Speaker 1: Media. I miss the days when I felt like I
Speaker 1: could just open a podcast by asking, what's boiling my
Speaker 1: pig anuses or something along those lines. You know, I
Speaker 1: we've we've we've achieved a lot of success over the
Speaker 1: last five or six years here at behind the Mastards.
Speaker 1: We've risen to the top of our field. You know,
Speaker 1: we we're beloved by all influential, powerful, mighty. But that
Speaker 1: that comes with a corresponding loss of power, you know,
Speaker 1: the power to be yourself right, really, the power to
Speaker 1: experiment goes away as one becomes a caricature of themselves.
Speaker 1: And so I understand a lot of the troubles facing
Speaker 1: President Biden today. That's that's really what I want to
Speaker 1: say with the opening of this podcast. Wow, I was
Speaker 1: thinking about Joe Biden because I was thinking about our
Speaker 1: old what's boiling my pig anus'es intro and he his
Speaker 1: skin does look a little bit like a boiled gainus.
Speaker 2: I thought you were going to say that he peaked
Speaker 2: around the same time that we peaked with our intros,
Speaker 2: which is when you said what's cracking my peppers?
Speaker 3: So many years ago?
Speaker 4: That was one of your best intros ever. That was Yeah,
Speaker 4: that was several lifetimes ago for all of us. But
Speaker 4: it stuck it in my heart, you know.
Speaker 1: M It's stuck in my heart the way that a
Speaker 1: boiled pig anus sticks in a restaurant that does not
Speaker 1: have enough money for calamari. Look it up, does really,
Speaker 1: that's what they do.
Speaker 4: That's fascinating.
Speaker 1: They bred pig auses and fry them in places that
Speaker 1: don't want to spend money on calamari. If you've ever
Speaker 1: had cheap calamari bread, solid chance it's a pig aus.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I've I'm less bothered by that than
Speaker 4: I would like to be. I feel like if I
Speaker 4: got gotten in that way, and I've had some cheap calamari,
Speaker 4: so I certainly have. You know, the texture just makes
Speaker 4: sense to me in my mind, it makes sense.
Speaker 5: M h.
Speaker 2: Well, I've just never been more thrilled to have an
Speaker 2: allergy to gluten. So, but I don't have to encounter
Speaker 2: accidental piginus when I want calamari, and people who push.
Speaker 1: Okay, you can use a gluten free breading, but I
Speaker 1: would will not be very good.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: If people want to if people want to drill down
Speaker 1: my political intentions here, I would say that Joe Biden's
Speaker 1: skin has the look of pig ainus that was bredded
Speaker 1: in a healthy, gluten free batter, whereas Trump's it's one
Speaker 1: of those like it's like not not the good batter.
Speaker 1: It's like the off brand Panco and it's just it's
Speaker 1: loaded with gluten. You know, it's it's not not great
Speaker 1: for you, as opposed to the healthy Joe Biden pig aus.
Speaker 4: Okay, you've made your political stance abundantly clear.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Journalists are supposed to stay inscrutable, so I
Speaker 1: hope this hasn't ruined my credibility.
Speaker 4: No, people are gonna have to break this down second
Speaker 4: by a second to know exactly when Robert Evans revealed his.
Speaker 1: Biased Now, speaking of anuses, do you know who's a
Speaker 1: big asshole? No, tell me the subject of our episodes today, Jamie,
Speaker 1: because this week we are talking about doctor Laura slashinger.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's right, baby, that's right. It's the Doctor
Speaker 1: Laura episodes. Oh excited? What do you know about doctor Laura?
Speaker 4: What do I know about doctor Laura? I mean, I
Speaker 4: don't know. I feel like she is not someone that
Speaker 4: I have had a close relationship with. I would say
Speaker 4: I know that she is missus self help. I know
Speaker 4: that she does. If my understanding is correct, she is
Speaker 4: a self help person who primarily caters to women, but
Speaker 4: also hates all women, including herself.
Speaker 1: Is that right, Yeah, that would be a good way
Speaker 1: of describing her. She is like the most hostile to
Speaker 1: women of any major woman like media influencer that I
Speaker 1: can recall.
Speaker 4: There's like, really is saying something that there's a lot to.
Speaker 1: Be said about, like the toxicity in some of the people,
Speaker 1: a lot of the people that, for example, Oprah has
Speaker 1: brought on her show. Right, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: valid criticisms, but Oprah's her whole kind of thing is positivity.
Speaker 1: You should feel good about yourself, you should feel good.
Speaker 1: And you know, she mixes that in with some like
Speaker 1: dangerous dieting tips and stuff, But that doesn't change the
Speaker 1: fact that, oh, yeah.
Speaker 4: She's trying to kill you. But like, also, I can
Speaker 4: never really divorce myself with Oprah from the idea that
Speaker 4: she doesn't I don't know that she like is pilled
Speaker 4: enough by the culture that she pushes. Yeah that I'm
Speaker 4: never fully sure if she knows how much she's hurting
Speaker 4: her audience from what I've heard of lauras Schlessinger. She
Speaker 4: doesn't really have an issue.
Speaker 1: She she has a powerful issue, and I think dissecting
Speaker 1: that is going to be an interesting part of this.
Speaker 1: But first, that's the cold open. When we come back
Speaker 1: more Doctor Laura, and we're back Jamie.
Speaker 4: To be clear, I didn't mean that she has she
Speaker 4: doesn't have an issue, huh. I meant that she doesn't
Speaker 4: have an issue with hating her audience openly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, no, no, Well, you know what, I
Speaker 1: would question that because what she hates is her callers.
Speaker 1: The point of being in her audience is to hate
Speaker 1: her callers with her, right. That's kind of the core
Speaker 1: of Doctor Laura is she is she is providing you
Speaker 1: with this rapid fire hose of women making bad decisions,
Speaker 1: and even if they're not women making bad decisions, she
Speaker 1: is going to like attack them before they have a
Speaker 1: chance to fully explain their situation so that you feel
Speaker 1: like they're women making bad decisions. It's we'll be talking
Speaker 1: about this more. But what doctor Laura offered starting in
Speaker 1: the late eighties and early nineties was the same thing
Speaker 1: that we get on Twitter when you wake up every
Speaker 1: morning and there's someone who had a really bad take
Speaker 1: or said something like stupid or crazy, and the entire world,
Speaker 1: or at least your entire online social circle, is making
Speaker 1: fun of them. That is what doctor Laura offered. She
Speaker 1: just offered the version of it that existed in a
Speaker 1: world where the radio was the only way to really
Speaker 1: get something like that. Everybody gets to have there. I
Speaker 1: don't know, two hours hate listening to like the bad
Speaker 1: life choices of primarily young women having kids too early
Speaker 1: or who cheating on their boyfriends, serving their boyfriends cheat
Speaker 1: on them, right, but that is what that is what
Speaker 1: the appeal of her show was.
Speaker 4: Okay, that makes sense. So I'm not extremely familiar with
Speaker 4: the radio show, but that does make I feel like
Speaker 4: there should be more examined about the radio host harassment
Speaker 4: to internet harassment pipe line. I was recently talking to
Speaker 4: the feminist vegan named Carol Adams, who is like awesome.
Speaker 4: She read this book called The Sexual Politics of Meat,
Speaker 4: so I'm sure she would love the piggy in this
Speaker 4: discussion we just had.
Speaker 1: As a courageous title. I'm going to give it to her.
Speaker 1: You have to be confident in your book to throw
Speaker 1: that out there. I really respect that she is unbelievably steel.
Speaker 4: Like No. I met her at a hot dog convention.
Speaker 4: She's really fucking I.
Speaker 1: Met her at a hot dog Amazing stuff, Jamie, Look.
Speaker 4: I'm coming in hot today. I met her at a
Speaker 4: hot dog convention and she was, you know, she's famously
Speaker 4: a vegan and was trying to, you know, sort of
Speaker 4: preach the gospel about vegan hot dogs. But I was
Speaker 4: talking to her about how she is because she is
Speaker 4: in her seventies, I think, and she had been harassed
Speaker 4: for big you know, people hate feminists and vegans, and
Speaker 4: so they always came after her because the title of
Speaker 4: her book is so cool and so it was like
Speaker 4: she had to deal with Rush Limbaugh harassment in you know,
Speaker 4: the nineties and then like the warped like Jordan Peterson
Speaker 4: version of that same harassment. But it's the same playbook.
Speaker 1: And if you're wondering, listener, I'm going to guess doctor
Speaker 1: Laura is a big enough name. I think probably a
Speaker 1: majority of people are familiar with who she is and
Speaker 1: broad but she she was is still to this day,
Speaker 1: although now mostly on podcasts, a major radio talk show
Speaker 1: host whose primary thing was giving women advice, not just women,
Speaker 1: but mostly women. Advice on their lives, right, and she
Speaker 1: was very mean about it. She is a precursor to
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson, Doctor Jordan Peterson. I don't know if he
Speaker 1: doesn't become a celebrity without Doctor Laura, but it's a
Speaker 1: harder road for him because she did.
Speaker 6: It.
Speaker 1: Had a major role in building a place not just
Speaker 1: in the media but in the right wing for a
Speaker 1: wildly successful like hop therapist who is primarily telling you
Speaker 1: you need to clean your room. Right, that's doctor Laura.
Speaker 1: And that's that's Jordan Peterson. Now he takes things.
Speaker 4: Book girl washer face, Sophie, do you remember that one?
Speaker 1: Yeah? No, doctor Laura's ten. Yeah, that's a different one.
Speaker 4: I read it.
Speaker 1: Doctor Laura's book, which we'll hear from this episode is
Speaker 1: ten stupid things women do to mess up their lives? Right.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, I am.
Speaker 1: Very yes, Goleseller. So I want to get into this.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about who doctor Laura meant to
Speaker 1: me first, because I we're gonna do something a little
Speaker 1: different here. We're going to play some interstittal clips from
Speaker 1: her show up through like the two thousands to the
Speaker 1: modern era as we talk about her past, because I
Speaker 1: would love to show you some of those very early
Speaker 1: from the seventies and eighties radio clips, but they don't
Speaker 1: exist anymore. The vast majority of her early career is
Speaker 1: lost media.
Speaker 2: Jill Jill did not listen to this pot to her
Speaker 2: radio show, Jamie Jamie's Mom.
Speaker 4: No, No, I feel lucky that my mom has a
Speaker 4: pretty good radar for women who hate other women and
Speaker 4: generally doesn't fuck with them. We were our radio personality
Speaker 4: when I was growing up. Who I think is still
Speaker 4: in the mix is Delilah. We were just like listening
Speaker 4: to you know, and that wasn't even pretending to give
Speaker 4: women advice. It was just people calling being like, hey,
Speaker 4: can I send you know a can we play a
Speaker 4: Seline Dion song for my husband who hates me? And
Speaker 4: Delilah's like, yes, queen, let's do it. And she's still
Speaker 4: on the air. I loved her. She played a lot
Speaker 4: of Leanne rhymes and Tracy Chapman, so that was my Yeah.
Speaker 4: I feel like I kind of lucked out where I
Speaker 4: never had to listen to doctor Laura. I feel like
Speaker 4: she's inevitable you will encounter her, But no, I never
Speaker 4: was around people who listened to her.
Speaker 2: I unfortunately did because we carpooled, and I always wanted
Speaker 2: to be closest to the adult because I had anxiety,
Speaker 2: and there was definitely some doctor law that in my
Speaker 2: childhood from various different adults driving to and from school. Robert,
Speaker 2: want to tell us your history.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so doctor Laura is still around and still doing
Speaker 1: her thing, which is primarily kind of feeding our worst
Speaker 1: impulses to want to feel like all of the people
Speaker 1: around us are somehow not pulling their share. Right, This
Speaker 1: is the impulse that a lot of conservatism works off of.
Speaker 1: But it's also pretty what you see it in a
Speaker 1: lot of leftists. You see it in everybody, right, this
Speaker 1: idea that like, somehow things are tough for me, and
Speaker 1: I have this feeling that for other people they're easier,
Speaker 1: and that's not fair. There's somebody grifting off of me,
Speaker 1: and they're you know, people feel this way because it's true,
Speaker 1: and it's true because like, there's a tiny number of
Speaker 1: incredibly wealthy people who exist and who make themselves wealthier,
Speaker 1: sucking value out of the rest of us. Right, These
Speaker 1: are the Jack Welch ass finance schools and stead jobs
Speaker 1: want to bees who are financializing our lives to hell
Speaker 1: and hollowing out this country for short term profit, doing
Speaker 1: stuff like buying up businesses, loading them with debt, and
Speaker 1: then you know, carrying out massive layoffs and reaping windfall
Speaker 1: profits for basically destroying people's lives.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But it's it's you know, that's true that like, those
Speaker 1: people are out there and they're not putting in the
Speaker 1: same amount of work that you are, and they're kind
Speaker 1: of ruining everything. But that's not immediately obvious to everybody.
Speaker 1: And the role, the valuable role that someone like doctor
Speaker 1: Laura plays in our media ecosystem is coming in and saying,
Speaker 1: you're right to feel like somebody's taking advantage of you.
Speaker 1: And here I'm going to play a bunch of like
Speaker 1: selectively curated audio of people who are having too many
Speaker 1: kids that they can't support, or you know, getting loaded
Speaker 1: up on debt or doing other irresponsible things, right, and
Speaker 1: these are the people that you should you know, you
Speaker 1: can spend some time today getting angry at these people
Speaker 1: and then go about your day and I will throw
Speaker 1: out some simple advice about how everyone just needs to
Speaker 1: take more responsibility for themselves.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That is where doctor Laura came into the picture. And
Speaker 1: it's you know, she helps to establish she's not the
Speaker 1: first person in this, but she comes in alongside the first, right,
Speaker 1: she is a contemporary of Rush Limbaugh. He hits a
Speaker 1: bit or like literally just a couple of years before
Speaker 1: she does in terms of like becoming a major figure.
Speaker 1: Morton Downey Junior, who we've talked about on the show
Speaker 1: was another major figure and like right around the same
Speaker 1: period of time. And her job was to give a
Speaker 1: lot of our moms, including my moms, people who had
Speaker 1: hard lives, who were like angry and frustrated because shit
Speaker 1: isn't fair, somebody to blame that was had no actual power, right,
Speaker 1: and nothing really like that there was no harm to
Speaker 1: the people who are like, you know, actually doing bad
Speaker 1: shit in our world if this person gets targeted, right,
Speaker 1: it's the same shit with like freaking out over well
Speaker 1: fair moms, as opposed to corporate wage theft, which is
Speaker 1: or freaking out over corporate or over shoplifting over like
Speaker 1: corporate wage theft, which massively exceeds the value of everything's
Speaker 1: shoplifted in this country by a factor Yeah, several times over.
Speaker 4: Everyone should shoplift. It's built into their budget to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And so when she's giving someone to blame, because I
Speaker 4: feel like every generation has a figure like this for
Speaker 4: women of like actually, I mean I feel like the
Speaker 4: generation after it's different, but like Sheryl Sandberg feels like
Speaker 4: a figure that is like, Oh, there is a clear
Speaker 4: solution to this, and it's you're the problem, and you
Speaker 4: just need to act wealthier than you are and like
Speaker 4: forget any systemic oppression exists, and then you'll just.
Speaker 1: Lean into it, Whereas doctor Laura's argument would be like,
Speaker 1: you don't need to lean in. You need to quit
Speaker 1: your job and raise your kids as Yeah, return to
Speaker 1: traditional gender roles and somehow that will make things fine.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: It was one of those I think because my mom
Speaker 1: liked her so much. I remember her for a long time.
Speaker 1: She's part of the cultural background noise of the world
Speaker 1: that I was raised in. Like when we would get
Speaker 1: in the car, it would either be the car talk guys.
Speaker 1: If it was my dad, who were broadly neutral, let's
Speaker 1: sayral yes, click and clap, click and clap. The Tampa
Speaker 1: Brothers I think was their name. Yeah, unbelievably midwestern. Probably
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with my incredible Midwest appeal
Speaker 1: to this day. And then there was doctor Laura, who
Speaker 1: my mom loved. My mom was kind of a frustrated person,
Speaker 1: like her entire first career plan had collapsed. She had
Speaker 1: tried to start two businesses and they had collapsed. She
Speaker 1: spent most of my early life in terrible debt and
Speaker 1: feeling like her hard work had not been rewarded. And
Speaker 1: I think she there was tremendous appeal to her and
Speaker 1: finding people who were irresponsible and having this kind of
Speaker 1: ARCon of conservative values. Doctor Laura yell at them because
Speaker 1: she felt somehow like people like that were responsible for
Speaker 1: her failures. Right that that's the impression that I have gotten.
Speaker 1: I didn't really at the time. You know, as a kid,
Speaker 1: I thought doctor Laura had had it all figured out, right,
Speaker 1: because my mom said that about her. Weirdly enough, like
Speaker 1: me starting to reevaluate her happened when I watched a
Speaker 1: Fraser episode at like age fourteen or fifteen.
Speaker 4: He's doing the work.
Speaker 1: He did the work, he did the way. Thank you
Speaker 1: Kelsey Robert, Thank you kel He was always listening. There's
Speaker 1: a there's a great episode of Fraser where they parody
Speaker 1: doctor Laura with a character named doctor Nora played by
Speaker 1: the great Christine Baranski.
Speaker 4: Who was one I remember this. Oh my gosh, see
Speaker 4: now you're talking about way.
Speaker 1: And I'm a huge Christine Baranski fan. Nobody, there's not
Speaker 1: anybody today. He's got like a voice like that, and
Speaker 1: he like, oh god, she was great.
Speaker 4: So oh, she's very much alive. She's with at Emmy's.
Speaker 4: I just saw her and Mamma Mia, here we go again.
Speaker 4: She's great.
Speaker 1: I must just have been I hope she's living her
Speaker 1: best life. I must just have missed the stuff she's
Speaker 1: been doing more recently. But she's They did a good
Speaker 1: episode about her, and it made me kind of because
Speaker 1: the point of the episode is that, like, she gives
Speaker 1: all this advice on how you should live your life
Speaker 1: and has absolutely followed none of it, and it turns
Speaker 1: out that's extremely accurate. Like the story of doctor Laura
Speaker 1: is a woman who did the opposite of the things
Speaker 1: that she advises women to do and gained tremendous wealth
Speaker 1: and influence as a result of doing all of the
Speaker 1: things she tells people not to do. She is the
Speaker 1: clearest example I found of somebody finding a ladder up
Speaker 1: and then cutting that ladder out like behind them, throwing
Speaker 1: it down to the ground.
Speaker 4: That's fascinating, I mean, because yeah, there's so many flavors
Speaker 4: of this kind of person where I feel like I
Speaker 4: didn't have a doctor Laura in the background of my childhood,
Speaker 4: but I definitely hadn't had Oprah in the background of
Speaker 4: my entire childhood, right, And like her, it felt more
Speaker 4: like her whole thing was like, you are enough, except
Speaker 4: not really, not.
Speaker 1: Really, you are enough, but you're too fat, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, but you.
Speaker 4: Look like shit and you're doing every and like yeah,
Speaker 4: and and but but you know, I guess where they
Speaker 4: kind of meet is the fear mongering around class and
Speaker 4: around like there's just a.
Speaker 1: Lot of that. Yeah, And it's because of that that
Speaker 1: I have have triangulated my own position as a cultural
Speaker 1: influencer to you look like shit, but that's fine. Look
Speaker 1: at the world. The world is not doing well enough
Speaker 1: for you to owe it looking better than you do, right, Like, yeah, you.
Speaker 4: Are enough, but make no mistake, you look fucking bad.
Speaker 1: You look like trash, but the world is trash, and
Speaker 1: so like you. In a way, it's camouflage, right, It's.
Speaker 4: Important to blend the occasion.
Speaker 1: You're like one of those chameleons, right that can like,
Speaker 1: blend into the tree behind them. It's a survival method.
Speaker 1: It keeps the birds from eating you.
Speaker 4: And I telling you that you need to look like shit,
Speaker 4: listen to your body saying.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, yeah, help blend in, blend into the trash
Speaker 1: fire around you. So, you know, I once I saw
Speaker 1: that Frasier episode, I changed my mind on Doctor Laura more,
Speaker 1: and I started to change my mind on a lot
Speaker 1: of other stuff. It was, you know, it wasn't just
Speaker 1: that World of Warcraft played a weirdly large role in that.
Speaker 1: But I stopped really paying attention to doctor Laura when
Speaker 1: I was like sixteen or seventeen, and as an adult,
Speaker 1: there wasn't really much of reason to pay attention to
Speaker 1: her period, and so I hadn't really thought of her
Speaker 1: in close to like about twenty years until I started
Speaker 1: doing research for these episodes. So, like I normally do,
Speaker 1: I just started like Google, I just googled her name
Speaker 1: and popped on news right just to see, like, what
Speaker 1: is there anything still happening? Like, I honestly didn't know
Speaker 1: if she was alive when I started these episodes, and
Speaker 1: the first thing I read about her as an adult
Speaker 1: in the modern era were these lines from the opening
Speaker 1: of a CNA article before she uttered the inWORD before
Speaker 1: her remarks uncheated on wives. Before the controversies over homosexuality
Speaker 1: and religion morality, Laura Slushinger was considered a breath of
Speaker 1: fresh airh that's a lot.
Speaker 4: That's a lead.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wow, okay, and they should it shouldn't be inward,
Speaker 1: it should be in words because she says it like
Speaker 1: eleven times during the explosion on air. That kind of
Speaker 1: lost her her job or caused her to quit her job.
Speaker 1: But that's also not quite what it sounds like.
Speaker 4: And was was that recently?
Speaker 1: This is that's twenty eleven, Jamie, Oh, that is so recent?
Speaker 4: Wow?
Speaker 1: But yes, also depends on what you consider recent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can tell it's a while ago because she didn't
Speaker 1: rebrand as like a canceled figure. She just kind of
Speaker 1: like found a new got into podcasting. Like it's a
Speaker 1: mix of She was clearly blazing a trail because that
Speaker 1: is what a lot of other people did when they
Speaker 1: got caught saying the N word right to start a podcast,
Speaker 1: but she also didn't do like a real media campaign.
Speaker 1: She's actually kind of interesting as a right wing figure.
Speaker 1: She's never embraced the political side of conservatism to the
Speaker 1: extent that is common for people who are similarly influential. Now,
Speaker 1: I think it might just be that she got really
Speaker 1: rich early enough that she's like, I don't need that.
Speaker 1: I don't need to talk to those people. They all
Speaker 1: seem unpleasant, like I'm a piece of shit, but I'm
Speaker 1: just going to enjoy my mansion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that is. I wish more people who
Speaker 4: were pieces of shit back in the day simply disappeared,
Speaker 4: because sometimes it does feel like that is the best
Speaker 4: case scenario.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it really is. I want to continue with
Speaker 1: the next paragraph from that see in an article because
Speaker 1: it gives an idea of the kind of show that
Speaker 1: doctor Laura ran and still runs for decades for those
Speaker 1: of you who didn't grow up on it. Quote. Despite
Speaker 1: the fact that many consider Laura Slashing the dragon Lady
Speaker 1: of talk radio, some of us can't help but admire her.
Speaker 1: Noted a decidedly mixed nineteen ninety nine consideration of her
Speaker 1: in Salon. She is snippish, overbearing, and often insulting, but
Speaker 1: anybody who has the temerity to call into her program
Speaker 1: knows what they are going to get, especially if they
Speaker 1: plead ignorance or innocence. Her message stop whining, sometimes delivered
Speaker 1: in just those blunt words. It was a message taken
Speaker 1: to heart by more than eighteen million radio listeners a
Speaker 1: week at her peak, people who looked at doctor Lor
Speaker 1: to set them straight in their relationships, ethical disputes, and
Speaker 1: moral conundrums.
Speaker 4: And well, yeah, if there's any evidence needed that our
Speaker 4: entire country has a humiliation kink.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's I've been thinking about that a lot, because
Speaker 1: before I dug back into this, you know, literally the
Speaker 1: day that I started this, there was like a viral
Speaker 1: tweet that was someone being like it was one of
Speaker 1: those like people on TikTok or blue Sky or whatever,
Speaker 1: like overly medicalizing stuff and like making statements about like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't realize this bad behavior is just
Speaker 1: something that people do when they have autism, and it's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know that get you get this stuff where
Speaker 1: it's like you get this with ADHD too, where it's
Speaker 1: like you just talk about stuff people do, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's not like this is this is just a this
Speaker 1: is just a behavior. It's not like necessarily related to
Speaker 1: any kind of medical condition, like you're talking about procrastination
Speaker 1: or whatever, like just we don't need to. And I
Speaker 1: started to get into this like annoyance sloop where I'm
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, people do need to take responsibility.
Speaker 1: And then I realized what was happening, which was that
Speaker 1: the entirety of the out like the algorithms that make Twitter, well,
Speaker 1: it's not really profitable, but the whole attempt to make
Speaker 1: Twitter and every other social media thing profitable relies on
Speaker 1: putting stuff in front of you that you would not
Speaker 1: have seen on your own that will make you frustrated
Speaker 1: and angry. And so it's taking what in reality is
Speaker 1: some young person working through and thinking about the world
Speaker 1: and not having any sort of actual harmful impact on me,
Speaker 1: Like somebody wrongfully crediting a belief to you know, autism
Speaker 1: or whatever has no impact on me or anyone else.
Speaker 1: It's a person talking through shit on the Internet. But
Speaker 1: the Internet runs off of churning that up and putting
Speaker 1: it in front of people to get them angry and
Speaker 1: to get them talking about it and making fun of
Speaker 1: that person and attacking right, like, that's that's the business,
Speaker 1: and that's doctor Laura's business, And so I guess, yeah.
Speaker 4: Wow, yeah she is a one woman algorithm. Yeah, where
Speaker 4: it's like not based on a sincere desire to educate
Speaker 4: or like it's based on like shaming people in a
Speaker 4: public forum is fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the same way, like, yes, some lady who
Speaker 1: I don't know has a child with a different man
Speaker 1: while cheating on her boyfriend or her husband or whatever,
Speaker 1: Like is that a problem for the people involved in
Speaker 1: that relationship?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: Does that in any way really harm me? Whatever republic
Speaker 1: might say about welfare, No, that is actually not something
Speaker 1: that I should care about at all. Like, there are
Speaker 1: so many actual problems that will actually harm me out there.
Speaker 1: But like, if you can put people's eyes on you know,
Speaker 1: this person's bad behavior is going to like you're gonna
Speaker 1: wind up paying for it or anything like your eyes
Speaker 1: on the shit, that doesn't matter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, especially when it's like codified as like this person's
Speaker 4: bad behavior, you're like they're a contextless bad behavior.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yeah, that's.
Speaker 4: Just like, well, I don't know why why would some
Speaker 4: why would this happen to someone? You know? And that
Speaker 4: sort of question, which I feel like is consistent throughout
Speaker 4: I mean, not even just right wing influential people, but
Speaker 4: you know, just the general classism of and racism and
Speaker 4: all of this stuff that goes through the way that
Speaker 4: we I mean, Sophie, I'm thinking about like I used
Speaker 4: to watch sixteen and Pregnant on MTV like no one's business,
Speaker 4: and that feels like I don't know if that exists
Speaker 4: without doctor Laura, because there is like a clear precedent
Speaker 4: for like shaming young usually poor pregnant girls. Yes, just
Speaker 4: out of context. Well they must have done it because
Speaker 4: they're poor.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the same And it's the same thing
Speaker 1: on the internet, right, Like it's a lot of these
Speaker 1: kind of like two minutes hate come around and like
Speaker 1: let's find somebody who again it's generally like a young
Speaker 1: person working shit out. And are they are they talking
Speaker 1: about like psychiatry and psychology in ways that are like
Speaker 1: not within the medical you know, mainstream or accurate? Are
Speaker 1: they sometimes causing problems for themselves by like doing the
Speaker 1: weird tumbler brain shit where people like lock themselves into
Speaker 1: an ideological box. Sure, but that's what young people always do, right,
Speaker 1: is figure out shit in slow, awkward, juttering ways. And
Speaker 1: it's honestly natural way for that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like on a certain scale, it that does get scary,
Speaker 4: but like, how is the solution to publicly shame them,
Speaker 4: which I feel like, especially now, almost makes it a
Speaker 4: certainty that they will double down on it.
Speaker 1: There's the rightest thing I've ever seen written about the
Speaker 1: internet is that article we all need to know less
Speaker 1: about each other? Like, yes, yes, some of this should not.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't be aware of what a bunch of like
Speaker 1: teenagers are are, how they're how they are trying to
Speaker 1: process their lives and identities. Yet like, give them time
Speaker 1: to do that. I got time to do that. I
Speaker 1: don't know, Jamie, You're kind of right in the middle
Speaker 1: of the age groups. But you've got more time than
Speaker 1: kids today. Get it seems like.
Speaker 4: I got I got time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway, you should all take some time to listen
Speaker 1: to these advertisers.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 1: Wow, Yeah that was good. That was good so bad smooth,
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you. See this is again. You can't
Speaker 1: teach this right, you can't train this, this is this
Speaker 1: is I'm pure, I'm hooked up to the Cali Yuga.
Speaker 1: I am mainlining accashic truths and that's why I'm able
Speaker 1: to add pivots.
Speaker 4: So well, folks, God is speaking through you in this moment.
Speaker 1: In a way, I am God, Jamie, in a way,
Speaker 1: I am God. Speaking of God, Doctor Laura was God
Speaker 1: to a certain kind of very frustrated middle class woman
Speaker 1: like my mom in the nineteen nineties. And I want
Speaker 1: to start by playing a clip for you of her
Speaker 1: show Just See You Again. If you either don't remember
Speaker 1: or you didn't spend a lot a lot of time
Speaker 1: stuck in traffic with your mom listening to Doctor Laura,
Speaker 1: this is what her show was like. And here's a sample.
Speaker 6: I am unsure of how to continue on in my
Speaker 6: relationship with my mother. I found out last September that
Speaker 6: my dad, the man who raised me, is not my
Speaker 6: biological father for the very first time, and it has
Speaker 6: obviously caused her a risk between my mother and I.
Speaker 5: Why Why Why was the guy who raised you nice?
Speaker 5: Yes he is, so let me understand this. Don't babble
Speaker 5: at me, so let me understand this. You want to
Speaker 5: dump a mother who made you with one guy obviously
Speaker 5: could not have been the greatest guy in the universe.
Speaker 5: He wasn't there, and then she found a nice guy
Speaker 5: to raise you, and you're pissed at her. What in
Speaker 5: the hell is wrong with you?
Speaker 6: I'm upset because she lied to me about it, So what,
Speaker 6: so what?
Speaker 5: Who gives a shit? That's her private life. She gave
Speaker 5: you a wonderful man to raise you, whom you consider
Speaker 5: your daddy. What if you had been adopted? Who the
Speaker 5: hell cares? She did the wrong thing with a jerk,
Speaker 5: and then she did the right thing with the guy
Speaker 5: who raised you. I seriously would rather smack you across
Speaker 5: the head than anything else right now, you ungrateful little twid.
Speaker 1: So I want to break down what's happening here. And
Speaker 1: I picked that because this is an instance where the
Speaker 1: point that she is making is hard to argue with, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: if that guy raised you from childhood, that is who
Speaker 1: you should see as your father, Like, and that's not bad,
Speaker 1: right that, Like, there's nothing wrong with a marriage working
Speaker 1: out with someone deciding that like, oh this the biological
Speaker 1: parent of this kid, I can't raise them with and
Speaker 1: doing something else that's not wrong. But what's actually happened here.
Speaker 1: This girl didn't come in and say fuck my mom
Speaker 1: and fuck my fake dad. She came in being like
Speaker 1: my mom didn't tell me the truth for years. And
Speaker 1: I feel like this is really complicated for me and
Speaker 1: doctor Laura didn't let her finish explaining the issue, even
Speaker 1: immediately drilled down and accused her of saying and she
Speaker 1: never actually said that her the guy who raised her
Speaker 1: wasn't she didn't consider him a father. All of that
Speaker 1: is stuff that Laura put into that conversation in order
Speaker 1: to create, because that's what she has to do, right.
Speaker 1: You can't have there's not enough people who are actually
Speaker 1: unsympathetic and shitty calling. You have to make them unsympathetic
Speaker 1: and shitty. In the first ten seconds of the call,
Speaker 1: so Laura hears this is a young woman calling in
Speaker 1: because her mom has just admitted that her dad is
Speaker 1: not her biological dad, and Laura, without the caller saying
Speaker 1: it starts, invents an issue in the issue being that, Okay,
Speaker 1: so this woman is attacking her mom and rejecting the
Speaker 1: guy who raised her, which this lady never claimed to
Speaker 1: be doing. Right, Laura invents the problem in order to
Speaker 1: call this woman an idiot right in.
Speaker 4: Like in no time at all, I really shot like
Speaker 4: it is. You can tell at this point that what
Speaker 4: she's been at at minimum fifth she cares yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: because it's like she's locked in and she knows I mean,
Speaker 4: and I'm sure she's invented this problem for other people before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I wanted to play it because people
Speaker 1: have this idea that it's like when I say that
Speaker 1: she's giving you people to hate, she's creating those people.
Speaker 1: Most of her callers are not people who have done
Speaker 1: anything wrong. There's nothing wrong when your mom tells you
Speaker 1: that your dad was not your biological father, with being like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is a lot to process, and I have a
Speaker 1: lot of conflicting feelings about it. But that's not a
Speaker 1: profitable it's not profitable like help that person, like a
Speaker 1: therapist would think through and talk through those conflicting feelings.
Speaker 1: It's profitable to pretend that this person is shitty, yell
Speaker 1: at her on the air, and then move on to
Speaker 1: the next collar. Right, So, now that we're all suitably
Speaker 1: ready to learn about a bad person, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about her biographer, who is one of the major
Speaker 1: sources of this episode. She has the incredible name Vicky Bain,
Speaker 1: which is a great name for a person who writes
Speaker 1: unauthorized biographies of media figures, and she is the author
Speaker 1: of Doctor Laura the Unauthorized Biography, A revealing look at
Speaker 1: the hidden life of radio phenomenon Doctor Laura Slashinger, which
Speaker 1: for reasons I cannot explain, has an anarchist flag as
Speaker 1: its background. We got this book cover. It's a series
Speaker 1: of choices here kind of it's like very a very
Speaker 1: distinct red and black blocky thing going on there.
Speaker 4: Ricky Bain does sound like a comic book villain's girlfriend.
Speaker 1: In Yeah, that's right. Wow, No, God's no talk radio.
Speaker 1: So Vicky L. Bain was at one point at least
Speaker 1: a correspondent for People magazine. Google tells me that she
Speaker 1: has a husband and two sons and lives in Colorado.
Speaker 1: She was also the author of two She's the author
Speaker 1: of two unauthorized biographies, one being the Doctor Laura Biography,
Speaker 1: which I've read, and the second, which I have not read,
Speaker 1: is The Lives of Danielle Steele and appears to be
Speaker 1: an unauthorized biography of Danielle Steele.
Speaker 4: Wow, I am not disinterested in that.
Speaker 1: I will seeah M, I think it's I found the
Speaker 1: Doctor Laura book on the Internet archive. You can probably
Speaker 1: find the Danielle Steele one there too, but I haven't checked.
Speaker 1: I will say, while this book is invaluable because we
Speaker 1: just really don't have a lot of other good sources
Speaker 1: about her early life that talk to a lot of
Speaker 1: people who know her. This is a really hateful book
Speaker 1: in a way that, even as someone who doesn't like
Speaker 1: doctor Laura, I had to go this is a little
Speaker 1: ethically questionable, particularly because a decent chunk of it, not
Speaker 1: most of it, but a major source is a guy
Speaker 1: who leaked nude photos of doctor Laura to the news.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, So this is a sleazy booker. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just I need to set that expectation before we
Speaker 1: get into this.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: It is like one of the great wrinkles of the
Speaker 4: world that horrible people can be treated.
Speaker 1: Like shit, and this this Vicky kind of treats doctor
Speaker 1: Laura likes shit. On the other hand, doctor Laura treats
Speaker 1: everybody likes shit. And I'm not saying that makes it right.
Speaker 1: It's just this is not two wrongs making a right.
Speaker 1: It's just two wrongs making a podcast. So hopefully you
Speaker 1: will all find that entertaining, and.
Speaker 4: So make sure to yeah, buy the product that on
Speaker 4: this great show, because there is no ethical solution we're presenting.
Speaker 1: No, it's like everything else in capitalism, folks. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good stuff. The book also feel features very fucked
Speaker 1: up stories from Doctor Laura's mother, who hated Laura and
Speaker 1: who Laura says was a terrible person. Although maybe that's
Speaker 1: Laura being a terrible person. It's impossible for us to know.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it is a weird experience reading a biography
Speaker 1: of a bad person and still going like, Wow, this
Speaker 1: book's kind of mean. But I got to give Vicky credit.
Speaker 1: That's an impressive achievement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, shout out, Vicky. Can't wait to hear you, Rake,
Speaker 4: Dan Yelle Steele.
Speaker 1: Take you down a peg.
Speaker 4: My aunts will be found devastated.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I assumed she was like forty people writing
Speaker 1: in a factory.
Speaker 4: Yeah, kind of like a Carolyn Keen kind of Yeah,
Speaker 4: Like he knows she's writing Nacy Drew books.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the Doctor Laura's story starts with two people
Speaker 1: she did not like, her father, Monty and her mother Yolanda.
Speaker 1: Back during the Great Dub Dub Dose, Monty was a soldier.
Speaker 1: He had a pretty serious World War Two. He gets
Speaker 1: promoted from corporal to lieutenant, which means a lot of
Speaker 1: people died ahead of him, Right, That's not a normal
Speaker 1: progression in a military career. At the end of the war,
Speaker 1: he was stationed in Italy, where he met Yolanda, who
Speaker 1: was a native Italian and one assumes looking for a
Speaker 1: way out of her war torn country. Vicki writes that
Speaker 1: Yolanda met Monty while he was quote serving in a
Speaker 1: disputed territory of Yugoslavia. So this would be an area
Speaker 1: that had a particularly nasty World War two. If you
Speaker 1: know the Balkans, World War two was not a great
Speaker 1: time to be anywhere near the fucking Balkans. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: they Europe after World War Two. She comes back with
Speaker 1: Monty to the East Coast, where they decide to have kids.
Speaker 1: This is a messy move and it's going to be
Speaker 1: unpopular with most of the people in Monty's life because
Speaker 1: Monty's family is Jewish and traditional enough that they do
Speaker 1: not like the idea of their son marrying a gentile girl. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: on January sixteenth, nineteen forty seven, Laura Catherine Sleshinger became
Speaker 1: one of the very first baby Boomers.
Speaker 4: Wow, like the original Boomers. That's really impressive. Imagine first way,
Speaker 4: very traumatized people having a super villain of a child.
Speaker 1: Yeah, two people who have been utterly shattered by war,
Speaker 1: coming back and having a child into a family who,
Speaker 1: for reasons of racism, rejects them and their child. A
Speaker 1: real recipe for a healthy person who's going to be
Speaker 1: a good christ.
Speaker 4: I don't understand what happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great, Okay.
Speaker 4: So she's born like this in four seven.
Speaker 1: In forty seven in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island.
Speaker 1: Monty eventually gets a job as a civil engineer, but
Speaker 1: his family never accepted his wife and kind of didn't
Speaker 1: accept his daughter as an adult. Laura wrote this of
Speaker 1: the troubled union. All hell broke loose when my father's
Speaker 1: mother went on a relentless attack against the Shiksa, which
Speaker 1: means in Yiddish, the non Jewish wife of a Jewish man.
Speaker 1: My grandmother tried to do everything she could to get
Speaker 1: rid of my mother and turned much of the family
Speaker 1: into rejecting her us. When I was two and a half,
Speaker 1: my mother took me back to Italy, probably to get
Speaker 1: a break from this cruelty. My mother's mother and father
Speaker 1: were dead by this time. She was not close to
Speaker 1: her brother, and her older sister had been killed by
Speaker 1: the Nazis. On the first day she joined the underground resistance.
Speaker 1: I like to think that I channel her courage. You
Speaker 1: do not, Laura.
Speaker 4: Look, no, sorry about that.
Speaker 1: Whatever you wherever you stand politically, sitting on a microphone
Speaker 1: is not the same as dying as soon as you
Speaker 1: join the anti fascist resistance in Italy. Very different things.
Speaker 1: One of them pays millions of dollars in your case,
Speaker 1: doctor Laura, so not quite the same.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and one of you is alive at age seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, one of you is still alive. You did
Speaker 1: not get murdered by Mussolini's buddies. Yeah, anyway, great stuff.
Speaker 1: Laura's childhood, though, was definitely not warm. Her parents had
Speaker 1: little time to spend on their daughter's emotional health, and
Speaker 1: because she was half Jewish, she was ostracized by other
Speaker 1: kids in her neighborhood. Again, this is the United States
Speaker 1: in the forties and fifties, right, Like, it's a big
Speaker 1: deal that she is half Jewish, Right Like, people make
Speaker 1: that a big deal.
Speaker 4: The part of the episodes where you make me feel
Speaker 4: bad for the Yeah, the initial wound of the fucked
Speaker 4: up person. It's always the hardest part, even more than
Speaker 4: the fucked up part.
Speaker 1: Look, very few people are never sympathetic. Right, there's a
Speaker 1: point in the Hitler story where he's just a boy
Speaker 1: trying to take care of his mom as she dies
Speaker 1: from cancer, and his his Jewish doctor notes decades later
Speaker 1: after he's the furor he had never seen a boy
Speaker 1: so sad. Right, that's just life. You just got to
Speaker 1: accept that if you actually care about understanding people.
Speaker 4: Well, I know, I've been on this show for a
Speaker 4: million years and it still makes me sad. I sure, baby, baby,
Speaker 4: doctor Laura, God, Laura. Yeah, it really it does feel
Speaker 4: motivating at least, like if there's a kid that is
Speaker 4: very much lost in your you know, in your like,
Speaker 4: be a person they can talk to, because she could
Speaker 4: be preventing a future doctor.
Speaker 1: Person you can talk to, make them feel valued, make
Speaker 1: them feel like they have a place to be. And
Speaker 1: every day or so say never get on the radio.
Speaker 1: Avoid the radio.
Speaker 4: No one ever told us that, and that and that
Speaker 4: was we didn't have that person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but come accountant or something. Yeah, that's what she needed.
Speaker 1: That's what well a lot of kids of this position,
Speaker 1: needy is subtle support and also don't don't become a
Speaker 1: radio host. So her primary impressions of her social peers
Speaker 1: in this period were that they responded to her with
Speaker 1: rejection and punishment. Those are her words, and this included
Speaker 1: physical violence at times. At home, she was also subject
Speaker 1: to physical violence at times because her father was both
Speaker 1: physically and mentally domineering. She later told a reporter that
Speaker 1: quote she was afraid to open her mouth because he
Speaker 1: would scream at her and smack her. At the same time,
Speaker 1: she credited her father with instilling in her the drive
Speaker 1: to succeed. Laura told another reporter from Red Book that
Speaker 1: her dad was quote real good at getting angry, but
Speaker 1: he was also good at telling me what was right
Speaker 1: and what was wrong. I think he could have cared
Speaker 1: more about the impact of his behavior instead of feeling
Speaker 1: entitled to act because that's what he thought or felt.
Speaker 1: She claimed that he was the kind of argumentative guy
Speaker 1: who would latch onto disagreements like a remora, who was
Speaker 1: almost looking for disagreements, right.
Speaker 4: And very specific fish to sorry, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. That's the kind of fish that her dad
Speaker 1: was and the kind of fish that she becomes.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Laura grows up desperate to make a mark and prove
Speaker 1: herself to be someone special, and likes this sort of
Speaker 1: person sometimes does She also winds up obsessed with the
Speaker 1: rules right, what is fair? What is right and wrong?
Speaker 1: Based on what are the rules? And so as a
Speaker 1: little girl, she would race to the principal's office whenever
Speaker 1: she saw other kids doing something bad, like vandalizing encyclopedias
Speaker 1: in the library. For gin Z listeners, and Encyclopedia is
Speaker 1: like Wikipedia, but without all like it's not mostly Star
Speaker 1: Wars lore, so other words, In other words, it's like
Speaker 1: a useless Wikipedia.
Speaker 4: Yeah. If Wikipedia couldn't be edited and looked and smelled
Speaker 4: like shit like something about the smell of Encyclopedia's was
Speaker 4: always very very sty.
Speaker 1: There's nothing about one piece in it, so you kids
Speaker 1: would wouldn't have any reason to read it.
Speaker 4: Wow, you really think I could make an animation to
Speaker 4: the youth again?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the gin Z kids know me. Yeah, they understand
Speaker 1: that I'm plugged in.
Speaker 4: Baby Uncle Robert is on one today, that's right.
Speaker 1: The Slushingers were on the tip of the spear when
Speaker 1: it came to White Flight, and by the late nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties they had left Brooklyn for a long Island suburb.
Speaker 1: Laura was the traditional gifted kid, pushed by an overbearing
Speaker 1: mother to succeed at school for an idea of the
Speaker 1: kind of stubbornness that she developed. As a result of this,
Speaker 1: Laura's mom made her practice piano an hour a day,
Speaker 1: and Laura's rebellion was she would only practice if she
Speaker 1: could start exactly on the hour or exactly on the
Speaker 1: quarter hour, So if it was like one oh one,
Speaker 1: she have to wait thirteen minutes until it was one
Speaker 1: fifteen to do her hour of practice.
Speaker 4: So I am like, you know, TikTok arm chair diagnosing here,
Speaker 4: But it sounds like she she may be a young
Speaker 4: OCD girl, having been there myself, like you have to
Speaker 4: do a certain thing at a certain time or we
Speaker 4: will die. Uh. That has also like in it, like
Speaker 4: in addition to it, it seems like that's her instinct, but
Speaker 4: also that there is this uh fixation on the idea
Speaker 4: of order, which explains going to the teachers for stuff,
Speaker 4: which explains but like that's like reinforced, like the idea
Speaker 4: of order is reinforced at home instead of like, hey,
Speaker 4: take your breath, you know, the stuff that you would
Speaker 4: hope for.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh, And I think that that's definitely like what
Speaker 1: we're seeing here right. Yeah, it's a she describes like
Speaker 1: her weird time fixation is self discipline, right, and I
Speaker 1: think it's her grasping for control, Like she can't make
Speaker 1: her control the fact that her mom wants her to
Speaker 1: do this, but she can have that kind of control
Speaker 1: and like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it's like unfortunately, I yeah, it's like
Speaker 4: I I don't know wh I was in like fourth
Speaker 4: and fifth grade. I wouldn't leave a room until I
Speaker 4: had written down what everyone was wearing and what was
Speaker 4: hanging on the walls, and that was the way to
Speaker 4: maintain like order. And then if there's no one around
Speaker 4: you to like, you know, sort of pull you out
Speaker 4: of that, and if there's people around you encouraging it,
Speaker 4: it's just like a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's it is one of
Speaker 1: those things where like this isn't doctor Laura being coming.
Speaker 1: Doctor Laura isn't the only way being this kid goes.
Speaker 1: It's not the usual this It only really.
Speaker 4: Happened, right, I hope not. Yeah, I know a.
Speaker 1: Lot of people who had very very I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: sure a lot of people listening are like, well, I
Speaker 1: had kind of a similar experience, right, totally, But it
Speaker 1: does it's also like she is one of those people where, oh,
Speaker 1: all of this makes sense. I totally understand how someone
Speaker 1: with this background wound up as doctor Laura.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, yeah, it's like not yeah, not everybody, but it's not,
Speaker 4: you know, inconceivable that this would happen.
Speaker 1: This is a crisis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Her classmates in
Speaker 1: grade school in high school all remember her as pretty
Speaker 1: quiet and extremely serious. Like as a as a kid
Speaker 1: in grade school, she was really weirdly serious and like
Speaker 1: one thing, you get a lot. Some of this might
Speaker 1: just be Vicky really pushing for salacious stuff. But they
Speaker 1: all talk about that she was hot, but they talk
Speaker 1: about it in such a way as like it's weird.
Speaker 1: She was hot, but she didn't have any friends and
Speaker 1: wasn't very popular because she didn't seem to want to
Speaker 1: know people.
Speaker 4: Right, that's uh so, I mean obviously we can't truly
Speaker 4: fully trust Vicky. Of course not No, I like it
Speaker 4: sounds like she fucking sucks.
Speaker 1: To be fair, Vicky could be doing this. You can't
Speaker 1: trust a bunch of people forty years later talking about
Speaker 1: how someone was in eighth grade.
Speaker 4: Right when was Vicky's book published?
Speaker 1: It was like in the nineties, but still a long time,
Speaker 1: not forty years, but a while later.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So like the word beautiful is still I mean
Speaker 4: it's still is now, but like especially then, like indiscriminately
Speaker 4: thrown around just to like validate the you are reading
Speaker 4: about an a person of worth. But I don't know.
Speaker 4: Every time it's like a young girl is described as like,
Speaker 4: you know, like didn't want to know other people, it's
Speaker 4: I immediately go to, like, she's probably shy.
Speaker 1: Maybe here's where we get weird here, because Okay, one
Speaker 1: of the best pieces of evidence suggesting that Vicky's portrayal
Speaker 1: of things may be accurate is that Laura says the
Speaker 1: same thing in different language. Here's what she told an
Speaker 1: interviewer in nineteen seventy nine. I had a distinct feeling
Speaker 1: of being out of sync with the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: just as if I had landed from another planet. While
Speaker 1: my peers were outside skipping rope and playing games, I
Speaker 1: stayed in the home, where, like a hilariously precocious child,
Speaker 1: I wore an ill fitting lab coat and crooked glasses. So, huh,
Speaker 1: that seems to kind of back up with Vicky saying
Speaker 1: I also think it might be a lie because this
Speaker 1: is doctor Laura nineteen seventy nine at the start of
Speaker 1: her career. And that doesn't sound like an honest recollection
Speaker 1: of events. Just nobody would described themselves as like a
Speaker 1: hilariously precocious child unless they were doing myth making right,
Speaker 1: That's what I'm.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because it's like we can't trust Vicky or Laura
Speaker 4: count of Laura's life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely not a single reliable source on this woman's
Speaker 1: early life. Laura wants you Doctor Laura as an adult,
Speaker 1: wants you to believe that as a kid, she was isolated,
Speaker 1: she didn't fit in, she felt like, you know, she
Speaker 1: was an adult in a world of children, and she
Speaker 1: was a mad scientist. It is very important to doctor
Speaker 1: Laura that you see her as a mad scientist as
Speaker 1: an adolescent girl, which is.
Speaker 4: Which interesting, which is so wild, because it's like, could
Speaker 4: there be anything more different than it sounds like what
Speaker 4: she is. I mean, I don't know enough, but like
Speaker 4: it sounds like she is not encouraging people to be
Speaker 4: like this. But it's also important to her that she
Speaker 4: is perceived like this.
Speaker 1: Yes, she's an iconoclast and also was a serious child scientist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe she was some of that anyway, well, we'll keep
Speaker 1: talking about this, but it is. It is very peculiar,
Speaker 1: and that makes me think about something that's not peculiar. Really,
Speaker 1: the only normal thing that exists.
Speaker 4: Okay, you're selling you goods and services.
Speaker 1: That's it, you know, Jamie, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know this, but ten thousand years ago in ancient Babylon,
Speaker 1: you know what people were doing. What goods and services?
Speaker 1: You know, my god, ten thousand years from now, when
Speaker 1: mankind has spread to the stars, goods and services. There's
Speaker 1: no other reason to go to the stars but goods
Speaker 1: and services. That's the message of Star Trek.
Speaker 4: There's more goods. I agree, I agree. I think that
Speaker 4: that is where things are headed. You know, we don't
Speaker 4: know the endgame of it, but yeah, we went to
Speaker 4: the stars to find more goods and more services.
Speaker 1: Right right, the ultimate finally, to find the goods and
Speaker 1: services that can make us happy. Right, and you'll find
Speaker 1: that justice, no, no fuck justice, yeah, all products, baby,
Speaker 1: That's the of this show. And we're back and we're
Speaker 1: thinking about doctor Laura as a child mad scientist. So
Speaker 1: when doctor Laura is ten or eleven years old, her
Speaker 1: parents have another daughter, and Laura has a bad relationship
Speaker 1: with her sister. She never forgives her for taking the
Speaker 1: attention that ought to have been hers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely, never forgives someone for being born. Mistake number one.
Speaker 1: I call my little brother every day and I just say,
Speaker 1: fuck you. You know, he's never been anything but good to me,
Speaker 1: sweet guy.
Speaker 4: But just suffered for his crimes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, even though his crimes in
Speaker 1: this case were taking enough of my parents' attention away
Speaker 1: that I was able to watch The Simpsons, which really
Speaker 1: worked out great for me.
Speaker 4: Incredible. My brothers, my little brother's major my brother brother's
Speaker 4: most notorious crime is that he he caught me making
Speaker 4: out with someone downstairs. Well, we were allegedly watching Family Guy,
Speaker 4: and was so disturbed that he threw up and woke
Speaker 4: up my parents and I got in trouble.
Speaker 1: See, my brother never narked on me. He's only ever
Speaker 1: been a good person. But when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: and like I was like fourteen or fifteen, and my
Speaker 1: parents were out for the night or something. I don't
Speaker 1: know why, they might have been doing a date night
Speaker 1: or some shit, but I was watching him and I
Speaker 1: tried to put on stuff that he wasn't normally out
Speaker 1: to watch, which like I would have loved when I
Speaker 1: had been his age, and he got scared and ran
Speaker 1: into his room behind like he was never a He
Speaker 1: was never a like I will knark on you. He
Speaker 1: just like was legitimately wanted to follow the rules punished
Speaker 1: for being a sweetie. Yeah, you know, he's a happier
Speaker 1: and healthier person than I will ever be. So who's
Speaker 1: to say?
Speaker 4: It does seem traumatizing to see an older sibling do
Speaker 4: something that is like coded as bad. But you know,
Speaker 4: what can you do there? You know, we celebrate our brothers,
Speaker 4: but they've got to go.
Speaker 1: They've got to go. They've got to go, Jamie. When
Speaker 1: the revolution comes, it'll be the little brothers first.
Speaker 4: Up against the wall to go.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think we can really make political hay off
Speaker 1: of this. Oh yeah, so she has a little sister
Speaker 1: never forgives her horrible relationship forever. She claims this is
Speaker 1: when doctor Laura claims, this is when she started dreaming
Speaker 1: of a career in psychology. I also think this is bullshit.
Speaker 1: She did not actually focus on psychology as a discipline
Speaker 1: until she is a mature adult, and this is how
Speaker 1: she I want you to hear how she framed this decision,
Speaker 1: this her childhood interest in psychology that there is no
Speaker 1: evidence of. In an interview later, once she was famous
Speaker 1: with psychology. Today all the kids talked about getting a
Speaker 1: boyfriend or a car, and I kept struggling with why
Speaker 1: I was alive, what life means? I don't I just
Speaker 1: don't believe you, doctor Laura. I just don't believe you.
Speaker 4: It's so weird for someone who is like famously encouraging
Speaker 4: women to return to the home, describing herself like fucking
Speaker 4: Alan Ginsburg, Like what are you saying?
Speaker 1: Shit, It's not just doctor. Lots of people do this.
Speaker 1: You get this online a lot with people being like wow,
Speaker 1: it seems like a lot of my peers are, you know,
Speaker 1: selfishly interested in just partying and drugs, and like, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about like stuff that matters, you know, whether that's
Speaker 1: politics or psychology or whatever. Like, no, everybody thinks about
Speaker 1: what things mean and who they are and what life
Speaker 1: is about. And everybody also wants to get laid.
Speaker 4: You're not special, chill out right, like like any intellectual
Speaker 4: curiosity excludes you from being a person with like human desire.
Speaker 1: To separate yourself from the rest of the human population
Speaker 1: because you want to feel like you're better than them.
Speaker 4: Hector, Laura, you were slamming Mike's cards with the rest
Speaker 4: of us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly like we all had. We all like got
Speaker 1: fucked up as kids and partied, and we also all
Speaker 1: looked up at the stars with wonder in our hearts,
Speaker 1: like you're not more of a person than anyone else.
Speaker 1: Speak Calm down, Calm down, doctor Laura, and calm down,
Speaker 1: you the listener. We all need that reminder sometimes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, take your breath, Take your breath. It's just a
Speaker 4: podcast for now.
Speaker 1: For now, until until the next Supreme Court ruling. God
Speaker 1: will it.
Speaker 4: That weaponizes podcasts?
Speaker 1: Yes, podcasters can now order airstrikes. Will Wheaton's finally gonna
Speaker 1: get his uh wow. Part of why I think that's right, Jamie.
Speaker 1: Part of why I think that doctor Laura is self
Speaker 1: mythologizing with a lot of this child man scientist stuff
Speaker 1: is that some of the quotes Vicky provides from her
Speaker 1: former classmates just describe her as a very normal girl.
Speaker 1: Here's here's a quote from the book talking about an
Speaker 1: interview with a friend of hers with the last name Eagle.
Speaker 1: Eagle even remembered Laura handing out advice and more. I
Speaker 1: had a shin of guy, explained Eagle, and I think
Speaker 1: we stalked him that year they were juniors, with her
Speaker 1: helping me. According to Eagle, Laura had several parties at
Speaker 1: her house as well, the kind where you turn off
Speaker 1: all the lights and play Johnny Mathis, said Eagle. She
Speaker 1: was fun. She could twist your arm into doing things
Speaker 1: you didn't want to do, but certainly nothing bad. Back then,
Speaker 1: we hadn't even heard of all the naughty things you
Speaker 1: could do. And that makes her sound like a perfectly
Speaker 1: normal teenage girl.
Speaker 4: It's so wild. How much more like infinitely accessible that
Speaker 4: makes her?
Speaker 1: Yes, Yeah, like there's the was she like the secret
Speaker 1: the only one really thinking about serious issues. I had
Speaker 1: to know the mysteries of the human mind. I wish
Speaker 1: she was at.
Speaker 4: Your way to characterize yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, helping her friends stalk a boy that they had
Speaker 1: a crush on and listening to fucking rock music or whatever,
Speaker 1: Johnny Mathis is. I'm not old enough to know. Don't
Speaker 1: come after me.
Speaker 4: Really, No, I think you might be soft rock, asked
Speaker 4: the Delilah audience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they'll they'll figure it out. So one thing
Speaker 1: we do see early evidence on is that people really
Speaker 1: did not like working with doctor Laura. She wrote for
Speaker 1: the school paper, and at one point they had a
Speaker 1: vote for who should be editor in the next year,
Speaker 1: and there was a classmate who was out sick and
Speaker 1: who had already said I don't want to be the
Speaker 1: editor when this vote comes up, and they all vote
Speaker 1: for him, even though Laura is campaigning for the job,
Speaker 1: because everyone seems to have agreed she should not have power,
Speaker 1: which I do find funny.
Speaker 4: Whoa bomber? That does feel like, I mean, like losing
Speaker 4: a little things. You're like, at what point does the
Speaker 4: true supervillain origin story take hold? Sometimes I do feel like,
Speaker 4: I mean, can you think of another example where the
Speaker 4: loss of a student election.
Speaker 1: Leads to it?
Speaker 4: It feels like a classic like supervillain origin story of
Speaker 4: like oh my peers hate me.
Speaker 1: I mean, all of Hitler's madness started when he didn't
Speaker 1: get picked to be the editor for his high school yearbook.
Speaker 1: You know, that's widely agreed on by Hitler's That was
Speaker 1: a lie people, I know people can't tell what Eliah
Speaker 1: is on the show, say that was a lie.
Speaker 4: It's fun look and and something something I'm a murderer
Speaker 4: and something something daddy, Okay. I do feel like, yeah,
Speaker 4: if you were a if you're a high schooler, just
Speaker 4: like vote the most evil person who is running into
Speaker 4: student government and then they'll just taper off.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think we should have like a like you know how,
Speaker 1: you know how there's that Uh. I'm trying to think
Speaker 1: of the like a Hunger Games situation. We should have that,
Speaker 1: but only for the kids who self select to be
Speaker 1: in student government. They're not going anywhere good, you know.
Speaker 4: Wow. I will not publicly agree to that, but.
Speaker 1: I think it is. But Jamie franchise, So you're arguing
Speaker 1: against the people here. I'm just I'm just a man
Speaker 1: of the people.
Speaker 4: My man, you're pro Susanne Collins and that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that guy who died that everybody liked he
Speaker 1: was in those movies anyway. That Yeah?
Speaker 4: Oh were you yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 1: Doctor Laura said this to the Los Angeles Times home
Speaker 1: magazine in nineteen seventy nine about this period in her life.
Speaker 1: Looking back, it seems to me I was struggling for
Speaker 1: some kind of acknowledgment or approval. I didn't feel happy,
Speaker 1: just driven towards science, and she said she reacted by
Speaker 1: retreating into the seemingly rational world of science. The childhood
Speaker 1: experiments with milk bottles and fruitflies turned into experiments in
Speaker 1: genetics and biochemistry. When she was in her teens. She
Speaker 1: even built her own lab equipment in the basement.
Speaker 4: Isn't it funny that, like that's a whether we like
Speaker 4: her or not, that's a woman talking about science, but
Speaker 4: it inevitably ended up in La Times Home. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: doctor Laura Codd.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very much so. Yeah, now there is some evidence
Speaker 1: she certainly seems to have been a good at science
Speaker 1: and very interested in it as a young girl. There's
Speaker 1: her quote from her Jericho High School yearbook on the
Speaker 1: U or she graduated, says quote because because it's so
Speaker 1: basically in this yearbook, it wasn't a huge school. So
Speaker 1: each each kid or each page would have two kids
Speaker 1: and you'd get a photo of them and then like
Speaker 1: that description of them at a quote. Right, And the
Speaker 1: quote that someone wrote for doctor Laura was Heredity determines
Speaker 1: the color of her eyes, but science lights them up.
Speaker 1: Her assistance is invaluable in any research lab. That's kind
Speaker 1: of weird. I don't know who that, but I find
Speaker 1: it off putting. Don't talk about what are we doing?
Speaker 1: Why are we.
Speaker 4: Talking about this in school? Weirdly, like a skull A skull.
Speaker 1: Measure kind of feels like you're going to lead to
Speaker 1: race mixing at some point.
Speaker 4: I don't like leading with heredity. Is is gross? Yeah,
Speaker 4: it makes me want to look up for Hopper. Durt's
Speaker 4: your book quote because I forget what it was, but
Speaker 4: I know it always made me laugh.
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean the murderer Sorr. I was thinking of
Speaker 1: Fred Durst.
Speaker 4: No, well, common misconception was.
Speaker 1: Recently in the great movie I saw the TV Glow,
Speaker 1: which was very good, he was.
Speaker 4: Yes, I loved that movie and I loved his appearance
Speaker 4: Robert Durst. No, he's a dead murderer. But Robert Durst.
Speaker 4: We Durst not criticize this bob whose activities make him
Speaker 4: stand out from the mob, which is an incredible yearbook
Speaker 4: quote for an eventual murderer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's an iconoclast.
Speaker 4: You know, I look I for years, I was like,
Speaker 4: he's innocent, and then that joke stopped being funny and
Speaker 4: then I stopped saying it. But he did, you know,
Speaker 4: get away with I think it was like in Texas
Speaker 4: in Galveston. He got away with dismembering someone in self
Speaker 4: defense was his most notorious crime.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I don't know if it's his most notorious crime.
Speaker 1: I think that hair that hair style was a worse crime.
Speaker 4: Wow, get his act.
Speaker 1: Also, I'm also pro murder. You know this about me?
Speaker 4: I know pro murder.
Speaker 1: I know. Yeah, yeah, I'm not. I'm I feel like
Speaker 1: the way a lot of voters, like those swing voters
Speaker 1: who keep going back between Trump and Biden. That's how
Speaker 1: I feel about murder. You know, I'm a swing voter
Speaker 1: for murder. You know some murders, I like some murders.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 4: I take it. I refuse to continue.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's probably a good idea. Once she graduates high school,
Speaker 1: her ambition is to become a great research scientist, and
Speaker 1: she would talk constantly to friends and the adults in
Speaker 1: her life that she wanted to find about wanting to
Speaker 1: find the cure for cancer. And you know, that's how
Speaker 1: kids talk about that. That's not really how cancer works,
Speaker 1: but that's how kids who are ambitious might talk about cancer.
Speaker 1: So I believe that, right. Laurie is always conservative as
Speaker 1: a kid. Some of her her friends recall her arguing
Speaker 1: about politics with them, but also like not weird, not weirdly,
Speaker 1: so just like you know, some kids, kids usually express
Speaker 1: some form of political opinion, and nobody really hers was
Speaker 1: not particular noteworthy kind of The most devastating detail of
Speaker 1: her adolescence comes right after she graduated high school and
Speaker 1: before she left for college. She worked up the courage
Speaker 1: to ask her dad, who was the only one of
Speaker 1: her parents that she seems to have actually loved, Am
Speaker 1: I pretty? And he said, no, you know, you don't
Speaker 1: have the looks that'll make a guy turn his head. Oh,
Speaker 1: is my god horrible. That's just devastating.
Speaker 4: It's your villain origin story. No, I forget what I
Speaker 4: said about that's oh my god.
Speaker 1: And we don't get much. She hates her mom. I
Speaker 1: just don't know that. We don't really get much in
Speaker 1: the way of detail as to why. So either what
Speaker 1: her mom was saying was way worse than this, or
Speaker 1: it's something a lot messier, like her mom was not
Speaker 1: nearly as shitty as her dad, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: she idolized her dad. You know, whatever is going on,
Speaker 1: there's any.
Speaker 4: Sort of human psychology that doctor Laura would refuse to
Speaker 4: understand oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she does not seem to have analyzed this, but yeah.
Speaker 4: That is like, that is devastating.
Speaker 1: We do get some hints of what the worst shit
Speaker 1: from her mom might have been, if that is indeed
Speaker 1: what was going on here, which is that her college
Speaker 1: roommates recalled that she was afraid of her mom would
Speaker 1: steal any boyfriend she happened to get, which is like
Speaker 1: a weirdly specific and also weird thing for a teenage
Speaker 1: girl to worry about. And if that was really a
Speaker 1: thing that happened to her boy Laura, I am sorry.
Speaker 1: That is a rough draw of the mom cart that's extreme.
Speaker 4: That also happened to the creator of Beanie Babies with
Speaker 4: his dad.
Speaker 1: Well, in that case, I think his dad did the
Speaker 1: right thing. So, and I don't.
Speaker 4: Totally disagree with you as the unfortunate thing.
Speaker 1: All I know is what I learned in that movie
Speaker 1: that I assume is Cannon.
Speaker 4: Oh that movie's dog shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, That's why I said. So. Laura goes
Speaker 1: to Stonybrook University, where studies physiology. Laura is noted by
Speaker 1: her few friends as never leaving campus. She does not
Speaker 1: go home for the holiday or anything, and she is
Speaker 1: also not an easy person to live with. One classmate
Speaker 1: recalls she always had an opinion of things and what
Speaker 1: people should be doing. Laura was particularly incensed whenever her
Speaker 1: roommates would have boys over. It didn't matter that everyone's
Speaker 1: doors were open and that no one was fucking, she
Speaker 1: would yell at them because she was sure they were
Speaker 1: screwing around and having premarital sex. So this is where
Speaker 1: we get some outside info that like, okay, so maybe
Speaker 1: she's just always sucked ass?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: Where does it.
Speaker 4: Sounds like whatever insecurity is or like she is internalized
Speaker 4: growing up has now turned into weapons forever?
Speaker 1: So this was a you know, she was off putting.
Speaker 1: No one ever was able to live with her for
Speaker 1: more than like a semester at a time. Right, She's
Speaker 1: that kind of person. After graduating, she went to Columbia
Speaker 1: University to get her masters and studied under an MD
Speaker 1: who was researching the glucose transport mechanism. Laura was at
Speaker 1: this point scientifically interested in finding more efficient methods of
Speaker 1: measuring glucose levels and response to insulin, which would have
Speaker 1: been great. If she'd stuck with that, that we would
Speaker 1: have been great.
Speaker 4: She doesn't.
Speaker 1: What she does do is meet a guy named Rudolph.
Speaker 1: She meets him because so she's a walker. She's one
Speaker 1: of these people who takes regular long walks, and it
Speaker 1: says something deeply unhinged about her that she took these
Speaker 1: long walks and high heels. And one day she catches
Speaker 1: her heel on a bridge, which makes her fall and
Speaker 1: seriously injure her kneecap, and Rudolph is onseen and gallantly
Speaker 1: rescues her. So the two start their relationship while Laura
Speaker 1: is in a wheelchair and dependent on him. They get married,
Speaker 1: but as she heals, she becomes aware of the horrifying
Speaker 1: reality that like Rudolph fell in love with the version
Speaker 1: of her that was dependent on him, and Laura is
Speaker 1: an extremely independent person, right, so the marriage starts to
Speaker 1: break apart. You know, it's just kind of a doomed situation,
Speaker 1: and the sort of thing that very young people do, know,
Speaker 1: get married too early based on something that is more
Speaker 1: of like a momentary thing that rather than evidence of
Speaker 1: like long term compatibility.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: Not a weird story and not one that most people
Speaker 1: would judge someone over, although doctor Laura is going to
Speaker 1: build a career judging people.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's like but if anyone is qualified. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm brave of both of you.
Speaker 2: Did not make a Rudolph the Red Nose reindeer joke.
Speaker 3: Just wanted to point that out.
Speaker 1: I don't know what does nose look like. So Laura
Speaker 1: graduated and broke up with her husband right around the
Speaker 1: same time she gets her master's degree. The actual divorce
Speaker 1: process is going to take some time, but before it's done,
Speaker 1: Laura travels to Los Angeles to teach physiology and human
Speaker 1: sexuality at the University of Southern California IA. The divorce, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great stuff. It's great stuff. The divorce gets finalized
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven, and Laura is going to spend
Speaker 1: the rest of her life delighting in telling interviewers that
Speaker 1: her ex husband brings his parents to court. I don't
Speaker 1: know enough to say which of them was the bad guy,
Speaker 1: but she does kind of sound like a dick when
Speaker 1: she talks about it. But hey, no fault divorce, which
Speaker 1: she's going to hate in the future.
Speaker 4: Oh great.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's while teaching at USC that, not quite
Speaker 1: yet a doctor, Laura Slashinger would meet a man who
Speaker 1: is going to set her on the road to becoming
Speaker 1: an icon. And that man's name is Bill Balance with
Speaker 1: two l's. Have you ever heard of Bill?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 4: I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Oh, Jamie, You're gonna love learning about this piece of shit.
Speaker 1: This is a real influential piece of shit.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: Born in Peoria, Illinois, Balance got his degree in journalism
Speaker 1: and served in the Marines before starting a varied career
Speaker 1: as a broadcaster during the Golden Age of radio from
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies. He worked everywhere
Speaker 1: from Denver in Honolulu to San Diego, San Francisco, and
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, which is where he was when Laura met him.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy one. He had launched a new hit
Speaker 1: series widely considered to be the first shock jock show.
Speaker 1: He's not quite a shock jock, but he is the
Speaker 1: he is the primordial ooze from which the shock jocks emerge.
Speaker 4: Right, Okay, it's all coming to yes there, Okay.
Speaker 1: And he is. He's hugely influential. He is pre Rush Limbaugh,
Speaker 1: he is pre Howard Stern, but he is all of
Speaker 1: them descended. You and I unfortunately have this guy's DNA and.
Speaker 4: Us I'm sure we do. And that what a bummer. Okay,
Speaker 4: all right, he is our he is daddy.
Speaker 1: He's great granddaddy at least.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the series that takes makes Bill take off.
Speaker 1: He's reasonably successful. But he has his huge hit series
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, and that series is Feminine Forum
Speaker 1: on KGBS AM in Los Angeles. I know you're you're
Speaker 1: just psyched to hear what Feminine Forum was?
Speaker 4: J I really hope is he the host?
Speaker 1: He suare? Is he share is good?
Speaker 4: I was hoping he would be the host?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Absolutely absolutely, Here's la.
Speaker 1: Times describes the show design for a young female audience.
Speaker 1: The daily five hour show featured topics such as where
Speaker 1: did his love go? And how did you know it
Speaker 1: was gone? And have you ever thrown yourself at a
Speaker 1: hunk who wasn't catching? And are you a red hot mama?
Speaker 1: Balance played the role of what former Times radio columnist
Speaker 1: James Brown called the lascivious uncle, chiding his doll babies
Speaker 1: to rid themselves of their grunt headed pressers. Within a year,
Speaker 1: Balance's Feminine Forum was one of the most popular radio
Speaker 1: shows in Los Angeles, with as many men turning in
Speaker 1: as women. By turns witty racy and confessional. The Daring
Speaker 1: program was soon syndicated across the country and spawned imitators
Speaker 1: in dozens of cities. Oh so, how are you feeling
Speaker 1: about that, Jamie.
Speaker 4: I'm just kind of taking it all in.
Speaker 1: It's a lot, there's a lot there.
Speaker 4: I feel like I my brain kind of like I
Speaker 4: started to get brain freeze at lascivious uncle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't have this guy anymore. You don't need
Speaker 1: to think of who because women get to my show
Speaker 1: is now, right, And.
Speaker 4: I guess that he maybe he was the final the
Speaker 4: final boss of Lasivia's uncles, because I can think of
Speaker 4: Lasivia's aunties or not even Lasivia's aunties, I can think
Speaker 4: of like shame shameful aunties.
Speaker 1: Bill is uncle.
Speaker 4: Was he popular? Was he genuinely popular among as far
Speaker 4: as I can tell?
Speaker 1: Very popular with young women? Because again fascinating, there's not
Speaker 1: a lot for them. There's not a lot of radio
Speaker 1: that's just young women talking about their relationship problems, their
Speaker 1: difficulties dating, and like Bill is there and the show
Speaker 1: exists because there's a man to kind of uh uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, midwife, if you'll forgive the phrasing, right,
Speaker 1: he's got to be there, and he's got to be
Speaker 1: like he's got to be kind of holding it up
Speaker 1: so that the network, you know, will approve it in
Speaker 1: the first place. But a huge part of the show,
Speaker 1: it's never just Bill as the host either. He brings
Speaker 1: in a lot of women, including eventually female like therapists
Speaker 1: and doctors and stuff as guest experts to help talk
Speaker 1: with these women callers about their like relationship issues and stuff.
Speaker 4: So is the tone of this show, like, as far
Speaker 4: as we know, is it doctor Laura coded? Is it
Speaker 4: kind of rooted in shamee?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 4: What is the vibe of it?
Speaker 1: He nearly always sides with the women calling a big
Speaker 1: part of he does it in a way that you
Speaker 1: and I would say is deeply sexist and gross. But
Speaker 1: he always he tells them like that their feelings are valid.
Speaker 1: A huge A lot of the times his advice is
Speaker 1: you need to dump that man. You're better than him, right, God,
Speaker 1: It's really it's complicated. Bill's legacy in this part is
Speaker 1: like very much it's not just bad or just good, right.
Speaker 4: I feel like, if anything, I don't know, I don't
Speaker 4: want to hand it to this guy in any way,
Speaker 4: shape or for him. But if his work demonstrated that
Speaker 4: there is a clear and present need for like young
Speaker 4: women to have their feelings validated by literally fucking anyone
Speaker 4: in a public forum, like that is such a bummer
Speaker 4: that it like it took someone that far afield from
Speaker 4: who they were being, like, no, you're it's okay.
Speaker 1: I would have to say. You can draw two lines
Speaker 1: from Bill. One line is shows like the Bechdel Cast right,
Speaker 1: where you've got women like talking without any kind of
Speaker 1: male intermediary, and like, that is a major thing in
Speaker 1: entertainment and it has been for quite some time. And
Speaker 1: Bill helped show that there was a thirst for that, right, and.
Speaker 4: The other thing the audience existed.
Speaker 1: Yes, the other thing Bill helped show is that a
Speaker 1: lot of people would listen to an old guy be
Speaker 1: gross to women, be gross about women. And so you
Speaker 1: get a lot of like the shock jockshit that's gonna
Speaker 1: come later comes out like a lot of people a
Speaker 1: lot of what what what networks get from this is
Speaker 1: that like, oh, there's a lot of interest in men
Speaker 1: talking to women about sex, right.
Speaker 4: Okay, So it's like you could you could pull how
Speaker 4: the Bexel cast.
Speaker 1: Right, that's kind of what's interesting about Bill. He's early
Speaker 1: enough fact that you can pull both from it, right,
Speaker 1: And I should give you at this point an example
Speaker 1: of the kind of incisive commentary that Bill provided. Oh boy, Sophie,
Speaker 1: this is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my gosh, my chest just tightened.
Speaker 3: Your husband he was not the father of this baby.
Speaker 1: Well, actually it's rather complicated.
Speaker 3: But we're going to explain it to Bill. My child
Speaker 3: is forty two. Child's father is my husband father. The
Speaker 3: child's father is your husband's father.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In other words, you were making it with your father
Speaker 3: in law to be right before the ceremony.
Speaker 4: Right, That's why I changed my mind, because.
Speaker 3: You figured that his that your father in law to be,
Speaker 3: was a better man than his own son. Right, So
Speaker 3: why didn't you marry the father in law? Was he
Speaker 3: still married to your ex, to your soon to be
Speaker 3: mother in law. Yeah, Oh, that's a kind of a
Speaker 3: dull thing for him to have done.
Speaker 4: Much longer.
Speaker 3: In other words, if you marry the projected or proposed husband,
Speaker 3: he would be the he would be the brother of
Speaker 3: his own child. Yeah, all right, But do you mention
Speaker 3: just in passing him was kind of a throwaway line,
Speaker 3: Giannina Mia, you mentioned that maybe it won't be for long.
Speaker 3: You mean he's going to get rid of his old
Speaker 3: fat wife and marry you, well, not marry me.
Speaker 5: I don't want to get married.
Speaker 4: So you see, Now, why is he hitting every consonant
Speaker 4: like that?
Speaker 1: That's that's how you delivered shit on the radio.
Speaker 4: Back then, what for back in the day.
Speaker 1: He's not really he's not being judgmental or mean there
Speaker 1: he's being silly. He's kind of making fun of it
Speaker 1: a little bit, but he's not. He's mostly just like
Speaker 1: asking her for details because it's like an interesting saucy story.
Speaker 4: Right. Well, yeah, that's the thing. I was like, I
Speaker 4: don't think he's doing nothing there. I think he's asked
Speaker 4: leading questions that he knows the answer to. That makes
Speaker 4: the behavior sound like more like not even that it's
Speaker 4: not salacious, but you know, like giving whatever, telling the
Speaker 4: listeners like, oh, that thing that you're wondering is like,
Speaker 4: is this person doing something kind of fucked up?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: And I and here is my fysaurus to prove it.
Speaker 4: Like he's doing a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's doing a lot, but he's also doing you see.
Speaker 1: You can also see him in the line to uh,
Speaker 1: doctor Laura, right where they they're doing a similar thing.
Speaker 1: Like Bill, as soon as he hears the basis of this,
Speaker 1: he's like, I need to steer this to talking about
Speaker 1: how this guy she's marrying is going to be the
Speaker 1: brother to her son. Right, that's the line that needs
Speaker 1: to get out. It's like the old you know, there's
Speaker 1: a popular song around the time, I'm my own grandpa, right,
Speaker 1: Like I need to get that, I need to be yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Oh my god. It's a great song here, doctor Demento.
Speaker 1: Very funny song. But he's really got a hit on that, right,
Speaker 1: because he knows that that's like the craziest, funniest detail.
Speaker 1: But the way he kind of pulls it out, he's
Speaker 1: got a much more slower style, like he's he's not
Speaker 1: doctor Laura, gives stuff less time to breathe, which is
Speaker 1: interesting to me, Like one of them isn't necessarily more
Speaker 1: honest than the other, but it is interesting, Like the different.
Speaker 4: To Bill's five.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Bill gets five definitely here, right, No, I mean
Speaker 1: you heard the slide whistle in there, he le, this is,
Speaker 1: of course the slide whistle show. So Bill is popular
Speaker 1: and I should you know, I said earlier it was
Speaker 1: extremely popular among women there's also a lot of rage
Speaker 1: inspired by this show, right, and he gets attacked a
Speaker 1: lot by feminist organizations obviously, and I'm going to continue
Speaker 1: that quote from the LA Weekly. Feminist groups accused the
Speaker 1: program of exploitation and insulting the intelligence of his collars.
Speaker 1: For his part, Balance called women's rights activists professional blind dates.
Speaker 1: So he's that kind of piece of shit, right, He's
Speaker 1: Howard Stern too, you know, although Howard Stern is much
Speaker 1: better personally.
Speaker 4: What this has to do with the Bechtel cast Robert
Speaker 4: I swear to.
Speaker 1: God, I don't know, Jamie. Like, it's a different era
Speaker 1: before Bill Balance. After Bill, you get Doctor Laura. After Bill,
Speaker 1: you get a lot of shows that are like women
Speaker 1: talking to and about women. Sure, he's not the only
Speaker 1: thing in there, but he's he's a he breaks a
Speaker 1: seal on what talk radio can be. And it's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that like after Bill, you get Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: and you get fucking like all of the shock jocks
Speaker 1: that we get Michael Medved, all of these horrible things.
Speaker 1: He's the first fish that walked on land, right, rather
Speaker 1: than the immediate Simian precursor, right, Like, he just sort
Speaker 1: of shows that radio can be a different thing than
Speaker 1: it had been before.
Speaker 4: I do think like across mediums, it is unfortunate and
Speaker 4: vile that there's like it's often just like a lucivious
Speaker 4: uncle who ends up, you know, proving that they're proving
Speaker 4: again because it's been proven over and over and over
Speaker 4: that there is an audience that is not just like men,
Speaker 4: and yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: There's and he does it by being like, there's an
Speaker 1: audience that's just not men for this kind of smut right,
Speaker 1: for smut talk, you know, but that does eventually lead
Speaker 1: to shows that are not smutty, right, Like, there's a
Speaker 1: there is a line you can draw there. And when
Speaker 1: I talk about the success of this show by night,
Speaker 1: he starts this in nineteen seventy one. By nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: there are five hundred shows and more that are ripoffs
Speaker 1: of the Bill Balance Show in different stations around the country,
Speaker 1: and Bill's show is more popular than ever. One of
Speaker 1: his most popular segments is a recurring bit with doctor
Speaker 1: Norton Christi, a clinical psychologist who had worked for the
Speaker 1: Rand Corporation. Oh yeah, doctor Christy's a fascinating pace as shit.
Speaker 1: Christie's job was to provide pseudo credible scientific analyzes of
Speaker 1: the fears and complaints made by ballast as callers. Right,
Speaker 1: so they quickly and again this is part of like
Speaker 1: the actual talent here is recognizing people don't just want
Speaker 1: to hear Bill be gross on the air and make jokes.
Speaker 1: They want to hear someone who you can claim as
Speaker 1: a scientist explain what the psychological oh.
Speaker 4: Right, certainly wouldn't continue on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean yeah, he's again you can draw direct
Speaker 1: line from Bill to to Jordan Peterson, right, sure, sure, or.
Speaker 4: I mean doctor Phil like doctor.
Speaker 1: Phil right, Yes, yes, absolutely, this is Bill is a
Speaker 1: really influend. He's not the only person who helps make
Speaker 1: this clear to the people making radio shows and eventually
Speaker 1: TV shows, but he's a major figure in that movement,
Speaker 1: and his station managers saw this as an correctly, as
Speaker 1: an endlessly reproducible format. You get a guy who's kind
Speaker 1: of funny, you get a medical prof someone you can
Speaker 1: claim as a medical professional, and you have callers talk
Speaker 1: about their fucked up lives. Billions of dollars, right, infinite
Speaker 1: money from doing this shit up to this day. Right, yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: one thing they do recognize is that you need a
Speaker 1: stable of experts because we're on the air a lot,
Speaker 1: and actual credible clinical psychologists tend to be busy. Right,
Speaker 1: if you're a good clinical psychologist, you probably don't have
Speaker 1: five hours a day to talk to you about who's
Speaker 1: on the radio, right.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, well, let's not know, no shade, but
Speaker 4: Fraser certainly found the time, and that was part of
Speaker 4: the reason that Niles and him had such problems. Niles
Speaker 4: didn't have five hours of radio a day because he
Speaker 4: was a real doctor.
Speaker 1: That is the point of the Fraser Show, is that
Speaker 1: Fraser's not a real psychiagy, He's a fra Yeah, but
Speaker 1: that's part of what makes it fun.
Speaker 4: I love, I love what a fraud that man is.
Speaker 4: Absolutely god such a formative childhood crush.
Speaker 1: But asolutely absolutely, look it was formative. We're talking about Niles, right.
Speaker 4: Oh, I'm talking about both of them.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, good, yeah, absolutely, both of them. Sure, fine,
Speaker 1: we throw Roz in there, sure, you know, honestly, throw
Speaker 1: John Mahoney on that pile, and on a.
Speaker 4: Good day, maybe even Bulldog, you know.
Speaker 1: Maybe Bulldog if he's in a good mood. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm glad we're having this this complex Fraser talk ja.
Speaker 1: So maris too once or twenty anyway, whatever, Oh, I.
Speaker 4: Mean, her absence was very you know, sexially potent.
Speaker 1: Right, So the station management saw this as an endlessly
Speaker 1: reproducible format. But they need people who actually have time.
Speaker 1: So they need people who they can pretender credible medical experts,
Speaker 1: but aren't enough of a credible medical expert to like,
Speaker 1: have better things to do. And this is where Laura
Speaker 1: Slishinger is going to come in.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: She first calls into Bill's show in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: Bill has an expert where he's asking women to call
Speaker 1: in and say and tell him would you rather be
Speaker 1: a widow or a divorcee? Right, Laura calls in. She
Speaker 1: uses a fake name, and she picks widow, and she explains, quote,
Speaker 1: then you don't have to second guess yourself whether you
Speaker 1: made the right choice in leaving. You don't feel guilt.
Speaker 1: Everybody feels sorry for you. They come over and cook
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 4: Oh slay, that's her reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Bill recognizes two key things about Laura from this call.
Speaker 1: One of them is she has a good voice for
Speaker 1: radio and she speaks well, and she's someone who actually
Speaker 1: might have some potential on the air, and the other
Speaker 1: the larger is that she sounds hot, so he keeps
Speaker 1: her on the line for twenty minutes and then he
Speaker 1: has her produce his producer get her phone number, which
Speaker 1: he's going to be a creep about. But that's all
Speaker 1: for part two, Jamie, that's all for part two.
Speaker 4: I am I am invested.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, let's all come back in a day or
Speaker 1: so and we'll learn everything there is to know about
Speaker 1: the Doctor Laura Show.
Speaker 4: Like every episode, I'm like, I think she's going to
Speaker 4: turn this around. I am a spit in the face
Speaker 4: of history. She's going to be an awesome person. I
Speaker 4: just know.
Speaker 1: This is This is where we learned that Doctor Laura
Speaker 1: stopped the second nine to eleven.
Speaker 4: You know, things wouldn't have gone that way if she
Speaker 4: was There.
Speaker 1: Were going to be three more planes, but not. She
Speaker 1: talked them all down. She told those hijackers to reconsider
Speaker 1: their lives, you know, with this job, raise a family.
Speaker 1: She did it. Everybody saved us, all save the I
Speaker 1: don't know, some other building. I don't know, another famous building.
Speaker 4: And even bigger one, the bigger one, Jamie.
Speaker 1: Where can people find you on the internet?
Speaker 4: Well, Robert, you can find me on this very network.
Speaker 4: You can find me every week on Tuesdays sixteenth Minute
Speaker 4: of Fame, where I talked to and about the main
Speaker 4: characters of the Internet and what their notoriety meant for
Speaker 4: the Internet and for them, and yeah, yeah, we Sophie
Speaker 4: of course is the producer. You are a producer, and
Speaker 4: Ian is an editor. So I mean, we're keeping it
Speaker 4: in the family over there. And it's hot Dog season,
Speaker 4: so get a copy of Raw Dog while you're on it. Tomorrow,
Speaker 4: I am as we were recording this. Tomorrow, I'm flying
Speaker 4: to New York to cover the Hot Dog contest. And
Speaker 4: it's it's going to be a barn burner this year.
Speaker 4: It's going to be very fraught. I can't wait.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Joey burn a barn down, Burn something down, folks.
Speaker 1: That's all I ask for my listeners. Light a fire somewhere,
Speaker 1: you know, we can do least we can do. It
Speaker 1: could be a legal fire, it could be an illegal fire.
Speaker 1: I prefer fires that are a gray area. You know,
Speaker 1: really like try to try to like get like like
Speaker 1: within six hours of a burn band starting, so you've
Speaker 1: got that plausible deniability, you know, really gamble.
Speaker 4: On like a sexy little Keep them guessing, you guess,
Speaker 4: Keep them guessing.
Speaker 1: That's all I ask, Baby, That's all I ask.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
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