What's The Winning Recipe For Daily Podcasts? Exploring Dedication, Diversity, And Knowledge With Gary Arndt Of Everything Everywhere Daily

Wish you were one of those influencers with raving fans who binge on your every word, consume all your content, buy everything you have to sell, and demand even more. Then stay tuned while Authority Magazine columnist and buzzfeed contributor Tracy Hazard shares strategies, tips and tactics from top videocasters, podcasters, authors and social influencers on creating that bingeable factor. Now let's join Tracy as she explores how to rise above all the digital noise with the Binge factor.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Binge Factor. I'm Tracy Hazzard and I have Everything Everywhere Daily podcast host Gary Arndt Today and A Daily Show. How could I resist having us discuss a daily show and all that goes into it? Is this worth it? Is it a lot of work? I mean, I think a lot of you are daunted with even creating a weekly show. So a daily show seems really overwhelming. But Gary's breaking it down really well here in this interview and you are going to be just fascinated by how he does it, what he does, where he finds the power in podcasting, and how he's created so much success. He is the host of Everything Everywhere Daily, but before launching that in July 2020, he spent 13 years traveling around the world and writing a blog. His travels taken him to over 200 countries and territories and all 50 states twice. His blog, Everything Everywhere was named a Top 25 blog in the world by Time Magazine and he appeared in USA Today, New York Times, the BBC, National Geographic. He is one of the world's most accomplished travel photographers and he was named travel photographer by the Society of American Travel Writers by North American Travel Journalists association. And he is a three time Lowell Thomas Award winner which is considered the Pulitzer Prize for travel journalism. So we currently host and produce the Everything Everywhere Daily Podcast. It features stories of people, places and things covered a wide variety of topics including history, science and geography. It has over 16 million total downloads and now averages over a million downloads per month. And I think it's even higher than that. He's going to talk about that a little bit. It has appeared in the top 25 on both Spotify and Apple charts and in 10 minutes a day, listeners can learn something new every single day on various subjects including history, science, geography, math and technology, as well as biographies of some of the most interesting people. Gary is a polymath and I had to look that up even though I had heard the term before. But he's basically kind of like a dabbling expert in everything and he uses his extensive research in multiple fields and his decades of world travel to find interesting and informative topics for each and every show every day of the week. So let's talk to Gary Arndt about everything Everywhere daily and how he creates an amazingly powerful daily podcast.

Gary, Everything Everywhere Daily. Wow. Daily. That's a lot of work.

Yes, it is.

So you came out of the blogging world, and that's where I really want to start. You were a blogger first before you were a podcaster, right?

I started traveling around the world in 2007, and I had a website that was associated with it. So I was very early in the days of travel blogging. I'm like one of the OG travel bloggers. And the world back then was very different. There was no social media, really. Social media was MySpace, and your blog was social media. And people would go directly to your website every day, or they would subscribe in an rss and they had an RSS reader, and so they would read everything that you published. And it was a very different model than what blogging has become today. I would publish articles just giving my thoughts about where I was in the world. I would use puns or song lyrics as the headings to the article. SEO wasn't a thing. Never heard the term. And it worked. It was great. And it was podcasting what it is today. And that world of blogging died very slowly over time. It died when Google killed Google Reader. It died when people began using social media, Facebook, Facebook, and Twitter as the means to promote their websites. And suddenly, they were now reliant on some large company. And eventually they pulled the rug out on it. Facebook at one point was like, oh, everyone's got to get a fan page. You got to promote your fan page. And everyone did that. And then they killed organic reach, and they said, oh, now you got to buy advertising for your fan page. And it got to a point where, before the pandemic, I was asking around different bloggers I knew that had been around for a long time. And on average, 90% of the traffic they were getting was from Google or Pinterest, some form of search engine. And as such, they were adapting what they were creating to correspond to that. And they were all basically writing the same thing, 15 things to do in this place. And it was all keyword research and everything else, and nobody was actually writing for human beings. And all the advice Google gives people is fundamentally a lie. It's what they want people to do, what they want SEO to be. But everybody really knows that the technical SEO experts are the ones that are killing it. And there's one very successful travel website. I'm not even going to name it, but it gets millions of page views a month and it's basically a content farm. It's all machine generated titles that they've created. I'm sure they're now even having AI do the actual articles. I realized this isn't the business I wanted to be in anymore. I didn't like it. I had been doing a podcast since 2009. I had a show called this Week in Travel that I did with two other co hosts. And when the pandemic hit, everything changed. Within a span of two weeks, the entire travel and tourism industry disappeared. We tried keeping our podcast alive, but we had nothing to talk about. Every week was just, well, nothing's happening, everything's closed, can't travel. So that podcast died. All the contracts I had lined up died, all the traffic to my website died, all the affiliate income disappeared because nobody was traveling, nobody was booking anything. And the companies in the industry weren't marketing because they had nothing to market. They had to conserve cash to stay alive. So I had problems with where the business was going even before the pandemic hit. And the pandemic made it worse. So I realized I needed to make a big pivot. And so I had this idea for a podcast in my mind that I had come up with two years earlier. I would use the name of my website, which I had developed a really good brand for everything everywhere, which is my travel website. But it wasn't going to be a travel podcast. It was going to be more of a history podcast. History, science, math, geography, sort of general educational show. And I began, I got the artwork done, I got theme music picked out, I paid for it, got the rights, had everything lined up ready to go. And I began doing research for the shows. And the shows were, the episodes are going to be like two to three hours. And I realized this is not a sustainable format.

No, it's really not.

It's not. It was a horrible business decision. And I. So I put it aside. There are some podcasts that can pull that off, but your odds of making it was something like that. And along the way I was at a conference I was speaking at, I went to a speaker's reception. I met a guy that I knew, very successful author, ran some conferences that got a thousand people to attend. And he was quitting his conference business and everything else. And I was like, well, why are you doing that? He's like, well, I started a daily podcast. It's one of the best things I ever Done. And I knew a couple other people that had successful daily podcasts. I'm sure you're familiar with John Lee Dumas, entrepreneur on fire. There's several other people I know that have done it. And so I came back to this idea of a daily show. It's like, well, instead of having two or three hour episodes, what if I just did the opposite and made it like 10 to 12 minute episodes? But I did it more frequently. And I did the math on that, and the math worked out a lot better in terms of being able to monetize it. So I created a list of a hundred show ideas, and on July 1, 2020, I published episode number one. And I've been doing it ever since then. I've now done 1100 shows in over three years, and the show has grown substantially now doing over well over a million downloads a month. Just last week, my biggest day ever, we had 59,000 downloads in a single day.

Wow, that's so great. And honestly, we're filming this right at the middle of the summer, and summer's the lowest download time of the whole year. And you did that well, that's amazing. That's so good.

And there's been so many benefits to the show that I didn't even realize when I started it. The benefits of doing a shorter daily show. For starters, people tend to listen to shorter shows first. You have multiple shows in your podcast queue. You have a 10 minute show, you have a three hour show, which one are you going to listen to first? 10 minute show requires less of a commitment, so you'll probably listen to that. Another benefit, people tend to have a higher completion rate. You're more apt to listen to the entire show, which is a signal that Spotify and Apple use to determine what to promote. Because you're producing, there are several things that go into show growth. How long your show's been around, but one of the variables is number of episodes. What's the quickest way to get a ton of episodes, do an episode every day. And So I have 1100 shows that I've done on a wide variety of topics. And I don't know if you're familiar with the product. Voxelize. Yep, that's an SEO tool. So I just, my network just got signed up with it and they showed me. And so on Apple Podcasts, I rank in the top 250 of all podcasts for visibility.

Right. And I want everybody to listen to this. Number One reason is 1100 episodes that have a lot of playthrough. Right. That's what Gary was telling us. He has playthrough at a higher rate than other people.

And the shows that are like number one and two are stuff you should know, which has been around for well over a decade.

They only do weekly.

Right, Right. But they've been around for so long and it's again, wide variety of topics.

And.

And I think number two is the Tim Ferriss show. Been around a long time, wide variety of topics. So, yeah, that was kind of unexpected. And then I've heard people talk about, oh, when you make a podcast, you have to have an avatar. Who's the person you're making the show for? My avatar is me. I didn't want to do stuff that I'm interested in, and I figured if I'm interested, someone else must be interested too. They must have a wide range of interest. And so sure enough. But the thing I didn't expect, I wasn't doing my show for, like I said, I was kind of just making it for me and people like me. Well, it turns out parents were listening with their kids. I made a decision early on that I was always going to keep the show clean because I've listened to history podcasts that I listened to for a long time, and they were very crude and very foul and it turned a lot of people off. But I don't think anybody tuned in because of it. There were just people that didn't bother as much as. So it was a net negative. And I was like, well, okay, well, just don't do that. Keep it clean and you don't bother anybody. I never talk about current events. I never talk about politics. I never do anything that's polarizing. I just keep it to things where people can learn something new every day.

So I have to say that I listened to the History of Wine just recently. Like, that was the.

That was literally yesterday's show.

That was yesterday's show. So I always listen to. But one of your really early episodes, a couple in the middle that interest me, especially because yours is short, so I can consume a few more on my research. And then I tried to listen to the most recent and I was like, History of Wine. This is great. My dad made wine. Right. Like, so, like, I was thinking, I'm going to really. I learned so much I had no idea about. Like, I learned things that. And I thought I knew quite a bit about wine because of my dad. Totally did not. And so your fascinating look at everything is your own curiosity. That's what drives you to building that.

So you just said they were short, so I could listen to a bunch of them. And that's the thing, right?

That's it.

Right. If I had a one hour weekly show that was 60 minutes long, let's say 70 to make the math easy, if I put 14 ads in a one show, that's way too much. People wouldn't stand for that. But if I put two ads in a show, but I have seven shows, same amount of time, it's not nearly as onerous.

Well, and the issue is that most people are following. I'm going to call it YouTube advice. And you're not. You're looking at it in the podcasting ecosystem, in and of itself, in the YouTube world, they make more money if they allow more ads than they do longer content.

But the world of YouTube is all about appeasing the YouTube algorithm. There's no algorithm in podcasting. I have to appease people. I have to create something which is interesting. So one of the things you mentioned was, yeah, it was so easy, I could just listen to another one. And that was the thing. It's like making Doritos. Nobody binges on porterhouse steak. You can eat one and that's it. But if you think of the things people binge on, it's things that there are a lot of potato chips, cookies, popcorn, stuff like that, one after the other after the other. So I actually created this thing called the Completionist Club. And people write me all the time.

Saying, I think I need to be a member. I'm like a huge completionist. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's like if you start a book, you got to finish it. No matter how bad it is. If you start a list, you got to complete your list. I'm a completionist.

So early on, people said, yeah, I've listened to every episode and I said, so if you've ever watched Saturday Night Live, they have this thing called the Five Timers Club for hosts who've hosted the show five times. So I invented something like that for people who listen to every episode. I'm like, oh, welcome to the Completionist Club. You can talk to the doorman. We have cocktails and hors d'. Oeuvres. You're welcome. And then as people.

I would like a jacket, please.

Yeah. As people began doing it from other countries, I was like, oh, well, welcome Norway. Oh, we have a chapter in Oslo. You can go there and I'll mention something about some national food that they have or something like that. And it's become this thing and so my network said that they do far more analytical tracking than I do. But when you're in a network, you run ads for your show and other shows and vice versa. And they said that I had the highest by far of any podcast they'd ever seen. Of the number of episodes people listen to after they come to the show, they'll listen to an average of 10. Now, if you don't like something, you can figure that out pretty quick.

I usually say it'll take two to three.

Sure. So if they're listening 10, like if you didn't like the show, you'd stop after like two or three or something. So again, there's something there in having these short form shows that people enjoy. And because of how people consume podcasting, they're consuming it walking, they're consuming it on their commute, they're consuming it taking their kids to school. And it's easier to get in a 10 minute show than it is a two hour show. And I didn't even think of these things when I started.

I want to stop you right there because on my show I always do my analysis of the binge factor and you have the consummate bingeable show. You've created it this way. You knew you were making Doritos, right? You knew you were making it this way. So you were intentional and purposeful about it. But here's the key. There are a lot of people who can go out there and say they do a daily show. And there are people who make a daily show that has value. And that's the difference with your show, Gary. Everything, everywhere, daily has value in every single episode. And that effort is what is really truly bingeable about your show. It's not the fact that you have a 10 minute show. I mean, that's helping it the way the format that is in it is helping it be consumed more. But it's really, truly, I would not give it the time of day, I would not keep listening if I wasn't getting something valuable and interesting in every single episode. And that you are putting in a lot of time there and doing a great job of it.

Let me tell you the flip side of it. I know there are some daily shows where it's just like the host will talk for three minutes. It's like, oh, here's my inspirational quote of the day. Never give up, Keep some successory time.

Tell a quick story, be done.

I write a 2000 word script every day. This morning I woke up and I wrote an episode on the history of Golf. And just before I started talking to you, I hit publish on it. Tomorrow I'm doing another show. I can take those 2,000 word episodes and I publish them all as a blog post. So I'm able to generate traffic from that end. I could take those in the future and edit them, mash them together and create a series of ebooks on the Kindle store. I could create a real book. I can take these scripts now that they're written, edit them a little bit and do YouTube videos. There's a lot of successful educational channels where it's just a voiceover with some B roll footage and these channels get over a million subscribers. What I'm doing naturally lends itself to that. So there's a lot of way that yeah, it's a lot of work, but it's less work than I worked in a office and I have to show up for eight hours a day. I mean, it's not that. And so people say, oh man, that's so much work. I'm like, I work less than you and I make more money at it.

Well, let's talk about that monetization, because that is something that the podcasters really struggle with, understanding the ecosystem of monetization. And so you're making money off of host red ads, programmatic ads on the show, audio ads.

The vast majority are host run ads. Programmatic ads are for the most part garbage.

Yes, I agree with you. But you do have them. They're having.

It's better than nothing. Well, if you've listened recently, the reason is because I had a huge spike in traffic in the last week. And so I now have all this excess inventory that was never sold. So I hadn't heard a programmatic ad on my show for a couple months. And this week I suddenly there were a lot of them and it was for that reason. So it's better than nothing, but it's not the ideal.

And then you have ads on your website. So you've got web ads, you've got pop ups, you've got a bunch of different types of ads running on your website. And I'm assuming that's because you also knew how that worked from being a blogger before that, and you adapted to the new systems that are going there.

Those are a small part of what I earn. And quite frankly display ads on websites for the most part is garbage. I'd say it covers my rent, but it doesn't actually quite cover my rent. I'd say that plus Patreon maybe covers my rent at some point. I'll probably take the ads off my website just because I think that they junk it up and make it or.

Give a tipping point of that. I agree. Yep.

So, yeah, those are the primary.

Do you do affiliates as well or just straight sponsors?

I tried doing affiliate stuff with podcasting the first 18 months I did the show. So my first episodes I put an ad in just from day one. So people got used to the fact that this show had ads and I didn't have any advertisers because I just started. I had no audience, so I just made my own. I signed up for affiliate programs like audible.com and various other educational products, and I ran ads for those and they did not perform at all. It just doesn't work well with podcasting because there's no link. And I would have people say, oh, yeah, I bought that thing. It's like, I never saw credit for it. They just went to the website and did it. So I was functionally just giving free advertising to a bunch of companies. But it served its purpose for that time, and I don't regret it.

Yeah, no, I agree that there's like, we try a lot of things in podcasting. Right. But at the end of the day, it's the sponsorships and the relationships that we build that actually do better for us and perform better for our audiences as well, because we can be a little pickier about the relevance.

So what I'm doing now is I'm signed with a podcast network. They're a really good network. They're really good at sales. They've sold the show out for the most part ever since March, except for the recent traffic spike, which is a good problem to have. So right now, the primary monetization method is just CPM advertising on the show. And when I talk to a lot of other podcasters, I think there's two endpoints that shows are at. One is the high traffic, high volume show with CPM ads, which is where I'm at right now. And on the other end of the spectrum are smaller shows where the host is probably selling a product or a service and the podcast is used as a sales vehicle for that. You can have stuff in the middle, but those seem to be the endpoints where people see the most sort of monetization success. You have a very niche show that is focusing on a very particular type of listener, and you have a very broad appeal show, kind of like mine, or what you see on many other podcast networks where you can just run generic ads.

You mentioned video. Is that what's next for you are you going to be looking at more YouTube monetization? And did you put your podcast onto YouTube in the new YouTube podcast model?

The whole new YouTube podcast model, I think is a joke. It's really just gaslighting on YouTube on the part of saying, hey, we're now calling the things we've always had on service for years podcasts.

Playlists are now podcasts.

That's not a podcast. If so, yeah, my show is there. Nobody listens to it. I have a couple episodes that have gotten, I think over 10,000 views. But if it's not a real video, no one's going to watch it on YouTube. That's the reality. And all these people offering advice, oh, you gotta have your podcast on YouTube. People don't listen to audio content on YouTube. They watch videos on YouTube. That's the whole point of it. And whatever I do on YouTube, it'll probably be to drive traffic to the podcast. You have to have a lot of YouTube traffic to make money. The CPMs on YouTube are much worse than podcasting. And I think it was. Jordan Harbinger said, the market has spoken. You're going to get on average something like, what, $5 on YouTube? YouTube takes half of it. And even in the best niches, like finance or something, you're looking at maybe like a $12 to $15 CPM. The average in the podcasting industry is around $25. And I know of CPMs that are far north of that that people are getting.

Yeah, we used to do 100 in 3D printing, so it was way north of that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, with a very niche market like that, I could totally see it. And you're keeping a bigger percentage of it. So I never would make YouTube the focus of it. I think if people are looking at YouTube first and foremost, especially if they have a show that could be a podcast, it's probably just because they don't know better and they're just. YouTube's a cultural thing.

So how are you driving new listeners, like, where are you out seeking that? Are you using social media? I noticed that social really isn't totally connected to your website, but you have Instagram and you have social media out there. That's great.

Along the list of things that I think are garbage is promotion on social media.

It takes a lot of work with not a lot of return. Right.

And I should say I have six figure followings on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and I even did on Google. The way you grow an audience on a platform, any platform is on that platform. If you want to grow a podcast audience, you do it through podcasting. So, for example, yesterday, in fact, the reason I've had this big spike recently is I bought an ad on a really big podcast. There's this very big show that gets 100 to 150,000 downloads an episode. I noticed that they were doing a sponsorship, but it was just the same company over and over. It was the default thing. So I contacted them, and the podcast was owned by a nonprofit corporation. And I said, can I buy a sponsorship on your show? And they're like, yeah, sure. It fits the theme of the show. And they quoted me a price, and it was like a quarter of what it was to advertise anywhere else. So I'm like, yes, please. I bought a $5,000 ad. It's going to appear four times. The first time it ran, it doubled my traffic in one day. And so if you look at how big podcast networks grow their show, they do it through buying ads and paid promotion. The Avengers movie, one of the biggest movies ever made, had a $200 million marketing budget, and everybody knew the movie was coming out. A lot of podcasters are looking. They don't want to spend a dimension. They want to have success. They want to invest nothing in their show. And I don't see how that works. There's no other business I can think of. Yeah, I want a restaurant, but I'm not going to make a sign for it. And I'm not going to run advertising in the local newspaper or my favorite.

I would like a breakfast place, but I don't want to get up at.

5Am yeah, it just doesn't work. And the thing is, for a show like mine, at least, again, a daily show, I think, is a better business model. I'm able to determine the value of a subscriber to my podcast and the annual value of someone that subscribes to my show and listens to most of the episodes is well north of $10 a year and more if they listen beyond a year. But I can acquire a new subscriber for somewhere around 2 to $3. And I can. I'll buy $10 bills for $2 all day long. That's a very easy thing to do. And that's just doing it on, like, podcast apps. So you can buy ads on overcast, Podcast Addict, Podbean, pocket, cast, cast box, whole bunch of different ones, and you can and then also do feed drops on different shows. That's a very powerful way of doing it. And I found that there's a lot of shows in the history niche that have decent audiences. They're getting in the high thousands of downloads per episode or maybe even over 10,000, but they're not well monetized. And I can reach out to them and say, hey, I also have a history show. Want to make some money? Put this show in your feed, do a one minute intro for it, and you can delete it after 30 days. And I'll give you this much. They're like, oh, sure, promoting within podcasting is the best thing to do because 100% of the people that are going to listen to it listen to podcasts. And you don't have to worry about conversion when you do it on social media, you're doing it in an environment where you don't know if anyone listens to podcasts at all.

I gotta ask you this because we had a big backlash. We did a daily show when we first started, our very first podcast on 3D printing, it was a five day a week. It wasn't seven days, but it was five days. And it made all the difference. And we knew exactly what we were doing when we did that. We ran encores. Like you. That's what you call them. We called them repeats. And we got huge backlash from our audience, from our subscribers. They were really pissed at us for repeating episodes.

I have had zero complaints.

And that's gotta be because you tipped over a library that's so big that I can't get back to the beginning again. Is that. Do you think that's why that's a.

Big part of it. So even if someone's listened to every episode, they're not gonna remember 1100 episodes. So it's like a refresher. And statistically speaking, I know most people hasn't. In fact, I even do that to my intro to some of the encore episodes. I'm like, statistically, I know most of you have not listened to this episode, so I'm going to run it again. So I literally have had nobody. So I've literally had zero complaints about doing it.

Well, I do want to clarify. So what Gary's doing, just to be really clear, is this. He's not like replaying his entire episode without a new intro. He's actually inserting it back into his feed, a new file of it. If you want to think about this this way, it's not like you change the date of your original episode and you've moved it up. You're actually creating a new one and you're adding a little bit of an intro, probably new ads because, hey, you have new ads now.

Oh, and the other thing is my audience recognizes the work that goes into the show. I am a one person operation. I don't have assistants, I don't have a va. I don't have a staff of writers. I am one guy putting out 2,000 words a day, seven days a week. And they know because they can't see themselves doing it. They're like, hey. In fact, I've had people say I should publish less just so I don't get burned out because they like the show.

They don't want you to burn out because they see it happen.

So I got that going for me. And so, yeah, it's never been a problem. And I think also if you do something like 3D printing, I'm guessing there's going to be some element of a show like that that's going to be about news and what's happening in the industry. And my show is not a new show. It's complete evergreen content.

Well, we never did that. So just to clarify, we did five days a week. One was an interview. So we had longer content and shorter content. And we did that so that we could test out the model.

I think that's a good strategy.

Yeah, yeah. So we had an interview which helped us grow our show because we were interviewing people in the industry and we weren't connected. So we built community that way. And then we had the shorter shows were all focused on education, special projects that we thought were cool, cool materials. And then we had tech Tuesdays, which was not news, but it was like your ask us anything technical and we'll give you our answer to how we do it. And it worked out really well for us. But again, we did burn out after 650 episodes.

I was just at a conference last week, one of the first conferences I haven't spoken at in years. And I met this woman that I've known for quite a while and we haven't seen each other since the pandemic because it was a travel event. And she said, what are you doing? And so I sat down, I explained the business to her. She's a very business minded woman and all the while she's just staring at me and is like, that is brilliant. I go, yeah, I know. I was like, well, we do this and this. And then she was like, I'm gonna.

Do this, but so few people do. That's the point, Gary. That's why you're special, because so few people actually follow through and do it.

She's one of the people that will. But I'm like, yeah, if you do this one, you're gonna be able to sell your product. You're gonna establish yourself as an authority immediately. There's all these things that are going to happen, and all you have to do is have something to talk about. And she's not even going to be doing a scripted show like me, so I'm not even worried about that. And another benefit. So there's a. The Discovery Channel has a podcast that's kind of similar to mine. It's a short form. I'd say maybe it's a little bit longer, maybe like 15, 18 minutes. But they come out with it three times a week and they have a staff of four people to produce it in midtown Manhattan. Yeah.

So pricey. Pricey assistance. Yeah.

If there are some cutbacks that happen at the Discovery Channel, that's going to be one of the first things on the chopping block. If the ad market and podcasting goes soft, it's gone. And there's a lot of these big production things that these big networks have done. I remember on Twitter, this woman said, if you don't budget at least a quarter million dollars to produce a podcast, it's not a real podcast.

I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, that's crazy. That's just why they. Well, this is why Spotify had to lay off everybody and why they business.

Because you're creating something that's not viable. Whereas if you're an individual, I mean, all the real success I've seen if you're not a celebrity, has tended to come from people that are independent because you're keeping your costs low, which means that you're able to make something that's profitable and sustainable. So even if there are fluctuations in the market, you'll be able to survive it because even the low points will be enough for you to get by.

Well, Gary, what's next for you?

I'm going to do tomorrow's show.

I love it. What is your view on the AI in the industry? You mentioned it briefly, but, I mean, I hear all these people like, oh, I'm so excited about all this stuff. And I'm thinking to myself, I know from experience that when you have an AI voice, people don't listen, they tune it out.

Yeah. Even though the voices are getting better. Do you remember Seinfeld in the episode where Elaine was talking about the birth control sponge?

Yes, definitely.

She had a big thing about if a guy was sponge worthy.

Yep.

So I did an episode two weeks ago on the Element Titanium. And in the process of making titanium and purifying it, you create what's known as a titanium sponge, which is just a hunk of titanium with holes in it. I talked about how during the Cold War, the Defense Department created a strategic reserve of titanium sponges, but they only reserved it for things that were sponge worthy.

AI is never going to come up with a line like that.

No, they won't.

I can throw in different puns and jokes and do it in a deadpan way, but when people are so excited about AI you got to remember, everyone is going to have access to the same tools. And just because you think, oh, it's going to save me so much time and energy, someone's going to throw more money at it and produce more stuff. I was just at a blogger conference. I've been telling people this like, you're all screwed because you're talking about, oh, I'll be able to make this many articles like, so will everyone else. Except they'll be able to do thousands of articles a day. And it's just going to become this gigantic avalanche of garbage that's being produced on the Internet. And it's not going to help independent contract creators, people gravitate towards other people and personalities online. And I think in a world of AI, the way you stand out is to be a human and to have the foils of a human. My show is not perfectly edited. I've had someone say, every so often I hear your chair squeak. But I like it because it reminds me that it's a real person talking in the microphone.

And every so often because I'm using my hands, I hit the microphone and people notice that because you can't edit that out. But I know it makes you human, it makes it real, right?

And at the end of the day, if you're talking about something that requires expertise or authority or knowledge that has to come from a human. And I'm sure you know all the problems with AI and the fact that they get things factually wrong. It is a technology that can create things that sound like human speech, but it doesn't know if it's right or it's wrong.

Did you get that? I mean, it occurred to me as you were, as I was listening to this and I was like, I'm not fact checking anything here. But I was like, I didn't see any citations and stuff on your website to know, like, could I look up your fax? Or like, where you got it from? I didn't really think about that. But do you get People who are like, you know, you got it wrong, Gary. And what do you do about it?

Oh, it's happened a couple times, a couple of famous times that have become noteworthy throughout the show. One was the famous odd numbered piston engine thing. I made a statement that there were no odd numbered engines with the odd number of pistons. I had never heard of them, honest to God. I had just never heard of such a thing. And immediately afterwards people were saying, oh yeah, there was a five cylinder car. There was like completely news to me. I was just wrong. I made a correction. I had a brain fart in one episode where I said Bill Buckner let the ball go through his legs when he was playing for the Chicago Cubs. Played for the Red Sox.

I live with a very serious Red Sox fan.

But the reason I said that is because I collected baseball cards growing up. And I remember having a 1979, tops, Bill Buckner card when he played for the Chicago Cubs, which he did before the Red Sox. Yep, that's what I was thinking when I put it down. And there's been a couple other things like that where I just have had. The errors are such that they tend to be. When they do occur, can be corrected with a single word. Usually. Like, it's not, oh, the, the lost civilization of Atlantis existed back there is something that's just completely out of whack. It's something like that. And the other surprising thing is I have a very broad range of people that listen to the show. So I did an episode on the element thorium and I did a big thing about the potential uses for thorium and nuclear reactors. And turns out there's a bunch of people at Oak Ridge National Labs who listen to my show and they love. And they loved it. So I did a thing on Hyman Rickover and nuclear submarines and the history of that in the Navy. Well, turns out I have some people that spent their careers in the Navy as submariners who listen to the show and a lot of these things. I did an episode recently on understand the linguistic aspects of the Chinese language and how it's different. I had several native Chinese speakers writing tell me. It's like, yeah, I thought you did a really good job. You covered everything really well. So no matter what I talk about, somebody is going to know more than me and I have to at least pass that litmus test. And because my shows are short, I'm only providing an introduction to things almost every episode. There's somebody out there who got a PhD in the subject and spent their entire career on it. And I'm trying to consolidate all that in 10 minutes. And that's difficult to do. So that's all I'm really trying to do. And so to that extent, it does make it a little bit easier.

Well, I'm so glad, though, that it's the thing. If you're going to make a mistake, at least you can correct it and at least you can come back and say, hey, yeah, this is what happened, and I didn't know this and now I do. And that's the great part about podcasting. There's a dynamic feedback loop because people will reach out to you when they enjoy your show.

My most recent one was I said, accidentally said Anchorage was the capital of Alaska, which of course it's not. It's the largest city in Alaska. But I know that because I've been to Juneau and I've actually been to the Alaskan State House. But I had one person who's like, well, if you got this wrong, what else could be wrong? And I answered him like, what do you think could be wrong? I'm a human. I mean, you shouldn't necessarily take anything I say at face value.

Just like, we shouldn't be taking that AI at face value either. Right, Right.

So anyways, I think there could be potentially some limited uses for AI. I've used it on a few shows where it's like, just give me a brief outline, give me 10 points about this. But it's usually never interesting things, so I always have to go back and like, verify, especially dates, which I found. It gets wrong a lot. And there may be an interesting tidbit that it won't know is interesting that I often have to go find because that's just a skill you have. Like, oh, well, that's interesting. May not be important, but at least it's kind of interesting and quirky. That is not going to be given to you by some bot. So I am not. It has of limited use, but all these people thinking it's going to change everything for them. I don't think so.

I so agree. Well, Gary, I am so glad to have you on the show and I'm glad that you are in our podcasting ecosystem because you give podcasters such a great name and help us all have aspirations on where we might take our shows in the future. So thank you for being that. You've talked about yourself being an OG blogger, but you really are an OG podcaster as well.

Oh, thank you very much. I enjoy doing it and it's been a fun experience.

So everything everywhere, daily, you can find it on your favorite app. And of course, you can go to the blog post for this episode@thebingefactor.com and connect up to Gary directly, because he did make some offers and some ideas. So if you guys have some synergies, you should. You podcasters should talk together, band together, promote together, especially if there's synergies between his show and yours.

So I told you Daily show had so many things to unpack. And here's the thing. Gary is absolutely right that this is the same thing I learned when I was doing all my podcasting research back in 2014, before I started our first podcast and before Tom and I started our 3D print podcast, we were looking at this and we were seeing that the power was happening from basically a daily show. Now, there were various things that we wanted to accomplish, though our goal wasn't to make money off of advertising. Our goal was to test out a new business model for our business. So we needed to create authority and the potential for passive income at the same time, because we weren't sure which model we were going to do, which is why we still had our interview episodes and some other things. So keep in mind that you may need to be looking at a mix of models that daily might be a model for you if it's your outcome and your goal that you're looking for. And Gary is so right about how there's this opposite end of the spectrum where you're creating influence and advertisement, and that's where you're really making money in your podcast or you're making money in your core business. But that doesn't mean that there's not a hybrid model in the middle somewhere which gives you an alternative income stream. But it's not all the work that you're doing. So be thinking about some of the great tips and ideas and paths that Gary took that you could take as well. Some of the things I want you to really think about is what he said is powerful. Making sure it's on your website, making sure that you have a blog, even though he doesn't believe that Google has any, is of great value. And blogging isn't of great value. It's still where his podcast ends up, because the home base is something that you control. You're not at the whim of an algorithm when it's your home base. And that's what he valued in the old school blogging platform, the one that I started in when I wrote my first blog. And I can't even Remember, it was like a blog spot or something. I can't even remember where my first blog was located. It's been so long ago. But that was a totally different model. It was very human connected. And he's finding that human connection in the podcasting world. And I think he's poised to take off even further in an AI world, in a place where you're providing significant value, where you're providing something that listeners really want to hear about, and you're providing it in a snackable, easy to consume way that aligns with their view on the world. And not everyone wants to listen to a 10 minute podcast. There are people out there who say, this is my downtime and I want an hour, I want to escape from the world. It's a totally different model for them. So be thinking about making sure that everything that you're doing and these pieces of advice you're taking align with your outcomes, your goals, and who you think should be listening to it. Right? But staying curious, putting the work in. At the end of the day, this is pretty easy work, creating a podcast. And Gary does it in a harder way, I think, than I would even be willing to put my time and effort in. And this is my day job, this is my whole business and he will still write a script for it. So there are ways to really make this work for you. But you have to think down, what am I willing to invest time, energy, money to make sure that I can make podcasting work out for me, work out for my outcome, my ideal outcome, my business, and you can do what Gary does. So, Gary Arendt, everything, everywhere, daily. Go check it out. This is a podcast worth listening to. It's a totally different style. Plus there's always a topic. You got 1100 episodes to choose from. There's always going to be a topic. So you can test out, research, comp the show and understand what makes it tick. And you might even find yourself saying, wow, this just expanded my knowledge so much. I'm going to stay a subscriber beyond those 10 episodes on average and enjoy Gary Arndt's show, Everything Everywhere, daily. And I'll be back next time with another podcaster right here on the Binge factor so that I can give you different viewpoints on how you make money in podcasting, how you make it work in podcasting, how you build influence, how you build authority. And if you'd like to be on my show and you think your podcast has got a binge factor, don't forget, go to the website thebingefactor.com and apply to be a guest on my show. I'd love to feature you next week. Thanks everyone. I'll be back next time on the Binge Factor.

You've been listening to the Binge Factor Podcast. For more information on podcasting and video casting, success tips and tactics, please go to thebingefactor.com and be sure to listen to our other show for podcasters called Feed your Brand. If you'd like to be interviewed on this show as well as featured in Tracy's column, please go to thebingefactor.com guest and apply.