2. The Past and the Present of the Internet with Brian McCullough

For our second episode (and the very first one with a guest!), we sat down with Brian McCullough, creator of the Internet History Podcast, one of Ilya’s all-time favorite podcasts. Brian’s current podcast is Techmeme Ride Home, a popular daily summary of tech news that has over a million downloads every month. Brian is also an investor running the Ride Home Fund and a resident at TED (check out Brian’s talk). Brian is on Twitter as @brianmcc (https://twitter.com/brianmcc). Chapters 00:00 - Cold Open 00:18 - Welcome and Guest Introduction 03:06 - Brian's Background and Career 08:40 - The Dot-Com Bubble Explained 11:24 - ResumeWriters.com and Google AdWords 18:40 - Social Media Before Facebook 20:46 - Why Quentin Tarantino 23:02 - How Brian Got into Podcasting 28:06 - Leveraging Interviews for a Book 32:20 - Launching the Internet History Podcast 37:02 - Growing an Audience Strategically 42:00 - Being Where the Action Is 47:20 - Research and Interviewing Sources 50:57 - From Podcast to Book Deal 55:40 - Techmeme Ride Home Origin Story 59:32 - Interview Technique and Preparation 1:05:00 - Performing a Script 1:09:00 - Daily Show Workflow 1:10:32 - Editing Tools and GarageBand 1:15:00 - Recording Gear and the Port-A-Booth 1:17:00 - Sound Quality and Audience Forgiveness 1:22:58 - Podcast Advertising Economics 1:28:50 - Dynamic Ad Insertion Show notes Software Descript -- a tool that can help you edit audio similar to editing text in a word processor. SquadCast -- a powerful tool for recording interviews. It saves high quality audio locally and uploads files to the cloud, so you can download and process them later. Zoom -- video conferencing and audio recording. GarageBand -- the audio editor that comes for free with MacOS that Brian uses for podcast editing. Libsyn -- a podcast hosting platform we mentioned in the conversation. Gear Shure SM7b -- a kick ass condenser mic for podcasters and radio hosts. It's pretty much the golden standard in the industry. It's expensive and also requires an audio interface because it only has an XLR output (no direct connection to your computer's USB port). Blue Yeti -- an inexpensive USB mic that has multiple recording modes (e.g. cardioid, condenser, etc.) Arnab recorded this (and other) episodes using a Blue Yeti mic. Brian was also using a Blue Yeti for this recording! Harlan Hogan's Porta-Booth -- the foamy thing that helps prevent the room echo during recording that Brian uses for recording Techmeme Ride Home in the home office. Podcasts The Tim Ferriss Show WTF with Marc Maron Dan Carlin's Hardcode History This American Life (Ira Glass) Comedy Bang Bang The Rest is History Arsecast Nerd Poker Flop House Black Check with Griffin and David Random Mentions Quentin Tarantino and his movie Pulp Fiction Packy McCormick's newsletter Turner Novak AngelList Full show notes with links: https://www.metacastpodcast.com/p/002-brian-mccullough-internet-history Download the Metacast podcast app for free iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/metacast/id6462012536 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.metacast.podcast.player Get in touch Contact us: [email protected] Ilya's LinkedIn Arnab's LinkedIn