Like Water, Moses Hacmon Flows

Moses Hacmon’s life didn’t really start until he came to America. “I was like a ball in a pinball machine, trying to find a place where I felt good, where I belonged, where I could be myself and be creative,” he tells PAPER. Growing up in Israel, the 47-year-old would drive around for hours listening to music to escape the claustrophobia, this feeling of being trapped. “It’s a small country, so you can only drive so far before you have to turn back," he says.

In 2002, he landed in Los Angeles. Like a mystic, Hacmon manifested this place: filled with aspiring superstars, superficial decay and the uncertain underbelly of the American dream, it was a town where he finally felt like himself. “I didn’t feel like I left home,” he says. “I felt like I came back to a place I had been before.”

Hacmon was introduced to sculpture by a teacher in high school and instantly found his place within the practice. Having come from a painting background, he’d always been one to create things with his hands, and sculpting eventually led to an interest in architecture, which he went to school for in LA. “I applied and got accepted, and then September 11 happened,” he says. “Two weeks after I arrived, all of the immigration laws changed.” He got in just in time to get a driver’s license, social security number, and open a bank account — all the basic stuff to live as a human in America. Finally, Hacmon could sculpt his life.

“I thought architecture would be a way to make a living doing something I love,” he says. “Buildings are just sculptures people can walk through.” One-liner wisdoms like these just flow out of Hacmon like water, a key character trait that you find when talking to and listening to him describe himself and the world. At the Southern California Institute of Architecture, he didn’t just study design — he immersed himself in it. He worked full-time doing set design and other jobs while attending school full-time, sleeping four hours a night. “No weekends off for five years,” he says. “But I learned discipline. I learned to appreciate every hour.”

Before he ever thought of himself as a YouTuber, Hacmon was an artist — or maybe more accurately, a seeker. His curiosity shows up everywhere: in the furniture he makes in his current home with wife Trisha Paytas and their three (welcome, Aquaman) babies, in the sculpting that led him to architecture, in the flip-phone photo he once submitted to a Craigslist casting call that resulted in him being flown to Israel to play Jesus in a National Geographic documentary. “People had started telling me I looked like Jesus,” he says.

It was a little side gig, and a surprisingly fitting role (Jesus was a carpenter, right?). He ended up playing the role again and again — in music videos, commercials, oddball film gigs. “It didn’t feel strange to me. I’m not part of any one religion. It made people happy.”

His spiritual lens isn’t new. It’s always been there. But it wasn’t until he started working with water that things began to take shape — literally. In 2013, while experimenting with rust and metal in his Koreatown apartment, Moses noticed a pattern forming on the surface of the water. Not just abstract marbling, but an actual shape. “It was a form,” he says. “Like water was showing me something.” That moment became the foundation for what would later become his series Faces of Water, which featured a water-photographing technique he self-invented — and his YouTube channel, Channel Water.

Channel Water is hard to describe. With video titles such as, “Is Life a Simulation?” and,“What exists outside of Time and Space,” Hacmon’s channel feels less like a vlog and more like a guided meditation on reality. They have a '90s public access television aesthetic to them — think TV psychics like Miss Cleo — but also can be used as ASMR. Most episodes feature him talking directly into the camera, explaining his thoughts on energy, intention, memory, and what water can tell us about being alive. He speaks softly, unhurried, like he’s not trying to convince you — only to transmit something. “They can be boring and soothing, but the content is deep. It’s about consciousness, movement, energy," he says.

Hacmon doesn’t label himself as a spiritual teacher. He doesn’t really label himself at all. When I bring up astrology (fittingly, he’s a Scorpio), he offers a measured answer. “I think astrology — if you detach it from the idea of stars affecting you directly — is more about patterns,” he says. “Humans recognize patterns and assign them to maps. The only map we had back then was the stars.” The same logic, he says, applies to numerology or the Enneagram. “They’re different ways of describing the same patterns.”

What he does believe in, deeply, is water. Not as a metaphor, but as an actual medium of consciousness. “Water is the source of life. It only needs heat to become active. You can put water and soil in a cup, put it in the sun, and life starts from scratch every day,” he says. “It’s the only substance that reflects who we are and what we think.”

In one of his videos, the surface of water seems to breathe, almost like a lung. In another, tiny pulses shimmer like electricity. “You can literally see thought becoming form,” he says. “Movement becoming animal. Consciousness manifesting in shape.” In person, he speaks the same way. When I visited the Paytas-Hacmon household in 2023 for our Merry Trishmas shoot, Moses and I would connect in between shots. He would tell me about his water philosophy and how everything is connected. There’s a kind of tuned-in stillness to him, like he’s operating on a slower frequency than the rest of the world. It’s not a persona. It feels genuine — like the result of someone who’s spent years thinking deeply about why we’re here.

For all the high-level concepts, Hacmon’s world is deeply human. Somehow, Trisha — the maximalist YouTube glam icon — and him fit perfectly together and have built a life that flows like a river. These days, the couple hosts the Just Trish podcast together and Moses makes TikToks where he does “Tinned Fish Reviews” and other personal musings. “We balance each other,” he says. “There’s a rhythm to it.” With baby Aquaman here now, it makes me wonder how he will instill his philosophical ideas into his children as the grow up. “The only way to teach is by example. It doesn’t matter what you say — it’s what they see,” he says. “Hopefully, I give them a life so full of joy they won’t feel the need to search for meaning like I did.”

Arguably, this questioning of identity is the most relatable thing for all human beings on this planet, but for Hacmon who has seen all sides of the spectrum, the answer is simple. “I am not Israeli, Jewish, a man, or anything that is exterior to my spirit and soul,” he declares. “I am water.”

Photos via YouTube / Moses Hacmon
Header graphic: Jewel Baek