Mark Leda, former Apple and BMW photographer, details his transition to documenting America's "soft white underbelly" via YouTube, where he interviews sex workers and addicts despite platform demonetization. He argues that GoFundMe fails because it ignores root trauma, citing cases like Jerry, a man who forgave his shooter before dying of COPD, and SB, a gang member surviving a heart stab wound. Leda asserts that childhood neglect drives addiction, advocating unconditional love over punishment to heal societal fractures, while noting his own divorce stemmed from workaholism versus family focus. Ultimately, he concludes that hate only harms the self, urging society to prioritize loving children to prevent future abuse and create a better generation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Hello, world.
Today, my guest is Mark Leda.
Mark started his career as a world renowned professional photographer.
Whose clients include the likes of Apple, BMW, Coca Cola, McDonald's, Budweiser, and the list goes on and on forever.
But he decided to give all of that up for his new passion, which is essentially doing these disturbing character studies on the most fucked up human beings in America.
On his fascinating YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly, Mark interviews pimps, prostitutes, homeless drug addicts, inbreds.
He actually went to the home of an inbred family.
In Appalachia and filmed his entire encounter, which is stunning.
It's on his YouTube channel.
Mark is doing some extremely powerful work, which is shining light on, in my opinion, one of the biggest problems in this country, which is raising our children.
So grab a seat and buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, because this podcast will knock your socks off.
Please welcome Mark Leda.
Welcome Mark Leda the Photographer00:08:19
So for people out there who don't know who you are, why don't you give me just like a brief background on yourself?
Who am I?
Who is Mark Leda?
I'm a photographer that I did advertising for my whole life since I was a teenager.
And that's what I did for decades.
But then kind of with starts and stops, I kind of started doing these portraits down on Skid Row in Los Angeles.
And then I started doing interviews with some of the people.
And it's just kind of grown from there.
And now I'm doing pretty much devoting most of my time, almost all my time, to these interviews of all kinds of interesting characters.
A lot of drug addicts, a lot of gang members, a lot of sex workers.
And I'm branching out and going to other things now, too.
Yeah, it's interesting to see a guy like yourself from the traditional advertising world kind of diving into the digital social media world with YouTube.
Yeah, it's a fun thing.
I definitely noticed instantly the crossover with your photography on the thumbnails, like going on your channel and seeing all of the thumbnails are like amazing photographs of these characters in your studio.
Yeah, I mean, that's what I do.
I'm a photographer and I do a good job of that.
You have like over a million subscribers on YouTube, right?
You have like 1.3 million subscribers.
I think it's four or four right now.
Yeah, I just saw.
No, but when I first started it, which is really just like a year, a little over a year ago, year and a half ago, I thought I'd have 20 subscribers.
I honestly thought this is just going to be for a couple friends of mine to laugh at, to find interesting.
And I just think it's worth doing.
So I'm just going to do it.
And I thought maybe 20, 30 oddballs would find it interesting.
Because there's always people for every, you could put up anything.
And there's somebody out there that responds.
And I got those 30 subscribers.
And then I got 60.
And then I had 100.
And then I had 300.
And now it's 1.4 million.
It's crazy.
That is insane, man.
I had no idea that there was, you know.
I mean, I kind of knew.
I mean, maybe I, you know, your subconscious is very interesting how it's different than what you, like, on the surface, I kind of thought that no one would be interested, but maybe subconsciously I knew better because we're all human.
Yeah.
And if you're human, you struggle.
Who doesn't?
We all do.
And that's what these stories are really all about.
What gave you the idea to start bringing these people into your studio and interviewing them?
Like, what made you want to interview them?
Well, initially, I had a studio down in Skid Row, I've had three of them now.
But the first one, I was doing portraits, and it was great.
I had a great location.
People would just walk in, and I'd give them a little cash, and I'd do a portrait.
And that was it.
That's what I've always done is just photography.
And then Canon came out with these cameras that do video.
The 5D and the 7D?
Exactly.
It was a 5D.
And I said, oh, let me just play around with this.
There was this one prostitute, heroin addict, and she was a prostitute, Caroline, that I got to know down there.
And I said, hey, would you want to do an interview?
I kind of knew a little bit of her story.
And she says, sure.
So she sits down and I point this little camera at her and we just did a, I didn't take it seriously.
I just thought this is just, I'm just going to play around with this stupid video camera.
I've never shot video in my life.
And I was like, whoa, this is heavy.
And that was incredible.
I just got really lucky the first time, I thought.
And that was that.
I didn't really think that it was going to turn into something.
And then I did a few more.
And, you know, damn it, if they weren't all interesting in different ways.
And I'm, you know, it's, I've said this before in other interviews where, Richard Branson from Virgin said, talking about career choices, said you create four lists.
One list is everything you're good at.
Another list is everything you're bad at.
A third list is everything you love.
And the fourth list is everything you hate.
And if you look at all those strengths and weaknesses and things you're into and things you're not into, it'll tell you what to do.
So I'm really into psychology.
I've always been that.
And I find people super interesting.
You know, just the way you look, the way you dress, the way you wear your hair, the way your body language, all these things, everybody is interesting to me.
And then you get all these in the United States, you get all these different characters.
You know, the people in Boston look very different from the people in Miami.
And then you go to New Mexico, they're very different from how they look in Minnesota.
And those are so interesting to me.
I've been to every state now.
For my first book, Create Equal, I went to every state, and I found every single state interesting.
I wouldn't want to live in South Dakota, but it's interesting as could be to me because it's just, wow, look at how these people live.
Look at the struggles they have.
Look at the.
The stories that are there.
And I just find it all so interesting.
So I'm really into that.
So that's the psychology and the people aspect.
And I'm also into photography.
And I'm also into like these stories and, you know, just the psychology.
You know, I mentioned this in one of the recent interviews that I'm interested in the human struggle, the thing that we all go through, which is, you know, trying to find love, trying to find happiness, trying to find fulfillment, trying to make a living, trying to just.
survive and thrive in the world.
And I find all that stuff so interesting.
And it's just interesting.
And then we also seem to be like in our own way.
Like we'll do things to screw ourselves up.
You know, like why would you start, why would you drink like that to alienate your entire family, to lose your wife, lose all your income, lose your job, lose everything?
You've just destroyed your own life.
Why would you do that?
So that became really part of this whole process too.
So really what this project is, is a mix of all of these things all put together.
All the things that I'm good at, all the things that I love.
And I don't have all the other hassles and all the things that other jobs, like my advertising career, there's lots of ass kissing and there was a lot of doing things you didn't really want to do.
I love photography, but I was doing photography for that.
I don't give a fuck about that.
But they look great, man.
I can swear, right?
Oh, yeah, you can swear all you want.
I don't give a fuck about that.
I mean, so often I would say to Axel, my assistant who works with me for decades, still does, on these trips, he comes with me.
And I would say to him all the time, like, I would hate this so much, what I'm doing.
I give two shits about this.
But there's money, so we're doing it.
But that's how you're spending your life, is doing something you really don't want to do.
And now the digital technology has kind of undermined your ability to make a great living, which I made a great living at photography, at advertising photography.
Well, you have some of the biggest fucking clients I've ever seen.
I had a client list that was so ridiculous.
Give me like your top five clients that you've had.
Everybody.
I shot literally for everybody.
Every single client.
On light, right?
Yeah, of course.
100 times.
And Mercedes-Benz and IBM and Apple.
I was the Apple photographer for like 10, 12 years.
You name it, everybody.
So I was wildly successful.
And it was really great.
It was a really great ride for 10 to 14 years there.
It was wonderful.
I loved it.
And I was really proud of it.
But eventually it got to a point where it's like, I just wasn't happy.
I wasn't enjoying it anymore.
And it's like and then it also became more difficult to make the money that I got used to because digital technology changed.
like find somebody in this whole state that doesn't have a camera in their pocket.
Right.
And eventually that bleeds, that affects people like me who charge.
With that whole gig economy, you just go online and.
Well, I would charge more than anybody else in the world for what I did.
But when somebody had a client like Intel and they needed to spend, we just want the best.
Who's the best?
And boom, they'd come to me and I'd charge whatever I charge and they would pay it because they're not going to cut corners and pay somebody cheaper.
Oh, this photographer is a quarter of the price.
Digital Technology Changes Everything00:11:30
They don't care.
It's Intel.
or it's Apple or it's whoever and I would always get the job.
And I made so much money, it was ridiculous.
So that was great.
And then eventually it became not great.
And I really was just, I was unhappy.
And then also what happened is because all the digital technology, there became all this cheap competition.
And the economy kind of took a turn for the worse and all kinds of other things happened in the world and it just became really difficult for guys like me to make the money that I was used to.
I mean, I still do jobs once in a while.
I did one last week, a nice one.
And I got another one coming up and that's really what supports this channel because I'm still not making money at this channel.
You know, the Youtube demonetizes pretty much everything I put up, even really even the clean videos like there's, there's a like, even the cleanest video, i'll put up something that doesn't have a single swear word.
Drugs were never mentioned, sex work nothing.
You know.
Like uh Selena, this little, uh high school girl that's really sweet story from Appalachia that got demonetized.
Like there's nothing wrong with that video.
It's a high school kid talking about avoiding the the the, the dangers for this.
You know drug, that's a big problem man, that's a.
It's so hard to make money.
You know, when they demonetize everything I put up From the get go, they can't even watch it.
They just see, like Norman, a crack addict who's recovering.
I put up his videos, they demonetize.
I put one up this morning, he got demonetized.
Come on.
He's not even talking about drugs.
He's just talking about the fact that he got laid off at work and he's going to persevere and he's going to try to get another job.
That's all the talk is about.
And they talked about Kobe Bryant at the end.
And it's like, that's it.
Do you hit that button, the manual review?
I can't make money on YouTube yet.
Maybe one day something will change or shift, or maybe I'll put up so many videos that.
eventually it'll turn the corner and I'll start making more money.
But I spend a lot of money doing this.
Like those 10 pedophiles that I just told you about off camera that I interviewed 10 pedophile sex offenders.
That's why you're down here in Florida, right?
That's why I'm here in Florida.
So tell me about that.
How did you find out about this trailer park or whatever it was?
Well, I do a lot of research.
I mean, when I'm looking for the Ku Klux Klan or in this case, sex offenders or whatever, I found that there's this mobile home park in St. Petersburg, Florida.
That has nothing but sex offenders because they're not allowed to live near schools.
They're not allowed to do they can they can only live in certain areas so This trailer home park is like somebody figured out like let's just put them all here They'll all be happy.
They'll all be self-contained the community won't have a problem with them and that solves all the problems and it and it I just figured let me just go there and see what I can work out and it worked out great yesterday was like Shooting fish in a barrel for me.
So how do you approach something like that?
You just are you just show up to the mobile home park with your camera in your hand sometimes I want to know sometimes like I don't want to I don't want to travel all the way across your country for nothing.
Right, exactly.
But you have some sort of.
But that's happened.
Because my saying that I use a lot with this project is you got to kiss a lot of frogs.
And sometimes I'll do these interviews and I got to sit through 45 minutes of pain and misery and really difficult things that are being shared and I'm not going to use it.
Because I only use about one out of six that I shoot.
So it's not like I just shoot videos and put them up.
I shoot a lot of videos and I use only the best ones.
But sometimes you just have to like wing it and just show up and do it that way.
Because sometimes you can't really set things up.
Like I'm a photographer from LA and I'm going to come to St. Petersburg, Florida.
I'm going to interview you pedophiles.
Don't call.
Yeah, right.
That's not going to work.
Right, of course.
That doesn't fly.
So you have to feel everything out and every single situation is different.
So there's no formula for how you can get a Ku Klux Klan member to share a story because they don't like doing interviews because they usually get colored as bad guys or racist or whatever, which you can say whatever you want about them.
But all I'm looking to do is a nonjudgmental.
Right.
Interview with them.
Not good, i'm not saying.
I'm not saying anybody is good or what it is.
The pedophiles i'm not.
The sex offenders, i'm not.
I'm not saying anything good or bad about them.
Every single one came back to me later on, says that was great and thank you for talking to me.
So that that's a, that's a huge part of how do you approach them though, like like I just tell them what i'm doing.
What exactly do you say to them?
Uh well, I mean it kind of.
You have to feel it out, you.
You have to be a chameleon to figure out what will work for you, what will work for her, what will work for all these different people, and it's not the same approach all the time.
It's always very different, and i'm very good at feeling that out.
So again, it goes back to the list that Richard Branson mentioned.
It's like you need to, like one of my strengths is I'm able to figure out what you might be thinking or feeling.
And I can adapt my behavior to work with you by speaking a little more slowly or saying the right things.
Or maybe it's just about money for you.
Or maybe it's not about money.
Like in Appalachia, money doesn't work.
Really?
Money doesn't work.
They don't even take money.
The majority of the interviews in Appalachia, you know, when we're all done, I pay people.
And I'll put like $100 in their hand and they jump back.
Like, no.
They won't even take the money.
Yeah.
One of your most popular video series on your channel is about an inbred family, right?
Where did they live?
It's got 12 or 13 million views.
Yeah, it's got like, yeah, an insane amount of views.
When I was doing Create Equal, my first book, which is all American portraits, I went to every state and I did portraits of all kinds of people, from astronauts to ballerinas to politicians to drug addicts, everything.
Everything you can imagine that exists in the United States, polygamists, everything.
We were in West Virginia just driving around as I would do, and just driving around with no goal, no one to hook up with.
We were just looking around and went to a convenient, like a little truck stop, and there was a cop there.
And I just, you know, cops are really good to talk to because they know everybody.
They know all the stories and all the stuff.
So I went up to the cop and told him what I'm doing.
He goes, Yeah, I could do that.
I get off at two o'clock.
I was like, great, I'll meet you too, right here.
So I did, and he just took me to a whole bunch of different spots that were incredible.
He was great.
I use these kind of contacts very often, and he was one of the best in Raleigh County, West Virginia.
He was amazing.
And he eventually, not on the first trip, but the second trip there, took me to see the Whitaker family in a town called Odd, West Virginia.
Odd, West Virginia.
Yeah.
Well, West Virginia and Kentucky have a lot of these towns that just have the strangest names.
I just did a video, I think, last week of a girl that lives in Hell for Certain, Kentucky.
And there's the most ridiculous names for towns in both West Virginia and Kentucky.
So there's a town in West Virginia called Odd.
And there's a bunch of other.
And this cop just took you to these guys, Whitaker's?
Well, no.
What he actually said, it's a great story.
This was a second trip to West Virginia.
The first one, we were doing some other things, and all our equipment got rained on, so we had to just like, we can't even shoot here.
We can't rent new equipment.
because we're in West Virginia, so we had to pack up and go home.
But he said, when you come back, make sure you bring video camera, because you're going to need video for this.
And this was back when I was, this was 2004 when I was doing Great Equal, which was just photography, no videos.
And he goes, make sure you bring a video camera.
And I'm just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't do video.
I've never touched a video camera in my life.
So we went back to LA.
And then two weeks later, we came back.
And he goes, you brought a video camera, right?
I'm like, no, I didn't.
He got all pissed at me.
He was like, I told you to bring a video camera.
And then, so whatever.
He took us there.
And he was exactly right.
It was the most.
Like that little scene from Deliverance that everyone knows.
We come around this, you know, we're on a road and it turns into this little country road, then it turns into a dirt road, and we come to this trailer and then a little shack on the other side of the road.
And there's these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us.
And the one guy, you'd look at him in the eye or say anything, and he would just scream, and go running away and his pants would fall around his ankles and he'd go running off and go kick a garbage can and this would happen over and over.
It was, it was out of control, the craziest thing i've ever seen, but I eventually got you know.
It's an interesting story.
I this.
This shows you how I operate.
This is.
This is why the barrier to entry for this project is incredible, and barrier to entry is the key to making business successful, whatever you're doing, because if you just do something that's easily duplicatable um, then everyone's just going to copy it and do it.
But but here's, this gives you a window into what I do.
So this family in West Virginia gets, they're like kind of protected by the neighbors and the relatives and whatever, whoever, you know, they don't like people coming to ridicule these people.
And everybody in the area kind of knows of them and, well, let's just go over to the Whitakers and laugh at them or something.
This kind of stuff happens.
So I was this city slicker with cameras and, you know, it's a pretty, not a huge production, but it's like, it's clearly I'm not from around here and it's clear that I'm doing something different.
So.
Just my luck, we showed up and somebody in their family had just passed away.
And they were all mourning the death of their aunt or their grandmother or somebody.
And I asked one of the brothers who actually spoke if I could do these portraits.
He goes, no, we just had a death in the family and we're all mourning and we're having a funeral soon and blah, blah, blah.
And it's just not a good time.
I'm like, damn it.
I came all the way out here.
And this happens.
It's just terrible timing.
So I have to be respectful and say, okay, I'm sorry.
Thank you.
Maybe I'll come back.
And that's just the way it goes.
But then I started thinking about it.
I'm like, you know what?
It might be really nice for them if, because I was shooting 8x10 Polaroids at the time, 8x10 film, but then shooting 8x10 Polaroids.
So they get a big instant print.
And I said, if I shot Polaroids of them, they could have a print of the entire family and they could include that in the casket.
With their loved one and they might actually be into that So I shot one of the members of the family and then I shot a second one and a third and a fourth and then eventually they liked that idea and They said okay and that's what I did I ended up getting portraits of everyone I wanted to and I gave them a print and and Did all the little nice things I do on behind the scenes and they That was that and it was it was a nice little relationship I started and we would go back whenever I'd be in West Virginia shooting on like other projects and stuff,
which wasn't often, but once or twice I'd be there and I'd go visit them and say hi and And then, so now I'm working on this project, and I was just like, let's just drive by and say hi again.
And I knew I couldn't do an interview like I do, which is a little more civilized like this.
These people are so hard to communicate with them.
The Soul Sucking Nature of Work00:15:27
Right.
And I don't know if it was ever going to work out anyway.
So I was just with my iPhone.
I just picked up my iPhone and I shot this stupid little video just kind of to show that the level of poverty, level of everything that was in that family, it wasn't meant for my.
Channel because I won't post a video unless it has the portrait, and I couldn't get another portrait.
I knew that wasn't going to be in the works.
The last time it was a miracle that it happened, I don't think that was going to happen again.
So I just shot this little video, and as I was shooting, I realized this is kind of interesting.
This might actually work.
Let me just follow through with it and see if maybe it.
So, you know, I see a lot of comments.
I get all that kind of comments from this is, you know, everything you can imagine.
On a video that becomes that popular, it becomes really interesting just to read the comments.
But everything from I'm an exploited bastard to.
This is incredible and everything in between.
But I forgot where I was going with that.
But it just turned into something like, yeah, I guess I could kind of use this.
I can use the portraits from Create Equal, which is what I did, and I can post it.
The video.
The video.
And I did, and I didn't know what it was.
It didn't really fit the channel.
I didn't really say anything in the video.
It was just something that was.
It feels exploitive, but.
But I.
But, you know.
I think it's good for us all to know that a lot of these things exist.
For sure.
People say, oh, what you're doing is exploitive all the time.
Look, a hotel, the hotel I'm staying at while I'm here in Tampa, they're exploiting my need to sleep.
Yeah.
The restaurant that I had breakfast at is exploiting my hunger.
Everything is exploitive.
You take a picture, photography and video especially are by nature exploitive.
Because if I take a picture of a girl for an ad, you're exploiting her beauty.
You're paying her for her beauty and you're using it in an ad.
Is that not exploitive?
So everything can be viewed as exploitive.
Except the difference is this is actual real shit.
That's whatever it is, paid acting or modeling or whatever.
Right here, you're shining a light on something that's real.
Like you're shining a light on an actual wound.
Yeah, I mean, there's so many different ways of looking at what I do.
And a lot of people take a negative view saying, oh, you're just exploiting these people for money.
I'm not really making money, but one day I might.
So you have to take that off the table.
So one day I might make money.
So yes, I'm exploiting people for money.
But I'm also kind of exposing or just creating awareness of what's going on in our country in terms of like drug addiction and gang violence and sex work and all these destructive things that people are going through.
And like all the poverty that's, you know, people can say all these people in Appalachia are living wonderful lives, leave them be.
Yeah, but they could also get a lot more support from the government or from corporations or something so they could not be digging up roots in the middle of the winter, climbing mountains to survive on $10,000 a year.
That's a rough life.
Despite the fact that they don't complain, it's still a really rough life.
And I think a lot of these things are important to that we all understand what's going on in the country.
So that's an important thing to consider when you're saying it's just exploitive.
And yes, they're exploitive.
If I take a drug addict and I do an interview with her, she takes the hit because she's been made to look bad.
Now, I didn't trick her into doing that.
She came to me, or I might have asked her and said, you know, but I tell everybody right up front, like, This is going to be on YouTube.
your family, the police, your kids, your relatives, everyone you know could see this video.
And I make sure they understand that going in.
And if they still want to do it, then we do it.
But yes, these people don't look great in these videos sometimes because they're being exposed as homeless drug addicts.
So that person maybe takes a little bit of a hit, but they're happy and I compensate them nicely and I continue to take care of them long after the video is posted in different ways.
Here and there, I'll give them money for this or whatever.
I'm not going to cure their addiction.
That's a whole other conversation that we can get into.
But it's for that one person to be vulnerable and say, here's what I'm going through.
And this is how it happened.
I was molested at six years old.
That's a painful thing for me to sit with for the rest of my life.
I discovered this drug.
It kind of numbs the pain.
I escape from all my pain and I can live peacefully for a while.
But then I started doing it more regularly and I became addicted.
And now I'm a hardcore addict.
And now I'm doing sex work to pay for my drugs.
And I'm homeless and my life is a shambles.
I've lost my kids.
I've lost my everything.
family won't talk to me and my life's a train wreck.
I think it's important for us to understand that the child abuse that happened to her at six years old, sorry, is important for us to factor into everything that we're doing and going on and just like, and my videos.
It's like, if we do, all right, let's say, all right, I'm not going to do the videos anymore.
Let's just let Marianne continue to Live her life and create the cycle of destruction, and then her kids will get molested by her uncle who was doing whatever, and then it just continues on for another generation, and it'll continue on for many generations.
So I think by creating some awareness, we can say, hey, maybe we shouldn't leave the six-year-old kid with the uncle.
Do we know what the uncle's doing when we're off and the kid's alone?
I mean, so a little understanding and awareness of what can go on doesn't mean it always does, but seems to happen a lot is important.
So I think there's a benefit in these videos.
I think there's.
An exploitive nature to them, and there's always a good side and a bad side to everything is, is Christmas, uh which?
Which one is Christmas?
Is it a?
Uh, a celebration of the birth of Jesus, or is it an exploit, a holiday where uh, retailers are exploiting the?
You know, everybody is everyone.
We're all buying gifts for everybody.
They're going to make 80 of their profit for the year during december.
Which one is it?
It's both.
It's always both.
When, a when, a when a very attractive female marries a very wealthy man.
Is it because he's going to provide security and a better life Than the guy she went to high school with?
Or is it true love?
Right.
It's both.
It's always both.
And it really depends on your perspective.
So whenever I see these terribly negative comments or even the positive ones, you have to factor in that person's take on it.
Are they envious that maybe I thought of this and I have the courage to do it?
Are they.
There's so many different factors behind the scenes, but it's never as simple as, oh, these are just exploitive and that's it.
Yeah.
No.
It's much more complex.
I stopped looking at the comments.
Over a year ago because I realized it.
I realized very quickly, it's not good for your mental sanity.
It's not good for your sanity.
No I I, I tend to steer away from them.
I might watch them a little bit in the morning yeah, when i'm having breakfast, and that's about it yeah, but otherwise it's just.
It's so toxic, it's toxic, it really is.
It's toxic because, because people I know, like i've asked all my friends like, have you ever left a comment on Youtube?
Like no one I know has ever done it?
No, i've never done it.
But but you know, having said that, there's still a ton of people that make these really positive evolved, compassionate comments on my channel And that's beautiful to see.
And that's the majority.
But for every 10 of those, there's one that's just like really messed up.
That's the opposite for me.
It's human nature to only like the negative ones sinks in the positive ones.
You're just like, Oh, that's cool.
That's cool.
But the negative ones sticks with you.
Yeah.
So I find I'm happier if I just I'm doing this for myself.
I'm not doing it for anybody else.
I'm not trying to make anybody happy.
Some people say, Oh, I hate these Appalachian people.
Stop doing that.
Get back to the drug addicts.
And other people say these Appalachian things are great.
That's all I watch.
I don't give a fuck.
Right.
I'm not doing it for anybody else.
I never understood the people on the internet who create content only for the viewers.
I mean, Like the customer's always right.
Like, tell me what you want me to do next.
Like, there's a lot of people I've talked to on here who have really successful channels on YouTube who say, I only do what people suggest in the comments.
Like, I don't do anything else.
No, I do this 100% only for myself.
And if I think the hillbillies in Kentucky and West Virginia are interesting, I'll just do that and nothing but for the rest of my life.
But most likely, I'll probably going to steer away from that soon and I'll do something else around the country.
And I'll find that interesting and I'll stick with that for a while and I'll keep jumping around all over the country because there's interesting stuff everywhere.
There's a lot of interesting stuff right here in Tampa and St. Pete.
So, me and you are, I feel like me and you are so much the same in the aspect of our transition from advertising into.
Did you work in advertising?
Creation of your own content.
Yeah, my whole life.
Oh, you did.
Not my whole life, but when I was young, I picked up a camera and just started making videos when I was like 15 years old and eventually started getting paid to do that.
And it was more of in the entertainment industry.
Okay.
Basically, like shooting and producing commercials and TV pilots and then worked into feature films.
And then after that, kind of transitioned into advertising.
I started my own digital media agency where we did full scope branding for local brands and national brands as well.
And it was more so video and creative, not so much photography.
And same exact thing as you.
Same exact thing that you're saying to me is I started to hate it.
I started to, eventually, it just was like, okay, I'm just doing what these people need.
I'm putting my heart and soul into this work so these people can just make a profit.
And it's soul sucking at the end.
became just so redundant and soul-sucking for me.
I was just like, as well with the creating like TV pilots and pitching them in networks and having these old men in suits telling me how I need to change this piece that I made, this creative masterpiece that I created so it would fit their advertisers, right?
Like I'm creating content not for what it is or how it's going to affect people, but I'm creating it so it will fit the mold of what their advertisers will pay them.
And that's what I just got the worst taste in my mouth from that industry.
And I was just like, fuck that.
I'm going to start, I'm going to take everything that I've made over the past 10 years, I'm going to repackage it and put it on YouTube.
And that's how I transitioned into doing stuff on YouTube.
But the difference between me and you, I think, is like, I needed money.
I was like, I didn't get paid a lot doing that during, I mean, I made good money, but not an insane amount of money.
I wasn't even paid by Apple.
I think my biggest client was like Land Rover.
But I was like, I need to make a slow transition from. the paid advertising industry into doing my own shit on YouTube.
Yeah, no, I was lucky in that I had savings from my past career that I could just do whatever I wanted to.
And this is what I wanted to do.
And if I want to shoot hillbillies and nothing but for the rest of my life, I'm free to do that.
So you're set.
You don't have to ever make a dime on YouTube.
No, no, no, no.
I mean, I tend to do things with gusto, whatever I do.
If I care, whether it's a project, or a relationship or a house or whatever.
I do, I do, I'm very intense.
Like anybody that knows me is just like, he's wound up.
I'm wound up to a fault.
But I can, I can relax and kick back sometimes.
But, but right now I'm just, I'm in work mode and I'm just like, I just work all day, every day, seven days a week.
That's all I do.
And, uh, and I love it.
I'm happy.
But, you know, doing advertising, you just, your tolerance for doing things for money just, It got war thin.
Yeah, like a creative prostitute.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's exactly it.
Yeah.
It's exactly the same.
And, you know, you talk to these, all these prostitutes.
I, you know, I ask them either on camera or off.
I mean, do you, do you respect the guys that you, that you see?
And every single one of them says, no, of course not.
These guys are all a bunch of creeps.
And, you know, it's like, you know, I had some really great clients that I still continue, you know, I'm still friends with from advertising.
But, but the whole nature of doing things for money is just, it's, it's, it's hard.
You can do it once in a while.
Okay, I just did it last week and it's like, okay, it was cool.
Nice client.
But it's nice if you can pick and choose, right?
It'd be nice if you could pick and choose.
But this project for me is a reaction to all the stuff I did for money.
So there is no way, like let's say some big network picks it up and wants to do a version of this channel.
Let's say they offer me a gazillion dollars and say, yeah, but you need to, whenever the girl talks about how she got had sex or raped when she was six years old.
You got to cut that out.
You got to tone that down.
We can't include that.
That's too dark.
Then I just would turn it down.
Because I'm not doing this for the money.
I'm doing it because it's real.
That's amazing, man.
You're traveling.
And that's maybe why people respond to it because it's clearly raw.
It's as raw as I possibly could make it.
And it's just real life.
These are all real stories.
I'm sure some of them are embellished.
That's what you do.
You tell me about your high school days.
I'm sure you're going to tell a story where the gym coach was like 350 pounds and he was seven feet tall.
When he actually was, like you know, six foot two and he was 220 pounds.
But that's what happens with stories over the years.
But but the the rawness of these and the realness of it, it's just.
That's that's why I think they, the audience, has grown so quickly.
So you're traveling the world, you're traveling the country.
I'm trying to make it just the country.
If I did the world, I think it would.
It would take time off my life, and you've been in Florida for three days now.
Right, it'll be a total of 48 hours, and i'm guessing you're working at least eight to ten hours a day, more than that, and you're.
And you're doing this Without making any money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, like that's insane.
Well, these sex offender videos, you think I'm going to make any money on that?
Look, what I paid each of these 10 guys is a lot.
You know, for a pedophile to come on and tell you everything that he's done, which all these guys did, and some of them were victims of stings and stuff like that, so their stories are not so damning.
But a lot of these guys have these horrific stories that just make your.
The hair standard on the back of your everything.
It costs me a lot of money to get these 10 interviews.
And I'm not going to make a penny on it.
I may make $15, $20, $30.
Would it be a nice thing to happen for a couple years down the road for Netflix to come to you?
Yeah, yeah, that would be good.
And if it ever did.
That would be a nice thing.
You would like that.
Yeah, no, that would be helpful.
Because what I could do with more financial support would make what I'm doing now pale.
But I just don't want to spend that kind of money.
On something that, you know, I can go broke.
And even though I might have a lot of money, I can burn through that.
Impossible Dreams for Interviews00:06:09
Well, I mean, if you don't have, you might, you may not be making dollars, but you're certainly gaining influence online.
I mean, you have over a million subscribers.
Yeah.
You have a lot of attention.
I don't even know.
I mean, it says I have 1.4 million subscribers, but I don't think I do because like the video I posted today has, or let's say the one yesterday, I got my Wi-Fi turned off, but let's say the video I posted yesterday has 25, 30,000 views or maybe 60,000 views.
That to me tells me that I have about 60,000 subscribers.
Not 1.4 million.
Because there might be 1.4 million that have been on my channel at a certain point and know I'm going to subscribe to that.
But they're not watching every day.
What I get on my lowest videos, which is just 30 to 60,000, that's how many subscribers I think I have.
Yeah, it's definitely not as transparent as you would imagine with the YouTube, the way the algorithm works and who they push their content to and why they push their content.
Well, YouTube's been really good to me because they recommend my videos a lot.
Do they?
Yeah, I get lots of views.
I think, I don't really know.
I don't know anything about social media.
But it seems like I'm getting a lot of people say, oh yeah, I get recommended your stuff all the time.
So that seems to be a good thing.
So I think YouTube's been good to me, even though they do demonetize a lot of my stuff.
Yeah, I mean, that is a common thing.
But we're talking about sex and child abuse and drugs and murder and gang violence and child molestation.
Those are not going to get monetized.
I'm just not going to get monetized.
So advertisers don't want it.
What what was like one of the most Gut-wrenching stories that you heard in St. Pete talking to those pedophiles like what was one of the craziest Encounters you had down there.
Oh, you know, let me wait till the videos come out See people don't understand I I do these interviews and it's not like I'm sitting there absorbing everything that's being said.
It's impossible I don't think any human could sit through 10 of these things all day long and soak up every single story.
I don't know how therapists do it.
Yeah, I'm sure that'd be pretty good.
I think a professional therapist probably just kind of doesn't absorb everything.
They must have some tool.
You're just trying to get stuff out of them, right?
You're just trying to let them talk, tell their stories.
And that's why sometimes I'll see these things like you ask them how many kids they have twice in one interview.
Look, I'm doing, I'm operating two cameras, framing, exposure.
I'm using natural light.
So the light changes if a cloud goes by.
The audio levels.
Let's say something happens on their wardrobe or their hair or whatever.
I'm like a one-man band doing so many things all at once that it's so impossible to.
Oh, and also while I'm doing all this, I'm conducting an interview.
I need to keep track of your story.
And I just talked with nine other people and I can't remember.
Were you molested by your uncle or your dad or your cousin or were you not molested?
I don't remember who's who.
And it all becomes a blur after a while.
So for me to remember every aspect of every single.
People think I do one interview and I'm just sitting there like a talk show host doing that one interview and I'm very conscious.
That talk show host is not operating cameras or microphones or worried about the 12 people outside that are trying to get in and people that are texting me saying, Hey, I need this, I need that.
And every single day of the year, I get between 10 and 50 messages from people saying, Hey, I need money for this, I need money for that.
My kids got cancer, my this, my people you've interviewed?
Yeah, people I've interviewed.
They all need something, and there's always an excuse why they need it.
And I have to deal with that all the time.
I just bought a second phone so I can kind of split the two because at some point it just becomes ridiculous for me.
Do the stories ever affect you personally?
Emotionally, I mean, obviously when you're producing them, you're worried about a slew of different things, mechanically and visually, audio, everything.
But after you edit them and you post them, do they ever kind of hit?
Yeah, there are certain people that just really, you see how terrible their lives have been and your heart can't not go out to them.
I'm not, I'm human.
So it's like when Latoya tells me her story and how horrible her childhood was, her whole life still is.
Man, my heart just when I see her on the street and she comes over I just grab my wallet What do you what do you need honey?
Let me help you because because I just What am I gonna say you know, I can't help you today, right?
So I so I do and I do it all the time and I can't cure her childhood I don't have the ability to do that if I could I would but I can't and we can't we can't cure all these I mean, that's that's the tragedy of all these stories is like people will use common sense And you know their hearts in the right place, but they see these stories and like Mark you didn't help this person like they're not helpable you're not trying to help them, right?
I mean, I do a lot of that kind of stuff, but I don't want this to become a help channel.
Right.
Like, my channel is not about, oh, we're going to save so and so.
We're going to make them all better.
We're going to patch them all up and fix them up.
And they're going to live happily ever after.
You can't go back in time.
You're trying to repair something.
You're trying to repair a childhood.
You're trying to repair what happened to her at six years old, and that's deep in her subconscious.
And how do I fix her subconscious?
I don't even know.
I don't even know how to do that.
By trying to stop it happening to future people.
That's my take on it.
It seems like preventing it from happening to the next generation would be the best attack on this.
It may not fix.
Latoya, but it'll perhaps fix her kids that are being raised by somebody else, and maybe it won't happen to them.
But I mean, I've seen firsthand what it's like to try to help these people.
It's so much work.
It takes all your time, money, focus, energy to try.
It takes a team of people to try to help one person, and it still doesn't work.
And everybody says, oh, just do a GoFundMe for somebody.
All you're doing is throwing cash at somebody who's got a drug problem in most of these cases, or some other type of problem.
And that money doesn't get spent.
In the proper ways.
And you could argue that, oh, then you handle the money and you spend this and then make sure it goes in the right place.
Choosing Photography Over Social Media00:02:31
Look, I'm one guy.
I'm one guy operating all these cameras, traveling, doing all this stuff all by myself, not making money doing it.
And you want me to help so and so.
While you sit on your sofa watching YouTube videos saying, why don't you help this person?
I'm like, come on.
You are a madman.
You said you shot 10 videos yesterday.
Yesterday, yeah.
I do that a lot.
That's insane.
That's fucking insane.
I can do one of these a week.
Maybe I record two a week, but I only post one a week.
No, that's what I said.
I'm intense.
I'm wound up, man.
What is it about you that makes you such a hard worker and makes you want to put out so much content?
You said yourself that you're not a big social media guy.
So you're obviously not doing it to feed some sort of algorithm.
I wish I was doing something other than social media, but I don't even know what that would be.
Like photography, I do a very vertical portrait.
It's a special format that I came up with to do a full-length human portrait.
So the perspective, the ratios are basically what a human body is, a six-foot-tall person roughly.
Right.
And I had cameras custom-made for that and all that, and that's a very vertical image that doesn't fit into a wide format like YouTube or a square one like Instagram or anything else that's on social media.
They all don't work well with a vertical image.
So what do I do?
So I do that pan, which is a huge compromise, but what else do I do?
And to me, the photography is more important than the interview.
The portrait's more important than the interview.
For you.
For me.
Really?
For me.
If I had to choose one or the other, I would do the photography.
Why?
There's so much more in the interview, I feel like.
No, I don't.
I see the value in the interview, and everyone else does too, and I get that.
And I see that that's important to the interview.
Don't get me wrong, the photography is beautiful.
The photography, I'm very proud of.
The interviews, not so much.
The early ones, I didn't put any effort into them.
I didn't care about the audio.
I didn't care about how the background looked or anything looked.
I just pointed a camera.
If it was out of focus, I almost didn't care because I really wanted to put zero effort into the video to make sure that what I was doing is highlight.
It's all about the portrait for me.
And if the interview could just be audio only, sit behind the portrait, that would be cool for me.
I'd be happy with that.
But, you know, I started doing the videos the way I do them.
But as time went on, I kind of like, all right, let me make it look a little bit better.
It's hard to look at that.
And it's hard to listen to it because the audio is so bad, especially at my Skid Row studio where there's so much background noise.
Awareness of Complex Drug Problems00:05:25
It's awful.
Terrible.
I mean, the noise and the sirens and the people in the background and the music and all the crazy shit that goes on.
It's hard to do audio there.
But the reason I'm there, people would say, well, why don't you just get a studio that's quieter somewhere.
away from Skid Row.
I have to be right where I'm right in the heart of all the action in order to get the people to be willing to come in Open up their hearts and souls and their their subconscious basically to share those stories and feel free that they can run out if they have to right or at least when they're done they feel free but if they have to drive over here and do the talk I would get much more stifled interviews that I wouldn't get the same kind of content.
What is the what would you say is the common denominator with all these people like the pimps the prostitutes the terrible childhood?
Terrible childhood.
For all of us.
You, me, and everybody else.
Yeah.
Anything specific about childhood?
Well, I mean, I said this in one of the videos.
I think the one with Monica from Patrick Cady.
I said, you know, Soft White Underbelly was Blue Easter Cult's original name.
Whose?
Blue Easter Cult, the band.
Oh, yes, yeah, yeah.
Their original name was Soft White Underbelly.
And I just thought that was a cool name.
And also, kind of, Soft White Underbelly to me represents the most vulnerable part of an animal.
Right?
Right.
It's like, what's the most vulnerable part of a dog or a cat or a coyote or a bear, it's their stomach.
It's not protected.
It's soft.
It's white usually.
Soft white underbelly is the most vulnerable part of the country.
So these stories are all about these children when they're most vulnerable get broken.
And that's just so fucked up.
Yeah.
And if we're not aware of how this all happens, then it'll just continue.
It'll just continue for another 300 years or 3,000 years.
So why not expose what's broken so that maybe we can do things to protect kids so that maybe this shit won't happen to Latoya or her kids or the next Latoyahs.
So it's, it's, there's a lot of things that are really wrong.
And you got to put out these painful stories in order to figure it all out.
And that's all I'm doing.
So, so somebody says, oh, you're exploiting these people and all that.
It's like, fine.
Let's, let's just not do it.
Let's just let all these kids get molested and beaten up and abused and just get back to our Starbucks and forget about it all.
Or we can look at it and maybe like create some awareness.
And I see that kind of starting to happen.
People are going, man, this is really fucked up.
The foster system is so broken.
You know, you know, there's so many stories of things that are just.
Gone so bad in these people's lives, and I think just by becoming more aware of how these things happen and how often they happen, we can do things to prevent it.
Not 100% of the time, but definitely a lot more than we're doing now, which is none.
You know, it seems to just happen all the time.
And so, what is it about Skid Row, and specifically, like your studio is on Skid Row?
What is it about Skid Row that I mean, why is it such a condensed?
Well, I mean, the city of LA kind of just decided, like, rather than having these people all over the city, let's try to keep them in one contained spot and just let them exist there.
No one goes there.
You know, most people drive around it or avoid it, and it's kind of out of the way.
It's right next to downtown, but no one really goes downtown unless you're going to the downtown part of downtown.
Staples Center.
Yeah, all that.
And there's some shopping and there's business and all that stuff downtown.
But this is just east of downtown, and you would never go there unless you're trying to buy some crack or heroin or crystal nuts.
Do you think it's a good thing that Skid Row exists?
Or do you think there's a better option?
I mean, You could build a little thing out in the desert where you take all these people and all the tents and all that and you put them in the desert somewhere and then they're out of sight.
They still exist.
They're still on our planet, but you don't see them anymore.
So out of sight makes everyone feel better, perhaps.
But it's kind of like that's what my videos do.
They make you see that this is going on.
And it goes on in every country.
I see it going on all over Tampa, right here.
It happens all over your city.
And I've been to every state and I've seen this kind of stuff in every state.
Maybe the population is smaller in North Dakota than it is in L.A., but.
It happens in North Dakota.
It happens everywhere.
Different forms of it.
It looks different.
It's American Indians, perhaps, in North Dakota.
And it's all kinds of people in L.A.
And in Tampa, it's this.
And it's all over.
It seems like all you hear about in the news is trillions of dollars being spent on different things, different stimulus packages or different wars are spending trillions of dollars on.
But there's all this shit going on right under our noses that it seems like if you actually paid attention to it and it was your job.
To pay attention to it, it wouldn't be that hard to fix if you had trillions of dollars.
It's a complicated, very complex problem.
Drugs Are Not the Real Problem00:04:03
Like when Nancy Reagan was doing her war on drugs, just say no to drugs and all that kind of stuff.
It's like drugs are not the problem.
No.
Drugs aren't the problem.
Drugs are just a symptom of the problem.
The problem is these people had terrible, terrible, terrible things happen to them when they were six years old.
Usually it's something to do with their dad or their uncle or their cousin or their whatever.
And that's painful for a human to deal with.
So what do you do?
You become hypersexualized or you start using drugs or you do something to escape from that.
And if you do enough drugs, eventually you become addicted.
So then you're a drug addict.
So let's say you cure that addiction.
You haven't solved the problem.
The problem is what happened to her at six years old.
How do you fix that?
You don't.
So you can patch her all the time you want, but she'll eventually keep redoing the same behavior.
And that's really what's going on.
Well, how do you fix that?
How do you fix the people who created that problem?
How do you fix the uncle?
How do you stop that?
I mean, what is the answer to creating less losers?
Maybe you castrate these guys that are sex offenders.
Maybe something happened to that guy, though.
No, it did.
It did.
That's why I'm totally non-judgmental in these talks I did yesterday.
I'm not saying, dude, you're a bad dude.
You're evil.
I'm never saying that ever.
And then as well, I mean, I'm sure you, like, I'm not, again, I'm not saying it's good or bad, but I'm sure a lot of people who are living in that village full of sex offenders are people who didn't commit crazy crimes.
So maybe they were in the wrong place in the wrong time and a girl was drunk and underage.
I talked to one guy who was, he met a girl in a club.
He had to be 18 years old to get in the club.
So that means everyone in there is of age.
She had a fake ID saying she was 19.
He was 25.
So she's six years younger than he is.
They had some fun.
Then he finds out that she was only 16.
And he did like seven, eight years in prison.
And now he's a sex offender, has to register twice a year for the rest of his life.
He has to live in this mobile home park.
He can't do anything with his life.
He can't get a job without, oh, you're a sex offender, which is the worst thing you could ever be branded as, right?
So good luck getting, you know, because to survive in the world, you have to do it with gusto.
You have to be confident.
You have to be like, I'm going to go kick ass at this job interview tomorrow.
Watch me kick some ass tomorrow.
No.
I'm ready.
These guys aren't ready for anything after that.
No, the system is fucked.
The system is not designed to help people become better.
It's designed to make money off people who are off incarcerating people.
Yeah, no, I mean, I see that the cops, they were very.
This is just one guy's case.
And some of these guys are serial.
Right, for sure.
Child rapists.
And that's a totally different animal.
And one of the talks was on how there are all these different levels of sex offenders.
One of the guys mentioned this in the talks yesterday.
And that was interesting because I think he's right.
There are.
A sex offender is not a sex offender.
Some guys just, you know, I talked to one guy who was just nothing but, you know, child porn, and that became a, that, I asked him, what, what, what, what got you into child porn?
And he says, that was, it was just my, I get, I became desensitized to regular porn.
So I needed something more extreme.
And, and so that's one story.
Another one was a guy just got set up, you know, the cops did a sting, and he ended up meeting a 14 year old girl at a gas station, and next, you know, he was high on crystal meth, and he, he just wanted to have some fun with somebody, and it turned out she was 14.
And the cops even, like, I think he told me the cops, uh, It was actually a woman of his age that he was meeting, but then she said, oh, you got to meet my daughter.
My daughter's 13 or something like that.
So she was pimping out her daughter?
It was a cop.
Oh, it was a cop.
It was a sting, and they were saying, my daughter's, you know, you should meet my daughter.
She's really whatever.
So the whole thing was all being set up by the cops, and the guy eventually got caught, never had sex with anybody, but he got nailed.
So I'm not defending anybody.
Shutting Up to Do It Right00:05:28
All I'm doing is presenting some stories.
I'm not saying anyone is good or anyone is bad.
I just think it's important for us just to listen and understand.
How many interviews have you done total?
Do you know?
I have probably like 2,300 now.
2,300 interviews.
In the last year and a half.
What else do you do?
Do you have a family?
Do you have.
I got divorced like five years ago, and I have two teenage daughters.
One's in college, one's getting ready to go to college.
Seems like you do have time for that.
I get up around three or four in the morning.
That's fucked up already.
That is fucked up.
And then I start editing in the morning, and then I go to the gym every morning, and then I usually edit a little more, and then I go shoot all day.
Sometimes I just edit all day.
I'm traveling more now, so the travel really throws a wrench in all that.
But I'll edit all day until I go to bed and I do it all over again.
That's all I do.
I have no social life.
I don't have any time for that.
You mentioned earlier.
I'm not complaining.
I love it.
Right.
If I didn't like it, I would stop.
But I feel like I'm onto something that's worthwhile and I enjoy doing it.
So it's like, why should I not do that?
I could sit by the pool all day, but I wouldn't be happy doing that.
I'd rather be inside editing.
So I stay busy.
Do you feel like.
I'm happier now than I think I've ever been.
Really?
Doing this, yeah.
Do you feel like you're making a difference in the world with this stuff?
Do you feel like you're.
I mean, I think there's potential for that.
I don't know if I am yet.
I see, like, in the trajectory of this project, I'm on the first page of that.
It's like I'm just beginning.
But you must feel like that you've started to make a dent.
You must feel like you're starting to make a change.
I mean, what else would you have done?
You must feel like something is possible.
Pulling you right.
Yeah, I have really high standards, so whatever has been accomplished so far is not really it's nothing.
What is your?
Do you have a goal?
Well I, I just.
I just think like i'm not going to ever share it.
I don't.
I never talk about things i'm going to do.
Okay, I put 100 of my focus and concentration on doing it, and for me to tell anybody about what i'm going to do takes away that focus and energy about, from from from doing it, And you need 100% of that focus and energy to do whatever you're going to do, especially if it's something that's really challenging and requires a lot of courage and requires a lot of like something on your part.
You better just keep it to yourself and shut up and do it.
Because if you start talking about what you're going to, I've seen this a million times with people.
Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do that while we're sitting at Starbucks having a coffee.
You're not going to do it.
It's almost a list of things you're not going to do.
I've learned.
So I just, if I'm going to do something, I'm going to shut up and I'm going to do it.
And you're going to be like, holy fuck, how did you do that?
Like you didn't tell me you were going to do that.
That's how I operate.
I just keep it all to myself and I just do it.
I find I'm much more focused that way.
And you need all that focus you can get.
Like Axel, who works with me, he says, You're the most focused person I've ever met.
But I've read about Kobe Bryant.
He seems pretty intense, too.
He was.
Yeah, that's.
But you need that kind of laser focus on just this is what I want to have happen.
And nothing close to that is going to work.
If I get something that's kind of close, but not quite, that's garbage.
Because there's only one thing I want to see happen.
And I'm not going to share it.
That's super interesting.
What?
Because if I start talking about what I'm going to do, I can guarantee you I'm not going to do it.
Too much of the energy has already been dissipated and I just won't have what it takes to make it happen.
I can put some effort in, get half-assed and kind of do it, but it really won't get done.
But if I shut up about it, I'll do it.
But in your mind, you must have a super clear, concise, laid-out vision of where you're going, right?
Absolutely.
And did you take time to plan that out?
Like I said, I'm really intense.
I'm not asking.
Obviously, you don't want to share it, but did you take time to lay out that path in your own mind?
Yeah, kind of.
But I'm also very, sometimes you have to improvise and see that, oh, this is going to work better than that.
And there's always improvise.
There's always adaptation going on.
Like with this project, I find like my opinion of what the problem is or my ideas on what the most effective way to do what I'm doing is changes almost every week or every month.
Right.
Like I'll learn something like, oh, I didn't realize that that would be something that people will respond to.
Or I didn't realize that that would be as, it would resonate as much as I thought it would.
Or, you know, I'm learning stuff all the time.
Or I didn't realize like just recently.
One of the biggest kind of discoveries I made with, you know, because really what I'm doing is about the human struggle to just be happy.
That's really what I'm doing.
People think I'm doing videos on Skid Row or on drug addicts.
I'm like, I'm not doing videos on drug addicts.
I did a whole bunch on drug addicts because it's like an extreme version of what you and I go through.
Like, I've never smoked pot.
Fear and Risk in Human Struggle00:15:26
I don't even drink alcohol now.
I don't have a problem with any of these, but I never, drugs are not my issue.
And I don't have a gambling problem.
I don't have other problems.
But, you know, I'm not perfect.
I've got issues like we all do.
And those struggles are common with everybody.
We all go through it.
And I forget where I was going with this.
Oh, what I just discovered recently.
So you're always changing your approach.
Yeah, I'm always changing my approach.
But I learned something recently that was just so heavy and so important.
And I'm still processing it today.
I don't want to name any names.
She's not on my channel, but there was somebody that I wanted to help.
That I wanted to interview, but she wouldn't do it.
But I wanted to help.
And she calls me one day and says, you know what?
I could use your help.
I'd like to get out of this life.
And I said, sure, that's cool.
Let me help you out, but I just want you to know there's no there are no strings attached here.
I'm not your sugar daddy.
I'm just going to help you.
You're not obligated to me in any way.
I just want you to know that right up front.
It's not this for that.
You're not trading this for anything.
I'm just going to help you.
I want to make that clear.
And I said, I was busy that day shooting or whatever.
And I said, let me call you tonight.
And it sounded like this is, Because I'm eternally hopeful.
I'm the most optimistic, hopeful person I've ever met.
Like, no matter what obstacles there are, I believe they can all be overcome, no matter what they are.
And that's a great quality to have.
So, this seemed to be, you know, again, these are all long shots because very few people actually climb out of these situations.
But I'm hopeful.
So, let's give this a try.
And she seemed to have a lot of potential, like, a lot of potential.
Like, you know, you can, you can.
You can fix your life so beautifully.
I saw it so clearly.
And she and I talked about it and so on.
So I was going to call her that night.
So I called that night and she's like, not around.
That was weird.
This is an important phone call.
She had a cell phone?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And never was able to connect with again.
And some weird little text came back, so, oh, I had an emergency or whatever.
And so we never connected.
And then I saw her on the street again shortly after that, and she runs away from me, like avoids me, like I'm a rapist or something.
I'm like, that doesn't make sense.
Never had any weirdness happen in the interactions between us.
And it was just weird.
I'm like, what would make somebody do that?
And it continues to this day.
I saw her before this trip and just treating me like I'm just like the devil.
And I talked with some other people that do what she does, and they said, oh, it could be this, it could be that.
And those all hold water.
But I honestly believe what it is.
Sometimes you have to follow your intuition, and your intuition can tell you a lot.
And my intuition on this one is sometimes people just can't accept good in their lives.
You just can't.
And I represent good because I told her, I'm going to help you out.
This is going to be just to help you out.
It's free.
It's not going to be like you're trading.
You're not buying anything.
I'm just helping.
And she rejected it so hard and heavy.
Like I'm evil.
Like I'm representing something that's just so foreign and bad.
And I think what it is is like when you go through child abuse, which maybe she went through, maybe she didn't, but my suspicion is maybe there is something there.
Because you don't end up in that kind of lifestyle if you didn't have something terrible go on.
The wires in your brain get rewired.
And what's good is of no use.
And what's bad becomes what you go after.
And everything is crisscrossed.
And it's like, so you end up making terrible decisions.
You end up in a lifestyle that's really dangerous and self-destructive.
And you go nowhere in life.
And eventually you probably get involved in drugs or depression or something worse.
And that's where I fell in.
I just didn't represent any of that bad stuff.
I was just like looking to help out without any strings attached.
And you get crapped down for it.
And I understand that because forgiveness is the most important thing in the world to me.
Because there's always an explanation for everyone's behavior.
One of the questions I ask a lot on my channel is, what's the most important thing you've learned in your life?
And there's so many great lessons.
In life, we could talk for three hours about all the great lessons there are.
But to me, the one that really hit me that I never understood and then I never knew, and then I read it, I'm like, in The Course in Miracles, which is kind of an interpretation of the Bible.
And I'm not religious.
I'm the least religious person you've ever met.
But I was reading The Course in Miracles, which is like an interpretation of the Bible.
It's almost like a layman's version of the Bible.
Like a Bible you can't read.
Like, what the?
That's not English, even.
I don't know what that is.
I can't understand a page of it.
The Course in Miracles is kind of like a.
A layman's version of that.
More understandable.
More relatable.
And one of the things it said, this is one of the early books on it that I was reading, said, everything we do is either an act of love or an act of fear.
That's profound.
Everything we do.
When I read that, I put the book down for like, Like nine months or a year and just sat there and processed that.
Because if you think about everything we do, you know, that mean thing that somebody did to you or that whatever hell you did or that, it's all just fear, fear of not getting enough, fear of being hurt, fear of this.
You can always boil it down.
down to some fear of something.
And then once you understand it, then all of a sudden you're like, oh, so there's no reason to be, there's no benefit in being fearful.
There's none, absolutely none.
It's like heaven and hell.
It's that extreme.
And it becomes like you can either act with love or not act at all.
That's what it boils down to.
And that to me is the most important thing I've learned.
Wow, that's heavy.
It's what the world needs because you look around, what is everybody doing?
What is all these behaviors that we're seeing that we're all just like so up in arms about?
It's all fear.
Some form of fear.
And fear is not like, oh, I'm afraid of heights.
Fear can be afraid of not getting enough.
Fear of something happened to me like it happened to me when I was a kid.
Fear of, if you really boil it all down, you see that, oh, that's just somebody's insecurity and fear.
Do you think that that girl was afraid of you helping her?
It could have been anything, because it could.
It could have been, could have been she had a pimp who was threatening her.
Could have been uh, could have been fear of doing the right thing and getting her life straight.
And maybe that that just is too daunting a an idea to foreign an idea.
Maybe she feels like she doesn't deserve it, because once you have something happen to you, you're like, man, I don't deserve anything good in my life, so you're gonna reject it, even if it's, even if it comes with no strings attached, even if it's just like, here you can have this phone, it's all yours, you don't need to do anything except enjoy it.
It could have been that.
It could have been that maybe there was some romantic thing going on and that can scare people off, right?
Because when people are in romantic relationships, sometimes people behave like, why the hell are you behaving like that?
Because they're afraid of getting hurt.
But if you really have courage to override your fears, you can go into that relationship with courage and just be like, I know I might get hurt here, but I'm going to take a risk.
Wow.
You have to.
There's no way around it.
Without risk, you get nothing.
What do they say?
No risk, no reward.
Risk is such an important thing in life.
And that's one thing about me.
A lot of people are risk-averse.
A lot of people are just afraid of taking risks.
Oh, that's too scary.
That's too dangerous.
You might get hurt.
You might get robbed.
You might get whatever.
I've been robbed like six, seven, eight times down on Skid Row.
I knew I was going to get robbed before I got robbed.
I got a gun to my face one time.
That happens all the time.
On Skid Row?
Yeah, yeah.
All kinds of shit happens there.
I can tell you, I should write a book about all the stuff that happens behind the scenes, but I don't want that to be about what my channel is about.
It's not a soap opera and it's not a helping channel.
It's about awareness and understanding.
That's all I wanted to do.
That was my goal.
I'm doing this for me.
I'm not doing it for views.
So I just do these videos to create awareness.
But risk is such an important thing in everything we do.
If you don't take risk, then you're wasting everybody's time.
Right.
And I tend to love risk.
Like, if I find something risky, that's what turns me on.
That's the only kind of female that interests me.
That's the only kind of project that interests me.
That's the only kind of project of any sort.
Building a house, anything.
Anything that's not risky just bores the fuck out of me.
Yeah.
I love risk.
I'm not a gambler, but I guess I am a gambler in terms of like.
Yeah, you are gambling.
Yeah, I do have a gambling problem.
Not at a casino, though.
I do have a gambling problem, but I never.
Casinos do nothing for me.
I'm like, this is just noisy.
But in real life, risk is like, it's what turns me on.
I was telling you before, right before we started, that.
Like one of my favorite stories is during Create Equal, not this project, but Create Equal, we were up in San Francisco, you can hold your thought.
Yep.
So I was in San Francisco with one of my assistants working on Create Equal, and I wanted to do a portrait of the Hells Angels.
And you can't just call them up, I'm some stranger from LA, you just have to show up.
So nine in the morning, went to the clubhouse in Oakland for the Hells Angels, knocked on their door, nobody answered, knocked on the door louder, nobody answered, knocked on the door a third time.
The do you want?
This biker shows up.
He wants to kill me because I woke him up and most people would be like well, you don't want to do that, but no, I do that.
I do that, but.
But I also know how to think on my feet really, really well, better than that's.
One of the things i've learned is like, no, i'll figure out.
I don't know what i'm going to figure out.
I'm not, I don't.
I don't even know what i'm going to have to figure out but, whatever it is, i'll figure it out.
Do you bring people with you when you do this, or do you do it alone?
I do it like i'll have an assistant driving, but I don't want him involved.
I don't.
I'm protecting him from getting hurt, right.
So he's off two blocks down the street and you're unarmed.
I never carry anything.
I've never shot a gun.
No.
I'm not into that.
But people always say you should and all that.
Well, it's hairy.
I'm 6'4", and I can kind of take care of myself.
Yeah.
Even a biker, Hells Angels, is not going to I mean, with a gun and a bat and a chain, you could probably do some damage.
But I have a knack for what's the word?
Defusing?
I mean, whatever.
If somebody's got something that they're threatening me with, I have a way of showing them that, look, I'm not a threat.
Mm-hmm.
I'm not here to hurt anybody.
Here's what I'm doing.
Like with the pedophiles yesterday, nobody said no to me because I presented to them a way like, look, I'm just looking to hear your story.
I'm not here to make you look like a bad guy.
I'm not here to do anything to you.
I'm not here to do anything other than hear your side of the story.
And I think people can sense when somebody's up to no good or there's something shady going on.
And I don't do anything shady.
I'm not a liar.
I don't do things to people that I have to, like I go to bed tonight with a clear conscience every day of my life.
And that's super important to me.
Because I'm not tricking anybody into anything.
I'm not scamming anybody.
I'm not pulling anything.
I'm just telling you what I do.
If you're interested, that's cool.
And if you're not, that's cool too.
Yeah, you're an open book.
I'm an open book.
And I'm not here to play anybody.
I'm not here to scam anybody.
So that's super important.
And I think people can sense that.
And if you're just coming at people with, here's what I'm doing.
I think you're interesting.
Love to talk to you.
Love to hear your story.
People love to tell their stories.
One of the things I find interesting on my channel is A lot of these people have confessed to like even murders and crazy things.
There's a few people that have confessed to murders or things close to it, things that don't have a statute of limitations on them.
So, like, why the hell would you say that?
I'll say to them after the interview, like, why the hell would you say that?
I'm not worried about it.
So, you want me to put this on YouTube?
You sure?
And yeah, yeah, go ahead.
So, what happened after you banged on that door, the Hells Angel guy, and he answered?
He slammed the door on my face.
And then I went across the street.
There's a little Mexican restaurant that was serving breakfast.
I got breakfast for everybody.
And I brought it over and I brought a whole bunch of breakfast and they enjoyed breakfast with me and got to be friendly with them and I did a portrait about an hour and a half later.
No interview?
No, I wasn't doing interviews then.
Okay.
That was before I even thought.
That was for your project.
That was for the Create Equal, which is a book of portraits.
It's really just the template for what I'm doing now.
But Create Equal is just portraits.
There was no interviews.
I wish I was doing interviews then, but I wasn't.
And, you know, it takes a lot of maturity to do what I'm doing and I didn't have it then.
I started that project in 1999.
I just wasn't mature enough.
I wasn't bold enough.
I wasn't strong enough or whatever.
What do you mean, maturity?
You know, to do certain things, you need to have a certain, some, some wherewithal, some, some substance to yourself.
And I just didn't have it at the time, but I do now.
So now I, now I go up to everybody and anybody and say, here's what I'm doing.
I'm going to sit with you for 45 minutes or whatever and hear your story in and out and, and, and do all that.
That takes a lot.
It's super draining.
How did you acquire that, that substance or character?
You grow up.
You grow up.
Yeah, you know, I'm growing up a lot as I do this, you know.
Yeah, and I listened to that first interview I did with Caroline, which was in 2010, I think.
Sorry, who's Caroline?
Caroline is the heroin addict, the very first interview I ever did.
We talked about that earlier, just a little while ago.
She was a heroin addict on Skid Row that I did the very first when the Canon camera came out.
I just said, Oh, let me just do an interview.
Okay, so that's who Caroline was.
Um, I listened to that very first interview, and like, Oh, I sound like a little kid, I sound like a young, stupid kid.
I asked her some stupid questions, I'm like, That's just dumb, yeah, but whatever.
Listening to the First Interview00:14:17
I put it up.
But who I am now, I would never even ask some of those questions.
I seemed immature at the time.
So now I'm a little more seasoned.
So I think it takes a certain something.
A couple things I wanted to bounce off you.
One of them was I feel like that project, Deck Hands, I did was so in line with what you're doing.
But the main difference was I was out there for a long time shooting a lot of people, interviewing a lot of people, shooting a lot of B-roll.
And trying to turn it into a 30 minute sort of like documentary with like a very specific feel, like a very dark ambience.
Yeah.
I was very particular.
I spent days and days and weeks searching for specific music that I wanted to use for a certain five second piece of the videos, right?
Like I was very, I was very like romantic to it.
Yeah.
Like I was very attached to it and I was like.
Everything had to be perfect.
I didn't want to release it until everything sounded right.
And I was just like, it was so much a part of myself.
And I was so afraid of just like letting go of it.
Yeah.
And I feel like you've really overcome something there with what you're doing and the scale of work you're putting out.
I don't feel like, do you have any sort of those feelings when you're working on this stuff?
No.
I honestly believe, my whole life, I believe that whatever I touch turns to gold.
So you can say that's BS and say my stuff is crap.
But I believe.
That what I touch turns to gold.
But why?
I don't know.
I'm lucky.
What do you mean you touch it and it turns to gold?
What is it about you?
I think my photographs are better than everybody else's.
Do you think it's something that's only inside you?
If you decide to put out a piece of work, it's automatically gold.
What is it about you that makes it gold?
One of my favorite quotes I ever heard was from Michael Jordan.
I'm going to paraphrase, so I'm sure I'm getting it wrong.
I forget the series.
It was the Chicago Bulls playing against, I think, the Utah Jazz, and it was the finals or the semifinals or whatever.
It was like the sixth or seventh game of the series.
The Bulls were down by two.
They had two, three seconds left in the game.
The Bulls had the ball inbounds.
The coach is like laying out the play.
You pass it here, boom, boom, boom.
Then we're going to try to get it to Michael, and then Michael will do the shot.
And he's laying out this whole plan for this next three-second play.
And Michael just said, paraphrasing, he goes, fuck that shit.
Give me the ball.
Get the fuck out of my way.
Like he knew, and he did, the Bulls won that game.
Mm-hmm.
He knew without a doubt that he can get the job done.
I have that.
I'm not a basketball player.
I'm a photographer.
But I know that if it's in my hands, I'm going to do it.
I have no doubt in my mind.
And that's a great gift.
I could be wrong.
I'm sure my photography is not so great sometimes.
I'm sure somebody else could maybe do a better job.
But I don't buy it.
But do you worry about your work being perfect before you put it out in front of millions of people?
It always is.
It always is.
I'm so good at what I do.
I've been doing this since I was 14 years old.
It's all I've ever done, and I'm like obsessed about doing it well.
So, like, everything I do is great.
I mean, I'm sounding like a pompous jackass just on purpose, but I'm trying to make a point.
And that point is I'm very confident, and I really put a lot of work behind what I do.
So, I don't really put out a whole lot of crap.
There's some videos that I probably put out that are probably not worth it.
There's three or four that I probably should take down.
I just I like putting one up every day.
So every once in a while like like right now I'm out of town No one's editing videos.
I'm like, you know, yeah, I've got some schedule to be put up for the next five five days, but at some point there becomes a week period where like fuck I don't have anything to put up.
I didn't shoot it right but whatever I really believe in myself I think what I do when I touch things that they're great I put a lot of effort in though.
I put a ton of effort into what I do.
That's what people don't understand I make it look easy I make it look really easy.
I don't show you how much blood sweat and tears go into it I don't like showing that.
Do you watch the videos after you post them?
No.
The only ones I ever watch, for some reason, I find Lewis.
Lewis is this alcoholic that I've interviewed.
I mean, there's some that I watch.
I'm so immersed in it all that I don't.
And I'm editing them, so I see them when I'm editing them.
But the ones that I would actually sit and watch, I find Lewis' delivery.
He's almost like a comedian, and it's very entertaining.
He should be a comedian.
He's really fun to watch.
And there are other people that are really kind of charismatic and they're interesting to listen to, but I tend to not do that.
I don't have a time for it.
Another thing I want to bounce off you, and again, the only reason I'm bringing this stuff up is because I feel like I can learn a lot from asking you these questions.
You mentioned that Richard Branson quote about making the four different lists of things that you're good at, things you're not good at, things you like, things you hate.
Yep.
I feel personally that this thing, this podcast, these raw conversations are.
somewhat very much the same as a lot of the documentaries that I've done and also so different.
Number one, I mean, the main difference is it's basically a documentary minus all the prep work, minus all the travel, minus all the music, minus all the B roll.
It's just straight raw dialogue.
Which is great.
It's just raw stories.
It's like what Joe Rogan does.
And it's everything I'm not good at, though.
No, but you're pretty good at it.
But I'm terrible at it.
I really am terrible.
Well, I mean, it's like I'm a terrible interviewer.
I'm a terrible interviewer.
I'm not a good interviewer.
I'm not even a good conversationalist.
But I make an effort.
And really, these are not interviews in my mind.
These are photographs with a little bit of backstory.
So I'm not, you know, everyone say, oh, you're a terrible interviewer.
It's okay.
It's fine.
I'm not trying to be a great interviewer.
I'm trying to be a great photographer.
And these little backstories of the person's story kind of helps.
And by doing 2,000 of them, I'm eventually becoming a little bit better at it.
And sometimes when the dynamics between me and the subject are right, then it becomes more of a better conversation.
That happens sometimes.
You put two people in a room together, they're going to click or they're not.
And sometimes I click with people and they are.
And sometimes we're just like, it's just not going to ever.
Right.
But no, you get better at whatever you do a lot of.
Right.
Well, I feel like, again, some of my most successful work is like it's storytelling.
It's kind of like a documentary, but it's also kind of like a music video.
Like the music really gives you the vibe and it really tells the music actually tells 50% of the story.
Yeah.
And this is the opposite of that.
But I can do as many as I want in a week versus if I do work on one of those documentary projects.
It takes me a lot more work.
I can maybe do one in a month if I bust my ass.
Yeah, for sure.
And that's what I'm good at.
I'm good at using a camera.
I'm good at creating like a whole thing.
No, no.
I'm good at taking the camera out at night with.
Natural light, and creating this really cool cinematic looking interview with like a boat in the background and the moonlight, and putting dark music to it and making it really resonate with somebody, really like hit you when you watch it.
And this is the complete opposite of that.
But I'm doing it because I can do more of them and it's I'm doing it.
What I've learned from doing this is, it's made me, even though I'm still terrible at it.
It's made me a better communicator.
It's made me like a.
It's improved so many aspects of my life just by being able to sit here uninterrupted and talk to somebody for two hours.
I find that I'm starting to become a little more, like I'm very shy.
I'm very, I'm not like an outgoing, I don't like being in front of the camera.
I don't like doing all that kind of stuff.
And to be like, to be doing these talks, eventually you kind of just, all right, I'll ease, I'm easing into it and I'm kind of like getting a little more comfortable with it where maybe we can start having more conversations now.
Like the video I did, I put up on Sunday of with Amber.
I think I titled it A Prostitute's Life.
With this girl named Amber who works Figueroa.
She's a little bit, she's not one of the young girls, she's one of the older ones.
And I've had her on before, and it's just a little more of a conversation about that life and how you got into it and the ups and downs of it all.
And it's more of a conversation than a, where are you from, what was your childhood like, what drug do you use, all that kind of stuff, which is very cold.
I mean, a lot of people will make these comments, you sound like you're interrogating these people.
The fact that I'm off camera and I'm just this like mysterious voice that's coming from the background saying, and what do you do for money?
You know, I sound like a cop.
I sound like Joe Friday.
I think a lot of that is because I'm off camera.
Because if you could see my body language, I mean, these people wouldn't open up with me the way they do if I was a cop or behaving like one.
And I'm not.
But maybe my voice sounds very straight and serious because we're talking about heavy, serious stuff.
So I can't laugh and joke and be friendly and soft with them because we're talking about really dark, heavy stuff.
So when you hear just a voice coming from nowhere, like.
That's creepy.
So, just the nature of the fact that I'm off camera and I choose to be off camera.
I could do a talk show where it's two of us sitting together talking on two chairs, like the Dick Cavett show or a talk show.
I choose not to do that because I would rather not be on camera.
So, it's a little bit creepy that the voice comes from nowhere and it sounds like you're just interrogating these people, but they're clearly not.
No one feels interrogated when they're doing this.
Yeah.
What is, out of the over 2,000 interviews you've done, which one is your favorite?
Which one do you think about the most?
Which one do you always go back to?
Oh, I mean, my little personal favorite is one with SB, which is a gang member.
And not because it's so deep or heavy.
It's just SB is.
He got stabbed in the heart recently.
We thought he died, but I think he's alive.
I haven't seen him since.
It happened like four or five months ago.
But I haven't seen him since.
I heard he survived.
It's only like a minute and a half long.
It's the shortest video on my channel.
And it's so intense and so beautiful and so well done about him talking about the streets.
And it's just like, fuck, if I could just do that with every video, it was so beautifully done.
And he was a great storyteller.
He would tell these stories.
He probably still does, hopefully.
He tells stories in like where he's playing, like him and his buddy are robbing a third guy.
And he tells a story.
What he's saying, and then he talks as if he's his buddy.
Then he talks you, and he's telling this whole story with three different characters, but he's playing all three at the same time.
And he does it with such street slang, and he's like, it's just so fascinating for me to listen to.
But he's talking about really violent, crazy stuff that most of my audience probably doesn't like.
You know, a lot of people love the gangs' videos, and other ones hate them, and other people love the Appalachians, and other people find them boring.
And, you know, how much drug addiction can you actually watch?
You know, it's like, so some, but people love those.
You put up a female, an attractive female heroin addict, that'll get a lot of views.
So it's all that.
But the SB one is, all the SBs are great.
The Jerry, you know, Jerry is the black gentleman who was shot in the face with a shotgun.
Oh, yeah.
That one was.
He just passed away this last weekend.
Did he really?
He died, yeah.
Yeah.
How long did he survive after he was shot in the face with a shotgun?
It's been a long time.
I mean, it's been, I forget what year he was shot, but it's been 15 years or so, maybe longer.
Do you know how he died?
Oh, yeah.
He had COPD, you know, the breathing.
He had problems breathing.
He even told me, I saw him a couple days before he died.
I would see him every once or twice a week.
I'd just stop by and I was paying his bills and all that.
So I'd see him often.
And I saw him a couple days before he passed away.
And he just said, yeah, it's just so hard for me to even go down to the lobby of his apartment.
He lived on the third floor.
For him to just go downstairs in the elevator, not the stairs, elevator.
He said, it's just so hard for me to get around now because my breathing is so bad.
So I kind of knew that this might be happening, but I was surprised that it happened as soon as it did.
But he was such a lovely dude.
I was amazed at how well spoken that guy was and how friendly and charismatic he was.
The guy was missing half of his head.
I think it's.
I did the original video that's very kind of just crude.
And I wasn't very proud of it.
So I did a part one and a part two with him.
And then now there's a part three showing his apartment.
But the part one and part two are the ones I would rather people watched because it covers everything in that original video that's not so good and much more.
And in, I think, the part two of that.
Series, he talks about forgiveness.
Which to me, there's nothing more important to talk about.
And I asked him, What would he say to the guy who shot him?
Because half his face and half his brain is missing.
The whole right side of his head, it looks like a cantaloupe you dropped off a building.
His head is shaped like a half moon.
And he.
He said, I love you.
I forgive you.
Forgiveness After Tragic Violence00:04:00
And that's the only way you can be.
That's the only way that you can be.
And a lot of people don't understand that.
It's the only option.
Because to be hateful hurts you.
To be hateful doesn't accomplish anything.
There seems to be so much hate in the world.
And you just look in the comments on YouTube, it seems like a third of them are hate-filled or motivated by hate.
Hate accomplishes nothing.
And what people don't understand about it, to put out some hate against somebody, That hate comes back to you and it hurts you more than it hurts them.
Subconsciously.
People don't understand how subconsciously this is.
You suffer.
You suffer.
And if you want to hurt yourself, go ahead and hate somebody.
But you're going to suffer for it.
And that's why I say I go to bed every night with clear conscience.
Man, I don't hate anybody or anything.
If I loan you $5,000 and you never pay me back, I'm going to treat you exactly the way I did before you ever offered me, before you ever borrowed $5,000.
I'm going to treat you exactly the same because I don't want to have that.
crap on me.
I'm probably not going to loan you another five grand, but I'm not going to carry that anger with me.
Because if I carry that anger, like, man, that motherfucker didn't pay me back.
It's not hurting you.
It's hurting me.
And if I just let it go, as Jerry says in that talk, you just let it go.
And you're lighter on your feet.
And it's easier for you to smile.
And it's easier for you to sleep.
And your heart rate is lower.
And your brainwaves are more calm.
And everything is better to just forgive and let go.
With everything like when I went through the divorce it'd be very easy for me to like blame this blame that blame blame this person blame blame blame blame I took 100% of the responsibility for everything that I went through 100% of the responsibility for everything I don't care who else was involved.
I take the response.
I take the blame for everything and by doing that I Have total peace with it with everything.
I'm not angry at anybody not angry at anybody You just forgive and you're just lighter on your feet.
You're happier.
You're, you're at ease you're, you're at peace and it's just a better way to live.
And I I don't know where I learned that.
I've known that since I was a little kid.
So that's not, that's one of the that's not the most important lesson i've learned, because I seem, i've seemed like i've known that my whole life, even when I was a little kid.
I just I knew that my parents don't have it, my parents don't have that.
No one in my family yeah, I can relate embodies that, but I, I live by it always have.
It's not something I try to do, it's just something I have always done Yeah, I feel like I feel like I know why you got divorced.
I feel like your work probably you were you're a workaholic.
Yeah, yeah, so anyone anyone who had a romantic relationship with you probably was going crazy like what the fuck pay attention to me.
No, my ex-wife is the coolest woman that ever walked the earth.
She was great.
She is great.
That's great that you maintained a good relationship.
Oh, yeah, no, we just had Thanksgiving dinner together.
Oh, that's fucking awesome.
She's great.
She's great.
I people people meet her and they're like what the fuck you're an idiot.
I'm like, well, yeah, but No, it's all cool.
She's got a nice boyfriend now, and that's all great.
And I'm happy for her.
So, no, it was a time where my career was cranking, and we were raising little kids, or not little kids, but she was totally into raising kids, and I was totally into my work, and things just kind of started to veer apart.
And Create Equal came out, and it flopped.
I mean, it's out of print now, and you can buy a copy on eBay or on Amazon.
You can get a used copy for like $1,000, so it's hard to find.
What?
Yeah.
It's an expensive book.
Did you create a specific amount of copies to sell?
I mean, the publisher did.
Okay.
And there's no more available.
The title in Germany published it.
But it's out of print, and now you can find an old copy for a lot more money.
Finding Dignity Through Purpose00:10:58
So I guess I shouldn't be ashamed of it.
I mean, the first gallery show that I had with it, we sold like half a million dollars in prints at that first show.
But that sounds like a lot, but I spent much more than that to create that project.
You have to understand that I do things really heavy, like really intense.
I don't just kind of take some pictures.
I don't do that.
I don't kind of do something.
You mean you're not some corporate executive trying to squeeze profits out of everything you do?
No, I do things with gusto.
That's one thing I do.
When I do something, if I'm into it, if I'm not into it, good luck.
I won't even get off the sofa.
I won't do shit.
What's the point if you're not into it?
Yeah, if I'm not into it, I just don't do shit.
But if I'm into it, look out.
Look out.
Look out.
That's all I can say.
That's the way everything should be, man.
That's where everything should be.
You need purpose in what you do.
When I am focused, there's no stopping me.
Between the combination of focus and concentration and hope, It just makes anything possible.
It makes anything I want possible.
And there's very little that I don't accomplish when I want it.
That's amazing.
It's great.
It's great.
But you have to believe and you have to really be so committed.
It's like, I'm going to make this happen.
I don't care how much.
Sometimes I find I'll come up against something really negative.
Like, oh, that's a really terrible setback.
That's never going to happen.
And I'll see how that setback can actually make this happen.
Because the other person, let's say you're interacting with a person, that person that's just said no, you allowed them to say no.
You've given them the space.
And that's really important.
That's an important thing with human interactions is to give people the space or the respect to it applies to every kind of interaction.
But let's say somebody does something really bad.
Are you married?
Yes.
You're married.
Let's say you do something that really just your wife didn't dig and you really fucked up in some way.
Who knows what?
Just make up something in your head.
You fucked up.
She's pissed off.
She's disappointed in you.
You were a serious fuck up.
She could come back at you and go, what the fuck's the matter?
She could give you all kinds of crap for it.
Or she could give you your space and your respect and let you kind of hold your head up when you come home from work.
And that'll allow you to kind of get your dignity back.
And you'll choose to do the right thing next time.
Most likely.
You'll choose to do the right thing next time something like that comes up.
Instead of repeating that same fucked up behavior.
Hmm.
By giving you that, she's not going to condemn you when you came home from work.
She's not going to, like, say, you motherfucker, you fucked up again.
She's just going to interact with you just the way she, I'm not saying being passive and let you get away with it.
But giving you the room to retain your dignity Because that's important.
That's super important that you that you still feel good about yourself It's like it's like raising little kids.
We talked about this earlier if you if you make the kid feel bad They're gonna be bad if you make the kid feel good about themselves They're gonna do the do the right thing and the same thing with adults so if she if your wife makes you feel bad about something You're probably gonna continue to do it eventually But if she allows you to forget about, let's forget that happened.
Let's forgive and forget.
You know you fucked up.
You process that.
man, I don't want that to happen again.
I feel bad about doing it.
But she didn't, like, make me feel guilty about it.
Not try to punish you.
Not try to punish you.
Just like, you know, you disappointed her, right?
You know, you fucked up.
And if you're a stand-up dude, you're going to not do it again.
And you can get back to the relationship with your dignity, with your, you know, you can be proud of who you are.
That's, I guess that's what I'm saying.
Whereas otherwise, then you're going to feel bad about who you are.
And eventually that'll just, the whole relationship will deteriorate.
You know, it'll all just fall apart because you feel like a piece of crap because of what you did, and that just makes you behave like a piece of crap.
And it's the same thing with children.
How did you learn this?
It's just common sense.
Everything boils down to common sense and science.
It's all science.
Yeah, but it has to be some sort of experience.
You're not born with that, right?
I'm born with the forgiveness thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was definitely born with that.
I'm born with the focus and drive that I got.
Yeah, that's for sure.
So born with the I mean, it's just understanding.
Like, do you think that theory or that concept of not punishing someone for a fuck up or a major mistake and letting them sit back?
I'm not saying being passive.
I'm not saying being passive at all.
Just so if anybody's listening to this, oh, you're just letting, you're enabling or whatever.
And I'm not saying that.
What I'm doing is giving you room to do the right thing next time.
Now, if you continue to fuck up and do it again and again and again, then yeah, lock them up and whatever.
But all I'm saying is.
You're not saying cut off the relationship.
You're just saying.
No, I'm just saying.
If everything's been fine, all of a sudden you did something really fucked up.
Rather than just saying, dude, you really fucked up and you're an asshole and you, you know, all that and making you feel really shameful and really.
Because chances are you already know that.
You already know that.
Everybody knows when they fuck up.
You don't need to be reminded.
The fact that you're being reminded just makes you feel worse.
But if you, if she just.
Interacts with you, just as before, just as she did before this happened.
It gives you room to what.
It gives you the space, the dignity to walk into the room again with your head held high and give her a kiss on the forehead or cheek and and just be cool and do the right thing next time.
And people don't seem to understand that they would rather just hate and condemn and and make you feel bad and that that just takes things down mm-hmm, and nobody wants that.
She doesn't want it and you don't want it.
It hurts her, it hurts you right, but if she did this, It helps her and it helps you.
I'm not saying be passive, though.
I'm not saying just let people.
I totally understand.
If you had one message for the world after everything you've learned from your life, your work, all the people you've interacted with, what would your message be?
What's your legacy?
Oh, I would say forgiveness and understanding.
Forgiveness is such a huge one.
I forgive really well.
When I say forgive, it's just like what Jerry said in that talk.
Totally forget, just like never happened, right?
Like, if you borrowed that $5,000 from me and you never paid me back, I would continue to interact with you as if nothing ever happened because it didn't in my head.
And hopefully, you know, you get past it too.
And one day maybe you pay me back, and one day maybe you don't.
I'm probably not going to loan you any more money.
But that forgiveness, kind of like what we just talked about with your wife, and you know, right?
Um, it allows everyone to heal, and that's what that's that's that's the real.
Thing that we want to happen.
That's like the thing with my channel.
I want us all to be healed and happy and at peace and loving ourselves.
Really, it's all about loving yourself.
I mean, it's really that it's that lack of unconditional love that happened in childhood that causes all these problems you see on my channel and in life.
Unconditional love is the answer to everything.
The reason I mentioned the Blue Ace Circle thing earlier, I never finished that.
So if Blue Ace Circle ever wanted their name back, I would change the name of my channel to Unconditional Love.
Really?
Because that's really what it is.
That's what all my videos are all about.
The fact that you didn't get that when you were a kid and now you're doing all this screwed up behavior.
Because you were never loved unconditionally.
And love is not unconditional love.
It's like a disguise that looks like love.
And your mom is being nice to you, but then she's also being manipulative.
And she's nice to you, but then she's not.
And then she's nice to you, but there's all these games that are being played.
And unconditional love is just like, it's unconditional.
And that heals everything.
Heals everything.
Kids grow up beautifully with that.
You know, when you abuse a kid, when you sexually molest them, when you do all these terrible things, when you talk down to them, they end up broken.
And if you just love them and accept them and give them patience and listen to them and talk to them as if they're intelligent, they'd grow up to be great people.
So something along the lines of all that is what we all need.
That's super powerful, man.
Thank you again for being here.
Cool.
I appreciate this so much.
And you're very good at what you do.
It's such a powerful thing.
You shouldn't think you don't.
Well, I appreciate it.
You're very good.
I appreciate you're very kind.
Tell the people listening where they can follow you, where they can find your work, and how they can support what you're doing.
Oh, I have a YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly.
And if you want to support it, I put up this GoFundMe thing that people can support.
I only want it for people that want to do it.
So it's not like you're supposed to support.
But it's like, you know, I struggle to make money with this.
I have a Patreon channel too, and Patreon has some.
I'm trying to make more videos on there that are exclusive.
I might have more coming, but so far there's only like 40 or so videos that are exclusive to the Patreon channel.
But that's another way to support what I'm doing.
It's $10 a month.
And I think that's about it.
But I'm grateful that people watch it because it seems like maybe some people will start to figure out that hate won't accomplish anything good.
That's one thing I'd love to change.
Because, man, it just makes me so sad when you see all this hate.
No matter how bad somebody has been, it's like to hate them.
Just that's what like.
It's like the.
It's like these commenters think that if I leave a hateful comment, the target of that hate will stop doing what they're going to do.
They're not no, they're going to dig their heels in deeper.
So you've, you're contributing to the problem right, you're?
You're making the problem worse, you.
You think you're disapproving and you're going to, you're going to stop it somehow, but what you're actually doing is putting fertilizer on it.
Creating Awareness for Future Generations00:01:09
The way to do, the way to handle this is, you listen to these talks.
You comprehend what they're saying.
You listen to how these things came about, what the childhood was like, what the environment was like, how they grew up.
And maybe we could create a more educated generation next time.
Maybe we could create a little more awareness or a little more open-mindedness or maybe a little less racism or a little more would have this, that, or the other so that the next generation is a little more evolved.
Because a lot of the who the hell would hit a kid?
Who the hell would sexually molest a kid?
Who the hell would do that?
I can't even imagine that shit.
No.
But it happens.
It's happening right now as we're talking somewhere.
And it's like, it's horrible.
We definitely need to figure out a way to make people in our country better and make less losers, for lack of a better term.
That's it.
That's really it.
That's really it.
I mean, that's what I'm hoping maybe this channel kind of does.
It's like, oh, wow, we're really screwing up.
We're really dropping the ball.
And it's not about homelessness or drug addiction or whatever.