Interview Transcript: Donald Bell

I’m glad to be here.

Yes, many lives.

It depends who I’m talking to, typically. I think right now my main thing that I’m engaged with is my YouTube channel for my Maker Projects and Maker Project weekly news show, which is called Maker Update. That’s the thing that I’m probably engaged with the most right now, in that I have some guilt around that too because there are a lot other projects that have fallen to the back burner that I wish were not so.

But right now I produce Maker Update weekly. I do other videos for a site called Cool Tools, where I’ll do a video review of different tools, or not just tools but appliances, gear, things that are recommended by other people, or things that I’ve found. And I send this off to Cool Tools, which is a site that’s run by Kevin Kelly from Wired and Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing. They pair up to do that site, and I’ve been a fan of that site and their podcasts for a while. So I do videos for them. I do videos for myself. When I’m not doing that, I am in a band called Aloha Screwdriver. And I practice with my friends in the band, it’s usually weekly, but recently it’s been we’ve been falling off schedule.

That happens. But then something, we’ll all sync back up, and we’ll get back into gear, and a have shows to practice for, or something like that. But right now it’s this and the holidays. And with a new kid on the way from our bass player’s family, things have taken a bit of a lull. But that’s the other main thing that I do is the band.

Yeah. I think at this point, we’re all in our late 30s, and we’re not trying to game it for MTV stardom. Right?

We’re casually in a band that releases music regularly, but still there’s nothing cutthroat about what we’re doing. We’re friends who are in a band that we’re both are not equally up there. I think our friendship is … I hope our friendship is the paramount concern there. But we’ve also, we’ve kept the band going through all of us having our kids and continuing to have our kids. If the kids can’t derail a band, I don’t know what will.

Or a move. But I think-

Right. Most of the roadblocks have been already navigated. So we’ll hang in there. Also, it helps that we’re in like an instrumental surf rock band. We always talk about how we can age into this band as long as we need to.

I see us still playing in the senior home. We have to actually find a way, as a practical concern right now for our drummer, Steve, he’s been having foot problems. How can we do this band all from wheelchairs or from sitting down? So how can we really turn that corner soon so that we can all of us be playing in chairs.

Yeah. You joke, but actually it is part of my task right now or my thinking right now around the band is how to integrate it more with the making side of things, the DIY electronics and technology side of things, to make it more of a show and as much as a band.

Yeah, and I think it also gets to the fact that I know that most of my motivation right now is towards making, doing projects, and filming projects, and working with do-it-yourself technology. If I can harness that to kind of get my enthusiasm back up for the band too, it helps But it’s also, it’s just kind of like, and I don’t know if it’s just the Bay Area. But right now I don’t know if there’s anything quite as uncool as being in a rock and roll band in the Bay Area right now, maybe in the United States or the world, but I don’t know. Maybe it’s just been a bad stretch of shows, but I feel like we’ve been playing good venue, I mean, decent venues in the San Francisco Bay Area, Friday, Saturday night, and it’s just kind of like crickets.

And it’s either the world telling you, “Look, no one wants to see your band at all.” Or it’s like we’ll have a lot of the standing rock and roll venues and music nights have been turned into DJ nights, and I understand the appeal of that, especially for a young audience that’s now increasingly taking the reins in the Bay area. But it also is like, well, it’s maybe time to regroup and think about a different approach to the band.

Yeah.

I understand. I find my own kind of resistance to it and cringe around it, and I just have to be honest with myself about that. And I think that it’s part of it … I don’t know. There’s a lot of different threads that you could pull on it for why it is. I think for me, the revelation that stood out for me, this was years ago, I did a … talk about multi-creative, but one of the little turns I made was into stand-up comedy and doing open mics in San Francisco, and then building it to a show. And it was a lot of fun. And I also knew that I just didn’t need one other thing for me to do, and that as fun as it was, it was also like this is one of those things I could come back to if I really want to. But the band where I have friends who are here, close by, who are actively wanting to be in a band, I don’t want to give up that for this.

There’s only so much time in a week. But the revelation was booking a Wednesday night comedy show in some theater in the mission in San Francisco, a place that would be hard to get to, no one’s ever been there before, probably, ticket prices were maybe like $20. Not like the $5 we’d usually do for a show, try to lure someone out to a show to see the band. $20 ticket price, venue no one had been to before, a bunch of comics no one’s ever heard before. But it just being the promise of comedy and not having to tolerate someone’s band that you may or may not enjoy, it was like a sold out show of like unknown comics that I was on the bill for. I was like, this is … It’s been so long since I’ve been doing shows, and trying to get people out to shows to see a band or see bands, that I had forgotten that sometimes if you’re offering something entirely different, the reaction to it is so different.

And so seeing that really opened my eyes to like, man, if I could make the band something that’s not like, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to go see this band that may or may not be great. Or maybe they’re a great band, but they may or may not have a good night,” whatever it is. I didn’t have to sell anybody coming out to an open mic comedy show. That was just like, “Of course I’ll go see that.”

And even if like half the comedians are awful, they’re all going to have 5- or 10-minutes sets that I can … There’s something about tolerating an awful band that’s different. It’s like it can be loud and obnoxious, and it can sour you to going out and see bands in a way that seeing awful stand-up comedy, a 5-, 10-minute awful comedian, it’s not going to turn you off to seeing comedies necessarily, you know?

Yeah, I understand that too. They typically call them bringer shows, right?

It’s all the comedians are trying to get their own friends to show up and see them do something they’ve never seen their friend do before. But the analog to that, to music of like, “Come out and see me play on acoustic guitar. You’ve never seen me do that before,” it still is a harder sell.

I feel like we’re there right now. I think the band is being honest with the fact that as much shtick as we have and as much as we try to make it an interesting night for people, there’s more that could be done, possibly, and maybe even like a different way of booking the shows, giving people … If we make it more of an experience and less of a … There’s two openers. Then we’re somewhere in the lineup here …

Yeah, and we played some of those shows too. Those have been some packed shows.

I don’t know.

It’s on my … I’ll usually on a day-to-day basis, if I have a day in front of me, I’ll put together lists of things I wanna accomplish that day. I’ve literally wrote “Save the band” on my list several days in a row.

Just today I put down instead of “Save the band,” well, I got to try to make it more granular if I can so I can more realistically cross something off the list. And then I think today I wrote like, “Make the minimum viable plot line for a show.” If you were going to write a 20 minute one-act play that also had the band in it somehow, what’s the least I could get away with and have it not be a band performance, but performance of some other kind of thing that you’d go out and see, to the point where you would book a theater for it, like a little tiny theater for it instead of booking a rock venue or a club?

Yeah. It’s not that we’re at the elbow room, it’s that it’s a performancy thing here. Yeah, I don’t know. That’s what we’re thinking right now. And, again, if I can fucking build some robots to make it work or do some different stage production or something like that. The other thing that I keep ruminating on, and this is happening for museums right now too, museums are having kind of like their competitive moment for a lot of the, like the Meow Wolf and the different art collectives. Like what was the Ice Cream, Museum of Ice Cream, whether there’s like the color. I haven’t gone to them, but I’ve seen all the Instagram photos because everyone’s gone nuts these different art experiences that they can Instagram every room on, right?

Yeah. And so I feel like that’s what I’ve been hearing about how museums have been trying to react to this, is kind of the same moment where there’s a certain predictability or stodginess you’re trying to break out of. But a lot of people are going out to experiences, and almost just as like an Instagram opportunity, right?

Or they see that someone else has Instagrammed a photo from the ball pit at the Color Museum, and they want to have that same type of thing. And that in itself snowballs a kind of a viralness of the experience, or people wanting to go out. You couldn’t just be like The Red Hot Chili Peppers on stage and be like, “This is amazing.” But if there was like a line for “The Red Hot Chili Peppers photo experience” after every show, people would line up for that, maybe even more now than they would line up to go to the show.

That can go deep.

Yeah, I think there’s this, it’s this interesting shift, and it’s one that I am like growing up for me pre-Internet so much of like what made people cool in my eyes or like how I tried to cultivate my own coolness was like the secret shit. It was like you’d go to Berkeley and there’s a zine rack in Berkeley that had this particular … It had Factsheet Five or it had whatever the key was to the coolness, and you alone are able to kind of get it, and none of your friends were. There was like it was-

Right. Exactly. And it wasn’t necessarily something you shared. I don’t know. There’s still part of me that I feel like is … And it might just be my own messed up way of seeing the world, but it still feels like the coolness comes from me having the secret knowledge, not just sharing it to everybody, in some ways.

As opposed to the … [Distracted by the sound of a classic bike horn honking outside] [Laughing] The clown horn …

Okay. I just figured that’s your neighborhood clown going by, squeezing his nose.

[Getting back on topic] Anyway, the Kardashian version where it’s just like, I want to just show you everything amazing that I’m doing with my life right now. And I want, as soon as I know the thing, I want to tell everybody about it, and whether it’s genuine or not, I want it. It’s like so much of it is like, “Look what I’m doing. Look what I’m doing. Look what I’m doing. Look at how awesome this is what I’m doing.”

And I feel like that’s more generally what people are looking for somehow, or at least I’m picking up on it now, that so much of what people are going … how they want to spend their money when they’re going out on a Friday night is some experience where they can report back on social media, “Look at this awesome thing I’m doing.” And if it’s hard to record or capture, if it’s just another blurry image from the back of a concert hall, whether it’s Spinal Tap or Weezer or Kanye, it’s like if you can’t adequately convey how awesome it is that you’re there experiencing this thing, it’s almost like it’s wasted money. If you can’t plant your little flag in the experience and for whatever your motivations are, be able to show people, like, “I was here experiencing this thing. I got to … This was …” you know?

I might have missed out on all these other things that all my awesome friends are doing, but here’s what I was doing, and I have the right photo op here to show that.

Yeah, I think anything to some degree you have to trick people to get in the door. No one starts a new thing if it’s genuinely kind of new and interesting and people already are a fan of that new thing, right?

You’ve got to somehow entice people.

And I just don’t feel like any rock band right now, even if you’re 19 years old and the new hotness being pushed by Warner Brothers or whoever it is, I think everyone in kind of conventional rock and roll is having a hard time selling conventional rock and roll right now.

Yeah. I think that there’s also this larger thing of just like we’re at a saturation point with access to music now. When the Nirvana era was around, it was still like there was mainstream radio that you couldn’t avoid. There was mainstream MTV. There was mainstream radio. But getting music otherwise was like you’re going to Tower Records and finding the guy with the green hair to be able to give you the recommendations that were off the radar that could change your life. But otherwise there was no other easy way for that stuff to filter through.

Right? And now it’s flipped, and it’s like you could listen to the radio, but it’s the lowest common denominator. It’s never been more of a mainstream hit parade of the same 10 songs on radio. And so but you’ve got now you could cue up Spotify, and they’re going to recommend like 30 different things you’ve never heard of before that could be amazing. Now the struggle is just like with all this amazing music that you could possibly expose yourself to, how does any of it still surprise you? And then the experience, it comes back to the experience. And I think that’s what a lot of the music labels are trying to do too is trying to make bigger concerts, more Beyonce experiences, more things that you’re going to go out and see, because they’re not making the money off of the music anymore.

Yeah, and that’s all the other rationale for making-

It’s part of the motivation for being in the band is that it’s a way for me to get off my own complacent ass and get out to be in San Francisco on a Friday night when I would not otherwise drag myself out there unless there’s something I really wanted to see. But I’m always glad that I’m there. And if it’s like a dingy show that no one shows up to, it’s like it’s so a part of my adolescence. I started playing teen centers with these same guys when I was like 15 years old. So it’s like the dingier and more poorly attended the show, the more it feels like home to me.

But I still don’t want to still be playing, at 39 years old be playing to the other bands essentially, those shows. We just had one of those recently. It was like, why is it still like this? How is after being in this band for so long, how can we still have nights like this? Yeah, I think the other thing I did recently is I saw the artist Tom Sachs have a, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, he had this thing called Space Program, where he and his kind of crew of minions reenact this fake space trip to … and in this case it was the Europa. And it’s like this multi-hour-long thing, and you sit in a audience of folding chairs, and you watch him go through the motions of pretending like he’s like he and his crew are going to Europa, and it’s really …

But it’s all tongue in cheek, and you see them like actually taking like a drill out to like a frozen block of ice back behind the museum. And it’s all done over like a closed circuit TV. But it was like, aside from the fact that I needed a bathroom break halfway through or just I was out past my bedtime, I just wanted to stay around for the whole thing because it was like this shared experience. And it was silly, and it was fun. It was so much more memorable than turning on Spotify or seeing a band on a Friday night. It was weird and makery. And it had all those things. I’m like, “Ah.” It was like the other band that we’ve always kind of aspired to be like is Man or Astro-man?

To me this was almost like the logical extension of the Man or Astro-man? like shticky NASA-tinged retro astronaut stuff but without the music, but with the stage show completely replacing the music.

And I wouldn’t want to go there necessarily. But I feel like there’s some extra room in between there. And-

Personnel in all acoustic outfits.

Playing to senior homes.

Yeah. Steve is making … Our drummer is having a tremendous success as the lead singer and ukulele player of a children’s band that he’s devised. He’s now on his second album, and I would have never guessed, sorry, Steve, that three years ago when he had put this together that he’d be making a lot more money and booking a lot more gigs playing children’s music than he would be with Aloha Screwdriver.

But, again, I feel like it comes back to that stand-up comedy moment for me, which is like if you entirely change what you’re selling and what the audience might be for it, you can hit upon something that is not a … you don’t have to work so hard to sell, that people are actually eager to have this new thing.

Yeah.

Improvisational.

“We’re going to pay you the bare minimum. We would have doubled the amount you got if you had sold more beer, but you didn’t, so, yeah, just book something else next time.”

Yeah, and we’re not a conventional band anyway, so it’s like having us be unconventional in a different way is not a-

… weirder departure.

Yeah, sure.

For 2015 I took a job, my dream job, at Make Magazine as their projects editor, where it was my role to every day find new people who’d come up with cool do-it-yourself projects, and work with them to get their projects and their instructions for them published in the magazine and published up on the website. It was great because we had the clout with Make Magazine. Again, it was one of those changes where before that I’d worked at CNET for eight years, and every time I’d try to talk to somebody or whatever as like a kind of tech reporter person, it was always like pulling teeth where it’s like, “I’m trying to get something out of you.” And people would be resistant. They’re going to wait. “I’m going to wait for Engadget to contact me,” whatever it is. But to be with Make and to contact Makers was like I was delivering like the lottery check to them. And it wasn’t. There was no money in that part. But it was just like they were so excited to have Make contact with them. I was that face of it, and worked with them to get their projects published and more attention on what they do and what’s creative about them.

It was really fulfilling work, and I did that for a year, and then Make just shed a bunch of employees, including me. And I just didn’t want to stop doing that. I loved it too much, and I felt like even though my time at Make I liked working to get the projects in the magazine, it was so focused on the magazine that there was no time to put it on video or take it a different direction that was more timely so that when the projects went up, we could talk about them right then and not wait the month and a half for them to come out in the magazine, at what point you are so sick of editing that piece, and looking at it, and proofreading it, and all that stuff, but to hit it while the iron’s hot and be able to be enthusiastic about the project as soon as it’s out there was a big part of the appeal for me.

So I was hoping that by doing the same thing, rounding up my favorite projects for the week, and talking about them on a weekly show, and also in that curate and explain what’s great about the projects, just hopefully the audience would be there, the same audience that would be there for a Maker Faire or a Maker Magazine that would come around the show and be excited with me for these new projects. So that’s what Maker Update is.

I think when I first started doing my own YouTube channel, my hope was that I’d have more time in the day to do my own projects too and publish reviews of like kits and other projects and have it be a mix. But it was one of those things where the enthusiasm for the weekly Maker Update roundup was just so much proportionally or disproportionately there. The audience is there for that compared to what I was doing otherwise. There’s still some of the projects I’ve published have been well received. And this is more hit or miss compared to what the Maker Updates.

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

And I think getting to the point we were talking about there’s nothing, there wasn’t anything else out there like it. There are dozens of amazing makers who are creating projects and publishing project videos that are beautiful and amazing work. And I love covering them. But there’s not … There had not yet been a YouTube show that really tried to corral all of that into a digest experience. You know?

Yeah. There is, I do feel like in this Pinteresty Reddit time we live in, there are a lot of do-it-yourself projects that are beautiful, and the outcome is amazing. And often times people will share the outcome, and you’ll see that. And that’s a DIY project. But there’s no documentation. There’s no … If you really want to make the thing, not all projects really will step you through the process from knowing nothing to like coming out the other side with that same object. Right? There’s a lot of pictures of beautiful meals, but the recipe isn’t complete. Right?

And so there’s a lot of that in the maker world, and it bugs me. Especially when it’s a great project. Actually, one of the best projects I’ve done is there was a maker who I later met who hacked a Billy Bass talking fish to have an Alexa, like an Echo interface so that you could talk to the fish and the fish would speak back to you like Alexa would. And it was amazing. And it went viral. His video went viral for that thing, but he didn’t show you how he did it.

I know that this guy is like a teacher at like a tech institute, where he could tell you how he did it, and he didn’t, and it bugged me so much to the point where I needed to go and do it. I needed to figure out maybe not how he did it but how I would do it knowing what I know. And so I did my own hack of it. I published it up on Instructables and did a very short, crude video for it. But it’s been one of my best received projects. And I still get emails on that weekly on like people who are trying to remake it.

It’s great, but it’s, again, it’s one of those things where I was like, there’s a lot of projects out there that are amazing, but there’s not a lot of documentation for it. And then the other thing is true, which I think I’m trying to help with is that there’s so many shitty projects out there that no one would want to do that are amazingly documented. But there’s still so much in that with DIY technology space that harkens back to like the ’70s RadioShack. Make your own capacitor. And you’re like, “I don’t want to. Why would I want to do that?” Why would I want to make my own battery tester? I can order … Amazon can deliver me a battery tester for $2 free shipping right now.

And it’s like I understand the thrill of making your own stuff just for the sake of making your own things and it being satisfying, or exploring the technology. But for me at the end of the day, I mostly make things because I selfishly want the cool thing that comes out of me making it or that I can’t get it any other way, or-

And you put in the work to document it well and-

… great photos and explain it.

Yeah. That’s part of the motivations for mixing it up too is that I’m kind of over tweeting and Instagramming about my band doing shows. If I’m not interested enough about the show to be excited enough to blast it out and share my excitement around it, then what is that saying? You know? And-

Right. It comes through, somehow. When I’m genuinely excited about something, and even if it’s silly or it’s a crappy photo, it comes through. So it’s not so much that I … Because we’ve done it before where it’s like, “Okay, this, we need to be better about Instagramming. We need to like, for this next show we need to get like three Instagram posts up just to really try to get the audience out to the show.” It’s like I don’t know what the formula is, and I don’t know how to game it. And even if I have the instruction book on how to game it, when it gets to that point, you’ve lost me.

But if the game is how do we make this so much interesting, more interesting for us to be a part of that we just naturally want to share it because we’re excited about it, right, it’s like how I always, my Instagram posts go up dramatically when I’m on vacation because I’m excited to like see new things. It’s not just that I’m trying to brag to somebody that I’m at a beach or that I’m some exotic destination. It’s just I’m out of my usual routines. And it’s the dust is kind of blown off of my day-to-day life. And it makes me excited to post that, “Oh, I went to this cool bakery,” or whatever the dumb thing is. And it’s genuine that I’m excited about it.

Wow. Yeah. Wow.

I know I mentioned this earlier, the Tom Sachs piece that I saw in real life. But I’ve also been enjoying his short films on YouTube. He has a new one called The Hero’s Journey. It’s all about one minion coming up in the ranks in his art workshop, but it’s like this tough love how to get through my studio. And it’s worth watching. A lot of his short films, I really enjoy. But they’re kind of my soul food that I go back to.

He’s got one that’s like a love story of plywood, and it’s just about how he handles plywood in his shop, like exactly the number of plys to get, what grain, what rating to get on the plywood, when you paint it, before you cut it, and just like it’s … But it’s not like woodsmith type stuff. It’s like a very practical artist take on working with this stuff. But he’s also … And once you see enough of his stuff, you know that some of it his kind of macho, no-nonsense demeanor is just all tongue in cheek stuff, because his whole thing is really about how there’s just mistakes in all of his work, that one of his quotes is like, “Aye, I realize that Apple could make the most perfect device, most beautiful object, perfect object in every way, not flaws or anything, but like apple can’t make something as shitty as I can make this chair.” Right?

And so, “And in that shittiness I have this power, and the more I kind of acknowledge it and exploit the defects in the stuff that I make, the more human it becomes, and the more me it is.” And just that kind of stuff like doesn’t make me cry, but it does … I love going back and filling myself up with that again; and then Austin Kleon, who you turned me on to, his newsletter, just following him and his works and the different directions he points me to in terms of books to take on and things to think about; and the guys from Cool Tools, they do another newsletter called Recommendo, which is just usually like five recommendations sent out to you weekly. And it could be like a cheap deal on kitchen towels that Mark Frauenfelder has used for the past month and was like, “These are great, and they also make great shop towels,” or like a hack on how to book international travel in China and get to figure out the train station times or whatever some other thing, but just like five is very digestible. But there’s usually like one nugget in there that kind of steers me towards something interesting.

So I can recommend Recommendo.

It’s not going to be comprehensive.

Yeah.

Makerprojectlab.com is where all the Makery stuff have been talking about lives, including the weekly Maker Update YouTube show and the different projects I’ve done, and my newsletter, my weekly newsletter, which is basically a newsletter version of the Maker Update video but just for people who don’t want to watch the video, and they want the links to click, it’s all there. Cool-tools.org is the company that sponsors my Maker Update videos, but I also just love those guys, and I’m a fan, and they enable me to buy all the tools on my Amazon wish list so that I can get them, and review them, and talk about them.

Cool.

Yeah! The Dan Chan Cardboard Cutter. I love that thing. That’s one of my sleeper hits. I had no idea people were going to be so freaked out by it.

To open up the boxes. Yeah, that’s the Amazon box opener. They just really just … Amazon should like just give that away with Prime just to get everyone to be able to get into their boxes easier.

Well, cool. Yeah. So there’s that. I think those are the two things, and alohascrewdriver.com if you want to check out the band we’ve been talking about.

That’s where you can hear the sounds.

You’re welcome.