Dec. 14, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:26:06
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Hello, Mark. | ||
| Hey, Joe. | ||
| How do you do what you do and maintain any... | ||
| Mental health? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's just tell everybody, you have the YouTube show Soft White Underbelly, which I found a while back and just watched one video and then I went down the rabbit hole. | ||
| Today I binged a bunch of them preparing for this. | ||
| Dude, it's so sad and so heartbreaking. | ||
| You interview all kinds of people, addicts, prostitutes, Johns, gang members. | ||
| Why Soft White Underbelly? | ||
| Why did you come up with that name? | ||
| I remember my dad when I was in the 60s, 70s, talking on the phone. | ||
| I heard that term being used. | ||
| It's like an analogy for the vulnerable part of whatever you're talking about. | ||
| I don't hear that term anymore, but I remember it back then. | ||
| And I always thought it was a cool name. | ||
| Blue Easter Cult used it as their original name before Blue Easter Cult. | ||
| So I just... | ||
| It was a fun name. | ||
| Makes people wonder what the hell it's all about. | ||
| Well, it's very appropriate. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think it's fitting for what I'm doing. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| How did you get involved in interviewing all of these people that are sort of downcast from society? | ||
| So I've been an advertising photographer since I was 14 years old, or after high school, really. | ||
| I went to college for it, but I was always into photography. | ||
| And then I got into advertising and I did that for decades and decades. | ||
| Had a great career. | ||
| And then what happened is, you know, my advertising work was so slick and beautiful and perfect and everything is retouched so it's better than life. | ||
| And you do that for decades and you get burnt out. | ||
| And you just get fed up with the perfection and all the aspirational aspects of advertising. | ||
| And I just wanted something that was real. | ||
| I recognized that there were things going on in the world that weren't so perfect. | ||
| And I just felt like my life was out of balance. | ||
| I didn't want to grow old and have my kids say, What did your dad do? | ||
| Oh, he shot advertising his whole life. | ||
| I wanted to do something different. | ||
| And I've always done these side projects. | ||
| Even when I was a teenager in Chicago, I was always fascinated with the drunks on Madison Avenue on the west side. | ||
| You see these guys sleeping on park benches and just with a paper bag and a bottle in their hands. | ||
| It was such an interesting lifestyle to me. | ||
| Because I didn't grow up like that. | ||
| I grew up in a pretty perfect household. | ||
| Mom and Dad, parents loved me. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| But I was fascinated with all that dark stuff. | ||
| And that continued throughout my career. | ||
| I was always doing portraits of people like that. | ||
| I didn't really do much with it until... | ||
| About 1999, I started working. | ||
| While I was doing advertising, I would sneak away whenever I had a hole in my schedule, which wasn't often, but over nine or ten years, I went to each of the lower 48 states and started photographing everything that exists in the U.S. Cowboys in Wyoming. | ||
| Drunken Indians in New Mexico. | ||
| Ballerinas in New York City. | ||
| Repo men in Oklahoma. | ||
| Auto mechanics in Alabama. | ||
| Pedophiles all over the country. | ||
| Polygamists in Utah. | ||
| The Amish in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Just everything that kind of fits for... | ||
| Oh, that's Pennsylvania. | ||
| They have Amish there. | ||
| So I would pick that and I'd hunt it down and find it. | ||
| So I got really good at finding these... | ||
| There's subcultures that we've all heard about, but you didn't really know if... | ||
| Some of them are easy to find. | ||
| Drug addicts are easy to find. | ||
| But there's other subcultures that I've found that are more difficult to find and certainly difficult to photograph and now really difficult to interview. | ||
| So I did that book. | ||
| It came out in 2010. It's called Created Equal. | ||
| And I was really proud of it. | ||
| It put my heart and soul into it. | ||
| But it didn't really... | ||
| I would sit at a table when somebody's looking at it and they would go, oh, what did he sound like? | ||
| What did the cowboy sound like? | ||
| How did he get like this? | ||
| How did he get this career? | ||
| What was his childhood like? | ||
| All these questions. | ||
| And I honestly didn't know it for each of these 200 portraits in that book. | ||
| And I realized if I'm going to make this really stick the way I wanted it to, I'm going to have to do it with an interview as a backstory. | ||
| So it's a portrait, and then I would just do these interviews that might just exist behind the portrait as you're looking at it. | ||
| And that's how I started. | ||
| And, you know, I always had studios like on Skid Row, like while I was doing advertising in LA at my LA studio. | ||
| I'd had another studio down on Skid Row, which was, you know, cheap and, you know, I would just sneak away there on slow days. | ||
| And just photograph all the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the transgenders, the mental health, you know, the people that are off, the rockers, everything. | ||
| Gang members. | ||
| And I love doing it, but I never really did anything with that until I started. | ||
| Canon came out with a Canon 5D, which is a still camera that did video. | ||
| And I just was playing around. | ||
| I never shot video in my life. | ||
| And I'm like, let me just put this thing on a tripod and interview somebody. | ||
| And there was this girl, Caroline, who was a heroin addict prostitute down on Skid Row. | ||
| And I was like, hey, I got to know her. | ||
| And I said, hey, would you want to just sit and tell me your life story? | ||
| And she goes, sure, I'll do it. | ||
| So she sat down and did this. | ||
| And it was heartbreaking. | ||
| Like, Jesus, I just hit a grand slam my first time at bat. | ||
| Like, a really horrifying story. | ||
| And she... | ||
| So I did that, and I was like, wow, that was amazing. | ||
| I started doing a few more, and they were all interesting in their own way. | ||
| Every single one was very different and interesting. | ||
| I'm like, maybe there's something here. | ||
| And went through a divorce, went through... | ||
| I went through a lot of stuff. | ||
| My mom died, went through a divorce. | ||
| My advertising industry changed a lot in those years. | ||
| This was like seven years ago, seven, eight years ago. | ||
| I gave up my studio and I just kind of didn't know what I was doing with my life. | ||
| And I had all these storage units for all my studio equipment and my furniture. | ||
| I was building a house, so I had all my furniture in the house. | ||
| I had like four or five different storage units around the city. | ||
| I'm like, let me just consolidate all these into one big space, and maybe I'll have room for a studio up front, and I'll start doing those portraits and those interviews I was doing on Skid Row before. | ||
| And just see if I enjoy doing that. | ||
| Because I didn't know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. | ||
| I wasn't doing advertising anymore. | ||
| I didn't know what I was. | ||
| I was just drifting. | ||
| And I started doing these and I just loved it. | ||
| Just loved it. | ||
| And I started doing them every day. | ||
| And I've done it pretty much every day for over three years now. | ||
| What you're doing is... | ||
| Almost the exact opposite of advertising. | ||
| It's a reaction to that slick, aspirational... | ||
| I shot Apple for 10, 12 years and made these products look amazing, right? | ||
| They had to be perfect. | ||
| And I'm like, life isn't perfect. | ||
| Life is messy. | ||
| Life can be really messed up. | ||
| And I've longed for that. | ||
| So that's what this is. | ||
| I got all these skills, all these chops of how to find these people, how to interact with them, how to find them, how to connect with them, how to get their trust from doing Create Equal, where I did that for 10 years and I was interacting with all kinds of people, from Hell's Angels down to pedophiles, everything. | ||
| You name it. | ||
| Everything that exists in the U.S. When I first started, I was really shy. | ||
| This is going to be really hard. | ||
| I decided this was my project. | ||
| This is what I'm going to do. | ||
| But when I first started, it was like, man, this is not my personality type, to go up to strangers and tell them, you know, I want to photograph you. | ||
| That was so hard. | ||
| But now I've gotten so good at it that it's a breeze. | ||
| You know, I got to a point, I remember early on, I was just like so nervous to do this, to walk up to a stranger in a casino in Las Vegas and say, hey, I think you're interesting. | ||
| I'd like to photograph you. | ||
| That was the first one I did. | ||
| And then By the end, I remember I wanted to photograph the Hells Angels, the motorcycle gang up in Oakland. | ||
| It's like their main headquarters. | ||
| I just flew up to Oakland. | ||
| You can't really arrange that. | ||
| You can't call them up on the phone and say, hey, I'm a photographer in LA. I want to photograph you guys. | ||
| That's just not going to happen. | ||
| So I just flew up there, and it was morning, and I ring their buzzer at their headquarters in Oakland, and no answer. | ||
| It's like 9.30 in the morning. | ||
| I ring it again. | ||
| Nobody answers. | ||
| I ring it a third time, and somebody comes. | ||
| This junkyard dog of a biker opens the door and says, What the fuck do you want? | ||
| And I'm like, I start telling him, he just slams the door in my face. | ||
| He goes, fuck off, and he just slams the door. | ||
| Like, that didn't go well. | ||
| But I've done this so much now that I'm so good at it that I knew to give him some time, allow him to say no, I'm not going to force, I'm not going to pressure him. | ||
| Went across the street, there's a Mexican restaurant that was serving breakfast. | ||
| I got breakfast for a bunch of guys, and I brought it over, and I rang it again, he opens the door, and I had breakfast for him. | ||
| And eventually they let me in, and we chatted, and I eventually photographed the president, the head of that chapter, Cisco Valderrama and Flash, and this guy's name was Marvin. | ||
| And it was a great portrait. | ||
| I'm proud of it. | ||
| I made that happen because of my ability to just go up to anybody, killers, anybody, and just walk up to him and say, hey, this is what I'd like to do. | ||
| Did you ever read Hunter Thompson's book on the Hells Angels? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| Not bad. | ||
| That was his breakthrough book. | ||
| And he was embedded with the Hells Angels and hung around with them for long periods of time. | ||
| No, it's a hell of a lifestyle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's sort of where he invented that sort of gonzo journalism aspect. | ||
| No, I love that kind of... | ||
| William Volberg is another author that's kind of like that. | ||
| I love Bill Volberg's work. | ||
| Where it's just like you immerse yourself into these really fucked up dangerous situations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you come out with gold or you get killed or shot or knifed or whatever. | ||
| That is a fear of yours. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've been robbed so many times on Skid Row. | ||
| I came around the corner once and there's a gun to my face and it's like, fuck. | ||
| But you still do it? | ||
| Yeah, I still do it. | ||
| Did you feel when you were doing advertising... | ||
| Advertising is so strange, right? | ||
| Because it doesn't bother me. | ||
| I have this sort of relaxed attitude on certain things. | ||
| Like, well, that's not going to trick me. | ||
| Some guy's talking about the hollow earth. | ||
| Well, that's not going to trick me. | ||
| That doesn't bother me. | ||
| But when you think about the overall impact of what it's doing... | ||
| It's giving people – it's sort of like the – part of the big problem that people have with social media is it creates these unrealistic expectations and then it also has people comparing their life to what they see in advertising. | ||
| Yeah, advertising and social media are kind of following the same. | ||
| This is the main concern with advertising of pharmaceutical drugs. | ||
| Because it's all people having the best time. | ||
| Like at a picnic, running through a wheat field, and this could be you. | ||
| Why isn't this you right now? | ||
| This could be you if you just do this thing, or take this thing, or buy this thing. | ||
| That's the manipulation of advertising. | ||
| And what did that feel like when you were a part of that? | ||
| You were acutely aware of it. | ||
| I'm part of it. | ||
| I'm part of the... | ||
| That process. | ||
| And I hated the feeling of that after a while. | ||
| Initially, it was great. | ||
| When I first started doing Apple, I was so proud of myself. | ||
| And I'm still proud of my career. | ||
| I love what I did in advertising, and I'm so proud of that work. | ||
| But I have to admit, as I got older, it started feeling really like I'm tricking people. | ||
| I'm tricking people. | ||
| I'm not cool with that. | ||
| It didn't sit well with me at the end of the day. | ||
| I'm just like, so that's how I made my money? | ||
| That's how I spent my life on this planet? | ||
| And I just wanted to do something that mattered. | ||
| Do you think that advertising should be regulated or do you think we should leave that up to people or educate people on the effects of it the same way people are trying to educate people on the effects of Of social media and what it does to people's mental health when you compare these unrealistic lives to yours? | ||
| I mean, it comes down to greed. | ||
| It's human greed. | ||
| Corporate greed. | ||
| They want what they want, and they're going to get it by creating these ads that are just better than life. | ||
| You know, just so amazing. | ||
| Your life would be perfect if you drive this car, if you buy this phone, this... | ||
| Take this drug, whatever. | ||
| I even wonder if in this day and age that's necessary. | ||
| I feel like today, more than ever, because of social media, because of people that actually review things and talk about things on social media, honestly, without bias and without being paid to do so, you can do stuff And sell stuff, and it just has to be good. | ||
| Like, look at Teslas, for instance. | ||
| They don't even advertise. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| And it's like the number one car in America. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just because it's great. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| Obviously, it's connected to Elon Musk, who's this enormous figure, but... | ||
| It's a much smarter way to market a product. | ||
| It's not deceptive. | ||
| Elon could come out with a running shoe or a... | ||
| Anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A drink, and people would drink it. | ||
| When you first started doing these videos, did you have to figure out a way to balance your own mental health with interviewing these people? | ||
| Because I gotta tell you, like, I watched a bunch of videos today in the gym while I was working out, and I felt like shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I hope these feel good after our workout. | ||
| It affects people in different ways. | ||
| Some people make, oh my god, my problems are not so bad. | ||
| My life is pretty great. | ||
| I've heard that many times. | ||
| I've heard that more often, but I get what you're saying, because I'm immersed in it. | ||
| What you see on my YouTube channel is 1,200, maybe 1,300 videos. | ||
| I've done over 5,000. | ||
| Because not everything I shoot, like with you, you're shooting... | ||
| You're doing interviews with Elon Musk and Dave Chappelle and Huberman, and they're great. | ||
| You know they're going to be great. | ||
| You don't need to do eight or ten in a day like I do. | ||
| I'll do six, seven, eight, nine, ten in a day hoping to get one. | ||
| Or two. | ||
| But even the ones that you have where the people can barely communicate, they're almost more disturbing. | ||
| Like I watched a couple today of homeless people where, you know, there was this one woman, she was missing one of her toes and, you know, that woman and she's just the movement and the mental health. | ||
| The obvious signs that she's very troubled and probably on some drugs and it's just... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you have children? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I have two daughters, 19 and 22. Yeah, so that to me was like the hearing the stories of how they were all abused sexually and physically when they were children and... | ||
| And seeing what it leads to. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| So I'm aware that these things go on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've been down on Skid Row for 12 years now, maybe 13 years. | ||
| And so I know what's going on. | ||
| Do you live down there? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I live in... | ||
| Pacific Palisades, which is like the exact opposite. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I live in Bel Air basically, but then I go down to the worst. | ||
| I go from the worst part of town to the best part of town. | ||
| Yeah, it's a big, it's a drastic change from one to the other. | ||
| But even when I was doing this before I started Soft White Underbelly, I was aware that this crap is going on to these people when they were kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when I decided, you know, I gave up advertising and wanted to do something that was meaningful to me, I looked around, like, that's a problem that needs to be addressed. | ||
| And, you know, people say, oh, your work's exploitive. | ||
| You're exploiting these poor drug addicts. | ||
| Like, I understand there's an exploitive element to it. | ||
| All photography has that, you know, element to it. | ||
| But let's say I never did these videos. | ||
| Let's say we just pretend these problems don't exist. | ||
| It's all gonna continue and Caroline's kids are gonna get molested by the babysitter or by the uncle or by whoever and it's gonna repeat the pattern over and over and over. | ||
| So I figured by putting out these You know, it's disguised as entertainment, but what it really is is if you watch a dozen of them, you're going to learn, like, fuck, we need to protect our kids. | ||
| We need to watch our kids. | ||
| We need to, you know, how many fathers were absent in these kids' lives that I do? | ||
| Like, like, like 1% of them had fathers that were in their lives. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Like, where are the dads? | ||
| What are they doing that's so important that they can't raise their own kid? | ||
| Well, they're probably fucked up, too. | ||
| Well, that's where it goes. | ||
| The never-ending cycle. | ||
| It's cycle after cycle. | ||
| Have you interviewed anyone and then come back years later and they straighten their life out? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's happened. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Who? | ||
| I've done 5,000 and it's literally like... | ||
| Four that I know of. | ||
| And what has that been like? | ||
| Can you give me an example? | ||
| And even though they've done it doesn't mean they didn't break down and relapse today. | ||
| That happens all the time. | ||
| Just as they got clean doesn't mean they're going to stay clean. | ||
| But the ones that I believe in the most, because some people told me they were clean, but I don't buy it. | ||
| But the ones that I know are clean, they just did it by themselves. | ||
| They just hold themselves up and they figured out a way to wean themselves and change their routine and change their environment and eventually broke through. | ||
| But I think you need that self-worth. | ||
| Like you and I have the self-worth to go, you know, I deserve better. | ||
| I deserve to drive a nice car. | ||
| I deserve to live in a great house in a great city and have a great job. | ||
| And I deserve all these things and have a great woman in my life and all these things. | ||
| If you have the self-worth, you're going to accept and build those things in your life. | ||
| These people, especially the ones on Skid Row, the drug addicts, their self-worth is broken. | ||
| It's broken. | ||
| And they don't believe they deserve anything better than to live in a cardboard box or a tent on the sidewalk. | ||
| In the rain, in the winter. | ||
| And they're doing the drug just to escape the pain of what happened to them when they were seven years old with their dad or uncle or brother or whoever. | ||
| And it's like, you can't fix a childhood. | ||
| How do you fix a childhood? | ||
| When you see a place like Skid Row and you see all these people that you've interviewed Do you try to formulate some way that these people can be helped, like that we can diminish this problem? | ||
| When I first really got serious, like three and a half years ago is when I started, really just, I was down there every day doing eight interviews a day. | ||
| I would see somebody who was like, oh my god, your life would be great if you just got clean. | ||
| I was naive. | ||
| I was naive. | ||
| I start helping them, and we're going to get you to rehab. | ||
| I spent so much money. | ||
| I've wasted so much money. | ||
| My own hard-earned money, I just put towards somebody that had no intention of really ever doing anything. | ||
| Well, it seems like it has to come from the individual. | ||
| It can't come from... | ||
| It has to. | ||
| That's what I've learned. | ||
| You can't help people by saying, hey, you've got to do this. | ||
| No, I see all these comments on my videos. | ||
| Mark, you didn't help this person. | ||
| I can't change their self-worth. | ||
| You'd have to be with them 24 hours a day. | ||
| You'd have to be with them 24 hours a day. | ||
| 150,000 at least a year to house them, to feed them, to transport them, to get them therapy, all the drugs, all the mental health drugs, everything they're going to need, doctors, all that stuff. | ||
| It's a lot of money for one person, and it may not even work. | ||
| So I've got two kids of my own. | ||
| I've got my own life. | ||
| I've got bills of my own. | ||
| I'm doing a YouTube channel, and I'm shooting eight videos a day. | ||
| When am I going to sit there and take somebody under my wing and save them? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know, these people are on their phones, on their sofa, texting, leaving a comment saying, Mark, you didn't help this person? | ||
| I'm the busiest person I know. | ||
| I haven't taken a day off in over three years. | ||
| Christmas, birthday, everything. | ||
| I work every single day. | ||
| Either shooting or editing. | ||
| And these people are sitting on their phones telling me what to do. | ||
| They can't get off their ass and maybe, you know, clear off their bank account to save somebody. | ||
| But even that probably wouldn't do it. | ||
| And still wouldn't work. | ||
| What do you think could be done? | ||
| Well, I mean, it's such a... | ||
| Complicated problem. | ||
| You look at the homelessness problem. | ||
| You have it a little bit here in Austin, but in LA it's really bad. | ||
| Let's explain Skid Row to people. | ||
| Skid Row is a neighborhood. | ||
| It's probably, I don't know how many square blocks, but maybe it's, it goes from like roughly, because it spreads out a lot, and it's spread out since I've been there. | ||
| But let's call it like from 4th or 5th Street to 8th Street. | ||
| It's just east of downtown LA. And downtown LA is cool. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| Just east of downtown. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But it looks like Austin. | ||
| I wouldn't recommend people visit. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's not a place. | ||
| No, you wouldn't go to downtown. | ||
| If you want to go to LA, you don't go to... | ||
| Every other town, you go downtown. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Every other... | ||
| I'm from Chicago. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say Chicago. | ||
| You spend the whole time... | ||
| If you go to visit Chicago, you spend the whole time downtown. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In LA, you should not go downtown. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| But Skid Row is this neighborhood just east of downtown. | ||
| Yeah, Jamie's got an image of it. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Let's find some photos of it, because it's kind of an enormous swath of land that's been completely abandoned, it seems like. | ||
| But like this girl smoking right here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That goes on every block. | ||
| The cops will roll by. | ||
| Nobody's stopping her. | ||
| She's smoking meth. | ||
| She's smoking meth or crack or whatever. | ||
| Fentanyl. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're living like that. | ||
| Let's find a video of it so you can see the scale of it because it's pretty intense. | ||
| When you see people... | ||
| I found out about Skid Row when we were filming Fear Factor downtown. | ||
| We filmed a lot of episodes of Fear Factor downtown. | ||
| And this was... | ||
| Early 2000s. | ||
| And it was nothing like it is now. | ||
| I'm sure now it's quite a bit more. | ||
| But even back then, it was like, how is this one area isolated? | ||
| Like, how is this one area just filled with homeless people and drug addicts and criminals? | ||
| And I really didn't know until I watched this Netflix series on the Jerome Hotel. | ||
| And it was about that woman who died in a water tank. | ||
| You aware of that story? | ||
| I don't, but I've heard everything. | ||
| It's a woman who got off her meds, and there was a video of her in an elevator, and it looked like someone was following her, and she was looking out of the elevator. | ||
| And then the woman turned up missing, and her family went to look for her. | ||
| And what it turned out was that's a crime scene. | ||
| I'm sorry, did I say the Jerome? | ||
| Cecil. | ||
| Where's the Jerome? | ||
| Is that down there, too? | ||
| I don't know the Jerome, but the Cecil's notorious. | ||
| That's the one I met. | ||
| The Cecil is a hotel... | ||
| I've heard so many stories. | ||
| My favorite or the most horrifying is so many people used to get thrown off the roof of the Cecil Hotel that the little chicken restaurant on the corner used to have a jar where you could put your money in and place bets on what floor the person would have been pushed out of. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Whether it's the roof, the 13th floor, the 12th floor. | ||
| How many? | ||
| Oh, I've heard like hundreds, I think. | ||
| I mean, stories get exaggerated over the years. | ||
| So this documentary was about this woman and she had gotten off her medication. | ||
| At first, it was like a crime-murder mystery. | ||
| And then as it goes on, you realize, oh, no, this lady had just escaped from her family and got off her meds, and she was paranoid schizophrenic. | ||
| None of these stories are as simple as, oh, I just got shot, or I just got stabbed. | ||
| There's mental health that's mixed in. | ||
| You asked me what the problem is with all this. | ||
| So you see homelessness. | ||
| You see all these homeless people on the street in L.A. or in San Francisco or Seattle or Portland or Vancouver. | ||
| You see it in a lot of cities. | ||
| It's really bad in L.A. and San Francisco and the West Coast for some reason has a ton of it. | ||
| So, oh, like what L.A. is doing, you put them up in housing. | ||
| Problem solved, right? | ||
| And we're done. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No, because you peel back the layer. | ||
| The top layer of that, underneath the homelessness, is drug addiction. | ||
| Pretty much 100% across the board. | ||
| None of these people are down and out and just like, oh my God, I'm homeless. | ||
| That doesn't happen. | ||
| They're all drug addicts. | ||
| And even when they tell you they're clean, they're still lying. | ||
| So you peel back the drug addiction layer, and what are you going to do? | ||
| You put them all in rehab, which is going to be tremendously expensive, and it's not going to work all the time. | ||
| That would be part of the solution, but it's not going to be the solution. | ||
| So you peel back the layer of drug addiction, you've got mental health. | ||
| They all have mental health issues. | ||
| And you can't just magically fix their mental health. | ||
| The damage was done when they were little kids, when they were 5, 6, 7, 8 years old. | ||
| With whether it's neglect or abuse, you know, physical abuse, sexual abuse, whatever. | ||
| Just terrible parenting. | ||
| Terrible role models. | ||
| And they don't learn this. | ||
| Let's say you got them off the streets. | ||
| Let's say you fix the drug addiction. | ||
| You get them therapy for years and you fix the mental health issues somewhat, but they still don't know how to... | ||
| Do all the things that we all know how to do. | ||
| Like build trust in others. | ||
| Gain the trust of others. | ||
| How to handle money. | ||
| Delayed gratification. | ||
| They have no concept of that. | ||
| Everything is just like, how do I make a quick buck right now? | ||
| That's the only thing they know. | ||
| If they have a job interview on Monday, like if I had something like that or a meeting to go to, I would know how to show up and I'm going to kick ass on Monday. | ||
| These people don't know how to do anything like that. | ||
| They probably won't even show up. | ||
| They don't know how to be on time. | ||
| They don't know how to do anything in order to advance their lives. | ||
| I think it boils down to their self-worth is so broken that they don't believe they deserve anything better. | ||
| So if you don't believe you deserve anything better, you could be handed a million dollars. | ||
| Here's a winning lottery ticket. | ||
| Go cash it in. | ||
| You've got a million dollars. | ||
| They're going to fuck it up as fast as you can see it. | ||
| As fast as you can imagine. | ||
| Have you had any drug addicts or sad stories like that in your own friendship circle? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, like all my friends are clean as a whistle. | ||
| I've never smoked pot. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Never smoked pot. | ||
| Nothing, huh? | ||
| A little alcohol every now and then? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I haven't lately, but I'm not a drinker. | ||
| I don't have a problem with drinking. | ||
| My dad used to say to me, he still does, he goes, you don't drink, you don't smoke, you don't gamble, you don't chase women. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Everybody does something. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It's a sign of being raised well, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, no, I was raised really well. | ||
| You don't need the escape. | ||
| I mean, the way my mom raised me was like, I can't imagine a better... | ||
| I really think the problem... | ||
| So you start going back to peeling the layers back. | ||
| You go back to... | ||
| Where did I leave it off? | ||
| So you got the mental health problems. | ||
| You peel back that layer, and then you got the broken family. | ||
| In a lot of these stories, dad was absent, or dad was in prison, mom's on drugs, sister's a hoe, brother was in a gang. | ||
| What do you think she's going to turn... | ||
| Stepfather was abusive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Boyfriends were abusive. | ||
| So the families are broken. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you peel back that layer, and why is the family broken? | ||
| Well, they're growing up in a community that there's no opportunities, there's no education, there's no role models, there's no nothing. | ||
| It's just like figure out how to survive at 12 years old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're looking around at what everyone else is doing. | ||
| Everyone else is a con artist or a hustler. | ||
| I've got to figure out my hustle. | ||
| And if you're an attractive female, you're going to become a hoe. | ||
| And if you're a dude, you're going to become a drug dealer or a gang member, and you're going to rob people or do whatever. | ||
| And that's what happens. | ||
| Those are extremes, but to some extent that happens in a lot of communities. | ||
| Growing up in a good childhood, in a good family, and then being exposed to these people over and over and over again, what kind of an effect has that had on you personally? | ||
| Initially, I thought I was super resilient. | ||
| I'm strong. | ||
| Not physically strong, but I'm strong mentally. | ||
| I can handle anything. | ||
| I was playing around with big money and big jobs and big campaigns, and it was very, very stressful at times. | ||
| But I handled it all. | ||
| I was cool with it. | ||
| But when I started doing this project, I recognized it. | ||
| I knew from Create Equal, the book I worked on, What it's like to deal with these kind of people, because I interacted with a lot of them. | ||
| So I knew getting into it, I was going to get robbed, I was going to deal with hustlers and con artists and thieves and liars. | ||
| I knew that. | ||
| But I dove in, and that's like... | ||
| Barrier to entry. | ||
| Like people who watch my channel, like, oh, I want to do what Mark's doing. | ||
| Good fucking luck. | ||
| Like, every day I want to quit. | ||
| Well, you're really good at it, too. | ||
| You have a very non-judgmental way of communicating with people that allows them to open up. | ||
| It's very comforting. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You seem like a very nice guy, and when you're talking to these people... | ||
| You know, you just, you're very flat, you know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, I can interview the Ku Klux Klan or a pimp or a pedophile. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I interviewed a guy named Marshall on my channel. | ||
| He's an older guy. | ||
| He's probably in his 70s. | ||
| And he was having intercourse with his daughter from 6 until 14. And her best friend, I think. | ||
| And he eventually did prison time for it, but he's free now and he's living in this... | ||
| You know, he's living in Florida. | ||
| And I interviewed him, and I just, I'm talking to him as if I'm talking to you right now. | ||
| Like, I could be interviewing or interacting with, it's not about how I interview, it's how I interact with others. | ||
| And he was open about this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've interviewed a bunch of those guys. | ||
| Did he have shame? | ||
| He didn't seem to, but he said some of the right words. | ||
| But it wasn't like he broke down, like if I had done something like that, I'd be, I'd be crying, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wouldn't be, you couldn't. | ||
| Did that happen to him when he was younger? | ||
| I asked him about that and he said, I suspect something might have and who knows if that's the truth or what, I don't know, probably did. | ||
| He didn't recall anything, but he suspected that something happened. | ||
| But you do see, go ahead. | ||
| But my point is that whether I'm interviewing the Queen of England or a homeless drug addict on Skid Row, I treat them the exact same way. | ||
| Nothing in my behavior would change whether I'm interviewing a pedophile that's having sex with his daughter or the president. | ||
| Yeah, well, it comes across, and you have a very good way of getting these people to relax and communicate. | ||
| I realized this. | ||
| Before I started this project, I knew that—because I saw it during my advertising career. | ||
| You deal with all kinds of people, and I saw over the course of my life—I've been around now long enough to see that a lot of people just love to open up with me. | ||
| And tell me shit they shouldn't be telling me. | ||
| I'm a stranger. | ||
| You just met me 20 minutes ago, but you're telling me all this... | ||
| There's something about my personality that makes people just relax and trust me and just tell me all kinds of stuff. | ||
| I don't even know what it is. | ||
| I'm not judgmental. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| Even the pedophiles, I don't condone what he did. | ||
| I don't approve it in any way. | ||
| I think it's horrifying. | ||
| But my job right then is not to condemn him and say, you're so fucked up. | ||
| It's just like, let me just hear your story, because I'll bet you there's something we can learn from it. | ||
| There's something that we could understand better that maybe we can apply to figure out how to prevent this in the future. | ||
| Do you think that's possible? | ||
| With all the interviews that you've done and this overwhelming number of fucked up people that you've interacted with, Skid Row's grown considerably just since I've been there. | ||
| When I first went there was the early 2000s. | ||
| It's much, much bigger now. | ||
| It's a much bigger problem. | ||
| It's all over the city. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How does that genie get put back in the bottle? | ||
| I mean, how does one ever... | ||
| That's why my channel is not an intervention-type show where I'm trying to fix everybody and patch them up and put them back into the real world. | ||
| I can't do that. | ||
| I'm one person. | ||
| I believe the solution is... | ||
| To show people... | ||
| I'm putting these videos out there so everyone can see this is how this happens. | ||
| Let's not do this anymore. | ||
| Let's figure out another solution. | ||
| Perhaps if dad stayed in the family... | ||
| And the parenting was like something that would benefit the kid and not cause them trauma. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That would be great. | ||
| But the odds of that happening from one of your videos are very small. | ||
| Very small. | ||
| So does it feel futile sometimes? | ||
| Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| For sure, but... | ||
| I'm the most, you know, it's ironic that I'm doing this really, really dark project because I'm the most positive, hopeful person you'll ever meet. | ||
| Still? | ||
| Yeah, I'm a Pollyanna. | ||
| I don't think that'll ever change. | ||
| And that hasn't had any effect on your own personal relationships, the way you view human beings? | ||
| I'm aware of how often people are con artists and hustlers and how dishonest people can be. | ||
| Because I never encountered that to the extent that I do now. | ||
| Whereas when I go down to Skid Row, it's a different world. | ||
| And literally everybody is trying to get my wallet. | ||
| Trying to get whatever I've got. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Camera equipment. | ||
| You name it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| And it's like, to be surrounded by that many hustlers and con artists and thieves, it wears on you. | ||
| And just recently, I exercise a lot. | ||
| So every morning I'm working out for like an hour and a half, two hours. | ||
| And it never wore on me. | ||
| I don't get sore. | ||
| I'm in great shape. | ||
| Just in the last three to four months, I'm like, God damn, I'm sore. | ||
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| I'm not doing anything different. | ||
| I'm not eating anything different. | ||
| What is going on that my body is just hurting? | ||
| And I suspect what it is, it's the mental toll after three and a half years of doing this that's finally catching up. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| I mean, I think it's inescapable. | ||
| I heard Gabor Mate say on your show, I think it was on your show, he said... | ||
| That whatever happens to you mentally manifests physically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like, it makes perfect sense. | ||
| But I mean, mentally, it hasn't really made me crazy. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| If I'm hanging out with my friends who have nothing to do with this world that I'm interviewing... | ||
| The relationships like it always was. | ||
| You know, I just spent Thanksgiving with my ex-wife and kids and my best friend and it was just like old times. | ||
| It's like 20 years ago. | ||
| Nothing changed. | ||
| But I think physically, mentally, like somehow it's affecting me now. | ||
| I don't know how it could not. | ||
| Do you wonder how long you can keep doing this for me? | ||
| How many drug addict interviews does the world need? | ||
| I don't think we need anymore. | ||
| If you want to watch some, there's probably 500 on my channel. | ||
| You can get all you need. | ||
| So I think enough's enough. | ||
| I'll probably phase out of that. | ||
| I'm already starting to do that. | ||
| What are you going to do now? | ||
| Just more... | ||
| Like yesterday, I interviewed a guy. | ||
| Mental health issues are interesting. | ||
| Sexual fetishes are interesting. | ||
| Sex workers are not as traumatic as... | ||
| They're not as pathetic and traumatic as the drug addict stories. | ||
| Yeah, the most positive one I saw from you today was a guy who had a foot fetish. | ||
| Yeah, some of them are lighter. | ||
| It was kind of funny. | ||
| I interviewed a guy here yesterday in Austin who was an oilfield worker down in Odessa, but he moved further north. | ||
| He wanted to be a skydiving instructor. | ||
| Young kid, I think he's 28, I think. | ||
| And he was doing his 25th jump, I think he said. | ||
| And two of his shoots got tangled up. | ||
| You have a backup shoot. | ||
| First one didn't open up correctly, so he did the second one. | ||
| I think they both opened up at the same time. | ||
| And they got tangled up. | ||
| Held him for a while and then he fell 4,000 feet, hit a cornfield, and survived. | ||
| The parachute slowed him down a little? | ||
| Is that what happened? | ||
| He doesn't remember because he blacked out. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| He blacked out and he hit the ground, broke everything on the right side of his body. | ||
| Yeah, but he's alive. | ||
| And he still wants to jump? | ||
| Yeah, I asked him at the end, I go, do you regret skydiving? | ||
| He said, no, I'd like to still do it right now. | ||
| They won't let me. | ||
| My friend Brian, his dad worked with this lady who was a skydiver, and she was always trying to get him to go skydiving. | ||
| Let's go skydiving, let's go skydiving. | ||
| And then one day he went to the office and she wasn't there. | ||
| And he found out that she died skydiving. | ||
| I mean, to me, it's such a senseless way to die. | ||
| It's a crazy thing to do. | ||
| No, I mean, he talked about how the adrenaline. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He became addicted to the adrenaline rush. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He says it's not a drug addiction. | ||
| It's not a sex addiction. | ||
| It's an adrenaline addiction. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So stories like that are what I'm looking to do. | ||
| Not that. | ||
| That's pretty... | ||
| How did you find this guy? | ||
| He emailed me. | ||
| See, I get people emailing me. | ||
| I get hundreds of emails a day. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you go through them yourself? | ||
| Well, I just hired somebody to help me do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| But... | ||
| So you're trying to move away from all the addicts. | ||
| I'm trying to move away from just Skid Row drug addicts. | ||
| It's like, we don't need any more. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It gets stale after a while. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'll do some once in a while. | ||
| I mean, some of these people are magnificent speakers. | ||
| They're fascinating to listen to. | ||
| Some of them, I found so many just miraculous people down there. | ||
| There's great people down there. | ||
| I mean, it's not like they're all a bunch of drug-addicted losers. | ||
| Some of these people are just like you and me. | ||
| They just happened to get caught up in some Quicksand that they just cannot get out of. | ||
| It's so sad to listen to some of these stories when you see that's a great person. | ||
| They're stuck in quicksand and you can't pull them out, even if you want to. | ||
| If you had all the money in the world, you couldn't pull them out. | ||
| When I was 23, I moved to New York and I started hanging out at this pool hall. | ||
| And I met a lot of drug addicts. | ||
| And I had known a few people with drug problems from my hometown. | ||
| A few people with drinking problems that couldn't stop drinking. | ||
| But I'd never been like really close to someone who had like a legitimate drug problem. | ||
| And I had a friend named Johnny and he had a crack problem. | ||
| And he was a great guy. | ||
| A really intelligent guy. | ||
| Play musical instruments, could do complex math in his head. | ||
| You could have a calculator and you could say like 500 times 50 minus 30 divided by 3 and he could give you the number. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| And you could do it with a calculator in front of him and he would be as fast as the calculator. | ||
| He was a brilliant, brilliant guy and he was a pool hustler. | ||
| And I met him when he was homeless and he was, you know, sleeping in these 24-hour pool halls or he would get a, you know, a bed in these flop houses and he was just addicted to drugs and he, you know, he had mental health problems and he would self-medicate and I would, | ||
| you know, I drove him to get drugs on multiple occasions and I'd try to get him to get off of them and And he would be on this rollercoaster ride where he would smoke crack and then he would need to come down so he would get alcohol and he would go and drink these 40 ounces of Old English and just try to bring himself down from whatever the fuck he was on. | ||
| And then I moved out here. | ||
| He came out to visit me once. | ||
| And I thought we were just going to hang out and go places and play pool. | ||
| But he was coming out to try to kick heroin. | ||
| And when he came out, he just stayed in the bedroom for like a week. | ||
| He was just all fucked up. | ||
| He was just sick for a week. | ||
| And then finally, at the end of the week, he came out of it. | ||
| And, you know, he hadn't had any heroin system in a week. | ||
| And he was starting to come clean and feel better. | ||
| And that was the last time I saw him. | ||
| And then the next time I talked to him, I think I saw him one time after that. | ||
| But, you know, he had kind of resumed his—I had moved to Hollywood, and I was on a television show, and we were still friends. | ||
| But he had kind of resumed his life of being homeless and drug addiction, and then I got a call from another friend that he died. | ||
| And that was around a little bit after 2000, and it was— It was such a helpless feeling because I knew him as a human and he was so funny and he's so smart and so interesting. | ||
| No, some of the greatest minds, the most charismatic, most interesting people ever, super intelligent and talented people are living on the streets, addicted to drugs. | ||
| Because it almost goes hand in hand. | ||
| You get these great minds that are so creative and they're also so self-destructive. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know why those two things go together, but so oftentimes creativity goes along with drug addiction. | ||
| Look at all the dead people in your lobby, all those pictures. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| They all died at 27. Mug shots of the rock stars and stuff, yeah. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It's very confusing when you don't have that problem. | ||
| When you're like, why don't you just do this? | ||
| I would just do this. | ||
| And at the time when I met him, like, now I smoke pot, I occasionally do mushrooms, and I don't fuck with anything that's good. | ||
| You know, but back then I didn't do anything. | ||
| So for me it was very strange to be like clean and sober and trying to like, I was like focused on my life. | ||
| You're not prepared because you don't have the knowledge of what he'll do for that drug. | ||
| Also, in my mind, the people that did that were losers and idiots. | ||
| And now here's this guy who's clearly brilliant and a beautiful person. | ||
| He was one of my favorite human beings. | ||
| He was my best friend. | ||
| And he was homeless. | ||
| And it was so strange for me to have grown up with a nice family in a nice place where things weren't bad, you know, middle class. | ||
| Everything was nice. | ||
| And then for me to be around a person like that who, you know, spent his time trying to rob people in pool games, pretending that he couldn't play, it was like an art form for him. | ||
| He would just pretend he was terrible and he was an overweight guy, so he looked like a bumbling loser. | ||
| And, you know, he would wind up getting a bunch of money from people, and then he would spend it on drugs. | ||
| And it was such a helpless feeling to watch someone who you loved and cared about Who just couldn't stop they just couldn't get their life in or they kept sabotaging their life like no matter what happened like whatever his His sense of self-worth Whatever the thing was inside of him. | ||
| He just couldn't help himself He just couldn't stop that he would get off of it for a little while decide he was gonna clean up and then dive right back into it Yeah, it's so heartbreaking to watch. | ||
| He was the closest that I'd ever been to a person. | ||
| Everyone else that I knew that I had problems was like my friend's cousin or this guy that I worked with. | ||
| They weren't people that I was really close with. | ||
| And with him, we spent so much time together. | ||
| And to watch him just could not escape. | ||
| Whatever the gravity, the magnetic pull, the addiction, the thing to just like constantly trying to get fucked up and escape. | ||
| Yeah, usually they're trying to escape something that happened in their childhood or some lack of love. | ||
| Yeah, something. | ||
| Well, there's mental health in his family, too. | ||
| That's a big part. | ||
| I suspect, you know, there's a lot of these people that are schizophrenic or they have these issues and they have children and it's genetically transferred. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I think there's nature, there's nurture, there's a lot of things that are... | ||
| It's not just like, oh, you were molested when you were sick, so that's why you're a drug addict. | ||
| It's more complex than that, I think. | ||
| Have you met any of these people that have gone through any sort of psychedelic therapy? | ||
| No. | ||
| Have you? | ||
| I've heard about it, but I've not encountered anyone who's tried that and done that. | ||
| It's not really available to these people. | ||
| No, not in Skid Row. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you're... | ||
| You've got to have the motivation, first off, to want to get clean and use that as a technique to do it. | ||
| And I'm hopeful that somebody, some doctor somewhere, I think University of Chicago is doing something with skin grafts that help with drug addiction. | ||
| Skin grafts? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How so? | ||
| I don't know all the details, but it's just like they're doing studies right now, I think. | ||
| But I'm hopeful that somebody is going to discover something that will cure that drive to fix. | ||
| How do skin grafts work? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It'll come on the news if it's successful. | ||
| See if you can find what... | ||
| Yeah, Jamie's on that. | ||
| University of Chicago. | ||
| Skin grafts to cure drug addiction. | ||
| That's a... | ||
| It is so fast how fucking smart some people are. | ||
| Science is amazing. | ||
| Some way around it. | ||
| CRISPR modified skin grafts to treat addiction. | ||
| The skin cells are then re-implanted to the patient through a skin graft that acts as a so-called bioengine. | ||
| Producing these molecules throughout the life of the graft. | ||
| In pre-clinical studies, the engineered skin grafts protected against drug addiction and overdose in animal models. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah, I think they're doing human studies. | ||
| So it's modified skin grafts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| You know, and then there's a... | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| It's Chicago. | ||
| Genetically altered skin grafts hold promises addiction treatment. | ||
| The treatment has been shown to work in mice, and the researchers hope to begin human trials next year. | ||
| If it proves itself there, be a valuable addition to a growing but still inadequate arsenal of addiction treatments. | ||
| I mean, it's one of the biggest problems we have in our culture. | ||
| I mean, look at our country. | ||
| It's horrifying. | ||
| You come to LA, it's just so embarrassing. | ||
| Austin, too. | ||
| Austin's cleaned it up quite a bit, but there's still some spots, and there's plenty of homeless people that are on 6th Street and down that area. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It's really, really fucking sad. | ||
| Because also, people define themselves by their lowest moment often. | ||
| And when you have been a person that sleeps on the street, it's that lack of self-worth, this identifying yourself as a complete and total failure, it's very difficult to escape that, especially when you compare yourself To these people that, you know, they show up for work at their tech job and they have this normal existence. | ||
| And they're all looking down on you and treating you with disrespect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're living in the streets. | ||
| It's cold. | ||
| It's rainy. | ||
| It's whatever. | ||
| You're obviously worthless. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's nobody that's reinforcing the fact that you have any worth at all. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just going to take you down further. | ||
| And it's probably come from your childhood of being treated as worthless and abused. | ||
| Yeah, but you asked me, like, how I can go down to Skid Row and do this. | ||
| I've done it every day for over three years. | ||
| I think the fact that I am not tempted by these things. | ||
| Like, you could put crack, fentanyl, and crystal meth right here, and they would sit here for three weeks, and I wouldn't even touch them. | ||
| What about four weeks? | ||
| Four weeks is when I give it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just They'll be gone in the fourth week. | |
| My fear about all those things, like I've never tried cocaine, I've never tried amphetamines, and one of the reasons why is it seems like people love them. | ||
| You know, that's part of the problem is I think the thrill of whatever it is that those things give people. | ||
| I think one of the reasons my channel is so popular is because there are a hell of a lot of people who are using some of these drugs and being functional in the real world. | ||
| I think that's true, but I also think it's just fascinating. | ||
| I mean, I don't use those things and I'm fascinated by your channel. | ||
| I mean, it's just the human condition is very fascinating to people because we recognize all these elements in ourselves, maybe to a lesser degree or maybe... | ||
| Maybe you only have an addiction to pornography, or maybe you only have an addiction to gambling, but you see a person who's hooked on meth. | ||
| They're all the same. | ||
| And it's kind of, there's parallels. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was one addict, a gambler, who turned into a heroin addict. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| He was a big-time gambler, big-time, in New York City. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I forget his name. | ||
| I interviewed him this summer. | ||
| And he switched his gambling addiction to a heroin addiction. | ||
| He was like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whew! | |
| The gambling one, it's wild. | ||
| Gambling is fascinating to me. | ||
| That's another one that I encountered when I was in the pool halls. | ||
| People that were just absolutely just captured by gambling. | ||
| And I never thought of gambling as being an addiction. | ||
| I thought of gambling as being just a Weird weakness that people do to escape their life and they just get but then I saw the actual like chemical response these people have to winning and losing and Chasing money and this this this constant So it becomes their whole life is trying to win a bet and trying to play and trying to recover from a bad bet and then trying to avoid people they owe money to and There's so many addictions out there. | ||
| There's so many. | ||
| Whether it's sex or shopping or gambling or eating or laziness or... | ||
| Yeah, procrastination. | ||
| Heroin drinking. | ||
| Yeah, even exercise, which is a great addiction. | ||
| That's my addiction, but... | ||
| Yeah, it's a good one. | ||
| It's not killing me. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with that one. | ||
| That one seems to actually improve the quality of your life, but it has characteristics of impulsiveness. | ||
| Yeah, when I go to Gold's Gym every morning at 5.30... | ||
| I'll bet you more than half of the people that are there, it's the same crew every morning. | ||
| We all know each other. | ||
| I'll bet you half of them are former addicts. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Of some sort. | ||
| Well, that's a lot of people that get into running, marathon runners and triathletes and ultra runners. | ||
| They substitute this very positive addiction. | ||
| The addiction of overcoming and just pushing your body. | ||
| Humans are wound up. | ||
| I know I am. | ||
| I'm never going to run a marathon. | ||
| It's not my thing. | ||
| But you see people who are running marathons. | ||
| I'm just like, why? | ||
| Why would you run 26 miles? | ||
| Everything's going to hurt after that. | ||
| But we have this drive to do something extreme, it seems. | ||
| Call it self-destruction. | ||
| I don't know what you want to call it. | ||
| Self-sabotage, maybe. | ||
| But so many of them are former alcoholics. | ||
| And they put that aside and they found this new obsession. | ||
| You can't just stop drinking and be like, I'm cool now. | ||
| I don't drink anymore. | ||
| It's like you need to find something to replace that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what people, they realize that eventually. | ||
| I mean, I know so many people that went to Alcoholics Anonymous and then they became hooked on coffee and cigarettes. | ||
| And the coffee and cigarettes, they said, this is okay. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's not as bad. | ||
| It's not killing me as quickly and it's not forcing me to lose jobs and I can function in society with this. | ||
| But my mind has opened tremendously from when I started this. | ||
| I really consider when I started it maybe – I kind of started – I've had three studios down on Skid Row, but the first one I had for three years and I gave it up. | ||
| I had to mess up my life with the divorce and other stuff. | ||
| Then I had another one and got rid of that one, but the third one I've had now for almost four years. | ||
| I had a friend of mine who realized my channel is what I'm doing now. | ||
| She's known me for a long time. | ||
| She goes, I remember driving with you through LA. We're going to a restaurant. | ||
| And you saw some homeless guy begging on the street corner, hassling you for money, and you said under your breath, just get a job. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get a job. | ||
| Do you want some coffee? | ||
| No, I'm good. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That used to be me. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think it's a lot of us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I still say it. | ||
| Sometimes these guys come at me, and they just, every day of the year, they're coming at me for free handouts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I give away, I hate to tell you how much money I give out. | ||
| Every single day of the year, I'm giving between $2,000 and $3,000. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Just giving out money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Not like fucking Santa Claus. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| But like, sometimes it's paying interviewees, sometimes it's paying the person who brought me the interviewee, sometimes it's The people who keep it quiet outside my studio door, sometimes it's, you know, I'm a square white dude. | ||
| I go into South Central to, you know, I interview a lot of the prostitutes on Figueroa Street, which is not Skid Row. | ||
| It's South Central LA, very different neighborhood, but equally dangerous, probably more dangerous, in fact. | ||
| I used to go down there and like, I'm worried about getting killed. | ||
| People get killed there every day. | ||
| You know, gangs are thick. | ||
| And they see a white guy, I'm either a cop, I'm either an undercover cop, or I'm a trick. | ||
| And if I'm a trick, that means you can rob me. | ||
| It's like open season. | ||
| I got a wallet full of money that I'm looking to spend on a girl, but they're going to hustle me or con me or rob me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the way that I can continue to do this almost three and a half years now and do it fairly safely is by spreading so much goodwill. | ||
| Like, I'm generous with these people I interview, and I'm generous with the pimps, and I'm generous with the... | ||
| You know, the gangs that control the neighborhoods or whatever I have to do in order to go down there safely and not get hassled. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And especially on Skid Row, I've handed out so much over the years that it's just, I'm like, I won't tell you what they call me, but it's a positive thing. | ||
| Because I'm like Santa Claus down there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you've got to get out of this. | ||
| You can't keep doing this. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, the human struggle is fascinating. | ||
| It's not just drug addicts. | ||
| Part of the reason I'm just doing drug addicts is because I'm in L.A. and Skid Row is right here. | ||
| If I don't think about it, I'll just go to Skid Row and I'll get some interviews. | ||
| So now I'm making a serious effort to not do that. | ||
| Have you thought about escaping L.A.? Oh, yeah. | ||
| I've been all over the country. | ||
| You know, for Create Equal, I went to each of the lower 48 states. | ||
| So, I mean, I just came back from New Orleans. | ||
| What has created the book? | ||
| That's the book I did of American Portraits. | ||
| It was really the template for Soft White Underbelly. | ||
| It's out of print now, so don't look for it. | ||
| It's really hard to find. | ||
| I think the last time I saw it, it was like $1,000, a used copy. | ||
| But maybe somebody will do a reprint of it one day. | ||
| Because, God, I get emails every day of the year, people wanting to buy that book. | ||
| If it came out tomorrow, it would sell out. | ||
| Some publisher should do it. | ||
| But I've been to New Orleans. | ||
| I've been to Tampa several times. | ||
| I've been to Kentucky and West Virginia many times. | ||
| The Appalachias? | ||
| Yeah, Appalachia's amazing. | ||
| Coal miners? | ||
| Coal miners and just, I love hillbillies. | ||
| Did you ever see the Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia? | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| I interviewed Mamie White. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| Yeah, Jessica's sister. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| She's a trip. | ||
| Boy, that whole family's a trip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I saw that series. | ||
| This is Create Equal. | ||
| They're all diptychs. | ||
| They're all pairs of images. | ||
| So I've got a fur trapper and a woman on the Upper East Side of New York with a fur coat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And they're not meant to be point... | ||
| They're just juxtapositions of interesting... | ||
| Lady with his little dog. | ||
| She's holding up. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Find the polygamists and the pimp. | ||
| That's my favorite. | ||
| There's the Klan. | ||
| Right there, top right. | ||
| Oh no, right there, that one. | ||
| These are polygamists in Utah on the left and a Detroit pimp and his girls. | ||
| What is it like interviewing pimps? | ||
| They're very braggadocious. | ||
| They're very full of themselves. | ||
| You really won't get the truth. | ||
| You really won't get... | ||
| A lot of people I interview, they break down and they tell me the honest truth of what they're feeling and what they experience as kids. | ||
| These guys are all focused on, I want to look very cool. | ||
| So they're kind of very focused on their image. | ||
| Right, and how they're coming across. | ||
| How they're coming across, yeah. | ||
| Did you ever watch any of those documentaries on Pimps, like Pimps up, hose down? | ||
| I know all those guys. | ||
| They went to Kenny Ridd's birthday party. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like part of the Klan. | ||
| Jesus, what was that like? | ||
| I mean, they're cool with me. | ||
| They love me because I treat them nicely and they... | ||
| I'm like part of the family now. | ||
| I'm this square white guy that's like friends with all the pimps. | ||
| I knew him from Chicago. | ||
| I knew Bishop Don Magic Wand from Chicago. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He's probably the most famous pimp ever. | ||
| He's the most famous pimp ever. | ||
| Yeah, well, probably the most famous because he's been in movies with Snoop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Fillmore Slim? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fillmore Slim I interviewed. | ||
| I've done almost all of the really big name ones. | ||
| But I'm just fascinated by that lifestyle. | ||
| Not the new age pimps. | ||
| Most of the new age pimps are just gang members that found a new hustle. | ||
| And they're wearing jeans and t-shirts. | ||
| But the old school pimps from the 70s and 80s that are just dressed to kill and driving these custom Cadillacs or Lincolns or Rolls Royces. | ||
| And they're all about the show. | ||
| And they've got three girls, five girls in fur coats and You know, the girls were sexy, they dressed well, the dudes were out of this world. | ||
| Yeah, I went to the Players' Ball down in Atlanta. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| A couple years ago. | ||
| What is that like? | ||
| It's a lot of people showing off is what it is. | ||
| It's not my scene. | ||
| But that's the culture. | ||
| That's the culture. | ||
| You've got to understand. | ||
| What people don't understand, what white people don't understand about that whole subculture, they love to hate pimps. | ||
| We all hate pimps. | ||
| No one wants to see a woman taken advantage of. | ||
| Nobody wants that. | ||
| Except maybe some pimps. | ||
| But what they don't understand is these guys, the women that they are managing, This will get a lot of negative comments on YouTube. | ||
| But the women are just trying to survive. | ||
| And they figured out this is a way that I can make money. | ||
| But they don't know how to do it well. | ||
| They don't know how to manage their money. | ||
| If they have money, they spend it. | ||
| It's all gone. | ||
| And they end up broke every night and they're just like, they're spinning their wheels, going nowhere. | ||
| So a pimp will step in and like, let me handle your money. | ||
| You give me all your money and I'm going to take care of you. | ||
| We're going to save some for your future and I'm going to keep some of it and we're going to live in style and you're going to work for me. | ||
| You're going to be one of my stable. | ||
| So he provides some benefits and security and guidance, but when they break up, it's rare that the girl gets anything. | ||
| And it's always a horrible ending. | ||
| It's usually a horrible ending, yeah. | ||
| When the pimp goes to jail sometimes. | ||
| But the girls never end up with a story where like, oh yeah, and then I got my money and I went off to college. | ||
| That never happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But the pimp does provide a lifestyle for the time when she is doing that that is better than what she was doing without him. | ||
| And you've interviewed people that have been open about murdering people, too. | ||
| Yeah, I've interviewed a lot of people that have done that. | ||
| You know, I'll interview people. | ||
| I could do a whole YouTube channel on what happens after the interviews that I do. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Do a lot of people get in trouble? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Nobody's ever gotten in trouble. | ||
| The cops have never come after anybody. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I've done all these interviews and the cops have never approached me about anyone I've interviewed. | ||
| Isn't that kind of crazy? | ||
| It's crazy to me. | ||
| But I think, you know, I know the cops watch because they'll roll by and say, hey, who are you posting today? | ||
| So they watch all the time. | ||
| I think the cops enjoy watching because the people that they're arresting are always lying to them. | ||
| They're never telling the truth. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I was robbing that liquor store, and I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry, I was guilty. | ||
| They're never getting that. | ||
| But when I interview people, I say, yeah, I robbed a liquor store, and I got away with it, and I did this, and I robbed a jewelry store, and I shot the guard in the shoulder, and I got away with it. | ||
| They're getting to hear the story told a very, very different way than the way they hear it when they book somebody. | ||
| Do you interview cops as well? | ||
| I would love to, but... | ||
| I've only interviewed a couple of retired cops. | ||
| And they're great stories. | ||
| Great storytellers and great stories. | ||
| Perhaps my favorite video on my channel is Mike Dowd, who's a... | ||
| Yes, I know Mike. | ||
| I've had him on the podcast. | ||
| Mike's the best. | ||
| That documentary. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| The 7-5? | ||
| The 7-5. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's an amazing documentary. | ||
| And it's just all about this young, idealistic cop who gets... | ||
| Tell me that's not a movie. | ||
| It's screaming to be made. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, well, the documentary is fantastic. | ||
| But yeah, an actual movie about it. | ||
| He just got indoctrinated into the world of corruption right from the beginning. | ||
| He witnessed a murder and was told to shut the fuck up. | ||
| When he came to my studio, he approached me and asked me if I'd be interested in doing the interview. | ||
| And I said, yeah, sure, I'd love to. | ||
| And we were talking as he was driving up from Orange County to me. | ||
| He lives, I think, in New York and Florida, but he was in Orange County for something, so he was driving up. | ||
| We're talking on the phone, and I'm listening to the way he talks. | ||
| I'm like, Mike, this is the way I'd love my videos to go. | ||
| You're a great conversationalist. | ||
| You're probably the best conversationalist I've ever heard. | ||
| And that's why you're so successful. | ||
| One of the reasons you're so successful. | ||
| But I'm not. | ||
| I'm just a photographer. | ||
| And all I'm doing with these interviews is trying to provide a little backstory that my photographs can't provide. | ||
| So when Mike was driving up, he's talking to me on the phone. | ||
| I'm like, he's such a great speaker. | ||
| And I love listening to him. | ||
| Even when he's just talking about what time he's going to be there. | ||
| His voice and the way he talks is great. | ||
| So New York. | ||
| And I said, Mike, let me run something by you. | ||
| And this is what I love to do. | ||
| I wish every video on my channel was like this. | ||
| I said, could you do this whole talk where you tell your entire story without me saying a single word? | ||
| He goes, oh yeah, no problem. | ||
| I can do that. | ||
| And I'm like, let's try it. | ||
| So he came in and he did the exact... | ||
| I didn't make a single noise. | ||
| I said thank you at the very end. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| And that's the way I love... | ||
| Those are my best interviews. | ||
| I don't say a word. | ||
| Well, he's a perfect candidate for that. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| And I've had some even drug addicts that do it. | ||
| And I've had other people do it. | ||
| And very often what happens is I'll ask them my typical questions are like, where are you from? | ||
| What was your family like? | ||
| And sometimes they just take the ball and run with it. | ||
| And then they do the whole thing on their own and I don't say another word. | ||
| So that's almost the same thing. | ||
| And that's the way I love it. | ||
| I'm not looking to have a conversation like you and I are having right now. | ||
| I'm not good at that anyway. | ||
| That's not my strength. | ||
| My strength is the photograph. | ||
| The reason why I asked you about cops is I feel about cops the same way I'm feeling about you, but even to more extreme, that they're exposed to things they cannot unsee, and the pressure and the stress of that is so, so overwhelming. | ||
| And also, they're thought of as the enemy, and they're not appreciated, and the risks that they take are not taken into consideration, and the stress and the PTSD that they almost all have. | ||
| All. | ||
| Every one of those cops has seen videos of a cop pulling someone over for a routine traffic stop and getting gunned down. | ||
| They've all seen that, and they know that that's a possibility. | ||
| Every time they pull up to a car that has tinted windows, they have no idea what's going on. | ||
| No, after doing what I'm doing, which is not as dangerous as what the cops are doing, because they're clearly trying to get somebody and put them in jail or prison, I'm just trying to give them money for an interview. | ||
| So my danger is not as high as theirs, but... | ||
| I can relate to how dangerous their life is because every single person they approach is potentially going to shoot them, run, do something. | ||
| Or they're mentally ill and they're going to just do something crazy. | ||
| I follow a few. | ||
| There's police-related Instagram pages that sort of highlight that, that are really well done. | ||
| One of them is police posts and faces of Rampart is another one. | ||
| And it's these cops that post these videos, and it's educational. | ||
| First of all, it's educational to other police officers, because a lot of them, they talk about what went wrong here, situational awareness, why this officer got in trouble, what you should do, and how this officer handled this in an incompetent way, or you should never allow something to escalate to this place. | ||
| But a lot of it is just you are forced to look at what they experience on an everyday basis where everyone they're talking to is lying to them. | ||
| Everyone they're talking to has a... | ||
| And then they also develop this horrible cynicism about human beings and everyone they pull over. | ||
| They just get so overwhelmed from decades of this job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cops are so underappreciated, especially right now. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| I say it all the time and people get mad at me all the time. | ||
| I'm like, listen man, I know cops. | ||
| Because of my martial arts background, I grew up with cops. | ||
| I was around cops from the moment I was a young teenager all throughout my adult life because of martial arts. | ||
| Because so many cops train in martial arts to protect themselves. | ||
| And they're good people for the most part, like all people. | ||
| Most people are good people for the most part, but good people that are forced into jobs that have horrific pressures attached to them and horrific consequences if anything goes wrong. | ||
| And paid very little. | ||
| Yes, and they're under just unbelievable stress and they make terrible errors because of that stress. | ||
| And then someone gets a cell phone video of that, and they post someone planting a gun or doing this, and then everyone thinks all cops do that. | ||
| No, and you cannot shoot the wrong guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You cannot ever risk doing that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I watched a horrible video the other day. | ||
| So they're shooting at you. | ||
| But you can't really just shoot back because what if you hit a kid? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that was what I saw. | ||
| There was a horrible video of a grandson, this very troubled grandson who pulled the knife on his grandfather. | ||
| And while the cops were there, he went to stab the grandfather and the cops opened fire on the kid and shot the grandfather too. | ||
| Killed both of them. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| And in the police post, this was all about, you know, understanding about accuracy and when to shoot and When to intervene and it's sort of a step-by-step breakdown for other officers so they can sort of look at this. | ||
| There's a great video on my channel with a retired cop named Kevin, Kevin Donaldson. | ||
| It's a great story about PTSD of being a cop and what the aftermath of all that is. | ||
| I can't even imagine. | ||
| What their minds must be like, especially someone who works in a horrible neighborhood where you're constantly dealing with that. | ||
| And the things that they see, like they're constantly seeing murder, constantly seeing car accidents, constantly seeing overdose, constantly seeing physical abuse, sexual abuse, rape, torture, you name it. | ||
| And you're married and you come home to your wife and you're like, how was your day, honey? | ||
| Yeah, and you're in Simi Valley with your kids just trying to stay calm and then, you know, you hear fuck the police and you're like, okay. | ||
| You know, it's a horrible. | ||
| Yeah, horrible job. | ||
| It's a yeah, and any support for them always gets like shit on But I think about them the same way I'm thinking about you I think prolonged exposure to the most horrific elements of society is Got we you know, | ||
| we sort of formulate our idea what the world is based on what we've encountered and And, you know, if you've encountered nothing but a beautiful neighborhood and nice families and everybody's friendly and you go to the football game and everybody cheers, yay! | ||
| You know, this is life for you. | ||
| But if you're experiencing what you're experiencing, you're talking to people on Skid Row on a day-in, day-out basis, like, what does that affect? | ||
| Like, how are your dreams? | ||
| Do you have nightmares? | ||
| I don't remember my dreams. | ||
| I sleep really well. | ||
| But I'll tell you this. | ||
| I call this project a crash course in empathy. | ||
| Because when I first started, like I said, I would look at these people like, just get a job. | ||
| A bunch of lazy losers that won't get a job. | ||
| And then after hearing story after story after story, I see like, oh, now I get it. | ||
| People are sort of like... | ||
| You can't. | ||
| When people are developing and growing, there's certain things that happen to them that are very hard to unfuck. | ||
| And when things go sideways and their life is fucked, like trying to bring them back to a place like where you are or a place where I am, where someone who didn't have those things happen to them as a child, that is an enormous task. | ||
| It's almost insurmountable. | ||
| I don't think it's even possible. | ||
| You can just prop them up a little bit so they're better, but they're never going to... | ||
| I mean, there are some that do it, but those people that have really recovered and have gone on to do great things... | ||
| We're people who kind of were doing great things before, but then they got caught up with cocaine and then they pulled themselves out. | ||
| So it seems like to me, and I've talked about this ad nauseum, is the only way to fix this is to fix the areas in which this is prevalent and to somehow or another pump money and resources into community centers and education and giving people some kind of hope. | ||
| And then even then, you're just going to make less of it. | ||
| You're not going to eliminate it entirely. | ||
| And it's a generational problem that could take decades upon decades to really put a dent in it. | ||
| But it's a task that's worth doing and no one is approaching this. | ||
| When politicians are sending billions of dollars overseas and billions of dollars on projects that a lot of people don't even agree to, And it's our tax money. | ||
| And nothing is being spent. | ||
| No. | ||
| If you want to save our country, this is the way to do it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Why are we looking at doing all these crazy things in other countries or going to Mars or wherever we're thinking? | ||
| How about right here in our own backyard? | ||
| Yeah, how about fixing places like the South Side of Chicago and Detroit and Baltimore? | ||
| And the way to do that, I believe, is providing hope for those families. | ||
| And it's not going to happen right away. | ||
| It's not going to happen in a generation. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And no one's got the patience for it. | ||
| Because whatever work you're going to put in, whatever money you're going to put in and energy and effort, you won't see in your lifetime. | ||
| I had a conversation with some friends about this last night, and they were saying, but would the country even run the same way if that happened? | ||
| Because don't you need all these poor and disenfranchised people to have the country work the way it works? | ||
| I'm like, but the country doesn't have to work the way it works. | ||
| This is just the way it works right now. | ||
| It's not like it wouldn't work another way. | ||
| Well, you know, what's interesting is You know, the universe, nature, even the human body regulates. | ||
| That's what it does. | ||
| When something's out of balance, it'll figure out and it'll find a... | ||
| It's like a seesaw. | ||
| It'll eventually balance out. | ||
| So we have a preponderance of down and out broken people on the streets, living in boxes and tents, addicted to drugs. | ||
| And we've also got the ultra super billionaires and the multi multi-millionaires. | ||
| And they're both existing on the two extremes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And good luck getting the rich to say, all right, we're going to give away a third of our money so that we can help these people. | ||
| Well, they don't have any faith in it. | ||
| They also think that, I mean, when I talk to people about this that are very wealthy, they have a problem with charities that most of the money actually winds up going to administrative costs. | ||
| And very little of it actually goes to the people. | ||
| And then you find out that people that are working on the homeless situation... | ||
| I have a friend, Coleon Noir, who was a lawyer, and he was in San Francisco, and his perspective was, oh, they're not spending enough money to fix this homeless problem. | ||
| And then he talked to someone who was actually deeply embedded in that situation. | ||
| He said, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| That's not the problem. | ||
| They are spending a lot of money on it. | ||
| But the money is going to these people that get high salaries that work on the homeless problem. | ||
| And he showed us a spreadsheet of all these people. | ||
| And it's six-figure salary, some of them $250,000 a year. | ||
| And it's a lot of them that are handling the homeless situation in Los Angeles and the homeless situation in San Francisco. | ||
| And there's no incentive to fix it. | ||
| The budget goes up every year. | ||
| The homeless problem goes up every year. | ||
| There's no accountability. | ||
| There's no, hey, we've spent all this money and the problem is bigger and you guys keep getting raises. | ||
| Like, what the fuck is going on here? | ||
| It becomes an industry. | ||
| And then fixing the homeless. | ||
| Like, if you look at the actual budget for dealing with the homeless, pull up the budget for dealing with the homeless in Los Angeles in 2022. Because it's bonkers when you see the sheer amount of money that's being spent ineffectively. | ||
| And all anybody seems to care about is we're working hard to mitigate the homeless situation, and we have upped our budget, and we're like, oh, they've upped the budget. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| And you think, that must be effective. | ||
| We're going to fix this. | ||
| But nothing gets done. | ||
| It's a big problem. | ||
| I think the big number was for California, not just for Los Angeles. | ||
| Okay, let's get to California. | ||
| 7.2 billion. | ||
| 7.2 billion just for homeless. | ||
| I would think with that you could clean up Tenderloin in San Francisco and LA. 3.3 billion general fund in 21-22 to almost 30 homelessness related programs across the state. | ||
| That is so much money. | ||
| And yet the problem gets bigger and bigger every year. | ||
| And I don't... | ||
| I think the problem, when you... | ||
| I was talking about the layers, you keep peeling them back. | ||
| When you peel back the last layer, it's human greed. | ||
| Human greed is the problem. | ||
| But also, what can be done? | ||
| When you think about what are the strategies that these people are employing, shelters, food, food stamps, counseling, these are like Band-Aids on gunshot wounds. | ||
| It's a Band-Aid on cancer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's a better description. | |
| No, but I think if we... | ||
| Here, just look at what's taught in schools. | ||
| They're teaching trigonometry and algebra and all these things. | ||
| When everyone's got a cell phone in their pocket, you don't need to be learning trigonometry anymore. | ||
| If you're going to become an engineer, then study trigonometry in college, but you don't need to be teaching it in high school. | ||
| They should be teaching human interaction, how to raise children. | ||
| All these skills that we're using on a daily basis. | ||
| They should talk about empathy, too, and how important it is, and kindness, and how it's not just good for the person you're kind to. | ||
| It's actually good for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| That's why I feel okay with giving away so much money, because I know that it benefits me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what people don't understand about hate, whether it's hate on social media, or hate in general, or racism, or just... | ||
| All of the above. | ||
| Homophobia. | ||
| All of the above. | ||
| Any form of negativity and hate and judgment. | ||
| What people don't realize about that, if I'm hating you, it hurts me. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It doesn't hurt you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You don't give a fuck if I hate you or not. | ||
| Well, it hurts my feelings if you say it to me. | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| But mostly, you're carrying it around. | ||
| It's hurting me. | ||
| What is that expression? | ||
| My blood pressure is up. | ||
| My peace of mind is gone. | ||
| I'm sitting around... | ||
| Distracted about how pissed off I am at you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, what a horrible way to go through life. | ||
| Yeah, there's an old expression about hate, that it's a poison that kills the vessel that's holding it. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| It does. | ||
| And we're not told that. | ||
| We're told, you know, revenge is being told. | ||
| We were talking about Marcus Aurelius the other day, that Marcus Aurelius, who was the emperor of Rome 2,000 years ago, was talking about empathy. | ||
| and talking about how important it is to forgive people. | ||
| Like there's this brilliant stoic philosopher, thousands of years ago when people hacking each other to death with swords and arrows and shit, and this guy was trying to see through it as a leader. | ||
| And it's the rarest of rare of people that lead like that, that really genuinely have this perspective like humanity can do better, we should strive to do better. | ||
| And he was striving to do better in his own personal life. | ||
| And that was what Meditations was all about, his book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I try to do with my videos. | ||
| My idea was I'm going to present these ideas. | ||
| And I could write an article saying, oh, you need to raise our kids better. | ||
| We need to be better parents, better role models, and we'll have a better outcome with these kids. | ||
| Nobody's going to read that article. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if I put out some entertaining videos that how many people are watching... | ||
| You'll learn the lesson, which is how important that childhood is to provide that kid with unconditional love. | ||
| Not love. | ||
| Not love. | ||
| Love is bullshit. | ||
| Unconditional love. | ||
| Everything else is some disguised bullshit. | ||
| Because you can have a parent who, I love you if you get good grades. | ||
| I'll love you if you stay out of jail. | ||
| I'll love you if you're not gay. | ||
| I'll love you if you're whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like the way my mom loved me, She passed away a couple years ago, but... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Give me a second. | |
| Like, I could have been gay. | ||
| I could have been in jail. | ||
| I could have been flunking out of school. | ||
| Could have been mean to her. | ||
| I could have been anything. | ||
| And I know that she would have loved me the exact same way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And because she did... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are the person you are. | |
| I wanted to make her proud. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I still do. | ||
| I think this project is just an homage to her. | ||
| Well, you're very fortunate. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I don't know anybody that had a mom like mine. | ||
| And my dad was great, too. | ||
| Not as great, but my dad was really great. | ||
| My dad came from absolute shit. | ||
| Well, all of our parents came from a different era, too. | ||
| We have to take that into consideration. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| I mean, look at how so many people in this new generation are looking for the easy lick, the shortcut, the hack, the easy way to get rich or do whatever. | ||
| They want the fast buck. | ||
| Look at anybody who's done anything great in our world. | ||
| In the 1900s, in the 1800s, in the 1700s, from the beginning of time, every one of those people have a story of overcoming great adversity and working harder than you can even imagine. | ||
| They're amazing stories of perseverance, of courage, of all these things that nobody seems to want to do now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they're not taught that that's something you should strive for. | ||
| And when there are these options that are available, like becoming a TikTok star or becoming... | ||
| You know, there's these things that are available that are so simple that you see 17-year-olds making millions of dollars and you're like, well, that's what I want to do. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't want to struggle. | ||
| That's more attractive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's not enough... | ||
| There's not enough emphasis on the fact that in doing difficult things, you learn about yourself. | ||
| And then this thing that you can create that's hard to create, that takes a long time, is immensely satisfying, as opposed to winning the lottery, which is what everybody wants to do, which is just, for the most part, when it happens to people, it kind of upturns their life. | ||
| Well, I mean, you win the lottery, most of these people that are not willing to work for it haven't put in the work for it. | ||
| If they actually came upon $3 million, they would fuck it off. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They would fuck it off, because deep down subconsciously, they know they don't deserve it. | ||
| Which is so strange that we have this sort of watermark in our mind of what our value is. | ||
| And anything that goes above that, we try to bring that water back down to where it was. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| No, like when two people are romantically involved, a guy and a girl meet, or whatever, two people meet. | ||
| If you rated self-worth on a scale from 1 to 10, if one of them's an 8 and the other one's a 5, there's no chance in hell it'll ever work out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Unless that 5 gets their shit together. | ||
| Yeah, but that's so hard to do. | ||
| It's so hard to do. | ||
| It's so hard to do. | ||
| Generally, two 5s can become an 8. If they grow together. | ||
| But they have to, like, really love each other and be friends. | ||
| They can have their bipolar heaven or whatever. | ||
| Well, I've seen a lot of really successful couples that, like, lose hundreds of pounds together. | ||
| And there's a lot of that on social media that I think is very inspiring when people do get their life in order. | ||
| No, and that would bond people better than anything. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And it seems to do that, you know. | ||
| But one of the things that I've noticed on your channel is there's a lot of couples that are addicted together. | ||
| You have these fentanyl addict couples, which is so heartbreaking. | ||
| I just did one earlier this week, Mike and Stephanie, and they were talking about how when they get apart from each other, they can kind of get clean and do fine, but then they love each other and they get back together and they self-destruct. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| They love each other and then they kill each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just the programming of the human mind and the fact that we don't really have tools to fix that. | ||
| Like, if you have a fucked up computer, you can bring it to a repair shop and they can go, oh, you've got a fucking virus on your hard drive and it's infected this and that and, you know, your fucking, your hard drive is broken and we can fix that and Replace that and reformat. | ||
| We can't do that to mine. | ||
| No, you said something on the Gabor Mate interview you did recently, where you said, it's like we're these living life forms without an instruction manual. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| That's what we are. | ||
| We're these highly evolved... | ||
| Living creatures and you don't know how to operate it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So we're just going through school and we all hate school and we get out and we just screw up. | ||
| If they were teaching Gabor Mate's work in schools, oh my god, we'd be a different society. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we would be a different society. | ||
| And just a few classes like that could shift the mindset of so many people. | ||
| It's so easy to fall back into your old ways of thinking and behaving. | ||
| But if we did that a lot in high school and exposed people to that, we genuinely could fix a lot of the problems that we see or at least make some strides. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think that would make more of a difference in the world than anything else we've talked about. | ||
| Yeah, and just so many people have never encountered an environment where people are supportive. | ||
| You know, for me, it was martial arts. | ||
| When I was a young boy, when I found martial arts, I was immediately brought into this world of discipline, where discipline was celebrated, and it was admired, and then also love of your fellow practitioners, and it was a community. | ||
| And it was the first time I'd ever been around like a really positive community of people who valued hard work and also valued people who excelled at that hard work and really admired them and really used them as examples. | ||
| And those people went on to become instructors and it really – Profoundly affected the way I look at the world and profoundly affected the way I look at the value of other people and their hard work. | ||
| Their esteem-building acts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, and most people, I mean, you know, I found martial arts when I was a kid because I was small and I was always fucked with and I was scared of everybody. | ||
| And I had one pivotal day. | ||
| I had sort of dabbled in martial arts. | ||
| And then one day, where I walked into this one school in Boston, which was the Jaehyun Kim Taekwondo Institute, and from that one day, it changed my whole life. | ||
| And I'm so fortunate that that happened to me, and I often wonder, What would I be like if I didn't live in a nice neighborhood with nice people and didn't expose myself to that and didn't engross myself in that world of people that wanted to excel? | ||
| There's not a chance in hell. | ||
| No, a kid in South Central doesn't have any of those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| A kid whose mother is on Skid Row. | ||
| I mean, what do you do? | ||
| How do you get there? | ||
| You're fucked from birth. | ||
| You're being raised by a grandparent, if you're lucky. | ||
| If you're lucky. | ||
| Maybe the foster system. | ||
| And you don't have access to martial arts or ballet classes or music classes or... | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Even good education, I don't think. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No opportunities. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No role models. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| And this is what I think that could be mitigated with money. | ||
| If we allocated money, the way we allocate money to these overseas issues and the way we just throw money around at the military-industrial complex, and if we allocated that kind of money to try to take a comprehensive approach to shifting We had this guy on who was a cop in Baltimore, | ||
| and I guess it was like the early 2000s he was there, and he found a piece of paper that was an arrest report from the 1970s, and it was the same arrests in the same neighborhoods for the same crimes, and it was overwhelming to him. | ||
| He was like, oh my god, this is just corruption and systemic racism and you're not going to fix this with just policing. | ||
| You're not going to just arrest your way out of this. | ||
| I think you need to change the mindset of these people. | ||
| This younger generation... | ||
| Like, what's become very cool? | ||
| To be bad. | ||
| Oh, if you're bad, you're cool. | ||
| That has to change. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That has to change. | ||
| I remember back in the 60s... | ||
| You're not old enough. | ||
| I was born in the 60s. | ||
| Like, being a good person was cool. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was for a while. | ||
| You got it by your neck now. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Being a good person was what people aspired to. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And... | ||
| Now it's like to be a bad person is what people... | ||
| Well, that's culture, unfortunately. | ||
| There's a lot of culture that has emphasized that. | ||
| And it's, you know, a lot of rap music and a lot of things celebrate that sort of badass lifestyle. | ||
| And, you know, when you come from nothing, that looks incredibly attractive. | ||
| Like, here's a guy flashing money. | ||
| He's wearing expensive sneakers. | ||
| He's got a great car. | ||
| You don't know any better. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And those are all... | ||
| Things that people aspire to that are very difficult to achieve. | ||
| So you look at that, instead of like having a balanced life and a loving family and being a pillar of the community, you aspire instead to being this thing that's very difficult to become, which is the guy who has the big house and the fancy clothes and the money you're flashing around. | ||
| And so it's just that you're chasing the wrong carrot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now that's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're a broken country. | ||
| And it's like if you want to – if you really love your country and you want to fix it, that would be the area to – those would be the areas to attack. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't see any effort at all. | ||
| Find me a politician that's, like, really going to do that. | ||
| Well, they don't even talk about it. | ||
| They don't even talk about it. | ||
| I mean, they'll talk about social safety nets, which I think are also very important, welfare and, you know, things for poor people that are genuinely just struggling because they're down on their luck. | ||
| That we should treat them as members of our community and try to help them because we can. | ||
| And that's a sign of a good, strong, healthy community that we do look out for people that are less fortunate than us. | ||
| But there's more that has to be taken into consideration. | ||
| Much, much more that has to be done. | ||
| Figure out, like, how is this continuing to happen in these same places over and over and over again? | ||
| And how is there no effort to try to mitigate that? | ||
| Because it's a long-term thing. | ||
| Like, this expression, you got to get better the same way you got sick. | ||
| And this country got sick slowly. | ||
| You're very much on the pulse of what's going on in the world and the country and technology and everything, right? | ||
| Society, culture, everything. | ||
| Do you think we are... | ||
| What you're watching is a society in downfall, like spiraling down? | ||
| There's a lot of us. | ||
| There's a lot of our society that is in downfall. | ||
| There's a lot of our society that is spiraling. | ||
| There's a lot of the way we think about things that is fruitless and pointless and ultimately negative. | ||
| But I think there's a lot of people also that are aware of that. | ||
| And there's also a distribution of information today and the way people are having conversations today that's totally unavailable before. | ||
| Your channel is part of that. | ||
| This podcast is part of that. | ||
| The multitude of podcasts that are out there where intelligent, kind, compassionate people Are thinking and talking about things, talking about the way you approach other human beings and talk to people the way you live your life, the way you can put pleasure and immediate gratification aside and seek discipline and hard work and the value and the benefit of that, the value and the benefit of treating people with kindness. | ||
| And developing a good core group of friends and treating each other well. | ||
| I think that's spreading. | ||
| I think that's helping. | ||
| But I think we are constantly in this yin-yang battle as human beings. | ||
| And I don't think you have darkness without light, and I don't think you have light without darkness. | ||
| I think we're always going to be... | ||
| We're this bizarre, flawed, intelligent, calculating entity. | ||
| That is trying to figure out its existence which is ultimately finite in nature anyway. | ||
| And our goals and our aspirations and our dreams, there's so much of our society that's based around chasing objects which ultimately you can't keep. | ||
| And then also if you do give them to your kids, you're probably fucking them up. | ||
| It's very very few people that I've met that come from wealthy families aren't fucked up or at least I have friends that grew up very wealthy and their families wealthy and they're wealthy now and they know that they got there because of their family and there's a thing about them that's always insecure so they have to kind of brag a little and tell you a little of this they've done a little of that they've done and I know what they're doing and they're not bad people they're just trying to establish that they're valuable No, | ||
| imagine if your dad was an Elon Musk or somebody who was so wildly successful that you can never, in your wildest dreams, you're never going to outdo your father. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What's the motivation? | ||
| This is an old expression. | ||
| Show me the son of a great man who's also a great man. | ||
| It's very rare. | ||
| For men to aspire to be like their father, if your father was some, like, super conqueror-type character who just is out there. | ||
| Well, a great man is a vague term. | ||
| It is a vague term. | ||
| Vague term. | ||
| Vague term, because it could be just a great emotionally great man. | ||
| My dad was a great man, but he was not a multimillionaire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But the thing is, like, what our society values in terms of when we look at someone who's great, we look at a Bill Gates, or we look at a, you know, someone who's amassed insurmountable wealth. | ||
| And that's, if you're a son and you're born in that, also, you don't have to work hard, because you're kind of always going to be okay. | ||
| You have an endowment, you have a fund, you have a this or that. | ||
| If you're that wealthy and successful, as I guess you and I probably are, how do you protect your kids from that? | ||
| How do you? | ||
| I'm not going to give you anything, so now you're a selfish bastard. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And if you do, you're damned if you do. | ||
| Well, I try to instill in my kids the value of hard work, but also sometimes kids don't want to hear it from you. | ||
| No. | ||
| Kids won't do what you say. | ||
| They'll do what you do. | ||
| I turned into my dad. | ||
| I just kind of blended a bit of my mom in as well. | ||
| So I'm an artist, but I work my ass off. | ||
| And that combination makes me a successful artist. | ||
| And I remember watching my dad work. | ||
| My dad never came home from work saying, oh, I worked my ass off this week and I traveled all over the Midwest and I did this and I did that. | ||
| I grew up in Chicago, in Detroit. | ||
| He never talked about how hard he worked. | ||
| He just did it. | ||
| He just shut up and did it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He never bragged about it. | ||
| He never complained about it. | ||
| It's just what he did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And my best friend Bob and I, we joke about how we had the same dad. | ||
| You know, different dads, of course, different families, but our dads are almost the same type of person. | ||
| Just shut up and worked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And brought home the bread to support the family. | ||
| Yeah, if you grow up in that... | ||
| I was very fortunate to grow up in the Northeast. | ||
| And stayed married forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| People that grow up in hardworking environments tend to value hard work. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard you talk about that too. | ||
| Growing up in the Midwest or the Northeast, you learn that life is tough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tough. | ||
| When your car breaks down and it's February and it's dark and it's 1130 at night and you've got to figure it out. | ||
| Yeah, that's real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's a value that you get from that that's really unavailable in any other place in life. | ||
| No, you're not going to learn that in California. | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| I always say that one of the problems in California is also being a trust fund baby in terms of the weather. | ||
| Yeah, it makes you soft. | ||
| Yeah, you're just always sunny. | ||
| I still see myself to this day. | ||
| I've been in California. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| 20, 30, three decades? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Long time. | ||
| And I still think of myself as a Chicagoan who's just, I'm just doing this in LA for a while. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm still a Chicagoan in my mind. | ||
| All my friends from Boston feel that way too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're Boston guys. | ||
| I mean, I look like a California boy, but I am a Chicagoan through and through. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And a Detroiter too. | ||
| Well, you know, LA is such a strange place because it's a place where people go to become somebody. | ||
| And that's always bizarre. | ||
| No, I saw that when I moved there. | ||
| I moved with my best friend who I went to high school with in Chicago. | ||
| And we had each other to stabilize each other and we kept each other on track. | ||
| That was very helpful. | ||
| But I saw so many people that I'd be friends with and like, man, they're just lost. | ||
| Like, you're getting into what? | ||
| You're going to what event? | ||
| What club? | ||
| And they eventually self-destruct and move back to their small towns. | ||
| Yeah, it becomes a thing of like finding the social circle that's popular and now it's about photographing yourself with those people. | ||
| Right, it's hard to make friends in LA. Yeah, well it's even weirder now I think with social media because social media... | ||
| Hollywood's always been kind of like it's all about the image and this The red carpet, which is like the most bullshit thing in the world. | ||
| Where in life are you standing there and there's a hundred cameras pointing at you and you're posing and looking around and they're like, Mark, over here, over here, over here. | ||
| And you're smiling. | ||
| But they live for that moment. | ||
| I have more great friends in New York than I do in LA. I've lived in LA forever. | ||
| There's great people in LA. I know there are, yeah. | ||
| But in spite of LA. That's right, that's true. | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But that environment, it's also... | ||
| You have all these people that are... | ||
| Even if they have no aspirations to show business, they're still flavored by that show business. | ||
| And now it's even more fucked because you have these Instagram and social media influencers who are almost all full of shit. | ||
| And like, it's all nonsense. | ||
| And it's all image. | ||
| And it's all... | ||
| Fake. | ||
| It's all fake. | ||
| And this is what they're selling and pushing and promoting, and that's what the young people are aspiring to, and they realize that there's a value in it, that you could actually achieve social success and numbers on your Instagram page and numbers on your TikTok and numbers on your YouTube. | ||
| No, I think that's the most valued commodity now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| To be, what do you call it, an influencer or whatever? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| A YouTuber or whatever the hell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm horrified that I'm probably one of those, but... | ||
| Well, not really. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I guess I am too, right? | ||
| But what are you doing? | ||
| Like, you're doing something that's very different than just, like, TikTok-ing, you know, or just... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I tell people who are like, Like, agents and managers that I'm working with, the number one thing that's important to me is my integrity and how I'm perceived. | ||
| Like, I don't give a fuck if I make money or not. | ||
| I don't need to make money from this channel. | ||
| The way YouTube demonetizes it, it's like I don't even... | ||
| Does YouTube demonetize a lot of your videos? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| What is their rationalization for demonetizing what you do? | ||
| I think they were good to me for a while. | ||
| They were promoting my stuff and they were monetizing it for a while. | ||
| But then, like if you look at the top 10 videos, I've got some videos that have a lot of views, like 15 million, 30 million, 33 million. | ||
| Six of the top ten have been demonetized or deleted. | ||
| Deleted? | ||
| Deleted. | ||
| Which ones got deleted? | ||
| A video of Lynn. | ||
| She had some mental issues and she was a crystal meth addict. | ||
| It was a very popular video because so many people connected with her. | ||
| And she actually passed away earlier this year, I think. | ||
| Why did they delete it? | ||
| She talked about suicide. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| I assume that's why. | ||
| Because YouTube sent me a notice. | ||
| They emailed me a notice saying, are you considering suicide? | ||
| Like this form document that they send out whenever there's a suicide mention or whatever. | ||
| So they... | ||
| There was a video where she mentioned suicide, so somebody reported it and it got deleted. | ||
| And that would have been a moneymaker. | ||
| Did you try to respond to that or repeal it? | ||
| Talking to YouTube is like talking to a wall. | ||
| I have a... | ||
| Partner manager, but nothing's really good. | ||
| There's such a danger in that kind of censorship. | ||
| Like anything to do with sex now? | ||
| Pretty much every video that has anything to do with sex gets demonetized. | ||
| Even the foot fetish guy? | ||
| No, if it's a male, here's what's interesting about it. | ||
| If it's a male talking about sex, or sex work, or sex being a trick or whatever, or a pimp, that's okay. | ||
| If it's a female, demonetized. | ||
| Is it because they think it's exploitation in some way? | ||
| Like, is there a rationalization or is it just completely subjective? | ||
| No, I think it's because, oh, here's a poor, vulnerable female who is talking about how she got into sex work. | ||
| We can't have that on, you know, we can't allow advertising on that. | ||
| So I can post it, but I can't make money off of it. | ||
| It's so unfortunate because, well, and also not necessarily post it, right? | ||
| Because you said the other one was deleted because of suicide. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes they delete them. | ||
| It's just, I think what you're doing is very valuable. | ||
| It's uncomfortable, but it's very valuable. | ||
| And the idea that someone at YouTube wouldn't recognize that and understand that, it's very disheartening. | ||
| No, I mean, it's pathetic that you have a channel that has 4 million views, The spirit of it is to help society, and you can't make money with it. | ||
| What I make on YouTube, I spend in the first two weeks of every month. | ||
| So that money, the additional money comes from... | ||
| I mean, really, what's... | ||
| Well, you have a subscription model, too. | ||
| I have a subscription channel, too, and that's starting to take off. | ||
| And when did you start doing that? | ||
| About a year ago. | ||
| And was that in response to the demonetization and the censorship? | ||
| That's exactly why I did it. | ||
| And this subscription model, is that also on YouTube or is that on your website? | ||
| No, it's on mysoftwhiteunderbelly.com. | ||
| And that's really the state of the art of my channel. | ||
| That's where every video lives, deleted, uncensored. | ||
| So they can find that one that was deleted from Instagram? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The original Lynn video is there. | ||
| There's a bunch of others. | ||
| Or on YouTube, rather. | ||
| Yeah, there's some others that were deleted. | ||
| All the demonetized ones. | ||
| There's a lot of nudity that's not on YouTube. | ||
| There's a lot of videos that are not. | ||
| There's like 150 videos that are not on YouTube. | ||
| That, to me, is another reason I wanted to do it, other than to try to make money with this project that I worked so hard at, is I figured one day I'm going to post something that's going to get my whole channel taken down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I figured eventually that's going to happen. | ||
| I'll do something that just pisses somebody off and the whole channel will be gone, disappeared. | ||
| See you later. | ||
| It's just terrifying that that's an option today, especially with someone who's doing the kind of work that you're doing. | ||
| Yeah, but there's rap videos that are 10 times raunchier than what I'm doing and the spirit behind it is... | ||
| That this is cool, whereas the spirit of mine is like, I just want to create awareness so that maybe people will learn to avoid it. | ||
| No, it's not rational. | ||
| But they're monetized. | ||
| The rap videos all have ads on them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And my stuff does not. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's not logical. | ||
| No. | ||
| But it's a big corporation, and good luck trying to have a logical conversation with them. | ||
| It's a big corporation that's also under the spell of an ideology. | ||
| The woke ideology of today is trying to find who are the victims and who's the perpetrator and what should you be allowed to talk about and what are you not allowed to talk about and what narrow confines Of conversations are you allowed to exist in? | ||
| And what topics are you just not allowed to approach? | ||
| And YouTube has been horrible with that in a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah, just recently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's like it's accelerating, it seems. | ||
| And it seems like that's one of the things that does happen with censorship that people don't seem to understand. | ||
| When you want things censored that you don't agree with, what you have to understand is that you're setting in motion something that will look for more things that are offensive, more things that are not allowed and will decide even further and further to push this until it's trying to control the way you think and the way you process information and what you're exposed to. | ||
| And somehow or another they think that that's a net positive. | ||
| Or they think that it's positive for advertising revenue. | ||
| And that the advertisers think it's positive. | ||
| But it's preposterous to me that someone would not want to advertise. | ||
| There's certain things that they could advertise on your channel. | ||
| And particularly if they were thinking about it and strategizing. | ||
| That would maybe be beneficial to some of the people that are looking at those things. | ||
| I mean the best example is like when a gang member... | ||
| Or a prostitute video gets demonetized. | ||
| Which really means I can't make money on it, which really means I should put it on my subscription channel and not even put it on YouTube. | ||
| I'm doing that as a favor to my audience. | ||
| But eventually that's where it would lead when you demonetize something. | ||
| Or they put an age restriction of 18 on it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you can't be under 18 watching this. | ||
| Look at the age that all these prostitutes and gang members were when they joined it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They were 13. They were 14. Yeah. | ||
| So the people who are joining these subcultures Can't watch these videos that are giving you a clear picture of what your future is going to be. | ||
| You can't watch them. | ||
| My videos are clean. | ||
| You know, the exotic video. | ||
| This is this very attractive prostitute from South Central LA, from Figaro Street. | ||
| She has tattoos all over her face from pimps. | ||
| And the video has like, I don't know how many views. | ||
| 14 million, 15 million. | ||
| It's got millions of views. | ||
| It's the second most popular video on my channel. | ||
| It got demonetized. | ||
| She doesn't swear once. | ||
| She doesn't talk about any sexual acts. | ||
| All she talks about is how difficult that lifestyle is and how tough her life is. | ||
| She mentions that she smokes crystal meth, but that's it. | ||
| And it is, in a way, it's educational. | ||
| It's educational as anything. | ||
| Because I could put videos out of some girl saying, I was once a prostitute, and it's a bad lifestyle, and you shouldn't do it. | ||
| All young girls, make sure you don't do this. | ||
| Nobody's going to watch that. | ||
| Who the fuck is going to watch that? | ||
| But if you put a beautiful girl like Exotic out there, and she tells you her whole life story, it's heartbreaking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And a young kid will listen to that and go, fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had no idea it could lead to that. | ||
| Well, most people don't know anyone like that. | ||
| So that's one of the things about your interviews would say, like, some of these homeless people. | ||
| Like, there was one... | ||
| There was this woman who never looked at the camera once, and she... | ||
| It's like gyrating in these weird ways, like looking at the sky. | ||
| And you look at that and me as a father, that was someone's baby at one point in time. | ||
| That was a little child that could grow up to be anything. | ||
| Could grow up to be an artist, could grow up to be, you know, whatever. | ||
| All these people. | ||
| All these people. | ||
| They're all just human beings. | ||
| We're all just humans. | ||
| Just a bundle of potential and they just got fucked. | ||
| They just got a terrible roll of the dice, terrible hand of cards, terrible circumstances, terrible experiences, terrible abuse. | ||
| Sometimes you look at nature. | ||
| The lion eats the antelope. | ||
| That's just the way it happened that day. | ||
| The antelope loses, the lion wins. | ||
| And it's like, that's the nature of our universe, of our world. | ||
| Who's to say that humans are exempt from that? | ||
| Well, we certainly aren't. | ||
| Some of us are going to be winners and drive fancy cars and live in nice houses and have great lives and great vacations and raise their kids well. | ||
| And other ones are going to live on the street. | ||
| I'm not saying that's what I believe. | ||
| I'm just saying that's the reality. | ||
| Well, I mean, look at what's happening. | ||
| And I think about this all the time. | ||
| Should every swimmer get a trophy? | ||
| No. | ||
| Just the winners. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the winners get to win and the losers suffer the loss. | ||
| Well, it's supposed to inspire people who are also trying to become winners to feel the pain of loss, which makes you more disciplined. | ||
| It makes you work harder because you want to try to figure out a way to win. | ||
| And that's supposed to be like a net benefit and to also enforce the value of hard work and discipline. | ||
| If you see that person who wins all the time and they're at the pool before anybody and they're eating healthy and they're stretching and doing all the right things and you're like, I want to be like that person. | ||
| Yeah, listen to anybody who's done, like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Jerry West, all these guys, they lost and lost and lost and lost and then they learned how to win. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then they became, they're only perceived as winners now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But there was a time where they were like, Kobe sat on the bench for the first few seasons. | ||
| That's how you become that person. | ||
| Yeah, you don't become that person through like extraordinary gifts from the moment you're a child and nothing but great positive things happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It comes from discipline and hard work and That's what's not being enforced by the social media, TikTok sort of generation of kids looking for this immediate gratification and also looking to be rewarded for just existing. | ||
| Look at all these people I just mentioned, Michael and Covey, for example. | ||
| They're angry. | ||
| They were driven. | ||
| Michael Jordan's the best example of anything. | ||
| If you ever watch his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, it's magnificent. | ||
| A magnificent example of how angry a champion is. | ||
| I love that speech. | ||
| Michael was always this... | ||
| I'm from Chicago. | ||
| Michael was this... | ||
| They called him the black Jesus. | ||
| He was just better than anybody. | ||
| There was no question who the greatest basketball player of all time was. | ||
| It's Michael Jordan. | ||
| Watch the highlights and you'll see. | ||
| I love Kobe more than anybody. | ||
| But Michael was the best there ever was. | ||
| Probably ever will be. | ||
| Psychotically driven. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Everybody was horrified in the whole theater when he's getting his Hall of Fame. | ||
| Because he was angry at... | ||
| Angry at everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All the people that doubted him. | ||
| All the people that doubted him. | ||
| All the people that disrespected him. | ||
| He listed them all like he had them on a sheet, but he had them in his brain. | ||
| And it's amazing because you're like, why are you even thinking about those people? | ||
| You're Michael Jordan. | ||
| You're the fucking man. | ||
| He's the greatest. | ||
| Name an athlete who is more influential than Michael Jordan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
None. | |
| In their sport. | ||
|
unidentified
|
None. | |
| I mean, look at Jordan's. | ||
| They're still the number one sneaker in the world. | ||
| Yeah, they should be. | ||
| He's magnificent. | ||
| And that comes from that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm angry. | ||
| You know, my dad treated me like... | ||
| My dad, my sister's like... | ||
| My sister's one of my favorite people. | ||
| She's five years older, but she's about eight years older in terms of maturity. | ||
| Because I matured very slowly and she matured very quick. | ||
| I think she went through grade school a year early. | ||
| She got through high school in three years. | ||
| She went through college in three years. | ||
| And she was trying to get into dental school at like 20 years old or 21 years old. | ||
| And didn't get accepted for a while. | ||
| Worked in a motel for a while. | ||
| Because she couldn't do anything. | ||
| She just had to get a job. | ||
| And my dad was hard on us. | ||
| My dad was hard on us and said things to her and me. | ||
| I was not a straight A student. | ||
| My sister doesn't know any other letter than A, you know, on a report card. | ||
| But I remember him saying to us, if you're so smart, how come you can't get into dental school? | ||
| That's harsh. | ||
| That's harsh. | ||
| When you got nothing but A's. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the only reason you couldn't get in is because she was too young. | ||
| No dental school wanted to take her because she was a teenager, basically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, she had to age a couple years and then she got in. | ||
| Now she's a dentist. | ||
| But my dad used to tell me that kind of stuff all the time. | ||
| And it put a fire on, I mean, it would either break you and you start smoking dope and you spiral downward or you silently get angry. | ||
| And my sister and I joke about it all the time now. | ||
| The reason we both became successful was just to prove our dad wrong. | ||
| And, you know, I talked to him about it. | ||
| He says, yeah, I was just trying to put a fire under your ass. | ||
| And I'm like, well, it worked. | ||
| It worked. | ||
| It's hard because you're still going to resent that person for being cruel when you're younger. | ||
| No, but I mean, to me, the reason I do these videos, I love to learn. | ||
| You do too. | ||
| I mean, look at what you're doing. | ||
| You love to learn. | ||
| And I love to understand. | ||
| The wanting to understand why we self-destruct, why we self-sabotage, why society is broken, why all these things that are topics on my channel is what drives me to do them. | ||
| And I want to know why... | ||
| I forgot. | ||
| I lost my train of thought there. | ||
| Your dad being hard on you. | ||
| Yeah, but I just want to know what... | ||
| I lost my... | ||
| But I know what you're saying. | ||
| What is missing in these people? | ||
| What are the factors that lead people to become downcast and downtrodden of society? | ||
| And what are the factors that lead people to become healthy, functional, successful humans? | ||
| For me, it was a combination of the unconditional love I got from my mom that kind of kept me on track and made me believe in myself Tremendous. | ||
| I believe everything I do turns to gold. | ||
| It's a magical gift. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Artistically, I believe my work is the best. | ||
| I'm sure it isn't, but I believe it is, so that just gives me the confidence to proceed and do more and like, oh my god, this is so much fun. | ||
| I get to create... | ||
| I'm laying golden eggs every day. | ||
| That's how I look at it. | ||
| But it could also have gone where, like, let's say I didn't get that unconditional love from my mom, and my dad was giving me a hard time saying, you know, that conditional love, saying, you've got to be successful in order to... | ||
| Oh, so I guess where I was going with that is my dad used to give me this hard time all the time, and it drove me to succeed. | ||
| And I didn't get good grades in school, but when I got out of school, in my mind, I'm like, now I'm going to prove him wrong. | ||
| I'm going to prove everybody wrong. | ||
| I'm going to show everybody what I can do. | ||
| And it took years. | ||
| It took a lot of years. | ||
| But I eventually just became so wildly successful. | ||
| I would send my dad... | ||
| I would mail him my... | ||
| This is before cell phones. | ||
| I would mail him my bank statements. | ||
| I had a million dollars in the Bank of America checking account, getting minimal interest. | ||
| Even the tellers would be like, why do you have this much money in a checking account? | ||
| Because I'm working so goddamn much, I don't have time to... | ||
| Invest it. | ||
| I literally was. | ||
| When I was doing advertising, I worked so much all the time. | ||
| But you wanted him to know. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I was shoving his nose in the shit. | ||
| How did he respond to that? | ||
| He was so proud of me. | ||
| Oh, that's good. | ||
| So proud of me. | ||
| He talks about that to this day. | ||
| Well, that's great. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So it was effective. | ||
| Yeah, it worked. | ||
| It worked. | ||
| It worked for my sister, too. | ||
| We both laugh about it now. | ||
| That it sucked, but it worked. | ||
| It sucked, but it works. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I try to raise my kids differently. | ||
| Why? | ||
| We could talk here for hours about whether that is the healthy way to raise a child. | ||
| I could make a strong argument for why it is. | ||
| And there were generations that raised their kids that way. | ||
| But I tend to love more like my mom did. | ||
| With women in my life, with my friends. | ||
| I'm basically kind. | ||
| I'm not a hard-driving, you know. | ||
| Has this project and doing all these videos made you more empathetic? | ||
| Oh, fuck yeah. | ||
| I mean, I always was soft and nice and loving, but now I think I'm more than ever. | ||
| I'm much more understanding. | ||
| Because the key to empathy, the key to forgiveness, which is really my biggest thing is forgiveness, is understanding. | ||
| Because if you understand why somebody is behaving the way they are, you'll forgive them. | ||
| And you don't even need to know all the details. | ||
| If you've learned enough stories, you eventually will... | ||
| Gain the understanding that even though I don't know your story, I'll bet you it's similar to his story and her story, which I've already heard, and they're horrifying, and I understand why they're in the situation that's similar to yours. | ||
| So you may not know the details, but you have gained the empathy and the compassion and the understanding to forgive. | ||
| And so the overwhelming volume of these people that you've interacted with, it has to have shifted your idea of what it means to be a person. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| No, I've matured tremendously in the last three years from doing this. | ||
| I mean, I started this just as like, let me just do this crazy project. | ||
| I didn't think it was going to become a success on YouTube, but I knew that I was going to learn a lot about people, about why we self-destruct, about why we self-sabotage, about why we... | ||
| Get in our own way. | ||
| Why would you drink like that to destroy your relationship with your wife, to lose your kids, lose your job, lose your finances, lose everything? | ||
| You're now a drunk living on the street. | ||
| Why would you do that? | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| But if you hear the whole story and what they went through and how they weren't loved as a child and how their dad never neglected them or abused them or whatever, all the pieces start to fit. | ||
| And then you gain some empathy and compassion. | ||
| When you move on from doing this, you're going to just interview interesting people that are doing different kinds of things? | ||
| I did a really great interview with a girl named Kate down in New Orleans. | ||
| She is an obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferer. | ||
| And that was a great interview. | ||
| So many people liked it because it was just like, oh my god, that's me. | ||
| I saw so many comments saying that's what I have. | ||
| I didn't even realize it. | ||
| Because that's my story. | ||
| And I see that in so many of my videos. | ||
| Like, this is my story. | ||
| So I like the mental health stories. | ||
| The sex stories are always fun. | ||
| I find sex interesting. | ||
| Even though I don't make money on YouTube, I'll still do them. | ||
| And I'll put them on my subscription channel sometimes too. | ||
| And then this guy, like the skydiver I mentioned, that's an interesting story because what's interesting about his story is not that he had this crazy one-in-a-million event happen in his life, tragic, is how he views life now. | ||
| That's what the second half of our talk is all about, is how he views life. | ||
| Life and values where he's at in life. | ||
| I mean, he doesn't really have his body to use like he once did. | ||
| Maybe he'll gain it back, hopefully. | ||
| How long ago was his accent? | ||
| Three months. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Three months. | ||
| He just emailed me before I came down here. | ||
| And I'm like, this is great timing. | ||
| Can he walk? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He walks with a cane. | ||
| I don't think he can use his right leg. | ||
| He fell on his right side, so his right leg, his right arm, his right everything. | ||
| He bit his tongue. | ||
| Bit his tongue off, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hemorrhage. | ||
| He said his testicles turned like a cantaloupe. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| I mean, you fall 4,000 feet into a cornfield, some bad shit's gonna happen. | ||
| So, from now on, like, this new direction that you want to take things to, how do you seek out people? | ||
| Do you just, like, when you get emailed, like, this seems interesting? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'll probably post a video on my channel. | ||
| I've been thinking about doing it, I just haven't done it yet, because I just hired somebody new, and I want to get her, like, up to speed on everything. | ||
| But we put out little ads on... | ||
| Instagram and TikTok, not TikTok, Craigslist and things like that. | ||
| And we're getting some response to that, and that's been great. | ||
| That's how I found him. | ||
| But... | ||
| I've always gotten lots of emails from people that like my channel. | ||
| Oh, I want to be on your channel. | ||
| But if they don't send a video, I won't even consider it. | ||
| Because everyone says they have a great story, but I need to see how you speak. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that's a problem that I've had where we're interviewing people who've written books. | ||
| Some of them are not terrible speakers. | ||
| Yeah, and sometimes they talk the way they write. | ||
| Like, pause, um, pause, um, right, click, click, click, because that's how they think. | ||
| No, see, what I do with everybody, I won't even consider you unless you've sent me just a 15 or 30 second video of you just telling me your name and where you're from. | ||
| It's just the basics, so I can hear your voice, see what you look like, see how you speak, because if you're... | ||
| Some people are more charismatic speakers than others. | ||
| What I'm doing is maybe some people look at it as, oh, you're doing this good deed for society. | ||
| And maybe there is some of that, but there's also this is entertainment as well. | ||
| And I'm from advertising. | ||
| I'm slick. | ||
| I still have that in me. | ||
| I don't look like a homeless, disheveled dude. | ||
| I know how to put myself together. | ||
| So my art tends to have some of that quality too. | ||
| So I want it to look and sound good. | ||
| Not technically, but in terms of how you speak. | ||
| How you tell a story. | ||
| I'm looking for great storytelling is what I'm looking for. | ||
| I tell people all the time, rather than telling me the most horrific story that's ever been told, I would rather have you tell a boring story about crack cocaine, but you're a great speaker. | ||
| I had a guy, I had a couple of crack addicts and crystal meth addicts just recently I just interviewed on Skid Row, and they're just great storytellers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| But their story wasn't the most horrific ever, but it's great storytelling and it's fun to listen to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| How often do you consume these videos? | ||
| I mean, are you watching them all day long? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you, like, purposely go out of your way to not? | ||
| Your very first question when we started, I never answered, which is, like, how does it affect me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to understand, like, you have a crew, and you have cameras all set, everything's set. | ||
| I'm using natural light. | ||
| So the sun is going behind the clouds, the sun is moving... | ||
| Throughout an interview, there's noise going outside. | ||
| I'm doing this all by myself. | ||
| I'm operating two cameras. | ||
| I have to make sure the mic... | ||
| I don't use headphones and a mic like this. | ||
| I'm using a lavalier mic that they clip on. | ||
| So I have to make sure that's not getting bumped or knocked off or whatever. | ||
| I'm like a one-man band. | ||
| I'm trying to do two things. | ||
| I'm doing all these things at the same time. | ||
| Oh, and I'm also doing an interview. | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| Let me ask you this question. | ||
| And I'm doing like six or eight of these a day. | ||
| So I have to remember, like, were you molested by your uncle or your dad? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| And I've made this mistake. | ||
| People tell me, so I've got kids and all this. | ||
| And then later on in the interview, I ask them if they have kids. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not because I'm an idiot. | ||
| It's because I'm doing so much at once that I can't possibly absorb everything I'm being told. | ||
| Got it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I'm also interviewing, at least on Skid Row especially, so many, like, The force that comes at me of bullshit and hustling and conning and lying and thievery and all that crap, it's a lot. | ||
| So they recognize you now when you show up? | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| People in Skid Row. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I'm like a fixture there. | ||
| So you're that guy. | ||
| I'm the guy that does those interviews. | ||
| And a lot of people will bring me somebody that they know or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, that happens a lot. | ||
| And you pay those people and... | ||
| I pay the people that bring them. | ||
| I pay the people I interview. | ||
| I pay some people that I've interviewed in the past and I'm helping them out with motel rooms or... | ||
| How did you find... | ||
| One of the most compelling and fascinating videos that I watched was those mountain people. | ||
| Oh, the Whitaker family? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In West Virginia? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How'd you find them? | ||
| That was during Created Equal, the book that I mentioned. | ||
| I was going to each of the lower 48 states, and we were in West Virginia just driving around. | ||
| Axel, my assistant and I, he's worked with me for decades. | ||
| And we're just driving around, looking for anybody interesting to photograph. | ||
| It was just like... | ||
| Let's just see what we can find. | ||
| And we're in a truck stop, convenience store, gas station thing. | ||
| And I'm inside and there's a cop in there. | ||
| And cops always know everybody in their county or whatever. | ||
| This is a Raleigh County cop. | ||
| And I went up to him, told him what I'm doing. | ||
| And he goes, oh yeah, I know all kinds of people. | ||
| I'm like, I bet you do. | ||
| He goes, I get off at two o'clock. | ||
| And I go, I'll meet you here too. | ||
| So we did. | ||
| I've had people like this before who have helped me. | ||
| This guy was probably the best I've ever had. | ||
| He took me to pure gold over and over and over. | ||
| All these interesting people who I photographed for Create Equal. | ||
| He knew exactly what I'm looking for. | ||
| He showed me the best of the best of Raleigh County. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| I'm sure there's more. | ||
| I know there's more. | ||
| The ones he showed me were so great. | ||
| And the first day we did this, we shot this person, we shot that, we shot a third, and then it started raining. | ||
| And my strobe equipment, I always use strobe equipment for my photographs. | ||
| This is photographs only at the time. | ||
| This is for a photo book. | ||
| Got rained on. | ||
| And so we had to pack up and leave. | ||
| Can't rent photo gear in West Virginia, so we just had to go back to LA. And I told him, we'll be back in two weeks. | ||
| So we come back, and he says, when you come back, make sure you bring video cameras. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't do video. | ||
| So I didn't say anything. | ||
| But two weeks later, we come back and he meets us and he goes, did you bring video cameras? | ||
| I'm like, no, I don't do video. | ||
| He got really pissed. | ||
| He's like, you're going to want video. | ||
| I'm like, I don't do video. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Just photos. | ||
| So we follow him. | ||
| He's in one car. | ||
| Not a cop car, but his own private car. | ||
| And we're following him in our rental. | ||
| And we're going off the highway. | ||
| Then we go off this mountain road. | ||
| And it's winding through the mountains. | ||
| Beautiful country. | ||
| Appalachia. | ||
| Western West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, it's right near the border of Kentucky. | ||
| It's so beautiful. | ||
| It's one of the most beautiful parts of the U.S. And this windy road turns into like a gravel road and then turns into a dirt road. | ||
| And there's shacks. | ||
| Every once in a while you see a house. | ||
| Somebody lives there? | ||
| You can't believe people live there. | ||
| And we're very poor. | ||
| I mean, the poverty in that part of West Virginia is like, these people are making, I think, an average of $12,000 a month. | ||
| That's what they live on. | ||
| So we're going down this dirt road, and then we come around this bend. | ||
| We're going really slow. | ||
| $12,000 a month? | ||
| I'm sorry, $12,000 a year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| $12,000 a year. | ||
| How do they live on $12,000 a month? | ||
| I was like, that's actually... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| $12,000 a year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| $12,000 a year. | ||
| Can you imagine that? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's like parts of Kentucky and West Virginia are like that. | ||
| So poor. | ||
| So we're driving down this dirt road. | ||
| We come around this bend. | ||
| There's a shack on the left and there's a trailer on the right. | ||
| Small trailer. | ||
| And there's about 10 or 12 people just walking around, and we're going really slow. | ||
| So they're not used to cars coming by at all, but going that slow, they definitely, we got their attention. | ||
| And it's like everyone you look at, it's like their eyeballs are going this way. | ||
| And a single tooth among them. | ||
| Not a single tooth in any of their heads. | ||
| And they look at us and we look at them and they start yapping and screaming and barking. | ||
| Some of them are just staring at us and drooling. | ||
| Yeah, these people. | ||
| This was the video. | ||
| The inbred family. | ||
| The Whitakers. | ||
| Let's play some of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what are your names? | |
| I'm sorry, who's this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
His name's Ray. | |
| Ray? | ||
| I remember Ray. | ||
| I photographed you, Ray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you remember? | |
| Years ago. | ||
| So that sound is this man barking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lorraine and Timmy. | |
| None of them speak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You guys grew up here in Odd, West Virginia. | |
| How many years have you lived here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I'm alive. | ||
| You're, uh... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You guys, I mean, did you go to school? | |
| You did? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some of your brothers and sisters probably didn't go to school, or how much schooling did they get? | |
| These are all brothers and sisters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Daddy, why didn't we school wrong? | |
| You graduated from what? | ||
| You went to high school, Timmy? | ||
| Timmy graduated high school. | ||
| Doesn't speak a word. | ||
| He's actually Lorraine's daughter. | ||
| Son. | ||
| Oh, son. | ||
| Come right out. | ||
| And that's a man barking for people just listening to this. | ||
| That's all he... | ||
| So they live with a bunch of dogs, and he's adopted their way of communicating. | ||
| I don't know about that, but he does sound like a dog when he speaks. | ||
| Here he is right here So some of it's a dog some of it is him They sound very similar. | ||
| Yeah, that's a dog barking. | ||
| And that's him. | ||
| Now, what is the story of this family? | ||
| So it's Ray on the left, Timmy in the center, Lorraine's son, not daughter, and that's Freddie on the right. | ||
| Freddie has passed away recently. | ||
| So let me tell the story about how we met. | ||
| So we pull up and these people are just staring at us. | ||
| And it's something that, like, it's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| I will never, I'm certain I will never see anything crazier than this. | ||
| We pull the cars over, me and the cop get out, and the cop comes up to me and says, I told you, you should have brought a video camera. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, you're right. | ||
| So I walk over to the house to ask them if I could photograph them. | ||
| And she, I think one of the sisters just points to the Trailer home, across the road. | ||
| So I go to the trailer home, and there's a man sitting on the couch with two women. | ||
| And I poked my head in. | ||
| The door was open, so I poked my head in, and I said, my name's Mark. | ||
| I'm a photographer from California. | ||
| I just started giving my spiel, and he interrupts me. | ||
| He says, sorry, sir, we had death in the family. | ||
| We're mourning. | ||
| We're not interested at this time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm just like, fuck. | |
| Came all the way out here? | ||
| And I gotta be respectful. | ||
| Somebody died. | ||
| So I just like, okay, I'll check in with you later and I left. | ||
| I go back to the cop and Axel and I'm talking to him like, fuck, we came at the wrong time. | ||
| But then I started thinking. | ||
| You know, I'm fast on my feet thinking. | ||
| I'm shooting 8x10 film and 8x10 Polaroids, so you get an instant Polaroid. | ||
| So I have the ability to take pictures of the family, and I thought maybe that might be nice to give them 8x10 prints, these instant Polaroids, of their family. | ||
| And they can include that in the casket of, I think it was their sister-in-law who passed away. | ||
| And you could put the prince in the casket, take the family with her, some symbolic gesture like that. | ||
| So I asked Kenneth, who's one of the brothers who speaks, if I could take his photo. | ||
| And he's always been friendly. | ||
| And he said, yeah, sure, no problem. | ||
| So we set up on the side of the house. | ||
| And I got my backdrop and the light and the camera. | ||
| It's a bit of a production. | ||
| Clearly something unusual is going on here. | ||
| And some pickup truck comes running down the road, sees what's going on, slams on his brake. | ||
| And this dude gets out of the car angry as fuck. | ||
| It looks like he wants to kill me. | ||
| He's just marching over to me. | ||
| I'm like, oh God, this is not going to be pretty. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| He goes, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| Let me explain what I'm doing. | ||
| I grab my book and I show them the samples of other portraits I've done and they're all respectful. | ||
| They're beautiful portraits. | ||
| And I explained that there was a death in the family and I'm going to take photos of the family and they're going to include it in the casket. | ||
| I'm also going to pay these people for letting me take their photos. | ||
| And I calmed them down and eventually he let me be and I took the photo. | ||
| Who was that gentleman? | ||
| He was just one of the neighbors, I think. | ||
| He was protecting those people? | ||
| He was protecting them, yeah. | ||
| Because a lot of people in that area know about them and like to drive by and throw eggs and make fun of them and stuff like that. | ||
| So he thought I was doing something like that. | ||
| So I got him off my back and I'm taking a photo of Kenneth. | ||
| I think I took a photo of Lorraine and her sister Barbara. | ||
| And Lorraine's holding a nephew or something. | ||
| So I had a couple prints already, and I go over to Larry, who was one of the other brothers who was in that trailer, and I showed him the prints, and I said, you know, I have an idea. | ||
| What if I took photos of the family and I gave it to you guys? | ||
| You could include it in the casket with your sister-in-law. | ||
| Would you like me to do that? | ||
| He goes, well, that's fine about me. | ||
| If they want to do it, it's up to them. | ||
| So that gave me the green light to go ahead and do this, and I went back, and I tried to get that photo that you just saw of Ray on the left, Timmy in the center, and then Freddie on the right. | ||
| Timmy and Freddie were cool. | ||
| They'll stand there for as long as I want. | ||
| Freddie was like Ray is now. | ||
| But Ray, this is 2004, so it's, what, 16 years ago? | ||
| 18 years ago. | ||
| Ray was so uncontrollable. | ||
| So I have Freddie and Timmy standing there, and I'd go find Ray, and I'd ask him, Ray, could I ask you to come over here, and I'll take your photo with your brothers. | ||
| And he would come over and he would stand right next to my camera, like right next to it, two inches away from the lens. | ||
| And I'm like, no, no, no, I need you to stand with your brothers. | ||
| And he would get, as soon as I corrected him, he would just flip out and go screaming, running off. | ||
| Pants would fall around his ankles, no belt, and he's wearing jeans that are too big, so his pants fall around his ankles. | ||
| And he runs off and goes to kick a metal garbage can. | ||
| Screaming. | ||
| And this would happen over and over and over. | ||
| I spent like an hour, probably an hour and a half, trying to get him to stand for a portrait. | ||
| Eventually, I tried this over and over again. | ||
| Eventually, I got it to happen. | ||
| And we pack up and we leave. | ||
| And I gave them the prints and I gave them some money as well. | ||
| We're driving away and Axel, before he got on the highway again, I said, dude, you just got to pull over the car. | ||
| I just need to soak in with what just happened. | ||
| That was the craziest shit I've ever seen. | ||
| I've never seen human beings like that. | ||
| That's like being on another planet. | ||
| That was the craziest thing ever. | ||
| And over the years, I kind of maintained a relationship. | ||
| So those photos were put out in my first book, Created Equal, which I mentioned earlier. | ||
| So years go by. | ||
| I popped there again and visited them once or twice over the years when I was doing some other projects for advertising or something in the area. | ||
| So I kind of stayed in touch with them a little bit. | ||
| But then when I started doing Self White Underbelly, I love Appalachia. | ||
| I love going there for content. | ||
| And I find the people just so beautiful and interesting. | ||
| It's a shame that there's drugs there. | ||
| I went there to avoid the drugs, to get away from it, but the drug problem there is worse than L.A. But there's other people who have not touched drugs, and they're my favorites. | ||
| Just the backwoods hillbillies are my favorite. | ||
| They're so beautiful. | ||
| So we're back in West Virginia. | ||
| I'm like, hey, we're close to the Whitakers. | ||
| Let's go drive by. | ||
| So we drive by their house. | ||
| And I'm not thinking of doing an interview with them. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| Because I have these rules that I set for my project for Soft White Underbelly where I kind of do it in a studio. | ||
| I try to. | ||
| And it's an interview where I'm asking questions. | ||
| And these people can barely answer anything. | ||
| They just bark or they stare at you or whatever. | ||
| So I didn't see this as being for my channel. | ||
| I just was going to say hi to them. | ||
| And we pull up and I'm like, you know, life is different now. | ||
| I have a video camera in my pocket. | ||
| Let me just shoot a video of this as I'm saying hi to them. | ||
| And I'll show it to my friends back home who have been here before. | ||
| I've seen them about, you know, I've heard about them before. | ||
| So I'm shooting a video as I'm talking to them. | ||
| And as I'm shooting, I'm realizing this is kind of interesting. | ||
| I wonder if... | ||
| If I stretch this out, maybe it could be a video somehow. | ||
| And I could use the portrait from CreateEqual, because I always include a portrait in all my videos. | ||
| If it doesn't have a portrait, I don't use it. | ||
| I could use it, but then I just proceeded. | ||
| I made it as long as I could. | ||
| I asked them the same question over again. | ||
| They couldn't answer them because they don't really communicate so well. | ||
| But that video, I ended up editing it and putting it together, and I put it on my channel, and now it's got 33 million views. | ||
| 33 million. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| What is the story with that family? | ||
| The parents were double first cousins. | ||
| But in addition to being double first cousins... | ||
| What is double first cousins? | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| But in addition to that, their fathers, on both the mother and the father side, were twins, identical twins. | ||
| So it's like the same person birthed the mom and dad, even though they were different people, but they're identical twins. | ||
| And then the parents were cousins on top of it. | ||
| And then who knows what other environmental issues there are. | ||
| What is a double cousin? | ||
| Double cousins, first cousins, but twice. | ||
| They share both sets of grandparents. | ||
| It can happen both parents of one double first cousin or also the siblings of parents of another double first cousin. | ||
| This is like a puzzle for a test. | ||
| I don't explain it. | ||
| It can happen when two siblings meet and have offsprings for two other siblings. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| But there's a guy who did all the genetic mapping of this, and he just showed me. | ||
| He posted a video on YouTube. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| So he explains the whole genealogy of this. | ||
| So that is this family. | ||
| First double cousins share all four grandparents. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this family was deeply inbred. | ||
| Yeah, and as poor as can be. | ||
| Poorer than poor. | ||
| I mean, the conditions under which they live are, like, unbelievable. | ||
| Like, the house is so filthy. | ||
| How do they get any money? | ||
| I'm sure they get some support from the state or something. | ||
| But when I did that video... | ||
| I just felt like the right thing to do is to help them financially. | ||
| Even though YouTube demonetized that video, eventually I fought YouTube on it, and they eventually monetized it. | ||
| I don't know why they would demonetize it, because there was no swearing, no nothing. | ||
| It's just a poor family, but that's YouTube. | ||
| But eventually I'm making money on that video, so I just figured I'll share it with them. | ||
| And then I got so many people requesting, oh my, how do I help this family? | ||
| So I put up a GoFundMe that's just for them and people donate to it and I give them money. | ||
| I've given them lots of money now. | ||
| You can see in the more recent, there's I think four videos with that family. | ||
| Their living conditions have improved quite a bit. | ||
| So is the entire family inbred? | ||
| The woman who's talking, is she just like a lesser? | ||
| They're all brothers and sisters. | ||
| Except for Timmy who is Lorraine's The family tree is someone put together. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Did you put this together? | ||
| No, I did not. | ||
| This video is four days old. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| This is the one I told you about. | ||
| So the father of John Emery Whitaker and Gracie Whitaker are identical twins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| Maybe the twins born March 1st, 1882. Yeah, so Henry Wade Whitaker and John Whitaker. | ||
| So the children of identical twins then had sex. | ||
| Who are also cousins. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I posted that video, and they've become so popular. | ||
| People want more videos from them all the time, but I don't want to just turn them into a circus act. | ||
| But now their living conditions have improved. | ||
| Yeah, because of meeting me, I'm not saying I did any great thing. | ||
| All I'm just saying is I've helped them out. | ||
| But I'm not going to milk this and turn it into a regular thing. | ||
| People want to see them weekly. | ||
| I'm not going to do that. | ||
| Is that the most bizarre of all the people that you've encountered? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I mean, yeah, probably the most, but man, I've heard so many stories. | ||
| So many women that got pregnant by their dads at 10 years old. | ||
| So many women that have been through some of the most horrific. | ||
| Men, too. | ||
| I mean, I could say some things here, but this video would get demonetized. | ||
| Well, we're on Spotify. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| Okay, so Latoya, who's this black girl, she's on Skid Row to this day. | ||
| I still see her. | ||
| I help her out when I see her sometimes. | ||
| She was getting fucked in the ass by her dad and tore the area between the vagina and the asshole. | ||
| She said, like, 27 stitches. | ||
| To fix that? | ||
| I mean, how that happens and the dad doesn't get... | ||
| Somebody doesn't get investigated, I don't know, but that was a different time, maybe. | ||
| Or somebody's just afraid to... | ||
| Who's going to make that call? | ||
| Who's going to do something? | ||
| So do you, when you, this new project, are you going to do this independently of Soft White Underbelly? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's not a new project. | ||
| It'd just be a slightly... | ||
| A different direction. | ||
| A different direction. | ||
| Because I can't, how many drug addict stories do we need? | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| I mean, I'll do them once in a while still because a lot of my audience likes that. | ||
| But, you know, it's interesting because, like, I'll put up gang member videos and some of the audience is like, oh, I hate these gang members. | ||
| They're too violent. | ||
| I think there's similar lessons. | ||
| I've watched one of the gang member videos today and it's, you know, he was just talking about how no one ever encouraged him in any way when he was growing up. | ||
| He was never worth shit and the only sort of value that he found ever was being a part of the gang. | ||
| Yeah, that's the story. | ||
| That's what happens to these guys. | ||
| And then, you know, I put the Appalachian videos up and some people think they're boring and other people love them and that's, you know, they want more. | ||
| So I do a mixed bag of all kinds of stuff. | ||
| Eventually, I'd like to go to every state and just do interesting stories from all over. | ||
| And if someone has and they're listening to this and they have an interesting story... | ||
| They should contact you on softwhiteunderbelly.com? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's a website that's in the header of the YouTube channel. | ||
| There's an about section up at the top of the screen, I think, or near the top with my email address. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Which is soft underscore white underscore underbelly at yahoo.com. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jamie's good. | ||
| And so, good luck sorting through all those. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| After this. | ||
| After this, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But listen, what you've done is very fascinating and very disturbing, but I think ultimately educational. | ||
| And if anything, I think it will bring a sense of understanding of what these people have been through that, you know, you can't just say, hey, you're lazy, go get a job. | ||
| There's a lot going on. | ||
| And it's horrible. | ||
| And it's, you know, It's showing the flaws in this culture. | ||
| It's showing the massive problems that we have in raising human beings in these gigantic cities. | ||
| It's hard to believe this is the greatest country in the world with these stories. | ||
| How could that be the greatest country in the world? | ||
| Yeah, how could it be? | ||
| But it is. | ||
| That's what's even more fucked, right? | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you, Jeff. | ||
| Thanks for doing what you do. | ||
| It's been very disturbing, but ultimately very educational. | ||
| You do a great job, too. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate you. | |
| All right. |
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