Bob Crane And The Harsh Realities Of Addiction (And How To Overcome It)

When police investigated Bob Crane’s apartment, they found the star of the 60s TV hit Hogan's Heroes face down in his own bloody sheets. The back of his head had been caved in with a blunt object. To make sure the job was done, the murderer had tied an electric cord around his neck. Police assumed the murder weapon was one of the camera tripod combos Bob had set up (in secret) to film the woman he brought home. Some of the women were totally unaware they were being filmed, but some also didn’t even know Bob was planning a three-way with them, which involved Bob's friend and camera operator, John Carpenter.

Bob’s death was so shocking and so bizarre that it became the scandal of the 1970s. The murder of the title character from Hogan's Hero would eventually turn into a movie, five books, three major investigations, and countless articles and podcasts. If you follow any of these sources, you'll come to your own conclusion about who murdered Bob Crane since the law never officially landed on a verdict. But if you look at Bob Crane’s scandal with modern eyes, especially the days leading up to the murder, it takes on a new tragic light. Reading about Bob Crane is like reading about the death of a pioneer with addiction. Bob was on the cutting edge of every one of his vices.

For one, video cameras by JBC and Panasonic had just barely evolved to be the self-contained cassette systems were used to, meaning the amateur camera technology was so new, Bob had to have a camera specialist in-house to help him record homemade porn. Bob was ahead of his time for his diagnosis. Sex addiction wasn't new, but the term itself only emerged in the 1970s and would finally be added to the psych handbook, aka the DSM, a full decade after Bob's death. Scottsdale, where he died, was still a tiny budding town in Arizona. It was amid exploding, growing over 600% between 1960 and the year of Bob's death.

Everything about Bob Cane's murder was scandalous and tragic, but from a modern perspective, one might conclude that Bob's addictions were hypercharged by his cleverness. The things that made Bob an innovative, creative and entertainer also made him an engineer of his own vices - practically inventing porn addiction before anyone could call him out on it. But that's part of what makes the creative mind so dangerous. It can be just as ingenious about getting its addictions met as it is with anything else requiring a creative spark.

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Online shopping, porn, alcohol, nicotine, sugar, salt, mobile games, microtransactions, casinos in our pockets, Tweets in the air, the sound of gold coins pouring from a slot machine. These days, the whole world is engineered to give your brain what it wants - more dopamine. If you're an addict in the modern world, you're standing in the ocean of dopamine up to your waist, holding a bucket, trying to bail it out. Because everything from your car to your phone to your kitchen was designed by the smartest minds on the planet are made to do one thing, to keep you hooked. So that's what today's episode is all about: the brilliant engineering that goes into addiction and how we can recognize it. And we have three myths about the science of addiction to get us started.

Myth One: You can't trust an addict. The addict’s brain is literally wired differently and reports that claim addiction is a disease just prove it.

Joe: Last year, we had an episode about Stephen King and alcoholism and you and I kind of shared some stories about addiction. Looking at this episode with Bob Crane being basically an engineer of his own addiction, what were the weird/clever things you did to manage your addiction? I definitely got some for me.

Todd: The biggest one was I worked harder to earn more money so I can indulge in more of my vices. Then I went to extreme cover-ups to hide it. How about you?

Joe: I think the double life aspect is a huge part of addiction. I mean, it's a huge part of what Bob Crane went through. On the public front, he is this charismatic person. In my double life, I was a master of scheduling. I would like human resources myself and my addiction. Now, I would always overdo it. I would always wake up tired and hungover, but cleverness went into how much can I get away with.

Todd: This episode may be about sex addiction, but we are also talking about gambling, alcohol, drugs, etc. Whatever the addiction is, I think the biggest misconception that the addict has how clever they actually are. They always think they're fooling everybody, but they're really not fooling anyone, right? You just don't get confronted on it, so you think you are winning.

Joe: I humans are so good at spotting weirdness, and we're so good at seeing a slight bit of crazy. We are more put off by somebody who's hiding most of their addiction than we are by somebody who is living out in the open with it. So, we are more weirded out by that and thus, we spot it easier when somebody is hiding it. So, today's topic is how creative people deal with addiction and why it hurts them so much - like why it is so easy for the creative mind to be addicted.

Though Crane was a wonderful person who was charming and humble, there were signs that he had an unhealthy relationship with women. He would have affairs with one leading actress after another. So, he was the star of the show Hogan's Heroes and he used that to be in a relationship even though he was married from a young age. He had an appetite for this. He indulged in this addiction his whole life, day after day. His second wife was well aware of what he did after when he was not with her. People asked her how she was able to stay with him, and she said, “I'm not the one being used. These women are.” Bob said, "I wish I could just push a button when I was finished, and they fall through the floor and disappear." In short, he treated women the way the world treats toilet paper.

Well, we're going to just say outright that not too many addicts wish they had a trapdoor in the floor to get rid of other people. I know that he's a comedian and that that is a total joke, but I think the stigma of an addict having morals degraded is very prevalent. The idea that somebody will pick their addiction over morals or other people has been brought up a lot. I've been to addiction meetings. I ran into a guy who said he was running a loading facility. He said that when he was amid his addiction (alcohol) if his co-managers knew what he was capable of, younger him would have been in rubble; they would have never trusted him. Ironically, he said he wouldn't hire addicts almost in the same breath. But he himself said that even though he is a functioning addict and considers himself to be responsible and somebody you can trust, he wouldn't trust one even if they were recovering. I think every addiction has a time when it is functional. And then it goes to shit over time. For example, there was a brief period when opium addicts were stealing money. There's the classic in America, which is cocaine addicts taking cash from like grandma's purse.

But I think that is such a small window, and it is over publicized. Because of media, addicts have been branded as untrustworthy. Because of that, we don't recognize that there is a very slim number of addicts that you can't trust with money or a job. But the reality is that most can be trusted and not trusting them for a job or money can cost them their healthy return to society. We did an episode recently about the Reddit, Am I The Asshole? And in that episode, we talked about actor-observer asymmetry, which is basically if I'm a jerk, it's because of circumstances. If someone else is a jerk, it’s because they're a jerk to the fabric of their being. I view this as very similar to the stigma of addiction.

Myth Two: There's no stopping an addict either. If they're deep in their dopamine disease, they’ll find a way to get their fix just like Bob Crane.

I want to talk about a couple of interesting studies regarding addiction. So this comes from public health studies, and it illustrates how we actually see addiction. We can say all day that we want people to succeed and that we want people to recover, but this was published, and it went over a sample study of 709 participants. They asked them about their attitudes toward addiction and mental illness. This study found that people had more negative opinions about those with drug addiction than mental illness, but the research also found that people would oppose policies that would help drug addicts in their recovery.

That said, I think sex addiction is the least visible of addictions, but one in five males has a serious pornography addiction. With alcohol and gambling, you can see it on their face and smell it. But you can't see the sex stuff. We're going to cover a lot of different addictions in this episode. Most of them are invisible or looked at as so common that we don't care about them. Phone addiction, caffeine addiction, sugar addiction – these are addictions that hit the dopamine spot just as hard as hard drugs do. That said, people want to shame people into stopping their addiction when that is the worst thing to do. So, we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. To this study, only about one in five people (20%) said they would work closely on a job with somebody who's addicted compared to 60% of people who said they'd work with someone with mental illness. The funny part is that everybody who responded to that is probably addicted to something.

I think that the public view on different addictions - is that there are good addictions and bad addictions. All that nonsense. That is what's holding us back from calling each other out on this. Moving on, 43% were opposed to giving individual addicts the equivalent of health insurance or to giving health insurance to people with it. So, we literally want to stop taking care of addicts, which is crazy. Like, everything we're going to talk about as far as public opinion goes is insanity. We don't see addicts as people when they are amid their addiction. For this research, respondents agreed on one question, roughly 3 in 10 people believe that recovery from a mental illness or drug addiction is impossible. So, there are a lot of people who don't even think that you can come back from addiction.

This is kind of our first way that the creative mind gets enslaved by addiction, but it's probably like our third way. We've covered already making up reasons not to care for each other. We create a caricature of that person. We're advocating that we put everyone on the same moral scale as ourselves. Let's talk about food addiction for just a second. Food is engineered to be addictive. I think of that when I was 50 pounds heavier than I am today. I used to go to 7-Eleven and get the biggest big gulp I could get. I was disgusted by how fat I was. I was disgusted by the way I was eating. People, especially online, fat-sham just as hard as they shame addicts. We treat all types of addiction with the same level of contempt and shame. Mostly because we're afraid it could happen to us, or we don't want to think about our own addiction. Again, I guarantee we have one to some degree.

Now, here's kind of a mind-bender. Have you ever heard of the idea that addiction is a learned behavior that it's not fully hardwired from the start? It's hard to say for people raised in one of those families how much of its genetic and how much of it is exposure to alcohol and drugs. Same with the eating. There's a Professor named Marc Lewis, and he's in the Netherlands. He talks about deep learning and the idea is the longer you spend in your addictive state, the more cues you attach to your drug or drink of choice. Aka triggers. And one of the things I realized while reading, being in an addictive state can be very different.

For example, if you say you're a social drinker and you only do it at around other guys, but I guarantee those are all sort of like you mapping out your addiction. You are letting your brain get used to those cues. You won't be able to see a game the same way without having those cues get triggered from now on. Triggers can be very commonplace, but you're designing the perfect experience for yourself. Whatever comforts you end up being the way you sort of building your addiction. In drug abuse programs, they talk about geographical cues, like you are in a certain space and time will do it. It goes from it’s about the substance to it’s about the place you're in and the things you're doing while using that substance. For Bob Crane, it seems like he brought it with him.

The idea is that the longer you spend in your addictive state, the more cues you attach to your drug or drink or visual of choice, and you're going to turn on that dopamine system. You're going to seek those triggers when you're stressed or alienated. Now, the alienation part is very, very important. There's a theme we are already hitting, which is creative people become addicted, and then we isolate them and they stay addicted. So just keep that in mind as we go on through this podcast; this also applies to positive things, the idea of deep learning. It applies to making money. I'm going to quote from his article here. “There have been studies showing that people making high-powered decisions and business and politics also have the very same high levels of dopamine, specifically dopamine metabolism in the striatum because they're in a constant state of goal pursuit.”

This is Bob Crane chasing the next conquest, the next woman. He's going to put through his metaphorical hatch in the floor. He's activating the same dopamine metabolism in the striatum, the same mechanism as when he is kicking ass in his radio show or getting that new deal for Hogan's Heroes or making these big professional moves. He says, "Most people who become addicted are experiencing a kind of loneliness, depression or alienation." So, I'm betting, Bob Crane felt lonely sometimes and that his public face was covering up a few things.

Myth Three: Every addiction is unique. Like a gross frozen sewage snowflake, there's no such thing as a universal treatment for addictions in general, right?

Speaking of eras where addiction is at its prime, can we talk just a tiny bit about phone addiction? If you have a phone addiction and you're a sex addict or porn addict, then they definitely intersect, but every app on your phone is designed to hit those dopamine spots. They literally use every sound they can and every cue they can to get us to pay attention to our phones for a little bit longer. Now, you can watch videos in his talks online. We're going to link to a few, but Tristan Harris says to form a habit sometimes there's a whole playbook of techniques to get you to keep using these products as much as possible. And they're shaping the thoughts and actions of people. That's when I started realizing how many of these things are built to give you dopamine.

For a while, Instagram experimented with giving you bursts of messages instead of releasing them naturally; when you would get a notification, normally, it's more effective than the bursts. So, the burst message is getting two, three, or four messages, even if some of them aren't from people. Getting them in a grouping like that will give you a bigger dopamine hit. They beefed it up. They keep you connected longer. If you have a gap where you stop using your phone, a lot of services have learned that if they send you a Google timeline to show you what you were doing this time last year or an update from the service or a message reminding you of things you'd watched, it can draw you back in.

To unhook yourself from phone addiction, it’s actually quite simple - turn off non-human suggestion links and updates on all of your apps. Most of them actually do have an option to say, don't message me unless it's a real person. You'll be shocked at how often that thing does not ring anymore. That may sound very boring, but if you see that little red bubble, you will click on it. This is a way to stop that trigger from happening. I have hinted at the idea that addiction might be made worse by isolating addicts, shaming them, and choosing not to work with them. However, it has the opposite effect. I'm going to link to a TED Talk by Johann Hari called Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong. He refers to a famous study called the Rat Park study.

For years, scientists tested addictive substances by putting pats in water tanks. And saying, oh look, cocaine is 100% addictive. Alcohol is 70% addictive. MDMA is 30%. And eventually, the rats picked cocaine over food. For most addictive substances, the rats will pick it over food or regular water and then will die of an overdose at some point. But a scientist came in and was like, what if we put them in a tank like poor people living in their apartment. There's nothing there. It's blank on the walls. They don't have social connections. There's literally nothing to do except escape their environment by doing that drug.

So, they designed an experiment where they put in toys and a good rat environment. They put in other rats to socialize with. They gave them things to do and an environment that wasn't dismal and depressing. The result? The rats hardly ever got addicted when they had those connections and when they were not mentally trying to escape their environment. That is what people need in America right now – a better environment. And phone addiction. Things like Facebook and Twitter, do not count as real bonds. Those will not get you out of the blank rat cage. You need to be interacting with real people. The Ted Talk ends with the phrase, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety; The opposite of addiction is connection.”

Joe: Imagine if Bob Crane had been taken aside and taken away from his buddy John Carpenter. What if this had ended differently? What if he had had those connections at that moment?

Todd: Bob manipulated people based on his movie star title, good looks, and his stellar reputation. So, to me, this is how he met his end. Now, the women weren't always known that they were being videotaped either. That's another thing. And the way he was found in Scottsdale, there was no forced entry, but he was beaten to death with a camera tripod, which is what John Carpenter's specialty was. So, it'd be like a baseball player killing you with a baseball bat. It was very personal. A lot of the theories were that Bob had finally gone to his friend John and said he didn’t want to do this anymore, and John got made about it. Now the crime scene back in the day was contaminated terribly by the police. They did a horrible job probably because, in this area, there weren't a lot of murders. There was even a chunk of Bob Crane's brain in John Carpenter's car, but they tried him, and they couldn't prove it. There was no murder weapon found either. They said it might not have been the camera, but boy, there was a lot of evidence there for that one. I wonder just how much of the sex was consensual. I think they got kinkier and dirtier, and I doubt that it was always consensual. I think we're dealing with probably a lot worse than Bill Cosby.

Joe: I know that his son went on record to say that it was always consensual. But looking through the list of like accusations and stuff, it sounds like it got very questionable and very criminal.

Todd: I want to challenge everybody to watch this movie – Auto Focus. It does a great job at showing these value changes in this man who was playing a good guy by day and a bad guy at night.

Joe: And it's got Willem Dafoe as John Carpenter in case you want to be extra creeped out by the potential murderer. But yeah, you can rent it on YouTube and Amazon and things like that.

Todd: It's a good movie. It's a creepy movie. You got to take a shower afterward. I wish everyone could have just one get out of an addiction-free card.

Joe: Yes, but late. I would want people to feel what addiction is like before they get out of it.

Todd: But before it takes them.

Joe: Exactly.

Final Thoughts

Historically, Americans tend to focus on addiction-related deaths only when it's a celebrity: Elvis Presley, Billie Holiday, Michael Jackson, and Heath Ledger. Or, if you want to get more recent, DMX, Michael K. Williams, and Tom Petty. When it's a celebrity, we say it's tragic, but when it's Kenny from the hardware store, it was his fault for having weak morals. To be blatantly, scientifically, and statistically honest, the War on Drugs is not going well. Even calling it a war might be why we're in this mess – applying that one side can win and that there is an enemy – that lucrative addictions like alcohol or opioids are acceptable for society, but non-lethal drugs like LSD or marijuana make you the enemy. Or that we can fight addiction like addiction is a soldier charging at us over the trench wall, and our only choice is to lock it and its victim behind bars.

This attitude as a whole is what drives loved ones deeper into shame and isolation. And people are smart. They're creative when it comes to hiding an addiction and getting more of it. Study after study has shown that connection, social bonds, acceptance, and environment aren't just effective at curing addiction; a loving social environment with safety nets makes addiction near impossible to take hold in the first place. Maybe that's how we save the next Bob Crane or Philip Seymour Hoffman. We stop telling them that they are morally weak. We stopped trying to give them time at double digits. We stop trying to help them find the bottom faster. Maybe if we stop going to war on addicts, we won't find so many casualties lying face down in their own bloody bedsheets.