Truth Tastes Funny with Hersh Rephun

Hersh Rephun
  • 5.0 (37)
  • Comedy
  • Updated Weekly

Truth Tastes Funny is a weekly conversation with Hersh Rephun and a special guest about the strange, fascinating, and often invisible ways human beings create meaning. How we form opinions. How we misunderstand one another. How we flatten complexity into certainty. And how those interpretations quietly become the reality we live inside. In a post-truth world, people rarely respond to reality first. They respond to what they believe reality means. Once that interpretation takes hold, everything else starts organizing around it. Each episode explores how ideas spread, identities form, assumptions harden, and why two intelligent people can walk away from the same experience with completely different stories about what just happened. Expect topical conversations. Unexpected observations. A few uncomfortable realizations. Plenty of laughter. And the occasional moment when you catch yourself doing exactly the thing we're talking about. The podcast also offers a glimpse into "First Contact Live," Hersh's weekly forum where guests discover, in real time, how other people interpret their work on first contact. Because the goal isn't simply to communicate more clearly. It's to better understand how communication becomes reality in the first place.

  1. 3d ago

    Andrew Hurteau: When Does Preparation Become Performance?

    The stakes go up. So you prepare more. Then you prepare some more. And somewhere along the way, you stop sounding like yourself. On this episode of Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun sits down with performance coach Andrew Hurteau, who has spent 35 years helping actors, speakers, executives, and leaders show up when it matters. His background runs from Shakespeare and stage combat to coaching leaders and teams at organizations including Meta, Dolby, Gartner, The North Face, and Kaiser Permanente. Pasted text The conversation starts with a deceptively simple question: When does preparing to be yourself become performing somebody else? Andrew argues that performance itself isn’t the problem. Athletes perform. Actors perform. Speakers perform. The trouble begins when preparation turns into something so polished, scripted, or memorized that the person disappears behind it. For Andrew, memorization is often the enemy of authenticity. Rehearsal is useful. Familiarity is useful. Preparation is essential. But sounding like you’re reciting something you wrote three weeks ago? Not so much. Pasted text Hersh and Andrew get into acting, stand-up, keynote speaking, trust, authority, audience psychology, and why the best actors can say the same line for the 80th time and still make it sound like they just thought of it. Pasted text They also explore something leaders often get wrong: The audience is not there to watch you demonstrate that you deserve to be in the room. If you already have the stage, a degree of authority has already been granted. Trying too hard to prove it can actually diminish trust. Andrew’s advice is almost the opposite: engage, listen, ask questions, read the room, and make the audience feel like they’re the reason you’re there. Pasted text And that leads to one of the strongest ideas in the conversation: Authenticity doesn’t mean winging it. It doesn’t mean being unprepared, unfocused, or proudly off the cuff. It means preparing in a way that still sounds like you when the moment arrives. Pasted text At its heart, this episode asks: How do you prepare enough to be ready without preparing so much that you disappear? Andrew LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-hurteau-2a812061/ *** Subscribe for exclusive content: https://www.butterfieldspeaks.com/andrew/ *** Butterfield Speaks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/butterfield-speaks Butterfield Speaks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ButterfieldSpeaks -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix. Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

    Andrew Hurteau: When Does Preparation Become Performance?

  2. Sep 23

    Ross Murker: Who Told You Who You Are?

    For much of his life, Ross Murker had an explanation for why certain things seemed harder for him than they did for other people. He was lazy. He was weird. He didn't have enough persistence or whatever mysterious “oomph” everyone else seemed to possess. Except none of those explanations was particularly good. On Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun talks with Ross about what happens when somebody else's assessment of you becomes the story you eventually tell yourself. Ross struggled to fit the expectations of school, work and even his own family. Then, at 58, he was diagnosed with autism, ADHD and CPTSD. Suddenly, experiences stretching all the way back to childhood began falling into place. The diagnosis didn't give Ross a new identity. It gave him a different lens through which to understand the one he'd been living all along. And with that understanding came something harder: grief over the person he might have become if he'd had that information and support 40 years earlier. Today, Ross is a certified hypnotherapist who works primarily with neurodivergent clients. But his argument about hypnosis goes considerably wider. We're all absorbing ideas about who we're supposed to be, what success looks like, what's normal and what isn't. Eventually, some of those ideas stop sounding like things we've been told. They start sounding like us. Ross and Hersh talk about conformity, childhood, identity, neurodivergence, the energy we expend trying to appear acceptable, and what can happen when that energy finally becomes available for something else. They also discover a shared appreciation for comedy, including Ross's childhood realization that if he could make the other kids laugh, he wasn't being bullied. Maybe the work isn't becoming somebody new. Maybe it's figuring out which parts of the person you've been told you are were ever yours in the first place. https://linktr.ee/RossMurker -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix. Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the

    Ross Murker: Who Told You Who You Are?

  3. Sep 14

    Daniel A. 'Danny' Bobrow (BOB roe): How Do You Talk to Someone Who Thinks You’re Wrong?

    Everybody wants to be understood. Things get trickier when we have to understand somebody else first. On Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun sits down with persuasion expert Danny Bobrow for a conversation about what happens when two people can look at the same facts and inhabit completely different realities. Danny has spent more than four decades working in communication, sales and marketing. His Persuasion Blueprint is built around three ideas: caring, connection and collaboration. But this conversation quickly moves beyond business. What do you do when someone you care about believes something you find impossible to understand? Can you acknowledge another person's reality without agreeing with them? And what if the goal of a difficult conversation isn't changing anybody's mind, but preserving enough humanity to keep talking? Danny and Hersh get into sales, family, social media, politics, Israel and the Middle East, and the strange way human beings can turn disagreement into a threat almost instantaneously. Danny also introduces what he calls the “care gap”: the distance between how much we believe we care and how much of that caring the other person can actually perceive. That leads to one of the simplest ideas in the episode: before someone is likely to hear what you have to say, they need some indication that you've heard them. Sometimes persuasion means changing a mind. Sometimes success is leaving the relationship intact. And sometimes the smartest thing you can say is: Tell me how you got there. www.linkedin.com/in/dannybobrow www.instagram.com/danielabobrow https://www.youtube.com/@DannyBobrow/shorts www.Facebook.com/danielabobrow -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix. Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

    Daniel A. 'Danny' Bobrow (BOB roe): How Do You Talk to Someone Who Thinks You’re Wrong?

  4. Sep 9

    Joey Chandler: When Everyone Still Thinks You’re the Old You

    You change. Unfortunately, nobody sends your friends and family the software update. On this episode of Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun sits down with Joey Chandler to explore the strange gap between who we're becoming and who everybody else still thinks we are. Joey approaches growth through personal values. Hersh comes at it through perception and interpretation. But they quickly find themselves in the same territory: relationships, divorce, parenthood, business, identity, and the sometimes awkward business of introducing the current version of yourself to people who remember all the previous ones. Joey shares what happened after divorce and burnout forced him to confront an exhausting realization: he could only be himself. The problem was figuring out who that actually was. That led him to three core values: connection, curiosity and fun. They've since become less of a personal-development exercise and more of a practical compass. Joey tells a terrific story about lying in an ER with his leg broken in three places when his 16-year-old son looked at him and asked, “Dad, which of your core values is missing right now?” Annoying? Absolutely. Also exactly the question he needed. Hersh and Joey get into the things we don't say in relationships, the little problems we step over until they've quietly become big ones, and whether becoming more ourselves sometimes requires grieving the choices we didn't make earlier. Then Joey introduces a deceptively simple experiment he's been trying: instead of waking up determined to be better, ask: How can I make today better than yesterday? Maybe it's dinner with your family. Calling a friend. Going outside. Having more fun. The point isn't relentless self-improvement. It's removing some of the pressure and getting curious about what would make today a little better. At its heart, this episode asks: What happens when you've changed, but the people around you haven't changed their idea of you yet? www.certaingrowth.com @joeychandler70 -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix. Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

    Joey Chandler: When Everyone Still Thinks You’re the Old You

  5. Sep 2

    Desislava Dimitrova: The Courage to Question Your Own Story

    How much of what you believe about yourself did you actually choose? On this episode of Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun is joined by meditation teacher, spiritual life coach, and healer Desislava Dimitrova for a wide-ranging conversation about identity, intuition, fear, healing, self-trust, and the stories we repeat until they begin to feel like truth. Desi knows something about having those stories disrupted. Growing up in an environment where she was taught to be quiet and not question authority, she spent years disconnected from parts of herself she would eventually come to see as essential. Then, at 37, doctors discovered a rare tumor in her spinal cord. Surgery was unavoidable. Recovery meant learning how to walk again, living with the fear that the tumor could return, and spending years rebuilding herself physically and emotionally. Meditation became part of that recovery, but the deeper transformation involved finding her voice, establishing boundaries, understanding what love meant to her, and developing the confidence to build a life around work her own family didn't necessarily understand. Hersh and Desi explore the difference between instinct and intuition, why first impressions tell us as much about ourselves as the people we're judging, how fear can make an unhappy situation feel safer than change, and why knowing yourself may require challenging some of the beliefs you've carried the longest. They also find an unexpected intersection between Desi's spiritual work and Hersh's work around first contact: a label can be accurate and still be incomplete. "Meditation teacher" may describe something Desi does. It doesn't necessarily tell you what happens when someone works with her. And that raises a question that applies to all of us: how much do people actually understand when they think they've figured us out? At its heart, this episode asks: What becomes possible when you stop treating the story you've always told yourself as the only story available? www.desi-divine.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/desislava-dimitrova-30271293 Instagram : desisdivine -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix. Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

    Desislava Dimitrova: The Courage to Question Your Own Story

  6. Aug 26

    Whose Mission Are You On? with Mark Reynolds

    What if you don't need another hack, another book, or another person telling you what to do? What if you already know? On this episode of Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun is joined by decorated Army veteran, international speaker, high-performance coach, CPA, author, and one-time aspiring comic Mark Reynolds for a conversation about identity, agency, ambition, humor, and what actually has to change before change sticks. Mark works with high achievers who have done the homework. They've read the books. They know how calendars work. They understand the habits. And they're still not necessarily creating the lives they want. Which raises a much better question than "What should I do?" What do I actually want? Mark and Hersh explore what happens when people reach the middle of successful lives and realize they've spent years following a mission that may have been handed to them by a company, a profession, a family, or an earlier version of themselves. Knowing what you wanted at 25 doesn't answer what you want now. They get into Mark's unusual journey through the military, physics, psychology, corporate life, comedy and coaching, including the fourth-grade teacher who told him he could be smart or funny, but couldn't be both. Turns out she may have underestimated the usefulness of being both. Along the way, they talk about why some problems are really just "gravity," why purpose may be something we choose rather than discover, how identity can keep successful people trapped inside roles they've outgrown, and why the breakthroughs that change our lives are often the ones we couldn't possibly have planned. And eventually, they come back to comedy. Because humor doesn't merely make hard things easier to tolerate. Mark sees joy and laughter as part of the strategy for creating a bigger life. At its heart, this episode asks: If you already know what to do, maybe the question isn't what comes next. Maybe it's who you need to become to actually do it. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/successauditor/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.g.reynolds.3/ Handle: @successauditor Website: http://markreynolds.tv/ -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix. Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

    Whose Mission Are You On? with Mark Reynolds

  7. Aug 19

    Sandra Lena Silverman: When the B******t Stops Working

    Sandra Lena Silverman has tried just about everything in the pursuit of looking and feeling better. Botox. Fillers. Facelifts. Breast surgery. Liposuction. Threads. Peptides. Red light therapy. She’ll also tell you exactly which ones she regrets. On this episode of Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun sits down with the author of From B******t to Botox for a candid, funny, occasionally jaw-dropping conversation about beauty, aging, insecurity, marriage, infidelity, divorce, and what happens when external fixes stop solving internal problems. Sandra traces part of her beauty journey back to a comment from her then-boyfriend at 26 that made her question her body for the first time. That insecurity eventually led to years of procedures, treatments, and experimentation before she realized she had been chasing something the procedures themselves could never deliver. The conversation also goes much deeper into the relationship that shaped her upcoming second book, From B******t to Broken Hearts. Sandra talks openly about a 27-year relationship marked by repeated separations and infidelity, why she stayed as long as she did, the complicated choices involved when children are part of the equation, and what finally made her say, “No more.” Hersh and Sandra explore the line between self-improvement and self-rejection, why honesty can be liberating, what happens when humor becomes a survival tool, and why being able to laugh at something doesn’t mean you have to excuse it. Sandra also shares hard-earned lessons from her own cosmetic procedures, including what she would do differently, what she believes women should research before choosing a surgeon, and why consistency, strength training, nutrition, and internal work became increasingly important as she got older. And yes, there’s a Ring camera story involving a woman showing up at Sandra’s front door at 5:00 AM that may be impossible to top. At its heart, this episode asks: How much of ourselves do we spend trying to fix before realizing the bigger work may be learning what we no longer need to tolerate? Website www.sandralenasilverman.com Instagram @sandralenasilverman -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix. Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

    Sandra Lena Silverman: When the B******t Stops Working

  8. Aug 12

    Miles Spencer: What If Goodbye Isn't the End of the Conversation?

    What if you could talk to someone you love after they're gone? Not watch an old video. Not scroll through photographs. Not even a seance. Actually ask them a question and hear them answer. On this episode of Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun sits down with entrepreneur, author, and Reflekta AI founder Miles Spencer, whose new "soul tech" venture is using artificial intelligence to create interactive digital legacies from the voices, memories, stories, and values people leave behind. And Hersh has tried it. He talked to Miles' late father. That experience opens a fascinating conversation about memory, grief, technology, family, and what it means to preserve more than someone's image. Miles shares the deeply personal origin of Reflecta, including his father's words near the end of his life about the body being temporary while spirit and soul endure. Years later, technology finally gave Miles a way to interact with those words, stories, and memories in a form neither of them could have imagined. Hersh and Miles explore: What it feels like to have a spontaneous conversation with someone who is goneThe difference between preserving memories and interacting with themWhy a few seconds of recorded voice can preserve something remarkably powerfulThe emotional responsibility that comes with recreating someone we loveWhere digital legacy ends and unhealthy dependence might beginWhy families lose enormous amounts of history with every generationHow AI could preserve the wisdom of people long after their deathsThe ethical line between digital legacy and deepfakesAnd whether future generations have a claim on the stories we're allowing to disappear Miles also shares the moment his digital version of his father unexpectedly called him "Tiger", just as he had throughout Miles' life. Miles knew that memory had been entered into the system. He'd simply forgotten. His father hadn't. At its heart, this episode asks a very human question made possible by very new technology: If someone you loved could answer one more question, what would you ask? https://milesspencer.com/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bQIoqgAyhCbx9TYqPWOlMlYwIMpwZqD3q0O-zpZGi1Y/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.lpmur2fiqvlw -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix. Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

    Miles Spencer: What If Goodbye Isn't the End of the Conversation?
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About

Truth Tastes Funny is a weekly conversation with Hersh Rephun and a special guest about the strange, fascinating, and often invisible ways human beings create meaning. How we form opinions. How we misunderstand one another. How we flatten complexity into certainty. And how those interpretations quietly become the reality we live inside. In a post-truth world, people rarely respond to reality first. They respond to what they believe reality means. Once that interpretation takes hold, everything else starts organizing around it. Each episode explores how ideas spread, identities form, assumptions harden, and why two intelligent people can walk away from the same experience with completely different stories about what just happened. Expect topical conversations. Unexpected observations. A few uncomfortable realizations. Plenty of laughter. And the occasional moment when you catch yourself doing exactly the thing we're talking about. The podcast also offers a glimpse into "First Contact Live," Hersh's weekly forum where guests discover, in real time, how other people interpret their work on first contact. Because the goal isn't simply to communicate more clearly. It's to better understand how communication becomes reality in the first place.

Information

  • Creator
    Hersh Rephun
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    180
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Truth Tastes Funny with Hersh Rephun
  • Show Website
    Truth Tastes Funny with Hersh Rephun