Join Marty and Marty as they discuss the new documentary, "Going Clear" on the Church of Scientology, directed by Alex Blumberg, and starring Kirsty Alley. They discuss the history of the church, the motivations behind it, and what it means to be a part of it. They also discuss the impact of the documentary on the public perception of the religion and whether or not it should be allowed to be made into a documentary. They also talk about why they think the church is a religion, and why they don't think it's a religion at all. And of course, there's a whole lot of talk about L. Ron Hubbard and his crazy ideas about aliens and the universe and their connection to the Bible and the Holy Qur'an. If you're in the mood for a conspiracy theory, this is the episode for you. And if you don't like conspiracy theories, you'll love this one! Subscribe to our new podcast, "The Dark Side Of," wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with our newest episodes and get notified when we deconstruct the latest news and discuss the most outrageous conspiracy theories you've ever heard! Subscribe, share, and spread the word to your friends about what's going on in the world of The Dark Side of...well, whatever you're listening to! wherever you are listening to this podcast! and why you should be listening to it! in the first place! Enjoy! -Marty and Marty for the rest of the podcast. - -Jonas as he's a big fan of this week's episode of the show, and we're working on a new episode of Behind the Mindset, and he's going to make you feel professional with headsets on the podcast, so you won't want to miss out on the latest episode of The Mindset Project, too! And he's not going anywhere else but here's what you should listen to it? and we'll be posting it in the next week, right here on the next episode of After Hours, so don't forget to check it out! . And we'll see you next week! --Jonas for the latest in the After Hours. -- ! Thank you for listening to the podcast? -- -Jon as he sassy, Jon as he makes you know what he's listening to our latest episode, right away!
00:00:09.000I was saying before the podcast started that you sent me down a Scientology rabbit hole last night, my friend.
00:00:15.000I'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.
00:00:25.000And, you know, I spent three years down that rabbit hole, and it's a weird one.
00:00:48.000And actually, I mean, I know there's a lot to talk about, but...
00:00:51.000Perhaps the biggest obstacle to making a documentary about Scientology is the overabundance of material.
00:00:59.000You know, 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.
00:01:08.000I 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...
00:01:22.000And 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.
00:02:34.000I'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?
00:02:49.000Her 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.
00:03:01.000He wrote down more things that never happened than anyone who's ever lived.
00:03:06.000And they don't have a problem with that.
00:03:08.000I mean, you've said about 10 different things that I could break down and analyze.
00:03:14.000I mean, I'm basically on the same page as you.
00:03:15.000I think 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,
00:04:06.000Most other religions are created by desert mystics or warriors or introspective people, but a modern-day sci-fi writer who's writing things about aliens taking over foreign galaxies, that accounts for a lot of its very bizarre inflection.
00:04:46.000But the guy, he lied about so many things.
00:04:50.000He was also abusive to his wife, wives, I think, plural.
00:04:55.000So physically, he was abusive to them.
00:04:59.000He was very, very troubled and suicidal.
00:05:02.000One 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.
00:05:29.000You were not a disgrace to the military.
00:05:32.000You acquitted your service in the Navy very creditably.
00:05:36.000It was all these sort of lies he was telling himself to reassure himself that he was actually to feel okay about himself.
00:05:43.000It's a very humanizing document because you just see all his neurotic inclinations laid bare.
00:05:50.000That then subsequently informed his lifelong attempt to, as you say, sort of therapeutically heal himself.
00:05:57.000And I think there's other people that identify with those.
00:06:01.000Self 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.
00:06:17.000And I think that's where Scientology does benefit a lot of people.
00:06:32.000When 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, yeah, that's all pretty black and white.
00:06:42.000But I think we can, in some ways, we can sympathize with some of the people that are in it Oh, yeah.
00:06:51.000I 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?
00:07:00.000But I also think that on the outer periphery, there are concentric rings of commitment to Scientology, and in the inner circle, it is extremely demanding, and I would argue abusive, and And cult-like.
00:07:17.000On the outer circles, as you get further from the center, I think it can be relatively benign.
00:07:23.000And especially if you're a VIP or a celebrity in which you're exposed only to the best sorts of treatment.
00:07:29.000You're given kind of platinum card treatment.
00:07:42.000That he's only ever been treated like a prince when he's been in Scientology.
00:07:46.000So he feels so grateful for everything that they've done for him.
00:07:51.000Yeah, 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.
00:08:01.000You know, when you see him when they had the happy birthday thing for him and he's dancing and everybody's cheering.
00:08:06.000Like, imagine if people treated you like that all the time.
00:09:25.000This is a different 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...
00:11:02.000So it's not like you can argue against it.
00:11:06.000I mean, one of the big things they're up against is 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.
00:11:19.000So 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...
00:11:35.000Hubbard apparently once said, oh, the best way to wash windows is using vinegar.
00:11:40.000You're like, don't use Windex, use vinegar.
00:11:42.000And because of that, whenever they washed windows in the Sea Org, in the inner sanctums of Scientology, they had to use vinegar because Hubbard said that was how you were supposed to do it.
00:12:01.000Basically, if it's gospel, then how do you reform—you know, God's changed his mind is basically what you have to say.
00:12:09.000Well, 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?
00:12:29.000And there's a lot of open-ended questions that never have any answers.
00:12:32.000So when someone comes along and they have this rigid ideology where things are very clearly defined, you must ask, who is defining these things?
00:12:42.000Who is this person that is beyond reproach?
00:12:45.000And when that person is a yellow-toothed weirdo that's dressed like a captain with some medals that he put himself...
00:14:40.000It 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.
00:14:55.000Yeah, all of that, but that's basically Freud, basically.
00:15:22.000But the fact is, exhibit A is just read Dianetics.
00:15:26.000If you read the Bible, it's got loony stuff in it, but it's got passages of transcendent poetry and just parables that you can meditate on and are beautifully written in the translated English.
00:15:39.000You 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.
00:15:52.000Your father tried to abort the fetus, and you can still remember that, and that's holding you back.
00:15:58.000And at that time, a record was playing, and every time you hear that record, it sort of...
00:16:03.000This sort of Pavlov mixed with really weird, totally unscientific ideas.
00:16:24.000But that's what we were saying earlier about rigid ideologies.
00:16:28.000Rigid 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.
00:16:37.000One 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.
00:16:46.000If you know that these are the rules and you don't have to think about why homosexuality is bad or why, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the issue is.
00:16:57.000When someone defines something like that for you, it makes it so you have less questions and you have comfort in these truths, you know, air quotes.
00:17:22.000You 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.
00:17:34.000There'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.
00:17:46.000Whenever 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, that woman, she did not seem stupid at all.
00:18:01.000No, I'm sure 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.
00:18:13.000A lot of the assertiveness she shows I think she probably acquired through Scientology and a lot of Scientology training in terms of what it imparts to people It's one of the reasons that I think it appeals a lot to actors because it works,
00:18:40.000I 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.
00:18:55.000And 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.
00:19:05.000And it is your obligation to ensure that those truths are saved for posterity and communicated as widely as possible.
00:19:13.000In a totally unadulterated fashion, because any adulteration of the message means that not only do they not work, they become toxic and dangerous.
00:19:22.000It 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.
00:19:39.000Yeah, 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, you know, when people said, you know,
00:19:54.000there's nothing in the Bible about the papacy, really.
00:19:57.000There's nothing about selling indulgences and having palaces in Rome, in the Vatican.
00:20:02.000So actually, really, there's just stuff in the Bible about...
00:20:35.000It'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.
00:21:07.000I think there's an obvious thing of...
00:21:09.000The 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.
00:21:17.000And then you sort of reach a tipping point of commitment where it becomes almost embarrassing to back out.
00:21:31.000It's very hard to walk away from that commitment.
00:21:34.000So there's all these powerful, compelling reasons for why.
00:21:40.000But 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.
00:21:50.000You see these gilded casinos, you see these towering, shiny buildings, you know, they're kind of over the top and grotesque, but they're also sort of majestic and imperial.
00:22:01.000And if you ever watch Scientology footage, some of it's on YouTube, and you see how they are very good at a certain kind of over-the-top aesthetic.
00:22:43.000It's sort of designed by Jay Peterman, you know, like the catalogue company, and it has sort of old globes and kind of distressed wooden furniture and wicker chairs, and it feels like it's got a slightly colonial golden age of exploration feel.
00:22:58.000And 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.
00:23:11.000Yeah, there's a seductive quality to a lot of religions.
00:23:14.000I find a seductive quality to people that are very confident in what they're saying and this ultimate truth that they're espousing.
00:23:44.000The 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.
00:23:55.000I was just stunned by the amount of work and the hundreds of years of work that had gone into creating that.
00:24:02.000But when you're there, the overall scale of it is so immense that it makes you feel...
00:24:11.000It makes you feel insignificant in the greater picture.
00:24:14.000And 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.
00:26:02.000You know, one of the appeals of, I think, whether it's Scientology or Islam or Christian, extreme Christianity, you know, whatever form that takes, they can say, like, we have all our answers.
00:26:19.000I'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.
00:26:31.000But actually, you know, I can't really articulate that in ten words.
00:26:56.000Yeah, you're like, I don't have a book, like, whatever we call the other way of doing things, you know?
00:27:01.000And also, you don't want to say, like, well, in Western tradition, you know, you're trying not to, because whether we like it or not, all our beliefs have some sort of geographic and temporal specificity to them.
00:27:11.000As 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.
00:31:24.000Yeah, I'm not going to disagree with you.
00:31:26.000I mean, I feel as though we're in a weird place.
00:31:28.000We'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?
00:31:37.000And around the same time, trolling became a buzzword, and it was the idea that we should stop trolling.
00:31:42.000And 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.
00:31:53.000Well, there was also a lot of people that were defending What had happened in Charlie Hebdo by saying that those cartoons were really racist.
00:32:02.000They were going so far pro-Islamic to sort of...
00:32:06.000Well, I'm gonna say I what I heard was and because I understood this was some people saying Absolutely, it's a crime.
00:32:14.000And people have the right to be, you know, to be offensive.
00:32:18.000But 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 a neo-Nazi was killed.
00:33:34.000In 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 creditable one.
00:33:48.000Yes, that's a really good point, because what were they doing, and what was the point of what they were doing?
00:34:49.000Well, 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.
00:36:08.000Is a lot of how, allegedly, according to experts on thought reform or cults, so-called, they say that by learning a new language, it's part of what kind of gets you caught up in the thought patterns of an abusive system.
00:36:25.000If 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.
00:36:31.000They love to use them because it sort of lets everybody know that you're on the inside.
00:37:11.000So that's a big part of how they operate.
00:37:13.000And I think as well, I mean, this is something I mentioned before.
00:37:16.000It 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 freedom or free way of thinking,
00:37:33.000It's like Bush saying, you're either with us or against us.
00:37:35.000And in Scientology, in a famous statement of Tom Cruise's that he gave in 2004 when he was given a Freedom Medal of Valour at a big Scientology awards ceremony in England, He said, you're either playing on the pitch or you're out of the arena.
00:37:51.000He's the one when they gave him that gold dinner plate.
00:37:53.000Yeah, they gave him a huge, like a Flavor Flav style gong.
00:37:56.000And so his thing is like, you're either on the pitcher, get out of the arena because there's no half measures, you know?
00:38:27.000Well, you know, I'm going to sound weird now because one of my promises that I made to myself was that I would never gratuitously mock the beliefs of Scientology.
00:38:37.000And one of the things they find offensive is to reveal some of the secret truths that are unveiled.
00:38:46.000Unique 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?
00:38:54.000So you don't at 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.
00:39:04.000There'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.
00:39:11.000In Scientology, you learn more as you go up.
00:39:15.000Some say that this is partly something that it owes to Crowley, or Alistair Crowley, I think it's pronounced, 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.
00:39:29.000And it is quite a seductive idea, the idea, oh, I'm going to learn more as I go on, a kind of unraveling mystery.
00:39:47.000So 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.
00:40:03.000And allegedly, if an uninitiated OT or an uninitiated person is shown the secrets, it makes them go crazy.
00:40:29.000It's a little cheap when all these documentaries say, you know, $100,000 in or $200,000 or $500,000, you're going to learn what happens at OT3. And then they spoil the surprise for everyone.
00:40:43.000And I also felt like I'd like to be able to say to, if I ever meet a Scientologist, 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.
00:40:54.000I just, I have a right to know my truth and express my truth.
00:40:59.000I don't want to make, you have a right to believe what you want to believe.
00:41:01.000And if you think, you know, no more than I'd force a Jewish guy to eat pork or tell a Rastafarian he had to cut his hair.
00:41:07.000And 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.
00:41:14.000Well, 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.
00:41:29.000And there's an amazing moment in the documentary, the HBO documentary, where was it?
00:41:47.000He'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 white-gloved hands.
00:41:56.000And then there's a handwritten piece of parchment inside, written in Hubbard's manuscript.
00:42:02.000And you read it in that room, and then the guy has a kind of little routine he follows.
00:42:07.000Like, the person who brought you in comes in and says, has it been read and comprehended?
00:43:37.000It's the ability to retain your memories and your identity across multiple lifetimes.
00:43:43.000And that's why it's so important to a Scientologist to recollect his or her past lifetimes because it suggests that you're now on your cosmic destiny and you will carry it forward when you next incarnate.
00:44:01.000I 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.
00:46:50.000Well, he was upset that they showed that video of him, you know, saluting, you know, to LRH, you know, they salute when they got the medal, all that crazy shit.
00:47:03.000Oh, 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.
00:47:42.000Because 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.
00:47:49.000Can you imagine if Leah Remini was in a commercial for Scientology?
00:47:52.000They'd never be able to use it again, right?
00:47:55.000So it's sort of insurance, because they want to be able to use the...
00:47:59.000They 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.
00:48:07.000That's their actual reason for doing it?
00:49:10.000Intellectually, 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,
00:49:25.000even that, even though all those things make sense to me intellectually, I'm still fascinated.
00:49:32.000I'm still so puzzled that in 2016, with the internet, with all the access to information that we have today, that that still exists.
00:49:41.000And you look forward and you wonder, is this going to fizzle out?
00:49:48.000But 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.
00:50:03.000So I read a thing that said, well, it's religion that sells secrets, right?
00:51:17.000A year before Larry Wright's book, Going Clear.
00:51:21.000So it's thunder was stolen by Going Clear, but it's also an excellent book and a great primer.
00:51:27.000If you enjoyed Going Clear, I highly recommend Inside Scientology.
00:51:30.000And she points this out, that in 1950...
00:51:33.000McDonald's was invented and so was Dianetics.
00:51:37.000So 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,
00:51:52.000some 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.
00:56:39.000And 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...
00:56:48.000Speak to your friends and family who are still in Scientology, but we don't want you speaking out.
00:56:53.000And so then the defector will be like, okay, fine, I want a simple life.
00:56:57.000But Leah Remini, to her credit, has actually, you know, gone out there and absolutely made it a mission to call them out.
00:57:20.000And so I think they're encouraged to go up the bridge quite quickly.
00:57:24.000I had a neighbor who was a Scientologist, and he wanted to buy a piece of property, and we had a discussion about this, how I found out he was a Scientologist.
00:57:33.000He said out of nowhere, you know, we start talking about this.
00:57:36.000He's like, yeah, I'm thinking about buying it, but right now my wife is about to go clear.
00:58:45.000If 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.
00:58:56.000And 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...
01:00:41.000So 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.
01:00:54.000And I didn't want it to be a kind of just poking them for the sake of it type of thing.
01:00:58.000Anyway, 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...
01:01:14.000In 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.
01:01:27.000So 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.
01:01:35.000And 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.
01:01:47.000So there'd be this wraparound of them and children, they'd start filming us.
01:01:53.000And it turns out they were making a documentary about me making my film about Scientology.
01:01:58.000So then it becomes this sort of whole...
01:02:39.000They'll extract any photograph where I look like a dick or ugly or ludicrous.
01:02:45.000Any ill-advised bit of publicity I ever did where I was promoting a series and I looked goofy.
01:02:51.000They'll say, this is a serious journalist.
01:02:54.000And then they'll take quotes from interviews out of context to make me sound like either a goofball or kind of malicious deceiver.
01:03:04.000And, you know, if you want to really see the DNA of Scientology, I often think, because occasionally I get caught in this mindset of like, you know, what is so, what is, it's just another religion.
01:03:14.000There's no better or worse than other religions, really.
01:03:17.000And then some, you know, you know, sometimes you can slightly lose, you go native slightly, or you're on their websites and you're thinking like, some of this makes sense.
01:03:25.000But If you look at how they attack their enemies, they're so unlike other religions, certainly unlike Christianity for the most part.
01:03:35.000So official Scientology's pronouncements when they attack ex-members and journalists are so tabloid and childish and so malicious and nasty...
01:03:45.000You really see into something deep about their mindset.
01:03:49.000Because their view, as you mentioned, is that if you're a suppressive person, i.e.
01:03:53.000someone who's attempting to hold Scientology back, then you are fair game.
01:03:59.000They could do almost anything to try and put you out of business.
01:04:03.000Do 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?
01:04:41.000Well, not constantly, but you would spend a few days kind of Hours would go by, and at the end of it you emerge like, have I learned anything?
01:04:50.000All I know now is these absurd terms that are no use to anyone, like n-theta.
01:04:57.000But in-turbulated, theta energy is, you know, thetans are spirits, theta is positive spiritual energy, but in-turbulated is bad.
01:05:04.000So it's basically, n-theta is kind of bad for your energy, I think.
01:05:08.000So it's n-theta for you to be in Scientology.
01:05:11.000And it could be exposed to anything negative, anything critical of Scientology.
01:05:16.000So they're encouraged to be off the internet and to be off.
01:05:21.000Don't consume anything you think might be critical.
01:05:24.000They're encouraged to be off the internet.
01:06:44.000One thing L. Ron Hubbard got right was the idea that if you get celebrities in, then you've got a kind of golden ticket to reaching the masses.
01:08:04.000And when I was doing the film, I went in, not exactly undercover, but I went in...
01:08:09.000Not for a sequence in the film, just to sort of keep myself grounded, to keep it all real.
01:08:13.000You know, 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 a us-and-them mentality of your own.
01:08:32.000So I wanted to make them real, and I went along to Scientology Org and just sort of chatted to some people and said, you know, I make documentaries, I'm interested in this subject, you know, what's it all about?
01:08:44.000And 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.
01:10:41.000I mean, when they're auditing, they're supposed to be somewhat blank.
01:10:45.000A big thing in Scientology is sort of being comfortable in yourself and not, like, learning how to stare at someone.
01:10:52.000There'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.
01:11:03.000To all because it's all about I'm unembarrassable.
01:11:06.000I'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, right?
01:11:16.000It's one of the paradoxes of it being controlling religious movement because so much of it is about controlling yourself.
01:11:44.000His thing is, he says one of the best things he learned in Scientology was how to confront and shatter suppression, right?
01:11:52.000So any time 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.
01:12:23.000I mean, as much as I say 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 authority on mental illness and That's dangerous.
01:12:37.000And 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.
01:12:53.000That was an issue that L. Ron Hubbard had.
01:12:56.000And if you go down Sunset, Yeah, I think it's Sunset.
01:13:19.000I think prescription drugs are over-prescribed.
01:13:23.000I think there's a real argument that there's a lot of people that are on antidepressants that shouldn't be on antidepressants.
01:13:29.000I think there's a lot of natural alternatives, one of them being exercise, one of them being enhancing your standing in life in terms of what you do for a living or where you live or the people that you hang out with.
01:13:41.000All those things can affect the way you feel and that can be interpreted as depression.
01:13:46.000There's a lot of I mean, there's a reason if your life is shit, if all the aspects of your life is shit and you feel bad, the solution's not a pill, right?
01:13:54.000So I think in some ways they've got something to say that makes some sort of sense.
01:14:00.000But in a weird way, though, that's the dangerous part because it's where Scientology intersects with a totally valid...
01:14:09.000The trouble is, if you have someone who's heavily psychotic, and it's not a medication-induced psychosis, you know, psychosis is a real medical phenomenon, and Scientology's not going to take them on.
01:14:22.000If 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.
01:15:20.000But if you had gone on some sort of medication...
01:15:23.000If I'd 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, well, good luck with that and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
01:15:53.000We don't go into this in the documentary, but you can read up on the internet about cases where there's been people who had mental illness either within Scientology.
01:16:06.000I mean, perhaps the most famous scandal within Scientology...
01:16:11.000Or the most notorious to Scientology watchers was the case of Lisa McPherson.
01:16:28.000And she had a psychotic episode in Florida.
01:16:33.000And instead of being taken 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.
01:17:56.000I only did one session, and that was with...
01:18:00.000You know, the main guy in the film is a guy called Marty Rathbun, and he was...
01:18:06.000There's a sense in which the film is as much about him as it is about Scientology.
01:18:10.000He was a Mr. Fix-It within Scientology.
01:18:13.000He was the number two to David Miscavige.
01:18:14.000David Miscavige is the guy who took over in 1986 or thereabouts from L. Ron Hubbard and has been running it ever since.
01:18:21.000He's an unaccountable leader who is, in essence, the Pope of Scientology.
01:18:27.000And there are many allegations of him being physically abusive towards his followers.
01:18:31.000Marty Rathbun was his right-hand man for many years.
01:18:34.000Marty Rathbun left in 2004 or thereabouts.
01:18:37.000So he's sort of our deep throat in the film.
01:18:40.000But 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.
01:18:53.000Destruction of documents and also a certain amount of physical violence himself, which he, you know, has apologized for.
01:19:01.000And 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.
01:19:12.000You know, by, almost by definition, you can't be in something that long and that You know, Leah Remini was a celebrity parishioner, right?
01:19:20.000She was going around the celebrity center, she was doing Scientology, but she was not in the Sea Org.
01:19:25.000The Sea Org is this clergy, it's the inner saint.
01:19:27.000It'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.
01:19:36.000You can be a Scientologist in that way, right?
01:21:24.000But I think a lot of that is to do with, someone explain this to me, one of the rules about a non-profit or about being a religion, having their religious status, is they cannot hoard their income.
01:21:36.000Like money that comes in has to be spent, otherwise they're in violation of their charitable status.
01:21:43.000So, someone just told me this the other day.
01:21:45.000So, in other words, they have to kind of keep buying buildings because there needs to be a cash outflow.
01:23:34.000No, because actually, 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...
01:23:47.000Like, he's annoyed with his girlfriend.
01:24:00.000By the way, she was considered an SP because her father was a psychiatrist, I believe.
01:24:07.000Anyway, 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 I think it was...
01:24:20.000Anyway, his girlfriend at the time was having trouble understanding what Miscavige was saying, because he speaks quite fast.
01:26:34.000Allegedly, they have a bad view of him.
01:26:37.000A lot of what I'm saying is based on, 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.
01:26:50.000And he was the biggest thing, I would say, in terms of exposing Scientology for what it is, probably in the history of Scientology.
01:27:00.000John Travolta's wife was on Fear Factor, and I got to meet John Travolta because his wife was in the finals.
01:27:23.000And he would go out there, and he would perform these stunts just high as a kite.
01:27:28.000I mean just gone because 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 and 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 in other universes.
01:28:44.000There's something about George Carlin.
01:28:46.000I'm sure she is nice, and I'm sure you can be.
01:28:49.000I mean, not to sound like a broken record.
01:28:50.000Well, again, my neighbor, my former neighbor many years ago, was a very nice guy.
01:28:55.000And 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.
01:29:11.000Yes, 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.
01:29:26.000So this is who I am, this is what I do.
01:29:28.000And she was on the phone and she said, oh yeah, I got the DVDs and I was watching them.
01:29:36.000And she started laughing in the act of talking about...
01:31:00.000What if everybody started doing whatever this is, this new thing, which eliminated, became prevalent throughout the world, eliminate, like, vaccinations, right?
01:31:23.000But for the most part, most people are vaccinated to prevent against diseases.
01:31:28.000If 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 and who knows.
01:31:49.000Yes, I think it was, yeah, it's like you said, the yin and the yang.
01:31:53.000I think Scientology aspires to be that, you know, and I think the danger of it is it would bear certain similarities to a sort of almost fascist vision, I think.
01:32:06.000I mean, I think that there is an overlap there, you know, the cult of health.
01:32:11.000The cult of glowing, smiling, beacons of health and humanity marching up and down.
01:32:17.000And actually, it's our ability to rub along with difficult characters and to sort of embrace the ugly side.
01:32:27.000I can't define exactly what it is, but it feels like that's an important dimension of life.
01:32:32.000Well, 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.
01:32:42.000And I learn a lot from other people's negative behavior how to never be like that myself without having to make those same mistakes.
01:32:49.000Also learn from my own mistakes, I'm sure.
01:32:52.000But 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.
01:33:09.000I 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.
01:33:20.000Hunter Thompson or William Burroughs or, you know, Philip Roth, if you like, you know, talking about the absolute, the most kind of contemptible and disgusting impulses we feel.
01:34:00.000Whereas, actually, Christianity, I'm not a Christian, but it sort of embraces the fact that it's just your human side.
01:34:06.000Your human side is earthly and twisted and sexual, and actually you need to embrace some sort of higher being.
01:34:14.000Well, 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,
01:34:30.000and claw of the wild, and the recognition that somehow or another we've emerged from that and that we aspire to do better.
01:34:36.000And 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,
01:34:51.000and you're now a wiser, more educated person, and you seek to continue to advance and continue to do better.
01:34:57.000So it's sort of like it's all analogous.
01:35:02.000Now, 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, you know, when we talk about him self-diagnosing and self-treating,
01:35:19.000It'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?
01:35:32.000Sexually loose, that they always like to point the finger at other girls that are sexually loose.
01:35:38.000It's like one of the first indications that a girl might be a slut is that she likes to point at other girls, and that's a real common thing.
01:35:46.000And I think that the things that annoy you the most about yourself, you tend to highlight those aspects when you discuss human beings or other people that irritate you.
01:36:03.000They say, yes, my dad likes to quote, there's a Bulgarian philosopher and writer called Elias Kaneti who's had an aphorism that the thieves' hell is the fear of thieves.
01:36:15.000So that we sort of project our qualities to others and it fills us with anxiety that they may be that.
01:36:22.000To go to the other point, though, it would be wonderful to feel that we advance through life acquiring wisdom.
01:36:27.000I don't know that it's necessarily the case.
01:36:30.000And what strikes me about Hubbard is...
01:36:34.000You know, the merit that you see in Scientology, the bits that feel workable and make sense, seem to have come out fairly early on.
01:36:41.000And then later on, the stuff he was coming out with was more and more outlandish.
01:36:45.000Whatever therapies he was evolving, when it went to the OT levels, it was really getting properly out there.
01:37:21.000And so he had a sort of ocean-going religion where they were...
01:37:26.000Kind of 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, like find a kind of new frontier that he could more or less make for his own kind of claim for Scientology.
01:37:40.000But 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...
01:37:51.000They felt that Scientology had made them psychotic or they just thought it was fraudulent or that they wanted their money back.
01:37:57.000He had to disappear and was living in seclusion, more or less hiding out while money was kind of shuttled back and forth to him.
01:38:06.000And that's why I said at the beginning that the problem with Scientology is an overabundance of material.
01:39:36.000I think chat shows, as you put them, they're pretty much bullshit anyway.
01:39:40.000Because 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.
01:40:41.000One of the things I learned was members of the Sea Org who have taken this vow of poverty live 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.
01:40:54.000So you know it better have a positive, uplifting message.
01:43:18.000You 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.
01:43:33.000Because he's a leading man, and he's a leading man that has love affairs in these movies with women.
01:43:41.000It'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.
01:43:53.000Like, 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, Like, men get excited.
01:44:05.000But 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.
01:44:15.000They're like, are you sure you're not gay?
01:44:16.000Like, I don't even know how I feel about this.
01:44:19.000We don't accept a gay person, yet at least, playing a straight man who's a leading man in a movie.
01:44:26.000I don't think there's anyone who's been able to pull that off.
01:44:59.000And there's sort of a tacit blackmail going on.
01:45:04.000So whether that's really happening now, I don't know.
01:45:08.000That may have happened in the past, allegedly.
01:45:11.000Well, there's an issue with them going after detractors and people that leave because it doesn't really exist in other organizations or other religions.
01:45:18.000A perfect example of another religion that was most obviously created by a con man is Mormonism.
01:45:25.000Joseph Smith was 14 years old when he claimed to find golden tablets that were the lost work of Jesus and that only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone.
01:45:34.000It was a story that was created in 1820. It's such a ludicrous story that, you know, a lot of people, when they find out about it, they go, wait, wait, wait, hold on.
01:45:43.000Like, people, like, 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?
01:45:50.000And by the way, it's that, not Scientology, that Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in America.
01:46:02.000I mean, whatever you sit 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?
01:46:12.000I am not glad he's not running for president right now.
01:46:17.000And 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.
01:47:02.000So, you know, the people out there, I think blue-collar kind of white Americans on the front porch see Trump and they think, yeah, that guy's my guy.
01:47:17.000I 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...
01:47:31.000Robo candidates almost literally in the case of Rubio was kind of malfunctioning with his his kind of soundbite algorithm was glitching so he's coming out with the same soundbite within 10 seconds But all these robo-candidates, and then someone who seemed like a kind of visceral,
01:47:47.000flesh-and-blood human on stage, and who, moreover, when he said stupid, crazy stuff, did not then hit the trail to apologize.
01:47:55.000He would just keep saying weird things.
01:47:58.000And I think people felt like, you know what, he's showing the media for the shell game that it is.
01:49:44.000And also, he doesn't necessarily represent...
01:49:47.000For a lot of people, one of the things that Romney represents that's problematic for people is that not only is his father a Mormon, but he's from one of the most bizarre sects of Mormons, where they left the United States so that they could have multiple wives.
01:50:44.000So they didn't want to give up the polygamy aspect of the religion.
01:50:47.000So they just went south to Mexico, which was not that much different than the United States back then.
01:50:52.000Then, when cars were invented and the United States really exploded and became much more prosperous than Mexico, then ultimately it got even crazier when they got involved in the drug war.
01:51:04.000The drug war, where there was drug cartel people were Kidnapping people in the Romney family and other Mormons that are living down there.
01:51:13.000So they started like being, they had armed guards on sentry 24 hours.
01:51:17.000I mean, it's like a scene from The Walking Dead.
01:51:19.000They're all standing there with high-powered rifles.
01:51:44.000Because I think they thought it would be incredibly damaging to the Republican Party because this guy is the frontrunner for the Republicans.
01:51:50.000And I don't know who the fuck on the Democratic side agreed to not really get into this.
01:51:55.000But that means they're not just a part of a cult.
01:51:57.000They're a part of a gun-toting, polygamous cult that has an armed compound in Mexico.
01:52:45.000Like my friend Brian was born in the Philippines, but he's American because he was born on a military base.
01:52:49.000No, you can be American, but he was going to be, I mean, but can he be president and not born in the U.S.? 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.
01:54:57.000I had a bit about this in like 2005. I had a bit about George Bush and 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.
01:55:12.000I think he was a test to find out how dumb people are.
01:55:23.000And there was only one way to find out.
01:55:26.000You put a dumb guy in office, and you see how people react.
01:55:30.000And that 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.
01:55:40.000And they just decided to get some fucking pro wrestling type president.
01:55:47.000Some 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.
01:58:11.000It is a corrupt, completely corrupt institution.
01:58:15.000And what he's saying about crooked Hillary, I agree.
01:58:18.000Look, 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.
01:58:34.000So 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, and he tones everything down at this result.
01:59:37.000I agree with what you said about it took an orange-haired casino magnate with pathological lying issues to point out the truth about the brokenness of the American.
01:59:54.000We'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.
02:00:19.000You'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.
02:00:33.000And if that's the case, we need to fix that instead of just continuing business as usual.
02:00:38.000We need to figure out how to expand our educational system or enlighten some of these people, maybe drop mushrooms everywhere or something.
02:00:45.000There's got to be a better way than just continuing business as usual when that business has been shown, at least in Hillary Clinton's case, to be completely corrupt.
02:01:17.000He's like, is Obama a guy who is lying all along or When he was 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 sort of reneged on?
02:01:31.000Or 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,
02:01:51.000and 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.
02:01:58.000But 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.
02:02:14.000And the speeches that he gives, 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.
02:02:28.000I think there's something to be said for that.
02:02:31.000And I think that that is what George Bush wasn't.
02:02:33.000And that was what was appealing to me about Obama.
02:02:36.000But, you know, but Eve bullshits too, you know?
02:02:39.000So it's like, at what point in time do you get to speak your mind?
02:02:44.000Do you ever get to say what you really think?
02:02:46.000And if that's what he really thinks, if that's who he really is...
02:02:50.000When 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.
02:03:02.000Like, you've got to kind of play it as much down the middle.
02:03:05.000You 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.
02:03:15.000It's almost like pretending to be someone who you're not to try to pick people up at a bar.
02:03:54.000We need people to specialize in these things.
02:03:57.000And 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 We're good to go.
02:04:25.000To be seen, whether or not it's ultimately disastrous.
02:04:28.000My 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.
02:04:36.000That's one of the things that he had a problem with Cameron over.
02:04:53.000Like, I feel as though it's easy to go along with the groupthink, but I was in favor of staying in Europe.
02:05:03.000Well, when I'm talking about representative government, what I'm talking about is like this electoral college set up and the one person, one vote set up and the idea that 300 plus million people are going to be represented by just a handful of people that are representing states.
02:05:20.000Yeah, 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, I mean, it's just fascinating how he managed to overturn the apple cart.
02:05:33.000I 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 the delegates and whatnot.
02:05:45.000Well, they came up with it back when there was no communication.
02:05:48.000They 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.
02:05:57.000They 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.
02:06:09.000That's one of the things that people don't even realize.
02:06:11.000In representative government, when you have this one person who represents a group of the people, if the group of the people decides to vote for Hillary Clinton, that one person doesn't have to agree with that.
02:06:23.000And it's designed for back when people were illiterate.
02:06:26.000And 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.
02:06:35.000And they're trying to manage this and trying to figure out how to take the founding fathers' 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.
02:06:56.000I mean instantaneously someone can send a Facebook message, they can send an email, they can tweet.
02:07:01.000You can find out what people's opinions are.
02:07:03.000But then it becomes whether or not these people are qualified to decide which direction the country goes.
02:07:10.000Well 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.
02:07:22.000Because There's a lot of stuff that gets made when it comes to disastrous implications for the environment.
02:07:28.000I 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.
02:07:53.000No person in America that was just a regular citizen had any say in these major decisions.
02:07:59.000Like, 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.
02:08:12.000I have to say, as someone who resides in the UK and who's 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.
02:08:26.000And for all its flaws, in Britain, there's a cap on how much they can spend on their campaigns.
02:08:31.000So they have like one or two TV ads each.
02:09:14.000I mean, it just goes across this just wide range of different philosophies on how to govern and people get a better sense of, you know, what they would like or what they agree with most.
02:09:27.000Because this hard line right and hard line left and this rigid ideology that you have to subscribe to on both sides.
02:09:34.000If you're on the right, you don't support gay marriage, you're anti-abortion, you're this, you're that, you want gun rights, you want this, you know, fuck immigration.
02:09:43.000You know, there's all this stuff that you have to kind of agree to if you agree to the right.
02:09:47.000And then on the left, you have to agree to a lot of things that people, you know, not necessarily agree as well.
02:09:54.000So it's so complicated to have a two-party system and try to pretend that there is a real democracy.
02:10:24.000And in that time, crazy shit can come out.
02:10:26.000And 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,
02:10:46.000Well, 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.
02:11:26.000I mean, Dr. Drew did some big thing the other day talking about her health because, you know, she had fallen down in 2012, and apparently, like, Mm-hmm.
02:11:49.000And 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.
02:12:08.000It 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.
02:12:21.000As you say, impulsivity, sometimes a lack of empathy, erratic behavior, and it was about people, you know, inevitably it's about the relationships that they're in and the way in which people have to adapt around to the new needs.
02:12:37.000And, you know, yeah, it's unbelievable stuff.
02:12:41.000I mean, you know better than anyone from your sports kind of interest that post-boxing, post-NFL, post-hockey, if you're a fighter in hockey, and pro-wrestling too.
02:12:53.000There's been several terrific documentaries, one by Steve James called Head Games.
02:13:16.000I've seen it firsthand from friends who became erratic and became really unstable after getting beat a few times in mixed martial arts fights.
02:13:25.000I've seen it from boxers, people that I knew when I was young, and then I met them 10-15 years later, and their life was a mess.
02:13:44.000It's connected with this very, very soft connective tissue that keeps it in place inside the head.
02:13:50.000It's just not meant to be hit that much.
02:13:53.000You 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.
02:14:08.000One 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.
02:14:17.000You know, the first one's not good, but the second one is cataclysmic.
02:14:20.000Yes, 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.
02:16:05.000And I think human beings in all areas of life other than our political system, we have advanced radically since the 1700s.
02:16:13.000If 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.
02:16:30.000But we still have this goofy system that was created back when people rode horses, wrote with feathers, and when you wanted to picture something, you had to draw it.
02:16:41.000But that's great because that's a great metaphor for the human brain in a way and kind of a big thought to carry as we sort of draw to the close of our interview.
02:16:50.000But, you know, because the brain, you know, our brains are hinged around the innermost parts of our brain, the amygdala, which is essentially reptilian in origin, you know.
02:17:01.000And so many of our deepest impulses, the sort of fear response and so forth, are programmed from a kind of evolutionary heritage.
02:17:10.000You know we've got neuro circuits that go back thousands if not millions of years and you know 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 you know 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 You could deduce maybe as many examples that
02:17:40.000suggest that all it's done is allowed us to do everything, whether for good or ill, more efficiently and more effectively.
02:18:05.000Sometimes I read things that persuade me otherwise.
02:18:07.000I think that we're more advanced and more safe now than ever before.
02:18:11.000I think if you look back on 2,000 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.
02:18:19.000Certainly here in America or in the West, but, you know, in a globe with six, what is it, six billion?
02:18:26.000If you were dropped at random on Earth, Where would you where I mean chances are you wouldn't be Joe Rogan you would probably be what I don't what would you probably be?
02:18:36.000Well, there's certainly horrible places working, you know making Apple phones in a factory you could be or you could be in China living in some skyrise being some multi billionaire Cell phone magnate.
02:18:51.000You know, I mean, there's certainly some wonderful spots in the world outside of America.
02:18:55.000There's certainly some great places to live.
02:18:57.000Even 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.
02:19:05.000The Internet is pretty much worldwide.
02:19:07.000Cell 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 gonna have more data to choose from.
02:19:17.000They're gonna have more cherry-picking that they can do.
02:19:20.000They 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, don't watch any videos, and I think 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.
02:19:40.000You're not like mocking them and you don't want to shit on them.
02:19:42.000What 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.
02:19:49.000One 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?
02:19:58.000Because 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 also into you.
02:20:08.000Like, when you fight monsters, don't become a monster.
02:20:11.000And 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.
02:20:20.000And 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.
02:21:27.000Because I think the ability to communicate and open debate is why we've advanced to the point we're at in the first place.
02:21:34.000The suppressing of that is almost always someone who has a bad idea that they're trying to shelter.
02:21:39.000So 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.
02:22:16.000What short-circuits their beliefs, what allows them to see something bigger than what they're in is when you treat them with kindness.
02:22:24.000And 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,