Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 262: L. Ron Hubbard Part II - Dianetics

Episode Date: March 15, 2017

We're getting into the foundations of Scientology this week as well as Laffy's disastrous love affairs and the insane caper involving Hubbard kidnapping his own daughter.  Heartbreaking Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Unseen Horrors Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? So I landed in JFK last night, and I got picked up by a tax cab. It was really windy coming into New York last night. It was really very scary, very cold. And I got in a taxi, and the guy is driving. Asian man means nothing. We don't have to clarify that. Yeah, there's no, you just throw that out there, okay? We're coming on the highway, and he's like, do you mind if I turn on radio? I was just like, yeah, buddy, do what you gotta do. Turns it on. Dustin the Wind comes on.

Oh, I like that. And he's just going, and so he starts full-throat. This is 12.30 at night. Oh yeah, he's Dustin the Wind. As he's screaming Dustin the Wind, he is putting the taxi up to 95. No fucking joke. 95 miles per hour, we are weaving in and out of traffic while he's going, oh yeah, you got it in the wind. Oh, I mean, if he's not wrong either. Very confident. Welcome to the show, everyone. I am Ben Kissel. That's Marcus Parks. Thankfully, he got here safely after a taxi ride from Heaven, in my opinion. That sounds like a great time. He took a 40-minute drive. It is a 40-minute normally, no traffic drive from JFK to Brooklyn. Yeah.

16 minutes. Oh, I love that guy. And that's just using the power of his mind, the confidence. And there's a lot of people that get a lot done just with the power of their minds. And one of those guys in particular, Mr. LRH, which is the only way I've been calling him LRH. No, no, no, no. If you call him LRH, then you are, they're starting to worm their way into your fucking brain, man. Lafayette Hubbard is the name. And say your name is Henry Zabrowski. My name is Henry Zabrowski. Okay.

Lafayette Hubbard himself could have trained that Asian man to be the first Asian president, which we're not going to see until 2048. Well, who knows what it can happen? All right, so we're on to, yeah, LRH Hubbard part two. This is, we're getting more intense. He's getting crazier and crazier. Yes, he is. Now, following his bigamist wedding to Sarah Northrop. Big of him, big of me. Do not. Are you seriously going to start with that? I already did.

Hubbard moved with his new bride to California and continued his scheme of bilking money from the Navy by faking various injuries and ailments. And you don't need a college degree to get that job. No, you can just fake anything. But the debasement he had put himself through in order to carry out the scam, plus the shame of a less than stellar naval career, combined with the disintegration of his first marriage, had put him in a bit of a low place. When you say less than stellar naval career, you are talking about him wasting a huge amount of ammunition on a... Magnetic deposit, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Less than stellar.

And also almost starting a war with Mexico, yes. Less than stellar. They don't care. I don't know if that's true. And since he was in a low place, the affirmations were born. Now, this is the core of the magical power of LRH Hubbard. Now, this is true. Now, remember, as a chaos magician, if you're practicing chaos magician, anything you do has replications in the universe, right?

Ramifications? Shut up. Reprecussions. I don't know what repercussions. LRH made up a 15-letter word for God in Dianetics, which I read 180 pages of on the plane yesterday. So I think I know a little bit about some of the words. What is the 10-letter word for God? Literally, it is that.

It's like E F G H 4 4 5, it's like literally, I will write it out and I'll put it, it makes no sense. It's just a part of how Laffy plays with reality. Okay. So he has been lying about these diseases. Now, a lot of times when we talk about, they always talk about the same thing, which is like, if you're going to make a lie about something, never make it about somebody you love. Never say like somebody got hurt or that's why I can't do X, Y, Z. Because you're putting bad karma out there.

So he has been building up this fake persona of himself as an injured person. So he knew that on the inside, he had to write himself. And a part of that was using essentially magical queries or what you'd say are like, when you state your intention in a ritual, he did these in his own journals. Now, the affirmations were essentially the other half of what would become Dianetics, along with Excalibur, which was the secret manuscript that was so amazing, it made people either lose their minds or kill themselves. Like the new Duke Nukem game that never came out.

No, it came out and it was terrible. That's not good. The affirmations, though, were nowhere near as dramatic and were much more private than Excalibur. They were essentially proclamations about himself so he could feel better about the low state of life that he'd found himself in. For example, he would write simple generalized statements like, I can write, my mind is still brilliant, and I am not bad to look upon. Oh, what a jerk off.

No, he's positive. No, he's not positive. He's a self-centered, self-meanwhile, self-loathing maniac. It's an exercise that works. If you keep a journal and write good shit about yourself in it, you'll start to believe it. Fake it till you make it. That's just what people in solitary confinement do. So they don't hang themselves with a bed sheet.

Exactly, but then you write a fun little book out of your own dookie. But besides those generalized statements, there were also a lot of very personal statements. For example, I am fortunate for losing Polly and my parents for they never meant well by me. Fortunate. Wow. They might be the lucky ones. That last affirmation actually held quite a bit of weight at this time for Ronald

as his family had all but disowned him for abandoning his wife, Polly, and their two children. Even his aunts who had once loved him so much said, He's but a stranger to us now. Oh, God. I hate what he's done. He's a pig. He's disgusting. Oh, my goodness.

Well, that's not right. Yeah, he just abandoned his entire family. They have every right to hate him. Yeah, for greener pastures, buddy. See you later. Greener pastures, well, yeah. Well, what he had done is after he had married Sarah Northrop, he went back to Montana and tried to live there for a little bit while his ex-wife and his children were living with his grandparents.

Also something in a magician slash psychopath would do. You show up and just be like, this is reality now. We're all going to pretend like this is fine. But his family are like, well, maybe that's your reality. But our reality is that we have been raising your children for you out here. You need to show the back up. And where's your fucking cash? Yeah.

It seems like you're making all this money. You show up at all these fancy clothes, which is he just been spending Rob and Peter to pay Paul this entire time. Yeah. His wife eventually divorced him on grounds of desertion. And when he went back with Sarah to Montana, he would not see them again until his mother's death. And even then, he didn't even stay around for the funeral.

His wife divorced him for the same reason that Beau Bergdahl's in prison. I mean, it's like, desertion is the saddest thing I've ever heard a wife have to divorce her deadbeat husband for. You got 10 years for take this job and shoving it. Let's bring some Schaefer into this. Why not? So the affirmations were set out in courses. Course one included the aforementioned statements as well as more bizarre things like,

My magical work is powerful and effective. The number seven, 25 and 16 are not unlucky or evil for me. Masturbation was no sin or crime. I do not need to have ulcers anymore. Get the guy out of Scientology. Get him off of your walls and things like that. Just put him in the corner playing scratch-offs in the bar. That's who he is.

That's all that this is. But think about this. That means these are things that he is starting to believe. I think that he was very obviously he's very sick. But he obviously was having trepidations about the numbers seven, 25 and 16. And he's jerking off quite a bit. A lot. And I'm guilty of that.

We're all guilty of that. That's fine. Yeah, there are these little small delusions that he has. I don't need to have ulcers anymore. I don't need it. You're just going to kick them to the curb. That's right. The ulcers line brings us right into course two,

which dealt with his imaginary health problems as well as his, let's say, unhealthy attitudes towards sex. Concerning his health, he had believed in his non-existent injuries so heavily that he was essentially having to deprogram himself from them. After faking a foot injury, he wrote, The injury is no longer needed. All is well.

You have perfect and lovely feet. So he pulled kind of a Kevin Spacey from usual suspects or something. Yeah, yeah, something like that. Also, he doesn't have, I can guarantee you, I've never seen a picture of him without shoes on. But he does not have lovely feet. No, I can guarantee you he doesn't. Another affirmation said,

Your stomach trouble you use as an excuse to keep the Navy from punishing you. You are free of the Navy. I think you can fake good stomach trouble though. You think so? Yeah, I mean, I get super nervous and I'm just like, Oh, and I can get all knotted up. All you have to do is, Oh, oh, oh.

You think I'm sick. I believe it. That's always a good trick too. If you're ever on a bus and you want to sit alone on a bus, especially gray on a bus, always pretend like you're super, super sick. Yeah. Like sit there going, Oh, God.

Yeah. This devil's in my boss. Yeah, well, it's very difficult to be in the picture of perfect health when on a bus. Now, this is what he wrote about sex. You have no fear of what any woman may think of your bed conduct. You know you're a master. You know they'll be thrilled. You can come many times without weariness.

Many women are not capable of pleasure and sex. And anything adverse they say or do has no effect, whatever, upon your pleasure. I do got to say, just given the physical look of Elron Hubbard, that makes that statement disgusting. But think about it, if Sting said that. If Sting said that. That's just tantric sex. Well, yeah.

No, absolutely not. Multiple organ. Oh, no, tantric sex. You hold it for one big one. Yeah, you hold it for one big one. But it's about a sheer tantric experience. Two people like snakes having orgasms together. Yeah, this is the opposite of tantric sex.

Okay, it's the opposite of tantric sex. Either way, it's more disturbing because he's just such a dumpy little toad person. It's like more like, it's bad if it came from Elron Hubbard, only be worse if it came from Hulk Hogan. Oh, well, the Hulkster can do anything to me. He also wrote, you have no fear if they conceive. What if they do? You do not care.

Pour it into them and let faith decide. Doesn't matter how good you look in that one. Just pour it into them. I don't need a Jimmy hat. I don't need no net for my sperm like the flying Walenders down there. He was also utterly and completely obsessed with masturbation, which seems to be an almost universal preoccupation amongst cult leaders. I don't know why, but these guys are all obsessed with jerking off.

You got to get out. You got to get it out. You got to get it out. I guess so. Yes, but some of the guys, they get it out too much. Dave Berg got it out way, way too much. And was it Shoko Asahara didn't get it out enough? It requires sort of a lack of self-control, doesn't it?

I mean, one of the first things you learn is, you know, not to touch yourself in public or do those things when you're a kid, but like these guys just don't even, they just don't care. It'd just be different if you masturbated all the time and you didn't feel super guilty about it, but he obviously did. I feel like if you don't feel guilty about masturbating, I don't think you should feel guilty about masturbating. But I'm saying that's the problem, it's the guilt, it's not the masturbate.

What you're doing on a bus, you have to somebody with a stomach ache because that's your thing. That's a crime. Well, this is what he wrote about that. Masturbation does not injure or make you insane. Your parents were in error. Everyone masturbates. Look around you.

Yeah, you're right, man. Everyone is jerking off. Yeah, now you start. What the hell am I? I'll do it too. The personal goal section of the affirmations he would mention it, again by just saying simply, you do not masturbate.

And this was in the same section that he wrote, snakes are not dangerous to you. There are no snakes in the bottom of your bed. I don't care what Grover says. I know that there's a monster at the end of this book and I do not want to complete the book and you don't have to complete the book. He's very Freudian with his love of snakes.

Oh, he's all about Freud. Now, the affirmations also show rare moments of self-awareness that I think are very important to understanding L. Ron Hubbard about his exaggeration of his past and present life. He wrote, You can tell all the romantic tales you wish, but you know which ones are lies. You have enough real experience to make anecdotes forever.

Stick to your true adventures. It is not necessary for you to lie to be amusing and witty. Now, what this tells us is that Hubbard's lying was compulsive and he was well aware of it. Unfortunately, instead of trying to fix it, he doubled down because no matter how much of a charlatan he was, Hubbard was, you got to admit, a brilliant man. Yes, of course.

Lean in. Always lean in. Yeah, yeah. What he did was he turned that weakness of compulsive lying into a strength. He rode the wave of his ever-growing sea of bullshit manipulating people into believing him until either he was done with them or they were done with him after which he would do his best

to utterly destroy them. Well, and I watched this documentary last night. My Scientology movie by Louis Thoreau. He's a Frenchman. And it was very interesting. They focused a lot on that. People who excommunicated from the church. Holy hell, they really get the treatment rough.

The SPs. As they should. Well, I don't know. Well, it's very necessary to him keeping the lie going because when you have a defector, they're, of course, trying to get other people inside out. So you have to destroy these people in order to keep your power. Also, the more people who believe in your lie

gives the lie more power, the more true the lie becomes. And if you watch that Tom Cruise speech on Scientology, he laughs through that entire part discussing SPs. He's literally just talking about destroying lives. Yeah. It's really unbelievable. Because they think that SPs are literally lower people. But later on we get into Scientology.

I'm talking about SPs and psychs specifically. Well, SPs are suppressive personalities. There's a lot of, we're going to do a lot of this. Nicole Kidman's father was declared an SP which is one of the reasons why her and Tom Cruise's marriage fell apart. Oh, no. I thought they were going to make it far and away with such a good movie because it was far and away, which is really just the same fucking thing.

Put them next to each other. Yeah, Days of Thunder. That was a good one. It always made me want to drink Mountain Dew. I just mellow yellow. Mellow yellow, that's right. I always hated that mellow yellow truck. I was like, it's a Mountain Dew country, motherfucker.

You can also tell in reading the affirmations that Hubbard was starting to ramp up to something huge. He just hadn't figured out just what it was yet. He wrote, Your psychology is advanced and true and wonderful. It hypnotizes people. It predicts their emotions for you or their ruler. And this was years before Dianetics,

which is the book that truly launched his career and would be the foundation that all of Scientology would be built upon. He just needed to perfect one more trick to pull it off. Hypnotism. Now this is where it gets kooky. This is where it gets kooky. And you know this hypnotism thing that sounds goofy, that sounds kooky. It fucking worked.

This is a skill that he would take throughout his life and use on people again and again and again. And this is where we're going to get back into the world of Jack Parsons here. Jack Parsons taught L. Ron Hubbard a lot about what it takes to get people under your wing. And then this information is because a part of the third course of the affirmations talks about him contacting his guardian angel spirit. And so, and that he's in direct contact with a red-haired woman that's beautiful, that it tells him all the truths that he needs to know

and only he can see her. And you could see those occult teachings now directly fueled what Dianetics went. But what he realized he had to do was figure out how to trick the meat of the human brain, which takes something like hypnotism. It totally disproves your religion too, by the way. His guardian angel would be like a fat slob who was eating a Chick-fil-A in the corner, just like covered in grease instead of a beautiful woman. You know what I'll say to you, Laffy?

Congrats on not touching yourself this afternoon. Thank you. Oh, you're still, you're going ahead and you're doing it anyway. You know what, congrats for being y'all, being true to yourself. Yes, queen. So yeah, Elron Hubbard had been taught hypnotism by Jack Parsons, but he needed to find a group that was willing to participate so he could truly perfect this skill.

So luckily, the nerds at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society were all too willing to oblige. These fucking guys. I just remember the group of kids I played magic with, right? It's just like, and I see that it's the same crew. We had one Jehovah's Witness kid. Is it similar to the group of adults that you play magic with? No, because you also do that now. Technically, those guys, it's D&D and technically they are all professional comedians. Okay.

But it's just always like, you could see the same crew. It was like a fat little Jehovah's Witness, my friend Jeff who's like a gangly Jewish dude with fucking, with buck teeth and braces and a guy named Corey who had like that weird patch of silver hair and no one would talk to him and then a silent Indian boy. Yes. Well, with any luck, they'll nickname us the Unfuckables. Now, not surprisingly, Hubbard was a fantastic hypnotist

and could put some people into a trance by counting the three and snapping his fingers. One, two, three. My god. I'm in the further, man. This is creepy. Now, the weakest minds he could hypnotize almost instantly and one of those weak minds was a guy named Bell Cox. After one... This just is what it is.

We called you Willie Cox from now on. You love the nickname. After one hypnotism session, Hubbard privately took Bill aside and told him that at two o'clock the next day, Bill would drop whatever he was doing and meet Hubbard on the corner of Wilshire and Lucas. When Bill arrived, he found that he could not physically take his hands out of his pockets until Hubbard let him. What's happening? Oh, man! Oh, man, Machange! Machange's got my fingers hostage!

He just wanted a friend so bad. Yeah. Now, after that, when Hubbard finally allowed him to remove his hands, Hubbard commanded him to grab a metal rail which Hubbard made Bill believe was getting progressively harder and harder. Now, psychosomatic or not, the pain caused Bill to scream in fear until Hubbard laughed, patted him on the shoulder and sent him home. Ha! Get out of here, Willie Cox.

That won't be the only hot pole you touch in your life. Get out of here. I'm having fun with you. Good to see you. What did you mean by that last statement? One, two, three. You're a peanuts. Oh. Salty. Salty. It's very... This is my question. So, he did this to various members of this sci-fi group.

He would hypnotize them and they'd pull all these pranks and they're all laughing and liking about it. So, I have never been hypnotized. I don't know what it's like. I actually don't know if I can be hypnotized because I'm so loud inside of my own brain. Oh, it can happen. They will not get me. Well, I mean, the closest thing I ever had to being hypnotized, we would go for these evangelical retreats and the pastors do, they do spellbind you.

Yeah, they're hypnotic kind of movement. Yeah, I mean, speaking in tongues is an extremely hypnotic movement. Absolutely. Give it a G.B. No, that's Charles Manton's scat, Marcus. I'm having fun. That's just fun to me. And then I did get the pushover when they touch you on your head and you fall backwards. That did happen.

Yeah. And you do kind of, I would argue it's more going with the flow than being hypnotized. But yeah, so I do understand the power a little bit. But I wonder if that Elron has just had so much power in this group of nerds. And I love that we did one of the best parts about groups of friends of nerdy guys like this. I said they're very supportive. Yeah. And I almost wonder if they're all in on this game because they used to do this all the time.

They would talk about when Elron would show up and he would tell them these fantastic stories. There would be like one guy who's like, so how old are you, 184 years old? And Elron, there was like one time, one of the sci-fi authors got kicked out of the group. And Elron turned to me like, well, why are you never talking about? He's just like, well, he says you said you spent eight years in the Navy and then you said you explored China and then you went to Africa and then you traveled all of these uninhabited islands. If you add up all those years, that's like 84 years. And so they could kick them out. But everyone else just liked the game of it. Well, they liked the game at first because at first the hypnotism stuff was like really fun.

Like one guy, he made him believe that he was holding two tiny kangaroos in his hand. That's cute. That's fun. And then another time he made a guy think that he was having a phone argument with a really pushy used car salesman. See, that's stressful. Yeah, that's it. That's stressful. They're like, okay, that's still kind of fun though. But this hot rail incident, they only found out... Hot rail incident.

That's right. It sounds like the porno Axl Rose is going to have to make to get any cash in five years. Well, they found out about this when they started doing regression because there was one guy that said that he was visited by Elron Hubbard in some sort of like astral projection. And it was very unpleasant for him. So they're like, let's see if he's been doing anything else. So they started doing this like post this hypnotic regression on Bill Cox. And they found out this thing that he had done because at the end of this hypnotism, Elron told him like, you will not remember any of this. And he didn't. He didn't say anything to anyone. It wasn't until they did this like post hypnotic regression that they found out what Elron had actually done.

And they're like, that's not fun. It's kind of fucked up. And they were all sitting in their... And it's just kind of amazing. All these guys immediately, all the authors are like, what if he's been hypnotizing all of us? We don't know. So then Elron just shows back up being like, hey, boys, I see finger sandwiches. And they're all just like staring at him like he's the devil. But it also gives them a reverse power on them because now it's really interesting. Once you start that, and again, I think that Elron Hubbard did that on purpose where he's like, now their whole reality is in doubt all the time. Yeah. And now he's even more powerful.

Now he's like truly becoming like a powerful magician in this small little world. Yeah. In this small little world, which eventually expands into the entire world. This is where it all begins. It all begins with the Los Angeles Fantasies Science Club. Yes. Unbelievable. And it led to Stuart Smalley. Interesting. He's good enough, he's smart enough. Yeah, that is true. That is what it is. Now he's a congressman. Or a senator, rather. In January of 1949, Hubbard announced in a magazine called Writers, Markets and Methods that he was working on a book of psychology.

He was working on it right alongside pulp sci-fi stories like Beyond the Black Nebula and Emperor of the Universe. These are greatness. I mean, listen to some of these names he did for Westerns. Gun boss of tumbleweed. Awesome. And, well, this one isn't as great. Johnny the town tamer. You're naughty town. You're naughty town, and I'm gonna teach y'all how to be hey. You naughty, stinky little town. Give me a smack on your bottom, sweet little naughty town. Johnny the town tamer sounds so fun because the horses were bad. He was just like, yo, you'll be a good horse.

You're a naughty sheriff and a naughty dog. Oh my goodness. But those stories only paid a penny a word, nowhere near enough for Hubbard. In fact, he openly said this in a meeting of sci-fi writers. Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion. Ooh, yes. He said it in a room full of people, and he said that again and again and again and again.

A bare-faced messiah by Russell Miller, I found at least four examples when people have remotely said it because they're like, it's just so funny that he went on to do it, which is like, come on guys, he gave you the thesis statement since he was like 20, 21 years old. I would love to see him on Shark Tank, just looking for investors and do his religious cult. Some people start a taco truck to make money, but he just went right, right to the religion. Well, when he was working on this book around this time, he wrote a letter to his publisher, his agent, or somebody like that. Fory Ackerman. Yeah, Fory Ackerman, and he was like, I haven't decided whether I'm going to destroy the Catholic Church or build a new one.

He's like, you gotta stop it, L.R.A. You're making me laugh so hard I'm gonna shit my giant pants. Fory Ackerman had huge pants. Fory Ackerman's a favorite. He's a very famous presence in the world of sci-fi and horror. He was one of the first super fans. He was a horror host, and he was a weird part of history and pop culture that he was L. Ron Harbert's fucking book agent. Well, why were his pants so big? Was he a big guy or a small guy in big pants?

He's just one of those skinny guys, but looks real, real big because he wears big pants up to his nipples. Oh, tall pants, high pants, sure. Now, the fact that a popular sci-fi writer was working on a new sort of psychology was extremely exciting to sci-fi fans who were starting to get a little smug about their own place in society. They believed that since sci-fi writers had been predicting future technologies and their stories for years that it would only be a matter of time before one of them would create a science all of their own. Like, they believed we are going to save the world. Sci-fi is the most important literary advancement in the history of man because we will save the universe. Well, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to get food for everybody, and we're going to end slavery. That's the second thing, and it's going to be absolutely tremendous, absolutely fabulous. But the third thing that actually needs to come before all of that is that I'm writing this book about intergalactic space witches that run everything with their orgasm muscles.

And the lead character, his dick is so strong, and he kind of looks like a fat little man with a beret on not unlike myself. And his dick could control the universe because just how thick he can come. Okay, so after we make Captain Cockpilot, then we'll get food for everyone. Then we get to food, and then we get to end suffering around it. I think we should feed the slaves first, right? Then make them not slaves anymore. But you do want to write this first? Absolutely, it's got orbs in it. Okay.

The psychology was perfect for this new science because you didn't need all that bothersome math or physics or anything like that in order to do it. And this right here was extremely important to the initial success of Dianetics. Not saying that he didn't include a couple equations in Dianetics, just because he did. And then you make no sense. Yeah, because he was also telling people that he was a fucking nuclear physicist. And I think one person said that they read some of his papers on nuclear physics, and they said that it was like an undergrad student who half paid attention to one lecture and then tried to write a graduate thesis. That describes his life pretty perfectly.

Well, apparently to him, there's several stories that built up the nuclear physicist level, where it started with the idea for Dianetics came when he died on the operating table during an explosion, when he was fighting in the theater of war in Japan. Oh, yes. Which he did not do. No. But he said in the vision that he died and that he had died on the operating table, he went to heaven, he saw the tomes of all knowledge, started reading them,

and then all of a sudden the hand of fate itself came and said, it's not your time yet, Elrod, and threw him back into his body. And then that came from, he was in the hospital for a long period of time. He said that while he was a convalescing in the hospital, he would go read nuclear physicists like textbooks and psychology textbooks, and basically prison educated himself while in the hospital. And then the next one is, I was a nuclear scientist. Yeah, it's like that collar you had on your radio show the other day that said that he went to the University of YouTube. University of YouTube, and he broke down the intelligence of the races.

You know, working at Fox News Radio, you get some really interesting conservative opinions. Yeah, YouTube University, self-educated in every way, just like Elrod Hubbard. These sci-fi fans wanted to believe so bad that one of their own was going to create something that would truly change the world. And as far as they were concerned, Hubbard was the perfect guy to do it. He was an explorer, a war hero, a daredevil pilot. He had the look, he had the cock. I guess so. He was everything they wanted to be while still being one of them at the same time.

You know what I mean? I know what you're saying. Yeah, he was able, like we were talking about with his wealthy grandfather, but his working class dad. This was like Lin Sanity. Lin Sanity for the LA sci-fi community. Jeremy Lin. You're bringing in Lin Sanity? That was like five years ago.

No, I think it's in Houston now. It went out of New York. I think Jeremy Lin still has the number one Jersey sales, by the way. Really? Because people in China just buy them up. They love it. Yeah, they love it because also they fashion homes out of them. That's true.

Lin Sanity. Yeah, and these guys, these sci-fi writers, they were perfectly manipulated into thinking that Elron Hubbard was actually going to deliver on all this. See, Dianetics. Where have we heard that before? Yeah, a lot of parallels between Elron Hubbard and what's going on in the United States right now. You get further and further on, like you start hearing about all this shit and you're like, wow, like it's just tactics. Like these tactics just work again and again and again to full people. Well, you get to put it this way so we keep forgetting that it works.

Well, it just works that way. We all just forget that it works and you don't realize that it's been this way since the beginning of this country. This whole country was built on bullshit. Yeah, the whole world was built on bullshit. And it happens to everybody. It does not matter who it is, Dianetics, Scientology, all this stuff is started by super smart people. And just look what happens with modern country music. They tell us it's good.

Everyone knows it's not. Dianetics was first teased in the December 1949 issue of astounding science fiction in which the editor wrote that a fantastic new science was soon to debut in its pages. He wrote, the power is almost unbelievable. It proves the mind not only can but does rule the body completely. And I am just covered in hives about it. The nerds made nuclear weapons. The nerds are incredibly dangerous. Yeah, why do we? Because he's also, nerds are great and they're sweet and they're enthusiastic.

I don't know. I mean, what do jocks really do other than certain things that are true? That's for the most part. But that is, okay, what? Jocks are great, but all right. No, that's, we don't, there's no evidence about the chess clubs. I don't need evidence. Donald Trump and everyone, I don't need evidence.

Oh, well, it doesn't, they score touchdowns and they shoot, they make dunks. In April, the hype got even bigger. The editor wrote that this new technique of psychotherapy would cure insanity, which was contagious, by the way, not hereditary. Yeah, you fucking idiots. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah, we better wear those weird Chinese face masks around Marcus. Just a surgical mask. That's the Ingrams.

And also the techniques could also give a man a perfect memory and a higher IQ. It would also not just alleviate, but completely cure all of the most common nerd diseases like ulcers, sinusitis, and asthma. Which is interesting because they're all stuff that Elron suffered from. And the same team, because he said that he was blind in the hospital, one of the main stories that came out, and that he had used the principles of dianetics to heal himself. So he said it was eye problems, feet and limb problems, because he said he had problems with his foot, and he said he had problems with his ulcers. And he said using dianetics, he fixed all that in his body because it's all in the mind. The power of positive thinking.

Exactly. And since nerds demand evidence, it had also been tested. It was claimed that over 250 people have been cured using this new technique. This is the sound of quotation marks. Cured. Yeah. Now one of those people was a man named John Campbell, one of Hubbard's earliest followers. Campbell was a man of science and appreciated Hubbard's so-called scientific approach to the mind.

Because he needed a scientist to help verify everything he was talking about. He at least needed a guy on the payroll that he attached to the book. So he called up this guy and me and like, I think I could fix your problems with my mind. And again, these scientists are not very impressive people. Well, they are impressive. They're scientists. But not impressive like in a room. L. Ron Hubbard was a fucking man of character and class. This is a man, I honestly feel like I'm actually pretty...

Man of wealth and fame. I know, I feel like he's a rolling stone in some way. But it's kind of like in H.H. Holmes days, where she's like, in a room of the most impenetrable, thick, suspended nerds, it's if you can figure out how to talk fast and have flaming red hair, like I also did as a boy, you can keep a bunch of nerds' attention. Yeah, sure. I'm an attractive guy in an AA meeting with people who were previously addicted to meth or something. But it doesn't make me attractive. Make yourself a 10 in whatever situation you're in.

I suppose so. The Hubbard compared the human brain to a computer in which one could recall and erase memories using a form of hypnosis. Robert Anton Wilson officially disputes and destroys in his book, Prometheus Rising, which you'd look if you're a really true student of magical thinking. Yes, or if you want to have a good relationship, don't read it. What is it, though, with these science minds, right? I mean, obviously, they're really intellectual, but then they're so dumb and ignorant, like Steve Jobs, for example, not going the medical route for his surgery or for his cancer.

Well, they want it to be technical. They want to understand it because the human brain is the one thing that we still don't understand. We understand so very little about how the mind actually works. But also, again, it boils down to the simplest. It's packaging. Nerds want a nerdy-looking thing. I'm looking at me, right? I like creepy shit.

You could sell me on anything if you put a bunch of creepy shit on it. I'm like, oh, cool. Oh, nice. Oh, my god. I'll take it. I'll buy it. Give it to me. For years and years, I solely rented movies based on the cover.

I was like, I watched Jack Frost a lot because the cover was awesome because the snowman melted into a monster. Yeah, why do you think we all love Evil Dead 2 so much? Because it's the coolest fucking movie poster that's ever been in bad taste. Watched it last night. I watched it last night. Oh, yeah. Oh, my god. So good.

Campbell would be one of the first test subjects in what would eventually become auditing, which we'll get into more in-depth later. In Campbell's first session, he was guided further and further back into his memory, resurrecting long-forgotten events along the way until he had finally arrived at the moment of his birth. Somehow, this resulted in Campbell's sinusitis almost completely clearing up, or so he said, and so John Campbell became Hubbard's first big booster. He hypnotized him, essentially. I'm visualizing this. I saw the movie Get Out.

Catherine Keener is so awesome. They do a hypnotism scene in that. It's so badass. That's what I'm thinking about now. Oh, yeah. Now, after he was converted, Campbell wrote about his experience to Dr. Joseph Winner, who was a general practitioner. He was an actual MD who contributed medical articles to astounding sci-fi.

I wish this magazine was still around, like a thing like this was still around. Have you ever gotten ahold of an old, like, 50s pulp magazine in Flip through? They're fucking awesome. They're so much fun. I didn't get that shit. You're going into a doctor. You got to get a tumor removed. You find out he's a sci-fi writer.

Well, he's got a sci-fi writer. He contributes medical articles to a science fiction magazine. He's a fun guy. I just don't know if I would trust him with a knife in my skin. Now, at first unconvinced, Winner decided to test the method on his six-year-old son, who had just come up with a fear of ghosts, which he believed were constantly lying in wait to strangle him. You know what?

I'm never going to tell my kid that's not true. It's going to be like, yes. Son, ghosts are real, and they will strangle you, and I will tell you one thing, all women leave. Yes. And I heard there was a Coors light in the fridge for adults like your father. Why don't you just go be a good- Why don't you go see if you can discover it and bring it back for your father?

Oh, yes. You don't want to anger the ghost. He likes to Coors lights, too. When the child described the ghosts, they were found to look like doctors in surgical gowns. And so, using this method, they eventually traced the fear back to the son's difficult birth in which the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck.

Freud. Ooh. And by exposing a painful past experience, they found that the boy's fear of the dark had disappeared. So Winner figured there must be some of this new science, and so he joined on to fully develop Dianetics. Yes, we got these boys on, like... These two guys.

He got a scientist and he got an MD on board. Yeah, he's got his little Stevie. Reputable people, yeah. And he's got his, uh... Clarence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Clarence Clemson. Eastbound and down?

Reference? No, Bruce Springsteen. Oh, okay. A little Stevie from Eastbound and down. Remember that? Yeah. Now, these guys, these three dudes, first started working on the terminology.

Their first name for painful past experiences was impediment, but that didn't have enough juice. You need something nice. You need something good, like... Yeah. Yeah, impediment that's too many syllables. Right. They eventually settled on Ingram,

which was a medical term for a lasting mark or trace. God, that must have felt like when you named the Rubik's Cube. Yeah. When you're like, yeah, that's got snap. Yeah, speech impediment is kind of a mean-spirited term for the disease, because it's hard to say. Well, what do you want to say? You got Wally Mouth?

I don't know. Something that doesn't necessarily force them to, you know, shine with their impediment. This guy's got junkie lip. You could say that without stuttering. Junkie lip rolls off the tongue. Ingrams were caused by aberrations, which were caused by physical and emotional pain,

which were triggered by a perceptic, which is any sense message, like sight, sound, or smell. And since pain was a threat to survival, the conscious mind sought to avoid it. You know, Hubbard felt that the key to all humankind was to survive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would make a lot of sense. Survival was the most important thing,

and that is very important to understanding how L. Ron Hubbard, he believed that survival, the only thing that mattered in life, nothing else mattered but survival. It wasn't just a base, like, you know, because all of us, our base emotion is survival, but for him, that's all it was. And when someone's only goal is survival, that makes them an extremely dangerous person.

Meanwhile, his children are out there looking like pig pen from, you know, peanuts because they're poor and miserable. But you see, he breaks it up into four dynamics, though. So it's like survival ends up fitting into this weird, because then he tries it, because it starts really selfish, but then as you go, as you read Dianetics, you start seeing, oh, he's covering up his tracks, because then it turns into the four dynamics,

which is you have to do something, one that helps just you and your career and your success and your personal survival, two, whatever helps you get laid to make more people to have the human race to continue to go on. Three, that which helps the world, that which helps the earth in order to have a place for all of us to live and to survive on.

And number four, whatever is a macro thing that helps all humankind. And then there was number five, where it's like women wipe front to back. Yeah. Boys, feel free to wipe back to front. It doesn't matter. Sometimes do it sideways.

Boys don't have to wipe. So these angrioms would be filed away in what the three men dubbed the reactive mind, which was the unconscious side of the mind, where they caused all sorts of problems for people. And they said the angrioms could only build up in your body if you're unconscious or dead, which possibly means that we live multiple lives.

This idea that you collect angrioms onto your life track. I mean, that really, the life track and the angrioms and the past lives and the multiple lives and all that, that's really, when he gets into Scientology, that's when that shit really starts getting hampered. He starts ramping it up. He starts ramping it up and, in fact, makes it a central tenet of the religion.

Well, that's why you have to sign the billion-year contract. Yep, the billion-year contract. Love that kind of job security. Now, the purpose of Dianetics would be to access those angrioms and refile them to the analytical side of the mind, which was the conscious mind. Smarty pants brain.

Smarty pants brain. And once refiled, they could be erased. And once they were erased, the mind could operate at full efficiency. The person would have total recall. His IQ would rise. He would be confident. And all psychosomatic illnesses would be cured.

Yes, and he would become what is now known, which is the famous term, clear. And that is the ultimate goal of Dianetics, is to become clear, which means you have no more angrioms. Angrioms. You could jump higher. Your sight, and he said,

You can't actually jump higher. You just think that you're jumping higher, but then everyone just sees you like, ooh. Yeah, but guess what? But they think about, they see how high you think you're jumping and then they get impressed. And eventually they start seeing you jumping

as high as you think you're jumping. I don't. Is that what happened with Spudweb? I don't know. Now, of course, to come up with all this, Hubbard, Winner, and Campbell had to have a singular obsession with the subject. This obsession led to Campbell's divorce,

which his wife cited Dianetics as, quote, the last straw. Oh my God, hilarious. Oh my God, just hanging out with L. Ron Hubbard all day. You're just going to go hang out with this screaming maniac all day writing, and he's just like, I'm on a verge of a breakthrough. I got to say, usually when wives

hate their husband's friends, they're right. Usually. Sometimes not, but usually. Now, but Campbell didn't really seem to care as people do in situations like this, for the dawn of a new age was upon them. In the May 1950 issue of astounding science fiction, which featured an alien monkey on the cover.

Come on, back at me. The new science was finally debuted. In this article, Hubbard outlined everything that he and the other two dudes come up with, but it was nothing more than a preview to get the full story on how you could actually do this yourself in your own home. You'd have to pay four bucks for a copy of Dianetics,

the modern science of mental health. Yeah. For 1950s, four bucks, that goes a long way. That's about 25 bucks. Four bucks is a whole prostitute. At least. For her life. Is that the way that you think of money in your head?

Not always. In people money. So I got myself a copy Dianetics. First of all, he did a great job about putting the power in your hands. True self-help idea. At this point, I do believe that Elrond Hubbard did feel that he could flip all this into a Tony Robbins type thing.

That he can genuinely help people, even if it's bullshit, he'll turn it, somehow he will ask backwards, fall his way into being a true saver of humankind, and not for all truristic reasons, but because it will make him super rich and powerful, but he will also then get the good points too. It's interesting you mentioned Tony Robbins, because I was thinking about him watching this documentary

last night, and the thing that Tony Robbins understands is the power that he harnesses. And that's why he's very aware of not becoming a cult deity. But he gave it all away. He did. He's given it all away. Elrond Hubbard's keeping everything for himself. Yeah, because he's an egomaniac.

I mean, obviously, I'm sure Tony Robbins has some egomaniac traits too, but at least he's aware. Yeah. Yeah, he's aware. No, Tony Robbins is fine. I like him. Yeah. He's 6'7".

Good guy. He is a big, big man. He is. He's my size. I read 186 pages of Dianetics, and it is thick and dumb. It is terrible. It is an awful book. And I got to the point where I literally started looking up,

and I was just like, all right, I just got to be like a cliff notes of this. And so I found a blog called The Dianetic Journey. And it was this woman that was like open to the very beginning. She was just like, I just, I wanted to get into Dianetics because I was trying to figure out a new way to like, to think about the world and think about all the stuff. And it's her going through literally the same journey that I'm

going through going, huh, that's kind of interesting. That doesn't make any sense. Chapter 2 doesn't make any sense. And it seems like all of this is a scam. But no one wants to be taken advantage of. No one wants to be a fool. So they try to rationalize this stuff, right? Because they bought it for four bucks.

Yeah. If you get through it, I mean, the whole thing is, I mean, it's pretty much like a near-uncomprehensible hodgepodge like Darwin, Pavlov, Freud, and Young repackaged with new terms to make it sound like a completely new idea. Yeah. Yeah. And he also ripped off Eastern philosophy a bit in the form

of the tone scale, which is just like a reworking of the karmic wheel but with graphs. The tone scale was essentially how he was his major breakthrough for dianetics, which is going to carry over to Scientology, which is this sort of concept of, it's a graph of happiness and how that leads towards immortality. Yeah. It's just this graph that's like, there's four zones,

zones one through four, and there's numbers within those zones that are attached to your general attitude. And the farther you go up the scale, like a zero is called total apathy, and that means that you are dead, which means that essentially your mood is connected straight to your survival rate. So as you go up the tone scale, by getting rid of engrams, you slowly go up towards completely happy in zone four,

which brings you as close to immortality as possible. But you know, zone zero gives us nirvana. Zone four gives us divo. So I kind of like zone zero. Wait, are you talking shit on divo right now? I love divo. I'm not talking shit. I'm not talking shit.

I'm just saying, but if you really want to talk about music, nirvana is better than divo. That's, I cannot say that. This is not even a conversation that we're having. I love divo. You can whip it good. That's not the only song. That's not the only song.

Yeah. Have you ever heard? Yeah. Q, are we not men? We are divo? Yeah, you idiot. Yeah. I love you, though.

I will never. No, I'm not. I don't even care. I'm not a man. Every single album that nirvana put out is better than the best album that divo put out. That is a fun song when driving fast. Yes.

But when actually contemplating life. I'm not even going to argue this with you fucking, I'm going to call you Nimrods. I did have this, I did have this question. When it comes to Scientology, is Dianetics the Bible of Scientology? It is the egg. Or is it more? No, it's layer one.

It's different, right? No, yeah. It's a different thing. It's the foundation, but it's not the Bible. That's what we're going to get to is that Dianetics fixes the body. Scientology fixes the soul. The way he spins it out is that the more research he does, he expands what he knows about the universe.

Nirvana Unplugged alone is better than every single divo album combines. Nark Mothers Ball went in to make some of the most incredible soundtracks. Movie soundtracks in the book. And by the way, Nirvana Unplugged is pretty much a fucking covers album. Yeah, thank God. And it's covered by a great heroin addict who I love. Kurt Cobain was murdered. By Corti.

He was not keeping his head on a fucking swivel. No, he was definitely more like on a limp. Yeah, yeah. He's off. Anyway. Don't get me wrong, I love Nirvana, and Uter was one of my favorite albums, all right? Yeah, I like it too, yeah.

Okay. The first school I ever had a crush on, Nicole Lopez had green hair, and she carved Kurt into her arm, and that's how I fell in love with goth chicks, goth chicks for the rest of my life. Healthy. She's healthy.

Today's last podcast on the left is brought to you by Hunter Killer. By now you've probably heard about Hunter Killer, the murdery mystery subscription box service that delivers new clues to your doorstep every month. Hunter Killer puts your true crime sleuthing skills to the test, and you don't even have to leave your house. The story's unfolded with an ongoing creepy correspondence. Things like letters, articles, objects, and tools,

all from a Hannibal Lecter type killer curator. Hunter Killer's been featured in BuzzFeed Fast Company, and the editors at Bustle are writing weekly about their experience. One of the best parts about Hunter Killer is the online community of armchair detectives that work together on the mystery, and people really are obsessed. It's like living in your true crime series.

The secret Facebook groups, forums, podcasts, and live videos to contribute to the experience. All you have to do is apply for membership at hunterkiller.com. They only let a few hundred new members in a month, so don't wait too long. They have different subscription plans to choose from, and Hunter Killer also makes an incredible gift. We all have that special person in our lives

that is just as secretly obsessed with true crime as we are. There's really nothing out there like this to help support our show. They've offered a 10% discount for our listeners. Use the code LEFT and get 10% off, so head on over to hunterkiller.com and register now. Come join the hunt. Vision to all the pseudoscientific nonsense and dianetics,

it also has a few choice words to say about women. See, Ingrams can be implanted as far back as the womb, sometimes even within 24 hours of conception. And women, according to Hubbard, were unfaithful creatures who often had affairs with other men while they were pregnant. Honestly, dianetics reads as somebody is just the most bitter, disgusting shit about women.

It's really fucked up. I love the way that a man who abandons his family somehow has a way to vilify women at the end of all this. Oh, always. Yes, some of the worst Ingrams came when a woman, while having sex with her lover, she's cheating on her husband with, she would badmouth her husband to her lover

while they were fucking. Elrond Hubbard did steal a woman away from Jack Parsons and take her on a boat, right? Yes. And the in utero child, if the child was named after the husband, would be born with an inferiority complex because her mother was fucking another dude

and for some reason was talking about how much she hates her husband while they were having sex. In utero, another great Nirvana album, and remember when we mentioned Evil Dead? My favorite Nirvana album. We mentioned Evil Dead and then Campbell was the next word to come out of your mouth. It's all coming together.

Synchronicities. Interesting. Yeah, and also, you know, he said that all feeble-minded people were the result of attempted abortions and all these women, for the most part, their main method of attempted abortion was to stab knitting needles into their stomach

or up their vaginas and stir the soup. And he was very, like, she's saying that most women tried to abort the baby. Like Albert Fish comes. Yeah, yeah. And furthermore, a pregnant woman might ruin her child by being constipated. So I'm assuming he's a pro-lifer then, huh?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, on the toilet, the woman, if she's constipated, she might say, and this right here, this excerpt, this is Ron's words. This is from Dianetics. So this is a woman on the toilet constipated? This is a woman on the toilet constipated.

And this is something that a woman, a pregnant woman, might say when she is constipated. He felt the need to. In order to implant an ingram. Oh. This is hell. Oh, I'm all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy.

I can't think. Oh, this is too terrible to be born. I don't think she was having sex. Yeah, what is happening is that's all I'm adding to his head is that he's imagining it's sign of sexy for a pregnant woman to be all constipated on the toilet. Oh, that was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard. That was since Toybox Killer.

I haven't been so creeped out. I'm not having one. Definitely not. I hated that. Congratulations. We all agree. Anybody who got it hard while driving down the street, only one of that, you get a gold star.

No one got a gold star on that. Now, this may result in chronic colds for the child who is so stuffy he can't think. Oh, yeah, all jammed up. All fucking just absolutely stretched out with what's not. Why would he even feel the need to extrapolate on this? Why would he even talk about this? All of his examples are ridiculous.

They're all super weird. He writes about hypnotism and things that can go wrong, how Ingrins can be placed for 10 pages. But how does he take that and be like, I'll make the analogy about a chick pooping? I do not know. I'm pretty sure that his first wife had a lot of constipation while she was pregnant.

He was like, that's how all of them are. Oh, was that baby was forming inside of her? She was a little gassy. Well, she's tooting for two. Yeah, and the kid might also have an inferiority complex from being too terrible to be born, like a piece full of it, like a rumpful of dump. Like a rumpful of dump.

You know, I was always named rump dump. Rumpful of dump? Yeah. Hubbard also wasted no time ripping into medical professionals. It's very likely that Hubbard was smart enough to know that if his new science gained traction, the mental health professionals were sure to have a few choice words to say about him, which they fucking did.

Of course. They absolutely hated it. Everybody did. I can't, I'm sorry, I just have to say, I can't stop thinking if E.O.R. would be happier if they made a character called Rumpful of Dump that could have been E.O.R.'s girlfriend in Winnie the Pooh. So he's supposed to, it would make him happy

to have sex with another weird mule that smells like shit. I don't know what it looks like. Her name is Rump and a Dump. No, Rumpful of Dump. Rumpful of Dump. No, I just, just try to Rump a Dump. Oh, Rump a Dump. Rump a Dump.

I mean, this is my wife Rump a Dump. I used to be a Seb and I'm happy because Rump a Dump's around. And of course, Hubbard, you know, predicting that the medical health professional was going to come after him, Atoy issued a preemptive strike accusing medical, mental health professionals of either making their patients worse

just so they could scam money from them or by being guilty of zombifying every patient they could get their hands on just for the fun of it. And that would become a core tenant of Scientology for, I mean, still to this day, mental health professionals are just out to get ya. Anti-depressants in any sort of medication is evil and only creates more ingrams

and all medical professionals are the devil. Again, example being Nicole Kimman's father. The reason why he was in SPU is because he was one of the most famous psychiatrists in all of Australia. And they would call them psychs and again, it started with doctors and then eventually the lore turned into they were the embodiment of demons

that were billions of years old. Now the third part of the book was the actual practice of Dianetics. In order to go from being pre-clear, which is chock-full of ingrams, to being clear, which is no ingrams, one had to go through the process of auditing. Now auditing was done in a dark room

in which the pre-clear would be guided into what Hubbard called a Dianetic Reverie all under the supervision of an auditor. Once you've reached Reverie, you can move back further and further through your life up to the moment of birth, sometimes going back to the moment of conception, which Hubbard called a sperm dream.

Which I called the seventh grade. Yeah, a sperm dream indeed. Isn't that a form of psychiatry in itself? Yes, absolutely. Well, of course it is. Well, that's what he's saying, is that he's saying this is a new form of psychotherapy. And I mean, it's all about...

Let's do it yourself. Yeah, it's do it yourself. So, what I'm saying with the buddy is that your buddy can be your auditor. And also anybody can train to be an auditor because after this comes out, it starts off with anybody can be an auditor. And then it turns into,

give me $500 and I'll teach you how to be an auditor. And it's... Oh, my God. Yeah, they have another example in that documentary I saw with an actor who wanted to... He saw an ad in Backstage Magazine. He ended up spending $50,000 in three years on these dumb, stupid-ass books.

But that's another thing that a lot of cults and my parents, we didn't have medicine. We had an aloe vera plant for three years. No matter what you were sick with, he was like, suck on the plant. And that was supposed to work. Shuck on the plant. Well, it wasn't like that, Henry.

Shuck on the plant. Do not take my childhood. Take my childhood to watch. You suck on the plant. Do not take childhood memories with your version of it. So, as you went further back into your memory, you discover ingrams,

which once discovered could be filed into the analytical mind and arrays. For example, one guy said that he saw two bulging eyes while he was being audited, which he said looked like popping eyes. Popping eyes became

Popeyes. Like Popeye the Sailor Man. Sure. Which became Poppy. It sounds like we're in a room where people are writing one of those dumb shit commercials

to the Super Bowl. It doesn't make any sense. You don't know what it is until it gets to the end, you know what I mean? Yeah, but you know what? We're gonna put Selma Hayek in it. That's a great idea. That's a great idea.

Now, Poppy's made the guy think of a pawn. He said, In Flanders fields the poppies grow by the crosses row on row. Crosses made him think of his brother who had died at a young age years earlier. He then came upon the ingram that was created by his brother's death,

which he had never quite dealt with, and he discovered that after finding and dealing with it, he felt better. Which is actually, of course, though. Of course you feel better if you think about something, and also people love to talk about themselves,

so you immediately feel better when you're talking about yourself. Yeah, but I mean, I just don't know why they have to attend, because that's just a rule of improv. They just found the scene, and the scene happened to be his dead brother, and that's what, you know,

was the crux of the angst. It's also that scene from Black Dynamite where he's doing the conspiracy breakdown in the restaurant. Yeah, at first, that's the first reference to Black Dynamite. Congratulations, everyone. Thank you.

That's interesting. Now, this happened again and again with people, and so the thought process went that if auditing worked, then maybe there was something to Dianetics as a whole, and by extension, when Scientology came around, maybe there was something to that, too.

Because auditing did make some people feel better, so when someone felt better through auditing, mostly by just having someone listen to them talk about their problems for two hours, they would audit two friends, and they would audit two friends, and so on and so on. Yeah, they would hold auditing parties

where people would get together and audit each other, and it would become the thing to do in L.A. Yeah. L.A. is the birthplace of some of our worst ideas. It's the worst place in America. The weather is too nice. The weather is just too nice.

The sun fries your brain. The worst place in America is still, it's got to be Gary Indiana. No, I love Gary Indiana. Gary Indiana is a bad place. No, it's fine. Good people. And I'm sorry, L.A., it is not the worst place in America.

Can't wait to see you at the Masan Glacier Hollywood for every cemetery. No, no, no. Not all of L.A. I've got my own issues with it, all right? Gary Indiana. Gary's a fine place. In just two months,

Dianetics sold over 55,000 copies. Wow. And it topped the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Over 500 Dianetics groups have been set up around the U.S. and everywhere people were firing their $15 an hour psychoanalyst for a $4 do-it-yourself mental health kit. This is 1950. People are just starting to get into psychoanalysis.

People are nervous as fuck because we've got the Cold War starting to ramp up. People are looking for something, anything to make them feel better, and Dianetics was a cheap and easy way. And you have a whole generation of dudes back from World War II. Yeah. And there's a lot of weird psychological problems

that a lot of these guys, my grandfather even vaguely talked about, because of the nature of the war because there was such clear delineated lines between who's good guys and bad guys. The people that came back, they didn't even really think that they had shell shock or dealt with horrors of the war

until now you have a whole generation of guys that kind of like, there's an influx of money, the economy's boosting in America. They're like, okay, it's time to make babies and have houses and everybody's shattered from killing people for five years. Yeah. So after Dianetics started selling,

the real money started rolling in. Humberts started talking to the newly opened Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey for training in how to become an official Hubbard endorsed auditor. These courses cost in 1950, $500 each,

which in today's money, little over five grand. And if you look at the chart, you've seen the Dianetics chart. It's just a perfect example of just bread crumb, bread crumb, bread crumb. It's such a genius marketing scam. Well, it started with, in Dianetics,

there was an end to it. There was clear. Clear was the highest level. That's what everybody was trying to get to. And then once Scientology started, that's when the goalpost started moving. That's when all the OT shits started, the operating fate and stuff,

which we'll get into on the next episode. Dianetics also had a little bit of a backdoor in there where how clear was on a permanent state. Clear you could bounce in and out of. So if you hit clear, it's great. You can make clear. You can go back down. Yeah, you can go back down.

And Elron Hubbard also had a great way of being kind of like self-effacing by saying, even I'm not clear. Like clear is something that even I haven't came upon yet. Well, he started there. And then eventually he became

Lord Jesus Christ of everything. Yeah, eventually. Now, on August 10th, Hubbard hosted an event at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. to unveil the world's first clear. This is just maybe what, three months after Scientology came out.

Her name was Sonia. And Hubbard was going to demonstrate to an audience of about 6,000 people just what they could hope to accomplish if only they were to buy Dianetics and see it through to the end. So Sonia came on stage and said that Dianetics had cleared her sinuses

and it cured her, quote, a strange and embarrassing allergy to pain. Although I don't really know what the fuck a strange and embarrassing allergy to pain actually is. Is that the one thing I experienced in the emergency room when the guy was cauterizing my thumb and I was bellowing

like I was having an earth-chattering orgasm? Is that what it is? I don't know why you would ejaculate during that experience. No, I was just screaming. Yeah, but that's not an allergy to pain. That's just pain. Yeah, that's just pain. I don't know what an allergy to pain is.

It's all horseshit. Well, the audience thought it was horseshit too. They were underwhelmed. They were showing up expecting to see the next stage of human evolution and instead it was just a woman named Sonia going like my sinuses are clear. Aren't you happy?

It could just be like a fucking my pillow commercial. I love my pillow. So, Hubbard, he felt like he's about to lose the audience so he makes the mistake of taking questions from the crowd and the crowd, they knew, had dyonetics so they started

and they knew that if you were clear then you had perfect recall of your memory. So someone shouted What'd you have for breakfast on October 3rd, 1942? I know for a fact it wasn't. Yogurt parfait.

Yeah, it wasn't. Just say yogurt parfait. It wasn't a dookie milkshake. We need to get a different producer in this year. And then another one asked What's on page 122 of dyonetics? It says something about making yourself have an abortion.

And then when Hubbard turned his back to her, one smartass yelled Quick, what color ties Hubbard wearing? Something to do with abortion. What in the world? She had no answer to any of this. She completely and totally froze.

Wow, shocking. Yeah, Hubbard, I mean he tried to recover. The only thing he could come up with was that when he called her out on stage she became frozen in present time and it had blocked her total recall. Genius, Elron. So she needed to become clear again.

Oh, I see, so she's going to pay another 50 grand to do that. It reminds me when Rush Limbaugh had that short-lived television show and they had to escort the audience out because he got boot off stage. Do you remember that? Yeah, he's such a jackass. He started doing a monologue. Everyone booted him

and they had to get the audience out when they came back to commercial. He was just him in an empty room. Wow, now in the modern age an incident like this would have been caught on video and uploaded to YouTube before the night was even over. And religion is dead in the womb.

This whole thing is over and done with. But in 1950 it was nothing more than a bad night and Hubbard moved on. Yeah, because you have to count upon the word of the paper boys. They'll say anything for a nickel. Anything.

In just a short couple of months Dianetics had offices in New York, DC, Chicago, and Honolulu. And headquarters in California located in a former governor's mansion called the Casa. Ooh, Mexican. There was Spanish architecture.

It was like the Casa. That's fun. Honolulu is a fun name. I love Honolulu. Why Kiki? Why not? I'd say that it's cute, but it is a whole race. You know what I mean? So it's not cute, it's just how they live.

Oh, you mean the Polynesians? Yeah. What are you talking about? They live and it seems cute. It is cute. I'm sure that they're vicious, but also erotic and also sad. They're people. They did once to have a king.

Yes, once. But all this money is coming in. Ron wasn't any better with money. Then, then he was when he spent the money he made right in buckskin brigades on a boat. He also refused to delegate authority as he was becoming increasingly paranoid

that the CIA had hit men after him because he was just that goddamn important. Well, now you're seeing the manic, the manic faces coming out and becoming less more like fantastic and awesome. He's buying everybody beers at the bar and like, like, let's all jump off the bridge. You mean like having fun times? That kind of manic.

Like having some real paranoid delusions and then eventually that will spiral into depression. Yeah. I mean, that happens sometimes. I mean, because it's really starting to become apparent that Elron Hubbard is a manic depressive because sometimes when you start getting a lot of success, when you start getting a lot of endorphins rushing in,

that will flip a switch on you and the manic turns from I'm going to write all night to everybody's out to get me which turns into depression and it's just like this never ending cycle and this is something that would go on like Elron Hubbard would never

recover from this because of course he would never fucking get help for any of it because he thought that auditing was going to fix all of his fucking problems. When in fact auditing probably made it even worse because auditing was actually proven to drive people literally insane. It would drive people to the

nut house. But also it's him believing his own lies. Yeah. And yet and also I feel like even at this point he doesn't yet fully believe his own lies. He does sort of know that he's supposed to say auditing will fix all my problems because he's telling everybody the auditing will fix all your problems but the auditing is not fixing

his problems. We'll find out later that he kept the auditing records that he kept every one of them. There's like tons of them literally tons in weight of his auditing records that all show that he learned nothing. And during that process at this point were they holding the

truth sticks or whatever. The emeter had not showed up. Not yet. Okay. And the nut house by the way actually has no nuts in it which I do want to clarify. Little bowls of cashews or something. Now Hubbard's mistress at the time Barbara described him as vain, arrogant, self-centered and unable to tolerate any

frustration of any kind on top of a heavy drinking habit. Now Barbara was beautiful. Barbara was all of Elrond's wives and mistresses were all beautiful. Very beautiful. She's described him as flabby and she did not know why she was attracted to him except for

some wonderful ideas which guys got against some wonderful ideas. Interesting. All you have to do is be interesting and not creepy about it and not self-righteous about it. He was also funny. As Leo said he was funny and he used to play ukulele in the US a lot of time. He used to put funny

costumes on and he would act stuff out. This drunk dumpy shit had also placed the ukulele I would fucking beat him up every day of his life. This was before that was when it was Hawaiian and not like folksy art girl. There was a ukulele dreadful. Actually

Barbara and Elrond had quite the interesting relationship. They had an on and off again affair that was very very tumultuous and the two of them were the way he put it. So now Elrond is this nerd who has made a bunch of people start worshiping him and he's starting to get

all of his dreams come true and so what he do then is he plays that he's kind of already sick of his wife who's got a kid now he's got this new pure woman that was supposed to help him with the people that were attacking for his religion and for the dianetics processes that he was putting together.

Wait so the wife Barbara did he have children with Barbara also? No. He still just got the two kids that he's abandoned right? He would never sully Barbara. At this point he's got two kids with Pauly that he is abandoning. He's got one kid with Sarah a little girl named

Alexis. He's also abandon. He's still married to her. He's in the process of it. Yeah. And so they met and so they broke up and so this is a Barbara and Hubbard broke up at one point and this is a transcript of what she said that she's had. I watched an interview with her

and she's fantastic. She's a fucking nut. Yeah and this exer by the way this is her recollection of the conversation that she wrote later in her journal. You make a habit of instilling engrams too, don't you? That's fine. That's good behavior for the founder of dianetics

isn't it exciting for you being a pawn on such a grand chess board? You're playing for the world. Can you think of anything more exciting? I don't give a good goddamn about the world. I want a single, gratifying, human relationship. You couldn't have

one. You're an ambitious woman. You crave power. You're a Marie Antoinette, a Cleopatra, a Lucretia Borgia. You must have a Caesar or an ex-Alexander. No. I don't need a Caesar, though Caesar may need me. I know you now, Ron

and at this moment I'm closer to you than anyone has ever been. And knowing me, don't care for me anymore. I care for you in a different, new and exciting way. I shouldn't do this. He kissed me. You still care for me. How do you know? You

can't find your hat. You're distracted. That makes you feel powerful, doesn't it? It makes me aware of something interesting. You still want me. Why? Because you need me. You'd need me more than I need you. In 1939 I was very much in love with a girl.

She fell that way, too. When I knew she had a boyfriend coming up, I waited on the stairway with a gun just for a moment. Then I said, they are flies. I realized who and what I was and left. I told her I would leave her free to marry a Sharpie with a cigar and a mouth from

Muncie, Indiana. Would you be left free? The alternative is a Sharpie with a cool cigarette from Elizabeth New Jersey. That wasn't wise. Very wise of you to say that. I'm just going to say not my type. That's number one. And number two,

that's Meatloaf. Those are Meatloaf lyrics. That is such fucking nerdy. Sharpie with a cigar from Elizabeth New Jersey. I love Meatloaf. That is opera rock to say the least. There are 50s romance comics.

It's very romantic. It's very over the top. It kind of shows you how Barbara thought about the relationship. It validated her to be a part of it as much as it validated Ron to have a beautiful woman as his wife. They're just living two different

realities. How don't they see what their lives are like? Because in their minds they're princesses and kings, but in reality they're just like pathetic morons. Kissle. What? The reality is what they think. The reality is what I'm looking at in my sweatpants. Look at it though.

The reality is me looking at them in sweatpants on a bus. They're at each other pretending like they're wearing crowns. If it didn't turn into a gigantic multi-billion dollar cult that was like that, I would say you were right and I was wrong, but they made it happen. They did.

All right, fine. Now due to Hubbard's mental, okay, don't get too fucking happy on yourself. I just said all right, fine. I didn't say you were correct. I said I don't want to argue about this because we have to get to more information about Elrond. The great debunker strikes again! You are not the great debunker. Due to Hubbard's

mental instability, the Dianetics Foundation became financially insolvent fairly quickly and the whole thing started to fall apart. Dr. Winner was the first to go, mainly because he found that even though Elrond Hubbard had told him auditing is perfectly safe,

anybody can be an auditor. Don't worry about it. Winner had seen firsthand at least a couple of people perfectly sane people driven to an asylum by auditing. They went too deep. They went too far in. They said people were screaming.

No one was sleeping or eating. Some guy just was habitually slapping himself in the face. Just from talking. Because they would do it for two hours. What auditing was, an auditing session was two hours long and you were supposed to have ten hours

of auditing before you were supposed to feel the effects. You've got twenty hours of just going further and further in your mind and being guided into places that are a lot of times not fucking real. These people sometimes would be guided

into these delusions and they would also be worried constantly about ingrams. Is that causing me an ingram? Is this causing me an ingram? Oh my god, I can't get rid of my old ingrams because I'm getting new ingrams all the time, but I can't get rid of my old ingrams until I take care of these

new ingrams and it would drive people absolutely fucking insane. Meanwhile, their bank account is just going lower and lower and lower. Yeah, that's like me with t-shirts. I love t-shirts too. I get drunk and buy t-shirts online all the time. That's all I do. And by the way, thank you to

YYYS for sending us some wonderful t-shirts. Thank you so much. Also check out our new t-shirt, represent.com. That's a good old plug. Now, when Winter left, Hubbard went about a campaign to not only tarnish Winter's reputation, but to utterly and completely

destroy him as was to be his philosophy throughout his life when anyone crossed him in any way. He was never satisfied with just someone having a black mark on their reputation. Hubbard wanted that person to be their life, to be in ruins. But you know it's interesting

because again, going, you know, harkening back to that thing that I saw, the dock, when people do leave the church, they still do hold on to some of the tenets of Scientology. And in a lot of ways, they do see themselves as the God that will take down Scientology. So Elrond was a right to be afraid

of people leaving because they did want to blow the whole thing up. Yeah. That is what I mean, again, but that is what cults do. The difference between, in my head, a cult and a religion, we'll probably talk about this a lot, is that it's making little versions of the leader. Yeah. And also, you know, these people spent so many

years thinking that the person at the top is this exalted figure. So if they leave the cult, then that means that they are smarter than this exalted figure. Yeah. So therefore, they must also be an extremely smart, God-like person. Because

that part of their brain that sees this person as someone better than, they, you know, they then get that transferred to themselves. Now, Hubbard's favorite tactic in the early 50s was to report people as communists to the House Un-American Activities

Committee headed by Wisconsin's own Senator Joe McCarthy. Well, we're proud of our Joe McCarthy. You should be. This was a cheap and easy way for people to get rid of enemies in the early 50s. You'd rat someone out as a commie and see their life quickly fall apart

as just being accused was enough to ruin most people in 1950. It's kind of like the witch hunt. Someone should have written like a play or something that was about the witch hunt, but what was really about that? Crucif... Crucif, what?

Someone, I didn't just come up with a million dollar idea, fuck! Every idea I come up with their television show sounds like an always sunny fucking Philadelphia. I like that idea. Can we put Selma Hayek in it? Yeah. No, but we can put Marilyn Monroe in it, if you know what I mean. Yeah, Arthur Miller, that weird man

had sex with Marilyn Monroe. Again, shows at El Run, Hubbard, all you have to be is interesting. Or manipulative and in power. Yeah, you either got to be... You either got to be an interesting writer like Arthur Miller or a total jock like Joe DiMaggio

and then you can get Marilyn Monroe. Or you can be an extremely powerful magician, politician like John F. Kennedy, you get Marilyn Monroe. Joe DiMaggio and JFK acceptable from Marilyn Monroe. Arthur Miller was a beautiful mind. Yes, he did. No, he had a beautiful mind.

Jesus Christ, have you never read The Crucible? No, it's a good book, and I actually performed in The Crucible. I was the steak. This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. Marilyn had, she didn't deserve that. Now, Hubbard's marriage was also

fallen apart once again. Hubbard was having an affair with Barb while Sarah was having an affair with Barb's former boyfriend, an auditor from Los Angeles named Miles Hollis. Elron forced to go on a double date. Him and Sarah went on a double date

with Barbara and Miles and then Miles started fucking Sarah and that made Elron Hubbard really upset. Okay, so the accurate depiction of these people. Elron Hubbard playing scratch-offs in the corner of the bar. This is a trailer park romance that belongs on the stage of a Jerry Springer set.

These people are not classy individuals and they don't have any answers. They're gods as well. I can't imagine someone believing that. The marriage between Hubbard and Sarah had been absolutely horrific. When Sarah was pregnant, Hubbard kicked her in the stomach several

times to try to induce an abortion unsuccessfully. He once hit her so hard that he broke her eardrum and he had done this exact same thing to Polly as well. I mean, this was just something that he had done throughout the years. Yeah, would you notice when you read Dianetics, it talks

about all of the, it's very interesting because it talks about the ingrams created when you beat a woman. Yeah, when you say take that, take that, take that. Oh, wonderful. And so the child here is take that, take that while in the womb and so he becomes a thief. That makes all the sense in the world. We need more

male-led religions, that's what I think. But that is the tactic that David Miscavige uses as well now. Yeah. Just very physical, very violent. Extremely so. Now, they both knew that they shouldn't have been together, but Hubbard refused a divorce saying it would hurt his reputation. He told her that

if she really loved him, she would kill herself rather than have him go through the indignity of a divorce. I mean, he's right. Like Romeo and Juliet, but the dumpy-dumb version. Yeah, just fucking kill yourself. That is insane. Right. So Sarah finally left

on February 3rd, 1951, which prompted Hubbard to do something extremely drastic. He needed to take control of the situation so he decided the best way to do that would be an old-fashioned kidnapping. First, Hubbard and a couple of associates took little Alexi, their child.

They dropped her off at a second location, then went back two hours later to get Sarah. Hubbard then drove Sarah around San Bernardino in the middle of the night trying to find a doctor to declare her insane. Literally, he's driving around

with a screaming woman in the car. And in like two o'clock, two a.m. And then he keeps going into hospitals being like, I need you to declare this woman insane. And they're like, no. You're obviously the crazy one. And he's grabbing Sarah being like, you love when I masturbate. You don't care that

all I do is masturbate. I don't care that all I do is masturbate. I masturbate. Well, don't forget that you also drink, honey. I drink as well, but I don't feel guilty about that. When they couldn't find a doctor to declare her insane, Hubbard said

he would return their daughter under the condition that she would sign a document that said she had gone with him willingly and not under duress. And he will do this several times. And this is a kidnap, this is a thing where he'll be like, because he'll flip it and be like, I'll write a fucking letter up and you have to, you have to basically,

again, deny reality, change reality in order to absolve me. Yeah. It happens. It's like the Elford plea that the West Manifests Free had to sign word. Yeah. You don't admit that you're innocent. The state still admits that you're guilty, but they let you go free somehow. Exactly. It's all nonsense.

Elron, naturally, went back on this deal and took their daughter to Chicago and took this whole thing even further. He called Sarah and told her that he had killed their child, cut it up into pieces, and dropped the pieces in the river. And it was all her fault

because she had left him. And he let that sit for a couple of fucking days. And then he called back, I'm like, sorry. Sorry. Nah, just kidding. Not. And then he wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI saying that Sarah and her lover Miles were both

communists out to destroy his America Loving Organization from the inside out. And Hoover jumped at it. Oh, yeah. Of course, Hoover jumped at it because Hoover was jumping at everything. I just put on my favorite fucking wedding dress. I've got to go take care of more communists. Oh, god damn it. First of all, let me just, all right, well, let me

fish this stiletto out from inside of me. Then I'll be able to bust these cameras. Hoover, of course, sent out an agent to check out the case. But after just one interview with Hubbard, the agent went back to the FBI and said, this guy's fucking insane. We don't need to

have anything to do with this guy. What we do need to do is start a fucking file on him because this guy we actually have to watch. And this is very again, we're going to see a lot where Elron Hubbard using his dumb tactics brings heat on himself a lot. And then

again, I think it's because he likes it. The negative attention and the positive attention is what's fuel in the fucking manic engine. Well, you don't have Jesus without Pontius Pilate. You got to have people scrutinizing you otherwise you're not a god. Absolutely. He loves people attacking him because the more people attack

him, the more valid he is. Yeah, he flips it because if they're attacking him, then he must be doing something right. I don't know if that sounds fucking familiar to anybody, but that's what he that's how his followers get more admiration for him. That's

how his organization gains strength because if they're being attacked and they must be doing something right. It's Colt 101. It's Religion 101. The God Hates Fags Colt. That's all the whole thing was predicated on them being protesting weddings or funerals of Marines and then they people yelling at them

to be like that's proof. It's also in nowadays and that's like I have friends that are like I have Instagram friends that are like cyber Goths. Like it's like the super intense like makeup and they're all like in weird corsets. And then the one boyfriend is always selling this shirt that's like hated by some trash

trash talk by some was hated by all trash talk by some. Do I give a fuck? I'll tell you what it's less than one. The funny irony is no one knows who you are and no one gives us you what you do. But people like having haters. Yeah, people love it. It validates their lives.

That's when honestly whenever I feel like oh overwhelmed or something I always just remember there's six billion people in this world all of them care about themselves. No one cares what we do. Yeah, it's actually great liberating. Yeah, some people just want attention no matter what and the easy it's much more simple and easy to get negative

attention than it is to get positive attention. It is ridiculously easy. Now Sarah officially filed for divorce and Hubbard got his first spate of truly bad press. This shit was awful because Sarah got a lawyer that loved publicity

knew how to work the press. So there were all these headlines that was like cult leader kidnaps top and shit like that. And so Hubbard eventually granted Sarah the divorce under the condition that she write a letter saying how awesome he was and how none

of this stuff in the press was true and she would have to publish it. Of course Hubbard wrote the letter and she signed it and so the divorce was finalized. Ron then came back to the United States and settled in Wichita, Kansas under the financial care of a Mr. Don

Cursell, Ron's very first super rich dupe who would give him the money he needed to keep going until he could start Scientology Proper which we'll get into on the next episode. If you are a billionaire just please use your money for good.

Wisely, use it wisely. Be an Elon Musk. I like Elon Musk. You don't even have to use it for good. Just use it for your own fun. Just don't use it for evil. Bill Gates too he does some good stuff. Get a helicopter, zip around with it. I'd have a bunch of gold clothes.

You want gold clothes? Sure. Do you feel like that's not going to you're five foot seven slow Polish man. Do you think that wearing gold clothes is going to make you a target? I would be carried. I would be carried by five MMA champions.

There's this millionaire in Amarillo that I think is a lot like what you would be like Henry if you got rich. He bought this field. He painted a whole bunch of gigantic boulders to look like billiard balls. Then he worked out equations where he would pay people

to push the billiard balls across the field to play a huge game of billiards. That's incredible. That's how the pyramids were built. He would pay teenagers to drive around on the outskirts of golf courses and yell at golfers on megaphones.

This is incredible. He's a chaos maker. He would pay people money to put up road signs in their front yard that would just have like a big

picture of a cricket on it and say Cricket crossing. Others would say why not? There are hundreds of these all across Amarillo because he'd give people like 300 bucks. He's like here's $300. Let me put a sign and people have no say over

what goes on in their yard. They sign a contract. Whatever they get, they're fucking stuck with it. I'm going full the jerk if I get rich. I can see that. That's part two of the Ella Ron Hubbard series. Unbelievable work.

Great job everybody. Can I stop reading Dianetics now? You should have started reading Dianetics. We're done with Dianetics. We're moving on to Scientology proper. We're moving on to the bridge. We're going to say two more rounds.

Zino, all of that wacky bullshit. This is when it gets really crazy because the older Ron Hubbard gets the crazier he gets the more vicious he gets. And also man, two toot comes to Sea Org. Sea Org by David Schiele

in the face of the planet. Make way for the Commodore. It's just pirates of the fat Caribbean It's just pirates of the fat Caribbean. Get tricked and duped into this stuff and they really are victims in their own way. Get out! Well, it's people looking for an answer. And that's what every cult is, and these are all like cults of personality.

People get taken in with this every day. It doesn't make them stupid, it doesn't make them bad people. No, actually they're very smart a lot of times. Yeah, a lot of times they are very smart, but it doesn't make them stupid, it doesn't make them bad people, it just makes them desperate. Looking for an answer. Any answer. So, some reason people get keyed in to these cults, they get keyed in to these leaders,

and they think, alright, this is it. This is the guy that's gonna solve all of my problems, and a lot of times people make it the end all, be all. They were like, this guy is gonna solve all my problems, or nobody is. Also, Scientology is Star Trek University. It's like, it's cool to be a part of the fantasy. If you wanna live the fantasy and give it fully, it's like living D&D with your life. Yeah.

You wanna go and play with aliens and believe in all of this shit if you want to. But there's a real world that happens as well. Yes. Yes, there very much is. Alright, well let's see here. Marcus, what should we do now? Should we thank people for donating to the Patreon page? Thank you so much for donating to the Patreon.

As always, patreon.com slash slash podcast on the left. If you wanna give to our Patreon, unfortunately we can't do shoutouts this week because we're recording so much, so we haven't had time to really gather them up. But if you give just $1 to our Patreon, you get advanced ticket sales on all of our shows. And thank you guys so much for everybody who has already bought tickets to our next Spade Alive shows. Go to cavecomedyradio.com slash live. Of course, in Austin, we sold out the first show just on pre-sales alone.

We had to open up a second show, so it is absolutely worth it just to pay a dollar a month to get access to the pre-sell tickets. That's if you wanna see us. That's if you wanna see us. That's if you care about seeing us. If you don't care about seeing us, then that's fine. I guess we're all fucked. Everything's fucked.

Yeah, so give us whatever you feel like we deserve, and if you don't feel like we deserve anything, that's totally fine too. We just appreciate your listening. That's right. And you can find Marcus Parks on Twitter at Marcus Parks, Henry loves you, Henry loves you on Twitter. Yes. And Dr. Fantasty on Instagram, Marcus Parks did Marcus for everything.

I'm Ben Kissel on Twitter, and Ben Kissel won on Instagram. And at LP on the left for all of our Bullshits. Yeah, and go and follow me on Spotify. There it is. And also, I'm doing a weekly, I'm reading a creepypasta for the Patreon subscribers, so this week's episode, or creepypasta, was advice from a friend, but is that friend alive? You'll have to listen to find out.

All my dead friends are the smartest. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, because you make them all agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. Because they don't have any more personalities, so they can't, yeah. Hail Satan.

Hail yourselves, everyone. Hail game. Hail me. Magus Delegions. Magus Delegions. Magus Delegions. Magus Delegions.