How Gary Arndt built Everything Everywhere, a podcast with 1.5 million monthly downloads

He's already published 1,400 episodes since 2020.

What does a professional travel photographer do when all international flights are shut down due to a global pandemic? That’s a question Gary Arndt found himself asking in the early months of 2020. By that point, he had built up millions of social media followers and an entire career from snapping photos in exotic locales, and within a matter of weeks his income streams had completely dried up.

Luckily, he had already been batting around the idea for a podcast that didn’t require any travel. In July 2020, he started producing seven episodes a week of Everything Everywhere, an educational show about a diverse range of topics, and it immediately took off. Today, it generates 1.5 million monthly downloads and pulls in much more advertising income than Gary ever made as a travel photographer.

In our interview, Gary walked through how he found his audience, where he gets his ideas for new episodes, and why he weaned himself off the social media platforms that once delivered him huge reach.

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Transcript

Hey, Gary, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So these days you host an incredibly popular education podcast, and I definitely want to spend most of this episode talking about that. But before we talk about that, you've actually been an Internet entrepreneur spanning all the way back to the mid 1990s, right?

Yeah, so like the really early days of the internet. I got involved because my college roommate – you've probably heard of a product called ColdFusion. It's actually owned by Adobe right now. And so, yeah, JJ Allaire was my college roommate and I lived with him after college. And while I was living with him, he built this tool that allowed very easy, intuitive ways to hook up a database to a website, which at the time, going way back, this is like 1995, it was hard to do. People were buying servers. They had to buy copies of Oracle to do things that would just be trivial today, cost enormous amounts of money.

Give me an example of something that you would want to try to do by hooking up a database to a website.

Like what you can do with WordPress, like simply having an article you could publish where you put it in a database and then have it output as text. Just doing that was very, very difficult. There was no MySQL, there was no PHP. So he built a tool that could be used on this new operating system called Windows NT. You could use Microsoft Access, which was a very cheap relational database. And it did really, really well. He focused on the tool and people were coming to him saying, well, could you build my company's website? And he didn't want to actually build websites. So he said, well, do you want to do this? So I said, sure. So I started doing this and then I hired a friend who had a friend, and, you know, four years later, I'm 28 years old, I got 50 people working for me and I sold the business to a larger multinational corporation that wanted to get involved with the Internet. And this is all before the dotcom bubble burst.

So he created an easier way to do certain things with websites. And then he had a bunch of people coming to him saying, hey, you've built this tool. I actually want to build a website. And so you were kind of like a spinoff business from that, like basically a website building agency.

Yeah, but they had nothing to do with it other than occasionally referring clients. It was a consulting firm, basically. We were just doing work for hire, but it was primarily, we call it data-driven websites, which today is everything, but back then it was kind of novel.

And you sold it to a larger agency or something like that?

Yeah. So the company that ended up buying it was Syntegra. They were the consulting wing of British Telecom, and they had bought another consulting firm in my area that was being run out of Minneapolis. And so I did that.

And then I bought a network of video game websites that was doing really well. We were doing 50 million page impressions a month at our peak. And then the dot-com bubble burst and we were selling ads through CNET at the time. And so we would arbitrage it. It was like a $2 CPM. We would just split it with the companies, with the websites that we hosted. But this was in the heyday of like Counter-Strike and EverQuest and things like that. And then when the dot com bubble burst, CNET pulled out, and that kind of ruined everything. I went back to school for a bit, and then I came up with the idea of traveling around the world for a year.

So the gaming websites, they covered games. They were like online forums. What did they do?

Right. Both. We hosted the official Counter-Strike forum. We hosted Alakazam, or we sold the ads for them. The flagship site was called Stomp.com, which was kind of a gaming news site. So we hired reporters, you know, we'd go to E3 every year. So that was the primary thing.

And then we had these other large major websites that we sold ads for. But that was not long for this world, just given the way the ad market worked in the early 2000s.

Yeah, and like 50 million pages a month. I mean, that would still even today be somewhat impressive, but that was especially impressive back then.

Yeah, but it was all like gaming stuff. So it wasn't like they were going to articles. It was like, you know, a forum where people are constantly refreshing the page and like an EverQuest site where you'd find like, you know, hints to quests and things like that.

And I guess all that advertising dried up as soon as the dotcom bubble burst.

Like literally instantly. Like we got one phone call from CNET who was our provider and it just disappeared overnight.

Yeah. And so even though you were getting a huge audience, it wasn’t even worth running anymore. So you just shut it down.

We had to. Our revenue literally went to nothing, which, as we'll get to in a moment, kind of repeated itself later on in my life. But yeah, that was not a good time.

And then you said you went to grad school after that?

I didn't go to grad school. I just went back to school and studied geology and geophysics for a couple of years, thinking maybe I could get into academia. And I realized I do not like academia at all. I like learning, but I don't like the... all the other stuff that goes around academia.

And I was a little bit older when I went back. I got to know a lot of the PhD students. I was friends with them and just seeing everything that they were going through and all the hoops they had to jump through and then what they had to do to get a job, and then what the job would pay. It was just very, very unappealing, especially coming from an entrepreneurial background. It was just a completely different culture and something that I just didn't like.

And during all this time, were you doing photography as an amateur? How did you start getting interested in photography?

Well, like I said, I came up with the idea to travel around the world. And before I went on the trip, I went and bought an expensive camera that I didn't know how to use, like so many people. So I'd never really taken photos before ever. And I had always been a fan of National Geographic. I have one of the biggest collections of National Geographic magazines in the world. So I'd always been a big fan of this stuff.

And I realized right away in the first two weeks of my trip that this idea that if you're going to buy a good camera, it's going to take good pictures just doesn't work. So I set out on the very slow incremental process of teaching myself how to do photography. And thankfully I was traveling. So I had lots of opportunities to take photos of very beautiful things. I initially was gonna be gone for a year. I thought maybe two years. Really, I ended up traveling for 13 years. I started a website. The website was a very early travel blog that became very popular. My photography became pretty popular. And this was all before Instagram was around, even before Twitter and Facebook. Facebook, when I started the blog, was still something that was used by colleges. And RSS was the big thing at the time too. Everybody tried to up the number of people who were subscribing on RSS, and you'd have a Feedburner widget that you would have on the front page of your website. And that was the thing. And the website became pretty popular, I think in large part because I started traveling in places that a lot of people don't normally visit.

I began by crossing the Pacific and I spent about six months crossing the Pacific, visiting lots of different island countries. And I just kind of kept going. There was a period around Christmas 2007 when I sort of had a come to Jesus moment where I was like, well, I don't know if I should keep doing this website. It's kind of a lot of work. And so I went into a newsstand in Hong Kong, and I just bought every travel magazine and I opened up a spreadsheet and I just started doing an analysis. Like what do these magazines do? And one of the things I realized is that the number of things they cover in an issue was like 30 different countries. Most people don't visit 30 countries in their life, let alone a month. So the question was, well, why are these people buying this magazine? It's not for travel planning purposes. And the thing I realized it was, it was basically travel porn. They were fantasizing about places they could visit.

And so that was when I really stepped up my efforts in photography. I began posting an image every day to my website and I gradually got better and better and better to a point where a couple of years later I was winning the top awards in North America for travel photography.

And how were you, how did you learn it? Was it just self-taught like reading on the internet?

Yeah, that's all.

So people started finding the blog. Was it just through Google? Was it like a drive-by readership? Or was it like people coming in?

SEO wasn't a thing when I started. Blogging back around 2007, 2008, it was a lot like how podcasting is today, in that it was RSS based primarily. People would read your site every day. So it was more like a newsletter.

You just happen to have your own website. I didn't think twice about SEO. I wasn't writing titles that would, you know, use certain keywords, I would do something cute. I'd have a song lyric or a pun or something like that to capture people's attention. And what really began to change things was when Twitter came out. And then when Facebook came out, everything started to shift. People weren't going directly to websites anymore. And I suppose the thing that really killed it was Google getting rid of Google Reader. So I got on board with that.

I developed very big followings on social media and I always kind of felt there was something wrong with it, even though I was doing rather well. It never really resulted in any money. The travel industry was very slow to recognize this and they're still way behind the times today. And the site did very well. Tons of people started flowing into what I was doing. There were just tons of travel blogs and travel influencers that started appearing, all of which had very shallow content because they were just chasing likes. So it'd be here I am in this place. And it didn't even matter where the place was. And I found even on Instagram – and I have a decent Instagram following – but if I didn't post a photo of a mountain, a rainbow or a waterfall or something like that, it just wouldn't get the likes. And I have a lot of friends who are very good photographers. And I see that they just went down this path and that's all they do. It's, you know, they run photo tours, but it's to the Canadian Rockies, Iceland, Patagonia, and a few of these places where you can take these photos of mountains and stuff. And they're very beautiful. That's all they do. And that didn't really appeal to me.

And all these years that you were doing the blog and then transitioning to also doing social media, were you making money during this time or were you just living off of savings?

No, I began making money. The site did okay. I had brand ambassadorships that I did with several companies. It's very difficult. I tried doing some courses and things like that. So yeah, I did okay.

And a lot of people don't realize that you can travel fairly cheap if you don't have a home. Most of my travel was covered after a certain point. So I was able to travel and go from place to place and people would fly me there. So I was able to make a living from it. I wouldn't say it was a great living, but it certainly could be done.

Yeah. And so you're traveling. So you're not going back to a home base. You're literally just like, you're just constantly traveling.

After about 10 years, I got burned out. And so I ended up getting a place around 2017. I got an apartment in Minneapolis. And I would travel about a third to half the year. So still traveling a lot, but not necessarily full time.

And during all this time, did you ever be like, I'm going to leverage my connections and my audience to just get freelance gigs for travel magazines or travel websites or anything? Or was it always you just wanted to 100% focus on your personal brand, your personal website, stuff like that?

I'm a member of the Society of American Travel Writers. I've served on their board of directors. Travel writing, travel photography, working for magazines is a horrible business. Horrible. They pay next to nothing. Most of them have gone out of business. The ones that survive, some of them don't even pay for photography anymore.

If they do pay, it's minimal because everybody has this glamorous notion of being a travel photographer. So they don't have to pay great. There are tons of photos available online where you could offer someone $20 and they would gladly take it. So it's not a good business.

And I remember talking to some old school National Geographic photographers where they were envious of what I was doing. And I think a lot of people would look at them and say, well, I'm envious of what you guys get to do. They were envious of me because I at least controlled my own fate. Whereas they were subject to the winds of whatever was happening in the publishing industry.

Yeah. So then there's the rise of social media, Instagram. I was looking, it looks like you have like 170,000 followers on Instagram. something like 140,000 followers on Twitter. I don't know what your Facebook following is, but I'm guessing it's substantial. And was there this kind of sweet spot of like 2012 to 2016 where you were thinking, okay, maybe this is the future. Maybe I can just aggregate these huge audiences on these huge platforms and maybe that's going to be the future of my business.

Yeah, I was all in. I had 2 million followers on Google+.

Oh yeah, there was a huge photography community on Google+.

I remember that. But the thing that first gave me an indication that something was wrong was when Google came out with fan pages and they're like, oh yeah, you got to put stuff in your fan page. So I literally bought ads on Facebook to grow my fan page and then they pulled the rug out.

So having spent the money to build up a fan page, then they cut down the organic reach of the fan pages. And then they said, okay, now to reach these people, you gotta buy ads, to which I was like, well, why did bother building the fan page at that point? I could just buy an ad. You don't need the fan page. And with that and the whole Google Reader debacle, you know, I kind of developed a sense of unease about this business, that too much of it was being dependent upon these big companies. And by the time 2018 rolled around, I began asking other travel bloggers how much of your traffic is coming from Google and/or Pinterest – Pinterest basically also being a search engine. And the answers I was getting were usually north of 90%. And of that remaining 10%, I'm guessing it was some sort of social media like Twitter, Facebook, but basically almost everything. was coming from these sites.

So I would hear bloggers say, oh, my readers. And I always wanted to say, no, you don't have readers. You have traffic. You don't have readers. And that was the big difference from when I started blogging around the mid-2000s, where you literally had readers because your blog was social media. That's where they went. And I would say the closest analogy to that today would probably be Substack. where you literally follow someone, you're notified when they write something new. That's what blogging used to be.

So when you were getting maximum reach, you know, across Google+, Instagram, Facebook, probably driving millions of impressions – how many people do you think actually knew who you are? Like, if you said Gary Arndt, they would have gone, oh, that's a travel photographer I really like. Like, did you have an actual core fan base?

People in the travel industry definitely knew who I was. I think a lot of them still know who I am and there was certainly a very core group of people who love to travel who would follow what I was doing. The thing I eventually realized is that people don't care about travel unless they're about to go on a trip. You don't follow travel like you do sports or technology or politics where there's always something new happening. There's nothing new happening in the world of travel. Change is very incremental. A new general manager at a hotel, a new hotel opens, doesn't matter. The Coliseum was there a thousand years ago. It'll be there a thousand years from now. Nothing's really changing. And as a result, it kind of almost was destined to be something that was dependent upon SEO.

Because it would be people doing research right around the time that they're going to travel.  It's a one-time thing. It's kind of like bride-focused or wedding-focused publications. It's like you're only going to get married once or twice in your life, and you're only going to want to consume that content at that exact point, and then you're never going to be interested in it again.

Exactly. And so all these things were kind of building up in my head, the dependence on, you know, these large companies, the problem with travel content. You know, when I first started blogging back in 2007, the things I was writing about were thoughts and observations of the places I visited, not the kind of things that you would necessarily read if you're researching something for a trip, just something that people might be interested in. But by 2018, 2019, I really started having my doubts about this business because it just seemed to me it was a matter of when, not if. Google's going to wake up one day and just flip a switch and it's all going to disappear. And sure enough, that happened this year. Like almost everybody I know with a travel blog is freaking out because their traffic has dropped to levels where the business is no longer sustainable.

So you're starting to get burnt out and not even knowing if you want to do this anymore. Then the world events force your hand anyway because the pandemic happens. Right. Countries are locked down. Nobody's flying on planes anymore. Basically, most of the travel industry came to a standstill. I'm guessing in hindsight, it was a blessing in disguise because it provided an opening for what came next, but like in the moment, you know, looking at April, 2020, May, 2020, what's going through your head at that point?

Well, March, 2020, I come home from my last international trip from Portugal, February 28th, 2020. March 1st, I start getting sick. I probably have COVID. This was early enough where there weren't tests available and things like that. So pretty sure I had COVID. And then the two weeks after that, I lose 95% of my income. Traffic to the website dries up. Affiliate sales dry up. All the contracts I had canceled. I had an event that I ran called the Travel Influencer Summit. I was going to be running another one. We're talking to the host destination. We had it planned out. It was going to be a pretty sizable event. We bring in the top 30 travel influencers in the world, people with very big YouTube followings, Instagram followings. That fell through. 

And I began talking to some higher up people I knew in the travel industry, you know, because nobody was doing anything. So we were all just doing Zoom calls and stuff. And I initially thought in March that this was going to be over in like a month. Like this is going to be over in a few weeks and then, you know, late April, May, we're going to be back to doing whatever. That obviously didn't happen. And some of the people I talked to said like, no, no, no, you don't understand. This is going to be years to play out. This is really catastrophic. And then I began realizing, okay, I have to do something. I cannot rely on the travel business anymore. 

So I'd been podcasting a long time, whether it was streaming Winamp stuff back in 2000 to my EverQuest Guild. In 2009, I launched a podcast called This Week in Travel that we did for 11 years up through the pandemic. I had an idea for a show. I made the artwork for it. I bought the rights to the music. I did that back in like 2017. I never ended up pulling the trigger on it. And I thought about what I needed to do. My original idea for a podcast was going to be a longer form, two to three hour show that I did once every two weeks. The problem is the math didn't work out in terms of making money from something like this. 

And I remember I was at a travel event a few years earlier. I met a guy who had been very successful. He launched a daily podcast. And I met him in the speaker's room and he was saying, yeah, this is the best thing I've ever done. And this is the guy who was a best-selling author, ran very large events with thousands of people. And he basically stopped doing a lot of that because the podcast was so successful.

So I kind of did the numbers on that and I realized, well, this works out much better. And so I made that decision. I took all the artwork from the previous show that I had planned and the music, and I hanged the show format. And on July 20th, 2020, I launched Everything Everywhere daily.

And it's explicitly not a travel podcast. I wanted something that people would be interested in all the time, but it allows me to use all the experiences and knowledge I've gained traveling. I can talk about all of those things, but I just don't do it in a travel context. I'm talking about the history of a place and, you know, the reason behind it. And I pitched the idea to several of my friends who are podcasters. I said, well, what do you think about this? And they all have the same reaction: Like one, this is a great idea. Two, you're insane for doing this because this isn't sustainable to do every day. But I had nothing else going on. So I started doing it and just started pumping out episodes every single day. And it's been almost four years now.

And Everything Everywhere, that was the name of the original blog that you had, right? So was the idea there is like you kind of already had this brand equity, this brand knowledge, this great SEO for this already existing entity. And it was better to just name it after that.

And it was such a generic name that I could really pivot it to almost anything. And quite frankly, it fits better with my podcast now than it ever did the travel blog.

So you launched this daily podcast. And like you said, it's not a travel podcast, but you're using kind of your worldly experience. 

It's an education podcast that's teaching about history or different things around the world. History, geography, mathematics, science. I do some biographies, you name it. Every day is something completely different and kind of random. And you don't know what it's going to be. And it's seven days a week.

So how long is the average episode?

I would say it's about 12 minutes now.

Talk me through the process. I'm guessing it's scripted or at least semi scripted.

It's a scripted show every day. I write about 2,000 words. Basically I'm writing a 2,000 word term paper every day. I do run about two reruns every week, just to get a break. But I've done so many episodes at this point, I'm up to, you know, 1,400 that most people either haven't heard those old episodes or if they did, it was years ago. So they've forgotten about it.

And then what's the process for writing it? Is it just like you have a Google Doc or something where potential interesting topics to talk about? 

Completely depends. There are some topics that I don't even need to research because I know them so well, usually topics in mathematics. I have a degree in math. But literally what you've described is what I do. When I started the show, I sat down and I created a list of 100 show ideas, which is still something I recommend to anybody starting a podcast. Come up with 100 show ideas. That may change over time. You may delete some, you may merge them, whatever, but at least have that. Today, it's a little under a thousand ideas. And whenever I come up with something, I just put it on the list.

And then every few weeks I'll go through, it's like, okay, well, I need to come up with shows for the next week or two. What is it? And I'll just, I don't know, whatever kind of moves me. And usually these are things that I know a fair amount about before I start writing about it, or at least the overall story. There's a lot of things that I don't know enough about. So I'm kind of putting that off and I'll just sort of read about it for a while until I feel comfortable enough to actually talk about it.

And so you write the 2,000 words and then you're just kind of recording it into a mic. Are you adding in like other levels of production, like music or sound effects or anything like that? It's just like an intro and then you're just jumping right into it?

30 second cold open. Theme music, two ads, the body of the show, an outro. Every single episode is that format.

And so you have this already existing audience, so it's not like you were launching from scratch, although it's kind of adjacent to what you're doing, not in direct alignment with what you were doing. How much did that help you in terms of maybe getting a slightly bigger jump from the beginning than maybe someone who was just starting a podcast out of nowhere?

It helped some, but not nearly as much as people think. Because you look at the audiences I have on these social media sites, oh, it's in the six figures. I had about 200 people listening to every episode when I launched.

That's way more than anybody starting from scratch.

Yes, but it wasn't thousands. It wasn't like... MrBeast launching a podcast and he gets 100,000 people listening to every episode. So it was good, but not anywhere close to what would be necessary to make it viable.

I've talked to you before, obviously, because I always do pre-interviews for the show, and you told me you don't really know how the audience found you. It was just like a very steady growth from there.

Word of mouth, mostly. I did get promoted on Apple in January of this year, and I saw a big boost from that. But I was already doing a million downloads a month before that happened. So it was a sizable bump, and it stayed around. So it's been a permanent, I would say, 30% bump from when that's happened.

But a lot of it's just been organic. And it's a combination of word of mouth because the people who love the show really love the show. Like I've created this thing called the completionist club for people that have listened to every single episode. Every week I get people coming to me saying that they just entered the completionist club and that's 1,400 episodes at this point. And I've had people that said they've listened to all of them twice. And one guy, even three times. There's one place in the Philippines. It's a restaurant. They run my show in the background all day long. And people just tell me things like, I tell all my friends about it or, you know, I listen to this episode and I'm sharing this fact with people I know in the office. There's a lot of that. But the other thing is because of the nature of my show. Like, it's not like it's a show about one topic. It's a show about everything. And as a result, I am throwing an extremely wide net over a wide variety of topics. So I am getting a very broad SEO coverage for this. So if you did a search on the Eiffel Tower, you're probably going to see me somewhere on that list. If you do it on the Colosseum in Rome, I'm on that list. If you do something on... Joan of Arc, I'll be on the list. Maybe I'm not number one, because there might be an entire podcast about that. But as the show's getting more popular, it's ranking higher

There was a company that specialized in podcast SEO and they would go through like every single podcast on Apple and do all these searches. And according to their metrics, I was one of the top 50 podcasts in the world on Apple podcast by their SEO metrics.

Yeah, and so just to kind of explain what you're saying, people will often go into Spotify or Apple and be like, I'm going to the Eiffel Tower. I'm going to see if I can find podcasts on this. I'll type Eiffel Tower into the search and see what comes up. You have such a wide net that, in aggregate, those millions upon millions of searches are converting into people maybe listening to an episode or two say thinking, Oh, I really like this. And then subscribing and then becoming more regular listeners.

Yeah, that's what I assume is happening. Because like I said, I have so many different keywords that I'm publishing episodes for. And as far as I can tell, the way Apple does their SEO rankings, the more successful a podcast is, the higher it ranks, roughly. I mean, there's more that goes into it. So if you did an entire, say, 100 part episode on the Eiffel Tower, that would probably rank first because the whole podcast is about it. But then of episodes just about that, you know, I think I would be in the mix. And then there's just I've done so many different things that I'm just throwing a bigger net than most people.

And when did you start monetizing it? So you mainly sell advertising. That's your main way of monetizing, right? When did you first start introducing advertising?

Episode one. The very first episode I put ads in because I wanted to acclimate people to the expectation that this was a show with ads. And what I did in the first episode is I signed up for affiliate programs and I made my own ads for companies.

So like Audible, some of these different websites that anybody can go in and grab a discount code or something like that.

So I did that for about the first 18 months.

And how much did that actually generate real revenue for you? Or was that purely just to get people acclimated to hearing ads?

I would say something very close to zero. Which kind of goes to show affiliate advertising just doesn't work on podcasts. I know there are some people that have very niche shows that have been able to do some stuff if they get a special discount code or something, but generally speaking for a broad audience like mine it doesn't work. So after 18 months, I'm doing about 100,000 downloads a month, which is enough to start to get the attention of some smaller networks. So I ended up signing a one-year deal with an advertising network. They started selling some ads for the show and it was okay. It was, you know, I think the best month I did a couple thousand dollars in revenue, not enough to be doing anything special, but it was money coming in. And I took all of that money and I reinvested it into promoting the show.

I bought ads on podcast apps, other podcasts, things like that. And after a year, the show grew substantially over the course of that year. And it was doing maybe half a million downloads a month. And then I signed with Glassbox Media, who I'm currently with now to sell ads. And since then, the show's really taken off. So now I'm doing a little under 1.5 million downloads a month.

And are they selling host-read, dynamically inserted ads?

The vast majority of the revenue is coming from host-read ads.

But do you do any open programmatic that's just randomly inserted ads from other...

Yes. But that, that's basically just filler. That's for people who are living outside of the United States where the host-read ads aren't targeted. Or if I have excess inventory that, you know, because the show grew and we have some leftover, but it's basically remnant ads. In an ideal world, you wouldn't have any of that at all because you make very little money from programmatic advertising.

And what kind of companies tend to advertise with you?

A lot of the usual suspects you'll find on other podcasts. Just started doing it with Harry's Razor. Probably my biggest one is ButcherBox. Newspapers.com. They're a service where you can search. They have tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of pages of newspapers dating back to the late 17th century from multiple countries that you can just search on a database. You know, I've done stuff with BetterHelp. They're one of the biggest, you know, podcast advertisers. So it's kind of typical podcast advertising.

Yeah, so it's not like you're appealing necessarily to niche advertisers. It's mainly just kind of like the more mainstream ones that are trying to reach a mass audience.

Well, there's one major exception to that. The first paying sponsor I had was the Tourist Office of Spain. I had worked with them in the past. They loved my work. And when I launched the podcast, they contacted me and they're like, what can we do to help?

And so I suggested to them, well, how would you like to do a sponsored episode? I'll do a host read ad. It'll be baked in. And then the whole episode will just be something about Spain. And they're like, that's a great idea. I still have full discretion as to what the episode will be about. They've never really cared. I think I've done probably 25 sponsored episodes for them. And it's been everything from biographies of Salvador Dali and Queen Isabella to the history of the Canary Islands to the history of Paella, things like that. And they love it because it's so different from the marketing they traditionally do. And it's telling people the why rather than the what or the how, which is something that’s very difficult for them to promote. And I just met with the CEO in Chicago who runs their office. They're pleased as punch. The problem is getting anyone else in the travel industry. And I keep telling them, it's like no one else is interested in this. You know, and I've talked to tons of travel companies and they're still just doing the same thing that they were doing 20 years ago for marketing.

And I feel like I've interviewed media entrepreneurs that do a lot of sponsored content for like travel bureaus and stuff like that. I'm surprised there's not more interest for you to do that, especially since you have a lot of successful use cases for this one.

The reason is all of these tourist boards are by and large funded by governments or some consortium of hotels and other groups. They don't have to show a profit, especially the very large tourist boards that are at the state or national level. Because they just don't have to show a profit. They just have a budget that they need to spend. And what they spend it on simply needs to be palatable to the people that are approving it. And that's why, do you remember the CNN airport channel?

I mean, CNN was on airports. Yeah.

No, but they had a special airport channel.

Okay. I don't know that I knew that it was a separate channel. Yeah.

Well, it doesn't exist anymore, but all of their ads were for these national level tourist destinations, like for India, Seoul. And the reason was if you went and said, we're doing an ad buy on CNN, nobody would blink an eye. So you're going to drop a million dollars on CNN.  Okay, no problem. You're going to drop a million dollars on Condé Nast Traveler or Travel and Leisure. No one's going to bat an eye. You're going to spend $10,000 on a podcast? They don't know what to do with that. So that's going to raise a red flag. And it's like the old saying, nobody ever got fired by buying IBM. Nobody ever got fired by spending money on mainstream media. And the goal of most of these people in the tourist organizations is to not be fired. because there is actually no metric for success.

There's no way to know if an ad spend actually brought people to a destination, right? There's bigger factors at play like exchange rates and the pandemic and the cost of flights that are going to have a bigger impact than any marketing campaign they have. So they don't need to do anything creative or cutting edge. They just need to spend money in a way that will not raise a flag.

So as your podcast has started generating more revenue and stuff like that, have you invested any in terms of upping your production game or creating other kinds of tangential content? Like I saw on your Instagram, you do create some short form videos and stuff like that. What's your experimentation on kind of repurposing content or upping your production game or anything like that?

There's very little to do in the way of the actual podcast production. What I do is very simple and I don't really see any reason to change it. I ran an experiment earlier this year where I hired a company to do short form videos every day that went on TikTok and Instagram and everywhere else. And they did a pretty good job. They were well produced, but they did not convert. which kind of, you know, I thought I'd give it a try, but my experience up to this point was that you cannot grow a podcast on social media. And every major podcaster that I've ever talked to or I've heard an interview about says the exact same thing. It just doesn't work. It doesn't convert. The only thing that really works well for growing a podcast is to spend money promoting on other podcasts, that it has to be within the ecosystem.

You're writing these 2,000-word scripts. I could see it'd be easy to adapt that into – because there are daily newsletters that are similar in genre to what you're doing where it's like a new topic every day. We're going to educate you about this topic and then one and done. I think I've interviewed some of these people who create these newsletters. Have you ever thought about taking those scripts and kind of adapting it into blog posts or newsletters or anything like that?

All my scripts are blog posts. Every single one of them. If you go to my website, you'll see an episode list. It's one gigantic page. And so I post them there. But it's not a big part of what I do. If there was a newsletter out there that would be interested, I'd be happy to talk to them about reposting some of my stuff. I'd have no problem with it whatsoever. But no, one of the biggest problems I have is... Producing the show every single day means that that's where the majority of my time is spent. And as of right now, this is a one man operation.

I'm the only person that's ever been involved doing anything with the show. So I've recently put out a job posting for a business manager because there are things like tours that I think I could run. I've had a lot of people interested in doing a tour and the show has grown to a point now where I think I could maybe even rent out an entire riverboat in Europe and fill it with 100, 150 people. There's the potential of taking the show on the road, which I know a lot of podcasts have been successful about. Books. Merchandise. I've never done any merchandise. I got people begging me to create some stuff. So there's a lot of things that can be done. It's just hard to do when your first priority every day is writing and researching a 2,000 word script. And a lot of times I'm recording the show at like three or four in the morning. And then I immediately publish it minutes after it's done. That's how it's usually done. So it's not like I'm batching these up a week ahead of time. It's literally, I record it, it goes up, and then I start the next day.

And so you want to hire someone who has skills around just like growing the business who can be like, all right, I'm going to develop a merch line for you or I'm going to organize like a live events tour or something like the stuff that would be very time intensive that you don't have time to do?

Right. The production of the show as of right now is the one thing I don't think I can offload to somebody else. Eventually, I will probably hire some writers to at least do it a few days a week. But what I'm bringing, I've often said, I don't know if I'm the only person who could do this show, but of the people who could do it, I'm probably the only person that would want to do it. So it's going to be a lot easier for me to find someone for the business side than it is going to be for the content side. And when I put out the job posting, I was rather shocked at the quantity and the quality of the responses I had, like people that ran podcast networks or founded podcast networks were responding to it. And. I thought it was kind of odd because I'm just an indie podcaster. But I think one of the things probably has to do with the fact that a lot of these networks, they launch shows and they put a lot of money behind these shows, but that doesn't mean that they're successful. Whereas what I'm doing, I'm taking a show that I've put the sweat equity in, I've made the show successful, and now I'm simply trying to make it more successful. It's already a proven concept.

And you mentioned interacting with your audience. What is your way of interacting with your audience now? Is it just kind of random emails that are coming in? Or have you created an online forum or anything like that?

I have a Facebook group and a Discord server. And those are the two preferred ways. And in the long term, I would actually love to get away from Facebook because I don't trust them.

How active are those two forums?

Um... reasonably active, not super active because so much of it is centered around the show. So in each of those places, I'll post the episode art for the next show. So you get 24 hours advance notice as to what the next show is going to be. I get a lot of people giving suggestions for upcoming episodes of things I could do. Every so often, I'll get someone that challenges me on a point that I brought up in one of the episodes. So it's stuff like that.

In terms of traveling the world, doing the travel photography and stuff like that, I kind of imagine that would be difficult to do when you have a daily schedule.  Do you feel like you've scratched that itch? Do you feel like you need to figure out a way to take vacations? You're saying you're staying up till three or four in the morning sometimes to get these episodes out. 

I've traveled a lot. Like literally I would not be surprised if I'm the best traveled person you've ever talked to in your life. Like I've been to every continent I've been to, you know, 200 countries and territories. I've been to every state twice. So I've done a lot and I get this question a lot.

And so my answer usually is I'm pretty good for right now. I've caught lightning in a bottle and I need to see this through. That being said, I can do this from anywhere. So I don't think I'm going to be able to travel like I used to in terms of bopping around from place to place and continually moving. But I certainly could go somewhere for an extended period of time, like a month, and just record the show from there and just go live there for a while. And eventually, I would like to hire a writing team, get them trained up so I can start to queue up episodes ahead of time where I could take a week or two off and not have to worry about the show disappearing. But I'm not there yet. 

You could knock out reading five scripts in a row and then just hand over the audio to them and then they can produce it and put it out.

Physically recording the show is the easiest part of what I do. That's not a problem. I can finish that within 20 to 30 minutes. It's the writing and the research that takes all the time.

So I forgot to ask. So iOS did a major update in which Apple Podcasts have changed the way that they do auto downloads, where it used to be if you stopped listening to a show and then started listening to it again, it would go and download all those back episodes that you hadn't listened to, that it hadn't downloaded. Obviously, it's rocked the entire podcast industry, but I heard that it hurt daily podcasts the most, because obviously a bunch of episodes would get downloaded. How did that affect you?

Did not affect me at all.

Really? Wow.

So when it happened, I think it was in September of last year is when they rolled it out. I suppose I saw a plateau of growth. There was a period where it didn't grow, but I never saw downloads decrease at all. And if it wasn't for the fact that I listen to Podnews, I would never even have known that it happened. It just didn't affect me. And my show is much bigger today than it was when they released this change.