Mastering the Art of Daily Podcasting: A Conversation with Gary Arndt

Brent Peterson (00:01.409)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Gary Arndt. He is the host of Everything Everywhere Daily Podcast, the Everything Everywhere Daily Podcast. Gary, go ahead, a better introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and give us one of your passions.

Gary (00:21.294)
Well, as you said, my name is Gary aren't I'm the host of everything everywhere daily and My daily life is getting up making a podcast and then repeating it the next day because it's a daily podcast Which is something that is not for the faint of heart even though from a business standpoint. It actually works really well

Brent Peterson (00:41.933)
Yeah, that's awesome. So mine's weekly and I find it a lot of work just to get that done. So tell us, mean, so we have to still get to your passion. What is your passion in life? And I think I know what it is, but reading your bio, but tell us, just give us the struggles in doing it every single day. then, and do you do it on weekends and then give us your passion.

Gary (01:04.576)
It is seven days a week. The only break that I take is I sometimes will do reruns. I have over 1600 episodes now, so even if people have listened to it, they probably have forgotten it if it was two years ago. So I'm able to get away with doing that. But yeah, I do an episode every single day. It is not an interview show. It is a scripted monologue show. So every day I am writing basically a 2000 word term paper about some topic and then I read it.

And the show episodes are 12 to 15 minutes long, I would say. They've gotten a little bit longer over time. And the as the name of the show would suggest, it covers everything. So I've basically violated every rule that podcasters are told to follow. You're often told, oh, you got to find a niche and then you got a niche down and you got a niche down harder. I literally am the anti-niche. It's it's literally a show about everything and.

You also hear that you're not supposed to give up your day job to start a podcast. Well, I started this show in the middle of the pandemic. I was a travel photographer and a travel blogger. And literally in the two week period of March of 2020, everything fell apart and I kind of had no choice. I had this idea as sort of my back pocket and I chose to pursue it. And I put, I just threw everything into it and been doing it now for four and a half years.

Brent Peterson (02:29.933)
That's awesome. So outside of doing your daily podcast, do you have other passions?

Gary (02:37.046)
Yeah, I mean, the great part about my show is because I talk about everything. Every conceivable interest and passion I have can be part of the show. The show is, mean, while the name is everything, like I would not be talking about entrepreneurship on the show. I might talk about the history of entrepreneurship or the history of commerce or something like that, but I probably wouldn't be giving advice about, you know, how to make money, things like that. I think the thing you're probably getting at is travel.

In 2007 I sold my home to travel around the world. I thought I would travel for a year or two. That ended up turning into 13 years and turns out the world is a very big place. One of my other passions is the Green Bay Packers of which I am a part owner of the team.

Gary (03:25.9)
Beyond that, I'm not really sure. mean, this takes up an enormous amount of my time now.

Brent Peterson (03:31.661)
Yeah, I can, can, I've never heard of the Green Bay Packers. That's a hockey team right over there in Wisconsin.

Gary (03:36.876)
No, it makes sense that you wouldn't have heard of them. They've won four Super Bowls and I know that Super Bowls are not something that people in Minnesota are familiar with.

Brent Peterson (03:45.017)
Right, yeah. I will say my birthday is January 15th, 1967. So I do have little bit of Packer's history in my birth and my dad did make it to the game. Or not to the game, but watch it on TV. All right, before we dive into some about your podcast, I'm gonna tell you a joke and all you have to do is give me a rating and I like what you said. Let's do a rating.

8 through 13, it's going to be even more confusing. And to make it even more, more confusing, I'm going to do four jokes for you. And, and I'm going to rattle them off. No, actually, you know what? I'm going to tell you the joke and then you're going to give me a rating.

Gary (04:27.234)
To explain that rating system, before we started recording, I mentioned that I worked at a company once in Minnesota that rated their employees on an 8 to 13 scale. So if they got like a 9 or a 10, they would feel good about it, which to me seemed like exactly the thing you don't want to do. Like if someone's doing a bad job, I don't know why you want them to feel good about doing a bad job, because then they'll continue doing a bad job.

Brent Peterson (04:53.209)
I think for me, if we just did the rating 10 through 10, like just 10, you could only give it one number. Just 10. All right, let's try this really quick. Here we go. The food provided on the small aircraft wasn't good. It was a little plane.

Gary (05:00.718)
10.1 to 10.9.

Gary (05:18.798)
you want me to rate this one right away? I wouldn't even qualify that as a dad joke. That's really more of a little kid joke. I would on a scale of one to five, I would put that at a two.

Brent Peterson (05:20.45)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (05:29.697)
Alright, would that be a Vikings joke maybe? Alright, here we go. Why did the librarian get kicked off the plane? It was overbooked.

Gary (05:41.538)
That involves a little bit more wordplay, so I'll give that a three. Hopefully we're crescendoing here.

Brent Peterson (05:47.193)
I don't think so. How do you know elephants love to travel? Because they always pack their trunk.

Gary (05:55.534)
Let's give that a 2.5.

Brent Peterson (06:01.081)
Where do hamsters like to go on vacation? Hamster Dam.

Gary (06:07.842)
We'll give that a three.

Brent Peterson (06:09.239)
All so let's move on. You can see that my dad jokes are extremely funny. All right, so let's back up. I would say that you are an entrepreneur. You are the definition of being an entrepreneur. You don't have a paycheck. You've come up with this lifestyle that works for you and you're self-employed. So tell us a little bit about...

that trajectory when you first started your podcast and then maybe when you first made your first dollar.

Gary (06:43.032)
So this actually begins kind of in the 90s. I lived in the Twin Cities and I was very early in the Internet and I started a consulting firm that did web application development back when hooking up databases to websites was very hard to do and very rare. And so I was in my 20s and by the time I sold the business four years later, I had 50 people working for me. I was 28.

And the company that I said I worked for was actually the company that I sold it to. For one year, I was on their payroll doing nothing. They paid me an incredible amount of money to I would literally come in to the office at 10, say hello to everyone to make sure they saw me, surf the internet for two hours, go get lunch. And that was my day.

Eventually left, went back to school. I'd started another company, a network gaming website and opened up a land center, which turned out we were both kind of a head and behind the curve based on different trends that were going on. Ended up going back to school for a couple of years, studied geology at the University of Minnesota. Realized I did not want to become an academic. And then I hatched the idea of traveling around the world, which I began in 2007. And

When I started traveling, I started a website called Everything Everywhere. That was the origin of it. So way before this movie ever came out, I had the name and the website became very popular and I bought an expensive camera when I started traveling that I didn't know how to use. And over several years, I learned how to use it. Had a lot of opportunities to take photos. Got better to the point where 2013, 14 and 15, I was named travel photographer of the year in North America.

really improved, you know, from a complete novice to becoming kind of an expert in it. Developed, you know, pretty big followings on social media. And by 2019, this was before the pandemic, I felt that it was going in a really bad direction. It used to be people would just follow you on your website and you could provide your thoughts about the places you were traveling to. Then everything

Gary (09:01.708)
got shifted to social media and then the social media companies pulled the rug out, made it impossible to get organic reach. And then all the travel blogs, they were getting all their traffic from Google, which meant that they were all doing SEO articles. They were writing the exact same thing and they were no longer interested in anymore. And that was kind of not what I got into this for. And then when the pandemic hit, I remember coming home from my last international trip, February 28th, 2020.

I got COVID March 1st, first week of March, felt horrible. And this was still early enough in the pandemic where they weren't doing testing and stuff like that. I just felt like crap and got through it. And then they started shutting things down and the entire travel and tourism industry collapsed within like a two week period. And I thought, well, okay, maybe this'll be back in like April or May. talking to some people I knew that were higher ups in the industry with companies, I realized this was not going to happen.

And I felt that this was an opportunity to make a big pivot. And the only place that was left that was like the old Internet that wasn't reliant on large companies or algorithms was podcasting. And I had already had an idea for a podcast based on the name of my travel website, Everything Everywhere. I had the artwork done. I bought the rights to some theme music and it already to go. But my initial idea was to make a

a podcast that would be longer episodes of two to three hours and release it maybe once every other week. However, I ran the numbers on this and it just didn't work out. So I shelved the idea. This is like 2018. So I came back to the idea in 2020, but I thought, well, what if I did it differently? I had a friend who had started a daily podcast and I met him at an event we were speaking at and he said it was one of the best things he had ever done. So I looked at it again. I said, well, what if I did this? I realized this worked out much better. So I

Pitch the idea to some of my friends who were successful podcasters. They all had the same reaction. They said, is a great idea. You are insane because daily podcasts require a lot of work. But I had literally nothing else going on in my life at the time. So I started it on July 1st, 2020 and I've been doing it ever since. And those first month, the first month, I think I got 6,000 downloads for doing a month worth of shows.

Gary (11:25.518)
and now I'm currently doing about 1.5 million a month.

Brent Peterson (11:29.817)
Yeah, that's amazing. So I, you know, I looked at some of your past episodes. You have some fascinating subjects. Tell us a little bit, like I saw the one on Roman roads and I'm always fascinated on, if you go to England, the straight roads are the ones that the Romans built and the curvy roads are the ones that the English built. Tell us how, you know, give us some of the ideas about how you do your research and then how you...

publish that or how you put it in, you I'm assuming you write a paper and then you read it,

Gary (12:05.87)
So I have a running list of show ideas. started this and it's an exercise I recommend everyone do if they want to launch a podcast. I came up with a list of 100 show ideas and it was a Google Doc and I have been updating that same Google Doc now for four and a half years, taking off shows as I do them and then adding ideas as I come up with them. And as of right now, I think there are 930 something episode ideas on that list. So

basically kind of keeps growing. And they're all just things that I find interesting that I think would make for a good story and a good episode. And some episodes take me years to get off the ground. So I did an episode on Gnosticism, which was an early first and second century Christian sect that is very, very different than what you think of as Christianity. It's more of a new age type thing. That took me a long time to

kind of get off the ground. And then I also did one on the origins of quantum mechanics, which also took me a very long time because it's a very difficult thing to try to explain. Others, I can turn around much quicker. It really depends, but I always try to just make it something new and different every day. And if you're interested in Roman history, there will eventually be another one. If you don't like Roman history, tomorrow there will be something.

Brent Peterson (13:31.363)
Yeah, I think I've listened to all of Mike Duncan's Roman history. I think that's where he got his started and he has a similar format. And I think Dan Carlin as well has the long format like you were talking. What made you, so all your episodes are around 15 minutes, what made you choose that length?

Gary (13:51.34)
feel there's a certain amount of time that you can ask of someone in your audience. And that amount of time is probably around an hour to an hour and a half a week. So you could do that as one episode a week, or you could do that as divided up into seven different episodes. And there's a lot of history podcasts that go in depth on a single subject. There aren't a lot that we're doing what I'm doing. So taking the shotgun approach, it's...

I think in many ways much more challenging. It's a lot easier to just research one subject and then do episodes on that like a continual linear story of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. Doing a whole bunch of different things is much more challenging. And yeah, it's.

I have to have an idea of what I'm going to say before I start doing it. So that's why it sometimes takes a while for me to get an episode off the ground.

Brent Peterson (14:51.801)
So out of all the topics you've done, what surprised you the most? Have you been surprised while you're researching? Have you been surprised after? Have you been surprised from feedback you've gotten? Tell us a little bit about that.

Gary (15:06.218)
The biggest example I always use as a surprise when you're in school, you're always told that, you know, when Columbus discovered America and all these European explorers came over, they were looking for new routes to the Orient for the spice trade. But what they never tell you is why were they looking for new routes to Asia? Why weren't they just happy with what they had? And there's a reason for that.

And it all has to do with the fact of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. When that happened, the Ottomans basically then had a monopoly on all of the trade routes between Europe and Asia. And what did they do when they had a monopoly? They jacked up the price. So all of a sudden, the spices and other things that were coming from Asia, like silk, started to cost a lot of money for Europeans. And that was when they started to look for alternate ways

to bypass the Ottoman monopoly. And that part of the story, I never recall hearing. just flatly state, they were looking for other routes to Asia, but they never explained why. And it's very interesting that if the Ottomans had not done that, or if they had not gotten a monopoly on the trade routes, there may have been no incentive for Europeans to ever try to find ways to Asia, and they would probably not have discovered the Americas when they did.

Brent Peterson (16:32.441)
So, you know, going back to some of your topics, some of them are very in-depth and some of them, I'm not going to say light, like when you're doing research, how much time do you put in and do you devote? Do you have a hard cutoff saying, hey, I've already spent like days researching this. I'm not going to go any farther. What does that discipline look like?

Gary (16:56.344)
Like I said, I know that roughly what I'm going to say, I know the outline of the story. And then the day I'm actually writing and researching it, I'm kind of filling in a lot of the gaps in terms of places, dates, people, things like that. So that's mostly what I'm doing. And even so long as so I like have all of my episodes lined up for or I know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of this month.

So I can look at that list and at least start thinking about what I'm going to be doing. And I'm at least somewhat familiar with the topic. Otherwise, it never would have made the list. And then when the time comes to actually start writing it, it's really just a matter of putting those pieces together.

Brent Peterson (17:42.519)
And do you find people are dropping in, listening and then coming back? is it just people like the variety of subjects? It's kind of like a newspaper, right? Like a byline every day.

Gary (17:53.954)
I get people that listen to have that have listened to every episode. I have a thing I created called the completionist club where it's for people that have listened to every episode. And today I'm doing episode number 1662. So without exaggerating, some people will start listening to the show and binge it for like three or four months straight. Listening to no other podcasts.

Brent Peterson (18:20.663)
Yeah, I think I see you only have one episode on the Green Bay Packers. Is there a reason that you don't have more on the Vikings?

Gary (18:28.462)
If they gave me something to write about, think there'd probably be, you you can only talk about losing the Super Bowl so many times.

Brent Peterson (18:35.833)
So you do have a lot on Spain though, so tell us, my best friend just moved back to Spain and I love going to Spain, but tell us, is there a fascination with Spain or is it somewhere you just love to travel to?

Gary (18:50.15)
two things. One, yeah, I've spent a lot of time in Spain. I've lived there for several months and the Tourist Office of Spain is one of the biggest sponsors of the show. So they were the first sponsor that came to me wanting to be a part of it because I'd worked with them in the past and they have been, you know, I've been doing sponsored episodes about something to do with Spain, you know, a couple of times a year ever since.

Brent Peterson (19:14.829)
That's great. So Gary, tell us a little bit about how people find you. Tell us how people, your contact information, where's the best place if somebody's looking up to find you.

Gary (19:26.658)
Wherever you are listening to this podcast right now, just search for everything everywhere daily.

Brent Peterson (19:32.259)
That's great. Great. Gary, at the end of every podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything. And you might have just done it, but what would you like to plug today?

Gary (19:42.124)
The only thing I have to plug is the podcast. I have nothing to sell. I have no courses. I have no book. If you are a curious person and you like learning new things and you want to learn something new every day, you should definitely check out Everything Everywhere Daily. It has a very eclectic and wide audience. If you look at my demographic stats on Spotify, it's like flat across every age group. So I have young people, I have old people, have truck drivers, I have

researchers at MIT, everybody listens to the show. It's made for everyone. And you'll probably end up learning things that you didn't even know that you didn't know.

Brent Peterson (20:20.621)
That's awesome. I'm going to give a plug. There's a conference in Cleveland that happens every year called the Content Entrepreneurs Expo, and you'd be a perfect keynote for that conference. So CEX.events is the URL, and I think it's great for all content creators who are doing unique and fabulous things.

Gary (20:40.438)
I'm familiar with it, I just haven't been there, but I have several friends that have spoken at it.

Brent Peterson (20:44.953)
Excellent. All right, Gary Art is the the podcaster of everything everywhere. Thank you so much for being here.

Gary (20:51.992)
Thanks for having me.