INTERVIEWER: I think finding something that helps you find fulfillment and happiness is important. And if that happens to be heroin, and you got it under control… maybe it’s okay.
MATTHEW: I do, but then it’s the money thing. It’s a lot of money.
INTERVIEWER: How much do you spend? How much do you spend a week?
MATTHEW: A month, probably $1,500. So I could have a nice apartment.
That’s from an interview with Matthew, a functional heroin addict. Matthew says he smokes heroin, every day, all day. And yet he has a job, and he does it well, and nobody knows.
The interview with Matthew is part of a YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly.
I discovered Soft White Underbelly a few weeks ago. It features hundreds or maybe thousands of in-depth interviews with drug addicts, homeless people, child abuse victims, prostitutes, escorts, inbred Appalachian families, gang members, a high-level mob boss, a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal preacher, a conman who ran real-estate frauds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, and various others on the outside of what you might call mainstream society.
I won’t lie — I got sucked into this channel because of purely prurient curiosity about the lives of escorts and prostitutes and even a male gigolo.
I’m not sure what my persuasion and influence takeaway for you is today. Except that, in my experience, being interested and curious is like a superpower in almost any field.
You achieve focus by being interested. And you achieve interest, if you don’t have it already, by seeing details.
I talked yesterday about how there are primal urges that motivate all people — except these are secrets most of us will never share with others. Often, we can’t even face up to them on our own, in the dead of night, as we’re falling asleep, with the covers pulled up to our eyeballs.
But the people who are interviewed on Soft White Underbelly are incredibly open about the most shocking, intimate, painful, and humiliating things in their lives.
Maybe some of these stories aren’t true. But I bet many of them are. And they’re very revealing.
Yes, these are extreme stories of people coping with bad life situations and bad life choices.
But like I said yesterday, the human experience is similar among all of us. And a person doesn’t need to have extreme abuse or trauma or misfortune to fall into the same patterns of thought and behavior as the people on Soft White Underbelly.
So if you pay attention to the details of their stories… it might be useful both to understand others better, and to understand yourself better.
Or who knows, maybe I’m just trying to justify my own prurient fascination.
In case you want to decide for yourself, let me recommend a SFU interview to start with.
It’s with a black-hat hacker, who started in the 1980s by phreaking phones and early ATMs, then graduated to more lucrative and high-scale tech exploits ($10M for hacking the DirectTV receiver), and culminated about 10 years ago with… well, I won’t spoil it.
If you’re interested, the full interview is below. But before you watch it, if you want more ideas on understanding yourself and other people better — both for profit and for curiosity’s sake — then sign up to my email newsletter.