Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, Dream listeners, if you like this podcast, you're
Speaker 1: gonna love the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wrote a book. It's called Selling the Dream and
Speaker 1: it's coming out March twelfth, twenty twenty four, on Atria.
Speaker 1: It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs and
Speaker 1: some that you've never even heard of. I hope check
Speaker 1: it out previously on the Dream so that you can
Speaker 1: see this training seven steps to becoming a recruiting machine.
Speaker 3: But it doesn't actually.
Speaker 1: Tell you how to recruit people.
Speaker 3: So this is funny because it's like step one, like
Speaker 3: make a decision.
Speaker 1: Step doesn't even say make a decision. It says one, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Step one decisions, Step two, mindset, step three, collect friends,
Speaker 3: Like it's just what.
Speaker 1: There are about a million different origin stories for our
Speaker 1: current obsession with maximizing our potential in America, and my
Speaker 1: favorite one of those stories kind of explains everything you
Speaker 1: need to know about the coaching hustle today, only it
Speaker 1: starts back around the first time the machines started to
Speaker 1: take over. I'm talking Industrial Revolution era, the latter half
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds, not this like new chat GPT stuff.
Speaker 1: Back then, humans were looking inward, like what makes me
Speaker 1: a human individually special and irreplaceable, and a bunch of
Speaker 1: their ideas were like, Hey, I have a mind and
Speaker 1: a body and a soul, Look what I can do.
Speaker 1: Spiritual movements like new Thought and the law of attraction,
Speaker 1: you know how your attitude and thoughts affect stuff in
Speaker 1: the physical world, became super popular right around then, so
Speaker 1: did hypnosis. Some folks took all this stuff a little
Speaker 1: too far, in my opinion, and started doing a thing
Speaker 1: called mentalism mind reading and watch me bend this for
Speaker 1: without touching it. Magic stuff like that. Others took the
Speaker 1: idea to church and came up with beliefs like Christian science,
Speaker 1: which focused on healing the body with the mind, often
Speaker 1: through prayer. And of course there were a bunch of
Speaker 1: Charlatans in on the game. There was money to be
Speaker 1: made on seances. Everyone wanted a Ouiji board and all
Speaker 1: that other creepy Victorian stuff. Supposedly, this all became really
Speaker 1: popular after the Civil War because so many people died
Speaker 1: and there weren't proper funerals. Folks wanted to connect with
Speaker 1: lost loved ones again in you know, like in their minds.
Speaker 1: And then along came a man named Napoleon Hill, and
Speaker 1: he said, what if this new way of thinking was
Speaker 1: applied solely to making money? After all, if you can
Speaker 1: conjure the dead and bend spoons with your mind, you
Speaker 1: should be able to like manifest a pile of gold bricks,
Speaker 1: you know, think and grow rich. So back in the
Speaker 1: thirties he wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich.
Speaker 1: His inspiration, he said, was a meeting with Andrew Carnegie.
Speaker 1: And this is Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, not Dale Carnegie,
Speaker 1: the author of another self help classic, How to Win
Speaker 1: Friends and Influence People. That guy, Dale Carnegie, no religion.
Speaker 1: Changed the spelling of his last name to match Andrews
Speaker 1: the year Andrew Carnegie died. Not really a coincidence. So
Speaker 1: we're talking about the og Carnegie Andrew Anyway, Napoleon Hill
Speaker 1: meets og Andrew Carnegie, and well, let's let him tell it.
Speaker 4: Mister Carnegie delivered a lecture that I shall never forget.
Speaker 5: Let me call your.
Speaker 4: Attention to a great power which is under your controls
Speaker 4: at mister Carnegie, Hi, power which is greater than poverty,
Speaker 4: greater than the lack of education, greater than all of
Speaker 4: your fears and superstitions, combined, it is the power to
Speaker 4: take the station of your own mind and direct it
Speaker 4: to whatever ends you may desire. When you speak of
Speaker 4: your poverty and lack of education, mister Carnegie explained, you
Speaker 4: are simply directing your mind to attract these undesirable circumstances,
Speaker 4: because it is true that whatever your mind feeds upon,
Speaker 4: your mind attracts to you. Now you see why it
Speaker 4: is important that you recognize that all succeists begins with
Speaker 4: definitess of purpose, with a clear picture in your mind
Speaker 4: of precisely what you want from life.
Speaker 1: This is from a nineteen twenty eight filmed presentation Hill
Speaker 1: gave on his first book, The Law of Success. So
Speaker 1: on the supposed advice from Andrew Carnegie, Napoleon Hill says
Speaker 1: he set about speaking to as many successful and wealthy
Speaker 1: people as he possibly could, and eventually he wrote this book,
Speaker 1: Think and Grow Rich that has sold one hundred million
Speaker 1: copies since then. If you haven't heard of this book,
Speaker 1: I would like the address of the rock you've been
Speaker 1: living under, because I am tired of having to know stuff.
Speaker 4: Know what you want and believe that you can and
Speaker 4: we'll get it. Give expressions of gratitude. Many times daily
Speaker 4: for having received that which you want, even before you
Speaker 4: actually get us go pstation up. Persation starts first in
Speaker 4: the mind. Please remember this when over digging by defeat,
Speaker 4: as you may be many times, remember that man's faith
Speaker 4: is tested many times before he is crowned with final victory.
Speaker 4: And except Jordan's there's nothing more than a challenge to
Speaker 4: keep on try.
Speaker 1: Think and Grow Rich came out in nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: and to this day, people are devoted to the book
Speaker 1: and to Hill's teachings, and not just motivational speakers like
Speaker 1: Tony Robbins and all the other robins is this book
Speaker 1: is a part of popular culture, or just regular culture,
Speaker 1: or even unpopular culture. Everyone loves it, including the man
Speaker 1: who created the Fubu fashion line, Damon John my second
Speaker 1: favorite shark on Shark Tank.
Speaker 2: Now many of you have heard me credit the book
Speaker 2: that I read, and that I have read several times
Speaker 2: ever since I was a kid, Think and Grow Rich
Speaker 2: by Napoleon Hill, and it helped me start FOOGL. And
Speaker 2: today I want to share with you the top five
Speaker 2: lessons I learned from that book that helped me get
Speaker 2: to where I am today.
Speaker 6: And Lana del Right, I actually read this book called
Speaker 6: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which.
Speaker 1: Isn't Yeah you did, It's great.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's amazing because it's not really about money, right,
Speaker 6: it's just more I'll just always remember this line where
Speaker 6: he talks about burning every bridge except the one bridge
Speaker 6: to the thing that makes your heart the most on fire,
Speaker 6: and I was like, that's definitely singing, But how am
Speaker 6: I going to get there?
Speaker 1: There was even a film made about Napoleon's book and
Speaker 1: the story of his life, starring professional perpetual teenager Rob Dirdak.
Speaker 1: Of all those shows twelve year old boys love to
Speaker 1: watch on MTV.
Speaker 7: The hardest thing to actually masters faith when that doubt
Speaker 7: and fear that's ultimately a self protection mechanism that stops you.
Speaker 7: The only way to get through that is faith in
Speaker 7: your plan. And your plan only matters if you really
Speaker 7: believe anything, because faith is the piece that's going to
Speaker 7: give you the ability to continue through the highs and lows.
Speaker 7: And when you get to that level, you really believe
Speaker 7: that you are creating your entire existence, you feel like
Speaker 7: you're manipulating reality.
Speaker 1: But that film part interviews with famouses who loved Napoleon
Speaker 1: Hill and part reenactments from his life. It was never released,
Speaker 1: and I think we might know why. None of his
Speaker 1: story is true, starting with the fact that after a
Speaker 1: string of run ins with the law, he decided to
Speaker 1: go by his middle name instead of his first.
Speaker 5: Napoleon Hill was born Oliver Napoleon Hill.
Speaker 1: Wait, his name isn't even Napoleon.
Speaker 5: Right, his name is Oliver or nap This.
Speaker 1: Is Matt Novak. A few years ago, his partner came
Speaker 1: to him and she asked him if he'd ever heard
Speaker 1: of this guy Napoleon Hill, because she just read something
Speaker 1: about him.
Speaker 5: And that was nothing but a gut reaction on her
Speaker 5: part that something was fishy and set me off on
Speaker 5: this course. But she came up to me and said,
Speaker 5: there's this guy named Napoleon Hill and he needed to
Speaker 5: bunk him. And that's exactly what I set out to do,
Speaker 5: because it was pretty clear that this was a guy
Speaker 5: with a lot to sell and not much substance behind it.
Speaker 1: And careful what you wish for if you have a
Speaker 1: partner who respects your ideas. Because he did exactly what
Speaker 1: she suggested and spent the next two years working nights
Speaker 1: and weekends writing a twenty thousand word piece about Napoleon Hill,
Speaker 1: and that first discovery that his name wasn't really Napoleon
Speaker 1: was crucial to his research because if you just look
Speaker 1: up Napoleon Hill in historical records, it's all about the book.
Speaker 1: You can't really find anything on Napoleon Hill from before then. Honestly,
Speaker 1: using your middle name was a great trick in the
Speaker 1: olden days.
Speaker 5: But if you search Oliver Hill or Oliver Napoleon Hill,
Speaker 5: you get a bunch of scams that he was running,
Speaker 5: buying lumber on credit and then selling it at pennies
Speaker 5: on the dollar to other people. And you know, various
Speaker 5: companies were scammed in this way, and he was pursued
Speaker 5: by the authorities.
Speaker 1: And what does that, I'm sorry, when he's buying the
Speaker 1: lumber on credit and then selling it for really cheap
Speaker 1: and then not paying back the credit yep, okay okay.
Speaker 5: With no intention to ever pay back the people who
Speaker 5: he got it on credit for. It seems he changed
Speaker 5: his name when he was trying to flee the South.
Speaker 5: It seems a lot of his earliest scams with lumber
Speaker 5: were in the South, and then he headed off to Washington,
Speaker 5: d C. To start a car business. After the lumber scams,
Speaker 5: he flees to washing in d c where he starts
Speaker 5: a school for auto mechanics. But it turns out that
Speaker 5: that school is actually a scam where the quote unquote
Speaker 5: students are basically performing unpaid labor constructing cars.
Speaker 1: So their tuition is going toward their own work.
Speaker 5: Well, they're paying to basically work for free, which was
Speaker 5: quite a scam.
Speaker 1: But you know, I was going to ask if he
Speaker 1: had any experience building cars.
Speaker 5: You know, cars were this was the early nineteen tens
Speaker 5: and it's still a pretty new environment for cars, so
Speaker 5: it was you know, I don't know how he got
Speaker 5: involved in cars specifically, but they were the hot new
Speaker 5: technology at the time. But yeah, that fell through and
Speaker 5: he moved on to a candy company. There's so many
Speaker 5: different companies that he started that you know, were dissolved
Speaker 5: or disappeared from the records a year or two later.
Speaker 5: I don't know what the candy company scam was, but
Speaker 5: that was another one that he had. He bought something
Speaker 5: called the Martha Washington Candy Company and changed the name
Speaker 5: to the Betsy Ross Candy Company. I mean, weird little
Speaker 5: things like that where I don't know what the scam
Speaker 5: was with this candy company, but there's records, public records
Speaker 5: of him starting this and then changing the name, and
Speaker 5: then it disappears a year.
Speaker 1: Later as a fan of piling on to prove a point.
Speaker 1: There are a few more scans I want you to
Speaker 1: hear about. But remember the reason I need to drill
Speaker 1: this into your brain is because this guy is thought
Speaker 1: of as only a force for good, only a business
Speaker 1: and life expert, only a person who wanted to help
Speaker 1: other people have better lives through the way they thought
Speaker 1: about themselves and the power that they had to change
Speaker 1: the world around them with their minds. But this is
Speaker 1: how his mind actually worked, who he actually was, how
Speaker 1: he actually thought and grew rich. Though even that turns
Speaker 1: out to be a lie. We'll get to that in
Speaker 1: a minute.
Speaker 5: I also found in the late nineteen tens, and this
Speaker 5: would have been right around the First World War, he
Speaker 5: shows up to the newspaper archives threatening to sue public
Speaker 5: transit company because the reading because his eyes were strained
Speaker 5: because the lights in the cars weren't good enough so
Speaker 5: he got bad vision, like just the most frivolous, like
Speaker 5: the kind of you know, there's frivolous lawsuits today, But
Speaker 5: imagine one hundred years ago someone talking about how I'm
Speaker 5: going to sue this the public transit company because I
Speaker 5: can't read as well on the bus. It's like I have.
Speaker 5: You know. By the early twenties, he had a scam
Speaker 5: where he would go town to town again very music
Speaker 5: man or you know, north Haverbrooks Simpson style monorail guy.
Speaker 5: He'd go down to town and would say that he
Speaker 5: was collecting money for a special correspondence school in the
Speaker 5: nation's prisons. So he joins up with some check forger
Speaker 5: who is He gets him bailed out of prison and says, oh,
Speaker 5: we're starting this company, a charity that will it's called
Speaker 5: the inter Wall Correspondence School, and we're gonna collect all
Speaker 5: this money for inmates so they can have a better
Speaker 5: life and get an education inside, and then when they
Speaker 5: come out it'll be all this great stuff. Well again,
Speaker 5: I found newspaper articles where these towns would say the
Speaker 5: local chaplain would say the money never got there, we
Speaker 5: never saw a cent of it. Napoleon Hill, of course,
Speaker 5: have the goal to say that it was the clergy
Speaker 5: that we're lying about never getting the money. So I
Speaker 5: don't know how successful that one was, but he was
Speaker 5: raising apparently significant sums, you know, one thousand dollars here
Speaker 5: and there, which adjusted for inflation from one hundred years ago,
Speaker 5: is you know, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 5: So that was essentially the scam in the early twenties,
Speaker 5: oh the ties. So I found this this photo online
Speaker 5: of Thomas Edison with Napoleon Hill. And this is significant
Speaker 5: because throughout his entire life, Napoleon Hill swears that Andrew
Speaker 5: Carnegie told him to go interview all these famous people.
Speaker 5: He provided supposedly letters of introduction to interview successful businessmen
Speaker 5: from around the country. And there's absolutely no evidence that
Speaker 5: a he met with Carnegie to begin with, and b
Speaker 5: there's no evidence that he actually met any famous person
Speaker 5: that he claims to have except for Thomas Edison.
Speaker 1: Yes, Napoleon or Oliver or whatever you want to call him,
Speaker 1: perhaps the ear life coach, if you will, did put
Speaker 1: his mind to meeting Thomas Edison. But it wasn't based
Speaker 1: on gumption or having the right attitude or any of
Speaker 1: the tenants he espoused in his famous tome. It was
Speaker 1: because he was absolutely fine with making shit up. He
Speaker 1: wrote to Thomas Edison and said he had an award
Speaker 1: to give him. He did not have an award to
Speaker 1: give him, but he said he had an award to
Speaker 1: give him, and that was all made up and it
Speaker 1: wasn't a real award. And then he went to Thomas
Speaker 1: Edison and then got a picture taken with Thomas Edison
Speaker 1: handing him a fake award, and then he published the
Speaker 1: photo of him and Thomas Edison in order to look
Speaker 1: like he knew Thomas Edison, which he didn't. He just
Speaker 1: like again, made up a whole thing. Creepy. I think
Speaker 1: you go to jail for that these days, wouldn't you.
Speaker 5: One of my favorite things about Napoleon Hill's claims is
Speaker 5: he claimed to be advisor to two presidents, President Woodrow Wilson,
Speaker 5: the Democrat, and Napoleon Hill would later claim that he
Speaker 5: was in the room when the negotiations were happening with
Speaker 5: Germany about the end to World War One.
Speaker 1: Mmm mmmmmmm that makes sense, Yeah, which makes perfect sense.
Speaker 5: He also claimed to be an advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Speaker 5: and took credit at one point for coining we have
Speaker 5: nothing to fear but fear itself. What yes? Napoleon Hill
Speaker 5: claimed that he came up with we have nothing to
Speaker 5: fear but fear itself. And it makes total sense that
Speaker 5: Napoleon Hill would be an advisor to FDR because Napoleon
Speaker 5: Hill is an ant was an anti union arch conservative,
Speaker 5: and FDR apparently wanted his advice.
Speaker 1: Matt's being facetious obviously, I mean.
Speaker 5: At the time that I was writing this, this was
Speaker 5: I published this in December twenty sixteen, so just after
Speaker 5: the twenty sixteen election. So now some of these things
Speaker 5: may seem plausible, more plausible, at least somewhat more plausible
Speaker 5: if you've got sort of a Jared Kushner character in
Speaker 5: the middle of this, or you've got Kid Rock advising
Speaker 5: on North Korea policy.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Kanye's in the room, and yeah, right, yes,
Speaker 1: does he ever get married or anything?
Speaker 5: Oh, he's married five times. Yes, he is married five times,
Speaker 5: according to the official biography, and there was a popular
Speaker 5: biography published in the nineties about him. I believe they
Speaker 5: only have three of his five marriages, and I discovered
Speaker 5: a couple more, one being his first marriage when he
Speaker 5: was a teenager was with fellow teenager and got her pregnant,
Speaker 5: and it seemed like a shotgun weddings sort of situation,
Speaker 5: and then she supposedly recanted and said it wasn't his,
Speaker 5: so I think that marriage was annulled.
Speaker 1: She got to know him for like two weeks.
Speaker 5: Just right, either his second or third marriage, and I
Speaker 5: forget now. I found a lengthy public record from that
Speaker 5: one where he is visiting broth you know, the allegations
Speaker 5: against him from friends and colleagues, or that he was
Speaker 5: visiting brothels, and detailed accounts of his infidelity as well
Speaker 5: as his abuse. You know, there's something in there about
Speaker 5: him throwing a baby on the ground. Not good stuff,
Speaker 5: so really unfortunate stuff there. I'd say the most fascinating
Speaker 5: marriage was to Rosa Lee Beelund. And Rosa was in
Speaker 5: her twenties when Napoleon Hill and she meet in the
Speaker 5: mid thirties, and this was seemed to be a marriage
Speaker 5: of convenience for some reason, that they had schemed together
Speaker 5: to take over the world. And it looks like she
Speaker 5: should take a lot of credit for the book Thinking
Speaker 5: grow Rich, his most popular work. She was at the
Speaker 5: very lead, heavily involved editor. But I think would probably
Speaker 5: today be considered a co author of that work.
Speaker 1: Would you look at that Napoleon Hill was no Matt Novak.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that. Much as you've heard in previous
Speaker 1: seasons of our show, you'll know it's not uncommon for
Speaker 1: men like Napoleon to brashly build their empires by taking
Speaker 1: credit for the work of women. I'm thinking Avon Topperware Christianity, you.
Speaker 5: Know, because he was not a strong writer. Even his
Speaker 5: biographies admitted that some of his work was not great.
Speaker 5: So the success of Thing Grow Rich, his biggest work,
Speaker 5: is almost certainly a product of their marriage, which lasted
Speaker 5: just a few years.
Speaker 1: What do we know about her? Do we know anything
Speaker 1: about her?
Speaker 5: Well? So she The most interesting thing I think about
Speaker 5: her is that she convinced Napoleon to sign up pre
Speaker 5: Up that basically handed her all the publishing rights to
Speaker 5: his books. Wow and which Yes. The idea here being
Speaker 5: that if anyone came to sue him or tried to
Speaker 5: get claw money back for any number of his scams,
Speaker 5: that they wouldn't be able to touch him. That was
Speaker 5: the idea. But obviously that did not work out for him,
Speaker 5: because she divorced him and married the divorce attorney.
Speaker 1: No yes for each other.
Speaker 5: Yes, So we're in the late thirties and he shows
Speaker 5: up at at this a social experiment, let's use the
Speaker 5: term social experiment being conducted on Long Island. There is
Speaker 5: a guy named James Schaeffe who has started a cult
Speaker 5: called the Master Metaphysicians.
Speaker 1: Sounds legit, let mean.
Speaker 5: Double check, Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians. Say that again,
Speaker 5: the Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians.
Speaker 1: Okay, great, and they do what so.
Speaker 5: They are sort of regarded based on you know, I
Speaker 5: talked with a Long Island historian about this. They're basically
Speaker 5: seeing in the late thirties as this sort of kookie
Speaker 5: alternative community that's pretty harmless, but they have some rather
Speaker 5: unorthodox views. They buy up this this huge mansion in
Speaker 5: Long Island and a bunch of people come to live there,
Speaker 5: and you know, there's the innocuous stuff, which is the vegetarianism,
Speaker 5: but then there's the more they want to raise an
Speaker 5: immortal baby, so.
Speaker 1: They doesn't that sounds totally reasonable to me. Moving on, so.
Speaker 5: They adopt, and I use that term loosely, a five
Speaker 5: month old girl. Our mom was a waitress. I'm going
Speaker 5: to guess unmarried, and in the end it all turns
Speaker 5: out okay because the babies are turned. But you know,
Speaker 5: they attract some attention for wanting to. They believe that
Speaker 5: through their life philosophies they can they can make a
Speaker 5: person immortal, and so by starting from scratch with this baby,
Speaker 5: they think that they can, you know, get her to
Speaker 5: live forever.
Speaker 1: After all, if anything's possible using the power of the mind,
Speaker 1: why not at least try something truly impossible. Thinking and
Speaker 1: growing into whatever you decide you want to be. That's
Speaker 1: what it's about, right, creating a life that operates without restriction.
Speaker 1: It's about transcending, being extraordinary.
Speaker 5: In fact, the head of the cult, James Schaeffer, tried
Speaker 5: to get the people who were doing right around the
Speaker 5: same time. Nineteen thirty nine, New York World's Fair had
Speaker 5: this huge times capsule that's sealed for five thousand years,
Speaker 5: and they wanted to include some documents about her so
Speaker 5: she'd be the only person still alive at the time
Speaker 5: when this time capsule was.
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say they wanted to
Speaker 1: include her. No, five thousand years from now, we open
Speaker 1: it up and she's like, Hi, I did it. They
Speaker 1: did it right? When did they give her back? Do
Speaker 1: you know, like, how long did they wait? Were they
Speaker 1: like terrible too, He's gotta go didn't work?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was. It was after the press died down.
Speaker 5: It wasn't. It wasn't more than a couple of years.
Speaker 5: I know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so she was an awful toddler and then they
Speaker 1: were sure right.
Speaker 5: But Napoleon Hill, oddly enough, was the baby's godfather.
Speaker 1: Is that true?
Speaker 5: Yeah? No, he because he was hanging out at this place,
Speaker 5: you know, he was. He was buddies with Shaeffer and
Speaker 5: the cult leader, and they had all kinds of scams together.
Speaker 5: A couple of years later, Shaeffer would go to jail
Speaker 5: for one wealthy woman who felt like she was getting scammed,
Speaker 5: said hey, you took all my money. And Shaeffer wrote
Speaker 5: about how it was all Napoleon Hill's idea. But Napoleon
Speaker 5: I don't know how Napoleon Hill gets out of trouble
Speaker 5: in all these situations. As far as I know, he didn't.
Speaker 5: He was arrested a few times, but never served any
Speaker 5: considerable amount of time in prison as far as I
Speaker 5: can tell.
Speaker 1: What do you personally think about the type of person
Speaker 1: Napoleon Hill?
Speaker 7: Once?
Speaker 1: First of all, again, his name was Oliver Napoleon Hill.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I get the feeling that he carried this baggage
Speaker 5: of not having great ideas about self worth, and I
Speaker 5: think that he he was. I think that in some
Speaker 5: ways he really did believe in the idea that thoughts
Speaker 5: can affect material reality. I think that there's a kernel
Speaker 5: of truth to that that you first have to sort
Speaker 5: of visualize what you want to see in the world.
Speaker 5: But I think that he was using those ideas that
Speaker 5: were percolating at the time into an incredibly cynical scheme,
Speaker 5: an entire life devoted to trying to swindle money. Almost
Speaker 5: everything he did was dishonest in some way. And you know,
Speaker 5: the most honest buck he earned was in in the
Speaker 5: book that he's remembered for. But at the end of
Speaker 5: the day, it was probably the labor put in by
Speaker 5: his wife at the time was worth more than anything
Speaker 5: he'd ever accomplished.
Speaker 1: But Napoleon's Napoleonic impact is not only felt by people
Speaker 1: looking for guidance and business.
Speaker 5: You know, Okay, so the prosperity Gospel, the guys like
Speaker 5: Joel Austin are drawing much more from Napoleon Hill than
Speaker 5: they are from the Bible. I'd argue, you know, these
Speaker 5: people who want you, who are insistent upon the idea
Speaker 5: that God wants you to be rich and that you
Speaker 5: deserve it because God wants you to have all this wealth.
Speaker 5: Despite Jesus being pretty clear, it seems on the whole
Speaker 5: camel through the eye of a needle thing.
Speaker 1: The camel through the eye of a needle is often
Speaker 1: attributed to Jesus. It's also found in a bunch of
Speaker 1: other old religious texts. But here's how it is quoted.
Speaker 1: In the New Testament. Jesus says it is easier for
Speaker 1: a camel to go through the eye of a needle
Speaker 1: than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.
Speaker 5: Seems to make it clear that rich people can and
Speaker 5: get into Heaven. So the prosperity gospel people today would
Speaker 5: be I think the best example of Napoleon Hill.
Speaker 1: Can you talk more about the time that he and
Speaker 1: his wife were writing this book, what was going on
Speaker 1: in America or around the world.
Speaker 5: Sure, well, you know in I believe unemployment peaked in
Speaker 5: nineteen thirty two or thirty three at around twenty five percent,
Speaker 5: so massive unemployment, the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties
Speaker 5: was incredibly difficult time for a lot of people, and
Speaker 5: a book like this coming in thirty seven or thirty
Speaker 5: eight was, you know, something that people could latch onto
Speaker 5: as Oh, I can think my way out of my
Speaker 5: material conditions. I can think my way out of being
Speaker 5: poor and not having a job and being on breadlines.
Speaker 5: And that's a powerful idea even in the best of times,
Speaker 5: but especially when people are struggling with the fact. And
Speaker 5: I think I mentioned this at the piece. You know,
Speaker 5: one of my favorite movies is Solvent's Travels, which is
Speaker 5: president Sturgist movie from forty one. I want to say
Speaker 5: that where the lesson is that people don't want to
Speaker 5: be reminded of difficult times when they're living through them.
Speaker 5: And when you're living through a difficult time, you savor
Speaker 5: And I think that, you know, not that they're completely analogous,
Speaker 5: but I think that people don't necessarily want a lot
Speaker 5: of stories right now about the pandemic because I think
Speaker 5: that was a tough time for everyone, and they want escapism,
Speaker 5: They want other forms of entertainment and education that have
Speaker 5: nothing to do with the pandemic because it was just
Speaker 5: such a tough period for a lot of people. Walk
Speaker 5: into a big bookstore like Barnes and Noble, and you're
Speaker 5: going to see Napoleon Hills books, especially Think and Grow Rich.
Speaker 5: His books get passed around at like real estate conferences
Speaker 5: and all sorts of different environments where people are big
Speaker 5: into sales. You know, he was essentially a salesman speaking
Speaker 5: to salesmen, and it makes a lot of sense that
Speaker 5: he came around at that time. There's a lot in
Speaker 5: his work that you know, there's the get rich quick angle,
Speaker 5: but there's also the believing in yourself angle. He has
Speaker 5: a lot of different ideas about how to improve your
Speaker 5: mind and body, things that would become mainstream and self
Speaker 5: help literature later on. But he definitely was selling people
Speaker 5: on the idea that to be a success you had
Speaker 5: to first think like a success, and we see that
Speaker 5: pop up in all of his writings.
Speaker 1: Here's the bottom line, though it worked. We are talking
Speaker 1: about him today. I'm talking about him right now. Napoleon
Speaker 1: Hill wanted to be a success, and he sold us
Speaker 1: on the idea that we could do the same thing.
Speaker 1: What he left out of his message was his obvious
Speaker 1: feeling that it was okay to get there by any
Speaker 1: means necessary. Sometimes it feels like we've collectively decided not
Speaker 1: to say that part out loud, to venerate the wealthy, successful,
Speaker 1: famous people and not look too hard at how they
Speaker 1: got there. Maybe we want someone to tell us how
Speaker 1: to do life, to absolve us of the responsibility of
Speaker 1: doing life in a moral way, because to have it
Speaker 1: all is inherently a moral Next time, our hero Jennifer
Speaker 1: does her best Napoleon Hill impression and does not like
Speaker 1: what it does to her.
Speaker 3: And when you first join, you're told like it's you
Speaker 3: get this free white Mercedes, or you earn ARBON will
Speaker 3: pay for a bonus, will pay a car bonus towards
Speaker 3: a white Mercedes, if you just could get yourself to
Speaker 3: regional vice president. What it actually means is you go
Speaker 3: to the Mercedes dealership, you get a three at least
Speaker 3: a three year lease in your name with your credit score,
Speaker 3: you sign up, so you're locked in. And now I
Speaker 3: see it clear as day. It's a way to keep
Speaker 3: you locked in for the next three years, because how
Speaker 3: are you going to pay for it? And you put
Speaker 3: it in your name and ARBON gets all the credit
Speaker 3: for it.
Speaker 1: Was there reimbursement enough to actually cover the lease and insurance?
Speaker 1: No The Dream is written, hosted, and executive produced by
Speaker 1: me Jane Marie. Our producer is Mike Richter, with help
Speaker 1: from Nancy Golumbiski and Joy Sandford. Our editor is Peter Clowney.
Speaker 1: The Dream is a co production of Little Everywhere in
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