face back probably because of engagement.
Like when you train your audience one way or another, this is where I'm on the precipice of it's just a fine mix.
Right. It's a mix between what's going to work, what is it?
He's my gold standard right now for the punchiness of the way the cuts happen and stuff.
(25:37):
The audio, the fucking it's like he's on Adderall, like a thousand percent.
Just like this fucking nonstop flow of amazing fucking shit.
Yep. And that's the thing.
When you've got enough of a staff and enough of a team built around you, you can get to that point.
And I know that it's not happening immediately for me.
But that's the direction I want to be able to go.
(25:58):
Because back in the day, Locker Gnome had I had employees, I had people or contract laborers to help.
We were doing tech video every day.
We were turning it around, the news and stuff.
And it just didn't the writing. It wasn't what it needed to be.
The content wasn't what it needed to be at the time.
And people said that they missed it, but it just never took off on YouTube.
The format for that vertical just never landed.
(26:22):
And I've seen other people do it far more successfully than I could have.
So I'm looking for mixing my persona with my interests with what is going to resonate with the audience.
And so I feel like I'm going to tilt closer to a watch mojo style with geekiness.
I'm not familiar with that one in particular, but I was going to ask you to hit me up with a few people.
(26:42):
Upgrade my heroes here a little bit. Who should I be watching?
Well, watch mojo is not really a hero, per se.
It's a lot of the top 10 things you didn't know about things that come with tech bait.
And that I feel has got an evergreen presence.
And then that's also the thing that allows me to not have to stress as much because there's just there's only so much I can do.
(27:11):
There's only so much knowledge I have.
I don't you can ask me to rattle off the specs on this MacBook that I use.
And I'm like, I know it's got to be.
I don't think that's why people watch your shit, bro.
I think you are personality plus your venn diagram of interest.
That's what people are coming for.
That's my hope.
And so I even steered with I just got the I'm using the new iPhone 15 Pro Max to record this or to stream into this.
(27:37):
I've got it connected as a webcam.
And there's a billion unboxing is just people have seen this before.
I'm like, what can I do?
And so I've done in the past unedited fun boxings or slightly edited fun boxings and they never really resonated.
But now that I was able to take that same crazy, wacky, what the hell is this guy on experience and really turn it on its ear with an editing style that is just is what is going on here.
(28:07):
It resonates and it catches on.
So I have a chance to have that voice while still serving up the meat and potatoes.
And then have you published any of these style ones yet?
Oh, yeah, they're up like, yeah, I haven't taught one.
I want to make sure I want to check it out.
It's all good.
The but yeah, that's I still have a personality and humor is key.
(28:28):
But then even then, there are times I got a little more I get a little more serious.
And those are the longer ones like the ones where I'm going off on how Apple software quality controls absolute hot.
I like those words, man.
I really do. I find the algorithm pushing me to be more opinionated than I want to be sometimes.
Like, it really feels like it pushes you into having a fucking hot take on everything or whatever.
I do. But see, that's the problem, Chris.
(28:50):
Everybody's got a hot take.
And so it's difficult to establish.
And I had this conversation with his name's he's asked on social.
He recently left T-Mobile after being there for 20 years.
He was the content producer and for what they had done.
(29:11):
And he was even remarking that everybody's got a platform, but there's no expertise.
There's no gravitas.
But they're getting the traffic.
Right.
And we've got no knowledge, no perspective at all.
And at least I might have that going for me.
That's great.
I've got a laundry list of people who might say I did YouTube for this because I saw you.
(29:32):
I did that because that's great.
It doesn't pay the bills.
I'm happy to put myself out there to get people doing what they need to get doing.
But I got to make sure I'm taking care of myself, too.
That's the challenge with.
If you don't mind showing a little of the sausage making, what does pay the bills?
What's the most profitable?
Sweet. Is it you?
Is it the YouTube monetization?
(29:52):
Sponsorship.
And we've currently got an active sponsorship for the stuff that I do on Twitch.
Twenty seven.
And that's where someone's yo, dude, you're now the logitech guy.
I'm going to give you 10 grand to be the logitech guy.
That's a sponsorship.
Yeah, but not like that.
Not exactly.
You got to do 10,000 be great.
But we use StreamYard to broadcast 24 seven on a 3D printing channel that runs constantly.
(30:15):
And then I also use it on my personal feed as well.
We use StreamYard specifically.
And so then I negotiated a sponsorship because they were really happy with how they were using
the platform at that time.
So in many ways to come back to, you know, where does AI play into it?
Where does the events play into it?
Sponsorship.
Where does that the tech videos you might make something with ads if you get lucky.
(30:36):
But where that where you really take hold is when you are able to start nailing down sponsors
and sponsorship.
So we've been esoteric philosophical.
I'd be surprised if anyone who doesn't want to make their own channel is still with us
at this point.
But I do want to get into some a couple other things.
Will you hit me with some like some tips and tools around software you've been using lately?
Specific AI stuff.
(30:57):
What have you been using you're fucking stoked about?
And I can go one for one with you if you want.
But rattle off some stuff that that you really are.
People should check out.
They're probably the common names, right?
Although maybe like a lot of folks are still just dipping their toes.
The one that I really the one that I started to use the other day,
(31:17):
and I think I'm going to use it a bit more than I used to.
I ideogram dot AI.
Yeah, ideogram is like a mid journey or like a dolly.
But you can put words and images.
Well, you can actually say shit.
And I feel that the images are far more usable.
Like it's just it's these are it's a real like logos and graphics and merch shit.
(31:40):
They're definitely more usable in that way.
Yeah.
So what do you even make it in there?
Oh, I will often do a as I find different sites that I find interesting as a creator
or like an entrepreneur, I'll share them.
So I'll stack up usually about 25 of them a week
and I'll share five of them a day in my various social feeds on mastodon and threads.
(32:03):
But on LinkedIn, I'll post all 25 at once because otherwise it is.
Are the 25 tools?
Yeah, tools that I'm that might be newer that are just hitting my radar.
Yeah.
And they may be useful to others.
It helps somebody else.
Great.
Gamma is another one that I really like.
Sorry, one sec.
How are you using an ideogram?
Oh, just to generate images to go along with those posts.
(32:25):
Oh, cool. I'll do like a robot artist or something that I find
kind of interesting to mix this up with that.
Yeah.
There are a dime a dozen now.
It's still fun to do.
Yeah, I've been just using them to make logos for new project ideas, little icon graphics
and stuff for different like tools I've been developing and stuff and just messing around
(32:46):
with that team logos and just ideating with it a little bit.
Or like phrases that come through my mind, like little quotes or phrases just fun to
come into ideogram, generate an image, print it out, stick it on the wall, a little fucking
inspiration, de-inspiration, the quotes or whatever.
De-motivationals.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what else you got on your tools list?
(33:07):
I mentioned gamma.
That's an easy way to build a website or a deck or a presentation with just a few details.
It's probably the easiest tool out there to use.
What kind of websites would you make with it?
Tell me what you're doing.
Well, I did one because if anybody ever asked for, hey, could you consult?
What could you consult on?
I had to have something that was organized.
(33:27):
And so I built a site that basically spoke to the things that I would be able to do.
Do you pay for that one?
What's that?
Do you pay for gamma?
No, it's free.
I mean, you're able to do the things you want to do without paying for it.
Yeah.
Cool.
What else you got on your queue?
Yeah, the mid journey, of course,
(33:49):
chat GPT takes a lot of that cognitive load off for what it is.
What are you doing with GPT?
I had been doing YouTube tags and descriptions.
Anytime I need to flush out something that I just don't want to write.
And have you talked with advanced code analysis yet?
(34:09):
No.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God, dude.
It's pretty amazing.
I'm sure.
Here's your non-developer pro tip about advanced code analyzer.
It allows you to attach documents and files
so you don't even need to use the coding component of it.
Just by choosing it as the model you have,
you can attach like eight PDFs to it and be like,
yo, summarize these eight PDFs, find interconnected themes and output me a summary.
(34:34):
Instead of cutting and pasting into the main token window,
you can upload PowerPoints, Word docs, anything like that.
So you don't have to be a developer to use the advanced data analysis function.
Interesting.
I haven't seen.
I haven't tried.
I haven't had a use case for it yet.
I wish I did.
How about GPT plugins?
What are a couple of your faves?
I don't have any.
I don't pay for GPT.
(34:55):
I don't think I'm at that point where I could warrant the cost.
I pay for mid-journey now, but I may actually stop again
because I'm finding ideogram to yield just as good results or even using Dali.
Dude, all this shit is moving so quickly that it is really hard to keep abreast.
(35:16):
So I'm sure you maybe know this already,
but I may be canceling my mid-journey subscription as well, even though I love it
because Dali 3 is coming out and it's coming out inside GPT.
So the same interface you use to do your text prompting now in GPT,
they're just going to essentially take mid-journey but better
and port it all right on in there to the GPT interface.
And that's probably when I'll I've been debating it,
(35:39):
but that's when I wanted to see about using ideogram to try these things.
And I'm very happy with ideogram. Have you have you fucked with Poe?
Have you seen Poe come across? So you remember Trillium.
Remember back in the day when there was like 10 instant messaging platforms?
Oh, Trillium. Trillium.
Yeah. Yeah. So you had to have Trillium to talk to all your different friends across
(36:01):
all your different networks. So there's one called Poe now and it's like an AI dashboard.
And it's got llama and palm and GPT and clode and mid-journey and all these things
stacked in one interface and you check one and then you ask your question to that.
Then you check the next one, ask your question to that.
It's a great way of seeing like what the different models are good at.
Yeah. I heard that for the creative writing thing, dude.
(36:23):
Claude has been kicking GPT's butt when it comes.
I use right now. Here's my secret sauce.
I'll take this video. I'll grab the transcript.
I'll drop it into GPT and I'll be like, yo, GPT, make detailed notes of my talk with Chris Perillo.
It'll and pull out all relevant poll quotes like things I can use as quotes by themselves.
(36:43):
So it goes through and generates this very detailed list.
But if I was to actually ask that now to turn it into prose, it fucking screws the pooch, man.
It doesn't sound great. It sounds like AI, even despite some other cool hacks I have
from making it sound like my voice. So that's when I pull it into the clode
and have it do the writing there. And it's two different people.
It's like having a high schooler write it versus that. What is that tool?
(37:06):
The tool is called Po, P-O-E. And the creative writing AI that I prefer is Anthropics Clode.
OK. C-L-A-U-D-E.
My French friend said I was saying it wrong, so hopefully I'm saying it right now.
Yeah, it's been super cool. And that's my only exposure to Google's Palm model and
(37:27):
Facebook's Llama model, both of which I just wanted to tinker with or whatever.
And so I've been having a lot of fun with Po.
Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't done any of this. My God.
I know. I wouldn't have to explore Po.
Oh, man. Yeah, it's cool. It just gives me this window into these different models
and starts helping me think more, not just about like how does GPT work,
(37:50):
but how does AI work in general? They are not necessarily synonymous.
Wow. All right. What else is on your tool list?
I really don't use a lot. I don't. What do you record in audio and video in these days?
No, no. It's all I handed off to human being.
Yes. I'm sure they might have their set of tools, but I'm not really production minded.
(38:12):
Here's another one of my fucking so fun, empowering pro tools is
and it's not like that new. Other people use it, but Descript,
this podcasting and video blogging tool. Here's the real sweet thing, dude.
I take the video, I drop it in, it transcribes it, and then I've got these two windows side by side,
the picture and the text. I go into the text and I can take out words in the text and it goes back
(38:37):
to the video and it takes out the audio and video and makes a cut, a beautiful seamless cut.
So I can now edit audio and video in a text file, essentially.
Interesting. Yeah, it's super incredible, man.
Really interesting. Really still.
I'm taking it. OK, let's switch gears then a little sec.
(38:57):
Give me a couple like people who you're super tuned into now.
Who do you think is doing a great job out there?
We mentioned Phil DeFranco, but let's go about some other ones.
How about Matt Wolf? You checked out Matt Wolf?
No. No? It's my favorite video podcast on the Internet right now.
Yeah, dude, he's so cool. He's so cool.
(39:18):
His site's called Future Tools. Oh, yeah. OK, I guess I do.
Yeah. Yeah. His video blog, dude, is hot shit.
Oh, I bet. You want to talk about condensing like a
week's worth of stuff into this punchy, highly edited, highly produced.
It's incredible. I don't know if I've watched the video,
but I think he's one of the people that I follow on X.
(39:39):
Oh, yeah, man. He's he's a legit source, dude.
He's a first order. He's a first order.
He's a first order knowledge fountain.
I believe it. I absolutely believe it.
Anyone else that you think?
I guess I don't really watch content.
(40:00):
Certainly not the way I used to.
I even ignore a lot of my YouTube subscriptions.
This is a good chance for your audience and mine to make some suggestions
then like who we should be checking out and watching.
Yeah. Drop it in on there like who we should be checking out.
Because usually what will happen is someone will send me a link.
Right. And then I watch or listen to that.
And so that's more often than not the people that I follow or listen to
(40:23):
because there's so much content these days and I know people and I know of people,
but I just don't have I ain't got time even for the things that I love.
I spend more time, more of my time watching produced content as in traditional content,
like streaming media like on Apple TV plus or Paramount plus or whatever
on all the streaming media platforms.
When I have like bandwidth, I spend more time with that than I do online content.
(40:47):
Fascinating, man.
Yeah, I was there for a while, but I'm right back slurping up
as much as I can off the Internet these days.
It's just what's captivated my imagination.
Hey, I want to go back in time a little bit and just talk about some of the GnomeDeck stuff
because it's meant so much to me over the years.
I just wanted to put out there that like people I still work with to this very day
(41:09):
came from meeting them at GnomeDeck.
That's funny.
And it was early Internet.
It was focused around personal publishing.
To say that it was non-commercial is not exactly fair because there was
sponsors and money to be made and stuff.
But the commercial nature of it was more innocent or something like it wasn't as much.
(41:31):
I don't know.
I don't know if I'd go that far.
It was a model that I wish could have continued to work, but I knew that it just wouldn't.
And because not being an event production guy with that kind of background,
it was a challenge and not really having a stable team every year was like reinventing.
Despite people having knowledge of it, that's just not enough.
(41:53):
And without a stable foundation and an understanding of what needs to be done
and by whom and having that carefully curated, I went out and after the 10th year and I was done.
And by then, Ted X had come around as a model.
I'm like, that's great.
(42:14):
I may be asking the wrong guy here considering you're so jaded these days, but
I feel like I had a bit of an epiphany last week.
I was at Dent, the Dent, the Future Conference down in Santa Fe.
And I was sitting there just blissed out, man, having an I love the world moment.
I was looking around.
I was like, man, the connections in this community are so rich and so deep.
(42:35):
And I actually care about these people.
I'm invested in their life.
This is pretty fucking amazing.
And then the next thought I had was like, things didn't always start off this way.
And the only way to make things this way is time.
This element of time passing and those relationships really,
even ours growing over 20 years or something, it's a lot different than just
some hot new creator on the Internet or whatever.
(42:56):
Like I'm invested in more than just your show, your life and stuff.
And so anyway, I as I sit there, I'm like, yo, Chris, if you truly do want to have something
like this someday, the only way to do it is to put your stake in the ground now and to declare
based around my personality, my unique interests and the beauty of the networks
that I put in place over my life.
(43:16):
I am going to, I think, start a conference.
Have fun.
Tell me, hit me up.
Talk me out of it.
Talk me out of it.
No, I will not talk you out of it because I've had the experience several times over,
not just with Nome Dex, I ran blogger fair for four years, tried to pivot that,
(43:39):
just didn't have the right team, did a couple of like toy collecting events, which I loved,
but just didn't have the right partnerships.
I've been doing the creator tech dot net, these meetups, mixers in Redmond that I'm hoping
will catch on.
I'm hoping, but I'm trying.
I'm like trying to make connections.
I'm trying to build that up and do it in a way that I want to do it because I love
(44:03):
the conversational nature of events.
But the next one I'm staging to do, I'm into 3D printing now and I love it.
In fact, the first time I heard about it, if you were there that year, we had Bree Pettis
on stage.
I'm friends with Bree to this very day because of MakerBot launch at Nome Dex.
This is the type of thing I'm talking about, man.
I wasn't into it then, man.
(44:23):
What is this?
What am I going to do with this?
You made us those coins with your face on them.
With the cheese.
Yeah.
Everything old is new again, right?
But I'm setting, I've been wanting to do in the past, there have been a handful of community
driven 3D printing events that go by RepRapFest.
(44:45):
So IRF or MRF would be Midwest RepRapFest, East Coast RepRapFest.
There's different RepRapFests.
So these are community driven events that are usually done at fairgrounds.
And I want to do something different.
I don't know what it was.
And there's now an opportunity for me to do, what's the word I'm looking for?
(45:08):
There's an opportunity for me to do a 3D printing event.
And I've been looking for a venue and a viable possibility.
Like I did with the creator tech.
I'm like, I'm not going to pay for a venue and charge people who aren't going to show up.
I don't have the same connections as I used to.
Yeah, totally.
But for 3D printing, I know the community is here.
(45:29):
They just need a place to go.
And so I'm working in good faith with a local place that was doing an event anyway this fall, winter.
And we've been doing this dance.
Yeah, I'd be interested in doing something with y'all and nothing for a while.
And they said, no, we won't be able to do it because of this, that, and the other thing.
(45:50):
So I just iced it.
Then they came back to me and says, hey, we're going to be doing an event
that's going to be this type of audience, very much in the same vein of the type of
audience that's interested in 3D printing.
Would you be interested in doing your 3D printing event for Maker Deck?
That's the name of the 24 seven Twitch channel, Maker Deck.
(46:11):
You can go there now and see.
I can pull it up on the second monitor and show you.
But basically, we're going to have an event in tandem.
And it'll be adults only because the way the event is, I don't think that's going to be much
of a problem because of the crossover.
Yeah, I'm doing a Maker Deck event this winter.
So I'm not going to I'm not going to try to tell you don't do an event because it's very
(46:34):
you learn a lot.
You're on the radar in a different way.
You gain experience.
You'll stress out.
You will literally die and then come back to life.
Like you don't realize I will give you some tips.
Because I'm about to ask you to join my advisory board.
So please give me some.
Chip.
Oh, boy.
I stepped into it.
So minimize your risks up front.
(46:56):
Mitigate your risks.
Bootstrap as much as you possibly can.
Make connections where you possibly can.
And when you're in the process, you'll learn a lot.
And I've certainly learned about what I don't want to do or how I don't want to do it, how
I want to have the event be done and how to drive it.
I can host the shit out of anything.
(47:17):
Sure.
But the thing to keep in mind, day of event, you're done.
That's it.
You can't do you can try changing things.
But you have to switch into host with the most most set it all aside.
All the time.
Trust me, things are going to blow up.
Someone's cat exploded.
Then you have to think.
Clean it up and then got it.
(47:37):
It's a decision.
I got it.
It's it's in a different mindset.
And then when you're done, you just you this you feel the sense of accomplishment.
That is almost unparalleled.
And that's the thing.
That sense of accomplishment that you get is the thing that energizes you to do the
next event, even when you know you're going to die.
And you know, I've got a couple of things that I'm thinking of as I go into this.
(48:01):
I'm trying not to be manic about it.
I'm trying not to be like, I'm going to have the biggest event of all time or anything
like that.
I'm hoping to have 35 paid people in the first year or something like that.
I'm building my budgets around like a pretty small core that can grow out over time.
I'm I'm approaching it from the sitting there at Dent perspective of looking back on a
tenure arc.
So I'm looking 10 years from now and I want to be in a sweet venue in a sweet location
(48:25):
with tier one keynotes, awesome activities, great musicians and bands playing.
And we'll just get their baby steps along the way or whatever.
Yeah, I'm going to bite off a small chunk and then I'm going to do that chunk and then
I'm going to.
That's what I was thinking.
And yeah, I think it's going to be like just it's going to be artier than a lot of tech
(48:46):
events.
I want to bring in some South by Southwest stuff.
I want to bring in some Burning Man slash bar camp slash food camp values of.
I'm sorry, there's no attendees here.
There's only participants.
You've got to bring something to the table if you want to be a part of this community
or whatever.
Right.
And it's got to be a little bit more than just money.
We all bring our money to the table, but you got to bring something else to.
Right.
Is maybe the ethos and I mean, like, I think it's a little bit more than just money.
(49:10):
Ethos and I mean, I even feel a bit of a sense of responsibility because, dude, as a
photographer, I've got to go to the coolest events in the whole wide world.
I've been to the TED Talks, the pop text, the South by Southwest, the dent, the gnome
decks, whatever.
And I've ingested all this shit and synthesized it.
And now I want to share my unique perspective with other groups.
(49:31):
That's reasonable.
Yeah, man.
That is.
Yeah.
I say go for it, because ultimately, even if you do your own spin, you'll iterate.
The first gnome decks that I did was different from the last one.
Like it evolved.
I let it have a life of its own.
So in many ways, like what I'm doing with the creator tech dot net stuff being the
(49:53):
conversations at the crossroads of creativity or creators, much like you and me,
entrepreneurs and technologists.
Like, I feel like that's the thing, but I don't know.
Maybe it's going to get co-opted.
I don't know.
But I've got a question here for you.
And maybe I should wait for our first advisory more.
But I'm going to ask it out loud right here right now.
So part of what I think makes dent work is Steve Broback and Jason Preston are equal
(50:18):
partners in this thing.
And what that allows it to do is it allows it to be easily bigger than either of them.
So gnome decks wasn't about Chris Perullo.
You know what it was.
I didn't want to wait.
I know, but it was inevitable by the strength of your personality, interest, all the rest.
So this thing that I'm doing.
Yeah, I want it to be Krugfest, but I don't really want it to be Krugfest.
(50:41):
I want it to be dent desk.
And do you think that I should consider doing the Steve Broback, Jason Preston thing?
Or should I align with a peer who shares my interests and that we make a new thing
together and it is one more step removed from my persona?
As long as that's where it comes down to agreements and understandings and boundaries.
(51:02):
You're like, as long as you find someone you can work with for a decade.
Yeah, not just that.
Your goals are aligned, your visions aligned, and they are a compliment to you, not a mirror
of you.
And that's challenging because I have found through years of doing what I've done that
some people that I might not everybody's this way, but a lot of the people that I might
(51:24):
have attracted want to be me.
And I don't mean that in the.
I know exactly what you mean.
They want to be in the orbit, but they also want to be me.
Yeah, you need to go out there and front the business and then you know the other guy who's
sitting there organizing all the teams together and stuff.
So I have tried and I have failed at putting things together and ultimately giving rise
(51:45):
to personalities.
I've tried and failed in the moment that a personality steps out of something that I've
done.
I'm like, I've fucked up again.
I that's my feeling that I screwed up and it lost its way.
And that was the right person at the right time.
But all the more reason why, especially when I'm very key on maker deck, not being personality
(52:08):
driven, very adamant.
It means your personality is driven specifically.
Yeah, I don't.
I'm like, Chris Perillo is personality driven, right?
I don't want locker gnome to be personality driven for now.
I have no choice because that's the thing is pays the bills.
But at some point, I'll be able to pass that baton because it'll be abstracted for me.
I'm just like Linus Sebastian.
(52:29):
I am Linus, but he being the thumbnail, but not in the video.
So it's like it's that kind of abstraction where that value is still there.
But there's a deeper value than beyond just not being able to scale a personality or having
it tied to that personality.
And if they go, that's it.
The project goes like that was the wrong person.
That was my love thinking through this stuff and talking through it with you, man.
(52:52):
It is so cool to be like reconnected and just to really watch you reinvent yourself, like
doing the learning out loud, living out loud thing.
Yeah, I respect the fuck out of it.
Seriously, I appreciate it.
Yeah.
Hey, we got five minutes left.
What else do you want to talk about?
I don't know.
We talked about coffee, veganism, AI, conferences, content, high school bullying.
(53:13):
No, we didn't get into that.
Although, yeah, I've had it.
My daughter, apparently, she's nine.
She's turned nine having problems with a girl on the bus.
And I'm like, I told her, I know exactly how you feel.
I had problems with people that thought they could push me around.
And for years, I let them.
And I said, you know, the only thing that stops a bully is standing up to them.
It's not fun.
It's not easy, but I had to do it.
And you know what?
(53:34):
Even the scariest bully in high school, man, I really thought he was going to kill me.
One day, because I looked like an easy target.
And you can't give them the satisfaction.
I said, don't even bother arguing.
Don't engage.
You don't need to stay on your path.
And when they realize that they can't get to you, they'll just move on.
(53:55):
And one day he pushed me from behind in gym class.
I turned around and I pushed him from behind.
This guy's bigger than me.
He was not exactly how every you have the different classes of kids in school, not exactly.
In the upper class, not exactly in the lower.
Not exactly in the lower, but like one you didn't want to mess with.
(54:16):
Yeah.
The person that you just did not want to mess with.
And so I, but I did it instinctually.
I be like, no, this is the time to stand.
And I threw up my fist.
Sorry, God.
I'm so glad I didn't have to use them.
And I'm here's the thing.
He didn't.
He didn't really didn't bother me from that point on.
And he, like, he was surprised.
But I think this is my own narrative.
(54:37):
But I think in many ways he respected me.
Absolutely.
Oh, he's not going to be.
I'm like, no, I'm done.
Yeah.
And that's what it took.
So, yeah, there's your high school bullet.
You brought it up.
I'm like, I got a story for you.
I know, man.
It's so funny.
It applies all the way to this very day.
There's a couple of times recently people been trying to bully me online a little bit and stuff.
And just kind of like stand up saying you're not going to take it.
(54:59):
And it's not easy.
Like people are back the fuck off once you tell them that.
No, this is not.
This is the boundary.
This is the boundary.
Yeah, man.
Yeah, it's key.
Yeah, I could go on.
You can give me any topic and I can spin on it for an hour.
I'm a talker.
I'm a content producer.
No need, man.
I think we've really covered a lot of ground.
I actually thought we'd sit around and talk about some of the good old times, but
(55:20):
we'll save that for another one.
A bonus podcast for the history buffs in the room or whatever.
Yeah.
RSS.
I shall.
Oh, my God.
It does.
On that topic, dude, I think that some of the energy I'm feeling right now around AI
and this whole stuff does harken back to rocking the web like it's 2005.
Man, I got my Tumblr back.
(55:40):
I'm blogging again.
I got my podcast going.
Talking to Matt Mullinwig from Automatic on the podcast tomorrow.
It's the time machine.
Tell him I said hi.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
He was that I don't know if he was ever he was at a Nome Dex, but we weren't each other's over.
I remember him showing me WordPress dot com before it launched.
I remember.
But I don't think that was at no.
I went to WordCamp Vancouver yesterday and I realized while I was there,
(56:04):
it was 20 years ago that Northern Voice was in that same room.
And I met for the first time, Matt Mullinwig, Robert Scoble,
a whole bunch of you motherfuckers that came up to Vancouver to do personal publishing conferences.
And I was literally right in the same building 20 years later at WordCamp.
And I had just this surreal experience.
I think before anything happened, Darren Barefoot, rest of the team.
(56:28):
Yeah.
He he was asking me he was at Nome Dex and he's asking me for advice before he
he everything got kicked up in Vancouver in and around that time.
And I remember giving him advice and guidance and I hope it helped.
I think about.
Derek Miller.
And I think about Darren Barefoot quite a bit.
Those are a couple like pillars of our community that time who are no longer with us.
(56:50):
And it is.
It's the it's the booby prize of that thing I was telling you about time and richness
from communities.
People do move on and it's sad,
but send out love to their friends and family and letting everyone know.
I still think about those guys all the time.
I do.
Believe it or not, they do cross my mind every so often.
(57:12):
They do.
Yeah, man.
That's awesome.
I love you, Chris Perillo.
Me too.
Yeah.
Talk soon, dude.
Thank you very much for hanging out with me on the podcast.
Thank you, Chris.
Over and out.
Hey, what's up, Internet? It's Chris Krug.
(00:02):
I'm checking in here today with Chris Perillo.
What's up, man?
I'm on my second cup of decaf.
What's up with that? Decaf?
Because apparently I can no longer buy caffeinated beverages.
I realized I was too excitable, and I said that.
You're done.
You are one of the highest energy guys.
I know you can't kick the morning ritual of the coffee or something.
Yeah, that's the problem.
(00:23):
My body couldn't take caffeine anymore a couple years ago,
and it is the ritual.
I just enjoy that.
I've always wondered who decaf exists for.
I'm like, get in or get out, but...
For me, I'm vegan.
And so I have it with a heavy cream alternative.
Like, it's made of coconut milk, and it's just a nice, rich, hearty beverage
(00:43):
that I have in the morning.
I'm so intrigued by that.
You're a vegan?
Yeah, I flipped about six years ago.
I've been hanging out with some vegans lately.
You guys are an interesting bunch.
We're stealthy like that.
You don't realize it until we pick up a carrot.
And you know we're vegan, because we'll tell you.
Cross-fitting veganism, right?
(01:03):
And AI.
You're a prompt ending, and you're an cross-fitting vegan, man.
Are you one of those kind of vegans that actually eats real food?
Carrots and stuff?
No.
I'm a junk food vegan, right?
I'll eat if it's not animal-based.
The reason, or the primary reason I switched was I was 44 or 45
and just realized that I'm not getting younger
(01:24):
and had always been worried about my heart health specifically.
And that was the one thing I'd never tried.
And my cholesterol came into normal levels,
and I was able to balance it.
I still eat a lot of garbage that I shouldn't eat.
It's without the guilt.
And it's knowing that I'm on a better path now
than I was five years ago.
I'm vegan for life.
I went to this vegan dumpling place last night.
(01:46):
In the middle of the night, it was a Speakeasy.
It was the craziest place.
It was an all-vegan dumpling place.
And then we ordered pork shumai, essentially.
It was so realistic and so incredible
that the vegan that I was with couldn't even eat it at all.
They got meated out on how not vegan it was.
I'm telling you, you could have something that is,
quote unquote, vegan, right?
(02:07):
Or plant-based or whatever the marketing term is of the day
and not know it.
I could give someone a fully plant-based food product, right?
And they wouldn't know.
If you didn't tell them, they wouldn't know.
And I can guarantee here in the States,
they're very much of the mindset,
it's vegan, therefore it's evil.
You don't realize just how much garbage you eat
(02:28):
that you wouldn't realize that by replacing it
with something that might be just maybe a little better.
And the complaint is, well, that's all processed food.
And I do the whole, remember the animated GIF
of the pug that's sitting there and it goes,
that's my reaction.
Hang on, you're getting on my case
about eating processed food, Mr. McDonald's?
Okay.
Totally.
Okay.
Hilarious.
(02:49):
All right.
My big epiphany this week has been like,
you don't gotta be a vegan to eat vegan food.
Eating vegan food sometimes or vegetarian food.
And that doesn't make you anything other than an omnivore.
That's it.
I feel like it's the right path for me.
And I've got my body, I've got proof that it works.
Yeah, the proof is in the pudding,
(03:10):
you are like 85 years old.
Now you look better than ever.
That's the cryogenic chamber.
The proof is in the pudding, but I can't eat pudding.
I haven't found an on dairy pudding yet.
Oh, hooves and snouts?
Yolans, yeah.
Can't do gelatin.
This has been the longest, most meandering pre-roll
for a video that's about tech.
But the reason why I invited Chris on the show,
(03:32):
I went to his conference in 2006 called Gnome Dex.
It was a fucking amazing community.
But dude, who is the locker gnome and what was Gnome Dex?
I keep wondering that myself.
I keep wondering that myself.
I've been on such a...
As old as I am, because I just turned 50 this year,
(03:55):
in internet years, I feel like I'm even older.
Because yeah, I did start...
You are absolutely 10,000 years older in internet years.
That's true.
In the mid 90s, that's how locker gnome came to be,
an email newsletter.
I would find interesting websites.
We've come full circle.
I'm still finding interesting websites.
It's just they happen to be...
AI can do this, AI can do that.
And you can do this and that.
(04:17):
I was doing that back in the mid 90s.
Yeah.
Not AI, but discovery.
I'm all about putting these stories down on the permanent record.
This historical stuff.
So no, tell me again the story of who is the locker gnome?
Me.
I have no other way of defining it apart from...
It was a high school nickname and I needed a web domain.
(04:37):
And I was stupid and registered locker gnome instead of a single word domain.com.
And I could have been retired eons ago.
I started podcasting in 2006 and then gave it up for 17 years.
I totally know what you mean.
Yeah.
Chris has been around since the beginning,
he's building websites in the 90s,
lived through the web 2.0 content revolution.
(04:59):
Here you are again messing with AI and all the kind of newfangled shit coming out
and reinventing yourself once again.
You have to though.
And I don't see... AI is just a buzzword.
Let me take a step sideways here.
I don't catch every single trend that comes down the pike.
I just totally ignored crypto and blockchain and NFTs and web 3.
(05:27):
I get it.
I understand its value, but it didn't resonate with me.
When I...
Some people pivoted, right?
They went from yay crypto to yay AI.
A lot of people.
I don't know where you're going with this.
I walked the same path and I believe the reason is probably because you're more of a content creator than an entrepreneur.
I was watching your thing on Geekwire the other day where you were talking about never receiving investment and bootstrapping the ground up.
(05:53):
You're like, I wouldn't even know what to do with the money if it came and they gave it to me.
I think the people that pivoted from web 3 straight into AI were guys trying to build internet businesses specifically more than people who are just like producing content for the love of it.
AI woke me from my slumber.
Pandemic was ending.
I was starting to reinvent myself as a photographer.
(06:13):
AI comes around and completely woke me because of its ability to specifically around creating stuff, putting it out there, finding my voice, building an audience around that, getting it out into the world.
It was the stuff that really got me going again.
That's something that always excites me about technology.
I don't get excited for the sake of it, right?
A new iPhone comes out.
I don't get all that excited.
(06:34):
I'm using an iPhone right now connected to the Mac by way of continuity camera, but hardware doesn't do it for me.
Software does it for me.
And specifically what that software does, what it enables.
Don't tell me a feature.
Tell me its impact.
That's where the excitement in me is.
And you're right.
I feel like in the past, I used to be very content minded.
Everything I looked at, I figured out, OK, that could be content.
(06:56):
This is before the term, quote unquote, influencer was around.
Sure.
And if you want to label me that, fine.
I'm not saying you will.
If I bridle at it because I feel influence is a byproduct of creation and I'm not being all.
Who you tweeting about it?
I know Kardashian, that's for sure.
It does bring with it some kind of negative connotations of like,
(07:17):
you know, can I speak to your manager?
Don't you know I'm a restaurant critic influencer here?
Yeah, that doesn't rub me the right way.
I fell into entrepreneurialism as a way to make the content work.
Chris, you're talking about reinventing.
I don't. It's hard to do.
And I've tried over and over again.
(07:38):
And, you know, the world has changed.
The Internet has changed.
And I've had people ask, you know, going all the way back, even before we knew each other,
say, hey, why don't you do something like you did at tech TV?
Because I used to host a cable television show two decades ago.
And then I remind people, I said, that was two decades ago, dude.
They're like, what?
No, like it was two decades ago.
(07:59):
Yeah, you're wrong, Rob.
But they ask, why can't it be that way again?
I'm like, because the Internet exists.
And you've got YouTube and Twitch and Kicknow and so many algorithms,
either accelerating or punishing you for how you do things.
And that is where I have been tripped up for the longest time.
I know. I've heard you ranting a lot lately about the algorithm.
(08:21):
For the people who get it, I get it.
And I understand how it forces everybody to up their game,
but it becomes that much more of a challenge to play the game.
And the enjoyment of the game is not me.
You're explaining everybody else into what we're talking about here.
So let me try to set the stage.
You tell me where I'm wrong.
So to be an Internet guy and influence our YouTube sensation,
to do the thing, the reinvention that you're talking about now
(08:43):
requires like doing serious SEO keyword monitoring
and making videos based on what people want to watch
as opposed to what you are passionate about or interested in or whatever.
So you're literally doing two hours of research in the morning
trying to figure out what people are searching for on YouTube
before you make your videos and you're making videos
that adapt directly to those people.
That's the model these days, right?
(09:04):
Generally speaking, although I'll go a step further,
it's not so much even that because there's stiff competition,
but the video itself, at least in relation to YouTube,
engagement time is everything because if you can have,
I've got like three hundred and thirty thousand subscribers on YouTube.
But the problem is, if the first few people who see that video
don't engage with the video,
most of those subscribers will never see it hit their feet
(09:26):
because YouTube will basically punish you
if you do not create a video that improves engagement
because that's what YouTube wants.
It wants engagement.
It doesn't want creators.
It wants engagement.
And there's a difference.
So pardon, but I don't really swallow the tripe of
we're all about creators.
I'm like, no, you're all about money, dude.
Creators just so happen to be the way that you make your money.
Let's just put it on the table.
(09:47):
That's the way it is.
Because otherwise, I would not have had to basically stop
because I just couldn't years ago. This would have been about it.
Ten years ago is really when algorithmic feeds became the norm in social media.
And you might remember you reference 2006 blogs, podcasts.
You very much had to roll your own audience.
(10:08):
You had to press the flesh and you had to get out
and you had to make legitimate connections and build relationships.
Now it's turnkey and now it's scalable.
And now that's what made these companies like Facebook, X or Twitter back then.
Right.
Even though the beginning of Twitter, there was no algorithm.
It was just this home feed where you were following literally everybody on Twitter.
(10:33):
It was different.
And creating content, I just fell naturally into social media.
I'm like, this is great.
This is wonderful.
Oh my God.
And then they turned it off.
Here, like Facebook, come on in.
Come on, build your audience here.
Build it here.
I'm like, yeah, okay, that's great.
This is awesome.
Oh my God, this is so great.
And then they turned it off and you wonder what the hell happened.
(10:55):
And I would say there for me, there has been a dark period for a number of years
and it's taken a lot for me to get my bearings again.
I've done a lot of soul searching to figure out what it is that I want to do,
what it is that I can do, what it is that I do well.
And went working for Intel for about four years.
(11:15):
And I'm still on the job market because I feel like I could
got a lot of experience to lend someone or something.
But until that happens, I've got to invest in myself.
And the best way to invest in myself is to double down on the assets that I have
and play the game the way it needs to be played.
So I'm basically having to dive into savings
and pay for what needs to happen in order to make what it is that I want to do happen.
(11:38):
Totally.
In the sense that I might be good in front of the camera,
but I'm not good at figuring out the YouTube thing the way it's played right now.
So I've got to outsource editing.
I've got to outsource a lot of that optimization and trajectory.
I've got to even outsource writing despite being a writer
because writing is all about the engagement that you get.
You have to hit certain points in order to flatline, which is good with the engagement.
(12:02):
You want that.
You need that because that's the only way.
The only way I'm going to be able to take hold again.
It's no longer sufficient just to do a video.
That's the bare basis.
Wow.
So you are being very strategic about the videos you're making.
Talk to me a little bit about the strategy that you piece back to.
Actually, before you do, I wanted to say one thing.
The pandemic for me was very much, I think, what it was for you as well.
(12:23):
I was able to do some soul searching.
I was pretty much a perpetual motion machine right up until the pandemic started.
I came back from a six-month trip doing photo shoots in Africa
a month before the pandemic started and everything went from 60 to just zero overnight.
And I rented a farm and I grew some vegetables and some animals and some ganja.
(12:44):
And I had a great time, but I really, things dried up all the way.
And I did do some soul searching during that time.
And I wasn't even sure things were ever going to fire back up like they had before.
I literally had given up the idea of being a world travel photographer,
traveling around doing stuff.
I just, I wasn't sure if that was ever going to happen again.
(13:04):
And as it has started to fire back up, I'm going to say since last December for me and stuff,
it's been a process of very intentionally putting the pieces back together in a way that like
I feel a little bit more in control of instead of like it controlling me or whatever.
Chris, man, I feel that pain.
I so much, I've got a family to support, right?
(13:25):
A wife, child.
And I was always, I was an entrepreneur, right?
I carved out my own career path before there was a career path.
That's not braggadocious.
It's just flat fact.
It's undeniable for 25 years.
It's just, it's what I did or tried to do.
Yeah. You've been an independent, creative publisher on the internet for 25 years.
There's no way.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, but that's, that was the hardest part is like the wanting to tether myself,
(13:52):
not to a previous success, because there's always what can I do next?
What can I do?
How can I do this differently?
The games changed.
How do I play it now?
And what's the best way to do it?
And so that's hence the idea of again, going to work for Intel, which is great.
It was steady income, which I never had.
In my life, but it helped pay the bills.
And that's where coming back to doing things.
(14:15):
How could I do things on my terms instead of the world forcing me to deal with it on
their terms?
And that's what I found even working on LinkedIn or working through LinkedIn.
I hate LinkedIn.
I absolutely loathe it.
There's absolutely nothing I liked about it.
I hate it.
I absolutely hate LinkedIn because it's just, it's not my place.
(14:35):
There's nothing warm about it.
I feel like I have to wear a tie every time I scroll on the feed.
I'm like, people actually enjoy this.
I'm like, I am not that guy.
OK, I agree with you for the most part.
But in the last six months, as it started to take off again, I found that I've been
able to insert my pirate messages into what's usually a pretty stuffy environment and
finding like it works for engagement.
(14:57):
Like it might not be the best representation of my professional brand.
But I'm hopping in there without my suit and tie on and just being my renegade pirate
self, I feel like maybe I am injecting a little bit more awesomeness into the LinkedIn
world or something like that.
So here's what I'm doing.
Feel free to take the ball and run with it.
But like I was doing, I still am doing these little shorts where like the tech news of
(15:20):
the day, Amazon announces something or Microsoft does this or heaven for Elon Musk decides
to whatever.
And I'll do a shoot it live to tape.
I'll set up my my phone and just shoot 60 seconds done.
It's a package.
I could upload it to this channel that whatever I could put it, whatever.
So I'm putting that despite it not really being linked any.
(15:40):
Yeah, it is more like career building and whatnot.
Sometimes I hit a hot button topic and it resonates and then you get responses, which
of course drives engagement.
And what I'm doing with that is less about I'm not making any money doing these little
video shorts, but there's a chain.
My thinking is, again, controlling your own destiny with content.
I'm thinking someone's going to hit that.
(16:03):
They don't know who I am or maybe they haven't seen me in a while.
And they just so happen to find there's a career opportunity or job opportunity or a
for hire opportunity.
I'm like, we'd be really good for being a spokesperson or helping us engage with this
guy.
And I will have put out instead of continuing to send out resume only to be rejected by AI
or having a resume that honestly, my resume is garbage.
(16:27):
It is hot garbage.
And people say, oh, you got to optimize.
I'm like, I the last job I might have had was was like in the mid 90s, I was doing Pizza
Hut deliveries.
That doesn't play well.
If you look at an entrepreneur's resume, like it just looks like they did 25 years of nothing
(16:48):
when they did 25 years of survival, which is everything.
But to translate that and cram it into a job opportunity, it's difficult to go through
a hiring manager who doesn't have the context when they're looking at this sheet of paper.
It just doesn't add up.
It just I'm going to put myself in the shoes of the hiring manager.
I know I've been like sitting ringside on this path that you've been on there for a
(17:09):
while.
I've been listening to you talk about your search and your frustrations with it and trying
to put your round peg in the square hole.
Don't you think that maybe those hiring managers are just thinking that you're a bit of a wild
card and or your brand and your personality is bigger than almost anybody that could hire
you, I think might possibly have been a part of it.
(17:30):
Whereas you're like, yo, I'll bring my three hundred thousand subscribers to your world.
Think about how much intrinsic benefit there is to me doing something like that.
They're like, whoa, you're always going to be bigger than us.
No, I've never.
No, I've never used that on the resume.
At least I've always put down practical experience
that I feel is applicable to any particular role that I might apply for, whether it's
(17:54):
content, community.
Like, I don't want you to be my spokesman for my company, but I'd be afraid the first
time I tell you something that you don't like, you're just going to bounce back into your
old amazing world anyway, because you're fucking good.
At least that's the impression that people might have from the outside.
So welcome to the problem.
Yeah, I know.
It's like I'm either under qualified or overqualified.
Now I know I'm running into ageism.
(18:15):
So it's an issue.
But what else am I going to do?
I've had this discussion with my dad recently.
You're going into savings.
I'm like, savings is going to be gone at some point.
And if I if I'm sitting here a year from now still wondering what's happening next, I will
have lost all that time.
(18:37):
Then the money would it may be dwindling faster, but at least there's an opportunity to turn
a thousand dollars into ten thousand.
And that's the best opportunity that I have with my resources right now is specifically
to reinvest in myself.
Absolutely.
In the thing that I feel is the most viable.
And that is specifically YouTube is where a lot of that's made.
(18:57):
And talk to me about the physical community stuff, too.
So I noticed you started convening people in Seattle again.
Yeah.
Again, when you're in between and you're trying to figure out where things going.
I've been fascinated by technology and being a creator and working with technology and
entrepreneurialism, all these things.
(19:18):
And I thought there's got to be other people who are equally as fascinated by these kinds
of conversations.
So effectively, yeah, I figured out if I just put a finer point on it, I could host an event
somewhere in Seattle, bring people together and have conversations.
So I've done two of them.
The next one's happening tomorrow.
It's free.
Hosted at the Microsoft Redmond reactor, free parking, free admission, free beverages.
(19:43):
Like it's not.
So my impression is, dude, you're bringing a lot of people together who want to talk
about stuff and share common interests.
Isn't that isn't there a business in there?
Yeah, there is.
But the thing is, you're like small potatoes.
It's not where you're going.
Yeah, it's not right now.
We're nowhere near escape velocity.
There were nowhere near what it might need to be.
(20:06):
And so if in many ways, I'm testing the waters, I'm like Jeremiah Owens doing down the Bay
Area, the Bay Area is known to be the Bay Area and things are happening in the last
two weeks has just exploded onto the scene.
He started holding those llama events or whatever.
He's getting a thousand people to sign up for him.
All of a sudden now he's publishing an A.I.
(20:27):
events around the world newsletter that's got thousands of subscribers.
He launched a Slack Slack channel.
All of a sudden, it's fucking blowing up and shit.
Like it feels like there is a bonafide value in bringing folks together around this shit.
And that's what I'm trying to lay the foundation for.
Talk to me about the other prongs of that strategy.
So you're doing YouTube, you're doing live events.
(20:47):
What are these other things that you feel like it's worthwhile investing yourself and
as you said, your savings in right now?
Yeah, I would say primarily the events.
I'm not really investing savings in them.
I'm trying to do that smart.
Yeah, but you're investing your life force in your life.
In a time in which you're reinventing yourself.
Yeah.
But I would say that in terms of that, if I had a focus, it would probably be YouTube and or video.
(21:12):
Talk to me about the strategy.
I want to know like what are you going to do?
Yeah.
People have always known me for on YouTube for doing YouTube video and framing me as they'll say I'm an OG because I was there in 2006 when everything kicked off.
You absolutely are the oest of genius.
I am.
But I have over the years have had other tech YouTubers like reference me is like this guy, Chris is the inspiration, whether it's Marquez Brownlee or Linus Sebastian on down the line.
(21:43):
I floated away from that because I just didn't double down on tech.
Honestly, I just didn't.
I didn't take the same path for better or for worse.
It just didn't.
It stopped working for me and it could have been that I was just burnt out on it at the time.
I just didn't do it the same way that other people did.
I didn't see it the same way other people did.
And I did not put as much emphasis on production as I should have.
(22:06):
And I tried my way to do things the way that I thought they were to be done.
And it just didn't work.
But where I work for a sec, what did you not when you said you didn't put enough emphasis on production?
What do you mean?
Back when again, you could just turn on a camera and then record a video and upload.
It's fine.
Anybody could do it.
But then almost overnight, people were up in their production game.
(22:28):
A lot.
Everything you see now is so super tight, so super highly edited, man.
My shit's all these one take, blah, blah, blah.
Let's have a conversation.
Yeah.
But even then, YouTube, it wants longer content.
But at the cost of choppy.
It's so it's I did not do what I should have done.
(22:53):
I don't regret doing what I did because ultimately I ended up here.
I do regret not thinking differently or thinking that it was always going to work the same way it always had.
And it clearly did not.
Now I'm thinking, OK, I know the problems I faced before I recognize and even the videos because this is only started in the past two weeks.
(23:17):
I found an editing team and an optimizer to help at least see if we produce a video.
Can we produce a video that people are interested in watching?
Are the existing subscriber base still active in the feedback that we've received from the great watch?
It's been very it's given me at least some amount of hope.
(23:40):
So the next stage is hiring a writer who is key on retention.
It uses humor, who does research, we're talking because I would rather write right here like a script writer.
Yeah, script writer.
And then basically the idea would be pick a topic that might be either relevant contemporaneously or have some evergreen value.
(24:03):
I could basically say to her, OK, let's go with this topic.
Let's try to shoot for 500 words, a thousand words, whatever it is, because the length of time is dependent on the content.
And then I do the idea would be I intro the video and then I launch into the voiceover and to do so to do that, it's less stressful because someone's done the writing to do that.
(24:26):
It's less stressful because someone else is doing the B roll.
And then all I'm able to then what I can do if on an economy of scale is I could theoretically crank out and.
Voiceovers a day and have that foundation, that's where have that the foundation is being laid or it is there.
Trying to rebuild on top of that is where I am now.
(24:48):
So I'm trying to move rapidly, but the way that gets scaled up is I'm just doing voiceovers.
And then at some point I'm able to hand off the baton to have another person also doing voiceovers or doing other content on top of that to introduce other personalities or other people.
You follow Philip DeFranco?
Oh, yeah, way back.
Didn't he do a switch like this where he he used to put his face on the screen and all the visuals were here next to him.
(25:13):
But then didn't he swap it out for a while where he took his face out and had only the quote unquote B roller visual wouldn't surprise me.
But I don't. But I think he went backwards.
I think he brought his face back probably because of engagement.
Like when you train your audience one way or another, this is where I'm on the precipice of it's just a fine mix.
Right. It's a mix between what's going to work, what is it?
He's my gold standard right now for the punchiness of the way the cuts happen and stuff.
(25:37):
The audio, the fucking it's like he's on Adderall, like a thousand percent.
Just like this fucking nonstop flow of amazing fucking shit.
Yep. And that's the thing.
When you've got enough of a staff and enough of a team built around you, you can get to that point.
And I know that it's not happening immediately for me.
But that's the direction I want to be able to go.
(25:58):
Because back in the day, Locker Gnome had I had employees, I had people or contract laborers to help.
We were doing tech video every day.
We were turning it around, the news and stuff.
And it just didn't the writing. It wasn't what it needed to be.
The content wasn't what it needed to be at the time.
And people said that they missed it, but it just never took off on YouTube.
The format for that vertical just never landed.
(26:22):
And I've seen other people do it far more successfully than I could have.
So I'm looking for mixing my persona with my interests with what is going to resonate with the audience.
And so I feel like I'm going to tilt closer to a watch mojo style with geekiness.
I'm not familiar with that one in particular, but I was going to ask you to hit me up with a few people.
(26:42):
Upgrade my heroes here a little bit. Who should I be watching?
Well, watch mojo is not really a hero, per se.
It's a lot of the top 10 things you didn't know about things that come with tech bait.
And that I feel has got an evergreen presence.
And then that's also the thing that allows me to not have to stress as much because there's just there's only so much I can do.
(27:11):
There's only so much knowledge I have.
I don't you can ask me to rattle off the specs on this MacBook that I use.
And I'm like, I know it's got to be.
I don't think that's why people watch your shit, bro.
I think you are personality plus your venn diagram of interest.
That's what people are coming for.
That's my hope.
And so I even steered with I just got the I'm using the new iPhone 15 Pro Max to record this or to stream into this.
(27:37):
I've got it connected as a webcam.
And there's a billion unboxing is just people have seen this before.
I'm like, what can I do?
And so I've done in the past unedited fun boxings or slightly edited fun boxings and they never really resonated.
But now that I was able to take that same crazy, wacky, what the hell is this guy on experience and really turn it on its ear with an editing style that is just is what is going on here.
(28:07):
It resonates and it catches on.
So I have a chance to have that voice while still serving up the meat and potatoes.
And then have you published any of these style ones yet?
Oh, yeah, they're up like, yeah, I haven't taught one.
I want to make sure I want to check it out.
It's all good.
The but yeah, that's I still have a personality and humor is key.
(28:28):
But then even then, there are times I got a little more I get a little more serious.
And those are the longer ones like the ones where I'm going off on how Apple software quality controls absolute hot.
I like those words, man.
I really do. I find the algorithm pushing me to be more opinionated than I want to be sometimes.
Like, it really feels like it pushes you into having a fucking hot take on everything or whatever.
I do. But see, that's the problem, Chris.
(28:50):
Everybody's got a hot take.
And so it's difficult to establish.
And I had this conversation with his name's he's asked on social.
He recently left T-Mobile after being there for 20 years.
He was the content producer and for what they had done.
(29:11):
And he was even remarking that everybody's got a platform, but there's no expertise.
There's no gravitas.
But they're getting the traffic.
Right.
And we've got no knowledge, no perspective at all.
And at least I might have that going for me.
That's great.
I've got a laundry list of people who might say I did YouTube for this because I saw you.
(29:32):
I did that because that's great.
It doesn't pay the bills.
I'm happy to put myself out there to get people doing what they need to get doing.
But I got to make sure I'm taking care of myself, too.
That's the challenge with.
If you don't mind showing a little of the sausage making, what does pay the bills?
What's the most profitable?
Sweet. Is it you?
Is it the YouTube monetization?
(29:52):
Sponsorship.
And we've currently got an active sponsorship for the stuff that I do on Twitch.
Twenty seven.
And that's where someone's yo, dude, you're now the logitech guy.
I'm going to give you 10 grand to be the logitech guy.
That's a sponsorship.
Yeah, but not like that.
Not exactly.
You got to do 10,000 be great.
But we use StreamYard to broadcast 24 seven on a 3D printing channel that runs constantly.
(30:15):
And then I also use it on my personal feed as well.
We use StreamYard specifically.
And so then I negotiated a sponsorship because they were really happy with how they were using
the platform at that time.
So in many ways to come back to, you know, where does AI play into it?
Where does the events play into it?
Sponsorship.
Where does that the tech videos you might make something with ads if you get lucky.
(30:36):
But where that where you really take hold is when you are able to start nailing down sponsors
and sponsorship.
So we've been esoteric philosophical.
I'd be surprised if anyone who doesn't want to make their own channel is still with us
at this point.
But I do want to get into some a couple other things.
Will you hit me with some like some tips and tools around software you've been using lately?
Specific AI stuff.
(30:57):
What have you been using you're fucking stoked about?
And I can go one for one with you if you want.
But rattle off some stuff that that you really are.
People should check out.
They're probably the common names, right?
Although maybe like a lot of folks are still just dipping their toes.
The one that I really the one that I started to use the other day,
(31:17):
and I think I'm going to use it a bit more than I used to.
I ideogram dot AI.
Yeah, ideogram is like a mid journey or like a dolly.
But you can put words and images.
Well, you can actually say shit.
And I feel that the images are far more usable.
Like it's just it's these are it's a real like logos and graphics and merch shit.
(31:40):
They're definitely more usable in that way.
Yeah.
So what do you even make it in there?
Oh, I will often do a as I find different sites that I find interesting as a creator
or like an entrepreneur, I'll share them.
So I'll stack up usually about 25 of them a week
and I'll share five of them a day in my various social feeds on mastodon and threads.
(32:03):
But on LinkedIn, I'll post all 25 at once because otherwise it is.
Are the 25 tools?
Yeah, tools that I'm that might be newer that are just hitting my radar.
Yeah.
And they may be useful to others.
It helps somebody else.
Great.
Gamma is another one that I really like.
Sorry, one sec.
How are you using an ideogram?
Oh, just to generate images to go along with those posts.
(32:25):
Oh, cool. I'll do like a robot artist or something that I find
kind of interesting to mix this up with that.
Yeah.
There are a dime a dozen now.
It's still fun to do.
Yeah, I've been just using them to make logos for new project ideas, little icon graphics
and stuff for different like tools I've been developing and stuff and just messing around
(32:46):
with that team logos and just ideating with it a little bit.
Or like phrases that come through my mind, like little quotes or phrases just fun to
come into ideogram, generate an image, print it out, stick it on the wall, a little fucking
inspiration, de-inspiration, the quotes or whatever.
De-motivationals.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what else you got on your tools list?
(33:07):
I mentioned gamma.
That's an easy way to build a website or a deck or a presentation with just a few details.
It's probably the easiest tool out there to use.
What kind of websites would you make with it?
Tell me what you're doing.
Well, I did one because if anybody ever asked for, hey, could you consult?
What could you consult on?
I had to have something that was organized.
(33:27):
And so I built a site that basically spoke to the things that I would be able to do.
Do you pay for that one?
What's that?
Do you pay for gamma?
No, it's free.
I mean, you're able to do the things you want to do without paying for it.
Yeah.
Cool.
What else you got on your queue?
Yeah, the mid journey, of course,
(33:49):
chat GPT takes a lot of that cognitive load off for what it is.
What are you doing with GPT?
I had been doing YouTube tags and descriptions.
Anytime I need to flush out something that I just don't want to write.
And have you talked with advanced code analysis yet?
(34:09):
No.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God, dude.
It's pretty amazing.
I'm sure.
Here's your non-developer pro tip about advanced code analyzer.
It allows you to attach documents and files
so you don't even need to use the coding component of it.
Just by choosing it as the model you have,
you can attach like eight PDFs to it and be like,
yo, summarize these eight PDFs, find interconnected themes and output me a summary.
(34:34):
Instead of cutting and pasting into the main token window,
you can upload PowerPoints, Word docs, anything like that.
So you don't have to be a developer to use the advanced data analysis function.
Interesting.
I haven't seen.
I haven't tried.
I haven't had a use case for it yet.
I wish I did.
How about GPT plugins?
What are a couple of your faves?
I don't have any.
I don't pay for GPT.
(34:55):
I don't think I'm at that point where I could warrant the cost.
I pay for mid-journey now, but I may actually stop again
because I'm finding ideogram to yield just as good results or even using Dali.
Dude, all this shit is moving so quickly that it is really hard to keep abreast.
(35:16):
So I'm sure you maybe know this already,
but I may be canceling my mid-journey subscription as well, even though I love it
because Dali 3 is coming out and it's coming out inside GPT.
So the same interface you use to do your text prompting now in GPT,
they're just going to essentially take mid-journey but better
and port it all right on in there to the GPT interface.
And that's probably when I'll I've been debating it,
(35:39):
but that's when I wanted to see about using ideogram to try these things.
And I'm very happy with ideogram. Have you have you fucked with Poe?
Have you seen Poe come across? So you remember Trillium.
Remember back in the day when there was like 10 instant messaging platforms?
Oh, Trillium. Trillium.
Yeah. Yeah. So you had to have Trillium to talk to all your different friends across
(36:01):
all your different networks. So there's one called Poe now and it's like an AI dashboard.
And it's got llama and palm and GPT and clode and mid-journey and all these things
stacked in one interface and you check one and then you ask your question to that.
Then you check the next one, ask your question to that.
It's a great way of seeing like what the different models are good at.
Yeah. I heard that for the creative writing thing, dude.
(36:23):
Claude has been kicking GPT's butt when it comes.
I use right now. Here's my secret sauce.
I'll take this video. I'll grab the transcript.
I'll drop it into GPT and I'll be like, yo, GPT, make detailed notes of my talk with Chris Perillo.
It'll and pull out all relevant poll quotes like things I can use as quotes by themselves.
(36:43):
So it goes through and generates this very detailed list.
But if I was to actually ask that now to turn it into prose, it fucking screws the pooch, man.
It doesn't sound great. It sounds like AI, even despite some other cool hacks I have
from making it sound like my voice. So that's when I pull it into the clode
and have it do the writing there. And it's two different people.
It's like having a high schooler write it versus that. What is that tool?
(37:06):
The tool is called Po, P-O-E. And the creative writing AI that I prefer is Anthropics Clode.
OK. C-L-A-U-D-E.
My French friend said I was saying it wrong, so hopefully I'm saying it right now.
Yeah, it's been super cool. And that's my only exposure to Google's Palm model and
(37:27):
Facebook's Llama model, both of which I just wanted to tinker with or whatever.
And so I've been having a lot of fun with Po.
Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't done any of this. My God.
I know. I wouldn't have to explore Po.
Oh, man. Yeah, it's cool. It just gives me this window into these different models
and starts helping me think more, not just about like how does GPT work,
(37:50):
but how does AI work in general? They are not necessarily synonymous.
Wow. All right. What else is on your tool list?
I really don't use a lot. I don't. What do you record in audio and video in these days?
No, no. It's all I handed off to human being.
Yes. I'm sure they might have their set of tools, but I'm not really production minded.
(38:12):
Here's another one of my fucking so fun, empowering pro tools is
and it's not like that new. Other people use it, but Descript,
this podcasting and video blogging tool. Here's the real sweet thing, dude.
I take the video, I drop it in, it transcribes it, and then I've got these two windows side by side,
the picture and the text. I go into the text and I can take out words in the text and it goes back
(38:37):
to the video and it takes out the audio and video and makes a cut, a beautiful seamless cut.
So I can now edit audio and video in a text file, essentially.
Interesting. Yeah, it's super incredible, man.
Really interesting. Really still.
I'm taking it. OK, let's switch gears then a little sec.
(38:57):
Give me a couple like people who you're super tuned into now.
Who do you think is doing a great job out there?
We mentioned Phil DeFranco, but let's go about some other ones.
How about Matt Wolf? You checked out Matt Wolf?
No. No? It's my favorite video podcast on the Internet right now.
Yeah, dude, he's so cool. He's so cool.
(39:18):
His site's called Future Tools. Oh, yeah. OK, I guess I do.
Yeah. Yeah. His video blog, dude, is hot shit.
Oh, I bet. You want to talk about condensing like a
week's worth of stuff into this punchy, highly edited, highly produced.
It's incredible. I don't know if I've watched the video,
but I think he's one of the people that I follow on X.
(39:39):
Oh, yeah, man. He's he's a legit source, dude.
He's a first order. He's a first order.
He's a first order knowledge fountain.
I believe it. I absolutely believe it.
Anyone else that you think?
I guess I don't really watch content.
(40:00):
Certainly not the way I used to.
I even ignore a lot of my YouTube subscriptions.
This is a good chance for your audience and mine to make some suggestions
then like who we should be checking out and watching.
Yeah. Drop it in on there like who we should be checking out.
Because usually what will happen is someone will send me a link.
Right. And then I watch or listen to that.
And so that's more often than not the people that I follow or listen to
(40:23):
because there's so much content these days and I know people and I know of people,
but I just don't have I ain't got time even for the things that I love.
I spend more time, more of my time watching produced content as in traditional content,
like streaming media like on Apple TV plus or Paramount plus or whatever
on all the streaming media platforms.
When I have like bandwidth, I spend more time with that than I do online content.
(40:47):
Fascinating, man.
Yeah, I was there for a while, but I'm right back slurping up
as much as I can off the Internet these days.
It's just what's captivated my imagination.
Hey, I want to go back in time a little bit and just talk about some of the GnomeDeck stuff
because it's meant so much to me over the years.
I just wanted to put out there that like people I still work with to this very day
(41:09):
came from meeting them at GnomeDeck.
That's funny.
And it was early Internet.
It was focused around personal publishing.
To say that it was non-commercial is not exactly fair because there was
sponsors and money to be made and stuff.
But the commercial nature of it was more innocent or something like it wasn't as much.
(41:31):
I don't know.
I don't know if I'd go that far.
It was a model that I wish could have continued to work, but I knew that it just wouldn't.
And because not being an event production guy with that kind of background,
it was a challenge and not really having a stable team every year was like reinventing.
Despite people having knowledge of it, that's just not enough.
(41:53):
And without a stable foundation and an understanding of what needs to be done
and by whom and having that carefully curated, I went out and after the 10th year and I was done.
And by then, Ted X had come around as a model.
I'm like, that's great.
(42:14):
I may be asking the wrong guy here considering you're so jaded these days, but
I feel like I had a bit of an epiphany last week.
I was at Dent, the Dent, the Future Conference down in Santa Fe.
And I was sitting there just blissed out, man, having an I love the world moment.
I was looking around.
I was like, man, the connections in this community are so rich and so deep.
(42:35):
And I actually care about these people.
I'm invested in their life.
This is pretty fucking amazing.
And then the next thought I had was like, things didn't always start off this way.
And the only way to make things this way is time.
This element of time passing and those relationships really,
even ours growing over 20 years or something, it's a lot different than just
some hot new creator on the Internet or whatever.
(42:56):
Like I'm invested in more than just your show, your life and stuff.
And so anyway, I as I sit there, I'm like, yo, Chris, if you truly do want to have something
like this someday, the only way to do it is to put your stake in the ground now and to declare
based around my personality, my unique interests and the beauty of the networks
that I put in place over my life.
(43:16):
I am going to, I think, start a conference.
Have fun.
Tell me, hit me up.
Talk me out of it.
Talk me out of it.
No, I will not talk you out of it because I've had the experience several times over,
not just with Nome Dex, I ran blogger fair for four years, tried to pivot that,
(43:39):
just didn't have the right team, did a couple of like toy collecting events, which I loved,
but just didn't have the right partnerships.
I've been doing the creator tech dot net, these meetups, mixers in Redmond that I'm hoping
will catch on.
I'm hoping, but I'm trying.
I'm like trying to make connections.
I'm trying to build that up and do it in a way that I want to do it because I love
(44:03):
the conversational nature of events.
But the next one I'm staging to do, I'm into 3D printing now and I love it.
In fact, the first time I heard about it, if you were there that year, we had Bree Pettis
on stage.
I'm friends with Bree to this very day because of MakerBot launch at Nome Dex.
This is the type of thing I'm talking about, man.
I wasn't into it then, man.
(44:23):
What is this?
What am I going to do with this?
You made us those coins with your face on them.
With the cheese.
Yeah.
Everything old is new again, right?
But I'm setting, I've been wanting to do in the past, there have been a handful of community
driven 3D printing events that go by RepRapFest.
(44:45):
So IRF or MRF would be Midwest RepRapFest, East Coast RepRapFest.
There's different RepRapFests.
So these are community driven events that are usually done at fairgrounds.
And I want to do something different.
I don't know what it was.
And there's now an opportunity for me to do, what's the word I'm looking for?
(45:08):
There's an opportunity for me to do a 3D printing event.
And I've been looking for a venue and a viable possibility.
Like I did with the creator tech.
I'm like, I'm not going to pay for a venue and charge people who aren't going to show up.
I don't have the same connections as I used to.
Yeah, totally.
But for 3D printing, I know the community is here.
(45:29):
They just need a place to go.
And so I'm working in good faith with a local place that was doing an event anyway this fall, winter.
And we've been doing this dance.
Yeah, I'd be interested in doing something with y'all and nothing for a while.
And they said, no, we won't be able to do it because of this, that, and the other thing.
(45:50):
So I just iced it.
Then they came back to me and says, hey, we're going to be doing an event
that's going to be this type of audience, very much in the same vein of the type of
audience that's interested in 3D printing.
Would you be interested in doing your 3D printing event for Maker Deck?
That's the name of the 24 seven Twitch channel, Maker Deck.
(46:11):
You can go there now and see.
I can pull it up on the second monitor and show you.
But basically, we're going to have an event in tandem.
And it'll be adults only because the way the event is, I don't think that's going to be much
of a problem because of the crossover.
Yeah, I'm doing a Maker Deck event this winter.
So I'm not going to I'm not going to try to tell you don't do an event because it's very
(46:34):
you learn a lot.
You're on the radar in a different way.
You gain experience.
You'll stress out.
You will literally die and then come back to life.
Like you don't realize I will give you some tips.
Because I'm about to ask you to join my advisory board.
So please give me some.
Chip.
Oh, boy.
I stepped into it.
So minimize your risks up front.
(46:56):
Mitigate your risks.
Bootstrap as much as you possibly can.
Make connections where you possibly can.
And when you're in the process, you'll learn a lot.
And I've certainly learned about what I don't want to do or how I don't want to do it, how
I want to have the event be done and how to drive it.
I can host the shit out of anything.
(47:17):
Sure.
But the thing to keep in mind, day of event, you're done.
That's it.
You can't do you can try changing things.
But you have to switch into host with the most most set it all aside.
All the time.
Trust me, things are going to blow up.
Someone's cat exploded.
Then you have to think.
Clean it up and then got it.
(47:37):
It's a decision.
I got it.
It's it's in a different mindset.
And then when you're done, you just you this you feel the sense of accomplishment.
That is almost unparalleled.
And that's the thing.
That sense of accomplishment that you get is the thing that energizes you to do the
next event, even when you know you're going to die.
And you know, I've got a couple of things that I'm thinking of as I go into this.
(48:01):
I'm trying not to be manic about it.
I'm trying not to be like, I'm going to have the biggest event of all time or anything
like that.
I'm hoping to have 35 paid people in the first year or something like that.
I'm building my budgets around like a pretty small core that can grow out over time.
I'm I'm approaching it from the sitting there at Dent perspective of looking back on a
tenure arc.
So I'm looking 10 years from now and I want to be in a sweet venue in a sweet location
(48:25):
with tier one keynotes, awesome activities, great musicians and bands playing.
And we'll just get their baby steps along the way or whatever.
Yeah, I'm going to bite off a small chunk and then I'm going to do that chunk and then
I'm going to.
That's what I was thinking.
And yeah, I think it's going to be like just it's going to be artier than a lot of tech
(48:46):
events.
I want to bring in some South by Southwest stuff.
I want to bring in some Burning Man slash bar camp slash food camp values of.
I'm sorry, there's no attendees here.
There's only participants.
You've got to bring something to the table if you want to be a part of this community
or whatever.
Right.
And it's got to be a little bit more than just money.
We all bring our money to the table, but you got to bring something else to.
Right.
Is maybe the ethos and I mean, like, I think it's a little bit more than just money.
(49:10):
Ethos and I mean, I even feel a bit of a sense of responsibility because, dude, as a
photographer, I've got to go to the coolest events in the whole wide world.
I've been to the TED Talks, the pop text, the South by Southwest, the dent, the gnome
decks, whatever.
And I've ingested all this shit and synthesized it.
And now I want to share my unique perspective with other groups.
(49:31):
That's reasonable.
Yeah, man.
That is.
Yeah.
I say go for it, because ultimately, even if you do your own spin, you'll iterate.
The first gnome decks that I did was different from the last one.
Like it evolved.
I let it have a life of its own.
So in many ways, like what I'm doing with the creator tech dot net stuff being the
(49:53):
conversations at the crossroads of creativity or creators, much like you and me,
entrepreneurs and technologists.
Like, I feel like that's the thing, but I don't know.
Maybe it's going to get co-opted.
I don't know.
But I've got a question here for you.
And maybe I should wait for our first advisory more.
But I'm going to ask it out loud right here right now.
So part of what I think makes dent work is Steve Broback and Jason Preston are equal
(50:18):
partners in this thing.
And what that allows it to do is it allows it to be easily bigger than either of them.
So gnome decks wasn't about Chris Perullo.
You know what it was.
I didn't want to wait.
I know, but it was inevitable by the strength of your personality, interest, all the rest.
So this thing that I'm doing.
Yeah, I want it to be Krugfest, but I don't really want it to be Krugfest.
(50:41):
I want it to be dent desk.
And do you think that I should consider doing the Steve Broback, Jason Preston thing?
Or should I align with a peer who shares my interests and that we make a new thing
together and it is one more step removed from my persona?
As long as that's where it comes down to agreements and understandings and boundaries.
(51:02):
You're like, as long as you find someone you can work with for a decade.
Yeah, not just that.
Your goals are aligned, your visions aligned, and they are a compliment to you, not a mirror
of you.
And that's challenging because I have found through years of doing what I've done that
some people that I might not everybody's this way, but a lot of the people that I might
(51:24):
have attracted want to be me.
And I don't mean that in the.
I know exactly what you mean.
They want to be in the orbit, but they also want to be me.
Yeah, you need to go out there and front the business and then you know the other guy who's
sitting there organizing all the teams together and stuff.
So I have tried and I have failed at putting things together and ultimately giving rise
(51:45):
to personalities.
I've tried and failed in the moment that a personality steps out of something that I've
done.
I'm like, I've fucked up again.
I that's my feeling that I screwed up and it lost its way.
And that was the right person at the right time.
But all the more reason why, especially when I'm very key on maker deck, not being personality
(52:08):
driven, very adamant.
It means your personality is driven specifically.
Yeah, I don't.
I'm like, Chris Perillo is personality driven, right?
I don't want locker gnome to be personality driven for now.
I have no choice because that's the thing is pays the bills.
But at some point, I'll be able to pass that baton because it'll be abstracted for me.
I'm just like Linus Sebastian.
(52:29):
I am Linus, but he being the thumbnail, but not in the video.
So it's like it's that kind of abstraction where that value is still there.
But there's a deeper value than beyond just not being able to scale a personality or having
it tied to that personality.
And if they go, that's it.
The project goes like that was the wrong person.
That was my love thinking through this stuff and talking through it with you, man.
(52:52):
It is so cool to be like reconnected and just to really watch you reinvent yourself, like
doing the learning out loud, living out loud thing.
Yeah, I respect the fuck out of it.
Seriously, I appreciate it.
Yeah.
Hey, we got five minutes left.
What else do you want to talk about?
I don't know.
We talked about coffee, veganism, AI, conferences, content, high school bullying.
(53:13):
No, we didn't get into that.
Although, yeah, I've had it.
My daughter, apparently, she's nine.
She's turned nine having problems with a girl on the bus.
And I'm like, I told her, I know exactly how you feel.
I had problems with people that thought they could push me around.
And for years, I let them.
And I said, you know, the only thing that stops a bully is standing up to them.
It's not fun.
It's not easy, but I had to do it.
And you know what?
(53:34):
Even the scariest bully in high school, man, I really thought he was going to kill me.
One day, because I looked like an easy target.
And you can't give them the satisfaction.
I said, don't even bother arguing.
Don't engage.
You don't need to stay on your path.
And when they realize that they can't get to you, they'll just move on.
(53:55):
And one day he pushed me from behind in gym class.
I turned around and I pushed him from behind.
This guy's bigger than me.
He was not exactly how every you have the different classes of kids in school, not exactly.
In the upper class, not exactly in the lower.
Not exactly in the lower, but like one you didn't want to mess with.
(54:16):
Yeah.
The person that you just did not want to mess with.
And so I, but I did it instinctually.
I be like, no, this is the time to stand.
And I threw up my fist.
Sorry, God.
I'm so glad I didn't have to use them.
And I'm here's the thing.
He didn't.
He didn't really didn't bother me from that point on.
And he, like, he was surprised.
But I think this is my own narrative.
(54:37):
But I think in many ways he respected me.
Absolutely.
Oh, he's not going to be.
I'm like, no, I'm done.
Yeah.
And that's what it took.
So, yeah, there's your high school bullet.
You brought it up.
I'm like, I got a story for you.
I know, man.
It's so funny.
It applies all the way to this very day.
There's a couple of times recently people been trying to bully me online a little bit and stuff.
And just kind of like stand up saying you're not going to take it.
(54:59):
And it's not easy.
Like people are back the fuck off once you tell them that.
No, this is not.
This is the boundary.
This is the boundary.
Yeah, man.
Yeah, it's key.
Yeah, I could go on.
You can give me any topic and I can spin on it for an hour.
I'm a talker.
I'm a content producer.
No need, man.
I think we've really covered a lot of ground.
I actually thought we'd sit around and talk about some of the good old times, but
(55:20):
we'll save that for another one.
A bonus podcast for the history buffs in the room or whatever.
Yeah.
RSS.
I shall.
Oh, my God.
It does.
On that topic, dude, I think that some of the energy I'm feeling right now around AI
and this whole stuff does harken back to rocking the web like it's 2005.
Man, I got my Tumblr back.
(55:40):
I'm blogging again.
I got my podcast going.
Talking to Matt Mullinwig from Automatic on the podcast tomorrow.
It's the time machine.
Tell him I said hi.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
He was that I don't know if he was ever he was at a Nome Dex, but we weren't each other's over.
I remember him showing me WordPress dot com before it launched.
I remember.
But I don't think that was at no.
I went to WordCamp Vancouver yesterday and I realized while I was there,
(56:04):
it was 20 years ago that Northern Voice was in that same room.
And I met for the first time, Matt Mullinwig, Robert Scoble,
a whole bunch of you motherfuckers that came up to Vancouver to do personal publishing conferences.
And I was literally right in the same building 20 years later at WordCamp.
And I had just this surreal experience.
I think before anything happened, Darren Barefoot, rest of the team.
(56:28):
Yeah.
He he was asking me he was at Nome Dex and he's asking me for advice before he
he everything got kicked up in Vancouver in and around that time.
And I remember giving him advice and guidance and I hope it helped.
I think about.
Derek Miller.
And I think about Darren Barefoot quite a bit.
Those are a couple like pillars of our community that time who are no longer with us.
(56:50):
And it is.
It's the it's the booby prize of that thing I was telling you about time and richness
from communities.
People do move on and it's sad,
but send out love to their friends and family and letting everyone know.
I still think about those guys all the time.
I do.
Believe it or not, they do cross my mind every so often.
(57:12):
They do.
Yeah, man.
That's awesome.
I love you, Chris Perillo.
Me too.
Yeah.
Talk soon, dude.
Thank you very much for hanging out with me on the podcast.
Thank you, Chris.
Over and out.
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