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The Disturbing Cult Of Scientology · The conspiracy

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Seventy five million years ago, a galactic warlord named Xenu
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: had a problem. His empire spanned seventy six planets and
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: the population had gotten out of hand, and his solution
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: was elegant in a monstrous sort of way. He lured
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: billions of people into tax offices under false pretenses, froze
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: them in glycol, loaded them onto DC eight shaped spacecrafts,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: flew them to Earth, and dropped them into volcanoes. Then
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: he detonated hydrogen bombs, and the souls of those billions, untethered, disoriented,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: and subjected to thirty six days of electronic brainwashing, attached
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: themselves to the only conscious beings left on the planet, humans,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: people like you and me, and we've been carrying them
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: ever since. One man claimed to have uncovered this specific history,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: and in the spirit of generosity, he built a church
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: to help remove those hitch hiking souls, one by one,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: level by level, and for thousands upon thousands of dollars,
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: no less, And that church is the Church of Scientology.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: And to understand how something like that becomes real and
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: becomes powerful, and becomes one of the most litigious and
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: controversial organizations in modern history, you have to go back
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: to the beginning, and you have to start with the
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: man who invented it all, l Ron Hubbard. Crime, conspiracy, gaunts,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: serial killers and murder, all things that I love to consume,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: and I know you do too, you sickness and beautiful,
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: intellectually minded. Today we're getting into scientology. You guys wanted
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: me to do this one so bad and it is
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: so crazy. I mean, if you didn't pick that up
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: from the intro, so this this is going to be
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: a wild ride. So with U further ridicule, let's unbuckle
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: our sat Boult's going my fight on the highway, slam
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: on the brakes and must the windshield into this insane
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: cult together. All right, Let's pause the video for a
• 2:32
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  Speaker 1: I'm the only person on earth who finds nineteen seventies
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  Speaker 1: cult leaders interesting? You know, it turns out betting on myself.
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• 4:01
  Speaker 1: to it. Lafayette. Ronald Hubbard was born on March thirteenth,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: nineteen eleven, in Tilden, Nebraska, a quiet, flat town, small
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: enough that everyone's business was everyone else's business too, and
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  Speaker 1: his father, Harry Ross Hubbard, was a US Navy officer,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: which meant the family was always moving Montana to Washington,
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: d c. To the Philippines, to Guam. Young Ronald had
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: no time to take root anywhere, and his mother, Ldora
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  Speaker 1: May Waterbury, held the household together while Harry was away.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: And by most accounts, the surface of Hubbard's childhood was
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: stable and ordinary enough if you put aside moving everywhere constantly,
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: which I feel like would do something to a kid.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: But underneath it something was forming. From early on, Hubbard
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: was learning a particular skill, a very practical one at that.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: He was learning that the version of yourself you present
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  Speaker 1: to the world matters more than the truth underneath it.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: AA A classic cult leader. Okay, that's what we're dealing with.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: We already know. And he was learning how to perform
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: because people who knew him as a boy described him
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  Speaker 1: as creative, energetic, and possessed of a strange, persistent hunger
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  Speaker 1: for admiration, and he claimed later in life that he
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: had spent his childhood studying under Native American tribal elders,
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  Speaker 1: and that he had been initiated into Mongolian shamanism, one
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: of the youngest people ever to achieve it, he claims,
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: and he also claimed to have traveled extensively through Asia,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: immersing himself in Buddhist philosophy and Far Eastern mysticism. None
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: of it was documented, and the only evidence shows a
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: boy being shuttled between naval postings with his father. But
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: documentation for Hubbard was always somewhat besides the point, you know,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: it kind of always is for a cult leader. It's
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  Speaker 1: always like I'm just the middleman to the guy upstairs,
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  Speaker 1: or like I just received all this information on gold
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  Speaker 1: tablets by this angel but nobody else can see them,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: or whatever. You know, it's just allack ouseuf. So in
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  Speaker 1: nineteen thirty, Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University to study
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: civil engineering, and he withdrew two years later after failing
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  Speaker 1: physics and underperforming across subjects that required things like evidence
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  Speaker 1: and verifiable results because he doesn't like that. Remember, he
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: just likes to make stuff up and have everybody not
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: ask questions about it, and he would later claim multiple
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  Speaker 1: academic credentials, including expertise in nuclear physics, the same subject
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  Speaker 1: he had failed as an undergraduate, and people who encountered
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: him in this period described someone who could dominate a
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  Speaker 1: room despite his failings, and he was verbally fast and
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  Speaker 1: entertaining and told stories about himself that were almost always
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: larger than the circumstances warranted, and former colleagues in the
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  Speaker 1: science fiction world described him as just being magnetic. The charm,
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  Speaker 1: by most accounts, was real, and he joined the US
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  Speaker 1: Naval Reserve in Nighttime teen forty one, following Pearl Harbor,
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Church of
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Scientology's official biography describes Hubbard as a decorated war hero,
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  Speaker 1: a wounded combat veteran, and a brilliant naval commander. The
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: US Navy's own records, obtained through a Freedom of Information
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  Speaker 1: Act request, tell a considerably different story, though, which is
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: unsurprising at this point if we're going to keep the
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: same theme here, going to say something and then we're
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: gonna find out it's bullshit. Basically, in four and a
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  Speaker 1: half years of service, Hubbard was relieved of command twice.
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  Speaker 1: The most famous episode involves May nineteen forty three, when
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  Speaker 1: Hubbard supposedly attacked a Japanese submarine off the coast of Oregon,
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  Speaker 1: and the naval's official review found that he had been
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  Speaker 1: firing at a known magnetic deposit on the ocean floor.
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  Speaker 1: He had shot at a rock and written it up
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  Speaker 1: as victory. That's grazee. And he also directed his ship
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  Speaker 1: into Mexican territory waters without authorization, which escalated into a
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  Speaker 1: diplomatic incident. And he later claimed twenty one medals and decorations,
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  Speaker 1: but official records document four and none of them were
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  Speaker 1: combat achievements. And he claimed he had been blinded and
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: crippled by war wounds in that he healed himself through
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: techniques that would later become dianetics, but his medical records
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: showed treatment for ulcers and conjunctivitis, and the Navy noted
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: his complaints were largely psychosomatic. So before the war, Hubbard
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: had actually married a woman named Paully Grubb, and they
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  Speaker 1: would have two children together, and in nineteen forty six,
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  Speaker 1: while still legally married to Paully, he married his second wife,
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  Speaker 1: Sarah Northrop, and by legal definition, that was bigamy, and
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  Speaker 1: Polly was left to manage the fallout from a marriage
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  Speaker 1: that was still technically in effect, while her husband had
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: just simply moved on because that that's just how he felt.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: He just kind of did whatever he felt like, just
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: like thought he get away with it. But she received
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: no particular acknowledgment of this in any church biography. And
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: the pattern is worth noting early because it repeats itself
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  Speaker 1: at every scale. He took what he wanted, constructed a
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  Speaker 1: more flattering version of what had happened, and left others
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  Speaker 1: to deal with the wreckage. Just a classic, classic narcissist.
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  Speaker 1: If if anything, he's absolutely just a narcissist, probably a
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  Speaker 1: pathological liar too. We can, I think we get us home.
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  Speaker 1: And he did this with women, with money and with
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  Speaker 1: the truth we as we see it, and he would
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  Speaker 1: do it soon on a much larger scale. So before
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  Speaker 1: and between his military years, Hubbard had another career pulp
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  Speaker 1: fiction writer, science fiction adventure westerns. He wrote them all
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  Speaker 1: under his own name and a collection of pseudonyms, and
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  Speaker 1: the pay was a penny a word, so volume was everything.
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  Speaker 1: So he's really, okay, let's just look at this. He's
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  Speaker 1: really good at making up stories, really good at lying,
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  Speaker 1: really good at fast talking, and being really charming guys.
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  Speaker 1: This is the perfect recipe for our cult leaders still
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  Speaker 1: and for the craziest lore of any call ever. I
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  Speaker 1: have to give him that, if anything, I will give
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  Speaker 1: him that. You know, But I digress. Let's get into it.
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  Speaker 1: Because he was remarkably fast at producing hundreds of thousands
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  Speaker 1: of words per year, quality was understandably a casualty of
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  Speaker 1: that pace. But the science fiction community knew him, and
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  Speaker 1: the more generous among them remembered him as a gifted storyteller.
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  Speaker 1: And he was also known for embellishing, as we know,
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  Speaker 1: not just in his fiction, but his own life story,
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  Speaker 1: which grew with each retelling like a fish that just
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  Speaker 1: kept getting bigger and fatter and bigger and really can't
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  Speaker 1: swim anymore. And what's worth paying attention to looking back
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  Speaker 1: is the architecture of his stories, because in his nineteen
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  Speaker 1: thirty eight story, slaves of sleeps carry memories from traumatic
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: experiences in previous lives, unable to escape what their past
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  Speaker 1: selves set in motion, and the reactive mind of dianetics,
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  Speaker 1: the idea that past trauma drives present suffering is the
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: same concept with different vocabulary, essentially, as we'll see and
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: in the old doc Methusola series, the central character belongs
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  Speaker 1: to a secret brotherhood of near immortal beings with capabilities
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  Speaker 1: ordinary humans can never access, and the operating Thetan scientology's
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  Speaker 1: elite spiritual being at the top of the bridge is
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  Speaker 1: the same character in different clothes, as we will come
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  Speaker 1: to see, and in final Blackout, a singular leader rises
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  Speaker 1: through superior knowledge and sheer force of will, commanding total
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  Speaker 1: loyalty from his followers, and immortal spirits trapped in physical bodies,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: past life trauma accumulating across reincarnations, and ancient alien civilizations
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  Speaker 1: operating on cause mtime scales. These were just genre conventions.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: His Hubbard was rehearsing the architecture of a belief system
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  Speaker 1: he would later sell as Revelation, and somewhere in these
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  Speaker 1: years he reportedly made an observation that has been attributed
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  Speaker 1: to him by multiple science fiction contemporaries that the most
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: efficient route to real money was to start a religion,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: and the exact phrasing has never been nailed down. Some
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: say it was at a convention, some say a bar,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: and some say to a specific editor, but nobody disputes
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  Speaker 1: what he did next. So to understand what comes next,
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: you need to know about a man named Jack Parsons
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  Speaker 1: born Marvel Whiteside Parsons. He was a self taught rocket
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  Speaker 1: engineer who never finished his degree and yet became a
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: co founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he pioneered
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: a solid rocket fuel formula foundation to modern aerospace. And
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: he was also a completely devoted practitioner of Bellamick Occultism,
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: which is a philosophical and religious system built around the
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: belief that every individual's true will was the supreme law
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: of the universe and its founding organization, the Ordo templi
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: orientis mouthful of words worked through a graduated series of
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: initiatory levels, each unlocking more esoteric knowledge than the last.
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  Speaker 1: Does this make sense No, I think that's why it
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  Speaker 1: is what it is. You just hear a lot of
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: words and you're like, yeah, okay, that sounds cool. You know,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: I feel like it's just meant to confuse people. But
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: if that structure sounds at all familiar, it should. Because
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Parsons ran the OTO's a gop lodge out of his
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  Speaker 1: large mansion in Pasadena, so it was part commune, part laboratory,
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  Speaker 1: part ritual space attracted artists scientists, occultists, and bohemians from
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  Speaker 1: all directions, and it attracted Hubbard immediately. So Hubbard moved
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  Speaker 1: in during the summer of nineteen forty five, and he
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: wasted no time making himself at home, including with Parson's girlfriend,
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: made himself a little dow at home, if you know
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  Speaker 1: what I'm saying, and this would be Sarah Northrop, who
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: he would marry later as we spoke about. So in
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: early nineteen forty six, Parsons and Hubbard undertook a series
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: of Othelamic rituals known as the Babylon Working, and the
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: goal was to summon an elemental companion for Parsons. Now,
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Parsons conducted the operations while Hubbard took notes and directed
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: the sequences. And shortly after the rituals concluded, a woman
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  Speaker 1: named Marjorie Cameron appeared in parsons life and he was
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: convinced they had succeeded. So when Alistair Crowley, the system's
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: British founder, heard about all of this from England, he
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: was unimpressed, and he told his colleagues that Parsons had
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: lost his mind and that Hubbard's involvement was particularly embarrassing
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: and almost on Q Hubbard left taking Sarah Northrup his yacht. Now,
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: because he's got a yacht and a significant portion of
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: parsons savings with him, So he stole his girl and
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: his savings and a yacht. Who is this guy? And
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: he called it a business venture and Parsons pursued legal
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: action and recovered some of the money in the future.
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  Speaker 1: But Jack Parsons died on June seventeenth, nineteen fifty two,
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: when an explosion tore through his home in Pasadena. Now
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: the ruling was accidental, but who knows, you know. But
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Hubbard didn't leave Pasadena with parsons beliefs because they're Parsons beliefs, right,
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  Speaker 1: And he's a narcissist, so he's got to make up
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: his own shit. He left with an education, essentially, and
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: he had watched how rituals could manufacture psychological states, and
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: he had seen how mystery and staged revelation could hold
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: intelligent people in place. But he took these intelligent people,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: binding them to a system they couldn't fully disapprove. And
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: he had been taking notes the entire time, and four
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: years later those notes would have a title a publisher,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: and of course a price tag Dionetics the Modern Science
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: of Mental Health was published on May ninth, nineteen fifty
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: and within weeks it was a best seller, and within
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: months it was a cultural phenomenon, and within a year
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: it had sold over one hundred and fifty thousand copies
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: and launched Dinetics clubs across the country. And the book
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: central claim was that the human mind operates on two
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: separate tracks. The first is the analytical mind, rational near perfect,
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: a flawless computing system, and the second is the reactive mind,
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: an unconscious storage bank of painful memories called n grams. Now,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: these n grams, according to Hubbard, were the source of
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: all human suffering, all irrationality, and all psychosomatic illness, and
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: they functioned below conscious awareness, causing fear and compulsion the
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: person couldn't explain, and a solution was a process called auditing,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: where a trained practitioner would guide a subject through their
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: painful memories, having them re experience each one repeatedly until
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: the emotional charge dissolved entirely, and when the reactive mind
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: was fully cleared, the person became what Hubbard called a
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: quote clear charity. Now, a clear Hubbard promised, would have
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: near perfect memory enhanced intelligence and immunity from psychosomatic illness.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: And Hubbard declared this science, and he gave it clinical vocabulary,
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: precise procedures, and scientific sounding apparatus to go with it.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: But there was just one little toy, little problem. H
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: It wasn't It wasn't it wasn't science. It was just
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: made up. Shocker, because the regression technique he described had
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: existed for over fifty years in hypnotherapy practice. Because that
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: all probably sounded familiar to you. I've talked about that
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: type of therapy in some deep dives I've done before.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: It's not new, it's very much already a thing, except
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: for you know, enhancing intelligence and you know, having a
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: perfectly clear mind and not being able to have any
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: sort of psychosomatic illness. That's all bullshit. But the relative
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: therapy part is already something that exists because the reactive
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: mind was structurally identical to the unconscious as described by
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Freudian psychoanalysis. And what he added was just new vocabulary,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: and the promised that ordinary people could apply it to
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: each other without professional training, which is you just can't
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: do that. And the American Psychological Association and the American
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Medical Association both reviewed Dianetics, and the claims were untestable.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: The neuroscience incompatible with what science actually knew about how
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: memory works, and no controlled study existed to support any
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: of it, and the definition of a clear was unfalsifiable,
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: almost by design, because he publicly exhibited his first clear
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: in August of nineteen fifty before an audience of scientists
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: and journalists in Los Angeles, and the clear was a
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: young woman named Sonia Bianca who was unable to recall
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: basic physics formulas she had claimed to have memorized, and
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: the audience was not persuaded, but the book kept selling
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: anyway because people didn't care really about the science, they
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: just cared about the idea. So by nineteen fifty two,
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: the original Dianetics Foundation had gone bankrupt mismanagement, organizational chaos,
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: and Hubbard's own tendencies had collapsed it, and he even
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: temporarily lost the rights to the Dianetics name, and a
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: bankruptcy court had taken his movement, so he just built
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: a new one, and this time on ground no court
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: could seize. So in nineteen fifty two he introduced the
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: concept of the Thetan, the immortal individual soul human beings,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: Hubbard now claimed, were not just minds with problems. They
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: were ancient spiritual entities who had existed for trillions of years,
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: accumulating damage across the millennia. The reactive mind was still there,
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: but it was now just the beginning, a small stepping
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: stone into a far more cosmic drama. And crucially, a
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: self help business could go bankrupt, but a religious one
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: could not. His religious organizations operated under different legal frameworks,
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: frameworks Hubbard had studied carefully, because these religions got tax exemption,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: regulatory protection. A church wasn't selling a product that didn't work.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: It was practicing the freedom of religion. Okay, go wrong,
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: So every dollar tithed went to the church, not to
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: a product that could be FDA regulated. It wasn't a
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: spiritual calling, it was a legal strategy. So this entire religion,
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: like some others, was entirely made up just to get
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: tax free money, essentially, and so his little cult couldn't
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: be poofed in front of his face, and probably just
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: for his ego in general. So in nineteen fifty three,
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Hubbard wrote a letter to a colleague explicitly advising the
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: reframing of the organization as a religion and listing its
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: financial and legal advantages in his own handwriting, and that
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: letter has been extensively verified. In the Church of Scientology's
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: entire legal identity rests on the argument that it is
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: a sincere religious movement, and Hubbard's own handwritten letter cataloging
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: the tax and legal upside of calling itself a church,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: makes that argument considerably harder to sustain. Kind of sounds
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: like bullshit, honestly, but the Church of Scientology was officially
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: incorporated in Los Angeles in nineteen fifty four. And here
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: is the architecture of the beliefs. Right, So in Scientology,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: you are not your body and you are not your mind.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: You are a thetan in immortal spiritual being who has
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: existed for trillions of years. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: It's meant to be. And because of that unimaginable span
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: of time, you have accumulated spiritual damage, oh no, false memories,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: diminished capabilities, trauma layered across Lifetimeslogy's purpose was to restore
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: you to your original state of total freedom and limitless capability,
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: and the tone scale was Hubbard's numerical hierarchy of emotional
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: states running from negative forty, which is death at the
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: bottom to forty, which is serenity of being this at
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: the top negative forty forty, and scientologists were trained to
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: evaluate themselves and everyone around them on this specific scale,
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: and this was in order to identify who was safe
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: to be around and who was not. And in Hubbard's
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: own writing, people operating at the lower end of the
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: scale are described as dangerous suppressors of other survival people
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: who should be removed from your life. So it functions
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: essentially as a social credit system for deciding who belongs
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: in your world, and that brings us to the bridge
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: to total freedom, which was the path through it all
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: a sequential program courses and audition sessions, each level requiring
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: payment before you could advance to the next naturally payment,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: you know, tithing, untaxable tithing. And at the lower levels
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: you were addressing the nngrams dignetics identified, and at the
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: upper levels you were handling ancient spiritual entities attached to
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: your body and unlocking knowledge of events in scientology's deep
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: cosmological history. And this is the genius of the architecture
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: though because it really, it honestly is kind of genius
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: because the further you climbed, the more you knew, and
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: the more you knew, the more special you felt. And
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: don't we all just want to feel special, you know,
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: that's all. We're all the main characters in our own life,
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: and we want to be the best main character we
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: can be. So Hubbard was just like, make everyone think
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: they're special, but they're actually stupid. Am I right? I'm
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: just kidding, But no, that's actually what he thought, because
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: the more special you feel, the harder it is to
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: imagine walking away. And every level was another achievement, another
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: step toward a truth that outsiders or even members who
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: hadn't gone as far, could never access. So it exploited
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: something fundamental in us all, just the human desire for
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: hidden knowledge, the thrill of being among the few who
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: understand what others cannot. It wasn't about intelligence. It was
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: about belonging to a secret club where the revelations never
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: stopped coming aka at cult. Okay, And if you started doubting,
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: you had already spent thousands of dollars and years of
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: your life getting there, So leaving meant admitting all of
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: that was gone. So it wasn't a trap for stupid people.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: It was a trap for curious ones. And then there
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: was the E meter and the art of auditioning, now
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: the electro psychometer. The E meter, I'm gonna say, is
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: two metal cylinders connected by wires to a circuit, and
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: you hold one in each hand, and when the electrical
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: conductivity of your skin changes, which happens when your sweat
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: glands activate, which can happen for any number of reasons,
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: including nervousness, discomfort, or simply just being a little hot.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: A needle deflects on a dial. And it is at
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: its core the same underlying technology as a polygraph machine,
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: if you're familiar with those. It's like a light detector machine,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: you know. In scientology, claims it measures the mass and
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: motion of mental material aka the energy content of n
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: grams and storage spiritual matter aka bullshit. Okay, the FDA
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: ruled in the nineteen sixties that it had no demonstrated
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: therapeutic value, and independent scientific analysis has consistently found it
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: measures galvanic skin response and literally nothing more. And what
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: makes auditing genuinely powerful and genuly dangerous is what happens
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: to everything said in that room, every secret, every fear,
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: every dark memory. Every transgression is recorded and every session
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: across every level logged and archived. Remember that former members
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: have testified extensively that this information was used as leverage blackmail,
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: right because if you decided to leave the church, the
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: church would use what you had disclosed against you. So
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: the intimacy of auditing was very real, and so was
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: the mechanism underneath it. The confessional functioned as surveillance, and
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: none of it happened by accident. And everything about scientology
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: was built the way it was for a reason, and
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: the reason all traced back to the psychology of the
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: man who designed it. Let's take a quick pause to
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: talk about bad habits. Now, Quitting smoking or vaping isn't
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: really about nicotine. It's about the habit, the hand to
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: mouth motion, the fidget, the little pause, white knuckle through it,
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: and around day five the cravings just hit hard. And
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: that's where fume comes in. Now. Fume spelled fum is
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: a flavored air device. No nicotine, no vapor, and no batteries,
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: Just a weighted, twisty, fidget friendly tool that gives your
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: hands and mouth something better to reach for. I keep
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: mine nearby while I'm digging into the dark stuff we
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: cover on this show. Albeit I've never vaped or smoked,
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: but I have a major fidgeting problem, so it's really
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: nice to have and it helps when I get stressed,
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: and drawing on it with a flavor like Crisp Mint
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: is genuinely really satisfying, and the flavors are lighter than vaping.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Think flavored water versus soda and Crisp Mints the strongest,
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: best for heavy users, and raspberryes tangy and on the
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: sweeter side. And over seven hundred thousand people have used
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Fume to take steps toward better habits. So head to
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: try fume dot com. That's t ry f um dot
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: com and use code CCCM when you grab a journey
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: pack to get a free gift, that's trifume dot com
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: code CCCM. Don't just try to quit, upgrade the habit loop.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much to Fume for sponsoring the video
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: Hubbard's personal finances were unusual for the leader of a
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: nonprofit religious organization, and former members described watching large cash
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: deliveries personally received by him. What a cult leader taking
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: all the money for himself I've never heard of such
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: a thing. Investigators documented flows of organizational money into his
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: personal accounts, and he lived very well while c ORG
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: members earned ten dollars a week. And we'll get into
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: the SORG people in a minute. And the internal culture
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: of Scientology increasingly reflected its founder, the paranoia, the conviction
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: that the outside world was fundamentally hostile, the belief that
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: the mission was important enough to justify extraordinary measures. And
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: he was not reacting to outside threats. He was just
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: building the response infrastructure before the threats could even materialize.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: So he was just he was doomsday prep and essentially so.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: In October nineteen sixty seven, Hubbard issued a formal policy
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: letter introducing the status of suppressive person, an enemy of
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: the church, a threat to Scientology's survival, and he was
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: very specific about what could be done to them, and
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: the fair Game policy stated that a suppressive person may
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: be deprived of property or injured by any means by
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: any scientologist without any discipline of the scientologist. So basically,
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: anybody could do anything to them without being held responsible
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: for it. So they could be, in Hubbard's own words, tricked, sued,
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: lied to, or destroyed whatever that means, and this was
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: not a metaphor, it was official church policy, and in
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: October of nineteen sixty eight, following public backlash, Hubbard issued
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: a follow up order retiring the phrase fair game, and
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: he was careful to note that the change only affected
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: the terminology and the underlying treatment of suppressive persons was
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: to continue unchanged. And one of the most documented early
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: applications involved a journalist named Paulette Cooper who published a
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: book about scientology in nineteen seventy one, and what followed
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: was a multi year campaign against her. Bomb threats were
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: made in her name, and an operation was run with
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: the explicit goal of having her criminally indicted for those
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: same threats. And the campaign had an official name inside
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: the Guardian's office, and it was Operation Freakout. Pretty lame
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: name to me, but what do I know? In The
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: stated per pose overall was written down by Hubbard himself,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: and it was to quote unquote harass and discourage rather
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: than to win. And the documents detailing all of this
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: were among the forty eight thousand files the FBI seized
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: years later, and courts in multiple jurisdictions have found the
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: fair Game policy to be real and to have been
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: applied against real people across decades, and the church continues
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: to deny its existence, and as recently as twenty twenty three,
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: former member Leah Ramini filed a lawsuit citing ongoing fair
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: game harassment, surveillance, smear campaigns, coordinated contact with her employers
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: and family, and the tactics described are identical to what
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: Hubbard put in writing in nineteen sixty seven. The name
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: was just retired, but the policy was not. But then
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: there is the Sea Org, which I mentioned briefly before,
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: and now we're going to talk about. So in nineteen
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: sixty seven, Hubbard resigned from his formal positions in scientology's
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: or organizational structure and took to the water, and he
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: established a floating headquarters aboard a fleet of ships, eventually
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: centered on the flagship vessel Apollo. Literally became water World
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: out there, swear to God. The stated reason was philosophical,
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: of course, freedom from any single government's jurisdiction and the
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: ability to pursue advanced operating THETAN research without interference. Basically,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: he just wanted to get away from the law and
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: just be able to do whatever he wants. And you know,
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: the waters are lawless. They're not actually lawless, but with
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: you can get away with a lot more on the
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: water basically. So the more observable reason was that Hubbard
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: was facing growing scrutiny from multiple governments, framing every conflict
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: as a coordinated psychiatric conspiracy using external pressure to deepen
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: internal loyalty, and he was actually banned from re entering
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: the United Kingdom in nineteen sixty eight. So international waters
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: were just a little bit more hospitable than any shore
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: at this point, and the Sea Organization was formally established
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty seven as Hubbard's elite court, a paramilitary
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: structure of Scientology's most of voted members, living and working
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: aboard ships under rigid discipline, like a bunch of weird
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: pirates or whatever that believe in that they were the
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: aliens that were put on earth in volcanoes and like
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: were mystical beings or whatever. So working days routinely ran
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: fourteen to sixteen hours, and members wore naval style uniforms
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: and operated under a hierarchy of ranks, and their salary
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: was ten dollars a week even for that time. That's
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: really bad. And the Sea org or Sea Organization members
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: signed contracts of service for wait for it, a billion years.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: They signed a contract to work for a billion years,
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: because remember they're trillion year old beings, so what a
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: shitty contract? Ten bucks? Although ten bucks a week for
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: a billion years, that adds up, and it was not figuratively.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: It was literally the same commitment across every future lifetime essentially,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: and children as young as six were signing these contracts,
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: by the way, and adults who grew up on the
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: ships described childhoods of grinding labor, constant ideological pressure, and
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: fear of discipline that hovered over everything they did. And
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: one of Hubbard's preferred punishments was having members thrown overboard
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: into the harbor, sometimes from the upper deck, which is
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: a considerable fall in front of the entire crew, mind you,
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: and Sea Org members who committed serious infractions were assigned
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: to the Rehabilitation Project Force, or the RPF, and that
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: included hard physical labor, restricted diet, isolation from others, and
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: intensive re indoctrination sessions that could last months or years.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: And for those who failed to progress in the regular RPF,
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: there was the RPF's RPF, which was a program within
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: the program more restrictive and even more isolated, and the
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: siege mentality hovered built on those ships did not stay
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: at sea, and when the Church would eventually return to land,
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: it came back with a plan. So Operation snow White
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: was the largest known infiltration of the United States government
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: to buy a private organization in American history. That is bonkers, okay,
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: because it wasn't a foreign intelligence service, which you'd expect,
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: not a criminal cartel. It was a church. And beginning
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: in the early nineteen seventies, the Guardian's Office inserted operatives
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: into approximately one hundred and thirty six government agencies and
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: organizations across the United States. They got busy on the
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: water and they made a serious plan, okay, infiltrating the
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: government is insane. And this was organizations in the United
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: States and in thirty other countries with an estimated force
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: of up to five thousand people at various points. And
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: the stated objective was to locate and destroy what the
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: Church calls false reports about scientology in government files. And
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: the method was to place agents inside those agencies who
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: would steal the documents, and the operatives obtained legitimate employment
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: inside the IRS and other federal agencies, and they photographed files,
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: removed records, and systematically purged documentation unfavorable to the church.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: This is crazy. They expunged themselves, and the operation was
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: authorized at the highest levels of the church, including obviously
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: by Hubbard and Hubbard's own wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, who
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: served as controller of the Guardian's office. But it began
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: to unravel in nineteen seventy six when an operative named
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: Michael Messner was recognized by a federal employee, and by
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: mid nineteen seventy seven, under pressure and fearing for his safety,
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: he turned himself into the FBI and became a government witness.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: So on July eighth, nineteen seventy seven, the government responded
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: in simultaneous raids on church offices in Los Angeles and Washington,
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: d c. Resulted in a seizure of over forty eight
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: thousand documents, and by nineteen seventy nine, eleven senior church
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: officials had been convicted, including Mary Sue Hubbard, Hubbard's wife
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: at the time, and she was sentenced to five years
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: but only served one, and l Ron Hubbard himself was
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: named as an unindicted co conspirator but was never charged.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: Haw I feel like money was involved in that, But
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: what do I know? You know? But essentially he was
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: hiding and unreachable, and the church's public response was to
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: characterize the convicted executives as rogue actors who had operated
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: without authorization, and the forty eight thousand documents suggested otherwise, though,
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: and Hubbard had already made himself impossible to find before
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: any of it started to fall apart, So by the
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: mid nineteen seventies, Hubbard had effectively vanished from visible leadership,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: communicating through written directives and operating through trusted lieutenants, and
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: legally vulnerable as a named co conspirator. He refused to
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: surface those so they're like, ah, we can't find him.
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: I guess he can get away with it. It's fine,
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: there's a little tisk disc I guess. But from roughly
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine until his death in nineteen eighty six,
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: he lived in a series of isolated locations under different names,
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: and his final years were spent primarily in a motor
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: home at a remote ranch in Creston, California, accompanied by
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: a small handful of trusted staff, and he continued to
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: issue Hcobs or Hubbard Communications Office bulletins formal policy directives
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: that the church treated as scripture. Essentially, those instructions kept
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: arriving by paper, and his photograph was everywhere inside church facilities,
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: not unlike Jesus Christ in Christian churches, and his lectures
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: played constantly, and his physical absence somehow made him feel
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: more authoritative, not less because you can't argue with words
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: on a page, but in his absence, power inside the
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: church was steadily consolidating around a young man named David Miscavige,
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: who had positioned himself as Hubbard's gatekeeper, ensuring that Hubbard
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: could only reach his own organization through him. So on
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: January twenty fourth, nineteen eighty six, l Ron Hubbard died
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: at the Creston Ranch at the age of seventy four,
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: and the official cause was a stroke, and the San
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: Luis Obispo County Coroner's toxicology report found vesterial in his system,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: which is an anti anxiety medication and a psychiatric drug,
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: and scientology members were forbidden from taking psychiatric medication. Oh
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: looks like it didn't listen to his own rules. Shocker,
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: But his death was not publicly announced for three days,
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: and during those days, a small group within the church
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: was managing the transition, and during this time he was
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Sea, of course,
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: and there was no public funeral. Members were told that
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: Hubbard had voluntarily left his body to continue his research
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: in the freer state, and that the highest level operating
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: Thetan had simply chosen to move on, and members who
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: found this explanation incomplete were not given any other options.
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: In control of his estate, the writing's trademarks and intellectual
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: property of the entire religion was passed to David Miscavige,
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: who had been positioning himself for exactly this moment for
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: five years now, and he at the time was twenty
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: five years old, and he remains the leader of Scientology
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: till today now. David Misscavage was born on April thirtieth,
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and he joined the
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: Sea Organized at sixteen, reportedly with his parents Blessing and
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: his father, A. Ron Misscavige Senior, was a scientologist and
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: eventually a Sea Org member himself, so it ran in
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: the family basically. People who knew Misscavage as a young
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: Sea Org member described someone unusually driven unusually effective and
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: unusually willing to do whatever was required to advance, and
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: he caught Hubbard's attention and was brought in as a
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: personal assistant pretty quickly, pretty soon after he joined, and
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: by nineteen eighty one, Miscavige had engineered the removal of
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: the Watchdog Committee, the church's nominal governing body, in Hubbard's absence,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: and replaced it with a structure he controlled, and he
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: forced the resignation of Mary Sue Hubbard, Hubbard's own wife,
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: from the Guardian's office, and by the time Hubbard died
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty six, no credible alternative to Misscavage had emerged,
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: and he just became chairman of the board of the
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: Religious Technology Center, body controlling all Scientology trademarks and copyrights.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: And multiple former senior executives who worked directly under Misscavage
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: for decades have described a leadership style defined by micromanagement,
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: volcanic rage, and regular physical violence, and the Tampa Bay
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: Times Truth Rundown investigation in two thousand and nine reported
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: that Misscavage routinely struck members of his senior staff, sometimes
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: during meetings, as an ordinary feature of life at the
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: church's international headquarters. And former Inspector General Marty Rathbun, former
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: International spokesman Mike Rinder, and others from Misscavags direct inner circle,
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: providing consistent accounts to multiple journalists and in multiple legal proceedings,
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: and the church called every single one of them a
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: disgruntled apostate motivated by vengeance. And there was a great
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: many disgruntled apostates with remarkably similar stories though, and Misscavage's
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: own father, Ron Misscavage Senior, published a member in twenty
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: sixteen titled Ruthless, and he described the church spending approximately
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars per week to surveil him after he left,
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: and he described on camera suffering a cardiac episode while
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: still inside the church and being told that David had
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: decided to wait and see whether his father survived on
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: his own before intervening, what a monster. That's it? No, sorry,
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: I know the background changed, and I changed. It's a
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: different day, just saying it's a different day basically. Anyway,
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: let me continue. And then there was Michelle or Shelley Barnett,
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: who was actually born into scientology and her mother, Florence
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: or Flow Barnett, was a longtime member and eventually a
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: senior church official. Growing up, Shelley's entire world was the church,
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: her community, her education, her social circle, and her sense
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: of purpose. And to understand what happened to Shelley, you
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: first have to understand what happened to her mother. So
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: by the mid nineteen eighties, Flow Barnet, Shelley's mother, had
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: fallen out of favor with church leadership, and the reasons
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: have never been fully documented, but the result was definitive.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: She was declared a suppressive person, very bad, and under
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: disconnection policy that meant her own daughter, now married to
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: the most powerful man in scientology, was required to cut
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: off all contact with her. Now Shelley and David disconnected
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: from Flow entirely, a mother declared an enemy, erased from
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: her daughter's life by institutional decree. Extremely sad, and on
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: September twenty fifth, nineteen eighty five, Florence Barnett would be
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: found dead in her Los Angeles home. Now the ruling
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: was and it was allegedly by gunshot. Three shots, specifically
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: though to the head and to her chest. So get
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: a safe say I'm not buying it. And it was
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: also with a rifle. Forensic investigators noted with some understatement
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: the obvious physical difficulty of that entire scenario, and the
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: ruling was not challenged for whatever reason, and it was
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: just quietly filed away. And Shelley had been cut off
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: from her mother before she died, and whether she was
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: permitted to grieve or how is not something the church
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: has ever addressed. Now. Shelley and David Muscavige had married
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty two, and she wasn't simply the leader's wife.
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: By the late nineteen nineties and the early two thousands,
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: she was one of the most powerful operational figures in
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: the entire church, effectively running day to day administration at
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: the international headquarters in Hammett, California, known internationally as the
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: Gold Base, and people who worked alongside her described someone
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: as driven and as capable as her husband. She was not,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: by any means a peripheral figure. She was a co
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: architect of the institution, and somewhere around two thousand and
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: five or two thousand and six something changed, and former
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: members have described an incident in which Shelley made a
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: series of personal reassignments without David's explicit authorization, filing positions
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: on her own initiative and in an organization where Misscavage's
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: control was absolute and unquestioned that David's that is, that
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: was not a small thing. This was very bad, and
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: she was removed from her position because of that. Allegedly
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: she was removed quietly, and then she was just gone.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: And the last confirmed public sighting of Shelley Misscavage was
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: in August of two thousand and seven, when she was
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: briefly escorted to her father's funeral, And she has not
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: appeared publicly since, and she has not seen at church events,
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: and she does not give interviews and she does not
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: appear in photographs either, and former senior members who worked
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: at the highest levels of the church for decades say
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: they don't even know where she is. And in twenty thirteen,
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: actress and former member Lea Rimini filed a missing person's
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: report with the Los Angeles Police Department, citing genuine concern
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: for Shelley's well being. In the LAPD conducted a welfare
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: check and issued a terse statement Shelley Misscavage had been
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: located and was not a missing person, and no other
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: details were provided, though no photograph and no public statement
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: from Shelley herself, and no independent verification of any kind.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: But the church's position is that she is alive and
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: well and engaged in church work of her own choosing,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: and former members familiar with church operations believe she is
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: held at a remote church facility in the mountains of
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: San Bernardino County, one of the several isolated properties the
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: church owns and control, accessible only through church channels monitored
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: by church staff. And she has a family outside the church,
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: and they have not been able to reach her either though,
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: and there have been no letters, no calls, and no
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: contact that anyone outside the organization has been able to
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: independently confirm. So Shelley Miscavige is, depending on whom you ask,
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: either a dedicated senior church official living exactly as she chooses,
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: or which I'm leaning more to a woman who has
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: not been seen by anyone outside Scientology's control in nearly
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: two decades, whose disappearance has never been fully accounted for,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: and whose family has no way of knowing if she
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: is okay. And this theory also poses that she might
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: just not even be alive. We don't know, and I
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: don't think we ever will know, and that is horrifying,
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: especially given what happened to her mother, which is complete bs.
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: Someone killed her. Maybe I have to say maybe, because
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: I don't know for sure, you know, but three shots
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: to the head and chest? Are you kidding me? With
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: a rifle? Are you kidding me? But the Church confirms
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: Shelley is alive, and she has not appeared anywhere to
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: confirm it herself. So do with that which you will.
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: But that brings us to the IRS war and the
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: tax exemption victory. Now, the IRS had striped Scientology's tax
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: exempt status in nineteen sixty seven, and the reason was
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: pretty straightforward. Organizational money was flowing directly into L. Ron
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: Hubbard's personal accounts, conveniently enough for him, and that was true,
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: and the IRS would document it. And what followed was
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: a war that lasted twenty six years. And the Church's
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: response was not to make their case in court. It
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: was to make the IRS's life as unlivable as possible,
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: which I didn't even know was possible. And they filed
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: approximately two thousand lawsuits, not against the IRS as an institution,
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: but against individual IRS employees. And the goal was not victory,
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: It was just exhaustion. But it is one thing to
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: sue a large agency, but it is something more intimate
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: and more frightening to sue the individual person who works there.
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: That is bold as hell, But as we know that
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: people in Scientology are the most bold people ever, it seems.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: But private investigators were deployed against IRS personnel even and
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: operatives showed up at private meetings, and the pressure was
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: just relentless and very personal. And in October of nineteen
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: ninety one, David Mscavige and Inspector General Marty Rathbun walked
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: into IRS headquarters unannounced and they met privately with the
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: IRS Commissioner, Fred Goldberg Junior, And the details of that
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: conversation have never been fully disclosed. But on October first,
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, the IRS granted Scientology tax exempt status.
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: What the hell did they say in that room? And
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: how can I get in on that? You know what
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: I mean? I just kidding, I'm just kidding. I'll pay
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: my taxes whatever, whatever, dude, But seriously, like that is
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: so incredibly shady, Oh my god. And it wasn't just
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: tax exempt for the church itself but one hundred and
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: fifty three associated entities as well, and the church paid
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: twelve point five million dollars and all twenty two hundred
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: outstanding lawsuits just disappeared, and every tax liability was gone,
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: and the agreement was kept secret until December nineteen ninety seven,
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: when the Wall Street Journal obtained and published the seventy
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: six page closing document, and tax law experts described the
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: terms as extraordinary, and every tax liability was just gone,
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: and the agreement was kept secret until December nineteen ninety seven,
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: when the Wall Street Journal obtained and published the seventy
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: six page closing document, and tax law experts described the
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: terms as extraordinary. A twenty six year war that the
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: irs appeared to be winning had been resolved in a
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: single private meeting, and inside the church it was treated
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: as proof of divine favor. I'm gonna go ahead and
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: assume it was probably blackmail or something along those lines,
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: but what do I know. When the government settled, miscavige
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: turned to a strategy Hubbard had first outlined thirty eight
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: years earlier, and that was celebrities. Let's take a quick
• 53:42
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• 55:19
  Speaker 1: Let's get back to it now. Hubbard identified celebrities as
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: priority targets as far back as nineteen fifty five, and
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: he called them opinion leaders. I don't think anybody wants
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: a celebrity's opinion these days, but different time. But basically
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: people whose public endorsement shapes what ordinary people believe. And
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine, the church opened Celebrity Center International
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, a separate facility built specifically for public figures,
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: offering better amenities, more attentive staff, and materially different experience
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: than what regular members received, just basically regular life. It seems,
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: because why treat normal people good, you know, unbelievable, But
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: it was because regular members weren't the marketing department right.
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: They weren't selling anything the celebrities can sell, And the
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: biggest one that you probably already know of is Tom Cruise.
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: Tom Cruise is the church's most valuable asset and has
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: been for forty years, and he was introduced to Scientology
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: by his first wife, Mimi Rogers, in the mid nineteen
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: eighties and became a devoted member almost immediately, forming a
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: close personal friendship with David Muscavige that had been described
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: by former insiders as the most important relationship in the
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: church's modern era, and the two men reportedly vacation together,
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: share meals and speak constantly. This makes me not like
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: Tom Cruise. This makes me really not like Tom Cruise
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: now that I've learned a lot more about this, And
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: it's a bummer because you know, I like Mission impossible.
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: I like that it is, but this puts a big
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: damper on that. Now. Miscavige has been called Cruz's best
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: friend by multiple sources, and what that friendship has meant
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: for the church is immeasurable. Because Cruz's endorsement gave Scientology
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: a cultural legitimacy it had never previously achieved, and his
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: second marriage to Nicole Kidman presented a problem. Former senior
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: members have described church concerns that Kidman, whose father was
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: a psychologist, a profession scientology treats with hostility right for Lisa,
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: was pulling Cruise away from his commitment. They can't have that.
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: They can't have little bitty Tommy Cruz leave the party
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: to his auditing files, some former officials have alleged were
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: reviewed for material that could be used to manage the relationship.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: And the marriage ended in two thousand and one, and
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: Kidman was subsequently described in church circles as a suppressed person.
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: Who else was a suppressive person? Oh yeah, that was
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: Shelley's mom who was murdered allegedly, and Cruz's children from
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: that marriage, who remained with him and were raised in
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: scientology disconnected from their mother for a significant period, which
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: is incredibly disturbing. And after the divorce, according to multiple
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: former members and journalists who investigated the story, church officials
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: effectively helped Cruse audition for a new girlfriend, a scientologist
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: actress named Nazanin Boniatti, who was reportedly selected, briefed, and
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: introduced to Cruz in late two thousand and four. Under
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: circumstances she did not fully understand and the relationship ended
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: after several months, and she was later assigned to the RPF,
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: which remember is bed Debt's bed, and she has spoken
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: about the experience publicly. And Cruz then met Katie Hulme
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: in two thousand and five. In their relationship documented partly
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: by the now infamous couch jumping in OPRAH, partly by
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: a level of choreographed public enthusiasm that struck many observers
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: as usual, produced a daughter, Surrey, and a marriage that
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: lasted a till twenty twelve. Now Holmes reportedly planned her
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: exit from the marriage with considerable secrecy, aware of how
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: the church handled departures, and she filed for divorce, retained
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: custody of Surrey, and moved quickly. Can't imagine. I feel
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: like it's just like a whole scary situation happening with
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: Tom Cruise and Surrey has been raised outside scientology, and
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: Tom Cruise has reportedly not seen her in years, a consequence,
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: former members say of the same disconnection policy applied to
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: everyone else, and he has never publicly addressed it. So
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: just a whole lot of shady shit going on behind
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: the scenes of Cruse's life. And then there's John Travolta again,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: another blow like who doesn't love Greece? Goddamn it. But
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: John has been a member since the nineteen seventies and
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: his relationship with the church has outlasted everything the collapse
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: of his film career, its improbable revival, the death of
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: his son Jet in two thousand and nine, and decades
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: of tabloid speculation about his personal life. And he has
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: credited auditing with transforming his early career, and former members
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: and journalists have have long alleged that the church's leverage
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: over Travolta runs into the other direction too, and that
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: auditing records containing sensitive personal disclosures have functioned as a
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: reason to stay a ka blackmail, and the church obviously
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: denies this, and Givolta has never publicly indicated any desire
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: to leave. And then there's Christy Ally, who was a
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: vocal and enthusiastic member for decades, crediting Scientology's Narconon program
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: with helping her overcome a cocaine addiction in the nineteen
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: teen eighties, and she remained a committed member until her
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: death from cancer in twenty twenty two, and defended the
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: church publicly and energetically throughout her life. And then there
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: was Elizabeth Moss, best known for playing the lead in
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: The Handmaid's Tale, a show about theocratic authoritarian society that
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: controls women through a religious doctrine, and is a practicing
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: scientologist and has declined to discuss the apparent tension in
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: that pairing. I have lost all respect for this person
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: because of now knowing this. This is insane. That is
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: insane to be on that show and then be a
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: part of scientology as well. What the But she has
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: described scientology as something deeply personal that she doesn't speak
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: about publicly because would ruin her career basically, But here
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: I am now you know she's a staunch member of it.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: And then there is Beck, the musician who grew up
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: in a scientology family and has a member his entire life,
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: and he has largely avoided discussing it in interviews as well.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: But then there's Erika Christensen and Body Elfman and Giovanni
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: Ribisi and his sister Marissa Verbisi are among dozens of
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: working actors who are scientologists, many of them second generation
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: members who grew up inside the church, which and if
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: you're growing up inside that church, that's like a whole
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: other thing. If you're choosing to go in as an adult,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: that's one thing, and I'm judging you very harshly. But
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: if you grow up inside it, I don't know. I
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: do have a little smidgeon of empathy, because that's just
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: all you know growing up. And then there's Isaac Hayes,
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: the musician behind the South Park theme Saterrizing Scientology, and
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: he had been a cast member for nine years, and
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: his son later stated that Hayes had suffered a stroke
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: before the departure and had not personally made the decision
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: to leave, and that church representatives had acted on his behalf.
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: Because what celebrity members provide for the church is something
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: it could never purchase directly, and that is mainstream legitimacy.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: A famous successful person calling the technology real is proof
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: to existing members that it works, and they bring their
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: networks with them. Come, come, come, come, my child. I'm
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: a celebrity. Everything I do is real and it matters,
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: and it's supposed to give you fomo. But when I
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: love that work, we're just in like this grand awakening
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: now where we just don't buy that shit and it's fabulous.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: But what happens when a celebrity leaves is equally instructive.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: And when Leah Ramini left in twenty thirteen after thirty years,
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: the church's response was immediate, and she was declared a
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: suppressive person, and her character was publicly attacked and a
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: coordinated campaign followed her for years, and former members who
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: had been her close friends stopped speaking to her overnight,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: and she had been one of the church's most prominent
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: public faces, and within days of her departure she was
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: treated like an enemy. And the same machine that makes
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: celebrities useful on the way in makes them targets on
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: the way out. And the more prominent you were, the
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: more aggressively they come after you. So once fair game starts,
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: except they renamed it, which means nothing, silence isn't really
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: an option anyway. So that's the one thing I can
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: think of, you know, with celebrities that join it and
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: are part of it, and you know, I'll give them,
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: you know, a little devil's advate benefit of the doubt.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: I can't imagine the fear in them, like if they
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: want to leave, they can't because there's first first off,
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: there's like the auditing where they have all sorts of blackmail,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: which I don't know. Maybe that means they are bad,
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: bad people, depending on what they said to them. And
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: then there's just the fear of losing their entire career
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: and all this stuff. It's a well oiled machine that
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: Scientology is built. It's very scary, but who's to say.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: But obviously it's not just celebrities walking through the door.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: It's it's person really and the people who walk through
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: a Scientology door are not a particular type necessarily, and
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: research on high commitment groups find members drawn most often
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: from people at turning points, a divorce, a job that
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: fell apart, a stretch of time where nothing quite fits,
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: basically just lost people. We see this again and again
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: with every cult that we go over. Cults just look
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: for people who don't fit right now or that are
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: looking for purpose in their life right and the church
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: is really good at spotting those openings, and it usually
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: starts with a free personality test outside a church storefront.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: The Oxford capacity analysis is what it's called, and it
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: has nothing to do with the Oxford University and no
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: clinical validity whatsoever. And what it has is a very
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: effective way of identifying whatever is currently wrong in your
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: life and making it. The conversation and the results are
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: never mailed, and they're delivered in person by someone warm
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: in a room that already feels like a community. In
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: the first few weeks, feel genuinely good. People ask about
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: your life and actually listen, and everyone around you seems purposeful,
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: like they found something, and that warmth isn't fake. Most
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: of these people genuinely believe what they're in. The entry
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: costs are low at first so as not to scare
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: you too much, not to stick or shock. Yeah, and
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: it's not out of generosity, but because the real financial
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: demands come later, once you've settled in, once you've gotten comfortable,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: and once you feel like you can't leave. And in
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: the meantime, the outside world gets quietly reframed. That worried
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: friend becomes a potential trouble source, the family member asking
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: questions gets assigned a category, and before long, the people
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: most likely to pull you back are the ones who've
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: been reclassified as the problem. And once you believe that,
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: the next invoice stops feeling like a financial decision and
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: more like just your own decision. You want to keep
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: moving up, So you got to pay and that requires
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: the bridge moving up and pay enough, and that bridge
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: to total freedom is very expensive. Entry level courses run
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, which is
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: still pretty expensive, and as members advance, costs rise dramatically,
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: and some OT levels run to tens of thousands of
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: dollars each. Reaching OT three alone is estimated to cost
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: between one hundred and three hundred thousand dollars in total
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: accumulated payments. And at each level, members aren't merely completing
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: a course because at the lower levels they believe they're
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: erasing the root cause of all their suffering, and at
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: the middle levels they're accessing capabilities most humans will never develop, right,
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: they're becoming superhuman, if you will. And at the upper
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: OT levels, they believe they're doing work that affects the
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: entire planet. They get to play god up in this tier,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: you get to be God tier literally, and any hesitation
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: about paying is handled through the same system that handles
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: everything else. The reluctance to pay is framed as a
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: spiritual problem, not a financial one, because the reactive mind
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: is interfering with your progress, and auditing can help you
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: work through it, and members have taken second mortgages, emptied
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: retirement accounts, and borrowed from family and church staff has
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: helped members identify money they didn't even know was accessible,
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: and members who fall behind financially don't get removed, they
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: just simply stop progressing. And in a social structure where
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: everyone around you is constantly moving forward, stagnation carries real stigma,
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: and a fully committed member's life becomes organized almost entirely
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: around the church, and evenings, weekends and social time fold
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: inward and the outside world gets filtered through the church's framework,
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: not really by force, but because nothing outside offers anything
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: as affirming, as complete, or as purposeful as what's inside now.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: Operating theton level three is what you receive after years
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: of work and somewhere between one hundred and three hundred
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars in payments. Like we spoke about before, and
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: Hubbard called the materials the wall of fire, and he
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: warned that reading them without proper preparation could cause pneumonia
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: or even death ka, which is a very convenient thing
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: to say, because it means that any negative reaction you
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: have to what you're about to learn, confusion, skepticism, uncontrollable,
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: laughter is your own spiritual inadequacy. It's not really a
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: reason to question the material. So let's just see what
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars gets you, and it'll tell you.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: Seventy five million years ago, a galactic ruler named Xenu
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: controlled the confederacy of seventy six planets, each averaging one
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: one hundred and seventy eight billion people. And he had
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: an overpopulation problem, you see, and his solution was to
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: summon the access population into tax offices under false pretenses,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: freeze them in glycol and alcohol, load them onto a
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: spacecraft shaped like the Douglas DC eight jets, fly them
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: to Earth, and drop them into volcanoes. Then he detonated
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: hydrogen bombs, and the major world religions were Xenu implants,
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: all of them. The disembodied souls now called body thetans,
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: subjected to thirty six days of electronic brainwashing, attached themselves
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: to whatever living beings remained. And these humans are still
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: there right now on you, possibly several hundred of them,
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: and they are responsible for your fears, your limitations, your
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: bad knee, your bad relationship with your mommy, just basically
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: everything holding you back. And the ot levels above three
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: exist to remove them one by one, but at additional cost.
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: And here's what almost nobody does after receiving this information. Leave.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: They don't leave after hearing this story, this fiction, this
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard, you know, grade a pathological lying fiction bullshit,
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: which is crazy because the sunk cost is too high.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: They're in three hundred grand and they know if they leave,
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: they're just gonna their their careers are gonna get ruined,
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: Their life's gonna get ruined by these assholes, and the
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: years they've spent are just too many. And crucially, Hubbard
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: already told you that finding this absurd was a symptom
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: of your own spiritual illness. So if you found this
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: crazy like me, it's because I'm spiritually ill and stupid.
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: And by the time you're sitting in that room holding
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: those pages, the architecture has been doing its jo for years,
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: the cult has been doing its job, and your doubt
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: has been pre explained away. And members at lower levels
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: who deny that xenu is any part of scientology aren't lying.
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: They genuinely just haven't been told yet because they can't read.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: I get I know, I didn't pay anything. You know,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: the entire structure was designed so you won't find out
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: until you've spent too much to turn back, essentially until
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: you're into deep. Basically, it's like gambling gone wrong. It's
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: like you have a gambling addiction and you just can't stop.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: And then there's a disconnection policy which required members to
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: completely sever contact with anyone the church had declared a
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: suppressive person, parents, children, spouses, siblings, partners of decades. One
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: letter or phone call, and then silence forever. No texts,
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: no emails, no calls, no visits. The person simply disappears
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: from your life as though they'd never existed, and parents
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: spent years not knowing whether their adult children were even alive,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: and some waited over a decade for a word that
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: never came. And the church describes disconnection as a voluntary
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: personal choice, and former members describe it very differently, though,
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: because maintaining contact with your mother would cost you your
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: entire social world, every friend you've made in years, your standing,
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: your spiritual progress. The choice is not free, and the
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: function is precise and very deliberate. It eliminates every person
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: outside the church who might reach a member and raise
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: a doubt, and it replaces the family they came in with,
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: with the new family, one entirely inside the organization, entirely
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: aligned with its worldview. So your old support network is
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: now completely gone and the new one depends on your
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: continued participation. And for those already deep inside the sea
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: organization specifically, the consequences of stepping out of line were
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: even more or immediate because they would be put into
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: the RPF, the Rehabilitation Project for says we know, and
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: the church describes the RPF as a voluntary rehabilitation program,
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: but former members consistently describe having no choice in the
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: matter and being treated like less than animals essentially, and
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: some never made it to exit at all. So across
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: Scientology's history, the church has been connected to deaths and
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: disappearances that remain unexplained, and the pattern that emerges is
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: consistent people in psychological crisis whose care was removed from
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: outside professionals and handled entirely inside the church. And first
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: is Florence Barnett Shelley Muscavage's mother, whom we've already spoke
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: about what the hell was that she was called a
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: suppressive person and then she mysteriously died of three gunshot
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: wounds that were clearly made by someone else. And there's
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: Shelley Misscavage, who just disappeared and hasn't been seen since
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: two thousand and seven. And then there was Lisa McPherson,
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: who was born on February tenth in nineteen fifty nine
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: in Dallas, Texas, and she was not swept in accidentally
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: or under dress. She had been a committed scientologist since
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: her teenage years in the nineteen seventies, believing fully in
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: what she was doing, and by the early nineteen nineties
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: she had relocated to Clearwater, Florida, home to the Flagland
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: Base Scientology spiritual headquarters and self described mecca of technical perfection.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: And moving there was an act of devotion, essentially, and
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: Lisa had made the choice deliberately with her whole heart. Now,
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: on November eighteenth, nineteen ninety five, she was rear ended
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: in a minor traffic accident on US Route nineteen and
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: she was not seriously physically injured, and she got out
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: of her car and then she began removing her clothing
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the street. Her medics transported her
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: by ambulance to the Morton Plant Hospital and she was alive.
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: She was physically uninjured and clearly and unmistakably in the
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: middle of a psychological crisis, and a group of scientologists
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: arrived at the hospital shortly afterward, and they informed the
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: staff that Lisa was fine and that she was a
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: scientologist and that the church would take care of her,
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: and she was discharged against medical advice and Morton Plant
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: Hospital's own records showed that the staff was concerned about
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: her before she left, but she was taken to the
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: Fort Harrison Hotel, the church's main facility in Clearwater, and
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: placed under the introspection run down a protocol written by
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: Hubbard in nineteen seventy three for handling what the church
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: calls a psychotic break, and the protocol called for total
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: isolation from all external contact, no communication with family or
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: friends outside of the church, and no direct interaction with
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: the people in crisis either. Essentially, just complete isolation and silence.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: Sounds like the opposite of what a person going through
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: a psychological break would need in my opinion. I'm not
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: a doctor, though, what do I know now? The theory was
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: that removing all stimulation would allow the person to naturally stabilize,
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: so for seventeen days, she was left in isolation. So
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: Lisa McPherson was kept in a hotel room in complete
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: isolation for seventeen straight days, and the church staff kept detailed,
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: handwritten logs throughout, and those logs were later obtained and
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: entered into evidence, and they described a woman slowly deteriorating
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: day by day in the church's own hand weight loss, dehydration,
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: diminishing consciousness, a woman who had walked into that room
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: under her own power, who had years of her life
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: invested in this organization, who had moved across the country
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: to be closer to it, was losing ground quietly in
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: a hotel room. And the log's note at multiple points
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: that she was not eating and not drinking and not
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: responding normally, and at no point during those seventeen days
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: were outside medical professionals called. And on December fifth, nineteen
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: ninety five, church staff placed Lisa McPherson into a van
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: and drove forty five miles to a scientologist's physician in Doomden, Florida,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: and she would die before they arrived, and she was
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: only thirty six years old, and her autopsy found severe
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: dehydration and more than forty insect bites on her body
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: and she had lost a significant amount of weight, and
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: the Clearwater Police Department launched a homicide investigation, and the
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: state Attorney filed criminal charges against the Church of Scientology
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight and one count of a neglect
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: of a disabled adult and one count of practicing medicine
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: without a license, and at two thousand the criminal charges
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: were dropped and the medical examiner amended the death certificate
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: and the reasons for the amendment were never fully explained
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: to the public satisfaction, and a civil wrongful death lawsuit
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: brought by her family was settled out of court in
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: two thousand and four for an undisclosed amount under sealed terms.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: So you can safely assume that money just washed away
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: the fact that this woman died under the church's watch
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: and because of the church. The church murdered Lisa McPherson,
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: in my opinion, allegedly so no member of the Church
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: of Scientology has ever been held criminally responsible for what
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: happened to Lisa McPherson. In what Lisa's case represents is
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: a pattern made very visible. A person in crisis, removed
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: from outside care, isolated inside the church and handwritten log
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: documenting her deterioration line by line in the church's own
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: hand in medical intervention, arriving too late by forty five miles.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: And the logs exist, and they were written by church
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: members in church facilities during the seventeen days they chose
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: not to call a doctor, and no one has ever
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: been held accountable. In disgusting. And what's even more sickening
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: is that children were not exempt from the demands of
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: Scientology's internal structure and in the Sea Organization, especially because
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: they occupied a category all on their own. Because they
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: weren't full members in the formal sense, and not civilians either,
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: they were just kind of present and expected to contribute.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: And the Cadet Organization was the formal structure for children
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: of Sea Org members, and kids as young as five
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: years old and six were enrolled, given assignments, and expected
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: to produce. And while their parents worked sixteen hour days,
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: the children were managed separately, largely apart from them, and
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: the organization kind of just became the parent. And the
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: children born into the Sea Org signed billion year contracts,
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: Oh my god, the same contracts binding adults across all
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: future lifetimes, and no court has ever adjudicated whether a
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: contract signed by a six year old is legally valid,
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: which how the hell would that be valid? Dude, I
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: didn't even know how to spell my name at six years old.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: I don't think, let alone redline a fighting contract. But
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: the Church has never had to answer for it anyway,
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: like they haven't had to answer for anything else. And
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: the education inside the Sea Org was built around Hubbard's
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: own study tech, his system applied to his materials supervised
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: by his organization, and standard academic subjects were secondary to
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: understanding Scientology's texts and procedures. And multiple adults who grew
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: up inside the Sea Org describe emerging with significant gaps
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: in basic knowledge things their peers simply knew they had
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: never even been taught. And Jenna Misscavenge Hill, David Miscavige's niece,
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: published a memoir in twenty thirteen titled Beyond Belief, My
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: Secret Life inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, and she
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: describes a childhood structured almost entirely around the organization, separated
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: from her parents for most of every day, assigned work
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: from a young age, and always aware that any behavior
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: reflecting poorly on the Church could have consequences not just
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: for her, but also for her parents and multiple former
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: Sea Org members have also described significant pressure on pregnant
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: women to either have abortions or leave the organization, and
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: the stated position was that raising a child was incomparable
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: with the Sea Org service, and the choice was framed
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: as binary like leave and have your child or end
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: the pregnancy and stay just so messed up and what
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: adults who grew up in side scientology most often describe
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: as a fundamentally abnormal childhood with the work schedules, the
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: ideological saturation, the absence of outside education, and the separation
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: from their parents, and then the disorientation of leaving it
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: because many described learning basic adult life skills essentially from
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: scratch when they left, like how to get a job,
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: how to navigate bureaucracy, and how to just talk to
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: people who have never heard of fetans. You know, you're
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: basically an ali, which I guess you know in scientology
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: you kind of are. You're an alien, like coming to
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: Earth and just figuring out how humans actually work, like
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: that's what scientology does to you. So a lot of
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: them were just figuring this out in their twenties and
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: even thirties, which is just I can't even imagine. And
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: the biggest wave of high level departures came in the
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: two thousands and the twenty tens, as former senior executives
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: began talking publicly for the first time. And Marty Rathbun
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: had been the churches inspector general and one of the
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: Scavenger's closest people for over two decades, and he left
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: in two thousand and four and became the central source
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: for the Tampa Bay Times landmark truth Rundown investigation in
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. And Mike Render spent roughly three
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: decades as the church's chief international spokesman, and he left
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: in two thousand and seven and became one of the
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: most sustained public critics of Scientology's history, co hosting Leah
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: Ramini's documentary series Scientology and the Aftermath, a three season
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: A and E series that ran from twenty sixteen to
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen and featured dozens of former members on camera
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: and even won an Emmy Award. And the departure process
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: for Sea Org members who leave without permission includes what
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: the church calls a freeloader debt, a bill for every
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: course and auditing session received during their years of service
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: calculated at full current public rates, and these bills routinely
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: run to tens of thousands of dollars. So you spent
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: years working for remember ten dollars a week, and on
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: the way out they would hand you a bill. Not
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: unlike the Canadian government. When I left the country, they
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: told me to give them all my money before I left.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: Be I just a little side note for any Canadians
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: that ever want to leave the country. There's an exit tax.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: Really fun, really fun. You'll learn about it if you
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: ever leave now. Lawrence Wright spent years researching and writing
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: Going Clear, published in twenty thirteen, and the church's response
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: was more than twenty five letters, totally hundreds of pages,
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: challenging every refactual claim in the manuscript. Before publication and
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: the Tampa Bay Times Truth Rundown series won the Gold
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: Medal for Public Service from the Florida Society of News
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: Editors in two thousand and nine, and during the series publication,
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: the church bought advertising space on the Tampa Bay Times
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: own website, What the kind of Bundy scientology has disgusting
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: as we're figuring out and everyone saw what they were
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: doing and it didn't work. Shocker. People were like, Oh,
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: they're just controlling the media, like the government. Everything runs false.
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: Ar call. Hubbard laid out the legal strategy in his
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: own words in nineteen fifty five, saying the purpose of
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: the lawsuit is to harass, not to win, right. They
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: just want to harass you so you can't take it anymore,
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: and then you win by doing that. Two thousand individual
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: lawsuits against IRS employees is the largest expression of that approach,
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: as we talked about, and individual suits against journalists and
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: former members were just designed to rack up legal costs
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: and deliver fear to people who couldn't afford to fight
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: an organization of Scientology's resources. And other countries have been
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: less tolerant than the United States, and Germany classified Scientology
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: as incompatible with democratic values and placed it under state
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: surveillance for decades. That's a w for Germany, right there.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: I'd say. In France convicted the Church of organized fraud
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine and a conviction upheld an appeal.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: Sick love that in Belgium, Australia, and Russia have all
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: conducted formal investigations or taken regulatory action at various points
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: in America remains the place where scientology has functioned most
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: successfully with the least institutional resistance. And now that we're
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: learning everything we're learning with you know, Jeffrey Epstein and
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: the government and all the control and how everything is
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: just manufactured, that does not surprise me in the least
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: and just makes me think that the Goverment's in on
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: scientology too, and it's just a big money scheme essentially,
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: as we know that. It's disgusting, it's so dumb, I like,
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: why do these people exist? You know? But the thing
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: that finally broke their control over information wasn't a government
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: and wasn't a courtroom shocker. It was the Internet. Now,
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: the entire architecture of Scientology's power over its members depends
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: on controlling what they know. Right, Knowledge is power, and
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: you need to control that knowledge. But the Internet ooh,
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: that provides a lot of people with a lot of knowledge,
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: like really fast, and they can't control that. Oh. No,
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: the secret knowledge structure only functions if the secret stays secret.
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: You cannot charge someone one hundred thousand dollars to discover
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: that xenu exists if they can find out about it.
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: For free. Oh like you guys right now? Oh no,
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: I saved you guys three hundred grand ear welcome, okay,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: because the Internet made that possible, or made it possible
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: to know, but impossible for the Church to keep that
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: information secret. And the Church didn't see it coming. And
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four, pieces of the OT levels began
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: appearing on usenet newsgroups, and the Church came after them
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: with copyright claims and legal threats, and some providers took
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: the material down, but it kept spreading anyway, because that's
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: the way the Internet works, baby, And by two thousand
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: and eight, Wiki Leaks had published six hundred and twelve
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: pages of OT level materials and the z News story
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: was sitting in Google search results, and Church representatives were
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: still publicly denying that Xenu was any part of scientology,
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: while simultaneously filing legal actions to get him removed from
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: the Internet. And in January of two thousand and eight,
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: the church demanded YouTube remove a leaked internal video featuring
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: Tom Cruise. I hope they don't come after me, just kidding,
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: They won't, They won't come at me, just kidding. Please don't,
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: please don't. The response came from a loosely organized online
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: collector called Anonymous, and they read the takedown as censorship
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: and declared war. And on February tenth, two thousand and eight,
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: Anonymous held simultaneous protests outside church facilities in ninety three
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: cities worldwide, and it estimated seven thousand to eight thousand
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: people showed up wearing guy fowx masks, and it was
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: devastating in a way. The church had no tools to handle,
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: and their entire playbook relied on identifying and targeting individuals,
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: suing them, surveilling them, contacting their employers and families, and
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: Anonymous had no spokesperson to threaten, and no employer to call,
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: and no family to pressure. Every tool the church had
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: was useless against a crowd with no face. So what
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: changed permanently was the information environment. Anyone curious about scientology
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: could now find out about XENU before they ever walked
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: through a door, and the secret the bridge was built
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: to protect was sitting on the first page of search results.
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: All wow wow. So the information war was over and
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: they lost it. So the church has claimed at various
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: points between eight and fifteen million members worldwide, and independent
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: researchers and sociologists have landed on numbers considerably smaller, and
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: a two thousand and eight American religious identification survey found
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: approximately twenty five thousand Americans who identified as scientologists. So
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: the gap is partly explained by the billion year contract.
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: I guess since everyone who ever joined is technically committed
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: for all future lifetimes want to croc as shit, and
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: the church can with a straight face count living and
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: the dead as current members in any organization with seventy
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: years of records could run that math, and former members
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: and journalists who visited major church facilities in recent years
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: reports something more telling than statistics, and the buildings feel
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: pretty empty, and even flagship locations in Law, Los Angeles
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: and clear Water drawn noticeably less traffic than they once did.
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: At the same time, the church has been aggressively acquired
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: in properties through a program called the Ideal Org Initiative,
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: and local communities are encouraged to fundraise for years to
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: purchase and renovate large buildings, which are then inaugurated in
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: elaborate ceremonies. And former members have described the program as
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: a fundraising mechanism that benefits central church accounts rather than
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: local communities and the resulting buildings, many of them grand
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: and prominently located, often sit largely unused, So just a
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: giant waste of space, waste of money just taken up
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: the real estate like a bunch of assholes. And independent
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: financial analysts estimate the church's total assets at somewhere between
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: one and two billion dollars, with real estate holdings accumulated
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: over decades accounting for a significant portion of that. In
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: an organization that may have twenty five thousand actual active
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: members is sitting on the financial infrastructure of one that
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: claimed fifteen million, and that gap between the money and
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: the membership is one of the most telling numbers in
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: the whole story. But the people who left Rathmund Render, Remini,
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: Wright didn't tell their stories and just move on. They
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: kept going, and Render has spent nearly two decades giving depositions,
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: speaking at hearings, and appearing on camera for anyone who
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: would listen. And Romini filed legal actions against the church
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: as recently as twenty twenty three, setting years of ongoing
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: fair game retaliation. So they're basically stalking per and like
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: making her life a living hell because she left. And
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: the documentary series Scientology and the aftermath drew millions of
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: viewers who had no prior connection to the story and
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: left them with one that they couldn't forget. And what
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: the church has not done in response to any of
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: it is address the substance, no public accounting of the
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: RPF's conditions, no explanation of where Shelley Masscavage is, and
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: no answers to the questions the nineteen ninety three IRS
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: agreement raised and never resolved. And in May of twenty
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: twenty three, actor Danny Masterson, best known for that seventy show,
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: was convicted of two counts of and sentenced to thirty
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: years to life in California State prison. And the conviction
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: itself was significant, what surrounded it was even more significant
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: because Masterson's victims had attempted to report to the assaults
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: to the Los Angeles Police Department in the early two thousands,
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: years before any charges were filed, and what happened next
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: has been described in sworn testimony and civil lawsuits, and
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: church officials intervened and witnesses were contacted, and victims were
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: pressured to handle the matter through scientologies internal ethics procedures
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: rather than through the law enforcement and the women, all
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: scientologists at the time, found themselves in a system that
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: treated reporting a crime again them as a betrayal of
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: the organization, and the LAPD sat on the investigation for
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: nearly two decades. Talk about corruption, and it is impossible
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: to know with certainty how much of that delay was
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: attributable to church pressure and how much to other factors.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: But what is knowable is this, the church's framework explicitly
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: classified the women as potential trouble sources for going to
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: outside authorities, and the tools of disconnection and social pressure
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: that the church has always used internally were being deployed
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: to suppress a criminal complaint against one of its celebrity members.
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: And it worked for twenty years, which is horrifying. And
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: when the conviction finally came, the church moved quickly to
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: distance itself, describing Masterson as having been removed from active
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: participation in the church activities, and former members and critics
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: noted that the church had publicly defended him as recently
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: as twins seventeen, when accusations first became public and the
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: Masters In case cracked open something the church had long
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: managed to keep closed. A serious legislative conversation about whether
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: an organization with documented patterns of obstruction, bit and coercion
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: should continue to operate under the full protections of religious
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: tax exemption. Now, the federal lawsuits accumulating against the church
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: represents something it has not faced before, and that is
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: the legal framework. Multiple former Sea Org members, including some
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: who spent decades inside, have filed civil lawsuits under the
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and the legal argument is specific
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: and very serious, and it is that working eighty to
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: one hundred hours a week for ten dollars, being unable
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: to leave the base freely, and facing the RPF or
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: a freeloader debt bill as consequence of departure, and being
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: threatened with the destruction of every relationship you have left,
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: meets the federal legal definition of forced labor. These are
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: not marginal claims filed by people with thin records. They
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: are claims backed by decades of testimony, corroborating accounts from
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: hundreds of former members across multiple decades, and a paper
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: trail of internal church policies that describe exactly the conditions
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: being alleged, and federal judges have allowed them to proceed.
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: And what makes us legally different from everything that came
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: before is the framework essentially is fair game, harassed critics
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: into silence, and two thousand IRS lawsuits exhausted a government agency.
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: But human trafficking statutes were specifically designed to address situations
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: where the normal mechanisms of consent and exit have been
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: systemically dismantled. So they exist precisely because some organizations build
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: structures so controlling that voluntary stops meaning anything. And the
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: Church is being asked for the first time in a
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: federal courtroom to defend the conditions of sea org life,
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: not as a matter of religious freedom, but as a
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: matter of whether those conditions constitute a crime. And David
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: Muscavige is named as a defendant in several of those suits,
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: but he has not appeared. And the nineteen ninety three
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: IRS agreement was, for thirty years was the church's most
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: unassailable legal protection, and it wasn't just tax exemption. It
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: was a kind of institutional legitimacy, a signal that the
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: US government had evaluated Scientology's religious claims and accepted them.
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: And that protection is now under more serious scrutiny, finally,
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: than at any point since it was granted. So the
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: Danny Masterson case, the human trafficking lawsuits and the ongoing
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: fair game campaigns documented in active litigation, and the growing
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: body of federal court records describing conditions inside the Sea
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: org have combined to create something completely new, which is
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: a bipartisan political constituency interested in revisiting the question. Former
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: members and advocacy groups have formally lobbied members of Congress,
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: and tax law scholars who previously had no particular interest
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: in scientology have begun writing about the legal standards in
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: the nineteen ninety three agreement was held to and whether
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: those standards would survive. The evidence that has emerged since.
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: My guess is no, and there is no immediate legislative threat,
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: and the church has substantial legal resources and a long
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: history of making government scrutiny more trouble than it's worth,
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: not to mention the billion dollars they have in their
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: back pocket, but the argument the church relied on in
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three that it is a sincere religious organization
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: deserving the full productions afforded to faith communities is harder
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: to sustain in a courtroom where former members are testifying
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: about forced labor, obstruction of justice, and systemic suppression of
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: criminal complaints. You know what I mean. And the agreement
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: was negotiated before Wiki Leaks published the ot levels and
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: before the Truth rundown, and before Going Clear, and before
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: the Masterson verdict, and before a federal judge publicly expressed
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: frustration that the organization's leader was evading service of process.
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: So the IRS gave Scientology its shield in a private
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: meeting whose contents have never been disclosed. And whether that
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: shield survives what is now on the public record is
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: a question no one has yet been forced to answer.
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: And David Miscavige stopped making press appearances around twenty twenty two,
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: and that timing is obviously not coincidental. That is when
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: federal lawsuits began naming him as a defendant. So he
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: did like his daddy did, and he disappeared, And once
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: process servers started looking for him, he became a very
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: difficult person to find outside the church, and he has
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: not disappeared entirely. And in March in twenty twenty four,
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: he appeared at the dedication of the Ideal Church of
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: Scientology in Chicago, speaking on stage age before thousands of people,
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: And in December of twenty twenty four, he delivered a
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: two and a half hour address at the Shrine Auditorium
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: in Los Angeles for the church's annual New Year celebration.
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: But what he will not do is appear anywhere he
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: does not control right no press interviews, no public events
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: outside church property, and no legal proceedings. And a California
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: Superior Court judge said this to his legal team in
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, saying, quote, he's got teams of lawyers.
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: He should just appear and defend himself. It's very frustrating
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: for me. We've reached a new level of craziness unquote.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: But he still hasn't appeared because he's a giant, fighting
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: baby woos narcissistic, psychopathic. But the church's finances have never
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: been fully disclosed, and the nineteen ninety three IRS agreement
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: covering over one hundred and fifty entities has never been
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: released to the public, and Shelley Miscavige has not been
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: seen outside the church control since two thousand and seven,
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: more than seventy years. The church was built by a
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: man who invented his own biography, borrowed ideas that already
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 1: had foundations, and dressed them as revelation. And ran an
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: organization that caused documented identifiable harm, financial ruin, psychological abuse,
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: the destruction of families, and the suppression of anyone who
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: tried to say so out loud. And it has survived
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: everything thrown at it, including raids, lawsuits, defections, the Internet.
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: And it's all because of its money, its lawyers, and
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: the people inside who genuinely believe. But what it no
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: longer has is control over what you know before you
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: walk through its doors. The story is not over. I
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: hope it's not over, but for the first time in
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: its history, it is being told by people. The church
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: cannot silence. Where is Shelley Miscavenge? What did the nineteen
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: ninety three agreement actually contain? Who has been paid and
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: how much to keep the courts closed? The questions remain open.
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: But that is that for the deep dive on scientology.
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: Please let me know what else you want me to
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: deep dive down below. This one was crazy. I mean,
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: I knew a little bit about it, but my god,
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: it is crazy. It's crazy that these organizations can get
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: their claws into our government. That is extremely disturbing, especially
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: given our government is extremely flawed. But I digress. Let
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: me know what else you guys want me to deep
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: dive into. Until then it will see your beautiful face
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: and stay safe out there, all right, Fine,