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Inside Scientology: The Controversies, Secrets and Allegations · The conspiracy

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: 75 million years ago, a galactic warlord named Xenu had
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: a problem. His empire spanned 76 planets, and the population
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: had gotten out of hand. And his solution was elegant,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: in a monstrous sort of way. He lured billions of
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: people into tax offices under false pretenses, froze them in glycol,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: loaded them onto DC-8 shaped spacecrafts, flew them to Earth,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: and dropped them into volcanoes. Then he detonated hydrogen bombs
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: and the souls of those billions untethered, disoriented, and subjected
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: to 36 days of electronic brainwashing attached themselves to the
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: only conscious beings left on the planet.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: And in the spirit of generosity, he built a church
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: to help remove those hitchhiking souls one by one, level
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: by level, and for thousands upon thousands of dollars, no less.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: And that church is the Church of Scientology. And to
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: understand how something like that becomes real and becomes powerful
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: and becomes one of the most litigious and controversial organizations
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: in modern history, you have to go back to the
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: beginning and you have to start with the man who.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Invented it all, L. Ron Hubbard.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder, all things that
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: I love to consume and I know you do too,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually minded freak.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: Today we are getting into Scientology.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: You guys wanted me to do this one so bad
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: and it is so crazy. I mean, if you didn't
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: pick that up from the intro. So this is gonna
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: be a wild ride. So without further ado, let's unbuckle
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: our seat belts, go Mach 5 on the highway, slam
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: on the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: insane cult together. All right, let's pause the video for
• 2:32
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• 2:47
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  Speaker 1: Go to shopify.com slash cccm. That's shopify.com slash cccm. Thank
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  Speaker 1: you so much to Shopify for sponsoring the video and
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  Speaker 1: supporting the channel. And let's get back to it. Lafayette
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13th, 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: A quiet, flat town small enough that everyone's business was
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: everyone else's business too. And his father, Harry Ross Hubbard,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: was a U.S. Navy officer, which meant the family was
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: always moving. Montana to Washington, D.C. to the Philippines to Guam.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: young Ronald had no time to take root anywhere. And
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: his mother, LaDora Mae Waterbury, held the household together while
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Harry was away. And by most accounts, the surface of
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Hubbard's childhood was stable and ordinary enough, if you put
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: aside the moving everywhere constantly, which I feel like would
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: do something to a kid. But underneath it, something was forming.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: And from early on, Hubbard was learning a particular skill,
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: a very practical one at that. He was learning that
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: the version of yourself you present to the world matters
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: more than the truth underneath it.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: AKA classic cult leader.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: That's what we're dealing with. We already know. And he
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: was learning.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: How to perform because people who knew him as a
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: boy described him as creative, energetic, and possessed of a strange,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: persistent hunger for admiration. And he claimed later in life
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: that he had spent his childhood studying under Native American
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: tribal elders and that he had been initiated into Mongolian shamanism,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: one of the youngest people ever to achieve it, he claims.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: And he also claimed.
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  Speaker 1: To have traveled extensively through Asia, immersing himself in Buddhist
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: philosophy and Far Eastern mysticism. None of it was documented,
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: and the only evidence shows a boy being shuttled between
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: naval postings with his father. But documentation for Hubbard.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: Was always somewhat besides the point. You know, it kind
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: of always is for a cult leader. It's always like,
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: 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.
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  Speaker 2: Or whatever, you know? It's just all that kind of stuff.
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  Speaker 1: So in 1930, Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University to
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: study civil engineering. And he withdrew two years later after
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: failing physics and underperforming across subjects that required things like
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: evidence and verifiable results. Because he doesn't like that, remember?
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: He just likes to make stuff up and have everybody
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: not ask questions about it. And he would later claim
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: multiple academic credentials, including expertise in nuclear physics, the same
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: subject he had failed as an undergraduate. And people who
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: encountered him in this period described someone who could dominate
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: a room despite his failings.
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  Speaker 2: And he was verbally fast.
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  Speaker 1: And entertaining and told stories about himself that were almost
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: always larger than the circumstances warranted. And former colleagues in
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: the science fiction world described him as just being magnetic.
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  Speaker 1: The charm, by most accounts.
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  Speaker 2: Was real. And he joined the U.S.
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  Speaker 1: Naval Reserve in 1941 following Pearl Harbor. and was commissioned
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: as a lieutenant. And the Church of Scientology's official biography
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: describes Hubbard as a decorated war hero, a wounded combat veteran,
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: and a brilliant naval commander. And the US Navy's own
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request tell
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: a considerably different story though, which is unsurprising at this point.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: We're gonna keep the same theme here. It's gonna say something,
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: and then we're gonna find out it's bullshit basically. And
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: in four and a half years of service, Hubbard was
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  Speaker 1: relieved of command. Twice. The most famous episode involves May 1943,
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: when Hubbard supposedly attacked a Japanese submarine off the coast
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  Speaker 1: of Oregon. And the Naval's official review found that he
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: had been firing at a known magnetic deposit on the
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: ocean floor. He had shot at a rock and written
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  Speaker 1: it up as victory.
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  Speaker 2: That's crazy.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: And he also directed his ship into Mexican territorial waters
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: without authorization, which escalated into a diplomatic incident. And he
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: later claimed 21 medals and decorations, but official records document
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: four and none of them were combat achievements. And he
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: claimed he had been blinded and crippled by war wounds
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: and that he healed himself through techniques that would later
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: become Dianetics. But his medical records showed treatment for ulcers
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: and conjunctivitis. And the Navy noted his complaints were largely psychosomatic.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: So before the war, Hubbard had actually married a woman
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: named Polly Grubb. And they would have two children together.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: And in 1946, while still legally married to Polly, he
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  Speaker 1: married his second wife, Sarah Northrup. And by legal definition,
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  Speaker 1: that was bigamy. And Polly was left to manage the
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  Speaker 1: fallout from a marriage that was still technically in effect
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  Speaker 1: while her husband had just simply moved on because that's
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: just how he felt. He just kind of did whatever
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  Speaker 1: he felt like. Just like thought he could get away
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: with it. But she received no particular acknowledgement of this
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  Speaker 1: in any church biography. And the pattern is worth noting early.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: because it repeats itself at every scale. He took what
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  Speaker 1: he wanted, constructed a more flattering version of what had happened,
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  Speaker 1: and left others to deal with the wreckage. Just a classic,
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  Speaker 1: classic narcissist. If anything, he's absolutely just a narcissist. Probably
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  Speaker 1: a pathological liar, too.
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  Speaker 2: We can, I think we can assume.
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  Speaker 1: And he did this with women, with money, and with
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  Speaker 1: the truth as we see it. And he would do
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: it soon on a much larger scale. So before and
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  Speaker 1: between his military years, Hubbard had another career, pulp fiction writer,
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  Speaker 1: science fiction, adventure, westerns. He wrote them all under his
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  Speaker 1: own name and a collection of pseudonyms. And the pay
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  Speaker 1: was a penny a word. So volume was everything.
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  Speaker 2: So he's really, okay, let's just look at this. He's
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  Speaker 2: 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 cult ever, I
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  Speaker 1: have to give him that.
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  Speaker 2: If anything, I will give him that, you know? But
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: 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,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: which grew with each retelling like a fish that just
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: kept getting bigger and fatter and bigger until he can't
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  Speaker 1: swim anymore. And what's worth paying attention to, looking back,
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: is the architecture of his stories. Because in his 1938 story,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: Slaves of Sleep, Characters carry memories from traumatic experiences in
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: previous lives, unable to escape what their past selves set
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  Speaker 1: in motion. And the reactive mind of Dianetics, the idea
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  Speaker 1: that past trauma drives present suffering, is the same concept
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: with different.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: Vocabulary, essentially, as we'll see.
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  Speaker 1: And in the old doc, Methuselah series, the central character
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: belongs to a secret brotherhood of near immortal beings with
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: capabilities ordinary humans can never access. And the operating thetan,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Scientology's elite spiritual being at the top of the bridge,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: is the same character in different clothes, as we will
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: come to see. And in final blackout, a singular leader
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  Speaker 1: rises through superior knowledge and sheer force of will, commanding
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  Speaker 1: total loyalty from his followers. And immortal spirits trapped in
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: physical bodies pass life trauma accumulating across reincarnations. and ancient
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: alien civilizations operating on cosmic time scales. These were just
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: genre conventions. Hubbard was rehearsing the architecture of a belief
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: system he would later sell as revelation. And somewhere in
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: these years, he reportedly made an observation that has been
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: attributed to him by multiple science fiction contemporaries, that the
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: most 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.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: A specific editor.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: But nobody disputes what he did next. So to understand
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  Speaker 1: what comes next, you need to know about a man
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: named Jack Parsons. Born Marvel Whiteside Parsons, he was a
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: self-taught rocket engineer who never finished his degree. and yet
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: became a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And he
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: pioneered a solid rocket fuel formula foundation to modern aerospace.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: And he was also a completely devoted practitioner of thelemic 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, Orientis,
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  Speaker 1: it's a mouthful of words, worked through a graduated series
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: of initiatory levels, each unlocking more esoteric knowledge.
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  Speaker 2: Than the last. Does this make sense?
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: No. I think that's why it is what it is.
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  Speaker 1: You just hear a lot of words and you're like, yeah, okay,
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: that sounds cool. I feel like it's just meant to
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: confuse people. But if that structure sounds cool, at all familiar,
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  Speaker 1: it should, because Parsons ran the OTO's Agape Lodge out
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: of his large mansion in Pasadena. So it was part commune,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: part laboratory, part ritual space. And it attracted artists, scientists, occultists,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: and bohemians from all directions. And it attracted Hubbard and immediately.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: So Hubbard moved in during the summer of 1945, and
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: he wasted no time making himself at home, including with
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Parsons' girlfriend, made himself a little too at home, if
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. And this would be Sarah Northrup,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: who he would marry later as we spoke about. So
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: in early 1946, Parsons and Hubbard undertook a series of
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: thelemic rituals known as the Babylon Working. And the goal
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: was to summon an elemental companion for Parsons. Now Parsons
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: conducted the operations while Hubbard took notes and directed the sequences.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: And shortly after the rituals concluded, a woman named Marjorie
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Cameron appeared in Parsons' life. And he was convinced they
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: had succeeded. So when Aleister Crowley, the system's British founder,
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: heard about all of this from England, he was unimpressed.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: And he told his colleagues that Parsons had lost his
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: mind and that Hubbard's involvement was particularly embarrassing. And almost
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: on cue, 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.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: Who is this guy? And he called it a.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: business venture and Parsons pursued legal action and recovered some
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: of the money in the future. But Jack Parsons died
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: on June 17th, 1952, when an explosion tore through his
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: home in Pasadena. Now the ruling was accidental, but who knows,
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: you know? But Hubbard didn't leave Pasadena with Parsons beliefs
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: because they're Parsons beliefs, right? And he's a narcissist, so
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: he's got to make up his own shit. He left
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: with an education, essentially. And he had watched how rituals
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: could manufacture psychological states. And he had seen how mystery
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: and staged revelation could hold intelligent people in place. But
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: he took these intelligent people, binding them to a system
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: they couldn't fully disapprove. And he had been taking notes
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: the entire time. And four years later, those notes would
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: have a title called a publisher, and of course, a
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: price tag. The Modern Science of Mental Health was published
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: on May 9th, 1950. And within weeks, it was a
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: best seller. And within months, it was a cultural phenomenon.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: And within a year, it had sold over 150,000 copies
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: and launched Dianetics clubs across the country. And the book's
• 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 engrams. Now,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: these engrams, according to Hubbard, were the source of all
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: human suffering, all irrationality, and all psychosomatic illness. And they
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: functioned below conscious awareness, causing fear and compulsion the person
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: couldn't explain. And the 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 the
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: emotional charge dissolved entirely. And when the reactive mind was
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: fully cleared, the person became what Hubbard called a, quote, clear. Sure, dude. Now,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: a clear, Hubbard promised, would have near-perfect memory, enhanced memory, intelligence,
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: and immunity from psychosomatic illness. And Hubbard declared this science,
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: and he gave it a clinical vocabulary, precise procedures, and
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: scientific-sounding apparatus to go with it. But there was just
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: one little tiny little problem.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't science. It was just
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: made up. Shocker.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Because the regression technique he described had existed for over
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: 50 years in hypnotherapy practice. Because that all probably sounded
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: familiar to you. I've talked about that type of therapy
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: in some deep dives I've done before.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: It's not new. it's very much already a thing, except for.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: You know, enhancing intelligence and, you know, having a perfectly
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: clear mind and not being able to have any sort
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: of psychosomatic illness. That's all bullshit, but the relative therapy
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: part is already something that exists. Because the reactive mind
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: was structurally identical to the unconscious as described by Freudian psychoanalysis.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: And what he added was just new vocabulary and the
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: promise that ordinary people could apply it to each other
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: without professional training, which is, you just can't do that.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: And the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: both reviewed Dianetics, and the claims were untestable. The neuroscience
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: incompatible with what science actually knew about how memory works.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: and no controlled study existed to support any of it.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: And the definition of a clear was unfalsifiable almost by design,
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: as he publicly exhibited his first clear in August of
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: 1950 before an audience of scientists and journalists in Los Angeles.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: And the clear was a young woman named Sonia Bianca,
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: who was unable to recall basic physics formulas she had
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: claimed to have memorized. And the audience was not persuaded.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: but the book kept selling anyway, because people didn't care
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: really about the science. They just cared about the idea.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: So by 1952, the original Dianetics Foundation had gone bankrupt, mismanagement,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: organizational chaos, and Hubbard's own tendencies had collapsed it. And
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: he even temporarily lost the rights to the Dianetics name.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: And a bankruptcy court had taken his movement, so he
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: just built a new one. And this time on ground
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: no court could seize. So in 1952, he introduced the
• 20:22
  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 could not.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: His religious organizations operated under different legal frameworks. Frameworks Hubbard
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: had studied carefully because these religions got tax exemption, regulatory protection.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: A church wasn't selling a product that didn't work. It
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: was practicing the freedom of religion.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: What could 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 be
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: poofed in front of his face and probably just for
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: his ego in general. So in 1953, Hubbard wrote a
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: letter to a colleague explicitly advising the reframing of the
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: organization as a religion and listing its financial and legal
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: advantages in his own handwriting. And that letter has been
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: extensively verified. And the Church of Scientology's entire legal identity
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: rests on the argument that it is a sincere religious movement.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: And Hubbard's own handwritten letter cataloging the tax and legal
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: upside of calling itself a church makes that argument considerably
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: harder to sustain. Kind of sounds like bullshit, honestly. But
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: the Church of Scientology was officially incorporated in Los Angeles
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: in 1954. And here is the architecture of the beliefs, right?
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: So in Scientology, you are not your body and you
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: are not your mind. You are a thetan. an immortal
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: spiritual being who has existed for trillions of years. Sounds
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: pretty cool.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: Doesn't it? It's meant to be.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: And because of that unimaginable span of time, you have
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: accumulated spiritual damage. Oh no, false memories, diminished capabilities, trauma
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: layered across lifetimes. And Scientology's purpose was to restore you
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: 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 states,
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: running from negative 40, which is death, at the bottom
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: to 40, which is serenity of beingness at the top.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: So negative 40 and 40. 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 others' survival, people
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: who should be removed from your life.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: So it functions.
• 23:47
  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
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: to total freedom, which was the path through it all.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: A sequential program of courses and audition sessions, each level
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: requiring 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 Ngrams Dianetics 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 though,
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: because it really, it honestly is kind of genius. Because
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: the further you climbed, the more you knew. And the
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: more you knew, the more.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: Special you felt.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: And don't we all just want to feel special? You know,
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: that's all we... We're all the main characters in our
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: own life and we want to be the best main
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: character we can be. So Hubbard was just like, make
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: everyone think they're special, but they're actually stupid.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: Am I right? I'm just kidding. But no, that's actually
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: what he thought.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: Because the more special you feel, the harder it is
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: to imagine walking away. And every level was another achievement,
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: another step toward a truth that outsiders or even members
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: who hadn't gone as far could never access. So it
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: exploited something fundamental in us all. Just the human desire
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: for hidden knowledge. The thrill of being among the few
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: who understand what others cannot. It wasn't about intelligence. It
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: was about belonging to a secret club where the revelations
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: never stopped coming, aka a cult, okay? And if you
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: started doubting, you had already spent thousands of dollars and
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: years of your life getting there. So leaving meant admitting
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: all of that was gone. So it wasn't a trap
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: for stupid people. It was a trap for curious ones.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: And then there was the E-meter and the art of auditioning.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: Now 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.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: And it is, at its.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Core, the same underlying technology as a polygraph machine, if
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: you're familiar with those. It's like a lie detector machine,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: you know? And Scientology claims it measures the mass and
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: motion of mental material, AKA the energy content of engrams
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: and stored spiritual matter.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: AKA bullshit, okay?
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: And the FDA ruled in the 1960s that it had
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: no demonstrated therapeutic value. And independent scientific analysis has consistently
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: found it measures galvanic skin response and literally nothing more.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: And what makes auditing genuinely powerful And genuinely dangerous is
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: what happens to everything said in that room. Every secret,
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: every fear, every dark memory, every transgression is recorded and
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: every session across every level logged and archived.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: Remember that.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: Former members have testified extensively that this information was used
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: as leverage. blackmail, right?
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: Because if you.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: Decided to leave the church, the church would use what
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: you had disclosed against you. So the intimacy of auditing
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: was very real, and so was the mechanism underneath it.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: The confessional functioned as surveillance, and none of it happened
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: by accident. Everything about Scientology was built the way it
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: was for a reason, and the reason all traced back
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: to the psychology of the man who designed it. Let's
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: take a quick pause to talk about bad habits. Now,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: quitting smoking or vaping isn't really about nicotine. It's about
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: the habit, the hand-to-mouth motion, the fidget, the little pause.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: White knuckle through it, and around day five, the cravings
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: just hit hard, and that's where a fume comes in. Now, Fume,
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: spelled F-U-M, is a flavored air device. No nicotine, no vapor,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: and no... batteries, just a weighted, twisty, fidget-friendly tool that
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: gives your hands and mouth something better to reach for.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: I keep mine nearby while I'm digging into the dark
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: stuff we cover on this show, albeit I've never vaped
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: or smoked, but I have a major fidgeting problem, so
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: it's really nice to have and it helps when I
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: get stressed. And drawing on it with a flavor like
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: crisp mint is genuinely really satisfying. And the flavors are
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: lighter than vaping. Think flavored water versus soda. and crisp
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: mints the strongest, best for heavy users, and raspberries tangy
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: and on the sweeter side. And over 700,000 people have
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: used Fume to take steps toward better habits. So head
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: to tryfume.com, that's T-R-Y-F-U-M.com, and use code CCCM when you
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: grab a journey pack to get a free gift. That's tryfume.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. Now,
• 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.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: What? A cult leader taking all the money for himself?
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: I've never heard of such a thing.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: Investigators documented flows of organizational money into his personal accounts.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: And he lived very well while Sea Org members earned
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: $ 10 a week. And we'll get into the Sea Org
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: people in a minute. The internal culture of Scientology increasingly
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: reflected its founder. The paranoia, the conviction that the outside
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: world was fundamentally hostile, the belief that the mission was
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: important enough to justify extraordinary measures. And he was not
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: reacting to outside threats. He was just building the response
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: infrastructure before the threats could even materialize. So he was just,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: he was doomsday prepping essentially. So in October, 1967, Hubbard
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: issued a formal policy letter introducing the status of suppressive person,
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: an enemy of the church, a threat to Scientology's survival.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: And he was very specific about what could be done
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: to them. And the fair game policy stated that a
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: suppressive person may be deprived of property or injured by
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: So basically anybody could do anything to them without being
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: held responsible for it. So they could be, in Hubbard's
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: own words, tricked, sued, lied to, or destroyed, whatever that means.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: And this was not a metaphor. It was official church policy.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: And in October of 1968, following public backlash, Hubbard issued
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: a follow-up order retiring the phrase fair game. And he
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: was careful to note that the change only affected the
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: terminology and the underlying treatment of suppressive persons was to
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: continue unchanged. And one of the most documented early applications
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: involves a journalist named Paulette Cooper, who published a book
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: about Scientology in 1971. And what followed was a multi-year
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: campaign against her. Bomb threats were made in her name
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: and an operation was run with the explicit goal of
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: having her criminally indicted for those same threats. And the
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: campaign had an official name inside the Guardian's office. And
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: it was Operation Freakout. Pretty lame name to me, but
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: what do I know? And the stated purpose overall was
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: written down by Hubbard himself. And it was to, quote unquote,
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: harass and discourage rather than to win. And the documents
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: detailing all of this were among the 48,000 files the
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: FBI seized years later. And courts in multiple jurisdictions have
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: found the fair game policy to be real and to
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: have been applied against real people across decades. And the
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: church continues to deny its existence. And as recently as 2023,
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: former member Leah Romini 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 1967. The name was just retired,
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: but the policy was not. But then there is the
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: Sea Org, which I mentioned briefly before and now we're
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: going to talk about. So in 1967, Hubbard resigned from
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: his formal positions in Scientology's organizational structure and took to
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: the water. And he established a floating headquarters aboard a
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: fleet of ships, eventually centered on the flagship vessel, Apollo.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: Literally became Waterworld out there, I swear to God. The
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: stated reason was philosophical, of course. Freedom from any single
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: government's jurisdiction and the ability to pursue advanced operating Thetan
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: research without interference. Basically, he just wanted to get away
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: from the law and just be able to do whatever
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: he wants. And, you know, the waters are lawless. They're
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: not actually lawless, but you can get away with a
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: lot more on the water, basically. So the more observable
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: reason was that Hubbard was facing growing scrutiny from multiple governments,
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: framing every conflict as a coordinated psychiatric conspiracy, using external
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: pressure to deepen internal loyalty. And he was actually banned
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: from reentering the United Kingdom in 1968. So international waters
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: were just a little bit more hospitable than any shore
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: at this point.
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: And the sea.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: Organization was formally established in 1967 as Hubbard's Elite Corps,
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: a paramilitary structure of Scientology's most devoted members, living and
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: working aboard ships under rigid discipline, like a bunch of
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: weird pirates or whatever that believe in that they were
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: just aliens that were put on earth in volcanoes and
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: like were mystical beings or whatever. So working days routinely
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: ran 14 to 16 hours. And members wore naval-style uniforms
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: and operated under a hierarchy of ranks. And their salary
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: was $ 10 a week.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: Damn! Even for that time, that's really bad.
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: And the Sea Org, or Sea Organization, members signed contracts
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: of service for....
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: 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, they're trillion year olds beings. So what
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: a shitty contract, 10, 10 bucks, although 10 bucks a
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: week for a billion years, that adds up. But, and
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: it was not figuratively, it was literally the same commitment
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: across every future lifetime, essentially. And children as young as
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: six were signing these contracts, by the way. And adults
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: who grew up on the ships described childhoods of grinding labor,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: constant ideological pressure, and fear of discipline that hovered over
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: everything they did. And one of Hubbard's preferred punishments was
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: having members thrown overboard into the harbor, sometimes from the
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: upper deck, which is a considerable fall in front of
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: the entire crew, mind you. and Sea Org members who
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: committed serious infractions were assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: or the RPF. And that included hard physical labor, restricted diet,
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: isolation from others, and intensive re-indoctrination sessions that could last
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: months or years. And for those who failed to progress
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: in the regular RPF, there was the RPF's RPF, which
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: was a program within the program, more restrictive and even
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: more isolated. And the siege mentality Hubbard built on those
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: ships did not stay at sea. and when the church
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: would eventually return to land, it came back with a plan.
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: So Operation Snow White was the largest known infiltration of
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: the United States government by a private organization in American history.
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: 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 1970s, the Guardian's office inserted operatives into
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: approximately 136 government agencies and organizations across the United States.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: They got busy on the water and they made a
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: serious plan, okay? Infiltrating the government is insane. And this
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: was organizations in the United States and in 30 other
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: countries with an estimated force of up to 5,000 people
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: at various points. And the stated objective was to locate
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: and destroy what the church calls false reports about Scientology
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: in government files. And the method was to place agents
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: inside those agencies who would steal the documents. And the
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: operatives obtained legitimate employment inside the IRS and other federal agencies.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: And they photographed files, removed records, and systematically purged documentation
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: unfavorable to the church. This is crazy, they expunged themselves.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: And the operation was authorized at the highest levels of
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: the church, including obviously by Hubbard and Hubbard's own wife,
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: Mary Sue Hubbard, who served as controller of the Guardian's office.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: But it began to unravel in 1976 when an operative
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: named Michael Mesner was recognized by a federal employee. And
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: by mid-1977, under pressure and fearing for his safety, he
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: turned himself into the FBI and became a government witness.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: So on July 8th, 1977, the government responded and simultaneous
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: raids on church offices in Los Angeles and Washington DC
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: resulted in a seizure of over 48,000 documents. And by 1979,
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: 11 senior church officials had been convicted, including Mary Sue Hubbard,
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: Hubbard's wife at the time. And she was sentenced to.
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: Five years, but only served one.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: And L. Ron Hubbard himself, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator,
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: but was never charged.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: Huh.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: I feel like money was involved in that, but what
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: do I know? You know? But essentially, he was hiding
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: and unreachable. And the church's public response was to characterize
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: the convicted executives as rogue actors who had operated without authorization.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: And the 48,000 documents suggested otherwise, though. And Hubbard had
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: already made himself impossible to find before any of it
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: started to fall apart. So by the mid 1970s, Hubbard
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: had effectively vanished from visible leadership, communicating through written directives
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: and operating through trusted lieutenants. And legally, vulnerable as a
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: named co-conspirator, he refused to surface though. So they're like, ah,
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: we can't find him. I guess he can get away
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: with it, that's fine. Just a little tsk-tsk, I guess.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: But from roughly 1979 until his death in 1986, he
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: lived in a series of isolated locations under different names.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: and his final years were spent primarily in a motorhome
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: at a remote ranch in Creston, California, accompanied by a
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: small handful of trusted staff. And he continued to issue HCOBs,
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: or Hubbard Communications Office Bulletins, formal policy directives that the
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: church treated as scripture, essentially. But his instructions kept arriving
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: 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 24th, 1986, L. Ron Hubbard died at the Creston
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: Ranch at the age of 74. And the official cause
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: was stroke. And the San Luis Obispo County Coroner's toxicology
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: report found visceral in his system, which is an anti-anxiety
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: medication and a psychiatric drug. And Scientology members were forbidden
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: from taking psychiatric medication.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: Oh, looks like he 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,
• 41:13
  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: Thaten 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: Control of his estate, the writings, trademarks, and intellectual property
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: of the entire religion was passed to David Miscavige, who
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: had been positioning himself for exactly this moment for five
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: years now. And he, at the time, was 25 years old.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: And he remains the leader of Scientology till today. Now,
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: David Miscavige was born on April 30th, 1960 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: And he joined the Sea Organization at 16, reportedly with
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: his parents' blessing. And his father, Ron Miscavige Sr., was
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: a Scientologist and eventually a Sea Org member himself. So
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: it ran in the family, basically. People who knew Miscavige
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: as a young Sea Org member described someone unusually driven,
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: unusually effective, and unusually willing to do whatever was required
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: to advance. And he caught Hubbard's attention and was brought
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: in as a personal assistant pretty quickly, pretty soon after
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: he joined. And by 1981, Miscavige had engineered the removal
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: of the Watchdog Committee, the church's nominal governing body in
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: Hubbard's absence, and replaced it with a structure he controlled.
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: And he forced the resignation of Mary Sue Hubbard, Hubbard's
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: own wife, from the Guardian's office. And by the time
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: Hubbard died in 1986, no credible alternative to Miscavige had emerged.
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: And he just became chairman of the board of the
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: Religious Technology Center, the body controlling all Scientology trademarks and copyrights.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: And multiple former senior executives who worked directly under Miscavige
• 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 2009 reported that Miscavige routinely
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: struck members of his senior staff. sometimes during meetings, as
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: an ordinary feature of life at the church's international headquarters.
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: And former Inspector General Marty Rathbun, former international spokesman Mike Rinder,
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: and others from Miscavige's direct inner circle provided consistent accounts
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: to multiple journalists and in multiple legal proceedings. And the
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: church called every single one of them a disgruntled apostate.
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: Motivated by vengeance.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: There was a great many disgruntled apostates with remarkably similar stories, though.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: And Miscavige's own father, Ron Miscavige Sr., published a memoir
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: in 2016 titled Ruthless, and he described the church spending
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: approximately $ 10, 000 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.
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: What a monster.
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: That's it?
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: For now. Sorry, I know the background changed and I changed.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: It's a different day. Just saying. It's a different day, basically. Anyway,
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: let me continue.
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: And then there was Michelle, or Shelly Barnett, who was
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: actually born into Scientology. And her mother, Florence, or Flo Barnett,
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: was a longtime member and eventually a senior church official.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: Growing up, Shelly's entire world was the church, her community,
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: her education, her social circle, and her sense of purpose.
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: And to understand what happened to Shelly, you first have
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: to understand what happened to her mother. So by the mid-1980s,
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: Flo Barnett, Shelley's mother, had fallen out of favor with
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: church leadership. And the reasons have never been fully documented,
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: but the result was definitive. She was declared a suppressive person.
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: Very bad. And under disconnection policy, that meant her own daughter,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: now married to the most powerful man in Scientology, was
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: required to cut off all contact with her. Now, Shelley
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: and David disconnected from Flo entirely. A mother declared an
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: enemy erased from her daughter's life by institutional decree. Extremely sad.
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: And on September 25th, 1985, Florence Barnett would be found
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: dead in her Los Angeles home. Now, the ruling was...
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: And it was allegedly by gunshot. Three shots specifically though,
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: to the head and.
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: To her chest.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: So gonna safely say, I'm not buying it. And it
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: was 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 Miscavige had married
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: in 1982, and she wasn't simply the leader's wife. By
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: the late 1990s and the early 2000s, she was one
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: of the most powerful operational figures in the entire church,
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: effectively running day-to-day administration at the international headquarters in Hammett, California,
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: known internationally as the Gold Base. People who worked alongside
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: her described someone as driven and as capable as her husband.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: She was not by any means a peripheral figure. She
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: was a co-architect of the institution. And somewhere around 2005
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: or 2006, something changed. And former members have described an
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: incident in which Shelley made a series of personal reassignments
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: without David's explicit authorization, filing positions on her own initiative.
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: And in an organization where Miscavige's control was absolute and unquestioned,
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: David's that is, that was not a small thing. This
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: was very bad. And she was removed from her position
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: because of that, allegedly. She was removed quietly, and then
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: she was just gone. And the last confirmed public sighting
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: of Shelly Miscavige was in August of 2007, when she
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: was briefly escorted to her father's funeral. And she has
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: not appeared publicly since. And she is not seen at
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: church events, and she does not give interviews. And she
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: does not appear in photographs either. And former senior members
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: who worked at the highest levels of the church for
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: decades say they don't even know where she is. And
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: in 2013, actress and former member Leah Romini filed a
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: missing persons report with the Los Angeles Police Department, citing
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: genuine concern for Shelley's well-being. And the LAPD conducted a
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: welfare check and issued a terse statement. Shelley Miscavige had
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: been located and was not a missing person. And no
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: other details were provided though, no photograph and no public
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: statement 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 controls, 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.
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: So Shelly Miscavige. is, depending on.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: Whom you ask, either a dedicated senior church official living
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: exactly as she chooses, or... which I'm leaning more to,
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: a woman who has not been seen by anyone outside
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: Scientology's control in nearly two decades, whose disappearance has never
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: been fully accounted for, and whose family has no way
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: of knowing if she is okay. And this theory also
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: poses that she might just not even be alive. We
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: don't know, and I don't think we ever will know,
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: and that is horrifying. especially given what happened to her mother,
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: which is complete BS. Someone killed her. Maybe, I have
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: to say maybe, because I don't know for sure, you know?
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: But three shots to the head and chest. Are you
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: kidding me with a rifle? Are you kidding me? But
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: the church confirms Shelly is alive and she has not appeared.
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: anywhere to confirm it herself. So do with that what
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: you will. But that brings us to the IRS war
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: and the tax exemption victory. Now the IRS had stripped
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: Scientology's tax exempt status in 1967. 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 26 years. And the church's response
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: was not to make their case in court. It was
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: to make the IRS's life as unlivable as possible, which
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: I didn't even know was possible. And they filed approximately
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: 2000 lawsuits, not against the IRS as an institution, but
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: against individual IRS employees.
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: And the goal was not victory. It was just exhaustion.
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: But It is one thing to sue a large agency,
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: but it is something more intimate and more frightening to
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: sue the individual person who works there. That is bold
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: as hell. But as we know, the people in Scientology
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: are the most bold people ever, it seems. But private
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: investigators were deployed against IRS personnel even, and operatives showed
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: up at private meetings, and the pressure was just relentless
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: and very personal. And in October of 1991, David Miscavige
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: and Inspector General Marty Rathbun walked into IRS headquarters unannounced.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: And they met privately with the IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg Jr.
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: And the details of that conversation have never been fully disclosed.
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: But on October 1st, 1993, the IRS granted Scientology tax-exempt
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: status rights. What the hell did they say in that room?
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: And how can I get in on that?
• 52:14
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean? I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: I'll pay my taxes.
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: Whatever.
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: Whatever, dude.
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: But seriously, Alec, that is so incredibly shady.
• 52:25
  Speaker 2: Oh my God.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: And it wasn't just tax exempt for the church itself,
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: but 153 associated entities as well. And the church paid $ 12. 5
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: million and all 2,200 outstanding.
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: Lawsuits just disappeared.
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: And every tax liability was gone. And the agreement was
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: kept secret until December, 1997, when the Wall Street Journal
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: obtained and published the 76 page closing document. And tax
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: law experts described the terms as extraordinary. And every tax
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: liability was just gone. And the agreement was kept secret
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: until December, 1997, when the Wall Street Journal obtained and
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: published the 76 page closing document. And tax law experts
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: described the terms as extraordinary. A 26-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.
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: And inside the church, it was treated as proof of
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: divine favor.
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: I'm going to go ahead and assume it was probably
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: blackmail or something along those lines, but what do I know?
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: With the government settled, Miscavige turned to a strategy Hubbard
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: had first outlined 38 years earlier, and that was celebrities.
• 53:41
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  Speaker 1: the channel. Let's get back to it. Now Hubbard identified
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: celebrities as priority targets as far back as 1955, 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
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: in 1969, the church opened Celebrity Center International in Los Angeles.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: a separate facility built specifically for public figures, offering better amenities,
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: more attentive staff, and materially different experience than what regular
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: members received. Just basically regular life, it seems. Because why
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: treat normal people good, you know?
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: But 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 40 years. And he was introduced to Scientology
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: by his first wife, Mimi Rogers, in the mid-1980s and
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: became a devoted member almost immediately. forming a close personal
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: friendship with David Miscavige that had been described by former
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: insiders as the most important relationship in the church's modern era.
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: and the two men reportedly vacation together, share meals, and
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: speak constantly. This makes me not like Tom Cruise. This
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: makes me really not like Tom Cruise, now that I've
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: learned a lot more about this. And it's a bummer,
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: because I like Mission Impossible, I like that he does stunts,
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: but this puts a big damper on that. Now, Miscavige
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: has been called Cruise's best friend by multiple sources, and
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: what that friendship has meant for the church is immeasurable.
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: Because Cruz's endorsement gave Scientology a cultural legitimacy it had
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: never previously achieved. And his second marriage to Nicole Kidman
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: presented a problem. Former senior members have described Church concerns
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: that Kidman, whose father was a psychologist, a profession Scientology
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: treats with hostility.
• 57:33
  Speaker 2: rightfully so, was pulling Cruz away from his commitment. They
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: can't have that.
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: They can't have little bitty Tommy Cruz leave the party.
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: So 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 2001. And Kidman was subsequently
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: described in church circles as a suppressive person. Who else
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: was a suppressive person? Oh yeah, that was Shelley's mom,
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: who was murdered, allegedly. And Cruz's children from that marriage,
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: who remained with him and were raised in Scientology, disconnected
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: from their mother for a significant period, which is incredibly disturbing.
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: And after the divorce, according to multiple former members and
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: journalists who investigated the story, church officials effectively helped Cruz
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: audition for a new girlfriend. a Scientologist actress named Nazanin Baniyadi,
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: who was reportedly selected, briefed, and introduced to Cruz in
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: late 2004 under circumstances she did not fully understand. And
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: the relationship ended after several months, and she was later
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: assigned to the RPF.
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: Which, remember, is bad. That's bad.
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: And she has spoken about the experience publicly. And Cruise
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: then met Katie Holmes in 2005. And their relationship, documented
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: partly by the now infamous couch jumping in Oprah, partly
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: by a level of choreographed public enthusiasm that struck many
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: observers as usual, produced a daughter, Suri, and a marriage
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: that lasted until 2012. Now, Holmes reportedly planned her exit
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: from the marriage with considerable secrecy, aware of how the
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: church handled departures. And she filed for divorce, retained custody
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: of Suri, and moved quickly. I 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 Suri 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 Cruise's life. And then, There's John Travolta. Again,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: another blow. Like, who doesn't love Grease? God damn it.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: But John has been a member since the 1970s, 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 2009, and decades of tabloid speculation
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: about his personal life. And he has credited auditing with
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: transforming his early career. And former members and journalists have
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: long alleged that the church's leverage over Travolta runs into
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: the other direction, too, and that auditing records containing sensitive
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: personal disclosures have functioned as a reason to stay, a.k.a.
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: Blackmail.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: And the church obviously denies this, and Girolda has never
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: publicly indicated any desire to leave. And then there's Christy Alley,
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: who was a vocal and enthusiastic member for decades, crediting
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: Scientology's Narconon program with helping her overcome a cocaine addiction
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: in the 1980s. And she remained a committed member until
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: her death from cancer in 2022. and defended the church
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: publicly and energetically throughout her life. And then there was
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: Elizabeth Moss, best known for playing the lead in The
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: Handmaid's Tale, a show about theocratic authoritarian society that controls
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: women through religious doctrine, and is a practicing Scientologist and
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: has declined to discuss the apparent tension in that pairing.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: I have lost all respect for this person because of
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: now knowing this.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: This is insane.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: That is insane to be on that show and then
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: be a part of Scientology as well.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: What the f * * *?
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: But she has described Scientology as something deeply personal that
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: she doesn't speak about publicly because... would ruin her career, basically.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: But here I am, now you know, she's a staunch
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: member of it. And then there is Beck, the musician,
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: who grew up in a Scientology family and has been
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: a member his entire life. And he has largely avoided
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: discussing it in interviews as well. And then there's Erika
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: Christensen and Bode Elfman and Giovanni Ribisi and his sister
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: Marissa Ribisi are among dozens of working actors who are Scientologists.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: Many of them second generation members who grew up inside
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: the church. And if you're growing up inside that church,
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: that's like a whole other thing. If you're choosing to
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: go in as an adult, that's one thing, and I'm
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: judging you very harshly. But if you grow up inside it,
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I do have a little smidgen of
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: empathy because that's just all you know growing up. And
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: then there's Isaac Hayes, the musician behind the South Park theme,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: satirizing Scientology. And he had been a cast member for
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: nine years. And his son later stated that Hayes had
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: suffered a stroke before the departure of and had not
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: personally made the decision to leave, and that church representatives
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: had acted on his behalf. Because what celebrity members provide
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: for the church is something it could never purchase directly,
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: and that is mainstream legitimacy. A famous, successful person calling
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: the technology real is proof to existing members that it works.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: And they bring their networks with them. Come, come, come, come,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: my child.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: I'm a celebrity. Everything I do is real and matters.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 2: And it's supposed to give you FOMO.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: But I love that we're just in this grand awakening
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: now where we just don't buy that shit.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: And it's fabulous. But what happens when.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: A celebrity leaves is equally instructive. And when Leah Romini
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: left in 2013, after 30 years, the church's response was immediate.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: And she was declared a suppressive person. And her character
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: was publicly attacked, and a coordinated campaign followed her for years.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: And former members who had been her close friends stopped
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: speaking to her overnight. And she had been one of
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: the church's most prominent public faces. And within days of
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: her departure, she was treated like an enemy. And the
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: same machine that makes celebrities useful on the way in
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: makes them targets on the way out. And the more
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: prominent you were, the more aggressively they come after you.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: So once fair game starts, except they renamed it, which
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: means nothing, Silence isn't really an option anyway. So that's
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: the one thing I can think of with celebrities that
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: join it and are part of it. And I'll give
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: them a little devil's advocate benefit of the doubt. I
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: can't imagine the fear in them if they want to leave.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: They can't, because first off, there's the auditing, where they
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: have all sorts of blackmail, which I don't know, maybe
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: that means they are bad people, depending on what they
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: said to them. And then there's just the fear of
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: losing their entire career and all this stuff. It's a
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: well-oiled machine that Scientology has built.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: 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 any 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.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 2: In the first few weeks feel genuinely good.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: People ask about your life and actually listen, and everyone
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: around you seems purposeful, like they found something. And that
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: warmth isn't fake. Most of these people genuinely believe what
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: they're in. The entry costs are low at first, so
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: as not to scare you too much, not to sticker
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: shock you.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: And it's not out of generosity.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: But because the real financial demands come later, once you've
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: settled in, once you've gotten comfortable, and once you feel
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: like you can't leave. And in the meantime, the outside
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: world gets quietly reframed. That worried friend becomes a potential
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: trouble source. The family member asking questions gets assigned a category.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: And before long, the people most likely to pull you
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: back are the ones who've been reclassified as the problem.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: And once you believe that, the next invoice stops feeling
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: like a financial decision and more like just your own decision.
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: You want to keep moving up, so you got to pay.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: And that requires the bridge. Moving up and paying up.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: And that bridge to total freedom is big. very expensive
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: entry level courses run a few hundred to a few
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars, which is still pretty expensive. And as members
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: advance costs rise dramatically and some OT levels run to
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollars. Each reaching OT three alone
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: is estimated to cost between 100 and $ 300, 000 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. So they get to play God up in
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: this tier. You get to be God tier, literally. and
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: any hesitation about paying is handled through the same system
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: that handles everything else. The reluctance to pay is framed
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: as a spiritual problem, not a financial one, because the
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: reactive mind is interfering with your progress, and auditing can
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: help you work through it. And members have taken second mortgages,
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: emptied retirement accounts, and borrowed from family, and church staff
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: has 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.
• 1:08:47
  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 inward,
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: 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 debt in level three is what you receive after
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: years of work and somewhere between $ 100, 000 and $ 300, 000 in payments,
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: like we spoke about before. And Hubbard called the materials
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: the wall of fire. And he warned that reading them
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: without proper preparation could cause pneumonia or even death.
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: Which is a very convenient thing to say because it
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: means that any negative reaction you have to what you're
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: about to learn, confusion, skepticism, uncontrollable laughter, is your own
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: spiritual inadequacy.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 2: It's not really a reason to question the material.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: So let's just see what $ 300, 000 gets you. And it'll
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: tell you 75 million years ago, a galactic ruler named
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: Xenu controlled a confederacy of 76 planets, each averaging 178
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: billion people. And he had an overpopulation problem, you see.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: And his solution was to summon the excess population into
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: tax offices under false pretenses, freeze them in glycol and alcohol,
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: load them onto a spacecraft shaped like the Douglas DC-8 jets,
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: fly them to Earth and drop them into volcanoes. Then
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: he detonated hydrogen bombs. And the major world religions were
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: Xenu implants.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 2: All of them.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: The disembodied souls, now called body thetans, subjected to 36
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: days of electronic brainwashing, attached themselves to whatever living beings remained.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: And these humans are still there right now.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: On you.
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: Possibly several hundred of them. And they are responsible for
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: your fears, your limitations, your bad knee, your bad relationship
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: with your mommy, just basically everything holding you back. And
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: the OT levels above three exist to remove them one
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: by one, but at additional cost. And here's what almost
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: nobody does after receiving this information, leave. They don't leave
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: after hearing this story, this fiction, this L. Ron Hubbard,
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: you know, grade A pathological lying fiction bullshit. which is
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: crazy because the sunk cost is too high. They're in
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: 300 grand and they know if they leave, their careers
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: are gonna get ruined, their life's gonna get ruined by
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: these assholes. And the years they've spent are just too many.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: And crucially, Hubbard already told you that finding this absurd
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: was a symptom of your own spiritual illness. So if
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: you found this crazy, like me, That's because I'm spiritually
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: ill and stupid. And by the time you're sitting in
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: that room holding those pages, the architecture has been doing
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: its job for years. The cult has been doing its job.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: And your doubt has been pre-explained away. And members at
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: lower levels who deny that Xenu is any part of
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: Scientology aren't lying. They genuinely just haven't been told yet
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: because they can't read. I know, I didn't pay anything,
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: you know? The entire structure was designed so you won't
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: find out until you spent too much to turn back, essentially,
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: until you're in too deep. Basically, it's like gambling gone wrong.
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: It's like you have a gambling addiction. And you just
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: can't stop. And then there's a disconnection policy, which required
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: members to completely sever contact with anyone the church had
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: declared a suppressive person. Parents, children, spouses, siblings, partners of decades.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: One 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've 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. Former members describe it very differently, though, because
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: maintaining contact with your mother would cost you your entire
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: social world. Every friend you've made in years, your standing,
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: your spiritual progress. The choice is not free. The function
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: is precise and very deliberate. It eliminates every person outside
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: the church who might reach a member and raise a doubt.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: And it replaces the family they came in with, with
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: the new family. One entirely inside the organization, entirely aligned
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: with its worldview. So your old support network is now
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: completely gone and the new one depends on your continued participation.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: And for those already deep inside the C organization specifically,
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: the consequences of stepping out of line were even more immediate.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: Because they would be put into the RPF, the Rehabilitation
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: Project Force, as we know. And the church describes the
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: RPF as a voluntary rehabilitation program. But former members consistently
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: describe having no choice in the matter and being treated
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: like less than animals, essentially. And some never made it
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: to exit at all. So across Scientology's history, the church
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: has been connected to deaths and disappearances that remain unexplained.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: And the pattern that emerges is consistent. People in psychological
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: crisis whose care was removed from outside professionals and handled
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: entirely inside the church. And first is Florence Barnett, Shelley
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: Miscavige's mother, whom we've already spoke about. What the hell
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: was that? She was called a suppressive person, and then
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: she mysteriously died of three gunshot wounds that were clearly
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: made by someone else. And then there's Shelley Miscavige, who
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: just disappeared and hasn't been seen since 2007. And then
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: there was Lisa McPherson, who was born on February 10th
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: in 1959 in Dallas, Texas. And she was not swept
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: in accidentally or under duress. She had been a committed
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: Scientologist since her teenage years in the 1970s, believing fully
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: in what she was doing. And by the early 1990s,
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: she had relocated to Clearwater, Florida, home to the Flag
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: Land Base, Scientology's spiritual headquarters and self-described mecca of technical perfection.
• 1:15:37
  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 18th, 1995, she was rear-ended in a minor
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: traffic accident on US Route 19. And she was not
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: seriously physically injured. And she got out of her car,
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: and then she began removing her clothing in the middle
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: of the street. And paramedics transported her by ambulance to
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: the Morton Plant Hospital. And she was alive. And she
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: was physically uninjured. and clearly and unmistakably in the middle
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: of a psychological crisis. And a group of Scientologists arrived
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: at the hospital shortly afterward, and they informed the staff
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: that Lisa was fine, and that she was a Scientologist,
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: and that the church would take care of her. And
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: she was discharged against medical advice, and Morton Plant Hospital's
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: own records show that the staff was concerned about her
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: before she left. But she was taken to the Fort
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: Harrison Hotel, the church's main facility in Clearwater, and placed
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: under the Introspection Rundown, a protocol written by Hubbard in
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: 1973 for handling what the church calls a psychotic break.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: And the protocol called for total isolation from all external contact.
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: No communication with family or friends outside of the church.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: and no direct interaction with the people in crisis either.
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: Essentially just complete isolation and silence. Sounds like the opposite
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: of what a person going through a psychological break would need.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: In my opinion, I'm not a doctor though, what do
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: I know? The theory was that removing all stimulation would
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: allow the person to naturally stabilize. So for 17 days,
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: she was left in isolation. So Lisa McPherson was kept
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: in a hotel room in complete isolation for 17 straight days.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: And the church staff kept detailed handwritten logs throughout. And
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: those logs were later obtained and entered into evidence. And
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: they described a woman slowly deteriorating day by day in
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: the church's own hand. Weight loss, dehydration, diminishing consciousness. A
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: woman who had walked into that room under her own power,
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: who had years of her life invested in this organization,
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: who had moved across the country to be closer to it,
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: was losing ground quietly in a hotel room. And the
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: logs note at multiple points that she was not eating
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: and not drinking and not responding normally. And at no
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: point during those 17 days were outside medical professionals called.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: And on December 5th, 1995, church staff placed Lisa McPherson
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: into a van and drove 45 miles to a Scientologist
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: physician in Dunedin, Florida. And she would die before they arrived.
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: And she was only 36 years old. And her autopsy
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: found severe dehydration and more than 40 insect bites on
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: her body. And she had lost a significant amount of weight.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: And the Clearwater Police Department launched a homicide investigation. And
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: the state attorney filed criminal charges against the Church of
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: Scientology in 1998. And one count of abuse and neglect
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: of a disabled adult. And one count of practicing medicine
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: without a license. And at 2000, the criminal charges were
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: dropped and the medical examiner amended the death certificate and
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: the reasons for the amendment were never fully explained to
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: the public satisfaction. And a civil wrongful death lawsuit brought
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: by her family was settled out of court in 2004
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: for an undisclosed amount under sealed terms. So, You can
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: safely assume that money just washed away the fact that
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: this woman died under the church's watch and because of
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: the church. The church murdered Lisa McPherson, in my opinion, allegedly.
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: So no member of the Church of Scientology has ever
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: been held criminally responsible for what happened to Lisa McPherson.
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: And what Lisa's case represents is a pattern made very visible.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: A person in crisis removed from outside care isolated inside
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: the church. And handwritten log documenting her deterioration line by
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: line in the church's own hand in medical intervention arriving
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: too late by 45 miles. And the logs exist. And
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: they were written by church members in church facilities during
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: the 17 days they chose not to call a doctor.
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: And no one has ever been held accountable.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 2: Disgusting.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: And what's even more sickening is that children were not
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: exempt from the demands of Scientology's internal structure and in
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: the C organization, especially because they occupied a category all
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: on their own because they weren't full members in the
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: formal sense and not civilians either. They were just kind
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: of present and expected to contribute. And the cadet organization
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: was the formal structure for children of C org members.
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: Kids as young as five years old and six were enrolled,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: given assignments, and expected to produce. And while their parents
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: worked 16-hour days, the children were managed separately, largely apart
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: from them. And the organization kind of just became the parent.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: And the children born into the Sea Org signed billion-year contracts.
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: Oh my God.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: The same contracts binding adults across all future lifetimes. And
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: no court has ever adjudicated whether a contract signed by
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: a six-year-old is legally valid, which how the hell would
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: that be valid? Dude, I didn't even know how to
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: spell my name at six years old.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 2: I don't think.
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: Let alone redline a fucking contract. But the church has
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: never had to answer for it anyway, like they haven't
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: had to answer for anything else. And the education inside
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: the Sea Org was built around Hubbard's own study tech.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: His system applied to his materials supervised by his organization.
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: And standard academic subjects were secondary to understanding Scientology's texts
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: and procedures. And multiple adults who grew up inside the
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: Sea Org describe emerging with significant gaps in basic knowledge,
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: things their peers simply knew they had never even been taught.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: And Jenna Miscavige Hill, David Miscavige's niece, published a memoir
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: in 2013 titled Beyond Belief, My Secret Life Inside Scientology
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: and My Harrowing Escape. And she describes a childhood structured
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: almost entirely around the organization, separated from her parents for
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: most of every day, assigned work from a young age
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: and always aware that any behavior reflecting poorly on the
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: church could have consequences, not just for her, but also
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: for her parents. And multiple former Sea Org members have
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: also described significant pressure on pregnant women to either have
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: abortions or leave the organization. And the stated position was
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: that raising a child was incomparable with the Sea Org service.
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: And the choice was framed as binary, like leave and
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: have your child or end the pregnancy and stay. Just
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: so messed up. And what adults who grew up inside
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: Scientology most often describe is a fundamentally abnormal childhood with
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: the work schedules, the ideological saturation, the absence of outside education,
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: and the separation from their parents. And then the disorientation
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: of leaving it. because many described learning basic adult life
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: skills essentially from scratch when they left. Like how to
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: get a job, how to navigate bureaucracy, and how to
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: just talk to people who have never heard of Fentons.
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: You know, you're basically an alien, which I guess, you know,
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: in Scientology, you kind of are. You're an alien, like
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: coming to earth and just figuring out how humans actually work.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: Like that's what Scientology does to you. So a lot
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: of them were just figuring this out in their twenties
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: and even thirties, which is just, I can't even imagine.
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: And the biggest wave of high-level departures came in the
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: 2000s and the 2010s as former senior executives began talking
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: publicly for the first time. And Marty Rathbun had been
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: the church's inspector general and one of Miscavige's closest people
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: for over two decades. And he left in 2004 and
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: became the central source for the Tampa Bay Times landmark
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: truth rundown investigation in 2009. And Mike Reinder spent roughly
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: three decades as the church's chief international spokesman. And he
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: left in 2007 and became one of the most sustained
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: public critics of Scientology's history, co-hosting Leah Rumini's documentary series,
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: Scientology and the Aftermath, a three-season A & E series
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: that ran from 2016 to 2019 and featured dozens of
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: former members on camera and even won an Emmy Award.
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: And the departure process for Sea Org members who leave
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: without permission includes what the church calls a freeloader debt.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: a bill for every course and auditing session received during
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: their years of service, calculated at full current public rates.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: And these bills routinely run to tens of thousands of dollars.
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: So you spent years working for, remember, $ 10 a week,
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: And on the way out, they would hand you a bill.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: Not unlike the Canadian government, when I left the country,
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: they told me to give them all my money before
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: I left. But yeah, just a little side note for
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: any Canadians that ever want to leave the country, there's
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: an exit tax.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 2: Really fun, really fun. You'll learn about it if you
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 2: ever leave.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: Now, Lawrence Wright spent years researching and writing Going Clear,
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: published in 2013. And the church's response was more than
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: 25 letters totaling hundreds of pages challenging every factual claim
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: in the manuscript before publication. And the Tampa Bay Times
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: Truth Rundown series won the gold medal for public service
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: from the Florida Society of News Editors in 2009. And
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: during the series publication, the church bought advertising space on
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: the Tampa Bay Times' own website. What? The kind of
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: money Scientology has is disgusting, as we're figuring out. And
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: everyone saw what they were doing, and it didn't work.
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 2: Shocker. People were like, oh.
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: They're just controlling the media, like the government, everything runs
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: full circle. And Hubbard laid out the legal strategy in
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: his own words in 1955, saying the purpose of the
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: lawsuit is to harass, not to win, right? They just
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: want to harass you till you can't take it anymore.
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: And then you win by doing that. 2,000 individual lawsuits
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: 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 designed to rack up legal costs and
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: deliver fear to people who couldn't afford to fight an
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: organization of Scientology's resources. And other countries have been less
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: tolerant than the United States. And Germany classified Scientology as
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: incompatible with democratic values and placed it under state surveillance
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: for decades. That's a W for Germany right there, I'd say.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: And France convicted the church of organized fraud in 2009
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: and a conviction upheld an appeal.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 2: Sick, love that.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: And Belgium, Australia, and Russia have all conducted formal investigations
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: or taken regulatory action at various points. And America remains
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: the place where Scientology has functioned most successfully with the
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: least institutional resistance. And now that we're learning everything we're
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: learning with Jeffrey Epstein and the government and all the
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: control and how everything is just manufactured, that does not
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: surprise me in the least and just makes me think
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: that the government's in on Scientology too. And it's just
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: a big money scheme, essentially, as we know. But it's
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: just disgusting. It's so dumb. Why do these people exist?
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: But the thing that finally broke their control over information
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: wasn't a government and wasn't a courtroom.
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 2: Shocker. It was the internet.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: Now, the entire architecture of Scientology's power over its members
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: depends on controlling what they know, right? Knowledge is power,
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: and 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, like,
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: really fast, and they can't control that.
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 2: Oh, no.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: The secret knowledge structure only functions if the secret stays secret, right?
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: You cannot charge someone $ 100, 000 to discover that Xenu exists
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: if they can find out about it for free. Oh,
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: like you guys right now. Oh no, I saved you
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: guys 300 grand. You're welcome, okay? Because the internet made
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: that impossible, or made it possible to know, but impossible
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: for the church to keep that information secret. And the
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: church didn't see it coming. And in 1994, pieces of
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: the OT levels began appearing on Usenet newsgroups. And the
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: church came after them with copyright claims and legal threats.
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: And some providers took the material down, but it kept
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: spreading anyway because that's the way the internet.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 2: Works, baby.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: And by 2008, WikiLeaks had published 612 pages of OT-level materials.
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: And the Xenu story was sitting in Google search results.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: And church representatives were still publicly denying that Zinu was
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: any part of Scientology, while simultaneously filing legal actions to
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: get him removed from the internet. And in January of 2008,
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: the church demanded YouTube remove a leaked internal video featuring
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: Tom Cruise.
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 2: I hope they don't come after me! Just kidding, they won't.
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 2: They won't come at me. Just kidding, please don't. Please don't.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: The response came from a loosely organized online collective called Anonymous.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: And they read the takedown as censorship and declared war.
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: And on February 10th, 2008, Anonymous held simultaneous protests outside
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: church facilities in 93 cities worldwide. And an estimated 7,000
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: to 8,000 people showed up wearing Guy Fawkes masks. And
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: it was devastating in a way the church had no
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: tools to handle. And their entire playbook relied on identifying
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: and targeting individuals, suing them, surveilling them, contacting their employers
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: and families. And Anonymous had no spokesperson to threaten and
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: no employer to call. and no family to pressure. Every
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: tool the church had was useless against a crowd with
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: no face. So what changed permanently was the information environment.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: Anyone curious about Scientology could now find out about Xenu
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: before they ever walked through a door. And the secret
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: the bridge was built to protect was sitting on the
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: first page of search results. 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 8 and 15 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 2008 American religious identification survey found approximately 25,000 Americans
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: who identified as Scientologists. So the gap is partly explained
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: by the billion-year contract, I guess, since everyone who ever
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: joined is technically committed for all future lifetimes.
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 2: What a crock of shit.
• 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. And any organization with 70
• 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: report something more telling than statistics. And the buildings feel
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: pretty empty. And even flagship locations in Los Angeles and
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: Clearwater draw noticeably less traffic than they once did. At
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: the same time, the church has been aggressively acquiring properties
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: through a program called the Ideal Org Initiative. and local
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: communities are encouraged to fundraise for years to purchase and
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: renovate large buildings, which are then inaugurated in elaborate ceremonies.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: And former members have described the program as a fundraising
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: mechanism that benefits central church accounts rather than local communities.
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: And the resulting buildings, many of them grand and prominently located,
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: often sit largely unused. So just a giant waste of space,
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: waste of money, just taking up the real estate like
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: a bunch of assholes. And independent financial analysts estimate the
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: church's total assets at somewhere between $ 1 and $ 2 billion,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: with real estate holdings accumulated over decades accounting for a
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: significant portion of that. And an organization that may have 25,000
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: actual active members is sitting on the financial infrastructure of
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: one that claimed $ 15 million. And that gap between the
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: money and the membership is one of the most telling
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: numbers in the whole story. But the people who left, Rathbun, Rinder, Romini, Wright,
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: didn't tell their stories and just move on.
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 2: They kept going.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: And Rinder has spent nearly two decades giving depositions, speaking
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: at hearings, and appearing on camera for anyone who would listen.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: Ramini filed legal actions against the church as recently as 2023,
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: setting years of ongoing fair game retaliation. So they're basically
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: stalking her and like making her life a living hell
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: because she left. And the documentary series, Scientology and the
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: Aftermath drew millions of viewers who had no prior connection
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: to the story and left them with one that they
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: couldn't forget. And what the church has not done in
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: response to any of it is address the substance. No
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: public accounting of the RPF's conditions, no explanation of where
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: Shelley Miscavige is, and no answers to the questions the
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: 1993 IRS agreement raised and never resolved. And in May
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: of 2023, actor Danny Masterson, best known for That 70s Show,
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: was convicted of two counts of rape. and sentenced to
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: 30 years to life in California State Prison. And the
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: conviction itself was significant. And what surrounded it was even
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: more significant because Masterson's victims had attempted to report the
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: assaults to the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 2000s,
• 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 Scientology's 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 against 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.
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 2: Talk about corruption.
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: And it is impossible to know with certainty how much
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: of that delay was attributable to church pressure and how
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: much to other factors. But what is knowable is this.
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: The church's framework explicitly classified the women as potential trouble
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: sources for going to outside authorities. And the tools of
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: disconnection and social pressure that the church has always used
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: internally were being deployed to suppress a criminal complaint against
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: one of its celebrity members.
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 2: And it worked.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: For 20 years, which is horrifying. And when the conviction
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: finally came, the church moved quickly to distance itself, describing
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: Masterson as having been removed from active participation in the
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: church activities. And former members and critics noted that the
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: church had publicly defended him as recently as 2017, when
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: accusations first became public. And the Masterson case cracked open
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: something the church had long managed to keep closed. A
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: serious legislative conversation about whether an organization with documented patterns
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: of obstruction, abuse, and coercion should continue to operate under
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: the full protections of religious tax exemption. Now, the federal
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: lawsuits accumulating against the church represents something it has not
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: faced before, and that is the legal framework. Multiple former
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: Sea Org members, including some who spent decades inside, have
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: filed civil lawsuits under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. And
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: the legal argument is specific and very serious. And it
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: is that working 80 to 100 hours a week for $ 10,
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: being unable to leave the base freely and facing the RPF,
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: or a freeloader debt bill as consequence of departure, and
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: being 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 this legally different from everything that came
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: before is the framework, essentially. His fair game harassed critics
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: into silence. And 2,000 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: Miscavige is named as a defendant in several of those suits.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: but he has not appeared. And the 1993 IRS agreement was,
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: for 30 years, was the church's most unassailable legal protection.
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: And it wasn't just tax exemption, it was a kind
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: of institutional legitimacy, a signal that the US government had
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: evaluated Scientology's religious claims and accepted them. And that protection
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: is now under more serious scrutiny, finally, than at any
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: point since it was granted. So the Danny Masterson case,
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: the human trafficking lawsuits, and the ongoing fair game campaigns
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: documented in active litigation, and the growing body of federal
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: court records describing conditions inside the Sea Org have combined
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: to create something completely new, which is a bipartisan political
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: constituency interested in revisiting the question. And former members and
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: advocacy groups have formally lobbied members of Congress. And tax
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: law scholars who previously had no particular interest in Scientology
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: have begun writing about the legal standards in the 1993
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: agreement was held to and whether those standards would survive
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: the evidence that has emerged since. My guess is no.
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: And there is no immediate legislative threat. And the church
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: has substantial legal resources and a long history of making
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: government scrutiny.
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 2: 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 1993,
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: that it is a sincere religious organization deserving the full
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: protections afforded to faith communities, is harder to sustain in
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: a courtroom where former members are testifying about forced labor,
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: obstruction of justice, and systemic suppression.
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 2: Of criminal complaints. You know what I mean?
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: And the agreement was negotiated before WikiLeaks published the OT
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: levels and before the truth rundown and before going clear
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: and before the Masterson verdict. And before a federal judge
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: publicly expressed frustration that the organization's leader was evading service
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: of process. So the IRS gave Scientology its shield in
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: a private meeting whose contents have never been disclosed. And
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: whether that shield survives what is now on the public
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: record is a question no one has yet been forced
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: to answer. And David Miscavige stopped making press appearances around 2022.
• 1:39:31
  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. Once processed
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: servers started looking for him, he became a very difficult
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: person to find outside the church. And he has not
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: disappeared entirely. And in March in 2024, he appeared at
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: the dedication of the Ideal Church of Scientology in Chicago,
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: speaking on stage before thousands of people. And in December
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: of 2024, he delivered a two and a half hour
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: address at the Schwein Auditorium in Los Angeles for the
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: church's annual New Year's celebration. But what he will not
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: do is appear anywhere he does not control, right? No
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: press interviews, no public events outside church property, and no
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: legal proceedings. And a California Superior Court judge said this
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: to his legal team in 2024, saying, quote, He's got
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: teams of lawyers. He should just appear and defend himself.
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: It's very frustrating for me. We've reached a new level
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: of craziness. But he still hasn't appeared because he's a giant, baby, wuss, narcissistic, psychopathic, asshole.
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: But the church's finances have never been fully disclosed. And
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: the 1993 IRS agreement covering over 150 entities has never
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: been released to the public. And Shelley Miscavige has not
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: been seen outside the church control since 2007. And across
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: more than 70 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.
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 2: I hope it's not over.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: But for the first time in its history, it is
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: being told by people the church cannot silence. Where is
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: Shelley Miscavige? What did the 1993 agreement actually contain? Who
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: has been paid? and how much to keep the courts closed.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: The questions remain open. But that is that for the
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: deep dive on Scientology. Please let me know what else
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: you want me to deep dive down below. This one
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: was crazy. I mean, I knew a little bit about it,
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: but my God, it's crazy. It's crazy that these organizations
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: can get their claws into our government. That is extremely disturbing,
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: especially given our government is extremely flawed.
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 2: Um, but I digress. Let me know what else you
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 2: guys want me to deep dive into.
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: And until then, I will see your beautiful face and
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: stay safe out there. All right. Bye.