Part One: How L. Ron Hubbard Lied His Way to Godhood

Lafayette Ron Hubbard was a living monument to how much a tall white guy can achieve by lying, without pause, for seventy straight years. In Episode 27, Robert is joined by Caitlin Durante (The Bechdel Cast) and they discuss the wild life of the found of Scientology. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again
Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything
you don't know about the very worst people in all
of history. Now, this is a show where I read
a tale about a terrible person to a guest who
is coming in cold, or as cold as you can
possibly come into on a subject like. My guest today
is Caitlyn Durante of The Bechtel Cast, comedian and uh

(00:23):
fan of l Ron Hubbard. Love him love some l
r H. Yeah, yeah, what what do you know about
Mr Hubbard? I know that he was a sci fi
like pulpy writer in his early days, and that he's
the founder of the Church of Scientology. Yeah. I watched
Going Clear and that's pretty much all I know. Okay, cool.

(00:44):
He was a living monument to how much a tall
white man can achieve in this world by just lying
without pause or cessation for seventy straight years. That's his
whole life. He just never stopped lying from the time
he was about four years old until the day he died.
And uh he died worth like six million dollars, so
it worked out pretty well. I had a weird time

(01:07):
researching this because I wanted to hate him, and it's
really hard to hate him. Um, he's a piece of ship.
He is a monster. He does terrible things, but there's
also he's not just a terrible guy. Like with a
lot of terrible people today, it'll be like some rich
asshole who like does something that's terrible to the environment
or like you know, is abusive to their employers or whatever.

(01:29):
L Ron Hubbard did his terrible things while shooting for
the moon. That's ambitious, and you gotta admire him for that.
He might be the most ambitious con artist in human history.
He's in the running, all right. So. Lafayette Ron Hubbard
was born on March thirteenth, nineteen eleven, and Tilda, Nebraska.
His family moved there shortly thereafter to Helena, Montana. His

(01:51):
grandfather was moderately successful, but not wealthy by any means.
He owned a decent house, some stables, and a guitar
with a black man's head carved on to the top
of it. That's a detail you'll run into a number
of times about his early life. Yeah, yeah, I'm guessing
it was racist, but I don't know. Um. Later Hubbard
would claim his grandfather owned a massive ranch a quarter

(02:12):
the size of Montana, uh, and that he spent his
early childhood having adventures there and becoming a blood brother
of the Blackfoot Indian tribe. That's good. Yeah, he's already appropriating,
you know, other cultures. Was born appropriating other cultures? On
the website what is Scientology, which is a scientology website,
it says that his particular friend among the Blackfoot tribe

(02:33):
was an elderly medicine man commonly known as Old Tom quote.
Establishing a unique friendship with the normally taciturn Indian, Ron
was soon initiated into the various secrets of the tribe,
their legends, customs, and methods of survival in a harsh environment.
At the age of six, he became a blood brother
of the Blackfeet, an honor bestowed on few white men.
So this is when he six. This is what he claims.

(02:53):
So this is what he claims. This is not There's
there's no evidence that six year old Ron Hubbard had
adventures with Indians and became their blood brother. The Los
Angeles Times reporter on this in nineteen UH they talked
to a historian named Hugh Dempsey, who was an expert
on the Blackfoot tribe and whose wife is a member
of the Blackfoot tribe. Uh, And he basically said blood

(03:15):
brothers aren't even a thing the tribe has. It's like
a Hollywood idea that was invented for Western movies. Yeah,
so it seems like all of l Ron Hubbard's ideas
about this tribe that he claimed membership then came from
like movies he watched as a kid, which is yeah, okay, good.
So I love how influential movies are and how they,
you know, don't do anything to funk up our society. Well,

(03:37):
and it's amazing how little fact checking people do if
you claims alive from far back enough like that, because
the Church of Scientology still continues this line to this
day that l Ron Hubbard was a brother of the
Blackfoot tribe. And he even claimed later that a lot
of his philosophical ideas came from like Indian rituals and stuff.
And it's like, as far as we know, he never

(03:58):
met a single member of the Blackfoot tribe. Right, So, um,
I did want to give sort of a source on
el Ron Hubbard's early life from a sympathetic side. Most
of the research I did on this was by people
who were very critical of him, so I didn't want
to know kind of how the Church of Scientology talks
about his upbringing. And I found el Ron Hubbard dot org,
which claimed to have biographical information on him, but actually

(04:21):
was just trying to sell me a series of books
on el Ron Hubbard because it was owned by the
Church of Scientology. But there was a trailer for the
book series about el Ron Hubbard called el Ron Hubbard
a Profile, and I want to play you a little
bit of that because it gives you an idea of
sort of the cliffs notes of his life as portrayed
by the Church of Scientology. He earned a hollowed place
in blackfeet more, became the nation's youngest eagle scout at

(04:44):
the age of thirteen, and studied with the last in
a line of legendary mystics from the court of Kubla Khan.
Barn stormed into aviation history, ascended to the heights of
Greatness in a now fabled kingdom of the Pulse, and
charted unknown realms beneath a feigned explorers Club flag retrace

(05:06):
his journey to the founding of Dianetics and scientolic and
ultimate Almost none of that's true. He was an explorer
and founded uncharted. He was there was a group called
the Explorers Club, which was like a big thing in
the day, and he did basically connive his way into
being a member there, and he did carry out a

(05:26):
couple of expeditions that didn't really find much um but
he piloted around in a boat until his boat broke
down and he had a flag with him, so that
that that's kind of what exclaiming there. So one of
my main sources for this episode was a book called
Bare Faced Messiah, which is a really comprehensive biography of
Aron Hubbard by Russell Miller, probably the first anyone ever wrote,

(05:47):
and he interviewed a lot of Aron Hubbard's relatives, people
who saw him as he was growing up and stuff. Uh,
And none of the people who were with him when
he was a baby, when he was six, when he
was like a young child, had any recolle action of
any of the stuff that he claimed about. His aunt Marnie,
who grew up with him, described him as the baby
of the family, adored and coddled by everybody. He was

(06:08):
very much the love child of the whole family. He
was adored by everyone. I could still see that mop
of red hair running around. So he was like the
little baby of the family. But he grew up more
or less in a house in a small town as
the beloved youngest child of a very close knit family.
No adventures in his early childhood that there's any evidence of, um,
But he gotta love that imagination on him. You know,

(06:31):
there's a thin line between imagination and just lying. Yeah. Uh.
The actual information shows that Hubbard enrolled in kindergarten at
age six, rather than becoming a Blackfoot brother. I suppose. Yeah,
his local nickname was Brick because of his red hair.
I guess because bricks are red and nineteen fifteen was
not a good time for nicknames. So Ryan Johnson's film

(06:53):
Brick is actually based on h I wish I knew
something about. Yeah, I'm assuming that's a very good joke.
I haven't seen it. Oh, it's not a good joke,
A joke. It's a pretty good movie. Yeah, okay, okay, Well,
l Ron Hubbard's Young Life was not a pretty good
movie because he just he pretty much went to kindergarten. Um.

(07:13):
He later claimed that while he was in school, he
would protect other kids from the bullies, terrorizing his classmates
using the lumberjack fighting skills he learned from his grandfather.
His grandfather was not a lumberjack, owned a small oil company,
but wasn't a lumberjack. Um. One of Ron's closest childhood friends,
Andrew Richardson, stated he never protected nobody. It was all bullshit.

(07:34):
Old Hubbard was the greatest con honors who ever lived,
which is more or less true. Ron moved to Seattle
after his dad joined the Navy when he was like
twelve years old. Uh, he did join the Boy Scouts
at this point and became an Eagle Scout at like
age thirteen, but there's no true. That is true. That
is true, But there's no evidence that he was the
youngest Eagle Scout ever because back then the Boy Scouts
did not make a note of what age people were

(07:56):
when they became Eagle Scouts. Bad bookkeeping, bad book keeping out.
But I'm guessing Ron knew that, which is why he
made the lie. Yeah, but he was good at being
a boy scout, I guess not hard Well, he's already
an explorer and a blood brother of a tribe. All
that time spent with the Blackfoot really prepared him for
his merit badges, uh in whittling and bald face lies.

(08:19):
During his teenage years. His dad was in the navy,
so during his teenage years Ron visited him twice for
like a month or two each time, so he did
get to spend some time in the Far East. It
was mostly on military basis with his parents. The myth factory,
of course that he created later spun this into a
series of exotic Eastern adventures where he said you heard
that I was trained in the court of Kubla Khan
by to bet mystics. He was on vacation with his

(08:41):
parents and like China and stuff. He mostly seemed to
not enjoy his time in the Far East. He thought
China was gross and dirty. He thought Chinese people were
gross and dirty. We have his diaries from those times,
and he's not weirdly racist for an American in like
nineteen twenty, but he's pretty racist, um pretty race in
Mission into Time a scientology book, though he spun his

(09:03):
basic vacation with his parents in China into quote and China.
He met an old musician whose ancestors had served in
the court of Kubla Khan and a Hindu who could
hypnotize cats and the high hills of Tibet. He lived
with bandits, who accepted him because of his honest interest
in him and his way of life. So that's fun, okay, good,
yeah it so far. He saw the Great Wall of China.
His only notes in his notebook about this was that

(09:24):
they should make it into a roller coaster because like
a shipload of money. So uh, there's there's no evidence
of him learning any ancient Eastern wisdom, but we do
know that this is the time when he first started
sketching out short stories because he's spent a lot of
boring time on boats and trains and stuff with like
a notebook writing out story ideas. Most of them were
just like he didn't even write out a lot of stories.

(09:45):
It was mostly just him writing out the ideas. So
like there would be entries like love Story goes to France,
meets Swell abroad, and Marseille. She takes them to her sink,
bedroom and bath where he lives until notable citizens object.
He stands them off and takes the next book for America,
having received a long expected will donate. So it's like
weird little stories like that. Most of them involved American

(10:05):
travelers meeting beautiful foreign women. Again, he's like fourteen. He
didn't seem to know how to write sex scenes. So
like the closest he got in his first short story
was a scene where like a navy corman is with
like a beautiful native woman and they fall in love.
But then when he would write out like what they did,
he just kept scratching it out to the point that

(10:26):
we don't know what he wrote because he apparently wrote
a sex scene and they're just like furiously erased it.
He's like he puts his oh god, oh god, oh god,
what is a woman again? All right? Cool? So he's
an in cell. It is entirely possible he did not
know what a woman was at that point. He was
like a fifteen year old in the twenties. Yeah, he

(10:48):
either knew everything or nothing. He knew that you're supposed
to objectify women, he just doesn't know how. Yeah, he
was bad at it, and that would be like a
hallmark of l. Ron Hubbard's writing, is that, especially since
a lot of the pulp fiction that he became famous
for other stories in that genre were really sexual. That
was never a thing he was good at. Um Okay, that. Yeah,

(11:08):
you heard it here. First, Ron Hubbard couldn't write about sucking.
Ron Hubbard couldn't. Now, actually that's not true. Weirdly enough,
which we'll get too later. There's some evidence he actually
became pretty good at fucking. Wow, did he just make
that up? And that's more of his inventive. No, these
are people who didn't like him otherwise, but like who

(11:31):
were in relationships and we're like he was. He wasn't
bad at fucking. I can't wait till we get there.
Oh no, it's exciting. This is quite a journey. So
after he got back from the Far East, he enrolled
in George Washington University in the fall of nineteen thirty.
Scientology publications state that while there he became the associate
editor of the university newspaper, was a member of many

(11:51):
university clubs and societies, and enrolled in one of the
first nuclear physics courses ever taught in an American university. UM,
and several were words of that are not entirely incorrect. Um.
He did go to George Washington University. He was a
student of the School of Engineering. He did not take
nuclear physics courses because this was nineteen UM He was

(12:12):
not good at civil engineering. He hated it and usually
did not go to class. He did write for the
school newspaper, but he was not an editor for it.
He just wrote a few articles, mostly as pr for
the club that he launched, which was the school gliding Club. Oh,
he loved gliding, like hang gliding. No, it's still exists

(12:32):
today as a sport. You don't hear about it much.
But they're basically planes. If you saw one park you
would just guess it was a plane. But most of
them don't have engines, and you can either fling them
into the sky with this weird winch system, or you
can like drop them off the back of an airplane.
People can travel across continents in these things. If they're
really good at them, you can go hundreds of miles.
But they're not really planes because there's no engine. Yeah,

(12:54):
there's no engine. It's just about managing your levels and whatnot.
I don't know. I'm not a glider pilot. But he
was a big fan of that, and he did it.
He was apparently pretty good at it, but he was
better at creating a club for it and drilling up
interest in it. Soon he started writing articles for like
Sportsman's Magazine, Sportsman Aviator and other magazines like that. We
would just lie about you know, I was in this

(13:15):
horrible die and my plane was falling apart and like, yeah,
and I had this I crashed into this barn and
so he just made up stories about stuff he did
in this glider plane when in reality, he did it
for like a year or so, and then he lost
his license because he couldn't afford to renew it, and
then he never flew again. But he kept writing articles
about flying even after he stopped being able to do it,
because yeah, it sounds like a theme of his from

(13:36):
fabricating stories. Yeah, there's usually a germ of truth. He
did fly a glider a lot. There was one time
where he like crashed a glider into a small town. Uh,
nobody got hurt, and like he wound up having to
take off from a nearby hill or something like that,
which he then turned into you know, stories of traveling
across the country on a glider at having all these

(13:56):
advent and discovering a whole other continent and yeah, um, yeah,
so that's all round humbard. In college, his grades were
as bad as you'd expect because he usually would skip
out on class in order to glide more often. So
he was studying civil engineers civil engineering, right, okay, so
his idea, Yeah, of course he was bad at it
because he thought the Great Wall of China should be

(14:19):
a roller coaster. Like that was his idea of like structures,
that was that was the first thing he thought, seeing like,
the most impressive thing people had ever built was like man,
but a roller coaster on the son of a bit. Yeah. Um,
his grades were pretty bad. But during this time, like
a ninety two, when he was a sophomore, his school
launched a literary journal and he submitted his first finished

(14:41):
short story for publication. So that's the first time he
got published writing fiction. Uh. The story was titled Tah
after the name of its main character, uh, and it
was about a twelve year old child soldier in China
on a march to die horribly in a battle. Um.
He quickly wrote another short story about another really really
bloody battle, this time in nave battle in the Yanksee River.
He repeatedly described the river as being filled with headless corpses.

(15:04):
He had a big thing for gore, big thing for violence.
Most of his early stories involved bloody adventures in vaguely
Asian settings. Um so this is his passion. Clearly see
the pattern. That summer summer of l Ron Hubbard decided
to launch an expedition of his own. He called it
the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition and convinced a bunch of
other young nineteen year old boys to pull their money

(15:26):
so they could rent a boat for the summer and
sail to the Caribbean. Their goal was to explore abandoned
pirate strongholds and filmed themselves running around in pirate costumes
for the presumed historic value of these videos of children
running around in pirate costumes. He also said that he
wanted to quote collect whatever one collects for exhibits and museums. Again,

(15:48):
not a lot of specifics about what's going to happen.
Loves vagueness. Also the Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. The
film also sounds like it was based on l Ron
Hubbards a little a lot of movies based on the
Sky Live. There was a report on his adventure in
the school newspaper, written by an anonymous writer who was
almost certainly al Ron Hubbard himself. Uh so, I'm gonna

(16:09):
read you that school newspaper article trying to get other
kids to join his expedition in the Caribbean. Contrary to
popular belief, Wind Jammer days are not over in Romance
refuses to die the death at least for fifty young
gentlemen Rovers, who will set sail on the schooner Doris
Hamlin from Baltimore on twenty June for the Pirate haunts
of the Spanish Main. According to L. Ron Hubbard, the

(16:30):
strongholds and bivouacs of the Spanish Main have lay neglected
and forgotten for centuries, and there has never been a
concerted attempt to tear apart the jungles to find the
castles of Teach Morgan, Bonnet, Bluebeard, kid Sharp down there
where the sun is whipping up heat waves from the palms.
This crew of gentlemen Rovers will re enact the scenes
which struck terror into the hearts of the world only
a few hundred years ago, with a difference that this

(16:52):
time it will be for the benefit of the fun
and the flickering ribbon of celluloid. In their spare time,
if they have any, they will scale the heights of
belching volcanoes, hunting the thick jungles, shoot flying fish on
the wing, YadA YadA, YadA YadA. Yeah, so it sounds
like a great adventure. Um, the Great Depression was in
its height at this point, so it was like a
lot of kids signed up because they're like, well, what
else are we gonna do? There's no jobs, might as

(17:13):
well have an adventure sailing around in the Caribbean. Um.
Hubbard claimed that Fox Movie Tone and Pathane News had
already put in bids for the film rights. He claimed
the New York Times had contracted to buy the photographs.
So he's basically promising that they would do this expedition
and sell a bunch of video and photos and everybody
would get money. That was the claim going out there.
Um now it was all lies, of course, and Eldon

(17:36):
Hubard actually hadn't worked out deals with any media agencies.
The New York Times has no record of this, neither
do any of the agencies he said he'd contracted with.
He didn't even have enough money to properly finance the
whole expedition, so the Doris Hamlin, which did sail out,
had to return to Port about a month early, having
found no pirate strongholds and filmed no movies. The captain
Hubbard had hired called the voyage the worst trip I

(17:57):
ever made. Most of the gentleman Rovers jumped ship at
their first two ports. Um, yeah, yeah it was. It
was kind of a disaster. Yeah, good for them though,
good for you abandoning ship whatever. You know, the sunk
cost fallacy can make fools of us. All sometimes in
support and just get off that boat. Which in the
third episode of this three part series, there will be
a boat that people don't get off of. We will

(18:19):
see what happens when l Ron Hubbard gets to carry
one of his dreams of taking a bunch of people
on a boat to the furthest extent. He never gives
up this idea. So in September, when you know, everyone's
back in school and Hubbard's back from his failed voyage
to the Spanish main, l Ron Hubbard wrote an article
chronicling his journey for the school newspaper. In this article,
the journey was turned into a historic success where everybody

(18:40):
got laid. Yeah, it was all like no girls allowed.
It seemed like no, of course not. Gentlemen Rovers can't
can't you have a gentle lady Romer. No, absolutely not no, no, well, yeah,
would you have wanted to be on that boat? No,
testster know that sounds like a nightmare. I mean, I'll

(19:03):
be honest. If at age like nineteen, I'd had a
chance to get on like a sailing ship and traveled
to the Caribbean and pretend to be a pirate, I probably,
but it could have been convinced to do it. But
I had a lot of dumb ship when I was nineteen. Yeah,
Hubbard wrote in the article. When they weren't out catching
sharks or harpooning or visiting some colorful spot, they were
capably entertained by the dark eyed Senorita's at the various ports.

(19:24):
I'm gonna guess he just invented that all. The article
also hailed the scientific achievements of the expedition, which mostly
included a bunch of film and specimen donations to the
University of Michigan. The University of Michigan has no record
of any donations from Ron Hubbard. Seeing any trend here
so far? But really you picked up on a pattern,

(19:47):
Well there isn't one yet U. Ron Hubbard dropped out
of school shortly after getting back from this and We
will be getting into all of that and what happened
after he leaves college later in the start of his
career writing terrible pulp fiction. But before we get into that,
give me a good ad segue, Caitlin. Hey, everyone, uh,
stay tuned for more l Ron hubberd. But until then,

(20:13):
to check out this ad that was fantastic, really really natural.
That's the part that makes it most convincing to people.
And we're back. Our producer Sophie just had to throw
out a salad that was really bad. So if you
want to feel like you were with us while you

(20:34):
listen to the show, make yourself a terrible salad and
then throw it away. When we last left off of
our story, l Ron Hubbard had dropped out of college
after a failed expedition to pretend to be pirates and
the Caribbean. What a time the thirties were, Yeah, Yeah.

(20:57):
According to a brief biography of l. Ron Hubbard, pulished
after he came up with dianatics. His first action on
leaving college was to blow up steam by leading an
expedition into Central America. In the next few years, he
headed three all of them undertaken to study savage peoples
and cultures to provide fodder for his articles and stories.
Between nineteen thirty three and nineteen forty one, he visited
many barbaric cultures and yet found time to write seven

(21:18):
million words of public fact and fiction. No, no no, this
is true. He did get published probably about two million
words something like that of mostly fiction. So like he
was a prolific writer from thirty three to forty one,
he didn't write seven million words, right, And he just
would like, I gotta find some savage people to write about.
And that's a hundred percent lies. He didn't go to
Central America. We have no record of any expeditions that

(21:40):
he led to study savage peoples and cultures. But also
the fact that he was like, Yeah, these disgusting savages,
gotta go find out about them and exploit them and
their lifestyles. I mean, it's nineteen fifty nine. Calling them
people is almost woke. Good. Fine, But obviously, right after

(22:03):
Hubbard dropped out of school, his dad used his Navy
connections to get Hubbard a gig doing volunteer work in
Puerto Rico for the Red Cross, which I think is
the closest he got to a expedition into Central America,
which is not very close to being an expedition in
Central not at all that this is what I think
he's talking about. He immediately abandoned his commitment to the

(22:23):
Red Cross as soon as he arrived on the island
and instead wandered off into the woods to search for
gold he believed that Punkistadors had hidden. So he is
purely delusional, right, It's hard to say how much of
him is just a liar and how much of him
is living in a fantasy world, because it's clearly a
mix of the two. Because he's not a hundred percent

(22:44):
a liar. I can't believe that after having read his story.
Some of this is he just lives in this whimsical
world of his. He'll just take like a nugget of
true information and then like blow it way out of proportion. Yeah,
because like for the rest of his life he would
talk about like how he was a gold prospector and
not for a time it was like you wanted around
the jungle and didn't find goals. Um. Yeah. Scientology lore

(23:09):
claims that he carried out the first mineralogical survey of
Puerto Rico, but there is again no evidence of this.
He did briefly work for a prospecting company, but he
was back in the mainland United States within a few months.
In April nineteen thirty three, he married a woman named Polly.
He was ostensibly working as a writer during this period,
but Polly later claimed that in their first year together
he probably made less than a hundred dollars. Now at

(23:29):
this point, he was writing mostly nonfiction. Later that year,
he claimed to have found gold on his own land,
and there's some news reports of interviews with him about
the gold he found on his land. That appears to
have been a lie, cooked up for the benefit of
a scheme that we don't know the other half of.
Like I'm gonna assume he tried to make money off
of it, But all we know is there's these articles
about him finding gold and no evidence that he ever
found gold. He was clearly trying something, But you're not

(23:53):
going to catch the whole story. For every one of
this guy's schemes, he never was not scheming a b
S always be, always be scheming. Nineteen thirty four saw
the explosion of the only art form el Ron Hubbard
would ever truly master, pulp fantasy fiction. From like thirty
three to thirty four, hundreds of new magazines started up
around the United States. Many of these were like weekly

(24:14):
magazines that would have like fifteen twenty different stories in them,
and he would total like sixty seventy thousand words. So
like every week they're putting out like a novel's worth
of short stories. And there's dozens of magazines doing this.
So there's a huge amount of hunger in this market
for quickly written, cheap stories of cowboys and Indians, of gangsters,
of monster and bear attacks like that sort of stuff

(24:35):
was so sold in this period. So a man capable
of ceaseless, effortless machine gun rapidity lying was perfectly. He
was built to write really really quick, shitty fiction. Um
and and he was good at it up until this point,
Like I said, he'd written mostly for sportsman magazines and
national geographic type oflication and lying about his expeditions and stuff. Yeah,

(24:59):
but as soon as he became aware of the hunger
for pulp fiction, Lafayette Ron Hubbard knew what he needed
to do. For six straight weeks, he wrote one short
story per day each between forty and twenty thousand words,
which is an insane rate of product. Fathom that. Yeah,
can you fathom it? If the person writing these never
edits anything, never even reads over his own stories. He

(25:21):
would just type out a story in one long swoop
and then mail it off to a random magazine. So
there's probably like continuity errors and like all kinds of consistency,
really messy tales. Yeah yeah, yeah, but who gives a ship.
They need stories, and most of them didn't even get accepted,
Like he's just writing so many stories shifting out this

(25:41):
least horrible, horrible, horrible stories. Also, the movie pulp fiction
was based on, he certainly wasn't influenced, because he helped
to find the genre. His stories had titles like Green
God Calling, Squad Cars, See Things, dead Men Kill, and
The Carnival of Death. Yeah. I would watch some of

(26:02):
those movies. Of course. He was good at titling. Yeah,
of course he would. And he was like for he
certainly wasn't bad for a pulp fiction writer. He was
definitely in the middle of the pack in terms of
quality goes. But he was mostly famous for just no
one else could write this much um, And this does
seem to be like his real talent was he could
just write like a fucking bazooka like it's it was crazy.

(26:24):
Have you ever read any of it? Yeah, it's really bad,
but I don't like pulp. It's all really bad, like
I enjoy um HP Lovecraft, and he's an objectively bad writer.
There's fun ideas in it that are scary, but it's
not good writing. Of course. It's not good pacing, like
neither Stephen King for that man. Yeah, good stories, great

(26:45):
horror writer, kind of clunky gross. I've actually not read
much or if any. Oh no, I've I read the
Shoshank Redemption novella. That that one. Yeah, And I think
Stephen King is like the good version of l Ron
Hip because they both were able to write it in
absurd rate. Um. But Stephen King was just like, whow okay,

(27:06):
I can just write stories people enjoy and not create
a cult. Yeah, I'm just gonna be on cocaine. No,
I'm just gonna do lots of drugs. Be Stephen King,
not l Ron Hubbard. If you have this gift, so
Elron Hubbard quickly made a name for himself in the
pulp fiction set. He started traveling to New York City
regularly and became a fixture among pulp writers and editors.

(27:27):
He made sure they knew him as quote, a real character.
He portrayed himself as a badass who, despite his young age,
had lived a life full of death defying adventures. Some
of these men, like the writer Frank Grouper, quickly picked
Hubbard out as a bullshit artist. Quote. One evening, a
Grouper set through a long account of Ron's experiences in
the Marine Corps, his exploration of the Upper Amazon, and
his years as a white hunter in Africa. At the

(27:49):
end of it, he asked, with obvious sarcasm, Ron, You're
eighty four years old, aren't you. What the hell are
you talking about? Ron snapped. Grouper waved a notebook in
which he had been jotting figures. Well, he said, you
were in the Marines seven years. You were a civil
engineer for six years. You spent four years in Brazil,
three in Africa. You barnstormed with your own flying circus
for six years. I've just added up all the years
you did this and that comes to eight four. Good

(28:12):
on him, hill him out on his bullshit, But he
still liked Tubbart. Like even the people. Pretty much everyone
knew he was full of ship for the most part,
but they he was fun to be around, like his
stories were usually entertaining. Um, he was. He was an
interesting guy. Most people seem to like him. Yeah. For
a while, his career went pretty well. Uh. In nineteen
thirty five, Columbia Motion Pictures paid him to write a

(28:33):
fifteen part film story called The Secret of Treasure Island
was played in like fifteen different days or something like
that during Saturday morning. Matt May services like it was
a little sequential thing, and this is the only Hollywood
thing he was ever involved with. But for the rest
of his life he would claim to be a Hollywood
screenwriter and just claimed he had written famous movies that

(28:54):
he didn't write, and that there's no evidence he had
anything to do with what I'm gonna just start doing.
Yeah yeah, the Church of Science. He says he was
one of the legends of Hollywood's Golden Age. That's amazing. Yeah.
So yeah, just lie, yeah, lie, I am claiming you
wrote great movies. Alright, guys, everyone, I wrote The Godfather
Part two. Oh that was you. I produced it. Oh yeah,

(29:16):
we should already know Chang. Yeah, I mean I could
actually claim that pretty easily. I don't even have to
change my name. Um. So the reality is that he
tried to start a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood,
but he couldn't hack it, and so he moved back
East to write more trashy pulp fiction in the woods
with his wife. He developed a number of pseudonyms for
his work with various publications, names like Winchester Rimington, cult,

(29:40):
just like gun gun gun cults, A gun is it? Yeah? Yeah,
could like was the most famous handgun in the world
at the time. I heard a cult, no cult, no,
no coult No, it was three guns gun gun gun.
I'm gun gun gunna wits. Kurt von Racken was another,
which I think was just like a badass sounding German

(30:01):
name renee Lafayette, which is at least half his real name.
Joe Blitz and Legionnaire. These are good names, These are
good names. No, he's got some gifts. He's got some gifts. Yeah.
Isaac Asimov liked a lot of his fiction, so like
he gained some respect within the community. He certainly wasn't

(30:21):
seen as like the worst. He was one of the
most prominent names in UH in the pulp fiction universe
at that point. People talked mostly though about like the
rate of speed at which he was able to put
out stories. There were rumors that he typed using one
incredibly long piece of paper at a time, that each
story was just one massive scroll that he would roll
up when he was done. Uh. There were rumors that
he built his own keyboard with single keys for the

(30:43):
words that he used most often because he just typed
so fast. That's actually very smart if that's true, which
I don't think. It is no evidence that's that's smart. Yeah,
it would have been smart if he'd done it. I
don't think I've ever made enough money to get his
own custom typewriter. There were stories that editors would just
send messengers to his hotel room with like cover art
and then wait outside while he wrote a story to

(31:03):
go with the cover art, like so he would just
like reverse engineer stories based on these are at least
stories about him, and it's not hard to believe given
the rate at which he produced words in a day
is insane. I can't even write three words a day.
This script is about eighteen thousand words, and I wrote
it in two days, and that was a lot of writing.

(31:23):
So well brag okay, yeah, yeah, well look, join my
cold just joined my colt. I'm already there, baby, Okay,
Well I need a boat. We're gonna I got a whole.
I have got a whole slow boats you know what?
Not just gentlemen rovers on my boat trip to the
Caribbean where we pretend to be pirates. You're gonna let
women to how how progressive? Well, I want to be

(31:46):
able to scam twice as many people, of course, Yeah,
absolutely so. Obviously. Hubbard eventually turned from writing you know,
adventure tales and cop drew almost to writing cheesy science fiction.
This is sort of the period in the mid thirties
when sci fi starts to blow up as a genre,
and he was part of the Golden Age of science fiction.
He wrote alongside guys like I already noted, Isaac asim Off,
but Robert Hidland else broud de Camp. He was like

(32:08):
one of the founders of popular science fiction. And in
nineteen thirty eight, when his writing career was near its height,
he wrote a book called Excalibur, which he never showed
to anybody but constantly claimed was going to change the world. Yeah,
Excalibur was a work of philosophy, not of fiction, and
it was Hubbard claimed a work of such breathtaking philosophic
brilliance that it drove everyone who read it to commit suicide.

(32:31):
That's why he says he couldn't show it to anybody
at the locket in the bank fault, because people killed
themselves when they read this amazing book. Could even that? Okay, yeah,
I can only imagine. I can't imagine he just wrote
a book so good people shoot themselves. You know that
feeling when you finish a really good book and then
you go buy a gun. Yeah, yeah, about three guns?

(32:56):
The other one? Yeah, one name for each of the
guns you'll have to buy when you finish his his
amazing book. Um. Some people claim they actually read copies
of this back in thirty eight. Some people claim he
never wrote it. We don't really know if he ever
wrote a book and showed it to some people and
then shelved it, or if it was all aliative. Again
with people who claimed that they read drafts of it

(33:18):
said that its whole focus was about like the need
to survive, Like that was Hubbard's big The survival instinct
was his big like philosophical focus. The thing he was Yeah,
so it's like, here's how to survive but then it
drives people to for some reason. Yeah. We don't know
what he wrote in the book, but he wrote about
the book to a number of people, including his wife.
In a nineteen thirty eight he wrote her a letter

(33:39):
about it that includes this paragraph that provides some insight.
This is Hubbard's writing. The entire function of man is
to survive. The outermost limit of endeavor is creative work.
Anything less is too close to simple survival until death
happens along. So I'm engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium
sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to
astound the gods. I turned the thing up. So it's
up to me to survive in a big way, foolishly perhaps,

(34:01):
but determined. Nonetheless, I have high hopes for smashing my
name into history so violently that it will take a
legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal
is the real goal, as far as I am concerned.
So this is honestly, he kind of accomplished. He sure did. No. No,
this is part of why it's hard to hate him.

(34:21):
This is a man who set a goal to smash
his name into history and did it in a really
shitty scary way, but not a failure. I live near
l Ron Hubbard Lane or where in Los Angeles. The
building we're in we'll probably do the video later in it,
but the giant Church of Scientology building is like right

(34:42):
off of like our balcony and stuff like. He definitely
smashed his name into history and that was his goal
at age seven and night, So there you go. Uh.
In the late nineteen thirties, l Ron Hubbard bought a
boat and convinced the Explorers Club to let him carry
their flag on a DIO experimental expedition with his wife.
The journey did achieve some useful scientific ends and did

(35:04):
help better map the route up to Alaska, so that's nice.
Ron's aunt Marnie, suspected the trip was mainly an excuse
for him to convince various companies to outfit his boat
for free, because he would write to all of them saying,
I'm gonna do this expedition. You need to send me
free ship, which is smart, and he got a lot
of free ship. His boat did break down in Alaska,
and he spent most of the trip hanging out at
a radio station in a small town in Alaska, lying

(35:24):
about fighting German saboteurs and grizzly bears and stuff. So again,
still spent most of his timeline, but did achieve some
minor scientific got to commend him for that. His second
expedition worked a lot better than his first. That's hard
to argue with. Ron Hubbard did serve his country in
World War Two. The exact extent of his service is

(35:45):
somewhat open for debate. The official Church of Scientology line
is that he was commissioned before the war and was
present in the Philippines when Japan invaded. He was the
first American casualty in the Far East, flown home in
the Secretary of the Navy's own airplane. He served in
five different theater years of the war and received twenty
two Medals're gonna guess how much of that's true. I
would say maybe five percent. None of it. None of it. Well, No,

(36:08):
he did enlist before the war, but that's that's the
only thing that's true. He didn't see any combat. He
was supposed to have been in the Philippines, and if
he had actually been sent there, he might have wound
up fighting the Japanese in the Philippines, which would have
been a hell of a thing. But while he was
on his way to Manila, his commanding officers decided they
hated him so much that they sent him home. Because

(36:30):
here's his personnel file. This officer is not satisfactory for
independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give
impressions of his importance. He also seems to think he
has unusual ability in most lines. These characteristics indicate that
he will require close supervisions for satisfactory performance of any
intelligence duty. So he's just like going around like telling

(36:50):
his stupid stories to like anyone who will listen and
just like get this. And then he's lying to like
actual military intelligence people and they're like, no, get this guy.
We don't want this guy anywhere near as like get
him the funk away. Yeah, it's the military there. Yeah,
that said he was better at tricking other people in
the military. He should have done if he did seek combat,

(37:11):
is just give his book Excalibur to all the enemies
and then they would just kill them. Just air drop Excalibur.
We could we could have used that instead of the nukes,
just dropped those over Japan and in the war exactly.
We could have just given one to Hitler, damn it,
l ron your gift. So after this, he was sent
back to a training center in Georgetown, Maine, where he

(37:32):
lied and told everyone that he had served extensively on destroyers.
His instructors believed him, and he became the classroom source
for information on destroyer piloting, even though he had never
been in one. He just lied about it. Eventually, Lieutenant
Hubbard talked his way into command of an anti submarine boat,
a corvette, the U S s PC eight one five.

(37:53):
The command of it. Yeah, a little boat, like a
pt boat, like a little bit of boat meant to
hunt submarines. Like I don't like eight or nine guys
on it. But he did talk his way into getting
a boat. He loves boats. He really loves bot He
really loves not good with him, really bad with him actually,
but he loves both. The Church of Scientology essentially put

(38:13):
out fake military paperwork about out on Hubbard's service, and
then journalists went to the actual military which confirmed, like now,
there's no evidence of him doing any of this. But
according to the Church of Scientology's fake military documents, for
part of the war, Mr Hubbard was in command of
a squadron of corvettes. In ninety three, the vessel under
his direct command, PC eight one five was engaged in

(38:33):
action which resulted in the sinking of one Japanese submarine
and the disabling of another. This incident, which took place
off the coast of Oregon, was described by Mr Hubbard
in a report that he sent to the Commander in
chief of the Pacific Fleet. Sounds really impressive, taken out
to Japanese subs, pretty cool, pretty significant contribution to the
war effort protecting Oregon. Oregon's great, except for all the racists.

(38:54):
So ship that racist line really threw me off for
a second. Um, we're gonna talk about what actually happened
and run Hubbard's epic naval battle with what may have
been Japanese submarines but almost certainly was something a lot
less interesting. We're gonna talk about that in a while,
But first, Caitlin, do you love products? You know what?
I love this product that you're about to hear about.

(39:17):
Let's listen to it and we're back. We're talking about
l Ron Hubbard and his epic naval battle with a
pair of Japanese submarines. So basically, what Hubbard claims is
that while they were sailing up from Oregon, there had
been a Japanese bombing raid on Oregon, Like I think

(39:37):
it was like a balloon or something that had bombs
attached to They did attack a place on the Oregon
coast near this time, so everybody was like freaked out
in paranoid and Hubbard was sailing down from Oregon and
essentially thought that he had sighted a submarine and started
dropping depth charges on it and called in other boats
for back up, and for two days l Ron Hubbard

(39:57):
and like five ships were just bombing the ship out
of what he said was Japanese submarines. Nobody else actually
dropped any bombs because they didn't find anything. They were
just like sailing around. Well rotten Hubbard bombed the ocean.
It random, It's probably just like a family on a yacht.
And he was like, it's even sadder than that. So
the Navy had Admiral Frank Fletcher, who was the operational

(40:19):
commander during the Battle of Midway, like a very serious admiral, dude,
uh investigate the so called action in which Hubbard had
taken out two submarines. Because Hubbard, when he got back
to base, claim that he destroyed one submarine and wounded another.
Most likely. Actual research found out that what had happened
is there was just a magnetic iron ore deposit on
the seafloor that had fooled with his instruments, and he'd

(40:40):
spent two days and dropped more than a hundred depth
charges on a lump of metal. Oh my gosh. Lieutenant
Hubbard was furious when his commanders wouldn't recognize the heroism
he displayed in recklessly bombing the ocean. Now this was
not a great moved for his career. Then Navy doesn't
like it when you bombed the ocean. Um, so you

(41:03):
would thinks as a prospect or he would understand a
deposit of metal. But if he was a real prospector, yeah,
So the good news is that he had an opportunity
to redeem himself a couple of weeks later when he
recklessly shelled an uninhabited Mexican island and then ordered his
men to fire their weapons into the water around the island. Officially,

(41:24):
he says this was an unapproved gunnery training exercise. Mexico
said it was an American boat firing wildly on Mexican land,
and so they weren't happy with this, so Hubbard lost
his boat as a result of attacking Mexico. He loves boats. Uh.
The admiral who looked over lists and reassigned him rated

(41:44):
him as below average and said that he should be
put on a large boat where he could be properly supervised.
So for the rest of the war he would spend
more time in naval hospitals than serving on ships. While
he would claim to Robert Hineland and his other writer
friends that he had been sunk four times and wounded repeatedly,
there's no evidence that he ever suffered any service related injuries.
He did come down with a duodn ulcer during his

(42:05):
time in the military, but that's about it. Nothing as
a result of combat is just an ulcer in your guts.
And so after the war, el Ron Hubbard would spend
most of his time lying about several unverifiable service related
injuries to the v A in order to get more
disability benefits. He spent years doing this. This was most
of his writing in the first two years after the war,

(42:25):
was lying to the v A about the extent of
his injuries to try to get more money out of them.
Thousand words a day. Please. He did eventually get at
disability payment, but it was it was for nonsense. So
right around this time, he abandoned his wife to hang
out in a black magic sex mansion in Pasadena. What

(42:46):
do you mean is that that's the that's weird to you? Okay,
that was just a lot of information, it is, Okay,
you'd expected to be more interesting than it. Really, abandoned
his wife to hang out in a black magic sex
cult sex mansion, sex mansion. There's this guy named Jack
Parsons who was you've heard of Alistair Crowley. Okay. Alistair

(43:06):
Crowley was like a Slemma, this like black magic sort
of thing. He was a magic guy. He wrote a
bunch about it. He was very prominent in that industry
and like one of his industries the wrong word, but whatever,
magic industry, one of the magic industry. One of his
acolytes was a guy named Jack Parsons, who was like
a rich kid who owned a mansion in Pasadena. And oh, okay,

(43:27):
they touched briefly on this and going clear, yeah, it's
it's weird and murky. I don't think Hubbard ever believed
much of it. But Hubbard wanted to fuck the ladies
that Jack Parson had around him, because Jack was like
they had a polyamorous thing going on, because it was
like we're beyond, you know, all this the constraints, and
Hubbard just went in there to like steal his girlfriends

(43:48):
basically and still twenty dollars from him because he got
Parsons to invest in a yacht company and then just
bought a yacht for himself and the girlfriend got to
move away, so he lived on a yacht for a
while until he had to sell it. Uh. Yeah, the
whole black Magic sex mansion thing isn't as interesting as
it ought to be. They did try to summon the Antichrist, yeah,
but it was kind of boring to be honest. Yeah. Yeah,

(44:10):
you would have hoped for more of a tale there,
but I think it's all nonsense. So on August tenth,
ninety six, he married the woman that he had taken
away from this black magic sex mansion, the twenty one
year old Sarah Northrop. He married her thirty miles away
from where he had married his first wife, Pauli, thirteen
years ago. He was still technically married to Paully, so
this was big of me. But he's not like actively

(44:32):
living with both of them. He's just he never before, No,
he never told his first wife what had he just
he just ran away. She had no idea where he was.
He abandoned their kids too, they had like two kids.
He just abandoned his kids and his family stole a
guy's money to buy a yacht, and then old they
really dodged a bullet, that first family of his. They

(44:54):
did you get the feeling she's angry that he's a creep.
You don't get the feeling. They feel like they missed out.
I'm not having out run how word around. During this time,
after he wed Sarah, Hubbard started selling more stories again,
got back into writing pulp fiction. He sold several stories
to an editor named Sam Merwin, who said of him, quote,
I found him a very amusing guy and bought several
stories from him. He was really quite a character. I

(45:15):
always knew he was exceedingly anxious to hit big money.
He used to say he thought the best way to
do it would be to start a cult. So this
is like ninety six, the first time when Hubbard, you know,
starts putting out feelers that like he wants to start
his own religion. He's like boats Cokes moving up, that's
where the money is. He eventually moves up to boat

(45:35):
Colt right. The whole, the whole journey. Yeah. On April
fourteenth seven, Ron's first wife, Polly, filed for divorce on
the grounds that her husband had abandoned her and their children.
Seems pretty fair, very reasonable. She had no idea who
he was living with. She had no idea he was
already married to somebody else. But that changed three weeks
later when Ron moved into the home he had once

(45:57):
occupied with his first wife with his second wife. His
family was furious about this because his mom and dad
had been taking care of his first wife and their
kids and putting them up, so they they're really angry
about this. This is kind of when his aunt Marnie
soured on him. Well, we loved him as a child,
but he's a perfect stranger to us now, so I'm
glad they realized that. Yeah, he seems to have changed.

(46:18):
In late l Ron Hubbard met the man who had
become his lifelong literary agent Forrest Ackerman. After their first meeting,
Hubbard drove Forest home and told him along and insane
story about how he died on the operating table and
visited heaven um. He would claim a number of times
in his life to have visited heaven. He once claimed
to have visited heaven six or seven million years apart.
He had multiple lives. Uh. Here's how Forrest recalled l

(46:44):
Ron Hubbard driving him home, telling him about his Yeah.
I remember he had an old rattle trap of a
car and he was chewing tobacco as he drove. He
would open the tour with one hand and squirt tobacco.
JU said, onto the road. When we got to my apartment,
we sat outside in the car while he continued with
the story. It was at five o'clock in the morning
and the sun was coming up before he had finished. Okay,

(47:05):
and then he was like, better represent this guy as
his literary age. I think he was like, this is
a motherfucker who can tell a story. Yeah. I think
he had a lot of money off. So Hubbard told
Ackerman about Excalibur, his suicide inducing visionary philosophy novel. I
almost forgot, Yeah, I almost forgot. Don't worry. He never did. Uh.
He claimed he had been rejected by publishers. Quote he

(47:26):
was told it was too radical, too much of a
quantum leap. If it had been a variation of Freud
or Young or Oddler, a bit of an improvement here
or there, it would have been acceptable. But it was
just too far ahead of everything else. He also said
that as he shocked the manuscript around, the people who
read it either went insane or committed suicide. The last
time he showed it to a publisher, he was sitting
in an office waiting for a reader to give his opinion.
The reader walked into the office, tossed the manuscript on

(47:48):
the desk, and then threw himself out the window. Ron
would not tell me much about Excalibur, except that if
you read it, you would find all fear would be
totally drained from you. I could never see what was
wrong with that or why it would cost anyone to
commit suicide. Right. Yeah. Also, that's just going to be
my excuse as a as a failed screenwriter. I'm just
gonna like, well, my screenplays are really good and they

(48:09):
just get rejected because people die. Hubbard continued to sell
sci fi short stories during this period, making just enough
money to stay alive, but not quite enough to live
comfortably or stay in one place with his new wife.
His most successful series was the old Doc Methuselah adventures.
These are futuristic tales about a space traveling physician adventurer
with an alien sidekick slave who cries whenever the doctor

(48:30):
tries to free him. It does seem like these might
have been an influence to Doctor Who, but I don't
know that. But it was about like an immortal doctor
traveling through the universe, solving mysteries and stuff with a slave. Yeah,
it may have been, may have been. It was pretty popular.
L Ron wasn't exactly a genius, but he was probably
one of the ten most notable names in science fiction
at this time. UM. At some point he earned the

(48:51):
attention of John W. Campbell, who was a very famous editor.
He's some people call him the father of science fiction.
You know, Mary Shelley's probably the mother and founder of
the discipline. But he was the editor of Astounding Science Fiction,
and like most of the greats of the sci fi
Golden Age, worked with him, and he was apparently really really,
really good editor, and he liked el Ron Hubbard, but
his work with Ron would be something outside of the

(49:12):
sci fi genre. See Hubbard. At this time decided that
he didn't want to keep writing short stories and dimestone novels.
He wanted the respect he thought he was entitled as
a philosopher. Uh So, in January of l Ron Hubbard
wrote a letter to his agent and promised him a
book on philosophy. Here's how bare faced Messiah summed it up.
Ron promised that among the handy household hints contained in

(49:33):
the book was information on how to quote rape women
without their knowing. It, communicates suicide messages to your enemies
as they sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco Parkway to the
mayor for cash, and evolved the best way of protecting
or destroying communism. He had not decided, he added, casually,
whether to destroy the Catholic church or merely start a
new one. There's that paragraph. How do you even start

(49:54):
to unpack that? I mean, some of that is like
nine people would be like, oh yeah, teach guys out
of right. Sure, it's everyone was terrible. It's just a
garbage year. But yeah, buckle up, not get more pro women. Actually,
I'll say this for l. Ron Hubbard, I kept expecting

(50:15):
him to be a rapist. I have no evidence that
he was a rapist, no accusations or anything like that,
which you really expect with these guys, really do, especially
if he's taking that sort of especially he's taking that
sort of stance. Well. Also, society's understanding of what rape
was back then was a bit different. Later that year,
rumors began to spread in the science fiction community that l.

(50:38):
Ron Hubbard was up to something new. He was planning
to reveal a new science of the mind, something that
didn't seem as odd to people then as it does
to us now. Science fiction had already developed an uncanny
reputation for predicting the future. Science fiction writers had been
the ones who sort of called nuclear bombs and stuff
like that had been predicted, so had space travel and
everything by science fiction writers. So there was a real

(50:58):
belief in the community that like, something brilliant was going
to be born out of all this fiction. So they
were ready for a sci fi author to create a
new science like that didn't seem crazy to people like nowadays.
And someone's like, you hear about this new science fiction
writer who's launching a science Okay, yeah, Okay, that's not
where you do it, right, Yeah. That December of nine,

(51:20):
John Campbell published an editorial in the December issue of
an Astounding Science fiction. He revealed the imminent release of
l Ron Hubbard's new science, Dianetics. Do don dun dun
quote from John Campbell, It's power is almost unbelievable. It
proves the mind not only can, but does rule the
body completely. Following the sharply defined basic laws set forth,

(51:41):
physical ills such as ulcers, asthma, and arthritis can be cured,
as can all other psychosomatic ills. So John Campbell was
a believer because el Ron Hubbard had already used his
revolutionary new science to cure the editor's chronic sinusitis. Most
of the work of Dianetics revolved around sitting down with
an auditor and remembering old trump adic incidents from one's past.

(52:01):
Campbell believe Hubbard had taken him back to the moment
of his birth, which somehow fixed his nose. I don't know,
he believed it. Uh. In mid nineteen fifty, before the
publication of his book on dionetics, I'll Run, Hubbard attended
the last meeting of his life as a simple science
fiction writer. It was a convention in Newark, a sort
of prototype for comic con like events of today. During
the meeting, Hubbard is reported to have said, writing for

(52:22):
a penny award is ridiculous. If a man really wanted
to make a million dollars, the best way to do
it would be to start his own religion. In April
of nineteen fifty, Campbell t's that coming in June, a
sixteen thousand word article on dionetics would be in the
magazine titled Dionetics An Introduction to a New Science. In
his hype article, Campbell related the story of an ampute
veteran who Hubbard had saved. Basically, he claimed that, like,

(52:44):
this guy had been hit by a mortar shell, and like,
while the medics were coming through afterwards that were like,
this guy's hopeless, he's better off dead anyway. And then
he wound up surviving, but he wanted to kill himself
because the he had read Excalibur No No, because the
memory of these medics saying that he was better off
dead had gotten lodged in his brain. And that was
what dianetics was all about, is bad memories get misfiled

(53:04):
in your brain, and you have to go through with
this auditing therapy and refile them. Basically, so Hubbard and
Campbell succeeded in wangling support from an actual medical doctor
for their science. You gotta remember science is and it's
it's pretty rudimentary science. It's not an exact science. There's
a lot of nonsense going on in science. And so

(53:24):
this guy, doctor Winner sits in on several auditing sessions.
Because they would run auditing sessions on just sci fi
fans that Campbell brought in. They were just performing quasi
psychiatry on strangers who walked in off the street and
just liked reading science fiction. But yeah, Eventually Dr Winter
agreed to go through a session himself and found it
really compelling. He added that in the other patients he'd observed,

(53:44):
the changes were obvious and people seemed to be cheerful
and relaxed and feel better after they got out of
a dianetic session, So he figured, maybe there's something to
do this, Like this seems like it might be a
real science. It really seems like what was going on is,
you know, psychotherapy was pretty new as a discipline at
this point, and Diane edics, which just sort of repackaging
psychotherapy with different names. But like, there's a benefit in

(54:06):
sitting down with your friends and talking about and talking
about your feelings, and that's what he was doing so
that's what people found benefit with because people didn't talk
about their feelings. Men didn't talk about their feelings, so
there was a benefit to this um It wasn't Hubbard's genius.
It was just the benefit of sitting down and talking
about your feelings. Dr Winter actually tried to publish an

(54:28):
article on Hubbard's methods, but the Journal of the A
m A and the American Journal of Psychiatry both rejected
his papers. They said that he and Hubbard had neglected
to provide any clinical evidence that their techniques worked. In fact,
it seemed that they were just ripping off the basic
techniques of psychotherapy, giving everything new names, and making up
wild claims about repressed memories. Many sci fi fans, though,
were interested in this new science being launched via fandom,

(54:48):
Although several fans wrote to Campbell to complain that all
he wrote about now was dionetics, for the most part,
people seemed really excited asac as him Off though did
read an early copy of the dionetics article and proclaim
it gibberish, so not everybody was on board. In May
of nineteen fifty, the Science of Dianetics was released in
the form most befitting a serious new scientific discipline, a
science fiction fantasy pulp fiction magazine. Here's the cover of

(55:12):
the issue where dionetics was announced. Okay, you want to
describe the cover of that astounding science fiction magazine with
a new science being launched in it. It's, uh, this
man appears to have hair all over his body. It's
drying like an alien. Yeah, it's like he a very
aggro looking man with for he appears to be wearing

(55:32):
like a mask over his eyes, his catlike eyes. Yeah. Um,
he is crossing his arms. He's very angry about something
and um yeah, just he looks like a creature slash alien,
slash werewolf. And most of the magazine that week was
just a bunch of random science fiction stories. This was

(55:54):
from the Helping Hand. I guess that's some alien coming
to Earth to help Earth or whatever. The article that
launched dianetics was also in this magazine. In the article,
Hubbard explained that the brain was basically like a computer,
and like a computer, it has the potential to operate
with perfect recall and recollection. Mental illness was caused by
memories that had essentially gotten misfiled in the brains, and

(56:15):
you could refile everything. You can make brains functioned perfectly
and you'd remember everything, and just human beings could be
perfected by this new mental science that l. Ron Hubbard
had essentially developed. Um. So yeah, he called these memories
they got misfiled in grams and so like if a
child got bitten by a dog when he was too
she might not remember getting bitten by the dog, but
the ingram would be stuck in her and it could

(56:36):
be stimulated by sites and sounds that were similar to
what had been going on around her when the dog better,
and that could cause distress the purpose of dianetic theory
was essentially to gain access to the in grams and
what he called the reactive memory banks of the mind
and refile them and the analytical part of the mind
so you wouldn't react to them logically. So that was
how he justified the science behind dianetics. Sounds like nonsense

(56:59):
because it is nonsense now. Hubbard claimed that if the
earliest in grams in the brain, which usually happened around childbirth,
could be located and refiled, a person's analytical mind would
reach new heights of productivity and success. Individuals who cleared
their earliest in grams would be called clear, and they
would have perfect memory recall in a total immunity from
all psychological illnesses and many physical ones too. In May

(57:21):
of nineteen fifty, Dionetics The Modern Science of Mental Health
reached bookstores across the nation. Its publisher, Hermitage House, only
printed six thousand copies for its first run. They were
not expecting a major success. The book was a guide
for her to carry out auditing sessions. As described by
Hubbard and Campbell in The Reader's Own Home, Hubbard was
basically yeah, providing a dress up guide for people to
perform unlicensed psychotherapy on their friends and family. Very safe, Yeah, Dionetics.

(57:44):
The book was a profoundly anti woman terrorist. Greed was
a feminist icon. Feminist icon Aron Hubbard claimed that attempted
abortions were the single most common cause of prebirth ingrams
quote a large proportion of allegedly feeble minded children or
actually attempted abortion cases. However, many billions America spends yearly
on institutions for the insane and jails for criminals are

(58:06):
spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex
blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a
blessing of God. All these things are scientific facts, tested
and rechecked and tested again. So he's like a pro life,
pro rape again feminist, icon feminist, all right. He believed
that other ingrams came from abuse of husbands. For example,

(58:28):
if a husband beat his pregnant wife and yelled take it,
take it. I tell you you've got to take it,
the child might interpret those words literally and become a
thief because take it. Ron Hubbard, he thought a pregnant
woman suffering from constipation might sit on the toilet and
you know, be a horrible pain and go, oh, this
is how I'm all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy.
I can't think. This is too terrible to be born.

(58:50):
And so the child would think that they were so
terrible they didn't deserve to be born because their mom
couldn't poop. That's such a specific thing for him to
write to like speculate as to what a woman say, Okay,
that's great, really interesting. He thought a lot of prenatal ingrams,
and in fact, the worst prenatal ingrams were caused by

(59:10):
women cheating on their husbands. Because he assumed that a
woman cheating on her husband would talk about her husband
to her lover, and that the fetus developing would hear this,
and since many kids had the same names as their fathers,
he would think that his mom was talking about him.
It's weird, right, You know how fetuses understand language perfectly.

(59:31):
That's that's what they're most famous for, fetus is their
language skills. Many of these ideas are still present in
scientology today. For example, about a second worth of googling
brought me to a Scientology parent website and a page
on that website titled why silent Birth. It quotes out
Ron Hubbard. A woman who wants your child to have
the best possible chance will find a doctor who will
agree to keep quiet, especially during the delivery, and who

(59:53):
will insist upon silence being maintained in the hospital living
room as far as is humanly possible, because, of course,
any yelling during the birth would give the child like
if the doctor's like, come on, now, push the feet,
is the baby is going to be like, oh, I'm
supposed to push people down exactly, and I'll just be
a shoven monks. And that's why our streets are filled
with shovers, seriously shoving people every day because I was

(01:00:18):
given birth. ABS always be shoving. Yeah, scheming and shoving.
Scheming and shoving both important. Dianetics was not an instant success,
but within the first couple of weeks of publication, it's
spread very widely enough to earn bestseller status and provoke
its first negative press. The New York Times were bad
stuff about it. A reviewer from New Republic savaged it

(01:00:40):
and basically claimed it was it was nonsense. Whatever makes
sense in his discoveries does not belong to him, and
his own theory appears to this reviewer as a paranoia system,
which would be of interest as part of a case history,
but which seems quite dangerous when offered from mass consumption.
Is the therapeutic technique? Probably fair, someone knew what they
were talking about. Yeah, all the experts were like, this
is a bad idea, there are you are also noted that,

(01:01:00):
in addition to being able to cure psycho somatic illness,
Hubbard claimed Dianetics could treat cancer and diabetes. Uh. The experts,
of course cried out that this was dangerous nonsense, but
no one listened. Hubbard's sold fifty copies in the first
two months after release. He was finally rich. So in
thirty nine short years, I'll run Hubbard had gone from
a fake blood brother of the Blackfoot Indian tribe to
a fake war hero, real trash novelist, and had now

(01:01:22):
ascended to the lofty heights of a pop psychiatry guru.
Dianetics was officially a fat, but Hubbard had a plan
to keep this fat going long past its rational expiration date.
And that is what we're going to get into in
part two. Yeah, we haven't even gotten to the establishment
of scientology yet, I know, I know, or the establishment
of his boat Colt. There's so much more, so much

(01:01:44):
more to get into. Caitlyn Duranti, you want to plug
your plug doubles, I would simply love to. You can
listen to my podcast, the Bectel Cast at how Stuff Works. Uh,
follow us on Twitter and Instagram at baco cast, and
you can follow me on those places as well at
Caitlin Toronte and you can find me on Twitter at
I right, Okay. We can find this podcast on the

(01:02:05):
internet at behind the Bastards dot com. We'll have pictures
of that wonderful issue of a Standing Science and yeah,
check us out on Instagram, Twitter at Bastards Pod. You
can buy our t shirts on t public behind the Bastards,
So go do that, wash your brains off, Come back
tomorrow and here another hour or so about all Ron
Hubbard being a fucking nutbar It's gonna be great. Well,

(01:02:26):
but see you then