The Right 200 Downloads Beat 2000 Every Time | Gary Arndt

Gary Arndt: [00:00:00] don't chase vanity metrics. I have become very mercenary doing this show. It's entirely possible that you could get more sales from 200 downloads an episode than you could from 2000.

If it's the right 200

Sadaf Beynon: hey there. This is Podjunction podcast, the show where business leaders share how they use podcasting to grow, connect, and build their brands. Today I'm talking to Gary Arndt, creator and host of Everything Everywhere Daily, one of the world's most downloaded educational podcasts with over 50 million downloads since launching in 2020. Gary, welcome to the show.

Gary Arndt: Thanks for having me.

Sadaf Beynon: It's great to have you, Gary. You've got such an interesting backstory, spending years traveling the world before launching your show. Can you tell us a bit about that chapter and how that evolved into what you're doing now?

Gary Arndt: Yeah, so I started traveling in 2007 because I basically didn't know what to do with my life and, uh. I had no wife, [00:01:00] no kids. I had some savings and there was nothing stopping me. So I decided to do it. And I thought I'd travel for a year, maybe two. Uh, but it turns out the world is really, really big and I just kind of never stopped.

I had a, a website that became very popular. I had a popular travel blog. Um, and I started really before social media was a thing. So when Twitter and Facebook and, and Instagram. Um, came out. Uh, I developed followings on those platforms as well. I became well known for photography,

but over time as a business, uh, I didn't really like where it was going, uh, with, with a lot of content creation, to be honest.

Everything became about appeasing an algorithm, which meant the lowest common denominator for content was what was winning. You'd see these influencers and they would just have a highly choreographed photo of themselves, wistfully looking at a cup of coffee [00:02:00] with it didn't matter where they were. Um, and this was true in everything.

And online, you know, for your, the website, it all became SEO. Uh,

everyone tried to game the algorithms and so click bait and, you know, all this outrage, uh. Would, would drive what was happening. And I kind of longed for the old days where I just had a website and people came to the website and they left comments and, and that was a social media, but you know, it was largely killed by a combination of Facebook and Google.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: so I, so I was really kind of not feeling great about where things were going. And then the pandemic hit. And when the pandemic hit, it just devastated the travel industry.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: More so than any other because it just, it came to a stop. Uh, there was zero travel. A lot of the companies that I'd worked with. I literally had zero revenue coming in.

They were not running, uh, tours. Um, and it was very, very bad. And my income went from, [00:03:00] it dropped like 95% over a period of two weeks. In March of 2020, all the contracts I had going on were canceled. Traffic to my website dried up. Nobody was, was researching or thinking about travel at that point, and. I knew that I had to do something different and I'd been podcasting for a long time.

I was the coast of a show called This Weekend Travel since 2009. The Pandemic killed that too. Um, but I had an idea for a show. I went so far as to make the, uh, the show artwork. I had theme music that I bought the rights for, and I was gonna be doing longer episodes of like two hours and release maybe one episode every other week.

And. I kind of realized that it really wasn't a great business model, so I just put the idea aside. And when the pandemic hit, I realized that podcasting was the last vestige of the old internet. That it wasn't dependent upon algorithms, it wasn't dependent upon SEO. It's still largely word [00:04:00] of mouth, although there, there, there is a component of it.

You know, people discover shows on Apple and other platforms. Um, but it, it's not like YouTube. Where someone may post video, video, video, and then one spikes and goes viral, and then maybe they don't see it again. That's, that's not how audio podcasting works. So I revisited the idea that I had, and instead of doing long episodes infrequently, I decided to do short episodes every day.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: I pitched this idea to some of my friends who had successful podcasts and they all had the same advice. They said, this is a great idea and you're insane because daily epi daily podcasts very seldom work.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: I was like, well, I got nothing else going on in my life right now. So, uh, I created a hundred show ideas and on January 1st, 2020, I published episode number one.

And uh, after I'm done talking to you, I'll be working on episode number 1,844.

Sadaf Beynon: wow. Wow. [00:05:00] That's fantastic. So. What made you decide to do the The daily format?

Gary Arndt: Um, it was really a calculated business decision, to be honest.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm. Hmm.

Gary Arndt: One, I felt that I was uniquely in a position to do this kind of show. I have a very, uh, broad and varied background between travel and, and, and degrees and subjects that have nothing to do with each other. Uh, so I felt that. Maybe I'm not the only person in the world who could do it, but I'm probably the only person in the world who has the time available right now to do something like this.

And I also just did the math that one of the, there there's several components that go into the growth and success of a show. Uh, biggest one is perhaps time, but one of the factors is also the number of episodes you produce. And the quickest way to get in a lot of episodes is to. Do it every day.

So after a year, you have 365 [00:06:00] episodes.

If you do that on a weekly show, that'll take you seven years.

Sadaf Beynon: Mm-hmm.

Gary Arndt: So, and, and that's kind of what I found happened.

Sadaf Beynon: That's really great. That's really smart. So was the goal then to turn the podcast into a business? Or was it more of a creative leap initially that kind of found traction, or how did you find those?

Initial,

Gary Arndt: had every intent from day one of turning it into a business.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: Um, I basically write a 2000 word script every day.

Sadaf Beynon: Okay.

Gary Arndt: I, so I'm, I'm writing a term paper every single day,

and that's not something most people do for fun.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: But, you know, if, if I wanted to just do it because it, it was interesting, I would just read a lot, which is what I did before I started the show.

Uh, but no, I, I intended it and I, but I gave myself like. A year to a year and a half,

uh, before it really started to achieve any sort of success. But I was willing to stick with it that entire time 'cause I believed in what I was doing.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Wow. So do you record one every day or do you batch record and release [00:07:00] one every day? How do you do that

Gary Arndt: No, I record every day, usually like a few hours before. I really can't do, uh, more than one a day because the, the time consuming part is not the recording. Recording's easy.

I can record, you know, the average show, uh, the body of the show will be about 12 minutes. That'll take me 20, 25 minutes to record.

That's not hard. It's the writing and research that takes up all the time and doing multiple in a day. Maybe if I spent all day doing it, I could do two. But doing more than that really is impossible. But I also, recently for the, finally after five years, I hired an assistant. So I have someone who's helping me with writing and research.

So,

um, do have a bit of a, a, a buffer now, so I could like go on vacation.

Sadaf Beynon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's,

that's big. So were you doing all the production yourself as well?

Gary Arndt: Every up until, like I said, hiring an assistant a few weeks ago. Every aspect of my show was done by myself. I [00:08:00] had no help in anything other than selling ads, which I have a network to do.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm. Yeah, that's, that's huge. That's big. And for five years,

Gary Arndt: It's, it's not as big as it seems. Um.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: The audio production. So there's different types of podcasts, like what we're doing right now. This is an interview show. It's being done online. So there's uh, different things you have to take into consideration. We're having a live discussion. It's not scripted.

There's ums and ahs. Maybe there'll be something in the background, there'll be a siren or something. You need to pause it. Um, there could be an internet issue, right? That that happens sometimes. So I have the easiest type of show. I have a solo scripted podcast, which means I'm reading text. It's only me. I don't, so many of the things you have to worry about, uh, editing in a show just go away.

So what I do is I just start reading the script until I flub up or wanna do it differently, and I just go back and I start at that point and I just keep doing it over and over and over until I get to the end. And when I'm done, it's done. And that's how I'm able to do it so [00:09:00] fast.

Sadaf Beynon: So, Gary, you already had an audience from your blog. You were talking about your website. When you built the podcast, did you have that audience in mind or were you making a fresh start In many ways?

Gary Arndt: It was really a pretty big pivot. Um, I got a little bit of audience from that, but not as much as you would think. Um, so I have like little under 180,000 followers on Instagram.

I have over a hundred thousand followers on Twitter, Facebook, all of that. But when I launched the show that first month, I got maybe 200 downloads episodes.

So most of that audience did not come over,

Sadaf Beynon: right.

Gary Arndt: that includes an email list that was over 10,000 people. Uh, so it, it was quite a bit. So it, it, it's not like I had this huge tsunami of people coming over, and that's one of the, the things I learned is that promoting podcasts on social media doesn't work very well because of the conversion problem.

Sadaf Beynon: Right.

Gary Arndt: [00:10:00] Uh. And this isn't just me saying, and I, and I've tried, I've done, I've spent money, uh, creating video shorts for

TikTok and things like that, and it just does not convert very well. And I've talked to many other large podcasters that have audiences much larger than mine, and they've all said the same thing.

Social media does very little. Yet. Whenever I see podcasters talking about starting a show or launching it. The only thing they think about is promoting it on social media.

And if you look at what large podcast networks do for promoting their shows, it's almost all within the podcasting ecosystem. They promote it on other podcasts or within podcast apps or places where 100% of the people that are gonna reach our podcast, listen.

Sadaf Beynon: Right. So Gary, if you don't mind, I'd love for you to dig into that a little bit more. Like, is it, again, something to do? You mentioned earlier about the algorithms and SEO and all that. Is it something to do with that, that's why it doesn't work, or is there another [00:11:00] reason behind it?

Gary Arndt: No, I, I think it's conversion.

Sadaf Beynon: Okay.

Gary Arndt: Facebook does not want people leaving Facebook. No one wants them leaving that

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: And if you have an audio podcast, it requires opening up a separate app. Hitting subscribe. There's, there's several steps, you know, that you have to go through.

And, uh, so one, the places you're promoting it don't want people to leave.

And second, it's just, it. Moving from one platform to the next doesn't work. Well. Trying to promote your Instagram on Twitter is not gonna work well. If you wanna promote Instagram, do it on Instagram. You wanna promote Twitter, do it on Twitter. If you wanna promote a podcast, do it on podcasts. I don't know who's listening to, to our discussion right now.

I know that 100% of them listen to podcasts.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: That's all I know.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: So, and really to grow any show you, you want podcast listeners,

Sadaf Beynon: Mm-hmm.

Gary Arndt: uh, podcast audience is growing all the time. Uh, that's good. But [00:12:00] it's, it's still not everyone. And a lot of people, they, they think YouTube, you know, not an audio podcast right away.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Gary, how does your, um, particular podcast fit into your work? So from a business or a brand building perspective?

Gary Arndt: Uh, it is the business right now,

so almost a hundred percent of my revenue is coming from, well, it is pretty much a hundred percent if, if you include like Patreon and advertising.

Sadaf Beynon: Okay.

Gary Arndt: So I've always believed that there's kind of two approaches you can take to monetizing a podcast. They're not mutually exclusive, but it just helps clarify it.

On one hand, you can sell a product or service,

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: this is what a lot of podcasts with smaller audiences do. Uh, they have coaching or a book or a course or something like that, that they sell. Larger podcasts don't do that. It's, it's pretty much just straight advertising and that, that's what my show does.[00:13:00]

Uh, now of course you can blend it. You, there's nothing stopping you from having a course and running it. But, uh, the truth is, to get, to make any real money advertising, you need to have a pretty sizable audience. You need to at least have about 10,000 downloads per episode, and the vast majority of podcasters are never going to achieve it.

That being said, I know of many podcasters who are making six figures, but don't have anywhere close to that. You know, they may just have hundreds of downloads per episode, but it's a very focused audience that is concerned about what they're talking about. My audience, I mean, literally the name of my show is everything Everywhere.

It's, it's, it's not a niche. So I'm casting a very broad net.

So. Advertising is, is what works for me because I've been able to get a big audience for that.

Um, and I, and I've racked my brain like, what could I, you know, could I have a product or something? And there really isn't, uh, I might do tours or something at some point or merchandise.

Everyone does that. Um, [00:14:00] but I'm kind of definitely on that one end of the spectrum.

Sadaf Beynon: Do you think, um, podcasting has given you a, um, a new kind of authority or reach that your blog or photography didn't?

Gary Arndt: Absolutely. So like I said, just to qualify what I'm saying, I had a pretty large audience on social media and, and everything else,

Sadaf Beynon: Mm-hmm.

Gary Arndt: but the response I have gotten with my podcast is unlike anything I have done. By several orders of magnitude. The real metric online that matters is time, not eyeballs, not numbers and likes.

Most people can't tell you the last 10 things they liked on social media,

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: You're just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Next thing, next thing, next thing. You may see hundreds if not thousands of things in a week, and you don't remember any of it with podcasting, and I need to be very clear. Audio podcasting, not YouTube.

[00:15:00] You are in a place where people otherwise cannot consume content.

You are in their head and you, they're giving you your ti their time. So. I actually calculated, like of the number of people that visit my website, what's the average time spent on the website? Multiply those two things together and then I figured out, okay, number of downloads I get on the podcast, what's the percentage completion of people?

And it's like, you know, 90% of people will listen to the whole thing.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: What, and I, I estimated it, it's close to 10,000 times more time is being spent listening to my podcast and is being spent. Reading things on my website,

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: and you could even factor in social media in that, even at, even when I was at my peak, because how long do people spend looking at a photo?

A few seconds.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: But with podcasting, I have time. I just had, uh, this last Saturday I had my fifth anniversary party for my show, [00:16:00] and I had it in Wisconsin, which is not a huge, you know, market. Appleton, Wisconsin. It's, it's not very big. I managed to fill a building with it. I had people flying from California, New Jersey, people drive in from all the states surrounding, uh, that came to see me.

And you'd, you develop a parasocial relationship. I have this thing I created for my show called the Completionist Club for people who have listened to every episode of my show, which is becoming hard because I have over

1800 episodes on my show. And there have been probably a couple thousand people that have done that.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: Which means that they're listening over and over and over. And not only that, but I get people who listen, who have done it twice and in a few insane cases three times. So they're listening to my voice more than I listen to my voice and I'm me. that never, that, that does not happen on social media,

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: [00:17:00] and that development of a parasocial relationship can only be developed in that kind of environment.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: Even I don't, I, I, I don't even think it can be done on YouTube, because with YouTube, if you look at like completion rates of videos, it drops off dramatically

before it even hits like, you know, a minute usually.

And, uh, with my podcast, because it's short and frequent, it, it's very, very high.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah, it's

digestible. Yeah.

Gary Arndt: and you've probably seen the data that, um.

People can recall ads better from audio podcasts, um, that there's, uh, a greater ability for pe It, it's just qualitatively

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm. Hmm.

Gary Arndt: every metric I can think of, and it's not even close. And that's the, the thing that most people don't realize, um, is how good podcasting is at that. And if you did want to, to create a numerical reflection of this, all you have to do is look at CPM rates on YouTube versus audio podcasting.[00:18:00]

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: The best CPMs you can hope for on YouTube are for like finance channels, and they might get like a $15 CPM.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: Otherwise, it's very common to get like two to $3 CPMs for most things. The average CPM in an audio podcast industry-wide is $20, and they can go well beyond that. And I think, you know, the, the industry has voted with their money.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: The problem is there's usually not a big gaudy number. You don't, you don't. You can see how many people saw a video, but you don't see how many people listen to a podcast.

Sadaf Beynon: Mm-hmm. That's right.

Gary Arndt: I think that's what.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Yeah. Well, clearly your content is res resonating and I mean, like 50 million plus downloads is no small feat, but we both know Gary, don't we? That, um, growth doesn't happen without a few lessons along the way. So what have been, what have been some of the biggest surprises or challenges that you've [00:19:00] run into since launching the show?

Gary Arndt: You hit plateaus every once in a while,

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: and you have to be able to stick it out if you believe in what you're doing.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: You and, and you have to be able to, to keep going. And I, you know, I, I had periods where I'm like, well, should I keep doing this? Especially early on. And, uh, you don't get a lot of feedback in podcasting either.

Sadaf Beynon: Mm-hmm.

Gary Arndt: know, you can post a YouTube video and there'll be hundreds of comments underneath it that that's not the way podcasting usually works.

So that, and the other big thing is you have to be willing to invest in the growth of your show. I can't think of any other. If you want your podcast to be a business, I can't think of any other business where you can hope to launch a business, invest nothing and expect success

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: yet somehow Podcasters all the time are doing this where they, yeah, I have a podcast.

No, I'm not, [00:20:00] you know, I don't want to spend, well, what about a hundred dollars? No, I'm not gonna spend that. And it's like.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: With all the podcasts out there, hoping that people find you just doesn't work. If you're not a celebrity, you're just not gonna get, you know, the attention of people, and so you're gonna have to spend some money.

A podcast is a media property.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: a small media property, but it's still a media property, and you are competing with Netflix. Television studios, movie studios, books, music, all of that for people's time. Time spent listening to a podcast is time not spent watching television.

And when a new Marvel movie comes out, they may spend a hundred million dollars on promotion for that movie.

Even if it's something everybody knows is kind of coming out already,

why is your podcast any different? Why do you think that you cannot spend any money on it? If you look at every successful podcast studio, they'll have a, a budget of [00:21:00] tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, uh, for the promotion of a show when it launches.

You know, that's, that's kind of the norm in the industry. I'm not saying you have to spend that much money. I, I didn't do that when I started, but I spent hundreds of dollars buying ads on places like Overcast Pocket Cast, uh, podcast at and places like that to expose people to my show. And that drew the audience, allowed me to make more money to spend more money and kind of get the ball rolling.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm. Gary, you mentioned, um, plateauing every now and then. Um, when you hit those plateaus, what do you do to build new habits or systems to stay on track? What, what does that look like for you?

Gary Arndt: Uh, try something new.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: You know, I've been in a plateau, uh, for my current show for a while. It's a good plateau. It's like 1.5 million downloads a month.

Uh, so. I am gonna be invest, I'm, you know, eating my own dog food and [00:22:00] I'm investing a lot. I've just launched a big marketing campaign with a, uh, the, one of the largest, uh, trivia websites that also does like pub trivia.

And, uh, they have a, a conference where a thousand people show up. So I'll be at, I'll be there and I'll be working with them. Uh, I do advertising on other podcasts. I do guest appearances on other podcasts, so. I even bought a, an ad in the American Mensa email newsletter.

Sadaf Beynon: Mm-hmm.

Gary Arndt: All places where, you know, I'm hoping that I can, the other thing is that I have a very good idea what the value is of a new subscriber to my show.

So I can calculate if I get a subscriber and, you know, let's say they listen to what percentage of my shows and with this CPMI can pretty much figure out what they're worth and so. For me, a new subscriber is about $10 a year.

Sadaf Beynon: Okay.

Gary Arndt: So if I can acquire a subscriber for substantially less than that, then it's a pretty good [00:23:00] deal.

And that's an important exercise just because it gives you an idea of how much you should spend to acquire a subscriber. And I know people that have values per subscriber, well over $10, especially if you're in kind of that first camp where you're selling a course or. You know, a training or coaching or things like that, uh, it can be much, much higher.

So spending money to acquire those new customers can be well worth it. I'm kind of on the other end, uh, where $10 is probably actually pretty low, but I can still usually get subscribers for somewhere in like the one to $2 range.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm. Wow. So, Gary, do you know what, what works best for you in terms of growth? So is it cross promotions? Is it guest appearances? yeah.

Gary Arndt: A little bit of everything. You never know when people are gonna be listening. Uh, and the other thing I should note is that what you need to do will change as your show [00:24:00] grows.

So what I did to start the show, I can still do that. But I'm gonna probably get the same results because it's, it's linear, it doesn't scale.

So if I buy an ad on, say, the Overcast app, I can get, I don't know, a hundred to 200 subscribers in a month from that ad.

Sadaf Beynon: Mm-hmm.

Gary Arndt: But when you're doing, when I'm getting 50,000 some downloads a day. That doesn't, you can, you can barely tell it in the, the noise of the daily fluctuations of downloads. I need something that, you know, how do I double my show?

And that is a very different problem when you're where I am versus where I was say three years ago. So

now I'm looking at, you know, and it's gonna cost me more money. And that's fine. Uh, but it's a, it's a different nut that I'm trying to crack. So I'm looking at bigger marketing deals with bigger platforms for more money.

Not something I would recommend when you're just starting out, but, um, [00:25:00] what worked for me then just isn't gonna move the needle for me now. I.

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm, hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think there, there is something about that, isn't it? Like you have to, you have to keep evolving and you know, it's clear you've built something with real staying power, but, um, we need to still keep looking ahead to see what, what needs to be adapted and, and changed. So, with that in mind, actually, what's on the horizon for the PO podcast or your brand overall?

Gary Arndt: Uh, keep doing what I'm doing. Um. I said that for the first five years I was basically doing everything myself. And I think I definitely need to be bringing more people on board. I've not launched a subscriber version of the show, and because I have people that listen to so many episodes, uh, there's demand for that.

You know, if you're gonna listen to. One, or you know, if you release an episode every week, every two weeks, it's not a big deal When you listen to one every day and you have a back catalog in the [00:26:00] thousands, um, getting people to subscribe to that could actually be a pretty good source of revenue. And again, because I know the value of a subscriber, let's say I charge five, $6 a month.

Uh, for that you get 30 episodes. Uh, the annual value to me of that is way more than I'm gonna get from advertising, so that's something I need to do. Merchandise, I got people begging me for merchandise. I haven't done that yet. And the reason I haven't done a lot of this stuff is simply because I've been producing a podcast every day, and that's always the top priority.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Gary, if you were to give advice to, uh, business leaders who are podcast curious, but unsure if it's worth their time or effort, what would you say?

Gary Arndt: Figure out what your end goal is.

Um, don't chase vanity metrics. I have become very mercenary doing this show. Where I just, I don't waste my time doing anything that isn't going to, uh, you know, move things forward. I used to [00:27:00] speak at tons of conferences. I don't speak at any anymore because I don't, I don't attend podcast conferences, you know, 'cause I, I went to a few and I'm like, well, is this gonna help me grow my audience?

No. No one here is looking for. Podcast to listen to. They're all worried about their own show.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: this gonna help me make money? No, it's not. Advertisers aren't here. Am I gonna learn anything? No, I'm not. It's the same people doing the same sessions at every single thing, and it's all available online. So all I'm doing is taking time away from my show and spending money.

It doesn't help me. Um,

so if, if you have a business and you're launching a podcast to support the business,

then that needs to be your focus and viewing conversion. Not just empty audience growth or downloads for the sake of, of a vanity metric. And that's the biggest thing.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: If you, it's entirely possible that you could get more sales from 200 downloads an episode than you could from 2000.

If it's the right 200 I.

Sadaf Beynon: Yes, [00:28:00] absolutely. Yeah, you're right. It's, um, it's a conversion, not the vanity metrics, and it's so easy to get pulled into those because so many people just go based on how many downloads you've got. But that doesn't always equate.

Gary Arndt: Yeah, and like I said, that's why you, it's helpful to think of this as two ends of a spectrum on the spectrum I'm on. Downloads do matter, right? Because I'm making my money from the advertising.

But if you're not doing that, then the downloads don't really matter. It's all just conversion and targeting the right people, and especially if you're spending money to grow your audience, it forces you to think about where will my money be best spent and what is the audience that I want to attract?

As opposed to if you just want downloads for the sake of downloads, then you get stuck into these places that will like embed your podcast on a video game. One of those mobile apps that pops up and you know, you get an automatic download, but no one actually listened and no one cares. And what you really want is you, you don't want download.

You want an audience, you [00:29:00] want to build an audience. You want to build a community of people that care about what you have to say and want to hear more from you in the future.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. No, thanks for that. That was really helpful. That was a really helpful way to, to put that. Before we close, Gary, you've shared so many great insights into the day-to-day and the strategy behind your show, but if you were to zoom out a little, how has your approach to storytelling evolved from your travel days to now?

Gary Arndt: Well, I've gotten better at it,

Sadaf Beynon: Hmm.

Gary Arndt: I would hope would happen after you've done it 1500 times.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Gary Arndt: Uh, I look back at some of my early episodes and I cringe. And I have enough episodes published now where I'm kind of be gonna be hitting a limit on some podcast apps.

So I may have to either redo some of them, which I'm thinking of doing, or take some of them down.

Uh, but I've just gotten better at the act of storytelling, and it's one of those things, I'm sure you've heard about the whole 10,000 hours and putting that in. Um, I've done that and it, it's a lot of reps.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.[00:30:00]

Gary Arndt: And you just become better and better. And so what I think of when I do a new episode and my episodes could be on anything from, you know, a biography of someone to the element nitrogen,

and.

You need to develop a story arc, even if it's for nitrogen, right? It's like, how is it discovered? You know, what does it do? How is it used for? What are some applications? What's, what could it be used for in the future? Things like that.

Uh, so there's still some sort of arc there, and that's always kind of what I'm thinking about.

Uh, I, when, when I record a show, I usually end up, uh, finishing the recording at around midnight to 2:00 AM.

Sadaf Beynon: Okay.

Gary Arndt: And soon as I'm done, like literally once I've hit publish, I go to bed and I'm thinking about the next episode and what I'm gonna be doing. And so long as I have some sort of narrative in my head

for what it's gonna be about, the writing is actually pretty easy because all I have to do is follow that, that path.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. [00:31:00] Wow. That's cool. Thank you, Gary, this, this has been such an insightful conversation for me. Thank you.

Gary Arndt: Thanks for having me.

Sadaf Beynon: If someone wants to dive into your podcast or connect with you, where should they go to do that?

Gary Arndt: Uh, wherever you're listening to this podcast right now, just go search for Everything Everywhere Daily.

Sadaf Beynon: Awesome. Thank you. All. The links that Gary's just mentioned can be found in the show description, and if you've been wondering how podcasting could support your own business growth, I hope Gary's story gives you permission to pivot the pivot and the tools to build something that lasts. Thanks as always for listening and buy for now,

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