Mark Laita, a former advertising photographer who built a million-dollar career with brands like Apple, pivots to Soft White Underbelly—a raw YouTube project documenting America’s fringe, from polygamists in Utah to Skid Row hustlers and the Whitaker family, whose extreme poverty and inbreeding he exposed. His unfiltered interviews, like those with pimps or Marshall (who abused his daughter for years), reveal systemic failures: $7.2B spent on California’s homelessness without progress, schools prioritizing trigonometry over empathy, and a culture glorifying "bad" behavior while dismissing discipline. Despite YouTube demonetizing his work—even educational content—Laita’s GoFundMe efforts transformed lives, like the Whitaker family’s, though he now shifts focus to broader struggles, including mental health and resilience, questioning why such extremes persist in "the greatest country." [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.