- [Matthew] Hi!
My name is Matthew Santoro.
I'm Canadian, I'm bald and I'm a YouTuber.
Okay, that's all you need to know.
Bye!
(film projector whirring)
No, just kidding.
But, for real, you guys have been watching my videos
and following my journey for years now and
you probably think you know me pretty well,
but the truth is,
there's a lot more to the story that you don't know.
In this video, I'm going to tell you everything
that you've ever wanted to know about me:
where I cam from, how I got to where I'm at now,
and everything in between.
If you've ever wanted to know more about me,
this is the full story from start to, well, now.
So, let's start from the beginning.
I was born in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada on July 16, 1985
in a hospital to my two loving parents,
Mike and Kathy Santoro.
I was an only child so, from an early age,
I learned how to entertain myself and be creative.
I think you get why that becomes important later in my life.
Shortly after being born,
my parents decided to move to a small city called Welland.
It's a relatively small city of about 52,000 people and,
truthfully, there isn't really much to do there.
I mean, we have a mall and a bridge.
That's about it.
Basically, it's a quiet town where people move to retire.
Not exactly an exciting thing for a kid.
When we moved there, my parents bought me my very first pet,
my dog, Barney.
He was the cutest little fluffy dog I'd ever seen
and I loved him very much.
He was the only boy of the litter and
that made him extra-special to me.
We would snuggle and play together all the time
and he'd even sleep with me every night as I grew up.
My dad named him Barney,
after Barney Rubble from The Flintstones.
Still not exactly sure why but hey, why not?
We gave him so much love that
he lived for a really long time, around 16 years,
but eventually, he got too old and
we decided to put him down.
Luckily, my uncle is a veterinarian,
so he was surrounded by a loving family when he passed,
but I'm getting ahead of it.
As a kid, I attended St. Kevin's Elementary School.
It was a Catholic school but not one of those
hard-core uniform-wearing ones where
the boys aren't allowed to talk to girls.
I was always the class clown,
always doing things to make people laugh.
But, despite that, I was never very popular in school.
Now, I wouldn't say I was a loser.
More like, I just didn't feel like I fit in with any cliques
I always felt like I just never belonged.
I always felt different, like I didn't understand why
the other kids acted the way that they did.
I always tried really hard to fit in but it never worked.
Eventually, I figured out the harder you try
to make people like you, the less they will.
I was always thankful that I was never really bullied.
I mean, I was picked on, but never beat up
or anything like that.
I had some pretty great teachers growing up,
as well as a few close friends and I was pretty happy,
except for when I turned eight and my parents divorced.
I definitely didn't take that well.
I honestly don't have a lot of memories from that time,
but I do remember that it made me a really sad kid,
as well as confused.
I felt sad for a long time after that and
I couldn't explain a lot of the emotions that I felt but,
despite that, my parents did all that they could
to make it as easy on me as possible.
The biggest thing I always give my parents credit for is
that they never talked crap about each other around me.
Ever.
Despite their differences,
they only ever spoke highly of each other.
That's something that I'm still thankful for to this day,
because I know that not every kid has that privilege.
Next up was high school.
I attended Notre Dame College School,
which I always thought was a weird name,
considering that it wasn't a college but anyway,
high school was similar to grade school for me except
that I now had a whole bunch of hormones
rushing through my body all at once.
Yeah, that didn't make things awkward at all.
Out of all of my classes, I loved Improv class the most
because I got to be onstage making people laugh.
In fact, I would do this thing called the Mother Lobster,
where I'd snap my claws together and
throw myself against the chalkboard.
Yeah, I was weird.
It was in my first year there that I met and
started dating my first ever girlfriend.
Her name was Holly.
She was nice.
That same year, I found my first job.
It was at a grocery store called Zehrs
in the hot deli department, where I fried chicken and,
believe it or not, I ended up staying there for 10 years,
and even fully paid my way through university.
That's pretty much the summary of my high school days,
but there were two important lessons that
I learned during my time there that are still true today
that I want to impart upon you.
The first is to never envy anyone else's life, ever.
No matter how great someone's life looks on the surface,
I promise you, everyone has demons that they struggle with
and no one is as perfect as they seem.
I learned that one the saddest way possible when
one of the most popular kids in my school,
who everyone looked up to,
took his own life one weekend without any warning.
It turns out he had been terribly depressed
and nobody knew about it.
The other important lesson is to never hesitate.
If you want something, act today,
because you might not get your shot tomorrow.
This was another hard lesson that I learned.
I had a huge crush on this girl named Jen and
I waited days to gather the courage to ask her to prom
and when I finally did,
she told me that she was just asked earlier that same day
by another guy and, what makes it worse is that
she also said that she would have gone with me.
That one stung.
It was in high school that I chose to go into accounting.
I know, I know.
Boring!
The truth is I only went into it because one of my teachers,
Mr. Graffi, told me that I could make a lot of money,
so I set my sights on Brock University,
switched all of my classes to accounting and dove in.
Next up was university and it was
a really good time in my life.
It was during this time that I started to become
more serious about fitness and weightlifting
and I got into pretty good shape.
In between my studies,
my friends and I would go out two or even three times a week
I still don't know how I went out that much
and managed to pull off a 75 average.
During my second year there,
I ran into my high school crush, Marcy.
We started hanging out and then started dating.
Fast-forward and, after five and a half years,
I graduated with a Master of Accountancy degree
and moved in with Marcy.
That's also when I got my first job at an accounting firm.
Things were going really well.
Just after I graduated, near the end of 2009,
is when I first discovered YouTube,
specifically, the YouTubers who inspired me
to begin making my own videos.
My biggest influence at the time was Ray William Johnson.
I was in love with the concept of making videos
and putting them online for everyone to see.
It was just so exciting and new.
After moving to St. Catherine's with Marcy,
I bought a camera and taught myself
how to edit and shoot video.
Fun Fact: I almost didn't even post my very first video.
It was only because of Marcy's encouragement
that I gained the strength to do it.
From there, I started making videos twice a week and,
despite the fact that I was only getting
about 100 views a video, I still loved it.
For a couple of years,
I would work long hours crunching numbers then
come home and write scripts, shoot videos,
edit them, and post on Saturdays.
Then, one day, everything changed.
I got laid off.
Now, you'd think I would have been devastated
but oddly, I wasn't.
In fact, I was happy.
For the first time in years,
I felt like I was free to do anything I wanted.
I decided to vlog the experience,
calling it I Lost My Job Today.
In fact, that video is still on YouTube today.
Feel free to look it up if you want to see Chubby Matt.
It was at that moment that I learned another hard,
but important life lesson.
To paraphrase the great Jim Carrey,
"You can fail at what you don't want to do,
"so you might as well take a chance on what you love."
So, I did.
I decided to pursue this YouTube thing full-time,
despite having no idea how I would make it work
and feeling completely lost.
For an entire year, I took making videos really seriously.
I was determined to make it, so I did everything I could to
put myself in a position to do so, including going to VidCon
and networking with bigger YouTubers.
It was during this time that I met and
became good friends with Scott Kinmartin,
who introduced me to HouseholdHacker and Rob Dyke.
Needless to say, we all became good friends and
would even do a weekly Livestream together
called Let Your Google Hang Out.
In fact, we became such good friends that we decided
to take a cross-America trip together.
Luckily, it was in a free car that Scott had won
through the Ford Fiesta movement, which was great
because we were all broke and it's a tough economy.
But, in all seriousness,
little did I know that this would end up being the trip
that would change my life forever.
Other than quitting accounting,
this was the second big risk
I had ever taken in my whole life.
Up until that point, I was always a very small-town
conservative guy who was really just happy being
safe in his little bubble, but all of that changed.
Over the course of two weeks,
we traveled from east to west coast together.
It was a ton of fun and I still have many great memories
and hilarious stories from that trip.
While we were on the road,
I decided to take another big risk:
to switch from comedy skits to exclusively Top 10 videos.
Up until that point, I had always done list videos
and skit videos separately but one day, I thought,
"Hey, what would happen if I combined
"the facts with the humor?"
And boom!
Soon, I started getting 5,000 subscribers a day,
then 10,000 and then 25,000 subscribers a day.
In three months, I went from 15,000 subscribers to millions.
Keep in mind, it took me four years of making videos
to get those 15,000 and I got millions within three months.
I had never felt a high like that in my life.
I even passed many of the YouTubers
who inspired me to begin in the first place.
My patience and hard work had finally paid off but
another big change was coming that I couldn't predict.
The sudden fame was shifting my life in another direction
and Marcy and I started to grow apart.
Eventually, we realized that things
just weren't right anymore and,
after being together for five years,
we decided to split ways.
Luckily, to this day, we are still good friends and
I am forever grateful for everything that she did for me
while we were together.
At this point in my life,
I had finally gotten everything I worked for
and it was exciting, however, despite that,
the truth is I didn't handle my sudden fame very well.
I lost the sense of who I was and
I didn't even know who I was supposed to be.
From July to December, 2014,
I became very depressed and isolated.
In fact, there were some weeks when I was so depressed,
I couldn't even bring myself to make a video and
unfortunately, the next two years were equally
as confusing and difficult for me.
If I could summarize that entire time into one word,
it would be rollercoaster.
There's a lot that happened during that time,
but I'll summarize it for you like this:
I met a girl that I thought loved me and
that I thought was my dream girl,
but ended up just using me to launch her YouTube career
and put me through a lot of pain.
But, I also was on over 40 plane rides,
visited places I had never seen before,
and even moved to Toronto.
Then, I got into some unnecessary YouTube drama
with some friends that really sucked,
but then I traveled to South Africa to be in
the final Resident Evil movie.
Then, I got into some more YouTube drama,
this time with a gnome in a cartoon.
I know, it sounds weird.
It was.
But then, I released a book with a full tour,
won a Streamy Award for Breakout Creator of the Year,
and even went to the White House, so yeah.
Like I said, rollercoaster.
That brings us to the end of 2016.
I still found myself lost and unhappy,
so I decided that I needed a change of scenery.
I took another huge risk and moved to Los Angeles.
It's taken me six months but I finally, just now,
have adjusted to living here and, to be honest, it's nice.
But, the truth is, I often miss Toronto a lot
and all of the amazing friends that I made there.
I miss my family a lot, too, but the good news is that
I travel back there every couple months, so it's not so bad.
So, that's pretty much it.
I guess I'm still finding my way and
I'm still figuring out life as I go
but, through it all, I learned one more important thing.
I've realized that life itself is not
something that you figure out.
Maybe it's not about the destination,
but about the journey instead.
Maybe it's all about making mistakes,
learning from those mistakes,
and being a better person tomorrow than you were yesterday.
It's about enriching the lives of those around you.
It's about taking risks as often as possible
and doing things that scare you,
because growth lies just outside of your comfort zone.
I don't know what the future holds for me, but that's okay,
because throughout all the crazy ups and downs
that may be to come, I know that my life will be about
creating what I love,
continuing to try to make the world a better place
for the people I care about,
and of course, sharing it with you.
(pleasant orchestral music)
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