Breaking Bread with Tom Papa - Episode 196 - Moshe Kasher

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Tom Papa and Moshe Kasher discuss Moshe's poignant journey while writing about his daughter in his book.Moshe then takes us through his time in AA, and he reflects on his unique upbringing in all-black Oakland, questioning the effectiveness of his therapy and his fascination with history's subjective truths. TThe conversation then shifts to Moshe's love for people, the energy of crowds, and his experiences at Burning Man. They explore the magical moments life offers, like surfing, and circle back to Burning Man's profound impact.The discussion weaves through Moshe's connection to Judaism, pandemic life with his wife Natasha, and his childhood experiences, touching on the theme of grieving within Jewish traditions after the death of his father.They ponder what unites comedians and delve into the process of creating Moshe's book and audiobook.The episode concludes with a look at Moshe's future aspirations and reflections on fatherhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey, don't you know? Hey, it's also a show. Hey. How's the espresso? Do you want, what do you want? You want me, do you want the truth? Yeah. I would say it's pretty weak. Pretty weak. Yeah, I'd say it's like hot, hot, foamy water. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's an espresso, you know? You know there's a Legerro in espresso pod. That's the one that I'm partial to. For real? Yeah, wait, espresso is the main pod, right? Yeah. Yeah, there's a Legerro one. Oh, really? When I'm lonely on the road, I'll crack one open and have a go at it.

What notes does it strike? I would say a blue collar background with a upper class pretension. That's so perfect. Well, Legerro means light, I think. And so it's like their light blend. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

We're trying to work things out. You're the first person to sit here in the Tritorium. This feels so classy. Feels nice, right? I feel like I might get assassinated if you go to the bathroom. Yeah. If you see Joey walk out. That big Irish cop lump her in.

And I hand you a napkin to tuck into your shirt. I was just watching Barbie on the plane for the first time. I thought that joke was really good about, they were trying to distract men by just women asking men to explain the plot and the people. of the Godfather. Like, you haven't seen it? Have a seat. It's pretty great.

Congratulations on your book, right off the bat. Thank you very much. It's really well done. I've only just begun it. Where are you at? Well, I didn't want to go in order. Okay. So I went Burning Man.

Okay. And then I... Get back to your roots, Tom. Yeah, I went Burning Man. Then I went, yeah, yesterday on my radio show, I was smoking weed. and because my kids are away at college. And I'm like, I can do this now. My producer, Joe, was like, I don't think so.

You still have a job. I'm like, yeah, I can do it. So Burning Man definitely has a great allure, you know, just for the... Would you be interested in going? In reality? Yes. I'm going to, yeah. Interesting.

Yeah, I'll get, we'll start there. Okay. But I did that. Then I did deaf. Yes. And then I did... AA a little bit and then jumped and skimmed. Now I'm running out of time.

Skimmed comedy. Okay. Yeah. It's so cool. The idea to break it down your life down by these little subculture tribes that you spent time in and big part of your life is, I've never seen it done that way before. Well, I was like, thanks.

And I was, I wrote a memoir already. Right. You've written, how many? I've written more than one? Three books. It's impressive. I mean, they're a slog and an undertaking. Yeah, it's a lot of work.

And this is thick, by the way. Yeah, this is a big boy. This is not like the second one that you turn in just like under the wire. This is the beauty standard of the mid-2020s. Right. It's not the 90s beauty standard. No. This one's got a little back.

That's some thickness to it. Well, I wrote a memoir already, and I, like, I've always, when I wrote a book was interested in not in doing something a little bit different. And, like, this in particular, I was like, I don't want to write another memoir, a standard issue memoir. Yeah. And I wrote the rave, the one that you didn't read yet. Oh. Which everybody loves the deaf, the deafness one. Yeah.

But for me, the rave one was the, I don't even know what, you ever get those fits of, like, creative, like, all of a sudden in the middle of the night, you just start writing. started doing that before I even was thinking about it as a memoir and like I thought this could be a roadmap for another book which is like history and it could be these universes that created me and like in some ways it was really natural because in some ways this just is kind of who I am are these tribes. Yeah. Yeah. I know because I've heard you touch on a lot of them before when we were just talking about you and your act or when you've been on my shows or whatever and but to see it kind of broke down into, almost into chapters, into essays, it gave it like structure. Right.

Like, you think of a person, you think of, oh, all that stuff. And you grew up in New Jersey and then you did this and then you did that. But to see it like as, no, this was the era of this. I mean, of course, there's overlap in the timing of different things. But to see it have structure in a life is pretty, it's pretty profound. Did you cry at the end when you wrote the final stuff to your daughter? Cry? Yeah.

You're talking about me? Yeah. Did I cry? Is that what you're asking me? Uh-huh. Man, I'll be honest. I haven't cried since infancy, to be honest. No, I did.

And you know what was so? I did. I did. I got really emotional when I wrote that and when I would read it back to my, that's a very sad feeling, though, when you're reading your own work and crying. No. You're touched by your own work. Well, it's, yeah, but it's, I'm crying, watch reading it because I'm

touched by your work. When you're writing it, it's catharsis. I mean, it's such like, it's just so there's a, you're saying out loud the stuff that are deep inside you. And when you were writing that, these little,

you know, I have daughters. So like to read like you're a little missive to her, which you're writing currently, but you're going to want her to read this in 10 years, 15 years. That's a very sweet moment.

That's a very... Yeah, well, it... Can you not cry? Well, I felt, I mean, the real emotional part for me was realizing... I didn't realize till I kind of almost until I started writing that, until I got... I kept getting asked this question about this book

by my brother, who was like my main... He's my guy that I go to. I'm sure you have a guy or a girl. The one, yeah, one girl. And like, what's the... These are great. What is the thesis? What's the thing that brings these things together?

like the answer at first is very obvious. It's like, well, you know, it's me. It's my, it's my history, my body, my, my, my, my, my meness. But then as I got towards the end of it, when I started writing that passage in particular, I realized like, oh, this is like a, this is a scrapbook that I'm leaving, it's an archaeological artifact that I'm leaving behind for her, for my kid. And I didn't even know until I got to the end and started, I had a lot of realizations that happened at the end of the book about what the book was about.

but that one in particular was like, oh, I'm leaving this as an, yeah, as an archive so that she knows like what my life was and who I was. Like my father died when I was when I was 20. And he was this mysterious figure with all this in very similarly, all these like sort of tribal eras in his life. And one of the things that happens when you lose a parent young is that you realize all of these questions that you maybe could have chiseled together in a, formulated as an adult and go back to your elderly parent and say, Dad, what was this? Or this confused me.

Were you lying? Was I miss? You just don't get to ask those because they're gone. And so this was like, this isn't going to answer all over questions, obviously. Yeah. At least was like a record of who I was and how I got to the person that met her. Yeah. Oh, it was beautiful.

It's also, it also seemed, when I was reading it, it felt a little bit like, um, like a, a roadmap in a way. Like, not that she has to follow the same steps, but it is kind of cool to see when you don't know where you're going, to see what someone you love found their way. It's like, oh, this is going to be okay. Because a lot of your turns, you could be in the middle of them thinking, am I going to make it through AA at 15?

Am I going to, now I'm just, I'm of all these obstacles, but there's a way around all of it or through it. Yeah, and I have two thoughts on that. One is some of the turns, the turn from AA to rave. Right. And chronologically, that's how it happened. Yeah. There's AA, and then it was, the next thing was raves.

And it was very logical for me as a kid to go, like, well, I'm 15 years old, I just, like, gave up and closed it. the gates behind this like horrifying childhood that I had. But now I'm still a kid. Like I had missed that somehow. I thought like my life was over. I thought like, you know, I was 15, but I go, okay, well, I guess I'm up. I'm done with fun and I'll just do like recovery bowling with these, you know, Vietnam vets from now on. But then about a year in, I go, oh, wait, I'm like still a teenager. Like, I got to go find fun and life and what else life has to offer me. And the thing that I stumbled into was, was my first rave. And it became very quickly swallowed me whole and

became my whole social life and my whole world. Well, that very easily could have been a turn that, like, shunted me back into a really dark and dangerous place, you know? Oh, yeah, easily. It doesn't logically comport that those two worlds go together. They did for me, and I got lucky. Yeah. But it could have just, it could have been a horrifying experience.

Right. And for her to read that and be like, oh, no, it's, it's okay. You can go to a place that seemingly could be a little dangerous, but if you have your wits about you. Yeah. I did like the one comment. and maybe I did glance it, when you said that you entered the rave scene with this kind of,

uh, uh, uh, I don't know what the words were, like a moral superiority. Like after coming out of AA that you had like a, you knew that you were living life ethically and like you were, you were kind of like in the doctrine and then showed up at the raves like,

I'm, uh, am I misconstruing? No, I'm trying to, I'm trying to grab what you're, which part you mean. Like I definitely, a hundred percent.

with A.A. I mean, the timeline of A.A. is very complicated. Yeah. Which I didn't, I don't know if I even went into, but what really occurred was I was 15 years old and I'd been in rehab since I was 13. Amazing. In and out. I kept getting kicked out. Every rehab I ever went to, I got kicked out for behavioral issues. Right. And now I'm 44. And I look back on that time and I go, there was so much in my life where I was like positive, sure that I was like a drug addict, alcoholic, that that's what was going on. And now I'm 44 and I'm looking back and I'm going, I don't know what it was anymore. Like, it's all kind of confusing. Was I just a like behavioral case? Was I, did I have psychological problems that I was using? I definitely had a drug problem. Sure. But to think of my,

anyway, everything's a little like foggy. But I, I, I kept getting kicked out of these rehabs for behavioral issues. Every high school I ever went to, I got kicked out for behavioral issue. I fucking hated adults. Like that way, like just, I, I vibrated with hatred for adults. I, like, Why? Where'd that come from? Because your folks were... Well, my mom sent me to therapy when I was four. I started going to therapy when I was four. And I always like, you know... And that's way ahead of the trend. Well, my mom believed in therapy the way...

Evangel... the way my dad believed in God. Right, right. My mom got out of the relationship with my dad through therapy, and my grandma got out of the relationship with my grandfather through therapy. So by the time we landed in Oakland, I was nine months old, and she had escaped this... abusive relationship with my father through therapy, therapy became my daddy in this weird psychological way. The way I described it in the first book, Casher in the Rye, is like, I would be having an argument with my mom,

like, you know, we'd look up at the sky and we'd say, oh, look, this beautiful blue sky. And my mom would go, no, no, the sky's green. We'd go, what are you talking about, mom? This guy's, look, I mean, it's like classic. That's a classic. Blue is kind of the classic. She'd go, nope, green sky.

Then we'd go to family therapy. and I'd say, hey man, Doc, my mom keeps saying the sky's green. And then the therapist would go, be, the sky's blue. And my mom would turn around us and go, oh, the sky's blue. Sorry about that. Like, that was the only way we could kind of get. It was daddy. It was like, dad, mom said I can't go play at the Johnson's house this weekend.

So she. How many daddies were there? How many therapists? Yeah. By the end of my tenure in rehab and such, I was in no exaggeration. therapy eight times a week. I had rehab five days a week after school. And then one day a week, I had group therapy. One day a week, I had individual therapy. And one day a week, I had family therapy. So there were many. There were many. And then there was the police. And then there was

the Oakland Public Schools. And then there was a special education system. And then there was the guy that drove the short bus. Like there was all these adults and every single one of them kind of had the same messaging for me, which is like, do this and you will, this will stop. You know, live according to our rule and things will stop. And so by the time I went to AA and at 15, and I'd already been going to meetings in a big van for two, three years at that point. So I knew where they were when it was time to sort of get off the train. I walk into the Monday night Young People's Meeting in Oakland,

and I look in the room. And look, I guess I would have known this already because I'd already been there. But, you know, I was smoking weed in the parking lot of the NA meetings, you know, trying to pick up girls, whatever. But I walked in to like ask for help. and I look around at this young people's meeting and this fucking adults. It's all adult at the young people's meeting.

Like old gross people, 25, 26 years old. They're just pinning you in. And I go, I'm fucked, you know. And then they're just going to tell me what to do again. And then I started listening and they weren't telling me what to do. They were telling me what they did.

And that shift was so profound that it let me stay a little bit longer. long enough to like sort of accrue days right because now now you're equals it felt like that yeah it felt like you know I remember there's this part in in in this book where I'm talking to this kid I'm now sober I'm talking this kid at my final continuation high school I was in every every school I went to was like a different iteration of like some version of continuation yeah some were like more penal some were more uh mental health you know all of them some were like some were like like hippie alternative, but they were all like alternative.

Yeah. I'm talking to this kid and I go, yeah, you know, I must have been nine months over at this point. I go, yeah, I'm talking to my friend, old man Bill. And, you know, he says, old man Bill, and this kid's like 15. Like he goes, I'm sorry, you have a friend named Old Man Bill? And I go, yeah, why? He goes, how old is this guy? I don't know, 75.

Because you got a 75 year old friend? And I felt like, yeah, I guess I guess I do. And there was something so cool about that. Yeah. There was something so nurturing about these people. And the women. Right. The women, what was really neat about AA for me was that I was significantly younger.

Yeah. Incredibly unattractive. You know, just in my affect. I don't mean I was physically repulsive. Although, you know, I was like young and had like a ring of acne. And like I had a southern accent back then. Right. Never been to the South.

Just like. Just picked it up? Yeah, just sort of decided. Old man Bill. Yeah. Yes, well, Old Manville was a black man, and that was what I was affecting, for sure. And, you know, and I, by the way, I would slip in and out of it, depending on who I was talking to. I was like, you know, this is 1994, you know, it's like I would, and I'm from the Bay, I'm from Oakland.

Every white kid, like, the cool kids were black in my public school. Like, you know, the letterman of Iowa, you know, like the star quarterback and the frat guy or whatever, the sports bro. That was a black guy in Oakland, 100% of the time. So the white kids either pretended to be black were invisible and kept their heads down until they got into private school and got out of Okolitan schools. Or were lucky enough, this was a very rare breed, to be born in a black community and actually be accepted by the black kids. So I was like option one. Just a bunch of other white kids that pretended we were black and had only white friends. What were you wearing?

Oh, Fila. That was my nickname. They called me Fila. Fila has changed now in such a way that I don't think the reference is resonant. Because it's a hipster brand now for like Gen Z kids. Right. But back then it was like, it was the Italian sportswear company that defined me. And they called me Fila because I had, I had multiple Fila outfit.

So I had a Fila hat and a Fila shirt that said Fila on it. And then Fila socks and a Fila shoe. I was Fila. I was Fila. Did it work? In what way? Did I? Did the black kids kind of like not throw you away immediately?

Well, yeah, you know, what actually did happen was there was never acceptance. Right. But what happened with our group is we became that white boy crazy group. Right. So we were so drugged out that the black kids would look at us and be like, we're kind of good. Like they weren't in any way intimidated by us, but they were kind of like, you guys go over there. They kind of like let us be. I do remember I was drawing a weed leaf on, on, you remember when, did you smoke pot when you were yet?

Yeah. Well, not until like senior year. When you like discover it, and especially when you're that young, you're like, you think it's like cool to like weed iconography. So I'm drawing this like weed leaf on my, you know, trapper keeper thing. And this black girl looks over at my thing. And she said, she was like, damn, that's white boy crazy. And I just thought, I mean, I could have been doing backflips with how proud that made me to be a scene. To be seen.

I finally felt like I am seen. That's right. I am crazy. Yeah. And also all the mental health professionals around me. were telling me similar information. So that all ported. Do you have, do you have, when you look back at it or I don't know if it was in the moment

or when you look back at it like this was dad, having all of these different spots, did it work? Like you're so smart and well adjusted as an adult from the time I met you. It's like, yeah, it seems like, you. you had a pretty good upbringing. And then you see the structure behind it after reading the book. But, like, you know what I mean? Like, did you have to shed it or did it kind of work?

That's one of the fundamental, like, the book is part history, literally. I mean, as you know, like, part of it is not my story. It's just the history of that subculture. And what I've, and I love history and I almost became a history professor at a certain point in my life. Yeah. What I've started to realize about history is, like, post-mortem, like, There isn't reality.

There's no truth. And one of the great, like, there just isn't truth. There's just a Roshaman perspective on, like, what it is that occurred. If you asked my mother today, did the therapy, is the therapy the reason I got sober and became a well-adjusted adult? She will say, for sure. 100%. If you ask me, I don't, I can't answer the question.

For a long time, the answer was no. Right. For a long time, I would be, when I was like an AA speaker, because after a while, I stayed sober for a long time. And like I was saying, the timeline was I was in AA and then I went to the raves and then I stopped going to AA and then I went back. And that's when I really became the kind of like rule following sort of cheerleader of AA, sort of getting flown around the country to speak at AA conferences, which is I think

where I learned how to perform in front of people. Yeah. But if you'd ask me then, I had this whole spiel, but I don't know that I believe anymore. Right. But my spiel was, I had all of these diagnoses from all these therapists and all these rehabs, They were ADHD, conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, learning disabled, clinically depressed. I was on medication. They called me on my way to becoming a first class sociopath.

I read that in my own psychological profile. I got locked in mental hospitals. I was on medication. I was with all these therapists. And then none of them solved my problem. Then I came to AA and I worked the 12 steps and all of those problems went away. And so what I had was none of those things. What I had was undiagnosed alcoholism because when I applied the 12 steps of AA,

all of those psychological problems went away. That was my fire and brimstone message. Yeah. I don't know that I believe that anymore. Uh-huh. It's all too, those lines are too clean. Yeah, right. So I don't know the answer.

Did I, did all of that inundation of therapy make it so that when, so that I had this, like, I've often described this realization that I needed to get help as a kind of like, beam of light from the universe. Why would a 15-year-old think, like, because this was the realization, Tom. It's like all of these, I hated adults because they're all telling me what to do. And then I had this like moment of realization, is it possible that every adult in my life is just completely out to lunch? Every single one of them is wrong and I'm the only person that's right.

And when I had that thought, I go, oh, no, maybe I'm the problem. And maybe the problem is the drugs and the alcohol. And then the solution becomes really readily apparent, which is stop doing drugs alcohol. Then the real problem started, which is that I would stop. And then I would wake up in the morning and I would want to get high. And I'd go into my mom's purse and steal money or steal some books from her bookshelf or sell some of her clothes. And then I'd go get high. And then I, at the end of the day, go, oh, my God, how did I get here again? Right. That cycle was the real scary part. Yeah. So, but where'd that beam of light come from? Maybe it was from all the

therapist like setting me maybe it was from all the rehab and the and the and the diagnoses and all this stuff or maybe it was providence and the universe giving me this gift i don't actually know the answer do you feel like the universe has spoken to you at other moments in your life like do you feel like it's a guy there's a guiding force in some point as an adult or yeah i i don't know I don't know. I feel like as I've gotten older, I don't wonder what you feel. As I've gotten older, I feel like the, I have to like go mining for magic now. And it used to just be like right on the surface. Like I used to, those early days in AA, those early, that first rave, the first time I went to Burning Man, like the first time I got on stage, it used to feel like this like sort of electric current was like right under the surface. And now I feel like I've got to put on my little miner hat and like, you know, go down. With my kid, I'm sure you felt this. Like, my kid, I can feel these like moments of magic that are,

that are more elemental and feel more grounded in reality. Yeah. But I used to feel like, yeah, I would get these sort of messages of truth or inspiration. And now I feel like, I don't know if I feel like the world's less magical. I just feel like more grounded. Yeah. Well, you've been through so many lightning strikes. Right.

I'm used to it by now. Yeah, exactly. And I bet, I mean, the kind of cool thing is, that you were always kind of open. You seem to have always been, you weren't like a closed off. There was something searching. There was something,

and you were a little antenna kind of open to what was coming. I'm sure that's where the electricity comes from in a life. I love, I realize this, right, writing this book, like, I just love the, and it's why I do crowd work so much. It's like, I love people.

And I think that there's so, I mean, obviously people are all, also. But I love like people's the kind of weird magical electricity that exists in groups of people that exists in individuals. And like I love doing crowd work because I'm like I, you know, as corny as this sounds like I've always said like every single crowd has like a story to tell me. And if I don't find it, it's not because they didn't have it. It's because I didn't discover it. Like right. You know, it's in there. And and I think it's all connected. Like I just love talking to people and experiencing people and experiencing groups and tribes.

And I love being a lot. It's fascinating. I've been having this thing recently where just watching film or watching a documentary, watching whatever, just watching like the smallness of what people are doing is completely profound and magical. Like just watching somebody like walk in or walk out has really been on my mind. Like watching someone gather their stuff and then say goodbye to who's in the house and go out into the world. It's like, that's like heroic. That is a, these are not small things. Like,

there's a little person going on this journey that only they really understand and really are experiencing. It's funny you say walk out because Hannibal Burris and I used to send each other clips of the ultimate walk-ons for late night sets. Like, not even the set. No one, we weren't interested in the actual comedy. It's like, what's your energy when you're walking out onto the States. Like some people are just truly magical. I hate to say, Bill Cosby had a really good one. What was his? It was just the way he, it wasn't, I can't even describe it. It's just like, you know, it's this sort of magnanimous clutching of the chest and then pointing out to the crowd and then pointing at the host and then the band leader. Like there's these little teeny choices that say like, well, this guy's a star. This guy's nervous. You know, this guy knows he's doing a huge favor to this show by being here. This guy knows this is the biggest moment of his life, you know. So yeah, but that's what Burning Man is in a lot of ways. It's about teeny tiny little moments of absurdity that are, that need no further contacts.

Like there's a passage in the, did you read the whole Burning Man? I think so. There's a passage in there, which is one of my favorite. I know that it isn't what people expect when they say, what's like so magical about Burning Man. I mean, this is last year was my 24th time going. And I worked there for 15 years. So a lot of the magic is like faded away. Right.

But there's this, there's these, and there are spectacles that I've, you know, overwhelming spectacles. Insane. I mean, I remember there was once this guy that had built a stagecoach. It was like an old-timey, like metal stagecoach that they, they wheeled. This was, I think, on Monday, so most people had gone home. I don't think they were allowed to use it during the event. It was so dangerous.

Oh, yeah. They wheeled it in, and it was like a cannon. It was a stagecoach, but with a tank, you know. Turret? Turret. Sure, I love that. And they go, they had like a supportive, a support staff telling us all like back up. We all, we didn't know what it was.

So we back up. Yeah. And we backed up, I think probably 100 feet. And they let loose this flame cannon from the turret that was so overwhelmingly, I think it was a story high. And it was so hot that we were 100. I remember the whole crowd that was 100 feet back screamed and started running like we were like. It was like our faces were melting and it shot out like a hundred feet.

It would have eviscerated any human being who had been there. I mean, it was so fucking hot. And then it came down and it turned off. And then you realized that the whole flame had been powering a single blender at the back of the sagecoats that was mixing margaritas. And then they like poured margaritas for a few people. So there are things that are on that level of scale. Yeah. But one of my favorite memories at Burning Man was I was walking.

The way Burning Man is set up is it's like a, it's like a clock. And the man, the statue of the man is 12 o'clock. And the city is the hours from like 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Am I doing that right? You know, it's this part. This is where all the population is. Right. And up here is sort of blank space.

And past the man is what they call deep playa. And it's where it's very, there's almost nothing out there. But there are little installations. Once in a while, you'll stumble onto something. And we were walking. way out in deep playa, and it's, you know, it's at least a mile out. And it's cold and it's dark. And we see this pale little blue light, like way out.

And we go, we're just kind of wandering. So we say, well, let's go to that little pale blue light. With everything else going on, let's walk to the pale blue light. And by the way, that's a lot of what I think life is like is like, oh, there's a little pale blue light. Let's go see what that is. And then it might be the biggest thing you've ever seen your life. So we walk for probably 40 minutes and we get to the pale blue light. and it's just a man, an old man,

and he set up a teeny marionette, it actually fits your set very well. He set up a teeny marionette stage, and he's doing a marionette performance for fucking nobody. There's no one there until we got there. He was doing it just to do it. He was doing it for us, whoever stumbled by.

And to me, that little moment of magic, you say, like, have I had other inspirational moments? Like sometimes the most random, ridiculous, absurd thing in the world, in particular at Burning Man, has felt that way. Yeah.

Okay, back to Burning Man. The original question where we were going to start. First of all, I baked you this bread. I was wondering what that was. You could feel it. It was literally down to the minute. Oh, my God.

Yeah. You're a bread baker? Oh, yeah. Hold on. It smells really good. Yeah. Bust it out. Sure.

That's what I call it perfect. That's what I call perfect loaf right there. Right? This is, yeah. Oh, man. That's for you. What do you got? You and your family?

Oh, I'm not. Yeah, I've got a starter. We're not going to break bread literally. No, you're going to bring it home. I'm so excited to eat this. I can't even tell you. I'm excited for you guys to have it. It's like perfect.

Yeah, it's pretty good. So what? You're like a comedy genius and then you're just like a perfect baker? Yeah, it's pretty much my resume. Thank you. You're welcome. So I had to time it out. I literally was pulling it out of the oven and it was definitely too hot to take out.

P.S., I feel like little moments like that, you know, these feelings as you get older of like these little moments of like beauty and perfection. like a perfectly baked loaf of bread where you master something. Yeah. I'm sure you weren't always the baker you are today. No, no. You know, like, I started surfing late in life. I'm like, I'm fucking terrible at it.

But it's like, it's this sort of experience of doing something I'm bad at and getting better at it. Yeah. Even those things feel like little magical moments. Oh, 100%. And that's kind of like when you were saying that like the magic, you know, isn't as intense. Yeah. It's not like those giant moments. I find the older I get that I'm more aware of them, but there's, yeah, it's almost at a lower

frequency. Yeah, for sure. You know what I mean? Like that moment you'll have putting on your wetsuit, tying the strap around your ankle. And you look in the sun setting and things are like. Yeah, something. Those smaller moments, I find, I find that as far as like the openness, that we have a,

there's less neediness. there's less. Yeah. You're not trying to, you're not, you're a sponge that's pretty full at this point. So you're not like frantically looking for moisture. You're just kind of, uh, if that analogy works. Yeah, no, like when you're 20 or when I was 20 and each of these worlds is, is, is a, story of this is like, I would find this magical universe and I would go, I want to own it.

I don't, it's not sufficient for me to be a member of it. Like, I want to like be, I want to be the king. I want to be the mayor. And then all of a sudden, you know, know, when you become the leader, or even in the leadership sort of track, the whole magical reason that you wanted to be the mayor in the first place starts to feel like poisonous a little bit. Comedy is like the perfect example. You like, you go, I want to like own comedy.

And then you go, oh, there's so much striving and there's so much like me, me, me, me, you know, like, and now it's a business and I'm doing bluechew ads and, you know, like. So I think it's like as you get, as I'm getting older, it's like sufficient. for me to kind of to not run the thing but to like experience the thing and not be the master. I think surfing for me is like this perfect example. Like it is the first thing I have ever done where I wasn't good at it. And I am not, I'm just not talented at it. I'm not a natural.

And I've just continued to do it. Yeah. And that feels like magical and it's weird. A hundred percent. I remember Daniel Tosh was going to show me how to surf. He's good. He's really good. And he started as a kid.

And he's like, come, come down and I'll show you how to surf. and I said, okay, when? He goes, whenever, whatever's good for you? I'm like, yeah, but with the tides, like, doesn't it matter? He goes, not to you. But yeah, that's exactly. Surfing is the first thing I have ever not quit when I, when I hit a, you aren't talented at this. Oh, yeah.

My whole life was like, I needed to be, I needed to be a star at a thing. Yeah, yeah. And I just feel like there is something deeper about, like, about figuring out how to do something for the joy of doing it, not figuring it out for the mastery of it. Right, right, just to be a part of it a little bit. Now, with Burning Man, I just had my nephew, Sam, who was just here on the podcast.

He had a cool podcast of his own. And he's actually living in Oakland. And he lives an alternative lifestyle. He does not like to conform. He really is always striving to live in a Burning Man kind of existence. And he goes to this kind of mini-burning-man thing by Salt and Sea, where they just go out into the desert. There's like 100 people.

Total randos just completely just they show up in different outfits. And some people have mini-bikes and some people have whatever. And it's just chaos. It's just chaos for a weekend. and him and his brother just came back from it this weekend, and I was hanging with them. They stayed at my house when they were done with the crazy desert. And there's always been a part of me that loves the alternative lifestyle,

that loves the idea of Burning Man. And then there's the scared part of me that doesn't like chaos. Yeah. That really likes to know that things are in order. You know what I mean? and so I've always thought like I should go to Burning Man and then I hear about or read you're writing on this by the way is so great it's so descriptive for someone who's never gone just hearing about the dust like it's like just like in you is like baked on you like the way you describe it is everything that makes me want to go and not go that's I'm good I'm so glad that was the idea The idea was, you know, for a person that was a Burning Man person, they would read it and have a nostalgic and comedic journey.

And for a person like you had never been, they would get this kind of warts in all feeling of like, I kind of understand what it would be like to be there. Yeah. And so I'm really glad to hear you say that. Yeah. No, you're, you know, you're really a good writer. Oh, thank you.

Just on its own. And so you're descriptive, it was like really nice to, it was kind of calming because after dealing with my nephews and being like chart wrestling, like, and they're like, you could come. you'd be like going back to your old days and you'd party and it would be fun and I'm like so it was just kind of like angsty about it and then to read like to be able to be brought into the experience while reading comfortably on my couch oh yeah well be able to shower at any time yeah yeah exactly well that chaos and there's less chaos with every given year and and in fact what

what your nephew's doing is like it's just another uh stop on the timeline of burning man to me because like what they're doing out there, it doesn't appeal to me. Oh, yeah? Well, I'm just over it. I'm like, I'm past it, but I still, the only reason I still go to Burning Man is I have a record. Like, I have a streak. It's like being on TikTok. I got a post, you know, I got a post every day.

Like, if I don't go, then I go, oh, I stopped going. And now I'm a guy that used to go. Right. I barely, I can barely muster the energy to go every year. And by the way, it takes me almost no energy because I've got it all down to such a science. Right. Because it's been so long. Does Natasha go?

Natasha has been. I made a few extreme tactical errors with Natasha. I worked there for 15 years at Burning Man. Yeah. Security, right? Kind of, yeah. We would, what we would do, we worked at a department called The Gate, and we would search all the vehicles as they would come in to kind of like try to find,

you know, folded up hippies underneath a folding couch and an RV. And we did. We would, you know, grab a stumbling arm and go like, hey, come on, Tree Willow. Let's go. And you pop them out. And they'd be in there like, you know, It was 60 bucks. Yeah.

Well, it would be like that. It used to be a lot of fun. I mean, part of what the gate was, and this won't, it's hard to translate. And that's,

I unpack it in the book is like, Burning Man started that chaos you're talking about. Burning Man started and before Burning Man, you know, with, when acid hit the world. Right. The world kind of,

the young, the youth shattered into like a thousand different directions, right? And, uh, you know, some of it was the hippie movement. Some of it was Ram Dass, turn on, tune in, drop out, Timothy Leary stuff. And some of it, and one iteration of it was Kim Keezy and the Merry Pranksters, right?

They bought a bus and they just started dropping acid and driving across the country to go like, what weird shit can we see? Yeah. Like, that's enough. It's enough to just go, like, explore the, we don't need to go to India and tell, like, white people everywhere how to find enlightenment. Like, enlightenment can be as absurd as, like, a marionette performance in deep play a like. Let's go see what weird shit there is out there. And then this group in San Francisco heard about that. And they were like, let's take it a step further.

Let's agitate weird shit. Let's create weird shit in real time. Right. Like, you know, this is a group called the Suicide Club. That was like a secret society. And they would have like, they would climb up to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge to have high tea. Or they'd, you know, they'd infiltrate the American Nazi party and then go like do a performance in their meeting. You know, they were agitating real.

Yeah. And then this group heard about them and said, let's do that. But instead of doing it for us, you know, we'll have this cool experience. Let's do it for the public. And they were called the Cacophony Society. And they invented this phrase called culture jamming, right? Where you would do a thing that would, like, disrupt culture to such a degree that people looking would have this moment of like, what the fuck is going on here? This feels like chaos.

This is scary. So they created, you know, improv everywhere comes from them. Flash mobs come from them. Right. Billboard liberation where you see like a billboard where an artist has, like, adjusted it slightly so that it's, you know, It looks like it's a target ad, but it's like an anti-imperialism added. Like, they did that. Like, that was their contribution to society.

And then they linked up with this guy, Larry Harvey, who was just doing this performance art of setting this man on fire on the beach in San Francisco. And they joined forces and they went out to the Black Rock Desert to do like a festival dedicated to that, to a culture jamming, weird, like, ripping of the kind of stable feeling of society where you could just go. see weird shit, a stage coach that makes margaritas that also could kill a village. You know what I mean? Right.

And so the chaos is a part of it. It's like that it's a human, a healing experience to have a meaningless feeling of wonder. Yeah. Yeah. And when you have a family or if you're just nervous by nature, you don't want that disturbance. There's like, there's that, there's a great line in the, in the Grateful Dead song. rich man in his summer home rich man in his summer home

says just leave well enough alone. Yes, yes. You know what I mean? You're like, okay, we're good. I've kind of carved out a manageable structure here. And then your nephew's coming out off the desert. And they're like, we're tearing it all down. And you're like, don't.

Yeah. Well, that's, that is the, that is the, um, the negotiation of Burning Man, uh, and, and also just like life in general. Yeah. It's like, it's like, it's this negotiation of like, it feels, I want to be, by the way, you aspire to be a guy that goes to Burning Man. I aspire to be a guy who lives in my van and, and is just traveling around and never, doesn't have a house and doesn't have bills and just like, lives in a national park for four. I'll never be that guy. I like my house. I like, I like, I like, he.

heat. I like Netflix. I like, you know what I mean? I like nice clothes. But I always have looked at my friends who are more Burning Man world than me and gone, God, that seems like such a cool. Yeah. You know, it's not cool as a retirement plan, by the way. Van Life is a lot of fun when you're in your 30s and 40s. Then when you start getting like sciatica and kidney problems and you're like, I don't have a fucking savings account because I spent it all on campsite reservations. Like, you're kind of fucked. But, um, but, but, but in that book, in the book, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I describe, like, I don't know what burning man means, but I know in some ways what it means to me

because the actual burning of the man, to me, represents, like, that we are all, we are all the man that is going to catch fire. Like, we are all impermanent. We are about to die. Right. You know, if you go up far enough, our death is like tomorrow on the grand timeline.

And so while you are alive, which is short and rare and precious, and unbelievable that, you know, I've got this bit right now. I'm working on that it's all about come. It's just nothing but come. But it's like, it's one of the things in there, it's like if your dad had just, your mom was out of town, your dad was just like, you know, frustrated. And he jerked off instead of making love to your mom.

Like, you don't, you're not here. Like, you never, you weren't, it's so impossible to be alive. You were contained in one orgasm. Like, you weren't just like meant to be. It was like you were what, you were one. A wet dream away from never existed, from the collected works of Tom Papa just never be. No, it's not Tom Papa. It's Diane Papa.

And she's a geneticist somewhere in Sweden now doing a whole different timeline. So like, it is profound. So that feeling of like wanting to be safe, which I so relate to and I want to be safe too. I mean, starting surfing made me realize like, I'm a hot dogger. I want safety above all. But while you're chasing safety and comfort, it's very easy. not for you. I mean, Tommy, you have a cool life. But a lot of people in the safety zone, they just don't do that much.

They just kind of miss out on like doing the thing. And so I think that's what Burning Man and sort of my whole life's journey has been about. It's like, I want to like shake an experience of extremeness in some way out of the small timeline that I'm here. Right. Yeah. I watched this documentary once called Maiden Voyage. It's so fucking good. it's about the youngest girl ever to sail around the world on her own. Oh, yeah.

She's like 14 or 15, and she sails from Amsterdam by herself. And it's kind of hilarious because, like, the government tries to shut her down, but her parents are like, you go, you go, little girl. We are Dutch. We believe in adventure. And then she goes and, like, her big realization at the end is like, I don't want to spend much time with my family anymore. But anyway, I was watching it as a parent to a daughter and going,

I would fucking, I would fucking never. I would never let my daughter do this. Never. But then there's something I admire about it because I go, life is so conveyor belt feeling for so many people. Like if I happen to have the daughter that is the world's greatest solo circumnavigator, like I wish I was the type of dad that goes, go, live, see what's in the sea. Yeah.

It really is. It's funny because we're all contradictions. And the timeline is so short. It's like, I said, I always say that I want to be like the cool guy when they travel, like the cool photojournalist who just has his camera, his jean jacket and like one little satchel. And it's just like wherever. I'm in Mozambique and this is the way to I'll sleep wherever tonight.

But you've got the eight piece Louis Vuitton. I get that. I've got three credit cards. and where do they where does it safe to stay yeah but it is cool i mean but there is like that thing and i you know who knows uh it's there is that thing like when you take mushrooms or you have to just be fearless and just let it go yeah and be conscious of it's what's happening right now we're tripping right now this is okay right and in that and that kind of it's the same thing with chaos it's it's okay we're in that right now

And you just got to, you just, the only thing, the only silly thing stopping you is fear in that very tiny, tiny moment. A hundred percent. It's ego is the, is the big enemy of the thief of joy. They say fear is the thief of joy. And ego is like the physical, the action-based manifestation of fear. Like, you were talking about traveling. And I was thinking about my friend Jeremy, like, he's, when I travel, my whole vibe is like, I'm cool. I could be German, you know.

Hey, you don't know. I'm not American really. Like, I could. And that, my friend Jeremy, his vibe is like, excuse me, a German man, where are the good German restaurant? And I'm like, I would never. I would like crumble. Like I need everybody to look at me and go, that's one of the cool ones. Yeah.

Meanwhile, Jeremy's having a better fucking vacation than I am. You know what I mean? Because the German guy's going, oh, you want the good German. And we're going, oh, down here. Have you seen all museums? That's a great place for sex work. Go this way. Like, he's having all these experiences because his ego is at a zero.

And mine is getting in the way of acquiring joy. Right. It's so funny. It is a much better way to be. When you talk in the book, one of the other things is Judaism. Yeah. The classic subculture. The coolest one of all.

It really is. Do you want any of these pastries, by the way? We decided that we should probably have food if you want any. Oh, I'm good. I mean, you know what? The food of friendship is what I'm consuming right now. Come on you. It is funny when,

this is just a thing, because I haven't seen you in a while, during the pandemic, watching you and Natasha post, it seemed like it got very, very animalistic, and it got very, what's the word?

Not carnal. It got very, Yeah. Horny? What? Horny? No, me, I'm sure there was some horny. But it's all of a sudden you guys were like camping. You were like, there seemed like a little earthiness.

Well, we moved to the woods. Yeah. We moved to my ancestral homeland in, my grandfather built a cabin in the Redwoods of Mendocino. Not the Jewish side of the family. We're not big cabin builders. But we lived up there and we did become a bit, a bit feral. Farrell, that's the word. That's the word.

And it was awesome. For me, anyway, like, to watch my kid, like, turn into this little, like, forest creature was just like, this is as positive an experience as I feel like we could be having. Yeah. And in the similar vein that we're talking about Burning Man, during the pandemic, it was like, let's keep our shit together. We're still working. We're still doing this stuff. And then I'd see your guys post and it was like, that's what I'm feeling in my head. We physicalized it.

Yeah. And just to see. like you in the woods, like with a little mud on you. And it was, it was great because a big part of my, I know what I look like and what I seem like, but a big part of my anxiety in the world is, and I think maybe it is connected to the Judaism, is I'm like this creature of masculine and feminine energies. Like I know that I come across as this like a little effete hipster. But like I, a lot of my anxiety is about, not even anxiety, but it's like I notice myself doing these things that are almost like caricature,

masculinity things, you know? Yeah, no, there's no joke. I mean, when you go through the book, it's like, uh, I think you're closer to being a badass in a, like you're not, I know what you're saying. I want that. But you did, but you are that. Yeah, well, good. You are born. It's all ego. It all gets back to ego. It's like I somehow feel there's some deficit in me and so I'm making it up. I have a, you know, an RV on a lifted Chevy 2,500 HD. And like I, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, like, I, I, I, like, walk out with, like, cock on my hands. And I'm like, honey, I'm, like, the ape in 2001, like, look what my hands have

off. And then she goes in and looks at it, and it's like, this doesn't work, but it's like, it's enough, you know, the joy I feel when I do a minor kind of masculine task. So your background in Judaism and where you are in Judaism now, Well, my background is weird and complicated, as I think every part of my weird, ridiculous of life. But my- Yeah, the background was extra weird. Well, mine, I think, I, the phrase I use is that I had a profoundly more and profoundly less Jewish upbringing than any of the Jews that I know. Like, I wasn't, nine months a year, I was a fully secular, almost zero Jewish, as a kid I'm talking about.

And my dad, when my mom, as we said, went to therapy, pulled in a, escape like a parachute line and moved us almost literally in the night to Oakland. My dad, who had been born to two secular Jews, my grandmother, Helen, she was left behind in Hungary by my great-grandfather, who was an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew, who moved to the United States to go, like, kill enough chickens to, like, raise the money for his family. And by the time he sent for them, she was over it and resentful because she had been raised without a father. She was 20 years old and hadn't seen her dad in 12 years and was just like, fuck you, fuck this, I'm out of here. Became an American Communist Party member, married a Yiddish novelist, my grandfather, Dovid Kasher.

And they were card carrying American Communist Party members, civil rights marching, you know, beatniks that wanted nothing to do with religiosity. Right. And my dad followed in those footsteps. He was born Jewish, he was born deaf and but became an abstract impressionist painter and a beatnik and a like, you know, Freiko. And that's when he met my mom. And they had this like sort of beatnik crash pad in the East Village in New York and were painters and filmmakers and weirdos, deaf weirdos. And then when my mom left, my father, I imagine, this is one of the questions that I was unable to, am unable to really ask him. Right.

He, you know, in the detonated absence of his family, I have this calendar when my mom left from my dad's house when he died. And there's literally X's counting off the days until we return. And when I, when the X's stopped, I imagine my father's new life began. Wow. And he became like a born, he went back to the old country. He went back to his grandparents' faith because religion is good for that. You know, when you have no answers, they're like. Yeah.

We do answers. Right. Yeah. That's sort of our thing. We've got you. So he became this ultra-Orthodox Jew, and then he ended up marrying a woman. He was, he went back to ultra-Orthodox Judaism, or I don't even know if you could call it back. Yeah.

But he married a woman who was from us, the Sotmar, Hasidim, who are the most hardcore. Did you see unorthodox on Netflix? No. It's about like this, like, super hardcore sect that this woman escapes from. Right. That was my family. Oh, wow. And so I, then all of a sudden my dad won visitation rights to see me.

Right. And I flew home at about, I think, five years old to, like, as I say, like, from this totally secular world to, like, cosplay as Tevia the milkman for six weeks a year. Like, I literally, the kids in my neighborhood spoke Yiddish as a first language. Yiddish. Yeah. Not even Hebrew. We're talking. I got cousins, Tom, that are, they have Eastern European accents.

And they were born in America. and their parents were born in America. And their parents don't have the Eastern European accents. So just the community? It's like when you are an immigrant's kid, the immigrant says, I go be a part of the community. Like don't, let's not stick out. But then you are raised.

Now you're an adult. And then you go, hey, we're good. So then you take your kids and you go, let's just send them in this community, let's just send them to a seminary. Right. You see it in Asian families here now that like my generation, a lot of people have very Americanized names.

But then younger Asian kids I've noticed are like taking on the more traditional name. And they go, this is who I am. I'm confident here. The way that that manifested itself in the Jewish community was they would send them to Yiddish-speaking Yiddish seminaries. So the kids, my age, had straight up sounded like characters in Dr. Javago. And their parents sounded like Yankees fans. Like it was the strangest fucking thing. That's so funny.

So that's the world I grew up in. So you would just. drop in there for a couple of months in the summer? This was my summer vacation. That was your summer vacation. It was awful, dude. And did you have, were you, was he trying to teach you? Was he trying to convert you?

Or were you just allowed to still be secular, but just hanging out for the summer? I certainly wouldn't be allowed to be secular. Right. But I also never got this feeling for my dad, like, and I'm so grateful that he didn't give me this, because I never got this feeling like where you, what you're doing back home is sin. And when you're here, it's holiness. Yeah. And this is where.

you the punishment will come or what or god's up there and he's watching you in california and he knows when you're horny and like yeah i never got that all i got like from my dad was like put this yamaka on put this outfit on let's go pretend and and and it was in some ways a manifestation of my dad's probably insecurity about his position in that community right he was kind of a newcomer himself so he's just like and he's deaf and like you know he just it so he just wanted us to like fit in right and so my relationship with Judaism then was like childhood like panic all the time I would just like be walking through the neighborhood I had an English prayer book and that was like already a scarlet letter oh really yeah English English English it's New York City dude it's an English community but like in that world I walk in with an English prayer book and people are like I swear like whoa whoa they used to do dodgeball games in that community and it would be me and the the ultra-Orthodox kids versus the actually religious kids like they would be looking at

looking like, you know, they had the full, like, and they were the dominant, they were the black kids from Oakland public school. They were the cool kids. So I was just like, my only experience with Judaism was like embarrassment, shame, terror. They do a thing in Judaism where it's a great honor to be like called up to the Torah. And there's all these different like things you can do. You can say the blessing for the Torah and when you're past 13. But when you're younger, you can like put.

the gown, put the like, they have like a dress that they put on the Torah. Yeah. And then there's a belt. There's like a belt that you put on it. Like you wrap it and you, and I was like belt worthy. And maybe once a year I would get belt job. And it was like big honor. Right.

And I'm just like my only, it was very difficult to do, but I would try to affect a look all summer long of I am incapable, like my facial expression, incapable of belt duty. Like that's what I was trying to look like. I just wanted a guy to look at me and go, he can't do belt. Because I would like. So you'd be off the hook. I would just like walk up there and I like literally the whole job is going like this. Yeah.

I'm just like I just like and I had heard that if you drop the Torah up, that was another one, you lift it. Lift it and then you sit. If you drop the tour you're supposed to fast for 50 days. 50 days. And then there's some work around where you can donate to the synagogue. But I was just like I knew. I knew like I'm going to lift it. I'm going to fucking drop it.

I don't have any money. Like we're on well. I was raised on welfare. Like I'm not going to be able to. I'm going to die of like Torah abuse. Where's my felon? Where's my 40? That's really what it was.

When I finally got home when I turned about 12 and I got high for the first time, it's just like, oh, I don't care about any of that. I'm not going back. And by the way, to make matters worse. I'm going into too much detail. But to make matters worse, when I went, summer is the worst time to go visit a local orthodox community. I didn't even think of that. Because not only are you in wool, but black wool, there's no, black wool, there's no good holidays. Like Hanukkah's in the winter

Passover's in the spring Russia Shana where you dip the apples in the honey That's in the fall All we got was a holiday called Tisha Bavav. You never even heard of it. It's the commemoration of the great temples in 70 AD and like some 38 BC Like it's literally a commemoration of two fallen buildings

And that was the big holiday And the way you celebrate Tisha Bavav is you are supposed to weep in temple And so I would go in a temple on this big holiday and there'd be all these grown men like shuckling back and forth and like squeezing tears out of their faces like the graduation ceremony at a stella adler acting workshop and i would be in there going like oh ha ha ha because i'm so ashamed like i don't want anybody know i'm like i don't even know what what's great temple we had a great temple what's a great temple but i just go oh oh fellas

and i would like think about like kids making fun of me in in oakum public schools like try to like like what acting exercises yes exactly like when people make fun of my mom's deaf voice i I literally be thinking about that, like, trying to squeeze a tear out. I miss those building so much, fellas. It was just like a fucking trail of tears. Oh, my God. So now as an adult, I know I'm leaping, but is there any connection to Judaism? Well, in your, like, do you have, I mean, because A.A. is a very Christian-based.

It is. It is. And it's in its roots, it is Protestant Christian. Right. The basics. It's a group called the Oxford group that was really back to basics. Yeah. And in many ways, A.A. is such a simple version of spirituality.

Yeah. And I don't mean that, insultingly. I mean, like, when I got to A.A., finally, I had this thing where I go, oh, I can, you, like, the esoterica of Hasidic Judaism is so, you have to, you have to study so much to get to the part where it's all life function-based. You know, there's a blessing for eating. There's a blessing for going to the bathroom. It's a total system.

It's a closed system. Right. Very complex system. Super complex. And in order to get to the parts that are meaningful, you know, like, it's all study-based. And like, I say, like, Jews study the way Buddhists meditate, you know? Right.

And so to get to enlightenment, you've got to get through fucking tomes. Yeah. And I never had any, I never had through all that shame and weirdness. I never had a feeling of anger or alienation towards the religion itself. It was always towards the experiences that I had. Like, I just had this like, somehow my dad wasn't heavy-handed enough with the way he gave me this incredible version of religiosity to make me go, fuck that. I never want anything to do with it. But when I found A-A, it was like, oh, this is actually useful.

When I step on your toes, I can go to you and I say, I'm sorry for stepping on your toes, Tom. In the morning, it was just. practical and and and and and I could live like that yeah and then when I was like 20 my dad got sick um and I flew you know I I flew home and he was you know already beyond the the the help of doctors you know it's like when we first heard he was sick it was like there was this conversation with my brother like should we go and my brother and I decided he would go first and he went and had this like meaningful experience. But then I got the call when it was like time to go now.

And go now means it's too late. Like you should have gone before. Yeah. So when I got there, he was already sucked up and addled with cancer and just it was on his way. On his way. And it was really rough and really weird. But there were some funny stories that occurred as a result of it.

When you get really sick in the ultra-Orthodox world. they call in like chaperones or like show mares to watch, to be there the moment it died, the body dies, so that you can make sure everything is done according to the incredibly complicated system of rituals. And it's crazy how complicated it is. Yeah, I can imagine. There's so many different rules that have to be followed.

So I had this strange experience of like the most intimate moments of grief, watching my father die. I would like look over and it would be like one of the accents, to Dr. Javagan's, like, sitting there, like, during my intimate moment, and it'd just be like, this guy that, like, you know, looked at me sideways for having an English prayer book. Right. Yeah. It was so weird.

But one night, one of the guys, one of my cousin, he says, I was a little more comfortable. I was 20, and I was sober five years. You know, I had earrings and I was like a longer hair and I was like a raver, full on raveur at that point. I was a little bit more comfortable in my skin. And he, so I was, you know, I would talk to him and I would debate with them. and then one night, one of the cousins, he goes, you're not religious.

I go, yeah, no. And he goes, can I tell you? Can I tell you something? I go, oh, fuck. It's something I've never been able to admit to anyone. I go, oh, my God, okay. Like, okay, you're gay. You know, I got, I'm from California,

so it's like my legal duty to be like, I accept you, I love you, and you are on your way. And it's like, I've always wanted. And I go, you have to be gay. I get it. I've always wanted to fuck a man. I get it. Yeah. I've all of his responded. I go, yeah, I get it.

To be, to be a lawyer. I go, what? A lawyer? Like a lawyer? And he's like, yes. Oh, that feels so good to get that off my chest. I go, what do you mean? Don't tell anyone. Yes, I go, you could just be a lawyer.

Just go be a lawyer. And he goes, oh, no, no, no, mommy would never let. I was like, what a fucking, what is this universe? Like, any other Jewish family's wet dream. And this guy's like, I could never. So intense. But when my dad died, I did the morning ritual, which, you know, Shiva, everybody knows about that, where you, like, sit low to the ground.

But it's also really complicated and rule-oriented. And there's all these, like, strata of grief. Like, the first seven days you sit and you don't look in the mirror, you do nothing but, like, just grieve, you grieve heavy. And then at seven days, the day seven, you get up, you walk around the block and you, like, let the spirit of the dead person flip. float into the sky or whatever. And then, but then you have a month where you, you're up and you go back to work,

you get back to your life, but you're like in this altered state. You're still in a grief state. You don't shave. You don't listen to music. You've put yourself in this like sideways place. And then after the month, you can shave and you can get back to a more normal, but you're still in this, in the third phase, which is a full 11 months, not a year. You have to say the prayer for the dead, the cottage prayer, to make.

sure that their soul ascends up to heaven. But not a year, 11 months, not a year. God forbid he should be so evil. He needs a full year of these prayers to get up to heaven. 11 months will do. Even in grief, it's like a negotiation. 11 months. So anyway, throughout that year, when I go back home,

I'm now this rave kid. And I started going on Friday evenings. I was supposed to say it every day, but I knew I wasn't going to do that. My brother, he has his own story where he became a rabbi because of this experience. So he was doing the full duty where he was doing it three times a day. Yeah. But throughout that year, I would go every week.

That would be my commitment to myself every week I would go to temple and say this prayer for my father. And I had this experience of like going into these temples that were like freaky hippie woman rabbi and gay people. And like, it like, I had this like reconfiguration of like my own connection. Yeah. And it became. like, yeah, it's a part of who I am now in this way.

And in that way, like, my dad did give me a connection to his faith, but he wasn't here to see it. Right, right. Yeah, it became a little bit more of a way that you could fold it into your life. But isn't it interesting, like, that you weren't being indoctrinated, but yet that stuff sticks? That's the same question you asked at the beginning. Like, was it the therapy that got you to have the realization?

Yeah. It was a realization that the evidence that the therapy was bullshit. It's the same thing as like, yeah. Yeah, was it, did I find this relationship to my identity despite the traumatic parts? Or was it because of the traumatic parts? Yeah. I have this memory. Yeah, or is there something in your nature, which is from your ancestors?

Well, part of what it is, it's like, I think that the Jews and the deaf worlds, these two worlds that aren't really subcultures. You know, they're really just the, yeah. They are sub to the culture. They are small groups within. this dominant culture, they were the worlds I was born into. Deaf parents, this Hasidic Dad, both of them have this kind of through line, which is that there are these people on the margins who would not allow any dominant culture to control their destiny.

They say we will survive and we will make our own rules despite what the dominant society has told us. And I think that's what I was looking for in all these other universes, was like these other groups of weirdos. Right, right. Yeah, you're comfortable there. Those are my people. Yeah, those are your people.

And that's why comedy to me is like this ultimate version because I think what's so cool and powerful about comedy is like, you know, the through line between like you and, you know, me and Natasha and Mike Epps and Kevin Hart and, you know, Bill Burr. I mean, we don't, these aren't necessarily people that fit in. in a social order. This is very similar to AA. They say the people that would normally not mix.

But we've got this thing, which is like everybody like sees the world through this lens of like this shit is hilarious. And so it brings you together in this like very bizarre connection piece, which I think I really love. Right. Yeah, it is, that is very interesting. It's kind of this, I mean, it's kind of the rest of your stops along this, this way, in your life

but it's it's all not accepting the status quo yeah yeah exactly I think those are the people that I look for and that's definitely what comics are and you know in that way like I don't know you're my old man Bill

you know right but no I think you and I probably could have hung out but I just I think it's so cool and I used to think it was even cooler before the politics of the world sort of to really pull people apart. Yeah. When I would see people and I go,

you guys shouldn't even like each other. Right. It's not even that you shouldn't be around it. You should be enemies, but you have this third commonality, which is like, that's funny. You see a person set and you go like, ugh, I hate, like I would watch Patrice.

Right. It would always be like, ugh, I hated what he said. God, that was fucking funny. And I respected that because it was this thing that we had in common. And I just thought that was such a, I always felt like there was such a powerful thing

that comedy had that I sort of, feel like we've lost a little bit. Like people have gotten pulled apart more. Yeah. But I always thought that was so cool. A little more siloed. There is definitely that thing. Yeah, there's a lot of different layers to the pulling apart.

But there is that thing. Like, we don't see each other for a long time. I know it's like a family. It's like, oh, my cousin's coming over today. Yeah. You know what I mean? My cousin that I'm, it's comedy so weird, because, yeah, my cousin that I'm in, I'm in competition with.

You know, it's like, we're like, that's something that's always so bizarre to me is it's like, it's family and everybody's, I guess family, everybody's jealous of everybody else too. So maybe it's just family. Right. Yeah, 100%. All right. So you, the book is subculture vulture and people can get it. Did you do the audiobook too?

I did do the audio book. There's a funny story from the audiobook, speaking of the black community. There's a part in the book. where I describe, I was really in a deep identity crisis. To the degree, and it was the 90s, to the degree where I was a liberal N-word user when I was 13, 14 years old, in the good way. Yeah.

You know, the good way. Yeah. The good way. And I had this experience, which was so like a part of my journey of growing up, which was that my friend Larry, who was a black kid in AA, he was about 19, sober three or four years. And he was my buddy. He was like my friend.

And sober longer than me, and he's black. And one day he just grabbed me and he threw me up against the wall right outside of that 2910 telegraph meeting. He threw me up against the wall and he's just like, you need to stop fucking saying that word. And I was like, oh, man, you know, I don't mean anything by it. You know, it's just like, that's just who I am. You know, it's just some North Oakland shit. And he like, he goes, stop saying that shit too. He's like, you're not from North Oakland.

You're from northern Oakland. You're from a nice part of the northern area. of Oakland. Stop saying the N-word. Stop saying you're from North Oakland. Anytime you do either of those things, I'm going to beat the fuck out of you. And as I say in the book, I go, you know, some spiritual realizations happen slowly as your mind blossoms like a lotus over time. And sometimes a kid named Larry throws you up against a wall and threatens to beat your ass. And it happens all at once.

So that was part of the journey. And it was like a truly a meaningful experience. It was the closest I felt to my head literally popping out of my ass. I had this realization like, this is just like thundering realization. Oh, he is, he's right. He's not just right. He's like, right on this like bone level, you know? Like, it was like, and not most things are not like that.

But it really was. It was like one moment I said it. The next one was like, wow, I can't believe that's who I was. It's amazing. And I was coming to the audiobook and I was realizing that this passage has the N-word in it. And it was one thing to type it, but it's another, I could put an asterisk in it. But how am I supposed to do this for the audio?

Larry would not be happy. I go, well, what do I do? Maybe I'll find like a celebrity, like a black actor, a celebrity. And then I go, I was talking to Chelsea Preddy. She's like, what are you going to call an actor and go, hey, could you come in for two lines? You say the N-word four times? It's like, nobody wants this job. And I'm like, right, what do I do?

And nobody wants this job. And then somebody says, a friend of mine is like, what about Larry? I go, Larry? Actual Larry? And he's like, yeah, I go, yes, that's the idea. I go, I didn't talk to actual Larry in 20 years. So I go on to Facebook, which I, I, I, I, I, I, always loved because I support them politically in every decision that they make.

Of course. I fucking find Larry. And I'm like, dude, this is going to be weird. But you were really meaningful to me as a friend, but also in this particular way. And he's like, oh, I remember that conversation. And I go, I hope this isn't awkward or weird, but how would you feel about, he's not in the entertainment industry. He's coming in and he goes, I would be honored to do it.

No way. And so it's actual Larry is in the audio book. No way. Did he just do that part or did he do the whole section? He did that section. he did his lines. He was Larry. And I go, and I say in the book something to the degree of something the effect of like, well, for obvious reasons, I cannot read the next passage about my friend Larry.

So, ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce actual Larry? And then here comes actual Larry. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. That's amazing. So you've gone through all of these. You have six subcultures that you've kind of been a part of. Yeah. And you write this very beautiful missive to your daughter of what it all means and where it's

to go but you're a young man yeah uh do you think you'll pop up i mean surfing's a little bit of a one do you think a history professor do you think there's uh is can you see yourself ending up maybe not even longing for it do you think there's what are the odds that mosha ends up in another subculture for a good chunk of time oh i think that the odds are are low And I think, but I guess possible. I was thinking about this when I came in and you said that your daughter's, your last daughter went to college. Yeah. I was thinking like the, I was thinking about this a lot lately.

Is when you have a life like mine, but when you have a life period, when you have children, you go, because that was all I was doing was like running from world to world. Like, what is my meaning? What is my purpose? Like, where are my superpowers? You know, like, what's my universe where my people are, where I'm powerful? And then you go, fight, fun. You know, let's have fun. My religion is fun.

I want more experiences. And then you have a kid, hopefully, when you have a kid, your feeling is like, oh, I'm, I don't need to, I was. I was ready to stop striving in the way I was, you know? I was like old enough where I go, like, I'm not going to miss going to the raves anymore. I'm ready for a new experience. Then you have this kid and you meet the kid and you go, oh, this is the thing. and I didn't get far past that but now my daughter's almost six

and I had this realization the other day is like you have this shift where you go oh my whole life's purpose I know what my life's purpose is it's to like inculcate this creature with lessons and love and send them into this this world armed with all of the things they need to be armed with to have

power and happiness and joyful experience of the world but also protection blah blah blah this is my purpose and then I just thought I hadn't even got and far enough to think about it, then they move out. Like, you have this profound shift where you go, I know exactly what my life is.

And then 18 years later, they're like, bye. And I go, now what the fuck? You're right. So maybe that's when I'll find this subculture is like when I'm in your position. Yeah, you'll start baking bread. That's right. I think I'm a baker. Please, let me be a baker.

Yeah, it's really true. I remember like before we had kids, I was just like, I was like, oh, this is going to be good for us, because I'm starting to think way too much about myself. Yes. My career was just, it's that desperate part of your career when you're trying to find your spot. And I was like, what's this lump in my armpit? Am I, do I have something? Yeah.

And it's like, once you have a kid, it's like, you don't think about your armpits ever again. Right. You're just completely all in. Her armpit. And then you pop out. And yeah, it is a shift for sure. Well, it's just such an interesting part of the life cycle. where it's so obvious what your mission is.

And then, but my wife's, a person, like a spiritual leader, she went to, said, like, you're, from the minute they come out of you, you are training them to leave you. You're like training them to say goodbye forever. And it's such a weird thing because it's so true and obvious when you have a child what the, what the mission is. Yeah. And then what is the mission? And that's why in India, when the kids move out, that's when they go to the,

woods. That's when they go sit under a bush for 40 years. They're just like, okay, Mike, I think I'm good. I'm going to go figure out if there's any secrets in the universe left for me to think about, you know? Yeah, for sure. But we're not going to do that because we like Louis Vuitton for four seasons, six credit cards. So what the fuck? But I don't have to worry about that yet. She's just six. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've so long to go. I think this a new subculture I can't quite see it happening I think like part of what this book was about

was like feeling like I had settled and it took a weird path of never, of always feeling agitated, never feeling settled. This weird path to go like, I feel like I've like settled into my skin and I've seen and I have integrated these pieces of myself to realize, like, it took all of these pieces that don't feel like

they fit to make me. And everybody's got that. Like, every single human being in the world has got that. And to, is this, like, path that without every element on the path, the good, the pain, the awful, all of it, you just wouldn't be yourself. And when you were saying in the beginning, like, about, will my daughter go through a journey like this, like part of like what what I was thinking about the books, I don't know how possible it is for people to, I mean, they have journeys and everybody's got a path, but like these splintered

realities. Yeah. Reality has become really unsplintered because of the internet. The reality is really synthesized into this like thoroughfare of culture. And like this, that letter that I wrote to my daughter was not just about like, here's what I've been through, but also like, here's what life was like before everything was so connected when things felt a million miles away where you could stumble into like it felt like pinball like you're slapped from one experience to another yeah so I don't know maybe there is another experience out there for me yeah maybe it's even in that section when you say when you take your I forget how you describe it about being in the computer verse of the future and you connect like your eye yeah yeah yeah yeah you connect like your

your Oculus eye to whatever. Yeah, your cybernetic eyeball and then your urine, dis, reaculturation tube or whatever. Yeah, 50 years from now, 80 years from now. Yeah, it's going to be, yeah, maybe that'll be it. Maybe we'll just be doing video games with our eyeballs or something. Well, you know what somebody told me that I thought was so interesting? It was like, because I wrote that thing going like,

oh, now culture is all like collapsed on itself and it's all one big thing. And she was like, this journalist I was talking to about, the book was like, this is true. What you're saying is true, but also on the other end of it, I'm seeing these weird mini subcultures popping out because of the internet. Like, you know who Drennan Davis is? He's a comic that I started with in San Francisco. He's brilliant, brilliant comedian.

But he's got this video series he does where he like makes his cats talk. Like it was just his cats, but he's talking. And I saw him the other day and he's like, it's fucking gangbusters. Like the cat talk people, they love it. I'm doing cat talk meet up. and, you know, they're selling out my shows and, like, and I go, well, that's, I guess that is also a subculture that's, like, been squeezed out of the bottom of the internet. It's like these, they're sub-sub-cultures. They're like, they're just people that like Drennan Davis's cats, you know, there's all these, like, mini, mini, mini cultures and like, so there is something cool about, I do think sometimes, like, people our age are like, we, we aren't ready for what, you know, it seems diseased what the internet is rendering upon us. But our kids, especially our grandkids, they'll be, they'll have the cybernetic eyeball.

And so we can't even see maybe what they are doing with the internet has like filtered the poison. And they've like found a way to make it beautiful. Yeah, maybe. I hope so. Probably not. I hope so. I mean, there's. It seems like it's going that way.

Everything seems like it is going really well and progressing towards a like really positive future. Oh, yeah. I'll see that. Yeah. I mean, we definitely, I don't know what problems are left to solve, really. Well, we are coming together as a society. and I would say luckily the earth is in good shape as well. Yeah.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for breaking bread with me. Yeah. Bring that home. I said, Natasha. This is not fake like I'm on a podcast trying to be a good guy. I'm like extremely genuinely, viscerally excited about it. Maybe that's my subculture. Not a baker.

It's just eating bread. Just eating people's stuff. Why your book is so great, though, in a parting little message to our listeners, is you go into these subcultures that are pretty fraught and there are filled with obstacles and that you are able to go into all of these and come out being a great guy and a great dad and a great husband and a great comedian is really inspiring. Like you were saying like we all humans kind of do stuff. But I really, truly, the reason this book is good and I can't wait to continue reading it is

this is not everybody goes through this and becomes this there's a lot of places in here where people could have gotten stopped in that cul-de-sac and maybe not have done it but your sense of humor

and you're just your whatever got you through it and it's inspiring oh thanks yeah 100% that means a lot because you were a good guy as well and I'm very impressed with you as a person too so it takes one to no one I guess is what I'm saying you know I feel fat um is there anything before we go

any dates you want to plug anything else other than the book? Live dates other than getting this book. I will be in Tacoma at the Tacoma Comedy Club March 1st and 2nd and then Madison, Wisconsin, Comedy Club on State the 14th through the 16th of March

and finally I'll bet that Netflix is a joke thing on May 12th at the Trubidor here in sunny Los Angeles. Oh, that's cool. Mosher.com, et cetera. Beautiful. All right, we got it, Joey. Okay.