Creating Superfans Podcast Episode 311: Gary Arndt

Brittany Hodak [00:00:03]:
Pop quiz. What do pizza, gemstones, the Apollo program, the crusades, and ninjas have in common? Those are just a few of the subjects of episodes of my all time favorite podcast called Everything Everywhere Daily. Now it’s always a treat when I get to speak with someone whose work I’m truly a super fan of, and today’s guest, Gary Arndt, definitely fits the bill. He’s the creator and host of Everything Everywhere Daily, which is, in my opinion, the world’s very best podcast for curious people. Prior to launching the show, Gary was an award winning travel photographer and blogger who has won just about every prestigious award you can imagine. He’s been to every continent and every US state twice, and he has degrees in mathematics, political science, economics, geology, and geophysics. Suffice to say, he’s one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. In this podcast, we’re gonna talk all about how he got started and the secret sauce that has made it one of the world’s most successful shows.

Brittany Hodak [00:01:09]:
Whether you’re a creator or entrepreneur looking for tips about building something people will love or just a curious person, you’re gonna love this episode. Let’s get into it. Gary, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

Gary Arndt [00:01:22]:
Thank you for having me.

Brittany Hodak [00:01:24]:
I have to say it is not often that I find a podcast that I not only listen to and anticipate the release of every new episode, but actively go back and binge episodes. I was telling you before we started, I’ve listened to 5 or 600 episodes of the podcast and cannot wait to listen to the ones that I have not. And for a show with 1500 episodes, I think that says a lot.

Gary Arndt [00:01:50]:
Yeah. I, I I started a thing a while back on the show. It’s kind of a joke. Have you ever seen Saturday Night Live and they have the 5 timers club? Uh-huh. So what so when a host hosted for the 5 time, then they do this skit where they’re they have a 5 timers clubhouse, and they get a smoking jacket and everything. So this was maybe a year into the show. Someone contacted me and they said, oh, I really like the show. I I’ve listened to every episode.

Gary Arndt [00:02:16]:
I said, well well, welcome to the Completionist Club. At the Completionist Club, you have concierge service, we have drinks and dining, blah, blah, and then more people started contacting me saying that they they joined the Completionist Club. And next thing you know, it became a thing where people began, you know, I have hundreds of people that have now listened to every podcast. And it what’s weird is I and I don’t know if anyone else that’s really done this in podcasting, but it’s almost kind of like a collectible where, you know, if you have baseball cards or Beanie Babies or whatever, people try to, like, collect them all. And I’ve kind of established that same thing with the podcast to encourage people to listen to over a 1000 episodes of my show.

Brittany Hodak [00:03:02]:
Well, and I think the reason that it works and the reason that there are so many people that are excited to join the completionist club is because if you are a curious person, there is no way that you won’t love this show because you cover so many topics. There’s such a wide range. I will tell you sometimes I’ll see a topic and I’m like, oh, another World War 2 episode, not sure how much I really care about this. And then 3 minutes in, I am so hooked. It’s the most fascinating thing. You make learning about things that we’ve never heard of or never considered fun, which, you know, something that I was laughing that I saw you write somewhere on your website that you dropped out of grad school because you loved learning, but you hated researching. And I can’t imagine how much your researching must go into this show because I know you’re a team of 1. Right? You’re doing all of this yourself.

Gary Arndt [00:03:53]:
I am the only person that has ever done anything for every episode of the show. No one has helped me do anything. And, yeah, I mean, I like learning, but doing research, especially, you know, I was in a geology program. That’s a very different type of thing. And people getting a PhD, it is a multi year process. Everyone I know who’s in a PhD program, no matter the discipline, hates it. It it it’s not fun. And I had, you know, a very wide range of interests and, you know, I I got value out of my time there.

Gary Arndt [00:04:29]:
I’m glad I did it, but I saw no point going for it.

Brittany Hodak [00:04:33]:
Well, I love the show. You’re a little over 4 years in, and I know you said you started this show kind of as a pivot because when the world shut down in 2020, you could no longer travel as a photographer. So you started this show. And I’m curious because I know you started it with a great deal of intentionality. Is it something that you foresaw continuing to go a 1,000 plus episodes, or was it something in your mind that you thought I’ll do a couple 100 of these or 500 of these? What it what it No. I when you started?

Gary Arndt [00:05:04]:
So just some background. I’ve, sold my home in 2007. I thought I was gonna travel around the world for a year ended up being a decade, I basically was traveling at that point it wasn’t full time but it was like a third to a half of the year I would be on the road and I was a pretty accomplished travel photographer. I’d I won every, you know, major travel photography award there was to win. When the pandemic hit, everything just went to hell. I lost 95% of my income in the span of 2 weeks in March of 2020. All the contracts I had were canceled, and, I had already had my doubts about what I was doing, like blogging, because it had become instead of me traveling and writing my thoughts about places, it had all become keyword driven SEO content, and everybody was writing the same articles chasing the same keywords, and it was it was not fun. And what was what and what still is being produced is is largely just garbage designed to appease Google.

Gary Arndt [00:06:08]:
And back in the old days of blogging, what you cared about was people subscribing to your website with an RSS reader. That was what mattered. And there was one area where that still exists on the Internet and that’s podcasting. And you’re it doesn’t really matter, SEO. I mean, there’s a small SEO component to it, but it’s not very big. So I had this idea for a show, and I had to make this work. So, yes, I fully envision myself spending years doing this until I could get it to a point where it was successful. And I knew it would be because I figure if if this is something I like and I am interested in these topics, there have got to be other people out there who would be interested as well and so I just put my head down and threw myself into it and it took about a year and a half before I got to a point where I could start making some money reasonably And then a year after that before I I was able to, you know, start doing quite well.

Brittany Hodak [00:07:11]:
Not Kelsey Brothers well yet, but, hey, we’re on that path. Right?

Gary Arndt [00:07:16]:
Dude, if I can date if I date Taylor Swift, who knows?

Brittany Hodak [00:07:19]:
I mean, yes. A a 9 figure deal could be in your future as well. Well, I and I think that’s such a such great advice of build something that you love, and then other people who love the same things you love will find it, rather than how do I make something that’s generic or vanilla enough to, like, maybe sort of appeal to a lot of people who are quasi interested, which I feel like is a trap so many people fall into, especially because social media almost seems to reward that in some ways. So the fact that you said, I wanna design a show that intellectually curious people like myself will find, I think is is a testament not just to your long term planning, but also to why I think this probably works so very well.

Gary Arndt [00:08:08]:
Yeah. And I also felt I was in a unique position to do this show. I have degrees in 5 different things, math, economics, political science, geology, and geophysics. I traveled around the world for 13 years. I’ve been to over 200 countries and territories. I’ve been to every state twice, and I’m just I I read a lot. So I have a background and a knowledge base to do a show like this.

Brittany Hodak [00:08:39]:
Mhmm.

Gary Arndt [00:08:39]:
And I was desperate enough when I started the show, I realized that I may not be the only person in the world that can do this show, but of that subset of people who could do it, no one would want to do it because of the amount of work. And I pitched the idea to the show to some of my friends who were podcasters, and they all had the same reaction. This is a great idea, and you are insane for trying to do a daily show like this because it’s not just me talking and, you know, making stuff up off the top of my head for a few minutes every day. It’s not like, oh, daily inspiration. No. I’m writing a 2,000 word term paper every day and researching it. And the writing and the research is what takes all the time. The actual recording the episode is is rather trivial once that’s done.

Gary Arndt [00:09:25]:
But, yeah, I’ve 1500 shows in and, just keeps growing.

Brittany Hodak [00:09:31]:
Well and what I think is really interesting too for anybody, obviously, anybody who hasn’t listened to the show yet, you have to immediately go subscribe to wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Subscribe to Gary’s. But what is really fascinating to me is the editorial decision that you made to not really put yourself in these episodes. Your every now and then, you’ll have almost as an aside of, oh, when I visited this country or I saw this or I saw that, but it really is like a term paper that you’re just delivering, not with any first person knowledge or bias, just, like, really interesting stuff that, to be honest, a lot of people could read it and it would be the same effect. So when I kinda went down the rabbit hole to say, well, who is this guy? He seems so smart and so fascinating and he knows all of these things. I was shocked to find out how well traveled you are because it’s not something that you talk about a lot in the show.

Gary Arndt [00:10:23]:
I made a conscious decision to not make a travel podcast, and the reason is because I did a travel podcast for 11 years. And in our best month, I would say we were doing about 25,000 downloads a month. Now I do that before 10 AM every day. People only the problem with travel as a content, you know, niche is that people only care about travel when they’re about to go on a trip. People don’t follow travel like they do sports, politics, technology, celebrity gossip, things where there’s stuff happening all the time. Right? There’s something new happening. There’s always a new iPhone coming out, there’s an election taking place, there’s a new season in every sport. The Colosseum in Rome, it’s there, it’s still gonna be there, ain’t going nowhere, nothing really changes.

Gary Arndt [00:11:20]:
And so I wanted something that didn’t make me reliant on the travel business, but something where I could use everything I learned as a basis for it. And this turned out to be, you know, kind of the perfect thing to do.

Brittany Hodak [00:11:36]:
Now in covering so many different topics, how closely do you watch your metrics? Do you know, oh, I get more downloads or more shares or more social traffic when I’m talking. So you’re not tracking it. Was gonna say First

Gary Arndt [00:11:49]:
of all, there is no social traffic. I completely ignore social media. Don’t give a shit about social media at all. And this is a guy I have a 100,000 followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, almost do on Pinterest. I had 2,000,000 people on Google Plus. Do not care about social media. It does not convert for podcasting, period. And I have tried.

Gary Arndt [00:12:08]:
I have invested money in it. I’ve had people create professional, you know, snippets of shows, does not move the needle for podcasting, TikTok, everything, so I don’t care. And when I talk to people like, what’s your favorite episode? It’s all over the place. Everyone has a favorite episode that they’ll pull out of the hat from 3 years ago or something, and it’s always different. And so one of and you’ll see people in a lot of like, you know, marketing or podcast websites, you know, find out what your listeners want and keep doing that. I’m like, no, I’m and I have violated every rule for what you’re supposed to do with a podcast. So I just do whatever I think is interesting. And I know maybe there are people that don’t like the World War II episodes, but you know what? Tomorrow, it’s not gonna be a World War 2 episode because I almost never do 2 types of things back to back.

Gary Arndt [00:13:04]:
So there’ll be something new and different. It might be an episode on science. It might be one about geography. It might be one on, you know, ancient history. It might be one on modern history. It might be something on mathematics. I’ve done a lot of those that a lot of those go over people’s heads, but, just as an aside, I did one on non Euclidean geometry, and it was over a lot of people’s heads, I understand. Then I got a professor who wrote me, a math professor, and said, your episode was so good.

Gary Arndt [00:13:28]:
I assign it the 1st day of class for non Euclidean geometry so everyone can listen it. And and just basically, here’s here’s why it exists and and what it is. So, yeah, the fact that it’s eclectic and there’s something different and random every day, I think, has become kind of one of the hallmarks of the show’s show and why people like it so much because I’m not just talking about one thing over and over.

Brittany Hodak [00:13:54]:
Well and as somebody who is a super fan of the show, I there is almost never a day when I don’t send an episode to a friend, and it’s usually somebody different. Because you will say something that makes me think, I’ve gotta share this with so and so. I’ve gotta share this with so and so. And I love what you said about socials. I had Shama Hyder on a few episodes ago, and she was talking about this concept of the rise of dark social, and we don’t share publicly anymore. Like, we all did in 2012 because we didn’t know any better. Nobody knew how to use social media, so you would publicly share. But now when you consume something and you wanna share it with somebody, you DM them, you text them, you email them, you pick up the phone and say, hey.

Brittany Hodak [00:14:34]:
I think you’d like this. And I think that’s what’s so cool about a podcast like this. Almost never do I hear an episode and not think, oh, this person would love this, and it’s somebody that maybe I haven’t talked to in 3 months or 4 months or 6 months. And so much discovery in podcasting, I believe, comes from exactly that, a

Gary Arndt [00:14:56]:
friend correct.

Brittany Hodak [00:14:57]:
Do that.

Gary Arndt [00:14:58]:
Because it’s all word-of-mouth.

Brittany Hodak [00:14:59]:
It does nothing. It’s editorial, which I think is maybe 1% of the podcasts I’ve discovered have been because of editorial coverage on the players, and the other 99 have been friends saying you should check this out.

Gary Arndt [00:15:10]:
And that’s hard for a lot of podcasters because they’re used to seeing things on social media and things going viral. Podcasts do not go viral. They don’t. It’s a slow crawl, And you may have, you know, occasionally see some bumps in traffic or anything if you get mentioned in a a news outlet or something like that. But for the most part, it is this day in, day out doing the work. And if you look at the factors that go into creating a successful podcast, it it’s several things, you know, obviously, the the quality of the show, but then 2 of them are time and the number of episodes. And time, well, you can’t do much about that other than just keep doing it. But the number of episodes, I realized right away that the more episodes I do, every episode is an opportunity for someone to discover my show.

Gary Arndt [00:16:02]:
And you know I mentioned SEO before and how it’s not really a part of podcasting, but to the extent that it is I am throwing a really big net. So if you search for the Eiffel Tower, the Peloponnesian War, or something like that, I’m gonna come up on a whole lot of things. And maybe there’s someone ahead of me that has a whole podcast about that subject, but, you know, I’ll I’ll probably be on the list. And as the show gets, you know, older and, grows and gets a bigger audience, it tends to go up. There was a a a tool, I think it’s called Voxelize. It was an s podcast SEO tool. They went on a business. But before they went out of business, I was subscribing to it, and I was in the top 50 in the world in terms of podcast reach, by s by SEO on both Apple and Spotify.

Gary Arndt [00:16:54]:
And I think it’s just due to the fact of kind of, like, the shotgun approach I’ve taken.

Brittany Hodak [00:16:59]:
Well and like you said, that’s it’s very hard to finish an episode and not be curious about the next episode because if you’re finding it for the first time, the natural inclination is to think, wow, that has nothing to do with this one I just listened to. And so you listen to another one and you think, well, that’s fascinating too. And then you said that the third one has nothing to do with those first two. So I think the shotgun approach is, as a listener, really enjoyable.

Gary Arndt [00:17:23]:
Yeah. Just and just to give people, if they’re not familiar with the show, yesterday, the show I did was on the crisis of the 3rd century in the Roman Empire. The show I’m working on today is about a Dutch prime minister in the 17th century who was literally torn apart by a crowd who ate him. And then tomorrow’s show is about an album that was released by the Wu Tang Clan several years ago where they only made one copy of the album.

Brittany Hodak [00:17:48]:
But then

Gary Arndt [00:17:48]:
I sold it for $2,000,000 and Yeah. So Once Upon A Time in Shaolin. So Wu Tang Clan, Roman Empire, Dutch prime minister who is consumed by a riot.

Brittany Hodak [00:18:02]:
So the the Wu Tang one is really interesting because one of the questions that I wanted to ask you is you very rarely do anything that could be considered a current event. Right? You you you Correct. You’ve covered SpaceX. You’ve covered, you know, things that are happening that you’re like, oh, this you know, the Webb Telescope found this or it it’s sort of scientifically current, but you don’t do any current events. And is that because you’re not interested in it? Is it because it just feels a little bit left to center of what you’re doing? I am sure it’s an intentional decision knowing you.

Gary Arndt [00:18:33]:
It is a very intentional decision. If you go I did a study of Apple Podcast reviews for big podcasts and the number well, there were 2 things that that were the responsible for the most one star reviews overwhelmingly. One was too many ads. So I have 2 ads on my show, and that’s it. That’s all there will ever be. And I I get people that can

Brittany Hodak [00:18:56]:
complain about it, and you shared that one star review, which I

Gary Arndt [00:18:58]:
I still get people that complain. A blast.

Brittany Hodak [00:19:01]:
So that was one.

Gary Arndt [00:19:02]:
And the other thing is inserting politics where it’s not needed. And so I made a decision that I was simply not there are so many places you can get to hear people talk about current events. Mhmm. The media is saturated with it. I don’t need to do it. There are places you can go. And one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever gotten from someone is they they said, you know, I’ve listened to a 1,000 episodes of the show, and I have no idea how you vote. And I was like, good.

Gary Arndt [00:19:32]:
That’s that’s precisely, you know, what I want. So, yeah, I think it’s not necessary. I think there should be a place where people can go where they’re not inundated with with politics all the time. And I also I just don’t find it interesting, to be completely honest. But I I think space missions are different. That’s not politics. Right? And I’ve also mentioned some you know, I’ll occasionally mention an archaeological discovery that was the Herculean papyri and how they had these scrolls for 100 of years and they couldn’t read them because they were charred and these look like a, you know, charcoal briquette. But eventually, the technology caught up and now they’re able to start deciphering these things.

Gary Arndt [00:20:17]:
That was both history and current events insofar as that. But so yeah. I mean, I it’s not to say it’s never gonna happen. When the volcanic eruption occurred in Tonga, I did an episode on that kind of as an explainer video. It’s like, oh, alright. So here’s here’s kind of what happened. And I’ve also done historically related episodes that pertained to things going on at the time. So when the 2020 election took place, I would do episodes on previous presidential elections.

Gary Arndt [00:20:50]:
Mhmm. The election of 18/60, the, you know, when there was a the thing where they couldn’t elect the Speaker of the House, I did an episode on the history of the Speaker of the House. And I trust the audience to make inferences and figure things out, and they don’t need me hitting them over the head, that if they just know the background of these things that they can come to conclusions themselves.

Brittany Hodak [00:21:12]:
Yeah. And I and I certainly appreciate that. I have learned a lot about, contested elections and why we have primaries, and and you do a really great job of that. And even, you know, nonpolitical at all current events of why do we have leap day, and why is the month called this, and why are there 7 days in the week? You have done so many fascinating things. It reminds me a little bit, and this is gonna sound weird, but I mean it as the absolute highest compliment. I’ve got 2 little boys. I have a 4 year old and a 6 year old, and anybody with little kids knows that they literally never stop asking questions. They ask, like, 10,000 questions before I’ve made breakfast.

Brittany Hodak [00:21:49]:
And some of them are really fascinating. And I feel like there is a childlike curiosity to just the list. It sounds like you had, you know, a kid saying, wouldn’t it be cool if you could tell me about this and this and this and this? And I think that’s probably why so many people like me listen to the show with our kids. Because even though it’s gonna spawn, like, 10 more questions from the episode, you answer things in such a, like, natural progression of the way that we would have them. Like, as new questions come up as you’re talking about things within the episode, which is really cool.

Gary Arndt [00:22:22]:
The show was never designed for kids, but I also made the decision along with not talking about current events that I was gonna make it friendly for kids. Like, you could watch it with your kids. I’m not gonna swear. I’m not no. I always say it’s as clean as history will allow. There were massacres in history. There are things that happened. There were concubines and other things that happened, and I’m not gonna avoid those subjects, but I’m also not going to swear.

Gary Arndt [00:22:51]:
I’m not going to do anything that would, you know, make it something that you wouldn’t they would be embarrassed. I’m not gonna talk about graphic sexuality or anything like that. And one of the and I’ve I learned this very quick. 1 of my college roommates was list was a listener to the show and he told me that he listens in the car every day when he took his daughter to school. And I did not think of this when I started the show. And since then I have gotten so many parents that have told me just the other day I did an episode on the Arctic the Arctic Circle and a guy left a comment and it’s still pretty high in the Facebook group his 6 year old Listens to the show with him and he asked him it’s like well, what is the the Arctic Circle and he explains it? Well, that’s a line of latitude Well, what’s it based on based on the equator and he said he learned all this from your podcast just, you know, 6 year olds don’t normally know about lines of latitude and the Arctic and Antarctic and the equator and all this stuff, but just through osmosis, he kind of has picked this stuff up and I’ve gotten reviews and emails from many a 9 year old, who said that this is their favorite show and, and it’s just such a wide range, you know, I’ve got truck drivers. I have mail delivery people that listen to it while they, you know, do their rounds, But I also have researchers at MIT and Oak Ridge National Labs that listen to my show. So when you hear people talking about launching a podcast, they talk about, oh, you need to have an avatar.

Gary Arndt [00:24:24]:
It’s like, I I don’t know what my avatar is. My avatar is me. It’s whatever I find interesting, and and that’s all it is.

Brittany Hodak [00:24:32]:
Well and I think it’s because, occasionally, you have something that it’s not a demographic avatar. It’s a psychographic. It’s curious people. Right? That is your avatars is people who are curious about interesting things. And I grappled with some of that when I was writing my book, creating super fans, because I wanted to write a book that was accessible, whether you were the CEO or whether you were a 17 year old kid at your first job with no real concept of why you are the acting chief of experience. And so I’ve I’ve joked sometimes. My book isn’t for everybody. It’s only for people with customers or who want customers.

Brittany Hodak [00:25:08]:
So, like, if that’s not you, don’t read my book. And it’s funny. I said that one time on a podcast and my mom texted me and was like, I don’t have customers, but I really liked your book. I think it’s a good book for life too. And I was like, thanks, mom. But notwithstanding, you know, moms, that is you know, it’s it’s it’s it’s broad enough to where it is a psychographic and not a demographic avatar, and and and your show very squarely falls into that into that territory.

Gary Arndt [00:25:35]:
Yeah. Because it’s it is all over the place in terms of age, sex. Most of the audience is American, but that’s primarily because that’s where I do most of the promotion. But I’ve gotten people from Eritrea, Nigeria, you know, damn near every country in the world if you look at the stats other than maybe North Korea, who listen to the show. And it’s a it’s really a a global thing that this type of curious person exists everywhere and in all sorts of different occupations, like I said, from truck drivers to, physicists that it really doesn’t matter your educational background, how much money you make or anything else. Curiosity kinda knows no bounds.

Brittany Hodak [00:26:24]:
Yeah. Well and so you’re a little over 1500 episodes in. I loved that your 1500th episode was the year 1500. I thought that was a really fun way to do it.

Gary Arndt [00:26:31]:
I wish I had done that sooner. Than in hindsight. I

Brittany Hodak [00:26:34]:
was gonna ask, are you gonna do, like, year 2000 for your 2000th episode?

Gary Arndt [00:26:39]:
Yeah. I might as well. I mean, I’m gonna keep doing it every 100 episodes, I think.

Brittany Hodak [00:26:42]:
Okay. You’re gonna do it every 100?

Gary Arndt [00:26:43]:
One less episode I need to think about. And then maybe when I get to that point, I’ll start going backwards in time, and and start going backwards by a 100 years. I did an episode a while back that was about how your mental map is wrong.

Brittany Hodak [00:26:58]:
I loved that one. And you talked about in the 1500th one of contracting and expanding, essentially. That

Gary Arndt [00:27:05]:
but I also want and and so maybe I’m kinda doing it through these episodes, but I wanted to do one about how your mental timeline is wrong. That we we assume like, oh, the Aztecs were an ancient people. No. They weren’t. Aztec empire actually started just a, you know, a few 100 years before the Europeans showed up, and there are European universities like that go back a 1000 years and the rise of Buddhism in Southeast Asia corresponded to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. And there are a lot of things that occurred on similar timescales, but we tend to think of some things as being newer or some things as being older. And I I so I may end up doing one about that as well. But, yeah, the the the map in your head is wrong episode.

Gary Arndt [00:27:48]:
I think, a lot of people like because they were quite surprised at things like Canada is closer to Africa than the United States is because we’re thinking in terms of a map, not a globe.

Brittany Hodak [00:28:01]:
Yeah. No. I I love that, and the the timing is so true. My husband said something the other day about how when our kids hear songs from the eighties, he’s like, that would have been like me growing up in the seventies hearing a song from the thirties. Like, that’s how old this music is, but you don’t think about it because in your mind

Gary Arndt [00:28:18]:
a theory about that too. And I’ve thought about doing an episode on this that the rate of change of things has changed. So if you look at an old TV show or a movie, you can spot if this is from the 19 seventies versus from the 19 sixties versus from the 19 eighties. Hairstyles are different, clothes is different, everything is different. And maybe it’s just me, but I’ve seen a lot of other people, it’s very difficult to tell by clothing and hairstyles something that was shot 20 years ago from today because the change in fashion has not changed nearly as much over the last 20 years as it did from say 1960 to 1980. And that there was this period in the 20th century where everything was changing so fast. My great grandparents who I remember quite well, grew up without electricity. They just didn’t have it.

Gary Arndt [00:29:12]:
My mom, was the first family on their block to have a television And today, the only thing like that we could really say is maybe smartphones. That’s that’s, you know, if you go back 10, 15 years, that’s something that nobody had and people have a hard time, you know, kids especially. How did you live without them? But that’s not as big of a change, I don’t think, as electricity. And so yeah. I mean, that may be a future episode too, but I I have to figure out what I’m gonna say about it.

Brittany Hodak [00:29:42]:
How many future episode ideas do you have written down?

Gary Arndt [00:29:45]:
A little under a1000.

Brittany Hodak [00:29:47]:
And how many more do you come up with every day as you work through episodes?

Gary Arndt [00:29:52]:
Lot of episodes I do are things I think of that day, or I will literally be watching so a lot of times, I’ll watch a movie while I’m writing the show. And then based on the movie I’m watching, I will, like, oh, I could do an episode on this. So I remember I did one on The Great Escape while I was watching The Great Escape. I was like, oh, this was a a real event that happened. And so so like a week later, I did The Great Escape episode. So that happens pretty frequently or one thing will lead to another. Or I always have the problem of zooming in and zooming out. Like, okay, I wanna talk this this is a very interesting thing, but to do this, I kinda need to explain this big thing first, and then I can talk about this thing.

Gary Arndt [00:30:35]:
So figuring out the order to do things is kind of an issue. And but then again if I if I do this and then I need to explain the bigger picture thing. Well, okay. That’s a second episode or maybe a third episode and every episode kind of begets another episode.

Brittany Hodak [00:30:52]:
So when you have something like that where you have a show that you think is gonna be maybe 1 or 2 episodes and you you sketch it out and you realize it’s, you know, 9 or 10, do you work on all of those together and and schedule them for the future? Or do you say I’m gonna work on that when it’s time and just work on 1 or 2 at a time?

Gary Arndt [00:31:10]:
I have 2 episodes that I won’t even say they’re scheduled. I haven’t done it yet, but that I I know that I’m gonna be doing. Mhmm. And then maybe a q and a episode. That that’s it. I usually this is usually a just in time inventory type process where I’m I’ll I’ll wake up a lot of days not knowing what the show is gonna be, and I just have to be moved by something. And there there are many times I like, that’s gonna take a lot of work or this is gonna be easy. And there are days where I’ll I’ll I’ll pick something I think will be easy just because I’m lazy.

Brittany Hodak [00:31:46]:
What is the most unpredictable way that your life has changed since you started the show?

Gary Arndt [00:31:56]:
I don’t travel anymore. I’ve been out of the country in four and a half years. I haven’t taken you know, I I was known as being a travel photographer. That’s why most people followed me online. I’ve taken my camera out of my bag once since February of 2020, and that was to go see the eclipse. And even then I screwed it up because I forgot to put the wrong filter on because I I was so out of practice doing it. It’s a lot of of work and, you know, the biggest thing is I had been doing a lot of social media and blogging for, you know, 13, 14 years before I started this podcast. Mhmm.

Gary Arndt [00:32:40]:
The level of feedback I’ve gotten from this show just blows the doors off of anything I’ve done. And I have had some really, you know, touching and moving, letters that people have sent me. One man, lost one of his children, and he said, you know, I was I felt horrible, and I just plowed through your show. And it it took my mind off it. Parents that tell me how their kids are are doing well in school or kids that tell me that, you know, I’m their favorite teacher, and that I you know, I I’ve had many kids tell me I learn more on this podcast than I do in school and those kind of things where you know that you’re really making a difference with people like you’re you’re really impacting people’s lives. That was something I don’t feel that I was really doing before. And, you know, every time I get something like that, it it it really kind of is motivation to to get the next show at the door.

Brittany Hodak [00:33:37]:
Yeah. What an incredible sense of purpose and what a great gift to to to find that.

Gary Arndt [00:33:42]:
Oh, and I don’t sleep much either. I usually get done recording shows around 4 in the morning.

Brittany Hodak [00:33:49]:
Do you find yourself often dreaming about an idea for a show or waking up thinking, wait. Was that a dream, or is that something that happened because you’re working on it late into the to the morning hours?

Gary Arndt [00:33:59]:
Oh, I will I will record the show, do everything I need to do, post it, go to bed immediately, and I’ll usually have my laptop with me for like 15 minutes where I will start getting ready the next day show, and a lot of it is just knowing what the story is going to be, right, like how do I tell the story of you know, a country or an element or something like that, which are not the kind of things you normally tell stories about, but there needs to be a way to make it interesting. And so there’s always different ways you can, you know, look at something. And so a lot of times if I’m doing something about an element, you know, a lot of it is the history of the discovery of the element, unless it’s one of the ancient elements that people knew about since, you know, time began, in which case you kind of have to talk about how it was used thousands of years ago and blah blah blah blah blah, how it’s used today. So every it’s figuring out the story for whatever it is you’re doing. And, like, I’m I’m really looking forward to the the the episode I’m gonna be writing tonight because, it’s gonna be really fun because it’s gonna just be filled with cannibalism jokes.

Brittany Hodak [00:35:13]:
As you said, sometimes when history, necessitates, it it can get a bit gory if if you got pulled apart and eaten by a cow.

Gary Arndt [00:35:20]:
The entire actually, that’s that’s that’s the whole that’s the only gory parts, like, he was killed and they ate his liver. The whole rest of the show is just gonna be a lead up to how this happened, because that’s the whole story. If it was just a mob attack this guy and bunch of people ate his liver, that’s 5 seconds. That’s not a whole you know, I gotta I gotta somehow make this interesting for at least 10 to 12 minutes. And, so that’s gonna be a lot of the show is, like, how did this relatively popular man who was elected 4 times to the highest position in the Netherlands get killed by a mob of people? Because that’s a real dramatic reversal of events.

Brittany Hodak [00:36:01]:
Well, one of the things that I talk about oftentimes in business in this podcast is the importance of story and how story can accelerate the path to connection and overpower apathy, and you are a masterful storyteller. In less caring hands or less skilled hands, this could sound like somebody reading a book report or somebody reading a Wikipedia page.

Gary Arndt [00:36:24]:
There are podcasts that do that. Yeah.

Brittany Hodak [00:36:25]:
There are many podcasts that do that.

Gary Arndt [00:36:28]:
And And there are one of the other things that I think I have going for me is that, when I was in high school and college, I was a very I was very successful in speech and debate. I was one of the top people in the United States, my senior year in high school in an event called extemporaneous speech. I was recruited in college, I placed in the top 10 of the national debate tournament twice. So I’m I’m very comfortable speaking in public, and I’m able to, I think, take a script and read it like I’m not reading it. And I think that’s kind of a skill in and of itself.

Brittany Hodak [00:37:07]:
It absolutely is. And I was curious, do you ever are you ever improving a little bit, or do you follow word for word the script that you’ve written for each episode?

Gary Arndt [00:37:15]:
I would say that 98% of it is on script. And then occasionally I will throw in a word or a sentence, while I’m doing it just to clarify something that I maybe didn’t write down at the time, that in the moment it’s like, okay, this this makes sense to explain it this way. But it’s it’s 98%, the script and I write the script for speaking. So normally if you write an article to be read it’s a very different style of writing than writing something for the ear. Our ears are much more forgiving than our eyes because everything we hear is someone speaking in a first draft, so we’re more forgiving the umms and the ahs and, you know, an occasional mispronunciation, our brains can kind of smooth over a lot of that whereas if you see a typo like, you some people just go nuts, and and they, you know, they’re you know, they gotta point it out and, you know, they’re kinda grammar Nazis about it. Yeah.

Brittany Hodak [00:38:13]:
Well, I think it is so well done, and I could talk to you for hours. But we’re gonna end this episode because I want everybody to go immediately listen to today’s episode if they haven’t done so already. I I think that I I know that that you’ve talked about you have one of the largest National Geographic, collections in the world. You also have referenced in a few episodes how much you love old movies and DVDs, and I think, the the mastery of your storytelling comes from that. Yeah. There you go. How many how many 100 or thousands of volumes is that? I mean, 10,000 I have

Gary Arndt [00:38:47]:
kind of a everything from about 1919 with a bunch scattered before that up until when I started traveling in 2007.

Brittany Hodak [00:38:56]:
Wow.

Gary Arndt [00:38:58]:
I have I have no room for anything else.

Brittany Hodak [00:39:00]:
Like, have you worked have you worked with them? Have you worked with Nat Geo on anything?

Gary Arndt [00:39:04]:
No. I know a lot of people who work there, and it’s really funny because when I started doing travel photography, I knew a lot of old school National Geographic photographers. Yeah. And they all everyone thinks like, oh, that’s the the pinnacle of what you’re doing, and it’s very prestigious, I’ll grant you that, but they were all envying what I was doing because I had the freedom to do what I want, to go what I want, and I was making more money than they did. And, when I get people that ask me about travel photography as a career, I tell them it’s it’s not a career anymore. There’s no money in it. None. Everybody has a camera nowadays.

Brittany Hodak [00:39:41]:
You know what I want? I want you to get a show on Disney plus that is everything, everywhere day I want you to get a show on Disney plus that is somehow a graphic representation of every podcast episode. And if that’s not something that you’re actively negotiating They

Gary Arndt [00:39:59]:
will they will never do it.

Brittany Hodak [00:40:00]:
To call you.

Gary Arndt [00:40:01]:
What they will do is they would just they would destroy the idea. They would hire an actor to be the host. They would water everything down. I I don’t think they could do it. And I think there’s a huge difference in, like, independent media, and I’m including podcasters and YouTubers and things like that, who who I mean, if you think of where people are really have dedicated fans, it’s in those platforms. Right? I I don’t know if you’re familiar with VidCon.

Brittany Hodak [00:40:31]:
Mhmm.

Gary Arndt [00:40:32]:
There are tens of thousands of people that go up to meet, you know, and the networks have nothing like that, even the streaming platforms. I mean, they’re capable of doing big budget shows. Sure. But I don’t think people, you know, have that same level of loyalty or attachment. I don’t I don’t I don’t know if they could do it. If they would, like I said, they would and Dan Carlin, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. He is one of the he is probably the biggest history podcast in the world, hardcore history. He’s been doing it for 15 years, and I remember hearing an interview where he’s he’s had people, come to him, like, for television show ideas and movies.

Gary Arndt [00:41:10]:
And, basically, it’s like, well, we wanna do your show except change everything. And he’s like, well, then it’s not the show. And he so he’s just he’s turned everyone down. And the great part about if you’re successful in this world, you really don’t need them. I think a lot of that, I remember when I started doing travel content, a lot of people had these dreams of working at the Travel Channel or stuff like that. And I got to know Samantha Brown and her husband, really well, who’s the producer for her show. And learning the the kind of behind the scenes details of how it really works and, you know, how they make the money and everything else, it is not nearly as you know, there’s a prestige factor to it. But in terms of a business, I would rather be doing what I’m doing or, you know, if you have a successful podcast or a YouTube channel, the amount of freedom you have and your ability to keep all of your income and own it, it outweighs, you know, everything else.

Brittany Hodak [00:42:14]:
A man who knows what he wants. I love it. Gary, thank you so much for coming on the show. Obviously, everyone should check out the podcast. Where else should they go, or what else should they do if they wanna learn more about you and the show?

Gary Arndt [00:42:26]:
Just go listen to Everything Everywhere Daily wherever you are listening to this podcast right now.

Brittany Hodak [00:42:32]:
Gary, thanks again. That’s it for today’s episode. Please help me out by leaving a review for the show or sharing it with a friend. Until next time, remember, don’t settle for standard. Be super.