Dr. Laura Schlessinger emerges from a violent, domineering childhood in 1947 as a "one-woman algorithm" of public shaming, pivoting from her father's physical abuse to a career validating conservative impulses against systemic issues. Initially appearing on Bill Ballance's Feminine Forum in 1975 under a fake name, she evolved into a hostile self-help figure who profits from humiliating callers while ignoring wealth inequality. Despite controversies like her 2011 use of the N-word and an unethical biography utilizing leaked nude photos, her trajectory illustrates how personal trauma fueled an obsession with enforcing traditional gender roles, ultimately creating a legacy of individual blame over structural reform. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Boiling Pig Anuses00:03:25
Cool zone media.
I miss the days when I felt like I could just open a podcast by asking, What's boiling my pig anuses or something along those lines?
You know, I uh we've we've we've achieved a lot of success over the last five or six years here at Behind the Bastards.
We've risen to the top of our field.
You know, we uh we're we're beloved by all uh influential, powerful, mighty, but that that comes with a corresponding loss of power.
You know, the power to be yourself, right?
Really, the power to experiment goes away as one becomes a caricature of themselves.
And so, I understand a lot of the troubles facing President Biden today.
That's that's really what I want to say.
That's what you're doing.
I was thinking about Joe Biden because I was thinking about our old What's Boiling My Pig Anuses intro, and he, 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 peppers so many years ago?
That was that intro.
Which was one of your best intros ever.
That was, yeah, that was several lifetimes ago for all of us.
But it's stuck in my heart, you know.
It's stuck in my heart the way that a boiled pig anus sticks in a restaurant that does not have enough money for calamari.
Look it up.
How does calamari is really that's what they do?
That's fascinating.
They bread pig anuses and fry them in places that don't want to spend money on calamari.
If you've ever had cheap calamari, solid chance it's a pig anus.
Yeah, you know, I've 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, it's the texture just makes sense to me in my mind.
It makes sense.
Well, I've just never been more thrilled to have an allergy to gluten so that I don't have to encounter accidental pig anus when I want calamari.
And hey, I want to be clear here.
It's gluten and pig anus?
No, it's gluten and gluten.
Oh, calamari breadcrumbs, baby.
Okay, okay.
You could use a gluten-free breading.
You could, but I would say that would be very good.
You know, if people want to, if people want to drill down my political intentions here, I would say that Joe Biden's skin has the look of pig anus that was breaded in a healthy, gluten-free batter.
Whereas Trump's, it's one of those like it's like not the good batter.
It's like the off-brand panko, uh, and it's just it's loaded with uh with gluten, you know, it's not not great for you.
Uh, it's punko as opposed to the healthy Joe Biden pig anus.
Wow, okay, you've made your political stance abundantly clear.
Thank you.
We journalists are supposed to stay inscrutable, so I hope this hasn't ruined my credibility.
No, people are 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 Schleshinger.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah, that's right, baby.
That's right.
Dr. Laura Harassment Pipeline00:15:38
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 does.
If my understanding is correct, she is a self-help person who primarily caters to women, but also hate 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.
This really is saying something.
There's a lot to be said about like the toxicity in some of the people, a lot of the people that, for example, Oprah has brought on her show, right?
There are a lot of valid criticisms, but Oprah's, her whole kind of thing is positivity.
You should feel good about yourself.
You should feel good.
And, you know, she mixes that in with some like dangerous dieting tips and stuff, but that doesn't change the fact that.
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 with 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. Laura is she is, she is providing you with this rapid fire hose of women making bad decisions.
And even if they're not women making bad decisions, she is going to like attack them before they have a chance to fully explain their situation so that you feel like they're women making bad decisions.
It's, we'll be talking about this more, but what Dr. Laura offered starting in the late 80s and early 90s was the same thing that we get on Twitter when you wake up every morning and there's someone who had a really bad take or said something like stupid or crazy and the entire world or at least your entire online social circle is making fun of them.
That is what Dr. Laura offered.
She just offered the version of it that existed in a world where the radio was the only way to really get something like that.
Everybody gets to have their, I don't know, two hours hate listening to like the bad life choices of primarily young women having kids too early or who cheating on their boyfriends or having their boyfriends cheat on them, right?
But that is what the meat, that is what the appeal of her show was.
Okay, that makes sense.
So I'm not extremely familiar with the radio show, but that does make, I feel like there should be more examined about the like radio host harassment to internet harassment pipeline.
I was recently talking to a feminist vegan named Carol Adams, who's like awesome.
She read this book called The Sexual Politics of Meat.
So I'm sure she would love the pig anus discussion we just had.
That is a courageous title.
I'm going to give it to her.
You have to be confident in your book to throw that out there.
I really respect that.
She is unbelievably funny.
I'm not joking.
Like, no, I met her at a hot dog convention.
She's really fucking funny.
I met her at a hot dog convention.
Amazing stuff, Jamie.
Look, I'm coming in hot today.
I met her at a hot dog convention and she was, 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, you know, 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. Laura is a big enough name.
I think probably a majority of people are familiar with 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 had a major role in building a place, not just in the media, but in the right wing for a wildly successful 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, Girl Wash Your Face, Sophie.
Do you remember that one?
Yeah.
No, Dr. Laura's book is a tin.
Yeah, that's a different one.
I read it.
Dr. Laura's book, which we'll hear from this episode, is 10 stupid things women do to mess up their lives, right?
Wow.
I have a book in the wild.
Yes.
Big wholesaler.
So I want to get into this.
I want to talk about who Dr. Laura meant to me first because 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 2000s to the modern era as we talk about her past, because I would love to show you some of those very early from the 70s and 80s radio clips, but they don't exist anymore.
The vast majority of her early careers lost media.
Jill did not listen to this radio show, Jamie.
Jamie's mom?
No, 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, hey, can I send, you know, can we play a Celine Deon 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.
You will encounter her, but no, I, I never was around people who listened to her.
I unfortunately did because we carpooled and I always wanted to be closest to the adult because I had anxiety.
And there was definitely some Dr. Laura in that in my childhood from various different adults driving to and from school.
Robert, want to tell us your history?
Yeah.
So Dr. Laura is still around and still doing her thing, which is primarily kind of feeding our worst impulses to want to feel like all of the people around us are somehow not pulling their share, right?
This is the impulse that a lot of conservatism works off of, but it's also pretty what you see it in a lot of leftists.
You see it in everybody, right?
This idea that like somehow things are tough for me and I have this feeling that for other people, they're easier.
And that's not fair.
There's somebody grifting off of me.
And they're, you know, people feel this way because it's true.
And it's true because like there's a tiny number of incredibly wealthy people who exist and who make themselves wealthier, sucking value out of the rest of us, right?
These are the Jack Welch ass finance schools and Steve Jobs wannabes who are financializing our lives to hell and hollowing out this country for short-term profit, doing stuff like buying up businesses, loading them with debt, and then, you know, carrying out massive layoffs and reaping windfall profits for basically destroying people's lives, right?
But it's, it's, you know, that's true that like those people are out there and they're not putting in the same amount of work that you are and they're kind of ruining everything.
But that's not immediately obvious to everybody.
And the role, the valuable role that someone like Dr. Laura plays in our media ecosystem is coming in and saying, you're right to feel like somebody's taking advantage of you.
And here, I'm 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, 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, she comes in alongside the first, right?
She is a contemporary of Rush Limbaugh.
He hits a bit like literally just a couple of years before she does in terms of like becoming a major figure.
Morton Downey Jr., who we've talked about on the show, was another major figure in like right around the same period of time.
And her job was to give a lot of our moms, including my moms, people who had hard lives, who were 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 shoplifted in this country by a factor.
Yeah, several times over.
Everyone should shoplift.
It's, it's built into their budget to do.
Yeah.
And 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 Cheryl Sandberg feels like a figure that is like, oh, there is a clear solution to this.
And it's, uh, 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 I see.
Yeah, return to traditional gender roles.
And somehow that will make things fine.
Right.
It was one of those, I think, because my mom liked her so much, I remember her for a long time.
She's part of like the cultural background noise of the world that I was raised in.
Like when we would get in the car, it would either be the car talk guys, if it was my dad, who are broadly neutral, let's say, neutral, but doing that.
Click and clap, click and clap.
The Tampa brothers, I think was their name.
Yeah, unbelievably Midwestern.
Probably has a lot to do with my incredible Midwest appeal to this day.
And then there was Dr. Laura, who my mom loved.
My mom was kind of a frustrated person.
Like her entire first career plan had collapsed.
She had tried to start two businesses and they had collapsed.
She spent most of my early life in terrible debt and feeling like her hard work had not been rewarded.
And I think she, there was tremendous appeal to her and finding people who were irresponsible and having this kind of archon of conservative values, Dr. Laura, yell at them because she felt somehow like people like that were responsible for her failures, right?
That's the impression that I have gotten.
I didn't really at the time, you know, as a kid, I thought Dr. Laura had 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.
He was today, Robert.
He was always listening.
He was always listening.
There's a great episode of Frasier where they parody Dr. Laura with a character named Dr. Nora, played by the great Christine Boransky, who is watching.
I remember this.
Oh my gosh.
See, now you're talking my wang.
Shaming Bad Behavior00:10:06
And I'm a huge Christine Boransky fan.
Nobody, there's not anybody today who's got like a voice like that.
And he's like, oh, God, she was great.
No.
Maybe she's still alive.
I hope so.
Oh, she's very much alive.
She's with Emmy's.
I just saw her in Mama 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 has absolutely followed none of it.
And it turns out that's extremely accurate.
Like the story of Dr. Laura is a woman who did the opposite of the things that she advises women to do and gained tremendous wealth and influence as a result of doing all of the things she tells people not to do.
She is the clearest example I found of somebody finding a ladder up and then cutting that ladder out like behind them, throwing it down to the ground.
That's fascinating.
I mean, because yeah, there's so many flavors of this kind of person where I feel like I didn't have a Dr. Laura in the background of my childhood, but I definitely had 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, that's.
Yeah, but you look like shit and you're doing everything.
And but, you know, I guess where they kind of meet is the fear-mongering around class and around, like, there's just a lot of that.
Yeah.
And it's because of that that I have 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.
Your body's telling you that you need to look like shit.
Listen to your body.
It's saying what you have.
It's, yeah, yeah.
Help blend in, blend into the trash fire around you.
So, you know, once I saw that Frasier episode, I changed my mind on Dr. Laura more.
And I started to change my mind on a lot of other stuff.
It was, you know, it wasn't just that.
World of Warcraft played a weirdly large role in that.
But I stopped really paying attention to Dr. Laura when I was like 16 or 17.
And as an adult, there wasn't really much of reason to pay attention to her, period.
And so I hadn't really thought of her in close to like about 20 years until I started doing research for these episodes.
So like I normally do, I just started like Google, I just Googled her name and popped on news, right?
Just to see like, what, is there anything still happening?
Like, I honestly didn't know if she was alive when I started these episodes.
And the first thing I read about her as an adult in the modern era were these lines from the opening of a CNN article.
Before she uttered the N-word, before her remarks on cheated on wives, before the controversies over homosexuality and religion and morality, Laura Sleshinger was considered a breath of fresh air.
That's a lot.
That's a lead.
Yes.
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 job.
Okay.
Or caused her to quit her job.
But that's also not quite what it sounds like.
Was that recently?
This is, that's 2011, Jamie.
Oh, that's so recent.
Wow.
But yes, also.
Depends on what you consider recent.
Yeah.
You can tell it's a while ago because she didn't rebrand as like a canceled figure.
She just kind of like found a new got into podcasting.
Like it's a mix of, she was clearly blazing a trail because that is what a lot of other people did when they got caught saying the n-word, right?
To start a podcast.
But she also didn't do like a real media campaign.
She's actually kind of interesting as a right-wing figure.
She's never embraced the political side of conservatism to the extent that is common for people who are similarly influential now.
Interesting.
I think it might just be that she got really rich early enough that she's like, I don't need that.
I don't need to talk to those people.
They all seem unpleasant.
Like, I'm a piece of shit, but I'm just going to enjoy my mansion.
Yeah, I mean, that is, I wish more people who were pieces of shit back in the day simply disappeared because sometimes it does feel like that is the best case scenario.
Yeah, yeah, it really is.
I want to continue with the next paragraph from that CNN article because it gives an idea of the kind of show that Dr. Laura ran and still runs for decades.
For those of you who didn't grow up on it, quote, despite the fact that many consider Laura Sleshinger the dragon lady of talk radio, some of us can't help but admire her.
Noted a decidedly mixed 1999 consideration of her in Salon.
She is snippish, overbearing, and often insulting.
But anybody who has the 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 if there's any evidence needed that our entire country has a humiliation kink, I've been thinking about that a lot because before I dug back into this, you know, literally the day that I started this, there was like a viral tweet that was someone being like, it was one of those like people on TikTok or Blue Sky or whatever, like overly medicalizing stuff and like making statements about like, 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, 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 was like, yeah, people do need to take responsibility.
And then I realized what was happening, which was that the entirety of the algorithms that make Twitter, well, it's not really profitable, but the whole attempt to make Twitter and every other social media thing profitable relies on putting stuff in front of you that you would not have seen on your own that will make you frustrated and angry.
And so it's taking what in reality is some young person working through and thinking about the world and not having any sort of actual harmful impact on me.
Like somebody wrongfully crediting a belief to, you know, autism or whatever has no impact on me or anyone else.
It's a person talking through shit on the internet.
But the internet runs off of churning that up and putting it in front of people to get them angry 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 wow.
Yeah.
On she is a one-woman algorithm.
Yeah.
Where it's like not based on a sincere desire to educate or like it's 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, 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.
You're 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?
You know, and that sort of question, which I feel like is consistent throughout, I mean, not even just right-wing influential people, but, you know, just the general classism of and racism and all of this stuff that goes through the way that we, I mean, Sophie, I, 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 young, usually poor pregnant girls.
Yes.
Just 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 on like, let's find somebody who, again, it's generally like a young person working shit out.
And are they, are they talking about like psychiatry and psychology in ways that are like not within the medical, you know, mainstream or accurate?
Are they sometimes causing problems for themselves by like doing the weird Tumblr brain shit where people like lock themselves into an ideological box?
Sure, but that's what young people always do, right?
Is figure out shit in slow, awkward, juddering ways.
And it's like on a certain natural way for that.
Financial Education Memo00:03:22
Yeah.
Like on a certain scale, that does get scary, but like, how is the solution to publicly shame them, which I feel like, especially now almost makes it a certainty that they will double down on it?
There's a, 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.
Yeah.
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, I got time.
I got time.
Yeah.
Anyway, you should all take some time to listen to these advertisers.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah, that was good.
That was good.
So that is 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 Cali Yuga.
I am mainlining Akashic truths, and that's why I'm able to ad pivot so well, folks.
God is speaking through you in this moment.
In a way, I am God, Jamie.
In a way, I am God.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know, the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
Pretending She Is Shitty00:15:44
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lindsay McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lindsay McGuire and I'm wild back.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Co Triistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Speaking of God, Dr. Laura was God to a certain kind of very frustrated, middle-class woman like my mom in the 1990s.
And I want to start by playing a clip for you of her show.
Just so you, again, if you either don't remember or you didn't spend a lot of time stuck in traffic with your mom listening to Dr. Laura, this is what her show was like.
And here's a sample.
I am unsure of how to continue on in my relationship with my mother.
I found out last September that my dad, the man who raised me, is not my biological father for the very first time.
And it has obviously caused a rift between my mother and I. Why?
Why?
Why was the guy who raised you nice?
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 entire life.
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 twid.
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.
Like, and that's not bad, right?
That like, 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 doing something else.
That's not wrong.
But what's actually happened here, this girl didn't come in and say, fuck my mom and fuck my fake dad.
She came in being like, my mom didn't tell me the truth for years.
And I feel like this is really complicated for me.
And Dr. Laura didn't let her finish explaining the issue even, immediately drilled down and accused her of saying, and she never actually said that her, the guy who raised her wasn't, she didn't consider him a father.
All of that is stuff that Laura put into that conversation in order to create, because that's what she has to do, right?
You can't have, there's not enough people who are actually unsympathetic and shitty calling.
You have to make them unsympathetic and shitty in the first 10 seconds of the call.
So Laura hears this is a young woman calling in because her mom has just admitted that her dad is not her biological dad.
And Laura, without the caller saying it, starts invince an issue.
And the issue being that, okay, so this woman is attacking her mom and rejecting the guy who raised her, which this lady never claimed to be doing, right?
Laura invents the problem in order to call this woman an idiot, right?
In like, in no time at all.
I didn't really shock.
Like it is, you could tell at this point that what she's been at it minimum 50 years.
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.
And then I wanted to play that because people have this idea that it's like, when I say that she's giving you people to hate, she's creating those people.
Most of her callers are not people who have done anything wrong.
There's nothing wrong when your mom tells you that your dad was not your biological father with being like, wow, this is a lot to process.
And I have a lot of conflicting feelings about it.
But that's, that's not a profitable, it's not profitable, like help that person, like a therapist would think through and talk through those conflicting feelings.
It's profitable to pretend that this person is shitty, yell at her on the air, and then move on to the next caller.
Right.
So now that we're all suitably ready to learn about a bad person, I 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.
And she is the author of Dr. Laura, the unauthorized biography, a revealing look at the hidden life of radio phenomenon, Dr. Laura Schleshinger, which for reasons I cannot explain, has an anarchist flag as its background.
Look at this book cover.
It's a series of choices here.
Kind of.
It's like very, a very distinct red and black, blocky thing going on there.
Vicki Bain does sound like a comic book villain's girlfriend in the age.
That's right.
Wow.
No gods, no, no talk radio.
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.
Yeah, I think it's, I found the Dr. Laura book in the internet archive.
You can probably find the Danielle Steele one there too, but I haven't checked.
I will say, while this book is invaluable, 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 God.
So this is a sleazy book.
I just, I need to set that expectation before we get into this, right?
It is like one of the great wrinkles of the world that horrible people can be treated like shit.
And this, this, Vicki 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, it's not, 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 give us that on this great show because there is 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.
But I got to give Vicky credit.
That's an impressive achievement.
Yeah.
Shout out, Vicki.
Can't wait to hear you rake Danielle Steele across the street.
Take your dad down a peg.
My aunts 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 thing.
Yeah, like who knows who's writing Nancy Drew books.
So the Dr. Laura story starts with two people she did not like, her father, Monty, and her mother, Yolanda.
Back during the great dub-w dose, Monty was a soldier.
He had a pretty serious World War II.
He gets promoted from corporal to lieutenant, which means a lot of people died ahead of him, right?
That's not a normal progression in a military career.
At the end of the war, he was stationed in Italy, where he met Yolanda, who was a native Italian and one assumes looking for a way out of her war-torn country.
Vicki 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 Schleshinger became one of the very first baby boomers.
Wow, like the original boomers.
That's really impressive.
Imagine 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 it's great.
Okay, 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.
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 Führer, he had never seen a boy so sad, right?
That's just life.
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 Dr. Laura.
God.
If only she had a lot of people.
Dr. Laura had a bad time of it.
Yeah.
It really, it does feel motivating, at least like if there's a kid that is very much lost in your, you know, in your, like be a person they can talk to because you could be preventing a future doctor from they can talk to, make them feel valued, make them feel like they have a place to be, and every day or so say, never get on the radio, avoid the radio.
No one would have told us that.
And that, and, and that was, we didn't have that person.
Yeah.
Become an accountant or something.
Yeah.
That's, that's what she needed.
That's what, uh, well, a lot of kids of this position need is subtle support and also don't don't become a radio host.
So her primary impressions of her social peers in this period were that they responded to her with rejection and punishment.
Those are her words, and this included physical violence at times.
At home, she was also subject to physical violence at times because her father was both physically and mentally domineering.
She later told a reporter that, quote, she was afraid to open her mouth because he would scream at her and smack her.
At the same time, she credited her father with instilling in her the drive to succeed.
Laura told another reporter from 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 onto disagreements like a Ramora, who was almost looking for disagreements, right?
And so would very specific fish to say, sorry.
Yeah.
That's the kind of fish that her dad was and the kind of fish that she becomes, right?
Laura grows up desperate to make a mark and prove herself to be someone special.
And 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 Gen Z listeners, an encyclopedia is like Wikipedia, but without all, like, it's not mostly Star Wars lore.
So in other words, it's like a useless Wikipedia.
Yeah.
If Wikipedia couldn't be edited and 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 have any reason to read it.
Trusting Grade School Stories00:05:54
Wow.
I can make an animation.
I'm 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.
That's right.
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 1.01, she had to wait 13 minutes until it was 1.15 to do her hour of practice.
So I am like, you know, TikTok armchair diagnosing here, but it sounds like she may be a young OCD girl.
Having been there myself, like you have to do a certain thing at a certain time or we will die.
That has also like in it, 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 like that's like reinforced, like the idea of order is reinforced at home instead of like, hey, take a breath, you know, the stuff that you would hope for.
Yeah.
And I think that that's definitely like what we're seeing here, right?
Yeah.
It's a, she describes like her weird time fixation as 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, I mean, it's like, unfortunately, I, yeah, it's like, I, I don't know, when I was in like fourth and fifth grade, I like wouldn't leave a room until I had written down what everyone was wearing and what was hanging on the walls.
And that was the way to maintain like order.
Um, and then if there's no one around you to like, you know, sort of pull you out of that, and if there's people around you encouraging it, it's just like a recipe for disaster.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's, it is one of those things where like this isn't Dr. Laura becoming 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.
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 Vicki really pushing for salacious stuff, but they all talk about that she was hot, but they talk about it in such a way as like it's weird.
She was hot, but she didn't have any friends and wasn't very popular because she didn't seem to want to know people.
Right.
That's uh, so I mean, obviously, we can't truly fully trust Vicki.
Of course not.
No, like it sounds like she fucking sucks.
To be fair, Vicki 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, a person of worth.
But I, I, I, 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, that because it's like we can't trust Vicki or Laura in the account of Laura's life.
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 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.
Mad Scientist Childhood Myth00:02:59
Yeah.
Maybe she was the some of that.
Anyway, we'll keep talking about this, but it is, it is very peculiar.
And that makes me think about something that's not peculiar.
Really, the only normal thing that exists.
The selling of goods and services.
That's it.
You know, 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.
You know, 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 goods.
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 we do find that.
No, no, fuck justice.
Yeah.
All products, baby.
That's the motto of this show.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand a system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know the famous author Roll Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
Political Hay Off This00:15:46
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm wild.
Wild Batshaw.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Co Triestas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
And we're back, and we're thinking about Dr. Laura as a child mad scientist.
So when Dr. Laura is 10 or 11 years old, her parents have another daughter.
And Laura has a bad relationship with her sister.
She never forgives her for taking the attention that ought to have been hers.
Yeah, definitely never forgive someone for being born.
Mistake number one.
No, I call my little brother every day and I just say, fuck you.
You know, he's never been anything but good to me.
Sweet guy.
Oh, I love my little brother, but he will suffer for his crimes.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
You know?
Yeah.
Even though his crimes in this case were taking enough of my parents' attention away that I was able to watch The Simpsons, which really worked out great for me.
Incredible.
My brother's, my little brother's major, my little brother's most notorious crime is that he caught me making out with someone downstairs while we were allegedly watching Family Guy and was so disturbed that he threw up and woke up my parents.
And then I got in trouble.
See, my brother never narced 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 to hide.
Like it was never a, he was never a like, I will narc on you.
He just like was legitimately wanted to follow the rules.
Punished for being a sweetie.
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?
They're, 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, shh.
Yeah.
So she has a little sister, never forgives her.
Horrible relationship forever.
How dare she?
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 know, I just don't believe you, Dr. Laura.
I just don't believe you.
It's so weird for someone who is like famously encouraging women to return to the home, describing herself like fucking Alan Ginsburg.
Like, what are you saying?
It's not just Dr. Leffer.
Lots of people do this.
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 any intellectual curiosity excludes you from being a person with like human desire.
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 mics hards 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 for now.
For now.
Until the next Supreme Court ruling, God willing.
That weaponizes podcasts.
Yes, podcasters can now order airstrikes.
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 mad scientist stuff is that some of the quotes Vicki provides from her former classmates just describe her as a very normal girl.
Here's a quote from the book talking about an interview with a friend of hers with the last name Eagle.
Eagle even remembered Laura handing out advice and more.
I had a crush on a guy, explained Eagle, and I think we stalked him that year.
They were juniors with her helping me.
According to Eagle, Laura had several parties at her house as well.
The kind where you turn off all the lights and play Johnny Mathis, said Eagle.
She was fun.
She could twist your arm into doing things you didn't want to do, but certainly nothing bad.
Back then, we hadn't even heard of all the naughty things you could do.
And that makes her sound like a perfectly normal teenage girl.
It's so wild how much more like infinitely accessible that makes her.
Yes.
That's yeah.
Like there's the was she like the secret science, the only one really thinking about serious issues.
I had to know the mysteries of the human mind.
That's a sinister way to characterize yourself.
Yeah.
Helping her friends stalk a boy that they had a crush on and listening to fucking rock music or whatever Johnny Mathis is.
I'm not old enough to know.
Don't come after me.
Stop reading.
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.
Whoa!
Bummer.
That does feel like, I mean, like losing little things.
You're like, at what point does the true supervillain origin story take hold?
Sometimes I do feel like, I mean, can you think of another example where the loss of a student election leads to it?
It feels like a classic, like supervillain origin story of like, oh, my peers hate me.
I mean, all of Hitler's madness started when he didn't get picked to be the editor for his high school yearbook.
You know, that's widely agreed on by Hitler.
That was a lie, people.
I know people can't tell what a lie is on the show when I say lies.
That was a lie.
It's fine.
Look, and something, something, I'm a murderer, and something, something, daddy.
Okay.
I do feel like, yeah, if you were a, if you're a high schooler, just like vote the most evil person who is running uh into student government and then they'll just taper off.
Yeah, I think we should have like uh like you know how you know how there's that uh 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.
Um, wow, I will not publicly agree to that, but I think it is a but but but I Jamie the Hunger Games is a beloved franchise, so you know you're arguing against the people here.
Um, I'm just I'm just a man of the people, I'm a man of the people.
Yes, you're pro-Suzanne Collins, and I celebrate that.
Yeah, yeah, and that guy who died that everybody liked, he was in those movies anyway.
Donald Sutherland, yeah.
Oh, were you?
Yes, yeah, yes, 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 LA Times home.
Yeah, yeah, it was very Dr. Laura-coated.
Yeah, very much so.
Yeah.
Now, there is some evidence.
She certainly seems to have been good at science and very interested in it as a young girl.
There's her quote from her Jericho High School yearbook on the year she graduated says, like, because so basically in this yearbook, it wasn't a huge school.
So each kid, each kid or each page would have two kids, and you'd get a photo of them and then like a description of them and 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?
It's weirdly like a skull, a skull measuring kind of thing.
It feels like you're going to lead to race mixing at some point here.
I don't like leading with heredity is gross.
Yeah.
To race.
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.
No, the big deal.
Oh, you mean the murderer?
Sorry, I was thinking of Fred Durst.
No, common misconception.
He 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 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 hair style was a worse crime.
Wow.
Get his ass.
I'm also pro-murder.
You know this about me.
I know you're pro-murder.
I know.
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 refuse to continue.
Okay, that's probably a good idea.
Once she graduates high school, her ambition is to become a great research scientist.
And she would talk constantly to friends and to the adults in her life that she wanted to find about wanting to find the cure for cancer.
And, you know, that's how kids talk about that.
That's not really how cancer works, but that's how kids who are ambitious might talk about cancer.
So I believe that, right?
Yeah.
Lori 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, 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, which is like horrible.
That's just devastating stuff to hear from you.
There's your villain origin story.
Forget what I said about Sugo.
That's, oh my God.
And we don't get much.
She hates her mom.
I just don't know that we don't really get much in the way of detail as to why.
So either what her mom was saying was way worse than this, or it's something a lot messier.
Like her mom was not nearly as shitty as her dad, but for whatever reason, she idolized her dad.
You know, whatever is going on.
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.
Oh, that is like, that is devastating.
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 cart.
That's extreme.
That also happened to the creator of Beanie Babies with his dad.
Well, in that case, I think his dad did the right thing.
So I don't totally disagree with you as the unfortunate thing.
All I know is what I learned in that movie that I assume is canon.
Oh, that movie'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, okay, so maybe she's just always sucked ass.
Right.
Where it just sounds like whatever insecurities or like she has internalized growing up has now turned into weapons forever.
So this was a, you know, she was off, put no one ever was able to live with her for more than like a semester at a time, right?
Marriage Starts Breaking Apart00:02:01
She's that kind of person.
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 would have been great.
She doesn't.
What she does do is meet a guy named Rudolph.
She meets him because, so she's a walker.
She's one of these people who takes regular long walks.
And it says something deeply unhinged about her that she took these long walks in high heels.
And one day she catches her heel on a bridge, which makes her fall and seriously injure her kneecap.
And Rudolph is on scene and gallantly rescues her.
So the two start their relationship while Laura is in a wheelchair and dependent on him.
They get married, but as she heals, she becomes aware of the horrifying reality that like Rudolph fell in love with the version of her that was dependent on him.
And Laura is an extremely independent person, right?
So the marriage starts to break apart.
You know, it's just kind of a doomed situation and the 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 that 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.
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.
Bill Breaks Talk Radio Seal00:15:08
The divorce.
Yeah, yeah, it's great stuff.
It's great stuff.
The divorce gets finalized in 1977, and Laura is going to spend the rest of her life delighting in telling interviewers that her ex-husband brings his parents to court.
I don't know enough to say which of them was the bad guy, but she does kind of sound like a dick when she talks about it.
But hey, no fault divorce, which she's going to hate in the future.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
So it's while teaching at USC that not quite yet a doctor, Laura Sleshinger, 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.
Okay.
Born in Peoria, Illinois, Balance got his degree in journalism and served in the Marines before starting a varied career as a broadcaster during the golden age of radio.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, he worked everywhere from Denver and Honolulu to San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, which is where he was when Laura met him.
In 1971, he had launched a new hit series, widely considered to be the first shock jock show.
He's not quite a shock jock, but he is the, he is the primordial ooze from which the shock jocks emerge, right?
Okay, it's all coming together.
Okay.
And he is, 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 what a bummer.
Okay.
All right.
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 in 1971.
And that series is Feminine Forum on KGBS AM in Los Angeles.
I know you're just psyched to hear what Feminine Forum was, Jamie.
I really hope.
Is he the host?
He sure is.
He sure is.
Good.
I was hoping he would be the host.
Let me have it.
Let me have it.
How this is.
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 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 my brain kind of like, I started to get brain freeze at Lascivious Uncle.
Yeah, we don't have this guy anymore.
I'm trying to think of who's in the middle of the whole, 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 shameful aunties.
Bill is Lascivious Uncle.
Was he popular?
Was he genuinely popular among as far as I can tell?
Very popular with young women.
Because again, 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 and he's got to be like, he's got to be kind of holding it up so that the network, you know, will approve it in the first place.
But a huge part of the show, it's never just Bill as the host either.
He brings in a lot of women, including eventually female like therapists and doctors and stuff, as guest experts to help talk with these women callers about their like relationship issues and stuff.
So is the tone of this show, like, as far as we know, is it Dr. Laura coded?
Is it kind of rooted in shame?
Like, what is the vibe of it?
He nearly always sides with the women calling.
A big part of, he does it in a way that you and I would say is deeply sexist and gross, but he always 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?
It's complicated.
Bill's legacy in this part is like very much, it's not just bad or just good, right?
I feel like if anything, I don't know.
I don't want to hand it to this guy in any way, shape, or form.
But if his work demonstrated that there is a clear and present need for like young women to have their feelings validated by literally fucking anyone in a public forum, like that is such a bummer that it like it took someone that far afield from who they were being like, no, you're, it's okay.
I would have to say you can draw two lines from Bill.
One line is shows like the Bechtel 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.
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?
Okay.
So it's like you could pull Howard Stern or the Bechtel cast from right.
That's kind of what's interesting about Bill.
He's early enough back that you can pull both from it, right?
Sure.
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 42.
My child's father is my husband's father.
The child's father is your husband's father.
Yes.
In other words, you were making it with your father-in-law to be.
Right.
Before the ceremony.
Right.
That's why I changed my mind.
Ah, because you figured that your father-in-law to be was a better man than his own son.
Right.
So why don't you marry the father-in-law?
Was he still married to your ex, to your soon-to-be mother-in-law?
Yeah.
Oh, that's a kind of a dull thing for him to have done.
Well, that won't be much longer.
In other words, if you marry the projected or proposed husband, he would be the brother of his own child.
Yes.
Right.
Gee.
But do you mention, 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, why is he hitting every consonant like that?
That's how you delivered shit on the radio back then.
He's a successful bride.
Told women what for back in the day.
Except for he's not really.
He's not being judgmental or mean there.
He's being silly.
He's kind of making fun of it a little bit, but he's not, he's mostly just like asking her for details because it's like an interesting, saucy story, right?
Well, yeah, that's the thing.
I was like, I don't think he's doing nothing there.
I think he's asking nothing.
Leading questions that he knows the answer to that makes the behavior sound like more like, not even that it's not salacious, but you know, like giving, whatever, telling the listeners, like, oh, that thing that you're wondering is like, is this person doing something kind of fucked up?
Yeah.
And 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 Dr. Laura, right?
Where he did, 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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, by God, it's a great song.
You hear about Dr. Demento.
Very funny song.
But he's really got to 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, he's not, Dr. Laura gives stuff less time to breathe, which is interesting to me.
Like one of them isn't necessarily more honest than the other, but it is interesting, like the difference.
How many hours does she have to Bill's five?
Yeah, Bill gets five.
I guess he has some time to whistle, which you definitely hear, right?
No.
I mean, you heard the slide whistle in there.
This is, of course, a slide whistle show.
So Bill is popular.
And I should say, 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 LA Weekly.
Feminist groups accuse 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.
Tell me what this has to do with the Bactal cast, Robert.
I swear to God.
I don't know, Jamie.
It's a different era before Bill Balance.
After Bill, you get Dr. Laura.
After Bill, you get a lot of shows that are like women talking to and about women.
Sure.
He's not the only thing in there, but he breaks a seal on what talk radio can be.
And it's also worth noting that like after Bill, you get Rush Limbaugh and you get fucking like all of the shock jocks that we get.
Michael Medved, all of these horrible things.
He's the first fish that walked on land, right?
Rather than the immediate simian precursor, right?
Like he just sort of 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's 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.
There's, and he does it by being like, there's an audience that's just not men for this kind of smut, right?
For smut talk, you know?
But that does eventually lead to shows that are not smutty, right?
Like there is a line you can draw there.
And when I talk about the success of this show, he starts this in 1971.
By 1975, there are 500 shows and more that are ripoffs of the Bill Ballant show in different stations around the country.
And Bill's show is more popular than ever.
One of his most popular segments is a recurring bit with Dr. Norton Christie, a clinical psychologist who had worked for the Rand Corporation.
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Christie's a fascinating piece of shit.
Christie's job was to provide pseudo-credible scientific analyses of the fears and complaints made by Ballas's 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 is a scientist explain what the psychological stuff goes, right?
He certainly wouldn't continue on.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, he's again, you can draw a direct line from Bill to Jordan Peterson, right?
Sure, sure.
Or I mean, Dr. Phil, like you know, Dr. Phil, right?
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
This is Bill is a really influential.
He's not the only person who helps make this clear to the people making radio shows and eventually TV shows, but he's a major figure in that movement.
And his station managers saw this as an correctly as an endlessly reproducible format.
You get a guy who's kind of funny.
You get a medical professional, someone you can claim as a medical professional, and you have collars talk about their fucked up lives, billions of dollars, right?
Infinite money from doing this shit up to this day, right?
Yeah.
Now, one thing they do recognize is that you need a stable of experts because we're on the air a lot and actual credible clinical psychologists tend to be busy, right?
If you're a good clinical psychologist, you probably don't have five hours a day to talk to Yahoo's on the radio, right?
Well, you know, well, let's not know no shade, but Frasier certainly found the time.
Frazier is.
And that was part of the reason that Niles and him had such problems.
Niles didn't have five hours of radio a day because he was a real doctor.
That is the point of the Fraser show is that Fraser's not a real psychiatrist.
He's a fraud.
He is a fraud.
But that's part of what makes it fun.
I love what a fraud that man is.
Absolutely.
God, such a formative childhood crush.
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 out there.
And Roz.
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 Fraser 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 they're credible medical experts, but aren't enough of a credible medical expert to like have better things to do.
And this is where Laura Sleshinger is going to come in.
Recognizing Laura Sleshinger00:02:08
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 her reason.
Yeah.
Bill recognizes two key things about Laura from this call.
One of them is she has a good voice for radio and she speaks well and she's someone who actually might have some potential on the air.
And the other, the larger, is that she sounds hot.
So he keeps her on the line for 20 minutes and then he has 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 invested.
Yeah, yeah.
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 where we learned that Dr. Laura stopped the second 9-11.
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.
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, Sophie, of course, is the producer.
Flying To Hot Dog Contest00:03:27
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 going to be a barn burner this year.
It's going to be very fraught.
I can't wait.
Yeah.
Oh, Joey.
Burn a barn down.
Burn something down, folks.
That's all I ask from my listeners.
Light a fire somewhere, you know?
Least we can do.
Least we can do.
It could be a legal fire.
It could be an illegal fire.
I prefer fires that are a gray area, you know?
Really like try to try to like get like within six hours of a burn ban starting.
So you've got that plausible deniability, you know, really gamble on it.
Like a sexy little keep them guessing kind of thing.
Keep them guessing.
Keep them guessing.
That's all I ask, baby.
That's all I ask.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on Demand.
This guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m., whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats you were late.
It was like a first like closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
Now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this probe, I'm a guy.
Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.