In honor of Black History Month, HotMovies teamed up with veteran performer Lotus Lain to interview Black performers and adult content producers to highlight their perspectives on the industry and their unique achievements. In the fourth of 12 Instagram Live interviews, Lotus sat down with the “industry’s boyfriend,” Isiah Maxwell. Lotus sat down with her good friend Isiah to discuss his rise to prominence in porn, how he avoids getting involved in drama, and his unforgettable trip to Africa where he sacrificed a goat! Check out Lotus and Isiah’s fun discussion below or watch the video on HotMovies’ YouTube or Instagram!
LL: Hello. Oh, shit! Look at the well-read Mr. Maxwell himself with the books behind him and everything to prove it.
IM: Oh, shit. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I love that. You can’t just have a regular bookshelf, can you? [chuckles]
No, no. This is my favorite spot in the room to do live stuff. [laughter]
I hear you. I have my favorite spot too. I have the little window light coming through naturally.
I hear you. Well, happy Wednesday. Happy hump day.
Yeah, happy hump day to you too. Thank you for joining me, and especially for making time this early morning before you get your super busy day started. I already know you’re busy.
Actually, I’ve been sidelined with COVID for the past week, so just kinda in isolation for a little bit. But a couple of rapid tests came back clear for the last couple of days, so I’m able to get retested today.
Good, good. Well, you’re looking good, so I’m pretty sure that it might be subsiding because I know how the COVID bug is. That shit fucked me up. It’s pretty rough.
I hear you. Luckily, I’m vaccinated, so I didn’t have as much of a tough time with it. But it was pretty much come and go.
Well, damn, thank you for just making it and being healthy and being here. So, Isaiah, we have many fans joining, and I just want to remind them that they could throw them in this little Q&A box at the bottom if they have questions. That’d be easier for me to read them, and it’d be easier to find than scrolling through. Ana‘s in there. Look, girl… [laughter] You have such a unique presence in our industry and a unique personality. You’re just like everybody’s favorite. I really wanna know, first of all, what’s your sign? Why are you so chill? Why are you so cool?
[laughter] I didn’t know my sign heavy until I got into this industry, but…Yeah, ’cause we all fuck with that. All of us hoes wanna know horoscopes.
[chuckles] That’s basically the icebreaker question. But I’m an Aries, and people say I don’t act like an Aries, for whatever that means, ’cause I’m not that familiar with the signs and everything. I took an astronomy class in college thinking that I would learn about astrology, and that was the first thing he said when I walked in. He was like, “If you think you’re gonna learn about Sagittarius and Aquarius, you’re in the wrong class.”Oh my God, that’s so funny. That just goes to show how that is not really a part of how you live your life and your personality. [laughter] That’s good though because you’re really not that much of an Aries. They say that they’re always up for battle and all of that. If anything, I know that you’re like the calmest, coolest, smoothest brother I know: point-blank, period. But you weren’t always like this. You weren’t always this zaddy of the industry, Top Male Performer winner, and all of that stuff. When I first met you, I remember you as an agent, and you were quite normal as far as guys go, but yeah. So tell us… Kinda take us through that journey of your humble beginnings to when you turned it on and focused, and you’re like, “No, I’m gonna be this performer powerhouse maximum supreme that every woman wants a piece of.”
[laughter] I mean, my journey starts like everybody’s journey. It’s continuous. It’s basically just trying to find yourself. And I started in this industry at the tender age of 22, and I was basically trying to find myself. I was doing a bunch of stuff at the time. I was in Bible study. Granted, during Bible study, I was there to impress a girl, so… I was like…So there were still dick motivations behind it. [laughter]
It was just the thing to do when you was in college. But I was just in a weird space of just finding myself, and the industry kind of just took me as a raw piece of mold and was like, “You could become whoever you want.” So Terrill, the guy that brought me into the business, had a desk full of books, a couple that I have on my bookshelf, actually, from ten years ago. And he told me…
Don’t be afraid to drop them titles. [laughter]
One of the books I had taken off his desk was The 40 Laws of Power. And I read that book through, and it kinda changed my perspective on a lot of things. Kinda saw a lot of ways people come at you without them even knowing that that’s how they’re doing it. And so I’m able to combat a lot of attitudes and personalities because I read about it in the strategies that they try to use to get whatever angle they like. And so when I was that young, he was just like, “Nobody is gonna give you the access to the industry like I’m about to give you.” And he was like, “Everything in my book is up for grabs, any information you want there. You could build whatever kinda empire you want from the information that is there, so ten years’ worth of information, and make of it as you will.” And so I literally took all of those books and studied the industry and kinda cut and trimmed the way I wanted to go about in this industry. And then dealing with the girls and seeing their trials and tribulations of being a new performer versus… Being a new performer and blowing up and becoming a major performer. I’ve seen those journeys and stuff like that. So crossing over to becoming a performer was more of an easy transition for me, because I monitor how so many people conducted their careers, and it was just easy for me to do something.
Yeah. So you really did your research and you were smart paying attention to the signs and everything, huh?
Absolutely, I was just very fortunate to come in at a very influential time. And information kind of just soaked at the time. It was like I was craving more information, craving stuff to learn to know what I’m talking about later on when I’m having these conversations with others. Yeah, I think it was at a point in my mid-20s, probably 25, 26 where I was like, “You know, if I’m gonna have conversations with people, I should at least know what I’m talking about.” And so…
At the very least. [laughter]
People just take a slither of information and theorize about what it means, and then spit it back to others as facts and just basically mansplaining things to other people without really knowing much about it. So… yeah, reading has definitely helped me in terms of how I present myself to others and what type of attitudes I want to have in terms of doing my career.
That’s really good to know ’cause you can definitely tell that you know how to handle yourself in pretty much any situation. ‘Cause I’ve seen you in a gang of situations Isiah, and you’re always cool as a cucumber.
I’m a bigger picture guy.
That’s really good. One of the questions someone has from the audience is, “How do you keep your stamina up? ‘Cause you are, you’re literally in every other scene.” And that’s a good question. If people wanna go round for round, pound for pound, how do they do that Isiah-style?
Pacing… pacing. [chuckles]
Pacing as far as what? Don’t just let it all out?
It’s a little bit of that. It’s like if I shoot two scenes in a day, and I’m about to release on the first scene, and I come up to the release, I have a mentality of, “Don’t give everything out on the first scene, because they need something for the second scene.” So I can literally stop mid-release and be like, “Alright, I gotta save the rest for the next scene.” [laughter]
This is crazy. That’s like superhero stuff. Control of your body and systems, right?
Absolutely, body control is key in this industry. As a male performer, body control is the number-one thing. I remember when I first got in, it was like, they’ll talk about some of the top performers, and one of the things that made them the top performers was releasing on command. And so it was just like, if the directors say, “I need you to finish in three seconds,” when it’s count down from three, two, one, it was like that. So it’s not that specific anymore. People give you your time and let you do what you need to do. But I have that mentality of, I wanna be that specific of like when they say, “Go,” go.
Yeah.
But in regards to stamina, for me, it’s pacing. It’s like if I’mma shoot three scenes today? It’s probably I’m not doing anything off-camera. Or if I’m shooting a full week’s worth of stuff, I’m not out late at night, trying to supplement that in and mess up my rhythm for the next few days and stuff like that. It’s pacing.
So that’s actually my next question. Do you have sex outside of your performer sex? Because I know you do perform sometimes twice a day like you said. So do you still make time for your own personal stuff that you’re into?
Make time is the key word there. [laughter] But…
If you get time. [laughter]
Yeah, definitely. I would say focus is kind of the term that I’m on right now, so… I manage everything myself. So it’s like I take care of my own books, I take care of my own OnlyFans and other platforms that I have and stuff like that. So a lot of my personal life stuff has been sacrificed in order to keep up those things and stuff like that. So a lot of stuff where I would like to do where I’m just hanging out, I don’t have the time to as much. And it just catered back into what I’m trying to do. I’m just focused on what I’m trying to accomplish and my bigger-picture goals and stuff like that.
So let’s talk about that. What are some of the bigger-picture goals Mr. Maxwell has up his sleeve? What are some future business ventures and things we can anticipate from you?
At the moment I’m capital building. So just basically, it doesn’t sound like you’re doing much when you’re saving.
Right, but you know, that’s Zaddy language right there, Isiah. That’s why you are who you are.
[laughter] Yeah. It doesn’t look like much when you’re saving, but my savings have an end goal to it. I like to make money work for me. I try to tell people in my circle that it’s one thing to just save your money, but it’s like what are you doing with it? So it’s like, I save my money in order to buy property. And I use that property to rent out to other people, and in return, just being a landlord. And so I use my money for projects like that outside of work. I also use it in the stock market with index funds. And even this weekend, because I was in isolation and had time to do the research and just look at stuff, I even invested in crypto.Oh my God. So you weren’t just tumbling around in the sheets, you were fucking looking out to your next business move while you were sick with COVID.
[laughter] Yes. One thing doesn’t stop you from another. Online is such a vast resource center of everything you can take without having to leave your home, so I just took advantage of opportunities. And I get calls for stuff like that all the time. I get calls for random different opportunity projects like NFTs and…Have you done those? Speaking of?
I ventured in a couple of projects that we’re working on now. But I’m not fully invested in it at the moment. I don’t try to spread myself too thin by trying to do too much at the same time, ’cause then you end up not doing much of anything.
Yeah, yeah, you’re right, man. Wise man. Okay. Let’s take another question from the audience. Someone wants to know, do you ever get tired of all the women? ‘Cause, you do work with a lot of different women.
[laughter] I don’t get tired of the women, I get tired.I know, I was gonna say the reason I even asked that question is because I would like to say from my point of view, you know how to make every type of woman feel like she’s your woman, like top woman desirable, and I think that speaks to why you’re one of the top guys in the industry. I noticed that the treatment that you gave to any woman, despite her level of fame, her level in the industry, or how many years she’s put in, you really make us all feel like sexy babies.
[laughter] Well that is one of my mindsets whenever I come on set. I do give my undivided attention to my scene partner, or I at least make her feel like the number one in the room to me. Because you sometimes go to set, and certain companies shoot all their scenes in one day, so everybody’s there and you’re like meeting all of these different girls that had their scenes before or after you, and you may have a history with them and stuff like that, but if your scene partners see that history playing out and it’s not with them, then it makes them feel a certain type of way. So although I do have greater histories with certain people, whenever I cross paths with them, I still put my scene partner as the center of attention for me because I know that that will come a long way when we’re shooting our scene.I mean definitely, I think it really shows. Everybody enjoys working with you. You’re always working. It speaks to what you’re all about. So this is a question from the stories… I’m kind of gonna re-word it ’cause it doesn’t make sense at the beginning, but they said, “Friends love you the most, at what age did you actually start performing in the industry?” And then, “What were your favorite male or female porn stars before you got started?” So those are a lot of questions coming from one person, but… What age you got started, like actually performing?
Alright, I would have to say late 23. So 23, 24 years old is when I started. I shot my first time on camera, it was a webcam show, I shot my first time was like 23 and it was just on the fly, and I was helping out a girl who needed a scene partner, and I was like at the time, I was like, “Should I, should I not, should I?” [laughter] I was just like, “I don’t know,” but then I ended up shooting it and it went really well. And so that was just like a little confidence booster there, but 2013 is when I really got the ball rolling in terms of, “Alright, I wanna do this.” But it still took a while. It still took a while. My first two years in the industry, I only shot 15 scenes.
Okay.
And then my third year, probably tackling about 50-70, and then after that, it was starting to get into the hundreds, and then the two hundreds and all of that per year. But yeah, it took a little bit… And I started early though, but what was the second question?
Yeah, it was basically who was your favorite female and male porn stars? Since we’re talking about this during Black History Month, let’s talk about your favorite Black female, male, porn stars that you look… or masturbated to.
No problem. The first one, of course, is always one of my favorites: Ana Fox. She was my first assignment… [chuckles]
Fuck! The assignment.
I came into her office and they were like, “Alright, you ready for your first task?” And I was like, “Yeah, what are we gonna do?” I’m like all excited about this porno, I’m like, “Yeah, what are we gonna do?” I need you to take these girls to different companies so they could see how they look, and it’s what we call a go-see. And Ana Fox was in there, and I took her and two other girls. I can’t remember the two other girls’ names, but what I do remember is I made a joke, and Ana was the only one that laughed and I knew I was gonna get along with her from that day on.
Yeah, ’cause she’s a real one. She’s probably of one the few girls that have a real sense of humor around here.
[laughter] I was like, for sure, I was like, “Somebody gets my sense of humor,” so her and I were gonna… And then I ended up getting in trouble.Uh-oh. Why?
Because one of the girls got in trouble on set and they needed her to get picked up. But I was having such a good time with Ana and them, I was still taking them on the go-see and ignoring my phone calls…
You were supposed to pick up the girl that was making trouble on set?
She got into an incident with the director, she wasn’t in any danger, but it was an argument on set and she wanted to go home. They needed somebody to pick her up and they were trying to call me to swoop by and grab her, but I was like, “Oh I’m on these go-sees,” and we’re all laughing together…
Fun. [laughter]
The phone call can wait. [laughter] And then I get back to the office and I get ripped. It was like, “Dawg, you gotta learn how to prioritize,” and blah, blah, blah, but it was a lot of insider things going on around at that time that I didn’t know what was going on, so I wasn’t… The problem wasn’t really me per se. But yeah, so I had a real good time.
Skin Diamond was like one of the top girls at the time. And I remember her, she was just an absolutely gorgeous girl. Like the Zendaya of… before Zendaya came out just like that natural beauty, that’s like, “Oh wow, I like how you look.” Nyomi Banxxx was…
Oh, yes, legend.
Was like aspiring just models to like look at and marvel at. I still have her DVD and a movie that she created.
Oh yeah, that’s a real fan. That’s real fan-ship right there. I love that. That’s dope.
It was an adult movie so I don’t mean like… It was like stuff like that I used to look at what she is doing in her career and just to notes and stuff like that, and I have so many notebooks of just like stuff that I took notes of when I was in the industry at the beginning like, “Okay I like what this person is doing, okay, I like what that person is doing it,” because I looked at my ex-boss table of all of his notebooks, so I was like you basically catalog what you do throughout this industry and put it on paper but…
Just a quick reminder for you guys trying to ask questions, there’s a little question box at the bottom of the comment bar that’s where you can to type the questions in, and if not hearing it might be your phone ’cause I can hear Isiah, and everyone else seems to hear us just great.
[chuckle]So [chuckle] this is literally a question that people wanna know about you: are you married and what are your thoughts on life?
On life?
Yeah. Wanna know how you philosophize life, sir.
[chuckle] I’m not married, such like two questions that are… [laughter] But I’m not married. I consider myself the industry’s boyfriend.Ohh, I love that. Oh my God, you kinda are. You kinda are.
And so yeah, I just… It helps me do my job easier because every girl that works with me knows I come… I just put this in my bio, it’s just my hot word of the week, but it’s no strings attached. And so with no strings attached, you don’t have to worry about any girl hitting you up after the scene and saying, you know like, “Do you like Isiah?” Or you don’t have to worry about anybody saying like, “That’s my boyfriend,” or…
Exactly.
Or you can go out on a date with him, or you can’t go out and get to know him better and stuff like that. Yeah, you know I just… I like to go on set and just know that I have a clean slate with everybody and I can do everything that I want to without no real obligations of feeling that I’m supposed to be catering to someone back at home. But when it comes to life, I like this…
[laughter] I have to ask you these deep questions.
Philosophy is basically for me, the bigger picture. I always tell people you have the right to feel the emotion that you’re feeling. The thing is how you react to it. So if you’re mad and stuff like that, you can be mad at stuff, but if you react mad where you’re like throwing stuff or at a club, you’re throwing bottles and stuff like that. I’ve been in these situations where people don’t even know when they’re mad and don’t know where to channel that energy, and so they do it in a negative way where it ends up hurting them in the long run with their job opportunities with people that wanna work with them in the future and stuff like that. So as an agent, whenever a girl used to get mad and stuff like that, I used to just tell them, “Vent it out to me,” Like just tell me how you feeling. Like how it makes you feel, like, what do you wanna do? And vent it all out to me because I’m your agent, and if you can’t do it to me, I don’t want you to do it out in the world where they can misinterpret it and take it and then run with it and shape it how they want to.
Exactly.
So I’m just like, you know get all that anger out with me and just yell at me, or like not at me, but yell with me.
Hit it out, yeah.
Hit it out because it’s the bigger picture we’re going for. We’re not here to focus on this one night that made you angry, we’re here to focus on building yourself a lifestyle for the future and stuff like that. And so yeah it’s like these 15-minute problems can’t carry on. You can’t think about it longer than it actually happened and let that 15 minutes fucking change your life and make you think about…
Exactly. Someone was saying some funny stuff in the chat, which I think was referencing what you were talking about, and with that, I got to say, one of the things that I loved and admire about Isiah the most is that he said he would never talk shit about another Black male in the industry. So you could take that however you want, but he won’t, and I appreciate that, and that’s very honorable. So next question, “Have you ever had the opportunity to work overseas, like in Japan or even Europe?”
Yes, I have. That was… One of the main reasons I started performing was because I saw performers traveling.
Yeah?
The first place I went to was Tanzania, Africa.
Wow, what the fuck? You went to the homelands. Okay, good. That was surprising, I thought you went to like, you know, most people go to Europe, London… those places.
Yeah, you know I was like…
What were you doing in Africa?
[laughter] Oh, man! I was… I was straight African living. I wish I had the DVD with me. I actually just found the DVD recently, which shows me in like a Messiah outfit.Shut up! How would I have never seen this? I definitely need to see this.
Yeah, I work with a Japanese crew out there and basically, they go to Africa, and tour it as if they’re tourists and go to all of these different Safari trips and stuff like that, and then film like… Film explicit stuff in-between. So they’ll be on a safari trip and then the girl will just break it in and give a BJ in the car, and then they’ll go back to the hotel and do a scene there, and then I came in and pretend to be one of the tribe members there, and they tour like our huts, and then I broke off with her, I filmed a couple of scenes myself. So it was real third-world living, no hot water or very limited, and no electricity at certain times of the day.
Yeah.
You had to drink everything out of a bottle, everything had to be prepared for you.
What did you appreciate the most about life over here, when you were over there when you came back?
Yeah, I definitely did the third-world experience out there, and it was definitely for the experience because I didn’t even get paid much to go out there, but I wanted to… I didn’t do it for the money, I did it for the experience. And yeah, being there… A lot of stuff happened on that trip. Like we got arrested.
You did? Oh my God.
[chuckle] Like yeah…What? You guys for the sex?
There are so many hustles in Africa. There are so many hustles. Like we had a driver there on the last day, he ended up telling the cops what we did, which is illegal, and the cops rounded us all up and took us all down to the jail, and we had to bribe our way out and give them all our cash on us, and so we left the country with no cash on us, and they had to wire us all the money.
How was this not like a little like… Like how is this not like a fucking like a movie, TV show, story, but like this Isiah in Africa?
And Granted, granted. The entire time I was in Africa, I always like to equivalate it to… It feels… I felt Black privilege.
Yeah, oh wow. What?
I felt like how a white man would feel in America. They were giving me so much Black privilege out there because of like my skin color. It was a weird feeling because I never felt anything like that where I was getting treatment that others would not. So like, for example, they were charging me a dollar for water, they would charge the crew people that were there who were Asian, they would charge them five dollars. And then like when we went to jail, I was in the back seat, and I asked the militia, I was like… I was like, “Are we in trouble?” And he looked at me, he was like, “You? You’re not in trouble.”
Oh my god. What the fuck? Ana, we need to go to Africa.
[chuckle]That’s so funny.
The entire time I’m in a truck. I mean, the crew people around me are crying. Just balls-out crying ’cause they don’t know what’s about to happen. And I’m just like, “Well, he said I’m cool, so I don’t know what y’all about to go through.” And then there was like… The thing that got me was that we were in a compound, and it was like a little gift shop where people make their own little gifts and stuff like that. And one of the producers came to me, he was like, “Isiah,” he was like, “Can you go over there? I think that guy’s tryna hustle me.” He was like, “I’m trying to buy that cane over there but he’s trying to over-sell it to me.” And so I go over there, and I’m like, “Hey, man,” I was like, “How much for this cane?” And then he was like, “Oh, for you? Because of same skin color, $5.” And I was like, “Word.” I was like, “Alright, I’ll go grab your money.” I went back to the producer, and he was like, “How much?” And I was like, “Oh, the guy said $20.” And… ‘Cause I was gonna give him the whole 20. And then he was like, “What? $20? He tried to sell me that cane for $65.” And I was just like, “Oh, shoot.”
[laughter] I like that.
He was like, “We’ll still give it to me.” And so he gave me 20 and I went back and I gave the dude the whole 20. I was like “Here, this is all for you.” I was like, “Let me just grab the cane.” But they were just… They were infatuated with me out there.
Oh my God. That’s so fascinating because there’s like Black guys out there, and then like… You’d think there’s like enough to where you would just blend in, but you stood out?
I stood out, yeah. My hair was different.
Oh, how was your hair then? We do have a question about your hair and why do you change it so much.
Well, my hair was the same kinda length as it is right now when it was out there. My hair is a little bit more fine in places that theirs wasn’t. And so they were just infatuated with that because they knew I was a different Black. They were just like, “Oh, what country are you from?” And like, “Oh, we see a little Cameroon in you,” or “we see a little Congolese in you.”
Yeah.
And so, they were just identifying me right off the gate. But it was just like, “Oh, welcome, welcome.” They made me an honorary Maasai member. I sacrificed a goat.
Shut the fuck up! Oh my God, Isiah, why didn’t you ever tell us any of this? Oh my god.
I fed a village. You know, helped feed a village of kids. They don’t waste anything out there, so they’re still hunter and gatherer.
I’m like 1000% serious, you and I have to talk about this afterward ’cause it’s like such a story of life could like out there and it’s like so interesting how… Like what?
I felt so bad because what they didn’t tell me was that the girl I was working with was vegan.
Oh, and you sacrificed the goat in front of her?
Yeah. And when she saw what was going on, she just broke down and that was just like… That was the end of the day. We didn’t film anything for the rest of that day. So we just filmed like us getting back up. But I had to have a talk with her and just kind of like explain my side of like, why I did it and like… ’cause she didn’t even know she was working with a Black guy. It was an Asian woman. this is all-Asian crew.
That’s right, I forgot. That’s right.
It was an all-Asian crew, and her agent didn’t tell her that… She knew she was going to Africa, she didn’t know all that she was doing, and so she was… And she never had sex outside of her… Outside of her race, so.
Oh my! Was she comfortable with you? Was that okay? Was she having feelings?
You know, after talking and getting to know each other, it was a K-pop band that I mentioned, and like we…
Which one? [chuckle] See, Isiah knows how to connect with people at all levels.
I was just finding an angle, and like when I mentioned 21, she was just like, “Oh, I’ve lit up.” Yeah. So we got along on that. And then, like yeah, after I had my talk with her on the vegan, and just like the smoothing that over, we were able to film some of these things. But that was Africa. And we’re going through my hair…
Yeah. Why do you change it so much?
I like to keep things interesting. You know? Like I shot so many scenes, I want to have a variety of looks in them. And so…
That’s smart.
I think the pandemic just kinda allowed that opportunity. During the pandemic, my barber of like 16 years passed away.
Oh no, I’m sorry.
Yeah. I mean, and like Black men, we’re just extremely close with our barbers, and like that was probably the person that I was conversing with the most at the time. I’m just like he saw me every five-to-seven days. And when he passed away I just kind of was just like, “I don’t want nobody to touch my hair right now.” And then my hair just kinda kept growing, kept growing, kept growing, and then it was at a point where I was like, “Oh, let’s just braid this.” And so I did that for a while, but I had braids before when I was in like 13, 14, right before I came out to California. That was the first thing.
Oh, where did you come from, by the way?
Cleveland.
Oh yeah Cleveland, Ohio. Something about you Cleveland niggas.
[laughter] Yeah they made me cut my hair when I first came out to Cali, ’cause they were like, you know…But yeah, at that time that look was a little too gangster, and it wasn’t like what people were trying to get out of a Black man.
Yeah.
That variety.
I came with my parents for the first time to Cali at the age of ten and like the first day I got there, the next day, our whole garage was tagged with Broadway gangster crew. And they were like, “Oh, our house has never been tagged until you came here, so they were just letting us know that they know that you’re here.”
Dang.
Ten years old, I’m ten years old with my trumpet like, “Okay.” [laughter] But then like I ended up becoming real good friends with them. Long story, but yeah, that was the attitude when I came out here. And future on, when my barber passed away, I just let my hair grow and just kinda just rocked the curls for a little bit, and then rocked the braids for a little bit. And then I knew I was gonna get tired of it and I just chopped it off. I was just like I guess, “I’m hot, I’m tired of picking this out, and I don’t feel like doing this every morning before work.” I was just trying to go to work and go home.
Well, dang. Isaiah, thank you so, so much for bringing us through these multiple journeys of your life. I feel like I’ve been up hills and valleys with you as far as the storytelling goes today. Talk about your business acumen, you talked about your wild trip in Africa, how much hair means to you. I guess just wrap it up because people are really begging. They want to know, they say you’ve missed out saying who are the male performers that you looked up to back in the day? So if you wanna just, I know you said the females that you looked up to, but they really wanna know who were some of the males were before we wrap it up. You have a lot of demanding fans, I just want you to know.
[chuckle] All good. It started off with Prince Yahshua. He was the guy…Oh, love him.
Yeah, he was my first mentor in regards to performing and carrying myself in this industry. He used to let me crash at his place when I couldn’t afford to go back home to LA.
I think you treat women similarly, in the way that you perform with them. You make us feel like queens and princesses.
Absolutely. Yeah, he helped me with a lot of different ways of thinking that I was trying to figure out very early on. I took a lot of early on advice from Lexington Steele. I took a lot of early advice on from Terrell. And although my times with those two wasn’t as long as say with like, Prince Yahshua, who continues to help me with any issues that I have today… a lot of their advice from early on in my career has still helped me carry on and look at the industry in a business sense and stuff like that. But yeah, now, today, it’s not so much of performers I look up to as much as just people that become businessmen within the industry.
I can look at my peers now and just kind of be marvel at what they’re doing. So like the Ricky Johnsons, the Jax Slayhers, the Troy Franciscos… the guys that just come on to this industry and be like, “Oh, alright, let me create my little business empire. I don’t really need the studios to do as much as I need to. I can take this into my own hands.” And that’s the generation of male performers that I’m on right now. Those who are, don’t wait for somebody to come and put them under their wing and take them up with them.
They’re like, “I could do this myself. Let me hire out my team. Let me put this all together myself.” So it’s very fun to look at my peers now and being like, “Okay, cool yeah. That guy, that guy, that guy I remember when they was in my office.” And I look at them, they’re hiring me. And it’s like, “Alright, cool.” That’s a college thing. They were like, “Always treat your peers that they may be one day be the ones that’s hiring you.”
True. Well, we are gonna end it right there, ’cause that’s some really sage advice. Thank you again. I appreciate you, I love you, you’re one of my top friends in the industry, you know that. Again, everyone that’s in the audience, thank you for your questions and your patience as I was getting to them and your time. We’ll see you again on Friday when we talk with Diamond Banks. Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
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