I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. In the early 2000s, Paul Barbado had a dream. He really,

really wanted to be a host on the TV show, Globe Trekkers.

If you don't know it, it's a British show that was inspired by the Lonely Planet guidebooks.

In each episode, the host goes around with a camera and crew to a different place in the world and just kind of gets immersed in the food and the sights and the sounds and the culture.

Kind of like an earlier British version of Anthony Bourdain's parts unknown.

So, yeah, basically a dream job.

And turns out not an easy job to get.

So instead, Paul decided to just make his own show from home.

He decided to make video profiles of every single United Nations recognized country

in the world, all 193 of them. He would go in alphabetical order from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe

and would make a short video report about each country's geography, geopolitics, religion,

and international relations. If all of this sounds like the

world's biggest social studies assignment, it kind of is. It actually took Paul 10 years to

finish the project. He called it geography now. And the result is this geographical encyclopedia

all on social media. To our knowledge, nothing like this existed before.

As you know, we love completists here on the show. So we wanted to know all about why Paul gave

himself this bonkers assignment, the surprising things he learned from it, and the real world

travel that the project inspired. By the way, Paul goes by Barbes on the Geography Now channel,

but we're just going to stick with Paul. Paul Barbato, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. First and foremost, I love Atlas Obscura. I actually have your books and everything.

I have them right here. Oh, that's so awesome. Thank you for having me on this.

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