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Speaker 1: Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again

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Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything

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Speaker 1: you don't know about the very worst people in all

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Speaker 1: of history. Now, this is a show where I read

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Speaker 1: a tale about a terrible person to a guest who

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Speaker 1: is coming in cold, or as cold as you can

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Speaker 1: possibly come into on a subject like. My guest today

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Speaker 1: is Caitlyn Durante of The Bechtel Cast, comedian and uh

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Speaker 1: fan of l Ron Hubbard. Love him love some l

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Speaker 1: r H. Yeah, yeah, what what do you know about

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Speaker 1: Mr Hubbard? I know that he was a sci fi

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Speaker 1: like pulpy writer in his early days, and that he's

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Speaker 1: the founder of the Church of Scientology. Yeah. I watched

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Speaker 1: Going Clear and that's pretty much all I know. Okay, cool.

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Speaker 1: He was a living monument to how much a tall

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Speaker 1: white man can achieve in this world by just lying

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Speaker 1: without pause or cessation for seventy straight years. That's his

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Speaker 1: whole life. He just never stopped lying from the time

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Speaker 1: he was about four years old until the day he died.

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Speaker 1: And uh he died worth like six million dollars, so

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Speaker 1: it worked out pretty well. I had a weird time

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Speaker 1: researching this because I wanted to hate him, and it's

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Speaker 1: really hard to hate him. Um, he's a piece of ship.

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Speaker 1: He is a monster. He does terrible things, but there's

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Speaker 1: also he's not just a terrible guy. Like with a

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Speaker 1: lot of terrible people today, it'll be like some rich

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Speaker 1: asshole who like does something that's terrible to the environment

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Speaker 1: or like you know, is abusive to their employers or whatever.

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Speaker 1: L Ron Hubbard did his terrible things while shooting for

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Speaker 1: the moon. That's ambitious, and you gotta admire him for that.

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Speaker 1: He might be the most ambitious con artist in human history.

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Speaker 1: He's in the running, all right. So. Lafayette Ron Hubbard

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Speaker 1: was born on March thirteenth, nineteen eleven, and Tilda, Nebraska.

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Speaker 1: His family moved there shortly thereafter to Helena, Montana. His

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Speaker 1: grandfather was moderately successful, but not wealthy by any means.

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Speaker 1: He owned a decent house, some stables, and a guitar

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Speaker 1: with a black man's head carved on to the top

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Speaker 1: of it. That's a detail you'll run into a number

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Speaker 1: of times about his early life. Yeah, yeah, I'm guessing

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Speaker 1: it was racist, but I don't know. Um. Later Hubbard

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Speaker 1: would claim his grandfather owned a massive ranch a quarter

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Speaker 1: the size of Montana, uh, and that he spent his

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Speaker 1: early childhood having adventures there and becoming a blood brother

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Speaker 1: of the Blackfoot Indian tribe. That's good. Yeah, he's already appropriating,

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Speaker 1: you know, other cultures. Was born appropriating other cultures? On

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Speaker 1: the website what is Scientology, which is a scientology website,

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Speaker 1: it says that his particular friend among the Blackfoot tribe

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Speaker 1: was an elderly medicine man commonly known as Old Tom quote.

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Speaker 1: Establishing a unique friendship with the normally taciturn Indian, Ron

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Speaker 1: was soon initiated into the various secrets of the tribe,

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Speaker 1: their legends, customs, and methods of survival in a harsh environment.

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Speaker 1: At the age of six, he became a blood brother

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Speaker 1: of the Blackfeet, an honor bestowed on few white men.

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Speaker 1: So this is when he six. This is what he claims.

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Speaker 1: So this is what he claims. This is not There's

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Speaker 1: there's no evidence that six year old Ron Hubbard had

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Speaker 1: adventures with Indians and became their blood brother. The Los

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Speaker 1: Angeles Times reporter on this in nineteen UH they talked

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Speaker 1: to a historian named Hugh Dempsey, who was an expert

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Speaker 1: on the Blackfoot tribe and whose wife is a member

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Speaker 1: of the Blackfoot tribe. Uh, And he basically said blood

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Speaker 1: brothers aren't even a thing the tribe has. It's like

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Speaker 1: a Hollywood idea that was invented for Western movies. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so it seems like all of l Ron Hubbard's ideas

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Speaker 1: about this tribe that he claimed membership then came from

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Speaker 1: like movies he watched as a kid, which is yeah, okay, good.

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Speaker 1: So I love how influential movies are and how they,

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Speaker 1: you know, don't do anything to funk up our society. Well,

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Speaker 1: and it's amazing how little fact checking people do if

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Speaker 1: you claims alive from far back enough like that, because

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Speaker 1: the Church of Scientology still continues this line to this

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Speaker 1: day that l Ron Hubbard was a brother of the

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Speaker 1: Blackfoot tribe. And he even claimed later that a lot

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Speaker 1: of his philosophical ideas came from like Indian rituals and stuff.

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Speaker 1: And it's like, as far as we know, he never

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Speaker 1: met a single member of the Blackfoot tribe. Right, So, um,

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Speaker 1: I did want to give sort of a source on

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Speaker 1: el Ron Hubbard's early life from a sympathetic side. Most

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Speaker 1: of the research I did on this was by people

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Speaker 1: who were very critical of him, so I didn't want

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Speaker 1: to know kind of how the Church of Scientology talks

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Speaker 1: about his upbringing. And I found el Ron Hubbard dot org,

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Speaker 1: which claimed to have biographical information on him, but actually

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Speaker 1: was just trying to sell me a series of books

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Speaker 1: on el Ron Hubbard because it was owned by the

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Speaker 1: Church of Scientology. But there was a trailer for the

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Speaker 1: book series about el Ron Hubbard called el Ron Hubbard

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Speaker 1: a Profile, and I want to play you a little

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Speaker 1: bit of that because it gives you an idea of

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Speaker 1: sort of the cliffs notes of his life as portrayed

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Speaker 1: by the Church of Scientology. He earned a hollowed place

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Speaker 1: in blackfeet more, became the nation's youngest eagle scout at

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Speaker 1: the age of thirteen, and studied with the last in

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Speaker 1: a line of legendary mystics from the court of Kubla Khan.

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Speaker 1: Barn stormed into aviation history, ascended to the heights of

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Speaker 1: Greatness in a now fabled kingdom of the Pulse, and

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Speaker 1: charted unknown realms beneath a feigned explorers Club flag retrace

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Speaker 1: his journey to the founding of Dianetics and scientolic and

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Speaker 1: ultimate Almost none of that's true. He was an explorer

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Speaker 1: and founded uncharted. He was there was a group called

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Speaker 1: the Explorers Club, which was like a big thing in

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Speaker 1: the day, and he did basically connive his way into

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Speaker 1: being a member there, and he did carry out a

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Speaker 1: couple of expeditions that didn't really find much um but

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Speaker 1: he piloted around in a boat until his boat broke

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Speaker 1: down and he had a flag with him, so that

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Speaker 1: that that's kind of what exclaiming there. So one of

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Speaker 1: my main sources for this episode was a book called

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Speaker 1: Bare Faced Messiah, which is a really comprehensive biography of

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Speaker 1: Aron Hubbard by Russell Miller, probably the first anyone ever wrote,

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Speaker 1: and he interviewed a lot of Aron Hubbard's relatives, people

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Speaker 1: who saw him as he was growing up and stuff. Uh,

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Speaker 1: And none of the people who were with him when

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Speaker 1: he was a baby, when he was six, when he

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Speaker 1: was like a young child, had any recolle action of

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Speaker 1: any of the stuff that he claimed about. His aunt Marnie,

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Speaker 1: who grew up with him, described him as the baby

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Speaker 1: of the family, adored and coddled by everybody. He was

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Speaker 1: very much the love child of the whole family. He

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Speaker 1: was adored by everyone. I could still see that mop

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Speaker 1: of red hair running around. So he was like the

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Speaker 1: little baby of the family. But he grew up more

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Speaker 1: or less in a house in a small town as

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Speaker 1: the beloved youngest child of a very close knit family.

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Speaker 1: No adventures in his early childhood that there's any evidence of, um,

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Speaker 1: But he gotta love that imagination on him. You know,

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Speaker 1: there's a thin line between imagination and just lying. Yeah. Uh.

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Speaker 1: The actual information shows that Hubbard enrolled in kindergarten at

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Speaker 1: age six, rather than becoming a Blackfoot brother. I suppose. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: his local nickname was Brick because of his red hair.

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Speaker 1: I guess because bricks are red and nineteen fifteen was

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Speaker 1: not a good time for nicknames. So Ryan Johnson's film

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Speaker 1: Brick is actually based on h I wish I knew

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Speaker 1: something about. Yeah, I'm assuming that's a very good joke.

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Speaker 1: I haven't seen it. Oh, it's not a good joke,

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Speaker 1: A joke. It's a pretty good movie. Yeah, okay, okay, Well,

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Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard's Young Life was not a pretty good

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Speaker 1: movie because he just he pretty much went to kindergarten. Um.

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Speaker 1: He later claimed that while he was in school, he

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Speaker 1: would protect other kids from the bullies, terrorizing his classmates

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Speaker 1: using the lumberjack fighting skills he learned from his grandfather.

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Speaker 1: His grandfather was not a lumberjack, owned a small oil company,

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Speaker 1: but wasn't a lumberjack. Um. One of Ron's closest childhood friends,

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Speaker 1: Andrew Richardson, stated he never protected nobody. It was all bullshit.

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Speaker 1: Old Hubbard was the greatest con honors who ever lived,

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Speaker 1: which is more or less true. Ron moved to Seattle

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Speaker 1: after his dad joined the Navy when he was like

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Speaker 1: twelve years old. Uh, he did join the Boy Scouts

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Speaker 1: at this point and became an Eagle Scout at like

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Speaker 1: age thirteen, but there's no true. That is true. That

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Speaker 1: is true, But there's no evidence that he was the

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Speaker 1: youngest Eagle Scout ever because back then the Boy Scouts

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Speaker 1: did not make a note of what age people were

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Speaker 1: when they became Eagle Scouts. Bad bookkeeping, bad book keeping out.

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Speaker 1: But I'm guessing Ron knew that, which is why he

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Speaker 1: made the lie. Yeah, but he was good at being

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Speaker 1: a boy scout, I guess not hard Well, he's already

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Speaker 1: an explorer and a blood brother of a tribe. All

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Speaker 1: that time spent with the Blackfoot really prepared him for

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Speaker 1: his merit badges, uh in whittling and bald face lies.

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Speaker 1: During his teenage years. His dad was in the navy,

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Speaker 1: so during his teenage years Ron visited him twice for

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Speaker 1: like a month or two each time, so he did

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Speaker 1: get to spend some time in the Far East. It

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Speaker 1: was mostly on military basis with his parents. The myth factory,

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Speaker 1: of course that he created later spun this into a

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Speaker 1: series of exotic Eastern adventures where he said you heard

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Speaker 1: that I was trained in the court of Kubla Khan

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Speaker 1: by to bet mystics. He was on vacation with his

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Speaker 1: parents and like China and stuff. He mostly seemed to

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Speaker 1: not enjoy his time in the Far East. He thought

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Speaker 1: China was gross and dirty. He thought Chinese people were

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Speaker 1: gross and dirty. We have his diaries from those times,

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Speaker 1: and he's not weirdly racist for an American in like

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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty, but he's pretty racist, um pretty race in

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Speaker 1: Mission into Time a scientology book, though he spun his

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Speaker 1: basic vacation with his parents in China into quote and China.

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Speaker 1: He met an old musician whose ancestors had served in

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Speaker 1: the court of Kubla Khan and a Hindu who could

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Speaker 1: hypnotize cats and the high hills of Tibet. He lived

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Speaker 1: with bandits, who accepted him because of his honest interest

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Speaker 1: in him and his way of life. So that's fun, okay, good,

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Speaker 1: yeah it so far. He saw the Great Wall of China.

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Speaker 1: His only notes in his notebook about this was that

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Speaker 1: they should make it into a roller coaster because like

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Speaker 1: a shipload of money. So uh, there's there's no evidence

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Speaker 1: of him learning any ancient Eastern wisdom, but we do

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Speaker 1: know that this is the time when he first started

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Speaker 1: sketching out short stories because he's spent a lot of

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Speaker 1: boring time on boats and trains and stuff with like

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Speaker 1: a notebook writing out story ideas. Most of them were

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Speaker 1: just like he didn't even write out a lot of stories.

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Speaker 1: It was mostly just him writing out the ideas. So

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Speaker 1: like there would be entries like love Story goes to France,

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Speaker 1: meets Swell abroad, and Marseille. She takes them to her sink,

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Speaker 1: bedroom and bath where he lives until notable citizens object.

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Speaker 1: He stands them off and takes the next book for America,

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Speaker 1: having received a long expected will donate. So it's like

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Speaker 1: weird little stories like that. Most of them involved American

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Speaker 1: travelers meeting beautiful foreign women. Again, he's like fourteen. He

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Speaker 1: didn't seem to know how to write sex scenes. So

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Speaker 1: like the closest he got in his first short story

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Speaker 1: was a scene where like a navy corman is with

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Speaker 1: like a beautiful native woman and they fall in love.

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Speaker 1: But then when he would write out like what they did,

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Speaker 1: he just kept scratching it out to the point that

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Speaker 1: we don't know what he wrote because he apparently wrote

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Speaker 1: a sex scene and they're just like furiously erased it.

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Speaker 1: He's like he puts his oh god, oh god, oh god,

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Speaker 1: what is a woman again? All right? Cool? So he's

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Speaker 1: an in cell. It is entirely possible he did not

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Speaker 1: know what a woman was at that point. He was

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Speaker 1: like a fifteen year old in the twenties. Yeah, he

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Speaker 1: either knew everything or nothing. He knew that you're supposed

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Speaker 1: to objectify women, he just doesn't know how. Yeah, he

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Speaker 1: was bad at it, and that would be like a

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Speaker 1: hallmark of l. Ron Hubbard's writing, is that, especially since

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Speaker 1: a lot of the pulp fiction that he became famous

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Speaker 1: for other stories in that genre were really sexual. That

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Speaker 1: was never a thing he was good at. Um Okay, that. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: you heard it here. First, Ron Hubbard couldn't write about sucking.

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Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard couldn't. Now, actually that's not true. Weirdly enough,

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Speaker 1: which we'll get too later. There's some evidence he actually

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Speaker 1: became pretty good at fucking. Wow, did he just make

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Speaker 1: that up? And that's more of his inventive. No, these

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Speaker 1: are people who didn't like him otherwise, but like who

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Speaker 1: were in relationships and we're like he was. He wasn't

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Speaker 1: bad at fucking. I can't wait till we get there.

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Speaker 1: Oh no, it's exciting. This is quite a journey. So

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Speaker 1: after he got back from the Far East, he enrolled

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Speaker 1: in George Washington University in the fall of nineteen thirty.

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Speaker 1: Scientology publications state that while there he became the associate

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Speaker 1: editor of the university newspaper, was a member of many

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Speaker 1: university clubs and societies, and enrolled in one of the

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Speaker 1: first nuclear physics courses ever taught in an American university. UM,

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Speaker 1: and several were words of that are not entirely incorrect. Um.

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Speaker 1: He did go to George Washington University. He was a

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Speaker 1: student of the School of Engineering. He did not take

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Speaker 1: nuclear physics courses because this was nineteen UM He was

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Speaker 1: not good at civil engineering. He hated it and usually

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Speaker 1: did not go to class. He did write for the

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Speaker 1: school newspaper, but he was not an editor for it.

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Speaker 1: He just wrote a few articles, mostly as pr for

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Speaker 1: the club that he launched, which was the school gliding Club. Oh,

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Speaker 1: he loved gliding, like hang gliding. No, it's still exists

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Speaker 1: today as a sport. You don't hear about it much.

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Speaker 1: But they're basically planes. If you saw one park you

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Speaker 1: would just guess it was a plane. But most of

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Speaker 1: them don't have engines, and you can either fling them

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Speaker 1: into the sky with this weird winch system, or you

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Speaker 1: can like drop them off the back of an airplane.

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Speaker 1: People can travel across continents in these things. If they're

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Speaker 1: really good at them, you can go hundreds of miles.

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Speaker 1: But they're not really planes because there's no engine. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: there's no engine. It's just about managing your levels and whatnot.

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Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm not a glider pilot. But he

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Speaker 1: was a big fan of that, and he did it.

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Speaker 1: He was apparently pretty good at it, but he was

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Speaker 1: better at creating a club for it and drilling up

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Speaker 1: interest in it. Soon he started writing articles for like

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Speaker 1: Sportsman's Magazine, Sportsman Aviator and other magazines like that. We

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Speaker 1: would just lie about you know, I was in this

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Speaker 1: horrible die and my plane was falling apart and like, yeah,

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Speaker 1: and I had this I crashed into this barn and

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Speaker 1: so he just made up stories about stuff he did

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Speaker 1: in this glider plane when in reality, he did it

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Speaker 1: for like a year or so, and then he lost

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Speaker 1: his license because he couldn't afford to renew it, and

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Speaker 1: then he never flew again. But he kept writing articles

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Speaker 1: about flying even after he stopped being able to do it,

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Speaker 1: because yeah, it sounds like a theme of his from

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Speaker 1: fabricating stories. Yeah, there's usually a germ of truth. He

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Speaker 1: did fly a glider a lot. There was one time

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Speaker 1: where he like crashed a glider into a small town. Uh,

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Speaker 1: nobody got hurt, and like he wound up having to

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Speaker 1: take off from a nearby hill or something like that,

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Speaker 1: which he then turned into you know, stories of traveling

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Speaker 1: across the country on a glider at having all these

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Speaker 1: advent and discovering a whole other continent and yeah, um, yeah,

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Speaker 1: so that's all round humbard. In college, his grades were

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Speaker 1: as bad as you'd expect because he usually would skip

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Speaker 1: out on class in order to glide more often. So

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Speaker 1: he was studying civil engineers civil engineering, right, okay, so

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Speaker 1: his idea, Yeah, of course he was bad at it

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Speaker 1: because he thought the Great Wall of China should be

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Speaker 1: a roller coaster. Like that was his idea of like structures,

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Speaker 1: that was that was the first thing he thought, seeing like,

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Speaker 1: the most impressive thing people had ever built was like man,

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Speaker 1: but a roller coaster on the son of a bit. Yeah. Um,

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Speaker 1: his grades were pretty bad. But during this time, like

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Speaker 1: a ninety two, when he was a sophomore, his school

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Speaker 1: launched a literary journal and he submitted his first finished

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Speaker 1: short story for publication. So that's the first time he

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Speaker 1: got published writing fiction. Uh. The story was titled Tah

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Speaker 1: after the name of its main character, uh, and it

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Speaker 1: was about a twelve year old child soldier in China

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Speaker 1: on a march to die horribly in a battle. Um.

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Speaker 1: He quickly wrote another short story about another really really

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Speaker 1: bloody battle, this time in nave battle in the Yanksee River.

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Speaker 1: He repeatedly described the river as being filled with headless corpses.

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Speaker 1: He had a big thing for gore, big thing for violence.

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Speaker 1: Most of his early stories involved bloody adventures in vaguely

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Speaker 1: Asian settings. Um so this is his passion. Clearly see

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Speaker 1: the pattern. That summer summer of l Ron Hubbard decided

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Speaker 1: to launch an expedition of his own. He called it

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Speaker 1: the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition and convinced a bunch of

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Speaker 1: other young nineteen year old boys to pull their money

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Speaker 1: so they could rent a boat for the summer and

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Speaker 1: sail to the Caribbean. Their goal was to explore abandoned

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Speaker 1: pirate strongholds and filmed themselves running around in pirate costumes

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Speaker 1: for the presumed historic value of these videos of children

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Speaker 1: running around in pirate costumes. He also said that he

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Speaker 1: wanted to quote collect whatever one collects for exhibits and museums. Again,

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Speaker 1: not a lot of specifics about what's going to happen.

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Speaker 1: Loves vagueness. Also the Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. The

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Speaker 1: film also sounds like it was based on l Ron

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Speaker 1: Hubbards a little a lot of movies based on the

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Speaker 1: Sky Live. There was a report on his adventure in

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Speaker 1: the school newspaper, written by an anonymous writer who was

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Speaker 1: almost certainly al Ron Hubbard himself. Uh so, I'm gonna

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Speaker 1: read you that school newspaper article trying to get other

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Speaker 1: kids to join his expedition in the Caribbean. Contrary to

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Speaker 1: popular belief, Wind Jammer days are not over in Romance

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Speaker 1: refuses to die the death at least for fifty young

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Speaker 1: gentlemen Rovers, who will set sail on the schooner Doris

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Speaker 1: Hamlin from Baltimore on twenty June for the Pirate haunts

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Speaker 1: of the Spanish Main. According to L. Ron Hubbard, the

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Speaker 1: strongholds and bivouacs of the Spanish Main have lay neglected

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Speaker 1: and forgotten for centuries, and there has never been a

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Speaker 1: concerted attempt to tear apart the jungles to find the

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Speaker 1: castles of Teach Morgan, Bonnet, Bluebeard, kid Sharp down there

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Speaker 1: where the sun is whipping up heat waves from the palms.

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Speaker 1: This crew of gentlemen Rovers will re enact the scenes

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Speaker 1: which struck terror into the hearts of the world only

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Speaker 1: a few hundred years ago, with a difference that this

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00:16:52,000 --> 00:16:53,640
Speaker 1: time it will be for the benefit of the fun

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Speaker 1: and the flickering ribbon of celluloid. In their spare time,

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Speaker 1: if they have any, they will scale the heights of

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Speaker 1: belching volcanoes, hunting the thick jungles, shoot flying fish on

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Speaker 1: the wing, YadA YadA, YadA YadA. Yeah, so it sounds

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00:17:05,040 --> 00:17:07,800
Speaker 1: like a great adventure. Um, the Great Depression was in

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00:17:07,840 --> 00:17:09,399
Speaker 1: its height at this point, so it was like a

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Speaker 1: lot of kids signed up because they're like, well, what

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Speaker 1: else are we gonna do? There's no jobs, might as

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00:17:13,760 --> 00:17:16,520
Speaker 1: well have an adventure sailing around in the Caribbean. Um.

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00:17:16,640 --> 00:17:19,359
Speaker 1: Hubbard claimed that Fox Movie Tone and Pathane News had

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Speaker 1: already put in bids for the film rights. He claimed

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Speaker 1: the New York Times had contracted to buy the photographs.

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Speaker 1: So he's basically promising that they would do this expedition

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00:17:26,640 --> 00:17:28,639
Speaker 1: and sell a bunch of video and photos and everybody

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Speaker 1: would get money. That was the claim going out there.

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Speaker 1: Um now it was all lies, of course, and Eldon

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Speaker 1: Hubard actually hadn't worked out deals with any media agencies.

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Speaker 1: The New York Times has no record of this, neither

355
00:17:41,080 --> 00:17:43,239
Speaker 1: do any of the agencies he said he'd contracted with.

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Speaker 1: He didn't even have enough money to properly finance the

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Speaker 1: whole expedition, so the Doris Hamlin, which did sail out,

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Speaker 1: had to return to Port about a month early, having

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Speaker 1: found no pirate strongholds and filmed no movies. The captain

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00:17:54,920 --> 00:17:57,520
Speaker 1: Hubbard had hired called the voyage the worst trip I

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Speaker 1: ever made. Most of the gentleman Rovers jumped ship at

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Speaker 1: their first two ports. Um, yeah, yeah it was. It

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00:18:03,600 --> 00:18:05,640
Speaker 1: was kind of a disaster. Yeah, good for them though,

364
00:18:05,680 --> 00:18:08,600
Speaker 1: good for you abandoning ship whatever. You know, the sunk

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00:18:08,640 --> 00:18:10,960
Speaker 1: cost fallacy can make fools of us. All sometimes in

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Speaker 1: support and just get off that boat. Which in the

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Speaker 1: third episode of this three part series, there will be

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Speaker 1: a boat that people don't get off of. We will

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Speaker 1: see what happens when l Ron Hubbard gets to carry

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Speaker 1: one of his dreams of taking a bunch of people

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Speaker 1: on a boat to the furthest extent. He never gives

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Speaker 1: up this idea. So in September, when you know, everyone's

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Speaker 1: back in school and Hubbard's back from his failed voyage

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Speaker 1: to the Spanish main, l Ron Hubbard wrote an article

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Speaker 1: chronicling his journey for the school newspaper. In this article,

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Speaker 1: the journey was turned into a historic success where everybody

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00:18:40,200 --> 00:18:46,040
Speaker 1: got laid. Yeah, it was all like no girls allowed.

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00:18:46,080 --> 00:18:48,920
Speaker 1: It seemed like no, of course not. Gentlemen Rovers can't

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Speaker 1: can't you have a gentle lady Romer. No, absolutely not no, no, well, yeah,

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Speaker 1: would you have wanted to be on that boat? No,

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Speaker 1: testster know that sounds like a nightmare. I mean, I'll

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00:19:03,160 --> 00:19:05,159
Speaker 1: be honest. If at age like nineteen, I'd had a

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Speaker 1: chance to get on like a sailing ship and traveled

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Speaker 1: to the Caribbean and pretend to be a pirate, I probably,

385
00:19:10,359 --> 00:19:11,639
Speaker 1: but it could have been convinced to do it. But

386
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Speaker 1: I had a lot of dumb ship when I was nineteen. Yeah,

387
00:19:15,200 --> 00:19:17,520
Speaker 1: Hubbard wrote in the article. When they weren't out catching

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Speaker 1: sharks or harpooning or visiting some colorful spot, they were

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00:19:20,440 --> 00:19:23,840
Speaker 1: capably entertained by the dark eyed Senorita's at the various ports.

390
00:19:24,920 --> 00:19:29,399
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess he just invented that all. The article

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00:19:29,440 --> 00:19:32,439
Speaker 1: also hailed the scientific achievements of the expedition, which mostly

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00:19:32,440 --> 00:19:34,840
Speaker 1: included a bunch of film and specimen donations to the

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Speaker 1: University of Michigan. The University of Michigan has no record

394
00:19:38,119 --> 00:19:42,560
Speaker 1: of any donations from Ron Hubbard. Seeing any trend here

395
00:19:42,600 --> 00:19:46,640
Speaker 1: so far? But really you picked up on a pattern,

396
00:19:47,160 --> 00:19:51,320
Speaker 1: Well there isn't one yet U. Ron Hubbard dropped out

397
00:19:51,359 --> 00:19:53,879
Speaker 1: of school shortly after getting back from this and We

398
00:19:53,920 --> 00:19:55,760
Speaker 1: will be getting into all of that and what happened

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00:19:55,800 --> 00:19:58,119
Speaker 1: after he leaves college later in the start of his

400
00:19:58,200 --> 00:20:02,479
Speaker 1: career writing terrible pulp fiction. But before we get into that,

401
00:20:02,760 --> 00:20:06,480
Speaker 1: give me a good ad segue, Caitlin. Hey, everyone, uh,

402
00:20:07,160 --> 00:20:13,040
Speaker 1: stay tuned for more l Ron hubberd. But until then,

403
00:20:13,600 --> 00:20:19,320
Speaker 1: to check out this ad that was fantastic, really really natural.

404
00:20:19,520 --> 00:20:21,639
Speaker 1: That's the part that makes it most convincing to people.

405
00:20:27,800 --> 00:20:30,640
Speaker 1: And we're back. Our producer Sophie just had to throw

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00:20:30,640 --> 00:20:32,399
Speaker 1: out a salad that was really bad. So if you

407
00:20:32,440 --> 00:20:34,439
Speaker 1: want to feel like you were with us while you

408
00:20:34,520 --> 00:20:36,919
Speaker 1: listen to the show, make yourself a terrible salad and

409
00:20:36,960 --> 00:20:39,359
Speaker 1: then throw it away. When we last left off of

410
00:20:39,359 --> 00:20:42,560
Speaker 1: our story, l Ron Hubbard had dropped out of college

411
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Speaker 1: after a failed expedition to pretend to be pirates and

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Speaker 1: the Caribbean. What a time the thirties were, Yeah, Yeah.

413
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Speaker 1: According to a brief biography of l. Ron Hubbard, pulished

414
00:21:00,320 --> 00:21:03,520
Speaker 1: after he came up with dianatics. His first action on

415
00:21:03,600 --> 00:21:05,800
Speaker 1: leaving college was to blow up steam by leading an

416
00:21:05,800 --> 00:21:08,719
Speaker 1: expedition into Central America. In the next few years, he

417
00:21:08,720 --> 00:21:11,359
Speaker 1: headed three all of them undertaken to study savage peoples

418
00:21:11,359 --> 00:21:13,679
Speaker 1: and cultures to provide fodder for his articles and stories.

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Speaker 1: Between nineteen thirty three and nineteen forty one, he visited

420
00:21:16,480 --> 00:21:18,920
Speaker 1: many barbaric cultures and yet found time to write seven

421
00:21:18,920 --> 00:21:21,679
Speaker 1: million words of public fact and fiction. No, no no, this

422
00:21:21,800 --> 00:21:23,920
Speaker 1: is true. He did get published probably about two million

423
00:21:24,000 --> 00:21:27,000
Speaker 1: words something like that of mostly fiction. So like he

424
00:21:27,040 --> 00:21:29,680
Speaker 1: was a prolific writer from thirty three to forty one,

425
00:21:29,920 --> 00:21:32,119
Speaker 1: he didn't write seven million words, right, And he just

426
00:21:32,200 --> 00:21:35,560
Speaker 1: would like, I gotta find some savage people to write about.

427
00:21:35,760 --> 00:21:37,840
Speaker 1: And that's a hundred percent lies. He didn't go to

428
00:21:37,920 --> 00:21:40,879
Speaker 1: Central America. We have no record of any expeditions that

429
00:21:40,960 --> 00:21:43,960
Speaker 1: he led to study savage peoples and cultures. But also

430
00:21:44,040 --> 00:21:47,760
Speaker 1: the fact that he was like, Yeah, these disgusting savages,

431
00:21:48,160 --> 00:21:50,879
Speaker 1: gotta go find out about them and exploit them and

432
00:21:50,920 --> 00:21:55,880
Speaker 1: their lifestyles. I mean, it's nineteen fifty nine. Calling them

433
00:21:55,920 --> 00:22:03,400
Speaker 1: people is almost woke. Good. Fine, But obviously, right after

434
00:22:03,520 --> 00:22:06,000
Speaker 1: Hubbard dropped out of school, his dad used his Navy

435
00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:09,240
Speaker 1: connections to get Hubbard a gig doing volunteer work in

436
00:22:09,240 --> 00:22:11,800
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico for the Red Cross, which I think is

437
00:22:12,040 --> 00:22:15,160
Speaker 1: the closest he got to a expedition into Central America,

438
00:22:15,400 --> 00:22:17,560
Speaker 1: which is not very close to being an expedition in

439
00:22:17,600 --> 00:22:20,560
Speaker 1: Central not at all that this is what I think

440
00:22:20,560 --> 00:22:23,639
Speaker 1: he's talking about. He immediately abandoned his commitment to the

441
00:22:23,640 --> 00:22:25,560
Speaker 1: Red Cross as soon as he arrived on the island

442
00:22:25,560 --> 00:22:27,639
Speaker 1: and instead wandered off into the woods to search for

443
00:22:27,680 --> 00:22:32,600
Speaker 1: gold he believed that Punkistadors had hidden. So he is

444
00:22:32,760 --> 00:22:36,720
Speaker 1: purely delusional, right, It's hard to say how much of

445
00:22:36,800 --> 00:22:39,080
Speaker 1: him is just a liar and how much of him

446
00:22:39,240 --> 00:22:41,520
Speaker 1: is living in a fantasy world, because it's clearly a

447
00:22:41,560 --> 00:22:43,960
Speaker 1: mix of the two. Because he's not a hundred percent

448
00:22:44,080 --> 00:22:46,840
Speaker 1: a liar. I can't believe that after having read his story.

449
00:22:47,240 --> 00:22:49,439
Speaker 1: Some of this is he just lives in this whimsical

450
00:22:49,520 --> 00:22:51,760
Speaker 1: world of his. He'll just take like a nugget of

451
00:22:51,800 --> 00:22:55,720
Speaker 1: true information and then like blow it way out of proportion. Yeah,

452
00:22:55,760 --> 00:22:57,680
Speaker 1: because like for the rest of his life he would

453
00:22:57,720 --> 00:22:59,800
Speaker 1: talk about like how he was a gold prospector and

454
00:23:00,080 --> 00:23:01,800
Speaker 1: not for a time it was like you wanted around

455
00:23:01,800 --> 00:23:08,680
Speaker 1: the jungle and didn't find goals. Um. Yeah. Scientology lore

456
00:23:09,160 --> 00:23:12,040
Speaker 1: claims that he carried out the first mineralogical survey of

457
00:23:12,080 --> 00:23:14,520
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico, but there is again no evidence of this.

458
00:23:14,920 --> 00:23:17,240
Speaker 1: He did briefly work for a prospecting company, but he

459
00:23:17,280 --> 00:23:19,480
Speaker 1: was back in the mainland United States within a few months.

460
00:23:19,800 --> 00:23:22,520
Speaker 1: In April nineteen thirty three, he married a woman named Polly.

461
00:23:22,840 --> 00:23:25,280
Speaker 1: He was ostensibly working as a writer during this period,

462
00:23:25,280 --> 00:23:27,240
Speaker 1: but Polly later claimed that in their first year together

463
00:23:27,280 --> 00:23:29,520
Speaker 1: he probably made less than a hundred dollars. Now at

464
00:23:29,520 --> 00:23:32,200
Speaker 1: this point, he was writing mostly nonfiction. Later that year,

465
00:23:32,200 --> 00:23:34,280
Speaker 1: he claimed to have found gold on his own land,

466
00:23:34,320 --> 00:23:36,960
Speaker 1: and there's some news reports of interviews with him about

467
00:23:36,960 --> 00:23:39,000
Speaker 1: the gold he found on his land. That appears to

468
00:23:39,000 --> 00:23:40,639
Speaker 1: have been a lie, cooked up for the benefit of

469
00:23:40,640 --> 00:23:42,520
Speaker 1: a scheme that we don't know the other half of.

470
00:23:43,160 --> 00:23:44,800
Speaker 1: Like I'm gonna assume he tried to make money off

471
00:23:44,840 --> 00:23:46,520
Speaker 1: of it, But all we know is there's these articles

472
00:23:46,560 --> 00:23:49,280
Speaker 1: about him finding gold and no evidence that he ever

473
00:23:49,280 --> 00:23:53,000
Speaker 1: found gold. He was clearly trying something, But you're not

474
00:23:53,000 --> 00:23:55,000
Speaker 1: going to catch the whole story. For every one of

475
00:23:55,000 --> 00:23:58,399
Speaker 1: this guy's schemes, he never was not scheming a b

476
00:23:58,760 --> 00:24:03,840
Speaker 1: S always be, always be scheming. Nineteen thirty four saw

477
00:24:03,880 --> 00:24:06,240
Speaker 1: the explosion of the only art form el Ron Hubbard

478
00:24:06,280 --> 00:24:09,960
Speaker 1: would ever truly master, pulp fantasy fiction. From like thirty

479
00:24:10,040 --> 00:24:12,399
Speaker 1: three to thirty four, hundreds of new magazines started up

480
00:24:12,440 --> 00:24:14,639
Speaker 1: around the United States. Many of these were like weekly

481
00:24:14,720 --> 00:24:17,720
Speaker 1: magazines that would have like fifteen twenty different stories in them,

482
00:24:18,040 --> 00:24:20,119
Speaker 1: and he would total like sixty seventy thousand words. So

483
00:24:20,160 --> 00:24:22,560
Speaker 1: like every week they're putting out like a novel's worth

484
00:24:22,600 --> 00:24:25,639
Speaker 1: of short stories. And there's dozens of magazines doing this.

485
00:24:25,720 --> 00:24:28,919
Speaker 1: So there's a huge amount of hunger in this market

486
00:24:28,960 --> 00:24:32,800
Speaker 1: for quickly written, cheap stories of cowboys and Indians, of gangsters,

487
00:24:32,800 --> 00:24:35,119
Speaker 1: of monster and bear attacks like that sort of stuff

488
00:24:35,320 --> 00:24:38,200
Speaker 1: was so sold in this period. So a man capable

489
00:24:38,240 --> 00:24:44,440
Speaker 1: of ceaseless, effortless machine gun rapidity lying was perfectly. He

490
00:24:44,560 --> 00:24:49,000
Speaker 1: was built to write really really quick, shitty fiction. Um

491
00:24:49,080 --> 00:24:51,680
Speaker 1: and and he was good at it up until this point,

492
00:24:51,680 --> 00:24:53,960
Speaker 1: Like I said, he'd written mostly for sportsman magazines and

493
00:24:54,040 --> 00:24:59,120
Speaker 1: national geographic type oflication and lying about his expeditions and stuff. Yeah,

494
00:24:59,359 --> 00:25:00,840
Speaker 1: but as soon as he became aware of the hunger

495
00:25:00,880 --> 00:25:03,800
Speaker 1: for pulp fiction, Lafayette Ron Hubbard knew what he needed

496
00:25:03,840 --> 00:25:06,520
Speaker 1: to do. For six straight weeks, he wrote one short

497
00:25:06,560 --> 00:25:10,040
Speaker 1: story per day each between forty and twenty thousand words,

498
00:25:10,080 --> 00:25:14,040
Speaker 1: which is an insane rate of product. Fathom that. Yeah,

499
00:25:14,359 --> 00:25:17,320
Speaker 1: can you fathom it? If the person writing these never

500
00:25:17,480 --> 00:25:21,240
Speaker 1: edits anything, never even reads over his own stories. He

501
00:25:21,280 --> 00:25:24,040
Speaker 1: would just type out a story in one long swoop

502
00:25:24,080 --> 00:25:26,119
Speaker 1: and then mail it off to a random magazine. So

503
00:25:26,119 --> 00:25:29,720
Speaker 1: there's probably like continuity errors and like all kinds of consistency,

504
00:25:30,000 --> 00:25:34,560
Speaker 1: really messy tales. Yeah yeah, yeah, but who gives a ship.

505
00:25:35,200 --> 00:25:37,960
Speaker 1: They need stories, and most of them didn't even get accepted,

506
00:25:38,040 --> 00:25:41,440
Speaker 1: Like he's just writing so many stories shifting out this

507
00:25:41,880 --> 00:25:45,800
Speaker 1: least horrible, horrible, horrible stories. Also, the movie pulp fiction

508
00:25:45,960 --> 00:25:50,600
Speaker 1: was based on, he certainly wasn't influenced, because he helped

509
00:25:50,600 --> 00:25:53,440
Speaker 1: to find the genre. His stories had titles like Green

510
00:25:53,560 --> 00:25:58,280
Speaker 1: God Calling, Squad Cars, See Things, dead Men Kill, and

511
00:25:58,440 --> 00:26:02,080
Speaker 1: The Carnival of Death. Yeah. I would watch some of

512
00:26:02,080 --> 00:26:04,520
Speaker 1: those movies. Of course. He was good at titling. Yeah,

513
00:26:04,560 --> 00:26:07,199
Speaker 1: of course he would. And he was like for he

514
00:26:07,320 --> 00:26:10,080
Speaker 1: certainly wasn't bad for a pulp fiction writer. He was

515
00:26:10,119 --> 00:26:12,040
Speaker 1: definitely in the middle of the pack in terms of

516
00:26:12,119 --> 00:26:15,240
Speaker 1: quality goes. But he was mostly famous for just no

517
00:26:15,280 --> 00:26:18,280
Speaker 1: one else could write this much um, And this does

518
00:26:18,320 --> 00:26:20,600
Speaker 1: seem to be like his real talent was he could

519
00:26:20,640 --> 00:26:24,400
Speaker 1: just write like a fucking bazooka like it's it was crazy.

520
00:26:24,560 --> 00:26:27,280
Speaker 1: Have you ever read any of it? Yeah, it's really bad,

521
00:26:27,800 --> 00:26:30,680
Speaker 1: but I don't like pulp. It's all really bad, like

522
00:26:31,320 --> 00:26:35,120
Speaker 1: I enjoy um HP Lovecraft, and he's an objectively bad writer.

523
00:26:35,320 --> 00:26:38,360
Speaker 1: There's fun ideas in it that are scary, but it's

524
00:26:38,359 --> 00:26:41,160
Speaker 1: not good writing. Of course. It's not good pacing, like

525
00:26:41,960 --> 00:26:45,520
Speaker 1: neither Stephen King for that man. Yeah, good stories, great

526
00:26:45,560 --> 00:26:50,000
Speaker 1: horror writer, kind of clunky gross. I've actually not read

527
00:26:50,080 --> 00:26:53,080
Speaker 1: much or if any. Oh no, I've I read the

528
00:26:53,119 --> 00:26:57,440
Speaker 1: Shoshank Redemption novella. That that one. Yeah, And I think

529
00:26:57,480 --> 00:26:59,719
Speaker 1: Stephen King is like the good version of l Ron

530
00:26:59,760 --> 00:27:01,840
Speaker 1: Hip because they both were able to write it in

531
00:27:02,640 --> 00:27:06,760
Speaker 1: absurd rate. Um. But Stephen King was just like, whow okay,

532
00:27:06,800 --> 00:27:09,040
Speaker 1: I can just write stories people enjoy and not create

533
00:27:09,080 --> 00:27:12,600
Speaker 1: a cult. Yeah, I'm just gonna be on cocaine. No,

534
00:27:12,840 --> 00:27:17,240
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna do lots of drugs. Be Stephen King,

535
00:27:17,320 --> 00:27:19,600
Speaker 1: not l Ron Hubbard. If you have this gift, so

536
00:27:19,680 --> 00:27:21,840
Speaker 1: Elron Hubbard quickly made a name for himself in the

537
00:27:21,880 --> 00:27:24,440
Speaker 1: pulp fiction set. He started traveling to New York City

538
00:27:24,480 --> 00:27:27,400
Speaker 1: regularly and became a fixture among pulp writers and editors.

539
00:27:27,720 --> 00:27:30,280
Speaker 1: He made sure they knew him as quote, a real character.

540
00:27:30,440 --> 00:27:33,840
Speaker 1: He portrayed himself as a badass who, despite his young age,

541
00:27:33,880 --> 00:27:36,439
Speaker 1: had lived a life full of death defying adventures. Some

542
00:27:36,520 --> 00:27:38,920
Speaker 1: of these men, like the writer Frank Grouper, quickly picked

543
00:27:38,960 --> 00:27:42,480
Speaker 1: Hubbard out as a bullshit artist. Quote. One evening, a

544
00:27:42,480 --> 00:27:44,879
Speaker 1: Grouper set through a long account of Ron's experiences in

545
00:27:44,920 --> 00:27:47,359
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps, his exploration of the Upper Amazon, and

546
00:27:47,400 --> 00:27:49,280
Speaker 1: his years as a white hunter in Africa. At the

547
00:27:49,359 --> 00:27:51,880
Speaker 1: end of it, he asked, with obvious sarcasm, Ron, You're

548
00:27:51,920 --> 00:27:53,879
Speaker 1: eighty four years old, aren't you. What the hell are

549
00:27:53,920 --> 00:27:56,399
Speaker 1: you talking about? Ron snapped. Grouper waved a notebook in

550
00:27:56,440 --> 00:27:58,520
Speaker 1: which he had been jotting figures. Well, he said, you

551
00:27:58,600 --> 00:28:00,560
Speaker 1: were in the Marines seven years. You were a civil

552
00:28:00,560 --> 00:28:03,000
Speaker 1: engineer for six years. You spent four years in Brazil,

553
00:28:03,080 --> 00:28:05,760
Speaker 1: three in Africa. You barnstormed with your own flying circus

554
00:28:05,760 --> 00:28:07,920
Speaker 1: for six years. I've just added up all the years

555
00:28:07,920 --> 00:28:12,120
Speaker 1: you did this and that comes to eight four. Good

556
00:28:12,160 --> 00:28:15,119
Speaker 1: on him, hill him out on his bullshit, But he

557
00:28:15,200 --> 00:28:17,879
Speaker 1: still liked Tubbart. Like even the people. Pretty much everyone

558
00:28:17,960 --> 00:28:19,760
Speaker 1: knew he was full of ship for the most part,

559
00:28:19,800 --> 00:28:21,960
Speaker 1: but they he was fun to be around, like his

560
00:28:22,040 --> 00:28:25,479
Speaker 1: stories were usually entertaining. Um, he was. He was an

561
00:28:25,480 --> 00:28:28,600
Speaker 1: interesting guy. Most people seem to like him. Yeah. For

562
00:28:28,640 --> 00:28:31,199
Speaker 1: a while, his career went pretty well. Uh. In nineteen

563
00:28:31,240 --> 00:28:33,679
Speaker 1: thirty five, Columbia Motion Pictures paid him to write a

564
00:28:33,720 --> 00:28:37,320
Speaker 1: fifteen part film story called The Secret of Treasure Island

565
00:28:37,320 --> 00:28:40,120
Speaker 1: was played in like fifteen different days or something like

566
00:28:40,160 --> 00:28:43,080
Speaker 1: that during Saturday morning. Matt May services like it was

567
00:28:43,120 --> 00:28:46,800
Speaker 1: a little sequential thing, and this is the only Hollywood

568
00:28:46,880 --> 00:28:48,640
Speaker 1: thing he was ever involved with. But for the rest

569
00:28:48,640 --> 00:28:50,400
Speaker 1: of his life he would claim to be a Hollywood

570
00:28:50,400 --> 00:28:54,480
Speaker 1: screenwriter and just claimed he had written famous movies that

571
00:28:54,520 --> 00:28:56,320
Speaker 1: he didn't write, and that there's no evidence he had

572
00:28:56,360 --> 00:28:58,680
Speaker 1: anything to do with what I'm gonna just start doing.

573
00:28:58,760 --> 00:29:00,680
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, the Church of Science. He says he was

574
00:29:00,720 --> 00:29:04,840
Speaker 1: one of the legends of Hollywood's Golden Age. That's amazing. Yeah.

575
00:29:05,280 --> 00:29:08,040
Speaker 1: So yeah, just lie, yeah, lie, I am claiming you

576
00:29:08,040 --> 00:29:12,000
Speaker 1: wrote great movies. Alright, guys, everyone, I wrote The Godfather

577
00:29:12,280 --> 00:29:16,080
Speaker 1: Part two. Oh that was you. I produced it. Oh yeah,

578
00:29:16,120 --> 00:29:18,160
Speaker 1: we should already know Chang. Yeah, I mean I could

579
00:29:18,160 --> 00:29:19,880
Speaker 1: actually claim that pretty easily. I don't even have to

580
00:29:19,960 --> 00:29:24,280
Speaker 1: change my name. Um. So the reality is that he

581
00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:27,360
Speaker 1: tried to start a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood,

582
00:29:27,360 --> 00:29:29,240
Speaker 1: but he couldn't hack it, and so he moved back

583
00:29:29,240 --> 00:29:31,520
Speaker 1: East to write more trashy pulp fiction in the woods

584
00:29:31,520 --> 00:29:34,080
Speaker 1: with his wife. He developed a number of pseudonyms for

585
00:29:34,120 --> 00:29:37,840
Speaker 1: his work with various publications, names like Winchester Rimington, cult,

586
00:29:40,000 --> 00:29:44,520
Speaker 1: just like gun gun gun cults, A gun is it? Yeah? Yeah,

587
00:29:44,520 --> 00:29:47,360
Speaker 1: could like was the most famous handgun in the world

588
00:29:47,400 --> 00:29:50,280
Speaker 1: at the time. I heard a cult, no cult, no,

589
00:29:50,280 --> 00:29:53,000
Speaker 1: no coult No, it was three guns gun gun gun.

590
00:29:53,600 --> 00:29:58,760
Speaker 1: I'm gun gun gunna wits. Kurt von Racken was another,

591
00:29:58,880 --> 00:30:01,080
Speaker 1: which I think was just like a badass sounding German

592
00:30:01,160 --> 00:30:04,480
Speaker 1: name renee Lafayette, which is at least half his real name.

593
00:30:05,160 --> 00:30:11,360
Speaker 1: Joe Blitz and Legionnaire. These are good names, These are

594
00:30:11,400 --> 00:30:15,760
Speaker 1: good names. No, he's got some gifts. He's got some gifts. Yeah.

595
00:30:15,800 --> 00:30:18,040
Speaker 1: Isaac Asimov liked a lot of his fiction, so like

596
00:30:18,120 --> 00:30:21,400
Speaker 1: he gained some respect within the community. He certainly wasn't

597
00:30:21,400 --> 00:30:22,760
Speaker 1: seen as like the worst. He was one of the

598
00:30:22,760 --> 00:30:26,400
Speaker 1: most prominent names in UH in the pulp fiction universe

599
00:30:26,400 --> 00:30:29,400
Speaker 1: at that point. People talked mostly though about like the

600
00:30:29,480 --> 00:30:30,960
Speaker 1: rate of speed at which he was able to put

601
00:30:30,960 --> 00:30:33,280
Speaker 1: out stories. There were rumors that he typed using one

602
00:30:33,360 --> 00:30:35,600
Speaker 1: incredibly long piece of paper at a time, that each

603
00:30:35,640 --> 00:30:38,640
Speaker 1: story was just one massive scroll that he would roll

604
00:30:38,760 --> 00:30:41,120
Speaker 1: up when he was done. Uh. There were rumors that

605
00:30:41,120 --> 00:30:43,480
Speaker 1: he built his own keyboard with single keys for the

606
00:30:43,480 --> 00:30:46,280
Speaker 1: words that he used most often because he just typed

607
00:30:46,320 --> 00:30:48,680
Speaker 1: so fast. That's actually very smart if that's true, which

608
00:30:48,680 --> 00:30:52,160
Speaker 1: I don't think. It is no evidence that's that's smart. Yeah,

609
00:30:52,360 --> 00:30:53,680
Speaker 1: it would have been smart if he'd done it. I

610
00:30:53,680 --> 00:30:55,400
Speaker 1: don't think I've ever made enough money to get his

611
00:30:55,440 --> 00:30:58,840
Speaker 1: own custom typewriter. There were stories that editors would just

612
00:30:58,840 --> 00:31:01,479
Speaker 1: send messengers to his hotel room with like cover art

613
00:31:01,560 --> 00:31:03,600
Speaker 1: and then wait outside while he wrote a story to

614
00:31:03,640 --> 00:31:06,480
Speaker 1: go with the cover art, like so he would just

615
00:31:06,520 --> 00:31:09,360
Speaker 1: like reverse engineer stories based on these are at least

616
00:31:09,400 --> 00:31:11,520
Speaker 1: stories about him, and it's not hard to believe given

617
00:31:11,560 --> 00:31:14,840
Speaker 1: the rate at which he produced words in a day

618
00:31:14,880 --> 00:31:18,240
Speaker 1: is insane. I can't even write three words a day.

619
00:31:18,440 --> 00:31:20,760
Speaker 1: This script is about eighteen thousand words, and I wrote

620
00:31:20,760 --> 00:31:23,240
Speaker 1: it in two days, and that was a lot of writing.

621
00:31:23,920 --> 00:31:28,040
Speaker 1: So well brag okay, yeah, yeah, well look, join my

622
00:31:28,120 --> 00:31:31,600
Speaker 1: cold just joined my colt. I'm already there, baby, Okay,

623
00:31:31,720 --> 00:31:35,400
Speaker 1: Well I need a boat. We're gonna I got a whole.

624
00:31:35,480 --> 00:31:37,880
Speaker 1: I have got a whole slow boats you know what?

625
00:31:38,080 --> 00:31:40,480
Speaker 1: Not just gentlemen rovers on my boat trip to the

626
00:31:40,520 --> 00:31:42,720
Speaker 1: Caribbean where we pretend to be pirates. You're gonna let

627
00:31:42,960 --> 00:31:46,240
Speaker 1: women to how how progressive? Well, I want to be

628
00:31:46,240 --> 00:31:48,520
Speaker 1: able to scam twice as many people, of course, Yeah,

629
00:31:48,640 --> 00:31:52,840
Speaker 1: absolutely so. Obviously. Hubbard eventually turned from writing you know,

630
00:31:52,920 --> 00:31:55,880
Speaker 1: adventure tales and cop drew almost to writing cheesy science fiction.

631
00:31:55,960 --> 00:31:58,560
Speaker 1: This is sort of the period in the mid thirties

632
00:31:58,600 --> 00:32:00,800
Speaker 1: when sci fi starts to blow up as a genre,

633
00:32:01,240 --> 00:32:03,280
Speaker 1: and he was part of the Golden Age of science fiction.

634
00:32:03,320 --> 00:32:05,760
Speaker 1: He wrote alongside guys like I already noted, Isaac asim Off,

635
00:32:05,760 --> 00:32:08,840
Speaker 1: but Robert Hidland else broud de Camp. He was like

636
00:32:08,880 --> 00:32:11,080
Speaker 1: one of the founders of popular science fiction. And in

637
00:32:11,160 --> 00:32:14,280
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight, when his writing career was near its height,

638
00:32:14,560 --> 00:32:17,240
Speaker 1: he wrote a book called Excalibur, which he never showed

639
00:32:17,280 --> 00:32:21,600
Speaker 1: to anybody but constantly claimed was going to change the world. Yeah,

640
00:32:21,880 --> 00:32:25,280
Speaker 1: Excalibur was a work of philosophy, not of fiction, and

641
00:32:25,360 --> 00:32:28,320
Speaker 1: it was Hubbard claimed a work of such breathtaking philosophic

642
00:32:28,360 --> 00:32:31,280
Speaker 1: brilliance that it drove everyone who read it to commit suicide.

643
00:32:31,840 --> 00:32:33,560
Speaker 1: That's why he says he couldn't show it to anybody

644
00:32:33,600 --> 00:32:35,360
Speaker 1: at the locket in the bank fault, because people killed

645
00:32:35,400 --> 00:32:42,400
Speaker 1: themselves when they read this amazing book. Could even that? Okay, yeah,

646
00:32:42,560 --> 00:32:44,640
Speaker 1: I can only imagine. I can't imagine he just wrote

647
00:32:44,640 --> 00:32:49,000
Speaker 1: a book so good people shoot themselves. You know that

648
00:32:49,040 --> 00:32:51,120
Speaker 1: feeling when you finish a really good book and then

649
00:32:51,120 --> 00:32:56,600
Speaker 1: you go buy a gun. Yeah, yeah, about three guns?

650
00:32:56,800 --> 00:32:59,480
Speaker 1: The other one? Yeah, one name for each of the

651
00:32:59,480 --> 00:33:01,720
Speaker 1: guns you'll have to buy when you finish his his

652
00:33:01,800 --> 00:33:07,240
Speaker 1: amazing book. Um. Some people claim they actually read copies

653
00:33:07,280 --> 00:33:09,120
Speaker 1: of this back in thirty eight. Some people claim he

654
00:33:09,160 --> 00:33:10,920
Speaker 1: never wrote it. We don't really know if he ever

655
00:33:10,960 --> 00:33:12,720
Speaker 1: wrote a book and showed it to some people and

656
00:33:12,720 --> 00:33:15,040
Speaker 1: then shelved it, or if it was all aliative. Again

657
00:33:15,080 --> 00:33:17,880
Speaker 1: with people who claimed that they read drafts of it

658
00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:20,080
Speaker 1: said that its whole focus was about like the need

659
00:33:20,160 --> 00:33:23,080
Speaker 1: to survive, Like that was Hubbard's big The survival instinct

660
00:33:23,120 --> 00:33:26,400
Speaker 1: was his big like philosophical focus. The thing he was Yeah,

661
00:33:26,480 --> 00:33:29,040
Speaker 1: so it's like, here's how to survive but then it

662
00:33:29,120 --> 00:33:32,920
Speaker 1: drives people to for some reason. Yeah. We don't know

663
00:33:33,080 --> 00:33:35,240
Speaker 1: what he wrote in the book, but he wrote about

664
00:33:35,320 --> 00:33:37,400
Speaker 1: the book to a number of people, including his wife.

665
00:33:37,400 --> 00:33:39,240
Speaker 1: In a nineteen thirty eight he wrote her a letter

666
00:33:39,280 --> 00:33:41,920
Speaker 1: about it that includes this paragraph that provides some insight.

667
00:33:42,840 --> 00:33:45,400
Speaker 1: This is Hubbard's writing. The entire function of man is

668
00:33:45,440 --> 00:33:48,080
Speaker 1: to survive. The outermost limit of endeavor is creative work.

669
00:33:48,200 --> 00:33:50,760
Speaker 1: Anything less is too close to simple survival until death

670
00:33:50,800 --> 00:33:54,040
Speaker 1: happens along. So I'm engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium

671
00:33:54,040 --> 00:33:56,240
Speaker 1: sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to

672
00:33:56,280 --> 00:33:58,760
Speaker 1: astound the gods. I turned the thing up. So it's

673
00:33:58,800 --> 00:34:01,200
Speaker 1: up to me to survive in a big way, foolishly perhaps,

674
00:34:01,200 --> 00:34:03,560
Speaker 1: but determined. Nonetheless, I have high hopes for smashing my

675
00:34:03,680 --> 00:34:06,120
Speaker 1: name into history so violently that it will take a

676
00:34:06,200 --> 00:34:09,359
Speaker 1: legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal

677
00:34:09,440 --> 00:34:11,400
Speaker 1: is the real goal, as far as I am concerned.

678
00:34:11,680 --> 00:34:18,640
Speaker 1: So this is honestly, he kind of accomplished. He sure did. No. No,

679
00:34:19,040 --> 00:34:21,360
Speaker 1: this is part of why it's hard to hate him.

680
00:34:21,400 --> 00:34:23,680
Speaker 1: This is a man who set a goal to smash

681
00:34:23,719 --> 00:34:26,960
Speaker 1: his name into history and did it in a really

682
00:34:26,960 --> 00:34:32,200
Speaker 1: shitty scary way, but not a failure. I live near

683
00:34:32,480 --> 00:34:37,560
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard Lane or where in Los Angeles. The

684
00:34:37,600 --> 00:34:40,080
Speaker 1: building we're in we'll probably do the video later in it,

685
00:34:40,200 --> 00:34:42,520
Speaker 1: but the giant Church of Scientology building is like right

686
00:34:42,800 --> 00:34:46,440
Speaker 1: off of like our balcony and stuff like. He definitely

687
00:34:46,480 --> 00:34:49,120
Speaker 1: smashed his name into history and that was his goal

688
00:34:49,160 --> 00:34:54,520
Speaker 1: at age seven and night, So there you go. Uh.

689
00:34:54,560 --> 00:34:56,719
Speaker 1: In the late nineteen thirties, l Ron Hubbard bought a

690
00:34:56,760 --> 00:34:59,160
Speaker 1: boat and convinced the Explorers Club to let him carry

691
00:34:59,200 --> 00:35:01,920
Speaker 1: their flag on a DIO experimental expedition with his wife.

692
00:35:02,160 --> 00:35:04,640
Speaker 1: The journey did achieve some useful scientific ends and did

693
00:35:04,680 --> 00:35:07,359
Speaker 1: help better map the route up to Alaska, so that's nice.

694
00:35:07,880 --> 00:35:10,440
Speaker 1: Ron's aunt Marnie, suspected the trip was mainly an excuse

695
00:35:10,440 --> 00:35:12,560
Speaker 1: for him to convince various companies to outfit his boat

696
00:35:12,560 --> 00:35:14,319
Speaker 1: for free, because he would write to all of them saying,

697
00:35:14,320 --> 00:35:15,920
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do this expedition. You need to send me

698
00:35:15,960 --> 00:35:17,879
Speaker 1: free ship, which is smart, and he got a lot

699
00:35:17,880 --> 00:35:20,480
Speaker 1: of free ship. His boat did break down in Alaska,

700
00:35:20,520 --> 00:35:22,279
Speaker 1: and he spent most of the trip hanging out at

701
00:35:22,280 --> 00:35:24,800
Speaker 1: a radio station in a small town in Alaska, lying

702
00:35:24,840 --> 00:35:28,960
Speaker 1: about fighting German saboteurs and grizzly bears and stuff. So again,

703
00:35:29,120 --> 00:35:32,360
Speaker 1: still spent most of his timeline, but did achieve some

704
00:35:32,520 --> 00:35:37,120
Speaker 1: minor scientific got to commend him for that. His second

705
00:35:37,120 --> 00:35:40,239
Speaker 1: expedition worked a lot better than his first. That's hard

706
00:35:40,239 --> 00:35:43,360
Speaker 1: to argue with. Ron Hubbard did serve his country in

707
00:35:43,360 --> 00:35:45,920
Speaker 1: World War Two. The exact extent of his service is

708
00:35:45,960 --> 00:35:49,040
Speaker 1: somewhat open for debate. The official Church of Scientology line

709
00:35:49,080 --> 00:35:50,840
Speaker 1: is that he was commissioned before the war and was

710
00:35:50,880 --> 00:35:53,279
Speaker 1: present in the Philippines when Japan invaded. He was the

711
00:35:53,280 --> 00:35:56,000
Speaker 1: first American casualty in the Far East, flown home in

712
00:35:56,000 --> 00:35:58,960
Speaker 1: the Secretary of the Navy's own airplane. He served in

713
00:35:59,080 --> 00:36:01,440
Speaker 1: five different theater years of the war and received twenty

714
00:36:01,440 --> 00:36:04,680
Speaker 1: two Medals're gonna guess how much of that's true. I

715
00:36:04,719 --> 00:36:08,360
Speaker 1: would say maybe five percent. None of it. None of it. Well, No,

716
00:36:08,480 --> 00:36:10,799
Speaker 1: he did enlist before the war, but that's that's the

717
00:36:10,800 --> 00:36:14,160
Speaker 1: only thing that's true. He didn't see any combat. He

718
00:36:14,200 --> 00:36:15,960
Speaker 1: was supposed to have been in the Philippines, and if

719
00:36:15,960 --> 00:36:18,160
Speaker 1: he had actually been sent there, he might have wound

720
00:36:18,200 --> 00:36:20,279
Speaker 1: up fighting the Japanese in the Philippines, which would have

721
00:36:20,280 --> 00:36:21,840
Speaker 1: been a hell of a thing. But while he was

722
00:36:21,880 --> 00:36:24,319
Speaker 1: on his way to Manila, his commanding officers decided they

723
00:36:24,320 --> 00:36:30,800
Speaker 1: hated him so much that they sent him home. Because

724
00:36:30,920 --> 00:36:34,680
Speaker 1: here's his personnel file. This officer is not satisfactory for

725
00:36:34,719 --> 00:36:37,920
Speaker 1: independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give

726
00:36:37,960 --> 00:36:40,400
Speaker 1: impressions of his importance. He also seems to think he

727
00:36:40,400 --> 00:36:43,600
Speaker 1: has unusual ability in most lines. These characteristics indicate that

728
00:36:43,640 --> 00:36:47,080
Speaker 1: he will require close supervisions for satisfactory performance of any

729
00:36:47,120 --> 00:36:50,919
Speaker 1: intelligence duty. So he's just like going around like telling

730
00:36:50,960 --> 00:36:53,520
Speaker 1: his stupid stories to like anyone who will listen and

731
00:36:53,640 --> 00:36:55,600
Speaker 1: just like get this. And then he's lying to like

732
00:36:55,640 --> 00:36:58,319
Speaker 1: actual military intelligence people and they're like, no, get this guy.

733
00:36:58,360 --> 00:37:00,960
Speaker 1: We don't want this guy anywhere near as like get

734
00:37:01,040 --> 00:37:06,440
Speaker 1: him the funk away. Yeah, it's the military there. Yeah,

735
00:37:06,719 --> 00:37:08,680
Speaker 1: that said he was better at tricking other people in

736
00:37:08,719 --> 00:37:11,200
Speaker 1: the military. He should have done if he did seek combat,

737
00:37:11,280 --> 00:37:14,560
Speaker 1: is just give his book Excalibur to all the enemies

738
00:37:14,560 --> 00:37:17,120
Speaker 1: and then they would just kill them. Just air drop Excalibur.

739
00:37:17,200 --> 00:37:19,040
Speaker 1: We could we could have used that instead of the nukes,

740
00:37:19,120 --> 00:37:21,600
Speaker 1: just dropped those over Japan and in the war exactly.

741
00:37:22,400 --> 00:37:24,600
Speaker 1: We could have just given one to Hitler, damn it,

742
00:37:24,760 --> 00:37:29,839
Speaker 1: l ron your gift. So after this, he was sent

743
00:37:29,880 --> 00:37:32,560
Speaker 1: back to a training center in Georgetown, Maine, where he

744
00:37:32,640 --> 00:37:35,799
Speaker 1: lied and told everyone that he had served extensively on destroyers.

745
00:37:35,840 --> 00:37:38,640
Speaker 1: His instructors believed him, and he became the classroom source

746
00:37:38,680 --> 00:37:42,040
Speaker 1: for information on destroyer piloting, even though he had never

747
00:37:42,360 --> 00:37:46,600
Speaker 1: been in one. He just lied about it. Eventually, Lieutenant

748
00:37:46,680 --> 00:37:49,399
Speaker 1: Hubbard talked his way into command of an anti submarine boat,

749
00:37:49,440 --> 00:37:52,080
Speaker 1: a corvette, the U S s PC eight one five.

750
00:37:53,320 --> 00:37:55,239
Speaker 1: The command of it. Yeah, a little boat, like a

751
00:37:55,280 --> 00:37:56,960
Speaker 1: pt boat, like a little bit of boat meant to

752
00:37:57,000 --> 00:37:59,160
Speaker 1: hunt submarines. Like I don't like eight or nine guys

753
00:37:59,160 --> 00:38:00,719
Speaker 1: on it. But he did talk his way into getting

754
00:38:00,719 --> 00:38:04,600
Speaker 1: a boat. He loves boats. He really loves bot He

755
00:38:04,719 --> 00:38:08,400
Speaker 1: really loves not good with him, really bad with him actually,

756
00:38:08,400 --> 00:38:13,399
Speaker 1: but he loves both. The Church of Scientology essentially put

757
00:38:13,400 --> 00:38:16,960
Speaker 1: out fake military paperwork about out on Hubbard's service, and

758
00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:20,359
Speaker 1: then journalists went to the actual military which confirmed, like now,

759
00:38:20,360 --> 00:38:22,360
Speaker 1: there's no evidence of him doing any of this. But

760
00:38:22,400 --> 00:38:26,080
Speaker 1: according to the Church of Scientology's fake military documents, for

761
00:38:26,120 --> 00:38:28,000
Speaker 1: part of the war, Mr Hubbard was in command of

762
00:38:28,000 --> 00:38:31,080
Speaker 1: a squadron of corvettes. In ninety three, the vessel under

763
00:38:31,120 --> 00:38:33,520
Speaker 1: his direct command, PC eight one five was engaged in

764
00:38:33,520 --> 00:38:36,640
Speaker 1: action which resulted in the sinking of one Japanese submarine

765
00:38:36,640 --> 00:38:39,279
Speaker 1: and the disabling of another. This incident, which took place

766
00:38:39,280 --> 00:38:41,520
Speaker 1: off the coast of Oregon, was described by Mr Hubbard

767
00:38:41,520 --> 00:38:42,920
Speaker 1: in a report that he sent to the Commander in

768
00:38:43,000 --> 00:38:46,239
Speaker 1: chief of the Pacific Fleet. Sounds really impressive, taken out

769
00:38:46,280 --> 00:38:49,880
Speaker 1: to Japanese subs, pretty cool, pretty significant contribution to the

770
00:38:49,880 --> 00:38:53,880
Speaker 1: war effort protecting Oregon. Oregon's great, except for all the racists.

771
00:38:54,280 --> 00:38:56,560
Speaker 1: So ship that racist line really threw me off for

772
00:38:56,560 --> 00:38:59,640
Speaker 1: a second. Um, we're gonna talk about what actually happened

773
00:38:59,719 --> 00:39:02,799
Speaker 1: and run Hubbard's epic naval battle with what may have

774
00:39:02,920 --> 00:39:06,600
Speaker 1: been Japanese submarines but almost certainly was something a lot

775
00:39:06,680 --> 00:39:09,560
Speaker 1: less interesting. We're gonna talk about that in a while,

776
00:39:09,760 --> 00:39:13,360
Speaker 1: But first, Caitlin, do you love products? You know what?

777
00:39:13,920 --> 00:39:17,000
Speaker 1: I love this product that you're about to hear about.

778
00:39:17,360 --> 00:39:26,200
Speaker 1: Let's listen to it and we're back. We're talking about

779
00:39:26,280 --> 00:39:28,600
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard and his epic naval battle with a

780
00:39:28,600 --> 00:39:32,520
Speaker 1: pair of Japanese submarines. So basically, what Hubbard claims is

781
00:39:32,560 --> 00:39:34,359
Speaker 1: that while they were sailing up from Oregon, there had

782
00:39:34,400 --> 00:39:37,799
Speaker 1: been a Japanese bombing raid on Oregon, Like I think

783
00:39:37,800 --> 00:39:39,640
Speaker 1: it was like a balloon or something that had bombs

784
00:39:39,640 --> 00:39:42,240
Speaker 1: attached to They did attack a place on the Oregon

785
00:39:42,239 --> 00:39:44,839
Speaker 1: coast near this time, so everybody was like freaked out

786
00:39:44,880 --> 00:39:49,040
Speaker 1: in paranoid and Hubbard was sailing down from Oregon and

787
00:39:49,560 --> 00:39:52,640
Speaker 1: essentially thought that he had sighted a submarine and started

788
00:39:52,719 --> 00:39:55,600
Speaker 1: dropping depth charges on it and called in other boats

789
00:39:55,600 --> 00:39:57,760
Speaker 1: for back up, and for two days l Ron Hubbard

790
00:39:57,840 --> 00:40:00,919
Speaker 1: and like five ships were just bombing the ship out

791
00:40:00,920 --> 00:40:03,920
Speaker 1: of what he said was Japanese submarines. Nobody else actually

792
00:40:03,960 --> 00:40:07,000
Speaker 1: dropped any bombs because they didn't find anything. They were

793
00:40:07,040 --> 00:40:09,440
Speaker 1: just like sailing around. Well rotten Hubbard bombed the ocean.

794
00:40:09,480 --> 00:40:11,720
Speaker 1: It random, It's probably just like a family on a yacht.

795
00:40:11,800 --> 00:40:15,880
Speaker 1: And he was like, it's even sadder than that. So

796
00:40:15,960 --> 00:40:19,080
Speaker 1: the Navy had Admiral Frank Fletcher, who was the operational

797
00:40:19,080 --> 00:40:23,200
Speaker 1: commander during the Battle of Midway, like a very serious admiral, dude,

798
00:40:23,760 --> 00:40:27,239
Speaker 1: uh investigate the so called action in which Hubbard had

799
00:40:27,280 --> 00:40:29,560
Speaker 1: taken out two submarines. Because Hubbard, when he got back

800
00:40:29,560 --> 00:40:32,640
Speaker 1: to base, claim that he destroyed one submarine and wounded another.

801
00:40:32,719 --> 00:40:35,840
Speaker 1: Most likely. Actual research found out that what had happened

802
00:40:35,960 --> 00:40:38,239
Speaker 1: is there was just a magnetic iron ore deposit on

803
00:40:38,280 --> 00:40:40,719
Speaker 1: the seafloor that had fooled with his instruments, and he'd

804
00:40:40,719 --> 00:40:42,919
Speaker 1: spent two days and dropped more than a hundred depth

805
00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:49,040
Speaker 1: charges on a lump of metal. Oh my gosh. Lieutenant

806
00:40:49,120 --> 00:40:52,120
Speaker 1: Hubbard was furious when his commanders wouldn't recognize the heroism

807
00:40:52,120 --> 00:40:58,279
Speaker 1: he displayed in recklessly bombing the ocean. Now this was

808
00:40:58,320 --> 00:41:00,520
Speaker 1: not a great moved for his career. Then Navy doesn't

809
00:41:00,560 --> 00:41:03,080
Speaker 1: like it when you bombed the ocean. Um, so you

810
00:41:03,120 --> 00:41:06,680
Speaker 1: would thinks as a prospect or he would understand a

811
00:41:06,760 --> 00:41:11,400
Speaker 1: deposit of metal. But if he was a real prospector, yeah,

812
00:41:11,840 --> 00:41:14,480
Speaker 1: So the good news is that he had an opportunity

813
00:41:14,600 --> 00:41:17,359
Speaker 1: to redeem himself a couple of weeks later when he

814
00:41:17,440 --> 00:41:20,799
Speaker 1: recklessly shelled an uninhabited Mexican island and then ordered his

815
00:41:20,840 --> 00:41:24,520
Speaker 1: men to fire their weapons into the water around the island. Officially,

816
00:41:24,560 --> 00:41:28,120
Speaker 1: he says this was an unapproved gunnery training exercise. Mexico

817
00:41:28,200 --> 00:41:31,479
Speaker 1: said it was an American boat firing wildly on Mexican land,

818
00:41:31,520 --> 00:41:35,479
Speaker 1: and so they weren't happy with this, so Hubbard lost

819
00:41:35,480 --> 00:41:40,880
Speaker 1: his boat as a result of attacking Mexico. He loves boats. Uh.

820
00:41:40,920 --> 00:41:44,560
Speaker 1: The admiral who looked over lists and reassigned him rated

821
00:41:44,600 --> 00:41:46,799
Speaker 1: him as below average and said that he should be

822
00:41:46,800 --> 00:41:49,319
Speaker 1: put on a large boat where he could be properly supervised.

823
00:41:49,719 --> 00:41:51,479
Speaker 1: So for the rest of the war he would spend

824
00:41:51,480 --> 00:41:54,279
Speaker 1: more time in naval hospitals than serving on ships. While

825
00:41:54,280 --> 00:41:56,279
Speaker 1: he would claim to Robert Hineland and his other writer

826
00:41:56,360 --> 00:41:59,040
Speaker 1: friends that he had been sunk four times and wounded repeatedly,

827
00:41:59,080 --> 00:42:02,280
Speaker 1: there's no evidence that he ever suffered any service related injuries.

828
00:42:02,600 --> 00:42:05,480
Speaker 1: He did come down with a duodn ulcer during his

829
00:42:05,520 --> 00:42:08,200
Speaker 1: time in the military, but that's about it. Nothing as

830
00:42:08,200 --> 00:42:11,640
Speaker 1: a result of combat is just an ulcer in your guts.

831
00:42:11,640 --> 00:42:15,680
Speaker 1: And so after the war, el Ron Hubbard would spend

832
00:42:15,680 --> 00:42:18,800
Speaker 1: most of his time lying about several unverifiable service related

833
00:42:18,840 --> 00:42:20,480
Speaker 1: injuries to the v A in order to get more

834
00:42:20,520 --> 00:42:23,520
Speaker 1: disability benefits. He spent years doing this. This was most

835
00:42:23,520 --> 00:42:25,640
Speaker 1: of his writing in the first two years after the war,

836
00:42:25,840 --> 00:42:27,960
Speaker 1: was lying to the v A about the extent of

837
00:42:27,960 --> 00:42:30,000
Speaker 1: his injuries to try to get more money out of them.

838
00:42:30,400 --> 00:42:35,120
Speaker 1: Thousand words a day. Please. He did eventually get at

839
00:42:35,560 --> 00:42:39,040
Speaker 1: disability payment, but it was it was for nonsense. So

840
00:42:39,600 --> 00:42:41,600
Speaker 1: right around this time, he abandoned his wife to hang

841
00:42:41,600 --> 00:42:46,120
Speaker 1: out in a black magic sex mansion in Pasadena. What

842
00:42:46,160 --> 00:42:51,200
Speaker 1: do you mean is that that's the that's weird to you? Okay,

843
00:42:51,440 --> 00:42:53,600
Speaker 1: that was just a lot of information, it is, Okay,

844
00:42:53,760 --> 00:42:56,200
Speaker 1: you'd expected to be more interesting than it. Really, abandoned

845
00:42:56,239 --> 00:42:59,400
Speaker 1: his wife to hang out in a black magic sex

846
00:42:59,520 --> 00:43:02,560
Speaker 1: cult sex mansion, sex mansion. There's this guy named Jack

847
00:43:02,600 --> 00:43:06,720
Speaker 1: Parsons who was you've heard of Alistair Crowley. Okay. Alistair

848
00:43:06,719 --> 00:43:09,399
Speaker 1: Crowley was like a Slemma, this like black magic sort

849
00:43:09,400 --> 00:43:11,520
Speaker 1: of thing. He was a magic guy. He wrote a

850
00:43:11,560 --> 00:43:14,160
Speaker 1: bunch about it. He was very prominent in that industry

851
00:43:14,160 --> 00:43:16,520
Speaker 1: and like one of his industries the wrong word, but whatever,

852
00:43:17,080 --> 00:43:21,440
Speaker 1: magic industry, one of the magic industry. One of his

853
00:43:21,719 --> 00:43:23,719
Speaker 1: acolytes was a guy named Jack Parsons, who was like

854
00:43:23,760 --> 00:43:27,120
Speaker 1: a rich kid who owned a mansion in Pasadena. And oh, okay,

855
00:43:27,200 --> 00:43:30,680
Speaker 1: they touched briefly on this and going clear, yeah, it's

856
00:43:30,719 --> 00:43:34,240
Speaker 1: it's weird and murky. I don't think Hubbard ever believed

857
00:43:34,320 --> 00:43:36,840
Speaker 1: much of it. But Hubbard wanted to fuck the ladies

858
00:43:36,880 --> 00:43:38,880
Speaker 1: that Jack Parson had around him, because Jack was like

859
00:43:39,280 --> 00:43:41,640
Speaker 1: they had a polyamorous thing going on, because it was

860
00:43:41,680 --> 00:43:44,680
Speaker 1: like we're beyond, you know, all this the constraints, and

861
00:43:45,640 --> 00:43:48,000
Speaker 1: Hubbard just went in there to like steal his girlfriends

862
00:43:48,040 --> 00:43:50,640
Speaker 1: basically and still twenty dollars from him because he got

863
00:43:50,719 --> 00:43:53,160
Speaker 1: Parsons to invest in a yacht company and then just

864
00:43:53,200 --> 00:43:56,160
Speaker 1: bought a yacht for himself and the girlfriend got to

865
00:43:56,200 --> 00:43:58,560
Speaker 1: move away, so he lived on a yacht for a

866
00:43:58,600 --> 00:44:01,480
Speaker 1: while until he had to sell it. Uh. Yeah, the

867
00:44:01,480 --> 00:44:03,799
Speaker 1: whole black Magic sex mansion thing isn't as interesting as

868
00:44:03,840 --> 00:44:07,600
Speaker 1: it ought to be. They did try to summon the Antichrist, yeah,

869
00:44:07,640 --> 00:44:10,799
Speaker 1: but it was kind of boring to be honest. Yeah. Yeah,

870
00:44:10,880 --> 00:44:12,480
Speaker 1: you would have hoped for more of a tale there,

871
00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:15,640
Speaker 1: but I think it's all nonsense. So on August tenth,

872
00:44:15,800 --> 00:44:19,400
Speaker 1: ninety six, he married the woman that he had taken

873
00:44:19,440 --> 00:44:21,759
Speaker 1: away from this black magic sex mansion, the twenty one

874
00:44:21,840 --> 00:44:24,480
Speaker 1: year old Sarah Northrop. He married her thirty miles away

875
00:44:24,520 --> 00:44:26,600
Speaker 1: from where he had married his first wife, Pauli, thirteen

876
00:44:26,680 --> 00:44:29,640
Speaker 1: years ago. He was still technically married to Paully, so

877
00:44:29,680 --> 00:44:32,200
Speaker 1: this was big of me. But he's not like actively

878
00:44:32,239 --> 00:44:34,480
Speaker 1: living with both of them. He's just he never before, No,

879
00:44:34,560 --> 00:44:36,799
Speaker 1: he never told his first wife what had he just

880
00:44:37,200 --> 00:44:39,600
Speaker 1: he just ran away. She had no idea where he was.

881
00:44:40,680 --> 00:44:43,000
Speaker 1: He abandoned their kids too, they had like two kids.

882
00:44:43,680 --> 00:44:46,480
Speaker 1: He just abandoned his kids and his family stole a

883
00:44:46,560 --> 00:44:51,160
Speaker 1: guy's money to buy a yacht, and then old they

884
00:44:51,200 --> 00:44:54,160
Speaker 1: really dodged a bullet, that first family of his. They

885
00:44:54,200 --> 00:44:56,640
Speaker 1: did you get the feeling she's angry that he's a creep.

886
00:44:56,640 --> 00:44:58,520
Speaker 1: You don't get the feeling. They feel like they missed out.

887
00:44:58,800 --> 00:45:02,840
Speaker 1: I'm not having out run how word around. During this time,

888
00:45:02,880 --> 00:45:05,839
Speaker 1: after he wed Sarah, Hubbard started selling more stories again,

889
00:45:05,880 --> 00:45:08,600
Speaker 1: got back into writing pulp fiction. He sold several stories

890
00:45:08,600 --> 00:45:11,120
Speaker 1: to an editor named Sam Merwin, who said of him, quote,

891
00:45:11,120 --> 00:45:13,080
Speaker 1: I found him a very amusing guy and bought several

892
00:45:13,120 --> 00:45:15,000
Speaker 1: stories from him. He was really quite a character. I

893
00:45:15,040 --> 00:45:17,399
Speaker 1: always knew he was exceedingly anxious to hit big money.

894
00:45:17,440 --> 00:45:18,920
Speaker 1: He used to say he thought the best way to

895
00:45:18,960 --> 00:45:21,759
Speaker 1: do it would be to start a cult. So this

896
00:45:21,840 --> 00:45:24,799
Speaker 1: is like ninety six, the first time when Hubbard, you know,

897
00:45:25,400 --> 00:45:27,799
Speaker 1: starts putting out feelers that like he wants to start

898
00:45:27,800 --> 00:45:33,080
Speaker 1: his own religion. He's like boats Cokes moving up, that's

899
00:45:33,120 --> 00:45:35,520
Speaker 1: where the money is. He eventually moves up to boat

900
00:45:35,600 --> 00:45:42,040
Speaker 1: Colt right. The whole, the whole journey. Yeah. On April

901
00:45:42,040 --> 00:45:45,600
Speaker 1: fourteenth seven, Ron's first wife, Polly, filed for divorce on

902
00:45:45,640 --> 00:45:48,000
Speaker 1: the grounds that her husband had abandoned her and their children.

903
00:45:48,200 --> 00:45:51,359
Speaker 1: Seems pretty fair, very reasonable. She had no idea who

904
00:45:51,360 --> 00:45:53,000
Speaker 1: he was living with. She had no idea he was

905
00:45:53,040 --> 00:45:55,520
Speaker 1: already married to somebody else. But that changed three weeks

906
00:45:55,600 --> 00:45:57,480
Speaker 1: later when Ron moved into the home he had once

907
00:45:57,520 --> 00:46:00,400
Speaker 1: occupied with his first wife with his second wife. His

908
00:46:00,520 --> 00:46:02,839
Speaker 1: family was furious about this because his mom and dad

909
00:46:02,880 --> 00:46:04,759
Speaker 1: had been taking care of his first wife and their

910
00:46:04,840 --> 00:46:08,440
Speaker 1: kids and putting them up, so they they're really angry

911
00:46:08,520 --> 00:46:11,040
Speaker 1: about this. This is kind of when his aunt Marnie

912
00:46:11,239 --> 00:46:13,279
Speaker 1: soured on him. Well, we loved him as a child,

913
00:46:13,320 --> 00:46:16,440
Speaker 1: but he's a perfect stranger to us now, so I'm

914
00:46:16,480 --> 00:46:18,440
Speaker 1: glad they realized that. Yeah, he seems to have changed.

915
00:46:18,960 --> 00:46:21,600
Speaker 1: In late l Ron Hubbard met the man who had

916
00:46:21,640 --> 00:46:25,560
Speaker 1: become his lifelong literary agent Forrest Ackerman. After their first meeting,

917
00:46:25,640 --> 00:46:28,120
Speaker 1: Hubbard drove Forest home and told him along and insane

918
00:46:28,120 --> 00:46:30,279
Speaker 1: story about how he died on the operating table and

919
00:46:30,360 --> 00:46:33,359
Speaker 1: visited heaven um. He would claim a number of times

920
00:46:33,360 --> 00:46:35,720
Speaker 1: in his life to have visited heaven. He once claimed

921
00:46:35,719 --> 00:46:37,920
Speaker 1: to have visited heaven six or seven million years apart.

922
00:46:38,480 --> 00:46:44,160
Speaker 1: He had multiple lives. Uh. Here's how Forrest recalled l

923
00:46:44,239 --> 00:46:47,320
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard driving him home, telling him about his Yeah.

924
00:46:47,360 --> 00:46:49,080
Speaker 1: I remember he had an old rattle trap of a

925
00:46:49,120 --> 00:46:51,239
Speaker 1: car and he was chewing tobacco as he drove. He

926
00:46:51,280 --> 00:46:53,840
Speaker 1: would open the tour with one hand and squirt tobacco.

927
00:46:53,960 --> 00:46:56,920
Speaker 1: JU said, onto the road. When we got to my apartment,

928
00:46:56,960 --> 00:46:58,920
Speaker 1: we sat outside in the car while he continued with

929
00:46:58,960 --> 00:47:01,200
Speaker 1: the story. It was at five o'clock in the morning

930
00:47:01,200 --> 00:47:05,600
Speaker 1: and the sun was coming up before he had finished. Okay,

931
00:47:05,800 --> 00:47:08,239
Speaker 1: and then he was like, better represent this guy as

932
00:47:08,320 --> 00:47:10,279
Speaker 1: his literary age. I think he was like, this is

933
00:47:10,280 --> 00:47:13,120
Speaker 1: a motherfucker who can tell a story. Yeah. I think

934
00:47:13,120 --> 00:47:16,040
Speaker 1: he had a lot of money off. So Hubbard told

935
00:47:16,040 --> 00:47:19,920
Speaker 1: Ackerman about Excalibur, his suicide inducing visionary philosophy novel. I

936
00:47:19,960 --> 00:47:24,320
Speaker 1: almost forgot, Yeah, I almost forgot. Don't worry. He never did. Uh.

937
00:47:24,360 --> 00:47:26,759
Speaker 1: He claimed he had been rejected by publishers. Quote he

938
00:47:26,800 --> 00:47:28,319
Speaker 1: was told it was too radical, too much of a

939
00:47:28,360 --> 00:47:30,400
Speaker 1: quantum leap. If it had been a variation of Freud

940
00:47:30,480 --> 00:47:32,560
Speaker 1: or Young or Oddler, a bit of an improvement here

941
00:47:32,640 --> 00:47:34,400
Speaker 1: or there, it would have been acceptable. But it was

942
00:47:34,440 --> 00:47:36,879
Speaker 1: just too far ahead of everything else. He also said

943
00:47:36,920 --> 00:47:39,000
Speaker 1: that as he shocked the manuscript around, the people who

944
00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:41,719
Speaker 1: read it either went insane or committed suicide. The last

945
00:47:41,719 --> 00:47:43,359
Speaker 1: time he showed it to a publisher, he was sitting

946
00:47:43,360 --> 00:47:45,360
Speaker 1: in an office waiting for a reader to give his opinion.

947
00:47:45,600 --> 00:47:48,000
Speaker 1: The reader walked into the office, tossed the manuscript on

948
00:47:48,040 --> 00:47:50,319
Speaker 1: the desk, and then threw himself out the window. Ron

949
00:47:50,360 --> 00:47:52,520
Speaker 1: would not tell me much about Excalibur, except that if

950
00:47:52,520 --> 00:47:54,160
Speaker 1: you read it, you would find all fear would be

951
00:47:54,200 --> 00:47:56,279
Speaker 1: totally drained from you. I could never see what was

952
00:47:56,280 --> 00:47:58,000
Speaker 1: wrong with that or why it would cost anyone to

953
00:47:58,040 --> 00:48:03,560
Speaker 1: commit suicide. Right. Yeah. Also, that's just going to be

954
00:48:03,560 --> 00:48:05,839
Speaker 1: my excuse as a as a failed screenwriter. I'm just

955
00:48:05,840 --> 00:48:09,120
Speaker 1: gonna like, well, my screenplays are really good and they

956
00:48:09,160 --> 00:48:13,439
Speaker 1: just get rejected because people die. Hubbard continued to sell

957
00:48:13,520 --> 00:48:15,919
Speaker 1: sci fi short stories during this period, making just enough

958
00:48:15,920 --> 00:48:17,839
Speaker 1: money to stay alive, but not quite enough to live

959
00:48:17,880 --> 00:48:20,200
Speaker 1: comfortably or stay in one place with his new wife.

960
00:48:20,520 --> 00:48:23,840
Speaker 1: His most successful series was the old Doc Methuselah adventures.

961
00:48:24,080 --> 00:48:27,040
Speaker 1: These are futuristic tales about a space traveling physician adventurer

962
00:48:27,120 --> 00:48:30,080
Speaker 1: with an alien sidekick slave who cries whenever the doctor

963
00:48:30,120 --> 00:48:32,160
Speaker 1: tries to free him. It does seem like these might

964
00:48:32,200 --> 00:48:34,080
Speaker 1: have been an influence to Doctor Who, but I don't

965
00:48:34,120 --> 00:48:36,400
Speaker 1: know that. But it was about like an immortal doctor

966
00:48:36,520 --> 00:48:40,839
Speaker 1: traveling through the universe, solving mysteries and stuff with a slave. Yeah,

967
00:48:41,080 --> 00:48:43,120
Speaker 1: it may have been, may have been. It was pretty popular.

968
00:48:43,680 --> 00:48:46,160
Speaker 1: L Ron wasn't exactly a genius, but he was probably

969
00:48:46,160 --> 00:48:48,520
Speaker 1: one of the ten most notable names in science fiction

970
00:48:48,600 --> 00:48:51,000
Speaker 1: at this time. UM. At some point he earned the

971
00:48:51,040 --> 00:48:53,959
Speaker 1: attention of John W. Campbell, who was a very famous editor.

972
00:48:54,040 --> 00:48:56,120
Speaker 1: He's some people call him the father of science fiction.

973
00:48:56,160 --> 00:48:58,520
Speaker 1: You know, Mary Shelley's probably the mother and founder of

974
00:48:58,520 --> 00:49:01,880
Speaker 1: the discipline. But he was the editor of Astounding Science Fiction,

975
00:49:01,920 --> 00:49:04,200
Speaker 1: and like most of the greats of the sci fi

976
00:49:04,360 --> 00:49:07,440
Speaker 1: Golden Age, worked with him, and he was apparently really really,

977
00:49:07,440 --> 00:49:10,520
Speaker 1: really good editor, and he liked el Ron Hubbard, but

978
00:49:10,560 --> 00:49:12,840
Speaker 1: his work with Ron would be something outside of the

979
00:49:12,880 --> 00:49:15,640
Speaker 1: sci fi genre. See Hubbard. At this time decided that

980
00:49:15,640 --> 00:49:18,360
Speaker 1: he didn't want to keep writing short stories and dimestone novels.

981
00:49:18,400 --> 00:49:20,279
Speaker 1: He wanted the respect he thought he was entitled as

982
00:49:20,280 --> 00:49:24,760
Speaker 1: a philosopher. Uh So, in January of l Ron Hubbard

983
00:49:24,760 --> 00:49:26,640
Speaker 1: wrote a letter to his agent and promised him a

984
00:49:26,640 --> 00:49:29,879
Speaker 1: book on philosophy. Here's how bare faced Messiah summed it up.

985
00:49:30,680 --> 00:49:33,200
Speaker 1: Ron promised that among the handy household hints contained in

986
00:49:33,200 --> 00:49:36,040
Speaker 1: the book was information on how to quote rape women

987
00:49:36,080 --> 00:49:39,160
Speaker 1: without their knowing. It, communicates suicide messages to your enemies

988
00:49:39,200 --> 00:49:41,960
Speaker 1: as they sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco Parkway to the

989
00:49:42,000 --> 00:49:44,240
Speaker 1: mayor for cash, and evolved the best way of protecting

990
00:49:44,320 --> 00:49:47,800
Speaker 1: or destroying communism. He had not decided, he added, casually,

991
00:49:47,800 --> 00:49:50,200
Speaker 1: whether to destroy the Catholic church or merely start a

992
00:49:50,200 --> 00:49:54,359
Speaker 1: new one. There's that paragraph. How do you even start

993
00:49:54,400 --> 00:49:56,400
Speaker 1: to unpack that? I mean, some of that is like

994
00:49:57,120 --> 00:49:59,719
Speaker 1: nine people would be like, oh yeah, teach guys out

995
00:49:59,719 --> 00:50:04,600
Speaker 1: of right. Sure, it's everyone was terrible. It's just a

996
00:50:04,640 --> 00:50:11,520
Speaker 1: garbage year. But yeah, buckle up, not get more pro women. Actually,

997
00:50:12,280 --> 00:50:15,200
Speaker 1: I'll say this for l. Ron Hubbard, I kept expecting

998
00:50:15,280 --> 00:50:17,680
Speaker 1: him to be a rapist. I have no evidence that

999
00:50:17,680 --> 00:50:20,600
Speaker 1: he was a rapist, no accusations or anything like that,

1000
00:50:20,640 --> 00:50:23,160
Speaker 1: which you really expect with these guys, really do, especially

1001
00:50:23,160 --> 00:50:25,480
Speaker 1: if he's taking that sort of especially he's taking that

1002
00:50:25,560 --> 00:50:29,600
Speaker 1: sort of stance. Well. Also, society's understanding of what rape

1003
00:50:29,719 --> 00:50:35,160
Speaker 1: was back then was a bit different. Later that year,

1004
00:50:35,239 --> 00:50:37,960
Speaker 1: rumors began to spread in the science fiction community that l.

1005
00:50:38,040 --> 00:50:40,160
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard was up to something new. He was planning

1006
00:50:40,200 --> 00:50:42,600
Speaker 1: to reveal a new science of the mind, something that

1007
00:50:42,640 --> 00:50:44,480
Speaker 1: didn't seem as odd to people then as it does

1008
00:50:44,520 --> 00:50:47,280
Speaker 1: to us now. Science fiction had already developed an uncanny

1009
00:50:47,280 --> 00:50:49,960
Speaker 1: reputation for predicting the future. Science fiction writers had been

1010
00:50:50,000 --> 00:50:52,320
Speaker 1: the ones who sort of called nuclear bombs and stuff

1011
00:50:52,320 --> 00:50:54,520
Speaker 1: like that had been predicted, so had space travel and

1012
00:50:54,520 --> 00:50:58,040
Speaker 1: everything by science fiction writers. So there was a real

1013
00:50:58,160 --> 00:51:00,960
Speaker 1: belief in the community that like, something brilliant was going

1014
00:51:01,000 --> 00:51:02,759
Speaker 1: to be born out of all this fiction. So they

1015
00:51:02,760 --> 00:51:05,359
Speaker 1: were ready for a sci fi author to create a

1016
00:51:05,360 --> 00:51:08,520
Speaker 1: new science like that didn't seem crazy to people like nowadays.

1017
00:51:08,560 --> 00:51:10,279
Speaker 1: And someone's like, you hear about this new science fiction

1018
00:51:10,320 --> 00:51:15,560
Speaker 1: writer who's launching a science Okay, yeah, Okay, that's not

1019
00:51:15,600 --> 00:51:20,640
Speaker 1: where you do it, right, Yeah. That December of nine,

1020
00:51:20,719 --> 00:51:23,480
Speaker 1: John Campbell published an editorial in the December issue of

1021
00:51:23,600 --> 00:51:26,400
Speaker 1: an Astounding Science fiction. He revealed the imminent release of

1022
00:51:26,480 --> 00:51:31,439
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard's new science, Dianetics. Do don dun dun

1023
00:51:32,200 --> 00:51:35,319
Speaker 1: quote from John Campbell, It's power is almost unbelievable. It

1024
00:51:35,360 --> 00:51:37,719
Speaker 1: proves the mind not only can, but does rule the

1025
00:51:37,719 --> 00:51:41,040
Speaker 1: body completely. Following the sharply defined basic laws set forth,

1026
00:51:41,239 --> 00:51:44,560
Speaker 1: physical ills such as ulcers, asthma, and arthritis can be cured,

1027
00:51:44,600 --> 00:51:48,759
Speaker 1: as can all other psychosomatic ills. So John Campbell was

1028
00:51:48,760 --> 00:51:51,000
Speaker 1: a believer because el Ron Hubbard had already used his

1029
00:51:51,040 --> 00:51:56,160
Speaker 1: revolutionary new science to cure the editor's chronic sinusitis. Most

1030
00:51:56,160 --> 00:51:58,320
Speaker 1: of the work of Dianetics revolved around sitting down with

1031
00:51:58,360 --> 00:52:01,400
Speaker 1: an auditor and remembering old trump adic incidents from one's past.

1032
00:52:01,520 --> 00:52:03,520
Speaker 1: Campbell believe Hubbard had taken him back to the moment

1033
00:52:03,560 --> 00:52:06,160
Speaker 1: of his birth, which somehow fixed his nose. I don't know,

1034
00:52:06,680 --> 00:52:09,279
Speaker 1: he believed it. Uh. In mid nineteen fifty, before the

1035
00:52:09,280 --> 00:52:12,000
Speaker 1: publication of his book on dionetics, I'll Run, Hubbard attended

1036
00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:14,120
Speaker 1: the last meeting of his life as a simple science

1037
00:52:14,160 --> 00:52:17,160
Speaker 1: fiction writer. It was a convention in Newark, a sort

1038
00:52:17,200 --> 00:52:20,040
Speaker 1: of prototype for comic con like events of today. During

1039
00:52:20,040 --> 00:52:22,360
Speaker 1: the meeting, Hubbard is reported to have said, writing for

1040
00:52:22,400 --> 00:52:24,640
Speaker 1: a penny award is ridiculous. If a man really wanted

1041
00:52:24,680 --> 00:52:26,360
Speaker 1: to make a million dollars, the best way to do

1042
00:52:26,400 --> 00:52:29,560
Speaker 1: it would be to start his own religion. In April

1043
00:52:29,560 --> 00:52:32,160
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty, Campbell t's that coming in June, a

1044
00:52:32,200 --> 00:52:35,040
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand word article on dionetics would be in the

1045
00:52:35,080 --> 00:52:38,480
Speaker 1: magazine titled Dionetics An Introduction to a New Science. In

1046
00:52:38,520 --> 00:52:41,080
Speaker 1: his hype article, Campbell related the story of an ampute

1047
00:52:41,120 --> 00:52:43,960
Speaker 1: veteran who Hubbard had saved. Basically, he claimed that, like,

1048
00:52:44,000 --> 00:52:45,880
Speaker 1: this guy had been hit by a mortar shell, and like,

1049
00:52:45,960 --> 00:52:48,440
Speaker 1: while the medics were coming through afterwards that were like,

1050
00:52:48,680 --> 00:52:51,160
Speaker 1: this guy's hopeless, he's better off dead anyway. And then

1051
00:52:51,160 --> 00:52:53,640
Speaker 1: he wound up surviving, but he wanted to kill himself

1052
00:52:53,680 --> 00:52:56,840
Speaker 1: because the he had read Excalibur No No, because the

1053
00:52:56,880 --> 00:52:58,920
Speaker 1: memory of these medics saying that he was better off

1054
00:52:58,960 --> 00:53:01,279
Speaker 1: dead had gotten lodged in his brain. And that was

1055
00:53:01,320 --> 00:53:04,160
Speaker 1: what dianetics was all about, is bad memories get misfiled

1056
00:53:04,160 --> 00:53:06,239
Speaker 1: in your brain, and you have to go through with

1057
00:53:06,320 --> 00:53:10,279
Speaker 1: this auditing therapy and refile them. Basically, so Hubbard and

1058
00:53:10,360 --> 00:53:13,520
Speaker 1: Campbell succeeded in wangling support from an actual medical doctor

1059
00:53:13,600 --> 00:53:18,120
Speaker 1: for their science. You gotta remember science is and it's

1060
00:53:18,160 --> 00:53:21,839
Speaker 1: it's pretty rudimentary science. It's not an exact science. There's

1061
00:53:21,840 --> 00:53:24,279
Speaker 1: a lot of nonsense going on in science. And so

1062
00:53:24,400 --> 00:53:27,000
Speaker 1: this guy, doctor Winner sits in on several auditing sessions.

1063
00:53:27,000 --> 00:53:29,839
Speaker 1: Because they would run auditing sessions on just sci fi

1064
00:53:29,920 --> 00:53:33,080
Speaker 1: fans that Campbell brought in. They were just performing quasi

1065
00:53:33,120 --> 00:53:35,440
Speaker 1: psychiatry on strangers who walked in off the street and

1066
00:53:35,480 --> 00:53:38,759
Speaker 1: just liked reading science fiction. But yeah, Eventually Dr Winter

1067
00:53:38,840 --> 00:53:41,120
Speaker 1: agreed to go through a session himself and found it

1068
00:53:41,160 --> 00:53:44,440
Speaker 1: really compelling. He added that in the other patients he'd observed,

1069
00:53:44,440 --> 00:53:47,000
Speaker 1: the changes were obvious and people seemed to be cheerful

1070
00:53:47,080 --> 00:53:49,080
Speaker 1: and relaxed and feel better after they got out of

1071
00:53:49,080 --> 00:53:51,560
Speaker 1: a dianetic session, So he figured, maybe there's something to

1072
00:53:51,560 --> 00:53:53,279
Speaker 1: do this, Like this seems like it might be a

1073
00:53:53,320 --> 00:53:56,360
Speaker 1: real science. It really seems like what was going on is,

1074
00:53:56,400 --> 00:53:58,680
Speaker 1: you know, psychotherapy was pretty new as a discipline at

1075
00:53:58,719 --> 00:54:01,480
Speaker 1: this point, and Diane edics, which just sort of repackaging

1076
00:54:01,520 --> 00:54:06,319
Speaker 1: psychotherapy with different names. But like, there's a benefit in

1077
00:54:06,360 --> 00:54:09,719
Speaker 1: sitting down with your friends and talking about and talking

1078
00:54:09,719 --> 00:54:12,440
Speaker 1: about your feelings, and that's what he was doing so

1079
00:54:12,480 --> 00:54:15,839
Speaker 1: that's what people found benefit with because people didn't talk

1080
00:54:15,840 --> 00:54:18,880
Speaker 1: about their feelings. Men didn't talk about their feelings, so

1081
00:54:18,960 --> 00:54:22,480
Speaker 1: there was a benefit to this um It wasn't Hubbard's genius.

1082
00:54:22,520 --> 00:54:24,720
Speaker 1: It was just the benefit of sitting down and talking

1083
00:54:24,960 --> 00:54:28,040
Speaker 1: about your feelings. Dr Winter actually tried to publish an

1084
00:54:28,080 --> 00:54:30,160
Speaker 1: article on Hubbard's methods, but the Journal of the A

1085
00:54:30,360 --> 00:54:32,800
Speaker 1: m A and the American Journal of Psychiatry both rejected

1086
00:54:32,840 --> 00:54:35,080
Speaker 1: his papers. They said that he and Hubbard had neglected

1087
00:54:35,080 --> 00:54:37,960
Speaker 1: to provide any clinical evidence that their techniques worked. In fact,

1088
00:54:38,040 --> 00:54:39,719
Speaker 1: it seemed that they were just ripping off the basic

1089
00:54:39,800 --> 00:54:42,520
Speaker 1: techniques of psychotherapy, giving everything new names, and making up

1090
00:54:42,560 --> 00:54:45,880
Speaker 1: wild claims about repressed memories. Many sci fi fans, though,

1091
00:54:45,920 --> 00:54:48,879
Speaker 1: were interested in this new science being launched via fandom,

1092
00:54:48,920 --> 00:54:51,160
Speaker 1: Although several fans wrote to Campbell to complain that all

1093
00:54:51,160 --> 00:54:53,239
Speaker 1: he wrote about now was dionetics, for the most part,

1094
00:54:53,239 --> 00:54:56,319
Speaker 1: people seemed really excited asac as him Off though did

1095
00:54:56,360 --> 00:54:58,800
Speaker 1: read an early copy of the dionetics article and proclaim

1096
00:54:58,840 --> 00:55:01,960
Speaker 1: it gibberish, so not everybody was on board. In May

1097
00:55:01,960 --> 00:55:04,640
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty, the Science of Dianetics was released in

1098
00:55:04,640 --> 00:55:07,840
Speaker 1: the form most befitting a serious new scientific discipline, a

1099
00:55:07,880 --> 00:55:12,080
Speaker 1: science fiction fantasy pulp fiction magazine. Here's the cover of

1100
00:55:12,120 --> 00:55:14,880
Speaker 1: the issue where dionetics was announced. Okay, you want to

1101
00:55:14,880 --> 00:55:17,640
Speaker 1: describe the cover of that astounding science fiction magazine with

1102
00:55:17,640 --> 00:55:20,440
Speaker 1: a new science being launched in it. It's, uh, this

1103
00:55:20,480 --> 00:55:23,520
Speaker 1: man appears to have hair all over his body. It's

1104
00:55:23,640 --> 00:55:27,239
Speaker 1: drying like an alien. Yeah, it's like he a very

1105
00:55:27,280 --> 00:55:32,719
Speaker 1: aggro looking man with for he appears to be wearing

1106
00:55:32,719 --> 00:55:37,320
Speaker 1: like a mask over his eyes, his catlike eyes. Yeah. Um,

1107
00:55:37,440 --> 00:55:41,320
Speaker 1: he is crossing his arms. He's very angry about something

1108
00:55:42,080 --> 00:55:47,239
Speaker 1: and um yeah, just he looks like a creature slash alien,

1109
00:55:47,480 --> 00:55:51,640
Speaker 1: slash werewolf. And most of the magazine that week was

1110
00:55:51,719 --> 00:55:54,440
Speaker 1: just a bunch of random science fiction stories. This was

1111
00:55:54,480 --> 00:55:58,080
Speaker 1: from the Helping Hand. I guess that's some alien coming

1112
00:55:58,080 --> 00:56:00,880
Speaker 1: to Earth to help Earth or whatever. The article that

1113
00:56:00,960 --> 00:56:04,000
Speaker 1: launched dianetics was also in this magazine. In the article,

1114
00:56:04,120 --> 00:56:06,520
Speaker 1: Hubbard explained that the brain was basically like a computer,

1115
00:56:06,760 --> 00:56:09,120
Speaker 1: and like a computer, it has the potential to operate

1116
00:56:09,120 --> 00:56:12,520
Speaker 1: with perfect recall and recollection. Mental illness was caused by

1117
00:56:13,000 --> 00:56:15,160
Speaker 1: memories that had essentially gotten misfiled in the brains, and

1118
00:56:15,280 --> 00:56:18,560
Speaker 1: you could refile everything. You can make brains functioned perfectly

1119
00:56:18,600 --> 00:56:21,319
Speaker 1: and you'd remember everything, and just human beings could be

1120
00:56:21,360 --> 00:56:23,800
Speaker 1: perfected by this new mental science that l. Ron Hubbard

1121
00:56:23,840 --> 00:56:27,400
Speaker 1: had essentially developed. Um. So yeah, he called these memories

1122
00:56:27,400 --> 00:56:29,640
Speaker 1: they got misfiled in grams and so like if a

1123
00:56:29,719 --> 00:56:31,560
Speaker 1: child got bitten by a dog when he was too

1124
00:56:31,640 --> 00:56:34,160
Speaker 1: she might not remember getting bitten by the dog, but

1125
00:56:34,239 --> 00:56:36,120
Speaker 1: the ingram would be stuck in her and it could

1126
00:56:36,160 --> 00:56:39,000
Speaker 1: be stimulated by sites and sounds that were similar to

1127
00:56:39,160 --> 00:56:41,080
Speaker 1: what had been going on around her when the dog better,

1128
00:56:41,080 --> 00:56:44,080
Speaker 1: and that could cause distress the purpose of dianetic theory

1129
00:56:44,160 --> 00:56:46,799
Speaker 1: was essentially to gain access to the in grams and

1130
00:56:46,840 --> 00:56:49,120
Speaker 1: what he called the reactive memory banks of the mind

1131
00:56:49,440 --> 00:56:51,879
Speaker 1: and refile them and the analytical part of the mind

1132
00:56:51,920 --> 00:56:55,120
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't react to them logically. So that was

1133
00:56:55,239 --> 00:56:59,040
Speaker 1: how he justified the science behind dianetics. Sounds like nonsense

1134
00:56:59,360 --> 00:57:03,000
Speaker 1: because it is nonsense now. Hubbard claimed that if the

1135
00:57:03,000 --> 00:57:06,360
Speaker 1: earliest in grams in the brain, which usually happened around childbirth,

1136
00:57:06,440 --> 00:57:09,480
Speaker 1: could be located and refiled, a person's analytical mind would

1137
00:57:09,480 --> 00:57:13,680
Speaker 1: reach new heights of productivity and success. Individuals who cleared

1138
00:57:13,719 --> 00:57:15,960
Speaker 1: their earliest in grams would be called clear, and they

1139
00:57:15,960 --> 00:57:18,400
Speaker 1: would have perfect memory recall in a total immunity from

1140
00:57:18,400 --> 00:57:21,880
Speaker 1: all psychological illnesses and many physical ones too. In May

1141
00:57:21,880 --> 00:57:24,919
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty, Dionetics The Modern Science of Mental Health

1142
00:57:24,960 --> 00:57:28,320
Speaker 1: reached bookstores across the nation. Its publisher, Hermitage House, only

1143
00:57:28,320 --> 00:57:30,600
Speaker 1: printed six thousand copies for its first run. They were

1144
00:57:30,640 --> 00:57:33,280
Speaker 1: not expecting a major success. The book was a guide

1145
00:57:33,280 --> 00:57:35,560
Speaker 1: for her to carry out auditing sessions. As described by

1146
00:57:35,600 --> 00:57:37,720
Speaker 1: Hubbard and Campbell in The Reader's Own Home, Hubbard was

1147
00:57:37,760 --> 00:57:39,840
Speaker 1: basically yeah, providing a dress up guide for people to

1148
00:57:39,880 --> 00:57:44,640
Speaker 1: perform unlicensed psychotherapy on their friends and family. Very safe, Yeah, Dionetics.

1149
00:57:44,640 --> 00:57:49,360
Speaker 1: The book was a profoundly anti woman terrorist. Greed was

1150
00:57:49,560 --> 00:57:53,720
Speaker 1: a feminist icon. Feminist icon Aron Hubbard claimed that attempted

1151
00:57:53,720 --> 00:57:56,680
Speaker 1: abortions were the single most common cause of prebirth ingrams

1152
00:57:57,120 --> 00:57:59,960
Speaker 1: quote a large proportion of allegedly feeble minded children or

1153
00:58:00,040 --> 00:58:03,880
Speaker 1: actually attempted abortion cases. However, many billions America spends yearly

1154
00:58:03,920 --> 00:58:06,400
Speaker 1: on institutions for the insane and jails for criminals are

1155
00:58:06,440 --> 00:58:09,120
Speaker 1: spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex

1156
00:58:09,160 --> 00:58:11,320
Speaker 1: blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a

1157
00:58:11,360 --> 00:58:14,280
Speaker 1: blessing of God. All these things are scientific facts, tested

1158
00:58:14,280 --> 00:58:21,440
Speaker 1: and rechecked and tested again. So he's like a pro life,

1159
00:58:21,760 --> 00:58:26,320
Speaker 1: pro rape again feminist, icon feminist, all right. He believed

1160
00:58:26,320 --> 00:58:28,880
Speaker 1: that other ingrams came from abuse of husbands. For example,

1161
00:58:28,920 --> 00:58:31,160
Speaker 1: if a husband beat his pregnant wife and yelled take it,

1162
00:58:31,240 --> 00:58:32,840
Speaker 1: take it. I tell you you've got to take it,

1163
00:58:32,920 --> 00:58:35,920
Speaker 1: the child might interpret those words literally and become a

1164
00:58:35,960 --> 00:58:40,000
Speaker 1: thief because take it. Ron Hubbard, he thought a pregnant

1165
00:58:40,040 --> 00:58:43,320
Speaker 1: woman suffering from constipation might sit on the toilet and

1166
00:58:43,480 --> 00:58:45,280
Speaker 1: you know, be a horrible pain and go, oh, this

1167
00:58:45,320 --> 00:58:47,600
Speaker 1: is how I'm all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy.

1168
00:58:47,640 --> 00:58:49,600
Speaker 1: I can't think. This is too terrible to be born.

1169
00:58:50,000 --> 00:58:52,120
Speaker 1: And so the child would think that they were so

1170
00:58:52,240 --> 00:58:55,000
Speaker 1: terrible they didn't deserve to be born because their mom

1171
00:58:55,040 --> 00:58:57,640
Speaker 1: couldn't poop. That's such a specific thing for him to

1172
00:58:57,720 --> 00:59:02,840
Speaker 1: write to like speculate as to what a woman say, Okay,

1173
00:59:03,000 --> 00:59:07,200
Speaker 1: that's great, really interesting. He thought a lot of prenatal ingrams,

1174
00:59:07,240 --> 00:59:09,880
Speaker 1: and in fact, the worst prenatal ingrams were caused by

1175
00:59:10,360 --> 00:59:13,400
Speaker 1: women cheating on their husbands. Because he assumed that a

1176
00:59:13,440 --> 00:59:16,240
Speaker 1: woman cheating on her husband would talk about her husband

1177
00:59:16,360 --> 00:59:19,480
Speaker 1: to her lover, and that the fetus developing would hear this,

1178
00:59:19,760 --> 00:59:22,280
Speaker 1: and since many kids had the same names as their fathers,

1179
00:59:23,040 --> 00:59:26,520
Speaker 1: he would think that his mom was talking about him.

1180
00:59:26,520 --> 00:59:30,880
Speaker 1: It's weird, right, You know how fetuses understand language perfectly.

1181
00:59:31,200 --> 00:59:34,000
Speaker 1: That's that's what they're most famous for, fetus is their

1182
00:59:34,080 --> 00:59:37,680
Speaker 1: language skills. Many of these ideas are still present in

1183
00:59:37,720 --> 00:59:41,120
Speaker 1: scientology today. For example, about a second worth of googling

1184
00:59:41,160 --> 00:59:43,920
Speaker 1: brought me to a Scientology parent website and a page

1185
00:59:43,920 --> 00:59:47,120
Speaker 1: on that website titled why silent Birth. It quotes out

1186
00:59:47,160 --> 00:59:49,200
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard. A woman who wants your child to have

1187
00:59:49,240 --> 00:59:51,160
Speaker 1: the best possible chance will find a doctor who will

1188
00:59:51,200 --> 00:59:53,480
Speaker 1: agree to keep quiet, especially during the delivery, and who

1189
00:59:53,480 --> 00:59:56,200
Speaker 1: will insist upon silence being maintained in the hospital living

1190
00:59:56,320 --> 00:59:59,120
Speaker 1: room as far as is humanly possible, because, of course,

1191
00:59:59,160 --> 01:00:02,000
Speaker 1: any yelling during the birth would give the child like

1192
01:00:02,080 --> 01:00:05,240
Speaker 1: if the doctor's like, come on, now, push the feet,

1193
01:00:05,360 --> 01:00:07,240
Speaker 1: is the baby is going to be like, oh, I'm

1194
01:00:07,240 --> 01:00:10,080
Speaker 1: supposed to push people down exactly, and I'll just be

1195
01:00:10,120 --> 01:00:12,800
Speaker 1: a shoven monks. And that's why our streets are filled

1196
01:00:12,800 --> 01:00:18,760
Speaker 1: with shovers, seriously shoving people every day because I was

1197
01:00:18,800 --> 01:00:24,080
Speaker 1: given birth. ABS always be shoving. Yeah, scheming and shoving.

1198
01:00:24,080 --> 01:00:28,680
Speaker 1: Scheming and shoving both important. Dianetics was not an instant success,

1199
01:00:28,720 --> 01:00:30,960
Speaker 1: but within the first couple of weeks of publication, it's

1200
01:00:30,960 --> 01:00:33,960
Speaker 1: spread very widely enough to earn bestseller status and provoke

1201
01:00:34,000 --> 01:00:36,400
Speaker 1: its first negative press. The New York Times were bad

1202
01:00:36,400 --> 01:00:39,600
Speaker 1: stuff about it. A reviewer from New Republic savaged it

1203
01:00:40,040 --> 01:00:43,120
Speaker 1: and basically claimed it was it was nonsense. Whatever makes

1204
01:00:43,120 --> 01:00:45,280
Speaker 1: sense in his discoveries does not belong to him, and

1205
01:00:45,320 --> 01:00:48,040
Speaker 1: his own theory appears to this reviewer as a paranoia system,

1206
01:00:48,040 --> 01:00:50,080
Speaker 1: which would be of interest as part of a case history,

1207
01:00:50,320 --> 01:00:53,080
Speaker 1: but which seems quite dangerous when offered from mass consumption.

1208
01:00:53,160 --> 01:00:56,000
Speaker 1: Is the therapeutic technique? Probably fair, someone knew what they

1209
01:00:56,040 --> 01:00:58,480
Speaker 1: were talking about. Yeah, all the experts were like, this

1210
01:00:58,520 --> 01:01:00,920
Speaker 1: is a bad idea, there are you are also noted that,

1211
01:01:00,960 --> 01:01:03,240
Speaker 1: in addition to being able to cure psycho somatic illness,

1212
01:01:03,320 --> 01:01:07,480
Speaker 1: Hubbard claimed Dianetics could treat cancer and diabetes. Uh. The experts,

1213
01:01:07,480 --> 01:01:09,400
Speaker 1: of course cried out that this was dangerous nonsense, but

1214
01:01:09,440 --> 01:01:12,160
Speaker 1: no one listened. Hubbard's sold fifty copies in the first

1215
01:01:12,200 --> 01:01:15,480
Speaker 1: two months after release. He was finally rich. So in

1216
01:01:15,520 --> 01:01:17,760
Speaker 1: thirty nine short years, I'll run Hubbard had gone from

1217
01:01:17,760 --> 01:01:19,960
Speaker 1: a fake blood brother of the Blackfoot Indian tribe to

1218
01:01:19,960 --> 01:01:22,600
Speaker 1: a fake war hero, real trash novelist, and had now

1219
01:01:22,680 --> 01:01:25,640
Speaker 1: ascended to the lofty heights of a pop psychiatry guru.

1220
01:01:25,800 --> 01:01:28,520
Speaker 1: Dianetics was officially a fat, but Hubbard had a plan

1221
01:01:28,560 --> 01:01:31,520
Speaker 1: to keep this fat going long past its rational expiration date.

1222
01:01:32,000 --> 01:01:33,760
Speaker 1: And that is what we're going to get into in

1223
01:01:33,840 --> 01:01:37,760
Speaker 1: part two. Yeah, we haven't even gotten to the establishment

1224
01:01:37,760 --> 01:01:40,520
Speaker 1: of scientology yet, I know, I know, or the establishment

1225
01:01:40,560 --> 01:01:44,320
Speaker 1: of his boat Colt. There's so much more, so much

1226
01:01:44,320 --> 01:01:46,640
Speaker 1: more to get into. Caitlyn Duranti, you want to plug

1227
01:01:46,640 --> 01:01:49,160
Speaker 1: your plug doubles, I would simply love to. You can

1228
01:01:49,720 --> 01:01:54,480
Speaker 1: listen to my podcast, the Bectel Cast at how Stuff Works. Uh,

1229
01:01:54,600 --> 01:01:57,840
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter and Instagram at baco cast, and

1230
01:01:57,840 --> 01:02:00,920
Speaker 1: you can follow me on those places as well at

1231
01:02:01,080 --> 01:02:03,960
Speaker 1: Caitlin Toronte and you can find me on Twitter at

1232
01:02:04,000 --> 01:02:05,960
Speaker 1: I right, Okay. We can find this podcast on the

1233
01:02:05,960 --> 01:02:08,840
Speaker 1: internet at behind the Bastards dot com. We'll have pictures

1234
01:02:08,880 --> 01:02:11,800
Speaker 1: of that wonderful issue of a Standing Science and yeah,

1235
01:02:11,960 --> 01:02:14,560
Speaker 1: check us out on Instagram, Twitter at Bastards Pod. You

1236
01:02:14,560 --> 01:02:17,320
Speaker 1: can buy our t shirts on t public behind the Bastards,

1237
01:02:17,360 --> 01:02:20,439
Speaker 1: So go do that, wash your brains off, Come back

1238
01:02:20,440 --> 01:02:23,360
Speaker 1: tomorrow and here another hour or so about all Ron

1239
01:02:23,400 --> 01:02:26,640
Speaker 1: Hubbard being a fucking nutbar It's gonna be great. Well,

1240
01:02:26,720 --> 01:02:27,440
Speaker 1: but see you then