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Mark Laita is a photographer, documentarian, and creator of the YouTube channel "Soft White Underbelly." www.youtube.com/c/SoftWhiteUnderbelly www.softwhiteunderbelly.com www.marklaita.com
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Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: A New Translation
Mark Laita, Created Equal
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Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Mark.
Hey, Joe.
How do you do what you do and maintain any...
Mental health?
Yeah.
Let's just tell everybody, you have the YouTube show Soft White Underbelly,
which I found a while back and just watched one video,
and then I went down the rabbit hole.
And today I binged a bunch of them preparing for this.
Dude, it's so sad and so heartbreaking.
And you interview all kinds of people, addicts, prostitutes, Johns, gang
members.
Why Soft White Underbelly?
Why did you come up with that name?
You know, I remember my dad when I was in the 60s, 70s, talking on the phone
with, you know,
I heard that term being used to, you know, it's like an analogy for the
vulnerable part of whatever you're talking about.
I don't hear that term anymore, but I remember it back then.
And I always thought it was a cool name.
Blue Easter Cult used it as their original name before Blue Easter Cult.
So I just, it was a fun name.
It makes people wonder what the hell it's all about.
Well, it's very appropriate.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's fitting for what I'm doing.
Completely.
How did you get involved in interviewing all of these people that are sort of
downcast from society?
So I've been an advertising photographer since I was 14 years old, or after
high school, really.
I went to college for it, but I was always into photography.
And then I got into advertising, and I did that for decades and decades.
Had a great career.
And then what happened is, you know, you do it.
My advertising work was so slick and beautiful and perfect, and everything is
retouched, so it's better than life.
And you do that for decades, and you get burnt out.
And you just get fed up with the perfection and all the aspirational aspects of
advertising.
And I just wanted something that was real.
You know, I recognized that there were things going on in the world that weren't
so perfect.
And I just felt like my life was out of balance, because I didn't want to grow
old and have my kids say, you know, what did your dad do?
Oh, he shot advertising his whole life.
I wanted to do something different.
And I've always done these side projects.
Even when I was a teenager in Chicago, I was always fascinated with the drunks
on Madison Avenue on the west side.
You see these guys sleeping on park benches and just with a paper bag and a
bottle in their hands.
It was such an interesting lifestyle to me, because I didn't grow up like that.
I grew up, you know, in a pretty perfect household.
Mom and dad, parents loved me.
It was great.
But I was fascinated with all that dark stuff.
And that continued throughout my career.
I was always, like, doing portraits of people like that.
And, you know, I didn't really do much with it until about 1999.
I started working.
You know, while I was doing advertising, I would sneak away whenever I had a
hole in my schedule, which wasn't often.
But, you know, for over nine or ten years, I went to each of the lower 48
states and started photographing everything that exists in the U.S.
Cowboys in Wyoming, drunken Indians in New Mexico, ballerinas in New York City,
repo men in Oklahoma, auto mechanics in Alabama, pedophiles all over the
country, polygamists in Utah, the Amish in Pennsylvania.
Just everything, like, everything that kind of fits for, oh, that's
Pennsylvania.
They have Amish there.
So I would pick that and I'd hunt it down and find it.
So I got really good at finding these subcultures that we've all heard about,
but you didn't really know if, you know, some of them are easy to find.
Drug addicts are easy to find.
But there's other subcultures that I've found that are more difficult to find
and certainly difficult to photograph and now really difficult to interview.
So I did that book, came out in 2010, it's called Created Equal, and I was
really proud of it, put, you know, my heart and soul into it.
But it didn't really, like, I would sit at a table when somebody's looking at
it and they would go, oh, what did he sound like?
What did the cowboy sound like?
What did he, how did he get like this?
How did he get this career?
What was his childhood like?
All these questions.
And I honestly didn't know it for each of these 200 portraits in that book.
And I realized if I'm going to make this really stick the way I wanted it to, I'm
going to have to do it with an interview as a backstory.
So it's a portrait and then I would just do these interviews that might just
exist behind the portrait as you're looking at it.
And that's how I started.
And, you know, I always had studios like on Skid Row, like while I was doing
advertising in L.A.
at my L.A. studio, I'd have another studio down on Skid Row, which was, you
know, cheap.
And, you know, I would just sneak away there on slow days and just photograph
all the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the transgenders, the mental health, you
know, the people that are off, the rockers, everything, gang members.
And I loved doing it, but I never really did anything with that until I started.
Canon came out with a Canon 5D, which is a still camera that did video.
And I just was playing around.
I never shot video in my life.
And I'm like, let me just put this thing on a tripod and interview somebody.
And there was this girl, Caroline, who was a heroin addict, prostitute down on
Skid Row.
And I was like, hey, I got to know her.
And I said, hey, would you want to just sit and tell me your life story?
And she goes, sure, I'll do it.
So she sat down and did this.
And it was heartbreaking.
Like, Jesus, I just hit a grand slam my first time at bat.
Like, a really horrifying story.
And she, so I did that.
And I was like, wow, that was amazing.
And I started doing a few more.
And they were all interesting in their own way.
Every single one was different, you know, very different and interesting.
And I'm like, maybe there's something here.
And went through a divorce, went through, you know, my mom, went through a lot
of stuff.
My mom died, went through a divorce.
My advertising industry, you know, advertising industry changed a lot in those
years.
Like, this was like seven years ago, seven, eight years ago.
And I just, I gave up my studio.
And I just kind of like didn't know what I was doing with my life.
And I had all these storage units for all my studio equipment and my furniture.
I was building a house.
So I had all my furniture in the house.
Had like four or five different storage units around the city.
I'm like, let me just consolidate all these into one big space.
And maybe I'll have room for a studio up front.
And I'll start doing those portraits and those interviews I was doing on Skid
Row before.
And just see if I enjoy doing that.
Because I didn't know what I want to do with the rest of my life.
You know, I was like, I wasn't doing advertising anymore.
And I didn't know what I was.
You know, I just, I was just drifting.
And I started doing these.
And I just loved it.
Just loved it.
And I started doing them every day.
And I've done it pretty much every day for over three years now.
What you're doing is almost the exact opposite of advertising.
Almost the, it's a reaction to that slick, aspirational.
You know, I shot Apple for 10, 12 years and made these products look amazing,
right?
They had to be perfect.
And I'm like, life isn't perfect.
Life is messy.
Life can be really messed up.
And I just, I, I, I've longed for that.
So that's what this is.
It's, it's, and I learned, I got all these skills, all these chops of how to
interact,
how to find these people, how to interact with them, how to, how to find them,
how to connect
with them, how to get their trust from doing Create Equal, where I did that for
10 years.
And I was interacting with all kinds of people from Hell's Angels down to from
pedophiles,
everything, you name it, everything that exists in the U.S.
I got, when I first started, I was really shy.
And this is going to be really hard.
I decided this is my project.
This is what I'm going to do.
But when I first started, it was like, man, this is, this is not my personality
type to
go up to strangers and tell them what I, you know, I want to photograph you.
That was so hard.
But now I've gotten so good at it that it's, it's a breeze.
You know, I've, I got to a point.
I remember early on, I was just like so nervous to do this, to walk up to a
stranger in a casino
in Las Vegas and say, Hey, I think you're interesting.
I'd like to photograph you.
That was the first one I did.
And then by the end, I was like, I remember I wanted to photograph the Hell's
Angels,
the motorcycle gang up in Oakland is like their main headquarters.
And I just flew up to Oakland.
You know, you can't really arrange that.
You can't call them up on the phone and say, Hey, I want to do it.
I'm a photographer in LA.
I want to photograph you guys.
That's just not going to happen.
So I, uh, I just flew up there and I, uh, it was a morning and I ring their
buzzer at
their headquarters in Oakland and, uh, no answer.
It's like nine 30 in the morning.
I ring it again.
Nobody answers.
I ring it a third time.
And somebody comes to this, this junkyard dog of a biker opens the door and
says, what
the fuck do you want?
And I'm like, well, I start telling him, he just slams the door in my face.
He goes, fuck off.
He just slams the door.
Like that didn't go well, but I've done this so much now that I'm so good at it
that
I knew to give him some time, allow him to say, no, I'm not going to force.
I'm not going to pressure him.
Went across the street.
There's a Mexican restaurant that was serving breakfast.
I got breakfast for a bunch of guys and I brought it over and I ring it again.
He opens the door and I had breakfast for him.
And, uh, eventually they let me in and we chatted and I eventually photographed,
uh,
the, uh, the president, uh, the, uh, the head of that, uh, chapter, uh, Cisco
Valderrama
and flash.
And, uh, this guy's name was, uh, Marvin and it was, it was a great portrait.
I'm proud of it.
And it was like, I made that happen because of my ability to just go up to
anybody, killers,
anybody, and just walk up to him and say, Hey, this is what I like to do.
Did you ever read Hunter Thompson's book on the hell's angels?
No.
It's really good.
Not bad.
That was his breakthrough book.
And, uh, he was embedded with the hell's angels and hung around with them for
long periods
of time.
No, it's a hell of a lifestyle.
Yeah.
And that's sort of where he invented that sort of gonzo journalism aspect.
No, I, I love, I love that kind of, um, uh, William Volberg is another author.
That's kind of like that.
I love Bill Volberg, Volberg's work.
Um, where it's just like you, you immerse yourself into these really fucked up
dangerous
situations.
Yeah.
And you come out with gold or you get killed or shot or knifed or whatever.
That is a fear of yours.
For sure.
Yeah.
I've been robbed so many times on skid row.
I've had, you know, I came around the corner once and there's a gun to my face
and it's
like, fuck.
But you still do it.
Yeah.
I still do it.
Uh, did, did you feel when you were doing average advertising is so strange,
right?
Because it doesn't bother me, you know, and I, I have this sort of relaxed
attitude
on certain things like, well, that's not going to trick me.
You know, some guy's talking about the hollow earth.
Well, that's not going to trick me.
That doesn't bother me.
But when you think about the overall impact of what it's doing, it's giving
people, it's
sort of like the, part of the big problem that people have with social media is
it creates
these unrealistic expectations.
And then it also has people comparing their life to what they see in
advertising.
Yeah.
Advertising and social media are kind of following the same.
Well, this is the main concern with, uh, advertising of pharmaceutical drugs.
Cause it's all people having the best time, like at a picnic, uh, running
through a wheat
field.
And like you, this could be you.
Why isn't this you right now?
This could be you if you just do this thing or take this thing or buy this
thing.
That's the manipulation of advertising.
And what did that feel like when you were a part of that?
Did you, you were acutely aware of it?
I'm part of it.
Yeah.
I'm part of the, that process.
And I hated the feeling of that after a while.
Initially it was great.
When I first started doing Apple, I was so proud of myself.
And I'm still proud of my career.
I love what I did in advertising and I'm, I'm so proud of that work, but I have
to admit
as I got older, it started feeling really like I'm tricking people.
I'm tricking people and I'm not cool with that.
It just, it didn't sit well with me at the end of the day.
I'm just like, so that's how I made my money.
That's, that's how I've, that's how I spent my life on this planet.
And I just wanted to do something that mattered.
Do you think that advertising should be regulated or do you think we should
leave that up to people
or educate people on the effects of it the same way people are trying to
educate people
on the effects of social media and what it, what it does to people's mental
health.
When you compare these unrealistic lives to yours.
I mean, it, it, it comes down to greed.
It's human greed, corporate greed.
They want what they want and they're going to get it by creating these ads that
are just better than life.
You know, just so amazing.
Everything's your, your life will be perfect.
If you drive this car, if you buy this pro, you know, this phone, this, uh,
take this drug, whatever.
I even wonder if in this day and age, that's necessary with what I feel like
today more than ever,
because of social media, because of like people that actually review things and
talk about things
on social media, well, honestly, without, you know, bias and without being paid
to do so,
you can do stuff and sell stuff and it just has to be good.
Like look at Tesla's for instance, they don't even advertise.
And it's like the number one car in America.
Yeah.
It's just cause it's great.
It's that simple.
Obviously, there's a lot.
It's connected to Elon Musk.
It's this enormous figure, but.
It's a much smarter way to market a product.
It's not deceptive.
Elon could come out with a running shoe or a, anything.
Yeah.
A drink and people would drink it.
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.
I felt like shit and I hope these feel good after I work out.
I know 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.
Cause like I'm immersed in it.
Yeah.
You know, what you see on my, on my YouTube channel is 1200, maybe 1300 videos
I've done
over 5,000 because not, not everything I shoot, like with you, you're shooting,
you're doing
interviews with, uh, Elon Musk and Dave Chappelle and you know, Huberman and
they're, and they're
great.
You know, they're going to great.
They're big.
You don't need to do eight or 10 in a day.
Like I do.
Right.
Like I'll, I'll do six, seven, eight, nine, 10 in a day, hoping to get one or
two.
But even the ones that you have where the people can barely communicate, they,
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, the, the mental health, the, 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 the, the, hearing the stories of how they were all
abused sexually
and physically when they were children and, and seeing what it leads to.
Right.
So I'm aware that these things go on.
Yeah.
I've been, I've been down on Skid Row for 12 years now, maybe 13 years.
And so I know what's going on.
Do you live down there?
No, no, no, no, no.
I, I live in Pacific Palisades, which is like the exact opposite.
Yes.
I live in Bel Air basically, but then I go down to the worst, I go from the
worst part of
town to the best part of town.
Yeah.
It's a big, it's a drastic change from one to the other.
Um, but even when I was doing this before I started Soft White Underbelly, I
was aware
that this, this crap is going on to these people when they were kids.
Yeah.
And when I decided, you know, 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.
And, you know, people say, oh, your work's exploitive.
You're exploiting these poor drug addicts.
Like, I understand there's an exploitive element to, to it.
All photography has that, you know, element to it.
But let's say I never did these videos.
So let's say we just pretend they never, pretend these problems don't exist.
It's all going to continue.
And, and 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, you know, it's disguised as entertainment,
but what it
really is, is if you watch a dozen of them, you're going to learn like, fuck,
we need to
protect our kids.
We need to watch our kids.
We need to, you know, how many fathers were absent in, in these kids' lives
that I do?
Like, like, like 1% of them had fathers that were in their lives.
Right.
Like, 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.
Well, that's where it goes.
It's a never ending cycle.
It's generation, 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?
I've done 5,000.
Right.
And it's literally like four that I know of.
And what has that been like?
Like, can you give me an example?
Yeah.
I mean, they, um, and, and even though they've done it doesn't mean they didn't
break down
and relapse tomorrow, you know, today, right?
That happens all the time.
Yeah.
Just as they got clean, doesn't mean they're going to stay clean.
But, um, the, the ones that I believe in the most, you know, cause some people
told me
they were clean, but I don't, I don't buy it.
But the ones that I know are clean, they just, 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.
Like you, you and I have the self-worth to go, you know, 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.
And 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.
And they're, 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.
And 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, 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?
When I first really got serious, like three and a half years ago is when I
started really
just, I was down there every day doing eight, 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, uh, I started helping them and like, we're going to get you to rehab.
And, you know, I spent so much money, like I've wasted so much money, my own
hearted money.
I just like put towards somebody that had no intention of, of really ever doing
anything.
Well, it seems like it has to come from the individual.
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, you know, all the drugs, all that
mental health
drugs, all the, everything they're going to need, doctors, all that stuff.
It's a lot of money for one person.
And it may not, may not even work.
So I'm, I've got two kids of my own.
I got my own life.
I got bills of my own.
I got, I'm doing a YouTube channel and I'm shooting eight videos a day.
Like, when am I going to sit there and take somebody under my wing and save
them?
Right.
You know, these people are on their phones, on their sofa, texting, you know,
sending,
leaving a comment saying, Mark, you didn't help this person.
I'm the busiest person I know.
I'm the, I haven't taken a day off in over three years.
Christmas, birthday, everything.
I work every single day, either shooting or editing.
And, and these people are sitting on their phones telling me what to do.
They, they, they, they can't get off their ass and maybe, you know, clear out
their bank
account to save somebody.
But even that probably wouldn't do it.
And still wouldn't work.
What do you think could be done?
Well, I mean, it's, it's a, it's such a complicated problem.
You, you look at homeless, you have 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's, it goes
from like roughly
because it spreads out a lot and it's spread out since I've been there.
But let's call it like from fourth or fifth street to eighth street.
Just, it's just east of downtown LA and downtown LA is cool.
It's nice.
But just, just east of downtown.
I know, I know, but it, but it looks like Austin.
I wouldn't recommend people visit.
No, no.
It's not a place.
No, you wouldn't go to LA.
You don't go to every other town.
You go downtown.
Right.
Every, every other, I'm from Chicago.
Every, you're going to say Chicago.
You spend the whole time.
If you go to visit Chicago, you spend the whole time downtown.
In LA, you should not go downtown.
Yeah, 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, let's find some photos of it.
Cause it's, it's kind of an enormous swath of land that's been completely
abandoned.
It seems like.
But 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, uh.
Something.
Meth or crack or whatever.
Fentanyl.
Yeah.
And they're, they're living like that.
Let's find a video of it so you can see this, this scale of it.
Cause it's pretty, it's pretty intense when you see people, uh, like I found
out about Skid Row
when we were filming Fear Factor downtown.
We filmed a lot of episodes of Fear Factor downtown.
And, um, I just, and this was early 2000s and it was.
It was, uh, 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, uh, I really didn't know until I watched this Netflix series on the Jerome
Hotel.
And it was about that woman who died in, um, a water tank.
Do you, are you aware of that story?
I don't, but I've heard everything.
It's a woman who got off her meds and it was, um, there was a video of her in
an elevator
and it looked like someone was following her and she was like 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, uh, she, that's a crime scene.
I'm sorry.
Did I say the Jerome?
Cecil.
Oh, Cecil.
Where's the Jerome?
Is that down there too?
I have no idea.
I don't know the Jerome, but the Cecil is notorious.
The Cecil.
That's the one I met.
The Cecil is a hotel.
I've heard so many stories.
My, my, 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, a jar
where you could put your money in and place bets on what floor the person would
be, have,
have been pushed out of.
Jesus Christ.
Whether it's the roof, the 13th floor, the 12th floor.
How many?
Oh, I, like, I, I've heard, like hundreds, I think.
I mean, I'm exaggerating, you know, stories get exaggerated over the years, but,
you know.
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, uh, escaped
from her family and got off her meds and she was paranoid schizophrenic.
And 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, like, you asked me what the problem is with, 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 a hundred percent across the board.
None of these, none of these people are down and out and just like, oh my God,
I'm homeless.
That doesn't happen.
They're, they're all drug addicts.
And even when they tell you they're clean, they're, they're still lying.
So you peel back the drug addiction layer and what are you going to do?
You 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.
You know, the damage was done when they were little kids, when they were five,
six, seven, eight years old with, with whether it's neglect or abuse, you know,
physical abuse, sexual abuse.
Whatever, just, just terrible parenting, terrible role models, terrible, and
they don't learn this, you know, like let's say you fixed, let's say you got
them off the streets.
Let's say you, um, fix the drug addiction, you get them therapy for years and
you've fixed the mental health issues 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,
delay gratification.
Delay gratification.
They don't, they have no concept of that.
Everything is just like, how do I make a quick buck right now?
Yeah.
That's the only thing they know.
You know, if they have a job interview on Monday, like if I, if I had something
like that or a meeting to go to, I would, 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 might, 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, their lives.
They, I think it's, it boils down to their self-worth is so broken that they
don't believe they deserve anything better.
Yeah.
So if you don't believe you deserve anything better, you could be handed a
million dollars.
Here's a winning lottery ticket.
Go cash it in.
You've got a million dollars.
They're going to fuck it up as fast as you can see it.
You know, as fast as you can imagine.
Have you had any drug addicts or, um, like sad stories like that in your own
friendship circle?
No, no, no.
Like all my friends are clean as a whistle.
I've never smoked pot.
Really?
Never smoked pot.
Nothing, huh?
Nothing.
A little alcohol every now and then?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I haven't lately, but you know, I use, you know, I'm not a drinker.
I don't have a problem with drinking.
You know, my dad used to say to me, he still does.
He goes, you don't drink, you don't smoke, you don't gamble, you don't chase
women.
What do you do?
Everybody does something.
I'm like, I'm like, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
Well, it's a sign of being raised well, maybe.
Yeah, no, I was raised really well.
You don't need the escape.
I mean, the way my mom raised me was like, I can't imagine a better, you know,
I really
think the problem, you know, so you go, you start going back to peeling the
layers back.
You go back to, um, where did I leave it off?
So you got the mental health problems.
You peel back that layer and then you got the broken family, you know, and a
lot of these stories,
dad was absent or dad was in prison, mom's on drugs, sister's a hoe, brother
was in a
gang.
What do you think she's going to turn?
Stepfather was abusive.
Yeah.
Boyfriends were abusive.
So the families are broken.
Yeah.
So you peel back that layer and why is the family broken?
Well, they're growing up in a community that there's no opportunities.
There's no education.
There's no role models.
There's no nothing.
It's just like, figure out how to survive at 12 years old.
Yeah.
And that's what, that's what they, and they're looking around what everyone
else is doing.
Everyone else is a con artist or a hustler.
I got to figure out my hustle.
And if you're an attractive female, you're going to become a hoe.
And if you're a dude, you're going to become a drug dealer or a gang member.
And you're going to rob people or do whatever.
And that's what happens.
Those are extremes.
But to some extent that happens in a lot of communities.
Growing up in a good childhood, in a good family, and then being exposed to
these people over
and over and over again, what kind of an effect has that had on, on you
personally?
Initially, I thought I was super resilient.
Like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm strong, not, not physically strong, but I'm strong
mentally.
Like I can handle anything advertising shop, you know, you know, advertising,
you know, I
was, I was playing around with big money and big jobs and big campaigns.
And it was very, very stressful at times, but I handled it all.
I was, I was cool with it.
But when I started doing this project, I recognized that I, you know, I knew
from Create Equal,
the book I worked on, what it's like to deal with these kinds of people.
Cause I interacted with a lot of them.
So I knew, I knew getting into it, what I was, what I was, I was going to get
robbed.
I was going to deal with hustlers and con artists and thieves and liars.
I knew that, but I dove in and like, you know, that's, that's like a barrier to
entry.
Like, like people watch my channel.
Like, oh, I want to do what Mark's doing.
Good fucking luck.
Like every day I want to quit.
Well, you're really good at it too.
You, you have a very nonjudgmental way of communicating with people that allows
them to open up.
It's very, it's very comforting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You seem like a very nice guy.
And when you're talking to these people, you know, you just, you're very flat,
you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm like, I can interview the Ku Klux Klan or a pimp or a pedophile.
Yeah.
You know, I interviewed a guy named Marshall on my channel.
He's an older, older guy.
He's probably in his seventies.
And he was having intercourse with his daughter from six until 14 and her, and
her best friend,
I think.
And he eventually did prison time for it, but he's free now.
And he's living in this, you know, he's living in Florida.
And I interviewed him and I just, I'm talking to him as if I'm talking to you
right now.
Like I, I could be interviewing or interacting with, it's not about how I
interview, it's how
I interact with others.
And he was open about this?
Yeah.
I've interviewed a bunch of those guys.
Did, did he have shame?
He didn't seem to, but he said some of the right words, but it wasn't like he
broke down.
Like if, if I had done something like that, I'd be, I'd be crying, man.
Yeah.
I wouldn't be, you couldn't.
Did that happen to him when he was younger?
I asked him about that and he said, I suspect something might have, and who
knows if that's
the truth or what?
I don't know.
Probably did.
He didn't recall anything, but he suspected that something happened.
But you do see, go ahead.
But my point is that whether I'm interviewing the queen of England or a
homeless drug addict
on Skid Row, I treat them the exact same way.
Nothing in my behavior would change whether I'm interviewing a, a, a pedophile
that's having
sex with his daughter or, or the president.
Yeah, but it comes across and it, you have a very good way of getting these
people to relax
and communicate.
I realized this, that's when I, before I started this project, I knew that
because I saw it like during my advertising career, you, you, you do with all
kinds of
people.
And I saw very over, over the course of my life, I've been around now long
enough to see
that a lot of people just love to open up with me and tell me, tell me shit
they shouldn't
be telling me.
I'm a stranger.
I'm a stranger.
You just met me 20 minutes ago, but you're like, you're telling me all this
person.
Like I, there's something about my personality that makes people just relax and
trust me and
just tell me all kinds of stuff.
Yeah.
I don't even know what it is.
I'm not, I'm not judgmental.
I know that.
Like, like even the pedophiles, like, I don't, I don't condone what he did.
I don't approve it in any way.
I think it's horrifying, but, but my job right then is not to condemn him and
say, you're,
you're so fucked up.
Right.
It's just like, let me just hear your story.
Cause I'll bet you there's something we can learn from it.
There's something that we could understand better that maybe we can apply to
figure out
how to prevent this in the future.
Do you think that's possible?
Like with all the interviews that you've done and this overwhelming number of
fucked up people
that you've interacted with, how does like skid row has grown considerably just
since I've
been there.
Like when, when I first went, there was the early 2000s.
It's much, much bigger now.
It's a much bigger problem.
It's all over the city.
Yeah.
How does that genie get put back in the bottle?
I mean, how does one ever, that's why my, my channel is not an intervention
show where
I'm trying to fix everybody and patch them up and put them back into the real
world.
I can't do that.
I'm one person.
Um, I believe, I believe the solution is to, to show people what's I'm, I'm
putting these
videos out there so you can, so everyone can see this is not, this is how this
happens.
Right.
Let's not do this anymore.
Let's figure out another solution.
Perhaps like if, if dad stayed in the family and the, the, the, the parenting
was like something
that would benefit the kid and not cause them trauma.
Right.
That would be great.
But the odds of that happening from one of your videos are very small.
Very small.
So does it feel futile sometimes?
Oh yeah, for sure.
For sure.
But I'm, I'm the most, you know, you, it's, it's ironic that I'm doing this
really, really
dark project.
Cause I'm the most positive, hopeful person you'll ever meet.
I'm like a Polly.
Still.
Yeah.
I'm a Pollyanna.
I don't think that'll ever change.
And that hasn't had any effect on your own personal relationships, the way you
view human beings.
Uh, I'm, I'm aware of how often people are con artists and hustlers and how
dishonest
people can be because I never encountered that to the extent that I do now.
Whereas I, when I go down to Skid Row, it's like a different, it's a different
world.
And literally everybody is trying to get my wallet, trying to get my, trying to
get whatever
I've got.
Right.
Camera equipment.
You name it.
Yeah.
Everything.
And it's like to be surrounded by that many hustlers and con artists and
thieves and it
wears on you.
And just recently, I exercise a lot.
So every morning I'm working out for like an hour and a half, two hours and it
never wore
on me.
You know, I don't get sore.
I, you know, I'm in great shape.
Just in the last three to four months, I'm like, God damn, I'm sore.
Like, what the fuck is going on?
Like, you know, I, I'm not doing anything different.
I'm not eating anything different.
I'm like, what, what is going on that my body is just hurting?
And I suspect what it is, it's the mental toll after three and a half years of
doing this.
It's finally catching up.
I would imagine.
I mean, I think it's inescapable.
Gabor Mate say on your show, was it, I think it was on your show.
He said, uh, that whatever happens to you mentally manifests physically.
Yeah.
And it's like, it makes perfect sense.
But I mean, mentally, it hasn't really made me crazy.
I'm not, I'm not, if I'm hanging out with my friends who have nothing to do
with this
world that I'm interviewing, the relationships like it always was, you know, I
just spend
Thanksgiving with my ex-wife and kids and my best friend.
And it was just like old times.
It's like 20 years ago, nothing changed.
But I think physically, mentally, like somehow it's affecting me now.
I don't know how it could not.
Do you wonder how long you can keep doing this?
Well, I don't really want to like, how many drug addict interviews does the
world need?
Right.
I don't think we need any more.
Right.
If you want to watch some, there's probably 500 on my channel.
Right.
You can get all you need.
So I think enough's enough.
I'll probably phase out of that.
I'm already starting to do that.
What are you going to do now?
Just more, like yesterday, I interviewed a guy, mental health issues are
interesting, sexual
fetishes are interesting, sex workers are not as traumatic as, they're not as
pathetic
and traumatic as the drug addict stories.
Yeah.
The most positive one I saw from you today was a guy who had a foot fetish.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Some of them are lighter.
It was kind of funny.
I interviewed a guy here yesterday in Austin who was, he was an oil field
worker down in
Odessa, but he moved further north to, he wanted to be a skydiving instructor.
Young kid, 20, I think he's 28, I think.
And he was, you know, he's doing his like 25th jump, I think he said.
And two of his shoes got tangled up.
You know, you have a backup shoot.
First one was, didn't open up correctly.
So he did the second one.
I think they both opened up at the same time and they got tangled up.
Held him for a while and then he fell 4,000 feet, hit a cornfield and survived.
So he survived.
The parachute slowed him down a little.
Is that what happened?
He doesn't remember because he blacked out.
Oh my God.
He blacked out and he hit the ground, broke his, everything on the right side
of his body
is just, you know, but he's alive.
And he still wants to jump?
Yeah.
He said he still would.
I asked him at the end, I go, is skydiving, do you regret skydiving?
He said, no, I'd like to still do it right now.
They won't let me.
My friend Brian, his dad worked with this lady who was a skydiver and she was
always
trying to get him to go skydiving.
Let's go skydiving.
Let's go skydiving.
And then one day he went to the office and she wasn't there.
And he found out that she died skydiving.
I mean, to me, it's such a senseless way to die.
It's a crazy thing to do.
No, I mean, he, he, he, he talked about how the, the adrenaline.
Yeah.
Uh, he became addicted to the, the adrenaline rush.
Yeah.
That's, that's his, that was his, he says it's not a drug addiction.
It's not a sex addiction.
It's a, it's a adrenaline addiction.
Yeah.
So, so stories like that are what I'm looking to do.
It's just not, not that, that's pretty.
How did you find this guy?
He emailed me.
See, I get people emailing me.
I get, I get hundreds of emails a day.
Right.
From people who go through them yourself.
Well, I just hired somebody to help me do that.
Um, but.
So you're trying to move away.
I'm trying to move away from just Skid Row drug addicts.
It's like, we don't need any more.
Right.
It gets stale after a while.
Yeah.
I mean, I'll do some once in a while.
I mean, some of these people are magnificent speakers.
They're fascinating to listen to.
Some of them, I found so many just miraculous people down there.
There's, there's great people down there.
I mean, there's not like they're, they're all a bunch of drug addicted losers.
Some of these people are just like you and me.
They just happened to got caught up in some quicksand that they just cannot get
out of.
It's so sad to listen to some of these stories when you see that's a, that's a
great person.
Yeah.
That's they're, they're stuck in quicksand and you can't pull them out.
Even if you want to, if you had all the money in the world, you could, you
couldn't pull them out.
When I was 23.
You're watching them drown.
I moved to New York and I started hanging out at this pool hall and, uh, I met
a lot of drug addicts and I had known a few people with drug problems from my
hometown.
A few people with drinking problems that couldn't stop drinking, but I'd never
been like really close to someone had like a legitimate drug problem.
And, uh, I had a friend named Johnny and he had a crack problem and, uh, he was
a great guy, like really intelligent guy.
I could play musical instruments, could do complex math in his head.
Like you could say, you could have a calculator and you could say like 500
times 50 minus 30 divided by three and he could give you the number.
It was amazing.
And you could do, you could do it with a calculator in front of him and he
would be as fast as the calculator.
He was a brilliant, brilliant guy and he was a pool hustler and, uh, I, I met
him when he was homeless and he was, you know, sleeping in these 24 hour pool
halls or he would get a, you know, a bed in these flop houses and he was just
addicted to drugs.
And he, you know, he had mental health problems and he would self-medicate and,
uh, I would, you know, I drove him to get drugs on multiple occasions and I'd
try to get him to get off of them.
And, and he would be on this rollercoaster ride where he would smoke crack and
then he would need to come down.
So he would get alcohol and he'd go and drink these 40 ounces of old English
and, and just try to like bring himself down from whatever the fuck he was on.
And then I moved out here.
He came out to visit me once and, uh, I thought we're just going to hang out
and go places and play pool, but he was coming out to try to kick heroin.
And, uh, when he came out, he just stayed in the bedroom for like a week.
He was just all fucked up.
He was just sick for a week.
And then finally at the end of the week, he came out of it and, you know, he
hadn't had any heroin in his system in a week and he was starting to come clean
and feel better.
And that was the last time I saw him.
And then the next time I talked to him, I think I saw him one time after that,
but, you know, he had kind of resumed his, I'd moved to Hollywood and I was on
a television show and we were still friends.
But he had kind of resumed his life of being homeless and drug addiction.
And then I got a call from another friend that he died.
And, uh, that was around a little bit after 2000.
And it was, it was so, it was such a helpless feeling because I knew him as a
human and he was so funny and he's so smart and so interesting.
No, some of the greatest minds, the greatest, the most charismatic, most
interesting people ever, super intelligent and talented people are living on
the streets, addicted to drugs.
Yeah.
Because it almost goes hand in hand.
You get these great minds that are so creative and they're also so self-destructive.
Yeah.
I don't know why those two things go together, but so oftentimes creativity
goes along with drug addiction.
Look at all the dead people in your lobby, all those pictures.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
They all died at 27.
Mug shots of the rock stars and stuff.
Yeah.
It's, um, it's very confusing when you don't have that problem.
When you're like, why don't you just do this?
I would just do, and at the time when I met him, like now, uh, I like to smoke
pot.
I occasionally do mushrooms.
I, and I don't fuck with anything that's dangerous, you know, but, uh, back
then I didn't do anything.
So for me, it was very strange to be like clean and sober and trying to like, I
was like focused on my life.
You're not prepared because you don't have the knowledge of what he'll do for
that drug.
Also, in my mind, the people that did that were losers and idiots.
Right.
And now here's this guy who's clearly brilliant.
Yeah.
And a beautiful person.
I was one of my favorite human beings.
He was my best friend.
Yeah.
And he was homeless.
And it was, it was so strange for me to have grown up with a nice family in a
nice place where things weren't bad, you know, middle class, everything was
nice.
And then for me to be around a person like that, who, you know, spend his time
trying to rob people in pool games, pretending that he couldn't play.
It was like an art form for him.
He would just pretend he was terrible and he was, he was overweight guy.
So he looked like a bumbling loser and, you know, he would wind up getting a
bunch of money from people and then he would spend it on drugs.
And it was very, it was such a helpless feeling to watch someone who you loved
and cared about who just couldn't stop.
They just couldn't get their life in or they kept sabotaging their life.
Like no matter what happened, like whatever his, his sense of self-worth,
whatever the thing was inside of him, he just couldn't help himself.
He just couldn't stop that.
He would get off of it for a little while, decide he was going to clean up and
then dive right back into it.
Yeah.
It's so heartbreaking to watch.
And that was, he was the closest that I'd ever been to a person that had,
everyone else that I knew that had problems was like my friend's cousin or this
guy that I worked with.
Or they weren't people that I was really close with and with him, we spent so
much time together and to watch him just, just could not escape whatever the,
the gravity, the magnetic pull, the, the addiction, the thing to just like
constantly trying to get fucked up and, and escape.
Yeah.
Usually they're trying to escape something that happened in their childhood or
some, something, some lack of love.
Yeah.
Something.
Well, there's mental health in his, um, family too.
That's a big part.
I suspect, you know, there's a lot of these people that are schizophrenic or
they have these issues and they have children and it's genetically transferred.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I think there's nature, there's nurture, there's a lot of things that
are.
It's not, not just like, Oh, you, you were molested when you were sick.
So that's why you're a drug addict.
It's, it's more complex than that.
I think.
Have you met any of these people that have gone through any sort of psychedelic
therapy?
Like Gabor Mate is a big, have you?
I've heard about it, but I've not encountered anyone who's tried that and done
that.
It's not really available to these people.
No, not in Skid Row.
Yeah.
And when you're.
You got to have the motivation.
Yeah.
First off to want to get clean and use that as a technique to do it.
And I, I, I'm, I'm hopeful that somebody, some doctor somewhere, I think
University of Chicago is doing something with skin grafts that, that help with
drug addiction, but.
Skin grafts?
Yeah.
How so?
I don't, I don't know all the details, but you know, it's just like they're
doing studies right now, I think.
But I'm hopeful that somebody is going to discover something that will cure
that drive to, to fix.
How does skin grafts work?
I don't know.
It'll, it'll come on the news if it's successful.
See if you can find what, yeah, Jamie's on that.
University of Chicago.
Skin grafts to cure drug addiction.
That's a, it is so fast, how fucking smart some people are.
Science is amazing.
Some way around it.
CRISPR modified skin grafts to treat addiction.
The skin cells are then re-implanted to the patient through a skin graft that
acts as a so-called bioengine, producing these molecules throughout the life of
the graft.
In pre-clinical studies, the engineered skin grafts protected against drug
addiction and overdose in animal models.
Whoa.
Yeah, I think they're doing human studies.
So it's modified skin grafts.
Interesting.
You know, and then there's a, here it is, it's Chicago, genetically altered
skin grafts hold promises addiction treatment.
The treatment has been shown to work in mice and the researchers hope to begin
human trials next year.
If it proves itself there, be a valuable addition to a growing but still
inadequate arsenal of addiction treatments.
I mean, it's one of the biggest problems we have in our culture.
Oh, it's, I mean, look at our country.
It's like, it's horrifying.
Right.
You come to LA.
Yeah.
It's just so embarrassing.
No, Austin too.
Austin's cleaned it up quite a bit, but there's still some spots and there's
plenty of homeless people that are, you know, on 6th Street and down that area.
It's, it's really, really fucking sad because also like people define
themselves by their lowest moment often and when you have been a person that
sleeps on the street, it's that lack of self-worth, this identifying yourself
as a complete and total failure.
It's very difficult, difficult to escape that, especially when you compare
yourself to these people that, you know, they show up for work at their tech
job and they have this normal existence.
And they're all looking down on you and treating you with disrespect.
Right.
And you're living in the streets.
It's cold, it's rainy, it's whatever.
You're obviously worthless.
Yes.
There's nobody that's reinforcing the fact that you have any self, any worth at
all.
Right.
It's just going to take you down further.
And it's probably come from your childhood of being treated as worthless and
abused and.
Yeah.
But you asked me like how I can go down to Skid Row and do this.
I've done it every day for over three years.
I think the fact that I, I am not tempted by these things.
Like you could put crack, fentanyl and crystal meth right here and they, they
would sit here for three weeks and I wouldn't even touch them.
What about four weeks?
Four weeks is when I give in.
I'm just kidding.
They'll be gone in the fourth week.
My fear about all those things, like I've never tried cocaine, I've never tried
amphetamines.
And one of the reasons why is it seems like people love them.
You know, that's, that's part of the problem is I think the, the thrill of
whatever it is that those things give people.
I think the reason, one of the reasons my channel is so popular is because
there are a hell of a lot of people who are using some of these drugs and being
functional in the real world.
I think that's true, but I also think it's just fascinating.
I mean, I don't use those things and I'm fascinated by your channel.
I mean, it's just the human condition is very fascinating to people because we
recognize all these elements in ourselves, maybe to a lesser degree, or maybe,
you know, maybe you only have an addiction to pornography, or maybe you only
have an addiction to gambling, but you see a person who's hooked on meth.
They're all the same.
And it's kind of, there's, there's parallels.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
No, you can, you can, I've, I've, there was one addict in a, a gambler who
turned into a heroin addict.
Wow.
He was a big time gambler, big time in New York City.
Yeah.
I forget his name.
Um, I interviewed him this summer and he, uh, he switched his gambling
addiction to a heroin addiction.
It was like, whew, the gambling one, it's wild.
Gambling is fascinating to me.
That's another one that I encountered when I was in the pool halls, people that
were just absolutely in, just captured by gambling.
And I never thought of gambling as being an addiction.
I thought of gambling as being just a, a weird weakness that people do to
escape their life and they just get into it.
But then I saw the actual like chemical response of these people after winning
and losing and chasing money.
And this, this, this constant side, it becomes their whole life is trying to
win a bet and trying to play and trying to recover from a bad bet.
And then trying to avoid people they owe money to.
There's so many addictions out there.
There's so many.
Whether it's sex or shopping or gambling or eating or laziness or yeah,
procrastination, heroin drinking, even exercise, which is a great addiction.
That's my addiction, but yeah, you know, that's a good one.
It's not killing me.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that one.
That one seems to actually improve the quality of your life, but it has
characteristics of impulsiveness.
Yeah, when I go to Gold's gym every morning at 5:30, I'll bet you more than
half of the people that are there, it's the same crew every morning.
We all know each other.
Mm-hmm.
I'll bet you half of them are former addicts.
Really?
Of some sort.
Well, that's a lot of people that get into like running, marathon runners and
triathletes and ultra runners.
They, they substitute this very positive addiction, the addiction of like
overcoming and just pushing your body.
Humans are wound up.
Yeah.
I know I am.
And it's like you, you know, I like, I'm never going to run a marathon.
It's not, it's not my thing, but you see people who are running marathons.
I'm just like, what?
Why?
Right.
Why?
Why would you run 26 miles?
Everything's going to hurt after that.
Yeah.
Um, but that's, that's, we have this drive to do something extreme.
It seems call it self-destruction.
I don't know what you want to call it.
So self-sabotage maybe, but so many of them are former alcoholics.
And they put that aside and they found this new obsession.
You can't just, you can't just stop drinking and be like, I'm cool now.
I don't drink anymore.
Right.
It's like, you need to find something to replace that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's what people, they, they, they realized that eventually.
I mean, I know so many people that went to Alcoholics Anonymous and then they
became
hooked on coffee and cigarettes and the coffee and cigarettes, they said, this
is okay.
Yeah.
Well, that's not as bad.
It's not killing me as quickly.
And it's not forcing me to lose jobs and I can function in society with this.
And then, you know.
But my, my mind has opened tremendously from when I started this.
Like I, I really consider when I started it, maybe, you know, I kind of started
and I've
had three studios down on Skid Row, but the, the first one I had for three
years and I gave it
up, had to, had to mess up my life with the divorce and other stuff.
And then I had another one and gave her, got rid of that one.
But the third one I've had now for almost four years.
Um, but I had a friend of mine who realized my channel is what I'm doing now.
And she goes, she's known me for a long time.
And she goes, I remember driving with you through LA, we're going to a
restaurant
and you saw some homeless guy begging on the street corner, hassling you for
money.
And you said under your breath, just get a job.
Oh boy.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah.
Get a job.
Do you want some coffee?
No, I'm good.
Thank you.
That used to be me.
Yeah, no, I think it's a mo, it's a lot of us.
Yeah.
I still say it.
Sometimes these guys come at me and they just, every day of the year, they're
coming
at me for free handouts.
Yeah.
I mean, I give away, I hate to tell you how much money I give out.
Every single day of the year, I'm given between two and 3000.
Really?
Just giving out money.
Wow.
Not like fucking Santa Claus, but like.
I know what you're saying.
But like, sometimes it's paying interviewees.
Sometimes it's paying the person who brought me the interviewees.
Sometimes it's the people who keep it quiet outside my studio door.
Sometimes it's, um, you know, I, I'm a, I'm a square white dude.
I go into South Central to, you know, I interviewed a lot of the prostitutes on
Figueroa Street,
which is not Skid Row.
It's, it's South Central LA, very different neighborhood, but, but equally
dangerous,
probably more dangerous.
In fact, um, I used to go down there and like, I'm worried about getting killed.
People get killed there every day.
You know, there's gangs are thick.
Yeah.
And they see a white guy.
I'm either a cop.
I'm either an undercover cop or I'm a trick.
Right.
And if I'm a trick, that means you can rob me.
Right.
It's like open season.
Just come, I got a wallet full of money that I'm looking to spend on a girl,
but they're going to hustle me or con me or rob me.
Right.
And the way that I can continue to do this almost three and a half years now
and, and,
you know, do it fairly safely is by spreading so much goodwill.
Like I'm generous with these people I interview and I'm generous with the pimps
and I'm generous
with the, you know, the, the gangs that control the neighborhoods or whatever I
have to do in order
to go down there safely and not get hassled.
Yeah.
So I've, I've, and especially on Skid Row, I've, I've handed out so much over
the years that it's like,
it's just, I'm like, I won't tell you what they call me, but it's a positive
thing.
Um, because, because I'm like Santa Claus down there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got to get out of this.
You can't keep doing this.
No, no, no.
I think, I mean, the human struggle is fascinating.
Yes.
There's not, it's not just drug addicts.
Part of the reason I'm just doing drug addicts is because I'm in LA and Skid
Row is right here.
If I don't think about it, I'll just go to Skid Row and I'll get some
interviews.
Yeah.
So now I'm making a serious effort to not do that.
Have you thought about escaping LA?
Oh yeah.
I've, I've been to, I've been all over the country, you know, for a create
equal,
I went to each of the lower 48 states.
So, I mean, I just came back from New Orleans.
What has created the book?
That's the book I did of American portraits.
It was really the template for soft white underbelly.
It's out of print now.
So don't look for it.
It's really hard to find.
I think the last time I saw it, it was like a thousand dollars.
A used copy.
But maybe somebody will do a reprint of it one day.
Because God, I get, I get emails every day of the year.
People wanting to buy that book.
If it came out tomorrow, it would sell out.
Yeah.
Some publisher should do it.
Um, but I've, I've been to New Orleans.
I've been to Tampa several times.
I've been to Kentucky and West Virginia many times.
The Appalachias?
Yeah, Appalachia's amazing.
Coal miners?
Coal miners and just, I love hillbillies.
Did you ever see the wild and wonderful whites of West Virginia?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I interviewed Mamie White.
Did you really?
Yeah, Jessica's sister.
Wow.
Yeah, she's, she's a trip.
Boy, that whole family's a trip.
Yeah.
Yeah, oh, that's right.
Yeah, I saw that series.
This is Create Equal.
Where it's, they're all diptychs.
They're all pairs of images.
So I've got a fur trapper and a woman on the Upper East Side of New York
with her fur coat.
Wow.
And they're not meant to be point, you know, they're, they're just
juxtapositions of interesting.
Lady with his little dog.
She's holding up.
Oh my goodness.
Wow.
Wow.
Find the, uh, the polygamist and the, uh, the polygamists and the pimp.
That's my favorite.
There's the clan.
So.
Right, right there, top right.
Oh no, right there, that one.
These are polygamists in Utah on the left and, uh, a Detroit pimp and his girls.
What is it like interviewing pimps?
They're, they're very braggadocious.
They're very full of themselves that you really won't get the truth.
You really won't get, like a lot of, a lot of the people I interview, they
break down and
they tell me the honest truth of what they're feeling and what they experienced
as kids.
These guys are all focused on, I want to look very cool.
So, so they're kind of very focused on their image.
Right.
And how they're coming across.
How they're coming across.
Yeah.
Did you ever watch any of those documentaries on pimps?
Like pimps up, hose down.
I know all those guys.
They went to Kenny Red's birthday party.
Did you really?
Yeah.
I'm like part of the clan.
Jesus.
What was that like?
I mean, they're cool with me.
They love me.
Cause I, you know, I treat them nicely and they, I'm like part of the family
now.
I'm the square white guy.
That's like friends with all the pimps.
Yeah.
I knew them from Chicago.
I knew Bishop Don Magic Wand from Chicago.
Did you really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
I used to see him at the,
He's probably the most famous pimp ever.
He's the most famous pimp ever.
Yeah.
Well, probably the most famous.
Cause he's been in movies with, uh, um, Snoop.
Yeah.
But, uh, Fillmore, uh, uh, Fillmore Slim.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fillmore Slim I interviewed.
I've done almost all of the, the really big name ones, but they, uh, I'm just
fascinated
by that lifestyle.
Not that, not the new, new age pimps.
Most of the new age pimps are just gang members that are, they found a new
hustle and they're
wearing like jeans and t-shirts, but the old school pimps from the seventies
and eighties
that are just dressed to kill and driving these custom Cadillacs or Lincolns or
Rolls Royces.
And they're all about the show and they've got, they've got three girls, five
girls in
fur coats and you know, the girls were sexy.
They dressed well.
The dudes were out of this world.
Yeah.
I went to the players ball down in Atlanta.
Oh boy.
A couple of years ago.
What is that like?
It's a lot of people showing off is what it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not my scene, but that's the culture.
That's the culture.
Yeah.
You got to understand.
I mean, what people don't understand, but what, what, what white people don't
understand
about that whole subculture, they could, you know, they, they, they love
to hate pimps.
We all hate pimps.
We all, no one wants to see a woman taken advantage of.
Nobody wants that, but except maybe some pimps, but, but what they don't
understand is these
guys, the, the women that they are managing is this, this will get a lot of
negative comments
on your, on YouTube.
But, um, the, the, the, the women are, they're just trying to survive and they
figured out
this is a way that I can make money, but they don't know how to do it.
Well, they don't know how to manage their money.
If they have money, they spend it.
It's all gone.
And they end up broke every night and they're just like, they're, they're
spinning the wheels,
going nowhere.
So a pimp will step in and like, let me handle your money.
You give me all your money and I'm going to take care of you.
We're going to save some for your future and I'm going to keep some of it.
And we're going to live in style and you're going to work for me.
You're going to be one of my stable.
So he, he, he provides some benefits and security and guidance.
But when they break up, it's rare that the girl gets anything.
And it's always a horrible ending.
It's usually a horrible ending.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When the pimp goes to jail sometimes, but the girls never end up with a story
where like,
oh yeah.
And then I got my money and I, I went off to college.
That, that never happens.
Yeah.
But, but the pimp does provide a lifestyle for the time when she is doing that,
that is better than what she was doing without him.
And you, you've interviewed people that have been open about murdering people
too.
Yeah.
I've interviewed a lot of people that have done that.
You know, I, I, I'll interview people.
I mean, I could do a whole YouTube channel on what happens after the interviews
that I do.
Really?
Oh yeah.
There's a lot of people get in trouble.
No, no, no, no, nobody's ever gotten in trouble.
The cops have never come after anybody.
Really?
I've done all these interviews and the cops have never approached me about
anyone I've interviewed.
Isn't that kind of crazy?
It's crazy to me, but I think, you know,
I, I know the cops watch cause they, they'll roll by and say,
Hey, who are you posting today?
So they, they watch all the time.
Yeah.
I think the cops enjoy watching because
the people that they're arresting are always lying to them.
Hmm.
They're never telling the truth.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
I was robbing that liquor store.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry.
I was guilty.
Right.
They're, they're never getting that.
But when I interviewed people say,
yeah, I robbed a liquor store and I, you know,
I got away with it and I did this and I, you know,
robbed a jewelry store and I shot the guard in the shoulder and I got away with
it.
And you know, like they're getting to hear the story told a very,
very different way than the way they hear it when they book somebody.
Do you interview cops as well?
I would love to, but, uh, um, I've only interviewed a couple of retired cops
and those, they're great stories, great storytellers and great stories.
Perhaps my favorite video on my channel is Mike Dowd.
Who's a,
Yes, I know Mike.
I've had him on the podcast.
Mike's the best.
That documentary.
Fuck.
Yeah.
The seven, what is it?
The seven, five, seven, five.
Yeah.
Is an amazing documentary.
And it's just all about this young idealistic cop who gets.
Tell me that's not a movie.
It's screaming to be made.
Yeah.
I mean, well, the documentary is fantastic, but yeah, an actual movie about it.
He just got indoctrinated into the world of corruption, right from the
beginning.
Yeah.
He witnessed a murder.
He was told to shut the fuck up.
When he came to my studio, he approached me and asked me if I'd be interested
in doing the interview and I said, yeah, sure.
I'd love to.
And we were talking as he was driving up from Orange County to me.
He lives, I think in New York and Florida, but he was in Orange County for
something.
So he's driving up.
We're talking on the phone and I'm listening to the way he talks.
I'm like, Mike, you could, I mean, this is the way I'd love my videos to go.
Like you're a great conversationalist.
You're probably the best conversationalist I've ever heard.
And that's why you're so successful.
One of the, one of the reasons you're so successful, but I'm not, I'm just,
I'm just a photographer.
And all I'm doing with these interviews is trying to give,
provide a little backstory that my photographs can't provide.
So when Mike was driving up, he's, he's talking to me on the phone.
I'm like, he's such a great speaker.
And he's, I love listening to him.
Even when he's just talking about what time he's going to be there,
his voice and the way he talks is great.
So New York.
And I said, Mike, let me run something by you.
And this is what I love to do.
I wish every video on my channel was like this.
I said, could you tell, could you do this whole talk where you tell your entire
story
without me saying a single word?
He goes, oh yeah, no problem.
I could do that.
And I'm like, let's try it.
So he came in and he did the exact, I didn't make a single noise.
I said, thank you at the very end.
And that was it.
And that's the way I love, those are my best interviews where I don't say a
word.
Well, he's a perfect candidate for that.
He's the best.
And I've had some even drug addicts to do it.
And I've had other people do it.
And very often what happens is I'll ask them.
My typical questions are like, where are you from?
What was your family like?
And sometimes they just take the ball and run with it.
And then they do the whole thing on their own.
And I don't say another word.
So that's almost the same thing.
And that's the way I love it.
I'm not looking to have a conversation like you and I are having right now.
Right.
I'm not good at that anyway.
That's not my strength.
My strength is the photograph.
The reason why I asked you about cops is I feel about cops the same way I'm
feeling about
you, but even to more in an extreme, that they're exposed to things they cannot
unsee.
And the pressure and the stress of that is so, so overwhelming.
And also they're thought of as the enemy and they're not appreciated.
And the risks that they take are not taken into consideration and the stress
and the PTSD
that they almost all have.
All.
Every one of those cops has seen videos of a cop pulling someone over for a
routine traffic stop
and getting gunned down.
Yeah.
They've all seen that and they know that that's a possibility.
Every time they pull up to a car that has tinted windows, they have no idea
what's going on.
No, after doing what I'm doing, which is not as dangerous as what the cops are
doing because
they're clearly trying to get somebody and put them in jail or prison.
Yeah.
I'm just trying to give them money for an interview.
So my danger is not as high as theirs, but I can relate to how dangerous their
life is because
every single person they approach is potentially going to shoot them, run, do
something.
Or they're mentally ill and they're going to just do something crazy.
I follow a few police-related Instagram pages that sort of highlight that, that
are really
well done.
One of them is police posts and faces of Rampart is another one.
And it's these cops that post these videos and it's educational.
It just shows people.
First of all, it's educational to other police officers because a lot of them,
they talk about
what went wrong here, situational awareness, why this officer got in trouble,
what you should do,
and how this officer handled this in an incompetent way.
Or you should never allow something to escalate to this place.
But a lot of it is just you are forced to look at what they experience on an
everyday basis
where everyone they're talking to is lying to them.
Everyone they're talking to has a...
And then they also develop this horrible cynicism about human beings and
everyone they pull over.
They just get so overwhelmed from decades of this job.
Yeah.
Cops are so underappreciated, especially right now.
It's terrible.
I say it all the time and people get mad at me all the time.
I'm like, "Listen, man, I know cops."
Because of my martial arts background, I grew up with cops.
I was around cops from the moment I was a young teenager all throughout my
adult life because of
martial arts because so many cops train in martial arts to protect themselves.
And they're good people for the most part, like all people.
Most people are good people for the most part.
But good people that are forced into jobs that have horrific pressures attached
to them.
And horrific consequences if anything goes wrong.
And paid very little.
Yes.
And they're under just unbelievable stress and they make terrible errors
because of that stress.
And then someone gets a cell phone video of that and they post someone planting
a gun or doing this.
And then everyone thinks all cops do that.
No, and you cannot shoot the wrong guy.
Right.
You cannot ever risk doing that.
Yes.
I watched a horrible video the other day.
So they're shooting at you, but you can't really just shoot back because what
if you hit a kid?
What if you...
Right.
Well, that was what I saw.
There was a horrible video of a grandson, this very troubled grandson who
pulled the knife on his grandfather.
And while the cops were there, he went to stab the grandfather and the cops
opened fire on the kid
and shot the grandfather too, killed both of them.
Yeah.
And I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ.
And in the police post, this was all about, you know, understanding about
accuracy and when to shoot
and when to intervene.
And it's sort of a step-by-step breakdown for other officers so they can sort
of look at this.
There's a great video on my channel with a retired cop named Kevin, Kevin
Donaldson.
It's a great story about PTSD of being a cop and what the aftermath of all that
is.
I can't even imagine what their minds must be like when, especially someone who
works in a horrible
neighborhood where you're constantly dealing with that and the things that they
see.
Like they're constantly seeing murder, constantly seeing car accidents,
constantly seeing overdose,
constantly seeing physical abuse, sexual abuse, rape, torture, you name it.
And you're married and you come home to your wife and it's like, how was your
day, honey?
Yeah.
And you're in Simi Valley with your kids, just trying to stay calm.
And then, you know, you hear, fuck the police and you're like, okay.
Yeah.
You know, it's a horrible, horrible job.
It's a, yeah.
And any support for them always gets like shit on.
Uh, but I, I think about them the same way I'm thinking about you.
I think prolonged exposure to the most horrific elements of society is, is God,
we, we, you know,
we sort of formulate our idea what the world is based on what we've encountered.
And, you know, if you've encountered nothing but a beautiful neighborhood and
nice families
and everybody's friendly and you go to the football game and everybody cheers.
Yay.
You know, this is life for you.
But if you're experiencing what you're experiencing, you're talking to people
on skid row
on a day in day out basis.
Like what, what does that affect?
Like how are your dreams?
Do you have nightmares?
I don't remember my dreams.
I sleep really well.
Um, but, but I'll tell you this, my, my,
I've, I've called this project a crash course in empathy because like when I
first started,
like I said, you know, I, I would look at these people like, just get a job.
Right.
A bunch of lazy losers that won't get a job.
Right.
And then after hearing story after story after story, I see like, oh, now I get
it.
People are sort of like, you can't, when, when, when people are developing and
growing,
there's certain things that happen to them that are very hard to unfuck.
And when things go sideways and their life is fucked, like trying to bring them
back to
a place like where you are or a place where I am, where someone who didn't have
those things
happen to them as a child, that is a, an enormous task.
Yeah.
I, I, I almost insurmountable.
I don't think it's even possible.
You can just prop them up a little bit so they're better, but they're never
going to,
I mean, there are some that do it, but those people that have really recovered
and
have gone on to do great things were people who kind of were doing great things
before,
but then they got caught up with cocaine and then they pulled themselves out.
So it seems like to me, and I've talked about this ad nauseam,
is the only way to fix this is to fix the areas in which this is prevalent and
to somehow or another
pump money and resources into community centers and education and giving people
some kind of hope,
giving people some, and then even then you're just going to make less of it.
Yeah.
You're not going to eliminate it entirely.
It's a law, a generational problem that could take decades upon decades to
really put a dent in it,
but it's a task that's worth doing and no one is approaching this.
When politicians are sending billions of dollars overseas and billions of
dollars on projects
that a lot of people don't even agree to, and it's all tax money and nothing is
being spent.
No. If you want to save our country, this is the way to do it.
Yes.
Why are we looking at doing all these crazy things in other countries or going
to the
Mars or wherever we're thinking? How about right here in our own backyard?
Yes. Yeah. How about fixing places like the south side of Chicago and Detroit
and Baltimore?
And the way to do that, I believe, is providing hope for those families.
And it's not going to happen right away. It's not going to happen in a
generation.
Right. Exactly.
And no one's got the patience for it. Because whatever work you're going to put
in,
whatever money you're going to put in and energy and effort, you won't see in
your lifetime.
I had a conversation with some friends about this last night and they were
saying,
but would the country even run the same way if that happened? Because don't you
need all these poor
and disenfranchised people to have the country work the way it works? And I'm
like,
but the country doesn't have to work the way it works. This is just the way it
works right now.
It's not like it wouldn't work another way. Well, you know, what's interesting
is,
you know, the universe, nature, even the human body regulates. That's what it
does. When something's
out of balance, it'll figure out and it'll find a, you know, it's like a seesaw.
It'll eventually
balance out. So we have a preponderance of down and out broken people on the
streets living in boxes
and tents, addicted to drugs. And we've also got this ultra super billionaires
and the multi multi
millionaires. And they're both existing on the two extremes. And good luck
getting the rich to say,
all right, we're going to give away a third of our money so that we can help
these people.
Well, they don't have any faith in it.
Nobody's got it.
They think they also think that, I mean, when I talk to people about this, that
are very wealthy,
they have a problem with charities that most of the money actually winds up
going to administrative costs.
Yeah.
And very little of it actually goes to the people. And then you find out that
people that are working on the homeless situation, I have a friend, Koleon Noir,
who was a lawyer and we, he was in San Francisco and his perspective was,
oh, they're not spending enough money to fix this homeless problem. And then he
talked to someone
who is actually deeply embedded in that situation. He said, no, no, no, no, no,
no.
That's not the problem. They are spending a lot of money on it, but the money
is going to these
people that get high salaries that work on the homeless problem. And he showed
us a spreadsheet
of all these people. And it's six figure salary, some of them $250,000 a year.
And it's a lot of them
that are handling the homeless situation in Los Angeles and the homeless
situation in San Francisco.
And there's no incentive to fix it. The budget goes up every year. The homeless
problem goes up every year.
There's no accountability. There's no, hey, we've spent all this money and the
problem is bigger
and you guys keep getting raises. Like what the fuck is going on here? It
becomes an industry and then
fixing the homeless. Like if you look at the actual budget for dealing with the
home, pull up the budget
for dealing with the homeless in Los Angeles in 2022, because it's bonkers when
you see the sheer
amount of money that's being spent ineffectively. And all anybody seems to care
about is we're working hard
to mitigate the homeless situation. And we're, you know, we, we have upped our
budget and like, oh,
they've upped the budget. This is great. And you think that must be effective.
We're going to fix this,
but nothing gets done. No, it's a big problem. I think the big, the big number
was for California,
not just for Los Angeles. Okay. Let's get the California. 7.2 billion. 7.2
billion just for homeless.
I would think with that, you could clean up Tenderloin in San Francisco and LA.
3.3 billion
general fund in 21, 22 to almost 30 homelessness related programs across the
state.
That is so much money. And yet the problem gets bigger and bigger every year.
Yeah. And I don't, I think the problem when you, I was talking about the layers,
you keep peeling them back. When you peel back the last layer, it's human greed.
Human greed is the problem. But also what can be done? Like what, I mean, when
you think about like,
what are the strategies that these people are employing shelters, food, food
stamps, this and
that, uh, counseling that these are like band-aids on gunshot wounds. It's a
bandaid on cancer.
Yes. Yeah. That's a good, that's all it is.
Description.
No, but I think if we
like, like, like here, just look at what's taught in schools. They're, they're
teaching trigonometry
and algebra and all these things. When everyone's got a cell phone in their
pocket, you don't need
to be learning trigonometry anymore. If you're going to become an engineer,
then, then study
trigonometry in college, but you don't need to be teaching it in high school.
They should be teaching human interaction, how to raise children. Like all
these skills that we're
using on a daily basis. They should talk about empathy too. And how important
it is and kindness
and how it's, it's not just good for the person you're kind to. It's actually
good for you.
Yeah. No, I mean, that's, that's the thing. I mean, that's why I feel okay with
giving away so
much money. Cause I, I know that it benefits me. Yeah. Like, like that, that's
what people don't
understand about hate, whether it's hate on social media or hate in general or
racism or just
all the above, all the above, all the above, any, any form of negativity and
hate and judgment.
What people don't realize about that, if I'm hating you, it hurts me. Yes. It
doesn't hurt you. Right.
You don't give a fuck if I hate you or not. You just, well, it hurts my
feelings if you say it to me,
but mostly you're carrying it around. It's like, it's hurting me. What is that
expression?
My, my blood pressure is up. My peace of mind is gone. I'm sitting around
distracted about how
pissed off I am at you. Yeah. It's like, what a horrible way to go through life.
Yeah. There's a, there's an old expression about hate that it's a poison that
kills the vessel that's
holding it. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. It does. It's, and it's, we're
not told that we're told,
you know, you, you know, revenge is being told. I mean, we were talking about
Marcus Aurelius the
other day that, uh, Marcus Aurelius, who was the emperor of Rome 2000 years ago,
was talking about
empathy and talking about how important it is to forgive people. Like there's
this brilliant stoic
philosopher thousands of years ago when people hacking each other to death with
swords and arrows and
shit. And this guy was trying to see through it as a leader. Yeah. And it's the
rarest of rare of
people that lead like that, that really genuinely have this perspective, like
humanity can do better
and we should strive to do better. And he was striving to do better in his own
personal life.
And that was what meditations was all about his book. Yeah. No, that's, that's
what I try to do
with my videos. My idea was I'm going to present these ideas and I could write
an article saying,
oh, you need to raise our kids better. We need to be better parents, better
role models, and we'll have a
better outcome with these kids. Nobody's going to read that article. Yeah. But
if I put out some entertaining videos
about how many people are watching, um, you'll learn the lesson, which is how
important that childhood
is to provide that kid with unconditional love, not love, not love. Love is
bullshit. Unconditional love.
Everything else is some disguised bullshit because you can have a parent, a
parent who I love you.
If you get good grades, I'll love you. If you stay out of jail, I love you. If
you're not gay,
I'll love you. If you're whatever. Right. Like, like the way my mom loved me,
she passed away a couple of years ago, but
give me a second. Like I could have been gay. I could have been in jail. I
could have been flunking
out of school, could have been mean to her. I could have been anything. And I
know that she would have
loved me the exact same way. Yeah. And because she did. You are the person you
are. I wanted to make
her proud. Yeah. I still do. I think, I think this project is just an homage to
her. Well, you're
very fortunate. Oh yeah. Yeah. I don't know anybody that had a mom like mine.
And my dad was great too.
Not as great, but my dad was really great. My dad came from absolute shit. Well,
all of our parents
came from a different era too. We have to take that into consideration. That's
a great point. I mean,
look at how so many people in this new generation are looking for the easy lick,
the shortcut, the hack,
the easy way to get rich or do whatever. They want the fast buck. Right. Look
at anybody who's done
anything great in our world in the 1900s and the 1800s and the 17th from, from
the beginning of time,
every one of those persons, every one of those people have a story of
overcoming great adversity
and, and working harder than you can even imagine. They're, they're amazing
stories of perseverance,
of courage, of all these things that nobody seems to want to do now. Yeah. Well,
they're not taught
that that's something you should strive for. And when there are these options
that are available,
like becoming a tick tock star or becoming, you know, there's these things that
are available that
are so simple that you see 17 year olds making millions of dollars and you're
like, well, that's
what I want to do. Yeah. I don't want, I don't want to struggle. That's more
attractive. Yeah. And
there's not enough, there's not enough emphasis on the fact that in doing
difficult things,
you learn about yourself. And then this thing that you can create, that's hard
to create,
that takes a long time is immensely satisfying as opposed to winning the
lottery, which is what
everybody wants to do, which is just for the most part, when it happens to
people, it kind of upturns
their life. Well, I mean, you win the lottery, most of these people that are
not willing to work for it,
haven't put in the work for it. If they actually came upon $3 million, they
would it off. Yes,
they would it off because they deep, deep down subconsciously, they know they
don't deserve it.
Which is so strange that we have this sort of watermark in our mind of what
what our value is.
And anything that goes above that, we try to bring that water back down to
where it was. Absolutely.
No, like when two people are romantically involved, and you know, two people, a
guy and a girl meet,
or whatever, two people meet. If they're self, if you rated self-worth on a
scale from one to 10,
if one of them's an eight and the other one's a five, there's no chance in hell
it'll ever work out.
Right. Unless that five gets their shit together.
Yeah, but that's so hard to do. It's so hard to do. It's so hard to do. Yeah.
Generally,
like two fives can become an eight. If they grow together. But they have to
like really love each
other and be friends. They can have their bipolar heaven or whatever. Well, I've
seen a lot of
really successful couples that like lose hundreds of pounds together. And there's
a lot of that on social
media that I think is very inspiring when people do get their life in order. No,
and that would bond
people better than anything. Yes. Yes. And it seems to do that, you know. But
one of the things that I've
noticed on your channel is there's a lot of couples that are addicted together.
Yeah. You have these
fentanyl addict couples, which is so heartbreaking. I just did one earlier this
week, Mike and Stephanie,
and they were talking about how when they get apart from each other, they can
kind of get clean and
do fine. But then they love each other and they get back together and they self-destruct.
It's so strange.
They love each other and then they kill each other. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the
programming of the human
mind and the fact that we don't really have tools to fix that. Like, if you
have a fucked up computer,
you can bring it to a repair shop and they can go, oh, you've got a fucking
virus on your hard drive and
it's infected this and that. And you know, you're fucking your hard drive is
broken and we can fix that
and replace that and reformat yourself. We can't do that to mine. No, you said
something on the
Gabor Mate interview you did recently where you said, it's like we're
these living life forms without an instruction manual. Yes. That was great.
Yeah. That's what we are.
Yeah. We're these highly evolved living creatures and you don't know how to
operate it. Yes. So, we're just
going through school and we all hate school and we get out and we just screw up
and if they were teaching
Gabor Mate's work in schools, oh my God, we'd be a different society. Yeah.
Yeah. They, yeah,
we would be a different society. And just a few classes like that could shift
the mindset of so many
people. It's so easy to fall back into your old ways of thinking and behaving.
But if we did that a lot
in high school and expose people to that, we genuinely could fix a lot of the
problems that we see or at
least make some strides. Absolutely. I think that would make more of a
difference in the world than
anything else we've talked about. Yeah. And just so many people have never
encountered an environment
where people are supportive. You know, for me, it was martial arts. When I was
a young boy,
when I found martial arts, I was immediately, um, brought into this world of
discipline where
discipline was, uh, it was celebrated and it was admired and, and then also
love of your fellow
practitioners and it was a community. And it was the first time I'd ever been
around like a really
positive community of people who valued hard work and, and also valued people
who excelled at that
hard work and it, and really admired them and really use them as examples. And,
and those people went
on to become instructors and it really profoundly affected the way I look at
the world and profoundly
affected the way I look at the value of other people and their hard work. Their
esteem building acts.
Yes. Yeah. And most people, I mean, I, you know, I found martial arts when I
was a kid because I was
small and I was always with, and I was scared of everybody. And, uh, I had one
pivotal day. I had sort of
dabbled in martial arts. And then one day where I walked into this one school
in Boston, which was the
J. Hun Kim Taekwondo Institute. And from that one day, it changed my whole life.
And I'm so fortunate that that happened to me. And I often wonder what would I
be like if I didn't
live in a nice neighborhood with nice people and didn't expose myself to that
and didn't engross myself
in that world of people that wanted to excel. I would not, there's no, not a
chance in hell.
No, that's a kid in South Central doesn't have any of those. Exactly. A kid
whose mother is on Skid Row.
A kid who's, I mean, what do you do? How do you get there? You're, you're
fucked from birth.
You're, you're being raised by a grandparent if you're lucky. If you're lucky.
Maybe the foster
system. And you don't have access to martial arts or ballet classes or music
classes or
nothing. Even, even good education, I don't think. Right. No opportunities.
Right. No role models.
Nothing. And this is what I think couldn't be, that could be mitigated with
money. With if you,
if we allocated money, the way we allocate money to these overseas issues and
you know, the way we just
throw money around at the military industrial complex. And if we allocated that
kind of money to try to
take a comprehensive approach to shifting this, this play, like if we had this
guy on who was a cop in
Baltimore and, um, I guess it was like the early two thousands, he was there
and he found a piece of
paper that was an arrest report from the 1970s. And it was the same arrests in
the same neighborhoods
for the same crimes. And it was overwhelming to him. He was like, oh my God,
this is like, this is just
corruption and systemic racism. And you're not going to fix this with just
policing. You're not going to
just arrest your way out of this. No, you need, I think you need to change the
mindset of these
young, these, this younger generation, like, like what's become very cool to be
bad. Oh,
if you're bad, you're cool. That has to change. Yeah. That has to change. I
remember back in the six,
you're not old enough. I'm just, I'm, I was born in the sixties, like being a
good person was cool.
Right. It was for a while in front of your face. You got it by your neck now. I'm
sorry. It's okay.
Being, being a, being a good person was what people aspired to. Yes. And, uh,
now it's like to be a bad person is what people, well, that's a culture.
Unfortunately, there's a lot
of culture that has, uh, emphasized that and it's, you know, a lot of rap music
and a lot of things
celebrate that sort of bad-ass lifestyle. And, you know, and when you come from
nothing that looks
incredibly attractive, like here's a guy flashing money. He's wearing expensive
sneakers. You don't
know any better. Right. And those are all things that people aspire to that are
very difficult to
achieve. So you look at that instead of like having a balanced life and a
loving family and being a
pillar of the community, you aspire instead to being this thing that's very
difficult to become,
which is the guy who has the big house and the, the fancy clothes and the, the
money you're
flashing around. And so it's just a, you're chasing the wrong carrot.
Yeah. Now that's it. Yeah. We're a broken country. And it's like, if you want
to,
if you're, if you really love your country and you want to fix it, that, that
would be the area to,
those would be the areas to attack. Yeah. And I don't see any effort at all.
Find me a politician. That's like really going to do that.
Well, they don't even talk about it. They don't even talk about it.
I mean, they'll, they'll talk about, uh, social safety nets, which I think are
also very important
welfare and, and, and, and, and, you know, things for, for poor people that are
genuinely just
struggling because they're down on their luck and that we should treat them as
members of our community
and try to help them because we can. And that that's a sign of a good, strong,
healthy community that we do look out for people that are less fortunate than
us. But there's more
that has to be taken into consideration and much, much more that has to be done.
Like you have to
figure out like, how is this continuing to happen in these same places over and
over and over again?
And how is there no effort to try to mitigate that? Because it's a long term
thing. Like this expression,
you got to get better the same way you got sick and this country got sick
slowly.
You're very much on the pulse of what's going on in the world and the country
and technology and
everything, right? Society, culture, everything. Um, do you think we are,
you're, what you're watching is a, is a society in downfall, like spiraling
down?
There's a lot of us. There's a lot of our society that is in downfall. There's
a lot of our society
that is spiraling. There's a lot of the way we think about things that is fruitless
and pointless and
ultimately negative. But I think there's a lot of people also that are aware of
that. And there's
also a distribution of information today and the way people are having
conversations today that's
totally unavailable before. Your channel is part of that. This podcast is part
of that. The multitude
of podcasts that are out there where intelligent, kind, compassionate people
are thinking and talking
about things, talking about the way you approach other human beings and talk to
people, the way you
live your life, the way you, you, you can put pleasure and immediate gratification
aside and, and seek
discipline and hard work and the value and the benefit of that, the value and
the benefit of treating people
with kindness and, and, and, and, and developing a good core group of friends
and treating each other.
Well, I think that's spreading. I think that's helping, but I think we are
constantly in this yin-yang
battle as human beings. And I don't think you have darkness without light. And
I don't think you have
light without darkness. I think we're always going to be where this bizarre,
flawed, intelligent,
calculating entity that is trying to figure out its existence, which is
ultimately finite in nature
anyway. And our goals and our aspirations and our dreams, there's so much of
our society that's,
that's based around chasing objects, which ultimately you can't keep. And then
also,
if you do give them to your kids, you're probably them up. It's very, very few
people that I've met that
come from wealthy families, aren't fucked up, or at least I have friends that
grew up very wealthy
and their family's wealthy and they're wealthy now. And they know that they got
there because of their
family. And there's a thing about them. That's always insecure. So they have to
kind of brag a
little and tell you a little of this. They've done a little of that they've
done. And I know what
they're doing and they're not bad people. They're just trying to establish that
they're valuable.
No, imagine if your dad was an Elon Musk or somebody who's so wildly successful
that you can never,
in your wildest dreams, you're never going to outdo your father.
Right.
What's the motivation?
This is an old expression. Show me the son of a great man who's also a great
man. It's very rare.
It's for men to aspire to be like their father. If your father was some like
super conqueror type
character who just is a great man is a vague term. I mean, it is a great term,
vague term, vague term,
because it could be just my dad, my dad was a great man, but he was not a
multimillionaire.
Right. But the thing is like what our society values in terms of when we look
at someone who's
great, we look at a Bill Gates or we look at a, you know, someone who's amassed
insurmountable wealth.
And that's, if you're a son and you're born in that also, you don't have to
work hard because
you're kind of always going to be okay. You have an endowment, you have a fund,
you have this or that.
And how do you, if you're, if you're that wealthy and successful as I guess you
and I probably are,
what, how do you protect your kids from that? How do you?
Yeah. I'm not going to give you anything. So now you're a selfish, selfish
bastard.
Right. Right. And if you do, you're damned if you do.
Well, I, I try to instill in my kids the value of hard work, but also sometimes
kids don't want to
hear it from you. No, they don't. Kids won't do what you say. They'll do what
you do.
Right. Like I turned into my dad. I just kind of blended a bit of my mom in as
well. So I'm an
artist, but I work my ass off. Yeah. And that combination makes me a successful
artist.
And I remember watching my dad, my dad never came home from work saying, Oh, I
worked my ass off this
week and I traveled all over the Midwest and I did this. And I did, I grew up
in Chicago and Detroit.
Um, he never talked about how hard he worked. He just did it. He just shut up
and did it.
Yeah. He never bragged about it. He never complained about it. It's just what
he did.
Yeah. And I, my, my best friend, uh, Bob and I, we joke about how we had the
same dad,
you know, different dads, of course, different families, but our dads are
almost the same
type of person. Just shut up and worked and brought home the bread to support
the family.
Yeah. If you grow up in that, I was very fortunate to grow up in the Northeast.
And stayed married forever. Yeah. Forever.
The people that grow up in hardworking environments tend to value hard work.
Yeah. I've heard you talk about that too. Yeah.
You know, growing up in the Midwest or the Northeast, you learn that life is
tough.
Yeah.
Tough. When your car breaks down and it's February and it's dark and it's, it's
11:30 at night and you're,
you got to figure it out. Yeah. That's real. Yeah. And there's a value that you
get from that.
That's really unavailable. Any other way place in life. No, you're not going to
learn that in
California. Right. No, you're not. And that's, I always say that one of the
problems in California,
it's also like being a trust fund baby in terms of like the weather.
Yeah. It makes you soft. Yeah. You're just always sunny.
Like I still see myself to this day. I've been in California,
shit, 20, 30, three decades. I don't know. Long time. And I still think of
myself as a Chicagoan
who's just, I'm just doing this in LA for a while. Yeah.
I'm still a Chicagoan in my mind. All my friends from Boston feel that way too.
Yeah. They're Boston guys.
I mean, I look like, I look like a California boy, but I am a Chicagoan through
and through.
Yeah. And a Detroiter too.
Well, you know, LA is such a strange place because it's a place where people go
to become somebody.
And that's, that's always. No, I saw that when I moved there. Like I moved with
my best friend who
I went to high school with in Chicago and we had each other to stabilize each
other and we kept each
other on track. That was, that was very helpful. But I saw so many people that
I'd be friends with
and like, man, they're just lost. Yeah. Like you're getting into what? You're
going to what event?
What club? Like, right. And they eventually self-destruct and move back to
their small towns.
Yeah. It becomes a thing of like finding the social circle that's popular. And
now it's about
photographing yourself with those people. Right. Right. It's hard to make
friends in LA.
Yeah. Well, it's even weirder now, I think with social media because social
media,
it's so Hollywood's always been kind of like, it's all about the image and this,
this, the red carpet,
which is like the most bullshit thing in the world. Like where in life are you
standing there? And
there's a hundred cameras pointing at you and you're posing and looking around
and they'll like,
Mark over here, over here, over here. And you're smiling and, but they live for
that moment.
Yeah. Yeah. I have more great friends in New York than I do in LA. I've lived
in LA forever.
There's great people in LA, but I know there are, yeah, but in spite of LA,
that's right. That's true.
Yeah. That's true. But that environment, it's also, you have all these people
that are,
even if they have no aspirations to show business, they're still flavored by
that show business. And
now it's even more fucked because you have these Instagram and social media
influencers who are
almost all full of shit and like, it's all nonsense and it's all image and it's
all fake. It's all fake.
And this is what they're selling and pushing and promoting. And that's what the
young people are
aspiring to. And they realize that there's a value in it that you could
actually achieve like social
success and numbers on your Instagram page and numbers in your tick tock and
numbers on your YouTube.
And that I think that's the most valued commodity now. Yes. To be a, what do
you call it? Influencer
or whatever? Yeah. A YouTuber or whatever the hell. Yeah. I mean, I, I'm horrified
that I'm
probably one of those, but not really. I mean, yeah, I guess I am too. Right.
But what are you doing?
Like what you're, you're doing something that's very different than just like
tick talking, you know,
or just, I mean, I, I, I, I tell people who are like, like agents and managers
that I'm working
with that the number one thing that's important to me is my integrity and how I'm
perceived.
Like, I don't give a fuck if I make money or not. I don't need to make money
from this channel.
The way YouTube demonetizes it, it's like, I don't even. Does YouTube demonetize
a lot of your videos?
A lot. But what is their, their rationalization for demonetizing what you do? I
think they were
good to me for a while. They were promoting my stuff and they were monetizing
it for a while.
But then like, if you look at the top 10 videos, I've got some videos that have
a lot of views,
like 15 million, 30 million, 33 million. Uh, six of the top 10 have been demonetized
or deleted.
Deleted? Deleted. Which ones got deleted? Uh, video of Lynn. She was, uh,
she had like some mental issues and she was a crystal meth addict. It was a
very popular video
because she was just so many people connected with her. And, uh, she actually
passed away, uh,
earlier this year, I think. Why did they delete it? She talked about suicide.
That's it? I, I, I assume that's why. Because, because YouTube sent me a, a
notice,
they emailed me a notice saying, are you considering suicide? You know, like
this form,
document that they send out whenever there's a suicide mention or whatever. So
they,
there was a video where she mentioned suicide. So somebody reported it and it
got deleted.
And then that was, that would have been a moneymaker. Did you try to respond to
that or appeal it?
Talking to YouTube is like talking to a wall. I have a partner manager, but
nothing's really good.
There's such a danger in that kind of censorship. Like anything to do with sex
now,
pretty much every video that has anything to do with sex gets demonetized.
Even the foot fetish guy?
No. If it's a male, here's what, here's what's interesting about it. If it's a
male talking about
sex or sex work or sex being a trick or whatever, or a pimp, that's okay. If it's
a female, demonetize.
Is it because they think it's exploitation in some way? Like, is there a
rationalization or is it just
completely subjective?
No, I think it's because, oh, here's a poor vulnerable female who is talking
about how she
got into sex work. We can't have that on, you know, we can't, uh, allow
advertising on that.
So I can post it, but I can't make money off of it.
It's so unfortunate because, well, and also not necessarily post it, right?
Because you said the
other one was deleted because of suicide.
Yeah. Sometimes they delete them.
It's just what, I think what you're doing is very valuable. It's uncomfortable,
but it's very valuable.
And the idea that someone at YouTube wouldn't recognize that and understand
that it's, it's,
it's very disheartening for me.
No, I mean, it's pathetic that you have a channel that has 4 million views. The
spirit of it is to help
society and you can't make money with it. What I make on YouTube, I spend in
the first two weeks of
every month.
So that money, the additional money comes from, I mean, really what's, what's,
what's,
you have a subscription model.
I have a subscription channel too, and that's, that's starting to take off.
And when did you start doing that?
About a year ago.
And was that in response to the demonetization?
That's exactly why I did it.
Censorship.
That's exactly why I did it.
And this subscription model, is that also on YouTube or is that on your website?
No, no, it's on my softwhiteunderbelly.com.
And that, that's really the, the state of the art of my channel.
That's where every video lives, deleted, uncensored.
So they can find that one that was deleted from Instagram?
Yeah, yeah.
The original Lynn video is there.
There's a bunch of others.
Or on YouTube rather.
Yeah, there's some others that were deleted.
All the demonetized ones.
There's a lot of nudity that's not on YouTube.
There's a lot of videos that are not, there's like 150 videos that are not on
YouTube.
It's really, that, that to me is like, the reason I wanted to, another reason I
wanted to do it, other than to try to make money with this project that I
worked so hard at, is I figured one day I'm going to post something that's
going to get my whole channel taken down.
Hmm.
I figured eventually that's going to happen.
I'll do something that just pisses somebody off and the whole channel will be
gone, disappeared.
See you later.
It's just terrifying that that's an option today, especially with someone who's
doing the kind of work that you're doing.
Yeah, but there's rap videos that are 10 times raunchier than what I'm doing.
And the spirit behind it is that this is cool.
Whereas the spirit of mine is like, I just want to create awareness so that
maybe people will learn to avoid it.
No, it's not rational.
But the, but they're monetized.
Yeah.
The rap videos all have ads on them.
Yeah.
And my stuff does not.
No, it's not.
There's not, it's not logical.
No.
And it's a big, it's a big corporation.
Good luck trying to have a logical conversation.
It's a big corporation that's also under the spell of an ideology.
And this, the, the woke ideology of today is like trying to find like, who are
the victims and who's the perpetrator
and who's the, the, and what should you be allowed to talk about?
What are you not allowed to talk about?
Yeah.
And what narrow confines of conversations are you allowed to exist in?
And what topics are you just not allowed to approach?
And YouTube has been horrible with that in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
Just recently.
Yeah.
Well, it's like, it's accelerating, it seems.
And it seems like that's one of the things that does happen with censorship
that people don't
seem to understand when, when you want things censored that you don't agree
with, what you,
you have to understand is that that you're setting in motion something that
will look for more things
that are offensive, more things that are, that, that are not allowed and will
decide even further and
further to push this until it's trying to control the way you think and the way
you process information
and what you're exposed to.
Yeah.
And somehow or another, they think that that's a net positive or they think
that it's positive
for advertising revenue and that the advertisers think it's positive.
I mean, but it's preposterous to me that someone would not want to advertise.
There's certain things that they could advertise on your channel.
And particularly if they were thinking about it and strategizing, that would
maybe be beneficial
to some of the people that are looking at those things, you know?
I mean, the best example is like when a gang member or a prostitute video gets
demonetized,
which really means I can't make money on it, which really means I should put it
on my subscription
channel and not even put it on YouTube. I'm doing that as a favor to my
audience, but
eventually that's where it would lead when you demonetize something.
The problem with or they put an age restriction of 18 on it.
Yeah.
So you can't be under 18 watching this.
Look at the age that all these prostitutes and gang members were when they
joined it.
Right.
They were 13.
They were 14.
Yeah.
So, so the people who are joining these subcultures can't watch these videos
that are giving you
a clear picture of what the, what your future is going to be.
You can't watch them.
Yeah.
My videos are clean.
You know, the exotic video.
This is this very attractive, uh, prostitute from South central LA from Figueroa
street.
She has tattoos all over her face from pimps.
And, uh, the video has like, I don't know how many views, like 14 million, 50
million.
So it's got millions of views.
It's the second most popular video on my channel.
It got demonetized.
Like for what, she doesn't swear once.
She doesn't talk about any sexual acts.
All she talks about is how difficult that lifestyle is and how tough her life
is.
She mentions that she's smokes crystal meth, but that's it.
And it's, it, it is in a way it's educational.
It's educational as, as anything.
Cause I could put videos out of some girl saying, I was once a prostitute and
it's
a bad lifestyle and you shouldn't do it.
All young girls make sure you don't do this.
Nobody's going to watch that.
Who the fuck is going to watch that?
But if you put a beautiful girl like exotic out there and she tells you her
whole life story,
it's heartbreaking and a young kid will listen to that and go, fuck.
Yeah.
I had no idea it could lead to that.
Well, most people don't know anyone like that.
So that's one of the things about your interviews would say like some of these
homeless people,
like there was one, there was this woman who'd never looked at the camera once.
Um, and she was like gyrating and these weird ways of like looking at the sky
and,
and you know, you look at that and me as a father, I'd like, that's, that was
someone's baby.
At one point in time, that was a little child that could grow up to be anything.
Yeah.
Could grow up to be an artist, could grow up to be, you know, whatever.
All of these people, all these people, they're all just human beings.
They're all, we're all just humans.
Just a bundle of potential and they just got fucked.
They just got a terrible roll of the dice, terrible hand of cards, terrible
circumstances,
terrible experiences, terrible abuse.
Sometimes, sometimes I, sometimes I, you look at nature.
The lion eats the antelope.
That's just the way, that's the way it happened that day.
The antelope loses, the lion wins.
And it's like, that's the nature of our universe or of our, of our world.
Who's to say that humans are exempt from that?
Well, we certainly aren't.
Some of us are going to be winners and drive fancy cars and live in nice houses
and be,
have, have great lives and great vacations and raise their kids well.
And other ones are going to live on the street.
And you know, you, I'm not saying that's what I believe.
I'm just saying that's the reality.
Well, I mean, look, it's what happened.
Look at what's happening.
And I think about this all the time.
Like, should every kid get a, should every swimmer get a trophy?
No.
Just the winners.
Yeah.
So the winners get to win and the losers suffer the loss.
Well, it's supposed to inspire people who are also trying to become winners,
to feel the pain of loss, which makes you more disciplined.
It makes you work harder because you want to try to figure out a way to win.
And that's supposed to be like a net benefit.
And to also enforce the value of hard work and discipline.
If you see that person who wins all the time and they're at the pool before
anybody
and they're eating healthy and they're stretching and doing all the right
things.
And you're like, I want to be like that person.
Yeah.
Listen to anybody who's done like, like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant.
Yeah.
Jerry West, all these guys, they lost and lost and lost and lost.
And then they learned how to win.
Yes.
And then they became, they're only perceived as winners now.
Yes.
But there was a time where they were like, Kobe sat on the bench for first few
seasons.
That's how you become that person.
Yeah.
You don't, you don't become that person through like extraordinary gifts from
the moment you're
a child and nothing but great positive things happening.
Yeah.
It comes from discipline and hard work.
And that's what's not being enforced by the social media, TikTok sort of
generation of kids looking
for this immediate gratification and also looking to be rewarded for just
existing.
Right.
You know?
No, look at it.
Look at like all these people I just mentioned, Michael and Kobe, for example.
They're angry.
They were, they were driven.
Michael Jordan's the best example of anything.
If you ever watch his Hall of Fame acceptance speech.
Yes.
It's magnificent.
A magnificent example of how angry a champion is.
Yes.
It was, that was, I love that speech.
Yeah.
Because like Michael was always this like, you know, I'm from Chicago.
Michael was this, he, they call him the black Jesus.
He was just like better than anybody.
Right.
There was no question who the greatest basketball player of all time was.
It's Michael, Michael Jordan.
Watch the highlights and you'll, you'll say, I love Kobe more than anybody.
But Michael was the best there ever was.
Probably ever will be.
Psychotically driven.
Fuck.
Everybody was horrified in the whole theater when he's accepted, getting his
Hall of Fame.
Because he was angry at.
Angry at everybody.
Yeah.
And that's what.
All the people that doubted him.
All the people that doubted him.
All the people that disrespected him.
He just, he listed them all.
Like he, like he had them on a sheet, but he had them in his brain.
And it's amazing because you're like, why are you even thinking about those
people?
You're Michael Jordan.
You're the fucking man.
He's the greatest.
He's name an athlete who is more influential than Michael Jordan.
None.
In their sport.
None.
I mean, look at Jordan's.
They're still the number one sneaker in the world.
They should be.
He's magnificent.
And that comes from that.
Yeah.
Fire.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm angry.
You know, my dad treated me like, my dad, my sister's like,
my sister's one of my favorite people.
She's, she's five years older, but she's about eight years older in terms of
maturity.
Cause I matured very slowly and she matured very quick.
She got out of, I think she went through grade school a year early.
She got through high school in three years.
She went through college in three years.
And she was trying to get into dental school at like 20 years old or 21 years
old.
And didn't get accepted for a while.
Worked in a motel for a while.
Cause she couldn't do anything.
She just had to get a job.
So she, and my dad, my dad was hard on us.
My dad was hard on us and said things to her and me.
I was not a straight A student.
My sister doesn't know any other letter than A, you know, on a report card.
But I remember him saying to us, if you're so smart, how come you can't get
into dental school?
That's harsh.
That's harsh.
I mean, you got nothing but A's.
Yeah.
And the only reason you couldn't get in is because she was too young.
No dental school wanted to take her because she was a teenager, basically.
Yeah.
You know, she had to, she had to age a couple of years and then she got in.
Now she's a dentist.
But my dad used to tell me that kind of stuff all the time.
And it put a fire on, I mean, it would either break you and you start smoking
dope and you
spiral downward or you silently get angry.
And my sister and I joke about it all the time now.
The reason we both became successful was just to prove our dad wrong.
And, and, you know, I talked to him about it.
And he says, yeah, I was just trying to put a fire under your ass.
And I'm like, well, it worked.
It worked.
It's hard because you're still going to resent that person for being cruel when
you're younger.
No, but I mean, to me, the reason I do these videos, the reason I love to learn.
You do too.
I mean, like, look at what you're doing.
You love to learn.
And I love to understand.
The wanting to understand why we self-destruct, why we self-sabotage, why the
society is broken,
why all these things that are topics on my channel is what drives me to do them.
And I, and I, I want to know why.
Uh, I forget.
I lost my train of thought there, but.
Your dad being hard on you.
Yeah.
But I, I, I just want to know what, what, I lost my.
But I know what you're saying.
Like, what is missing in these people?
What, what, what are the factors that lead people to become downcast and downtrodden
of society?
Yeah.
And what are the factors that lead people to become healthy, functional,
successful humans?
Yeah.
I, I, I, for me, it was a combination of the, of the unconditional love I got
from my mom that kind of kept me on track and made me believe in myself.
Tremendous.
I, I, I believe, like, everything I do turns to gold.
It's a, it's a magic, it's a magical gift.
I love it.
It's, it's the, like, artistically, I believe my work is the best.
I'm sure it isn't, but, but I believe it is.
So that just gives me the confidence to proceed and, and do more.
And, and like, oh my God, this is so much fun.
I get to create, I, I'm laying golden eggs every day.
That's how I, that's how I look at it.
Um, but it could also have gone where, like, let's say I didn't get that
unconditional love from my mom.
And my dad was giving me a hard time saying, you know, you, you know, that
conditional love saying you, you, you, you got to be successful in order to.
Oh, so I, I guess where I was going with that is my dad used to give me this
hard time all the time.
And it drove me to succeed.
And I, I didn't get good grades in school.
But when I got out of school, in my mind, I'm like, now I'm going to prove him
wrong.
I'm going to prove everybody wrong.
I'm going to show everybody what I can do.
And it took years, took a lot of years.
But I eventually just became so wildly successful.
I would send my dad, I would mail him my, uh, this is before cell phones.
I would, I would mail him my, uh, bank statements.
I had a million dollars in the bank.
Really?
I had a million dollars in the bank of America checking account, getting like
minimal interest.
And even the tellers would be like, why, why do you have this much money in a
checking account?
Like, cause I'm working so goddamn much.
I don't have time to invest it.
I literally, literally was.
When I was doing advertising, I worked so much all the time.
But you wanted him to know.
Oh yeah.
I was, I was shoving his nose in the shit.
How did he respond to that?
He was so proud of me.
Oh, that's good.
So proud of me.
He talks about that to this day.
Well, that's great.
Oh yeah.
No, I mean.
So it was effective.
Yeah, it worked.
It worked.
It worked for my sister too.
We both laugh about it now.
That it sucked, but it worked.
It sucked, but it works.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I w I wouldn't, I try to raise my kids differently.
Why?
Like you, you could, we could talk here for hours about whether that is the
healthy
way to raise a child.
Right.
I could make a strong argument for why it is.
And there were generations that raised their kids that way.
But I, I tend to love more like my mom did.
With women in my life, with my friends, with, I am, I'm basically kind.
I'm not, I'm, I'm not a hard driving, you know.
Has this project and doing all these videos made you more empathetic?
Oh, fuck yeah.
I mean, I always was soft and nice and loving, but now I think I'm more than
ever.
Yeah.
I'm much more understanding because, because the key to, the key to empathy,
the key to
forgiveness, which is really my, my biggest thing is forgiveness is, uh, is
understanding.
Because if you understand why somebody is behaving the way they are, you'll
forgive them.
And you don't even need to know all the details.
You just need to have, if you've, if you've learned enough stories, you
eventually will
gain the understanding that even though I don't know your story, I'll bet you
it's similar to
his story and her story, which I've already heard. And they're horrifying. And
I understand why they're
in the situation that's similar to yours. So you, you, you, you, you may not
know the details, but you
have gained the empathy and the compassion and the understanding to forgive.
And so the overwhelming volume of these people that you've interacted with as
it has to have like
shifted your just idea of what it means to be a person.
Yeah, for sure. No, I, I, I've, I've matured tremendously in the last three
years from doing this.
Just, I mean, I started this just as like, let me, let me just do this crazy
project. I didn't
think it was going to become a success on YouTube, but I knew that I was going
to learn a lot
about, about people, about why we self-destruct, about why we self-sabotage,
about why we
get in our own way. I mean, why would, I mean, why would you drink like that to
destroy your
relationship with your wife, to, to, to, to lose your kids, lose your job, lose
your finances,
lose everything. You're, you're now a drunk living on the street. Why would you
do that? Makes no sense. But if you
hear the whole story and what they went through and how they weren't loved as a
child and how their dad
never neglected them or abused them or whatever, all the pieces start to fit.
And then it, then you,
you gain some empathy and compassion.
When you move on from doing this, like you're going to just interview
interesting people that are doing
different kinds of things.
I mean, like I did, I did a really great interview with a girl named Kate down
in New Orleans. She is a,
uh, obsessive compulsive disorder sufferer. And, uh, that was a great interview.
So many people liked it
because it was just like, Oh my God, that's me. I saw so many comments saying
that's, that's what I have.
I didn't even realize it because that that's my story, you know, and I see that
in so many of my
videos, like this is my story. So I like the mental health stories. The sex
stories are always fun.
You know, I, I find sex interesting, even though I don't make money on YouTube,
I'll still do them.
Um, and I'll put them on my subscription channel sometimes too. But, uh, and
then this guy, like the
skydiver I mentioned, that's an interesting story because you know, what's
interesting about his story
is not that they had this crazy one in a million event happened in his life. Tragic
is how he views
life now. That's, that's, that's what the second half of our talk is all about
is how he views
life and values what, where he's at in life. I mean, he's, he doesn't really
have
his body to use like he once did. Maybe he'll gain it back. Hopefully.
How long ago was his accent? Three months. Geez. Three months. He just emailed
me before I came
down here and I'm like, this is great timing. Can he walk? He walks with a cane.
He can't,
I don't think he can use his right leg. He fell on his right side. So his right
leg,
his right arm is right. Everything is he bit his tongue, bit his tongue off, I
think. Yeah.
Hemorrhage. So he said his, his, his, his, uh, testicles turned like the cantaloupe.
Oh Jesus.
I mean, you, you fall 4,000 feet under a cornfield, some bad shit's going to
happen.
So from now on, like the, this new, uh, direction that you want to take things
to,
what, how do you seek out people? Do you just like, when you get emailed, like
this seems interesting?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh, I'll, I'll probably post a video on my channel. Sure. I've
been thinking about
doing it. I just haven't done it yet. Cause I just hired somebody new and I
want to get her like
up to speed on everything, but we, we've put out little, little ads on, uh,
Instagram and Tik Tok and
not Tik Tok, um, Craigslist and things like that. And we're getting some
response to that. And that's
been great. That's how I found him. But, um, I've, I've always gotten lots of
emails from people that
like my channel. Oh, I want to be on your channel. And, but if they don't send
a video, I can't,
I won't even consider it because everyone says they have a great story, but I
need to see how
you speak. Right. Yeah. That's, that's a problem that I've had where we're
interviewing people who've
written books. Some of them are not terrible speakers. Yeah. And sometimes they
talk the way they
write, like pause, um, pause, um, right, click, click, click. Cause that's how
they think.
See what I do with everybody. I won't even consider you unless you've sent me a,
just a 15 or 30 second video of you. Just tell me your name and where you're
from.
Hmm. Yeah. It's just a basic. So I can hear your voice,
see what you look like, see how you speak. Cause if you're,
you know, some people are more, they're just better. They're more charismatic
speakers than others.
And, and, um, you know, this, what I'm doing is like, you know, maybe some
people look at it as,
oh, you're doing this good deed for society. And maybe there is some of that,
but there's also,
this is entertainment as well. Yeah. And I'm from advertising. I'm slick. I
mean, I'm,
you know, I still have that in my, in, in me, you know, I don't look like a
homeless,
disheveled dude. I'm, I know how to put myself together. So my art tends to
have that,
some of that quality too. So I want it to look and sound good. Yeah. Not
technically,
but in terms of how you speak, how you tell the story, I'm looking for great
storytelling is what
I'm looking for. I tell people all the time, rather than telling me the most
horrific story
that's ever been told, I would rather have you tell a boring story about crack
cocaine,
but you're a great speaker. I had a, I had a guy, uh, had a couple of the crack
addicts
and crystal meth addicts just recently. I just interviewed on Skid Row and they're
just great
storytellers. Yeah. And I love that, but their story wasn't the most horrific
ever, but it's,
it's a great storytelling and it's fun to listen to. Yeah. And I love that.
How often do you consume these videos? I mean, are you watching them all day
long? No,
no. Do you purposely go out of your way? Your very first question when we
started,
uh, I never answered, which is like, how does it affect me? Yeah. You have to
understand,
like you have a crew and you have cameras all set. Everything's set. I'm using
natural light. So the sun
is going behind the clouds. The sun is moving throughout an interview. There's
noise going
outside. I have to, I'm doing this all by myself. I'm operating two cameras. I
have to make sure the
mic, you know, I don't use headphones and a mic like this. I'm using, uh, uh, a
lab of their mic that
they clip on. So I have to make sure that's not getting bumped or knocked off
or whatever.
I'm like a one man band. I'm trying to do two things. You know, I'm doing all
these things at
the same time. Oh, and I'm also doing an interview. Let me ask you a question.
Let me ask you this
question. And I'm doing like six or eight of these a day. So I have to remember,
like, were you molested
by your uncle or your dad? I can't remember. I can't remember. And I've made
this mistake. People tell me,
so I've got kids and all this. And then later on the interview, I asked them if
they have kids.
Right. It's not because I'm an idiot. It's because I'm doing so much at once
that I can't possibly
absorb everything I'm being told. Got it. Yeah. And I'm, I'm also interviewing
at least on Skid Row,
especially so many, like the force that comes at me of, of, of bullshit and
hustling and conning
and lying and thievery and all that crap. It's a lot. So they recognize you now
when you show up?
Who's that? People in Skid Row. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'm like a fixture there. So
you're that guy. I'm
the guy that does those interviews and they, you know, a lot of people will
bring me somebody that
they know or whatever. Yeah. That happens a lot. And you pay those people and I
pay the people that
bring them. I pay the people I interview. I pay some people that I've
interviewed in the past and
I'm helping them out with motel rooms or how did you find one of the most
compelling and fascinating
videos that I watched was those mountain people. Oh, the Whitaker family. Yeah.
In, uh,
West Virginia. Yeah. How'd you find them? Um, that was during create equal the
book that I mentioned.
He, uh, uh, I was, you know, I was going to each of the lower 48 States and we
were in West Virginia,
just driving around Axel, my assistant and I, he's, he's worked with me for
decades and we're just
driving around looking for anybody interesting to photograph. You know, it's
like, I was just,
it was just like, let's just see what we can find. And we're in a, like a truck
stop,
convenience store, gas station thing. And, uh, I'm inside and there's a cop in
there and cops
always know everybody in their, in their County or whatever. This is a Raleigh
County cop. And I,
uh, I went up to him, told him what I'm doing. And he goes, Oh yeah, I know all
kinds of people.
I'm like, I bet you do. He goes, I get off at two o'clock and I go, I'll meet
you here too. So we did.
I've had people like this before who have helped me. This guy was probably the
best I've ever had.
He's, he took me to pure gold over and over and over all these interesting
people who I photographed
for create equal. Just, he knew exactly what I'm looking for. He showed me the
best of the best of
Raleigh County. It was, it was great. I'm sure there's more. I know there's
more, but the ones he
showed me were so great. And the first day we did this, uh, we shot this person,
we shot that, we shot
a third and then it started raining. And my strobe equipment, I always use strobe
equipment, um,
for my photograph. This is photographs only at the time. This is for a photo
book, um, got rained on.
And so we had to pack up and leave. Can't rent photo gear in West Virginia. So
we just had to go
back to LA and I told him, we'll be back in two weeks. So we come back and he
says, when you come
back, make sure you bring video cameras. I'm like, yeah, yeah. I don't do video.
So I didn't say anything.
But two weeks later we come back and, um, he, uh, he meets us and he goes, did
you bring video cameras?
I'm like, no, I don't do video. He got really pissed. He's like, you're going
to want video.
I'm like, I don't do video. I'm sorry. Just photos. So we follow him. He's in
one car,
not, not, not a cop car, but his own private car. And we're following him in
our rental and
we're going off the highway. Then we go off to this mountain road and it's
winding through the
mountains. Beautiful country, Appalachia that Western West Virginia and Eastern
Kentucky is
it's right near the border of Kentucky. It's so beautiful. It's one of the most
beautiful parts
of the U S. Um, and this, this windy road turns into like a gravel road and
then turns into a dirt
road and there's shacks every once in a while you see a house and like somebody
lives there.
Like you can't believe people live there, but, and we're going very poor. I
mean,
the poverty in that part of the West Virginia is like these people are making,
I think an average of
12,000 a month, that's what they live on. So we're going down this dirt road
and then we come around
this bend and we're going really slow. 12,000 a month, 12,000. I'm sorry. 12,000
a year. Yeah.
$12,000 a year. How do they live on 12,000 a month? I was like, that's actually
no, no,
no. I'm sorry. 12,000 a year. Yeah. 12,000 a year. Can you imagine that? No,
that's crazy. Um,
that's, that's like parts of Kentucky and West Virginia are like that. So poor.
So we're driving
down this dirt road. We come around this bend. There's a shack on the left and
there's a trailer
on the right, small trailer. And there's about 10 or 12 people just walking
around
and we're going really slow. So they're, they're not used to cars coming by at
all,
but going that slow, they definitely, we got their attention. And it's like,
everyone you look at,
it's like their eyeballs are going this way and a single tooth among them, not
a single tooth in
any of their heads. And they look at us and we look at them and they started
yep and screaming and
barking. And yeah, some of them are just staring at us and drooling. And it was
like, yeah, these
people, this was the video, the inbred family, the Whitakers. Yeah. Let's play
some of this because
so what are your names? I'm sorry. Who's this? His name's Ray. Ray. I remember
Ray. I photographed
you right here. Do you remember? Years ago. So that, that sound is this man
barking. Lorraine. Lorraine.
And Timmy. Yeah. None of them speak. No, you guys grew up here in, uh, in odd,
West Virginia.
How many years have you lived here?
Well, you guys, I mean, did you go to school?
You did? Some of your, some of your brothers and sisters probably didn't go to
school or
how much schooling did they get? These are all brothers and sisters.
They didn't, they didn't go wrong, but they graduated.
You graduated from what?
Well, they were from high school.
You went to high school, Timmy? Yeah, he went to high school. High school out
in there.
Timmy graduated high school. Doesn't, doesn't speak a word.
How about you, Lorraine?
He's actually Lorraine's daughter. And, uh. Son.
Come right out.
And that's a man barking for people just listening to this. That's all he.
So they live with a bunch of dogs and he's adopted their way of communicating.
I don't, I don't know about that, but he does sound like a dog when he speaks.
Yeah, here he is right here.
It's a Ray.
So some of it's a dog, some of it is him.
They sound very similar.
Yeah, that's a dog barking.
And that's him.
Now, what is the story of this family?
So it's Ray on the left, Timmy in the center, Lorraine's son, not daughter.
And that's Freddie on the right. Freddie has passed away recently.
So the way, so let me tell the story about how we met.
So we pull up and these people are just staring at us.
And it's something that, like, it's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my
life.
I will never, I'm certain I will never see anything crazier than this.
And I, you know, we pull the cars over and me and the cop get out.
And the cop comes up to me, says, I told you should have brought a video camera.
I'm like, yeah, you're right.
So I walk over to the house to ask them if I could photograph them.
And she, I think one of the sisters just points to the trailer home across the
road.
So I go to the trailer home and there's a man sitting on a couch with two women.
And I poked my head in, the door was open.
So I poked my head in and I said, my name's Mark.
I'm a photographer from California.
I just started giving my spiel and he interrupts me.
He says, sorry, sir, we had death in the family.
We're mourning.
We're not interested at this time.
And I'm just like, fuck, came all the way out here.
And I gotta, I gotta be respectful.
Somebody died.
So I just like, okay, I'll check in with you later.
And I left.
I go back to the cop and Axel and I'm talking to him like, fuck, we came at the
wrong time.
But then I started thinking, you know, I'm fast on my feet thinking.
I'm shooting eight by 10 film and eight by 10 Polaroids.
So you get an instant Polaroid.
So I have the ability to take pictures of the family.
And I thought maybe that might be nice to give them eight by 10 prints,
these instant Polaroids of their family.
And they can include that in the casket of, uh, I think it was their,
there's a sister-in-law who passed away.
And, uh, you could leave, you could put the prints in the casket,
take the family with her or some symbolic gesture like that.
And he, I, I, uh,
so I asked Kenneth, who's one of the brothers who speaks if I could take his
photo.
And he was very, he's always been friendly.
And he said, yeah, sure.
No problem.
So we set up on the side of the house and I got my backdrop and the light and
the camera.
And, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, a bit of a production.
Clearly something unusual is going on here.
And some pickup truck comes running down the road,
sees what's going on, slams on his brake.
And this, this dude gets out of the car angry as fuck.
It looks like he wants to kill me.
He's just, he's marching over to me.
I'm like, oh God, this is not going to be pretty.
And I'm like, he goes, what the fuck are you doing?
And I'm like, let me explain what I'm doing.
I grabbed my book and I show him the samples of other portraits I've done.
And they're all respectful.
They're beautiful portraits.
And I explained that there was a death in the family and I'm going to take
photos of the family.
And they're going to include it in the casket.
And I'm also going to pay these people for letting me take their photos.
And I calmed him down and eventually he let me be.
And I took the photo.
Who was that gentleman?
He was just one of the neighbors, I think.
And I was protecting those people.
He was protecting them.
Yeah.
Because a lot of the, a lot of people in that area know about them and like to
drive
by and throw eggs and make fun of them and stuff like that.
So he thought I was doing something like that.
So I got him off my back and I'm taking a photo of Kenneth.
I think I took a photo of Lorraine and her sister, Barbara.
And Lorraine's holding a nephew or something.
So I had a couple of prints already.
And I go over to Larry, who was one of the other brothers who was in that
trailer.
And I showed him the prints and I said, you know, I have an idea.
What if I took photos of the family and I gave it to you guys?
You could include it in the casket with your sister-in-law.
Would you like me to do that?
He goes, well, that's fine about me.
If they want to do it, it's up to them.
So that gave me the green light to go ahead and do this.
And I went back and I tried to get that photo that you just saw of Ray on the
left,
Timmy in the center, and then Freddie on the right.
Timmy and Freddie were cool.
They'll stand there for as long as I want.
Freddie was like Ray is now.
But Ray, this is 2004.
So it's about 16 years ago, 18 years ago.
Ray was so uncontrollable.
Like, so I have Freddie and Timmy standing there and I'd go find Ray and I
asked him,
Ray, could I ask you to come over here and I'll take your photo with your
brothers?
And he would come over and he would stand right next to my camera, like right
next to it,
two inches away from the lens.
And I'm like, no, no, no, I need you to stand with your brothers.
And he would get, as soon as I corrected him, he would just flip out and go
screaming, running off.
Pants would fall around his ankles, no belt, and he's wearing jeans that are
too big.
So his pants fall around his ankles and he runs off and goes to kick a metal
garbage can.
Screaming.
And this would happen over and over and over.
I spent like an hour, probably an hour and a half trying to get him to stand
for a portrait.
Eventually, I tried this over and over again.
Eventually, I got it to happen.
And we pack up and we leave and I gave them the prints and I gave them some
money as well.
We're driving away and Axel, before he got on the highway again, I said, dude,
you just got to pull over the car.
I just need to soak in with what just happened.
That was the craziest shit I've ever seen.
I've never seen human beings like that.
That's like being on another planet.
That was the craziest thing ever.
And over the years, I kind of maintained a relationship.
So those photos came in that were put out in my first book, Created Equal,
which I mentioned earlier.
So, you know, years go by.
I popped there again and visited them once or twice over the years when I was
doing some other projects for advertising or something in the area.
So I kind of stayed in touch with them a little bit.
But then when I started doing Self-White Underbelly, I love Appalachia.
I love going there for content.
And I find the people just so beautiful and interesting.
It's a shame that there's drugs there.
I went there to avoid the drugs, to get away from it.
But the drug problem there is worse than L.A.
But there's other people who have not touched drugs and they're my favorites.
Just the Backwoods Hillbillies are my favorite.
They're so beautiful.
So we're back in West Virginia.
I'm like, hey, we're close to the Whitaker's.
Let's go drive by.
So we drive by their house.
And I'm not thinking of doing an interview with them.
You can't because I have these rules that I set for my project for Self-White
Underbelly where I kind of do it in a studio.
I try to.
And it's an interview where I'm asking questions and these people can barely
answer anything.
They just bark or they stare at you or whatever.
So I didn't see this as being for my channel.
I just was going to say hi to them.
And we pull up and I'm like, you know, life is different now.
I have a video camera in my pocket.
Let me just shoot a video of this as I'm saying hi to them.
And I'll show it to my friends back home who have been here before.
I've seen them about, you know, I've heard about them before.
So I'm shooting a video as I'm talking to them.
And as I'm shooting, I'm realizing this is kind of interesting.
I wonder if, if I stretch this out, maybe it could be a video somehow and I
could use the portrait from Create Equal because I always include a portrait in
all my videos.
If it doesn't have a portrait, I don't use it.
So, you know, I kind of think I could use it.
But then I just proceeded.
I made it as long as I could.
I asked them the same question over again.
They couldn't answer them because they don't really communicate so well.
But that video ended up, I ended up editing it and putting it together.
And I put it on my channel.
And now it's got 33 million views.
33 million.
It's crazy.
What is the story with that family?
The parents were double, I think their parents were double first cousins.
But in addition to being double first cousins.
What is double first cousins?
I don't even know.
But in addition to that, their fathers, on both the mother and the father side,
were twins, identical twins.
So it's like the same person birthed the mom and dad, even though they were
different people, but they're identical twins.
And then the parents were cousins on top of it.
Oh.
Yeah.
And then who knows what other environmental issues there are.
What is a double cousin?
Double cousins, first cousins, but twice.
They share both sets of grandparents.
It can happen in both parents of one double first cousin or also the siblings
of parents of another double first cousin.
This is like a puzzle to do for a test.
I don't explain it.
I don't understand it.
It can happen when two siblings meet and have offsprings for two other siblings.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
I don't understand it.
I don't understand it.
But there's a guy who did all the genetic mapping of this.
And he just showed me.
He posted a video on YouTube.
Jesus.
Yeah.
So he explains the whole genealogy of this.
So that is this family.
First double cousins share all four grandparents.
Okay.
So this family was deeply inbred.
Yeah.
And as poor as can be.
Poorer than poor.
I mean, the conditions under which they live are like unbelievable.
Like the house is so filthy.
How do they get any money?
I'm sure they get some support from the state or something.
But when I did that video, I just felt like the right thing to do is to help
them financially.
You know, because even though YouTube demonetized that video, eventually I
fought YouTube on it and they eventually monetized it.
I don't know why they would demonetize it because there was no swearing, no
nothing.
It's just a poor family.
But that's YouTube.
But eventually I'm making money on that video.
So I just feel like I'll share it with them.
And then I got so many people requesting, oh my, how do I help this family?
So I put up a GoFundMe that's just for them and people donate to it and I give
them money.
And I've given them lots of money now.
And you can see in the more recent, there's I think four videos with that
family.
Their living conditions have improved quite a bit.
So was the entire family inbred?
The woman who's talking, is she just like a lesser?
They're all brothers and sisters.
Except for Timmy, who is Lorraine's.
The family tree is someone put together.
Yeah, yeah.
Did you put this together?
No, I did not.
This video is four days old.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
This is the one I told you about.
So the father of John Emery Whitaker and Gracie Whitaker are identical twins.
There you go.
Maybe the twins born March 1st, 1882.
Yeah, so Henry Wade Whitaker and John Whitaker.
So the children of identical twins then had sex.
Who are also cousins.
Oh, Jesus.
Yeah.
So I posted that video.
They've become so popular.
People want more videos from them all the time, but I don't want to just turn
them into a circus act.
But now their living conditions have improved.
Yeah, because of my whatever, because of meeting me, I'm not saying I did any
great thing.
All I'm just saying is I've helped them out.
But I'm not going to milk this and turn it into a regular thing.
People want to see them weekly.
I'm not going to do that.
Is that the most bizarre of all the people that you've encountered?
Oh, no.
I mean, yeah, probably the most.
But, man, I've heard so many stories.
So many women that got pregnant by their dads at 10 years old.
So many women that have been through some of the most horrific men, too.
I mean, I could say some things here, but this video would get demonetized.
Well, we're on Spotify.
That's not going to happen.
Okay, so Latoya, who's this black girl.
She's on Skid Row to this day.
I still see her.
I help her out when I see her sometimes.
She was getting fucked in the ass by her dad and tore the area between the
vagina and the asshole.
She said, like, 27 stitches to fix that.
I mean, how that happens and the dad doesn't get, somebody doesn't get
investigated, I don't know.
But that was a different time, maybe.
Or somebody's just afraid to, who's going to make that call?
Who's going to do something?
So do you, when you, this new project, are you going to do this independently
of Soft White Underbelly?
No, no, no.
No, it's not a new project.
It'd just be a slightly.
A different direction.
A different direction.
Because I can't, how many drug addict stories do we need?
Right, of course.
I mean, I'll do them once in a while still, because a lot of my audience likes
that.
But, you know, it's interesting.
Because, like, I'll put up gang member videos, and some of the audience are
like, oh, I hate these gang members.
They're too violent.
But there's similar lessons.
I watched one of the gang member videos today, and it's, you know,
he was just talking about how no one ever encouraged him in any way when he was
growing up.
He was never worth shit, and the only sort of value that he found ever was
being a part of the gang.
Yeah, that's the story.
That's what happens to these guys.
And then, you know, I put the Appalachian videos up, and some people think they're
boring,
and other people love them, and that's, you know, they want more.
So I do a mixed bag of all kinds of stuff.
Eventually, I'd like to go to every state and just do interesting stories from
all over.
If someone has, and they're listening to this, and they have an interesting
story,
they should contact you on softwhiteunderbelly.com?
No.
There's a website that's in the about, in the header of the YouTube channel.
There's an about section up at the top of the screen, I think, or near the top
with my email address.
Okay.
Which is soft underscore white underscore underbelly at yahoo.com.
There you go.
Yeah.
Jamie's good.
And so, good luck sorting through all those.
No kidding.
Yeah.
After this.
After this, yeah.
Yeah, but listen, what you've done is very fascinating and very disturbing, but
I think ultimately educational.
And if anything, I think it will bring a sense of understanding of what these
people have been through.
That, you know, you can't just say, hey, you're lazy.
Go get a job.
It's, there's a lot going on and it's horrible and it, and it's, you know, it's
showing the flaws in this culture.
It's showing the massive problems that we have in raising human beings in these
gigantic cities.
It's hard to believe this is the greatest country in the world.
Yeah.
With these stories.
Right.
How could that be the greatest country in the world?
Yeah, how could it be?
But it is.
Yeah.
That's what's even more fucked, right?
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
Thanks for being here.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thanks for doing what you do.
It's, uh, it's been very, very disturbing, but ultimately very educational.
Well, you do a great job too.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate you.
All right.
Bye, everybody.