Adventure Travel with Gary Arndt - Everything Everywhere Daily

Area/Topic
Worldwide Travel, Travel Writing, Photography, Podcasting

Gary Arndt
Podcaster
Everything Everywhere Daily

Gary Arndt is the host of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Before launching Everything Everywhere Daily in July 2020, he spent the previous 13 years traveling around the world. His travels have taken him to over 200 countries/territories, and all 50 US states….twice!

His blog Everything Everywhere was named one of the Top 25 Blogs in the world by Time Magazine. He has also appeared in USA Today, the New York Times, the BBC, and National Geographic.

He is also one of the world’s most accomplished travel photographers. He was named Travel Photographer of the Year in 2014 by the Society of American Travel Writers and in 2013 & 2015 by the North American Travel Journalists Association. He is also a 3-time Lowell Thomas Award winner, which is considered to be the Pulitzer Prize for Travel Journalism.

Gary currently hosts and produces the “Everything Everywhere Daily” podcast. It features stories of people, places, and things covering a wide variety of topics, including history, science, and geography.

The podcast gets over one million monthly downloads and has accrued over 20,000,000 downloads since 2020.

https://everything-everywhere.com/

summary
In this episode of the Big World Made Small podcast, host Jason Elkins interviews Gary Arndt, a seasoned podcaster and extreme world traveler. They discuss Gary's journey from a childhood influenced by National Geographic to becoming a digital nomad and travel blogger. The conversation explores the impact of social media on travel trends, the psychology behind wanderlust, and the challenges of full-time travel, including burnout. Gary shares insights on the power of podcasting, the realities of starting a podcast, and offers advice for aspiring travelers. The episode concludes with reflections on the importance of enjoying the journey and the evolving nature of travel in a post-pandemic world.

takeaways

• Gary's childhood was influenced by National Geographic, sparking his love for travel.
• He sold his home to travel around the world, embracing a digital nomad lifestyle.
• Social media has significantly impacted travel trends, often leading to overtourism.
• Travel is not just a vacation; it's a lifestyle choice that requires commitment.
• Podcasting allows for deeper connections with audiences compared to traditional media.
• Burnout is a real challenge for full-time travelers, as it's not always a vacation.
• Gary emphasizes the importance of enjoying the day-to-day grind of podcasting.
• He encourages aspiring travelers to take at least one extended trip in their lives.
• The average podcast listener spends significantly more time engaged than website visitors.
• Travel can be more affordable when you eliminate the costs of maintaining a home.

Learn more about Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Marketing and join our private community to get episode updates, special access to our guests, and exclusive adventure travel offers on our website.

Transcript

Jason Elkins (00:01.118)
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Big World Made Small podcast for the adventure traveler. Today I'm really thrilled. I've got a fellow podcaster, someone that's been doing it a lot longer than I have joining the show. And also he's kind of an extreme world traveler. We've got Gary Arndt he's a podcaster as I mentioned. He's got the Everything Everywhere Daily podcast. Gary, welcome to the show. Happy to have you here. This is exciting. You and I spoke a week or so ago and you kind of told me about some of the stuff you'd been involved in and

Gary (00:22.506)
Thanks for having me.

Jason Elkins (00:30.27)
I think we could do a whole series of podcasts, just having conversations with you, but I really want to dig into kind of that part that connects with, you know, adventure travel, however we define that. Maybe I'll even ask you to define that. And before we, before we really kind of get into the details, I want to go back a little bit. I want to kind of figure out how did you get, you know, what inspired you to go from wherever you were to where you are now? So how far back do we need to go to kind of understand you, Gary?

Gary (00:56.056)
probably back to my childhood. My dad used to subscribe to National Geographic and I was always a voracious reader and I would always read stories about different places around the world. My family was not very well traveled. I never saw saltwater till I was 21 years old. Just for an example, which is which is actually not uncommon. We live in the middle of the country, but. Wisconsin.

Jason Elkins (00:59.156)
Yep.

Jason Elkins (01:19.188)
Where did you grow up?

I was going to ask that where did you grow up? Okay.

Gary (01:26.562)
So we had water, but just not salt water. And in fact, I can tell you the first time I ever saw salt water, it was in Puget Sound. was my senior year in college. We were going to the national debate tournament and we were passing this one park, I think just in Seattle and we were in a van. I was like, stop the van, stop the van. And they're like, what? And I ran out and I tasted the water to verify that there was in fact salt in it.

Jason Elkins (01:29.249)
you

Jason Elkins (01:55.424)
That's cool. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. So younger, I heard the national geographics. I as well, my parents, actually when I was born, about not every, I mean, they bought the whole year worth of episodes and kept them. And as a kid, I was reading them as well. I'm work. I'm curious if you were kind of like I was where I had the maps. I was really into the maps. I would take the maps out of that they'd put in the center and I had maps hung up all over my room. I don't know. Were you into maps as well? my gosh. For those.

Gary (01:55.893)
It was so

Gary (02:20.886)
You will notice one of the largest collections of National Geographic magazine in the world is sitting in my office. Yeah, I mean, you can't see it, but up here I have framed maps of pre World War I Europe that was in an early issue. have a photo taken from National Geographic. It was the first photo ever to show the curvature of the earth. It was taken from a stratospheric balloon flight in think 1932 that National Geographic sponsored.

Jason Elkins (02:27.616)
I see that. Yeah, that's that's quite impressive. All right. Very cool.

Jason Elkins (02:49.268)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (02:50.208)
So yeah, have a massive collection of maps, all sorts of stuff.

Jason Elkins (02:54.686)
I'm going to show my ignorance here. What's National Geographic doing these days? I haven't seen one in a while.

Gary (02:58.614)
Not a lot. They're suffering. They are, I mean, they exist. They expanded, you know, in the nineties into, you know, they were always the National Geographic was a nonprofit organization and the magazine was the magazine for their membership, kind of like AARP has a magazine and things like that. And then they created a for-profit division and they expanded into a cable network, all sorts of stuff.

and they invested into a lot of things which really aren't doing very well today. Basic Cable is not doing great. Magazines are not doing great. They closed National Geographic Traveler. They had an adventure magazine that they closed. National Geographic, the main magazine still exists, but you know, they're not getting the revenue that they used to. I know people who work there and you know,

Jason Elkins (03:33.319)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (03:56.701)
I've just heard of litany of kind of bad things over the years. I mean, they still exist. And I think they'll always kind of exist in some form. And maybe the solution is they go back to their original roots of being a, organization rather than a commercial enterprise. But I think the commercial part of it was bought by Disney.

Jason Elkins (04:11.038)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, okay. Well, and that's going to tie into our conversation a bit because at some point we're going to be kind of discussing, you know, the changes you've been through changes as through your career in this industry. And now we're having a conversation on a video call from, you know, I don't know where you right now. Okay, you're in Wisconsin now. I'm here in Columbia and we're doing this video call. You're a podcaster.

Gary (04:29.462)
Wisconsin.

Jason Elkins (04:37.032)
photographer, blogger, and quite a few things that you've done. So you've seen a lot of those changes yourself that maybe some of the similar things impacted National Geographic. And before we go there, I want to I want to go back. OK, so your childhood National Geographic, you never saw the saltwater until you're 21. You mentioned that your parents weren't big travelers. But other than National Geographic, was there anybody individuals in your life that inspired you want to travel? You went to the saltwater at 21. Things just took off.

Gary (05:04.502)
No, I like I said, my family never traveled. Nobody in my family ever went anywhere. We drove through part of Ontario once when I was a kid going to Niagara Falls and that was my international travel experience. So I, you know, no, there was no nothing in my life that really kind of would have led people to believe that I would end up doing that.

Jason Elkins (05:27.092)
Did you kind of think you might? I mean, because you were into the National Geographic stuff. Did you think when I get out of the house, I'm going to go do this stuff? Or what were you thinking?

Gary (05:30.986)
So what happened is, no, what happened is in the nineties, I started a very early internet company. I sold that to a large multinational company in 1998. And then I conned them after the sale into sending me to all their offices around the world to talk about the internet. And so I went on a three week whirlwind tour to Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Frankfurt, Brussels.

Paris and London circumnavigated the globe. First time I had ever done that. I had to get a passport. Never did that before. And that kind of got it started. So then the year after that on my own for the heck of it, I went to Iceland. It was actually pretty easy place to get to. I went back to school to study geology and geophysics, managed to do a research trip to Argentina where we collected soil samples.

And we ended up leaving the field early. We gathered everything as quickly as we could so we could go eat steak in Buenos Aires because it was really cheap. After that, I kind of came up with this idea that I didn't want to go into academia. I did not like that world. If you're an entrepreneur, I think you can understand, know, a lot of people in academia, they're there for the safety. You know, you get tenure, you get put on this track, you just jump through these hoops. And it wasn't something that appealed to me.

And I came up with this idea of selling my home to travel around the world. had, I was in my mid thirties. had no kids, no wife. I, you know, I had sold a business. there was no reason for me not to do it. So I told everyone that's what I was going to do. And at this point in my life, everyone was like, yeah, okay, whatever Gary says he's going to do. and then in March of 2007, I closed on my home before the, the real estate bubble burst and,

set out to travel around the world. I basically, the plan was go west. And it took me about, well, the rest of 2007 really to cross the Pacific ocean. And I just went to all these different little island countries and I had a website that I started at the time, which gained a following, I think because I was doing something different. Now there's this digital nomad thing, a lot of people doing it, the time nobody was. And

Gary (07:59.38)
I was also doing an around the world trip in a way that most people, they just go to like major cities. They'll go to London, Paris, Sydney, Hong Kong, Bangkok, places like that. And I was going to Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, you know, places that a lot of people, quite frankly, have never heard of. And I think that piqued a lot of interest in my site and what I was doing. I would write articles, giving my thoughts about these places, some of their background in history and the site eventually, the website eventually became

one of the biggest travel blogs in the world. And not that that was saying much at the time because there weren't a lot of them. and that's that one year around the world ended up becoming over a decade. I just sort of never stopped.

Jason Elkins (08:43.008)
Wow. What do you think the difference is between the person that does the round the world and hits the major cities compared to the person that really just takes their time and probably gets distracted many, many times along the way, which it sounds like I don't know if distracted is the right word. You tell me.

Gary (09:02.902)
I mean, a lot of times you only have a set amount of time. You know, maybe you'll devote three months to something like this. You have to get back for something. My schedule was very open ended. I sold my house. I didn't have to be anywhere. And a lot of people also, they, and this isn't just true of that, but it's whenever they travel, they go to someplace that they know about. So I meet a lot of people, you know, just in the community I live, they say they're going to Europe.

I would say 80 % of them are all going to Italy or Ireland. That's what they know. And if they're not, maybe it's like Germany or England. And if I tell people, Croatia has this great stuff or Montenegro, that's too crazy. this goes into the problem of overtourism. It's not that there are too many tourists. It's that there are too many tourists at the same place at the same time.

Jason Elkins (09:35.967)
Hmm.

Jason Elkins (10:00.01)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (10:00.984)
because everybody knows about Venice. Everybody knows about Barcelona and I've had many conversations with people that run tourism boards that like we don't we don't need to promote Barcelona and I mean the the Spanish Tourism Board sponsors my podcast. I've talked to them about this. It's like Barcelona is good. We want people to get to the other parts of the country and they just don't know of these places, but because they know of this, that's what they want to see. They have to see this and you know I've told people it's like well we you know we're we're going to.

Bora Bora or Tahiti as like all those are fine places, but if you go to the Cook Islands, you you can have the same experience at a fraction of the price and it's like no, we we want to go to Tahiti. And.

Jason Elkins (10:43.552)
curious, what do you think the role of social media, the Instagram world has done to that? Has it made it better or worse? Because I can see scenarios where I want to go to Bora Bora because I want a picture of myself doing what people do in Bora Bora so I can put it on Instagram and they're more concerned about that. Yeah, yeah, that's what I was going to say.

Gary (10:53.278)
worse.

Gary (10:59.82)
Now they want to see a picture of an overwater bungalow. Basically, and I say this as someone who has grown several large social media accounts. have little under 200,000 people that follow me on Instagram. I could tell you before I posted a photo how well the photo would do. Photos of mountains and of certain things perform well and nothing else does.

So I have a lot, like I said, I was a very accomplished travel photographer. won pretty much every travel photography where there is to win in North America in the 2010s. A lot of my photographer friends who likewise have large social media followings, they make their money now, not by selling photos, because there's really no market for that, but by selling trips. And all their trips are to places like Iceland, Patagonia, the Canadian Rockies, where it's the same shots over and over and over. They're not really doing much else.

And so there are a couple of places that get famous on social media and then more people go there so they can basically post the same shot of them there. You know, trolls tongue in Norway or whatever. And again, it's just that's what people know. And so that's where they want to go.

Jason Elkins (12:15.506)
And some people pride themselves in going places where other people don't. I don't know if pride is the right word, but I know for example, for myself in my travels, I tend to, when I'm like, wow, this is really cool. And then I look around and there's no other tourists around. I feel like I'm really having a special experience.

And I think there are some people like that. Obviously, those are probably a lot of the people that are following you and your social media and when you were blogging because you were writing about these more off the beaten path types of places. What have you learned about human psychology that explains that?

Gary (12:52.184)
I they're just always going to be people that if everybody does X, they're going to want to do why? And the thing is, most of the places that are popular, they're popular for a reason. It's not that they're bad places. Venice is great. The pyramids are great. If you're going to be in Egypt, you should go see the pyramids because there's a reason they're pretty cool. But the thing is, you can go to Venice in December. Or or March even right where there aren't crowds.

Jason Elkins (12:57.888)
you

Jason Elkins (13:05.962)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (13:22.473)
I, I, one of my last trips before the pandemic is I went to Ibiza and Majorca in December, just before Christmas. Nobody was there. Like it was empty. I could get a, I could get a seat at a restaurant anywhere. It wasn't crowded. Hotel rooms were cheap. Yeah. It wasn't quite as, as warm as it is in the summer, but a lot warmer than where I live. That's for sure. And, all the great historical sites.

Jason Elkins (13:47.05)
Wisconsin.

Gary (13:52.088)
that I visited and driving around the island and just experiencing all these things rather than just sitting at a beach. That was all still there, all still wonderful, still sunny. But a lot of people just don't think to do that.

Jason Elkins (14:08.148)
Yeah, no, that's, it's interesting. I, I'm pretty fascinated by the psychology of people. actually read recently, and maybe this is maybe this, you can relate to this, but I was reading about, I can't remember the name of the, the, the word that they use, but it's basically the diagnosis of wanderlust, almost travel addiction. And I don't know, maybe you've read about this stuff as well, but they were, they're talking about actually the term like extreme world traveler.

type of what was coming up in these articles about people that just have this need or this desire to just experience things, specifically travel. And I understand that there's now a diagnosis in the diagnostic manual for psychiatric disorders. Do you know the word? Are you familiar with what I'm speaking on? I'm sure you can speak to it anyway.

Gary (15:01.216)
I'm, I'm, I've come across what you're talking about. I think there are different types of people. So I'm, I'm active in several groups of people that are like trying to visit every country in the world. Some of those people, but some of those people don't want to experience anything. are literally just going through a checklist. There was this one woman and she visited every country in the world and then she made a big media thing about it. I'm the first woman to do it. She wasn't, you know,

Jason Elkins (15:13.086)
Yeah, that conversation came up in the articles I was reading. Yeah.

Gary (15:29.144)
lot many other women were found like dozens that had done it before her. And a lot of the places she literally got off the plane, got her passport stamped, went back on the plane. And. I don't see the point in that. There's a couple of places I've been to where I've been literally, you know, a couple hundred meters from the border and I could have crossed and I just never did because it wasn't there was no reason to just getting your passport stamp or passport stamped doesn't.

Jason Elkins (15:39.466)
Yeah.

Gary (15:58.742)
do anything for me. One of the big things I did was always visit UNESCO World Heritage Sites. And some of them are very well known, you know, like Venice or the pyramids or things like that. But then I would say the vast majority of them nobody's ever heard of. And you really have to go to your way to visit some of these. And I've made some very lengthy trips to very obscure places to see things that when I showed up was like, we don't really get any visitors here. Why are you here?

Jason Elkins (16:00.032)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (16:28.568)
and to go see and photograph some of these sites. So it's, you know, when I, when I say a lot of people, like, well, how many countries have you been to? And that's the discussion because it's like, how do you define a country? But what the real thing is like, yeah, I've been to Australia. I've been to every state in Australia. I've been to every Canadian province three times. I've been to every U S state twice. I've been to every state in Germany. I've been to, you know, every country in the United Kingdom. So it's,

doing exploration within these places, not simply landing at the airport, checking a box off and claiming victory.

Jason Elkins (17:07.004)
It's, there's a, you know, kind of a phrase or whatever, kind of like, you know, it's about, is it about the destination or the journey? Some people really are focused on the destination. They want to get to the destination to the point that they kind of just walk with blinders on, don't look at anything else until they get to the destination. And then oftentimes they may be disappointed or whatever. You sound more like a kind of journey type of guy, but you, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but maybe. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking like.

Gary (17:32.95)
No, it's a destination. Because our journeys today are on an airplane and flying sucks. There's nothing noble or romantic about sitting in a seat for 12 hours to get to, mean, so this whole journey thing, maybe that was true in an era of steam ships when it took a month to cross the Atlantic and you could meet people and talk to them or something. That's not true in a plane. Not at all.

Jason Elkins (17:46.42)
Well, I'm with you on that part.

Jason Elkins (18:00.192)
But I'm curious, well, hold on though, because you mentioned like these UNESCO World Heritage Sites that are quite a journey to get there. You're not flying right into that heritage site. So.

Gary (18:09.558)
No, I'm usually renting a car or getting a train or something.

Jason Elkins (18:13.056)
All right, do you enjoy that part? you feel like you get, do you?

Gary (18:16.116)
I would prefer to always drive than be on a train. If that's a reasonable option that's available.

Jason Elkins (18:25.536)
and what I hear in that, well, I don't know, why is that? Tell me why that is.

Gary (18:29.976)
because you have control over where you're going. You can do a side trip if you want. You can stop. You can see something. A lot of people are especially Americans. If you go to a place like Australia or the UK or Ireland where they drive in the other side of the road, they're terrified at the idea of doing that. And it's something that's really not hard to do. You just have to do it. And the first time I ever drove in the other side of the road, bought a, I rented a camper van.

Jason Elkins (18:32.296)
I thought you might say that.

Jason Elkins (18:49.397)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (18:59.594)
in downtown Auckland and I had to leave Auckland. And so here I am in the middle of this major city and I'm just, turned off the radio. I put both hands at like, you know, two and 10 and just repeated to myself, stand the left, stand the left, stand the left. And it's actually super easy to do once you get on a highway because it's, you're just going straight. But in a, in a city, when you're turning and getting on roundabouts and like, I got to do this the other way. And,

It took me a few hours to get the hang of it. And I've driven so many miles now on the other side of the road that I consider myself kind an ambidextrous driver.

Jason Elkins (19:37.984)
Have you had those moments where you forget? I mean, obviously, yeah, sometimes, but I remember I had an experience. My father had spent quite a bit of time in Australia and he'd come back to visit and he picked us up at school and we got in the truck and, and he pulled out onto the left side of the road. I mean, outside the school, I was like, okay, kind of muscle memory or whatever builds up. No.

Gary (19:56.076)
Yeah, I did that once.

Gary (20:01.44)
But that doesn't last very long. You realize pretty quick. yeah, because the drivers, the steering wheel is on the other side of the car too. So the thing that's usually the same, and there are some countries where this is an exception, is that the driver's side is usually in the median of the road. But there are places like the Bahamas where they drive on the left, but they have American cars.

Jason Elkins (20:09.876)
Yeah, yeah, that helps.

Jason Elkins (20:19.84)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (20:23.167)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Gary (20:26.292)
Or places in the Pacific like Micronesia, where most of their cars are Japanese cars, but they drive on the right. So they're doing it just the opposite.

Jason Elkins (20:36.072)
And maybe if they're used to it, but I think of like, you know, if you're in London or in England and you take the, I guess the tunnel or whatever they call it to go over to mainland Europe, I can imagine that if you're doing that very often, that can get kind of a kind of confusing, but yeah.

Gary (20:50.764)
The only border crossing I've done where they switch sides was going from Laos to Thailand. And I remember going over the border and they just had a sign. was like, remember to drive on the other side of the road.

Jason Elkins (21:05.05)
Yeah, so well, I guess if you're I heard you say, you know, I'd rather rent a car than take a train and it's because I can kind of look around a little bit. I can stop. have control over if I see something interesting, I can pull over, stop and go look at it, which is, guess, where I was going with that. Is it about the journey or the destination type of thing? I was just trying to get a feel for do you obviously not the flights? I get that. OK.

Gary (21:27.224)
I mean, the reason you go on the journey is for the destination. You know, I mean, you're not going to get in a car and just drive around in circles to go nowhere. You want to have a destination in mind. So I do think it's ultimately about the destination. I mean, we talk about destinations, but there are choices you have to make and how you get there. Like I said, I, you know, if it was possible and I wish somebody would do this, you know, it used to be if you went from,

Jason Elkins (21:46.997)
Yeah.

Gary (21:56.418)
the US to Europe, you had to go by ship, right? Before World War II, and aviation became a big thing. Now that's really not an option. Cunard does have a cruise that they do, but they actually go far slower than they need to because they want to make a thing out of it. So it's like a one week trip from New York to Southampton, I think. But they could do it, I've asked people, like they could do it in four days. If there was a company that did a low cost cruise,

Jason Elkins (22:18.281)
Hmm.

Gary (22:25.698)
from New York to Southampton in four days, I would do that every time going to Europe. Because they now have internet on board. You have Starlink and you could be productive. You would have an actual room. You could sleep on a bed rather than being uncomfortable in an economy class seat. Like the worst cabin in a cruise ship is far, that's better than a first-class, you know, lay down bed in an airplane.

Jason Elkins (22:31.221)
Well.

Jason Elkins (22:49.242)
You

Gary (22:54.136)
because it's an actual bed with a shower and you can and you can adjust your time zone, you know, an hour every day. Boom, there's no jet lag when you arrive. So I would do that. I think a lot of people would too. Maybe it wouldn't be the majority of people. You know, most people would want to save time. But if you have the time, I think it would be a great option. I keep waiting for someone to do it. I would totally because there are repositioning cruises as well, but they only happen like twice a year.

Jason Elkins (23:01.194)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (23:21.536)
Yeah, I think I would do that as well because if you're able to do whatever you do normally, work for example, if you can spend four days working and avoid that whole hassle of the flying and you don't have anything else to do, then why not? mean, it's, yeah, that makes sense. All right, so take me from, so let's go back. You started the website hugely successful with your travel blogging and...

Where should we go from there?

Gary (23:53.912)
I traveled around the world for, you know, 10 years, pretty much nonstop. eventually got a, started to get burned out. got a home base. lived in Minneapolis for a couple of years, where I would be on the road about half to a third of the year. and then the pandemic hit. I remember I was, my last international trip was in Portugal. I come home on February 28th, 2020 get COVID.

right away, probably picked it up at the airport.

Jason Elkins (24:27.239)
you're one of those guys that brought it over.

Gary (24:29.752)
I was probably one of many. They kept doing tests where they found out that it was actually here like earlier and earlier than we thought, like going back to like November or October of 2019. So I'm sick the first week of March, and this is early enough where nothing's closing down yet and there aren't enough tests available. And they're like, you know, save it for first responders and like whatever. I get better after a few days. I felt horrible. And then.

Jason Elkins (24:37.205)
Yeah.

Gary (24:58.328)
kind of in the middle of March, 2020, everything starts shutting down. The entire tourism industry basically collapses in a two week period. And everything I had going on disappeared. All the contracts I had traffic to the website. People just stopped being interested in travel because the thing is most people are only care about travel when they're about to go on a trip. It's not something you follow like sports or technology or politics or things like that. Something's always going on. And

I had some, some problems with where travel media was going even before the pandemic, because a lot had changed since I first started my website, social media became prominent and they just sucked the life out of everything. Instead of people going to your website, they now went to Facebook or Twitter and then they put in an algorithm and they thwarted what people saw. So you had to either pay money or play the game and do the click bait type stuff. and

By the time the pandemic hit, you know, talking to other bloggers, they were all getting 90 % of their traffic from Google searches. And what happened was instead of talking about your travels or your thoughts of traveling around the world, it just all became 15 things to do in Las Vegas. You know, everyone was doing the same articles based on keyword research to get traffic and you didn't even need to travel anymore. Right. None of that, none of that actually matters.

Jason Elkins (26:20.734)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (26:22.616)
And I kind of saw the writing on the wall. And sure enough, this year, 2024, Google changed their algorithm and most travel blogs got hammered. Like they lost, you know, 80, 90 % of their traffic because it was all based on one thing. And because I kind of figured that this was eventually going to happen, I decided to do a big pivot during the pandemic because I didn't feel I could rely on the travel industry anymore. And I launched a new podcast that wasn't

a travel podcast per se. call it Travel Adjacent. It's more of an educational show that allows me to talk about all the places I visited and the experiences I had, but it wasn't a travel show per se. Stay at this hotel, go to this place. It wasn't that. It was just telling the history of these places, which people could be interested in every day without necessarily wanting to go on a trip. And that's pretty much what I've been doing ever since.

Jason Elkins (27:17.809)
And you're doing one episode a day, right? I mean, it's the daily. And I mean, you and I, I'd be fascinated to understand the work that goes into that, how you do that, how you batch that. And I don't want to bore the listeners. You don't batch it.

Gary (27:30.198)
don't batch it. There's no batching at all. I have not written tomorrow's show.

Jason Elkins (27:35.336)
Wow! Okay, I'm impressed.

Gary (27:36.906)
I can't. I write a 2000 word term paper every day.

Jason Elkins (27:42.1)
Wow.

I'm not even sure what to say.

Gary (27:45.08)
Yeah, literally the ability to write more than one a day is not. Yeah. I am this is just in time inventory. There's no what I do do is I will. Run reruns. I have enough episodes now I this is tomorrow's episode will be number 5800 or or 1585. That I'll just do reruns, you know, maybe two times a week and.

Jason Elkins (27:50.492)
Okay, wow.

All right.

Jason Elkins (28:13.266)
Okay. I was wondering how you take some, some time off and step away from that. Cause that would be, yeah. Okay. All right. Well that's, that's pretty cool. And, I've listened to a few of your episodes and I love what you say. said travel adjacent because I think, you know, our audience is the same, right? It's the same type of person, not necessarily. mean, I don't know. I'm curious what you think, but somebody that would have read your travel blog, you know,

Gary (28:27.084)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (28:40.832)
10 years ago, that type of person is still going to be interested in probably most of the episodes you do. Do you feel or do you feel like it's shifted your audience?

Gary (28:47.35)
Yeah, no, I think it's it's by and large that I mean there's lots of things that are travel adjacent.

Travel can be seen of as its own thing. But like I said, people are only interested in travel when they're going on a trip. But there's a whole host of things where you can look at it through the lens of travel. One of the best is food. Anthony Bourdain's show was not a travel show. It was a food show, but he looked at it through the lens of travel. Every episode was something to do with food. It wasn't this hotel, this, the airport, whatever.

Jason Elkins (29:01.472)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (29:07.456)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (29:12.354)
Right. Yep. Yep.

Gary (29:24.116)
It was, it was a food show. know people that visit sports stadiums. I know people that are trying to visit golf courses that necessitates travel, but the focus is sports really. And they're looking at it through the lens of travel. And what I'm doing is history and education. And a lot of that, not always, but a lot of the shows can be looked at through the lens of travel. And this is something that I.

Jason Elkins (29:36.341)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (29:51.818)
I've had a hard time getting people in the travel industry to figure out that they just can't get their head around it. That, you know, you have to write an article about our place and it has, you know, it has to be on a travel site or something. And I'm like, well, people are going to find it through search, do a search on any topic you can think of about your destination. There are already 10 articles on page one. Why do you need more?

Right? What you want to do is reach people. And if you're doing a search, you already know about it, right? You're doing planning at that point, not discovery. The way you learn about things is serendipity, but you didn't even know you didn't know it right. One of the reasons why filming locations from the Game of Thrones became tourist attractions. It's not because people were looking for travel destinations. They were like, that's cool. I want to go see that.

Jason Elkins (30:20.156)
And there are 10 best places to visit in wherever it is.

Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (30:48.134)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. They never would have found that had it not been for watching an episode or two or three or the whole series. OK. All right.

Gary (30:50.568)
Gary (30:57.858)
But yeah, it's, but it's been very successful. And the weird thing is when I was doing travel photography, running my blog, I used to run tours where, I'd have to pull teeth to get 12 people to show up. There's small group tours. I could probably fill a riverboat now with 150 people easily with the size of my audience that I have for my podcast. So not talking directly about travel.

Jason Elkins (31:19.903)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (31:28.266)
I can sell more travel. And this is something that people haven't right, but people. There are some people that have figured this out and they realize that this is. In you know, maybe it's not the only way, but it certainly is a powerful method to because what is marketing ultimately? It's introducing people to something that they don't aren't aware of, right? Here's my company. Here's my product. Here's my business. I didn't know about that. I may I might be a good fit for it.

Jason Elkins (31:30.43)
Right. Cause you've got people listening for another reason. You've got people listening.

Gary (31:58.128)
And that's all it is. And the way you do that is getting in front of people who, you know, otherwise would not be able to do that. And you do that by going to these adjacent places where people aren't necessarily there for travel, but may be open to it.

Jason Elkins (32:13.824)
You know, and that's, that's interesting. It's it kind of reinforces my thought process with, this podcast, anybody that's listened to more than one episode knows it's generally more about the person. You know, this is not a come on, we're going to speak 45 minutes about the Balkans. You know, it's let's connect with the person. Let's have it. Hopefully an interesting conversation about what it's like to grow up and go into tourism or what, you know, what things came up along through the course of somebody's life that led him to that. And then.

Of course, yeah, if they own a tour operation in the Balkans, then we're going to talk a little bit about that. And then with the hope that somebody listened to it and feel a connection with the person that I'm having a conversation with and then, you know, but at the same time, it's not paid marketing. I'm not, nobody's paying me. We're just having a conversation.

Gary (32:54.445)
So.

No, but podcasting is qualitatively different. To give you an example, I did a show called This Week in Travel from 2009 to I think we killed it, 2022 in the pandemic. Because we had nothing to talk about. So maybe it's 2022. We did it for like 11, 12 years.

The show did okay. I think in a normal month, we would get about 20 to 25,000 downloads of the show. We did a show roughly every week. If you look at those numbers compared to the other things I was doing, my website, my social media, where I had six figure followings on all the major platforms, when I would meet one of my followers in person, which happened pretty frequently, almost always the f**k

first thing they mentioned was the podcast. And the reason was they heard my voice and that you could develop a bond with someone that you can't do through social media or through text. And podcasting is so much more powerful. The average amount of time spent when someone visits my website is under a minute, 45 to 55 seconds. So I actually calculated like how much time

How much more time do people spend on my podcast than they do on my website? And the answer was approximately 10,000 times more.

Gary (34:28.376)
Instead of a 45 second page view, they're 12 to 13 minutes listening to my voice, which is, you know, that's how you develop a parasocial relationship with someone and you really develop a following. And so I'm guessing the people that listen to the show are going to be far more apt to, you know, care about what you have to say or want to meet you or be more interested than they would if they were just read the transcript of this.

Jason Elkins (34:57.3)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree completely. Cause there's, you know, if you just look at the breakdown of what percentage of communication comes from the words and then there's the tonality and body language, which kind of can, can mix together. We're not getting a lot of body language, in a podcast. but your tone can change, you know, and the fact that I'm looking at you and having a conversation with you. You know, I can see your facial expressions, your body language. And I believe that that carries over to, the audience as well.

Gary (35:24.184)
And you know, if you're involved in the tourism industry and you're listening to this, like you have a small tour company or something, starting a podcast is not a bad idea. It costs almost nothing. You can get a good microphone that is plenty good enough for under $100. You can get hosting services that cost next to nothing, less than $20 a month. And you can do your own show. So there's a local

micro brewery next to where I live. And I'm friends with the owners. The brewer there is a former astrophysicist from NASA, started a brewery. His wife is a professor of chemistry at a local college. And we started a podcast and we're about 37 episodes into it. And it talks about the history, the culture, the science, the economics of beer and brewing. And

Jason Elkins (36:16.905)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (36:19.872)
Our numbers are not compared to like my main show. They're very tiny, right? I think we're doing maybe 2000 downloads a month. But just the other day, some guy came in, he drove three hours out of his way to visit their brewery because he listens to their podcast. He drives around in an RV a lot, enjoys visiting breweries, found this show, listens to it while he's driving. He's like, I got to go there. He comes up and he comes in the middle of the afternoon when there's not a lot of people there.

And he does a sampling of all their business like this. This is the best brewer I've been to leaves a fantastic review and everything. And that's just one anecdotal example of the power of a podcast. You don't need great numbers, but what you do need is if somebody is interested in going on a trip and they discover your show and they learn about something like, you talk to the chef. I want to go to that place. I didn't know about that place. Or there's this bike ride I can take. That's the power of it.

And that's very difficult to do if it's just a page on a website.

Jason Elkins (37:23.966)
Yeah, you're not going to get that. know, nobody's going to come in all excited to meet you and like experience it because while I read a blog post of the top five breweries and, and wherever. so that's great. And several of the guests that I've interviewed here on the show are either, you know, most of them are tour operators. Several of them are doing their own podcasts and several others have expressed an interest in doing that. So maybe they're listening right now and I'm going to take advantage of the fact that we have you here.

Gary (37:33.975)
Right.

Jason Elkins (37:53.056)
As you mentioned, it's not terribly expensive. do this show on the road. I've got my Yeti microphone that was, I don't know, 150 bucks or something, and no real sound studio, obviously. I'm sitting in front of my regular Microsoft laptop using the Riverside platform, which is, I think I pay, I don't know, 15 bucks a month or something. And we're generating these episodes. We've done about 90 now.

And I also recognize that there's a lot of other people that have decided to do a podcast and they got three or four episodes in, or maybe only published their pilot episode and didn't go any further. So what would you share as kind of the, know, what's the thing that typically gets in the way? What's the thing that you always want to caution people? If they come to you and say, Gary, I want to do a podcast. What's the other side of the story other than it's cheap, it's easy. You can do it on your own, but there's another side.

Gary (38:44.62)
A lot of people want to do a podcast and a lot of people want to write a book, but they don't want to write a book. They want to have written a book.

Jason Elkins (38:52.177)
yeah. OK.

Gary (38:54.392)
And the reason, so the vast majority of podcasts never make it to episode seven. And the reason is people go like, yeah, I'd like to have a podcast and they do it. And then something comes up and something has to get put aside and it gets put aside as the podcast. Cause it was never a priority. It was just a thing that they wanted to do. And then, you know, life gets in the way and the next thing, you know, they just stopped recording it. When I started my podcast, I had no choice. It's not that.

I quit my job, my job quit me. The pandemic hit, you know, 95 % of my income dried up and I was like, I have got to make this work. And I threw myself at it. And, you know, there's a period of about 18 months where I made nothing or next to nothing. and then the show just took off and now it's a very well paying job for me. but it was the tenacity to stick with it. And I told the people with the beer podcast and was like,

Jason Elkins (39:25.257)
Mm-hmm, okay.

Gary (39:52.876)
you know, expect about 18 months. That's what you're going to see before and until you really start to see traction. Because up until that point, people don't know if the you know, if the show is going to be around or whatever, and you need time to develop a following and word of mouth. And we're all like I said, with this guy that visited and there have been other examples, there are feedback, you know, positive things that we're seeing. There are regulars all listen to the podcast.

And they're learning things about the beer being brewed and the history and everything else that they didn't know. So there's been tangible benefits, but you have to make it a priority. And if it's not a priority, then it's probably going to fail.

Jason Elkins (40:21.056)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (40:25.599)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (40:35.656)
I love that you shared that and priority can come from a few different things. One can be financial, like my job left me. need to do, I got to do something. so that can be a big motivator and you've got, you know, the skillset in the background probably seem from my perspective might seem like a real natural progression with, with my show, you know, anybody that's, that's listening is maybe they, I don't think I've ever discussed this before, but like, you know, I'm

Currently as of this recording, I don't have any sponsors. I haven't really spent a lot of time looking for sponsors for the show per se. I don't have the listenership at this point to you know, I'm like, nobody's sending me a monthly paycheck. And I believe we've had so much success and I've been real tenacious about it because number one, I just wanted to have the conversations. I have a personal desire to just have these conversations, whether it's making money for me or not.

And then, and then two, use it, you know, I connect with, with people like yourself and other guests that I've ever reviewed on the show. And, you know, obviously with the hope that some business opportunities will come out of that as a digital marketing person. but that's for me is just, I just really wanted to have the conversations. I had someone recently approached me and say, I think I'd like to do a podcast because I think it's going to be good for my client retention. And I said, okay, but are the conversations you envision having with your guests are these.

conversations that you can get excited about or these conversations you want to that you believe you can personally get something out of anyway because I think that's important maybe it's not important for everybody I don't know what do think

Gary (42:07.488)
No, that's true. And this is a case where the journey does have to be as important as the destination. You have to enjoy doing it. You have to enjoy the day to day grind. You know, for me, I get the research topics I'm interested in and talk about it. So it's something I can, you know, even though, you know, I do have a pretty busy schedule doing the show, it's something I enjoy doing. So.

Jason Elkins (42:12.128)
yeah, you brought that back around. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (42:23.744)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (42:34.456)
It does have to be more than just, obviously you should have some sort of goal in terms of marketing the show. And I should add most podcasts will never get to a point where they're going to get sponsors. Never because that's a very high threshold because a lot of advertisers, they're they're not looking for shows. It's all just done in bulk. They're looking for numbers, right? You know, Budweiser and Coke in these places, they're just tons of money. They're spreading it out.

Jason Elkins (42:41.161)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (43:04.274)
And it costs about the in terms of time. It costs as much to deal with a very large podcast as it does a very small podcast. So they're going to deal with a very large one. And what most ad networks are looking for is like 10,000 downloads an episode. Like I said, which is a very high number. But that being said, there are a lot of podcasts below that threshold, oftentimes well below that threshold that do very well because they're selling their own product or service.

Jason Elkins (43:20.287)
Right.

Jason Elkins (43:32.41)
Exactly,

Gary (43:33.236)
And they can make very good margins on that without having to do podcast ads. And so that is.

Jason Elkins (43:40.274)
Right, right. And I can I can say or and say that my podcast is sponsored by Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Marketing. It is in a sense, you know, so and, you know, several of the guests have had built some websites for them and that's great. And that's that's it's nice to have a financial part of it as well. But at the same time, if someone came to me and said, geez, Jason, you could do a.

financial investing podcast and make a ton of money and you'd get all kinds of sponsors. Yeah, I'd make it three episodes before I'm like, okay, I'm out. It's just, you know, so for me, I think I'm definitely a journey type of person. But at the same time, if you don't have a destination as you were touching on, you know, it's great to have a destination because a destination will cause you to take that first step and, and, take the journey. So I appreciate that. So.

I'm curious. So you mentioned one thing I want to touch on. It's not directly related to what we were just discussing, but it's relevant to me because I've been traveling full time. I've been doing the digital nomad thing that's so popular now for the last few years. And one of the things you mentioned was the word burnout. said you got burnout, you went home, and then you were traveling less, maybe a few months, six months a year there for a period of time.

So anybody that was listens to you and says, I'm travel. I was a travel blogger, had the travel website and I was traveling around the world doing all this stuff and they can't even imagine how could you get burnt out on that?

Gary (45:12.45)
That's because they think you're on vacation. And you're not on vacation. I was working. was, and I was going at a much harder pace than a lot of people do. I wasn't just getting an apartment somewhere and hanging out for three months before moving to the next city. I was, I was traveling and, you do get burned out doing that. And they envision, you know, that kind of travel as, like I said, being on vacation, because that's what they think of travel as.

Jason Elkins (45:14.591)
Yeah.

Gary (45:40.266)
I'm leaving home for a limited period of time and then I get to come back. One of the first things that hit me when I started traveling full time is that I sold my home and I had a moment of this where I was like in Hawaii and I was like, I can't go back. There is nowhere to go back to. This is my reality. And it was a huge mindset shift where I had to accept the fact that where I am right now, that's home. And so yeah, that's.

Jason Elkins (45:55.146)
Yeah. Yeah.

Gary (46:10.828)
Just do it. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (46:11.028)
That can be difficult. That can be difficult. I remember the first time I kind of had my first breakdown. I think I'd been traveling probably four or five months and I thought, man, life is amazing. Life is amazing. And one night I went into the kitchen at this place I'm staying at, the shared kitchen with five other nomads. And I was ready to make some dinner and I just, honestly, I just broke down in tears. I was like,

These are not my pots and pans. It's not my kitchen. I like to cook. I'm a foodie. And I just realized, wow, I really miss my kitchen back home. Well, my kitchen no longer exists back home. It's someone else's kitchen now. And all those pots and pans went to Goodwill or whatever. And it was a real moment for me to recognize, like, I can't just go back to my house, to my place, to the kitchen. And that was pretty profound for me. So I always tell people, it's like,

You know, it is a big change. It's hard when people ask you, where do you live? Well, I don't know.

Gary (47:12.758)
No, I another weird thing is so I would say in the last year and a half, I got a new place, moved back. I lived in Minneapolis right on the same street where the riots took place. I left, moved back to my hometown and I put a lot of my stuff in storage. And so it was only within the last year that I've taken a lot of this stuff out. And it was very strange because I packed this stuff away in 2007 and it was like, I just hit pause.

And then, you know, decade and a half later, I'm now hitting play again and taking out dishes and pots and things like that, that had just been sitting there for the longest time. And it was kind of a surreal experience. But the other thing is, you know, I went and did this and life went on. All my friends got married, had kids, got promotions, moved for jobs.

have other things going on in their life now. you know, Gary's done traveling around the world. Well, it's a, you know, it's a different world that I'm coming back to.

Jason Elkins (48:20.778)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. It sounds like you kept a lot of your stuff for kind of that. Eventually someday I might want this stuff, right? So you put it into storage. I went the opposite route. I got rid of everything. I left a cast iron skillet and a Dutch oven at my mom's house, but I told her I said this is yours now. It's not mine, but don't don't give it away or don't sell it because I might want it someday. And I think that as I started my course and I'd gotten rid of everything.

It became my identity became, okay, I'm a traveler. I got to be a traveler. I don't have any other choice. This is my identity. And I recognized that had I kept some stuff, maybe had I even kept my apartment for a few months, I might've taken a different path. might have just traveled for a few months, gone back, traveled for a few months. I don't know. So I guess where I'm going with that is would you advise, if someone came up to you and said, want to go start traveling the world.

What would your advice be as far as how, should they jump right into the deep end with both feet or kind of dip their toes in? What would you advise? Well, yeah. Okay.

Gary (49:28.898)
All depends on their circumstances. Not everybody has the luxury to go sell their stuff and travel. They may have family obligations or a job or whatever. I encouraged everyone to at least take one three month long extended trip at some point in their life. But everyone's circumstances are going to be different. So, but I suffered the same thing when I finally decided to get an apartment after.

traveling nonstop. was like, well, that was my identity. If I'm not, if I'm not this guy anymore, why would people care, pay attention? It turns out they don't care. That wasn't a big deal.

Jason Elkins (49:58.46)
Mmm. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (50:08.037)
No, I think you're right. I think that there I've been, you know, like I said, three years now, I suspect there's some times that I may have said, you know what, maybe I'm going the wrong direction. Maybe I need to adjust a little bit. But it's like, my identity, I told everybody I'm going traveling. I told everybody I sold all my stuff. And as you travel, you tell everybody you sold all your stuff. And then at some point, I think in my case was like.

I can't go back. can't change it because then it's like putting my tail between my legs and crawling back home and admitting that I was wrong on some level. So these are just the things that bounce around in my head as I continue my journey.

Gary (50:43.928)
But just, you know, I went back to the US. It's not like I didn't stay in the country. even, you know, would stay with my parents for a while. Did trips around the US. You know, I gave my parents my car, just said do whatever with it. I sold it to him for $1 and when I came back there's like, if you want to use, know, whatever they they didn't need a second one. So I mean, there's there's lots of things you can do. You don't have to do anything.

Jason Elkins (51:06.77)
I should have done that. That would have been a good idea.

Jason Elkins (51:14.332)
Mm-hmm. I love it.

Gary (51:14.833)
Jason Elkins (51:17.92)
Well, I appreciate you touching on that because I think some people to listen to the show are aspiring to maybe travel a little bit more, kind of make it a lifestyle. But I think you're right. think take a three month trip, you know, by yourself and go figure out what it's like to travel by yourself because that can be a big shock. It's a lot different than a one or two week trip. I worked in the travel business long time. I've traveled a lot by myself at three or four weeks at a time, but I think three months is probably a really

Gary (51:45.218)
But you know, those short, you know, if you're traveling for a week or two, that's vacation. And I talked, but you know, I talked to people, it's like, how can you afford to do it? And it's because in their mind, when you go on vacation, it's not like you can say to your bank, Hey, I'm not going to be using the house for two weeks. So I'm not going to pay mortgage on it, or I'm not going to pay rent. That's not how it works. All your other expenses keep going on and you're going on vacation on top of it. Right. It's an additional expense.

Jason Elkins (51:50.524)
or a work trip in my case, but yeah.

Jason Elkins (52:13.044)
Yeah.

Gary (52:15.128)
But when you get rid of everything, then that changes the economics of it completely. And I don't think people have ever really thought about it. Okay, how much do you spend on life? Your car, your oil changes, your gas and electric, your rent, your mortgage, all this stuff, add it all up. And how much does it cost to get a place in Costa Rica or Bangkok or wherever? Not very much. Cause you're not paying for a lot of that extra stuff. Food's a lot cheaper.

Jason Elkins (52:40.128)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (52:45.36)
And, yeah, that's, but the point being it's not a vacation. It's your life. You're just living in a different place.

Jason Elkins (52:47.434)
You've got public transport. You've got all these things. Yeah. Yeah. My, my son, he's 18 and he's got a lot of his friends that he likes to talk about how his dad, you know, as a world traveler and his friends, like, wow, your dad must be rich. Well, no, but I'll tell you what, I can live a better quality of life traveling than I can, especially because it's important to me. But, you know,

The expenses can be quite a bit different as you as you already touched on and you can actually go travel and have a life unless you're trying to maintain the house and the car and all the other things, other things back home. Anyway, I appreciate you sharing that part of the story with me. We've discussed quite a few things and I want to be respectful of your time. I'm curious, what did I forget to ask you? What should I have asked you or what do you want to make sure that our listeners know about you travel in general or anything really before we wrap up?

Gary (53:43.512)
Check out my podcast, everything everywhere daily, wherever you're listening to this show.

Jason Elkins (53:45.204)
Yep. Yep. All right. Yep. Very cool. And that will be in the show notes here on my show. So definitely jump over. I've listed a few episodes now and it's, it's something that, you know, it's like basically 15 minutes a day, right? And it's, it's interesting stuff. So anybody likes podcasts, definitely should check that out and just really appreciate you coming on the show and I'll look forward to maybe collaborating on some future projects with you in the future. Thanks, Gary. Appreciate you.

Gary (54:14.104)
Thanks for having me.