my grand unified theory of podcasters
the punk scene to addiction to funny podcast pipeline
the best podcasters, in my oh so humble opinion, all seem to have emerged from an overlapping set of punk-adjacent scenes, done battle against the fearsome nemesis that is opioid addiction, and emerged to tell the tale. sometimes several times a week, wherever podcasts are streamed.
what qualifies me to discern the best podcasters in modern media? idk, it’s my substack. i can make declarations if i want to. and hey, you’ve kind of got to hand it to me! i’ve listened to my fair share of podcasts. as much as it pains me to admit it, there’s zero doubt in my mind that i’ve spent an above average number of hours of my short life with a stream of mindless chatter in my ears, disocciating. i’m a sheepish podcast fan. a proverbial friend of the pod. a total podhead, if you will.
it was a few months ago that i realized three of my all-time most-played podcast hosts shared, among other things, a predilection for downers. chris black of how long gone, brace belden of true anon, and dave manheim of dopey, the podcast about drugs, addiction, and dumb shit.
it’s only in writing this now that i realize two of the three shows i discuss here (how long gone and dopey) came into my life via cat marnell. all roads lead to the queen of the lower manhattan media class, i suppose. she who taught the masses how to murder [their] life. blessed be the fruit. now we just gotta get her on true anon, and we can add her to the unifying theory.
so without further ado, my unifying theory of entertaining podcast hosts, and what it is that makes them so.
exhibit a: chris black
chris black, who i've mentioned here before, co-hosts bi-coastal elite podcast how long gone with jason stewart, aka dj themjeans. chris & jason met in the hardcore scene, mailing cds, stickers and zines back and forth from orange county to conyers, georgia (hometown not only of chris black, but also notably of the fanning sisters). both chris and themjeans were straight edge at the time — choosing to abstain completely from drugs and alcohol, as well as any animal products.
from there, chris’s punk scene credentials only multiplied. in the mid-2000s, he managed cartel, a pop punk band also from conyers, chris’s atlanta suburb. in the years since, he’s built a career for himself in fashion and branding under the moniker done to death projects.
now, he’s sober once again, this time less related to the hardcore scene and more related to having survived multiple ODs and a $100k/year oxy addiction. he’s public about his addiction, his sobriety, and alongside jason, regularly asks guests on his show to rank their top three prescription pills. together, they put out three episodes of how long gone per week, pontificating on every inane aspect of pop culture, from andy cohen’s edible dosage to martha stewart’s las vegas outpost, to the cardi b & offset meal at mcdonald’s.
from what i can tell, most fans of the show are team jason, preferring his sweet, friendly, quick witted humor. personally, i love them both but identify as a chris loyalist. the so-called straight man to tj’s (that’s them jeans for the unititiated) jester. chris is a canonical hater. his drive to neg all those around him is unmatched, making his approval all the more meaningful, when it’s actually attained.
exhibit b: brace belden
with a name like brace belden, there was no way this guy wasn’t going to grow up to become a podcast host. fittingly, and not unlike chris and jason, brace met his co-host, liz franczak (“fran-zak”), in the san francisco punk scene as teenagers. together, along with their producer yung chomsky, brace and liz host the podcast true anon. the ONLY anti-pedophile podcast fighting the sicko elite. allegedly.
and they do so to much fanfare. according to my most recent visit to their patreon page, true anon is currently pulling in north of $98k a month. a month! *pushes glasses up nose* according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, they would only have to host the show for 5,000 more years to get to les wexner’s net worth.
what initially started out as a jeffrey epstein truther show has since spun out to cover the sinister power structures that be in all their many manifestations, from the falun gong to george santos, cop city to synanon. leave it to brace, who spent his adolescence in punk bands and writing for the bay area punk zine maximum rocknroll, to reveal the real ugly truths underlying large swaths of our society and intelligence state. prepare for your third eye to be opened, baby.
a character to end all characters, brace went from punk kid to florist to boxing gym manager to fighting isis in syria, to (finally) highly successful podcast host. in the midst of his aforementioned checkered past though, his addiction spiraled. “i don’t know if you’ve ever shot coke into your hands,” he said to new york magazine in 2017. “you think it’s gonna be awful, but it turns out to be great.” it wasn’t just coke, but heroin too. it was heroin that he overdosed on, leading to several rounds of rehab and finally, sobriety.
exhibit c: dave m. [last name redacted]
last, but certainly not least, dopey dave. i’ll redact his last name here, for the sake of anonymity, but you can easily find it if you’re so inclined. fun fact — he and i went to the same high school. close to 25 years apart, sure, but same high school nonetheless. of the podcasts i’m discussing here, dopey (the podcast about drugs, addiction, and dumb shit) is the most on-topic by far. i mean, hello — it’s a podcast about drugs, addiction, and dumb shit.
dave started dopey with his friend chris, who he met in rehab. tragically, chris relapsed and died of a heroin overdose in july 2018. since then, dave has gone on to host the show on his own, and the content has shifted significantly from drugs and dumb shit to recovery (with plenty of dumb shit interspersed).
as with chris and brace, i would be remiss not to mention dave’s punk roots. in the early days of his misspent youth, dave was in a skapunk band. skapunk: a sub-genre that mixes jamaican style ska with hardcore punk. think the clash, think sublime, think no doubt. i don’t know — the 90s were a weird time to be alive (i guess… i was barely sentient).
for many years now, dave has worked for katz’s in addition to being president of dopey nation. you may know him for his work as the last jewish waiter. in the early days of his heroin addiction though, he was a vj on mtv. even when he was high, he seemed to have made some attempt at giving them the old razzle dazzle. if you, like me, are a patreon patron of his, you may be lucky enough to catch a clip here and there.
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so what’s my point here? what exactly is my grand unifying theory of why these guys make me laugh? why have i let the three of them narrate long, ambling walks by the water and quieter stretches of work day? allow me to play armchair psychologist for a moment.
all three of them score high on openness, extraversion and neuroticism. low-ish, i would think, on conscientiousness and agreeableness. they got that dog in them, as the kids say. that same dog that drew them to the punk and punk-adjacent scenes of their youth.
that rebellion, that recklessness. the same need to share and perform and gain approval from a room full of strangers took them all from dumpy tour vans and diy house shows to the stages of spotify and patreon, where they espouse their opinions and conspiracies, their drunkalogs and dopey stories.
that neuroticism. that need to be liked and loved and known (i imagine) spun easily into full-blown addiction. the high frequency whir of the voices inside their heads quieted by the fuzzy lull of downers.
the thought occurs to me that maybe i’ve constructed this grand overarching theory around a specific niche of content i just so happen to gravitate toward. perhaps recovered opioid addicts and punk scene alumni don’t make generically funny podcast hosts, but make funny podcast hosts specifically to me. i wonder how many other people out there happen to listen to this specific constellation of shows. are they all incels? does my taste make me an incel, by proxy? these are the great questions of our time.
we can only speculate on what makes certain parasocial relationships so salient. all i know for sure is that whatever combination of nature and nurture led these three attention-getting bros down the path they each went down, they’ve all been to some version of hell and back, risking life and limb in the process.
in rare moments of earnestness, i can tell they’re each immensely relieved to be on the other side of their own personal hells, and are channeling the energy they once spent chasing highs of another kind into the highs of their creative output. they’ve stared down the dark depths of the void, and have come back, possibly funnier for it. giving both less and more of a fuck at the same time. the good people at betterhelp and athletic greens thank them for it, as do i.
