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This is exactly right. Isn't some far off concept? It's already here. Next starts now.
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Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye. Hello and welcome to My Favorite Murder.
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That's Georgia Hardstart. That's Karen Kilgariff. And this is a very special episode.
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That's right. This is a bonus episode. Surprise. That's right. It means you're getting more stories.
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You didn't earn it, but you deserve it. So this episode is presented by Hyundai.
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That's right. Thank you, Hyundai, for making this storytelling bonus happen. So for today's theme for this bonus episode, we thought it'd be fun to connect our stories through a shared thread.
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Both of them feature people who were innovators, pioneers, and just generally ahead of their time.
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Yes, people who saw things differently and acted on it. That's right. And are women.
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So thank you, Hyundai, for this bonus episode. Thanks for listening, and let's get into it.
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Let's do it. All right. I'm excited about the theme of this because it's a story I've always wanted to cover.
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It is about a really incredible innovator and a woman who is, by all, what's the word?
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Accounts. A badass. Thank you. So today's story is about an actress who is known as the most beautiful woman in the world.
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For decades, her name was synonymous with beauty, glamour, and sex appeal. She was even said to be the inspiration for both Catwoman, woman and women, Catwoman everywhere, and Snow White.
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Oh, wow. And over those same decades, while everyone knew her name, virtually no one knew that she invented the necessary precursor to some of the most ubiquitous technology that we use today, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
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This is the story of legendary screen actress and equally legendary inventor Hedy Lamarr.
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It's such a cool opportunity to be able to talk about her. Yeah. But I truly think she is one of the most perfect looking women.
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It's ridiculous. Like this movie, I watched the bombshell, the Hedy Lamarr story documentary.
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And like every time you see her on screen, your breath is taken away at how gorgeous she is.
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But then the brain. Then there's a brain as well. She's a very complicated woman.
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And the main source I use for the story is a 2017 American Masters documentary called Bombshell, the Hedy Lamarr story.
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And the rest of the sources can be found in the show notes. So Hedy is born Hedwig.
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Bring that name back. I mean. Hedwig Ava Maria Kiesler. She's born in 1914 in Venice, Austria.
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Nope. In Vienna, Austria. Her parents are both born Jewish, but it seems like she's raised not very religious or both kind of more or less secular, which is really common in Vienna at the time.
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And it seems like that was the place to be in that time period. Post-World War I, pre-World War II, and all the atrocities, like this place was it.
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Both of her parents had come from humble roots but had gotten good educations. And her father is the manager of a major bank in Vienna.
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And so Hedy has a really close, loving relationship with him. And he really, like, you know, wants her to get her education and is very, like, you know, supportive of that.
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So one day when she's five years old, Hedy takes her music box apart and then successfully puts it back together.
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I never could do that second part of it. It's fun to take things apart. That's for sure.
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And this sparks a lifelong interest in engineering. So her father walks her around Vienna and points out all the technology, the streetcars, the electric cables, and explains to her how they work.
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And so she's just super smart right off the bat. She grows up in a part of Vienna that's heavily populated with artists and intellectuals, many of whom are Jewish but also secular.
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And this means it's a fairly progressive society. nudity and sexuality in the arts isn't really taboo.
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You know, like cabaret. Think of that. Musical, yeah. Yeah. It's generally agreed upon that if Hedy had been less beautiful,
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maybe she would have become a scientist. But she grows up in this arts-focused culture.
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And because as a teenager, she starts to become incredibly gorgeous, that she just has to become a model and be in movies almost.
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Like, you know. Should we see a picture of her? Yes. Just so everybody knows. I mean
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so beautiful it's crazy she looks like Elizabeth Taylor meets Vivian Lee yes exactly
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yeah those perfect kind of petite faces yeah also God bless anyone that can do a part
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down the center it cannot be me it's amazing Hedy is very good at being on film and somewhat
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a wild teenager she enjoys all this attention when she's 16 she walks into one of the biggest
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movie studios in Vienna, and within days, she's getting roles in movies. It was that easy back
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then. I mean, when you're hot. Yeah, when you're that beautiful. When Hedy's just 18 years old in
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1933, she stars in a movie called Ecstasy, which is about a bored housewife who has a sexual
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awakening. And this film kind of follows her for the rest of her life. It includes a wide shot of
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her running naked in the woods, a topless moment, and a close-up of her face while she's basically
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having an orgasm, which is just like unheard of and so scandalous to everyone outside of this
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society that's just, you know, really progressive. This, of course, is way too much for American
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audiences. You know, they yank at their pearls. The film is banned in America because of the sex
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and it banned in Nazi Germany because Hedy Jewish So this film gets a lot of attention And it seems like Hedy had a bad experience on set as well So it just kind of it sucks You wonder what her life would have been like if she hadn
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done this specific film. In 1934, right after shooting this movie, Ecstasy, Hedy, who is 19,
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marries an Austrian munitions baron named Fritz Mandel. So Fritz is older, he's divorced, he wants
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this beautiful woman on his arm, essentially 19-year-old. He sells weapons to the Nazis and
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is extraordinarily wealthy, but he's also Jewish. But he comes from this long line of munitions
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barons, right? So what do you do? So Hitler won't personally associate with him, but it's kind of
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gray area in the beginning of Hitler's regime. Well, yeah. I mean, there's plenty of how many
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companies that still exist today exist because they did exactly that thing with Hitler. Crazy.
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and used slave labor, all that stuff. Totally. So as you might expect from an arms dealer to the Nazis,
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Fritz is not the nicest man. He's extremely jealous and possessive of Hetty. He instructs household staff to listen in on her phone calls.
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Anytime she says the word acting, they have to tell him and she gets in trouble.
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She's expected to look nice at dinner parties and do little else. And she does attend some meetings with him
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if he needs her to look good on his arm. And at these meetings, she learns a bit about torpedoes and how they work. So she's still like chasing, you know,
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knowledge, even though it's kind of being banned from her life. She learns that torpedoes need to
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be guided by radio frequencies, but that this makes them detectable to enemies who can jam
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those frequencies. She can't stop thinking about this idea and how one might evade detection by
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changing frequencies quickly enough. But her husband isn't interested in her thoughts on the
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matter. It's all yap, yap, yap to him. Yeah. So you can imagine like if she had gone to college,
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gone to school, gotten an education in engineering and science, you know, she would have gone on to
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do even bigger things, but she figured it out on her own. She stays married to Fritz for about
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three years. Then her father dies of a heart attack and it's just completely devastating
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to Hedy. So she's like, I got to get out of this life. This isn't where I'm supposed to be.
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She's watched after so carefully that she has to actually have, plan an escape from the home.
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And she does this. First, she sews all of her jewelry into the lining of her coat.
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And then one night, she hires a maid who looks like her. One night, she puts sleeping powder in the maid's tea and basically, like, puts her to bed, takes the maid's outfit, puts it on, and takes off in the night.
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Thank you so much for their coat up like this. Thank you so much. Yeah. Good night.
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You want to be like, good for her, but it's also the maid is just, like, wakes up in the morning.
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Do we know for a fact that the maid wasn't in on it? I mean, maybe she was like, yeah, I'll do it.
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Dang. Put me out. Red flag for your job number one. You look exactly like the lady interviewing you.
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Right. Don't do it. And you get sleepy around her all the time. So she rides off into the night on her bicycle and escapes her abusive marriage.
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At just 21, she flees to London where she lives with some family friends. And then one night she goes to a movie and sees the MGM lion at the beginning of the movie.
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And she's just impressed with the movie. And she's like, I want to do that. So she tries to get a job with that studio. And as we know, the studio is headed by Louis B. Mayer. So it's Metric Golden Mayor. And he's actually in town in London at the time for a short visit. And he's trying to recruit European actors who are fleeing the Nazis. Many of them don't speak great English and are desperate to get out of Europe. So he's able to sign them with like really predatory contracts.
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contracts. I mean, that's dark. It's so dark. And he's Jewish himself. And he's, you know.
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I mean, I'm sure there's a justification in some ways, but like, at least I'm doing something.
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Absolutely. You could be looked at in different ways, for sure. Why not just a nice contract? This is the wave of the future. I'm positive it's coming.
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Let's hear it. Oh, just that people get into that position. They're like, we're going to do some nice contracts.
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Everyone's going to be happy. They're going to be able to buy a house after this.
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No one's going to feel used. They're going to love it and they're going to love the arts. It's going to be worth it.
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So Hedy is offered one of these contracts. It's not as bad because she's already been in movies and stuff.
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It's $125 a week is what she's offered, which in today's money. This was in the 30s?
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Yeah. $600 a week? $2,897. Shit. So that's a lot of money a week. That's like union rates.
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Totally. But it's not enough for her. She's like, I'm actually talented and beautiful and have experience.
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But she does want the job. So she storms out and leaves an impression that way and then finds out that mayor will be leaving London on the specific ship, the SS Normandy.
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So she books a one-way ticket on that ship and then makes sure to run into him throughout.
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All she has to do. She's a hot lady. She puts on her tennis clothes and her bathing suit and just happens to walk by him all the time.
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And a nice red lip. That's right. She's done and done. One night she enters the dining room and her beautiful clothes that she had already and her beautiful face and walks in and everyone turns to stare at her.
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Stop, pause, look at the ceiling. Imagine yourself on the ceiling. She knows it.
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Like, God, that feeling. Yeah. And so he offers her a contract for $500 a week by the end of the trip.
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He ups it by $200? It was $125 and now it's $500, which is $11,588 in today's money a week.
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Yeah, hell yeah. So it works. Okay, great. And he and his wife come up with her name because she needs a fancy name.
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So it's Hedy Lamarr after a different actress who had tragically died. And Lamarr means the sea.
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So Hedy Lamarr. Okay. Because they're at the sea. I don't know. It's pretty good.
00:11:49
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00:12:30
Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye. Hedy finds her footing in a film called Algiers, in which she plays a glamorous jewel thief.
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Should we take a look at another photo? No brag, but those are the eyebrows I had in the 90s.
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You can tell the remnants are still there, but man. Pencil thin. We went that thin in the 90s.
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Imagine she looked that good with thin eyebrows, what she'd look like with normal eyebrows, even better.
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If she had those big, tall, laminated ones. Tatted on. Okay. In 1939, when she's 23, she marries a screenwriter named Jean Markey, and they adopt a son together.
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She ends up having a lot of marriages, and it's one of those sad stories like, you know, Marilyn Monroe, where they just never seem to work.
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It's such a weird time for women in marriage, though, because she's making $11,000 a week.
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Right. So she doesn't need to be doing anything. She probably has to. Yeah. And it seems like this dude that she married, everyone was like, him?
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And she was like, he's nice to me. He reminds me of my dad. He immediately starts cheating.
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Like, she even tries to make the right, you know, not some fancy actor. Not a munitions fan.
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A smart guy, a writer. This is a safe bet. You fool. Nope. They're the worst every time.
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That's true. They're the worst every time. Every man is entitled. It's on some level.
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So he starts dating other actresses and the marriage ends. In 1940, Hedy now has a huge year with MGM first appearing in the movie Boomtown, which is a massive hit.
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And she stars in several more movies that year, working under that brutal studio system that we've heard so much about.
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But she's just working her butt off. And in order to perform for long hours, she's given amphetamines.
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It's, you know, the usual, the usual. And then given sleeping pills at night to help her sleep.
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But she doesn't sleep. She goes home and works on inventions. She has an invention like desk in her house.
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Nice. Where she has all her like science things and has one in her studio on set as well where she can go and tinker between takes because she wants to do science stuff.
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Yeah. After her marriage to Jean fails, Hedy, she starts dating Howard Hughes. Yeah.
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The aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch The Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him.
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But incredible innovator, serious mental illness, right, that kind of went unchecked.
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I think so, yeah. She says he's a, quote, very strange man. But they do get along really well.
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Give us examples. I know. They said something like he was a bad lover. And I'm like, what does that mean?
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Does that mean on what level? There's so many levels where he could be. He keeps making airplane noises just the whole time.
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Right. But they do get along intellectually. He is, you know, someone she can talk to about science and interesting things like that. And he gives her access to his workforce of scientists for whatever invention she wants to make. And in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings. And she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like what the two would look like as a plane.
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and that kind of becomes the plane that we know today. Like he uses it. Holy shit.
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And he calls her a genius. She is a genius, it sounds like. Yeah, throughout her adulthood,
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she's always tinkering with chemistry and with ideas. By 1940, World War II is in full swing,
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although America has not yet entered. And Hedy's mother has escaped Vienna and is living in London.
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So Hedy's trying to get her mom from London, which still isn't safe for her, to the U.S.
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But it's incredibly dangerous for those ships that are crossing to America because German U-boats can and will torpedo civilian ships making that crossing.
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So you have that issue. And then also supply ships are being torpedoed and sunk.
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And it's kind of at a point where we're losing the war because we can't get the supplies.
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We can't get, you know, people out of there in time. So Hedy comes up with this idea that she had had of frequency hopping with help from a professor at Caltech in Pasadena.
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Oh. guiding the torpedoes with frequencies that constantly change so they can't be jammed.
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So she meets a composer named George Antile, and together they come up with a way to make this frequency hopping system work,
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inspired by a method George has used and figured out of synchronizing player pianos.
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So you know when you see the, like, dashes that are all the way across the line?
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So if those are in secret order, then if they jam the radio frequency, it doesn't matter only jamming it for this, you know, amount of time,
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because it's hopping so often. So you can't jam the whole thing. Okay. And so that way they're easier to control.
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They always go. Yeah. Like a player piano, they just keep going. Right. So George and Hedy patent this idea.
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They present it to the Navy, but it's rejected as being impractical. They kind of laugh them off.
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And we're like, what do you think? This isn't a player piano. It's a torpedo. And then also Hedy is from Austria.
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And so they also seize the patent because it's the property they say. I'm an enemy alien.
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Oh. Yeah. She's not from here. They think she could be a spy. She's made this patent and tried to give it to them.
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Yeah. And they're like, no. We'll get you. Right. And then it's like, yeah, now we're on to you.
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Or it's like, right, you're on to me, the person who came and gave you this idea.
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And, you know, she's not American enough for them. But then they also like hey can you use your good looks and celebrity to sell war bonds Yeah And she does I mean imagine how many ideas and inventions and things have been lost at time because the kind of patriarchy in this system just couldn entertain the idea of a woman having a good idea
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Yeah. Just a real loss. Yeah. Or had too much of an ego to, like, agree and allow it.
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It's frustrating. Can we have our own planet, please? No. Thank you. Make it work.
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That sounds right. In 1943, Hedy marries a British actor named John Loder. They are together until 1947.
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They have two children. Everyone says he's really dull compared to her vivaciousness and intelligence.
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So then she has another brief marriage after that. But what? I like the way you said that, like, because everyone said he was dull.
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She's like, fine, I'll divorce him. I'll get somebody else. And so Hedy has a bumpy relationship with Louis B. Mayer.
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I think a lot of actresses probably did. And she gets a reputation for being difficult.
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Yeah. Because she doesn't let people push her around. So in the late 40s, she produces two movies on her own, which is pretty much unheard of at the time.
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But she's not getting the parts she wants. And so she does it herself, which pisses off Mayer even more.
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And in 1949, she does get the movie Samson and Delilah. It's a massive hit. It renews her career.
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And then right after that, she produces and stars in The Love of Three Queens. and it's just this huge expensive production that she undertakes.
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It doesn't get a distribution and she loses a lot of money from it. At this point, she's kind of struggling financially.
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So in 1952, when she's 38, she marries an oil tycoon named W. Howard Lee, which is like, she kind of is like, this is my life now.
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She can. I need to support my children. You're going to hit that money button if it is within your reach.
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Yeah. And she like has to move to Texas with him. And it sounds almost like a Green Acres kind of a thing.
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Not so much. Get the movie star and get her to move back to Texas. Yeah, exactly.
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She does become estranged from her first child, the adopted son she had with Gene, her second husband.
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He goes off to boarding school and ultimately kind of is taken in by another family.
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And so it's kind of not spoken of anymore. It's kind of sad. And so eventually Hedy's marriage to the Texan, Lee, also fails.
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And she has two other short marriages after that. In the 1950s, she starts to struggle more profoundly with her mental health and with substance abuse, which, of course, had been introduced to her by professionals at the MGM studio.
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In the late 50s and 60s, when she's in her 40s, this all takes a huge toll and she has several breakdowns.
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In the 60s, she also becomes a patient of Dr. Max Jacobson, a.k.a. Dr. Feelgood, who I actually covered in episode 349.
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I was surprised to hear that. And it was relatively recent. Yeah, it's called A Bit of Stew.
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2022, that's not recently. Oh, God. Right? Damn. I don't know where my brain was at the time.
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That was, we were on Zoom. That was like the blank years. Yeah. We should skip that and rewind.
00:21:01
Just skip the whole pandemic. Pretend it never happened. Yeah. So he does this evil thing where he tells people that he's injecting them with a vitamin shot,
00:21:08
vitamin B to pep you up, and it's just meth. Yeah. And gets all these people addicted to meth.
00:21:14
So Hedy's behavior in the 60s and 70s becomes very erratic and unstable. It's hard on her kids, but her daughter says, quote, now I can be forgiving of that erratic behavior because she was a victim of the very system that made her famous.
00:21:28
And she's actually arrested for shoplifting in 1966 in this weird like Winona Ryder style way that it's like, did she or didn't she?
00:21:36
She gets acquitted, but it definitely tarnishes her reputation. I mean, it's that kind of shoplifting where it's like you don't need anything and you're clearly doing it for like the dopamine hit.
00:21:45
Right. Or she had a bunch of money on her, too. it's like, was it a misunderstanding?
00:21:49
It could have been. Yeah. Or did you just like walk out thinking, I'm Hedy Lamarr.
00:21:53
I must have like a tab open. I don't know. Right, exactly. Like you don't do things for yourself like that back then.
00:21:58
I think the Winona Ryder one, it reminded me of like, when somebody is a star, back then, that level of a star
00:22:04
where literally everyone does everything for you. Gives you whatever you want. All the time.
00:22:08
Yeah. As she gets older, she starts to struggle with her identity. She's always been appreciated primarily for her beauty.
00:22:14
and now that it's starting to fade, you know, through her eyes, she starts to get cosmetic
00:22:20
procedures. And in fact, she dictates to the surgeon how she thinks the procedure should be
00:22:25
done. And she ends up making plastic surgery. She advances it by being like, you should do the
00:22:31
incision here. You should do the incision here. Here's where you should hide this. Here's where
00:22:35
you should enhance this. And she actually looks amazing even after she's gotten some work done.
00:22:41
And I mean, she looks in today's standards incredible. But of course, this press is still relentless, still photographs her every time she leaves the house.
00:22:49
It's kind of just worst case scenario. All the bad stories you hear from back then happens to her and she becomes reclusive.
00:22:57
And she starts to look less and less like herself the more procedure she gets. So in the 80s, when she's in her 70s, Hedy struggles more, especially as her money starts to run out.
00:23:06
But she returns to thinking about her original frequency hopping patent. and she's pretty sure it's been used.
00:23:12
And so if you use the patent, you have to pay for it. Yeah. That's kind of the understanding when you file a patent.
00:23:20
That's that thing about patents. Yeah. If the U.S. government uses it, they have to pay you for it.
00:23:24
And she knows that by the 60s during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Navy had been using frequency hopping.
00:23:30
So this would mean that they had used it before her patent. It had expired in 1959.
00:23:36
But she expects that they had used it before, which would mean it hadn't expired yet.
00:23:40
And so she is owed money. So in 1990, when Hedy's 75, a reporter named Fleming Meeks, who works at Forbes at the time, is talking with his father, who's an astrophysicist at MIT.
00:23:51
And his father tells him he had just learned something interesting from a colleague, that actress Hedy Lamarr had been a brilliant and prolific inventor.
00:24:00
Fleming, the journalist, is hooked on this idea and he tracks Hetty down. He coaxes her out of her shell by sending her a bouquet of roses.
00:24:08
He kind of sweet talks her and then gets this long interview with her on tape, which you can hear in the documentary, where she talks about all of her inventions, her life, all the incredible things she's been through, how she feels about them.
00:24:21
And she talks about her suspicions that the Navy had used her patent. So the article runs that year, and it's the first time the public ever finds out about Hedy Lamarr's inventions.
00:24:32
You know, she had been keeping it to herself. Over the course of the 90s and into 2000s, frequency hopping is being used for an explosion of technologies that we now use all the time.
00:24:42
GPS is a big one, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. Hedy's idea is at the foundation of this technology.
00:24:49
Do we have a photo of the plans? Because I know Karen loves scientists. There you go.
00:24:53
Oh, I love a blueprint. Here's a blueprint. do with it what you will. This is her just like as she's filming and then in her dressing room,
00:25:00
she's like, just some thoughts. What a genius. I know. And that's just one of very many. So our
00:25:06
most secure military communications are done with a satellite system that was built using Hedy's
00:25:12
patent, though the patent had long expired. In 1997, the Navy, Milstar, which is a satellite
00:25:20
communications company and Lockheed Martin want to present Hedy with an award for all her work,
00:25:27
but she declines appearing at the ceremony. She's kind of a recluse and won't leave her house.
00:25:32
And so her son accepts the award for her. And she says, quote, I am happy that this invention
00:25:38
has been so successful. I appreciate your acknowledgement of you honoring me. And it
00:25:42
was not done in vain. Thank you. End quote. So that's kind of all she gets. Hedy dies peacefully
00:25:47
in the year 2000 at the age of 85 without ever knowing for sure if her patent had been used
00:25:53
before it expired. It had. It's only after that a military contractor says that he was handed
00:26:00
Hedy's patent by a Navy official in 1955 and asked to see if it was good for anything. So he didn't
00:26:08
know it was her patent. This was four years before the patent had expired. So just like she had
00:26:14
thought it had been used. He used it actually to create something called a sono buoy. You know what
00:26:20
that is. It's a buoy that communicates securely with aircraft. Sure. It's just it was used. Yeah.
00:26:25
He had been unaware of the patent implications or that Hedy had not been paid. And it only comes
00:26:30
to light when he creates a website explicitly thanking Hedy Lamarr for her inventions and says,
00:26:36
without you and this invention, we would have never been able to create that initial secure
00:26:41
communication system. Wow. So she was right all along. Confirmed from the inside. That's right.
00:26:47
So that is the story of Hedy Lamarr, who was a great beauty, of course, but also more importantly,
00:26:52
an innovator and an inventor. Wow. I love that. That's incredible. So this story begins on September 19th, 1973. A 29-year-old Southern California woman sits
00:27:07
alone in the Astrodome's nosebleed section. She's here to study the building because tomorrow she'll
00:27:14
be competing. She's looking at the incredibly high ceilings, the intense lighting, and she tries to
00:27:19
imagine the booming sound of the packed house that will be there the next day. Then she looks down
00:27:25
toward the floor level and sees herself facing off with her competitor in front of millions of people,
00:27:31
knowing that this isn't an ordinary match. Everything is actually on the line. This is
00:27:36
It's the story of the cultural moment when legendary athlete, feminist, and LGBTQ plus icon Billie Jean King wins the battle of the sexist tennis match.
00:27:46
Hell yeah. Do you know about this? No, I know the story not very well. Okay. I'm excited.
00:27:52
Let me get to the details. Okay. So the sources used in the show today are Billie Jean King's autobiography.
00:27:57
It's called All In and her website, BillieJeanKing.com. We went to the source. Got it.
00:28:03
But there are other ones and they're in our show notes. So Billie Jean Moffitt, which is her maiden name, is born in Long Beach, California in 1943.
00:28:12
And as she grows up, she discovers her love for sports like softball and basketball.
00:28:16
But she doesn't pick up tennis until she's a preteen when her friend Susan asks if she wants to come with her for a lesson at Long Beach's Virginia Country Club.
00:28:26
Did you know there were country clubs down in Long Beach? No. I didn't either. So her friend and their family are members.
00:28:32
Billie Jean is not a member of this or any other country club. Her family, self-described blue-collar family.
00:28:39
Her dad's a fireman. Her mom is a homemaker. So tennis is basically a sport that she's just not been exposed to.
00:28:45
It's basically at this time for the elite. Right. It's a secret sport. And according to her, for this first lesson, Billie Jean is not good at tennis.
00:28:56
But something clicks inside her. And later on, she's going to write, quote, I like the variety in mental challenge.
00:29:01
I liked being able to hit the ball over and over. Tennis fascinated me from the first day I played with Susan using a borrowed racket.
00:29:09
End quote. So she obviously has a natural aptitude for the game. She's very competitive.
00:29:15
She's always working to improve. And because of this, she starts to win a lot. But it is 1955.
00:29:22
So even though Billie Jean is proving herself on the court, she's treated very differently
00:29:26
than the young male athletes that she competes around. When she's just 12 years old, she goes to the exclusive Los Angeles Tennis Club.
00:29:35
Have you ever been there? Me either. And she's wearing a pair of shorts her mother made for her.
00:29:40
And she's told those shorts are in violation of the club's dress code for girls and women,
00:29:44
which requires them to wear either a tennis dress or a tennis skirt. Gross. So then later when the other young tennis players gather for a group photo she is excluded from that photo Yeah Another time also at the Los Angeles Tennis Club they have lunch arranged for the top players which Billie Jean should be involved with
00:30:06
But it's just for the boys. So Billie Jean and her mom eat bag lunches outside on a bench.
00:30:12
Oh, my God. Yeah. But wherever Billie Jean plays tennis, sexism and double standards follow.
00:30:17
One of her teachers docks points off of her grades because, as they say, quote, Billie Jean occasionally takes advantage of her superior ability during recess tennis games.
00:30:28
Oh, my God. Yeah. She's upsetting boys by being too good at it. Yep. They get real upset about the sport.
00:30:35
She will later write about it saying, quote, pursuing your goals as a girl or a woman often meant being pricked and dogged by slights like that.
00:30:43
End quote. So she had to get used to it from a very young age. But as she enters her teens, she's becoming aware of how other people are completely shut out of certain spaces, like the many tournaments that she competes in that are hosted at whites-only country clubs.
00:30:58
She writes in her autobiography, quote, I wondered how the people of color around me felt.
00:31:03
When I was young, I'd seen photos of how the Little Rock Nine students had to walk past an angry white mob to desegregate their Arkansas school in 1957,
00:31:12
or how six-year-old Ruby Bridges still had to be escorted daily by four federal marshals to attend classes at her previously all-white New Orleans school.
00:31:21
I knew the stories of how Althea Gibson and Jackie Robinson broke the color barriers in their respective sports, tennis and baseball.
00:31:28
End quote. So growing up with this backdrop of the civil rights movement, it imprints a huge sense of justice on Billie Jean King.
00:31:36
She will write, quote, even if you're not a born activist, life can damn sure make you one.
00:31:42
The older I got, the more I aspire to. There wasn't just unrest in the world around us. There was a storm gathering inside of me.
00:31:49
Yeah. End quote. I totally remember this culturally, even though I was three years old when it happened.
00:31:55
Right. So I was too young, but I think it kind of lived on for at least the next decade. Yeah. But I seem to remember like the vibe of it. Ultimately, Billie Jean King, as she began to fight for women's rights, had to like fight publicly against really chauvinistic men about those.
00:32:14
You're not just fighting it in tennis. It's you're fighting the entire world, society.
00:32:20
You're like, yeah, you become the face of a fight like that, which is a lot of pressure.
00:32:24
Billie Jean graduates high school in 1961. And just weeks later, at 17 years old, she and 19-year-old Karen Haunts win the women's doubles at Wimbledon.
00:32:34
And they are the youngest to ever do it. And they still are to this day. Holy shit.
00:32:39
Yeah. 17. 17 and 19. They just go in and, like, destroy. Damn. With this win, Billie begins to shoot up the ranks of competitive tennis.
00:32:48
She becomes the number three player in the United States. By 1966, when she's just 23 years old, she's the top-ranked female tennis player in the world.
00:32:57
She wins Wimbledon's women's singles for the next three years in a row. In 1967, she wins what will be the precursor to the U.S. Open, which are the U.S. Nationals.
00:33:09
And the next year, she wins the Australian Open. So she is dominating. Nice. And between all of those gigantic wins, she marries a law student named Larry King.
00:33:18
No relation to Larry King. What if this was like a young Larry King? Pre-suspenders Larry King?
00:33:25
So Larry supports Billie Jean's career wholeheartedly, but the tournament circuit is tough and it's
00:33:30
undeniably discriminatory to women athletes. Most notably, Billie Jean and her female peers are routinely paid less prize money than their
00:33:39
male counterparts. Sure. So in 1970, 27-year-old Billie Jean makes a move. She and eight other female tennis players symbolically accept a $1 contract to join the Virginia Slims tour.
00:33:53
Wow. So Virginia Slims, infamous ladies' skinny cigarette that we all know and love, decides to start a tennis tour with women only.
00:34:01
It's a 19-city stop tennis tournament that travels across the United States, and the cash prizes for the top athletes are all for just the women.
00:34:11
So basically they just get their own kind of like prize bank and give it to themselves.
00:34:16
Got it. These athletes still plan on playing the marquee tournaments of the year like the U.S. Open in Wimbledon.
00:34:21
But by leaving the traditional tournament circuit, they're putting their careers and their reputations in this intensely male-dominated sports world at stake.
00:34:30
Well, it makes sense, too, that they're like, you're not going to pay us enough.
00:34:33
We're going to go somewhere else. We get paid. See how much money you lose because we're not here anymore.
00:34:37
Right. And if you don't think we're that important, we only deserve, you know, a tenth of the pot.
00:34:43
Yeah. Then let's see what happens. Yeah. It's a huge move. And it's that kind of thing.
00:34:47
It can't be kind of underlined enough how it was not happening. Yeah. It had not, you know, very few other places were women asserting themselves in those situations.
00:34:58
So now in addition to playing top-notch tennis, these women have to work basically their asses off promoting the Virginia Slims tour, making sure there's butts in seats so they sell so then they have the big prize tournament to be competing for.
00:35:13
In some cities, Billie Jean and her fellow athletes hand out free tickets to random pedestrians on the street, hoping they'll come and watch and basically get interested in women's tennis.
00:35:22
And these efforts actually pay off, with thousands of spectators showing up in every city, proving to male stakeholders that there is real public interest in women's sports.
00:35:32
She must be so proud today, watching season after season these teams take off and these female athletes just become more and more in the public eye.
00:35:41
It's very cool that she's around to see it. All the while, Billie Jean King continues shattering the norms.
00:35:47
In 1970 she makes history as the first female tennis player to earn more than in prize money in a single season Wow Do you want to guess how much that is in today I mean It over You just won
00:36:06
Okay, so nice one. Thank you. But don't celebrate too soon because the gender pay gap still exists.
00:36:13
Just two years later, Billie Jean wins the U.S. Open and is paid $15,000 less in prize money than the male winner.
00:36:19
Right. But instead of complaining, instead of whining, it just fuels her. She appears before Congress fighting for the passing of Title IX, which bans sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal dollars.
00:36:34
So she goes to the root of this discrimination. Yeah. I love that it's like not even specific to her and her career at that point.
00:36:40
It's like, here's where it began for me and here's where it begins for so many young girls.
00:36:45
Yeah. Let's fucking kick it. Let's fucking get out of the fucking way. Yeah. And this passes in 1972, and it remains the law of the land today.
00:36:54
Although they chip, chip, chip away at it. They sure do. I didn't know this. This is so compelling to me.
00:36:59
In 1973, Billie Jean King forms the Women's Tennis Association. Wow. It's gigantic.
00:37:04
She's just like, you know what I'm going to do now? Yeah. She's like, we've got to tighten this stuff up.
00:37:10
I have no excuse for my laziness. Listen, you do three podcasts a week. It's not easy.
00:37:16
Thank you. I was fishing for that. Debbie, and you got it. Women's Tennis Association is responsible for, among other things, the fact that women get equal pay at the U.S. Open now. That was one of the first things that after they came into the world, they started fighting for that. And the U.S. Open basically gave in the year that that discussion started, like basically immediately. And so the U.S. Open was the first major tournament of any sport to award the same prize money to male and female competitors alike.
00:37:46
And for a time like that, it was a huge trailblazing victory for the equal rights of women.
00:37:50
But you know, when women are making progress in the world, there's always going to be an old bowling bag of a man who's going to cry about it.
00:37:57
Isn't there? An old bowling bag of a man. And in this story, there is a true villain.
00:38:03
And a lot of people, there are theories that this was kind of... PR. Yes. It was churned up for press.
00:38:10
Do we have photos? We will. Okay. But the thing that's funny, I'll show you that bowling bag for sure.
00:38:15
What's funny about this is that it was such a part of the culture of women yapping, get back into the kitchen type of stuff.
00:38:22
Men are for Mars, women are for Venus. This ex-tennis player whose career ended in 1939.
00:38:28
Jesus. A man by the name of Bobby Riggs. He starts talking about when all of this kind of movement happens.
00:38:35
Anytime that he's like interviewed or talking, he does a lot of what they call when you play the X something games, exposition games.
00:38:43
What's the word I'm looking for? X Games? No. Exhibition? Thank you. Exhibition games.
00:38:51
Okay. His career had basically turned to playing exhibition games. Right. He's like the Harlem Globetrotters of tennis.
00:38:57
But I don't think he was good like the Harlem Globetrotters. I mean, those guys fucking rocked.
00:39:02
This guy, I think, was just around and had a big mouth. Got it. And so... That's all you have to do to be a man these days and to be successful.
00:39:10
That's right. Be around. These days? Have a big mouth. It's pretty much how it is.
00:39:14
So he just starts just spouting inflammatory sexist comments about women's tennis and the fight for equal pay in the sport, right?
00:39:22
Because she's making progress. Just shut the fuck up, dude. His two big ones that he did were he said women's tennis, quote, stinks.
00:39:29
You can see some pretty legs, but it's night and day compared to the men's game.
00:39:33
It's just very standard. Yeah. Another time he's quoted as saying a woman's place is in the kitchen, in the bedroom, and not necessarily in that order.
00:39:42
Gross, dude. Right? Let's take a look at Bobby Riggs. Oh, he looks like a fucking, what's his name?
00:39:52
Austin Powers. He's absolutely Austin Powers. He's, oh, my God. I wonder if Mike Myers did that on purpose.
00:39:59
Dude. Because it really is that kind of caricature. It's a caricature of a man who's, like, commenting on them.
00:40:06
You have to respond simply because you won't stop doing it. Right. But it's also, like, you're commenting on women.
00:40:11
like you're some kind of prize, dude. It's like the concept of I decide other people's value.
00:40:17
But I don't have to do anything to make myself appealing in any way. I stopped playing tennis 32 years ago,
00:40:24
but I'm going to talk about how you shouldn't be playing tennis. Totally. Okay, so he's just fanning the flames of chauvinism for attention and relevance.
00:40:32
It's not a hard thing to do. It never has been, especially as the women's movement is looming into the zeitgeist.
00:40:38
and men are very much put out by this concept of equality. They do not like it. Never have.
00:40:45
According to a quote from Billie Jean in a BBC.com article, she says that Bobby Riggs followed her around for two years,
00:40:53
challenging her to play against him. Yeah. Then he asks her to play on Mother's Day 1973,
00:40:59
and in that offer, he refers to her as, quote, the leading women's liver of tennis, end quote.
00:41:06
So Billie Jean says, I'm sorry, I don't know who you are. No, that's not true. Actually, Billie Jean King was always super classy.
00:41:14
When she talked about Bobby Riggs, she was like, he's a hero of mine. He's one of the greats of tennis.
00:41:20
Wow. Like, not in this, you know, when this kind of thing comes up. But in general, she'd always looked up to him as like a hero of tennis.
00:41:28
So it's really gross. And he just starts harassing her. Yeah, and kind of being like, oh, you think you're so big?
00:41:35
Well, play against me. Amen. He's harassing and stalking her and playing it off like it's a game, like a playful flirtation.
00:41:42
Right. Basically, she just always says no and kind of leave me alone. Yeah. So he challenges a different top-ranked female tennis player to this match on Mother's Day 1973.
00:41:53
That player name is Margaret Court She considered one of the best to ever play the game But she had just been returning to competitive play after taking a year off to have a baby She agrees to play Bobby Riggs not realizing how big of a spectacle he planning on making it
00:42:10
So on May 13th, 1973, with 3,500 spectators watching courtside and another 10 million watching from home, Bobby beats Margaret Court decisively in 6-1, 6-2 game.
00:42:24
He plays a soft, slow type of tennis, and it totally throws off the way she plays, which is like hard-hitting, fast-moving.
00:42:32
This match will become known as the, quote, Mother's Day Massacre. But you just got to think of these, like, male sports reporters who are, like, just sitting there waiting.
00:42:41
Yeah. I would be surprised to learn that there was any kind of equanimity in this reporting.
00:42:47
So everybody watches this on TV, and Billie Jean does too. and as she does she immediately understands what the stakes of this are and were and at a time when
00:42:58
female athletes are fighting for respect and recognition not to mention equal pay and equal
00:43:03
sponsorships this loss plays right into the hands of the naysayers and the performative chauvinists
00:43:09
and the people who are like we have an excuse not to give you money so billy jean king reaches out
00:43:15
to the gloating Bobby Riggs and says, I will play you. They then begin to promote this battle of the sexes tennis match relentlessly.
00:43:25
Billie Jean is quoted as saying, quote, I'm taking this match very seriously. I love to win.
00:43:29
I welcome the responsibility and the pressure. Bobby had better be ready. And according to that same BBC article, Bobby turned up to a practice session wearing a shirt
00:43:40
with two circles cut out where his nipples were and joked that Billie Jean King would
00:43:44
look better in it than him. The next day in the final news conference, a direct speaking Billie
00:43:51
Jean King calls him a creep. Bobby Riggs asks her to take it back. She looks him straight in the eye
00:43:57
and says, creep stands. That is a good comeback. So a few months later on September 20th, 1973,
00:44:06
Billie Jean King goes head to head against Bobby Riggs and it's a perfect storm. Bobby's gloating
00:44:12
sexist blather has now been repeatedly aimed directly at Billie Jean, who's not just a tennis
00:44:17
player, but a public face of the women's movement. And this has expanded from a pop culture tennis
00:44:23
match to a referendum on the validity of the women's movement. Yeah. They name it the Battle
00:44:28
of the Sexes, and more than 30,000 people show up at the Astrodome to watch it. The Astrodome.
00:44:34
Is that the one in UCA? In Texas. USC. Okay. It's not in LA. The Astrodome. I'm right about that,
00:44:41
our night? It's famous, right? It is. Yeah, you're right. Well, look, I never said. Listen, I did
00:44:49
never. We can't pretend to be sports fans just because we're talking about sports. Astrodome,
00:44:53
the Staples Center. I don't know. Very similar places. So 30,000 people around that area go to
00:45:00
watch. 90 million watch it from home. Holy shit. It's almost how many people listen to this podcast.
00:45:05
I mean, and again, apologies to all 90 million of you. This match sets an all-time record for tennis watching, and it's still held to this day.
00:45:16
It will be one of the most watched sporting events of all time, period. Holy shit.
00:45:21
Yes. Because it's really kicking up all the vibes of, like, early 70s politics, essentially.
00:45:27
About so much more than— Yeah. So they have these insane entrances. It almost goes into, like, professional wrestling.
00:45:35
Wow. Billie Jean King is carried onto the court by shirtless men in one of those beds with four men at each corner.
00:45:41
Whose idea was that? Well, there was a PR person that said, oh, you're a feminist.
00:45:46
You're not going to do this. And she went, what are you talking about? I love this idea.
00:45:50
And jumped up onto it. She's like, let's play this thing. Good for her. Meanwhile, when Bobby Riggs comes out, he's being pulled.
00:45:58
There's nothing not problematic about everything about this thing. We can all assume that.
00:46:02
But just to state it. He's being pulled on a rickshaw by women in T-shirts that bear the Sugar Daddy candy logo.
00:46:10
And he's got an endorsement deal with Sugar Daddy candy. Bro. So that's a whole candy company that's like we're on the dude side.
00:46:19
Can you imagine being his kid and being like, oh, this is so embarrassing. My dad is so embarrassing.
00:46:25
It's so goofy. But then at the same time, there's just so many people are like, yeah, you know, we need to teach those women a lesson.
00:46:32
Yeah. So what's great is that they meet and they present gifts to each other, you know, as a kind of opening salvo.
00:46:40
Bobby wearing a sugar daddy sweatsuit gives Billie Jean an oversized sugar daddy lollipop.
00:46:46
And because Bobby Riggs has proclaimed in the press over and over that he is proud to be a male chauvinist pig, Billie Jean gives him a piglet.
00:46:54
A live piglet. In photos. Let's see them being carried. I want to see them being carried.
00:47:00
Oh, he's in a rickshaw. He's in a little rickshaw, and those are the sugar daddy women that are pushing it.
00:47:06
But then here's— Oh, she looks incredible. It's not the best. So she's got more of a Cleopatra thing going.
00:47:12
But also the woman standing next to her with a fucking tight perm has got a sign that just says,
00:47:17
Bye. Bye. I know. What kind of time traveler woman is that? Seriously. Because that's a Billie Jean King shirt.
00:47:24
Yeah, she's on her side. She's like, bye. Yeah. There's some go Bobby goes in the background.
00:47:28
Yeah. This is like wrestling. It's totally wrestling boys against girls. Yeah. So it's kind of great.
00:47:34
And I love that she's such a smart woman. And she's like, you can't cast me as the serious ball busting feminist.
00:47:40
That's not what this, yeah. Yeah, I get what this is. She's like being playful about it.
00:47:44
Yes. Which is a great way to like make an inroad. And show you're smart. Yeah. Here's a piglet.
00:47:49
Go away. Savvy. Yeah. Now you have to take care of a pig. Okay. The enormous social and psychological weight of this cultural event lands squarely on Billie Jean's shoulders as it is.
00:48:00
The game begins. So she does falter a little bit. Like, Bobby scores first. Then Billie Jean hits a ball out of bounds.
00:48:07
So she stops. She gives herself a pep talk. And she basically pulls out her A game.
00:48:13
She will later write, quote, For all the pre-match hype about Bobby's skills, many folks forgot I was a versatile shot maker and a shrewd tactician, too.
00:48:23
Fuck yeah. Now I'm trying different shots, seeing what works. I'm making Bobby work for every point.
00:48:29
Hell yeah. So she basically, that same feeling, which I'm sure happened to Margaret Court, came of like, no, this really matters.
00:48:36
But instead of like tightening up, she allowed imperfection. She allowed like, hey, he's going to get some points, whatever.
00:48:44
And she learned from it. Yeah. And adjusted. Yeah. And then she's like, what do I need to be doing?
00:48:49
Not how do I need to be defending? Right. Yeah. So in the end, they play five full sets, which is what only men did back then.
00:48:56
Oh, really? Women played three and men played five. Okay. Billie Jean decisively blows Bobby Riggs away in consecutive sets and wins $100,000 grand prize.
00:49:08
That is incredible. She'll later say, quote, I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn't win that match.
00:49:13
It would ruin the women's tennis tour and affect all women's self-esteem. God. I mean, so much pressure.
00:49:20
She had so much more to lose than him. So much. It was just a dumb joke to him. Yeah.
00:49:25
But then for her to realize halfway through, not even halfway through, in the beginning,
00:49:28
like, oh, I'm actually better than him at this. Why am I nervous? His last game was in 1939.
00:49:35
He had to stop playing tennis because of World War II. What a nice feeling to be like, oh, wait a second.
00:49:42
Yes. I've got this. Yeah, I've got this. This is fucking easy. I'm now going to put the ball places and make that little guy run.
00:49:48
Make him look stupid. Make that little wig come off. Do you want to take a look at her winning this Battle of the Sexes?
00:49:54
Yes, please. This is what she did. Oh, she had a great night that night. And there's the Astrodome.
00:50:00
Look at how full it is. It's so crazy. Oh, God, to be there. Yeah. Time machine.
00:50:05
Fighting for girls. Oh, sorry, we're mid-quote. To beat a 55-year-old guy was no thrill for me.
00:50:11
The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis. Amazing. End quote. So then she's also just being a businesswoman.
00:50:18
Yeah, it's an opportunity. Yeah. A big opportunity. The fanfare around this match introduces countless new people
00:50:23
to the previously elites sport of tennis It a major evolution for women in sports overall and the power of this win will persist for decades I mean truly I could not have been conscious of this happening
00:50:38
and I absolutely knew all about this as a young girl. Same. And yeah, I wasn't born yet,
00:50:44
like much later. Yeah. It really set us up for terrible disappointment for the 90s and 2000s.
00:50:50
Billie Jean King will later say, quote, our battle of the sexes match helped to advance the game of tennis and women everywhere, end quote.
00:50:59
Now, there are people out there who try to say that Bobby Riggs threw the match because he needed the money because he owed the mafia so much money with gambling, which is, of course, Billie Jean King calls those rumors ridiculous.
00:51:14
And they are ridiculous. He was a 55-year-old man playing a woman at the top of her game.
00:51:19
Right. He will later go on to say that he completely underestimated her and did not realize how fast she was.
00:51:26
Basically, he's just a fraud. But she also talks about him after the fact, like, they stayed friends.
00:51:34
She did not get got by him in any way. She treated him like the joke he was treating her as.
00:51:41
And they actually were able to stay friends to the point where she talked to him the night before he died and he told her he loved her.
00:51:48
Wow. Yeah. So it was a private relationship that was very different than the results of what the culture kind of reacted to in this game.
00:51:57
Got it. That's nice. I know, isn't it? Because she's the bigger, she gets to be the bigger person because she's like, yeah, I destroyed you.
00:52:04
So wonderful. We can be friends. Billie Jean King's cultural influence is, of course, undeniable.
00:52:09
She's won 12 Grand Slam singles titles. She's been inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
00:52:15
She was awarded the French Legion of Honor. She became the first female commissioner in professional sports after co-establishing the mixed-gender world team tennis league.
00:52:25
Wow. And her fight on the tennis court was memorialized on film in the 2017 movie Battle of the Sexes where Emma Stone played her.
00:52:33
And just so everyone knows, if you don't know what a grand slam is, that's when you win the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open all in the same year.
00:52:42
Jesus. So you go slam. That's a very Williams sisters kind of thing to do. Cool.
00:52:48
Billie Jean is also just as well known for her advocacy work for the LGBTQ plus community.
00:52:55
And being that it Pride Month that also one of the reasons that I did this story She was not a lot of people know this she was outed by an ex in the early 80s No way When nobody was out
00:53:07
Yeah. The people managing her career at the time begged her to deny that she was gay.
00:53:13
Instead, she held a press conference and confirmed it. Wow. Becoming one of the first famous American athletes to be out as a lesbian.
00:53:21
That is incredible. Or out at all. Yeah. Yeah. And since then, Billie Jean King has talked at length about how confusing and painful this part of her life initially was. There was no one to follow. Like very few. I shouldn't say no one. There was some people out there in the culture, but in the kind of like show business she was in.
00:53:39
Totally. She was a true trailblazer once again. And she has said, quote, I've always thought about future generations. I promised myself at 12, I would try to be number one so I could help the world be a better place at 12 years old.
00:53:52
Oh, my God. I wanted to be able to influence and do those things. End quote. In 2009, President Barack Obama presents Billie Jean King with the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and says, quote,
00:54:05
What we honor are not simply her 12 Grand Slam titles. She did it 12 times. Twelve Grand Slams?
00:54:11
Yeah. 101 doubles titles and 67 singles titles. And then he said, pretty good, Billie Jean.
00:54:18
It's hard to do a quote from Barack Obama because he likes to, you know, do side commentary.
00:54:22
And it's so sad that he's gone from our lives. We honor what she calls all the off-the-court stuff, what she did to broaden the reach of the game, to change how women athletes and women everywhere view themselves, and to give everyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, including my two daughters, a chance to compete both on the court and in life.
00:54:45
As Billie Jean once said, we should never, ever underestimate the human spirit, nor should we underestimate Billie Jean King's spirit, end quote.
00:54:55
Today, 82-year-old Billie Jean King is among history's most iconic athletes. As she continues to inspire generations of young people and promote the rights of people everywhere, she's never forgotten the joy that she felt playing tennis for the very first time.
00:55:10
She said, quote, I just love hitting a tennis ball. It's just that simple. There's no way I could have gotten through all the pressures on and off the court if I hadn't loved it.
00:55:21
I love it. End quote. And that's the story of the legendary Billie Jean King. That was amazing.
00:55:28
I love that And I got the feeling that day And I wonder if the woman the tennis player who lost Margaret Court Margaret Court like I wonder if do you think they did it on purpose to kind
00:55:38
of like hype it up? Because if it had just been them first, it wouldn't have had the hype that it
00:55:42
did. Completely. I mean, that's absolutely possible. The fact that any of this, I love the idea that
00:55:49
this would have been like a let's fight for women's equity in sports or let's fight for women's
00:55:55
tennis or let's get out there and give them a chance to prove themselves. It just seems so
00:55:59
unlikely in like 1973. But I think answering this kind of like, oh, you think boys are better than
00:56:06
girls? Like it's this playground fight that's just been going on for so long. And she stepped up and
00:56:12
was like, sounds good. Let's do this. And then just trounced him. Love it. Yeah. That was such
00:56:17
a fun episode of fucking badass women. I know. Like these superstars that we all get to be there.
00:56:23
they get to be our heroes. Yeah, let's try to emulate them, you guys, and do stuff for the greater good.
00:56:29
Let's be perfectly gorgeous in the face and perfectly great at tennis. Sounds great.
00:56:36
Hurry up. That wraps up this special bonus episode presented by Hyundai. Thank you so much for listening
00:56:42
and thank you to Hyundai for making this episode possible. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.
00:56:47
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00:56:59
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00:57:05
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