S3 E4: Think and Grow Duped

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Previously on the dream.

So you can see this training, seven steps to becoming a recruiting machine.

But it doesn't actually tell you how to recruit people.

This is funny because it's like step one, like make a decision.

It doesn't even say make a decision.

It says one.

Yeah, step one, decision.

Step two, mindset.

Step three, collect friends.

Like it's just

what?

There are about a million different origin stories for our current obsession with maximizing our potential in America.

And my favorite one of those stories kind of explains everything you need to know about the coaching hustle today.

Only it starts back around the first time the machines started to take over.

I'm talking Industrial Revolution era, the latter half of the 1800s, not this like new chat GPT stuff.

Back then, humans were looking inward, like, what makes me a human individually special and irreplaceable?

And a bunch of their ideas were like, hey, I have a mind and a body and a soul.

Look what I can do.

Spiritual movements like New Thought and the Law of Attraction, Attraction, you know, how your attitude and thoughts affect stuff in the physical world, became super popular right around then.

So did hypnosis.

Some folks took all this stuff a little too far, in my opinion, and started doing a thing called mentalism, mind reading, and watch me bend this fork without touching it, magic stuff like that.

Others took the idea to church and came up with beliefs like Christian science, which focused on healing the body with the mind, often through prayer.

And of course, there were a bunch of charlatans in on the game.

There was money to be made on seances.

Everyone wanted a Ouija board and all that other creepy Victorian stuff.

Supposedly, this all became really popular after the Civil War because so many people died and there weren't proper funerals.

Folks wanted to connect with lost loved ones again, in, you know, like in their minds.

And then along came a man named Napoleon Hill.

And he said, what if this new way of thinking was applied solely to making money?

After all, if you can conjure the dead and bend spoons with your mind, you should be able to like manifest a pile of gold bricks.

You know, think and grow rich.

So back in the 30s, he wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich.

His inspiration, he said, was a meeting with Andrew Carnegie.

And this is Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, not Dale Carnegie, the author of another self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

That guy, Dale Carnegie, no relation, changed the spelling of his last name to match Andrew's the year Andrew Carnegie died.

Not really a coincidence.

So we're talking about the O.G.

Carnegie, Andrew.

Anyway, Napoleon Hill meets O.G.

Andrew Carnegie, and well, let's let him tell it.

Mr.

Carnegie delivered a lecture that I shall never forget.

Let me call your attention to a great power which is under your control, said Mr.

Carnegie.

A power which is greater than poverty, greater than the lack of education, greater than all of your fears and superstitions combined.

It is the power to take possession of your own mind and direct it to whatever ends you may desire.

When you speak of your poverty and lack of education, Mr.

Carnegie explained, you are simply directing your mind power to attract these undesirable circumstances.

Because it is true that whatever your mind feeds upon, your mind attracts to you.

Now you see why it is important that you recognize that all success begins with definiteness of purpose, with a clear picture in your mind of precisely what you want from life.

This is from a 1928 filmed presentation Hill gave on his first book, The Law of Success.

So on the supposed advice from Andrew Carnegie, Napoleon Hill says he set about speaking to as many successful and wealthy people as he possibly could.

And eventually, he wrote this book, Think and Grow Rich, that has sold 100 million copies since then.

If you haven't heard of this book, I would like the address of the rock you've been living under because I am tired of having to know stuff.

Know what you want and believe that you can and will get it.

Give expressions of gratitude many times daily for having received that which you want, even before you actually get physical possession of it.

Possession starts first in the mind.

Please remember this.

When overtaken by defeat, as you may be many times, remember that man's faith is tested many times before he is crowned with with final victory and accept your defeat as nothing more than a challenge to keep on trying.

Think and Grow Rich came out in 1939 and to this day people are devoted to the book and to Hill's teachings and not just motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and all the other Robbinses.

This book is a part of popular culture or just regular culture or even unpopular culture.

Everyone loves it.

including the man who created the FUBU fashion line, Damon John, my second favorite shark on Shark Tank.

Now, many of you have heard me credit the book that I read and that I have read several times ever since I was a kid, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

And it helped me start foo boo.

And today I want to share with you the top five lessons I learned from that book that helped me get to where I am today.

And Lana Del Rey.

I actually read this book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which isn't, yeah, you did?

It's great.

Yeah, it's amazing because it's not really about money.

Right.

It's just more, I'll just always remember this line where he talks about burning every bridge except the one bridge to the thing that makes your heart the most on fire.

And I was like, that's definitely singing, but how am I going to get there?

There was even a film made about Napoleon's book and the story of his life, starring professional, perpetual teenager Rob Deerdeck.

Of all those shows, 12-year-old boys love to watch on MTV.

The hardest thing to actually master is faith When that doubt and fear, that's ultimately a self-protection mechanism that stops you.

The only way to get through that is faith in your plan.

And your plan only matters if you really believe in it.

Because faith is the peace that's going to give you the ability to continue through the highs and lows.

When you get to that level, you really believe that you are creating your entire existence.

You feel like you're manipulating reality.

But that film, part interviews with famouses who loved Napoleon Hill and part reenactments from his life, it was never released.

And I think we might know why.

None of his story is true, starting with the fact that after a string of run-ins with the law, he decided to go by his middle name instead of his first.

Napoleon Hill was born Oliver Napoleon Hill.

Wait, his name isn't even Napoleon.

Right, his name is Oliver or Knapp.

This is Matt Novak.

A few years ago, his partner came to him and she asked him if he'd ever heard of this guy, Napoleon Hill, because she just read something about him.

And that was nothing but a gut reaction on her part that something was fishy and set me off on this course.

But she came up to me and said, there's this guy named Napoleon Hill and you need to debunk him.

And that's exactly what I set out to do because it was pretty clear that this was a guy with

a lot to sell and not much substance behind it.

And careful what you wish for if you have a partner who respects your ideas because he did exactly what she suggested and spent the next two years working nights and weekends writing a 20,000-word piece about Napoleon Hill.

And that first discovery that his name wasn't really Napoleon was crucial to his research because if you just look up Napoleon Hill in historical records, it's all about the book.

You can't really find anything on Napoleon Hill from before then.

Honestly, using your middle name was a great trick in the olden days.

But if you search Oliver Hill or Oliver Napoleon Hill, you get a bunch of scams that he was running, buying lumber on credit and then selling it at pennies on the dollar to other people.

And, you know, various companies were scammed in this way and he was pursued by the authorities.

And

what does that mean?

I'm sorry.

When he's buying the lumber on credit and then selling it for really cheap and then not paying back the credit?

Yep.

Okay, okay.

With no intention to ever pay back the people who he got it on credit for.

It seems he changed his name when he was trying to flee the South.

It seems a lot of his earliest scams with lumber were in the South, and then he headed off to Washington, D.C.

to start a car business.

After the lumber scams, he flees to Washington, D.C., where he starts a school for auto mechanics.

But it turns out that that school is actually

a scam where the quote-unquote students are basically performing unpaid labor constructing cars.

So their tuition is going toward their

own

work.

Well, they're paying to basically

work for free.

which was quite a scam.

But,

you know.

I was going to ask if he had any experience building cars.

You know, cars were,

this was the early 1910s, and it's still a pretty new environment for cars.

So it was, you know, I don't know how he got involved in cars specifically, but they were the hot new technology at the time.

But yeah, that fell through and he moved on to a candy company.

There's so many different companies that he started that, you know, were dissolved or disappeared from the records a year or two later.

I don't know what the candy company scam was, but that was another one that he had.

He bought something called the Martha Washington Candy Company and changed the name to the Betsy Ross Candy Company.

I mean,

weird little things like that where I don't know what the scam was with this candy company, but there's records, public records of him starting this and then changing the name and then it disappears a year later.

As a a fan of piling on to prove a point, there are a few more scams I want you to hear about.

But remember, the reason I need to drill this into your brain is because this guy is thought of as only a force for good, only a business and life expert, only a person who wanted to help other people have better lives through the way they thought about themselves and the power that they had to change the world around them with their minds.

But this is how his mind actually worked, who he actually was, how he actually thought and grew rich.

Though even that turns out to to be a lie.

We'll get to that in a minute.

I also found in the late 1910s, and this would have been right around the First World War, he shows up in the newspaper archives threatening to sue public transit company because the reading, because his eyes were strained, because the lights in the cars weren't good enough, so he got bad vision.

Like just the most frivolous, like the kind of, you know, there's frivolous lawsuits today, but imagine 100 years ago, someone talking about how I'm going to sue this

the public transit company because I can't read as well on the bus.

It's like, I have, you know.

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By the early 20s, he had a scam where he would go town to town, again, very music man or, you know, North Haverbrook Simpson style monorail guy.

He'd go town to town and would say that he was collecting money for a special correspondence school in the nation's prisons.

So he

joins up with some check forger who is,

he gets him bailed out of prison and says, oh, we're starting this company, a charity that will,

it's called the Interwall Correspondence School.

And we're going to collect all this money for inmates so they can have a better life and get an education inside.

And then when they come out, it'll be all this great stuff.

Well, again, I found newspaper articles where these towns would say, the local chaplain would say the money never got there.

We never saw a cent of it.

Napoleon Hill, of course, had the gall to say that it was the clergy that were lying about never getting the money.

So I don't know how successful that one was.

But he was raising apparently significant sums, you know, $1,000 here and there, which adjusted for inflation from 100 years ago as, you know, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars.

So that was essentially the scam in the early 20s.

Oh, the 20s.

So

I found this photo online of Thomas Edison with Napoleon Hill.

And this is significant because

throughout his entire life, Napoleon Hill swears that Andrew Carnegie told him to go interview all these famous people.

He provided supposedly letters of introduction to interview successful businessmen from around the country.

And there's absolutely no evidence that A, he met with Carnegie to begin with.

And B, there's no evidence that he actually met any famous person that he claims to have, except for Thomas Edison.

Yes, Napoleon or Oliver or whatever you want to call him, perhaps the ear-life coach, if you will, did put his mind to meeting Thomas Edison.

But it wasn't based on gumption or having the right attitude or any of the tenets he espoused in his famous tome.

It was because he was absolutely fine with making shit up.

He wrote to Thomas Edison and said he had an award to give him.

He did not have an award to give him, but he said he had an award to give him.

And that was all made up and it wasn't a real award.

And then he went to Thomas Edison and then got a picture taken with Thomas Edison handing him a fake award.

And then he published the photo of him and Thomas Edison in order to look like he knew Thomas Edison, which he didn't.

He just like, again, made up a whole thing.

Creepy.

I think you'd go to jail for that these days, wouldn't you?

One of my favorite things about Napoleon Hill's claims is

he claimed to be advisor to two presidents, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat.

And

Napoleon Hill would later claim that he

was in the room when the negotiations were happening with Germany about the end to World War I.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Which makes perfect sense.

He also claimed to be an advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and took credit at one point for coining, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

What?

Yes, Napoleon Hill claimed that he came up with we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

And it makes total sense that Napoleon Hill would be an advisor to FDR because

Napoleon Hill

was an anti-union arch conservative and FDR apparently wanted his advice.

Matt's being facetious, obviously.

I mean at the time that I was writing this, this was I published this in December 2016, so just after the 2016 election.

So now some of these things may seem

plausible.

More plausible, at least somewhat more plausible, if you've got sort of a Jared Kushner character in the middle of this, or you've got Kid Rock advising on North Korea policy.

Yeah, and Kanye's in the room.

Right, yes.

Does he ever get married or anything?

Oh, he's married five times.

Yes, he is married five times.

According to the official biography, and there was a popular biography published in the 90s about him, I believe they only have three of his five marriages, and I discovered a couple more.

One being his first marriage when he was a teenager

was with a fellow teenager and got her pregnant, and it seemed like a shotgun wedding sort of situation.

And then she supposedly recanted.

and said it wasn't his.

So I think that marriage was annulled.

She got to know him for like two weeks and was like, what?

Just kidding.

Right.

Either his second or third marriage, and I forget now, I found a lengthy public record from that one where he is visiting brothels.

You know, the allegations against him from friends and colleagues are that he was visiting brothels and detailed accounts of

his...

infidelity as well as his abuse.

You know, there's something in there about him throwing a baby on the ground.

Not good stuff.

So

really unfortunate stuff there.

I'd say the most fascinating marriage was to Rosa Lee Bieland.

And Rosa was in her 20s when Napoleon Hill and she meet in the mid-30s.

And this was

seemed to be a marriage of convenience for some reason that they had schemed together to take over the world, and it looks like she

should take a lot of credit for the book Think and Grow Rich, his most popular work.

She was at the very least a heavily involved editor, but I think would probably today be considered a co-author of that work.

Would you look at that?

Napoleon Hill was no Matt Novak, I'll tell you that much.

As you've heard in previous seasons of our show, you'll know it's not uncommon for men like Napoleon to brashly build their empires by taking credit for the work of women.

I'm thinking Avon, Topperware, Christianity.

You know, because he was not a strong writer.

Even his biographies admitted that some of his work was not great.

So the success of Thing Grow Rich, his biggest work, is almost certainly a product of their marriage, which lasted just a few years.

What do we know about her?

Do we know anything about her?

Well, so

she,

the most interesting thing I think about her is that she

convinced Napoleon to sign a prenup that basically handed her all the publishing rights to his books.

Wow.

And which, yes, the idea here being that if anyone came to sue him or tried to get Claw money back for any number of his scams, that they wouldn't be able to touch him.

That was the idea, but obviously that did not work out for him because she divorced him and married the divorce attorney.

No, she didn't.

Yes.

They were made for each other, these two.

So we're in the late 30s, and

he shows up at

this

a social experiment let's let's use the term social experiment being conducted on Long Island

there is a

guy named James Schaefer who has started a cult called the master

metaphysicians

sounds legit let me double check

Royal fraternity of the master metaphysicians say that again

the royal fraternity of the master metaphysicians okay great

and they do what

so

they are sort of regarded um based on you know i talked with a long island historian about this they're basically seen uh in the late 30s as this sort of kooky alternative community that's pretty harmless but they have some rather unorthodox views.

They buy up up this huge mansion in Long Island and a bunch of people come to live there.

And, you know, there's the innocuous stuff, which is the vegetarianism, but then there's the more...

They

want to raise an immortal baby.

So they...

Who doesn't?

I mean, that sounds totally reasonable to me.

Moving on.

So

they

adopt, and I use that term loosely, a five-month-old girl.

Her mom was a waitress.

I'm going to guess unmarried.

And in the end, it all turns out okay because the babies are turned.

But,

you know, they attract some attention for wanting to...

They believe that through their life philosophies, they can...

they can make a person immortal.

And so

by starting from scratch with this baby, they think think that they can, you know, get her to live forever.

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In fact, the head of the cult, James Schaefer, tried to get the people who were doing right around the same time, 1939 New York World's Fair had this huge Times capsule that's sealed for 5,000 years, and they wanted to include some documents about her since she'd be the only person still alive at the time

when this time cast soul was I thought you were going to say they wanted to include her no

5,000 years from now we open it up and she's like hi

I did it they did it right

when did they give her back do you know like how long did they wait were they like uh terrible twos gotta go didn't work yeah it was it was after the the

press died down it wasn't it wasn't more than a couple years i know that yeah so she was an awful toddler.

And then they were like...

Sure.

Right.

But Napoleon Hill, oddly enough, was the baby's godfather.

Is that true?

Yeah.

No, because he was hanging out at this place, you know, he was

he was buddies with Schaefer, the cult leader, and they had all kinds of scams together.

A couple years later, Schaefer would go to jail for one wealthy woman who felt like she was getting scammed, said, hey, you took all my money.

And Schaefer wrote about how it was all Napoleon Hill's idea, but Napoleon, I don't know how Napoleon Hill

gets out of trouble in all these situations.

As far as I know, he didn't, he was arrested a few times, but never served any considerable amount of time in prison, as far as I can tell.

What do you personally think about

the type of person Napoleon Hill was?

First of all, again, his name was Oliver Napoleon Hill.

Yeah, I get the feeling that he

carried this baggage of

not having great ideas about self-worth.

And I think that he

was,

I think that in some ways he really did believe in the idea that that thoughts can affect material reality.

I think that there's a kernel of truth to that, that you first have to sort of visualize visualize what you want to see in the world.

But I think that he was using those ideas that were percolating at the time into an incredibly cynical scheme, an entire life devoted to trying to swindle money.

Almost everything he did was dishonest in some way.

And the most honest buck he earned was in

the book that he's remembered for.

But at the end of the day, it was probably

the labor put in by his wife at the time was

worth more than anything he'd ever accomplished.

But Napoleon's Napoleonic impact is not only felt by people looking for guidance in business.

Okay, so the

prosperity gospel, the guys like Joel Austein

are

drawing much more from

Napoleon Hill than they are from the Bible, I'd argue.

You know, these people who want you, who are insistent upon the idea that

God wants you to be rich and that you deserve it because God wants you to have all this wealth,

despite Jesus being pretty clear, it seems, on the whole camel through the eye of a needle thing.

The camel through the eye of a needle is often attributed to Jesus.

It's also found in a bunch of other old religious texts, but here's how it is quoted in the New Testament.

Jesus Jesus says, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Seems to make it clear that rich people can't get into heaven.

So the prosperity gospel people today would be, I think,

the best example of

Napoleon Hill.

Can you talk more about the

time that he and his wife were writing this book?

What was going on in America or around the world?

Sure.

Well, you know,

I believe unemployment peaked in 1932 or 33 at around 25%.

So

massive unemployment, the Great Depression of the 1930s was incredibly difficult time for a lot of people.

And a book like this coming in 37 or 38

was

you know, something that people could latch on to as, oh, I can think my way out of my material conditions.

I can think my way out of being poor and not having a job and being on breadlines.

And that's a powerful idea, even in the best of times, but especially when people are struggling with the fact, and I think I mentioned this in the piece, you know, one of my favorite movies is Sullivan's Travels,

which is

Preston Sturgis movie from 41, I want to say.

That where the lesson is that people don't want to be reminded of difficult times when they're living through them.

And

when you're living through a difficult time, you savor.

And I think that, you know, not that they're completely analogous, but I think that people don't necessarily want a lot of stories right now about the pandemic.

Because I think that was a tough time for everyone and they want escapism.

They want other forms of entertainment and education that have nothing nothing to do with the pandemic because it was just such a tough period for a lot of people.

Walk into a big bookstore like Barnes and Noble and you're going to see Napoleon Hill's books, especially Think and Grow Rich.

His books get passed around at like real estate conferences and all sorts of different environments where people are big into sales.

You know, he was essentially a salesman speaking to salesmen.

And it

makes a lot of sense that he came around at that time.

There's a lot in his work that, you know, there's the get-rich-quick angle, but there's also the believing in yourself angle.

He has a lot of different ideas about

how to improve your mind and body, things that would become, you know, mainstream in self-help literature later on.

But he definitely was selling people on the idea that to be a success, you had to first think like a success.

And we see that pop up in all of his writings.

Here's the bottom line, though.

It worked.

We are talking about him today.

I'm talking about him right now.

Napoleon Hill wanted to be a success, and he sold us on the idea that we could do the same thing.

What he left out of his message was his obvious feeling that it was okay to get there by any means necessary.

Sometimes it feels like we've collectively decided not to say that part out loud, to venerate the wealthy, successful, famous people, and not look too hard at how they got there.

Maybe we want someone to tell us how to do life, to absolve us of the responsibility of doing life in a moral way, because to have it all is inherently amoral.

Next time, our hero Jennifer does her best Napoleon Hill impression and does not like what it does to her.

And when you first join, you're told like it's you get this free white Mercedes or you earn Arbonne will pay for a bonus, will pay a car bonus towards a white Mercedes if you just could get yourself to regional vice president.

What it actually means

is

you go to the Mercedes dealership, you get a three, at least a three-year lease in your name.

with your credit score.

You sign up, so you're locked in, and now I see it clear as day.

It's a way to keep you locked in for the next three years because how are you going to pay for it?

And you put it in your name and Arvon gets all the credit for it.

Was there reimbursement enough to actually cover the lease

and insurance?

No.

The Dream is written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Jane Marie.

Our producer is Mike Richter, with help from Nancy Golambiski and Joy Sanford.

Our editor is Peter Clowny.

The Dream is a co-production of Little Everywhere and Pushkin Industries.

If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content, exclusive binge opportunities, and ad-free listening across our network for just $6.99 a month.

Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.

And while you're there, please sign up for our newsletter.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

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See capital1.com slash bank, capital One NA member FDIC.

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Hey, dream listeners, it's finally here.

The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.

It's $5 a month.

It's the only tier.

No commercials.

Plus, bonus content.

This helps keep us independent, and your contribution will help change the way every listener hears the dream.

We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us.

We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything.

But I don't love rules.

So, what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called women be shopping, and it's there.

And we're just going to talk about what we bought.

It'll be fun.

That's the dream.s-u-p-e-r-ca-st-t dot com.

Supercast.

Please, please go subscribe.

It's five bucks.

It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles.

See you there.