Part Two: The Dr. Laura Episodes
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Call zone media.

Does that feel right? You know, she's got a lawsuit that she made in here. She's had at least one that was unreasonable, but she lost and gave up. She also will be talking about a very reasonable over the revenge porn that gets posted of her. Yes. So...

Uh, yeah, that one, uh, although it doesn't go her way either. So she has a bad record with the law, I guess. Even evil people can be angry about revenge porn. Yeah. I mean, I think we're being pretty fair to her, uh, in here. I'm certainly not accusing her of anything other than, um, being a kind of media person that I think is unethical, but I still have that right. So before we get into the story, Jamie, uh,

Mm hmm. Is not who I meant to call out there. Sophie has a thing to plug. Oh, yeah. It's hard when we don't have our cameras on. Uh huh. Yeah. In the last couple of days since we recorded this, my family lost our family dog, Sydney, who had been with us for 14 years. And she was immensely important to us. She was my mom's soul dog and just a light.

And we were fortunate enough that she got wonderful end-of-life care from our vet, but most people can't afford that.

veterinary care these days because it's so expensive. And I just wanted to plug an organization that my vet recommends that does work to help people who need hardship support during times when their pets might need life-saving or life-enhancing treatments. And that is paisleypaws.org. That's P-A-I-S-L-E-Y-P-A-W-S.org. The .org is important. There's another thing

thinklets.com not .com it's .org so I just wanted to plug that and yeah Sydney was really special so hug your pets yeah hug your pets buy them the nice food this time don't economize on your pets always buy them the nice food go into debt for your pets go into debt for your pets you know rob a bank for your a lot of people are doing it these days and it seems like there's no consequences

So, you know, watch the movie. Watch like the first two thirds of heat and like the first I don't know. Watch like the right six minutes of Reservoir Dogs and then don't watch anything else from those movies and go go rob a bank. I was just a city was definitely pro crimes.

There you go. Speaking of crimes. John Wick, an entire crime in the interest of dogs franchise. Yeah. Yeah. People love committing dog crimes. It's not those kind. They hate a specific kind of dog. On behalf of dogs. Paisleypaws.org.

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Yeah. Yeah. Let's lock it in. Let's.

Let's lock it out. When we left off with this story, Bill Balance, again, spelled with two L's, which my spell corrector will never accept, made me angry. Microsoft Word is a crime against humanity. Bill Gates should be thrown into a volcano. Clippy will pay. Clippy will pay. They all should pay. Bill Balance and Laura Schlesinger had just met over the radio waves, and he had had his producer get her number because Bill is a giant creep.

Now, obviously, this is the entertainment industry. He is definitely trying to have sex with her. This is not a lopsided relationship entirely, though. The power imbalance is. But Laura seems from the beginning to have been open to the idea that like, well, this could be how I get my foot in the door and in the radio.

So it's one of those kind of situations. And it's also worth noting, Laura is at this point an adult with a master's degree and a marriage behind her. So that's a choice she can make, right? Right. It is unclear to me whether she called in to that show at the first place.

place because she wanted to try and like make a name for herself in radio or if that only happened the way Bill claims it is because Bill is going to claim that once they have their relationship because they are in his words dating she does not use that term for it

The tricky thing is, I feel like we have yet to encounter a credible source in this story. Not one good source on the life of Dr. Laura. It's really challenging because you're just like every time the new source is introduced, it's somehow less credible than everyone we've met so far.

Yeah, that's the right way this book goes, right? That's the right way to look at this book. And part of why I'm trying to suggest that maybe Laura went into this with a plan is because Bill is a liar and he is going to claim that he's responsible for her wanting to be in radio. And I don't know if I want to give that to Bill. Dr. Laura is among, at least whatever else you want to say about her, a pretty like motivated, self-directed, rational person.

So I don't know. But but the truth will never be knowable here. The day after he Laura calls into his show, Bill is within 24 hours at her parents home. He describes her as having what he called a, quote, thousand watt going smile, which is not a phrase I've ever heard. And he claims that he convinced her she was a star and that she should get into radio. Laura has backed up aspects of this. Here's here's how she described their meeting.

He came to my parents' home and sat across the table from me and looked me in the eye and said, someday you're going to be an international radio star. He's in the business 35 years and he's never done this. And this is not a pickup line. We're at my parents' house, for gosh sakes. The closest to radio I'd ever been was turning one on to get the weather report. I had no interest in it, no designs on it.

But she does after Bill's call. And Bill gives her a pretty full charm offensive. He takes her to dinner at Musso and Frank's, which is a fancy restaurant in L.A. to talk about her future. Wow.

Again, did Bill because also one of the possibilities here is that Bill was both simultaneously a creep who wanted to hit on a younger woman and also thought she would be good in radio because he actually does like help her make connections in radio. So I guess several different things are possible here and we don't really know which, but it's definitely gross. Yeah, definitely gross. But, you know, in the interest of I don't know, I feel like so many people

Again, I feel like I'm coming to Dr. Laura's defense. Fuck.

But like she hasn't done anything I think is wrong here. Yeah. No, no. I mean, I feel like this is like this. This kind of situation is the source of so many so many fraud complexes where I think that two things are true here, which is that this man is a fucking creep. And obviously, I mean, if she was untalented in radio, like in a, you know, ethically valueless sense, she would not be on radio.

you know, still, she wouldn't still be working. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So he wasn't wrong, but he was a pervert. He wasn't wrong, but he was a pervert. And again, there's a lot of unknowables here, but Laura becomes a fixture at the station after this. She's initially just like a very regular guest. She makes, I think some money doing that, you know, especially when they like bring her in to help basically co-host episodes or segments. Yeah.

And she gets as a result of this, because she's on Bill's show so much, she gets offers, I think, initially from the same station. She gets like little jobs, right? She's not giving her own show right away, but I think she's doing some guest hosting here and there. She's doing some like announcing. She's doing some just whatever kind of VO they need, right? Mm-hmm.

Bill describes her as not a natural, someone who has mic fright, like is scared of the microphone to start. But she he says she develops skill and keeps with it. She certainly gets good at it. However, you know, she started where Bill and Laura's stories largely diverge is that he says they started sleeping together and were in a relationship for more than two years. Laura sort of denies this, but not fully. And it was the reason why.

Why Bill, as I said earlier, leaks a bunch of her naked photos to a porn website, which he does in exchange for $50,000. Oh, my God. Oh, he's a real creep. I don't know. I don't actually know how rich he was. You know, these guys also snorted all their money back then. So like it's entirely this man was this man was a huge radio shock jock in 1971. All of that money went right into cocaine. Good.

Good Lord. Yeah. So you kind of have to go back and forth here. I generally prefer to build on this stuff, but like Bill sells naked photos of her and also like letters and notes that she had written him and signed him like while they were seeing each other. Right. He provides all of that to this porn website and to, I think when it becomes a big deal, but a couple other places because she like ignores him at a party and she's

denies that they ever saw each other. And so he's like, I'm going to be a piece of shit, make money and also get, you know, get back at her for not respecting me or whatever. Like that's the full context of why that stuff comes out.

And it is here that I should note that while Dr. Laura was an adult when this relationship started with a master's degree, Bill was the same age as her dad and had served, in fact, in World War II with her dad, but as a captain. Oh, yeah.

Well, not like in the same unit, but like that's the age gap, right? He is. This is like creepy. Yeah. Uh-huh. Just want to make just really don't want to be sleeping on the details of how bad a person Bill is. I just also don't want to like infantilize her in this. Yeah. Yeah. The way he describes their relationship. She slept with him to get her foot in the door and then abandoned him as soon as she didn't need him anymore. And if that's what happens, then.

I'm glad Bill's angry about it, right? I'll say that much because he definitely sucks. This is also a piece of shit. Pieces of shit begetting pieces of shit. What a beautiful story. I've heard people allege that like he was basically grooming her. You know, that's certainly a way to look at it. Laura does not describe it that way, but we'll never know. Now, in addition to being a massive creep, Bill gives Laura some career advice that's going to prove crucial.

He wants her to, and this is kind of the biggest impact he actually does have other than like giving her a leg up into the business is he says, Hey,

This having like professional medical advice, people, professional therapists and counselors give advice on people's fucked up lives is going to be a bigger business and entertainment in the future. You've already got like this scientific academic background. She's Laura is at this point working on her Ph.D. You should get your counseling certificate. Right. So you actually have a professional credential to bring to the table because there's going to be a lot of money in that.

And Laura commits to doing this. Now, doing this is going to take like 2,000 hours of supervised counseling work. But if he does it, Bill says he'll make her a regular like every week on the show, which is like a job. I don't know how much it pays, but that's like paying work in the radio. Right. Yeah.

Laura gradually, as she's doing this, because she's on the show occasionally, she's doing some guest bits and she's getting her counselor's license. She starts to kind of like hone in on what her personality on air ought to be, right? And she notices-

She has times when she's nice and she's like listening to people and she's empathetic. And she has times because she's kind of an angry person when she snaps at people and she's just like really shitty to them. And she starts to learn over the couple of years that she's doing this. People respond to me being mean. Right. People love when and this is a clinical thing. People love when mommy yells at them. Uh huh. They do. Why do they?

They love that shit so hard. They love that shit to a degree that may damn the whole species one day. Um,

In the unauthorized biography, Dr. Christie, Bill's first on-air medical expert – this is the guy Bill's working with before Laura comes in. He says that he gave Laura the advice to channel her angry Italian ancestry into her show. Okay. And that Laura resisted this, and so Bill had to make an appeal to Dr. Christie's authority, and this is how Vicki writes it.

Wow, what a sentence. So I love that. Like, look, you should really trust this man. He advised the Shah of Iran. You know how well that job went for him? God.

And the fact that the Rand Corporation is like number two. Yeah. Coming onto the show to help us sort out your personal problems, the psychiatrist who told the czar he definitely wouldn't die in a basement.

Good stuff. So while she's working on her counseling certificate, Laura continued her studies at Columbia, getting a Ph.D. in 1974, which allowed her to identify as Dr. Laura Schlesinger, both in advertisements for her counseling business and on air. She would call herself doctor and then describe herself as a therapist or a relationship expert, etc. And this is something that a lot of people might have led them to believe that her doctorate

was medical or in any way relevant to providing relationship advice. People love this grift. People love this grift. It's a classic. It's a classic. She gets away with it forever. She is also going to attack colleagues who do the exact same thing in a way that is so vicious and like, but also the dedication she puts to it shows that like, oh, she knows that this is her weakness, right? She knows that Dr. Laura is way more marketable than Laura, right? Mm.

And yeah, it's cool. It's cool that she understands this and recognizes that she has to attempt to nuke everyone else who does the same thing in order to protect her position here. In the late 1970s, while Laura is starting her career and is now a doctor, her parents get divorced. And right around the same time, she cuts Bill off, breaks things off with him and starts going independent again.

This seems to have been partly inspired by the fact that she met Louis Bishop, a fellow teacher at USC and a married man with three children, the youngest of whom was 13. Laura, intrigued by his sexy shoulders, started hitting on him.

She that's her words. Look, I'm not I don't know. Lou Bishop shoulders are not mine to comment on. I don't know. Maybe she was attracted to a jacket and she just didn't realize. Happened to a lot of people in the 90s. You've seen those jackets. I know. It's like we're talking. I mean, we're talking about late century jackets. These are it's the jacket you want to fuck and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by just doing that.

And that's why you should never put on a jacket from the 70s, people. A lot of people get pregnant with some weird kids that way. Someone left their husband for a jacket. Yeah.

That jacket is 30% human reproductive materials. There's just something about him. Yeah, she hits on him. Now, again, this guy, Lewis, has three kids, the youngest of whom is 13. He is in a marriage. Laura will later claim that she only started to flirt with him when Lou was separated from his wife, Jean.

Anonymous colleagues at USC claim she pursued him while he was still with his wife. Right. And obviously that doesn't mean that the blame is all on her, but it does mean that she was fine with hitting on a guy and fucking a guy who was in a who was married with kids and

And like that is a thing she will tell people they're scum for doing later. Right. I don't bring that up because I. Right. I care to be a moral paragon here. I'm just saying she's going to shit on people for doing the same thing. She'll judge people for. Right. Yes. Yes. For do. And in fact, we'll judge people for doing shit that's not even that questionable. Right. Anyway, for unrelated reasons, here's a clip from a call to the Dr. Laura show. Jamie. JP, welcome to the program.

Hey, yeah, hi, Dr. Laura. Hi. I had a quick question. I've been seeing a woman for a number of years now, and I found out that she... I don't know what a number of years means. What does it mean? Get him. Get him. Over two years. Okay, so you've been seeing this woman for two years. Are you shacked up together, or you go drive to her house? Yeah.

No, we hang out together. We've done things. Are you shacked up or do you live in two different places? No, we live in different places. Okay, good. Either one of you have minor children? I don't. She has like teenagers. And how old are her teenagers?

I rather not, don't feel comfortable to say that, but I just don't want, you know, that's nothing, you know. I need to know how old they are, and I don't see how that's going to be a distinguishing characteristic. Everybody has already recognized their voice. Yeah, why do you need that info? They're like 16. They're both 16? They're twins? No, 16 and 17.

16 and 17. Okay. That gives you two years of dating her. If you want to marry her, you have to wait two more years until the kids are up and out. They don't need to deal with you in the house. That usually doesn't work out very well. Okay. So, um, hmm.

Yeah. So that's that's fucked up. Right. Because, number one, this guy just does not even because, you know, what she actually did was get into a relationship with a married man behind like the back of the woman in that relationship. And then the family broke up as a result of that whole thing.

I'm not putting all the blame on her either, but that was the situation she was in, right? This guy is just saying, I want to date this woman who has two 16-year-olds. And she's like, well, you can't marry them or have a serious relationship with her while they're teenagers, right? Because that would disrupt them too much. And it's like, what about the 13-year-old in this situation you were in? I was like, she's a gigantic fucking hypocrite. I'm like more interested in how...

How like listening to her operate like it's the same deal with Bill drills and what's their age. Yeah, exactly. Like she's just like a shark looking for an angle. And like if one angle doesn't pan out, she will wait for him to talk two to three more seconds and try the next angle. And it's just I mean, it's brutal.

Her audience, one thing they like is scummy men or men who were weak or something. And so you want to – first off, it's about getting them off balance, right? The more things that you can needle him on like constantly – like he does that – or she does that at the start of the call where he's like a number of years. She's like, how many years, right?

is it because that that is the most important thing? No, but number one, it maybe gives her something she can pivot off of later. And number two, by starting it like that, by like drilling on him, she's getting him off balance. She's making him more nervous. Hopefully he'll say something else that she can drill him into and how he said it, right? It gives her an in for like a first judgment because even,

when she, when she like takes in the information of two, I was genuinely unsure which way she was going to go. Just that whichever way it went, it was going to be a weird judgment. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I think it, cause it's like of the issues to have, I don't think,

It's reasonable to be like, well, you shouldn't marry someone when they have teenagers because that will disrupt the team. No, you it's your responsibility as an adult in there to not fuck up their lives. I'll agree with that. But you marrying their mom is not necessarily that thing. Right. I feel like this is a part of the show, I'm sure. But like by the time that interaction was over, I forgot what, if anything, the question was. Because to some extent, it's about that constant feeling of like.

Hearing someone who is together attacking all of these people for being slothful and lazy and like not, you know, these symptoms of our degraded modern society and all of its cultural rot, right? That's a lot of what the people who like this show get out of it, right? Right. That's good. I think that relates to the topic of the question. Okay, so she is like a manipulative hypocrite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of the Dr. Laura story. Okay. The Dr. Laura-stora. Not a good joke. Not really a joke. Throughout the 1980s. I gave you the pity laugh and I regret it. Thank you. I appreciate the pity laugh. Take it back, Loftus. No. I take it back. I'm sucking it back up. I'm giving great lesson to all of the men out there, you know, because pity laughs spin the same as real laughs, which is not very well. Yeah.

Stop laughing at bad jokes. That was not a bad one, Sophie. Stop laughing at men's bad jokes. That was a real one. The first one was fake. That one really... I'm sorry, Sophie. I'm being a bad ally. I'm going to take the joy of that real laugh and I'm going to take it with me into these ads. Oh, wow. Now I'm party to something. Here's the thing. The FTC is coming after you. I have bad news news.

Which might also be goodness for both of you. I know when each of you is real laughing and fake laughing every time. I believe that. Oh, no. Every time. I've never let myself take that in. Of course you do. Oh, yeah. All of you. Fuck.

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And we're back. Ah, what a great time. What a great time to be alive in Dr. Laura's world. So through the early 80s, Laura got a series of low stakes radio gigs at small stations. She spent years trying and failing to break into the mainstream on her own while in order to make money teaching at USC and maintaining a private practice.

Her first big break was in September of 1983 with the nationally syndicated program Breakaway. Like a lot of shows, they were trying to capture the success Bill Balance had seen by bringing in a resident therapist to help gawk at people. Laura does well enough in this job that soon she is pitching her first TV pilot for a show called Conflict.

Frasier wishes. Oh, if only Frasier would have loved this show. In his fucking dream. I mean, I guess he did have it. This actually would have been a pretty good episode of Frasier. Yeah. The idea would be that like people would come to Dr. Laura with problems and they would she would give them advice. They would take it. And then six weeks later, they would come back to discuss if it had worked.

Um, now this was not going to be a real, like even in the pilot, they do, they bring in actors, uh, which is not abnormal for reality shows, but when she has a show later, she will lie about people being actors. Uh, so I'm going to assume it would all look like lies.

This doesn't sell. Laura will continue to try to force her way onto television, a dream which she does technically succeed at but never really works out for her. She is a radio star, right? I found a demo reel, which to my best knowledge dates from sometime in the late 1980s to early 90s. What stands out to me in this video is that this is a Laura who has not yet become the person we've heard in the clips that I've played.

She is less aggressive, more nervous, more focused on actually providing some sort of useful feedback. And she's wearing a fabulous brooch. She is wearing a nice brooch. And I'm going to let Jamie play some of this or Sophie play some of this audio for me while I write an apology letter for that. Hello, Sue. Hi.

- That's a real one. - I have a daughter. I want to know how I can tell my daughter how far she can go on a date and when I began to tell her that. - Yeah, how old is your daughter? - My daughter is 15. - Has she been dating already? - No. I want her to start dating and I want to know when to start telling him these things. - How do you assess your daughter? Do you think she's a bit shy?

Oh, so you're, it sounds, yeah, I guess I had a feeling that you were thinking that maybe for her, the sexuality might be a tool for making the connection or for communication or for getting acceptance or approval by a guy.

Right. Yeah. Now, there's a couple of things that are really interesting about that to me. For one thing, you would not find that, I think, irresponsible if that was how a therapist talked to you, right? No, it seemed like she was like, I mean, I think she is. Oh, God. Yeah.

There's so much Frasier. There's so much Frasier low-hanging fruit here. She is always like, whether she's doing a good or a bad job, she's always listening very carefully. But this was like a non-menacing, like actually instructive kind of listening. The questions she asked, number one, her tone is not aggressive. And number two, she's clearly not using it to needle, but to actually get more information, which...

which she seems to actually process and respond to rather than take in a separate direction, right? Like if this was on her show, she would never say, okay, so it seems like you think your daughter might be looking at sex as a way to connect to people, which is a reasonable and fair way to express a worry about like a teenager having sex, but without like being judgmental. You're just saying, I think maybe they see sex as this. And so this, you know, I'm concerned that it might lead to this or that, right, in their relationships, right?

As opposed to, oh, she wants to shack up because she thinks that's how you get boys to like you or something like that would be how Laura would express it today. Right. I mean, even the tone that she says shack up with. It's just this doesn't feel like there is an explicit agenda to it, even though it's like I'm sure that the, you know, like advice she's going to give is like fairly conservative. But like, yeah.

But it doesn't feel malicious in the way that the first clip did. Yeah. Yeah. And it's because it's really not because at this point she doesn't realize how much money that's going to make her. Right. Oh, yeah. My therapist has a roommate. So that's how I know she's good.

Yeah. It's interesting. Like it is actually good therapy advice that she gives. Like later in that call, the mother discussions that like, you know, I made a lot of mistakes when I was her age in regards to relationships. I'm afraid she's going to repeat my mistakes. And Laura's advice is very responsible. She's like, well, you should go to your daughter. You should open up about your own life and how you feel about the choices you've made. And kind of maybe that can guide her to like where you are. Right now. Yeah, that's actually good advice. You know,

not just yelling at your kid, not just saying you're not allowed to do this, but being like, well, look, you know, this is what happened to me when I was young. Like, this is maybe information you should have, and here's how I feel about it. I think that that's, like, responsible advice. It's not, like, overwhelming or shocking advice, but... And I think that's why this doesn't work, right? There's no good TV show and people having...

thoughtful therapists consider their problems. People don't want to watch reasonable conversations on television. You want the worst people you've ever seen being insane assholes to each other. That's why always Sonny's been on the air for so long. Well, I really...

I really do. I was thinking about this. I forget what show I was watching a clip from. It might have been like that show Couples Therapy. But like people either want to watch a reasonable person talking to the most unhinged like or like most troubled patients imaginable. Or the reverse. The Louis Theroux effect. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Or an unhinged therapist scolding like pretty well adjusted people. Theroux. And nothing in between. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, Louis. Yeah.

Get him. Yeah. Watch Weird Weekends. There's a great episode on that with preppers that really predicts a lot of our current or at least shows the early stage of our current weird militia communities. Great show. Ah, Louie. Complicated man. Speaking of complicated people, Laura's life is pretty complicated because while she is trying to get a radio show and working as a therapist, she and her now husband Lou have a kid together.

Lou had been a teacher when they had met at the school she taught at and had had to retire in disgrace because –

of everything that happened with Dr. Laura. And so he is kind of like working as her manager for a bunch of this period. I don't think he, he is not the breadwinner to be sure. Right. It seems like a lot of the family finances are on Laura's shoulder. That's the feeling that I get. None of this is like precise, but that is at least what I'm led to believe by Vicky's book. Who knows how accurate that is. So he's kind of like, he's, he's mommaging her a little bit.

It seems like it if if how Vicky's F how the mostly anonymous people Vicky quotes, like if that's accurate, right? There's so many despicable people attempting to tell this story. It's only bad people. Only bad people. Because, yeah, you can see a world where it's like that is just a tool to make to emasculate. No one who doesn't suck has ever been within 30 feet of Laura Schlesinger. Like that's the lesson of this.

So we'll never know. So we'll never know. There's no Forrest Gump-like character to give us insight. Tragic. There is, however, a son named Derek with a Y. Sorry. Okay.

It's an unhinged way to spell Derek. There's no other way to say it. I'm not trying to punch down Derek, but your name is not spelled right. Derek, we support you and your, I think, almost inevitable, you know, ska interests. Wait, it's also one R. Oh, now Derek joins a ska band. Wait, wait, Robert. Yeah, D-E-R-Y-K. Thank you.

Ska. Ska. This guy is skanking. He's got a name that would have made him fit in in the Mighty Mighty Boss tones. Maybe he gave him the idea to do that embarrassing album about George Floyd. Oh, my God. Look, the city hasn't bounced back since. Ska has not bounced back from that album. No, no. It's just something you can't pick it up, pick it up, pick it up after that.

Wow. So I love any chance to do a ska bit. I'll let you have it. A couple years after Derek is born, Laura is going to make a major point of like her show that women who have kids should not have a career if they can avoid it, that it is not fair to raise kids and have a career at the same time for a woman.

And I want to give you an idea of how she talks about this. I want to play you a call from a woman named Rosemary who is on track. She claims to be partner at a law firm and is trying to decide, should I get a nanny for my kids? Right. And here is Laura's response. Rational, I'm sure. If you were your kid, what would you want your mother to do? Oh, I would definitely want my mom to stay home with me. That's your answer.

I think... You should never have had a child if becoming a partner and all of that stuff was that important. You never should have had a child. Part of the rest of it is it's not important to me. I don't even especially love my job, and I do love being home with my baby girl. Well, I don't know why you asked the question then. I feel that...

I'm hearing a lot. Feel. If I'm an internal voice, but also I'm hearing. I asked you a simple question. If you were your daughter, what would you want your mother to do? There is no other debate other than the answer to that. I'd want to be mothered, you said. So why would you even contemplate something different for your kid than you would want for yourself? I care about doing what's best for my daughter. Right. And unless you're a really bad mother, having you home is best for her.

Uh-huh. I'm a really bad mother. Then having you home is the best for her. Yikes. Also, in this window Sophie just had open, the copy was like, don't buy the feminist lie. Oh, yeah. Laura has a big lot of bits about how the feminists have ruined women by making them want careers. I just... It's...

I don't know. It's so frustrating because it's like, does she ever at any point try to justify the fact that she has a career? Is there any explanation as to why that is? Or she's just the exception? She lies for one thing because she says, as a spoiler, she says, we spent the first for the first three years. I didn't leave the house.

That's not true, as we'll talk about. But also, that's three years. She's not telling this woman, because maybe her kids are both older than three, right? She's saying you should quit your job that could provide so well for your family that your kids might be taken care of, right? But you could pay, like, partner at a law firm is not like a

Not a shit job, right? That could be the path to quite a bit of wealth. She's saying give that up because otherwise you will not be a responsible parent when what she did was continue to work on being a radio personality while her child was very young, right? Right. I don't think that's wrong. I actually think that's very impressive. My mom got a second master's degree in her late 40s while she was raising us.

so that she can start a new career. Right. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't, you, if that, if she were to be honest about who she is, the advice to give this woman is like, you know, be cautious of how, you know, once you start having your kids watched by an A, talk to them, be cognizant of how this is affecting them. If you get a sense that, you know, the individual you've picked or just this situation is harming them, then you may need to reappraise things. But like,

Many children have had a nanny a couple of nights a week, especially if they're kids who are older. And it's not when I was fucking 10 or 11. I would I loved any time one or both of my parents were out because I got more time to read books and talk to weird adults on the Internet, which was never goes bad for kids. No, it's always fine. And unfortunately, it can't be stopped.

Nope. We have learned that. It's not like my parents being home prevented that. It just made it harder. Yeah. It's obviously like these are – especially if you're an only parent, like it's a complicated, difficult thing. But the fact of the matter is, however you see about that, Laura literally did the thing where she didn't spend all of her time at home to take so that she could build her career because she knew how much money was in it.

And she's telling this woman not to do the same thing. I think that's shitty, right? That's all I got to say on the matter. Yeah. So because this is such a through line in her advice to women, Laura makes a point to claim that she managed to be Dr. Laura. She says she only works like two hours a day or at least during this period. And that, again, she didn't leave home for the first three years. Vicki Bain is going to claim this is a lie.

Although Laura had been teaching a nighttime graduate level psychology course at Pepperdine University branches in the San Fernando Valley since January 1982, she took the fall semester of 1985 off to prepare for Derek's birth. But Lou was left to babysit Derek, then two months old when Laura returned to Pepperdine in January 1986 to continue her hour and a half long Tuesday evening clinical practicum for psychology students.

Laura also maintained a Saturday private practice, again, sharing office on Ventura Boulevard. And in mid-1986, with Derek not yet six months old, she added another teaching commitment to her work at Pepperdine and her private practice. So she just does the opposite of what she said. I don't think that that's – yeah. It's like she feels –

She sounds almost like a, you know, stereotypical media like projection of like a working woman of the 80s whose business is talking other women out of doing that. Like, it's just. Yeah. And I and, you know, yeah.

I'll be damned if that's not a profitable. I mean, there is just an infinite amount of money to be made in making women feel horrible about themselves because there's no point in your life where that is not precedent. It's just everything that from what I can tell, Laura values in her life comes from the fact that she was willing to spend less time with her infant child in order to further her careers. Right. Right.

Yeah, I don't think that's a reasonable choice. She makes a lot of money enough to make sure that kid never wants for anything. I'm not I'm not going to come here and say that's not she did the wrong thing. But the wrong thing is like pretending that other people who have that chance or just who just who need to work because everyone does usually that they're being a bad mom, which they're not. Right. Right. Which I mean, especially in the back half of that, like is just like.

It made my stomach clench a little bit for the woman on the phone. Because that soft defense of like, I'm not a bad mother. She's like, okay, well then. Well, then you should be at home. Quit your job. You're like, oh God. There's just like, yeah, it is a...

A certain kind of hell. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yes. So while Laura was by her own standards working out of the home and being working outside of the home and being a bad mom, she was also being a bad therapist by anyone's standards. Yeah, that's her job. One of the anonymous sources for Vicki's book is a former student of Laura's. So this is a woman taking Laura's classes online.

And during one day when they're talking, Laura basically says, you should become my patient at my therapy business. Now,

I don't think you're allowed to do that as a therapist. I think that's probably not ethical. But I don't know. It was it was the 80s. Right. A lot more. Everyone is on cocaine. Right. So it's hard not to invite people to to be therapized by you. Baby Derek's on cocaine. Baby Derek. Baby Derek is doing more cocaine than a nightclub DJ could survive doing in modern terms. Baby Derek dug up some.

He's in the backyard. He's good to go. It's like how alien people talk about the pyramids. Like we have lost the knowledge as a species for how to do as much cocaine as they did back then. As baby Derek and Dr. Laura are all doing every single day along with this student. Ain't it the truth. Anyway, I'm going to continue with that quote from Vicky's book.

It was her way or no way, the student said the student turned patient. Basically, I walked in and she said, I want you to tape all your sessions. I expect all my patients to bring in a tape. We use my tape recorder. We're going to tape everything. Basically, I think what she was saying was if you listen to this over and over again, you'll get more out of it.

According to this patient, the tapes were returned to her after each session and are still in the patient's possession. They document some boundary-breaking activities between therapist and patient. Over the next two and a half years, this patient met with Laura almost weekly, paying her $100 an hour for her work. "'I guess she took a liking to me,' recalled the patient, who added, "'And I guess at that point in my life, I needed the attention. She reeled me in and broke nearly every boundary that there is.'"

For example, the former patient said, there was a young man she was seeing right before me, so we would kind of pass each other there in the waiting room. She would talk to me about what some of his issues were. That really freaked me out because I wondered if she was telling the next person about me. Then there was a very known newscaster who was also seeing her as a therapist around the same time I was, and Laura talked a little bit about him as well. She asked me to babysit her son on several occasions. Laura said, I don't talk to my sister, and Derek doesn't have an aunt. I want you to be his aunt.

So that is a boundary. You know, I've had a therapist. No, that is bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard a therapist be like, you cannot. If I if I were to meet you out in the world, I would like leave immediately and pretend not to know you. Yeah. Like, I'm not sure if that's the norm for everyone, but you are certainly not supposed to ask them to be your aunt or your kid's aunt. No, I feel like this. I mean, it's it's.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that like Dr. Laura's work is directly in conversation with this, but like the fact that she is a very like, you know, an increasingly public therapist figure and then in the eighties feels directly in conversation, but like how therapists were presented as these savior figures during the satanic panic too. And just like how this was such a popular and like still publicly somewhat trusted grift in,

despite however much evidence, like recorded evidence to the contrary. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, yeah. Anyway, for years after this point, Laura and this patient become weirdly remain very close. Um,

The patient later claims that Lou was a helicopter parent or helicopter husband. So basically this patient says Lou was there every class she would do at the college. He was always around. He was like obsessed with her success. And Derek was not there. So maybe they even hired a nanny.

Right. The good news is that Dr. Laura had enough time while raising a kid to start up another business. This one making custom sweaters for major film productions. And Jamie, this is where the show goes in a shocking direction. No. Because I will bet you did not call that the sweaters Whoopi Goldberg wore in Sister Act were made by Dr. Laura Schlesinger. What? Yes. Yes.

Why? No, I just fucked the audio file so bad. I screamed too loud. Oh, what a win this was. Coming across this, Jamie, there's an experience. I feel like I am the only one who can understand what like pirate captains felt when they like landed and actually like hit treasure in their shovel. Right. Because that's how it felt reading that detail. I am.

floating three feet above the ground. The slack from my mic to my Zoom recorder, the only thing tethering me to the earth. How? How? God. Fascinating stuff. At least one custom sweater. I know. I know. I love it. It's glorious. She also made some of the Lost Boys costumes in Hook.

I just, there's no way to be ready for that. No! It hits like a cyclone. A woman's heart is an ocean of secrets. Like you just never know. Wow. I don't know which sweater in Sister Act that Dr. Laura made, but it was apparently for Whoopi. So...

Well, I would be open to, yeah, someone start like a poll. The next time you watch Hook. Which sweater is giving you an aura of menace? Let's see.

Anyway, wild stuff. Yeah. So Lyra is finally syndicated on air in the mid 1980s, but she loses the show. This is another unhinged twist. The network that owns her show is bought by the Liberty Lobby, which was founded by a Nazi named Louis Carteau as a political action group for the far right and also published the newspaper Spotlight, which was dedicated to Holocaust denial.

That is far less shocking to me than the sweaters and sister act. You know, Laura is, number one, not a fan of people who deny the Holocaust. She is half Jewish. She's going to become Orthodox Jewish for a period of time. Then she stops. But at any rate, she does not thrive here. She quits the station not long after it's taken over by the far right. We don't know the exact reasons, but it might have had something to do with the fact they were really bad people.

So good for you if that's the case. And even Dr. Laura has a line. Dr. Laura had a line at least. Who knows about today? Yeah, fair enough.

But she did have a line then, and she gets credit for that. Good for you. Good on you. So according to Bill Balance, after she leaves – maybe she was fired also. It's really unclear to me, but in which case, less kudos. But according to Bill Balance, she called him and begged for help, saying that she would kill herself if she couldn't get back on the radio. Bill is a huge liar. I don't know that that doesn't really sound like Laura to me, but maybe she did. Yeah.

The good news for Laura was that things turned around for her very quickly after this point. Near the end of the 1980s, a radio executive picked her to replace Sally Jessie Raphael. Her primary competition for the role was a woman named Barbara DeAngelis. Today, Barbara is a prominent author, lecturer, and New York Times bestselling author. She has a PhD in psychology from Columbia Pacific University, which is not a real college.

It was state approved, but not accredited. It is sketchy. Right. Yeah. Now, Laura is going to go to war with this woman because she calls herself Dr. Barbara DeAngelis and get like she will complain to station management and station management will make it like stop Barbara from describing herself as a doctor on air. Right.

Laura, Dr. Laura is definitely a real PhD from a real accredited school, but it's in kinesthesiology. It is not in anything relevant to what she is doing on air. It is not in therapy or in counseling. It is somewhat dishonest for her to

portray herself in this context as Dr. Laura, but she still does. It's actively dishonest. And like, it's weird because also it's dishonest for Barbara DeAngelis to call herself a doctor. It's just like, let's find the most lyingest people we can find to compete for this. So I don't know. You can...

Dubious trophy. Yeah, you can feel however you want about that. But she's definitely a hypocrite. Right. Colleagues at the time added that Laura was by far the most aggressive person at the radio station. Any disagreement or conflict with her was likely to result in weeks or years of vicious shit talking.

And this is what Barbara says happened to her, that Laura basically becomes like – almost stalking her in a professional sense. This escalates to Laura sending in anonymous complaints to the board of behavioral science examiners that Barbara DeAngelis was fraudulently portraying herself as a doctor, which I guess she was.

Anyway, she also sends a letter to the D.A. of Los Angeles accusing Barbara of practicing medicine without a license, which I don't know that Barbara was doing, although maybe this is a very like boomer woman con. Like just right. It's watching like the Barbara V. Laura war.

Well, I don't like either of these people. Yeah, right. You're like all of all of these generic boomer women names to no good. I wish neither of them had ever had a job giving people life advice, I guess, is where I land on the Barbara V. Laura debate. It's it's hard to find someone professionally giving life advice who also has a pathological need for attention. I have known a couple of people who were like good enough at life that I think their advice has a

would have a monetary value and they are all way too busy living good lives to get on the radio and do that show. Right. And that is what is supposed to, and that is like the beautiful catch 22 of people worth listening to. They're usually too busy to talk to you. That's exactly right, which is why you're left with people like me. And that's why we're here. Ponder that while you listen to these ads. Yeah.

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So Barbara leaves the station, KFI, where she and Laura have their quarrel. She later would claim that this happens in 1992, several months after she left. Quote, I received a call from a woman who sounded very nervous on the phone. She said she had been a patient and a friend of Laura's and she wanted to meet and talk to me because she had some information. She came out and told me that she knew for a fact it was Laura, as I suspected, who had set out to destroy my career and discredit me because she had heard Laura say it from her mouth and not just say it but scream it.

Now, again, no good sources here. Barbara's story does, or at least Vicky finds other people who worked at KFI who back up aspects of the story, including that Laura was incredibly hostile to Barbara. So, yeah, I don't have trouble believing that she orchestrated this woman's expulsion from the network because she was threatened by her because she was competition. Right. I also think that Barbara definitely was portraying herself as a doctor, and I don't really think she was. Yeah.

I don't think that, yeah, again, there's like, I'm rooting for no one. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I'm rooting for those sweaters and hook. Maybe I'll have to watch that movie again and really have an eye for the sweaters. I hope they're able to sort of dig themselves out from the trauma. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so shocked by that reveal. What a baffling thing to learn in the middle of this. It comes. It's like, yeah, it's like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. Just bam. Now there's sister act in the middle of this story.

It's a moment. Yeah, it is like this moment where you're like, wait, is this going to change the direction of her life? And it's like, no, no, not at all. No, no, no. Utterly unrelated. A complete red herring for the future of Laura Slesinger. There's no narrative to be gotten from it. It just is. You would cut this out of the script on her life because like, why are we doing this? Where are we going on this journey? This doesn't teach us anything. This doesn't contribute to who she becomes. But life isn't a story, people.

Yeah. It's the early 1990s were a precarious time financially for the Schlesingers. They had a devastating house fire and were basically on the edge of eviction, horribly in debt. At least a Vicky story is accurate. The story one is left believing if we take that book as more or less true is that Dr. Laura was ruthless and so cruel to Barbara in part because she was a

She saw that if I don't break through in radio, we're fucked, right? We've kind of bet everything on this, and I don't like being a therapist.

We get a vision of her during this awkward period through a piece of rare, nearly lost media. Or at least we can learn about her a little in her absence in this lost media because we're not actually going to hear her in this. This is a recording of the Meeting of the Mouths, a radio special hosted by Tom Lakis, who I think I've done ads for. He's one of the first shock jocks.

He came right after Bill Balance and right before Howard Stern, right? So if you're looking at like where we land on the descendants chart, Lakers comes out of balance. Stern kind of is birthed somewhere in that miasma, although Stern is on the air by the time they're talking about him. I just need to say, I...

I absolutely hate, detest, despise the phrase meeting of the mouths. It's horrible. It's so gross. And this is like a big radio special. You get a bunch of hosts together in a room, right? So Laura is big enough that she's made it into the room with Tom Blakus, who's a significant name. Also in this video is Barbara DeAngelis, Rush Limbaugh, and some other dudes who matter less than either of them.

So this is during that awkward period. I don't have any Allura in here because she's very quiet. So is Barbara. And it's kind of unclear to me when one is talking or the other because they're not on great audio. And all women sound the same to you. Just say it. All women sound the same. But the point is that like you learn a lot about her position here. This is 1990s.

She and Barbara are kind of just putting in very little, right? It's mostly Tom Lakers and Rush Limbaugh, who has just exploded at this time. It gives you an idea of where her standing is, right? If this had been a couple of years later, Laura would have been talking as much as Rush, like, because she does become that level of figure. So this gives you an idea of kind of where – this is her early career. And honestly, we could get away without –

playing this clip, but Rush Limbaugh is going to say something here that I just feel I've had to listen to it and now you're going to listen to it. And for some context, this is Tom Lakers and Rush Limbaugh arguing about the band Two Life Crew who have had to cancel several shows after being accused of profanity. You can, you're not allowed to throw in another hard left like this. I know, it's wild stuff. You can't.

Tom is arguing two live crews shouldn't be censored, basically. Right. I don't approve of them being so profane, but it's bad that they're having to cancel their shows and rush being like, as long as the government doesn't have a law saying they can't do their show, it's fine. Right. That's the argument. And I'm just going to play you a clip from that argument. Just warning, Jamie listeners, you're going to hate this. Oh, you're not going to be happy, but it's happening. Well, why do we gather here?

And play. Are you not troubled that the whole focus of the particular song in question of 2 Live Crew was to talk about how much fun it is to bust female vaginal walls, to rip them apart, to rip them apart. Yes, yes. I'm troubled by it, but I also know that the free market would eventually determine that most

people don't want to buy a record like that. That had to be with other people. I never heard Rush Limbaugh say vaginal walls before, and I wish I hadn't. Bust female vaginal walls. I am so sorry, but it's in me now, and now it's in you. But he said it exactly like you would think. Which is worst case scenario. If you

If you were like a comedian doing a fake Rush Limbaugh voice and like reading out rap lyrics, right? Because you thought that was funny. You would say that phrase the way that Rush said it there. Well, that's I mean, that's like that guy's whole beat, right? That's the Rush Limbaugh effect. That's the Jordan Peterson effect. They're always performing a bad SNL audition of themselves. Fucking Ben Shapiro reading Wet Ass Pussy, right? Like, yes, that's part of the appeal.

That's part of their comedians are left dead in a ditch over the self parody. Yeah, that's part of what works with them. Busting through vaginal walls. Yeah. Somebody somebody's got to clip that one out and turn that into an EDM track. Thank God.

Was that an iambic pentameter, do you think? Yes, it must have been. A lot of people don't know this, but both the show Deadwood and everything Rush Limbaugh ever said, perfect iambic pentameter. Gorgeous. So all of that's very unpleasant. But you can see 1990, she has not found her footing, right? Because she is not, she doesn't say anything when Rush Limbaugh says that.

But in 1994, she does break through and she owes a lot of the success she has finally to her co-host in this recording, Rush Limbaugh. His success had put conservative talk radio on the map. So Bill Balance makes it clear to the people with money in radio, oh,

These women are listening to shows and Rush Limbaugh makes it clear that like people like weird, loud, right wing assholes and putting those two together is going to make it very clear that Dr. Laura has an audience. Right. Listening to shows could be dangerous. Better throw a wrench in the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um,

So this is going to work out well for her. Now, to fit into this new market, Dr. Laura makes herself harsher, crueler, and, you know, more Rush Limbaugh-esque. Wow, that's a horrible Daft Punk remix. Yeah. Much of her success is supercharged by the fact that she also times the release of her first book wonderfully. In 1994, I think, 94, 95, she publishes the advice book, "'Ten Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives."

Yes. If you ever heard the show, you heard this title. I knew the name of Dr. Laura's first book without even having to research it because I heard it a million times on the air. I've seen it on shelves without knowing. Yeah. I mean, that book has endured. Yeah.

It absolutely has. And I'm going to read you the first five chapters. And each chapter comes with like a little sentence that I guess is supposed to be a descriptor. Number one, and these are, again, the 10 stupid things women do to mess up their lives. Number one, stupid attachment. Is a woman just a whoa, whoa, whoa on a man? You typically look to the context of a man to find and define yourself. I don't understand why she wrote that. That doesn't make sense.

What does that mean? Anyway, stupid courtship. I finally found someone I could attach to and other stupid ideas about dating. Desperate to have a man, you become a beggar, not a chooser in the dating scene. Stupid devotion. But I love him and more stupid romantic stuff. You find yourself driven to love and suffer and suck or do you spill that sucker in vain?

Stupid passion. Oh, yeah. Oh, ah, we're breathing hard. It must mean love. You have sex too soon. Too romantically and set yourself up to be burned. Stupid cohabitation. The ultimate female self-delusion. So stop lying to yourself. You're not living with him because you love him. You're living with him because you hope he'll want you.

You can't you generally can't tell me that this isn't just like articles written by Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. I was going to say the front half of that was like a semi good, if a little conservative, Olivia Rodrigo single. And then it just sort of descended into madness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So looking into this book is very frustrating. It starts with the introduction where we learn that her book on women was inspired by two men. The second of those two men was her father, and the first was an engineer at KFI. Quote, after working with me for more than six months, three hours a night, five days a week, Dan Mandis was hearing approximately 25 women per show agonize over some dumb guy. You know, Laura, he told me in an unguarded moment, if you listen to your show long enough, you begin to think women are stupid.

And that's kind of the core of what the Dr. Laura show is and why it's toxic. Right. Yeah. You mean, you mean, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, man. Our stupid on man. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's a lot of it. That was my favorite part. Yeah.

She has, again, as I talk about, like she is kind of like she succeeds by doing the thing that is still a lot of why how like Internet discourse works. Right. You find someone who's saying something you can clip out of context or something shitty and then you lay into them for a bunch of people who don't know them. Right. Like that's the gist of Dr. Laura. That's why the Internet works the way it does. We all want to believe that we're smarter.

than we are, right? And Laura aimed herself specifically at a special kind of middle American Christian conservative, someone like my mom, right? People who have had tough goes of it, who are scared or angry about the things that they see out in the world. And they want, you know, they need, rather than blaming the systems, to blame the freeloaders, right? The people they imagine are responsible for their difficulties. The people that they imagine are less responsible and good than they are.

And Dr. Laura provides that, right? It's just like on, you know, same as it ever was, right? Now, it is not a coincidence that Dr. Laura explodes in popularity in the mid-90s. This is the tipping point for modern conservative grievance politics in the media.

And they're angry because Bill Clinton has just, to their eyes, unjustly taken power from them after three presidential terms and is a very immoral man. And his immorality coincides with an explosion online in explicit films and TV like The Simpsons, right? You get all these –

in like media that that conservatives get angry about. Right. When the Simpsons may seem tame to you now, but early in its time on the air, Barbara Bush, when she was first lady, attacked it. Right. Which is why there's a whole Simpsons episode starring the Bushes. Yeah. I was like, that does that is good context for that. Yeah. She attacks the show because she does like the Simpsons was fairly unique in that period, a show where there's like

there's nothing redeeming about the country or about like a lot of the people in it. Like the police are corrupt. The mayor is a crook. All of the politicians are crooks. The adults are alcoholics, you know, like,

Right. The school, the teachers don't have the best interest of their students. No, they do not give a shit about their students. Yeah. They're like, it's beautiful. It's perfect art. It's very cynical. And it made a lot of, it's part of this. It's not the only thing doing, but it makes a lot of conservatives feel attacked

and under fire, right? A lot of conservatives who maybe wanted to feel that way because it's more exciting than just living in the suburbs, taking your kids to school, working 40 hours a week at an air-conditioned office, right? You want to feel like you're part of a culture war. You're being attacked, right? Right. Like it gives you a sense of – there's a sense of order. There's a sense of control. Yeah, yeah.

And a sense of action, right? And I found an interview with Dr. Laura from 1994 in the Los Angeles Radio Guide. It quotes her as saying, my values are an oasis in the middle of a moral nothingness. I am single-handedly trying to change this lack of ethics and values.

Great stuff. So she's a she's a crusader. She's a crusader, you know, you know, took part in the breaking up of a marriage or told secrets from her patients to other patients. Hey, was Christ not flawed, Robert? You know, engineered the destruction of another woman's career, you know, but like whatever. Right. She's an oasis of morality. Yes.

So during this interview with the Los Angeles Radio Guide, which I guess used to have enough readers to be a magazine, she described the chief problem of modern women as, quote, they define success by things other than their family relationships. I mean, Laura hates her entire family, aside from, I guess, her kid and her husband, but certainly does not have other family beyond that that she's close with. And the feeling doesn't seem like...

But has a great career. Right, right. I don't think that's wrong to have be fucked up with your family and have a good career. I'm fucked up with my family and have a good career, but it's wrong to tell people you shouldn't do that. Right. I just, I wonder, I mean, I know that there's no clean answer for this, but it's just like, it seems like

From a very young age, she has both had a fixation on control and a sense of order and been imbued with a deep sense of self-hatred. I cannot stop thinking about that. Like it's all connected of like, well, what is the best I can do for myself while maintaining the same level of self-hatred and like spreading it around? It's just – Yeah. Yeah.

That's good stuff. It's awesome. Sorry, that's what I meant to say. It's the essence of right wing politics, right? Everything I disapprove of is bad. And I am the lone voice for truth fighting back against it. It hurts me to do this. But but as you guys like figure, I have to do it now. In that interview, Laura does sum up her only flaw. Generally, I want my way and I want it now. Aside from that, I don't have any bad habits.

Now, that's that's that's it's fun stuff. And when it when it comes to the harm a person like Laura Schlesinger has done, I can focus just on her historic context. Right. As we've said, she paves the way for guys like Jordan Peterson, even for like, you know, I mentioned the Bechdel cast. Obviously, this podcast has as we owe something to Bill Balance. We also do to Dr. Laura. But so does fucking Joe Rogan.

Right. Like these are all part of. I would say I would say more so. Yeah. Yeah. Not in the direct kind of content, but that she makes space in media and shows how she's part of the growing awareness that executives in TV and in radio just all over entertainment have with like, oh, there's a lot of money in people's messy lives and people being mean to people in messy lives.

Right. She's not the only person doing this, but she's massively successful. Right. She is the number one radio personality for years. In 2011, she's the number five audience on the radio. She's huge for a very long time. People love to get yelled at by mom. Yeah. Yeah.

So I could focus on all of that, and I guess we will a little bit, but I want to focus more right now on the damage that her advice can do to individual people. You don't have like a book of the experiences of everyone who called her show, but you can occasionally find people who called in or who listened to her talk about the impact she had on them in places like Reddit. This may spoil where the story is going, but I found accounts from several women about how Dr. Laura affected them in the narcissistic abuse subreddit.

I'm not laughing at narcissistic abuse. It's just like, yeah, that is, that does kind of describe the Dr. Laura show. She would pop up there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, of course. And here's one person describing their experience. Back in the 90s, I was a stay and I've, I've edited this a little bit for length. Back in the 90s,

Back in the 90s, I was a stay-at-home mom starting a family with my husband. I was raised in a conservative Catholic home with two parents who loved me and my brothers very much, and I had a traditional marriage whereas my father worked in my mother's stay-at-home to raise us.

Fast forward to the 90s, listening to Dr. Laura. My husband was gone a lot. We lived far from family. There were many red flags of my husband's behavior, treatment of me, but I'd listen to Dr. Laura during the day and vowed to be a better wife, to be kind to my husband, to treat him better, respect him more, nag him less. What that did was cause me to ignore the red flags of major character flaws in my husband.

I recall for some reason my husband was doing or saying something I believed was out of line, possibly calling me a bitch or neglecting to come home when he said he would, not calling while traveling. I'd turn on Dr. Laura and hear about how if you choose to marry this man and make babies with him, then suck it up for the sake of the kids.

I stayed and ignored major red flags for years. At the time, I was listening to Dr. Laura and I was blaming myself and he was lying to me about everything he did the second he stepped in the door. It was ideal because his office was an hour commute from our home in Southern California at the time. So he kept me and the kids a safe distance from his hidden lifestyle. This is obviously a man who has a whole life cheating on her as a narcissistic abuser, right? I'm not going to go into-

The details of it, we don't need that on the radio show. But this is how she describes listening to the Dr. Laura show as making her think she did the right thing by ignoring the fucked up shit he was doing. Right. Anyway. Well, I mean, it's like I'm at least glad. I don't know. It's so it's so fucked because I feel like, you know, the Internet at large is often, I think, like used as the.

complete villain of how this stuff gets perpetrated, but it obviously goes back before then. And in this case, it seems like the internet has given this person a like space to actually air it out and talk with people. Cause yeah, I do think it's valuable as angry as I often get at the internet, at social media for how much more toxic it's made this to note that like,

yeah, this was happening in the radio. This is probably happened before the radio. I'm sure like magazines that have, you know, you get like these, you know, media,

mail in your advice stuff, right? That stuff predates Dr. Laura, where you send in a letter and they give you advice. I'm sure this kind of stuff happens. I think the lesson here, Jamie, is that we need a secret police force empowered to kill on sight anyone who knows or talks to more than three other human beings in the course of their life. You know? Just prune that shit down. Prune that shit down. Yeah, it's true. The problem is communication.

And as a person, you cannot expect the majority of people to internalize more than three things about you. No. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I think I can build a better future now, Jamie. I think we know. I know what I'm going to go to Kamala with if she takes over from Joe. I think this could revitalize American politics. Imagine an America in which no one knows more than two other people, you know? Wow. That's a utopia in my mind. We will become a proper country. Anyway.

We could become a proper country. Yeah. So another user in that subreddit mentioned reading one of Dr. Laura's other bestsellers, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. And it was in this book that Dr. Laura publicly espoused her belief that women have an ethical objection to have sex with their husbands even if they don't want to have sex.

This is a staple of her advice. And it's interesting. I found a whole review of this book on like a super far right, like homeschooling Christian nationalist website. And one of the things they explain is that like, look,

Women need love. Men need respect most of all, right? And you're not respecting – they don't say this, but they advise her book, and what she is saying is you are not respecting your husband if you don't let him fuck you, right? It is that direct, and I have to play him –

I don't know, more or less, but it's a little differently fucked up than that. She is not saying women don't have the right to not consent to sex with their husbands. She is saying you are being a bad wife if you ever say no. Okay. And there actually is kind of a difference there. I'm not saying one's better than the other, but it is a little bit of a difference. Evil third thing. Got it. Evil third thing. And I want to play you a clip of this from her modern day YouTube show. And yeah, just listen to this. This is her reading a listener letter.

I've never been married, so I'm soaking up all I can to help me when I do marry. Is it absolutely never okay to say no to your husband even when you're sick? Not being there yet, I'm curious what tips you can give all women for overcoming not feeling well to go forward and still have sex with their husbands. Let's just say if you're needing kaopectate or an IV, come on, that's just silly. If your husband is saying, "Hey baby, I want to pump you," when you're sick, you've married a jerk.

We're talking about when you're feeling irritated or I'm annoyed or I'm just too tired today and turning away your man when this is the measure that men have of how much we love them. Now, I love...

shit like this because it's both it's a great one two of like wow this is a deeply toxic thing to tell women and then wow oh this is also a toxic thing to say to men great yeah wow dr laura you've finally done it a thought that is cogently terrible for everyone on earth yeah she was really leading heavy with the women's stuff but then at the end there you as a man only have value if someone's willing to let you fuck them like oh we got there way to

go. Wow. Her wig did a 360 degree spin at the end of that. You just couldn't see. Sure does. Her hair is doing something else at this point. Now that's very gross, right? I will say it's, this is a woman who used to have an audience of 18 million people listening every week, right? Or at least reaching that many people. Radio numbers are a little wonky, as are all numbers that anyone in entertainment ever gives or gets. Oh, they're

It's all made up. And then if they decide they don't like it, they'll just delete it forever. Yeah. And this view, this video has 182,000 views in 14 years. Dr. Laura has 41,000 subscribers. So more people than you'd hope for, but she is definitely not... Diminished. ...chugging along the way that she used to, right? Yeah. Now, I find...

what she's saying here, especially funny because another major line in her, again, because she's saying here like, you have to fuck your husband, right?

whenever he wants because like your only value is your ability to make him feel wanted by being able to have sex with someone, right? The other thing that she says frequently is women today are pigs and women today are pigs for seeing life purely in terms of like sex and short-term pleasure when the thing she's making clear is that the only relationship men and women can have that is valuable to the other involves sex.

So it's beautifully incoherent. And I want to play you a clip of her calling modern women pigs. I was raised by my grandma listening to you. I remember growing up hearing that all too often women strive for short-term gratification instead of long-term satisfaction. Now I'm ready to show you that you can really use a refresher in that course. Is there any way I can receive an update or something to refresh my own memory on these talks?

It would be the utmost and helpful as to where I am in life trying to remember about what was said about long-term satisfaction. Wow, this is so timely because these days most women out there are pigs. Are you shocked that I said that? Oh. Do you think I'm talking about you? I might be. Is it one, three minutes, three hours, three days, three dates, and you're already having sex with somebody you don't know?

That's the short-term gratification. That's the pretending there's a relationship. That's the pretending that somebody gives a darn about you. That's pretending that somebody respects you, cares about you,

You know what? Here's the deal. You know he's in love with you. I don't need to know what the deal is. Clock me, Dr. Laura. See if I give a rat's ass. I hate to say it, though, but that's also a perfect example. Like, yeah, she's really good at understanding how to speak properly.

Right. Like the way in which her voice builds up, the way in which she changes her voice, like the different tones uses her cadence, the way in which she organizes that response is just like, yeah, that's that's someone who has been broadcasting for more than I've been alive. Right. Like, yeah. Yeah.

I enjoyed the whenever she said pretending, that yellow font came up on the screen in big letters and said pretending. It was kind of like the more you know looking. She's better as a broadcaster than her editor is as a video editor. I enjoyed it.

I hope Derek was editing that shit on iMovie. With a fucking Y right there in his name. I hope he charged a hefty hourly rate to edit mommy's little videos. I, yeah, that was bleak. I mean, she is clearly a master at finding any angle to make anything.

a person real or imaginary to feel horrible about themselves. But it doesn't, I don't know. I feel like this specific style of shaming doesn't hit the way it once did. I don't know. What do you think? No, no. I mean, that's, you've seen her decline, right? And part of it is that-

She just isn't – she's always been kind of culture war adjacent, but never as much as people are today. I think she would have found it kind of undignified. She would never do – not that she's any better, but like the degree to which all of these people become –

caricatures of themselves and every form of media imaginable, I don't think she would have been comfortable with. I think she wants too much control over her image to get that close to a bunch of other media figures, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's my feeling of it. I just wonder, I mean, honestly, because she's well into her 70s at this point, I wonder if there's just a part of it is like at some point,

I wonder this about, you know, older people who are involved in the culture wars conversation. I'm like, how are you not just fucking exhausted? It's exhausting. Yeah. I'm 36 and I fucking hate it. It's exhausting to like bear witness to much less participate in. I would imagine like she might just be fucking tired. Yeah. I think it's because some of these I don't think she is.

Although she has some of that. But guys like Rush Limbaugh were born to be culture war ghouls. Yes. Whereas most of us, people like you and me who have grown up in the middle of this fucking thing they helped start, we maybe have gotten involved by nature. But I don't know about you, Jamie. My ideal life is being a weirdo with like a radio show talking about cryptids who lives in the woods and one day just disappears while hunting for big wood or big,

Bigfoot or one of those worms in Mongolia that has lightning powers. That's what I would like to disappear searching for. Is that what Dune was about? Don't answer. I don't know. I think Dune might have been inspired by that Mongolian worm, Jamie. Awesome. That may or may not exist.

I'll never know. Look, nobody's found the great Khan's tomb and nobody's found one of those worms. Put them together. Bada bing, bada boom. You got a pretty good fucking high adventure novel. You know, it does feel I mean, like clearly, you know, Dr. Laura has a clear place in the pantheon of science.

20th century grifters. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And she does very well at her height. The show is on 450 radio stations. She is second only to Rush Limbaugh. This is when she, she starts receiving a bunch of awards. She gets one from the department of defense eventually. Um,

And then she snubs Bill Balance at an awards ceremony. And this is why he sells her photos to a porn website. Schlesinger is rightfully furious. She sues him for invasion of privacy and copyright violation. The court ruled that she had no right to the images. And the porn site puts them back up. I'm not an expert on this case, but it sounds pretty fucking gross to me.

She does not appeal. She tells her audience the photos were taken at a low point in her life. And since she was going through a divorce at the time, she didn't have moral authority to talk.

Well, yeah, it's like, it doesn't matter at what, it just matters that it's illegal to distribute. Right, that's where I am on this. It's like, well, you just shouldn't be allowed to do that at all. That's completely unacceptable. That feels like, yeah, the Dr. Laura kicking in of like, oh, well, this, you know, there's a reason that this happened. It's like, no, actually, this is the rare time that I'm on your side. No, you are completely right to sue him and I wish the case had gone your way. Yeah. Yeah. I think it doesn't because of some weird, like,

The copyright issue is a big part of it, right? There's something weird about like their professional relationship that I think it's – I don't know though. I'm not going to – don't want to talk out of my ass on it because she's in the right there. In 1999, she signs a deal with Paramount to create a talk show, which is a disaster.

Laura does not have the kind of face charisma that you need to be a compelling TV lead. And there's also something inherently shameful about what she does. Right? Like you don't want to see somebody be that mean. You might want to hear it when you're driving and you're in a bad mood because you're commuting, but you don't necessarily want to see it. I don't. I mean, but if.

But if that were true, wouldn't that be true of like Rush Limbaugh and Jordan Peterson and all those guys that we see all the time? Rush Limbaugh also has a TV show that doesn't really work out in the long run. Jordan Peterson comes around later and is a different kind of guy, you know? He's related to both of them. But for one thing, he's a lot more like...

of a lower tempo of energy usually, right? Like part, that's part of how, you know, he, he has his times when he's clearly manic or on whatever weird drugs his daughter convinced him to take. But the Jordan Peterson that initially got famous is like a very good at sounding like a cultured and calm academic for the most part until he has his like moments of passion until he goes raw meat mode. Right, right. Whereas Dr. Laura is kind of immediately mean to whoever calls, you know, um,

Anyway, the show flops. Laura's desperation over the show flopping is evident in the fact that the series had to bring in paid ringers to generate conflicts.

because it was so bad. They did this lazily on two consecutive days. The same researcher employed by the show is brought in to play two different people. The first is like a student who gets money to write essays for other students. And the second is a woman living with her boyfriend trying to decide if she should get married. The show has its last episode in March of 2001. Now,

Jamie, I know that you and I both know about another terrible thing that happened in 2001. You know? Shrek came out. I think it's changed my life. I know it's changed your life.

And that's when Dr. Laura briefly had a conflict with the gay community. Yes. This was at a different time. It's the only other thing that happened in 2001 that I can recall after March. Shrek came out, you know, Mulholland Drive came out. Shrek comes out, right, yeah. Amongst other things. And Dr. Laura calls homosexuality a biological error.

Now, Laura kind of immediately has to backpedal. This would not happen today. She would grift off of this. She would certainly be feted by the far right, right? Or the normal right at this point, just by the right. She can't – it's weird because 2001 in so many other ways is so much worse a period for like queer rights in this country. But at this point –

there's enough like GLAAD and stuff. There's letter writing campaigns against her. People cause enough of a problem that she has to apologize. And her point on this is all, again, you can really see that the narratives haven't calcified to the point that they are at this point. Because while she says a bunch of horrible things like gay people, it's not, it's the result of basically a biological glitch, right? Rather than something that we see in every species that reproduces sexually. Since the beginning of time, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But she also says, well, we should. This is also fucked up in a way when kids get too old for good, straight parents to want them, gay men should be able to adopt them, which is such a weird.

I've never even heard that. Wow. That's a new fucked up thing. It's honestly impressive gymnastics there. Like you just have to hand it to her sometimes. Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah. I didn't know how to make gay people should be allowed to adopt kids horrible, but you did it. Wow. And in two ways, it's amazing stuff. Laura continued her by now time-worn tradition of giving people advice and

The best example of her giving advice that is like the opposite of stuff that she actually did from later in her career is that she would repeatedly tell people, you got to honor your parents. You should try to have a good relationship with your parents. If you're a kid, you should have a good relationship with your parents. And the best thing that a kid can – or that a parent can have is grandkids, yada, yada, yada. In real life, she briefly hires her mom to be her secretary and then fires her mom. And then her mom –

goes on to spend her remaining years alone in a condo. She dies and isn't found for like three months and may have been murdered. We don't know if she was murdered or not. It's a little bit of a mystery, but here's what Laura herself wrote on the matter.

One day the Beverly Hills police called me. She had a condo in Beverly Hills to let me know my mother was dead and had been dead on the floor of her apartment for about four months. There were no friends and none of her neighbors were close. Nobody noticed. They said it was probably a homicide, but not a robbery. When the police came to my home to ask me questions, I told them it couldn't be a homicide. I said that to murder someone personal, you had to be close enough to begin to hate and that nobody got close to her. The final conclusion was unknown cause of death, but not homicide.

So no comment. No comment. Messy. Messy. Fucking brutal. Yeah, that's that's brutal. Now, I will say, Jamie, I think I solved this case.

I think I know something that Laura didn't at the time, right? So the police think this is a homicide. You know, maybe the serial music can start playing now. The police believe this is a homicide, but Laura says her mom wasn't close enough to anybody to be murdered for personal reasons. But in the book Vicki Bain wrote about Dr. Laura, it opens with an interview with Yolanda, Dr. Laura's mother, from inside her house. Yes.

Vicky describes the house. She seems friendly with Dr. Laura's mom. Am I saying that biographer Vicky Bain murdered Dr. Laura's mother for some personal reason?

Not in any legally binding sense. We'll never know. To what end? Listen to the next 11 episodes of my podcast on who killed Dr. Flores' mother, which is okay to joke about a little because she hated her, you know? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's not. Who cares? What are you going to do? And then I will start a rival podcast called Vicky Bain Innocent and here's why.

Jamie and I are going to grift so much money off of this woman who, as far as I can tell, published two unauthorized biographies back in the 90s and then did not publish any other books. Hey, people have made more of less. Might be a fake name that a publisher made up to publish this book. No way to know.

Anyway, up to the mid-aughts, Dr. Laura remained one of the most successful broadcasters on the planet. All of this took a disastrous turn on August 10th, 2010. Up to that point, Dr. Laura was like the number five broadcaster in the country by audience. But on that broadcast, while talking about modern comedy, she says this.

Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger. I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it's affectionate. It's very confusing. Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ, Dr. Laura. Oh, she goes on. She does? I'm not going to play all of this. Maybe I should. But like the lady she's on the phone with, who I think is a black woman, says, well, you were like really comfortable saying the Inward Alarm.

of times on air. That's kind of weird. And Laura gets really angry and uses it 11 more times just being like, you know, yeah. Then she says a lot of blacks only voted for Obama because he was half black. And when the caller disagrees, Laura says, don't NAACP me. Oh, Jesus. That's not great. Yeah.

Jesus fucking Christ. Not great. Yeah. Yeah. Quite a blow up. So this is what does her in professionally? As a big name. Yeah. She issues an apology later that evening and then apologizes on air. God, I mean, it's like a place that's fucking something. Yeah.

Basically, at the end, you think probably there was a backroom deal. She doesn't immediately quit, but she quits at the end of the year. She goes, I think she goes on Letterman to be like, I'm quitting in order to regain my First Amendment rights to say whatever is on my mind. Yeah, good on Letterman for letting her give her perspective. Yeah, thank God. But nobody really wanted to hear it after this point, even though she is still doing it. So, well, there you go.

you know, at, at very least, uh, it doesn't seem like she is endured meaningfully outside of her only demographic. It seems like it's ever been like generationally bill. Nobody knows who fucking bill balance was right now. We do live with his, I mean, Howard Stern's still on the air. Um,

Not to say that – but we are part of like the – we exist in a space that he helped make, right? And a lot of the worst people on the internet today, a lot like Jordan Peterson being the example we keep going back to.

I don't know if they wouldn't. I'm not going to say there would be no Jordan Peterson without Dr. Laura, but he would have had a lot more work to do to make that space if she hadn't been there first. Right. Right. And make no mistake, I believe in Dr. Jordan Peterson. I believe he would have found a way. But, you know, certainly didn't hurt. Yeah.

This is fascinating. Dr. Jordan Peterson finds a way. Wow. From just a looming presence in the Barnes and Noble aisle to knowing that she is, I don't know, in no small part made some of our worst schools possible in the world.

And also made one of the sweaters in Sister Act. And the Lost Boys costumes and hook. If you remember nothing else, you know, that feels about right. Yeah. I am going to rewatch Sister Act tonight and guess which sweater. I could rewatch, you know what? Let's all rewatch Sister Act. That's a very gentle, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We'll rewatch Sister Act. We'll rewatch a good TNG episode where she plays Guinan. Maybe the one where they go back in time and meet Mark Twain. He's got a ridiculous mustache. And most importantly, I know we had an episode of Lower Decks about that. Uh-huh. How?

How could you not? Most importantly, we'll go back and watch the Christine Baranski episode of Frasier. Yeah, the Christine Baranski episode of Frasier. The episode of TNG where they, well, the two-parter, where they go back to San Francisco in old times. And then, of course...

the movie sister act and law and a hook. If you've got time, it's actually a very relaxing weekend. Watch this. It's like a nice weekend. You know what? Everybody have fun. Jamie, do you have anything you want to plug at the end here? Perhaps a podcast.

You know, I would love to plug 16th Minute as well as the Bechtel cast, which we firmly are in denial that we have anything to do with any of this. But yes, listen to 16th Minute on Cool Zone Media. There's actually a lot of what I was thinking throughout this episode had to do with an interview on a recent episode with Carol J. Adams, author of...

The sexual politics of meat who was harassed and doxxed for weeks and like an entire summer by Rush Limbaugh back in the day and then went on to be harassed and doxxed by Jordan Peterson fans just a couple of years ago. And we talk about sort of the, you know,

illusion that this is an internet problem when it has existed in a very similar form for a long time. So, yeah, check out my interview with Carol. And if you just like internet main characters, that's that's the show. Yeah. Go to hell. I love you. Bye.

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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