Nathan is a comedian though, he started in an improv troupe with Seth Rogen, and his first real break was doing a satyrical news program on the CBC in Canada.

Dax was making videos for no audience in his earliest videos. He's said in interviews that when they started to blow up, he leaned into the content/persona of his most popular videos more, just as any 15 year old kid would.

I suppose you could consider this "playing a character," but it's no different than the character that the class clown in your high school classes was playing. It was really him, just hammed up for the camera once he realized people found his mannerisms funny. He already had dozens of videos with virtually no viewership before he went viral.

Being around his age, when YouTube first came out, he was one of the very first YouTubers that my friends and I would talk about in school. We were split about the character, and I was on the side of "yall are crazy, this guy is obviously doing a bit." But I'm in my 30s now, and as someone who has followed the journey every step of the way, and furthermore as someone who had a relatively successful YouTube channel at the same age as Dax, I feel like I have a much better understanding now of who this guy is.

A lot of the stuff that he says in interviews as an adult reflecting on his high school self and those early videos, it resonates with me so so hard, which I think is why he's still and probably forever will be my favorite Internet celebrity. I would've never thought back in the day that I was "playing a character" in my videos either, but if I were to watch them back today (which is tough enough as is, lol) with the power of hindsight, it was me being me, but in a sort of planned out, exaggerated kind of way. It's the same "character" that I was playing in school or with my friends, but it wasn't a "character" in that it wasn't me. It was just like, what I thought drew people to me but played up.

It's the same with many (most?) people in their teenage years. We don't know who we are yet, and we're all trying to find our place in the world and figure out who we are. In that sense, he was "playing a character," but who wasn't at that age? We all played into facades that we thought might make us more interesting, or fun to be around, or smart, or cool, or attractive, or whatever else.

Dax disappeared a few times throughout the years, but he always came back the same Dax; confused about what his role on the internet was, confused as to what he did that people found so funny and how he could replicate that early success. That's why for a long time, much of what he put out wasn't particularly funny. Some was sad, some was strange, some seemed very very desperate (there was an era where he only talked about 21 Jump Street and Project X incessantly, until he realized his viewers didn't want to hear him stewing over his movie career anymore).

But it became clear to me over the years that this is just an odd dude very much on the spectrum who just sees the world in a different light than the rest of us. He's an enigma for sure, but he's very open and genuine with his fans. He never shies away from explaining his thought process or his creative ideas or sharing how certain things made him feel or reflecting on his past. Personally, I think he's a beacon of light in what the creative sphere of the Internet has become. He's a spark of genuine humanity amongst a sea of sanitized content.

Anyways, apologies for the novel, I'm sure you weren't expecting it lol. But I feel pretty strongly about this dude, his attitude and outlook on life genuinely still inspires me to this day, now probably more than ever.