Mark Laita of Soft White Underbelly on Doing Interviews and The Homeless Problem

When you first started doing these videos, did you have to figure out a way to balance your own mental health with interviewing these people? Because I got to tell you, like, I watched a bunch of videos today in the gym while I was working out, and I felt like shit. And I hope these feel good after I work out. No, it affects people in different ways. Some people make, oh my God, my problems are not so bad. My life is pretty great. I've heard that many times. I've heard that more often, but I get what you're saying, because I'm immersed in it. What you see on my YouTube channel is 1,200, maybe 1,300 videos. I've done over 5,000. Because not everything I shoot, like with you, you're shooting, you're doing interviews with Elon Musk and Dave Chappelle and Huberman, and they're great. You know they're going to be great. You don't need to do eight or ten in a day. I'll do six, seven, eight, nine, ten in a day hoping to get one or two. But even the ones that you have where the people can barely communicate, they're almost more disturbing. Like I watched a couple today of homeless people where, you know, there was this one woman, she was missing one of her toes, and you know that woman, and she's just the movement and the mental health, the obvious signs that she's very troubled and probably on some drugs and it's just ... Do you have children? I do. I have two daughters, 19 and 22. Yeah, so that to me was like hearing the stories of how they were all abused sexually and physically when they were children and seeing what it leads to. So I'm aware that these things go on. I've been down in Skid Row for 12 years now, maybe 13 years. So I know what's going on. Do you live down there? No, no, no, no, no. I live in Pacific Palisades, which is like the exact opposite. I live in Bel Air basically, but then I go from the worst part of town to the best part of town. It's a drastic change from one to the other. But even when I was doing this before I started Soft White Underbelly, I was aware that this crap is going on to these people when they were kids. When I decided I gave up advertising and wanted to do something that was meaningful to me, I looked around like that's a problem that needs to be addressed. People say, oh, your work's exploitive. You're exploiting these poor drug addicts. I understand there's an exploitive element to it. All photography has that element to it. But let's say I never did these videos. Let's say we just pretend these problems don't exist. It's all going to continue. Caroline's kids are going to get molested by the babysitter or by the uncle or by whoever and it's going to repeat the pattern over and over and over. So I figured by putting out these ... It's disguised as entertainment, but what it really is is if you watch a dozen of them, you're going to learn. We need to protect our kids. We need to watch our kids. How many fathers were absent in these kids' lives that I do? Like 1% of them had fathers that were in their lives. Where are the dads? What are they doing that's so important that they can't raise their own kid? Well, they're probably fucked up too, which is the never-ending cycle. It's cycle after cycle. Have you interviewed anyone and then come back years later and they straighten their life out? Yeah, yeah. That's happened. Yeah? Who? And it's literally like four that I know of. And what has that been like? Can you give me an example of one? And even though they've done it, doesn't mean they didn't break down and relapse today. That happens all the time. Just as they got clean, doesn't mean they're going to stay clean. The ones that I believe in the most ... Because some people told me they were clean, but I don't buy it. But the ones that I know are clean, they just did it by themselves. They just hold themselves up and they figured out a way to wean themselves and change their routine and change their environment and eventually broke through. But I think you need that self-worth. You and I have the self-worth to go, I deserve better. I deserve to drive a nice car. I deserve to live in a great house in a great city and have a great job. I deserve all these things and have a great woman in my life and all these things. If you have the self-worth, you're going to accept and build those things in your life. These people, especially the ones on Skid Row, the drug addicts, their self-worth is broken. It's broken. They don't believe they deserve anything better than to live in a cardboard box or a tent on the sidewalk, in the rain, in the winter. They're doing the drug just to escape the pain of what happened to them when they were seven years old, that their dad or uncle or brother or whoever. And it's like you can't fix a childhood. How do you fix a childhood? When you see a place like Skid Row and you see all these people that you've interviewed, do you try to formulate some way that these people can be helped, like that we can diminish this problem? No, when I first really got serious, like three and a half years ago, was when I started really just ... I was down there every day doing eight interviews a day. I would see somebody who was like, oh my God, your life would be great if you just got clean. I was naive. I was naive. And I started helping them and like, we're going to get you to rehab. I spent so much money. I've wasted so much money. My own hearted money I just like put towards somebody that had no intention of really ever doing anything. Well, it seems like it has to come from the individual. It has to. It can't come from ... That's what I've learned. You can't help people by saying, hey, you got to do this. No, I see all these comments on my videos. Mark, you didn't help this person? I can't change their self-worth. You'd have to be with them 24 hours a day. You'd have to be with them 24 hours a day. You'd have to be spending easy, 150,000 at least a year to house them, to feed them, to transport them, to get them therapy, to all the drugs, all that mental health drugs, all that everything they're going to need, doctors, all that stuff. It's a lot of money for one person and it may not even work. I got two kids of my own. I got my own life. I got bills of my own. I'm doing a YouTube channel and I'm shooting eight videos a day. When am I going to sit there and take somebody under my wing and save them? These people are on their phones, on their sofa, texting, sending, leaving a comment saying, Mark, you didn't help this person? I'm the busiest person I know. I haven't taken a day off in over three years. Christmas, birthday, everything. I work every single day either shooting or editing. These people are sitting on their phones telling me what to do. They can't get off their ass and maybe clear out their bank account to save somebody. But even that probably wouldn't do it. It still wouldn't work. What do you think could be done? It's such a complicated problem. You look at the homelessness problem. You have it a little bit here in Austin, but in LA it's really bad. Let's explain Skid Row to people. Skid Row is a neighborhood. It's probably, I don't know how many square blocks, but maybe it goes from roughly, because it spreads out a lot. It's spread out since I've been there. Let's call it from 4th or 5th Street to 8th Street. This is just east of downtown LA. Downtown LA is cool. It's nice. East of downtown is, I know, I know. It looks like Austin. I wouldn't recommend people visit. No, no, you wouldn't want to. It's not a place. If you want to go to LA, you don't go to every other town you go downtown. Right. I'm from Chicago. Yeah, I was going to say Chicago. You spend the whole time. You go to visit Chicago, you spend the whole time downtown. In LA you should not go downtown if you're visiting. That's what I'm saying. That's exactly right. But Skid Row is this neighborhood just east of downtown that is the... Yeah, Jamie's got an image of it. Yeah, there it is. Let's find some photos of it because it's kind of an enormous swath of land that's been completely abandoned, it seems like. Like this girl smoking right here? Yeah. That goes on every block. The cops will roll by. Nobody's stopping her. She's smoking meth. She's smoking meth or crack or whatever. That one. Yeah. And they're living like that. Let's find a video of it so you can see this scale of it because it's pretty intense when you see people... I found out about Skid Row when we were filming Fear Factor downtown. We filmed a lot of episodes of Fear Factor downtown and this was early 2000s and it was nothing like it is now. I'm sure now it's quite a bit more. But even back then, it was like how is this one area isolated? Like how is this one area just filled with homeless people and drug addicts and criminals? And I really didn't know until I watched this Netflix series on the Jerome Hotel and it was about that woman who died in a water tank. You aware of that story? I don't, but I've heard everything. It's a woman who got off her meds and there was a video of her in an elevator and it looked like someone was following her and she was looking out of the elevator and then the woman turned up missing and her family went to look for her. And what it turned out was that's a crime scene. I'm sorry, did I say the Jerome? Cecil. Where's the Jerome? Is that down there too? I don't know the Jerome, but the Cecil's notorious. That's the one I meant. The Cecil is a hotel. I've heard so many stories. My favorite or the most horrifying is so many people used to get thrown off the roof of the Cecil Hotel that the little chicken restaurant on the corner used to have a jar where you could put your money in and place bets on what floor the person would have been pushed out of. Jesus Christ. Whether it's the roof, the 13th floor, the 12th. How many? Oh, I've heard like hundreds. I think. I mean, I'm exactly, you know, stories get exaggerated over the years, but yeah. So this documentary was about this woman and she had gotten off her medication and at first it was like a crime murder mystery. And then as it goes on, you realize, oh no, this lady had just escaped from her family and got off her meds and choose paranoid schizophrenic. It's always, none of these stories are as simple as, oh, I just got shot or I just got stabbed. Yeah. There's mental health that's mixed in. I mean, the whole problem, you asked me what the problem is with all this. So you see homelessness. You see all these homeless people on the street in LA or in San Francisco or Seattle or Portland or Vancouver or you see it in a lot of cities. It's really bad in LA and San Francisco and the West coast for some reason has a ton of it. So, oh, you just like what LA is doing, you put them up in housing. Problem solved, right? And we're done. Not really. No, because you peel back the layer. The first, the top layer of that, the homeless underneath the homelessness is a drug addiction, pretty much 100% across the board. None of these people are down and out and just like, oh my God, I'm homeless. That doesn't happen. They're all drug addicts. And even when they tell you they're clean, they're still lying. So you peel back the drug addiction layer and what are you going to do? Get them, put them all in rehab, which is going to be tremendously expensive. It's not going to work all the time, but that would be part of the solution, but it's not going to be the solution. So you peel back the layer of drug addiction, you've got mental health. They all have mental health issues and you can't just magically fix their mental health. The damage was done when they were little kids, when they were five, six, seven, eight years old with whether it's neglect or abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, whatever. Just terrible parenting, terrible role models. And they don't learn this. Let's say you've fixed, let's say you got them off the streets. Let's say you fix the drug addiction. You get them therapy for years and you've fixed the mental health issue somewhat, but they still don't know how to do all the things that we all know how to do. Like build trust in others, gain the trust of others, how to handle money, delayed gratification. They have no concept of that. Everything is just like, how do I make a quick buck right now? That's the only thing they know. If they have a job interview on Monday, like if I had something like that or a meeting to go to, I would know how to show up and I'm going to kick ass on Monday. These people don't know how to do anything like that. They probably won't even show up. They don't know how to be on time. They don't know how to do anything in order to like advance their lives. I think it boils down to their self-worth is so broken that they don't believe they deserve anything better. So you don't believe you deserve anything better. You could be handed a million dollars. Here's a winning lottery ticket. You cash it in and you've got a million dollars. They're going to fuck it up as fast as you can see it. As fast as you can imagine.