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Dave kicks off the first-ever Wednesday Dose of Dopey talking about post-Thanksgiving food insanity, a brownie-topped cheesecake Linda brought home, and his evolving stance on cheesecake as a “real” dessert. He updates the Dopey Nation on the Dopey Fitness Challenge, his failed attempt at jogging with his dog Winnie that ends with him eating pavement, ripping his pants, smacking the dog in frustration, and then feeling guilty about it all week. Dave reads an email from Haley in Mississippi, who loved the Glenis and Billy Strings episodes and promises heavy dopey stories from homelessness, prison, and IV meth. He begs for more voicemails and then plays a chunk of Miles Davis’s autobiography, where Miles describes sliding from snorting heroin into shooting it, realizing he has a habit, and sinking into a four-year “horror show” of heroin and cocaine in New York.

Then Dave introduces Naughty God (Dakota), a heavily tattooed Instagram/TikTok/YouTube creator who built a big following rating nod videos “sportscaster-style.” Dakota tells his story: growing up between a sweet, young mom and a meth-addicted dad, starting drugs at 13 by snorting random pain pills he found in a friend’s brother’s room, and becoming the classic weed-identity kid with a pot-leaf MySpace. He forms the band LAW with his friend Jacob Nowell (Bradley Nowell’s son, who now sings for Sublime), and they grow up playing shows in San Diego and Long Beach while having access to grown-up levels of partying. Dakota falls in love with cocaine in his mid-teens, then with speed, and his using gets him kicked out of LAW when Jacob gets sober and can’t handle him showing up high to everything.

After moving to Orange County, Dakota dives into selling and using coke in San Clemente, then adds Oxy 30s (“blues”), fentanyl pills, and heroin to his daily rotation. He and his tight crew—especially his best friend Robert—live in a constant loop of dealing, partying, and using. Over two months, Robert, Dakota’s cousin, and three other friends all die from fentanyl. The losses break him: he has a mental breakdown, calls his grandma, and checks himself into a San Diego hospital detox, where he’s put on 100mg of methadone and spends years on the clinic grind.

Dakota talks about being on methadone for four–five years, barely using anything else, then deciding—with help from a therapist—that he’ll never fully turn a corner if he stays on it forever. He tapers himself from 100mg down to 4mg over about a year, jumps off, and goes through a long, foggy, uncomfortable withdrawal. He’s now about a year and a half off methadone, occasionally smokes weed, sees a therapist, plays bass in his band Somehow Unseen, and works on content. He and Dave riff on nodding (“my whole life”), nod techniques, fentanyl’s short “legs,” and the economics of why heroin likely won’t “come back” in a big way.

Dakota explains how he built NaughtyGod into a fast-growing account by structuring it like a recurring “show” and inventing/collecting phrases like “Charm City Rainbow,” “Nodwalk Shuffle,” “Baltimore Street Yoga,” “Sheriff of Nottingham” to describe different nod poses. They talk about Instagram flagging and banning drug content, other junkie meme/recovery pages, and how both of them accidentally stumbled into helping people through content that started out as pure jokes and self-centered ambition. They agree to collab on a nod reel, and Dakota shouts out his band and pages.

All that and more on a brand new WEDNESDAY Episode of the good old dopey show!

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