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September 26, 2023 15 mins

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Thomas Girard for his podcast Unique Ways. The premise is he asks all his guests the same 20 questions to get insight into their unique perspectives and paths.

We covered a wide range of topics - from my background blending tech, creativity and photography, to my goals for the future building my company and online community. I shared advice on creating your own opportunities and not waiting around. And we discussed some of the cool new AI tools I'm experimenting with these days.

I'm always down to connect with fellow creators looking to push boundaries and swim upstream. So hit me up online, check out my podcast Motley Krug, and subscribe to my newsletter. Thanks for listening and hope you enjoy the full conversation with Thomas! Let's keep exploring the edge together.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Greetings people of the internet. It's Chris Krug here. What follows is a recent podcast that I recorded with Thomas Gerard.

(00:10):
He invited me to be on his Unique Ways podcast where he interviews people that are carved out their own way and are swimming upstream and being successful.
So he asks them all the same 20 questions. It's a good chance for me to get my stories out there into the world. I really hope you enjoy it.
Thanks a lot Thomas. Over and out for now, internet.

(00:32):
Welcome to Unique Ways with Thomas Gerard. We've got an awesome guest on today. His mantra, technology is best when it brings people together. Please join me in welcoming Chris Krug.
Hey, good morning Thomas.
Ready for your 20 questions?
I think so. I took a look at these questions before our interview and I got intimidated. They're hard.
We can definitely skip over the ones that you don't like.

(00:53):
Nah, let's take a crack at it.
Okay, here we go. Number one, tell me a little bit more about yourself.
I'm a creative jack of all trades. I have a background in web development and that led me into communications and photography.
And that became my sweet spot. I was able to do photography alongside my technology consulting.

(01:14):
When Web 2.0 broke, I was one of the first users of Flickr and one of the first users of Twitter. I was able to use those tools to share my photos and to build an audience and a reputation.
And I was able to share what I was doing with other artists and creatives. My sweet spot is an intersection of technology and creativity and sharing and education.

(01:38):
Sweet, yeah. I remember teaching and recommending that we bring you in for a long time.
Question two, what's a piece of knowledge that makes you different?
My unique blend of tech and art. I find myself in the role of translator where I'm working with artists to understand technology or working with tech entrepreneurs to understand the creative process and how photographers, filmmakers, podcasters use these tools.

(02:03):
I got real lucky. I was 18 years old. I went to college in 1995. I showed up at the university. I'd been assigned to the English as a second language dorm.
And I rolled in and there was a bunch of exchange students from Seoul, Korea. I popped my head into the share space and I was like, Hey, what's going on? I'm Chris. What you up to? They were like, personal homepage.

(02:24):
I said, what? They said Netscape Navigator Gold personal homepage. They were sitting there building themselves websites.
I hung out with those guys and by the end of the week, I'd had my first links page up. Since the beginning of World Wide Web, I've been tinkering through the early stages and then through Web 2.0 right up into this whole AI and blockchain revolution.

(02:47):
I've grown up building the internet.
It's great to hear your art angle. If you guys are looking for more art related shows, check out the one with Senya Su. She's a great local artist here.
Number three, why this of all things? Why do you do what you do?
I feel like I can't do anything else but what I do. I thrive on creativity and curiosity and innovation.

(03:11):
This whole emerging digital landscape is a unique place where I get to be the painter and critic, the gallery owner all at the same time.
Why would I do anything else? How could I do anything else? I'm able to influence culture. This is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.
What does your future look like?
I've spent a lot of time in the last decade sharing my skills and knowledge with clients as a consultant on other people's projects.

(03:40):
And it's about time I take some of these techniques and unique perspectives that I've been implementing for other people and use them on my projects.
I'm focused on building my company and I hope to make a million bucks next year.
Beyond the finances, I'm looking to make a sphere where artists and technologists can come together, share and learn and make a collaborative space.

(04:03):
I've been doing development around AI lately. I've been releasing small tools. I think of bass hits. I'm trying to get different ideas out there and see what works.
I can align some of my energy and resources behind the ideas that get traction and turn those bass hits into home runs.
Awesome. Let's talk about location. How's the place playing to what you do?
The place is pretty fluid for me. Vancouver's home right now. I go back after spending the pandemic out on the islands.

(04:30):
Digital Realm is my playground. Whether I'm an East Van or traveling around for shoots and events, the sense of place is wherever I can create and make an impact and roll up my sleeves and work on awesome projects with people that I'm inspired by.
Nice. What advice would you give your younger selves?
Don't follow the hype. Trust your skills. Take time to master them. Connections that matter over time, the relationships and the people.

(04:56):
Allow younger me to pursue some personal growth earlier in my life. I went to therapy for the first time. Sharing I found it really useful.
Definitely wish I could hop in a time machine and go tell 20 year old KK that's a good idea.
What's a day in your life like?
No two days are really the same. I could be scouting photo shoot locations or creating digital strategies for a client.

(05:19):
Yesterday I moderated a panel for professional communicators and PR people about how AI is going to change their industry.
One of the panelists was my old best friend and business partner Robert Scales from Montreal.
The other panelist was the chief technology officer for the US Department of Defense Space Force.

(05:41):
Then she was calling in from the Pentagon. You just never know where things might end up.
Spend a lot of time blogging, making podcasts, video blogs. I like to do those events so I'm out and participating in things.
I'm an early bird so I'm up early. It's when I can find a nice big chunk of time to myself to sink my teeth into projects.
By the time the rest of the world wakes up, my phone's ringing and people want my attention.

(06:08):
Wake up early, work hard and then take a break and eat and work out and have a nap.
Then usually do a second day starting at about two o'clock and sink back in again.
Nice. I'm also on the AI train. I was recently on a panel at the Vancouver Convention Center about AI and met John Bondoc.
Definitely got to pick your brain some more.
Dan Burke, lifelong learning is a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?

(06:32):
I definitely let my curiosity drive me. I'm always reading. I'm following thought leaders.
One of the coolest things about the internet is we have direct access to our heroes' brains.
Long before an article comes out by my favorite journalists, I can be following their tweets and understanding where their minds at.
I'm always dabbling with new tools.

(06:54):
I've been really interested in this concept lately of learning out loud.
By that I mean learning in public, sharing. I'm starting an online newsletter.
I'm trying to grow that community and evaluating different tools and I'm sharing that information with my community.
I am talking about the mistakes I made and what I learned from them so that other people can not make those same mistakes.

(07:17):
I just had a new intern come over this week and I am trying to crystallize some of this learning out loud philosophy and process for him.
I want him documenting and sharing the internship so that it's not just what he's learning from me but what he's learning from other people too as he shares his experience.
That sounds rad.
Number nine, what tools do you use? Are you entirely digital?

(07:39):
It is a really cool time to talk about tools with the advent of AI and with new technologies. Everything's changing and it's changing really fast.
My suite of tools is changed. On the AI front, there's a bunch of tools I'm using.
The one that I have been stoked about this week is called Po.
You remember Trillium, the instant messaging platform that let you connect to all your different instant messaging platforms so you could send and receive messages in one place?

(08:07):
Po's like that for AI. It's got Clode AI and Llama AI and ChatGPT and Mid Journey and all these different models assembled in one place in one interface.
By going there, different things are better at different tasks.
Like the Clode model currently has a 100,000 token limit.

(08:30):
You can paste huge blocks of text into it and get it to summarize and analyze and annotate.
I've been stoked on Po. I've been doing my podcasts and video blogs in Descript, which is this hybrid online offline tool.
I record in it. It also does the transcription and it allows you to edit your podcast and your video blog through the transcript.

(08:53):
You can change the transcribed sentence in text and it'll go back to the audio and video channels and make those seamless edits and updates in a way that would have taken me a long time before.
Because of the technically complicated nature of making some of those edits, I would just skip it.
I would say that's going to take too much time for me to do that. This thing's good enough as it is. Let me blast it out there.

(09:18):
With Descript, I've been changing my editing game. I've got Notion up on my desktop right now. It's a personal wiki. It's like my journal or my notebook or my Moleskine.
I start there every morning. It's got my to-do lists. It's got links. It's got my calendar and it's a really flexible, modern way.

(09:40):
It's lightweight. It can produce things as HTML and cut and paste straight in and out of my blog editors.
Because it's web-based, I can use it on all my different computers, on all my different phones. All my information is available to me in all the different places. I like that a lot.
I use the Adobe Suite. The new Photoshop's incredible with its AI generative capabilities.
I use the standard Gmail Suite. I'm really addicted to Google tools. They integrate really well. They're rolling out the Google Duet AI directly into Google Docs and Gmail.

(10:12):
I've been keeping a spreadsheet of my SaaS expenses, my software as a service expenses.
If you don't keep your eye on it with all these tools that are out right now, you can really run up a big billion.
I'm spending $350 or $400 a month on these recurring software as a service tools.
Another tool I'm freaking stoked about is Beehive. That's the software I'm using to run my email list.

(10:36):
It's super modern. It's got the referral program baked into it. It's got great integration with my blog and my website. I'm loving Beehive.
I've been using 11 Labs. 11 Labs is a voice cloning technology.
Use it for making deep fakes if you're doing nefarious stuff, but I've been using it to make podcast intros and outros.

(10:57):
I've been able to train this voice model on my voice by reading it. David Attenborough's strips from Planet Earth.
It's got a solid clone of my voice. In the month that I've been playing with this tool, it has improved so much.
First KK voice clone sounded like a drunken robot and this last one is indistinguishable from my own voice. My mom couldn't tell the difference.

(11:19):
Nice. The subscription point is a good point. I'm thankful that the iPhone has a subscription tab and you can keep track of that. Otherwise, I would spend all my money on that.
I use the Google Play Store subscription monitor and I pay for stuff with PayPal when I can. They have a subscription monitor too. I've just decided it's something I really keep my eye on.
If you weren't doing what you do now, what would you be doing?

(11:41):
I'd be a pure tech entrepreneur or always wanted to be a filmmaker, work on long-term feature length, films that bring audio, video and all sorts of things to bear. I would just specialize a little bit more.
What would you not like to do with your career?
Anything monotonous or repetitive. I'm really good at starting things and getting them from zero to one. Then as things start to move into more of a day-to-day, that terrifies me a little bit. I like starting new stuff, being creative, finding patterns that emerge and connecting those dots. Being stuck in a cube would be what I don't want to do.

(12:23):
Do you have a favorite word, quote or sentence?
I often think of that Oscar Wilde quote, be yourself, that everyone else has already taken. There's a lot of times where I'm reminded how much I don't fit in to things and that's something I'd have confidence around and be proud of.
Do you have a least favorite word, quote or sentence?
I hate it when people say, think outside the box. It's so cliche that it's just painful. I got some other pet peeves. I don't like a know-it-all.

(12:52):
Pick one word to describe yourself.
Unconventional.
What keeps you up at night?
Ideas, Thomas. Ideas, man. My brain's a never-ending brainstorm session.
What's a dream you're chasing?
I would love to have a mobile media van, a really super fancy Burning Man-proof thing I could drive across the Sahara Desert with Starlink on the top, fully equipped lifestyle media van that I could just untether completely.

(13:26):
What inspires you?
I'm inspired by the unknown, whether it's an unexplored idea or a concept or create a challenge. I'm always turning over rocks and seeing what's underneath them and trying to grow and learn new things.
Last couple questions here. Any advice you'd like to share?
More now than ever, I would say don't wait for opportunities. Now is the time where you can build your own door and kick it open.

(13:51):
I don't think we need to do things the way they've been done before or the way that other people tell us to do them. Make your own way.
Thanks, number 20. How can I assist keep tabs on you? What should we check out?
I'm active online. Check out my website or find me on YouTube or Instagram. I've started this podcast. I call it Motley Krug. It's on Spotify, Apple and Google.

(14:13):
Check me out. Subscribe to my email newsletter. I'm growing that right now and looking to take that to the next levels. Say hello, say what's up. I'll say hi back and we can connect.
Thank you so much for coming on. It's such a pleasure to have you on after following you for so many years and being able to have this conversation with you is really special for me. Thanks so much.
Yeah, man. This is a cool thing you're doing. I like how you are unbounded by the fact that you're in Vancouver. It's cool. You had Chris Doe on, Richard Saul Worman. He started Ted as a total badass. I love what you're up to, man. Super inspiring. And thanks a lot for having me on your show.

(14:48):
Awesome. Thanks.
So did you make it all the way to the end? I'm curious how many people are listening to these pods. Thanks a lot, Thomas. I had a good time talking to you. For those who are interested in our discussion, he actually invited me back for a video podcast a couple of weeks later.

(15:11):
And I think we went quite a bit longer and that'll be coming out over the next week or so. I'll edit it all up sweet and get it out there over the airwaves. Please share this podcast with your friends and your family. I'm trying to grow things around here.
Send me a message and let me know you made it to the end. I'll send you a sticker in the mail or something like that. And thank you so much for all the love and support. I'm going to keep exploring the edge of future technology and creativity and speaking to artists and creatives and other independent publishers and content creators who are trying to figure out what the fuck is going on out there.
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