SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
If you like travel videos, you might be familiar with Peter Santenello's work. His YouTube channel has more than 4 million subscribers, and he specializes in travel documentaries that explore communities and cultures worldwide. But for his latest project, Santenello ditched his passport and began exploring the United States. He focused on places in the U.S. he says are often ignored and even ridiculed, from Amish country to East LA. He describes what he found in his new book called "Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches From Across The Country We Call Home," and he's with us today.
Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming on the show.
PETER SANTENELLO: Hello, Sacha. Thank you.
PFEIFFER: Peter, I love travel. I've done two cross-country road trips - there and back - and I loved it, although it's a lot of driving, and that makes me reluctant to go out and do it again. So tell us a bit about your love for road trips and how that started.
SANTENELLO: Yeah. Well, it started right after high school, growing up in Vermont. My buddy and I got in a van, a bare-bones van, and went across country for 3 1/2 months, and that trip changed me in the sense that I just wanted to see more. So that's how it kicked off.
PFEIFFER: You write that the reason you decided to refocus from global travel to traveling in the U.S. is because you consider the United States - as you put it - one of the most misunderstood countries. How do you think the U.S. is misunderstood?
SANTENELLO: Misunderstood, I would say, is the fact that we have so much more going on here than most of us - I'd say myself included - are led to think 'cause it's such a huge geography, so many different cultures, so many different ways of living. And that's what my channel and now my book taps into.
PFEIFFER: And you covered a lot of ground. There's East LA. There's the Hamptons. There's also Alaska, the Deep South, the Chesapeake Bay, California redwoods. Of all the places you visited, which one was least like what you had expected it to be?
SANTENELLO: I would say St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Now, this is an island three times the size of Maui, and you can actually see Russia from it, where the Siberian Yupik people live. They still hunt whales and reindeer. But if you start comparing a place like that with Miami, and just wrap your mind around the fact that you're in the same country...
PFEIFFER: Well, everything's different, right? Weather-wise, just name - you name it.
SANTENELLO: You name it, except the American flag up over the USPS, which is a trip. Same flag both places, and I'm outside a wedding ceremony and they're speaking their traditional language. And I feel like I'm in Burma or somewhere, but I'm actually in my own country. And that's the beauty of America. When you start going granular, you can get into situations like that, that - I only found about this place through looking at Google Maps late at night. We still have parts of the country that nobody really knows about.
PFEIFFER: I can recall at least two times in your book where you mentioned that feeling of feeling like you're in a different country, even though the U.S. flag was still flying in all of those places. Is there another place where you really felt like you weren't in a country you recognized?
SANTENELLO: With the Chicanos in East LA, you know, they're in - it's in my - the part of my book called Neither Here Nor There. You know, the Chicanos in America quite often are categorized. They are called Mexican. And then the guys I was with, when they say they go to Mexico, they're called American. But once you get in deep in East LA, the low rider culture, talking with the locals that have a Spanish accent but English is their native tongue, that's a trip. Or Smith Island. I met up with a guy that - his family has been here 374 years.
PFEIFFER: This was part of Maryland?
SANTENELLO: Yup. And they still have a hint of Elizabethan English. The old timers there, they still say some words like from the Motherland. A cross between Elizabethan and a Carolina Brogue accent. But here, you're just - you're out there, and you're like, this is a totally different world than where I grew up in Vermont or lived most of my adult life in California. And to me, after traveling so many countries, yeah, there are always regional differences. But a lot of countries don't have the good fortune of having so much landscape and just so much diversity. It's not one homogeneous thing.
PFEIFFER: Near the end of your book, you come to this conclusion that no part of the country would be better off without the rest. That got me thinking about all these divides we have - the red-blue divide, this talk sometimes even of the secession, you know, a national divorce between red and blue America. I wonder what you felt like you learned about what we might be sorry we might lose as a country if we were to split in some way?
SANTENELLO: Well, a few things. We're all dependent on one another, as in urban America is dependent on rural America and vice versa. So if you want electricity in urban America, if you want food, you're going to need the rural lands. And if you're in rural America, you're going to need the infrastructure built out by the cities. You're going to need telecom, the technology, that's mostly created in urban hubs. So both, even though you might not see it directly, we're completely dependent on one another. And then the blue state, red state comment that I hear all the time, I don't see these tensions on the ground. I haven't dealt with any of it. Nobody cares if the UPS driver voted red or blue.
Of course, we have our issues. There is definitely political polarization, but when you get out there, it's not at all as bad as it seems. And, you know, looking at the United States from a foreign lens, let's say, I just think we're really hard on each other, to be honest, especially in these current times. There's a bit of optimism in me that some of that tension, maybe not all your viewers or listeners feel the same way, but from what I'm seeing on the ground all across the country because this is all I do, I think we're going to get to a better place in the next five years or so.
PFEIFFER: That's a nice closing thought. That's Peter Santenello. His new book is "Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches From Across The Country We Call Home." Peter, thank you.
SANTENELLO: Thank you, Sacha.
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