Behind the Bastards - Part One: Napoleon Hill: The Grifter Who Invented 'The Secret' & Donald Trump

Episode Date: August 6, 2019

In episode 78, Robert is joined by Sara June to discuss Napoleon Hill, the grandaddy of grifters. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's murderin' my chickens? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bassers, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history. And I was just talking about Zanku Chicken in Los Angeles, which has a dark past with our guest today, comedian and director, the Los Angeles-based Sarah June. Hello, thank you for having me.

Thank you for not attacking me over that pretty bad introduction, which is not one of my best ones. Have you? Oh, yeah. That's nice to hear. Yeah, you know, you're not the worst. Is that good? Is that helping?

Yeah, well, that's my goal. This is sort of a dark podcast, so I feel like I can be very gray with my compliments. Hey, that wasn't terrible. You're not the worst. Well, I mean, as a person, that's always my goal. When I leave a social interaction, is that everyone agree? Well, that's not the worst person I've ever talked to.

Yeah. Hey, man, shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, hopefully people won't hate you and talk about how much they hate you right after you leave. That's definitely not happening. Because no one does that to Neil Armstrong. Who did shoot for the moon? I don't know.

That guy did a lot of bad stuff, I think. Neil Armstrong? No, I'm thinking of Buzz Aldrin. Okay, let's just leave that at that. I'll tease that about Neil Armstrong. Time's up Neil Armstrong. No further comment. Yeah, yeah, we will slander an astronaut

and then just move right on without explaining it. I like this idea. Yeah, beautiful, perfect. That's right, you're on blast. I had a friend talk to me like a year ago. I was like, oh, I'm going to put you on a show with this guy. And he was like, oh, that guy? And I was like, yeah, what's up with him?

And he was like, oh, that guy sucks. And I was like, oh my God, what are you talking about? Who did he hurt? And he was like, no, I just mean like he's like really awkward and not funny. I was like, you can't, in this environment, you can't just say, oh, that guy sucks and expect me to not assume that means he raped one of your friends.

Yeah, I had this, not the same problem. You got to be specific, you know what I mean? When somebody's just annoying, just be like, oh, that guy's really annoying. Don't be like, oh, that guy sucks because I think it's something much worse. Yeah, I had a years long running joke about hating Will Wheaton and would make cryptic comments about how terrible he is

and the awful things he's done. And it was just like a joke because he just seemed like the most harmless possible person to make fun of. Yeah. But then time was up. People started being like, what do you know about Will Wheaton? Did he attack somebody? I was like, oh no, this is not, I didn't want to.

Yeah, you can't do that anymore. Yeah. But then he wound up kind of defending a guy who did do a bunch of fucked up shit. Well, there you go. Maybe I was right all along. Yeah. I'm a hero.

Is he the bastard for today? No. We are talking about a fella named Napoleon Hill. Have you ever heard of Napoleon Hill? No. Have you ever heard of a book called Think and Grow Rich? Oh, yes. Yeah, there we go.

Everybody's seen, everybody listening to this, if you don't have a copy of the book, you have a friend or family member who has this somewhere on their bookshelf, like 100% of the country. It's like Proto the Secret. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very Marianne.

It's very much Proto the Secret. This is my problem with Mary Ann Williamson. She's funny and all, and she talks about governing with love and all, but then I read her book, and it's kind of Think and Grow Rich. Yeah, and that's part of why I want to talk about Think and Grow Rich today, because Napoleon Hill sort of founded the...

He wasn't like the first self-help author. He wasn't like the first business advice author, but he was the first guy to kind of, in a modern sense, do this sort of quasi-almost spiritual approach to business and personal life advice, where you're mixing in success advice on how to run a company with weird metaphysical theories. He was the guy who invented that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was the one who brought the idea of the law of attraction to Wall Street. Yeah, yeah, and that's the guy that we're talking about today. But before we get into him and his life, I want to talk a little bit about the new thought movement. Now, whether or not you've heard of it, the new thought movement has had a big impact on your world.

The central idea of the movement was that your thoughts and your affirmations can materially alter the nature of reality. Magic, that's magic. It's magic, it's magic. But it's magic for people who like... Who won't say magic. Yeah, because they're Christian or whatever.

They just don't want to seem weird. Yeah, or they're atheists, and they want to come up with a scientific justification. New thought contains multitudes. There's Christian chunks of it. There's atheist chunks of it. The secret you can see is like a modern day. The Christian chunks are trying so hard

to not be considered witchcraft. It's pretty funny. Yeah, one of my favorite things is people who are hardcore fundamentalist Christian and hate witchcraft, but also talk the same way that my friends who are into Aleister Crowley do about certain things. Alex Jones was just talking about on Info Wars

how Donald Trump's Fourth of July speech was a ritual magic, but he had to emphasize it's Christian ritual magic, but he's still talking about... It's just so baddy. But this is less baddy than that, which is the point of it, is that they're supposed to be arguing that

this isn't magic, this is just part of how the physical world works. It's magic, but for sad nerds. Magic for sad nerds. So the secret would be one example of a modern day descendant of the New Thought Movement that's sort of on the more secular, not necessarily atheistic,

but certainly secular, opera side of things. The secret's meant for anybody. Now prosperity, gospel, Christianity would be another descendant of the New Thought Movement. Wow, one of my favorite things in the world. Oh yeah, it's absolutely abhorrent. If you haven't lived in the Deep South or watched that one, John Oliver Special,

prosperity, gospel, Christians are the folks who essentially will, like, get on their TV stations and beg little old ladies to take on credit card debt in order to make thousands of dollars in donations to their church. Then they'll use those donations to buy, like, fancy private jets and mansions and stuff.

And the claim that they make to these people they're fleecing out of money is that God needs them to show their faith by making a seed donation that will magically cause God to bless them with even more money. So the prosperity gospel is another descendant of the New Thought Movement.

And it's more widespread than you'd guess. By some counts, 17% of... You're just selling God's love. You're like, you gotta invest in God's love right now. This is gonna climb. Trust me, baby. This is gonna skyrocket. You're gonna be rolling in money. And it's clean because it's all from God.

Because it's all from God, baby. The term that they use a lot is prove God with your donation, which seems like it should be blasphemous. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know... I'm not a Christian, but that seems blasphemous to me. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the Bible about money.

And most of the stuff that Jesus said is kind of contrary to a lot of the other stuff, which is a lot of rules about debt and borrowing and what's allowed and not allowed and what you have to do to your debt. That interest is an abomination. Yeah, yeah. I remember him beating the shit out of bankers.

Yeah, there's a lot of that. I remember, if I'm not mistaken, that's the only time Jesus beats somebody with a whip. He was real pissed. Yeah. Anyway, so prosperity, gospel, Christianity is wacky and very ripe for parody, but it's also really popular.

And it's also incredibly destructive. Yeah, yeah. Very destructive and very popular. About 17% of all American Christians adhere to prosperity theology in some form or another. Wow. Roughly 1 million Americans attend prosperity gospel preaching churches

every single Sunday. So this is a sizable movement. There's a lot more to say about this stuff, and our current president ties into it. But before we get to Napoleon Hill and his role in all of this, I want to keep on this track for a little bit. So the New Thought movement sprang up in the late 1800s,

and the name New Thought embodied the belief that, of course, thoughts could create reality without the need for prayer or worship. The founder of the movement was a Portland main clockmaker named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, which is a great name for a guy who founds a weird cult style of thinking. And makes clocks.

Let's not forget he's a guy who lived in Maine and makes clocks. I already don't trust him. I feel like they hand you a clockmaking kit as soon as you come out of the womb named Phineas. Like, well, here's your fucking clock. Get used to it. Yeah.

He focused, like, his teachings focused on, like, curing illnesses with positive thinking, and Phineas theorized that disease could be banished by the redirection of thoughts. One of his students was a woman named Mary Baker Eddy, who went on to found the Christian science religious tradition. Connecting all the dots.

Yeah, exactly. These are the folks who, like, will let their kids die because they try to treat lymphoma or whatever with prayers. They don't believe in using medicine because they see it as being like against God's will. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, I've got a lot of, I've had a lot of information on the New Thought Movement

and a very solid write-up by a website called The Conversation, who does some pretty good stuff. I love having conversations. Yeah, I love conversations too. Wow, this is a great conversation. Yeah, it is, yeah. There are article notes that by the 1890s, New Thought had morphed away from healing disease

and onto helping people achieve success through positive thinking. So this starts as a guy being like, we're going to redirect people's thoughts to make them healthier. And then over the course of a couple of decades, it turns into, like, positive thoughts make money. Well, what could be healthier than being super rich? Yeah, it is statistically the healthiest thing for you, is being rich as shit.

So that article quotes historian Beryl Satter's explanation for the reasoning of the New Thought believers. Quote, So you can see how that could be a harmless thing for just like, I don't know, you're the lady who lived, like one of your friends' mom's growing up who was always into like weird books about self-help. Like you could see how it could be harmless,

but you could also see how those beliefs could lead to kind of toxic attitudes towards the poor. Yeah, because if you just have to think yourself into a better situation, then you're kind of blaming people who are poor and sick on their sickness and their poverty. Yeah, it's just because they didn't vibe high enough. It removes all of societal organization as a factor

for why someone might be poor, you know, or just, you know, it removes the idea that social class is like not entirely your choice. Which is kind of, I thought the whole point of class was that you didn't really get a choice, you know, and if you wanted to jump, it was gonna be like almost impossible, but they were like, no, no, no, poor people,

they're just not thinking enough about money. They don't want it really. Yeah, they don't want it really, and that's why they're poor. And it's no coincidence that the New Thought movement, the shift in the New Thought movement towards this sort of more toxic attitude happened in the Gilded Age, which is the previous period in American history

that's most like our current period in American history. I'm gonna quote again from that conversation article. Quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote. Quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote. in the thought of poverty, they will be poor, and the chances are that they will remain in poverty. If one holds themselves, whatever present conditions may be, continually in the thought of prosperity, they set into operation forces that will sooner or later bring them into

prosperous conditions." Hmm. Yeah. Hold on, I'm thinking really hard about everyone fan-mowing me. $6. Yep. I'm thinking about, yeah, yeah, how bad. I wanna-

I'm manifesting so hard. Yeah. Is it working? I gotta check my Venmo. Check your bank account. I'll check it at the end of the episode. If you've got more credit cards. At Hey Sorry June, Venmo me, $6.

If you believe in the secret. Yeah, your seed donations to Sarah June will be given back in kind by the gods of Twitter or some shit. Yeah, the seed donation that you give to me will manifest in my purchase of weed, and that is how your investment will blossom here. In fact, me getting high is in a way a proof of God through your donation. Prove God by donating marijuana money to Sarah June. Yeah.

Through your faith. So yeah, I think it's time now to get into our main subject for today. I just thought some of that background would be useful. Very helpful. Oliver Napoleon Hill was born in 1883, the son of an unlicensed dentist slash moonshiner and a woman named Sarah, who I'm sure was quite nice. Dentist slash moonshiner, what a cool dad. Yeah, that's a fucking great dad.

Your dad pulling out teeth, drunk as fuck, just like making white light. You know, he had a bunch of like bottles of like pure ethanol that he kept teeth in. Just a crazy lab in the shed. Just preserving all kinds of gums. No wonder he sent you out to be such a freak. I'm a big fan of like efficient synergy, you know, researching this podcast, but listen to an audiobook on a run or whatever. And I love the efficient synergy of both ripping teeth out of people's heads and making the

moonshine you need to sterilize them and cut and work as a painkiller. Yeah, dude. I mean, it sounds like he would get you super fucked up and then when you blacked out, he would pull your teeth, which, you know, what a great guy. Yeah, no, they have to pour you home from fucking the Dr. Hill, the same doctor dentist. So was he rich? No, no. But they did okay.

They were right. You know, I don't know if you'd even call them middle class, but they weren't impoverished. They grew up in rural Virginia at Weiss County as a child, all of her family called him nap. Do you say Weiss County? Weiss. Okay. But it was a pretty white county, I think. You don't say.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to guess. But I am talking out of my ass there. As a child, his family called him nap. Years later, Napoleon would write that his family represented three generations of, quote, ignorance, illiteracy, and poverty, but the New York Times notes that this was probably not the case, quote, in fact, his grandfather was a printer. His father became a self-taught dentist and treated his neighbors until the state licensing authorities got wind of his activities.

He'd been enrolled in dental school. A self-taught dentist, and he got shut down for doing it, but then he went to dental school at age 40 and practiced legally. Oh my God. Wow. He was like, I'm going straight. Yeah. I'm going straight to be a dentist.

Did he still illegally make moonshine even after becoming a dental dentist? Oh, he must've. You don't stop making moonshine. Yeah. That's just the hobby. That's a calling. Yeah. Speaking of divine intervention.

It's the duty of the world. Yeah. I would consider the concept of moonshine to be proof of divine intervention. Yeah. Now, Napoleon's mom died when he was nine years old, and his father remarried the next year to a woman named Martha, who was the widow of a school principal and seemed determined to push her new son towards a life of the mind. See, as a kid, Napoleon had a reputation for wildness.

What's that? No, go ahead. Napoleon had a reputation for wildness. He loved hiking around the woods in the middle of nowhere in Virginia with a hand gun firing at whatever he saw. Now, he was 12 at the time when he was doing this. So that's 12-year-old Napoleon wandering around the woods with a hand gun shooting stuff all the time.

That sounds like Virginia. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like Virginia. So Miss Martha comes into the picture as his stepmom, and she sees this kid living half feral in the trees with a gun, and decides maybe he could use some parenting. So she buys him a typewriter, and she tells him, if you become as good with the typewriter as you are with that gun, you may become rich and famous and known throughout the world. You can get pretty rich by shooting people with a gun.

You can actually get very rich by shooting people with a gun. Now, it's possible that that conversation never happened. Napoleon Hill, that's based on his recollections and an unpublished autobiography, and Napoleon Hill was a notorious and inveterate con man, and a lot of what we're going to talk about is based on his recollections of his life. Oh, Jesus. He was clearly full of bullshit his whole life, and all we know about him is his lies. Yeah, we know a few other things.

So my primary sources for this article are a New York Times article published in 1995, which is good but fairly short, and a Gizmodo article by Matt Novak called All American Huckster. An article would be kind of an unfair way to describe what Mr. Novak wrote. He essentially put together like a short nonfiction book that's just published on a website. It's like tens of thousands of words long, exhaustively researched, and clearly took him, I think he spent at least like six straight months putting this thing together. So he like traveled around and like found, went through archives to like find original

like articles about Napoleon Hill written while he was alive, and it's a very, very good article. So I want to kind of highlight Mr. Novak's work up front because he did some great work, and I don't think I haven't really found any other journalist who's dug into Napoleon Hill to this kind of extent, so he's pretty critical. So from what we can put together based on a variety of sources, Young Oliver's first job was writing up news articles for a small newspaper. Some of his articles would be picked up by local newspapers in Virginia, and this became

a source of spare cash for the enterprising young teenager. His biographers write, quote, Napoleon would soon become a prolific source of stories. His writing was unpublished if not crude, but he compensated with unbounded verve and a vivid imagination. Indeed, he later recalled that when news was scarce and there weren't stories to tell, he simply made them up. So that's his first job. Great career blogging.

It seemed to start to all be a pattern. Yeah. Now, Hill claims to have first gotten married when he was 15 years old. In a convoluted story for which there are no records and no evidence outside of Hill's autobiography, he claims a young woman fell in love with him and she was pregnant from somebody else, but she lied and said that the child was his. And when Napoleon married her, thinking the child was his, but then had the marriage annulled when he learned the truth.

Now, there's no records of this marriage anywhere. We don't know what actually happened. Based on the rest of his life, my guess is that he just abandoned this woman and her child, who was his child too. But he claims he got hoodwinked by her. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah.

Oliver Napoleon Hill graduated high school at age 17 and went to a business school until 1901. When he was 18, he started to work with a coal magnate named Rufus Ayers. In his article for Gizmodo, Matt Novak writes, quote, Ayers was said to be impressed with Hill, who, according to the official biography, compensated for his youth and five foot six stature by adopting the appearance of a serious young executive, ramrod straight posture, impeccable double breasted suits, immaculately pressed white shirts, conservative bow ties and white handkerchiefs neatly posed in the breast pocket.

I hate this guy. That's how young Napoleon. Yeah. You're not a fan? What is it? Is it the handkerchief? It's not the handkerchief. It's the immaculately pressed white shirts.

It's also the, you know, I bet he, wow, yeah, this is the kind of, this is like a young Republican kind of guy, you know? Yeah. He looks like, he looks like the kind of guy, like I'm sure he's the kind of guy who'd wear a full suit in DC in the middle of the summer. Yeah. Yeah. But also like as a 17 year old.

Yeah. Who wears a suit like when he doesn't have to and he kind of thinks everybody else is worse for not wearing a suit. Like he kind of acts like it's a joke. He's like, haha, it's my thing, I wear suits, but he actually thinks everybody who doesn't wear suits all the time is a loser. Yeah. You get that feeling from Napoleon or it may just have been, it may just have been like

a calculation of, because he's a con man where he was like, well, everyone trusts a guy in a suit and I need extra trust because I'm conning people constantly, so I should always wear a suit. I'm still thinking about that last quote where he's like, you know, when there's not any news, I make it up, aren't I a good journalist? Like he doesn't know what being a journalist is. Well, in a little bit of fairness to him, at that point in time, there was a lot of weird bullshit in papers.

There was a lot of weird bullshit in papers. Yeah. No, that's true. There was a lot of crazy shit in papers. Yeah. But like you weren't supposed to tell people we make it up. You know, you're supposed to tell people we know a lot of stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, he's from the beginning, not somebody to whom the truth is a major concept. Important. Yeah. Yeah. Just not a fully fleshed out concept. Truth, it's like sketchy, sketchy outline. There's something there.

If you say something, maybe it's the truth, maybe it's not. It's a nice idea. Yeah. To Napoleon Hill. It's like, oh, that's, you know what? That makes me think of something else, some bullshit. So six months into his employment, Oliver Napoleon Hill was promoted to work as a clerk for a mine in Richlands, Virginia.

Now the first major tests of his professional acumen, other than his ability to wear a suit, came when the manager of a bank, which was also owned by his employer, the same guy who owned the mine, this bank manager got wasted and accidentally shot a black bellhop to death. Now we have a couple of different versions of the story. It's possible he dropped his gun and it fired by accident. It's possible it was an active outright murder. We just really don't know. But the New York Times reports what happened.

Next. Quote, with the boss away, he'll took charge, arranging to have the death covered up. As a result, his employer made him manager of the mine at the age of only 19. Yeah. This all tracks with the suit thing. Yeah. This all tracks with the suit thing. Now according to Napoleon Hill's autobiography, when he arrived at the bank after the shooting,

the drunken manager had left the vault open and thousands of dollars were scattered around. Hill goes out of his way to note that he scrupulously recorded and reorganized all of the money without taking anything. He wrote, quote, I could have appropriated $15,000 to $20,000 or perhaps more without the slightest indication that I had taken the money. You absolutely took the money if you make the point of noting like I could have stolen all this money, but I didn't. Nobody.

The kind of people who don't steal money from their bosses. Nobody would bring that up unless they had done it. Don't bring that up. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to guess he stole some money. But Hill claims that in gratitude for his honesty, Rufus Ayers promoted him to manage the coal mine. Yeah.

That's a thing bankers do. Who knows? Reward honesty. Yeah. Yeah. One way or the other, Napoleon Hill covers up a murder and winds up in charge of a coal mine. And it makes out with maybe $15,000, but his own estimate.

By his own estimate. Maybe $15,000. So yeah. That's the story so far. This guy is like Pete Buttigieg so far, where like everything, he just keeps like moving upward, you know, and he's like, aren't I great at this? And everyone's like, I don't know, but sure. And then he just, he just keeps going up.

Yeah, maybe. I don't know much about Pete Buttigieg. Oh, he's kind of like, he was like a top of his class, you know, like went to an Ivy League, like did really good grades, you know, high achiever. Yeah. I wouldn't say Napoleon was a high achiever. I think he was more of a, I think he was more of a guy who kept sliding into the right place at the right time with the right lie.

And that's where he is so far. Is he like gets into this good situation and kind of wangles a job by covering up a murder. Like who hasn't. I don't know who I would compare him to, but yeah, that's where he is right now. So we're going to break for ads because it's time for a product and maybe a service or two, but when we come back, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of fucking cons. Just a whole lot of conning people out of money. So after the break, products.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say for one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads?

From my heart podcast and school of humans, this is let's start a coup. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we found who Napoleon Hill does remind us a little of and it's Roger

Stone. Like, yeah, I think that's a good comparison, Sophie. I think this is what Roger Stone would have been if he'd never gotten into politics because he is. Well, we'll tell the rest of his story so you can understand why I think that. So on June 17th, 1903, Napoleon Hill married a woman named Edith Whitman. Their daughter Edith Whitman Hill was born two years later in 1905. The family moved to Marbury, Alabama, when their daughter was six months old.

But Napoleon sent them back to Virginia five months after that. Then in 1907, he moved to Mobile, Alabama to start a timber company with his family still waiting behind in Virginia. So he spends maybe a couple of months in total, like actually living with his family. And then he's off to start this new company. Now, one probable reason that he spent so much time moving about outside of his business is that Napoleon Hill had a tremendous addiction to prostitutes. One of Napoleon's friends later testified during divorce proceedings that his wife instituted

about his behavior on a 1906 business trip. Quote, soon after he reached Bluefield, West Virginia, we went to a house of ill fame between 8 and 9 o'clock of that night. And Mr. Oliver Inhill, within a few minutes after arriving there, took one of the girls to a room in the same house and stayed with her until about 12 o'clock that night. Both of the women who stayed at this house were of easy virtue, and Mr. Hill went there for the purpose of having sexual intercourse with these women. He admitted to me that night when we were going to the hotel that he had sexual intercourse

with the girl that he took to the room. That's pretty clear. Yep, that's the one he told his wife about. Well no, this is the one that one of his friends told the judge about when his wife sued for divorce. Oh, oh, I see. Okay, great way to find that out. Yeah.

Now, I think she probably guessed, although he was again never around. Napoleon and Edith were together for five years, but only actually again together for a fraction of that. In court proceedings, Edith claimed that he was frequently violent when they were together. At one point during a visit to Virginia, he left with their young daughter and delivered her to his stepmother and then threatened his wife that he would never give their daughter back to her. In January of 1908, he wrote his wife this letter, quote, I'm leaving the country where

you'll never bother me. You can only communicate with me through my father and not unless he thinks best. Wow, very excited to see this guy become extremely rich. Well, I have some good news there, but we'll get to that. I don't want to bury the lead. He does briefly. It does seem interesting to me that this is basically the same thing Elron Hubbard did to his second wife, kidnapping their baby and moving away, except for in Hubbard's case,

he took the baby to Cuba and drank heavily while writing a book, whereas Napoleon at least left his infant daughter with family. So we can say conclusively that Napoleon Hill was a better father than Elron Hubbard. There are worse things you can do with a baby than give them to their stepmother. Yeah, worse things you can do with a baby. That you steal. Mm-hmm. Yeah, stole a baby.

Yeah, that you steal. Yeah. Look, if he's not abandoning babies, he's stealing them. Yeah, that's this guy. He mostly abandons babies. Mostly abandons babies. Fairness to Napoleon, he only stole the one baby. And it was his baby.

And it was his baby. I mean, most babies are stolen by their parents, but yeah. So three months after writing that letter, Edith managed to get back her baby and successfully file for divorce. He alleged that Napoleon sometimes threw their small child on the bed and choked her. So actually, he's not a better father than Elron Hubbard. I could tell that. Yeah, no, that guy sucks.

Yeah, Hubbard didn't beat his kids. Well, he actually, this is really a pointless thing. They're both terrible parents. Yeah. Yeah, maybe we shouldn't dwell too much on this. And Elron Hubbard used a lot of kids too. I don't know why I try to evaluate them. Yeah.

You know, we want somebody to be the good guy here, but it turns out they're all bad. I shouldn't look for the good guy in Elron Hubbard. Right. But the podcast isn't called behind the good guys. No, no. So Edith also alleged that at one point, her husband threatened to blow her brains out on a crowded city street. Numerous people who worked with Napoleon testified to his constant dalliances with prostitutes

and habitual infidelity. Now, so yeah, the marriage splits up and at this point in time, Napoleon's timber business isn't exactly doing well either because it turns out that rather than being a business, it was just kind of a scam. So Napoleon bought $10,000 to $20,000 worth of lumber using credit from companies around the country. So he would buy the lumber and sign a contract saying he would pay them back later with interest. And then he would just take the lumber and sell it individually to people for cash.

But he had no plan of actually paying back the credit. Well, like on the street court? Yeah, essentially. Yeah. He was just driving around you like you guys want some fucking wood? Yeah. So he would sell the wood for cash and just keep moving so that nobody could ever, yeah, that was the whole plan.

Oh, where'd you get that wood? He was basically just stealing wood and selling it on the street. Yeah, fell off a truck. Well, it's really advanced. Yeah, he's not a great con man, but he's a constant one. Yeah, he's like making up news and telling everybody in fucking stealing wood. This is the most traceable crime. Sub-thief and fake journalist at this point is his resume and stole a baby once.

Yeah. So, by late 1908, many of his creditors had realized they were being fleeced. Matt Novak cites an article in the October issue of the Pensacola Journal covering Hill's lumber fraud. The whereabouts of Owen Hill said to be the president and general manager of the Acre Hill Lumber Company is causing considerable anxiety among creditors of the concern in the state and several other lumber sections. Hill has not been at his office since September 8th.

This was issued for Hill's arrest. At the same time, the post office started looking into claims of mail fraud, which Napoleon Hill had also been busy committing. Wow. He was charged with check fraud as well. Hill spent the fall and winter in 1908 on the run dodging law enforcement and creditors as he gradually made his way to Washington, D.C. Well, this is what I'm saying.

You can't be weighed down by a baby when you're dodging creditors, you know, running up and down the country. The wife is just like really holding him back from being the slimyest bag he can be. And once he's free of his wife and free of his creditors and all of the people that he fleeced in his lumber business and his check fraud, and he moves to Washington, D.C., he drops the first named Oliver and starts going by Napoleon Hill because he's a new man now. Right. Right.

He's changed. Just like his ease. That'll make it harder to be found. Yeah. So, 1909, when he winds up in D.C., is a time in which cars were still new and very exciting to just about everybody. There was a lot of money to be made in the nascent automobile industry, and more importantly for Mr. Hill, there was a lot of money to be made in lying to people about the nascent

automobile industry. In order to understand this, you have to think of cars not as the ubiquitous tools they are today, but more like the internet and social media were a decade ago. Scams are always going to be rampant with any new technology, doing that sweet spot after it becomes clear how valuable it is, but before anyone really understands it. They're like, cars are in that place in 1909, when Napoleon Hill winds up in D.C. So he joins immediately an automotive enthusiast group called the Automobile Club of Washington, and it inspires him to create his own organization, the Automobile College of Washington, in

early 1909. No. Already fake. Already not a college. Just a club. Oh, yeah. Not a college. It's a club.

What is he going to? I don't know. What is automobile fraud? It's kind of a college. Do you learn things? It's a college kind of in the same way Trump University is a college. Okay. So they're both yes.

It's a little more legit. Okay. It's a little more legit than Trump University. So the idea is that the Auto College is a training program that would teach you how to build cars with six weeks of training. Oh, like a coding bootcamp, but for cars. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Like he's promising graduates that they'll be able to earn between $75 and $200 per week, which is like really good money. Totally. What you have to do is like pay to learn how to build cars. Now the reality of the situation, these people were building cars. So there is actual learning how to build cars going on here. But what Napoleon has done is basically set up a car factory wherein people pay to work there.

Oh, wow. Like that's the business. That's the scam. Yeah. What a good one. This is his best one yet. Yeah. This is a good.

This is a decent scam. This one's like legal. Yeah. Like there's an actual product, people are presumably learning something, but you're making a bunch of money and presumably folks aren't realizing, are we just paying to work in a factory? Yeah. I kind of want to do like a coal mining college.

I'll teach you how to mine coal. You just got to mine coal. Look. Give me all the coal you mine. No, you're not doing it right. Do it for another few years. You need another few years of coal school. Yeah.

It's like if the Washington Post rebranded as a journalism school and started charging people to write op-eds. Wow. Yeah. Well. Yeah. Now, so yeah, he worked out a deal with the Carter Motor Corporation in 1910 and 1911. And basically they, that's who he was making cars for.

So his students were producing vehicles that were then sold by the Carter Motor Company. And you know, it was a great deal for Carter because they get free labor and Napoleon gets free money and the students, you know, you might even think that it's semi-legitimate because at least the students are going to learn how to assemble cars and they could presumably get a job elsewhere. That they didn't pay for. Yeah. That they didn't pay for.

That is an actual job. So presumably like this, this is, I would say this is the high point of Napoleon Hill's life as a person who did things that were almost legitimate. Yeah. He's doing a classic capitalist scam here. You know, it involves slavery, it involves new technology and it involves a lot of lying. So this is, you know, he's really, he's got the three, mwah, together, beautiful scam. But like all great scams that involve slavery, it involves like it's slavery where the people

who are kind of slaves don't think of themselves that way because they're paying for the privilege. Right. Right. Like it is voluntary servitude. So I don't know. Slavery might, slavery is a bit far. He's just tricking people into being employees and telling them, but yeah, it's, I don't know what you call people in this situation.

It's like running a film school and like secretly having them make the new, like if Disney started a film school and secretly had people make new Marvel movies and didn't pay them. Yeah. Like, yeah. So while he's running this kind of half scam car college, Napoleon meets another woman named Elizabeth Horner. Now his main attraction to Elizabeth seemed to be that her family was rich. They got hitched and shortly thereafter, Napoleon's bogus car college collapses.

Now. Did everyone just kind of catch on? Well, it seems like what happened is that the Carter car company who he was making vehicles for fell apart probably because their vehicles were being assembled by people who didn't know how to make cars. The one fatal flaw in the perfect scam. Yeah. Because Napoleon didn't know how to make cars.

Yeah. This is the issue. We're like, I don't think, I don't think very functional cars were not being produced by this school. So it was also alleged that Napoleon had stolen a car from some of his business partners and he was arrested and his college was put into receivership. Now, none of this stopped Napoleon from continuing to operate his automotive college. Instead, he just changed the focus of the school from teaching people how to build cars

to teaching people how to sell cars. So you got to be able to pivot as a scammer. Logical next step. Napoleon's learning how to pivot. Now as time went on, the focus of a school drifted further and further away from teaching any kind of marketable skill and towards the sort of multi-level marketing schemes we're very familiar with in the 21st century. That is Moto article I've been citing highlights an early expose of Hill's scam, an article

in Motor World magazine titled, pointing the easy route to get rich quick land. I went ahead and I found an archived copy of that report and I'd like to read it now in my best old timey voice because I really enjoy it. Astonishing and enticing means employed by the greatest automobile college in the world to catch the would be chauffeur's coin. Masters of gas engines evolved in 12 weeks and before graduation and after. There's money, money everywhere, if not a cent to spend. That's pretty good.

It's a fun subtitle. So the author of this article wrote about Napoleon's revamped fake college that, quote, the whole business is so cunningly planned as to appeal not only to the cupidity of the indolent Nairduel who, in his ignorance, thinks he sees the gates of prosperity standing ajar, but also to the ill-informed but really ambitious youth who has an honest desire to make something of himself and who is willing to devote his scanty savings and infrequent spare hours to the task. Because Nairduel's always screwing it up for the ambitious do-gooders, do-wells.

Now that statement could apply equally well to Amway or Young Living Essential Oils or any modern-day MLM. This is before people used the term multi-level marketing. They weren't even calling these pyramid schemes at this point. So Napoleon Hill's really fucking groundbreaking at this stuff. But the actual business practice that he evolved for his auto-college is really groundbreaking. Basically, I'm just going to read from the article breaking it down. The very day you enroll, the flow of language ripples on, you may, note the grace's permission,

begin to send in the names of the young men whom you think might be interested in our course. It is estimated that half of such men will enroll, and as the school pays $3 ahead for every student brought in according to this plan, it is suggested that you should pay for your course several times over in this manner. He stops even selling, like he says, like, okay, now this is a school where you teach people how to sell cars. But the real business is getting your friends to sign up for the college, and then you get

a cut of what they, like, it's the same way every MLM works. Well, you know, here's the thing, Robert, everybody's making money, so why are you mad? Well, I mean, the only downside is that after, like, at a certain, like, six weeks or so into this process, there's no people left on earth to enroll. Six weeks, you know what, I don't like to think that far ahead. I like to live in the now. That's actually why I'm so wealthy and successful, because I'm not going to, you know, these are negative thoughts, and I'm thinking prosperity.

Thinking for prosperity. You're thinking and growing rich. I am. I am. You should try thinking and growing rich. On November 11th, 1912, Napoleon and Florence had their second baby boy and the second of their three children. This son was born deaf.

Now according to Napoleon's biography, a lifetime of riches, quote, the baby boy was not only born deaf. He was completely without ears and the years to come, despite the intense fighting with both family and school teachers, Napoleon would never allow the boy to learn sign language. Oh my God. It gets. Why? He was determined to single-handedly teach his deaf son to speak and even to hear.

As the boy was growing up, he would talk to him for hours with his lips pressed against Blair's cranial bone at the base of the neck, just behind where his ears would normally have been. Wow. That's so creepy. Just shouting into his kid's skull. Oh my God. Well, not even shouting, just talking with a little, like that.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Now, Napoleon's biography claims that this eventually worked out because Napoleon's son had a weird bone deformity and like, yeah, I'm going to read it from the biography. Please, please do. I'm going to note clearly lies, like obviously lies, but this is how his biographers with the Napoleon Hill Foundation explain why it was good that he refused to teach his deaf

son sign language. Years later, the boy did begin to hear, for it was discovered that the bone itself was conducting sound to his brain and eventually he wore a specially designed hearing aid that dramatically improved his hearing and speaking abilities. But it was Napoleon who inspired Blair's desire to overcome his handicap. His father never allowed his son to give up. He didn't even allow Blair to consider himself handicapped. No.

He taught his son that deafness was simply an adversity that could be triumphed over. Think and become not deaf. Yeah. Think and grow ears. What the fuck? Wow. Yeah. That's fucking wild.

You know what's crazy is another way to quote, overcome the handicap of being deaf is to have sign language and speak sign language. Sign language? That's actually how you overcome that disability. Yeah. That's so, can you imagine, oh my God, I feel for that kid just having to sit with your dad talking to your skull for hours and he's probably talking all sorts of bullshit about how like being deaf is your fault because you didn't think hard enough about ears while

you were growing or something. Your attitude's not positive enough. You're not deaf. You're not. Incredible. And then to completely censor and mute him his entire life to give him sign language. Give him no way to express himself while constantly telling him you're not deaf. I'll say this, it's not as bad as it sounds, Sarah, because Napoleon abandoned his children

for the vast majority of their life. So he's not around all that much. You know, I mean, right now that seems like the nicer thing to do. Yeah. I would say it's better to be abandoned by Napoleon Hill than parented by him. Absolutely. Now, you know what, it's not good to be abandoned by Sarah. No.

Well, anything really. The products and services that support this show. Whoa. They would never abandon us. They will not abandon you. Never. Never. Never.

Never. Never. Never. Never abandon you. Products. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So as I noted, Napoleon's college collapsed eventually, like all scams do, and he moved his family in with his wife's family to leach more money off of them. His wife's family helped him get a job at a university by having a family friend who was a judge write him a letter of recommendation. The job was in sales and advertising, but since Napoleon now had a piece of paper in which

a judge had written that he was a good guy, Napoleon started using this to claim to be an attorney at law. Even his own biographers admit, this highly exaggerated claim looked impressive on paper, but there is no record of his having performed legal services for anyone. Hey man, I'm a self-taught attorney. Okay. So you want a license? Well how about this?

I got a note from a judge, says I'm cool. It doesn't even say I'm a lawyer, but would anyone who's not a lawyer know a judge, QED? Just imagine it's like a beautiful, like a gilded, looks like a diploma, but then in Gothic font instead of saying his name, it just says, this guy's chill, and then there's a judge's signature. This guy's chill. A judge. A.judge.

If anyone listening to this is a judge, hit me up on Twitter at IWriteOK and I'll give you my mailing address and you can send me a piece of paper that says I'm chill, because I would love to practice law, just as Napoleon Hill didn't. Yeah, that sounds like a hoot. Tape it to my shirt. Hey guys, I'm representing myself in court. Yeah, so Napoleon Hill worked at that university for a couple of months before quitting in 1915 and getting involved with a candy company, which he and his partners renamed the Betsy

Ross Candy Shop. Hill was quickly pushed out of the job by his partners, likely because they realized he was a gigantic con man who was stealing from them. We don't really know. Stealing candy? We do know. Stealing money, I think. They bought this company together and he was probably just stealing from the company,

because he's Napoleon Hill. We don't know exactly what went down. He's thinking about growing rich. Look, he's not stealing. He's manifesting wealth. He manifested wealth from the cash register to his pockets. We don't know exactly what happened there, but Hill claims that his business partners had him, quote, arrested on false charges.

He never specified what those charges were, but he claims he was forced to hand over his stakes in the company. So Napoleon Hill would spend most of the 19 teens leaping from one failure to another. In September 1915, he created another fake school, the George Washington Institute, which he claimed was dedicated to teaching the principles of success. Part of this class was apparently having his students write hundreds of letters to newspapers supporting Napoleon Hill's race for a seat in the US Congress. Now he never ran for Congress, but it seems like we don't know why he did this.

This seems like he was just trying another scam, but it didn't get off the ground. He just had so many scams going. Yeah. What a weird move. It's like, you know, maybe it's so when he, if he was like, if I run later, I can be like, look at all this grassroots support I have. Yeah. I think a guy like Napoleon, like, you know, ABS always be scammed.

So like, you know, while you got your main scam you're working on, you're trying to seed little other scams. Totally. Because not all scams, not all scams will last. So you got to plant a lot of seeds. Not all scams will last. You got to diversify. Right.

Because I was like, wow, he's already running, he's already running a school scam, right? He's already getting money out of that. Now he's going to like, let that feed into a larger, more legitimate scam of being a politician. Wow. This is like really good, but I guess he couldn't, he couldn't hack it. Like the George Washington Institute is his day job and having people write letters to newspapers telling them to run for Congress is his equivalent of a 401k. Like that's like his, that's like his security.

He's putting some scam away for later. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. This one's for my kids. Yeah. No, he wouldn't leave anything. That's what Napoleon Hill was talking about.

They can think and grow rich themselves. Next I'm going to quote again from Gizmodo's Matt Novak, quote, some students of the George Washington Institute would accuse Hill's unaccredited school of fraud and it too had a very short life. According to his biographers, Hill returned the favor of one student's criticism by alerting the FBI of the German-American kids suspicious activities. The student was supposedly arrested for the duration of World War One. Oh my fucking God.

Such a piece of shit. Wow. Damn, he does not play at all. No, he does not fuck around. If you're like, hey, this school is a scam, he's like, I'm sending you to jail. Tell the FBI you're a fucking spy. Wow. Cool guy.

Yeah, he's a real piece of shit. Abuses his children, immigrants, all people, trying to learn a trade. He's definitely, I have not run across any racism in this story. So as far as I know, Napoleon Hill would have scammed a black man as well as a white man. You know, Napoleon didn't see color. Just green, baby. Just green, baby.

That's the only color. Although it's also possible he just only fleeced white people because he completely ignored that anyone else existed. That's pretty likely, yeah. I really don't know anything about his attitude on race relations. I'm going to assume not great. Yeah, I think we can safely, safely surprise. Now, the George Washington Institute quickly collapsed, and by 1917, Napoleon Hill was

trying to sue the Illinois General Railroad because he said the lighting on their cars was bad for his eyesight and had caused him to need glasses. So he gets a little bit desperate in the end of the 19-teens. Yeah, he's really diversifying, but not in a great way. This has been like a sad arc. You get from like this legitimately kind of cunning automotive college scam to like suing the railroad for fucking up your eyes. Yeah, I mean, ambulance chasers next, you know.

Yeah. By 1918, the Better Business Bureau attacked him after revealing that his success school was really just a barely camouflaged stock-selling scheme. The magazine Postage reported that, quote, while it appeared on the face of the operation that he sought students for the educational course he offered, there was evidence that his chief object was to sell stock in the enterprise. Napoleon apparently convinced people to buy stocks in his college by claiming it had a capital value of over $100,000.

In reality, the entirety of the enterprise was worth around $1,200 at best. Napoleon was once again, yeah, yeah. He was arrested again, and this arrest seems to have convinced his long-suffering wife to finally cut ties with him. All these failures in a row certainly had a deleterious effect on Hill's morale, as you might imagine. The New York Times noted, quote, Hill regarded such setbacks as a test of his faith, but he was not immune to despair.

After another one of his business failures, he confessed, I had spent the better portion of my life chasing a rainbow. I had begun to place myself in the category of charlatans who offers a remedy for failure which they themselves cannot successfully apply. Wow, a lot of self-awareness for such a piece of shit. That is a shocking amount of self-awareness for a con man. And it is also insane that at this point in his life, he's like, people think I'm a charlatan. You guys, like be honest with me.

Does everyone think I'm a charlatan? Yes. Yes. He says that as he's setting up a shell game or something like that in the middle of downtown Manhattan. He's rolling loaded dice. Do you want to buy some lumber, by the way? Do people not trust me?

Now by 1919, Napoleon Hill had gotten tired of jumping from scam to scam, sometimes a step ahead of the law, but often several steps behind it. He decided that from now on, his life was going to be different. And his first step to winning that different step was to weaponize the Golden Rule. Yes, the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. On its surface, it seems like one of the least problematic things a human being could believe or advocate, but our friend Napoleon found a way to make it problematic.

He founded Golden Rule Magazine, which he used to outline his new philosophy on life. This is Napoleon Hill's philosophy on the Golden Rule. Quote, it seems ridiculous to refer to the Golden Rule as a weapon, but that's just what it is, a weapon that no resistance on earth can withstand. The Golden Rule is a powerful weapon in business because there is so little competition in its application. What a psychopath. Yeah, yeah.

So Matt Novak explains, quote, Hill's understanding of the Golden Rule meant that people would become indebted to you for providing something to them. It was a weapon. Rather than do unto others as you would have them do unto you, he believed that by providing something to someone or simply showing them kindness, they owed you something in return. So that's how the Golden Rule works for Napoleon Hill. Oh my God. Wow.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Cool. Now, Golden Rule Magazine was founded using money from a couple with the last name of Cox and they were a wealthy couple who owned the General Oil Company and they were looking to drum up more investors for their business and that was kind of the purpose that they

had for this magazine that Hill was running. So their plan was for Hill to basically use his magazine. No, no, no, no. I hate this so much. Oh God. Their plan was for Hill to use his magazine to convince people that General Oil was a great thing to invest in. This is fucking cartoonish, man.

The whole magazine was a scam. It's an oil company starting a magazine that's like, remember what Jesus said? Here's how you can use it to make yourself rich. Yeah. In April of 1919, Hill wrote an article in his magazine titled, An Interesting Man and His Wife, the Cox's, Who Have Made a Million Dollars for Other People. Wow. The article claimed that the Cox's were using a million dollars of their profits to fund

scholarships for American veterans. Philanthropy is good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was untrue, obviously. There was no million dollars set aside for veterans and Hill and the Cox's would be sued by the FTC in October of that year for fraudulent advertising.

But being sued for fraud did not stop Napoleon Hill from producing his magazine about the Golden Rule. Yeah. In May of 1922, he awarded a chiropractor by the name of B.J. Palmer what he called Hill's Golden Medal. Hill claimed that the award was based on 150,000 votes cast by subscribers of his magazine who among them from places far away is Japan, Italy, Australia, and England. Woodrow Wilson came in second place.

What? Now, there were no subscribers to Golden Hill magazine. Just a couple, I mean, maybe a couple of dozen. This was all a lie, but this is like what he was getting at when he, with his Golden Rule philosophy, it was basically the way that he actually acted on that is he would present awards to prominent citizens, politicians, and celebrities and then use that opportunity to like get pictures with them and talk with them and try to get them to either invest in his scams or to let him use their name and credibility so he could trick other people

into scams. Wow. So that's the Golden Rule as used by Napoleon Hill. Yeah. Well, now we call it swag, baby. You give them some free stuff, they got a gram about it. Now it's just being an influencer. Yeah.

Napoleon Hill was like the original influencer. In 1922, Napoleon Hill used this tactic to start up a partnership with T.O.T., a prominent chaplain and humanitarian. Bill and T.E.G. started a charity that on its face provided educations to prisoners in Ohio to help rehabilitate them. Don't tell me what it really is, I don't want to know. Yeah, it's bad. It's real bad.

It's just let me believe. Please. Yeah. Yeah. So Napoleon would go from town to town raising money for this program, telling newspapers things like, what we're trying to do here is mentally meet these men who are shut off from the outside world. We're going to prove to them that they have something to look forward to, then put in

their hands the tools which they can carve out their future. Yes, absolutely. Beautiful, right? Yes, I, the oppressor, am going to give you the oppress to the tools you need to escape my oppression. That's what I'm going to do, because I'm really good and nice. I wouldn't call Napoleon an oppressor just because he's been arrested a shitload of times and spent a lot of time in jail himself, like because he's a criminal con man.

But of course, there was no actual charity. He was essentially running like the monorail scheme from the Simpsons, but with the charity aimed at raising money to like provide education to prisoners. In Shelby, Ohio in 1923, Napoleon collected more than $1,000 from kind-hearted locals who were happy to raise funds to give convicts a chance at a better life. A lot of the money came from a group of local school children who raised the cash because they were just so compassionate about the convicts that he'll had, you know, painted a picture of how he was going to help them.

Hill spent much of the 1920s following the same basic pattern. He'd go from town to town, sweet talk, decent folk into donating money to help these people, and then he'd skip town, never to be seen again. But the late 1920s, however, this scam had run its course. Napoleon's wife, he had a new wife now, Florence, was starting to get pissed off with him. He wound up in Philadelphia, broke and befriended a publisher named Pelton. And this is sort of when Napoleon's life starts to change. So the late 20s, like he's been run out of most of like the Midwest and the South and

is hiding out in Philadelphia. He's got a new wife and she too has some family money, but she's pissed at him. And yeah, he befriends a publisher, a guy named Pelton, and convinces this guy that he has a great idea for a new self-help book called The Law of Success. So Napoleon started to weave a fantastic story for Pelton, claiming that back in 1908 he'd sat down with Andrew Carnegie, one of the wealthiest and most successful men in America, had been handed a sacred task to collect all of the success secrets of the greatest men in history and distill them into a sort of science of success.

Yes, it's like the Da Vinci Code, but for success. Yeah, exactly. The success code. Yeah, Andrew Carnegie. That should be obvious. Under the roof. Yeah. Well, he's still alive at this point.

Well, that's what we think. So yeah, as should be obvious to everybody, this meeting never took place. There's zero evidence whatsoever that Napoleon Hill ever met Andrew Carnegie. What do you mean there's no evidence? But Napoleon Hill said it happened. He did say it happened, and here's how his biography describes this historic meeting between Andrew Carnegie and Napoleon Hill, the two greatest minds in the history of success. Quote, the richest heritage a young man can have is to be born into poverty, Carnegie

told him. He saw his own humble origins, not as a deterrent to success, but rather as the inspiration to overcome all obstacles and attain seemingly impossible goals. If one had a strong sense of self worth, Carnegie claimed, no degree of impoverishment could hold one back. Individuals who achieve outstanding success are not born with some peculiar quality of genius not possessed by others. Confidence is a state of mind.

It is under the control of the individual, not an inborn trait, and the starting point for developing that self-confidence is the definiteness of purpose. This was Carnegie's cardinal rule in his philosophy of personal achievement. The man who knows exactly what he wants has a definite plan for getting it and has actually engaged in carrying out that plan, has no difficulty in believing his own ability to succeed. Only the man who procrastinates soon loses confidence and winds up doing nothing. But what happens, he'll ask, when a man knows what he wants, has a plan, puts it into action

and meets with failure. Doesn't that destroy his confidence? Carnegie smiled. I hope you would ask that, because it is important to understand what I'm about to tell you. I believe that every failure carries with it, in the circumstances of the failure itself, the seed of an equivalent advantage. If you examine the lives of truly great leaders, you will discover that their success is an

exact proportion to their mastery of failures. Life has a way of developing strength and wisdom in individuals through temporary defeat. So you can see why people would find this compelling. Yeah, it kind of leaves out all of the exploitation of other people that went along with Andrew Carnegie's financial success. Yes, completely, yes. And it also, again, it puts the onus of failure on the people who are not materially successful. Right, if you're not rich, then it's because you're not good, it's just you're not brave

enough or good enough. You're just not, there's a thing, it's not your fault, but you're also just not good or brave or smart. So if you were, then you would be richer, because that's what I did, and it was all because of my thoughts. You could have chosen to be rich like me. Because I thought so hard about success, every night I thought about it. Yeah, why didn't you think about it being successful as hard as me?

If you did, your kids would have bread. And again, I just want to make it clear, I don't think Andrew Carnegie ever expressed anything like this. Oh, absolutely. This is all Napoleon Hill putting words in Carnegie's mouth. I don't know anything about the man, but I'm sure he didn't say this shit. So next, according to Hill, Carnegie explained to him that in his conversations with other rich men like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, he'd learned that all wealthy men had similar

stories. They had all risen to greatness via trial and error and totally earned the wealth the universe had bestowed upon them. Carnegie told Hill that he'd become convinced that the average person could gain wealth by studying the lives of great businessmen and replicating their tactics. All that was necessary was for some enterprising soul to go out, talk to the great leaders and successful men of the world, translate their wisdom into an easy-to-read guide for the average reader.

So this is the task that Andrew Carnegie sets Napoleon Hill with. It was merely bestowed upon him as a mission. It was thrust upon him to go out, like an explorer, collect the gem secrets of business success and then bring them to the common man so that we can all become as successful in money as him, a con man. Yeah. He's like, I want you to be the Indiana Jones of rich people and like steal the golden idols of how to run businesses from their temples of, okay, that's, yeah, anyway.

So yeah, yeah, this is like, so Hill claims that like Andrew Carnegie sets him this task and that Carnegie tells him it's going to take 20 years to complete the mission. Andrew Carnegie is this like old, like elder who lives on a mountain and is like, my son, you must collect the secrets, I give you 20 years. That's exactly the story that Hill tells. And conveniently enough, he pitches this book in 1928, which is 20 years after he claims he had his fake meeting with Andrew Carnegie. Of course, he's been, he's spent the last 20 years not tricking people into building

cars for him, but collecting success secrets. Yeah. In between fleecing small towns out of their spare money and running multiple fake colleges, he was interviewing the great thinkers of the world about success. So next, according to Hill's biography, quote, Hill can confess that he not only shared Carnegie's utopian vision, but believed it could be accomplished. That was exactly what Carnegie wanted to hear. With his usual bluntness, he turned to Hill and without any further preamble, inquired

if he felt equal to the challenge of undertaking this great work himself. Hill was honored and amazed that Carnegie saw in him someone worthy of the task, but Napoleon Hill believed he was. It took him less than half a minute to accept the offer. In fact, it took exactly 29 seconds, according to Carnegie, who had taken out his stopwatch and was timing Hill's response. Afterwards, he told Hill that he had given him a maximum of 60 seconds to come to a decision. If it had taken even one second longer than that, Carnegie said, the offer would have

been withdrawn because a man who cannot reach a decision promptly once he has all the necessary facts cannot be depended upon to carry through any decision he may make. It's bad to think through your decisions. That's true. Yes. It's definitely bad. It's bad to spend more than a minute deciding whether to take on an unpaid 20-year quest. I mean, this is why I'm not rich, is because I think about decisions a lot.

I don't know if, you know, could I have accepted such a daunting task, the daunting task of going around to old rich men and asking them how they got so rich. I don't know, man. I don't know if I have the strength of character for that. No. No. That's why, you know, you're not Napoleon Hill. You lack the strength of character to kidnap your own child, run a fake automotive school

and steal lumber. Man, I'm really doing this all wrong. I got to read the book. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I'm telling this story so other people can follow in Napoleons. I've done sort of what he did and I'm taking all of the wisdom of his life and condensing it for you.

Yeah. So, yeah. The thing I've just read you, that's the story that Napoleon Hill told Pelton, the guy who, you know, the publisher that he befriended. And it was, it's a good story. Like that's a great idea for a book. Especially the thing about, I only had 30 seconds to decide and he would have, you know, that's just like a real heightening of the stakes that he was a good storyteller.

Yeah. Now there was only one problem because he had Pelton, as soon as Pelton, Pelton being a smart guy, like here's the story and he's like, oh yeah, I could sell a book with that premise. But there's an issue, which is that Napoleon Hill is destitute. And if he'd spent the last 20 years learning all of the secrets of success, he would probably not be destitute. So Napoleon had to find a way to pretend to have some money in a meeting with this guy

in order to convince him. Man, you've been training his whole life for this. Yeah, exactly. So we're going to talk about how he did that and Napoleon's first major financial success in part two. But right now, Sara June, would you plug some plugables because it is the end of this episode? Absolutely. I will plug my website, haysarajune.com, H-E-Y-S-A-R-A-J-U-N-E.

You can see where I am doing comedy shows. You can come to my comedy show, High Priestess, if you're in L.A., highpriestesscomedy.com. I am on Venmo and Instagram at haysarajune. I'm on the Daily Zeitgeist sometimes and this is a great podcast. Thank you for listening to it. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find this podcast and all the sources for it at behindthebastards.com.

You can find us on The Graham and the Twits at At Bastards Pod, and those are the only places in the world that you can find us. So don't go looking anywhere else. Take these clues, my young success magicians, use them to find the success you seek. If you can track me down on the top of the mountain where I live, I will put you in the quest of talking to all of the worst dictators in the world and distilling their secrets of success. And once you put all the success rules in the crown, then you will manifest richness,

but not for you, for some other guy, for another guy who's above you. Yeah. All right, that's the episode. We'll be back. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.