HIBT Lab! Babish Culinary Universe: Andrew Rea

Growing up, Andrew Rea dreamed of becoming a Hollywood filmmaker. But the special effects production job he landed after college left him feeling…uninspired. After a series of creative defeats and mounting relationship troubles, his therapist suggested he find a new creative outlet. Andrew decided to make a short cooking video inspired by an episode of Parks and Recreation and uploaded it to YouTube... This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy asks Andrew about his journey from TV and movie buff to YouTube cooking sensation. His channel, Babish Culinary Universe now has nearly 10 million subscribers. Plus, Andrew candidly shares how his struggles with mental health have shaped his career. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So you know those scenes in movies and TV shows where the characters are eating an incredible meal? Or maybe eating something really disgusting? Have you ever thought, I wonder how that would really taste? Or even, could I actually make that? Well, that's the kind of thinking that inspired Andrew Ray to start a YouTube channel in 2016. He called it Binging with Babish. And whether it's the burger cook-off from Parks and Recreation, or the prison pasta sauce from Goodfellas, or Remy the Rat's cooking from Ratatouille, Andrew has made them all, and many, many more. And along the way, he's built Binging with Babish into one of the most

• 5:55Guy Raz?

  popular cooking channels on YouTube with nearly 10 million subscribers. He's also published two cookbooks and helped to create his own line of cookware. Now, Andrew is not a professional chef. In fact, his videos often feature his failures as well as his successes. And in the past couple of years, his channel has expanded to include videos on cooking techniques, simpler recipes, and even guest chefs. The channel is now known as the Babish Culinary Universe. And as you will hear, it's become a very big business. All right, so you grew up in upstate New York, right?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yes, outside Rochester, home of Xerox, Kodak, and Bausch & Lomb.

• 6:40Guy Raz?

  When did you first start getting into cooking?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Oh, when I was very young, my mother taught me how to make some very basic stuff before she died when I was 11, and it became kind of like a, you know, nice way to feel closer to her and remember her, you know?

• 6:54Guy Raz?

  Tell me a little bit more about, I mean, you start cooking as a kid and you had this incredible trauma earlier in your life, and I'm a dad to two boys, one of whom is 11, and I, you know, losing a parent at that age, I cannot, I just can't imagine it. Tell me a little bit about, about cooking with your mom. Was she a great cook? Did she have a love for cooking?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  She was a great cook in that she was a mom and she could beautifully nourish her family. And it's making the same stuff that she's been making for years. So, you know, spaghetti with canned clam sauce and different stews and Nestle Toll House cookies, you know, just, just classic as mom as you can get, you know? This tastes good, mom made it.

• 7:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But you weren't like, even as a kid, thinking, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna become a cook. Like, this was something that you kind of did for fun and you weren't like this sort of savant at 16, like, oh, this is gonna be a Michelin three-star chef one day?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. I cooked some, some, some really objectionable meals. So I was doing things like stuffing chicken breasts with cream cheese and artichoke hearts and throwing them in the oven and then getting like really huffy and embarrassed when my family wouldn't eat them, because they didn't want to get sick or whatever. I might have been cocky about it, but I sure didn't know what I was doing.

• 8:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  And I sure didn't think I would pursue it as a career. I was pretty intent on going to film school after college since, I think, ninth grade.

• 8:25Guy Raz?

  That's what you wanted to do? You wanted to make movies?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, what I really wanted to do was have my dad let me take my college savings and just use it on a film and be the next Robert Rodriguez or whatever. But I'm really glad he didn't do that because I was stupendously inept and it would have been a massive failure. So I'm glad I went to college instead and, and learn the ropes, so to speak.

• 8:47Guy Raz?

  From what I understand, your dad taught photojournalism at Rochester Institute of Technology. It's a very good school. And so were you around like cameras and video editing equipment from a pretty early age?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And my dad wasn't just a professor of photojournalism. He was a major advocate of digital photography well before it was mainstream in Rochester, home of Kodak. So

• 9:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  He was selling solar panels in a coal mining town. And

• 9:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  You know, so I think he was alienated from some parts of his community as a result, but he saw the potential in digital and eventually became its, you know, main spearhead at RIT.

• 9:32Guy Raz?

  So you decided to pursue a career in filmmaking, thinking that you want to be the next Francis Ford Coppola, or like, I don't know, were you like the kind of kid in high school who would watch and study films?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  I would study them in that I would watch them over and over and over and over. I watched

• 9:51Guy Raz?

  Who were your favorite directors?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Well, it changed as I was getting older. You know, if you asked me in ninth grade, it'd be Guy Ritchie and whatever. If you asked me in college, it'd be Federico Fellini, and it would be Woody Allen. And if you ask me now, it's frankly, it's the Russo Brothers. I think that they're, they're complete geniuses. And John Favreau, the person who I actually know and am friends with. But yeah, that was my dream. I really wanted to become a filmmaker. And after college, I just kind of went into the film industry and the post-production world and didn't really, you know, scratch the itch.

• 10:25Guy Raz?

  What did you do? Did you move to Los Angeles or New York City after you, because you went to Hofstra in New York when you studied film. And so you presumably you graduated from college, kind of knowing the basics of how to maybe make a film. Where did you, where did you go work after?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, my senior thesis film was like seven minutes long, shot on 16 millimeter. It was, you know, edited front to back. It was so, yeah, I had the, I had all the, the basic skills to create a short film. So I sold my car to my brother for $2,000 and I used that to procure a, a room in a five bedroom, legally probably a one bedroom in, in, in Brooklyn, Atlantic and, and Fifth, I think it was the corner where there was a restaurant called Brooklyn Grange that's gone now. So being directly above a restaurant, it was a Roach motel, you know, I put glue traps underneath my bed and I pull them out in the morning and they would be covered with Roaches, like four or five or six. It was, it was disgusting. And the, I was working in a

• 11:27Speaker 01

  restaurant and I was working at Anthropologie as the guy who goes through your purse when you set off the alarm.

• 11:34Guy Raz?

  The, the clothing store. Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I basically was the guy that everybody hated because I'm the one who's like, ma'am, I have to look through your purse if you set off the alarm. And I was interning at a now defunct post-production house for free, 35 hours a week, learning visual effects software, smoke and flame.

• 11:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And eventually I came across the right listing. I gave the right interview and I finally got a job in my field, which just that alone was a huge accomplishment for me.

• 12:03Guy Raz?

  Do, doing what?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Visual effects for commercials, television commercials. This little company of four people called Switch FX. I had started as an assistant and I worked my way up to a senior flame artist, which, you know, is not hard to do in a company of four people, but still, I, it was an amazing job with amazing people, but it wasn't scratching my itch creatively because my job was to get rid of Nike logos off of like actors shirts and stuff in commercials.

• 12:29Guy Raz?

  Oh.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Or like lightening up the bags under their eyes or getting rid of flyaway hairs. They're just all the things you're never supposed to notice.

• 12:36Guy Raz?

  But the really hard stuff is in post-production, like spending hours and hours on a frame.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I remember we did a commercial for Swiffer once where it was like breakup with your mop was the campaign and the mop was, was drinking through a straw for some reason and they'd shot the- It was practically like they did puppetry. So this mop was being held up by a Medusa head of fishing line and wires and strings to control it. So every tendril of the mop was shaking and had to be isolated and painted out frame by frame. This was one of my earliest projects at my new gig, and that would be what my career was like, was just these very, very slow, weird minutia. Like, one time I had to change the direction a woman's eyes were looking.

• 13:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah, but, I mean, and it sounds super tedious, but at the same time, what incredible training to learn how to make film, to make film come alive.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It gave me an attention to detail, that's for sure, because, you know, I would end up doing client sessions where they'd be looking over my shoulder and we would be going through it frame by frame, and they'd be looking for any, you know, little bit of green screen or a little visible wire. And I'd have seven people sometimes standing behind me, just poring over every single image. So yeah, it definitely was great training for attention to detail and making sure things are clean and crisp.

• 13:58Guy Raz?

  I'm sure during this part of your life, you were exhausted at the end of the day and probably just collapsed and went to sleep or watched a movie. But did you ever do anything on the weekends? Would you ever take out any camera equipment and just film stuff yourself, or not really?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  So I, let's see, back in like 2012, I think is when I started doing documentary production freelance. So I would do fundraising films for organizations like The Opus Project, Team Lift, and Harlem Academy.

• 14:28Guy Raz?

  These are all nonprofits in New York, I'm assuming?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Yes, and they afforded me the opportunity to do some pretty incredible things. I got to go to Malawi, I got to go to Haiti, and document some really beautiful, incredible, and difficult work. So that was also really great training, because, you know, documentary production, both shooting and editing, you're the director, because you have to piece together this story from whatever actually happened and you managed to capture.

• 14:57Guy Raz?

  It sounds like, I mean, and this was freelance work, but it really sounds like this was kind of a shift, right? Because now, doing post-production is important, but actually making the documentaries a different skill set that you're developing at that point.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  It was something I tried to develop a long time ago, me and Sawyer, who's my business partner today, and our friend Rashid from high school, we all tried to make a documentary our freshman year of college down in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We went down there to gut houses and we brought a camera with us and tried to whip together a post-Katrina documentary. And it didn't come out great, but it was an early indicator of our interest to tell compelling stories like that. So yeah, I thought that documentary was a means to get my foot in the door because it was low production cost and it was mostly, just like we said, attention to detail and ability to tell a story. And it eventually culminated in doing what I so often do, which is bite off way more than I can chew.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  And I agreed to edit a feature documentary about the prison system and I was going to do it in my off hours. So I did it after work. So at my work ended at 7:00 PM and me and the director would crank until 1:00, 2:00 in the morning, sometimes all night. And so to answer your question, yeah, I was, I was really trying to get my foot in the door as a creator of any kind, this is before creator was a job title, in this, in this industry and try to get noticed by telling a story.

• 16:25Guy Raz?

  I read that around this time in your life, you've talked about this, you were going through some personal challenges. You were experiencing quite a bit of depression. Tell me what was going on in your life at that time.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Well, it was really that documentary film that I had chosen to work on. We worked on it for a year and a half and it never really went anywhere. And it was one of the most defeating and depressing creative endeavors of my life. It made me think, I don't have the ability to tell a story. I don't have a unique voice. I don't have a unique perspective and I'm not going to make it in this industry. So that's what landed me in bed, not wanting to get out for about two weeks. And yeah, but me in a pretty deep depression.

• 17:09Guy Raz?

  And I think you are also would be going through a divorce around that time.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  This likewise precipitated that divorce because basically my pulling myself out of bed was the decision to go seek therapy and seeking therapy put me on antidepressants. And antidepressants gave me a little bit more bandwidth to build and create things.

• 17:32Guy Raz?

  To function.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and after this massive creative defeat, my therapist recommended that I find a new creative endeavor, something that gets me excited, something that makes me, you know, want to work on it instead of dread working on it as my entire, you know, creative career had become. So I, you know, bought a camera and a light and a microphone and I wanted to shore up my documentary production ability and just do more side gigs to make some money, see if I could go freelance, whatever.

• 18:04Guy Raz?

  Well, I mean, I'm curious about that. I mean, you're, you're in this challenging place in your life, but you decide a form of therapy was going to be to make your own video and it was going to be a cooking video. It would become binging with Babish, but how would that even start?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Well, I was messing around in my kitchen and I was like, you know, I love food. I love cooking. Maybe I should do some food photography or something like that. I was like, I can put my, my interests together. That's a good idea. And so I was just trying to get a good angle on some food in my kitchen. It was a very prohibitive kitchen to shoot still or video in. So I was just trying to find like any viable angle where it didn't look unnatural, where it didn't look, you know, weird or fake. And I tried to make the light look like natural, you know, daylight flowing in through a window. And I just tried to get it right. And as I was fiddling with that, I was watching Parks and Rec for, you

• 19:00Speaker 01

  know, probably the fifth or sixth time and watched a scene that I had seen a dozen times because it's from a great episode where there was a burger cook off and they were discussing some pretty exotic ingredients that I was like, what would that actually taste like? Papaya chutney, black truffle aioli, Telegio cheese crisp? How would that work? Would that work together? And turns out it's, it's okay. But that's really where the idea came from.

• 19:25Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Andrew Ray recreated that iconic Parks and Recreation Burger Cook-Off, and eventually grew Binging with Babish from this single video into one of the most popular cooking channels on YouTube. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 23:22Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Andrew Rae, the creator and host of Binging with Babish. So Andrew, before the break, you were telling me about this idea that you had to recreate the burger cook-off scene from Parks and Recreation. And I guess we should mention, this is an episode where the character That Rob Lowe plays, Chris Trager. He wants to get rid of beef burgers in the cafeteria and replace them with healthier turkey burgers.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yes, so I can tell you the whole scene. I could recite it by heart.

• 23:54Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  The idea is Chris wants to see if he can make a turkey burger that tastes better than a beef burger.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  I humbly place before you my east.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  It's Chris Trager's patented Trager turkey burger.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  An Asian fusion burger.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Made with something farms, organic turkey.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  A toasted tlejo cheese crisp.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Papaya chutney, black truffle aioli, and microgreens, gluten-free brioche bun.

• 24:13Guy Raz?

  Yes, I remember. And then she's eating it and one of the panelists is, I taste saffron in here.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  What is this in here? Saffron?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yes. And then another guy's like, I like the umami flavor. And then, yeah, I love Parks and Rec. But, and Ron makes a beef burger. Grills them up with plain on a bun. And he's just like, here, this will be better. And he's right. And I tend to agree. As an omnivore, I think beef does taste better than turkey, especially in a fatty, you know, texture-forward thing like a burger. So he was absolutely right.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, it's so much better. It's crazy. Turkey can never beat cow, Chris. Sorry.

• 24:53Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so you, inspired by this scene from Parks and Rec, you decide to make a cooking video on how to make these two things. And you're not in it. I mean, you're in it, but just your arms and your torso, and you're wearing an apron. And it's basically, you're showing how you make this thing. And first of all, why didn't you want your face in it?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  I wasn't trying to remain anonymous. I think later in my career, that anonymity helped me, a little fun mystery for people to finally unveil my face at a million subscribers. But what I wanted to do was put the focus first and foremost on the food. That's why I wear a black apron. It's so the food pops, and so you can see the steam coming off of it. And I shot things at a very, very shallow depth of field, not only because it looks, you know, pretty, and because I'm a complete sucker for any shallow depth of field. It also really narrows your focus in the frame on what you're looking at. So if the food is in focus and everything else is blurry, you got, not only is it front

• 25:53Speaker 01

  and center, it's symmetrical, and any personality that I'm bringing to it is ancillary and incidental. It's more about the food.

• 26:03Guy Raz?

  And the name, you introduced yourself as Oliver Babish, not as Andrew Ray. Tell, like, explain who Oliver Babish is for people who don't know that character.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Oliver Babish shows up in eight total episodes of the NBC seminal drama, The West Wing. And it is a, I like making online usernames named after obscure characters from my favorite shows. And I made the video specifically for Reddit, for the food subreddit, because I had been posting there. I'd been enjoying getting a little bit of notoriety, posting my dinner and, you know, having fun, pithy conversations with strangers and getting to the top of the subreddit. And I was like, huh, a video is like a moving picture. I could make that and post it on Reddit. And I did. And that's why in the first episode, you'll hear me say, hey, what's up Reddit food? Because that's what it was intended for.

• 26:56Guy Raz?

  So you post this video on Reddit, but you still have your day job, working in post-production and doing documentary freelance work?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yes, because I didn't monetize any videos for a year. So I would continue to make this show as a hobby for a year after its inception.

• 27:11Guy Raz?

  You continued with this theme of trying to recreate food from TV shows or film?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yes, I have always enjoyed food and movies and television. And what I really love about it is that it really combines my mother's love of food with my father's love of imaging. And like, it's her heart and his eye. And I really, I really appreciate the thematic symbolism of that.

• 27:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and the thing I love about the idea is it's a great device, a great concept, right? Because you want to do something in cooking, but then what? And then you're making things that so many people are familiar with. It might just be like a one line in a movie or a TV show, but it's such a great concept. And it really did connect. I mean, that first video, you got a lot of great feedback, but really, it blows up like eight months later with a video you make about a sandwich from friends called the Moistmaker Sandwich. What happened? How do you explain its virality? Is there any way to explain it? Is there anything you did to make that happen?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  I didn't do anything, but I can trace, I can tell you the sort of path that it took, which was, you know, I was repeatedly submitting my videos to Reddit, but somebody posted this episode, the Moistmaker episode, on the video subreddit. And Red of videos, at least at the time, and still to this day can be a sort of frontline for what's going to go viral on the internet. That's often where I see it first. And it climbed up to, I think, like, the fourth position, which at the time I had never gotten that high before. And it received, you know, I think like 100,000 views from that. And then, like I said, since it dictates when and where videos sometimes go viral,

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I think a lot of news outlets and magazines and whatnot go to that subreddit, see what's hot right now. They saw this and it ended up being republished on Food and Wine and Entertainment Weekly and a bunch of, you know, traditional media outlets. And that helped bolster it even further. And I think it ended up trending, which, again, unbelievable watershed moment for the channel. And I think in its first week, it pulled down about 600,000 views, if I remember correctly.

• 29:30Guy Raz?

  Wow. Making a video like that, you know, The Friends Moismaker, you roasted a turkey, you did a bunch of things, and you show this video, and the video is only a few minutes.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  The night before Sandwich Day, we want to prep our 20-pound bird by butterflying it. This means cutting out the spine and flattening, which is a long, arduous process if you don't have the right scissors. So go out and get some poultry shears, because this is really super hard unless you have the right tools.

• 29:58Guy Raz?

  How long? Just kind of break down, actually, how many hours, including the filming and post-production, from buying the ingredients to filming to post-production, does it take to make what amounts to a, you know, I don't know, what, six, seven-minute video?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I'd say at the very least, an episode from front to back, if it's super simple and easy, will take about 20 hours. So you're looking at like, maybe four hours of production if it's, you know, some kind of simple. Then you're looking at probably 10 hours of post-production. Then you got color grading, some graphics, sound mixing. The voiceover is far and away the hardest part because I don't write it beforehand. I just sort of do it and not, not in one shot. I mess up a billion times, but I don't write it. I just kind of stream of consciousness it. And that becomes very creatively draining. And if we're talking about something with exotic ingredients and/or exotic preparation

• 30:58Speaker 01

  that takes days or huge amounts of effort, you know, we're talking about the better part of a weekend spent shooting and then all my evenings after work spent editing to keep making it at this period.

• 31:11Guy Raz?

  And, and this was still a, a fun project that you were doing. You were not thinking, hey, this could be my job.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Definitely not. This was definitely still a, um, an after-school activity. And even when it blew up initially, I was very resistant to become a YouTuber.

• 31:29Guy Raz?

  Why? Because you thought that wasn't real filmmaking or real like, because you wouldn't study film. So did you have this conception of what that meant?

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a little bit of a snob. I'm sure I'm like, I didn't want to become a content creator because in my mind that was, you know, um, handycams and stunt videos and pranks.

• 31:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  And I was like, you know, that's just not for me. And it just turned out to be utter creative freedom. That's what YouTube offered. So as I leaned into it and discovered that I could start making money doing it, yeah, it became my dream job real fast.

• 32:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah. When did that happen? I mean, by 2016, you get this video that's just getting, it's blowing up, the moist maker. At what point did you say to yourself, you know, I can make money off of this?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Well, that's where Sawyer comes into the picture. My oldest and dearest friend, his name is Sawyer Jacobs. We met in ninth grade and he is currently my partner. He, before anybody else, saw the marketability and, and brand recognition potential in this product, uh, which, you know, he was character. What I was doing that way. And I was like, dude, I'm just messing around after work. You know, this is just, this is a YouTube show like seriously. And he was like, because he worked at Conde Nast at the time.

• 32:49Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  And he was seeing these legacy brands doing these ad deals. And he was getting a better and better understanding of how the advertising industry works and how important it is to have name recognition and a brand and how much that's worth. And he very early on, wanted to work with me on it. And he was the first one to sort of come in with me as my attorney initially. So he was the first one to see that. And he was also the first one to be able to help me monetize it by helping me sign with a management company out in Nashville. So that was probably, I think that was about four months after the moist maker video is when we started monetizing.

• 33:29Guy Raz?

  And one of the early things you did was set up a Patreon account where you basically asked, you know, people who want to support you to sign up on Patreon and they get bonus content and, you know, eventually you were getting like $10,000 a month just from Patreon subscribers.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was the first thing that really enabled me to step away. Thank you for reminding me because that came in before the YouTube dollars.

• 33:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And I was lucky enough to have a robust set of fans that were kind enough to contribute to what I was doing and enable me to leave my job. And that's what I, it was June of 2017 that I gave 70 days notice to my employer because their dear friends still are. And decided that I was going to do this gig full time.

• 34:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, when you're making $10,000 a month, that's 120,000 a year. Like, that's, that's pretty great. And that was, it sounds like that was clearly the, the impetus to get you to just quit your day job in post-production filmmaking and to focus on making these videos full time.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very rare that small business owners get to start their business making more money than they were making at their day job. But I sure do appreciate it because it was, it's a nice safety net to have.

• 34:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And did the growth just occur kind of organically? I mean, or were there things that you were able to start to do to get people to pay attention to these videos and to get more subscribers?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Once again, I leaned on Reddit. Reddit is a really cool community because they found me, you know? They're the ones who like gave me a stage and they take a certain amount of pride in that. So every time I put out a video, everybody on Reddit would upload it to the top of the video subreddit, which would get a huge amount of traffic and just eyeballs on. And the algorithm, YouTube algorithm, when you suddenly and massively just get an influx of views from an outside source, it's going to prioritize you in the algorithm. So my videos would end up trending after that. Like it was a surprise when they didn't trend.

• 35:36Guy Raz?

  Wow. So Reddit was really this important conduit that enabled you to just grow. But at this point, I mean, you're making some money from Patreon, so that's giving you the steady stream of income. And then you, and anybody can do this, I think, at a certain point, you open your YouTube videos up for monetization, right? Which essentially means that you get a small percentage of the fee when the ads are played on it. And from all the conversations we've had on this show, at least initially, and maybe even longer than that, it's not a lot of money that you're getting from YouTube.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, initially it wasn't. And probably within a year and a half, that changed because our CPM started rising, cost per milli, so the amount that YouTube pays you per thousand eyes on. And our CPM started rising because we are family-friendly content. We attracted a very robust advertising sector and just our CPMs would rise and rise and rise along with our viewership. So before too long, it became absolutely nothing to sneeze at. And then, you know, it became, for a minute, was the lion's share of our income, but then that was superseded by integrations.

• 36:49Guy Raz?

  So integrations, explain that for people who aren't familiar with how that works.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  So integrations are basically product placements in videos on YouTube. So we do a 15 to 30 second ad read at the top of the video and a 45 second ad read on the tail.

• 37:06Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Top and tail is tail as old as time and how YouTubers bring home the bacon. And the first partner that we worked with, who we still work with today is Squarespace. They did a three episode deal with us and that was enough for me to like get champagne for me. And so I was like, look at us, we did this. And they, they brought in our first deal, which was our first, you know, kind of cash windfall.

• 37:30Guy Raz?

  But really it's still you, what filming and producing and editing and voicing and doing everything?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, sometimes just for the sake of nostalgia, I still do that. The show is a sort of template that I can build very easily and very quickly. And then I can, as I do the voiceover and as I bring, you know, episode specific personality to it. I can, I can, I can make it into something unique. So it was something that I handled myself for a very, very long time. When we were brought on Made In Network, they would edit together episodes of Basics with Babish, which we launched in 2017. And yeah, it's just a general cookery show, which I was very, very nervous to launch because before that I was resting on this sort of pop culture crush and thinking, you know,

• 38:22Speaker 01

  nobody's going to want to watch me if there isn't, you know, a Marvel movie attached to it. But turned out people enjoyed it.

• 38:28Guy Raz?

  And were you ever nervous about, I mean, you're not a trained chef, right? You didn't go to culinary school.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 38:35Guy Raz?

  Were you ever worried about getting criticized by professionals that you were not, I don't know, professional enough, or did you just kind of lean into the fact that you aren't?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Well, you know, like most YouTubers, I know there can be 100 nice comments and one mean one, and all you see is the mean one. So I listened very carefully whenever I received criticism because it's all I saw, because I have a complex. But I knew I was going to be met with incredulity from people who really, really know what they're doing. So that's why I made it as patently obvious as I possibly could that I was an amateur. And that meant showing my mistakes, that meant, you know, having a laugh if I spilled something or burnt something, that meant being very, very honest with the audience. And I think that's something that people resonated with, which is why they kept watching me even if I wasn't making food from their favorite movie.

• 39:29Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another very quick break, but we'll be right back with more from Andrew Ray of the Babish Culinary Universe. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 41:22Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Andrew Ray from the YouTube channel Babish Culinary Universe. So by this point in 2017, you've launched Basics with Babish, the show. And then, I guess in 2019, you go on to launch another show called Being with Babish. And that features a lot more of you, right? You're interacting with fans and sharing personal stories. And you go on to release cookbooks and cookware products. So you grew really quickly. I have to assume that you're a multimillion-dollar company today.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yes. I'm really thrilled and humbled with how well the company has done financially. Because, yeah, we're a pretty lean organization. As of right now, we're six employees strong, myself included. And our expenses are extremely low. And our revenues are extremely high because they're based off of just the sheer number of viewers that we've been able to generate. And we're actually very proud of our compensation model that we've built with our creators. Because now on the channel, there's more than just me. There's Kendall, there's Alvin, there's Rick. We have a number of different shows. We want to make more with more personalities. And the way that we've been compensating our talent is via percentage,

• 42:43Speaker 01

  which I'm not familiar with any media brand doing that, where our talent and our creators are paid commensurately with what ads are placed on their videos and how well their videos do.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  And it's not only been a way to generously compensate our talent, but I think to fairly compensate them. So we have a new system now where we have advertisers coming in for talents that aren't me on the channel. And it's a new way that we get to fairly pay people for their time on camera.

• 43:15Guy Raz?

  How dependent is the success of your model on the number of subscribers you have?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  It really depends on the advertisers. Some advertisers only see that subscriber number and, you know, just see that as the potential number of eyeballs that their product is going to get in front of. And other advertisers are a little more, you know, they delve deeper into the numbers. They want to see how our videos have been performing recently. They want to see how they're projected to perform. So we work with advertisers in any way we can to get them the data they need.

• 43:47Guy Raz?

  Tell me about some of the smart, I think, decisions you made, particularly as the food, this is the mainstream food media world really kind of imploded in 2020. A lot of these big publications, many of which produce great videos and recipes. I follow them. I'm a home cook. I love them. But many of them went through some really challenging times, including Bon Appetit. And there was very well-known examples of people of color who felt that they were being exploited on the videos. And you reached out to some of them and said, hey, come, come work with me, including famously Sol Lele.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yes. Like I was saying before, we, we had an idea of how we could fairly compensate our employees and our talent. And we wanted to try it out. And, you know, I make it a habit not to speak ill of my contemporaries. But we saw a free agent, a creative who needed a new home and somebody who we could potentially really openly, transparently compensate. But there was, yeah, there was sort of a corporate reckoning happening at that time. There was like a half dozen companies that went through major reckonings in their corporate leadership. And we were very grateful to be as small and lean as we are because we're just a bunch

• 45:11Speaker 01

  of friends who haven't, you know, done awful things to each other by unclosed doors. So that's, that's a nice position to be in.

• 45:17Guy Raz?

  You know, Andrew, and I'm just gonna be straightforward about this, and I know some people listening are gonna like it, but I see a lot of very famous YouTubers, my kids watch them, and I don't understand. I don't understand what the appeal of them is, because some of them are just mean, or they're incredibly self-absorbed. And it's funny, because I watch my kids or other people watch them, and they don't perceive it in the same way. I watch your videos, and you're very likable. And I'm not just saying that because you're on the show, but you are. You have a likable persona, because you gotta develop a persona. If people listening to How I Built This hate me, they're not gonna listen to the show. And so I have to work really hard to make sure that, you know, people will like me, because I want you to stay with the show, and I want, and, you know, it's not an act,

• 45:59Guy Raz?

  it's who I am. But you still have to kind of cultivate that. And you have this ability to connect with people. And so what do you, how did you think about being that person?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  I really appreciate that. First of all, that's an extraordinarily kind thing to say. And I think that my viewers share a genuine connection with me. When I meet them on the street, they always say, like, can we grab a beer? Like, I feel like we'd be friends or something. I hear that a lot. And I believe it, because the things that we do are kind. We want to make uplifting, encouraging content. So we make it encouraging by showing how much of a doofus I am, and how hard it is for me to, you know, cook. And we make sure not to, you know, do it at the expense of anybody else by criticizing anybody, or, you know, trying to generate controversy with anybody, because those are, like you said, very, very common tactics with YouTubers.

• 46:52Guy Raz?

  And can be very successful.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:54Guy Raz?

  You go after somebody, you're, all of a sudden, you're blowing up all over YouTube and social media.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's a way you can do it. But you might also notice that I've never, ever said like and subscribe, which is a very common YouTuber trope to say, to finish, begin and finish a video with, hey, guys, like and subscribe. And I've never said that.

• 47:15Guy Raz?

  You don't say smash that like button.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Never said smash that like button squad.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And luckily, what that's built us is a very robust audience who only subscribed because they wanted to subscribe.

• 47:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  And I think that's why we have such high viewership retention. Like, we have a really loyal core of those subscribers who will watch our videos, no matter what we put out. And so, we try to meet them with quality content that's also kind and uplifting.

• 47:44Guy Raz?

  And you have also been pretty straightforward about your own ups and downs. And you've been open about just like going, going to dark places. But at the same time, somebody could look at you and your life and say, oh, this, this is amazing. He's got 10 million subscribers, all this success, all these channels. He's, he's famous, he's making lots of money. What, why does he go down these, these rabbit holes of despair? And I know it's a very superficial question to ask, but what happens when, when people ask you that question or you see those kinds of comments?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Not a superficial question to ask at all. I'm very grateful for you asking it because I want to be as loud a voice I can in the conversation about mental health. It's, everything that they say about it being under-reported, under-discussed, undertreated is absolutely true. I have access to the best treatment that I could possibly get now. And it's sometimes still not enough because if you have chemical imbalances in your brain,

• 48:43Speaker 01

  it's akin to wanting to run a marathon, but being mad at yourself for having a broken leg.

• 48:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  And personally, I have depression, ADHD, general anxiety disorder. And I don't want those to be shameful things. I want, those are part of my personality, they're part of my brain chemistry. And in terms of being a public figure and being a success with them, I honestly, I know very few people who are public figures who don't have problems like this. It's part of being an entertainer sometimes.

• 49:18Guy Raz?

  I wonder if you ever feel like there are days where you're just like, I want to get off this hamster wheel, I just want to stop making this stuff and I don't want to make something every other day.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Well, I took a break a couple of months ago.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  I took a month off back in April of this year. I disappeared from the channel. We put out a little notice and it was because I had had a, just a complete breakdown.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  The moment when I screamed eureka at the top of my lungs and fell onto my bed, I had a really sobering moment where I was like, I am not myself right now. I am, I am not Andy. I am not Andrew. I'm not one of those people. I am so obsessed with this company and hitting these deadlines and putting out two episodes a week. And I started to feel joy and, and, and extra energy and not need sleep and, you know, borderline mania from it. And luckily my friends, you know, had a friendship intervention, you know, and just be like, hey, you're gonna, you're gonna burn out here. You need, you need to, you know, take care of yourself.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  And in that time, I learned a lot about, I've always been an adamant meditator, but I learned a great deal about just how to cope with my, my anxiety and my, my sometimes crippling depression when it starts to show its head. And now conversely, when I'm too excited and I'm too worked up and, and anxious and, and it starts to blind me to how poorly I'm taking care of myself.

• 51:01Guy Raz?

  And is it, is that pressure come from you? Is it from some, I don't know, part of the universe that tells you, you gotta make more stuff, or it's not as good as this stuff, or I don't know, where, where's it come from?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  I have a little voice in my head, and I think a lot of us do,

• 51:19Speaker 01

  that tells me whenever I'm not working, or whenever I'm doing anything really, that I'm either, you know, you should be working, or you're not working hard enough, or you're not doing good enough.

• 51:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  And I know that sounds universal because it is. I feel like most of us have that nagging voice in our head that's just like, you aren't enough.

• 51:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  It's taken a long time to identify that voice as not me. It's never had my health or my wellbeing in mind.

• 51:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  And the day I realized that voice hates me was the day that I kind of spun out there and decided to take a month off because I was just working myself into a grave. And so I, recognizing that voice as the malevolent presence that it is, was a very important moment for me this year.

• 52:13Guy Raz?

  I wonder whether, I mean, your business and what makes your business so valuable is the audience it reaches, right? And anybody who has a big audience is very lucky. We're lucky too on this show. And what makes it valuable is that advertisers see value in those people, especially a specific type of audience, the kind of person who is attracted to your videos, they are desirable to advertisers. But you are still the center of it. Of course, you've got other people. But ultimately, do you have a vision for how to de-emphasize you, Andrew, as the person of the main focal point in the Babish world?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  I always want to, you know, the name of the brand is Babish. And I always want to be, me and Sawyer, at the center of the thing that we've built here. I still want to be the face of it. I still enjoy being on camera and making my show. Hell, after we're done with this interview, I'm gonna go and edit together tomorrow's episode. I have to do the voiceover for it tonight because it's gotta go out tomorrow. But I'm excited to do it because it's fun.

• 53:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah. What do you think, sort of, long-term? I mean, what do you want this brand to be? Do you want it to be like a Food 52 or like a Martha Stewart kind of brand where, you know, you've got all these product lines and just different media channels and different partnerships and books and publishing?

• 53:45Speaker 01

  That you just compared me in the same sentence to Martha Stewart is stunning.

• 53:50Guy Raz?

  But, you know, she started small. I mean, the point is, is that it's an empire of a person and all these things around it, gardening and cooking and products and TV and film. I mean, now that you're really growing, what do you want this business to be in the future?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  I'm gonna dream big with you, real quick. I'm just gonna shoot for the stars here.

• 54:09Guy Raz?

  Let's do it.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  I envision us as a multimedia brand that is still doing what we're doing right now, which is creating informative, entertaining, uplifting, positive, evergreen, high utility content on a much larger scale that is creator first and human first. I want it to be one of these companies that pioneers and taking care of its employees and fairly and transparently compensating its creators. I see creating lines of products that are affordable for people who are setting up their kitchens. I see a slate of content that we can create

• 54:50Speaker 01

  for streaming platforms and television networks that is positive and uplifting, like Great British Baking Show, something that feels like a warm hug when you're watching it, but also maybe teaches you something or encourages you to try something you might not have otherwise. And seeing that on a much larger scale, basically just a much wider version of what we're doing right now. I mean, I thought this was my dream job, but that's now within the very distant realm of possibility. And that is an intoxicating and really exciting prospect.

• 55:29Guy Raz?

  Andrew Ray of the Babish Culinary Universe. Thanks for joining us.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, man. Thanks for having me.

• 55:37Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy dot Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger,

• 56:17Guy Raz?

  Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coats. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.