Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Dr. Laura Episodes

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to discuss the life and times of Dr. Laura Schlesinger, the angriest woman on the radio and harbinger of Jordan Peterson. (2 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I miss the days when I felt like I could just open a podcast by asking what's boiling my pig anuses or something along those lines. You know, I, uh, we've, we've, we've achieved a lot of success over the last five or six years here at behind the bastards. We've risen to the top of our field. You know, we, uh, we're, we're beloved by all, by all influential, powerful, mighty, but that comes with a corresponding loss of power, you know, the power to be yourself, right? Really the power to experiment goes away as one becomes a caricature of themselves.

And so I understand a lot of the troubles facing President Biden today. That's really what I wanna say with the opening of this podcast. Wow. That's how we're leading. I was thinking about Joe Biden because I was thinking about our old what's boiling my pig anus's intro

and his skin does look a little bit like a boiled pig anus. Well, that's fair. I thought you were gonna say that he peaked around the same time that we peaked with our intros, which is when you said, what's cracking my pepper so many years ago. Which was one of your best intros ever. That was, yeah, that was several lifetimes ago

for all of us. But it's stuck in my heart, you know? It's stuck in my heart the way that a boiled pig anus sticks in a restaurant that does not have enough money for calamari. Look it up. That's what a lot of the calamari is. Really?

That's what they do. That's fascinating. They bread pig anuses and fry them in places that don't want to spend money on calamari. If you've ever had cheap calamari, solid chance it's a pig anus. Yeah. You know, I'm less bothered by that

than I would like to be. I feel like if I got gotten in that way, and I've had some cheap calamari, so I certainly have, you know, the texture just makes sense to me in my mind. It makes sense. Well, I've just never been more thrilled to have an allergy to gluten, so that I don't have to encounter accidental

Pig anus when I want calamari and hey, I want to be clear here anus Bread crumbs, okay, okay, you can use a gluten-free breading You know if people want to if people want to drill down my political intentions here, I would say that Joe Biden's skin has the look of pig anus that was breaded in a healthy gluten free batter. Whereas Trump's it's one of those like it's like not not the good batter. It's like the off brand panko.

And it's just it's loaded with with gluten. You know, it's not great for you. It's punko. As opposed to the healthy Joe Biden pig anus. Great. Wow, okay. You've made your political stance abundantly clear. Thank you.

We journalists are supposed to stay inscrutable. So I hope this hasn't ruined my credibility. No, people are gonna have to break this down second by second to know exactly when Robert Evans revealed his bias. Now, speaking of anuses, do you know who's a big asshole? No, tell me. The subject of our episodes today, Jamie,

because this week we are talking about Dr. Laura Schlesinger. Wow, okay. Yeah, that's right, baby. That's right, it's the Dr. Laura episodes. Laura Schlesinger. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's right, baby. That's right. It's the Dr. Laura episodes. Okay. Are you excited?

What do you know about Dr. Laura? What do I know about Dr. Laura? I mean, I don't know. I feel like she is not someone that I have had a close relationship with. I would say I know that she is Mrs. Self-Help. I know that she does. If my understanding is correct,

she is a self-help person who primarily caters to women, but also hates all women, including herself. Is that right? Yeah, that would be a good way of describing her. She is like the most hostile to women of any major woman like media influencer that I can recall. That's really saying something.

There's a lot to be said about like the toxicity in some of the people, a lot of the people that, for example, Oprah has brought on her show, right? There are a lot of valid criticisms, but Oprah's, her whole kind of thing is positivity. You should feel good about yourself, you should feel good. And you know, she mixes that in with some like dangerous dieting tips and stuff,

but that doesn't change the fact that she- Oh yeah, she's trying to kill you, but like also you, I can never really divorce myself with Oprah from the idea that she doesn't, I don't know, that she like is pilled enough by the culture that she doesn't, I don't know, that she like is pilled enough by the culture that she pushes. Yeah. That I'm never fully sure

if she knows how much she's hurting her audience. From what I've heard of Laura Schlesinger, she doesn't really have an issue. She has a powerful issue. And I think dissecting that is going to be an interesting part of this. But first, that's the cold open. When we come back, more Dr. Laura.

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New episodes every Thursday. In the early morning hours of September 6th, 2016, St. Louis rapper and activist Darren Seals was found murdered. That's what they gonna learn. Own for death, own for nothing. Every day Darren would tell her, all right, Ma, be prepared.

They are going to try to kill me. All episodes available now. Listen to After the Uprising, The Murder of Darren Seals, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jordan Gonsalves and I'm a journalist. Join me on my new podcast, But We Loved,

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The key is to understanding yourself, learning to love and embrace yourself. You can listen to But We Loved on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Jamie. To be clear, I didn't mean that she has, she doesn't have an issue. I meant that she doesn't have an issue with hating her audience openly. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Well, you know what? I would question that because what she hates is her collars.

The point of being in her audience is to hate her collars with her, right? That's kind of the core of Dr. Laura. She is providing you with this rapid fire hose of women making bad decisions. And even if they're not women making bad decisions, she is going to like attack them before they have a chance to fully explain their situation

so that you feel like they're women making bad decisions. It's, we'll be talking about this more, but what Dr. Laura offered, starting in the late 80s and early 90s, was the same thing that we get on Twitter when you wake up every morning and there's someone who had a really bad take or said something like stupid or crazy,

and the entire world, or at least your entire online social circle is making fun of them, that is what Dr. Laura offered. She just offered the version of it that existed in a world where the radio was the only way to really get something like that. Everybody gets to have their, I don't know,

two hours hate, listening to like the bad life choices of primarily young women having kids too early or who cheating on their boyfriends or having their boyfriends cheat on them, right? But that is what the appeal of her show was. Okay, that makes sense. So I'm not extremely familiar with the radio show, but that does make,

I feel like there should be more examined about the like radio host harassment to internet harassment pipeline. I was recently talking to a feminist vegan named Carol Adams, who's awesome. She wrote this book called The Sexual Politics of Meat. So I'm sure she would love the piggy in this discussion we just had.

That is a courageous title. I'm gonna give it to her. It's fucking cool. You have to be confident in your book to throw that out there. I really respect that. She is unbelievably fucking cool. Like I'm not joking.

Like, no, I met her at a hot dog convention. She's really fucking cool. I met her at a hot dog convention. Amazing stuff, Jamie. Look, I'm coming in hot today. I met her at a hot dog convention. Amazing stuff, Jamie. Look, I'm coming in hot today. I met her at a hot dog convention and she was, she's famously a vegan and was trying to sort of preach the gospel about vegan hot dogs.

But I was talking to her about how she is, cause she is in her seventies, I think. And she had been harassed for being, people hate feminists and vegans. And so they always came after her because the title of her book is so cool. And so it was like, she had to deal with Rush Limbaugh harassment in, you know, the nineties.

And then like the warped, like Jordan Peterson version of that same harassment, but it's the same playbook. And if you're, if you're wondering listener, I'm going to guess Dr. Laura is a big enough name. I think probably a majority of people are familiar with who she is in broad, but she was a, is still to this day, although now mostly on podcasts, a major radio talk show host whose primary thing

was giving women advice, not just women, but mostly women advice on their lives, right? And she was very mean about it. She is a precursor to Jordan Peterson. Dr. Jordan Peterson, I don't know if he doesn't become a celebrity without Dr. Laura, but it's a harder road for him because she did, had a major role in building a place,

not just in the media, but on the right wing for a wildly successful, like pop therapist who was primarily telling you, you need to clean your room, right? That's Dr. Laura and that's Jordan Peterson. Now he takes things- What was that book, Girl, Wash Your Face? Sophie, do you remember that one?

Yeah, no, Dr. Laura's book is a- Rachel Hollis? Yeah, that's a different one. I read it. Dr. Laura's book, a 10, yeah, that's a different one. I read it. Dr. Laura's book, which we'll hear from this episode is 10 Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, right? Oh, wow, I have seen that book in the wild.

Yes, yes. It's a big old seller. So I wanna get into this. I wanna talk about who Dr. Laura meant to me first, because we're gonna do something a little different here. We're gonna play some interstitial clips from her show up through like the 2000s to the modern era as we talk about her past because I would love to show you some of those very early from the 70s and 80s radio clips,

but they don't exist anymore. The vast majority of her early career is lost media. Jill did not listen to this part, to her radio show, Jamie? Jamie's mom? No, I feel lucky that my mom has a pretty good radar for women who hate other women and generally doesn't fuck with them.

Our radio personality when I was growing up, who I think is still in the mix, is Delilah. We were just listening to, you know, and that wasn't even pretending to give women advice. It was just people calling, being like, hey, can I send, you know, can we play a Celine Dion song for my husband who hates me? And Delilah's like, yes, queen, let's do it.

Like, and she's still on the air. I loved her. She played a lot of Leanne Rimes and Tracy Chapman. So that was my, yeah, I feel like I kind of lucked out where I never had to listen to Dr. Laura. I feel like she's inevitable. You will encounter her, but no, I never was around people who listened to her.

I unfortunately did because we carpooled and I always wanted to be closest to the adult because I had anxiety. And there was definitely some Dr. Laura in that in my childhood from various different adults driving to and from school. Robert, want to tell us your history? Yeah, so Dr. Laura is still around and still doing her thing, which is primarily kind of feeding our worst impulses to want to feel like all of the people around us are somehow not pulling their share, right?

This is the impulse that a lot of conservatism works off of, but it's also pretty, you see it in a lot of leftists, you see it in everybody, right? This idea that like somehow things are tough for me and I have this feeling that for other people they're easier and that's not fair. There's somebody grifting off of me. There's, you know, people feel this way because it's true. And it's true because like there's a tiny number of incredibly wealthy people who exist

and who make themselves wealthier, sucking value out of the rest of us, right? These are the Jack Welch ass finance schools and Steve Jobs wannabes who are financializing our lives to hell and hollowing out this country for short-term profit, doing stuff like buying up businesses, loading them with debt,

and then carrying out massive layoffs and reaping windfall profits for basically destroying people's lives, right? But it's, you know, that's true that like those people are out there and they're not putting in the same amount of work that you are and they're kind of ruining everything, but that's not immediately obvious to everybody.

And the role, the valuable role that someone like Dr. Laura plays in our media ecosystem is coming in and saying, you're right to feel like somebody's taking advantage of you. And here, I'm gonna play a bunch of selectively curated audio of people who are having too many kids that they can't support, or getting loaded up on debt, or doing other irresponsible things, right?

And these are the people that you should, you can spend some time today getting angry at these people and then go about your day And I will I will throw out some simple advice about everyone just needs to take more responsibility for themselves, right? That is where dr. Laura came into the picture and it's you know, she helps to establish She's not the first person in this but she she comes in alongside the first right? She's not the first person in this, but she comes in alongside the first, right? She is a contemporary of Rush Limbaugh. He hits a bit, or like literally just a couple of years

before she does in terms of like becoming a major figure. Morton Downey Jr., who we've talked about on the show, was another major figure in like, right around the same period of time. And her job was to give a lot of our moms, including my moms, people who had hard lives, who were angry and frustrated because shit isn't fair, somebody to blame that had no actual power, right?

And nothing really, that there was no harm to the people who are actually doing bad shit in our world if this person gets targeted, right? It's the same shit with like, freaking out over welfare moms, as opposed to corporate wage theft, which is, or freaking out over corporate, or over shoplifting, over like corporate wage theft,

which massively exceeds the value of everything shoplifted in this country by a factor, yeah, several times over. Everyone should shoplift. It's built into their budget to do. So when she's giving someone to blame, cause I feel like every generation has a figure like this for women of like, actually, I mean, I feel like the generation after it's different,

but like Sheryl Sandberg feels like a figure that is like, oh, there is a clear solution to this. And it's, you're the problem. And you just need to act wealthier than you are. And like forget any systemic oppression exists and then you'll be fine. Yeah, just lean into it. Whereas Dr. Laura's argument would be like,

you don't need to lean in. You need to quit your job and raise your kids. I see, okay. And return to traditional gender roles. And somehow that will make things fine, right? It was one of those, I think because my mom liked her so much, I remember her for a long time. She's part of like the cultural background noise of the world that I was raised in. Like when we would get in the car,

it would either be the car talk guys, if it was my dad who are broadly neutral, let's say neutral to good. Shockingly, yes. Click and clap, click and clap. The Tampa brothers, I think was their name. Yeah, unbelievably Midwestern. Probably has a lot to do with my incredible

Midwest appeal to this day. And then there was Dr. Laura, who my mom loved. My mom was kind of a frustrated person, like her entire first career plan had collapsed. She had tried to start two businesses and they had collapsed. She spent most of my early life in terrible debt and feeling like, like her hard work had not been rewarded. And I think she, there was tremendous appeal to her and finding people who were irresponsible and having this kind of Archon of conservative values, Dr. Laura yell at them because she felt somehow like people like that were responsible for her failures.

Right, that's the impression that I have gotten. I didn't really at the time, you know, as a kid, I thought Dr. Laura had it all figured out, right? Because my mom said that about her. Weirdly enough, like me starting to reevaluate her happened when I watched a Frasier episode at like age 14 or 15. Wow, he's doing the work.

He did the work, he did the work. Thank you, Kelsey. He was listening, Robert. Thank you, Kelsey. He was listening. He was always listening. There's a great episode of Frasier where they parody Dr. Laura with a character named Dr. Nora played by the great Christine Baranski, who is one of- I remember this.

Oh my gosh. See, now you're talking my language. I'm a huge Christine Baranski fan. Nobody, there's not anybody today who's got like a voice like that. And he like, oh God, she was great. I hope she's still alive. I hope so.

Yeah. Oh, she's very much alive. She's winning Emmys. I just saw her in Mamma Mia. Here we go again. She's great. I must just have been, I hope she's living her best life. I must just have missed the stuff she's been doing

more recently, but they did a good episode about her and it made me kind of, because the point of the episode is that like she gives all this advice on how you should live your life and it made me kind of, because the point of the episode is that like, she gives all this advice on how you should live your life and has absolutely followed none of it. And it turns out that's extremely accurate. Like the story of Dr. Laura is a woman who did the opposite of the things

that she advises women to do and gained tremendous wealth and influence as a result of doing all of the things she tells people not to do. She is the clearest example I found of somebody finding a ladder up and then cutting that ladder out like behind them, throwing it down to the ground. That's fascinating. I mean, because yeah, there's so many flavors of this kind of person where I feel like I

didn't have a Dr. Laura in the background of my childhood, but I definitely had Oprah in the background of my entire childhood. Right, and it felt more like her whole thing was like, you are enough, except not really. Not really, you are enough, but you're too fat. Like, yeah, that's exciting. Yeah, but you look like shit, and you're doing every, and like, and, but, you know, I guess where they kind of meet

is the fear mongering around class and around, like there's just a lot of that, yeah. And it's because of that that I have triangulated my own position as a cultural influencer to, you look like shit, but that's fine. Look at the world. The world is not doing well enough for you to owe it looking better than you do, right?

Yeah, you are enough, but make no mistake, you look fucking bad. You look like trash, but the world is trash. And so like you, in a way it's camouflage, right? It's important to blend in. You've dressed for the occasion. You're like one of those chameleons, right? That can like blend into the tree behind them.

It's a survival method. It keeps the birds from eating you. And I- Your body is telling you that you need to look like shit. Listen to your body. It's saying look bad. It's yeah, yeah. Help blend in, blend into the trash fire around you.

So, you know, once I saw that Frasier episode, I changed my mind on Dr. Laura more and I started to change my mind on a lot of other stuff. It was, you know, it wasn't just that World of Warcraft played a weirdly large role in that, but I stopped really paying attention to Dr. Laura when I was like 16 or 17. And as an adult, there wasn't really much of reason to pay attention to her period. And so I hadn't really thought of her in close to, like about 20 years until I started doing research for these episodes. So like I normally do, I just started like Google,

I just Googled her name and popped on news, right? Just to see like, what, is there anything still happening? Like I honestly didn't know if she was alive when I started these episodes. And the first thing I read about her as an adult in the modern era were these lines from the opening of a CNN article. I didn't know if she was alive when I started these episodes. And the first thing I read about her as an adult in the modern era were these lines from the opening of a CNN article.

Before she uttered the N-word, before her remarks on cheated on wives, before the controversies over homosexuality and religion morality, Laura Schlesinger was considered a breath of fresh air. That's a lot. That's a lead. That's a hell of a lead.

Okay. And they should, it shouldn't be inward. It should be in words. Cause she says it like 11 times during the explosion on air that kind of lost her her job. Okay. Or caused her to quit her job. But that's also not quite what it sounds like.

When was, was that recently? This is, that's 2011, Jamie. Oh, that's also not quite what it sounds like. When was, was that recently? This is, that's 2011, Jamie. Oh, that's so recent, wow. But yes, also. Depends on what you consider recent. Yeah. You can tell it's a while ago because she didn't rebrand as like a canceled figure.

She just kind of like found a new, got into podcasting. Like it's a mix of, she was clearly blazing a trail because that is what a lot of other people did when they got caught saying the N word, right? To start a podcast. But she also didn't do like a real media campaign. She's actually kind of interesting as a right wing figure. She's never embraced the political side of conservatism

to the extent that is common for people who are similarly influential now. Interesting, okay. I think it might just be that she got really rich early enough that she's like, I don't need that. I don't need to talk to those people. They all seem unpleasant. Like I'm a piece of shit, but I'm just going to enjoy my mansion.

Yeah, I mean, that is, I wish more people who were pieces of shit back in the day simply disappeared because sometimes it does feel like that is the best case scenario. Yeah, yeah, it really is. I want to continue with the next paragraph from that CNN article because it gives an idea of the kind of show that Dr. Laura ran and still runs for decades, for those of you who didn't grow up on it. Quote, despite the fact that many consider Laura Sleshinger the dragon lady of talk radio,

some of us can't help but admire her. Noted a decidedly mixed 1999 consideration of her in salon. She is snippish, overbearing, and often insulting, but anybody who has the itinerary to call into her program knows what they are going to get, especially if they plead ignorance or innocence. Her message, stop whining, sometimes delivered in just those blunt words. It was a message taken to heart by more than 18 million radio listeners a week at her peak. People who looked at Dr. Laura to set them straight in their relationships, ethical disputes and moral conundrums. Well, if there's any evidence needed that our entire country has a humiliation kink.

Yeah, it's, that's, I've been thinking about that a lot because before I dug back into this, you know, literally the day that I started this, there was like a viral tweet that was someone being like, it was one of those like people on TikTok or Blue Sky or whatever, like overly medicalizing stuff and like making statements about like, it was one of those like people on TikTok or blue sky or whatever, like overly medicalizing stuff and like making statements about like, oh, you know, I didn't realize this bad behavior is just something

that people do when they have autism. And it's like, I don't know that you get this stuff where it's like, you get this with ADHD too, where it's like, you're just talking about stuff people do, right? Like it's not like, this is just a behavior. It's not, you're just talking about stuff people do, right? Like, it's not, like, this is just a behavior. It's not, like, necessarily related to any kind of medical condition.

Like, you're talking about procrastination or whatever. Like, just, we don't need to, and I started to get into this, like, annoyance loop where I was like, yeah, people do need to take responsibility. And then I realized what was happening, which was that the entirety of the, like, the algorithms that make Twitter, well, it's not really profitable, but the whole attempt to make Twitter and

every other social media thing profitable relies on putting stuff in front of you that you would not have seen on your own that will make you frustrated and angry. And so it's taking what in reality is some young person working through and thinking about the world and not having any sort of actual harmful impact on me? Somebody wrongfully crediting a belief to autism or whatever has no impact on me or anyone else. It's a person talking through shit on the internet.

But the internet runs off of churning that up and putting it in front of people to get them angry and to get them talking about it and making fun of that person and attacking. Like that's the business and that's Dr. Laura's business. And so I guess, yeah. Wow, yeah. She is a one woman algorithm. Yeah, where it's like not based on a sincere desire

to educate or like it's based on like shaming people in a public forum is fun. In the same way like yes, some lady who, I don't know, has a child with a different man while cheating on her boyfriend or her husband or whatever. Like, is that a problem for the people involved in that relationship? Sure. Does that in any way really harm me, whatever Republicans might say about welfare?

No, that is actually not something that I should care about at all. Like, there are so many actual problems that will actually harm me out there. But like, if you can put people's eyes on, you know, this person's bad behavior is going to like, you're gonna wind up paying for it or anything to get your eyes on the shit that doesn't matter.

Yeah. Especially when it's like codified as like this person's bad behavior, like a contextless bad behavior. Yes, yes. Yeah, that's just like, well, I don't know. Why would this happen to someone? And that sort of question,

which I feel like is consistent throughout, I mean, not even just right-wing influential people, but just the general classes and racism and all of this stuff that goes through the way that we, I mean, Sophie, I'm thinking about, I used to watch 16 and Pregnant on MTV, like no one's business. And that feels like, I don't know if that exists

without Dr. Laura, because there is like a clear precedent for like shaming young, usually poor pregnant girls. Yes, yes. Just out of context. Well, they must have done it because they're poor. It's the same thing on the internet, right? It's a lot of these kind of like two minutes hate come around and like, let's find somebody who, again, it's generally like a young person working shit out.

And are they talking about psychiatry and psychology in ways that are not within the medical mainstream or accurate? psychiatry and psychology in ways that are like not within the medical, you know, mainstream or accurate? Are they sometimes causing problems for themselves by like doing the weird Tumblr brain shit where people like lock themselves into an ideological box? Sure. But that's what young people always do, right? Is figure out shit in slow, awkward, juttering ways and natural way for that. Yeah. out shit in slow, awkward, juttering ways. And it's like on a certain scale, that does get scary, but like how is the solution to publicly shame them, which I feel like especially now almost makes it a certainty that they will double down on it.

The rightest thing I've ever seen written about the internet is that article, we all need to know less about each other. Like, yes, yes, some of this should not, you shouldn't be aware of what a bunch of teenagers are, how they are trying to process their lives and identities yet, like give them time to do that. I got time to do that. I don't know, Jamie, you're kind of right in the middle of the age groups,

but you've got more time than kids today get, it seems like. Like- I got time. I got time. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, you should all take some time to listen to these advertisers.

Wow. Wow. Yeah, that was good. That was good. That was amazing. That was smooth. Thank you, thank you. See, this is, again, you can't teach this, right?

You can't train this. This is, I'm pure, I'm hooked up to the Kali Yuga. I am mainlining Akashic truths and that's why I'm able to add pivot so well, folks. God is speaking through you in this moment. In a way I am God, Jamie. In a way I am God. It all started with two federal agents who heard a rumor. Jamie, in a way I am God. We have to do our job and we have to find out who did they kill. It had been 15 years since this alleged murder.

Was it still possible to unearth the truth? I used to watch the Unsolved Mystery shows and I often thought about calling because I was like, this is not right. How can a person get killed and no one knows anything? I'm Jay Calvern, and this is Deep Cover, The Nameless Man. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and iconic Ferguson activist,

Darren Seals was found shot dead. Every day, Darren would tell her, they are going to try to kill me. A young man in 2016 was killed on this block. Well, I'm a podcast journalist. And I'm a former state senator, Maria Chappelle-Nadal. I was in the movement with Darren, and I've spent two years with co-host Ray Novoselsky

investigating his death. Even if I did want to tell you something, that's a dangerous game to play. FBI did this to myself. They've been following him for months. That's enough proof right there. All episodes available now. Listen to After the Uprising Season 2, The Murder Murder of Darren Seals on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From KT Studios, the number one podcast, The Idaho Massacre is back. The new developments in the University of Idaho murder case.

It was an unimaginable crime. In the early morning of November 13th, 2022, four University of Idaho students killed. Police have no suspect and no murder weapon. A nationwide manhunt captivates the world. Moscow PD saying today they're now looking for a white Hyundai Elantra. Then, a shocking arrest. There is now a suspect in custody.

This is a PhD student in criminology? This is the guy? Will he be found innocent? He claims he has an alibi. Or face death? Listen to season 2 of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's the hardest question you've ever asked your mom?

Mom, what happened to your sister Margarita? For me, it's about a murder that's haunted my family for decades. They said that they took her, and the next day she was already dead. To find the answers, I went to the place where my family is from, El Salvador, and found that the story starts with a priest who was killed on the altar and sparked a war. I'm Jasmine Romero, and on Sacred Scandal Nation of Saints, join me as we uncover an unholy war, one that includes government cover-ups and politicians turned death squad leaders.

But I'll also tell you the story of one family, mine, because on this journey, I found out that we had more secrets than I knew. Listen to Sacred Scandal Nation of Saints as part of the MyCultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of God, Dr. Laura was God to a certain kind of very frustrated middle-class woman like my mom in the 1990s. And I want to start by playing a clip for you of her show.

Just so you, again, if you either don't remember or you didn't spend a lot of time stuck in traffic with your mom listening to Dr. Laura, this is what her show was like. And here's a sample. I am unsure of how to continue on in my relationship with my mother. I found out last September that my

dad, the man who raised me, is not my biological father for the very first time. And it has obviously caused a rift between my mother and I. Why? Why? Why? Was the guy who raised you nice so let me understand this don't babble at me so let me understand this you want to dump a mother who made you with one guy obviously could not have been the greatest guy in the universe he wasn't there and then she found a nice guy to raise you and you're pissed at her. What in the hell is wrong with you? So what so what who gives a shit That's her private life

She gave you a wonderful man to raise you whom you consider your daddy What if you had been adopted? Who the hell cares? She did the wrong thing with a jerk. And then she did the right thing with the guy who raised you. I seriously would rather smack you across the head than anything else right now. You ungrateful little twit. So I wanna break down what's happening here. And I picked that because this is an instance where the point that she is making is hard to argue with.

Like, yes, if that guy raised you from childhood, that is who you should see as your father. Like, and that's not bad, right? That like, there's nothing wrong with a marriage working out with someone deciding, like, and that's not bad, right? That like, there's nothing wrong with a marriage working out with someone deciding that like, oh, the biological parent of this kid, I can't raise them with and doing something else. That's not wrong.

But what's actually happened here, this girl didn't come in and say, fuck my mom and fuck my fake dad. She came in being like, my mom didn't tell me the truth for years and I feel like this is really complicated for me. And Dr. Laura didn't let her finish explaining the issue even immediately drilled down and accused her of saying,

and she never actually said that her, the guy who raised her wasn't, she didn't consider him a father. All of that is stuff that Laura put into that conversation in order to create, because that's what she has to do, right, you can't have, there's not enough people who are actually unsympathetic and shitty calling, you have to make them unsympathetic and shitty

in the first 10 seconds of the call. So Laura hears, this is a young woman calling in because her mom has just admitted that her dad is not her biological dad. And Laura, without the caller saying it, starts, invents an issue. And the issue being that, okay, so this woman is attacking her mom

and rejecting the guy who raised her, which this lady never claimed to be doing, right? Laura invents the problem in order to call this woman an idiot, right? In like, in no time at all. Zero time. It is really, like it is, you can tell at this woman an idiot, right? In like, in no time at all. Zero time. It is really, you can tell at this point that what? She's been at it minimum 15 years.

She's good at it, yeah. Yeah, because it's like she's locked in and she knows, I mean, I'm sure she's invented this problem for other people before. Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah. And then I wanted to play that because people have this idea that it's like, when I say that she's giving you people to hate, she's creating those people.

Most of her callers are not people who have done anything wrong. There's nothing wrong when your mom tells you that your dad was not your biological father with being like, wow, this is a lot to process. And I have a lot of conflicting feelings about it. But that's not a profitable, it's not profitable like help that person,

like a therapist would think through and talk through those conflicting feelings. It's profitable to pretend that this person is shitty, yell at her on the air, and then move on to the next caller. Right. So, now that we're all suitably ready to learn about a bad person,

I wanna talk about her biographer, who is one of the major sources of this episode. She has the incredible name Vicki Bain, which is a great name for a person who writes unauthorized biographies of media figures. And she is the author of Dr. Laura, the unauthorized biography, a revealing look at the hidden life of radio phenomenon,

Dr. Laura Schlesinger, which for reasons I cannot explain, has an anarchist flag as its background. Look at this book cover. It's a series of choices here. Kind of, it's like a very distinct red and black, blocky thing going on there. Vicki Bane does sound like a comic book

villain girlfriend in the 80s. Yeah, that's right. Wow. No gods, no talk radio. So Vicki L. Bane was at one point at least a correspondent for People magazine. Google tells me that she has a husband and two sons and lives in Colorado.

She was also the author of two, she's the author of two unauthorized biographies, one being the Dr. Laura biography, which I've read, and the second, which I have not read, is the lives of Danielle Steele and appears to be an unauthorized biography of Danielle Steele. Wow, I am not disinterested in that, I will say.

Yeah, I think it's, I found the Dr. Laura book in the internet archive, you can probably find the Danielle Steele one there too, but I haven't checked. I will say, while this book is invaluable, cause we just really don't have a lot of other good sources about her early life that talk to a lot of people who know her. This is a really hateful book in a way that even as someone

who doesn't like Dr. Laura, I had to go, this is a little ethically questionable, particularly because a decent chunk of it, not most of it, but a major source is a guy who leaked nude photos of Dr. Laura to the news. Oh my God. So this is a sleazy book. Yeah. I just, I need to set that expectation

before we get into this, right? It is like one of the great wrinkles of the world that horrible people can be treated like shit. And this, Vicky kinda treats Dr. Laura like shit. On the other hand, Dr. Laura treats everybody like shit. And I'm not saying that makes it right. It's just, this is not two wrongs making a right. It's just two wrongs making a podcast.

So hopefully you will all find that entertaining. And so make sure to buy the products and services I said this on this great show because there's no ethical solution we're presenting. No, it's like everything else in capitalism folks. Exactly. So yeah, it's good stuff. The book also features very fucked up stories

from Dr. Laura's mother who hated Laura and who Laura says was a terrible person, although maybe that's Laura being a terrible person. It's impossible for us to know. But yeah, it is a weird experience reading a biography of a bad person and still going like, wow, this book's kind of mean. But I gotta give Vicky credit, book's kind of mean. But I got to give Vicki credit.

That's an impressive achievement. Yeah, shout out Vicki. Can't wait to hear you rake Danielle Steel across the coals. Yeah, take your damn to peg. My aunt will be found, you know, devastated. Yeah, yeah. I assumed she was like 40 people writing in a factory.

Yeah, kind of like a Carolyn Kean kind of, yeah. Like who knows who's writing Nancy a factory. Yeah, kind of like a Carolyn Kean kind of, yeah, like who knows who's writing Nancy Drew books. So the Dr. Laura story starts with two people she did not like, her father, Monty, and her mother, Yolanda. Back during the great dub dub dose, Monty was a soldier. He had a pretty serious World War II. He gets promoted from corporal to lieutenant,

which means a lot of people died ahead of him, right? That's not a normal progression in a military career at the end of the war He was stationed in Italy where he met Yolanda who was a native Italian and one assumes Looking for a way out of her war-torn country Vicky writes that Yolanda met Monty while he was quote serving in a disputed territory of Yugoslavia So this would be an area that had a particularly nasty World War II. If you know the Balkans,

World War II was not a great time to be anywhere near the fucking Balkans. Yeah. So they leave Europe after World War II. She comes back with Monty to the East Coast where they decide to have kids. This is a messy move and it's going to be unpopular with most of the people in Monty's life

because Monty's family is Jewish and traditional enough that they do not like the idea of their son marrying a Gentile girl. Nevertheless, on January 16th, 1947, Laura Catherine Schlesinger became one of the very first baby boomers. She was born- Wow, like the original boomers. That's really impressive.

First wave baby. Imagine two very traumatized people having a super villain of a child. Yeah, two people who have been utterly shattered by war, coming back and having a child into a family who for reasons of racism, rejects them and their child. A real recipe for a healthy person who's going to be a good therapist on the radio. She was set up for success. I don't understand what happened. Yeah, it's great. Okay, so she's born like this in in 47. In 47 in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island. Monty eventually gets a job as a civil engineer, but his family never accepted his wife

and kind of didn't accept his daughter. As an adult, Laura wrote this of the troubled union, All hell broke loose when my father's mother went on a relentless attack against the shiksa, which means in Yiddish the non-Jewish wife of a Jewish man. My grandmother tried to do everything she could to get rid of my mother and turned much of the family into rejecting her, us. When I was two and a half, my mother took me back to Italy, probably to get a break from this cruelty. My mother's mother and father were dead by this time. She was not close to her brother and her older sister had been killed by the Nazis on the first day she joined the underground resistance. I like to think that I channel her courage. You do not, Laura. Look.

No, sorry about that. Wherever you stand politically, sitting on a microphone is not the same as dying as soon as you join the anti-fascist resistance in Italy. Very different things. One of them pays millions of dollars in your case, Dr. Laura, so not quite the same. Yeah, and one of you is alive at age 77. Yes, yeah, one of you is still alive. Did not get murdered by Mussolini's buddies.

Oh, God, yeah. Anyway, great stuff. Laura's childhood, though, was definitely not warm. Her parents had little time to spend on their daughter's emotional health, and because she was half Jewish, she was ostracized by other kids in her neighborhood. Again, this is the United States in the 40s and 50s, right? Like it's a big deal that she is half Jewish, right? Like people make that a big deal. The part of the episodes where you make me feel bad

the episodes where you make me feel bad. Mm-hmm. For the, yeah, the initial wound of the fucked up person. It's always the hardest part, even more than the fucked up part. Look, very few people are never sympathetic, right? There's a point in the Hitler story where he's just a boy trying to take care of his mom as she dies from cancer.

And his Jewish doctor notes decades later after he's the Fuhrer, he had never seen a boy so sad, right? That's just life. You just gotta accept that if you actually care about understanding people. Well, I know I've been on this show for a million years and it still makes me sad. It should.

Baby Dr. Laura, God. If only she had like one person. Baby Dr. Laura's having a if only she had like one person. Maybe Dr. Laura's having a time of it, yeah. It really, it does feel motivating at least, like if there's a kid that is very much lost in your, in your, like be a person they can talk to because you could be preventing a future Dr. Laura.

Be a person they can talk to, make them feel valued, make them feel like they have a place to be, and every day or so say, never get on the radio, avoid the radio. No one ever told us that, and that was, we didn't have that person. Yeah, become an accountant or something. Yeah.

That's what she needed, that's what, well, a lot of kids in this position need, is subtle support and also don't become a radio host. So her primary impressions of her social peers in this period were that they responded to her with rejection and punishment. Those are her words, and this included physical violence at times. At home, she was also subject to physical violence at times because her father was both physically and mentally domineering. She later told a reporter that quote, she was afraid to open her mouth because he would scream at her and smack her. At the same time, she credited

her father with instilling in her the drive to succeed. Laura told another reporter from Red Book that her dad was quote, real good at getting angry but he was also good at telling me what was right and what was wrong. I think he could have cared more about the impact of his behavior instead of feeling entitled to act because that's what he thought or felt. She claimed that he was the kind of argumentative guy who would latch onto disagreements like a remora

who was almost looking for disagreements, right? And so would sort of- Wow, it's very specific fish to say, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's the kind of fish that her dad was and the kind of fish that she becomes, right? Laura grows up desperate to make a mark

and prove herself to be someone special. And likes this sort of person sometimes does, she also winds up obsessed with the rules, right? What is fair? What is right and wrong based on what are the rules? And so as a little girl, she would race to the principal's office whenever she saw other kids doing something bad,

like vandalizing encyclopedias in the library. For Gen Z listeners, an encyclopedia is like Wikipedia, but without all, like it's not mostly Star Wars lore. So in other words, it's like a useless Wikipedia. Yeah, if Wikipedia couldn't be edited and smelled like shit. Like something about the smell of encyclopedias was always very, very sticky.

There's nothing about One Piece in it. So you kids wouldn't have any reason to read it. Wow, you're really, I could make an anime joke. Speaking to the youth again. The Gen Z kids know me. to read it. Wow. You're really, I can make an anime joke. The Gen Z kids know me. Yeah. They understand that I I'm plugged in baby. Uncle Robert is on one today.

That's right. That's right. The Sleshingers were on the tip of the spear when it came to white flight. And by the late 1950s, they had left Brooklyn for a Long Island suburb. Laura was the traditional gifted kid, pushed by an overbearing mother to succeed at school. For an idea of the kind of stubbornness that she developed as a result of this,

Laura's mom made her practice piano an hour a day, and Laura's rebellion was she would only practice if she could start exactly on the hour or exactly on the quarter hour. So if it was like 101, she have to wait 13 minutes until it was 115 to do her hour of practice. So I am like, you know, TikTok armchair diagnosing here, but it sounds like she may be a young OCD girl,

having been there myself, like you have to do a certain thing at a certain time or we will die. That has also like in addition to it seems like that's her instinct, but also that there is this fixation on the idea of order, which explains going to the teachers for stuff, which explains, but that's like reinforced, like the idea of order is reinforced at home instead of like, hey, take a breath, you know, the stuff that you would hope for. Yeah, and I think that that's definitely like

what we're seeing here, right? Yeah. She describes like her weird time fixation as self-discipline, right? And I think it's her grasping for control. She can't control the fact that her mom wants her to do this, but she can have that kind of control. And yeah, it makes sense to me. Yeah. I mean, it's like, unfortunately, yeah. It's like, I don't know. When I was in fourth

and fifth grade, I wouldn't leave a room until I had written down what everyone was wearing and what was hanging on the walls. And that was the way to maintain like order. And then if there's no one around you to like, you know, sort of pull you out of that. And if there's people around you encouraging it, it's just like a recipe for disaster. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it is one of those things where like, this isn't Dr. Laura being coming, Dr. Laura isn't the only way being this kid goes. It's not the usual. It only really happened once. God, I hope not, yeah. I know a lot of people who had very, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people listening are like,

well, I had kind of a similar experience, right? Totally. But it's also like, she is one of those people where, oh, all of this makes sense. I totally understand how someone with this background wound up as Dr. Laura, right? Absolutely, yeah. It's like, yeah, not everybody, but it's not, you know,

inconceivable that this would happen if this is who she is. It's not surprising. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Her classmates in grade school and high school all remember her as pretty, quiet, and extremely serious. Like, as a kid in grade school, she was really weirdly serious.

And like one thing you get a lot, some of this might just be Vicki really pushing for salacious stuff, but they all talk about that she was hot. But they talk about it in such a way as like, it's weird, she was hot, but she didn't have any friends and wasn't very popular because she didn't seem to wanna know people, right?

That's, so I mean, obviously we can't truly fully trust Vicky. Of course not. No. I like, it sounds like she fucking sucks. To be fair, Vicky could be doing this. You can't trust a bunch of people 40 years later talking about how someone was in eighth grade. What was Vicky's book published?

Uh, it was like in the nineties, but still a long time, not 40 years, but a while later. Yeah. So like the word beautiful is still, I mean, it's still a snap, but like, especially then like indiscriminately thrown around just to like validate that you are reading about a person, a person of worth. But I, I, I don't know. Every time it's like a young girl is described as like, you know, like didn't wanna know other people, I immediately go to like, she was probably shy.

Maybe, here's where we get weird here, because one of the best pieces of evidence suggesting that Vicky's portrayal of things may be accurate is that Laura says the same thing in different language. Here's what she told an interviewer in 1979. I had a distinct feeling of being out of sync with the rest of the world, just as if I had landed from another planet.

While my peers were outside skipping rope and playing games, I stayed in the home where, like a hilariously precocious child, I wore an ill-fitting lab coat and crooked glasses. So that seems to kind of back up what Vicki's saying. I also think it might be a lie because this is Dr. Laura, 1979 at the start of her career. And that doesn't sound like an honest recollection of events.

Nobody would describe themself as like a hilariously precocious child unless they were doing myth-making, right? That's what I'm, yeah. Cause it's like, we can't trust Vicki or Laura in the account of Laura's life. Yeah. Absolutely not a single reliable source

on this woman's early life. Laura wants you, Dr. Laura as an adult wants you to believe that as a kid, she was isolated, she didn't fit in, she felt like, you know, she was an adult in a world of children and she was a mad scientist. It is very important to Dr. Laura that you see her as a mad scientist, as a, a, an adolescent girl, which is interesting.

Which is so wild because it's like, could there be anything more different than it sounds like what she is? I mean, I don't know enough, but like, it sounds like she is not encouraging people to be like this, but it's also important to her that she is perceived like this. Yes, she's an iconoclast and also was a serious child scientist. Yeah. Maybe she was, some of that anyway.

We'll keep talking about this, but it is very peculiar. And that makes me think about something that's not peculiar. Really the only normal thing that exists, Jamie. The selling of goods and services? That's it. Jamie, I don't know if you know this, but 10,000 years ago in ancient Babylon, you know what people were doing?

What? Goods and services. Oh my God. 10,000 years from now, when mankind has spread to the stars, goods and services. There's no other reason to go to the the stars, goods and services. There's no other reason to go to the stars, but goods and services.

That's the message of Star Trek, I think. There's more goods. I agree. I agree. I think that that is where things are headed. We don't know the end game of it, but yeah, we went to the stars to find more goods and more services.

Right, the ultimate, finally to find the goods and services that can make us happy, right? And you'll find that. We did not seek justice. No, no. Fuck justice. Yeah. All products, baby. That's the motto of this show.

It all started with two federal agents who heard a rumor. She mentions, well, there is this alleged murder to have taken place. There was just one problem. They had no clue who the victim was. We have to do our job and we have to find out who did they kill. It had been 15 years since this alleged murder. Was it still possible to unearth the truth? I used to watch

The Unsolved Mystery shows and I often thought about calling Because I was like this is this is not right. How can a person get killed and no one knows anything? I'm Jay Calpern and this is Deep Cover, The Nameless Man. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New from double asterisks and I heart podcasts, a 10 part true crime podcast series. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and iconic Ferguson activist Darren Seals was found shot dead. Every day Darren would tell her, they are going to try to kill me. A young man in 2016 was killed on this block.

Well, I'm a podcast journalist. And I'm a former state senator, Maria Chappelle-Nadal. I was in the movement with Darren, and I've spent two years with co-host Ray Novischelsky, investigating his death. Even if I did want to tell you something, that's a dangerous game to play. FBI did this to myself. They've been following him for months. That's enough proof right there. All episodes available now. Listen to After the Uprising Season 2, The Murder of Darren Seals on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From KT Studios, the number one podcast, The Idaho Massacre is back. The new developments in the University of Idaho murder case. It was an unimaginable crime. In the early morning of November 13th, 2022, four University of Idaho students killed.

Police have no suspect and no murder weapon. A nationwide manhunt captivates the world. Moscow PD saying today they're now looking for a white Hyundai Elantra. Then a shocking arrest. There is now a suspect in custody. This is a PhD student in criminology. This is the guy. Will he be found innocent?

He claims he has an alibi. Or face death. Listen to season two of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On September 17, 2009, 24-year-old Mytris Richardson was released from the Malibu Lost Hill Sheriff's Station. She had no money, no phone, and no ride. She walked out of the station and into the night. And she never made it home. Nearly a year later,

Maitrice's naked, skeletonized remains were discovered in a canyon six miles from the station. I'm Dana Goodyear. Five years ago, I started reporting on the Maitrice Richardson case. Everyone knows something horrible happened to Maitrice. Nothing about her case makes sense and for 15 years the sheriff's department has failed to solve it in Lost Hills Dark Canyon we're investigating what happened to my trees Richardson listen to Lost Hills Dark Canyon on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you

listen to podcasts podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back and we're thinking about Dr. Laura as a child mad scientist. So when Dr. Laura is 10 or 11 years old, her parents have another daughter and Laura has a bad relationship with her sister. She never forgives her for taking the attention that ought to have been hers. Yeah, definitely never forgive someone for being born. Mistake number one. No, I call my little brother every day and I just say, fuck you. You know, he's never been anything but good to me. Sweet guy. Oh, I love my little brother,

but he will suffer for his crimes. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Even though his crimes in this case were taking enough of my parents' attention away that I was able to watch The Simpsons, which really worked out great for me. Incredible. My little brother's major, my little brother's most notorious crime

is that he caught me making out with someone downstairs while we were allegedly watching Family Guy and was so disturbed that he threw up and woke up my parents. No. And then I got in trouble. See, my brother never narc'd on me. He's only ever been a good person. But when I was a kid and like, I was like 14 or 15 and my parents were out for the night or something,

I don't know why they might have been doing a date night or some shit, but I was watching him. And I tried to put on stuff that he wasn't normally allowed to watch, which like, I would have loved when I had been his age. And he got scared and ran into his room behind. Like, he was never a, he was never a like, I will narc on you.

He just like was legitimately wanted to follow the rules. Punish for being a sweetie. Yeah. You know, he's a happier and healthier person than I will ever be. So who's to say. It does seem traumatizing to see an older sibling do something that is like coded as bad,

but you know, what can you do? They're, you know, we celebrate our brothers, but they've gotta go. They've gotta go. They've gotta go. Jamie, when the revolution comes, it'll be the little brothers first up against the wall. Little brothers are first to go. Yeah. I think we can really make political hay off of this.

Oh, shh. Yeah. So she has a little sister, never forgives her horrible relationship forever. How dare she? She claims, this is when, Dr. Laura claims this is when she started dreaming of a career in psychology. I also think this is bullshit. She did not actually focus on psychology as a discipline

until she is a mature adult. And this is how she, I want you to hear how she framed this decision, her childhood interest in psychology that there is no evidence of in an interview later once she was famous with psychology today. All the kids talked about getting a boyfriend or a car and I kept struggling with why I was alive,

what life means. I don't, I just don't believe you, Dr. Laura. I just don't believe you. Yeah, it's so weird for someone who is like famously encouraging women to return to the home describing herself like fucking Allen Ginsberg. Like, what are you saying?

I hate this shit. It's not just Dr. Leffert. Lots of people do this. You get this online a lot with people being like, wow, it seems like a lot of my peers are selfishly interested in just partying and drugs. And I'm thinking about stuff that matters, seems like a lot of my peers are selfishly interested in just partying and drugs and like, I'm thinking about like stuff that matters,

you know, whether that's politics or psychology or whatever. Like, no, everybody thinks about what things mean and who they are and what life is about. And everybody also wants to get laid. You're not special, chill out. Right, like any intellectual curiosity excludes you from being a person with human desires or needs. Don't separate yourself from the rest of the human population

because you want to feel like you're better than them. Dr. Laura, you were slamming Mike's hearts with the rest of us. Be serious. Yeah, exactly. We all got fucked up as kids and partied and we also all looked up at the stars with wonder in our hearts.

Like you're not more of a person than anyone else. Calm down. Calm down, Dr. Laura and calm down you the listener. We all need that reminder sometimes. Yeah, take a breath. Take a breath. It's just a podcast. It can't hurt you for now.

For now until the next Supreme Court ruling, God willing. That weaponizes podcast-based violence. Podcasters can now order airstrikes. Awesome. Will Wheaton's finally gonna get his. Wow. Part of why I think, that's right, Jamie, part of why I think that Dr. Laura is self-mythologizing

with a lot of this child mad scientist stuff is that some of the quotes Vicki provides from her former classmates just describe her as a very normal girl. Here's a quote from the book talking about an interview with a friend of hers with the last name Eagle. Eagle even remembered Laura handing out advice and more. "'I had a crush on a guy,' explained Eagle,

"'and I think we stalked him that year. They were juniors with her helping me. According to Eagle, Laura had several parties at her house as well. The kind where you turn off all the lights and play Johnny Mathis, said Eagle. She was fun. She could twist your arm into doing things you didn't want to do, but certainly nothing bad. Back then, we hadn't even heard of all the naughty things you could do.

And that makes her sound like a perfectly normal teenage girl. It's so wild how much more like infinitely accessible that makes her. Yes, that's, yeah. Like there's the, was she like the secret, the only one really thinking about serious issues? I had to know the mysteries of the human mind. That's a sinister way to characterize yourself. Yeah.

Helping her friends stalk a boy that they had a crush on and listening to rock music or whatever Johnny Mathis is. I'm not old enough to know, don't come after me. I don't really know. I think he might be soft rock. Ask the Delilah audience, they'll know. Yeah, they'll figure it out. So one thing we do see early evidence on

is that people really did not like working with Dr. Laura. She wrote for the school paper and at one point they had a vote for who should be editor in the next year. And there was a classmate who was out sick and who had already said, I don't want to be the editor when this vote comes up. And they all vote for him, even though Laura is campaigning for the job

because everyone seems to have agreed she should not have power, which I do find funny. Whoa. Bummer. That does feel like, I mean, like losing, at little things, you're like, at what point does the true supervillain origin story take hold?

Sometimes I do feel like, I mean, can you think of another example where the loss of a student election leads to it? It feels like a classic, like super villain origin story of like, oh, my peers hate me. I mean, all of Hitler's madness started when he didn't get picked to be the editor for his high school yearbook.

You know, that's widely agreed on by Hitler. That was a lie, people. I know people can't tell what a lie is on the show when I say lies. That was a lie. It's fine. Look, and something, something, I'm a murderer and something, something, daddy, okay?

I do feel like, yeah, if you're a high schooler, just like vote the most evil person who's running into student government and then they'll just taper off. Yeah, I think we should have like, like you know how there's that, I'm trying to think of the, like a Hunger Games situation. We should have that, but only for the kids who self-select to be in student government.

They're not going anywhere good, you know? Wow, I will not publicly agree to that, but I think it is a, but I best- Jamie, The Hunger Games is a beloved franchise, so you're arguing against the people here. I'm just, I'm just a man of the people. I'm a man of the people. It's true, yes. You're pro Suzanne Collins and I celebrate that. Yeah.

Yeah. And that guy who died that everybody liked, he was in those movies. Anyway, Donald Sutherland. Boy was he. Yeah. Oh, were you, yes, yeah, Donald Sutherland. So Dr. Laura said this to the Los Angeles Times Home Magazine in 1979 about this period in her life.

Looking back, it seems to me I was struggling for some kind of acknowledgement or approval. I didn't feel happy, just driven towards science. And she said she reacted by retreating into the seemingly rational world of science. The childhood experiments with milk bottles and fruit flies turned into experiments in genetics and biochemistry when she was in her teens.

She even built her own lab equipment in the basement. Isn't it funny that like that's a, whether we like her or not, that's a woman talking about science, but it inevitably ended up in LA Times Home. Yeah, yeah. It was very Dr. Laura coded. Yeah, very much so, yeah.

Now there is some evidence, she certainly seems to have been good at science and very interested in it as a young girl. There's her quote from her Jericho High School yearbook on the year she graduated says, quote, like, so basically in this yearbook, it wasn't a huge school. So each kid or each page would have two kids

and you'd get a photo of them and then like a description of them in a quote, right? And the quote that someone wrote for Dr. Laura was, heredity determines the color of her eyes, but science lights them up. Her assistance is invaluable in any research lab. That's kind of weird. I don't know who wrote that, but I find it off-putting.

Don't talk about heredity. What are we doing? Why are we talking about this in the school yearbook? That feels weirdly like a skull measuring kind of- It feels like you're gonna lead to race mixing at some point here, right? I don't like, leading with heredity is gross. Yeah, but to race science. This makes me want to look up Robert Dirth's yearbook quote I don't like leading with heredity is is gross. Yeah

Race science makes me want to look up for Robert Dirth your book quote because I forget what it was But I know it always made me laugh. Oh the big D. Oh I mean the murderer. Sorry. I was thinking of Fred Durst No, well common misconception was recently in the great movie. I saw the TV glow, which was very good. He was yes I love that movie and I loved his appearance. Robert Durst, no, he's a dead murderer. But Robert Durst, we durst not criticize this Bob, whose activities make him stand out from the mob, which is an incredible yearbook quote for an eventual murderer. Yeah.

He's an iconoclast, you know? I, look, I, for years, I was like, he's innocent. And then that joke stopped being funny and then I stopped saying it. But he did, you know, get away with, I think it was like in Texas, in Galveston, he got away with dismembering someone in self-defense was his most notorious crime.

Yeah, well, I don't know if it's his most notorious crime. I think that hair style was a worst crime. Wow, get his ass. I'm also pro-murder. You know this about me. I know you're pro-murder, I know. Yeah, I'm not, I feel like the way a lot of voters, like those swing voters who keep going back

between Trump and Biden, that's how I feel about murder. I'm a swing voter for murder. Some murders I like, some murders I don't. I take it I'm like a- I refuse to continue. Okay, that's probably a good idea. Once she graduates high school, her ambition is to become a great research scientist.

And she would talk constantly to friends and to the adults in her life that she wanted to find about wanting to find the cure for cancer. And you know, that's how kids talk about that. That's not really how cancer works, but that's how kids who are ambitious might talk about cancer. So I believe that, right?

Laurie is always conservative as a kid. Some of her friends recall her arguing about politics with them, but also like not weirdly so. Just like, you know, some kids usually express some form of political opinion and nobody really... hers was not particularly noteworthy. Kind of the most devastating detail of her adolescence comes right after she graduated high school and before she left for college,

she worked up the courage to ask her dad, who was the only one of her parents that she seems to have actually loved, am I pretty? And he said, no, you don't have the looks that'll make a guy turn his head. Which is like horrible. That's just devastating stuff to hear from your dad. There's your villain origin story.

Forget what I said about Stuko. That's, oh my God. And we don't get much, she hates her mom. I just don't know that we don't really get much in the way of detail as to why. So either what her mom was saying was way worse than this or it's something a lot messier. Like her mom was not nearly as shitty as her dad,

but for whatever reason she idolized her dad, whatever is going on here is either- Yeah, there's like any sort of human psychology that Dr. Laura would refuse to understand. Oh yeah, absolutely. She does not seem to have analyzed this, but yeah. That is like, that is devastating. We do get some hints of what the worst shit

from her mom might've been, if that is indeed what was going on here, which is that her college roommates recall that she was afraid of her mom would steal any boyfriend she happened to get, which is like a weirdly specific and also weird thing for a teenage girl to worry about. And if that was really a thing that happened to her,

boy, Laura, I am sorry. That is a rough draw from mom card. That's extreme. That also happened to the creator of Beanie Babies with his dad. Well, in that case, I think his dad did the right thing. So I don't totally disagree with you as the unfortunate thing.

All I know is what I learned in that movie that I assume is canon. Oh, that movie is dog shit. I know, that's why I said it. So Laura goes to Stony Brook University where she studies physiology. Laura is noted by her few friends as never leaving campus. She does not go home for the holidays or anything.

And she is also not an easy person to live with. One classmate recalls, she always had an opinion of things and what people should be doing. Laura was particularly incensed whenever her roommates would have boys over. It didn't matter that everyone's doors were open and that no one was fucking, she would yell at them

because she was sure they were screwing around and having premarital sex. So this is where we get some outside info that like, okay, so maybe she's just always sucked ass. Right, whereas it sounds like whatever insecurity is, or like she is internalized growing up has now turned into weapons forever. So this was a, you know, she was off,

but no one ever was able to live with her for more than like a semester at a time, right? She's that kind of person. After graduating, she went to Columbia University to get her masters and studied under an MD who was researching the glucose transport mechanism. Laura was at this point scientifically interested in finding more efficient methods

of measuring glucose levels and response to insulin, which would have been great if she'd stuck with that. That's a, we, would have been great. She doesn't. What she does do is meet a guy named Rudolph. She meets him because, so she's a walker. She's one of these people who takes regular long walks. And it says something deeply unhinged about her that she took these long walks in high heels. And one day she catches her heel on a bridge, which makes her fall and seriously injure her kneecap. And Rudolph is on scene and gallantly rescues her. So the two start their relationship

while Laura is in a wheelchair and dependent on him. They get married, but as she heels, she becomes aware of the horrifying reality that like, Rudolph fell in love with the version of her that was dependent on him. And Laura is an extremely independent person, right? So the marriage starts to break apart, you know, it's just kind of a doomed situation. And this sort of thing that very young people do, get married too early based on something that is more of like a momentary thing that rather than evidence of like long-term compatibility,

not a weird story and not one that most people would judge someone over. Although Dr. Laura is gonna build a career judging people if you should like this. Oh, I mean, it's like, but if anyone is qualified. Yeah, and brave of both of you to not make a Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer joke. Just wanted to point that out.

I don't know what his nose looked like. Brave. So Laura graduated and broke up with her husband right around the same time she gets her master's degree. The actual divorce process is gonna take some time, but before it's done, Laura travels to Los Angeles to teach physiology and human sexuality at the University of Southern California. The divorce.

Yeah, yeah, it's great stuff. It's great stuff. The divorce gets finalized in 1977 and Laura is going to spend the rest of her life delighting in telling interviewers that her ex-husband brings his parents to court. I don't know enough to say which of them was the bad guy, but she does kind of sound like a dick

when she talks about it. But hey, no fault of yours, which she's going to hate in the future. Oh, great. Yeah. So it's while teaching at USC that not quite yet a Dr. Laura Slushinger would meet a man who is going to set her on the road to becoming an icon.

And that man's name is Bill Balance with two L's. Have you ever heard of Bill? No, I don't think so. Oh, Jamie, you're gonna love learning about this piece of shit. This is a real influential piece of shit. Okay. Born in Peoria, Illinois,

Balance got his degree in journalism and served in the Marines before starting a varied career as a broadcaster during the golden age of radio. From the 1950s to the 1970s, he worked everywhere from Denver and Honolulu to San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, which is where he was when Laura met him. In 1971, he had launched a new hit series,

widely considered to be the first shock jock show. He's not quite a shock jock, but he is the primordial ooze from which the Shock Jocks emerge, right? Okay, it's all coming together. Okay. And he's hugely influential. He is pre Rush Limbaugh.

He is pre Howard Stern, but he is all of them descendant. You and I unfortunately have this guy's DNA in us. I'm sure we do. And that, what a bummer. Okay. All right. It's not great. He is our dad. He is daddy.

He's great granddaddy at least. Yeah. Okay. So the series that takes, makes Bill take off, he's reasonably successful, but he has his huge hit series of 1971. And that series is Feminine Forum on KGBS AM in Los Angeles. I know you're, you're just psyched to hear what Feminine Forum was, Jamie.

I really hope, is he the host? He sure is, he sure is. Oh good, I was hoping he would be the host. Well yeah, let me have it. Absolutely, absolutely. Let me have it. Here's how the LA Times describes the show. Designed for a young female audience, the daily five hour show featured topics such as,

where did his love go and how did you know it was gone? And have you ever thrown yourself at a hunk who wasn't catching and are you a red hot mama? Balance played the role of what former Times radio columnist James Brown called the lascivious uncle chiding his doll babies to rid themselves of their grunt head oppressors. Within a year, Balance's Feminine Forum was one of the most popular radio shows in Los Angeles with as many men turning in as women. By turns witty,

racy and confessional, the daring program was soon syndicated across the country and spawned imitators in dozens of cities. So how you feeling about that, Jamie? I'm just kind of taking it all in. It's a lot. There's a lot there. I feel like I, my brain kind of like, I started to get brain freeze at lascivious uncle. Yeah, we don't have this guy anymore.

It's good that we don't. Yeah, I'm trying to think of who. Because women get to have shows now. Right? Right, and I guess that he, of who was my lascivious uncle. And I guess that maybe he was the final boss of lascivious uncles, because I can think of lascivious aunties, or not even lascivious aunties,

I can think of like shameful aunties. But lascivious uncle, was he genuinely popular among girls? As far as I can tell, very popular with young women. That is fascinating. There's not a lot for them. There's not a lot of radio that's just young women talking about their relationship problems, their difficulties dating.

And like, Bill is there and the show exists because there's a man to kind of, honestly midwife it, if you'll forgive the phrasing, right? He's got to be there. I don't forgive it. And he's got to be like, he's got to be kind of holding it up so that the network, you know, will approve it in the first place. But a huge part of the show, it's never just Bill as the host either.

He brings in a lot of women, including eventually female, like therapists and doctors and stuff as guest experts to help talk with these women callers about their relationship issues and stuff. So is the tone of this show, as far as we know, is it Dr. Laura coded? Is it kind of rooted in shame? No. What is the vibe of it?

He nearly always sides with the women calling. A big part of, he does it in a way that you and I would say is deeply sexist and gross, is the vibe of it. He nearly always sides with the women calling. A big part of, he does it in a way that you and I would say is deeply sexist and gross, but he always, he tells them like that their feelings are valid. A huge, a lot of the times his advice is you need to dump that man, you're better than him, right? God.

It's really, it's complicated. Bill's legacy in this part is like very much, it's not just bad or just good, right? I feel like if anything, I don't know, I don't want to hand it to this guy in any way, shape or form, but if his work demonstrated that there is a clear and present need for young women to have their feelings validated by literally fucking anyone in a public forum, that is such a bummer that it like it took someone that far afield from who they were being like, no, you're, it's okay.

Ugh, ugh. I would have to say you can draw two lines from Bill. One line is shows like the Bechdel cast, right? Where you've got women like talking without any kind of male intermediary. And that is a major thing in entertainment and it has been for quite some time. And Bill helped show that there was a thirst for that.

And the other thing- The audience existed. Yes, the other thing Bill helped show is that a lot of people would listen to an old guy be gross to women, be gross about women. And so you get a lot of people would listen to an old guy be gross to women, be gross about women. And so you get a lot of like the shock jock shit that's gonna come later comes out. Like a lot of people, a lot of what networks get from this

is that like, oh, there's a lot of interest in men talking to women about sex, right? Okay, so it's like you could pull Howard Stern or the Bexel cast from this. Right, right. That's kind of what's interesting about Bill. He's early enough back that you can pull both from it, right? Sure, yeah. And I should give you at this point an example of the kind of incisive commentary that Bill

provided. Oh boy. Sophie, this is, yeah. Oh my gosh, my chest just tightened. Your husband, he was not the father of this baby. Well, actually, it's rather complicated. But we're going to explain it to Bill. My child is...

Forty-two. My child's father is my husband's father. The child's father is your husband's father? Yes. In other words, you were making it with your father-in-law to be? Right. Before the ceremony? Right, that's why I changed my mind. Ah, because you figured that his, that your father-in-law to be was a better man

than his own son? Right. So why don't you marry the father-in-law? Was he still married to your ex, to your soon-to-be mother-in-law? Yes. Oh, that's a kind of a dull thing for him to have done. Well, that won't be much longer. In other words if you marry the projected or proposed husband he would be the brother of his own child. Yes. Right. Gee, but you mentioned just in passing it was kind of a throwaway line, Gia Nina Mia. You mentioned that maybe it won't be for long. You mean he's gonna get rid of his old fat wife and marry you?

Well, not marry me, but I don't wanna get married. No. There. So, you see- No, why is he hitting every consonant like that? That's how you delivered shit on the radio back then. That is how you told women on the radio back then. He's a successful broadcaster. That is how you told women what for back in the day.

Except for, he's not really, he's not being judgmental or mean there. He's being silly. He's kind of making fun of it a little bit, but he's not, he's mostly just like asking her for details because it's like an interesting saucy story, right? Well, yeah, that's the thing. I was like, I don't think he's doing nothing there.

I think he's asking leading questions that he knows the answer to that makes the behavior sound like more, like not even that it's not salacious, but you know, like giving whatever, telling the listeners like, oh, that thing that you're wondering is like, is this person doing something kind of fucked up?

Yeah, and here is my thesaurus to prove it. Like he's doing a lot. Yeah, he's doing a lot, but he's also doing, you can also see him in the line to Dr. Laura, right? Where they're doing a similar thing. Like Bill, as soon as he hears the base of this, he's like, I need to steer this to talking about how this guy she's marrying is going to be the brother

to her son, right? That's the line that needs to get out. It's like the old, you know, there's a popular song around the time, I'm My Own Grandpa, right? Like I need to get that, I need to- Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh my God, it's a great song. You can hear it on Dr. Demento. Very funny song, but he's really got a hit on that, right? Because he knows that that's like the craziest, funniest detail. But the way he kind of pulls it out, he's got a much slower style. Like he's not, Dr. Laura gives stuff less time to breathe,

which is interesting to me. Like one of them isn't necessarily more honest than the other, but it is interesting, like interesting to me. One of them isn't necessarily more honest than the other, but it is interesting, like the difference. And now both of them go after- Well, how many hours does she have to Bill's five? Yeah, Bill gets five. I guess he has some time to kind of tease it out of me.

And he has a slide whistle, which you definitely hear, right? No. I mean, you heard the slide whistle in there. This is of course a slide whistle show. So Bill is popular. And I said earlier, it was extremely popular among women. There's also a lot of rage inspired by this show, right?

And he gets attacked a lot by feminist organizations, obviously, and I'm gonna continue that quote from the LA Weekly. Feminist groups accused the program of exploitation and insulting the intelligence of his collars. For his part, balance called women's rights activists professional blind dates. So he's that kind of piece of shit, right?

He's Howard Stern too, you know? Although Howard Stern is a much better person probably. Tell me what this has to do with the Bechtel cast, Robert. I swear to God. I don't know, Jamie. Like it's a different era before Bill Balance. After Bill, you get Dr. Laura. After Bill, you get a lot of shows

that are like women talking to and about women. Sure. He's not the only thing in there, but he breaks a seal on what talk radio can be. And it's also worth noting that like after Bill, you get Rush Limbaugh and you get fucking, like all of the shock jocks that we get. Michael Medved, all of these horrible things.

He's the first fish that walked on land, right? Rather than the immediate simian precursor, right? Like he just sort of, it shows that radio can be a different thing than it had been before. You know? I do think like across mediums, it is unfortunate and vile that there is like, it's often just like a lascivious uncle who ends up, you know, proving that they're proving again, because it's been

proven over and over and over that there is an audience that is not just like men. And yeah, yeah, yeah, there's, and he does it by being like, there's an audience that's just not men for this kind of smut, right? For smut talk, you know? But that does eventually lead to shows that are not smutty, right? Like there is a line you can draw there. And when I talk about the success of this show,

he starts this in 1971. By 1975, there are 500 shows and more that are rip-offs of the Bill Ballant show in different stations around the country. And Bill's show is more popular than ever. One of his most popular segments is a recurring bit with Dr. Norton Christie, a clinical psychologist who had worked for the Rand Corporation.

Oh yeah, Dr. Christie's a fascinating piece of shit. Christie's job was to provide pseudo-credible scientific analysis of the fears and complaints made by ballots as callers, right? So they quickly, and again, this is part of like the actual talent here is recognizing people that don't just wanna hear Bill be gross on the air and make jokes, they wanna hear someone

who you can claim as a scientist, explain what the psychological stuff goes, right? And that certainly wouldn't continue on, yeah. I mean, yeah, he's, again, you can draw a direct line from Bill to Jordan Peterson, right? Sure, sure. Or, I mean, Dr. Phil, like, you know, there's many people. And Dr. Phil, right, yes, yes.

Absolutely. This is, Bill is a really influential, he's not the only person who helps make this clear to the people making radio shows and eventually TV shows, but he's a major figure in that movement. And his station managers saw this as an, correctly, as an endlessly reproducible format. You get a guy who's kind of funny,

you get a medical professional, someone you can claim as a medical professional, and you have collars talking about their fucked up lives. Billions of dollars, right? Infinite money from doing this shit. Up to this day, right? Yeah. Now, one thing they do recognize is that

you need a stable of experts because we're on the air a lot and actual credible clinical psychologists tend to be busy. Right, if you're a good clinical psychologist, you probably don't have five hours a day to talk to yahoos on the radio, right? Well, you know, well, let's not, no shade, but Frazier certainly found the time. Frazier is-

And that was part of the reason that Niles and him had such problems. Niles didn't have five hours of radio a day because he was a real doctor. That is the point of the Frasier show is that Frasier's not a real psychiatrist. He's a fraud. He's a fraud.

In the end, he's a fraud. Yeah. But that's part of what makes it fun. I love what a fraud that man is. Absolutely. God, what a such a formative childhood crush, but we don't have time. Absolutely, absolutely.

Look, it was formative. We're talking about Niles, right? Oh, I'm talking about both of them. Okay, okay, good. Yeah, absolutely, both of them, sure, fine. And Roz while we're at it. And Roz, well, throw Roz in there, sure, you know? Honestly, throw John Mahoney on that pile.

And on a good day, maybe even Bulldog, you know? Maybe Bulldog if he's in a good mood, right? Yeah. I'm glad we're having this, this complex Frazier talk, Jamie. So Maris too, once or twice anyway, whatever. Oh yeah. I mean her absence was very, you know, sexually potent. Right.

So the station management saw this as an endlessly reproducible format, but they need people who actually have time. So they need people who they can pretend are credible medical experts, but aren't enough of a credible medical expert to like have better things to do. And this is where Laura Schlesinger is going to come in. She first calls into Bill's show in 1975. Bill has an expert where he's asking women to call in and say, and tell him, would you rather be a widow or a divorcee? Right? Laura calls in, she uses a fake name

and she picks widow and she explains, quote, then you don't have to second guess yourself, whether you made the right choice in leaving. You don't feel guilt. Everybody feels sorry for you. They come over and cook for you. Oh, a sleigh. That's her reason. Yeah. Bill recognizes two key things about Laura from this call. One of them is she has a good voice for radio and she speaks well and she's someone who actually might have some potential on the air.

And the other, the larger is that she sounds hot. So he keeps her on the line for 20 minutes and then he has his producer get her phone number Which he's going to be a creep about But that's all for part two Jamie. That's all for part two. I am I am invested Yeah, yeah, let's let's all come back in a day or so and we'll learn everything There is to know about the Dr. Laura show. Like every episode, I'm like,

I think she's gonna turn this around. I spit in the face of history. She's gonna be an awesome person. I just know it. This is where we learned that Dr. Laura stopped the second 9-11, you know? Things wouldn't have gone that way if she was there. There were gonna be three more planes,

but not, she talked them all down. She told those hijackers to reconsider their lives. You know, quit this job, raise a family. She did it everybody. Saved us all. Saved the, I don't know, some other building. I don't know another famous building. An even bigger one.

An even bigger one. Jamie, where can people find you on the internet? Well, Robert, you can find me on this very network. You can find me every week on Tuesdays, 16th Minute of Fame, where I talk to and about the main characters of the internet and what their notoriety meant for the internet and for them. And yeah, Sophie, of course, is the producer, you are a producer and Ian is an editor.

So I mean, we're keeping it in the family over there and it's hot dog season. So get a copy of raw dog while you're at it. Tomorrow, I am, as we were recording this tomorrow, I'm flying to New York to cover the hot dog contest. And it's gonna be a barn burner this year. It's gonna be very fraught. I can't wait.

Yeah. No, Joey. Burn a barn down. Burn something down, folks. That's all I ask for my listeners. Light a fire somewhere. Least we can do. Least we can do.

It could be a legal fire. It could be an illegal fire. I prefer fires that are a gray area. Really try to get like within six hours of a burning. It could be a legal fire, it could be an illegal fire. I prefer fires that are a gray area, you know? Really, like try to like get like within six hours of a burn ban starting, so you've got that plausible deniability, you know? Really gamble on it.

Like a sexy little keep them guessing kind of thing. Keep them guessing, keep them guessing. That's all I ask, baby. That's all I ask. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From KT Studios, the number one podcast, The Idaho Massacre is back.

The new developments in the University of Idaho murder case. It was an unimaginable crime. One house, four victims, only one accused. If this is true, then this guy is the real life Dexter. Listen to season two of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising,

and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeart Radio

app, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and activist Darren Seals was found murdered. That's what they gonna learn. On for death, on for nothing. Every day, Darren would tell her, all right, ma, be prepared, they are going to try to kill me. All episodes available now. Listen to After the Uprising, The Murder of Darren Seals on the brink of war, one man held together the fragile peace, Archbishop Oscar Romero. He was brutally assassinated in front of dozens of his loyal followers.

His death marked the start of a civil war that left more than 75,000 people dead and a million more displaced around the world. My family includes both, those that fled and those that died. Listen to Sacred Scandal, Nation of Saints on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.