Aloha and Namaste everyone and welcome to impolitic with John Heilman my

podcast on politics and culture for Odyssey and Puck,

coming at you every Wednesday and Friday with fresh topical candid.

Fun conversations with the people who shift and shape our culture

from the quarters of political power to those in tech, business, sports, and entertainment.

Entertainment.

That brings us to our guest today, a rising star of comedy who started developing a one-man show called

Just for Us back in 2018 and slowly but surely refined it into a totally hilarious, deeply serious, seriously wise, profoundly

impathic, truly transcendent piece of comedic performance art delivered in a style that was

equal parts Gary Shandling, Jerry Seinfeld, Woody Allen, Spalding Gray, and Mike Birriglia just for us, renders the unlikely, mostly true story of how Alex, born and raised in a modern Orthodox Jewish family, came to spend one evening at a meeting of white nationalists in Queens.

Workshopped abroad abroad abroad. in Queens. Workshoped abroad, launched in the U.S. way off-Broadway. Just for us

gradually gathered steam, mostly by word-of-mouth, ultimately landing on Broadway

for a sold-out run last summer where it earned Alex both an O. B. and a Tony award and

then being adapted into an HBO comedy special. You can see that on Max

for which Alex is currently holding an Emmy nomination for

Outstanding Writing for a variety special. Just for us was one of those

cultural phenomena I like to think of as a low-key high-brow juggernaut. Not a mega blockbuster in the

traditional sense like Barbinheimer or Deadpool or in the Broadway context

Hamilton or Spam a lot, but a show where eventually it starts to seem that everyone you know has seen it and been so wowed by it that they find themselves going back to see it again, and sometimes again and again and

again for the sheer pleasure of turning on their friends and family to it.

I say this with some degree of authority because I in fact am one of those people.

I first saw Alex's show in January of 2022 at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village

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