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

Episode Date: August 8, 2019

In Part Two, Robert is joined again by Sara June to continue discussing Napoleon Hill. 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 scamming my generation's money? My generations of naive Americans who think the answer to success is as simple as envisioning yourself with more money rather than based heavily in a combination of luck and the clash you're born into. I'm Robert Evans, this is Behind the Bastards! That was one of our better intros, I'd say. Sara June is our guest today. How do you feel about that intro?

I feel like that was, simultaneously, very, very broad and very, very specific. You've managed to cover everybody and see into our souls and our deepest fears. Yeah, yeah. I love our deepest fears. I love our deepest fears. Big fan. Well, I'm Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we tell you about the worst people in all of history. And of course, the terrible historical person we're talking about today is Napoleon Hill. This is part two of our episode on the old nappy age. So, when we left off, Napoleon had finally come up with his first really great idea that didn't involve creating a fake school or fleeing from angry mobs after robbing them blocks.

I mean, those were very good ideas, but still not close to Think and Grow Rich. Yeah, yeah, and to think with this, we're not close to the success quest. Yeah, this is the Law of Success, so we're not at Think and Grow Rich yet. This is his first book. Oh, okay, right, right. Yeah, so he has this great idea for a book and he's got a publisher who's interested in it and he just needs to convince this guy that he's wealthy so that the dude will believe that he has actually spent 20 years interviewing the most successful people in history. This sounds like a great sitcom premise.

It is a great sitcom premise. You could really make a fun movie. This sounds like a really fun episode of a sitcom. Oh, I gotta convince him I'm rich. You know, I feel like Steve Carell would knock Napoleon Hill out of the fucking park. Steve Carell knocks, I mean, let's be honest, everything out of the fucking park. But yes, he would be really good at this as a blustering con man. Oh, yeah, yeah, I would watch that movie. And for young Steve Carell, we get, I don't know, one of the Jonas Brothers probably, get those kids in the seats.

How old do you think the Jonas Brothers are? What, 11? They're like, they're in their 20s now. The Jonas Brothers are adults now. I'm going to be honest, the last pop culture that I remember really, really clearly where like those cups with Space Jam stuff printed on them at McDonald's. Everything after that is just a blur. Well, okay, let's not bother Robert with what year it is. Let's move on. I feel like I don't want to break you out of this trance because you're like a sleepwalker

and you might pee on me or something. People still like Space Jam, right? Absolutely, but not in the way you think. We've got this new thing called irony. Don't worry about it, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. So, yeah, Napoleon's got to convince this guy that he's rich so that he can sell his book idea. And once again, in order to do this, Napoleon leaned on the wealthy family of one of his wives. I think he's up to his like third or fourth now.

I kind of have trouble keeping track of them. There's a lot of wives at play in this story. Yeah, absolutely. You know, a wife is really just another type of scam. Yeah, a wife is basically a debit card to Napoleon Hill. Here's the secret to Napoleon's success. A wife is a scam. Yeah, a wife is a scam too. Everything's a scam if you look at it, right? So, Napoleon borrows money from his wife's brother to rent a gigantic fancy hotel room in Philadelphia so that he can pretend to be a big shot businessman rather than a guy who has spent most of the last decade

literally robbing churches and elementary schools. And then running away from the police all across the United States. Yeah, all across the country. So, I'm going to quote again from his biography, A Lifetime of Riches. So, all this is happening before Pelton even arrives to meet with Napoleon. Yeah, he's getting in character. He's getting in character. And his goal was to make an entrance and establish himself as a rich big shot before Pelton arrives

so that when the publisher shows up to talk with him, the hotel staff will treat him like he's a big shot. Right. That's the con, which is a pretty smart con. Yeah, he's laying the groundwork. And it apparently works, like the hotel staff treats him like royalty, Pelton's impressed and assumes that he's actually a rich guy. So, Pelton agrees to publish Law of Success, which will be not just one book, but a multi-volume epic. And he even pays Napoleon a healthy advance. Now, you might imagine that a man in Napoleon's situation, whose wife has been supporting the family for more than a year

and whose family had just loaned him the money that he needed to make his dreams possible, you might expect that guy to at least like pay his brother-in-law back? Yeah. But, no, Napoleon does not do that. He's not a pay people back sort of guy. He keeps all the royalty money for himself. Pay people is not scam. Now, you might also have expected this guy who has like had his wife and kids living with like their family all this time. You might expect him to like say, okay, well now we can all move into a place together since I just got this advance

and we can all live together as a family while I write this book. That doesn't happen either. That's not really one of the Laws of Success. No, it's not. The Law of Success is apparently continuing to live in Philadelphia, abandoning his family and writing books, which is what Napoleon does during this period of time. So, now during this month, these months, Napoleon keeps writing his wife lurid letters detailing the lavish gifts he plans to buy for her upon like once his book is a success and the money comes in. He promised her that if she just held on a little bit longer and let him work alone in Philadelphia,

the money would come rolling in and their troubles would be over forever. And part of this was actually true because by dumb luck, sheer dumb luck, Napoleon's book Law of Success is a gigantic hit and he makes a huge amount of money with it. Well, here's the thing. I wouldn't call that dumb luck. You know, I think it's a good scam. Yeah, he did put in the groundwork. You're right. He put in the groundwork. He wrote a whole book. He wrote something that was, first of all, he did something that was almost free for him to do, right?

Which is like write a book, right? He's got this advance. It's a very low cost endeavor, you know, writing a book. And so, you know, he's just making profit and he's selling something by telling people what they want to hear, which is you can get rich quick and it's within your control. And he's also telling rich people you're rich because you're very good and smart. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Napoleon, you're right. Napoleon put in the work and he gets successful. And by mid-1928, his royalty checks were more than $2,500 a month,

which is the modern equivalent of making $36,000 a month. Damn. And is this really, like, probably the first honest money he's ever made? Yeah, this is the first honest money that he's ever made in his life. Now, it's interesting to wonder about, like, why this book was such a hit. Hill's biographers posit this theory, quote, law of success might well have been discarded as the ravings of a lunatic, but for the fact that much of Hill's most improbable conjecture was spun from the musings of men like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Thus anchored in respectability, these passages stimulated readers to wonder, to ponder life on a grander scale, more than any self-help book ever has, before or since.

Again, this is written by the people who are with the Napoleon Hill Foundation, so they think this is the best book ever written. Right. And he also made up all of these quotes. Yeah, he made up all of these quotes. These are all lies. Matt Novak of Gizmodo reached out to David Nassau, who was Andrew Carnegie's official biographer, and Nassau told him that he found no evidence of any kind that Carnegie and Hill ever met. So there is zero... Oh, I mean, Thomas Edison, come on, you know, fucking... Oddly enough, that's the only one of them he met.

Yeah. No way. Yeah, yeah, but it's... We'll talk about it later. You're gonna like this. Okay. But that is the one famous person he writes it out in the book that he did meet. But it's not quite the way he portrays it. But first, I want to read a quote from that Gizmodo article about how he portrays Carnegie in his book. Quote,

Opening Hill's book to any random page and reading the drivel passed off as Carnegie's own words is a fun game. As just one random example from page 97 in my copy. This is like written as a conversation. Hill, will you tell me, in the simplest words possible, just how one may control this wheel of fortune? I would like a description of this important success factor, which the young man or young woman just beginning a business career may understand. Carnegie, first of all, to control the wheel of fortune, one must understand, master, and apply the 17 principles of achievement. I have already named five of these principles, and I might here suggest that these five, if properly applied, will carry one a long way on the road towards success in any calling. This is just like the great grandfather of an entire genre of bullshit success books.

It's a quote peep show, it's business secrets of the pharaohs. Yeah, the idea that Carnegie is like, no, there's 17 principles of success, and those allow you to run the wheel of fortune, and that's how business works. Rich guys aren't sitting around mapping out their success into abstract principles. They're looking at spreadsheets and going, kill all those people. Yeah, there's two kinds of great businessmen. There's the look at spreadsheets and say, kill all those people, we'll make an extra four bucks. And then there's the guys who are literally just like, oh, what if we try doing this? What if we make a computer that does this thing?

What if we make this purple? We'll see if it sells money. Yeah, a lot of them are born with a lot of money or given a lot of money, like Trump or whatever, where it's like, well, maybe if someone gives me a million dollars, I can buy a building and make $3 million. There's no principles at work there. It's just profit. Yeah, it's those guys and it's the dumb luck guys. Buy something people need and charge them more than they can afford for it until they die. Yeah, that's literally the only rule of success.

That's a great business secret. Yeah, find something people need and sell it to them until they die. You should put out a book. You know what, I'm tweeting it for free, buddy. I'm just kidding. I don't tweet, but yeah, you're welcome. You're all welcome for these business secrets. Can you imagine Napoleon Hill's Twitter?

Absolutely. I think, wow, he would be so fucking good. He would be tweeting crazy. He would be like Marianne Williamson meets Trump level tweets. Oh God, he would definitely be part of the Democratic debates. He would totally be running. Oh my God. Him and Hick and Looper would be buddies.

I don't think many people got along with Napoleon Hill. That's a very good point. Hick and Looper would show up at the next debate with like pantsless because Napoleon had stolen them and quit town. Oh boy. Now, so in reality, as I alluded to a little earlier, only one of the famous men that Napoleon Hill claimed to have interviewed actually had any face-to-face contact with him, and that man was Thomas Alba Edison. Now, if you remember from part one in that Golden Rule magazine that he ran for a while, that he would like come up with bogus awards to give prominent people in order to get close to them

because he believed that that was his strategy for a tactic. Well, his meeting of Thomas Edison is another example of that. The whole scheme was discussed in a December 1923 article of Specialty Salesman magazine titled Destroyers of Confidence. Quote, Hill figured out how he could have a picture made with Thomas A. Edison so he could give him a medal. He sent a press agent over to announce that Mr. Hill, one of the leading magazine writers, wished to attend the Edison Convention of Dealers. Of course, he was welcome. He asked Mr. Edison to pose with him a request he could hardly refuse.

So then the two guys shook hands and he tried to hand Thomas Edison this medal that he supposedly was awarding him. But Edison seems to have immediately realized what was going on and wouldn't even take the medal. But Napoleon got a fucking picture with him. Dude, this guy would have been so fucking good at Instagram. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's kind of what this is. He just comes up with a lie long enough to get a picture with Thomas Edison. And then for the rest of his life, he circulates that picture of him with Edison as proof of like,

No, I did talk to all these famous people. Here's casually a picture of me with Edison. Yeah. Look how comfortable he looks. Look how comfortable he looks. So the photo, I want to read you the caption that Napoleon Hill wrote for the photo of him and Edison. Two of America's famous men, Thomas A. Edison left in Napoleon Hill, Mr. Edison is the inventor of the talking machine, the electric light, the moving picture and scores of other things that serve mankind.

Mr. Hill is the editor of Napoleon Hill's magazine and the new Philistine magazine and believes in making the golden rule the rule of all human conduct. Edison was born of poor parents and began his career as a news butcher on a train. Hill began as a laborer in the coal mines, both have risen to fame through their own efforts. I do love that he has changed covering for the murder of a black boy and getting made the manager of a coal mine into laboring in the coal mines. Yeah, you know, it's all in how you finesse it. That's some pretty intense finessing. Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's not great, but it's funny.

It's actually terrible. The word I'm looking for is it's very terrible. It's a horrible thing, yeah. But you know, it's good to remember this during campaign season. Yeah, yeah. So if you paid attention here, you probably noticed a through line in Hill's writing. He's focused entirely on the idea that people rise to fame and wealth only through their own efforts and that people consequently fail only through their own efforts. Hill was not the first person to want to popularize this sort of thinking, but he was the first person to phrase it in a way that made it seem mystical, spiritual and most importantly marketable.

For this reason, he's still known by many people today as the godfather of the modern day self-help genre. And what's so brilliant about this to me, if you want to like talk about this from a, I don't know, like a class, like analyze this the way that someone like Friedrich Engels would. For a long time, people at the top of society, the kings and the queens and the nobles and whatnot, had to like come up with it. Like divine right of kings justifies why I have all this money and you don't because it's God's will that I should rule you. And like that stops working because we've got, in part because we get democracy, because we've got newspapers, because people like, you know, things change and that no longer works. And this is a brilliant way to justify that in the same way, but to make people feel empowered by embracing it. So instead of them just being like, well, the king's the king and I got to accept that or he'll kill me or God will kill me. Instead you're like, well, I'm just poor right now because my mind's not positive enough and it's my thinking.

Like it's one of those things that would almost make you believe in a conspiracy because it's a genius way to stop people from eating the rich. It's making this popular. Totally because it's like, yes, you know, yes, you're bad, but you could be good if you thought hard enough. Yeah, if you thought hard enough, you know, and all these positive thoughts that poor people are having actually do not affect the rich in any way. I'm thinking real hard about wealth redistribution. Yeah. So are a lot of us. It doesn't seem to be helping. As I stated in some previous podcasts we recorded, what helps more than thinking about wealth distribution is everybody going out buying a pair of bolt cutters. Just make sure you have those with you, you know, they'll be handy one of these.

They're in my trunk, buddy. Yeah. So anyway, now Hill's book is a huge success. He's making fuckloads of money. And now that he's actually finally wealthy for the first time, he starts spending money like it caused cancer. He bought two Rolls Royces in a mansion on 600 acres, which he named Shagbark for reasons that are lost to history. This giant mansion was, of course, way out of his price range. So he conned some investors into buying into it with him with the idea that he was going to turn Shagbark into the world's first, what he called the world's first university sized success school. So that's his first idea. And then over time, the success school morphs into a success colony.

So now he plans to like make a utopian community where he's going to make human beings better by teaching them the secrets of success. Okay, this guy can't even have a bestselling book without turning it into a scam. Like this is scam on scam on scam at this point. Everything's got to be a scam with him. He's got some money finally, but he's got this pathological need to fucking scam people. Yeah, it's what they all do. It's like, it's why Donald Trump is like buying from his own properties in a basically illegal manner, like in order to make more money while he's present. Like the con of becoming the president, that's not enough. Like I've got to also use the presidency to enrich my businesses. It's like Elron Hubbard, like, well, you know what? No, it's not like Elron Hubbard. Not everything is like Elron Hubbard.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. He's unique and beautiful. And I just like thinking about him. I just like thinking about him. He's an iconic cult leader. Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, and for a little while, just by the sheer success of his first book, it looked like he might actually start a success college or a success colony. And more importantly, for a very brief chunk of time, Napoleon Hill actually made good on the things he promised his wives, or one of his wives. For a few precious months, he and his wife Florence and their three children all occupied the same home. He actually got her the mansion that he promised her.

Wow. So that's nice. Yeah, well. It only lasted a few months, yeah. All worth it. Yeah, he almost immediately got sick of this and started leaving home to go on speaking tours, which some of which were legitimate, but most of which were probably just him having sex with prostitutes. So the cash started to roll in in late 1928 and throughout 1929, but then the Great Depression hits and it puts an end to Napoleon's money spigot. The royalty checks Peter out.

His stupid mansion is foreclosed on and his family has to move back in with his wife's parents. Now, his family moves back with his wife's parents. Napoleon remains in New York City so he can write his second book, which he calls The Magic Ladder to Success. But this wound up being so badly written that his publisher was unwilling to bother printing it. Wait, after all the shit he wrote in the law of success, the publisher has standards now? It may just have been, this was just a worse book. All right. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I never read The Magic Ladder to Success. Maybe he just lost his mojo. Yeah. Maybe he became like when a comedian gets rich and then all their material is about rich people problems. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of what happens, except for he's not rich anymore. He's not rich for very long because he immediately goes wildly in debt. So like with most of America, the Great Depression was a dark time for Napoleon.

He spends most of it broke, engaged in one scammer and other. And I can't detail all of that. You should have a feel for the man's style by now. Yeah. He's just scamming throughout the Depression. Petty shit. In 1935, Florence finally filed for divorce. Napoleon didn't bother to contest it.

Now, there are two different versions of Napoleon's life. Reality and the version self-help aficionados who still love his work believe today. In that version of events, Napoleon Hill was still poor during the Great Depression, but he was also somehow hired by FDR to save the country from the Depression. And of course, Napoleon claims he refused to be paid for this work. And so everybody thought he was crazy for refusing to take money from the President for helping solve the Depression, but he totally solved the Depression. Matt Novak writes, quote,

Years later, he would claim that he was approached by the Roosevelt administration to help instill confidence in the American economy. As host biographers note, his personal record of his relationship with Franklin Delano, Roosevelt and FDR's administration was surprisingly scant. And their political views were polar opposites, with Hill being an arch-conservative. But somehow they made it work, and Hill's ideas were injected into FDR's New Deal program, supposedly imploring labor unions to be more cooperative with management at various companies. Again, this was all according to Napoleon Hill, an anti-union arch-conservative

who claimed to have written some of FDR's speeches and even decoyed the phrase, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. What? This guy will not stop. No, he can't. He can't. And I should note, he also claimed later in life that during World War I, he'd been a personal advisor to Woodrow Wilson and claimed that on the day that Germany surrendered, he was sitting next to Woodrow Wilson when he got the telegram and that he advised Wilson personally that he had to make the Kaiser's abdication

a necessary requirement for accepting the surrender. So, Napoleon Hill takes credit for getting rid of the Kaiser. Wow. He's just like, he's like a, what's his fucking name? Like a forest gump. That's the picture he wants to portray. Yeah, he's forest gump. He's like, you know, he's zealig. He's fucking everywhere. He's everywhere at once throughout history. He's the one, he's the one that kills Hitler. Yes. That's how he wants people to see him. But he was also poor while being a personal advisor to the president, also still poor and humble.

Yeah, still poor and humble. He is honest about the fact that he was fucking broke during this period of time. Yeah. I will say admitting that he spent much of his life poor as shit is the one thing Napoleon Hill is honest about, kind of consistently. Now, after Florence left him, he was completely cut off from her family money. So he made ends meet by sundry scams and by continuing to cash in on the success of his first book by giving lectures. During one of these lectures in Tennessee, which is essentially a self-help seminar in like 1936, he mentions that he's looking for his dream girl. He says this like during a lecture, he's giving a bunch of strangers, which seems weird to me.

Yeah. But a young woman in the, what's crazier is a young woman in the audience, Rosa Lee Beeland, makes a beeline for Napoleon after the lecture and is like, I'm totally fucking down. Let's do this shit. Wow. Thinking get laid, buddy. Thinking get laid. It's time to go to ad. It is time to go to ads. You know what goes better with, is better than getting laid? Nope. That's not a good transition. You know what's better than sex? Products and services.

Products and services. And the best of all are products and services that enable sex, like the wonderful dick pills that we advertise on this show. 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. 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. 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. 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. We're back. Great products. Good services. So you're telling me that Napoleon Hill manifested not only incredible wealth, but also his dream girl just by lying his entire life about everything? Yeah, although dream girl would be putting it a bit strong. I think you might like what happens with Rosalie.

It doesn't go the way I expected it to. So the two were married within days. Napoleon was 53 and Rosa was 29. Which seems like it could potentially have been a dangerous and exploitative situation, but it was literally the opposite. See, Rosa was just as much of a con man as Napoleon Hill. She wanted to make a fuckload of money selling nonsense self-help advice, and she knew Napoleon was her vehicle to doing that. So immediately after their wedding, they sit down to write a new book, Think and Grow Rich. The couple moves in with Napoleon's son Blair and his wife in their tiny New York apartment so they can stay off the street while they work on this book because neither has any money. Now Napoleon's son Blair was literally the last person he had to lean on.

None of his other children would even talk to him, as he had habitually burned every single bridge that he came across in life. So once Blair, and Blair is again the deaf son he refused to teach sign language to. Oh my God, that son takes pity on his terrible dad and is like, yes, you and your wife can live with me while you write another book of awful bullshit. It gets even worse. So once Blair and his wife Vera start hosting Napoleon and his new wife, things quickly get bad. Because Napoleon is an asshole, and also because, mainly just because Napoleon's an asshole. And he particularly hated his husband's wife. According to Hill's own, yeah, he hated his son's wife.

Oh, so Napoleon Hill really didn't like his son's wife. Vera, yeah, he hates Vera. According to his own biography, quote, she bore the full brunt of Napoleon's ability to unashamedly heckle and hound people he didn't like. Vera endured several months of naps, nastiest bullying and sniping, then finally left Blair and moved back to West Virginia. Blair soon returned to West Virginia too, after loaning his father enough money to subsist for several more months. Blair and Vera tried to rebuild their marriage, but several years later were divorced. Although Blair went on to become an eminently successful businessman and a beloved community leader, he never remarried. So Napoleon gets taken in by his son, kicks them out of their own apartment and ruins their marriage.

And gets hundreds of dollars from him. Yeah. This guy just doesn't give a shit about anything or anybody. No, he is a total piece of shit. Now, Napoleon and his wife, while living at the apartment they stole from his son, finished their new book. And Rosa was an integral part of the entire process, because Napoleon was a terrible writer, and she was apparently a pretty good editor. So she manages to edit his ramblings into something other human beings would enjoy reading. The book had to be rewritten three times, but eventually the couple got it right, and they succeeded in convincing Hill's old publisher Pelton to give him a second try.

Think and Grow Rich is one of those books that is hard to oversell the success of, and overemphasize its impact on society. By some counts, it's sold as many as 20 million copies. Now, that number is probably a big exaggeration, but 10 million might not be. It was a hugely successful book. I've seen it on the bookshelves of more people than I can count. It's everywhere. Any used bookstore you go to will have one or a few copies of Think and Grow Rich. Yeah, it's fucking everywhere, and it's still very, very common and very popular.

And a lot of that's to do with the fact that I've never read it, but I think people say it's a well-written self-help book, which I think is probably mostly due to Rosalie. Yeah. Now, Think and Grow Rich was essentially just a refining and rehashing of the best parts of Napoleon's first book, Law of Success. I found a 2015 write-up of the book on Business Insider. It was titled, 78 Years Ago, A Journalist Studied 500 Richmen and Boiled Down Their Success into 13 Steps. Now, calling Mr. Hill a journalist stretches the definition of that word maybe more than it's ever been stretched. I can't think of anyone who is less of a journalist than Napoleon Hill. Even when he was writing for a newspaper, he was mostly full of shit, and then he didn't write for newspapers anymore, so he didn't even call himself a journalist.

No, he's closer to being a lumber salesman. Yeah, he called himself a businessman. Yeah. So, the Business Insider write-up confusingly summarizes Hill's work this way. Quote, Think and Grow Rich shares what he calls the money-making secrets in 13 principles. There's no mention of money, wealth, finances, or stocks within Hill's text. He takes a different approach, focusing on breaking down the psychological barriers that prevent many of us from attaining our own fortunes. These money-making secrets include such bold and mind-blowing strategies as, Desire Riches instead of Wishing for Them.

Napoleon wrote, Quote, Wishing will not bring riches, but desiring riches with a state of mind that becomes an obsession than planning definite ways and means to acquire riches and backing those plans of persistence which does recognize failure. That was different steps. First, you had desiring, and then you had making a plan and taking action. Yeah. Those are different things. Well, he says, the idea that he's saying Desire Riches instead of Wishing for Them is nonsense because his description of desiring riches is the same. There's no difference between desiring something and wishing for it. Yeah.

It's just nonsense. You could say that it's good advice to say, if you want to be successful, be obsessed with the thing you want to do, plan ways to make it happen, back those plans with persistence, don't accept failure. But again, that's not a guide. That's obvious. It's like me selling myself as a marathon coach by saying, so you just run for 26.2 miles and don't stop. Don't stop for any reason. Don't stop. Just keep going and you'll finish the marathon. And you know what? If you fall and you can't run anymore, that's not my fault. It'd be more like saying, if you fall and can't run anymore, I suggest getting up and continuing to run. Here's the thing. You have to desire finishing the race and then you have to do it.

It's like, yeah. That's how you achieve success. It's very easy. You think about it and then you do it. I mean, I don't know how I can make this any easier for you guys. Yeah. The secret to success is planning a way to succeed and then doing it. He's not just saying be successful. He's saying make a plan to be successful, but that's still not useful information. Yeah. Yeah. So another thing that's included in his book or another one of the steps included in his book is faith. He notes, riches begin in the form of thought. The amount is limited only by the person in whose mind the thought is put into action.

Faith removes limitations. Yeah. So think and grow rich, as you may have guessed by now, is the book that popularized affirmations, which is the idea of writing down a bunch of times per day. I'm going to get this grade on a test or I'm going to make this much money or I'm going to get this job. Yeah. A big part of affirmations is basically the idea that they trick your brain into creating new thought patterns by forcing yourself to repeat thoughts that are positive or desired over and over, allowed or by writing them down and then by doing so, it's just like, you know, it'll just, you trick your brain and then you think a different way.

And Hill didn't call them affirmations. He called it the principle of auto suggestion, but it's the same thing. Like the idea is the same. And usually like affirmations now are generally, it's generally considered important that they be in the form of a statement rather than a predictive future statement, like I am rich versus like I will be rich, you know. Ah, yeah. This whole scam has evolved so much over the years. It's always heartening to hear about how. Yeah. So think and grow rich, like I said, sold like hotcakes. And as someone who has never been drawn to self-help books, I can't really explain why, but people loved it and they still love it. And I've met a lot of like reasonable, intelligent people who I respect,

who have this book on their shelves somewhere and presumably found value in it. So if you're one of those people, I have no desire to shit on you or the fact that you found value in it. But I do think it's funny that Napoleon Hill wrote about sex transmutation. So we're going to talk about that some. Oh, hell yeah. From think and grow rich, quote, the desire for sexual expression is by far the strongest and most impelling of all the human emotions. For this very reason, this desire, when harnessed and transmuted into action other than that, a physical expression may raise one to the status of a genius. Oh, okay. He's a nofap guy.

Yeah. He's a nofap. You pulled it. You got it. I didn't. Oh, okay. So I actually, nofap is like a community on Reddit of people who don't masturbate and there are other places too, like the Proud Boys have a no masturbation rule. It's like a thing some groups of people have, this idea that if you don't masturbate, you can transmute your sexual energy that you would lose if you came into whatever. I mean, it's also like why I think monks aren't allowed to jerk off because all of the energy in your body has to be channeled towards the greater purpose, whether that is being a Nazi or loving God or whatever. Yeah. And I have to note that with literally about a fucking second worth of Googling,

I found a Reddit thread in the nofap subreddit titled, What Napoleon Hill Thought of Nofap in 1938. Wow. Now, I'm just going to read you one of the exchanges from that thread. Oh, okay. Fine. So it starts with a guy named, with the username Rocky Mountain Oysters, which are testicles. Quoting Napoleon Hill. So here's the Napoleon Hill quote, Controlled sex supplies the magnetic force that attracts people to one another.

It is the most important factor of a pleasing personality. It gives quality to the tone of the voice and enables one to convey through the voice any feeling desired. And then the person quoting this Rocky Mountain Oysters writes underneath that, Somebody who hadn't seen me in about a year was just telling me tonight that my voice lessons must be working because the tone of my voice while I was singing sounds so good. In reality, I quit the voice lessons more than a year ago. It doesn't sound good at the moment because I've been a good nofapper for a week and a half. Oh my God.

And then the response to this is someone else who says, I'm a singer too. And I found that at times when I'm sexually sober, it feels like my voice electrifies the air around it. Also, I understand that Frank Sinatra used to sleep with a different woman every night, except when he was getting ready to record an album. Maybe that's why he was such a shitty singer. I love it. I love it. Oh boy. Oh boy. I mean, the great thing about nofap is that there's such a huge historical precedent for it.

And all they really want is proof that other men throughout history have done the same thing as them and have been great. So all of these forums are just guys being like, see Aristotle said it. So it's got to be true kind of thing. I dated a guy once who told me that he thought women were less attracted to him when he wore deodorant because of pheromones or whatever. And I was like, I don't know. I don't think that's true. I think you're just being addicted to people and that's why they don't like you.

Yeah. I love the little theories people come up with. There's a lot. The things that they just want to do. I mean, it's so crazy too because just like the think and grow rich thing, there are, I can see how part of this works. And I can see like a kernel of truth in this or how for some people it does work. Like if you're in the state of mind where you have money making opportunities or you have talent, but you just are paralyzed by self-loathing or old ways of thinking.

And I can see why reading a self-help book that states the obvious, which is think about what you want and then make a plan for it. It's very helpful and is good. It's the same thing with this nofap stuff. Like I can see if you're a creative person, if you're a musician or if you're a writer and you're in the process of you're going to put on a show or you're like writing something and you want to be able to bring that like powerful, like sexual sort of like impulse to it. I can see, yeah, if you stop masturbating, you don't have sex for a few days.

Like, yeah, maybe you'll be in a mind state and better able to like convey that. If you're like singing a song about how badly you want to fuck somebody in your Frank Sinatra, maybe yeah, you want to be horny as shit when you're recording that song. Apparently for a lot of people, it's just like a focus thing. It's like, I'm not going to masturbate because I'm not doing anything. I'm just focusing, saving up all of my energy, you know, for this. But like to do it as a lifestyle is so interesting because it's like, what do these guys think they're getting out of not masturbating?

Generally, it's women. Yeah, which is, I know that there's, I will say like, I've read enough into that community to know that there's a chunk of them for whom it's like, no, I had a real problem masturbating and I was getting nothing done because I had just an internet porn addiction. And like, if that's your situation, like totally reasonable. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you do what works for you, man. Especially if you've been in it in such a way where you don't feel in control of your ability to masturbate and then you gain control, you know?

It's a very empowering feeling. So like, I get, you know, why that would be, it's like when you start to work out and you feel like you have, you know, more control over your body and, you know, oh, and my body can do more stuff than I realized, you know? Yeah, it's just, what gets ridiculous is when you have to like turn it into a superpower and make it into this iron rule of nature. Yeah, and then you have to like quote Napoleon Hill about it and why it's actually good. Like, that's my least favorite genre of thing in human culture is like people

who find a thing that works for them and then need to find a justification for why it's the best way for everyone to be. It's like if because I'm a drug addict, I were like, no, I've discovered through research that human beings only have a set quantity of sobriety in their life. And so if you're not wasted most of the time, you can't be sober when it matters. Yeah. Like, it's that ridiculous, like, that is my self-help book, Get Wasted and Grow Sober, which will be coming out from Knopf Hill in December 2019.

So, you know, pre-order it on Amazon. There's a lot of wisdom in there. A lot of those success jewels hidden in that book. Yeah. So this was a fun little digression. I always love talking about the no-fap community. Same, absolutely. Shout out.

If you're a no-fapper, we're not trying to attack you, but if you call yourself a no-fapper, it's fair game for us to giggle at you. Yeah, come on. Come on. I don't need to know about whether you masturbate. Here's the thing. There's plenty of people who don't masturbate and just never talk about it. Yeah.

There's lots of non-masterbaters who don't talk about it. They're called women. I'm just kidding. Women masturbate a lot. Yeah. Yeah. My bus driver doesn't masturbate. I ask him every day.

He never says anything about it. That's probably why he's so successful. I don't even ride a bus, but this guy's near my house. I wait at the bus stop. I wait for the doors to open. I say, do you masturbate? He says, no. Go away.

Did you come today? And I'm satisfied. Yeah. Oh, boy. Okay. So, thinking Grow Rich was a huge hit, and Napoleon and his new wife, Rosalie, both grew rich. And in true Napoleon Hill fashion, they immediately spent all of their money as quickly as it

came in, substantially faster than it came in, in fact. They were so busy buying cars and a mansion and other nonsense that they forgot to pay back Napoleon's son Blair for the $300 he'd loaned them that had made it possible for them to survive while writing their self-help book. Classic Napoleon Hill. I love that he writes a book about how people who are successful do it completely on their own, due to their own minds and totally deserve everything they make, and then fails to repay his son the $300 that allowed him to not live on the street while he was writing the book

that made him rich. And the crazy thing is he really believes all this. Yeah, I'm sure he does. He was like an arch-conservative, and he was like, you can only achieve success through individual effort, when the entire circumstances of his life are, he's dependent on other people to fall for his lies so he can scam them out of money, and then he just leans on various family members and non-family members, his wife's family members, until they get sick of him.

Yeah. I cannot think of anybody more supported by a community of people than this guy. He's incredibly supported. Absolutely no individual achievement at all in his life. He's never made anything that anyone wanted, except for this book, and he's like, here's the thing, I did bootstraps. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I bootstrapped my way into, yeah, there's a lesson in the story of Napoleon Hill.

Yeah, tweet at us if you can figure out what the lesson is. Yeah, tweet at us, tweet at us, or buy bolt cutters. Yep. A lot of rich people, gates out there. Yeah. Yeah, in 1938, Rosa wrote Blair a letter bragging that she and Napoleon were so rich that they were now considering retiring. Blair sent back a letter asking if she might pay him back now, and Rosa did not respond

to this. Blair wrote his mother Florence a letter calling his dad, quote, an unscrupulous holier than now, two timing, double crossing, good for nothing, which is pretty fair. Yeah, and also, you know, a very, yeah, a very fair and clean assessment. Yeah. By 1939, however, the money had started to dry up. Napoleon and Rosa Lee cooked up a plot to try and draw interest back to their book and reinvigorate sales.

They started claiming that they were going to adopt 15 children and raise them to be ideal Americans. They hinted that they discovered all of the bad parenting habits that most Americans were ruining their kids with. One of the big ones is abandoning your children. No, that seems fine. That's a big one. That one's fine.

In Napoleon Hill's case, that's actually the most responsible parenting habit is to abandon your children immediately. No, actually, adopting 15 children is maybe one of the worst ideas he's ever had. Yeah, it's a terrible idea, and it never happened, thankfully. Thank God. It was either just a scam to get attention or it was supposed to be they were maybe working on another book. It seems like they might have been trying to put together a child care book.

But either way, the scheme didn't happen because their marriage started to crumble shortly thereafter. And we'll talk about the sex cult that tried to raise an immortal baby that got sort of related to Napoleon Hill. But first, products! Services! 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 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. 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. 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. We're back. Wow. I got to know more.

Yeah. This is the story that people reached out to me with, wanting to know about when they suggested Napoleon Hill as a bastard, as this immortal baby cult that he got involved with. This is some real shit. It's not really that interesting a story. Everything else about Napoleon's life is way more interesting. But there's a neat story, but it's just not a very long one.

The Clis notes is this. There was a weird cult called the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians led by a guy named James Bernard Schaefer. Sorry, master metaphysicians? Yeah, metaphysicians, yeah. You'll understand why in a second. They were led by a guy named James Bernard Schaefer and were a part of the New Thought Movement.

Most of their teachings revolved around thinking things into reality. So they were kind of in that original strain of the New Thought Movement where you could think yourself into better health. And they had around 10,000 members at their height, and in 1939 they were able to buy a gigantic mansion in Long Island. Now the cult fell in love with Think and Grow Rich and quickly adopted it as one of their primary religious texts. And then, in 1939, the cult decided to adopt a baby and make it immortal.

They sort of adopted and sort of bribed the mother of a baby named Jean Gont. According to a write-up from hoaxes.org, quote, Baby Jean was given a private nursery where, in addition to a nurse who attended her 24 hours a day, she was constantly watched over by Schaefer's followers. The plan was to make her immortal by never allowing her to hear mention of death or disease, nor would she be exposed to any bad or destructive thoughts. No unkind words would ever be spoken in her presence. She would eat an all-vegetarian eternity diet.

As she grew older, she would learn about tobacco, coffee, tea, mustard, vinegar, and spices, but she would never consume any of them. I'm sorry, mustard? Yeah, mustard. Wait a second. It's right up there. Okay, I do. Mustard and tea in the same level with tobacco and alcohol.

Wow. Did Mormons eat mustard, right? Yes, I think Mormons are fine with mustard. What is this anti-mustard sandwich prepared to move by Mormons? Wow. Yeah. The royal society of fucking mustard haters. Yeah, fucking mustard haters.

It's also so cruel that you're going to raise this baby and you're going to tell her about alcohol and tobacco and coffee, but you can never have these things. Yeah. I mean, if you're raising her as you smoke a cigarette. Presumably as you smoke a cigarette. Isolation chamber, you might as well just never tell her about them. Yeah, you're never going to tell her about death, but you will tell her about alcohol, but say she can't take it because why?

I feel like there's holes in the plan. Yeah, growing up and no one ever talking about death? Yeah. Thankfully, she did not because none of this worked out. Wow, I can't believe this. The cult almost immediately gave up the baby. It really thought out plan didn't go anywhere. Yeah.

Well, the baby's mother sued the cult for essentially abducting their kid. Right. And Napoleon doesn't really interact with this story much. As far as I can tell, his main crosses with this is both that the cult used his book as like a religious text and they made him Baby Jean's godfather. But I'm not aware of him ever actually meeting Baby Jean or even having much to do with the cult. Once again, for the better.

He had some involvement with him, but like, yeah, he was not really, I don't think he was a big part of this. They did pose the baby with a picture of his book. It seems like one of those things where he would have. Just like he fucking, him posing with Edison, baby posing with a book. It seems like he probably would have gotten on board with what the cult was doing if it had like worked out at all and they'd attracted a lot of media attention. Yeah, but it just didn't go in with this plan, but it didn't really go anywhere.

And it certainly wasn't his, his main burner scam. Yeah. His only direct interaction with the cult, as far as I can tell, is that he may have gotten its leader embroiled in a scam that eventually lended in a suicide. I mean, at this point, who has he not embroiled in a scam? Yeah. The whole world at this point. Yeah.

Yeah. In the early 1940s, Schaefer, the cult leader, convinced one of his wealthy cult members to give him a lot of money to buy a magazine. The magazine flopped and she sued him for grand larceny, for which he did five years in Sing Sing Prison. In his appeal in court to try to fight the sentence, he claimed, quote, Napoleon Hill came to me on her about the first of December, 1939, and told me that he had an opportunity to purchase a magazine called Psychology for about $5,000, and that we could each put up

$2,500 and become partners. He told me that although the magazine was then in very bad condition, it had once made $25,000 a year, and he thought that could be built up again. I was interested, but told him I hadn't the money. I decided, however, to try and borrow $2,500 to go into the venture, and with that in view, approached Mina Schmidt, the lady who sued him for the loan. I quickly stated to her the purpose for which I wanted the money, with which I had been told by Mr. Hill concerning the history of the magazine and what he thought of the future

prospects, notwithstanding its poor financial condition at the time. So that was Schaefer's appeal. He claims that Napoleon came up with a scam that got him put in prison, but his appeal was rejected. He may have just been lying. He did five years in prison, and then he and his wife shot themselves in their car several years after being released. So it's hard for me to tell how direct Napoleon's role in any of this was, but just based on

his personal history, I don't have any trouble believing that he used these people's trust in him to swindle them out of $2,500. Yeah, that sounds like something he definitely has done before literally hundreds of times. Now the good news is that Napoleon himself did finally meet a grifter who was more than his match. His fourth wife, Rosalie. In 1941, with money running out, she finally got tired of him. While he was away giving lectures, she sold off all of their property, including his beloved

Rolls-Royce, and then ran off and served him with divorce papers. Her justification was that he'd cheated on her, which was probably true, but considering Rosalie also immediately married her divorce lawyer, it's equally likely that Napoleon just met a grifter who was faster on the draw than he was. She was his queen. She was the only one crazier than him. She got right the fuck out of there, sold off all their shit, and gone. And then she wrote self-help books, because now that she'd been attached to Napoleon Hill,

she didn't need him anymore. She could get self-help books published. Totally. She gave him the old Napoleon Hill treatment. She got in there, got a selfie, and left. She Napoleon Hilled Napoleon Hill. I love it. Yeah.

That's a happy ending for a scammer story. He marries this woman 20-something years younger than him, and you think he's going to take advantage of her, but then she just robs him wiped? Well, here's the thing, first she makes him rich. She writes his best-selling, but she translates his bullshit ramblings into one of the best-selling books of all time. And then she's like, fuck off. She earned that shit.

For damn sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, so Oliver Napoleon Hill never again repeated the staggering success of Think and Grow Rich. He continued to write and lecture for the rest of his life, but most of that life was spent near the edge of financial collapse. His next book, Mental Dynamite, published in 1941, was a flop.

I'm so glad I get the, you know, fill in your own Napoleon Dynamite joke here. Yeah. Yeah. Damn it. You're right. I don't know what the joke is, but there's got to be one in there. They'll make one. They'll make one.

Yeah. Now, Hill married again in 1943, and he made minor news in 1953 when he started urging the government to end the Korean War by nuking every single city in Russia. Which is an interesting solution to the Korean War. What if we kill all the Russians? Wow. Anybody tried that? That sentence had a real twist ending.

Yeah. He was an arch conservative. Yeah. Like, you get the feeling he and General MacArthur would have gotten along. Yeah. Wow. Now, Napoleon Hill himself would know no more great success in his life, but in 1952, a book he inspired and helped to craft did become a big success, The Power of Positive

Thinking by Norman Vincent Peel. Now, The Power of Positive Thinking is still today one of the most influential books in the self-help genre, and Peel credited Napoleon Hill with helping him write the book. Now, you may not have heard of Norman Vincent Peel, but someone who does know who that guy is, is President Donald Trump. Because Norman Vincent Peel was Donald Trump's pastor when Trump was a child. Decades later, Donald Trump recalled, quote, you always, when the service was over, you'd have said, I'd have sat there another hour.

There aren't too many people like that. It wasn't the speaking ability, it was the thought process. For you see, Norman Vincent Peel was part of a tradition in American Christianity called Christian Libertarianism. The movement was spawned by conservative Protestant preachers who hated the New Deal and believed, quote, freedom from government is a necessary part of freedom under God. And while Napoleon Hill wouldn't have identified himself as one of these sorts, exactly, his writing laid the groundwork for them.

I'm going to quote again from that article on New Thought, from the conversation, quote, Peel's message was unequivocally nationalistic. As historian Christopher Lane writes, the idea that America needed a pro-Christian nationalism to head off an attack of atheistic communism was central to Peel's message, and he stuck to it zealously. Peel's identity as God's salesman for positive thinking was inseparable from his belief that only in a free market society could Christianity thrive. The article goes on to note that, quote, American exceptionalism is at the heart of Trump's

Christianity. As theologian Stanley Hower was puts it, Christianity in Peel's hands was closer to a set of beliefs a follower could make up to suit their desires. Trump has adopted the strategy and applies it to the country. The link between Christianity and nationalism was evident at Trump's inauguration when prosperity gospel minister Paula White said in her invocation, we recognize that every good and every perfect gift comes from you and the United States of America is your gift for which we proclaim gratitude.

Wow. So that's neat. Napoleon Hill ties into the today. Isn't that fun? Wow. Well, uh, oh boy, I mean, this is all just, isn't this really just manifest destiny repackaged? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is that same idea, which is like manifest destiny is the idea you need to tell any people anywhere who are on top because it's the, it, for one thing promises

to them that you'll stay on top forever. Yeah. And not only that you're, you're on top and you'll stay on top, but that everything you get through destroying other people's lives is actually an expression of divine will through you. Yeah. Any financial power that you amass and money is not a system of value created by and able to be destroyed by human beings, but is in fact just an expression of God's will that

is infallible. Yeah. If you're, if you're somebody living in a giant mansion built on grifted cash and you're hearing someone like me talking about how people should buy bolt cutters so they can make their way through your gates and take all of your things, you need to believe that God himself has ordained your position and is protecting you. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of trouble sleeping at night. Yeah.

And also, you know, even when people aren't scared, but when rich people just feel guilty, you know, when, when rich people see the amount of suffering in the world of people who, who do not have the same wealth that they do and they feel guilty and they think, well, maybe I should be doing something about this. And then Norman vins appeal is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. So other politicians who are more directly influenced by Napoleon Hill include Newt Gingrich,

who read Think and Grow Rich as a young man and Mitt Romney, who was born rich and probably didn't need to do much thinking to stay that way. The secret, which would sell 15 million copies is basically a 21st century rewriting of Napoleon's masterpiece of positive thinking. Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield, Stephen Covey, and a platoon of other modern self-help gurus all cite Napoleon Hill as foundational parts of their own grifts, although they don't call what they do grifting, obviously, even though they are. Now Napoleon Hill died in Greenville General Hospital in South Carolina at 6 30 p.m. on

Sunday, November 8th, 1970. He was almost penniless. I could end this by pointing out that his work has outlived him, that a Napoleon Hill Foundation continues to sell every book he ever published and that he has enjoyed something of a renaissance in our modern gilded age. But instead, I'd like to end by reading part of a weird ass essay I found written about how Napoleon Hill hid secret magic rituals in his books. I found this on a website called ButterflyLanguage.com, which is apparently the blog of a woman

named Valerie Diorazio, who's a comic book and video game writer who's worked for DC, Marvel, and other big names, and she's also really into the occult, and she alleges that Norman Vincent Peel and Napoleon Hill were basically sneaking magic into a mainstream Christian thought. Both Hill and Peel discuss such heady stuff as thought energy, creative visualization, and flat out mental telepathy, but they do it within a Judeo-Christian context that wouldn't freak out the mass audience at the time. Basically they got that stuff in under the radar, and they do it in the most stripped

down, simple form possible. Some critics of Peel, and they are admittedly legion, accuse him of essentially practicing some sort of hypnosis voodoo on his readers by repeating the same stuff over and over. But it also works. It works. The power of positive thinking is one of the most occult books I've ever read, specifically because it is presented as the exact opposite of such, and thus seeps directly into your subconscious.

She goes on to note, it should be no surprise that towards the end of his life, Napoleon Hill admitted that he was literally in touch with an extradimensional entity called the master, through whom he pretty much channeled parts of his books. This is the author of Think and Grow Rich folks, one of the most recommended business groups of all time. So that's fun. So he's really, he is a lot more like L. Ron Hubbard than we thought. There's like an alien that's telling him what to write in his books.

Yeah, and she also notes that Norman Vincent Peel had a lot of weird magic stuff in his own book. Like he talked about something called the other self in the presence, that like is almost this like quasi-magical thing. Is it just like astral projection? Yeah, I really don't know. You know, I thought about this, especially when there was that whole Trump Jim Baker coin thing.

Yeah. Do you remember that when they were advertising on Fox News, it was a couple months ago, they made a gold coin with Donald Trump, not quite in profile because it turned out in profile. He looked very bad, but sort of a downward, downward diagonal profile. And then King Cyrus of Persia in profile, and they were selling this for like $45. And what was crazy to me when I watched this clip was, you know, I've seen coin commercials, but I'd never seen one where the pastor and the salesman is referring to it as a prayer coin.

And what he says is, if you buy this prayer coin and you hold it while you pray for Donald Trump and you pray to bless America, all of our collective prayers will be transmitted. The coin itself is a fucking amulet. Oh my God. I mean, that's what he's describing. He's describing an object that you put your magical energy into that then transmits that magical energy through the power of representation and focused thought, which is magic. That's all magical practice.

This is a cult as fuck. And I was like, how is this on a conservative Christian channel? Isn't the whole point of Christianity that you're not supposed to pray to objects, that you're not supposed to have idols, that the connection to God is either direct or through a religious leader? And I think that might be a little bit of the point that both that article on the New Thought Movement and that this Valerie Diorazio woman was making is that like Napoleon Hill is like kind of integral in sort of sneaking a cult thinking into modern American Christianity.

And why that's why some of this stuff has gotten so weird is because of his influence and guys like Norman Vincent Peel, which I think might mean that Donald Trump is technically an evil wizard. So you know, there's that information for you. That's the episode. That's all I got. It's really funny to prosperity gospel Christianity is some of like simultaneously the coolest most fusion Christianity because it's basically magic.

But also some of the dirtiest, most exploitative of modern religion that we've ever seen, which is just getting old people to give you their money. It's indulgences essentially. It's like give us the money and you get to go to heaven. Yeah. And we'll put in a word with God for you. But also you're putting in a word with God for yourself by giving money to this pastor who is already incredibly wealthy.

It's frustrated to me because actual occult rituals and stuff are so much more fun. Like I'm not a believer in any of that, but I've participated in some stuff with friends of mine like weird goetic ceremonies and stuff where like you're drawn over the floor and there's candles everywhere and people are like chanting and like you've got like people like baking like like blood into like wafer crackers and stuff in order to have like a sacrament and stuff like it's it's it's cool and weird and wacky and that's what makes it interesting is that you have fucking incense and candles and you get dressed up in special clothes and yeah, that's fun.

That's all it's fun and it's also on purpose. It's to put you in a spiritual mindset or whatever, you know, so it's like the power of positive thinking and thinking to grow rich are just that kind of like focused thinking type behavior of like casting a spell or whatever. But without all the fun stuff, no robes, no candles, just an old scammer, nobody's taken acid. Yeah, it's it's bullshit. If he had just included a paragraph that said, and if you take acid and fuck while doing

all this, it works even better. No, no, no, no fucking. Yeah, we'd be in a very different place as a country, but we're not fucking Napoleon Hill. Well, this is this is all very good evidence for why no one should ever go to business school. Yeah, don't go to business school, just visualize a path for success and then you'll be rich. Yeah.

And don't jack off ever. That's yeah. Don't jack off. The only secret. Think about being successful. Don't learn how like the stock market works or like how to how to maintain payroll or like. Don't learn a skill.

Don't learn a trade. Don't do anything. Don't learn a trade. Just promise them a lot of stuff. Don't deliver. Get the money and tell them they can be whatever they want to be. Yeah. It's just a grift and abandon everyone in your life until you die penniless.

That's the Napoleon Hill method. I do like that he's one of the only guys like this we talk about who actually ends up without any fucking money because he was he was never good at any of this. He's a bad scammer. He's a bad scammer who got lucky. He's a bad scammer who wrote one successful book and then found a scammer who was better than him who helped him write a second more successful book. Yeah.

And everything else he ever did was a rank failure. And he was so dumb that he burned through all of his money as soon as he made it. And like that's Napoleon Hill. It's cool to know that basically all of the most powerful people in business and politics all think of this guy as a hero. Yeah. And it's it's amazing to think of like it's amazing to think that somebody steering the country thinks that the advice and think and grow rich is good.

It's very scary to me because at the heart like like we talked about at the heart of prosperity gospel Christianity is the idea that having money is both proof of God's blessing and proof that other people should give you more money. You know like those pastor prosperity gospel pastors will say you know you need to give me money to prove that God is real or that you love God or whatever the fuck to prove God. And then they will also point to their riches as a sign that God loves them the most. God has blessed me.

Yes. God has blessed. Well no God didn't really bless you with it. Like a lot of people gave all their money a lot of very poor people gave you a bunch of money. You know like well God has blessed me and then the poor people are like you know he does seem to be doing pretty good. Yeah well he clearly God wants him to have money let's give him some money and make God

happy. I mean it's a way of engendering a slave mentality in you know the working class that will then govern their whole lives you know and make people think that they're not worth anything on their own. That their labor is not valuable that money is not tied to labor. I mean to say something like what Mary Ann Williamson says which is the labor theory of value is obsolete in the 21st century and we need to go to a vibrational theory of value or some crazy shit.

Yeah. Yeah okay who who decides who decides how much vibration there is you know where's the fucking FDI vibrations. That's part of what makes this all so fucking dangerous in my mind is that like it sounds harmless enough on its head especially when we're in this world we've got groups that are like literal Nazis marching in the streets and people saying really hateful things and talking about locking up kids someone being like no it's you know the labor theory of value doesn't mean it like it's all vibrations and if we vibrate more positively then that's

going to like improve everything. Yeah we need to raise the consciousness of the poor in order to so they won't be poor anymore it's like no people are poor because they fit into a capitalist system that requires the majority of people to be poor so that a very small percentage can be ultra rich. Yeah and that and it's an excuse you know I'm not gonna say Mary Ann Williamson feels this way because I don't know her opinion on the social safety net right but that logic can is very easily can lead you to be like well no you shouldn't we shouldn't be giving services we shouldn't be trying to provide homes for the homeless or food at the very

least for them we shouldn't be trying to like. We should be helping them raise their consciousness instead. Yeah we should just you know we should just give them copies of Napoleon Hill's book which if you're a rich asshole who wants to stay that way and doesn't want anybody else to catch up you you could do a lot worse than just handing out free copies of Think and Grow Rich to the people around you because it's like it's a book that's designed not even designed because I think it was an accident because nothing Napoleon Hill was smart enough to plan anything like this but it sure as hell works that way.

Yeah. Which is amazing. Incredible. What an American. I think that's the episode. I think that's it. That's all we got. Shall I plug?

Yeah Sara June you want to plug your plugables before we roll out. I got I got all my plugables at Hey Sara June H-U-Y-S-A-R-A-J-U-N-E that's my website that's my Venmo that's my Instagram you can follow me I am making some shows for means TV at means underscore TV anti-capitalist entertainment cooperative we're coming out with some shows in 2020 so follow them on Twitter and see see some stuff we made already. And I'm Robert Evans my self-help book drink and grow sober will be out this December so so please check it out it's critical information for all of you you can find me on Twitter at I write okay you can find this podcast on the internet behind the bastards.com you

can find us on Instagram and Twitter at at bastards pod by t-shirt to public dot com that's it that's the fucking episode I love about 40% of you. 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 like a lot of guns but our 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 iHeartRadio 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. Send to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.