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Excess Data
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She’s part Nancy Drew, part Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A sweet natured girl with a big heart and brain to match. Intrepid and impertinent, the world of technology is her meta-mystery, and she’s dedicated to solving it component by component (while lending a helping hand to needy folks along the way). We’re talking about Cali Lewis, the face of popular video podcast Geek Brief TV, and International Director of the fictional Geek Intelligence Agency (G.I.A). “Alias was very popular at the time, so the idea was that I'd be the international director of this Geek Intelligence Agency and my face would pop-up on my agent’s spy-watches and say, ‘this is what you need to know’ and ‘this is what’s important in Tech’,” Cali tells us. “The GIA is also a way for people to get involved and feel a part of the show, rather than just e-mailing me.” The Alias angle is appropriate, as Cali isn’t really Cali. She’s Luria Petrucci; Texan, Chihuahua owner and former model. “Luria Petrucci isn’t really Googlable." She’s also suggested that ‘Cali’ is a deliberate amalgam of herself and husband/co-producer Neal Campbell, encapsulating the creative heart of the show more squarely than either singular individual. From her HQ in Dallas, the 26 year-old creates the Brief and G.I.A dispatches with Neal, maintains numerous websites, and guests as a talking head on major networks and celeb podcasts. “Our goal is to keep it extremely entertaining, moving along at a good pace,” says Cali. “The challenge is to wade through tons of information on a daily basis and take only what we’re truly interested in and about, then compress that into a small format. There is so much information out there and so many product releases that we only cover what we’re excited about. This way, if someone’s watching during his or her lunch-break, they can have a laugh, a good time and go on with their day.” So what turns a young woman into a gadget geek? For Cali, it began with a childhood desire to “take apart stuff in the kitchen”. She would watch her Mom go at it on the word-processor in awe. “She typed soooo fast! I made her teach me to type and I played on that word-processor as much as I could be in her bedroom without her getting mad at me.” And when she went to stay with her Dad (her parents were divorced), she would play on his PC and Nintendo. “I would wake everybody up, you know, trying to play with it…trying to keep the volume down. I was constantly consuming anything I could that had anything to do with technology. In high school I wanted to build my own PC. I didn’t have the funds to do it at that time, so now I’m doing it!" Ignorance isn’t bliss for the head of the G.I.A – it’s impossible. Her unswerving curiosity prohibits apathy about the world she lives in. “I think it starts as a general curiosity, but then I think you realize that once you do know how things work, you aren’t held hostage by them,” she explains. “You don’t depend on anyone. Once you figure out how you can find the answers, how you can get something to do what you want or fix something, you’re not depending on anybody and you can do things by yourself and you can potentially teach others. Knowledge is power is an old saying, but I think it’s very true.” It’s powerfully infectious for her viewers, who love her passion for the way things tick, as much as they love her personality and on-Pod persona. Though the show attracted a base of younger men when it debuted, GBTV now pulls a wide berth of viewers across age, geographic and occupational boundaries. With Cali as their affable heroine, chicks are chief among them. “That’s the incredible thing that has come out of Geek Brief that I feel so proud of,” enthuses Cali. “I see women and younger girls willing to say ‘you know what? I’m a geek and I’m proud of it’. They’re embracing that word – a word that when I was a kid was not acceptable. I’m seeing that change as we go along and it’s so incredibly cool! I think Geek Brief has been a part of that in some way because girls will e-mail me and say ‘thank you’. ‘Thank you for showing me it’s cool’ or ‘thank you for showing that it’s acceptable’. That’s something that I didn’t really expect to come out of Geek Brief, but I’m really happy about the way it’s turning out.
Also written by Venessa Paech
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Venessa Paech - Editor & Founder. Venessa holds a BFA from NYU. She has done the arts to death, and has been in love with the web since she "discovered" it at a CyberCafe in NYC in '93. She wants to be a podcaster when she grows up.
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