The Mark Laita Interview: Creating “Soft White Underbelly” & Documenting America’s Dark Side

no jumper coolest podcast in the world and today we have uh somebody who i'm a huge fan of you are yeah totally man okay mark of software underbelly how you doing nice to meet you adam yeah so okay this is the the thing i've been thinking about is how when i first started doing podcasts it was in downtown l.a fifth in los angeles so right by me basically on the edge of skid row and i used to always have people uh comment like you should interview a homeless person you should interview one of these guys who we see hanging out outside of your house and i always thought oh that's a stupid idea nobody wants to see that and then one day i run across your channel and i'm like wow i really did not take those comments as seriously as i should like your channel in a lot of ways sort of like has taught me a lot about the value of having conversations with people who you know the outside world would probably assume don't really have anything useful to say yeah i mean people are people right they really the peop people are people they're just like whether they're powerful and wealthy or whether they're down and out they're still there are still stories you know lessons to learn from everybody a hundred percent lessons to learn like what not to do maybe more than what to do and like we were just saying there's a lot of um a lot of people that you interview operate in a way that the people i interview don't they have nothing to lose they just unload they'll tell you the whole [ __ ] story not everything i do is about [ __ ] people and drugs right i understand yeah you know sometimes it's sometimes it's strippers and gang members but but a lot of people feel unheard and a lot of people once they make it into the wrap world and stuff they end up feeling very differently they end up feeling like everybody already knows everything about me i want to be very protective of what i'm putting out there into the world and a lot a lot of times when you're interviewing you know a stripper or a prostitute or whatever it might be they probably don't really feel like they've ever had an opportunity where anyone cared that much to ask so much what attracted me to what i'm doing is is these people they're not selling anything they're not trying they're not trying to further their career as a musician they're not trying to you know maybe they're trying to convince you that their story is the truth and and what their family did to them is is is not fair or something like that but they're they're really not they're not trying to promote anything right they're just telling their story and sometimes you can just feel that they're they're telling a a version of the truth that's pretty close to what actually happened because anytime you tell us like if you told me about your childhood or back back in high school the way you're going to tell that story you're going to embellish we all do that's human nature to tell your story and go yeah simple the gym teacher was 375 pounds and he was six foot nine and you know that kind of when he was actually like six foot one and he was you know 240 pounds right is is that something that considers that concerns you is the amount of truth that's being told because i've seen you do interviews with people where they were talking about getting molested by their parents and then they do another interview and they say all that [ __ ] was made up yeah well i mean some you have to be able to read i'm not presenting these as these are sworn documents of the truth a lot of them are full-blown lies or there's a lot of lies mixed in right but if you're at all able to interpret what's what someone's when someone's lying yeah like like the best example is a prostitute to come you know an older a middle-aged prostitute comes on and says yeah i'm 24 years old and i even i didn't even questioned her on that like are you sure you're 24 and she goes yeah i'm like okay i love that slide and she just smiled but you have to you have to read through that because the way i see that is here's a woman who's supporting herself as a prostitute which means being young and beautiful is is is her way to support herself other than that she's down and out and homeless right with nothing to sell so you have to understand where she's coming from she's scared shitless that her only way of supporting herself is is fading away right so she's 24 years old out of fear and if you if you can read through that lie you you you get a glimpse into who she's who she is and what she's concerned about right but she scared him right i've been watching this show on uh netflix called the no-go what i'm saying is the lies are kind of a part of the story right i feel i've been watching the show uh the no-go zones that basically will take you to like all the worst areas all over the world and sort of show you a lot of a lot of drug selling and a lot of prostitutes and stuff like that and it was interesting because i watched like kind of the whole season of that and then after i got done with that i started watching a shitload of your stuff to get ready for this interview and it occurred to me that like the the main difference between a show like that and what you're doing is that you're just sort of allowing them to pick their narrative you're not slotting them into let's see what a prostitutes life in cape town is like you're sort of just allowing them to run with whatever and sometimes it feels like they want to tell you about the the intimate details of their day-to-day work and sometimes they want to tell you about their childhood trauma that got them here but it seems like you you kind of rarely uh forcefully guide that correct them i mean sometimes i'll ask who molested them or stuff like that which i get a lot of flack for but um yeah i really just want to learn you know that's really what i think is behind a lot of why i'm doing this is just i i like learning about myself and about other humans and i think by understanding and learning you just become better suited to deal with life and and and be happy definitely that's all we really wanted is to be happy right yeah so if you understand more of what's going on and why you're doing it and why other people are behaving the way they are you you've you can calm down and just like oh i get why you're doing that it's not that you it's not that you don't like me it's that you're scared shitless of getting hurt definitely or i'm being i'm acting this way because i'm afraid of getting taken advantage of or something like that so did this all start with the photography part of it yeah i'm a photographer i've always been since i was 14 that's all i've ever done and i just finished a big project called create equal which took me like 9 or 10 years and i went to every state each of the lower 48 states and and photographed everything from uh cowboys to astronauts to to repo men to ballerinas to there's a couple homeless drug addicts there's there's everything in there just everything that kind of exists in the united states amish people everything nuns and prostitutes everything um and the idea was just to just photograph the normal the visual [Music] catalog of of america basically and you spent 10 years yeah 10 years cost me like half a million to do it because when i do these projects i i really invest like whatever i care about i i invest like like without much concern for what's coming back from that investment i'm not gonna make money on it right i mean i actually did make a lot of money selling you know some of the gallery shows when that when that project finally came out and we did some gallery shows i i sold a lot of prints and i probably made that money back but but it wasn't about making money it's about i don't know what it's about learning doing what you love furthering the human species it's like all these things i mean your soul is telling you what you want to be dealing with i mean because i'm an advertising photographer it's all i've ever done you know and i've had these side projects that kind of kept me sane because if you just do advertising you're selling a product and it's hard to feel like you're like making it look you know with retouching and all that we make things look better than they really are and it's all perfect and and homogenized and that gets under yours that bugs you after a while when you're doing when that's all you're doing what am i doing i'm helping corporations make money i'm making coca-cola make more money that's what i did with my life you can make good money and there's certainly a creative aspect to it but ultimately do you feel like that's a career that kind of it started becoming less creative and more just like you're just a plumber installing a sync that the housewife because there's so much data at a certain point too like these days with with advertising i feel like there's there's a lot less oh maybe this will sell a soda no it's like we have all this data to base our decisions on and because everyone's afraid of losing their clients the client gets to make all the creative decision decisions and the client doesn't know how to make good creative decisions so the industry has changed a lot and i found myself less and less satisfied with that career and i've been doing my whole life and i've got money saved up i have it all invested in a house i'm building right now but but i basically have money i just don't have it at my disposal right now because it's tied up in the house but so um if i had my brothers to just do anything i wanted like what would i do and i just sat there for like a month or two and just sat like what what am i going to do am i going to become a real estate developer am i going to you know work out a lot maybe i'll just work out a lot i don't know what i do you know what would i do if i had the freedom to do anything i wanted and then it hit me at one point oh yeah i used to have that studio down on skid row after i finished create equal i got a studio down on skid row in la and i just started doing portraits of uh of all the people that you see on my channel a lot of them and i it was a really interesting project because those people are just such interesting characters and at some point i started doing interviews of them when canon came out with the first video the first still camera that did videos what year did you start interviewing that was like 2010. oh wow okay so that long 2010 is what i've been doing i started doing this okay so it's been like uh 11 years now and uh the first interview i did was it was a prostitute heroin addict named caroline and it was so powerful really in a way that you never thought photography could be or i mean i feel like a lot of photographers are they don't want to give and say that video can be more powerful than photography but yeah i know that's a great question because uh i like to think the photo is everything i'm a photographer i'm not an i'm not an interviewer you're an interviewer you're a much better interviewer than i am i'm just a photographer but i recognize after watching after looking at create equal you page through it with somebody else at a party they're going through the book and i'm like i should have done interviews i should have done it they want to know this they want to know that i realize the portrait is as great as it is i'm really proud of that those portraits you want you want to know more you want to hear what they speak like you want to see how their body language you know how they move so many things you learn so much more about somebody when you're hearing them speak watching them do it what they do so portrait is about that instant and it's also can be very false like if you look at the the the thumbnail on my channel or you look at the portrait oh this guy's dignified and like i'm about those kkk guys look a lot tougher than when you hear them talking yeah you know when they're all squatted up with all their guys yeah [ __ ] and then you hear them talking you're like this [ __ ] yokel and a costume what is he talking about so the photos can lie yeah and the portrait and the you know it's a different kind of line than the the lies you're talking about i just watched uh ron jeremy and man he looked like he had he had girls all over him in the thumbnail or whatever and then you watch the interview and it's just you get a very different idea of what his real life might be like yeah yeah especially now no but it's like i i started doing these portraits and then i started doing interviews and then i kind of my life got turned upside down the industry kind of changed and i lost my love for it and you know digital technology took over so everybody's a photographer and that undermined my ability to charge what i did and make the same money i used to and then i got a divorce on top of it it's like my whole life my whole table got turned upside down i was like let me let me just like i put everything down for a while really and then when everything kind of settled and i back to what i was saying a couple minutes ago i was like so what who am i what do i want to do and i decided let me just i really had a good time when i was down on a skid road doing those crazy photos and even the interviews let me start doing interviews and portraits down there again and i started i just got i had to store all my furniture because i'm building this house like i said and i had four different storage units around the city i'm paying like a thousand here 1200 there a thousand here like i can save money if i just got a big space downtown somewhere off of skid row or near skid row or in skid row and i could probably find room to shoot these portraits and interviews in the front and that's exactly what i did and it's been i've i'm shooting every day now not necessarily always on skid row like last week i was in mississippi i was in tampa florida before that i'm going to san francisco as soon as we're done here so it's not about skid row it's it's more about just the united states right for me yeah united states or do you have international plans no i don't want to i don't if i start going international that means at some point i'm have to trudge through the forest of new guinea right the jungle of new guinea and like because because i'm not going to say oh i'm only going to do europe and south america i'm going to do the whole planet and when i do things i do them all out but if you do this for a few more decades do you think there's any chance that you could kind of doing the skid row stuff could start to feel a little scale uh stale or even the usa can you see yourself wanting to take it to yeah to take any country boom that's another gigantic challenge you know there are great stories in other countries even if i went to africa i could do this in africa you know i i said many times i could do a whole like underbelly like a year ago was basically a skid row channel right 95 of the videos were shot on skid row i always said i could do the exact same thing in appalachia which i've done a bunch of interviews in appalachia last year and what got you up there in particular uh great equal i just went to every state and i i got to know it and i know it's there i know those people are fascinating and they're so they're wired so differently than the rest of the country right the values they have are so different than the rest of us they're beautiful people you like one of the things i learned from owning a store downtown uh for all those years was don't talk to them don't give them a dollar if you give them an inch they're going to take a mile and there were other and i'm not proud of this in retrospect because when i see your channel it makes me actually realize like wow i think i actually missed out on a lot of the interactions that i could have had but i mean i was in the mind state where you know i would have a girl in town from a different state or whatever and and she would be giving money to a homeless person that's at the store and i would tell her listen i know you are a nice person and you think that you're doing something nice but if this if they start to get the idea that this is a place where you can just get free money then it's gonna be a big problem for us so i'm actually in the position of telling other people to be less kind for our benefit because you know and and to people who think that that sounds like i'm just kind of cold-hearted being an [ __ ] like i mean this is very very much like a daily you know fight for survival it wasn't like i was just trying to be an [ __ ] and suggest that everybody else be an [ __ ] but it just felt like for self-preservation that you kind of needed to keep that trust they're trying to get their money for whatever their their thing is and if they feel a little bit of weakness then they're going to keep pushing on that spot and you just seem like you i don't know like do you relate to what i just said or 100 okay you know 100 right like this morning i probably bled i'll bet you i i led about a thousand dollars at least 12 1200 today in that yeah and how so who are you giving it out to everybody that comes up to me and i have a hard time saying no and when i do say no they don't leave so at some point i'm paying them to leave to just leave yeah i think that just leave me alone i got a pack for going to the airport i don't want to forget something and i'm like i'm in san francisco i forgot this like [ __ ] you know that's really tragic when i go to like mississippi or kentucky where i can't even rent the equipment i need or buy it i'm in the middle of nowhere so i i need give me a half an hour to focus on what i'm doing don't interrupt me don't don't knock on my door don't do anything so i pay somebody to like stand out front and make sure nobody comes to me and interrupts me so i can just focus on packing up for my trip wow because if you come in five times five different people come in and say hey i just need 20 bucks my kids are dying i'm distracted i can't remember what i was just thinking about oh yeah oh i need i need the charging cord for this microphone and like oh so now i'm in kentucky and i don't have the cord to charge this microphone that just died right and that's because somebody just came to me and asked me for 20 bucks to say they're they're whatever so even when you're traveling uh what word kind of travels that you are somebody who's not scared to help somebody out oh yeah for a while after i went to memphis last december and for three four months after i came back from memphis i was getting phone calls from pimps and prostitutes because that's all i interviewed on that trip for months every morning i'd get you know they're two hours ahead of us i'd just my phone would be but they want money or that i'm a white guy that peels off dollar bills for people right but they want coverage they want to be on the channel the pimp and his prostitute both got arrested so they were in jail they needed somebody to get their bail out and sometimes i'll help i could i could easily just say sorry no yeah and i do that i'm getting better at saying that but i also know that if if i go back to memphis and i want to do more interviews there knowing that i bailed them out of jail is going to just open up some doors and they're going to help me and they're going to do what i want them to do so let's take that memphis trip uh just for example when you show up there yeah do you show up there with no plans do you show up there with nothing i know i knew no nobody and then no there was a girl who contacted me and said i know all these people down there wendy what's her name and she just just emailed me out of nowhere she watches my channel and likes it and said hey if you ever come to memphis i can help you out with some interesting people and say well you know i know memphis is pretty well known for this kind of subculture do you know any people she said oh yeah i know lots of people so she we met with her and she drove us around and one thing led to another and that you know one the one thing i learned is you make this contact and you know great i made this contact but that contact knows four people and then we meet those four people and this one happens to be really good and they know for other people and it just spreads out like that right like i went to kentucky i went to appalachia i think six times last fall last summer and fall we started going like in september august or september or something like that and i would go back every few weeks every month first three trips i got nothing nothing nothing i went to mississippi last week spent you know it cost me like seven eight thousand dollars just to go to mississippi you know the baggage alone is 450 each way the airfare the hotels the rental car the the my assistant sometimes i bring an assistant to help me drive and carry bags and and then the people that i contact with and the people i interview you add all that up it's it's close to ten thousand dollars but why didn't you get anything because it wasn't interesting really yeah just wasn't it you've had interviews here i'm sure they're just it just fell flat and we put them out anyway and then they get uh they get judged harshly i feel like i only use about one out of five that i do you do wow that's interesting i was wondering that yeah because i was thinking about three thousand and there's only 700 on my channel uh okay so there's a lot that you don't see because i was thinking that i'm thinking like you never will these are good but there's got to be a lot of bad ones i was i was thinking i'm like well there's gonna be so many more bad ones than good ones yeah and i just sit through them all yeah i'm i'm beaten up by the end of the day emotionally yeah really it wears me out how much pain can you listen to mm-hmm how much pain can you listen to right people get on my back because you know you she told you she had three kids and then you asked her how many kids you had part of that is because i'm doing i'm operating you have a whole crew how many people you got working here about ten right yeah about something i've got nobody it's just me i'm operating i'm not i'm not bitching i'm just saying i'm operating two cameras yeah microphones uh so the audio levels the focus the framing the light because i use natural light i'm not using an artificial light i'm using natural light so when a cloud goes behind the sun i got to change i could adjust for like a stop or two on but two cameras at the same time that's a lot to be doing while you're conducting an interview right so forgive me if i didn't catch that she had three kids yeah i feel that she like nobody ever came back to that you already i already answered that question nobody has ever said that they're happy to talk about their kids people get upset when their interview doesn't come out no i've never had anybody give me a hard time for it really that's interesting if i didn't drop a lot of it's like even one percent of the interviews i do here oh my god they'd be showing so you're dealing more with people that are like yeah concerned with fame a little bit yeah right i'm not but i feel like a lot of those people still have a desire for fame even if it's a different kind of fame yeah maybe yeah no no one's ever came back you never used my interview i mean i'm sure there are some people that are upset that i didn't but it's got to be interesting yeah you know it's got to be something like that i'm proud of but i don't feel like the person's selling their like i have a lot of pimps the pimps are the worst where they come on and like oh yeah i'm super interesting are you really yeah and i'll take a chance and they come on and they're either telling a story of redemption but it's not it's not like a compelling story of redemption it's just like hey i'm a good guy now yeah so yeah and you're in a position where you're selling your music you then have to be basically kind of like judging their trauma or like well that's not their trauma your narrative like is this a compelling narrative and that kind of puts you in a weird spot i would be happy to post nothing but content of of crack addicts that got clean and tell their stories right but i found when i do that i did some of those early on and they got like an eighth of the number of views is a train wreck story really yeah so i'm not i'm not necessarily doing things just for the views but at some point you do need to get some views in order to like support you know so you find when somebody is a former heroin addict that that will get way more way less views than someone who is like presently clearly addicted to drugs oh yeah and telling a horrific story and all that yeah what does that mean people have called it pain porn i was thinking that literal term i'm like this is like pornography i'm not sure exactly what kind but yeah somebody called it pain porn that's a great term um it's kind of like that i mean like when you're driving at home from work yeah and there's a 16 year old driver who's doing a great job and he's using his directional he's changing lanes properly he's doing a great job do you want to watch that or do you want to watch the the head on collision the other 16 year old had who was drunk right you're going to stop and look at the wreck you're going to not even look twice at the 16 year old who's doing a great job 100 um it's human nature i remember when i first started to take photos when i was like 16 or some [ __ ] i remember i took a photo of uh like a homeless guy and somebody told me the next day they said it's really trashy to take photos of homeless people because it's kind of like the lowest hanging fruit it's trashy they can't really consent to it etc i'm sure you've probably heard those same arguments against photographing the homeless i'm exploiting them yeah how did you i mean i i think when i see your portraits i mean it's very obvious to me that you're doing something that's a lot different and a lot better than your average person who just picks up a camera and they see a homeless person and they think oh that's an easy thing to take a photo of where do you fall on the considerations that you have to make i treat everybody with respect from the guy at your front door who greeted me to you to the president to everybody i treat everybody equally the same like i don't treat a homeless person differently that i would treat obama who i loved you know i would treat them both the exact same way not different in any way like if i was interviewing a homeless crack addict or or the president of the united states i would treat them the exact same way so i treat everybody the same so if i'm doing that am i exploiting them i'm not sure i am they're agreeing to it most of these people come to me now i'm not coming to them hey do an interview with him please do it they all come to me and they all want to come back a second third fourth time yes i'm paying them money but but i bet you they would do it if i didn't pay the money but i believe time is worth money so i pay people money regardless of whether they want it or not the only people that really refuse money are the appalachians really they want to take money most of them won't take money they're probably like the most needing of them yeah they're the poorest it's interesting it's the poorest part of the country where i go the counties that i go in kentucky and west virginia are the poorest in the country and unless they have a drug addiction which some of them do now a lot of drugs are pretty bad there but the ones who who don't just drink moonshine maybe you know they don't really have a serious addiction problem they just jump back when i pull out you know money i can't i can't take that like i'm like i'm some kind of jerk really yeah that's so interesting it's just that they're raised a certain way you know they believe their stories are or something they want to share and that's it's not about paying money for it and i'm not paying for their stories i i believe i'm just paying you for your time right you know you you sat with me for 20 minutes and told me your story thank you for doing that and here's something just for sitting with me and telling me your story right you know it's more about the time and the effort and the distraction from their busy life i i think that which is nice helps to simplify the uh the exchange as well in a way because it's kind of like you know when people even when people come in here and you know i have uh some contemporaries who will sometimes like pay their guests and they've told me that once they start paying the guests they show up on time they don't cancel well they see that it makes the whole thing a little bit more consensual where both sides benefit no one's ever mentioned that but that's a huge part of why i do it because like when i was doing create equal which was just portraits no interviews i want like if i'm going to fly to wyoming to shoot a cowboy that i've you know my scout already found a photo of and i want to photograph him i want to make sure he's going to show up so if i'm going to pay him 500 to show up he's going to be there but if i don't pay him 500 i'm just going to take his photo i'm going to fly all the way to wyoming and he's not going to show up and i'm like now what do we do so scout my time is very very valuable you sort of just have people around the country that you'll just be in communication with and they'll sort of throw ideas scouts like like for for for that project when i was looking for cowboys or ranchers up in wyoming and montana i had somebody who worked at one of these ranches and i said could you photograph some of the some of the guys that work on the ranch and just send me photos and then i'll see if i want to photograph these guys and that's what i'm calling a scout i just connected with somebody that knew somebody that knew somebody so i call it a scout but it's really just a co-worker or a friend and they sent me some photos of some of the guys and like oh he'd be a great photo now an interview is a whole nother thing because i've had people that i've flown across the country for because they look so great and then they can't tell their story and then it's like [ __ ] a waste of time that's interesting the desire to not put out the episodes that you don't like even though is that out of respect for who the audience because i feel like the audience a lot of times kind of wants to hear the story from the person who's the most out there i'm sure if you ask my viewers if they want to see all 3 000 interviews they'd say yes but if i posted everything that i did i don't think i'd have the same audience i do so you have to understand like you know the quality of what you put out is is going to affect everything you do there has to be a respect for the overall quality of the channel you just you don't want people to feel like oh maybe if i click this video it's gonna be horrible we'll see what one of the things i realized early on when i did this i could title these you know something like you know a lot of these stories are about having sex with my dad you know because a lot of these women have right i could i could use that in the title somehow i see i see youtube videos that have these kind of titles like when i when i talk when i title the video a homeless woman i want to do that knowing that my viewers who who know my channel will know that a video titled homeless woman interview is worth watching yeah it's not just a woman talking yeah i don't have a house yeah so there's usually something to it that makes it worth watching because i feel like what you do is the kind of thing that opens you up to so much criticism of what you're doing but i mean maybe i'm just sort of in a bubble where i'm just a fan but it doesn't seem like you really get as much hate for it as i think a lot of people would and i think a lot of it is the aesthetic decisions when you have this beautiful photograph for the for the photo you don't have you trying to like really sort of lay the narrative out for them very often you don't have the salacious titles again i feel like all that stuff kind of insulates you against a lot of the click bait stuff really causes people to judge you very very harshly yeah and i get i'm guilty of a little bit of clickbaity because i could title my sex worker videos you know sex sex worker interview right but i don't i title it prostitute or escort or stripper strippers you know not the most pc term in the world nor is prostitute but sex workers the vaguest term ever yeah you know a pimp is a sex worker right a masseuse can be a sex worker is she a moose masseuse or so i want to have a little bit of you know descriptive you know i want i want a little bit of the detail so you know what you're going to watch but you know i think the viewers who really know if you're watching a lot of my videos you need to watch a lot there's 750 on there now but if you go through them i can't i can't save all 3 000 people i've interviewed and it wouldn't just be the 3000 interview what about the other 30 000 that are out there that i didn't interview they don't get help because why because i chose because i didn't meet them yet so i can't save everybody but i do help a lot of the people i interview in different ways sometimes i'm just peeling off money to people like i did this morning sometimes i'm paying people's you know for people that really are showing signs of wanting to get out of their life style i'll buy them a car i'll i'll give them housing i'll pay for their expenses for a month or three so they can get their [ __ ] together get a job and then they're hopefully hopefully uh on their way to be self-sufficient that really happens though that's what i'm learning because a lot of homeless people it's kind of uh we think of homeless people as just being homeless people forever i'm not always talking about homeless people i'm talking more about like sex workers or something like that right but a little more capable of but like drug addicts homeless homeless people we we always tend to assume that they're just gonna be like that forever when you see somebody on the side of the street but i think that the truth is is that this is kind of like a transitionary state for a lot of people that they might be homeless for a while and then at some point somebody helps them out and then a lot of people were at one point homeless and then they got their lives together right but i mean the problem is not drug addiction the problem is not homelessness the problem is mental health yeah it really is and people are starting to understand that a little bit there's a great video i just shot some of my favorite videos are the ones i shoot with monica who works for the patrick katie foundation and she's so informed about all this stuff and she's just so intelligent and she speaks so beautifully about what it's like to help these people and how it goes down and how what the problems are in society why it doesn't work out why we're not doing our part you know and uh we we did that this morning actually and she she and i spoke about how it's it's mental health it's not drugs drugs are just a symptom of the problem now drugs can exacerbate and maybe even cause like schizophrenia or some of the other mental conditions that you see but there's some it's like there's some something was broken first for the person to say yeah let me try heroin at 16 years old yeah that's something i've definitely seen from watching enough of your videos is that i mean this is just a band-aid that people try to put on their mental illness like it's almost like 100 percent like very very rarely that you see somebody who's a drug addict that doesn't have child hood trauma that they're trying to yeah i mean every single one of my videos could be like mentally ill person you know like every single video including myself you know if i you know i'm mentally ill we're all mentally ill one way or another you interview a lot of people who i think a lot of people would not be able to get away with interviewing like the clan stuff like yeah i mean if i did a podcast with the clan it would be or a sex offender a child molester exactly i mean a lot of that stuff people would be like why the [ __ ] are you giving voice to someone who is abhorrent those are i i can't even read the comments anymore i mean the majority of my commenters are supportive and say really kind things and i love that and that's that's great most of my audience is really evolved and intelligent but there's a portion of my audience that that just just hates and uh hates what i do and just hates in general hates the interviewee hates hates life hates themselves really is what it truly boils down to if you really peel away the peel away the layers you'll see the person really just hates themselves so that's why they're lashing out against this prostitute or this homeless person or this drug addict or whatever but it's it's uh you know my most of my audience is intelligent and supports what i do and they under they understand that i do help when i can because there's there's people who are like like jerry and you know rita and a lot i mean i can't even count count them all there's so many people that i support on a daily basis and and you know in major ways sometimes but i don't want to make i don't want to make my channel about a help channel the purpose of my videos is is to prevent these things from happening so if i if i start becoming this jesus figure who's helping everybody that it's going to be entertainment and that's not what i want you know i just want people i want i want to learn and i want maybe the audience to learn how these things happen so that we can protect it from our but so when you kids futures you just said these stories are cautionary tales does everybody on the channel have to basically be somebody who's been through hell or is a bad person no no because what's the standard no i mean just interesting really yeah you know because like ruby baker who i interviewed from kentucky it's the most inspirational you know beautiful old woman you could ever find hmm and there's no trauma there's no you know or anything she lost a child or something but she had a lot of kids so it's a beautiful story and people love that video so it's not about a bunch of trauma you know a lot of people that i've interviewed are just cool and interesting right and maybe they come from a tough childhood or a tough life came from the streets but you know like sharp who's a pimp that i've interviewed several times he and i speak private you know just on the phone a lot and he he's just an interesting cat he's just an interesting dude right he's charismatic as any anybody you'll ever find the women love him or they hate him and the men love them or hate them and i tell them all the time like the reason that you're so uh magnetic and and people react to you so strongly it's it's like half the portion of the audience hates you thinks you're an exploitative like bastard that beats your women and the other half think you're like your next best you should run for president right you know and he you know and i get the same kind of crap sometimes where people like oh you're an exploited bastard and you oh you're an angel that's helping all these people and moving society forward in a good positive way i'm both and i'm neither and i'm some mix in the of all of these put together just as he is you know yes he's a pimp but but but i've talked with his girls and and they're they're cool they're happy they're not i don't sense anything other than a nice relationship right not not a not a conventional relationship but it you know i you know i don't think i'd be you know the the simplistic view that i am uh giving sex offenders klansmen and pimps a voice is a very it's a very small-minded way of looking at it i'm just showing us as a society what exists and how these subcultures came to be and and how they operate and how they think i'm not saying anybody's good or bad right you know if you notice like the sex offender like i certainly don't condone molesting a child if anybody thinks i do then you're you're just not smart enough to watch my channel but um i'm just i know that if i listen to your story you're gonna tell me more than if i go you're a creep tell me your story right right he's like you're not going to tell me anything no because i've seen a video of yours that was titled i've seen interviews with the klansmen and the interviewer is just like you can just feel the hatred before he even says hi right okay so do you know nick cannon is the actor and rapper and whatnot super famous rich et cetera um and he at one point interviewed richard spencer who's probably the world the america's most well-known white supremacist i guess at this point and um he's a very very slick communicator you know he wears the suits and he's he's very very well spoken he's smart but then at the end of the day his agenda is basically white power and i saw that nick cannon interviewed him and i immediately thought in my head that's not coming out because i the thing that i knew as soon as i saw it is i know that they're going to get along too well and i know that the video is going to expose the fact that they have more in common than anybody is going to want to admit just in the sense that i think that this whole white power ideology if it was coming from the mouth of some other groups it wouldn't really sound as offensive and i was right the video never came out because i just there's something different about doing a podcast where you have two people kind of getting along and at a certain point somebody in that whole corporate world that he's in is gonna say we can't put out a video with you getting along this well with a white supremacist that i think that's a benefit to what you do though is you get out of the way so much the klansmen gets to sort of go off and you don't really seem like you're a real participant that's right i'm not an interviewer all i'm trying to do is get everyone to do with johnny the gang member that i interviewed a lot or eric a former crack addict that interview a lot or lewis the alcoholic that i have interviewed those guys just tell a story if you notice i don't even say anything i don't say hey eric how's it going tell me your story i don't say anything i just go and i sit back for 30 minutes or 45 minutes and then they tell me they're done and i turn off the camera i never said a word in most of those videos and that's my ideal that's how i'd like every single one of my videos to go but i can't i need to ask you where you're from just to get the conversation going and then sometimes it takes off and other times i need to coax it out of them every every step of the way but it's interesting too because you you know they know that if they don't talk then what the [ __ ] are you sitting here for so they just started talking yeah i was so lucky that i've met people like the guys i just mentioned and there's some women too they're just great storytellers they're just great i mean who knew you're like man you're the best speaker i've ever heard you know eric especially and that's something i will notice when i you know spend a lot of time around you know quote-unquote important people interviewing people that you know have done something with their lives it's quite important that they have to talk about and i notice that a lot of times those people are quite guarded you know like i certainly don't walk into a room with a bunch of normal people and just start telling them my life story i don't start telling them like what about this famous rapper i interviewed this week this is how much money i made of this youtube video i don't do that because i've kind of like accomplished enough of my life that i don't really feel the need to walk into a room and start announcing what i've done but i noticed that when i hang out with people who are very much more you know ground floor in their lives that i'll go hang out with some guy and he'll he'll start telling me about his job as an electrician like he's the [ __ ] you know like it's the most interesting thing on earth he's just he's used to that of just sort of making content by just talking about his experiences and i find that very very fascinating because a lot of the most accomplished people i know have like no outer monologue that they're constantly presenting but normal salt of the earth people that's like a very normal thing for them is they they'll walk into a room and just start talking about their lives in a way that you know rich and famous people a lot of times don't yeah i mean what i believe and sometimes i follow it and sometimes i break my rule but nothing is more powerful than if i find out that you have accomplishments that you're not telling me about but i find out through the grapevine or just some weird way i found out that you went to harvard and you were recruited by the the clippers to play in the nba but you passed up on it you know you're not telling me how cool you are how great a basketball player you were or how smart you are i just happened to have found out through somebody that knew you or went to school with you or or played basketball or whatever and you like wow really adam really he was so if you're not selling it it's a hundred times a thousand times more powerful and significant than if you tell me how great you are you know if you're telling me how great you are it's like yeah okay you know but if you find out that you're great or have wonderful qualities or accomplishments that just but you weren't telling me about it you're just a dude where's it one-on-one two people talking i heard something all the differences said this the other day they said that people are so one of the number one things you hear people talk about when you ask somebody how are you doing oh i'm so busy and that's just like so consistent you know poor people rich people everybody wants to tell you how busy they are me too and they said think about what people are really telling you when they say that they're busy they would never sit there in the conversation and tell you i'm extremely in demand but that's what you really are saying when you say you're you're busy and you know you're sort of letting people know in advance i don't have that much time to offer so really even this right here me you talking to you this is quite valuable that's like really what people are saying when they say they're busy and people feel very comfortable saying that but they won't say what they're actually trying to communicate there which i think because i've and that made so much sense to me because for the last few years i've really always found myself kind of annoyed by people who talk about how busy they are in part because i know that when i was 10 times less busy than i am now i was still telling people i was busy so i'm kind of like i don't really believe my own [ __ ] that much in that regard because i know that i was telling people i was busy 10 years ago when i really didn't have [ __ ] going on compared to now yeah i mean for me the reason that my life gets difficult lately as my channel gets bigger and bigger there's so many i'm being pulled in so many different directions like every day i wake up to 30 messages from people whose lives are in crisis and they need me to save them that just drains you after a while every day saturday sunday every night i don't get a break every single day all day long and then there's all the i'm trying to make things happen which is totally separate and then there's my other career which is really first priority over all this bs that i'm going through and then when i'm doing both at the same time it just it just becomes impossible i just want to like turn off my phones for a week at some point do you just have to ignore some some emails or well like i'll like emailing me is is next to impossible now you know i had one email address or two actually and they quickly became like out of control so i got a second that got over they're not now i have like five or six different email addresses and i can't really deal with any of them wow because i get so many people saying you need to interview me and you need to help this person and i'm the cousin of this guy who you times 3 000 people 3 000 interviews they're all getting not not every one of them but i'm getting pulled in all these different directions by people who said i want to reach out to save this person i want to do this i want to do that i'm one dude yeah i'm just one dude i don't have a team behind me i don't have the money to pay a team if i was making a [ __ ] ton of money i would hire i would hire the team of people and let here just handle this email but i have to do it myself and if i if i never got any emails this channel takes up so much of my time you know you could probably go in like a more business first direction but it seems like that really doesn't appeal to you like if you started to treat it like more of a business if you started to really want to maximize productivity and all that kind of stuff all these kind of things that are available yeah i don't even know selling merchandise is the answer but i'll probably start doing that soon just just because people want t-shirts i've heard there's all these people selling fake soft white underbelly t-shirts now okay yeah there's fake tic toc accounts with my channel that all my videos i i paid to create them but somebody else has created a tick tock channel with all my videos and and i guess you can make money on tick tock somehow i don't know we haven't really got there yet i don't know i don't know anything about social media but but it's just like it's it's it's it's overwhelming does that bother you or do you feel like your content is kind of like public domain like once you do it people it bothers the hell out of it okay i'm human yeah but what am i going to do about it call mr tick-tock and say ask him to take that down you could you could definitely have it removed from copyright that's a good question but there's there's got to be that's not a good question it's a question i've been wrestling with for six months okay trying to get that channel to get taken down but you can't try to contact youtube i mean this what we just talked about susan is here right now yeah um i just got an email this morning coincidentally from youtube offer me a uh what's it called partner manager so that might help me with youtube but that doesn't help me with tick tock and instagram and all these other things that are using my yeah how hospitable do you consider youtube to be as a platform you you not only get videos age and demonetized but you get stuff removed as well i'm assuming i've had some removed i get a lot that are demonetized not it's not it's not all or nothing people seem to think oh all mark's videos are demonetized that's not that's not the case it's only certain ones but in general i believe youtube supports what i'm doing and is youtube's been really good to me so i'm not angry at youtube but all i'm saying is i kind of my stuff is educational it's not porn you know when i when i do an interview of a a prostitute the spirit behind it is let's find out how this girl got into this career why she's like this this is i believe it's probably not an ideal career for a young woman i'm glad if she's happy i'm happy for her but but prostitutes and porn stars i don't know that it's an ideal career for a woman i really don't so what i'm doing is just showing you how they got there i'm not saying it's good or bad you notice i don't say that oh porn is bad i mean very rarely do i make judgments like that i've only done it like a handful of times in all my interviews but the spirit behind what i'm doing is to educate yet sometimes my work gets treated like it's porn and if you really watch my my interviews you'll see that it's it's pretty educational and youtube 99 of the time treats it like that but every like if a video is titled prostitute interview it's very hard for me to get it monetized sometimes they do which makes no sense to me but but usually they don't like this week i think i've got three or four prostitute interviews and they're all i think one got monetized and the thing that really kills you isn't the fact that it's not monetized is the fact that the views stopped coming in and so you could have a video doing extremely well and then it gets demonetized and boom it just flatlines and doesn't get any more views yeah that problem as well i haven't i don't really pay too much attention to all that oh cause that's what i'll notice is that when it turns from green to yellow and they turn off the ads then they also kind of turn off the suggested video thing so i'm not the views will just plummet and that's what hurts is like listen you keep the money but let me keep getting all the [ __ ] views on this so i at least know that it made the impact that it could have i know very little about youtube and social media okay but i i believe you i mean my channel is what i got like 2 million subscribers now that wouldn't be the case if youtube didn't support what i'm doing and promote it so i believe they're they're generally good to me but they have to do what they have to do you know if somebody says oh you know lynn talked about suicide you got to take that down you know it's going to trigger people what are they going to do no we're going to leave it up so they have to take it down so it's probably a viewer that was upset about lynn this girl that was a crystal meth addict that interviewed her first interview she talked about suicide she didn't commit suicide and she's threatened suicide a thousand times but she's never ever gonna do it i don't believe but she talked about it and it got deleted uh like two weeks ago just because she was talking about doing it but if you're gonna talk if you're gonna start deleting videos because someone talked about suicide that's a quarter of my videos pretty much yeah so i'm not sure if that's i think it's a viewer who got upset because it's a powerful lin's for his videos is very powerful because she's some so like troubled and so just full of angst that it triggered somebody and they reported it and it got deleted so that's that's gone that's unfortunate yeah that's what that's my patreon channel is for you want nudity you want all the rawest content you go to patreon and pay ten dollars a month and you can get that oh okay so is that doing pretty well no no we're about to launch ours hopefully i don't promote it right oh okay you know i don't promote it i just put it up and i did a video a year and a half ago or whatever it was when i when i started it and that's all i've ever really done i have a little thing at the very end of my videos saying i have a patreon channel but people don't watch the ends of my videos so they only watch the first eight minutes and then they then they bail i feel bad when i miss like the last 10 minutes you know i'll be watching a 45 minute one and sort of you know i'll notice myself skipping the next one when there's like eight minutes left and i'll be thinking like am i missing like this maybe there's a really good ender to that one yeah sometimes i mean like i did one this morning that i thought was uh i probably wasn't going to use it and then the gentleman told me like i asked him like you know how do you do you think if your childhood was different if you know it may have been taken your life in a different direction he goes well when i got molested they go you know so then it became it became more interesting again i noticed there's like trends with your content like you'll just get interested in something and then there'll be a bunch of stuff about that like the nudist thing like is that no it's because i took a trip to tampa where there are these nudist resorts so that's why you got a influx of like a whole bunch of nudist and swinger videos i'm going to be going back there um at the end of the month where did that uh because that's not something i ever would have thought is something that would make sense on your channel but no see if you really understand my channel which which is it can be very uh it's my fault because i did so many videos on skid row that people thought it was a drug addiction skid row channel and it is not and if you're coming here just for drug addict stories you're going to be disappointed because like when i sell that house next year i'll have money to really do what i want to do with this channel you'll you'll still see some drug addict stories but you're going to see you know cowboys and you're going to see amish people and you'll see you know you'll see all kinds of different subcultures across the country and they're all going to be interesting but they're not all drug addicts stories the only reason you see so many drug addict stories is because skid row is half an hour from my house and it's full of a lot of the worst stories you ever know i mean finding as you i'm sure know finding interesting content is the biggest challenge if i go to skid row i don't have to even think about it i just go down there and i find gold all the time every day i found one of the best interviews i've done all year this morning really with a woman who was sex trafficked since she was a little kid oh wow clover when i um when people used to always ask me to interview uh people on the street or whatever a lot of the the first thing that would come to mind for me would be if someone's on the street smoking crack doing heroin meth whatever are they really able to consent to being on camera that's a great question how often does that weigh into your decision about putting these people on camera and a lot of times i feel like they're at some level of sobriety like maybe they've uh they're not like actually on drugs at the moment you know of all the interviews i've done i've had two where the in one case the family of a crack addict and he wanted me to keep his video up but his family and friends contacted me as friends mainly and said look you gotta take that down he's got a respected career and you're making him look like he's you know they were really polite about it they weren't aggressive they were just like can you take that down because it's gonna ruin his career and i don't want to ruin anyone's career so i took it down right but then i saw him like a couple days later he goes you took that down and i'm like yeah he goes i wish you hadn't and and then i'm like you know so he wants it up but but it was an interesting video because he's really it's a really intelligent talk about being on skid row rather than just a you know he's a white guy he's accomplished he was a musician he was respected he had a great life but he chose the street life at least temporarily at this point in his life and it is i thought it was really a deep interesting talk but it's gone now i think it exists on patreon but but it's gone from my youtube channel and the other one was a guy who was so fascinating but he was he was clearly high and i i normally don't do interviews with people who are high but he was just so fascinating and interesting and beautiful he was a beautiful you know physically beautiful person you know shawn i think he's on they all still exist on my patreon channel right that's a reason to go to patreon but um i just thought he was just so like interesting to look at and listen to he spoke beautifully about how much he loved his dad and it was a great talk but his his family called me and said you gotta take that down he looks like an [ __ ] like so so i did but that's a weird decision because it's like if he was down to do it like who who is the family necessarily to tell him no you know what narrative should be in that case even he called me up says yeah i was so high i didn't i think stupid yeah so yeah i i have his number i may do another one later but typically you can't recreate magic you know it worked that time because it worked you try to recreate it it 99 of the time it falls flat and that's a lot the whole thing with drug addicts too is that a lot of times you will get there there might be 10 different versions to their personality that you might get in an interview you might get multiple different versions of their personality in one interview because they might be like still sort of high and then the adrenaline sort of wears off midway through the interview all of a sudden they're kind of drowsy yeah nobody i've had people fall asleep in the middle of an interview yeah that happened this morning because you're so not in control of like where you're at in your yeah your energy no but back to your original question about whether it's okay you don't really have their consent if they're high look what what i do is is pushing the limits of what's um appropriate or or or or right you know i i push the limits all the time like like the stuff i do is like i really thought my channel would get taken down from from youtube by now that was really kind of my secret little goal was to put this channel up make it as edgy as i can and eventually get it taken down by youtube because it's just too inappropriate and then there'll be a patreon channel back up and that's people can go there that was my plan but youtube has basically done the opposite and supported me which is cool too you know so so i instead i'm getting support from youtube so um if you two ever took it down then i'd probably start making money because everyone would probably pay when i'm charging 10 a month on patreon and then i'd probably start making money but who knows i'm just i'm just doing what i do i'm learning every day i do this you know about myself and about other people and about society and our country and how humans work and i love learning definitely what um what does the sheer size of your audience at this point oh i'm saying so to answer your first question i'll be quick um it's about prevention right so if somebody has to pay the price which always is going to have there's always a trade-off somebody's going to have to pay a price if you're going to do an interview of a drug addict it's the interviewee the interviewee is paying the price i pay them i can i compensate them i treat them with respect but they are taking the hit because look here i am i'm a drug addict and it's uh it's humiliating or embarrassing even though they're not particularly humiliated they're proud of it and they want to come back and do another one but i understand how people say oh no you you made that person look bad because you you show them as a drug addict but it's it's not about them it's about the the thousands of young people who are being parented by people who are watching my channel or even the young people that are watching my channel my channel is pretty popular so a lot of people are seeing it and i'll bet you it's affecting somebody in terms of their decisions about using drugs or joining a gang or or becoming a sex worker or all these things so somebody has to pay the price for that awareness and understanding and that's the drug addict or the prostitute yeah sorry no for sure your audience is gigantic what do you think that says about you know the fans the world youtube you know it's interesting monica and i were speaking off-camera about this she's a musician first and then this help that she does with the patrick katie foundation is just her little side hustle she was saying everybody in the music industry is using i've heard really because i'm naive i've never smoked pot you know i'm the square square you'll ever see in terms of drugs but um i think the drugs are much more common you know because a lot of my channel is about drugs it seems it's ridiculous that i'm a the head of this channel that has something to do with drugs but it's it's really not about drugs it's about humans you know i just i like learning about humans so that's really what i do but drugs seem to be super popular across our country and uh like the most popular video i posted in the last six months is of matthew who's a functional heroin addict so it's got two and a half two and a half million views i didn't i didn't think that video would get fifty thousand views it's got two and a half million and the reason for that is because there's a lot of people who are functioning and using right i believe yeah i have a friend who uh because it's not i mean he's not particularly charismatic or interesting he's just a he's a nice dude who uses heroin i think that functional word was the whole thing because i remember when i first met somebody from the northwest when i first moved to l.a and he just told me like yeah my mom and dad they they do a crystal meth they go to work it's like [ __ ] cup of coffee to you it's like they do meth all day and i remember being so shocked because i just didn't realize that there were people who had functional relationships with that kind of stuff but now that seems incredibly obvious to me like of course like everybody who does heroin or crystal meth can't be out on the streets robbing people you know there's got to be people with workable relationships with these drugs yeah no and i'd like to do more of them yeah but it's hard to find people that want to talk about it when they've got a nine to five and they don't want to lose their job oh you're a heroin addict you're fired you know so there's that yeah and but there are people who who can get around that somehow yeah and that's the ones i'll interview but and what i think interesting because like i get drawn to a lot of the gang stuff that you do just because i feel like that's kind of the stuff that's the closest what is your background i mean what do you i'm waiting for my soft white underbelly interview no just really quickly how'd you get into this um so in 2006 i started like the first bmx blog website basically uh when i was living in new york city i've been running bmx bikes since i was 12. i basically did that from like 2006 so around 2016. that was all i did was run this blog at over time it kind of became more like oh i'm a podcaster i started interviewing all these pro bmx riders and stuff within the first year i interviewed a couple underground rappers and they just those interviews did so many more views than the bmx riders i was interviewing which gave me a little bit more confidence because i've been like a lifelong like hip-hop addict and that was always the number one thing that i was a fan of all of a sudden i started to realize for the first time in my life like oh there are people in this world who give a [ __ ] about what i have to say and i was very lucky because i was sort of there for the early era of the soundcloud era so there's a rapper xxxtentacion who you might have heard of who passed away a couple years ago and his interview was by far my biggest interview i think it was like 14 million views or something like that and that that one was the one where all of a sudden it became like oh now everybody knows about you and that that kind of took it to a totally different level and now i just try to interview whoever i find interesting yeah but you're very good okay yeah i like your style of like just making like joe rogan's really great too like the way he makes conversation happen is just like it's it's perfect it's beautiful yeah there's so many different interview styles styles yeah what have you learned about interviewing i know your style is kind of get out of the way yeah but you see i i don't i don't really see myself as an interviewee i i interviewer i see myself as just a photographer who's just trying to get their story so my ideal scenario what i'm aiming for is like the johnny or the eric or the lewis videos that i mentioned which is just a photo and them telling their story that's perfect for me that's that's the formula but that doesn't work in 99 95 percent of the cases so i need to coax it out but the the fewer words i can say the better now every once in a while i'll interview somebody who we just click with and we have conversations off camera that are great so i'll actually have a conversation with them on camera but everyone complains when i do that so so i should probably not do that but but i still do it sometimes that's interesting yeah um because one thing that stands out to me about your your stuff is that you know photography i guess in a lot of ways is like bigger than ever since everybody can take a photo and obviously there's you know if you're a great photographer there's tons of commercial opportunities there's tons of brands that need high quality photo work all the time but photos don't go viral that often these days in comparison to video and that's what i find so fascinating about yours is that if i was a photographer who was just looking for a way like how do i make my photos get out there more i would probably land on something like what you're doing oh i'll do this youtube content and then i'll have the photos as the thumbnail and insert it inside the video well i'm not selling my photos right but if you just wanted people to see them then i feel like the youtube videos are the perfect vehicle to get more people so if the goal is just for people to see the photos the youtube videos that thought never even entered my mind really all i'm trying to do is inform society about each other that's that's all i'm thinking about definitely like when a prostitute comes out and tells you how she got to where she is how she her boyfriend at 15 years old turned out to be her pimp and she didn't know it and and how she was molested when she was six years old and how sex became a part of her life at a very young age that is a story that should be told because you know it's going to happen again and again listen to the 300 sex worker videos on my channel every girl has almost the same story yeah you know i guarantee it's happening right now somewhere for sure that [ __ ] is a constant over and over and over reminder of how [ __ ] careful you need to be with your kids yeah i mean it's really it's it's the reason for my channel is is like like if you love yourself you're going to treat others differently you're not going to be molesting your kids if you love yourself right so clearly we don't love ourselves enough how do you love yourself is it religion for a lot of people it's religion i'm not religious so i don't get religion as the way but i was parented really well not perfectly but you know on a scale from one to ten i would say you know i was parented like a 9.5 so i didn't have this traumatic terrible childhood with my parents so i've never had these kind of like weird sexual things with anybody right you know my relationships have all been pretty cool with everyone i've had a relationship with so i i don't really have enemies i don't have people that hate me other than on this youtube channel they don't really hate me with what's really going on there is they hate themselves or they hate what i'm my channel represents and that that's not me but we just need to as a society be healthier be happier because if you're happy you're not going to [ __ ] with anybody you're not going to do anything to a young kid yeah i was wondering how you're going to humanize this this guy i forget his name that you interviewed and just said rapist in the title yeah and i was you know wondering like how did you do that interview before i even clicked on it like how do you do that interview and not seem like you're giving him space to justify his actions i was just immediately interested too because it's like is he just admitting that he's a rapist off rip which he did but before he even got into that he was talking about how his earliest memories of sex and relationships or just love were based around his family members raping him and it's like that just immediately forces you into this mind state where even the most judgmental person can't help but understand that this guy is a product of his circumstances and that doesn't like absolve him for all the [ __ ] he's done but it's impossible to remove a person from trying to understand their uh their their upbringing yeah i mean like if you're watching my channel you're and you're judging or hating somebody like like james the rapist or a sex offender for example you know it's the ones who molest young kids if you're judging or hating them you're not learning your mind is in a different you're using a different part of your brain and what i want to do is get help everyone learn so if your mind is open you're just listening to the story like there's a video that i didn't post on youtube i posted on patreon last week richie who's a sex offender it was just too much for youtube so i didn't even post it there but um he talks about how he was molested by his uncle who would take him to the zoo all the time but they never went to the zoo and then his step-dad his mom like her mom's boyfriend or somebody came into the picture the same thing happened again and i think it happened to either other times like camp counselors and all this kind of it was a entire childhood full of being screwed with sexually so sure enough he's he's gone out and he's i think i forget how many kids way too many kids that he's done this with and he has a ton of remorse but he says at the end of the video i'm gonna do it again that guy was just talking about james yeah and then by the end of the video he's talking about raping his own mother yeah and that that was the moment where i found myself i noticed after a few minutes that my hands that were breaking up weed had frozen my eyes my jaws dropped and i just been staring at the tv for like three minutes when i asked him it was that intense when i asked him like what what what did you just say and he's like well right right my mother like he couldn't really say it yeah he mumbled it and he kind of so you raped your mother yes yeah yeah he even he had a lot of and he's squirming around in his chair and he just he could barely like live with himself enough to tell you that story but for some reason it was like he had to yeah he had to leave it's it's again mental health i mean there's something wrong with him mentally whether it's his family's fault or maybe it's just the brain chemistry he was born with or maybe i mean all these serial killers and all that i mean is it because something terrible happened to them as kids or is it just genetics or is it the water they're drinking or what is it is that cell phones is it the plastic well like i don't know what's going on but there's something going on in the world that there's so many people shooting random people and raping so many kids and like why are we all so violent and cruel do you feel like you are better equipped to answer that question now than when you started it should be right that's a great question i mean yes but i don't have the answer i mean like like with all the sections like i used to like like the you see a stripper or a prostitute or whatever and you're like i used to be much more judgmental now i never judge like i i don't even i think i've eradicated it from my personality now because i i know now after doing all these interviews that there's something happened to you when you were young that kind of set you on that path so i'm not even gonna think that what you're doing is bad or wrong or anything yeah i'm just going to see it as you found a way to support yourself good for you and if you want something better you know maybe i can help you with that or maybe i can't or maybe whatever you know it's like but all you can do is is love and support that's all you can do because if you're going to judge and say no you what you're doing is [ __ ] up they're not going to stop doing it they're going to dig their heels in deeper and just do it more with more shame but the only way out is to build them up and and give them dignity and respect and love and let them take a deep breath and and hold their head up high and feel good about themselves and when they do that they're much more likely to make better decisions for themselves and maybe make decisions that might make them a little less money but make them happier yeah you know so so i don't i mean it's it's hard to uh to say oh i have all the answers now after doing all these interviews i i i understand things better but i still don't understand a lot which is why i'm still hungry to do this i i look forward to doing this because i'm learning all the time there's no type of interview that has grown stale to you are there interviews that you did early on that maybe you would turn down now because you just don't find that person like i feel like if i did a couple of clan interviews that i just wouldn't really be able to keep doing it oh yeah i mean i i don't want to do a whole bunch of them i think i've got one more in the can that i'll use but i'm waiting for the right i don't want to just put up a plan video but the reason i went to mississippi was to find the the the counterpoint to the clan interview which is a cold-hearted klansman it's it's an interesting video because there's even footage of the of their uh ritual thing at the beginning but uh i wanted to find a a an older like a 90 year old i interviewed a bunch of 90 year old uh african-american people in oh wow that's good middle of mississippi hoping to find a racism story that really would be a good counterpoint to that right the best i found and she wasn't the most compelling storyteller so i'm not going to use it but i'm persistent i'll probably keep trying but i asked her about racism she was 94 years old i think she was tell me racism must you must have seen a lot in your 94 years tell me what you've seen racism i've never seen racism and this is a totally black community like i mean you can count the white people on on one hand i think that i saw while i was there for two days three days whatever um i've never seen racism i wonder what she would define racism she worked on like i think she worked on the cotton fields as a kid and all that and she's what is racism well racism is where like maybe people from one race might not like people from another race and treat them badly i'd explain to her what racism was and she goes yeah no when we worked in the fields in the cotton fields that the the the the cotton the plantation owners would treat the children of the black people a certain way and she kind of got into it and it was very clear that yes there was racism in her life that she experienced like harshly right but she didn't even see it as anything other than just that's the way life is right she didn't see like hey you're treating me unfairly like now i think blacks are much more aware that hey you're treating me right differently than you would treat a white person or whatever so they're much more on edge about it and it's a bigger deal the black black lives matter and all that kind of stuff i mean her threshold for what she probably for what would have to happen for her to consider a racist would probably be incredibly high yeah i mean she didn't even know it was it existed but but that's a community it was so black that there was no tension between the whites and blacks there just wasn't anything the whites were basically they thought it was a cop everyone assumed i was a cop in that community because i was white wow because why would a white person be there there was no reason that must just be such an eye-opening learning experience for you too because i'm sure you could have never imagined that dynamic right right now so as i'm saying that i love to learn and doing these interviews i just keep learning so eventually when i stop learning like when i do the klansman videos i don't i don't interviews i'm not really learning a whole lot so i'm kind of i did a handful of those and i think i might if somebody was really interesting i'd do it but probably i probably won't go looking for more of those you ever do a clan interview and then look at the comments and realize a lot of people agree with them and did that yeah i've seen some of that and did that bother you or make you think twice about it no no because i'm not i'm not assuming my entire audience has evolved and right and sees things the way i do like i i i work very hard and i i'm very successful at being non-judgmental yeah every once in a while i'll tell a process a young prostitute's like you know what you're doing is probably not good for your kid and it's not going to end well look at some of the other interviews you'll see that it's not going to end well and i'll talk her out of it but generally i just let them tell their story and and stand back so i'm really good at just standing back and letting people do their thing and say their piece and and say thanks for telling your story definitely um is there any part of you when i was interviewing uh big u from who's basically like the founder of the roland 60's crips out here and he's really transitioned into like making documentaries and doing all this stuff in the music industry and stuff is a really great story but he's very much figured out that his name is so powerful and his uh you know everything that he's been through in his life is so big that he constantly will have different documentary people wanting to work with him trying to turn his ideas or stories that he's been a part of into documentaries stuff like that and when i was having that conversation with him i was like that's so interesting because i feel like you know a documentary is just one way that you could present a narrative just the same way that a podcast is like this this big you could have easily started a podcast he could easily not easily but he could have created a tv show there's so many different ways to tell a story in this day and age it occurs to me the that stories that you're telling i could completely imagine a lot of those stories being sort of like interwoven into an a a documentary or a narrative is there anything that is that something that you think about is any of this content ever going to be repurposed for a bigger purpose uh eric is writing a book currently with his you know life story which is which would be great right johnny should but he's so high that i don't think that'll ever happen okay the gang member he's got great stories and it would be a great movie or but you don't automatically think oh i could do a doug i'm talking about this one person i'm thinking the soft white underbelly like something like the like see i i m the spirit of what i want to do is is to learn for me and i think my audience likes to learn that that's that's 99.9 percent of what i'm doing so if i was going to do a documentary about chongo or about johnny for example let's say johnny i'm going to stop learning while i do that i'll learn a little bit about johnny and the gang life and all that but i'm i'm not learning like you know this the interviews i did this morning i learned from the interviews i'll do up in san francisco this week i'll learn from i'll learn a little bit every day and i love i love what i've learned in the last especially the last two years when i've done this so hot and heavy you know like every day i've been doing it i just learn learn learn learn just a little bit more every day it's like i just become like a a more well-rounded person by doing that so i i don't think i'll put it down to go do something else even if even it's gonna make money because i think what's at this point in my life i'm more interested in doing what's right than making money i'll make money when i sell the house you know so if i need money i just i just sit on a beach until next summer when i sell the house and then i'll have money it's not about money it's about to me it's about learning right because you said earlier that once you saw the house things will be a little different you're going to do different things if somebody just dropped a million dollars on you right now what would i do what are you doing a little different with the channel like i would hire editors because i spend so much my time editing i would hire researchers to help me find people because i'm doing that as well editing takes up most of my day shooting you could get somebody for [ __ ] five bucks a day to edit for you man i don't know are you are you really picky with the editing yeah i'm a freak yeah not five bucks a day that's not a living but i know what you mean no i i could but i like doing it myself yeah yeah i'm sure i could hire somebody who's really great like when i hired people i pay them a lot i don't pay them just a little like people want to intern for me i get emails every day from people who want to intern they want to work for me for free i love what you're doing i want to work for free i don't hire people for free i pay them a lot so if you're [ __ ] amazing and worth what i'm going to pay you then you're going to be maybe part of my team if i ever start making money but i'm not going to hire somebody who just wants to work for free mm-hmm i don't need that yeah you don't want to ever hire anyone who wants to work for free because what i'm doing is so dangerous like if you're going to work on set with me yeah like like when i went to memphis the first pimp i interviewed i ended up becoming really good friends with and he just died recently dro in an auto accident but he he told me like when we first saw you you're a white guy in our neighborhood man we were just going to rob you yeah but then you came walking up to us and told us what you're doing and you're offering us money and we're like what the [ __ ] let's not rob this guy yet and then he and i became friends later but he uh initially was gonna rob me so if i had some intern out there who's like young and you know naive you know because not everybody knows how to navigate those kind of situations well um it can be it can be a real problem and i don't want that liability if somebody you know he got stabbed or he got robbed or shot or killed or whatever because he was working with me right the liability is too much so i'd rather do this by myself 100 some of your more high profile interviews like the ron jeremy thing or the michael franzis one uh are those situations that happen in different uh ways since i'm assuming you know just like see ron jeremy walking down the street no no and i'm not i'm not into porn at all so i'm not i i saw an interview with him and he was an interesting cat and he's lived a very very different lifestyle and i just thought it would be funny and and interesting and let me just try it and he's a charming guy he's friendly charming he's intelligent you know he had interesting things to share but it was that was just a little experiment that probably is not a direction i want to go in so i don't think even if i had all the money to spend on this channel i wouldn't i wouldn't take it in that direction i i like people who aren't aren't selling anything and have never told their story like i get a lot of people coming to me that they've got they got a little secret agenda they want to sell their music or they want to sell this or they're going to be famous or they want to start a podcast or they want to do this that or the other and i tend to steer away from those because i'd rather find a pimp who's never ever talked about anything or or a drug addict or a gang member or whatever i mean the gang members here's here's one thing i've learned the people that don't want to tell me their story that really just those are the most interesting ones those are the ones i want those are the ones i want yeah but as soon as i find out you know when somebody when i go to a no city and well there's these four people and this one doesn't want to tell her story and like get her that's the one i want because that's one who's got something really interesting a lot of the best conversations i've had through this podcast have been the conversations that took place immediately after we stopped recording and the rapper just started telling me about how they used to run this drug empire and right they're they're like literally like unplugging the mics like as if we're still recording and [ __ ] because they're so paranoid there's somebody recording them right and that is a weird one because i'm on one hand of course i'm i don't want you to say anything on camera that's going to get you in trouble your interviewers and mine overlap kind of yeah probably you've done you've done gang members oh yeah but you know it's funny because when i watch your stuff a lot of times when i interview someone who's in a gang or whatever sometimes though especially with the older guys they'll be regretful about it they'll have negative things to say about it but then at the same time a lot of dudes love the gang [ __ ] they love it they [ __ ] love the culture of it they love everything about it like and a lot of times when i watch yours i don't know if it's just the ones you use or if it's just um the environment makes them want to present it differently but they like very rarely are you know presenting gang banging in a positive way on your stuff is that intentional no i i i don't like not use the ones that support like if i had a gang member who came out and really thought it was awesome and it was great is that what you're saying yeah i would love that really i would love that because it's not necessarily i'm not endorsing it but it just shows you something like what i'd really love to get more of with the gangs because i've got johnny 12 times right how many more johnny interviews do i need even though he's still interesting um but every once in a while i'll find a gang member like what i'd love is to find a young active one guy who's 17 18 19 and and lives for it it's his only option that that gives you a window into that subculture that that we probably need to look at as a society yeah i could probably help you out um although i wonder just you know i feel like if you're 18 and really in it gang banging wise you don't want to talk about it it's like the number one thing where you're going to be really disincentivized to talk about it yeah no that's the problem that's why i don't have more of them because they generally don't talk about it like i've met guys on the street who have tattoos all over their face and like dude i'd love to talk to you i could just tell by the the the attitude and the look and the whole thing and you're asking me to do something that i would never ever do so it's like i get it yeah some of the vlogs that we've done where we go to people's uh neighborhoods have been like the most shocking and like moving for me like even little things like we did one in long beach where we went to um this rapper's like neighborhood and i just saw all these like you know 15 16 year old kids just sort of hanging out in this alley and uh you know they're like 16 and i saw a gun poking out of one of their uh pocket like in the back of their shirt you're as white as can be right yeah and i'm just hanging i had a couple guys with me and stuff i'm not worried but i'm i'm just like seeing like these dudes sit on the [ __ ] corner these kids these are kids they're 15 or 16 and if you ask them what they want to do with their life they'll tell you that they want a gang bang yeah but they want to be part of this and they want to represent this well right and they don't know anything else and i mean that's what i'd love to find shocking i'd love to get more of those kind of interviews and maybe i have to go to chicago for it or something but again they sometimes don't want to talk yeah yeah it's an interesting subculture but again as a small part of my audience likes that i'm not going to like start becoming a gang channel it's not my thing yeah understandable um yeah i mean it was a great conversation i really appreciate you coming in oh thanks no it's it's it's nice to talk about it sometimes i never really talk about i just do it yeah so i've done like three interviews now for them okay that's dope yeah oh you know i got to talk about this amanda yeah i don't think i really understood how big your channel was until i saw nor did i number one trending on twitter and i'm like that many people are talking about an interview that he did and granted she did a bunch of interviews but yeah but she was just a little street girl that i thought was interesting and i kept doing interviews with her and she i got friendly with her dad and i said man what you're amanda's coming over here she wants money all the time what do i do and it was very clear what she was doing to get money yeah which is super dangerous right 10 different ways so i said tell you what i'll i'll have a man to come to me every day and i'll give her 40 bucks and we'll do a quick little interview quick little like sometimes they were like two minutes or less one minute sometimes more but generally she was so inco in just gibberish coming out of her mouth right nonsense money but but she's cute and she's a quirky personality and she was fun to watch um while she was deep into her into her crack addiction and so i'd give her the 40 bucks and she'd come back for more and i'd have to tell her how i couldn't give her any more because i'm just feeding her addiction at that point and it's like it it was it was a tough it's tough dealing with addicts but and she would have temper tantrums and all this kind of stuff it was out of control and she'd like yell outside my studio you'd hear in the background of other videos those other interviews i've done you'll hear amanda yelling mark you know because she just wants her money for more crack but she got clean miraculously through this woman lima who just came out of nowhere like an angel just came out of nowhere and helped her get clean yeah how involved did she have to get to help her get clean super involved like like she was talking to the courts every day talking with the judge talking with the district attorney talking with whoever she needed to talk to to make sure that amanda stayed and she assaulted her dad right around this right before she met right before lima contacted me and and larry amanda's dad calls me and says what do i do mark what do i do he and i talk a lot and amanda just assaulted me and the police are here and they want to know if i want to press charges i'm like yeah what do you got to lose if you don't press charges she's out on the street again and she's going to do something terrible like she always does why not put her in jail it's not going to be so bad okay i'm going to press charges so he did so she went to jail for like a week or two or three until her court date and that's when lima came into the picture and lima decided she's going to help amanda and make a long story short she got the court to hold amanda for two months which must have been terrible for a crack addict to be going through all that and just sitting there in a cell but um eventually her case got the court decided that she's got to do one year of rehab or she's going to do five years in prison and it wasn't just a rehab where you could leave if you wanted to it was basically like a jail i mean it was super pleasant great rehab great rehabs she went to she went to two different ones one in la and he got too expensive because lima and her husband were basically paying for all this rehab well over a hundred thousand dollars that she and her husband were paying because the gofundme really wasn't supported that much and she found amanda through your channel she found a matter through my channel wow and she kind of just oversaw the entire process lima did i give lima all the credit for that i mean i did my part to get you know make things happen but but lima was like an angel that came in and just saved amanda from from herself wow and she got clean which was beautiful the last interview i did i think in april she was just like talking with you it was like weird like that's the same person because i know you as a crack head that's like so out of control right it's weird to see you speaking intelligently and having compassion for others and like all these skills that i'd never seen come out of this person it was really a beautiful story and then she dies and do you know the circumstances that she died now they're still doing the autopsy they said it's gonna take two or three months so this was just may that it happened early may i think it was mother's day wow it happened mother's day morning she fell she died in her sleep wow and her dad told me there's a history of aneurysms in defense in this side of the family so maybe it's that lima suspects it had something to do with all the trauma that she went through i mean she would come and see my studio with like scrapes and beaten up like she'd get beaten up like weekly wow all her teeth are gone yeah you know scrapes on her head bumps here bleeding there is the one where she was wearing the overalls her first interview was the first one yeah and she's totally pretty and it's really kind of weird to hear her talking about doing all these drugs and stuff because she isn't really like showing the the the the signs that you typically see that somebody's living on the street everyone gives me a hard time because i made some comment some joke when she tells me that she made some like comment about all the crazy sexual things that she does with guys and i'm like like i'm a guy i'm a guy i'm i'm not an angel everybody thinks i'm a saint and an angel i'm just a dude of the camera you know i'm not a bad dude but what did you say though that pissed people off i think i said you know she she does something crazy sexual whatever and like so what are you doing later i'm a guy i have a sense of humor i can't i can't show it on this on these videos because i have to be straight so i play the straight man which is hard for me because because i could i could say some of the funniest stuff ever right but i choose not to so that's that's my rule and i follow rules so if my rule is i don't make jokes with people then i just don't so right so i have to play straight man sharp and i work really nicely together because he he's the whole street and he's so so kind of he's got such a great persona right and he's so like charismatic and and i have to be the straight white guy yeah and it's a good dynamic it's like it's like a comedy team do you think that the fact that you are such a sort of clean-cut white guy that you like don't do drugs that you're not even on the spectrum of drug use like i feel like even me smoking weed maybe that would blur the line a little bit if i were to be doing the kind of interviews that you do uh do you think it helps you in some way that you're kind of from a completely different world i treat everyone with respect and that's how i get into this pimp world that's why i'm accepted into i treat everybody well basically until they start just taking advantage of me which happens once i start giving people support then they start taking advantage of me and that that's what i'll i'll back off and that's the only problems i've ever had but because i'm not tempted by drugs at all i'm surrounded by them all the time people are smoking crack right in front of me in my studio people come you know i've seen everything right none of it tempts me it's not even there's not a chance in hell that i would ever use any of these things so that gives me the ability to dive into that commun that that world without any danger of becoming an addict because if if you're going to smoke pot you might smoke crystal meth on a weekend or something and then next you know so that that could happen right with me i don't think it ever could no i'm not i'm not saying i'm better than i'm not perfect i have my vices too you know but but they're not drugs yeah with amanda um what do you think it was though that made that many people stand up and did she stand out to you as being the most popular person on your channel no but then when she passed were you just shocked by the number of people who are clearly affected by a story it was very surprising for me because like really amanda like when her like some of her videos kind of went semi little viral early on they got like a couple million views like wow that was interesting yeah i didn't think anything of her i just thought she was an interesting little street girl and but um there's other people i think are a little more compelling than amanda but you know celebrity is almost like she became a celebrity celebrity is a weird thing like why do some of the people that become huge celebrities become celebrities it's not because they're more intelligent or they're more talented or the more anything they're just they got something that pushes the buttons of people and makes them connect with them or something you know and amanda seemed to have something like that it made a lot and it's also a really sweet recovery you know everyone's rooting for everyone on my channel to get happy and healthy you know that's that's the general spirit of my audience which is really beautiful so amanda actually came through and did it because very few do you know of the 3 000 people i've interviewed there's been alex a white kid from chicago who's clean from fentanyl now i talked to him recently and he goes yeah i'm clean i'm craving like a [ __ ] but i'm clean so he's done it on his own you know he went to a rehab in chicago and he you know he's he's doing it but his family is supporting him tremendously and i think he's still doing good jimmy a little kid from florida who i sent to colorado to go to rehab and i'm helping him a little financially to stay stick with it and then um amanda who was kind of forced into it by the by the courts and that's about it i mean rita's you know in housing but it's it's hard to break free from the from the hold of these addictions it's hard man it's got to be brutal so i don't know it's sad i mean that's why the that's why i can do what i do and not get too discouraged and too bent out of shape over how traumatic and terrible and depressing it is because when somebody tells me a really depressing terrible horrible tragic story i go this is going to prevent some a lot of people from doing this it's going to help some parents parent better it's going to help some kids to not make the same decisions this person did so i feel like that's good the interviewee took the hit but there's a world of people watching that are going to benefit from it so that's why i can do what i do without losing any sleep over it i don't feel guilt over like exploiting a heroin addict when i know that i'm preventing probably thousands maybe many more other people from becoming heroin addicts because if you watch 10 of my videos you're probably going to think really long and hard about smoking crystal meth this weekend right if you've watched 10 of your videos and somebody offers you crystal meth it's like [ __ ] you might still fall for it but i mean just having that that massive wall of content that you've consumed that's telling you the exact opposite has to it has to help yeah that that's why i do it yeah that's why i can do it and not feel not a second of guilt over exploiting anybody because no matter what you're doing you're gonna end up pissing off somebody or you're gonna upset somebody so so i'm i'm not worried about that and i even believe i know that the interviewees would want people to hear their stories so they won't fall in the same traps that they did they've told me that a thousand times so i'm on when i'm okay with it and the interview is okay with it and everybody's still okay with it six months or a year later then what's the problem but somebody's still got a problem so people that's the human nature people are everything about letting anybody do an interview anonymously like blur out their face or something because i've done that sometimes there's two of those two people that were uh hitmen for the uh mexican mafia right and those got the least views of they're the probably two of the most interesting videos interviews on my channel and they're the least watched wow because there's that you don't get to see the face interesting and that humanity means that much more to people yeah i mean i've had a lot of people come to me like i'll do an interview but you gotta blur my face yeah and uh i'm not gonna do it makes sense yeah i'm very visual so this is the vision that's why i was thinking i'm like as soon as you blur the face your photographer that just must really like get in the way of your stated purpose you know when i had to blur those to interview these faces it's just like oh i hate doing this yeah it ruins the whole visual but makes sense yeah i appreciate you man yeah man you too thank you for coming on you're doing a great thing a real honor um everybody subscribe to software underbelly no thanks and uh yeah much respect for what you're doing no jumper coolest podcast in the world check us out on youtube soundcloud itunes like comment subscribe no jumper.com if you want to support friday we'll be streaming your music appreciate you man thank you adam real okay

Channel: No Jumper

Views: 1,499,225

Keywords: Mark Laita, Mark Laita Interview, mark laita soft white underbelly, soft white underbelly, soft white underbelly interview, soft white underbelly no jumper, mark laita no jumper, mark laita photography, soft white underbelly portrait, mark laita adam22

Id: I3zAr64FXrs

Length: 97min 21sec (5841 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/EsmagaSapos]

Thanks for sharing man.

I just hope Mark doesn't get frustrated with it. But he has a point he wants to get across and that usually leads people to keep doing something for a long time.

If he didn't had a point things would even be greater, in my opinion, just a guess, but he could get bored with routine and nothing to aim at.

I'm speechless to the amount of money he's been throwing at this project without none coming back. In the future he has to get some revenue somehow, money doesn't last forever.

Also, not having anyone helping, and I get his trying to protect his idea, but in the future I'm sure he knows he has to find someone he can trust to do editing, management of all this things, planning trips, all of it, but has to be someone with the mindset his been hired for a job and not to take credit for none of it.

[u/Life_Attorney_2178]

Loved this interview, at first the guy interviewing him seemed abit arrogant, then second half he clearly realised he was unable to match Mark and didn't need to compete with him.