Full Transcript – Gary Arndt – Wild Business Growth Podcast #314

This is the full transcript for Episode #314 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Gary Arndt – Everything Everywhere Daily, Traveling Polymath. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Gary Arndt 0:00
The ability to adapt is more important than the ability to plan.

Max Branstetter 0:18
Hi there. Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth podcast. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting, and you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is episode 3.1415926535 and today’s guest is Gary Arndt. Gary is the host of the incredible podcast, Everything Everywhere Daily, and the creator of the award-winning travel blog, Everything Everywhere. And he’s an award-winning travel photographer, he sold his house in 2007 decided to travel the world, and since then, has an incredibly unique and fascinating and curiosity fulfilling outlook on life, on travel and history, all of which are topics that could sometimes randomly come up on his podcast, which now gets over one and a half million downloads per month. In this episode, we talk all those things, how to stay curious, and some of the most memorable things that Gary’s either experienced himself or went down a wormhole researching it is GA enjoy the shoe. Oh, rady, we are here with Gary. Aren’t not to be confused with my father in law, Gary, I don’t know. Maybe that’s something I don’t know there, but his name is Gary, but host of everything everywhere, one of the most fascinating podcasts as well as blogs that you’ll ever come across, and so so many exciting things to dive into, from everything everywhere, everything everywhere, daily, awesome show. Go check it out, either right now or right after this. Gary, thanks so much for joining. How you doing today? Good. Thanks

Gary Arndt 2:19
for having me. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Max Branstetter 2:22
And I’m starstruck in the podcasting world here, because we’ve done a good amount of episodes now, but you know, we do once a week, so whenever come across paths with somebody that does a daily podcast, it’s like a whole different ball game. And so I was trying to think of the right word to describe it, but keep going back to prolif, prolific, or even prolific, if we’re going to invent words there, but just admire what you do. But before we get into all that. So in 2007 you sold your house in Minnesota. You went on to travel the world, and kind of Everything started from there. Why did you make that decision? I

Gary Arndt 3:00
didn’t know what else to do. I had an internet company that I started in the 90s, and I sold it before the.com bubble burst. Went back to school for a few years, realized that academia was not a place I really wanted to be. I liked learning, but I didn’t particularly enjoy research and the academic culture, and so I came up with this hair brained idea of selling my home and traveling around the world for a year. And I kind of thought it would be more than a year, maybe two years ended up being well over a decade. I just kept traveling and traveling, and basically from 2007 till the pandemic, I spent most of my time on the road. Towards the end, I did have an apartment in Minneapolis and but I would still be traveling maybe half the year. That was kind of how that started. Yeah, I just didn’t really, kind of know what else to do. I was in my 30s. I had no wife, no kids. There was nothing stopping me. I had the means to do it, so I

Max Branstetter 3:55
did it, and now you regret it every single day, don’t you? No, I’m just kidding, not at all.

Gary Arndt 3:59
Because, you know what I one of the things I thought of is that this is an investment in myself that can never be repossessed. You know, all the experience I did and seen more than 99.9999% of humanity will ever experience. I’ve been to to more places and done more things. I have been in the water with great white sharks. I’ve been bungee diving. I got to get launched from a nuclear aircraft carrier. I’ve been dog sledding in the Yukon I’ve been oh man, swimming with jellyfish, scuba diving, you name it. And those are all things that most people never get to do. And so, you know, I had a pretty sizable chunk of my life where I was able to go and basically experience everything I ever wanted to.

Max Branstetter 4:51
So you just routed off like all my rapid fire Q and A questions for the end. So thank you for that. No, but is there so many once in a lifetime or nones in a lifetime? Experiences, as you hinted at, there is there a travel moment from, you know, the past couple decades that still kind of comes to the top when you think of, holy shit, I can’t believe I did that.

Gary Arndt 5:11
Not really. Because a lot of those things are actually quite doable by anybody, if they just make the conscious decision to do it. Many people, you know, they grow up. You know, my family never traveled anywhere. They weren’t rich, they never did anything. But once you get on the road, you meet people who are living a life like you, and they just made the decision to do it. You can go bungee jumping. You can go parachuting. I can tell you where to go in South Africa or South Australia if you want to swim with great white sharks. There are places you could if you want to do these things, where you can do it. And it doesn’t necessarily even cost that much money, but it’s just a matter of going there. And people get so bogged down in their lives and they think, Well, I don’t have the money to travel. It’s so expensive. No, what’s expensive is going on vacation, because all of your expenses you have, your rent, your mortgage, your utility bills, your insurance, everything else that that constitutes your life, you have to keep paying that stuff when you go on vacation, right? You don’t call the bank and say, Well, I’m not going to pay the mortgage this month because I’m not going to be using the house. It doesn’t work like that. That would be really nice, by the way, right? So it’s an additional expense, which is why people think it’s expensive. But if you sell your house, right, or put your stuff in storage and travel for an extended period of time, all that stuff goes away, maybe you’re paying a storage fee, that’s it. And you’re traveling to places that are much more affordable than the United States, they have a much lower cost of living, and you can get by and live quite well on maybe one to $2,000 a month, very well in some places. This is something a lot of people can do, and I understand that maybe you’re physically not able to do it, maybe you have responsibilities, you have kids, a parent, whatever. I mean, there are other things I understand that. But for a lot of people, the things I did are doable. It’s not something you have to wait to do, you know, at some undetermined point in the the distant future where you just wish and hope for it’s something you can, you can make happen if you just determine that you’re going to do it.

Max Branstetter 7:24
I really appreciate that perspective there. I think the biggest thing that always holds people up when it comes to world travel is the cost piece. And yeah, when you think about like you, when it is a vacation, there are those underlying costs at home that you’re responsible for, as you said, it’s a total, totally different mindset chef, to be like, actually, yeah, we’re not going to have those expenses anymore because we are, like, on the move or living somewhere else. So I never really thought about that way. And in addition to, like, the cost side of things, what else is a huge consideration. If you are someone who’s thinking about getting on the go and moving around the world for a bit where

Gary Arndt 8:01
you travel to so a lot of Americans, they just don’t know much about the world, and so they have a very set limited number of things they know about, and that is the universe of things they have to choose from if they want to travel. Most Americans, when they go to Europe, they’re going to the UK, Ireland, Italy, maybe France. That’s it. Not many people go to Spain. More Americans are going to Portugal, not going to Poland. They’re not going to Montenegro, Albania. Montenegro is great, you know, it’s, it’s really affordable, right on the Adriatic. Some beautiful stuff, the the beautiful mountains. Most people don’t think to go there. The Canary Islands. Lot of Europeans go there. Americans never do and or so they’ll know the Caribbean, because it’s close. But you know, oh, I’m gonna go to the Pacific. I’m going to Tahiti, Bora, Bora, they fur to places like that. But if I suggest, well, the Cook Islands, well, I don’t know what that is, and so if you just, you know, do some research and expand your knowledge base, you’ll find some fantastic places that maybe just aren’t the popular tourist destinations that are great you can go to Fiji. Fiji is kind of like the hub of the Pacific, it’s probably one of the biggest countries there. And there are places in Fiji where you can spend $1,000 a night, but there are also places in Fiji where you can spend $50 a night, all inclusive, these are small places run by local villages. They are not at all luxury. But who cares? Because you’re in Fiji and you’re literally sleeping 20 feet away from the beach, and the people are wonderful. Language is not a problem. It’s cheap. You’re in Paradise, and a lot of people just don’t know about it. Do.

Max Branstetter 9:59
Well, a lot of people know about you now. So let’s get to your blogging and podcasting journey, and the stories that you’ve you’ve seen through your own life, your own eyes and your own lens, and now so many have seen as well. So everything, everywhere you know, we mentioned at the top here that 2007 totally changed your life. When did you make the decision that, hey, I’m going to start taking pictures, and I’m going to start sharing some stories about the places I go.

Gary Arndt 10:26
Well, the decision to make a website that was kind of a no-brainer. When I sold my company back in 1998 I conned the company, I sold it to, which is a big multinational company, to send me on a whirlwind tour around the world to talk to their offices about internet stuff because they were still kind of new to this. I took a three week trip where I went to Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Frankfurt, Brussels, London and Paris. And that was the first time I had ever really kind of done something like that, and I created a website for the people back in the office. I had a really, really basic digital camera at the time where I could take simple photos. And I thought, well, yeah, I could do that. When I started, I had always kept a personal website, but I was about nine months into the trip, and I had, you know, a fair amount of experience and success doing stuff online. And I realized, well, this is kind of a waste of my time. So I realized I either need to double down on this, and I don’t know what this is, what, because nobody was really doing this at the time, or I needed to stop doing it. And so I went to, I was in Hong Kong, and I went to a magazine stand, bought all the English language travel magazines, opened up an Excel spreadsheet, did an analysis of what these magazines write about, and I realized that they’re mentioning like 38 different countries editorially per issue. Most people never go to 38 countries. So what are they using these magazines for it’s not travel planning. It’s pornography. It’s travel pornography.

Max Branstetter 12:08
By the way, appreciate the distinction. Mine was going a totally different place, but

Gary Arndt 12:13
it’s fantasy, right? They dream of visiting these places, and it involves a lot of photography. And I had bought a camera when I started traveling, a fancy camera, an SLR with all the buttons and knobs and dials, thinking that, Oh, this fancy camera, it’s expensive, so it’ll take good photos. And I learned right away that is not how it works, that you can take very bad photos with a very good camera. I began taking photography seriously, and so I started posting a photo every day to my website. And I did that for eight years. Every single day I posted a photo and what posting? Now that’s not a big deal anymore, because we have Instagram and things like that, but at the time that didn’t exist, it forced me to make my work public so people would see it, and doing that requires you to up your game, because you don’t want to have something bad. And I underwent an iterative process just learning how to take photos. I learned what all the dials and knobs and buttons on my camera did. I looked at other photos, analyzed them, and when I started, I’m like, Well, I don’t know how they did that. And later I got to a point where it’s like, Oh, I know how they did that. You know, this is probably what the F stop was they and eventually comes down to, like, oh, they had to be there at that time of day. You know, it’s positioning and finding the right place at the right time. And by, you know, 2013 2014 2015 I was named travel photographer the year in North America, three times from knowing nothing to that, and it was all just this process of just slow improvements, you know, and incrementally getting better. What

Max Branstetter 13:49
single photograph was the most impactful to your photography career?

Gary Arndt 13:55
There’s no one photo that was impactful for my career. There are several that I really like. You know, I’ve done some gallery shows, and I have a lot of the residual photos that are now decorating my apartment, which was kind of the original goal of getting a camera when I started traveling to begin with. There’s one I took on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean that I really like. This woman, she was about 100 yards away, stood up before this massive waterfall and posed. I don’t know who it is to this day, but she did it perfectly, like I couldn’t have planned it any better. There are some shots I got in like Wadi Rum and Jordan. There’s some nature shots that I thought were really special, that I got in British Columbia, some that I took in Manitoba when I was up there photographing polar bears. They’re a lot I’ve just of the foot not not the photos I’ve taken, but the photos that I’ve like processed. There’s like 50,000 of them up online,

Max Branstetter 14:48
skipping a lot here, but the point is that you have the diligence to be sharing content daily, and so that goes back to your photography and blogging. And. And then here comes 2020, and it flowed through to the podcasting world as well. So you have everything everywhere, daily, the podcast now, which we’ll talk about it. But

Gary Arndt 15:12
let me, let me explain how this transition happened. Yeah, yeah, sure. No, David, please. The current podcast is not a travel podcast, right? And that was a conscious decision. So when the pandemic hit, I can tell you the dates of how all this went down. My last international trip was February 2020 I was in Portugal. I arrive home, flying to Minneapolis, February 28 the next day, I get sick. I have COVID, very early COVID. This is, you know,

Max Branstetter 15:45
March, that’s, that’s early adopter for the US COVID.

Gary Arndt 15:48
Yeah, there’s no tests available or anything. I’m positive I had COVID. I don’t know what else it would have been. Felt miserable for a week. I get better, and then everything starts shutting down. All, you know, all the the tourism industry goes to zero, basically. And I already had some problems with where travel media was going. One of the problems is travel media is nobody really pays attention until they’re about to go on a trip. You don’t follow this like you do sports, politics, fashion, technology, celebrity gossip, where there’s always something new happening. The Coliseum is there. It’s been there for 2000 years. It’ll probably be there 2000 more. Not much happens in the world of travel. And what happened is, when I started doing a travel blog, I was a blog, blog, a web log, and I would write my thoughts about the places I was visiting and everything and everyone got into this because I saw it as this glamorous lifestyle. And what ended up happening was the algorithms took it over Twitter, Facebook, and then they changed their algorithm so they didn’t drive organic content. So everybody ended up getting their traffic from Google, which means that everybody started writing the exact same article, 15 things to do in Las Vegas. And I knew one, it’s crabs in a bucket, because SEO is a zero sum game. And eventually Google was going to do something and screw everyone. And that happened this year, this this year 2024, travel blogs just got hammered. Like a lot of them lost 80% of their traffic, and I when, so when the pandemic hit, I’m like, Okay, this is the opportunity to pivot into something else. And I’ve been doing a podcast. I was a co host of a show called This Week in travel from 2009 till the pandemic. And I had an idea for a podcast. I had the artwork done. I had the the rights to the music, the theme music reserve. I had everything ready to go, except I was originally thinking of like two to three hour episodes, kind of more like hardcore history that would be released infrequently. And I did the math on this, and it never really worked out as a business. And I was at a an event probably a year before the pandemic. Met this guy new he launched a new podcast. It was a daily show, and he started closing down the other business things he had going on. And I asked him why he was doing this. Like this podcast is the best thing I’ve ever done. It just makes more than everything else. So I thought about that, I was like, Well, what if I, what if I took the opposite approach, instead of taking a howitzer to a topic, what if I did a shotgun approach and I did a daily show and I did the numbers on them like this works out much, much better, that there’s something that there’s, you know, if you look at a equation to determine, like podcast growth, there’s a whole bunch of different variables that are in it, but one of the variables is The number of episodes you produce. And the easiest way to produce more episodes is to just, you know, do it more frequently. So July 20, 2020, I began everything everywhere, daily. And the name of my travel blog was everything everywhere. So I kind of had the the IP. And I should say, I was using this name well before the movie ever came along that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and I’ve been doing it ever since. And the show is not I lean on and use a lot of what I learned traveling, and I mentioned that in the show. But it’s not a travel show, per se. It’s an educational show, lot of history, science, geography, math, stuff like that. A

Max Branstetter 19:18
quick note on the downloads, part of that, like, in frequency, part of it so often. People ask in the podcasting space, like, how do I grow my downloads? How do I gain listeners? And like, hands down, the most surefire way to do that is to release more episodes. Like, people always forget about that. But it’s like people talk about going from one episode to two a week or or even more frequent than that. And like, yeah, you know, you might not have everybody listening every single time, but like, if there’s more content out there, there’s more potential for downloads. So it’s like, people always over complicate that. So the, I mean, we’ll call it the history bucket your podcast, but you’re right, it’s all sorts of, I mean, it’s everything everywhere. What was it that? Compelled you enough about, like, history and science and kind of these random fun fact 10 minute stories that you’re like, alright, this, there’s enough here. And I’m passionate enough about this stuff that, like, I would talk about this stuff every day.

Gary Arndt 20:14
This was the podcast that I wanted to listen to that nobody was doing. And I figured if there were, if I would be interested in this, other people would as well. As far as what made me uniquely qualified to do this? There’s no degree for doing this show, because it covers everything. But my undergraduate majors were math, economics, political science. I went back to school, got degrees in geology and geophysics, which required me to take classes in chemistry, biology, astronomy, everything else. I had a business, and then I traveled around the world for about 13 years, visiting over 200 countries and territories. So that gave me an extremely broad knowledge base to fall back on, both academic and through life experiences. And I’ve often said I don’t know if I’m I’m not saying I’m the only person who could do this show, but of the people who could do this show, I’m probably the only one that would bother to do this show. Someone else was probably doing something better.

Max Branstetter 21:17
You take that back, but no, it’s a talk about a labor of love. You hear that term all the time when you’re spending time every single day doing something, you better love it. But when you look back to the early days of the if you zoom out like it’s still early days for your podcast, but in the early, early days of the podcast, what like moment or like inflection point was there? Like, what? What was it where you started to be like, Hey, we’re getting some traction here. I think this is, like, this is picking up.

Gary Arndt 21:46
I suppose it was like, 18 months into it. And mind you, that was a year and a half of doing this every single day. And you know, when the the pandemic hit, I lost like 95% of my income. I ended up moving and I lived in Minneapolis when I started the show on Lake Street, where all the George Floyd riots happened, my neighborhood basically burned down. So I ended up moving to Wisconsin, which was a brilliant decision, but I just kept doing it. And I knew, I don’t know, several years ago, the Houston Astros won the World Series, and they were the worst team in baseball a couple years earlier, and they just had this amount of like trust the system, where they had a system in place, and you just had to follow it through. And that was kind of my belief, that you have periods where things plateau and you feel like you’re not going anywhere, and it’s like you just stick with it, and all of a sudden, I’d see these spikes in traffic out of nowhere. And things would happen. Earlier this year, Apple, for the first time, promoted the show. You know, I went from a million to a million and a half downloads a month. And these things happen. More people keep discovering it. And that’s the thing with podcasts, as opposed to YouTube. A lot of people, their first reaction is, Oh, you got to make a YouTube channel. You YouTube channel. YouTube is almost, you know, I would say highly to almost exclusively dependent upon an algorithm. If they change the algorithm, you’re done. You’re just done, right? CPMs on YouTube videos are a fraction of what they are for audio podcasts, the very best niches in YouTube are like finance, and I think they make like a $15 CPM, which is like the bottom of what you’re gonna get for audio podcasts, not to mention that production is more and you know, Google could close down your your YouTube channel at any moment. So audio podcasting, I think, is, I will say it’s a better business, but it’s harder to grow at first, but once you’ve made that growth, the audience is yours. It’s like growing an email list.

Max Branstetter 23:54
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great analogy. And I’m a huge fan of YouTube as well. And like, I believe there’s, there’s obviously room for for both of those in the podcasting space, but you’re an awesome success story of like, of why I fell in love with podcasting in the first place is like being able to do whatever you’re doing and listen to whatever you want, whenever you want, and just get educated on like, random fun facts and history and trivia and just things that are interesting or entertaining to like on demand, like that, that will never get old, and it’s so powerful. And it should

Gary Arndt 24:25
say, I’m not against YouTube, you know, I may very well launch a YouTube channel at some point, but the base is always going to be the audio podcast, because that is something I own and control. The YouTube part of it would be something extra.

Max Branstetter 24:39
Yeah, no, I totally see what you mean for your show. So, like, I would say, kind of in podcasting, the standards, kind of like a weekly podcast, once a week drop. You went with the daily approach, which obviously, you know, if you can stick with it for years, you can see phenomenal growth. You can see phenomenal results. You also had, like, fantastic time. Me as well. But can we dive into your process a little bit like, what does it look like a typical day for you putting an episode together? What’s what’s kind of like the high level? Look at that from start to finish.

Gary Arndt 25:12
So I’ll wake up around 10 or 11 in the morning, hopefully I’ll have an idea what the next episode is. So sometimes I’ll plan it out a week, two weeks ahead, what the episodes are going to be. Sometimes I’ll wake up and I don’t know what it’s going to be.

Max Branstetter 25:27
Does that stress you out? By the way, when you when you don’t know, because if

Gary Arndt 25:31
I know what it is, that’s half the battle. Because then I can just, I can just walk around and think about, okay, whatever. I’m going to put it in this order. I’m going to say this, this and this, I’m going to cover these things. And then the actual typing of the script becomes pretty easy. Like, if it’s if I know what I’m going to say, I could crank out a script. And my scripts are about 2000 words. The quickest I could do it maybe, is two hours. If it’s not that, then I’m looking at five to six hours. I usually have a pretty good idea. I’ve done enough research beforehand that I know kind of what I’m going to say before it starts, I keep a running list of show ideas that’s constantly evolving. I take stuff off as I do an episode, and then I add stuff to it. There’s about 930 show ideas on there. For example, tomorrow’s episode will be episode number 1599, I do reruns about twice a week now, to give me a few days off. But that’s fine, because statistically, I know most people either didn’t hear that episode or they forgot it because it was two years ago, or something like that. Writing the script is in researching is by far the thing that takes the most time. The actual recording of the show is relatively trivial. A scripted monolog show is the easiest type of podcast to do from a production standpoint. There’s no ums and ahs. You don’t have to worry about the internet connection and the person you’re talking to. It’s very simple. I just start talking, and if I flub up, or I want to say something the right way, I just move the waveform back on the recorder and start from that point, and then I just keep doing that till I’m done. And when I’m done, it’s already edited.

Max Branstetter 27:10
Yeah, that’s a streamlined process. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but yeah, it totally is. When you have a script, it is easy that the problem is if it goes too long, like, if you’re going longer than 10 minutes, then it’s at a certain time like it, well, actually, maybe, do you see that like, does it drain you even like reading something for like, a 10 minute period? No,

Gary Arndt 27:28
I’m just so used to it. At this point, it takes me about 20 minutes to do a 10 minute show to record. And I know how long it’s going to be because I’ve done so many of them. So I’ve done probably over 1200 unique episodes that I can tell from the word count how long the show is going to be approximately. So I know that 2000 words is what I’m shooting for. Sometimes it’ll be 1800 sometimes it’ll go as long as 2200 I’ve had some episodes that went like 2400 words. So I’ve written, I think I asked I just post a thing on this, on LinkedIn. Since I started the show, I believe I’ve written two and a half million words for my scripts.

Max Branstetter 28:13
Awesome. That might be the biggest congrats at all your millions. That research piece is huge when it’s a show that’s so heavy in history and everything else, etc, that you want to call it. But what’s your research processes look like when you’re getting these shows together?

Gary Arndt 28:27
Well, it all starts by just randomly discovering stuff. So a couple hours ago, I went out to eat, went to lunch, brought my laptop with me, and I was reading an article on Chinese cuisine and how there really isn’t such a thing as Chinese cuisine. If you look at a map and look at that part of the world, that’s China, there is no one cuisine. There’s traditionally send like, well, there are eight different cuisines, but there aren’t eight cuisines, because eight really is the way they divided up southeastern China. And so this author said, Well, there’s really 63 Chinese cuisines. And so it was this massive article delineating all the different cuisines for every single part of China. This is the kind of stuff I read about. But then as I’m reading it, I’m like, there’s a lot. Not only are there different cuisines in China, but there are completely different languages. We call them all Chinese, but in reality, someone who speaks Cantonese and someone who speaks Mandarin, they can’t talk to each other. And I’ve literally had friends that like are from China, and we went to a Chinese restaurant, but it was Cantonese. They couldn’t speak to the the staff there, and Chinese something and having to do in English. But there’s lots of places in the world like this. I was thinking, Okay, well, if you go to India, Southern India, very, very different from northern India, both in terms of food and in terms of language. You go to Nigeria, you know, there are very different groups of people there. And there are lots of places all over the world like this. So I got thinking, well, I could do an episode on countries and countries. There was a, if you ever seen 10. Lasso when he first shows up, yeah, yeah. We’re talking about, well, no, this is England. That’s Scotland and that’s Wales. They’re different countries. And he says, Well, how many countries are in this country? I was saying, Okay, this could be the basis of the show countries and countries where, you know, Texas, the culture in Texas is very different than California or Utah or Hawaii, and we speak the same language, but the differences in other parts of the world are even more pronounced. So, so that was an example of, like, how I come up with an episode idea. So it’s just like, okay, I can do this, but and then on top of all that, it’s like, and I probably should do something on Chinese food, but I probably need to do more research on that, because I don’t think I was at a point right now where I could do much beyond like, you know, Cantonese versus szechu. Well,

Max Branstetter 30:48
if you ever need help with someone taste testing all the 63 different Chinese foods, I’m just gonna volunteer myself and say I’m happy to taste test for you. So hit me up. But over the years, has there been, like, any sort of main sources? I’m assuming Wikipedia comes up all the time, but any sort of main sources, in addition to that, that tend to rise to the top when you’re crafting

Gary Arndt 31:15
these if you do a search. So my episodes are short, so I’m not writing a doctoral thesis. This is a kind of an intro to any given topic that I’m doing. Like I said, it’s the shotgun approach. So if you do a basic search on things, there are several history sites that are always going to come up. And you really have to always look at multiple things, because it’s very easy, especially it’s like, you go to a Wikipedia page and they’ll say, well, such and such did that in 1464 and then you go to another website, and it says, well, such and such did this in 1468 you’re like, Well, hold it. Was it 1464 1468 and then you go and find some more sources, and some might say 1464 and some might say 1468 and you’re like, Well, what the hell is it? You just end up saying, like, well, in the 15th century to kind of just muddle it up, or, you know, if you can’t get a specific date. But there’s all kinds of examples of this where, you know, you find stuff on Wikipedia that is wrong, or if it’s not wrong, it certainly doesn’t conform to what anybody else is saying on a given topic. And you always kind of have to take it with a grain of salt. I’ll use Wikipedia, but you got to be very careful. And why I should say Wikipedia for things about history, science, science topics, Wikipedia is great. There’s very little in the way of anybody with an agenda talking about physics or something like that, when you get into history, a lot of times it’s just a matter of these small details that may often be wrong. Do you just have to check, by the way,

Max Branstetter 32:55
is that how it’s pronounced? Is it Wikipedia? Because, if so, I’ve been pronouncing it wrong. Wiki. Yeah, I’ve always said wiki, like Wikipedia quickly, like that. I would trust you. I have known, but we stumbled into a different who knows this could be a future podcast episode for you. But speaking of that, as part of prep for this, some of the most fun I’ve ever had preparing for a guest because your episodes are so quick and easy to bounce around and to binge, and I wanted to listen to some old and some new from your show, and just to give the audience a taste of some of your episodes, the one from the very early days that blew my mind. You titled broccoli James broccoli. It was about James Bond and the whole ties to the broccoli family, which I didn’t even know there was a broccoli family, and the origins of broccoli out of Italy and everything there, and how it ties to the Bond movie franchise.

Gary Arndt 33:52
Yeah, go look at any early James Bond movie, yeah, in the credits, and you’ll see like, Cubby Broccoli,

Max Branstetter 33:58
which sounds like a totally made up name. No, they’re

Gary Arndt 34:00
family. So cruciferous, I did another episode on this. Cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, do not exist in nature. These are man made things that over centuries, through cross breeding, that we have created, we’ve created things that are highly palatable. And if you want to understand why they can’t exist in nature. Grow a garden with some lettuce and see how long it lasts if you don’t put a fence around it, right? Animals are going to eat these things immediately. They’re all based on a couple plants in Europe, and they don’t even look like, you know, the foods that we’re eating. So, yeah, like, broccoli was something that was created, and the broccoli family was responsible for popularizing it

Max Branstetter 34:46
all the way through broccoli Rob Andy Bernard’s improv partner, no a cappella partner from the office. But anyway, I’m sure there’s great relation there, but that, so that was a memorable one for like. That just blew me away. And there’s so many other great episodes. More recent one about the Blitz in London was fascinating. Learned a lot there that I didn’t know beforehand. But for you personally, is there any, or like, a couple episodes that kind of jump to the top when people ask, like, Hey, what are your favorite episodes that you’re like, I’m really glad I did this. I

Gary Arndt 35:18
always go back to the story of Chief Joseph Medicine Crow, who was the last war chief in the Crow Nation, and he did it in World War Two. And to earn the title of war chief, it’s not given, it has to be earned. And there are four things you have to do. You have to touch an enemy in battle. You have to steal an enemy’s weapon. You have to lead a raiding party, and you have to steal a horse. And the horse part would be the tricky part in World War Two to do, but he was in the US Army in Europe, and towards the end of a war, his unit was going to start shelling a, I think it was an SS or a Gestapo base, and they had like 30 thoroughbred horses, and they’re going to start opening it with mortar fire in the morning. And he told this commanding officer, it’s like, before you do this, let me go in, let me get the horses out. So he just goes in with a rope, uses it at a bridle, opens up the gate, leads all the horses out. And it’s not till he goes home in Montana and starts talking to the elders in his tribe, where they want to hear his war stories that they notify him. Was like, Well, you did everything to become a war chief, so we’re making you a war chief. And he lived to be 103 was a published offer or in the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Uh, real fascinating story.

Max Branstetter 36:40
It is appreciate that. By the way, when you when you were saying the the four requirements for being before Chief, I was thinking that it’s like the modern day requirements for what the bride should wear at a wedding, like something blue, something like, oh, maybe it has origins there, and now for something awesome. That was corny. But have you ever thought about starting a podcast yourself, but can’t quite get over the hump? Here’s something awesome that might help you do it. Podcasters kit Yes. Podcasters kit six is live at the time of this drop. It is live through this Saturday, and it is your place to get 38 podcasting courses, resources, products, you name it all for the price of $47 it’s an incredible amount of health information. I’m honored to be a part of it once again. And if you’re interested in signing up for podcasters kit, make sure to check out the description of this episode or the blog on the website, and that’ll send you there. Now let’s get a little curious. I want to dive more into you as a person, or as a host or as a polymath, because the word I keep kind of going back to is curiosity. I feel like Curiosity has driven so much of your travels. It’s driven so much of your podcast content creation and all the stories there. What do you think it is that makes you so curious?

Gary Arndt 38:09
I have no idea.

Max Branstetter 38:11
That’s a curious answer, no, just no. I

Gary Arndt 38:13
don’t know. I’ve always been this way. I learned. I taught myself how to read my first day of kindergarten. My mom brings me in, and she gets a call saying, Oh, Mrs. Aren’t we have a problem? She goes, what? What’s the matter? And she’s like, Gary knows how to read. Like, yeah, I just I learned how to read from Sesame Street in the electric company all throughout school. I would be the kid that would read the encyclopedia stuff like that. So I’ve always kind of been really curious. I’m a big believer that there are two things you need to do to learn. You need to know how to read and you need to be curious. We’re very good. Well, I should say we’re reasonably good at teaching people how to read. We’re horrible at curiosity. In fact, we stifle curiosity. You can learn far more on your own, chasing your own passions, and in the process, learn most of what you’re going to learn at school than you would be by being forces in the classroom. And when you look at general knowledge assessments of adults, so often we look at like, oh, test scores of 14 year olds versus Finland versus Singapore, whatever. That doesn’t matter. Our job for schools is not to have 14 year olds score well, in math, it’s to create adults. And when you look at general knowledge scores for adults, it’s abysmal. It’s like they didn’t go to school, like they they have forgotten almost everything. 98% I think maybe more of people who take a foreign language class in the United States can’t speak the language or forget almost all of it. I was like, Well, what was the point of the whole thing? Why did you take four years of your life doing this and come out with nothing they can’t tell you the basics of history. I’m sure you’ve seen the videos where they asked people on the streets basic, basic questions, like, who’s the Queen of England? Or, like. Like, who is the Queen of England, the queen of or something like that, where the answers in the question that people can’t answer it, or find the United States on a map and they can’t do it. So I have a, I have a wide range of people that listen to the show, like, really wide like truck drivers, 11 year old kids, people at MIT that all listen. And the thing I often get from kids and from parents is they say, Well, you are our favorite teacher. My kid learns more from you than they do in school. And the question is, well, how is it that a 10 minute podcast can do more than a day at school? It’s because you’re peaking people’s interest. And a lot of times I’ll get parents that say, you know, we’ll listen to your show, and then we’ll sit down and we’ll research more of it if we find it interesting. So it’s a starting point then. And yeah, I’m sure you’ve gone, you’ve done this, where you’ve gone down some rabbit hole about some subject, whatever it might be that you’re interested in, and maybe you become obsessed with it for a while, and you can probably tell me more about whatever that subject was than something you did in from a classroom when you were a junior in high school.

Max Branstetter 41:05
Yeah, like the broccoli family? No, I’m just kidding. I keep going back to that. But how do you think that we can, like, improve people’s curiosity?

Gary Arndt 41:18
I think kids are naturally curious. You just need to let them go nuts. You know, a lot of kids go through a phase when they’re younger. Of they like dinosaurs, right? Let them go nuts with dinosaurs. You can learn a lot from dinosaurs. How do we know about dinosaurs fossils? What are fossils? They’re bones. What do we know about bones? You from there. You can get into chemistry. You can get into biology. Those topics will eventually lead you to math. Instead of just sitting someone down and going through these rote things, let them learn about these things as a means of, okay, I need to, I need to do this to figure out this other thing I’m really interested in. People always say, Well, you know, homeschooling these kids are every every every year you look at like the National Geographic geography bee, or the Scripps Howard Spelling Bee, it’s always homeschool kids are crushing everybody else. And it’s a lot of times because, like, this is something they want to do. They’re really into geography, or they’re really into spelling, and they’re willing to devote themselves to it, and they they just kind of crush everybody else. I think that’s the primary reason.

Max Branstetter 42:26
Let’s, I’m gonna put you on the real hot seat here. We’re gonna wrap up with some rapid fire Q and A. These are, these are more seemingly random than your podcast episode topics. You ready for it? Sure. All right, all right. Let’s get wild. Speaking of cruciferous now, I can’t drop it, but this is on Wikipedia or Wikipedia, whichever is correct. We’ll have to research it later, and maybe the answer is they’re both correct. I saw that you started a they called it a video game salon in Minneapolis, land

Gary Arndt 42:56
gaming center. Yeah, in the late 90s, early 2000s people had crappy internet connections. Maybe you had a DSL connection that was a couple 100k right? But if you brought your computer to your friend’s house, you could hook up an Ethernet connection and play Quake half life, whatever, at very good speeds. So I built a facility. We got a bunch of top end Alienware machines. At the time. We had like 28 stations, fast networking, so you could play with each other. But then we also had like a t1 connection, which, again, at the time, was really fast. It would be nothing today we had, I had a gaming website as well that sort of funded this, but when the.com bubble burst, we were doing great selling ad inventory for gaming websites, and then it all kind of fell apart overnight.

Max Branstetter 43:57
Well, you caught me that turned out to be more of a prompt than a question. But I guess a follow up question would be, what, what was the most groundbreaking video gaming console of all time?

Gary Arndt 44:09
Oh, the Atari 2600 that was the console. That was the first one that literally broke the ground. Everything else was just, you know, there are certainly better ones, but that was the one that really changed everything. What’s really cool the Atari 2600 joystick, which was just a stick in one button. You can now buy an Atari 2600 joystick with a USB connector for like 20 bucks, and inside of it is every 2600 game that was ever produced.

Max Branstetter 44:40
It’s amazing. It’s so no, like, the video game companies are doing incredible job with, like, the nostalgia and bringing everything back. That’s another one. I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or nostalgia.

Gary Arndt 44:51
I play World of Warcraft classic. I’m in a really good Guild, and fundamentally, I’m playing a 20 year old game. And I think. What a lot of people realize is that graphics are great, but in terms of gameplay, a lot of the best games came out 1020, years ago, Age of Empires two, not Age of Empires, not Age of Empires three, but Age of Empires two, one of my favorite games. A lot of people it’s their favorite game. They came out with a redone version of it with modern graphics, but kind of the same gameplay was very popular. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of games like that, and

Max Branstetter 45:33
you actually segue to this perfectly. As I was I was wondering about ages, if you go to any age, or we’ll just call it like any time frame in history. If you could travel there, what would it be?

Gary Arndt 45:43
Probably the very early 20th century, 1920s maybe just before, just after World War One. That was a period where you saw the fastest rate of change in world history, where electrification in cars became a thing, where you’re dealing with people who a few years ago, may have had a horse in an outhouse, now have electricity and a car. And these are radical changes in lifestyle. The biggest change for most people and people my age, maybe I grew up, you know, I had a computer in high school. Wasn’t very fast and Apple to see or something like that. But like, smartphones have been the thing that if you look at the world today versus the world 20 years ago, it’s really not that different, except for the fact that everybody carries a phone. That’s the thing that changes. But if you go back to the 1920s the the T you know, and in that maybe the 10 years before or after, probably before, that’s when the world was really changing. And I think that would be kind of fascinating to see.

Max Branstetter 46:54
I often think about that my my grandpa, Henry, he passed away, actually, in 2020 he was born in 1924 and like, I think about that often, of like, Oh my God. Like, what was life like growing up in that age, and to be coming into, like, the age of being able to remember stuff and having memories, better said, with the Great Depression and then World War Two and everything like, that’s, that’s

Gary Arndt 47:17
just my great grandfather, who I can still remember quite well, was born in 1898 and that, you know, he grew up in an era where there, there wasn’t running water, there wasn’t any of this stuff. Everything was by horse. And that’s fundamentally different. You know, another thing I started doing in the pandemic was learning Latin people often say, Well, why would you do that? You can’t use it anywhere. Well, you can use it. You can use it in the past. And there’s an enormous amount of not just from ancient Rome, but also through the Middle Ages that was all written in Latin. And if you read a lot of ancient texts, whether it’s in Latin or translated, one of the things you realize is that humans are pretty much the same. There are technical things different about our world today, kids on cell phones and stuff like that that are different. But in terms of, like interpersonal relationships and things we worry about and whatnot, that’s the same problems they were dealing with 2000 years ago. So a lot of this stuff in I think, having this realization that we are the same people going through the same things, different, to be sure, but fundamentally our reactions to it, and the fact that there were people back then plotting and scheming and and doing all the things that you see people do now, kind of comforting, in a way

Max Branstetter 48:37
it is. But I wish I knew that earlier, because we would have done this whole interview in Latin ipsum. No, that’s all. I know. It’s not even real. But okay, real quick, first thing that comes to your head, best city slash region in the world for food, and worst city or region in the world for food, best

Gary Arndt 48:59
city, I would have to say is a tie between Singapore and San Sebastian, Spain.

Max Branstetter 49:04
Ooh, wait, what’s the San Sebastian What are, what are they known for? I mean, I love Spanish food, but they’re particularly

Gary Arndt 49:12
well, like I was saying, there is no like, there is no Chinese, sorry, I love one of the 63 uh, it’s in the Bosque region of Spain, very close to the border, right on the border of France and the Atlantic Ocean, and it really is just one of the best food cities in the world. Girona, which is on the other side of the Pyrenees, near the Mediterranean, I’d say, is another area where you see just some of the world’s best restaurant in these areas that you have really fresh seafood, but it’s also in the mountains, and it kind of is the best of both worlds Singapore, the food culture there. I really like the Hawker stands. You get a wide variety of different cuisines done really well. So those would be my two

Max Branstetter 49:55
and then what’s a place that maybe we’ll call it to? A bit of an adjustment with your stomach to get used to their food.

Gary Arndt 50:03
There really has been no place like that where you had to adjust to it. I mean, the only thing you’re going to find in most places that would be difficult would be spices. And the truth of the matter is, if you’re not from that country, most places are not going to make it very spicy. I remember being in Thailand, and I ordered a dish. It was like a blue crab salad of some sort. And the waitress is like, you want Thai spicy, or farang spicy? And I was like, Thai spicy. That was a mistake, because, I mean, spices are really the only thing that’s different. I get a lot of people that ask like, oh, it’s the weirdest thing you ever ate. And what they’re really asking for is either some animal or some part of an animal that we don’t eat. And the fact of the matter is, all the things we don’t eat we used to eat. Well,

Max Branstetter 50:56
he took it back to Ted Lasso. Now I’m thinking of that scene where he tries the really spicy vindaloo, and he’s like, yeah, yeah, we’ll do the spicy version. No, no, that’s that’s not good for anybody, all right? And then last one, what is, I’ll call it like a quirk or a side effect, like, what’s something you didn’t expect, but it’s just kind of impacted your daily life, about being such a polymath and seeking and all these stories and experiences that kind of came about. You didn’t expect

Gary Arndt 51:26
it. I don’t know, because I this is how I’ve always lived. You know, it’s like asking a fish, what’s it like to breathe water

Max Branstetter 51:34
I’m interviewing what

Gary Arndt 51:37
it that’s just the way it’s always been. You’re constantly trying to read more. One of the strange things is, is that there’s such the internet is basically like drinking from a fire hose. There’s so much stuff available that I find that I don’t spend enough time reading books anymore, that I can get what I want quickly and digest it in the form of an article, where I’m not going to sit down and plod through 600 pages of something. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but it’s definitely a thing. That’s

Max Branstetter 52:11
what will remain to be seen. And Google’s kind of a microcosm of this with like, the AI answer or any ChatGPT, anything that you’re using AI to search, like if you get the answer right away you’re looking for, obviously, that helps from an efficiency standpoint, but in terms of learning and enjoying the process of reading and coming through insights like that, like that, I’ve totally agree that’s that’s part of the process of, like, reading books and doing research and that where it’s like a long process and it just doesn’t have The same delivery, if it’s instant gratification right away, so remains to be seen. But Gary, really appreciate it. This has been awesome. Love your podcast. Love everything that you share out and really inspired by all you do and staying curious. I know if people want to check out your podcast or any of any of your content, they can go to everything everywhere.com. And is there anywhere? Obviously, they can find your podcast, everything everywhere, daily on the podcast platforms as well, but anywhere else that you want to shout

Gary Arndt 53:11
out, no, wherever you are listening to this podcast right now, just hit the search button. Look for everything everywhere daily and start listening.

Max Branstetter 53:20
Gary, thanks again. Last thing, final thoughts. It could be a quote, just kind of one line, words to live by, whatever you want. Send us home here,

Gary Arndt 53:26
the ability to adapt is more important than the ability to plan. This is something that I’ve come to believe through the course of traveling around the world, and I still believe it today,

Max Branstetter 53:40
one of the many abilities of the incredible Gary Arndt. Gary, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, sharing your Wild story and Wild stories, and thank you Wild Listeners for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, make sure to follow the Wild Business Growth podcast on your favorite podcast app and hit Subscribe on YouTube. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter. You can also find us on Goodpods, and for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. That is where podcasting meets entrepreneurship meets puns that are bad. And you can sign up at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter Until next time, let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!