Who You Meet Down America’s Forgotten Backroads - Peter Santenello - #1132

What first pushed you into this whole life? We’re in Austin, and you used to wait tables here while dreaming about seeing the world. That’s such a fucking dream, man.

I was at Fleming’s in the early two-thousands, saving twenty grand to go to Europe for seven months, buy a Ducati in Italy, ship it home, done. Instead I spent a winter snowboarding in Switzerland, then bought a one-way ticket to Georgia, a place I’d barely heard of. I landed with mafiosos racing away in BMWs and had to pay twenty bucks to leave the airport. Georgia was the gateway drug: I looked at the map, saw Tajikistan, and kept going. I hit around fifty countries in two years, ran out of cash in Uzbekistan, took awful-interest credit-card advances. Best debt I ever had. Money could be earned later; I might never have that freedom again.

I’m glad I wasn’t filming then. Content is work—you’re hunting story and shaping everything—while back then I could just let my mind run. Looking down at that old restaurant from my hotel today, I thought about the waiter selling porterhouses. You can’t map life forward, but the dots connect looking back: curiosity, luck, hard work.

Living abroad makes you learn more about home. I’m not sure where mine is now. America is where my business is, and I feel welcomed here, but I’m obviously not American. We share a language, so I forget I’m foreign until I reference Jaffa Cakes or Mr. Bean and nobody gets it. Then the alienation jump-scares you.

That’s why I wanted to show Americans countries reduced to bad headlines—Georgia, Syria, places people think they know. On the ground, it’s more granular. Damascus showed me free speech matters: I could criticize America in a cab, but the driver got tense when I asked about his president. Istanbul is a great middle-road first trip if you respect the culture. I used to judge Americans who didn’t travel, then got it: two weeks off, family obligations, money. Still, if you’re young and hungry to see things, you can arrange a life around it. I avoided career paths that wouldn’t give me that freedom.

I came home at twenty-six, but it took years to find the work. Networks rejected my travel-show pitches: who are you, where’s the dramatic arc? I tried businesses and an interest-based social app, then at thirty-eight I was in Golden Gate Park thinking, what the fuck am I doing? A friend brought me to Ukraine, where I lived four years and met my wife. I stayed with a rural eastern Ukrainian family, dug a well by hand, filmed six videos. Then I sold corn at a beach, got chased off by the kukuruzza mafia, and Ukrainians loved it. I wound up on television and thought maybe this can work. Iran and Saudi brought audiences, but every country wanted its own stories. The pandemic brought us to America; six years later, reaching Americans became sustainable.

What Americans miss is the scale of their own country and how many ways people live. I find places at night on Google Maps: two tiny towns, a post office, no Street View—what’s happening there? Miami and remote Alaska are separate universes. I enter bubbles people may never meet: rich and poor neighborhoods, Amish communities, Native nations. You can’t flatten Native people into one category. There are hundreds of federally recognized tribes, with different histories and rules. Some are patriotic, traditional, Christian; there’s no universal label. Their economic range is enormous too, from Pine Ridge to the Seminoles owning Hard Rock. America gets crazier the closer you zoom.

Central Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta stand out as struggling regions. In Appalachia, jobs disappeared, addiction hit hard, and geography limits opportunity. OxyContin landed among miners already carrying physical pain; when work vanished, the pain became psychic too. I’ll show drugs and poverty, but not rage bait or tragedy porn. Kensington was the bleakest place I’ve seen, partly because of fentanyl. The story I wanted was Buddy, pulling kids toward boxing and rehab: here’s disaster, and here’s somebody trying. Compassion doesn’t mean leaving a sick person face-down on a curb because freedom is complicated.

That’s the strange American tension: freedom, local control, different laws, agencies tripping over each other. But the variety is fucking cool. You can see wildly different landscapes, cultures, and lives without crossing a border. America feels less divided than isolated. Online life turns loud caricatures into WWE, while actual people live ordinary, complicated lives. Adventure isn’t necessarily Thailand; it can be taking a left turn you normally wouldn’t. Real life lands differently.

Exactly. The gap between the internet and ground truth is massive. Without reality to counterbalance the feed, everything looks catastrophic. Anything worthwhile is a long game; I was still searching at thirty-eight. The border taught me not to hold one fixed opinion. In some areas, a wall gives Border Patrol visibility; along the Rio Grande, it can damage the landscape. I saw people from more than a hundred countries arriving through cartel-run routes, claiming asylum into courts backed up for years. I don’t blame someone escaping Honduras for trying; the scale was still unsustainable.

I’m a free agent. I admire communities rooted in one place for ten generations, but I fit everywhere and nowhere. My wife stabilizes it—she edits, I find and shoot, and the channel is our baby. I keep it small because managing wrecks the work. Everything’s under Peter Santanello: website, YouTube, book. The book has stories behind the camera—Amish worlds, Chicanos, Alaska, American universes. There’s plenty of doom already. I wanted to zag the other way and leave people feeling better about their fellow Americans.

That’s maker mode versus manager mode. Peter, you absolutely rule. Your work makes dark subjects human without pretending they’re not dark, and reminds people there’s a whole country—and world—off the screen.