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

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. 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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.

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

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.

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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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.

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

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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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? 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 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 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, 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. 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

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 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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

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

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

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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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.

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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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.

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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, but see you then