Paul ‘Barbs’ Barbato, host of GeographyNow YouTube channel with more than three million subscribers, on the importance of geography and exploration
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If you were going on holiday, what one necessity would you always remember to pack? For Paul ‘Barbs’ Barbato – the creator and host of acclaimed YouTube channel, GeographyNow – a top contender would be a neck pillow, once a ‘cheesy’ accessory but now a life-line for staying comfy on a flight.
Yet for Barbs, exploring is far from staying in a comfort zone – it represents a mammoth project of research, filming and editing that has taken up the majority of the last decade of his life.
Spanning ten years, his YouTube channel has focused on the full-time project of creating in-depth profiles for 193 UN-recognised territories, ending with Zimbabwe earlier this month. Barbs has even visited 99 of these himself, and for other countries he’s yet to see, combined knowledge shared by his subscribers along with detailed research to make his popular videos.
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Being surrounded by a diverse range of cultures in his childhood in Chicago was a motivator for starting GeographyNow, as well as seeing a gap in the YouTube space for videos that went beneath the surface. Rather than glossing over ten facts, or providing brief summaries of a place, Barbs instead wanted to throw himself into researching countries and helping others to learn more about them too.
‘It’s not just about being educational – it’s getting people interested in the stuff you’re trying to be educational about,’ Barbs says.
And it’s true: it is all too easy to recount times sat in classrooms, uninspired. Captivating an audience, especially in the digital age, is even more difficult. A rule of thumb is that a digital content creator has six seconds to engage an audience.
That’s six seconds which need to condense interesting information down into its most distilled points, while also being engaging enough to stave viewers away from clicking on a competing video. With more than half a billion views on his channel, it’s evident that Barbs has clearly cracked the code with his audience.
While the project began with just four strands – talking about the political, diplomatic, physical and demographic geography of each country covered – it quickly developed into encompassing more details about sports, culture and food as subscribers’ interest peaked, creating videos over 30 minutes in length.
Keeping motivation up to produce such content for ten years is no easy feat, but Barbs’ self-described ‘crazy brain’ that hyper-fixates on one project until its completion certainly helped.
Now that Barbs’ ten-year-long project is complete, he hopes to head out and forge new experiences beyond the purely educational strata, beginning with his new series ‘Letters’, where he visits countries and shares his experiences of travelling.
‘I’ve been talking about geography for so long now that it’s time for me to move on: to do geography. I’m going to explore the world and make content there, as opposed to sitting in a studio and speaking about the world.’
But within the four walls of his studio, Barbs’ favourite piece of work is not one of his episodes of the series – it is instead a deeply personal exploration. It recounts him and his mother visiting the countries of their heritage following his father’s death.
Passing through Ireland, France and Italy, Barbs and his mother aimed to take some of his father’s ashes to a small village where his Italian ancestors came from. Eventually finding Barbs’ one surviving relative – using the support of subscribers Davide and Paolo who they met along the way to translate – brought a journey spanning three countries to a close.
The role of subscribers is one not lost on Barbs. Far from a detached audience watching through a screen, his subscribers’ regular contributions of information on the languages or culture of their own country is clearly valued. The learning is symbiotic: Barbs imparts the information he has learned onto his audience, and also acknowledges the new information he gleans from the help of his subscribers.
Based on his detailed videos, it is clear that exploration for Barbs is more than ticking off a bucket list of landmarks. When he is exploring the world rather than educating about it, Barbs likes off-the-beaten-track adventures, encountering local people along with the places. He hopes to visit the Ennedi Plateau in Chad and the Bissagos archipelago in Guinea Bissau on future trips.
‘A lot of people don’t realise how much Africa is really growing right now, especially West Africa. I find that super intriguing. There’s so much going on, and it’s really starting to boom.’
Exploring Greenland with his mother remains Barbs’ favourite travel experience. Recounting meeting Greenlandic people – including a 14-year-old who hunted a musk ox to feed her family – Barbs begins to smile. Awe-struck, he speaks of their resilience and ability to adapt, to survive and thrive. For Barbs, there are profound tidbits to learn from the people who live in country, as much – if not more – as there is to be absorbed through culture, food and traditional tourist activities.
‘You can’t have a country without people – and if you really want a valuable experience, you have to meet them,’ he says.
Understanding what makes Barbs tick, and why he wants to travel so much, is boiled down simply by the YouTuber.
‘Unfamiliarity makes me happy,’ he says. ‘And that’s why I like to travel. At the core of my being, I always say my favourite destination is the one that I haven’t been to yet.’
And it’s this desire to keep on exploring – to keep learning – that is the ultimate message Barbs hopes his audiences will take away with them. In his own words: ‘No matter how much you think you know about the world, you don’t know enough.’
