YouTuber Paul ‘Barbs’ Barbato has been making his way across every UN-recognized country in alphabetical order over the last ten years. We got to speak with him as part of Dexerto’s new Rising Stars series as he finally finished his decade-long journey in Zimbabwe.
Geography Now is an educational YouTube channel with over three million subscribers, created by Barbato in 2014. Throughout the ensuing decade, he’s visited a slew of countries around the world with the hopes of crossing every UN-recognized nation off his list.
Ten years later, he finally achieved this vision, successfully profiling 99 countries from A to Z. We got the chance to ask him about this monumental task, his plans for the future, and what inspired him to start such a massive undertaking in the first place.
Barbs always knew he wanted to cover every country in the world — but it was also important for him to respect his viewers and not ruffle any feathers. To avoid causing a kerfuffle, he decided to follow the UN’s list of officially recognized countries and follow them in alphabetical order to dodge any accusations of showing favoritism.
“People could accuse me of ‘showing favoritism’ or ‘bias’ if I had covered certain countries earlier than others or acknowledged certain disputes,” he explained. “To avoid this, I decided to follow the UN’s list, as it seems to be a solid catalog of nation states that most would consider has a publicly functional ‘internationally recognized’ status.
“I then decided to do the episodes alphabetically so as to show no favoritism and the viewers would know what was coming next, they just didn’t know how I was going to do it. Which I guess may have been the ‘hook’ to the show.”
Barb’s channel is full of funny and educational content, offering hard and fast lessons on each country’s culture, history, ecology, and politics from his perspective. Many of his videos gain hundreds of thousands of views as excited fans pour in with their takeaways from the episode.
He says that making content was a “necessity” for him, telling us there weren’t many channels like his back when he first launched his YouTube account in 2014. To him, there was a glaring void in YouTube’s video catalog — and he wanted to fill it.
“I’ve always been intrigued about learning about the world and its people,” he said. “However, at the time I started in 2014, there were no channels like Geography Now. There were ‘educational channels’ that may have had an episode pertaining to geography, but no fully dedicated geography channels that focused on doing full profiles on every country in the world — so I decided to be the first one!”
Barb’s passion for geography was sparked by the diverse Chicago neighborhood he grew up in, which made him innately curious about other cultures, languages, and countries around the world.
“In school, I was constantly surrounded by kids that would speak different languages,” he told us. “It fascinated me, even more so when I found out where that language originated from. From there, my love for geography only grew and grew. I’m a heavy visual learner as well, so the Atlas soon became my favorite book.”
Now that he’s an adult, he’s checked 99 countries off his list… and of them all, he says Greenland is one of his favorites thanks to a special trip he took there with his mother.
“I have to admit one of the most amazing memories I have is going to Greenland with my mom when I was doing a video project,” he said. “Even though I prefer avoiding cold weather, the Arctic and Inuit-run areas of this world fascinate me.
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“It’s like a different planet up there, made of rock and ice, with conditions that are so inhospitable — yet people that have learned how to be adaptable and thrive. I met children as young as 10 that told stories of how they hunted muskox to feed their family over the weekend as if it were a casual Saturday activity. That mindset blows my mind.”
Barbs’ travels have offered him a slew of unique opportunities, but one of his greatest accomplishments was becoming the first person to document himself crossing the world’s narrowest three-country salient between Burkina Faso, Togo, and Ghana.
“It’s a super narrow corridor only about 120 meters wide, and I filmed it all in real time displaying my GPS,” he told us. “This is the stuff I live for. …To most people it may seem completely pointless, but in my view, it was one of the best days of my life.”
Two years later, this was capped off by his trip to Zimbabwe, successfully finishing his decade-long project “with a bang” by traveling to the country with eighteen of his subscribers.
“I just came back and it was AMAZING,” he said. “Everybody in the group got along, despite the fact we all came from different places and had different upbringings, lifestyles, and worldviews. Best of all my mom came with me and I was able to provide her with her first experience on the African continent.
“We were able to experience some major highlights of the country. We saw so much wildlife and I got amazing interviews with the Zimbabwe locals. More importantly, I filmed much of the Zimbabwe episode IN the country. This is essentially my ‘magnum opus,’ so I had to do it in the most appropriate way, and what better way than actually going to the country?”
Thanks to all his efforts, Barbs has become a bonafide internet star — a title he humbly denied, calling himself a mere ‘public figure.’ For him, internet fame has become a way to continue his passion and connect with people all across the globe, even allowing him to make friends with someone from the island nation of Tuvalu, of which there are only 13,000 in the entire world.
“I’m just a guy who really wanted to accomplish something,” he said. “It took ten years to finish, and somehow 3.5-ish million people wanted to join along for the journey. What does THAT feel like?… Amazing.
“Because of the content I make, I have a very global audience, and part of my job is to talk and listen to them. My subscribers play a crucial role in my content, as I am constantly talking and interviewing them for inside information about their countries. …In a way, sometimes I’m a bigger fan of my subscribers and consider them bigger ‘stars’ than I’ll ever be.”
Now that his decade-long project is finally over, we had to ask what Barbs has in store for the future of his channel… but he says this is just the beginning of a brand-new direction for his content.
“No more talking about the world. It’s time to talk to it. This is the direction I want to take Geography Now. I want to actually do geography and document it. Yes, the Zimbabwe episode will be the last ‘Country of the UN’ video, but that’s just the start of a new beginning.
“I’ve been waiting to do this new content series for a long time, and now I can finally begin the next chapter. Geography Now 2.0 is coming, and as I always say on the show, stay cool and stay tuned.”