Part One: Napoleon Hill: The Grifter Who Invented 'The Secret' & Donald Trump

In episode 78, Robert is joined by Sara June to discuss Napoleon Hill, the grandaddy of grifters.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
What's murdering my chickens. I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bassards,
the show where we tell you everything you don't know
about the worst people in all of history. And I
was just talking about Zanku Chicken in Los Angeles, which
has a dark past, with our guest today, a comedian
and director, the Los Angeles based Sarah June. Hello, thank

(00:25):
you for having me. Thank you for not attack Amy
over that pretty bad introduction. That's not one of my
best ones, have you. Oh yeah, that's nice to hear. Yeah,
you know you're not the worst. Is that good? That's
my thing? Yeah, that's my goal. This is leaving dark podcast,
so I feel like I can be very gray with

(00:46):
my compliments. Hey, that wasn't terrible. You're not the worst? Well,
I mean as a person, that's always my goal when
I like leave a social interaction is that everyone agree, well,
that's not the worst person. Yeah ever talk to Yeah,
so hey, man, shoot for the moon even if you miss. Yeah,
hopefully people won't hate you and talk about how much

(01:08):
they hate you right after you leave. That's definitely not
happening because no one does that. To Neil Armstrong, who
did shoot for the Moon. I don't know that guy
did a lot of bad stuff. I think Neil Armstrong.
Uh no, I'm thinking of buzz Alder. Okay, let's just
leave that at that. I'll just I'll tease that about
I'll tease that about Neil Armstrong. Time's up, Neil Armstrong,
no further comment. Yeah, yeah, we will slander an astronaut

(01:31):
and then just move right on without explaining it. I
like this idea. Yeah, beautiful, perfect, that's right, you're on blast.
I had a friend talk to me like a year ago.
I was like, oh, I'm going to put you on
a show with this guy. And he's like, oh, that
guy And I was like, yeah, what's up with him?
He's like, oh, that guy sucks. And I was like,
oh my god, what are you talking about. Who did
he hurt? And he was like no, I just mean
like he's like really awkward and not funny. I was like,

(01:51):
you can't in this environment, you can't just say oh,
that guy sucks and expect me to not assume that
means he raped one of your friends. Yeah. I had this,
not this specific. When somebody's just annoying, just be like, oh,
that guy's really annoying. Don't be like, oh, that guy sucks,
because I think it's something much worse. Yeah. I had

(02:11):
a year's long running joke about hating Will Wheaton and
would make cryptic comments about how terrible he is and
the awful things he's done. And it was just like
a joke because he just seemed like the most harmless,
possible like person to make fun of. Yeah, and then
but then times being like, what do you know about
Will Wheaton? Did he attack somebody? I was like, oh, no,
this is not I didn't want to. Yeah, you can't

(02:32):
do that anymore. Yeah, but then he wound up kind
of defending a guy who did do a bunch of
fucked up shits. So there you go along. Yeah, I'm
a hero. Is he speaking of heroes? No, we are
talking about a fella named Napoleon Hill. Have you ever
heard of Napoleon Hill? No? Have you ever heard of

(02:55):
a book called Think and Grow Rich? Oh? Yes, yeah,
there we go. Everybody's seen. Everybody listening to this. If
you don't have a copy of the book, you have
a friend er family member who has this somewhere on
their bookshelf. It's like secret. Yeah, it's very very much
proto this secret. This is my problem with Mary and

(03:17):
Williamson is like she's funny and all, and she talks
about governing with love and all. But then like I
read her book and it's kind of thinking grow rich. Yeah,
And that's what part of why I want to talk
about thinking Grow Rich today because Napoleon Hills sort of
founded the the He wasn't like the first self help author.
He wasn't like the first business advice author, but he

(03:38):
was the first guy to kind of, in a modern sense,
do this sort of quasi almost spiritual approach to like
business and personal like life advice, where like you're mixing
in success advice on like how to run a company
with like weird metaphysical theories. Like he was the guy
who invented that. Yeah yeah, yeah. He was the one
who brought you know, the the idea of the law

(04:01):
of attraction to Wall Street. Yeah yeah, and yeah, that's
the guy that we're talking about today. But before we
get into him in his life, I want to talk
a little bit about the New Thought movement. Now, whether
or not you've heard of it, the New Thought movement
has had a big impact on your world. The central
idea of the movement was that your thoughts and your

(04:23):
affirmations can materially alter the nature of reality. That's megic.
It's magic. It's magic, but it's magic for people who
like who want like, yeah, because they're Christian or whatever,
they just like, don't they see weird? Yeah, or they're
atheists and they want to like come up with a

(04:43):
scientific justification, Like new Thought contains multitudes. There's Christian chunks
of it, there's atheists chunks of it. The secret you
can Christian chunks are trying so hard. The Christian chunks
are trying so hard to not be considered witchcraft. It's
pretty funny. Yeah, I I I. One of my favorite
things is like people who are like hardcore fundamentalist Christian

(05:04):
and hate witchcraft but also talk the same way that
my friends who are into Alister Crowley do about certain things.
Like Alex Jones was just talking about on info Wars
how Donald Trump's fourth of July speech was a ritual
ritual magic. But he said he like he had to
emphasize it's Christian ritual magic. But like he's still talking
about like it's just so baddy, but this is this

(05:27):
is this is less baddie than that, which is the
point of it is that it's supposed to be. They're
supposed to be arguing that like this isn't magic. This
is just like like part of how the physical world works, right,
it's but create reality magic for sad nerds. So the
Secret would be one example of a modern day descendant
of then Thought movement that's sort of on the more secular,

(05:50):
not necessarily atheistic, but certainly secular Oprah side of things.
The Secrets meant for anybody. Yes, Now, Prosperity Gospel Christianity
would be in another descendant of the New Thought movie Wow,
one of my favorite things in the world. Oh yeah,
Like it's absolutely abhorrent if you haven't lived in the
Deep South or watched that one John Oliver special. Prosperity

(06:12):
Gospel Christians are the folks who essentially will like get
on their TV stations and beg little old ladies to
take on credit card debt in order to make thousands
dollar of dollars in donations to their church. Then they'll
use those donations to buy like fancy private jets and
mansions and stuff. And the claim that they make to
these people they're fleecing out of money. Is that God

(06:32):
needs them to show their faith by making a seed
donation that will magically cause God to bless them with
even more money. So the prosperity gospel is another descendant
of the New Thought movement, and by it's more widespread
than you'd guess. By some count seventeen percent. You're just selling,
selling God's love. You're like, you got to invest in

(06:53):
godspel right now, this is gonna climb, trust me, babe.
This is going to sky rocket. You're going to be
rolling in money and it's clean because it's all from God.
Because it's all from God. Baby. Yeah. The term that
they use a lot is prove God with your donation,
which is like, seems like it should be blasphemous. Yeah. Yeah, well,

(07:13):
you know, I'm not a Christian, but that seems blasphemous
to me. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff in the
Bible about money, and most of the stuff that Jesus
said is kind of contrary to a lot of the
other stuff, which is a lot of like rules about
debt and borrowing and you know what's allowed and not

(07:33):
allowed and what you have to do to your debt. Yeah,
that interest is an abomination. Yeah, yeah, I remember him
beating the shit out of bankers. Yeah, there's a lot
of that. I remember. If I'm not mistaken, that's the
only time Jesus beats somebody with a whisp. It was
real pissed. Yeah. Anyway, So, but the prosperity Gospel Christianity

(07:59):
is and very ripe for parody, but it's also really popular,
and it's also incredibly destructive. Yeah, yeah, very destructive and
very popular. About seventeen percent of all American Christians adhere
to prosperity theology in some form or another. Wow. Roughly
one million Americans attend prosperity Gospel preaching churches every single Sunday.

(08:20):
So this is a sizable movement. There's a lot more
to say about this stuff, and our current president ties
into it. But before we get to Napoleon Hill and
his role in all of this, I want to keep
on this track for a little bit. So the New
Thought movement sprang up in the late eighteen hundreds, and
the name new Thought embodied the belief that, of course,
thoughts could create reality without the need for prayer or worship.

(08:40):
The founder of the movement was a Portland, Maine clockmaker
named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, which is a great name for
a guy who founds a weird cult style and make clocks.
Let's not forget anything. Guy who lived in Maine and
makes clocks. I already don't trust him. I feel like
they hand you a clockmaker kit as soon as you

(09:01):
come out of the womb named Phineas, Like, here's your
fucking clock. Can't get used to it. Yeah. He focused
like his teachings focused on like curing illnesses with positive thinking,
and Phineas theorized that disease could be banished by the
redirection of thoughts. One of his students was a woman
named Mary Baker Eddie, who went on to found the

(09:22):
Christian Science religious tradition Christian Scientists. Yeah exactly. These are
the folks who like, will let their kids die because
they try to treat lymphoma or whatever with prayers. They
don't believe indice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I've got a

(09:43):
lot of I've had a lot of information on the
New Thought movement and a very solid write up by
a website called The Conversation, who does some pretty good
stuff having conversations. Yeah, I love conversations too. Well this, yeah.
H Their article notes that by the eighteen nineties, new
thought had morphed away from healing disease and onto helping

(10:05):
people achieve success through positive thinking. So the starts as
a guy being like, we're going to redirect people's thoughts
to make them healthier, and then over the course of
a couple of decades it turns into like, positive thoughts
make money. Well, what could be healthier than being super rich? Yeah,
it is. Statistically the healthiest thing for you is being
rich as shit. So that article quotes historian Beryl Satter's

(10:30):
explanation for the reasoning of the thought of New Thought believers. Quote,
since human thought had creative power, negative thoughts materialized in
negative situations, while spiritual thoughts could form a positive reality.
So you can see how that could be a harmless
thing for just like, I don't know, you're the lady
who lived like one of your friend's moms growing up,

(10:51):
who was always into like weird books about self help, Like,
you could see how it could be harmless, but you
could also see how those beliefs could lead to kind
of toxic attitudes towards the poor. Yeah. Yeah, because if
you just have to think yourself into a better situation.
Then you're kind of blaming people who are poor and

(11:11):
sick on their sickness and their poverty. Yeah, it's just
because they didn't vibe high enough. And it removes all
of societal organization as a factor for why someone might
be poor, you know, or just you know. It removes
the idea that that social class is like not entirely

(11:32):
your choice, which is kind of I thought that was
the whole point of class, was that you didn't really
get a choice, you know, and if you wanted to jump,
it was gonna be like almost impossible. But they were like, no, no, no,
poor people, they're just not thinking enough about money. They
don't want it really. Yeah, they don't want it really,
and that's why they're poor. And it's no coincidence that

(11:52):
the New Thought movement, this shift in the New Thought
movement towards this sort of more toxic attitude happened in
the Gilded Age, which which is the previous period in
American history that's most like our current period in American history.
I'm going to quote again from that Conversation article, quote
a book that illustrates the New Thought movement shift towards
individual prosperity is Ralph Waldo Trene's In Tune with the Infinite.

(12:15):
A popular writer and lecturer, Trene taught that one's ability
to channel positive thoughts would lead to success. Published in
eighteen ninety seven, the book sold millions of copies and
gained Tren a wide following, including from the automobile industrialist
Henry Ford. So. Trene was one of the first people
to really push the idea that happiness was the product
of positive thinking, not brain chemistry or your physical circumstances.

(12:36):
He wrote in his book quote, if one holds themselves
in the thought of poverty, they will be poor, and
the chances are that they will remain in poverty. If
one holds themselves, whatever present conditions may be, continually in
the thought of prosperity, they set into operation forces that
will sooner or later bring them into prosperous conditions. Hmm, yeah,

(12:56):
hold on, I'm thinking really hard about everyone femoing me
six dollars. I'm thinking about yeah, yeah, how bad I
want to manifest so hard? Yeah, I gotta check my vemo.
I'll check it at the end of the episode June
ye venmo mey six dollars. If you believe in the secret. Yeah,

(13:21):
your seed donations to Sarah June will be uh will
be given back in kind by the gods. Yeah. The
seed donations that you give to me will manifest in
my purchase of weed. Uh and and that is how
your your investment will blossom. Here. In fact, me getting
high is in a way a proof of God through

(13:43):
your donation. So prove God by donating Caronjuana money to
Sarah June. Yeah. So yeah, I think it's time now
to uh to get into our main subject for today.
I just thought some of that background would be would
be you very helpful? So. Oliver Napoleon Hill was born
in eighteen eighty three, the son of an unlicensed dentist

(14:06):
slash moonshiner and a woman named Sarah, who I'm sure
was quite nice dentist slash moonshiner. What a cool dad. Yeah,
that's a fucking great dad. You're pulling out teeth drunk
as fuck, just like making white light. You know. He
had a bunch of like bottles of like pure ethanol
that he kept teeth in just a crazy lab in

(14:27):
the shed, just preserving all kinds of gums. No wonder
his I'm a big fan of like like efficient synergy.
You know, totally researching this podcast, but listen to an
audiobook on a run or whatever. Wow, And I love
the efficient synergy of both ripping teeth out of people's
heads and making the moonshine. You need to sterilize them

(14:49):
and cut and work as a painkiller. Like yeah, dude,
I mean he sounds like he would get you super
fucked up and then oh you blacked out. He would
pull your teeth, which you know, what a great guy. Yeah, No,
they have to pour you home from fucking the doctor Hill,
the safe doctor dentist. No, no, but they did. Okay,

(15:11):
they were you know, I don't know if you'd even
call him middle class, but they weren't impoverished. They grew
up in rural Virginia at Wise County as a child,
all over family count Wise. Ah, but it was a
pretty white county, I think. Yeah, I mean, I'm just

(15:31):
gonna guess, but I am talking out of my ass there.
As a child, his family called him nap Years later,
Napoleon would write that his family represented three generations of quote, ignorance, illiteracy,
and poverty, but The New York Times notes that this
was probably not the case. Quote. In fact, his grandfather
was a printer. His father became a self taught dentist

(15:52):
and treated his neighbors until the state licensing authorities got
wind of his activity a self taught dentist, and he
got down for doing it. But then he went to
dental school at age forty and practiced legally. Wow, he
was like, I'm going straight, Yeah, I'm going straight to
the dentist. Did he still illegally make moonshine even after
becoming Oh he must have. You know, you don't stop

(16:14):
making moonshine. That's just the hot that's a calling. Yeah.
Speaking of divine in the world, Yeah, I would consider
the concept of moonshine to be proof of divine intervention. Yeah. Now,
Napoleon's mom died when he was nine years old, and
his father remarried the next year to a woman named Martha,

(16:34):
who was the widow of a school principal and seemed
determined to push her new son towards a life of
the mind. See as a kid, I'll show you that
I had a reputation for wildness. What's that? No, go ahead.
Napoleon had a reputation for wildness. He loved hiking around
the woods in the middle of nowhere and Virginia with
a handgun, firing at whatever he saw. Now, he was

(16:55):
twelve at the time when he was doing this, so like,
that's twelve years Napoleon wandering around the woods with a handgun,
shooting stuff all the time. It sounds like so yeah,
that sounds like that sounds like Virginia. So Miss Martha
comes into the picture as his step mom, and she
sees this kid like living half faral in the trees
with a gun and decides maybe he could use some parenting.

(17:16):
So she buys him a typewriter, and she tells him,
if you become as good with the typewriter as you
are with that gun, you may become rich and famous
and known throughout the world. You can get pretty rich
by shooting people with a gun. You can actually get
very rich by shooting people with a gun. Now, it's
possible that conversation never happened. Napoleon Hill, Like, that's based

(17:38):
on his recollections and an unpublished autobiography. And Napoleon Hill
was a notorious and inveterate con man, and a lot
of what we're going to talk about is based on
his recollections of Jesus and since he was clearly full
of bullshit his whole life, and all we know about
him is his lies. Yeah, we know a few other things.
So my primary sources for this article are a New

(17:59):
York Times article published in nineteen ninety five, which is
good but fairly short, and a Gizmoto article by Matt
Novak called All American Huckster. An article would be kind
of an unfair way to describe what mister Novak wrote.
He essentially put together like a short nonfiction book that's
just published on a website. It's like tens of thousands
of words long, exhaustively researched and clearly took him. I

(18:21):
think he spent at least like six straight months putting
this thing together. So he like he like traveled around
and like found went through archives to like find original
like articles about Napoleon Hill written while he was alive,
and like it's a very very good article. So I
want to I want to kind of highlight mister Novak's
work up front, because he did some great work, and
I don't think I can't really found any other journalists

(18:44):
who's dug into Napoleon Hill. To this kind of extent,
so's he's pretty critical. So from what we can put
together based on a variety of sources, young Oliver's first
job was writing up news articles for a small newspaper.
Some of his articles would be picked up by local
newspapers in Virginia, and this became a source of spare
cash for the enterprising young teenager. His biographer's right quote,

(19:07):
Napoleon would soon become a prolific source of stories. His
writing was unpublished, if not crude, but he compensated with
unbounded verve and a vivid imagination. Indeed, he later recalled
that when news was scarce and there weren't stories to tell,
he simply made them up. So that's his first child.
Great career will be a pattern. Yeah. Now. Hill claims

(19:28):
to have first gotten married when he was fifteen years old,
in a convoluted story for which there are no records
and no evidence outside of Hill's autobiography, He claims a
young woman fell in love with him, and she was
pregnant from somebody else, but she lied and said that
the child was his, And when Napoleon married her thinking
the child was his, but then had the marriage annulled.

(19:49):
When he learned the truth. Now, there's no records of
this marriage anywhere. We don't know what actually happened. Based
on the rest of his life. My guess is that
he just abandoned this woman and her child, who was
his child too. But he claims he go she got
he got hoodwinked by her. Yeah, yeah, he knows. Yeah so.

(20:11):
Oliver Napoleon Hill graduated high school at age seventeen and
went to a business school until nineteen oh one. When
he was eighteen, he started to work with a coal
magnate named Rufus Ayers. In his article for Gizmoto, Matt
Novak writes, quote, Ayers was said to be impressed with Hill, who,
according to the official biography, compensated for his youth and
five foot six stature by adopting the appearance of a

(20:31):
serious young executive, ramrod straight posture and peckable double breasted suits,
immaculately pressed white shirts, conservative bow ties, and white handkerchiefs
neatly posed in the breast pocket. I hate this guy.
That's how young Napoleon. Yeah, you know you're not a fan.
What is it? Is it the handkerchief? It's not the handkerchief.
It's the immaculately pressed white shirts. It's also the you know,
I bet he uh wow, Yeah, this is the kind

(20:54):
of this is like a young Republican kind of guy.
You know, yeah, he looks like he looks like the
kind of guy like I'm sure he's the kind of
guy who'd wear a full suit in DC in the
middle of the summer. Yeah. Yeah. But also like as
a seventeen year old, this is you know, the guy
who who wears a suit like when he doesn't have to,
and he kind of thinks everybody else is worse for
not wearing a suit. Like he kind of acts like

(21:15):
it's a joke. He's like, Haha, it's my thing. I
wear suits, but he actually thinks everybody who doesn't wear
suits all the time is a loser. Yeah, you get
that feeling from Napoleon. Or it may just have been
it may just have been like a calculation because he's
a con man, where he was like, well, everyone trusts
a guy in a suit, and I need extra trust
because I'm conning people, so I should always wear a suit.

(21:38):
I'm still thinking about that last quote where he's like,
you know, when there's not any news, I make it up.
Aren't I a good journalist? Like he doesn't know what
being a journalist is. Well, in a little bit of
fairness to him, at that point in time, there was
there was a lot of weird bullshit in paper. Yeah,
I know that's true. There was a lot of crazy
shit in papers. But like you weren't supposed to tell
people we make it up, you know, supposed to tell

(22:00):
people we know a lot of stuff. Yeah, yeah, you're yeah,
it's he's he's from the beginning, not somebody to whom
the truth is important A major concept. Yeah, yeah, just
not a not a fully fleshed out concept. Truth. It's
like sketchy, sketchy outline. There's something there. If you say something,
maybe it's the truth, maybe it's not. It's a nice idea. Yeah.

(22:24):
To Napoleon Hill, it's like, oh, that's so, that makes
me think of something else, some bullshit. Yeah. So, six
months into his employment, Oliver Napoleon Hill was promoted to
work as a clerk for a mine in Richland's Virginia. Now,
the first major tests of his professional acumen, other than
his ability to wear a suit, came when the manager

(22:45):
of a bank which was also owned by his employer
the same guy who owned the mine. This bank manager
got wasted and accidentally shot a black bell hop to death.
Now we have a couple of different versions of the story.
It's possible he dropped his gun and it fired by accident.
It's possible it was an active, outright murder. We just
really don't know. But the New York Times reports what

(23:06):
happens next. Quote with the boss away, Hill took charge,
arranging to have the death covered up. As a result,
his employer made him manager of the mine at the
age of only nineteen. Yeah, this all tracks with the
suit thing. Yeah, this all tracks with the suit thing. Now.
According to Napoleon Hill's autobiography, when he arrived at the
bank after the shooting, the drunken manager had left the

(23:28):
vault open and thousands of dollars were scattered around. Hill
goes out of his way to note that he scrupulously
recorded and reorganized all of the money without taking anything.
He wrote, quote, I could have appropriated fifteen to twenty
thousand dollars or perhaps more, without the slightest indication that
I had taken the money. You absolutely took the money

(23:49):
if you make the point of noting like I could
have stolen all this money, but I didn't nobody, the
kind of nobody would bring that money from there. They
had done it. Don't bring that up. Yeah exactly. I'm
gonna guess he stole some money. But Hill claims that
in gratitude for his honesty, rufus Ayers promoted him to
manage the coal mind. Yeah, that's the thing bankers do,
reward honesty. Yeah, yeah, one way or the other. Napoleon

(24:14):
Hill covers up a murder and winds up in charge
of a coal mine and makes out with you know,
maybe fifteen thousand dollars, yeah atimate, Yeah, by his own estimate, Yeah,
maybe fifteen grand. So yeah, that's that's the story so far.
This guy is like is like Pete Butterage so far
or like everything, he just keeps like moving upward, you know,

(24:35):
and he's like, aren't I great at this? And everyone's like,
I don't know, but sure, and then he just he
just keeps going up. Ah. Maybe maybe I don't know
much about Pete Butterage. Always kind of like he was
like a top of his class, you know, like went
to an IVY league, like did it really good grades?
You know, the high achiever. Yeah, I wouldn't say Napoleon
was a high achiever. I think he was more of
a I think he was more of a guy who

(24:59):
kept sliding into their place at the right time with
the right lie, and and that that's that's where he
is so far. Is he like gets into this good
situation and kind of wangles a job by covering up
a murder like who I don't know whom, but yeah,
that's where he is right now. So we're gonna break

(25:19):
for ads because it's time for a product and maybe
a service or two. But when we come back, we're
going to talk about a whole bunch of fucking cons
just a whole lot of conning people out of money.
So after the break products, we're back, and we we

(25:44):
found who Napoleon Hill does remind us a little of,
and it's Roger Stone, Like, I, yeah, I think that's
a that's a good comparison, Sophie. I think this is
what Roger Stone would have been if he'd never gotten
into politics, because he is he is. Yeah, Well, well
we'll tell the rest of his story so that you
can understand why I think that. So on June seventeenth,

(26:05):
nineteen oh three, Napoleon Hill married a woman named Edith Whitman.
Their daughter, Edith Whitman Hill, was born two years later
in nineteen oh five. The family moved to Marbury, Alabama
when their daughter was six months old, but Napoleon sent
them back to Virginia five months after that. Then in
nineteen oh seven, he moved to Mobile, Alabama to start
a timber company, with his family still waiting behind in Virginia.
So he spends maybe a couple of months in total,

(26:28):
like actually living with his family, and then he's off
to start this new company. Now, one probable reason that
he spent so much time moving about outside of his
business is that Napoleon Hill had a tremendous addiction to prostitutes.
One of Napoleon's friends later testified during divorce proceedings that
his wife instituted about his behavior on a nineteen oh
six business trip. Quote soon after we reached Bluefield, West Virginia,

(26:51):
we went to a house of ill fame between eight
and nine o'clock of that night, and mister Oliver in Hill,
within a few minutes after arriving there, took one of
the girls to a room in the same house and
stayed with her until about twelve o'clock that night. Both
of the women who stayed at this house were of
easy virtue, and mister Hill went there for the purpose
of having sexual intercourse with these women. He admitted to
me that night, when we were going to the hotel,
that he had sexual intercourse with the girl that he

(27:12):
took to the room. That's pretty clear, yep, the one
he told his wife about. Well, no, no, this is
the one that This is the one that one of
his friends told the judge about when his wife sued
for divorce. Oh oh, I see, Okay, great way to
find that out. Yeah, now, I think she probably guessed,

(27:32):
although he was again never around. Napoleon and Edith were
together for five years, but only actually again together for
a fraction of that. In court proceedings, Edith claimed that
he was frequently violent when they were together. At one point,
during a visit to Virginia, he left with their young
daughter and delivered her to his stepmother, and then threatened
his wife that he would never give their daughter back
to her. In January of nineteen oh eight, he wrote

(27:53):
his wife this letter quote, I'm leaving the country where
you'll never bother me. You can only communicate with me
through my father and not unless he thinks best. Wow,
very excited to see this guy become extremely rich. Well,
I have some good news there, but but we'll get
to that. I don't wanna. I don't wanna. I don't
want to bury the lead he does. Briefly, it does

(28:13):
seem interesting to me that this is basically the same
thing l Ron Hubbard did to his second wife, kidnapping
their baby and moving away, except for in Hubbard's case,
he took the baby to Cuba and drank heavily while
writing a book, whereas Napoleon at least left his infant
daughter with family. So we can say conclusively that Napoleon

(28:33):
Hill was a better father than l Ron Hubbard. There
are worse things you can do with a baby then
give them to their step mother. Yeah. Worst things you
can do with a baby that you steal. M M yep,
that that that you steal. Look, if he's not abandoning babies,
he's stealing them. Yeah, that's that's this guy. He's he
mostly abandons baby. Mostly fairness to Napoleon, he only stole

(28:56):
the one baby, and it was his baby, and it
was his baby. I mean, most babies are stolen by
their parents. But yeah, so three months after writing that letter,
Edith managed to get back her baby and successfully file
for divorce. She alleged that Napoleon sometimes threw their small
child on the bed and choked her. So, actually he's
not a better father than el Ron Hubbard. Yeah, no,

(29:18):
that guy Hubbard. Hubbard didn't beat his kids. Well he
Actually this is really a pointless thing. They're both terrible parents. Yeah, yeah,
maybe we shouldn't kids too. I don't know why I
try to evaluate them. Yeah, you know, we want somebody
to be the guy here, but it turns out they're
all bad. I shouldn't look for the good guy and
l Ron Hubbard. Right, but this podcast isn't called behind

(29:41):
the Good Guys. No, no, so. Edith also alleged that
at one point her husband threatened to blow her brains
out on a crowded city street. Numerous people who worked
with Napoleon testified to his constant alliances with prostitutes and
habitual infidelity. Now so, yeah, the marriage splits up, and
think the point in time, Napoleon's timber business isn't exactly

(30:03):
doing well either, because it turns out that rather than
being a business, it was just kind of a scam.
So Napoleon bought ten to twenty thousand dollars worth of
lumber using credit from companies around the country. So he
would like buy the lumber and like sign a contract
saying he would pay them back later with interest, and
then he would just take the lumber and sell it

(30:25):
like individually to people for cash. But he had no
point credit. Yeah, essentially, Yeah, he was just driving around
like you guys wants some fucking wood. Yeah, he would
sell the wood for cash and just keep moving so
that nobody could ever Yeah, like that that was the
whole plan. Truck selling it on the street. Yeah, out

(30:47):
of a truck, really advanced. Yeah, he's not a great
con man, but he's a constant one. Yeah. It's like
makings telling everybody and fucking stealing wood. Yeah. So the
most traceable crime thief, wood thief and fake journalists at
this point is his his resume and stole a baby once. Yeah.

(31:08):
So by late nineteen oh eight, many of his creditors
had realized they were being fleeced. Matt Novak sits an
article in the October issue of the Pensacola Journal covering
Hill's lumber fraud the whereabouts of Owen Hill, said to
be the president and general manager of the Acree Hill
Lumber Company, is causing considerable anxiety among creditors of the
concern in the state and several other lumber sections. Hill
has not been at his office since September eighth. Warrants

(31:31):
were issued for Hill's arrest at the same time, the
Post Office started looking into claims of mail fraud, which
Napoleon Hill had also been busy committing. Wow he was
charged with Czech fraud as well. Hill spent the fall
and winter in nineteen oh eight on the run, dodging
law enforcement and creditors as he's gradually made his way
to Washington, d C. That's what I'm saying. You can't
be weighed down by a baby when you're dodging creditors,

(31:52):
you know, running up and down the country. The wife
is she's just like really holding him back from being
the slimiest bag he can be. And once he's free
of his wife and free of his creditors and all
of the people that he fleeced in his lumber business
and his check fraud, and he moves to Washington, d C.
He drops the first name Oliver and starts going by

(32:14):
Napoleon Hill because he's a new man there. He's changed,
just like disease. That'll make it harder to be found. Yeah.
So nineteen oh nine, when he winds up in DC
is a time in which cars were still new and
very exciting to just about everybody. There's a lot of
money to be made in the Nason automobile industry, and
more importantly for mister Hill, there was a lot of
money to be made in lying to people about the

(32:35):
Nason automobile industry. In order to understand this, you have
to think of cars not as the ubiquitous tools they
are today, but more like the Internet and social media
were a decade ago. Scams are always going to be
rampant with any new technology doing that sweet spot after
it becomes clear how valuable it is, but before anyone
really understands it. So like cars are in that place

(32:55):
in nineteen oh nine when Napoleon Hill winds up in
d C. So he joins immediately an automotive enthusiast group
called the Automobile Club of Washington, and it inspires him
to create his own organization, the Automobile College of Washington.
In early nineteen oh nine already already fake already, not
a college, just a coluge, not a college. It's a club.

(33:17):
What is he gonna? I don't know what what is
Automobile College? Is it a college? Does he train? Does
he learn? It's a college kind of in the same
way Trump University is a college. Okay, so they're it's
a little more legit. It's a little more legit than
Trump University. So the idea is that the Auto College
is a training program that would that would teach you

(33:37):
how to build cars with six weeks of true. Oh oh,
like a camp but for cars. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like
he's promising graduates that they'll be able to earn between
seventy five dollars and two hundred dollars per week, which
is like really good money, and all they have to
do is like pay to learn how to build cars. Now,
the reality of the situation, these people were building cars,

(33:59):
so there is actual learning how to build cars going
on here. But what Napoleon has done is basically set
up a car factory wherein people pay to work there,
like that's that's that's the business. That's the scam. Yeah,
this is his best one yet. Yeah, this is a
good This is mm hmm yeah, like there's an actual product.

(34:23):
People are presumably learning something, right, but you're making a
bunch of money and no, like presumably folks aren't realizing.
Are we just paying to work in a factory. Yeah.
I kind of want to do like a coal mining college.
Like I'll teach you how to mind coal. You just
got to mine coal. Look your mine. Uh no, you're

(34:45):
not doing it right, do it for another few years.
You need another few years of coal school. Yeah. It's
like if the Washington Post rebranded as a journalism school
and started charging people to write op eds. Wow. Yeah,
well yeah, now so yeah. Hill worked out a deal
with the Carter Motor Corporation in nineteen ten and nineteen eleven,

(35:08):
and basically they that's who he was making cars for.
So his students were producing vehicles that were then sold
by the Carter Motor Company. And you know, it's a
great deal for Carter because they get free labor and
Napoleon gets free money and the students. You know, you
might even think that it's semi legitimate because at least
the students are going to learn how to assemble cars
and they could presumably get a job elsewhere that they

(35:31):
didn't pay for. Yeah, that they didn't pay for. That
is an actual job, So presumably like this, this is
I would say, this is the high point of Napoleon
Hill's life as a person who did things that were
almost legitimate. Yeah, he's doing a classic capitalist scam here.
You know, it involves slavery, it involves new technology, and

(35:53):
it involves a lot of lying. So this is you know,
he's really he's got the three hmah together beautiful. But
like all great scams that involve slavery, it involves like
it's slavery where the people who are kind of slaves
don't think of themselves that way because they're paying for
the privilege. Like it is slavery voluntary servitude. So I

(36:16):
don't know, slavery. Might slavery is a bit far. He's
just tricking people into into being employees and telling them
but yeah, it's it's I don't know what you call
people in this situation. It's like running a film school
and like secretly having them make the new Like Disney
started a film school and secretly had people make new
Marvel movies and didn't pay them. Yeah, like like yeah,

(36:41):
so while he's running this kind of half scam car college.
Napoleon meets another woman named Elizabeth Horner. Now, his main
attraction to Elizabeth seemed to be that her family was rich.
They got hitched, and shortly thereafter, Napoleon's bogus car college collapses.
Now did everyone just kind of hard to say, Well,
it seems like what happened is that the Carter car

(37:02):
company who he was making vehicles for, fell apart, probably
because their vehicles were being assembled by people who didn't
know how to make cars. The one fatal flaw in
the perfect scam. Yeah, because Napoleon didn't know how to
make cars. So this is the issue. Were like, I
don't think, I don't think very functional cars were not

(37:23):
being produced by the sodom the school. So it was
also alleged that Napoleon had stolen a car from some
of his business partners, and he was arrested and his
college was put into receivership. Now none of this stopped
Napoleon from continuing to operate his automotive college. Instead, he
just changed the focus of the school from teaching people

(37:44):
how to build cars to teaching people how to sell cars. So, yep,
you got to be able to pivot if a scammers
how to pivot now. As time went on, the focus
of a schools drifted further and further away from teaching
any kind of marketable skill and words, the sort of
multi level marketing schemes we're very familiar with in the
twenty first century. That the motor article I've been citing

(38:06):
highlights an early exposee of hills scam, an article in
Motor World magazine titled pointing the easy route to get
rich Quickland. I went ahead and I found an archived
copy of that report, and I'd like to read it
now in my best old timy voice, because I really
enjoy it. Please. Astonishing and enticing means employed by the
greatest automobile college in the world to catch the wood

(38:27):
be Chaufur's coin Masters of gas Engines evolved in twelve
weeks and before graduation and after there's money, money everywhere,
if not a cent to spend fun, that's pretty good fun,
Sun times. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, uh so. The author
of this article wrote about Napoleon's revamped fake college that quote.
The whole business is so cunningly planned as to appeal

(38:49):
not only to the cupidity of the indolent naird Weell, who,
in his ignorance thinks he sees the gates of prosperities
standing ajar. But also to the ill informed but really
ambitious youth who has an honest desire to make something
of himself, and who is willing to devote his scanty
savings and infrequent spare hours to the task. Those those
near Duell's always screwing it up for the ambitious, the

(39:11):
ambitious do well. Yeah, now that that statement could apply
equally well to like Amway or Young Living Essential Oils
or any modern day MLM. Like this is before people
use the term multi level marketing. They weren't even calling
these pyramid schemes at this point. So Napoleon Hills really
fucking groundbreaking at this stuff. And like the actual business

(39:33):
practice that he evolved for his Auto college is like,
it's really groundbreaking. Basically, I'm just gonna read from the
article breaking it down. The very day you enroll, the
flow of language ripples on. You may note the Grace's
permission begin to send in the names of the young
men whom you think might be interested in our course.
It is estimated that half of such men will enroll

(39:55):
and as the school pays three dollars ahead for every
student brought in. According to this plan, it is suggested
that you should pay for your course several times over.
In this manner, he stops, he stops even selling, like
he says, like, Okay, now, this is a school where
you teach people how to sell cars. But the real
business is getting your friends to sign up for the college,
and then you get a cut of what they like.

(40:16):
It's it's well, you know, it's a thing, Robert. Everybody's
making money, So why are you mad? Well, I mean,
the only downside is that after like at a certain
like six weeks or so into this process, there's no
people less than six weeks. You know what. I don't
like to I don't like to think that far ahead.
I like to live in the now. That's actually why

(40:37):
I'm so wealthy and successful, because I'm not gonna you know,
these are negative thoughts, and I'm thinking prosperity, thinking for prosperity.
You're thinking and growing rich, I am, I am. You
should try thinking and growing right. On November eleventh, nineteen twelve,
Napoleon and Florence had their second baby boy, and the
second of their three children. This son was born deaf. Now,

(41:00):
according to Napoleon's biography, A Lifetime of Riches quote, the
baby boy was not only born deaf, he was completely
without ears. In the years to come, despite the intense
fighting with both family and school teachers, Napoleon would never
allow the boy to learn sign language. Oh my god,
it gets why he was determined to single handedly teach

(41:22):
his death son to speak and even to hear. As
the boy was growing up, Hill would talk to him
for hours with his lips pressed against Blair's cranial bone
at the base of the neck, just behind where his
ears would normally have been. Wow, that's so creepy, just
shouting into his kid's skull. Oh my god, Well, not
even shouting, just talk like that. Yeah, wow yeah. Now,

(41:46):
Napoleon's biography claims that this eventually worked out because Napoleon's
son had a weird bone deformity. Uh And like, yeah,
I'm gonna read from the biography. I want to note
clearly lies, like obvious lies. But this is how his
biographers with the Napoleon Hill Foundation explain why it was
good that he refused to teach his death son's sign language.

(42:09):
Years later, the boy did begin to hear, for it
was discovered that the bone itself was conducting sound to
his brain, and eventually he wore a specially designed hearing
aid that dramatically improved his hearing and speaking abilities. But
it was Napoleon who inspired Blair's desire to overcome his handicap.
His father never allowed his son to give up. He
didn't even allow Blair to consider himself handicapped. He taught
his son that deafness was simply an adversity that could

(42:31):
be triumphed over. Think and become not deaf if yeah,
think and grow ears. What the fuck? Wow? Yeah, that's
you know what's crazy? Is another way to quote overcome
the handicap of being deaf is to have sign language
and speak sign language. That's actually how you overcome that disability.

(42:54):
You know. It's so can you imagine, Oh my god,
I feel that kid, just having to sit with your
dad talking to your skull for hours. Yeah, and he's
probably talking all sorts of bullshit about how like being
deaf is your fault because you didn't think hard enough
about ears while you were growing or something. Your attitude
is not positive enough. Yeah, you're not deaf. You're not incredible,

(43:18):
and then to completely and to completely censor and mute
him his entire life, to give him no way to
express himself, while constantly telling him you're not deaf. I'll
say this, It's not as bad as it sounds, Sarah,
because Napoleon abandoned his children for the vast majority of
their lives, so he's not around all that much. You know,

(43:40):
I mean right now, that doesn't that seems like the
nicer thing to do. Yeah, I would say it's better
to be abandoned by Napoleon Hill than parent advice. Absolutely,
Now you know what it's not good to be abandoned
by Sarah. No, well anything, products and services that support
the show. They would never not abandon you, never, never, never,

(44:04):
they'd never abandon you products. We're back, so uh, as
I noted, Napoleon's college collapsed eventually, like all scams do,
and he moved his family in with his wife's family
to leach more money off of them. His wife's family

(44:25):
helped him get a job at a university by having
a family friend who was a judge write him a
letter of recommendation. The job was in sales and advertising,
but since Napoleon now had a piece of paper in
which a judge had written like that he was a
good guy. Napoleon started using this to claim to be
an attorney at law. Even his own biographers admit this. Yeah,

(44:45):
even his own biographers admit this highly exaggerated claim looked
impressive on paper, but there is no record of his
having performed legal services for anyone. Hey, man, I'm a
self taught attorney. Okay, oh you want a license? Well
how about this. I got a note from a judge,
says I'm cool. Yeah, it doesn't even say I'm a lawyer,
but would anyone who's not a judge, No, a lawyer,

(45:07):
who's not a lawyer, No a judge. I'm just swee,
just imagining. It's like a beautiful like a gilded looks
like a diploma, But then in Gothic fond instead of
saying his name, it just says this guy's chill. And
then there's a judge signature, this guy's chill, guess, judge,
judge at judge. If anyone listening to this is a judge,

(45:28):
hit me up on Twitter at I write, okay, and
I'll give you my mailing address and you can send
me a piece of paper that says, I'm chill because
I would love to practice law, just as Napoleon Hill didn't. Yeah,
that sounds like a whot. Tape it to my shirt. Hey, guys,
I'm representing myself in court. Yeah. So Napoleon Hill worked

(45:49):
at that university for a couple of months before quitting
in nineteen fifteen and getting involved with a candy company,
which he and his partners renamed the Betsy Ross Candy Shop.
Hill was quickly pushed out of the judge by his partners,
likely because they realized he was a gigantic con man
who was stealing from them, stealing, stealing money. I think
they bought this company together and he was probably just

(46:11):
stealing from the company because he's Napoleon Hill. We don't
know exactly what went down. Thinking about growing rich. Look,
he's not stealing, He's manifesting wealth from the cash register
to his pockets. Yeah, we don't know exactly what happens
happened there, but Hill claims that his business partners had

(46:34):
him quote arrested on false charges. He never specified what
those charges were, but he claims he was forced to
hand over his stakes in the company so Napoleon Hill
would spend most of the nineteen teens, leaping from one
failure to another. In September nineteen fifteen, he created another
fake school, the George Washington Institute, which he claimed was
dedicated to teaching the principles of success. Part of this

(46:56):
class was apparently having his students write hundreds of letters
to newspapers supporting Napoleon Hill's race for a seat in
the US Congress. Now, he never ran for Congress, but
it seems so like, wait, we don't know why he
did this. This seems like he was just trying another scam,
but it didn't get off the ground. Yeah, he just
had so many scams going yeah, yeah, what what a
what a weird move. It's like, you know, maybe maybe

(47:18):
it's so when he if he was like, if I
run later, I can be like, look at all this
grassroots support I have. Yeah. I think a guy like Napoleon, like,
you know, abs always be scamming. Yeah, So, like, you know,
while you got your main scam you're working on, you're
trying to see little other scam because not all scams,
not all scams will last. So you got to plant
a lot of not all scams will last. You got

(47:39):
to diversify, right, because I was like, Wow, he's already
running He's already running a school scam, right, He's already
getting money out of that. Now he's gonna like let
that feed into a larger, more legitimate scam of being
a politician. Wow, this is like really good. But I
guess he couldn't. He couldn't hack it, Like the George
Washington Institute is his day job, and having people write

(48:00):
letters to newspapers telling him to run for Congress is
his equivalent of a four oh one can. Like, that's
like his that's like his security. Like he's putting some
scam away for later. Yeah, exactly exactly. This was my kids. Yeah,
uh no, he wouldn't leave anything of his fucking kids.
This is Napoleon Hill we're talking about. They can think
and grow rich themselves. Uh. Next, I'm gonna quote again

(48:23):
from Gizmoto's Matt Novak quote. Some students of the George
Washington Institute would accuse Hill's unaccredited school of fraud, and
it too had a very short life. According to his biographers.
He'll return the favor of one student's criticism by alerting
the FBI if the German American kids suspicious activities. The
student was supposedly arrested for the duration of World War One.
Oh my fucking god, such a piece of shit. Wow, damn.

(48:47):
He does not play at all. No, he does not.
Just if you're like, hey, this school is a scam,
He's like, I'm sending you to jail a spy. Wow.
Cool guys. He uses his children, immigrants, all people trying
to learn a trade. Definitely. I have not run across

(49:12):
any racism in this story. So, like, as far as
I know, Napoleon Hill would have scammed a black man
as well as a white man. You know, Napoleon didn't
see color. Just green baby, just green baby, that's the
only color. Yeah, although it's also possible he just only
fleeced white people because he completely ignored that anyone else existed.

(49:33):
That's pretty I really don't know anything about his attitude
on race relations. I mean to assume not we can.
I think we can safely safely surmise now. The George
Washington Institute quickly collapsed, and by nineteen seventeen, Napoleon Hill
was trying to sue the Illinois General Railroad because he
said the lighting on their cars was bad. For his
eyesight and had caused him to need glasses, so he

(49:54):
gets a little bit desperate. Yeah, he's a really diversity,
but not in a great way. Yeah, he's this has
been like a sad arc you get from like this
legitimately kind of cunning automotive college, like suing the railroad
for fucking up your eye. Yeah, I mean ambulance chasers next,
you know. Yeah. By nineteen eighteen, the Better Business Bureau

(50:17):
attacked him after revealing that his success school was really
just a barely camouflaged stock selling scheme. The magazine Postage
reported that quote. While it appeared on the face of
the operation that he sought students for the educational course
he offered, there was evidence that his chief object was
to sell stock in the enterprise. Napoleon apparently convinced people
to buy stocks in his college by claiming it had
a capital value of over one hundred thousand dollars. In reality,

(50:39):
the entirety of the enterprise was worth around twelve hundred
dollars at best. Napoleon was once again yeah yeah, he
was arrested again, and this arrest seems to have convinced
his long suffering wife to finally cut ties with him.
All these failures in a row certainly had a deleterious
effect on Hill's morale, as you might imagine. The New
York Times noted quote hilbergard such setbacks as a test

(51:01):
of his faith, but he was not immune to despair.
After another one of his business failures, he confessed, I
had spent the better portion of my life chasing a rainbow.
I had begun to place myself in the category of
charlatans who offers a remedy for failure which they themselves
cannot successfully apply. Wow. A lot of self awareness for
such a piece of shit. That is a shocking amount
of It is also insane that at this point in

(51:22):
his life he's like, people think I'm a charlatan. You guys,
well better start another success. Be honest with me. Does
everyone think I'm a charlatan? Yes? Yes, he says that,
like as he's setting up like a shell game or
something like that in the middle of the like downtown. Yeah,

(51:45):
do you want to buy some lumber? By the way?
Trust me now. By nineteen nineteen, Napoleon Hill had gotten
tired of jumping from scam to scam, sometimes a step
of the ahead of the law and often several steps
behind it. He decided that from now on, his life
was going to be different, and his first step to
winning that different step was to weaponize the Golden Rule. Yes,

(52:06):
the Golden rule do unto others as you would have
them do unto you. On its surface, it seems like
one of the least problematic things a human being could
believe or advocate. But our friend Napoleon found a way
to make it problematic. He founded Golden Rule Magazine, which
he used to outline his new philosophy on life. This
is Napoleon Hill's philosophy on the Golden Rule. Quote. It

(52:26):
seems ridiculous to refer to the Golden Rule as a weapon,
but that's just what it is. A weapon that no
resistance on earth can withstand. The Golden Rule is a
powerful weapon in business because there is so little competition
in its application. What a psychopath? Yeah yeah, so, Matt
Novak explains. Quote. Hill's understanding of the Golden Rule meant
that people would become indebted to you for providing something

(52:48):
to them. It was a weapon rather than do unto
others as you would have them do unto you. He
believed that by providing something to someone or simply showing
them kindness, they owed you something in return. So that's
how the Golden Rule works for the Oh my god. Wow. Okay, yeah,
all right, yeah cool. Now. Golden Rule magazine was founded

(53:09):
using money from a couple with the last name of
Cox and they were a wealthy couple who owned the
General Oil Company, and they were looking to drum up
more investors for their business. And that was kind of
the purpose that they had magazine that Hill was running.
So their plan was for Hill to basically use his magazine.
I hate this so much, Oh god. Their plan was

(53:33):
for Hill to use his magazine to convince people that
General Oil was a great thing to invest. It's an
oil company starting a magazine. That's like remember what Jesus said,
Here's how you can use it to make yourself rich. Yeah.
In April of nineteen nineteen, Hill wrote an article in
his magazine titled an Interesting man and his wife the Coxes,

(53:55):
who have made a million dollars for other people. Wow.
The article that the Coxes were using a million dollars
of their profits to fund scholarships for American veganarilanthropy is good. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
this was untrue. Obviously, there was no million dollars set
aside for veterans, and Hill and the Coxes would be

(54:15):
sued by the FTC in October that that year for
fraudy and advertising. But being sued for fraud did not
stop Napoleon Hill from producers this magazine about the Golden Rule. Yeah,
in May of nineteen twenty two, he awarded a chiropractor
by the name of B. J. Palmer what he called
Hill's Golden Medal. Hill claimed that the award was based

(54:36):
one hundred and fifty thousand votes cast by subscribers of
his magazine, who, among them from places far away as Japan, Italy,
Australia and England. Woodrow Wilson came in second place. What now,
there were no subscribers course Golden Hill Magazine, just a couple,
I mean, maybe a couple of dozen. This was all
a lie. But this is like what he was getting
at when he with his Golden Rule philosophy. It was

(54:57):
basically the way that he actually acted on. That is,
he would present awards to prominent citizens, politicians and celebrities
and then use that opportunity to like get pictures with
them and talk with them and try to get them
to either invest in his scams or to let him
use their name and credibility so he could trick other
people into scams. Wow, so that's what that's how. That's
the golden rule as used by Napoleon Hill. Yeah. Well

(55:21):
you know, now we call it swag baby. You give
him some free stuff. They got agream about it. Now
it's just being an influencer. Yeah. Yeah. Napoleon Hill was
like the original influencer. Yeah. In nineteen twenty two, Napoleon
Hill used this tactic to start up a partnership with
t O Ted, a prominent chaplain and humanitarian. Hill and

(55:42):
Teed started a charity that, on its face provided educations
to prisoners in Ohio to help rehabilitate. Well, don't tell
me what it real. I don't want to. Yeah, it's
please Yeah. Yeah. So Napoleon would go from town to
town raising money for this program, telling newspapers like, what
we're trying to do here is mentally meet these men

(56:02):
who are shut off from the outside world. We're going
to prove to them that they have something to look
forward to, then put in their hands the tools which
they can carve out their future. Yes, absolutely, yes, I
the oppressor, am going to give you the oppressed to
the tools you need to escape my oppression. That's what
I'm going to do. Because I'm really good and nice.
I wouldn't call Napoleon an oppressor just because he's been

(56:24):
arrested a shitload of times and spent a lot of
time in jail himself, like because he's a criminal convey Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But of course there was no actual charity. He was
essentially running like the mono rail scheme from The Simpsons,
but with a charity aimed at raising money to provide
education to prisoners. In Shelby, Ohio. In nineteen twenty three,

(56:45):
Napoleon collected more than one thousand dollars from kind hearted
locals who were happy to raise fund Steve convicts a
chance at a better life. A lot of the money
came from a group of local school children who raised
the cash because they were just so compassionate about the
convicts that he'll had, you know, pain picture of how
who's going to help them. Hill spent much of the
nineteen twenties following the same basic pattern. He'd go from

(57:05):
town to town sweet talk decent folk into donating money
to help these people, and then he'd skip town, never
to be seen again. By the late nineteen twenties, however,
this scam had run its course. Napoleon's wife he had
a new wife. Now Florence was starting to get pissed
off with him. He wound up in Philadelphia, broke, and
befriended a publisher named Pelton. And this is sort of

(57:29):
when Napoleon's life starts to change. So the late twenties,
like he's been run out of most of like the
Midwest and the South and is hiding out in Philadelphia.
He's got a new wife and she too has some
family money, but she's pissed at him and kim befriends
of public. Yeah, I can't imagine why. So he befriends

(57:50):
a publisher, a guy named Pelton, and convinces this guy
that he has a great idea for a new self
help book called the Law of Success. So Napoleon started
to weave a fantastic story for Pelton, claiming that back
in nineteen oh eight, he'd sat down with Andrew Carnegie,
one of the wealthiest and most successful men in America,
had been handed a sacred task to collect all of

(58:12):
the success secrets of the greatest men in history and
to still them into a sort of science of success. Yes,
it's like the divincion code, but for success. Yeah, exactly.
The success code should be obvious under the loof yeah
he's well, he's still alive at this point. Well, so, yeah,

(58:35):
as should be obvious to everybody. This meeting never took place,
Like he there's zero evidence whatsoever that Napoleon Hill ever
met Andrew carry But do you mean there's no evidence
Napoleon Hill said it happened. He did say it happened.
And here's how his biography describes this, uh like historic

(58:56):
meeting between Andrew Carnegie and Napoleon Hill, the two greatest
minds in the history of success. Quote. The richest heritage
a young man can have is to be born into poverty.
Carnegie told him he saw his own humble origins not
as a deterrent to success, but rather as the inspiration
to overcome all obstacles and attain seemingly impossible goals. If
one had a strong sense of self worth, Carnegie claimed,

(59:17):
no degree of impoverishment could hold one back. Individuals who
achieve outstanding success are not born with some peculiar quality
of genius, not possessed by others. Confidence is a state
of mind. It is under the control of the individual,
not an inborn trait, and the starting point for developing
that self confidence is the definiteness of purpose. This was
Carnegie's cardinal rule in his philosophy of personal achievement. The

(59:38):
man who knows exactly what he wants, has a definite
plan for getting it, and is actually engaged in carrying
out that plan has no difficulty in believing his own
ability to succeed. Only the man who procrastinates soon loses
confidence and winds up doing nothing. But what happens Hill asked,
When a man knows what he wants, has a plan,
put it, and puts it into action, and meets with failure,
doesn't that destroy his confidence? Carnegie smiled, I hope you

(59:59):
would ask that, because it is important to understand what
I'm about to tell you. I believe that every failure
carries with it and the circumstances of the failure itself
the seed of an equivalent advantage. If you examine the
lives of truly great leaders, you will discover that their
success is an exact proportion to their mastery of failures.
Life has a way of developing strength and wisdom and
individuals through temporary defeat. So you can see why people

(01:00:20):
would find this compelling. Yeah, it kind of leaves out
all of the exploitation of other people that went along
with Andrew Carnegie's financial success. Yes, completely, Yes, And it
also again it puts the onus of failure on the
people who are not materially success. Right, if you're not rich,
then it's because you're not good. It's just you're not

(01:00:40):
brave enough or good. Yeah, you're just not and it's
a thing. It's not your fault. But you're also just
not good or brave or smart. So if you were,
then you would be richer. Because that's what that's what
I did, And it was all because of me. You
could have chosen, and because I to be real hard
about success every night, I thought of itout it. Yeah,

(01:01:02):
why didn't you think thinking about if you did, your
kids would have bread? And again, I just want to
make it clear, I don't think Andrew Carnegie ever exprastinating
like this. This is all Napoleon Hill putting words into
Carnegie's mouth. I don't know anything about the man, but
I'm sure he didn't say this shit. So next, according

(01:01:23):
to Hill, Carnegie explained to him that in his conversations
with other rich men like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison,
he'd learned that all wealthy men had similar stories. They
had all risen to greatness via trial and error and
totally earned the wealth the universe had bestowed upon those
Carnegie told Hill that he'd become convinced that the average
person could gain wealth by studying the lives of great

(01:01:43):
businessmen and replicating their tactics. All that was necessary was
for some enterprising soul to go out talk to the
great leaders and successful men of the world translate their
wisdom into an easy to read guide for the average reader. Wow.
So this is the ask that Andrew Carnegie. You know what,
he didn't ask for. It was merely bestowed upon him

(01:02:05):
as a mission. It was thrust upon thrust go out,
you know, like an explorer, collect the gem secrets of
business success and uh, and then bring them to the
common man so that we can all become as successful
in money as him. A con man. Yeah, He's like,
I want you to be the Indiana Jones of rich people,

(01:02:28):
and like like of rich people to call the Golden
idols of how to run businesses from their temples of Okay,
that's yeah anyway, uh so yeah, yeah that this is
like so Hill claims that like Andrew Carnegie sets him
this task, and that Carnegie tells him it's going to
take twenty years to complete the mission, and Carnegie is

(01:02:48):
like old like elder who lives on a mountain and
is like, my sign, you must collect the secrets I
give you. That's exactly the story that that Hill tells.
And conveniently enough, he pitches this book in nineteen twenty eight,
which is twenty years after he claims he had his
fake meeting with Andrew Court. He spent the last twenty

(01:03:08):
years not tricking people into building cars for him, but
collecting success secrets. Yeah, in between fleecing small towns out
of their spare money and running multiple fake colleges, he
was interviewing the great thinkers of the world about success.

(01:03:29):
So next, according to Hill's biography quote, Hill confessed that
he not only shared Carnegie's utopian vision, but believed it
could be accomplished. That was exactly what Carnegie wanted to hear.
With his usual bluntness, he turned to Hill and without
for any further preamble inquired if he felt equal to
the challenge of undertaking this great work himself. Hill was
honored and amazed that Carnegie saw in him someone worthy

(01:03:50):
of the task, but Napoleon Hill believed he was. It
took him less than half a minute to accept the offer.
In fact, it took exactly twenty nine seconds, according to Carnegie,
who had taken out his style watch and was timing
Hill's response. Afterwards, he told Hill that he had given
him a maximum of sixty seconds to come to a decision.
If it had taken even one second longer than that,
Carnegie said, the offer would have been withdrawn because a

(01:04:11):
man who cannot reach a decision promptly once he has
all the necessary facts cannot be depended upon to carry
through any decision he may make. It's bad to think
through your decisions, that's true. Yes, it's definitely. It's bad
to spend more than a minute, yes, deciding whether to
take on an unpaid twenty years. I mean, this is
why I'm not rich, is because I think about decisions
a lot. You know, I don't know, if you know,

(01:04:34):
could I have accepted such a daunting task, The daunting
task of going around to old rich men and asking
them how they got so rich. I don't know, man,
I don't know if I have the strength of character
for that. No. No, that's why you know you're not
Napoleon Hill. You lack the strength of character to kidnap
your own child, run a fake automotive school, and steal

(01:04:55):
lumber man. That's all wrong. I got to read the book. Yeah, yeah,
that's why I'm telling this story so other people can
follow in Napoleon's I've done sort of what he did,
and I'm taking all of the wisdom of his life
and condensing it for you. Yeah. So, yeah, everything I've
just read you that's the story that Napoleon Hill told Pelton,

(01:05:16):
the guy who you know, the publisher that he befriended,
and it was it's a good story. Like, that's a great,
great idea for a bo So the thing about I
only had thirty seconds to decide and he would have
with you know, that's just like a real heightening of
the stakes. That he was a good a good storyteller. Yeah.
Now there was only one problem because he had Pelton
as soon as Pelton Pelton being a smart guy, like

(01:05:38):
here's the story and He's like, oh, yeah, I could
sell a book with that with that premise. But there's
an issue, which is that Napoleon Hill is destitute and
if he'd spent the last twenty years learning all of
the secrets of success, he would probably not be destitute.
So Napoleon had to find a way to pretend to
have some money in a meeting with this guy, or

(01:06:00):
he's been training his whole life for this, Yeah, exactly.
So we're gonna talk about how he did that and
Napoleon's first major financial success in part two. But right now,
Sorrow June, would you plug some pluggables because it is
the end of this Absolutely, I will plug my website
Heysarrow June dot com h E y s A r

(01:06:22):
A j U n E. You can see where I
am doing comedy shows. You can come to my comedy
show High Priestess if you're in La High Priestesscomedy dot com.
I'm on Venmo and Instagram at heysar at June. I'm
on the Daily Zeitgeist sometimes and this is a great podcast.
Thank you for listening to it. I'm Robert Evans. You
can find me on Twitter at I write. Okay, you
can find this podcast and all the sources for it

(01:06:43):
at behind the Bastards dot com. You can find us
on the Gram and the twits at at bastards pod
and those are the only places in the world that
you can find us, So don't don't go look in
anywhere else. Mountain, use them into the success you seecret.
If you can track me down on the top of

(01:07:04):
the mountain where I live, I will quest, I will,
I will. I will put you with a quest of
talking to all of the worst dictators in the world
and distilling their secrets of success. Uh. And once you
put all the success in the crown, then you will
manifest richness, but not for you, for some other guy,
for for another guy who's a bud. Yeah, all right,

(01:07:28):
that's the episode. Uh. We'll be back on Thursday with
part two. H