How 2,100+ Podcast Episodes Built a Top Show | Gary Arndt's Daily Podcast Formula

What does it take to create more than 2,100 podcast episodes and build an audience that keeps coming back?

In this episode, we sit down with travel photographer, entrepreneur, and podcaster Gary Arndt to uncover the systems, mindset, and strategy behind one of the most impressive publishing streaks in podcasting. After traveling the world for 13 years and visiting over 200 countries, Gary found himself at a crossroads during the pandemic. What emerged was a daily podcast that has become a masterclass in consistency, audience building, and content creation.

Gary shares why publishing frequency matters, how he structures his episodes, the surprising math behind podcast monetization, and why creating content for yourself may be the best audience strategy available. He also explains how a simple list of 100 episode ideas helped fuel years of podcast growth.

Whether you're a business owner, marketer, or podcaster looking to improve your content strategy, this conversation is packed with practical insights on brand building with podcasting, marketing with podcasting, client attraction podcasting, and creating a sustainable content engine.

What You'll Learn:

✅ Why consistency beats perfection in podcasting
✅ The advantages of a daily publishing schedule
✅ How to monetize without overwhelming listeners with ads
✅ Why audience avatars can be simpler than you think
✅ The importance of maintaining an episode idea bank
✅ How podcasting can create long-term business opportunities

If you're considering starting a podcast or want to get more value from your existing show, this episode delivers actionable tips you can implement immediately.

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Transcript

0:00

Today's guest has over twenty one hundred episodes that are out there. That is a lot of podcasting, and that is a lot of lessons that we can learn from this one. Really interesting. Stay tuned. Gary Arndt that once, once again, I think I'm getting that right. You said one hard dramatic syllable is what you said right before we started recording here, I loved it. You have such a unique story. You spent thirteen years, you traveled two hundred countries. You have been all over the damn place. I think that that's that's an accurate statement. Yeah. It's even more unique. Before that, I was in the right place at the right time. In the nineties, I started an internet company, sold it before the dot com bubble burst, got bored, went back to school, studied geology and geophysics, realized I didn't want to be an academic. And then came up with the idea of traveling the world, sold my home, thought I'd travel around the world for a year or two, turned into thirteen. Um, then the pandemic hit, which was not good. If you were a travel content creator or a travel company or anything involved in the travel industry. So what happened is, quite literally, I can, I can almost give you the rundown. January twenty eighth, twenty twenty. I come home from my last international trip. I have not been out of the country since I came home from Portugal. March first I get Covid and I am sick for I assume it's Covid. I never got tested because it was really early on. Still, there were no tests available. They were like, you know, I'll save it for the healthcare people. Uh, pretty sure it was just Covid. I felt horrible. That put me under for about seven to ten days. And then middle of the month, everything shuts down. And I'm thinking, well, it'll probably be done by April or May. No, that that doesn't happen. It was not I'm and I, I had my concerns about where, uh, travel blogging and things like. And I, you know, I have a fair had a fairly big website, very popular social media accounts. Uh, I was a pretty recognized photographer. I'd won every major travel photography award there was to win. Um, but things weren't looking good before the pandemic. It had become highly, uh, concentrated into just SEO, which meant that you constantly had to appease the Google algorithm, which meant you didn't have to actually travel. It didn't matter anymore. Uh, when I first started blogging back in two thousand and six, it was that was social media. It was before Twitter, before Facebook. And people would come to your website and I'd have catchy, you know, clever titles for my blog posts, and that all kind of went away and I didn't like where it was going and I had to make a decision. As the pandemic became worse, I was like, I don't want to rely on just this one industry. Um, and so back in twenty eighteen, I'd come up with an idea of launching a podcast that would be like two to three hour episodes that would discuss some topic in history. Like my first episode was going to be, why is the Mona Lisa so popular? And go into the history of the painting. And long story short, it was stolen in the early twentieth century, and that's why it became popular. Um, but I did the math and it didn't really work out. So I was thinking this would be more of a hardcore history like show where longer episodes published infrequently. I've got the artwork for the show done, the theme music for the show, purchased the rights to it, never pulled the trigger. So in the pandemic, I went back to a discussion I had with a friend of mine who had launched a daily podcast, and he said it was one of the best things he had ever done. And so I did the math on this and I'm like, this makes a lot more sense. There are several variables that go into the success of a show, right? One of the biggest ones is time. Longer you've been around and another big one is number of episodes. Well, the quickest way to do that is to just publish more frequently, right? Your Daily Show is going to have seven times the number of a weekly show. More opportunities to be discovered through whatever means. And I started doing the math. It's like, well, if I put two ads in a daily show, that's fourteen ads a week. If I put fourteen ads in, say, an hour long weekly show, that would be really annoying. But if you spread it out, you know, to just two a day, it becomes kind of palatable. And so I thought I was like, well, this, this actually works kind of better. And then I bounced the idea off one of my friends who had a very successful podcast. He said, one, this is a brilliant idea. Two, you're insane because it's very hard to do a daily show. That's, that's the part where I would have come in and said the same thing because I mean it. Yeah. Like it's crazy. I was a travel guy in the pandemic. I had nothing going on. So like, I got time and a lot of times in podcasting, you'll hear people talking about creating an avatar for your audience. My avatar was me. I just made the podcast that I would listen to. I'm very curious about a great many things, which was one of the reasons I traveled so much. And so I particularly created a show. So much of what we see today is created by an algorithm, right? That is, oh, you like this? Here's more of this. And it you don't always want to see more of that. Like, yeah, I just wanted to see that one video that one time, but I don't want that to be my life now. I just so, but with a podcast, I can do something completely different every day that there's a serendipity involved for listeners to learn about something new that's not algorithmically driven. Uh, but there are topics that I found interesting. And I figure, well, if I find them interesting, other people probably will too. So I launched the show on July first, twenty twenty, and before I launched it, I created a list of one hundred show ideas, which is an exercise I believe everybody should go through before they ever launch a show. They should always know what these are. Maybe every one of those ideas doesn't turn out to be a show, but at least you have this list. And I have been using the same list in Google Docs for six years, adding to it, taking stuff away as they get done. In fact, my show today was number one on that list. It was a topic that I created six years ago that I finally did, you know, yesterday. Um, and that's been a very helpful practice. And then I just started banging away at it every single day. And I basically treated it like a job. I, to me, I mean, there's so many things there that the, the math behind it is one of those things that in podcasting and marketing, most people don't think of like, like you said, the two ads super palatable and like that math makes so much sense. And I've never heard someone put it so simply and so succinctly on that. The other thing that I find so interesting is like, your episodes are like I saw most of them are fifteen minute ish, um, that range ish, uh, heavy on the ish. There's some longer, some shorter, obviously. So each episode is a script. Sure. The scripts we shoot for two thousand words might be a little more. Might be a little less, which turns out to about in the body. So is a thirty second cold open two one minute ads about a twelve minute body within like a small bit afterwards. Um, those numbers can change a little bit, but roughly that that's what it is. Um, and I created that format before I launched the show, which means that because the ads are not running first, they're not pre-roll ads, they're mid-roll ads. But I'm not interrupting the body of the story. Meaning I have a very clear audio signal when the ads start and a very clear audio signal when the ads end. And so the body of the story, which is twelve minutes long, is never interrupted by an ad, but I get the mid-roll ad bonus in terms of, um, what they run for. Yeah, that makes perfect sense with that. When you started doing that structure of the daily I. That's a big part that fascinates me. Are you batch recording a lot of these or are you recording every single day? I have not recorded tomorrow's show yet. Wow. Because the recording is the easy part. Sure. So because I have a monologue show that is scripted, the editing is very, very minimal. Yeah. And what I do is I use GarageBand. Makes sense. Nothing fancy. I record until I reach a point where I don't like what I said, or I flubbed up, or I had a very difficult to pronounce foreign word. I just move it back on the waveform to where there was a pause. And I start from there again. And I have literally sometimes had to do the same paragraph twenty times. Um, if it's a uniquely hard word or something. Um, but I keep doing that. And then when I'm done with the script, I'm done with the editing. So it may take me anywhere from thirty, maybe sometimes forty minutes to record a full episode and then I'm done. So I don't need any fancy editing. I don't need a separate editor. I don't know if there's a name for this style of editing, but it just it works for me. It's easier than doing editing for an interview show. There's no ums, there's no ahs, there's no breaks in conversation because it's scripted. So the workflow of what I do is actually pretty easy. The time consuming part is the writing and research. And so that is what really prevents me from doing. Now, that being said, within the last year, I've now finally started hiring writers. So I have two writers and they've taken a big load off my shoulders. So today I'm doing a bunch of interviews. I had a webinar that I listened to before this. I got a monthly podcast group that I'm going to tonight. So I'm doing one of their shows tonight. All I have to do is edit it and editing a show takes about. And I mean text editing, not audio editing. That takes maybe an hour. And everyone in the audience says, well, I don't know which writer wrote it. It's like, well, that's the point, because by the time I'm editing it, hopefully it'll sound more like me. And then it's my voice. And, um, so that that's worked out pretty well. That's really interesting because it's funny, we talk, one of the things that I always tell podcasters when they're, especially when they're starting out, is podcasting is like a paint job. It's all in the prep work. It's not how you put on the paint. Putting on the paint is the easy part. It's the washing the walls. It's taping everything off. It's masking stuff. That's it's that prep work. And so the prep and the writing and you've. So you've got the topics then outlined, like, if you don't mind me asking, I mean, I know you said you've had the same document for six years that you're pulling stuff on and off of. How many ideas do you typically have where waiting in the wings? Because I know that's a big problem for a lot of podcasters. The current master list is nine hundred and seventy different show ideas. Not all of these are going to see the light of day. Some of them will get merged together. So we have a weekly writers meeting me and my two writers. And we've we've gone over some of these. So I just and I just put I just throw anything on the list when I come up with it. If I'm walking in a documentary on TV, I'm like, that'd be an interesting thing. I'll just put it on there. Or if I'm reading something. And so we do that. And sometimes a topic just isn't enough for a full episode. Sure. Um, so we had this one on a guy named liver, Peter Johnson, who was a mountain man. And so one of my writers looked into it. It's like, I don't know if we could do a full episode, but maybe we could do an episode on Mountain Men and how they lived. And the other famous Mountain Men was like, yeah, we could do that. so it may morph into something else, or it might get split up. And the other thing that happens is you research an episode and it's like, well, we came across five different things that could all be separate episodes. And it kind of just expands that way. So now you said nine hundred and seventy. Yes. I mean, your, your, your, your two and a half years worth there. Um, so my last ones that I've added to the list are coconuts because they're propagation and everything else. I've seen them around the world. There's a whole interesting thing there. Widescreen film formats. Um, the nineteen eighty six Cleveland Balloonfest, which was one of the biggest. They tried to set a Guinness record for the most balloons, launched at once over a million. And it was a disaster. They ended up closing down the airport because they had a million helium balloons. We're we're in Cleveland right now. So yes, we know about this one. Yes. Um, so I don't know if that's a full show. I don't know if we'll ever do it, but I came across it and I'm like, that's really interesting. Maybe that could be something. So I throw everything on that list. And then there are things that sometimes aren't, don't, aren't even on the list that I end up doing shows for that. That's truly amazing. And the, and really, this stems just one hundred percent from your curiosity on stuff. Yeah. That's, which is why I said, you know, I'm the avatar for the show. It's interesting because like most of the times when we talk, we're talking with people that do guests on their shows, and we find that the most successful hosts are the ones that are genuinely curious about the person that they're talking to. For you, it's just it's the same thing. It's just the subject. You're just genuinely curious about the subjects. You know, I considered doing an interview show and I did one in the past for eleven years. I did a show called This Week in Travel, and it was me and two co-hosts, and we had a fourth person who was always our guest every week. And it's hard to get good guests. And the guest makes the show one hundred percent, and the top podcasts out there are able to get the best guess. Fly them in, have interesting conversations, and if you can't do that, I don't think a show is going to fly. I could start a much better interview show now, having had a successful podcast than I could if I tried doing that six years ago, and I'm bringing in enough now from this show or, you know, maybe I could fly people in or something like that. But it's, I, I purposely chose not to do interviews and I think that was a good idea. It's interesting you say that because I like we, I do, I totally see both sides of it. And I truly enjoy this show because I get to talk with people like you and I get to learn from people like you in the same sense. I co-host another show where we. It's just her and I talking. We look at. We create notes ahead of time. We know we have a general idea what the other one's going to say. We work well together and we don't have to worry about guests or anything like that. Now, my favorite bit about that, and I'm wondering if you get the same thing, um, we get pitched all the time someone that should be a guest on our show, they're like, oh, we've watched your show. We would love for this person to be a guest on your show. And I'm like, we don't have guests. Um, no, I get that. And I don't even have a co-host. Right. And I gotta remind people, you know, uh, I've done a two thousand episodes. There have been zero guests. My favorite question that I was, I always like to say, I always like to ask these people. I'm like, do me a favor. Like, who's been your favorite guest so far? Um, that's the question that I always ask in the emails to send back to them. Um, that being said, like you've obviously monetized the podcast and monetized it. Well. Were you able to do that from day one as the like the podcast as its own asset? Not really. What I did when I started is I put ads in the show, but I made my own ads for things that I had affiliate accounts for. So I would do ads for audible dot com based on my audible account, based on whatever book fit that episode. I was a brand ambassador when I was traveling for a company called G adventures, so I just did some gratis ads for them. But the point was to get people accustomed from day one to this being a show that is going to have ads. I didn't want to do it. And then two years later, it's like, oh, ads are in the show now. Like it was not something that when they appeared that it bothered people, I the intention behind this is something that I kind of want to dive into because there's so many people start their podcast because like, I want a podcast and they grab a microphone and they start yammering into it and then they're like, great, I've got a podcast. When you started building this, what did you use to get like the step one, the step two. Um, because obviously the intention about you started this at a level eight, nine, or ten rather than whereas most people are starting at a level one, two or three, if that makes sense. Like what did you use for resources to, to get that intention and to get that structure to, to make sure you were doing that right. So like I said, I had very popular social media accounts, but that didn't do a whole lot for me. So when I launched the show, I would say in the first, in the first month of the show, I had six thousand downloads. Wow. Yeah. But I get that by eight a m now. Every day. Interesting. Nothing. Sure. Um, but. So that was a couple hundred a day, but hundreds of, you know, two hundred thousand Instagram followers, one hundred thousand followers on all these platforms didn't give me thousands of people listening. Sure. And that was something I learned right away, is that it is very difficult to convert someone from a different platform to an audio podcast. And that and I have had people with much bigger shows than me tell me the same thing, that social media does not convert well to podcast listeners. The best platform is probably TikTok, but even that's not great. Um, the place you find podcast listeners is in podcasts, which is a radical thing to say, I realize, but, you know, one hundred percent of the audience is going to be a podcast listener and they've already figured out how to listen to a podcast and everything else. So where I found the biggest success early on was advertising in podcast apps. Overcast, podcast addict, places like that pocket cast. And that had, uh, quite a bit of success. And I always tell people, and so you're looking at hundreds of dollars for promotion, not thousands or tens of thousands. I kind of always think of, uh, growth in terms of like factors of ten when you're starting out, you know, okay, one, that's you, that's easy. Ten you probably know that many people personally, they could get to listen a hundred. Okay. That requires a bit more work. Uh, you could probably do that by hand by literally just emailing people or reaching out or doing stuff. But then you get to a thousand and we're talking about like, let's say downloads per show, uh, per episode. Um, that's going to require a completely different strategy than you use to get to one hundred and ten thousand will require something completely different yet again, and one hundred thousand. So I'm in that ten thousand to one hundred thousand range right now. And to do that, quite frankly, you have to spend a lot of money because at the end of the day, a podcast is a media company, no different than a big Hollywood studio or a television network. The only difference is smaller, obviously, but you're competing for the exact same thing, which is people's time and attention. And there is a finite amount of that. It's zero sum. So they could be watching Netflix, or they could be listening to your podcast and they got to make a choice. I love how you put that because it's, it is truly one of those things where we are all competing for that attention. And it's, it's time. And I always preach like, if someone's giving you the most valuable thing. They have their time. What value are you giving them back? What I find so interesting, and I know we've kind of talked about this, but you didn't hyper niche because so many people feel like they needed to do that. You're just like, I'm going to talk about interesting stuff. I've broken every rule of podcasting you, you truly have. And so that's one of the things that I kind of really want to want to talk about. Do you think that it's because you have just found a way to stay interesting is what's made it like is what it's what's enabled your podcast to do what it's done and grow the way it's done. Because once again, like so many people, we talk about like that hyper niche thing. And as we produce other podcasts, we see like if someone fits in a slot buoy, in a lot of cases, if they can own that slot, they're going to own that slot. But we're looking at the total addressable market of that specific slot. And in many cases, it's not even the ten thousand. It might be the four or five thousand. In other cases, we're looking at some like the The Business Fix podcast that I'm a part of. We're looking at middle and upper management, which is a huge number of people, and we've kind of niched in on them, but not hyper niched. Do you think? So I guess my question is, do you think your ability to grow has been more about like a you've always got a really good production value and B, you're just have interesting stories. Yeah. I mean, I think it's that. And well, first there is a niche, um, it's a podcast for curious people. And that in and of itself eliminates the vast majority of the population because most people are not smart or curious. Correct. That's just a fact. It is like you, you, I take great pride in the fact I have everything from truck drivers to literal nuclear physicists to eleven year olds that listen to the show. And if you did those men on the street interviews where it's like, can you point the United States on a map and nobody can do it? I would like to think that everybody listens to my show would do really well, and they would have to edit it out because, you know, it's not interesting if you know it. Um, but that's, that's not a huge part of the population and I've kind of accepted that. Um, but there is a niche, even though superficially it's kind of not because literally the name of the show is everything everywhere. So I'm not going to be talking about like an episode on like tips to grow your podcast, right? That's not what the show is about. It's about things in history or educational type things, geography, whatnot. Um, so there is a niche to it. And also if you look at the most successful shows out there, like Joe Rogan's show, there's no real niche. Sure. I mean, he does talk to, you know, comedians and MMA people, but he could have anybody on the show, right? It's just a conversation show. And I think that by casting a very wide net, uh, that's one of the reasons, you know, if you have a niche, you're going to have a niche audience, which means usually a small audience, you can do quite well monetizing a small audience if it's the right audience and maybe you have a good product. Uh, but it's never going to be super big. And the flip side to that is, uh, if you have a larger audience like mine, uh, really advertising is the only thing that you really can do. I mean, there are other things you can do. I may do live shows or something in the future, but there isn't like a product. Uh, you know, maybe I'll write a book or something. I don't know how well that's going to do because non-fiction books don't really sell that well anymore. Um, but it limits it on that side. That. That's interesting. Um, and it's an interesting, it truly is, it's an interesting approach because like you said, you, you break every podcast rule out there and, uh, it's, it's worked, which to me is, is awesome. And I, I, that's one of those things where I love seeing, like, I can see why breaking that rule has worked so well for you. Uh, when people just get lucky, um, then my brain has a tougher time being like, wait, they just got lucky or we can't figure it out. Yours is quantifiable as to why it's worked. And I, the rule breakers I, I, I truly love like that. With that, you said it's two thousand one hundred and fifty nine episodes. Um, is, is what's coming out today as we record this. Um, I still remember that number, which is an insane once again, that number, like I said, I still look at that and I'm like, is that decimal point in the right place is, uh, what you, you've got some lessons in there that, like an early stage podcaster can probably take like, what would be one big thing that you would grab on to and be like, look, in two thousand one hundred and fifty nine episodes, this is the mistake that I have made that kneecapped me or that really hindered me that you should not be doing. I haven't made a lot of mistakes. I obviously not that's not me being arrogant, but the format of my show is the exact same as it was in episode one. They're a little longer now, but it's pretty much the same. I don't think I've made any super huge errors. One of the big lessons is you got to produce the show. Like I have never in history heard of a daily newspaper or a daily news newscast that issued something that's saying, you know, today's episode, you know, today's issue just isn't up to our standards. So there will be no newspaper today because we don't feel it's good enough. That has never happened, right? Ever. And I hear some podcasters like, oh, you don't, don't worry about it. Just wait until you feel it's good and, and just publish whenever you think it's like, no, you have got to publish and you have to do it on whatever your timetable is. If it's a weekly show, then you've got to produce it every week. I have a daily show, and there have been many, many times, like three days ago, I'm up at three a m recording. I have done episodes a couple times where I have literally fallen asleep at the microphone while recording. I just said, that is no hyperbole. That's very seat I am sitting in right now and this microphone. And when that happens and I nod off, I have to get up. And I live in Wisconsin, so if it's winter, I will literally walk outside to get really cold. So I will wake up and come back and finish it. Uh, but you have to do it. It has to be done. I there are some episodes where you can barely hear me talk because my voice was so hoarse because I had a cold, but I recorded and it just it has to be done. And people wonder how you do a daily show. It's like, well, it's a job. You know, no one says to somebody that works a nine to five job. It's like, man, you go into an office every day for eight hours a day. That's amazing. Yes. No one no one says that. That's just the norm. That's what's expected. No. You know, doing a daily podcast is. No. It's easier than being a coal miner. You know, there's a lot worse things in this world. I get to write and talk about stuff that I find interesting. That's not so hard in the big scheme of things. It's funny. It's one of the reasons why I truly love being in this industry, because we get we really do get to do some very cool things. Um, and it's on our schedule and it's, I mean, once again, you are a slave to the clock in a way that it's got for you. It's got to come out every day. But in the same sense, you've got the freedom that, okay, if I feel like doing it at three o'clock in the morning, I'm going to do it at three o'clock in the morning. Now, now, to be fair, uh, before I hired some writers, I would often do what I call an encore episode, which is just a rerun. And quite frankly, once you've done over two thousand episodes, people forget a lot of the past. Um, so you're able to do that. And I'll also tell you another thing I accidentally did, and this turned out to be genius, just as a lark. This was maybe, I don't know, the first year or two of the show, someone leaves a review saying, wow, Gary, I really love the show. I've listened to every episode. And so as a joke. So I have this little segment at the end of the show where I'll usually read a review that someone left on Apple Podcasts or something. I made up this thing called the Completionist Club based on like the SNL Five-timers club, and I was like, oh, we have chapters all over the world. You can come in and, you know, it's kind of a joke. And then more and more people started saying, I've entered the completionist club. Whereas the local chapter, I was like, oh, well, you're in Baltimore while we got crab cakes there. And, you know, make putting some local spin on it. And next thing you know, I have hundreds and hundreds of people who have listened to every episode of my podcast. I have two. So if you were to start playing my episode one and go all the way through, that is probably close to seventeen or eighteen days of continual audio content, not sleeping. And not only have I had people listen to every episode, I have had people. I had to create diamond elite status in the completionist club because some people have listened to every episode twice. And in one extreme case where I suggested he just seek help, he one guy listened to every episode four times. So I'm creating. I held my fifth anniversary event for the show last July in Appleton, Wisconsin, where I live, which is not in the way to anything. We're kind of outside green Bay. I had people flying in from California, new Jersey, driving in from every neighboring state to come take part in the show. I had kids, parents bringing kids to take pictures with me. I never intended any of this when I started, um, one of the other things I did when I started that turned out to be good and I never really thought about it, was I never talk about politics or current events ever. That makes all the shows more evergreen. And one of the things I realized I did a kind of a quick analysis of what not at what gives five star reviews, but what gives one star reviews and one of the biggest you know, there were two things. One, too many ads and two people interjecting politics in something that was not political. If you have a political show, fine. That's that's what you're there for. So I never talk about that. And I've had people, I've seen discussions online where people tried to figure out who I voted for and they can't, which I think is a sign of success. And the other thing I do is I don't use any profanity in the show ever. And that, again, I didn't realize this, but I had a college roommate that said, yeah, I listened to it with my daughter every day taking her to school. And I was like, oh, that's a whole market I never thought of. And it turns out there are tons of parents that listen with their kids, and they're able to do that because I made that decision to keep the show clean. So those two things, you know, everyone talks about making evergreen content. My show is hyper evergreen. I, you know, something about the Byzantine Empire is going to be fine a hundred years from now. Most probably. I don't think that's going to change. So which is why the completionist club works. And I'm also not I've done some things that deal with like, uh, there was a volcano several years ago off of Tonga that erupted and I did an explainer video or, uh, the Artemis mission that recently went to the moon. I did an explainer video on that. So there are a few things that are kind of a little dated, but for the most part, everything is completely evergreen and clean. I that's once again, it's the, to me, the, the intention that you've had with that is huge. And that that's the difference that I see so many podcasters, they, I don't want to call it sloppy, but they don't have that same level of intention with stuff, and that's big. The reason I made those decisions is because a guy I listened to who had a podcast, they. They did nothing but that. It became hyper raunchy. And I literally calculated once I'm like seventy percent of their show was not talking. It was a history show. It was not talking about history. And they would occasionally read reviews that they would mock of people that didn't like what, how they talked about or the politics. And I'm like, okay, you can make fun of it if you want, but I would say you could easily double or triple your audience if you just laid off it and kept to the subject at hand. And so one of the things I realized was, all right, I'll just why antagonize people if I don't have to? Um, so that's what I the decision I made, I think it's been a good one. No, it's been a great decision. It truly is a great decision on that because once again, your audience, there's not the the avatar for it is a is a group of people instead of the person, and it includes kids, which is awesome. One of the things that I like to to ask people about, and I'm sure that this is going to be just an amazingly interesting answer. What are some of the future plans for you, as intentional as you have been about building everything thus far? Like, what do you see as the future for podcasting and more specifically, the future of like your show? There's been a big lot of talk lately about the move to video. This has all been done by Spotify and YouTube that want you to do videos so they can make more money advertising. The thing that nobody ever talks about. What are the CPMs on YouTube versus audio podcasting? If you are in a great niche on YouTube, like finance, you might get fifteen dollars CPM. A lot of people are getting closer to maybe a two dollars CPM. The average in audio podcasting for a host read ad is around twenty dollars, and it can go well up from there. So I think the market has spoken and there's lots of data that you've probably seen that people have far better retention of ads from audio podcasting than they do on video. So I think a lot of the pivot to video is kind of hokum. Um, you know, the whole YouTube podcasting marketing strategy has just been calling YouTube videos, podcasts. That's all it is. They've done nothing. Um, so I could launch a YouTube channel in the future, but it's not going to just be a cut and paste of the audio podcast. It would be something different. I might use that as the basis for maybe, I probably record a different voiceover for it. Um, but it requires a lot of work too, which means more money. So if I were to put out a video every day like I do for this show, I would need a team of people. So I'm going to have to get a lower CPM plus spend a lot more money. So that's a very challenging proposition and there's a lot of risk. So that's always been kind of there. But I've never pulled the trigger on it. Another thing would be, uh doing live shows. So this isn't a comedy show. But you know, I think I could probably do if I could get people to fly into Appleton if I were to just go to Chicago, New York, LA or whatever. Uh, you know, I think I could probably do something. I may do another test somewhere. Maybe I do a bar meetup and see how many people show up. Um, and I would need to put together some sort of, you can't really do a live episode of this show me reading off of a script and constantly trying to pronounce words doesn't really go over well, so there would need to be something else. Um, one of the things that people are always asking me about are my travels. So I have a, I can basically recall every place I've been. I have fifty thousand photos that I can pull up at an instant and tell stories behind all those things so that that tends to go over well. Uh, another thing would be possibly launching another podcast, uh, maybe an interview show where I hire another writer and I just focus more on, you know, I can record the shows easily enough. Um, maybe something like that. Uh, running a tour, uh, early in the show, I thought about doing a tour for listener. And I should add, when I was doing travel photography, it was like pulling teeth to get ten to twelve people to show up for a tour. And I ran tours in South Africa, the Galapagos, places like that. Um, I had like one hundred and fifty people in forty eight hours that wanted to do a tour with me. And that was when the show was one tenth the size of what it is now. So now I'm thinking like, I could literally book an entire riverboat cruise in Europe or something and sell it out. And so, so there are opportunities. The thing that gets in the way of everything is the fact that it's a daily show, and that's kind of the problem. So. There's other things, you know, I'll probably do a paid version of the subscription version of the show shortly that doesn't have any ads. But a lot of that is so Apple has a greater incentive to promote you more than an actual revenue strategy. Uh, I'm working on a book, but again, I'm not putting a whole lot of, um, it's about the future of learning and, uh, especially self-learning because I think there's opportunities for that now that are just astounding. Um, so yeah, the show doesn't lend itself to a simple product, you know, or even like a service. I'm not going to do, you know, one on one tutoring with anyone or anything like that. Um, so yeah, those are, those are some possibilities. I don't think audio podcasting is going to be changing a whole lot. I think if you were to set up something with an RSS feed right now, it'll work in ten years. It worked twenty years ago. You know, that's the beauty of it. It's funny you say that because I in fact, recently I had Dave Jackson in and, uh, I mean, kind of podcasting, one of Podcasting's OGs and, uh, him talking about it kind of in the same way he said, like, look, it's been around. It's, I mean, radio is still around. Um, podcasting hasn't killed radio. Netflix hasn't killed radio. There's, there's all these other things that people are still going to gravitate to. And it's one of the things that I love about podcasting because it's convenient. I can have a podcast in while I'm doing it, while I'm driving, while I'm working in the yard. While I'm running the lawn mower, I can be have I, I can be learning, I can be entertained, I can be getting educated all while doing something. Podcasting is the only thing that fits into those niches. If you're in a long drive, you're not watching YouTube videos. I hope not. I certainly hope you're not. Yeah. No, as, as, as someone that owns multiple motorcycles, I see it occasionally, but I hope people are not watching videos. But, you know. People rely on email. Email is really important, right? I agree. When's the last time you said what is the future of email? It's just there. It's just fricking email. It's the same protocol we used thirty years ago when the internet first started. We use it today. It works. It'll probably be the same thing tomorrow. We don't need to add a whole lot to it. It works. RSS feeds with audio, podcasts, work, And everything else I think is kind of just other companies that have an agenda. I agree, I feel like I, I do feel like video can add something, but I don't feel like it can replace us. Yeah. There are some great YouTube channels out there. I watch YouTube. I'm not saying I don't, but it's a different thing. It very much is it very much. And I think what happened is a lot of people were listening to the Joe Rogan podcast on YouTube, and then they started to call that a podcast. And so now there's a and then YouTube did some survey and they realized this and I'm like, hey, we can just call this podcasting. And so they created a podcasting, you know, home page. And I looked at him like, this is the same stuff I'm that I was on my other home page. Nothing has changed. I don't know what the difference is. And if everything on YouTube is a podcast, then, well, they have movies and TV shows on YouTube. What are they? podcasts and what is not a podcast at that point. And I don't I don't know what the answer is. I so as far as I'm concerned, YouTube is its own thing and that's fine, but it's not podcasting. I, I, I agree with that. There's, there's a, there's a big piece to that. Uh, that being said, um, I always like to ask one kind of question as we close out here, if there's one piece of advice that you could give to like a business owner that is looking to like create a podcast to help them with some of their marketing and their authority, what would be that one piece of advice? And it can't be just press record. Um, that's too lame of an answer we joke about is what would be that one piece of advice that you would give someone that's starting out? Okay, before I answer your question with regards to pressing record, one of my co-hosts when I did this week in travel was podcasting Hall of Famer Chris Christiansen, who runs the Amateur Travel podcast. Yeah, and I was traveling at this time, so I'd be all over the world. And we had an episode once where I was in Krakow in Poland, and I couldn't make when they were doing the show, because I was going to go into the salt mine, which is a World Heritage site. And so I was going to miss the show, but I'm down there and I'm at the gift shop a mile beneath the surface of the earth. And I call in right in the middle of it because they were doing it on Skype, which was the thing at the time. And I think it was the world's deepest podcast. Like I was a mile below the earth making podcasting history. I was only on for like a minute or two just to say hi to check in, and then I leave. And then after the show, Chris Podcasting Hall of Famer writes me and says, I forgot to hit record. So it was lost. So that being said, everyone in video or audio has done something of that nature where we've all said like, look, that was a great take, but let's do it one more time just to make sure. And I'm going to press record this time. All right. So so my advice, there's one of the biggest problem in podcasting is that people give up on it. They started with the best intentions and then they just quit. And the reason is it's not a priority. It's just a thing they want to do. It's a side thing. And when something comes up and something will always come up, the podcast gets put aside. So if you want the podcast to be successful, you have to make it a priority. And most people do not make it a priority. It's the third or fourth or fifth thing that they worry about, because there's other stuff that's more important. And if you have it that far down your list, you're probably just going to abandon it at some point. So you need to make it a priority if you're going to go down this route. And there are far too many people that are like, I want to start a podcast, what should it be about? And that that is that that there is the check mark for failure because you want a podcast. It's like, you know, I really want to be a pro athlete, but I don't know what sport I should play. It doesn't work that way, right? You have to have an expertise or at least an interest. And then I would like to share this with the world on a podcast. Doesn't work the other way around. I couldn't have said that better myself. That is, I love the sport. I I'm an analogy guy. So the sports analogy is, is really just unless you are Bo Jackson, right? He could say that, right? Bo Jackson, Bo Jackson can say that. Yeah, he could do anything. That being said, where can people find your podcast? All two thousand one hundred and fifty nine episodes of it. Anywhere you listen to podcasts. Just search for everything everywhere daily. I love that, Gary. Thank you for the time today. I truly appreciate this. Your experience of recording two thousand one hundred plus podcasts has shown through, and your intention behind it is truly amazing. I really appreciate this. Thank you for having me. For everyone else out there, I've got some interesting thoughts from today. I will be right back. Gary's got a wealth of knowledge, but once again, two thousand one hundred plus episodes in. And there's a couple of things that I want to touch touch on here is one is his intention from start to where he's at currently, the intention that he has had in the things that he is doing and the things that he has done. I mean, everything is very organized step by step by step. After I mean, briefly there we talked afterwards about how he has taken. And he figures out what each what each listener brings in for him in ad revenue, and he figures out how much money he can spend on his own ads in order to make sure that that equation works and is still profitable for him to me. I mean, once again, it's that intention about looking at this like step one, step two, step three, where am I going with this? And what are the steps that I need to find in between with that? That is huge. The one hundred show ideas. Now I always tell people you need to have ten to fifteen show ideas before you ever start the one hundred. Show ideas if you've got I mean, look, if you've got a podcast that's coming out with a new episode every day, you need one hundred show ideas before you ever hit record. But to me, it really speaks to making sure that you've got that runway out in front of you. He records every day. He doesn't batch record, which I also found. I mean, an interesting way that he does it, but really, I mean, having a runway out in front of you of ideas because there's nothing worse than showing up in front of the camera and in front of the microphone and being like, uh, or I have no idea what the heck I'm going to talk about today. That just shouldn't happen. Having that runway of ideas out in front of you really is a big thing. The next point that I want to talk about, this is something that we talk with people all the time about you're, you're not going to convert social media people into podcast people, and you're not going to convert podcast people into social media people. We've even found this on YouTube that you're not going to convert shorts people into video people. It's different audiences. They are different people. The, the, the viewing capacity, the listening capacity. It's all very different now. Should you create content for each one of those audiences? If you can? Yes. Grab as many people as you can. But once again, don't think that your social media audience is going to help pull people into the podcast. It's just not. The last piece that I want to talk about is the ads. There's multiple ways to advertise a podcast. We would love to help you figure out how to advertise your podcast, if that's how you would like to grow that. That all being said, do me a favor. Take care of yourself. If you can take care of someone else too. I will see you very, very soon.