“Geography is everything” for digital creator Geoff Gibson. The Portlander’s YouTube channel explores population geography and how that affects cities, states and countries.
courtesy of Geoff Gibson
“Geography is everything” for digital creator Geoff Gibson. The Portlander’s YouTube channel explores population geography and how that affects cities, states and countries. Some of his video essays have millions of views, including pieces about the Cascadia Subduction Zone and why some parts of Oregon and Northern California have few people living there.
More recently, Gibson covered Astoria and why it never became a major hub like San Francisco. We learn more about “Geography by Geoff” and how it struck a chord on social media.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Geography is everything for digital creator Geoff Gibson. The Portlander’s YouTube channel explores the complex relationship between place and human life. Questions like “why do so many people live here” or “why do so few live there?” His videos, which have been viewed millions of times, encompass the whole world. But he’s shown a lot of love for the Northwest, with episodes devoted to the Cascadia Subduction Zone, rural Oregon, and Astoria. Geoff Gibson joins us now to talk about his YouTube channel, “Geography by Geoff.” Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Geoff Gibson: Hey, good to be here. I’m very excited to hang out with you for a little bit, Dave.
Miller: Likewise. Your Substack is called “Geography is Everything.” What do you mean by that phrase?
Gibson: So, Geography is Everything was actually a podcast before it’s just a Substack, with a professor of geography at Portland State. It was something that me and this professor ‒ his name is Hunter Shobe ‒ we had always sort of talked about, that we can describe anything and everything through the lens of geography. We’re all spatially connected in this world of ours. So if something happens in Oregon, it’s not just happening in Oregon. In fact, you can usually trace it to somewhere elsewhere in the world. And how those two things are connected is sort of that geography that binds us all together. And that’s sort of what we mean, everything is geography, and geography is everything.
Miller: That came from conversations you had at the university level. But thinking back, what do you think about the way geography is taught in schools earlier, to third graders or tenth graders?
Gibson: I can recall from when I was that age, I remember having a geography lesson. I remember very distinctly being “let’s remember all the capitals of all the states in the United States,” and that really being the extent of it.
Now there was this other thing called social studies, which was sort of this mixture of mostly history, some sort of social aspect, talking about sort of the cultural aspects of different things. And it mixed with a little bit of geography. But it was very light on the geography. And I always thought this was really interesting, it was a very interesting way to teach geography and teach the world, particularly within a country that is globally so prominent, and has their fingers in so many different parts of the world, that we don’t really teach all that much about the world.
You talk to people from ‒ let’s take the United Kingdom because they’re close friend and ally of the United States and we obviously interact with them quite a bit ‒ their geography education, they learn about the world so much more from such an earlier age than we do in the United States, at least back when I was going through these classes. I think it’s just a really interesting dynamic. Personally, I don’t think we’re teaching our kids enough about the world, especially given the modern sort of era of politics and everything that’s going on.
Miller: How did you decide to start a YouTube channel devoted to geography?
Gibson: Going all the way back to my undergrad at Portland State University when I decided, sort of on a whim, to major in geography, because I was like “I like maps,” fast forwarding about a decade or so, I had really gone into this idea of cartography ‒ making static maps with some key piece of data ‒ and making them look really pretty and really beautiful. You’re sort of blending this data and art and everything like that. I would share those out into the world, put those out onto Reddit or Twitter at the time, just to like get it out there and have people interact with it. And that was really fun for me. At the time I had a full-time job, and I was doing this on the side. It was just a hobby.
And then the pandemic hit, as it did for everybody. And I found myself with a lot more time. So I was creating more maps, I was creating so many different maps, I was creating maps on all of the different places in the world the Simpsons have ever been. I was creating maps on the average rental price per metropolitan area in the United States. I was creating all these maps and I was just sending them out. And I was realizing that as I was sending out these static maps to the ether of social media sphere, that I wasn’t really in control of telling the story that I was trying to tell. People were interpreting these maps in all kinds of different ways. Sometimes I’d go into these comments and they would just be spiraling out of control. And I’d be trying to tell the story within the comments of why I did it this way or why I showed this specific thing.
And I realized if I actually want to tell the story behind these maps that I’m making, I need to become more of a storyteller, and not just a map maker and cartographer, and somebody who’s just making these static things. And so I ultimately decided that if I’m gonna do this, I should make YouTube videos about it, because that’s an easier way to tell a visual story through maps and graphics and everything like that. And one thing led to another, and now here I am few years later.
Miller: I want to play some audio from one of your actually relatively recent videos. It’s about Astoria, and why Astoria did not become the preeminent city on the West Coast, nothing nearly as prominent as San Francisco, say. Part of the answer has to do with the mighty Columbia River. This is an excerpt from your video.
Gibson [recording]: The Columbia River is the prime artery of one of North America’s longest river systems. From the Canadian Rockies, through the arid plateaus of the Pacific Northwest into the Pacific Ocean, it drains a vast watershed, and carries an enormous volume of water. Every single second, about 100 swimming pools worth of water are dumped into the Pacific Ocean.
But with all this water, it also brings a vast amount of sediment, which creates a constantly shifting sandbar at its mouth. This interplay of river currents, ocean swells, and tidal forces creates an environment of turbulent waters and large unpredictable waves. Mix that with a sandbar that is constantly shifting under the water, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. And this disaster has struck time and time again, with nearly 2,000 ships meeting their fate in this region alone, hence the nickname it has since acquired: The Graveyard of the Pacific.
Miller: What made you want to focus on Astoria for that recent video?
Gibson: Astoria holds a very special place in my heart. I really love that little town. I remember the very first time I ever went out to Astoria, I think it was 2011, I had moved to Portland a couple of years prior. And it was just sort of a random, let’s go out to the coast area and see what it’s all about. I remember coming upon Astoria and just being this cool little town, sort of a little funky vibe. It was clear that people who lived in Astoria really loved Astoria. And I just remember thinking, sitting sort of near the waterfront there and looking at the bridge going over to Washington, and it made me think of San Francisco. I remember sitting there and being like “this is an interesting area because there’s all this water,” and you can see the cargo ships moving in and out, and just thinking at that moment “Why isn’t this a bigger city?”
And then as I was getting into making videos, I’m obviously a Portlander and I live in the Pacific Northwest and I’m a big homer for the Pacific Northwest, and I try to include talking about the Pacific Northwest at various intervals. But I don’t want to always focus on it because obviously people want to know more about the world in general. But it was sort of the end of the year of 2024. It was gonna be my last episode for the year. I created one every single week. And I was like, “you know what, this one’s just going to be for me.”
Miller: A lot of your videos focus on one particular question, variations on this question, which is “Why do so few people live in this area?” Colombia’s west coast, Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Northern Florida, Central Pennsylvania, eastern Montana, all of Indiana relative to the states around it. What is it about this particular question that fascinates you?
Gibson: Every place has a story. And that’s not a unique quote from me right now. But I think it’s something that we often forget about. If a city is in a place, it’s there for a very specific reason. That reason can be a large variety of different things, but it’s there for a reason. And the other side of that coin is, if people aren’t really in a place, there’s also a very specific reason for that, and there’s a story behind that.
I think as I was diving into this question originally… I think my very first video on this topic was this thing I called “America’s Empty Belt,” which is this big large swath sort of in the middle of the country that really separates the tight-knit pattern of development in the East Coast from the scattered but still fairly prominent developments on the West Coast, and there’s sort of this big empty belt in the middle. And as it turns out, it’s basically where the Great Plains runs up to the Rocky Mountains. So aside from Denver, there’s not a whole lot of major cities in the area. And I just remember the reaction to that, people love that kind of video, they’re like “wow, this is really cool, I’ve never thought about it this way.”
And then as I was sort of doing my post video analysis, I was like, “Okay, this was a really fun video to create, it really gets at the heart of a lot of geography that I like to talk about: telling a story, where are people coming from, what’s happening there, what’s the weather conditions, what’s the historic conditions that might have pre prevented a settlement from starting.” There’s a bunch of places, such as Astoria, that could have grown much larger were it not for a few key historic decisions not made. So it just sort of became one of those questions where, if there’s an interesting story about this here in this belt, this middle area, there’s an interesting story about this for every place.
So take Florida for example, right. The southern half from about Orlando on is where most Floridians live. Well, why is that? And then the answer always might seem obvious. People always like to say “oh, it’s the weather, it’s the climatic conditions that create and inable this.” In reality, it’s much more complicated than that. There’s a lot more going on in these places that end up answering that question more fully.
Miller: One thing that I’ve been struck by is how, if you just gave me the names of your different videos, and also a list of the number of views that each one got ‒ but not connected ‒ I don’t think I could draw the correct lines between them. A recent example of this is one of your recent videos called “Will Trump redraw the World Map?” This is after he became president. That only has 60,000 views. The one that’s called “Why So Few Americans Live in this huge area of the West Coast” has over 8.5 million views. How do you explain this one example? And more broadly, how good are you at this point in anticipating which of your videos is really going to hit it big?
Gibson: I think everybody who creates content for YouTube will say this, that there’s a little bit of guessing, no matter how good at this you are. I still do a little bit of guessing myself. It’s a mixture. As you start creating content for something like YouTube ‒ and this would probably apply for TikTok and Instagram and all these things as well ‒ these algorithms that manage these systems, they want you to neatly fit into a niche, have your lane. And I happen to fall into, obviously the geography niche, and there’s other geography content creators out there. And there’s politics niches, there’s urbanism niches, and there’s all these kinds of niches for everybody.
So really, once you figure out what your niche is and you start creating content about it, these systems will start recognizing that that’s your niche, and they’ll start pushing that content to people who also like that. So here’s where we get to why there’s such a big discrepancy in something such as “will Trump redraw the world borders” versus “why is there so few people living in this area.” My best guess for that is the “why so few people from” concept falls almost squarely within what YouTube has found that this is what Geography by Geoff does.
Miller: The box that you/the algorithm have built for yourself.
Gibson: Exactly, yeah. They can then take that content and say “we know everybody who else likes this content,” because Geoff has created a lot of these videos, people have liked them, we can immediately push them out to all these people.
Now for the Trump video, there are people who really like politics and they will watch politics, and they will consume it a lot. Obviously, some of our biggest network channels are all about politics these days. But I think what happened was that I created this around a very controversial figure, to say the very least. And it would push it out to my subscribers, which is 650,000ish people, and it would also try and push it out to other people who maybe like geography. But they didn’t know what to do with the politics part of it. I’m not a politics person, and so it wasn’t going to the politics people, because they might not be interested in geography. Instead it was trying to push it to the geography people that YouTube knows that watch my channel like geography.
And therefore, it just wasn’t received very well because of any variety of reasons. There could have been just not that much interest in hearing about politics from me. I’m not a politics person. This is not a way for me to get into politics, because I don’t really want to do it all that often. But I was like “well, this is a really big topic and like, let’s see what Trump has said in the past and what he says that he’s gonna do in the future, and apply a geography lens to it.” But it didn’t work out, and that’s okay. Not every video works out.
Miller: What kind of pressure do you feel now to pump out new content to feed this beast?
Gibson: I mean, there’s the constant pressure. I create videos every single week. But it’s different because to me it doesn’t really feel like pressure. I really enjoy what I do. I have the luxury of learning for a living, learning about a new place every single week and sort of diving into the story and trying to tell that story. There’s always that aspect of “okay, I need to make sure that I have a video coming out,” and that is a certain amount of pressure. And it’s not that if I don’t have a video that comes out, YouTube will be like “you’re out, get out of here, you’re making space for the next creator.” But based on my current model of revenue generation, a lost week of videos is a lost week of revenue, essentially.
Miler: You are based in Portland, and a big stan for the Northwest as you said. But we’re talking to you in Japan right now. What are you doing right now?
Gibson: Yeah, I’m in the southern island of Kyushu, well, I’m in Beppu. I’m traveling the world for the next year and change, with my partner Alexa. We’ve spun up a whole new channel just around traveling and doing a travel blog, a little bit of geography education. I basically had this moment where I was like “I’m talking so much about the world, I’m learning so much about the world, but I’m not experiencing the world.” I’ve created a video about Japan, for example. But I’m not there in Japan to really experience it. And I was like “well, I have this opportunity, I work for myself, and I can travel the world and maybe try and do something and experience some of that geography in person.”
And so that’s kind of what we’re doing now. We are in Japan now, we’ll be in Taiwan next week and then we’ll be in Vietnam, and we’ll just keep on going.
Miller: All paid for by clicks, essentially.
Gibson: Exactly, paid for by clicks, yeah.
Miller: Geoff Gibson, congratulations. Enjoy this time.
Gibson: Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s going to be wild.
Miller: Geoff Gibson is the creator of the YouTube channel “Geography by Geoff.”
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