From Prison Roots to Plant Power

From Prison Roots to Plant Power: T Barb’s Journey to Comedy Success

There’s a moment early in this Hustle Zone conversation where Ryan Perez introduces his guest as “a mother, comedian, entrepreneur, author, radio personality, a vegan chef” — and by the end of the episode, every one of those titles has earned its place.

T Barb — born Tiffany Barb — grew up on Joy Road in Detroit, a neighborhood she describes as rough, the kind other Detroiters know from rap references but few outsiders understand. Both of her parents met fresh out of prison, and her arrival marked the first real stretch of time either of them stayed out. She started smoking weed and cigarettes at age 11, not because anyone pushed her into it directly, but because it was simply the environment — adults in the neighborhood normalized it, and as she puts it, kids wanted to be adults because “it wasn’t popular to be a kid” anymore.

What makes her story land differently is the reflection she brings to it. She doesn’t paint her parents as villains — she describes them as products of their own unresolved trauma. Her mother aged out of the foster care system after entering it at two years old and was never shown what healthy parenting looked like. Her father carried his own generational wounds and later lost his kidneys when Tiffany was young, limiting how present he could be. “They were just doing the best that they could,” she says, while also noting that raising kids with zero structure and raising them with too much rigidity can both backfire.

That upbringing became the reason she went into social work. She became a first-generation college graduate, attending an HBCU in New Orleans after taking a Greyhound bus there alone from Memphis — a trip she still describes as one of her proudest accomplishments. She went on to earn an MBA and spent 14 years with the state of Michigan working in Children’s Protective Services, Adult Protective Services, and foster care. She talks candidly about the system’s chronic underfunding — foster families, she says, were still receiving the same daily reimbursement rate in 2019 that they received back in 2004 — and about the empathy gap she saw between caseworkers who came from the community and those who didn’t. Sometimes, she says, the difference between a family staying together and a child entering foster care was as small as buying groceries herself.

Comedy entered almost by accident. A coworker who did stand-up told her she was funny enough to try it, it was on her bucket list, and after one strong open mic she never stopped. Eventually she left her social work career behind entirely to pursue comedy, radio, and entertainment full time — and now has her first TV comedy special, “Getting Off,” releasing on Prime Video. She also wrote a short memoir, “Faith Over Fear: Tales of a Retired Hood Rat,” an 81-page book she says was inspired partly by a friend who told her nobody would want to hear her story — a comment she ultimately dedicated the book to disproving.

The conversation opens and closes on her plant-based lifestyle, which she frames less as strict veganism and more as an intentional, ingredient-conscious way of eating. It started as a spiritual Lent-style 40-day commitment, grew after watching the documentary “What the Health,” and solidified as she researched the environmental and health costs of commercial meat production. She’s now built “Hood Rat Kitchen,” a vegan cooking demo series aimed specifically at making healthier plant-based food approachable for people in her own community — without judgment toward those who still eat meat, including the meals she still cooks for her friends and family.

Through it all, she keeps returning to one idea: diversify everything you’re doing, because if one hustle slows down, another one carries you. Between the radio show, comedy bookings, the cooking series, general contracting, a hot dog cart, and raising her son, she jokes that she’s exhausted — but insists it’s necessary. And motherhood, she says, has been the thing that kept her out of real trouble, joking that her son deserves thanks for keeping her “free.”

By the end of the episode, Ryan Perez sums up what many listeners will likely feel: her path from Joy Road to a Prime Video comedy special isn’t just a hustle story — it’s proof, in her own words, that “you never have to stay where you start.”