Exploring Everything Everywhere Daily with Gary Arndt

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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. We’re so honored to have with us today, world traveler, Gary Arndt. He’s a podcaster, he also has a blog. Welcome Gary to the Impact Podcast.

Gary Arndt: Thank you for having me.

John: Gary, you are a fascinating individual. I’m so honored to have you on today. Before we get going and talking about all your travels and your podcast and your photography, obviously, talk a little bit about where you grew up and how you got on this journey to start with.

Gary: I grew up in Wisconsin, a very typical Midwestern family. We didn’t really travel much, but I was kind of unique as a kid. I taught myself how to read before kindergarten by watching television. I watched Sesame Street and the Electric Company, and when I went to kindergarten, the teacher told my parents that they had a problem because I was the only kid who could read. I was always interested in things like National Geographic. My uncle had a subscription and I remember reading a lot of the old issues he had, and it was something I was always fascinated with. Was a very successful academic debater in high school and college and started an internet company in the 90s. Sold that before the .com bubble burst, went back to school, studied geology and physics and geophysics and decided that I was going to travel around the world. So in 2007, I sold my home. I thought I’d be traveling for a year or two, and I ended up doing it for 13 years.

John: Travel. Were you a traveler before you made that decision? Had you been around a lot of places before or this was something like a dream of yours that you were just going to make come true?

Gary: The first big trip I took was after I sold my company. I sold it to a much larger firm. It was a pretty small consulting firm. We did web database integration which today is nothing but back then was a bigger deal, and the company I sold to was actually the consulting wing of a large former mainframe company. They had offices around the world, so they sent me on a tour for three weeks where I went to Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Frankfurt, Brussels, Paris, London. That was the first, I literally circumnavigated the globe and it was the first time I had ever really been anywhere. That was eye-opening. I had done a couple other trips. When I went back to school to study geology, I did a research trip to Argentina. I did a brief trip on my own to Iceland. And when I came up with this idea, things just set in motion. It took me about a year and a half to sell my house and tie up all the loose ends. Turns out the world is really big and so it took me a long time to. to travel. I’ve still haven’t seen everything, but I’ve seen a lot of it.

John: 200 countries or so, about?

Gary: Countries and territories. That includes places that are not technically countries like Antarctica, Gibraltar, French Polynesia, things like that.

John: When you get self reflective, Gary, those 13 years, how did that how did that travel fundamentally change you as a person?

Gary: I think I’m probably a lot more relaxed. You really have to learn to go with the flow. One of the things that I learned, this was two weeks into my travels, I was on the big Island of Hawaii and two weeks is about the length of time most people, if it’s a longer vacation, will be gone. Whenever you travel in the back of your mind, whether it’s a good trip or a bad trip, you’re going home. I was two weeks into this and it just hit me like, “I can’t go home. I don’t have a home. This is home right here, right now. This is it”. It took me a took me a couple of minutes, actually, to digest this fact, but I quickly did and I realized this is where I am. This is this is it. That was an attitude adjustment that has stuck with me ever since. If you’re stuck in an airport, that’s where you are. Things happen, I don’t get worked. I’ve seen people lose their mind over possibly being shortchanged the equivalent of 10 cents. I don’t bother with that. If I order beef and I get the chicken, unless it’s a very big scam or something, I’m just not going to sweat it. So I don’t worry about those sort of things anymore.

John: That’s great. That’s sort of like it’s almost like you have a meditative quality to travel that whatever happens, happens in your present and whatever’s going on.

Gary: I also realized when I started traveling that I was truly, for at least the first couple of years I was doing it, truly free. I had no wife, no kids, no debt, no obligations, no place I had to be. I had the means to go wherever I wanted and do whatever I want. I didn’t have to be anywhere. I didn’t have to go home, and that’s the kind of freedom that very few people ever get to experience.

John: That’s true. That’s really true. When people meet you and they hear about all the places you’ve been and then they’ll say to you invariably, what’s your favorite country? How do you answer that? And why is that such a difficult question?

Gary: Well, there is no answer. Countries are big. How do you, how do you evaluate Alaska versus Arizona? They’re completely different things, but they happen to be in the same country. But I have a stock answer that I give, because I usually have my phone with me and I have all of my images that I took on my phone and so I say the answer is South Georgia Island. I say that because nobody knows where South Georgia Island is, and as I’m doing it, I’m pulling up the image and I say, this is when I say South Georgia Island is located between Africa and South America. It’s just above Antarctica. You cannot fly there. You must only go there by boat. It’s very few people. Usually it’s ships that are going to Antarctica that stop there and it’s always the highlight of the season. People prefer South Georgia over Antarctica, and I say, here is why, and I pull out a picture and it’s just filled with penguins. It is a shot that has tens of thousands of penguins in it. I say this is why South Georgia is my favorite place. But as for a country, unless it’s a very small country, they’re usually even a reasonably sized country is going to be big enough where there are good cities and bad cities or and really what it comes down to is most people have a good or bad experience. I’ve known people that have been to places I love and they had a bad experience. Maybe they had bad weather, they encountered bad people or they had a bad meal. That happens, that can happen at home and they end up painting an entire country by their experience.

John: You said at the top of the show the world is a big place and I agree with you but have you seen the transformation due to the travel industry and Hospitality industry in the last 20 years? Has the world gotten smaller because transportation and hospitality has gotten better around the world or do you still look at it as a big place? I feel it’s getting smaller or is that just a misconception by me?

Gary: Communications has made it smaller. You can talk like what we’re doing right now, if we wanted to do this 20 years ago, would have cost an enormous amount of money. We’d probably have to go to a broadcast studio and whatever. Now it’s nothing. The biggest change has been smartphones hands down. When I started traveling, it was in March of 2007. That was in the brief period between when the iPhone was announced and when it went on sale. When I started traveling, there were no, for all practical purposes, smartphones. And even then for several years, there was no easy way to get data roaming or anything like that. There was almost none of it when I started. I remember in 2009, I went to Jerusalem and I happened to be there for Holy week, so I got to experience all of that. Then I went back. years later, I think it was 2017 or 2018, I was there again, and I went to the same places. Now it was everyone just had their phones in front of their face.

John: Listen, let’s talk about that then, social media, you bring up a great point. How has social media, they talk about China Maxing, and this happens, a country or city gets hot because of social media and Instagram and all this other kind of stuff now, which that never wasn’t a thing 30 years ago, as you said, or even 20 years ago. When you go back to locations, have you seen a destination transformed for the worse or better because there’s been a massive influx of tourism to that area because of social media?

Gary: In some places. The problem of over tourism is not a problem of too many tourists. It’s a problem of too many tourists at the same place at the same time. A lot of it is really a problem of ignorance. If you were to ask most Americans to name a city in France other than Paris, most of them couldn’t do it. So if they’re planning a trip to Europe, there are only a few things that people are even going to know to do, and they end up going to those places. Everybody I know their first trip to Italy, they go to Rome, Florence and Venice. That’s the trip everybody does. There’s nothing wrong with those places. They are great places. They truly are. But everybody does that. Everybody goes to Barcelona now. So the problem is everybody going to the same places and they don’t realize there is a ton of amazing stuff elsewhere. I spent three months in the city of Gerona, which is about a 45 minute train ride north of Barcelona along the coast. It was amazing. They shot Game of Thrones scenes there. Amazing old town. Great history. Nobody knows about it. Europe, for example, is littered with these places, and so is the rest of the world. Every time I do an interview and I do quite a few of them, I always talk about Nahanni National Park, and I’m going to mention it here, too. One of the greatest national parks in the world, and most people have never heard about it. It’s in Canada. It gets about 800 visitors a year. To give you an idea of how great it is, when the first class of UNESCO World Heritage Sites was created in 1978, included on that list were Yellowstone, the Galapagos Islands and Nahanni, yet no one knows about it. Even Canadians don’t know about Nahanni. The reason why is because it’s located in the Northwest Territories and I drive there directly. It has about a two month season where you can visit and you need a float plane to get into the park, but it is it’s incredible. Because the numbers are so small, this is kind of my test. I always mention it on every interview to see like, okay, even if 10 people go, that should be a noticeable bump in numbers. From what I’ve seen, I remember talking to the park ranger. It’s like, I’ll mention it. But people never go because they go to the places that are easy. Another great example, the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. Dominica, not the Dominican Republic. I think is the greatest island in the Caribbean. It’s lush, it’s mountainous, tons of rivers, hot springs, all this stuff. Yet it’s the least visited country in the Western Hemisphere. Why? Well, it’s so mountainous they can’t build a really long runway, which means that you just need to fly to a neighboring island and then take a very short flight, like 10, 15 minute flight or a ferry ride to get to the other island. There’s just one more step. But that one extra step means nobody bothers to go, because they’re going to go to the all-inclusive resort in the place where the big planes land, and that’s what a lot of it is. If you look at the places that get all the tourists, it’s where there are cruise terminals and major international airports.

John: Wow. Frustratingly, only 48% to 53% of Americans have passports. Obviously you’re a travel evangelist. How do you get people to shed their misconceptions of what travel really could do for person’s heart and soul?

Gary: Well, I’m obviously pro travel and I think people should travel more and I think at some point in everyone’s life, they should do at least three months extended travel. Maybe this is when they retire. Maybe it’s between jobs, after they graduate college, whenever it is. But at some extended travel for at least three months. But one of the reputations Americans have and I’ve gotten into many arguments with this. If you were to draw a I think it’s a 1000 kilometer circle around with Prague at the center, there are 32 different countries in that circle. You draw that same circle on Kansas City and you are not out of the United States.

John: Great point.

Gary: So the average European is going to visit more countries, and yes, they speak different languages and there are different cultures and things like that and that’s just a historical remnant of the way that it developed and you can travel extensively in the United States and a lot of people will take road trips and by distance you’re traveling just as much as Europeans are it’s just that you’re in the same country. It used to be before 9/11, Americans could go to Canada Mexico and most of the Caribbean without a passport. You just needed a driver’s license and that’s why a lot of Americans traditionally don’t have passports. It’s much higher now than it used to be because you do need a passport to go to those places. But if you look at how far people travel, there are some exceptions. The Dutch are very good travelers. But in the course of traveling, I didn’t meet a whole lot of Italians or French. French tend to go to places that speak French.

John: Surprises. We all get preconceived notions about everything we do in life. So when you’re preparing, when you were preparing to go to a certain country or territory, talk about the one area that surprised you the most that was totally different than what you were expecting.

Gary: I wasn’t really surprised that much after doing it a long time simply because you get used to it that a lot of, I’m not saying the places are the same, but certain countries, there’s a certain style of architecture that you’re going to see around the world, depending on the development level of the country. A lot of the big surprises were places like Sierra Leone, which is a desperately poor country and they’d been through a lot. We were in Freetown at night, and I remember Freetown has a population of roughly a million people. It was the only city of that size I had ever been in anywhere in the world where you could see the stars at night because there were almost no lights. There were no beggars because who do you beg from? There’s hardly any tourists. People were more just as curious as us about as we were about them. So few people ever bothered to come there. I was in East Timor right after the Civil War ended and there were a lot of UN peacekeepers there and I was walking around one day with my camera and someone walked up to me and goes, “Who are you? Why are you here?” I go, “Well, I’m a tourist. I’m visiting”. And he was shocked. He’s like, “Really? You’re not with the like a relief agency or something?” I’m like, “No, I’m just here to see stuff”. And his attitude towards me changed completely. He’s like, “Oh, well, go see this and this.” When he knew that I wasn’t part of one of those groups, it radically changed. That was another place I’d like to go back to because it was in really rough shape when I was there. I’m sure it had its, things have been fixed and repaired and developed since then.

John: After seeing so much of the world. What are the common threads that bind us all?

Gary: Most people go about their daily lives. They wake up, they go to work, they do what they need to do to raise their kids, to make money and that’s life for most people. They have family, they celebrate things. It’s very simple. I think a lot is focused on what is different. One of the things I always mention, when I was a kid, we took a trip to Niagara Falls once and we drove through Canada. It was my first time in Canada. Basically, everything in Canada is pretty much the same as the United States, except some things are different. The packaging has stuff in French. It’s in kilometers instead of miles, you’ll see a crown on the highway sign. So there were little things that are different and your eyes are drawn to the things that are different because it’s otherwise on a background that’s very common. So that’s what stood out. When I went to Japan for the first time, everything is different. My eyes were drawn to the things that were the same. I went, “Oh, they have 7-Eleven. Oh, they have Lay’s potato chips at 7-Eleven. They’re prawn flavored or seaweed flavored, but they’re potato chips.” So I think at a bigger level, people tend to focus on the things that are different about most places and they don’t pay attention to the things that are the same. It’s just not newsworthy. Likewise, you only hear about a country when something bad happens. You don’t hear anything about it if things are just going on as normal.

John: If you’ve just joined us, we have today have Gary Arndt with us. He is a world famous traveler. Also an amazing podcast. He was one the most popular podcasts in the world. Well, everything everywhere daily will put that in the show notes will also put his website in the show notes. everything-everywhere.com. On that website you can see Gary’s unbelievably beautiful photography. Gary, when did you start the photography journey in your life? Did that did that start young or did that start as an adult during your travels or when did you get that bug?

Gary: Started a week before I started traveling.

John: Did you know you that talent? Did you know you had that talent?

Gary: No. I bought a an expensive camera before I started traveling, thinking, “Oh, this will take good pictures”. Thankfully, right away I learned, my first stop outside of the mainland US was Hawaii. I learned right away that is not how it works that you can take very bad pictures with a very good camera. So I spent the next several years just sort of iteratively getting better, reading up about what all the knobs and the dials and the buttons do. They actually have a purpose, learning how to do exposure, learning how to compose things and over time, I just got better and better. Eventually, I remember this was in 2013, I was in Namibia for a conference and I was out into the deep desert for five days and I remember coming back to Swakomund and I went to an internet cafe to check my email and there were all these emails like, congratulations, congratulations, congratulations. I was like, “What, what are you congratulating me for?” I’d won a travel photographer of the year for the society of American travel writers, which is like the biggest award you can win in North America. I didn’t expect it at all. In fact, when they gave out the award, I wasn’t at the ceremony. Nobody knew who I was, which was kind of funny. Yeah, it was just an iterative process. I just taught myself how to do it.

John: Once you had the bug, though, did you go online and study great photographers’ hacks and different different ways to do things or did you just learn iteratively on your own? Did you just make it your own process?

Gary: No, you definitely look at other photographers, but the way you look at it changes over time. It starts with how did they do that? Then eventually get to a point of I know how they did that. It changes. At first you may be worried about gear and settings and things like that and then eventually you realize, oh, he had to sit on top of a mountain for two weeks in order to wait for the right conditions to get that shot. That’s really the secret. Once you’re figuring out the settings of the camera and all that stuff, that’s just learning the alphabet. You really learn how to write when you’re taking the time to get those kind of photos.

John: So it’s really more art than science?

Gary: Once you get past the beginning stages of it, yeah. The old joke is someone was at a photography showing and they asked a photographer, it’s like, how did you do that? And he just said F-11 and being there.

John: Being there, I love that. Obviously you could take a technically good photo, but it doesn’t tell the story you wanted it to tell. Which photo of yours, do you have a, if I’m asking you to make a selfish choice, which photo of yours tells the best story that you wanted it to tell?

Gary: In terms of a story like that, it would be a photo that I took in Ethiopia. It was in in Lalibella, Ethiopia, which have the stone carved churches. Actually, I can probably show it in the chat room or something, or you can link to it.

John: Yeah, we’ll link to it. If you send it to us, we’ll put a link to that and we’ll put it our show notes so our listeners and viewers can look at it. We’d love to do that.

Gary: But it was a Coptic Christian priest, and he had gotten a call on his cell phone. So he was walking out of this ancient stone church and the light coming inside the church was just such that it was great, and I got him answering his phone.

John: That’s cool. That’s cool.

Gary: I’ll just put it in the chat there.

John: Perfect. Thank you. Thank you for that. We’ll post that in the show notes. That’s awesome. Did you ever arrive at a location expecting it to be an amazing canvas for you to take wonderful photos and it didn’t turn out to be what you wanted it to be?

Gary: If that happens, it’s usually due to weather.

John: Got it.

Gary: Sometimes you just get bad luck. Sometimes you get good luck. I was in Meteora, Greece, which is this place in inland Greece that has all these monasteries built on the tops of these stone pyres. I was there one day and it was fine, and then I was there the next day and they had bad weather, which was good because they had these low hanging clouds and so all the monasteries were in these low hanging clouds and it made for really great photography.

John: You’ve talked about technology earlier when we were talking about how you and I are able to do this today, whereas 20 years ago, I’d have to fly out to Wisconsin or something of that nature, or we’d both have to go to a professional studio, a broadcast studio in our local area to pull this off. Talk about technology and photography. I’ve seen photos of you with all your gear taking the photos. But if I gave you today the most recent Apple iPhone, and I said, Gary, go travel and then send me the pictures. Could you get 90% or 95% of what you’re doing with the big gear with an iPhone?

Gary: A fair amount of it. The the phones that are in cameras are pretty good. One of the things I would do is I would have it save as a raw file, which is an uncompressed and normally saves is like JPEG. That’s one of the big things. So when you’re editing a raw file and you still have to edit photos, that doesn’t change. People think like that when you press a button that’s somehow capturing a reality. No, it’s just capturing the settings that the camera gives you. There are still apps that let you have control over the ISO or even the shutter speed. Actually, there are some that will let it sit open for longer exposure ones. The things that like an iPhone can’t do very well is anything that requires a zoom lens. Long-term exposure, like wildlife photography, sports photography, it’s not very good at that. Even every so often they’ll say like, there’ll be like a cover of a magazines like we shot this on the iPhone and that’s technically true, but they have tons of lighting. They have special lenses that attached to the iPhone. It’s on a tripod. So there’s no vibration. So there’s all sorts of things that there are surrounding the iPhone, but it is technically the iPhone but it’s not like they’re just whipping it out of their pocket and taking a picture.

John: Got it. You you said when you started your journey in 2007, you were alone. Do you still travel mostly alone and talk a little bit about alone traveling versus group traveling? Compare and contrast any of your experiences versus each other, the pluses and minuses.

Gary: Most of my travels were by myself. There are times where you have to take a group trip or it’s it makes more sense to do it. If you want to travel in the Galapagos, you’re probably going to be on a ship. If you want to go to Antarctica, places like that, you kind of have to do it with a group. Other types, a lot of people, if they’re not well traveled, they just feel more comfortable and safer being in a group and that’s fine. I just never had a problem with it. A lot of people, they’re amazed like, “Oh man, how can you do that by yourself? You must be so brave.” It’s like, I never thought of it that way. I just thought of it as, well, if I don’t do it myself, I’m not going to do it. I can’t wait around for someone else. So I’m just going to go.

John: Talk a little bit about your podcast. You talk about everything. You sort of are an everyman in terms of historians, scientists, explorers, experts. You have so many different types of experts. Who’s your favorite type of guest on your podcast? You wake up tomorrow morning and you’re taping a podcast, who would be your ideal guest that you’re [inaudible]

Gary: My podcast doesn’t have any guests.

John: Okay. What’s your favorite…

Gary: It’s a monologue show. I just write a script every day.

John: What’s your favorite topic? What’s your favorite topic? Do you lean back on geology?

Gary: No, it’s all over the place. I started the show in the middle of the pandemic. In March of 2020, everything fell apart for me. I lived in Minneapolis at the time. I got COVID the first week of March. I came back from my last international trip. All the contracts, everything I had going on had been canceled by mid-March. Traffic to the website evaporated. Nobody was caring about traveling anymore and nobody was doing anything. So we were doing zoom calls like this with a bunch of people and I talked with some people that were high up in the travel industry and we all thought this would be done in a few weeks. They’re like, “No, this is, this is probably going to take a long time”. I realized that I needed to. diversify from the travel industry. One of the things I’d learned that people only care about travel when they’re about to go on a trip. It’s not like other things where like you’re interested in sports, politics, celebrity gossip, technology, things are changing all the time. There’s always news. There’s no real news and travel. They open a new resort. Okay, fine. Odds are you’re never going to go there. The Coliseum, it’s there. It’ll be there in a hundred years. Nothing’s changing. I wanted something that I could take advantage of everything I learned traveling, but also not be reliant on people who are just interested in travel. So I launched a daily educational podcast and it’s just about all the things I was interested in. I have a wide variety of interests and I figure if I’m interested, there are other people out there that would be interested as well. Turns out I was right. The show took off. It does a million and a half downloads a month right now.

John: Incredible.

Gary: It’s about a 15 minute show. It’s very brief and it gives you an overview of whatever topic. The topics are literally all over the place. So if you don’t like what today’s show is, just stick around for tomorrow and it’ll be something completely different.

John: I’ve heard you talk about everything from rare earths to history, myself in the gym, I’ve listened to you because I think does lean back on your your your geology background?

Gary: Partially. Yeah, that episode was from a book that I bought like 25 years ago talking about the rare earth hypothesis was just an explanation for the Fermi paradox. If there are intelligent aliens out there, why haven’t we seen them? There are many different theories. I’ll probably do some of the other ones in future episodes, but today’s episode, as we’re recording this, was on fan theories for movies like Jar Jar Binks was actually a Sith Lord or that if you remember the Michael Bay movie, The Rock. with Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery.

John: Of course.

Gary: The theory is that that is actually a James Bond movie. It’s Sean Connery as an older James Bond who was imprisoned. Tomorrow’s will be about Napoleon III.

John: Your interests are extraordinarily varied. Do you still travel? Do you still travel?
Once you travel that much, it’s almost like an addiction. Do you to you still, even though you do the podcast, do you still get out and go and get on a plane and go places?

Gary: No, not as much. Not as much…

John: Because it’s a daily show?

Gary: Yeah. Well, two things. One, it’s a daily show, and two, the shows really become successful and so I’m kind of got golden handcuffs attached to the show because I got hundreds of thousands of people that are waiting for the next show. I haven’t been out of the country since the pandemic.

John: Come on. Really?

Gary: I’m probably going to go somewhere this winter. I’m thinking of going to New Zealand or Australia. What I’ll do is I’m not going to travel like I used to, but I’ll just go get a short term rental somewhere like for a month and just record the show there.

John: I was going say you can still do it wherever you are.

Gary: Yeah. I can do that. But like I said, when the pandemic hit, I didn’t even mention, I was in Minneapolis and my neighborhood burned down in the riots. So I had that going on in addition to all of the pandemic stuff. I ended up moving back to Wisconsin, which is where I grew up, which quite frankly turned out to be one of the better decisions ever made and have been doing the show ever since. It’s got a lot of legs now. I have some writers on staff. The show is growing and there’s more opportunities I have to to do other things. We may take it on the road and do some live shows.

John: There’s not a day you and I can wake up, Gary, and AI isn’t in the headline, whether it’s Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, New York, whatever, it’s in the headline. Talk a little bit about three of your passions. Travel, podcasting and photography. How is AI going to affect any or all of those to the benefit of people who, I see as you as a creative, as creatives like you?

Gary: Well, for travel, I know a lot of friends that are still doing straight travel stuff, and it’s affected them a lot. Because now, let’s say you want to take a trip somewhere, you can just go into an AI thing and say, plan a seven-day itinerary for me to go wherever and it’ll do a pretty good job. So it’s it’s really cutting out people from that part of the equation. Photography, it’s completely ruined. I don’t really do much photography because I haven’t been traveling. My photography was part of my travel, not the other way around. I’d never be a wedding photographer.

John: I understand. But you still do it for art now because you don’t have the time because you focus on the podcast.

Gary: That’s a big part of it. But it’s also, what happened is, like you mentioned, everyone has a really good camera in their pocket now, and so photography has gotten devalued. There’s really not that much money in it. All the people I know that have stuck with travel photography are making money now selling photo tours and doing teaching and that’s fine, but you’re not going to really make money unless you’re a very, very small number of people off straight photography. As for podcasting, how AI is going to help. That’s the one area I think that people are going to want to hear from people. The conversation we’re having right now, if you were to literally make a transcript of it, there’s ums and uhs, and we’re so used to hearing a rough draft, that’s the way human beings talk. AI is almost too polished, and I’ve used AI to like come up with ideas or if it’s a very broad topic, like kind of narrow it down, what should I talk about? Most large language models are by definition giving you something that is average. It’s taking the average of what it brings in. If you, if there’s a very interesting fact or tidbit or take on something, it is almost certainly not going to give you that. So you have to figure it out. I’ve even tried. I’ve gone into Chat GPT, and I said, what would be some good possible episodes for Everything Everywhere Daily? It gave me a long list of stuff I’ve already done. It’s like, well, thanks, but that’s not it. It was unable to come up with something brand new. Now, who knows that may change in the future. It’s continually getting better. One of the things I’ve been working on, because of the nature of my show, I have a really weird audience. A lot of times you hear in podcasting that you should have an avatar. I have housewives and truck drivers and researchers at MIT and CEOs and ninth graders who are all listening to my show.

John: That’s awesome.

Gary: It’s across the map. So I don’t think there’s just one type of person that I can create it for. It’s designed to be something general and broad, and my point being the best way to teach someone is through one-on-one instruction. The data on this is overwhelming. It’s called the two sigma paradox that literally you can take someone in a normal classroom who’s at the 50th percentile individualized instruction. They can perform at the 98th percentile. The problem and reason it’s a paradox is you can’t run an education system like that. You need one teacher per student and that’s not very cost effective. In fact, even billionaires don’t do this with their kids. They just send them to an elite school because they’re more concerned about the credentialing and the social status of the school than they are about actually learning. The thing that has the potential to change this is AI. If you use AI as a tutor, you can speed run school, and I’ve told kids this. There’s no reason why you can’t get through an entire year of math in high school in like two weeks to a month if you use AI, You can ask it the dumbest questions that you want and it doesn’t care and it will answer your dumb questions until you figure it out or explain it in a different way or what YouTube video could I watch where someone explains it. The potential for people to learn is so much greater. The problem is when when AI first came out, these large language models, kids figured it out before teachers, and so what they were doing is teachers would assign homework or an essay and kids would have AI do it and they would submit it. I know several teachers now and they’re okay, they figured it out. And so they’ve reversed it. You now have to do the essay in class. You now have to do the things that AI could do in front of the teacher or in a place where it can’t be done and you can do a lot of what traditionally is classroom instruction at home with AI or YouTube. I think people haven’t really realized the power of this yet that education is very conservative, it does not change much, and a lot of people, they still can’t get past the idea of what just has to be this way. Our current educational system is a little over 100 years old of putting people in classrooms and it was designed for doing it at scale for an industrial workforce. When you look at, a lot of times when we try to evaluate the quality of our educational system, it’s like, well, our 14 year old test scores versus Finland’s 14 year old test scores, 14 year old test scores doesn’t matter. What matters is what do adults know? Cause we’re really trying to create knowledgeable adults. What’s really sad is when you look at general knowledge assessment tests for, for adults. It’s as if nobody ever went to school at all. They have forgotten everything. This is one of the reasons I do my podcast is you don’t have to necessarily be in a classroom. Most of the things we know in life didn’t come from a classroom. It came from experience, reading, osmosis, whatever it might be. But it wasn’t necessarily a classroom. So I think AI has potential for doing enormous things, but the key is the student has to be curious and motivated. If they’re not that, they’re going to use it to just offload its thinking to this AI and they’re going to be worse off than they otherwise would have been.

John: How do you come up with the topics? Do you ever take five in a day and let that be the week or do you try to do it real time and do one a day and flow with your own emotions and what tickles your fancy at that given time?

Gary: The actual recording of my show is trivial. It’s a 15 minute show and I’m reading from a script. The writing and research is what takes all the time.

John: Got it.

Gary: I’ve gotten much, much better at it now, but when I started, I was taking six to eight hours to do one episode. I’m basically doing a 2000 word term paper every day.

John: Wow!

Gary: Now I have some writers too that are helping out. That’s taken off a lot of the workload, but we have a running list of… When I started the first exercise I did, I always recommend this to anyone starting a podcast. I created a list of 100 ideas for shows.

John: I love it.

Gary: Some of those never made it, but I at least had the ideas, and that list just kept growing. So as I did a show, I took it off and then I added more ideas. That list is now I think on 967 ideas that I have not created and I have done over 2200 shows. What happens is one show begets another idea. It’s like, we could take a different take on this or there was this other part of it or… There’s all sorts of ways that you can do it. And so I’m never going to run out of anything. When you hear people talk about like when they tell you how to do a podcast, they always say you should have a niche and then you should niche down further. I’ve broken every rule of podcasting. I don’t have a niche, and they say, “don’t quit your day job”. It’s like, well, the day job kind of quit me, so I had to throw myself into it.

John: When I go to the gym and I listen to your podcast, I love the brevity of them. Do you think that’s one of the keys to your success?

Gary: The brevity?

John: Yeah.

Gary: Yes, and I didn’t realize this when I started. If you have two podcasts in your queue and one is a three hour interview and one’s a 15 minute show, most people will listen to the 15 minute one to clear it out of their queue because you know you’re not going to finish the three hour one anyway. You’re going to have to listen to it multiple times.

John: That’s exactly right.

Gary: So having a shorter show, you have much higher completion rates. It’s almost 90% of the people that start the podcast finish it. It’s digestible. I have people like, “Well, I dropped my kid off to school. It’s just long enough where I can listen to the whole thing”. Or if you’re on a long drive, I’ve had people say, “Yeah, we went on vacation and we just listened to it nonstop and we listened to several hundred episodes”. It’s like nobody binges on steak. You binge on popcorn and cookies and little things. It’s a joke. Early in the show, someone said, “Hey, Gary, I’ve listened to every episode”. And I said, “Oh, welcome to the completionist club”. And I made up this thing where we had a concierge and velvet rob service, and as more people started doing it I said, “Well, we have a chapter in North Carolina, we have a chapter in Amsterdam”. This became a running thing. Now I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of people that have listened to every episode. I have 2000 episodes and I have some people that have listened to it twice. In one rare case, a guy listened to every episode four times. No, that’s actually a problem. I wouldn’t listen to it 4 times.

John: Talk about your audience. That’s a great point. How much does the feedback from your audience inform future shows?

Gary: Almost zero.

John: Really?

Gary: I’ll tell you why. One of the great things about audio podcasting as opposed to YouTube is you don’t have spikes in the number of downloads. You don’t have people discovering a single episode and they listen to it. They tend to discover the show and then listen and download all the episodes of the show. In YouTube, what I’ve seen happen is people will have a YouTube show and then they have, say, one episode that goes viral and it gets real popular, and so now the temptation is, I’m going to do that episode again, or I’m going to do something like it. It’s called audience capture. And you keep doing what the audience, what you get feedback from. It’s a feedback loop. With my show, because part of the whole point of it is randomness and the fact that you don’t know what you’re going to be able to get. I don’t want to get stuck in that loop. I do get lots of recommendations from people for episodes and a lot of them aren’t actually aren’t even bad ideas, but they’ll just get put on that list of 900 plus things. And maybe in a year I’ll get around to it or something. But I try not to find out what’s popular and do it over and over. Just as a good example, I did my six year anniversary at the beginning of July, and I let people call in and leave messages. What is your favorite episode? I had over 70 people leave messages from six continents. Not a single one picked the same episode.

John: Come on!

Gary: This is what I found. It’s like everyone has a different favorite. That serendipity in terms of what you hear is part of the appeal of the show, I think.

John: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, now you said, well, first of all, brevity, one thing and randomness. Randomness. Like you said, you’re not going to do five more shows just because one of your shows got a boatload of downloads. You’re going to just keep running with how your your creative mind works.

Gary: Yeah. And you saw. So we’ll do shows about World War II or the Civil War or ancient Rome, but we’re not going to do them back to back, or if we did an ancient Rome show, okay, we’re going to hold off the next one for next month or something and we’ll do something different. If we do a show about geography, maybe we do the history of a river or a country or a city. We’ll wait a while until we do another one. There’s always something different going on and people seem to like it. And that’s something I should add is hard for AI to do.

John: You’re right. Talk a little bit about, Gary, seems like whatever you’ve chosen in your life, travel, photography, podcasting, you’ve mastered it, mastered it more than anyone else. Do you have a next journey outside of those three things that you’re interested in mastering and that you think you’re going to take on in the future?

Gary: No.

John: Okay.

Gary: I’m 56. This is probably going to be the last big thing I’ll do. I’ve caught lightning in a bottle with it. There are things I could do to branch off from what I’m doing right now, but I have a very good job. I get to talk about whatever I want to a large group of people who are willing to listen. Literally whatever I want. It’s hard to beat that. When it comes to travel, I get this from a lot of people like, “Man, you must really be wanting to travel again”. I got a lot of that out of my system. I front loaded all my life travel, and I’m not saying I’m never going to travel again. I will, but yeah, I think I scratched that itch.

John: Before we go into a little bit of a fun lightning round, talk a little bit about Tease something. Obviously, we’re going to put your your podcast link in our show notes and your website and that that wonderful photo you sent over. Tease something you want our listeners to know about that’s coming soon with regard to your podcast. You said you might bring your podcast live to some cities in the future or something of that nature.

Gary: Yeah, that’s still up in the air. I held an event last year in Appleton, Wisconsin, which is not in the middle of anywhere, and I was surprised at the turnout. I had people from both coasts fly in. Parents brought their kids because I’m their favorite teacher. So I figured if I could get that many people to come here, then if I were to go to larger cities, if you look at like the biggest cities that listen to my podcast, it’s just the biggest cities in the country, New York, California, L.A.

John: Yeah, you’d kill it.

Gary: I think I could do something with that. I have no immediate plans. We just launched a weekly recap show on Patreon where one of my writers and I, we just go through the week’s episodes and we give our thoughts on the topic and talk about things we weren’t able to put in the episode or it kind of goes down rat holes sometimes of other topics. I thought about maybe launching an interview show that would go with it where I would get academics or people that have written books to come in. I want it to be more of a highbrow show. I don’t want to really talk to politicians or celebrities. I’d rather talk to people that have something interesting to say and can talk at length on it. So that’s a possibility. I find me after 6 years, I opened a merch store. I had people begging for that. Probably doing a daily podcast is my top priority every day is getting the next show at the door.

John: That’s awesome. Since less people that are listening to this podcast are going to do a podcast and more people are going to want to travel. I’m to do a lightning round that’s around your travel, if you don’t mind.

Gary: Sure.

John: All right. Here we go. Favorite UNESCO World Heritage Site, do you have one?

Gary: I’m going to go with this is kind of a dark horse. The Volkingen Ironworks in the Saarland of Germany.

John: Explain this to the listeners.

Gary: This is an old ironworks facility that closed down in the 20th century, and it was cheaper to make it a World Heritage Site than it was to decommission the facility and tear it down. If you’ve ever seen one of these movies like Robocop, where they’re in this like the old industrial facility with the pipes and the tubes everywhere, it’s like that. It has the feel of it and you can get a great tour of it. A lot of times when you go on vacation, you know, it’s like, “Look at the ancient things that are 2000 years old”. Those are great. I’ve been to a lot of those, but this is a piece of industrial history from the industrial revolution, and a lot of these things weren’t preserved. SO preserving something like this, I thought it was a really interesting place to visit and it’s a place that most people would overlook and not even think to go if they were traveling.

John: Wonderful. Favorite local food?

Gary: Oh, boy, I’m going to go with, generally speaking, my favorite type of cuisine is Japanese, followed by Argentinian just because the beef in Argentina is so good.

John: That’s fair. Japanese and Argentinian, that’s fair.

Gary: Yeah, but I remember the first time I was in Argentina, we were in the field collecting samples and we left a day early so we could get back to Buenos Aires and eat steak.

John: I love it. I love that our stomach rules rules where we go. Window or aisle seat? Window or aisle?

Gary: Aisle.

John: Carry on or checked?

Gary: Actually, I for years had to check because I had a large bag for my camera tripod, and because literally all my stuff, I had my camera bag that I would bring on the plane with me. But then I had a larger bag with my clothes and everything else that I checked. I only had a couple of cases where It didn’t arrive with me and it usually arrived a day later or so.

John: Sunrise or sunset photography?

Gary: Sunset. You don’t have to wake up early.

John: One place, if someone’s not to really travel that much, but they they want to hear from you one place they got to go before they check out of this wonderful journey.

Gary: Assuming cost is no objective.

John: Cost is no objective.

Gary: Take a cruise to Antarctica and stop at South Georgia Island.

John: There you go. For you, before you check out of this journey, one place you’re going to go back and revisit.

Gary: I’d go back almost anywhere. I’ll probably be stopping in Fiji this winter if I go to Australia and I usually hang out there. There’s some hotels on the beach near the airport in Nandi. I’ll stay there for a few days before heading on just because flying to Australia is horrible. If you can take a break and break up the flight that makes it a lot easier. It depends what you’re interested in.

John: Got it. I think you answered this at the top of the show, but I’m going to ask it again. One life lesson that comes from all your travels.

Gary: Your ability to adapt is more important than your ability to plan.

John: I love it. Just chill out, chill out and enjoy it.

Gary: No matter what your plan is, it’s going to fall apart. As Mike Tyson says, everybody got a plan until they get hit in the mouth.

John: That’s true.

Gary: Life’s going to hit you in the mouth. Something’s going to go wrong. I know people that they just overly schedule everything, and the great part when you’re traveling full time, you’re pretty much on no schedule or agenda. It’s like, yeah, I’m going to go to that town up that’s a couple hours away. No, maybe I’ll do it tomorrow. Maybe I’ll do it the day after, whenever you get around to it. You can meet people that just came from there. They can tell you what the current status is and things like that. It gives you a lot of freedom.

John: I love it. Gary, again, you are a brilliant guy, obviously, and it’s just an honor to meet you and have you on the show. I wish you continued good health and great success with the podcast. All the podcasts and the website and everything you’re doing will be in the show notes for our listeners and viewers. Gary, thanks for making the world a more interesting and more wonderful place, and thanks again for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Gary: Thanks for having me.

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