Sober Sunrise - AA Speaker Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Nobody Will Know. God Will Know. - AA Speaker - Pat R. Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

At fourteen months sober, Pat accidentally tasted vodka and thought nobody would know. The AA foundation built through meetings, sponsorship, service, and washed coffee cups answered with three words: God will know.

☀️ Sober Sunrise App
Listen to Sober Sunrise AA speaker talks anytime, track your sober time, take a daily pledge, and keep recovery support close throughout the day.
📱 https://sober-sunrise.com/app
If you enjoy the app or find it useful in your recovery, a quick rating or review on the App Store would mean a lot and helps more people find Sober Sunrise.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Pat, sober since August 28, 1970, grew up in Brooklyn with an alcoholic father and a mother whose long dependence on stimulants and alcohol left Pat watching other people for cues about how to think, feel, and behave. She began drinking alone at fifteen because alcohol quieted the confusion and briefly filled the empty place inside her. Over the next twenty years, drinking became the organizing principle beneath marriage, motherhood, rigid household control, late-night binges, rage, and relationships that looked acceptable from the outside while collapsing internally. After a humiliating afternoon at a family picnic and a blackout behind the wheel, Pat walked into Brooklyn’s Canarsie Group. For one hour, the hole inside her felt filled. A sponsor claimed her, the group put her to work, and she stayed close through meetings, speaking commitments, service, washing coffee cups, sweeping floors, and traveling in caravans with other members. When her family moved to rural New Jersey at fourteen months sober, that entire structure disappeared and the emotions she had never learned to face came rushing back. At a gathering one night, Pat unknowingly took a sip of a drink containing vodka. Her first thought was that nobody would know; the next was that God would. She put it down, called her sponsor, returned to a meeting, and began working the program at a deeper level. Through inventory, amends, prayer, willingness, education, nursing school, a painful divorce, a new marriage, sponsorship, and continued service, Pat found the mind, choices, emotional life, and heart’s desires that alcohol had postponed. Her message is that everything she needed to grow and change was already present in the books, rooms, and people of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Pat R. from Lake Hopacong, NJ speaking at the 3rd Buckeye Roundup in Cincinnati, OH - November 11th 1994

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

I've Been Around Airports for 50 Years. I Still Can't Fly - AA Speaker - Tom K. Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

Tom says being around AA is like spending fifty years around airports without learning to fly: recovery began only when he became willing to do absolutely anything, take the Steps, and stay useful.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Tom, sober since September 15, 1978, shares what Alcoholics Anonymous taught him about living with alcoholism rather than searching for a loophole out of it. Born in Pennsylvania and introduced to heavier drinking while attending college in Ohio, he entered marriage and fatherhood wanting to be dependable but steadily became the opposite: he lied about his drinking, took company money, lost jobs, neglected his family, and repeatedly lowered the line he swore he would never cross. Even after a doctor identified alcoholism, Tom turned a controlled-drinking experiment into proof that he had passed the test, then stayed to give himself a graduation party. A geographic move and a country-club career could not stop the progression. When the job, home, finances, relationships, and hope finally collapsed, the AA meetings he had resisted became the only place left to go. Tom told a sponsor he was willing to do absolutely anything, and the fellowship began teaching him how to live through the Big Book, the Steps, a home group, prayer, accountability, and action. At a year and a half sober, legal and financial consequences returned, but another member helped him stop asking God to remove the burden and start asking for the strength to carry it. Tom follows that lesson through family decisions, General Service, sponsorship, and daily practice of Steps Ten, Eleven, and Twelve. Nearly thirty years into recovery, his message remains practical: it is not the meetings you make but the Steps you take, spiritual maintenance cannot wait until something breaks, and all anyone can stay sober in is now.

Tom K. from Jacksonville, FL speaking at The 42nd Annual New Hampshire Convention in North Conway, NH - April 11th 2008

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

I Didn't Know AA Had a Skybox - AA Speaker - Charlie P. Sep 25, 2026

Show notes

Seventeen years sober, Charlie thought he had already experienced what AA could offer. Then deeper Big Book work showed him he had spent all those years in the cheap seats without knowing there was a skybox.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Charlie, sober since March 22, 1985, shares a funny and direct Alcoholics Anonymous talk about the difference between staying away from alcohol and treating alcoholism. He remembers discovering drinking at sixteen, regular blackouts, crashing his mother's car into a parked police vehicle, pawning his family's belongings, entering treatment, and making promises to his father that he sincerely meant but had no power to keep. AA gave him physical sobriety, but over the following years he repeatedly hit a wall and settled into a meeting-based program while dishonesty, self-will, isolation, and the bedevilments continued operating underneath his life. Surviving a plane crash briefly sharpened his gratitude, but the deeper change began when a sponsor took him back through the Big Book and showed him the material he had missed between willingness and inventory: selfishness and self-centeredness were the root problem, and alcohol had been his solution. Charlie describes revisiting inventory, completing long-delayed amends, practicing Steps Ten and Eleven daily, sponsoring other men, and helping build Austin's Primary Purpose Group around line-by-line Big Book study. His message is directed to the person with years in AA who is no longer feeling the fire: the full program is still available, the best years can still lie ahead, and nobody has to relapse before beginning again.

Charlie P. from Austin, TX speaking at Summer Serenity at the Beach in Destin, FL - August 26th 2010

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

The Pink Cloud Was Never Supposed to Turn Gray - AA Speaker - Chuck C. Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

Nearly twenty-one years sober, Chuck challenges an old AA assumption: the pink cloud is not supposed to fade when the Steps keep turning physical abstinence into a peaceful way of life.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Chuck had spent nearly twenty-one years carrying the Alcoholics Anonymous message when he gave this talk at the 1966 Monteagle Roundup. He begins by taking the spotlight off famous speakers and placing it back where AA lives: one alcoholic talking with another, making coffee, sweeping floors, visiting jails, and sharing the language of the heart in a quiet room. Chuck then asks what sobriety really means. During a twenty-five-year drinking career, he repeatedly achieved physical abstinence and still returned to alcohol; the miracle came when the program gave him a way to live peacefully, joyously, and comfortably with himself. From there, he challenges the idea that AA’s early honeymoon must fade, recalls the stubborn self-will that exhausted every personal resource he had, and insists that “here are the Steps we took” means action rather than reading, debating, or waiting for God to do the work. Walking through surrender, inventory, confession, amends, prayer, service, and the destruction of ego, Chuck describes the Steps as the actions that roll away the stone and make conscious contact possible. He came to AA willing to accept the unhappiest sobriety on earth if he could simply stop drinking. Instead, he found his health, family, work, usefulness, a God of his own understanding, and what he calls the whole package.

Chuck C. from Laguna Beach, CA speaking at the 1966 Monteagle Roundup in Monteagle, TN - 1966

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

The Martini Became a Coffee Cup - AA Speaker - Michael D. Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

Michael turns his AA recovery story into a slide show where the martini keeps reappearing, until a hospital death watch, the fellowship, and nearly fourteen years of sobriety replace it with a coffee cup.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Michael grew up in San Francisco, flew during World War II, tried monastic life, studied theology, and built an award-winning advertising career across Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, and Kansas City while martinis gradually became the organizing principle of his life. By 1978 he was isolated at home, drinking roughly half a gallon of vodka a day, and making a blizzard trip in layers of pajamas and black leotards because running out overnight felt unthinkable. When he finally called for help, he collapsed in a hospital tunnel, spent five days in intensive care, and awakened paralyzed from the waist down under a death watch. Michael initially rejected the hospital AA meetings, but later found identification at Kansas City’s Plaza Fellowship and helped establish the Live and Let Live group in 1979. Approaching fourteen years sober, he uses a deliberately theatrical slide presentation to challenge several AA myths: the Steps are not casual suggestions, nobody graduates after completing them once, life does not become permanently manageable, and recovery means more than excusing behavior with “what do you expect from a drunk?” His program is built around change, inventory, learning through mistakes, accepting divine delay, and the three givings of giving, forgiving, and thanksgiving. The final slide replaces the old martini and black leotards with an AA meeting and coffee cup. As Michael says, there have been a few changes.

Michael D. from Kansas City, MO speaking at Chicago Roundup - July 20th 1991

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

We Don't Want Change. We Want Relief. - AA Speaker - Bob B. Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

Bob got sober at twenty-four, but AA's harder lesson came years later: he did not really want transformation - he wanted relief without surrendering the behaviors that were wrecking his sober life.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Bob started drinking at fourteen, was diagnosed as alcoholic at nineteen, drank his way out of Notre Dame, and repeatedly watched each fresh start collapse. At twenty-four, frightened by another multi-day drunk, he called Alcoholics Anonymous and met two men at a diner who did not interview, diagnose, or instruct him; they simply shared their lives, and Bob recognized his own. He drank twice after entering AA, including a dangerous honeymoon relapse in Acapulco, but returned to meetings and stayed. Going to AA was easy for him. Living AA was not. Over the next several years, gambling, debt, anger, poor work habits, marital conflict, and harsh parenting followed him into sobriety while he quietly rebuilt the wall he had torn down as a newcomer. Around eight years sober, Bob discovered that he believed God could restore "us" to sanity but did not believe God could restore him. That second surrender changed his work, marriage, and parenting, but later success brought another problem: a period of "deep shallowness" in which money and status became his identity. After losing eight million dollars and facing a son's alcoholism at twenty-four years sober, Bob had to discover who he was without his wealth. His message after thirty-one years is that AA recovery is not merely mechanical and spiritual experience cannot live on yesterday's bread. Real transformation asks alcoholics to stop bargaining for relief, face the false self they are protecting, and move through the pain that opens the door to surrender.

Bob B. from St. Paul, MN speaking at the Sacramento Spring Fling in Sacramento, CA - February 13th 1999

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

My Higher Power Has a Substation in My Computer - AA Speaker - Paul O. Sep 21, 2026

Show notes

Paul says his Higher Power has a substation in his computer: after working AA's Twelve Steps for nearly thirty years, he types his problems to God until an intuitive answer begins to appear.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Paul opens this AA talk by making the room hug, then turns to the balance he believes keeps alcoholics sober: meetings and the Twelve Steps together. He describes attending meetings while continuing to drink for seven months, quitting every morning, and living like a tour bus with no driver while different voices in his head took turns making decisions. Through the Steps, those voices began communicating, and Paul learned to use powerlessness as relief instead of defeat. He explains why Step Three must lead immediately into inventory, why every later Step deepens the ones before it, and why he has repeated the full process roughly every five years. Along the way, Paul shares the four-column inventory guides he helped develop, writing his first inventory in code, finally taking a Fifth Step at a San Diego convention, using spot inventories for marriage and money, and typing letters to God when he needs an intuitive answer. He talks about accepting the defects his Higher Power has not removed, forgiving people without pretending to like them, and viewing recovery as a baseball diamond stretching from physical to spiritual sobriety. After nearly thirty years, his focus is emotional sobriety: if somebody else's behavior is not worth taking a drink over, Paul asks, why reward it by becoming so upset?

Paul O. from Laguna Beach, CA speaking about working the Twelve Steps at the AA Desert Pow Wow in Indian Wells, CA - August 3rd 1996

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

You Won't Stand Any Closer to God Than This - AA Speaker - Tom L. Sep 19, 2026

Show notes

A Methodist minister admits that his darkest years came after he first entered AA, then explains how Big Book sponsorship, family reconciliation, and service taught him where God had been hiding.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

In this 1971 Alcoholics Anonymous talk, Tom shares how a five-day blackout, a worried wife, and an ultimatum from his employer brought him to his first AA meeting in Chattanooga. He attended to save his family and career, learned to describe himself as sick, and then kept drinking because he accepted the advice to discard whatever parts of the program he did not like. After losing his job and family and being found by two AA members on a New Orleans park bench, Tom returned to the fellowship but still tried to recover without surrender. Three years after his introduction to AA, an honest inventory and a sponsor who insisted on one clear path finally let some light into the darkness. Tom describes discovering that God had been hidden behind his ideas about theology and religion, then following a spiritual call from engineering into the Methodist ministry. Through anonymous help with his education, his wife's medical crisis, an embrace from the son who remembered his drinking, and carrying the message to another suffering alcoholic, Tom returns to one lesson: God appears when the door is opened through honesty, love, sponsorship, and service. He closes by honoring the three sponsors who taught him how to say "I love you," value what a person is over who they are, and leave Alcoholics Anonymous no less useful than he found it.

Tom L. from Luray, VA speaking in Palm Springs, CA - June 6th 1971

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

I Have More Time Sober Than I Did Drunk - AA Speaker - Laila M. Sep 18, 2026

Show notes

At twenty-six, Laila has ten years sober after entering AA at sixteen, and she makes a fierce case that an alcoholic's seat is equally worthy whether they drank for six years or sixty-six.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Laila entered Alcoholics Anonymous at sixteen after growing up in an alcoholic home, using alcohol and drugs to bury fear and trauma, and reaching a dangerous emotional bottom that led to treatment. At first, AA sounded like strange slogans, and she misunderstood sponsorship so completely that she imagined finding a business to sponsor her like a Little League team. She began learning the program, received her six-month chip from her dying grandfather during a family AA meeting in his hospital room, and then moved from a thriving young people's fellowship to a town where older members told her she was too young and had not drunk enough. Laila eventually stopped attending meetings without taking a drink, but sobriety without connection left her sick, isolated, and unwilling. A woman who agreed to sponsor her for just thirty days met with her every day, took her through the Big Book and Twelve Steps, and restored her faith in Alcoholics Anonymous. Years of meetings, service, sponsorship, and repetition later, those actions carried Laila through the deaths of an aunt and her brother within days of each other. With the phone in her hand and the book in her lap, she kept calling, kept doing what AA had taught her, and stayed sober. Her message after ten years is simple: no one else gets to measure an alcoholic's bottom, the solution belongs to every member, and one more sober day is the gift worth passing on.

Laila M. from Stafford, TX speaking at the 3rd Annual Arkansas Traveler Roundup in El Dorado, AR - September 2002

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

Sponsorship Is the Cake - AA Speaker - Chad B. Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

Chad arrived at his sponsor's door ready to skip straight to Step Four, but a coverless Big Book and the complete Twelve Steps showed him why sponsorship was not merely the icing on recovery - it was the cake.

☀️ Sober Sunrise Episode Archive
Hundreds of AA speaker tapes and recovery stories:
https://sober-sunrise.com/episodes

🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch
https://sober-sunrise.com/merch

🌴 Sober Sunrise Newsletter
https://sober-sunrise.com/newsletter

Chad shares how his first drink at seventeen made him comfortable in his own skin, then traces the progression from weekend drinking to alcohol in the shower, drinking before work, blackouts, DUIs, and the realization that willpower could not solve his problem. About thirty days sober and certain he would drink again without a solution, he finally asked the AA member who kept checking on him to become his sponsor. Chad arrived for their first session with pencil and paper, eager to begin Step Four, but his sponsor slowed him down and started at the beginning of the Big Book. In this practical walk through the Twelve Steps, Chad describes recognizing his powerlessness in the Doctor's Opinion, turning his fear over to God, inventorying the resentment he carried toward his father, sharing his secrets, and making direct amends. Somewhere in that process, the obsession to drink disappeared. The deepest surprise came with Step Twelve: after receiving a two-year token he never expected to earn, Chad found himself giving one to a man he sponsored and realized that carrying the AA message was not the icing on the cake. Sponsorship was the cake, the icing, and the whole deal.

Chad B. from Fairborn, OH speaking at the Trinity Lakeside Group in Dayton, OH - February 6th 2009

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Sober Sunrise – AA Speaker Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected