How I Built This with Guy Raz - ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Babish Culinary Universe: Andrew Rea

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

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.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special. There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place.

Looking to grow your business? Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe. All loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb.

It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca.com. Hey, before we start the show today, I just want to let you know that the team is taking some much-deserved time off for Thanksgiving this week. So we're going to bring

you this appropriately food-themed how I built this lab episode that First aired back in August. And if you haven't already heard this interview with Andrew Ray from the popular YouTube show Binging with Babish, you are going to want to hear it. And if you have heard it, you're going to want to hear it again because it is such a great episode. Stick around to hear how Andrew went from a single video back in 2016 to running one of the most popular food channels on YouTube. Okay, here's the show. 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 a 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 cookoff from Parks and Recreation or the prison pasta sauce from Goodfellas or Remy, the rats 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 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? Yes, outside Rochester, home of Xerox, Kodak, and Bauchin Lom. When did you first start getting into cooking? 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. Tell me a little bit more about, I mean, you start cooking as a kid and you have 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 just can't imagine it. Tell me a little bit about cooking with your mom. Was she a great cook? Did she have a love for cooking? She was a great cook in that she was a mom and she could beautifully nourish her family. And he was making the same stuff that she's been making for years.

So, you know, spaghetti with canned clam sauce and different stews and Nestle-Tolhaus cookies, you know, just classic as mom as you can get. You know, this tastes good. Mom made it. Yeah. But you weren't like, even as a kid thinking, oh, I'm going to 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 going to be a Michelin three-star chef one day.

Absolutely not. I cooked 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. 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. That's what you wanted to do.

You wanted to make movies. Yeah. 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. 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 learn the ropes, so to speak. From what I understand your dad taught photojournalism at Rochester Institute of Technology is a very good school. And so were you around like cameras and and video editing equipment from a pretty early age? Absolutely. And my dad wasn't just a professor

of photo journalism, he was a major advocate of digital photography well before it was mainstream in Rochester, home of Kodak. So he was selling solar panels in a coal mining town. And, 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 main spearhead at RIT. So you decide 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?

I would study them in that. I would watch them over and over and over and over. Who were your favorite directors? Well, it changed as I was getting older. 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 complete geniuses. And John Favro, the person who I actually know and I'm 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 in the post-production world and didn't really, you know, scratch the itch. 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 go work after? Yeah, my senior thesis film was like seven minutes long, I was shot on 16mm.

It was, you know, edited front to back. It was, so yeah, I had the, I had all 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 room in a five bedroom, legally probably. at one bedroom in Brooklyn, Atlantic, 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'd put glue traps underneath my bed and I'd pull them out in the morning and it would be covered with roaches, like four or five or six. It was, it was disgusting.

And I was working in a restaurant and I was working at anthropology as the guy who goes through your purse when you set off the alarm. The clothing store. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. Doing what? Visual effects for commercials, television commercials. This little company of four people called SwitchFX. I started as an assistant and I worked

my way up to a senior flame artist, which, you know, it's not hard to do in a company of four people, but still. 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. Or like lightning up the bags under their eyes or getting rid of of flyaway hairs or just all the things you're never supposed to notice. But the really hard stuff is in post-production, like spending hours and hours on a frame. Oh yeah. I remember we did a commercial for Swiffer once, where it was like break up with your mop was the campaign and the mop was drinking through a straw for some reason. And they'd shot those 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 of a woman's eyes were looking. 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. Absolutely. It gave me a 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, a little bit of green screen or a little visible wire. And I'd have seven people sometimes standing behind me just pouring over every single image. So, yeah, it definitely was great training for attention to detail and making sure things are clean and crisp. 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? 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. These are all nonprofits in New York, I'm assuming. 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 the story from whatever actually happened and you managed to capture. I mean, it sounds like, I mean, then this was freelance work, but it really sounds like, I mean, and then this was freelance work, but it really sounds like, like this was kind of a shift, right? Because now doing post-production is important, but actually making the documentaries a different skill so they are developing at that point. 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, 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. 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 p.m. And me and the director would crank until one, two 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 industry and try to get noticed by telling a story. 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 until it was going on in your life at that time. 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, put me in a pretty deep depression. And I think you also would be going through a divorce around that time. 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. To function.

Yeah. 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. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm curious about that. I mean, 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? 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 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 daylight flowing it 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 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 cookoff. And they were discussing some pretty exotic ingredients that I was like, I wonder what that would actually taste like? Papaya chutney, black truffle aoli, telegiore cheese, crisp. How would that work? Would that work together? And it turns out it's okay. But that's really where the idea came from. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Andrew Ray recreated that iconic parks and recreation burger cookoff

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. Welcome back to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Andrew Ray, 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 cookoff scene from Parks and Recreation. And I guess you 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. Yes. So I can tell you the whole scene, I could recite it by heart. Yes. The idea is Chris wants to see if you make a turkey burger that tastes better than beef burger. I humbly placed before you. It's Chris Trager's patented Tracker's turkey burger. It's made with something farms, organic turkey,

Telesio cheese, Chris, papaya chutney, black trufflaioli, and microgreens, the honey gluten-free rioche bun. Yes, I remember. And then she's eating it, and one of the panelists says, I take saffron in here. What is this in here? Saffron? Yes.

And another guy's like, I like the umami flavor. And then I love him. But, um, and Ron makes a beef burger. It's a hamburger made out of meat. 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. Oh, my gosh, so much better. It's crazy. Turkey can never beat cow, Chris. Sorry. 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? 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. So the food pops 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 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 and center, it's symmetrical, and any personality that I'm bringing to it is ancillary

and incidental. It's more about the food. And the name, you introduce yourself as Oliver Babish, not as Andrew Ray. Explain who Oliver Babish is for people who don't know that character. Oliver Bavis 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 for my favorite shows. And I made the video specifically for Reddit, for the food subreddit, because I had been posting there. I had 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 who it was intended for. So you post this video on Reddit, but you still have your day job working in post-production and doing

documentary freelance work? 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. You continued with this theme of trying to recreate food from TV shows or film? 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. It's her heart and his eye. And I really appreciate the thematic symbolism of that. 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? 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 videos subreddit, and Reddit videos, at least at the time, and still to this day, can be a sort of front line 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, I think a lot of news outlets and magazines and whatnot go to that subreddit to 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. Wow. Making a video like that, you know, the friend's moist maker, you roasted a turkey. You did a bunch of of things and you show this video and the video is only a few minutes. 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.

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? I mean, I'd say at the very least,

an episode from front to back, if it's super simple and easy, we'll 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've 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 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 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. And this was still a fun project that you were doing. You were not thinking, hey, this could be my job. Definitely not.

This was definitely still an after-school activity. And even when it blew up, initially, I was very resistant to become a YouTuber. Why? Because you thought that wasn't real filmmaking or real, like, because you wouldn't study film. So did you have a conception of what that meant? 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, handicams and stunt videos and pranks. And I was like, you know, that's just

not for me. Um, 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. Yeah. When did that happen? I mean, By 2016, you get this video that 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? 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 brand recognition potential in this product. which he was characterizing 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 Condi Nast at the time. 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 Moistmaker video is when we started monetizing. 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 think he had bonus content. And, you know, eventually you were getting like $10,000 a month just from Patreon subscribers. 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. Yeah.

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

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's a nice safety net to have. 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? 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 up foot it to the top of the videos subreddit, which would get a huge amount of traffic and just eyeballs on. And the algorithm, the 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. 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.

Yeah. I mean, initially it wasn't. And probably within a year and a half, that changed because our CPM started rising, cost per milly, 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. It was the lion's share of our income, but then that was superseded by integrations.

So integrations, explain that for people who aren't familiar with how that works. 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. 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 get champagne for me and Sawyer. I was like, look at us.

We did this. And they brought in our first deal, which was our first kind of cash windfall. But really it's still you, what, filming and producing and editing and voicing and doing everything? 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 as I do the voiceover and as I bring, you know, episode specific personality to it, 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 brought on Maiden 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, 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. And were you ever nervous about, I mean, You're not a trained chef, right?

You didn't go to culinary school. No, sir. 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? 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. 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. 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 in, 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 like interacting with fans and sharing personal stories. And you'd go on to release cookbooks and cookware products. So you grew really quickly. I mean, I have to assume that you're a multi-million dollar company today. 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, 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. 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. How dependent is the success of your model on the number of subscribers you have? It really depends on the advertiser. 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 number. 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 the data they need.

Tell me about some of the smart, I think, decisions you made, particularly as the food, the sort of 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 work with me, including famously Sol El L. L. Whaley. Yes. Like I was saying before, 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 of friends who haven't, you know, done awful things to each other by and closed doors. So that's a nice position to be in. You know, Andrew, some, and I mean, I'm just going to be straightforward about this. And I know some people listening aren't going to 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've got to develop a persona. If people listening to how I built this hate me, they're not going to 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, this is not an act. 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? 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, yeah, 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. And can be very successful.

Yeah. You go after somebody. You're all of a sudden, you're blowing up all over. YouTube and social media. 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. So you don't say smash that like button. Never said smash that like button squad. And luckily, what that's built us is a very robust audience who only subscribed because they wanted to subscribe. Yeah. 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. And you have also been pretty straightforward about your own ups and downs. And you've been open about just like going to dark places. But at the same time, somebody could look at you in your life and say, oh, this is amazing. 10 million subscribers, all the success, all these channels. He's, he's famous, he's making lots of money. Why does he go down these rabbit holes of despair? And I know it's a very superficial question to ask, but what happens when people ask you that question or you see those kinds of

comments? Not a superficial question to ask it 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 underreported, underdust, 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, it's akin to wanting to run a marathon, but being mad at yourself for having a broken leg. Yeah. And personally, I have depression, ADHD, general anxiety disorder. And I don't want those to be shameful things.

Those are part of my personality. They're part of my brain chemistry. And in terms of being a public figure and being 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.

I wonder if you ever feel like their days are just like, I want to get off this hamster wheel. I just want to stop making this stuff. I don't want to have to make something every other day. Well, I took a break a couple months ago. 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 just a complete breakdown. 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 not Andy. I am not Andrew. I'm not other 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 extra energy and not need sleep and borderline mania from it. And luckily my friends, you know, had a friendship intervention, you know, and just be like, hey, you're going to, you're going to burn out here. You need to, you know, take care of yourself. 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 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 anxious and and it starts to blind me to how poorly I'm taking care of myself. 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 got to make more stuff or it's not as good as this stuff or I don't know. Where does it come from? I have a little voice in my head. I think a lot of us do 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. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. It's taken a long time to identify that voice as not me. it's never had my health or my well-being in mind. Yeah. And the day I realized that 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 recognizing that voice as the malevolent presence that it is was very important moment for me this year. I wonder whether, I mean, your business and what makes your business so valuable is the audience that reaches, right? And anybody who has a big audience is very lucky. We're lucky to 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 view of vision for how to de-emphasize you, Andrew, as the person of the main focal point in the Babish world? I always want to, you know, the name of the brand is baddish. 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 going to go and edit together tomorrow's episode. I have to do the voiceover for it tonight because it's got to go out tomorrow. But I'm excited to do it because it's fun. 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 media channels and different.

different partnerships and books and publishing. That you just compared me in the same sentence to Martha Stewart is stuck. But, you know, she started small. I mean, the point 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, where do you want this business to be in the future? I'm going to dream big with you real quick. I'm just going to shoot for the stars here. Let's do it.

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 for streaming platforms and television networks that is positive and uplifting like a 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 that 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. Angel Ray of the Babish Culinary Universe, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much, man. Thanks for having me. 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.roaz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is H-I-B-T

at ID.wondry.com. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arablewey. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Jacey Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coates. 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.