Discovering America's Soft White Underbelly | Mark Laita

we're going to start posting each podcast episode that you see on youtube a week earlier on patreon so feel free to join for early access to all episodes plus we're going to start doing bonus podcast episodes every week so if you want to join patreon it's patreon.com concretevideos next week's episode is already posted there so feel free to go check it out hello world today my guest is mark lata mark started his career as a world-renowned professional photographer whose clients include the likes of apple bmw coca-cola mcdonald's budweiser and the list goes on and on forever um but he decided to give all of that up for his new passion which is essentially doing these disturbing character studies on the most [ __ ] up human beings in america on his fascinating youtube channel called soft white underbelly mark interviews pimps prostitutes homeless drug addicts inbreds he actually went to the home of an inbred family in appalachia and and filmed his entire encounter which is stunning it's on his youtube channel mark is doing some extremely powerful work which is shining light on in my opinion one of the biggest problems in this country which is raising our children so grab a seat and buckle up ladies and gentlemen because this podcast will knock your socks off please welcome mark leda so for people out there who don't know who you are why don't you give me just like a brief uh background on yourself who am i uh who is marc laida uh i'm a photographer that uh i did advertising for my whole life since i was a teenager and that's what i did for decades but then kind of with starts and stops i kind of started doing these portraits down on skid row in los angeles and then i started doing interviews with some of the people and it's just kind of grown from there and uh now i'm doing uh pretty much devoting most of my time almost all my time to these interviews of of all kinds of interesting characters yeah a lot of drug addicts a lot of gang members a lot of sex workers a lot of and you know i'm branching out and going to other things now too yeah it's interesting to see a guy like yourself from the traditional advertising world kind of diving into like the digital social media world with youtube yeah i definitely noticed instantly the crossover with your photography on the thumbnails like going on your channel and seeing all of the thumbnails are like amazing photographs of these characters in your studio yeah i mean that that's what i do i'm i'm a photographer and i do a good job of that i'm not going to feel like over a million subscribers on youtube right you have like 1.3 million subscribers four or four right now yeah i just saw um no but when i first started it which is really just like a year little over a year ago year and a half ago i i thought i'd have 20 subscribers i honestly thought this is just going to be for a couple friends of mine to laugh at to find interesting and i just think it's worth doing so i'm just going to do it and i thought maybe 20 30 oddballs would find find it interesting because there's always people for every you could put up anything and and there's somebody out there that that responds and i had i got those 30 subscribers and then i got 60 and then i had 100 and then i had 300 and then and then and now it's 1.4 million that's crazy that is insane man i had no idea that there was you know i mean i kind of knew i mean maybe i you know your subconscious is very interesting how it's different than what you like on the on the surface i kind of thought that no one would be interested but maybe subconsciously i knew better because we're all human yeah and if you're human you struggle who doesn't we all do and that's what these stories are really all about what gave you the idea to to start bringing these people into your studio and interviewing them like what means initially i had a studio down the skid row i've had three of them now but the first one um i was doing portraits and it was great i had a great location people would just walk in and i do i give them a little cash and i do a portrait and that was it that's what i've always done is just photography and then canon came out with these uh uh cameras that do video the 5d and the 7d exactly is a 5d and uh i said oh let me just play around with this let me you know there's this one prostitute a heroin drug heroin addict and she was a prostitute caroline that i got to know down there and i said hey would you would you want to do an interview i kind of knew a little bit of her story and she said sure so she sits down and i point this little camera at her and we just did a i didn't take it seriously i just thought this is just i'm just going to play around with this stupid video camera i've never shot video in my life and uh i was like whoa this is this is heavy and it was that was incredible i just got really lucky the first time i thought and that was that i didn't really think it was going to turn into something and then i i did a few more and you know damn if they weren't all interesting in different ways and i'm you know it's i've said this before in other interviews where um richard branson from virgin said talking about career choices said you you create four lists one list is everything you're good at another list is everything you're bad at a third list is everything you love and the fourth list is everything you hate if you look at all those strengths and weaknesses and and things you you're into and things you're not into it'll tell you what to do so i'm really into psychology i've always been than that and i find people super interesting you know just the way you look the way you dress the way you wear your hair the way your your body language all these things everybody is interesting to me and then you get all these in the united states you get all these different characters you know the people in boston look very different from the people in miami and then you go to new mexico they're very different from the how they look in minnesota and those are so interesting to me i i've been to every state now for for my first book create equal i went to every state and and i found every single state interesting not i wouldn't want to live in south dakota but it's interesting it could be to me because it's just wow look at how these people live look at the struggles they have look at look at this the the stories that are there and i just find it all so interesting so i'm really into that so that's the psychology and the people aspect and i'm also into photography and i'm also into like these stories and and you know just the the psychology you know i mentioned this in one of the recent interviews that i'm interested in the human struggle the the the thing that we all go through which is you know trying to find love trying to find happiness trying to find fulfillment trying to make a living trying to just survive and thrive in the world and i find all that stuff so interesting and it's just interesting it's it's it's it's and then then we also seem to be like in our own way like we'll do things to to screw ourselves up you know like why why would you start why would you drink like that just to to alienate your entire family to lose your your wife you know lose all your income lose your job lose every you've just destroyed your own life why would you do that so that became really part of this whole process too so so really what this this project is is a mix of all of these things all put together all the things that i'm good at all the things that i love and i don't have all the all the other hassles and all the things that other jobs like my advertising career there's lots of ass kissing and there was a lot of a lot of doing things you didn't really want to do i loved photography but but i was doing photography for for that i don't give a [ __ ] about it but they look great i can swear right you're photographing oh yeah you can swear i don't give a [ __ ] about that i mean so often i would say to you know axel my assistant who works with me for decades still does on these trips he goes comes with me and i would say to him all the time like yes i would hate this so much what i'm doing i give two shits about this but there's money so we're doing it and it's like but that's how you're spending your life is doing something you really don't want to do and now the digital technology has kind of undermined your ability to make a great living which i used i've made a great living at photography at advertising photography it was i mean well you have some of the biggest [ __ ] clients i've ever seen i had a client list that was so ridiculous give me like give me like your top five clients everybody i shot literally for everybody every single client right yeah of course a hundred times and and mercedes-benz and ibm and apple i was the apple photographer for like 10 12 years uh you name it everybody so you you though i was wildly successful and it was really great it was a really great ride for 10 to 14 years there it was wonderful i loved it and i was really proud of it but eventually it got to a point where it's like i just wasn't happy i wasn't enjoying it anymore and it's like and then it also became more difficult to make the money that i got used to because digital technology changed like find somebody in this whole state that doesn't have a camera in their pocket right and eventually that bleeds that that affects people like me right who charge with that whole gig economy you just go online well i i i would charge more than anybody else in the world for what i did but when somebody had a client like intel and they needed to spend we just want the best who's the best and boom they'd come to me and i'd make i'd charge whatever i charge and they would pay it because they're not going to cut corners and pay somebody cheaper be oh this photographer is a quarter of the price they don't care it's intel or it's apple or it's whoever and i would always get the job and i made so much money it was ridiculous so so that was great and then eventually eventually it became not great and i i really was just i was unhappy and then also what happened is because all the digital type technology there became all this cheap competition and the economy kind of took a turn for the worse and all kinds of other things happened in the world and it just became really difficult for guys like me to make the money that i was used to i mean i still do jobs once in a while i did one last week a nice one and i've got another one coming up and that's what that's really what supports this channel because i'm still not making money at this channel you know youtube demonetizes pretty much everything i put up even really even the clean videos like there's there's a even the cleanest video i'll put up something that doesn't have a single swear word drugs were never mentioned sex work nothing you know like uh selena this little uh high school girl that's a really sweet story from appalachia that got demonetized like there's nothing wrong with that video it's a high school kid talking about avoiding the the the the dangers for this you know drug that's a big problem man that's a it's so hard to make money you know when they demonetize everything i put up from the from the get-go they they can't even watch it they just see like like like norman this guy uh a crack addict he was recovering i put up his videos they demonetized i put one up this morning he got demonetized come on he's not even talking about drugs he's just talking about the fact that he got laid off at work and he's going to persevere and he's going to try to get another job that's all the talk is about and they talked about kobe bryant at the end and it's like that's it do you hit that button the manual i can't make money on youtube yet maybe one day something will change or shift or maybe i'll put up so many i'm not going to swear so many videos that eventually it'll turn the corner and i'll start making more money but but i spend a lot of money doing this like those 10 pedophiles that i i told just told you about off camera that i interviewed 10 pedophile sex offenders that's why you're down here in florida right that's why i'm here in florida um so tell me tell me about that how did you find out about this locate this this trailer park or whatever it was well i do i do a lot of research i mean like like when i'm looking for the cookless clan or or in this case sex offenders or whatever like i i found that there's this mobile home park in in saint petersburg florida that has nothing but sex offenders because they're not allowed to live near schools they're not allowed to do they can they can only live in certain areas so this trailer home park is like somebody figured out like let's just put them all here they'll all be happy they'll all be self-contained the community won't have a problem with them and that solves all the problems and it i just figured let me just go there and see what i can work out and it worked out great yesterday was like shooting fish in a barrel for me so how do you approach something like that you just are you just show up to the mobile home park with your camera in your hands sometimes you guys i want to know something like i don't want to i don't want to travel all the way across the country for nothing right exactly but that's happened because because my saying that i use a lot with this project is you got to kiss a lot of frogs and and sometimes i'll do these interviews and i got to sit through 45 minutes of pain and misery and really difficult things that are being shared and i'm not going to use it because i only use about one out of six that i shoot so so it's not like i just shoot videos and put them up i shoot a lot of videos and i use only the best ones um but sometimes you just have to like wing it and just show up and do it that way because because sometimes you can't really set things up like i'm a photographer from la and i'm going to come to st petersburg florida i'm going to interview you you pedophiles don't call yeah that's not gonna work right of course that doesn't fly so you have to feel everything out and every single situation is different so you can't there's no formula for how we can get a ku klux klan member to share a story because they don't like doing interviews because they usually get colored as as bad guys or or or racist or what whatever which which you can say whatever you want about them but but all i'm looking to do is a non-judgmental right interview with them not good i'm not saying i'm not saying anybody is what it is the pedophiles i'm not the sex offenders i'm not i'm not saying anything good or bad about them every single one came back to me later on says that was great and thank you for talking to me [Music] so that that's a that's a huge part of how do you approach them though like i just tell them what i'm doing what exactly do you say to them uh well i mean it kind of you have to feel it out you you have to be a chameleon to figure out what will work for you what will work for her what will work for all these different people and it's not the same approach all the time it's always very different and i'm very good at feeling that out so so again it goes back to those the list that richard branson mentioned it's like you need to like one of my strengths is i'm able to figure out what you might be thinking or feeling and i can adapt my behavior to to work with you by speaking a little more slowly or or or or saying the right things or maybe it's just about money for you or maybe it's not about money like in appalachia money doesn't work really money doesn't work they don't even take money the majority of the interviews in appalachia you know when we're all done i pay people and i i'll put like a hundred dollars in there in their hand and they jump back like no they won't even take the money yeah one of your most popular uh video series on your channel is about an inbred family right where where did they live it's got 12 or 13 million views um yeah it's got like yeah the insane amount of when i was doing crate equal my my first book which is all american portraits i went to every state and i did portraits of all kinds of people from astronauts to ballerinas to politicians to drug addict everything everything you can imagine that exists in the united states polygamists everything um we were in west virginia just driving around as i would do and just just driving around just with no goal no no no one to hook up with we were just looking around and went to a convenient like a little truck stop and there was a cop there and i just you know you know cops are really good to talk to because they know everybody they know all the stories and all the stuff so i i went up to the cop and told him what i'm doing he goes yeah i could do that i get off at two o'clock great i'll meet you too right here so i did and he just took me to a whole bunch of different spots that were incredible he was great of all you know i have i use these kind of contacts very often and he was one of the best in uh in uh raleigh county west west virginia he was amazing and and he eventually after it was not on the first trip but the second trip there took me to see the the whitaker family in in in odd a town called odd west virginia odd west virginia yeah well west virginia and kentucky have a lot of these towns that are just have these strangest names i just did a video i think last week of a girl that lives in hell for certain kentucky and and there's there's the most ridiculous names for for towns in both west virginia and kentucky so there's a town in in west virginia called odd and there's there's a bunch of other and this cop just took you to these guys but he actually said it's a great story he this was a second trip to west virginia the first one we were doing some other things and all our equipment got rained on so we had just like we can't even shoot here we can't rent new equipment because we're in west virginia so we had to pack up and go home but he said when you come back make sure you bring video camera because you're gonna need video for this and this was back when i was this was 2004 when i was doing great equal um which was just photography no no videos and uh he goes make sure you bring a video camera and i'm just like yeah yeah yeah i don't do video i've never touched a video camera in my life so we went back to la and then two weeks later we came back and he goes you brought a video camera right i'm like no i didn't he got all pissed at me he was like like i told you to bring a video camera and then so whatever we he took us there and he was exactly right it was the most like that little scene from deliverance that everyone knows we come around this you know we're on a road and it turns into this little country road then it turns into a dirt road and we come to this trailer and then a little shack on the other side of the road and there's these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us and the one guy would just you'd look at him in the eye or say anything and he would just scream and go running away and his pants would fall around his ankles he'd go running off and go kick a garbage can and this would happen over and over it was it was out of control the craziest thing i've ever seen but eventually got you know it's an interesting story i this this shows you how i operate this is this is why the barrier to entry for this project is incredible and barrier entry is the key to making business successful whatever you're doing because if you just do something that's easily duplicatable um then everyone's just going to copy it and do it but but here's this this gives you a window into what i do so this family in west virginia gets they're they're like kind of protected by the neighbors and the relatives and whatever whoever you know they don't they don't like people coming to ridicul these people and everybody in the area kind of knows of them and oh let's just go over the whitakers and laugh at them or something this kind of stuff happens so i was this city slicker with cameras and you know it's a pretty not a huge production but it's like it's clearly i'm not from around here and it's clear that i'm doing something different so just my luck we showed up and somebody in their family had just passed away and they were all mourning the death of their aunt or their grandmother or their somebody and i asked one of the one of the brothers who actually spoke if i could do these portraits and he goes no we're we're we just had a death in the family and we're all morning and we're having a funeral soon and blah blah blah and it's just not a good time like damn it i came all the way out here and this happens it's like it's just terrible timing so i have to be respectful and say okay i'm sorry thank you maybe i'll come back and that's just the way it goes but then i started thinking about it like you know what it might be really nice for them if because i was shooting eight by ten polaroids at the time eight by ten film but then shooting eight by ten polaroids they get a big instant print okay and i i said if i shot polaroids of them they could have a print of the entire family and they can include that in the casket with their loved one and they might actually be into that so i i shot one of the members of the family and then i shot a second one in the third and fourth and eventually they liked that idea and they said okay and that's what i did i ended up getting portraits of everyone i wanted to and i gave them a print and and did all the little nice things i do on the behind the scenes and they that was that it was it was a nice little relationship i started and we would go back whenever i'd be in west virginia shooting in like other projects and stuff which wasn't often but once or twice i'd be there and i'd go visit them and say hi and then so so now i'm working on this project and i was just like like let's just drive by and say hi again and i knew i couldn't do an interview like i'd do which which is a little more civilized like this these people are so hard to you can't even it's hard to communicate with them right and and i don't know if it was ever going to work out anyway so so it was i was just i was just with my iphone i just picked up my iphone and i shot this stupid little video just kind of to show that that the level of level of poverty level of everything that was in that family without any int it wasn't meant for my channel because i won't post a video unless it has the portrait and i couldn't get another portrait i knew that was it wasn't going to be in the in the works the last time it was a miracle that it happened i don't think that was going to happen again so i was just shot this little video and as i was shooting i realized this is kind of interesting this might actually work let me let me just follow through with it and see if maybe so you know i see a lot of comments i get all the kind of comments from this is you know everything you can imagine on a video that that becomes that popular it becomes really interesting just to read the comments but yeah everything from i'm an exploited bastard to uh yeah this is this is incredible and everything in between um but uh i figured i was going with that but it it just turned into something like yeah i guess i could kind of use this i can use the portraits from create equal which is what i did and i can post it the video the video and i did and i didn't know what what it didn't really fit the channel i didn't really say anything in the video it was just something that was it feels exploitive but uh but i but you know i think it's good for us all to know that a lot of these things exist for sure you know people say oh you're what you're doing is exploitive all the time look a hotel the hotel i'm staying at while i'm here in tampa they're exploiting my need to sleep yeah the rest the restaurant that i had breakfast at is exploiting my hunger where everything is exploitive you know you take a picture of photography and video especially or by nature exploitive because if i take a picture of a girl for an ad you're exploiting her beauty you're paying her for her beauty and you're using it in an ad that's is that not exploitive so everything can be viewed as exploitive except the difference is this is actual real [ __ ] that's that's that's whatever it is paid acting or modeling whatever right now right here you're shining a light on something that's real like you're shining a light on an actual well an actual wound yeah yeah i mean i there's so many different ways of looking at what i do and a lot of people take a negative view saying oh you're just exploiting these people for money i'm not really making money but but one day i might so you have to take that off the table so i'm one day i might make money so so yes i'm exploiting people from money but but i'm also kind of exposing or just creating awareness of what's going on in our country in in terms of like drug addiction and gang violence and sex work and all these destructive things that people are going through and like all the poverty that's that's you know people can say all these people in appalachia are living wonderful lives leave them be yeah but they could also get a lot more support from the government or from corporations or something so they could not be digging up roots in the middle of the winter climbing mountains to survive on ten thousand dollars a year that's a rough life despite the fact that they don't complain it's still a really rough life and i think a lot of these things are important to that we all understand what what's going on in the country so that that's that's an important thing to to consider when you're saying it's just exploitive and and yes they're exploitable if i take a drug addict and i do an interview with with her she takes the hit because she's been made to look bad no no i didn't trick her into doing that she came to me or or or i might have asked her and said you know but i want i tell everybody right up front like this is going to be on youtube your family the police your kids your relatives everyone you know will could see this video and i make sure they understand that going in and if they still want to do it then we do it but but yes these people don't look great in these videos sometimes because they're being exposed as homeless drug addicts so for that that that person maybe takes a little bit of a hit but they're happy and i compensate them nicely and i continue to take care of them long after the video is posted in different ways you know here and there i'll give them money for this or whatever i'm not going to cure their addiction that's a whole other conversation that we can get into but but it's um it's a for that one person to be vulnerable and say here's what i'm going through and this is how it happened i was molested at six years old that's a painful thing for me to sit with for the rest of my life i discovered this drug it kind of numbs the pain i i escape from all my pain and i can live peacefully for a while but then i started doing it more regularly and i became addicted and now i'm a hardcore addict and and now i'm doing sex work to pay for my drugs and i'm homeless and my life is a shambles i've lost my kids i've lost my everything family won't talk to me and my life's a train wreck i think it's important for us to understand that the child abuse that happened here at six years old sorry is it is is important for us to factor into everything that's that that we're doing and going on and just like and and and my videos you know it's like if we if we did we all right let's let's say i'm not going to do the videos anymore let's just let marianne continue to live her life and create the cycle of destruction and then her kids will get molested by her uncle who was you know doing whatever and then it just continues on for another generation and it'll continue on for many generations so i think by creating some awareness we can say hey maybe we shouldn't leave the six-year-old kid with the uncle do we know what the uncle's doing when we're we're off and the kids alone i mean yeah so so a little understanding and awareness of what can go on doesn't mean it always does but seems to happen a lot is important so i think there's a benefit in these videos i think there's an exploitive nature to them and there's always a good side and a bad side to everything is is christmas uh which which one is christmas is it a uh a celebration of the birth of jesus or is it an exp holiday where uh retailers are exploiting the you know everybody's every we're all buying gifts for everybody they're going to make 80 of their profit for the year during december which one is it it's both it's always both when a when a very attractive female marries a very wealthy man is it because he's going to provide security and a better life than the guy she went to high school with or is it true love right it's both it's always both and it really depends on your perspective so whenever whenever i see these terribly negative comments or even the the positive ones you also you have to factor in that that person's take on it are they are they envious that maybe i thought of this and i have the courage to do it are they there's so many different factors behind the scenes but it's never as simple as oh these are just exploitive and that's it yeah no it's much more complex i stopped looking at the comments uh over a year ago because i realized i realized very quickly it's not good for your mental scent it's not good no i i i tend to steer away from him i might watch him or a little bit in the morning yeah when i'm having breakfast and that's about it yeah but otherwise it's just it's so toxic it's toxic it really is toxic because because people i know like i've asked all my friends like have you ever left a comment on youtube like no one i know has ever done it no i've never done it but but you know having said that there's still a ton of people that make these really positive evolved compassionate comments on my channel and that's beautiful to see and that's the majority but for every every 10 of those there's one that's just like really messed up that's the opposite and it's human nature to only like the negative one sinks in the positive ones you're just like oh that's cool that's cool but the negative one sticks with you yeah so i find i'm happier if i just i'm doing this for myself i'm not doing it for anybody else i'm not trying to make anybody happy some people say oh i hate these appalachian people stop doing that get back to the drug addicts and other people say these appalachian things are great that's all i watch i don't give a [ __ ] right i'm not doing it for anybody else i never understood the people on on the internet who create content only for the viewers i mean like the customer's always right like tell me what you want me to do next like there's a lot of people i've talked to on here who have really successful channels on youtube who say i only do what people suggest in the comments like i don't do anything else no i do this 100 only for myself and if i think the hillbillies and out in kentucky and west virginia are interesting i'll just do that nothing but for the rest of my life but most likely i'll i'm probably going to steer away from that soon and i'll do something else around the country and i'll find that interesting and i'll stick with that for a while and i'll keep jumping around all over the country because there's interesting stuff everywhere there's a lot of interesting stuff right here in tampa and st pete so me and you are i feel like me and you are are so much the same in the aspect of our transition from advertising into did you work in advertising creation our own content yeah my whole life but i when i was young i picked up a camera and just started making videos when i was like 15 years old and eventually started getting paid to do that um and it was more of in like the entertainment industry okay um basically like shooting and produci like producing commercials and tv pilots and then worked into feature films and then after that kind of transitioned into advertising i started my own digital media agency where we did we did like full scope branding for for local brands and like national brands as well and it was more more so video and creative not so much photography and same same exact thing as you same exact thing that you're saying to me is i started to hate it i started to eventually it just was like okay i'm just doing what these people i'm doing what these people need i'm putting my heart and soul into this work so these people can just make a profit and it's it's soul sucking at the it just became just so redundant and and soul-sucking for me i was just like as well with the creating like tv pilots and pitching them in networks and having these old men in suits telling me how i need to change this this piece that i made this creative masterpiece that i created so it would fit their advertisers right like i'm creating content not not for what it is or what how it's going to affect people but i'm creating it so it will fit the mold of what their advertisers will pay them and that's what i just got the worst taste in my mouth from that industry and i was just like [ __ ] that i'm going to start i'm going to take everything that i've made over the past 10 years i'm going to repackage it and put it on youtube and that's how i transitioned into doing stuff on youtube but the difference between me and you i think is like i needed money i was like i didn't get paid a lot doing that during i mean i made good money but not an insane amount of money i wasn't even paid by apple i think my biggest client was like land rover but i was like i need to make a slow transition from the paid advertising industry into doing my own [ __ ] on youtube yeah no i was i was lucky that i had savings from from my past career that i could just do whatever i wanted to and this is what i wanted to do and if i want to shoot hillbillies and nothing but for the rest of my life that i'm free to do that so you're set you don't have to ever make a dime on youtube no no no i mean i mean i tend to do things with gusto whatever i do if i care whether it's whether it's a project or a relationship or or a house or of whatever i do i do i'm very intense like anybody that knows me just like he's wound up i'm wound up mm-hmm to a fault but i can i can relax and kick back sometimes but but right now i'm just i'm in work mode and i'm just like i just work all day every day seven days a week that's all i do and uh and i love it i'm happy but you know doing advertising you just your tolerance for doing things for money just it's got war thin yeah like a creative prostitute yeah yeah no that's exactly it yeah it's exactly the same and uh you know you talk to these all these prostitutes and you know i asked them either on camera or often i mean do you do you respect the guys that you that you see and every single one of them says no of course of course not these guys are all a bunch of creeps and you know it's like you know i had some really great clients that i that i still continue you know i'm still friends with from advertising but but the whole nature of doing things for money is just it's it's it's hard you can do it once in a while okay i just did it last week and it's like okay it was cool nice client but it's nice if you can pick and choose right it'd be nice if you could pick and choose but but this this project for me is a reaction to all the stuff i did for money so there's no way like let's say some big network picks it up and wants to do a version of this channel let's say they offer me a gazillion dollars and say yeah but you need to whenever the girl talks about how she got had sex or raped when she was six years old you gotta cut that out you gotta tone that down you just we can't include that that's too dark then i just would turn it down because i'm not i'm not doing this for the money i'm doing it because it's real that's amazing man like you're you're traveling and that's maybe why people respond to it because it's it's it's clearly un yeah it's just raw it's as raw as i possibly could make it and it's just real life it's just this is these are all real stories i'm sure some of them are embellished that's what you do you tell me about your high school days i'm sure you're going to tell the story where the the gym coach was like 350 pounds and he was seven feet tall when he actually was like you know six foot two and he was 220 pounds but that's what happens with stories over the years but but the the rawness of these and the realness of it it's just that's that's why i think they the audience has grown so quickly so you're traveling the world you're traveling the country trying to make it just a country if i did the world i think it would it would take time off my life and you've been in florida for three days now right it'll be a total of 48 hours and i'm guessing you're working at least eight to ten hours a day more than that and you're and you're doing this without making any money yeah yeah no like that's insane well these sex offender videos you think i'm going to make any money on that look what i paid each of these 10 guys is a lot you know for a pedophile to come on and tell you everything that he's done which all these guys did and some of them were victims of stings and stuff like that so their stories are not so damning a lot of these guys have these horrific stories that just make your the hair stand on the back of your everything um it cost me a lot of money to get these 10 video interviews and i'm not going to make a penny on i might make 15 20 30 would it be a nice thing to happen for a couple years down the road for netflix to yeah yeah come to you and that would be good and if it ever that would be a night you would you would like that yeah no that would be helpful because what i could do with with more financial support would make what i'm doing now pale but i just don't want to spend that kind of money on something that you know i can go broke and even though i might have a lot of money i'll i can burn through that well i mean if you don't have money you might you may not be making dollars but you're certainly gaining influence online i mean you have over a million subscribers yeah you have a lot of attention i don't even know i mean it says i have a 1.4 million subscribers but i don't think i do because like the video i posted today has or let's say the one yesterday i got my wi-fi turned off but let's let's say the video i posted yesterday has 25 30 000 views or maybe maybe 60 000 views that to me tells me that i have about 60 000 subscribers not 1.4 million because there might be 1. 1.4 million that have been on my channel at a certain point and no one's gonna subscribe to that but they're not watching every day um what what i get on my lowest videos which is just you know 30 to 60 000. that's how many subscribers i think i have yeah it's it's definitely it's not as transparent as you would imagine with the the youtube the way out the algorithm works and who they push their content to and why they push their content well youtube has really been really good to me because they recommend my videos a lot do that yeah i get i i get lots of views you know that i seem i i think i don't really know i don't know anything about social media but it seems like i'm getting a lot of like people say oh yeah i get recommended your stuff all the time okay so that seems to be a good thing so i think youtube has been good to me even though they do demonetize a lot of my stuff yeah i mean that is a comment we're talking about we're talking about sex and child abuse and drugs and murder and gang violence and child molestation all these th those are not going to get monetized yeah i'm just not going to get monetized so advertisers don't want it what what was like one of the most gut-wrenching stories that you heard in st pete talking to those pedophiles like what was one of the craziest encounters you had down there oh yeah let me wait till the videos come out see people understand i i do these interviews and it's not like i'm sitting there absorbing everything that's being said it's impossible i don't think any human could sit through ten of these things all day long and and soak up every single story i don't know how therapists do it yeah i'm sure that'd be i think a professional therapist probably just kind of doesn't absorb everything they must have some tool you're just trying to get stuff out of them right you're just trying to let them talk tell their stories and that's why sometimes i'll see these things like you ask them how many kids they have twice in one interview look i'm doing i'm operating two cameras framing exposure i'm using natural light so the light changes if a cloud goes by the audio levels the like let's say something happens on their wardrobe or their hair or whatever i need to i'm doing so i'm like a one-man band doing so many things all at once right that it's so impossible to oh and also while i'm doing all this i'm conducting an interview i need to keep track of your story and i just talked with nine other people and i can't remember were you molested by your uncle or your dad or your cousin or were you not most i don't remember who's who and it all becomes a blur after a while so for me to remember every aspect of every single people think i do one interview and i'm just sitting there like uh like a talk show host doing that one interview and i i'm i'm very conscious that talk show host is not operating cameras or microphones right or worried about the 12 people outside that are trying to get in and people that are texting me saying hey i need this i need that and i every single day of the year i get between 10 and 50 messages from people saying hey i need money for this i need money for that my kids got cancer my this man people you've interviewed yeah people i've interviewed they all need something and there's always an excuse why they need it and i have to deal with that all the time i just bought a second phone so i can kind of split the two because because at some point it just becomes ridiculous for me do the stories ever affect you personally emotionally i mean obviously when you're when you're producing them you're worried about a slew of different things mechanically and and visually audio everything but but after you edit them and you post them do they ever kind of hit yeah there are certain people that just really you see how terrible their lives have been and your heart can't not go out to them i'm not i'm human so it's like when latoya tells me her story and how horrible her childhood was her whole life still is man my heart just when i see her on the street and she comes over i just grab my wallet and like what do you what do you need honey let me help you because because i i just what am i going to say i can't help you today right so i do and i do it all the time and i can't cure her childhood i don't have the ability to do that if i could i would but i can't and we can't we can't cure all these i mean that's that's the tragedy of all these stories it's like people will use common sense and you know their hearts in the right place but they see these stories like mark you didn't help this person like they're not helpable you're not trying to help them right i mean i do a lot of that kind of stuff but i don't want this to become a help channel right like my channel is not about oh we're going to save so and so we're going to make them all better we're going to patch them all up and fix them up and they're going right they're gonna live happily ever after you can't go back in time you're trying to you're trying to repair something you're trying to repair a childhood you're trying to repair what happened here at six years old and that's deep in her subconscious and how do i fix her subconscious i don't even know i don't even know how to do that by trying to stop it happening to future people that's what i that's that's my take on this like it seems like preventing it from happening to the next generation would be the best attack on this it may not fix latoya but it'll perhaps fix her kids that that are being raised by somebody else and maybe it won't happen to them but but i mean i've seen firsthand what it's like to try to help these people it's so much work it takes all your time money focus energy to to try it takes a team of people to try to help one person and it still doesn't work and you know you everybody says just do a gofundme for somebody all you're doing is throwing cash at somebody who's got a drug problem in most of these cases or some other type of problem and that money doesn't get spent in the proper ways and you could argue that oil and then you you handle the money and you spend this and then make sure it goes in the right place look i'm one guy i'm one guy operating all these cameras traveling doing all this stuff all by myself not making money doing it and you want me to help so-and-so while you sit on your sofa watching right youtube videos right saying why don't you help this person i'm like come on you're you are a madman you said you shot 10 videos yesterday yesterday yeah i do that a lot that's insane that's [ __ ] insane i can do i do one of these a week maybe maybe i record two a week but i only post one a week no that's what i said i'm i'm intense i'm wound up man what is it what is it about you that makes you such a hard worker to make you want to put out so much content like i mean you're not you said yourself that you're not like a big social media guy so you're obviously not doing it to feed some sort of like i wish i wish i was doing something other than social media but i don't even know what that would be like photography i do a very vertical portrait it's a special format that i that i came up with to do a full length human portrait so the the the the perspective the ratios are basically what a human body is a six foot tall person roughly right and i had cameras custom made for that and all that and that doesn't that's a very vertical image that doesn't fit into a wide format like youtube or a square one like instagram or anything else that's on social media they're all they all don't work well with a vertical image so what do i do so i do that pan which is a huge compromise but what else do i do and i and to me the photography is more important than the portrait i mean than the interview the portrait's more important than the interview for you for me really for me if i had to choose one or the other i would do the photography why there's so much more in the interview i feel like oh i know i i see the value in the interview and everyone else does too and i get that and that i see that that's important to the don't get me wrong the photography is beautiful the photography i'm very proud of the interviews and not so much the early ones i didn't put any effort into them i didn't care about the audio i didn't care about the how the background looked or anything looked i just like pointed the camera it was out of focus i almost didn't care because i really wanted to put zero effort into the video to make sure that it you know i was what i was doing is highlight it's all about the portrait for me and if if if the uh the interview could just be audio only sit behind the portrait that would be cool for me i'd be happy with that but but you know i started doing the videos the way i do them but as time went on i kind of like all right let me let me make it look a little bit better it's hard to look at that and it's hard to listen to it because the audio is so bad especially at my skid row studio where there's so much background noise it's awful terrible i mean the noise and the sirens and the people in the background the music and all the crazy [ __ ] that goes on it's hard to do audio there but i the reason i'm there you people say why don't you just get a studio that's quieter somewhere away from skid row i have to be right where i right in the heart of all the action in order to get the people to be willing to come in open up their hearts and souls and their their subconscious basically to share those stories and feel free that they're they can run out if they have to right or at least when they're done they feel free but if they have to drive over here and do the talk i would get much more stifled interviews i wouldn't get the same kind of content what is the what would you say is the common denominator with all these people like the pimps the prostitutes the terrible chocolate terrible childhood for all of us you me and everybody else yeah anything specific about childhood or well i mean i mean if it i mean it i i said this in one of the videos i think the one with monica from patrick haiti i said uh you know software underbelly was blueist or cult's original name whose blue easter cult the band oh oh yes yeah their original name was soft white underbelly and i just thought that was a cool name and and also kind of software underbelly to me represents the most vulnerable part of an animal right it's it's like what's the most vulnerable part of a dog or a cat or a coyote or a bear it's their stomach it's not protected it's soft it's white usually soft white underbelly is it's the most vulnerable part of the country so these these stories are all about these children when they're most vulnerable get broken and that's just so [ __ ] up yeah and if we're not aware of how this all happens then we'll just continue it'll just continue for another 300 years or 3000 years so why not expose what's what's broken so that maybe we can do things to protect kids so maybe this [ __ ] won't happen to latoya or her kids or the you know the next latoya's so it's it's there's a lot of things that are really wrong and you got to put out these painful stories in order to figure it all out and that's all i'm doing so so somebody said oh you're exploding these people and all that it's like fine let's just not do it let's just let all these kids get molested and beaten up and abused and just get back to our starbucks and forget about it all or we can look at it and maybe like create some awareness and i see that kind of starting to happen people are going man this is really [ __ ] up the foster system is so broken you know you know there's so many stories of things that are just gone so bad in these people's lives and i think just by becoming more aware of how these things happen and how often they happen we can do things to prevent it not a hundred percent of the time but definitely a lot more than we're doing now which is none you know it seems it seems to just happen all the time and so what is it about skid row and specifically like your studios on skid row what is it about skid row that i mean why is it such a condensed well i mean the city of l.a kind of just decided like rather than having these people all over the city let's try to keep them in one contained spot and just let them exist there no one goes there you know most people drive around it or avoid it and it's kind of out of the way it's right next to downtown but no one really goes downtown unless you're going to the downtown part of the staples center yeah all that all that and there's some shopping and there's business and all that stuff downtown but this is just east of downtown and you would never go there unless you're trying to buy some crack or heroin or crystal meth do you think it's a good thing that skid row exists or do you think there's a better option i mean you could build a little thing out in the desert where you take all these people and all the tents and all that and you put them in the desert somewhere and then they're out of sight they still exist they're still on our planet but but you don't see them anymore so out of sight makes everyone feel better perhaps but you know it's kind of like that's what my videos do they make you see that this is going on and it goes on in every country i see it going on all over tampa you know right here it happens all over your city and i'm i've been to every state i've seen this kind of stuff in every state maybe the population is smaller in north dakota than it is in l.a but it happens in north dakota it happens everywhere different forms of it it looks different north you know it's american indians perhaps in north dakota and it's it's all kinds of people in l.a and in tampa it's this and and it's all over it seems like all you hear about on the news is trillions of dollars being spent on different things different stimulus for different stimulus packages or different wars they're spending trillions of dollars on but there's all this [ __ ] going on right under our noses that it seems like if you actually paid attention to it and it was your job to pay attention to it it wouldn't be that hard to fix if you had trillions of dollars it you know it's a complicated very complex problem you know you know like when nancy reagan was doing her war on drugs just say no to drugs and all that kind of stuff it's like drugs are not the problem no drugs aren't the problem drugs are just a symptom of the problem the problem is these people had terrible terrible terrible things happen to them when they were six years old usually it's something to do with their dad or their uncle or their cousin or their whatever and that's painful for a human to to deal with so what do you do you you come become hyper sexualized or you start using drugs or you do something to escape from that and you if you do enough drugs eventually you become addicted so then you're a drug addict so you let's say you cure that addiction you haven't solved the problem the problem is what happened to her at six years old how do you fix that you don't so you can patch her all the time you want but she'll eventually keep redoing the same behavior and that's that's really what's what's going on well how do you how do you how do you fix that how do you fix the people who created that problem how do you fix the uncle how do you how do you how do you stop that i mean what is the answer to maybe creating less losers maybe you castrate these guys that are sexist maybe something happened to that guy though when he no it i'm totally non-judgmental in these talks i did yesterday i'm not saying dude you're a bad dude you you're evil i'm never saying that ever and then as well i mean you i'm sure you like i'm not again i'm not saying it's good or bad but i'm sure a lot of people who are living in that village full of sex offenders are people who didn't commit crazy crimes maybe maybe they were in the wrong place in the wrong time and a girl was drunk and underage i talked to one guy who was uh he met a girl in a club he had to be 18 years old to get in the club so that means everyone in there is of age she had a fake id saying she was 19 he was 25 so she's nine she's six years younger than he is they had some fun then he finds out that she was only 16 and he did like seven eight years in prison and now he's a sex offender he has to register twice a year for the rest of his life he has to live in this you know this mobile home park he can't do anything with his life he can't get a job without oh you're a sex offender which is the worst thing you could ever be branded as right mm-hmm so good luck getting you know because you just to survive in the world you have to do it with gusto you have to be confident you have to be like i'm gonna go kick ass at this job interview tomorrow watch watch me kick some ass tomorrow no i'm ready these guys aren't ready for anything after that no the system is [ __ ] the system is not designed to help people become better better it's designed to to make money off people who are off incarcerating people yeah no i mean i see that the cops they were very in the h this is just one guy's case and some of these guys are serial right for sure child rapists and that's a totally different animal and one of the talks was on how there are all these different levels of sex offenders one of the guys mentioned this in the talks yesterday and that was interesting because he's i think he's right there are a sex offender's not a sex offender some some guys just you know i talked to one guy who was just nothing but you know child porn and that became that i asked him what what what got you into child porn he said that was it was just my i get i became desensitized to regular porn so i needed something more extreme and and so that's one story another one was a guy just got set up the cops did a sting and he ended up meeting a 14 year old girl at a gas station and next thing you know he was high on crystal meth and he he just wanted to have some fun with somebody and she turned out she was 14 and the cops even like anything he told me the cops uh it was old actually a woman of his age that he was meeting but then she said oh you got to meet my daughter my daughter's 13 or something like that so she's pimping out her daughter she was it was a cop oh it was a cop it was a sting and they were saying my daughter's you know you should meet my daughter she's really whatever so the whole thing was all being set up by the cops and the guy eventually got caught never never had sex with anybody but he got he got he got nailed so i'm not i'm not defending anybody all i'm doing is presenting some stories i'm not saying anyone is good or anyone is bad i just think it's i think it's important for us just to listen and understand how many interviews have you done totally do you know probably like 2 300 now 2 300 interviews in the last uh year and a half do you what else do you do do you have a family do you have do you have i i've uh i got divorced like five years ago and i have two two teenage daughters one's in college one's getting ready to go to college um seems like i i get up around three or four in the morning that's that's that's [ __ ] up already that is [ __ ] up and then i start editing in the morning and then i go to the gym every morning and then i i usually edit a little more and then i go shoot all day sometimes sometimes i just edit all day i'm traveling more now so now the travel really throws a wrench and all that but uh i'll edit all day until i go to bed and i do it all over again that's all i do i have like no social life i don't have any i don't have any time for that you mentioned earlier i'm not complaining i love it right if i didn't like it i would stop but i feel like i'm onto something that's worthwhile and i enjoy doing it so it's like why should i not do that i could sit by the pool all day but i wouldn't be happy doing that i'd rather be inside editing so i i stay busy do you do you feel like i'm happy i'm happier now than i think i've ever been really doing this yeah do you feel like you're making a difference in the world with this stuff do you feel like you're i mean i think there's potential for that i don't know if i am yet i don't i i i see like in the in the trajectory of this project i'm like i'm on the first page of that that's like i'm just beginning but you must feel like that you've started to make a dent you must feel like you're starting to make a change i mean what else what else you must feel like something is pulling you right yeah i have really high standards so whatever has been accomplished so far is not really it's nothing what is your do you have a goal well i just i just think like i'm not gonna ever share it i never talk about things i'm going to do okay i put 100 of my focus and concentration on doing it and for me to tell anybody about what i'm going to do takes away that focus and energy about from from from doing it and you need 100 of that focus and energy to do whatever you're going to do especially if it's something that's really challenging and requires a lot of courage and requires a lot of like something on your part you better just keep it to yourself and shut up and do it because if you start talking about what you're gonna i've seen this a million times with people here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do that while we're sitting at starbucks having a coffee you're not gonna do it it's almost a list of things you're not gonna do i've learned so i just if i'm going to do something i'm going to shut up and i'm going to do it and you're going to be like holy [ __ ] how did you do that went like you didn't tell me you're going to do that that's how i operate i just keep it all to myself and i just do it i find i'm much more focused that way and you you need all that focus you can get you know my my like my like axel who works with me he says you're the most focused person i've ever met i've read about kobe bryant he seems pretty intense too he was yeah that's that's but you need that kind of laser focus on just this is what i want to have happen and nothing close to that is going to work if i get something that's kind of close but not quite that's that's garbage because there's only one thing i want to see happen and i'm not going to share it that's super interesting what because if i start talking about what i'm going to do i can guarantee you i'm not going to do it too much of the energy has already been dissipated and i just won't have what it takes to make it happen i can put some effort in get half-assed and kind of do it but it really won't get done but if i shut up about it i'll do it but in your mind you must have a super clear concise always laid out vision of where you're going right absolutely and did you did you take like i said like you're saying obviously you don't want to share it but do you did you take time to to lay out that path in your own mind yeah yeah kind of but but i'm also very sometimes you have to improvise and see that oh this is going to work better than that and there's there's always improvise there's always adaptation going on like like with with this project i i find like my my opinion of of what the problem is or my ideas on what the most effective way to do what i'm doing is changes almost every week or every month right like i'll learn something like i didn't realize that that that would be something that people will respond to or i didn't realize that that would be as as it would resonate as much as i thought it would or you know i'm learning stuff all the time i didn't realize like like just recently one of one of the biggest uh kind of discoveries i i made with with you know because really what i'm doing is about the human struggle to just be happy that's really what i'm doing people think i'm doing videos on skid row or in drug addicts i'm like i'm not doing videos on drug addicts i did a whole bunch on drug addicts because it's like an extreme version of what you and i go through like i've never smoked pot i don't even drink alcohol now i haven't i don't have a problem with any of these but i never drugs are not my issue and i don't have a gambling problem i don't have other problems but you know i'm not perfect i've got issues like we all do and those struggles are common with everybody we all go through it and i i forget where i was going with this um oh what i just discovered recently so you're always changing your approach yeah i'm always changing my approach but i learned something recently that was just so heavy and so important and i'm still processing it today i don't want to name any names and she she's not on my channel but there was somebody that wanted to help that i wanted to interview but she wouldn't do it but i wanted to help and she calls me one day and says you know what i could use your help i'd like to get out of this this life and i said sure that's cool let me help you out but i just want you to know there's no there are no strings attached here i'm not i'm not your sugar daddy i'm not i'm not there's no i'm just going to help you you don't you're not obligated to me in any way i just want you to know that right up front i'm not i'm not it's not a this for that you're not trading this for anything i'm just going to help you i want to make that clear and i said i was busy that day shooting or whatever and i said let me call you tonight and sounded like this is because i'm eternally hopeful i'm i'm the most optimistic hopeful person i've ever met like no matter what obstacles there are i believe they can all be overcome no matter what they are [Music] and that's a great quality to have so this seemed to be you know again it's you know these are all long shots because very few people actually climb out of their these situations but i'm but i'm like i'm hopeful so like let's give this a try and she seemed to have a lot of potential like a lot of potential like you know you can you can you can fix your life so beautifully i saw it so clearly and she and i talked about it and and so on so so i was going to call her that night so i called that night and she's like not around that was weird this is an important phone call she have a cell phone yeah okay yeah and uh never never was able to connect with again some weird little text came back so i had an emergency or whatever and so we never connected and then i saw her on the street again shortly after that and she runs away from me like avoids me like like i'm like a like i'm a rapist or something i'm like that doesn't make sense never had any weirdness happen in the in the interactions between us and it was just it was just weird i'm like what what would make somebody do that and it continues to this day you know i i saw her before this trip and like just treating me like i'm just like the devil and i talked with some other people that do what she does and they said oh it could be this it could be that yeah and those all hold water but i honestly believe what it is sometimes sometimes you have to follow your intuition and your intuition can tell you a lot and and my intuition on this one is you you sometimes people just can't accept good in their lives you just can't and i represent good because i i i told her i'm going to help you out this is going to be just to help you out it's free it's not going to be like you're trading you're not buying anything you're not there's no i'm just helping and just she rejected it's so hard and heavy like so so it's like like like i'm like i'm evil like i'm representing something that's just so foreign and bad right and i think what it is is like when you come from when you get go through child abuse which maybe she went through maybe she didn't but my suspicion is maybe there is something there because you don't end up in that kind of lifestyle if you didn't have something terrible go on that your your brain the wires in your brain get rewired and what's good is of no use and what's bad becomes what you go after and everything is crisscrossed and it's like so you end up making terrible decisions you end up in a lifestyle that's really dangerous and self-destructive and you go nowhere in life and eventually you probably get involved in drugs or depression or something worse and that's where i felt i i just didn't represent any of that bad stuff i was just like looking to help out right without any strings attached and you get crap down for it and that i understand that because i forgiveness is the most important thing in the world to me because there's always an explanation for everyone's behavior you know one of one of the questions i ask a lot on my channel is uh what's uh what you should do at the end what's the most important thing you've learned in your life and there's so many great lessons in life i could we could talk for three hours about all these all the great lessons there are but to me the one that really hit me that i never understood and then i never knew and then i read it i'm like uh in the course of miracles which is a which is a kind of an interpretation of the bible and i'm not religious i'm the least religious person you've ever met but i was reading a course in miracles which is like an interpretation of the bible it's almost like a lay man's version of the like the bible you can't read like what the english even i don't know what that is i can't understand a page of it um of course a miracle is kind of like a a layman's version of that more understandable more more relatable and uh one of the things it said is one of the early books on it that i was reading said everything we do is either an act of love or an act of fear [Music] that's profound everything we do when i read that i put the book down for like like nine months or a year and just sat there and processed that because if you think about everything we do you know that mean thing that somebody did to you or that whatever you hell you did or that that it's all just fear fear of not getting enough fear of being hurt fear of this you can always boil it down to some fear of something and then once you understand it then all of a sudden you're you're like oh so there's no reason to be there's no benefit in being fearful there's none absolutely none it's like heaven and hell it's that extreme and it becomes like you can either act with love or not act at all that's what it boils down to [Music] and that that to me is the most most important thing i've learned wow that's heavy it's what the world needs because you look around like what is everybody doing what are what is all these behaviors that we're seeing that we're all just like so up in arms about it's all fear some form of fear and fear is not like oh i'm afraid of heights fear can be afraid of not getting enough fear of something happened to me like it happened to me when i was a kid fear of fear of there's if you really boil it all down you see that oh my that's just somebody's insecurity and fear do you think that that girl was afraid of you helping her it could have been anything because it could it could have been could have been she had a pimp who was threatening her could have been could have been fear of doing the right thing and getting her life straight and maybe that that just is too daunting an idea to to foreign an idea maybe she feels like she didn't deserve it because once you have something happen to you you're like man i don't deserve anything good in my life so you're going to reject it even if it's if even if it comes with no strings attached even it's just like here you can have this phone it's all yours you don't need to do anything except enjoy it it's um it could have been that it could have been that you know maybe there's some romantic thing going on and that that's can scare people off right you know because like when people are uh in romantic relationships sometimes people behave like why the hell are you behaving like that because they're afraid of getting hurt right but if you really have courage to override your fears you can go into that relationship with courage and just be like i know i might get hurt here but i'm going to take a risk wow you have to there's no way around it without risk you get nothing what do they say no risk no reward risk risk is such an important thing in life and and that's that's one thing about me is is i a lot of people are risk averse you know a lot of people are just afraid of taking breath oh that's too scary that's too dangerous that you might get hurt you might get you know robbed you might get whatever i've been robbed like six seven eight times down on skid row i knew i was gonna get robbed before i got robbed i got a gun to my face one time that happens all on skid row yeah yeah all kinds of [ __ ] happens there i can tell you i should write a book about all the stuff that happens behind the scenes but i don't want that to be about what my channel is about it's not a soap opera and it's not a helping channel it's about awareness and understanding that's all i wanted to do that was my goal i'm doing this for me i'm not doing it for views so so i just do these videos to create awareness but risk is such an important thing in everything we do if you don't if you don't take risk then you're wasting everybody's time right you know and i tend to love risk like if i find something risky that's what turns me on that's the only kind of female that interests me interests me that's the only kind of project that interests me that's the only kind of project of any sort building a house anything anything that's not risky just bores the [ __ ] out of me yeah i love risk i'm not a gambler but i guess i am a gambler in terms of like yeah you are gaming all right i do have a go out of the casino though i do have a gambling problem but i never casinos do nothing for me i can walk through a casino i'm like this is just noisy but but in real life risk is like it's what turns me on i was telling you before right before we started that like one of my one of my favorite stories is uh during create equal not not this project but critical uh uh we're up in san francisco hold your thought yep so as i was in san francisco with uh one of my assistants working on create equal i just i wanted to do a portrait of the hell's angels and you can't just like call them up i'm some stranger from l.a but you just you just have to show up so nine in the morning i went to the clubhouse in oakland for the hell's angels knocked on their door nobody answered knocked on the door louder nobody answered knocked on the door third time what the [ __ ] do you want like this biker shows up and he wants to kill me because i woke him up and most people be like well you don't want to do that but no i do that i do that but but i also know how to think on my feet really really well better than that's one of the things i've learned it's like no i'll figure [ __ ] out i don't know what i'm going to figure out i'm not i don't i don't even know what i'm going to have to figure out but whatever it is i'll figure it out do you bring people with you when you do this or do you do it alone i do it like i'll have an assistant driving but i don't want him involved i don't i don't i'm protecting him from getting hurt right so he's off two blocks down there you're unarmed i never carry anything i've never shot a gun no i'm not into that um but people always say you should and all that but well it's it's hairy because i'm 6'4 i can kind of take care of myself and yeah even a biker hell's angel's not going to i mean with with a gun and a bat and a chain he could probably do some damage but but i i have a knack for what's the word uh defusing i mean right whatever if if somebody's got something that they're threatening with i have a way of showing them that look i'm not a threat i'm not here to hurt anybody right here's what i'm doing like with the pedophiles yesterday nobody said no to me because i presented to them away like look i'm just looking to hear your story i'm not here to make you look like a bad guy i'm not here to do anything to you i'm not here to do anything other than hear your side of the story and they can i think that i think people can sense when somebody's up to no good or up or there's something shady going on and i don't do anything shady like i'm not a liar i don't i don't do things to people that that i have to like i go to bed tonight with a clear conscience every day of my life and that's super important to me because like i'm not tricking anybody into anything i'm not scamming anybody i'm not pulling anything i'm not pulling anything i'm just telling you what i do if you're interested that's cool and if you're not that's cool too yeah you're an open book i'm an open book and i'm not here to play anybody i'm not here to scam anybody so that's that's super important and that i think people can sense that and if you're if you're just coming at people with like you know here's here's what i'm doing i think you're interesting love to talk to you love to hear your story people love to tell their stories like i mean one of the things i find interesting on my channel is um a lot of these people have confessed to like even murders and crazy things there's there's a few people that have confessed to murders or things close to it things that don't have a statue of limitations on them so like what why the hell would you say that i'll say to them after the interview like what why the hell would you say that okay i'm not worried about it so you want me to put this on i can put it on youtube you sure and then yeah yeah go ahead so what happened after you banged on that door the hell's angel guy and he answered he slammed the door on my face uh and then i went across the street there's a little mexican restaurant that was serving breakfast i got breakfast for everybody and i brought it over and i brought a whole bunch of breakfast and they enjoyed breakfast with me and got to be friendly with them and i did a portrait about an hour and a half later no interview now i wasn't doing interviews then okay that was before i even thought that was for your project that was that was for the create equal which is a book of portraits it's really it's really just the template for what i'm doing now but create equal is just portraits there's no interviews if i wish i was doing interviews then but i wasn't and you know it takes a lot of maturity to do what i'm doing and i didn't have it then you know i did that back in 1990 i started that project in 1999 i just wasn't i wasn't mature enough i wasn't bold enough i wasn't strong enough or whatever what do you mean maturity you know to do certain things you need to have a certain some some wherewithal some some substance to yourself and i just didn't have it at the time but i do now so now i now i go up to everybody and anybody and say here's what i'm doing i'm going to sit with you for 45 minutes or whatever and hear your story in and out and and do all that that takes a lot it's how it's super draining how did you acquire that that substance or character you grow up you grow up yeah you know i'm growing up a lot as i do this yeah yeah and i i i listen that first interview i did with caroline which was in 2010 i think sorry who's caroline caroline is the heroin addict the very first interview i ever did we we talked about that earlier just a little valuable she was a heroin addict on skid row that i did the very first when the canon camera came out and i just oh let me just do an interview okay so that that's what caroline was um i listened to that very first interview and like oh i sound like a little kid i sound like a young stupid kid i asked her some stupid questions i'm like that's just dumb but whatever i put it up but but who i am now i i would never even ask some of those questions i seemed immature at the time yeah so now i'm i'm i'm a little more seasoned so so i think that's that's you know it takes a certain something a couple things i wanted to bounce off you um one of them was like i feel like the project deckhands i did was so in line with what you're doing but the main difference was i was out there for a long time shooting a lot of people interviewing a lot of people shooting a lot of b-roll and trying to turn it into a 30-minute sort of like documentary with like a a very specific feel like a very dark ambience i was very particular i spent i spent days and days and weeks searching for specific music that i wanted to use for a certain five-second piece of the of the videos right like i was very i was very like romantic romantic to it yep like i was very attached to it and i was like everything had to be perfect i didn't want to release it until everything sounded right and i was just like it was so much a part of myself and i was so afraid of just like letting go of it yeah and i feel like you've really overcome something there with what you're doing and the scale of work you're putting out i don't feel like do you have any sort of those feelings when you're working on this stuff no i honestly believe my whole life i believe that whatever i touch turns to gold so you can you can say that's bs and you say my stuff is crap but i believe that what i touch turns to gold but why i don't know i'm lucky what do you mean you touch it and it turns to gold what is it about you i i i think my photographs are better than everybody else's do you think it's something that's only inside you that if you decide if you decide to put out a piece of work it's automatically gold like what what is it about you that means one of my favorite quotes i ever heard was from michael jordan and i'm going to paraphrase so i'm sure i'm getting it wrong but it was it was i forget the series it was the bull chicago bulls playing against i think the utah jazz and it was the finals or the semifinals or whatever it was like the sixth or seventh game of the series the bulls were down by two they had two two three seconds left in the game the bulls had the ball in bounds the coach is like laying out the players you pass it here boom boom that was good try to get it to michael and then michael will do the shot and he's laying out this whole plan for this next three second play and michael just said paraphrasing he goes [ __ ] that [ __ ] give me the ball get the [ __ ] out of my way like he knew and he did the bulls won that game he knew without a doubt that he can get the job done i have that um i'm not a basketball player i'm a photographer but but i know that i if if if it's in my hands i'm gonna do it i have no doubt in my mind and that's a great gift i could be wrong i'm sure my photography is not so great sometimes i'm sure somebody else could maybe somebody do a better job but i don't i don't buy it but do you worry about your work being perfect before you put it out in front of millions people it always is it always is i'm so good at what i do i've been doing this since i was 14 years old it's all i've ever done and i'm i'm like obsessed about doing it well so so like everything i do is great i mean i'm i'm sounding like a pompous jackass just on purpose but i'm trying to make a point and that point is i'm very confident and i and i really put a lot of work behind what i do so i don't really put out a whole lot of crap there's some videos that i probably put out that are probably not worth there's three or four that i probably should take down but um i just i like putting one up every day so every once in a while like like right now i'm out of town no one's editing videos i'm like you know yeah i've got some schedule to be put up for the next five five days but at some point there becomes a week period where like [ __ ] i don't have anything to put up and i didn't shoot like you know so right but whatever i i really believe in myself i think what i do when i touch things that they're great i put a lot of effort in though i i put a ton of effort into what i do that's what people don't understand i make it look easy i make it look really easy i don't show you how much blood sweat and tears go into it i don't like showing that do you watch the videos after you post them no the only the only ones i ever the only ones the only ones i ever watched for some reason i find uh lewis lewis is this uh alcoholic that i've interviewed i mean there's a there's a there's some that i watch you know i'm so immersed in it all that i don't right and i'm editing them so i see them when i'm editing them but the ones that i would actually sit and watch something i find lewis is delivery he's almost like a comedian and it's very entertaining he should be a comedian he's really fun to watch and there are other people that are really kind of charismatic and they're interesting to listen to but but i tend to not do that i don't have time for it another thing i want to bounce off you and again i'm only the only reason i'm bringing this stuff up is because i feel like i can learn a lot from asking you these questions um you mentioned that richard branson quote about about making the four different lists of things that you're good at things you're not good at things you like things you hate yeah um i feel personally that this thing this this podcast these raw conversations are somewhat very much the same as a lot of the documentaries that i've done and also so different number one i mean the main difference is it's basically it's a documentary minus all the prep work minus all the travel minus all the music minus all the b-roll it's just straight raw dialogue which is great it's just raw story it's like what joe rogan does and it's everything i'm not good at though no you're pretty good at it but i'm terrible at i'm really am terrible i mean it's it's like i'm a terrible interviewer right i'm a terrible interviewer i'm not a good interviewer i'm not even a good conversationalist but but i i make an effort and really these are not interviews in my mind these are these are photographs with a little bit of backstory mm-hmm so i'm not i'm you know everyone says oh you're a terrible interviewer that's okay that's fine i'm not trying to be a great interviewer right i'm trying to be a great photographer and these these little backstories of the person's story kind of helps and by doing 2000 of them i'm eventually becoming a little bit better at it and sometimes when the when the dynamics between me and the subject are right then it becomes more of a like a better conversation that happens sometimes just you put two people in a room together they're gonna click or they're not and sometimes i click with people and they are and sometimes they're just we're just like it's just not gonna ever right but uh no you you get better at whatever you do a lot of right well i feel like again the the some of my most successful work is like it's a story it's storytelling it's a it's a it's a kind of like a documentary but it's also kind of like a music video like the music really gives you the vibe and it really tells the music actually tells 50 of the story and this is the opposite of that but i can do as many as i want in a week versus if i do work on one of those documentary projects it takes me a lot more work i can maybe do one in a month if i bust my ass yeah for sure and that's what i'm good at i'm good i'm good at using a camera i'm gonna i'm good at at the creating like the creative no no i'm good like i'm good at taking the camera out at night with natural light and creating this really cool cinematic looking interview with like a boat in the background and the moonlight and and putting dark music to it and making it really resonate with somebody really like hit you when you watch it and this is the complete opposite of that yeah but i'm doing it because i can do more of them and it's i'm doing it what i've learned from doing this is it's made me even though i'm still terrible at it it's made me a better communicator yeah it's made me like a it's improved so many aspects of my life just by being able to sit here uninterrupted and talk to somebody for two hours i find that i'm starting to become a little more like i'm very shy i'm very i'm not like an outgoing i don't like being in front of the camera i don't like doing all that kind of stuff and to be like to be doing these talks eventually you kind of just start at least i'm easing into it and i'm kind of like getting a little more comfortable with it where maybe we can start having more conversations now like like the video i did i put up on sunday of uh with amber uh i think i titled it a prostitute's life with this girl named amber who works figaro she's a little bit uh she's not one of the young girls she's one of the older ones and and i've had around before and it's just a little more of a conversation about that life and and how you got into it and the ups and downs of it all and it's more of a conversation than a where you're from what was your childhood like what drug do you use all that kind of stuff which is very cold i mean a lot of people will make these comments you sound like you're interrogating these people the fact that i'm off camera and i'm just this like mysterious voice that's coming from the background saying and and what do you do for money you know i sound like a cop i sound like joe friday um it's uh it's i think a lot of that is because i'm off camera because if you could see my body language i mean these people wouldn't open up with me the way they do if i was if i was a cop or behaving like one and i'm not but maybe my voice sounds very straight and serious because we're talking about heavy serious stuff so i can't laugh and joke and be friendly and soft with them because we're talking about really dark heavy stuff so when you hear just a voice coming from somewhat from nowhere like that's creepy so so just the nature of the fact that i'm off camera and i choose to be off camera i could do a talk show where it's two of us sitting together talking on two chairs like the dick cavett show or a talk show i choose not to do that because i would rather not be on camera so it's a little bit creepy that the voice comes from nowhere and it look it sounds like you're just interrogating these people but but they're clearly not no one no one feels interrogated when they're doing this yeah what is out of the over 2000 interviews you've done which one is your favorite which one which one which one you do you think about the most which one you always go back to oh i i mean my little personal favorite is is one with uh sb which is a gang member and not because it's so deep or heavy it's it's just sb was this is he got stabbed in the heart recently and we thought we thought he died but i think he's alive i haven't seen him since it happened like four or five months ago um but i haven't seen him since i heard he survived um it's only like a minute and a half long it's the shortest video on my channel and it's so intense and so beautiful and so well done about him talking about the streets and it's just like [ __ ] if i could just do that with every video it was so beautiful so beautifully done and he was a great storyteller he would tell these stories he probably still does hopefully um he tells stories in like where he's playing like him and his buddy are robbing a third guy and he talks he tells a story what he's saying and then he talks as if he's his buddy and then he talks you and he's he's telling this whole story with three different characters but he's playing all three at the same time and he does it with such street slang and he's like it's just so fascinating for me to listen to but he's talking about really violent crazy stuff that most of my audience probably doesn't like you know a lot of people love the gang's videos and other ones hate them and other people love the appalachians and they other people find them boring and you know how much drug addiction can you actually watch you know it's like so some people love those you put up a female attractive female heroin addict that'll get a lot of views so it's it's all that but uh the ssb one is all the sbs are great um the jury you know jerry is the the black gentleman who was shot in the face with a shotgun oh yeah that one yeah he just passed away this last weekend did he really he died yeah yeah how long did he have how long did he survive after he was shot in the face with that it's been a long time i mean it's been i forget what year he was shot it's been 15 years or so maybe longer do you know how he died oh yeah he had copd you know the breathing he had problems breathing he even told me i saw him a couple days before he died i would see him every once or twice a week i just stopped by and i was i was paying his bills and all that so i'd see him often and i saw him a couple days before he passed away and he uh he just said yeah it's just so hard for me to even go down to the lobby of the his apartment he lived on the third floor for him to just go downstairs in the elevator not the stairs elevator he said it's just so hard for me to get around now because my breathing is so bad so i kind of knew that this might be happening but i was surprised that it happened as soon as it did but he was such a lovely dude i was amazed at how well spoken that guy was and how how how friendly and charismatic he was his missing half of his head when we and that uh i think it's i did you know i did the original video that's very kind of just crude and i wasn't very proud of it so i did i did a part one and a part two with him and then that was a part three showing his apartment but the part one and part two are the ones i would rather people watch because because it covers everything in that original video that's not so good and and much more and then i think the part two of that series he um he talks about forgiveness which which to me there's nothing more important to talk about and i asked him what would what would he say to the guy who shot him because half his face and half his brain is missing with the whole right side of his head it looks like a cantaloupe he dropped off a building his head is shaped like a like a half moon right and uh he he said i love you i forgive you that's the only way you can be that's the only way that you can be and people don't a lot of people don't understand that it's the only option because to be hateful hurts you to be hateful doesn't accomplish anything there seems to be so much hate in the world and you know you just look in the comments on youtube a third of them are hate-filled or motivated by hate hate accomplishes nothing and well people don't understand about it you to to put out some hate against somebody you your that hate comes back to you and you it hurts you more than it hurts them subconsciously people understand how subconsciously this you suffer you suffer and if you want to hurt yourself go ahead and hate somebody but you're going to suffer for it for it and that's that's that's why i say i go to bed every night with clear conscious man i don't hate anybody or anything if i loan you 5 000 and you never pay me back i'm going to treat you exactly the way i did before you ever offered me uh when before you ever borrowed five thousand dollars i'm going to treat you exactly the same because i don't want to have that crap on me i'm not i'm probably gonna probably not gonna loan you another five grand but i'm not going to carry that anger with me because if i carry that anger like man that [ __ ] didn't pay me back it's not hurting you it's hurting me and if i just let it go as jerry says in that talk you just let it go and you're lighter on your feet and it's easier for you to smile and it's easier for you to sleep and it's your heart rate is lower and every your brain waves are more calm and everything is better to just forgive and let go with everything like when i went through the divorce it would be very easy for me to like blame this blame that blame this person blame blame blame blame i took 100 of the responsibility for everything that i went through 100 of the responsibility for everything i don't care who else was involved i take the response i take the blame for everything and by doing that i have total peace with everything i'm not angry at anybody not angry at anybody you just forgive and you're just lighter on your feet you're happier you're you're at ease you're you're at peace and it's just a better way to live i i don't know where i learned that i've known that since i was a little kid so that's not that's one of that's not the most important lesson i've learned because i've seen i've seen like i've known that my whole life even when i was a little kid i just i knew that my parents don't have it my parents don't have that no no one in my family embodies that but i i live by it always have it's not something i try to do it's just something i have always done yeah i feel like uh i feel like i know why you got divorced i feel like your work probably you were you're a workaholic yeah and yeah so if anyone any anyone who had a romantic relationship with you probably was going crazy like what the [ __ ] pay attention to me no no no no no no no my ex-wife is the coolest woman that ever walked the earth she was great she is great that's great that you maintain a good relationship oh yeah no we just said thanksgiving dinner together that's [ __ ] awesome man she's great she's great people people meet her and they're like what the [ __ ] you're an idiot i'm like well yeah but uh no it's all cool she's got a nice boyfriend now and that's all great um and i'm happy for her so no it was it was a time when my career was cranking and we were raising little kids or not little kids but they were you know she was totally into raising kids and i was totally into my work and things just kind of like started to veer apart and create equal came out and it flopped in my i mean it's out of print now you can buy a copy on on like ebay or on amazon you can get a used copy for like a thousand bucks so it's hard to find yeah it's it's an expensive book did you create a specific amount of copies to sell i mean the publisher did okay yeah and there's no more availability in germany publish it but uh it's out of print and now you can find an old copy for a lot more money so i guess i shouldn't be ashamed of it i mean the first gallery show that i had with it we sold like half a million dollars in prints at that first show but that sounds like a lot but i spend much more than that to create that project you have to understand that i do things really heavy like really intense i don't just like kind of take some pictures i don't do that i don't kind of do something i mean you're not some corporate executive trying to squeeze profits out of everything you do no i i i do things with gusto that's what's one thing i do i when i do something if i'm into it if i'm not into it good luck i won't even get off the sofa i won't do [ __ ] what's the point if you're not yeah if i'm not into it i just don't do [ __ ] but if i'm into it look out look out let's just look out that's all i can say that's the thing that's the way everything should be that's where everything should be people need you need purpose in what you do i i am when i am focused there's no stopping me between my com the combination of focus and concentration and hope just makes anything possible it makes anything i want possible and there's very little that i don't accomplish when i want it that's amazing it's great it's great but you have to believe and you have to really be so committed it's like i'm going to make this happen i don't care how i don't care how much sometimes you almost i find i ha like i'll come up against something really negative like oh my that's a really terrible setback that's never going to happen and i'll see how no that setback can actually make this happen because the other person let's say you're interacting with a person that person that's just said no you allowed them to say no you give them the space and that's really important that's an important thing with human interactions is is to give people the space or the respect to like you know it's it probably applies to every kind of interaction but let's let's say somebody does something really bad like let's are you married yes you're married let's say you you do something that that really just your wife didn't dig you really [ __ ] up in some way who knows what just make up something in your head you [ __ ] up she's pissed off she's disappointed in you you were you were a serious fuck-up she could come back at you and go what the [ __ ] the matter she could give you all kinds of crap for it or she could give you your space and your respect and let you kind of hold your head up when you come home from work and that'll allow you to kind of get your dignity back and you'll choose to do the right thing next time most likely you'll choose to do the right thing next time something like that comes up instead of be repeating that same [ __ ] up behavior by giving you that that that um she's not going to condemn you when you came home from work she's not going to like say you [ __ ] you [ __ ] up again or you do whatever she's just going to interact with you just the way i i'm not saying being passive and let you get it get getting away with it but giving you the the room to retain your dignity because that's important that's super important that you that you still feel good about yourself it's like it's like raising little kids we talked about this earlier if you if you make the kid feel bad they're going to be bad if you make the kid feel good about themselves they're going to do do the right thing and the same thing with adults so if she if your wife makes you feel bad about something you're probably going to continue to do it eventually but if she if if she allows you to forget about let's let's forget that happen let's forgive and forget you know you [ __ ] up you process that man i don't want that to happen again i feel bad about doing it but she didn't like make me feel guilty about it not try to punish you not trying to punish you just like you know you disappointed her right you know you [ __ ] up and if you're a stand-up dude you're gonna not do it again and you can you can get back to the relationship with your dignity with your you know you can be proud of who you are that's i guess that's what i'm saying whereas otherwise then you're going to feel bad about who you are and eventually that'll just the whole relationship will deteriorate yeah it all just fall apart because you feel like a piece of crap because of what you did and that that just makes you behave like a piece of crap and it's the same thing with children how did you learn this it's just common sense everything boils down to common sense and science it's all science yeah but it has to be some sort of it has to be some sort of experience that you're there you're not born with that right i'm born with a forgiveness thing yeah yeah i was definitely born with that i'm born with the focus and drive that i got yeah that's for sure so born with uh i mean it's just understanding like do you think do you think that that theory or that concept of of not punishing someone for for a [ __ ] up or a major mistake and letting them sit back i'm not saying being passive i'm not saying being passive at all just so if anybody's listening oh you're just you're just letting you're enabling or whatever and i'm not saying that what i'm doing is giving you room to do the right thing next time now if you continue to [ __ ] up and do it again and again again then yeah lock them up and whatever but right but all i'm saying is you're not saying cut off the relationship you're just saying no no no no no i'm just like if everything's been fine all of a sudden you did something really [ __ ] up yep rather than just saying dude you really [ __ ] up and you're an [ __ ] and you you you know all that and making you feel really shameful and really because chances are you already know that you already know that yeah everybody knows when they [ __ ] up you don't need to be reminded the fact that you're being reminded just makes you feel worse but if you if she just interacts with you just as before just as she did before this happened it gives you room to gives you the space the dignity to walk into the room again with your head held high and give her a kiss on the forehead or cheek and and just be cool and do the right thing next time and people don't seem to understand that they would rather just hate and condemn and and make you feel bad and that that just takes things down [Music] and nobody wants that she doesn't want it and you don't want it it hurts her it hurts you right but if she does this it hurt it helps her and it helps you i'm not saying be passive though i'm not saying just oh that people are saying let you know i totally understand if you had one message for the world after everything you've learned from from your life your work all the people you've interacted with what would your what would your message what's your legacy oh i would say forgiveness and understanding forgiveness is such a huge one like i forgive really well and when i say forgive it's just like what jerry said in that talk totally forget just like never happened right like if you borrowed that 5 000 from me and you never paid me back i would continue to interact with you as if nothing ever happened because it didn't in my head and hopefully you know you get past it too and one day maybe you pay me back one day maybe you don't i'm probably not going to loan you any more money but that forgiveness kind of like what we just talked about with your wife you know right it it allows everyone to heal and that's what that's that's that's the real thing that we want to happen that's that's like the thing with my channel i want us all to be healed and happy and at peace and loving ourselves really it's all about loving yourself i mean it's really it's that lack of unconditional love that happened in childhood that causes all these problems you see on my channel and in life unconditional love is the answer if it blew it but the reason i mentioned the bluish the whole thing earlier i never finished that so if if blue color ever wanted their name back i would change the name of my uh channel to uh to unconditional love really because that's really what it is right that's what all my videos are all about the fact that you didn't get that when you're a kid and now you're doing all this screwed up behavior because you were never loved unconditionally and love is not unconditional love there is it's like it's like a disguise that looks like love and your mom is being nice to you but then she's also being manipulative and she's she's you know nice to you but then she's not and then she's nice to you but there's all these games that are being played and unconditional love is just like it's just it's just it's unconditional and that that heals everything heals everything you know kids grow up beautifully with that you know that you know when you abuse a kid when you sexually molest them when you do all these terrible things when you talk down to them they end up broken and if you just love them and accept them and give them you know patience and listen to them and talk to them as if they're intelligent they grow up to be great people so something along the lines of all that is what we all need that's super powerful man well thank you again for being here cool i appreciate i i appreciate this so much and you're very good at what you do such a powerful you shouldn't think you don't well i appreciate it you're very good i appreciate you very kind um tell the people listening where they can follow you where they can find your work and how they can support what you're doing oh uh i have a youtube channel called soft white underbelly um and if you want to support it i i put up this gofundme thing that people can support i only want it for people that want to do it so it's not like you're supposed to support but it's like you know you know i i struggle to make money with this i have a patreon channel too and patreon has some some video i'm trying to make more videos on there that are exclusive i might have more coming but so far there's only like 40 or so videos that are exclusive to the patreon channel but that's another way to support what i'm doing it's ten dollars a month and i think that's about it but uh i just i'm grateful that people watch it because it seems like maybe some people will start to figure out that hate won't accomplish anything good that's what i'd love to that's one thing i'd love to change because because man it just makes me so sad when you see all these this hate like no matter how bad somebody has been it's like to hate them just that's what like it's like it's like these commenters think that if i leave a hateful comment the target of that hate will stop doing what they're going to do they're not no they're going to dig their heels in deeper so you've you you're contributing to the problem right you're you're making the problem worse you you think you're disapproving and you're you're going to stop it somehow but what you're actually doing is putting fertilizer on it the way to do the way to handle this is you listen to these talks you comprehend what they're saying you you listen to how these things came about what the childhood was like what the environment was like where how they grew up and like maybe we could create a more educated generation next time maybe we could create a little more awareness or a little more open-mindedness or maybe a little less racism or a little more with this that or the other so that the next generation is a little more evolved because a lot of the a lot of the who the hell would hit a kid who the hell would sexually molest a kid who the hell would do that i can't even imagine that [ __ ] no but it happens it's happening right now as we're talking somewhere and it's like it's horrible we definitely need to figure out a way to make people in our country better and and and make less less losers for lack of a better term that's it that's it that's really it that's really good i mean that's that's what i'm hoping maybe this channel kind of does is like oh wow we're really screwing up we're really dropping the ball it's not about homelessness homelessness or drug addiction or whatever it's it's about loving our children super powerful man thank you so much for your time mark thank you [Music] you

Channel: KONCRETE

Views: 744,183

Keywords: Koncrete, podcast, underground, exclusive, independent, interview, interviews, koncrete podcast, mark laita, soft white underbelly, the whitaker family, the whitaker family odd west virginia, the whitaker family documentary, mark laita soft white underbelly, skid row, pimp interview, los angeles, appalachian people, mark laita kelly

Id: ta-8xFg0L0w

Length: 106min 47sec (6407 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EsmagaSapos]

He's more emotional than I expected.