Stories the Media Won't Tell: Peter Santenello's Viral Mission (podcast)
Forbidden Conversation #14
When Peter Santenello was 24 years old, he took his $20,000 in saving, left the U.S. for the first time and spent the next two years travelling around 50 countries, debunking for himself the fear-based narratives that he was taught in his youth and learning about the world around him.
Today, he does much of the same for his 1.6M YouTube subscribers who tune in to his videos to help them discover cultures, places and stories that the media so often fails to capture. Whether it’s the Hasidic Jewish community in New York, Chicano culture in East LA, the Amish, Skid Row, Compton, a Native American reservation, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the U.S./Mexico border—what distinguishes Santenello from most is his tremendous openness and curiosity when it comes to capturing these stories and unique communities. And he’s often willing to go places where much of the mainstream has more often tended to ignore.
In this episode, we discuss why some cultures tend to be more widely misunderstood, why his work has resonated so much with audiences, how he keeps his own views and biases from tainting his coverage, how he decides what topics and cultures to cover, how he’s able to gain the trust of the people featured in his stories, the increasing polarization in our media coverage, and whether he’s found any universal truths throughout his many adventures and conversations.
The FORBIDDEN CONVERSATIONS Podcast is a series that takes on topics that don't always get attention or are more challenging to tackle and seeks to address them through civil discourse and nuanced exploration. To view all episodes so far, visit here. Please subscribe, like and comment. You know, all the YouTube things. It helps a LOT!
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❓❓❓Is there a culture that has really surprised you throughout your travels? Leave a comment below to share!
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God I miss reading your Twitter posts
Never surprised, but always intrigued. I lived four years each in Vietnam and Germany, traveled extensively in South America, and have been in Ukraine for sixteen years now. Learned the languages to varying extents. People everywhere are very human.
The places I liked most were those most unlike the USA. I was a well-paid single guy in my early 30s in Germany of the '70s. Getting married should have been a piece of cake - but it was too much like the USA! Already shot through with feminism, careerism and an anti-child mentality.
God knows why Santenello would have been affected by fear-based narratives. There are indeed places where the streets are dangerous, but by reading and listening you can almost always avoid danger. People were worried about me living in wartime Vietnam, now wartime Kyiv. Nah. I felt more fear as a polar bear on the streets of Washington D.C.