¶ Exploring the World With Gary Arndt
They say life is short and the world is wide . My guest today , gary Arndt , knows this better than most . Having traveled extensively , gary reminds us that the world is far too vast to see it all in one lifetime . As a debate champion and the host of the award-winning Everything Everywhere podcast , gary brings a unique perspective on exploration and discovery .
So buckle up . It's time to see the world through Gary Arndt's eyes . Welcome to Journey with Jake . This is a podcast about adventure and how , through our adventures , we can overcome the challenges of life that come our way . While I expect you will learn some things about different adventures , this show will entertain you .
Each episode will feature different guests or guests as they share experiences and stories from the different adventures they have been on . Not only will you be entertained , but you'll also hear the failures and trials each guest faces and what they have done or are doing to overcome the hardships that come their way .
My goal is to take each of us on a journey through the experiences of my guests , with the hope that you'll be entertained and inspired to overcome your day-to-day challenges . After all , it's not all about the destination , as it is about the journey . Welcome back to Journey with Jake .
I'm your host , jake Bushman , and I'm excited to bring you another fantastic episode Today . We're joined by the highly accomplished Gary Arndt . Before we dive in , I'd like to invite you to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts , if you enjoy what you hear . Leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify would mean the world to me .
You can also catch episodes on YouTube . Just search Journey with Jake Podcast . And while you're there , be sure to subscribe and hit that like button . I'd love to connect with you all . The best place to do that is on Instagram . At Journey with Jake Podcast , I share clips from past , current and upcoming episodes , along with a bit about my personal journey .
So come , follow along . I'd love to hear from you . Lastly , journey with Jake is part of the Podmatch Podcast Network . If you're looking for more great podcasts , visit podmatchcom forward slash network . Now on to today's episode .
I had an incredible conversation with Gary Arndt , who spent over 13 years traveling the world and is now the host of the Everything Everywhere podcast . If you enjoy this episode , I recommend checking out episode 55 with Kat Medina , where we discuss embracing the traveler's mindset . All right , let's get to my conversation with Gary Arndt .
All right , I am super get to my conversation with Gary Arndt . All right , I am super excited today I have Gary Arndt on the call with me today . Gary , welcome to Journey with Jake , thanks for having me . Yeah , this is exciting . I was doing a little research on you and I'm like , wow , gary does a podcast , he does a show every day .
He's got a lot of people who listen , a lot of downloads really cool and it's a history podcast and we're going to dive into that . Before we do that , we're also going to talk about your travels , but I'd like to know a little bit about who you are , a little bit , a little bit about your background .
So , if you don't mind , just kind of tell us where you're from and just kind of a little bit of background so we know who Gary is
¶ From Debater to World Traveler
. Grew up in Wisconsin .
Did not do a lot of traveling growing up . My family , I think we took maybe two road trips ever One we took to South Dakota , one we took to Niagara Falls . Went to college . I was recruited in economics , but that kind of fell by the wayside .
In the 90s I had a friend who was doing stuff with this new thing called the World Wide Web and he said , oh , you should come check this out . He built a product that tied databases to the internet , made it real simple , and then companies started coming saying , well , could you do this for our website ?
And he didn't want to actually build a website , he wanted to focus on the tools . He's like do you want to do it ? So I was like , sure , fast forward . Four years later I'm 28 years old . I got 50 people working for me . Sell the company before the dot-com bubble bursts . Start a couple other companies . Go back to school for a bit .
In my 30s I studied geology and geophysics , got bored and realized I didn't want a career in academia . So I came up with the harebrained idea of selling my home and traveling around the world for a year , and that one year turned into 13 years . Turns out , the world's really big .
I visited over 200 different countries and territories , 400 different UNESCO World Heritage Sites . I've been to every state twice , including every US territory , every Canadian province , every state in Germany , every state in South Africa , every state in Australia . Lots of travel .
Lots and lots . That's amazing how many places you've been to when you sit and think about it , where you've been , and you said 13 years of traveling . Have you seen it all , or is there still things out there that you still haven't seen ?
Oh , lots of things I haven't seen . Like I said , the world's a really big place . Oh , lots of things I haven't seen . Like I said , the world's a really big place . There are some countries , kind of obvious ones that are pretty popular tourist destinations , that I haven't been to . I've not been to Jamaica , I've never been to Peru .
There's lots of parts of countries that I haven't visited . Technically , I've been to China , but I haven't been to Beijing , I haven't been to Shanghai . So yeah , there's a lot to go see . It's almost impossible to claim that you've seen everything . The world is far bigger than a lifetime , wow .
Yeah , for sure , absolutely , and that's amazing . It's amazing how many you've been to , but still plenty to go out there and see . All right , I want to ask about your debate experience and trust me , I'm not going to get in a debate with you because , yeah , that's not my thing . Why debate ? Was that something you did in high school ?
Did you have a debate team in high school and then that just carried over into college ?
Yeah , I joined the debate team . Turns out I was really good at it . I did speech and debate . I was one of the top 10 in the United States , got recruited in college . I was in the top 10 at the national tournament . My junior and senior year was a high school debate coach , ended up coaching .
I did it for three years and I had three different teams placed in the top 15 in the country , won multiple state tournaments . So yeah , it was something I was pretty good at .
All right , I don't know debate at all , so I'm just going to ask a little couple some technical questions for these competitions . How does it work ? I mean , are you assigned something ahead of time ? Is it on the fly , like , how does this work ?
Yeah , so you have a resolution that you debate for the entire year and it's primarily a research activity . I mean , that's , that's the biggest thing . It requires an awful lot of research you have to have . You know . I would say that a lot of debate rounds are won before you ever walk into the room .
And it's also a very you know , the top tier of academic debate is very fast paced . It's not a bunch of people saying and my opponent such and such , it's not that at all . And a lot of people . You know it's not a spectator sport .
If you were to go watch the final round of the national debate tournament , which I think is on YouTube , you probably wouldn't understand it . And by understand it I mean you probably wouldn't literally understand what they're saying because they talk so fast . Wow , okay .
I just think it's so interesting . That's what I love about doing this show . I meet people who do all kinds of things , a lot of travelers , things like that . I think you've traveled to more places than anybody I've ever talked to , which is awesome , but you've also done debate .
I also think I read something about you having sort of like a video game company or like a place where people can come play video games .
Yeah . So after I sold my first business I bought a popular video game website . This guy next to me had it and he got into debt , tried to use it to fund an ISP or something . So I bought it from him , I paid off his debt and then we grew that . We had a deal with CNET at the time where we were selling ad inventory .
We established basically a network of video game sites . I think we were doing like 50 million ad impressions a month at our peak . And then we also opened up a land gaming center in Minneapolis which was a really nice facility but turned out . The span at which something like that was viable was pretty short .
It was at a period where people didn't have great internet connections at home , so you could come to a place and play on , you know , an ethernet network with your friends . We had , you know , lots of energy , drinks , stuff like that . But as internet connections got better at home and computers got better , the necessity of a place like that kind of disappeared .
So even when I started traveling I'd often go to like a uh , an internet cafe , and those don't exist anymore because everybody has phones now .
Yeah , everyone has phones . Internet connection is a lot better , for sure . Okay , so 2007 rolls around . You decide I'm going to get out of academia and I'm going to travel . What was it about travel ? Why did you say , hey , let's do this ?
When I sold my business , I conned the company that bought it to send me on a trip around the world . It was a three-week trip where I visited all their major offices . I to send me on a trip around the world . It was a three-week trip where I visited all their major offices .
I went to Tokyo , taipei , singapore , frankfurt , brussels , paris and London , and I had never been out of North America before and this was a real eye-opening experience . I literally circumnavigated the globe , had a lot of free time when I wasn't doing business stuff . It was a real eye-opening experience . After that , I did a couple other short trips .
I did one to Iceland by myself when I went back to school . I was on a research project that we flew down to Argentina to collect soil samples , which was a blast . It was something I really enjoyed doing , and I was at a point in my life where I had no obligations . I had no wife , no kids .
I had plenty of money to go travel , and so I did , and this few months adventure turned into 13 years . Yeah , it took me the better part of 2007 to cross the Pacific Ocean , to give you an idea . So I kind of just the general direction was go West . Last point in the US well , not in the US , but in the continental US was LA .
Flew to Hawaii , learned how to scuba dive there , went to Tahiti and then Easter Island , and then the Cook Islands , and then New Zealand and then Fiji , samoa , tonga , american Samoa , back to Fiji , new Caledonia , vanuatu , the Solomon Islands , nauru , kiribati , back to Fiji , hawaii , guam , the Marshall Islands , micronesia , palau , the Philippines , and then I went to
Okinawa , worked my way up through Japan to Seoul , and then I was in the Hong Kong around Christmas .
Wow , and then you kept going . So when you're doing this , when you're just out traveling the whole time , do you have a residence ? Like how does this work , Like how do you know ?
I mean , cause you're no Okay . So how does that ? So for Well , I should say for about 10 years , I just lived out of my bag , stayed in guest houses and hostels and things like that . I was moving around too much to have a permanent place to stay . Other people do it different .
They'll go to a major city and stay there for several months or a better part of a year . I just moved around a lot . That was the way I did it . There's no set way to do it .
What was the longest stint you had ? I guess ?
I stayed a month in Saigon . I stayed close to a month in Melbourne . I think I stayed a little bit long . Well , I stayed three months , I guess , in Girona in Spain , spent a fair amount of time in Bangkok , and these were periods where I just kind of got tired . I was sort of burned out traveling .
So I would just hole up in a place for a while and what I call doing an anti-vacation , because I was out traveling all the time I I just would stay in and play video games and do that anti-vacation traveling again the anti-vacation , but you're still somewhere where you were , whether it was in Bangkok or wherever the case may be , doing the anti-travel .
I like that what has been over the course of these last few years like what's been the hardest part about it , like what was the hardest part about traveling for you .
And this isn't . This isn't just me , this has happened to almost everybody . I know that's done . Long-term travel you eventually get burned out . The constant moving around becomes difficult . It's hard to establish any friends , any sort of life in a regular place . Everybody you meet is kind of ephemeral .
When I came back to the US , I remember taking my stuff out of storage that I originally put in and taking out all the plates and everything else and it was like I had just put pause on my life and now I was hitting play again . But everyone else I knew , their life kept going on . They got married , had kids and they were in a very different place .
So there's definitely an opportunity cost in terms of traveling . If you're going to be doing this , you're not doing something else , whatever that might be . So I would say those are the biggest challenges to traveling long-term .
What do you think is the biggest benefit that you got out of this ?
Oh , I have done and seen more than 99.999% of humans that have ever lived . Most people don't go anywhere , or they go in a few places , or they take a vacation and they go to some tourist spot . It's not just . I've visited a lot of places . I've been launched from a nuclear aircraft carrier . I've been swimming with great white sharks .
I've been sled dogging in the Yukon . I've been man . There's so many things I've done dogging in the Yukon . I've been man . There's so many things I've done , and it's something that a lot of people never get to do . You know , maybe they might do one of those things , whether it's hot air ballooning over South Africa done that .
I've been in a Formula One race car , hit 180 miles an hour on it . Done that , ridden camels , you name it . So a lot of different things .
All right , perfect and that's you know . Journey with Jake is all about adventure and challenges with adventure , things like that . I do love to hear stories , any particular adventure that you remember that you wouldn't mind sharing with us kind of the background behind it and kind of what happened
¶ Exploring Lesser-Known Travel Destinations
2010, .
I was staying for a couple months in Bangkok and they were undergoing these very large , really large political protests .
And one day the protesters and there were hundreds of thousands of people that had converged on Bangkok were going to protest at the prime minister's house who lived a couple blocks from where I was staying , and they were going to go dump blood on the front gate of his house . So I'm like , all right , I got to go see this .
So I go down with my camera and I'm just this foreign dude with a camera and I'm right on the street between a couple thousand very angry protesters and hundreds of cops in full-blown riot gear , helmets , shields , billy clubs and I'm between them and it was kind of exhilarating . But I got some amazing photos from it and they ended up .
I didn't stay for the whole thing because it took them hours to march down the street to dump the blood .
Supposedly one of the journalists that were there took a sample of the blood that they dumped , because they had took samples from like thousands of people and they had these plastic water jugs full of human blood and it was just full of everything Hepatitis , hiv .
They tested it and like it was this mix and concoction of like every nasty disease you could think of .
Wow , and you were there for that . Yeah , that's amazing when you look back on all your travels , the 200 plus countries you've been to , like you said , the States multiple times Is there any particular place where ? If , like , if you could only go back to one place , where would you want to go back to ?
I always get this question of some form of everyone , and the assumption is that there is a best place . You know , it's like saying to someone with children okay , if you , if you could get rid of all your kids except one , what would be the one ? And there there's an answer , and there really is no answer to that question .
A city is a very different place than going to visit a beach or mountains , for completely different reasons , and I don't think these things are exclusive and it kind of reinforces this notion that there is a best place and therefore everyone must go to the best place .
There are fantastic places that people have just never heard of and they're unlikely to ever visit because they're just unaware of it . One of the greatest places you can visit , I'll tell you right now Namibia , and everybody I know that's been to Namibia agrees with me , but almost nobody knows about Namibia , and it is one of the largest deserts in the world .
I spent like five days in the deep desert and this is desert , desert , right , this is dune , this is nothing but sand dunes . We camped one night on this thing called the Long Wall , sometimes called the Wall of Death , which is a 300-foot-high dune that abuts the Atlantic Ocean , even though you're in the tropics .
Technically it's like really cold because it's all cold water coming up from Antarctica . And just again , an amazing experience , and most people don't know about it . If you look at where most like Americans travel , they're going to places like Mexico or the Caribbean because it's close .
If they go to Europe , they're going to England , ireland , maybe Italy , maybe France . That's about it , and there's just a very small universe of things they choose from because for the most part , that's all they know .
If you ask an American to name a city in France that isn't Paris , most of them can't , and if you don't even know it exists , it's very difficult to plan a trip there .
And for you was it just kind of discovering it as you went . Is that kind of how it worked out for you ?
Yeah , there was a lot of that , like you'd kind of have an idea of what the next place would be Beyond that , like you'd meet people at a hostel or something . Then that's why they're great places to stay , because it's you get to meet people and there's always someone who just came back from the place you're going and they'll say , oh go , do this .
See this , don't do this , don't you know , don't take this taxi or whatever . They'll have , you know , very , very fresh experiences that you're not going to get from like a guidebook .
All right , you mentioned , you talked about Namibia and the and the whole kind of the desert atmosphere there . Since we're speaking to different places like that , I kind of want to , I want to hear , like , how about a mountain place ? What kind of what mountain place jumps out to you ?
Well , a lot of Americans don't know about it , even though it is kind of a big tourist attraction like the Jungfrau in Switzerland up in the Alps . It's very popular , I think , in India and other people in Europe . But in places in Europe but for whatever reason , americans just don't really know about it . But it's got a beautiful train ride to get up there .
That's fantastic . The Canadian Rockies you can't go wrong going to , like Bamford , jasper , even though Banff is so overvisited in the summer . I've been there in the winter and there's literally nobody there and it's just as beautiful .
And even if you go in like the spring or the fall , it's a completely different experience than if you just go right in the middle of summer . I went up in the Andes in Argentina , outside of Salta , which again is kind of very dry . No tourists up there at all .
Another great place to visit , trying to think of some other mountain areas , and there are things that are mountains that maybe we don't call mountains . They're not necessarily the biggest peaks in the world , but even if it's like Blue Ridge Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina , I think that's another really great drive .
A lot of people from that region visit , but it's probably not on a lot of people's list if you're not from that area .
Yeah , I mean , I live out West so I haven't been there , but I've heard it's beautiful . I've heard great things about that part of the country . All right , since we're still you know we're desert mountains .
How about tropical or beach places for you ? Those are two different . They can be two different things . Okay , yeah , let's talk both then . A lot of beaches are kind of the same insofar as you go to a white sand beach it's calcium carbonate you have palm trees . Palm trees are basically a global species .
You'll find very similar or the same species of palm trees almost anywhere . There was one beach that I visited I don't even know the name of it or if it has one . I went to the Solomon Islands , which , again , I think they get 10,000 visitors a year , and the vast majority of those are people there for business or they work for non-governmental organizations .
I went to an outer island in the Solomon Islands called Ronell and I asked them how many visitors they get a year and they said 10 . I think that might be a bit more at this point , but it's probably less than a hundred . And then they took me to this place where the ships used to come in .
They have a new small port now , but they took me to this place where the ships used to come in . They have a new small port now . They took me to the old one and I guess nobody had bothered to go down here in like several years and so I was at this beach that no human had been on in years .
It was a very weird experience because you saw like gigantic clamshells on the shore which you would never see anywhere else because somebody would grab that right away . It just had this feeling of remoteness that I always kind of liked . Pide La Cuesta , just north of Acapulco , I thought was a great beach , really a big beach too , really wide , really long .
Culebra in Puerto Rico had some of the best sand , if you just want to get technical about the sand . Anguilla Caribbean also had very great sand . Yeah , those are some of the beaches off the top of my head . And as for tropical areas , iguazu Falls in northern Argentina , southern Brazil that's a fantastic place to visit . It's kind of rainforest-y in the area .
Northern Australia , if you want to go to Kakadu National Park , I think that's one of the great national parks of the world . In the Northern Territories . There's some really cool things to see in Papua New Guinea . I really enjoyed my time there and some really great scuba diving as well .
Oh , and for the beaches one of the best beaches , the very , very underdeveloped area for tourism and I don't think it's going to be developed anytime soon , but there's certainly potential is in West Africa and Sierra Leone Very poor country that's had a lot of problems , but that whole coast along the West Africa , along the Gulf of Guinea .
The water is so warm because it comes north and then it has to hook 90 degrees and as it gets in that section where it goes east west it just bakes in the sun so the water becomes really warm .
This is amazing that I can , just , you can just name all these places , just this place here . Well , when you've been there .
It helps . It's absolutely . It's not like you're memorizing it for a test yeah , no , exactly .
And so you have and that's the cool part you have those memories of the places that you've been and so you know about them and you learn about them .
I wanted to ask about , kind of like , the influence of social media , because when you first started , 2007 , social media wasn't a big , it was kind of in its infancy , you know , if at all , but then near the end of your travels , I think you kind of finished right around the pen when the pandemic kicked in , probably 2020 .
I know you know social media was a lot bigger , so I know places
¶ Social Media, Travel, and Hostels
got more popular . Did you notice any any of that Like ?
Oh yeah , okay , yeah . So , for example , I started traveling in March of 2007 , which was like a month after Steve jobs announced the iPhone , but before the iPhone became available in June . So when I started , there were , for all practical purposes , no smartphones . And even when smartphones came out , international travel was difficult with them .
And then eventually they'll let you get a SIM card and now they have eSIMs , which make it trivial and it's very easy to travel around the world with a phone . The first time I was in Jerusalem was in 2009 .
And I remember going to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre , which is one of the holiest places in Christianity and there are many pilgrims that were there , and I returned back about not quite 10 years later completely different experience Everyone had a phone in front of their face .
Everyone's just taking pictures , not even trying to take a good picture , but like literally every single person had a phone . When I started your , like you said , social media really wasn't a thing , but it quickly became a thing and I think in a lot of ways , it ruined the experience .
There's a lot of people out there that are just trying to take an Instagram shot of themselves . I was in Sri Lanka once and it was for this event that they were hosting for quote unquote influencers .
I primarily did photography , like you know , standard travel photography , but then there were some of these influencer influencers that were there and I remember we climbed to the top of this mountain wasn't a very big mountain in Sri Lanka and there was this woman who was a Chinese influencer and she walked up the mountain in like a ball gown so she could take a
picture at the top of the mountain of her wearing a ball gown .
No one in their right mind is going to dress like that , walking up a mountain , but it's to create this unreal sense of how glamorous your life is and when you travel long term it is not glamorous this unreal sense of how glamorous your life is and when you travel long-term it is not glamorous . It's staying in a lot of seedy places .
I've gotten bed bugs , I've been in the hot room that the air conditioning doesn't work and in all my stays , only once did I ever leave a place because it was too bad , and that was in Manila , because literally the bathroom for my room was a toilet sitting right next to my bed . That didn't work .
I was like , okay , there's my line , this is what is too much for me ?
You found your line in Manila . Wow , I wondered about that because it just seems like , especially as of late and I see a lot of travel posts and things just because of what I do with Journey with Jake and it just made me wonder . I was like you know , especially you , starting in 2007, .
It just had to be a totally different thing , and so thanks for sharing that , because it does . It sounds like it has just kind of evolved differently . People stand in there with , you know , phones in front of their faces instead of actually looking at what's going on and where they're at .
You know I'm not against smartphones . In fact , they can be very useful things traveling . I remember I rented a car in Skopje , macedonia , and I did a two-week trip around the Balkans and I was able to navigate using Google Maps and rent hotel rooms .
It was very handy , not to mention you point the camera at something and translate a sign and get at least a gist of what it's saying . They're very handy , but I have , for the most part . You know I had a very big followings on social media and I haven't .
I basically abandoned posting on these places because , for the most part , it's just not very authentic . I just felt it was like a waste of my time . And when you look at the time , a question I love to ask people can you tell me the last 10 things you hit like on on social media ? No idea , right ? No , no one can . It's all ephemeral .
Yeah , time you could waste on TikTok or Instagram . You could spend reading a book or even watching a movie and get more out of it than you probably would just scrolling on stuff that you're not going to retain .
So you talked about your camera . You pretty much traveled with your , your camera , throughout these 13 years . Were you documenting all of this ?
Yeah , I , like I said I've taken well , just of the photos that I processed . I have over 50,000 photos on my website from all over the world . I was named travel photographer of the year three times in North America . I won three Lowell Thomas awards , which is like the Pulitzer for travel journalism .
So , yeah , I was documenting a lot of it and I had a popular , real popular travel blog . But the social media part of it because it's out of the other thing is it's all controlled by an algorithm .
And one of the things I realized is , if I there are a lot of photos I like that if it wasn't of a mountain or a rainbow or a waterfall , it's just not going to get very many likes .
And so a lot of very good photographers that I know who and there are great photographers they end up just posting the same things over and over and they run photo tours to the same places because everybody just wants photos of these things rather than going someplace . That's really interesting , but it's not going to be , you know , patagonia or Iceland .
What , if anything ? Is there a solution for that ?
People need to broaden their horizons . Like I said , the reason why people go to so few places is because they don't know of many places . If I talk about going to Montenegro , most people either have never heard of the country or don't know where it is , or they don't know anything about it . They just don't know .
And so if you don't know , or if they do that like it scares them right . There's the idea of this place . Well , I don't know what that is , but oh , ireland , that's fine . I've heard of that , I know what that is . Because they don't know anything about it . It's outside of their comfort zone .
I kind of want to go back to some of these seedy places you stayed at . First of all , explain . I've had a couple of people on who stay at hostels quite a bit . Give me kind of the gist of hostels overall because I still don't know if I fully understand what they're like .
For the most . You can get a private room at a hostel just like you would a hotel , or you can stay in a dorm room , which is super cheap . I didn't do that because I was too old for that stuff . That tends to be for younger people Probably going to share a bathroom . That's the biggest difference and there's
¶ Podcast Success and Travel Reflections
usually a pretty sizable communal area and there are certain hostels they're chains in Europe . They'll have a restaurant and a bar downstairs and they tend to be a lot cheaper than a regular hotel , so they probably don't have maid service every day .
If you're there for a week , you're responsible for your own towels and making your own bed and stuff to keep the cost down .
Gotcha Okay , so that's kind of how it's set up , but there are private rooms . Then In my mind I always just pictured a line of bunk beds and people- .
They do have that , but most I mean there are like some upscale hostels . Now there really are . I have a friend who has written a book on boutique hostels in Europe and some of them are really , really nice . Did you ever spurge and would stay at a nice hotel every now and again ?
No , which does not say I didn't stay at fancy hotels or something , but I wasn't the one paying for it . Gotcha Okay . I remember I spent back-to-back nights in Cape Town , south Africa . One night was at the one and only , which I think costs like $1,000 a night , and I had a butler for my room . Then the next night I was back at a hostel .
But the reason I don't believe in splurging for hotels is because I would rather splurge on a business class ticket than I would on a hotel . You spend most of your time in a hotel , unconscious , sleeping . Maybe occasionally having a nice shower or a bath would be worth it , but for the most part I would prefer to .
Flying is horrible , flying economy class , and I have flown at the time . I think there's longer flights now , but I went from Dallas to Sydney , which at the time was the longest flight in the world , and I flew economy and it was just an absolute miserable experience .
It was basically like a full day in the air and if I could , you know , getting a business class seat for something like that would actually be worth more than upgrading from , say , a hostel to the four seasons .
For me , Very good , okay , yeah , that makes sense . Like you said , you're asleep most of the time . You're in a hotel . In hotel you're out exploring , you're out seeing things , rather than just sitting in a hotel room . So that that makes total sense .
I can see where you're , where you're coming from on that and I should say I've talked about this with other long-term travelers and most of them agree with me . They would rather , if you're going to spend money on something , get a good plane ticket rather than a good hotel room .
Okay , I want to ask about kind of what you're up to now , because I know 2020 hit travel slowed down due to the pandemic , things like that . Is that what kind of got you off ? The travel thing was the pandemic .
Yes , there were problems before the pandemic that I was noticing in travel media .
Everything shifted and when I started , I just had my website and people went to the website and they read my articles and they commented on the website , and that shifted over time as everything moved to like Twitter and Facebook and then eventually Instagram , and these were all platforms that were controlled by very big companies and everything was done through an
algorithm and over time , the number of people that organically visited a website or knew who you were drop , drop , dropped and it was dependent upon this . And just before the pandemic I was asking people and the average was like 90% of everybody's website traffic was coming from Google .
Well , when people are searching for travel content , they're usually planning a trip , and so , rather than me writing my thoughts about the history of a place , everything just became guides , things to do , top 15 things to do in Vegas . Everyone was writing the same article for the same places and it was no longer fun .
Over on social media , it was people who were just doing clickbaity type things or the same type of photos in the same type of places . None of this was interesting to me anymore . So when the pandemic hit my last international trip . I came back from Portugal February 28th 2020 , got sick , had COVID real early on . Two weeks after that .
95% of my income dries up . I thought , like a lot of people , that this would be over with really quick Like this would be a few weeks . I didn't realize it would last as long as it would . Over with really quick Like this would be a few weeks . I didn't realize it would last as long as it would .
And eventually I realized I had to do something and I thought this was a good opportunity to make a change . So I had this idea for a podcast that I had been kicking around . That would not be a travel podcast per se , but I could use a lot of the things I learned through traveling .
The original idea for the show was going to be really long episodes that would be published infrequently , maybe like a two-hour episode published once every two weeks .
But I realized that that really wasn't a very good business model and I went back to this idea and I had a friend who had a daily podcast and he did really well with it and I got talking to him and I started thinking about it and I realized , well , this would work a lot better .
So I relaunched the show using the artwork and the theme music that I had already purchased the rights to , and , on July 1st 2020 , I launched the first episode of Everything Everywhere , daily . Everything Everywhere is the name of my travel blog . I call it travel adjacent . It's not a travel show like today .
We're visiting this place and here's what we're to see , and it's not that it's educational content , it's history . But , like I said , I'm able to use everything I learned traveling . I will talk about my travels in the course of doing this If it's relevant for the show . And the show has been a huge hit since I launched it . It's been up .
It's going for about four uh , four and a half years . Now . We're closing in on our 40 millionth download . We get I get about a million and a half downloads a month . The show is far more successful than I ever could have imagined .
That's amazing . Congratulations on that . I think that's fantastic . I listened to your episode today , I think , cause you have an episode every day . I think because you have an episode every day , I think it was 1600 . I think it was the episode today . I think it was episode number 1600 . Even so , I was like , wow , how many episodes .
And that makes sense If you're doing it every day . That's what's what's going on and I enjoyed it . In fact , I got to . I got to travel here this weekend . I'm going to be downloading some episodes and listen to it by travels .
Yeah , I've done episodes like on geography , about the . You like on geography about the . You know certain countries . I've done it about inventions , people battles , science and math episodes . You , you know all sorts of different things .
The episode I'm working on tonight will be the election of 1788 , the first presidential election ever , and how it was completely different than any other election we ever had . There was no popular vote . There was no one knew really what to do . It was a unanimous vote . George Washington won unanimously .
A lot of things that never happened again and a lot of problems . They realized , yeah , we should probably fix this and they did with subsequent amendments and stuff . I've done it on rivers of the world and the origin of words and phrases , lots of different things , even sports .
So it's similar . It reminds me of you know you're talking about how the world's a big place and you know your 13 years of travel . You've seen a lot of places , but you haven't seen everything , and it's a lifetime to see everything , and even more than that . It sounds like it's the same with this podcast . I mean it sounds like you can . It's endless .
I mean you could . There's so many different things you could talk about .
Yeah , Every every time I do an episode , it usually brings up one or two ideas for future episodes I could do .
What do you think the future holds you kind of just want to keep this rolling . I mean what ? How do you , how do you feel about it ?
Yeah , it's going really well right now . Certainly not going to ruin a good thing . The the downside to this is that it's very difficult to travel when you're doing a podcast every single day .
And so I literally I , you know I went through this period of 13 years where I was traveling around the world almost nonstop and I have not been out of the country since I , since the pandemic hit , and I've only taken a few flights for , like conferences and stuff .
But even that , I think I'm cutting down on the conferences because I'm just getting nothing out of them .
Yeah , and it sounds like maybe I'm wrong on this , but you're pretty much just a one-man wrecking crew for this right .
You're just kind of handling everything for yourself for the most part . Yeah , I've developed a system that is pretty efficient . Vast majority of the time is spent writing and research , so I write a script for every show . I like to tell people . I write a 2000 word term paper every day .
The actual recording is pretty trivial and if you're doing a monologue , scripted monologue show , that's the easiest type of podcast to record . It's technically very simple to do . Yeah , so I got about , you know , 50,000 people a day that that listen and the show just keeps growing . So Fantastic , that's awesome . I might end up .
I've been thinking of maybe going to like Australia or something this winter and I would just I wouldn't travel or , you know , run around like I used to do , I would just get an apartment somewhere and record the show from there for a period of time .
Yeah , you can do that yeah , change of scenery . I like it . Where now Wisconsin was your home ? Is that where you're living now ? Where's where's home now ? For you where you're living now .
Where's home now for you ? Okay , back in Wisconsin , back here . And that was one of the better decisions I've ever made too . I was living in Minneapolis during the pandemic and when I started the show and I lived right on Lake Street , which is where all the riots occurred .
My neighborhood was a lot of it burned down and was trashed , and a couple of months after that I just put all my stuff in a U-Haul . One day , notified my landlord , by the way , I'm gone . You may do what you will . They never followed up on it . Yeah , I moved back here and have no regrets .
In fact , one of the things I realized after moving was I live in a community with about I don't know about 80,000 people , maybe a little bit more with the surrounding communities . There's an Amazon fulfillment center here . There's nothing I can't get here that I can't get in a major city . We have all manner of ethnic restaurants . I can watch any movie .
I can see any sporting event because of the way the internet works now and streaming , but I pay a fraction for what I would pay if I was living in New York or something , and I tell people I live in a very nice building , arguably the nicest apartment in this community , right on a river . I see deer and geese every day .
I get to look out of my window and see a river , even though I'm in the middle of town . For what I pay , you would basically be living in a closet if you were in New York .
Thank you so much for taking some time with me . This has been fascinating to get to know who you are a little bit better . Didn't really know who you were until I found out I was going to be talking to you and I was like I was just super impressed with hundreds of places that you've been to . Not only that , but just what you're doing with your podcast .
I think it's really cool . I think that's awesome . You're an inspiration to me , so I appreciate that . My final question to you before we wrap this up is , since this is an adventure type podcast , what does adventure mean to you ?
Adventure just means kind of doing something new and out of your comfort zone . You know , I remember the first time I went bungee jumping it was in Queenstown , new Zealand , and it was kind of drizzling , so they didn't have a lot of people doing it , it was basically me and a family from India .
And the way they did it it was by weight , and so these two little girls
¶ Enhancing Travel Through Personal Stories
, who were like 10 years old , went bungee jumping before me and after a 10-year-old girl does it , and you're a grown man , you can't really chicken out . You kind of have to do it at that point . But I did it . You kind of have to do it at that point , but I did it Never . I didn't see saltwater until I was 21 years old , but I taught myself .
I didn't . I shouldn't say I didn't teach myself , but I learned how to scuba dive , done , you know , over a hundred dives around the world with all sorts of things , and you know it's all about going to places that you've never been before and experiencing new things and and and that's adventure . Gary , thank you so much for coming on journey with Jake .
Thank you for having me . A big thank you to Gary Arndt for joining me on the show . If you'd like to learn more about Gary or check out his podcast , you can follow him on Instagram at everything everywhere , or visit his website , everything-everywherecom . It was such a great conversation .
Thank you again , gary , and thank you to all of you for tuning into Journey with Jake each week . For those of you who follow me on Instagram , you might've seen my recent announcement . February may be the shortest month of the year , but it's going to be packed with content . I'll be releasing two episodes a week , every Monday and Thursday . Throughout February .
I've had some incredible conversations with fantastic guests and I can't wait for you to hear them . Be sure to join me for my next episode this Thursday , featuring Autumn Carolyn . Autumn is a traveler , photographer and the author of Travel and Wonder .
We dive into her incredible journey , including some unforgettable stories like being kissed under the Eiffel Tower in Paris . You won't want to miss it and , as always , remember , it's not always about the destination , as it is about the journey . Take care , everybody .