[RERUN] Brian McCullough, the host of Techmeme Ride Home and Internet History Podcast

This is a re-run of our "very second episode" originally published on Jan 11, 2023. 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 - Rerun intro and a year of podcasting 03:47 - Cold open from original episode 04:12 - Welcome and how we discovered Brian 06:53 - Brian's background and career journey 08:35 - From film school to the dot-com bubble 12:27 - The dot-com bubble explained 15:06 - ResumeWriters.com and riding out the bust 18:24 - Resume Writers takes off 24:34 - Why Quentin Tarantino as a role model 26:48 - The birth of Internet History Podcast 29:09 - Writing a book and the podcast as research 34:10 - Launching the podcast and early growth 37:30 - Writing a book in the open 39:05 - The publishing industry and book economics 41:01 - Leveraging guests to grow your audience 43:03 - The snowball analogy 46:06 - Early validation and finding your niche 48:55 - Research and interviewing techniques 54:43 - Bringing it up to the present day 58:34 - Growth through prominent guests 1:00:04 - Techmeme Ride Home is born 1:03:10 - The art of interviewing 1:08:26 - Performing a script vs. reading it 1:11:10 - Daily workflow of a daily podcast 1:14:18 - Recording gear and GarageBand 1:19:00 - The Porta-Booth and sound quality 1:21:00 - Audience forgiveness on audio quality 1:26:49 - Podcast advertising and CPM economics 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