Name: Mark Laita of Soft White Underbelly on Doing Interviews and The Homeless Problem
Uploaded: 2022-12-14T21:38:22.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mark Laita of Soft White Underbelly on Doing Interviews and The Homeless Problem' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-12-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mark Laita of Soft White Underbelly on Doing Interviews and The Homeless Problem' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-12-14. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- When you first started doing these videos,
did you have to figure out a way to balance
your own mental health with interviewing these people?
Because I gotta tell you, I watched a bunch of videos today
in the gym while I was working out,
and I felt like shit.
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,
'cause I'm immersed in it.
- Yeah.
- 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 doing interviews with Elon Musk
and Dave Chappelle and Huberman, and they're great.
You know they're gonna be great.
You don't need to do eight or 10 in a day like I do.
- Right.
- I'll do six, seven, eight, nine, 10 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.
- Yeah.
- Where there was this one woman, she was missing one of her toes,
and 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, do you have children?
- I do. I have two daughters, 19 and 22.
So that, to me, was like, hearing the stories of how they were all abused
sexually and physically
when they were children, and seeing what it leads to.
- Right. So I'm aware that these things go on.
- Yeah.
- I've been down on Skid Row for 12 years now, maybe 13 years.
And so I know what'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.
- Whew.
- Yeah. It's a big, it's a drastic change from one to the other.
- Yeah.
- Um, 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 I 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 is exploitive.
You're exploiting these poor drug addicts.
Like I understand there's an exploitive element to, to it.
All photography has that, you know, element to it, but let's say I never did
these videos.
Let's say we just pretend they never pretend these problems don't exist.
It's all going to continue.
And Caroline's kids are going to get molested by the babysitter or by the uncle
or by whoever.
And it's going to repeat the pattern over and over and over.
So I figured by putting out these, you know, it's disguised as entertainment.
But what it really is, is if you 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 1% of them had fathers that were in their lives.
Right.
Like, where are the dads?
What are they doing that's so important that they can't raise their own kid?
Well, they're probably fucked up too, which is the never ending cycle.
It's generation, it's cycle after cycle.
Have you interviewed anyone and then come back years later and they straighten
their life out?
Yeah, yeah.
That's happened.
Yeah?
Who?
I've done 5,000, and it's literally like four that I know of.
And what has that been like?
Like, can you give me an example of one?
Yeah, I mean, and even though they've done it doesn't mean they didn't break
down
and relapse tomorrow, you know, today.
Right.
That happens all the time.
Yeah.
So 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're
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.
And I started helping them.
And like, we're going to get you to rehab.
And, you know, I spent so much money.
Like I've wasted so much money.
My own hard-earned money.
I just like put towards somebody that had no intention of really ever doing
anything.
Well, it seems like it has to come from the individual.
It can'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.
You'd have to be spending easy 150,000 at least a year to house them, to feed
them,
to transport them, to get them therapy, to, you know, all the drugs, all the
mental health drugs,
all the everything they're going to need, doctors, all that stuff.
It's a lot of money for one person, and it may not even work.
Right.
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.
Like, when am I going to sit there and take somebody under my wing and save
them?
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 out their bank account
to save somebody.
But even that probably wouldn't do it.
And still wouldn't work.
What do you think could be done?
Well, I mean, it's such a complicated problem.
You look at homeless.
You have the homelessness problem.
You have it a little bit here in Austin, but in LA, it's really bad.
Let's explain Skid Row to people.
Skid Row is a neighborhood.
It's probably, I don't know how many square blocks.
But maybe it's, it goes from like roughly, because it spreads out a lot.
And it's spread out since I've been there.
But let's call it like from 4th or 5th Street to 8th Street.
This is just east of downtown LA.
And downtown LA is cool.
It's nice.
But just, just east of downtown.
I know, I know.
But it looks like Austin.
I wouldn't recommend people visit.
No, no, you wouldn't.
It's not a place.
No, you wouldn't go down.
If you want to go to LA, you don't go.
Every other town, you go downtown.
Right.
Every, 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.
That is the.
Yeah, Jamie's got an image of it.
Yeah, there it is.
Let's, let's find some photos of it.
Because it's, it's kind of an enormous swath of land that's been completely
abandoned.
It seems like.
But like, like this girl smoking right here.
Yeah.
That goes on every block.
The cops will roll by.
Nobody's stopping her.
She's smoking meth.
She's smoking.
Something.
Meth or crack or whatever.
Fentanyl.
Yeah.
And they're, they're living like that.
Let's find a video of it so you can see this, this scale of it.
Because it's pretty, it's pretty intense.
When you see people like, I found out about Skid Row when we were filming Fear
Factor downtown.
We filmed a lot of episodes of Fear Factor downtown.
And I just, 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.
Are you aware of that story?
I don't, but I've heard everything.
It's a woman who got off her meds.
And it was, there was a video of her in an elevator.
And it looked like someone was following her.
And she was like looking out of the elevator.
And then the woman turned up missing.
And her family went to look for her.
And what it turned out was she, that's a crime scene.
Cecil Hotel.
I'm sorry.
Did I say the Jerome?
Cecil.
Oh Cecil.
Where's the Jerome?
Is that down there too?
I have no idea.
I don't know that Jerome, but Cecil's notorious.
The Cecil.
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 be, 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.
Stories get exaggerated over the years.
So this documentary was about this woman and she had gotten off her medication.
And at first it was like a crime murder mystery.
And then as it goes on, you realize, oh, no, this lady had just escaped from
her family
and got off her meds and she was paranoid schizophrenic.
And it's always, none of these stories are as simple as, oh, I just got shot or
I just got
stabbed.
Yeah.
There's mental health that's mixed in.
I mean, the whole problem, like you asked me what the problem is with all this.
So you see homelessness.
You see all these homeless people on the street in LA or in San Francisco or
Seattle or
Portland or Vancouver or you see it in a lot of cities.
It's really bad in LA and San Francisco and the West Coast for some reason has
a ton of it.
So, oh, you just, like what LA 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 get them, put them all in rehab, which is going to be tremendously
expensive.
It's not going to work all the time, but that would be part of the solution.
But it's not going to be the solution.
So you peel back the layer of drug addiction, you've got mental health.
They all have mental health issues.
And you can't just magically fix their mental health.
You know, the damage was done when they were little kids.
When they were five, six, seven, eight years old.
With whether it's neglect or abuse, you know, physical abuse, sexual abuse,
whatever.
Just terrible parenting.
Yeah.
Terrible role models.
Terrible.
And they don't learn this.
You know, let's say you fixed, 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've fixed 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.
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 like advance their lives.
I think it boils down to their self-worth is so broken that they don't believe
they deserve anything better.
Yeah.
So if you don't believe you deserve anything better, you could be handed a
million dollars.
Here's a winning lottery ticket.
Go cash it in.
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.

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

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- When you first started doing these videos,
did you have to figure out a way to balance
your own mental health with interviewing these people?
Because I gotta tell you, I watched a bunch of videos today
in the gym while I was working out,
and I felt like shit.
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,
'cause I'm immersed in it.
- Yeah.
- 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 doing interviews with Elon Musk
and Dave Chappelle and Huberman, and they're great.
You know they're gonna be great.
You don't need to do eight or 10 in a day like I do.
- Right.
- I'll do six, seven, eight, nine, 10 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.
- Yeah.
- Where there was this one woman, she was missing one of her toes,
and 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, do you have children?
- I do. I have two daughters, 19 and 22.
So that, to me, was like, hearing the stories of how they were all abused
sexually and physically
when they were children, and seeing what it leads to.
- Right. So I'm aware that these things go on.
- Yeah.
- I've been down on Skid Row for 12 years now, maybe 13 years.
And so I know what'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.
- Whew.
- Yeah. It's a big, it's a drastic change from one to the other.
- Yeah.
- Um, 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 I 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 is exploitive.
You're exploiting these poor drug addicts.
Like I understand there's an exploitive element to, to it.
All photography has that, you know, element to it, but let's say I never did
these videos.
Let's say we just pretend they never pretend these problems don't exist.
It's all going to continue.
And Caroline's kids are going to get molested by the babysitter or by the uncle
or by whoever.
And it's going to repeat the pattern over and over and over.
So I figured by putting out these, you know, it's disguised as entertainment.
But what it really is, is if you 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 1% of them had fathers that were in their lives.
Right.
Like, where are the dads?
What are they doing that's so important that they can't raise their own kid?
Well, they're probably fucked up too, which is the never ending cycle.
It's generation, it's cycle after cycle.
Have you interviewed anyone and then come back years later and they straighten
their life out?
Yeah, yeah.
That's happened.
Yeah?
Who?
I've done 5,000, and it's literally like four that I know of.
And what has that been like?
Like, can you give me an example of one?
Yeah, I mean, and even though they've done it doesn't mean they didn't break
down
and relapse tomorrow, you know, today.
Right.
That happens all the time.
Yeah.
So 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're
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.
And I started helping them.
And like, we're going to get you to rehab.
And, you know, I spent so much money.
Like I've wasted so much money.
My own hard-earned money.
I just like put towards somebody that had no intention of really ever doing
anything.
Well, it seems like it has to come from the individual.
It can'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.
You'd have to be spending easy 150,000 at least a year to house them, to feed
them,
to transport them, to get them therapy, to, you know, all the drugs, all the
mental health drugs,
all the everything they're going to need, doctors, all that stuff.
It's a lot of money for one person, and it may not even work.
Right.
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.
Like, when am I going to sit there and take somebody under my wing and save
them?
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 out their bank account
to save somebody.
But even that probably wouldn't do it.
And still wouldn't work.
What do you think could be done?
Well, I mean, it's such a complicated problem.
You look at homeless.
You have the homelessness problem.
You have it a little bit here in Austin, but in LA, it's really bad.
Let's explain Skid Row to people.
Skid Row is a neighborhood.
It's probably, I don't know how many square blocks.
But maybe it's, it goes from like roughly, because it spreads out a lot.
And it's spread out since I've been there.
But let's call it like from 4th or 5th Street to 8th Street.
This is just east of downtown LA.
And downtown LA is cool.
It's nice.
But just, just east of downtown.
I know, I know.
But it looks like Austin.
I wouldn't recommend people visit.
No, no, you wouldn't.
It's not a place.
No, you wouldn't go down.
If you want to go to LA, you don't go.
Every other town, you go downtown.
Right.
Every, 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.
That is the.
Yeah, Jamie's got an image of it.
Yeah, there it is.
Let's, let's find some photos of it.
Because it's, it's kind of an enormous swath of land that's been completely
abandoned.
It seems like.
But like, like this girl smoking right here.
Yeah.
That goes on every block.
The cops will roll by.
Nobody's stopping her.
She's smoking meth.
She's smoking.
Something.
Meth or crack or whatever.
Fentanyl.
Yeah.
And they're, they're living like that.
Let's find a video of it so you can see this, this scale of it.
Because it's pretty, it's pretty intense.
When you see people like, I found out about Skid Row when we were filming Fear
Factor downtown.
We filmed a lot of episodes of Fear Factor downtown.
And I just, 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.
Are you aware of that story?
I don't, but I've heard everything.
It's a woman who got off her meds.
And it was, there was a video of her in an elevator.
And it looked like someone was following her.
And she was like looking out of the elevator.
And then the woman turned up missing.
And her family went to look for her.
And what it turned out was she, that's a crime scene.
Cecil Hotel.
I'm sorry.
Did I say the Jerome?
Cecil.
Oh Cecil.
Where's the Jerome?
Is that down there too?
I have no idea.
I don't know that Jerome, but Cecil's notorious.
The Cecil.
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 be, 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.
Stories get exaggerated over the years.
So this documentary was about this woman and she had gotten off her medication.
And at first it was like a crime murder mystery.
And then as it goes on, you realize, oh, no, this lady had just escaped from
her family
and got off her meds and she was paranoid schizophrenic.
And it's always, none of these stories are as simple as, oh, I just got shot or
I just got
stabbed.
Yeah.
There's mental health that's mixed in.
I mean, the whole problem, like you asked me what the problem is with all this.
So you see homelessness.
You see all these homeless people on the street in LA or in San Francisco or
Seattle or
Portland or Vancouver or you see it in a lot of cities.
It's really bad in LA and San Francisco and the West Coast for some reason has
a ton of it.
So, oh, you just, like what LA 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 get them, put them all in rehab, which is going to be tremendously
e