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

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Robert is joined again by Joelle Monique to continue to discuss Werner Erhard.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. How many times has our opening just been me doing that? It's not even a shriek at this point. Somebody will know. The energy for a shriek.

A lot. Somebody on Reddit has been keeping track, I'm sure. Look, we will give an undisclosed prize, and that prize might be nothing, to the first person to listen through every episode of the show and count exactly how many episodes open. For your mental health, don't do that. No, no. Sophie, this is Sophie. Robert.

Mental health can be one. Okay, Joel, what we care about is downloads, baby. Do you remember when the Spotify-wrapped thing happens every year? Robert and I, Robert was like, I feel so bad. Oh, yeah. There were some fucked up numbers in that Spotify-wrapped in our podcast. Oh, no. That doesn't seem like a good life story.

Those people are very well educated, and they're not getting fooled by anyone. They've heard it all. It's a good choice for our bottom line, and that's what matters. That's what really counts. That was so ghoulish. Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters. Downloads, baby.

It's 100% about downloads, you know? Okay. That's how we do it, baby. That's how we do it. I love it. We get them DLs. So, part two. Joel, by the early 1970s, Werner was filling 250-person EST classes several times a week,

each participant paying $300 and 70s money for the privilege of pissing their pants while listening to Werner Erhard say shit like this. Quote, although most of us seldom think about it, the kind of talking that reaches down into being and alters what is possible deeply affects our lives. For example, the truth that all men are created equal did not exist before the creation and signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. At that time, there was no evidence for the equality of man. It was a truth brought forth in the Declaration alone.

In the act of speaking and the author's willingness to give themselves over to the possibility to stand fully for their creation, an equality that had before been impossible was born. 200 years later, in the space of that declaration, we are still exploring the possibility of equality and discovering its implications as they extend to all mankind. Once you have heard what the Declaration of Independence had to say, not as a representation, not even just to be in the presence of it, but as a clearing for the possibility that it is, then what you can think and feel and see is altered. Your actions are altered. Who you are has taken on a new meaning.

Uh, this is some white nonsense. Yeah. This is some white ass nonsense. I don't know about that, Werner. Yeah. It's like, oh, we couldn't be equal before. That's not true. Yeah. We were equal the minute it was signed. Super not true.

No, no. You just glance right over slavery. It's really wrong no matter how you think about it. All right, sir. Wow. I mean, yeah, the, the, I don't know, there's, there's something in the idea that like words can create the potential by informing people of possibility, right? And I do believe that to an extent. Sure. It's also just not like a hard and fast rule.

Like for one thing, assuming if you're saying like this piece of writing created the possibility in the mind of like different ways of being, okay, I'll believe that. But also before that person wrote it down, it wasn't written somewhere that like, that like occurred to them probably through a process of like reading other people's ideas, synthesizing them, conversations they had, but like, I don't know. People thought this guy's never heard of it. He doesn't know. Anyway, whatever. Werner plays the role of a great humanitarian there to make people better through a mix of

tough love and pop philosophy. Hundreds of people were enraptured with his ideas, eventually tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and many volunteered to work for EST without pay. That's a big part of how he makes so much money on this is a lot of the people who run these, these workshops with him and for him are not actually being compensated. Uh, horrible. Yeah. Becky Carter, a former volunteer whose husband was a paid trainer later told reporters, we felt like we were on the cutting edge. We believed we were a part of something important time.

Scientology. Yeah. Scientology. It's also, it's part of why he's like bringing up the, uh, the declaration of independence and shit. Um, because it's like, I want to connect people, the ideas that we're revealing and giving out in this class, I want to connect to this great and famous piece of, you know, human, uh, intellectual heritage, right? Yeah. So that people will recognize exactly what I'm saying is just as revolutionary, right? Yeah. 100%. Yeah. It's, here, here's some red flags for you guys and the things we just went through.

Uh, one, this guy clearly has no critical thought, but two, if anyone asked you to work for free run, run in the other direction, you should always be compensated. We, until we don't live in a capitalist society anymore, get the fuck out of dodge, get, get paid in either hard cash or experience and good experiences too. Don't, don't fall for the fake shit. Like, oh, you took out my trash. Congratulations. You can put that you worked out of this company. Like, oh, what a dick. Yeah. It's, uh, it's good stuff. It is great stuff. It's okay stuff. So, um, as EST grew, Werner fed this impression by hosting symposiums with prominent philosophers, scientists and

artists and unfortunately this included Raul Julia and John Denver. No. Yeah. No, that's a bummer, right? Yeah. My main man. Oh, this is devastating. No, not Gomez. Come on. Devastating. Come on. Not Gomez.

Really hurts. Heartbreaking. Not M. Bison. Heartbreaking. Also John Denver's there, whatever. Within the organization, members were urged to constantly sell more classes and the solution to all personal and interpersonal crises was more time spent listening to Werner and his handpicked trainers. Part of how Werner established his genius bonafides was being a gigantic pain in the ass. Randy McNamara, a senior member of EST staff, gave this description of Werner's requirements for setting up a meeting room. Each pillow had an exact place in the room. A pillow could not be off by two inches and it wasn't legitimate to ask what two inches mattered to a pillow.

You got to be enlightened from Werner's handling of pillows. You either did it exactly right or you didn't get to assist Werner with the pillows anymore. Whoa. Cool stuff. Yeah, that seems useful. If he sounds like an 80s bully, it's probably not worth it. Yeah. Well, I mean, he is about to be. He is making the transition from 70s bully to 80s bully. So that's good. That's glorious. Werner used some of his wealth to purchase a mansion in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was also maintained to his exacting standards by an

army of volunteers from a write-up in Mother Jones. Any experience of Werner Earhart is orchestrated in advance. The environment in which he lives is as much a part of an interview with him as the words he purrs out, thousands of them winding their way past logical intervention, or the warm handshake of greeting or the obligatory parting hug. The interior of the Franklin House is overwhelming, opulent, dripping good taste and prosperity. Plants perfectly watered in tendon so that not the slightest brown curls the end of a leaf protrude from enormous wicker baskets. In the midst of this modern decor is a collection of African and Oriental gods and goddesses, among them an ancient Buddha.

Puzzled or an impassable resignation, he tends to his inner life while above him, from the midst of a clutter of ferns, a single rocket-shaped sculpture, juts out from the wall. The tip is whittled to a sharp point, lethal, phallic, primitive. It seems a reminder that no matter how carefully assembled is this collection of dormant divinity, the primary theme is power, hard, driving, alive, spike-like, nailed through the trappings of aesthetics. Everything's a dick! It's explicit! Clearly, you know, we were talking in the previous episode about how this guy probably bragged about how big his dick was. You know, now we see the compensation all

over his home. Here is my dick in rocket form. These plants are my dick, they have no brown curlies on them. Smooth, waxed plants. Smooth as a... yeah, smooth and waxed. That's good. So, great, great stuff. I found one interview with a woman who worked for him in the mid-80s, maintaining his closet, which was actually a chunk of a warehouse where he kept his clothes. I aspire! Wait, oh no! Now I like him a little. Oh, now you're back on board. Is a warehouse for a closet?

Yeah, he has a closet warehouse. A warehouse. Oh, gosh, okay. So, she was given a printed manual, like a small book about how to iron and organize his shirts. Quote, there was a tracking system, so if there was a flaw of any kind, like a button missing or a thread hanging, it could be determined who last handled it, whose responsibility it was. Right, he's big on this personal responsibility thing, so if ever there's a slight crease in one of his shirts, he needs to know specifically who is to blame so that they can be punished viciously.

Wow, he became a mean girl. He's Georgina George out here, really making life miserable for his crew. What's super confusing about... I just, where is, I guess maybe if we can look at the Pope as like, here's a legitimized figure of an organization that should probably be questioned more than it is because of the crimes we're aware that they have committed. Yeah, the crimes. But they got giant warehouses full of gold shit that's meticulously handled in a secret city that nobody else gets to have influence over. It's weird. I don't know, I guess I'm just examining the difference between like, okay, that's kind of legitimized, but here

this guy is like, I want to help people. How do people end up being like, yes, I will organize your closet to your insane level of standards? Yeah. And what you came in here for was like, individual self-improvement. It's a weird leap to think about, but I know what happened, not to say that those people are like, unhinged or anything. It happens to a lot of people. A lot of people wake up and they're like, oh God, now I'm in a cult. How did this happen? Yeah.

But it's weird to think about how you go from one to the other without being like, this is insane and I should leave. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's how it happens. So you will not be wildly surprised to hear that when Burner's incredibly anal requirements weren't met, he had a tendency to blow the fuck up. I want to quote now from the first of a series of investigations by the Marin Independent Journal. When tasks didn't meet Earhard specifications, former employees say he often became enraged. It wasn't just that he got angry, recalls Drew, a former member of Earhard's personal

staff. He would get up close to you right in your face and scream, you asshole, you worthless piece of shit. Oh, Drew also recalls Earhard pushing him roughly after he failed to massage his back properly. On another occasion, he saw Earhard strike an employee and in a separate incident witnessed him putting his hands around someone's throat in anger. Now, the article goes on to note reports from several of Burner's employees that they never saw him handle anyone roughly or even yell very frequently. Obviously, I wasn't there, but the Independent Journal's investigation does attempt to handle the discrepancy between

reports of his behavior. The answer may have been unwillingly supplied by Gary Grace, who served on Earhard's staff from 1974 to 1979 in a variety of executive positions. Burner is a person who relates to everyone individually, he says. Grace, who now owns a string of supercut stores in which Earhard is an investor, adds that Earhard is totally different with everyone he's met, which I think just means that if he thinks he can get something out of you or that you have value to him, he'll be nice to you because he doesn't want to fuck himself over.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like Tom Cruise is our guy, he gets us into things, he helps legitimize us, so we treat him like a king. Yeah, Tom Cruise is never going to get the bad stuff. No, he's not going to the basement in the weird house out in the forest, OK? No, no. He's the royal treatment, so.

Yeah. Yeah, I also think it's funny for them to be like, we're trying to be even. This guy directly profits off of him. He says he's kind of OK and only does this to certain people. Yes, I bet you have seen many things and you're like, let me just cover up for my money's sake. Nuts. Yeah, it's good stuff. So it is extremely easy to find personal experiences of former employees who came to see Werner as cruel and abusive. Undoubtedly, though, most EST

volunteers and staff members saw him as an enlightened, near-perfect being. Within the organization, he was known as Source, similar to how Nexium co-founder Keith Ranieri was Vanguard, and L1 Hubbard was the Commodore. One former member expanded. The source started out to mean that Werner was the source of the training in the organization, says Becky Carter. But what it came to imply was that he was the source of each individual's personal success, right? And that Marin Independent Journal investigation notes, there are more than a few clues that Werner Erhard sees himself as someone with transcendent powers. At a December 1987 meeting, forum leader Vic Gioschia quoted Erhard, when you get

to a field of open snow on which you have never walked before and which no one has ever walked before and which you don't think it is possible to walk, look for my footprints. Whoa! When you saw one set of footprints in the sand, that's where Werner Erhard carried you while he yelled at you about how you were a fucking cuck for crying when your mom died. About how your time at Auschwitz was your fault, really. Oh my God. That's when he carried you so that he could heckle you.

Beautiful. Wow! It must be so amazing to attain this level of influence over people. Yeah. I bet it's addicting. I get it. It definitely seems like it's a powerfully addictive drug that also destroys your brain very quickly because that seems like what happens to Werner. Yeah. One former volunteer even remembers people describing an aura of light encircling Erhard.

Oh no. People gave their power away to Werner, says Becky Carter. As long as you were in the organization, you would be powerful too because you got your power from Source, and we were grateful to him for that. If a person was ill or had an accident, it was assumed that the cause was being incomplete with Werner, meaning there was something amiss in one's relationship with Erhard. When people did leave, those still working for Erhard claimed that effectors even looked different. We used to say we could see it in their eyes, recalls Landon Carter, a former EST trainer.

Y'all were brainwashed. Y'all were brainwashed into thinking this guy was a god because he yelled at you, right? Yeah. Because he yelled at you in a way that reminded you of your grandpa mixed with Jesus. Regina George, I'm telling you. Yeah. Oh, everyone loves him. I should love him and be close to their light so I can also be popular. Yeah.

I'm pretty. Wow. The elevated position that Erhard held in his people's hearts and minds was nowhere better reflected than in the relationship he had with the trainers, his organization's high priests. When EST trainers and then forum leaders were designated, which was kind of their swearing-in ritual, they essentially promised eternal servitude. Those of you who are a big cult stance will note that this is basically the same way the Church of Scientology's sea orc with its billionaire multi-lifetime loyalty oaths works.

Werner was extremely open about the debt he owed Hubbard, including this in his authorized biography. Yet Hubbard as a writer in Scientology as an organization are out of touch with the normal means of communication in the Western world. This results in an unrealistic and needlessly adversary attitude of the Scientology organization towards the society in which it lives. And a Huffy, well, if that's the way you're going to be, we'll just ignore you attitude on the part of society. Werner Erhard is virtually the only consciousness leader and the only person of distinction

in American society to have stepped outside this childish quarrel between Scientology and society and to have acknowledged both his indebtedness to Hubbard and his emphatic differences with him. Wow. That's good stuff. That's good stuff. Wow. Both society and this cult are wrong for not getting along, right? I want to find a way to make Scientology get along with American society because clearly that's the problem and not that there's a cult.

They are the solution. Yeah, the solution is to just make it a little friendlier. What this meant in practice is that Erhard basically ripped off the core ideas of Scientology, finding new names for what were essentially auditing sessions and e-meters and dianetics and selling them to people as the great ideas that Hubbard had come up with boiled out from the cult that he'd founded, right? The fact that Werner was not a cult leader but used the ideas of one was a prominent part of EST's branding. This is something they advertised like, hey, guys, do you want that great cult taste without all those cult calories? That's cult feeling.

Yeah. EST's got you, baby. We're the diet coke of cults. That's so interesting to me because it means a large group of people saw Scientology and were like, okay, obviously it's cuckoo but some of them are getting better. Clearly this must work, right? There's not going to be something in there. This distilled version might be for me. That's why. It's extremely funny.

1977 was roughly the midpoint for EST's life as a popular self-public self-help program. By that point, six years or so in, Earhart had enrolled and taught hundreds of thousands of people. He'd hired dozens of employees to help him carry out workshops and manage his growing empire. And of course, he'd continued to raise a family with his wife, Ellen. At this point, they had three children, 14, 13, and nine years old, all born since Werner had fled home for the West Coast. Werner lived in a lavish mansion in Pacific Heights, but as he'd grown more popular, he'd become more prone to mood swings, emotional outbursts,

and even, allegedly, physical abuse. It was bad enough that all three children lived with their mother in a separate home in San Rafael. The Marin Independent Journal would later report on all this in 1990. Adair, who was 26 years old in 1990, told the Independent Journal, Our relationship with our father was based on fear. We were petrified of him. It was the kind of fear you feel in your stomach. The only way I can describe it is to say it's the feeling that you might lose your life. In her recollections, the only time their father interacted with them was in scheduled meetings where he would track their progress at various activities and arrange them for internal propaganda photos.

There were agendas handed out ahead of time for family meetings, time sheets that he gave his preteen children to fill out. They're filling out time sheets to make sure that... To spend time with their father. That's great. Not to spend time with him, to spend time being used by him as ads for EST. That's the allegation. As the Marin Independent Journal described it, they do not remember a single pleasurable family event.

No dinners at home, no days at the beach, no family picnics. The one exception was a football game that they say was staged for photos for a book about their father. What they do remember is being treated like props in their father's life. We were puppets used to promote his image, says Celeste. Of course, Celeste and additional children. That is nightmarish. You say Celeste and additional children. That's not all that different from how Werner referred to them. As Adair described it, Werner was only vaguely aware of the human beings he'd helped bring into the world.

Quote, he didn't know us at all. He'd even forget our names. Oh, sad. The psychological trauma he has inflicted. Oh, God, that's so terrible. Yeah, baby. Yeah, that's how you do it. Forget your kids' names. Oh, man, this guy. You know what else you should forget? The existence of any products and services that don't support this podcast.

There you go. There it is. The act of treason to not support this podcast with advertising dollars. I'm a judge now. I've declared it myself and yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French.

We take a show. We take a darkly comedic. And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. I hope you have all taken some form of physical revenge against the products and services that don't support this podcast. Godspeed. Let's get back into it. Let's talk more about Werner Erhard. So this relationship continued into their adulthood. Years later, in the late 1980s, when Werner had moved onto a yacht in Sausalito, he asked Adair to drop in for a visit. This was not a common request, and she was surprised until she realized that a writer from Vanity Fair was on the yacht with her father, writing a piece on his life.

Yeah, you get a lot of little stories like that. It's very funny. It's extremely funny. Oh, Celeste, I'm sorry, babe. Can you imagine being like, my dad, I mean, he's older now, maybe he wants to make amends. You show up, he's the exact same fucking person. That's the good shit right there. That's that good shit right there. For most of Erhard's children's childhood, the only times their entire family was together were monthly family meetings at Dad's Mansion, which also included EST staff members to help take notes and handle other things. Some of those other things included family discipline.

And this brings me back to 1977. It was during one of these family meetings that year that Werner would finally snap all the way. The night started normally, with dinner cooked by Erhard's chef and served by volunteers who worked for EST and saw setting out plates for his kids as a key part of their spiritual journey. A dare later claimed, at those meetings, we would go around the room and each of us would have to say something about our lives, sort of like a big encounter group. That night after dinner, when it got to the talking part, Dad accused mom of having an affair and asked, what are you withholding? Erhard had his volunteers from EST keep track of the issues he had with his family, who he barely knew. One category of problem was called perpetrations and withholds, an infidelity fit here. Obviously, his own was fine. The issue was the possibility that his wife might be unfaithful.

This was a broader term than just sex and included gathering allies against him and undermining him, as he told her. So Werner started to attack his wife and as Celestra called, he wanted her to surrender to him, to commit himself to her completely, but she never completely surrendered. She kept back something of herself and he couldn't tolerate it. This is heading in a good direction. Listen, I don't, you know, this is not a podcast that condones murder. I just want to preface this by saying that. This is occasionally a podcast that condones murder. We've condoned a few murders on this podcast. If this guy went missing in the middle of the night, you know, it might be a gift for everyone.

It would have been, but that is not where this story goes, Joel. Goddamn it, I was really hoping. I was really hoping, Robert. Eventually, because he's berating her, their mom stops responding and Werner turns to his brother, Henry Rosenberg, who was helping to run EST by that point and he says, handle this, Harry. Harry gets up and he shoves their mother off of her chair and onto the ground. Next, as the Marin Independent Journal reports, at this point, they recall their older half-sister, Claire, saying, please stop doing this. And their father saying something like, shut up or the same thing will happen to you. With Ellen lying on the floor, curled into a ball. They remembered Gonyki Spitz, one of Erhard's closest aides, pulling her hair.

Adair and Celeste then remember another aide, Raz and Graski, kicking and smacking their mother. That night, Ellen stayed at Franklin House while the children were brought back to their home in San Rafael by an Erhard-appointed female guardian. So she had to stay behind in the house where God knows what happened. Yeah, probably to get the shit beaten out of her by his followers. Jesus Christ. Yeah, which is, by the way, we're saying that like a big part of this was he was all that good cult flavor without the bad cult aftertaste. Now, this is full on cult leadership, right? That's a full on cult.

Well, you are having your followers beat your wife for disrespect. Yeah, you have you have fully transitioned. Not even for disrespect, but just because she wouldn't fully give herself to that's something happening in your brain. She wouldn't admit that she'd like lied and stuff because she didn't. It's fucked up. Oh, Jesus. Poor woman. That's awful.

So the second night that guardian drove the kids back to the Franklin House. This is the next day. They were ushered into the same room where they dined the previous night. But this time the chairs were set up in a circle in countergroup style. Once again, Ellen Earhart was shoved out of her chair. Dad made her get down on her knees and then he yelled at her to stop withholding, says Celeste. Then Bob Larzelleri, that's a weird name, started to strangle her. Claire tried to hide St. John's eyes.

I was in shock, says Celeste. I screamed, stop it. You're going to kill her. I remember my father saying, sit down or you're going to get it. So, again, I've edited this to make it a little smoother. I should note that most of the Colt members referenced here did not respond when asked to comment on these allegations. I have seen. And where the dependent journal reaches out to them, right?

And it says, like, hey, this is the allegations being made. Most of them do not respond. Rosenberg and Spitz, in particular, declined comment. And Grasky told a journalist, it is unfortunately true that I witnessed things that I am ashamed of. And it is also true that I was treated in ways that I am ashamed of. But I never hurt anybody. I never kicked anyone. So that's interesting.

The only person who was part of the abuse and commented on it in a way that, like, admitted it was Bob Larzelleri, the guy whose last name is weird. It's weird. It's L-A-R-Z-E-L-E-R-E. And he does seem to have come out of the other side of whatever fucking headspace, let him participate in this kind of shit. And he later told reporters, Werner was accusing her of infidelity and he wanted somebody other than himself to make her tell the truth. Werner didn't ask me to hurt Ellen. He asked for volunteers.

I was asking as his lieutenant. That's what Werner did. He got other people to do his dirty work so his hands would be clean. When I volunteered, there wasn't any question about what I was going to do. The idea was to choke her until she told the truth. I knew I wasn't going to permanently damage her. The idea was to scare her, but it was unbelievably scary. Usually people whose breath is cut off struggle, but she didn't.

She sort of fainted and collapsed to the floor. Now, looking back on it 13 years later, the thing that scared Larzelleri most was that absolutely no one in the room, especially Werner, tried to stop him from strangling her. Quote, Presumably I could have killed her and no one would have intervened. What I did to Ellen was such a horrible thing. Werner didn't make me do it. It was my choice and I wasn't able to forgive myself for a long time.

I'm incredibly ashamed of what I did, but I wasn't the only person who gave up my power to Werner. I was numb for two or three days and then it finally dawned on me to ask the question, how did I get to the place where I could do such a thing? I allowed myself to do things I would never do now or would never have done before. And two years after this assault, Larzelleri leaves EST. Well, good for Larzelleri for acknowledging his role in it. Yeah, that is a pretty unsparing account. Yeah, and probably the only person to take any type of good lesson out of this,

which is like, I'll take responsibility for my own actions. Apparently a big tenet of this organization. God, horrific. And yeah, I mean, I think the last time I was out here, we were learning about the cult in Japan that poisoned the subway system and they sort of had similar experiences of... No, it was a bombing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think we...

Because we haven't done that cult yet. Okay, then I was on another show where we were talking about it. But the idea that you could bring yourself to then like take out a member of your organization just on someone's, you know, vague words. Again, the depths of humanity that we don't know about them. We don't know the end of it. Terrible. Yep, we don't know about them.

So on the night of the choking, Celeste and Adair sat in shock, terrified to speak up. Erhard told them that their mother was no longer allowed to live with them because she decided she could not, quote, trust herself to tell the truth. They were forcibly separated from her for two years while another cult member acted as their guardian. Ellen was forced into an EST wife rehabilitation program that is most often described as some sort of Stepford Wives bullshit. Erhard made a trusted volunteer shadow her every hour of her waking day. Her weight was tracked, she had no free contact with her kids, and she was punished for every one of her withholds.

When she had progressed far enough down this path to gain some trust with Erhard, he decreed that the next step of her rehab program was to act as the family made. Celeste recalls, I came home from school one day and mom was scrubbing the kitchen floor. I said, hi mom, but she didn't look up. She just kept scrubbing. The guardian said, your mother is not allowed to talk to you. I mean, it sounds like hell.

Yeah. What a terrible thing to be so defeated in your own head that you don't even talk to your children. I mean, the fear that must be there, the paranoia at this point, if you're constantly followed and everything gets tracked, the mental and health issues you must have. I mean, if your weight is constantly being monitored, when your weight naturally fluctuates throughout the month, it just happens. Everyone's does, by the way. Yeah.

That's terrible. Oh, God. It's fucked up. All of this is deeply abusive and fucked up and controlling. Some of the most profoundly abusive stuff I've ever read, or at least have read in the last couple of months. But obviously, while this is all going on, Werner's public profile remains very different.

He was not seen by most people as a cult leader, and evidence of this comes from another project he launched in 1977, the Hunger Project. This was a nonprofit geared at ending World Hunger by 1997. The popularity of EST and the sheer number of influential people who'd taken courses meant Werner was able to quickly drum up a pile of celebrity sponsors. John Denver said that, Werner epitomizes for me what it is to be a human being. Rawl Julia, another devotee, said that Erhard found what it takes to make a life work. Valerie Harper, Rhoda from the Mary Tyler Moore show,

called him the most extraordinary man I know. So that's not great. Again, this is the first thing about Rawl Julia I've heard that I don't love. But there you go. Oh, I'm so sad about this, Rawl. It's giving JK Rawling starting a shelter for women that we know is going to be trans exclusive, which celebrities double check or Matt Damon shilling for crypto.

Figure out who it is you're supporting and telling people to go to. You've way too much influence to be this willy-nilly about it. Yeah, yeah, it's not great. And there were also a lot of well connected fans who are less famous, but more influential. One of these fans was Enid McGilford, who was the wife of the assistant secretary of defense. She was a devotee of EST classes and one day in May of 1978,

she got a chance to tell President Jimmy Carter about the hunger project. There are 100,000 people out there who really just want to totally serve you and do anything you want them to do to end hunger and starvation on the planet for the next 20 years. This apparently had some impact on Jimmy Carter and his son, Chip Carter, became an advocate for the hunger project. But what was the hunger project precisely? Great question. Here's Mother Jones writing in December of 1978.

EST created the hunger project as an independent nonprofit organization and gave it a $400,000 interest free loan. EST's tax deductible arm, the EST Foundation, bestowed on the project $100,000 grant. This money financed a series of 12 presentations at the urban centers across the nation, where Erhard presented the idea of ending hunger to 40,000 Americans. In a slideshow and lecture, he and his resident hunger expert, Ray Prosterman,

tried to get at the first principles of hunger and starvation. He then gave the project to those Americans who, after paying $6 to attend the show, demonstrated that they wanted to take personal responsibility for being the source of the project and ending hunger and starvation on the planet in the next two decades. So, if you followed that, what he's doing here is he's taking $6 from everyone who shows up to end world hunger, and he's telling them that ending hunger is their responsibility,

so they better figure something out. Now, if you're wondering what did the hunger project actually do to help end hunger, the answer is not a goddamn thing. Wow. Wow. Who'd have thought it? Elon probably. Is Elon taking notes? Is he going to start a cult, Robert? I mean, he's kind of got one. But I think what we're going to here is...

Yeah, it's good stuff. So, I want to talk a little bit more about the hunger project, because this is a pretty unique grift that I've heard of, like charity grift, in some fairly exciting ways. Quote, the hunger project does not advocate for any particular solution to hunger, like land reform, food self-sufficiency, or the wrestling of power from landowners by peasants. Nor does it ask its enrollees to make dehumanizing gestures like sending money to anti-hunger organizations.

Above all, the project does not want its members to feel guilty about the deplorable situation that causes each year the death of some 15 million people all over the world. Rather, it asks them to view hunger and starvation as a wonderful opportunity, an opportunity to make a difference in the world. To create such optimism, Earhart counsels us to examine our positions about hunger and starvation. This is the first step in getting the project.

Once we examine our attitudes, we will discover that two prevail. One, we think hunger and starvation are inevitable, and two, we think that to end it, we have to do something, support a particular position. But these things, Earhart assures us, are not the case. Hunger and starvation are not inevitable. We have the technology to eradicate them, and positions merely make matters worse by engendering opposing positions.

So, like, he's saying, basically, if you suggest a specific tactic for ending hunger, people are going to argue with you about whether or not it works, or if it's a good idea, and then you're just going to get bogged down and, like, talking about shit. The real way to end hunger is to get everyone in a big room and get them all to agree that hunger is bad, and then steadfastly refuse to think any more on the matter. And, yeah, basically just kind of vibe about how ending hunger is important

without discussing it in any more detail or trying to take any more substantive action. The vibes will help more than anything else. I want to be vivid, but this seems like wealthy people shit. It's kind of like what they do. They're like, oh, well, we talked about it, and we do some money at the problem. Is it not solved?

If you try to give money to a hungry person, or food to a hungry person, somebody might say, hey, there's a better way to do that, and then, clearly, you'll get bogged down arguing with them. So it's much better to just think about how nice it would be if nobody's hungry, and then you'll fucking, that'll fix it somehow. We did it, guys.

Eradicated hunger. We did it. Erhard's big, like, the thing that he's advising people go through here is a process of what he described as deeducation. Quote, rather than knowing more and then more as you go along, you will need instead to be willing to know less and then less. That is to say, to be somewhat confused as you go along. Finally, you will have struggled enough to be clear that you don't know.

In the state of knowing that you don't know, you get as a flash of insight the principle out of which the answer comes. Again, this advocacy for stupidity being the solution to your problem. If you think less, it'll hurt less. I mean, there's, again, the way that you could interpret this in a positive way is that, well, the more that you study an issue as complicated as hunger, the more you'll understand how complex it is and how little you understand about, like, different aspects of it, right?

Because hunger is incredibly complicated. It's not just hand-starving people food because there's all sorts of other logistical hurdles. There's all sorts of long-term issues. There's governmental hurdles. There's all sorts of different things about hunger that are complicated in different areas. It's different.

The kinds of suffering that people go through is different. But that's not what he's saying. What he's saying is you have to stop people from learning about hunger and just sort of let them empty their mind and that if they empty their mind of knowledge enough, eventually the idea for how to cure hunger will occur to them. This next passage from that Mother Jones article is quite a banger. What forces caused hunger in the first place?

Erhard is vague about this. Call them political forces if you like, he advises generously. Study the political forces and you will see that hunger and starvation on the planet are the inevitable result of those forces. If you don't like the politics, do it with economic forces. If you don't like the economics, do it with sociological forces, psychological forces, philosophical forces, or if you prefer a combination of them.

By the time that report... So that's nothing, right? That is absolutely saying nothing. What causes hunger? A bunch of stuff. Don't think about how to solve any of these individual problems. Just like, you know, again, vibe at it. By the time that report was published,

about 180,000 people had enrolled in the hunger project and made 30,000 donations, totaling about a million dollars in 1978 money, which equals roughly all of the money on earth today. And hey, at least raising money could help, right? You can buy food with money and some chunk of people who are starving just need to be handed food. But only 1% of those donations were spent on actually feeding people.

Erhard was adamant that giving hungry people food would dehumanize them. Right? Because receiving charity is bad for you, right? It's going to make them lazy. It's going to make them not believe in their own power if they just get food when they're starving to death. Can't do that. Awesome. That is bananas because of what was the entire point

of starting this thing anyway. You don't want to think about a solution. You don't want to give them money. You don't want to hand them food directly. Where did this money end up going? You say it's bananas. I say it's based. And you know what else is based, Joelle? Oh, no.

If you want to cure hunger, don't give money to some charity or just an actual starving person. Don't cook people a meal. Don't volunteer at a soup kitchen. Think real hard about how hunger is bad and then purchase a product that supports this podcast. Perfect. Mm-hmm. That'll fix it.

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 Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story

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

or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today

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

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

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back! I'm overjoyed at the fact that nobody's hungry anywhere in the world anymore. That's pretty cool.

It's a good thing we did today and I think we should feel proud of ourselves. Yeah, I'm proud of us and no one else in the world. So since giving hungry people food or money is dehumanizing, the money that The Hunger Project raised was used to solicit more donations by publishing The Hunger Project's quarterly newsletter paying Werner Erhard to write slideshows and narrate films for their meetings. In fact, it seems like basically all of the donations just went right to Werner, because they're like licensing EST materials, all this good stuff.

Mother Jones's investigation showed that The Hunger Project acted only as a recruitment arm for EST, and Hunger Project volunteers were regularly asked to give money, use their own vehicles, and provide free labor for the non-profit. It's one thing to volunteer for a service that's really beautiful, particularly if you're, you know, it's a good cause you would think. You can't know it's corrupt necessarily as you're the person handing out cans. It's entirely another thing for them to be like, thank you so much for donating your time, also please open your wallet,

and if you could also please come back with us to our other venture and do some work there for free, that would be great. That would be just wonderful. Ew! Yeah, so the entire idea behind the project had come out of growing criticism that Erhard's EST business, while framed as an enlightened attempt to make the world better by unleashing the human potential of its members, was nothing but a get-rich-quick scheme, which turned $300 seminar fees into mansions and yachts for Werner Erhard.

The Hunger Project allowed him to pretend that this was not the case, while at the same time funneling tax-free donations back to EST. Of course, since EST was a technical system of solutions for people's real problems, Erhard found ways to justify that the Hunger Project worked, or didn't. It all came down to mindfulness and the power of positive thinking. Hunger was caused by bad attitudes and bad intentions, thus the only thing needed to combat it was not economic justice, not environmental reform, or any of the other things that make it easier to feed people.

Instead, the solution was to get a bunch of rich white folks to think real hard about hunger together. Now, the Hunger Project still exists today, although it claims to have severed all ties with Werner. Most positive articles about the man will note that in 1988, he received the Mahatma Gandhi Humanitarian Award for his work with the Hunger Project. That sounds impressive, though, right, Joelle? The Mahatma Gandhi Award. Wow.

The Mahatma Gandhi Humanitarian Award. Joelle, come on. Are you not impressed by that? I'm floored by it. This is absolutely rich people love giving each other shit. I hear it's an award for your success. This is even better than it sounds. Oh, my God.

Is it fake? It's a fake award. Oh, it's better than fake. The Mahatma Gandhi Humanitarian Award is handed out or was handed out every year by the Gandhi Memorial International Foundation, which was run by Yogesh Gandhi, a relative of the Mahatma. That sounds impressive, Joelle, right? It does.

That's pretty good, except there's no evidence at all that Yogesh was related to Mahatma Gandhi. Like zero evidence and immediate descendants of the Mahatma describe Yogesh as a con man enriching himself through false claims of connection to Gandhi. In 1999, Yogesh was charged by the Department of Justice for wire fraud, tax evasion, and perjury. That's awesome. That's so funny. That is a whole mess of things happening. But I like that real, recognized, real, and they're like, are you scamming people?

Me too. If I are you, maybe we won't talk about each other's shit. Oh, it's better. So the year before, Werner gets his award in 1988, I think. And the year before he gets it, the Humanitarian Award recipient was Ryochi Sasakawa, a Japanese businessman who was imprisoned after World War II for war crimes. Sasakawa got his award after donating half a million dollars to Yogesh and the Foundation, which might give you an idea about how you get the Mahatma Gandhi Humanitarian Award as

a war criminal. Just pay for it. A alleged war criminal. Oh, God. Oh, God, that's funny. So by the end of the 1970s, EST was starting to see a decline in interest. Profits fell, and this is where Werner proved himself to be a savvier man than most of the guru cult leaders he'd copied.

He closed EST for good in 1985, citing a much different mood among people today. The reality was that his wife, Ellen, was finally divorcing him, and a number of ugly details had been made public. The IRS was investigating him over the finances of EST and the hunger project and possible tax fraud. But Werner did not retire. Instead, he folded many of EST's 530 employees and all of its teachings into the forum, which was billed as a totally new seminar platform for, as the Chicago Tribune described it,

achievers who want to achieve more. Okay. Quote, this time around, enlightenment comes in the form of a two-weekend workshop that, by comparison to the hard-edged, highly-structured EST training, may seem like a picnic in the park. The hours are somewhat shorter, beginning at 8.30 a.m. and lasting only to midnight. Rules have been relaxed in two requests. Lectures replaced by dialogues.

The notorious kidney killer stretches between breaks have been reduced from four or five hours to two and a half. Trainers have become leaders, and they no longer call a participant's unprintable names. Okay. Did they say go only 8.30 a.m. to midnight? Yeah. Did I hear that correctly? It's shorter.

There's more breaks. You're not pissing yourself. They're not screaming curse words at you. The 80s, the 70s, that kind of shit worked, in part because I guess everybody was on a shitload of cocaine. Probably. In the 80s, we're heading closer to the soft Nambi Pambi 90s. You got to mix it up by the late 80s.

You got to make shit a little bit kinder. You can't be as mean to people. Also, you're not just trying to get anyone on the street who wants to achieve. You're trying to bring in people who already are making good money so they can afford your lectures. A lot of those people maybe aren't going to want to be yelled at as much because they're used to being treated well. You got to pamper your money as they say.

Okay. Exactly. Exactly. The forum was also much more expensive, costing $525 a piece for a weekend session. More to the point, Erhard had diversified his business. Seminars just made up around half of his profits. Quote, EST enrollment fees accounted for less than half of the revenues, a reported 35 million that flowed into corporate coffers last year.

The rest came from a network of for-profit enterprises that have sprung up around the parent company, Burner, Erhard, and Associates. He is, for instance, a partner in transformational technologies, specializing in management and leadership seminars, Ditto for Hermannet, Inc., and Action Technologies, which offer programs dealing with language and computers. All told, the number of people participating in the multitude of Erhard-connected programs hit 200,000 last year, up from 180,000 in 1983, a considerable sphere of influence. Now, by this point, a lot of those fucked up details about how Burner treated his wife

and child were out. And when the Chicago Tribune brought this up, he gave a characteristic response. Like all families, we have gone through and will continue to go through difficulties. That's part of being a family, Erhard said. The question is not, do you have difficulties? The question is, who are you in the matter of handling them? That's the name of the game. And I got people to choke my wife out for me.

Yeah. I didn't order the hit. So it's fine, legally speaking, they chose to do it themselves. I'm not a bad guy. Yeah. Well, the money continued to roll in, so did the bad press. And in 1991, the IRS publicly accused Erhard of tax fraud. At the same time, 60 Minutes aired a segment about Burner that was the first widespread

depiction of him as an abusive father. It contained bombshell allegations that he molested two daughters from his second marriage. Burner responded by selling his ownership in the forum, giving away his dog and fleeing the country. Now, those don't seem like the actions of an innocent man, but Burner probably was innocent of the worst charges against him. The daughter who accused him of sex abuse recanted, saying that she had lied to get a book advance.

The IRS charges went nowhere, and that 60 Minutes clip was deleted from the archive, which has led to him. This has given him the ability to claim like, look, there were allegations against me, but they were all false. No, there was like one specific set of false allegations, but a lot of other people have spoken up about different kinds of abuse. Right. It's just that he probably didn't molest his daughter.

Which is like a good thing to not have done, but not the bulk of the allegations against this man. Also, that's just a thing you're not supposed to do, so you don't get brownie points for not doing that. You certainly do not get brownie points for not molesting your daughter. It is important to note that she has recanted those allegations, so whatever. Four years he stayed overseas, operating a version of the forum in Japan and working with his brother to open yet another business consulting firm, Landmark.

In 1996, he was diagnosed with the Epstein-Barr virus and traveled to Grand Cayman Island to recover. By the way, the Epstein-Barr virus is still a sponsor of this podcast. Mono, get it. You remember that one, Sophie? You remember that old bit? About Mono? Yeah, it made me unhappy.

Well, it's back, baby. I was like, damn it, I hope he forgot. End of the pod, the Epstein-Barr virus has swung in to give Werner a little bit of justice. It was here at Grand Cayman Island that he met a Harvard economist, Michael Jensen, who'd attended a landmark course and walked away convinced that Werner was one of the great intellectuals of the century. How, bro? And that brings us to Werner today.

He is still the fuck around. No! I know. I know, I know. I generally encounter that with bastards who were active in this period of time, who were major kind of cult self-help figures in the 60s and 70s, 70s particularly. But yeah, he's still around. The New York summarizes his present trajectory.

Quote, in 2004, with the help of a landmark official, Dr. Jensen developed an experiential course on integrity and leadership at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester. The class was offered there for five years, with Mr. Erhard signing on as an instructor in its third year. What? It has since been taught at several universities around the world, as well as at the United States Air Force Academy.

As far as its philosophical underpinnings go, Mr. Erhard struggled a bit to describe the course without resorting to its Delphic phraseology, ontological pedagogy, action as a correlate of the occurring. Sitting in front of a bank of computers at his hotel room, he reads excerpts from the 1,000-page textbook he is working on, such as, as linguistic abstractions, leader and leadership, create leader and leadership as realms of possibility, in which, when you are being a leader, all possible ways are being available to you. Again, that is the same nonsense he was saying earlier.

It is nonsense, right? That doesn't mean anything. You sound like Richard Walker. It's like Jordan Peterson's shit, you know? It's crazy. Make your shit seem like kind of cryptic. Delphic is a good description. And make it like really dense.

And people will think that it's smart just because they can't parse out what you're trying to say, like, and look, if you are reading a thing that seems complicated and you don't understand it, half the time ish, maybe it's just something complicated that you need to devote more time to understanding, but half the time, someone's just bullshitting you, right? Your assumption shouldn't just be that this is actually smart. Right. Because a good chunk of the time, it's just bullshit.

Right. Yeah. So feel free to just strap on your critical thinking skills, you know, take your time with it, really break down the words, and you'll, you know, you'll see eventually that you're like, oh, no, this is just bullshit, and you should be able to explain it to like a fifth grader. And then, you know, then you can know the truth of something when you can explain it down to that level.

That is, I really hope that we are done. I think I, I'm not a part of it. Oh, we're not quite done. No, not you and me, not you and me in this story, but I hope that, like, Gen Z seems to be sort of over this idea of these elite colleges. How can you be a Harvard professor and be like, this guy's a genius? Well, it is, it's interesting, you bring up Harvard, the Stanford professors who raised Sam Bankman Freed, who's kind of the grifter in the news right now, like the part of the

reason why so many people were convinced that guy was a genius is when people talked to him, he would give these like kind of cryptic circular arguments that were like not really saying anything. But it was all confused enough that like people could convince themselves, well, I must just not get it because he's a billionaire. So he must be a genius and like, no, he was not a genius. He was a grifter and you got conned. Charisma is a magic power.

Wow. It's incredible. It's amazing. And also varied because a lot of people would be like, well, he wasn't charismatic. So he couldn't have been grifting me. Look at him. He's wearing that like shlubby shirt and shorts. Like he wasn't, you know, this like sexy, slick, silica belt.

That was the uniform. Right. Exactly. Like that's the grift. The grift changes. But it's all, it's all confidence work, right? Yeah. It's just the things that people are willing to be confident and change over time.

So I'm going to continue that quote from the New York Times. Briefly, the course which owes ideological debts to the forum and to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger takes an experience based rather than knowledge based approach to its subject. Students master principles like integrity and authenticity in order to leave the class acting as leaders instead of merely knowing about leadership. Its promoters believe the course has broader applications both within and outside of academia. They should take it to the government, said Paul Fireman, the former chairman and CEO

of Reebok, who was consulted with Earhard on his recent work. Mr. Fireman says that Reebok's stock price jumped from the six or seven dollar range to the 25 to 30 dollar range. After he introduced his employees to landmark training, according to the Times, Werner now blames the allegations against him that forced him to sell his company in 1991 on a covert influence operation by the Church of Scientology. He tends to use the fact that his daughter recounted her allegations of sex abuse and the failure of the IRS investigation against him as evidence that he was targeted unfairly.

But of course, that doesn't say anything about the other fucked up shit about him that we discussed here. Landmark trainings are today more mainstream than EST ever was, bringing in more than 130,000 business people every year, many quite highly placed. Companies like Panda Express, the University of Southern California, Borneo, Lululemon, and Lululemon have either paid for or advised employees to take landmark seminars. Landmark consultants of trainers have worked with employees of NASA, Apple, Microsoft, Reebok, and through its more corporate division, the Vanto Group.

So that's all great stuff. I'm glad this guy is still influential among like the financial set. That's great. Unproblematic. Yeah. Oh, maybe we're not there yet, but his wife, you know, is she okay? Yeah, I think she's okay. I mean, he's not, he didn't stay married, that's for sure.

Oh, thank God. Okay. Yeah. I want to say a little more about the fact that like he's using a lot of Heidegger here because like Heidegger is an influential philosopher, he talks a lot about the nature of consciousness and like the nature of truth. A lot of people will say that he was, he had a lot to say of value and I certainly am not saying that we should like discard a guy for having problematic communications or relationships

with bad people. But in Heidegger's case, the problematic relationships he had was with the Nazis. So I do want to note as we talk about the fact that Heidegger is influential here and that this guy is Earhard, a big part of his early training was like, hey, the Holocaust was partly your fault, which is a wild thing for anyway, whatever. Problematic dude himself. I want to read a quote from a New Yorker article about an appreciator of Heidegger's trying to like square himself with Heidegger's Nazi past.

When I read Heidegger's books, I knew, but didn't particularly care that he had been a Nazi. He joined the party in 1933, the year after giving the lectures behind the Essence of Truth. I was so fascinated by his philosophy that his Nazism stayed hidden, though his ideas felt vivid and present. His biography belonged to the past, but over the past few months, not caring has become more difficult.

That's largely because of a philosophy professor named Peter Trauney, who has began publishing some of Heidegger's anti-Semitic writings. Trauney is the director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, in Germany, the editor of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, some of which were published for the first time this spring. It's always been safe to assume that Heidegger, being a Nazi, was also an anti-Semite, although not necessarily a virulent one, whatever that term might mean. You don't need to add that qualification, New Yorker writer, by the way.

You don't need to add that qualification, he joined in 1933, but as my colleague Richard Brody wrote a few weeks ago, the passages reveal a particularly unsettling kind of anti-Semitism, one which hasn't been fully visible before. They show that even as Heidegger held the most banal and ignorant anti-Semitic beliefs, he wrote about a worldwide conspiracy of calculating Jews unfurling its influence. He also tried to formulate a special philosophical and even Heideggerian kind of anti-Semitism. Jews, he writes, are uprooted from being in the world that is incapable of authentically caring and knowing.

The passages, some of which were written during the Second World War, account for only a few pages out of more than a thousand, but they have alarmed and disgusted Heideggerians because they show that Heidegger himself had no trouble using his own philosophy for anti-Semitic ends. Anyway, I'm not gonna get much more into it than that, but you know, the fact that Heidegger's showing up in this, I do find sort of concerning, although again, he had a lot of other stuff to say, but you can't, you should not ever be talking in depth about Heidegger's ideas without acknowledging that he was a fucking Nazi.

And he was, I will say, 1933 is one of the worst times to have joined the Nazi party on a moral level because number one, you don't have the kind of, it's weird to frame it this way, but the courage to have been a Nazi in the early 20s before they were in power, where you're at least being like, I'm a Nazi and I'm willing to suffer for the fact that I'm a fucking Nazi. If you're joining in 1933, you're also not one of those people who joins later on when it's like, this is the only way to get ahead in society. You're someone who was champing at the bit to be a Nazi, but you didn't want to hurt

your career. And as soon as Hitler took power, you joined the party because you're like, well, now I can be open about what a piece of shit I am. Huzzah! Like it's the, it's the worst time to join the Nazi party, I would argue. Anyway, whatever, you can feel the way about that you want. How you feeling, Joelle? We happy?

I need a shower, this was really awful. It covered, it covered everything from the guy who takes zero responsibility for his own life, demanding everyone else does, you've got workplace, workplace abuse and mental and physical abuse at these centers, then spousal abuse, which is terrible. He doesn't remember his children's names and he's still getting paid today. That's the worst part. I'm livid. I'm livid.

I love it. I love it. I know you do. Yeah. Gosh. Well, Joelle, you want to plug your plugables? I mean, yeah, come find me on social media where I'll talk about happier things or things of less consequential matter, you know, just come talk pop culture with me, you know, it's

just a day to day, happy fun space. Sometimes we get mad because, you know, racism and sexism and ableism still exist and that's a challenge for us. They sure do. It's much lighter than this garbage of a person. Oh my God. No. Thanks for educating me again, Robert.

Appreciate it. Anytime, Joelle. I will say one other thing that exists is my substack where you can find writings for me on rationalist Harry Potter or the year 2000 family sitcom Tucker, which starred Seth Green as himself as a pedophile, but not as the bad guy of the show. Weirdly enough, he was a cool pedophile and the show is completely unaware of how fucked up that is. What?

It's amazing. Oh my God, Joelle, this show is incredible. It's about like a 14-year-old kid who has a crush on his next door neighbor who is also a 14, but she's dating 26-year-old Seth Green who is playing himself as the movie star Seth Green and it's like it's framed as being a problem because Seth Green is such an obviously cool guy that this 14-year-old can't compete and not like it's a problem because a 26-year-old is dating. It's shy.

I am looking at this cast. It's so funny. Lina, what the fuck is that? Oh yeah. Leela from Futurama is in it. The main character is Hogarth Hughes from the Iron Giant. It's a wild series. What?

I am so... Can you see how out of they get you into this? You have such a strong career. ShatterZone.substack.com. Check it out. Goodbye. I love you. Or I don't.

Impossible to say which. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences 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.