Acting on Top of Acting

Ari’el has spent his life playing characters, trying on different identities. But at a certain point he must discover who—beneath all these competing selves—he truly is. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. My name is
Ali Eleele statue Yeshayao my whole life. I've battled the truth.
I'm Middle Eastern, my roots are in Yemen. I was

(00:22):
scared that if anyone found out that I was less
valid of a person. But I'm so sorry to have
lied to everybody in this room.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
That's Ari's Statuel Tony Award winning actor, singer, and playwright.
His one man show Other is currently running off Broadway.
Ari's is a story of all the ways our identities,
the way we see ourselves, the way others see us,
have a profound impact on the shape of our lives

(00:54):
and the stories we tell. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
is Family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we

(01:15):
keep from ourselves. All right, tell me about the landscape
of your childhood in Berkeley, California.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
The landscape of my childhood. Well, the first thing I'll
say is that at one and a half, my parents divorced,
and so I was raised between the household of Yemen
and Israeli father and an Oshkenazi American doctor, and they
both had very different ways of thinking and engaging with

(01:50):
the world. My dad had moved with nothing but ambition
and no sort of higher education beyond high school, and
he was a taxi driver when he first moved to
the Bay Area in San Francisco, and he eventually started
his own Harvard flooring company. My mom, on the other hand,
had just finished residency and was an obgyn And so

(02:14):
I think the landscape was really shaped by my experiences
in those two cultures. And though many people would consider
me to have sort of a middle class, upper middle
class Jewish upbringing, I consider myself to come from a
bicultural background. One house was Hebrew, it was Yemennite food,
it was Yema Nite music, and then the other house

(02:36):
was much more academic. As I got older, you know,
my mom remarried. In the conversations with her partner, who
is Ashkenazi and has a background in psychology and sociology,
were very intellectual. So that was sort of the backdrop
at home at school. Very quickly, I guess I felt different.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Ari's story begins when his parents meet at an Israeli
folk dancing night. It's the nineteen eighties in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
His father.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
His abba is a taxi driver and his mother a
medical student. They are from entirely different worlds, both in
origin and temperament, but this doesn't stop his father from
almost immediately saying to his mother on the dance floor,
I'm going to marry you, and how many children do
you want? Do you want four? Do you want five?

(03:28):
Ari is five years old when the toll of growing
up between those different worlds begins to reveal itself psychologically.
He starts exhibiting certain behaviors and it's decided that he
will start to see a therapist.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
I was experiencing really, really intense phobias that I couldn't
quite explain at a very young age. I had this
strong folk of eating in front of people with a
range of disabilities, and I would go for weeks without eating.
If we were at a restaurant, or if I was
at the grocery store at my mom somebody came in
and I saw a hearing aid or a wheelchair, I

(04:06):
would sort of have a phobia of the food that
was purchased or consumed next door in front of one
of those people. I have no idea where it came from,
and nobody really know what to do. And my dad,
who is not someone that was raised with medicine or
diagnosis or anxiety, just thought I was a kid. And

(04:27):
my mom thought that this was a disorder, and so
she brought me to a cognitive behavioral therapist, and the
therapist then charted out with me. Well, first of all,
we named the anxiety Meredith.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Well I love that, Okay. I mean, so the therapist
says to you, age five, you have something called obsessive
compulsive disorder OCD for short. But what are we going
to name this thing that you have? How are we
gonna persona? I mean, how did that come about? Because
you came up with Meredith like the stepmom in the
Parent Trap.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
The Parent Trap, That's exactly right. I had an older
sister Atalia, who's two and a half years older, so
anything that she watched I watched, and Parent Trap was
the movie that we watched, and we really didn't like Meredith.
Meredith is very rude, very it was very mean, and
so in fact, I remember that therapy session, I was
underneath the couch picking at some of the loose fabrics

(05:24):
and he asked for the name, and I said Meredith,
And that felt very very right to me, it was
Meredith because that was the image I had of something
that felt evil, and in retrospect, obviously, it was his
way of helping me disassociate with the strong feelings that
I felt. I remember gave me a worksheet and I
would sort of rank what was the scariest person to

(05:47):
eat in front of to the least scary, and it
was like on a scale of ten to zero. He
had this idea of sort of desensitizing, and the plan
was that he'd bring me out to a restaurant and
that we would start the sort of de sanpsitize. And
I was very frightened of that and I didn't want
to do that at all, and we actually never followed
through with that, but that was my first time in therapy.

(06:09):
My parents sent me to a public school for kindergarten,
and I got so hooked on impersonating the other kids
and getting into this kind of street culture in Berkeley
as a kindergartener and starting to speak slang that my
parents sent me to a Jewish school, hoping it connected
by roots and sort of get me out of that environment.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
I guess that's so interesting. Of course, you grow up
to become an actor, So it's hard to kind of
unnot sort of untangle what was what? How do you
see that early impersonation or adopting of a different kind
of identity is a kindergartener? Was that fun fore? Or
was that coming from a place of I don't know

(06:49):
what or who I am?

Speaker 1 (06:52):
It was the greatest joy. It was the absolute greatest
joy and ease, and it kind of focused me and
I love the different ways that people spoke. I remember
as a kindergarten our study to use the word ain't
and my mom said to me, like, why are you
using that word? He said, well, that's what Mitchell uses.

(07:14):
So I got really really hooked on how people spoke.
And it wasn't even conscious. I just would get into
a character and it would consume me until I stopped
feeling obsessed with it. And I didn't even recognize it
as Meredith consuming me. It was just utter pleasure and
it was effortless to me, and it was freedom in

(07:37):
some way before I even knew what freedom meant.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Do you think it was Meredith or do you think
it was just something that was not connected to the
OCD Well.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
I think it's a combination of both. I think Meredith
has the elements of her my anxiety, of the elements
that are difficult and need to be managed, such as
this phobia food. And then there's the part of Meredith
that's incredibly curious and that loves the sound of different
voices and accents, et cetera. And so I think it

(08:10):
was her that got me so hooked on it, and
that it would just feel good to me to sort
of go to school and impersonate some person all day.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
And yeah, that's where Meredith ticks in, right, is that
it's not like an isolated incident and it becomes like
a thing I'm gonna keep doing this.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Yeah. Look, I mean, I think we have all these
words and phrases to help us understand ourselves, but like,
at the end of the day, it is who I am.
I didn't understand it in that way then, but now
when I look at it, it's just like it's the
particular way that I digested the world. And there were
some particular ways that I would say it disrupted my

(08:50):
quality of life and other ways in which it really
enhanced the way I was singing in the world around me.
So that was really early.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Ari's now in third grade, the whole class is doing
a presentation for a disability week. When it's his turn,
he stands and goes to the front of a classroom.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
I got up and I shared that I had obsessed
with a composer disorder named Meredith, and I sort of
was asked to talk abouting around into class with those
kind of social students. I though, I would say that
I wasn't thriving socially before that, and I never quite
understood why I didn't thrive socially, but that certainly didn't

(09:31):
help admitting that to the class. I speak about it
in some ways a silly thing, but if I put
myself back into the body that third grade kid, I mean,
it's day in, day out, and there was a girl
at the wheelchair at school and I wouldn't eat, and
I wouldn't eat when I got home, and I wouldn't
touch the food that was in my lunch. I mean,
it was a really, really real phobia that I believed.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess it's not a real
phobia unless you believe it, like Meredith was so much
a part of you. It also, it seems to me,
took a lot of courage or a lot of, you know,
just gumption for a third grade kid to get up
there and say, you know, I have this disability.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
I think there were kids with a number of other
disabilities that we presented. One he was in a wheelchair,
one had sort of webbed fingers or it was like
and I think the teacher thought it was a really
good idea to show the spectrum of these conditions. I
remember my mom even then thinking it was really weird.
I didn't I just sort of went along with what
the teacher asked me to do. And now that I'm
reflecting on it with you now, I suppose it is

(10:39):
quite strange that I would announce that in that way
and that I would be asked to but at different times.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
The way that I kind of read that was that
the way that your parents each handled it with you
that it doesn't seem like there was any shame.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Yeah, I mean my dad either didn't understand it or
was in denial or a mixture of the two, and
my mom was committed to fixing it. I'm just as
I'm talking about it, right, I'm just feeling a tightness
in my chest because I'm remembering how real it was.
So it was like a dad who had no vocabulary

(11:13):
language for mental health, and a mom who maybe had
too much language for it. And I remember, I still
didn't recognize that it's making me abnormal. It was just
a feeling that I had, but I was still very
normal in my head.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
At school, Ari is also othered by the color of
his skin. He's aware of this difference, describing himself as
the only brown kid in school, So in an effort
to both justify and identify with this, to simultaneously lean
in and lean out, he decides to be in Israeli.
He starts speaking with an accent.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
So on one level, I had a lot of status
as the son of an Israeli at Jewish day school
because everyone has to do a Hebrew classes, and I
was more Proffi than the rest of my classmates, So
in the class I had a sort of level of status.
But but outside of Hebrew class, I didn't recognize the
Judaism that I was surrounded with because I always felt

(12:13):
that it was described in a way or practiced in
a way that that sort of ignored what I had
learned from my dad about what it meant to be Jewish,
and it wasn't inclusive of my Misvaki heritage, and so
I felt that it was you know, the word that

(12:34):
is now used as ashka normative. That was the environment
that the school was. There was a transfer student for
a year from Israel and Amalan. I felt much more
comfortable with him because he spoke Hebrew and he had
a context for what I was. For him, it was
very you know, Israel's you're Yemen night that kema meis,
they would say. And so the same thing that happened

(12:55):
in kindergarten happened again. I just fell in love with
this kid in his accent, in addition to my dad's accent.
And so for that year we were just Israeli best
friends and it was pleasurable to me again to feel
an identity. And often what I would do if I

(13:17):
didn't feel like I was being accepted is that you
kind of choose an identity that other people can't have.
But in that moment, it made the difference to the
fact that I was different and wasn't accepted, and I
was this kid who took medication in the morning and
had this eating phobia. Well, here's this thing that differentiates
me in a cool way, or in a funny way.

(13:40):
And so that's I leaned into it.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
You know, So, when you're around nine, you stand up
to Meridis like really for the first time, and it's
it's around this whole idea of, you know, the kinds
of things that this inner voice is saying to you,
which is that if you consume food and of you
know someone with a disability, you know, the world is

(14:04):
going to explode. And you test out really for the
first time, whether that's in fact true. You kind of
go a mono with Meredith and discover that the world
isn't going to explode.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
I do I do if I remember the feeling in
my body. What actually urged me to do that was
that my grandparents, my mom's parents, would take my sister
and I on trips and my grandmother would get really,
really fussy when I wouldn't eat, and I didn't know
how to explain it to her. And this lasts for
two three years, and she was going to take my
sister and I to Mexico, and I thought to myself,

(14:39):
I really deserve to enjoy Mexico as a nine year old.
And so I remember this sort of surge of power
that came into my body, this knowingness this, you kind
of step out of your body to achieve something even
though you're very scared, and it's something that I still
use to this day. It's the same and that gets

(15:00):
me on stage right like it's a scary thing that
you're doing, but this other part of you takes hold.
And I learned at that time that was called my willpower.
And so I remember telling my mom, I'm ready. And
what's funny is I had already stopped the therapy with this,
my first therapist who had had this whole plan of

(15:21):
we neing me off my fear, and I said to
my mom, I'm done. I got back home, I said
I'm done, and she didn't believe me, and I and
I took a lot of pride in the fact that
I would prove her on and so we did that.
We went to the street corner on College and Ashby.
It's my favorite place during fluff donuts. We got a
dozen donut holes. I waited for somebody with a wheelchair

(15:42):
and just stuffed my mouth and my mom couldn't believe it.
She later told me that she called the therapists it
worked this way, said just don't do anything, just if
he believes it just let it be. And so it
was a triumph, and it was out of body, and
I felt, it's so, it's funny. It's like something clicked
in my brain and I decided I was done with it,

(16:04):
which set the stage for a relationship with my obsessive
pupulsey disorder that later in life I learned could not
be willed out of myself. You can be brave in
the face of fear, but you cannot will yourself out
of that relationship. And at the time I thought that
I could right.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Well, and it's a relationship that keeps on morphing. Yes,
we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
On September eleventh, two thousand and one, Ari is ten
years old. After the terrorist attacks, Ari sees brown faces

(16:46):
on television for the first time. He thinks they look
like Abba and asks Abba, are we Arab? And Abba responds, no,
we're Jewish, We're Yemeny Jews. In the wake of nine
eleven and Ari encounters the fear and hatred of Muslims
so prevalent at that time, and since he's easily mistaken

(17:07):
for Muslim, he makes a decision to shape shift once more.
He decides to be white.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
Nine to eleven was completely transformative to my life, you know,
And just to speak to some of the new ones,
there is that complicated nature of it because my dad,
as someone who had an Israeli identity, did not feel
in any way, shape or form connected to this event
that happened in our country, even though we were being
pegged as such. So I, after the eating phobia and

(17:40):
all the other weird things that happened at Jewish day
school and then being teased and having my dad be
called those solid and moden, I thought I gotta restart.
I gotta start fresh. You gotta start fresh. And I
had this fantasy of fitting in with other white kids,
and I thought that if I put it up in
my hair that I could look like Ross s Geller

(18:04):
from friends that would watch all the time. And I
had this whole sort of idea that if I just
you know, have the right wardrobe and I'm a little
more attentive to how I come across that all that
I could be popular, that I can be liked. It
also coincided with my dad moving to a suburb where
it was really ninety five percent white, and so I

(18:27):
remember that summer and deciding that I needed to start fresh.
And I showed up at the school and it worked
well for as long as it worked. That you know,
I came in with skater shoes and the hair. And
the big thing was changing my name for Ariel to Ari.
I thought that could sort of camouflage me. And I

(18:48):
also thought that taking my dad's last name Yeshiyahoo and
just taking my mom's last name, Statuel, it would sort
of give me space to be I wanted to be,
or whoever I wanted to create myself to be. So
it worked until obviously it didn't.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
Well that could be the story of so much of
your young years, right, It's like it worked until it didn't.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yes your theme.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
One of Ari's good friends at the time is a
boy named Jared. Jared is white and well so is
Ari for now. But one day Jared drops Ari off
at home and he sees Abba. Jared turns to Ari
and says, I didn't know the Taliban was among us.
For the first time, Ari must reckon with the very

(19:38):
real shame he feels about his father, his appearance, his accent.
He'd felt hints of this shame earlier, but now it's
cemented he doesn't want people meeting his Abba.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
By sixth grade, you're sort of more aware of who
you are in the world. And I would say that, yes,
you know, Abba became something that made me feel very
different and associated me with something that I really didn't
want to be associated with.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, and he blew your cover.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
I mean he he certainly did.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
It couldn't be all those It couldn't be those other
identities that you were trying on if Aba showed up.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Not at all, that's exactly right. I'll also say that
it was it was stressful going to this new school
because even my mom, who is quote unquote white presenting,
was Jewish and we didn't live life like Jared AND's
family live life should know, So so there was like
a lot of tension. And I don't think I knew

(20:41):
how much energy it took so much energy to go
to school and put on this mask, which I'm sure
most kids do. I don't think that it's unique kids
trying to fit in, but to the extent that I did,
and learning that my dad would someone would blow my cover.
After that point, yeah, that was a really big stressor.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
And so then in seventh grade, a black kid comes
to the school and assumes you're black. Yes, and his
name's Rob, and he's he's a basketball player and you're
playing basketball, and I talk a little bit about that,
like what happens there.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
I don't know how it works for most is, but
for Yemen Night kids. In my particular DNA, my hair
got really curly from sixth to seventh grade, and so
I was able to sort of go from ross Geller
hair to like having a sort of a jew fro,
which to him looked like an afro. And again it
was the same feeling that I had with elementary school

(21:44):
of oh my god, you know, in literally in one day,
this kid throws a basketball at me, calls me the
N word, and it was like, in one second, I
completely redefined my social reality way that I was out
of options. By that point. There wasn't another option. It

(22:04):
didn't it didn't occur to me that there was this
other way of being in the world. And again it
was something as I described it would happen to the
Jewish school. Well, the one status that I felt was well,
I can speak Hebrew, and so during Hebrew class I
have an edge here and at this other all white school,
I have brown skin. And now my hair is curlier,

(22:28):
and so I can sort of contort my looks and
my speech and my clothing to gang status. And that coincided,
you know, at a time where like gangster rap was
the coolest thing, and everyone loved gangster rap. It didn't
matter if you were in the suburbs or you were
in the inner city, like it was the coolest thing.

(22:50):
And so me and this kid were sort of cosplaying
as gangsters and it was awesome. It was really fun,
really really fun.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
And you made the basketball team.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
I made the badotball team, and we would just kick
people's asses during the day, and all of a sudden,
we sort of instilled fear in other kids because we
had something they didn't. We were the culture, you know.
And it was like at this like totally like waspy
suburban middle school in the outskirts of San Francisco Bay Area,
Like we were just living our fantasy, just playing basketball,

(23:22):
listening to rap music, just all these stereotypical things. But
we felt like we were on top of the world,
and we dreamed that we would be NBA players together
and it was it's so funny. As I go through
these moments, my chest either opens or contracts on what
memory I'm talking about. But I'm feeling my chest open
up as I talk to you about this, because I mean,

(23:44):
what a transformative moment. And it was like, this is it,
this is it, Like I found the answer with this
with my with my buddy Robert, and it felt I
still I love the kid. I texted in even today.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
And you were, you know, also like part of his family, right,
like you were spending time with his grandmother and his
like sort of extended family.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
And yeah, it was the first time that there wasn't
any qualification for what I was. They didn't care. They
just accepted me. In every other environment I'd been in,
it was like, oh, well you're half Yemen ight, and
you're half Ashkenazi. And at the Jewish school there was
this focus on placing and identifying and putting into a

(24:28):
box and labeling. And at Robert's home, it was just love.
And they took me in and his grandmother and his
grandfather's grandfather would pick us up a blast rap music
and grandmother would get there and she just she had
me call her grandmother. So there was his granddad, grandmother
an Denise, Auntie Denise, and she would cook us this
amazing soul food and with like the best chicken and

(24:52):
collar greaves, and it was it was unbelievable to me,
and it was delicious. But it was a degree of
acceptance that I didn't even find in my own household
because hearkening back, right, I had this Israeli Yemeni father
who had opinions about my American mother and vice versa, right,

(25:14):
and so there wasn't really alignment in my own household.
There Robert's house, it was just love and it was acceptance,
and I loved it.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
And it sounds like even when Aba blueyar Cover, you know,
when they made Abba, it doesn't have the same before
and after, Like oh, I mean Rob kind of makes
fun of you and he calls you he's like.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
Hinduinian, like curry Hinduinian. Yes, correct, but it's like it seems.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Kind of playful and not really toxic in the way
that some of these other encounters were.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Well, when me and Robert were living in our fantasy world,
it was the greatest thing in the world world, but
he always had this edge on me. At the end
of the day, I was this Hinduinian, right, and it
didn't sit right with me. And it was like it's
debilitating and it's emasculating, and I don't even know if

(26:16):
I want to associate it with masculinity, but it's like
it was like this secret because Robert and I continued
our charade at school even after he met my dad.
Between he and I, there was this imbalance, and there
was like, at the end of the day, rather than
having this fantasy of being this equal and this black kid,
I was now this like weird Middle Eastern kid who

(26:37):
was pretending with Robert. But he knew the truth and
I knew the truth, and I didn't like that because
by that point I was really really embarrassed. I mean
I would go back after school and share at myself
in the mirror for like hours and just adjusting the
position of my face and asking myself, do I look

(26:57):
more Middle Eastern or do I look black. I would
have these conversation with myself because it was so intense
for me to feel like an other and to feel
like a yeminick. And if someone asked, are you Middle
Eastern or you would say that, I would get hot,
my face would get right, and I would feel my
entire body heat up, and so yes, it was playful,

(27:19):
but underneath the playfulness was this real feeling of alienation.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
For me, Well, that makes so much sense because in
the joyful part that you were talking about, you were
fully in it. The fourth wall hadn't come down or
you know, yes, and then after that you know that
on some level you're pretending.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yet I felt like I can handle the pain. I
can handle the pretending as long as no one else knows.
But if other people know, then I'm it just poisoned
the freedom that I felt.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Toward the end of eighth grade, Ari is at a
basketball camp. He's continuing to pass as black, and he's
hanging out with his friend Josh, who's one of the
few other black kids at this sleepway camp. Most of
the other kids are Jewish and from the suburbs. But
then it happens again, Aba shows up.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
It was this magical week with this kid. It was
like Robert on steroids. It was like I felt totally free,
I felt totally cool, totally accepted. There weren't other kids
at the school. It was just like complete reinvention. And
at the end, my dad came to surprise by picking
me up and this kid looks at me. He's like yo,
daddy a rep and I scuttled the kid away and

(28:36):
I made up a story. We're a terrible things. Loving
father comes and just paralyzes me with fear. That is
a moment that I'll never forget, and telling him that
I didn't actually have a dad, my real dad died,
that the guy who was there calling me his dad
was an uncle through marriage. That was what my thirteen

(28:57):
year old brain came up with. Remember that car ride
home and this sort of dissonance I felt with my dad,
who I love so much, and this lie that I
just told and this life that felt so good to
me there, and that ultimately is would catalyzed me saying

(29:18):
I got to really start fresh, and I whatever I
had with that kid at camp, I want that all
the time. And so that led me to the school.
And so, to be honest with you, high school, I
was much more calculated. It was that experience of that
camp that led me to feel them. It felt better
than with Robert because Robert had this secret, but that
kid didn't until the very end of the week.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
And so then in high school, is what you mean
that you sort of like double down on.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
That, I got smarter about it, so again, new wardrobe,
haircut speech, and it was like a deeper commitment to
this identity that I wasn't fully able to live in
in middle school because because it sort of was sprung

(30:04):
on me with Robert. But this time it was a
little more rehearsed, and it was pretty amazing to show
up at that school. And it was Berkeley High School,
which was I would say, fifty percent black, you know,
I was. It wasn't, it wasn't predominant, but it was,
like me, fifty percent. But that was the only social
circle that I cared about, so I didn't even see

(30:25):
the other kids. I only saw the black kids and
all these things that had not been good at my
Jewish day school, being told I was too brown, or
or learning in middle school that, you know, being called
Osama in the context of this black high school, my
physical attributes to really hot commodities in the black community

(30:46):
because I was light skinned and I had what they
called good hair, which means that it's loose curls and
not tight girls. And so all of a sudden, you know,
the way that I looked repurposed in this other context
was like the ultimate social status, and it was really unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
What was it like, I mean to go to sort
of your internal life during that time, It's like you
were having this experience that felt really powerful and you know,
exciting and joyful, and you were really popular, and like
the assumed identity was just like totally working for you.

(31:26):
And at the same time, you know, at the end
of the day, like a high school student, you're with
your you know, one of your parents. Did you feel
any kind of internal split, Like, what was it like
during those years when you were with Abba, because you
were hiding him from everyone and yet at the same
time you had such a strong relationship with him.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yes, yeah, I mean it was It was a lot
of effort. It was a lot of work and a
lot of stress, and those surprise that the anxiety sort
of started eating me alive later in life, But at
the time it felt like I was doing what I
needed to do. But my god, it was a lot
of work. It was like code switching at a level.

(32:09):
I mean, in some ways, it's like you leave home
and then you do an audition for an entire day,
and then you go home back home, it was like
the entire day was a performance. My entire social life
was a performance, and so there was that. There was
the fact that you know, my mom came from a
different bacu of my dad, and it was just really

(32:30):
very stressful. I remember. I mean it was like for
those four years of high school, being in public with
my dad was incredibly stressful. I was afraid I would
run into somebody. And it was even like going out
into like stores and you know, you know, seeing an
employee of I don't know, Whole Foods or wherever it

(32:51):
might be, and feeling like I couldn't really be the
self that I wanted to be around my parents. And again,
this is like universal, it's just in my case, it
was this added layer of like wanting to be seen
as a different race than my dad. So it was
like the regular embarrassment of being with your parents layered
on top of like I'm living this fictitious life, and

(33:15):
it was I mean, it was painful, but I didn't
see it as that at the time.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
Did you have that same experience if you were, say,
like out at Whole Foods with your mom, I mean
that would have also blown your cover.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Mom didn't blow cover because I couldn't get away with
being fully black. So the story that I had is
that my mom was white and that my dad wasn't around,
and my dad was black, so mom mom was much
safer to be with in public.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Ari skips his own graduation because he doesn't want his
dad yet again, to blow his cover. But he doesn't
just casually skip the graduation. He orchestrates a big story,
because that's what he does.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
When you're a kid like me, you think five steps ahead.
So I said that I wanted to I was already
interested in traveling, and I wanted to visit my family
in Israel. You always find a story that's really believable,
and you're five steps ahead, so you don't even say
I'm skipping. You say I really want to go travel
and I miss them, and I don't care about my graduation,
all right. So I had always been really smart about

(34:23):
coming up with excuses that would spare me from having
to say the truth.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
So you moved to New York, you enroll at NYU.
You're avoiding your father. It's been eight years of hiding him.
And you say that it was taking a toll. How
was it starting to take a toll?

Speaker 1 (34:45):
It was one thing to be in high school, and
you know, as I described going and doing an audition
or a performance all day and coming home and still
having this sort of point of contact. It's an entirely
different thing to be pursuing the career in a city
across the country that aims to be public and realizing like,

(35:10):
holy shit, when is this going to end? And it's
funny because as I say this to you, what I'm
thinking back to earlier part of the conversation. I was
talking about this enormous high with Robert on the basketball court.
I don't think the kid who had that enormous high
thought about, well, what about when I go to college?
And acting is so much in relation to your identity
and to who you are. And so I was acting

(35:32):
on top of acting, right like I had this persona,
and then on top of that persona, I was studying acting.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
When you moved to New York, you maintained the identity
from high school like you moved as a as a
young black actor going to m YU.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
I did as a young biracial half black actor. It
was really interesting. It was like there was the Robert
phase of blackness, was just this middle school kid on
the playground, and then there was the the high school phase,
which was more calculated and basketball and arts and whatever.
And then by college it was like this there was

(36:08):
a new layer of blackness, which was sort of an
intellectual blackness. Like I started joining these groups that were
racial and social justice groups, and so like we'd gainst
these very high level conversations of that identity and about race,
and I was participating in those conversations those groups as
a half black kid.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
So you un enroll from NYU. Does something precipitate that
or is it just this kind of blanket, overwhelming feeling
of I cannot keep this up.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
I wasn't doing well. I started failing a couple classes
or taking incompletes on a couple and there was this real,
real fear of continuing on this trajectory of hiding myself.
It was just like it was becoming too stressful and
the stakes felt like they were too high, and I

(36:59):
started to get to an age where it didn't sit
right anymore. I was conscious of it in a way
that I was never conscious before, and so I thought,
get out of here, let's go home.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
And where was Meredith during all of this? Was she
relatively kind of quiet before she kind of ended up
coming growing back.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
I don't think that she was ever quite but merit
at that times works on autopilot, right, and so like
you're doing your little touching rituals and all the other things,
and that's just sort of like a daily merit it
sort of exerting your control. In regards to the macro
fear of, you know, leaving a school. I think that

(37:42):
she certainly was a part of it, which was like,
run away from something that's not safe, and if I'm
moving in a direction that is going to expose me,
then get out of it. And I think that is
where she was at the time, And so it was
fear that said, I gotta just run away from from
a situation that feels like it could expose me.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yeah, you have a really moving line in your play,
which is I was giving up my dreams to keep
my cover.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
But there are these moments where I ari have to
face Meredith, and there are these critical junctures in my
life where I have to make a decision that's going
to scare this shit out of Meredith because I already
believe that on the other side of basing Meredith is

(38:31):
something better. And there was a lot of innertention. It
was starting to weigh on me, and that the solution
of hiding behind an identity was feeling unsustainable.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
After spending the summer at home, Ari realizes he has

(39:13):
to go back. Acting. Isn't just some hobby or dream,
it's his calling. Back at NYU, his theater professor Kent
assigns something called an auto drama, a raw personal solo piece.
In many ways, this brings things back full circle to
Ari standing in front of his third grade class saying,

(39:35):
I have something called OCD and her name is Meredith.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
I was so lit up by that assignment. This other
force gave me this courage, and it had to be done.
It had to be done. It was like it was
no longer sustainable for me to live in this lie play.
And I went through my life and exposed each of
the moments in which lies continued to compound on themselves

(40:07):
and fest up to each and everything, culminating of course,
and like this is my actual identity, Like I'm this
Yemenite Israeli Ashkenazi kid, and I'm not who I've said
that I was. And you know, the professor is African
American can gosh, and so there is a bond that

(40:30):
I had with him under the guise that I was
the fellow black human beings students. So it was really
really massive to say that specifically to him. And I
felt like I was going to lose the mentorship, the connection,
the love, all these wonderful, genuine, warm feelings of connection

(40:56):
that I had with my mentor by coming out with this,
and yet I couldn't do it anymore. It was it
was just making me sick. And I came out and
the world didn't explode a lava. It was cathartic and
also very frightening.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
And what Ken does is you finished this whole performance.
That's not a performance, right, And he says, it's really
unbelievable what burdens the world puts on us for being us.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, that was a sigh of relief for me. What
a brilliant thing for him to say. That's what he said.
Those are the exact words. And then began the journey
of understanding what it meant for me to be quote
unquote Middle Eastern. That's what I thought. I thought, Well,
if I'm not black, then in Middle Eastern, what does
that mean? And that was a really challenging process because

(41:44):
it's like, Okay, well I have this way of talking,
so do I change that now? And my labs will
talk I used to talk. How do I deal with
all the friendships that I've created under this false identity?
There was a lot of logistics to handle it. It's
almost like you know when someone dies and you get
into sort of like all the paperwork and choosing the
I don't mean to be so morbid, but like there's

(42:06):
all these comedies about debt where people then have to
sort of get right into logistics, and I feel like
that's what happened to me. It was like I was
mourning this old identity, but then how the hell do
I rebuild? And this entire vision I had for the
career that I wanted, for the roles that I wanted
to play for all of these things changed and so

(42:27):
that was a really interesting journey to embark on.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Did you make a list of people and you know,
just begin to have conversations with them or was it
more organic than that?

Speaker 1 (42:40):
It was more organic. It was more of like, you know,
there was the classmates in school accepted me, and we're
more or less okay and understanding when it was more
so about how do I build new community that is
in alignment with who I now say that I am.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
Ari's embark on his career. He's auditioning regularly and as
part of a group of actors who call themselves Manassa
Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian actors finally an
identity group in which Ari actually belongs. The group forms
in part as a response to an off Broadway show,

(43:19):
a Middle Eastern off Broadway show called The Band's Visit.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
The group formed in a friend's living room around the
time that The Band's Visit was originally announced as an
off Broadway production at the Atlantic Theater Company, and a
lot of us weren't getting auditions for it. We couldn't
get seen for it, or we wouldn't get cast. And
we were seeing the cast of The Band's Visit get
populated by actors who didn't even have roots in the region,

(43:47):
and we thought to ourselves, like, no, what every other
group seems to be protected when it comes to casting
except for us, And this is the first time there's
a Middle Eastern show and we're not being cast in
it no way. So we start this group and the
umbrella is pretty wide Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian.
And there's two things happening. For me. On a personal level,

(44:10):
I'm just starting to feel comfortable saying that I'm Middle
Eastern and auditioning for Middle Eastern roles. And on the
other hand, we're now fighting for our voices and our
community to get the roles in stories that are about
our ancestors and or about cultures that we belong to,
whether it's our parents or us. Right. But it started

(44:32):
to fracture because there'd be Indian roles that auditioned for
and I would and I remember getting told there was
a show at Williamstown where he wants to offer to me,
but then the writer back said, we can't get this
to a non Indian actor, but that same treatment wasn't
beginning to Middle Eastern roles, and that the Middle Eastern

(44:52):
roles would be open to anybody under the umbrella of Manasa.
And so there started to be infighting because it felt
like there was an agreement on who could play what
and nonetheless who were all really pissed that show in
general wasn't using explicitly Middle Eastern actors And for me,

(45:13):
not only was I upset that it wasn't using Middle
Eastern actors for the Egyptian characters. I was also set
that they weren't using Middle Eastern actors for the Israeli
roles because the actual town the band that is based
on is mostly Moroccan and Yemeny immigrants in the south
of Israel. But ultimately we start this small lobbing in

(45:33):
group and the band's visit has another round of auditions
in another round, and after seven auditions over nine months, I
got to part and I felt like so in alignment,
like I am playing a Middle Eastern role. I've been
waiting for this. Everything feels aligned for me. I was
hiding my whole life. Now I get to play this

(45:56):
strapping Middle Eastern leading man. Only from ANASA members to
be upset because I Ari is rarely was taking an
Egyptian role, and there was frustration. An actor said that
I was settling on their roles, and so, you know,
I played the role, but it wasn't necessarily embraced entirely

(46:20):
by people within the community. As we continue to sort
of get more and more granular about who can play what.
I didn't even know what to say at that point.
I mean, I felt i'd spent so long not embracing
who I was. I finally felt like I was embracing
who I was. But as it turned out, that wasn't
who I was. And I later came to the conclusion
that it wasn't who I was. But at the time,

(46:43):
after spending so many years hiding my father on the
basis that he was Middle Eastern, it felt really cathartic
to play a role that was Middle Eastern.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
And it sounds like kind of like during that time,
after you get the part and it's this tremendous success
in this great run and you're nominated for a Tony
and then you win a Tony, you know this is
a dream. And yet at the same time, inwardly it
seems like there's also I mean, Meredith is like not

(47:15):
in autopilot, no, And there's this relationship that you have
to sweating that has come and gone over the years,
but has become this you know, you're on stage and
you're doing interviews, and you're in situations where it's not
just a minor thing, it's a huge liability, and you

(47:35):
have all of these different ways of stories around why
you're sweating. You know, just more like thinking five steps
ahead of you know, I'm going to come up with
a story to make this sweating be reasonable. But I
mean the way that you describe it, when the show
closes after about a year and a half, what you
feel is this kind of tremendous relief.

Speaker 1 (47:55):
Yeah, merit. It's sort of evolved. So in the same
way that in college, I sort of, you know, achieved
this massive in the auto dramas, came out as Middle
easterned and that felt so so likes such a relief,
and then I had to deal with building an identity
as a Middle Eastern person. In this case, I achieved
my dream of being on Broadway and being Middle Eastern,

(48:16):
and now I need to be a public person and
I was not ready for that. And I've always had
these very strange phobias. But the phobia that developed as
I got on Broadway was being around people, speaking to people,
sitting across from them, talking, being looked at. I mean,
everything every day felt like a living hell. It felt

(48:40):
I hated being with people. It was frightening, and every
second felt stressful, and it was like I was just
going through any concoction of alcohol or xanax or of
anything that could help me and frankly nothing did. I
would just sit across from a person and just start shitzing,

(49:01):
and it just continued to build and build and build
to the point where just nothing felt safe, nothing felt good.
A friend's dad they said, man, you know you have
such an amazing life, why you're not celebrating? And I
couldn't explain that every day felt frightening. So yeah, when
the show closed, it meant that I wasn't forced into

(49:23):
a lot of social situations. Now, what's interesting is that
the show more often than not felt good to me.
It was like, it wasn't every day that I get
panic attacks, but when they came on during the show,
it was like utter hell. And so when it closed,
it was like, I'm not forced into the Broadway social scene,
which is people coming, they want to come after the show.

(49:43):
They're asking you for drinks, they're asking you for dinners,
and people couldn't quite understand how someone who's performing live
in front of a thousand people and having a solo
and winning an award like can't sit down for coffee
without panicking. And I didn't even know what was happening.
And now that I look back a little bit, I
think It's like all of this, the tension that I

(50:06):
felt around performing and being somebody who I wasn't, and
all of a sudden achieving all these things that I'd
always dreamed of, the validation I always dreamed of, but
not quite feeling comfortable in my skin, and so it
would literally pour out of me my discomfort. And yeah,
so finishing the show was a great relief. It meant
that I didn't have to be forced into all those

(50:26):
social settings.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
When Ari wins his Tony Award, he's just twenty six
years old. This is the kind of success that most
actors only dream of early, dazzling public, but not entirely
so for Ari. He's young, though it doesn't feel that
way at the time. That's the trick of your twenties.
You think you're all grown up. When the show closes,

(50:54):
instead of basking in the glow of his triumph, Ari
flees goes as far as he can think to go
Kampala Uganda. He wants anonymity, adventure, distance, and there, among
the warm strangers and unfamiliar streets, something shifts just a bit.
The anxiety that's pulsed through him during the show, during

(51:15):
his life begins to loosen.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
It was more tolerable because yeah, there wasn't that sort
of cutthroat New York judgmental environment, but it wasn't entirely away,
like I'd still get into sweat paintings. I mean, Mary
doesn't sort of like retire just because you're in Uganda.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
But I think you were hoping she would.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
I was hoping she would, but she didn't. But yeah,
I did end up meeting an interesting friend.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
In Kampala, Ari meets a Ugandan young woman named Shila
and they begin to spend time together.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
So I'm taking my phone out and I'm filming from
my iPhone in a very busy market and she tells
me to put the phone away, and I'm arrogant because
I'm American, and I say no, no, no, I got it,
and she says, but you're zoo and someone's gonna snatch it.
And say what is that? She said, yeah, amzomu, and
so what the hell is that? She said, you're a
white person and I said I'm white. She said, yes,

(52:11):
I see all white. You are a mazomle. And so
I look around this market and there was a guy
there who was turned out he was German, but he
was super white looking, and you know, blonde and blue eyes.
And I and I just run up to him, like, dude, said,
sheil a hold on for a second. Run to him,
said due, can you just stand next to me so
she can look at me next to you? And he
goes sure, And he thought it was weird, but he said,

(52:31):
no problem. And I stand next to him and I
go back to her and I say, all right, that
is white. I am not white. She goes, no, you're white.
You just have curly hair. I was like, oh, that's
not that's not how I see things I saw. I
tried to Protestant. No, I'm actually a Middle Eastern. She goes, no,
you're American. I'm like, I'm not American. She said, no, no, no,
you're so American. And uh. At the time, it wasn't

(52:53):
the most profound thing. It was just like, you know,
you got a woman called me American. But in retrospect,
I I think it's the first time I had been
so definitively called American.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, like that being the identity.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
Yes, exactly. So looking back at my entire life and
all these things I did to fit in, and there
was a simplicity in the way that she saw me
and the thoughts on myself. Hmm, maybe that's the thing
that's been missing, and I had to go to a
different country to just sort of get them. Well, that's
the thing. It's just American. That was it the whole time.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
When Ari comes back home, he gets cast as a
Syrian refugee in a new show, but the pandemic happens
and the theater world, along with the rest of the world,
closes down. Ari ends up back home with Abba for
a while, and he has the time and space to
really think about identity, his identity, what does it mean

(53:54):
for him to be American. He has long conversations about
this with his friend Az, who's part of the Manassa group.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
The George Floyd protests are happening, and there's these really
large conversations about America and American identity and who's American.
And I think that a lot of people who didn't
fit into sort of the black white binary started thinking
a lot about their place as these larger conversations are
happening about equity and racial justice, etc. And so the

(54:26):
big revelation for me was that this watershed moment I'd
had being cast in the band's visit and feeling like
I'd finally sort of tapped into the authenticity of who
I was was actually complete bullshit, and that myself and
it's these and this entire monossa group had been duped

(54:46):
into believing that that is what we were. And so
I'm having this sort of these like micro wars with
other you know, South Asian, Middle Eastern North African kids
about what roles we should or shouldn't play, ignoring the
fact that, like the bigger issue is that the only
things we're competitive for are roles that are in regions

(55:08):
where ancestors are from that where we're from. We're American,
And in that particular conversation we talked about you know,
clicking the box other which is something that I've checked
my entire life, and feeling like the experience I had
growing up was like there wasn't really space or understanding
for what I was, and so I had to keep
clinging onto these identities that didn't really fit me, and

(55:30):
that I didn't necessarily feel like I understood myself accurately,
and that like and that I was American and that
maybe that would sort of soothe this quest for self definition.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
But then October seventh happens right right, Yeah, and that
changes a lot.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
It does. I started this conversation with you saying that
I didn't necessarily feel like I connected to the Jewish
identity at my Jewish day school growing up, but it
was so clear to me after that happened how Jewish
I was. And in spite of the fact that a
lot of my life was defined by my brown skin

(56:14):
and sort of trying to find an identity that would
help me fit in, I'm Jewish through and through, and
I felt it on a molecular level. And I felt
like even the person who I was, even if I
didn't recognize it as a kid, was equally shaped by

(56:35):
my mom Hiroshkenazi identity, just as much as my dad's
Yemenite background and my dad's Yeminit background shape the food
that I like, the way that I look, but the
way that I think and the way that I process,
and even the fact that, like you know, performing and
winning a Tony as an actor wasn't enough for me.
There was something inside of me and my DNA as

(56:56):
a thinker. On my mom's side, these these Jews who
are who My grandfather was a physicist and my mom
and psychologist and these people who think deeply about this.
It made me feel very clear that I was unequivocally
Jewish in the way that I thought in my identity.
And so there was this sense of like, maybe this

(57:16):
is a clarity that I've been searching for. But at
the same time, I feel Arab, and I've spent the
last ten years playing Arab roles and identifying with my
Arab peers. And my childhood was defined in many ways
by the fact that I was escaping my Arab identity.
I wasn't running away from my Jewish identity as a kid,

(57:37):
I was running away from the fact that people thought
of me as Arab, and I wanted anything but to
be looked at as Arab. And so, you know, October seventh,
it just felt like as a son of an Israeli
Yeminite and Ashkenasi American mother, it felt like you had
to say something, and there's this sort of pressure for

(57:59):
everyone to say something, and I wanted to say something
of value. What is there to say? Blindly standing with
one side or another is just not the sort of
nuance that I live in or believe in. And then
it became clear to me as an artist. The only
thing that I could do was be personal and try
to speak to a level of unity by saying, like
I have air of blood, I have Jewish blood, and

(58:22):
they're actually intertwined. And I thought of that as being
an offering that could help at least challenge some of
the rabbit anti Semitism that I was seeing.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
We're living in a moment in time when nuance feels
nearly impossible, especially online. Social media leaves little room for
complexity in our increasingly divisive world. But Ari does something
to express himself. He posts a video honest, layered, vulnerable.
In it, he attempts to reconcile what's happening by articulating

(59:00):
the fullness, the nuance of his identity.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
When I posted, I was just torched because people would
hang on to a fraction of what I was saying
and say I was told the Zionists stop being a
hamas apologist. I mean everything in the book that you
could hear by showing a little bit of empathy and
trying to stand in the center. I've since evolved in

(59:26):
my thinking about that, and I'm not as affected as
I was then then. I was really sort of demoralized
by the state of the world and the state of
how binary and polarizing, how much hatred there is. I
was really flattened by that. I don't feel that way today,
but I did feel that way. Then.

Speaker 2 (59:49):
Is that what inspired you to, I mean, ultimately to
write the play that became Other?

Speaker 1 (59:56):
So I started writing it long before I'll Go seventh,
long before I started writing in twenty eighteen. I wrote
it because I was I was in so much pain
and so uncomfortable that writing became a safe place for me.
And I felt that the complexity, the complexity of my
life and the experiences I was having, and all these

(01:00:17):
different identities that I'd had sort of been both an
insider and outsider of I needed to process it. And
so I started writing in twenty eighteen, and I knew
that I wanted to get something out, And it just
so happened that in the journey of writing that play
over the last six years, this major thing happened. And
actually when Other first came out, it was titled Out

(01:00:40):
of a Character. We opened it at Berkeley rep and
that was pre October seventh, and of course post October seventh,
every producer New York thought, it's got to be about
October seventh, and my director was really protective to say,
this is your story and we're not writing to people's
political agendas. And so it took a lot of refinement

(01:01:02):
and introspection to understand how to approach October seventh and
a piece of art that wasn't ripped from the headlines,
but something that felt evergreen.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Ari writes his play, Meredith has begun to take a
back seat, and there's a real shift in the way
Ari is now moving through his life. But he has
one more important thing he needs to clean up. He
needs Abba to know about his shame and fear. He
needs to tell Abba the truth of their shared history

(01:01:38):
and how it's impacted him, but he's terrified to do
it in person. Instead, Abba comes to opening night of
Ari's play when it's first staged in twenty twenty three
at Berkeley rep. In Ari's play, there's a scene in
which Ari confesses to Abba in a coffee shop.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
My dad is there, and I have this entire story,
this entire part of my life that somehow interpersonally, I
never felt the courage to share with him. But I
felt this need to free myself and I'll just harken
back to the kid with the Donah holes needed to
free himself. The kid in college need to free himself,
and now the adult needs to free himself. And I

(01:02:21):
needed to free myself and come clean about this anxiety
that I've been trying to hide, about these secrets that
I've been holding, and just start living an authentic life.
And so, yeah, my dad came to opening night, and
you know, the end of the play is, you know,
my character me confessing to him these years that i'd
spent hiding and telling people, you know, throughout high school

(01:02:44):
that didn't have a dad, and my real dad was dead,
and my dad sort of calmly accepting that and saying
I'm his son. And so the meta experience was that
I shared that with him on stage in the play
while he was in the audience, and it nearly flattened him,
but he ended up coming about eight more times and
really started to appreciate the story. And it's very intense

(01:03:07):
when he's in the audience, it's really intense for me
as a performer in the play.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
He says to you, Ari, You've always been a special kid.
You're my son. Let's enjoy the coffee, because right you're
at a coffee shop was his reaction in real life?
I mean it sounds like his coming eight times to
see the play is a version.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
Of that, right. Yes, yeah, for sure he did use
those exact words, but that's that's the words that I
believe he would have said if that exact conversation happens.
But he's just proud of me, and I think it
was a lot, you know, for him to see. But
he stayed supportive. And I think the longer the play goes,

(01:03:52):
and how we've had multiple productions each time, he's able
to sort of enjoy it more. And it's life. I
don't know what to say. I mean, it's just life. Yeah,
I'm kind of at a loss because it's like, what
do you do what you can't recover those years you
can't change or to app and you just share your
truth so you could have a more authentic relationship you
and you move forward.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero.
You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder,

(01:04:43):
and if you'd like to know more about the story
that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.