Robert Evans and Sarah June expose Napoleon Hill as a prolific grifter who fabricated his mentorship with Andrew Carnegie to invent "The Secret." They detail his fraudulent schemes, including the Automobile College of Washington pyramid scheme, a fake stock venture exposed by the Better Business Bureau in 1918, and a charity scam in Shelby, Ohio. The hosts condemn his abusive treatment of his deaf son and his history of fleeing creditors, arguing that Hill's legacy of deception fundamentally corrupted the modern self-help industry. Ultimately, this analysis suggests that the very principles of "positive thinking" are rooted in calculated fraud rather than genuine wisdom. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Mostly Human: A Guaranteed Human Story00:01:50
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Think and Grow Rich Origins00:13:25
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's murdering my chickens?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, 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, comedian and director, the Los Angeles-based Sarah June.
Hello, thank you for having me.
Thank you for not attacking me over that pretty bad introduction, which is 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 goal.
This is sort of a dark podcast, so I feel like I can be very gray with 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 I've ever talked 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 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?
No, I'm thinking of Buzz Aldrich.
Okay, let's just leave that at that.
I'll just 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 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?
And he was 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, 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 the specifics.
You got to be specific.
You know what I mean?
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 a years-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 person to make fun of.
And then time started being like, what do you know about Will Wheaton?
Did he attack somebody?
And I was like, oh, no, this is not.
I didn't want to.
Yeah, you can't do that anymore.
Yeah.
But then he wound up kind of defending a guy who did do a bunch of fucked up shit.
Well, there you go.
You were right all along.
Yeah.
I'm a hero.
Is he a man?
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 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 or family member who has this somewhere on their bookshelves.
It's like 100%.
It's proto-the secret.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's very, very much proto-the secret.
This is my problem with Marianne 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 think and grow rich.
Yeah, and that's part of why I want to talk about Think and Grow Rich today, because Napoleon Hill sort of founded the, he wasn't like the first self-help author.
Right.
He wasn't like the first business advice author, but he 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 the idea of the law 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 and 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 affirmations can materially alter the nature of reality.
Magic.
That's magic.
It's magic.
It's magic.
But it's magic for people who like to do it.
Who won't say magic.
Yeah, because they're Christian or whatever.
They just like don't want to seem weird.
Yeah, or they're atheists and they want to come up with a scientific justification.
Like new thought contains multitudes.
There's Christian chunks of it.
There's atheist chunks of it.
The secret you can't do.
The Christian chunks are trying so hard.
The Christian chunks are trying so hard to not be considered witchcraft.
It's pretty funny.
Yeah, one of my favorite things is like people who are like hardcore fundamentalist Christian and hate witchcraft, but also talk the same way that my friends who are into Aleister Crowley do about certain things.
Like Alex Jones was just talking about on Infowars how Donald Trump's 4th 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 badty.
But this is less badty 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 part of how the physical world works.
Right.
It's magic, but for sad nerds.
Create reality.
Magic for sad nerds.
So The Secret would be one example of a modern-day descendant of the New Thought movement that's sort of on the more secular, not necessarily atheistic, but certainly secular Oprah side of things.
The secret's meant for anybody.
Yes.
Now, prosperity gospel Christianity would be another descendant of the new thought movement.
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 gospel Christians are the folks who essentially will get on their TV stations and beg little old ladies to take on credit card debt in order to make thousands 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 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.
You're like, you got to invest in God's love right now.
This is going to climb.
Trust me, baby.
This is going to skyrocket.
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, 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 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 was a lot of that.
I remember, if I'm not mistaken, that's the only time Jesus beat somebody with a whip.
He was real pissed.
Yeah.
Anyway, so prosperity gospel Christianity is wacky and very ripe for parody, but it's also really popular.
And it's somewhat different.
It's also incredibly destructive.
Yeah, yeah, very destructive and very popular.
About 17% of all American Christians adhere to prosperity theology in some form or another.
Wow.
Roughly 1 million Americans attend prosperity gospel preaching churches every single Sunday.
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 1800s, and the name New Thought embodied the belief that, of course, thoughts could create reality without the need for prayer or worship.
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 makes clocks.
Let's not forget he's a guy who lived in Maine and makes clocks.
I already don't trust him.
I feel like they hand you a clockmaking kit as soon as you come out of the womb named Phineas.
Like, well, here's your fucking clock.
Get used to it.
Yeah.
He focused, like, his teachings focused on 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 Eddy, who went on to found the Christian science religious tradition.
Christian scientists are the folks with the nasty science.
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 in using medicine because they see it as being against God's will.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Now, I've got a 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.
I love having conversations.
Yeah, I love conversations too.
Wow, this is a great conversation.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah.
Their article notes that by the 1890s, New Thought had morphed away from healing disease and onto helping people achieve success through positive thinking.
So this 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 explanation for the reasoning of New Thought believers.
Quote, since human thought had creative power, negative thoughts materialized into 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 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.
Yep.
Yeah, because if you just have to think yourself into a better situation, then you're kind of blaming people who are poor and 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 social class is like not entirely your choice.
Which is kind of, I thought that was sort of the whole point of class was that you didn't really get a choice, you know, and if you wanted to jump, it was going to 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 the new thought movement, this shift in the new thought movement towards this sort of more toxic attitude happened in the Gilded Age, 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's shift towards individual prosperity is Ralph Waldo Treen's In Tune with the Infinite.
A popular writer and lecturer, Treen taught that one's ability to channel positive thoughts would lead to success.
Published in 1897, the book sold millions of copies and gained Treen a wide following, including from the automobile industrialist Henry Ford.
So Treen 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.
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.
The Murder Mystery at City Hall00:12:17
Hmm.
Yeah.
Hold on, I'm thinking really hard about everyone Venmoing me.
$6.
I'm thinking about, yeah, how bad I want to.
I'm manifesting so hard.
Yeah.
Is it Worgen?
I got to check my Venmo.
Check it out.
I'll check it at the end of the episode at Hayesara June.
Venmo me.
$6.
If you believe in the secret.
Yeah, your seed donations to Sarah June will be given back in kind by the gods of Yeah, the seed donations that you give to me will manifest in my purchase of weed and that is how your your investment will blossom here.
In fact, me getting high is in a way a proof of God through your donation.
So prove God by donating marijuana money to Sarah June.
Yeah.
From your faith.
So, yeah.
I think it's time now to get into our main subject for today.
I just thought some of that background would be useful.
Very helpful.
So Oliver Napoleon Hill was born in 1883, the son of an unlicensed dentist 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 lights.
You know, he had a bunch of like bottles of like pure ethanol that he kept teeth in.
Just a crazy lab in the shed, just preserving all kinds of gums.
No wonder his son was such a freak.
I'm a big fan of like efficient synergy, you know, researching this podcast, but listening 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 and work as a painkiller.
Yeah, dude, I mean, he sounds like he would get you super fucked up and then when 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 Dr. Hill, the doctor dentist.
No, no, but they did okay.
They were, you know, I don't know if you'd even call them middle class, but they weren't impoverished.
They grew up in rural Virginia, yeah, Wise County.
As a child, Oliver's family called.
Did you say Witz County?
Wise.
Okay.
But it was a pretty white county, I think.
You don't say?
Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to 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, Hill's grandfather was a printer.
His father became a self-taught dentist and treated his neighbors until the state licensing authorities got wind of his activities.
He's a self-taught dentist.
A self-taught dentist, and he got shut down for doing it.
But then he went to dental school at age 40 and practiced legally.
Wow.
He was like, I'm going straight.
Yeah.
I'm going straight to be a dentist.
Did he still illegally make moonshine even after becoming a girl?
Oh, he must have.
You know, you don't stop making moonshine.
That's just the hobby.
That's a calling.
Yeah.
Speaking of divine intervention.
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, 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, he 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 in Virginia with a handgun, firing at whatever he saw.
Now, he was 12 at the time when he was doing this.
So, like, that's 12-year-old Napoleon wandering around the woods with a handgun, shooting stuff all the time.
That sounds like Virginia.
Yeah, that sounds like Virginia.
So, Miss Martha comes into the picture as his stepmom, and she sees this kid, like, living half feral in the trees with a gun and decides maybe he could use some parenting.
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 that conversation never happened.
Napoleon Hill, like, that's based 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 his lives.
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 York Times article published in 1995, which is good but fairly short, and a Gizmodo article by Matt Novak called All-American Huckster.
An article would be kind of an unfair way to describe what Mr. 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 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 kind of highlight Mr. Novak's work up front because he did some great work.
And I don't think I haven't really found any other journalist who's dug into Napoleon Hill to this kind of extent.
So 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 biographers write, quote, 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 job.
Great.
We're seeing a great career.
He's a startup pattern.
Yeah.
Now, Hill claims to have first gotten married when he was 15 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 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 got hoodwinked by her.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who knows?
Yeah.
So, Oliver Napoleon Hill graduated high school at age 17 and went to a business school until 1901.
When he was 18, he started to work with a coal magnate named Rufus Ayers.
In his article for Gizmodo, Matt Novak writes, quote, Ayers was said to be impressed with Hill, who, according to the official biography, compensated for his youth and 5'6 stature by adopting the appearance of a serious young executive.
Ramrod straight posture, impeccable 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'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, wow.
Yeah, this is this is the kind of, this is like a young Republican kind of guy, you know?
Yeah, he, 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 D.C. in the middle of the summer.
Yeah, yeah.
But also, like, as a 17-year-old, this is, you know, the guy 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 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 constantly.
But I should always wear a suit.
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 wasn't anything.
There was a lot of weird bullshit in papers.
Yeah, no, 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, you were supposed to tell people we know a lot of stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It's he, he's, he's from the beginning, not somebody to whom the truth is 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 to Napoleon Hill.
It's like, oh, that's a good idea.
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 Richlands, Virginia.
Now, the first major tests of his professional acumen, other than his ability to wear a suit, came when the manager 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 bellhop 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 act of outright murder.
We just really don't know.
But the New York Times reports what happened 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 19.
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 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 $15,000 to $20,000 or perhaps more without the slightest indication that I had taken the money.
You absolutely took the money if you make the point of noting, like, I could have stolen all this money, but I didn't.
Nobody, the kind of thing that would steal money from Napoleon.
Don't bring that up.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm going to guess he stole some money.
But Hill claims that in gratitude for his honesty, Rufus Ayers promoted him to manage the coal mine.
Yeah, that's a thing bankers do.
Reward honesty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One way or the other, Napoleon Hill covers up a murder and winds up in charge of a coal mine.
And makes out with, you know, maybe $15,000.
By his own estimate.
Yeah, by his own estimate.
Yeah, maybe $15,000.
So, yeah, that's the story so far.
This guy is like Pete Buttigiege so far, where everything he just keeps moving upward, you know, and he's like, aren't I great at this?
And everyone's like, I don't know, but sure.
And then he just keeps going up.
Maybe.
I don't know much about Pete Buttigieg.
Oh, he's kind of like he was like a top of his class, you know, like went to an IV league, like did really good grades, you know, 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 kept sliding into the right place at the right time with the right lie.
And 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.
Wangles: Luck vs. Covering Up00:03:23
Like who hasn't?
I don't know who I was.
But yeah, that's where he is right now.
So, we're going to break 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.
I can't wait.
So, after the break, products.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Will Farrell's Capitalist Scam00:16:10
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice and sells, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back, and we found who Napoleon Hill does remind us a little of, and it's Roger Stone.
Like, yeah, I think 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, we'll tell the rest of his story so that you can understand why I think that.
So, on June 17th, 1903, Napoleon Hill married a woman named Edith Whitman.
Their daughter, Edith Whitman Hill, was born two years later in 1905.
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 1907, 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, 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 1906 business trip.
Quote, soon after we reached Bluefield, West Virginia, we went to a house of ill fame between eight and nine o'clock of that night.
And Mr. Oliver N. 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 12 o'clock that night.
Both of the women who stayed at this house were of easy virtue, and Mr. 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 took to the room.
That's pretty clear.
Yep.
Pretty clear.
This is 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.
Great way to find that out.
Yeah.
Now, I think she probably guessed, although he was, again, never around.
Right.
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 1908, he wrote 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 we'll get to that.
I don't want to bury the lead.
He does briefly.
It does 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 Hill was a better father than L. Ron Hubbard.
There are worse things you can do with a baby than give them to their stepmother.
Yeah, worse things you can do with a baby that you steal.
Yep.
Stole a baby.
That you steal.
Look, if he's not abandoning babies, he's stealing them.
Yeah, that's this guy.
He mostly abandons babies.
Fairness to Napoleon, he only stole 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 L. Ron Hubbard.
Yeah, no, that guy sucks.
Yeah, 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 dwell too much on this.
I think that's too.
I don't know why I try to evaluate them.
Yeah.
You know, we want somebody to be the good guy here, but it turns out they're all bad.
I shouldn't look for the good guy in L. Ron Hubbard.
Right.
This podcast isn't called Behind 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 dalliances with prostitutes and habitual infidelity.
Now, so, yeah, the marriage splits up.
And at this point in time, Napoleon's timber business isn't exactly doing well either.
Because it turns out that rather than being a business, it was just kind of a scam.
So Napoleon bought $10,000 to $20,000 worth of lumber using credit from companies around the country.
So he would buy the lumber and sign a contract saying he would pay them back later with interest.
And then he would just take the lumber and sell it individually to people for cash.
But he had no point actually paying back the credit.
Yeah, essentially.
Yeah.
He was just driving around being like, you guys want some fucking wood?
Yeah, he would sell the wood for cash and just keep moving so that nobody could ever.
Wow.
Yeah.
That was the whole plan.
Oh, where'd you get that wood?
Oh, it fell off a truck.
He was selling it on the street.
Yeah.
Fell off a truck.
It's really advanced.
Yeah, he's not a great con man, but he's a constant one.
Yeah.
He's like making up dudes and telling everybody and fucking stealing wood.
This is the most traceable crime.
Wood thief and fake journalist at this point is his resume.
And stole a baby once.
Yeah.
So by late 1908, many of his creditors had realized they were being fleeced.
Matt Novak cites 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 Acrey Hill Lumber Company, is causing considerable anxiety among creditors of the concern and the state and several other lumber sections.
Hill has not been at his office since September 8th.
Warrants 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 check fraud as well.
Hill spent the fall and winter in 1908 on the run, dodging law enforcement and creditors as he gradually made his way to Washington, D.C.
Well, this is what I'm saying.
You can't be weighed down by a baby when you're dodging creditors, you know, running up and down the country.
The wife, is she 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 Napoleon Hill because he's a new man now.
Right, right, right.
He's changed.
Just like disease.
That'll make it harder to be found.
Yeah.
So 1909, when he winds up in D.C., is a time in which cars were still new and very exciting to just about everybody.
There was a lot of money to be made in the nascent automobile industry.
And more importantly for Mr. Hill, there was a lot of money to be made in lying to people about the nascent 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 or 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 in 1909 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 1909.
Already fake.
Already not a college.
Just a club.
Oh, yeah.
Not a college.
It's a club.
What is he going to?
I don't know what is automobile.
For a 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 both a college.
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 teach you how to build cars with six weeks of training.
Oh, like a coding boot camp, but for cars.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Like he's promising graduates that they'll be able to earn between $75 and $200 per week, which is like really good money.
Totally.
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.
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.
What a good one.
This is his best one yet.
Yeah, this is a good scam.
This sounds like legal.
Yeah.
Like there's an actual product.
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 mine coal.
You just got to mine coal.
Give me all the coal you mine.
No, you're 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.
Ah, well.
Yeah.
Now, so, yeah, Hill worked out a deal with the Carter Motor Corporation in 1910 and 1911.
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 was 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 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.
He's doing a classic capitalist scam here.
You know, it involves slavery.
It involves new technology.
And it involves a lot of lying.
So this is, you know, he's really, he's got the three together.
Beautiful scam.
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.
Right, right.
Like, it is voluntary servitude.
So, I don't know.
Slavery might, slavery is a bit far.
He's just tricking people into being employees and telling them.
But yeah, 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 if Disney started a film school and secretly had people make new Marvel movies and didn't pay them.
Yeah.
Like, yeah.
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 bogused car college collapses.
Now, well, it seems like what happened is that the Carter Car 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.
We're like, I don't think very functional cars were not being produced by this automotive 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 how to build cars to teaching people how to sell cars.
So you got to be able to pivot as a scammer.
Logical legs.
Now, as time went on, the focus of a school drifted further and further away from teaching any kind of marketable skill and towards the sort of multi-level marketing schemes we're very familiar with in the 21st century.
That Gizmodo article I've been citing highlights an early expose of Hill's scam, an article in Motor World magazine titled, Pointing the Easy Route to Get Rich Quick Land.
I went ahead and I found an archived copy of that report, and I'd like to read it now in my best old-timey voice because I really enjoy it.
Please.
Astonishing and enticing means employed by the greatest automobile college in the world to catch the would-be chauffeur's coin.
Masters of gas engines evolved in 12 weeks and before graduation and after.
There's money, money everywhere, if not a cent to spend.
That's fun.
Fun subtitle.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
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 not only to the cupidity of the indolent ne'er-do-well who in his ignorance thinks he sees the gates of prosperity 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 ne'er-do-wells always screwing it up for the ambitious do-butters, do-wells.
Yeah.
Now, 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 Hill's really fucking groundbreaking at this stuff.
And like the actual business practice that he evolved for his auto college is like, it's really groundbreaking.
Basically, okay, I'm just going to read from the article breaking it down.
The very day you enroll, the flow of language ripples on, you may, note that 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, and as the school pays $3 a head 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.
So you see, 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, it's the same way every image.
Here's the 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 left on our own.
Overcoming Deafness with Napoleon Hill00:03:33
Six weeks, six weeks.
You know what?
I don't like to think that far ahead.
I like to live in the now.
That's actually why I'm so wealthy and successful because I'm not going to, 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 rage.
On November 11th, 1912, Napoleon and Florence had their second baby boy, and the second of their three children.
This son was born deaf.
Now, 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 intense fighting with both family and school teachers, Napoleon would never allow the boy to learn sign language.
Oh my God.
It gets weird.
Why?
He was determined to single-handedly teach his deaf 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 like that.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
Now, Napoleon's biography claims that this eventually worked out because Napoleon's son had a weird bone deformity.
And like, yeah.
I'm going to read from the biography.
Please do.
I want to note, clearly lies.
Like, obviously lies.
But this is how his biographers with the Napoleon Hill Foundation explain why it was good that he refused to teach his deaf son sign language.
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.
Hill taught his son that deafness was simply an adversity that could be triumphed over.
Think and become not deaf.
Yeah, think and grow ears.
What the fuck?
Wow.
Yeah, that's fucking wild.
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.
And use sign language.
That's actually how you overcome that disability.
You know, it's so.
Can you imagine?
Oh my God.
I feel for 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's not positive enough.
Yeah.
You're not deaf.
You're not.
Incredible.
And then 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, I mean, right now, that seems like the nicer thing to do.
Yeah.
I would say it's better to be abandoned by Napoleon Hill than parented by him.
Absolutely.
Now, you know what?
It's not good to be abandoned by Sarah.
No.
Well, anything.
Products and services that support this show.
Whoa.
They would never abandon you.
They would not abandon you.
Never, never, never abandon them.
Never Abandon Your Children Again00:03:27
Never, never abandon you.
Products!
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
The Golden Rule Philosophy Exposed00:15:46
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, as I noted, Napoleon's college collapsed eventually, like all scams do, and he moved his family in with his wife's family to leech more money off of them.
His wife's family 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 that he was a good guy, Napoleon started using this to claim to be an attorney at law.
Even his own biographers admit, 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 know a lawyer, who's not a lawyer, know a judge?
I'm just QED.
Just imagine it's like a beautiful, like a gilded, looks like a diploma, but then in gothic font, instead of saying his name, it just says, this guy's chill.
And then there's a judge's signature.
This guy's chill.
This guy's chill.
A judge.
A dot judge.
If anyone listening to this is a judge, hit me up on Twitter at iWriteOK, 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 hoot.
Tape it to my shirt.
Hey, guys, I'm representing myself in court.
Yeah, so Napoleon Hill worked at that university for a couple of months before quitting in 1915 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 job by his partners, likely because they realized he was a gigantic con man who was stealing from them.
We don't really know what we do know.
Stealing money, I think.
They bought this company together, and he was probably just stealing from the company because he's Napoleon Hill.
Yeah.
We don't know exactly what went down.
He's thinking about growing rich.
Look, he's not stealing.
He's manifesting wealth.
He manifested wealth from the cash register to his pockets.
We don't know exactly what happened there, but Hill claims that his business partners had 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.
Very sad.
So Napoleon Hill would spend most of the 19 teens leaping from one failure to another.
In September 1915, he created another fake school, the George Washington Institute, which he claimed was dedicated to teaching the principles of success.
Part of this class was apparently having his students write hundreds of letters to newspapers supporting Napoleon Hill's race for a seat in the U.S. Congress.
Now, he never ran for Congress, but it seems like 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.
He just had so many scams going.
Yeah.
What a weird move.
It's like, you know, maybe 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 scammers.
So like, you know, while you got your main scam you're working on, you're trying to seed little other scams.
Totally, because not all scams, not all scams will last.
So you got to plant a lot of seeds.
Not all scams will last.
You got to diversify.
Right.
Because I was like, wow, he's already running a school scam, right?
He's already getting money out of that.
Now he's going to 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 hack it.
Like the George Washington Institute is his day job, and having people write letters to newspapers telling him to run for Congress is his equivalent of a 401k.
Like that's like his, that's like his security.
He's putting some scam away for later.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
This one's for my kids.
Yeah.
No, he wouldn't leave anything to his fucking kids.
This is Napoleon Hill we're talking about.
They can think and grow rich themselves.
Next, I'm going to quote again from Gizmodo's Matt Novak.
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, Hill returned the favor of one student's criticism by alerting the FBI of the German-American kid's suspicious activities.
The student was supposedly arrested for the duration of World War I.
Oh my fucking God.
Such a piece of shit.
Wow.
Damn, he does not play at all.
No, he does not play.
If you're like, hey, this school is a scam, he's like, I'm sending you to jail.
Tell the FBI you're a fucking spy.
Wow.
Cool guy.
He's a real person.
He abuses his children, immigrants, all people trying to learn a trade.
Definitely.
I have not run across 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.
That's pretty likely, yeah.
I really don't know anything about his attitude on race relations.
I'm going to assume not.
Yeah, I think we can safely, safely surmise.
Now, the George Washington Institute quickly collapsed, and by 1917, 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 gets a little bit desperate.
Yeah, he's really diversifying, but not in a great way.
Yeah, this has been like a sad arc.
You get from like this legitimately kind of cunning automotive college.
That was like a good idea.
Suing the railroad for fucking up your eyes.
Yeah, I mean, Ambulance Chaser is next, you know.
Yeah.
By 1918, the Better Business Bureau 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 $100,000.
In reality, the entirety of the enterprise was worth around $1,200 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, Hill regarded such setbacks as a test 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 self-defense.
And it is also insane that at this point in his life, he's like, people think I'm a charlatan.
You guys...
Well, better start another success school.
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 downtown Manchester.
He's rolling bloated dice.
Do you want to buy some lumber, by the way?
Trust me?
Now, by 1919, Napoleon Hill had gotten tired of jumping from scam to scam, sometimes a step ahead of the law, but 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, 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 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 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 Napoleon.
Oh my God.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
Cool.
Now, Golden Rule Magazine was founded 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 for this magazine that Hill was running.
So their plan was for Hill to basically use his magazine.
Yeah.
I hate this so much.
Oh, God.
Their plan was for Hill to use his magazine to convince people that General Oil was a great thing to invest in.
It's fucking cartoonish.
The whole magazine is.
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 1919, Hill wrote an article in his magazine titled, An Interesting Man and His Wife, The Coxes, Who Have Made a Million Dollars for Other People.
Wow.
The article claimed that the Coxes were using a million dollars of their profits to fund scholarships for American veterans.
Philanthropy is good.
Yeah.
This was untrue, obviously.
There was no million dollars set aside for veterans.
And Hill and the Coxes would be sued by the FTC in October of that year for fraudulent advertising.
But being sued for fraud did not stop Napoleon Hill from producing his magazine about the Golden Rule.
Yeah.
In May of 1922, 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 on 150,000 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 to 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 with his Golden Rule philosophy.
It was 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 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, you know, now we call it swag, baby.
You give them some free stuff.
They gotta gram about it.
Now it's just being an influencer.
Yeah, yeah.
Napoleon Hill was like the original influencer.
Yeah.
In 1922, Napoleon Hill used this tactic to start up a partnership with T.O. Teed, a prominent chaplain and humanitarian.
Hill and Tege started a charity that on its face provided educations to prisoners in Ohio to help rehabilitate.
Don't tell me what it really is.
I don't want to know.
Yeah, it's just let me believe, please.
Yeah, yeah.
So Napoleon would go from town to town raising money for this program, telling newspapers things like, what we're trying to do here is mentally meet these men 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, 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 arrested a shitload of times and spent a lot of time in jail himself.
Because he's a criminal conman.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But of course, there was no actual charity.
He was essentially running the monorail scheme from The Simpsons, but with a charity aimed at raising money to provide education to prisoners.
In Shelby, Ohio, in 1923, Napoleon collected more than $1,000 from kind-hearted locals who were happy to raise funds to give 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 Hill had, you know, painted a picture of how he was going to help them.
Hill spent much of the 1920s following the same basic pattern.
He'd go from 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 1920s, 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 when Napoleon's life starts to change.
So by the late 20s, like he's been run out of most of 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 can't imagine why.
So he befriends 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 1908, 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 the success secrets of the greatest men in history and distill them into a sort of science of success.
Yes, it's like the Da Vinci code, but for success.
Yeah, exactly.
The success code.
Andrew Carnegie.
Under the loop.
Well, he's still alive at this point.
Well, that's what we think.
So, yeah, as should be obvious to everybody, this meeting never took place.
Like, there's zero evidence whatsoever that Napoleon Hill ever met Andrew Carnegie.
What 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 historic meeting between Andrew Carnegie and Napoleon Hill, the two greatest minds in the history of success.
The Fake Carnegie Meeting Secret00:07:24
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, 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 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, puts it into action, and meets with failure.
Doesn't that destroy his confidence?
Carnegie smiled.
I hope you would ask that, because it is important to understand what I'm about to tell you.
I believe that every failure carries with it, in 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 in exact proportion to their mastery of failures.
Life has a way of developing strength and wisdom in individuals through temporary defeat.
So you can see why people 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 successful.
Right.
If you're not rich, then it's because you're not good.
It's just you're not brave enough or good enough.
Yeah.
You're just not.
Here's the 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 I did.
And it was all because of that.
And because I thought so hard about success.
Every night I thought about it.
Yeah, why didn't you think about it?
Yeah, why don't you try thinking about it?
If you did, your kids would have bread.
And again, I just want to make it clear.
I don't think Andrew Carnegie ever expressed anything 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 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 them.
Yes, yes, sir.
Carnegie told Hill that he'd become convinced that the average person could gain wealth by studying the lives of great 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 task that Andrew Carnegie said.
You know what?
He didn't ask for it.
It was merely bestowed upon him as a mission.
It was thrust upon him.
It was thrust upon him to go.
He would go out, you know, like an explorer, collect the gem secrets of business success, 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.
Of rich people.
Still the golden idols of how to run businesses from their temples of.
Okay.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So yeah, this is like, so Hill claims that like Andrew Carnegie sets him this task and that Carnegie tells him it's going to take 20 years to complete the mission.
Oh my God, Andrew Carnegie is this like old elder who lives on a mountain and is like, my son, you must collect the secrets.
I give you 20 seconds.
That's exactly the story that Hill tells.
And conveniently enough, he pitches this book in 1928, which is 20 years after he claims he had his fake meeting with Andrew Carnegie.
Of course, he's spent the last 20 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.
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 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 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 29 seconds, according to Carnegie, who had taken out his stopwatch and was timing Hill's response.
Afterwards, he told Hill that he had given him a maximum of 60 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 man who cannot reach a decision promptly once he has all the necessary facts cannot be dependent upon to carry through any decision he may make.
It's bad to think through your decisions.
That's true.
Yes.
It's bad to think free.
It's bad to spend more than a minute deciding whether to take on an unpaid 20-year-old.
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, 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 lumber.
Man, I'm really doing this all wrong.
I got to read the book.
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, the guy who, you know, the publisher that he befriended.
And it was, it's a good story.
Like, that's a great idea for a book.
Especially the thing about I only had 30 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, uh, a good storyteller.
Yeah.
Now, there was only one problem because he had Pelton as soon as Pelton, Pelton being a smart guy, like, 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 20 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 in order to get him.
He's been training his whole life for this.
Yeah, exactly.
So we're going to talk about how he did that and Napoleon's first major financial success in part two.
But right now, Sarajun, would you plug some pluggables?
Because it is the end of this episode.
Absolutely.
I will plug my website, hey SarahJune.com, H-E-Y-S-A-R-A-J-U-N-E.
You can see where I am doing comedy shows.
You can come to my comedy show, High Priestess.
Clues for the Next Episode00:03:33
If you're in LA, HyPriestessComedy.com.
I am on Venmo and Instagram at Hey Sarah 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 iRideOK.
You can find this podcast and all the sources for it at behindthebastards.com.
You can find us on the Graham and the Twits at BastardsPod.
And those are the only places in the world that you can find us.
So don't go looking anywhere else.
Take these clues, my younger people.
Use them to find the success you seek.
If you can track me down on the top of the mountain where I live, I will put you in the quest of talking to all of the worst dictators in the world and distilling their secrets of success.
And once you put all the success tools in the crown, then you will manifest richness.
But not for you, for some other guy, for another guy who's a buster.
For you.
All right.
That's the episode.
We'll be back on Thursday with part two.
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