Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Last Days of L. Ron Hubbard

Episode Date: June 6, 2019

Robert is joined again by Michael Swaim and Abe Epperson to continue to discuss the end of L. Ron Hubbard's life.  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. 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? Again, Elronding my Hubbard's, it's part two of Elrond Hubbard's death episode. It's my guests, as with last time, Abe Eperson, Michael Swain. None of you will have noticed the joke in that, but I pointed to the wrong person. It did not translate visually.

Another thing that's not going to translate visually is me getting ready the next product I'm going to throw during this episode. I'm tired of the bagels. So Robert took out his big knife and now he's stabbing the plastic of a many, many Kleenex box. He pulled one off. I'm going to be throwing Kleenex boxes and I'm going to throw the first one to the window right between us. Right between you. Went to the windows and to the walls. And if you know the rest of that song, you know why we need so much Kleenex.

We got a 10 pack. Is there going to be a 10 pack of throwing boxes? It is a lot of Kleenex. That is a lot of Kleenex. I will throw all of them by the end of this episode. I thought you were going to pop open one of those bad boys and throw individual Kleenex, but that's not as impactful. That does not have the impact of throwing a whole box of Kleenex. Is it important to you that the box be filled with Kleenex or could it just be a box with a similar weight?

I think I'm just going to throw a lot of stuff over the course of the rest of my career. Understood. I like tossing, I like throwing. Both good things, both fun. Get some salads in here for you. I would love to toss some salads. Hello everyone on the early morning commute. Welcome to Robert and the pig and the other pig.

It's your drive times zoo. You know what, I hate drive times zoo shows. Another two. That was a good one. Sophie, who cleans up in here? Is it me? Oh, it's you. Sophie.

Well, we've already established the joke, so this is going to keep happening. And there's no way to stop it. I can't over exaggerate her lack of enthusiasm. So far you've picked pretty easy things to clean up. When it evolves to throwing confetti. Oh, this Christmas I'm just going to throw ornaments. Shatter them against the walls. Just pushpins everywhere.

Just pushpins everywhere. Pushpins. Like a home alone that you have made. Just bullets. I think someone who's barefoot so much of the time wouldn't want to scatter pointy things around the ground. But okay. No, it's got those counts. Yeah.

It's fine. It's fine. You know what else is fine? Oh, Ron Hubbard's career. I disagree. I can't wait. Oh, it's just fine. I might agree with that by the end.

Oh, of course it's fine. I mean, now Abe, you do quite a lot of directing on your own. Yes, sir. So I think you might pick up some tips and tricks. Oh, I'm going to learn. From the master. My next set. Oh, it's going to be bad.

Because this is a master class right now. This is a master class right now. Everyone who listens to this episode will be qualified to direct a Hollywood production. Yes. It just takes this much. If they all are on Hubbard Film School. If they all are on Hubbard Film School. Posted by Fine the Best.

It really does only take that much if you also have millions and millions of dollars. It's like literally infinite money. Now, Life on the Run is not good for anyone's health. Despite his vast wealth and the opulent surroundings of the La Quinta Ranch where he hid out in Southern California, by early 1977, Hubbard's lifestyle was catching up with him again. Susan Bloom, who trained to be a messenger during this period, was horrified by his appearance when she first met him. Quote, The first night I was there, I didn't talk to LRH since he was busy, but I saw him.

He had long reddish gray hair down past his shoulders, rotting teeth, and a really fat gut. He didn't look anything like his pictures. The next day I met him, he was doing exercises in his courtyard and called me over. I was nervous meeting him. I was really surprised that I didn't feel this electric something or other that I was told happens when you are around him. So these were in the last days before the FBI dragnet closed down around Mary Sue Hubbard and Oliver Elrond's people with the Guardian's office. And Mary Sue became extra protective of her husband during this period. Her dogs, which were said to be clear, guarded him at all times.

If they barked at you, it was a sign that you were secretly committing crimes against the Hubbards or had done so in a past life. Oh, that's not going to stoke his paranoia. Anytime the dog barks, that mailman is an agent who opposes the church. What happens when the dog barks at him? I don't think the dogs stay around if they bark at him. They just have new dogs on deck. That dog toy is a suppressive person. Who knew? Now Elrond continued to innovate his tech during this period.

His main interest was the purification rundown, which he viewed as a cure for drug addiction. This was an evolution of Hubbard's GUK vitamin treatment, which we talked about during the first three parter. Today, the purification rundown is a popular Scientology treatment that involves massive doses of vitamins in a sweat lodge. In Oklahoma, it killed four people over the course of three years. Hubbard developed this treatment based on what he believed were the effects of LSD on the body. According to Jim Dent Kalki, one of Hubbard's longtime helpers, quote, all the information came from one person who had taken LSD once. That was how he did his research. What's it like? It's pretty chill, dude. All right, it's going in the book.

This is my shit right here. Honestly, it was good. Now, Hubbard became convinced that the purification rundown was going to cure all of the world's drug addictions. He decided this achievement had clearly earned him a Nobel Prize, and he wrote it in order to his PR officer, authorizing the expenditure of unlimited funds to win him the Nobel Prize he so clearly deserved. He didn't get a Nobel Prize. Oh, really? It turns out it's kind of hard to bribe these guys. No, you can't say that. It's canon.

I do think if the listeners of this podcast want to get me a Nobel Prize, I will do drugs off of it. Would you rather get a Nobel Prize for stopping all drug use, you personally? Yeah. Or just have listeners send you some drugs? I would rather get the Nobel Prize. I've got a blacksmith, so I take the Nobel Prize to my blacksmith and have it forged into a crack pipe, and then I would begin smoking crack.

And I'd be a Nobel Peace Pipe. Yeah, Nobel Peace Pipe. If you want to see me throwing some stuff, you give me some crack in a Nobel Peace Pipe. It won't be peaceful. It comes with a cash prize as well, I think the Nobel Peace Prize, at least. And you know where that cash prize is all going to be spent? Yeah. Under a bridge filling up that pipe.

You're going to get shivved for your golden pipe. That's gone. That's what happens under bridges. It's not going to be great. Now, cupboard transferred from La Quinta to a hideout in Sparks, Nevada, after the FBI crashed down on Operation Snow White. All contact with the Guardian's office in the Hubbard family was suspended, and LRH relied on his child messengers to deliver his words to and from church leadership.

On May 25, 1977, Star Wars launched to a world of unsuspecting moviegoers. Here we go. It made, conservatively, all the money, and changed both Hollywood and the world forever. Now, I don't know if Elron Hubbard ever actually saw Star Wars. I kind of doubt it because he was a horrible narcissist who probably never read or watched anyone else's science fiction. Right. It's possible. I know he read a lot of Harlan Ellison, who's my favorite sci-fi.

He definitely, yeah. We're like personal friends, and I guess, you know, you feel the guilt or like you have to. You imagine the one person who could get along with Elron Hubbard? Yes. Of course it's Harlan Ellison. It's just weird that if you, I mean, he seems to really like sci-fi. Yeah. He may have seen it.

How could he resist? Yeah. It's hard to, like, I don't know if he ever saw it, but he definitely paid attention to its financial success. From July to December of 1977, while hiding out in Sparks, Nevada, he worked feverishly on the screenplay for a feature film, Revolt in the Stars. This was a dramatization of one of the- So Star Wars. Yeah. It's a war that does occur in the stars.

The Star Wars, if you will. Yeah. A Star War, if you will. This was a dramatization of one of the highest level Scientology training courses, the OT3 information, or Operating Theden. It's going to give that shit away? Yeah. You had to pay 100 grand for that. There's actually some weird stuff regarding that, which we'll get to here.

So the rough plot was that an evil space dictator, Xenu, murdered 76 planets worth of aliens, sucked in their frozen ghosts to Earth, and blew them up with nuclear bombs strapped to volcano. Frozen is such a great word choice, like ghosts. Ghosts are water vapors. Ghosts are ghosts. That's what they are. And they all have swords. Yeah. They can freeze a ghost.

Forged in motor. Oh my God. I just figured out how we can solve global warming. All right. Freezing ghosts? The people least likely to believe in global warming are also probably going to be the most superstitious people in the country. So the most likely, I'm going to guess, global warming deniers also have a high tendency to believe in ghosts. Of magical thinking, yeah.

You convince them that if the ice caps melt, all of the ghosts will be freed. Ooh. I think we have a plan here. Then we got a problem. And then we got a plan. And we got to put, we got to cool down the world to keep the ghosts frozen. Yes. Dictators need to never stop doing whatever drug they did as a child.

Right. And there are ghosts in the North Pole. There are ghosts in the North Pole, and they will kill us if we don't freeze them. These are the myths of our time that we need to embrace that will help us. It's like that. I saw a post where someone, some anti-vaxxer was talking about how you can actually make vaccines safe if you rub a potato on the vaccine injection site. And it's like, yeah, okay, just tell them that.

Tell them that. Tell them that. Yeah, vaccinate your kids and rub them with a potato. It's fine. Just release all of Dan Aykroyd's books. Yeah. 10 years later, the potato flu decimates the population of North America. Hot potatoes.

That will be the last Fox News chiron before everyone dies. Potatoes are too hot. We caught the hot potato, and the round is over. Oh boy. Potato versus ghost. Now, if you've paid attention to anything I've said about El Ron Hubbard over the last five hours or so of podcasts about the fucker, you know that he's literally incapable of giving a single idea he ever had.

Now, y'all remember Excalibur? The book Hubbard claimed to have written in 1938 that he said was so profound it caused people to commit suicide instantly after reading it. Yes, that's how I know the words Excalibur from, is that? Yeah, it's like the Monty Python, the funniest joke that you can't see. But with psychology. The second you go mad, right? Would that be good?

That's not a feather in your cap. This guy read my book and committed suicide right after. I think that means it's super good. I kind of want that Comic-Con panel. We have today George R. R. Martin, and the guy who wrote the book that makes everyone kill themselves. My name is El. 40 years after his claims about Excalibur started, Hubbard made the same claims about the

OT3 course materials. Scientologists weren't exposed to the Zee News story until they were several years and thousands of dollars into the religion already. That's because, according to Hubbard, learning the story of Zee News would cause death in a matter of days. According to Tony Ortega, a former Scientologist who's now an activist against the church, quote, if we follow his logic, his intention in writing it was to produce a film that, if shown to the world, would kill off all the non-OT3 part of the population.

Oh, man. It would be genocide. It's the biblical flood. For everyone who's not, hasn't paid me enough money to be at this level. Dude. He's going to make a movie to kill everybody. He's going to make a fucking passion of the run. I'm firmly convinced, and of course there's no way to prove, that at every step, a large

chunk of him knows that, and it's probably the thing he's most proud of, look at how I built a billion dollar empire on nothing. On nonsense. I'm proud of that. So I don't think he wrote it thinking, this will kill everyone, but it's still, every detail of his life is better if you assume he believed his own bullshit. It is. Yeah.

I think he started to at a certain point. I don't know how you don't mix it up at some point. You don't make the kids search for gold for months on cramped sailing vessels. If you don't really believe they might find some. And some of the paranoid shit he did, you're like, well, that's not fabricated. He's really grappling with paranoia at this point. Yeah, he's definitely paranoid. I imagine little Elrond going to the ice cream truck and saying to the guy selling the ice

cream, you know that popsicles are ghosts, and he goes, really? He's like, oh my God, that worked. I know what my life is. Oh God, I do like to think about like what would happen if this movie was made and did what Hubbard said it would do and like everyone who watched it killed themselves because you would have conversations with your friends would be like, you know, there's that new movie that makes everybody kill themselves. You want to go to see it?

Well, yeah. I kind of do. I do kind of. I like, I love life, but also I have the AMC movie pass. I got to use it on something. And I am dying to know the details. There's nothing getting on Netflix anymore. Yeah, let's watch the murder movie.

Also, what a weird experience if you came into the room late and everyone is dead, but there's one person and you're like, ew, you're an OT3 in Scientology. I did not know that. And they're like, I know. I'm sorry. So another thing that Ortega notes in his article about revolt in the stars is that John Travolta is still to this day expressing a desire to make the movie into a major Hollywood production, which may mean that John Travolta secretly wants to commit mass planetary genocide.

Yes. At the very least. He knows that fact. Yeah. The idea that John Travolta is trying to wipe out all life on earth that's not Scientology is now my favorite conspiracy theory. Right. Yeah.

I also believe that now probably thanks to the popularity of this podcast, some group of nerds who I will love forever. Forever. We'll find this and shoot it on their phones and send it to us. Shoot Basilisk's pants. Please. The 40%. Yeah.

Please make the movie that kills everyone. Which is basically he just thought of the ring. Yeah. The ring, but for everyone. For everyone. Yeah. And just as sort of future payment to whoever does shoot revolt in the stars, I'm going to throw another box of Kleenex.

All right. Nozzletop. Number three. That's a Scientology thing, right? Yep. I think so. Or take it apparently read through the script for revolt among the stars, which I think you can find if you really look for it.

And he summed up its plot this way. In the script Hubbard wrote from the movie, the character Raul, clearly based on Hubbard himself, takes on the might of various two-dimensional characters with single-syllable names, Chi and Min, who have wandered out of an episode of Flash Gordon. The screenplay apparently ends on these lines as the evil Xenu is strapped into a prison inside of one of the volcanoes he previously bombed to murder space ghosts. Wedding. His dry, cracked lips.

Xenu looked up at the doctor, some terror showing in his glazed eyes. These devices keep one alive forever? Don't talk. Snap the doctor. A guard snapped forward. Don't talk to the prisoner. Despairing. Xenu rolled his eyes.

How long is forever? No one answered. No one knew. Well, yeah. What? What? What? What the fuck are you even talking about?

I mean, it sounds like, I've been to film school and there's quite a bit of scripts that are, uh, suspicious of this type of writing. By the way, when your movie Revolta Among the Stars comes out, everyone's going to refer to it as rats, so good luck with that. Now, Hubbard's dream was to make the movie himself and add George Lucas to his list of accomplishments alongside aviation pioneer, treasure hunter, prophet, and surprisingly good at sex. This gradually expanded into a desire to add a whole film production wing to the Church

of Scientology. The Cineorg. A 10-acre ranch around La Quinta was purchased, codenamed Monroe, and turned into housing for the production staff for L. Ron Hubbard's new film company Slash Cult. The studio was built on a 140-acre grapefruit farm that the Church also purchased. How do you give notes when you're in a cult? Like if everyone acting in it and producing it is on set? There are no notes.

Yeah. You do what he tells you. Actually, I actually think the set's a little, uh, a little gaudy right now. That's suppressive, dude. That's suppressive right there. So if the movie kills everyone though, like, does the screenplay just like paralyze them? Or is it the, like, what stage is the magic like, kill yourself? All of these people are OT3.

So they can handle it. So they can do whatever they want. I bet his plan was to do the opposite. Let the movie come out, no one dies, and then say, see, you're all Scientologists, so you don't even know it. And you got to pay me 40 grand. 40 chess, I see. Now, um, yeah, so they buy several different giant ranches to add to their already giant

ranch and turn into a film production studio. Now, according to the book, Bareface Messiah, quote, lights, dollies, cameras, and a vast range of technical equipment were all moved into the new studio. Hubbard took to wearing a cowboy hat, suspenders, and a bandana, which he imagined gave him an artistic mien appropriate to a film director. The synopsis was to cut its teeth, making simple promotional films illustrating various situations in which Scientology could be used beneficially. Hubbard wrote all the scripts and knew exactly what he wanted.

Constantly biting into a raw grapefruit, he just carries it all the time, throwing grapefruits. This is like, he's Hunter S. Thompson, right now. He is. Hunter would be shooting at people. Right, right. But he's just using cameras. Hunter would have absolutely shot at people. Yeah, but he's using cameras.

So Hubbard knew what he wanted, but found out that it was, it's really hard to make movies. Like, it's just kind of a difficult thing to do. And so, uh, his first productions did not all go well. Now some of this had to do with the fact that the random assortment of people who'd found the Church of Scientology compelling did not all possess the incredibly specific technical know-how necessary to make films. Now, I want to note that this had been true of Elrond Hubbard's Navy, too, and they'd

sort of faked it until they'd made it. But it turns out that the same strategy does not work with moviemaking, thus answering forever the age-old question, is it harder to captain a boat or man a boom mic? It's harder to man a boom mic. Apparently. Easier, easier to get random people to be part of a Navy. Well, there's no, because you can drop depth charges and say you hit something, and that's fine.

When you're shooting a movie, if you don't get the scene, it's not enough. It's just not easy. They listen to it and say, uh, this is shitty sound. So the Church put out a call to any members of the faith who had even vaguely relevant experience in the film industry. The best they could do was Adele and Ernie Hartwell, championship ballroom dancers who had taken a few courses and were told that the Sina org would be their path into the Scientology elite.

They were not impressed upon their arrival to the Sina org. Ernie later recalled, I was absolutely shocked to see everyone running around in shorts, ragged clothes, dirty and unkempt. They put us in a little three-room shack on the edge of the ranch. We go inside and what a mess. The place was overrun with bugs and insects. Adele said, quote, The main thing I disliked was that when we first got there, we were programmed on the lies we had to tell.

If we ran into one of our friends, we had to tell a lie to them and say that we were just there for a vacation. We were schooled on how to get away from process servers, FBI agents, and any government officials or any policeman who wanted anything to do with Hubbard. Welcome to our production company. Here's what you say to the FBI. I bet just being in California, there's a fair chance some of these people probably would have gone to film school if they weren't broke from spending all their money on the

Church of Scientology. I mean, they came from everywhere though. He just moved them to, you just had to go wherever you wanted to go. But they have all the money, send some people to film school if you want to have people with voices squashed out by Elron Hubbard's movie making enterprise. I want to see these cult people's movies. I do desperately want to see these cult people's movies. You know what else I want to see or at least listen to?

The fine products and services that have advertised on our show and or program. Oh, I love those. I want to see them. Kind of fingers crossed that some Scientology is. I'll just close my eyes and imagine. Our ads are randomly generated a lot of the time, so it is possible the Church of Scientology will advertise. You know, I'm actually fine with that if they advertise on this episode totally down.

I'm not okay with it. I don't know if listening through all this, an ad for the Church of Scientology makes you decide, you know what, yes, this is for me. You clicked on this and you're like, but the ad really resonated. Yeah. All right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and, you know what, they were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. This season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. 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 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? 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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back, and Sophie is actually leaving the room. She's about to open the door, which is bad for sound quality, but good for what I like to call cinema verite, a term I invented for podcasts being true. We're really peeling back the podcasting curtain here. You invented that term. I did invent that term. The term loosely affiliated with podcasts, hence the word cinema, and curtain.

Well you know, the main goal when you make a podcast is to just broadcast to everyone else that, yes, you should also have a podcast. You should have a podcast. I won't rest till there's as many podcasts as there are people. I want there to be twice as many podcasts as people, and until there are, I will continue to throw. Cleaning podcasts! So before.

I laughed, but it hit me in the throat. Well you know what they say about throats, Michael. Products and services? It's the laziest part of the body. That's true. All right. We're back. Well, there's peristalsis.

So Elron Hubbard, auteur director, was still desperately afraid of being brought in by a surprise police raid. A souped up Dodge Dart with a full tank of gas was kept on stand by 24-7 outside of his production facility. Yeah. Just fuck it and run, Carl. The director has a, like, I feel like everything we've said so far is applicable only to Elron Hubbard or Roman Polanski.

Yeah. Every day, put a Philly cheese steak on the dashboard and replace it the next day. I might have to go at any moment. He's like, it occurs to me that we should just have a table of disguises. They literally did. All right. Yeah. All right.

I don't know if any of y'all are aware of this, but auteur directors are not known to be mentally healthy people at the best of times. Elron Hubbard might have given a guy like Stanley Kubrick a run for his money in the crazy pants category. Stanley Kubrick finished movies, though. He did finish movies. Adele first met Hubbard when she was working in the wardrobe department and heard him start to scream at a group of his underlings.

Quote. This is a quote of Hubbard directing, so pay attention. You dirty goddamn sons of bitches, you're so goddamn stupid. Fuck you, you cock suckers. It seemed to go on for several minutes. I had something in my hand and it fell to the floor. I said, who in the world is that? They said it was the boss.

We weren't allowed to use the name Hubbard for security reasons. You mean the leader of the church speaks like that? I asked. Oh yes, was the reply. He doesn't believe in keeping anything back. Yeah, this is straight out of the book of USC School Cinematic Arts, actually. You goddamn sons of bitches. Adele's first big job was makeup assistant on a Hubbard flick called The Unfathomable

Man. It was a modest project, covering the entire history of the human race from the beginning of time to the modern era through the eyes of Elrond Hubbard. Unfathomable. I'm sorry. That's a great title. What a title. You can't even think of it.

What's the first thing you think? Well, he's a man. Well, I can think of a man. No, you can't. You can't. Not this guy. Adele's recollections make it sound rather surprisingly like the Sam Raimi flick. Quote.

Did he ever like those films to be bloody? It was enough to make you sick. We'd be shooting a scene and all of a sudden he'd yell, stop, make it more gory. We'd go running out on the set with all this caro syrup and food coloring and we'd just dump it all over the actors. Then we'd foam some more and he'd stop it again and say, it's still not gory enough. Then we'd throw more blood on them. Well, he's competing with the Bible.

So he's got to match every religion needs to match a certain level of gore just to keep our interest. Just imagine him at monitor and when they nail how much blood, he's just going, yes. This will bring Scientology to the masses. Okay, now pour some blood on me. Okay, now we can continue. Get the disguises. The movie included a scene where an FBI office was bombed.

This was understandably Elron Hubbard's favorite part. He jerked off. Well, directing that scene, I imagine. He grew a little over-enthusiastic and had so much blood dumped on his actors that their clothing stuck to their bodies and had to be cut off by the wardrobe people. Hubbard made up for his general lack of knowledge of how to make movies by being an incredibly persnickety asshole. According to Bareface Messiah, quote.

When the Senate org was shooting in the studio, all the sets had to be cleaned and scrubbed with special soap every morning before Hubbard arrived and the messengers would go around with white gloves to assure it had been done properly. Hubbard had a director's chair that no one else was allowed to sit in and as he was walking around the set, a messenger would follow close behind him, ready to put the chair underneath him if he chose to sit down. One unfortunate girl got the positioning wrong by a few inches and as the Commodore sat down, he missed the chair and scrubbed the floor until you learned that she was

put in Scientology's prison. That's not real, is it? Yeah, it's real. They brought her there. She was tortured. And you know, well, it's worth it if the work stands up to the test. That's why we have an Academy Award for Cleanest Set. That's very key to filmmaking.

Wait, is it? Really? No. It's a Nobel Peace Prize material, but I just love that he's like, you know, directing a movie. You keep the set clean, you place the chairs correctly, you have a lot of blood, movies. Now the numerous stories that Hubbard tried to film all had grand narratives, usually starting at the very beginning of galactic history.

One film, The Problems of Life, was about a young couple who felt their existence lacked meaning. They asked for advice from a psychiatrist who was played as a violently insane person. They next asked help from a scientist who was also violently insane. Then they found a Scientologist who was a perfect being of pure contentment. Keema Douglas, an artist and Scientologist who spent time with Hubbard during this period, noted, quote, The trouble was that he wanted to make movies that would take over Hollywood, but they were

terrible, really terrible. The crew would have to do scenes over and over again before he was satisfied. Occasionally the day would end up with a fine, well done, everyone, but more often there were tantrums and he'd storm off the set screaming that it had better be right tomorrow. Oh, well, Hubbard. Well, fix it. Fix it. We don't know how to fix it.

Do it. Do it. Or more beatings for you all. I've got to go have sex surprisingly adroitly. This better be a movie when I get back. All the while, as Alron Hubbard painstakingly acquired roughly the amount of expertise one would receive in the first semester of film school, he was raising money to make revolt in the stars of reality.

He succeeded in putting together millions of dollars to make the film and funneled it through a production company called a Brilliant Film Company. Tragically, Hubbard was as bad at running a production company as he was at everything that wasn't infiltrating the federal government. A Brilliant Film Company went bankrupt and revolt in the stars was never more than a few costumes in an unbelievably bad screenplay. I'd still pay a lot to see those costumes. I would still pay a lot to see those costumes.

Someone's got those costumes. Someone's got. They are like religious artifacts now. Right. There's a church of Scientology where there's a case like you'd see an arc light and you're like, it's that thing we never made. And they all still have the blood on them and it's still unsure of whether or not it's the fake blood or the real blood from the beatings.

And when they cut them out of the clothes and stabbed them. Yeah, you know there were some scissors accidents on set. In late 1978, a few days after Mary Sue Hubbard and 10 other top Scientologists were indicted for their rampant crimes, Elron Hubbard collapsed while filming a very stupid movie in 120-degree heat. He recovered, but it had become abundantly clear to everyone that the ranch in Southern California and the strenuous life of an auteur film director were not suited for the ailing old man.

Now, during this time, Elron Hubbard continued to receive regular auditing sessions. His auditor was a fellow named Mayo, and Mayo grew increasingly unsettled about the revelations he received from the great prophet of Scientology as he recovered from heatstroke. Quote, from Mayo. He revealed things about himself in his past which absolutely contradicted what we'd been told about him. He wasn't taking any great risk because I was a loyal and trusted subject and had a duty to keep such things confidential.

It wasn't just what I discovered about his past. I didn't care where he was born or what he had done in the war. It didn't mean a thing to me. I wasn't a loyal Scientologist because he had an illustrious war record. What worried me is that when I saw things he did and heard statements he made that showed his intentions were different from what they appeared to be, when I was with him, messengers often arrived with suitcases full of money, wads of $100 bills, yet he had always said and written that he never received a penny from Scientology.

Who had asked to see it, the messenger had opened the case and he'd gloat over it for a bit before it was put away in a safe in his bedroom. He didn't really spin much. I guess it was getaway money. I didn't mind the idea of him having money or being rich. I thought he had done tremendous wonders and should be well paid for it, but why did he have to lie about it? I slowly began to realize that he wasn't acting for the public good or for the benefit of

mankind. It might have started out like that, but it was no longer so. One day we were all talking about the price of gold or something like that and he said to me, very emphatically, that he was obsessed by an insatiable lust for money and power. I'll never forget it. Those were his exact words, an insatiable lust for money and power. I love gold. I love gold.

Jesus. Also, because if you're at that level where you're hit, the boss's auditor, you must have already been exposed repeatedly to the fact that the purpose of auditing is not to keep it confidential. The purpose of auditing is to have dirt on people. I don't know how this guy didn't walk away with a portion of the gold is what I'm getting at. He may have.

Hey, guess what, boss? Yeah. I have a recording now. You idiot. Yeah. You dying old idiot. I think the guy you put in that job is the guy you know is never going to betray you. Right.

Yeah. And he did while Hubbard was alive. Eventually it seems like he came clear. I'm sure it was a process so all the pieces didn't align, but hearing this quote now, you're like, if you felt this way, then you could have walked away with a chunk of that gold, probably. You could have walked away with one of those suitcases of dirty $100 bills. Because if there's anything Hubbard's going to respond to, it's blackmail, I like that.

After a couple months of convalescence, Hubbard was healthy enough to get back to directing movies. Naturally, he made his auditor an actor. Quote, he walked around with an electric bullhorn yelling orders through it even if the person was only a few feet away. The crew were in a constant state of fear. He'd say he wanted a certain set built and describe it. Everyone would work in a frenzied state to get it done often through the night, not stopping

for meals or in praying it would be right and that they would not get into trouble. When he arrived to begin shooting, he invariably decided he didn't like it. It had been altered. He wanted it blue, not green. Some of the crew would be sent to RPF Scientology Prison, and others would be running around trying to find some blue paint. Then he'd want to know why it was blue and not yellow. Have you seen the Star Wars documentary, Empire Dreams, where he can't pronounce his

own. It's Gungans. Gungans. Gungans. George, you wrote this. You wrote this. Yes, it's like poetry at rhymes. There's a weird synergy in the fact, did you hear about the plot, Lucas released details

of the plot he was going to do if he had done seven, eight, and nine, and it involved tiny creatures that live in your blood called the Wills. He loves tiny creatures living in your little magic books. I know. It's Theatons, dude. It would like. They are the same. Lucas, now that he is officially, I guess, traded Star Wars to, quote, white slavers.

Not totally inaccurate. No, no. It's a description of the Disney Corporation. It doesn't mean that one of them is on the right side. I think for the good of everyone, he may as well buckle down and make Revolt Among the Stars. Oh, absolutely. I think Lucas is the man to do it.

Yeah. He's the only man to do it. He's the only man to finally make Revolt Among the Stars reality. I'm holding Chekhov's Kleenex box in there. I'm getting ready. I'm illustrating another point about filmmaking, which is that you should always throw Kleenex at the walls. It's like, yeah, it's like a bullhorn.

As Chekhov's tools go, that one didn't stretch the tension out, but sure. It did not. It did not. I didn't go to film school. Yeah. You gotta do it in the Colorado Hubbard. You gotta do it in the Colorado Hubbard. Don't let that stop you.

Yeah, totally. Exactly. We got five more of these Kleenexes that I got to toss, and I'm starting to realize I may not have that much anger, so some of these tosses are going to be less impactful than the others. It's all right. It's just where we are right now. Can't not toss them.

I promise. They can be sad Kleenex. Tossing boxes. Sad Kleenex. All right. Let's get back to the thing. Here's Mayo again, talking about El Ron Hubbard as a director and being an actor under him. Quote, when I was trying to be an actor, I'd have to do the same line over and over again.

It was never right. It was too loud, too quiet, too intense, not intense enough. Then he'd scream, why aren't you doing it enthusiastically? He'd end up stamping off, screaming that it was all impossible and that no one would do what he said. One of the main reasons why he got sick, I think, was that he had so many failures and so much frustration and upset over the movies. Everyone was tiptoeing around waiting for explosions.

So yeah, because this man is someone who just tells people how he wants the world to be and it just happens and in filmmaking, they have to create it for themselves. They have to act. It's the one thing. He gets through his whole life doing that basically and it works with his private navy, but it can't work with filmmaking. You can't force the audience to think the movie's entertaining. You have to make an entertaining movie.

Nor can you get the thing that's in your head absolutely perfect every time. Like by every performer. But also as an actor, I mean, come off it, Mayo. I had to say the line a bunch of times. That's the process of acting for film. You get the feeling though that it was literally for days at a time sometimes and he would just say more enthusiastically. He doesn't know how to direct you.

He's not sitting down like, let me walk you through your motivation here. You have to understand why it's wrong. He was just shouting, no, it's not right. As an example, a very basic rule of directing is it's widely frowned upon to just say, do this emotion. That's the most basic directing rule. I also love that his notes are basically going a direction, going the opposite direction. These ambiguous definitions of what he wants, that sounds real clear to me.

That sounds like a guy with vision. If only he had been a YouTube personality and just said, fuck it, I will be all the parts and I will shoot this in my room. Oh, he would be a huge hit on YouTube if he were alive and younger today. That would be, he would own that place. He would be one of those channels you end up on when you're three clicks away from a decent good God-fearing video. And he would be convincing, I'm just going to guess here, convincing millions that the

Holocaust didn't happen. You see that kind of cultism and tribalism and Twitch streamers and stuff, it's pretty real. Oh, he would be so good at Twitch. He would Twitch it up. He would be incredible. Yeah. Now, I do want to note as we get to this point that I think the story, the fact that Elron

Hubbard finally failed when he tried to stumble into filmmaking is proof of something important, which is that the U.S. Navy and all navies are a bunch of pansy waste, little woos factories. Okay. Hollywood is where shit really gets done. So, suck on it, fucking aircraft carrier, wimps. We got our prop guns. We're pretty close to the ocean right now, so I'm a little nervous. What are they going to do?

They can't make a movie. That's what this proves. Well, we've also infiltrated the Coast Guard, much like Elron Hubbard, so. Yeah, take it, Coast Guard. Fucking movies is what's hard. Yeah, that's the real... That's the message here. Not these people have their cushy wars.

Yeah, they're easy jobs on submarines. What's hard is movies. Yeah. That's what we can all agree is what we do is the most important best job. The most important and the most difficult job. I would like to see anyone in the goddamn Navy toss a fucking Kleenex box. See, I expected you to grab that Kleenex box and you grab that one, so now you have to go to jail.

Yes. That's how this works. Fun fact, all of Hollywood's dolly industry, the things that move cameras in space kind of thing, that was all adopted from Navy technology for putting bombs into planes. We've been reverse infiltrated by some Navy PR mouthpiece. Son of a bitch. The Navy? You're in the pocket of big Navy, aren't you?

I am. Big Navy. I love that. Crucially different from old Navy. Yeah. New Navy. Yeah. Sorry, Navy.

I'm not really that sorry. It's fine. You've got boats. You're fine. Now, eventually the stress of running the Cine-Oregon dealing with the brutal California desert climate, as well as his growing fear that the FBI was closing in on him, forced Elron Hover to make would become his very last move to a tiny farming town called Hemet, California.

Oh boy. I spent lots of time in it. Oh yeah. Nice little lake. Why? Camping. Camping. Yeah.

Well. Around Hemet area. I love camping. And you know what else I love? No. Products. Oh. Services.

Every time. Just those two things. No other room for love in my life. The rule of three is not being fulfilled is going to just kill me this whole break. Yeah. Well. Yeah. Too bad.

I could not have a third. Not going to help you yet. Condiments? I hope by chance you get a condiment. I really hope. I hope it's a condiment I had, too. You get a like a goober, sent hand for goober's peanut butter and jelly and one jelly. Condiments!

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

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? 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. We're back! So, L. Ron Hubbard moved to Hemet, California in secret, his location was known only to a handful of people within the church.

For the next six years, the number of people Hubbard interacted with regularly wouldn't be enough to make up two full baseball teams, or basketball teams, whichever one's smaller. I think it's five people on basketball, right? Well, that's on the court. That's on the court. There's more people on baseball teams. There's more people on baseball teams. That's also way more people than I know.

Yeah, exactly. Curling team, I think. Curling team. That is inappropriate. Yeah. Now, this life of seclusion and hiding out from justice suited Ron Well, according to Bearface Messiah, quote, although he occasionally threw his food across the room when he believed the cook was trying to poison him, by and large, he was better tempered than he had been when

he was trying to make movies. He usually got up about midday, odded himself for an hour, and then dealt with whatever correspondence the messengers had decided he should see. In the afternoons, he devoted several hours to taping lectures and mixing suitable background music. In the evenings, he watched television and reminisce to a small but always attentive audience. Did you say mixing?

Yeah. So he spent all day making playlists and mixtapes? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He probably would have edited his own podcast. That's a good, harmless old man. Yeah.

That's a do. That's fine. It's like a cute messiah. You know? It's better than torturing people in your prison when they don't act right. Filmmaking was the, that's really what cracked the chestnut there, really opened him up to. You know what? I'm just going to chill out.

I also can't believe he doesn't have someone tasting his food ahead of time at this point. I just assumed he'd have the whole royal, like, groom of the stool to wipe his ass. Royal food taster to keep the poison out. I want to know what tips him on. Yeah, but if he's got a royal food taster, he's going to get to throw his food across the room. And as I've proved with these throwing food, like you have Kleenex boxes. Yeah.

Well, I do have toss and food. Yeah, you make a plate for yourself and a plate to toss. I throw food at Sophie when things aren't the way that I would. Robert is filling a Kleenex box with food. He's just shoving it full of food. That's going to be tough to clean up when Sophie gets back. We only have three left. We'll leave it for her.

We'll leave it for her. She loves it. She does love it. David Mayo was Moen member of Hubbard's small, attentive audience in the nights. He recalled many evenings with a Commodore, playing hillbilly songs on his guitar and lying about the years he'd spent as a troubadour in Appalachia. I think he was making up the songs as he went along afterwards. Everyone clapped.

Yes. Hillbilly. I desperately want to hear some of Elron Hubbard's improvised hillbilly songs. I wanted to see that live. There's no replacement for that. There's nothing that could have possibly. That's your YouTube channel. That is a hundred.

Unplugged. You're hubby. Elron Hubbard pretending to be a hillbilly singing random songs. Hey. Hey, y'all. Hey, y'all. Little Nas X, help me out. Xenia was coming to get you.

On the days when he went into town, Hubbard would wear a variety of absurd disguises. A baseball cap with fake hair sewn onto it, stage makeup to alter the shape of his face, false eyebrows and sideburns. Hubbard was convinced he looked like a local. No one else thought this. Thankfully, the internet did not exist, and so no one in him recognized him either. For six years, Hubbard's location was kept perfectly secret from the law, the government, and even his own wife and children.

Fortunately, he pared down the number of Scientologists allowed to be around him. David Miscovich, his former messenger and also at one point a cameraman, was often the only person in direct contact with Elron Hubbard. Do you know if he worked on the movies? Oh yeah, yeah. That's what he was doing. Good. That was okay.

That's part of why. Bring in the guy who knows anything. Bring in the guy who knows anything. Yeah. I need cameraman. Hey, guy who used to be like a messenger. A production assistant. You're a cameraman.

Yeah. Yeah. Later, if you could beat some other guys up in a room, I guess you can have this. Yeah. That's true. Now what happened with Miscovich? Rich. We'll talk about Miscovich later.

Okay. He needs his own episode. He needs his own three-parter, probably, to be honest. Now, Hubbard did continue sending letters to David Mayo, his beloved auditor. Mayo recalls these letters growing more and more unhinged as the months turned into years of isolation. Quote, in the first paragraph of one letter, he said something like, you might think I've gone crazy, but I'm still okay.

Just believe what I say is true. I remember thinking, God, whatever's coming must be pretty weird. They called me mad and said, on the outside of the envelope, that's what I got worried. It was real demented stuff, berating psychiatrists and claiming they were the root of all evil. Not just on this planet, but since time immemorial. He had figured out that back at the beginning of the universe, psychiatrists created evil on a particular star system. When I read through it, I thought, my God, he is crazy.

He can exhort me to think he's not crazy, but this letter belies it. Oh, I thought you were going to end with like- What a classy way to say shit is crazy, dude. Fucking nuts. I thought you were going to go with like, yeah, this is kind of crazy because who made the scientists? Who made the psychiatrists invented evil at the beginning of time. It's always got to be the beginning of time.

I wish we could know his, that origin of that. I feel like he must have at some point in his life had one therapy session where he went, yeah, I'm a little blue and they were like, you're a piece of shit. And he was like, well, I hate this. I hate psychiatry. Like, who hurt you, little Elron? I will say that his hatred of psychiatrists is more proof that like, as a man, even though he didn't spend that much time here, he was the living embodiment of Los Angeles.

Like this city in a single man. Out of touch with all the realities, completely in space. Very hungry for power. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of a terrible place to live. It's so specific and consistent, like it rubbed off on Tom Cruise. He did that appearance where he famously said psychiatry is evil.

It's such a core tenant and I don't know of any other religion that's like, also the Lord sayeth, screw chiropractors. We hate them. Oh, no, Buddhism's really anti-chiropractic. Yeah, it's a hard line. Poem, Ozzy Mandias, where it's like, because Los Angeles itself is kind of a testament to that. They're like, let's make them a metropolis where in the desert, where you don't make

20 million people there. How do we plan for this? Don't plan. We'll make it up as we go. No planning. Okay. But we should at least have a network of trams and trolleys and no. One car for every person.

Okay. How do we get water? We just steal it from this other state. Let's take it from North people. Now everyone in the town's feeling alienated and isolated by the plight of modern man. Well they should pay us. We can fix that. We cure what ales use.

Now, by 1982, Lafayet Runhubbard's letters to David Mayo revealed a growing obsession with death. The Commodore was 71 years old in poor health and as crazy as a bat on acid. Hubbard was still canny enough to know that he had exactly one great achievement left in him. Oh, Runhubbard was going to write the greatest science fiction series of all time. The first entry in the new saga would be Battlefield Earth, a saga of the year 3000. Just pepper, cut to him typing, firefly, pilot.

What? What are you telling me right now? That's why there's only one season. Hubbard did not publish a sci-fi story in more than 30 years at that point. Battlefield Earth was a sprawling 800 page epic. He declared it the longest science fiction book ever written, which might actually have been true at the time. I really have no idea.

Who cares? What is that as a name? That's not a determinator quality. It's the most of it. That is believable though because one thing all around Hubbard can do is write incredibly long books and never edit them. Not for a second. This is his finnigan's wake.

Yeah. And as a sci-fi short story buff, just for the record, all of his short stories are mediocre. He wasn't an amazing sci-fi short story writer. He was an adequate short story writer in an age in which you'd buy a book that had 40 of them for a penny. And that's what entertainment was. He was like a mediocre Netflix series that you put. That's what his science fiction was because those little magazines that would be full

of stories were like Netflix. Some of them you get some Arthur C. Clarke's and it's like Bojack Horseman or whatever and it's brilliant. And a lot of them are Elron Hubbard, which is like the cake topping show or whatever. They were almost always like Flash Gordon. Like he never had a grand sci-fi concept. He put a cowboy in space and had him do cool shit. Yeah.

Yeah. This is heresy. Yeah. I've turned. I looked out the window and I've gone clear. Don't say that about Elron Hubby. Elron. So the plot of Battlefield Earth was as dumb as it was shitty.

Johnny Good Boy Tyler, the protagonist, was one of the last human beings on Earth after an alien invasion destroyed civilization. In the thousand years since, mankind regressed to a feral, stone age level of development while the evil aliens who now ruled the world mined it for its resources. Hubbard's ego demanded that Battlefield Earth be an instant hit. Thankfully, he had the resources of one of the world's wealthiest cults at his beck and call. The Church of Scientology bought 50,000 copies of the book at launch and also poured millions

into a PR campaign aimed at making it go viral. Scientologists were ordered to buy two or three copies each, at minimum. Battlefield Earth was just the prelude to Mission Earth, a 1.2 million word epic Hubbard intended to release in 10 parts. Yeah, 1.2 million words. And that has been written? Oh yeah. Okay.

Because I was like, was he pointing at the stands calling his shot? The sequel, by the way, 1.2 million words. He did that and then wrote it. And then did it. Yeah. And then there's some reference. I think Lord of the Rings trilogy at the top that has about 400,000 words total somewhere in that ballpark.

So three Lord of the Rings. Three Lord of the Rings trilogies. And you mean the entirety of the Lord. Yeah. So three Lord of the Rings trilogies. Yeah. Yeah. We never think about how much goddamn time this guy spent in front of a type right now.

That's one thing that is not alive. He did it right. He wrote like fucking crazy. At the end, it just says screw Flanders over and over. So Hubbard actually wrote this monstrosity or at least dictated it to someone else we don't really know. But tragically, he did not live to see it released in its entirety. On January 19th, 1986, Elrond Hubbard sent out his last command, flag order number 3879,

the Sea Org and its future. In this order, the Commodore promoted himself to Admiral, published a glossy photo of himself in a new uniform and, about five days later, died. He did not die alone, but he was not surrounded by his friends or family either. His doctor and lawyer were the only ones present. Everything about his death was handled with the utmost secrecy, but the church could not stop the coroner from looking at the body. The inquest found a bandage on his right butt cheek covering 10 fresh needle marks.

It also found traces of hydroxine in his blood. The drug is most often prescribed as an anti-anxiety and anti-neurotic medication. In other words, a psychiatric medication. The church steadfastly rejected the idea that Elrond Hubbard had died with psychiatric medicine in his system. He claimed that he took the medication as an anti-histamine, which, sure guys, absolutely. Well, his butt gets famously congested. Elrond Hubbard was having anti-histamine, yeah, exactly.

In a phone interview with the San Luis Obispo New Times, church spokesman Tommy Davis insisted he didn't take it as a psychiatric medication. That's all. It's one of those things that anti-scientologists want to make an issue about, and we're like, yeah, whatever. And to emphasize the anger Tommy Davis expressed to the newspaper, I'm going to throw another chair. I'm going to throw another one of these.

Yeah! Oh, that one was good. Because they were all going like he abused millions of people and we're like, as if. Yes. Whatever. Whatever. The rank and file of Scientology were informed of their prophet's death, death. Three days later, on January 27th, David Miskovich addressed 1,800 Scientologists at the Hollywood

Palladium Theater. He told them this. At 2,000 hours, Friday 24th January 1986, Elrond Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime for 74 years, 10 months and 11 days. The body he had used to facilitate his existence in this universe had ceased to be useful and in fact had become an impediment to the work he now must do outside its confines. The being we knew as Elrond Hubbard still exists, although you may feel grief, understand that he did not and does not now.

He simply moved on to his next step. LRH in fact used this lifetime in body we knew to accomplish what no man has ever accomplished. He unlocked the mysteries of life and gave us the tools so we could free ourselves and our fellow men. Wow. P.S., he did some self-auditing and he found out he's even better than he thought he was so he's an admiral now. I could not think of the hud-sucker.

You know the hud-sucker proxy scene. At 6.04, wearing hud-sucker, merged with the infinite. That is a punch up. He should have said merged with the infinite. Well, he did leave us with a little bit of a eulogy to himself because of course Elrond Hubbard wasn't going to let someone else get the last word. He wrote all the things. He wrote.

There's nothing he couldn't have written that wasn't written. And the elegy he chose was a song called Thank You for Listening from an album of Scientology songs titled The Road to Freedom. Are we going to listen to it? Yeah. We are going to hear Elrond Hubbard himself sing a motherfucking song. Oh dude, this is gonna- Please don't tell me he can fuck and has a voice like an angel.

I hope this is a bop, dude. I hope this is a bop. All right friends, without further ado, the voice of Elrond Hubbard. The boss! Yeah! Music's original. The boss! Thank you.

Everybody. Yeah. Nice bridge. Bringin' a synth. Bringin' a synth. Good job. Oh god damn. Thank you for listening.

Yes! Fuck yes! Yes, Elrond Hubbard! Are I right just for you, but others here in this may find things they would argue. Oh dude. This is the voice of like a dinosaur in a children's cartoon. It's good dude. I can hit the bass too!

Yeah! I love this song! I love it! Except if you listen to the lyrics and they're bad shit in the center. Of course they are. I'm gonna toss a Kleenex box. Yeah! Hit the roof!

There are also no real instruments on this song. That's not a one. It's a karaoke fan. Imagine all the listening to this at a funeral. For truth is truth and if they then decide to live with lies, that's their concern. Mine my friend, they're free to fantasize. Loves them low lines. It sounds like if the Full House theme were about how you all should have believed me,

you're all gonna suffer now. These are the notes to the Full House. A lot of musical interludes in between the vocals. He's breakdancing during this part. He's got two guitars on him and he's doing his solo right now. Surprisingly good at breakdancing and fucking. Really, way too much instrumentals. So much.

Okay. Now so that we can't get in trouble with copyright concerns, let's discuss linguistically, lyrically, musically, because you're both musicians, right? You're a rapist and you're part of Cody's band, right? I consider it Cody's band, but I don't know that it is. It's more like guys just showing up and... Which makes you as qualified as L. Ron Hubbard to talk about music. I've always wanted to put this on a public record.

I was kicked out of that band. No further comment, but that's true. Yes, so Cody's band. He is a pre-Madonna. We'll be listening to this episode. I want him to record my version of this song once I get a cult going. Well, I was in charge of... Let's cover this song!

I was in charge of cleaning the rehearsal rooms and the guys with the white gloves were not pleased. If they kicked me out of there. Michael, your thoughts on thank you for listening and on L. Ron Hubbard's voice. Let's start with your thoughts on his voice. Abe already stole the... Abe gave me the image that's stuck in my mind. It's like Barney the dinosaur singing to kids, but instead of teaching him how to wash their hands,

he's saying, you're all living in a diluted fantasy world of children. Soon you will get sick from this. Do you understand? Listen to my sweet candy. The free-to-fantasies. It also sounds like the guy in a barbershop quartet who's only there to hit the low note if he had to go, oh baby. And they're like, the three other guys didn't show up.

You got to sing the middle and high part. I'll do my best. If there's not a shot of that guy who hits that low note, then one goes, oh yeah, that low note part of the song. God, Abe, your thoughts. Yeah, mine went immediately to the instrumentation because it's just, it's shouting something immediately. Like from the get-go, it's the horns.

Like you were saying, Michael, they're like clearly fake horns. Like someone got like my brother's Casio and is doing like French horn on it. I bet they somehow fucked that up though. I bet they actually recorded because he had money, right? He had so much money. So I've never heard a recording that probably was recorded on actual instruments.

And because they're so bad at recording, like they're bad at filmmaking, they're very similar. It sounds like a MIDI version. And you know how I like middies, Michael? Middies are my favorite. The Boys Are Back in Town is your favorite track. It's better than the original, the MIDI versions. But I wish, or maybe it was, I mean,

if this was studio musicians he hired, what a great thing to be on a fly on the wall for. He clearly could have afforded it. I feel like he didn't just because he was so scared that everyone was trying to murder him or secretly the FBI, which is why he didn't just like hire a real production company to make this movie. It had to all be done in-house by secondologists.

NAR-15 can fit in a guitar case. So he's like, no musicians, no. Exactly. There's so many moments in this journey that we've been taking where it's just I want to know what that guy who was just told, all right, so you have to learn how microphones work. He's like, my last job was I worked at McDonald's. Or in the black cases, I was a heart surgeon.

This is not at all my area. Right. I have no clue how to do this. Well, it's going to have to be perfect or what? He'll beat you. You'll wind up in the torture prison. Well, I guess I signed up and gave money for this. I do feel like killing myself after listening to it. That must mean it's the best song.

It's the best ever song. It's the song version of Excalibur. Yeah. It's so weird to me that a guy who could manipulate the emotions of millions of people and strike at something core in us, which is just like the hook to Scientology is, yeah, your life is a mess, and they offer enough that seems believable at the base level that it hooks millions of people in.

And yet he doesn't understand tone at all. Like, it's the bizarre, the lyrics are ominous, and the music is like, Scientology is the soda that will finally refresh you, unlike all other sodas. He doesn't get how to manipulate people's emotions, and yet he does, obviously. And yet he does. Obviously, he gets it.

I did want to point out that he was only like, he was pitchy a lot less than I expected. Yeah. He was pitchy maybe once or twice. He like, flubbed a note, but I mean, he's got mediocre pipes. Yeah, I'm saying. Thoroughly mediocre pipes. The main thing that made it sound bad,

I thought, was that he cut everywhere. It sounds like the melody line is falling down the stairs. I know exactly what that is. It's called a noise gate, and they probably had it set too high. Too high. Because they don't know what's going on. So they just, anytime the microphone is like, oh, there's no signal, there's no tail.

There's a bunch of lawyers and spies trying to work audio equipment. Also, if the noise gate was off on this track between every line, you'd hear him go, when he like, breathes in as a 71-year-old crypt keeper. Casting on one less breath of air. Because any moment is the final one. Call me the Commodore.

Well, I think that's our legally mandated commentary over that song. Fair use? And you know what I have to say about fair use? I'm gonna chuck my last Kleenex box. That's number 10, baby. The floor is covered in throw-in bagels and throw-in boxes of Kleenex.

A couple of torn-up pieces of earlier scripts that I read earlier. What fun. I dropped the top of my water bottle on the ground. I wanted to help out. Thank you. We always leave it a mess, because I'm a problem.

Like L. Ron Hubbard. Once the show takes off enough, I will absolutely buy a compound in Southern California and force people to make movies. I'll be your lead movie maker. No, no, no, no. You'll be piloting boats. The Navy guys I bring into the cult,

they'll be making the movies. I assume you started this show to have a big track record, educate everyone on people way worse than stuff you plan to do later. No, it's not so bad. Or I might try to take it to the nth level. No way to know. I didn't finish Wild, Wild Country,

but I'm on board with creating a cult city in the middle of nowhere. I really want to see what your battlefield earth is. Oh, yeah. I want to know what you think happened right at the beginning of the universe. I wish we could get cults to just assemble, make a movie based on their beliefs,

and then disassemble. I want to see all of them. I wish all movies were made by cults. In a way they are. In a way. It is propaganda. All of it. Yeah.

Or what would have said. It's true. Including this. Well, yeah. I mean, this is absolutely propaganda, aimed at getting me a compound somewhere in the Northwest and a religion. Get indoctrinated people.

Yeah. With just a giant glowing Dorito on a spindle that turns slowly. A glowing Dorito on a spindle. Filming everyone at all times. And turrets of... Dry bables. Oh, that's...

Your cult would be nice because if you fuck up the set, or Robert changes his mind, he wanted a blue, now he wants a green, he just throws a bagel at your head. Like, it could be worse. I will throw bagels a lot.

Also, if you're hungry, just eat the compound. Yeah. Because it's made of bagels and chips. Big real rat problem. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You got your five rat quota already met

within three sentences. They're huge. They use so many carbs. These bagel fed rats are becoming too strong, Robert. Just threatening to overtake the compound. Somebody's been feeding them whey protein. So they've been working out as well.

So they're like, swole, nervous rats in your compound. Well, we found a dead rat with a bunch of puncture needles in its butt. We think it's the rat you. We think they have a hole down. Also, the rat has a T-shirt

that says the Joe Rogan podcast. It's the rat. It has a T-shirt that says the Joe Rogan podcast. We're fucked. We're so fucked. Oh, God. Oh, God. Okay.

Plugs. Plugables. Yeah. Yeah. Both he and I, Michael Swive and Abe Epperson, we have a little thing called Small Beans, which you can see on Patreon.

We do videos and podcasts ourselves. And there's a bunch of other great podcasts on that artwork. You can access it by going to patreon.com slash Small Beans. And yeah, we're doing another show. I don't know.

We said this last episode. I can't even remember. Oh, yeah. It's the double down. In case you only wanted to hear about the last part of the last part of L. Ron Hubbard's life. Yeah, we're launching a new show called

Off Hours. That is going to be basically the whole production team are people who used to work at a site called Cracked. What was that? Was that a site? It was a napkin fulfillment site. They refill all the paper towels

and soap dispensers. But they also ran a web series. And similarly, a lot of people who worked on that show are now working on our new show called Off Hours, which will involve four friends sitting around talking about pop culture. Well, that's legally distinct.

Legally distinct and a good antidote for behind the bastard. Yes. It gets you down. Come listen to some mindless bullshit that we won't find out for 20 years was actually evil. Your cult gets going.

Exactly. Let's get that cultural dipstick going. Everybody build a cult. All right. We for sure are. We for sure are. That shut us up. Everybody build a cult.

Okay, I'm leaving. Well, this has been Behind the Bastards. I've been Robert Evans. My Twitter, Instagram, at BastardsPod, website, findthebastards.com, T-shirts, T-public.

I have another podcast. It could happen here. It's sad. Goodbye. 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. 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 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 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.