Behind the Bastards - Part One: Werner Erhard and The Success Cult

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Robert and Joelle Monique sit down to discuss Werner Erhard, a maniac who abandoned his family to abuse new age weirdos in hotel conference rooms. (2 Part Series)See 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. What if I 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 in 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What? Forgotten what this episode is about? My host of the show? It's gonna make us sad. That's the only thing that I know for sure. I'm going to make us sad.

Maybe not. Maybe this is one of the episodes that doesn't do that, Sophie. You don't know. I mean, I do know because I have the script. Well, I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast behind the bastards. Bad people. Tell you all about them. Our guest today, Joelle Monique. Joelle, how are you doing? You know, I'm good. Preparing my soul for the next two episodes to just be demolished by the horrible things humans can do to one another. Looking forward to it. Well, this this episode is called The Man Who Killed Olive Lichtenstein with a Hammer. Oh, shit.

Yeah. No, no, it's not. It's not at all. I don't think that guy exists. What? Have you ever heard of a fellow, an individual, a guy named Werner Erhard? I'm not familiar with Werner. No. Good. Good. I have forgotten some of the things that I learned about him. So we're both going to be getting reacquainted with Werner. I wrote this episode a few weeks ago. I've heard of him. Oh, that's good, Sophie. What have you heard of Werner Erhard?

He's like a self-help. He wants self-help education type dude, right? Now, Sophie, did you hear about him from the episode script that I just said? No, I didn't. I did not. I studied psychology in college and his name came up. Yeah. Wow. Wait a big time us with your fancy college degree, by the way. I'm sorry. I'm educated. Yeah. Edgy and educated. Just put down my scotch. According to market data enterprises, the market for self-improvement literature and other self-help products grew by 50% in the years from 2000.

In 2004. I don't know if that has anything to do with 9-11, but let's just say it does. Sure. Today, the self-improvement industry is worth close to $11 billion a year. And US sales of self-help books grew by 11% per year from 2013 to 2019. A rate of increase that is unequaled in publishing. I don't believe any other category has grown by this much. The number of self-help titles in publication tripled during that period from more than 30,000 to around 85,000. Right now, some top shelf. I don't think that exists, period, because they're all pretty trashy.

But right now, some top self-help books include The Mountain is You, Transforming Self-Sabotage into Self-Mastery by Brianna Wiest. And according to the Amazon description, it's filled with pseudoscientific nonsense like this. But by extracting crucial insight from our most damaging habits, building emotional intelligence by better understanding our brains and bodies, releasing past experiences at a cellular level, and learning to act as our highest potential future selves, we can step out of our own way and into our potential. It's that line about at a cellular level that makes me know, oh, there's gonna be some horseshit in this. Yeah. Listen, as a woo-woo girl myself, I understood all the language, but I'm also very skeptical of who is shilling this stuff out and where it's going.

Yeah, the idea that this person has studied anything at a cellular level is probably laughable. What's great, what I love about shit like this is that it makes it clear, number one, what a genius LRH was. I'll run Hubbard, because all that releasing past experiences at a cellular level, that's thetans, right? That's ingram shit. All of this shit eventually loops back to being Scientology if you get it to it enough, and I just appreciate that. So let's all pour one out to LRH. I'm gonna keep my drink in my cup, Robert. I don't want to give anything to LRH. Oh, no. What do you got against Lafayette Ronald Hubbard? I feel the same.

Wow. This feels like a kind of bigotry. Okay. This is religious discrimination. Let's calm that down real quick. Brianna's author page on Amazon gives us this profound quote. I believe that the root of being human is learning how to think. From this we learn how to love, share, coexist, tolerate, give, and create. I believe the first and most important duty we have is to actualize the potential we were born with, both for ourselves and for the world.

The unspoken line of everything I write is, this idea changed my life. I hope my books do that for you. I hope they deeply inspire you, and I hope they help you to become the person you've always wanted to be. Let's really break that down. So she said, think. Thinking is the number one thing people should do, which, Brianna Boo, I mean... You're already doing it. You really sat in the bar low. Yes. Good work, Brianna.

Your synapses should be firing. Thank you. Yes, indeed. An essential part of humanism. Do not experience brain death. Good advice, Brianna. Let's all keep avoiding that. So other recent top self-help titles include, Don't Believe Everything You Think While You're Thinking is the Beginning and Ending of Suffering. The Amazon page for this bad boy informs me that more than a thousand Kindle readers have highlighted this passage from the book.

Therefore, it's not what we're thinking about that is causing us suffering, but that we are thinking. Which could either be some complicated Buddhist theory, or... And I think this is more likely, is probably some weird mindfulness shit. Yeah. I love that. It's a little victim-blamey. Man, if all those Holocaust survivors had just been pure vibes, they would have been doing better. The other thing is it contradicts her first statement about thinking being the most essential part. Oh, that's another one.

Oh, this is a different person. Yeah, this is some different broads. Oh, okay, yes. I forget who. I just was looking through some recent self-help hits. Oh, Valley. But yeah, I feel like if you're... I do think that's a smart attack that Brianna went through, because if you're really trying to get people who will be... Who you can influence, the folks who aren't thinking are probably better picks for that than the folks who are.

100%. This is something that you do when I say, buy my next seven books, get your things read. Get that brain off. Put that baby in snooze mode. I used to be a copywriter for self-help, folks. It was, by far and away, the worst job I ever had. Yeah. I got fired after a month because they were like, you can't keep changing the copy to be more positive.

And I was like, but you keep telling these women that they're ugly and they're never going to find a partner. And that's pretty much no advice at the end of it. It's just copy is just meant to... I think a lot of self-help copy is just meant to make you really depressed about yourself so that you keep coming back to this person for, quote, more advice. And it was devious and awful. See, as opposed to Elron Hubbard, who taught people how to improve their thinking patterns using the science of dianetics. Elron Hubbard's method definitely makes people cocky assholes and therefore overly confident. And so I guess if you were looking for more confidence, you know, that was the win. You did it.

You're right, Joelle. We didn't deserve him. So I want to highlight... Please stop blowing it to my mouth. I want to highlight here that I did not go into this portion of the episode wanting to shit on these two particular writers for some reason. I literally just googled top self-help books and these were two of the first three or four results that I saw. And I picked them because I was fascinated at how directly the central theses of each book, which I highlighted in those quotes, tracks back perfectly to the most influential self-help grifter in U.S. history, Werner Erhard. Now, you probably haven't heard of Werner. Obviously, Joelle, you had not.

Sophie has. His work came sort of in between the most well-known popular books in the self-help field. I'm talking about works like I'm Okay, You're Okay by Thomas Harris from 1967, as well as books like Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich from 1937, which we've already covered on the pod. No, Erhard's influence is extreme, but somewhat more subtle because he threaded the needle almost perfectly between popular mass business guru and vicious cult leader. Honestly, he did a better job of it than pretty much anyone I can name. Including our friend of the pod, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. Can I just say that I'm surprised that there's no Oprah in the script, just based on everything you said? I actually can't promise you there's not going to be an Oprah later.

I did a name search. Oh, you did a word search. Yeah, she doesn't pop up and I'm like, that's weird. Good work, Oprah. This one missed you. This one missed you. So first we should talk about the concept of self-help in American media and its history. I came across a book in my research, Sham by Steve Salerno.

I don't like this book and Steve comes to attacking the self-help industry from the position of a cranky conservative dude. But his work does make a couple of interesting points. The first common use of the term self-help associated with publishing in any way was the once burgeoning field of legal self-help. Obviously today, if someone is giving you tips for how to argue your own case in court, they are probably trying to get you to die in a shootout with the cops. But that was not the case for most of American history. And I didn't know this actually. A lot of the American legal system was built around the understanding that people would generally not have lawyers. And so for a long time, every legal publication in the country was geared towards helping regular Americans file suits and handle courtship on their own.

Horrified. Yeah, I think it was less scary back then. The legal system was a lot less complicated back then, right? That's true. And you probably knew, like, the judges and the lawyers, if you lived in small town America anywhere. Yeah. The judge is your neighbor, whatever. I'm going to read a quote from that book, Sham.

Some of the earliest self-help books were written in this vein. In 300 years of self-help law books, a fascinating piece for the website of the legal publisher, Nolo, Mort Ryber tells us that as early as 1784, the book Every Man, His Own Lawyer was already in its ninth edition here in America after original publication in London. Every Man, writes Ryber, was touted as a complete guide in all manners of law and business negotiations for every state of the union, with legal forms for drawing the necessary papers and full introductions for proceeding without legal assistance and suits and business transactions of every description. The book may have been one of the self-help industry's first bestsellers, according to Ryber, Every Man's author, John Wells, states in his introduction that the first edition was prepared and presented to the public many years ago, and was received with great favor, attaining a larger scale, it is believed, than any work published within its time.

So-called layman's law was a hot publishing genre. Ryber reports that from 1687 to 1788, every law book published in America was intended for use by laypeople, not lawyers. Wow. And I just didn't know this and thought it was interesting. It's super interesting. Yeah, that's kind of neat. Obviously, this is not strictly necessary to understand modern self-help, but, you know, it's in the show because I thought it was cool. The one bit of slight relevance this has for our topic today is that, as Salerno notes, early self-help writers saw themselves as just direct purveyors of information.

And this extended once things moved beyond the legal self-help industry. One of the earliest examples of this would be Dear Abby, who started her opinion column in the 1950s. And she relied heavily on outside experts, right? Dear Abby, back in its day, was not Abby giving you personal advice based on, you know, her great knowledge of the world. It was her bringing in expert advice for people's problems, right? Oh, that's so much better. Yes, that does seem a lot better. Even though I'm sure a lot of those experts were like Dr. Mercury and, you know.

But, yeah, that does seem like more responsible. Napoleon Hill also kind of, and Napoleon Hill is definitely more in the grifty side of things, but he still claimed that his think and grow rich was based around the idea that he had interviewed all of the greatest minds in business of his time. Oh, they love to do this. Yeah, and he had synthesized their wealth secrets. And Dale Carnegie, sorry, Dale Carnegie, who wrote Think and Grow Rich, did something similar. Thomas Harris is kind of the first, probably the first of these guys to change the game when he wrote the book I'm OK, You're OK in 1967, which refocused self-help from laymen bringing expert advice to the masses to a prominent academic.

Harris was a psychiatrist bringing the secrets he learned through his discipline to the people. You can see Harris is a direct precursor to guys like Jordan Peterson, right? Where I'm not a layman who's just like synthesizing expert knowledge. I am an expert and I'm coming to tell you the things that I've learned as I've dealt into the secrets of the human mind. I have all the answers. Exactly, exactly. And this is what brings us to Werner Erhard. Born John Paul Rosenberg in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 5th, 1935.

His father was a small town restaurant owner. He gave up his father, John Paul's father, gave up his faith, which was Judaism, as you might have guessed from the name Rosenberg. Although that's not always a sign because there was a prominent Nazi whose last name was Rosenberg for various forms of Christianity. He kind of like gets converted. He's a little bit of a born again. He joins his wife as an Episcopalian and he eventually I think kind of gets more into it than her. Obviously converts often tend to do that. John Paul attends high school in Norristown, Pennsylvania and he has pretty good grades. This is a bare-bones summary of his early life as you'll find on his Wikipedia page.

It's probably accurate and it's definitely boring. So in order to get a little bit more color, we are going to start using a shall we say more controversial source, which is a biography that Werner had written for himself. At times the book is written as if it's an autobiography, although it's mostly written as if it's a standard biography. It's a little messy. The book is titled Werner Erhard, The Transformation of a Man. Oh, wow. Obviously this is a book he wrote when he attained wealth and fame

and it is as trustworthy as all self-help guru cult leader books are. But that doesn't mean it's not entertaining. I'm going to read a quote to you from the forward and this is Erhard writing here. This book tells the story of my life, much of it is in my words and in the words of my family and friends and close associates in EST. That's the weird kind of cult thing he's going to create. As they talked with the author, my friend Bill Bartley, as he explains, I don't think that the story of my life, my personal drama, is very important.

The painter Georgia O'Keefe put it perfectly when she said, where I was born and where and how I have lived are unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest. While I have a past, I am not my past. I recognize, however, that people are interested and since the story will eventually be written, I want to support it's being presented accurately. Wait, you can't just, you get to say it's not important, but you've asked. So now I must tell you in this book that I mostly wrote, but someone else also wrote words.

What the, an editor was necessary, an editor was needed. It's also funny because that's the kind of book opening you'd expect from a guy who, number one, wants to seem deep, like, oh, I'm going to quote Georgia O'Keefe. What matters isn't where I've been, it's what I've done, but also someone who has some shit in their past that they absolutely need to lay around. That said, there's nothing in this introduction that's a guaranteed red flag, which changes as soon as we get to chapter one titled,

Donning the Mask, which has the subheading, in search of who one really is. This is followed by several paragraphs of the most turgid prose I've read in my life. Quote, this is a story about true and false identity and about who each of us really is. It is couched in the form of the life history of someone named Werner Erhard, an imposter by destiny and by choice, who went on a fateful journey of self-discovery. An imposter is someone with a fictitious past. The first thing to learn on the road to one's true self is that one is not who one thinks one is.

Each person, without exception, has a fictitious past. Each of us is, precisely, an imposter. In setting off in search of true identity, one steps into a labyrinth, a maze, a tunnel of love, a hall of mirrors, a derelict graveyard, a long-neglected archaeological site. Whatever metaphor one uses, part of the task is to uncover and confront one's accumulated masks, distorted images, multiple false identities at cross purposes. One must peel away not only the masks one knows so well,

but those that one thinks one is wearing now, but a host of other masks. So- How many masks are on my face, sir? I am sure Werner thought he was being deep as shit, is that? Oh, my word. Joel, real ones know. He was just riffing on the lyrics to Billy Joel's song. The Stranger, right?

You know, we all have a face that we hide away forever, and we take it out and show ourselves when everyone is gone. Some are satin, some are steel, some are silk, and some are leather. They're the faces of a stranger, but we love to try them on. That was initially a joke that I just, like, made a comparison to the Billy Joel song, but I looked it up. Can I see it? I looked it up.

This biography was published in 1978, and The Stranger, which was Billy's fifth studio album, came out in September of 1977. So The Stranger would have been one of the biggest songs in the world when Werner wrote this thing, and I think he absolutely was ripping a Billy Joel song off for his autobiography. My whole brain is melting. Because if you have, like, a very simple straightforward thing to rip off of,

why would- he did it like a child cheating on a test. Yeah, he did it badly, yeah. He's like, I'll add so many adjectives to really just make it flowery, and they'll think I'm smart, because I used to- He's rhymed, man, you know? Anyway, we all love Billy Joel here at this podcast. Very pro-Jole cast here. Who doesn't love Moving Out?

Who doesn't love Moving Out? Bass song. So when we finally get to Werner's childhood, in a segment called Joe and Dorothy and Their Boy, we open with child Werner, still named John, having the revelation that, quote, man is vile, but people are wonderful, while sitting around his dining room table with his parents in a suburb of Philly.

This is told in the third person, and yeah, after this we get to a slightly fuller biographical picture of his parents, which is boring, save for the fact that his dad tried to pretend his mom was Jewish to his parents before they got married. Since she was blonde, he called her a Swedish Jewess, which is funny. Werner does provide more context for how his father became a born-again Christian in this passage. Joe was managing an all-night restaurant at 52nd and Baltimore in West Philadelphia, where he worked from 11 o'clock at night until 7 in the morning.

Near dawn one morning, at around the same time when the milkman and the drunks came in, a man at Joe's counter exclaimed over his newspaper, those damn Jews, I can't stand them, I hate them. Another man, an Italian, looked over and replied quietly, well I don't hate them, I love them, my savior was a Jew. Joe began talking with him and finally accepted his invitation to go to the following Friday evening to a Baptist mission, to hear a Jew preach Christ. By Friday evening, Joe had cold feet.

Dorothy was out for the evening and her sister Barbara was babysitting. Joe was asleep and Barbara was instructed to tell any callers that he was out. Little two-year-old Werner, however, had been listening. When the Christian arrived at 7 o'clock, Werner scrambled out of his crib, ran to the head of the stairs, looked down and shouted, Daddy is here, he's in bed asleep. Werner had given away his father's whereabouts and Joe had to get up and did go to the mission, a dimly lighted hall, a storefront mission across from the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society on Walnut Street.

And the makeshift pulpit, a young man read from the beatitudes. I listened, Joe reported, and I wasn't thralled. What he said hit me like a sledgehammer. I lowered my head and said, if this man is saying the truth, Lord, give me a little bit of it. Now, that's interesting because both Werner has to take responsibility for his dad converting, right? He got out of his crib to let his father know. Don't blow your dad's spot up, man. That just makes me think you're a narc, not cool.

He doesn't just say the name of the building, but he gives towny directions. He's like, it's a cross from the bread store at the quarter of 56. He's like, why is this important? That's part of why I'm sure he's not telling the truth because it's like the over detailed thing. Most people's, unless you're someone who is very direction oriented, most people talking about stuff that happened 50 years ago aren't like, and it was on such and such street right at the corner of this and this and yada yada. Unless that corner has some later heavier significance or something,

but I don't think this guy is into foreshadowing or it's subtext. So, Werner, one of the things he is into is letting you know that he was not raised Jewish. And it's, I think this is kind of more a mark of the time this was published. He kind of phrases it for his readers in like a don't worry sort of way. Like, hey guys, I know my family's Jewish, but don't worry, I was raised Christian. I'm a self-hating man who would never. He knows that's going to concern them. Yeah.

There's a line in there that I, like, there's like a couple lines about how he loved his Jewish grandparents, but he never had a bar mitzvah to be like, look, it's cool. He's not too Jewish, right? Like, we're good. Don't worry, everybody. This man's so sad. Oh, yeah. It is, it is kind of depressing.

Yeah. I do kind of chalk that up to it being the 70s and Werner probably knowing like, there's a limit to how much Christians are going to accept in a book from somebody whose background is at all different from theirs. For sure. For sure. Yeah. But you know who doesn't care about your background?

Oh, is it advertisers? That's right. As long as you've got cash money, baby, they're on board. That's all they care about. They love you. They love you. Doesn't matter what you did. Did you kill a man yesterday?

They're fine with it. They don't ask questions. No. We're not the law. We're not the law. They're not the law. 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 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. 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. 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 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. And we are, in fact, sponsored by the company that makes contractor trash bags, which you can use to hide the bodies of the people that you're murdering if you're a serial killer. Hey, we don't care.

It's fine. What are you doing? Sophie, I'm making us money, Sophie. You're trying to make it so all of us lose our health insurance. Sophie, I am keeping us in our finery by sponsoring the serial killer industrial complex. Be careful, you're like three sentences away to doing an Oprah special. Three sentences away. Sophie, I would love to do an Oprah special because then I could finally sell people on

all of my different health care remedies. It's sad because I really feel like people are going to be like, that's so true, and they're not wrong. It's the, I got a whole book waiting in the, I'm just taking Eat, Pray, Love, and I'm doing Find and Replaces until it's legally a new book. It's going to be good. It's going to make me a lot of money, Sophie. And then I can, then I can quit this job.

Do we get to keep health insurance or not? Almost certainly not, Sophie. But all be okay. God bless. So, Werner is somewhat allergic to details in his autobiography, but what he gives us makes it clear that he did not grow up having a great relationship with his mom. As a young adult, he said that he and her, quote, now worked themselves up to a ground zero in our relationship.

And his book makes it clear that this was probably the result of him being a dick, quote. In the autumn of 1945, shortly following the Japanese surrender, Joe returned from the army. That's his dad. The 10 year old child who greeted him was beginning to look and act more like him. Werner's voice was not yet breaking, but it was already booming loudly like Joe's. Like his father, he was opinionated, even bossy, and he too loved to talk and to persuade. He even puckered his lips as Joe did when savoring a point.

He would correct his mother's handling of the household chores and, drawing on his reading from the newspaper and his school books, he would roundly criticize the opinions of his father and uncles when they gathered each week for the great family debates. I wish the 10 year old would try to tell me anything. Yeah, he sounds like he's just like shit talking his mom while she's cleaning the house. At 10 years old, I started acting like my dad while he was away at war. Sir, you better calm down back to earth. I'm just going to say it.

This kid needed to get drafted. Look, couple of weeks at Bastone would have fixed his ass up. So in the summer of 1952, 17 year old Werner attempted to join the Marine Corps. His parents refused to sign the permission slip to allow him to join while underage, which probably saved him from having to fight in Korea. His autobiography lets us know that he played lacrosse, rode horses competitively, and was on the swimming team, the school newspaper, and the creative writing club. He claims his fellow students knew him as the brain.

There is no corroboration for any of this, but Werner finds it very important that people know he was an unappreciated genius. Quote, By this time, I was becoming aware of my intelligence, but my family put me on edge about it. They would not let it be, but acclaimed it, praised it, and embarrassed me when I let it show, and berated me when I put it away. This offended my sense of appropriateness, and I began to be intellectual only in private. I had to hide how smart I was, because my parents were like, just too proud of me for being a super genius.

I was so loved, and my dick is huge. Yeah, yeah, huge hog, monster dong. Really, really shamed me for my massive, massive meat wagon. It just sucks because girls can't take it. Yeah, they were all like, wow, Werner, your dick's so huge. And I was like, stop it. No condoms will fit on it, you know. It's me, my massive brain, my huge dick.

That's why I don't have any, by the way. So after this line, there are just pages and pages and pages about how smart he is, and about how no one recognized his genius, except the few adults he met who told him he was a genius. So like, his fellow students didn't know, because he hid it from them, but all the adults recognized that he was brilliant. It goes on and on. This guy spends more time talking about how smart he is than anyone I've ever read. So let's skip ahead.

We know he married his high school sweetheart, Patricia Fry, when he was 18. And for a while, he seemed to be on the 1950s path to happiness. John got a job working for a Ford dealership, which at the time was a job you could buy a house with. That's a bomb job. He was trained. Yeah, that's a bomb job back then. And he's trained. His boss and his first used or his first car dealership is Lee Iacocca,

who's going to become like the CEO of Chrysler. Wow. Now, this is what he claims. I don't, again, I don't believe there's any evidence corroborating this. Oh, wait, was Iacocca Chrysler Ford? Because he's working there. No, no, he's, yeah, he's, he's, he leads Ford. Sorry.

Oh, no, he does. He leaves, he leads Chrysler too. Yep. You know what? He's, he's the, oh wow. He does the Pinto. Yeah. He makes, this is the guy that makes the Mustang, the Pinto.

I knew he was the Chrysler CEO during the 80s, because he's a very influential business guy back then. But, yeah, so Ford and Chrysler. Anyway, he, he claims that he is trained by Lee Iacocca. Again, there's no evidence of this. He and Pat definitely did have three children together. So from the outside, things look like they're going pretty well for him, pretty normally, as the 1950s gives way to the start of a new decade. But not all was well inside of John Paul Rosenberg.

Oh, he knows this. No, no, no, he's, he's, he's, he's torn. Um, and you can tell this because the chapter about his first wife and his three children is called derailed because they had derailed. Yeah. Well, because they had derailed him from having a meaningful life with their love and their being a family. Yeah.

You know, he said we wear a mask. He pretended to be a loving husband and father. I get it. Exactly. Exactly. They've derailed him from really achieving what he could achieve, which is writing this book. Um, it's very funny.

Werner's biography, I will say he doesn't make himself out to be the good guy here, but I will also remind you that having a fall and being a degenerate are critical aspects of the evangelical Christian redemption narrative. And that is what Walter is doing in this book. So when he's critical of himself, he is doing it in the sense of like a preacher being like, you know, I used to be addicted to drugs and then I found Jesus Christ and he brought me, you know, he's doing that kind of thing, right? Thank you.

Quote, everyone else in his environment. Werner charmed Pat, however, became his victim. She was the wife of a car salesman, but had no car and could not drive. She was stuck at home with the children. Werner's worst aspect was reserved for her. It was almost as if he needed to have her around to victimize. Apart from their quarrels, communication between them withered away into the exchange of information. When Werner was home, he would ignore her, preferring to read or watch television.

He would reprimand the children occasionally, but apart from that played increasingly little part in their upbringing. Wow. He's open about this part of his life being a disaster again, mainly so he can use elements of his pop philosophy to blame being a shitty husband on his mom. Quote, yet the source of the problem had nothing to do with Pat and little to do with the situation. It had to do with the way that my mind was patterned in the course of my childhood interactions with my mother, Dorothy.

Earlier, I told you how much I resisted my mother as a teenager. Well, it is a law of the mind that you become what you resist. Just as when a small child I had identified with my father, later I began to increasingly operate in my mother's identity. Having resisted my mother and lost my mother, I became my mother. I became Dorothy. Oh my God. You sound like a first year psychology student.

You just read Freud. Yeah. You're like, oh, my mom is definitely having an impact on my adult life. Yeah. And then it sounds like as he's writing, he's having the realization that he became his mother, obviously the person he hates. Again, there's like aspects of this that are true. Your parents influence you.

And I think many of us have had the experience of being like, why am I doing this? Oh, maybe it's like a thing that I like. Oh yeah, my dad used to do. My mom used to do that. Maybe like that's why I learned it. But what he's doing is being like, yeah, you know, I was a shitty husband. I wouldn't let my wife have a car. I ignored my kids and it's because I become my mom.

And you know, part of why that's untrue is his mom stuck around, which he's not going to do. Hey. Yeah. So that's cool. That's cool. Now, the thing we're all building up for is the moment when Werner Erhard and again, he's not named that yet, right?

He's John Paul Rosenberg. We're building up for the moment when his life as a normal 50s guy ends and his life as kind of a cult leader begins. An article about him in McSweeney's gives this summary, which is characteristic. Werner Erhard changed his name in 1960 and left his wife and three children in Philadelphia to fly west with his mistress, June Bride. The two cobbled together a conspicuously teutonic moniker for the nice Jewish boy from Pennsylvania inspired by two different people, German finance minister Ludwig Erhard and atomic scientist

Werner Heisenberg. Okay. Both mentioned an in-flight article on Germany's economic recovery. Not an in-flight article. Did you just pick two random names and smash them together? Very German names, by the way. What? Werner's biography makes frequent conspicuous mention of the fact that he was what Bill Hicks

would have called a reader and not the kind of person who reads books simply for pleasure or to learn, but the kind of person who exclusively reads hard books of serious philosophy and economic theory by men with complicated European names. A New York Times article I found gives a slightly different account of how he picked his name, noting it was, quote, lifted from an Esquire article he read on the plane to California. So that's, I don't know, that makes it sound a little bit less fancy when you note that it's Esquire, but that's just where I am, yeah. The story's not exactly the same to me.

He's out of place. He read something. It was like, bam, new name. New name, baby. Now, in his own account, Werner cops to having cheated on his wife with June, his mistress, says that the stress of living a double life hit him so hard that he started blacking out behind the wheel of his car. This was the start of his exploration of psychiatry and he visited a Freudian analyst who told

him he'd given himself a psychosomatic illness. Now, he gives up therapy immediately after this, but he notes that the experience with psychoanalytic theory had been invaluable. Basically like, she told me that I'd given myself a psychosomatic illness and I quit therapy having learned everything I needed to know about the mind. He picked up a couple of words from her and was like, yeah, we're done. I'm good. Thanks doc.

Appreciate the time. I have issues and I'm going to go resolve them by inflicting them on, I was doing hundreds of thousands of more people. Boy, you've really called where this is going. To make a long story short, he in June wind up on the West Coast where he continues to work in sales, this time moving copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Parents Magazine and the Great Book Series. And again, he has abandoned his three children with his wife.

Really need to emphasize that. He is just out of the fucking picture. By this, this time he in June had also gotten deeply into Norman Vincent Peel, author of The Power of Positive Thinking. This led him to Napoleon Hill and then to Zen Buddhism or at least whatever 1960s people in the Bay were selling as Zen Buddhism and then eventually to Scientology. There we go. No.

Back to LRH. No. We're all Rhodes Leads. He's the Rome of self-help. Werner found Scientology brilliant. He loved everything about it except for the fact that its leader had fled the country to hide on a series of boats and was repeatedly running afoul of the law. So basically he's like, this is great except for it's become a cult.

Like that red flag wasn't red enough for you? No, no, no. What are we doing? The red flag is that Hubbard let himself get carried away too much and wound up violating a variety of international laws. So he's like, man, if somebody could take a lot of these ideas and not kidnap their own baby and flee to Cuba, they could really make something of this. So gradually Werner, because he's interested in all this stuff, finds himself in the nexus

of a major social movement that's erupting in the United States, particularly in the West Coast at this time, which later comes to be known as the Human Potential Movement. This excerpt from the New Republic summarizes it. The Academic Humanist Psychology Movement, launched in 1961 by, among others, psychologist Abraham Maslow, sought to forge an alternative to the two dominant trends in contemporary psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Maslow believed that too much attention had been devoted to traditional psychology, to pathological behavior, and not enough to healthy individuals who were able to actualize themselves

and to attain and live from what he called peak experiences. In 1962, the Asselin Institute was established in Big Sur, California to offer experiential workshops designed to help people realize their human potential. The phrase comes originally from Aldous Huxley, an early ally and inspirer of Asselin. Human and potential theorists seeking ways to counteract what they saw as people's harsh psychological and social conditioning found parallels among the emotional opening up process of Western cathartic psychotherapies. The peak experiences described and advocated by Maslow and the altered states of consciousness

produced by Eastern methods of meditation and also by psychedelic drugs. The Union of Western Psychology and Eastern Religion became one of the Human Potential Movement's goals. And you know, there's valuable stuff in there. The idea that like, yeah, we're focusing, psychology focuses too much on people who have an illness and we should also be looking at people who are happy and doing well and seeing what we can learn from that. That's not an unreasonable thing to do.

Neither is it unreasonable to be like, we should probably, rather than assuming that we in the West have gotten everything right, look at philosophy and religion over in other parts of the world and try to integrate that. That's all, this is all fine. This is all also potentially very problematic. I guess I'm sure you can also recognize, yeah. Whose hands are we in? Yeah.

The first decade or so that Werner spends on the West Coast, he's just kind of taking all of this stuff in and he's doing it at this time. Not only is there, are there kind of the more reasonable facets of this Human Potential Movement, but cults and awareness of cults are exploding across the United States. This is the first great surge in like, cults in the US. Now, part of that is because at earlier periods in the history of the United States, there's been a bunch of cults. You could call the Pilgrims members of a cult, but that had just been like, people hadn't

thought of it as cults back there. You certainly could Robert, you certainly could. Yeah, but cult people are starting to become aware of cults and it's becoming like a moral panic. And you know, when I say moral panic, not an entirely unjustified one, but people are also like, this is kind of the first time that there's a big awareness that cults are a problem. It's the same era as like the serial, the rise of serial killers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Awareness of them, right? Yeah, yeah. And they're all tied to, you know, the Manson cult is kind of tying both serial murder to cultic weirdness and whatnot. This is the late sixties. You've got the people's temple rising to prominence in the same time. You've got the church of Scientology and the news with a bunch of scandals and Werner's fascinated by all this.

He's surrounded by people who are adjacent to it. He doesn't want any of that trouble, but he sees how powerful the techniques, some of these cult leaders are using are. And he wants that power and the money it can bring for himself. Years later, he would claim that constantly reading books of philosophy and Eastern religion eventually led him to a revelation. It happened on the Golden Gate Bridge, and I'm going to quote from Sweeney's again. He said in his biography, after I realized that I knew nothing, I realized that I knew

everything. Everything was just the way that it is. And I was already all right. I realized I was not my motivations or thoughts. I was not my ideas, my intellect, my perceptions, my beliefs. I became self, and he capitalizes the S there. His revelation became the basis for EST workshops, his shrewdest business scheme to date. Erhard's new life, a new view on life, which trends a fine line between Zen Buddhism and

mild psychosis, would appear a hard sell. It wasn't lucid on an intellectual level, if at all. And other parties would have to comprehend it through means admittedly other than reason and logic. Nonetheless, EST, which stands for Erhard Seminar's training and also means it is in Latin, began in the ballroom of the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco and became the singularly most influential group to emerge from the human potential movement. And the way EST works, what these classes are, fits a pattern that is by now very common.

You get a bunch of people together in a hotel conference room or a similar space to learn how to improve their sales techniques or boost their confidence as entrepreneurs or something. And the focus is on performing better as a financial actor in capitalist society and the assumed reason why you aren't performing at that level is you've got some sort of psychological blockage, right? And so EST is about clearing that blockage and emptying your mind and kind of letting the vibes carry you forward into being a more productive, healthier actor, right? That's what Erhard's saying about this, again, totally fake revelation he has.

I was already perfect. I just had to get out of my own way and let go of all these things holding me back, you know? Right. I don't want to interrupt you because I know that makes the men mad, but a couple of comments here. The Golden Gate Bridge thing, that's bullshit, right? That's definitely bullshit.

That's a lie. Yeah. Let's start there. Let's start. Also, the little quote, his revelation quote, that also was a whole lot of words that actually amounted to nothing. Let's come back to these quotes because for that ending of like, and I became the self. So you've always been yourself.

What does that mean? It's wild to me that like, okay, so because I was a copywriter for self-help people, this idea of like, how does this series of words trigger people to then be like, here's my money or this guy is a leader and I've got to become like him. And the conclusion I've come to is like, this is an obsession with the idea of an American hero, right? Like when we first got here, we were like, manifest destiny and like, we got to go out and be your own man and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

And I think that has become such a high ideal that people are constantly striving to achieve that they will do and believe anyone who just simply says they've accomplished that like Trump. I genuinely think that's the appeal to like Trumpers is like, oh, this guy, he did it by himself and I can't too. There's that. And there's also, I think a part of the big part of the appeal is that what he's saying is not because the reality of like succeeding at anything is either you're born rich, right?

Which most of these people aren't. So if you're not born rich, well, if you're that, that's the primary way to guarantee your success in capitalist society. One of the other ways is to like throw your entire life into the cause of getting good enough at something to succeed at it, right? And then that's hard and takes a lot of work. So if you are like, if you're telling people you don't need to like build up a base of skill, you just have to get rid of these bad thoughts.

And once you kind of clear yourself, and again, this is also part of like why Scientology is so much of this, once you clear yourself of these bad ingrams in your head, then you'll be a super human, right? You'll unlock the greatness that there's already greatness within you. You don't have to build it up in order to succeed. And also, I think part of this does appeal to people who were born rich and like have family money, but haven't been successful to say like, again, you don't need to improve yourself.

You just need to unlock this greatness by paying money so that I can clear your mind, right? It's a Disney fairy tale. If you just believe in yourself and are a good person, then all things will come true. Yeah. It's wonderful, really. But you know what will come true if you believe in yourself, Joel? I could buy more things.

That you can buy. Exactly. Exactly. I guarantee you every single product that you purchase that sponsors this show is as good as six months of what's an antidepressant that people are on? It's a six month long hug. It's really good. It's a six month long hug.

You know what? Yeah. You can get your prescription drugs and purchase products from this show. That's our legally binding advice. Legally don't do that. Don't cure your depression. So be it. Robert, I want health insurance.

I want health insurance. God damn it. Yeah. Well, you can buy it from the sponsors of this show probably. Probably. 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 I 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Gosh, what a good time.

What a great world. I love America. So the- That was so weird. No, you don't. Well, I am America. And yeah. And so are you.

Yeah. It was a book that came out. Anyway. All right. So I want to read some motivational lines that Werner Ehrhardt would use during these big EST seminars on his early customers. My spirit is ready. Yeah.

Here's a good one. Don't you realize you're acting like a dumb motherfucker and your whole life up till now has been nothing but meaningless bullshit? And this is pretty familiar to people who listen to our Synanon episodes with the great Paul F. Tompkins or episodes on the Elan School, all of which also have their origins right around this time. This also has Nexium vibes. It does.

It does. Although that comes later. But Nexium comes out of this very much. These all- There's this focus on not a group therapy that's deeply abusive and combative, right? Because you've got to like break through people's, you know, crystallized attitudes about themselves in the world. And the way to do that is like by insulting and hurting and berating them, right?

And the best way to do this is to get everyone like either one figure insulting and attacking a person while everybody like watches and heckles them. Like that's the best way to do it, right? And Werner, most of what he does in these group trainings is that he's just picking individuals and attacking them the whole time. This right up in McSweeney's continues. These tough love trainings usually took place in hotel ballrooms or conference centers across the United States over a course of highly structured 15-hour sessions in which participants

could not eat, urinate, defecate, talk, write, sit next to acquaintances or take off their name tags, stories circulated about Estee's fainting, peeing, vomiting and sobbing, a horrific scene that held its own inexplicable appeal. In her book, EST, 60 Hours That Transform Your Life, author and psychotherapist Adelaide Brie writes that the sessions were known as the no piss training among New Yorkers. Perhaps the fear of incontinence was part of the allure of groups like EST, along with the promise of tools to navigate self-imposed mental roadblocks and get on with your life. Something happened within this experience that did not happen outside and it was something

strong and emotional, a transformation you could enact without depending on where you lived the cult stigma. The professional truth seeker was compelled to imagine from these experiences the scene of the swaying EST mass like a sea anemone with the sobbing, laughing, staring people as the anemones phalanges. So that's bad. That seems problematic. That sounds terrible.

You said 15 or 50. 15. 15 hours, 15 hour days, 60 hours total is usually like a four day thing. That's yeah, that sounds exhausting, especially because, you know, if you're not eating, you're getting tired. Yeah, you're more suggestible. So you're more susceptible to, you know, being lied to essentially, there's no friend there that has your back like, oh, it's all good old fashioned cult shit.

Yes. And it's part of what they're doing here is this is traumatic, like it's uncomfortable. It's painful. You're you're engaging with mental trauma while you're physically uncomfortable and starving. But also that creates a bond with the people around you and with the situation. And we are talking about American culture in the 70s and 80s, which is like one of the bleakest periods socially in this nation. Yeah, it's something, right?

You feel something. It feels like it's a peak experience. You're creating the illusion of a peak experience because like you think about like what our actual peak experience fucking climbing to the top of a mountain, right? You know, the experience of like doing something really deviking the Appalachian trail achieving that goal you've had for like seven years, you know, and yeah, all of this stuff. Yeah, it's hard. There's there's discomfort, right?

Any seriously difficult goal, there will be kinds of discomfort. Sometimes it's less physical and more mental. But by doing this, you're kind of hacking people into believing they're doing something like running a marathon or yeah, writing a novel or whatever, doing some sort of difficult peak experience. You're not all you're doing is standing in a room while someone yells at you and you're not peeing. But you can kind of trick your brain into thinking that it is a peak experience.

And that's addictive. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it even today, they have those like, you know, seven thousand or much more than that, like fifteen, sixteen, seventeen thousand dollar camps for like grown men. Yes, yes. You can yell that. Yeah. Fake Navy training.

What the fuck is this? Let's be fair. It's not real Navy training. No, no, no, no. None of it's useful for making you into a warrior or whatever shit. Which is definitely the goal that I set for themselves. It's sad. Don't do that.

Please don't buy into that. But it's it's it's it's also like, you know, people talk about how like CrossFit is kind of culty. And it's the same thing. Right. This is difficult. This is painful. This is like intense.

Now, I will say the benefit of cross. I mean, sometimes people get hurt doing it. But like the benefit of CrossFit is at least you're like working out as opposed to just standing in a room. Well, like I berates you and not pissing like there are health benefits potentially to doing something physical. You only get that body you came in for trying to get. So you know, some wins, some wins with this, you're just getting shouted at by a man named

Werner Erhard. So the peak of the experience was the act of getting it. Erhard had got it on that drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. His followers were meant to get it at some point during the hail of abuse and nonsense lectures, in between pissing themselves and emotional confessions of their own frailties. One of the core points of the whole experience was personal responsibility as Werner understood it. In the book Outrageous Betrayal, an expose of Erhard, journalist Stephen Pressman writes,

By the late afternoon of the first day, the EST trainers always launched into another several hours worth of lectures revolving around one of EST's fundamental tenets, taking responsibility for your own life. In the world, according to Werner Erhard, required people to accept the idea that they were equally responsible for everything that happened in their lives, from illness and disease, to auto accidents and street muggings. Erhard and his trainers drummed into the heads of EST participants, but they alone caused all the incidents and episodes in their lives to occur.

The EST philosophy included no room for victims or excuses. Only when customers accepted that, only when they realized that all people create their own reality, were they in a position to resolve problems plaguing their lives. I'm having a moment because I grew up with a ton of late baby boomers and early gen X-series, and this was for sure a philosophy that was pushed on me a lot as a kid that was maddeningly confusing this idea that not only is everything your fault, but mistakes are a negative. No matter how they're made or why, it's immediately a platform to just be berated, and it never occurred to me that it might have come out of self-help culture.

It does, and part of what makes this stuff so insidious, there are healthy variants of the thing that he's saying. Taking responsibility is important for the things that you're actually responsible for. If you were to say get hit by a bus because the bus driver's drunk his shit on absinthe, you shouldn't take responsibility for your suffering there. Something bad just happened. If you get cancer, that's not your fault. That's just a bad thing that happened, and taking responsibility will not help you with

that. There's always these angles on it that aren't so bad. I came out of, I spent a lot of the time in the Burning Man subculture when I was younger. One of the rules that they have, and this is a rule specifically for the event, is you're responsible for your own experience. Radical self-reliance, baby. What that means within the context of the event is nobody here is being paid to put on a show to be a performer.

Everyone here is making the experience, and that's nice. You could take that where you're a cult leader and be like, you're responsible for your own experience, so if you don't like what I just did sexually to you, that's your fault, which is what Nexium does. That doesn't mean that the rule is, if you're applying the rule to a festival, that's not toxic. It's the taking it and applying it across the board that makes it cult shit. Part of the reason why this stuff is so insidious is because there's a version of it that's

reasonable. I'm sure a lot of these people, especially these rich kids coming into EST seminars, even had to take responsibility for much in their lives. That was a thing, there's an extent to which they needed to hear it and then an extent to which it becomes abusive, right? But that's part of what's so insidious about this stuff. Speaking of insidious, in one EST seminar, according to Pressman, Erhard tells his followers that even victims of the Nazi death camps were responsible for their experiences there.

At one point, oh Joel, at one point, a former concentration camp inmate happened to be in the audience. Screaming, screaming, oh no. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And Erhard, this is according to Erhard, I don't know that she actually was, but he would tell this story later that like, and an Auschwitz inmate was in the audience and she started yelling at me. And the way he tells it, he was able to talk her into accepting her role in the Holocaust.

Stop it. He said that she, quote, took responsibility for putting herself in, it's that goddamn simple. That's bad. Because that person had you up in a child or at least a very young adult. I mean, this is the 70s, so they could have been like, yeah, they could have been their 20s or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

But I, oh, okay, whether it's true or not, if he's straight up lying, it's terrible that you would lie about something like this. No matter what, this is horrible. No, it's true to hell, but if you really did this to a person, like to the seventh ring of hell you should go because what the fuck, oh my God. I do not believe this actually happened. I mean, it's that, which does not make it less fucked, lying about this is just as bad.

I just, I simply, I simply don't believe an Auschwitz inmate would like listen to someone say, well, you played a role in the Holocaust too, it takes two to Holocaust and then they be like, you know what, you're right, Werner. It's actually one that's like landed in New York and it has any kind of New York flavor on them. Like, no, it's going to be a direct fuck to you. I simply don't believe that. Now, maybe it was what I could believe is like, maybe it was like the kid or the grand

kid of a Holocaust survivor and like Werner talked them into it and then he changed the story over time to be better. Maybe it's something like that. But yeah, it's pretty bad. Pressman reports that one meeting he observed a person in the audience asked how that woman could possibly have made the Nazis lock her up and Earhard responded. How could the light be off when it's turned on? The question is completely stupid.

Now, that's nonsense. What? That's not an answer. That's bullshit nonsense. There is a clear and deeply frightening logic to everything that Werner is doing here. EST emphasized personal responsibility, but also told participants that they had to forget about the past, leave it behind them. This is not necessarily always bad advice on its own, but coupled with this extreme personal

responsibility, it leads inevitably to the conclusion that problems are purely the result of our own thinking. Being traumatized by even a rape or molestation is effectively a psychosomatic illness or one that the sufferer had a part in creating. And by the way, if you've watched the most recent Nexium documentary, Keith Ranieri would go on this rant about how well like if a baby gets molested, the baby had a part in it, right? The baby played a role in what happened.

That's where this comes from. Ranieri's familiar with all of this. He's very much picking and choosing from Nexium, a little bit of Synanon, a little bit of Scientology. He's aware of all of this. In the same way that Earhard is picking from these guys like Napoleon Hill and from Elron Hubbard, Keith Ranieri is pulling a little bit of Earhard out along with some other stuff to make his thing. Between 1971 and 1984, more than 700,000 people enrolled in EST workshops and many of them

would later claim to get it. Werner Earhard had succeeded in becoming a guru. He'd made millions while avoiding the pitfalls that had destroyed or compromised so many cult leaders. But behind closed doors, the picture was very different. And that's the story we're going to tell in part due. But first, Joelle, how about part, tell me about your plugables? Yeah.

Not much to plug right now. You can go check me out over at the Hive. If you're doing that, it looks like it's back up now. Puzzah for us. If you love a social media app but don't want to support the worst person on the planet. I got a show. It's called Comic-Con Metapod. You can check it out.

I love my co-host Hector. We have a good time talking about pop culture news. And yeah, in the new year, I'll have a newsletter. So if you follow me on the socials, I'll be releasing information about that. I'm going to just do my thing, watching the TV and the movies and talking about them. If Beyonce drops anything, I'll be talking about that. So come follow me and find out what's happening over there. Yeah, I think that's it.

Excellent. Well, find Joelle there and find me at my new EST team. I thought you were going to do a plug for us at Sketchfastic. I thought you were going to do your job. Yeah, you know what, you know what, look, everyone loved Werner Erhard sitting in a big room together in the Bay Area. And I'm about to have a bunch of people sit in the big room in the Bay Area with me. So look, I'm not going to say that sitting in at the live bastard show in the San Francisco

Bay will cure all of your diseases and make you a superhuman who is capable of immediately becoming a millionaire, but also, yes, in a very legally binding sense of the word, that's exactly what will happen if you come see my live show. So turn yourself into a living God, an unkillable hell beast of power by listening to me talk about, I don't know, some kind of piece of shit. I don't know who it's going to be yet. I haven't written the episode. Shut up.

I love you. Goodbye. Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 was 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. Find Alphabet Boys 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. What if I 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.