Joe Santagato

This morning, I got a random DM from a person and they did exactly... This is fucking weird, by the way, because now you know what I'm saying.

Someone... This has never happened to me ever.

You're like, no, actually... But that exact thing happened to me for the first time ever.

Someone sent me a screenshot.

It wasn't the first episode, but it was one of the first ones.

And I titled it, Who the Fuck Is This Guy?

And I talked about myself and what the podcast is going to be and things that I believe in or whatever.

And the message that they left me was like, I just want to say that I've been a fan of yours for a really long time and I just listened to this and...

It's really cool to see that you've gone on to be successful and have some fame and this and that, but this sounds like you.

You're still the same person there.

And that is the biggest compliment that I could get because that's the whole point.

That's what I want.

That's what I believed in.

I believed that if I was authentic enough, then I could stand out.

And I had the luxury of starting when I did because there wasn't a lot of people doing it.

Now everyone's doing it.

But it's hard to be authentic because you're constantly sort of inspired by other things that are happening on the internet, if that makes sense.

Well, for me at the time, like it was, I was making YouTube videos and a lot of people were kind of doing the same thing.

So that felt like the only way that I can stand out is if I do things sort of my way and I put my like kind of flair on it or whatever.

I didn't want to, and the things that other people were doing felt lazy to me.