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

To this day, let's say I want to interview somebody about FTX blowing up in crypto, which is a space I'm not super familiar with. I over-research and I have more questions than I need because then it allows the conversation to go in the direction that is right in the moment. Welcome to Metacast, a podcast about podcasting, and I'm your host, Ilya Bezdilev. Hello, and this is Arnab. Today we have a very special episode, and I'll start with this story.

Back in 2014, I lived in San Francisco. I was doing some education there. So I had a lot of free time. And a friend of mine sent me a link to this podcast called the Internet History Podcast. I never listened to podcasts before. But that podcast, it really captivated me. I just listened nonstop, like every single moment I had in my life where I didn't have to take care of my son or go to classes or spend with my wife. I would just listen to that podcast that covered...

All of the things I did as a teenager, starting from the Netscape browser and going a little bit before that, and Napster downloading MP3s. I think there was an episode about the MP3 standard. There was so much stuff that spoke. not just to my mind, but also to my heart. Because as a teenager, I was just, I mean, I was a geek, right? I was able to live through my teenage years again. I mean, the best parts of my teenage years. And today on our show, we have Brian McCullough.

who is the host of that podcast. And he also has another podcast, Tech Meme Right Home. And we are going to talk about a lot of interesting things today. Hi, Brian, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I love the fact that my show is very bingeable, especially if you discover it years later that, yeah, there's what, four or 500 hours worth of content for you.

It is funny that it was also reliving my youth to do that show. So I appreciate it resonated that way. Yeah, I think your show is timeless. Yeah, for my part, right, Ilya told me about your show, I think about a year back, I started listening to it and got completely hooked into it. And I think the new show, the Tech Meme Ride Home. That's the one that I started listening to after we kind of started chatting with you, right?

And that one was like, oh man, I've been missing this show for I don't know how long. Because this is like in 15, 20 minutes every day I get caught up with everything that's happening. It's amazing. I mean, obviously we'll go into this story, but the Internet History Podcast was an interview show. And the Tech Meme Ride Home is a news rundown, so the idea is in 15 minutes to catch you up. So they're two totally different beasts, really.

but we can get into all that. It serves two different purposes. One is, here's what you missed over the last 20 years, and one is, here's what you missed today. So cool. Brian, to get us started, can we... Tell us a little bit about yourself and your podcast, just so people get an idea of who you are and what you do. Yeah. So these days I'm a venture capitalist. I run the Right Home Fund. But every single day I produce the Tech Meme Ride Home, which is, like we said, a 15 minute rundown.

of the headlines of the tech world. It's not just the headlines because you could get a robot to do that. What I try very hard to do is give you the context of not just what happened but what people in Silicon Valley think about what happened. So I quote tweets a lot. I will quote from multiple different articles about a given story. So it's not just, oh, you know, this week FTX blew up. It'll be FTX blew up and this venue said this about it. This person said that about it.

So it's got an audience of around 50 to 70,000. You know, the C-suite at Microsoft supposedly listens every day. My friends at Andreessen Horowitz listen a lot, which is why they've been on the show a lot. It's really... Hopefully, and gratifyingly, sort of a water cooler podcast for folks that work in the tech industry. Before all that, I'm a four-time founder.

My first company I founded in back in 1999. So anyway, I come to this sort of naturally in the sense that the only industry I've ever worked in is tech. And I've been doing it for almost 25 years now. One topic that always fascinates me. And I guess I'm channeling my inner team, Ferris, now. How different things you did in life combine and compound.

And that leads to certain outcomes. So I'm curious what your educational background is. Maybe also some of your upbringing that actually led you to the path that you're in right now. Okay. Get ready. Buckle in. I'll give you the whole thing. Go on. We'll talk about how I wrote a book because of the podcast too. In the book, one of the points that I make, the book is called How the Internet Happened, was...

For folks growing up in the 80s and 90s, this whole idea of entrepreneurialism wasn't really a thing. If you were a kid and you were ambitious or you wanted to be famous or you wanted to be rich, maybe you wanted to be a rock star or a sports... or go to Wall Street or something like that, you did not think, oh, here's what I'll do is I'll start a company. It just wasn't in the zeitgeist, at least in America then.

What was in the zeitgeist in the 90s, I graduated high school in 96, was when Quentin Tarantino burst onto the scene, a whole generation of us were like, ah, we want to be him. And that was me. I went to college at the University of Florida and I bounced around in a bunch of different majors, even art history, computer science. I ended up getting...

technically an English degree, but with a film concentration. So essentially I went to film school, learned how to... edit film physically, manually, like celluloid, but then also this was when things were turning digital, so I learned how to edit digitally as well. And so you'll notice that nothing in that college had to do with like business school or economics or anything like that. To graduate, you had to do a thesis. And I was.

doing film, but I was, I had settled into the writing track of film. So the thesis was I had to write a screenplay. So this was the summer of 1998 going into 1999. And I'm... well, what am I going to write a screenplay about? And of course, the dot-com bubble is at its height at that point. And there's all these stories of people becoming millionaires and the first stories of kids going out to Silicon Valley and getting rich.

So I wrote a screenplay for my thesis called Palo Alto about kids going out to Silicon Valley to try to strike it rich. I didn't know anything about business or tech. I literally subscribe to things like Business Week and Fortune and Wired. You mean like paper magazines, right?

paper magazines to educate myself to know what I was talking about in theory. Of course, I had no idea what I was talking about, but, and I did write the screenplay, but you know, in the midst of doing that, there was an article in Wired. about a guy at Harvard who had a company editing college application essays and other essays that you would write for college. And I thought, well, I could actually do something similar.

I had learned how to do HTML and things like that. So in 1999, I registered the domain editmenow.com and literally put up flyers around campus. that was like, if you need an essay edited, go to this website and people will do it for you. It was just me doing the editing. But what quickly happened was it actually kind of took off, but...

you know, it's seasonal because, you know, college semesters happen, you know, there's only certain amounts of time that people need essays edited. What I discovered really quickly was that what people need all the time is resumes. to apply for jobs and not just college students. So Edit Me Now added a resume writing product. And then the dot-com bubble is starting to burst.

towards the end of 99 into 2000 when it famously... Brian, for people who are listening to us and who are maybe not in tech or maybe much younger, can you give a TLDR on what a tech bubble is? Sure. So the web and the internet, of course... kind of didn't exist in the 80s into the early 90s. It existed, but until Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web, normal people didn't use it. It was around 1994, 95, 96.

that normal people start to come on the web with things like the Netscape browser and you get things like Amazon being founded and Yahoo being founded. And if you think that crypto having bubbles and crashing is a thing, or people might remember the housing bubble or whatever, the first big bubble...

that at least again, I'm speaking as a North American, that people experienced as a, oh my God, everybody's getting rich. All these companies are being founded. And then all of a sudden it all goes away. The first time that that happened in modern times, I would argue, was the internet bubble. which mostly happened at the tail end of the 1990s. And then people date the bubble bursting to March of 2000, when the NASDAQ hit its peak, that it did not surpass for another 13 years.

Now that you've gone through that cycle and the current cycle, what's your thoughts on the comparisons? If you had asked me six months ago, I would have said it's nothing like the dot-com bubble. But I realized that the thing that I missed was that... Because what happened when the dot-com bubble burst, it took the entire stock market with it. And at least thus far, you know, crypto hasn't done that. Obviously, we're speaking in November of 2022.

A lot of tech companies have gone down in value in terms of their market caps. I think Amazon's even down 40% right now. But you also have things like... Shopify, I think its market cap is down like 85%. But the difference is, is that in the dot-com bubble, when it burst, the companies went away. They went bankrupt, right? So I had always been thinking...

Well, it's not like that because, believe me, and we'll get into this in a second, everyone thought that the internet was over. The internet's not going away. I don't know that crypto's going to go away, even if there's a bad crash, but...

My blind spot was, oh, it's not going to affect the entire economy or the entire world. But what I missed is that it functionally doesn't matter because if you're in one of those worlds, if you're working at a SaaS... company and all of a sudden SaaS is not hot, or if you're working on Web3 or VR and suddenly the funding goes away, you can have a nuclear winter that affects your industry that functionally will be like what the dot-com bubble was in the 90s.

How did you write out of that? And yeah. Okay. Very interesting. So editmenow.com pivots to resume writing. As the bubble's bursting, domain name... shopping is still a thing where you can pay $100,000 for a really hot domain or whatever. But that was also a very big part of the bubble where domains would go back and forth for a million dollars.

And one of the first things to pop was the domain market. And so I bought the domain ResumeWriters.com for, what was it? $2,000. And the guy that I bought it from said, if you had... contacted me six months ago, I would have charged you $200,000. That's the burst. Yeah. Right. So I have the site resume writers.com and this is right when Google is starting.

And first of all, for years, you know, if you need a resume written, having the domain resume writers was very good in terms of real estate on the Internet. So I had good Google juice, as we say. Before SEO was a thing, I guess. Yeah, I mean, that's because SEO was very simple. That's why domains were so valuable is that if you wanted to sell widgets, widgets.com would put you at the top of a lot of things. But the other thing that I wrote around that time was...

the birth of paid search and search advertising. My memory, of course, is hazy on this, but I know for a fact that the first week or month of... AdWords, I immediately got an account and I remember very clearly, I think I paid $100 and sold $150 worth of resumes. Right. Resume services. And so this blows my mind. I'm like, well, I can just do this all day long. What if I put in 200? What if I put in a thousand? You know, and it kept scaling with it.

And again, this was such early days, I can remember paying eight cents a click for the keyword resumes and things like that. So I'd like to say that my company and my business grew with Google in a lot of ways.

Again, for the first year, it's me writing the resumes. So I'm doing seven or eight resumes a day. But I've graduated college at this time. The only job that I had... a real job for about six months I worked on the line at FedEx so like literally boxes come down a conveyor belt and you have to sling them into other boxes that then go to the airport to be shipped and stuff

When I discovered, I remember the week that I first made $1,000 on resume writers. And I was like, all right, I'm quitting FedEx, right? Because to me, even sitting down and having to write seven or eight resumes a day was better than slinging boxes. I worked for DHL back in the year 2005, I think just for a short stint. Sorry, I'm going on a tangent now. Moving those boxes was so meditative. It was very meditative and I was in the best shape of my life.

But also what I do regret is I quit before I could have, like after you were on the line for a certain amount of time, they'd let you drive a truck. And I always sort of romanticize that because it would feel like being like a ship out at sea. You know, you're the captain of your own ship and you go out. Like that seemed like very romantic to me and meditative and, you know. Maybe that was a better life, to be honest, if I'd stayed on that path. But so...

Resume Writers takes off. Eventually, I hire people. Today, Resume Writers has, depending on the season, between 60 and 90 writers around the world that work for the company on contract. This is the tail end of the dot-com. bubble bursting. So there was actually a venture-based company called Resume.com that was my main competitor. I live in New York City now. First time I ever came to New York City was because job search site called Hot Jobs.

Hotjobs.com was big at the time. And I flew here to try to land a deal to become the official resume services partner of Hotjobs.com. And again, I've never been to business school. I don't know anything. I showed up in a suit to the meeting. And if you know anything about Silicon Valley and its address code, I was the only person in that entire office of 200 people that was wearing a suit.

I was nervous the night before I went out for drinks with friends, and I went to the bathroom. And I don't know if people still do this, but at the time, there was a lot of advertisement in bathrooms. And I go to the urinal and... The advertisement in the urinal is resume.com, my competitor that I'm there to win the deal against. I thought that was a good omen.

that I was urinating on my competitor. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So was the advertising right in the urinal? So actually you urinated on it? Yes, yes. So the little, you know, they have a urinal cake and then they have that little plastic thing sometimes. around the drain. It was brandedresume.com. Yeah, I don't see that very often anymore. So maybe that wasn't an idea that, you know, had a good return on investment, but that's sort of advertising.

At some point, it was popular to put like a fly image in the urinal. Yes. Because apparently men, you know, like to aim when they, you know, do this. And maybe like aiming to your competitors was also a thing. Exactly. Imagine you can aim for your competitor. To try to move it forward quickly, Resume.com was among the companies that went bust and went bankrupt. And ResumeWriters.com is still around today. I still own that company. And it's one of those things where competitors have come and go.

A few years later, when Monster.com decided to get into the resume business, we almost died because they flooded Google Ads and it made it very expensive for us. But it's also one of those things where if you hang around long enough, you survive and you're the last person standing. And we've bought competitors like ResumeWriting.com and ResumeService.com over the years. I still think we do good work.

There are worse ways to have made a living your whole life than helping people find better jobs. What actually really helped us was the recession that came in after the dot-com bubble burst. Lots of people needed resumes. Lots of tech people needed resumes. We still have...

If you go to resumewriters.com, you know, there's an executive product, there's a student product, and there's still, oddly, the only industry-specific product is a tech or IT resume, I think we still call it. That was because... In 2001, 2002, 2003, a good third of our business were people that had been laid off in the tech industry. And so it's one of those things where I say...

Resume Writers does really well when the economy does really well because people can shop around for better jobs. We do really well when the economy is crap. In 2008, we were making money hand over fist. It's when the economy is in the middle that we don't. do so great. So you may be coming into another hot period now. Yeah, you know, I don't ever try to root for that. We had a pretty good year, 2022. That company is never going to

be a big company. It's never going to IPO. But what it's essentially done is it's funded all of my crazy schemes for 22 years. And one of the things that I did, this was in 2003, I used... some of the excess cash from that company to try to start another company.

The first time I heard about social media, this was in the era of Friendster, if anyone remembers that. This was before MySpace, before Facebook, as I thought, well, social media has got to be great for jobs, for finding jobs, trading jobs and things like that. Like LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn. I can't remember exactly, but we launched around the same time as LinkedIn. The company was called Where Are the Jobs?

And it was essentially a way to try to trade job leads and things like that. It obviously did not become LinkedIn, as I say, but I'll give you a good example of what the dot-com bubble bursting was like. The engineer that I hired to create... the Where Are the Jobs website. He's such a superstar engineer that he went on to be one of the key people that made Netflix streaming happen.

He started at Major League Baseball. People don't know this, but MLB.com was one of the first successful large-scale streaming operations anywhere. He learned how to do that well, goes to Netflix, helps them. launch Netflix streaming. So I was able to hire that guy for, I think I said, if I pay you $10,000, will you code up the site for me? And he's like, yeah, I can do it in my spare time.

So that should give you an indication of the level of talent that you could just hire off the streets in Craigslist because they were out of a job because everyone thought that this internet fad is gone and over. So I'm giving you this background because it informs how I... know how to do the tech industry and stuff like that. I did another startup in 2005 that was who to talk to, similar idea, trading, job leads, et cetera. We got up to a quarter million users for that site.

I was funding this all through the cash coming off of resume writers. So I had the freedom to shut it down when I didn't think it was working. And for various reasons that wasn't working. But in that case, we had patents and various other IP that we were able to sell when we shut down. So that gave me... a little bit of cash as well. And again, I'm a single man, a bachelor at this point, so I don't need a ton of cash. Brian, before we get into podcasting, I'm curious.

Why did you want to be Quentin Tarantino? I mean, I remember when Pulp Fiction came out in 1994, I wanted to be John Travolta. Like, why Tarantino? Just to set this right, I was born and brought up in India. I didn't have that same kind of like, I think, Tarantino introduction. I got it much later in life. So I'm curious what exactly about Tarantino made you feel like that? Yeah.

It's not that, you know, I still like Tarantino and I like his films, but it wasn't, oh, him specifically. It was he was the big superstar that everyone wanted to emulate at the time. So again, if you're a smart, ambitious kid, you're looking at these avatars, these idols that you're like, well, I want to be smart and ambitious and famous and rich like...

her or like him. And nowadays, this is what I'm saying, is there is this template for doing that in business, right? Because we have the Mark Zuckerberg story. We have the, you name it, you know. coding up a chat app in your dorm room and becoming a billionaire. So smart, ambitious kids tend to do that because there's that template now. And so Tarantino just...

It's not like I wanted to make, you know, fast talking heist movies or something. I don't even know what kind of... Lots of people kill each other everywhere. That wasn't the ambition. It was just more to be like that, you know. I would say that was just a template that was available that I was following. And even when I started the first company, the idea was I would use that money to start a film. I just never got back to that. So what happened to Palo Alto? Did you ever release it?

You know, I had an agent at one point and I shopped around various scripts. My agent was the same agent that was the agent of the guys that made the American Pie movie. Okay. Oh, I know that movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We probably shouldn't describe it on the podcast, right? It's 18+. So I don't know. It went nowhere is the answer to your question. So you still have it? You didn't release it as a manuscript or anything? I just cleaned out a...

a storage locker recently that I saw it in there, but I wasn't even inspired to like flip through it. Was this any good? Cause I know it's not good. So the answer is it's nothing. Okay. Now we can fast forward to podcasting. Let's say from 2006 to 2012, I kind of don't do anything because I don't need to. Resume Writers is going on in the background. I did some blogging and things like that, and I was still...

active in tech. I angel invested in a few companies or something like that. I meet my wife around this time. We get married in 2014. But so around 2013, I'm back in New York City at this point. And I go to tech meetups and now I'm the elder generation. Now the people coming to tech meetups are 10 years younger than me. And so they asked me questions. Oh.

You were here for the dot-com bubble. What was that like? So now we're talking about it 25 years later, but this was even 10 years later. The lesson that I learned there was if you do anything long enough, it becomes history. You know, people coming into a scene, unless people actually stop and explain, well, here's what you missed. Here's how A led to B led to C led to today. They don't get caught up. Right. I even remember.

In college, having that experience where I took a class on the French Revolution, and I didn't know anything about it, so I wanted to know, how did it happen? who was Danton and why did the Bastille get sieged and things like that. The class was more sophisticated than that, so it was all about the economics of the late Ancien regime and how that affected the rural peasantry that then rushed to the cities. I was like, wait, wait, wait.

But I need to know the basics. Give me the ABCs. So around 2012, 2013, as people are saying... What was Yahoo? Yahoo's that company that no one cares about anymore. Yeah, no, Yahoo was huge. And I was like, well, everything that I've ever done, every company I've ever started, it's always like...

well, that's a good idea. Someone's going to do it. I could probably do it. So the idea was, if I just wrote a book that was how the internet happened, and to me, it started with Netscape as the first real web. company but then you know say how e-commerce started and then explain where yahoo and google and all these things came from and so around that time i

start to read books and start to think about, well, I'll write the book about how we got here, and it'll be an explainer for people in the tech industry, how we got here. In those days... When I would tell people this is what I was doing, they would be like, oh, that's great. You're going to explain how this technology transformed our lives. By the time the book actually came out in 2018, people were like, oh, is this a book that will explain how...

technology ruined our lives but um a book takes a long time to write so this is how i get into podcasting a book does take a long time to write you do a lot of research you do a lot of writing and if you're lucky years later it comes out and people read it, but they don't see all of the work behind it. And one of the things that I do is

Again, I've never been a big player in the tech industry, but I've been there. And so, again, you know people that eventually become important people. And I always like to joke, one of my best friends is Chris Messina, who invented the hashtag. And we always joke about, hey, you know the guy that's...

that 23 year old kid with the nose ring over there that is sort of in the corner and is like a weird and like, no one really wants to talk to him. Oh, that ends up being Jack Dorsey. You know, like all I do is I start to reach out to folks and I say, hey, can I interview you for my book? Well, I'm not going to fly out back and forth all over the world to do these interviews. I do the interviews over Skype. I record the interviews because I want to use them for the book. So I start to get...

three, four, five, six interviews. And I realized that, you know, again, I talked to somebody who was an early Amazon engineer. Like one of the people I interviewed was employee number two at Amazon.

the guy that built the first Amazon website. Is that the guy who was talking about the sneaker net? Yes, the sneaker net where how, yeah, before they figured out how to... do e-commerce securely, they would literally write down credit card numbers from one computer, walk over to the other computer, and put them in so that they wouldn't have to put the credit cards online because they couldn't be sure they could secure the credit card numbers.

Think about it. That's a perfect example. I would have an interview for an hour and a half with employee number two at Amazon, the guy that built the website for Jeff Bezos. I'm thinking to myself, Only one sentence that he told me maybe we'll get into the book. That's a waste of like good information. So.

I don't remember where this brainstorm came from, but I was like, well, what if I just put them out as podcasts? So I had been a fan of podcasting since the mid 2000s. I remember listening to the Adam Carolla show when it started. The Engadget show that eventually became The Verge when all those guys moved over there. I had always been a fan of that, you know, on iPods originally, and then eventually iPhones when iPhones come out.

Brian, what is it about podcasting specifically as a listener that attracted you to the podcasts as a medium? I think it's because my brain is sort of broken and I... You know, you have people that meditate and things like that and want silence and calmness. And I don't. My brain is broken. I need to fill it with something or I go crazy. So what podcasting was always.

for me, and I was a Howard Stern fan for years and years and years, so he does a four-hour show. There was always something going on in my ears and in my head. to as I'm doing other things, as I'm working, as I'm blogging, as I'm doing whatever. To me, that's what it was. I still use audiobooks in the same way. I'd rather be learning something, hearing something.

And then, you know, you guys know this. Some podcasters, you like their personalities so much that it's like hanging out with friends, which sounds weird and stuff. I know, you know, but it sounds like. I like your personality so much. Now I'm hanging out with you on this call. It's so amazing. And that happens. I'm on the other side of it now. I never get recognized for my face, but many times I'll be at a conference or something and people will hear my voice and be like, wait a minute.

Wait a minute. Huh? Oh, Brian. Yeah, yeah. That must be a fun feeling, yeah. It is fun. And people, you know, for the venture capital fund that I run now, a lot of the companies come... to me because they're listeners to the show. And so when they pitch me their companies, they start the Zoom calls by saying, okay, Brian, I got to geek out for a second. I've been listening to you every day for three years.

you be a perfect example you know way more about me than i know about you right absolutely yeah so it's an unusual thing but it's also a fun thing so i start to put some of the interviews out as a podcast called the Internet History Podcast. And it immediately got picked up on iTunes. You know, it's now Apple Podcasts, but...

Can we dig out for a second more? When you say like iTunes and iPod, actually, did you have to like download the podcast into your computer and then upload them to iPod with the cable? Is that how it worked? Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Was there like a publishing mechanism or how did you actually publish the podcast back then? Everybody did Libsyn back in the early days. Libsyn was the only player. Libsyn is still around today, but there's much bigger and more sophisticated.

podcast publishers. But the reason that I launched on Libsyn too is because when Marc Maron started his podcast, I know he was on Libsyn. The people that I was listening to... So all I knew when I launched the podcast was like, okay, you go to Libsyn, you get an account, and you upload your audio, and then you send it to iTunes to Index.

But for whatever reason, somebody at Apple saw it, thought it was cool, and put it on the New and Notable page. So the first week that I launched the Internet History Podcast, it had 1,000 downloads. And it just grew from there. And just so we understand kind of the context, so a thousand downloads for a new podcast, like folks like Marc Maron, for example, how many downloads would somebody like him have? Well, in those days...

He might have 100,000, and that was considered just mind-blowing. Now he's probably in the millions. Yeah, yeah. And for those of you who don't know, Marc Maron... He actually played the wolf in the Bad Guys movie, which I was like watching that movie with my son. Like, wait a second. I know that voice. Yeah, it was Mark Maron playing that. But he hosts a show called WTF.

And he had guests like Barack Obama and Slash and others. Yeah, he's a great interviewer. Okay, I'm glad you brought that up. Are you familiar with Dan Carlin's hardcore history? Yeah. I've consumed like pretty much everything that's available. Yeah. Okay. So imagine this is me in 2013 and I'm listening to Marc Maron and I'm listening to Dan Carlin and I'm thinking this must've been where the brainstorm came from.

I'm a little on both sides, right? Because what Marc Maron does is just interviews. So I'm sure I tried to copy his style. And then the other thing that I did shortly after I launched the Internet History Podcast is as I'm writing the book... I would read the chapters and release those as a podcast. So think about it. That's literally Marc Maron on one side and Dan Carlin on the other. And that's what the Internet History Podcast was.

The project was still to become a book someday. But the idea was, is if people are interested in this history, they'll get more of the background details that won't make it into the book. And they'll help me write the book, which they really did. When I would release some of the early chapters of the book as a podcast, people would get in touch with me and say, you got this wrong, you got that wrong. Eventually, you know...

People would suggest interviews for me. Oh, like you're about to do eBay. I know so-and-so that used to work at eBay. Let me put you in touch. So in a way, the project was also writing a book out in the open and sort of crowdsourcing it. That's so cool. Actually, I'm curious because I think the first episodes, whatever, how many first episodes I listened to, they were all narrative episodes. But if I hear you correctly...

There were actually interviews behind those. Did you release them afterwards? Yes, because I didn't think that launching with the interviews was the right thing to do. I thought that, okay, if this is a brand new thing, I should give people the context. So it changed over time, but... Originally, my thinking was I would group them together. It's like, okay, I'm going to write about eBay next, so I'll release a bunch of the eBay interviews along with the chapter on eBay.

That broke down for the reasons that you know as podcasters, it's hard to schedule people. So then eventually it was just I would throw up whatever I had while I was doing it out of order and things like that. The weird thing that happened was...

the podcast really did take off. I think to this day, the internet history, I should look that up, probably gets 150, 200,000 downloads a month. Because as we said at the beginning of this, people find it and binge it once that started to take off it was like okay i gotta keep this going because then this will be the way that i can build an audience for the book

We can get into this however much you want, but you don't just decide to write a book and then a publisher is like, oh, sure, we'll publish that for you. You have to get an agent and you have to write a book proposal and you got to do all these things. And one of the things that...

these days publishers want to see is that you have a built-in audience. Because believe me, I have learned the publishing industry is stuck in the 19th century when it comes to actually doing promotion and marketing for books. They suck at it. And so what they like to do is get people that have, you know, nowadays a social following or whatever, but like a reputation where people will buy the book because they know your name. Right. It's a different.

ball game in a different industry. I would say this if anybody out there is thinking of using a podcast to write a book or whatever, you're not going to get rich from your book. I actually earned out my advance, which is what that means is when you get a book contract, they pay you in advance, which mine was $50,000. And then you don't make another dime until you earn back that advance. Right. And apparently less than 1% of advances are ever earned back. Right. So I did well.

for earning back my advance. It was never a bestseller. $50,000 sounds like a lot of money, but remember, it took me six years to write. So if you do the math on the amount of time spent versus the dollars that you get, unless you're... Malcolm Gladwell or John Grisham or somebody like that, or J.K. Rowling, you're not going to become a millionaire by writing a book. If you want to write a book and you want to use podcasts to do it,

You have to think of these things as one feeding the other. The book, as we'll show in a second, and the podcast, they all have worked together to give me credibility and give me an audience. But it's not like... The book was like, okay, I used the podcast to get the book and then the book made me rich. That didn't happen. And it's unlikely to happen for anyone. But one of the things that I learned by doing the Internet History Podcast is that...

What you want to do is you want to leverage. You guys know this because you're doing it right now today. You want to leverage your guests to grow your audience. So to this day, I don't know why the first people let me interview them, except for the fact that.

I promised to put the, the interviews up on edited. And so it's like, it's giving people a chance to tell their side of the story in their own words. Right. But then what happened was, is that once you get four or five people and then you reach out to somebody.

at a higher tier. And they look and they say, well, if they got this person and this person, they must know what they're doing. Okay, I'll do it. And then once you've got a few of those higher tier, you can go to an even higher tier and they say, oh, if you got this person and this person, you must know what you're doing. Around the same time, I got a residency at TED. I don't know if you know TED, the TED Talks organization.

The residency was as I worked out of their offices as I'm doing the Internet History Podcast. And they helped me get guests and things like that. But think about it. Why did Ted think I was doing a good job? Because I had been doing the show for... 18 months and they looked and they're like, Oh my God, you got the guy that founded market watch. You got the, you know, shell caffin from Amazon. You must know what you're doing. Right. So.

Coming back to that, by the way, like you said, we struggled with getting a guest for a while and you were the first one. So I have to say from the bottom of our hearts, yeah, that was amazing. Thanks for getting started. This is why I said yes, because I understand how this works. And the thing that I always say is gaining an audience, anyone can do it if you're willing to put in the time and the effort.

And you do it strategically, but you'll only succeed in the end if once you get to the stage, you have something to say. So one of the things that I see, you know, we're talking about podcasting, but this could be relevant to all sorts of things. being an influencer, trying to write a book, whatever. There are tried and true methods of slowly. I always, the analogy I use is rolling a snowball down a hill.

At the top of the hill, your snowball's tiny. By the time you get down there, it's huge. And everyone's like, well, of course, because he has that huge snowball. No one saw the tiny snowball at the beginning. But if you don't have the goods once you finally get to that stage... then you're never going to have an audience. So there are certain people that I see trying to become YouTube stars or something like that. And I'm like, yeah, but you don't have the goods.

that's something that i don't know maybe you can learn and do and stuff like that but yeah i really like that uh that analogy i was recently watching a master class on masterclass.com by metallica which is my favorite band of all time

And they were talking about all these different things that they do. But then I think it was Lars Lurich and he says, but you have to have great songs. At the end of the day, everything else doesn't matter as long as you don't have great songs. I'll give you another analogy based on music. There's another thing that...

When I talk to young people and they're like, I want to do X, Y, or Z, or I want to be in this industry, I want to be in this crowd. I'm like, well, are you where that is happening? If you're not. I'm not saying that you can't live your dream in Iowa, but the analogy I would use for music is, in the 60s, what was happening in rock and roll was happening in London.

And you have Eric Clapton and you have John Lennon and you have Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and the Who, all those guys. Do you think that there weren't... equally talented musicians in Austin, Texas in 1965, or in Seattle in the 90s was where Nirvana and sound. J.P. Hendrix actually was in Seattle. I mean, he was born in Seattle and he was somewhere in the Midwest and in New York.

But he didn't become popular until he went to London. Exactly. So the thing that, and this can apply to anything, I want to become the best model railroader in the world, or I want to break into that industry. We'll find out where the best people are doing that. How is it working for you? Because you are in New York. Well, I guess you have been in New York for a while, right? But the actions have been happening in the Silicon Valley. Okay, but New York has had a tech scene that was...

second to Silicon Valley. If you were going to be anywhere else in the 90s or 2000s, New York City was where you would do it. And I would say that things change because of the internet. Because, okay, I'm saying geographically go to where it's at. But whatever your interest is, whatever you're trying to break into, you can break into it.

on the internet. You can stay in Iowa as long as you're in the right Discord server, right? I met people again in the industry that now have gone on to do amazing things, and I knew them when they were nobody because I was just there. I was just there when we were all nobodies. And eventually the nobodies and the weird kid with the nose ring in the corner becomes Jack Dorsey or becomes Jimi Hendrix or something like that. So it's just...

The thing that you got to do is never be shy when you're starting out. Coming back to the point about like you have to have the goods, right? Some of that is also like you have to have some strategy to do early validation. in whatever you're doing, right? Like, do you have any thoughts on like how podcaster, somebody who's trying to get started could figure out like, do I have the goods or not?

Well, also think about like if I've become a prominent podcaster, right? I had no background in that. What I found was I found a niche and a field that was... virgin territory. No one was doing this. Now, Dan Carlin was doing hardcore history. I don't know about history like Dan Carlin, but I do know tech. So you can, if you're starting out, I'm sure there's an entire ecosystem of model railroad podcasts and things like that, but whatever, like find that area and.

it's like the kids that go to Hollywood and it's just like, you know, I think Steven Spielberg did this. He just went out there and is like, you know, I'll go get you coffee. I'll hold the lights. I'll do whatever. And again, that's another, that's a perfect example of a scene that wasn't a scene when Steven.

And Spielberg goes to Hollywood in the late 60s and early 70s. It's still the old Hollywood studio system, but it's right on the cusp of the 70s explosion of new Hollywood when you get Scorsese and De Palma and all that stuff. Steven Spielberg comes up with all those kids. They called them the brats, the studio brats or whatever. But eventually all those kids, once they get their chance on the stage, have the goods and become.

Right. But you can't do that unless you go there and are willing to not just, okay, I'll hold the lights. I'll get you coffee. But commiserate with all the other people that are nobodies. Because again, eventually one of those nobodies or some of those nobodies are going to become somebodies. And then they'll remember you. And then you all come up together.

I've got a six-year-old and an eight-year-old now. That's the thing. I was one of those kids. I was a nerd, like you're saying. I was very insular. I'm not a joiner. I don't join clubs or whatever. The best advice is just don't be shy and be willing to be in a scene. Even if there's no monetary value, even if the rewards take time, you've just got to be where there's action. You've got to be where there's some sort of...

catalyst that will eventually explode. If you're not where the explosion is, you can't participate in it. I'm curious, when the first got started, you were in New York, you weren't, you know, in the Valley, but all action work was happening in the Valley. I mean, like the big action, like the Netscape kind of action, right? Like Yahoo kind of action. Well, I was also in high school when the Netscape IPO happened, so I couldn't participate. Yeah.

How did you do research to actually bootstrap your first chapters? I did a lot of reading. But again, if the Netscape IPO is the beginning of the modern internet era, which is what I argue in the book. I got there in 1999 and the Netscape IPO happened in 1995. I missed the first four years, but then I got in the scene.

I wasn't coming to this cold. I didn't decide I was going to write a book about Russian history, which I know nothing about. I was writing a history of stuff where I remembered backhand. If somebody is interviewing you guys... 20 years from now about this era of podcasting or whatever, or this era of app development, you'll remember everything that happened and you'll be explaining it as history. You'll know it like the back of your hand. You know, I remember that.

Six Degrees led to Friendster, led to MySpace, led to Facebook, led to Tumblr, led to Snapchat. I remember all those things like the back of my hand because I was there. I didn't know the details. I had to read books. I had to reach out to people and interview them and say, okay, explain to me why I know that Facebook destroyed MySpace, but why? what was going on at Myspace that I didn't know about. And see, that's also a hack too, because by hack, I mean a growth hack or a shortcut.

Eventually, the Internet History Podcast, I talked to billionaires and I talked to people that founded the companies. And when you interview those people, they will tell you that they knew they were going to succeed all along. They were a genius from day one. And you'll even hear, if you listen between the lines of those episodes, I let them go, but you can imagine me in my head thinking, that's not how it happened. That's not how it happened.

You have to start with a snowflake, right? And they don't want to talk about the snowflake. Which is fine because that's their version of history. That's fine. Like if my job as a historian is to give everybody's perspective of what happened. But the hack that I discovered was if you...

go to somebody who was there but isn't famous. So go to the person at MySpace that wasn't Tom and have them tell you what happened at Myspace, they'll tell you because no one's ever asked them to give their side of the story. There's a lot of this in the early episodes for sure, right? And there's a lot of like, you say yourself that it's hard to figure out exactly what happened in this space because you talk to different people and you hear different versions of it, yeah.

Yeah. I wanted to get everybody's perspective, even if I know that what they're saying is just retroactive bullshit. But that's still valuable in terms of, you know. It's valuable in like weaving the whole story together into the narrative that it is, yeah. So, I mean, you could think about doing a similar thing for all sorts of topics, you know, video game history. There's tons of people that do stuff like that and interview the designers behind this game or that game and stuff like that.

One of my recommendations, if you do want to go this sort of deep dive or slash history route, again, find a niche. Find something that is sort of not really been explored before. And not only will... you'd be the first person to plant your flag in terms of telling the story of that niche. But the people in that niche that love that niche that have been dying for someone to tell the story of that niche will talk to you.

I have to add a plug here. So if you're listening to this show and you were an engineer or product manager or designer on iTunes back like 15 years ago or in Libsyn or any other of those companies or when Spotify started podcasting, reach out. it to us. Our contacts are in the show notes. I would love to hear the story of how Libsyn fumbled the ball. They could have been the biggest thing in podcasting. I know people that worked at Pineapple Street and that worked at

Gimlet and stuff because all those companies were getting started when I got into podcasting. So I know those people. And you know what? You guys will be able to talk to folks at Gimlet probably about now because once enough time has passed. people feel comfortable enough to tell their story. And the golden period is around 10 years. So maybe you might need a few more, but whatever was happening in podcasting 10 years ago, people will, if they made their money.

they'll have enough distance from it that they won't be afraid that they'll say the wrong thing and lose their money. If they felt like they got screwed, they won't be afraid to say that person screwed me, you know, and our company failed because of X, Y, and Z, you know. with enough space, people will tell their story too. That's why I've never gotten like the Google founders or Jeff Bezos or any, maybe eventually one day I could, but what's their motivation for telling their story?

They have billions of dollars. They don't need it. And if you're fresh from a company, maybe the wounds are too fresh to tell your story. But with enough time, it can be cathartic to tell your story. You know, this is so awesome. Now to think about it, because we both have tech background.

So we actually could in the beginning follow that niche of like the technology for podcasting and go all the way back, talk to people. I think that would be really interesting. We understand how it works. We can also ask questions. Yeah. So one of the people that I spoke to was Dave Weiner, who invented.

the RSS feed. And so if the time comes, I'm happy to introduce you to Defoyer. Reach out eventually to Marc Maron and reach out. Again, you can do the same thing for... I think we've made it when we have Tim Ferriss in our show. There you go. I mean, I have people like that, that it's like, oh, if I can, if I can talk to them, you know, so to bring us up to the present day, and then I'm happy to talk about the process and things like that. Internet history podcast becomes popular.

I get a book deal. The book comes out in 2018. We were talking about this offline, but one of the weird things about it, you had said as a fan of the show, you're like, the early episodes of the show are so much more detailed than the chapters in the book. That's the nature of a book. You have an editor and they say in the contract, you should deliver a 90,000 word.

manuscript. And I turned in 180,000 word manuscript. And so the editor says to you, we are cutting this in half. And you say, no, we're not. And they say, yes, we are. That's useful because it made the book better. If I was writing the book... for only the people that know the industry, then yeah, it's sort of surface, and I don't get into as much depth in the book as I do in the podcast. But I was writing the book...

For my mom to be like, here's how you got a supercomputer in your pocket. Here are the people that did it to you. So that editing process was valuable. The book is a different thing than what the podcast is, you know? So like I said, the book came out.

Didn't hit the New York Times bestseller list, but it did fine. And it lives on because lots of crypto and Web3 people... have been buying the book over the last few years because they're trying to see if there are patterns that they can match to the crypto and Web3 industry.

Look, again, this comes back to the book was a part of my career. You know, because the book came out, I gave a TED talk. I gave a talk at Google. I was interviewed and, you know, I've been on CNBC and this one and that one. Because the podcast is popular and the book is published, I have this credibility. If I just one day said, hey, I'm Brian McCullough, I'm a tech industry expert, no one believes me. And I still don't believe me.

But once you have these different things under your belt, no one's going to doubt you anymore, right? And so all of the things feed into each other, which leads me to... The Tech Meme Right Home podcast, because around the time the book comes out. Just a quick question before we get into the Tech Meme one. So you mentioned that the first week itself, when you released it, Apple featured it and like you got a lot of.

publicity right i just got lucky i got lucky and then after that point you kind of kept on seeing growth did you do anything else big things to like promote it No, but then that's where you get strategic about your guests, where if you get somebody prominent to come on and they tweet about it, and then people in the industry would discover it.

And so Mark Cuban one time tweeted about the podcast and like, you know, I got an insane amount of downloads in a 48 hour period after that. So again, that comes back to.

if you get the stage and then you have the goods then at least in my experience and maybe it doesn't work out this way every time but then it sort of feeds on itself then the snowball is rolling down the hill and it's accumulating mass on its own of its own accord right with its own momentum and so again everything just feeds into it you know so at that point i'm going on npr regularly because anything every time something would happen in the tech industry

There were certain people that were fans of the podcast that then were working on an NPR show that's like, well, get that guy Brian on because he'll be able to explain this, right? And so when that happens, then boom, you also see a surge in downloads of your podcast and things like that. At the peak of your... podcasting with Internet History Podcast, how many downloads did you have per week or per month? In a month?

I think at its peak it was, let's say, 400,000. Also then maybe I had 100 episodes, 150 episodes at that point. I'll give you the download numbers of the Tech Meme Show because, you know, we do 1.7 million downloads. a month on that show. Let me get there and I'll explain that to you. So the book comes out, Internet History Podcast is a success.

Podcasting is having its moment. This is shortly after Serial. Everybody's making podcasts. And so I live here in New York and people are contacting me. Hey, Brian, would you come do... a tech podcast for this company, that company, you know, this publisher, that publisher. And I was taking a lot of meetings. But an example of if you're in an industry long enough, you just know people.

There's a website called techmeme.com, which for 15 years, people in the tech industry read every day because it's sort of an algorithmic based news site where here are the headlines. Like if you went to techmeme.com right now. Whenever you're listening to this, you'll be able to see sorted out the news of the day in the tech industry. The guy that runs that and the guy that founded it is a guy named Gabe Rivera, who I met years ago.

We became friendly. Every time he was in New York, we'd get a coffee or have dinner. Every time I was in San Francisco, likewise. And so I was just... Saying to him one time, oh, yeah, I'm probably going to do a tech news podcast at some point. But already at that point, everyone was doing that. And I'm like, how can I do a thing? That's not just you get two or three people around a table and just commiserate about the tech news. I said, Gabe, have you ever thought of doing a tech meme?

And he's like, yeah, of course. I can't do it. I don't have time. I was like, well, what if I did it? And then we sort of brainstormed, well, what is TechMeme good at? TechMeme is, they don't break their own news. They're a news aggregator. And it's like, you can go to Tech Meme and in 30 seconds, you can find out the latest news in the tech industry. So it occurred to us that the natural way to do a podcast for that would be to do something similar. So the Tech Meme Ride Home is a 15 minute.

news aggregation, essentially. So I pick the five to seven biggest stories, and I use TechMemes page as a guide. These are the most important ones. It helps me find, okay, I'll quote from The Verge for this, I'll quote from Wired for that, you know. And the business deal that I made with Gabe was I had to have full editorial control. So I picked the stories, and I picked the quotes, and I write the script every day. All I did was Gabe and I signed a contract where I licensed the brand Tech Meme.

I call it the tech meme ride home because originally the idea was I would put it out every day at five o'clock and you would listen to it on your commute home. And I kick back a certain percentage of the revenue that we make from advertising to Gabe.

But I'm completely independent. So think about this as a hack. So I have a reputation as a podcaster. But even that, it wasn't enough that people would jump with me to this other podcast. But Tech Meme, like I said, within the tech industry... is pretty much the gold standard so when i launched the tech meme right home you know peter kofka wrote it up in vox it got written up in tech crunch or whatever like because everyone was like oh my god tech meme has a podcast so

That's an example of, again, I'm levering up in terms of like my audience. I'm sort of using the reputation of TechMeme to... grow a larger audience, right? Again, it wouldn't have worked if when people try it out, they hate me or I don't do a good job. But that's why I still pay Gabe to this day because I... stood on his shoulders and used the brand that he had built for 15 years to build the audience for this.

Tech Meme Right Home podcast, which, again, is, you know, it goes up and down seasonally, but is around 50 to 70,000 folks every day and very powerful and important folks. I've leveraged that as well because it's tech meme. Why can I have Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz on a couple months ago? Why was he willing to come on?

because of TechMeme, but also because of me, because he listens to the show, he knows I know what I'm talking about. I do interviews with you know, news making people in the tech industry, people that I have no business talking to, because I'm not a journalist, you know, I don't have 20 years of doing this, but all of the things combined, the book.

The tech meme brand, the podcast, the ability for people to listen to the podcast every day to know that I'm not full of shit. The snowball just keeps rolling, right? Brian, I'm curious, when you interview people, I guess when you started and you interview now, have you done any training? No. No? Interviewing? So you just go by your gut? I don't know. Okay.

I hope this doesn't sound like, oh, I'm just naturally talented. I hope I don't sound like one of those billionaire founders that is like saying, oh, I really think what the secret is, is that I just ripped off people that I had been listening to my whole life. So I'm thinking of Howard Stern, Terry Gross, Ira Glass, Marc Maron. I heard, because I've been listening to them for my entire adult life, I heard how they did it, and I just tried to do it like them.

But then my secret sauce for interviewing people is that I just prepare, I over-prepare. So to this day, let's say... I want to interview somebody about FTX blowing up and crypto, which is a space I'm not super familiar with. I'll write up 30 questions. And I know that we'll only get to 10 of those questions.

But I do enough research that it's like I have, it can go in any direction. And so the thing that I've learned by doing it is if you over-prepare, Howard Stern always talks about good radio. like what good radio is. And so I over prepare, I over research and I have more questions than I need. Because then it allows the conversation to go in the direction that is right in the moment. I think bad interviews, and I know them when I hear them, are when the interviewer wants...

the conversation to go in a specific direction. And they keep pulling it back. And the natural flow of the conversation is going on weird. Can I get it back to the topic, please? Yes, exactly. I mean, it can work sometimes, but it's not the best way to do it. The best way to do it is let it flow in the moment. And I say to people, because subsequently, this is what I did when I was at TED, is I would train people on this.

You know, I would do interviews at TED and I would also train people to do podcasts and interviews. And the thing that I say is when I'm the host, it's the most in the moment activity I've ever done in my life because I'm thinking in my head. what is my interview subject feeling? I'm thinking in my head, what is the audience feeling? I'm thinking in my head, what am I feeling? And so all of those things are at the exact same time.

pressing on me as a pressure. And then the fourth aspect of that is, but it just should be a natural conversation that's entertaining, right? That's interesting. And so it is in the moment doing an interview. is unbelievably just intense because you're thinking of the experience of all of those people. You, the audience, the interviewee, etc.

And I didn't have any training on it, but the only thing I can tell you is that I heard my whole life people doing it well, and I just copied them. That's it. I don't know if you noticed, when I did the intro for this episode, I actually mimicked you. I feel like I'm going to do that actually for every time you interview a podcast, I would listen to how they introduce themselves and just mimic them, but I will not...

Tell that so that they don't feel self-conscious about that. No, that's fine, because that's the way to do it. To bring it back to music, every musician will tell you that. Bob Dylan wanted to be Woody Guthrie. And he wanted to be this folk star. And so he just straight copied. Every musician will tell you they straight copied. If you were a musician, Ilya, you'd copy. I am actually.

you'd start by being very Metallica-like, wouldn't you, right? Yeah, I want to be James Hatfield. Exactly. You even look like him a little bit. But then, even if you copy people, eventually parts of you come out. So, again, this is another lesson that probably holds true to a lot of things in life. Find people that you admire that do good work, copy them, and then eventually you'll find your own way. Yeah, I wonder if conceptually it's like you...

Just internalize so many of those kind of fundamental best practices, so to speak. And then they just come naturally. And then you kind of layer more of your own personality on top of it after you've done the basics. It also bootstraps you. into how you like to talk and how you like to present yourself. And then slowly as you gain confidence and you see that other people are liking this, you start to like, I think, flower.

Well, listen, people will say to me a lot, they're like, well, of course you're good at this because you have a natural radio voice. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I don't hear that. And it makes no sense. But if you listen to me interview somebody, especially a one-on-one interview. I stutter a lot. You know who does that is Terry Gross. When Terry Gross is asking a question, she'll...

start a little bit and then change her mind halfway through the sentence and stutter and whatever. And I find myself doing that as a tick. Maybe I do it less than I did at the beginning now, but I recognized from day one that that was me being her. I think Ira Glass is sort of like that, too, a little bit. I'll give you something else. Part of the Tech Meme show is doing interviews of newsmakers, but the majority of the show is reading the news of the day. And I write a script for that.

And so I'm essentially reading, if you listen Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, you know, weekdays to the show, you're actually hearing me read a script. And here's something that I did not know when I started that show. You have to perform it. Because if you don't perform what you're reading, it sounds like you're reading and it's boring. I've never listened to the first week of the Tech Me Right Home.

But I bet if you went back and listened to it, it's not as good as it is now. Because I remember in that first month, let's call it the first three weeks, eventually I had this realization that if I just read the first line of this story and then I read it, it sucks. But if I stop...

in a way that is natural to Brian and emphasize certain words of that first line, it sounds like I'm talking to you. And it felt weird when I had that realization. I felt embarrassed. I didn't want anyone to hear me when I was recording the show. because I was performing as if I was an actor, which I'm not. But I realized that was the key insight. I realize now that was the key insight to making that show successful was that I have to perform it like an actor.

Otherwise, it sounds like I'm reading. And so if I were to pull up one of my scripts right now, and actually I would perform it, I would hit, I would emphasize certain words, I would pause in certain ways, and I've learned to write as if I'm being conversational.

So I don't know. That's also not something that's something that I had to discover. But there is a performance to being public, being a public speaker or a public performer. If you're not performing it, then you're kind of not doing your job. I've heard from multiple places and also know for myself is that when you write, your writing voice is different from your speaking voice. So do you actually write in your kind of talking voice? I'm writing to make it sound like I'm not reading it. So yes.

I'll even write, instead of saying, I don't know, I'll write in the script, I don't know, to prompt myself to say it that way. Because if I'm reading and I say, I don't know, versus, I don't know. which sounds better, right? So yeah, for a hundred percent, I will write it to try to prompt myself to be more conversational.

Yeah. So one thing I would say, like, I guess as somebody who has done a podcast before, I could definitely guess that you're reading because it's a lot of content and, you know, you're speaking very cleanly and it's all great, but I don't feel like you're reading. So I just wanted to compliment you.

this. And by the way, I did go back and listen to your first couple of episodes of Tech Meme. I think they sound good. Well, I would say actually the audio quality isn't as good as it is right now. Yeah. Okay. You want to get into that? Yeah, let's get into that. But the content actually is very good. So I'm curious, before we go into the gear and stuff.

What is your workflow and your daily routine for producing a daily show? Because for me, I wouldn't be able to pull it off. I think it's too much structure daily. That comes back to my broken brain where I have Twitter open right now while we're talking and, um, all day long I'm scanning things and I'll see a story and I'll save it and, or I'll see a tweet and I'll save it.

And so again, in the same way that preparing for an interview, I have way more than I'll ever use over the 24 hours before a show every morning, I've been accumulating things that I might use and I save them in Slack folders. I save them in Twitter lists and things like that.

I have the advantage of TechMeme. TechMeme has editors and their algorithms organize what the big news is. So it's not like I have to every morning wake up and be like, what are the big stories? That's already been sorted for me, right?

And they've also sorted some of the best tweets and some of the best conversations. So my workflow is that all day long, I'm paying attention. You know, I'm going to bring up TechMeme right now and think, what am I going to have to talk about tomorrow morning? Oh, God, there's more. Elon reinstated Trump's account, so we'll have to talk about that. If I now see a tweet that I think is a good observation about that, I'll save it for tomorrow or whatever. So I usually sit down at the desk at 830.

And if I haven't recorded by 1130, I'm in trouble. So between 830 and 1130, I'm reading everything, starting to write the script, putting things in order. And then I record. Again, it's only a 15-minute show, so it maybe takes me 20 minutes to record, which isn't that much. And then the thing that I found no way to shortcut is the editing.

because I can't do one segment without screwing up or something. But I don't edit in real time. As I'm recording, I just make a mistake, pause, allow myself to find it. I leave room so that I can find it in the edit and fix it. So that's, again, something that I just learned how to do by doing. But so then it takes me an hour and a half to edit every day. There's no quicker way to do it. You mean edit audio?

Yeah, edit the audio. Yeah. At various times, I've hired people to do that for me. Right now, I don't have that. But so, yeah, usually these days, at least since the pandemic, I publish by noon or one o'clock. which sometimes means I miss a big story of the afternoon, but I think people have gotten used to that now. They know that I'll come back and pick it up the next day. So for the podcast part of it, from 8.30 to about lunchtime, that's my job in the morning.

And now I run a venture capital fund based on the podcast because the investors of the podcast are investors in the fund. And I get companies that are listening to me that... contact me. So my afternoons now are spent doing fund things and interviewing companies and getting pitched on investments and things like that. Now we're getting to the technical parts. So you said that you're doing the editing yourself?

What software do you use? GarageBand. And I'm sure there's better things out there. Everyone always tells me there's other... various other platforms that if I was a true professional, I would be using this, but I know how to do GarageBand and I can do it in my sleep. So I probably will be doing that for the foreseeable future just because I don't have the time or the inclination to learn something.

new okay so we really want andrew mason to come on our show have you ever tried descript yes i have in fact um i know andrew and you might not know this because i think i did it a couple years ago but i did experiments with descript when they first came out with the if you record two hours worth of content, then you can write it and then the robot will say it for you in your voice. I did experiment with that and did segments with that and stuff. And it was all right. It wasn't.

ideal. And I do know people that use the editing that way because Descript allows you to sort of edit as if... it's a word processor. So if you wanted to delete a sentence, you just erase the transcribed audio sentence and stuff like that. Descript a great product. Andrew's a great guy. They just actually raised a shit ton of money to hopefully build that out. So God bless them. But no, I only use GarageBand. You know, Marco Arment has a tool I used to use.

to clean up the audio. I can't remember what the name of it is, but you throw it in there and it does automatic things. And then I think it's also a way to try to put chapter titles in there, which I wish I could do, but I just don't have time. So I've used that. Oh, let me tell you, well, first of all, the mic I use, I'm not using right now, I'm using a Blue Yeti. Same here. Yeah, the Shure, what is it, Shure SMB7 or something like that? Or the one with XLR?

Yes, it's an XLR mic. Sure, it's M7B. M7B, you're right. Okay, so that's a $400 mic that basically everybody... that I know in podcasting uses. It's the same mic that Michael Jackson recorded the Thriller album on. Blue Yetis are fantastic. And go ahead and get one, especially if you're starting out. When the time comes to level up, go to Assure. Because it's XLR, you have to get various devices then to be able to plug that into your computer and things like that. The other thing, if...

I was able to record in my studio today. I'd be on that. And that's what I use. So when I'm doing interviews, I use Zoom now. When I started back in 2013, 2014. We're in the golden age of doing podcast interviews, guys, because I used to have to be like, okay, to do this interview, I need you to be on Skype. Okay.

I don't have a Skype account. Okay, let me help you set up a Skype account. And then let me help you do the settings. And then let me like now because everybody is used to doing Zoom calls. I can assume that everybody has Zoom, knows how to use it, and...

The audio quality of a Zoom recording is much better than even a Skype was. And there's all sorts of other tools. We're using Metacast right now and stuff like that. Actually, Metacast is the name of our podcast. We use Squadcast. But it just shows our logo. Sorry. No, it's good. I'll take it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In my opinion, Zoom is great because everybody already has it, knows how to use it. And all you got to do is check the box that says recording and it...

downloads locally. So I recommend that. What else? Oh yeah. Okay. One more thing I have, I showed you guys last time we talked, I have a, an audio box. What is this called? We'll have to take a picture of this and put it in our show notes. This was awesome to see. Let me look behind me here. Okay. So you put your head in it. Yes. So let me describe this. So it is called the...

Harlan Hogan's Port-A-Booth. Google Port-A-Booth. And as opposed to... having a room where you put all the foam on all the walls and stuff like that and ilya i can see you're in your closet which i did too being in a closet is in between the clothes is a great way to do but what the porter booth does It has that foam stuff. It's a little box. It unfolds and stuff so you can travel with it and things like that. I put my Shure SMB in there.

And I put my head in there every day and I use my phone. I put the script on my phone and I read from my phone inside the little box every day. And that is probably why the sound quality is better. like you said earlier. No echoes, yeah. We were actually wondering if you were going to do that with us today. Like, we'll see your head inside the box. It's so weird to have actually both of us, like, you know, in our closets, which is already weird enough.

But like, at least we are having our faces and you would be like this talking box. Yeah, no, you got to be able to see people's faces when you're doing interviews. Yeah. But again, if the sort of podcast you want to do is sort of like a Dan Carlin style where... It's not an interview. I highly recommend using that box. One time I had a sound engineer come and tweak my garage band settings. So the voice setting that you hear now on the Tech Meme Ride Home.

is tweaked specifically for my voice. I don't know the wizardry he did. The setting is completely unique or whatever, but he was a sound engineer that does this for a living. So I paid him a few hundred bucks and he did that for me. But those are the things that I've done subsequently to be more professional. And, you know, again, if you want to level up, then find yourself a sound engineer that can come and tweak your settings for your particular setup.

I worked with sound engineer for my first few episodes of my other podcast. And then as I was doing that, actually, I was also learning some of that sound production stuff. Also from him. I mean, he was fine, like me, just like learning that. And then I eventually bought all of the same software that he uses.

Now I'm just applying kind of the standard filters that I've learned and it saves me hundreds of dollars. Yeah. I mean, the only other thing that I use is I do use a pop filter. I'm not using one right now, which I'm sure you can hear. But if you're, again, reading.

And even for interviews, if I were in my home studio right now, I would have the pop filter on. That's just a really easy thing to do to sound a little bit better. On the issue of sound quality, one thing that I would say for podcasters is it helps. to try to sound as good as you can it doesn't hurt but i've found personally that

Podcast audiences will be forgiving of you as long as you're upfront about what the situation is. Like I've helped people launch podcasts where they go out on the street with just their iPhones and interview people on the streets. And so there's lots of street noise or whatever. But if you set the expectation. that that's what this is we're going out into the world then fine like and my audience understands by the way the episode that I did last night here the audio quality is terrible but

I said, listen, my two guests are in town. They're only in town for a little bit of time. You know, it's one of the guests was somebody that I wanted to have on for years. And so I set the expectations that, look, it's not going to be... as good as sometimes my interviews are and it really wasn't the the sound quality was pretty terrible my point is i think your audience will be forgiving of you if they understand

what you're doing and you're upfront with them about what you're doing. And if you at least make the effort, you know, at least make the effort to sound good. But then occasionally, you know, it's funny, you mentioned on the internet history podcast, I interviewed the guy that developed the MP3. standard it is one of the worst episodes audio wise i've ever done which is ironic that i'm interviewing the guy that created the mp3 and it's the worst and i think i even say in that episode

What I did is I edited together some of the stuff that was legible. And then I said, here is my best edited version of this. If you want to hear the whole thing and it's really annoying here at the second half. did the full audio. But I've interviewed people when they've been talking to me in their car. And again, if people understand

you're trying your best, I think they'll be very forgiving of you. Oh, that's a very good point. You also mentioned that you tried out editors, but you do it yourself now, right? I mean, that's a money thing. I'd love to have the hour and a half back in my day that I spend editing, but I just don't feel like paying for that right now. And I think an editor also have to like, it's a very personal thing, right? Like producing your podcast, they have to actually know.

the content and your personality to actually be able to project the way you want your podcast to sound like. That's an excellent point, because if I have recorded, you know, I sit there and I record for 20 minutes and then I immediately start editing. I remember. oh yeah, by the way, in segment two, you really flubbed somebody's name and it took you three tries to get it right. Well, if I hand that over to an editor, they don't know that, but I do know that. So I can do it faster.

because I'm also the person that did the recording. So if it takes me an hour and a half to edit, probably it takes the editor two and a half hours to edit. And to your point about being forgiving of sound quality, I remember actually a specific... place in Bellevue, Washington, where we used to live. I was driving in my car, listening to that MP3 episode.

I forgot which one long or the short one. And I was just like so excited about the content because like, I don't know, like MP3 was my life because I play music, you know, like I was always into music. I don't remember how bad the quality was. Like, it's not the point. It was one of the times, like he lives in

Germany. He is German. So he has a very thick accent and the Skype connection was terrible, but also he's a busy guy. He's an older guy. I knew I had to take what I could get, you know, and. One of the things, though, that's interesting about it that he taught me, this is an editing tip, but like one of the reasons that MP3s work, and please forgive me because it's been a while since I...

done this research and did that episode. But I learned a trick from him about editing audio, which is at the end of a sound, the human brain is trained to not hear the tail end of it. That's an editing technique that I use all the time when I'm splicing together a sentence that I screw up or something. As long as I leave enough space for silence when I start my second attempt.

I can splice it back together right to the edge of the previous sentence. If you put it right at the end of the last word you said, you won't hear the click of the edit, which... You even will have, I know it'd be better if I could show you visually, but if you do your edits halfway between the two, like let's say I do sentence one, screw up.

and do attempt two, if I do the edit and try to piece them together in the middle of the two problems, you can hear the edit. If you take the second one and bring it right up to the edge. of the first one you can't hear the edit and that i'm sure what i just described sound people know you know and it can describe it way better than me but god i use that every day to cover up things do you cut out breaths

Yeah. Sometimes I do. But again, like we were discussing that I've developed this technique that sounds like I'm talking. Sometimes I purposely leave in the breaths because if the flow is good enough... then it sounds like I'm talking. And a natural person, when they talk, pauses for breath. So it's on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes I will cut out the breaths. Sometimes I leave them in.

I know people that cut out every um and ah and every breath. And like, you know, the 99% invisible guy, you know, he's a master at doing that stuff. That's not me because also I don't have the time to do that. Yeah, if you just use a tool to do that, it sounds very unnatural. So if you do that, you have to really take your time to do it properly everywhere. Yeah. One last thing on podcasting before we go into the fund. I know when we did the...

introductory call you mentioned some of the numbers about like numbers of downloads also the ads i think people will be curious to hear about especially those who are just starting out or like thinking about starting how much money can someone make with podcasting

And how does it work? Yeah, one of the reasons that, again, I come from the business world where I know what it costs me to buy advertising. And advertising is sold on a... thing called a CPM cost per mila, mila being the sort of French slash Latin word for thousand. All advertising is sold this way on a CPM basis. So if you buy an ad on the Super Bowl, you're paying a certain dollar figure per thousand viewer. If you buy an ad in a magazine, you're being charged.

per thousand eyeballs that you expect to see that page. If you know advertising, that you know that one of the things that the internet did is it brought CPM levels down, down, down, down, down. That's what killed the newspapers. That's what killed a lot of media, right? Back in the day, if you ran Time Magazine, you could demand a $50 or $70 CPM. There are people in podcasting that demand $70 CPMs right now.

But $30 forever was considered, okay, if you can get a $30 CPM, that's good money. From day one, I've never sold an ad on my show for less than a $30 CPM. And the unit here is downloads. Per thousand downloads. Yes, correct. So you can do the math. If I sell an ad, I tend to sell at the low end so that I don't have to under. perform and then have to make good for stuff. So I generally sell it at 50,000 downloads. So tomorrow on my show, I'll have two ads. And so I sold it at 30 times 50.

So roughly $1,500 per ad. There will be two ads tomorrow. I generally do 22 episodes a month. So multiply 30 times 50. times two, times 22. That's how much money gross show generally makes if I sell out all my ad inventory in a month. Now, there's different factors. For certain ads, 30% of that will go to the ad network that I'm also contracted with. Some of the ads are...

inbound direct. And so I get to keep all the money, but even that I have to give a percentage to Gabe Rivera for the tech mean thing. So if you just did the math in terms of what you can see that I probably make in a month. Just know that I don't get all of that because it's sort of like a waterfall. Some goes to the network, some goes to Gabe. But the bottom line is the tech meme ride home can do.

And by the way, our ads have slowed down at the tail end of this year for the first time. For the first time in five years, our ad inventory is maybe 50% full. But on a good year, the Tech Meme Ride Home can do a half a million dollars. Wow, that's pretty amazing. There's two reasons for that. We have a super valuable audience. Don't you think there are a ton of companies that want to reach powerful people in Silicon Valley?

or even just the engineers and the grunts that work at Silicon Valley companies. Very valuable audience, niche audience, but very valuable. And then the other hack is that... 50,000 isn't that big an audience. If I only did one show a week, it'd be good money, but it wouldn't be half a million dollars. I'm doing 22 shows a month, right?

So a daily show, you have a ton of inventory to sell, but also you got to do it. Do you always have like two ad slots? And what happens if the ad inventory is not full? Early on. If I had an unsold ad, I just wouldn't run an ad. Now what I do, because it's in my interest to keep the advertisers happy, if I have an unsold thing, I'll just fill it with somebody else's ad that I did.

the week before. Because what you learn, advertising is a relationship business, right? So I want my advertisers to succeed because if they do, then they will re-up. I've been doing this show for five years now, so there have been advertisers that advertise with me for three solid years. If that happens, it's great because then I don't have to do the work of, if somebody drops out, then...

you got to hope somebody else drops in. So I want the advertisers to succeed. So what I do now is I, yes, even if it's unsold, I will run. somebody else's ad that has been sold because then they get these free impressions that hopefully get results for them. And so they'll stick with me. So it's in my interest.

to always run the ads when I have them because it's in my interest to keep the advertisers happy. One of the weird things is a couple of years ago, I started an ad-free version of the show that people subscribe $5 a month for. If you subscribe for that, you get the same show, but with just the ad stripped out. But if you look at the show notes of that show, I still have the links to the advertisers because...

The subscribers insisted that I keep them. And I said, why? If you're paying for me to strip out the ads, why do you still want to know who the advertisers were? And to a person, they all said, it's because your ads are educational for me. I'm an engineer that works in tech. I didn't know about Datadog until they bought an ad on your show. So I want to know about this tool, that tool, this new...

software platform, whatever, it's useful for me to at least know of these things. And so I'm in this weird situation where the ads are actually useful to my audience, maybe to a larger degree than some other. shows. What do you think about dynamic ad insertion where you have like the ad network insert an ad? Actually, I think I've heard one of those in your show. At the end of a show one day, I had to tell people, listen, guys, for the first time,

I haven't sold out my ad inventory. So you're going to start hearing some of these digitally inserted ads. I've tried to keep that to a minimum. So you won't hear it every day, but you can do it like a dial. So like, let's imagine that. In the summer, my ad inventory was 95% full, so I didn't turn on any of the DAI, right? If now, December especially, the cupboards are bare and it's only 50% full, then I can turn the dial and say, all right.

deliver 15% DAI. Unless I got desperate, I wouldn't turn that all the way up to the full 50. But I do do it to fill. And the reason is that then I still... want to fill with those other advertisers that have paid me the full $30 CPM because those DAIs are like, I see $8 CPMs after everybody takes their cut if it's DAI. So it's nice money to...

fill the cracks, but it's not nice enough money that I'm willing to, you know, have it take over. Right, yeah, and this sometimes can sound pretty disruptive to the flow of the show, too. Sure, sure. Versus like the ads that you're reading yourself, like the example that you gave about Datadog, right? Like that actually sounds educational and like I actually get interested and sometimes I go read about that thing afterwards. Yeah.

Hey, listen, by the way, one of the things that I discovered and didn't do is when I launched the Tech Meme show five years ago, if I had... A lot of those companies that were the early advertisers were like Fastly and Datadog and HubSpot. All of those companies subsequently went public. If I had invested in the first day IPOs of all of those companies that were early advertisers, I would have made some really good money.

Actually, it's a good segue to the fund, by the way. Oh, that's true. Let's talk about the fund. Yeah. There's this trend over the last few years of solo venture funds. If you're familiar with Paki McCormick, he runs a newsletter. There's also Turner Novak who got, he's a big TikToker or whatever. People in tech circles that have followings.

launched venture capital funds that are run on the platform AngelList because AngelList does all of the back end for you and stuff like that. So I had heard a few years ago people starting to do this and people were like, well, you should do it too, Brian, because you have a...

your tech audience, et cetera, et cetera. But I didn't think it would work. And I remember saying to my wife, well, let's give it a go. And I'm going to just keep pushing on doors until one of them doesn't open. So one day at the end of a show, I said, if I rolled up a rolling fund on AngelList, would anybody invest with me? And I put up a Google form and in 24 hours, 150 people said, yeah, we do it. It ended up we have.

our first year we had 77 investors how much do you have to invest uh that first year 2.7 million this year i mean how much how much do individual investors uh have to contribute the minimum is five thousand dollars a quarter It's all set by AngelList, by the way, so I don't have to worry about this stuff. So I announced the fund. I said, how many people are interested? In my mind, I was like, if I can't raise $2 million, it's not worth doing.

And like I said, we ended up closing $2.7 million in the first year. This year, because the tech downturn, it's down to $2 million, but that's still fine. That was the first door that opened. It's like, oh, yes, you do have an audience that is willing that, again, it kind of makes sense. You listen to me every day. You think I'm a smart guy. And you think, hey, I might be able to get deals.

and get into meetings that you couldn't get into. Okay, great. So the Ride Home Fund in its first year invested in 24 companies because the second door that opened was, okay, I got these investors and they're... Prominent people, pre-IPO, Google engineer, and great people, really intelligent. They helped me invest and vet these companies. The second door that I pushed on and it came open was, okay, got the money. Can I get deal flow, as it's called? Which is to say...

You might have money to invest, but how do you find the companies to invest in? And it has to be high quality deal flow. There's a million people, if you announce it to the world, that are like, here, please give me money. But if it's not good enough, well... Again, because of the quality of the audience that I have with the Tech Meme Right Home, the deal flow is incredible. Really smart people doing really smart companies. And again, the podcast.

I wouldn't have access to this if I didn't have the podcast audience. So that was door number two that opened. Door number three that opened was, okay, got the money, have the good deal flow, but a founder doesn't have to take a check from me. If Andreessen Horowitz is over here offering you a check and Brian McCullough is over here offering you a check, who's Brian? What I learned is that if I offer the megaphone of the podcast to startups...

they will take a check from me. Because I mostly invest in seed and pre-seed companies. So companies that are very earliest, right? Before they've even found product market fit or sometimes even have a product. And so... At that early stage, if you take a check from me and I say, when the time is right, come on the show and tell the audience about it, it's a free option on a marketing platform that can be extremely powerful.

at the earliest stage of your company. We've helped companies close their rounds. We've helped companies hire their engineering team. We've helped companies get their first thousand customers by coming on the show. And the way we do it is we do it like how I built this style.

I say, come on the show. It's not just about, oh, pitching your company. Tell me your entrepreneurial story. Tell me the struggles that you're having right now. Tell me what the vision of the company is, but also the roadblocks that you're facing. So the audience gets out of it sort of the entrepreneurial lessons in real time of real companies today that are launching, okay? So the audience likes it. The companies get out of it.

Even if the people listening aren't an investor in the fund, they become a fan of the companies in my fund. Like I said, how do you think we've helped people land their... their CTO, it's because they heard and they're like, oh, that's a really interesting company. They sound like good people. Brian, put me in touch with them, right? So... It's a win-win-win for everybody because I get good content for the audience. The companies get good exposure from the audience. And so I love it.

This gets back to the snowball thing or like the book. Everything that I do feeds into everything else. The fund wouldn't exist without the podcast. But as the fund is successful, it's going to also raise the profile of the podcast and virtuous cycle. Yeah, it's great. We've gone through, Brian, this is your life for two hours now. I never had a master plan to get here, but I've stumbled into a thing where I like podcasting. I like...

having a platform to tell people about their industry, about the tech industry. I like companies. I like founders. I like new ideas. And so I've stumbled onto this thing where I can do all of those things in a completely synchronous and flywheel sort of way, and it's a lot of fun. We've been recording for almost two hours now, and we are at the end of our a lot of time. What podcasts do you listen to? What would you recommend? Okay. I'm big into comedy podcasts and...

Soccer podcasts for years and years and years. Every Monday, for me, Mondays are Comedy Bang Bang Days. One of the OG original comic podcasts. I also am a huge fan of the podcast The Rest is History. They're two British historians that I actually kind of knew before they started their podcast, but has become wildly successful because they're amazing at it. They're doing it. They did a history of the World Cup last week.

Just great. Two really sort of wonky British historians, but they do all sorts of good entertaining history stuff. There's various Arsenal podcasts that I listen to because I'm a fan of Arsenal Football Club. So shout out to the Arsecast. I also love the Football Ramble, if you just like general football news. Wednesdays for me are Nerd Poker.

which is the comedian Brian Posehn and his other funny comedian friends have been playing for years Dungeons and Dragons. Yesterday being Saturday was The Flophouse, which is one of those we watch a bad movie and then talk about it and make fun of it. But it has been going on since 2008. It's also one of the original shows to do that. Today is Sunday. Sunday is when Blank Check with Griffin and David comes out. It's a movie podcast by two movie critics, but what they do is...

They do a director's filmography. The reason it's called Blank Check is their theory is... You're a director who makes a movie that is successful, and then you have a blank check to do whatever crazy passion projects you want for the rest of your career. So they just finished a series on Stanley Kubrick.

But they've done Christopher Nolan. They've done off-the-wall ones. They're long. They're two and three hours long. But for the old movie film nerd in me, I definitely recommend Blank Check. Off the top of my head, anything else I can think of? I'm going to be ashamed when I realize that I haven't named a real favorite of mine, but that's enough. I gave you five. That should be good. Thank you. So where can people find you? Are you still on Twitter? Yes, as long as Twitter.

As long as Twitter still exists, I'm at Brian MCC. I'm trying out this new thing called post.news, which may not even exist by the time you hear this, but I'm at Brian on there. It's a straight Twitter clone that... launched last week. Search your podcast app of choice for... Tech Meme Ride Home. You can hear me every weekday there. If you want to binge and hear how I got started, look up the Internet History Podcast. And that's it. That's all that matters anyway, where to find me.

Yeah, the Internet History Podcast, I just can't recommend enough, especially for people who like books. That's just like a 500 hour long book that is just, there's so much depth, so much kind of character in there. I just can't recommend it enough. Well, thank you. Same for the tech meme one, I think. The amount of different topics that you're able to go to every day and the amount of research and everything that shows up in 15 minutes, it's amazing, yeah.

Yeah, that's the one that pays the bills. So, yeah, give that one a try first and then do your deep dive into the Internet History Podcast. It's all good. It all works together, as I said. All right. Brian? It was a great pleasure to talk to you for two hours. I just didn't even notice how the two hours went by. Oh, thank you. Absolutely fantastic. So grateful for you to agree to talk to us.

and support us and be able to hang out with you and hear your story. That's absolutely amazing. And especially as a soccer fan, like you said, the first World Cup game is going on right now. Yeah, I know, I know. And by the way, Ecuador is playing and I'm a quarter Ecuadorian. So think of the sacrifice that I made. They're a very young team. I think lots of promises this time. I haven't checked into the scores. I'll go watch it. I'll do it. I'll do it when we get off. But do me a favor. When...

When you have Tim Ferriss on, maybe save that clip where you said that your dream is to have Tim Ferriss on and be like, we told Brian this however many years ago that one day we'd have you. So there you go. Let me know when Tim Ferriss comes on. Yeah, one of those things is like, at this point, I don't think I should be ready for Team Ferris. But like episode 50, episode 100, totally. Yeah, hey, you're right. You're going about it the right way. Thank you for listening.

please subscribe to us on the platform where you listen to podcasts and give us a rating that we deserve, which is hopefully five stars because you've listened up to this point and you still are listening, even though Brian is already gone. By the way, I'm recording this a couple of weeks after we recorded the episode because we forgot to do that. Thank you and see you later.