Interview with Gary Arndt of the Everything Everywhere Podcast

Business Brain, the Entrepreneurs podcast, episode 391 for Wednesday, August 3, 2022. Greetings, folks and welcome back to Business brain. Here at BusinessBrain show, we are the Entrepreneurs Podcast and here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton in Lafayette, California.

That's where it is.

I'm Shannon Jean and we have a.

New sponsor today, Business Capital Providers, which specializes in funding for small and medium sized businesses. You can Visit them@bcproviders.com SBS we'll talk more in depth about them a little bit later in the show. But good to have. Good to have them on board. Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's great.

I'm excited about today. We're going to do an interview, aren't we?

We are. Our first interview since changing the name of the show to Business Brain. And man, like, I just want to get right to it. There's not a whole lot to say.

It's fascinating and there's some real great takeaways from this. I call them T shirt comments. Something that's powerful that you could put on a T shirt. It would resonate with everybody and there's definitely a few of them in here. Really interesting and a lot about the business of podcasting, but really more about using your business brain to pivot and to come up with new concepts, expand what you're doing and scale it. There's some really good lessons here.

Yeah, no, our guest is Gary Aren't from the Everything Everywhere podcast and he had to create a podcast because his travel related business just died two plus years ago at which no one will find as any surprise at this point. So yeah, if you're ready to get to it, Shannon. I'm ready to get to it, man.

Yeah, let's do it, man.

All right, I'm really looking forward to. Here we go. Small business thing with our business brains and Gary Arndt from Everything Everywhere. All right, so you know, COVID 19 lockdowns are something that impacted most business owners. Creating headaches for some, creating opportunities for others. Our guest today, Gary Arndt, the host of the Everything Everywhere podcast, falls into both of these categories. Gary, thank you so much for coming on the show and joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So I kind of want to jump. We'll jump around in time here. But let's talk about how you found yourself deciding to become a podcaster. Tell us a little bit about what you've done previously, although we'll probably dig more into that. And then what made you decide that a podcast was the right thing when you decided to do it.

So for the purposes of this show, 2007, I sold my home, thought I'd travel around the world for a year. That year turned out to be the better. You know, over a decade, visited over 200 countries and territories, became a very accomplished travel photographer. I was named travel photographer of the year three times in North America, had a very popular travel website, very large following on social media. And so that was basically my business content creation around travel and photography. And March of 2020, I should say February 28, 2020, I come home from a trip from Portugal. I probably had Covid. This was still so early on that was like, oh, don't get tested unless you need it, because frontline workers, you know, I. I felt bad for what, five days? And then I got better and then I just never really thought of it. Probably had it. But within that month of March, everything shut down. Like the whole. I never imagined that the travel and tourism industry, which is one of the biggest industries in the world, would just disappear. The flights, car rentals, hotels, everything and everything I had going on, all the contracts, all the traffic to my website, everything just vanished. And I basically saw a 95% drop in my income. And I initially thought this would be pretty short. I was already planning projects for May of 2020 because I thought, yeah, this would be over in a few weeks.

Of course, hope is a valuable thing. That's right. Yeah.

Well, I mean, we didn't know at the time.

No, we didn't.

You know, I thought this was a, you know, and I started talking to some, some high up people that I knew in the travel and tourism industry. And they were telling me like, you know, oh, no, this is, this is, this is going to take years. Because even if there was some miraculous cure that came about, the second and third order implications of all this, of mothballing planes and laying off pilots and selling rental cars and all these other things are going to have repercussions that are going to last a very long time. And we're seeing this today. There are still problems if you want to travel. And I realized that I was. I was really in a bad shape because I had put all my eggs in this basket, a basket which, to be fair, I don't think anybody thought would disappear. But it did. And so I needed to do something. And a couple years previous, I had this idea of starting a new. I had been podcasting for quite a while, since 2009.

Okay.

I had a show called this Weekend Travel, but we never really took it seriously. It was more for fun, it was me and two other co hosts. We never made a dime off of it. I had this idea for another show. I was going to use the name of my website, Everything Everywhere. And I began doing research for some episodes. And these were the original plan was going to be for like very long two to three hour episodes that I produce maybe once every other week. And I did the math and I realized that the amount of work that would go into it for doing two shows a month probably was not going to pay off. So I sort of put it aside. But I had done all the artwork, I bought theme music, I had all this stuff ready to go, but I just never pulled the trigger on it. So when the pandemic hit, I realized, well, I need to do something else. And the idea went back to this podcast. But I also realized that the way I was planning it before wasn't going to work. And in the meantime, I had met a friend at a conference and we were in the speaker's room and he was telling me that he had launched a daily podcast and it was the best thing that he had ever done. Absolutely the best. And so I sat down and I did the math and I realized, well, if you're doing a daily podcast, at a minimum, you're talking about seven times, probably the number of ads from a regular show. So even if it's a 10 minute show, the amount of time compared to a weekly podcast is about the same. But it doesn't feel as onerous if there's just one ad, say in a 10 minute episode, as opposed to putting seven.

In a one hour episode or something. Yeah, that's an interesting approach. Makes sense. Yeah.

So I sat down and I developed a format for the show, planned it out, I wrote a list of a hundred different show ideas, things that I'd be comfortable talking about. And on July 1, 2020, I started the show. Wow. And I've been doing it. With the exception of one week where I moved in September of 2020, I've put out a show every single day.

Wow, that's awesome. Okay, so go ahead, Shannon. Yeah, yeah.

Well, you mentioned before we get on to some of your other questions, Dave, you've talked about significant followers and, you know, people that you had connected with with your travel and photography business. Did that, I would assume. Well, I don't want to assume, but thinking that that allowed you to pivot faster into the podcast business with those folks that stuck with you, or is it a totally different audience?

It's a totally different audience and a totally different mindset. So in the. One of the things, the reason I didn't start a travel podcast is one, it was in the middle of Pandemic, no one cared about travel. But two, I also discovered kind of the hard way that people only care about travel when they're about to go on a trip. You don't follow travel in the same way that you follow sports or politics or technology or. Or things like that. There's always something new going on in these areas. Celebrity, gossip, music, whatever. There's. There's new stuff. Nothing new is happening in travel, really. You know, it's just new to you.

If you're caring about a new place to go.

Yeah. I mean, there's a new hotel that opens in New York. So what?

Sure.

If you go to New York, there are hundreds of hotels. You know, given the number of times a person may visit, they may stay at the same hotel if they enjoyed the experience. And, you know, it doesn't matter to most people. The Coliseum in Rome still there. It's going to be there next year. Going to be there the year after that.

Yeah.

They're not building any more Roman ruins. You know, occasionally it's not intentionally. Yeah, right. Or a cruise ship might open, but people aren't following it. Right.

Yeah.

There is a small community of people. The most passionate people, quite frankly, are more involved in like travel hacking and credit cards and that. And that never interests me. I was traveling to learn about stuff and to see things, to explore. That's why I was traveling. So the podcast, and I should add, the podcast is named Everything Everywhere. And that is literally the topic, literally everything. Which I violated every rule of podcasting. Everyone says, oh, you should niche down and have a very defined niche. I'm like, no. I just. Every episode is something completely different. It's the Forrest Gump approach. It's like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get every day.

I mean, but in that. Not niche, you've actually created your niche. Right. You have this 10 minute show about something interesting. Well, something historical that you are going to make interesting in 10 minutes or less, or so I should say. Yeah.

You know, the tagline for the show is simply learn something new every day. And it's more often than not about something you didn't even know that you didn't know. It could be geography. I've done shows on math and science and it usually does take a historical event where I explain how this thing came to be.

Sure.

Because a lot of times, if you think back to your math and science. They never explained why you should be paying attention. I have a degree in math, and at no point did anyone in a calculus class ever tell me what calculus was. There was never a first day where they said, this is the point of calculus. And I had to figure that out later. And then it kind of made sense in hindsight, but they just started, okay, this is the function, blah, blah. And they just jump right into it. And there are, like, conceptual. You don't need to understand how to solve a lot of these equations to understand, say, what calculus is or what it's trying to do.

Right.

Or to understand, you know, and so that's kind of the goal of the show. Yeah. To make bits of history that maybe people have heard about, but they don't really know what it is. They came across it in history and they forgot about it since then. It's something that, you know, the Peace of Westphalia, that's a term that people may have come across, but they don't really know what it is.

Sure.

And it turns out. So I will. I don't talk about current events on the show, but I will often talk about things that have to do with current events. And I let people put the two things together. So, like the Peace of Westphalia, I did an example of that ended a really horrible war in Europe that most people have forgotten about, but it created this notion today of the nation state, and we have borders, and within those borders, countries can pretty much do whatever they want, for better or for worse. And crossing those borders is a bad thing. And that's kind of why we have all this, these multinational organizations and such. But it all stems from this treaty that was signed, you know, centuries ago.

Yeah.

So this is.

This is interesting to me because you took. And to sort of frame this for our listeners, you had. You had an idea for a podcast, and I'm going to even zoom out further, you had an idea for a different business that you could launch, a different thing to add to, to use our terms, your revenue stack. And you, You. You've sort of walked through it a little bit and realized this. I. This doesn't make sense for me. And you, you kind of put it on ice, but you had done a fair bit of the work. You know, like you said, you got theme music, you got a logo, you'd figured out what the name was, and then suddenly you found yourself in a scenario where you needed to add to your revenue stack and having that stuff that was on ice and being able to go back to it and mine it and completely retool it. You weren't starting from scratch. And like, this is something that we are constantly telling our listeners about is when those ideas come up, flesh them out as far as it makes sense to do in the moment, but don't lose any of that stuff, because someday you might find a piece of that that's valuable or the whole thing that's valuable. You know, things evolve. We have ideas that are ahead of their time. You had an idea that was both ahead of its time and also not quite in the way that you needed it until you found the way that you needed it and you found the time that you had to do it. So, yeah, absolutely.

And I jot stuff down all the time. And even within what I'm doing now, there's a lot of plans I have going forward. The content I'm making can easily be repurposed into a YouTube channel. Sure, easily. And there's many YouTube channels that are very successful basically doing the same type of content that I'm doing. I already have the scripts written. I already have the audio done. Maybe I rerecord the audio, but that's actually pretty trivial. I just need someone to help me do, you know, put together B roll footage, whatever the.

Yeah, whatever the video element of it would be. Sure.

But at some point, once. Once the show grows enough, I'll be able to do that. I could repurpose the scripts as ebooks and put them on like the. The Kindle store. Sell it very cheap. I could do it by theme. I could do it by the month that they were put out.

I was going to say, if people still bought coffee table books, your scripts would make a perfect little coff. Because you could just read one a day and, you know, enjoy. Yeah.

Or, you know, I could even create a calendar that has, like, a fact a day on it. I could. I have thoughts for how I could convert this into, like, a TV show. And there's a lot of places that are looking for podcasts to convert their content into video. And I'm talking to, you know, a bunch of people right now about the potential for. For pitching something to, like, a Netflix, for adapting the series for, you know, something like that. So there's a lot of potential. I don't know if any of these will come true. No, but at least thinking of them.

You have these ideas and that. That's the key that, you know, that's the entrepreneur's mindset, if you will. That's the business brain. Right. That. That's. You're constantly thinking with your business brain, even if you're not necessarily taking all of the actions, you're taking some actions. Obviously you've got a thriving business, but.

The core of what I'm doing is the podcast, right? And I don't. I want to grow it to a certain point and then, you know, I can start thinking about other things. I could potentially do a spinoff podcast.

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Can we talk about how what are you doing to Grow the podcast. One of the questions I get from people when I tell them, you know, we do, oh, I do Business Brain Podcast each week, the question they ask is, well, how do you turn that into a business? You know, so can you speak to that as far as, you know, applying your, your skill set and, you know, the business acumen that you've had with your other business to growing everything everywhere?

Sure.

So let me give you some numbers. So I just finished the month of July. July 2020 was my first month of the show. So it's been going on for two years. My first month of the show, I had 6,000 downloads. July 2022, I had 702,000 downloads. Awesome. And that's a 560% increase over 2021. And so it's grown quite a bit. I'm getting about 16, 17,000 downloads an episode after 30 days right now, globally. And basically what I did is when I started, I'm pretty data orientated about a lot of things.

Clearly. Yeah.

What do big podcasts do to grow their shows? And I ignored all the podcasting gurus who are podcasting gurus for the most part, because they have never grown a big show. Because the people with very big shows don't run courses on how to do podcasting. They have a big podcast and that's how they make their money. And a lot of people say, oh, social media and put out audio. No, that stuff doesn't work. And I, and I went and I found interviews with very big podcasters when they talked about their show and they all said the same thing. Social media, for the most part, doesn't work. You want to put out a tweet or Instagram post, that's fine. But it's not going to grow the show. You're catering to an audience that already follows you. Either they know about the show and have already committed, or they don't care. What moves the ball forward is promoting your show on other podcasts. I know that you invited me on your show. I said yes. Why? Because I know 100% of the people listening to this show listen to podcasts by definition.

By definition, that's right.

So being a guest is one way to do it. But the biggest way has been bonding, buying advertisements on podcast apps and doing feed drops and other shows. And the way I tell people is that a lot of people, they want, they desire their podcast to be a business and then they host on anchor.

Yeah, it's like, right, right.

You are unwilling to spend $5 a month to host your podcast. And you are hoping for success. And this is like setting up a restaurant in a tent on a abandoned piece of land because you don't want to pay for rent and then hoping your restaurant is going to be successful. No one wants to go there. Right, right. You know, you want to look. And so it's just like any other business, you have to spend money in marketing and promotion. No different than anything else, but you.

Have to spend money in the right places. And no, you're 100% right that the, you know, promoting on other shows is far and away the place we have the most success as well in terms.

Of growing the audience. Yeah, some people may not care, but some people say, oh, I'll check that out.

At the very least, you're promoting to people who are going to listen to a podcast because they are literally listening to a podcast.

And I've just, it's been, I've just purchased my biggest ad buy ever. It'll be running and starting in a few weeks on Player fm. That was a five thousand dollar ad buy. I bought their top tier. And if you look at who's advertising on that, it's net. Big Network. Big Network. Big Network. And then it's going to be dude sitting in his basement doing a daily history podcast.

Perfect.

And most of these are like business shows. There's. And I know you guys run a business show, but there's a lot of business shows.

There are.

Oh boy. So what I. And well, the other thing I found is when I run ads like on overcast or podcast static, they usually tell you, oh, you know, here's the range you'll usually get for new subscribers. I am always over that range.

Really? Oh, that's good to hear.

And I think it's because of the uniqueness of the show. A couple things I didn't know when I started is that because it is a short show, people tend to listen to shorter podcasts first. Okay, so you have a three hour Joe Rogan episode sitting in your podcast queue and you have a 10 minute show of mine. You're not going to finish the Joe Rogan episode regardless, but you can get mine out of the way. So you listen to. So that's what I find myself doing. There's a couple daily shows, I always get those out of the way and then I leave the longer shows kind of for last. Yeah, the other thing I didn't anticipate, so one decision I made is that I was going to keep it clean. I don't use any language. And that's simply because I've seen other podcasts that I listen to.

Sure.

Where it is explicit and I see where they lose listeners in the comments and in reviews. So I'm like, okay, well, let's just. Let's just remove that as an issue.

Yeah. There's no reason to have it unless there's this very specific reason for your show to have it. That's right.

Right.

Yep.

And some do. And of course, fine. I have nothing against it, but. Well, it turns out parents are listening to my show with their children when they take them to school.

Absolutely.

Homeschoolers are assigning it to their kids. I have high school classrooms that are listening to my show. Never intended. Was never my goal. But that happened. The other thing, I did an analysis of what were the reason for one star reviews for a lot of podcasts. So I went through and I just looked for one star reviews, and there were two things that always stood out. One was too many ads, and the second was inserting politics when it wasn't necessary. If you have a political show, go nuts. That's why people are there.

Right.

But if you're doing a tech show and you're like, and this iPhone doesn't work, just like the president, you're achieving nothing.

Yeah. It gets you. No, no, I mean, you know, because this is how we met, that I run a company that manages sponsors for podcasts, and the ones that are successful are the ones that know that, you know, stay in their lane in those regards. Right. You know, not adding politics for no good reason, not adding salty language for no good reason, not adding religion for no good reason. You know, those sorts of things, staying on, on topic are the, you know, that's the thing that brings everybody together. It doesn't matter what their beliefs are outside of it. The point is, you know, that whatever that topic realm is now yours. Of course, you have no one specific topic, but my topic.

My goal is for someone, for a listener to meet me one day and say, gary, I have no idea what your politics are.

Oh.

And I'd just be like, thank you.

I get that. I actually get the opposite. I did. That was my goal. Now people, when I meet them, tell me that they appreciate meeting someone whose politics match their own. And people of every political persuasion say that exact phrase to me. They. They think we agree because we agree on the things I talk about. That's it. You know, so, yep, it's. It's great. I don't. I have no reason to dispel that myth for them. I. I don't. I Avoid political conversations with people for the most part. But, you know, otherwise it's fine. Okay, so. Oh, go ahead. I do want to take us in another direction.

I was going to say I've not gotten. The worst reviews I've gotten are like three star reviews. And the reviews tend to be in the matter of like, this podcast is not perfect.

Sure.

And I was like, yeah, okay, okay.

Could have told you that.

No, for the most part, the reviews aren't just like, oh, this is a very good podcast. You were. Listen, the reviews are like, this is the best podcast ever.

That's great.

Like really gushing, like, you know, over the top type reviews that I never would have expected. And I think it's because I acknowledge people's time. I keep the show very tight and it's something you can get some, you know, take away from every single day.

So I love this idea of Learning by Mining 1 star reviews of other shows. This is. And going in with truly an open mind, you know, being that sponge and just whatever lessons are there, those are the lessons you're going to learn. You didn't have any preconceived notions about what you were looking for other than what is in the one star reviews. I love it. This is not even the travel thing though, is not your first business. On your website you talk about how you got bit by the travel bug sort of as a result of or as, as the fallout of selling a business that you had in the late 90s. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of, of what that business sale looked like and how the travel kind of fell into it after that?

So I had a very early Internet company in the 90s. We made database driven web applications back when everyone was still doing static HTML.

Yeah.

Are you familiar with a product called ColdFusion?

Of course.

I'm a nerd.

So yes. Yes.

So my college roommate built it and JJ Allaire and I was living with him when he was building it. And as he was building the app and the company, this is very early on, people were coming to him saying, well, I would like my company's website to use this cold fusion. And they have a database connected. And he didn't want to get into the business of doing websites. He wanted to focus on the product. So he said, well, do you want to do this? So I'm like, sure. I had nothing going on. So I started doing this. And it's a very simple, just a markup language for doing, you know, SQL queries and things like that.

Sure.

And then I Hired a friend who had a friend. And four years later I'm a 28 year old guy with a company with 50 people and I sell it to what was the remnants of Control Data Corp. At that time. They were a consulting firm. I didn't know it when I sold it, but they turned around and then sold the company to the British Telecom consulting unit a year later. And I think the reason they bought my company was they needed to have some Internet stuff on the balance sheet, of course, because otherwise they were just, you know, doing stuff with old mainframes. But the sales process was interesting. I had a guy as an advisor who was, has bought and sold many telecommunications companies. He was absolutely helpful in that process. And then after I sold the company, I was basically on their org chart. There was kind of like no one above me or below me. I would show up at 10 in the morning every day, made sure everyone saw me, and then I'd go for lunch and never return. And they were paying me $125,000 a year for this and no one cared. And then I eventually convinced them all, send me to your offices around the world. I'll talk about the Internet development and how they can. Remember this is the 90s early on.

Before the first bubble burst. That's right, yeah.

Yes. And all this stuff is, it's trivial today. Everything has a database, WordPress and it's not a big deal. But this was even before Apache, this was before MySQL, all these free type things, before PHP. So it was still a different universe.

Cold fusion was an amazing thing at the time. Yeah, exactly.

So they sent me to Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Frankfurt, Brussels, Paris and London. It was a three week trip, first time I'd ever really been anywhere, circumnavigated the globe. And that kind of got me started on travel. And I even started a website for the people in the company. And I had this very early digital camera that I took pictures of different things with. And that's kind of how it started.

Amazing. Okay. Yeah. Well, that paints a picture of not only how the travel started, but also more of what we call here your talent stack. That sort of informs how you got to this point today. You know, building websites is not. Is relatively trivial for you and that's been helpful for you in the travel blog and, and the travel stuff and then of course with the podcast as well. So. Yeah, that's good, that's good.

It was more a mindset about thinking in terms of business.

It's the business brain, man.

Well, there are some People like when, when everything went to hell for me, my, my first reaction wasn't, boy, I need to get a job. In fact, that is a. An impulse that I've never had in my life. Other than that one year period where I was on the payroll and didn't do anything. That's the only real job I had. And I wouldn't really ever consider that a job.

Sure. Yeah.

That's a contractual obligation.

That's a fallout from the contra. From the sale of the business. Yeah, that's very different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you're. I'm, you know, the, the. The thing you're always thinking of is, well, how can I, you know, what do I do? Not who will hire me? And I think I would make a horrible employee, to be honest.

Patently unemployable.

Yeah. We call ourselves patently unemployable. You're welcome to use that term. Yeah.

But the other great thing about the podcast is that people will ask me like, well, why are you doing that? It's because it scales. And this is the tough thing that people. So I ended up actually going back to Wisconsin where my family was, because I knew this would be a process. You're not going to have a successful podcast overnight. So it's been two years of doing the show, and I'm just now getting to the point where it's becoming successful. I'm getting the attention of larger companies within the industry, but it was two years of kind of doing nothing. And whatever income I made, I was just plowing it back in. In terms of promotion, most people are not going to have two years where they're going to be able to work on something without any reward from it. But I am happily willing. My first business in the 90s, I bootstrapped it. I never received a dime in funding, never took out a loan, and I funded it through my own poverty. And I'm happy doing that. I am happy living on next to nothing because I know, okay, my revenue path will be.000 quarter million dollars, half a million dollars. And you amortize that over the course of it, and then suddenly it starts to make sense. You just have to suffer through a couple years of building the business. And I'm now kind of in that inflection point where the show is growing, the word is spreading interest. And the other weird thing about podcasting is that until you get like 10,000 downloads an episode, no one really cares.

Right?

That's right.

Yeah.

You have 9,000 people listening. Might as well be zero. And then suddenly you hit 10,000. Oh, everyone, you know, and there aren't a lot of shows that have 10,000 downloads an episode. And so it's this weird environment where suddenly you hit that point and you, you know, everyone, you know, no one wanted to take a chance with you at 9,000, which they probably should if they're smart.

We take chances with shows at 5,000 all the time. Yeah. Because we know we can help them grow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, so that's been kind of a weird experience, but there's nothing I don't need to. Other than maybe more promotion. The system I have in place now, I can reach 1,000 people. As easily as 10,000 people, as easily as 100,000 people or a million.

Yes.

You know, it doesn't require a tenfold increase in expenses or timefold increase in audience.

No. Yeah, your same amount of time and a modest and trackable increase in maybe your bandwidth expenses, but that's it, you're done.

Yeah, yeah. And so that ability to scale was really important. And I talked to people about this. Like, you can get a good job working a very nice salary, but will you ever get a tenfold increase in your salary? No. Maybe if you're lucky, you could get a high executive position and double it.

Right.

Maybe. And that will take years, you know, plus political maneuvering and whatever else goes on.

Well, you have to be employable.

Right.

So, yeah, that. That counts us out.

Yeah, so. So that's why I did it. And I also think that I'm in a unique position to do this sort of show. I don't think Wondery, if Wondery wanted to do my show, they would need a team of writers. They would have a host who's just reading the script. But I've been to, like I said, I'm doing tomorrow's show on the Marshall Islands. I've been there. So I have things that I know from having been there and gathered information that I can talk about in addition to research that I've done on the show. And there's a lot of the episodes, I'd say maybe more than half where I can throw in some personal anecdote or I can do something from personal experience because I've been to the Coliseum, I've been to Roman ruins all over the world. I've been to all these places. I have degrees in five different subjects that are not really related. So I have this vast knowledge base to. To work off of.

So you have, you have a. As. As most people do. You have a unique talent stack that you've cultivated over the years. And, and you are absolutely using, if not all of it, certainly a good chunk of it to create this thing that would be very difficult for any other single person to create because they don't have what you have. And the smart part is using your business brain. You've identified all of this, so this is fantastic. So I'm curious though, you know, the living in a COVID lockdown world was perfect for doing a daily podcast of 10 minute stuff. And like you said, prior to all of this, you had traveled and visited things. So you have this breadth of experience that you can tap into and pepper into the show. I'm sure you're going to want, if you haven't already, that you're going to want to start traveling again. So I'm curious, I know you've answered this question. How will you continue doing the daily show while you are out exploring the world? Have you, have you, have you completely fleshed that out yet?

I'm not going to travel until one, travel gets better because it's still kind of a pain to travel.

Absolutely.

And two, the goal is to eventually hire some writers because right now the biggest thing for me to put out a show is writing and research that takes several hours. Recording the show is trivial. If you don't have any guests and it's just you and it's a script, it's easy. So once I can hire writers, then I think I can start traveling again and it'll be different. I'll probably stay in one place for a longer period of time, maybe like a two to three month stint.

That makes sense.

And the other great thing is, so. So the one travel brand that actually stuck with me was the Tourist Office of Spain. And I actually did several episodes that they sponsored where I. The topic of the show was something about Spain could have been Salvador Dali, it could have been Queen Isabella, the Canary Islands, whatever. And I've talked to several travel brands that I still have contacts with about maybe doing a residency in Spain or in Barbados or in Estonia, where I just go and record the podcast there for a couple months and maybe do several episodes about people, places or things pertaining to that country. A lot of people don't know. The only time George Washington ever left the United States was to go to Barbados, which was a British colony at the time. And there's a lot of history there. So there's tons of things to talk about in these places. And the only difficulty is getting them to understand podcasting. They're really sort of behind the Ball. But the numbers I'm getting at this point are big enough where I think it'll just overwhelm any concerns they have about marketing through podcasting.

Sure. Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this has been intensely informative and enjoyable. I really appreciate you coming on the show, Gary. Is there. Is there anything else you want to share before we. Before we wrap up at least this interview and maybe we'll do this again someday as your business evolves.

If you're thinking about doing a podcast, I don't think it's a bad idea, but you need to have a definite plan before you start and you need to put in the time you're going to probably have to do it for two years, I'm guessing, before you really start to see things take off. You might get lucky beforehand, depending on your niche and depending on how you do it. And also you have to have a willingness to spend money, I believe, to promote the show. People talk about the fact that there's a discoverability problem in podcasting, and I don't think it's true any more than there's a discoverability problem in movies or there's a discoverability problem in books. The last Avengers movie had a marketing budget of over $200 million for a movie that everyone knew was coming out and was the second half of a two part, you know, series of films, yet they spent $200 million to promote it. A podcast. Like I said, all the big podcasts do this. They have a promotion budget, at least for when they launch.

Yeah.

And you need to think about that as well.

That's true. You can solve the discoverability problem with money. That's as they do in every other business. In fact, every piece of advice you just gave when you said, if you're starting a podcast, I would say if you're starting a business, all of that follow follows. True. You gotta, you know, be willing to spend some money. You have to be willing to spend time and it's gonna take time, so. Yeah.

And don't be too rigid to your plan.

Yeah.

You're gonna discover things along the way. Like, I didn't know kids and parents were listening to my show. There are nine year olds out there who think I have their favorite podcast and my show is not designed for nine year olds. And then it got me thinking, well, maybe I could tap into the homeschool market. Maybe I could do a daily newsletter that's like five questions about the show where you can quiz people on retention, where this could be used as A free resource for families. I didn't think about that when the show first started, and now I realize this is an opportunity that I might have. And there's. There's other opportunities like this that pop up along the way. So definitely have a plan and especially a format for the show that I've never deviated from. My format, 30 second cold open, which I reuse for TikTok. I reuse it for posting on social media. Nine seconds of theme music. I have a set spot for the ad. I have an audio cue that the ad is done. So if I do programmatic advertising and it doesn't sound weird, like I'm sticking in, you know, and you've probably heard podcasts where they do that. Not an issue on my show. I do the body of the show, and then I have an ending where I usually read a review, and that has helped get the really good reviews. And I also do questions and things like that that people might have. So.

Interesting. Fascinating. So I know we've talked about the name of the show many, many times, but before we go, Gary, please tell us. Please tell our listeners where they can find you and your show, if you would, please.

Wherever you're listening to this, just go search for everything, everywhere, daily. And unless you're listening to it on a website, and then just go search it on Google, I guess. But basically it's on every podcast app, and it doesn't matter. You know, I tell people, if you don't know where to start, just pick an episode you think is interesting and start from there.

Perfect.

And don't listen to the episodes that you already know something about, because the most valuable ones are the ones that you have no clue what it's about.

Amazing. I love it. Gary, thank you so much for taking your time and sharing all of your stories and your thoughts and your insights with us. We really appreciate it. Oh, man. You know, fascinating. It's the first interview we've done since we changed the name to Business Brain. And what a perfect interview to do. Right? Because here's. Here's a guy. Yeah, he. Gary, has a business brain. And. And though I'm sure he's never called it that, he is astutely aware of the fact that he has a business brain, and he leverages it very intentionally all the time. It's. It's always what he's doing.

Well, the comment that, you know, sticks with, resonates with me is, I never thought about going and getting a job. Yeah, I feel the same way.

I've never thought about.

About that once you have some success.

And so, but even when things fell apart for him, you know, that, that what he said was, you know, he asked the question what do I do? Not who do I work for? And. Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Yeah.

When he's got thousands of bosses now instead of just one.

Yes.

And he's got something that he can scale up or down as needed. And it's, it's, it's a great example of a pivot that really works. And it, it works to his strengths.

Right. Yes.

It's his experiences and travel and that kind of thing. And, and it's terrific.

No, it's good. I, I loved his. There were a couple of great sound bites in there. One of my favorite ones was I funded, I funded businesses through my own. Poverty. Poverty. And what I. But, but like that's a powerful thing to know that. Okay. The way I'm feeling funding this is by not buying a new house and a new car and you know, and, or fancy dinners out. Like those sacrifices, if you want to call them sacrifices, are the, the price he is paying very explicitly. Yeah.

Even where he lives. It's like, oh, I came back to this area because I knew I would have to do this and take a deep dive and.

Yeah.

You know, so here, you know, getting to a place that's inexpensive and being thoughtful about that. It's like, oh, I'm not going to come live in New York City or you know, California in the Bay Area because it doesn't work in the beginning.

No. It doesn't make sense. Doesn't make sense to fund your business while you're also having to fund this, you know, high priced lifestyle. Yeah. Fascinating. I loved it. I loved it. Terrific. And the question, will you ever get a tenfold increase in your salary? I like that. It's good. Yeah, man.

Won't happen.

The business brain. No. It's been a while since we've done an interview, but when I met Gary I knew that we needed to, to have him tell his story to all of you and I'm glad we did. So. Yeah, I agree. All right folks, well, thanks for listening yet again. Make sure to send us your questions feedback at Business Brain. Check out our sponsor, bcproviders.com SBS if you need some funding for your business and go check out commhistory as well as everything everywhere. I'll see you next time. Keep living that charmed life, folks.