Speaker 1: Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything
Speaker 1: you don't know about the very worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history. Now, this is a show where I read
Speaker 1: a tale about a terrible person to a guest who
Speaker 1: is coming in cold, or as cold as you can
Speaker 1: possibly come into on a subject like. My guest today
Speaker 1: is Caitlyn Durante of The Bechtel Cast, comedian and uh
Speaker 1: fan of l Ron Hubbard. Love him love some l
Speaker 1: r H. Yeah, yeah, what what do you know about
Speaker 1: Mr Hubbard? I know that he was a sci fi
Speaker 1: like pulpy writer in his early days, and that he's
Speaker 1: the founder of the Church of Scientology. Yeah. I watched
Speaker 1: Going Clear and that's pretty much all I know. Okay, cool.
Speaker 1: He was a living monument to how much a tall
Speaker 1: white man can achieve in this world by just lying
Speaker 1: without pause or cessation for seventy straight years. That's his
Speaker 1: whole life. He just never stopped lying from the time
Speaker 1: he was about four years old until the day he died.
Speaker 1: And uh he died worth like six million dollars, so
Speaker 1: it worked out pretty well. I had a weird time
Speaker 1: researching this because I wanted to hate him, and it's
Speaker 1: really hard to hate him. Um, he's a piece of ship.
Speaker 1: He is a monster. He does terrible things, but there's
Speaker 1: also he's not just a terrible guy. Like with a
Speaker 1: lot of terrible people today, it'll be like some rich
Speaker 1: asshole who like does something that's terrible to the environment
Speaker 1: or like you know, is abusive to their employers or whatever.
Speaker 1: L Ron Hubbard did his terrible things while shooting for
Speaker 1: the moon. That's ambitious, and you gotta admire him for that.
Speaker 1: He might be the most ambitious con artist in human history.
Speaker 1: He's in the running, all right. So. Lafayette Ron Hubbard
Speaker 1: was born on March thirteenth, nineteen eleven, and Tilda, Nebraska.
Speaker 1: His family moved there shortly thereafter to Helena, Montana. His
Speaker 1: grandfather was moderately successful, but not wealthy by any means.
Speaker 1: He owned a decent house, some stables, and a guitar
Speaker 1: with a black man's head carved on to the top
Speaker 1: of it. That's a detail you'll run into a number
Speaker 1: of times about his early life. Yeah, yeah, I'm guessing
Speaker 1: it was racist, but I don't know. Um. Later Hubbard
Speaker 1: would claim his grandfather owned a massive ranch a quarter
Speaker 1: the size of Montana, uh, and that he spent his
Speaker 1: early childhood having adventures there and becoming a blood brother
Speaker 1: of the Blackfoot Indian tribe. That's good. Yeah, he's already appropriating,
Speaker 1: you know, other cultures. Was born appropriating other cultures? On
Speaker 1: the website what is Scientology, which is a scientology website,
Speaker 1: it says that his particular friend among the Blackfoot tribe
Speaker 1: was an elderly medicine man commonly known as Old Tom quote.
Speaker 1: Establishing a unique friendship with the normally taciturn Indian, Ron
Speaker 1: was soon initiated into the various secrets of the tribe,
Speaker 1: their legends, customs, and methods of survival in a harsh environment.
Speaker 1: At the age of six, he became a blood brother
Speaker 1: of the Blackfeet, an honor bestowed on few white men.
Speaker 1: So this is when he six. This is what he claims.
Speaker 1: So this is what he claims. This is not There's
Speaker 1: there's no evidence that six year old Ron Hubbard had
Speaker 1: adventures with Indians and became their blood brother. The Los
Speaker 1: Angeles Times reporter on this in nineteen UH they talked
Speaker 1: to a historian named Hugh Dempsey, who was an expert
Speaker 1: on the Blackfoot tribe and whose wife is a member
Speaker 1: of the Blackfoot tribe. Uh, And he basically said blood
Speaker 1: brothers aren't even a thing the tribe has. It's like
Speaker 1: a Hollywood idea that was invented for Western movies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it seems like all of l Ron Hubbard's ideas
Speaker 1: about this tribe that he claimed membership then came from
Speaker 1: like movies he watched as a kid, which is yeah, okay, good.
Speaker 1: So I love how influential movies are and how they,
Speaker 1: you know, don't do anything to funk up our society. Well,
Speaker 1: and it's amazing how little fact checking people do if
Speaker 1: you claims alive from far back enough like that, because
Speaker 1: the Church of Scientology still continues this line to this
Speaker 1: day that l Ron Hubbard was a brother of the
Speaker 1: Blackfoot tribe. And he even claimed later that a lot
Speaker 1: of his philosophical ideas came from like Indian rituals and stuff.
Speaker 1: And it's like, as far as we know, he never
Speaker 1: met a single member of the Blackfoot tribe. Right, So, um,
Speaker 1: I did want to give sort of a source on
Speaker 1: el Ron Hubbard's early life from a sympathetic side. Most
Speaker 1: of the research I did on this was by people
Speaker 1: who were very critical of him, so I didn't want
Speaker 1: to know kind of how the Church of Scientology talks
Speaker 1: about his upbringing. And I found el Ron Hubbard dot org,
Speaker 1: which claimed to have biographical information on him, but actually
Speaker 1: was just trying to sell me a series of books
Speaker 1: on el Ron Hubbard because it was owned by the
Speaker 1: Church of Scientology. But there was a trailer for the
Speaker 1: book series about el Ron Hubbard called el Ron Hubbard
Speaker 1: a Profile, and I want to play you a little
Speaker 1: bit of that because it gives you an idea of
Speaker 1: sort of the cliffs notes of his life as portrayed
Speaker 1: by the Church of Scientology. He earned a hollowed place
Speaker 1: in blackfeet more, became the nation's youngest eagle scout at
Speaker 1: the age of thirteen, and studied with the last in
Speaker 1: a line of legendary mystics from the court of Kubla Khan.
Speaker 1: Barn stormed into aviation history, ascended to the heights of
Speaker 1: Greatness in a now fabled kingdom of the Pulse, and
Speaker 1: charted unknown realms beneath a feigned explorers Club flag retrace
Speaker 1: his journey to the founding of Dianetics and scientolic and
Speaker 1: ultimate Almost none of that's true. He was an explorer
Speaker 1: and founded uncharted. He was there was a group called
Speaker 1: the Explorers Club, which was like a big thing in
Speaker 1: the day, and he did basically connive his way into
Speaker 1: being a member there, and he did carry out a
Speaker 1: couple of expeditions that didn't really find much um but
Speaker 1: he piloted around in a boat until his boat broke
Speaker 1: down and he had a flag with him, so that
Speaker 1: that that's kind of what exclaiming there. So one of
Speaker 1: my main sources for this episode was a book called
Speaker 1: Bare Faced Messiah, which is a really comprehensive biography of
Speaker 1: Aron Hubbard by Russell Miller, probably the first anyone ever wrote,
Speaker 1: and he interviewed a lot of Aron Hubbard's relatives, people
Speaker 1: who saw him as he was growing up and stuff. Uh,
Speaker 1: And none of the people who were with him when
Speaker 1: he was a baby, when he was six, when he
Speaker 1: was like a young child, had any recolle action of
Speaker 1: any of the stuff that he claimed about. His aunt Marnie,
Speaker 1: who grew up with him, described him as the baby
Speaker 1: of the family, adored and coddled by everybody. He was
Speaker 1: very much the love child of the whole family. He
Speaker 1: was adored by everyone. I could still see that mop
Speaker 1: of red hair running around. So he was like the
Speaker 1: little baby of the family. But he grew up more
Speaker 1: or less in a house in a small town as
Speaker 1: the beloved youngest child of a very close knit family.
Speaker 1: No adventures in his early childhood that there's any evidence of, um,
Speaker 1: But he gotta love that imagination on him. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a thin line between imagination and just lying. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: The actual information shows that Hubbard enrolled in kindergarten at
Speaker 1: age six, rather than becoming a Blackfoot brother. I suppose. Yeah,
Speaker 1: his local nickname was Brick because of his red hair.
Speaker 1: I guess because bricks are red and nineteen fifteen was
Speaker 1: not a good time for nicknames. So Ryan Johnson's film
Speaker 1: Brick is actually based on h I wish I knew
Speaker 1: something about. Yeah, I'm assuming that's a very good joke.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it. Oh, it's not a good joke,
Speaker 1: A joke. It's a pretty good movie. Yeah, okay, okay, Well,
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard's Young Life was not a pretty good
Speaker 1: movie because he just he pretty much went to kindergarten. Um.
Speaker 1: He later claimed that while he was in school, he
Speaker 1: would protect other kids from the bullies, terrorizing his classmates
Speaker 1: using the lumberjack fighting skills he learned from his grandfather.
Speaker 1: His grandfather was not a lumberjack, owned a small oil company,
Speaker 1: but wasn't a lumberjack. Um. One of Ron's closest childhood friends,
Speaker 1: Andrew Richardson, stated he never protected nobody. It was all bullshit.
Speaker 1: Old Hubbard was the greatest con honors who ever lived,
Speaker 1: which is more or less true. Ron moved to Seattle
Speaker 1: after his dad joined the Navy when he was like
Speaker 1: twelve years old. Uh, he did join the Boy Scouts
Speaker 1: at this point and became an Eagle Scout at like
Speaker 1: age thirteen, but there's no true. That is true. That
Speaker 1: is true, But there's no evidence that he was the
Speaker 1: youngest Eagle Scout ever because back then the Boy Scouts
Speaker 1: did not make a note of what age people were
Speaker 1: when they became Eagle Scouts. Bad bookkeeping, bad book keeping out.
Speaker 1: But I'm guessing Ron knew that, which is why he
Speaker 1: made the lie. Yeah, but he was good at being
Speaker 1: a boy scout, I guess not hard Well, he's already
Speaker 1: an explorer and a blood brother of a tribe. All
Speaker 1: that time spent with the Blackfoot really prepared him for
Speaker 1: his merit badges, uh in whittling and bald face lies.
Speaker 1: During his teenage years. His dad was in the navy,
Speaker 1: so during his teenage years Ron visited him twice for
Speaker 1: like a month or two each time, so he did
Speaker 1: get to spend some time in the Far East. It
Speaker 1: was mostly on military basis with his parents. The myth factory,
Speaker 1: of course that he created later spun this into a
Speaker 1: series of exotic Eastern adventures where he said you heard
Speaker 1: that I was trained in the court of Kubla Khan
Speaker 1: by to bet mystics. He was on vacation with his
Speaker 1: parents and like China and stuff. He mostly seemed to
Speaker 1: not enjoy his time in the Far East. He thought
Speaker 1: China was gross and dirty. He thought Chinese people were
Speaker 1: gross and dirty. We have his diaries from those times,
Speaker 1: and he's not weirdly racist for an American in like
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty, but he's pretty racist, um pretty race in
Speaker 1: Mission into Time a scientology book, though he spun his
Speaker 1: basic vacation with his parents in China into quote and China.
Speaker 1: He met an old musician whose ancestors had served in
Speaker 1: the court of Kubla Khan and a Hindu who could
Speaker 1: hypnotize cats and the high hills of Tibet. He lived
Speaker 1: with bandits, who accepted him because of his honest interest
Speaker 1: in him and his way of life. So that's fun, okay, good,
Speaker 1: yeah it so far. He saw the Great Wall of China.
Speaker 1: His only notes in his notebook about this was that
Speaker 1: they should make it into a roller coaster because like
Speaker 1: a shipload of money. So uh, there's there's no evidence
Speaker 1: of him learning any ancient Eastern wisdom, but we do
Speaker 1: know that this is the time when he first started
Speaker 1: sketching out short stories because he's spent a lot of
Speaker 1: boring time on boats and trains and stuff with like
Speaker 1: a notebook writing out story ideas. Most of them were
Speaker 1: just like he didn't even write out a lot of stories.
Speaker 1: It was mostly just him writing out the ideas. So
Speaker 1: like there would be entries like love Story goes to France,
Speaker 1: meets Swell abroad, and Marseille. She takes them to her sink,
Speaker 1: bedroom and bath where he lives until notable citizens object.
Speaker 1: He stands them off and takes the next book for America,
Speaker 1: having received a long expected will donate. So it's like
Speaker 1: weird little stories like that. Most of them involved American
Speaker 1: travelers meeting beautiful foreign women. Again, he's like fourteen. He
Speaker 1: didn't seem to know how to write sex scenes. So
Speaker 1: like the closest he got in his first short story
Speaker 1: was a scene where like a navy corman is with
Speaker 1: like a beautiful native woman and they fall in love.
Speaker 1: But then when he would write out like what they did,
Speaker 1: he just kept scratching it out to the point that
Speaker 1: we don't know what he wrote because he apparently wrote
Speaker 1: a sex scene and they're just like furiously erased it.
Speaker 1: He's like he puts his oh god, oh god, oh god,
Speaker 1: what is a woman again? All right? Cool? So he's
Speaker 1: an in cell. It is entirely possible he did not
Speaker 1: know what a woman was at that point. He was
Speaker 1: like a fifteen year old in the twenties. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: either knew everything or nothing. He knew that you're supposed
Speaker 1: to objectify women, he just doesn't know how. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was bad at it, and that would be like a
Speaker 1: hallmark of l. Ron Hubbard's writing, is that, especially since
Speaker 1: a lot of the pulp fiction that he became famous
Speaker 1: for other stories in that genre were really sexual. That
Speaker 1: was never a thing he was good at. Um Okay, that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you heard it here. First, Ron Hubbard couldn't write about sucking.
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard couldn't. Now, actually that's not true. Weirdly enough,
Speaker 1: which we'll get too later. There's some evidence he actually
Speaker 1: became pretty good at fucking. Wow, did he just make
Speaker 1: that up? And that's more of his inventive. No, these
Speaker 1: are people who didn't like him otherwise, but like who
Speaker 1: were in relationships and we're like he was. He wasn't
Speaker 1: bad at fucking. I can't wait till we get there.
Speaker 1: Oh no, it's exciting. This is quite a journey. So
Speaker 1: after he got back from the Far East, he enrolled
Speaker 1: in George Washington University in the fall of nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1: Scientology publications state that while there he became the associate
Speaker 1: editor of the university newspaper, was a member of many
Speaker 1: university clubs and societies, and enrolled in one of the
Speaker 1: first nuclear physics courses ever taught in an American university. UM,
Speaker 1: and several were words of that are not entirely incorrect. Um.
Speaker 1: He did go to George Washington University. He was a
Speaker 1: student of the School of Engineering. He did not take
Speaker 1: nuclear physics courses because this was nineteen UM He was
Speaker 1: not good at civil engineering. He hated it and usually
Speaker 1: did not go to class. He did write for the
Speaker 1: school newspaper, but he was not an editor for it.
Speaker 1: He just wrote a few articles, mostly as pr for
Speaker 1: the club that he launched, which was the school gliding Club. Oh,
Speaker 1: he loved gliding, like hang gliding. No, it's still exists
Speaker 1: today as a sport. You don't hear about it much.
Speaker 1: But they're basically planes. If you saw one park you
Speaker 1: would just guess it was a plane. But most of
Speaker 1: them don't have engines, and you can either fling them
Speaker 1: into the sky with this weird winch system, or you
Speaker 1: can like drop them off the back of an airplane.
Speaker 1: People can travel across continents in these things. If they're
Speaker 1: really good at them, you can go hundreds of miles.
Speaker 1: But they're not really planes because there's no engine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no engine. It's just about managing your levels and whatnot.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm not a glider pilot. But he
Speaker 1: was a big fan of that, and he did it.
Speaker 1: He was apparently pretty good at it, but he was
Speaker 1: better at creating a club for it and drilling up
Speaker 1: interest in it. Soon he started writing articles for like
Speaker 1: Sportsman's Magazine, Sportsman Aviator and other magazines like that. We
Speaker 1: would just lie about you know, I was in this
Speaker 1: horrible die and my plane was falling apart and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I had this I crashed into this barn and
Speaker 1: so he just made up stories about stuff he did
Speaker 1: in this glider plane when in reality, he did it
Speaker 1: for like a year or so, and then he lost
Speaker 1: his license because he couldn't afford to renew it, and
Speaker 1: then he never flew again. But he kept writing articles
Speaker 1: about flying even after he stopped being able to do it,
Speaker 1: because yeah, it sounds like a theme of his from
Speaker 1: fabricating stories. Yeah, there's usually a germ of truth. He
Speaker 1: did fly a glider a lot. There was one time
Speaker 1: where he like crashed a glider into a small town. Uh,
Speaker 1: nobody got hurt, and like he wound up having to
Speaker 1: take off from a nearby hill or something like that,
Speaker 1: which he then turned into you know, stories of traveling
Speaker 1: across the country on a glider at having all these
Speaker 1: advent and discovering a whole other continent and yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's all round humbard. In college, his grades were
Speaker 1: as bad as you'd expect because he usually would skip
Speaker 1: out on class in order to glide more often. So
Speaker 1: he was studying civil engineers civil engineering, right, okay, so
Speaker 1: his idea, Yeah, of course he was bad at it
Speaker 1: because he thought the Great Wall of China should be
Speaker 1: a roller coaster. Like that was his idea of like structures,
Speaker 1: that was that was the first thing he thought, seeing like,
Speaker 1: the most impressive thing people had ever built was like man,
Speaker 1: but a roller coaster on the son of a bit. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: his grades were pretty bad. But during this time, like
Speaker 1: a ninety two, when he was a sophomore, his school
Speaker 1: launched a literary journal and he submitted his first finished
Speaker 1: short story for publication. So that's the first time he
Speaker 1: got published writing fiction. Uh. The story was titled Tah
Speaker 1: after the name of its main character, uh, and it
Speaker 1: was about a twelve year old child soldier in China
Speaker 1: on a march to die horribly in a battle. Um.
Speaker 1: He quickly wrote another short story about another really really
Speaker 1: bloody battle, this time in nave battle in the Yanksee River.
Speaker 1: He repeatedly described the river as being filled with headless corpses.
Speaker 1: He had a big thing for gore, big thing for violence.
Speaker 1: Most of his early stories involved bloody adventures in vaguely
Speaker 1: Asian settings. Um so this is his passion. Clearly see
Speaker 1: the pattern. That summer summer of l Ron Hubbard decided
Speaker 1: to launch an expedition of his own. He called it
Speaker 1: the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition and convinced a bunch of
Speaker 1: other young nineteen year old boys to pull their money
Speaker 1: so they could rent a boat for the summer and
Speaker 1: sail to the Caribbean. Their goal was to explore abandoned
Speaker 1: pirate strongholds and filmed themselves running around in pirate costumes
Speaker 1: for the presumed historic value of these videos of children
Speaker 1: running around in pirate costumes. He also said that he
Speaker 1: wanted to quote collect whatever one collects for exhibits and museums. Again,
Speaker 1: not a lot of specifics about what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: Loves vagueness. Also the Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. The
Speaker 1: film also sounds like it was based on l Ron
Speaker 1: Hubbards a little a lot of movies based on the
Speaker 1: Sky Live. There was a report on his adventure in
Speaker 1: the school newspaper, written by an anonymous writer who was
Speaker 1: almost certainly al Ron Hubbard himself. Uh so, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: read you that school newspaper article trying to get other
Speaker 1: kids to join his expedition in the Caribbean. Contrary to
Speaker 1: popular belief, Wind Jammer days are not over in Romance
Speaker 1: refuses to die the death at least for fifty young
Speaker 1: gentlemen Rovers, who will set sail on the schooner Doris
Speaker 1: Hamlin from Baltimore on twenty June for the Pirate haunts
Speaker 1: of the Spanish Main. According to L. Ron Hubbard, the
Speaker 1: strongholds and bivouacs of the Spanish Main have lay neglected
Speaker 1: and forgotten for centuries, and there has never been a
Speaker 1: concerted attempt to tear apart the jungles to find the
Speaker 1: castles of Teach Morgan, Bonnet, Bluebeard, kid Sharp down there
Speaker 1: where the sun is whipping up heat waves from the palms.
Speaker 1: This crew of gentlemen Rovers will re enact the scenes
Speaker 1: which struck terror into the hearts of the world only
Speaker 1: a few hundred years ago, with a difference that this
Speaker 1: time it will be for the benefit of the fun
Speaker 1: and the flickering ribbon of celluloid. In their spare time,
Speaker 1: if they have any, they will scale the heights of
Speaker 1: belching volcanoes, hunting the thick jungles, shoot flying fish on
Speaker 1: the wing, YadA YadA, YadA YadA. Yeah, so it sounds
Speaker 1: like a great adventure. Um, the Great Depression was in
Speaker 1: its height at this point, so it was like a
Speaker 1: lot of kids signed up because they're like, well, what
Speaker 1: else are we gonna do? There's no jobs, might as
Speaker 1: well have an adventure sailing around in the Caribbean. Um.
Speaker 1: Hubbard claimed that Fox Movie Tone and Pathane News had
Speaker 1: already put in bids for the film rights. He claimed
Speaker 1: the New York Times had contracted to buy the photographs.
Speaker 1: So he's basically promising that they would do this expedition
Speaker 1: and sell a bunch of video and photos and everybody
Speaker 1: would get money. That was the claim going out there.
Speaker 1: Um now it was all lies, of course, and Eldon
Speaker 1: Hubard actually hadn't worked out deals with any media agencies.
Speaker 1: The New York Times has no record of this, neither
Speaker 1: do any of the agencies he said he'd contracted with.
Speaker 1: He didn't even have enough money to properly finance the
Speaker 1: whole expedition, so the Doris Hamlin, which did sail out,
Speaker 1: had to return to Port about a month early, having
Speaker 1: found no pirate strongholds and filmed no movies. The captain
Speaker 1: Hubbard had hired called the voyage the worst trip I
Speaker 1: ever made. Most of the gentleman Rovers jumped ship at
Speaker 1: their first two ports. Um, yeah, yeah it was. It
Speaker 1: was kind of a disaster. Yeah, good for them though,
Speaker 1: good for you abandoning ship whatever. You know, the sunk
Speaker 1: cost fallacy can make fools of us. All sometimes in
Speaker 1: support and just get off that boat. Which in the
Speaker 1: third episode of this three part series, there will be
Speaker 1: a boat that people don't get off of. We will
Speaker 1: see what happens when l Ron Hubbard gets to carry
Speaker 1: one of his dreams of taking a bunch of people
Speaker 1: on a boat to the furthest extent. He never gives
Speaker 1: up this idea. So in September, when you know, everyone's
Speaker 1: back in school and Hubbard's back from his failed voyage
Speaker 1: to the Spanish main, l Ron Hubbard wrote an article
Speaker 1: chronicling his journey for the school newspaper. In this article,
Speaker 1: the journey was turned into a historic success where everybody
Speaker 1: got laid. Yeah, it was all like no girls allowed.
Speaker 1: It seemed like no, of course not. Gentlemen Rovers can't
Speaker 1: can't you have a gentle lady Romer. No, absolutely not no, no, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: would you have wanted to be on that boat? No,
Speaker 1: testster know that sounds like a nightmare. I mean, I'll
Speaker 1: be honest. If at age like nineteen, I'd had a
Speaker 1: chance to get on like a sailing ship and traveled
Speaker 1: to the Caribbean and pretend to be a pirate, I probably,
Speaker 1: but it could have been convinced to do it. But
Speaker 1: I had a lot of dumb ship when I was nineteen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Hubbard wrote in the article. When they weren't out catching
Speaker 1: sharks or harpooning or visiting some colorful spot, they were
Speaker 1: capably entertained by the dark eyed Senorita's at the various ports.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess he just invented that all. The article
Speaker 1: also hailed the scientific achievements of the expedition, which mostly
Speaker 1: included a bunch of film and specimen donations to the
Speaker 1: University of Michigan. The University of Michigan has no record
Speaker 1: of any donations from Ron Hubbard. Seeing any trend here
Speaker 1: so far? But really you picked up on a pattern,
Speaker 1: Well there isn't one yet U. Ron Hubbard dropped out
Speaker 1: of school shortly after getting back from this and We
Speaker 1: will be getting into all of that and what happened
Speaker 1: after he leaves college later in the start of his
Speaker 1: career writing terrible pulp fiction. But before we get into that,
Speaker 1: give me a good ad segue, Caitlin. Hey, everyone, uh,
Speaker 1: stay tuned for more l Ron hubberd. But until then,
Speaker 1: to check out this ad that was fantastic, really really natural.
Speaker 1: That's the part that makes it most convincing to people.
Speaker 1: And we're back. Our producer Sophie just had to throw
Speaker 1: out a salad that was really bad. So if you
Speaker 1: want to feel like you were with us while you
Speaker 1: listen to the show, make yourself a terrible salad and
Speaker 1: then throw it away. When we last left off of
Speaker 1: our story, l Ron Hubbard had dropped out of college
Speaker 1: after a failed expedition to pretend to be pirates and
Speaker 1: the Caribbean. What a time the thirties were, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: According to a brief biography of l. Ron Hubbard, pulished
Speaker 1: after he came up with dianatics. His first action on
Speaker 1: leaving college was to blow up steam by leading an
Speaker 1: expedition into Central America. In the next few years, he
Speaker 1: headed three all of them undertaken to study savage peoples
Speaker 1: and cultures to provide fodder for his articles and stories.
Speaker 1: Between nineteen thirty three and nineteen forty one, he visited
Speaker 1: many barbaric cultures and yet found time to write seven
Speaker 1: million words of public fact and fiction. No, no no, this
Speaker 1: is true. He did get published probably about two million
Speaker 1: words something like that of mostly fiction. So like he
Speaker 1: was a prolific writer from thirty three to forty one,
Speaker 1: he didn't write seven million words, right, And he just
Speaker 1: would like, I gotta find some savage people to write about.
Speaker 1: And that's a hundred percent lies. He didn't go to
Speaker 1: Central America. We have no record of any expeditions that
Speaker 1: he led to study savage peoples and cultures. But also
Speaker 1: the fact that he was like, Yeah, these disgusting savages,
Speaker 1: gotta go find out about them and exploit them and
Speaker 1: their lifestyles. I mean, it's nineteen fifty nine. Calling them
Speaker 1: people is almost woke. Good. Fine, But obviously, right after
Speaker 1: Hubbard dropped out of school, his dad used his Navy
Speaker 1: connections to get Hubbard a gig doing volunteer work in
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico for the Red Cross, which I think is
Speaker 1: the closest he got to a expedition into Central America,
Speaker 1: which is not very close to being an expedition in
Speaker 1: Central not at all that this is what I think
Speaker 1: he's talking about. He immediately abandoned his commitment to the
Speaker 1: Red Cross as soon as he arrived on the island
Speaker 1: and instead wandered off into the woods to search for
Speaker 1: gold he believed that Punkistadors had hidden. So he is
Speaker 1: purely delusional, right, It's hard to say how much of
Speaker 1: him is just a liar and how much of him
Speaker 1: is living in a fantasy world, because it's clearly a
Speaker 1: mix of the two. Because he's not a hundred percent
Speaker 1: a liar. I can't believe that after having read his story.
Speaker 1: Some of this is he just lives in this whimsical
Speaker 1: world of his. He'll just take like a nugget of
Speaker 1: true information and then like blow it way out of proportion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because like for the rest of his life he would
Speaker 1: talk about like how he was a gold prospector and
Speaker 1: not for a time it was like you wanted around
Speaker 1: the jungle and didn't find goals. Um. Yeah. Scientology lore
Speaker 1: claims that he carried out the first mineralogical survey of
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico, but there is again no evidence of this.
Speaker 1: He did briefly work for a prospecting company, but he
Speaker 1: was back in the mainland United States within a few months.
Speaker 1: In April nineteen thirty three, he married a woman named Polly.
Speaker 1: He was ostensibly working as a writer during this period,
Speaker 1: but Polly later claimed that in their first year together
Speaker 1: he probably made less than a hundred dollars. Now at
Speaker 1: this point, he was writing mostly nonfiction. Later that year,
Speaker 1: he claimed to have found gold on his own land,
Speaker 1: and there's some news reports of interviews with him about
Speaker 1: the gold he found on his land. That appears to
Speaker 1: have been a lie, cooked up for the benefit of
Speaker 1: a scheme that we don't know the other half of.
Speaker 1: Like I'm gonna assume he tried to make money off
Speaker 1: of it, But all we know is there's these articles
Speaker 1: about him finding gold and no evidence that he ever
Speaker 1: found gold. He was clearly trying something, But you're not
Speaker 1: going to catch the whole story. For every one of
Speaker 1: this guy's schemes, he never was not scheming a b
Speaker 1: S always be, always be scheming. Nineteen thirty four saw
Speaker 1: the explosion of the only art form el Ron Hubbard
Speaker 1: would ever truly master, pulp fantasy fiction. From like thirty
Speaker 1: three to thirty four, hundreds of new magazines started up
Speaker 1: around the United States. Many of these were like weekly
Speaker 1: magazines that would have like fifteen twenty different stories in them,
Speaker 1: and he would total like sixty seventy thousand words. So
Speaker 1: like every week they're putting out like a novel's worth
Speaker 1: of short stories. And there's dozens of magazines doing this.
Speaker 1: So there's a huge amount of hunger in this market
Speaker 1: for quickly written, cheap stories of cowboys and Indians, of gangsters,
Speaker 1: of monster and bear attacks like that sort of stuff
Speaker 1: was so sold in this period. So a man capable
Speaker 1: of ceaseless, effortless machine gun rapidity lying was perfectly. He
Speaker 1: was built to write really really quick, shitty fiction. Um
Speaker 1: and and he was good at it up until this point,
Speaker 1: Like I said, he'd written mostly for sportsman magazines and
Speaker 1: national geographic type oflication and lying about his expeditions and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but as soon as he became aware of the hunger
Speaker 1: for pulp fiction, Lafayette Ron Hubbard knew what he needed
Speaker 1: to do. For six straight weeks, he wrote one short
Speaker 1: story per day each between forty and twenty thousand words,
Speaker 1: which is an insane rate of product. Fathom that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: can you fathom it? If the person writing these never
Speaker 1: edits anything, never even reads over his own stories. He
Speaker 1: would just type out a story in one long swoop
Speaker 1: and then mail it off to a random magazine. So
Speaker 1: there's probably like continuity errors and like all kinds of consistency,
Speaker 1: really messy tales. Yeah yeah, yeah, but who gives a ship.
Speaker 1: They need stories, and most of them didn't even get accepted,
Speaker 1: Like he's just writing so many stories shifting out this
Speaker 1: least horrible, horrible, horrible stories. Also, the movie pulp fiction
Speaker 1: was based on, he certainly wasn't influenced, because he helped
Speaker 1: to find the genre. His stories had titles like Green
Speaker 1: God Calling, Squad Cars, See Things, dead Men Kill, and
Speaker 1: The Carnival of Death. Yeah. I would watch some of
Speaker 1: those movies. Of course. He was good at titling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course he would. And he was like for he
Speaker 1: certainly wasn't bad for a pulp fiction writer. He was
Speaker 1: definitely in the middle of the pack in terms of
Speaker 1: quality goes. But he was mostly famous for just no
Speaker 1: one else could write this much um, And this does
Speaker 1: seem to be like his real talent was he could
Speaker 1: just write like a fucking bazooka like it's it was crazy.
Speaker 1: Have you ever read any of it? Yeah, it's really bad,
Speaker 1: but I don't like pulp. It's all really bad, like
Speaker 1: I enjoy um HP Lovecraft, and he's an objectively bad writer.
Speaker 1: There's fun ideas in it that are scary, but it's
Speaker 1: not good writing. Of course. It's not good pacing, like
Speaker 1: neither Stephen King for that man. Yeah, good stories, great
Speaker 1: horror writer, kind of clunky gross. I've actually not read
Speaker 1: much or if any. Oh no, I've I read the
Speaker 1: Shoshank Redemption novella. That that one. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: Stephen King is like the good version of l Ron
Speaker 1: Hip because they both were able to write it in
Speaker 1: absurd rate. Um. But Stephen King was just like, whow okay,
Speaker 1: I can just write stories people enjoy and not create
Speaker 1: a cult. Yeah, I'm just gonna be on cocaine. No,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna do lots of drugs. Be Stephen King,
Speaker 1: not l Ron Hubbard. If you have this gift, so
Speaker 1: Elron Hubbard quickly made a name for himself in the
Speaker 1: pulp fiction set. He started traveling to New York City
Speaker 1: regularly and became a fixture among pulp writers and editors.
Speaker 1: He made sure they knew him as quote, a real character.
Speaker 1: He portrayed himself as a badass who, despite his young age,
Speaker 1: had lived a life full of death defying adventures. Some
Speaker 1: of these men, like the writer Frank Grouper, quickly picked
Speaker 1: Hubbard out as a bullshit artist. Quote. One evening, a
Speaker 1: Grouper set through a long account of Ron's experiences in
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps, his exploration of the Upper Amazon, and
Speaker 1: his years as a white hunter in Africa. At the
Speaker 1: end of it, he asked, with obvious sarcasm, Ron, You're
Speaker 1: eighty four years old, aren't you. What the hell are
Speaker 1: you talking about? Ron snapped. Grouper waved a notebook in
Speaker 1: which he had been jotting figures. Well, he said, you
Speaker 1: were in the Marines seven years. You were a civil
Speaker 1: engineer for six years. You spent four years in Brazil,
Speaker 1: three in Africa. You barnstormed with your own flying circus
Speaker 1: for six years. I've just added up all the years
Speaker 1: you did this and that comes to eight four. Good
Speaker 1: on him, hill him out on his bullshit, But he
Speaker 1: still liked Tubbart. Like even the people. Pretty much everyone
Speaker 1: knew he was full of ship for the most part,
Speaker 1: but they he was fun to be around, like his
Speaker 1: stories were usually entertaining. Um, he was. He was an
Speaker 1: interesting guy. Most people seem to like him. Yeah. For
Speaker 1: a while, his career went pretty well. Uh. In nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five, Columbia Motion Pictures paid him to write a
Speaker 1: fifteen part film story called The Secret of Treasure Island
Speaker 1: was played in like fifteen different days or something like
Speaker 1: that during Saturday morning. Matt May services like it was
Speaker 1: a little sequential thing, and this is the only Hollywood
Speaker 1: thing he was ever involved with. But for the rest
Speaker 1: of his life he would claim to be a Hollywood
Speaker 1: screenwriter and just claimed he had written famous movies that
Speaker 1: he didn't write, and that there's no evidence he had
Speaker 1: anything to do with what I'm gonna just start doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, the Church of Science. He says he was
Speaker 1: one of the legends of Hollywood's Golden Age. That's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, just lie, yeah, lie, I am claiming you
Speaker 1: wrote great movies. Alright, guys, everyone, I wrote The Godfather
Speaker 1: Part two. Oh that was you. I produced it. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we should already know Chang. Yeah, I mean I could
Speaker 1: actually claim that pretty easily. I don't even have to
Speaker 1: change my name. Um. So the reality is that he
Speaker 1: tried to start a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't hack it, and so he moved back
Speaker 1: East to write more trashy pulp fiction in the woods
Speaker 1: with his wife. He developed a number of pseudonyms for
Speaker 1: his work with various publications, names like Winchester Rimington, cult,
Speaker 1: just like gun gun gun cults, A gun is it? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: could like was the most famous handgun in the world
Speaker 1: at the time. I heard a cult, no cult, no,
Speaker 1: no coult No, it was three guns gun gun gun.
Speaker 1: I'm gun gun gunna wits. Kurt von Racken was another,
Speaker 1: which I think was just like a badass sounding German
Speaker 1: name renee Lafayette, which is at least half his real name.
Speaker 1: Joe Blitz and Legionnaire. These are good names, These are
Speaker 1: good names. No, he's got some gifts. He's got some gifts. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Isaac Asimov liked a lot of his fiction, so like
Speaker 1: he gained some respect within the community. He certainly wasn't
Speaker 1: seen as like the worst. He was one of the
Speaker 1: most prominent names in UH in the pulp fiction universe
Speaker 1: at that point. People talked mostly though about like the
Speaker 1: rate of speed at which he was able to put
Speaker 1: out stories. There were rumors that he typed using one
Speaker 1: incredibly long piece of paper at a time, that each
Speaker 1: story was just one massive scroll that he would roll
Speaker 1: up when he was done. Uh. There were rumors that
Speaker 1: he built his own keyboard with single keys for the
Speaker 1: words that he used most often because he just typed
Speaker 1: so fast. That's actually very smart if that's true, which
Speaker 1: I don't think. It is no evidence that's that's smart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would have been smart if he'd done it. I
Speaker 1: don't think I've ever made enough money to get his
Speaker 1: own custom typewriter. There were stories that editors would just
Speaker 1: send messengers to his hotel room with like cover art
Speaker 1: and then wait outside while he wrote a story to
Speaker 1: go with the cover art, like so he would just
Speaker 1: like reverse engineer stories based on these are at least
Speaker 1: stories about him, and it's not hard to believe given
Speaker 1: the rate at which he produced words in a day
Speaker 1: is insane. I can't even write three words a day.
Speaker 1: This script is about eighteen thousand words, and I wrote
Speaker 1: it in two days, and that was a lot of writing.
Speaker 1: So well brag okay, yeah, yeah, well look, join my
Speaker 1: cold just joined my colt. I'm already there, baby, Okay,
Speaker 1: Well I need a boat. We're gonna I got a whole.
Speaker 1: I have got a whole slow boats you know what?
Speaker 1: Not just gentlemen rovers on my boat trip to the
Speaker 1: Caribbean where we pretend to be pirates. You're gonna let
Speaker 1: women to how how progressive? Well, I want to be
Speaker 1: able to scam twice as many people, of course, Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely so. Obviously. Hubbard eventually turned from writing you know,
Speaker 1: adventure tales and cop drew almost to writing cheesy science fiction.
Speaker 1: This is sort of the period in the mid thirties
Speaker 1: when sci fi starts to blow up as a genre,
Speaker 1: and he was part of the Golden Age of science fiction.
Speaker 1: He wrote alongside guys like I already noted, Isaac asim Off,
Speaker 1: but Robert Hidland else broud de Camp. He was like
Speaker 1: one of the founders of popular science fiction. And in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight, when his writing career was near its height,
Speaker 1: he wrote a book called Excalibur, which he never showed
Speaker 1: to anybody but constantly claimed was going to change the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Excalibur was a work of philosophy, not of fiction, and
Speaker 1: it was Hubbard claimed a work of such breathtaking philosophic
Speaker 1: brilliance that it drove everyone who read it to commit suicide.
Speaker 1: That's why he says he couldn't show it to anybody
Speaker 1: at the locket in the bank fault, because people killed
Speaker 1: themselves when they read this amazing book. Could even that? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can only imagine. I can't imagine he just wrote
Speaker 1: a book so good people shoot themselves. You know that
Speaker 1: feeling when you finish a really good book and then
Speaker 1: you go buy a gun. Yeah, yeah, about three guns?
Speaker 1: The other one? Yeah, one name for each of the
Speaker 1: guns you'll have to buy when you finish his his
Speaker 1: amazing book. Um. Some people claim they actually read copies
Speaker 1: of this back in thirty eight. Some people claim he
Speaker 1: never wrote it. We don't really know if he ever
Speaker 1: wrote a book and showed it to some people and
Speaker 1: then shelved it, or if it was all aliative. Again
Speaker 1: with people who claimed that they read drafts of it
Speaker 1: said that its whole focus was about like the need
Speaker 1: to survive, Like that was Hubbard's big The survival instinct
Speaker 1: was his big like philosophical focus. The thing he was Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's like, here's how to survive but then it
Speaker 1: drives people to for some reason. Yeah. We don't know
Speaker 1: what he wrote in the book, but he wrote about
Speaker 1: the book to a number of people, including his wife.
Speaker 1: In a nineteen thirty eight he wrote her a letter
Speaker 1: about it that includes this paragraph that provides some insight.
Speaker 1: This is Hubbard's writing. The entire function of man is
Speaker 1: to survive. The outermost limit of endeavor is creative work.
Speaker 1: Anything less is too close to simple survival until death
Speaker 1: happens along. So I'm engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium
Speaker 1: sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to
Speaker 1: astound the gods. I turned the thing up. So it's
Speaker 1: up to me to survive in a big way, foolishly perhaps,
Speaker 1: but determined. Nonetheless, I have high hopes for smashing my
Speaker 1: name into history so violently that it will take a
Speaker 1: legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal
Speaker 1: is the real goal, as far as I am concerned.
Speaker 1: So this is honestly, he kind of accomplished. He sure did. No. No,
Speaker 1: this is part of why it's hard to hate him.
Speaker 1: This is a man who set a goal to smash
Speaker 1: his name into history and did it in a really
Speaker 1: shitty scary way, but not a failure. I live near
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard Lane or where in Los Angeles. The
Speaker 1: building we're in we'll probably do the video later in it,
Speaker 1: but the giant Church of Scientology building is like right
Speaker 1: off of like our balcony and stuff like. He definitely
Speaker 1: smashed his name into history and that was his goal
Speaker 1: at age seven and night, So there you go. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the late nineteen thirties, l Ron Hubbard bought a
Speaker 1: boat and convinced the Explorers Club to let him carry
Speaker 1: their flag on a DIO experimental expedition with his wife.
Speaker 1: The journey did achieve some useful scientific ends and did
Speaker 1: help better map the route up to Alaska, so that's nice.
Speaker 1: Ron's aunt Marnie, suspected the trip was mainly an excuse
Speaker 1: for him to convince various companies to outfit his boat
Speaker 1: for free, because he would write to all of them saying,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do this expedition. You need to send me
Speaker 1: free ship, which is smart, and he got a lot
Speaker 1: of free ship. His boat did break down in Alaska,
Speaker 1: and he spent most of the trip hanging out at
Speaker 1: a radio station in a small town in Alaska, lying
Speaker 1: about fighting German saboteurs and grizzly bears and stuff. So again,
Speaker 1: still spent most of his timeline, but did achieve some
Speaker 1: minor scientific got to commend him for that. His second
Speaker 1: expedition worked a lot better than his first. That's hard
Speaker 1: to argue with. Ron Hubbard did serve his country in
Speaker 1: World War Two. The exact extent of his service is
Speaker 1: somewhat open for debate. The official Church of Scientology line
Speaker 1: is that he was commissioned before the war and was
Speaker 1: present in the Philippines when Japan invaded. He was the
Speaker 1: first American casualty in the Far East, flown home in
Speaker 1: the Secretary of the Navy's own airplane. He served in
Speaker 1: five different theater years of the war and received twenty
Speaker 1: two Medals're gonna guess how much of that's true. I
Speaker 1: would say maybe five percent. None of it. None of it. Well, No,
Speaker 1: he did enlist before the war, but that's that's the
Speaker 1: only thing that's true. He didn't see any combat. He
Speaker 1: was supposed to have been in the Philippines, and if
Speaker 1: he had actually been sent there, he might have wound
Speaker 1: up fighting the Japanese in the Philippines, which would have
Speaker 1: been a hell of a thing. But while he was
Speaker 1: on his way to Manila, his commanding officers decided they
Speaker 1: hated him so much that they sent him home. Because
Speaker 1: here's his personnel file. This officer is not satisfactory for
Speaker 1: independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give
Speaker 1: impressions of his importance. He also seems to think he
Speaker 1: has unusual ability in most lines. These characteristics indicate that
Speaker 1: he will require close supervisions for satisfactory performance of any
Speaker 1: intelligence duty. So he's just like going around like telling
Speaker 1: his stupid stories to like anyone who will listen and
Speaker 1: just like get this. And then he's lying to like
Speaker 1: actual military intelligence people and they're like, no, get this guy.
Speaker 1: We don't want this guy anywhere near as like get
Speaker 1: him the funk away. Yeah, it's the military there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that said he was better at tricking other people in
Speaker 1: the military. He should have done if he did seek combat,
Speaker 1: is just give his book Excalibur to all the enemies
Speaker 1: and then they would just kill them. Just air drop Excalibur.
Speaker 1: We could we could have used that instead of the nukes,
Speaker 1: just dropped those over Japan and in the war exactly.
Speaker 1: We could have just given one to Hitler, damn it,
Speaker 1: l ron your gift. So after this, he was sent
Speaker 1: back to a training center in Georgetown, Maine, where he
Speaker 1: lied and told everyone that he had served extensively on destroyers.
Speaker 1: His instructors believed him, and he became the classroom source
Speaker 1: for information on destroyer piloting, even though he had never
Speaker 1: been in one. He just lied about it. Eventually, Lieutenant
Speaker 1: Hubbard talked his way into command of an anti submarine boat,
Speaker 1: a corvette, the U S s PC eight one five.
Speaker 1: The command of it. Yeah, a little boat, like a
Speaker 1: pt boat, like a little bit of boat meant to
Speaker 1: hunt submarines. Like I don't like eight or nine guys
Speaker 1: on it. But he did talk his way into getting
Speaker 1: a boat. He loves boats. He really loves bot He
Speaker 1: really loves not good with him, really bad with him actually,
Speaker 1: but he loves both. The Church of Scientology essentially put
Speaker 1: out fake military paperwork about out on Hubbard's service, and
Speaker 1: then journalists went to the actual military which confirmed, like now,
Speaker 1: there's no evidence of him doing any of this. But
Speaker 1: according to the Church of Scientology's fake military documents, for
Speaker 1: part of the war, Mr Hubbard was in command of
Speaker 1: a squadron of corvettes. In ninety three, the vessel under
Speaker 1: his direct command, PC eight one five was engaged in
Speaker 1: action which resulted in the sinking of one Japanese submarine
Speaker 1: and the disabling of another. This incident, which took place
Speaker 1: off the coast of Oregon, was described by Mr Hubbard
Speaker 1: in a report that he sent to the Commander in
Speaker 1: chief of the Pacific Fleet. Sounds really impressive, taken out
Speaker 1: to Japanese subs, pretty cool, pretty significant contribution to the
Speaker 1: war effort protecting Oregon. Oregon's great, except for all the racists.
Speaker 1: So ship that racist line really threw me off for
Speaker 1: a second. Um, we're gonna talk about what actually happened
Speaker 1: and run Hubbard's epic naval battle with what may have
Speaker 1: been Japanese submarines but almost certainly was something a lot
Speaker 1: less interesting. We're gonna talk about that in a while,
Speaker 1: But first, Caitlin, do you love products? You know what?
Speaker 1: I love this product that you're about to hear about.
Speaker 1: Let's listen to it and we're back. We're talking about
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard and his epic naval battle with a
Speaker 1: pair of Japanese submarines. So basically, what Hubbard claims is
Speaker 1: that while they were sailing up from Oregon, there had
Speaker 1: been a Japanese bombing raid on Oregon, Like I think
Speaker 1: it was like a balloon or something that had bombs
Speaker 1: attached to They did attack a place on the Oregon
Speaker 1: coast near this time, so everybody was like freaked out
Speaker 1: in paranoid and Hubbard was sailing down from Oregon and
Speaker 1: essentially thought that he had sighted a submarine and started
Speaker 1: dropping depth charges on it and called in other boats
Speaker 1: for back up, and for two days l Ron Hubbard
Speaker 1: and like five ships were just bombing the ship out
Speaker 1: of what he said was Japanese submarines. Nobody else actually
Speaker 1: dropped any bombs because they didn't find anything. They were
Speaker 1: just like sailing around. Well rotten Hubbard bombed the ocean.
Speaker 1: It random, It's probably just like a family on a yacht.
Speaker 1: And he was like, it's even sadder than that. So
Speaker 1: the Navy had Admiral Frank Fletcher, who was the operational
Speaker 1: commander during the Battle of Midway, like a very serious admiral, dude,
Speaker 1: uh investigate the so called action in which Hubbard had
Speaker 1: taken out two submarines. Because Hubbard, when he got back
Speaker 1: to base, claim that he destroyed one submarine and wounded another.
Speaker 1: Most likely. Actual research found out that what had happened
Speaker 1: is there was just a magnetic iron ore deposit on
Speaker 1: the seafloor that had fooled with his instruments, and he'd
Speaker 1: spent two days and dropped more than a hundred depth
Speaker 1: charges on a lump of metal. Oh my gosh. Lieutenant
Speaker 1: Hubbard was furious when his commanders wouldn't recognize the heroism
Speaker 1: he displayed in recklessly bombing the ocean. Now this was
Speaker 1: not a great moved for his career. Then Navy doesn't
Speaker 1: like it when you bombed the ocean. Um, so you
Speaker 1: would thinks as a prospect or he would understand a
Speaker 1: deposit of metal. But if he was a real prospector, yeah,
Speaker 1: So the good news is that he had an opportunity
Speaker 1: to redeem himself a couple of weeks later when he
Speaker 1: recklessly shelled an uninhabited Mexican island and then ordered his
Speaker 1: men to fire their weapons into the water around the island. Officially,
Speaker 1: he says this was an unapproved gunnery training exercise. Mexico
Speaker 1: said it was an American boat firing wildly on Mexican land,
Speaker 1: and so they weren't happy with this, so Hubbard lost
Speaker 1: his boat as a result of attacking Mexico. He loves boats. Uh.
Speaker 1: The admiral who looked over lists and reassigned him rated
Speaker 1: him as below average and said that he should be
Speaker 1: put on a large boat where he could be properly supervised.
Speaker 1: So for the rest of the war he would spend
Speaker 1: more time in naval hospitals than serving on ships. While
Speaker 1: he would claim to Robert Hineland and his other writer
Speaker 1: friends that he had been sunk four times and wounded repeatedly,
Speaker 1: there's no evidence that he ever suffered any service related injuries.
Speaker 1: He did come down with a duodn ulcer during his
Speaker 1: time in the military, but that's about it. Nothing as
Speaker 1: a result of combat is just an ulcer in your guts.
Speaker 1: And so after the war, el Ron Hubbard would spend
Speaker 1: most of his time lying about several unverifiable service related
Speaker 1: injuries to the v A in order to get more
Speaker 1: disability benefits. He spent years doing this. This was most
Speaker 1: of his writing in the first two years after the war,
Speaker 1: was lying to the v A about the extent of
Speaker 1: his injuries to try to get more money out of them.
Speaker 1: Thousand words a day. Please. He did eventually get at
Speaker 1: disability payment, but it was it was for nonsense. So
Speaker 1: right around this time, he abandoned his wife to hang
Speaker 1: out in a black magic sex mansion in Pasadena. What
Speaker 1: do you mean is that that's the that's weird to you? Okay,
Speaker 1: that was just a lot of information, it is, Okay,
Speaker 1: you'd expected to be more interesting than it. Really, abandoned
Speaker 1: his wife to hang out in a black magic sex
Speaker 1: cult sex mansion, sex mansion. There's this guy named Jack
Speaker 1: Parsons who was you've heard of Alistair Crowley. Okay. Alistair
Speaker 1: Crowley was like a Slemma, this like black magic sort
Speaker 1: of thing. He was a magic guy. He wrote a
Speaker 1: bunch about it. He was very prominent in that industry
Speaker 1: and like one of his industries the wrong word, but whatever,
Speaker 1: magic industry, one of the magic industry. One of his
Speaker 1: acolytes was a guy named Jack Parsons, who was like
Speaker 1: a rich kid who owned a mansion in Pasadena. And oh, okay,
Speaker 1: they touched briefly on this and going clear, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's weird and murky. I don't think Hubbard ever believed
Speaker 1: much of it. But Hubbard wanted to fuck the ladies
Speaker 1: that Jack Parson had around him, because Jack was like
Speaker 1: they had a polyamorous thing going on, because it was
Speaker 1: like we're beyond, you know, all this the constraints, and
Speaker 1: Hubbard just went in there to like steal his girlfriends
Speaker 1: basically and still twenty dollars from him because he got
Speaker 1: Parsons to invest in a yacht company and then just
Speaker 1: bought a yacht for himself and the girlfriend got to
Speaker 1: move away, so he lived on a yacht for a
Speaker 1: while until he had to sell it. Uh. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: whole black Magic sex mansion thing isn't as interesting as
Speaker 1: it ought to be. They did try to summon the Antichrist, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it was kind of boring to be honest. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you would have hoped for more of a tale there,
Speaker 1: but I think it's all nonsense. So on August tenth,
Speaker 1: ninety six, he married the woman that he had taken
Speaker 1: away from this black magic sex mansion, the twenty one
Speaker 1: year old Sarah Northrop. He married her thirty miles away
Speaker 1: from where he had married his first wife, Pauli, thirteen
Speaker 1: years ago. He was still technically married to Paully, so
Speaker 1: this was big of me. But he's not like actively
Speaker 1: living with both of them. He's just he never before, No,
Speaker 1: he never told his first wife what had he just
Speaker 1: he just ran away. She had no idea where he was.
Speaker 1: He abandoned their kids too, they had like two kids.
Speaker 1: He just abandoned his kids and his family stole a
Speaker 1: guy's money to buy a yacht, and then old they
Speaker 1: really dodged a bullet, that first family of his. They
Speaker 1: did you get the feeling she's angry that he's a creep.
Speaker 1: You don't get the feeling. They feel like they missed out.
Speaker 1: I'm not having out run how word around. During this time,
Speaker 1: after he wed Sarah, Hubbard started selling more stories again,
Speaker 1: got back into writing pulp fiction. He sold several stories
Speaker 1: to an editor named Sam Merwin, who said of him, quote,
Speaker 1: I found him a very amusing guy and bought several
Speaker 1: stories from him. He was really quite a character. I
Speaker 1: always knew he was exceedingly anxious to hit big money.
Speaker 1: He used to say he thought the best way to
Speaker 1: do it would be to start a cult. So this
Speaker 1: is like ninety six, the first time when Hubbard, you know,
Speaker 1: starts putting out feelers that like he wants to start
Speaker 1: his own religion. He's like boats Cokes moving up, that's
Speaker 1: where the money is. He eventually moves up to boat
Speaker 1: Colt right. The whole, the whole journey. Yeah. On April
Speaker 1: fourteenth seven, Ron's first wife, Polly, filed for divorce on
Speaker 1: the grounds that her husband had abandoned her and their children.
Speaker 1: Seems pretty fair, very reasonable. She had no idea who
Speaker 1: he was living with. She had no idea he was
Speaker 1: already married to somebody else. But that changed three weeks
Speaker 1: later when Ron moved into the home he had once
Speaker 1: occupied with his first wife with his second wife. His
Speaker 1: family was furious about this because his mom and dad
Speaker 1: had been taking care of his first wife and their
Speaker 1: kids and putting them up, so they they're really angry
Speaker 1: about this. This is kind of when his aunt Marnie
Speaker 1: soured on him. Well, we loved him as a child,
Speaker 1: but he's a perfect stranger to us now, so I'm
Speaker 1: glad they realized that. Yeah, he seems to have changed.
Speaker 1: In late l Ron Hubbard met the man who had
Speaker 1: become his lifelong literary agent Forrest Ackerman. After their first meeting,
Speaker 1: Hubbard drove Forest home and told him along and insane
Speaker 1: story about how he died on the operating table and
Speaker 1: visited heaven um. He would claim a number of times
Speaker 1: in his life to have visited heaven. He once claimed
Speaker 1: to have visited heaven six or seven million years apart.
Speaker 1: He had multiple lives. Uh. Here's how Forrest recalled l
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard driving him home, telling him about his Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember he had an old rattle trap of a
Speaker 1: car and he was chewing tobacco as he drove. He
Speaker 1: would open the tour with one hand and squirt tobacco.
Speaker 1: JU said, onto the road. When we got to my apartment,
Speaker 1: we sat outside in the car while he continued with
Speaker 1: the story. It was at five o'clock in the morning
Speaker 1: and the sun was coming up before he had finished. Okay,
Speaker 1: and then he was like, better represent this guy as
Speaker 1: his literary age. I think he was like, this is
Speaker 1: a motherfucker who can tell a story. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: he had a lot of money off. So Hubbard told
Speaker 1: Ackerman about Excalibur, his suicide inducing visionary philosophy novel. I
Speaker 1: almost forgot, Yeah, I almost forgot. Don't worry. He never did. Uh.
Speaker 1: He claimed he had been rejected by publishers. Quote he
Speaker 1: was told it was too radical, too much of a
Speaker 1: quantum leap. If it had been a variation of Freud
Speaker 1: or Young or Oddler, a bit of an improvement here
Speaker 1: or there, it would have been acceptable. But it was
Speaker 1: just too far ahead of everything else. He also said
Speaker 1: that as he shocked the manuscript around, the people who
Speaker 1: read it either went insane or committed suicide. The last
Speaker 1: time he showed it to a publisher, he was sitting
Speaker 1: in an office waiting for a reader to give his opinion.
Speaker 1: The reader walked into the office, tossed the manuscript on
Speaker 1: the desk, and then threw himself out the window. Ron
Speaker 1: would not tell me much about Excalibur, except that if
Speaker 1: you read it, you would find all fear would be
Speaker 1: totally drained from you. I could never see what was
Speaker 1: wrong with that or why it would cost anyone to
Speaker 1: commit suicide. Right. Yeah. Also, that's just going to be
Speaker 1: my excuse as a as a failed screenwriter. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna like, well, my screenplays are really good and they
Speaker 1: just get rejected because people die. Hubbard continued to sell
Speaker 1: sci fi short stories during this period, making just enough
Speaker 1: money to stay alive, but not quite enough to live
Speaker 1: comfortably or stay in one place with his new wife.
Speaker 1: His most successful series was the old Doc Methuselah adventures.
Speaker 1: These are futuristic tales about a space traveling physician adventurer
Speaker 1: with an alien sidekick slave who cries whenever the doctor
Speaker 1: tries to free him. It does seem like these might
Speaker 1: have been an influence to Doctor Who, but I don't
Speaker 1: know that. But it was about like an immortal doctor
Speaker 1: traveling through the universe, solving mysteries and stuff with a slave. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it may have been, may have been. It was pretty popular.
Speaker 1: L Ron wasn't exactly a genius, but he was probably
Speaker 1: one of the ten most notable names in science fiction
Speaker 1: at this time. UM. At some point he earned the
Speaker 1: attention of John W. Campbell, who was a very famous editor.
Speaker 1: He's some people call him the father of science fiction.
Speaker 1: You know, Mary Shelley's probably the mother and founder of
Speaker 1: the discipline. But he was the editor of Astounding Science Fiction,
Speaker 1: and like most of the greats of the sci fi
Speaker 1: Golden Age, worked with him, and he was apparently really really,
Speaker 1: really good editor, and he liked el Ron Hubbard, but
Speaker 1: his work with Ron would be something outside of the
Speaker 1: sci fi genre. See Hubbard. At this time decided that
Speaker 1: he didn't want to keep writing short stories and dimestone novels.
Speaker 1: He wanted the respect he thought he was entitled as
Speaker 1: a philosopher. Uh So, in January of l Ron Hubbard
Speaker 1: wrote a letter to his agent and promised him a
Speaker 1: book on philosophy. Here's how bare faced Messiah summed it up.
Speaker 1: Ron promised that among the handy household hints contained in
Speaker 1: the book was information on how to quote rape women
Speaker 1: without their knowing. It, communicates suicide messages to your enemies
Speaker 1: as they sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco Parkway to the
Speaker 1: mayor for cash, and evolved the best way of protecting
Speaker 1: or destroying communism. He had not decided, he added, casually,
Speaker 1: whether to destroy the Catholic church or merely start a
Speaker 1: new one. There's that paragraph. How do you even start
Speaker 1: to unpack that? I mean, some of that is like
Speaker 1: nine people would be like, oh yeah, teach guys out
Speaker 1: of right. Sure, it's everyone was terrible. It's just a
Speaker 1: garbage year. But yeah, buckle up, not get more pro women. Actually,
Speaker 1: I'll say this for l. Ron Hubbard, I kept expecting
Speaker 1: him to be a rapist. I have no evidence that
Speaker 1: he was a rapist, no accusations or anything like that,
Speaker 1: which you really expect with these guys, really do, especially
Speaker 1: if he's taking that sort of especially he's taking that
Speaker 1: sort of stance. Well. Also, society's understanding of what rape
Speaker 1: was back then was a bit different. Later that year,
Speaker 1: rumors began to spread in the science fiction community that l.
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard was up to something new. He was planning
Speaker 1: to reveal a new science of the mind, something that
Speaker 1: didn't seem as odd to people then as it does
Speaker 1: to us now. Science fiction had already developed an uncanny
Speaker 1: reputation for predicting the future. Science fiction writers had been
Speaker 1: the ones who sort of called nuclear bombs and stuff
Speaker 1: like that had been predicted, so had space travel and
Speaker 1: everything by science fiction writers. So there was a real
Speaker 1: belief in the community that like, something brilliant was going
Speaker 1: to be born out of all this fiction. So they
Speaker 1: were ready for a sci fi author to create a
Speaker 1: new science like that didn't seem crazy to people like nowadays.
Speaker 1: And someone's like, you hear about this new science fiction
Speaker 1: writer who's launching a science Okay, yeah, Okay, that's not
Speaker 1: where you do it, right, Yeah. That December of nine,
Speaker 1: John Campbell published an editorial in the December issue of
Speaker 1: an Astounding Science fiction. He revealed the imminent release of
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard's new science, Dianetics. Do don dun dun
Speaker 1: quote from John Campbell, It's power is almost unbelievable. It
Speaker 1: proves the mind not only can, but does rule the
Speaker 1: body completely. Following the sharply defined basic laws set forth,
Speaker 1: physical ills such as ulcers, asthma, and arthritis can be cured,
Speaker 1: as can all other psychosomatic ills. So John Campbell was
Speaker 1: a believer because el Ron Hubbard had already used his
Speaker 1: revolutionary new science to cure the editor's chronic sinusitis. Most
Speaker 1: of the work of Dianetics revolved around sitting down with
Speaker 1: an auditor and remembering old trump adic incidents from one's past.
Speaker 1: Campbell believe Hubbard had taken him back to the moment
Speaker 1: of his birth, which somehow fixed his nose. I don't know,
Speaker 1: he believed it. Uh. In mid nineteen fifty, before the
Speaker 1: publication of his book on dionetics, I'll Run, Hubbard attended
Speaker 1: the last meeting of his life as a simple science
Speaker 1: fiction writer. It was a convention in Newark, a sort
Speaker 1: of prototype for comic con like events of today. During
Speaker 1: the meeting, Hubbard is reported to have said, writing for
Speaker 1: a penny award is ridiculous. If a man really wanted
Speaker 1: to make a million dollars, the best way to do
Speaker 1: it would be to start his own religion. In April
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty, Campbell t's that coming in June, a
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand word article on dionetics would be in the
Speaker 1: magazine titled Dionetics An Introduction to a New Science. In
Speaker 1: his hype article, Campbell related the story of an ampute
Speaker 1: veteran who Hubbard had saved. Basically, he claimed that, like,
Speaker 1: this guy had been hit by a mortar shell, and like,
Speaker 1: while the medics were coming through afterwards that were like,
Speaker 1: this guy's hopeless, he's better off dead anyway. And then
Speaker 1: he wound up surviving, but he wanted to kill himself
Speaker 1: because the he had read Excalibur No No, because the
Speaker 1: memory of these medics saying that he was better off
Speaker 1: dead had gotten lodged in his brain. And that was
Speaker 1: what dianetics was all about, is bad memories get misfiled
Speaker 1: in your brain, and you have to go through with
Speaker 1: this auditing therapy and refile them. Basically, so Hubbard and
Speaker 1: Campbell succeeded in wangling support from an actual medical doctor
Speaker 1: for their science. You gotta remember science is and it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty rudimentary science. It's not an exact science. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of nonsense going on in science. And so
Speaker 1: this guy, doctor Winner sits in on several auditing sessions.
Speaker 1: Because they would run auditing sessions on just sci fi
Speaker 1: fans that Campbell brought in. They were just performing quasi
Speaker 1: psychiatry on strangers who walked in off the street and
Speaker 1: just liked reading science fiction. But yeah, Eventually Dr Winter
Speaker 1: agreed to go through a session himself and found it
Speaker 1: really compelling. He added that in the other patients he'd observed,
Speaker 1: the changes were obvious and people seemed to be cheerful
Speaker 1: and relaxed and feel better after they got out of
Speaker 1: a dianetic session, So he figured, maybe there's something to
Speaker 1: do this, Like this seems like it might be a
Speaker 1: real science. It really seems like what was going on is,
Speaker 1: you know, psychotherapy was pretty new as a discipline at
Speaker 1: this point, and Diane edics, which just sort of repackaging
Speaker 1: psychotherapy with different names. But like, there's a benefit in
Speaker 1: sitting down with your friends and talking about and talking
Speaker 1: about your feelings, and that's what he was doing so
Speaker 1: that's what people found benefit with because people didn't talk
Speaker 1: about their feelings. Men didn't talk about their feelings, so
Speaker 1: there was a benefit to this um It wasn't Hubbard's genius.
Speaker 1: It was just the benefit of sitting down and talking
Speaker 1: about your feelings. Dr Winter actually tried to publish an
Speaker 1: article on Hubbard's methods, but the Journal of the A
Speaker 1: m A and the American Journal of Psychiatry both rejected
Speaker 1: his papers. They said that he and Hubbard had neglected
Speaker 1: to provide any clinical evidence that their techniques worked. In fact,
Speaker 1: it seemed that they were just ripping off the basic
Speaker 1: techniques of psychotherapy, giving everything new names, and making up
Speaker 1: wild claims about repressed memories. Many sci fi fans, though,
Speaker 1: were interested in this new science being launched via fandom,
Speaker 1: Although several fans wrote to Campbell to complain that all
Speaker 1: he wrote about now was dionetics, for the most part,
Speaker 1: people seemed really excited asac as him Off though did
Speaker 1: read an early copy of the dionetics article and proclaim
Speaker 1: it gibberish, so not everybody was on board. In May
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty, the Science of Dianetics was released in
Speaker 1: the form most befitting a serious new scientific discipline, a
Speaker 1: science fiction fantasy pulp fiction magazine. Here's the cover of
Speaker 1: the issue where dionetics was announced. Okay, you want to
Speaker 1: describe the cover of that astounding science fiction magazine with
Speaker 1: a new science being launched in it. It's, uh, this
Speaker 1: man appears to have hair all over his body. It's
Speaker 1: drying like an alien. Yeah, it's like he a very
Speaker 1: aggro looking man with for he appears to be wearing
Speaker 1: like a mask over his eyes, his catlike eyes. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: he is crossing his arms. He's very angry about something
Speaker 1: and um yeah, just he looks like a creature slash alien,
Speaker 1: slash werewolf. And most of the magazine that week was
Speaker 1: just a bunch of random science fiction stories. This was
Speaker 1: from the Helping Hand. I guess that's some alien coming
Speaker 1: to Earth to help Earth or whatever. The article that
Speaker 1: launched dianetics was also in this magazine. In the article,
Speaker 1: Hubbard explained that the brain was basically like a computer,
Speaker 1: and like a computer, it has the potential to operate
Speaker 1: with perfect recall and recollection. Mental illness was caused by
Speaker 1: memories that had essentially gotten misfiled in the brains, and
Speaker 1: you could refile everything. You can make brains functioned perfectly
Speaker 1: and you'd remember everything, and just human beings could be
Speaker 1: perfected by this new mental science that l. Ron Hubbard
Speaker 1: had essentially developed. Um. So yeah, he called these memories
Speaker 1: they got misfiled in grams and so like if a
Speaker 1: child got bitten by a dog when he was too
Speaker 1: she might not remember getting bitten by the dog, but
Speaker 1: the ingram would be stuck in her and it could
Speaker 1: be stimulated by sites and sounds that were similar to
Speaker 1: what had been going on around her when the dog better,
Speaker 1: and that could cause distress the purpose of dianetic theory
Speaker 1: was essentially to gain access to the in grams and
Speaker 1: what he called the reactive memory banks of the mind
Speaker 1: and refile them and the analytical part of the mind
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't react to them logically. So that was
Speaker 1: how he justified the science behind dianetics. Sounds like nonsense
Speaker 1: because it is nonsense now. Hubbard claimed that if the
Speaker 1: earliest in grams in the brain, which usually happened around childbirth,
Speaker 1: could be located and refiled, a person's analytical mind would
Speaker 1: reach new heights of productivity and success. Individuals who cleared
Speaker 1: their earliest in grams would be called clear, and they
Speaker 1: would have perfect memory recall in a total immunity from
Speaker 1: all psychological illnesses and many physical ones too. In May
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty, Dionetics The Modern Science of Mental Health
Speaker 1: reached bookstores across the nation. Its publisher, Hermitage House, only
Speaker 1: printed six thousand copies for its first run. They were
Speaker 1: not expecting a major success. The book was a guide
Speaker 1: for her to carry out auditing sessions. As described by
Speaker 1: Hubbard and Campbell in The Reader's Own Home, Hubbard was
Speaker 1: basically yeah, providing a dress up guide for people to
Speaker 1: perform unlicensed psychotherapy on their friends and family. Very safe, Yeah, Dionetics.
Speaker 1: The book was a profoundly anti woman terrorist. Greed was
Speaker 1: a feminist icon. Feminist icon Aron Hubbard claimed that attempted
Speaker 1: abortions were the single most common cause of prebirth ingrams
Speaker 1: quote a large proportion of allegedly feeble minded children or
Speaker 1: actually attempted abortion cases. However, many billions America spends yearly
Speaker 1: on institutions for the insane and jails for criminals are
Speaker 1: spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex
Speaker 1: blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a
Speaker 1: blessing of God. All these things are scientific facts, tested
Speaker 1: and rechecked and tested again. So he's like a pro life,
Speaker 1: pro rape again feminist, icon feminist, all right. He believed
Speaker 1: that other ingrams came from abuse of husbands. For example,
Speaker 1: if a husband beat his pregnant wife and yelled take it,
Speaker 1: take it. I tell you you've got to take it,
Speaker 1: the child might interpret those words literally and become a
Speaker 1: thief because take it. Ron Hubbard, he thought a pregnant
Speaker 1: woman suffering from constipation might sit on the toilet and
Speaker 1: you know, be a horrible pain and go, oh, this
Speaker 1: is how I'm all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy.
Speaker 1: I can't think. This is too terrible to be born.
Speaker 1: And so the child would think that they were so
Speaker 1: terrible they didn't deserve to be born because their mom
Speaker 1: couldn't poop. That's such a specific thing for him to
Speaker 1: write to like speculate as to what a woman say, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's great, really interesting. He thought a lot of prenatal ingrams,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the worst prenatal ingrams were caused by
Speaker 1: women cheating on their husbands. Because he assumed that a
Speaker 1: woman cheating on her husband would talk about her husband
Speaker 1: to her lover, and that the fetus developing would hear this,
Speaker 1: and since many kids had the same names as their fathers,
Speaker 1: he would think that his mom was talking about him.
Speaker 1: It's weird, right, You know how fetuses understand language perfectly.
Speaker 1: That's that's what they're most famous for, fetus is their
Speaker 1: language skills. Many of these ideas are still present in
Speaker 1: scientology today. For example, about a second worth of googling
Speaker 1: brought me to a Scientology parent website and a page
Speaker 1: on that website titled why silent Birth. It quotes out
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard. A woman who wants your child to have
Speaker 1: the best possible chance will find a doctor who will
Speaker 1: agree to keep quiet, especially during the delivery, and who
Speaker 1: will insist upon silence being maintained in the hospital living
Speaker 1: room as far as is humanly possible, because, of course,
Speaker 1: any yelling during the birth would give the child like
Speaker 1: if the doctor's like, come on, now, push the feet,
Speaker 1: is the baby is going to be like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to push people down exactly, and I'll just be
Speaker 1: a shoven monks. And that's why our streets are filled
Speaker 1: with shovers, seriously shoving people every day because I was
Speaker 1: given birth. ABS always be shoving. Yeah, scheming and shoving.
Speaker 1: Scheming and shoving both important. Dianetics was not an instant success,
Speaker 1: but within the first couple of weeks of publication, it's
Speaker 1: spread very widely enough to earn bestseller status and provoke
Speaker 1: its first negative press. The New York Times were bad
Speaker 1: stuff about it. A reviewer from New Republic savaged it
Speaker 1: and basically claimed it was it was nonsense. Whatever makes
Speaker 1: sense in his discoveries does not belong to him, and
Speaker 1: his own theory appears to this reviewer as a paranoia system,
Speaker 1: which would be of interest as part of a case history,
Speaker 1: but which seems quite dangerous when offered from mass consumption.
Speaker 1: Is the therapeutic technique? Probably fair, someone knew what they
Speaker 1: were talking about. Yeah, all the experts were like, this
Speaker 1: is a bad idea, there are you are also noted that,
Speaker 1: in addition to being able to cure psycho somatic illness,
Speaker 1: Hubbard claimed Dianetics could treat cancer and diabetes. Uh. The experts,
Speaker 1: of course cried out that this was dangerous nonsense, but
Speaker 1: no one listened. Hubbard's sold fifty copies in the first
Speaker 1: two months after release. He was finally rich. So in
Speaker 1: thirty nine short years, I'll run Hubbard had gone from
Speaker 1: a fake blood brother of the Blackfoot Indian tribe to
Speaker 1: a fake war hero, real trash novelist, and had now
Speaker 1: ascended to the lofty heights of a pop psychiatry guru.
Speaker 1: Dianetics was officially a fat, but Hubbard had a plan
Speaker 1: to keep this fat going long past its rational expiration date.
Speaker 1: And that is what we're going to get into in
Speaker 1: part two. Yeah, we haven't even gotten to the establishment
Speaker 1: of scientology yet, I know, I know, or the establishment
Speaker 1: of his boat Colt. There's so much more, so much
Speaker 1: more to get into. Caitlyn Duranti, you want to plug
Speaker 1: your plug doubles, I would simply love to. You can
Speaker 1: listen to my podcast, the Bectel Cast at how Stuff Works. Uh,
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter and Instagram at baco cast, and
Speaker 1: you can follow me on those places as well at
Speaker 1: Caitlin Toronte and you can find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: I right, Okay. We can find this podcast on the
Speaker 1: internet at behind the Bastards dot com. We'll have pictures
Speaker 1: of that wonderful issue of a Standing Science and yeah,
Speaker 1: check us out on Instagram, Twitter at Bastards Pod. You
Speaker 1: can buy our t shirts on t public behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: So go do that, wash your brains off, Come back
Speaker 1: tomorrow and here another hour or so about all Ron
Speaker 1: Hubbard being a fucking nutbar It's gonna be great. Well,
Speaker 1: but see you then