667: Wartime Radio
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When Dave is turning his life around and trying different things and figuring out what to do next, one of the places he looked was to the Howard Stern show. I think that was a really good choice. I know everybody is not a fan of Howard Stern, but I am, and I think that one of the best things about the show is that it's always been a place where people talk with this kind of brutal and funny honesty about themselves. One of Howard's innovations is that he took the strain of crude, dark, confessional comedy that's always been a big part of stand-up ever since Lenny Bruce. Howard figured out a way to turn that into radio, daily radio. Anyway, to get back to this guy, Dave, he loved that about the show, and in 2015, he was a few months sober in his early 40s, working as a waiter at Katz's Deli in New York City. When he was younger, he'd worked in television, hosting an interview show for college kids, but ruined that career with heroin addiction. Now, sober in recovery, he needed a project. He decided to do a podcast about drugs with the feeling of the Howard Stern show. He remembered the years when comedian Arty Lang was on Howard Stern, definitely my favorite period of Howard Stern. When Arty would come on every day, he would talk about his own drug problems, he would tell crazy stories, he would talk in this very real way about the mistakes that he was making in his life at that time that he was not able to stop, and Dave wanted to shoot for that. He would co-host the show with his friend Chris, who he had met Chris years before in rehab. It would spend hours in rehab smoking cigarettes and talking about the crazy things that they had done on drugs. That's what they wanted their podcast to be. People come on, tell wild drug stories, and very important to Dave, no recovery talk, which Dave found to be sanctimonious and annoying. This show is not necessarily about recovery. It's about drugs. Maybe eventually it will be. Who knows? If this show is ever about recovery, you're going to get somebody else in this spot. I'm out. In case this isn't clear, in these recordings, Dave is the one with the deeper voice and the loud opinions. Chris is the other guy. The show is about drug stories, it's not about recovery. It's not about doing the next right thing. It's about the last wrong thing. But maybe with the evolution of your recovery, that's what the show will become. Notice how, at the end there, Chris is not agreeing with Dave. Chris is 10 years younger than Dave, but started drugs and drinking at an earlier age. He was just 11 or 12. And there's way more extreme stories about it, including a year in prison. He's also spent way more time in rehab. And at this point, he'd been sober for nearly two years, versus four months for Dave. And all of that gave him a different feeling about recovery and sobriety. He was game to talk about it. But Dave was adamant.
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