Part One: The Dr. Laura Episodes
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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 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. We're beloved by all, influential, powerful, mighty. But that comes with a corresponding loss of power. The power to be yourself, 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 want to say with the opening of this podcast. Wow, Joe Biden. 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 going to 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? Mm-hmm.

Mm hmm. 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. How does a calamari is really? That's what they do. That's fascinating. They they they bred pig anuses and fry them in places that don't want to spend money on calamari. If you've ever had cheap calamari bread, solid chance it's a pig anus. Yeah. 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. Mm hmm.

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. Is there gluten in pig anus? No, it's gluten in calamari. Oh, in breadcrumbs, baby. You can use a gluten-free breading.

You could, but it will not be very good. You know, 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 not great for you. It's punko as opposed to the healthy Joe Biden pig anus. Great. OK, 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 going to 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. Yeah. Yeah. That's right, baby. That's right. It's the Dr. Laura episodes. 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...

If my 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 really is saying something. There's a lot to be said about like the toxicity and some of the people, a lot of the people that, uh, for example, Oprah has brought on her show. Right. Um,

Sure. 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. 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 pushes. Yeah. That I'm never fully sure if she knows how much she's hurting her audience. I, from what I've heard of Laura Schlesinger, she doesn't really have an issue. She, 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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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 callers.

The point of being in her audience is to hate her callers with her, right? That's kind of the core of Dr. Lore. 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 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...

Yeah, 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, having their boyfriends cheat on them. Right. But that is what the that is what the appeal of her show was.

OK, 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 the feminist vegan named Carol Adams, who's like

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 going to 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. Yeah.

Look, I'm coming in hot today. I met her at a hot dog convention and she was, you know, she's famously a vegan and was trying to, you know, sort of preach the gospel about vegan hot dogs. But I was talking to her about how she is because she is in her 70s, I think. And she had been harassed for being, you know, 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 the 90s 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. Lohr is a big enough name. I think probably a majority of people are familiar with Lohr.

who she is in broad, but she, 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 it had a major role in building a place, not just in the media, but on the right wing for a wildly successful celebrity.

like pop therapist who is primarily telling you you need to clean your room right that's Dr. Laura and that's 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 Rachel Hollis yeah that's a different one I read it Dr.

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. It's a big old seller. So.

I want to get into this. I want to talk about who Dr. Laura meant to me first, because I, we're going to do something a little different here. We're going to play some interstitial clips from her show up through like the two thousands to the modern era. As we talk about her past, because I would love to show you some of those very early from the seventies and eighties 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,

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. We were our radio personality when I was growing up, who I think is still in the mix is Delilah. We were just like listening to, you know, and that wasn't even pretending to give women advice. It was just people calling being like, no.

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, I loved her. She played a lot of Leanne rhymes 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 I, she's inevitable, but,

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.

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 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. People feel this way because it's true, and it's true because 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 ghouls 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 – 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 is taking advantage of you.

And here I'm going to play a bunch of like selectively curated audio of people who are having too many kids that they can't support or, you know, getting loaded up on debt or doing other irresponsible things. Right. And these are the people that you should, you know, you can spend some time today getting angry at these people and then go about your day.

And I will throw out some simple advice about how 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 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. Uh, Morton Downey Jr. Who we've talked about on the show was another major figure in like, uh, 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 like angry and frustrated because shit isn't fair. Somebody to blame that was, had no actual power.

Right. And nothing really like that. There was no harm to the people who are like, you know, 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 shoplift in this country by a factor. Yes. Several times over.

Everyone should shoplift. It's built into their budget to do. So when she's giving someone to blame, because 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. 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 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 back.

Yeah.

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 her hard work had not been rewarded. And I think she – there was tremendous appeal to her in 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 that's the impression that I have gotten. I I didn't really at the time, you know, as a kid, I thought Dr. Laura had 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 really was. 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. No, often imitated, never rep... I hope she's still alive. I hope so.

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 his...

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 an, had Oprah in the background of my entire childhood. Right. And like her, 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. Yeah. But you look like shit and you're doing every, and like, and, and, and, but, but, you know, I guess where they kind of meet is the fear mongering around, um,

And around like there's just a lot of that. Yeah. And it's because of that that I have 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'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 your body is telling you that you need to look like shit. Right.

Listen to your body. It's saying look bad. Yeah, yeah. Help blend in. Blend into the trash fire around you.

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 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. As an adult, there wasn't really much of reason to pay attention to her, period. 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.

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. Yeah. Wow. That's a hell of a lead. Okay. And it shouldn't be N-word, it should be N-words because 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 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. For sure.

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. 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, disappear.

Despite the fact that many consider Laura Schlesinger 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 temerity 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. And well, yeah, if there's any evidence needed that our entire country has a humiliation kink. Yeah, 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

that was someone being like, it was one of those like people on Tik TOK 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 it, you get, 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, this is just a, 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'm like, I was like, yeah, people do need to take responsibility. And then I realized what was happening, which was that the entirety of the out, 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 it,

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. Like 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 really.

runs off of churning that up and putting it in front of people to get them angry, to get them talking about it and making fun of that person and attacking. Like that's that's the business. And that's Dr. Laura's business. And so I guess. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. 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. Yeah. In the same way, like, yeah, 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 going to wind up paying for it or anything to get your eyes on the shit that doesn't matter. Yeah. Right. Especially when it's like codified as like this person's bad behavior, like they're a contextless bad behavior. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's just like, well, I don't know why, why would some, 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 classism and racism and all of this stuff that goes –

Through the way that we I mean, Sophie, I'm thinking about like 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.

usually poor pregnant girls. Yes. Out of context. They're just like, well, they must have done it because they're poor. It's the same. And it's the same thing on the internet, right? Like it's a lot of these kind of like two minutes hate come around and like, let's find a,

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? Are they sometimes causing problems for themselves by doing the weird Tumblr brain shit where people like

And it's like on a certain scale.

makes it a certainty that they will double down on it. There's a, the, the, the, the, 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 like teenagers are, are how they're, 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. I got time. I got time. Yeah. Anyway, you should all take some time to listen to these advertisers. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, that was good. That was good. So that was smooth. Thank you. Thank you. See, this is again, you can't teach this, right? You can't train this. This is this is I'm pure. I'm 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. In a way, I am God.

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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? Why?

Was the guy who raised you nice? Yes, he is. 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? I'm upset because she lied to me about it for... So what? ...her entire life. 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 want to 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. And that's not bad, right? That there's nothing wrong with...

a marriage working out with someone deciding that like, oh, this, the biological parent of this kid, I can't raise them with and, 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, 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 Lori 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,

invents an issue and the issue being that, okay, so this woman is, 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 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. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to play it 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 to 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 want to 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. Wow.

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. Really?

Kind of. It's like very, a very distinct red and black blocky thing going on there. Vicki Bain does sound like a comic book villain girlfriend in the 80s. Yeah, that's right. Wow. No gods, no talk radio. Oh,

So Vicki L. Bain 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. I think it's, I found the Dr. Laura book in the internet archive. You can probably find the Daniel Steele one there too, but I haven't checked.

I will say, while this book is invaluable because 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.

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. Yeah.

And this, Vicky kind of 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, yeah, buy the products and services on this great show because there's no ethical solution we're presenting.

No, it's like everything else in capitalism, folks. 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. Yeah.

But I got to give Vicki credit. That's an impressive achievement. Yeah. Shout out, Vicki. Can't wait to hear you rake Danielle Steele across the coals. Take her down a 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 Keene kind of. Yeah. Like who knows who's writing Nancy Drew books? Yeah.

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 Two. 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. Wow, like the original boomers. That's really impressive. Imagine two very traumatized people having a supervillain 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. I don't understand what happened.

Yeah, it's great. OK, so she's born like this 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. 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. 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...

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...

You just got to 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, baby, Dr. Laura. God, 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 emotionally.

uh, in your, you know, in your, like be a person they can talk to because you could be preventing a future doctor. 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. Uh,

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,

Laura told another reporter from Redbook 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 on to disagreements like a remora, who was almost looking for disagreements. Right. And so with 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. Mm hmm.

Laura grows up desperate to make a mark and prove herself to be someone special. And like 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

For Gen Z listeners, an encyclopedia is like Wikipedia, but without all like it's not mostly Star Wars lore. So other words, in other words, it's like a useless Wikipedia. Yeah. If Wikipedia couldn't be edited and looked 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 wouldn't have any reason to read it.

Wow. There you go. Speaking to the youth again. Yeah. The Gen Z kids know me. Yeah. They understand that I'm plugged in, baby. Uncle Robert is on one today. That's right. Don't mind him. The Schlesingers 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'd have to wait 13 minutes until it was 115 to do her hour of practice. Okay.

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. Yeah.

And I think that that's definitely like what we're seeing here. Right. Yeah. It's a she describes like her weird time fixation is self-discipline. Right. And I I think it's her grasping for control. Like she can't make her control the fact that her mom wants her to do this, but she can have that kind of control and like, yeah.

It makes sense to me.

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. This, it only really happened once. 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 does. 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. 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 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 Vicky's.

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 want to 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.

When was Vicky's book published? It was like in the 90s, but still a long time, not 40 years, but a while later. Yeah. So like the word beautiful is still, I mean, it still is now, but like, especially then like indiscriminately thrown around just to like validate that you are reading about a person of worth. But I don't know. Every time it's like a young girl is described as like,

you know, like didn't want to know other people. It's 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 themselves as like a hilariously precocious child unless they were doing myth making.

Right. That's what I'm. Yeah. Because it's like we can't trust Vicky 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 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 stars, but goods and services. That's the message of Star Trek. There's more good. I agree. I agree. I think that that is where things are headed. You know, we don't know the end game of it, but yeah, we went to the stars to find more goods and more services. Right. 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.

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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. Uh, really good person, but he will suffer for his crimes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, um, 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. Um, incredible. My brother's, my little brother's major, my brother, my little brother's most notorious crime is that he caught me, uh,

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. And then I got in trouble. Ha ha ha!

See, my brother never narked 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 nark on you. He just...

like was legitimately wanted to follow the rules. Punished for being a sweetie. Yeah. You know, he's, he's a, 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 there? You know, we celebrate our brothers, but they've got to go. They've got to go. They've got to go. Jamie, when the revolution comes, it'll be the little brothers first up against the wall. The little brothers are first to go. Yeah. I think we can really make political hay off of this. Oh, 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, this 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 just don't believe you, Dr. Laura. I just don't believe you. It's so weird for someone who is famously encouraging women to return to the home, describing herself like fucking Allen Ginsberg. What are you saying? I hate this shit. It's not just Dr. Laura. Lots of people do this. Yes.

You get this online a lot with people being like, well, it 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 the like any intellectual curiosity excludes you from being a person with like human desires. 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. Like we all had, we all like 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. Yes, yes. Podcasters can now order airstrikes. Awesome. Will Wheaton's finally going to 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 man scientist stuff is that some of the quotes Vicky provides from her former classmates just describe her as a very normal girl. Here's 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 side, 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.

Yeah. Helping her friends stalk a boy that they had a crush on and listening to fucking 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. 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. Right.

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 happens?

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? Yeah.

I do feel like, yeah, if you're a high schooler, just like vote the most evil person who is running into student government and then they'll just taper off. Yeah, I think we should have 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. But but but 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. Absolutely. And I celebrate that. Yeah. Yeah. And that guy who died that everybody liked, he was in those movies. Anyway, Donald Sutherland. Yeah. Oh, were you? Yes. Yeah. Donald Sutherland. Yes.

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 L.A. Times Home. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Laura coded. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. Now there is some evidence she certainly seems to have been a 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 because 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? Yeah, I was like, that feels weirdly like a skull measuring kind of... Yeah, it feels like you're going to lead to race mixing at some point here, right? Yeah, I don't like... Leading with heredity is gross. Yeah, to race science. This makes me want to look up Robert Durst's yearbook quote, because I forget what it was, but I know it always made me laugh. Oh, the big D? Yeah.

Oh, you mean the murderer. Sorry, I was thinking of Fred Durst.

No. Well, common misconception. Who was recently in the great movie. I saw the TV glow, which was very good. He was. Yes. I loved that movie and I loved his appearance. Robert Durst. No, he is 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

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, that hairstyle was was a worse crime. Wow. Get his ass. I'm also I'm also pro murder. You know this about me. I know you're pro murder. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not. I'm I'm 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, you know?

I'm a swing voter for murder. You know, some murders I like, some murders I don't. I take it on like a- I refuse to continue. Okay, that's probably a good idea.

And 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 weird

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 know, you don't have the looks that'll make a guy turn his head.

Oh, my God. Horrible. It's just devastating stuff to hear from your dad. Well, there's your villain origin story. No, absolutely. Forget what I said about Stuka. 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 that's

A lot messier. Like her mom was not nearly as shitty as her dad, but for whatever reason, she idolized her dad. You know, whatever is going on here. 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 that is like that is devastating. Yeah.

We do get some hints of what the worst shit from her mom might have 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 off the mom card. That's extreme. That also happened to the creator of Beanie Babies with his dad. Yeah.

Well, in that case, I think his dad did the right thing. So... I mean, 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's dog shit. Yeah, 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, OK, so maybe she's just always sucked ass. Right. Whereas it sounds like whatever insecurities or like she is internalized growing up has now turned into weapons forever. Mm hmm.

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.

OK. After graduating, she went to Columbia University to get her master's 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 we would have been great. She doesn't.

What she does do is meet a guy named Rudolph. She meets him because 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 heals, she becomes aware of the horrifying reality that like Rudolph doesn't

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, you know, get married too early based on something that is more of like a momentary thing rather than evidence of like long-term compatibility, you know? Not a weird story and not one that...

Most people would judge someone over, although Dr. Laura is going to build a career judging people. 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-nosed 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 going to 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. Yay.

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 and telling interviewers that her ex-husband brings his parents to court and

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 ours, 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 Schlesinger 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 going to love learning about this piece of shit. This is a real influential piece of shit. OK. 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. Yeah, let me have it. 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.

Oh, how are 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. And it's good that we don't think of who because women get to have shows now. Right.

Right. And I guess that he maybe he was the final the final boss of lascivious uncles, because I can think of lascivious aunties or not even lascivious aunties. I can think of like shame, shameful aunties. Bill is uncle. Was he popular? Was he genuinely popular among people?

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

I mean, 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,

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. Absolutely.

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 so it's 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

Yeah.

In a public forum? Like, that is such a bummer that it took someone that far afield from who they were being like, no, you're... It's okay. 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 like, 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. Right. And the other thing that the audience existed. Yeah.

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 like the shock jock shit that's going to 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? Yeah.

Okay, so it's like you could pull Howard Stern or the Bechdel 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... 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...

The child's father is my husband's father. The child's father is your husband's father. 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 your father-in-law-to-be was a better man than his own son. Right. So why didn't you marry the father-in-law? Was he still married to your soon-to-be mother-in-law? Yes. Oh, that's 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-in-law.

Of his own child? Yes. Oh, gee. But you mentioned just in passing, it was kind of a throwaway line, Giannina Mia. You mentioned that maybe it won't be for long. You mean he's going to get rid of his old fat wife and marry you? Well, not marry me, but I don't want to 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. 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. Well, yeah, that's the thing. I was like, I don't think he's doing nothing there. I think he's not doing anything. Leading questions that he knows the answer to that makes the behavior sound interesting.

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 i 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 see you can also see him in the line to uh

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 hear it on Dr. Demento. Okay. 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...

Give 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 the difference. How many hours does she have to Bill's five? Yeah. Bill gets five. I guess he has a slide whistle, which you definitely hear, right?

No. I mean, you heard the slide whistle in there. He loved this is, of course, a slide whistle show. So Bill is popular. And I should you know, 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 going to continue that quote from the L.A. Weekly article.

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...

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's he's a he breaks a seal on 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. Thank God.

He's the first fish that walked on land, right? Rather than the immediate simian precursor, right? Like he just sort of shows that radio can be a different thing than it had been before. 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. 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? Right. 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 ripoffs of the Bill Ballant show in different stations around the country. Okay.

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 analyses of the fears and complaints made by Ballas' callers, right? So they quickly... And again, this is part of like the actual...

talent here is recognizing people don't just want to hear Bill be gross on the air and make jokes. They want to hear someone who you can claim as a scientist explain what the psychological stuff goes, right? Oh, 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. 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.

Yeah. And his station managers saw this as an it correctly is 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 talk about their fucked up lives. Billions of dollars. Right. Infinite money from doing this shit up to this day. Right. 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 Yahoo's on the radio. Right. Well, you know, well, let's not know. No shade. But Frazier certainly found the time.

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 is not a real psychiatrist. He's a fraud. But that's part of what makes it fun. I love, I love what a fraud that man is. Absolutely. God, what is 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. Maybe Bulldog if he's in a good mood. Right. Yeah. I'm glad we're having this complex Frasier 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, slay. That's your reason. Yeah. 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 her produce 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 going to turn this around. I spit in the face of history. She's going to be an awesome person. I just know this is 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 going to 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 uh she did it everybody saved us all save 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 at 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, we've, we've 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, it's going to be a barn burner this year. It's going to be very fraught. I can't wait. Yeah. Uh,

No, Joey. Burn a barn down. Burn something down, folks. That's all I ask for my listeners. Light a fire somewhere. You know, 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. You know, really like try to try to like get like like within six hours of a burn ban starting. So you've got that plausible deniability, you know, really gamble.

Like a sexy little keep them guessing. 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, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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