Joe Rogan Experience #835 - Louis Theroux

Yeah, we feel professional with headsets on. And we're live. Welcome back, Louie. Oh, thanks. Yeah, thanks. Nice to be back. I was saying before the podcast started that you sent me down a Scientology rabbit hole last night, my friend. I've been down those before, but last night, knowing that you were going to be on and looking forward to it eagerly, I watched a lot of stuff. And I spent three years down that rabbit hole, and it's a weird one. Were you on the internet? Were you just clicking around? Yeah, just no. There's a lot on YouTube, but there's various very, very well-resourced websites. There's one called ClamBake. I've been to that one, yeah. And then there's all the Tony Ortega stuff. I mean, there's just whole worlds. And actually, I know there's a lot to talk about, but perhaps the biggest obstacle to making a documentary about Scientology is the overabundance of material. Because there's just so many ways to come in on it, and you can just chase intriguing leads and then months go by, and you're no nearer to filming anything. I had a lot of thoughts on this. And one of the thoughts, when I was really trying to unpack it all, is that I feel like one of the reasons why a lot of these people defend Scientology, and I think there's several reasons. It's their team, and once you become a part of a team, it becomes something that you identify with, it becomes very important to you, and then you want to defend that. So I think there's that. But also, I think some people take some benefit in what L. Ron Hubbard created. Because if you read Going Clear? Yes. When I read Going Clear, I watched the documentary, and then I read the book. And one of the things that was more fascinating about the book was the fact that he was essentially trying to diagnose and treat himself. And he was essentially a really nutty guy. He was very damaged. Yeah. He had a lot going on. And he was a guy who was trying to sort of sort it out himself, and in the process brought a lot of people in and then created this thing. And some people, they get some benefit from this thing. Because I was watching some of these people that are upset with you, like that woman, there's a trailer where this woman was upset at you because you were in ... I haven't seen the documentary yet. It comes out in America in January. But you were on a road that you had a permit for, and she was telling you you were on private land. That's right. And I'm looking at this woman, I'm like, this seems like a reasonable, intelligent, assertive, confident woman that would probably, if she didn't get into Scientology, she would have been successful in the corporate world. Right? I'm sure. And she is, her corporation is written by a nutty science fiction writer who wrote more fiction than any human that's ever walked the face of the planet. He made up more shit. He wrote down more things that never happened than anyone who's ever lived. And they don't have a problem with that. You've said about 10 different things that I could break down and analyze. And I basically, on the same page as you, I think there's ... the first thing to acknowledge about Scientology is that it's a religion and that all religions have a very high portion of, you know, I'm trying to put it politely, but just bogus, fallacious, clearly nonsensical material. Right? And Scientology is the same as all of those. I think there's a lot of people who've had, who've derived a lot of benefit from Scientology. I think people probably, there's people whose lives have been saved by it. Kirstie Alley will say at any opportunity that it was Scientology that got her off drugs. But I think a lot, you have to sort of take the whole package. And as far as Hubbard goes, he was an only child. He was a fantasist, a lonely guy who was also a narcissist. And I think as a writer, I mean, you can't, one of the things, intriguing things about Scientology is created by a sci-fi writer, right? Most other religions are created by sort of desert mystics or warriors or people, introspective people, but a modern day sci-fi writer who's writing things about aliens taking over foreign galaxies. That's really, that accounts for a lot of its, it's very bizarre inflection. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, not only that, I don't think he wrote a second draft ever. No, he didn't have time. He was just churning it out. I think a lot of the stuff that they say he wrote, he didn't write like, because he was married three times and at least one of his wives took credit for writing some of his stuff. And some stuff of Scientology may be written by his second wife, who he then he subsequently disavowed said he was never married to. But the guy was, he lied about so many things. He was also abusive to his wife, wives, I think plural. So physically he was abusive to them. He was very, very troubled and suicidal. One of the most intriguing things in going clear is reading this list of, I think they call them affirmations, which when he was in, after the second world war, he was wracked with self doubt. He thought he was a failure. He was embarrassed about his sexual urges, his compulsive masturbation, and so on and so forth. And he wrote down a list of things. Do you remember this section of it where it says, you do not feel compelled to masturbate 24 times a day. It's not literally, I was like, you are, you were not a disgrace to the military. You acquitted your service in the Navy very creditably. It was all these sort of lies he was telling himself to reassure himself that he was actually, to feel okay about himself. It's a very humanizing document because you just see all his neurotic inclinations laid bare that then subsequently informed his lifelong attempt to, as you say, sort of therapeutically heal himself. And I think there's other people that identify with those self sort of damaged thoughts, these thoughts where they don't like their past, they don't like who they are, they don't like the pattern that they're on, and they seek to try to change that and improve upon their position, improve upon their understanding and their acceptance of themselves. And I think that's where Scientology does benefit a lot of people. And so it is tricky, like many things in this life, it's not that black and white. I mean, is it black and white that it's a cult and that there's a lot of damaging aspects of that? Yes, absolutely. It's pretty clear. When you see the people that have tried to leave it and tell the truth about their experiences in it and how they've been harassed and hounded, and yeah, that's all pretty black and white. But I think we can, in some ways, we can sympathize with some of the people that are in it. And yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, but the other thing to say is, because you started by asking, what was it that made some people defend Scientology and is it loyalty to their team? But I also think that on the outer periphery, like there are concentric rings of commitment to Scientology and in the inner circle, it is extremely demanding and I would argue abusive and cult-like. On the outer circles, as you get further from the center, I think it can be relatively benign. And especially if you're a VIP or a celebrity in which you're exposed only to the best sorts of treatment, you're given kind of platinum card treatment, you go to the celebrity center, they roll out the red carpet for you. And I think those people feel immensely indebted to Scientology. I think that explains a lot about Tom Cruise, that he's only ever been treated like a prince when he's been in Scientology. So he feels so grateful for everything that they've done for him. Yeah, I think his experience, when he talks about them, if he's being honest, I mean, if everyone had that experience, Scientology would be amazing. You see him when they had the happy birthday thing for him and he's dancing and everybody's cheering like, imagine if you would just, people treated you like that all the time? Oh my goodness. Auditioning actors, like female actors to see if they were going to be your girlfriend. Did you read that whole? I mean, imagine if they rounded up the most attractive young female actors in Hollywood to see whether they would go on a date with you. Yeah. That would make life very simple. I don't know if you weren't married as I am. Would it though? Would it? I don't know, man. I mean, it's just dealing with a bunch of nutty people that are willing to go through that process. Yeah. And actually, because it would be like a almost King Midas thing where you wouldn't trust any of your instincts. You would feel as though people were erecting Potemkin villages everywhere you went. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Nothing would feel quite real. Right. That's a good point. Also, imagine your wife today, if you found out that your wife today was one of the people that had auditioned to be Tom Cruise's wife. I mean, if you don't make the cut, you're damaged goods for the rest of your life. That's interesting. You're a nutty broad who is willing to go and sign up to become Tom Cruise's new wife. Well, to be fair, they didn't know that was the job they were going in for. Right, to be fair. Yeah, that's true. So, they were just being... They just thought they were up for some gig. I mean, do you know what I mean? Maybe a sitcom or something. Well, essentially they were. Yeah. And then there's also all of the... This is a difficult thing to skirt around, but the Scientology treatment of homosexuals where they sort of shield them from the press or hide their activity and sort of... Do you know what a beard is? I do. Yeah. They hire beards. I mean, that's a great point. And I think actually that's another one that... I guess we as a society have evolved a lot over the last 50 years. To some extent Hubbard was a creature of his times and his attitudes towards homosexuality. The trouble is, because they're saying it's a religion, that's been enshrined as scripture. And so there is L. Ron Hubbard's scripture that dictates that homosexuals, gays, are perverts. They're 1.1 on the tone scale, which is the same as journalists, oddly enough, but it's very, very low. Basically, you are a kind of broken, deceitful, devious character. Journalists are 1.1 on the tone scale? Same as perverts. And actually, I think quite explicitly... I mean, I could go down... And that explains a lot about why it's so hard to make a documentary. In practical terms, why they don't cooperate with documentaries. They just see you as a pervert, someone who's dedicated to the abasement of humanity, in essence, someone who's holding humanity back from being what it should be. That's just incredible that he's managed to define journalists under that category. The very people that we rely upon to investigate the truth and express that truth, disseminate that truth to the general public, those people are perverts. And yeah, and that's scripture as well. You know what I mean? So it's not like you can argue against it in their... I mean, one of the big things they're up against is any attempt... Most kind of malfunctioning regimes, whether it's a corporate entity or something else, you say, this isn't working, let's try something else. So much of what happened in Scientology... This was explained to me by one of our sources in the film, a guy called Marty Rathbun, who was very high up in Scientology. He said something could be working extremely badly inside Scientology, but if it came out of Hubbard, then you couldn't really change it. Hubbard apparently once said, oh, the best way to wash windows is using vinegar. Don't use Windex, use vinegar. And because of that, whenever they washed windows in the sea or in the inner sanctums of Scientology, they had to use vinegar because Hubbard said that was how you were supposed to do it. And nothing can be changed. It's a bit like Mormons. I mean, now Mormons, I don't know how they got around it. They say that you don't have to be polygamous. But it's like turning an aircraft carrier around. If it comes from... Basically, if it's gospel, then how do you... How do you reform... You know, God's changed his mind is basically what you have to say. Well, that is the real problem with religion, because we all recognize that no one person has ultimate truth. And especially when you're just going through this life trying to figure out yourself, trying to figure out what is this all about, this strange spinning ball that's floating in the sky and we're hurling through infinity and what is the purpose of this existence. And there's a lot of open-ended questions that never have any answers. So when someone comes along and they have this rigid ideology where things are very clearly defined, you must ask, who is defining these things? Who is this person that is beyond reproach? And when that person is a yellow-toothed weirdo that's dressed like a captain with some medals that he put himself on his own jacket, and he's a science fiction author who wrote more bullshit than any human being has ever read, and wrote bad books. I mean, he's a bad writer. I've only... I haven't read any of his... I've tried to read Dianetics several times. It's almost unreadable in my view. Have you tried to read Dianetics? I've bought Dianetics once. A late night before the internet, there was a late night infomercial. I've always been a person who's really in a self-help and psychology. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Because I've always tried to figure out, like, what is it about, you know, why do people sabotage themselves? Why do I get lazy? Why do I not fulfill some of my goals? And so I really got into like Anthony Robbins, and I got into a lot of psychology books and self-help books. And one night I was at home, and I was watching this commercial for Dianetics. So I said, all right, I'm going to call this. And I called, and I guess I gave my credit card number or whatever it was. This is while you were an actor at this point. I was a working actor. Quite successful. Yeah, I was doing... I mean, they weren't okay. If they saw you coming, they would have absolutely... That would have made their year. Well, I never went in. I never went there. But I did, in the future, I did do the E-meter thing, but that was way later. So this is like 1994, when I just first came to Hollywood. I was alone in my apartment in North Hollywood, probably lonely, trying to figure things out. Just got here. I want to buy this fucking thing. Those people sent me pamphlets and paperwork and invitations to seminars and this thing and that thing for a decade. I mean, it just never ended. It was like weekly, monthly, constant. They're very, very relentless in their pursuit. And if you looked at what their pamphlets were saying, it was all really reasonable, enticing stuff. It was all about improving yourself. It was all about fulfilling your goals, eliminating negative thoughts, eliminating other people's negative thoughts that are influencing the way you view your life, eliminating the effect of past experiences that were negative and that may have defined you in some way. All of that. But that's basically Freud, basically. It's Freud with a lie detector. You hooked up to a lie detector. That in essence is auditing. The problem is when you read Dianetics, you realize it's how loopy it is in my view. And in fact, sometimes, and I praise this sort of skeptical-minded approach where people say, well, what's your problem with Scientology? All religions are kooky. But the fact is, exhibit A is just read Dianetics. If you read the Bible, it's got loony stuff in it, but it's got passages of transcendent poetry and just parables that you could meditate on and beautifully written in the translated English. You read Dianetics, and it's just childish stuff about literally things about, oh, a lot of your problems may be because when you are in utero as a fetus, your father tried to abort you. Your father tried to abort the fetus. You can still remember that, and that's holding you back. And at that time, a record was playing, and every time you hear that record, it's sort of this sort of Pavlov mixed with really weird, totally unscientific ideas. And then it expands to past lives. So it's traumas or bad memories from previous lifetimes. And at that point, I was just like, I'm not on this ship. Well, I was not before, but even more so. Yeah, it's hard to be honest. But that's what we were saying earlier about rigid ideologies. Rigid ideologies are always problematic because there's so many open-ended questions when it comes to being a human being on Earth, and that is a problem with religions. And one of the things that religions do by creating these rigid ideologies is they make things so that you don't have to question stuff, and that gives some people comfort. If you know that these are the rules and you don't have to think about why homosexuality is bad or why, fill in the blank, whatever the issue is. When someone defines something like that for you, it makes it so you have less questions and you have comfort in these truths, air quotes. But that's not good for anybody. It's bad for everyone involved because there are some things that I think we've all learned. Be nice to people, and it feels better to them. It feels better to you. You have a healthier existence when you have harmony with your neighbors and when you can create a good community of people that are being harmonious together and friendly together, it's a really nice place to live. That's pretty much a universal truth. There's a bunch of those that exist, but even those can be debated and discussed, and you find various approaches to the end goal of happiness. Whenever you have someone who wrote down a bunch of wacky shit like this, and then you have seemingly intelligent people defending it like that woman that we were discussing, and that woman was, she did not seem stupid at all. No, I'm sure she was, I was reliably informed because in the film we go off and meet her ex-husband who's now no longer in Scientology, and he describes her as a very sensitive, caring person. A lot of the assertiveness she shows, I think she probably acquired through Scientology, and a lot of Scientology training in terms of what imparts to people is a quality of being direct, being assertive, being confident, being in charge, and being okay with sort of dominating the situations that you're in. It's one of the reasons that I think it appeals a lot to actors because it works, I think, for people who have any sort of insecurity or who are going into situations of uncertainty, and it allows you to almost reprogram your circuits in some way and be okay about using assertive body language and speech. And it also imparts the sense that you have all the truths necessary to save humanity from itself, not just humanity on Earth, but throughout time and space. And it is your obligation to ensure that those truths are saved for posterity and communicated as widely as possible in a totally unadulterated fashion because any adulteration of the message means that not only do they not work, they become toxic and dangerous. It seems to me that there's a bunch of things going on and that there's some aspects of it that maybe could be beneficial, that they could extract from that. Just like these people that have abandoned Scientology can start Scientology Lite. Well, they do. They are doing that. Are they? Yeah, but one of the funny things is once you have Scientology Lite, it's called the Indy movement, independent Scientology, and it's often an analogy is made with Martin Luther and Protestantism. People said, there's nothing in the Bible about the papacy, really. There's nothing about selling indulgences and having palaces in Rome, so in the Vatican. So actually, really, there's just stuff in the Bible about following Jesus and reading the Bible, so shouldn't that be what we're doing? And so they go off, you have Protestantism. The trouble with the independent movement is it turns out that if you remove the rather predatory money-raising side and the sort of fundamentalist controlling side, you get something a bit wishy-washy that's more or less indistinguishable from many other sort of self-help creeds. It sort of loses its potency. It's almost that the authoritarian dimension of Scientology and the way in which it demands total obedience from its followers is intrinsic to its ability to have an effect. That's fascinating. People do in some way gravitate towards discipline, and you see that in the military, like the benefit of, so, yes, sir, no, sir. And one of the things I talk about in the film is, I mean, we talked as well about the appeal of Scientology, why do people defend it? So it works for some people. I think there's an obvious thing. The thin end of the wedge, you know, you get in knee-deep, and then you think, well, I've come in this far, so even though I've got doubts, I'll go a little further. And then you sort of reach a tipping point of commitment where it becomes almost embarrassing to back out. You're sort of $100,000 or more in. You're 10 years in. Your family is annoyed with you. A lot of them you don't see. It's very hard to walk away from that commitment. So there's all these powerful, compelling reasons for why. But the other part of it is, and this is the part that I, as an outsider, appreciate and I own up to in the film, is that there's something grandiose. It's a bit like Trump, right? You see these gilded casinos. You see these towering, shiny buildings. You know, they're kind of over the top in grotesque, but they're also sort of majestic and imperial. And if you ever watch Scientology footage, there's some of it's on YouTube, and you see how they are very good at a certain kind of over-the-top aesthetic. Do you know what I mean? Almost a kind of Lenny Riefenstahl-esque with lights and flaming braziers and thousands of people surging upward in unison. And it has an effect. You sort of think, wow, these guys know how to run a show. If you go into any org, have you been into an, they call them orgs, right? No. It's short for organization. Okay, so near where I'm staying in Los Feliz, there's one. It's on Hillhurst, I think. And you go in and it feels like you're kind of in a religious library, sort of designed by Jay Peterman. You know, like the catalog company, and it has sort of old globes and kind of distressed wooden furniture and wicker chairs. And it feels like it's kind of like a slightly colonial golden age of exploration feel. Do you know what I mean? And it feels very, it feels very, sort of swept up in this narrative of we're in a place where there's adventure and a sense of order. And actually there's a sort of seductive quality to it. Yeah, there's a seductive quality to a lot of religions. I find a seductive quality to people that are very confident in what they're saying and this ultimate truth that they're espousing. I went to the Vatican recently, and one of the things that was really apparent to me was the sheer scale and the vast, the size of like St. Peter's. It's not St. Peter's Cathedral. It's not Cathedral. It's called St. Peter's, isn't it? Basilica. Yeah, the Basilica, thank you. The Basilica, which was just to me the most amazing thing I think I've ever seen as far as like a human creation, the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life other than Chichen Itza, other than the Mayan pyramids. I was just stunned by the amount of work and the hundreds of years of work that had gone into creating that. But when you're there, the overall scale of it is so immense that it makes you feel pure. It makes you feel small. It makes you feel insignificant in the greater picture. And I think that that's a big factor with a lot of religions, is to eliminate the power of the individual by making you feel diminished by the sheer scale of what you're seeing and the hall that you're in. I'm sure. I'm sure that's correct. It's intimidating. Very much so. And there's one other thing which I would add in, which is last year, slightly on the back of doing the Scientology program, I was living in the UK and I was trying to get a program going about fundamentalist Islam or not even fundamentalist actually beyond where it's extreme radical Islam, so-called, you know, basically people who support ISIS, of which there are some in the UK, although they're hard to interview because it's actually a crime to glorify terrorism is what it's called. And so they have to talk very gingerly around the subject. But if you get into a debate about someone who is sincerely committed to ISIS brand of Sunni Islam, right, where they're saying actually, yes, sex slaves are okay. They'll say, like, slaves isn't quite the right term, but we approve that and blah, blah, blah. And then your throat, they say, well, by what authority do you challenge what we believe? Right? When you start coming at them with some kind of humanistic, secular, liberal sort of view of life and you try to explain, well, I'm not basing my, I don't have an authority as such, you know, like I'm not preaching a religion. I'm just saying, you know, it's kind of better to be nice to people. And they say, but based on what, under what authority, like you, you find that you actually don't really have, it's surprisingly difficult when you're thrown back on first principles to make the case for a sort of sensitive, secular way of doing things. Does that make sense? Yes. You know, we, one of the appeals of, I think, whether it's Scientology or Islam or, or, extreme Christianity of whatever form that takes, they can say like, we have all our answers, they're in a book and God told us. And so who told you? And I, well, no one told me I'm relying on a two millennia old tradition, you know, founded in, you know, Greco-Roman times, you know, with various people, you know, interpreters over the years, but actually I, you know, I can't really articulate that in 10 words. Do you know what I mean? Yes. So it's surprisingly hard. So once you're in the prison of a faith-based system, it's very hard to kind of leverage your way out. I, I didn't do a good job of trying to get them out, basically. Well it's very difficult when they say that, like by what authority? And you realize you don't have any and they think they do. Yeah. And that's where it gets weird. Yeah. You're like, I don't have a book, like whatever we call the other way of doing things, you know, and also you don't want to say like, well in Western tradition, you know, you, you're trying not to, because whether we like it or not, all our beliefs have a, some sort of geographic, contemporary specificity to them. As much as we might want to say that there are golden rules that exist through time and space, I don't think there really are. These are all kind of constructed. Right. Like all of culture. Yeah. Like all truths, all culture. And so you are having to say, well, you know, over the last few hundred years since the Enlightenment, we've found that in general, torture is not a brilliant idea and capital punishment is not great and slavery is largely discredited. And they, and they say, well, so this is about the Western Enlightenment. That's your authority. And I don't want to be kind of basing it on that. So I just, I slightly made a hash of it. After, after I did the interview, my producers said to me, so I said, yeah, I think he kind of owned you in that. The guy who's like the ISIS depend, he's now doing, he's doing, he's in prison now. That was why we didn't, one of the reasons we didn't finish the documentary. Anyway, that's sort of going off on a tangent side. Well, what did he go to prison for? Allegedly glorifying terrorism. You know, did you hear that Twitter yesterday banned 235,000 Twitter handles? No, really. For promoting terrorism? Really? 235,000. That's incredible. How, I mean, I'd be intrigued to know how they define promoting terrorism. Yeah, I would as well. Would that all be Islamic or? Yes. I would assume because I am not. So it must be that. But I wonder if they could, this, yeah, there was a conservative Breitbart blogger who was bad. Milo, Milo Yiannopoulos. That was very sketchy. I don't agree with what he said, but if you, if you really pay attention to what he said, it was very sketchy that they banned him. I mean, if you believe in freedom of speech or you don't, kind of. Yes. And what he, what he, all he did was he made a post on Breitbart about the Ghostbusters movie and it was very critical. He basically called it a piece of shit. It was a terrible movie. He said, it was this ridiculous feminist film and that creating this all female Ghostbusters cast where all the men are buffoons and. Did he not flame the African American actor? He flamed everyone. He called them fat and ugly and disgusting. And you know, what he's saying is essentially like, look, I'm, I'm bitchy. He's, he's bitchy all the time. He's a very flamboyantly gay guy. He's been in this podcast a couple of times. He's hilarious. I find him funny. I follow him on Twitter. I mean, yeah. Used to. Yeah, well, there you go. Well, they banned him, but here's what's interesting. He didn't do anything bad on Twitter. When you look at what he said on Twitter, it was like nothing, you know, it was like nothing more than thing. She had said, Leslie Jones had said a bunch of things about him or what other people had said about her. And she wrote something down that was just poor grammar. And he wrote my word, barely literate, you know, such a shame schools in America. You know, that's essentially what he wrote. And then he was banned. I mean, that is really mild stuff. I mean, if you, I think what there's a problem, first of all, that he's conservative and they don't like that and that he does attack feminists and social justice warriors and progressives and the left and he goes after them. And that's essentially the whole base of Twitter. Twitter has this, what do they call it again? What is their counsel? They have some strange, it's very Orwellian. It's like safety and trust and safety counsel or things. It's a watchdog group within Twitter that keeps tabs on it. Well, who decides what is and is not harassment and sort of, it's sort of like placating people or recreationally outraged by other people's opinions. The trouble is it's a public space that is basically a corporate entity, right? So in essence, they can do whatever they want legally, right? Yeah, but it's very ideologically based. It's very left wing. It's very weird in a lot of ways, which I am in many ways left wing. So when I read what they're saying, I agree in some ways, but outside of actual real harassment, I just don't think that you should be able to just ban someone because they call someone a bitch or call someone ugly. It doesn't seem to me... Yeah, I'm not going to disagree with you. I mean, I feel as though we're in a weird place. We're off on a tangent slightly, but it was around the time of Charlie Hebdo, which everyone was marching for the right to be offensive, right? And around the same time, trolling became a buzzword and it was the idea that we should stop trolling. And there's a certain disconnect we're living through as a culture to do with wanting to defend the right to be offensive, but also come down hard on trolling. And actually at a certain point, you can't have it both ways. Yeah. Well, there was also a lot of people that were defending what had happened in Charlie Hebdo by saying that those cartoons were really racist. They were going so far pro Islamic to sort of... Well, I'm going to say what I heard was, because I understood this, was some people saying absolutely, it's a crime, it's hideous, and people have the right to be offensive. But I'm not going to valorize the message or even hold these people up as free speech martyrs any more than I would do if Tom Metzger or neo-Nazi was killed. He does not thereby become a hero. He becomes a victim of a lynch mob, of a murderous campaign. But I'm not there by a supporter of his output. Does that make sense? Yeah, I'm sorry. Well, there's a mistake here. I have to text that to Tom Popo, who thinks he's supposed to be here right now. Apparently he's outside. He's supposed to be here next Monday. Whoops, Tom. Yeah, I think... So Penn, for example, I think it was Penn, the American... Magician. No, writers union. It was a guild of writers that supports the rights of writers around the world in America. And they said, well, we don't want to give an award. So there was a divide among Penn. Should we give an award to Charlie Hebdo? By giving them an award, are you thereby saying, we support you for saying that Muhammad was a piece of shit or whatever they were saying? Or are you... In other words, do you get an award for being killed? There's a little bit of a conflict there. In other words, so I don't... I'm sympathetic to people who feel that absolutely it was a crime, it was hideous, you know, Islamofascists killed Charlie Hebdo, but that does not thereby make Charlie Hebdo's message a laudable or accreditable one. Yes, that's a really good point, because what were they doing and what was the point of what they were doing? Were they just trying to be funny? Was it parody? I don't know if it was funny, because I don't speak French and I haven't really paid any attention to the translations. To me, there's something funny. Some of it seemed funny, some of it didn't seem that funny. But if Julius Streicher, right, that, you know, I'm not... I don't want to compare them directly with this, but, you know, an offensive propagandist for the Nazis, just to take an example. You know, I shouldn't even go down this road, because once you bring the Nazis in, it just clouds everything. Yeah, as soon as you say Hitler. Yeah, it's a kind of thought blocking... It blocks all thought. These worse than Hitler, this Trump. Yes. Yeah. The real bottom line is people were killed for cartoons. There's no way to defend that, right? I think everyone agrees with that. We agree with that. But does that make the cartoons good? It certainly doesn't. No. They could be shit cartoons and people were killed for shit cartoons. It's wrong to kill people for shit cartoons. But the cartoons are still shit. Even L. Ron Hubbard would agree with that. Hopefully. I don't know. Well, let's bring it back to Scientology, because that's one of the interesting things about Scientology is that anyone who is a quote-unquote opponent of Scientology, they are allowed to violate pretty much all of their principles and just go after you. You are the enemy. Yes. And there's a whole different set of rules for engaging with someone who's an SP. An SP, suppressive person. I like how they do that. That's what they do in the military too, by the way. IEDs. They abbreviate things. Acronyms. And a lot of stuff that in Scientology is based on Hubbard's naval experience. He loved... They dress up in naval uniforms. He loved things like little bulletins or anything that felt quasi-military. You know what I mean? In a way, it's a mixture of some military naval stuff and then some corporate-style stuff. What it isn't is a lot of religious stuff. That is the one thing that you don't get a flavor of. In terms of the way they dress and drill, there's some show business. You've got a little touch of Hollywood. You've got a touch of naval. You don't have any sense of it being spiritual or religious. I'm talking in the way they style themselves, the language they use. They're constantly using abbreviations that are more or less unintelligible to the outsider. Which by the way, is a lot of how allegedly, according to experts on thought reform or cults, so-called, they say by learning a new language, it's part of what gets you caught up in the thought patterns of an abusive system. Well, that's also military people. If you talk to people who really have a deep understanding of the military or people who love the military, they love to talk in those acronyms. They love to use them because it sort of lets everybody know that you're on the inside. It's like when people talk about cars or anything where there's a surface knowledge that most people have, oh, that is a Ferrari. Oh, that is a Corvette. But then there's deep, deep knowledge. You start going into the different types of gearing and the axles and, oh, it's got 411 rear end and this and that. And you're like, oh, he knows. He's the deep knowledge. He has the deep knowledge of the car. What is the deep knowledge of the military? And a lot of that is sort of expressed through acronyms. Yes. Yes. They do that. They do that. Yes. And they do all that stuff. So that's a big part of how they operate. And I think as well, this is something I mentioned before. It is important to bear in mind as well that as much as Scientology kind of casts the world in us and them terms, which is very characteristic of a lot of systems of thought that are inimical to sort of sort of freedom or free way of thinking, it's us and them. It's like Bush saying, you're either with us or against us. And in Scientology, in a famous statement of Tom Cruise's that he gave in 2004 when he was given a Freedom Medal of Valor at a big Scientology awards ceremony in England, he said, you're either playing on the pitch or you're out of the arena. Right. You know, this is the one when they gave him that gold dinner plate. Yeah, they gave him a huge, like a Flavor Flav style. Gone. And so his thing is like, you're either out on the pitch or get out of the arena because there's no half measures. You know, get in or you're out. And that whole idea, like if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem. It's a very dangerous, slippery road to go down because you're then by definition saying there's good guys and bad guys. And if you're not on my team, you're a bad guy. Well, let's define what the solution is, Tom. Yeah. You know, sit down. Tell us about what are Thetans. Explain to me how they threw Thetans, they throw them into a volcano. What happens? Well, you know, I'm going to sound weird now because like one of my promises that I made to myself was that I would never gratuitously mock the beliefs of Scientology. And one of the things they find offensive is to reveal some of the secret truths that are unveiled. You know, okay, I'll take a step back. Unique to Scientology is that it's a mystery religion, meaning that many of its beliefs are unveiled as you advance up the ladder of enlightenment. Okay. So you don't, day one, get told, unlike with Jesus and Christianity, on day one, you're told he died on a cross for your sins, believeth in him and you will be saved and go to heaven. There's no kind of catch or later sort of amendment that gets made when you're a year, two years, three years down the line. In Scientology, you learn more as you go up. Some say that this is partly something that it owes to Crowley or Alistair Crowley, I think it's pronounced, you know, and that Hubbard had practiced a form of Satanism when he was living in Pasadena in the 40s right after the Second World War and incorporated that aspect of it. And it is quite a seductive idea, the idea, oh, I'm going to learn more as I go on, a kind of unraveling mystery. So that is part of Scientology. When you get to the OT levels, which is once you've gone clear, which is sort of half the way… OT is operating thetan. Yeah. So to begin with, going clear was originally the best thing you could do. And then subsequently, he added more levels and more layers and you get to the OT and there's eight published OT levels and OT3, various secrets are revealed. And allegedly, if an uninitiated OT or an uninitiated person is shown the secrets, it makes them go crazy. But one of the things that… But I, you know, you're not… And every documentary about Scientology rejoices in telling you what the OT stuff is. And I think you were about to touch on it. I promised myself that I wouldn't reveal them because I sort of felt, you know, it's a little cheap when all these documentaries say, you know, this is what you… $100,000 in or $200,000 or $500,000, you're going to learn what happens at OT3. And then we… You know, they spoil the surprise for everyone. And I also felt like I'd like to be able to say to… If I ever meet a Scientology… I mean, I'm sure I've met some, but without knowing it. But, you know, if I ever meet Tom Cruise or Beck, I want to be able to say like, you know what? I didn't ever do anything. I just… I have a right to know my truth and express my truth. I don't want to mock you. I don't want to make… I have a right to believe what you want to believe. And if you think, you know, no more than I'd force a Jewish guy to eat pork or tell a Rastafarian to cut his hair. And so I'm not going to say to an OT, you know, I know what happens at OT3 and it sounds like a bunch of junk. Well, you don't even have to say it's a bunch of junk, but just expressing… I think there's what we know, okay? What we know about their doctrine or their… Whatever you want to call it, their scripture. And there's an amazing moment in the documentary, the HBO documentary, where was it… It was Paul Higgs? Is that what he's named? Haggis. Haggis. He gets to OT3. You're going to say it, fine. He gets to OT3 and he starts reading some of the handwritten stuff by Elvron Hubbard. There's a whole… It's an interesting bit in the book too. Do you remember like he's guided into a room and literally it's almost like they take it out of a safety deposit box and kind of open it up with gloves, kind of white gloved hands. And then there's a handwritten kind of piece of parchment inside written in Hubbard's manuscript. And you read it in that room and then the guy has a kind of little routine he follows, like the person who brought you in comes in and says, has it been read and comprehended or something like that, right? And then you've read it and you go like, yes. And then asking it shall be done or something. And then they put it back in and take it away. Yeah. Well, it must be… It's a great sense of theatre. Yes. Like I love… It's like being in the masons or… Yeah. The secret squirrel stuff is very appealing. Secret squirrel. Yeah. I forgot about secret squirrel. Yeah. But I think it's important to talk about what we know about what that is, about what is… That's fine. I mean, it's out there on the internet. I would say is what they believe is that man is an immortal spirit and you are not your body. You are the spirit and the spirit is a thetan. That's the term they use for spirit. And your spirit, you in essence have lived multiple lifetimes in multiple bodies going back millennia and going forward millennia. And that's not a unique thought. No. Unique to them. No, you have that in Buddhism, but unlike in Buddhism, the transmigration of souls does not… resides only in humans, right? I don't think you can become a chipmunk, right? Which you can in Buddhism, I think. Can you not? No. And I think, you know, depending on how your karma is, that's number one. Number two, which is even more important or just as important, is that you can carry your memories through the lifetimes using Scientology. And the gift that Scientology gives you is the ability to retain your memories and your identity across multiple lifetimes. And that's why it's so important to a Scientologist to recollect his or her past lifetimes, because it suggests that you're sort of… you're now on your cosmic destiny and you will carry it forward into your… when you next incarnate. These are all unique ideas. I mean, they're interesting, but when you know the source of all of it and yet they ignore it and they choose to not pay attention to the other things that he read or wrote rather like Battlefield Earth, that movie with John Travolta. Did you ever see that? I never saw that one. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. It's right up there with… did you ever see Showgirls? Yes, I have seen Showgirls. Showgirls is like a tour de force of writing a movie while you're high on cocaine. It's Joe Estahar's wrote that. It's Paul Verhoeven directed it. It's a great combination. It's one of the best unintentional comedies that's ever been made. Well, I'd argue that… because Verhoeven's a brilliant director, right? Starship Troopers he made and the first RoboCop, he knew… I think he knew what he was doing. I think he has a keen eye for Kemp and thought this is hilarious. Don't you… Estahar's maybe not. It could have been. It could have been. I think they were just coaxed out of their mind and they made a wacky fucking movie and they probably thought it was great. They're like, fucking print it. Let's go out. Let's go out. Let's hit the ivy. And I don't know. I mean, I think they were just out of their mind. And if you watch that film, there's a scene where… What is her name? Elizabeth? Berkeley. Berkeley. And the other guy from Blue Lagoon. Is it? Is it? What was that TV show that he was on? The handsome one, Kyle… What the fuck's his name? McConnell Loughlin. McLoughlin? Is it? Yeah, Kyle McLoughlin. They're having sex in a pool and she starts flopping around like a fish. She literally starts having spasms. If you continue to have sex with her, I feel like that's rape. Like, this is a woman who's having a goddamn seizure and you're going to keep having sex with her? Have you ever seen the scene? No. It's wonderful. Well, I've seen the movie, so yes, I must have. It's wonderful. She starts… They're having sex and she starts flailing like as if she's having a goddamn stroke. She's in the middle of a heart attack or a seizure. And that choice is the only thing that haunts me about that movie. Like, maybe it is… Maybe it was camp. Maybe they were doing that on purpose. I think it was. But I read an interview with the director of Battlefield Earth. Is it Battlefield Earth? Yes. And he apparently is a pretty good director and he's a European, I think, maybe French. And I think he just didn't know what he was walking into. And I think he didn't even… He didn't really check out what the gig was. Well, that was a product of John Travolta. Was it? I think Travolta was backsliding it. Labor of love. Maybe, yes. And it's wonderfully bad. Yeah. There's a funny bit in Going Clear in the book where I think Cruz sees it and it's like this is so embarrassing for Scientology. He's really upset about it. Well, he was upset that they showed that video of him saluting to LRH. They salute when they got the medal. All that crazy shit. Yeah, that's all over YouTube. The recruitment video. Was he upset about that being leaked? Yeah. Well, they tried to get that taken down. And of course, it spread like wildfire through the Internet because you just can't take things like that down. No, it's classic. Although a lot of stuff has been… There are a lot of great Scientology videos that have been taken down. Really? Yes. There's a famous one that's very hard to find. It's the orientation video that was shown to new parishioners. This is back in the 80s and it was done by an infomercial pitch man who was then a Scientologist and then subsequently left. By the way, do you know one of the… They don't cast Scientologists in Scientology commercials. Do you know why? Why? Because they blow too often. Like they leave and then they no longer want to be in the video or it becomes embarrassing to have someone speak. Can you imagine if Leah Remini was in a commercial for Scientology? They'd never be able to use it again, right? So it's sort of insurance because they want to be able to use the… They spend a lot of money on the commercial and they don't want to be embarrassed when the Scientologist who's the star of the commercial leaves Scientology and says that they were brainwashed. That's their actual reason for doing it? That's what I'm told, yeah. How many of them left? Let's say the retention rate. I don't know. They keep the data very close to their chest. I know that they have… They say millions. I think they say 40 million. Some vast amount worldwide. I know that in Antonio Ortega's blog, I think there's a US Census data that perhaps suggests in the US it might be 20 or 30,000. We should probably get that fact checked. But I believe… I read that there are more people who identify as Jedi as their religion than there are Scientologists. That's me. I'm a Jedi. I just decided. Is it a long process to become a Jedi or can you just claim it? I think this is a long process, but it's very cheap. It's a good thing. Oh, well, I've watched all the movies. I think I'm in. I just… It's amazing to me that this exists. I understand that it exists intellectually when I sit back and I look at the many, many different religions and many, many different ideologies that people subscribe to and the vast amount of people out there that are searching for truth and answer and something to belong to. Even that, even though all those things make sense to me intellectually, I'm still fascinated. I'm still so puzzled that in 2016 with the internet, with all the access to information that we have today, that that still exists. And you look forward and you wonder, is this going to fizzle out? But I think what they've done is they've kind of created a marketing juggernaut that is if not immune to, but at least highly resistant to any attempt to discredit or undermine. So I read a thing that said, well, it's religion that sells secrets, right? That's its USP. You advance up, you pay more money to get the more secret levels. The internet is kryptonite to that because the internet is a machine for revealing secrets, WikiLeaks and whatnot. You can Google anything. So that will be Scientology's Waterloo will be the fact that we now have searchable data. But it shows no signs of coming apart. The numbers may not be high, but the amounts of revenue coming in are huge from what I can tell. I get the feeling that, well, you just have to see how the amount that they're able to spend on advertising, the number of new buildings that go up. So however small it may be, it has a huge punching power. Where are they getting the money from? Well, it's an interesting point. The first thing is that it's structured almost like McDonald's. And interestingly, in 1950, the year that Dianetics was published was also the first year that McDonald's was established. That's pointed out by I don't know if you ever read Janet Reitman's book Inside Scientology. It came out a year before Larry Wright's book, Going Clear. So it was slightly, its thunder was stolen by Going Clear. But it's also an excellent book and a great primary. If you enjoyed Going Clear, I highly recommend Inside Scientology. And she points this out that in 1950, McDonald's was invented and so was Dianetics. So they basically kind of, it's a franchise system in which they are sort of selling, they own the property of the various buildings in which Scientology is sold. And then they license the materials, but they can't really, you know, some of the franchisees can lose money, but Scientology itself can't really lose money because they're just getting rents from the people who are selling the Scientology. Does that make sense, the services? But it doesn't make sense that they get that much revenue from that. Well, they get gigantic real estate holders. So they have huge amounts of real estate. The other part of it is that they, because it's a religion, the money is, you know, tax deductible or whatever, like they don't pay taxes on it in essence. And so I think that means that it's very hard for them to lose money. It's a huge cushion against financial failure. Well, that was a really disturbing part of the documentary, which showed how they became a tax exempt religion. The government essentially caved under the threat of massive amounts of lawsuits. Yes. Yeah. They were, basically the Scientologists found a way to pressure individual IRS employees to the point where their lives had become extremely hard. So they settled. What year was that? I want to say, I want to get this right, 92, I would say, 92, maybe 93. It's amazing that that's upheld. I know. Then again, there's, I mean, the benchmark for having charitable status is not that high. Look at the Clinton Foundation, right? Yeah. I mean, there are, the people scrutinizing what qualifies as a charitable enterprise do not seem to be working, especially, you know, on top of their game. So yeah, I think once that's in place, I think the other part of it is, so you pay, one of their roots for finances, you pay for services, you turn up, you spend, I want auditing. So I'll get an auditing package for $300 and you get, you know, whatever, five sessions. But the other thing is they solicit donations and five or six times a year, they have large events and that's the footage of Tom Cruise is at one of these events. And they're like these huge Hollywood style award ceremonies where they pack hundreds of Scientology's into an auditorium and they both look quite impressive. So to the outside of they look kind of grandiose and impressive, but they are in essence, a kind of live infomercial event where everyone who's there is then aggressively, redged, which means they're aggressively hit up for donations. Does that make sense? So anytime you see one of those events, all those people who are at the event before they can leave, someone comes up to them and says, how committed to Scientology are you? We would sincerely appreciate an expression of your support. And their guilt tripped into making a donation, a tax deductible donation. And I'm sorry, I know I'm rambling, but there's a lot of information. So they get huge amounts of money for that. And that money then, one of the good things about that is that can never be revoked. Like if you leave, one of the problems they had in the past was if you spend $10,000 on credit and say, I love Scientology, it's going to be amazing. And then you like $1,000 in, you know, into your services, you're like, this isn't doing anything. I want to leave. And then you ask for your money back and it's very hard for you to get your money back. Whereas the donations that are made to something called the IAS, Association of Scientologyists, you can't get those back once you leave. Anyway, I'll make it very simple for you. There's very rich Scientologists who make large donations. Basically, there's a guy called Bob Duggan who's a multi-billionaire who's donated literally tens of millions. Poor bastard. I mean, and there's a lot of actors who, I mean. Well Leah Remini, she's one of the most famous detractors, right? Person who's left. Right, right until she was like one of his most famous supporters. Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of weird because like her turnaround was like that. I know. Well, I have a lot of respect for that. I mean, I think there's a lot of guy, like this guy who was, I was talking about this pitch, the infomercial pitch man who did the orientation video that was taken down from YouTube. He's called Larry Anderson, right? And he, I really wanted to interview him for our film because I just thought the orientation video is so funny. It's one of this, it's this video where they say, he goes, welcome to Scientology. If at the end of this video you decide this is not for you, that's fine. You're welcome to leave just as you're free to jump off, throw yourself off a bridge or blow your brains out. So it's this very over the top kind of thing. It's just ludicrous. But he left Scientology so they couldn't show it anymore. But he left, like most high profile defectors, he just didn't want anything more to do with it. He's just like, I'm done. And very often they cut a deal where they say, fine, Scientology will say, we'll let you do the X, Y and Z, whether it's get some money back, speak to your people, your friends and family who are still in Scientology, but we don't want you speaking out. And so then the defector will be like, okay, fine, I want a simple life. But Leah Remini to her credit has actually gone out there and absolutely made it a mission to call them out. How far did she get? I don't know where she I think she was quite far. Most of the actors, I think actors, they consider people of influence. And so they get a certain amount of services for free. That's the impression I have. And so I think and I think they're encouraged to go up the bridge quite quickly. I had a neighbor who's a Scientologist, and he wanted to buy a piece of property. We had a discussion about this how I found out he was a Scientologist. He said out of nowhere, you know, we start talking about this. He's like, yeah, I'm thinking about buying it. But right now my wife is about to go clear. And I go, what's this is a long time ago. I go, what does that mean? And then he starts expressing what it means and that she's no longer going to be influenced by negative thoughts. And this is going to cost $50,000. And I probably more now, probably this is a 90s, but $50,000 for a ceremony where you're no longer going to be influenced by negative thoughts. And then you find out actually, footnote, there's this other thing you have to deal with, you know, and then there's another like 15 levels. So yeah, it's a funny, it's a funny one. Did you talk to Leah Remini? We approached her, you know, we I should explain that we took a specific approach. We knew going into it, I had been gestating this idea for years. And I'd been fascinated with Scientology going back to the late 80s, when I was a student, and then I remember in 90 or 91, I took a tour around the All Ron Harvard Life exhibit, there on Hollywood Boulevard, and had this weird feeling of if you've ever gone in where you just think, wow, it's like they took a person who was kind of an average sci fi writer and attempted to make him sound like he was the second coming of Jesus. And so everything is spun. And it's just a weird feeling, you know, seeing a whole museum dedicated to someone who seems to have been a relatively unremarkable person, you know what I mean? And so they're working extremely hard, saying like, he was one of the youngest ever Eagle Scouts to ever qualify in the state of Montana. And you're like, well, and I was like, my dad was an Eagle Scout, like, that's not that big a deal. And and so then I remember halfway through, I thought, well, this is this was funny for 10 minutes. And then an hour later, when you're on this guided tour, I've had enough. And so I said, I really need to leave. They were, where do you need to go? Like, what's so important that it's more important than you've seen the rest of it? And I suddenly felt under pressure, that uncomfortable feeling of like, oh, wow. And I had to pretend that I needed to be somewhere just to get out of the building. Anyway, so years go by. And I think I'd love to make a program about it. And then I could never quite find that I approached them. And they said, long story short, we're not really interested. We you know, we they took me on a tour of the celebrity center, they strung me along for a bit, but it was pretty clear quite quickly that they weren't going to let me in. So a few more years went by. And I was approached by Hollywood producer called Simon Chin, who, who, who made Man on Wire and Searching for Sugar Man. So he's, you know, he's well credentialed. And he's like, you know, you should do something about Scientology. I gave him the appeal about why I hadn't because they won't let me in. And as you know, my way of making documentaries is by invitation, you know, I make an approach and people say yes. And they let me in. Oh, you're very polite in your. Yes. I've done whatever, you know, big game hunting or the Westboro Baptist Church or gurus in the, you know, in India. But it's always I say, like, can we come and film? And they say, yes, and we do it. So I just couldn't get my head around how you make a film where the people don't want you to make the film as I knew they didn't and have it be still true to what I do in some way. And I didn't want it to be a kind of just poking them for the sake of it type of thing. Anyway, we decided that there was a way of doing it using reenactments in which we took a sort of meta approach to the reenactments where the whole process of casting and reenacting how you do Scientology using actors was filmed. In other words, we filmed casting a character to play Tom Cruise, casting an actor to play David Miscavige and role playing the different lines and used ex-Scientologists to kind of co-direct. So they were like, this is how you do it. And this is what Scientology is. And this was what it was like when I was in Scientology. And really, part of it was knowing that once we did that in and around Hollywood, that because Hollywood is so central to Scientology, they would get wind of what we were doing and would start coming to us. So there'd be this wraparound of them and they turned up and start filming us. And it turns out they were making a documentary about me making my film about Scientology. So then it becomes this sort of whole... When is that getting released? January. It's out in the UK in October, but January. No, I mean yours, the one on you. Oh, their one. You know, I think it'll come out... That's a great question. I'm surprised it's not out yet. I think it'll come out probably in January. I don't know, man. And what do you think it'll be about? I think it'll be a lot like what they have done to other journalists. They did one to Gibney. They did one on Larry Wright. They do them on X Scientologists if they're of sufficient kind of profile. It'll be a 10 to 15 minute thing. They'll extract any photograph where I look like a dick or ugly or ludicrous. Any ill-advised bit of publicity I ever did where I was promoting a series and I was like, I looked goofy. They'll say like, this is a serious journalist. And then they'll take quotes from interviews out of context to make me sound like either a goofball or kind of malicious deceiver. And if you want to really see the DNA of Scientology, I often think... Because occasionally I get caught in this mindset of like, it's just another religion. It's no better or worse than other religions really. And then sometimes you can slightly lose... You go native slightly or you're on their websites and you're thinking, hey, come on, this makes sense. But if you look at how they attack their enemies, they're so unlike other religions, certainly unlike Christianity for the most part. So official Scientology's pronouncements when they attack ex-members and journalists are so sort of tabloid and childish and so malicious and nasty. You really see into something deep about their mindset. Because their view, as you mentioned, is that if you're a suppressive person, i.e. someone who's attempting to hold Scientology back, then you are fair game. They could do almost anything to try and put you out of business. Do you think that these documentaries, whether it's Going Clear or The Book by Lawrence Wright or The Other Woman, what was the name of her book? Janet Reitman. What was her book again? Inside Scientology. Do you think that all this data, this accumulative data, reaches any of the members that are inside Scientology? They don't ever examine it? No, no way. It's considered N theta, which is a Scientology term. It means interpolated theta. I love... This is like catnip to be explaining this stuff. Is it? Yeah, kind of. It's like I said, I was steeped in it for three years, kind of absorbing all this... Was it your whole life or did you do other things? No, it wasn't. Not constantly, but you would spend a few days, hours would go by, and at the end of it you would emerge like, have I learned anything? All I know now is these absurd terms that are no use to anyone like N theta. But interpolated theta energy is... Theta is a spirit. Theta is a positive spiritual energy, but interpolated is bad. So it's basically N theta is kind of bad for your energy, I think. So it's N theta for you to be in Scientology and it could be exposed to anything negative, anything critical of Scientology. So they're encouraged to be off the internet and to be off. Don't consume anything you think might be critical. They're encouraged to be off the internet. Wow. Well, I should say that applies to people within the sea or in the inner circle of Scientology. Explain that, please. Yeah, it's a really important distinction because I'm absolutely certain that there's plenty of extremely nice, well-adjusted Scientologists, people who consider themselves Scientologists. My ex-neighbor. He was a really nice guy. I bet he was. And I'm sure everything I hear about Beck, the musician, is that he's a nice guy and I'm sure Giovanni Robisi is a nice guy. That guy's in? Yeah. Really? You didn't know that? That guy's in? Yeah, I think that's a nice one. I mean, Elfman. I mean, that's a... She makes sense. Really? Juliette Lewis. Yeah. I bet she's nice. I bet she's very nice. She and I have gone back and forth. We've talked to each other through messages on Twitter. Yeah. I wanted to get her in. Talk to her. And Danny Masterson. I don't know who that is. He's from... Isn't he that 70s show? He's in due? Yeah. And Jason Lee, I think he might be out. Really? You know who I mean. My name is Earl. Yeah, that guy's in? You didn't spend very long down the rabbit hole. Well, my rabbit hole was not limited. I try to avoid any rabbit hole that involves celebrities. But Scientology is predicated on... One thing Elrond Hubbard got right was the idea that if you get celebrities in... Yes. ...then you've got a kind of golden ticket to reaching the masses. Yeah. I jokingly thought about joining when I first came here. I was like, maybe that's the move. Just become a Scientologist. You could make a documentary about Scientology that would be totally different because... Actually, maybe we've blown it by even talking about it. But if you'd gone undercover... If I just decided I would go... I don't think they would listen. They would probably fucking hate me. Well, it depends what you've got out there. It's too late now. I'm not a documentary maker either. I don't have that sort of attention span that you have. You could have gone undercover and you would have been such a great scalp for them. They would have absolutely... Because when was the last time you heard of an established celebrity actor... Joining. Joining. I mean, can you imagine if... Well, maybe they can clean it up. I mean, that's why Will Smith... There was a sniff that he might be going that way. And it didn't pan out. But that was unbelievable. And there was a rumor that David Beckham might be flirting with it. But I mean, none of these things were born out. Well, what they could do for you, if you were a David Beckham, or maybe even for me, is they could act as like a gang. That sort of like... That's your posse. That kind of covers your back. Absolutely. I think there'd be... And when I was doing the film, I went in... Not exactly undercover, but I went in... Not for a sequence in the film, I just sort of keep myself grounded to keep it all real. Because one of the challenges with... When you're not exposed, you're not actually having day-to-day contact with the subject that you're covering. It's very easy to slip into us and them mentality of your own. And you're like, ooh, scary Scientologists. Ooh, they're bad. And actually, they're not. They're good people, many of them. And so I wanted to make them real. And I went along to a Scientology org and just sort of chatted to some people and said, you know, I'm going to make documentaries. I'm interested in this subject. What's it all about? And they really did... One of the things they do is a fairly hard sell. But you got the impression that they would 100% kind of take your money. They would accept you. Yeah, they would take your money. But they would absolutely, I think, be right on it. I don't know. I kind of lost confidence in... I was going to say 100% have your back and be your gang. But I don't know if I really did have that sense. I think if they knew you were a celebrity, if they thought you were, they would really go to... That you would get special treatment. I was in San Diego and I was filming this television show. We had a few hours downtime and they had one of these booths set up where you would go over there and hold on to those cans, the E-meter. I did all that. How many sessions did you do? Just one while I was there. I thought it was pretty good, was it? It was boring. The guy who I got was very unenthusiastic. It seemed like something they required him. You were supposed to be unenthusiastic. Oh, yeah? Well, on the E-meters, there's a script for how... It's called being an auditor. When someone's auditing you, in a sense, being the therapist, they have a script. They have to sit there comfortably, but they are not supposed to show any emotion when they're auditing you. It was doing it publicly, too. I was holding on to this thing and asking me questions. Was he reading the needle and saying... Yes. Did he say that? Is there a prior or something? There's a whole script they say. Did you have to say, I had a back pain and then they're like... Would you remember what road you went down with what you were seeing? Hardly. I just remember thinking that this guy... It's not a formal therapy. It's nothing that special. Yeah. The guy seemed like they were forcing him to do it. He didn't seem like this was something he was interested in. He's just really not interested in what he was doing. And he seemed like a volunteer. That's interesting. I mean, when they're auditing, they're supposed to be somewhat blank. A big thing in Scientology is sort of being comfortable in yourself and not learning how to stare at someone. There's a drill that we do in the film where you have to sit and stare at someone without saying anything literally for like minutes, if not hours. It's actually a powerful tool because it's all about, I'm unembarrassable. I'm going to own any sort of sense of awkwardness by just like I'm impermeable to any kind of social influence you think you can put on me. It's one of the paradoxes of being kind of controlling religious movement because so much of it is about controlling yourself. Do you know what I mean? And not allowing other people's thoughts or negative actions to control you. To control you. And actually a big thing as well. And one of the things Tom Cruise talks about when he's in his video is PTSD, confronting shattering suppression. I don't think I even said they got my acronym right. But anyway, his thing is shut. He's like, when you want to, he says like one of the best things he learned in Scientology was how to confront and shatter suppression. So anytime you see him in an interview, and there's a few of them on YouTube where he thinks he's getting a cheeky question, you can see he kind of gets a steely look where it's a sort of, it's not exactly adversarial. It's just like, no, you're out of line buddy. And we're not going to talk about it. Well, the Matt Lauer interview, which was devastating for his career in short term. He recovered from it. That was a window into madness. And into what he's really all about. That's the scary part. I mean, as much as I say, like, there's a big chunk of it that feels kind of valid and normal, maybe even therapeutic. But when you tip into thinking that you're the only one, that you have, you're the authority on mental illness, and that's dangerous. And individual issues with people that you have not diagnosed, you don't have any medical training whatsoever. You don't know what their specific neurochemistry is. You don't know the effect of the medication and whether it's enhancing or hurting them. And you just have this blanket view of psychiatry. That was an issue that L. Ron Hubbard had. And if you go down Sunset, yeah, I think it's Sunset. On Sunset, yeah. That's that psychiatry kills. It's psychiatry, the industry of death. That's a fun often. And that's one of their centers, right? If you go in there, they'll explain to you. The CCHR Citizens Commission on Human Rights. But, you know, and here's my issue with that. I think prescription drugs are overprescribed. I think there's a real argument that there's a lot of people that are on antidepressants that shouldn't be on antidepressants. I think there's a lot of natural alternatives, one of them being exercise, one of them being in enhancing your standing in life in terms of like what you do for a living or where you live or, you know, the people that you hang out with. All those things can affect the way you feel and that can be interpreted as depression. There's a lot of, I mean, there's a reason if your life is shit, if all the aspects of your life is shit, you feel bad, the solution is not a pill, right? So I think in some ways they've got something to say that makes some sort of sense. Well, but in a weird way, though, that's the dangerous part because it intersects with a totally valid social critique, right? The trouble is, if you are someone who's heavily psychotic and it's not a medication-induced psychosis, you know, psychosis is a real medical phenomenon and Scientology is not going to take them on. If you go to Scientology and say, I'm interested in Scientology, I've had a couple of psychotic breaks, but I really think you could help me out, they're not going to say, oh, come with us. Well, they'll run a mile from you. So they're critiquing people who they have no intention of helping themselves. Oh, wow. Yeah. And if you say, oh, and by the way, I've used some in the past, I was medicated for my psychosis, they'll say, well, that disqualifies you from treatment. When I went to my one, they said, if you've got forms of intervention, have you had in the past, have you done any sort of psychiatry? Have you had any problems like that? And I said, well, no, but I've had, you know, a little bit of therapy over the years. I said, what have you done? I said, I did a few sessions of CBT, cognitive behavior therapy, it's kind of bog standard, talking about, you know, problems, things you could do differently. The woman's like, oh, okay, just give me five minutes. Okay. And she left the room to check whether that disqualified me and came back and said, oh, yeah, that's not a problem. Okay, let's carry on. But if you had gone on some sort of medication. I said I was on Zyprexa for 10 years because I had an episode when I thought I was a poached egg for a few weeks. She would have said, she would have said, well, you know, good luck with that. And you know, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Oh, wow. So they're not interested in treating people that have had treatment. No. Oh, that's weird. No, they'll say, you know, tough break on this life. Good luck in your next life. They really would. We should check that, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. Oh, man, that's fascinating. And there's an interest, if you want to read, we don't go into this in the documentary, but if you can read up on the internet about cases where there's been people who had mental illness either within Scientology, I mean, perhaps the most famous scandal within Scientology or the most notorious to Scientology watchers was the case of Lisa McPherson. Do you know about her? She's the one that died. Yeah, she's done in detail in Inside Scientology in the Janet Reitman book. She was a paid up Scientologist, took it very, very seriously, a young woman, maybe 30. And she had a psychotic episode in Florida. And instead of being taken for, you know, and given bed care in a facility, she was taken by Scientologists from a hospital and more or less sequestered in a hotel for a week or maybe longer and died in the hands of the Scientologists. And what was her cause of death? I believe it was dehydration. We should double check on that. Wow. That's a rough way to go. Yeah. And she'd been having, you know, a total psychotic break. She was, I think, attacking people in the, who were attempting to, you know, take care or holding her hostage, depending on how you define it. And you know, there was a whole script that Hubbard had for dealing with people in psychosis, I don't think it was, you know, medically supported. It was basically involved ignoring them and keeping them secluded, kind of locking them in a room. Now, I saw an interview with you where you were talking about someone who used to be a former Scientologist, a woman. She wasn't a former Scientologist. She had gone undercover to sort of investigate them. Oh, yeah. And you were talking about the auditing having a positive benefit. Yes. I think it probably does. I mean, I think any kind of... But on you. Yeah. I mean, the auditing I did, I only did one session. And that was with, you know, the main guy in the film is a guy called Marty Rathbun. And he was, there's a sense in which the film is as much about him as it is about Scientology. He was a Mr. Fix-It within Scientology. He was the number two to David Miscavige. David Miscavige is the guy who took over in 1986 or thereabouts from L. Ron Hubbard and has been running it ever since. He's an unaccountable leader who is in essence the Pope of Scientology. And there are many allegations of him being physically abusive towards his followers. Marty Rathbun was his right-hand man for many years. Marty Rathbun left in 2004 or thereabouts. And he was... So he's sort of our deep throat in the film. But he also cops to the fact that when he was in Scientology, he was involved in all kinds of devious covert activity involving private investigators, destruction of documents, and also certain amount of physical violence himself, which he has apologized for. And so he, it becomes a sort of examination of him and his ability to... The fact that he's been seduced by this thing and it's still in certain ways, it's still in him. By almost by definition, you can't be in something that long. And that... Leah Remini was a celebrity parishioner, right? She was going around the celebrity sense. She was doing Scientology, but she was not in the sea or the sea or gets this clergy. It's the inner... It's the difference between someone who goes to a Catholic church a few times a year, right? And eats communion and prays a few times a year. That's... You can be a Scientologist in that way, right? Which maybe your neighbor was. If you're in the sea or it's somewhere between being in the Vatican and being a monk. You take a vow of poverty, you volunteer... You take a vow of poverty. Yeah. You get paid below minimum wage, tiny amounts, you're leading a kind of Spartan existence to save the planet. You sign a contract for 40 billion years or something. I think it is literally because it's supposed to cover all your future lifetimes, right? So when you come back, you're still in the sea ork. In fact, their slogan is something like, Vena Bemis or whatever the Latin is, it's we come back. Meaning that we come back in future lifetimes and we're still going to be in the sea ork. Anyway, so it's really important to get that distinction because I wouldn't want people to have the impression that everyone in Scientology is sort of going around in a uniform marching around on a... You know, in the vow of poverty. That's just the sea ork, guys. And most of them live down... Many of them live down in Hemet outside LA. And that's where... Where's Hemet? It's outside... It's towards Palm Springs, basically. It's in the desert. That's where they live? Yeah. There's a base down there. Although they have some giant center down there that they're going to start producing movies, right? Well, there's a center in Hollywood that they've just bought. Yeah. They've just, in fact, not just bought, they've just refurbed it and they've opened it. And they're going to open it to films. Which is bizarre because they have it. Yeah, there it is. Yeah. It's a $1 movie and TV studio complex in Hollywood. That just opened. But they have a complex in Hemet as well, bizarrely. So I don't know why they need another one. They like buying shit. Apparently, at one point in time, they were the number two real estate holders in Los Angeles. Well, that... Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. It's actually not... Maybe Hollywood? Not Los Angeles? Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. But I think a lot of that is to do with... Someone explain this to me. One of the rules about a nonprofit or about being a religion, having their religious status is they cannot hoard their income. Money that comes in has to be spent. Otherwise, they're in violation of their charitable status. So they... This is... Someone just told me this the other day. So in other words, they have to kind of keep buying buildings because there needs to be a cash outflow. Which sort of makes sense, right? Yeah, that's totally understandable. Yeah, that makes sense. Wow. Yeah. So, this guy, Marty Rathbun, who's sort of my guide through Scientology, and he's a fascinating guy. And Marty was in for how long? I want to say 24 years. Maybe it was 27 years, but I think he said 27 years. He had a nice outfit on and a nice uniform. He got the uniform. He got the golden ropes around the shoulder. You know, I'll say this about him. If you're in it and you're up at the top echelons as he was, you are on some kind of crazy sci-fi adventure, you know, if you think about it. You are living a kind of Jedi reality. You know, look at that rope. It goes across the chest. You're saving planets. What is his medals for? Look at all his medals. No, I think that might be... some of them are photoshopped. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, that might not be... some of them had medals just to make fun of... that might be a real one, I don't know. But the one that was above it seems real, right? Now look at that one. Yeah, that's real. Well, he doesn't look like that now because he's... that's 30 years ago. How amazing is it that they give them military medals? I mean, it looks like no different than what a general would have. Yeah. I mean, it's a beautiful thing. In a way, I mean... Yeah, I mean, it's an exciting life. They probably wouldn't be doing the dishes in that outfit. Like that's special occasions. Special occasions. And I'm sure he would get special treatment. I'm sure being the number two guy must have been an amazingly privileged... Yes, no, because you... basically, there's only really a number one, which is David Miscavige, and then there's just everyone else. Do you know what I mean? Oh, well, there's Tom Cruise, and then there's... Tom Cruise is kind of number one, right? Well, no, I... He's right up there. No, because actually, there's a... don't you remember in Lawrence Wright's book, there's a bit where Tom Cruise explains, I think maybe to Nazanin Boniardi, like his girlfriend at the time, he says, don't you... like, he's annoyed with his girlfriend. This is after it's split up from... What's it called? Nell P. Cruise? No, the one before. The Australian brother? Yeah, you know who I mean. Nicole Kidman. Thank you. Nicole Kidman, who's who... by the way, she was considered an SP because her father was a psychiatrist, I believe. Anyway, so he went out with a woman called Nazanin Boniardi for a while, and there's a section in Going Clear where they talk about... I think Miscavige came around for dinner or something, and it was... and I think it was... Anyway, his girlfriend at the time was having trouble understanding what Miscavige was saying because he speaks quite fast. And... Probably I'll speed it up. So she was like, what are you saying? And Tom Cruise was really upset and said to him, don't you get it? There's LRH, then there's David Miscav... COB is what they call it, then there's COB, and then there's me. You're doing a goddamn good Tom Cruise impression. Do that again. Don't you get it? There's LRH, then there's COB, and then there's me. Don't you get it? Don't you get it? You're glib, Matt. You're glib, Matt. You're glib, Matt. You're glib. That's a really good impression. You just gotta be... You know what? I feel him. I feel him saying that. I don't think I need Scientology if I've got... Cape Man Nitro. Cape Man Nitro. Yeah, 270 milligrams of caffeine. That's given me an OT edge. I'm on OT5 right now. Do you know what morning thunder is? I think I had that yesterday. You mix this, Cape Man coffee with some emulsified MCT oil in an iced coffee. That's what I have every morning. What is emulsified MCT oil? It's MCT oil that you can mix very easily with cold beverages or hot. What is MCT oil? Medium chain triglyceride oil. It's the most nutritious aspects of coconut oil that are blended together. They spin in a centrifuge to extract the best stuff. Did we just do a commercial? No. Sorry, Deb. You can get it anywhere. MCT oil is readily available at any sort of health food store and a lot of Arowan and Whole Foods and those type of places carry it. I've never even heard of that. Do you know of coconut oil, right? Yeah. They're healthy fats. They're really good for your brain. Good stuff. Yeah. So that's morning thunder. So the point being, we are on so many tangents right now. We went off. But your original question... What is COB's different? COB is chairman of the board. They fucking hate us. There we go. COB RTC. There we go. There's COB. And then there's me. And then there's glib. Then there's glib. And then there's Matt Lauer. And then there's John Travolta just below Matt Lauer. Apparently they have quite a dim view of John Travolta within Sianton. What? Why? This is such... All the butt fuckers? What is it? I think... Massage therapy. He's viewed... I don't know. Marty Rathbun talked. That's allegedly. Can I throw in allegedly in there? Allegedly. They have a bad view of him. I'm just... Everything... You know, once he blew, once he left, Marty Rathbun spilled his guts on the internet. In order to let people know what was going on. And he kind of... He was the biggest thing, I would say, sort of in terms of exposing Scientology for what it is, probably in the history of Scientology. John Travolta's wife was on Fear Factor. And I got to meet John Travolta because his wife was in the finals. She lost Coolio, who was... By the way, you want to talk about a guy who performs very well under the influence of marijuana. Coolio might be at the top of my list. Right up there with Joey Diaz. Coolio, they would open up his trailer and it was like a Cheech and Chime move. It was hilarious. And he would go out there and he would perform these stunts just high as a kite. I mean, just gone. You look in his eyes, they were just glazed over and he would perform flawlessly. And the last stunt involved balance. It was his balance thing. And I had a conversation with him before we did it. I was, unfortunately, stone cold sober at the time, I believe. And Coolio was... He's like, I've done this a million times in a million different lives and other universes. I'm ready to do it right now. I'm like, get after it, sir. Good luck to you. But John Travolta's wife, what is her name again? Kelly Preston. She's very, very nice. Very nice and very... Seems so normal. You know, I had conversations with her and she even sent me a gift. There was some sort of protein powder that she was drinking, some health drink that she was drinking. I asked her about it and she said, you know, give me your dress. I'll have some scent to you. And it's a nudge. So she sent some to the studio, I believe. She was very nice. I'm sure. Greta Van Susteren is a Scientologist. Get the fuck out of here. That's the one that surprises me. Really? Isn't she a journalist? I would have thought that. I would have thought that. Fox News. Yeah. Is that Cal? Is she on the... I don't know. Is she on the tone scale or not? I don't really get... Yeah. How can she be... She's inside. Maybe there's an exception. Well, I met her once as well. She seemed very nice as well. There was something about George Carlin. I'm sure she is nice and I'm sure you can be. I mean, not to sound like a broken record. Well, again, my former neighbor many years ago was a very nice guy. And I've met a lot of Scientologists inside of Hollywood and they all have this actor-y thing going on. Which is, I would like to believe that they are as nice as they're pretending to me, but I'm not sure. You know that actor-y thing? Yes. And I know one of my early experiences when I was talking to a Scientologist, when I was trying to first negotiate access to the church back in 2003 was, I'd sent her some old documentaries that I'd done. So, This Is Who I Am, This Is What I Do. And she was on the phone and she said, Oh yeah, I got the DVDs and I was watching. And she started laughing in the act of talking about... Like a fake laugh? Yeah, and I was like, that didn't feel quite real. Yeah. And then later on, another person I knew who was a Scientologist did the same thing. We're like, I saw the thing you did on television. Oh, that is a pet peeve of mine. I was like, oh wow, maybe that's part of what they do is sort of weird love bombing. I don't know. Maybe that was just coincidence. Well, it makes sense because they're trying to be influential and they're trying to be charming. Yeah. Right? I find a lot of the Scientologists that I've met that are actors, they're extremely charming. Like there's one of the things you hear about Tom Cruise. He looks you in the eye. He talks to you, remembers your name. Yeah. I'm sure that's true. I mean, they drill, as I said, they drill on looking people in the eye. But let's just assume that that's his real behavior pattern now. It's a very good behavior pattern. Nice. Yeah, it's very nice. I'm in favor of positivity. Yes. Although I think the world needs negative people. What? I think there need to be some. What? Don't you? But wait a minute. But the whole- It's part of the ecology of life is to have- The yin and the yang. Yeah. Yeah. If everyone was positive, then I mean, it would be a little too much. Well, it would be very strange if the world did become enlightened. Like what if some pharmaceutical company devised some pill that eliminates all the negative aspects of humanity? So much. We all just start taking it. Yeah. I mean, look, how many people brush their teeth? Pretty much everybody, right? What if everybody started doing whatever this is and this new thing, which eliminated, became prevalent throughout the world, eliminate, like vaccinations, right? Pretty much, I would estimate high 90% of the Western world is vaccinated. Every now and then I meet some kid who had hippie parents and they gave them apple cider vinegar and they never vaccinated them. A few of those exist. But for the most part, most people are vaccinated to prevent against diseases. If we came up with some sort of a vaccination to prevent the more disgusting aspects of human beings, negative behavior, aggression, meanness, it'd be very curious, very curious as to how that would play out, whether or not that would diminish ambition and progress. Who knows? Yes. I think it was, yeah, it's like you said, the yin and the yang. I think Scientology aspires to be that. I think the danger of it is it would bear certain similarities to a sort of almost fascist vision, I think. I mean, I think that there is an overlap there. The cult of health, the cult of glowing, smiling, beacons of health and humanity marching up and down. And actually, it's our ability to rub along with difficult characters and to sort of embrace the ugly side is I can't define exactly what it is, but it feels like that's an important dimension of life. Well, it certainly seems to be that there's a dynamic that plays out between human beings and that we learn not just from the positives, but also from the negatives. And I learned a lot from other people's negative behavior, how to never be like that myself without having to make those same mistakes. Also learned from my own mistakes, of sure. But when we see horrible things in the news and negative things, I think that does sort of reinforce how fortunate you are that you're not experiencing those horrible things and that there is some sort of an understanding of the worst aspects of people where it broadens your spectrum of possibilities. I agree, but I also think that many of my favorite writers you would probably define in some sense as walking the negative side of life. Sure. You think about... Hunter Thompson. Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs or Philip Roth, if you like. Sure. Talking about the absolute, the most kind of contemptible and disgusting impulses we feel. Bukowski. Oh, yeah. That's absolutely... Rambo, the French poet, this is sort of... This is who we are. This is the stuff of life. I think it's ineradicable. I think I'm suspicious of anything that pathologizes it too much and says, you know what, that's sort of... Which Scientology does in fact, they say that's your reactive mind. It's a malfunctioning part of your mind. It's a pseudo scientific thing. Whereas actually Christianity, I'm not a Christian, but it sort of embraces the fact that it's just your human side. Your human side is earthly and twisted and sexual and actually you need to embrace some sort of higher being. Well, I think most religions or ideologies that are trying to promote some sort of advancement. They look to the past and to the horrific nature of animal behavior, the tooth fang and claw of the wild and the recognition that somehow or another we've emerged from that and that we aspire to do better. And then we know that in our own lives, I mean, if you look at your own life as a microcosm, you've sort of figured out what you've done wrong hopefully and have advanced past those days of youth and foolish behavior. And you're now a wiser, more educated person and you seek to continue to advance and continue to do better. So it's sort of like, it's all analogous. It all sort of ties in together. Now, when people go too hard with that, when people go too hard with eliminating the bad behavior, I always wonder if like L. Ron Hubbard himself, if he was, when we talk about him self-diagnosing and self-treating and that's what they're doing as well. It's like, do you know that like, there's an old expression that, well, there's an old thing that you see with women that are, what's the best way to put this, sexually loose that they always like to point the finger at other girls that are sexually loose. It's like one of the first indications the girl might be a slut is that she likes to point at other girls and that's a real common thing. And I think that the things that annoy you the most about yourself, you tend to highlight those aspects. And you, when you discuss human beings or other people that irritate you. I'm sure there's something in that. Yeah. They say, yes, my dad likes to quote, there's a Bulgarian philosopher and writer called Elias Keneet who's had an aphorism that the thieves hell is the fear of thieves. So, that we sort of project our qualities to others and it fills us with anxiety. Sure. That they may be that. To go to the other point though, though, it would be wonderful to feel that we advanced through life requiring wisdom. I don't know that it's necessarily the case and what strikes me about Hubbard is, the merit that you see in Scientology, the bits that feel workable and make sense seem to have come out fairly early on. And then later on, the stuff he was coming out with was more and more outlandish. Whatever therapies he was evolving, when it went to the OT levels, it was really getting properly out there. Yeah. Whether that, maybe he was spiraling out. There's allegations that he was fully mentally ill, at least for episodes towards the end of his life. Well, he spent a great deal of time. The sea work was kind of concocted because he had to be off-line. He had to be, first of all, away from America. So, he took to the sea. So, they didn't get prosecuted. Basically, as I understand it, yes. And so, he had an ocean-going religion where they were traveling around. And then for a while, he was in England. And then for a while, he was in what was then Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, sort of trying to find a niche, find a new frontier that he could more or less make for his own claim for Scientology. But then even when he came back, he was so caught up in lawsuits in the last 10 or 15 years of his life. People pursuing him for money because they felt that Scientology had made them psychotic, or they just thought it was fraudulent, or that they wanted their money back. He had to disappear and was living in seclusion, more or less hiding out, while money was kind of shuttled back and forth to him. And that's why I said at the beginning, the problem with Scientology is an overabundance of material. You probably saw The Master, right? The Paul Thomas Anderson film. I fell asleep. I was watching in a hotel room when it passed out. It had to be. It's moments, but there's so many weird stories within Scientology. The Master is loosely based on Scientology? I would say fairly closely based on aspects of L. Ron Hubbard. Is that public? Have they acknowledged that? I think he had a screening for Tom Cruise, and I think he publicly said it wasn't based on L. Ron Hubbard. What did Tom say? I think Tom said, I don't know. Your glib ran out of the room. What do you hear about Tom? Like, everyone seems to say he's a good guy. Like, you meet him, he's, as you say, very focused, very attentive. I've heard several things. One, that he's not as short as everybody says. A lot of people want to say he's like five foot two. Apparently, he's five foot nine. That's what I've heard. But who knows? He could be wearing some funky stuff in his shoes. That he's very friendly. That he's very focused, very intense, very charming, very charismatic, very smart, and seems to be genuinely interested in what you have to say. Yeah. I mean, I've heard the same thing. If you, and what's your line on, if Tom Cruise is interviewed on a chat show, you feel he should be asked about Scientology? Ask him about whatever. I think chat shows, as you put them, are pretty much bullshit anyway. Because what they really are is you have a seven minute chunk where you're supposed to be promoting some movie about a super spy that fucking repels down from the ceiling and gets past lasers. I saw that one, yeah. I mean, that's really, or the other. I think he's a great actor. I love that movie. What is it, The Edge of Tomorrow? Is that what it's called? I love that movie. That was the time travel one. I love time travel. Sort of like Groundhog Day meets Mission Impossible. Yeah, meets Alien. It's a great movie. I really enjoyed it. I think he's a great actor. And I think you have to be fucking crazy to be a great actor. I really do believe that. And you know what was nice in that was that he started out, like in that movie, as a kind of non-Tom Cruise character. Do you remember? He's kind of cowardly and slightly weak. And he learns in the course of the movie to become Tom Cruise. Whereas, and it felt refreshing after seeing so many kind of Cruise as Ubermensch films, which by the way, I think is part of Scientology as well, is that he doesn't want to take on roles that are in theater. Yes. In other words, one of the things I learned was members of the Sea Org, who have taken this vow of poverty, lived extremely abstemious, cloistered lives, and they're not allowed to go to the movies for the most part, except when a Tom Cruise movie comes out. So you know it better have a positive, uplifting message. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So they would literally be bust. I was told to the cinemas to watch the matinee performances of Tom Cruise. Are they held back while the previews are playing? That's a good question. I would imagine they would have to be. Or maybe they give them- What do you think would be the worst thing they could see in probably a preview from my film? Yeah, that would not be good. They would- Oh my God, how ironic. Their eyes would drop out of their heads. And I think that's one of the perhaps issues they have with John Travolta as well, is that he's playing a heroin addict. Yeah. Pulp fiction. That makes sense. I mean, he really embraces some very bizarre roles. Yeah. He was in drag in Hairspray. They probably didn't love that. Do. Yeah. He's very good though. He's very good. Don't you love John Travolta though? He probably had a great time. Yeah, I do. I love him. I think he's a great actor. He's so good. And don't you feel like we've been on such a journey with him from Vinnie Barberino to- Yeah. He's like, he's a legend. He's a fascinating character. And I met him as well when his wife was on the show. And he was very nice. But it was that thing where he's really engaging, looks you in the eyes, very present. You think he's gay? Is that where we're going? People say that he's gay. I don't know. I have zero problem with people being gay. But I do have a little bit of a problem with someone who's not gay, who pretends that they're- Or someone who is gay rather. Well, that would be a real problem. Someone who's not gay and pretends they're gay. That's odd. But that's something like if you do gay stuff, you're just gay. Even if you're not gay and you pretend and you start dating guys, like I'm not even gay, but I'm gonna trick these dudes. I can't do this for you, pal. It could happen. Yeah, it could happen. It's an unfortunate aspect of- I don't know that he's pretending not- Is he pretending not to be gay? Allegedly. That's the word. The word is allegedly is that he's definitely not out. So if he is gay, he's pretending to be straight. But there's photos of him kissing men. And there's allegedly these massage therapists that have claimed that you've tried to have sex with them. I don't know if they're telling the truth or if they're just exploiting a possibility. Does that make you gay if you have sex with a man? It definitely helps. Unless you're in prison. Yeah, and even then you're just gay for the stay, right? Exactly. Oh, you know, I just think it's an unfortunate aspect of our society that- And this is a reality. If Tom Cruise is gay, it would be a very smart business move for him with his business to stay in the closet. Because he's a leading man. And he's a leading man that has love affairs in these movies with women. And you cannot do that if you're gay. It's one of the weird things about being a gay person, even in today's liberated and very progressive society. That a woman can be gay and she can play a straight woman in a movie. Because no one cares. Like, if a guy meets a girl and she's beautiful but she's been gay her whole life and he turns her out and all of a sudden she's heterosexual and then he winds up marrying her and having children with her. Everybody's like, we got her! Yeah! Like, men get excited. But if a woman meets a guy who's been just blowing dudes for the past 20 years and then all of a sudden decides he's not gay anymore. They're not excited about that. They're like, are you sure you're not gay? Like, I don't even know how I feel about this. It's- We don't accept a gay person yet, at least, playing a straight man who's a leading man in a movie. I don't think there's anyone who's been able to pull that off. There's that one dude, Doogie Howser. The Doogie Howser dude. He played like a womanizer in some sitcom but nobody's buying that bullshit. Sean Michael Patrick or- Neil Patrick Harris. Neil Patrick Harris. Neil Patrick Harris. Yeah. It's an interesting- and I think one of the allegations about Scientology always used to be that you spill your secrets in auditing. Yes. Which is like confession and then suddenly they're kept in a locked vault and if you leave they become public. And there's a sort of a tacit blackmail going on. So whether that's really happening now, I don't know. That may have happened in the past, allegedly. Well, there is an issue with them going after detractors and people that leave because it doesn't really exist in other organizations or other religions. So a perfect example of another religion that was most obviously created by a con man is Mormonism. Joseph Smith was 14 years old when he claimed to find golden tablets that were the lost work of Jesus and then only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone. It's a ludicrous story. It was a story that was created in 1820. It's such a ludicrous story that a lot of people when they find out about it, they go, wait, wait, hold on. Like people, they become Mormon and then they get deep into it and then they find out the roots of this and they go, wait a minute, what the fuck? And by the way, that's not Scientology. That Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in America. I wonder, well, they're nice people. This is the thing about Mormon. They seem very nice. They are very nice. Whatever you said against Mitt Romney, I'm glad he's not the president. But whenever I would see him with his family, I thought, well, you know, why can't our family be a bit more like that family? I am not glad he's not running for president right now. I think he's a better choice. And I was shocked that he wasn't willing to oppose Donald Trump because I think that that would be a fucking easy run for people that were conservative, that were uncomfortable with this Trump character and all his fucking loose dialogue and all the crazy shit that he says. I don't think so. I think what I think what Trump has is and why he's proved so sort of durable and popular is just this absolute I'm different. I'm you know, fuck everything anti-establishment. That's exactly what Romney doesn't have. Romney is like the consummate insider. He's his establishment. Washington, all the rest of it. And Trump seems is a kind of caveman. Yeah. He's a weird guy. So the you know, the people out there, I think white, blue collar kind of white Americans on the front porch see Trump and they think, yeah, that guy's my guy. Well, they embrace the strong man. He's a strong man who doesn't give a fuck. He says crazy things. He talks about how big his penis is. Yeah. I mean, he I mean, the run up to becoming the Republican nominee was one of the most embarrassing times ever for the Republican Party because you had all these fools dancing around this strong man. And also had a robo candidates almost literally in the case of Rubio who was kind of malfunctioning with his his kind of soundbite algorithm was glitching. So he was coming out with the same soundbite within 10 seconds. But all these robo candidates and then someone who seemed like a kind of visceral flesh and blood human on stage and who moreover when he said stupid crazy stuff did not then hit the trail to to apologize. He would just keep saying weird things. And I think felt like, you know what, he's showing the media for the shell game that it is. Yes, because he's he's saying, I'm not going to do that thing of like, I'm so sorry. I said that. Whereas like and also the old cliche about who would you want to have a beer with? Would you want to have a beer with Romney? First of all, Romney probably doesn't drink beer and then and and Trump actually you would probably enjoy the kind of weird ludicrous just peering at him would be entertaining in itself. Did you ever see the picture that he put up on Instagram with him in Trump Tower eating a taco bowl? And this was after all the crazy remarks that he had said about Mexico and Mexicans coming over here and raping. And I talked to the president of Mexico, who's going to pay for that wall? You know, we're not going to pay for that wall. Yeah. Well, the wall just got 10 foot higher. And everybody starts cheering. And then he takes a photo on Instagram of him smiling eating a taco bowl. Look at this at Trump Tower. And it says he's got the thumbs up. He's eating this taco bowl and it said something about like, I love Hispanics. Happy Cinco de Mayo. But what it but the best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. And then he also said, I love Hispanics. Like, see if you can find the actual Instagram post. What's your actual point? Look at this. Because I love Hispanics. That's fucking crazy. That's fucking crazy. I mean, I saw that. I'm like, okay, we're being trolled and look at the likes. Look at the retweets and the likes. 42,000 retweets. 44,000 likes. Isn't it that he can speak out. He'll he'll say something crazy. And then it's fun. 10 minutes later, he'll say he'll say something contradictory. Well, it's fun for us. It's fun for us. It's interesting. It's fun for us. And also he doesn't necessarily represent for a lot of people. He doesn't like one of the things that Romney represents. It's problematic for people is that not only is his father a Mormon, not only is it from them, but he's from one of the most bizarre sects of Mormons where they left the United States so they could have multiple wives. Who Romney's family? Yeah, you don't know that. No, is that why he's in Massachusetts? Let me hook you up. Lily Romney's family. Is it FLDS? No, I don't know what the fuck it is. But there was a vice piece on it. It's a fascinating piece. They all live in Mexico. Romney's family moved- I know who you mean. They moved to Mexico before Romney's dad was born. Romney's dad was not born in the United States. He was born in Mexico. And when the United States made polygamy illegal, they just said, this is in the 1800s when they didn't have cars. So people were like, well, who gives a shit if we're in the United States or Mexico, we're still riding horses and banging our nine wives. Let's just go over there. So they didn't want to give up the polygamy aspect of the religion. So they just went south to Mexico, which was not that much different than the United States back then. Then when cars were invented and the United States really exploded and became much more prosperous than Mexico, then ultimately it got even crazier where they get involved in the drug war. The drug war, there was drug cartel people were kidnapping people in the Romney family and other Mormons that are living down there. So they started like being, they had armed guards on century, 24 hours. I mean, it's like a scene from The Walking Dead. They're all standing there with high powered rifles. We're talking when? Right now. So Romney's family is still down there? Yes. Oh, it's amazing. Right now, when Romney was born in the United States, it's the Mexican Mormon War and it's a vice series and it is wonderful. Because this is something that for whatever reason was not really discussed during the campaign trail. I think they tried to keep this because I think they thought it would be incredibly damaging to the Republican Party because this guy is the front runner for the Republicans. I don't know who the fuck on the Democratic side agreed to not really get into this. That mean they're not just a part of a cult. They're a part of a gun toting polygamous cult that has an armed compound in Mexico. How do I not know this? Well, that's why Romney's dad wanted to be president, but could not run for president because he was born in Mexico. He came out of his mother's body in the wrong patch of dirt. So we did not allow him to run our great nation. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. Did he become a senator? I do not remember. He was involved in politics in some way. Ted Cruz was born in Canada though, right? Yes, he is. So did they change the rules? Dirty Canadian. He's not one of us. I love Canadians. I'm kidding. Did they change the rules? No, because he has dual citizenship because his mother was something. So you can be born... Yes. Like my friend Brian was born in the Philippines, but he's American because he was born on a military base. He was going to be... I mean, but can he be president and not born in the US? Well, in my book, no, because he was not given the God-given right to be born in the right patch of dirt. So fuck him. That's my book. But Constitution. Well, that was something that Donald Trump was bringing up. Well, by the way, people do forget conveniently that Donald Trump was one of the primary birthers. He was one of the biggest proponents of the idea that Obama was not born in America, that he was born in Kenya. Do you remember that? That was a big issue. Yeah. Oh, big time. Huge. I mean, he still is propounding absolutely fringe conspiracy nut beliefs about... He said that Obama founded ISIS, right? At a rally in Florida. Did he find ISIS? Founded ISIS. That Obama had started ISIS. But did he decide to say this at a rally in Florida or did Obama found ISIS in a rally in Florida? Oh, I think he said it at the rally. I think he said that Obama founded it in Raqqa. Let me hear this. Let's hear this. All over the Middle East. And it was a terrible mistake. And then Obama came in and normally you want to clean up. He made a bigger mess out of it. He made such a mess. And then you had Hillary with Libya. So sad. In fact, in many respects, you know, they honor President Obama. ISIS is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of ISIS. He's the founder of ISIS. He's the founder. He said it three times. And they're fucking cheering. He founded ISIS. Four times. And I would say the co-founder would be Crooked Hillary Clinton. Co-founder. Makes you wonder if he knows what the word found means. He doesn't give a fuck. Do you know what I mean? He's a pro wrestling candidate. I had a bit about this in like 2005. I had a bit about George Bush in that he was so dumb that I don't think that he was really the candidate that the Republicans like the best candidate they could have. I think it was a test to find out how dumb people are. Because there's only one way to tell it. The people that the bankers and the industrialists, they don't really know how dumb Americans are. They know about pop culture. They know what people like. And that they the only there was only one way to find out. You put a dumb guy in office and you see how people react. And then at the end of the first year when he won again or the first term when he won again, I think they were sitting around going, I think we can go dumber. And they just decided to get some fucking pro wrestling type president. Some dude who's like a combination of like a drill sergeant and a pro wrestler who just, you know, you just go to Ted Nugent concerts and scoop people up with nets and you just set them up. And that this is kind of what he is. I mean, you watch that. That is like the even the way the audience is yelling along and cheering. It's theatrical. This is all like a parade. It's theater. They don't necessarily think that Obama really founded ISIS. They don't care if he did or not. There's no thinking there. There's a box that they operate on. It's a very small box. They operate all their thoughts exist inside this box. And they never expand. They never go there. There's no there's no nuance. There's no subtlety. There's no there's no broad spectrum. There's no big picture. There's none of that. It's just assholes have their king. We have a lot of assholes. It's really easy to survive. It's real easy to have kids. You can't have thought when this started, you couldn't have thought that this would get this far. Would you like this seemed like a joke to begin with? Yeah. I thought somewhere along the line, cooler heads would prevail. But I'm torn because as a comedian, you know, I mean, this is a fucking gold mine. They're about to open up a dam of gold. They're going to break down the dam and gold is going to flow down. It's going to be amazing. But as a human being, this could literally lead to the end of civilization. I mean, as myself, as a sort of student of kind of self sabotage and the bizarre abysms of the human condition. Do you know what I mean? I find it fascinating. Yes. You know, it could be the end of the world, but it just you just see things happening that absolutely are unprecedented. And and this I have a kind of chaos, a chaotic streak that enjoys. It's like that feeling you get in the scoop playground as a kid when a fight breaks out. Fight, fight, fight. You just sort of it's like it's almost an arsonist thrill of seeing civilization burn. Something's going to happen. Something's crazy is going to happen. It's not business as usual. Here's another thing that I like about it. There's a lot of things that he says that are absolutely true. And here's one of the things that I like about what Trump represents. He is not the political establishment and the political establishment sucks. It really does suck. It is a corrupt, completely corrupt institution. And what he's saying about Crooked Hillary, I agree. Like if you look at the Clinton Foundation, you look at what they've been able to do and the laws they've been able to skirt and the amount of influence they're able to have and the amount of money that they're able to generate and where that money goes and how ambiguous it is and how that hasn't been investigated. He's right. He's right in a lot of ways. So I hope that a lot of what he's doing is theatrics. And if he does wind up winning, I hope that he puts around him some real political advisors that understand international policy, that he tones everything down and this is all. That's like the ultimate hope, right? I don't necessarily think it's true. Well, I hope that he loses, personally. But you hope that Hillary wins? Because I hope that she doesn't win either. Well, I don't see what... I mean, I don't see Jill Stein winning. I mean, I think it's either... What about Gary Johnson? He might... Who is Gary Johnson? How dare you? He's the... Well, he's an independent. He's... Gary Johnson is the libertarian candidate. He's a very reasonable guy. I thought Weld was the libertarian candidate. No. Is Johnson... Is Johnson with Weld? Is Weld the... Is Weld the vice? We're gonna find out. Johnson is the former governor of New Mexico. Between Hillary and Trump, you would go Trump? No. No. It's not that. No, I would go asteroid, which I hope an asteroid hits. You'd go Hubbard, OT3. I don't like either one of them. I mean, I agree with what you said about it took a orange head casino magnate, with pathological lying issues, to point out the truth about the American... The brokenness of the American... Yeah, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. Bill Weld is his vice president. I think we're in a bad place with either one of them, because either one of them are exposing the ridiculous aspects of our society and the ridiculous aspects of our political establishment, our political system. It's just not a good system. Representative government doesn't make any sense when people can represent themselves. It made sense back when it was impossible to get word to Washington how all these people felt. But now that people... You're almost saying by continuing representative government in 2016, you're almost saying that, well, you can't have one person, one vote, because people are too fucking stupid for that. I mean, you're almost saying that. Maybe they are. Are they? And if that's the case, we need to fix that. Instead of just continuing business as usual, we need to figure out how to expand our educational system or enlighten some of these people, maybe drop mushrooms everywhere or something. There's got to be a better way than just continuing business as usual. And that business has been shown, at least in Hillary Clinton's case, to be completely corrupt. Do you think Obama... How would you rate Obama? I like him as a human. What I like about Obama is he's measured, he's intelligent. And I think there's one thing that has been... I mean, as much as... When you look at politics, you look at someone who's running the president, there's a lot of speculation. How much power does he have? What is it like behind closed doors? What are those meetings like? Sam Harris has an interesting point. Is Obama a guy who is lying all along? Or when he's running for president and then gets in office and does different things like keeps Guantanamo Bay open and doesn't leave Iraq and all the different things that he reneged on? Or is it that you become president and then you are briefed? And then someone sits down and explains to you the horrific nature of the outside world. And here are the threats to civilization itself. Here are the threats in terms of terrorism, in terms of these different dictatorships that are seeking to gain nuclear arms. And here's some real problems and here's the strategies and here's what we have to do and here's why we can't do what you promised. There's that too. I don't know. We don't know. But what Obama does represent, and here's what trickles down, is as a man, he's very measured. He's very intelligent. He's very articulate. He doesn't lose his cool. He doesn't respond to nonsense. And the speeches that he gives are... They're a great representative of education, of dignity, of a guy who speaks very well and a guy who is smarter than most people that you know. I think there's something to be said for that. And I think that that is what George Bush wasn't. And that was what was appealing to me about Obama. But, you know, but he's bullshits too. You know, so it's like, at what point in time do you get to speak your mind? Do you ever? Do you ever get to say what you really think? If that's what he really thinks, if that's who he really is. When you're a politician, you are almost required to try to play this game of not pissing people off over expressing your true feelings on things. Like you've got to kind of play it as much down the middle. You know that there's going to be a bunch of people on this side that are going to hate you. There's going to be a bunch of people on that side that don't think you're going far enough. But you shoot down the middle and you get the best results. It's almost like pretending to be someone who you're not to try to pick people up at a bar. Like it's a bullshit act. And that's what politicians are. They're bullshitters. They're really good at bullshitting. What's bizarre about Trump is that he's not doing that. That this is who he is. I think that's true, I think. But to go to your point about whether people are stupid or not, I think that's an unkind way of phrasing it. I'm an unkind dude. So that's it. But actually, no one has the time. We have jobs to do and to be informed on all the subjects you would need to be informed on to make the right decisions, to run the country. No one has the time. It's a very good point. We need people to specialize in these things. It's like Brexit was a triumph in the UK when it was put to the vote, this massive decision on whether to be part of the EU. No one in that space of time, as a member of the electorate, could educate themselves to the point where they could make an informed choice on that. And so people thought, you know what? I just want to have something different. Let's vote for a change. And we had Brexit with, I would argue, disastrous results. Well, temporarily disastrous, but to be seen, whether or not it's ultimately disastrous. My friend Steve Hilton, who's a very bright guy, who's been on this podcast before, he was David Cameron's right hand man. He actually is a supporter of Brexit. That's one of the things that he had a problem with Cameron over. They had a falling out. I want to talk to him, sit down with him. I don't know enough of it. I don't really follow any politics. I barely follow the United States. I didn't know what the fuck Brexit was until it was going down and everybody was saying it was the end of the world. Yeah. I mean, I agree. Like I feel as though it's easy to go along with the group think, but I was in favor of staying in Europe. Well, when I'm talking about representative government, what I'm talking about is like this electoral college setup and the one person, one vote setup. And the idea that 300 plus million people are going to be represented by just a handful of people that represent each state. Yeah. I mean, the whole pro and the way in which Bernie Sanders was marginalized, I think. And likewise, in a way, the fact that Trump could run away with it is, I mean, it's just fascinating how he managed to upto overturn the apple cart. I haven't really grappled with the minutiae of how US democracy works, but it seems to me like it's a really bizarre arcane system with delegates and whatnot. Exactly. Who came up with that? Well, they came up with it back when there was no communication. They came up with it back when you had to take a horse and you had to carry a handwritten letter across the country to communicate with people. And that was just ineffective. They had to figure out how to have people in your various states and various counties and various districts represent the greater good of the people and also have the ability to decide over the rest of the people. That's one of the things that people don't even realize. In representative government, when you have this one person who represents a group of the people, if the group of the people, the group decides to vote for Hillary Clinton, that one person doesn't have to agree with that. It's a weird fucking system. Really weird. And it's designed for back when people were illiterate and there's a bunch of farmers and pilgrims and savages that came over from Europe on rafts and made it to America and just fucking have at it. And they're trying to manage this and trying to figure out how to take the founder and father's ideas and best keep it all together while they're exploring this whole new world and dealing with governing these people that were literally thousands of miles away that you couldn't even reach. We can do that now. I mean, instantaneously someone can send a Facebook message. They can send an email. They can tweet. You can find out what people's opinions are. But then it becomes whether or not these people are qualified to decide which direction the country goes. Well, if they're not qualified, we should probably figure out what the fuck we can do to make people more aware of what are the consequences of all these different decisions that are going to be made by our politicians because there's a lot of stuff that gets made when it comes to disastrous implications for the environment. I mean, when Obama was in office, he set so much in order or so much in motion that environmentalists and people that are against offshore drilling, I mean, there's a lot of fracking and offshore drilling and all sorts of things that could potentially have disastrous implications that were set forth by him that no one had any say in. No person in America that was just a regular citizen had any say in these major decisions. Like, you know, Mark Ruffalo just tweeted something about all the different offshore oil rigs that Obama had agreed to while he was in office. And it's disturbing. Really? That's interesting. I have to say, as someone who resides in the UK and is more used to the British system, the biggest shock when you come over here is during the election cycle, the amount of money that gets spent and the length of the campaigns. And for all its flaws, in Britain, there's a cap on how much they can spend on their campaigns. So they have like one or two TV ads each and then a couple of posters, but they do not do anything on the scale of what happens here. And the amount of money that gets spent here is just insane. So it does seem it has all the hallmarks of a broken system, I would say. Well, not only that, there's two recognised parties and anything else you're throwing your vote away. That's the implication. That's how people think. And Tom Rhodes, a friend of mine, he lived in Holland for quite a while. And he was talking about the variety of candidates to choose from in Holland. And now they just have so many different people. They have conservative liberals. They have conservative Green Party candidates. They have liberal Green Party candidates. They have... I mean, it just goes across this just wide range of different philosophies on how to govern and people get a better sense of what they would like or what they agree with most. Because this hard line right and hard line left and this rigid ideology that you have to subscribe to on both sides, like if you're on the right, you don't support gay marriage, you're anti-abortion, you're this or that, you want gun rights, you want this, you know, you know, fuck immigration, you know, there's all this stuff that you have to kind of agree to, if you agree to the right. And then on the left, you have to agree to a lot of things that people, you know, not necessarily agree as well. So it's so complicated to have a two party system and try to pretend that there is a real democracy that is... And it's not really democracy. No, no. Representative government. Yeah. I mean, that's for sure. Do you think Trump's got a chance of winning? Yes, I do, especially if people find out what Hillary has really been involved in. I mean, if they really start hammering that, like we have a few months to go. It's only August. We have to go through all of September, all of October, and then November. That's a lot of time. And in that time, crazy shit can come out. And it seems, I mean, I've read in the LA Times that he's already on a mini rebound based on this semi-apology he delivered last week, and that if he could tone it down a couple of notches and just sort of appeal to a few more women and just seem a little bit less insane, he will climb in the poll numbers. He could do it. Well, she's under two criminal investigations, and there's also plenty of video out there where there's a direct contradiction between what the FBI has said they were investigating what she was guilty of and then what she has said they said. So she's not honest. She's just not. I mean, it's pretty clear when you compare many things to what she said versus the actual facts, she's a lawyer. She's a lawyer who became a politician. She's a career politician. She knows what to do. She's got Teflon in her DNA, and she keeps plowing forward no matter what. She doesn't do interviews. She's not doing any of these rallies. She's just going forward, and it's very bizarre. There's also a lot of questions. I mean, Dr. Drew did some big thing the other day talking about her health, because she had fallen down in 2012 and apparently had a blood clot on her brain and really hurt herself really badly. And at her advanced age, this is a really dangerous condition. And he talked about her health care and talked about the care that she received and what the diagnosis was. And he's like, this is dangerous stuff. And so who knows how much of her behavior, because traumatic brain injuries are really significant when it comes to the way your brain works post-injury, the way you behave, impulsive behavior, aggression. I made a program on that subject last year. What was it about? I mean, what was it? It was called a different brain, and it was set in a brain injury rehabilitation clinic in the UK. And it was basically about serious personality changes in the wake of a traumatic brain injury. As you say, impulsivity, sometimes a lack of empathy, erratic behavior. And it was about people, you know, it's inevitably about the relationships that they're in and the way in which people have to adapt around to the new needs. And, you know, yeah, it was it's unbelievable stuff. I mean, you're talking about I mean, you know better than anyone from your sports kind of interest that post boxing, post NFL, post hockey, if you if you're a fighter in hockey, and pro wrestling, too. There's been several terrific documentaries won by Steve James called head games, and a few others that all examine. I mean, the levels of erratic behavior after an NFL career are unreal. Whether it's divorce, bankruptcy, suicide, or, you know, serious depression, it's off the charts. Yeah, I've seen it firsthand. I've seen it firsthand from friends who became erratic and became really unstable after getting beat a few times in mixed martial arts fights. I've seen it from boxers, people that I knew when I was young, and then I met them 10, 15 years later, and they're just life was a mess. They become alcoholics have a huge issue with their endocrine system, and they supplement with alcohol and drugs to try to self medicate. It becomes a real problem. I mean, the brain is very fragile. It's it's connected with this very, very soft connective tissue that keeps it in place inside the head. It's just not meant to be hit that much. You know, you're meant to like survive a few bumps and bruises. And that's what it's kind of designed for. And anything else, especially prolonged, continued abuse like that can have dire consequences, or one significant injury can have dire consequences. One significant one can be life changing, or in the sports context, two concussions, I'm sure, you know, back to back within a single sort of space of time, like one game. You know, the first one's not good, but the second one is cataclysmic. Yes. And it happens a lot of times where people deny the first concussion, and they go right back to playing football, or they go right back to sparring. It's a huge issue. You think Hillary may have a TBI, a traumatic brain injury? Well, I'm no doctor, obviously, but she definitely had a traumatic brain injury. She fell and she had a blood clot on her brain. I mean, this is all open public record, the diagnosis when you have a blood clot on your brain at 60 something years of age, that is incredibly dangerous. It's really bad. And then you have to address like what made her pass out in the first place? Like what made her black out when she fell down and hit her head? That's not good. I think what we really need in this country is like some altruistic Elon Musk type character, some real genius, someone who's like a really brilliant person who sees the state the country's in and offers some intelligent, well thought out solutions. That doesn't exist because those people are too busy doing whatever they're doing. So what we're left with is career politicians and then this madman who's a reality TV star, who's a casino man. I don't think that our system is good. I think it's very archaic. I think it's just not the best we can do. And I think we're just going to continue to use it until it blows up in our face. It's like instead of redesigning cars, we've got some Model T and we'll keep adding turbo chargers to it and fucking bigger wheels. And someone says, hey man, I think we can make a better car. Fuck that. This is our car. USA, USA. And they keep just slapping bolts and fucking rivets and screwing this thing in place. It's not good. It's not a good system and it's not the best we can do. It's certainly not ideal. And I think human beings in all areas of life other than our political system, we have advanced radically since the 1700s. If you look at the way we approach education, if you look at our ability to communicate with each other, if you look at technology, the innovation and the constant expanding of our horizons and possibilities as far as what we're capable of with technology, all those things have radically improved since then. But we still have this goofy system that was created back when people rode horses, rote with feathers, and when you wanted to picture something, you had to draw it. I mean, that is dumb. But that's great because that's a great metaphor for the human brain in a way. And then kind of a big thought to carry as we sort of draw to the close of our interview. But because the brain, our brains are hinged around the innermost parts of our brain, the amygdala, which is essentially reptilian in origin. And so many of our deepest impulses, the fear response and so forth, are programmed from a kind of evolutionary heritage. We've got neurocircuits that go back thousands, if not millions of years. And that metaphor you use to describe our political system of being an old jalopy that's been turbocharged is in essence what our brains are. And as much as it would be lovely to believe that technology and our ability to control nature and control our environment had been hand in hand with sort of a moral and civilizational improvement, that you could deduce maybe as many examples that suggest that all it's done is allowed us to do everything, whether for good or ill, more efficiently and more effectively. So we can help more people, we can blow more people up. You can drive faster, but you can drive faster away from a crime. Do you know what I mean? So I don't hold out any huge hope that there'll be a positive change. Really? See, I think that... I mean, I might be wrong. Sometimes I read things that persuade me otherwise. I think that we're more advanced and more safe now than ever before. I think if you look back on 2000 years ago and you look at today, which is a blink in the eye in terms of the age of the earth, it's infinitely better to live today than it is then. Certainly here in America or in the West, but you know, in a globe with six, what is it, six billion? I think it's seven. If you were dropped at random on Earth, where would you... I mean, chances are you wouldn't be Joe Rogan. You would probably be what? I don't know. Would you probably be... Well, there's certainly some horrible places. ...working in making Apple phones in a factory. You could be or you could be in China living in some sky rise, being some multi-billionaire cell phone magnate. Who the hell knows? You know, I mean, there's certainly some wonderful spots in the world outside of America. There's certainly some great places to live. Even if you live in poverty, you could live a wonderful, happy life that's way safer than it would be thousands and thousands of years ago. The internet is pretty much worldwide. Cell phones are pretty much available everywhere now. And so I think that access to communication is going to change the way people view the world because they're going to have more data to choose from. They're going to have more cherry picking that they can do. They can certainly have more confirmation bias and stick to their own group. Like we're talking about with Scientologists who don't go on the internet, don't take any suppressive information and don't watch any videos. And I think what I'd like about your approach and what I like about what you're saying when it comes to Scientology is that you're not a mean person. You're not like mocking them and you don't want to shit on them. What you want to do is you want to look at them for what they really are and try to get a really good understanding of it. Like one of my favorite parts of the trailer was that guy filming you and you're filming him and you go, are you making a documentary too? Well, and that's it, isn't it? Because you don't want to, you know, if I can quote Nietzsche, which is kind of a sophomoric thing to do, but it's the idea of like, you don't, when you, when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks all too into you. Like when you fight monsters, don't become a monster. And I don't want to, they're bullies in many cases and I didn't want to bully them back. And I didn't want to be trapped into a paradigm of us against them. And I was really trying to say, look, let's keep, I don't want, I don't, I want to see the human in you. Yes. Not just an agent for an oppressive regime. I think that's beautiful. I really do. And I think that is a very measured and intelligent and wise way to approach this. And I've enjoyed that about your other videos as well. I think in that sense, you're very unique in the way you, you approach documentary filmmaking. And I think the, the Scientologists, they're not our enemies. And the gentleman who left who's the number two guy, what was his name? Marty Rathbun. Look, he's a perfect example of that. You're talking about a guy who was in it for two plus decades. He left and he's, you know, sort of coming clean about all the stupid shit that he did when he's in there. People become a prisoner of their earliest ideology, the earliest ideology that they adopt. And that's one of the problems with any sort of a group think, whether it's a cult or religion, whatever the fuck you want to call it, ideologies become problematic when you can't escape, you can't vary. You can't, you have to stick to the dogma. You have to stick to the doctrine. And that's not good for people. It's not healthy. It's not smart. Because I think the ability to communicate an open debate is why we've advanced to the point we're at in the first place. The suppressing of that is almost always someone who has a bad idea that they're trying to shelter. So when you see people that are chasing after someone, because they're trying to communicate about something like you, who's doing it super respectfully, when you see that, what you have is a bunch of people that are trying to defend a bad idea and defend it with aggression. That's exactly right. And the more you kind of become a mirror image of whatever they're projecting, you reinforce them in their position as well. From doing other stories about extreme religious beliefs, like the Westboro Baptist Church, I know from people who I met who were in the church when I made my documentary and then subsequently left that what short circuits their beliefs, what allows them to see something bigger than what they're in is when you treat them with kindness, you know, and instead of shouting back at them or hurling abuse back, which just reinforces their view of you as an enemy of God or suppressive or however they characterize it, if you actually behave decently in an attempt to robustly present your position, but in a respectful way, and with a kind of coming from a place of caring and empathy, as opposed to sort of sensorial, so hostile attitude, that actually can be much more effective. Absolutely. You know, as well as being humane. Kudos to you, sir. Oh, thanks. I'm a big fan. I really am. I really appreciate you coming back here. And I'd love to have you back before the documentary comes out, which is in January. And hopefully by then the Scientologists have they've wised up and they've maybe, maybe their film will be out and we can be wonderful. We can plug their documentary. Yeah, we will. Maybe their film is going to say, Louie's a really great guy. Yeah. We investigated it. We found out he really practices what he preaches and we're sorry. I don't think it will be, but we'll see. All right, folks, we'll be back in just a little bit with Hannibal Burris. He'll be back at five o'clock, which is an hour from now. So until then, enjoy yourself.