Mark Laita: Soft White Underbelly

Our interview of Mark Laita for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere.

Mark is the creator and host of the Soft White Underbelly YouTube channel. Prior to starting the channel, he was a successful advertising photographer for over 40 years.

Mark has a fascination with people living alternative lifestyles and decided to start interviewing and documenting their stories, which has led to the creation of his highly popular YouTube channel, which has 6 million subscribers.

Mark has conducted nearly 9,000 interviews over the past 6 years, and has a unique ability to get people to open up and share deeply personal stories, even about topics like murder and addiction.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by Mark Lata. Welcome to the podcast.

Mark Laita:
Thank you, Jon.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And you have a YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly?

Mark Laita:
Yes,

Jon Pfeiffer:
As of last night, it had 5.98 million subscribers.

Mark Laita:
I think during this call it'll probably hit 6 million.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, cool. Then I'll just put it at six.

Mark Laita:
Yeah, it's going to be six in a couple of minutes.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Pretty substantial Instagram following a pretty substantial TikTok following, and I want to ask you about your channel and I want to ask you about,

Mark Laita:
And then Facebook is the same size as YouTube almost.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Oh, is it? Okay. And then you were interviewed by Joe Rogan, and I want to end with that because not everybody's been interviewed by Joe Rogan. So let's start from the beginning. Where are you from originally?

Mark Laita:
I was born in Detroit, and then a year right around the year the Tigers won the World Series, which was 68. We moved to Chicago. I lived in Chicago until I was 26, so I really think of myself as a Chicago one.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. And then what was your occupation before you started the channel?

Mark Laita:
A advertising photographer. An advertising photographer.

Jon Pfeiffer:
For how many years did you do that?

Mark Laita:
Shoot? Since I was fresh out of high. I mean, I went to college, but I was really into doing that kind of stuff from as a teenager up until around 59 years old

Jon Pfeiffer:
On 64. What made you decide to leave advertising and start a channel?

Mark Laita:
Advertising got stale for me. The industry had changed. It was changing and it has continued to change. Technology wasn't really good for people like me. I was the top of the food chain of photographers that did what I did and I charged whatever I wanted to, and it was a really great career. I'm really proud of that. Probably what I'm proudest of in my life, but other than my family. But it was changing and just the clients no longer wanted the best of the best. They just wanted something that looked good on a phone and it just like, there was no reason to be the Rolls-Royce of what I did because everyone wanted the Honda Civic.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then you started Soft White underbelly. What was the beginning, what's the origin story of that channel?

Mark Laita:
Well, I mean, even when I was a teenager in Chicago, I'd be downtown and I remember being down there with my parents, or when I was driving, I was downtown a lot, so I was a suburban kid. I lived in Elmhurst, the suburbs of Chicago, like 20 minutes, half an hour out of downtown. But I was downtown almost every day, especially after I got a little bit older. I remember as a teenager I'd see these homeless, just the interesting characters that are just on the streets. I mean, I remember seeing a bunch of homeless, probably alcoholics that had their bottle of whatever in the paper bag, and they're just sleeping on a park bench, and I'm like, man, that is the craziest shit ever. I grew up, I have a great family, I had a great family, great childhood. My parents loved me to death. My mom especially, my dad did too. But he had a very different style, probably more classic fathering style for the sixties. But I've always been fascinated with these people that live these very alternate lives, very alternative lifestyles.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Where did the name come from? The name for the channel?

Mark Laita:
I could answer that three or four different ways. I mean, there's a band called Bluster Cult. Their original name was Softwood Underbelly. So I remember hearing it there. But before that, I remember hearing my dad who was a sales rep for industrial Racks in the Midwest, and I remember hearing his, my dark room was close to his office, so I could hear through the wall, him making his sales calls, and I remember him saying to somebody, I've heard him say it more than once. Oh, that's the soft underbelly of the situation or of whatever he was describing, meaning the most vulnerable. That's the weakest link. That's the weakest. It's synonymous kind of with the weakest link or the most vulnerable part.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I had not heard the BU used to be called that.

Mark Laita:
Yeah, I mean it was before they became anything. I think they were just a bar band at the time.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I was watching the intro video that you have on your channel, and you were saying

Mark Laita:
It is a great name though, and it's great. I'll go back to the name. It's a great name, and it makes people go, what the heck is this?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, that's exactly right.

Mark Laita:
It's not about, it has to have some really great meaning. It's just an interesting name.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I was reading your intro or reading, listening to your intro video. You were talking about that the videos were meant to create awareness on wealth inequities, education inequities, opportunity inequities. How much has that played into where your interviewees are, are those inequities?

Mark Laita:
There's this web of all these things that are all combined, but the majority of the stories you hear on my channel, but not all, because I'm branching out now and you're getting all kinds of stuff. My last interview I did before we started here was with two, they're now fentanyl addicts, but they were alcoholics and there were other types of addicts, but they both came from great childhoods, especially the husband. And they're a couple living on the street. They've lost their kids, they've lost everything. They're just living in a tent on the street addicted to fentanyl. And it's like, how does that happen to somebody who's had a great childhood and all that? But it happens. These drugs are like quicksand and you set your foot in it and you're just pulled in and you can't pull out sometimes. But those are some of the stories I'm also doing sometimes, especially starting out, I did a lot of gang members. So those aren't necessarily drug stories or sex workers, same thing. Not necessarily drug stories. So whether it's really just all different forms of self-destruction, a lot of people, people like you and me, John, we love to self-destruct.

Speaker 3:

Oh, I get it.

Mark Laita:
We like to destroy our relationships. We like to destroy our health. We like to destroy, we our financial, everything. It's just

Jon Pfeiffer:
At one level or another.

Mark Laita:
I mean, that's probably why my channel has such a large audience is because I think a lot of people relate to these stories in one way or another. To me, the most fascinating, I've never done drugs, so I don't even know about these drug addict stories. I can't relate to them at all. It's really my family or friends are laughing, why are you doing drug addict stories? You're the last guy in the, so I don't know why I'm doing that, but to me, the gambler stories, I've interviewed gamblers who have just destroyed everything. Their marriages, they're broke, they've lost their homes, they've lost their families, they've lost everything for gambling. And it's like, that's fascinating to me. If there's one vice I kind of have, it's probably I like risk. I like things that are risky, go to Vegas or I don't gamble, but I like risky things in my life. This project is probably a good example of that.

Jon Pfeiffer:
We'll get into first the playlist and then the three most popular in terms of views videos. But how do you find people that you're going to interview?

Mark Laita:
Well, I started out doing it many, many years before I started Software Underbelly, I had a studio down on Skid Row when I had an advertising studio in Culver City, which is basically the heart of la, I realized I wanted to do something that was a little more personal, something that I really loved to do, because advertising was just getting a little stale for me. So I got a little studio on Skid Row, and I would set it up there and I would just go down there and find people on the street to just do portraits of just portraits. I'm a photographer, I'm not a videographer, I'm not an interviewer. But then after a while, Canon came out with these cameras that did video and it was pretty good quality, and I just started playing around doing some interviews. And the first dozen or so that I did, they were really fascinating. And the first one I did was, I dunno if it was the first one, but one of the first ones I did was just, oh my God, that's like a movie. That was an interview with Caroline, who's people that watch my channel regularly will know she's a heroin addict, prostitute on Skid Row. And it was just like, wow, that's really something. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I'm not a videographer, so I can't really do anything with it. I don't think YouTube existed then.

And it was just like, well, that's interesting. But I just put it down for a while and I kind of got back into it, back and forth, back and forth, and then I phased out of advertising. I gave up my studio in Culver City, and I was like, what am I going to do now? What do I do now with my life? I could retire, I could do another other people my age do, but I'm not really a typical person my age. So I started this and I remember that I love doing these portraits and interviews on Skid Row. So I just got another studio on Skid Row, and I just started doing them every day. I've done it every day for five and a half years now. It'll be six years in April.

Speaker 3:

Go ahead.

Mark Laita:
And I just started doing interviews. I was doing 6, 7, 8, 9 a day every day and just seven days a week all year long. I would just keep doing 'em and I would pick out the ones that are the most interesting.

Speaker 3:

I

Mark Laita:
Wasn't posting everything. I'll do 5, 6, 7, 8 in a day, and I'll use maybe two or one or maybe sometimes three if I get lucky. And I started posting 'em up on YouTube, and I swear I didn't think a dozen people were going to find this stuff. Interesting. I tuned. I never really watched YouTube, so I didn't know anything about it, but then I learned pretty quickly, there's a lot of people that watch this kind of stuff, and my channel just took off. I remember hitting a thousand subscribers. I'm like, that's crazy. Then I hit 20,000 I remember, and then I hit a hundred thousand. I hit a million so fast. It was crazy.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I read last night where more people watched election coverage on YouTube than on the news networks.

Mark Laita:
Yeah, no, YouTube's a very powerful platform. It is a really good platform too.

Jon Pfeiffer:
A lot. Have you ever had issues with YouTube's community guidelines?

Mark Laita:
Every day. Every day. Every day.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Right

Mark Laita:
Now, I'm

Jon Pfeiffer:
Having one. If you want to get back to playlist, you F as of last night, 900.

Mark Laita:
So back to your story with the community guidelines, I see people look at my, they'll make comments on my channel. Oh, he's just making bang. He's making all this money off all these homeless people. They don't realize that if the story has anything to do with sex or sex work or anything like that, it gets demonetized. And if you're familiar with my channel, that's most of my story. So a lot of my videos get demonetized.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, actually, yes. Last night I was looking on playlist and there are 453 interviews under the playlist, sex workers, those are all demonetized use under addiction and homelessness.

Mark Laita:
Some of those will get monetized. A lot of 'em will.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And the playlist that I found the most fascinating was 80 videos under Appalachia.

Mark Laita:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It's like I grew up in Nebraska, so it just,

Mark Laita:
Yeah, I grew up in Detroit and Chicago and my family would drive straight south to Florida, usually one time we went to New Orleans. But I remember driving through Kentucky and it was my favorite part of the trip to just be, I was fascinated when you go through that, the really, I don't know what route my dad would take. I was asking him recently, and he didn't even remember what highway we took, but I remember going through some of the side roads and you'd see all these dilapidated shacks with all the garbage just strewn down the side of the hill. And I'm just like, look at that. It's kind of like very similar to the homeless alcoholic I would see on the streets in Chicago. I was just fascinated with it. Who lives like that and what's that person, and what do they talk like and what do they do for money? And I want to know all these stories. So that's basically what I'm doing now. I, I find people interesting.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I remember growing up and seeing those kind of houses, but they would always have a TV in town.

Mark Laita:
No, but a lot of these people still to this day don't have electricity. They don't have running water. They don't have heat, they don't have,

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do you build, when you start, it's not your normal interview. How do you build trust with your subjects?

Mark Laita:
That's a great question. I don't know what exactly I do, but I realized quickly that I am doing something right. And I knew this even before I started this project. I would sit with clients. I remember this one. It might've been a boyfriend, not a boyfriend, but a friend of a boyfriend of my sister's who was like a biker, not a hell's angel biker, but a biker nonetheless. And he's just like, he would sit down with me even though I was a little kid, and I had a way, something about my personality made him feel like I wasn't judging him, made him feel like really relaxed. And he just started telling me all this personal shit about his childhood and his life, and confiding all this stuff that most people would never, ever share with a stranger. So I've always had something about my personality that helps people open up. I don't know what it is. And to this day, after doing all, I've done almost 9,000 interviews now. I don't know what I have. I don't know what it is,

Jon Pfeiffer:
But I mean, it's something because is your view, other than that, they're comfortable with you on why some of the people will open up and say some of the things that you would never tell to your closest friend?

Mark Laita:
Yeah, I think a lot, whether you've done the most horrific things in the world, like murder, I've had people admit to murdering somebody on my channel. And when you have deep, dark secrets, can't, it's very, very difficult to keep it inside. And sometimes you never get an opportunity to talk about it, so you have to just keep it inside and it eats at you. So all of a sudden I bring 'em into this studio and there's nobody around. It's just silent. I'm just sitting here listening to you. You're going to talk. I'm not going to interrupt you. And that gives them, it is like a forum for them to just say whatever they want to say and they'll unload with stuff they've never talked about. I have so many interviews where people said, I've never talked about that before in my life.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Have you ever felt threatened by a guest?

Mark Laita:
I had that one guy pull a gun on me? No, when they're in that, what's that?

Jon Pfeiffer:
I take that as a yes.

Mark Laita:
Yeah. Well, I mean, that was one rare time, but even then I wasn't, I mean, yeah, that was no fun. But I think when people are in this situation, the cameras are on them and it's all about them. That's not a situation where they're going to do something to hurt me. And I'm not really here to hurt anybody, so I'm not doing anything to piss anybody off. I've done so many thousands of interviews, and no one's ever really come back and say, to come back with me with having a problem with what I did. I didn't edit it to make them look like a fool. I didn't take out the part where they said something to make them look good. I try not to edit anything out. I try to treat them with respect. I give them their dignity. I light them in a way that makes them look flattering, I hope. And it's like I'm honoring these people. And these people are rarely honored. They're rarely looked at in this way. So I think by doing that, it's giving them a little bit of respect, which they rarely get.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Last night I watched part of a prison interview. How do you get permission to film in prison?

Mark Laita:
It is difficult, but if you're persistent, you can sometimes make things happen. Now that my channel is very popular, I get people emailing me all the time. I have Noel, my assistant, who just goes through the emails. That's all she does is goes through emails and finds, this one's interesting. That one's interesting. You may want to consider this one. And I'll go through those ones that she'll pick out. And I think there's a couple, you're probably talking about the ones I did in Kentucky, somebody who works, he was a jailer, or he works in the prison or jail. It's a jail, emailed me and said, Hey, you want to do interviews here? And I'm like, hell yes, I do. And I was actually coming out there in a few weeks. So we decided, I've been there twice doing that there. I love shooting in jails and prisons. Prisons especially.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Why is that?

Mark Laita:
Well, every single person in that prison has a story, every single one. And they would love to share it. They don't really typically share their stories too much.

Jon Pfeiffer:
No. Do you have a favorite guest you've had?

Mark Laita:
I mean, I really love everybody I've interviewed. They're all, I love like saying, which of your kids is your favorite? But that's

Jon Pfeiffer:
What I was thinking as I was asking that question.

Mark Laita:
But there are certain guests that are just incredible storytellers, incredible. Some of the best. I mean, that's really sometimes what I feel like what I'm doing is just capturing great storytelling. I could name about six things I feel like I'm doing, and some days I feel like I'm just capturing storytelling. Other days, I feel like I'm informing the world about things that are screwed up about our society, and sometimes I'm helping people or whatever. But my favorite people I've interviewed, maybe the best storytellers, like Michael Dowd, the corrupt cop in New York City is a magnificent storyteller. You want to see great storytelling. That first video that Mike did, which has millions and millions of views, it's the best storytelling you could ever find. It's just the best.

And Mike is a great dude. Now, he was in prison, did his time and all that. And he just talks about what he did and how he did it and how he felt. And when he came in to the studio, I said, Hey, rather than me asking you all these dumb questions, where are you from? What was your childhood like? How'd you grow up? What made you want to become a cop? All these stupid interruptions that I'm going to, can you just tell this story without me saying a single word? He goes, oh, yeah, sure, no problem. And he is a New Yorker, and he knows how to tell a story. So I just sat back and let him go. Didn't say a word until the very end. And I said, thank you. And that was it. And it's magnificent. I think it's still, to this day, it's probably my favorite. I mean, also, there's another an FBI agent named Giovanni Rocco who did a four hour talk on my channel. And that's another very similar, little different style of storytelling, but oh my God, the best four hours you could ever spend. If you're into that kind of content of cops and robbers and that kind of stuff, it's magnificent. Great, great, great storytelling.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I picked for this next series of questions, I picked the top three subjects, I guess that got the most views. The first one, the inbred family, the Whitaker had 43 million views.

Mark Laita:
Wow.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How did you find them?

Mark Laita:
Oh, did I find them?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Oh, by the way, before I, and then I'll let you off in talking. There are 17 interviews with that family or with family related to them.

Mark Laita:
17.

Jon Pfeiffer:
17.

Mark Laita:
Are you sure?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, unless YouTube lied to me last night.

Mark Laita:
Well, maybe they're including shorts, maybe. I did some shorts too, but I don't really count shorts as anything. Shorts are like ads for my videos, basically. But I've done at least a dozen. I know that my first book, which was a collection of American portraits, I went to each of the lower 48 states, and I was in West Virginia. This was about in 2004. And I was in a gas station truck stop, something like that. And there was a cop in there, and I went up to 'em and told 'em what I'm doing, and he goes, oh, I could help you. I know all kinds of interesting people. I'm like, really? He goes, yeah, get off at two o'clock. You want to meet me here? And I'm like, sure, I'll meet you right here at two o'clock. So he goes, I'm going to show you some crazy stuff. So we meet him at two o'clock and he shows us some really great people that I talked to him into letting me photograph them. And then it started raining really hard, and we just couldn't even, it's so muddy. It is so rough there. It's just like you couldn't do anything. So we left and I said, I'll be back in two weeks. And he says, make sure when you come back, bring video cameras. And I'm like, well, I don't shoot video. So this is 2004. I wasn't shooting video.

And I just kind of said, okay, okay, okay, so whatever. I come back two weeks later and he takes us down this windy road, and we're driving through the woods and it's a dirt road and it's a gravel, and then it's barely a road. And we come around this bend and there's a motor home on one side, and it looks like a dilapidated shack across the street. And it's like that scene in deliverance with the little kid

Times 10. There's all these people running around. The people are barking. Some of 'em are just staring drooling at you. Their eyes are going off in different directions. Nobody's got a tooth in their head. It's the craziest shit you've ever seen. It's hard to believe this existed in America. And it's a long story, which I think I tell on that Joe Rogan podcast. It was a major feat just to get the photograph, but I got most of the family to allow me to photograph them for that book. So that was 2004. So you go back now we move it forward to probably 20 20, 20 21. I'm in West Virginia again. I'm like, Hey. And I said to Axel, who was my assistant, same guy I was with when I did that the first time back in 2004, they said, let's go say hi to the Whitakers. I'm like, oh yeah, we're not too far away.

So we drive over and we say hi to him, and now I've got an iPhone in my pocket and it's got a pretty good video camera on it. I'm like, that was not my intention to shoot a video for my channel. If you look at the way it's shot, it doesn't look like anything from my channel. So I didn't even have a portrait, the portrait I used from the 2004 shoot. So it really didn't, all my videos have a portrait in them, and that's really the most important part of the video for me. So my intention by shooting this video was not to put on my channel. It was just to show my friends. They're all fascinated with the Whitakers. They want to see what they look like and sound like and all that. And so I walk up, I'm shooting this video, and then as I'm shooting it, I realize, you know what?

Maybe I just need to loosen the rules that I give myself in this channel and just relax them a little bit. And maybe this would be interesting content. And I just continued to shoot it. And I just sat there with my phone. And then when it was all done, I'm watching it As we're driving back to the airport, I'm like, this could actually work on my channel, and I could use the portrait from 2004 and this could actually work. So I get back to LA and I edit it, and I post it. And that sucker's got 43 million views now.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, one of the favorite ones of that group is the Walmart shopping Drip. Get them to Walmart.

Mark Laita:
I tend to be generous with the people I interview. I mean, I try to control my spending, but basically every dollar I make on this channel goes back into the people you see on the channel. So I've given them lots of stuff, and I just thought it'd be fun to document rather than just me handing 'em some cash. Let's take 'em to Walmart and get 'em whatever they want. And they were pretty respectful about it. They didn't exploit the fact that I was buying whatever they wanted. I told 'em, just get whatever you want.

Speaker 3:

So

Mark Laita:
I think the bill came to, I forget how much we spent. I thought it was a little over 2000 or a little over 1000. I can't remember which it was. I don't remember. Maybe over a thousand.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So the second most popular subject is a prostitute, exotic,

Mark Laita:
Exotic

Jon Pfeiffer:
With

Mark Laita:
Chelsea, goes by the name as Ryan.

Jon Pfeiffer:
In one of the interviews you said that she texts you every day.

Mark Laita:
Every day. She was doing it 20 minutes ago before this call. She's probably texted me during this call.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What prompted that? Do you have any idea?

Mark Laita:
I think that's her hustle. Most women, most people would have a job, and that's how they support themselves. This woman, I think, supports herself by asking people for money or conning them or extorting them or selling her body, which is what she used to do, or doing whatever the hustle can be to just whatever it'll take to get money from people. And to me, most people would listen to that and like, well, you should avoid that person. But if you look at what my channel is, it's a collection of artists, liars, addicts, hustlers, Brooks, basically nar dwells and a pathological liar or artist, whatever she is, is gold. In that first video, which got 40, no, 20 something million.

Jon Pfeiffer:
20 million years.

Mark Laita:
20 million, yeah. She got five marriage proposals. She got five marriage proposals. On that first video, I had a GoFundMe because so many people wanted to donate to her. And then she does present this compelling story where like, oh my God, this poor little angel, she's being exploited by all these pimps and she's on the streets, and she grew up in the foster home, and it's a really heartbreaking story, and she knows how to milk it. And she got like $60,000 worth of donations from my viewers. So we all fell for this girl. There was a time early on in that first video where everybody, 100% of the audience, the commenters were sympathetic to her story. We all bought it. But then after the second video, or maybe further down the road, they started, I started seeing comments like, yeah, this is a con artist. This is a pathological liar. This is a psychopath. This is. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? What are you talking about? I don't see it. And then at that point, I was doling out the $6,000 in donations to her, because that's what I have to do. It was donated to her, so I got to give it to her, but I wasn't giving it all in one lump. I was trying to just give it to her in small bits so it would last. And she would use it responsibly, hopefully.

But you also have to understand how busy I am. I'm shooting all day every day, so I don't have time to like, oh, let me walk you into a rehab. Let me get you therapy. Let me get you drug counseling and all that kind of stuff. I don't have, I'm one person. I'm just one dude with a camera. That's all I am. So a lot of people complain that you're giving a drug addict cash. I'm like, yes, I'm guilty of that. I did. But make a long story short, I started things, started looking fishy with what was going on, and I had her up in a room, like a monthly hotel type thing. It was an apartment, but it was a month by month thing.

And I was talking with the manager. I'm like, do you see anything fishy going on with the unit that I rented? And she goes, oh yeah, there's this black dude. He looks pretty shady, and he's coming in and out of that room all the time. I'm like, really? Because telling me she's there with her kids though, even though I've never seen the kids, and just to protect my viewers, I'm like, I don't want this to go really bad. I don't want this to be really embarrassing. So I just went over the apartment. I don't want to bother her, but I knock on the door and there's no answer. And so no one's home. I go back to the manager, I say, can I get an extra key for that unit? I'm just going to just take a peek, make sure there's a crib or whatever there is for kids. And it was embarrassing what I saw, but there was no sign of any child. There was everything you could imagine in that room that would indicate that I was being conned. And so I had to put the brakes on everything, and it kind of fell apart. The whole relationship fell apart quickly. But now it's kind of resurrected. I'm giving her a second chance, and history repeats itself, which my viewers will find out tomorrow on my channel. I'm posting that video tomorrow.

So it's like the exact story that happened before is happening again. And so makes for good content. That's all I can tell you.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, that's true. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit. What has the emotional impact been on you on being exposed?

Mark Laita:
I don't know. I'm very resilient. I'm very resilient. And it's like hearing eight, 9,000 stories of mostly trauma and drug addiction and just terrible, heartbreaking stories you would think would affect somebody negatively. And I don't know that it has. I don't know that it has. I also don't know that I listen. I'm not soaking in absorbing every detail and sitting there crying with everybody. I'm getting texts while I'm doing the interviews. I'm dealing with the person who's coming next and then the person who's coming after them. And then this person needs money and this one needs that. And it's like I've got 25 things going on while I'm doing an interview. I'm a one man band, and it's a lot for me to do. So hustling and just doing, I'm like a one man band doing six things at once, and you're telling me a story.

So when you say, so my kids were lost in the foster system. And then five minutes later I ask him, do you have kids? I'm like, I told you the viewers get upset. I said, he told you I had kids at two minutes and now you're asking him if he has kids. So I make mistakes. I'm not perfect. I'm not an interviewer. I'm a photographer. If you want to criticize my photography, then we have a conversation. But I'm not an interviewer. I don't claim to be an interviewer. I'm a photographer, and I'm throwing up these little video stumbles to help people get a little more in-depth story behind the photograph.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So after having done the 2000 plus videos that are up and the 9,000 plus interviews you've done, lemme ask you your opinions on the impact of upbringing, positive role models, and just the importance of hope. So now I'm going to get to wax philosophical here for a second.

Mark Laita:
Yeah, no, these are the most important things in a human's life. These are the most important things in a human being's life. I had great role models in my life. I had great upbringing. I had support. I had unconditional love. I had just everything, a human needs to thrive in the world. And I didn't become amazing right away, but I worked my ass off. I learned how to work really hard from my dad, and that's important. You turn into your parents. I mean, we turn into our parents whether we like it or not, it seems, I mean, I'm sure there are some exceptions, but if you look at the decade after decade after decade, it so often how people who really worked very hard to not become their parents, still became their parents. So if that's what's happening with me, I'm proud of that. My parents were pretty great. But if you listen to these stories, you realize how the cycle just continues over and over again.

When the mom was on drugs and she was an absent mom, and the dad was in prison, or the mom was a sex worker or whatever, Jesus, it seems so common that the child ends up doing something similar. And in the inner city where they don't see lawyers and doctors and airline pilots and things like that, they don't even see that. They see con artists, they see hustlers, they see thieves, they see drug dealers, they see pimps, they see prostitutes, and we're supposed to expect them to do something great. It happens, and it's a great story when it does happen, but for the most part, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I want to be respectful of your time, but I have one question before I ask my last question.

Mark Laita:
Sure.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You were on Rogan, Joe Rogan's podcast. How was that? What was that experience like?

Mark Laita:
It was great. I mean, I can talk if you ask me questions, it's very similar to what we're doing right now. It's almost identical. Joe is a really great conversationalist, as are you. He asks good questions. He's fun to talk to. That's important. That's why he's so incredibly popular. His podcast is incredibly popular, and he deserves that success because he's just a great conversationalist. I am not. I'm a great photographer, and that's really what I'm trying to do is just take great photographs and I somehow am ridiculously putting photographs, vertical photographs into a video that's horizontal. Just a stupid idea. But that's what I'm doing, and it seems to be working and I'm enjoying doing it. But Joe is a great conversationalist. He's become incredibly educated about everything that's going on in the world because all the people he is bringing in, he is great. He's

Jon Pfeiffer:
Amazing. Last question. Where can people find you on the internet if they want to suggest the story? If they had a potential person, how would they reach out to

Mark Laita:
You? Oh, I see you send in the homepage of my YouTube channel, there's all the info, but what we say there is to send a video, just a 15 second video just so I can see what you look like, what you speak to, make sure you don't mumble, and then a paragraph or two of your story, and you email it to info@softwideunderbelly.com. And then Noelle and I will go through it and maybe we'll fly you in or meet you here or meet you there or whatever.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Thank you.