Howard Stern
speaker
224 appearances
7 recordings
6 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 6 Mar
Howard Stern’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I had a miserable failure in Detroit. I got hired to be the morning man at WWWW in Detroit, which are the worst call letters for a radio station. I get on there and go, WWWW Detroit W4. I don't know what I'm doing, so I... I was hired to be the morning man. I had had some success in Hartford. Not a huge success, but success. And I got hired in Detroit.
And there was a radio consultant who said to me, do not go to Detroit. There are four rock stations. And out of the four, the one that they want to hire you at, dead last. Nobody even, I would go to parties and people would say, what do you do for a living? I'd say, oh, I'm the morning guy in W4. They go, oh, is that station still on the air? Nobody listened to this thing.
W4, Detroit's W4, the worst station. So yeah, I went on the radio in Detroit. It was a tremendous failure. And I said, what am I doing wrong? And I sat with it, and I thought, I've got to really just, I guess, lose all inhibition and admit to everything and just see where that goes. And when I went to Washington, D.C.
But I have to give the credit to also Robin Quivers. I met her in Washington, and she was phenomenal.
The chemistry was great. And a program director put us together and I went on the air with her and I started to become very confessional and people respond. We shot up to number one in a record amount of time. Because it was real and honest.
Wait a second. Talk about, I was masturbating at least three times a day and talking about it.
Well, it hurt everything. It hurt my... But I didn't care. All I cared about was my job.
keeping that job and getting audience and ratings. And that is a disaster for your personal life.
Yes, I mean, people, not only that, I went through a very strange period in time. I don't want to get all heavy about this because everyone knows this show is not heavy. No, no. We're going to make you cry before you're out of here. Okay, well, I'll do that. What it was is that I was very insecure about my career. I wanted this thing to take off in the worst way.
And so I even had a policy about... I stayed in my home after I did my show. I never went out. I was insane. So I didn't want to meet anyone in show business because I was talking on the air about a lot of people. So I just stayed in my house. I planned the radio show, did it, and went home. And the stuff I was doing was so outrageous and so entertaining to the audience that it blew up.
I mean, in New York, we had 25 million listeners and one out of every four cars on the Long Island Expressway was listening to me. Wow. And it was pretty phenomenal. But you have no... But... I had no life. Don't applaud. I had no life. But Howard... Where's Bradley Cooper? He's so good looking. But Howard, that shifted. If I looked like that, I wouldn't have to go on the radio and say shit.
Well, my dream was to be friends with Jason Bateman.
There's only one way I'm going to get this guy.
I told you I was insane.
Well, Chevy ended up coming to my wedding, which is even more important, and got up to make a beautiful speech to myself and my bride, and then stated to the audience that I had given him herpes. Wow. Which was really weird. But I loved it.
Well, because I think any good performer, and you guys are great performers and you know this, you must evolve. The show, you know, I used to say this. Now, Rush Limbaugh, forget the politics. You know, he had a very big following, but it was the same thing every day. You could predict what he was going to say.
Comfort to them. But for me, as a performer, I felt I want the show to be funny. I also want to be able to interview people. I want it to be broader. And I made a conscious decision. to shift the show and change it around.
And to me, it was way more exciting because the common thought was, well, Howard will go to satellite, and now the show's gonna be so fucking filthy, and everyone's gonna be out of their mind, and the strippers are gonna be able to fuck on the air.
No, no, the constraints, by having the constraints off, I said, well, then it's no longer funny.
Regular radio was funny. The government was trying to shut me down. That was drama.
Showing 61–80 of 224 · page 4 of 12
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