Part One: How L. Ron Hubbard Lied His Way to Godhood | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

I subscribed. He needs a more informed guest as to LRH. I scrolled through his podcasts. I will enjoy this in the end. He's got some great fodder!

Please, peeps... start calling him by his real name L Con Blabbers

For all of his bullshit and the evil he did, I do feel kinda bad that he lost his flying permit for gliders.

There is a better timeline, where he stayed a so-so writer who's main passion was just flying his glider.

Gliders are cool, you get to use warm updrafts to gain altitude, you basically have to utlisize the winds like a long range bird does

My favorite L. Ron Hubbard factoid is that he became a pilot, but was only able to get licensed for gliders.

My 2nd favorite is that "Dianetics" was not his invention but was a pre-existing set of semi-scientific techniques.

Kurt Vonnegut noted that for a while there, there was a tremendous demand for readable short stories. A lot of magazines were weekly, and a competent short story writer could make quite a tidy living. When television came in this changed but it's entirely possible that old L. Ron sold quite a few stories during this period.

Is there a sign-up sheet to join Robert's cult?

👍

King is alright. Also, I see him as writing about the world he lives in. As he lives in America, the books turn out to be horror stories....

But not a single word about his real works like 'the factors' or the axioms of scientology.

First 5 mins i turned off all i heard was left wing comments. All left wingers are facists!

Ron made me atheist.

L.Ron Hubbard probably hated psychologists because they revealed to him he was born a narcissistic sociopath

Reverse-engineering stories from cover art was a major practice in the comic book industry for a while. At one point, executives discovered that comics with apes on the cover sold especially well, so they had their cover artists bang out a bunch of covers with apes and then hand them off to writers, who had to figure out how to shoehorn an ape into the story they were writing.

L Ron Hubbard; the Muppet Baby of the cult world.

wasnt liddy also a blackfoot?

LRH just hated courtrooms and taxes. He got on that ship to AVOID TAXES - plain & simple. Worked too for years but eventually he came back to the USA, sneaking in I think in '75 in Clearwater. Total con-man but creative and loved his shoeboxes full of $25k.

So Hubbard lied his way to godhood? Sounds like a modern day Jesus to me.

You’d think that Tom Cruise would step in and help with the quality control of their advertising. He’s seen how movies are scored and narrated. But somehow every commercial from Scientology sounds like it was made in 1982. The music sounds like American telemundo and the narrator sounds like a bad game show host.

Jack Parsons is probably my favorite American kook. I love his story.

I had always thought "the adventure club" in Chef's send-off episode of South Park was just them being goofy.....

I've read thousands of anti-LRH comments, but not one of them seemed to have an idea or read of what the fundamental axioms of his philosophy are, like: "The Conditions of Existance", "The Factors", and "The Dianetics Axioms".
All I've read in the comments is about all his evil lies, his Crowley and Parsons relationships, xenu, the body thetans, the galactic confederations, the enslavement of his young followers, his negative views of some religions founders, psychiatry, gays, pedophiles, blacks, etc. but no comments whatsoever about the root structure of the afore mention foundations upon which his philosophy stands on. So, I wonder about the validity of the negative and positive evaluations on Scientology.

No video ? 🥱

I like Ron Hubbard

I am so glad they didn't knock Robert E. Howard because he was a phenomenal pulp writer and character creator. Holy shit, Hubbard is the King in Yellow with his Excalibur story.

how easy the devil can charm,

Huh. Didn't consider the specifics until now but now I'm wondering how much of the repressed memory movement connects back to Hubbard's attempt. Anecdotally I've seen contemporary antipsych outlets really invested in the Satanic Panic Therapist side of that fallout.

He got paid a penny a word in the early days. This is probably where he mastered the art of bullshitting.

Correction: was born in Helena MT. It’s pronounced ‘hell-en-ah’ not ‘haleeena’ cmon!

We are neighbors, and I cant stop laighing, this talk is very funny to me.

Learning a lot about a man who, made hollywood blue😅

Most of what I read is 1920s-1940s pulp fiction; hot take: pre-Scientology LRH was a pretty legit writer.

Worth noting that Jack Parsons was more than just “some rich kid”: he was one of the people behind NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

So this kind of glosses over the fact that Jack Parsons wasn't just a rich druggie satanist sex maniac, he was also a rocket scientist who helmed pre-NASA rocketry in the United States until he was fired from the army air corps and went on to explode himself in a fireworks factory. FWIW this connection made me curious if Lilly Northrop was related to Aerospace genius and death merchant Jack Northrop, but as far as I can tell she wasn't.

I remember seeing TV commercials on the old UHF channels back in the 70's for the Dianetics book series.

Good thing my mother scoffed & wouldn't order it for me

Ehhh dianetics… at least not as cumbersome as diabetics

Minor point of fact, Hugo Gernsback is credited as the founder of the genre science fiction. Campbell's legacy is that he shaped science fiction into a popular, mass media genre and was largely responsible for starting the careers of many notable golden age SF authors.

Many commentators like Brian Aldiss, famously, point to much earlier narratives--like Shelley's Frankenstein--as the progenitor texts of the genre. While accurate, it wouldn't be precisely true to say that Shelley, let alone any prior authors, created 'Science Fiction'. Rather, the genre was established by Gernsback who not only collected already extant stories but actively called for the creation of new stories of 'scientifiction'. In calling for, selecting, and editing new fiction he essentially established the first boundaries of the genre.

Also, interestingly, Forrest Ackerman was a significant early member of the Los Angelese Science Fiction Society. LASFS member rolls also included many other people who went on to be famous or significant, including Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett (who penned the first draft of Revenge of the Jedi), Myrtle Douglas (literally invented cosplay), Edith Eyde (renowned for publishing the first dedicated Lesbian magazine).

I focused on science fiction in college, and during my masters work for Library Information Science I specifically researched the role of women in early science fiction, fanzines, and ultimately published a very small piece about the fanzine Black Flames.

I guess we are lucky that Ron's childhood nickname was Brick and not some terrible slur of some kind?

The boy scouts were more focused at the time on keeping secret records about which leaders were pedophiles. /s

God, I listened to this original publication from y'all years ago, and it's always stuck with me.
Here to listen again. Great job, thank you.

that's the weirdest thing about scientology: believing in a science-religion made up by any sci-fi author is weird but it wasn't founded by any sci-fi author. it was a very mediocre sci-fi author barely living off his works (before he came up with dianetics) whose claim to fame is spewing more garbage than any other writer. And somehow that wasn't enough of a red flag

I’m guessing there are no ads for this one because it was demonetized in a hurry by the Church.

LRH has no redeeming qualities.!!

Awesome podcast. Great job. 🎉

Those early stories of L. Ron Hubbard remind me of an episode of the PBS Kids show "Arthur," where DW tells the most spellbinding story to the Tibble Twins. When they later ask Grandma to read them the rest of the book, it turns out to have been a book about the life of Leonardo Da Vinci. She made up the entire story, but did a great job in the process. Same cannot be said for L. Ron.