What does a professional travel photographer do when all international flights are shut down due to a global pandemic? That’s a question Gary Arndt found himself asking in the early months of 2020. By that point, he had built up millions of social media followers and an entire career from snapping photos in exotic locales, and within a matter of weeks his income streams had completely dried up.

Luckily, he had already been batting around the idea for a podcast that didn’t require any travel. In July 2020, he started producing seven episodes a week of Everything Everywhere, an educational show about a diverse range of topics, and it immediately took off. Today, it generates 1.5 million monthly downloads and pulls in much more advertising income than Gary ever made as a travel photographer.

In our interview, Gary walked through how he found his audience, where he gets his ideas for new episodes, and why he weaned himself off the social media platforms that once delivered him huge reach.

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Transcript

Hey, Gary, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So these days you host an incredibly popular education podcast, and I definitely want to spend most of this episode talking about that. But before we talk about that, you've actually been an Internet entrepreneur spanning all the way back to the mid 1990s, right?

Yeah, so like the really early days of the internet. I got involved because my college roommate – you've probably heard of a product called ColdFusion. It's actually owned by Adobe right now. And so, yeah, JJ Allaire was my college roommate and I lived with him after college. And while I was living with him, he built this tool that allowed very easy, intuitive ways to hook up a database to a website, which at the time, going way back, this is like 1995, it was hard to do. People were buying servers. They had to buy copies of Oracle to do things that would just be trivial today, cost enormous amounts of money.

Give me an example of something that you would want to try to do by hooking up a database to a website.

Like what you can do with WordPress, like simply having an article you could publish where you put it in a database and then have it output as text. Just doing that was very, very difficult. There was no MySQL, there was no PHP. So he built a tool that could be used on this new operating system called Windows NT. You could use Microsoft Access, which was a very cheap relational database. And it did really, really well. He focused on the tool and people were coming to him saying, well, could you build my company's website? And he didn't want to actually build websites. So he said, well, do you want to do this? So I said, sure. So I started doing this and then I hired a friend who had a friend, and, you know, four years later, I'm 28 years old, I got 50 people working for me and I sold the business to a larger multinational corporation that wanted to get involved with the Internet. And this is all before the dotcom bubble burst.

So he created an easier way to do certain things with websites. And then he had a bunch of people coming to him saying, hey, you've built this tool. I actually want to build a website. And so you were kind of like a spinoff business from that, like basically a website building agency.

Yeah, but they had nothing to do with it other than occasionally referring clients. It was a consulting firm, basically. We were just doing work for hire, but it was primarily, we call it data-driven websites, which today is everything, but back then it was kind of novel.

And you sold it to a larger agency or something like that?

Yeah. So the company that ended up buying it was Syntegra. They were the consulting wing of British Telecom, and they had bought another consulting firm in my area that was being run out of Minneapolis. And so I did that.

And then I bought a network of video game websites that was doing really well. We were doing 50 million page impressions a month at our peak. And then the dot-com bubble burst and we were selling ads through CNET at the time. And so we would arbitrage it. It was like a $2 CPM. We would just split it with the companies, with the websites that we hosted. But this was in the heyday of like Counter-Strike and EverQuest and things like that. And then when the dot com bubble burst, CNET pulled out, and that kind of ruined everything. I went back to school for a bit, and then I came up with the idea of traveling around the world for a year.

So the gaming websites, they covered games. They were like online forums. What did they do?

Right. Both. We hosted the official Counter-Strike forum. We hosted Alakazam, or we sold the ads for them. The flagship site was called Stomp.com, which was kind of a gaming news site. So we hired reporters, you know, we'd go to E3 every year. So that was the primary thing.

And then we had these other large major websites that we sold ads for. But that was not long for this world, just given the way the ad market worked in the early 2000s.

Yeah, and like 50 million pages a month. I mean, that would still even today be somewhat impressive, but that was especially impressive back then.

Yeah, but it was all like gaming stuff. So it wasn't like they were going to articles. It was like, you know, a forum where people are constantly refreshing the page and like an EverQuest site where you'd find like, you know, hints to quests and things like that.

And I guess all that advertising dried up as soon as the dotcom bubble burst.

Like literally instantly. Like we got one phone call from CNET who was our provider and it just disappeared overnight.

Yeah. And so even though you were getting a huge audience, it wasn’t even worth running anymore. So you just shut it down.

We had to. Our revenue literally went to nothing, which, as we'll get to in a moment, kind of repeated itself later on in my life. But yeah, that was not a good time.

And then you said you went to grad school after that?

I didn't go to grad school. I just went back to school and studied geology and geophysics for a couple of years, thinking maybe I could get into academia. And I realized I do not like academia at all. I like learning, but I don't like the... all the other stuff that goes around academia.

And I was a little bit older when I went back. I got to know a lot of the PhD students. I was friends with them and just seeing everything that they were going through and all the hoops they had to jump through and then what they had to do to get a job, and then what the job would pay. It was just very, very unappealing, especially coming from an entrepreneurial background. It was just a completely different culture and something that I just didn't like...