INFLUENCE

By: Matt Silverman
  • Summary

  • What does it really take to make a living (and an impact) on the Internet today? Join Matt Silverman (who has been covering online culture for 15+ years) in conversation with YouTubers, musicians, podcasters, streamers, journalists, TikTokers and more about turning creativity into a job, building community on ever-changing platforms, and their complex relationships with huge online audiences. INFLUENCE is the relaunch of 2 GIRLS 1 PODCAST, a weekly comedy/interview show about fascinating online communities, which ran for 7 years and nearly 300 episodes.
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Episodes
  • 35 This Is the Worst (and Also Best) Advice to Anyone Starting a Podcast | Ep 35 Gary Arndt, Everything Everywhere
    Jan 15 2025
    Gary Arndt ignored all the advice for new podcasters. Instead of focusing on a specific topic, he made a show about literally everything he could think of: history, geography, quantum physics, games, technology, and more. Instead of pacing out episodes weekly or monthly, he decided to publish every single day. 1,600 episodes later, his show “Everything Everywhere” has a community of 1.5 million monthly listeners. This success story leaves out that Gary is uniquely (and perhaps exclusively?) qualified to make this specific show. He’s been working on the Internet since the dawn of the World Wide Web, and his success during the first dot-com boom allowed him to travel the world as a self-taught photographer. He’s visited more than 200 countries and every U.S. state. He’s won major photography awards and had a wildly popular travel blog long before social media was a thing. That is until ALL travel ceased in March 2020. Knowing he needed to reinvent himself (again), he started the podcast. Slowly but surely, Gary’s daily “mini audiobooks” cut through the algorithmic noise where everything else is hyper-targeted to your existing interests. Gary sits down with Matt to discuss his world travels, the power podcasts (and other RSS-powered media) have that social media never will, why he DOESN’T want you to follow him on Instagram, his process for producing a show every single day, and the lessons from the dot-com implosion of the early 2000s that feel so ominous for the modern social Web. Subscribe to the Everything Everywhere Daily Podcast wherever you listen: https://everything-everywhere.com/ This show is made possible by listener support: https://www.patreon.com/influencepod Listen & subscribe wherever you get podcasts: 🍎 https://apple.co/44FeACS 🟢 https://spoti.fi/3UGQjrN ⏯ https://amzn.to/3wCdueF Join our Discord community! https://discord.gg/influencepod Call the show and leave a message: (347)-871-6548 Email me with guest & trivia suggestions! influencepod69@gmail.com (NOICE) Follow me: 🦋 https://bsky.app/profile/mattsilverman.bsky.social 🧵 https://www.threads.net/@matt_silverman 📸 https://www.instagram.com/matt_silverman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 22 mins
  • 34 The Internet Is Obsessed With His Tiny Video Game Sculptures | Sky Burkson, Miniaturist
    Jan 8 2025
    When Sky Burkson was a kid, he had two obsessions: drawing and video games. He went on to pursue a career in set design, but his love of games never faded. And when life threw his family a curveball, he knew it was time to recombine his passions. These days, his painstaking recreations of video game architecture and environments delight thousands of fans around the world, including some of YouTube's biggest gaming influencers, who regularly commission new work. His sculptures, which are made mostly of paper, are incredibly detailed, impressionistic miniatures of our favorite moments from Super Mario 64, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, The Legend of Zelda, and more. They often take months to create, but Sky credits that slowness for their popularity among online fandoms. This week, Sky joins Matt to discuss how he documents virtual spaces, why 1:1 re-creation doesn't always work, the hidden details players can't see, the reason he dumped 3D modeling software for good-old-fashioned pencils, and how to take that ONE perfect shot for social media. Check out Sky's website: https://www.skyburkson.com/ Follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skyburkson/ This show is made possible by listener support: https://www.patreon.com/influencepod Listen & subscribe wherever you get podcasts: 🍎 https://apple.co/44FeACS 🟢 https://spoti.fi/3UGQjrN ⏯ https://amzn.to/3wCdueF Join our Discord community! https://discord.gg/influencepod Call the show and leave a message: (347)-871-6548 Email me with guest & trivia suggestions! influencepod69@gmail.com (NOICE) Follow me: 🦋 https://bsky.app/profile/mattsilverman.bsky.social 🧵 https://www.threads.net/@matt_silverman 📸 https://www.instagram.com/matt_silverman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 33 mins
  • 33 How They Beat All 800,000 Remaining "Mario Maker" Levels Before Nintendo Pulled the Plug | Team 0%
    Jan 1 2025
    Happy Nude Year, one and all! I'm still on holiday break, but wanted to check in with out about the YouTuber(s) who exposed the Honey browser extension (owned by PayPal) as a massive scam, my upcoming guests, and sharing an encore episode from my other show, Colette & Matt Have Entered the Chat, about a small but mighty video game community that did the impossible, just in the nick of time! Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam, by MegaLag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk Original Show Notes from May 3, 2024 Since 2017, a small collective of "Super Mario Maker" enthusiasts have been trying to complete every single player-created level — a quest to truly "beat" a game with hundreds of thousands of uncleared stages. But when Nintendo announced that the servers for Wii U games would be taken offline in April 2024, the urgency reached new heights. Team 0% began to grow from its humble beginnings of about 500 members, to 15,000+ players, committed to identifying and clearing the remaining levels before they were lost to time. Playing the levels was only half the battle. Finding and cataloging the unbeaten stages using Nintendo's arcane databases was no simple task. But through some clever reverse-engineering and lots of spreadsheets, they had whittled it down to a handful of levels with just days until oblivion. What remained were some of the hardest, most obtuse Mario monstrosities ever created. And one level in particular could only be beaten by a robot — until... This week, we talk with MagicMason1000, a long time member of Team 0% who now manages the community's YouTube and social media. Mason walks us through the fascinating history of this monumental undertaking, the Team's massive popularity boom amid global headlines, what happens when Nintendo patches glitches in Mario Maker, the exciting (and then somewhat anti-climactic) final victory for the team, and the mysterious fate of all those levels now that the servers are gone. If you'd like to pitch in to beat every uncleared level of "Super Mario Maker 2," you can join the Team 0% Discord here: https://discord.gg/team0percent Check out the Team's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TeamZeroPercent And watch henryst's The History of Mario Maker's Last 100 Levels video, as discussed in this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUqUUXDmk40 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 46 mins

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