Speaker 1: H Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once
Speaker 1: again Behind the Bastards, the show that tells you everything
Speaker 1: you don't know about the very worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history. Now, this is part two of our epic
Speaker 1: three part series on l Ron Hubbard. If you haven't
Speaker 1: listened to part one, I recommend doing that now for
Speaker 1: those of you who are back for part two, you're
Speaker 1: listening to this the day after part one has dropped,
Speaker 1: but we are recording them all in one terrible marathon
Speaker 1: fell sloop. So you're at us in the point. If
Speaker 1: this were an actual marathon, this is about mile five,
Speaker 1: where you're starting to feel good, You've hit a stride,
Speaker 1: you're happy with the progress. But midway through this is
Speaker 1: when we're going to hit our wall and it's just
Speaker 1: gonna break us, both as human beings and as creative artists.
Speaker 1: So that should be really exciting for all you people.
Speaker 1: And then the third episode, we won't even be human beings,
Speaker 1: will just be shattered remnants of souls hanging on to
Speaker 1: me in Grahams in meat packing. Anyway, you ready, let's
Speaker 1: do this. So people regularly message me on Twitter to
Speaker 1: suggest new candidates for episodes of this podcast. Sometimes their
Speaker 1: suggestions are spot on, and I do appreciate them. But
Speaker 1: I get a lot of people who will love so
Speaker 1: just shitty people like Ben Shapiro or Rand Paul or
Speaker 1: Brett Kavanaugh, and I'm not going to do an episode
Speaker 1: one of these people because while they're shitty, they're all
Speaker 1: kind of lame um like, they're not interesting in a
Speaker 1: bad way. We all know the ways in which they're bad.
Speaker 1: Like Brett Kavanaugh. Everybody thinks he's bad, understands everything about
Speaker 1: him is a shitty person. That's public knowledge. I like
Speaker 1: to cover people who are shitty and exceptional, and that's
Speaker 1: why I picked el Ron Hubbard this week because I
Speaker 1: really do think We talked about this a little in
Speaker 1: the first episode. I think he may be the greatest
Speaker 1: con man who ever lived. So today is a story
Speaker 1: about we. We ended the last episode with the establishment
Speaker 1: of Dianetics as a science is kind of how he
Speaker 1: build it. You can think of like anyone Jordan Peterson.
Speaker 1: He's like that sort of guy where he you know,
Speaker 1: normally a guy like that gets six months a year
Speaker 1: of prominence or so right where everybody loves their new
Speaker 1: pop philosophy book. And then we just sort of shovel
Speaker 1: them into the coal fire of our culture and forget
Speaker 1: about them and move on. Another year. Someone else will
Speaker 1: come up and we'll we'll all be obsessed with that
Speaker 1: for a little while. L Ron Hubbard avoided letting that
Speaker 1: happen to him, and this episode is the story of
Speaker 1: how of how he fought against falling into obscurity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: If you want to become a guru and then transmit
Speaker 1: that guru nous into starting your own world religion, this
Speaker 1: is the first class you've got to take on that.
Speaker 1: Because el Ron Hubbard is the Master. Well there's that.
Speaker 1: That's why that movie is called The Master. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just got it. The Master just got it. Okay. So
Speaker 1: within two months of publishing Dionetics, more than five different
Speaker 1: dionetics groups had started across the United States. Out run
Speaker 1: Hubbard began offering classes in dionetics that were like dollars
Speaker 1: apiece um and holding you know, conferences. He established different
Speaker 1: centers in different states and whatnot foundations he called them,
Speaker 1: and the money started pouring in. Hubbard's work developed a
Speaker 1: rapid fan base who blanketed newspapers with angry letters when
Speaker 1: they provided critical commentary. It was sort of like an
Speaker 1: early example of what now happens every time anyone insults
Speaker 1: anybody popular like the first edition of the Elon Musk's
Speaker 1: Internet hate mob was l Ron Hubbard's fans of dionetics
Speaker 1: sending angry letters to the New York Times. One of
Speaker 1: the heads of Hubbard's troll brigade was a political science
Speaker 1: professor from Massachusetts named Frederick Schumann, and one letter to
Speaker 1: The New York Times, he wrote, history has become a
Speaker 1: race between dionetics and catastrophe. Dionetics will win if enough
Speaker 1: people are challenged in time to understand it. Now. The
Speaker 1: reason that people thought this was so important was because
Speaker 1: el Ron Hubbard had claimed that dionetics was not just
Speaker 1: a path to personal betterment, it was a way to
Speaker 1: cure people of mental illness, of psychopathy, and but also
Speaker 1: it was a way too If everyone did dionetics, if
Speaker 1: everybody became clear, Hubbard said, there'd be no more war.
Speaker 1: And this was again, you're talking about nineteen fifty. The
Speaker 1: specter of nuclear extermination has just arisen for the first time,
Speaker 1: so people are freaked out that like, we're going to
Speaker 1: murder the whole species, which we probably will at some point,
Speaker 1: Hubbard is claiming, with dianetics, we can denuclearise the world.
Speaker 1: We can all live in peace. You know, this is
Speaker 1: what will save humanity from the darkness of the Cold
Speaker 1: War in America. Ate it up. For the first time
Speaker 1: in his life, run Hubbard became the focus of national attention,
Speaker 1: which is clearly what he'd wanted his entire life. So
Speaker 1: suddenly he was being interviewed by a lot of journalists
Speaker 1: and newsmen, and of course they asked him about his
Speaker 1: childhood and his background. And this is when he was
Speaker 1: held all about I was a blood brother of the
Speaker 1: Blackfoot tribe across the country, sound gold, I was a
Speaker 1: pirate of the Caribbean. What's your life? If you were
Speaker 1: to write like a Twitter post tomorrow that becomes the
Speaker 1: Bible of the world six months later for some crazy
Speaker 1: piece of Internet outcome. Suddenly suddenly everybody's talking to Caitlyn
Speaker 1: Durrani and wants to know, like, would you grow up?
Speaker 1: What's the lie you choose to tell? Oh? God, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just such an honest person that I can't even
Speaker 1: make up a line. I'm never going to have your
Speaker 1: own religion with that attitude. I think the closest thing
Speaker 1: I would would be that I'm from punk Satani, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: the home of the Groundhog. Of course that's a lame line,
Speaker 1: I know, but the truth is that I'm from a
Speaker 1: town about twenty miles away. But it's just easier to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm from punk Sati. That's not even a lie. That's like,
Speaker 1: that's like growing up in Mesa and claiming you live
Speaker 1: in Phoenix, Like it's You're just making it easy for somebody.
Speaker 1: I'm just so brutally honest that I can't even fathom lying.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you how I do it. My lie
Speaker 1: would yes, okay, So Abu Bakr al Bag Daddy, the
Speaker 1: founder of isis probably dead, right, so I would just
Speaker 1: lie and say I killed him because I was over
Speaker 1: in Iraq around that time, so there's a kernel of truth.
Speaker 1: It's easy enough to make up the rest of the lie,
Speaker 1: and nobody who doesn't fact check that would be my lie.
Speaker 1: If the Internet wasn't here, it would be easier. The
Speaker 1: Internet exists, would be easy to prove it wrong. But
Speaker 1: if there's like nineteen fifty I could probably lie and
Speaker 1: make people believe that. It's so hard to fact check
Speaker 1: in the pre Internet. Yeah, there's everyone's just like I
Speaker 1: guess he was a blood I'm not gonna ask a
Speaker 1: Blackfoot Indian about whether or not they have blood brothers.
Speaker 1: Talk to somebody who's not white. No, sir, this is
Speaker 1: the New York Times, although in fairness the New York Times,
Speaker 1: they were actually very critical of Hubber and I. I
Speaker 1: picked the name of the newspaper, and I slandered the
Speaker 1: great lady. Let's get back to the story before I
Speaker 1: commit slander again. So l Ron Hubbard started, in addition
Speaker 1: to lying about his background, claiming that all of his
Speaker 1: years of work as a trashy sci fi writer and
Speaker 1: his globe trotting adventures were all research. You know, this
Speaker 1: was him studying human psychology and the human mind in
Speaker 1: order to develop his revolutionary new philosophy. All of his
Speaker 1: you know, his travels, his adventures that were not real
Speaker 1: were him studying history and ancient cultures to figure out
Speaker 1: the kernels of truth. He told Parade magazine that he'd
Speaker 1: had a child with his new wife, Sarah Hubbard, which
Speaker 1: was true. He claimed that the child was the world's
Speaker 1: first dianetics baby. He claimed to have protected her from
Speaker 1: noise and even parental conversations in order to keep her
Speaker 1: from developing any ingrams. As a result of this, he
Speaker 1: said she'd started talking at three months and crawling it
Speaker 1: four months. It's going to get terrible neglected his baby
Speaker 1: by like not talking to it or well, if I
Speaker 1: know anything about babies, it's that they thrive when isolated
Speaker 1: and neglected. Yes, I think that everyone says that about babies. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why most cradles are just dark rooms in the basement.
Speaker 1: That's how you raise again. Uh. Just a few months
Speaker 1: after the debut of Dianetics onto the world stage, I'll Run,
Speaker 1: Hubbard introduced Sonya Bianca as the world's first clear He
Speaker 1: claimed that she had quote full and perfect recall of
Speaker 1: every moment of her life, and then brought her out
Speaker 1: in front of an audience to prove it. Unfortunately, Sonia
Speaker 1: was just a twenty one year old physics major who
Speaker 1: did not have perfect recall of her entire life. So
Speaker 1: the audience immediately started asking your stuff, like what did
Speaker 1: you have for breakfast on October three nine, what's on
Speaker 1: page one twenty two of Dianetics? And she couldn't answer
Speaker 1: any of this. Yeah, at least get like an improv actor.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I had an omelet someone to lie right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At one point Hubbard turned his back and someone asked
Speaker 1: her what color Taiwa's and she couldn't even answer that.
Speaker 1: This is like, it's a debacle this first attempt to
Speaker 1: reveal it clear, but it teaches Hubbard a powerful lesson
Speaker 1: which has never ever put yourself into position where people
Speaker 1: can prove you're wrong. Like, if you're gonna hold events
Speaker 1: and stuff, you've got a stage. Manage that ship so
Speaker 1: that it goes exactly the way you want. He would
Speaker 1: be more careful in the future. He did come up
Speaker 1: with insane dionetics logic to justify why she hadn't been
Speaker 1: able to perfectly recall everything. He said that when he
Speaker 1: had called her up and asked her to come out now,
Speaker 1: the word now had frozen her in present time and
Speaker 1: temporarily interrupted her perfect memory. That makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: The mental gymnat back on board. So the whole event
Speaker 1: was a debacle, but it hardly put a dent in
Speaker 1: the progress of dionetics. Less than a year, the new
Speaker 1: science had made enough money to buy a four and
Speaker 1: a half million dollar mansion in Los Angeles. So Hubbard
Speaker 1: could manage his new operation in style. It was the
Speaker 1: old California governor's mansion, which is weird because the capital
Speaker 1: is not in Los Angele. I don't know why we
Speaker 1: had a governor's mansion in l but he bought it.
Speaker 1: All that money attracted attention from the government and from
Speaker 1: the media. There were from this point on kind of
Speaker 1: regular looks into him from the FBI and stuff, just
Speaker 1: because like he's making a lot of money, he's not
Speaker 1: paying taxes on a lot of it. He's being very
Speaker 1: shady with it. Barbara Kay worked with him at this time.
Speaker 1: She was a pr assistant for Mr. Hubbard. She later
Speaker 1: noted in interviews that quote, he was having a lot
Speaker 1: of political and organizational problems with people grabbing for power.
Speaker 1: He didn't trust anyone, and he was highly paranoid. He
Speaker 1: thought the CIA had hitman after him. We'd be walking
Speaker 1: along the street and I would ask, why are you
Speaker 1: walking so fast. He would look over his shoulder and say,
Speaker 1: you don't know what it's like to be a target.
Speaker 1: No one was after him. It was all delusion. Good
Speaker 1: Barbara would go on to have an affair with Hubbard,
Speaker 1: who had since lost that interest in his second wife, Sarah.
Speaker 1: The two work closely together and often traveled together so
Speaker 1: the Great Leader could administer the far flung chunks of
Speaker 1: his burgeoning new empire. At one point, he leased an
Speaker 1: apartment at the Chateau Marmont for them to share. In
Speaker 1: order to reassure Barbara of their relationship, Ron walked her
Speaker 1: through the apartment and said, this is your closet, This
Speaker 1: is your dressing table, this is your or toothbrush. Two
Speaker 1: days later, she found all of her possessions that she
Speaker 1: left in the apartment on a bag at her desk.
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard's wife, Sarah, and their baby had moved to
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, and Hubbard had put them up in the apartment.
Speaker 1: He'd ridded it for himself and Barbara. Later in the day,
Speaker 1: he apologized to her, called his wife a bitch, and
Speaker 1: said I miss you. Then he asked her to have
Speaker 1: dinner with him and his wife that night, with his
Speaker 1: wife present. Yeah. Yeah, he wanted to have dinner with
Speaker 1: him so she wouldn't think that he was having an
Speaker 1: affair with Barbara, all right, I understand. In her interviews
Speaker 1: with Russell Miller, Barbara admitted that she felt almost uncontrolled
Speaker 1: be drawn towards el Ron Hubard because you would get
Speaker 1: pissed him a lot for being a creep. But quote,
Speaker 1: I was completely infatuated. I remember I said to my roommate,
Speaker 1: we had a small apartment in Beverly Hills, if I
Speaker 1: ever tell you I am marrying this guy, I want
Speaker 1: you to tie me up and not let me out
Speaker 1: the door because he's a lunatic. But I didn't trust
Speaker 1: myself not to do it because I was so enchanted
Speaker 1: by him. Being with him was like watching a fascinating
Speaker 1: character playing a role on a stage. I was never
Speaker 1: bored with him. He was a magical, delightful man, a
Speaker 1: great wreck on tour, very bright and amusing, and a
Speaker 1: very gentle, patient and sweet lover. Oh so he has
Speaker 1: learned to fush. Yeah, she says he's learned to fun
Speaker 1: and she clearly recognizes he's a nut, so she has
Speaker 1: no reason to lie about this. I'm going to guess
Speaker 1: he'd learned how to fuck him. So everyone, good news.
Speaker 1: L Ron Hubbard learned to fuck. That's a T shirt.
Speaker 1: That's a T shirt. Someone do some art for our
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard learned to fund shirt so we can
Speaker 1: get really sued by the Church of Scientology, like ludicrously
Speaker 1: sued N Hubbard condoms. Maybe l Ron Hubbard. Dental Damn,
Speaker 1: that's the one. He was a general lover. That's what
Speaker 1: dental Damn says. Here's Barbara again. At the time, I
Speaker 1: recognized early on that he was also deeply disturbed. Some
Speaker 1: of the things he told me were really bizarre, but
Speaker 1: I never knew what to believe. He said his mother
Speaker 1: was a lesbian, and that he had found her in
Speaker 1: bed with another woman, and that he had been born
Speaker 1: as the result of an attempted abortion. He talked a
Speaker 1: lot about his grandfather, who could really hold his liquor
Speaker 1: and played a fiddle with the head of a Negro
Speaker 1: carved on the end. But he never talked about his father,
Speaker 1: and never once mentioned he had children. I did not
Speaker 1: know he had a son until I read it in
Speaker 1: the newspapers years later. There's a lot in that paragraph. Also,
Speaker 1: wasn't the fiddle a guitar? Was a guitar? But he's
Speaker 1: just lying about his instruments. They have forgotten what kind
Speaker 1: of instrument with a weirdly racist carving his grandfather head.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm gonna give him a pass on
Speaker 1: that one that's so close to the truth that it
Speaker 1: counts as honesty out of l. Ron Hubbard's mouth. Yes,
Speaker 1: I don't even know what to say about the part
Speaker 1: of what this makes me think is that maybe he
Speaker 1: did think that his mom had tried to abort him.
Speaker 1: I heard no evidence of this, but he seems to
Speaker 1: be obsessed with the idea, so maybe he thought that.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, Also, like he was, as we
Speaker 1: heard in part one, like the beloved, like baby, like
Speaker 1: everyone loved him in the family, So like what that,
Speaker 1: it does seem and I think this will become clear
Speaker 1: that he had a persecution complex. There's part of him
Speaker 1: that wanted to be hunted, that wanted the offer mine
Speaker 1: after him. So he may have just had a really
Speaker 1: happy family life and wanted to invent like this dark
Speaker 1: back story for himself because his real life was kind
Speaker 1: of boring. At one point, Barbara went with him to
Speaker 1: San Francisco and they attended a welcoming party at the
Speaker 1: house of a local dioneticist who adored l. Ron Hubbard.
Speaker 1: Barbara caught the Great Man in the kitchen making out
Speaker 1: with the host's wife. When they got back to the hotel,
Speaker 1: she refused to sleep with Hubbard, and he shouted, they're
Speaker 1: all against me. Yo n By the Winter of Dionetics
Speaker 1: had grown way way too fast for its bridges. Hubbard
Speaker 1: had established too many schools and too many places, and
Speaker 1: they couldn't cover their own bills. He'd also hired way
Speaker 1: too many people. Dr Winter, the guy who'd helped make
Speaker 1: Dionetics look legitimate, left the organization after several people developed
Speaker 1: psychoses during auditing. One attendee turns out, you can damage
Speaker 1: people by doing this. Yeah, have an untrained people try
Speaker 1: to do psychotherapy. It's a mixed bag. Lesson learned lesson.
Speaker 1: They didn't less this lesson flew way over everybody's head
Speaker 1: and still has um. One attendee of a Dionetic center
Speaker 1: in Elizabeth, New Jersey, noted quote people had breakdowns quite often.
Speaker 1: It was always hushed up before anyone found out about it.
Speaker 1: Happened to a guy in my course, a chemical engineer.
Speaker 1: They wanted to get him out of the school, and
Speaker 1: I volunteered to stay with him in an adjoining building.
Speaker 1: He never slept her eight and was in a terrible state.
Speaker 1: No one could do anything with him, and in the
Speaker 1: end they took him off to an asylum. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Dr Winter leaves, and a number of the people
Speaker 1: who had first think Campbell starts distancing himself from all
Speaker 1: of us. At this point, a number of people who
Speaker 1: had been backers of Dionetics sort of step away after
Speaker 1: because Hubbard just immediately goes to like crazy gurup, like
Speaker 1: right away, because he'd been waiting for this his whole life.
Speaker 1: Which guy's Campbell again, Campbell's the editor of the science
Speaker 1: fiction editor who was like a fan of his. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When Dr went or left, Hubbard announced that the doctor
Speaker 1: had been engaged in a scheme to take over the
Speaker 1: foundation um rather than just him being like, no, this
Speaker 1: isn't wearing it out, so he can't take accountability for anything.
Speaker 1: Oh good lord, No, no, no, l Ron Hubbard take
Speaker 1: acountability for something that is not the story we're reading.
Speaker 1: Yeah cool, it sounds like this is going to end
Speaker 1: really well. So problems with Dionetics were compounded by Hubbard's
Speaker 1: problems at home. In nine, his wife Sarah attempted suicide.
Speaker 1: Elron audited her afterwards and claimed to have recovered an
Speaker 1: ingraham that told him his wife's suicide attempt had been
Speaker 1: caused by a phone call from Barbara about work related business.
Speaker 1: Hubbard interrogated Barbara about this, and she actually wrote a
Speaker 1: record of the conversation in her diary. And it's pretty
Speaker 1: fun me, Barbara. You make a habit of instilling in
Speaker 1: Graham's too, don't you. That's fine, that's good behavior for
Speaker 1: the founder of dianetics, Hubbard. Isn't it exciting for you
Speaker 1: being a pond of such a grand chessboard? You are
Speaker 1: playing for the world. Can you think of anything more exciting? Barbara?
Speaker 1: I don't give a good goddamn about the world. I
Speaker 1: want a single, gratifying human relationship. Yeah, Hubbard, you couldn't
Speaker 1: have one. You're an ambitious woman. You crave power. You're
Speaker 1: a Marie Antoinette at Cleopatra, Lucretia Borgia. You must have
Speaker 1: a Caesar or an Alexander. You get the idea. She
Speaker 1: told him he needed her more than she needed him,
Speaker 1: and he responded in nineteen thirty nine, I was very
Speaker 1: much in love with the girl. She felt that way too.
Speaker 1: When I knew she had a boyfriend coming up, I
Speaker 1: waited on the stairway with a gun just for a moment.
Speaker 1: Then I said, they are flies. I realized who and
Speaker 1: what I was and left. I told her I would
Speaker 1: leave her free to marry a sharpie with a cigar
Speaker 1: in his mouth from Muncie, Indiana. Would you like to
Speaker 1: be left free? So Hubbard, I don't understand that either.
Speaker 1: This is just how Ron Hubbard response to someone trying
Speaker 1: to break up with him. I guess I don't know.
Speaker 1: I could not find out what a sharpie with a
Speaker 1: cigar in his mouth means as an insult. I mean,
Speaker 1: I understand why Muncy, Indiana as an insult. And if
Speaker 1: there's any fans from Muncy, Indiana, let me know I've offended. No,
Speaker 1: we do have a lot of Pittsburgh fans, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna give another shout out to Pittsburgh. It has no
Speaker 1: bearing on this story, but not too far from punk
Speaker 1: Sitani where I'm from. Ah, you're nah. So this seems
Speaker 1: to have prompted al Ron Hubbard to fire Barbara and
Speaker 1: break off the affair temporarily, although he would try to
Speaker 1: re engage it a couple of times. His marriage, though,
Speaker 1: was already doomed. At that point. His wife Sarah, had
Speaker 1: begun to date a dianetic sist named Miles Hollister, who
Speaker 1: she had met when Hubbard had forced his mistress to
Speaker 1: go on a double date with him and his wife,
Speaker 1: and she brought Miles along, and his wife wound up
Speaker 1: with Miles. It's a messy tale, um and Miles was
Speaker 1: apparently like a handsome, nice, intelligent guy, so Hubbard was
Speaker 1: obviously furious at all of this. It was around this
Speaker 1: point in when l Ron Hubbard decided to start drugging
Speaker 1: his followers, based on nothing really. He came to the
Speaker 1: conclusion that a mix of Ben's adrine, which is a
Speaker 1: type of speed, insane, doses of vitamins, and glutamc acid
Speaker 1: would help make auditing more effective. He called this chemical
Speaker 1: mixture g u K. According to his agent, you were
Speaker 1: supposed to take it every two hours for at least
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, so it was like really crazy doses
Speaker 1: of speed and vitamins and taking enough would allow you
Speaker 1: to release the ingrams within you without the need for
Speaker 1: an auditor. So that was Hubbard's claim. It didn't work out.
Speaker 1: Dianetics quickly abandoned this practice, but Elron Hubbard never gave
Speaker 1: up on the idea of dosing people with absurd amounts
Speaker 1: of vitamins to gain unspecified you need it. In the
Speaker 1: late seventies, after Scientology was established the church, he developed
Speaker 1: a variety of Scientology focused rehab centers Narconon for drugs,
Speaker 1: criminal for crimes, just to name two. One treatment method
Speaker 1: used in these programs was the purification rundown or still is, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's basically you sit in a sauna for days and
Speaker 1: take huge amounts of vitamins. Multiple people have died in
Speaker 1: these facilities for a variety of reasons. One Oklahoma facility
Speaker 1: lost four patients in the space of three years. So
Speaker 1: don't do that. Overdose on give people fatal doses and
Speaker 1: vitamins for no good reason. But you know what, you
Speaker 1: should take fatal doses of. That's not the right way
Speaker 1: to introduce ads. You know you should take the right
Speaker 1: amount of is the ads that we have. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: eat a derrito. You guys can, by the way, the
Speaker 1: simply organic white cheddar Dorrito's really good, really tasty. Here's
Speaker 1: some ads that paid us and we're back. We're back,
Speaker 1: and I just ate a couple of white cheddar organic derritos. Delicious.
Speaker 1: I'm not really focused on the organic thing normally. I
Speaker 1: can't imagine how organic would be different from normal derritos
Speaker 1: because it's all very processed. But it's good. I think
Speaker 1: it might just be the white cheddar is a flavor
Speaker 1: I like a lot, and these white cheddar Doritos are
Speaker 1: fucking fantastic. Yeah, Well are the cool ranch? Are those
Speaker 1: white cheddar? Is that something different? It's cool ranch? What
Speaker 1: do you mean? What do you mean is that something different? Well,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be cheese involved in the Look, we have
Speaker 1: three bags of Doritos on the table right now. They've
Speaker 1: given us zero dollars. We have three more bags than
Speaker 1: dollars we've gotten from the Dorrito's people. I should stop
Speaker 1: plugging them at this point. I'm now pushing three bags
Speaker 1: of Dorrito's towards Caitlin. They're all right here in front
Speaker 1: of me, uncomfortably, So you look uncomfortable. I'll explore these later,
Speaker 1: explores the right word for it. And you know who
Speaker 1: would have appreciated the adventurous taste of doritos, Ron Hubbard?
Speaker 1: It would be famed explorer l Ron Hubbard. This is
Speaker 1: not going to help our sponsorship, but we're off the
Speaker 1: rails now. Fuck it. I'll unfunck it if I'll do
Speaker 1: a whole podcast on how l Ron Hubbard would not
Speaker 1: have enjoyed the flavorful taste of doritos if if the
Speaker 1: Dorrito's people get in touch with us, is that good? Okay,
Speaker 1: let's get back to this story. So when we last
Speaker 1: left el Ron Hubbard, he'd broken things off with his
Speaker 1: wife and his his mistress, and yeah, it's nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: He tried to drug his followers, but it hadn't worked
Speaker 1: very well and um later in nineteen fifty one, the
Speaker 1: New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners started what would become
Speaker 1: a decades long pattern of state and national agencies investigating
Speaker 1: el Ron Hubbard's activities. They accused his facility and Elizabeth
Speaker 1: of teaching medicine without a license, and they brought a
Speaker 1: suit against him. In response, Hubbard closed up shop because
Speaker 1: he knew he was going to lose any sort of
Speaker 1: legal battle because he was teaching medicine without a license,
Speaker 1: And they left New Jersey. Everything he owned was shoved
Speaker 1: into the back of a black limousine and they drove
Speaker 1: to Los Angeles. Oddly enough, Greg Hemingway, youngest son of
Speaker 1: Ernest Hemingway, was one of the dianeticists who packed el
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard stuff. Greg It's weird because Ernest Hemingway sounds
Speaker 1: like an author name, like it just has that, probably
Speaker 1: because of his way, but it still has greg Like
Speaker 1: as a father, you're really sabotaging your kid from flowing
Speaker 1: in your footsteps. Gregory. I mean, you need more than
Speaker 1: one syllabley, even Gregory. I'd never read a book from Gregory.
Speaker 1: That's such an untrustworthy name. No, I mean I wouldn't. Michael,
Speaker 1: there's a book name. Oh, come on, that's just too generic.
Speaker 1: Sorry for all you Michael's out there. You want a
Speaker 1: generic first name and an exciting last name like Michael Crichton.
Speaker 1: Michael Crichton. There you go, exactly the most trustworthy writer, Yes,
Speaker 1: in history. He didn't turn out to be crazy or anything.
Speaker 1: You know what, I'll forgive everything he did after Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park because of Jurassic Park. You and I are on
Speaker 1: the same page. But yeah, that was a not as
Speaker 1: bad at ascent as this cheesy sci fi author, but
Speaker 1: pretty rough. In case you don't know, Michael Crichton spent
Speaker 1: his later years writing a whole book about how global
Speaker 1: warming was a lie, and also writing one of the
Speaker 1: critics who badly reviewed his books into one of his
Speaker 1: novels as a pedophile and describing the critics small penis
Speaker 1: Michael Crichton classy fella. Oh boy. Okay, So the marriage
Speaker 1: of el Ron Hubbard and Sarah Northrop fell apart as
Speaker 1: he was fleeing New Jersey. He knew that there was
Speaker 1: going to be a divorce, and since he was now
Speaker 1: quite wealthy, there was a lot of money at stake
Speaker 1: in order to secure more favorable divorce terms. What do
Speaker 1: you think Elron Hubbard did in order to ensure that
Speaker 1: he would have the upper hand in the coming divorce battle. Well,
Speaker 1: he's not known for lying, so I don't imagine he
Speaker 1: did anything dishonest. So I would guess that, you know,
Speaker 1: he just parted with half of his money and assets
Speaker 1: um amicably. No. Oh shoot, fun fact, he kidnapped his
Speaker 1: daughter Alexis and took her to Cuba. Yes, I remember
Speaker 1: this clear. Well, he didn't immediately take her to Cuba. First,
Speaker 1: he kidnapped her and paid a random nurse to take
Speaker 1: care of her for a month, and then kidnapped his wife.
Speaker 1: Once the baby was already taking care of He and
Speaker 1: two of us fall where kidnapped his wife physically forced
Speaker 1: her into the vehicle. According to bare Face Messiah, they
Speaker 1: grabbed her by each arm, one of them clamped a
Speaker 1: hand over her mouth, and they bustled her out of
Speaker 1: the house across the sidewalking into the back of the car,
Speaker 1: which drove off as speed. Sarah fought like a cat
Speaker 1: in the back of the car, screaming and shouting at Hubbard,
Speaker 1: who in turn was shouting at her. At one point,
Speaker 1: when the car stopped at traffic lights, she tried to
Speaker 1: releap out, and thereafter Hubbard gripped her around the neck
Speaker 1: in a stranglehold while the argument continued. Yeah, okay, feminist
Speaker 1: icon run over kidnapped his wife. This is why I
Speaker 1: say it's shocking that I can't find any evidence of
Speaker 1: him being like a child molester, because it's like she
Speaker 1: really seems like he would have been molesting some kids.
Speaker 1: Like But okay, like I said, still a piece of ships,
Speaker 1: Still a monster. So once his wife was subdued in
Speaker 1: the back of the car, they drove to San Bernardino
Speaker 1: to try and find a midnight doctor who would declare
Speaker 1: Sarah legally insane. Unfortunately, and kind of shockingly, he couldn't
Speaker 1: find one, which I think you probably would be able
Speaker 1: to into doctor willing to do that in l A. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you had l Ron Hubbard money, right, apparently you
Speaker 1: couldn't back then, all right, that's encouraged, so Kudo's nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties San Bernardino psychiatrists. You get a clear pass from
Speaker 1: behind the bastards. Eventually, he promised to tell his wife
Speaker 1: where she could find their daughter if she signed a
Speaker 1: piece of paper claiming he hadn't abducted her. Just then, Wow,
Speaker 1: this guy, I'm starting to like him. It's just so consistent,
Speaker 1: like it's just so shockingly consistently terrible. I'll tell you
Speaker 1: where our kidnapped daughter is if you agree not to
Speaker 1: tell anyone that I just kidnapped you and strangled you
Speaker 1: and trying to declare you insane. I mean, I gotta
Speaker 1: say strangling probably wouldn't got him in a much trouble, probably,
Speaker 1: and it didn't. He let her go after she signed
Speaker 1: a paper, But when she went to go find their baby,
Speaker 1: Hubbard had already had the child moved. In fact, he'd
Speaker 1: hired a couple who were against strangers to drive the
Speaker 1: baby across the country. The baby is just an afterthought
Speaker 1: and no point is he focused on this kid. It
Speaker 1: couldn't matter less to him. Sarah Hubbard filed a kidnapping
Speaker 1: complaint with the l a p D. But they assumed
Speaker 1: this was just a domestic dispute and decided not to
Speaker 1: get in the middle of things. So the l a
Speaker 1: p D hitting it out of the park. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: guys don't get a pass. Psychiatrists of San Bernardino. Cool
Speaker 1: with you. Fuck the l a p D. L a
Speaker 1: p D today. If you want to sponsor the show,
Speaker 1: we can talk about it. In the meantime, while Sarah
Speaker 1: was trying to file a kidnapping complaint, Elron Hubbard found
Speaker 1: a psychiatrist who was willing to diagnose him, saying which
Speaker 1: he had done just sort of a precautionary measure. According
Speaker 1: to one of the men who helped him do all this,
Speaker 1: a dianeticist with the last name of Demill quote, he
Speaker 1: and I first went to a psychiatrist who didn't like
Speaker 1: the smell of it. He obviously thought he was being manipulated,
Speaker 1: so we just paid him ten dollars and left. Then
Speaker 1: we went to a prominent diagnostic psychologist of that era
Speaker 1: who did some projective testing on Hubbard and produced an upbeat,
Speaker 1: harmless report, saying he was a creative individual upset by
Speaker 1: family problems and dissension, and it was depressing his work
Speaker 1: and so forth. It was very bland, but Hubbard was
Speaker 1: delighted with it. The main value of it to him
Speaker 1: was that it didn't say he was crazy, so he
Speaker 1: could claim he had been given a clean bill of
Speaker 1: health by the psychiatric profession. Okay. Next he called the
Speaker 1: FBI to claim that Myles Hollister, the man his wife
Speaker 1: was having an affair with, was a communist as well
Speaker 1: as armed and dangerous. He made several calls and reports
Speaker 1: to the FBI, trying to get them to murder his
Speaker 1: wife's new lover by claiming he was an armed and
Speaker 1: dangerous communist. Next, l Ron Hubbard, de Mille and his
Speaker 1: baby flew to Havana, Cuba. Hubbard put the baby in
Speaker 1: the care of two Jamaican women as soon as they arrived,
Speaker 1: who were also strangers. Not with anybody who cares about it. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: Ln Hubard is not gonna spend any time with his
Speaker 1: bay be. No no no. He spent the time in
Speaker 1: Cuba writing the draft of a sequel to his book
Speaker 1: on dianetics and drinking huge quantities of rum so he
Speaker 1: couldn't be taking care of a baby. Then he had
Speaker 1: to drink for several weeks straight and write a terrible book.
Speaker 1: Sarah did eventually file a writ with the l A
Speaker 1: Superior Court, and the news picked up the exciting story
Speaker 1: that the founder of America's newest cult, psychological fad whatever
Speaker 1: had abducted his own child. As a result, Outron Hubbard
Speaker 1: had to write a letter to his estranged wife. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read you that letter now. This is to Sarah.
Speaker 1: This is to Sarah. Dear Sarah. I have been in
Speaker 1: a Cuban military hospital and I am being transferred to
Speaker 1: the United States next week. Is a classified scientist, immune
Speaker 1: from interference of all kinds. Though I will be hospitalized
Speaker 1: probably a long time. Alexis is getting excellent care. I
Speaker 1: see her every day. She is all I have to
Speaker 1: live for. My wits never gave way under all you
Speaker 1: did and let them do. But my body didn't stand up.
Speaker 1: My right side is paralyzed and getting more. So I
Speaker 1: hope my heart lasts. I may live a long time,
Speaker 1: and again I may not, but Diane Netics will last
Speaker 1: ten thousand years for the Army and Navy have it now.
Speaker 1: My will is all changed. Alexis will get a fortune
Speaker 1: unless she goes to you, as she would then get nothing.
Speaker 1: Hope to see you once more. Goodbye, I love you
Speaker 1: Ron more. Truth. Yeah, Alexis is his daughter who he's
Speaker 1: not taking care of him instead drinking rum. Yes, and
Speaker 1: will later deny is his child and tells her when
Speaker 1: she comes to him an adult, that she was the
Speaker 1: illegitimate child of his wife. And I was going to
Speaker 1: ask about because he has kids from his first marriage
Speaker 1: with Paula, having five or six kids. Yeah, one of
Speaker 1: them Nibs I think was his nickname, was with the
Speaker 1: cult for a while and then left. Changed his last
Speaker 1: name to D Wolf's nephew, Jamie. D. Wolf does a
Speaker 1: lot of I think he's like a motivational speaker and stuff.
Speaker 1: So a number of his kids have become big anti
Speaker 1: scientology sort of voices. He didn't spend any time with them,
Speaker 1: so how could they have One of his kids committed suicide? Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: at least one. So Sarah filed for divorce, and the
Speaker 1: court documents she filed revealed horrific details from inside their relationship.
Speaker 1: According to her, at one point, Ron told her they
Speaker 1: couldn't get a divorce because it would be bad for
Speaker 1: his reputation. She says that he told her basically, you'll
Speaker 1: kill yourself if you really love me, because we can't
Speaker 1: get divorced because it's the fifties. She also says that
Speaker 1: he regularly strangled her. She believed that he was insane
Speaker 1: and needed to be locked up in a mental asylum.
Speaker 1: Obviously she has a bias, but it's really hard to
Speaker 1: disagree with that statement. Oh yeah, what a different world
Speaker 1: it would be if somebody had given a Ron Hubbard
Speaker 1: the help he's so desperately needed. Now. Hubbard flew back
Speaker 1: from Cuba around this time. He wound up living with
Speaker 1: a millionaire dionetics enthusiast named Purcell, who had gotten rich
Speaker 1: through something else and just love dionetics. Purcell wound up
Speaker 1: essentially taking over the business operations of Dionetics for a
Speaker 1: while and fixing everything on fucking all of the damage
Speaker 1: Hubbard had done to the structure of it to make
Speaker 1: it profitable and for a while, Wichita, Kansas becomes the
Speaker 1: center of dionetics research. Yeah, yeah, Wichita, So they're doing
Speaker 1: research not really. They just yeah, I mean now writes
Speaker 1: a bunch of books about dionetics to try to sell
Speaker 1: them to people and to teach classes. But no, I
Speaker 1: don't think they're doing much real research. When Sarah found
Speaker 1: out that Hubbard was in Wichita, she filed a petition
Speaker 1: asking to have his assets in Los Angeles placed into receivership.
Speaker 1: Hubbard responded by sending a letter to the Department of Justice.
Speaker 1: He described himself as basically a scientist. There's there's exact words,
Speaker 1: basically a scientist, and accused the Communists and their secret agent,
Speaker 1: his wife, of orchestrating a campaign to try and destroy him.
Speaker 1: He would later claim that his wife was a Nazi
Speaker 1: agent as well. He kind of switched between the two
Speaker 1: pretty much. It will and this is like McCarthy, era's
Speaker 1: good time to be accusing people of communism. It is
Speaker 1: proof of how nutty he sounded. He is constantly going
Speaker 1: to the FBI and claiming that all the people who
Speaker 1: are against him are Communists and armed and stuff, and
Speaker 1: the FBI immediately writes him off as a nut which
Speaker 1: the FBI was not good at determining who was legitimate
Speaker 1: a threat to the country, not in this period they
Speaker 1: went after a lot of innocent people, but even the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, FBI was like, this guy is fucking crazy,
Speaker 1: Like Joseph McCarthy's basically running the show right now, but
Speaker 1: this guy is a fucking lunatic. Like yeah, which, like,
Speaker 1: if the fucking FBI under j Edgar Hoover thinks you're
Speaker 1: too crazy to be credible about your anti communist conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: you gotta be real crazy. You gotta be really goddamn crazy. Okay.
Speaker 1: The good news is that Sarah Northrope eventually got both
Speaker 1: her divorce and her daughter back, and as far as
Speaker 1: I know, hopefully Alex has had a good childhood. I
Speaker 1: really don't know much more about her at this point,
Speaker 1: but she went to live with her infant whenever she's
Speaker 1: getting filled with bad ingrams like holy shit. In exchange
Speaker 1: for getting her baby back, though she agreed not to
Speaker 1: say anything bad about her ex husband l Ron Hubbard,
Speaker 1: he also made her write a statement, or rather he
Speaker 1: wrote a statement and then published it with her name
Speaker 1: attached to it, and she didn't complain. That seems likely
Speaker 1: based on the actual wording of the statement. I'm going
Speaker 1: to read you the end bit of it. There is
Speaker 1: no other reason for the statement than my own wish
Speaker 1: to make atonement for the damage I may have done
Speaker 1: in the future. I wish to lead a quiet and
Speaker 1: orderly existence with my little girl, far away from the
Speaker 1: interbulating influences which have ruined my marriage, Sarah North through pubbic.
Speaker 1: Interbulating is a word that l Ron Hubbard invented, which
Speaker 1: is why people think he just wrote this. And she
Speaker 1: wanted her baby back, and it was the fifties and
Speaker 1: she was like, this is the closest version of justice
Speaker 1: I can get. Yeah, Interbulating. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Speaker 1: By the end of dianetics looked to be on its
Speaker 1: way out. A conference of dianeticists only drew a hundred
Speaker 1: and twelve attendees, which is about about a year about
Speaker 1: what you could expect to get out of a fad
Speaker 1: pop psychology things like this. Hubbard desperately pushed book after book,
Speaker 1: including child Dionetics, but all of them failed to catch on.
Speaker 1: The book he wrote while drunk in Cuba did not
Speaker 1: see the same success as the original, which is really
Speaker 1: a tragic We call dietics to dionetics to extremely dionetics hardarch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could call it like a reverse Hemmingway, because he
Speaker 1: went to Cuba and got drunk to write but was
Speaker 1: less successful. And I assume that's where Hemingway did all
Speaker 1: his good stuff. I don't know much about swear around him.
Speaker 1: That's probably a shipload. Yeah, I assume may it would
Speaker 1: have been a better book of it had more cats. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It became increasingly clear to many people that l. Ron
Speaker 1: Hubbard was not quite the genius they had thought. Perry
Speaker 1: chapter Lane, a researcher at the Wichita Dionetics Foundation, said,
Speaker 1: quote the problem for many people involved in dionetics was
Speaker 1: that they accepted every word Hubbard said as literal truth,
Speaker 1: rather than a framework around which you could do things.
Speaker 1: I remember at a lecture one night, he told people
Speaker 1: that if they did this or that, they would no
Speaker 1: longer need to wear glasses, and that they would be
Speaker 1: able to throw them away forever. He pointed to a
Speaker 1: big bowl at the bottom of the steps leading up
Speaker 1: to the rostrum. At the end of the lecture, people
Speaker 1: were throwing their glasses into this bowl. Don Purcell, the
Speaker 1: millionaire who saved Hubbard's ass and save dianetics, was one
Speaker 1: of the guys who tossed their glasses into the bowl quote.
Speaker 1: Hubbard thought it was a great joke. He told me
Speaker 1: about it afterwards, making a snider remark about Purcell and
Speaker 1: describing how he took off his glasses, threw them into
Speaker 1: the bowl, and groped his way out of the lecture hall.
Speaker 1: Hubbard was laughing that people would do something like that
Speaker 1: just because of what he said. Of course, it didn't
Speaker 1: work like everyone else. Purcell had a new pair of
Speaker 1: glasses in a couple of days. Yeah, I thought the
Speaker 1: story was going to end that like someone crashed on
Speaker 1: their way home because they couldn't see. That would have
Speaker 1: made sense, No, I mean everyone on the road was
Speaker 1: drunk in they were limp when they hit. Anyway, Hubbard
Speaker 1: met and married his third and final wife, Mary Sue
Speaker 1: Whipped during this Wichita period. She was like eighteen, and
Speaker 1: he was like it was kind of a bit of
Speaker 1: a creepy, But they stayed together the rest of his life. Um,
Speaker 1: and he may even have been faithful to her. Maybe not,
Speaker 1: probably a couple of affairs in there, but he might have.
Speaker 1: They were They were together the rest of his life,
Speaker 1: well sort of. She wound up taking the Fall Firm
Speaker 1: and going to prison, but that's a story for another day.
Speaker 1: Um Wichita is also where he first revealed the e
Speaker 1: meter at of ice, he claimed could measure emotions and
Speaker 1: quote give an auditor insight into the mind of his
Speaker 1: pre clear. Hubbard announced this at a meeting in a
Speaker 1: Wichita hotel, right before he made the exciting announcement to
Speaker 1: a group of eighty that he had developed a new
Speaker 1: science even better than dionetics, a science that filled the
Speaker 1: few holes dionetics had had and elevated it to a
Speaker 1: new level that was almost more than a science. He
Speaker 1: called this scientology. Yeah. Now I looked on scientology dot
Speaker 1: org try and figure out what they had to say
Speaker 1: about this, and I actually found another reference to his
Speaker 1: totally real book Excalibur, because that's where they claimed the
Speaker 1: name comes from. L. Ron Hubbard began his studies of
Speaker 1: the mind and Spirit in ninety three, resulting in a
Speaker 1: manuscript entitled Excalibur in nineteen thirty eight. In this unpublished
Speaker 1: work that the word scientology first appeared to describe what
Speaker 1: Mr Hubbard termed the study of knowing how to know.
Speaker 1: He'd decided against publishing the book for the fact Excalibur
Speaker 1: didn't contain any therapy of any kind, but was simply
Speaker 1: a discussion of the composition of life. Consequently, he said,
Speaker 1: I decided to go further. So now it's worth interesting.
Speaker 1: The author of Bare Face Messiah found an earlier use
Speaker 1: of the word scientology and like a German scientific study
Speaker 1: published like in the thirties, but it had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with any of This is worth noting someone else
Speaker 1: figured out the term first. Not really a big deal.
Speaker 1: Hubbard probably wasn't plagiarizing this obscure German scientist, but I
Speaker 1: thought that was interesting. So in the scientology dot org
Speaker 1: write up of things, scientology was immediately conceived of as
Speaker 1: a religion. The reality is that it was immediately conceived
Speaker 1: of as a science, and its real purpose was to
Speaker 1: protect Hubbard legally because he and Purcell had gotten into
Speaker 1: a fight at this point over the rights to dionetics.
Speaker 1: Don Porcell and he had a falling out, and so
Speaker 1: there was a giant legal battle waging over who was
Speaker 1: going to own the rights to dionetics. So Hubbard created
Speaker 1: scientology initially so we could keep making more books and
Speaker 1: selling more products. I'm or thing that Purcell had no
Speaker 1: rights to yeah, and it was not a religion at first.
Speaker 1: Hubbard claimed that while Dianetics had been about the body,
Speaker 1: scientology was essentially focused more on the soul because he
Speaker 1: had quote come across incontrovertible, scientifically validated evidence of the
Speaker 1: existence of the human soul. So we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: what Hubbard claimed in scientology and how it changed from
Speaker 1: a way for him to dodge legal liability into a religion. Um,
Speaker 1: but first consume we're back. We're talking about scientology, the
Speaker 1: new science of the soul that l Ron Hubbard has
Speaker 1: just launched in order to avoid a court case, or
Speaker 1: in order to protect himself from a court case, start
Speaker 1: a religion. Oh the great well, Jesus actually started Christianity
Speaker 1: because he hit a guy with his camaro. Anyway, anyway,
Speaker 1: it was, it was. It was a mess, but it
Speaker 1: all worked out in the end, thank goodness. So Hubbard
Speaker 1: claimed to have discovered that human beings were driven by
Speaker 1: immortal and omnipotent beings called thetens. Now Thetan's try on
Speaker 1: millions of bodies over the course of eons, and so
Speaker 1: they're essentially these immortal spirits that like guide our meat
Speaker 1: sacks Dianetics had been about refiling bad memories in your
Speaker 1: brain to cure health problems, but Scientology was a way
Speaker 1: of waking your theting up to the memories of its
Speaker 1: long hidden existence in order to gain superpowers. Essentially, you're
Speaker 1: activating your theting so that you can, you know, and
Speaker 1: clearing off all of the bullshit that's tricked into thinking
Speaker 1: it's just a mortal being, um, something like that. It's
Speaker 1: close enough. Yeah. According to bare Face Messiah, Theting's were
Speaker 1: obviously not restricted to this universe, and auditing sessions revealed
Speaker 1: innumerable accounts of space travel and adventures on other planets,
Speaker 1: very similar to those found in the pages of Astounding
Speaker 1: science fiction, to which the founder of Scientology had so
Speaker 1: recently been contributing. One report described how a pre clear
Speaker 1: had arrived on a plane at seventy four thousand years
Speaker 1: ago and battled black magic operators who were using a
Speaker 1: lect ronics for evil purposes. So this is the point
Speaker 1: in which past lives become a real big part about
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard's philosophy. And they have electronics seventy years ago. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you space aliens, because space and aliens and stuff. Aliens
Speaker 1: have been traveling space all the time. Yeah. In July,
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard published The History of Man. He called it
Speaker 1: quote a cold blooded and factual account of your last
Speaker 1: sixty trillion years. In it, he promised that with scientology,
Speaker 1: the blind willigan see the lame walk, the ill recover,
Speaker 1: the insane becomes sane, and the sane will become saner.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, And if there's one man you should trust
Speaker 1: on how to become saner, it's the guy you kidnapped
Speaker 1: his own baby. You know. That says to me, sane,
Speaker 1: really stable guy, balanced man. You know, I've always really
Speaker 1: respected kidnapping as a discipline. Oh yeah, there's Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a wonderful industry. It's a calling, it's an art form,
Speaker 1: really a good solid kidnapping basically science. It's a guy
Speaker 1: stealing babies out of a window. What are you doing,
Speaker 1: I'm basically a scientist. That's the T shirt right there,
Speaker 1: Hubbards stealing a baby. We're gonna get some good T
Speaker 1: shirt based lawsuits out of this, and then I'll have
Speaker 1: to create a religion in order to maintain my rights
Speaker 1: to this show. And then I'm going to fight you
Speaker 1: for those rights, and then we're something Bad's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: You want a baby in Cuba, go right ahead, because
Speaker 1: that's where it's going. Oh boy, abduction jokes. It's a
Speaker 1: good fun when you know the kid got out. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of kids didn't get out of scientology anyway.
Speaker 1: Back to the story, So the History of Man basically
Speaker 1: repackaged Hubbard's dineticist ideas about in grams, but catch them
Speaker 1: in weird evolutionary terms. So now scientologists didn't just have
Speaker 1: to worry about the traumas you know, they'd experienced as babies.
Speaker 1: They had to worry about the traumas that deep back
Speaker 1: in time their ancestors had experienced. Hubbard claimed that many
Speaker 1: grahams were caused by clams because our clam ancestors were
Speaker 1: locked in an eternal conflict between the hinge that opened
Speaker 1: and the hinge that closed. He claimed that the gesture
Speaker 1: of opening and closing your thumb and forefinger wasn't consciously
Speaker 1: upsetting to people as a result of this, Are you
Speaker 1: getting okay? Do you have you have questions about that?
Speaker 1: That's not all clear. Our clam and our clam clamcestors.
Speaker 1: It's like a clamato clamanca fish. No clams specifically specifically clams.
Speaker 1: Are we descended from absolutely okay, or at least our
Speaker 1: thet and spent time in clams. Oh okay, um, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I'll get it. Okay, it's all internally consistent. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: all works out. And then the motion of of me
Speaker 1: clasping my you know, thumb against my fingers is upsetting,
Speaker 1: is what he's saying. Yeah, it upsets people. If you
Speaker 1: just do this, just walk around the street today and
Speaker 1: just do this at strangers. Basically sock puppet basically sock
Speaker 1: puppet motions. If you live near l Ron Hubbard Boulevard,
Speaker 1: just walk down at doing this. You're really piss some
Speaker 1: people off. I live near the whole church of Scientology.
Speaker 1: I live near the Scientology like movie studios. Oh fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm like in this area that where all that stuff
Speaker 1: is very well. If the scientologist tries to abduct you,
Speaker 1: you know how to upset them. Just do the clam thing. Now, Hubbard,
Speaker 1: did Warren quote your discussion of these incidents with the
Speaker 1: uninitiated and scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the
Speaker 1: clam to someone, you may restimulate it in him to
Speaker 1: the extent of causing severe jaw pain. One such victim,
Speaker 1: after hearing about a clam death, could not use his
Speaker 1: jaws for three days. So how's everyone's jaw feel? You
Speaker 1: know what's starting all tired because I'm making so many
Speaker 1: good jokes about Ron. My jaw is tired. But I've
Speaker 1: read through sixteen pages this nonsense. You know what doesn't
Speaker 1: tire your jaw out? And you know what, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to do a Dorito's at now. You could have
Speaker 1: had a Dorito's ad Dorito's people, but instead I'm going
Speaker 1: to shill for another product of the next product available,
Speaker 1: Lisol sanitizing wipes. That's what's good for you is Lysol
Speaker 1: wipe yourself, clean, your thetings away, your thetings away. See
Speaker 1: Lysol got a freebe Doritos. Anyway, back back to the tail.
Speaker 1: So there's an awful lot of lunacy in scientology. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to go into tremendous detail about all of
Speaker 1: the different crazy things he said, because that could be
Speaker 1: a whole fucking tin part episode. But it is important
Speaker 1: that you know it didn't all come together at once,
Speaker 1: you know, I think most people's understanding of Scientology's actual
Speaker 1: beliefs comes from that South Park episode, which did a
Speaker 1: pretty good job of summing it up. But he hadn't
Speaker 1: even invented all of this stuff yet, everything about Zeno
Speaker 1: and that this was all added over time. It was
Speaker 1: definitely cobbled together. He did not just come out with
Speaker 1: suddenly this vision of how things had happened. Well, genius
Speaker 1: doesn't happen overnight, you know, no, And neither do bullshit
Speaker 1: science fiction short stories in general. The story of scientology
Speaker 1: is the story of l Ron Hubbard just making up
Speaker 1: things for seventy years and writing them down, and now
Speaker 1: people have to pay attention to him because it's a religion.
Speaker 1: It's pretty great. He continuously expanded his claims of what
Speaker 1: scientology could achieve in the book Scientology eight to eight
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. I don't know what that's a reference to.
Speaker 1: He ragged with this book. The ability to make one's
Speaker 1: body older, young at will, the ability to heal the
Speaker 1: ill without physical contact, the ability to cure the insane
Speaker 1: and incapacitated, a set forth for the physician, the layman,
Speaker 1: the mathematician, and the physicist. So anyone can use this
Speaker 1: science to heal the sick. Weird that we still have
Speaker 1: sick people shocking. Scientology proved to be a much better
Speaker 1: money making scheme than dianetics had been. Hubbard moved to
Speaker 1: England and bought a gigantic manor house. He built facilities
Speaker 1: there and was soon making more than forty dollars a
Speaker 1: week just at the English facility teaching auditors there. He
Speaker 1: was making millions and millions of dollars long in the world.
Speaker 1: This marked the end of l Ron Hubbard's money problems.
Speaker 1: Money is just if your question is how did they
Speaker 1: afford that? For any other part of the next two
Speaker 1: parts of the story, it's just he's riches shit like
Speaker 1: forever now, and this is one of those things. He
Speaker 1: does not have any more money problems like. And this
Speaker 1: is because people are just buying into this religion and
Speaker 1: shelling out buying the books, paying for training all over,
Speaker 1: most of whom probably aren't super committed, because like I've
Speaker 1: talked to a number people in l a who did
Speaker 1: scientology for a years, so they probably spent a couple
Speaker 1: of grand on it, but then they just left. But
Speaker 1: there's a lot more people like that than there are
Speaker 1: a committed scientologists. It's a good money making thing, God,
Speaker 1: which is what it's always been, but I'll give it
Speaker 1: to him for this. It was a very idiosyncratic organization
Speaker 1: at its start, and that initially caused some problems because
Speaker 1: he was bad at managing. But he really seems to
Speaker 1: have learned how to manage a really profitable, gigantic worldwide enterprise,
Speaker 1: which is not easy. So again, one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why it's hard to hate him as much as you
Speaker 1: should is he's really competent. Like it's not like a
Speaker 1: guy who was just born rich and does shitty things,
Speaker 1: like an unnamed person we're all thinking of right now,
Speaker 1: just born rich and never has to work for his
Speaker 1: money and is mominent. Because the l Ron Hubbard was
Speaker 1: born poor and built a multibillion dollar religious cult, It's impressive.
Speaker 1: It's an impressive con, probably the most impressive con. On
Speaker 1: April tenth, ll Run Hubbard wrote to one of his
Speaker 1: higher ranking followers and suggested turning their science self help
Speaker 1: empire into a religion. I await your reaction on the
Speaker 1: religion angle. In my opinion, we couldn't get worse public
Speaker 1: opinion than we have had, or have less customers with
Speaker 1: what we've got to sell. A religious charter would be
Speaker 1: necessary in Pennsylvania or New Jersey to make it stick.
Speaker 1: But I sure could make it stick. Not inaccurate, it's stuck. Well,
Speaker 1: ask someone from Pennsylvania from punk SATONI specific from Pati
Speaker 1: for sure. People are Yeah, they're really impressionable there. So
Speaker 1: as the guy who defeated isis I agree with you? Uh?
Speaker 1: In December of ninety three, ll Run Hubbard incorporated three
Speaker 1: new churches, the Church of American Science, the Church of Scientology,
Speaker 1: in the Church of Spiritual Engineering, all in Camden, New
Speaker 1: Jersey's Jersey Boy. Uh. February of nineteen fifty four, he
Speaker 1: incorporated the Church of Scientology in California. Over the course
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty four, he encouraged Dionetics Foundation franchise holders,
Speaker 1: because that's how it spreads so rapidly. People were starting
Speaker 1: franchises to turn their businesses into independent churches. Yeah interesting, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: really it came together real well. Executives of the Hubbard
Speaker 1: Association of Scientologists were now ministers. Some even called themselves Reverence.
Speaker 1: Just let people call themselves Reverence, whatever you want. Whatever.
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to be a reverend. Scientology wouldn't qualify
Speaker 1: as a religion for the purposes of tax exemption. Until
Speaker 1: nineteen This was a battle, the battle to get accepted. Like,
Speaker 1: it took a long time. I'm not going to get
Speaker 1: into everything they had to do it it was. It
Speaker 1: was a fucking uphill. But starting in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: that's when he starts consistently saying this is a religion.
Speaker 1: This is the point which Hubbard quit claiming to be
Speaker 1: a researcher and a scientist and started presenting himself to
Speaker 1: the world as spotified holy man, basically a science Now
Speaker 1: he's definitely a holy man, definitely a holy man. He
Speaker 1: of course drew government attention, particularly from the FBI. This
Speaker 1: made him grow more and more paranoid. He encouraged believers
Speaker 1: to attack anyone practicing scientology outside of the Church. Apost
Speaker 1: states were called squirrels and should be sued out of existence.
Speaker 1: Um the term squirrel is still used by the Church
Speaker 1: of Scientology. You can find YouTube videos called squirrel Busters.
Speaker 1: Type that in and it's like guys with like go
Speaker 1: pro camras, just like yelling scientology nonsense. It's supposed apples
Speaker 1: state scientologists. Yeah, I saw some of that in Going Clear.
Speaker 1: It's weird. It's really uncomfortable. It's like to people yelling
Speaker 1: about a video game that you don't know anything about,
Speaker 1: Like it's so technical and specific. Are you on tech?
Speaker 1: What are you talking about? Man Um Hubbard advice scientologists
Speaker 1: who are arrested heckling nonbelievers or apost dates to immediately
Speaker 1: sue for a hundred thousand dollars and claim religious persecution.
Speaker 1: He said the only proper response to any kind of
Speaker 1: challenge to the church was unrestricted warfare. Attack, attack, attack,
Speaker 1: never stop attacking, can always be attacking. It works a
Speaker 1: B A. I mean it. It's the same social media
Speaker 1: strategy the president uses. Like you never apologize for doing
Speaker 1: something bad. You always just attack new people. And if
Speaker 1: you get attacked for something you find like it works it.
Speaker 1: Don't spend any time addressing problems, just attack. Really successful idea.
Speaker 1: So Hubbard figures this out in the early fifties and
Speaker 1: applies it to his religion. So it is, yeah, the coolest.
Speaker 1: Throughout the late nineteen fifties, auditing sessions and courses devolved
Speaker 1: from semi scientific discussions of dianetics and two lurid stories
Speaker 1: of past lives as aliens and famous historic figures. One
Speaker 1: of Hubbard's followers were called There was a good deal
Speaker 1: of rivalry as to who could dig up the most
Speaker 1: notable or extraordinary past life. Jesus of Nazareth was very popular.
Speaker 1: At least three London scientologist claimed to have uncovered incidents
Speaker 1: in which they were crucified and rose from the dead
Speaker 1: to save the world. Queen Elizabeth the First, Walter Raleigh
Speaker 1: and the Venerable bed were also popular. Funnily enough, I
Speaker 1: never met anyone who claimed to know anything about Attila
Speaker 1: the Hun Genghis Khan or punscious pie it, which is,
Speaker 1: if you're ever pretending to have fake lives, pretend to
Speaker 1: be someone cool, yeah, No one wants to be a
Speaker 1: goody two shoes in the past. Yeah. I was fucking Gangskan.
Speaker 1: That's a cool past live. Yeah. Now. The CIA had
Speaker 1: taken an interest in Hubbard in nineteen fifty seven, and
Speaker 1: the FBI had been onto him for a while, almost
Speaker 1: because of the hundreds of letters he'd sent them claiming
Speaker 1: people were communists. In nineteen sixty l Run Hubbard officially
Speaker 1: spooked the government when he urged his followers to do
Speaker 1: everything in their power to stop the election of Richard Nixon,
Speaker 1: not on the wrong side of history there. Now, Nixon
Speaker 1: didn't win, probably for other reasons because JFK was just
Speaker 1: such a charming son of a bitch, But the whole
Speaker 1: escapade convince Hubbard that he could use his colt to
Speaker 1: gain political power. In August of nineteen sixty two, l
Speaker 1: Run Hubbard wrote a letter to President Kennedy claiming that
Speaker 1: scientology was the only way to train human beings for
Speaker 1: the rigors of space flight. Since Hubbard and his followers
Speaker 1: were all aware of their past lives as space travelers,
Speaker 1: they really were the best people to manage astronaut training. Yeah, definitely, absolutely,
Speaker 1: totally again logically consistent the S and NASA stands for scientologists.
Speaker 1: He said in his letter to JFK. Quote, man will
Speaker 1: not successfully get into space without us. We do not
Speaker 1: wish the United States to lose either the space race
Speaker 1: or the next war. The deciding factor in that race
Speaker 1: or that war may very well be lying in your
Speaker 1: hands at this moment and may depend on what is
Speaker 1: done with this letter. Courteously, Ron Hubbard, suppose the alert
Speaker 1: we did get into space without them, have we? Though
Speaker 1: I've seen those staged moon landing photos see I think
Speaker 1: the moon landing is stage. But I think it's because
Speaker 1: we really landed on venus. Oh that's an interesting theory,
Speaker 1: and that's where cell phones come from, the government doesn't
Speaker 1: want you to yea. Yeah. Anyway, back to l. Ron Hubbard.
Speaker 1: In January of nineteen sixty three, the FDA carried out
Speaker 1: a raid on the Church of Scientology. They didn't get much.
Speaker 1: It seems like one of those things where they basically
Speaker 1: cooked up a bullshit reason because e meters were labeled
Speaker 1: improperly and we're like making health claims they shouldn't make.
Speaker 1: But they used as an excuse to send them a
Speaker 1: dozen of armed men and stuff to like raid a facility.
Speaker 1: It was like it was it was an overreach of force.
Speaker 1: It seemed like they were expecting to find a cache
Speaker 1: of weapons or something crazy because this Colt seemed so
Speaker 1: crazy and they didn't. Church of Scientology was probably more
Speaker 1: in the right than the FDA was, although they were
Speaker 1: publishing misleading stuff. The raid seems to have been kind
Speaker 1: of bullshit. Well, they read, you know, works from what
Speaker 1: was it, Remington Winchester Colt and exactly he's got three guns.
Speaker 1: The whole thing increased out on Hubbard since of paranoia
Speaker 1: and persecution. In nineteen five, Hubbard introduced ethics technology to
Speaker 1: his new faith, which included conditions that could be applied
Speaker 1: to people when they had had ethical lapses. One member,
Speaker 1: who worked in Hubbard's English manner as a butler, recalled
Speaker 1: I was assigned a condition of emergency because I served
Speaker 1: him salmon for dinner that was not quite fresh. I
Speaker 1: was shocked. You had to go through a whole formula,
Speaker 1: right it up and submitted with an application to be upgraded.
Speaker 1: Scientology developed a new cadre of ethics officers, who are
Speaker 1: basically secret police, tasked with punishing the insufficiently dedicated or disloyal.
Speaker 1: Different penalties, including a condition of liability, could be imposed.
Speaker 1: Members in a condition of liability had to wear dirty
Speaker 1: gray rags on their arms. They also couldn't like bathe
Speaker 1: and stuff. It was gross. Church members who screwed up
Speaker 1: too badly were declared suppressive persons. These people, Hubbard declared,
Speaker 1: were fair game to be destroyed by any means necessary.
Speaker 1: Now Australia had been a hotbed of Scientologist activity. Australia. Australia, Okay,
Speaker 1: Hubbard brag that was going to be the first clear continent.
Speaker 1: But in October of nine and Australian Board of Inquiry
Speaker 1: published report on Scientology and they wholeheartedly condemned the cult.
Speaker 1: So Australia basically kicked them out. They said it seemed
Speaker 1: so silly that people would think it was harmless, but
Speaker 1: that it's really fucking dangerous. Scientology is evil. It's techniques evil,
Speaker 1: it's practice a serious threat to the community medically, morally
Speaker 1: and socially, and it's adhere it's sadly diluted and often
Speaker 1: mentally ill um So Australia knows what is talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they banned them. They basically banned, or at least
Speaker 1: the state of Victoria basically banned Scientology. And I hate
Speaker 1: to say it, but we owe a lot of that
Speaker 1: to Rupert Murdoch newspapers he owned, and he seems to
Speaker 1: have been personally involved and really pushing coverage of how
Speaker 1: crazy Scientology was, which is responsible for starting the investigation
Speaker 1: which got it banned. He gave them their first nickname,
Speaker 1: which is also the only nickname I aware of for them.
Speaker 1: Bunk Homology didn't take off their Murdock's not great at
Speaker 1: naming things, um, But credit to a monster he was
Speaker 1: in the right this one time. In the fucking sixties,
Speaker 1: England began to crack down more on Hubbard and scientology
Speaker 1: as well. With the US, Australia and UK all clearly
Speaker 1: against him, l Ron Hubbard began to look for a
Speaker 1: new place to base his growing faith. His first instinct
Speaker 1: was Rhodesia. You ever heard of Rhodesia. I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I think it's Zimbabwe now. Rhodesia is the name when
Speaker 1: a bunch of white people were ruling over the black majority,
Speaker 1: pretty brutal. He was very much an apartheid state. There
Speaker 1: was a civil war, the people in charge got overthrown.
Speaker 1: Before that happened, he went to Rhodesia and basically promised
Speaker 1: to put a bunch of money into the local economy,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a new constitution for them that was
Speaker 1: meant to trick black people into thinking of their votes
Speaker 1: mattered without actually letting them vote. Weirdly enough, Rhodesia actually
Speaker 1: kicked him out. They didn't want anything to do with him. Yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's weird. You expect it to go even worse. But
Speaker 1: even the country of racists, run by racists for racists,
Speaker 1: and it's still like a major in far right white
Speaker 1: supremacist talking points today to talk about Rhodesia along they
Speaker 1: didn't want anything to do without run Hubbard, So I
Speaker 1: guess props to Rhodesia. Like once he got back from Africa,
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard began to cook up a scheme to
Speaker 1: escape all his myriad legal troubles. One of his friends
Speaker 1: recalled him saying, you know, John, we have got to
Speaker 1: do something about all this trouble we're having with governments.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of high level research that still has
Speaker 1: to be done, and I want to be able to
Speaker 1: get on with it without constant interference. Do you realize
Speaker 1: that the Earth surface is completely free from the control
Speaker 1: of any government. That's where we could be free on
Speaker 1: the high seas see back to the boat. Back to
Speaker 1: the boats. The high seas are exactly where al Ron
Speaker 1: Hubbard decided to go next, quietly, carefully and his minions
Speaker 1: embarked upon what he called the C Project. And we're
Speaker 1: going to hear about that C Project on the next
Speaker 1: episode of Behind the Bastards. Are you feeling I feel great?
Speaker 1: I feel I oh man, I'm invigorate. And my Satan's
Speaker 1: are They're really charged up and my ingrams or their
Speaker 1: their disappear gramm. They're they're instagramming, but they on their
Speaker 1: way out. What did you have for breakfast? Because of
Speaker 1: my many past lives, I definitely recall having some hot cakes,
Speaker 1: pot cakes, hot cakes. Well, I don't know what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to do. Speaking of Instagram, you can follow me
Speaker 1: there and on Twitter. That was good, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: At Caitlin Dronte spelled c A I T l I.
Speaker 1: And you can listen to my podcast right here on
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works. It is called the Bechtel Cast, and
Speaker 1: we talked about the portrayal of women in movies and
Speaker 1: uh yeah, follow us there at Bectel Cast b E
Speaker 1: c A d e O. Speaking of the portrayal of
Speaker 1: women in movies. My Twitter is I right, okay. You
Speaker 1: can find this podcast online at behind the Bastard's dot com.
Speaker 1: You can find us on Twitter at at Bastard's pot
Speaker 1: on Instagram to so check us out. If you're an
Speaker 1: angry scientologist, you can yell at me there. I'm sure
Speaker 1: I got something wrong about your religion because it's silly.
Speaker 1: That's the only religion I'll say that about, except for
Speaker 1: Zoro Astrinism. No, I'm actually I like zoro Astrinism. It's
Speaker 1: cool as hell. It's really neat, really cool imagery. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I don't know why I've faked and insulted Zoroastrians. There.
Speaker 1: I've gone mad reading all of this. This is what
Speaker 1: happens two hours into the Leron Hubbard podcasts. We insult
Speaker 1: Zoroastrians for no reason, a religion that never did anything
Speaker 1: to hurt anybody. Oh no, you're implicated now date and
Speaker 1: you're all implicated for listening and be implicated in our
Speaker 1: part three Boats