Moshe Kasher, a deaf Hasidic stand-up comedian and author of Subculture Vulture, traces his career’s unlikely turn from pool halls to comedy after seeing Patrice O’Neal and Sarah Silverman at 21. His memoir—structured in six scenes—explores subcultures like gambling addicts, Holocaust denialists (e.g., Fred Luchter), and medical malpractice (like neurosurgeon David Dunched’s 33 injuries in 37 patients). Kasher also dissects the deaf community’s distrust of hearing interpreters and cochlear implants’ divisive legacy, while Rogan muses on fringe theories like the Younger Dryas comet impact (11,800 BCE) and AI/UFOs as humanity’s unifying threat. Their conversation reveals how fear, ethics, and chance shape lives—from Kasher’s mother’s radical sexual openness to Epstein’s alleged intelligence ties—ending with a shared belief in life’s synchronicity. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, it seems like cult leaders have to have guns because their faith in their ability to see the universe and all the good and everything is not quite good enough.
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You need an AR. You need an AR to really get your point across.
I mean, there's probably a benefit in it, but every benefit that you get off of something that's a difficult endeavor is a detriment to something else.
I have thought about it many times, and I had a deal to write one once, but as I was writing it, they were trying to get me to write it like stand-up.
And they wanted me to write it in a way that, like, was funny like you'd be on stage.
Like, how much laughs would you want per minute on stage?
Which I kind of don't really think about even stand-up that much.
I just try to...
I cut out the bullshit.
I edit things, you know, economy of words with bits.
But I don't think, like, how many laughs I have per minute.
They were, like, very specific about it.
And then they said, how about this?
Why don't you just transcribe your stand-up?
And I was like, listen, I have a very different idea of what I want to write than you do.
So I'm going to give you your money back.
I gave them the money back and I said, I'm...
I'm just gonna if I'm gonna write something I'm gonna write it on my own and I did for a little while then I stopped but it was a lot of it It was just like I only have so much time to write and I would rather write about ideas that I'm gonna do on stage But I do have an idea about my time I've been working on it a little bit lately So I'm thinking about actually going forward with this.
It's about a my time when I was in my really early 20s and I discovered pool halls and Oh, yeah?
My friend Steve, who was the guy who ran the desk, who, you know, administered, gave people the balls, assigned your tables and stuff, he used to just put that motherfucker on, like, every time we were there.
When I really started playing, I think I was like 23 or 24, somewhere around then.
And it was just me and my friend John, who was also a comic, we went into this pool hall just for fun.
And, you know, we were just bored during the day.
Well, let's go play pool.
Neither one of us knew how to play pool.
We were terrible.
You know, like we'd played a couple of times.
And then we just stumbled into this pool hall that had...
This insane array of characters, all these people that were criminals and hustlers and homeless people and people who lived in flophouses and people who are fucking insane gambling addicts that would bet on raindrops coming down a windowpane.
Yeah, it's fishy also because it gives the possibility that fights are dives.
You know, when a coach is betting against their fighter, or giving other people information against their fighter, if that happened, I don't know if it happened again, I just want to be real clear.
It's allegedly.
If that's the case, that's kind of like, it's next door neighbor to a dive.
And that is the last fucking thing we want in mixed martial arts, is fixed fights.
Well, you know there's that weird idea, and apparently this is proven, that the difference between a world championship runner and the number five is like less than a second.
Their speed, right?
I mean, the difference between the Olympian and the guy that doesn't make the podium is so, it's just infinitesimally small.
And then the reason that the person wins is because they believe.
It's not even a physiological thing, it's like a confidence thing.
On that pool thing though, when you walked into that pool hall, And saw like, bam, this is another universe.
To me, that's the experience of my life over and over again.
That is what the book is about, is these momentary portals into another universe, you know, where somebody taps you on the shoulder and goes like, walk over here.
It's like Luke Skywalker, right?
He's this weak, powerless kid on Dantooine or whatever.
And then all of a sudden, Obi-Wan Kenobi goes, look, there's a whole other universe here.
I had a conversation with my daughter the other day.
I go, I sat her down.
I go, okay, honey, you're funny.
And with great power comes great responsibility.
I go, you're gonna have to figure out how to like where the line is.
Because people who are funny, take it from me, walk through the world offending people because they think they're being funny and they've gone like a step too far in personal interactions.
That missile destroyed the village and everybody in it.
I've definitely had that experience.
But yeah, there was that moment on my Crowdwork album, Crowdsurfing, where I heard myself, when I was listening back to it, I was riffing one riff, and in that riff switched back and did the better riff.
That's a pretty, speaking of the way the brain works...
There's a fucking hilarious one that Schultz just put out.
He's talking to some guy in the audience who brought a date, and the date turns out to be a trans woman, and it's just this hilarious But fun, light-hearted, positive.
Do you know why people think perhaps the Jews didn't suffer as much in plague other than conspiracy theories that they started it during the Black Plague?
So Jews, when they eat a meal, every single meal with bread, always wash their hands.
It's a part of the ritual.
It's a ritualistic thing.
You wash your hands before you eat bread.
And and People didn't really do that because germ theory wasn't people didn't know about germ theory They didn't understand the correlation between washing your hands and eating and so Jews would always wash your hand before every meal and that is how Apparently they they sidestepped some of the the ravages of the plague.
The other day we were on the beach though and my neighbor had a lobster trap out and he took out his lobster trap and he was undoing it and there was this undulating piece of seaweed.
I go, I think there's something alive in there.
And we shook it off and it was a full giant octopus.
It was the coolest and my kid reached in and grabbed the octopus like just like it was her friend She was like baby octopus my friend and they will bite the fuck out of you That's what we found out every octopus is venom.
Oh, she didn't get bit Every octopus is venomous and not most of them can't kill you, but every one of them has a beak that will fuck you up Yeah, they're all beak, but he was very cool.
Petting the crow with a brush, and she put the brush back on the shelf, then the crow flew over the shelf, grabbed the brush, brought it back, and said, no, no, keep petting me.
You start doing a certain, I think it's leaving it gifts, and then it will go, oh, this person gives gifts, then it will start bringing you gifts, and then if you keep going, it will start attacking your enemies.
Yeah, this guy, Dan Flores, who was on the podcast before, had essentially trained a crow by leaving it food every day, and he would go on a walk with his dog, and the crow would hang out with him.
When I was in Scotland, there was this lady who was, she trained a variety of birds, but she trained owls and falcons, and so she had a falcon there, and she said the problem with the falcon is when they let it go, it just fucks things up.
It just finds another bird and kills it.
Like, every time she lets it go, finds something and kills it.
I mean, it's a very different connection with food when you've been there and harvest it and when you actually go in the wild.
So it's one thing if you have a farm and you raise a cow and you kill the cow and you eat the cow, you have a connection with that food that's very different than me who just goes to a supermarket and buys a steak.
It's another level of that when you're going into the woods with a bow and arrow.
And you're climbing mountains and you're going 8-10 miles a day.
The biggest one I ever saw was actually inside of a car.
I saw inside, like, two years ago.
I was with my friend Colton, and he goes, look at the cat!
He stops the truck, and it's at dusk, like, right when the sunlight's going down, and I see these glowing eyes under a tree, and we're about 30 yards away from it, and I have binoculars.
They've been telling women to take birth control forever.
Birth control does all sorts of wacky things to the way you perceive people.
I have a friend and his daughter died.
She had a stroke.
Because she had a blood clot that is apparently one of the side effects of smoking cigarettes and taking birth control.
It's possible to have that happen.
And she died that way.
She was like 17 years old.
It's like, it's this tricky medication.
I mean, it's great that women got their liberation sexually and that every time you had sex, it wasn't like you're going to have a baby that you could choose when to do it, when not to do it.
So it's not saying that birth control is entirely bad, but if you're a woman and you have to take this thing in order to not get pregnant, and the guy doesn't have to do shit...
If a birth control pill was invented for a guy, and I think they did come up with one, but it radically lowers your testosterone.
So the way to kill your sperm cells would be either to ramp up your endogenous testosterone to where your body doesn't produce testosterone anymore, so you don't produce sperm cells, or You could kill it.
Kill the sperm cells.
Kill the testosterone.
And kill everything.
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They turn you into just a feeble version of yourself.
If you donate half your liver to me, if you and I have the same blood type, within six to eight weeks, your liver will have returned to full size, and my liver that you donated, that you gave me, will be full size as well.
Well, they're going to eventually be able to do that, I would imagine.
They're already looking into some sort of reconstruction of organs, like to be able to create a completely new heart that's made of your own tissue so that your body doesn't reject it.
You know, because your body rejects other people's tissue.
So if you gave me a heart, I would have to take crazy medication to make sure that my body didn't reject that heart.
There's that documentary about that guy that was putting artificial tracheas in people?
Oh, this is good.
Or bad.
It's horrifying.
It was this genius doctor that was putting in these plastic...
He had this breakthrough that you could just replace a trachea with a plastic tracheal tube and bathe it in stem cells.
And it would eventually, I don't know what, meld into your body's DNA tissue and just become a part of your body.
But he was making it up.
Did not ever it did not work one time.
Oh, no, but he was just like flying around the world.
It's like medical like master They're going this genius the genius of our time winning like Nobel prizes and stuff and just people were dying They were just putting a fucking tube into people's throat instead of a trachea.
Once there's a wall up where you're a medical professional, I guess there is a little bit of an arm's length.
I mean, these people did know they were doing an experimental surgery and that they could die, I guess, but they didn't know that it definitely wouldn't work.
It kept failing on sick people that needed new tracheas.
So he was like, what I need to do is find a relatively healthy person that has a tracheal issue, like a collapsed trachea or something, where they're still walking through the world with relative health, like the oyster guy, and I'll put it in them and that will prove that the thing works.
So he literally went on a worldwide quest to find somebody with like a fucked up trachea but that wasn't sick and found someone like that and it was cosmetic for her.
And she's like, I'm tired of talking like this and I have to have like a scarf on and okay, I'll do it.
It's about a guy who was like, he was a neurosurgeon and he was just like, it wasn't clear if he was like Dr. Mengele, like wanted to kill people or if he was just like a stupid person that was just like slashing in people's bodies.
Like it wasn't clear what he was doing, but it looked like when he would open someone up, he had no idea what he was doing.
I mean, he just was like stapling a artery to a bone.
Well, there's certain professions like that where you assume their degree is the thing that makes them competent, but you forget that it's just a person.
One patient, a childhood friend of Dunst, went in for a spinal operation with someone he trusted and woke up a quadriplegic after a doctor damaged his vertebral artery.
He claims he was invited to other American prisons, expected design modifications to electric chairs, possessed no relevant formal training or education, and claims that he was told that those who did possess such qualifications would not provide advice due to their opinions on death penalty, fear of reprisals, or that they were squeamish about the subject.
So, So what was he?
What was his background?
So, his career continued with other state prisons seeking his advice on execution facilities other than electrocution, such as gas chambers, hanging and lethal injection.
How do you say his name?
Luchter?
Luchter?
Initially professed his ignorance of other methods of execution.
The authorities seeking his advice reminded him that others with more qualifications refused to help.
Luchter claims to have taught himself on these other methods of execution and provided advice that was used by the authorities to improve safety and efficiency.
So as Fall claimed when Luchter claimed to have been sought as a witness for the defense for Ernest Zundel during, so one of the Nazis, right, in Canada for spreading false news by publishing and sending material denying Holocaust overseas.
Luchter was asked by the defense to travel to Poland to visit...
No, maybe that guy wasn't a Nazi.
Maybe he was like a Holocaust denier.
Ernst Zundel.
So what is the trial?
Spreading false news.
So he's just been accused of spreading false news by publishing and sending material denying the Holocaust.
So he's being tried for that.
And Luchter was asked by the defense to travel to Poland to visit Auschwitz to investigate whether there had been operating gas chambers for executions at the camp.
At first examination, Luchter felt that using poison gas in a building with the internal and external design of the buildings currently on display at the site would have caused the death of everyone in the area outside the buildings as well as inside.
The film shows videotaped footage taken in Poland of Luchter taking samples of bricks in the buildings to take back the United States forensic science labs.
To determine whether there was evidence of poison gas in the material.
These samples were not identified as to where they came from.
Luchter states that the laboratories reported that there was not any trace of any poison gas at any time.
See, he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.
This is one of the answers.
It says, it's all a question of concentration.
Once the gas is released into the atmosphere, its concentration decreases and is no longer dangerous.
Also, HCN dissipates quickly.
The execution gas chambers in US prisons were also ventilated directly into the atmosphere.
So it just dissipates.
Furthermore, the argument...
Would hold for the extermination chambers, it would hold for the delousing chambers as well, and one would have to conclude that no delousing chambers existed either.
So it's just he doesn't understand how it dissipates.
So there's probably no trace because there's no trace left.
We're talking about he's doing this 70 years later.
I guess if you were extremely ill, it would seem like, but you're still walking through the world, it would seem like you had been possessed on some level.
And so meth becomes this sort of cyclical trap where you can't actually...
It's not just that you want to get high.
Your brain can't make you happy without it.
And it takes a long time to rewire your brain in that particular way.
Heroin is the one that everybody overdoses from and meth is the one that people kind of go mad from slowly because their brains get weirdly atrophied in that way.
One of my friends from the pool hall was a crack addict and he would go get crack and then he would have to come down by drinking 40 ounces.
He would get so fucked up.
I took him a couple of times to like bad neighborhoods so he could cop but then we'd always have to go to a liquor store and he would get like a 40 ounce Of what?
And I would be nine months a year in Oakland, regular public school, listening to Too Short, fly back to my dad's house, get driven to the Orthodox barber shop, put a yarmulke on me, slacks, and I would go cosplay as an extra from Fiddler on the Roof for six weeks a year.
And that's sort of, I think that's the reason I fell into the rehab so heavily, into the drug so heavily, is because I was, everything about me made me feel like I am, I don't fit.
I don't fit.
I'm a hearing person in a deaf world.
I'm essentially a Gentile in a Jewish world, you know?
There was a local rabbi when I was getting close to my bar mitzvah, and he goes, he noticed, he was very nice, and he noticed that I didn't know Hebrew.
These kids spoke, and I'm not kidding, these kids spoke Yiddish as a first language.
That's why they had the Eastern European accent, right?
So my uncle, he was first generation American, so he sounds like an American because the first generation of Americans say, go fit in, right?
But then by the time he had kids, they're like feeling their comfort in the United States, and they go, Don't go fit in.
Go to a seminary where we learn Yiddish.
So my cousins sound like extras from Dr. Zhivago and my uncle sounds like a New Yorker.
Like it's that weird.
So they speak Yiddish as a first language.
I would bring an English prayer book to school and kids would, people would be like staring like it was a scarlet letter.
Like there's something wrong with me because I had an English book.
It's my 12th year or 11th year and I don't know the alphabet.
And this rabbi sees that I'm struggling.
And my dad was deaf and so he had this kind of like bizarre relationship with the community where he was like one part accepted, one part almost mascot in a way that was a little insulting, but he was loved, whatever.
The rabbi said, give him to me and I'll teach him Hebrew, right?
This is like the late 80s, early 90s.
You could at that time ask for some alone time with a child and they'd be handed over, no questions asked, right?
So I go to his house, and he starts teaching me the Hebrew, the alphabet, basic, elemental.
I mean, this is like a Talmudic scholar teaching me the ABCs, right?
And I am struggling.
I can't get it.
And he goes, don't worry, don't worry.
He goes, don't be embarrassed.
Hold on.
Shmuli, shmuli, come in, come, come.
And his son comes into the room, and he goes, do the English alphabet.
But if you were born lucky enough to have genetic deafness in your family...
So that you and your sibling were both deaf, then the two of you sitting together could create language, a language of two, right?
You would back and forth between two siblings create a family sign system that would enable the both of you learning from one another to create a language and enable you to reason and think and talk about how you feel even if it was just with one person.
I mean, the difference between an isolated deaf person and a pair of siblings is the world.
It's freedom, it's everything.
So one day, a French priest walks along and sees two deaf sisters signing back and forth to one another, and he goes, "That's language, Prior to that, deaf people weren't even considered to be linguistic.
They weren't even considered to be capable of reason.
But he goes, no, I know what that is.
I'm looking at language.
So he goes to these sisters.
His name is the Abbé de Epé.
And he says, teach me to sign.
Somehow he tells them, like, you know, teach me these gestures to them.
Teach me to sign.
They teach him to sign, and his thing was he wanted them to take the catechism, right?
He wanted them to be able to go to heaven.
He realized, oh, deaf people are linguistically capable, but they can't get into heaven unless they can take the catechism and confess their faith and take communion, right?
Which makes sense.
If there is a God, that God wouldn't allow them into heaven based on the fact that they couldn't speak.
So much so that the way that he would fundraise for this school is he would do like a traveling like roadshow where he would take his star pupils around France and around Europe and they would be at like an exhibition hall and a person in the audience would ask a question he would say oh Joe do you have a question for the deaf person and then you'd ask them at some French question like you know what is what degree of suffering can be borne by man or how many creams is too many creams for a brie or whatever And he would take your question,
sign it to his star pupils, and they would take a piece of chalk, walk up to the blackboard, and write the answer in perfect French.
And people lost their fucking minds.
Like, they couldn't believe it.
Like, deaf people, oh my god, it, like, unlocked this whole conception of the deaf as, like, they can think, they can reason, oh, all they need is language to be free, right?
So this whole network of schools for the deaf started to spring up.
They sprung up in all over Europe and they would copy the teaching methods of the school for the deaf.
And a guy from America came over, right?
And he saw this system and he basically took their star pupil.
And one of the things was the deaf would teach each other.
So you would teach them sign and then they would become educated and then they would become a professor at this school.
And he took like the star professor, Laurent Clerc was his name.
Thomas Gallaudet was the name of the American.
He came over and he saw Laurent Clerc and he said, move to America with me and let's go replicate this in America.
So Thomas Gallaudet says yes.
They get on a boat.
They sail to America.
By the time they landed, Thomas Gallaudet knew rudimentary sign and Laurent Clerc, who was like a fucking genius, knew basically had been taught English.
And they set up the first school for the deaf in America.
He was a genius, like a real genius, like an actual, like lucky enough to have been, you know, these circumstances in history where like the perfect man at the perfect time.
And it was this very bizarre kind of like almost the equality that deaf people on Martha's Vineyard felt was almost like the opposite of what affirmative action is attempting to do.
Affirmative action wants to correct a historic harm by changing the playing field.
This was an equity of everybody was the same because everybody on Martha's Vineyard knew either was deaf, knew a deaf person, or was related to a deaf person.
So everybody, hearing and non-hearing, signed on Martha's Vineyard.
It was a sign system called Martha's Vineyard Sign Language.
They took some of that.
They took the Plains Indian Sign Language, P-I-S-L it's called.
You know that gesture?
You've seen it in movies where the Native Americans will gesture to each other And you think they present it as if it's like a war language so they don't have to make noise.
But what it actually was was all the tribes in America spoke different languages.
So they created this kind of Esperanto of the tribes so that they could trade.
They could do trade.
And that was called Plains Indian Sign Language.
And they took all that into a kind of bouillabaisse of French Sign Language bass, Martha's Vineyard Chaser, and Plains Indian sprinkled on top, and they created American Sign Language.
And then 100 years, 200 years later, my mother was born deaf in Oakland, California, and she went to the California School for the Deaf, and she absorbed this language.
My mother was 13 when she went to the California School for the Deaf.
She was in...
An oral school system.
This is my long-winded way of telling you why deaf people have such a problem with hearing people.
That language that she learned, she was in an oral school system.
So almost as soon as the sign language system came out, And hearing people looked at it and go, we got to get rid of that.
The one thing that unlocked their freedom, the one thing that unlocked their minds, hearing people saw it and said, we have to take that away from them.
We have to make them more like us.
By doing the sign, they're creating more Wakanda.
They're creating an insular sort of closed circuit system of culture, right?
And they're And weirdly, this was at a time in American history where those closed circuits of culture were really frowned upon.
Oliver Sacks said teaching a deaf person without sign is like teaching you Japanese from inside of a soundproof booth by holding up flashcards in Japanese and like putting a symbol next to it.
It was like kind of doomed to failure.
And then they went through this 200 years reimposed darkness.
There was a trial where all the hearing educators decided that deaf people wouldn't sign anymore.
They fired all the deaf educators and they pushed them out and they created this oral system which really, I mean, it worked for some people.
But what it created was you had to be exceptional in order to be average in the deaf world.
You had to be a genius in order to get that oral system to work for you because your natural mode of communication had been kind of stamped out.
And then in about the 70s, deaf people started to like kind of rise up and say, fuck that.
We're signing.
This is who we are.
This is our native language.
And when I was born in 79, that was the world I was born into.
And so from that, two sisters on a fucking corner in a slum in Paris to that school to Gallaudet to a boat ride to Martha's Vineyard to the California School for the Deaf to my mother's hands to my hands.
That was the way that I acquired language.
It was through this crazy historical journey.
And that, to me, is the reason that when I was born into the deaf community, there was so much distrust of the hearing world because they were like they stole from us the one thing that gave us freedom.
I would assume every system—you want to hear something crazy— It is so not a translation of English that my mother would have a much harder time understanding a British signer than a French signer.
So it has nothing.
It's divorced from English, right?
Ah, this lady.
Okay, so I can tell you that this woman is actually using sign language.
I've been an interpreter when people were told they were dying.
I've been an interpreter when people were graduated from graduate school, from getting their doctorate.
I've been an interpreter where people were in court, and it was literally the degree to which I could sign accurately and faithfully was the difference between them going to prison and not going to prison.
I've done all of that, and that weight is super massive to me.
It's a fucking beautiful and fantastic documentary about cochlear implants and the deaf community.
I mean, the thing is...
The deaf community had a, and I don't speak for the deaf community, obviously, but I can speak from my own experience.
My mother has a cochlear implant.
She got one.
Because my mom was like, my mom's like an iconoclast, and she's like, I'm not going to allow a taboo in deaf society to keep me from experiencing as much of life as I could possibly experience.
But in general, especially at the beginning, deaf people hated the idea of a cochlear implant because they do not feel And I think to some degree I agree with them that deafness is a disability.
They feel that what it is, it's a culture.
I mean, obviously they can't hear.
That's a disability.
But the true disability comes from the fact that communication barrier.
And so to them, they see the cochlear implant as just another imperialist, now a robotic mechanism to make them hearing again.
Well, I can tell you in section two of the book, My Rave Years, what kind of music the deaf like more than any other in my experience, is definitely slamming techno.
When I was a big raver, and I became eventually like a rave promoter, and I was a DJ at raves through the 90s, and an ecstasy dealer, but that's another story.
I started, when I was about 16, I bought my first set of turntables and a mixer.
And I was terrible, obviously, like everybody starting out.
But you can't play in your headphones DJing, really.
You have to have it be amplified.
And I had a very lucky break in having deaf parents because I would just set everything all the way to the max and my mom would be happily studying in the other room and I would just be train wrecking techno beats.
But she, for some reason, you know, I wish, I mean, I love my mom, and who am I to say that it wasn't worth it?
She says it's worth it to her, and it's not my business.
She wanted to experience in the last quarter of her life, like, the sensation of sound, and I think, like, I get that, when you've never experienced something, like, why you wouldn't walk through that door.
But to me, I wish she'd never gotten it, because now she's, like, this wobbly older lady, and it, like, scares the shit out of me.
Especially if you just meet someone at a show or something like that.
It's insane.
But also, with these people, these scientists, that's a really sneaky trick to get a bunch of prominent people together and then invite you to be with those prominent people.
If you're a person that has an enormous amount of influence in a field of science, that's a very valuable person to have on your hand.
If you ever have something where someone has to speak to the general public, you get this expert, and this expert has an opinion that's very different than some other people's opinions, and then they promote that opinion as the person.
You could do a lot of things, especially if you have a lot of them.
I can tell you that I've been thinking about Destiny a lot.
She was the other stripper at the strip club looking at Stephen Hawking.
No, I've been thinking about Destiny a lot because of this book.
Because, you know, these are worlds, all of these worlds that I write about in this book, like deafness and Hasidic Judaism and AA and raves and Burning Man and stand-up.
They don't go together except through, like, my body.
Like, through me.
I'm the connective tissue.
Right.
Having written this book, like now I guess I'm in middle age or something like that.
I'm looking back and going like, this whole thing was a path.
And there is no way to see destiny.
I don't believe in destiny looking forward.
I believe in destiny looking back.
Like everywhere you land...
Is destiny in this weird way because it never could have been anything else?
I have all these, and I'm sure you do too, these portals in my life.
You could have been a pool hustler only.
And you could have gone to the pool hustler thing and then gotten shot and died at 25. There's all these multiverse possibilities of the Moshe that wasn't.
And the Moshe that was was always headed in this direction.
I think about stand-up.
The only reason I started stand-up is because I was in Israel doing a semester abroad and it was in the second intifada and it got shut down.
I just decided randomly to go to New York and I happened to have a friend who I'd kept in touch with who was doing stand-up and she brought me to a show that night and I saw Patrice and Sarah Silverman.
And I never even thought stand-up in my life I like never I mean I'd seen like delirious or it's like I watched Janine's Special and it's but I didn't care stand up wasn't part of my thing But I saw them doing their thing and I was like I couldn't believe it like I I'd been writing like long-form monologues and like wanting to be an actor I didn't know what I wanted to do.
I wanted to write plays Maybe I wanted to be a historian.
Yeah, it's only one thing going and it can go any way.
And if there's an infinite number of you out there, which it likely, the way the universe is, if you talk to people that actually understand the scope of infinity, they will tell you that.
Not only do humans exist, but you exist.
And not only do you exist, but you exist in the form where you have done everything that you have done on this earth.
There's definitely a purpose to the people that exist in the moment, that exist in this time that we're sharing.
So if that is real, and it is felt by all of us, life is amazing.
And when it is, and it's terrible when it's not.
There's definitely...
There's a meaning to it.
It's what does that do and what are these moments and what is the powerful emotion of love and the way people feel when they hear great music and all the good things that human beings are capable of and all the things that human beings do.
What is that doing?
It's expressing energy.
It's expressing the universe in some weird way has taken this multi-celled being and allowed it to change the surface of the planet and experiment with...
Video where it flies through space and hits another person's device on the other side of the planet instantaneously What we've done is fucking bizarre and I can't think that there's not a meaning to it because there's a mean to us while it's happening would If you believe that story that I... Not that I'm saying that story was the most magical story.
We're the perfect amount of distance from the sun to have an ozone layer and an atmosphere, and then you're a human that you got to incarnate in the human version, where you're not just like a sustenance, like, you know, the pig that you shot.
You could have been the pig that you shot, the funky pig, like...
That is such a rare...
It feels so common if you don't pay attention to the beauty in your life.
It can feel so common and banal and life is boring and meaningless.
And if you turn around, if I turn around and look at the kind of magic of this existence and this incarnation, I... And that's why I love life so much.
To me, the book is about my desire to...
When I die, I want to squeeze the last drop of the towel that was life.
I want the last little drip of water that was in there.
I want to drink it all.
I want to live...
My religion is fun.
It's not Judaism.
It's fun.
It's experiences.
It's love and the connection.
Talking to you, going on stage, writing a book, having a family.
I feel super overpaid.
I'm lucky and cuz a lot of my friends that I grew up with are dead and like I just and I could have been me too sure Could have been all of us.
Or you tie your shoes and you get into an accident.
So I think, yeah, you're talking about living in the moment.
Because there's so many possibilities that if you believe it one way are happening or could happen to you, then fear is, I mean, I live in fear sometimes and it's like, this is so pointless because it's the thing with my daughter.
The thing you're protecting her against, you're not protecting her against the actual thing that will harm her and vice versa.
So when he was bringing this dog, this guy was bringing a dog that they recognized as the enemy, there was a lot of people that were very distrustful of him.
Also, though, I have heard that when people, when uncontacted tribes, really like old school, you know, sustenance living sort of Iron Age level tribes come out of isolation and decide to join the world, a big part, what they want is clothes.
I think it might be really cold out there, just in life.
But I think that was, slowly over time, when we chose to wear clothes, we invented clothes and chose to wear clothes, I think slowly over time people lost all their body hair.
But I think at one point in time, when you see these really, go to that other picture of him where you see his back and everything, that one, that one, perfect, perfect, that one.
That's a fucking different kind of hair than the average person has.
I mean, if you look at it, I would imagine urban people, collectively, people who've lived in urban environments for longer periods of time probably have less body hair.
very cold rural climates like fucking Canadian men that live in like Alberta right they're probably hairier dudes it's weird that with what you're talking about you're kind of talking in a strange way it reminds me of like original sin too it's like straight up biblical right right we've lost our abilities the prime the first big event that occurs is something goes wrong and people and the human becomes aware of its nakedness it's It's what you're talking about.
It's not about cold.
It's about shame.
What I do believe, in answer to a question you asked me two hours ago, are all of these rules somehow connected to a functional, nearly scientific corollary, like trichinosis or whatever?
I do believe that on some level, every bit of biblical information, every bit of religious information, it has some sort of allegorical and metaphorical connection to our past.
Like, what does it mean that Adam and Eve saw their nakedness and realized they were naked and decided to cover up?
It speaks to like a historical truth.
Definitely, I don't think Adam and Eve saw their nakedness and were ashamed, but something occurred where we realized we are naked in the world and we must cover because people can't look at what we're doing.
Humans appear relatively hairless compared to our other ape relatives, but the density of the hair follicles in our skin is actually the same as would be expected of an ape our size.
The fine hairs that cover our bodies, which have replaced the thicker ones seen in our close relatives, are thought to be an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors.
The researchers found that body hair significantly enhanced how well people detected the bed bugs, which participants noticing the bugs on the hairy arm quicker than they did when tested on the hairless arm.
Interesting.
The hair's serving as motion detectors.
Whoa.
The hair also prolonged how long it took the parasites to find places to feed, presumably because they hindered movement.
She used to sit my brother and I down on Tuesday nights and read to us from a book called Boys and Sex.
And she was just like open.
When she found porn, when I hit puberty and she found porn, she took the porn and rather than yell at me, she brought me to like a lesbian, like a feminist vibrator shop and And she said, you can pick any of the lesbian text-based erotica that you want.
She wanted to make sure if I was looking at porn, it would have like 90 pages of prose poetry before we got to the good stuff.
There was a crazy story about the first woman person who ever survived symptomatic rabies that I heard on, I think, Radiolab.
Basically, she started displaying all these symptoms, like fear of water, rage, all that kind of stuff, and that's fatal 100% of the time.
Anyway, her parents took her to the doctor, and they go, this really made me laugh.
It's tragic, but it made me laugh.
The doctor's like, has anything unusual happened?
Anything that you think could have maybe brought this about?
And they're like, no, nothing we can think of.
Nothing?
Not bitten by a dog or a bat?
They go, oh no, yeah, she was bitten by a bat.
Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah, she was bit by a bat.
She was at church and a bat flew under her nose and bit her.
I was like, yeah, I think that might have been the inflection point.
But anyway, they put her into a coma.
Because something weird about rabies, apparently, like your body, it's kind of what we're talking about with human evolution.
Your body can beat it.
I'm not going to articulate this well.
Your body moves to beat it, but it moves at just below the speed of the virus.
The virus moves faster than your body's ability to beat it.
If the virus was slower, then your body would cure it, but it goes faster.
And so they put this girl into an imposed coma.
And slowed down, somehow in ways I don't understand, slowed down her system in such a way that the rabies went a little bit more dormant, and then her body was able to supersede the speed of the virus.
Ability of the natural host immune response to clear the rabies virus that the patient is supported through the intense exotoxic phase is the basic premise of this strategy.
So that makes sense too because you'd be able to hydrate them because one of the things that happens to people, they no longer can drink any water.
First reported fatality due to rabies in the United States, despite receiving appropriate post-exposure prophylaxis, according to a recent article published in Clinical Infectious...
Oh, he's 84. 84-year-old man had died in 2021 about six months after waking up in the morning while a rabid bat was biting on his right hand.
Tasmanian Devils are affected by two independent transmissible cancers known as the Devil Facial Tumor and the Devil Facial Tumor Facial tumor 2. Both cancers are spread by biting and cause the appearance of tumors in the face or inside the mouth of affected Tasmanian devils.
The reason that they transmit it so much, they have the cancer in their thing and they've got a behavioral tick where the way that they, I think, fight...
Is to like mash their faces together.
So they have the confluence of the disease that can spread that way and the behavioral tick that allows it to spread.
These viruses are just like us.
They want out.
They want to live.
They want to survive.
And they will somehow weirdly find a way to spread themselves.
I had a weird, very cosmic theory about the pandemic and COVID. I know that you don't cotton with conspiracy theories about COVID. I do.
No, I'm joking.
This is more sort of metaphysical, though.
When we were raised, I remember being told to wash my hands all the time, right?
But I don't really feel like I told my kids that.
It used to be almost religious, like wash, wash, wash, wash.
And then by the time I had my kid, I told her to wash her hands, but it wasn't like, you must.
And then all of a sudden, a new pathogen came into the human genome, and it was like, I mean, obviously I don't think that washing hands is that big of a deal with COVID, but I had this thought, what if viruses...
Go, like, dormant until we kind of...
Because the reason...
This is my big weird theory.
The reason that we were told wash, wash, wash is residual trauma from Spanish flu.
This is my theory here.
Right?
It's like your grandparents lived through that.
And then they embedded it in your parents.
Like, wash your hands.
It's super important.
And then it got to you.
And then it started to fade away a little bit.
And then all of a sudden you have a new pathogen.
I was like, what if these viruses have a little, like, a weird sort of...
Animal consciousness of like, okay, they've forgotten about the washing hands thing.
It started in America, but we were in the midst of World War I, and so every country was in this media embargo to not say, oh God, there's a new disease in America because it would have made our army look weak.
And every other country didn't want to admit it either, but Spain was either not involved in the war or didn't have that embargo somehow.
They reported the disease, and so for the rest of time it's Spanish flu.
Another weird thing I found out, the flu that you get today is the Spanish flu.
It's the variant that sprung off from the Spanish flu, like weakened and weakened and weakened an infinite amount of times, but the thing that we get that we call flu is just the cousin of the Spanish flu.
And just like how the plague was started in all these different parts of the world because people were shitting in the streets and living in filth and no sanitation, and that's probably exactly how it starts with them as well.
The virus is particularly deadly because it triggered a cytokine storm ravaging the strong...
Apparently it was no more aggressive than previous influenza strains.
Malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, poor hygiene exacerbated by the war, promoted bacterial super-infection, killing most of the victims after a typically prolonged deathbed.
And in that Poor Things, I think it was historical, sort of semi-historical, there was a combustion engine cab, but it was a stagecoach with a fake horse head on it.
At the very beginning of stagecoaches, people were so used to having a horse in front, it would just be like a little head.
And the new theory, this really sent a chill down my spine, is that every planet goes through the same basic process, which is that they become in 200 years.
They go from pre-industrial revolution to industrial revolution to strip mining themselves for resources.
And then their population explodes because they can sustain more population and they need to extract more resources.
And then they go to get to their like space age.
And by the time human, any planet gets to like space exploration, it has exploded in population and resource stripping to such a degree that they reach a decision that they have to make.
Every society is either we continue to strip mine and populate and go extinct because we're going to run out of room and resources or we shut down and do an imposed like Dark Ages.
Maybe we're in the middle of it and maybe that's what asteroids are for.
Maybe asteroids come along and we get a little cocky and they slam into the earth and we start from scratch again.
And then we have the same genetics as the intelligent people that figured out how to build the pyramids, but we're this new, confused, barbaric version of it that's been fucking eating rats for a thousand years.
So there's not just an infinite amount of Joes and Moshas, there's an infinite amount of human populations just regenerating and regenerating for an infinite amount of time until we get to the good one.
The people that are proponents of this theory, like Graham Hancock and Rendell Carlson, they think that human beings had achieved a very high level of sophistication in probably a different direction than we have now.
And that's the pyramids.
That's Gobekli Tepe.
That's all these ancient structures that they...
They don't understand how people could have explained or built a long, long, long fucking time ago that we can't do now.
And that's what happened.
The impacts happen, and then society rebuilds thousands of years later.
So thousands of years of barbarism, and then 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, written language emerges, agriculture.
But maybe those are the things that keep us from getting to the place where we nuke each other into oblivion.
Maybe those are the reset buttons of the universe where if we go down the bad path and maybe there's this race to try to be...
To have good morals and ethics and have society evolve at the same level that the human mind and technology evolves.
And to overcome this constant need for war and controlling resources which have dominated human culture from the beginning of time.
And that maybe it's this battle.
Maybe this culture war that we're all fighting that people are complaining about now.
Maybe part of that is this sort of struggle to Achieve a higher level of existence and maybe it's done in the wrong way on both sides to a certain extent But ultimately what it is is trying to sort out what's right and what's wrong and what's good and what's bad and why certain things take place and if we don't if we don't get to that and we keep keep engaging in wars then we never reach a technological level of sophistication that allows us to stop natural disasters and Right,
If we can get to a point where we can knock asteroids out of the sky and do something to release the pressure of the super volcano and figure out a way to not have people starve and all those things could be accomplished if we get to a certain point.
I think human beings generally, society, if it exists long enough, there's always going to be terrible moments, but...
Ultimately, people want the same thing.
They want their community to be good.
They want their friends to live.
They want their families to live.
You're terrified of other people that might want to take from you the thing that gives you joy and happiness and community and love.
Ultimately, I think we're going to figure out a way if human beings can exist long enough where we can work things out much better than we're doing right now.
I think one of the things that hinders our ability to work things out is just like you were talking about sign language, like that your sign from America is different than the sign from the United Kingdom.
I think if we develop a universal language through translation through technology, we will eliminate a lot of miscommunication and a lot of This failure to understand each other because we look at each other as the other.
We look at each other as something that's very different than us.
Samsung phones, the new Galaxy S24 Ultra comes out with AI and one of the features of AI is a translate.
So we can sit apart from each other and in real time This thing could take your, if you're speaking French, you could do it in your ears, in your headphones, or you could do it on the phone in written language.
It does both.
And if it's in headphones, we both have it, and I could talk to you in English, and you could understand it if you speak French, because it'll translate into perfect French, and then, or close enough as it is, it'll get better, and then you can speak French, and I will hear it in English.
And that's what you're saying is that hopefully we're evolving towards a situation where with a universal language or at least a universal understanding, you can see someone that's different and think that they're not.
What is the difference between isn't that awful to isn't that interesting?
And then because we're in a growth phase, you're going to go through over-corrections.
I think a lot of the cultural war that we're involved in, all the craziness that's happening in society, it's an over-correction.
And then people are going to get fed up with it and they're going to move into a more conservative direction.
They'll get fed up with that and then they'll move to a more liberal direction.
It's like it goes back and forth because we're trying to figure out what's the right way to do it and we're basing life On what we were taught by people who didn't know what the fuck they were doing, which is most of our parents and most of their parents.
Like, they didn't know what the fuck they were doing.
My grandparents didn't know what the fuck was going on in the world.
They raised kids who didn't know what the fuck was happening.
They raised me.
I barely know what the fuck is going on.
My kids know more than me.
Their generation will figure it out a little bit better, and if we can stay alive, We can eventually get to some commonality and we can realize that a lot of this stupidity is based on our human system of these tribal interactions that's kind of ingrained in our genetics.
Yeah, we'll wrap this up, but I'll recommend this book to people.
It's called American Cosmic, and it's essentially about this whole flying saucer.
I just did a whole podcast with a woman.
But now this is a previous book that I'm reading, and it connects it to religion, and it connects it to the stories in the Bible of Ezekiel, that Ezekiel is essentially seeing a UFO, and that these things are not just a physical thing, that there's some sort of a psychological aspect to them.
There's some sort of a frequency that we connect to occasionally as human beings, as thinking creatures.
A state of being able to receive whatever the frequency these things operate on.
And I think there's a lot of stories from ancient religion that's probably based on this.
And I think as we get more and more of an understanding of...
Quantum physics and this concept of dimensions and this concept of the ability of something that's far more advanced than us to manipulate dimensions and to visit back and forth.
And that the potential is that maybe that is where all intelligent life forms eventually evolve to if given enough time and they do it correctly.
They become interdimensional travelers and that what we're looking at when we're looking at these grays, these weird looking things, that's us in the future.
One of the things that Bob Lazar said about that craft right there, the sport model that he allegedly worked on in Area 51, Site 4, was that they didn't have controls in them.
Although what's really funny is there's a part- Did they try to pressure you to do it?
No, no, no.
They wanted me to do it.
I think they like when comics do it.
But there's a funny part in there where my friend Larry, early in my life, throws me up against a wall at an AA meeting and tells me to stop saying the N-word.
And he's a black kid, a black friend of mine.
And it was like when I thought that I had a pass or whatever.
Right.
And it's a moment about popping your head out of your ass, basically.
He basically threw me up against the wall and shifted my perspective into like, of course that's not what I'm supposed to be doing.
But I had this passage in the book where I was like, I mean, it's a very short passage, but I'm like, I'm not reading that shit.
And so I went forensically into my past and contacted Larry and said, Larry, it would be awesome if you would read the part of Larry.