Charting the Stormy Voyage of Scientology: Jon Atack's Revelations and the Quest to Illuminate Hidden Truths - Scientology Stories #38

Embarking on a voyage through the stormy seas of Scientology, we're joined by author Jon Atack to navigate the tumultuous history of the Church and dissect the motivations that led him to write "A Piece of Blue Sky." Casting off from the harbor of belief, Jon recounts the backlash of his departure from Scientology, charting a course through the murky waters of ethics files and auditing sessions. Our collaboration unearths the hypnotic anchors within Scientology's practices, as we shine a beacon on the alarming insights from John's research and his paper "Never Believe a Hypnotist."

Sailing through Scientology's controversial waters, our conversation buoys up personal tales entwined with the Church's storied past. We share the laughter and absurdity that surface when chaos becomes the norm, while also acknowledging the gravity of the Church's influence on its members. Jon's odyssey from believer to questioner elucidates the complex methods employed by the Church to control the narrative around L. Ron Hubbard's enigmatic legacy. We unravel the fear of litigation that shrouds the industry, revealing the relentless determination required to publish stories that scrutinize Scientology.

As our journey reaches its haven, we cast light on the formidable challenge of recovering from Scientology's grasp. We explore the intricate control mechanisms employed by the Church and affirm the imperative of equipping members with comprehensive information to reassess their beliefs. With the curtains pulled back on Golden Era Productions, we expose the ethical quandaries of manipulating Hubbard's spoken and written word. Our expedition concludes by inviting you to add your voice to this critical dialogue, steering the conversation toward the hidden assets and digital fortifications of the Church, and the collective strength found in shared experiences and open discussions.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Welcome back to the channel. Thanks for joining us. Today. We've got another episode of Scientology Stories. I'm your host, mark Headley, and today's guest. We have a very special guest today, an author, john Atec Hi.

Speaker 2: 0:32

Mark.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Hey, john, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2: 0:35

Yeah, a real pleasure. And, as we said, we somehow we've not met before.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Yeah, we've never actually spoken or met before until this video right here. It was very much, and John wrote a book. It was it in 19,. When did your book come out?

Speaker 2: 0:55

1990? The first year, the first edition was 1990.

Speaker 1: 0:59

Yeah, so a piece of blue sky in 1990. I was just in the Sea Org. I had just joined the Sea Org in 1989. So I had been in the Sea Org a year when that book came out and and you got into Scientology, I think in the early 70s 74.

Speaker 2: 1:18

December 74.

Speaker 1: 1:20

There you go, so you were in Scientology a year after I was born. So your, your Scientology time periods predate mine pretty much exactly by that amount of decades. And then we're kind of all coming for full circle these days back in the in the future.

Speaker 2: 1:43

I mean when I was, you know, first interviewing people to write what is now? Let's sell these people a piece of blue sky. I was meeting people who got involved in 1950. Yeah, and then you got the generation of the 60s and and I'm the 70s, and it just keeps on going and just gets worse and worse.

Speaker 1: 2:06

It's wild because there's so many decades. I mean some for those who don't. Who those are just watching this, and maybe this is your first video you've watched on our channel or on john's channel. Scientology has been up to nonsense for about 70 years, 70 decades or seven decades. They've been up to the nonsense that is Scientology. So there have been different, a series of whistleblowers over the decades for that time and very few of these people have sustained consistent whistleblowing that into.

Speaker 1: 2:48

Some people come and go some people are there was yeah, some people are there for a hot minute and then as soon as they blow the whistle, they disappear. Or Scientology gets to them, or it's wild. The thing I wanted to ask you was so you were in. You were in Scientology starting in 1974, you wrote your book in 1990. And the thing that always is curious to me is why did you write the book? Like what, like what you were? Obviously you knew they were up to no good, but what possessed you or what incentivized you to say I've got to write a book?

Speaker 2: 3:35

I just found out too much information that that we we hadn't been told these things. You know the my first day out was October, the 18th 1983. And I've been asked three days before to host a meeting at the Crown Hotel in East Grinstead which would be the first meeting of defecting Scientologists in the UK ever. And there was this character called Captain Bill who was going to be there and I'd never heard a Captain Bill. And I got to the door and there were two members of what was then the Guardians office standing by the Dural Hotel, smiling and taking our names down and the harassment began immediately.

Speaker 2: 4:19

My incentive initially I left the mother cult, whatever the church Scientology might be, that of course, as you and I know, it doesn't actually exist. It's hundreds of corporations that operate in that fictitious name. But I really believed in Scientology. I'd done OT levels, the upper levels through to five, so I'd done 25 of the then 27 available levels of Scientology. I'd trained as an auditor, done six courses doing that. I'd done the data series evaluators course you know she's a big one and I really believed. I really believed I'd never been on staff, I'd never been a living member, I had no idea what was happening and I think that was the thing that got me. Within a few months of leaving, I found myself in the middle, the very center of the independent movement in the UK, and I stopped believing and the harassment came on down, and we didn't know about this. So about the harassment, yeah exactly.

Speaker 1: 5:27

You thought everything was the way it was and then, when you no longer thought or no longer believed what Scientology was telling you, that's when the harass like once you started kind of saying to other people oh you know, there's this, this is something that this is not really the way it is. It's really this way Is that when they started, the guardians office started to kind of dig their claws in?

Speaker 2: 5:51

It started on the first day as soon as we said we were going to be meeting. There are about 60 people there they started issuing suppressive person declares the next day.

Speaker 1: 6:03

Just for meeting.

Speaker 2: 6:04

Yeah for having been there, and took them a few months to get to mine because my ethics file was only this thick. You know they were commendations. In the end I was declared suppressive for having given an auditing session without a case supervisor directive.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Okay. So for those of you who are listening or those of you are watching, signed, well, first of all, the ethics file. Whenever you do anything in Scientology, good or bad, if there's any reports or any documentations on it that it goes into your file. Everybody's got a file. They call it an ethics file in Scientology and I call it a dossier, absolutely Intelligent. Yeah, they're keeping track of you and any information on you they're gathering and those files. Now, these days, those files are all being digitized so they can share and access that information internationally instantly.

Speaker 1: 7:06

But, in addition to the ethics file in Scientology, if you're doing an auditing or a counseling session, it has to be within the confines of the Scientology business setup. So you have to have all these pieces in place. And also, scientology needs to get paid. So if you're doing it out of that and outside of their control, they're obviously not getting any money and they also can't control what's happening and they can't gather any information that's obtained in these counseling sessions. So, and that's what, and that essentially, is what the biggest threat to Scientology by what is called the independent movement. So there's a lot of people that believe in Scientology, but they don't want to play by Scientology's rules in terms of the business and the Intel gathering on all that stuff, but they like the technologies or the procedures or the therapies, and so they'll try to do that outside of the confines of Scientology. So you were declared because you had a session without it being a case supervisor.

Speaker 2: 8:13

Yeah, and the reality was that I'd actually phoned St Hill to talk to a case supervisor before giving a session to a friend who was ill, and I'd been given a directive over the phone. It was because it wasn't written down and that was all they could find in nine years of membership.

Speaker 1: 8:30

So you know it was really just a witch hunt and that's what they figured out. That's what they were like okay, we've got this, we can use this to discredit him or to, kind of, when you're, when you're a Scientologist and you get a declare, it's sort of just like a black, it's like a burn notice or a black mark against you. To anyone who knows you in that realm, they just say this guy's bad.

Speaker 2: 8:56

Yeah, you're being told that you're an anti-social personality, the psychiatric term for a psychopath, and the term used by Hubbard for his suppressive person declares and I mean I it was realizing what had actually been involved in that. I thought I was involved in an organization that was going to end war, criminality and insanity, and I was actually involved in an insane criminal organization that had declared war on me and that gave me the resolution. I think that's something that people don't necessarily understand. It said that only 6% of people will continue with a complaint. 94% of people will fall away if you can just hold them off for long enough.

Speaker 2: 9:41

But there are some of us who are born stubborn and in fact there's a run Hubbard story called. One was stubborn and I am that one and I just realized that I had, if you like, given all of my positive energy to this group for nine years, or much of my positive energy to it and all of my and yeah, it was actually destroying people's lives. So it was through the looking glass. It was realizing this is the opposite of what it claims to be. It's not liberating people, that's enslaving them. And I just got curious that you know that this story finding you know.

Speaker 2: 10:17

So for the book there are, 150 people were consulted one way or another, whether it was a book they'd written or an article or testimony they've given or interviews. That I did and I did a lot of interviews in the US and in the UK. And putting all of that together and saying, well, there's no history of this group and apart from Janet Reitman's kind of abbreviated version of my work, I'm afraid you know she does say it chapters one through seven, largely based upon a piece of blue sky or a bare faced Messiah. And of course bare faced Messiah was based on blue sky. I was the researcher for it and he hadn't Russell had the manuscript before he started.

Speaker 1: 10:59

And Russell, and you're talking about bare faced Messiah, which was written by Russell Miller and it had come out in, I want to say, in the late 80s, right?

Speaker 2: 11:08

It came out in late 87. Yeah, originally. And then Henry Holt suspended publication in the US because they were frightened of what might happen in the courts.

Speaker 1: 11:22

Based on Scientology's threats and and filing lawsuits and trying to keep this you know, before I forget, didn't Russell write the forward to your book? He did, yes.

Speaker 2: 11:35

Okay, and I mean I've got the print out of blue sky, which was then called Hubbard, through the looking glass that I gave to him, and I've got his annotated version of it, where he takes my chapter titles and things like that, but I would say about half of the material in bare faced Messiah, which is it's not only a great book, what a great title, you know bare faced.

Speaker 2: 11:58

Messiah, but about half the material in there came directly from me. I was the expert witness for it, as well as the all of the documents that were questioned by the cult had come from me. Yes, and it was. It was kind of the way it felt at the time was like if you're interested in some historical figure, let's say, and you say Henry the eighth or Abraham Lincoln, and you had the chance now to interview their retinue, the people who were around them, and that was what I had.

Speaker 2: 12:30

I interviewed so many people who had been right at the top of Scientology from its from its beginnings. I mean, I interviewed Don Rogers who was there, was on the board of the first Dynetic Foundation in April 1950. And he gave me the title. He said when we opened the doors to the first foundation, just before he opened it, hubbard turned to me and he said let's sell these people a piece of blue sky. Yes, and, and that's what's been happening ever since. Yeah, but I just felt outraged and I and a little solid myself, that I'd been part of this and I wanted to do something to make it clear to people what this organization is. And you know have tremendous respect for the autobiographical books and I I always recommend yours first, and they're, I think they're nearly 100 now, because it's funny, you know yeah, Sarah places in there.

Speaker 2: 13:26

you know, when the war is over event in 93, where one of the camera lenses has got apple juice on it, yeah, and the other one, the camera man's looking down Shelley, miss Gavage's cleavage, and you ended up, I believe, having to. There's a huge amount of money was spent just to put in a few minutes there and make it look real.

Speaker 1: 13:48

So the best the part for me, which was I love that you say that and thank you very much I'm flattered that you would say that I'm not in, by any means I do not. I don't usually refer to myself or call myself an author, but I did happen to write a book, but when I when I was writing it, I thought people think that this is like a deadly serious activity and this is all run a certain way and really, for being working there for so many years, it's basically like a bunch of high schoolers or middle schoolers, literally the people that are between 12 and 18 years old, running these organizations that don't have an education. It's all about, you know, personal politics and rumors and the got in the whisper web and it's it's not run efficiently or in any sort of smart way whatsoever and it's all being sort of commanded by this, this David Muscavige character, david Muscavige character, and I wanted people to understand that. No, this it's a madhouse where we work and it's not only is it a madhouse, it's comically a madhouse and and I wanted people to see that but also it's hard.

Speaker 1: 15:12

It's hard when you had, you know, 15 years of very heavy trauma. It's hard to tell that story and not find the the, the comedy in it, or not find, to not recognize the absurdity of it. And the absurdity is what's funny when you, when you start telling like this is actually what happened, you're like it's impossible, that's impossible that it happened. And then, as it unfolds, you're just like, oh, this is, this is crazy, but it's funny. It's so crazy that it's funny. But okay, so you, you said that you were talking about the autobiographical book.

Speaker 2: 15:54

Yeah, there are some. You know there are a bunch of really good good. You know I could sit here for five minutes listing, you know, Jefferson Hawkins and of course, janice Gillum Grady's books. Yeah, marjorie Wakefield, the Road to Zinu. That was an astonishing piece of work. So there's been a lot. You're going right back to the first one in 1951, a doctor's report on Dianetics by Dr Joe Winter, which is a fine book. Helen O'Brien, dianetics in Limbo. She was the head of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists and ran the Philadelphia Doctorate course and a book was never finally published but she left it with the Library of Congress and she kindly sent me a copy of it. Yeah, and so there are these really important, significant books.

Speaker 2: 16:48

I wanted to pull everything together and make a history and say this is chronologically what happened. I wanted to look at Hubbard's life. A couple of journalists had done it. There's a guy called James Feehlen in 1963, who's the first and should be sainted by those of us who've left Scientology, because he was the first person to point out that Hubbard was lying about everything. You know, his schooling, his expeditions, his war service. He was the first person to get there. But it seemed important to me to take the claims that Hubbard had made and show that he contradicted them, which I only came to realize after I'd left. But I gathered 22 published biographers Well, actually 21 published and one unpublished the Tomkins biographical notes, and no story is ever told the same way twice, you know. So he was either two, four or six when he became a blood brother of the Blackfoot people, the Pekuni, yeah, and of course they never had blood brothers, the tribal historians in 1990 in the LA Times, when we never had such a thing.

Speaker 2: 17:56

It's a Viking idea and her buddies at two years old I became a full blood brave, it's quite some. And that absurdity is the absurdity where I'll view. Speak that that you've got this Science fiction writer and he and he did that for a couple years this pulp writer, this adventure story writer who decides he's going to export this set of Lunatic ideas and that's difficult now for me coming back to it and going. It doesn't actually make sense any of it. Yeah, you know, when I finally decided I didn't believe it anymore, which is around the beginning of 1984, an appropriate year for it, I suppose that that I looked at it when you know, I don't have any body statements this this silly idea that you've got all of these clusters of little beings through your body Demons, dibs, gadons every literature has them.

Speaker 2: 18:54

It's that this is the worst kind of nonsense, and I, you know, I, I pretended, I went along with it and yeah, then in my last auditing sessions, which were outside of the the mother cult, I Just sat there and went no, I don't have any.

Speaker 2: 19:12

Other people might have them, but I haven't got any. And yeah, I felt so much better. In my last session I had a pts rundown and I'd never had one. Yeah, nine years and not had one. Can you imagine that? And I demanded this is the potential trouble source somebody who is troublesome to Scientology, and I'd never been considered that. And the idea is you're connected to a suppressive person. And so this really highly trained Auditor, I'd bulk up the word counselor. I don't think that Scientology is actually a form of counseling in any way, but we don't really have a I.

Speaker 1: 19:46

I say counseling to as a translation word.

Speaker 2: 19:50

Yeah, I do it.

Speaker 1: 19:51

It's not really. But yeah, when you say auditing, people are like, oh, there's like accountants involved. Yeah, it's well, there are. You know? Hey, there are. Yeah, they're definitely are. They don't do any of the auditing.

Speaker 2: 20:05

But it's. It is fundamentally and plainly and it's very hard for for those of us who are involved to believe this but it's a form of hypnotism. It's a form of guided imagination, to use Oxford University's Definition of hypnotism. You go into this imaginary world where you start to believe. You have these Engrams, these traumas that you've got to abriact or relive, and then you've got all of these visualization processors, the creative processors, as I would call them, which he got straight from Alistair Crowley, by the way, you know, along with quite a lot of the rest. So you've got all of this stuff going on, that that you're being put through and that.

Speaker 2: 20:46

So my last session was, you know, I was asked who was suppressing me and I hadn't really thought what the answer would be before I sat down and was asked a question and I looked at the auditor and said run Hubbard. And she went white. I'd never seen anybody blanch like this before, so much against what she believed having to sit there and listen to this terrible man say this. And she said could there be Anybody else? And I just looked at it. You know I could list lots of people, but this is it. It's run Hubbard, that that's. He's been suppressing me for nine years and it took me about a year to get get how poetic it was that the Scientology is being PTSD. I'll run hubbard it's. It's being an yes where you are a potential trouble source to our another, that's for sure.

Speaker 1: 21:33

It's so funny that you say that, because at the international headquarters Again, if any, if you have, if you're a seaword member or a Scientologist or a Scientology Staff member, employee, at any point, if you have an accident or you get sick, there's no question you are a potential trouble source. It's just, that's it, period, it's, there's no, there's no graze out your potential trouble source. And if you are a potential trouble source, then you are connected to a suppressive person. And so there would be the time periods at the international base where there would be a slew of accidents, like multiple people would get in car accidents, or Someone would be unalived, or there would be Someone would lose a finger, or all these things would happen, and they would almost happen in groups, like multiple in a week or month period.

Speaker 1: 22:25

And it would always be when there was a huge push or when there was a something that David Mischavich had just recently done, and it would be like, well, these people would have to go get interviewed on why they had had an accident or what it happened. And it would be, and it would almost Be like it's a trick, because you know it's the person you have to say is David Mischavich. But you know, if you say David Mischavich, then that's it. You're gonna be in the biggest trouble you've ever been in in your life. So you can't say David Mischavich, but the. The answer that's on the tip of your tongue and in the front of your mind is David Mischavich. And you have to figure out something else to say. And it's funny that you didn't see. We knew that from all the past people who had been interviewed. You didn't know that, so you just said it. It was hell run hover.

Speaker 1: 23:18

Yeah yeah, there's another thing that we did, a. It's funny that you mentioned the hypnotism, because at the International headquarters we shot this video called how to use Dianetics and it was sent. It was essentially the cliff notes on video for how to do dynetic auditing, so that you didn't have to read the book Dianetics, you could just watch a 30 45 minute video.

Speaker 2: 23:40

Let's face it, reading that book is is traumatizing 400 pages and contradictory nonsense.

Speaker 1: 23:47

Yeah, not only is it almost impossible to get through, it's almost impossible for Scientology to sell somebody that book and Expect that they are going to go and do that auditing in the book on their own. So they had to make a kit for somebody that had a video and it had some cassettes and it had. It was basically like this is how you could do this. We want you to do it, but we really want you to do it so much we're gonna give you all these other things that make it, so you don't have to read the book to do it. You can just watch some videos and listen to some cassettes and you could get going.

Speaker 1: 24:22

And when we were shooting that video, there is a scene in that when somebody says, well, isn't that hypnotism? And then we did a very clever way of showing that, although it, it sounds like hypnotism and it looks like hypnotism and it works exactly like hypnotism. So not hypnotism. Yeah, I mean and I remember thinking about that even when we were shooting this video is this hypnotism? Like? Are we? Literally are we? They seem like very, very close cousins or maybe unknown brother and sisters.

Speaker 2: 25:02

Okay, yeah, I did. I Think the single most shocking piece of research I've ever done Was it publishes a paper called never believe a hypnotist and that's a quotation from run-hubbit in the book science of survival Never believe a hypnotist. Now he frequently boasted that he'd been using hypnosis since he was 16. So never believe a hypnotist. You know, there's a little bit of a clue there and I went through everything I could find between 1950 and 52 where words that are used in hypnosis, like trans adjustability, were used. And I piece that together and I can remember I remember doing it now because I I typed up the quotations I was taking from the many different sources and then I Printed it all off and I cut them out into separate quotations and then started putting them into different piles so they'd fit together. And it really hit me this was about 1993.

Speaker 2: 26:08

It really hit me that Hubbard knew exactly what he was doing, that there's a description in 50 to 52 of how you enslave somebody psychologically and then he stops talking about that and Just does it. There perhaps the classic example which relates to early book one, so-called dynetics. Dynetics, the mental science of modern health as I like to think of it. He canceled that method in 1951 in science of survival. He says you cannot, must not use this method because it's hypnotic. And when you, when it was re-released in 1977, the book one course you've got this thing about waiting for the pre clears eyelids to flutter, which hubbard names as a specific effect of hypnotic trance. So yeah, you've got this situation where they're actually using a technique that that he himself had banned and outlawed Because it is definitely hypnotic. And if you go to anybody who's involved with Scientology and you say this is hypnotism, they'll go no, it isn't, it's just Immediately reject that thought. And then you say what is hypnotism to them and they go well, it's where you go, into a state where you think you're a chicken, nor you know you. You're taken over, you, ah, that is deep trance.

Speaker 2: 27:31

Yeah, when I interviewed Don Rogers and I think Tony or tag has put up the letters that that don sent to me on his site and they are incredible and he said well, actually, up until the last minute when, when the book Dynetics was commissioned by Art Sepos at Hermitage house, he was using deep trance. So all of the original work was done using deep trance. And indeed in the book he says at one point Hypnotism was never used in the research of Dynetics. And there's another point yeah, same book. He says this came out of research using hypnotism. But he turned around to Don Rogers and said, oh, we're gonna have to use another method and the diet. So the Dynetic method was not tested on anybody. The 273 cases that he claims had been cleared yeah, that book. Not one of them ever came forward and he used he just used standard deep trance, actually a method that I traced down last year. Finally, I found the hypnotist in Britain who'd developed the original method.

Speaker 1: 28:34

Who was quite famous Agatha.

Speaker 2: 28:35

Christie was treated by him. He was a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and it's the original Dynetic method which then it changes that what we're being sold in book one is actually Yossif Breuyer's Method, which Freud started with speaking of shartons.

Speaker 1: 28:52

But let's not go to know Hubbard Hubbard had no qualms about stealing anything from anyone that had anything to do with how he, you know, cobbled together Scientology when, when Ron Miscavige senior David Miscavige's father, when he first Left Scientology, he contacted me it's funny that you're the name of the book was the look had that looking glass, because that is exactly what he said. He said I had done a radio show in Los Angeles on a on a Radio station called KFI AM 640 and they had a show called coast to coast AM and it sort of had to do with the paranormal and aliens and UFOs and stuff like that and it was a late-night show. And the reason, the main reason that I had picked to do that show is because the international Headquarters were about two hours from Los Angeles and one of the only radio stations that you could pick up clearly was KFI AM 640. This AM station that had a very large transmitter that could go that far and you could tune it in very easily. And Ron Miscavige and his wife, becky Miscavige, listened to my radio interview on that station on an iPad that they were given by David Miscavige, because you could just tune into the stations digitally and and listen to your local new radio stations or however they did it. But he said that I was saying all the things that were happening at the property. And he was at the property, he was still in the seaworth, they were still loyal seaworth members, everything was. They were there, they were listening to this radio show and they were going.

Speaker 1: 30:39

You know he's saying, everything he's saying is true, this is what's happening here. And when they ended up getting in trouble for listening to the, to the show and and and bringing up saying hey, he brought up these things are valid points. We shouldn't, these things shouldn't be happening. And they're like you can't be listening to SP's on the radio and that's. And he and he sort of said that was sort of the beginning of the end, because then they were like what are we doing here? And then they were like you can't listen to that and they're like, and he's like but it's he, what he's saying is true and they're saying it's not true, he's an SP. And they're like no, no, we're here still, we, we know this is happening. And he said it was like I was looking through the looking glass, like oh, my god, am I living in this other world? But I don't know. I've, I've never known that I was living in this world.

Speaker 1: 31:31

And and when he started explaining this to me I thought you know, that's funny. And he said you know what I'm doing. I'm on a project where I'm trying to find every piece of Scientology and where it came from, and and so he had, he had found there's this book called the. I think it was called the, the keyhole theory, or the, the key system, and that had to do with engrams and and different things. But he had, he had kind of found all these different writings and he, and the thing that he was Saying was these are all from the late 1800s and early 1900s, all these techniques and these, you know, even study technology was not Elron Hubbard didn't come up with that, it was a couple that came up with it and they kind of, you know, pitched the idea to him and then he just crossed their names off and wrote his name and was like hey, scientology, here's study technology. So it was like all these little things that that he was telling me and I thought, you know, he really did Take a lot of things from a lot of places and then it was all basically just boiled down to his research when he was a pope fiction writer and in the early 50s when he did all this, or the the 40s, when he did all this quote-unquote Research, that was the basis of Scientology.

Speaker 1: 32:52

And you're just thinking like dude, you didn't do any research. Come on, your research was you reading other people's stuff and then just taking it and plagiarism and changing it, just enough. Just enough that maybe somebody wouldn't see like, oh, this is this or this, you have to. You haven't have to knowingly study Scientology and Study these other things to be able to figure out which one is a copy of the other. You know, you, if you, if you hadn't studied this other guy, or Freud, or this guy who treated Agatha Christie, you would never know that that's where Hubbard lifted it from no, and I mean Firstly, from miscavige was a lovely guy, let me just put that in.

Speaker 2: 33:39

I really like from miscavige and he did play the trumpet for me at one point, which was okay, good. But just it was really weird to think that somebody is Unpleasant, as David miscavige had this lovely man as a father and I remember I remember I met Ron Jr In 1975 when he was in the seal and it he was just really impressive young man. You know, it's really quite something.

Speaker 1: 34:07

But well, you know. Just so you know, they did call Dave when they first got into Scientology. Ron miscavige's wife, I want to say her name was Loretta and and Ron, I guess both of them they. His nickname, david miscavige's nickname was Enrique in theta, because he was always just a nightmare compared to all the other kids, and so it's funny that even at a very young age they pretty much had his number.

Speaker 2: 34:38

And it says something about genetics that that evidently this is a condition he was born with that and even, yes, having decent parents didn't change that. Yeah, very sad, but Jeff Jacobson wrote two excellent papers in the late 80s, I think, about Hubbard's use of other people's ideas, and I used those as a platform to say, well, can I show that Hubbard knew where these things came from? So I wrote a paper called possible origins of Dynetics and Scientology, which I think so a really fantastic title and One of my, is that up somewhere?

Speaker 1: 35:19

can we link to that? Yeah, um, okay, perfect, we'll put a link in the description to that, as well as all these other things that we're talking about. We'll put links to these in the descriptions if you guys want a deep dive. I mean the thing about Even the fact that we've got John here today. I've only been doing this since 2006. Okay, talking about Scientology and exposing it and putting out a book, john's For 40 years, yeah, so that is a wealth.

Speaker 1: 35:55

I mean there, there, if you, if you want to know where all this came from, people have figured it out. It's not. It's not like it's a mystery and it's also Not like we're not willing to tell you about it. So, whereas Scientology wants all of us to be excommunicated and not be able to say anything, the fact that Scientologists today can go on YouTube and say where did Elron Hubbard get all the Scientology stuff from? And there's a place and it says it and it's it's very Usually. I haven't looked at the link that we're gonna share from John, but in most cases we're citing books, we're citing references, we're showing the policy that Hubbard said, and, and you can compare them and then you can easily see, I know that when Ron Miscavige Was showing me some of these things, it wasn't like. It wasn't even like he changed it in some cases. In some cases he even uses the same terminology and the same Key words and the same like he doesn't really make a big effort to cover his tracks that this is where he lifted it from. He just lifts it whole cloth and just dumps it right into something that he did. And and and.

Speaker 1: 37:10

For Scientologists that are watching this video right now, whenever you're reading something in Scientology and it doesn't seem like it, it cohesively fits to the other things that Hubbard has said. This is the reason because he never said any of these things. And and his you know verbiage and the way he kind of, you know, narrates and sort of writes these things. You can tell when it's just Hubbard, just like freewheeling and it's out of his brain. And then you, when it gets into a technology or it gets into a procedure or something, it's a whole different thing and you're kind of like it doesn't seem like the same person is writing all of these things and that clue is the thing that is like that's the biggest. I'd say it's one of the biggest clues and the contradictions.

Speaker 1: 38:00

So at the international headquarters you were saying where he contradicts himself. That is one of the biggest problems they have at Scientology International is they're always trying to go through all of Hubbard's original writings and sort of conform them to what Hubbard had written. And when they do this they find that he Consistently contradicts himself. Or he'll say this term means this in one writing in 1957 and then just years later He'll say no, now this term means something different and it doesn't mean Something slightly different than what he said before. It's it's contradictory to what he said before or is even Goes against what he wrote before. That you shouldn't do that. You should now do this and then later on he'll kind of flip-flop again. So this happens throughout many of Hubbard's writings and many of Hubbard's books and bulletins and policy letters. And Anyway, before I forget for God, I wanted to say that little bit because it it totally makes sense with what you're, with what you were saying about him, just stealing this stuff from people.

Speaker 2: 39:11

Yeah, I. I mean I was hired in 93. Frank Sarge Gabode, who at that time was running the Institute for research into metapsychology, had sued Scientology for calling, saying he was plagiarizing Hubbard, and then he called me in and it's like, sarge, you should have told me before you sued them.

Speaker 1: 39:32

You know really it would have been helpful.

Speaker 2: 39:36

But the only way I can dig you out is to prove that Hubbard plagiarized it and that's when I wrote the paper and wrote it for that, for that case that he in the end Okay, I'm gonna say he chickened out and he sold David Mayo to David Miss Gavage in return for an agreement that the Metapsychologist would never be harassed, and that's not good enough really. I was a little bit annoyed about that, but nonetheless, you know to to look at that, the, if you look at the, how direct the lifts are and whether you can prove it. So I'll just give one example the original Dianetics, modern Science and Mental Health.

Speaker 2: 40:18

On the back cover published by this advertised, published by the same publisher, was a book by Dr Nando Fodor who's since become an imaginary character on the television, but he really did exist called the search yeah, the beloved investigation into Birth and the trauma of prenatal conditioning. So right there on the back of a book that's the first book that's going to tell you about birth being a trauma. That's recorded. A book that was published a year before is there. In fact, you can trace it back to Otto Rank of Freudian in the 1930s and to Alistair Crowley, who also talked about. You know the Wow.

Speaker 1: 40:59

It does seem like whatever happened in that Jack Parsons, alistair Crowley, whatever happened in that period of Hubbard's life, were his core memories, that sort of drove, a lot of later things that he ended up doing.

Speaker 2: 41:18

Yeah, I think to understand Hubbard at all, the crucial incident is Pasadena in 1946, where he and Jack Parsons perform a ceremony to incarnate the whore of Babylon and bring about the end days under the Antichrist. And that was Hubbard in 1946. And of course, the very last thing we have from Hubbard is the OT8 policy letter that had to be withdrawn, where he says that he's the Antichrist. So everything in between those dates for 40 years until his death. That's what's going on in his head.

Speaker 1: 41:58

Yeah, we just did a video about that a few weeks ago, which was the upper operating Thayton levels. We just went through them all, from one to eight, sort of as they are known. But also we did talk about that when they first came out with OT8. It was so unbelievably wild, even to the Scientologists, that they were just like what's going on and they had to sort of back-. They had to back up and kind of rehash it and then water it down a little bit so people wouldn't lose. They would literally go like I did not sign up for this.

Speaker 2: 42:36

And people did leave. I'm led to believe there was only a week where that bulletin or policy letter was in the course and he claims to be Lucifer in the Antichrist. It's absolutely consistent. As a historian of Scientology, it's absolutely consistent that he really believed that. When I first saw that issue and it was in the eighties, so I think possibly even before OT8 was released you had this bizarre manuscript called Lonesome Squirrel, produced by Steve Fishman.

Speaker 2: 43:13

And Fishman. It would appear Antonio Tagers done good work on this. He's a con man. That's what he is. Yeah, he'd got hold of that piece of material.

Speaker 1: 43:25

That's the weird thing about. I think they're called the Fishman affidavits or the Fishman.

Speaker 2: 43:28

There's some kind of body of documents where it's like the guy he was who, v Gates his psychiatrist, was suing Scientology for yeah. I got on the edge of the court case because I was around at that time and kind of looking at this weird guy and he suddenly he's saying oh yeah, I've hung out with Hubbard.

Speaker 2: 43:49

He goes under the name Jack now and he's in San Luis Obispo and you're going. Well, he was, he was in Creston. And then he gives you this material and I didn't believe it. So it took some convincing, after two people who'd done the course basically wrote down what they'd seen and it was exactly what Fishman said.

Speaker 1: 44:11

Yeah, and that's really the problem that I think Scientology. And oh, just to finish off on the Fishman thing, he was 100% a con man in the end. But how he got some of this information which was authentic and genuine is the part where no, it's one of these unsolved mysteries. How did that happen? Somehow he got. Jason Begay said it best. He says even if it's a mouse trap, the cheese is real. The cheese is real, even though it's a trap. There's got to be some real cheese in there.

Speaker 1: 44:53

But Scientology, even when you were talking about these old timers and these early dianeticists and early Scientologists when we're at the headquarters, we were always trying. The Elrond Hubbard personal relations personal public relations office was keeping track of all these people that had worked and done stuff with Hubbard and we would do videos with them every once in a while and it was a way for them to, kind of, because some of these people knew what really happened and some of these people knew what Scientology wanted everybody to think happened, and so these folks would get wind and dined and then they'd tell us stories and then we'd use them in these Elrond Hubbard tribute videos or whatever it was over the years. But there was one time that we were interviewing one of these people and the handler from the public relations office had left, but we were still shooting and we were still just chatting with them and rolling camera and then they started to get into a story that they were not supposed to tell us and the public relations person had kind of walked in mid this and was kind of a bit confused. They didn't exactly know what we were talking about and as soon as they kind of were hip to the story this person was telling, they were like hey, we're going to take a break for a second, hey, let's just go over here and talk for. And it was sort of, and we saw it, but we didn't really get anything juicy. That would be like oh my gosh, that's great.

Speaker 1: 46:25

Every once in a while they'd say they just make an offhand comment or they'd mentioned something, or one time drugs were mentioned by one of these people and just little hints of things, and you'd be like wait, what kind of drug? What are you talking about? And it would and also because I wasn't, I didn't go to school and also I didn't know the references Like so if somebody said pinks and blues or pinks and reds and blues or stuff. It didn't mean anything to me. But then later on, thinking back, I go like, oh, that must have been what the person was talking about.

Speaker 1: 46:59

So you get this idea that Scientology's they've been doing this for years, where they try to kind of massage the narrative so that some of these things that are the truth don't get out from any of these people that were there. And it just seems like at this point there's too many people to keep track of and to know who they're talking to and what documents are where. It's almost like the internet has sufficiently short circuited Hubbard's disconnection policies and his information control abilities of Scientology. I don't know how they can put the genie back in the bottle at this point.

Speaker 2: 47:47

Oh, it's too late, it's gone. The beast was fatally wounded a long time ago. It's just got a lot of blood to lose because unfortunately you have the whales. You have these people who are pouring money into Scientology. I mean seeing the thing that Alex Bonz-Ross, I think, got hold of. But about the meeting that he protested at St Hill last November, that somebody, I think they'd said they'd put in $54 million and as long as people are doing that it will persist. But it's shrinking. I mean we must be down below 25,000 members of the International Association of Scientologists now.

Speaker 1: 48:30

And I would say below 25,000 members, and including the C organization, which is roughly 4,000 to 5,000 people, depending on how you count them up. But yeah, you're exactly correct on that, you're definitely losing members and not getting as many new members in. Those numbers are abysmal compared to what they were able to do in the 60s or the 70s or even the mid-80s. I'd say in the 80s is when the turn started going down, yeah, they were going up, yeah.

Speaker 2: 49:10

Jeff Hawkins I would say until. Yeah, jeff Hawkins' campaign was the last successful campaign that anybody did and of course, as he says in his brilliant book, he basically threw away all of Hubbard's policies about marketing and PR and did the standard stuff and managed to sell this 1950 book that is interminable and incredibly difficult to read and pushed it back into the bestseller list. How much they were kind of cheating, as they did with Battlefield Earth and buying up. Yeah, they were buying up the copies from the bookstore.

Speaker 2: 49:44

Having given the publisher some Martin's Press, they were given a quarter of a million dollars to use as they wanted for publicity and a guaranteed sale of 40,000 hardbacks. Your usual first printing is eight to 10,000. So of course they were quite. I think it was Harvey Haber who placed the book with him. Finally, from all the services, and I think he'd approached 50 publishers who'd all said no, we're not in the slightest bit interested. Another thing, as we were going along that recognizing what Hubbard has or hasn't written, I'm sure that most people who've been in Scientology don't realize that there's actually only one book that Hubbard wrote. Only Dianetics, science and Survival was written by Richard DeMille.

Speaker 1: 50:32

Wow, I did not know that.

Speaker 2: 50:34

Yep and how to Live Though an Executive was written by Richard DeMille and everything thereafter. There's Alfie Hart, writes 8.80 and leaves and starts the wonderful Abre magazine, which is all online and is great, good fun. As people left they'd go and write something for the Abre into the 60s. It symbol was a squirrel. What can we say? And then John Sanborn, in 54, comes in and he, everything that is published until 1978 has been through the filter of John Sanborn, and when I interviewed him he said that in 54 Hubbard gave him him a vascia and he looked at him and went oh, you're kidding me. You know, because it started, I am Matrae. And then in 1974, 20 years on, john realized if he made it a question am I Matrae? It might sound dignified enough to publish. And so yes, and I'd just like to answer that question because I can give you an absolute answer, because he Matrae. No, he wasn't, because Matrae takes all of humanity into nirvana with him when he goes.

Speaker 2: 51:45

So another failed mission for Ron Hubbard. What can I say?

Speaker 1: 51:48

Totally. You know. It's so funny that you say that because when I heard the story about the couple that had written the study tech and then they'd given it to Hubbard, like, hey, we've got these things, the three barriers to study and then they were like, oh, we can't wait to see what he says. You know, like they were very they thought they were being good Scientologists and that they were doing him this huge favor and that he would be like, oh my God, I can't believe you discovered this. And da, da, da, da, da, da. And it was just like, oh, there's this new thing, guys, it's called the three barriers to study. It's going to be the basis of all Scientology study technologies. Like, yeah, we wrote it. It was like, yeah, nobody's ever going to know it with you. It was just like what? And the other thing that I find funny about that is that when Hubbard had given, he had written all the way up to OTA and he had developed these operating Thayton levels but there was nine through 15 that were never written, and the last years of his life were led to believe that is when he was doing this work and he would give us these operating Thayton levels and instead he passes away.

Speaker 1: 53:05

And what do they release that we don't? We've never seen that Hubbard's written. They release Mission Earth, a science fiction series that's 10 volumes. Now the OT levels. They may be maybe 20, 30 pages each. If you just gathered up everything Now he's written thousands and thousands of pages and none of them are these operating Thayton levels. You go like, guys, how is this the narrative that your church is telling you that he did this but he didn't do this? Wouldn't this have been more important than all this 10 volumes of spaceporn? It's one of those things where you're like this doesn't make sense, guys. There's pieces to this story that are not true.

Speaker 2: 54:00

Yeah, and there are very few pieces that are true. So Mission Earth. I interviewed Robert Vaughn Young, who wrote Mission Earth. That is to say that he had all of this text dumped on him and he had to make it into 10 novels somehow. He also wrote the Rocky Mountain News Elrond Hubbard interview of 1983, which is a fascinating document because in it you have a real clue to Ron Hubbard, which is so easy to miss. There's a question what's your favourite work of fiction? And Vaughn, on Hubbard's behalf, wrote. You haven't asked me what my favourite work of nonfiction is. It's Twelve Against the Gods by William Belethow, and in Blue Sky. I suggest that people read this book. This is Hubbard's favourite book, and it's about 12 people who basically did something significant, but life, though, didn't care whether what they did was positive or negative. I'm pretty sure that Woodrow Wilson, who made it as the 12th, would have been replaced by Adolf Hitler if it had been written 10 years later.

Speaker 1: 55:16

Yeah, I was going to say does that have anything to do with the Majestic 12? Is that the same thing? I don't know that.

Speaker 2: 55:22

No, the Majestic 12.

Speaker 1: 55:23

Oh, the Majestic 12. That's a big kind of thing in that. It's funny that you mentioned that, because I was just watching a video the other day that mentioned the same thing. It's sort of like the Shriners and different Freemasons and the Majestic 12, and it's sort of this idea that there's these 12 people that are sort of controlling all of this stuff and the members are these key, prominent people that are either Masons or they're Shriners or they have some sort of New World Order involvement that they're this body.

Speaker 1: 56:05

And Hubbard, if you, there's a lot of that throughout Scientology it's the World Bank and it's the these guys.

Speaker 2: 56:14

The Tenyaka Memorial.

Speaker 1: 56:17

Yeah, the APA and the AMA and all these guys are all out to get Hubbard and the whole Guardians Office, which is now the Office of Special Affairs that were. You know, the Guardians Office was convicted of perpetrating the largest infiltration into the United States government in its history, and not only I say always the United States government. It wasn't only the United States government.

Speaker 2: 56:42

No, they had convicted them kind of in the new fronts.

Speaker 1: 56:44

Yeah, they had infiltrated other intelligence agencies and other governments in, I want to say, at least 10 or 15 other countries, whether it was just stealing documents or had a spy there or just trying to get some information out of out of them in some way. But Scientology always had this sort of us against them mentality that's just kind of hard baked into it from Hubbard that we've got to, we've got to steal our sense of a, steal ourselves against these outside forces, because they want us, they want us gone and they're going to accuse us of doing all these dirty, dastardly things which we're doing. But but you know, it's sort of this. It's a common thread throughout the all of the decades of Scientology.

Speaker 2: 57:35

As Ron Hubbard said, the criminal accuses others of things he himself is doing. And let's just run that past you again I'll run. Hubbard accuses others of things he himself is doing?

Speaker 1: 57:47

What is it? The Val dast the over, just death. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 57:54

Yes.

Speaker 1: 57:57

So that was the other thing I wanted to ask you. So you write that you decide you're going to write the book. You interview all these people, you get everything together. You, you, you. How did you get a publisher? How did you publish the book?

Speaker 2: 58:10

Well, I approach 50 publishers. 11 of them wrote back and said they'd like to publish the book, and Collins, who at the now Harper Collins, at the time with the largest publisher in the world, held it for three months with an editor there, desperate to publish it in the in the first version. But the same thing came back from all 11 that wanted to publish it, which is we won't make any money doing this, they'll sue us. And I had a, indeed a letter from Neville Spearman, who was the head of Neville Spearman Publishing, who'd published the Mindbenders by Sir Vosper, who I came to know reasonably well, and they sold 108,000 copies of the Mindbenders. It was a bestseller. But Spearman wrote to me they were being sued by anybody to offset those.

Speaker 2: 58:58

Spearman hadn't made any profit on it. And he wrote back to me and said he'd love to publish the book but but there was no money in it and he signed himself off and I had this image of this man and his Savile Row, fitted suit you know, sat there as pinstripe or probably with an lovely Eaton accent or something you know, because he signed himself off death to the evil cult, neville Spearman. So I couldn't get a publisher. And after a couple of years, when Russell Miller came along in January 86 and said Sunday Times wanted him to find Ron Hubbard and write about that, and he gave me a check for £2,000 and I've been doing this for a couple of years and nobody had given me any kind of money for doing it. So that was very welcome. He hired me as his researcher and then we found a week later that Hubbard was dead and the Sunday Times said well, go ahead. You know it's an interesting story and I think we had three front pages out of it and at the time Sunday Times was the biggest distribution newspaper in the UK and he got a book deal and he signed me up for researching and paid me some money and I sort of thought I can't get my book published. The purpose of writing the book was I never imagined I'd make any money from it and that proved to be true. That's still true to this day. But so he might as well have it, and I let him have the manuscript. I have his annotated version of it.

Speaker 2: 1:00:28

That it came round to me eventually, which is kind of weird, and it he, russell, called me up one day and he's he'd traveled all over the world for the Sunday Times and he said I'm being followed everywhere I go and I've got the names of the the private detectives. Can you check with Lyle Stewart, who'd published Ben Corridon's, alwyn Hubbard, messiah or Madman? Can you check with him to see if he's being followed by the same people? Yeah, what he didn't know was that I'd never spoken to Lyle Stewart. So I you know he just presumed I must know him. So I phoned Lyle up and he was just a weirdly eccentric human being. He ran the first gay novel series in the US Birch Lane Press. He published books about the IRS and gambling, which is what he liked to do with his time. He hated the IRS. He told me that he'd been sued a hundred times and he'd won 99 of the cases you know. So come and get me. You know, he's that kind of very different type of human being from me, I must say.

Speaker 2: 1:01:35

And on the phone. So I phoned him up and say you know, I'm John A Tach, and before saying anything else he says have you written a book about Scientology? So I said yes, and he said I'll publish it. And then he came over and signed contracts with me and he said I'm I've actually sold the company for $12 million to this guy, steven Shragas, and I'm signing you up and it's his problem now and Shragas very nearly very nearly stock publication because they wanted to edit it severely and I and he said, well, we'll just drop it.

Speaker 2: 1:02:13

And then we got sued and we lost the case Blue Sky. Only two books have ever been banned in the history of the United States. The first was Victor Marchetti's CIA and you can understand why that was a bit sensitive. The second was Sure Piece of Blue Sky and we got that reverse to Depeel because I had the same attorney, mel Wolfe, that Victor Marchetti had had. And I'm pretty sure that when we lost the case the company said when did you lose it?

Speaker 1: 1:02:43

Because you lost it in 89. 89. Okay, and then it was overturned on appeal later on.

Speaker 2: 1:02:50

Yeah, and it was 17 counts against us 1995. 1995 was when we actually got it out, so we won the case in 90. Okay, and it was basically they'd. For about more than six months there'd been a private investigator who had wormed his way into my circle and he kept saying you know that he wanted to help me publish the book. And he wanted to help me publish the book and, as I say, I'd given it to Russell by this time and I'd pretty much given up on publishing it. So when he said, look, I'll give you 30,000 pounds If I can publish it under my own name, and I sort of sounds a bit weird, but I could do the money and I made the mistake of letting him have a copy.

Speaker 2: 1:03:45

It took months and then bang, that version turned up in court. By the time it turned up we'd already realized that we couldn't quote from Herbert's diaries, from intelligence orders and harassment orders, because of this bizarre ruling in the US courts of a JD Salinger and his yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah personal letters. They were available in the university collection. You could read them, but it was ruled that he could still make money from publishing them, so a biographer couldn't. That was ultimately overturned, thankfully, but by the time blue sky got to court I'd already revised the 60 paragraphs and paraphrased them. So all this stuff that they'd worked out that they could get me for was gone. Yeah, and the, the new edition, the let's sell these people a piece of blue sky has all 60 of the original Quotations back, plus another 40 for for good measure. You know, I thought we'll beef it out nice.

Speaker 2: 1:04:43

Yeah, let's update it. And it is incredible that you want that's amazing. What his words and you want to know where he said it. You know, as I said, there are 150 contributors to my book, but Fully half of what's in there comes directly from things Ron Hubbard said, and so he. Yeah, you know, if you look carefully, there's it. You know, for example, that there's a September 1950 recording called introduction to Dianetics, which became available, I think, in the 2007 golden Something of tech.

Speaker 1: 1:05:18

I was gonna say that's, that's one of the, the lectures that's in that kit that I was telling you. Right, that is the. That is one of those lectures that they were like hey, let's put this in with this and then that way they can listen to a two-hour tape and not have to read a you know a book that they're just never gonna understand, even after reading all things.

Speaker 2: 1:05:41

Whoever approved the release of that Recording? Of course I was David, miss Gavage. Yeah, I'd got his college grade sheets which said not only didn't he study nuclear physics, nuclear physics is not Molecular and atomic physics, it's a quite different world. He studied molecular and atomic physics and he got a grade F. And all I got was the college grade sheets.

Speaker 2: 1:06:06

And what Scientologist is going to believe that? Then Hubbard says it in the lecture I failed, yeah, atomic and molecular physics. And it's sort of so. You find that because he contradicts himself so much. And there's something to this that I think is quite fascinating.

Speaker 2: 1:06:24

In one lecture he talks about having become addicted to phenobarbital. The references in my paper never believe a hypnotist. The page number exactly yeah, what lecture he says. He made him a self-aginny pig in an experiment to come off phenobarbital. Now I got his medical records, veterans administration records, which showed that he was taking phenobarbital, which is a barbiturate.

Speaker 2: 1:06:48

Yeah, what was interesting to me was that every now and then, as in 1950, hubbard would tell the truth. Didn't happen often. Usually you'd get a story but this and I started to go oh, it's a close relative of sodium pentothal, so he's taking a drug that makes people spill the beans and then going and giving a lecture every now and then he admits he'd been addicted to this drug. So there's there's no doubt about it. I mean, and that whole thing with drugs, that if you go to Monsignor mental health, there's a paragraph there about you know, the safest drug is marijuana and alcohol is the most dangerous drug, and and this and you just gloss over it, you don't notice it because there's so much verbiage and here's a course recommending amphetamines. So the whole campaign against Ritalin by Scientology, that's the drug that he recommends. If you have to grab hold of anything, grab hold of Benzman. He says so well.

Speaker 1: 1:07:48

The other thing was that when he passed away in 1986, he had anti psychotic medications in this story.

Speaker 1: 1:07:58

Yeah, so you're like he can take them, but we've got a whole entire front group that's just dedicated to telling people that you should never do that, and so it's sort of like you, you, when you learn these things and and that's what I I Am a strong believer that Scientologists are operating with not enough information Because they're only they. Either they were born into it or that, like their second generation or third or just a generational Scientologist, that they were just raised in it so they don't know anything different, and and one of the things that you're, it's taught in the very Early stages of Scientology. When you learn about the potential trouble sources and the suppressive persons, you learn that Scientology is doing so much good that that people are going to attack and they're gonna pick it apart. And you should never listen to those people because they want to suppress you and they want to. They want you to do do bad, they don't want you to do good, like Scientology does. So you, you're programmed Very early on to put those blinders on, and so all the information, your only information source on Scientology is Scientology I it's conveniently works out that way somehow, but so I I'm a big proponent of let's give Scientologists as much information as possible that they're not gonna be able to get in Scientology.

Speaker 1: 1:09:35

And if possible, we can compare it to some things that are said in Scientology. So like the thing we just said about the drugs or the thing about the study tech or any of these things, a Scientologist hearing that it's just enough, like they, they might not care about the drug thing but the study tech thing could make them just lose their mind and get angry. Or they might not care about the study tech thing but the drug thing might be the thing. So I figure, if we do, if we just hit it from as many angles and just get as much information out there, just documenting it, that's gonna help the Scientologists Short circuit that blinders thing, because the blinders thing it not only it makes it so they don't even seek out that information, but if it does manage to get to them, they've already got a mechanism in in their thought process that he immediately puts that into their. You know, their garbage, their minds, garbage can't like no, not valuable information, not reliable, throw it away. And that is the thing where, when you were talking about the hypnotism, I really do think.

Speaker 1: 1:10:45

And when I explain Scientology to someone who has no idea. I said, there, they basically they give you, they tell you you have all these problems that you don't even know you have. And then when you're learning, when you agree that may be one of these ten problems I kind of do think I do have this problem I say, okay, we're gonna help you fix that and that's this ruin that. When you then go in to handle the ruin, then you find out you've got another 15 problems you never knew. But they're gonna also help you navigate all those. And they, at that point they give you the deck of cards and they say here's the deck of cards. You're going to build this house of cards around yourself, but we're gonna help you do it, we're gonna give you everything you need to do it, but you're gonna do all the heavy lifting and Then we're gonna tell you don't listen to anybody else. And then you won't know how to unbuild the house and and people, because you're you're in it and even though you built it, you don't know how to get out. So I really think when you can, even if you can just knock down one of those cards of the house, that helps the Scientologists not only it's a weird thing in order for them to leave, scientology.

Speaker 1: 1:12:06

They have to justify, they have to make an excuse of why they're leaving. They can't just leave and say this doesn't make any sense and this is the skies of conman. It has to be. Oh, it's David Miss Gavage, he perverted it, he's the one who did the, he's the bad guy. So I'm leaving because of him. I'm not leaving because of Scientology, I'm not leaving because of Elvren Hubbard. I'm leaving because of David Miss Gavage, and he's a bad guy and he's doing, he's beating people and he's just trying to get money. It's okay if they leave because of that. And so it's this weird thing you have to get around.

Speaker 1: 1:12:41

And most of them, to be fair, when they do leave and they live in the real world and they're not, you know, getting the constant top-ups on the hypnotism that then they sort of come out of the fog and then they, a large majority of them, then realize I'm not, oh, scientology's nonsense, hubbard's nonsense. But there's a lot of people that go many decades where they only get to the David Miss Gavage is bad, or even Scientology is bad, but they still think oh, no, but Hubbard, if Hubbard would have been around and was able to complete his re. You know you're just like so there's there's sort of levels to this thing that you, I Don't know that there's there. It doesn't seem to be like there's just a set way. Let's do it this way and you could deprogramming these people. You kind of have to come to it from, you know, all sorts of angles. That's, that's been my experience, at least it it's.

Speaker 2: 1:13:36

You know I've not just worked around Scientology in the last 40 years. You'll be pleased, know I have done other things and had something of a life. Yes, but during that period I've dealt directly in the recovery not the escape from Scientology, but the recovery of about 600 people. And To do that, once I'd got the biography of Hubbard and the history of Hubbard and Scientology down, which was 30 something years ago, I then started in the late 80s trying to understand the psychology what, what, how did this work? And Conway and Siegelman in the book snapping reviewing various cults, said Scientology may have the most debilitating set of rituals of any cult in America. I Said it if you're in the Christian is or the moon is, three or three, six months later, you'll be fine. You'll be back with Scientology unaided. 12 and a half years. That was their reckoning. Yes, I wrote to them.

Speaker 1: 1:14:39

I saw that they published that I'm not, I'm not, that that was to me. That was fascinating, that. That that's. It says a lot.

Speaker 2: 1:14:45

They've said more things.

Speaker 1: 1:14:47

Yeah, it's. It's literally ten times more Dangerous than any other that anybody's ever kind of codified or figured out.

Speaker 2: 1:14:56

It's ten times worse, it's the most elaborate system of mind control ever devised by the most litigious group in the history of the world. No other group has filed as many lawsuits of Scientology and and I Started to you know, I went into this conventional Psychology world to understand what the psychs thought and you know, ah yeah, phobia induction. Here's the first layer. I was in Scientology. The brain is a switching system. I don't want to know anything about it, it's too scary. Then you find out about cognitive dissonance and you find that, yeah, even there, that when Leon Festinger wrote about cognitive dissonance, he was and most people don't notice this he was writing about a Scientologist, the this, the cult Marion Keatschers group, which he wrote about him. When prophecy fails, it's a 1950s group. Marion Keatsch was received channeling messages from aliens and she was gonna leave the planet with her followers when the mothership came to get them. And he predicted and he was right about this that mothership wouldn't arrive.

Speaker 2: 1:16:05

Yeah, and he predicted that those of her followers that went to the hilltop would remain committed. Those who didn't go would leave, but those who went would remain committed. And this is Cognitive dissonance that the stronger the evidence you produce, the more it rigidifies the belief. When I went back to come, when see it's a woman because I've written a piece and I'd I'd said something about them only interviewing three Scientologists and Tony or take a blessing decided to publish and talk to them Rather than telling me I'd made a mistake.

Speaker 2: 1:16:37

They did yeah 33 for the second book, three first 30 seconds. But I went to them, you know. You said 12 and a half years. Would you agree with me that, in fact, the majority of Scientologists will not recover unaided? And they said yes, oh 100 percent unaided.

Speaker 1: 1:16:55

Yeah, you're right, unaided. Exactly that's what I was just going to say. The chances of recovery are not that great, but they're not that great even aided.

Speaker 2: 1:17:09

Well, there are ways and means as I say I've dealt with about 600 people in doing this. Well, I understand.

Speaker 1: 1:17:14

But the approach is not obvious.

Speaker 2: 1:17:19

Yeah, exactly Every person you deal with. There's no standard technology route. What's more, with most people and this is what really annoys me it only takes an afternoon With most people. It's possible to get them to understand what has glued them to this thing and start the process, which, of course, they will take on. You don't do it for somebody. You don't sit them in an audience session with an emeter. The first part of the process is very simple. Yeah Well, 11 years ago actually, I had a conversation with a woman in Australia who had been horribly treated as a child. She'd been f**ked as a child by a Scientologist stepfather who subsequently was convicted. There's no doubt about this. Then it had been covered up Scientology. She was 11, she went to the cops and it was covered up.

Speaker 1: 1:18:16

I just have to bleep that word, just so you know. Okay, I'm just saying, yeah, I'm going to bleep that one, but let's not. If we say essay or if we just say attack, that's yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:18:28

Okay, she was assaulted by her stepfather yeah, and there's no doubt of that. And when she first talked to me Steve Canane, the brilliant journalist who wrote Fair Game, the history of Scientology in Australia, which is a remarkable book he came to me and I was helping him with research for that and he said he'd met this woman and could I help her? You know that she'd had this terrible treatment. At 16, she joined the C-organisation. She had five years in that and then she left and she did a medical degree and her life started coming apart.

Speaker 2: 1:19:03

And I thought I was going to be talking to a woman of, you know, 23 or something. She was 37. She'd grown up in Scientology. She didn't have any comparison. She was obviously intelligent enough to get a degree. In fact she was on a master's programme when she quit her education. But she said to me is it true that reality is an agreement, as Hubbard says? And my response was yeah, if you're the hypnotist, reality is an agreement, but for the rest of us it's out there, whether you like it or not, reality is reality, whether you agree with it or not.

Speaker 2: 1:19:39

And it's not as Hubbard said. It's not us chanting space particle position what nonsense. The next week, when I talked with her, she was jubilant. She'd just used centred laundry conditioner for her washing and we hadn't talked about the hygiene hats in the C organisation or any of that, and it meant that the process had worked.

Speaker 2: 1:20:02

Challenge a Hubbard idea and discover that he's wrong about one thing and then just keep moving from there. But if you don't excise the belief, if you don't remove the belief, it's kind of the software that you're still running on those beliefs. So people will change the words and they'll now believe in karma instead of believing in the overt motivator sequence. When you say to them, you mean Vipakar, don't you? You don't mean karma. They go. What are you talking about? So karma means action, Vipakar means reaction. You've certainly read the Hindu and Buddhist texts on this, haven't you? No, I just believe it's true. What goes around comes around, and you're like okay, I don't mind if people end up agreeing with Hubbard's ideas, I just like them to think their way to it rather than believe their way to it Totally.

Speaker 1: 1:20:48

You know that's such a good point because that was the other thing I was going to say is that in Scientology, even if it doesn't sound right or it doesn't make sense to you, you just go. Okay, I get it. You know, like, yeah, you don't, you can't, you're not allowed to challenge the ideas or you're not allowed to say, oh, I don't think that happened or I don't think that's, you can't do that. But whether or not you accept it as like okay, like am I going to operate my life with that? And then when you leave for me, the trouble I have is I don't know what Scientology things were from Hubbard or were from something he stole. So I just tell people, like, if they ask me like well, you don't believe in the communication formula, and I'm like, okay, first of all, people were communicating well before Hubbard showed up.

Speaker 2: 1:21:47

So first of all he yeah so.

Speaker 1: 1:21:49

So I say, if you believe that speaking to somebody in a way that's understandable to them, so that you can convey a thought and then they can understand it and then have a conversation with you in the reverse order, I go. Well, that's obviously something that you can observe and you can understand the fact that Hubbard attached a whole bunch of significances to a lot of those parts of that thing that's happening.

Speaker 2: 1:22:18

Cause distance, if that's, and then said yeah that he came up with it.

Speaker 1: 1:22:22

I go, that's ridiculous, okay, he didn't come up with people having conversations. And also, if somebody says something and you don't say anything back, and then they're like, well, I'm not going to talk to this guy because he doesn't answer, you know, like, yeah, I'm pretty sure people knew about this kind of stuff before Hubbard. So then I say, instead of trying to, instead of trying to disprove all the things in Scientology that may be workable to a person, if you just talk about the absurd things like we're talking about here today, like oh, don't do drugs, but if you're Hubbard you can do whatever drugs you want, or you know these sort of things are, or even math I find math is also very useful but you say, well, your goal is to clear the planet. Okay, good, so that means every person in Scientology is eventually going to be to the state of clear and no longer be effect of their reactive mind. I go, okay, good, that's what that's it, that's the over. That is, the overriding goal of all of Scientology is to clear the planet.

Speaker 1: 1:23:27

I go, you guys can't even clear a zip code where the most Scientologists in the world live. How are you going to clear the planet. Okay, that there's. The math doesn't work. It's not a, it's not a solvable problem. There's no, there's no way. The way you're doing it, you're going to mathematically solve that equation.

Speaker 1: 1:23:48

So, to me, I go. So why even bother? Okay, why don't you come on, let's go to the movies? You know, live your life. Stop giving these folks money. You know, just do your thing. You know, if you need help in your life, opposed to what Scientology tells you, not every person in the real world is a drug or a thief or a prostitute or, you know, a criminal Dead in the head. There's plenty of yeah, there's plenty of really nice folks roaming around that you can be friends with and they will support you in your endeavors and you can support them in their endeavors, and it's you know. There's a whole world out there. And but yes, before I forget, john has also written a lot of other books since he wrote this piece of blue. Is it? Is it? What's the total? Use Five different books. I count it by ISBN. So, even when you said a piece of blue sky, let's sell them. That's another.

Speaker 2: 1:24:46

ISBN.

Speaker 1: 1:24:47

So that's another book, so is it six books that you've written then, based on that In print.

Speaker 2: 1:24:52

At the moment there's Scientology's Cult of Greed, which is also available as an audiobook, an e-book, and that is to give to people who have no experience of Scientology. It doesn't have any of the difficult terms that we've used today and it's got to me. The most damning evidence against Scientology, like Hubbard's 1947 letter to the Veterans Administration, is printed as it was, with him begging when he's like. Please help me. Please help me Begging for psychiatric treatment which he was not given.

Speaker 1: 1:25:29

Yeah, that is another interesting point and a lot of these documents and a lot of these things that John has uncovered. I've been through a ton of these things and if you read those and these things are in Hubbard's own writing, in his own voice, it's official, they're official sort of requests that are being done within the military and the government and these sort of things, and he's begging for these things that he essentially, a year or two later, is saying these things are the worst thing you could possibly do. He's begging for them in a letter for himself to get himself help. He's willing to do these things even though when he's now the Messiah of all this nonsense, he's saying please don't do that. And my take on that is because, well, if you do that, then you're not going to need my snake oil if you go and get the good stuff or the stuff that might work and all of the people are professionally qualified in the field of the mind or excluded.

Speaker 2: 1:26:39

So finding somebody who's had the phobia induced in them, and Scientology, that the psychs are this great conspiracy that is trying to destroy all life, according to Hubbard. And then we have this letter and it's hard to get the light.

Speaker 1: 1:26:56

If you send me a copy, I can put it up. I'll put it up on the screen, Great, so people can see. But then also we'll link again. We'll link to this book so you guys can pick a copy of this up. You have this on Kindle as well. Can people get this book?

Speaker 2: 1:27:13

digitally E-book print book and you can hear it in my lovely dulcet tones doing my ASMR version of it Perfect. But I mean in this letter he says, and it's signed Al Runhubbard at the bottom after trying and failing for two years to regain my equilibrium and civil life, I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own combatants. My last physician informed me that it might be very helpful if I were to be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psychoanalyst. Toward the end of my service, I avoided and you can tell this is Hubbard. Toward the end of my service, I avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose was seriously affected. I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations and have newly come to realize that I must first try them above this before I can hope to rehabilitate myself at all. Would you please help me?

Speaker 1: 1:28:25

It's amazing. It's also amazing that during that time was also, I want to say that that time period when that letter was written, according to the Scientology narrative, he had been healing himself and he had been crippled by the war, blinded and crippled With injured optic nerves and physical injuries to hip and back.

Speaker 2: 1:28:50

And I quote exactly. And when somebody says physical injuries, I start going is there some other kind of injury to a hip or back? This is a con man.

Speaker 1: 1:29:02

That's what 665,.

Speaker 2: 1:29:04

my philosophy is saying that when in 1957 he said he was down on July 25th, 45, he was in Hollywood and beat up three petty officers. End of the war. I was crippled and blinded and in a Look Magazine article in November, december 1950, he admits he had no, he didn't see combat and he had no war wounds. His eyes had been hurt by the flash of a gun and he'd fallen down a ladder and that becomes crippled and blinded.

Speaker 1: 1:29:33

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:29:33

So this is the kind of but these are the kind of things. When I left in 2005, I just didn't want to be in the sea or getting more. I could care less about Scientology. I literally was like I was just working, I grew up in it. I never signed up, I never wanted to do any of this stuff, I was just. It was the thing If you're a Scientology child and you're brought up in the Scientology upbringing and you go to Scientology schools, they're all grooming you to become a Seaward member, and if you don't become a Seaward member, you're sort of an outcast.

Speaker 1: 1:30:13

Or you have to become a very successful Scientologist or a Seaward member. Those are sort of the two paths, acceptable paths. If you don't end up in Scientology, you don't need to do any of this stuff, then you're kind of out of the club. And when I finally then joined the Seaward in 1989, 1990, go all the way to 2005, I get out and I started reading these type of things that you had exposed and you had written about, and even that letter where he talks about can I get this care? And those sort of things to me instantly I was just like, oh, this is a con. This whole thing was just a big giant bunch of nonsense. This dude never did anything that he said he did and it's all just make-believe. And so for me, it was very easy for me to sort of deprogram, like you said, in an afternoon, Literally, I watched the South Park episode.

Speaker 1: 1:31:18

I watched that and that was really up until that point I didn't even care about Scientology. It was sort of like, whatever, I'm not there, I'm not going back, so I don't even care what they believe anything about what they're doing over there. But Claire, here she's OT5. She's been doing all this technical. She's part of her because she's been studying it and doing it for so long. I haven't even read Dianetics. To this day. I haven't read Dianetics, Shame on you. So and I hadn't read any of the other books. I think I had to read most of what they call the Introduction to Scientology Ethics book, because I had to do a course where you have to read that book.

Speaker 2: 1:32:02

That was when it was a tiny little book, wasn't it? It was before it became a massive tome.

Speaker 1: 1:32:09

Exactly and I've read maybe some, most of that one, but almost everything in that book you read somewhere else in Scientology. It's a compilation of other Hubbard as in. They are older books. Yeah, exactly so, but but what was I saying? Oh, so, so when I when they said, when the South Park thing happened, and I looked, I'm watching the show and Claire is standing in the doorway off to the side while I'm watching it and I'm I'm checking in with her, like, is this, is this really?

Speaker 2: 1:32:42

real.

Speaker 1: 1:32:42

Like, is this? Because it says at the bottom of the screen, scientology's actually believeness? It says that I'm thinking like they're saying it like it's satire, but they have it up on the screen. No, this is actually what they believe, this is real. And I'm looking at her going yeah, and she's basically saying pretty much there's some things in there that have been kind of, you know, adapted for a cartoon and TV, but pretty much everything they're saying is what is in the, in the Hubbard writings. And I'm thinking to myself, you like, I've never even heard about any aliens until now. I'm not even in Scientology. And then I start and then I go, oh, I'm going to go online, I'm going to look, and then I start finding these things, the letters and the. Oh, he had drugs in his system in 1986 when they did the autopsy. Oh, he was trying to get this. Oh he, and I just go like, oh, yeah, it's all make believe.

Speaker 1: 1:33:41

And because I worked for the production, you know arm of Scientology, golden Era Productions and we made moot, that's all we ever did was make believe. We had guys, we would shoot one of these we call them quote videos, and it's where there would be a lecture and we take a little snippet of it and then we'd put a, we make a little video, little vignettes and little things, and we'd kind of show what he's talking about in the lecture and we show it in a video. We call them quote videos. And we had at least, I want to say, two or three different people that could write in Ella Rach's hand and L Ron Hubbard's handwriting so we could make whatever we wanted L Ron Hubbard to say. We could have somebody just write it and then you could say it.

Speaker 1: 1:34:30

And at that time at Golden Era Productions we were doing a film where we were supposed to use L Ron Hubbard's voice but he hadn't recorded the recording that we were supposed to use.

Speaker 1: 1:34:43

Or he had said I will record this and he never did, or it was a bad recording or something. And so the possibility of just cobbling together his words to get him to say that was being entertained and was being researched, like how good could we do this? And how good can or can we get another person that can talk just like him and just get him to say whatever we want him to say? When you're doing that and you're like, oh no, this guy's writings and this guy's voice and recordings are all sacred, but at the same time you know the same people that are saying that are saying well, if we need to make him say something, we'll make him say something, but it just gets into. The possibilities are endless. On what did he say? If you're going to rely on the Scientologist to tell you what he said, they literally could make him say whatever they want him to have said.

Speaker 2: 1:35:44

And the end will just be by the means.

Speaker 1: 1:35:47

Yeah, and that's problematic.

Speaker 2: 1:35:50

Yeah, and yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a crazy other world. And Mark Fisher and Dennis Gillum Grady of you know, call it the layering of the onion, and that was something we started to see as soon as I came out. I realized, oh, first of all you decide that the organization is dangerous and unpleasant, and so now you want to be with the independence. And then you get there and you kind of find that they don't really want to apply all of the policy because it's just insane, there's so much of it it's impossible. And so then it's sort of well, we, the ethics text, we don't do the harassment stuff, so we're not doing that anymore and we're not gathering information on you anymore, and it layers come off and then you get well, hubbard was actually, he was a liar.

Speaker 2: 1:36:41

There isn't any possibility otherwise, because he contradicted himself. But it was explained to me by the former commanding officer of St Hill Foundation that when I said, well, look, you know, he says here he was crippled and blighted and here he beat up three petty officers, she said, well, that's easy, he had two bodies. So I hadn't worked that one out, I must say. And then when I said that he you see, it is a simple solution.

Speaker 1: 1:37:08

Oh, and we must next, I say the simple solution is that he had cloned himself.

Speaker 2: 1:37:14

Yeah Well, the horrifying thought is there could be an infinite number of Elrond Hurd put, and then we're all in trouble and they all have body fatens they can't get rid of. You may know the answer to this question which I have, which is what became of the tech films in 1977 at the Keentah. Hubbard makes all of these dreadful little films. I only saw a couple of them. They all seem to disappear. What happened to them?

Speaker 1: 1:37:42

Well, all of the ones that he had that Elrond Hubbard produced. When I got there in 1990 to Golden Era Productions, they were still showing his films and organizations on Super 8 films which were like cartridges and they were also showing. This is a 1990. The CD has been out, the compact disc and DVDs have been out. I want to say, as of this time, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:38:13

And they are producing Elrond Hubbard.

Speaker 1: 1:38:16

Yeah, they're producing Elrond Hubbard technical training films that are on Super 8 millimeter film cartridges and and 16 millimeter film reels. And all of the ones that were available at that time were either produced by Hubbard or written by Hubbard. And I want to say there was only maybe about 15 of these that were floating around. He had written a total. I want to say it's it's either 26 or 29. How you count them is a little different on who you talk to, because there's these things called drill films. That's just a copy of the film, it's just an edited version of a full film.

Speaker 1: 1:38:57

But regardless, when I was there from 1990 until the early 2000s, we shot, produced, edited and had ready for release every single film that Elrond Hubbard had written as the training films.

Speaker 1: 1:39:15

And then there was another 50 films that he had written that they were called PSMPS is the public Scientology motion picture series and those were meant to get people into Scientology. And we had only we had only made a handful of those. Those were almost impossible to produce because Hubbard had only written treatments for them. Not all of them had were flushed out script but but he had written them and we could never get the scripts approved by David Miss Gavage. So we had, we, we spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars paying Scientology writers to write these films and write scripts from dialogue and the sets and the props and all that stuff Maybe even over a million dollars to to to script these things and they were paid, many of them were paid many of thousands of dollars to write them, but they would never get their final approval checks that it was approved, because David Miss Gavage would never, ever get it. David Miss Gavage would never, ever approve them. He just he just.

Speaker 2: 1:40:20

They were always, never good and of course he worked as a cameraman on on the original that came to films.

Speaker 1: 1:40:26

So yes, we redid every film, I want to say every frame of film that David Miss Gavage or L Ron Hubbard shot for the. For these films we redid at Golden Era Productions. We redid what they did because it was. I mean, I don't I'm trying to think of a movie that it's like what's a really really cult classic, like just bad movie.

Speaker 2: 1:40:57

Well, but I feel that it was pretty bad.

Speaker 1: 1:41:00

It was, it was battlefield Earth makes these things look like like home movies. Home movies, I mean these movies they're. I mean technically, a lot of these films are fine Production quality and and technically how they were produced is great, but they're just it's. It's Elron Hubbard's words in film version, so it's only going to be it's it's it's. It's only going to be as good as its bones, and the bones are Elron Hubbard, so it's not good. And also they're filled with suppressives.

Speaker 1: 1:41:39

So even when we would shoot these over the years, we'd have to double back every once in a while and redo a film because the main star is now a declared suppressive person, and so we kept having to either do redo scenes or or digitally replace people, and it was always. We were always having to revise them before we could finish them. We have to double back. Even the film that Elron Hubbard shot, which is this film called it's the, the pro tee, the professional TRs course, and it's the story of this guy, joe Howard, and and Joe Howard is a Scientologist that's got to do these professional training routines to be able to become become a great auditor, and Joe Howard is played by a gentleman, a long, very long time Seawork member named Dan Coon, and Dan Coon is now a suppressive person that's not in Scientology and he is the star of the film. That was the last film that was left that Elron Hubbard had shot and produced and was going to be. Just never. We're never, it was always stated, it was always told, explained to us that film will never, ever be replaced, that film will never be redone, because that Elron Hubbard did it and da, da, da, da, da. And so that film was retouched and was the audio was restored. You know, we did a lot, there was a lot of restoration work for that film, but even then there was like 10 people in that film that were, that were already declared suppressives. And so, because this the edict was, we could never, never, just do the film over from from scratch, we digitally shot. We shot these people new people, new actors, in the exact same costumes and the exact same positions and the same camera frame and the same camera angle and the same camera lens and everything was matched so we could digitally replace them. And then Dan Coon was declared a suppressive person and then they just said that's it, we're, we're. They tapped out and they and the only reason I know this is because Mitch Brisker, who was the director that I worked with when we did all these films, he stayed there for another decade or so after I escaped and he then did all.

Speaker 1: 1:44:06

He not only did he redo that film that they were never going to redo, he redid several of the 20 or so films that that I had done with him. He then did them another time and redid films, and so so, yeah, they have this. So those films. The ironic thing about those films is because they were on 16 millimeter film for so long they never really crossed over into the digital world in terms of something that's out in the public in the wild, and and, and, ironically enough, I was the one who digitized all of those films and ran the project to convert them into computer based files that could then be shown in all the organizations, in, in, in a digital format. But when we did that, david Muscavige said we're only, this is only going to get approved if you figure out a way that these films will never, ever, ever be able to get onto the internet. And so the reason why those films are not on the internet is because of me.

Speaker 1: 1:45:21

We, the way, the system that we made, we made all of the files separate, so some of them have subtitles, some of them have different, a different language, and some of them have a different video file, depending on what the language is. The titles and everything are specific to the language. And we actually built a media player called PsyPlayer and it takes the via the voice track and the specific track of a video that's in English and the subtitle and it sort of like pours them into a mixer and plays them on the computer real time. So you're not watching the English version of this film, you're watching the English video and English audio and an English subtitle that are being combined live for you when you watch it and but when you're not watching it, that film doesn't exist as you just saw it. Wow, so you would have to. It's funny because I tell people you'd have to get one of these computers and you'd have to know the password. You'd also have to know how not to burn it down, because we had to build in there like a failsafe, so if it got it in the wrong hands and then somebody entered the wrong password, it would just burn the files down. So there's all these other things.

Speaker 1: 1:46:37

Somebody recently wrote to me and they said, hey, we got this. We bought this storage option and it's got all this weird stuff. We don't know what it is, but there's this computer system in there and it says golden error productions. And we looked up golden reductions. We thought we thought you might know something about this. And so, long story not so short. I ended up buying the computer that this person had purchased at the auction. That was in this storage unit and I got it and it was one of the computers that I had built and I thought what are the chances that my password was in this computer? Anyway, no spoilers and no teasers, but my password did work on that computer. But that's the end of that story. For now.

Speaker 1: 1:47:30

But that is the reason why I think that those files just never really got out there, because it was something that David Muscavige was very, very, very cognizant of that if these things ended out there, they would be wild if people on the internet saw them, and so he tried to take every precaution as possible to make it so they wouldn't end up. Whether they do or don't in the future, who knows? No, they inevitably will. But you know, given time, you think they will, and I know, I know at least three pop people that have either the audio files or they have the video files, or they have some part. You've got the computer. Well, I have a computer from a system, but either way, they have all these. There's their. They really it's just like anything else in Scientology they silo information and they silo things.

Speaker 1: 1:48:27

So if that person does get out or that person does turn on them, they sort of are able to minimize the damage that person could do, because they don't know the other parts of the story or they don't know the other player. It's the same thing they do with private investigators and all these sort of you know operations. They run against people like you or Russell Miller that they, they. They're hiring Scientology Office of Special Affairs is hiring attorney who's hiring a private investigator. Whose firm private investigator firm who's then hiring individual private investigators that are then hiring, you know, people to help them or do things, or other other private investigators. So if any one of those people do anything, there's so many cutouts along the way that it's like this is not science, this is not Scientology. There's like four people between that thing that happened and a Scientology personnel. So you know it's, it's they've had.

Speaker 1: 1:49:32

I try to explain this to people. They've had 70 years to perfect this con and to figure out. You know how not to lose the game. They and and if you had, it's been sort of rumored that Scientology have about $3 billion and you know assets and cash or whatever at this point, and and so I sort of tell people if you had $3 billion, how much would you spend to keep the $3 billion? And and my answer is I think David Muscavige would spend $2.5 billion to keep a half a billion of it. You know on lawyers and nonsense lawsuits and you know smearing, public smear campaigns and Google ads and you know whatever else you can dream up that cause money.

Speaker 2: 1:50:24

Yeah, and what you're describing is the cell system which is used by terrorist groups in espionage and by international criminal organisations, that that you have cutouts and you know this person doesn't actually know who that person is talking to, and so it creates what appears to be a safe system. But of course, with Scientology, when people stop believing in it and when they realise that the emperor doesn't in fact have any clothes on, then it all comes apart. There are no punters anymore, there's nobody to buy, and among the tech films that you did look at, did you have the David Mayo one?

Speaker 1: 1:51:08

No. So at the international headquarters David Mayo I want to say anything that has any mention of him is something that you cannot read or have access to as a C-Work member, depending on what level Like if, maybe if you were in the Religious Technology Center, you'd have access to that set of files. They have a system at the international management which is called the data files and you can almost look up anything in these files up to your cleared level of access. So I worked in golden-air productions, so I had everything that you could get at any organization in the world, like an organization, a Scientology organization, like in Los Angeles or in Taiwan or in South America. I could see any of their files, but I couldn't see anything that was marked for the Office of Special Affairs and I couldn't see anything that was marked for Religious Technology Center or Author Services and in even some golden-air productions ones. I'd only have filtered access to some of those documents. So if you and also if you were looking around for David Mayo stuff as a C-Work member, that is, those keystrokes are all recorded somewhere. So if you're poking it, that's another thing. Like you say like, oh, did you ever see anything? If I happen to come across something. I might have made a note of it or something. But even the funny, the ironic thing about that in now that I'm thinking about it is everything I knew about David Mayo.

Speaker 1: 1:52:51

I heard from David Miscavige directly. So he would tell us that they have these things, these processes they do at the Flag Land Base that are called the L's and they're these levels that any Scientologists can do, no matter where they are on the Scientology training or processing chart. You can pay and do these levels. They probably cost 50 to $100,000 depending on how long you take to do them or whatever. It's a very, very big moneymaker for Scientology because they really don't have to do anything. You just pay them the money and then you do these counseling, you do these auditing, scientology processing sessions and they just make tons and tons of money.

Speaker 1: 1:53:32

But David Miscavige would bring this up on a very regular basis that those were all written by David Mayo and he purportedly did them on Hubbard. That's the story that I was told is that he sort of workshopped these with Hubbard and kind of did them with Hubbard and then Hubbard just said, okay, go ahead, write those up and we'll do those, and we'll do those at Flag, that'll be a flag thing or whatever it was, and so you're sort of reliant on what did David Mayo do? What did Hubbard tell him to do? Because it was all basically just based off of this relationship that they had had.

Speaker 1: 1:54:13

And because Scientology makes so much money, I want to say when I left in 2005, this was one of the most money-making things that Scientology had were these things. And if Scientologists were told, oh, those were written by the guy that we told you was the biggest, baddest, suppressive person in the entire world, it would make us maybe not look that great that we've been making. I want to say they've probably made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars off of these. It's called L, I think it's L10, 11 and 12.

Speaker 2: 1:54:49

Yeah, list 10, list 11, list 12. Released first in the early 70s. It was actually Otto Rose who worked with Hubbard on them. I don't think David was in that particular team then. He probably wrote them up later and in fact when they were released around about 1974, hubbard made a statement that he had worked. These were taken from an OT level 15 levels above OT8. So they're from OT23, which I think is what caused David Miscavige to try and seize all of Pat Broker's files the man who Hubbard had appointed as his heir and to pay $11 million to private detectives to follow him for 24 years in the hope that he'd get these missing OT levels. They still haven't got them. 1988 was the last release. We've just had superpowers since then.

Speaker 1: 1:55:51

Yeah, that's also something that was very fascinating to me, because it's very common knowledge at the international headquarters that there's no OT levels above OT8. It's just common knowledge at the international headquarters that Hubbard was supposed to write them and that he didn't Depending on who you talk to, because David Miscavige kind of changed the story around a little bit over the years. But according to David Miscavige, alvron Hubbard told Ray Middoth what OT9 and 10 were. Ray Middoth just forgot he didn't take good notes and then he couldn't find the not good notes and he just didn't remember it. To me that's just what I knew from being in meetings with David Miscavige is like, oh yeah, what about Ray? You didn't even do this and you forgot OT9 and 10. You're just in a meeting like, oh, and you forgot what OT9 and 10 were supposed to be. You're just like, wait a minute, did I just hear that Ray Middoth knew what OT9 and 10 were and they were so mind blowing that they just blew right out of his mind.

Speaker 2: 1:57:10

Yeah, he couldn't take anymore.

Speaker 1: 1:57:12

He just didn't remember. So it's funny to me that they did spend all that time and money paying those private investigators to watch Pat Broker for $11 million 24 years?

Speaker 1: 1:57:27

Did you hear the story about how one of the private investigators he enlisted his father to become friends with Pat Broker and then, for his birthday, the private investigator's father gave Pat Broker a cordless, a wireless phone, which was all the rage back then and that had a transmitter in it so they could just record all of his phone calls To me? That's how you know. They don't have OT, ot levels past OT. Otherwise why would you spend you know millions at tens of millions of dollars hiring these guys to watch this dude in case, just in case, he might have them? He said he didn't have them. He just told. The story I've heard is he told David Muscavige I don't have them. Hubbard never wrote them. He was working on crazy stuff but he never wrote up anything.

Speaker 1: 1:58:21

And so and I have a whole another project that has to do with that, which is really going to be lots of fun, and we'll have to talk about that later, but I just wanted to wrap up here. We've been going at this for a bit. This was a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you putting up with all my silliness and yeah, we could. We definitely should do another one of these. I know that you've done the.

Speaker 1: 1:58:49

You did another interview with Claire on our channel and I want to encourage everybody. If you're watching this on the Blone for Good channel, there's a link to John's channel in the description. Please go over to his channel and give him a like and subscribe. And and yeah, we definitely should do this again we have to figure out what we would, what other things we could talk about, or we could just do it like this. I kind of like this format a little bit better, where we don't we don't really have any sort of thing we're trying to do or just having a conversation, and wherever it leads, it leads, because I'm a big yapper. I think they tend to go a little long, but I hope that I let you speak a proportionate amount to what I spoke, mark.

Speaker 2: 1:59:37

it's usually me saying that to my guests, so you know.

Speaker 1: 1:59:40

I'm a regular chat. I was. I was giving Claire a hard time, that I said great interview with John. I, she, I had to edit a little like a phone. She got a phone call or something like that. I had to drop out and I'm so I kind of skimmed through it and I said you could have let him talk a little and then, and then she goes what? And I go. I'm just joking, of course. If I have a video that I do with John, you're probably going to be able to accuse me of letting. I should maybe let him talk.

Speaker 2: 2:00:11

It's about conversation. I think people often come to these, to YouTube, thinking that they're going to see interviews the kind of thing that you'd see on a TV show. You know and, and that's not what's happening. What's happening is that two people who are having expertise and an experience in common are having a conversation, and for me, that's that's what I want to see. I don't want to see a prepared list of questions and something like that.

Speaker 1: 2:00:37

I want to see where it goes, so this has been great and thank you, thank you, yeah, and if you're watching this and you want to leave a comment or you want us, you want to know about something else John and I should talk about, we can definitely list or have a, you know a sense of like oh, what do you know about this?

Speaker 1: 2:01:01

Yeah. So if you've got something like that, please put it in the comments below. And then, if you're listening on the podcast, we do put this out as a podcast as well. So if you're listening on the podcast, you can always go to the Blown for Good website and we've got a place where you can comment there. If you want to hear something else, or if you did enjoy this podcast or this episode, we'd love to know. So let us know in the comments if you enjoyed this, if there's something else that you'd like, and I'll mirror it on my site.

Speaker 2: 2:01:29

So again, I do occasionally get to answer comments there. I do occasionally have a spare hour not very often and but I really think it. You know, I believe that we are a community. It's not a matter of there being gurus who can tell us what to do and what to do. It's exactly the opposite of that. So, and I have learned so much, you know, when I was writing at Tony Ortega's bunker, people would make the most intelligent comments that they're. You know, saying something about the training routines. And this guy came on and said I felt that I was being trained to be a sociopath and you go. That's actually true.

Speaker 2: 2:02:08

Your feelings are being got out of the way through all of this drilling, so that you can be a weapon of Scientology, you know.

Speaker 1: 2:02:16

Yeah, and the last thing I wanted to say just along the same lines as that is sometimes someone who's been in Scientology they may look at something from a completely different aspect that I would never look at it from, because I worked there and I was sort of I wasn't.

Speaker 1: 2:02:35

I wasn't there to be enlightened, I was there to do a job. So my kind of take on a lot of this is just like I had to deal. I had to learn about the Scientology stuff just so they would let me do my job. I didn't do it because I wanted to get better, I didn't want to better myself using that. I had to do it because it was required. It was sort of like on the job training that you were required to do just in order to film a movie or drive a car or anything that you do in the civilization. So yeah, I love seeing the comments and I do try to get look at the comments and kind of go through there and see if there's anything else, and I've actually even done a few videos on the channel that were solely based off of suggestion from a comment.

Speaker 1: 2:03:22

So, we definitely looked through that. Great, awesome man. I appreciate it. Thanks again, guys. Thanks for everybody who tuned in and until next time. Thanks for watching. If you'd like to help support the channel, feel free to check out the merch store link in the description. We have Hale Zee New Zee New is my Homeboy and BFG branded Mouse Pads, shirts, mugs all sorts of other stuff in there that helps us to bring you new content on a regular basis. You can also pick up a copy of my book Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology in hardback, kindle and audible versions as well. There's also a link to our podcast and you can get that on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to watch another video, you could click on this link right here, or you could click on this one here, or you can click on the subscribe button right here. Thanks a lot, until next time.