Ride Home

Ride Home Media built a daily news podcast network whose flagship technology briefing was Techmeme Ride Home. The podcast’s AI coverage included a January 2025 crossover with Simon Willison and swyx, in which host Brian McCullough described using AI tools to turn his recorded audio into avatar videos and automate video editing.[3][5][1]

In the crossover published January 12, 2025, McCullough hosted Willison with swyx as cohost; swyx also made the guest connection. Designed for a tech-literate but non-technical audience, the conversation addressed falling model costs, agents’ reliability problems, multimodal capabilities and local LLMs. McCullough said he had regularly quoted Willison’s blog in the preceding year when covering AI developments.[1]

McCullough described using HeyGen for recent YouTube clips: he recorded his own MP3 audio, then supplied it to an avatar trained on him for lip synchronization. He also described Riverside’s AI “smart edit” switching between individual speakers and a combined view, replacing manual editing of three participants’ video tracks. He estimated that it saved him three or four hours per posted recording.[1]

These AI discussions appeared within an established daily briefing format. In January 2025, McCullough described Techmeme Ride Home as a 15-minute weekday tech-news podcast; its publication history reached back to March 2018, before Ride Home Media’s 2019 financing and expansion.[1][5][3]

Ride Home Media’s cofounders were Brian McCullough and James Welsh, with McCullough serving as CEO in 2019. Welsh had cofounded Digital Spy and worked as a vice president overseeing Hearst’s digital platform efforts. McCullough had hosted the Internet History Podcast and published How the Internet Happened in 2018. The company’s first podcast was produced in collaboration with Techmeme. December 2019 reporting described its episodes as 20–30 minutes long, surveying and analyzing the day’s major technology stories before the Eastern-time evening rush hour.[4][3]

On December 9, 2019, Crunchbase News reported that Ride Home Media had secured $1 million in seed funding from Tiny Capital, with a post-transaction valuation of $3.8 million. The company’s December 10 announcement listed three daily podcasts: Techmeme Ride Home, Election Ride Home and the debuting Celeb News Ride Home. Funding would support more subject-specific evening-commute briefings; McCullough’s ambition to expand into dozens of topics was a plan rather than an achieved network size.[4][3]

McCullough called the model “TLDR as a Service”: short daily summaries for committed audiences in particular niches. He estimated that an audience of roughly 30,000 listeners could support revenue for a host, support staff and the media company. That figure was his proposed economic threshold, rather than a measurement of Ride Home’s audience or revenue.[4]

Another show began as Coronavirus Daily Briefing, pivoted after a few months to Good News Ride Home, and became Kottke Ride Home on August 18, 2020. McCullough approached Jason Kottke about the collaboration; Jackson Bird remained its host and curator. Kottke’s August 19 announcement described a 15-minute daily selection of news and links, with the podcast and website operating independently. The show would complement the site rather than recap its posts.[5]