The Truth About Scientology w/ Mike Rinder | PBD Podcast | Ep. 191
FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/
PBD Podcast Episode 191. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Mike Rinder & Adam Sosnick.
Buy Mike Rinder's book A Billion Years: https://amzn.to/3SRlrSO
Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Yeah, why would you bet on July when we got Bet David?
Valuetainment, givin', values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to haters.
I dee run, homie, look what I become.
I'll give you the name here in a minute.
Folks, podcast episode number 191.
I know we did one last night with Mike Chandler.
Today it's with a very special guest, Mike Rinder, who, if you don't know who he is, today's going to be the kind of a show where you're, it's like a Twilight Zone type of a thing.
You're going to go into some interesting places, some stuff that you're going to say there's no way that's possible.
There's no way that's real.
There's no way any human being is capable of tolerating that for that many years or others.
But, you know, a lot of people are saying this stuff is real, and we're going to get right into it.
So today, Mike Rinder's background, he was a Australian-American former senior executive of the Church of Scientology International, CSI, and a C organization based in the United States from 1982 to 2007.
He served on the board of directors of CSI.
So not just a member, not just a leader.
When you're on the board, you pretty much know everything on the inside on what's going on, pretty much 99% of things that's going on on the inside, because that's what when you're part of a company, there's meetings salespeople have, there's meetings operations has, there's meetings compliance has, there's meetings executive team has, and then there's meetings that the board has that they know everybody's business.
It's very important to understand this.
Everybody's business comes and flows through the board of directors.
So when you're in the board, you know everything on the inside.
So this isn't just somebody that's defected that was a regular person.
This is a person that was on the board of directors for many, many years of CSI and also held the post executive director of its Office of Special Affairs overseeing the corporate legal and public relations matters of Scientology at the international level.
From 2016 to 2019, he co-hosted the Annie Documentary series with Leah Romini, Scientology and the Aftermath.
He has explained in 2020, he and Romini reunited to launch the podcast Scientology Fair Game.
In September 2022, which is last month, he published a memoir named A Billion Years, My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology.
With that being said, Mike, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.
Oh, you're welcome.
I'm really happy to be here, Patrick and Adam.
I know that you've done things about Scientology before, and some of my friends have been on this program with you, and I'm really happy to be here and talk to people who actually have an understanding.
Like, I've been doing a bit of media recently about the book, and most people have no real clue about the subject.
They're interested, they're fascinated.
They don't really understand much about it.
I walk in here, and you've got more notes laid out down there.
Like, it's sort of intimidating seeing how many notes you've got, like, how many printouts you've got and things ready to go.
But I'm ready to talk about anything.
Well, you know, the reason why this is a very interesting topic to me is when I had Mark Heatley on, and you know who Mark Heatley is.
He was with Sea Org, I think, 15 years.
Yes, very dear friend of mine.
And we sat down.
It was very interesting right off the bat because when he came in, he's kind of looking at me like, why are you agreeing to this interview?
I said, why is this?
Because you just interviewed, you know, a very, very big donor to the Scientology Church.
And I said, who are you referencing?
He was talking about Cardone.
I was on his show.
He was on mine.
Says, is this an inside thing?
He was so almost like uncomfortable about it.
And to me, I'm just sitting there interviewing because I'm trying to push him.
I'm trying to challenge him.
I'm not coming from a place of, hey, yeah, oh, these guys are bad.
I'm like, no, I'm trying to learn to see what he's going to say about it.
Because in 2006, I signed a lease in Granada Hills and I opened up an office with another guy named Michael who was with the Church of Scientology for many, many years.
He was from New Zealand.
And we had a very, very good relationship together.
And we had about 100 agents of his that were Scientologists.
And I worked with these guys.
And I got to tell you, my experience with them for what it's worth was absolutely amazing to work with these folks.
And, you know, on their work ethic, on their, you know, we had certain issues at the tail end of it, you know, financial, some other issues that happened.
But their work ethic, what they were doing, how they were coming about the business, how great of salespeople they were, how they had no problem working until 8 o'clock, 10 o'clock at night.
They were workers.
And I respected that.
I respect somebody that's a worker.
And later on, when I, you know, got a chance to get closer, I would go to the church in LA and I would debate them.
And I would just, you know, I had an itch to debate every religion at the time because I was going through my own journey.
And I would go to a church of Scientology and I would say, so tell me, who is God?
And they would say, who do you think is God?
I said, don't worry about who I think is God.
Who do you think is God?
No, who do you think is God?
Tell me who you think is God.
I'm asking you.
And it was such a, you know, they were so trained on how to ask questions and how to go back and forth.
And so I was enamored by it.
And then Mark Kidley and now we have you here.
So for some folks that don't know, if you don't mind taking a moment and just give your background on how you got into Church of Scientology and why you left in 2007.
Okay, well, I got into it because my parents became involved when I was a child in Australia.
And from about the age of five, I started being, well, really growing up in a Scientology household.
And when you're a Scientologist, you believe that the word of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, is really the word of God.
He wrote about or talked about everything, everything from how to wash windows to how to be eternally spiritually free and happy.
And the idea that Scientologists have is that Hubbard is the source of all valuable information about everything.
And he called his teachings in Scientology technology to give it sort of an aura that it was scientifically based.
And he claimed and continues to claim, Scientology continues to claim, that if you do exactly what he says, exactly the way he says to do it, it works 100% of the time.
It is the infallible solution to all problems confronted by any individual and all of mankind.
And so growing up, my sort of life became, well, what would Ron do to solve the problem?
What's Ron's answer to this?
And this is a really important thing to understand about Scientology.
You become so dependent upon what Hubbard says is the answer that you lose your perspective on figuring things out for yourself because it's easy.
And it's actually, frankly, one of the things that keeps people in Scientology.
It's really easy in some respects.
While it's enormously difficult in some fashion, it's really easy in some respects to be a Scientologist.
You don't have to think about anything.
There is an answer for you on how to do everything and how to act and what your reaction should be and what you should think about things, everything like that.
Anyway, I'm digressing.
You spend a lot of time with him.
You actually, you know, you spend time with him.
So there's a lot of people in Church of Scientology that have never met him, never spent time with him.
You have.
The vast majority of Scientologists have never had any interaction whatsoever with Hubbard.
Yes, you're right, I did.
But in any event, I was basically groomed to be a Scientologist from a very young age.
And part of being a good Scientologist is that ultimately you join what is called the C organization.
And the C organization is the sort of inner core of Scientology.
All of the top hierarchy of the Scientology organization are required to be Sea Org members.
And that's what the title of the book is about.
It's called A Billion Years because a Sea Org member signs a billion year contract committing themselves to eternity in the service of Scientology.
And Sea Org members live communally and have everything provided to them by the organization, which, you know, for some people is also very comforting.
And, you know, you don't have to worry about anything.
You've got food.
You've got somewhere to sleep.
It may be shitty food.
May not be a nice place to sleep.
Sure.
But you've got it.
And these days, actually, that's what a big selling point for Scientology is, to get people from Central America and Eastern Europe to come and join the Sea Organization in the United States.
And there was a recent article about it in the New York Magazine about this visa fraud that Scientology is engaged in.
Nevertheless, I became a Sea Org member shortly after becoming a Sea Org member.
I went, as you mentioned, to the ship that Hubbard was operating on at the time.
This was in 1973 and worked there with him for a couple of years until we came to Clearwater, Florida in December of 1975.
And I sort of rose through the ranks of Scientology to ultimately become the international spokesperson for Scientology and the head of what's called the Office of Special Affairs.
And what you read out at the beginning, Patrick, about the Office of Special Affairs is like from the press release that Scientology says.
You know, it's the media and public relations and, you know, dealing with litigate.
And omitted from that was destroying the enemies of Scientology.
That's a big part of the role of the Office of Special Affairs.
So going back to spending time with Hubbard, is that the ship, by the way, the ship right there?
No, that's a new ship.
That's the Freewinds, which is a different thing.
The Apollo is more of an old rust bucket.
Can you type an Apollo L. Ron Hubbard?
L. Ron Hubbard.
Let's see what it looks like.
There we go.
Black and white.
Well, it got painted white afterwards.
That one right there over there on the right, that's it.
Like those, that is the Apollo, the one on the right.
And you spent two years on that.
Yes.
So now I've read the reason why there was the, he had the ship is because it was not welcome by, you know, he was kicked out of a lot of different places.
They wouldn't let the ship go to many ports, so he had to go and live there until he got his tax.
There's a lot of stories you hear about that.
What was the reason why he was living on a ship for two years?
Because he had originally gone to this is a bit of a backstory, but Hubbard had moved to England and bought this manor house in the south of England called St. Hill, which was his home and the headquarters of Scientology internationally.
The British government and press started giving him a hard time.
He went off to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to quote-unquote take over the country because he believed that he had been Cecil Rhodes in a previous lifetime.
And he was going to go back and reclaim his kingdom and create a Scientology country and new civilization springing from South Africa.
And that only lasted a few months when they threw him out of there, too.
He returned to England, and the British government was seeking to revoke his visa or said that they would not renew his visa.
And he went, okay, the only place that's really safe, because the U.S. government was also, the FDA had raided the church in Washington, D.C.
And, you know, there were all sorts of problems with governments.
He said, okay, I'm going to become what he called Fabian, meaning I can't really be found.
I'm going to be anywhere and everywhere.
International waters, there's no government has jurisdiction over international waters.
So we could go to a port, but if there's any problem, we can just sail out to sea and I'll be safe.
Nobody can snatch me.
I'm safe.
So that is the reason that he originally went on to the Apollo and create.
That's where the word sea organization comes from.
The start of this was he took a few people from his home in St. Hill, the most dedicated Scientologist, took them with him, and they became like the crew of the ship and his assistants and messengers and flunkies.
And that began the sea organization, which I then joined in 1973.
That was in 1967, he started up.
So what was unique about his personality?
Like, you know, for somebody to say, you know, from washing windows to doing this, and, you know, if you got a headache, here's how to get rid of a headache.
And you hit your, you know, you kind of gradually go through this.
And if you're going through this part, you're going, everything had a system to it on what he wrote about.
And how many PhDs he had and how many degrees he had and the controversy behind the degrees that he had.
Well, he didn't have any.
There is two stories you hear about.
You hear about the amount he has and you hear about he had none.
But the truth is he had none.
He flunked out of George Washington University.
He did not finish.
Okay, you ask about Hubbard.
Hubbard was a larger-than-life character, a storyteller.
If there is one word I would use to describe Hubbard, it's storyteller.
Bullshitter, that could be another one.
But storyteller is the more sort of appropriate because his history in life was writing, fiction.
He was a fiction writer, a pulp fiction writer.
He developed a skill of presenting stories to people that are very entertaining.
And many of those stories are about himself.
And many of them are completely and utterly untrue.
And he developed a sort of a persona for himself as a war hero and like all these things that actually are not true.
He then, at the end of the war, he was in the U.S. Navy.
He had a very indistinguished career in the United States Navy, despite the fact he subsequently claimed that he was a war hero.
He had purple hearts, he was injured, he was a ship captain, he was this, he was that.
Like the stories of his exploits in World War II, you know, should be the subject of a movie if any of them were true, but they're not.
So he then came upon this thing of, I'm going to cure myself of the injuries.
He claimed he was blinded and crippled at the end of the war.
He was neither.
He had ulcers.
And he developed this thing called Dianetics.
And Dianetics, he claims, is scientifically researched and tested on hundreds of people and this and that.
None of that is true.
Yes, he dabbled around with people, but Dianetics is basically regression therapy.
It is taking an incident of upset or emotional strain or physical injury or whatever, and going back and finding the first point that it began and sort of recounting it.
And Hubbard devised, invented, created this thing that he called the reactive mind.
And that is what Dianetics is about.
And the reactive mind is one of Hubbard's great strokes of genius.
He said that you have a subconscious mind that controls your emotions, makes you sick, gives you physical ailments, and that it is composed of moments of pain and unconsciousness that are below your level of awareness.
And that current things in the environment will trigger your historical subconscious thoughts, pains, and emotions.
And that Dianetics can solve that.
The beauty of this to present to someone is, look, you may be really fucked up, but it's not your fault.
It's this thing called a reactive mind.
And you don't control it, but we have a way of getting rid of it.
And if you give me some money, I will teach you and audit.
That's what it's called, auditing in Scientology, and get rid of your reactive mind.
Now, someone who has physical illnesses or who is traumatized or who is emotionally unstable or whatever, telling them that you've got this secret that you have discovered that nobody else has ever known and that I can cure you of those things.
I mean, Hubbard's claim still sold in the Dianetics book today.
It'll cure cancer, it'll cure bursitis, you'll throw away your glasses, you won't need a walking cane anymore, you won't be irrational, you'll be a perfect thinking machine.
None of these things prove to be true.
At all.
Well, okay, here's the trick of this, Patrick.
There is some placebo effect that you tell someone, I'm going to cure you, and then you do stuff and they pay for it.
A lot of people will say, yes, I'm cured.
Oh, yes, I can walk again.
It's like you so you can't exactly say that nothing ever happens to anybody.
And this is one of the things that's very tricky about this subject: you will see all sorts of testimony from people telling and saying, Oh my God, I was such a nervous wreck and now I'm not.
And oh my God, I had this terrible problem with nausea when I woke up in the morning and I found through Dianetics that it was solved now.
And I guess that probably is true.
But that is presented by Scientology now or Hubbard then as if you do it exactly as Hubbard says, it works 100% of the time.
That's a little weird to say it works 100% of the time.
But that's the same criticism of a lot of churches, right?
Where they'll say, well, you know, this happened and then that happened.
Like it was God.
I don't know.
Maybe you just were thinking about it.
So it's ironic because every church gets criticized with that part, right?
Yes.
But going back with Hubbard here, so I want to know who inspired him.
The only reason I ask this question is because when you're saying all these things to him, I sense an element of C.S. Lewis, who used to write fiction books, and he started writing Near Christianity and all these other books and the battle with God that he had and Oxford University.
So I sense an element of C.S. Lewis minus the level of ego that Iran had.
I sense an element of Great Gatsby, where the stories of what happened and let me tell you in war and all these other things when the book did that inspire him.
I sense an element of Napoleon Hill when you're talking about Blinded and Crippled, where Napoleon Hill starts off and talks about how his son was blind and he was able to do this through the certain mindset.
And those books were written in the 20s and the 30s.
I sense an element of Joseph Smith with LDS where he finds these six plates and in Vermont and comes down and they go to Chicago.
Eventually, you know the story.
I sense some of the element of Jesus prophet.
I sense some of those things, right?
So my question for you would be: who were his, like, who did he admire?
And I don't even know if anybody ever figured this part out.
Who did he admire and who did he hate?
Gosh, that's such an incredible question.
I have no idea.
See, that's the answer.
That's what I want to know.
I have no idea.
I do know that he was very widely read and he loved to quote philosophers through the ages and claim great knowledge about the work of Freud or the work or what Socrates had to say or, you know, that he claimed to have read the history of civilization, you know, its entirety and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in its entirety.
And he claimed an enormous breadth of knowledge.
I'm not so sure that that knowledge went very below the surface.
I'm not sure that it was so deep.
I think that it was convenient to say I studied Freud or I did this or I did that.
But I will say that I believe one of Hubbard's, one of Hubbard's great talents was taking small pieces from others, all the way back to Buddha and the Eastern philosophies and pulling little bits and incorporating them into his shtick.
And because he did that, there are elements of Dianetics and Scientology that seem sensible, seem very normal, seem very attractive and appealing because they're these universal truths, the golden rule.
The golden rule became in Scientology, you know, an element of the philosophy without calling it the golden rule.
You know, this sort of stuff is found throughout Scientology.
The thing about Scientology and about Hubbard that is to me most compelling is the fact that he managed to devise a system which now others copy.
Like, I became very familiar with the whole Keith Ranieri Nexium story because I became friends with the people that made that film.
And Sarah Edmondson, the woman who was branded in the Vow, is a good personal friend now.
I asked them, Mark Vicente and Sarah, you know, a lot of this rings the scientist like it's got Scientology throughout it.
Oh yeah, he studied L. Ron Hubbard.
He studied Scientology to learn how to control and manipulate people and get them to believe something and put the carrot out in front of them of what it is that you have looking for the future that you are going to attain for yourself.
So I believe that Hubbard is the ultimate cult leader, the ultimate guy who figured out how you can persuade people to do things that are against their best interest and in his best interest.
People do a lot of stuff in Scientology.
You know, my book is about my personal experiences and the crazy, insane things that I did and the willingness to put up with the most outrageous stuff that happened to me and keep going.
But Scientologists all over the world mortgage their houses and give away their college funds and do all this stuff that is not in their best interest because they believe that Scientology is in their best interest and that trumps everything.
I had an agent of mine who, her and her husband, they were making $2.50 a year between their two jobs, French.
And when I would do their needs analysis on their finances, I would say, how come you guys are so broke?
Where does this money go to?
And she says, oh, you don't even know what we're doing.
I said, what are you doing?
We spent $50,000 last year on this course.
We spent this much money on this.
I said, why?
Do you know what we're learning with this?
You should take this course.
I said, how much money do you guys spend every year in your church?
The number they were telling me made like, and by the way, it's not like they were making a quarter million dollars because they just started making a quarter million dollars.
He was an engineer.
He was a smart guy.
So the question then becomes the following.
This is where it gets a little bit confusing.
One, who was the, a lot of times for a person who speaks like that big of themselves and what they're going to be doing, there has to be the first true believer with credibility that validates them, right?
If you don't have a true believer with credibility that validates them, this could be anybody that's talking a big game.
So who was the first person that was a true believer in him that validated his teaching and Dianetics?
Well, there was an editor that he had had, John W. Campbell, when he was writing science fiction.
And he was pretty influential in the publishing circles at the time.
And he was one of the early proponents, along with this medical doctor called Dr. Winter.
I can't remember his first name.
And Winter was like the endorser of Dianetics for Hubbard to begin with.
But shortly thereafter, he became like, I'm going to expose what's really going on here because this is a bunch of bullshit.
But he quickly, with Dianetics and through the publishing of the book, it became like a fad.
Like in the very, very early days of Dianetics, in the 1950s, it was like a fad.
And Hubbard would go around doing lectures.
He did this famous lecture in Los Angeles at the Shrine Auditorium, and he filled the place in 1950 on the basis of the book.
And people like, oh my God, this is the answer to everything.
And, you know, there is a story that is told about the claims that Hubbard made about what a clear is.
And that is the ultimate goal of Dianetics, to rid yourself of your reactive mind, and you will then become what's known as a clear.
And he made all these claims about clears that they would have basically a photographic memory and have perfect computation.
And because all of the reactive mind was removed, so it just left the perfect analytical mind.
And he got up on stage and had someone who supposedly was clear up there and they couldn't remember what they had for breakfast or couldn't remember what color tie he was wearing when he turned around.
And this sort of started the maybe there is not, maybe this isn't all that people believe it to be.
And that began a long history of Hubbard.
This is one of the other things of Dianetics and Scientology.
When the claims that he made would prove to be untrue, he would come up with a new part, a new thing.
Ah, yes.
Well, I've been doing more research and I've discovered now that X, Y, and Z.
So we're going to do this now.
We're not doing that anymore.
We're doing this now.
And there is this progression of things from 1950 all the way up to the day he died of here is the new hope to attain what I have been promising you could attain since day one.
And the fact that people continued to buy that or continued to buy that for years and years and years is one of the other sort of mysteries of how do you get someone to, I mean, it's like the apocalyptic the end of the world is coming on the 17th of July, you know, 1934.
And then on the 17th of July, there's no Armageddon.
And on the 18th of July, they're saying, well, we were just getting ourselves prepared.
This was a test.
God was testing us to see.
It's a very effective thing to do, though.
A lot of people have done that.
And they've imposed a lot of fear and control over people.
Absolutely.
And the fear that Scientology or Hubbard presented to his followers is the fear that you will have an eternity of black hopelessness.
Without Scientology, Not only this planet, but every being in this universe is doomed, doomed to a dark, black, dwindling spiral of nothingness and turning into a black rock.
And it's like the heaven and hell.
You've got on one hand, ultimate spiritual salvation, freedom, and happiness, and on the other hand, ultimate blackness, darkness, and terrible, terrible fate awaiting you.
And the only difference between the two is the technology of L. Ron Hubbard, which is the only thing that can save the blackness and turn it into light.
And that is the story of every religion on planet Earth since day one.
And Scientology is no different in that respect.
The difference with Scientology is it's presented and sold as you can have that pathway to spiritual freedom and enlightenment in the here and now.
Because we do things right now, provided you pay, right now with you that give you the first steps toward accomplishing that ultimate objective and take you all.
the way up the Hubbard Bridge to total freedom.
Can I ask a question about the followers, just so I get a full understanding?
Like you gave the example of the, the French couple that worked for you yeah, I believe, talking about the followers.
My question is this, um, you know, i'll use this as an example and then i'll get to the question.
Like, for instance, if you're a member of Islam okay, do whatever you want, I don't really care.
But when you start committing acts of terrorism and killing people, now we have a problem.
You can be a Scientologist all you want, don't care.
Give all your money to L Ron, Hubbard and the whole crew, literally don't care.
But when you start committing acts of violence or hurting people on the outside, that's where I have a problem.
So two parts, are there any um examples of them doing things outside of the organization, because I know you're very um implicit of what they've done inside.
But what is the problem if somebody says look, i'm looking for meaning and purpose in my life and i'm finding it here.
I don't care what if they want to give all their money to Scientology?
I literally don't care, that doesn't affect me.
So I mean, what percentage of the world is scientologist?
0.0001 percent.
So my question is this, if you want to practice scientology and you want to believe that Elron Hubbard, the science fiction writer, is the next coming of Jesus, have at it, buddy.
What's the problem with that?
There is absolutely no problem with that, adam.
You, you can.
In this country, you can believe anything you want, and I firmly, firmly support that.
You can't do anything you want, and that's what you're saying.
You can't believe in this, and then and say, it's my belief that made me go out and blow up a bus.
Scientology um.
Let me break this down into two parts, because you have the internal part.
Scientologist to Scientologist, what does it matter if uh, Joe Schmo goes and spends all his money and goes bankrupt?
Um, in Scientology, in in the microcosm, it matters nothing in the macro view.
This is an organization that is doing this systematically to people and is tax exempt.
And your taxes and your taxes and my taxes and everybody here who lives in the United States, who is paying taxes, is subsidizing those activities.
The internal abuses that go on to Scientologists, you know, I talk a lot about physical violence that is being meted out to people in the C organization, but also the destruction of families is something that shouldn't be a part of an organization that is being supported by the government.
Then there is the question of outside the realm of Scientology.
And, you know, I give quite a lot of examples of people in there who have been harassed and had their lives turned upside down because they dared say something negative about Scientology.
I go into some great detail about this guy, Bob Minton.
I sort of use that as a microcosm of this is what Scientology does based on the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard.
Adam, there is no other religion that I am familiar with that has a department that is their intelligence dirty tricks department and has policies written by the founder of the religion on how you go about destroying someone's life.
Scientology spends a lot of money hiring private investigators, hiring lawyers, creating smear sites, creating videos to smear people, following them around, harassing their families, simply because they say things that Scientology doesn't like.
That too is subsidized by your tax dollars.
And that is wrong.
And by the way, if you go into the part that he's talking about where they spent $25 million to spy on one man, you know, who spends $25 million to spy?
There's a number of these.
By the way, he's probably the most hated man that left Scientology is Mike Rinder.
Here's what you need to add.
You may add somebody else on that list, but I would say it's probably you.
Well, me and Leo Marini, I would say.
We're like, you know, do me a favor, go to that clip.
For some of you guys that are watching this, you're like, well, how do we know he is who he is?
Because maybe you don't spend a lot of time studying Scientology.
Okay, which I'm sure you have better things to do.
But if you want to make that bigger so they can see the full screen, this is Mike.
And what year is this, by the way?
Is this 2006, 2005?
Maybe a little before that.
Okay, so I'm not sure what that clip is.
So watch how you're defending Scientology.
This is Mike Rinder sitting on the board, international spokesperson.
You're going to hear a very different Mike in this clip than the one right here on the podcast.
Go for it, play.
I've known Tom for 15 years.
I consider him a friend.
Do you think he's a good spokesperson for Scientology?
I think he's a very good representation of what a Scientologist is.
I think he's obviously successful.
He's obviously very happy.
He does a lot to help other people.
He lives an ethical life.
But last year, the store was orbiting far from planet Hollywood into the galaxies of Scientology.
Many wondered, did he wander off too far?
Does the church ever call Tom Cruise and say, you know what, pull back the reins a little?
No, I don't think anybody in the world calls Tom Cruise and tells him to pull back the reins.
But Tom Cruise and other celebrities do promote Scientology's agenda.
Does the church actively recruit celebrities?
No.
No.
The church is open to anybody.
No one's specifically told we'd like to get more celebrities because celebrities sort of up the profile of Scientology.
We have a list of celebrities.
None of the people.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
You can puzzle right there.
How do you feel watching this right now, by the way?
How do you feel?
It's ridiculous.
I mean, I think it's a good idea.
Is it tough to watch it or is it?
I'm sort of used to it.
People have shoved this stuff in my face for some time.
Have you seen this one?
I hadn't seen that for a long time.
It's funny.
I saw Hoda at an event that I did with Leah one time for it was like the premiere of the movie she did with J-Lo.
And we were at the premiere, and Hoda walked in, and she knows Leah pretty well.
And she said, Oh, hi.
And I'm like, she said, Yeah, I interviewed you.
I said, Oh, really?
Okay.
Now, this, I didn't recall at that time that I had been interviewed by her.
And I say in the beginning of this book, one of the things that worried me about writing it was the fact that Sea Og members are so sleep deprived that you have a sort of a you live in a fog.
I look at myself on that clip and I go, oh my God, I look terrible.
I look like I haven't slept for a month.
I look like I'm sort of like sleepwalking through this interview, dazed.
That is the impression that I get of myself on there.
And it's probably true.
If that was 2006, I probably came out of the hole to go and do that interview.
Like I did, I was in the hole.
The hole every time I talked about it.
Every time I talked about it.
Can you go back to see what he looked like there?
I actually thought you looked pretty good there.
It's interesting that your take on that is that you didn't feel like you looked good.
Oh, you actually look kind of pale, but yeah, I look kind of pale.
You were saying the hole.
The hole.
Go ahead.
The hole is something that was depicted on the going clear HBO dock.
It was a prison at the International Headquarters of Scientology in Riverside County, California.
And I write a whole chapter about the hole because it was where the senior echelons of Scientology hierarchy were locked up by David Miscavitz and basically in a Lord of the Flies world,
beating confessions out of one another in order to satisfy Miscavige that everybody had somehow confessed to the terrible things that they were thinking or doing that was making his life difficult.
I was a very unique inmate of the hole in that when the media would reach out for a spokesperson to come and talk and they couldn't be persuaded not to do the show at all, I would be taken out of the hole and escorted to do an interview with the media.
Like someone would fly with me on a plane to New York.
I talk about going on the Today Show with Katie Couric and lying about the Xenu OT3 story.
This with Hoda is another example of that of being pulled out, sent off and answering questions in the way that it was expected that would be the, you know, the correct Scientology answer.
The fact that I say in there that there was never any effort to get celebrities in Scientology is so absurd.
There is an entire organization in Scientology called the Celebrity Center, which is dedicated to attracting and servicing celebrities.
Because Hubbard said very early on, celebrities are opinion leaders.
They make people see things in a certain way.
If Tom Cruise comes out and says, I'm a Scientologist and Tom Cruise is the biggest movie star in the world, then there is a whole lot of people that will go, well, if Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, may not be so bad.
Maybe all this crap I've heard about it isn't really true.
Maybe it really is helping him.
It may be able to help me.
And Cruz was recognized by David Miscavige as being the single source of the greatest number of new Scientologists in the history of Scientology.
Now, whether that's true or not is another thing.
There is also a lot of bullshit that goes into these claims that Scientology makes about anything.
But Tom Cruise was perceived by David Miscavige as the biggest asset that Scientology had.
And by the way, none of that is unique.
It's not like it's a unique thing.
Politicians, you know, hey, Oprah Winfrey endorsed Barack Obama.
You know, hey, Kanye West endorsed Donald Trump.
Hey, you know, Dwayne Johnson did a video interview with Kamalo Harris and Joe Biden.
That's been going on for a long time.
So the criticism to the church from that perspective, it doesn't really do anything.
I don't sit there and I see that as a critic.
I see that as a strategy on what they're doing.
Come big brands get shacked to do, hey, you know, Mr. General, what is it, general something, the insurance?
Yeah, the general.
The general.
You know, they do accept the things.
For a long time.
Yeah, I'm not, I don't look at that and I look at, oh, that's deceptive on what they're doing.
That's not my area of concern.
My area of concern is, you know, how people, okay.
So, for example, this whole concept about Scientology, some of the things he's writing about, he's actually positively helped a lot of people out.
Okay.
I've spoken to certain people that said, hey, man, I had an alcohol problem and I went to the, what do you call it?
The Lake Arrowhead place.
I think it was.
No, yeah.
And I'm telling you, I went to rehab.
I went to a lot of different places.
Once I went there, my life changed.
You know, okay, cool.
Hey, I read this book.
It really got me to change.
I took these three courses.
It helped me out with the way to communicate.
I mean, if you watch the 60 Minutes interview with Tom Cruise, which I'm sure you've seen this, the 60-minute interview with Tom Cruise, what's the gentleman's name he's sitting down with?
You know who?
Matt Lauer?
No, not Matt Lauer.
No, no.
This is an interview he did years ago.
If you can just pull up, type in Tom Cruise in 60 minutes.
If you watch the 60-minute clip with Tom Cruise on that, that's the one right there with Peter.
Yeah, Peter Overton.
If you watch that, it's a clinic what Tom does to the interviewer.
It's an absolute clinic what he does to him.
To be able to communicate at that level.
I mean, and by the way, he looks like identical way that Ted Koppel interviewed David Miscavige on how they learn body language, communication, rebuttals, putting the pressure more on the other individuals.
Okay, some may say that's learning how to be a great negotiator.
That's learning how to be a great salesperson.
That's learning how to be a great persuader.
So the criticism on that could be, well, you're just envious because you can't communicate and persuade as good as they do.
You, you know, now, John Maxwell once said one of the best things ever, which was very powerful.
He said, be careful when you learn how to persuade, because when you learn how to persuade, you all of a sudden realize you have a power that you sometimes feel like you're the only one that knows about the secret.
A lot of people learn how to persuade.
He says, the moment you go into just persuading people for your own benefits, it's no longer persuasion, it's manipulation.
When you go into the element of, I know I can get you to do what I want you to do because I'm going to win and you're going to lose.
That's a very temptation that a lot of people are going to be tempted to want to do.
You got to be careful there.
So there is some good that a lot of people talk about.
The bad that you hear about, like for me, from Hubbard to Miscavige, let's transition into Miscavige, okay?
You had two years around Hubbard and you had many more around Hubbard.
Yeah.
Total hours around Hubbard.
How many total hours would you say around Hubbard?
Well, I was on the ship with him for two years, but I didn't interact that much.
I then went and worked directly with him day in, day out, night and day for training to be what's called a Commodore's Messenger, which was the sort of the highest status that you could have in Scientology.
And, you know, I was with him from morning until he went to bed at night and then sitting outside his room in case he called in the middle of the night.
So that was intense.
And that was, you know, a few weeks of that sort of.
But then I interacted with him constantly.
I was in Florida.
I was sent back to Florida to be in charge of the organization there in Florida.
He was in California and I would receive these communications from him, you know, daily virtually.
So I had a lot of interaction with him, but then subsequent to that, when he died, David Miscavige took over.
I had far more direct personal interaction with David Miscavige.
But Patrick, I just want to go back to one thing that you said, which I agree with.
I don't think that there is anything wrong with the concept of having celebrities be your recruiters.
Recruiters or front people or whatever you want to call them.
These days they call them influencers.
Influencer.
But look at that.
Look at that clip.
I'm defending that.
Go, oh, no, we would never do that.
This is how Scientology operates.
There is this idea that certain things have to be, you can't really say that this is what Scientology does because it's going to be misinterpreted or it's unacceptable or people won't understand or it'll give a negative spin to what we do, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So a lot of the things in Scientology you see spokespeople or press releases or whatever coming out isn't really what's going on.
They will say, we're gay friendly.
We're absolutely, we do not discriminate against anybody.
That's absolutely untrue.
Hubbard's writings are very, very homophobic.
And Scientologists believe his writings 100% of the time.
But that's a socially unacceptable position to have.
So Scientology will come out and say, oh, no, we're totally gay friendly.
We love gay people.
Anybody is welcome to come in.
And interestingly, that is the genesis of the article about Paul Haggis that Larry Wright wrote in The New Yorker, which then resulted in the Going Clear book, which then resulted in the Going Clear documentary on HBO by Alex Gibney, which sort of opened the floodgates to Scientology.
Anyway, I'm sorry, I didn't really respond to whatever it was that you were asking me to respond.
But I understand what you're saying with the whole celebrity when you're saying that.
You know, my rebuttal for that would be, you know, that David Miscavige's leadership style was so walking on eggshells that you were actually scared on what answer you were going to give because how you were going to be demonized when you went back to have to hear from him.
So you didn't play loose, you played tight.
And I put that on him.
I put that on how much fear he imposed on you.
Well, you just were scared to know anything you say, he's going to judge you on whatever words that came out of your mouth.
Which there's a part of that that's mob-esque because in the mob world, you know, every word is, you know, there's a difference between two words.
You could use one word and it has a different meaning to the mob than you use in a different word.
So you have to give me exactly what you told that person in the way you told them.
What was the context?
At what point did you say this?
At what point did you use that word?
So I see David being that.
But the reason why I'm asking a question about L. Ron Hubbard and where I was going with this.
It's fair to say you've spent a few thousand hours with L. Ron Hubbard.
Yes.
Okay, perfect.
So let's set that aside.
That's, you know, you're a disciple.
You've witnessed.
So it's not like a person that's speaking theoretically.
You are in the disciple category.
And how many people in the world have spent a few thousand hours around L. Ron Hubbard that are living today?
Probably less than 100.
Okay, so less than 100.
So that's one in 100 who can speak with that kind of experience.
Now, take L. Ron Hubbard's, because I've seen you say that L. Ron Hubbard had a temper as well, but he was more charismatic, charming, and a little bit more, you know, easier to deal with versus Miscavige doesn't have that.
You know, his temper is worse.
So, and you've spent how many hours with Miscavige?
A million.
Okay, so the comparison between the two, a lot more with David than you have with L. Ron Hubbard, right?
Yes, correct.
What is the different style of leadership with Miscavige versus L. Ron Hubbard?
Miscavige doesn't really have any redeeming qualities in that he has a very, very aggressive style and a tendency to violent outbursts that are physical in nature.
I must people say, oh, yes, Miscavige is a fool.
He is no fool.
He is a very highly intelligent, smart guy.
Who says he's a fool?
Oh, a lot of people on social media or that they respond to me or, you know, or people who interview me.
They're like, well, you know, he's just crazy.
Well, crazy like a fox or whatever.
He is a super, super intelligent guy who is capable of absorbing enormous amounts of information and analyzing it and figuring out how to use it for his advantage.
Perhaps more so even than Hubbard.
David Miscavitch is the perfect product of L. Ron Hubbard.
And by that, I mean he too was raised a Scientologist from a very young age and had a similar sort of trajectory in life that I did.
He joined the C organization as soon as he could out of high school.
He sort of rose through the ranks.
He went and worked with Hubbard.
He was a protege of Hubbard even more than me.
He was with him when he was living in California, working every day for a year with him in California.
He also has a personality, David Miscavige, that lends itself to these Being like the perfect disciple of Hubbard in that Hubbard had a very mean streak to him.
He there is a lot of writings in Scientology about people who disagree with Hubbard and what is to be done with them.
And, you know, he says, I never forget.
I'll always even the score.
I never forgive people who have attacked Scientology on me.
I will destroy them utterly if possible, of course.
These are his words.
These are his words.
And you, if you look at David Miscavitz, that is the essence of David Miscavige.
He has got that part of Scientology down to a T.
And while he can be charming when he wants to be, like any sociopath can, I mentioned in my book that I read this brilliant book by a woman, a professor called Martha Stout called The Sociopath Next Door, which I recommend to anybody.
And it had a real impact on me because I realized.
It's a good book.
I realized, look, I thought I was dealing with a unique person in David Miscavige.
And obviously he is unique.
There's no other David Miscavitches, but there are a lot of other sociopaths and they share a lot of characteristics.
And I see Miscavige as being a classic sociopath and taking the bits that Hubbard gave and using those to become the new L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology.
For a long time, you could have said to any Scientologist, will there ever be another L. Ron Hubbard?
And every one of them would say no.
And probably all of them would agree with that statement now.
But if you said to them, is David Miscavige the epitome of L. Ron Hubbard carrying forth his legacy?
Every Scientologist would agree with you about that.
And every Scientologist today is as afraid of criticizing, questioning, or challenging the authority or words of David Miscavige as they were L. Ron Hubbard.
So now, the relationship with Miscavige and you, were you guys, are you guys about the same age or no?
He's a little bit younger.
He's like seven years younger than me.
Was there a running where both of you, did somebody else have the candidacy to potentially one day run Scientology or no?
Were you one of those that was looked at as potentially one day running it or you were not at that at that level?
Okay.
You know what I'm asking?
I know exactly what you're asking.
There was a couple who were the apparent heirs to the Hubbard Empire called Pat and Annie Broker.
And they were with Hubbard.
Hubbard went off like Hubbard was constantly running away thinking that the FBI was after him or the IRS was going to serve him.
And he had a car with a bag packed ready to escape.
And he did it a couple of times.
And ultimately, he ended up living in a motorhome on a ranch near San Luis Obispo in California.
And he was like incognito.
He called himself Jack Farnsworth.
He had long hair.
He was like, he was like a recluse.
The only people that were with him when he was there were Annie Broca, her husband Pat, and this other guy called Steve Saj Falth.
Annie Broca and Steve Saj Falth were with him.
Pat Broca was the conduit go-between between Hubbard and the outside world, and he wasn't actually with Hubbard a lot.
But the natural heirs to the Hubbard kingdom were Pat and Annie.
They were the people that he had chosen to be with him when he took off and they lived with him in his motorhome for two years or more.
And I detail a lot of this in the book because Miscavige somehow managed to take out Pat and Annie Broca and deem himself the natural heir to L. Ron Hubbard.
And, you know, it's a very complicated story, Patrick.
But he Miscavitch got rid of the brokers.
Yeah, what do you mean, get rid of or take out?
Okay, remove Pat Broca was threatened with, I'm going to turn you over to the IRS for criminal prosecution because you carried briefcases full of hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash to L. Ron Hubbard because they couldn't pay.
He was incognito, so they couldn't use credit cards.
They bought everything with cash, ranches, cars, whatever.
And Pat Broca was the guy that did it, and there was no accounting for it.
And so Pat Broca effectively agreed to go off and live his life, never speaking about Scientology again.
And he is alive to this day and has never said a word.
His wife died from cancer 12 or something, and he lived in Czech Republic and they traced him for 25 years and he spent 32 grand a month on detectives.
All that's is this the guy?
Yeah, that's the guy.
That's the one.
But putting aside Pat and Annie, who were the natural sort of ones to follow in Hubbard's footsteps, and I make a big point in the book.
Hubbard wrote about everything in his life, like every single little thing.
And he'd sent out these things called Ron's journals.
Hi, everybody.
This is what I'm up to.
Here's what's happening.
This is what we're doing, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But he never said anything about this is what happens at the end of my life.
There was no written succession plan.
There was no written or spoken succession plan.
Typically, he would have recorded in his voice, Here I am, and this is what's, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm getting to the end of my life and I'm going to move off and blah, blah, blah.
And this person is going to take over and blah, blah, blah.
None of that.
And this story was invented that he had causatively departed his body to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual enlightenment.
Yeah, that was a complete bullshit story.
Because if Hubbard had been known by Scientologists to have died of a stroke after having suffered earlier strokes with pancreatitis and babbling almost incoherently at the end of his life,
that would have been a big blow to the idea that, well, my technology will solve all men's kinds of problems and your health issues and your mental incapacities, et cetera, et cetera.
If Hubbard had ended up being in very poor physical condition and even mental condition at the end of his life.
So this story was invented that was presented to the Scientology world.
And I talk about that in there too.
But then Miscavige became somewhat obsessed with eradicating anybody who he saw as a potential replacement for himself.
He'd managed to wrest control and get himself in a position where the brokers were no longer a threat.
But there were other people who were, people who had worked more with L. Ron Hubbard, who had been around longer, who had more training in Scientology.
And one by one, he got rid of all of them.
And to some extent, because of my history and because of the fact that I understood the external world of Scientology, not just the internal world.
You know, I dealt with all the legal cases, et cetera, et cetera.
I was one of those people.
So me, along with all these other sort of leading names of Scientology, all ended up being put in the hole, all ended up being removed and disgraced.
And he carried on.
Very common.
It's kind of like to put in perspective, it's the movie Gladiator where Joaquin Phoenix goes to his dad and Marcus Aurelius says, I'm going to announce that Maximus is going to be the ruler, the emperor.
And he's like, how could you do that?
And then boom, he kills his dad and dad had a heart attack or he died from whatever.
And then, hey, this guy's this.
And then they arrest Marcus Aurelius.
And that scene of redemption coming back, you know, where he says, Gladiator, show your face.
And it takes us that whole scene.
My name is Maximus.
My name is Medicineman.
Yeah, exactly.
Father, you know, to a mother.
Father to a murdered son.
Husband to a murdered wife.
I have my revenge in this day and that's right.
That's right.
It's just a very, I mean, I just got the chills right now just thinking about that.
So it takes me to that.
And it also takes me to what happened with Saddam when Khomeini came in and took over Shah.
He had to get rid of all the generals that were loyal to the Shah, not to him, with Broker being one of them, that he had to get rid of them.
But so that's fine.
Great power play to give credit to a general in a military from 700 years ago may say, good move on what you did to take power over, and you pushed everybody out and he took over.
It's just eliminating competition or perceived competition.
That's all it is.
Very Machiavellian.
Yeah, it's definitely Machiavellian, Prince, but fine.
So you do that.
No problem.
You can have different people disappear, competing, all these things.
All of it is dark.
But, I mean, one of the people that's been disappearing for a long time, that every time somebody brings it up and Leah Romini brought it up, and hey, you don't ask about this.
Who do you think you are to ask about where is his wife?
I mean, the last time they're saying, what was the number the last?
They said 2009, they showed up.
And in 2012 or 13, 2013 is the last time they saw his wife.
It's been nine years.
Where is his wife?
No one sees his wife anywhere.
David Miscavige's wife.
His wife is missing for a long time.
She's not been seen in over a decade.
Yeah.
13, 2013.
She has been disappeared.
And I mean, I just know in the book of Bible, Enoch was taken by God.
And there's a couple characters that never died.
They were taken, right?
I don't know if you understand where I'm going here with this one.
Where is she?
She is holed up in one of the Scientology facilities in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Last I knew.
That's where she was taken, at least at the outset.
This is a very secret location that Scientology has.
And it is the headquarters of a particular organization in Scientology called the Church of Spiritual Technology, which is an organization that is dedicated to preserving the writings and words of L. Ron Hubbard for eternity,
etched onto stainless steel plates, held in titanium containers filled with argon gas, covered with gold, space shuttle tile material and buried in vaults dug into the ground across the United States.
But that's the headquarters of it, and it is a super secure compound.
And she was taken there because she began to question the choices and sanity of her husband and displeased him in whatever fashion.
And I talk about that in the book and my interactions with Shelly and one of the last interactions I had with her when she had been left at the gold property, which is where the hole was up in Riverside County.
And David was down in Los Angeles.
And I had gone to see him about something and came back.
And she wanted to see me right away.
And I went to see her.
And she sort of nonchalantly asked or tried to nonchalantly ask in the conversation, did you notice if Dave was wearing his gold or his platinum wedding ring?
And it was like, Shelly, seriously?
You're worried about whether Dave is still wearing a wedding ring?
Oh shit, things are bad.
And she vanished very shortly there.
What year was this?
2005.
And how was she?
How was she as an individual?
A lot of people found her to be, I don't know, cold and sort of nasty.
I had known her since she was 12 years old on the Apollo.
I had a very different relationship with her.
She was always very kind to me.
I talk in the book about Shelly coming to wake me up to tell me that I had to go to Clearwater because my child had died.
This is her right here?
Yes.
They're not very flattering photographs, those photographs, by the way.
But she is and oddly, she looks almost in that big one.
She looks almost like Mary Sue Hubbard, a very similar look to Mary Sue Hubbard at her age.
And I was going to make the point, Patrick, that L. Ron Hubbard also disappeared his wife.
Mary Sue Hubbard was the head of the Guardian's office, which was the predecessor of the Office of Special Affairs, which I became the head of.
Look at that.
Redhead, curly hair.
Yeah, and sort of similar facial feet, you know, that thin sort of thing.
Very interesting.
But...
Can you go back to a picture of what David Miscavige looks like?
And correct me if I'm wrong.
He doesn't do interviews at all these days.
He did one.
He did one.
How long ago was that?
2003 or something.
So he hasn't done an interview in 20 years almost.
Correct.
And that's intentional, obviously.
He does not want to be seen, heard, what?
I actually really want to know where you're going with the wife, because you're saying the similarities between Miscavige's wife and L. Ron Hubbard's wife.
What were similarities?
So she was trying to, and then she also disappeared.
Why did L. Ron Hubbard's wife disappear?
Because L. Ron Hubbard's wife was in charge of the Guardian's office and ended up being prosecuted along with 10 other senior officials of Scientology for infiltrating the U.S. government.
And seeking, infiltrating, like planning spies and stealing documents, tapping the IRS conference room and various other things.
And she was prosecuted and ended up going to prison.
When she got out of it, Hubbard believed that Mary Sue and all these people that were in the Guardian's office, who had been doing exactly what he laid out to do in his writings about how to deal with the enemies of Scientology, had created a threat to him, a personal threat that he may be dragged into this.
He was named as an unindicted co-conspiracer by the DOJ in that prosecution.
They could never pin anything on him because every one of the people from Mary Sue down said, oh, L. Ron Hubbard didn't know anything about this, which was bullshit.
He did.
But he believed that Mary Sue was now a big threat to him and that the government may be able to get to him through Mary Sue.
So she was put in a home, a house that was in Los Felis in Los Angeles and had a household staff that was provided and reported to David Miscavige.
And he never saw her again.
And he never even communicated with her again.
There was no written communication even.
It used to be that when they were in separate locations, that they would write letters to one another.
And the messengers, which I was talking about, the people that were with Hubbard on a day-to-day basis, used to answer those.
And then eventually he said, I don't want to hear from her anymore.
And they didn't even get responded to.
Or if they did, he never even saw them.
His own wife was having letters written to her by her husband who were actually composed by people like me, Commodore's messengers.
Miscavige believed that Shelly was a threat to him because for a long, long time, Shelly had been by Miscavige's side.
Whenever Miscavige went anywhere, Shelly was there.
She was the COB, which is what he calls himself, the chairman of the board, even though he's not actually on the board because he doesn't want to get served through corporate means.
The COB assistant was Shelly, and Shelley was with Dave everywhere.
Shelley was the one that hired the people for Tom Cruise's household.
Shelley was the one that would accompany Dave to, well, Shelley was there with Dave and two or three other people when Tom married Nicole in Tellurite.
They were inseparable.
Shelley then became convinced that maybe Dave was off the rails and there are a few other things that came up with, you know, her not carrying out his wishes.
And so he perceived her as a threat because if there was one person in Scientology that the leading officials like myself or Norman Starkey or Guillaume Le Serve or the other people who had prominent positions in Scientology, if there was one person that people would listen to in addition to David, it was Shelly.
They trusted her.
Absolutely.
And the ones like us, like me, that had known her for way longer than we'd known Dave trusted her perhaps more than Dave.
Simply because you felt she was more real, she was authentic, she was straight up, and she would tell you how she feels.
I mean, if you look at those eyes right there, Aaliyah's eyes look very confident, happy, chill.
Her eyes, you can tell there is, you know, just anguish.
That's the wife right there?
Yeah, to the left.
You can see there's some.
Can I ask a quick question about David Miscavige?
Because is it fair to say that in like the, to use the Holy Trinity analogy, it's L. Ron Hubbard at the top, and then you have David Miscavige and Tom Cruise.
Is that like sort of the big three of Scientology?
Yeah, that's exactly.
Okay.
Just got that.
That's the big three.
Got it.
I just Googled something, and it's become very apparent.
I want to understand this about David Miscavige.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon Complex, is 5'6.
David Miscavige, 5'3.
Right.
Okay, so you've spent a lot.
I'm just making the comparison right there.
I mean, to be a five-foot.
You were going to go there?
I'm going to.
You know, he's here.
That's fine.
Adam, many people.
You're going to have a flat tire.
Adam, many.
I'm just saying, like, that's not a big guy.
For someone to be Machiavellian and take over and be ruthless and to be cunning and make all these things happen, is it because maybe people were like, ah, he's just a little guy.
He's not going to do anything with this.
Don't worry about him.
He's just a little.
You can kind of dismiss a guy like that, but behind closed doors, a guy like that, cunning, he's, you know, chip on his shoulder.
We talked about that yesterday.
Is that something that maybe drove him to the top?
Is saying, listen, people are counting me out.
I'm, you know, a tiny little guy.
What is that?
Well, people speculate about that a lot.
I don't think it has anything to do with how big he was physically.
His dad talked quite a lot about what he was like growing up because he was very small and he was asthmatic.
And he had difficulty with a lot of things.
Like his dad tells this sort of famous story about David not being qualified for Pop Warner football because he didn't weigh enough.
So he took weights and put them in his pocket so that he could play even though he was an undersized run.
And Ron Miscavige.
Yeah, that guy, his dad, who I knew very well and had known, I knew Ron Miscavitch Sr. before I knew David.
I knew Ron Miscavitch Sr. because he was friends with my parents at L. Ron Hubbard's home in St. Hill.
And I met him and his wife and David and his brother and two sisters all well before they were ever, David was even in the C organization.
And he's almost on your and Leia's side of the things where he's a defector, correct?
The father of David Miscavige, the leader of Scientology, is openly not a Scientologist defector of Scientology, right?
Yes.
Unfortunately, he passed away recently, so he's not is anymore.
He's a was.
But yes, exactly.
And he appeared on the aftermath.
And he had a podcast, which I went on a number of times.
And yes, he's a wonderful guy.
He's also short.
That doesn't make him an asshole.
He wasn't an asshole.
He is.
I don't know that David Miscavige's physical stature has anything to do with that.
I think his personality type is what really counts.
I want to ask you a question.
So is he the type of person where he would watch an interview like this because he wants to know everything?
Or is he the type of person that's like, I don't want to read anything that says anything negative about me or anybody that says anything negative about our church?
What's his personality?
Because there's two different types of leaders.
Right.
Which one is he?
He's the former.
But he wouldn't watch this.
He would have someone watch it and make notes of every single thing that was said about him.
He doesn't give a fuck about the rest of it.
Just what's said about him.
I want to see exactly what was said about me.
Got it.
He's going to hear about the height thing.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
Adam, you're in deep trouble.
I have a bunch of things.
So let me just speak his wife, you know.
Yeah, let me continue with this part here.
If you can go to that Tampa Bay Times with the illustration about how much real estate they own, and what is the vision?
Is the vision to be a country?
Is the vision to be its own society?
Because this is Tampa Bay Times.
Okay.
I mean, it doesn't get worse than your own local paper writing about you, right?
And it says clear takeover, how Scientology, its downtown clearwater footprint in three years.
Okay?
So go for it.
This is in three years, not 50 years, three years.
Go for it.
Okay, so that's one.
Okay.
Go up.
Then it grows into a couple right there.
They keep buying, picking up, keep going, keep going.
They keep buying up all the real estate.
Keep going.
Keep going.
They're buying all that real estate.
Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
Timeline.
Keep going.
That's all that's left.
That's all that's left in that community.
They've bought pretty much every single piece of land and property in Clearwater.
So what is the vision?
Is his solution to say, I think internationally we can have momentum because people are starting to figure this out.
So let's have a massive community that we build it here, similar to, let's just say, certain churches did it in, you know, in Salt Lake City, or some churches that the Vatican.
Really, more of a matter of view.
Is that kind of what his strategy is?
What's the vision of the church?
Okay, there's a few answers to this.
One, yes.
It is the vision that Clearwater and Scientology announced this in 2000, I think it was, to become the first Scientology city on earth, Clearwater.
And this is pursuant to Hubbard's objective of bringing the governments and society into complete compliance with the aims and policies of Scientology.
This is what he said.
Clearwater is the microcosm of a bigger thrust of Scientology under the control of David Miscavige.
And this goes back also in part to the fact that Scientology is tax exempt.
Because you cannot, as an exempt organization, accumulate liquid wealth and not spend it on anything.
Because the theory of exemption is that you are providing services that the government would otherwise have to provide.
So you have to provide some sort of a public benefit.
If you're just raking in millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars and not doing anything with it, you're outside of the scope of what should be an exempt organization.
But if you are purchasing property to provide service to your congregation, the IRS is prohibited, effectively, from looking behind any of those transactions and going, well, you don't really need that building.
You don't really need this one because that would be making, you know, impermissible under the First Amendment encroachment of government into the policies and practices of a religion.
So the genius of this is Scientology under Miscavige has bought Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property.
That remains on the asset sheet of Scientology, so it's not like disappearing anywhere.
Because ultimately, what reflects, according to Hubbard, the success of Scientology is its total assets.
That is the measure of success of Scientology, the total assets, cash, gold, bank accounts, properties, real property, all of that accumulated is kept track of to the dollar every single week.
And these property assets have become like the new Scientology has become a real estate empire.
And Clearwater is sort of the as Scientology shrinks in numbers and influence around the world, which is certainly happening, and that is happening primarily due to the internet and the proliferation of media coverage that has now occurred about what really goes on in Scientology.
It is consolidating at its, quote, spiritual headquarters in Clearwater, Florida.
And Tracy McManus, the reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, has been doing a magnificent job of tracking exactly what's going on because a lot of those properties are being purchased now by shady LLCs that are really just Scientology fronts or Scientologists who are controlled by.
If you're a Scientologist in downtown Clearwater and you buy a property and Scientology David Miscavitch tells you, okay, sell it to us, you're selling it.
No, no, so by the way, this goes back again, let me be the devil's advocate.
Yes.
This takes me to when Walt Disney wanted to buy all the land in Orlando and nobody would sell it to him because they didn't want him to build a theme park.
And he went and bought all the land through other people's LLC.
And then eventually years later, they found that it was really him that was buying up everything.
And then he built Disney, right?
Now, the Catholic Church has done this.
Mormonism has done this.
Muslims have done this.
I can give you companies who have done this.
Certain people don't want a certain individual of power to move into their communities.
They don't allow it to happen.
You know, a Jeff Bezos wanted to move into New York and they wanted to buy all this land and AOC and others didn't want it.
They pushed him out.
He went elsewhere to somebody, a Jeff Bezos, isn't L. Ron Hubbard or a Miscavit.
So I understand what they're doing.
That still doesn't bother me.
Now, Tracy, who's writing about all this stuff, who's local, is Tracy feeling safe to expose all this stuff?
How is she getting away with them not targeting her, her family, going after her hardcore?
Because she probably doesn't have the, doesn't feel like she's in a safe situation if she's constantly exposing them.
I would agree with you.
She's got courage.
And there are a number of people in the world these days that have the balls to say, I don't give a shit what your reputation is.
I don't care whether you're going to threaten me or whether you're going to follow me or you're going to steal my garbage or you're going to put up cameras or you're going to go to my family or whatever.
I believe I have an obligation to do the right thing.
And she happens to be one of those people, as do you, as did Megan Shelley when she put me on her show despite the threats.
While other media, big media, are still cowed by Scientology and the threats that they get and the worry that the producers are going to be followed home, et cetera, et cetera.
The difference between Walt Disney or Amazon or any of these other examples, maybe not any, maybe the Vatican is a little different.
But generally, the assumption is that the organization that is conducting those sort of activities to acquire property and build something that they want to build or create a distribution warehouse for Amazon or whatever, that those companies aren't inherently hurting people.
Now, everybody could disagree about whether Amazon is good, bad, whether Walt Disney and Disney World is good or bad.
There's obviously things that are bad about everything.
But in my view, and certainly the view of Tracy and a lot of other people, the inherent problem with Scientology is not its simple beliefs about the reactive mind or Xenu or anything.
It is the fact that it is an organization that has a dedicated arm and branch that only works on destroying people they don't like and seeking to destroy people they don't like and spends tax-free, tax-exempt money on doing so.
That is what's wrong, and that's what has to be ended.
So let me push back again.
Yeah, go ahead.
So here's my pushback.
So somebody may say, again, the question I'm trying to find out is what do they see themselves at?
Is it a religion?
Is it a government?
Is it a country?
What do they view themselves as?
Because somebody on the inside there may say, what are you talking about?
The government's been doing this for the longest time.
A political party just targets one political side and just goes and raids them constantly.
What is the difference between what the government gets to do versus what I'm able to do?
And if somebody wants to come after us, we're going to go after them.
The mob did this.
The government does this.
Churches do this.
Sports teams do it.
Media company do it.
You know, somebody that leaves one place to states, when a talent leaves to another place, they go and demonize this person of how bad of a person they are.
And, hey, keep Tesla spots open in Northern California.
If you don't, I'm going to move to Austin.
Screw you.
I'm moving to Austin.
Let's demonize who Elon Musk is.
What a bad person he is.
What a bad, terrible.
This is very normal.
And when I tell you normal, I don't mean it that it's healthy.
All I mean it is the fact that a lot of other organizations use these manipulative tactics to do that.
But here's the question.
The question I got is, does Ms. Scavidge, does the church of Scientology view them as a country?
Do they view them as themselves as a church?
Do they view themselves as their own society, a secret society?
How do they really view themselves?
Because the way they view themselves will dictate why they're making the moves that they're making.
They view themselves as a bubble, a world of Scientology that is the only place that has all of the answers and that everything outside of that world is uninformed or ignorant or evil.
And that ultimately Scientology must take over the rest of society, the rest of the world, in order to save it from itself.
And you're going to say, Patrick, yep, that's no different than the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist people or the this.
And that's true.
It's not.
It's not different than that.
But they pretend that that's not the case.
But the truth of the matter is Scientology wants to take over the governments of all the world.
Hubbard said the objective of the Office of Special Affairs is to bring the governments and societies of the world into complete compliance with the aims and policies of Scientology.
They want to be everything.
They don't just want to be the city of Clearwater or control the city of Clearwater.
you think they want to be everything like worldwide but is it yes absolutely but the But the membership has been declining, though.
Membership isn't growing.
What they want and what they tell themselves they're accomplishing and what reality is is two very different things.
I mean, you will hear Scientologists say, we're changing the world.
We're bringing education to the countries of South America.
We're doing this.
We're saving people here.
We're saving people there.
And it's the internal bullshit PR that they have fed propaganda of we found a guy in Zimbabwe who said blah, blah, and that gets translated into the internal pitch that we've got Hubbard tech in all schools in Zimbabwe.
And Scientologists buy that shit.
You know where this now takes me to?
Where this now takes me to is any church ought to encourage debate, right?
Anybody, any political, any family ought to encourage their kids to debate, right?
Go debate and find a better argument than the one I got.
Science is supposed to be debate.
Everything's supposed to be debate, right?
Who's the person two and a half years ago, in the last two and a half years, that has encouraged people that you can't debate scientists anymore because it's a fact?
Who's that guy?
What's the guy's name?
Fauci?
Fauci, right?
Some similarity between Fauci and Miscavige on where you were going with the whole, you know, height situation.
But Fauci, Fauci is a guy that is also driven by power where eventually it was my way or the highway.
You don't question science, therefore you don't question me, right?
But this is America.
That doesn't work.
Americans are ones that like to question and they want to have the freedom of speech to say, well, I don't know about this and I don't know about that and I don't know about this.
And the moment people in America were silenced, if they disagreed, that didn't sit well with a lot of Americans because that's in our DNA.
Now, is the DNA of Scientology to not question anything and just to follow?
Is that the DNA of a good loyal member?
Or is a loyal member one that says, well, what about this?
And why do we do this?
And why does this work out?
Are you not supposed to question anything in Scientology?
Nothing.
Perfect.
Never.
Then here's the point.
I got a book here that's called From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp.
I don't know if you've read it or not.
I have not.
So would you say the current model is a totalitarian dictatorship type of a model?
Absolutely.
Okay, so let me read this to you.
So this is the last topic.
We can have a few other things we can talk about, but I want to wrap it up on this.
So when it comes down to power, he explains it in this chapter.
He tells a story.
He says, in the feudal state of Chuan, an old man, Chu, an old man survived by keeping monkeys in his service.
The people of Chu called him Ju Gong, which is monkey master, okay?
Which, hey, the book, the movie, The Master with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Walking Phoenix, you know exactly what movie that is.
Very weird movie.
Very well done.
And some people said that movie was towards L. Ron Hubbard.
A lot of people said that's exactly what it was.
Each morning, the old man would assemble the monkeys in this courtyard and order the eldest one to lead the others to the mountains to gather fruits from the bushes and trees.
Was the rule that each monkey had to give one-tenth of his collection to the old man?
Those who failed to do so would be ruthlessly flogged.
All the monkeys suffered bitterly, but dared not complain.
One day, a small monkey asked the other monkey, did the old man plant all the fruit trees and bushes?
The other said, no, they grew naturally.
The small monkey further asked, Can't we take the fruits without the old man's permission?
The others replied, Yes, we all can.
The small monkey continued, then why should we depend on the old man?
Why must we all serve him?
Before the small monkey was able to finish his statement, all the monkeys suddenly became enlightened and awakened.
On the same night, watching that old man had fall asleep, the monkeys tore down all of the barricades and the stockade in which they were confined and destroyed the stockade entirely.
They also took the fruits of the old man, had in storage, brought it all to the woods, and never returned.
The old man finally died of starvation.
Some men in the world rule their people by tricks and not by righteous principles.
Aren't they just like the monkey master?
Are they not aware of the muddle headedness?
As soon as people become enlightened, their tricks no longer work, right?
And then he continues to say, totalitarian power is power strong only if it does not have to be used often.
If totalitarian power must be used at all times against the entire population, it is unlikely to remain powerful for too long, since totalitarian regimes require more power for dealing with their subjects than do their other types of government.
Such regimes stand in greater need of widespread and dependable compliance habits amongst their people.
More than that, they have to be able to count on the active support of at least significant parts of the population in case of need.
And then he wraps it up with what Nicola Machiavelli said, which we mentioned earlier.
He said, and he argued this in the Prince, which is, this is why I don't think his strategy works.
I think he's getting in his own way of having any kind of a shot of turning this into a real religion that spreads.
Who has the public as a whole life of his enemy can never make himself secure?
The greater his cruelty, the greater his cruelty, the weaker does his regime become.
And I've spoken to a lot of people, and I sit there and I've watched this Ted Koppel interview with him multiple times.
And I know people like that.
And I know people like that in sales, you know, that have done very, very well for themselves.
I've done very, very well for myself in sales.
If you're able to get the other party to win and you win, eventually keep doing business together, eventually everybody wins.
They make money, you make money.
I remember one time I'm talking to this Jewish guy who had dealerships, was 35 years old.
Show me $6 million of cash.
And I've never seen that kind of money before at 21.
I said, how the hell do you have $6 million of cash?
That's crazy.
He says, let me tell you one thing about Jews on why most Jews have money.
When one Jew makes money, five Jews make money.
We make money together.
He said, capitalism, if you really want to make a lot of money, as long as everybody around you makes money and you make money, you're going to be fine.
If you're the only person that makes money and people around you don't make money, you're not going to be fine, right?
His model, when Mark Headley says he's making 50 bucks a month or $32 a month, whatever the number was, and he's breaking it out in over 16 years, he only made whatever, the 26,000, I don't remember what the number, he said.
This model, if it continues this way, it's just a matter of time before it falls apart.
Correct.
Doesn't it?
Yes, correct.
So what would be the tipping point for it to fall apart?
I think the tipping point that would rapidly make it fall apart would be if the IRS revoked the exempt status of Scientology.
Not because of the revenue that it potentially generates, but because of the oversight.
Once you become a religious exempt organization, there is virtually no government oversight and no transparency to what is happening with the finances.
You don't have to report anything to anybody.
If Scientologists who are handing over large amounts of money to Scientology found out that that money was not actually being spent for the things that they are being told it is being spent on, and instead found out that it was being spent on hiring endless numbers of private investigators and lawyers to send threat letters to the media and people to create ugly websites and shoot videos,
smear videos, that would result in a lot.
It's so contradictory to what Scientology tells the people who are giving them their support and money.
It would be the biggest sort of shocking expose that you could have happen in Scientology.
The on-high authority of Scientology, David Miscavitch, who stands on stage and tells us all that Scientology is helping here and doing this and accomplishing this objective and all of these things, and that that is, in fact, bullshit, that would be a breaking point for Scientology.
Rumors, I know you wrote something about John Travolta, you know, kissing a male masseur and, you know, a whole story about that, you know, and to me, I don't think that's a big deal.
You know, that's, it's like, okay, who cares?
You're in Hollywood.
If you're in Hollywood, I've heard a lot of stranger stories than John Travolta doing that.
But there's stories about John, a year ago, a story came out.
I don't know exactly what the headline was, that Travolta's thinking about stepping away from the church.
Okay, that was one.
Then over the years, you know, you've heard stories about how strong Tom Cruise used to be on selling Scientology and his interviews over the years have kind of mellowed out a little bit.
He's no longer that aggressive about recruiting it.
Is that because behind closed doors, they're just saying, hey, don't bring too much attention to it?
Or is that because Hollywood agents are saying it's not helping out your career?
Or is that because they're kind of like, well, this was great.
It was life-changing.
But I'm kind of moving.
I'm no longer going to be the spokesperson like I once was.
Well, I don't think either of them are offering themselves up as the spokesperson that they once were.
But I don't think that that is an indicator that they are no longer devoted Scientologists.
I think Tom Cruise got a lot of pressure from movie studios to, hey, you're supposed to be out there promoting movies, not promoting Scientology.
And, you know, I talk about that in the book and his former publicist, Pat Kingsley, and what happened when she was gone.
And that was her pitch to him.
You shouldn't be promoting Scientology.
The movie studios are paying you a lot of money and these junkets that they put on are to promote the movie, not your damn religion.
That's not what people come here for.
But I will say that it has become increasingly difficult for a Tom Cruise or a John Travolta to promote Scientology because if they are willing to talk about it, there are a lot of questions that they can't answer that journalists now know and understand from the exposure that has happened over the last 10 years.
And that makes it a very, very difficult thing for them to do.
To the point where Cruz apparently at this point requires reporters on any movie press junkets that they will not ask him about Scientology and bans certain people who have done Scientology exposés in the media from attending his press junkets.
Still till today?
To today.
And that's why you don't hear him talking about it and why you hear the mealy mouth sort of responses whenever this is brought up.
Like Elizabeth Moss has done a few interviews and people ask her and she's like, well, you know, it's helped me.
And, you know, I, you know, this is not a subject that I should really, I'm not here to talk about that.
I'm here to talk about handmaid's tale.
And, you know, the idea of going out and saying, rah-rah, Scientology has made my career is no longer, no longer a viable thing for them to do.
Where's the Celebrity Center, by the way?
In Los Angeles, in Hollywood.
And correct me if I, we constantly reference Tom Cruise and whoever he's been married to at the time, you know, Katie Holmes, Nicole Kidman, Mimi Rogers.
I get it.
They're all affiliated with him.
Even Travolta, Respect.
I think you even said Grant Cardone is a Scientologist.
Yep.
But how many other major names have joined Scientology in the last decade?
None.
Zero.
Not a one.
The only person who has emerged as a major name in the last decade is Elizabeth Moss.
But she was raised as Scientologist.
Yeah, I'm not even familiar with who that is.
She's the star of Handmaid's Tale.
All right.
But also, I just want to make another point, Patrick, about the John Travolta thing.
The reason I put that in the book was not because I'm trying to expose John Travolta as being gay or bisexual or anything.
It's because I'm saying that the reason that he will not come out and publicly say anything about it is because of Scientology.
There is absolutely no stigma these days to a movie star coming out and saying, I'm gay or I'm bisexual or I'm this or I'm that.
It's like it just is irrelevant to the world at large.
But to John Travolta, I say in there, I think he would rather be coming out and just admitting to his sexuality, whatever that may be.
But because Scientology is so anti-gay and because they believe that he should be cured of his gayness through auditing, he can't do it.
That's a different point of view of why not coming out, whether you're gay or bisexual.
But, you know, the fact that Hollywood is telling Tom, you're here to promote your movies, not Scientology, doesn't that kind of say that Hollywood is officially taking precedent over the Church of Scientology, that he's more loyal to his career than Scientology?
Or more loyal to the money than Scientology.
Yeah, it does.
And I think that there has been a definite shift.
I don't see Tom Cruise being a guy that's obsessed with money.
And I know you and I know.
No, let me explain to you why.
I don't.
And I think money's attracted to him.
I don't think he's attracted to money.
I think he's attracted to being the best at what he does.
Since 40 years old, that guy wanted to be an actor.
Tom Cruise, since 40.
It's not like he's all of a sudden at 16 years old.
He said, I'm going to go be an actor.
Since 40 years old, the guy wanted to be an actor.
And then When you become mission impossible, when you become Top Gun, Days of Thunder, you know, 4th of July, when, you know, Last Samurai, when you produce these types of, you know, movies, and by the way, I'm missing 50 other great flicks that he's been a part of, right?
The market's going to pay you.
You know, the market's going to pay.
I don't know how much money he made on Top Gun.
Rumor has it 200 million, 300 million.
I don't know the exact number.
He got paid and well deserved because the movie did over a billion dollars.
But I don't know if it would be money because at that point, like you said in the clip where you said, people can't, you can't tell Tom Cruise what to do.
I don't think anybody can tell Tom Cruise what to do, right?
One person can.
Except David Miscavige.
Well, but I think he's also lost it because if he's no longer talking about Scientology and he's talking about movies, because now David officially also can't tell him what to do, either David's getting softer or Tom's kind of becoming a little bit more to say, I'm going to do my career thing.
One of the two is taking place.
Yeah, well, I'm not there anymore, so I can't exactly say I believe that Tom Cruise has a very, very strong interest in money.
But I will also say that it's a pretty hard position now for David Miscavige to insist that Tom Cruise go out and do interviews about Scientology.
Why?
Because David Miscavich won't.
The leader of Scientology will not allow himself to even be put in a position where a reporter may have access to him to ask him a question off the cuff.
He hides.
Let alone being unwilling to go do 60 minutes or come and sit here.
He would never do that.
How's he going to tell Tom Cruise that you need to?
How is he going to tell Tom Cruise that you need to?
Well, he has for many years that he's promoted it, right?
Because if the strategy was to get celebrities, is the whole story about the David Beckham, you know, football field, all that, is that true that the Church of Scientology built a football field and said is that true?
Yes.
Do you mind sharing that story?
I wrote about it in the book.
When Tom Cruise became buddies with David Beckham and Victoria and started attending football games in Madrid and etc., etc.
I can't even remember all the whole story.
Miscavige had a football pitch built at the Gold Base property.
And this was not just, you know, we painted some lines on the grass out on a field and put up a couple of goals.
No, the field was leveled and laid with perfect turf and irrigation and everything.
And a person was assigned full-time to care for the soccer field, a Sea Org member.
Nobody played on it.
It was there because Tom, who had come fairly frequently to that property, lived there, partaken in services there with Nicole.
Tom had a plan to get David Beckham to come to that property.
There were a lot of people that came and have been brought through the auspices of Tom Cruise to that gold property to be pitched Scientology.
Ron Howard was one of them when he was doing Firing Away.
Ron Howard came to the property and was wind and dined and let's show you around and tell you how wonderful Scientology is.
That part of the celebrity world of Scientology is not appealing to the masses, but using the lines of influence that those people have to seek to get other people involved.
Steven Spielberg, I write about that in the book too.
Anyone who and governments, I mean, Tom Cruise, I flew to London with David Miscavige and Tom Cruise to go visit the specially designated representatives of Tony Blair's government to seek to get tax-exempt status for the Church of Scientology in the United Kingdom.
And that was set up by Tom Cruise contacting Tony Blair.
So these celebrities, the big celebrities, John Travolta went to visit the State Department to complain about the treatment of Scientology in Germany.
These people are used to solve problems and seek to create more influence for Scientology and inveil itself into important parts of the world.
Last thing here, can you pull up the clip with Tommy Davis?
Pull up the clip with Tommy Davis.
Did Tommy Davis do what you would do?
Were you guys both same positions?
Is it similar things you would do?
Yes, Tommy Davis effectively replaced me.
Tommy Davis replaced you.
And when I was put in the hole, he was brought in to be the spokesperson for Scientology.
I want you to see this.
Here's John Sweeney from BBC trying to talk to John Sweeney.
And the way John Sweeney reacts is just, I mean, you just have to watch this.
I thought it was Tom Cruise.
Now, watch this.
Play the one I just sent you right now, the other one.
Play this one out here.
It's very interesting.
And by the way, this angle is not fair because there's a better one that shows the angle of Tommy Davis.
But I just want you to watch this.
Now, this is John Sweeney losing it.
Press play.
I'm not an expert on Brain McCree.
And when asked in that case why he kept making the accusation, Sweeney's reaction was unexpected to say the least.
You did not hear all record of the NW.
Do you understand?
Do you understand?
You are closing the second half of the NW.
The first half.
Pause this.
What's going on here?
The feud between the two?
Because to me, it looks like, you know, John got under Tommy's skin first and then second time around, because you don't see who's around.
There's a bunch of Scientologists around with cameras on the Tommy.
Yeah, I saw you.
You're there as well.
You're standing to his right.
This is the reporter.
Yeah, this is from BBC.
And he's right there.
Tommy and him are right there.
I made that video.
This video with that narration, I made that video.
Wow.
I talk about this at some length in the book.
Tommy Davis told David Miscavitch, I will get Sweeney.
I will cause him to lose it.
And there is a lot that goes on before this particular clip of taking him through this thing called the Industry of Death exhibit about psychiatry in Los Angeles, which in and of itself is insane.
But Tommy Davis had spent the entire day up to that point needling John Sweeney.
Needle, calling him names, not allowing him to finish his questions, like just things that were being done to get him agitated.
And eventually he lost it.
And that's a pretty infamous thing that happened.
Sweeney has still not lived it down to this day.
And we made great hay out of that.
But I write in the book about exactly what happened and how this was carried out.
And it was being done specifically.
Tommy Davis was sending texts back and forth to David Miscavige while this was going on saying, you know, I'm doing this.
I'm going to get him.
I'm going to pull this off.
I'm going to rip him, tear him a dozen new assholes.
And it's tough to do, a dozen.
Yeah, whatever.
But meanwhile, John Sweeney had been repeatedly asking, we would like to have an interview with Mr. Miscavige.
And the response was always, he's too busy.
He doesn't know anything about you people.
He's like the, you know, it's like you asking for an interview with the Pope.
You know, you're not even rising to his level of consciousness.
And while that's happening, there's text messages coming in constantly to Tommy about this is what you need to do next.
Here's what you need to do next.
And Tommy made a big mistake and said that he subsequent to this, there was a sort of a moment of calm and Sweeney says, you know, Tommy, I want to have an interview with David Miscavitch.
What's happening with that?
And he said, I'll never, you can never have an interview with Miscavitch.
I talk to him every day and you're not going to get an interview.
And Tommy Davis realized what a big fuck up that was to tell John Sweeney that he talks to him all the time.
And in fact, that night, Tommy Davis took off and drove to Las Vegas and hid at the Wynne Hotel.
He abandoned his position because he knew what was coming.
And that is how I ended up in London.
I talk about that in there because John Sweeney went back to London.
John Travolta was doing the premiere of Wild Hogs at Piccadilly Circus.
Miscavige was scared that John Sweeney would get into the press junket and ask John Travolta embarrassing or questions that he couldn't answer.
So I was put on a plane to London to go deal with John Sweeney and warn John about what was coming, which is where this incident comes of the masseuse because I happened to be in John's suite at night, talking to him and whatever.
That's very, very strange to me.
But, you know, the one question that gives them a lot of credibility is if it's such a bad organization, if it is, you know, then how come IRS hasn't revoked their tax status?
How come the FBI hasn't, if the FBI can raid Mar-a-Lago and get access to papers and stuff like that, and they can go to all these, who was the congressman we had on, Scott Scott Perry, and they went to his door in August and, hey, hand us your phone and has all the text messages communication.
If this organization is so bad, how come the government's not worried about them?
Well, they are.
I mean, you can't say that the government is not worried about them.
Are they?
And have they acted?
There is a big problem that the government has acting against Scientology or two big problems.
One, the money that they have to hire lawyers that will mean it will drag on forever.
And two, the fact that they hide behind the First Amendment.
I talk in the book about when we were trying to get exemption from the IRS and the impact that Waco had on governments and agencies being willing to go after even fringe, kooky, you know, crazy religious organizations and how badly they got burned and how that had an impact on their willingness to grant exempt status to Scientology.
And, you know, these factors have been used by Scientology very smartly to prevent things when the IRS, when the FBI was doing an investigation in Los Angeles in 2009,
2010 into human trafficking, they went and hired the former AUS attorney for the Southern District of California who had left and went and schmoozed and said, you know, you don't want to get involved in this sort of case with Scientology.
And every government agency has to make decisions and particularly law enforcement has to make decisions about where do they devote their resources.
Are they going to go after the drug smugglers or are they going to go after the, quote, religion?
Are they going?
And a lot of it has to do with what is politically expedient, what's going to look good in the media.
And you talk about Mar-a-Lago or whatever.
Those decisions get made with a lot of other factors outside of just, is this something that justice should be served with or not?
There are political, financial, PR, all these agencies have all these factors that go into this.
And unfortunately, I mean, I keep saying every, you know, Lear and I have said a hundred times, when will the government finally act?
I don't know.
10 seconds.
Is this a true quote by L. Ron Hubbard?
He says, you don't get rich writing science fiction.
If you want to get rich, you start a religion.
Is that an actual quote?
There is some dispute about it, but I believe that it is.
Like, there's always these disputes about these things.
Some person says it is and some person says it isn't.
But, you know, it matches.
It matches what happened.
Yeah, that's my point.
So fascinating interview.
Appreciate you for coming out.
Book right now if you haven't ordered it.
If you look at Amazon right now, it's number one bestseller.
The Audible version, the hard book, you know, the hardcover, it's top three in the topic of Scientology.
Fourth one is Leah Romeni, and then even fifth one, sixth one is Dianetics.
So all their four books are ahead of Dianetics.
But a billion years, if you haven't ordered it, if you want to learn more about what's going on in this organization, if you had one point was approached and you want to learn more about it, we're going to put the link in the description as well as in the chat for you guys to go order it.
Mike, once again, thank you for coming out.
And for me, I've been around this environment for a while.
I judge people by my experience with them.
I've never been on the inside.
I've sat down with you and Mark Headley, both of you, C organization.
He did not move up at the levels that you did.
He was at a different place.
But there are too many people who are on the inside that are coming out sharing similar stories.
And it's deeply concerning to the average person that's not on the inside that says, hey, you may want to do your own due diligence before learning about it.
And, you know, question it all.
I think to me, that's the biggest thing with us and our family and what we do in business is question, question, question.
That's how you get to the truth.
But appreciate you for doing that, man.
Truly.
Appreciate you for coming out.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure.
Pleasure.
So, Tyler, are we doing anything else this week or this is it?
