Think And Grow Rich

Yeah, until you told me the one thing to know

“Is this is like the fundamentally? It's the secret it'll be like Andrew Carnegie knew the secret”

I already know where this is going wait Did you check did I tell you that? No, I'm just like trying to think of old timey celebrities that he's gonna You this whole book is premised on the idea that he had a conversation with Andrew Carnegie that he learned from I literally did not know that well, we're so good at this We're so good at this that you actually pulled out the entire conceit of this book from thin air

Should I just do the episode Peter having to read the book? I'll just improv the whole thing I'll tell you at the end what you got right when you got wrong Who starts Michael? Peter. What do you know about think and grow rich? All I know is that I'm nostalgic for time in America where you had to think to grow rich Think and grow rich by a man named Napoleon Hill wait, really? Yeah, Oliver and Napoleon Hill

As a book from 1937 powerful name get almost say that it contains an ancient wisdom

“a secret if you will this book has sold some unbelievable amount of copies”

I've seen estimates that look like a hundred million copies that sounds wrong. Yeah, that's probably not sure But I've just heard crazy numbers. Yeah, it is the spiritual progenitor of many self-help books Not just in substance, but in style and in the nature of Napoleon himself, which we'll get into This comes out one year after how to win friends and influence people which we talked about So this book is in the tradition of new thought which is a spiritual movement that was

Relatively popular at the time and which you and our listeners may know from the secret Do you remember the gist of the secret? Can you tell me the gist of the secret? It was just all this manifestation stuff

It's like if you imagine yourself having a million dollars the universe will give it to you

But it was almost like she thought it was like a metaphysical rule almost like god-like power that you could like cure cancer with it It's a material reality. Yeah, it's not just like the power of positive thinking is that you're confident and then confidence gets you stuff It's like if you want truly want something the vibrations in your brain Yeah, we'll match the vibrations of the universe

“She's basically saying there's the strong nuclear force the weak nuclear force gravity elector magnetism and the secret”

Those are the forces in the universe. So I'm gonna send you a bit from thinking to grow rich The ether is a great cosmic mass of eternal forces of vibration It is made up of both destructive vibrations and constructive vibrations it carries at all times Fibrations of fear poverty disease failure misery and Fibrations of prosperity health success and happiness just as surely as it carries the sound of

Hundreds of orchestrations of music and hundreds of human voices all of which maintain their own Individuality and means of identification through the medium of radio Started out pretty good like simple concept yeah, and then he just added this like hundreds of human voices thing on there for no reason It's radio by the way It's radio waves

That's very funny to add that there because this is the 1930s and like that's that's the most technology he can think of He continues from the great storehouse of the ether the human mind is constantly attracting vibrations Which harmonize with that which dominates the human mind and he thought idea plan or purpose Which one holds in one's mind attracts from the vibrations of the ether a host of its relatives You can see that this is not the best written book in the world

Also this was written with the help of his then wife one of several and It's sort of understood that he is a very clunky writer and she helped him and even then it's rough That's like the chat GPT of the era you see a and dash and you're like, oh, it's wife wife did it So the metaphysical Sort of argument here the pitch is that all of these frequencies are running for the universe and if you align

You are mind with the frequencies The universe will deliver whatever that frequency entails whatever thought idea plan or purpose Yeah, those are all scoops Peter plans group so here is an explanation Of the great depression which of course has just passed and this is not the last time that we will here in Napoleon Try to diagnose the great depression

Yeah, using his knowledge of the human mind. I thought all these guys need like here's my little self-help rule That also explains like all historical events. I mean well, it has to right because he's sort of explaining this great

He sort of seems to believe that everything that happens to a person happens because of

Which frequencies they are aligned with and so it has to explain everything Abraham Lincoln was imagining himself getting shot and the universe gave it to him for a while He was cooking with slave freeing vibes and then he got self-killin vibes He says here take notice of a very significant truth to wit the business depression started in 1929 and continued on to an all-time record of destruction until some time after President Roosevelt entered office

Then the depression began to fade into nothingness just as an electrician in a theater raises the light so Gradually that darkness is transmuted into light before you realize it so did the spell of fear in the minds of the people Gradually fade away and become faith

“We it's but it'd be like a new president took over and then the conditions changed, but it wasn't that it was the vibrations right?”

It was the vibration. Oh my god Peter. He's talking about a vibe shift. Oh, that's right Just using the longer version of vibe the fact that this is written a couple years after the depression is very important to like why this book Exist and I think why it was popular. He should have been talking about grit the lack of grit caused the great depression This also would have been a sick time to drop the game Yeah, imagine how much you would have cleaned up with some basic card tricks although back then everyone was wearing a top hat

So that wouldn't give you much competitive advantage You do more magic tricks, but also almost no one had a room. Yeah, that's real. So I read what's called the original edition of this book But the version I read has an introduction written in 2009 by an author Tom Butler Bowden He seems to be known for writing books about books. Okay. He has like a book about the 50

“Greatest self-help books stuff like right whatever, but he gives sort of an overview of”

Napoleon's life and I'm gonna send you it in a couple of chunks here America in 1908 was an exciting place

Henry Ford had ushered in the automobile age with the production of the first Model T's

The right brothers were doing the same for flight when they kept a craft in the air for two hours and the motion picture industry was just getting started In the autumn of that year young reporter Napoleon Hill was asked by a magazine to write a series on major business figures With his first subject the great steel magnate Andrew Carnegie now the richest person in America after the sale of his massive interests The widely Scott had grown excited as he expanded on the idea that there should be a concrete philosophy of success

For the average person drawn from the experience of great achievers when Carnegie suddenly challenged him to spend the next 20 years Formulating his philosophy Hill was taken a back It's reassuring to know that Andrew Carnegie was the right kind of white person It's one of Scott. This guy gives a summary of Hill's career. He was a young journalist

quote, "then followed business college the management of a mine employing 350 men a brief period in law school and After proving to be an effective salesman an appointment as a partner in a lumber company an impressive resume Indeed for someone raised in the cultural and material poverty a rural Virginia way he owned a mine Well, this is the actual reason that the depression happened is you could just pop into any industry and and be like

“I'll take us away. Yeah, I want you to remember some of the details business college mine employing 350 men”

Brief period in law school partner in the lumber company. That's his impressive resume. Just put those into your mind This is not foreshadowing the fact that you're emphasizing this. Yes, we'll not come back You just want to make sure that I'm understanding what we're talking about right now. So Hill goes back into journalism and in 1928 He publishes a book called Law of Success, which was ostensibly the result of his research into success Which Carnegie told him to do right his whole story is Andrew Carnegie told me in 1908

to study why Successful manner successful. The intro says the proceeds in addition to his lecturing fees

Enable the Hill to acquire a largest state in the Catskill Mountains. Hill had in mind to create the first

Success University on the site but also have it as a family home His earnest pursuit of riches and recognition had meant time away from his wife Florence and their three sons Who had remained in Virginia waiting on infrequent visits and erratic checks. Oh as the family enjoyed their new surrounds It seemed to vindicate all the years of uncertainty. Peter, we need to make like a bingo board for these Episodes because we already have like a seminar grifter. We have some like dubious biographical details. I feel like all of this

That was like classic Ibica material he then writes what will eventually become thank you grow rich Which from what I can gather I didn't read laws of success, but I browsed it It's mostly a repackaging of the first book right his publisher apparently wanted to call this book Use your noodle to win more brutal

Thinking grow rich is a quick best seller that makes Hill actually rich. This is what the intro says about that of course

There's quite an irony to the fact that Hill had not been rich when he wrote thinking grow rich far from it Which may on the surface undermine his apparent authority to write such advice Yet Hill might have answered but this was exactly the point Here was a success philosophy that worked as long as it was faithfully practiced and which inevitably would pay off Handsomely oh, so it's like he was a grifter

Yeah, but the fact that he sort of like grifted his way into success Confirms that the theory is true. This is like giving him way too much credit. You basically wrote a scam book when he was rich It's very funny to spot this glaring contradictions Even the grift which we've talked about so many times right that like a lot of these people Selling you they're get rich schemes

We're never rich until they sold it to you right you are they get rich quick scheme and then the dude just glides past it. He's like well, maybe

Why you know that's just the way the crazy crazy world works. It's like this is literally a broke guy Man you will on getting rich because it made him rich eventually does that mean it's any less of a sham So now let's talk about the book itself and

“Hills intro to the book he pitches it as him telling you a money-making secret that he learned”

and here is him giving you the story of Andrew Carnegie's wisdom. Oh my god. He literally says the secret. He literally says the secret dude He says the secret was brought to my attention by Andrew Carnegie more than a quarter of a century ago The candy loveable old Scotsman Carelessly tossed it into my mind when I was but a boy then he sat back in his chair with a merry twinkle in his eyes

And watched carefully to see if I had brains enough to understand the full significance of what he had said to me when he saw that I had grasped the idea He asked if I would be willing to spend 20 years or more preparing myself to take it to the world to men and women who without the secret Might go through life as failures. I said I would and with Mr. Carnegie's cooperation. I have kept my promise The secret to which I refer has been mentioned no fewer than a hundred times throughout this book It has not been directly named for it seems to work more successfully when it is merely uncovered and left in sight

Where those who are ready and searching for it may pick it up that is why Mr. Carnegie tossed it to me so quietly without giving me It's specific name. God he's wordy Especially in the beginning of the book he presents to the secret to making money as if it's something hidden in the book Yeah, he's like I'm not gonna name it. Yeah, it's right. He's like I'm not gonna tell you But if you read closely, he will see it, right? He says this a lot in the opening chapters, but then he basically does tell you the secret

And surely the secret is just believe in yourself, right? The secret is the vibration thing

That's all it is. It's not it's not more complicated than that although he elaborates on it to a degree that is Jolting and I said I'm gonna send you this little bit the secret was extensively used by President Woodrow Wilson during the World War It was passed on to every soldier who fought in the war carefully wrapped in the training received before going to the front President Wilson told me it was a strong factor in raising the funds needed for the war I like the idea that this is like a much hidden secret, but also every World War one soldier knew it

“Oh, that's what happened at Dunkirk. They didn't know the secret well the other side knows the secret too”

Sometimes and then it's just secrets so this caught my attention because he's claiming He spoke with Woodrow Wilson right and he claims he met Carnegie who then introduced him to Wilson as well as others like Henry Ford I'm like okay, okay hold up right. I need to look into this guy I find out there is an official biography published in 1995 Some some 25 years after Napoleon Hill died it is official in the sense that it is published by the Napoleon Hill Foundation

I start skimming that not only does it say that Hill advised Woodrow Wilson. It says he advised FDR Okay, it says in 1933 the Roosevelt administration reached out to Napoleon Hill and Hill advised him on Everything from labor policy to his fireside chats so Napoleon Hill ended the great depression is what we're gonna I think he's too humble to tell us, but I thought that was interesting because this book was published in 1937 and Hill doesn't mention that at all right, so in 1933 when the Roosevelt administration

“Assensibly reached out Hill is a medium successful self-help right why are they looking for his advice exactly?”

FDRs not attending a lot of seminars in his life in his official biography. It says that sometimes among friends Hill took credit for pointing the phrase there's nothing to fear but fear itself. That's like how I keep telling people that I coined the phrase eyebrows on fleek Something we all something we all still say he claims to have met Edison. He claims to have collaborated with Alexander Graham Bell He claims he was present in the room when Woodrow Wilson received the message of the German surrender in

way too much. Well, here's the thing in this point in history before like 1980 lying was

“Just go to like yeah, yeah, I advise that the R and people were like well, it doesn't sound right”

But I don't there's literally no way to disprove it being a high society grifter was like Easier because there's fewer I feel like people would not have had their like antenna up for that in the same way that we do now. So at this point I'm like okay, I'm googling Napoleon Hill fraud and yeah, right and up pops this gizmodo piece from 2016 by Matt Novak titled the untold story of Napoleon Hill The greatest self-help scammer of all time. Hell yes now we're fucking cooking. I'm like all right. Yeah, what Novak found was it there is

No record of Napoleon Hill even meeting Woodrow Wilson or FDR right in fact There is no record of him meeting Andrew Carnegie Hell is the entire foundation of the book Yes, the claim is that he met Carnegie in 1908, but he only started making that claim in the 1920s after Carnegie died Novak reached out to a Carnegie biographer who said he found no evidence that they ever met Novak also found a magazine piece published in 1921 about the World War I armistice where Hill did not mention being in the room with Woodrow Wilson

“Right, we started making that claim many years later. Yeah, and that claim is not even in this book, right that claim is something that pops up after”

Novak did a bunch of research to piece together an outline of Hill's actual life and it is one scam after another

Hell yes, so we're going to take a pretty significant tour and the first half of this episode is just going to be about this guy's life

Cool because I can't I can't read his success tips to you in good faith without first telling you about how he operated in the real world Maybe that was his success step. He should have written the book about how to scam your way into high school That's the thing is if he if you look at this if he was just like here's how you run a scam Yeah, it would have been great whereas making you the victim of the scam is what he actually did. Yeah, it's a shame because there was an opportunity here So most of what I'm going to tell you is from the gizmotopies. Although God help me

I did in fact read much of his official biographer So this guy is born Oliver Napoleon Hill in Virginia to a relatively poor family

“And he picks up writing when he's a teenager and starts working for a small newsletter that would occasionally get picked up by local papers”

His biographers who are very sympathetic to him said that he recalled making up stories when there wasn't anything good to report right so From an early age Yeah, I'm going to send you a bit from Novak. It says officially Napoleon Hill supporters are probably aware of two or three of his marriages In fact, he was married at least five times

This would perhaps not be worth mentioning except for the circumstances surrounding his first two marriages

The two that are largely missing from the official stories of Hill. Hill's first marriage occurred when he was just 15 and had gotten a girl pregnant According to the official hill biography, which is the only known record of his marriage, the young girl father angrily demanded that the two be married But not long after the wedding Napoleon's bride confessed that he had not fathered the child The marriage was annulled though it's unclear why this young girl would claim that the 15-year-old Napoleon was the father if this wasn't the case

But it wouldn't be the last time that the official record of Hill's life would erase one of his alleged children. So Hill graduates high school He attends a business school, and then he goes to work for a fairly prominent coal-man named Rufus Ayers In 1903 he gets married again. This time to a woman named Edith Whitman They have a baby girl They move to Alabama for a bit until he sends his wife and child back to Virginia to live with her father

It turns out that while married to her Napoleon like to dabble with Lays of the night and we know this because Edith would eventually file for divorce and be granted one. Oh, wow back then in 1908 You needed like an oil painting of your husband cheating on you to get him to get a divorce granted She said that he was a man of violent and ungovernable temper There were like serious allegations of abuse and there were serious allegations of

Cheating the whole concept of sending your wife and child away is also fascinating That's sort of divorce number one and but I was divorce number two. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry 15 year old. You know what you're right That's divorce number two. Okay, then we get What can only be described as some lumber fraud nice this is again from the no back piece throughout

1908 Hill had taken between $10,000 and $20,000 were have lumber on credit from various suppliers as far away as Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Indiana He had been selling off the lumber as quickly as he could in Alabama Accepting only cash and virtually any amount that he was offered this of course raised plenty of suspicions from the buyers

By the second half of 1908 word quickly spread that hill was committing fraud and every business man in the lumber community

“Was looking for him in September of 1908. Hill went on the run from his office in Mobile, Alabama”

So it's a was he stealing his lumber and selling it? He was buying the lumber on credit Selling the lumber for cash and then stiffing the folks who gave him the lumber dude I love how this is like life hack be a lifelong piece of shit This is how you get rich. So warrants are issued for his arrest lawsuits are filed. Yeah. He's investigated for mail fraud

Somehow in some way, he's either never caught or never gets into any significant trouble for this

This is also back when you could just like basically leave the state. He shows up in Washington, D.C. And is now going by his middle name Napoleon pretty quickly takes out ads offering training in automobile assembly Nice. He starts the automobile company of Washington. I hear is Novak again hills college was actually a way to get free labor for building cars students were paying for the pleasure of producing

Washington brand cars for the Carter Motor Corporation in 1910 and 1911 The Carter company had struck a deal with hills quote school and got free labor from quote students who were toiling away Constructing vehicles in a Washington warehouse. I'll got its internships basically you're working for exposure his business partners here

All break the partnerships with him in pretty short order making various allegations of misconduct including that he stole a car

The company goes into bankruptcy He pivots the business model to teaching people sales rather than automobile assembly. Once again, the students were doing actual labor frame by selling cars right and they received three dollars for each person They signed up to be students. Oh, it was an MLM very early High-level marketing which by the way doesn't even really exist for another like 20 years and it's modern form

Yeah, during all of this he has remarried to a woman named Florence and had a couple of kids

“Including one who is born deaf and I believe without physical ears”

Who he refuses to allow to learn sign language because he wants him to be able to Communicate like everyone else. He wants him to learn. He's a tiger dad. He writes about this at length in Think and grow rich now after about it and he framed it as like part of his secret to success, right by denying the kid Other tools of communication. He forced him to become more capable at speaking and even hearing, right? Here's here's more from Hill the little deaf boy went through the grades high school and college without being able to hear his teachers

Accepting when they shouted loudly at close range. He did not go to a school for the deaf We would not permit him to learn the sign language We were determined that he should live a normal life and associate with normal children and we stood by that decision Although it cost us many heated debates with school officials God that poor kid Jesus Christ is more during his last week in college something happened

“Which marked the most important turning point of his life through what seemed to be mere chance”

He came into possession of another electrical hearing device which was sent to him on trial He was slow about testing it due to his disappointment with a similar device

Finally, he picked the instrument up and more or less carelessly placed on his head hooked up the battery and

Low as if by a stroke of magic his life-long desire for normal hearing became a reality We had refused to accept nature's error and by persistent desire We had induced nature to correct that error through the only practical means of available But nature didn't fix the errors like a technology thing. He's just giving himself credit for the literal advancement of science Yeah, for like the invention of hearing aids. I imagine that

Doctors or somewhat familiar with this right you like cure a patient and then people like our prayers We're answered and you're like come on like I had syphilis, and I manifested penicillin Interestance it's like a technology that's all this issue eventually Napoleon heads to Chicago at one point pretending to be an attorney We don't know exactly what happened But we do know that he he got let her head describing himself as Napoleon Hill attorney at law hell

God knows what he was up to if you were called the intro by that other dude Said that Hill briefly went to law school Yeah, which for the record does not actually appear to be true right what was true was that he was posing as an attorney the guy In 2009. It's so weird to just write all this stuff down and not be like That he really meet all these people. It's so I mean this is a man who just writes books about books

That's like one tier below people who make podcasts about books to be below us Cross then Hill found the George Washington Institute, which was an unequredited school that taught the principles of Success this little institute gets into all kinds of minor trouble The big thing is that he runs a stock scam where he sold stock in the school to his students based on a fraudulent

Dummy corporation called the first national trust association and then he mailed students offers to lend the money for their tuition

Oh, good scam. Okay, kind of unclear how this played out legally But he again seems to have gotten away with it to some degree because the very next year He joins up with a couple who is looking for investors in their oil concern And he runs fraudulent ads for them and gets charged by the FTC

“How bad you have to fuck up for the FTC to go after you at this time the FTC was like two people”

It's unreal. Yeah, all right We're now in the early 1920s, right. I'm gonna send you a little bit Hill partner with chaplain TOT to start the intro wall Correspondent school in 1922 the charity would provide educational materials for prisoners in Ohio So they could lead productive lives once they left prison unsurprisingly the charity's main focus with the sale of subscriptions For Hills magazine and newly developed prison correspondence courses in 1923

There's a newspaper article published about all of his unpaid debts and other dealings It includes the fact that Hill has allegedly pocketed much or perhaps all of the charity money So here's a little more from no back Hill schemes of the early 20s were as brazen as they were despicable He'd hop from town to town often targeting churches Promising that every penny he collected was going to help men and prisons start in your life

But every penny was making it's way to Hill and his associates pockets by one way or another people found out that he's scamming them again

Because the various places that he claimed he was sending the money never actually received it Napoleon Hill walk so Sean King could run

Sean King wishes he had moves like this dude. He's on he's on the run again and he ends up moving around the midwest He's he's lecturing in the region including at least wants to a meeting of the clan. Oh At one point he goes into hiding for a couple of years though. It's not entirely clear why he pops up again in 1928 or so in Philadelphia trying to pitch his new book which would become the law of success Here is no back again Hill was completely broken Philadelphia and had to appear to his potential publisher as a man of success

And grace, so he borrowed money from his brother-in-law rent it an enormous suite in a swanky Philadelphia hotel and played the role of this successful business man for Pelton Hills byographers tell of Napoleon flashing a large watt of money around the hotel lobby Lavishly tipping every billboy and clerk he saw in anticipation of Pelton's arrival So this obviously works. He publishes his book and it's a bit of a hit by his standards He's making legitimate money for the first time in a while

He's buying fancy cars in houses. He buys a big estate in the cat skills as the intro told us and as the intro told us He's gonna turn it into a success academy But then of course the stock market crashes the depression hits and it wipes him out also There's there's something so perfect and telling about this trajectory this guy who just like has no morals

“whatsoever, right? Just complete inveterate scammer at first. He's doing actual stuff, right?”

He's like selling lumber. He's trying to build cars, but then eventually he finds out that just lecturing like Lying to people without the actual stuff is much more profitable Right, so he goes into self-help right like that says something about the self-help like genre is it like this is a guy that just wants to scam you And eventually he figures out this is the easiest way the more abstract you get yeah the easier the fraud becomes Because when you yeah when you are like

Stiffing your creditors that's gonna come back to bite you. There's like this clear disconnect But when you're just like yeah, I'm gonna teach you how to succeed

That will that won't come to come back to bite you in the same way because there's always like some plausible

Diability like it's your fault right right No no back says at this point in the in the piece if it hasn't become clear already Napoleon has more or less abandoned his wife Florence and their three sons Right the late 1920s. I was gonna ask about this. Yeah, he probably left them wherever he was They were all living with Florence's mother

Well, we're seeing Napoleon when he'd peek his head in for short bursts usually to get money by 1935 she files for divorce he remarries this time a 29-year-old he is fifty three He moves in with the only son who will still talk to him. Blair nice

Loan's a few hundred bucks from him and starts writing think and grow rich and here we are We have arrived at the book you have just heard his life story to this point and now it is time to learn About his principles of success. It's also funny because the actual secret is just like lying in shamelessness Like he kind of does have a secret

“But what if that's what he means when he says it's like hidden in the book. Oh shit”

What if the real secret is hidden and it's like you lie? Yeah, I just don't like this bullshit Yeah, it's a it's a meta text. Oh, man. It's like a little lead up between the lines. It's actually a really good story

But don't just even make sense Peter because I'm gay. It doesn't make sense. I know

Hey, no lowly toe has you call it. So he starts off the book with a bunch of anecdotes about people who Found success through sheer force of will

“Here is one about Henry Ford. We're in the Oprah new the secret section of the book. Dude it. There's a lot of it”

He says a few years back Henry Ford decided to produce his now famous V8 motor He chose to build an engine with an entire eight cylinders cast in one block and instruct it as engineers to produce a design for the engine The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed to a man That it was simply impossible to cast an eight cylinder gas engine block in one piece Ford said produce it anyway, but they replied. It's impossible go ahead for commanded and stay on the job until you succeed

No matter how much time is required six months went by nothing happened another six months past and still nothing happened at the end of the year For check this engineers and again they informed him They found no way to carry out his orders go right ahead said Ford all want it and I'll have it. They went ahead and then as if by a stroke of magic The secret was discovered the forward determination had one once more Peter. I recognize his anecdote Yeah, was it what was that one?

What was the money one? Jens and Sarah. So this is straight from you are a badass, which means that you are a badass actually I assume just pluck this also as usual. It's not actually an example of the secret at all. It's just an example of like being mean to your staff

“Which is exactly what we said on the euro bet has that this exactly what we said is just like what does he manifest it?”

Yeah, yelling at people to do it the actual question is how did the engineers do it? Yeah, I manifested a glass of ice water by like shouting it at the waiter across the restaurant He's so he says that if you have a definite desire or a burning desire You can manifest the wealth he says the method by which desire for riches can be transmuted into its financial equivalent Consists of six definite practical steps here we go, baby if you've been zoning out listen or focus up that lock-in

We're about to drop some fucking knowledge on you first fix in your mind the exact amount of money

You desire it is not sufficient merely to say I want plenty of money Be definite as to the amount second determined exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire There is no such reality as something for nothing third is established a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire Fourth create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once Whether you are ready or not to put this plan into action fifth right at a clear concise statement of the amount of money

You intend to acquire name the time limit for its acquisition state what you intend to give in or turn for the money and Describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it. That's just like the same as the previous four Yeah, yeah six read your written statement allowed twice daily once just before retiring at night And once after arising in the morning as you read see and feel and believe yourself already in Possession of the money I can't do this in the morning because I'm eating too much almond butter

Because my wife wants to have sex with me in two days in two days. Yeah, he's he goes on to say it may be a further help to know that the six steps here Recommended were carefully scrutinized by the late Thomas A. Edison to place his standard approval upon them I mean not only the steps essential for the accumulation of money, but necessary for the attainment of any definite goal You do not need this Napoleon you could just list your steps. I don't need Thomas Edison to approve. I'm gonna send you a picture click on that wait

What's this this is a picture of two middle-aged men on the left Thomas Edison on the right Napoleon Hill was that true this is a picture of Napoleon Hill with Thomas Edison The story of this photograph is that Hill went to a convention Edison was at an asked for a picture He then started circulating the photo with the caption describing the picture as being of quote two of America's famous men

Never stop hustling Napoleon. He basically just photobomb Thomas Edison

Then used it to like help boost his career, but this is the only of all like the people that he says he's met and shit Right, this is like the only one where it appears like well that they did at least meet once he he went in photobomb Thomas Edison once this Plan is not like you don't really need Thomas Edison's approval for this. It's like right down a plan and then implement the plan This is like the most basic advice for like basically anything in your life But what's interesting about this is and what we'll see more of in the rest of the book is that

He tells you like have a plan and and it's sort of unclear whether he thinks the purpose of the plan is like to be a set of practical steps that get you money or whether having a plan

“Impacts your vibration like the if you have a plan your vibrating closer to where you need to be vibrating”

But then like once you start saying that it's just sort of like you're no longer talking about vibrations

Yeah, if to align your vibrations with the universe

“You need to do the practical steps then what is the difference between this and just a practical guide?”

You're manifesting becoming a doctor and then the actual advice is like we'll go to medical school You vibrated yourself into medical school, but not really. I just did the steps necessary to achieve my plan So the first few chapters of the book are really just about the importance of having this burning desire for success and how it Must transcend me or hope and become something you actually believe will happen When he uses a term faith that is what he's talking about you have to really want to be rich

If you tried wanting to be rich, but after the first few chapters We actually move a way a little bit from the more mystical angles and he starts to provide more practical advice Yeah, he talks about the importance of specialized knowledge, meaning expertise He talks about the importance of making concrete plans

He talks about the importance of coordinating with reliable and talented people something he has never done

“It's always run through with mystical language, but like it's trying to be pragmatic”

Yeah, some of the most interesting parts of this book are him trying to talk about the real world in more like Realistic terms because then you can see like his actual mind at work And so here's him talking business a bit. He says the next flock of billionaires will grow out of the radio business Which is new and not overburden with men of Keen imagination Cruners and light chatter artists who now pollute the air with wise cracks and silly giggles

We'll go the way of all light timbers wrong bitch wrong bitch I was going to give you shit after this paragraph, but okay, and their places will be taken by real artists who interpret carefully Planned programs which have been designed to service the minds of men as well as provide entertainment whatever Go listen to this American life you've got a dark. They also said this been like TV was invented

It was this will produce mass literacy will never need schools again

It's like anytime there's a new technology it's like we're all gonna become good and smart cut to watch me watching Below deck. Yeah, I got this brain melty never let us encourage you if you have no experience in radio Andrew Carnegie knew very little about making steel. I have Carnegie's own word for this But he made practically use of two of the principles described in this book and made the steel business yield him a fortune Well, then why don't you I just do fucking steel fast. He's he loves the idea of radio

He's like the unit he thinks the whole universe is built around radio waves. It is funny to be like, oh, it's all about like Meta physical vibrations and then just be like, well, find a new technology that's growing and like get into that industry You know, let's talk about scale. Yeah, I actually think these portions of the book are really interesting because

He'll himself has never had a business idea of the size like, you know, start a business to sell my success principles getting a best or

Defraud right that's like how he operates. So yeah, it's interesting to hear him give advice about like what industries to go into how to succeed And in all these other ways that we know he's never succeeded in right in one chapter. He named several fields that he believes will require new leadership But he basically names like every field you can imagine. He says politics business industry religion Education medicine and journalism all require new leaders who are more

Empathetic to the public plastics. This is a window into his mind because coming out of the depression like People are obviously looking for answers right and his reasoning is all very based on this idea that people in all fields Sort of failed on a moral level and in in line with that he seems to chalk up a lot of the depression To rude customer service I really he says really every railroad in America is in financial difficulty

Who does not remember the day when if a citizen inquired at the ticket office the time of departure of a train He was abruptly referred to the bulletin board instead of being politely given the information He says the same about street cars and bankers and he attributes the rebound in the economy to these people all

“Recognizing the value of good customer service. What are you just manifest of nicer bankteller than bitch?”

He says behind the depression was a cause nothing ever happens without a cause in the main The cause of the depression is traceable directly to the world wide habit of trying to reap without sowing He means here trying to reap money without sowing like the seeds of kindness This is insane, but also could get published in the Atlantic today completely 100 percent Yeah, this is also on the it boasts could kill bingo board of you have this grand sweeping idea that explains all of history

And then you keep zooming in on it until it just like a grievance that you have yeah Yeah, yeah, but how the population bomb guy was annoyed that he couldn't find parking and Berkeley Right, and he's like we're all going to fucking die There's more about his diagnosis for the depression that I want to share. Hmm. Here you go The depression serve is a mighty protest from an injured public who's rights had been trampled upon in every direction by those who were clamoring for individual

Been restored to balance both employers and employees will recognize But they are no longer privileged to drive bargains of the expense of those whom they serve the employer and the employee of the future We'll be considered as fellow employees whose business It will be to serve the public efficiently in times past employers and employees have bartered among themselves Driving the best bargains they could with one another not considering that in the final analysis

They were in reality bargaining at the expense of the third party the public they served the future relationship

Between employers and their employees will be more in the nature of a partnership consisting of a the employer

“B the employee see the public. They serve Peter. Why did you make me read this?”

This is gibberish what he's trying to say is that part of the reason that the depression happened is bargaining for wages Oh, he says during the depression I spent several months in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania Studying conditions which all but destroyed the coal industry among several very significant discoveries was the fact that greed on the part of Operators and their employees was the cause of the loss of business for the operators and loss of jobs for the minors

So again, this guy's career is 95% fraud. Yeah, but he sees people bargaining for wages and he's like that's greed This should give you some sense of his actual politics But just to be sure his official biographers described him as an anti union arch conservative This is like a woman who went on the beast games and said greed is idolatry She was on the beast games twice. Are you watching beast games? No, I'm watching video essays about these games

Which is significantly class of cops class

“And there's no fucking way of watching you you'll never watch TV, but you will watch”

She says I don't care about any of these shows that I want an unwell zoomer to explain them to me He does at times make it very express where he stands on the issue of capitalism Send in you this we often hear politicians claiming the freedom of America when they solicit votes But seldom do they take the time or devote sufficient effort to the analysis of the source or nature of this freedom Having no acts of grind no grudge to express no ulterior motives to be carried out

I have the privilege of going into a frank analysis of that mysterious Abstract greatly misunderstood something which gives to every citizen of America more blessings More opportunities to accumulate wealth more freedom of every nature than may be found in any other country Dude send this to Thomas Chatterton Williams. We need your sentence record The name of this mysterious benefactor of mankind is capital capital

capital consists not alone of money, but more particularly of highly organized Intelligent groups of men who plan ways and means of using money efficiently for the good of the public and Profitably to themselves

We finally got to the capitalism as good section of the

Yeah, this is not necessary for the idea not at all

“But I think it's important to the book because coming out of the depression a”

lot of Americans had lost some faith in the capitalist project for obvious reasons, right? There's contemporary polling from like Pew and Gallup showing large amounts of support for government interventions into the markets Right free healthcare social security, etc. Like the number of people who supported a free healthcare It was like 75% this book exists within the context of a debate about what our society will look like and should look like moving forward And he's saying very expressly we don't have systemic issues in fact

Our system is great. It's the best system what we have is a collection of personal moral failures Right, so you can view this not just as like a self-help book, but a policy prescription We don't need socialism. We just need everyone to get their shit together Also, what's actually so interesting about this is that you could cast him kind of as the little guy like he grew up poor like he could have seen himself as somebody who was like taking from the rich

I mean, that would have been false. Yeah, he was doing all these cans at a time of like Rapidly increasing inequality he could have lived exactly the life that he had with an ideology of like we need to help out the little guy Right, and like rich people have too much money But somehow he manages to like glaze Capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and stuff like it's weird to have his life and come up with this ideology

Because it's not like he made money through capital accumulation

He made money through scamming. There's something weird about people like you'll you'll never encounter a guy who like

Survives through fraud, but is like self-aware enough to be like the little guy need some help around here Right, I feel like every fraudster is just like yeah capitalism rocks and it's like the best of it's amazing one Chapter gives practical tips on landing a job Which revolve mostly around marketing your personal services He's just taking out ads in newspapers and advertising yourself. Okay, and I don't I I just thought that was interesting

Because like you know how boomers will be like well, why don't you just walk down to the store and change the managers hand Two generations before that you didn't even need to do that you're just like took an ad out for yourself

Yeah, if you need someone to like top down a tree or something

“I can do that and then you just get a job that way”

Yeah, yeah. He also lists out the 30 major causes of failure Most of them are pretty normal lack of self-discipline and so forth right But there are some stand-out some odd ones the first is unfavorable hereditary background. Oh wrong kind of whites I actually thought this was gonna be racist. I was like, oh, this is gonna be expressly racist But he actually just means people who are naturally stupid. Oh

He says there is but little if anything which can be done for people who are born with a deficiency in brain power Okay They can't place ads don't be placed in ads if you're a dummy But also like what happened to trans muting like you made your son here according to you Exactly, so can I trans mute myself like 30 extra IQ points or something? Yeah, just a little bit

Yeah, this is the first one of of 30 major causes of failure He's like number one you're a dumbass

“Like if you're dumb enough to buy this book, that's why you're not succeeding. There's also”

ill health. Oh, okay. I'm gonna send you this This is like number six. I the order of these is inexplicable. He says no person may enjoy outstanding success without good health Many of the causes of ill health are subject to mastery and control these in the main are a overeating of foods not conducive to health B wrong habits of thought giving expression to negatives

C wrong use of an overindulgence in sex D lack of proper physical exercise E on an adequate supply of fresh air due to improper breathing also. He's just like an rfk junior kind of guy I was enthralled by this little throw away about getting an adequate fresh air due to a bad breathing

Yeah, this is never mentioned again in the book. We cannot explain that at all

Paul he needed was like a parent medical a long digression about muting Here's another here's another major cause of failure lack of controlled sexual urge Sex energy is the most powerful of all the stimuli which move people into action Because it is the most powerful of the emotions it must be controlled through transmutation and

“Converted into other channels. I disagree you disagree with what I think you can be on grander and have a podcast”

I think it's fine. You know what so I look if the lesson here is don't be so horny that you ruin your life Fair, but yeah, there's this little thing about trans muting your sexual urges That caught my attention and I don't think we can talk about anything else until we Talk about that. So let's give forward a bit Chapter 11 which is titled the mystery of sex transmutation

So he does elaborate on this. There's an entire chapter on sex transmutation. Okay. I know that you've already Complained about how all of his rating is saying the same thing over and over and that is not about to improve Here you go. He says sex Transutation is simple and easily explained it means the switching of the mind from thoughts of physical expression to thoughts of some other nature

Sex desire is the most powerful of human desires when driven by this desire

Men develop keenness of imagination courage will power persistence and creative ability Unknown to them at other times So strong and impelling is the desire for sexual contact that men freely run the risk of life and reputation to indulge it When harnessed and redirected along other lines this motivating force maintains all of its attributes of keenness of imagination courage et cetera

Which may be used as powerful creative forces in literature art or in any other profession or calling including of course The accumulation of riches. This is the chatterton illness where he like includes all these lists of things Yeah, yeah, like you don't need eight examples of what this can do because it is like a really simple concept So basically you take your bone or energy and you put your bone or energy into like Painting watercolors. Yeah, although I actually still don't understand how yeah, it's unclear to me if what he means is like

Don't jerk off instead right something right or if what he means is something else

It's not entirely clear he never says like don't have sex right right in fact the kind of the opposite

So let me send you this you need a boner of the mind You got a mind boner. It's very similar to an idea scoop. He says scientific research has disclosed these significant facts One the men of greatest achievement are men with highly developed sex natures Men who have learned the art of sex transmutation This is like the grit thing. You just like making this thing up. Yeah, too

The men who have accumulated great fortunes and achieved outstanding recognition literature art industry architecture and the professions We're motivated by the influence of a woman the research from which these astounding discoveries were made went back through the pages of biography and history for more than 2,000 years wherever there was evidence available in connection with the lives of men and women of great achievement It indicated most convincingly that they possessed highly developed sex natures. What is he talking about?

I was just like Googling around and a lot of like the no-fap communities are like by the way Napoleon Hill says So they some people think that it's like don't masturbate and you will sort of like a crew power

“I mean whatever. I don't think that's what he means actually because he says that he says the successful men had a highly developed sex nature”

implying they were having a lot of sex. It seems like they he's talking about people who are just fucking a lot Yeah, but then he also says like I'm not talking about just liver teams I'm not talking about being a liver team so it's sort of he's like you have to control it

But he never actually articulates what that means what if the actual secret is a ciclitarist? Is it the one o'clock

Then it's common in the secret Mahatma Gandhi in the secret. He says the reality of a six-sense has been fairly well established This six-sense is creative imagination the faculty of creative imagination is one which the majority people never use during an entire lifetime And if you said all it usually happens by mere accident. That's not what a sense is I'm still explaining I was ready. I'm like poised to fucking respond to those. He says that the only people who can use their creative imagination are geniuses

And that only geniuses have made the discovery of sex transmutation the creative

“Imagination is triggered when the mind is vibrating at an exceedingly high rate. So what I think he's saying is it like”

Being horny gets your brain vibrating high and then you utilize that high-vap vibration to think of good ideas Bring on chat GPT the AI robots are so much better than this shit. What is he talking about?

He says that this is more powerful than standard reasoning because reasoning is based on your own knowledge and experience

Which is flawed whereas this is connecting you to the vibrations of the universe, which are infinite the blood Was going to go to my bone or should go to my brain. He said and that's the energy that I should use He's just got a bone or so severe that his brain is raining of blood and he's like this is it All right, I just sent you a little bit more and obviously it's very necessary This is an important part of the episode in connection with the facts available from the biographies of certain men

We here present the names of a few men about standing achievement each of whom was known to a Ban of a highly sexed nature when any list of dudes George Washington Thomas Jefferson Napoleon Bonaparte Elbert Hubbard William Shakespeare Oscar Wild Woodrow Wilson Abraham Lincoln John H. Patterson Ralph Waldo Emerson Andrew Jackson Robert Burns and Rico Carruso. I just wrote LMAO under the situation under this whole situation I like more highly sex things if I was writing a self-help book

I would absolutely include a list of historical figures who could get it on a highly sex nature like I read the chapter twice because I was like does he say anything like is he Explaining this? Yeah, no because at first I was like, oh, it just means like you don't have sex Yeah, then he's giving examples of people who just he seems to believe had a lot of stuff a lot of sex

“Yeah, but then I still come back to the conclusion that like what I think he means like you get horny and then work”

Yeah, we're gonna move on to some other interesting later chapters He has a chapter that is about the human brain. It's so funny to be that in all of these books It's like you have a self-help idea, and then you could just write about literally anything sex Transmitation dude right about the brain right about sex who gives a shit. I'm sending you the opening paragraph. He says more than 20 years ago the author working in conjunction with the late Dr. Alexander Graham Bell and

Dr. Elmer Argates Observe that every human brain is both a broadcasting and receiving station for the vibration of thought Sure at this point. I feel like I don't need to tell you that this man Did not meet Alex and Fredo let alone helped him conduct some kind of brain experiment because what does he mean here? Broadcasting and receiving station does he mean that we can like hear each other's thoughts?

So most of the chapter is pretty boring. It's about the same things, right? You got to get your brain vibrating right, but there is one bit where he talks about telepathy Okay, which of course he believes is real sure. He cites the work of Joseph Ryan at Duke University as evidence that telepathy exists So I start poking around this guy is fairly well known. He is the founder of the field of Paris Icology he's the one who came up with the term ESP

Reception and of course now his work is widely considered to be a mess

Yeah, the methodologies are poor. It's never been replicated some of his colleagues were suspected of fraud and different circumstances

The very famous skeptic James Randy said he believed that Ryan was like a naive but good faith actor But I will say this in the 1930s. It was not crazy to see that a research and think like oh, maybe telepathy is real Yeah, yeah, we're doing like they were doing experiments with like cards where people could people predict what card was what right?

There's scenarios in which it looks like somebody's reading your mind

“Yeah, and they were real deal academics at the time studying this and finding what looked like evidence”

Yeah, the only reason I included this in the episode is because there are so many times that he'll references like Something you look up and then it's either not confirmed or it's confirmed as bullshit like right there is research about the sexual natures Yeah, the great men in history and you're like what the fuck are you talking about right? Yeah, and then he says this The one time he identifies actual science that you actually locate and you're like fair enough, man And it's about a fucking telepathy

I was like, oh my god, like even the real stuff is fake. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah There's something so crazy about this because it's like he was vibrating on the fraud wave length so hard Yeah, that like he could like he was like subconsciously spotting the telepathy fraud without even knowing it Like the only things you can convey to you are fraudulent and so even when he thought he was telling you about real science He was actually telling you about fake science. Yeah, well, maybe that means telepathy is real

He's attaching the grifter vibrations from other grifters So he's correct about telepathy and that is where we're gonna end our discussion of the book

“The book just sort of winds down along these lines right and it is a huge hit and I think a lot of the reasons why”

It's complete bullshit are also why it succeeded at the time Like coming out of the depression like people don't want to hear about structural impediments Yeah, right they don't want to hear about why like capitalism is gonna prevent you from getting rich They want someone to tell them if they could be rich if they just get their mind right because I did a little bit of research on the new thought stuff for the How to win friends at influence people episode and this was kind of a new idea

I mean all of us now in America are just like we're a wash and this dumb fucking power a positive thinking garbage But like this was kind of new at the time the idea that you could like manifest things by envisioning them Yeah, and it feels Scientific yeah, yeah, and I think kind of culturally right he's he's expressly says being rich as the results of your mindset Being poor is the result of your mindset. He says poverty is attracted to the minds of those favorable to it

“Hmm, I think to most saying people now this just reads as blaming poverty on the poor”

Yeah, which is a crazy thing to do following the depression right but to a person in that situation You could see how it might be hopeful. Yeah, it presents you with a feasible solution Right that solution is not like move to California in a wagon Right right your Senator or something. It's like I just believe in this and like try really hard make a plan, et cetera A little bit of epilogue here when the book becomes a hit he signs the royalty rights over to his latest wife

The one who helped him write it with the idea being that his various creditors would not be able to get at them In that way, he does not pay back the $300 loan his son Blair gave him to launch the book According to no back the Journalist who wrote the Gizmoto piece his wife wrote his son like a taunting letter about how about the high-life. They were living A drink champagne on your dime bitch. They are like they're like buying mansions and cars and shit

Enjoy living in a shack you fucking lose They broke up and they blow they blow through the money in like two years. That's nuts. They had the opportunity here to lead like a normal cushy life Yeah, but because he like spans all the money. He gets immediately

He just never stops getting in trouble. He starts associating with a weird cult called the master metaphysticians

Who drew headlines for purchasing an old Vanderbilt mansion and then announcing publicly that they intended to adopt and raise in a mortal baby Using metaphystics and also a vegetarian diet. Hell is the godfather of this child. Wait So it's a real child that's just not a moron. This is a real human child and that baby's name was Brian Johnson Napoleon gets divorced again He spends like the next 15 or so years doing the same shit

He always did he's giving speeches. He's trying to get people to invest in success schools He's launching magazines. He's writing unsuccessful books. It's wildly couldn't live on this for the rest of his life They were like buying mansions like a states and like roles or horses and shit like that He's getting run out of various towns, you know, and he's just he's back to he's back to classic Napoleon The man just loves scanning the pastor Norman Vincent Peel claimed that Hill helped him write the power of positive thinking really early 1950s

Which is notable first of all because it's just boost one book theory

Right. We'll do that on the show eventually, but it is going to be precisely the same as the fucking book And then also Peel was Donald Trump's pastor and someone who Trump for many years cited as an influence

That if Napoleon Hill never writes this piece of shit book a butterfly flaps its wings and Trump is not the president of the United States

“And Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016 and somebody even worse would be in charge now the phrase president Jillian Michaels would be appearing on this show constantly”

Or perhaps even better Joe Biden now 95 years old He's second term does not know he's president, but is still the president one of the interesting themes of the gizmoto

Peace is that Matt Novak is trying to get Napoleon Hills original writings from the Napoleon Hill foundation

Which is just like non-profit that's obviously meant to like boost his sort of profile and they won't give him access and They're like very caging weird about it and are like we can like give you a tour of his childhood home But you'll have to donate $5,000 to the foundation

No way there's something so interesting about like here

We are a hundred years after this guy was in his prime right his little and his foundation is run by a bunch of people

“Who are basically like doing his front to this day. It's like did he live the values?”

He espoused in his book. No, but did his work inspire millions of people to improve their lives Also no It's a sad contract of Dale Carnegie who did right one of these dumb books, but also seemed like a kind of a good guy Yeah, remember remember his little chapter where he just walks up to the boys cooking hot dogs and he's like, you know boys

“Gotta get out of the park see love that cooking hot dogs and but it was a Frank for her, but perhaps doing a little more safely”

All right, but just like a nice guy and then we have only a year later We have the complete Corruption of like this genre of book. Yeah, he's like Dale Carnegie is a fucking boy See yeah, like this fucking loser who's like trying to actually help you like make friends get your mind vibrating and Defraud everyone you know and fab but not too much the appropriate amount Dale Carnegie is like try to be nice to everyone

You meet and Napoleon. He was like get horny and think of ideas Get alone. Yeah, use your boner to vibrate your way into a job in radio This book could have been one sentence (upbeat music)