Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Richard Ramirez
Episode Date: July 18, 2026Richard Ramirez grew up sleeping in graveyards to avoid his violent father. At twelve, he found the role model he'd been looking for: a Green Beret cousin who came home from Vietnam with Polaroids of ...his victims and a philosophy that holding power over life and death made you a god.In part one of our three-part series, Katie Ring traces the childhood of Richard Ramirez that built the “Night Stalker,” and the night his killing began. This episode contains descriptions of child abuse, sexual assault, and murder. Please listen with care.Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios
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Hi listeners, it's Vanessa.
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After a childhood soaked in violence,
Richard Ramirez was desperate to find a sense of belonging,
but church wasn't cutting it for him,
so he looked elsewhere.
And the thing he chose to believe in
would help him justify
some of the most brutal murders this country has ever seen.
Today, I'm going back to the beginning
to the quiet church-going kid from El Paso,
and the obsessions that turned him into a serious,
killer America would come to fear, the night stalker.
Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the
nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are,
that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's
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Before I get started, please be advised that this episode contains descriptions of child abuse,
sexual assault, and murder. So please listen with care. This is the first of our three-episode
series on Richard Ramirez, one of the most notorious serial killers in American history.
Today, I'll talk about the violence he grew up around, the cousin who shaped him, and the
obsession that twisted his mind, and the night his killing began.
Richard Ramirez was the youngest of five kids, born on February 29th, 1960 in El Paso, Texas.
And from the very beginning, religion was at the center of his life.
Richard's parents, Julien and Mercedes, were working-class Mexican immigrants and devout Catholics,
and they raised all of their children in the shadow of the church.
But that faith didn't make their lives any easier.
All five Ramirez kids were born with medical problems, ranging from respiratory trouble to
bone deformities. Richard's parents came to believe that those problems came from chemical fumes
Mercedes had breathed while working at a factory while she was pregnant. With all of those struggles,
you'd hope their household was a nurturing one. And by all account, Richard found a lot of
comfort with his mom, but his dad was another story. Julian expected a lot from his kids, and when they
stepped out of line, he beat them. Whenever that happened, which was a lot, the rest of the family
would hide or pray. Once Julian decided to get violent, nothing could stop him, not even from
hurting his youngest son for breaking even the smallest rules. For me, one of the most unsettling
things about Richard's dad is that after he hurt his kids, he would punish himself in very extreme
ways. Richard later said once after beating the boys, he watched his father pick up a hammer
and smash himself in the head with it. To steer clear from his dad's temper, Richard started
started slipping out and making his way to a local cemetery, where he'd find a quiet spot
among the headstones to be alone.
Some nights he stayed there until the morning, choosing to sleep among the graves rather than
going home.
It says a lot that a graveyard felt calmer to him than his own house.
And over time, the dark and dead stopped scaring him at all.
The danger wasn't just confined to Julian either.
Richard was a rough and tumble kid who had come home from school with bumps and bruises,
who received serious head injuries when he was young. The first was when he was only two,
when a dresser toppled over on top of him and split his forehead open, a cut that reportedly
took around 30 stitches to close and nearly killed him. The second came when Richard was five,
when a park swing caught him in the head and knocked him out cold, leaving a deep gash in his
scalp. It was after that second injury that something new started. Richard started having seizures,
which doctors would eventually recognize as epilepsy.
He was already an anxious, restless kid,
and the seizures only made it worse.
His mom took him to doctor after doctor,
but none of them seemed especially worried.
They told her he'd grow out of it, but he didn't.
The seizures kept coming,
and the sweet boy who loved music
slowly turned into a withdrawn, paranoid kid.
He'd stare into space for long stretches.
Sometimes when the family was watching television,
Richard would leap out of his chair screaming that the monsters on the screen were coming for him.
He also wet the bed well into his adolescence, way longer than most kids do.
He was plagued by nightmares and restlessness he couldn't put into words.
And the older he got, the more those nights seemed to wear on him.
He started experiencing memory blackouts too, gaps where he couldn't account for what he'd done.
Those blackouts followed him to school, and they cost him.
When he tried out for the middle school football team, the episodes got him cut.
For someone who already struggled to make friends, that was a hard hit.
Richard pulled away from other kids and started spending most of his time alone.
Through all of it, one thing stayed constant, a love of music.
Even as he pulled away from the people around him, it was one of the few things that still
seemed to reach him.
But that wasn't enough to bring Richard out of his shell.
He was hungry for someone who understood him.
and there was one person he looked up to more than anyone,
an older cousin named Miguel.
On paper, Miguel seemed exactly like the kind of role model
a struggling kid needed.
He was in his 20s, a green beret who'd served two tours in Vietnam
and came home with medals.
To the Ramirez family, he was a war hero.
Miguel had come home from overseas when Richard was around 12,
right around the time he was most desperate for someone to look up to.
To a lonely, anxious boy like Richard,
Miguel was magnetic. He was older and tougher than anyone else in Richard's orbit.
He'd seen the world and come back from a war, and he seemed to take a real interest in his young cousin.
Richard hung on his every word, and Miguel was more than happy to have an audience.
Unfortunately, Miguel was actually the most dangerous person Richard could have been spending time with.
He introduced his younger cousin who wasn't even a teenager yet to marijuana.
While they got high together, Miguel told him stories, not war stories the way most veterans tell them.
Miguel bragged about the worst things he'd done overseas, like torturing and mutilating enemy soldiers
and assaulting and killing Vietnamese women, and he had proof.
Miguel carried Polaroids of his victims, including one of himself posing with a woman's severed head,
and he showed them to his young cousin.
Miguel didn't just describe brutality.
he made it sound powerful, glamorous even.
According to Richard's biographer, Miguel even put a kind of creed to it
that holding power over another person's life, deciding who lived and who died,
was the closest a man could come to being a god.
And with no one around to tell Richard otherwise,
the things Miguel described stopped being horrifying and started being something to admire.
Richard wasn't under Miguel's influence for long, though.
On May 4, 1973, when Richard was 13, he was hanging out at Miguel's place when Miguel and his wife Jesse got into a massive fight.
Richard could never recall what the argument was about, but he remembered one detail clearly.
For some reason, Miguel kept a 38-caliber pistol in the refrigerator.
At the height of the argument, Miguel calmly took it out and pointed it at Jesse.
She dared him to pull the trigger, and he did.
Jesse died, but Miguel now.
never went to prison for it. He was found not guilty of her murder by reason of insanity.
His defense tied the killing to a trauma he'd brought home from Vietnam, and instead of a prison
cell, he was committed to a Texas state mental hospital. Still, a 13-year-old had just watched
the cousin he idolized shoot his own wife to death, and losing that connection with Miguel,
only left Richard feeling more adrift than ever.
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Whatever grief Richard felt from what happened with Miguel and his wife, he kept it inside him.
That kind of trauma is hard to fathom, and to cope with it, he moved from marijuana to harder drugs, including LSD.
And rather than look for spiritual guidance at church, Richard started reading about Satanism and the occult,
which, in his mind, blessed exactly the kind of violence and sex Miguel had described.
A few months after the shooting, Richard was sent to live with his older sister.
Sir Ruth and her husband, Roberto. It seemed like maybe Roberto could be a new role model for
Richard, but that wasn't the case. Turns out his new brother-in-law liked to roam the neighborhood
at night and peer into women's windows, and he brought Richard along. Richard's worldview was
turning into something unspeakable. The cruelty Miguel had glorified, the power the occult seemed to
promise, the violence he'd been steeped in since birth. It all pointed in the same.
dark direction. Before long, school stopped mattering to him. Richard dropped out in the ninth grade
and took a maintenance job at a local holiday inn. The job made him more independent, which wasn't a
good thing. It also handed him keys and access to the building after hours. There were always
women coming and going at the hotel, and Richard couldn't stop himself from spying on them in their
rooms. He started fantasizing about the women he watched, and some of those fantasies turned
violent. In 1974, when he was 14, Richard watched a woman in her 20s check in. That night, he followed
her to her room and slipped inside while she was in the shower. When she came out, he wrestled her
down and tied her up. But before he could go any further, the woman's husband walked in. The husband
beat Richard so badly that when the police arrived, he had to be taken to the hospital. He was so
battered that his mom and sister barely recognized him. Richard fed them a lot. Richard fed them a
lie. He claimed the woman had invited him in and that her husband had simply caught them together
and lost his temper. They believed him. The Richard they thought they knew would never hurt someone,
so they brought him home and nursed him back to health. The couple he'd attacked left town
and never pressed charges. Richard walked away from a violent sexual assault at 14 with no real
consequence at all, and for the next few years, he drifted. The attack hadn't scared him straight and
with Miguel still locked away, there wasn't anyone pushing him in any direction at all.
He leaned harder on drugs, kept up with late night prowling, and sank further into petty
crime around El Paso. To the adults in his life, he looked like a solen teenager who lost his
way. None of them could see the shape of what was forming underneath, and things got worse
in late 1977, when Richard was 17 and Miguel was released from the state hospital. The two of them
picked up right where they'd left off. This time, Miguel went from talking to Richard about
violence to teaching him how to do it. He showed his little cousin how to move without making a sound,
how to slip into a house undetected, and how to get out without leaving a trace.
Richard put those lessons to work, burglarizing houses across El Paso, and over the next
couple of years, he built a reputation in the local underworld as someone who would steal anything.
Before long, El Paso started to feel small.
In 1978, just after he turned 18, Richard got on a bus to Los Angeles.
One of his older brothers already lived there, and he'd told Richard about a city full of money
and beautiful people, a place where a young man could disappear into the crowd and do whatever
he wanted.
It was in the city of Angels that Richard Ramirez would finally embrace his demons.
For the first few years in L.A., Richard did more of what he'd done in
El Paso. He stole to get by, drifting through cheap downtown motels, never settling anywhere
for long. He gravitated to places in Skid Row where a few dollars bought a bed and nobody asked
questions. He neglected his health and his drug use fueled mostly by cocaine, also left his teeth
rotting and gapped. He barely cleaned himself, and the combination of bad teeth and even worse
hygiene, gave him a stench so memorable that later witnesses would describe it as one of the things
they couldn't forget about him. Through it all, he slid deeper into a private world organized around
the devil. The book at the center of it all was the satanic Bible. It was meant to be provocative,
but Richard treated it as scripture. In its pages, he heard the same message Miguel had taught
him, that strength meant taking whatever you wanted, and that mercy was for the week.
By the summer of 1984, whatever was happening inside Richard's head had turned him into something truly dangerous.
And that June, he crossed a line that he could never come back from.
Late on the night of June 28, the 24-year-old was moving through the Glastal Park area on the northeast side of L.A.
He'd spent his last bit of cash on cocaine and was looking for an easy way to get more.
That's when he noticed a house with an open window.
Richard had a pair of gardening gloves on him,
but the screen wouldn't give while he was wearing them,
so he peeled them off and pried it loose with his bare hands,
then climbed inside.
The home belonged to 79-year-old Jenny Vincow.
She lived alone and didn't have anything worth stealing.
When Richard realized his break-in was a bust,
something in him turned.
He pulled a hunting knife from his pocket,
crept into the bedroom where Jenny was sleeping,
and stabbed her to death before she understood.
understood what was happening.
Then he sexually assaulted her.
When it was over and the rage drained out of him,
he seemed to grasp what he'd done,
and he ran,
jumping into his car and begging Satan to protect him.
Jenny's son, Jack, discovered her body the next day.
The scene was so brutal that it would stay with investigators who worked it,
but there was nothing to point them toward the killer,
or at least that's what they thought.
When Richard pried the screen off Jenny's window to climb inside, he left his fingerprints on it,
and investigators lifted them.
The trouble, though, was the era.
In 1984, there was no computer system that could take a fingerprint and search it against millions of
others.
A print was only useful if you already had a suspect to compare it to.
So Jenny Vincow's murder went cold, and those prints from her window screen went into a file.
a piece of the puzzle that wouldn't mean a thing for more than a year.
As far as Richard was concerned, Satan had come through for him.
There was nothing connecting Richard to Jenny Vincow.
He hadn't singled her out for any reason beyond an open window
and the terrible luck of being home.
That randomness, a killer with no link to his victims,
striking without warning or pattern,
was exactly what would make the months ahead so terrifying for the people of Los Angeles.
Angeles. After killing Jenny Vincow in the summer of 1984, Richard started to feel invincible,
all thanks to what he believed was Satan's protection. Unfortunately, he did have a lot of luck on his
side. Four months after murdering Jenny, he didn't kill again, at least not in any case that's
ever been tied to him. He went back to what he knew best, stealing, drifting, and feeding his
drug habit. And in mid-December of 1984, Richard was pulled.
over and arrested for driving a stolen car.
The police took his photograph and his fingerprints,
held him briefly, and then released him with orders to appear in court.
He never showed.
That booking would turn out to matter more than anything else that happened to him that year.
The mugshot and the full set of fingerprints went into the state's records and stayed there.
Richard had no idea and neither did the police that California now held proof of exactly who he was,
sitting in a file waiting for the day someone thought to pull it.
But it doesn't look like anyone chased him down over the stolen car.
It was a low-level offense and not worth going after Richard for it,
and it wasn't his first brush with the law.
Richard had been arrested before for small things like theft,
and each time he'd slipped back into the city without much trouble.
To the police, he wasn't anything more than a petty offender.
That was about to work in his favor.
In the months after murdering Jenny Vincow, the pole to kill again had only sharpened,
and this time Richard wanted to be smarter about it.
He thought back to Miguel and the soldier's lesson that you kill cleanly with precision,
so Richard made changes.
He gave up the hard drug so his head would be clear.
He wanted to be efficient.
And to do that, he bought himself a 22-calibre revolver, a small, quiet weapon,
the kind that wouldn't wake a whole neighborhood.
He also developed a method.
Richard favored houses close to freeways, the kind of place he could slip out of and disappear
onto an on-ramp within minutes.
He looked for an unlocked window or a door left open on a warm night, and he didn't
confine himself to one kind of neighborhood or one kind of victim.
Young or old in small houses or mansions, men, and women.
Anyone behind an unsecured door was a potential target.
It was that absence of a pattern that would make him to be.
so hard to catch. He spent the next few months planning, learning which neighborhoods sat
closest to the freeways, which windows tended to stay open, and how a quiet residential
street looked and sounded in the dead hours after midnight. Then on March 17, 1985 on St. Patrick's Day,
he decided it was time. That night, Richard stole a car and turned the radio up loud,
blasting ACDC's Highway to Hell.
That same ACDC record had another song Richard played on a loop,
a track called Night Prouler,
about a figure who slips into a house while its occupants sleep.
He was convinced it had been written about him by Satan himself.
With the music blaring, he pulled onto the freeway
and prayed for the devil to send him a victim.
He cruised the freeways for hours hunting,
certain that sooner or later the devil would put someone
in his path, and eventually he spotted a gold Camaro.
Behind the wheel was a young woman named Maria Hernandez, just 22 years old.
She was on her way home from her boyfriend's house.
Richard followed her into the suburb of Rosemead all the way to the condo she shared
with a roommate.
After Maria pulled into the driveway, Richard parked nearby, put on an ACDC cap, and crept
up behind her at the gate.
As she was unlocking the gate, Maria heard something, turned and found.
a man walking toward her with a gun.
She screamed and Richard fired.
What happened next was almost impossible.
Maria threw her hands up,
and the key she was holding deflected the bullet.
She dropped to the ground anyway and played dead
while he stepped over her and went inside.
Maria's roommate, 34-year-old Dale Okazaki,
was hiding behind the kitchen counter.
Richard found her and shot her dead.
On his way out, he noticed Maria was still alive.
She lifted her arms and begged him to let her live, and he did.
Although it wasn't out of mercy.
Richard was simply too startled by her to react,
so he stepped past her, got back in the car, and drove off.
He left something behind in that garage, his ACDC hat.
It had come off in all of the chaos,
and when police processed the scene, they recovered it.
It wasn't much, but it was something real,
an object the killer had worn and left at the scene.
But for now, they'd have.
They had no clue that Richard was the killer, and he wasn't finished for the night.
Restless and full of adrenaline, Richard turned the music up again and drove.
In nearby Monterey Park, he spotted 30-year-old Veronica Yu driving home.
He decided she'd be next.
Veronica noticed the car tailing her and pulled over to let him pass, but they ended up
side-by-side at a red light.
Richard got out, walked to her window, and dragged her from her car.
When she fought him, he shot and killed her, then fled.
The attacks had crossed city lines.
Rosemead and Monterey Park answered to different police departments, and for a while, investigators
didn't even realize the cases belonged to the same man.
There was no robbery, no connection between Richard and the woman he'd chosen, no pattern anyone
could point to.
While Maria Hernandez had gotten a good look at him, it wasn't enough for a positive ID.
The only connection was that the same kind of gun, a 22 caliber, had been used in both
killings, although nobody had realized that yet.
Because these early attacks clustered in the San Gabriel Valley, the stretch of suburbs east
of downtown Los Angeles, reporters started calling him the valley intruder.
The killings were terrifying, nothing about them made sense, and the man responsible
was already thinking about his next move.
Over the months to come, the killing would essence.
into one of the most terrifying crime sprees in American history.
And it would take a relentless detective, a single fingerprint, and an entire community to bring it to an end.
At the end of each episode, I'd like to take a moment to answer any questions you may have about the case and share my thoughts.
So make sure to comment below.
Richard had multiple head injuries as a kid, plus a seizure disorder that's set in during childhood.
How much do you really buy the idea that his brain is?
explains what he became. This one is especially interesting to me because I actually have epilepsy.
I'm very lucky because I rarely have seizures and mine wasn't the direct result of a head injury.
Obviously, having epilepsy and experiencing brain damage will not make you a psychopath. But there
are studies about how damage to certain areas of the brain can have significant effects.
Research has now identified several specific regions where abnormalities consistently show up in
psychopathic individuals, each linked to distinct behavioral traits. The amygdala is one of the most
studied. Psychopaths tend to have a smaller, less active amygdala, which helps explain their
lack of fear, emotional detachment, and inability to empathize. They show reduced activation when
exposed to fearful or distressing images and struggle to recognize fear and sadness in others.
The prefrontal cortex is another area of the brain that governs impulse control, decision-making,
and moral reasoning. Psychopaths tend to exhibit reduced activity and structural abnormalities here,
contributing to poor impulse control, risk-taking, and a lack of long-term planning.
The hippocampus, which handles memory and contextual learning, also shows reduced gray matter
in psychopathic individuals. This may contribute to their difficulty learning from consequences,
a key reason why punishment often fails to deter psychopathic behavior the way it does in others.
My viewpoint is that genes and brain damage don't make a psychopath, but they can lay their
groundwork.
Environment, trauma, neglect, abuse, early exposure to violence is what tends to actually
pull the trigger.
Let's talk about that cousin.
In a lot of tellings, Miguel is almost a footnote, but you clearly think he's central.
Why is that?
I think Miguel is one of the most important people in this story, and people tend to skip over
him.
Think about what he gave a vulnerable 12 and 13.
year old. First, a worldview. He took the worst things a human being can do, mutilation, sexual
violence, killing, and he framed them as proof of power. He even had photos. To a kid who already
felt powerless and rejected, that can be intoxicating under the right conditions.
On top of that, Richard physically watched Miguel murder his wife at 13 years old. There's a difference
between knowing that fact and witnessing it personally up close by the one adult you admire.
And later when Miguel got out, he came back and taught Richard practical skills like how to
break into a house without getting caught. So Miguel handed him both halves, the permission,
the normalization, and the toolkit. I really don't think you can understand Richard Ramirez
without understanding Miguel. The 1974 hotel attack. He's 14. He's caught in the act.
and then nothing happens, no charges. The couple just leaves town. How much does that early non-consequence
matter? I think it matters enormously, and it's one of the most frustrating moments in the whole timeline.
At 14, he committed a serious violent sexual assault. He got beaten and hospitalized, which frankly
was the only consequence he ever faced, and it came from the victim's husband, not the system.
Then he lied to his own family and they believed him. The couple chose not to press
charges, which I don't blame them for. Even if it's self-defense, sometimes if you beat someone
that badly, you're the one who can go to jail, especially if they believe Richard's story.
But from a behavioral standpoint, that's a textbook misintervention. This was the exact window
where treatment, supervision, or accountability might have made a difference when he was young
and the pattern wasn't fully set. Instead, the lesson he absorbed was, I can do this and walk away.
and he spent the next decade proving himself right,
because this was not the first time the legal system let him off.
And the Satanism, do you think that was a genuine belief
or a costume he put on to justify what he already wanted to do?
I think it was a genuine belief,
but I also think Richard didn't actually understand
or follow the theology of Satanism.
Rather, I think he took the shock value and edginess of it
to create a kind of personal mythology
that functioned more as a permission structure
than a genuine theological framework.
People who don't know about Satanism
view it as simply the antithesis of Christianity.
Christians and other religions that believe in God
believe that things like theft, rape, and murder are sins.
So if you believe in the opposite,
then you may believe those things are okay
and actually encouraged,
which is technically incorrect under Satanism.
So I think Richard used what he called Satanism
to externalize his violence as something cosmic
or destined rather than something he was choosing.
Richard didn't find Satanism and then turn violent.
He was already fantasizing about violence,
already assaulting people,
and then he reached for a belief system
that told him those urges were not just okay but holy.
So I think it was a genuine belief,
but what he called Satanism wasn't actually Satanism.
It was his own version of faith he created to justify his actions.
Whatever it was, he clearly leaned into it for years,
and we'll see in the next episodes how far he took it, the things he made victims say, and what he left at the scenes.
I think it's important to note that this was happening during what the country would later call the satanic panic when fear of the devil was everywhere.
And when I say edginess, this is what I mean, because everyone was panicking about it, but I think Richard liked going against the grain.
But also, my honest opinion was Satan didn't make Richard Ramirez do anything.
Richard was looking for a reason and he found one that fit.
You're a self-defense instructor.
Is there anything in how he operated even this early that you want listeners to take away?
I always want to be careful here because the only person responsible for what happened to his victims is Richard
Ramirez.
That said, I do want to share some tips that are simple and actionable that you can do for your
own safety.
The biggest thing is securing your house and knowing that these things can happen to you.
But it is much less likely to happen if you take some.
simple precautions, like locking your doors and especially windows even when it's hot. Also, as we saw
with one of his victims, locking your car doors is extremely important. I also recommend having
whatever self-defense tool you're comfortable having accessible near your bed. I'll have more of these,
plus a lot more of my thoughts in the next two episodes because the spree and the hunt for the man
behind it are only just beginning. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. To enhance your
listening experience, join Crimehouse Plus and get all three parts of each week's
America's most infamous crime stories dropped at once every Monday and ad-free.
You'll also get the rest of the crimehouse lineup ad-free and early and exclusive bonus episodes.
To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top
of the America's Most Infamous Crime Show page.
Come back tomorrow for our next episode on Richard Ramirez, also known as the Nightstocker.
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Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love.
Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48.
Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends,
and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours.
Listen to and follow the First 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or Word,
wherever you listen to podcasts.
