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

The Joe Rogan Experience when you first started doing these videos did you have to figure out a way to balance your own mental health with interviewing these people because I gotta tell you like I watched a bunch of videos today in the gym while I was working on I felt like [ __ ] and I always feel good after I work I know it affects people in different ways some people make oh my God my problems are not some so bad my life is pretty great I've heard that many times I've heard that more often but I get what you're saying because like I'm immersed in it yeah what you see on my YouTube channel is 1200 maybe 1300 videos I've done over five thousand because not everything I shoot like with you you're shooting you're doing interviews with uh Elon Musk and Dave Chappelle and you know huberman and they're great you know they're going to great they're big you don't need to do eight or ten in a day like I do right like I'll do six seven eight nine ten in a day hoping to get one or two but even the ones that you have where the people can barely communicate they they're almost more disturbing like I watched a couple today of homeless people yeah where you know there was this one woman she was missing one of her toes and you know that woman and she's just the movement and the the mental health the the obvious signs that she's very troubled and probably on some drugs and it's just yeah if you have children I do I have two daughters 19 and 22. yeah so that to me was like the hearing the stories of how they were all abused sexually and physically when they're children and and seeing what it leads to right so I'm aware that these things go on yeah I've been down on Skid Row for 12 years now maybe 13 years and so I know what you live down there no no no no I I live in Pacific Palisades which is like the exact opposite yes I live in Bel Air basically but then I go down to the worst I go from the worst part of town to the best part of town yeah it's a big it's a drastic change from yeah from one to the other um but even when I was doing this before I started soft white underbelly I was aware that this sh this crap is going on to these people when they were kids yeah and when I decided you know I gave up advertising I want to do something that was meaningful to me I looked around like that's a problem that needs to be addressed and you know people say oh your work's exploitive you're exploiting these poor drug addicts like I understand there's an exploitative element to to it all photography has that you know element to it but let's say I never did these videos let's say we just pretend they pretend these problems don't exist it's all going to continue and Caroline's kids are going to get molested by the babysitter or by the uncle or by whoever it's going to repeat the pattern over and over and over so I figured by putting out these you know it's disguised as entertainment but what it really is is if you watched a dozen of them you're going to learn like [ __ ] we need to protect our kids we need to watch our kids we need to you know how many fathers were absent in these kids lives that I do like like one percent of them had fathers that were in their lives right like where are the dads what are they doing that's so important that they can't raise their own kid well they're probably [ __ ] up too which is well that's where it goes it's a never-ending side it's generation it's cycle after cycle have you interviewed anyone and then come back years later and they straighten their life out yeah yeah that's happened yeah I've done five thousand right and it's literally like four that I know of and what has that been like like can you give me and yeah I mean they um and and even though they've done it doesn't mean they didn't break down and relapse tomorrow you know today right that happens all the time yeah just as they got clean doesn't mean they're going to stay clean but um the ones that I believe in the most because some people told me they were clean but I I don't I don't buy it but the ones that I know are clean they just they just did it by themselves they just hold themselves up and they figured out a way to wean themselves and change their routine and change their environment and eventually broke through but I think you need that self-worth like you you and I have the self-worth to go you know I deserve better I deserve to drive a nice car I deserve to live in a great house in a great City and have a great job and I deserve all these things and have a great woman in my life and all these things if you have the self-worth you're going to accept and build those things in your life these people especially the ones on Skid Row the drug addicts their self-worth is broken it's broken and they don't believe they deserve anything better than to live in a cardboard box or a tent on the sidewalk in the rain in the winter and they're doing the drug just to escape the pain of what happened to them when they were seven years old that their dad or uncle or oh brother or whoever yeah and it's like you you can't fix a childhood how do you fix a childhood when you see a place like skid row and you see all these people that you've interviewed do you try to formulate some way that these people can be helped like that we can diminish this problem you know when I first really got serious like three and a half years ago was when I started really just I was down there every day doing eight eight interviews a day I would uh see somebody who's like oh my God your life would be great if you just got clean I was naive I was naive and uh I started helping them and like we're going to get you to rehab and you know I spent so much money like I've wasted so much money my own hearted money I just like put towards somebody that had no intention of really ever doing anything well it seems like it has to come from the individual it can it has to from that's what I've learned you can't help people by saying hey no no I do this no I see all these comments on my videos Mark you didn't help this person I I can't change their self-worth you'd have to be with them 24 hours you have to be with them 24 hours a day you'd have to be spending easy 150 000 at least a year to house them to feed them to transport them to get them therapy to you know all the drugs all that mental health drugs all the everything they're going to need doctors all that stuff it's a lot of money for one person and it may not we may not even work right so I'm I got two kids of my own I got my own life I got bills on my own I got I'm doing a YouTube channel and I'm shooting eight videos a day like when am I gonna sit there and take somebody under my wing and save them right you know these people are on their phones on their sofa texting you know uh leave me a comment saying Mark you didn't help this person I'm the busiest person I know I'm a I haven't taken a day off in over three years Christmas birthday everything I work every single day either shooting or editing and uh and these people are sitting on their phones telling me what to do they they can't get off their ass and maybe you know clear out their bank account to save somebody but even that probably wouldn't do it and still wouldn't work what do you think could be done well I mean it's it's a it's such a complicated problem you look at homeless you have the homelessness problem you have it a little bit here in Austin but in La it's really bad let's explain Skid Row to people Skid Row is a neighborhood it's probably I don't know how many square blocks but maybe it's it goes from like roughly because it spreads out a lot and it's spread out since I've been there but let's call it like from fourth or fifth Street to 8th Street this is just east of downtown L.A and downtown L.A is cool it's nice but just just east of downtown I know I know I know but but it looks like Austin I wouldn't recommend people visit no no you wouldn't find out a place no you wouldn't go to go to L.A you don't go every other town you go downtown right every every other I'm from Chicago every year are you going to say Chicago you go to visit Chicago you spend the whole time downtown yeah in L.A you should not go downtown yeah that's what I'm saying that's exactly right um but Skid Row is this neighborhood just east of downtown that is the yeah Jamie's got um an image of it yeah there it is let's let's find some photos of it because it's it's kind of an enormous swath of land that's been completely abandoned it seems like but like like this girl smoking right here yeah that goes on every block the cops Will Roll by nobody's stopping her she's smoking meth she's smoking uh something meth or crack or whatever let's find a video of it so you can see this this scale of it because it's pretty it's pretty intense when you see people uh like I found out about Skid Row when we were filming Fear Factor downtown we filmed a lot of episodes of Fear Factor downtown and um I just and this was early 2000s and it was uh nothing like it is now I'm sure now it's quite a bit more but even back then it was like how is this one area isolated like how is this one area just filled with homeless people and drug addicts and criminals and I really didn't know until I watched this Netflix series on the Jerome hotel and it was about that woman who died in a water tank do you you wear that story I don't but I've heard everything it's a woman who got off her meds and it was um there was a video of her in an elevator and it looked like someone was following her and she was like looking out of the elevator and then the woman turned up missing and her family went to look for and what it turned out was uh she that's a crime scene event this I'm sorry did I say the Jerome where's the Jerome is that down there too it's an idea I don't know Cecil's notorious the sea salt that's the one I met the Cecil is a hotel I've heard so many stories my my favorite or the most horrifying is so many people used to get thrown off the roof of the Cecil hotel that the little chicken restaurant on the corner used to have a jar where you could put your money in and place bets on what floor the person would be have have been pushed out of Jesus Christ whether it's the roof the 13th floor how many oh I like I've heard the like hundreds I think maybe I'm exact you know stories get exaggerated over the years but so this documentary was about this woman and she had gotten off her medication and at first it was like a crime murder mystery and then as it goes on you realize oh no this lady had just escaped from her family and got off her meds and she was paranoid schizophrenic and it's always none of these stories are as simple as oh I just got shot or I just got stabbed yeah there's mental health that's mixed in I mean the whole problem like you asked me what the problem is with all this so you see homelessness you see all these homeless people on the street in LA or in San Francisco or Seattle or Portland OR Vancouver or you see it in a lot of cities it's really bad in L.A in San Francisco and the West Coast for some reason has a ton of it so oh you just like what Ellie's doing you put them up in housing problem solved right and we're done not really no because you peel back the layer the first the top layer of that the homeless underneath the homelessness is uh drug addiction pretty much 100 across the board none of these home none of these people are down and out and just like oh my God I'm homeless that doesn't happen they're they're all drug addicts and even when they tell you they're clean they're still lying so you peel back the drug addiction layer and what are you going to do get them put them all in rehab which is going to be tremendously expensive it's not going to work all the time but that would be part of the solution but it's not going to be the solution so you peel back the layer of drug addiction you've got Mental Health they all have mental health issues and you can't just magically fix their mental health you know the damage was done when they were little kids when they were five six seven eight years old with with whether it's neglect or abuse you know physical abuse sexual abuse whatever just terrible parenting yeah terrible role models terrible and they don't learn this you know let's say you've fixed let's say you got them off the streets let's say you um fix the drug addiction you get them therapy for years and you fix the mental health issue somewhat but they still don't know how to do all the things that we all know how to do like build trust in others gain the trust of others how to handle money to delay gratification delay gratification they don't they have no concept of that everything is just like how do I make a quick Buck right now yeah that's the only thing they know if you know if they have a job interview on Monday like if I had something like that or a meeting to go to I would know how to show up I'm going to kick ass on Monday these people don't know how to do anything like that they might they probably won't even show up they don't know how to be on time they don't know how to do anything in order to like Advance their their lives I think it's it boils down to their self-worth is so broken that they don't believe they deserve anything better yeah so if you don't believe you deserve anything better you could be handed a million dollars here's a winning lottery ticket go cash it in if you've got a million dollars they're going to [ __ ] it up as fast as you can see it you know as fast as you can imagine

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 2,399,311

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party

Id: Q9hrH-sZ0Vc

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022