The Drunkalogues

Joe Hart is the balm you need in these fractious times!

here are the original notes!

I've wanted to interview Joe Hart from the moment I started making this podcast as he has always exuded a powerful empathy for everyone around him even when things in his own life were clearly not going his way.  He grew up in New York in a house his dad built with his own hands and eventually moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. And i...

Lindsey Van Wagner grew up in and around Washington, DC and like so many of her contemporaries joined the federal government after college.  But the nine to five slog really wasn't for her.  A gnawing sense that she needed something more drove her to act out with booze and relationships until she hit her breaking point and sought help through a twelve step program.  Ironically, it was only once she was sober that she really felt th...

Daniel Schwarzhoff discovered pretty late in life that he was not really a Schwarzhoff: that the man he had always considered his father was not his biological dad.  It explained a lot.  At least it gave a shape to the chaos that had marked his early life.  He rose above that chaos with a career on Wall Street but brought a lot of it with him as well. When it eventually became too much, he found a twelve step meeting that really re...

Patti Clark grew up in Redwood City where she overcame a childhood marked by absentee parents to graduate high school and attend a good college. A sort of divine intervention shaped the trajectory of her life and then a tarot card reader helped her recognize her own addiction.  She spent 13 years sober, determined to raise her own children in a way that was different from her own upbringing, but then - after 13 years sober - starte...

Frank Conniff has been a stand up and writer and producer for many tv shows like Sabrina the teenage witch but he's probably best know for his role as TV's Frank on the Peabody Award winning cult hit Mystery Science Theater 3000 where he also served as a writer.

I discovered Frank as one of the many members of my extended clan of Murray-McDonnell cousins. When I started doing standup, everyone in my family asked me if we had met ea...

My original notes...

Jamie Niven is the son of international movie star and academy award winner for best actor, David Niven.  But I really knew him from my parents crowd of waspy New Yorkers spending the summers out on Long Island where he was always the life of the party and where growing up I had rarely seen any of his set get sober.  He had a career in finance before becoming an entrepreneur and then spent 20 years at Sotheby...

Reposting this as it again proves sadly timely in my community, and Clancy Martin's book is an invaluable resource for suicide prevention.

Clancy Martin is the author of the recently published, highly acclaimed memoire - HOW NOT TO KILL YOURSELF - which is also an enlightened and practical guide to suicide prevention.  Clancy speaks from experience as he is the survivor of at least ten attempts to take his own life.  And as a rec...

John Machado struggled wiht addictoin for years before a doctor's visit necessseitate a meeting with an addiction specilist who helped get him into rehab to begin a long process to recovery.. They say relapse is a part of the process of recovery but this convesation made me think that maybe the road to recovery is paved with all kinds of experiences some of which form the building blocks of a healthy life. 

John has published sever...

John Giordano grew up in the Bronx, a child of organized crime and despite joining his first gang at the age of ten managed to save himself from that fate thru his dedication to the discipline of competitive martial arts. But when his recreational drug use spiraled out of control in his twenties, he suddenly found himself on the receiving end of an intervention organized by the same criminals who raised him but also loved him. He m...

Keep seeing Eric in my social media feed, and he is always just so frikken funny, innovative and original.  Impecable delivery.  Check him out!  He talks here a lot here about what it was like to grow up as a gay man in the mid-west!

Eric Hahn is a stand up comedian who grew up in a steel town in Ohio where he started drinking at age 12.  He narrowly escaped a career as a butcher before finding his way to Los Angeles via a lucrat...

Nick Jonsson grew up in Sweden where drinking beer was kind of a way of life.  His drinking escalated when he moved to Australia for college and then got out of control when he started working in advertising and PR in Southeast Asia where the ex-pat community thrived in a lively and inexpensive bar scene.  His life was turned upside down after a couple job losses and he soon found himself drinking just to make it through the day. E...

This episode is largely about addiction to pornography as Powerful Eric struggled for years to overcome his own pornography addiction.  Ultimately, he stumbled on a shift in perspective that helped him get well, and he has built on that shift to create a program for other addicts that shares some of the tools I employ as well.  While this podcast is largely about drug and alcohol addiction, addictive behaviors share so many similar...