WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.779 So we are looking at a stack of documents today 00:00:02.779 --> 00:00:08.140 that they really outline one of the most improbable 00:00:08.140 --> 00:00:11.650 just chaotic, and frankly cinematic lives of 00:00:11.650 --> 00:00:13.890 the 20th century. Oh, absolutely. I mean, honestly, 00:00:14.029 --> 00:00:16.730 if you submitted the true biography of L. Ron 00:00:16.730 --> 00:00:19.489 Hubbard as a screenplay to a Hollywood studio, 00:00:19.649 --> 00:00:22.649 say, in the 1950s, it would have been rejected. 00:00:22.890 --> 00:00:24.329 It would have been tossed right in the trash 00:00:24.329 --> 00:00:26.929 for being too unrealistic. Just too much happens. 00:00:27.010 --> 00:00:29.390 You can't have a protagonist who is a pulp fiction 00:00:29.390 --> 00:00:31.890 writer, a naval commander, a black magician, 00:00:32.250 --> 00:00:36.009 an explorer, and the founder of a global religion. 00:00:36.289 --> 00:00:38.630 It breaks all rules. It completely defies the... 00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:40.439 The laws of narrative structure. And yet here 00:00:40.439 --> 00:00:43.140 we are. We're looking at the life of L. Ron Hubbard. 00:00:43.359 --> 00:00:45.780 And I think for most people, he exists as this 00:00:45.780 --> 00:00:49.159 this kind of caricature. He's the Zinu guy or, 00:00:49.179 --> 00:00:50.359 you know, the guy who jumped on the cat. Wait, 00:00:50.420 --> 00:00:52.100 no, that was his follower. Right. That was Tom 00:00:52.100 --> 00:00:54.500 Cruise. But Hubbard himself is this looming shadow. 00:00:54.939 --> 00:00:57.679 He's a figure of just immense contradictions, 00:00:57.679 --> 00:00:59.679 depending on which version of history you read. 00:00:59.759 --> 00:01:02.060 He's either the source. And that's with a capital 00:01:02.060 --> 00:01:04.260 S of all wisdom, a man who cracked the code of 00:01:04.260 --> 00:01:08.680 the human mind or or. Or he is perhaps the greatest 00:01:08.680 --> 00:01:11.879 con artist to ever breathe air. But the mission 00:01:11.879 --> 00:01:14.439 today isn't to debate the theology of Scientology. 00:01:14.599 --> 00:01:17.560 We're not here to decide if Zeno is real. We're 00:01:17.560 --> 00:01:20.239 here to look at the man. The documented man. 00:01:20.379 --> 00:01:23.219 We've got military records, court transcripts, 00:01:23.219 --> 00:01:25.980 his own private journals, and the letters he 00:01:25.980 --> 00:01:27.980 wrote when he thought no one was looking. Exactly. 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:30.560 We're trying to separate the hagiography, which 00:01:30.560 --> 00:01:33.260 is that polished, you know, that saint -like 00:01:33.260 --> 00:01:36.260 biography the church presents from the messy 00:01:36.260 --> 00:01:38.640 reality. Yeah. But I think the real hook here, 00:01:38.719 --> 00:01:40.239 the thing I really want to explore with you, 00:01:40.340 --> 00:01:43.159 is the central tension of his psychology. Which 00:01:43.159 --> 00:01:46.060 is what? How does a man who spent the 1930s writing 00:01:46.060 --> 00:01:49.430 stories about Superman and... Galactic Federations 00:01:49.430 --> 00:01:52.409 and just impossible feats of survival. How does 00:01:52.409 --> 00:01:54.950 he manage to pull those fictions off the page 00:01:54.950 --> 00:01:57.689 and turn them into a reality that millions of 00:01:57.689 --> 00:01:59.829 people bought into? That's the key right there. 00:01:59.950 --> 00:02:02.430 He didn't just write science fiction. He engineered 00:02:02.430 --> 00:02:04.810 a way to live inside a science fiction novel. 00:02:05.010 --> 00:02:07.209 Precisely. And he dragged the rest of us, or 00:02:07.209 --> 00:02:09.710 at least his followers, into the plot with him. 00:02:09.810 --> 00:02:12.310 So let's start where every good superhero origin 00:02:12.310 --> 00:02:16.250 story starts. The early years. And if you look 00:02:16.250 --> 00:02:18.750 at the official church materials, Hubbard was 00:02:18.750 --> 00:02:21.370 basically Indiana Jones from the moment he could 00:02:21.370 --> 00:02:23.909 walk. The myth -making started incredibly early. 00:02:24.090 --> 00:02:26.069 I mean, right from the beginning. Hubbard claimed 00:02:26.069 --> 00:02:29.250 that his grandfather, a man named Lafayette Waterbury, 00:02:29.490 --> 00:02:32.090 was a wealthy cattle baron in the American West. 00:02:32.370 --> 00:02:34.650 A cattle baron? Yeah. He painted this picture 00:02:34.650 --> 00:02:37.030 of a frontier childhood breaking horses, riding 00:02:37.030 --> 00:02:39.729 the range, owning these massive tracts of land. 00:02:39.909 --> 00:02:42.569 A real John Wayne type of upbringing. And the 00:02:42.569 --> 00:02:45.389 reality? The reality was a bit more mundane. 00:02:45.509 --> 00:02:48.620 His grandfather was a veterinarian. a local small 00:02:48.620 --> 00:02:51.639 town vet. He wasn't poor by any means, but he 00:02:51.639 --> 00:02:53.560 certainly wasn't a cattle baron. But you see 00:02:53.560 --> 00:02:55.080 what he's doing there, right? He's tapping into 00:02:55.080 --> 00:02:57.139 the zeitgeist. Oh, for sure. He's borrowing the 00:02:57.139 --> 00:02:59.419 cultural currency at the time. In the early 20th 00:02:59.419 --> 00:03:02.639 century, the West was the place of heroes. It 00:03:02.639 --> 00:03:04.840 was the American myth. He wanted to be a cowboy 00:03:04.840 --> 00:03:08.280 king. It's about building a persona. And this 00:03:08.280 --> 00:03:10.780 leads to the Blood Brother claim. This is one 00:03:10.780 --> 00:03:12.780 of those stories that gets repeated so often 00:03:12.780 --> 00:03:15.439 in the lore, it just becomes fact for his followers. 00:03:15.460 --> 00:03:18.419 Right. Hubbard claimed he was made a blood brother 00:03:18.419 --> 00:03:21.219 of the Blackfeet tribe. Which sounds very, you 00:03:21.219 --> 00:03:24.180 know, noble and impressive. It does. He claimed 00:03:24.180 --> 00:03:26.219 he was honored by the tribe, that he was given 00:03:26.219 --> 00:03:28.199 their secret knowledge the whole nine yards. 00:03:28.240 --> 00:03:30.879 It fits that chosen one narrative he was building. 00:03:31.139 --> 00:03:33.879 But when historians looked into it... Well, a 00:03:33.879 --> 00:03:36.099 couple of problems emerged. First of all, the 00:03:36.099 --> 00:03:38.719 Blackfeet tribe didn't practice blood brotherhood 00:03:38.719 --> 00:03:40.659 ceremonies. It just wasn't a thing they did. 00:03:40.860 --> 00:03:44.900 So the ritual he described, it didn't exist in 00:03:44.900 --> 00:03:47.460 their culture. Not in that way, no. And then 00:03:47.460 --> 00:03:49.740 there's the simple matter of geography. Hubbard 00:03:49.740 --> 00:03:51.960 lived over 100 miles away from the reservation. 00:03:52.240 --> 00:03:54.860 So unless he was commuting, you know, three hours 00:03:54.860 --> 00:03:57.879 by horse every day to hang out, it's highly unlikely 00:03:57.879 --> 00:04:01.379 he had any significant deep contact. Why tell 00:04:01.379 --> 00:04:04.120 that specific lie? It seems so easily checkable. 00:04:04.259 --> 00:04:07.780 In the 1950s, maybe not so much. But more importantly, 00:04:07.979 --> 00:04:10.740 it establishes him as having access to ancient 00:04:10.740 --> 00:04:13.490 wisdom. If you want to sell a new religion later, 00:04:13.629 --> 00:04:15.590 you need to show that you are a bridge between 00:04:15.590 --> 00:04:19.470 the ancient world and the modern. I know the 00:04:19.470 --> 00:04:21.949 secrets of the indigenous elders. It's a credential. 00:04:22.269 --> 00:04:24.110 Okay, so he's got the Western hero credential. 00:04:24.509 --> 00:04:26.610 And then he tries to get the Eastern wisdom credential, 00:04:26.790 --> 00:04:29.089 too. He travels to Asia as a teenager. He does, 00:04:29.350 --> 00:04:31.930 yeah. And this part is true. His father was in 00:04:31.930 --> 00:04:34.980 the Navy and was posted to Guam. So young Ron 00:04:34.980 --> 00:04:37.839 hops on a transport ship. He visits Grom. He 00:04:37.839 --> 00:04:39.939 sees some Chinese ports. This actually happened. 00:04:40.160 --> 00:04:42.839 But in his retelling, this isn't a kid tagging 00:04:42.839 --> 00:04:45.199 along with his dad on a work trip. Not at all. 00:04:45.259 --> 00:04:47.319 In his later writings, he describes traveling 00:04:47.319 --> 00:04:50.220 deep into Manchuria, meeting holy men in the 00:04:50.220 --> 00:04:52.720 hills of China, learning the secrets of the mind 00:04:52.720 --> 00:04:55.779 from Buddhist monks. He frames it as his years 00:04:55.779 --> 00:04:59.040 in the wilderness, like Jesus or Buddha. I looked 00:04:59.040 --> 00:05:03.089 at the diaries from this trip. They are... Let's 00:05:03.089 --> 00:05:04.730 just say they're underwhelming. That's putting 00:05:04.730 --> 00:05:07.290 it very politely. They are the diaries of a bored, 00:05:07.410 --> 00:05:09.769 slightly xenophobic American teenager. Yeah, 00:05:09.829 --> 00:05:11.629 that's what I got from it. He complains about 00:05:11.629 --> 00:05:14.449 the heat. He complains about the smells. He complains 00:05:14.449 --> 00:05:17.129 about the locals. There is zero introspection. 00:05:17.629 --> 00:05:21.269 There are no aha moments about the human soul. 00:05:21.850 --> 00:05:25.269 It's just a kid who's bored in Guam. It's amazing 00:05:25.269 --> 00:05:28.149 to see the gap between the primary source, that 00:05:28.149 --> 00:05:30.750 diary, and the biography he wrote for himself 00:05:30.750 --> 00:05:33.629 later. He was rewriting his own history in real 00:05:33.629 --> 00:05:36.529 time. He was editing his life. And that brings 00:05:36.529 --> 00:05:38.509 us to his education. Because if you're going 00:05:38.509 --> 00:05:40.629 to found a science of the mind Dianetics, you 00:05:40.629 --> 00:05:42.790 need scientific authority. You can't just be 00:05:42.790 --> 00:05:44.649 a cowboy mystic. You need to be a scientist. 00:05:44.750 --> 00:05:47.250 And this is a big one. He called himself a nuclear 00:05:47.250 --> 00:05:49.660 physicist. I've seen the interviews where he 00:05:49.660 --> 00:05:52.100 says it plain as day. I am a nuclear physicist. 00:05:52.319 --> 00:05:54.500 He leaned on that heavily. And you have to remember 00:05:54.500 --> 00:05:57.779 the context. This is the atomic age, the 1950s, 00:05:57.779 --> 00:05:59.879 and nuclear physics was the highest form of knowledge. 00:05:59.959 --> 00:06:01.540 If you understood the atom, you were a wizard. 00:06:01.660 --> 00:06:03.500 You were a genius. So what does the university 00:06:03.500 --> 00:06:06.100 transcript say? Well, he enrolled at George Washington 00:06:06.100 --> 00:06:08.920 University in 1930. He was studying civil engineering. 00:06:09.100 --> 00:06:11.459 And he did take a class on atomic and molecular 00:06:11.459 --> 00:06:13.579 physics. It was an intro course. And how did 00:06:13.579 --> 00:06:16.160 he do in that class? He failed it. He failed 00:06:16.160 --> 00:06:18.720 the class. He got an F. And it wasn't just that 00:06:18.720 --> 00:06:21.240 class. His grades were poor across the board. 00:06:21.439 --> 00:06:23.500 He dropped out in his second year after being 00:06:23.500 --> 00:06:26.160 placed on academic probation. He never graduated. 00:06:26.459 --> 00:06:28.839 He has no degree in physics, no degree in engineering, 00:06:29.040 --> 00:06:31.860 nothing. But he took the vocabulary from that 00:06:31.860 --> 00:06:34.949 one class. That's the real insight here. He didn't 00:06:34.949 --> 00:06:36.730 learn the physics, but he learned the language. 00:06:36.810 --> 00:06:39.750 He learned words like fission, reaction, energy, 00:06:40.029 --> 00:06:42.790 matter. And he realized that if you use those 00:06:42.790 --> 00:06:45.470 words to describe human emotions, you sound like 00:06:45.470 --> 00:06:47.410 a genius to people who don't know any better. 00:06:47.569 --> 00:06:50.069 So he's a college dropout. He's back in the world. 00:06:50.129 --> 00:06:53.589 It's the 1930s, the Great Depression. And he 00:06:53.589 --> 00:06:56.550 finds his true calling. The one thing he was 00:06:56.550 --> 00:06:59.329 actually legitimately good at. Pulp fiction. 00:06:59.430 --> 00:07:01.490 We have to pause here because I don't think people 00:07:01.490 --> 00:07:04.569 realize the sheer volume of what this man wrote. 00:07:04.689 --> 00:07:07.259 He wasn't just a writer. He was a factory. He 00:07:07.259 --> 00:07:09.319 was a machine. You have to understand the pulp 00:07:09.319 --> 00:07:11.120 market back then. These were cheap magazines 00:07:11.120 --> 00:07:13.899 printed on rough paper argosy. Astounding science 00:07:13.899 --> 00:07:16.860 fiction. They paid a penny a word. So if you 00:07:16.860 --> 00:07:18.459 wanted to eat, you didn't write good sentences. 00:07:18.560 --> 00:07:21.019 You wrote many sentences. I read somewhere that 00:07:21.019 --> 00:07:23.839 he was clocking 100 ,000 words a month at his 00:07:23.839 --> 00:07:27.279 peak. Oh, easily. There are stories that he used 00:07:27.279 --> 00:07:29.560 a typewriter with a continuous roll of paper 00:07:29.560 --> 00:07:31.660 so he wouldn't have to stop to change sheets. 00:07:31.860 --> 00:07:34.360 He would just type and type. He wrote westerns 00:07:34.360 --> 00:07:36.560 under one name, detective stories under another, 00:07:36.779 --> 00:07:39.100 sci -fi under a third. What does that do to a 00:07:39.100 --> 00:07:42.399 person's brain to spend 12 hours a day every 00:07:42.399 --> 00:07:45.980 single day just inventing imaginary worlds from 00:07:45.980 --> 00:07:48.360 scratch? I think this is crucial for understanding 00:07:48.360 --> 00:07:51.750 Scientology. When you write that much, that fast, 00:07:51.930 --> 00:07:55.110 you stop fact -checking. You rely on flow. You 00:07:55.110 --> 00:07:57.149 learn that if you say something with enough confidence 00:07:57.149 --> 00:07:59.649 and enough narrative drive, the reader will just 00:07:59.649 --> 00:08:02.189 go along with it. He was training his brain to 00:08:02.189 --> 00:08:04.889 believe that creation is truth. If I write it, 00:08:04.949 --> 00:08:07.370 it becomes real. And there's a specific incident 00:08:07.370 --> 00:08:10.269 in 1938, the Excalibur incident, that feels like 00:08:10.269 --> 00:08:12.529 the prequel to everything that comes later. Yes. 00:08:12.689 --> 00:08:15.110 This is the moment the prophet is born. And it 00:08:15.110 --> 00:08:17.389 starts, of all places, at the dentist. The dentist. 00:08:18.620 --> 00:08:21.420 He's under nitrous oxide laughing gas for a procedure. 00:08:21.920 --> 00:08:25.060 And he has a hallucination, a near -death experience. 00:08:25.220 --> 00:08:28.040 He claims he died, went to the other side, and 00:08:28.040 --> 00:08:30.519 was given the secrets of the universe. In a dental 00:08:30.519 --> 00:08:33.440 chair. In a dental chair. And when he wakes up, 00:08:33.440 --> 00:08:35.740 he rushes home and writes this manuscript called 00:08:35.740 --> 00:08:38.480 Excalibur. He was absolutely manic about it. 00:08:38.519 --> 00:08:40.419 He wrote a letter to his wife saying he had... 00:08:40.700 --> 00:08:43.220 High hopes of smashing my name into history so 00:08:43.220 --> 00:08:45.360 violently that it will take a legendary form. 00:08:45.500 --> 00:08:48.220 Smashing my name into history. That's not the 00:08:48.220 --> 00:08:50.120 goal of a researcher who wants to help people. 00:08:50.179 --> 00:08:52.039 That is the goal of a man who wants to be immortal. 00:08:52.320 --> 00:08:56.519 Exactly. It's pure, unadulterated ego. He tried 00:08:56.519 --> 00:08:58.279 to get Excalibur published, but the publishers 00:08:58.279 --> 00:09:00.639 all rejected it. They said it was incoherent, 00:09:00.639 --> 00:09:03.659 unreadable. But the core idea in that book, that 00:09:03.659 --> 00:09:06.379 the primary drive of all life is simply to survive. 00:09:07.080 --> 00:09:09.299 That became the foundation of Dianetics a decade 00:09:09.299 --> 00:09:11.860 later. He had to shelve the idea, but he never 00:09:11.860 --> 00:09:14.419 forgot it. So then the war comes, World War II. 00:09:14.539 --> 00:09:17.139 And if the nuclear physicist's claim was an exaggeration, 00:09:17.200 --> 00:09:19.419 his military record is. Well, it's a tragedy 00:09:19.419 --> 00:09:22.039 of errors. It is a dark comedy. It really is. 00:09:22.120 --> 00:09:25.480 He joins the Naval Reserve in 1941. And to his 00:09:25.480 --> 00:09:28.509 credit, he manages to get a command. He captains 00:09:28.509 --> 00:09:31.870 a patrol boat, the YP -422, and later a subchaser, 00:09:32.009 --> 00:09:35.370 the USS PC -815. Now, in the Scientology version 00:09:35.370 --> 00:09:37.470 of this movie, he's a war hero. He's hunting 00:09:37.470 --> 00:09:40.370 subs, taking fire, leading men into battle. Right. 00:09:40.470 --> 00:09:42.149 So let's look at the Battle of the Submarine. 00:09:42.149 --> 00:09:45.350 It's May of 1943. He's off the coast of Oregon. 00:09:45.750 --> 00:09:49.350 And Hubbard claims his sonar picks up a Japanese 00:09:49.350 --> 00:09:51.409 submarine. Which would have been a huge deal 00:09:51.409 --> 00:09:53.549 at that time. Massive. A Japanese sub off the 00:09:53.549 --> 00:09:55.610 U .S. West Coast. He goes to general quarters 00:09:55.610 --> 00:09:58.789 for 68 hours. That's nearly three full days. 00:09:59.190 --> 00:10:01.889 He is waging war. He's dropping depth charges. 00:10:02.250 --> 00:10:04.649 He's maneuvering the ship. He's radioing for 00:10:04.649 --> 00:10:06.889 backup. He claims he sees oil slicks, debris. 00:10:07.210 --> 00:10:09.669 He claims he sank the sub. What about the crew? 00:10:09.789 --> 00:10:11.549 Were they seeing all this, too? This is the power 00:10:11.549 --> 00:10:13.490 of suggestion, which Hubbard was an absolute 00:10:13.490 --> 00:10:15.889 master of. If the captain is on the bridge screaming, 00:10:16.049 --> 00:10:19.129 submarine, submarine, the terrified 19 -year 00:10:19.129 --> 00:10:20.889 -old on the sonar starts seeing blips everywhere. 00:10:21.049 --> 00:10:23.299 It becomes a. collective delusion. And what did 00:10:23.299 --> 00:10:26.139 the Navy's post -action analysis find? Brutal. 00:10:26.419 --> 00:10:29.299 Rear Admiral Brace did analyze the sonar logs, 00:10:29.539 --> 00:10:32.299 the ocean floor charts, everything. And the conclusion 00:10:32.299 --> 00:10:36.320 was there was no sub. Hubbard had spent three 00:10:36.320 --> 00:10:39.139 days bombing a known magnetic deposit on the 00:10:39.139 --> 00:10:41.559 ocean floor. He fought a rock. He fought a rock. 00:10:41.639 --> 00:10:44.100 And the rock won. Essentially, yes. He depleted 00:10:44.100 --> 00:10:46.200 all his ammunition fighting a magnetic anomaly. 00:10:46.889 --> 00:10:49.289 But he refused to accept it. To the end of his 00:10:49.289 --> 00:10:52.029 life, he claimed he sank a sub and the Navy covered 00:10:52.029 --> 00:10:54.690 it all up. And then almost immediately after 00:10:54.690 --> 00:10:57.769 this, this incident, he heads south and decides 00:10:57.769 --> 00:11:00.090 to do some unsanctioned target practice. Right. 00:11:00.190 --> 00:11:02.809 It gets worse. He's off the coast of Baja, California. 00:11:03.360 --> 00:11:06.120 He orders his men to test the ship's guns. So 00:11:06.120 --> 00:11:08.440 they start shelling an island. The Coronado Islands. 00:11:08.679 --> 00:11:10.639 Which happened to belong to Mexico. Yeah. A U 00:11:10.639 --> 00:11:12.940 .S. ally. So he is literally shelling the territory 00:11:12.940 --> 00:11:15.500 of a friendly nation. The Mexican government 00:11:15.500 --> 00:11:18.679 lodges a formal protest. The U .S. Navy is, as 00:11:18.679 --> 00:11:21.240 you can imagine, fortified. And that was it for 00:11:21.240 --> 00:11:24.080 his command. That was the end of it. He was relieved 00:11:24.080 --> 00:11:26.879 of command. The report filed by his superiors 00:11:26.879 --> 00:11:30.019 is just scathing. It says he is lacking in the 00:11:30.019 --> 00:11:31.879 essential qualities of judgment, leadership, 00:11:32.059 --> 00:11:34.960 and cooperation. They basically said, this man 00:11:34.960 --> 00:11:38.059 is a liability. Do not give him a ship. But here 00:11:38.059 --> 00:11:41.120 is where the narrative pivots again. Because 00:11:41.120 --> 00:11:44.580 in the 1950s, when he's building Dianetics, he 00:11:44.580 --> 00:11:47.870 needs a comeback story. He claims he was crippled 00:11:47.870 --> 00:11:50.190 and blinded in the war. He needed a hero's journey. 00:11:50.370 --> 00:11:52.169 You can't be a great healer if you haven't healed 00:11:52.169 --> 00:11:54.090 yourself from something terrible. He claimed 00:11:54.090 --> 00:11:56.250 he was machine gunned in the back. He claimed 00:11:56.250 --> 00:11:58.330 he was the first American casualty of the Pacific 00:11:58.330 --> 00:12:01.090 War. He claimed he was blind. And crucially, 00:12:01.090 --> 00:12:03.269 he claimed he used his own mental techniques, 00:12:03.509 --> 00:12:05.990 the early version of Dianetics, to fix himself. 00:12:06.210 --> 00:12:08.970 Right. That's the sales pitch. I cured my own 00:12:08.970 --> 00:12:11.009 blindness with the power of the mind. What did 00:12:11.009 --> 00:12:13.179 the medical records say? The actual VA file. 00:12:13.299 --> 00:12:15.899 We have his full file. He was never wounded in 00:12:15.899 --> 00:12:18.299 combat. He never received a Purple Heart. He 00:12:18.299 --> 00:12:22.179 was hospitalized for ulcers, malaria, and I'm 00:12:22.179 --> 00:12:24.500 not making this up, active conjunctivitis. Pink 00:12:24.500 --> 00:12:27.299 eye. Pink eye and a sore stomach. So the war 00:12:27.299 --> 00:12:30.460 wounds that crippled and blinded him were ulcers 00:12:30.460 --> 00:12:34.220 and pink eye. Yes. but just think about the audacity 00:12:34.220 --> 00:12:37.259 of that to take pink eye and turn it into blinded 00:12:37.259 --> 00:12:40.419 in combat it requires a level of narcissism that 00:12:40.419 --> 00:12:42.960 is almost impressive he wasn't just lying to 00:12:42.960 --> 00:12:45.279 get a pension he was lying to build a mythology 00:12:45.279 --> 00:12:48.480 and that mythology gets weirdly dark right after 00:12:48.480 --> 00:12:51.840 the war we enter what's known as his occult period 00:12:51.840 --> 00:12:54.600 and this is the part of the story that always 00:12:54.600 --> 00:12:56.980 surprises people They know about the sci -fi 00:12:56.980 --> 00:12:58.940 stuff, but they don't know he was hanging out 00:12:58.940 --> 00:13:01.379 with rocket scientists and doing sex magic. It's 00:13:01.379 --> 00:13:03.659 one of the strangest crossovers in American history. 00:13:04.139 --> 00:13:06.779 Hubbard ends up in Pasadena living in this big 00:13:06.779 --> 00:13:09.519 mansion owned by a man named Jack Parsons. And 00:13:09.519 --> 00:13:11.600 Jack Parsons isn't just some nobody. No, not 00:13:11.600 --> 00:13:13.919 at all. Parsons is a legitimate genius. He's 00:13:13.919 --> 00:13:15.980 one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 00:13:16.379 --> 00:13:19.240 JPL. There is literally a crater on the dark 00:13:19.240 --> 00:13:21.480 side of the moon named after him. But Parsons 00:13:21.480 --> 00:13:24.450 had a secret life. He was a devout follower of 00:13:24.450 --> 00:13:26.889 Aleister Crowley, the infamous British occultist. 00:13:27.009 --> 00:13:29.610 He ran a magical lodge, the Ordo Templi Orientis, 00:13:29.669 --> 00:13:32.090 out of his house. And Hubbard just moves in. 00:13:32.210 --> 00:13:34.509 How did these two even get along? Parsons was 00:13:34.509 --> 00:13:37.789 completely mesmerized. He wrote a letter to Crowley 00:13:37.789 --> 00:13:41.029 saying Hubbard was a gentleman with red hair 00:13:41.029 --> 00:13:43.549 and green eyes who possessed an unbelievably 00:13:43.549 --> 00:13:46.250 high intelligence. He thought Hubbard was a natural 00:13:46.250 --> 00:13:48.450 magician. And they start performing these rituals 00:13:48.450 --> 00:13:51.769 together. the babylon working the babylon working 00:13:51.769 --> 00:13:54.809 it was a series of complex sex magic rituals 00:13:54.809 --> 00:13:57.610 intended to summon a goddess or a moon child 00:13:57.610 --> 00:14:01.710 to earth to manifest her in physical form in 00:14:01.710 --> 00:14:04.210 these rituals parsons would be the magician and 00:14:04.210 --> 00:14:07.029 hubbard acted as the scribe the scribe what does 00:14:07.029 --> 00:14:09.429 that mean he would sit there and allegedly channel 00:14:09.429 --> 00:14:12.230 messages from the astral plane while parsons 00:14:13.299 --> 00:14:16.220 did the more physical work of the ritual. Hubbard 00:14:16.220 --> 00:14:18.500 would go into a trance and dictate poetry and 00:14:18.500 --> 00:14:20.960 commands from some supposed entity. It sounds 00:14:20.960 --> 00:14:22.679 like he was just improvising sci -fi dialogue 00:14:22.679 --> 00:14:24.639 in a dark room with candles. That's probably 00:14:24.639 --> 00:14:26.559 exactly what he was doing. He was role -playing. 00:14:26.639 --> 00:14:29.019 He was using his pulp fiction skills in a new 00:14:29.019 --> 00:14:31.940 context. But Parsons took it deadly seriously. 00:14:32.179 --> 00:14:34.860 And then, in classic Hubbard fashion, the con 00:14:34.860 --> 00:14:37.500 turns personal. He steals a girl. He starts sleeping 00:14:37.500 --> 00:14:39.879 with Parsons' girlfriend, a woman named Sarah 00:14:39.879 --> 00:14:43.690 Northrup. And then he convinces Parsons to hand 00:14:43.690 --> 00:14:46.850 over his entire life savings, about $20 ,000, 00:14:47.110 --> 00:14:50.169 which is a huge amount of money in 1946 to invest 00:14:50.169 --> 00:14:52.529 in a business venture. They called it Allied 00:14:52.529 --> 00:14:55.350 Enterprises. And what was the business? They 00:14:55.350 --> 00:14:57.470 were going to buy yachts on the East Coast and 00:14:57.470 --> 00:14:59.730 sail them to California to sell them for a profit. 00:14:59.929 --> 00:15:03.250 Let me guess. The yachts never arrived. Hubbard 00:15:03.250 --> 00:15:05.789 and Sarah took the money, bought one boat, and 00:15:05.789 --> 00:15:08.480 just tried to sail away together. Parsons literally 00:15:08.480 --> 00:15:11.080 had to perform a banishing ritual and then file 00:15:11.080 --> 00:15:13.539 a lawsuit to chase them down in a storm off the 00:15:13.539 --> 00:15:15.620 coast of Florida to get a fraction of his money 00:15:15.620 --> 00:15:17.940 back. He fleeced a rocket scientist. He did. 00:15:18.259 --> 00:15:20.460 But the most important document from this era 00:15:20.460 --> 00:15:23.320 isn't the lawsuit. It's a private journal known 00:15:23.320 --> 00:15:26.019 as the Affirmations. This is a document that 00:15:26.019 --> 00:15:28.259 Hubbard wrote for himself and the church fought 00:15:28.259 --> 00:15:30.799 for years to keep it hidden. I've read excerpts 00:15:30.799 --> 00:15:33.720 of it. It's a very uncomfortable read. It's a 00:15:33.720 --> 00:15:37.070 window into a fracturing mind. These are self 00:15:37.070 --> 00:15:39.070 -hypnosis scripts he wrote to read to himself. 00:15:39.330 --> 00:15:41.870 He's trying to program his own brain. He writes 00:15:41.870 --> 00:15:43.889 things like, you are gallant and dashing, you 00:15:43.889 --> 00:15:46.629 are the guardian, your eyes are brilliant. But 00:15:46.629 --> 00:15:48.850 he also admits to his own lies in it. That's 00:15:48.850 --> 00:15:51.990 the smoking gun. He writes, your stomach trouble 00:15:51.990 --> 00:15:54.789 you used as an excuse to keep the Navy from punishing 00:15:54.789 --> 00:15:58.049 you. He admits in writing to himself that the 00:15:58.049 --> 00:16:00.250 war wounds were fake. He writes things like, 00:16:00.330 --> 00:16:03.190 masturbation does not injure you. which shows 00:16:03.190 --> 00:16:05.830 he's fighting these deep feelings of sexual insecurity 00:16:05.830 --> 00:16:08.590 and guilt. It sounds like he's trying to brainwash 00:16:08.590 --> 00:16:10.690 himself into becoming this character he wants 00:16:10.690 --> 00:16:13.629 to be. He is, and this is the missing link. He 00:16:13.629 --> 00:16:16.309 developed these techniques, repetition, commands, 00:16:16.549 --> 00:16:19.269 overriding memory to fix his own broken psyche, 00:16:19.470 --> 00:16:22.210 and then he had the realization, if I can sell 00:16:22.210 --> 00:16:24.629 this to myself, I can sell it to the world. Which 00:16:24.629 --> 00:16:28.129 brings us to 1950, the Big Bang, the publication 00:16:28.129 --> 00:16:32.179 of Dianetics. He pivots. He realizes the occult 00:16:32.179 --> 00:16:34.580 is too weird for the mainstream. Pulp fiction 00:16:34.580 --> 00:16:38.399 doesn't pay enough. But mental health. That is 00:16:38.399 --> 00:16:42.600 a goldmine. America in 1950 is full of traumatized 00:16:42.600 --> 00:16:46.039 WWII vets. Everyone is anxious about the bomb. 00:16:46.159 --> 00:16:48.679 It's the perfect market. So he repackages all 00:16:48.679 --> 00:16:51.620 his ideas as a modern science. He publishes Dianetics. 00:16:52.269 --> 00:16:54.370 the modern science of mental health. And we should 00:16:54.370 --> 00:16:56.029 probably explain what the Enneagram is because 00:16:56.029 --> 00:16:58.350 this is the core product he's selling. So what's 00:16:58.350 --> 00:17:00.330 an Enneagram, according to Hubbard? He used a 00:17:00.330 --> 00:17:02.429 mechanical analogy, which was very smart for 00:17:02.429 --> 00:17:04.769 the time. He said the mind is like a computer. 00:17:05.259 --> 00:17:07.640 The analytical mind is the perfect conscious 00:17:07.640 --> 00:17:10.339 computer. But when you are unconscious knocked 00:17:10.339 --> 00:17:12.880 out under anesthesia or even, he claimed, in 00:17:12.880 --> 00:17:15.619 the womb, the analytical mind shuts off and the 00:17:15.619 --> 00:17:17.960 reactive mind turns on. And the reactive mind 00:17:17.960 --> 00:17:20.400 is basically a tape recorder. Exactly. A crude 00:17:20.400 --> 00:17:22.940 tape recorder that records everything. The pain, 00:17:23.019 --> 00:17:25.259 the smells, the words spoken around your unconscious 00:17:25.259 --> 00:17:28.339 body. This recording is what he called an Enneagram. 00:17:28.579 --> 00:17:31.019 And later in life, these Enneagrams act like 00:17:31.019 --> 00:17:33.849 corrupt code. If someone uses a phrase that's 00:17:33.849 --> 00:17:36.250 in your Enneagram, your body replays the pain. 00:17:36.450 --> 00:17:39.529 So his example was, if a doctor says he's a hopeless 00:17:39.529 --> 00:17:42.450 case while you're under anesthesia for a surgery, 00:17:42.650 --> 00:17:45.150 later in life, if your boss says the word hopeless, 00:17:45.369 --> 00:17:47.589 you might get depressed or even feel a pain in 00:17:47.589 --> 00:17:51.490 your side. Yes. Or you get asthma. Or arthritis. 00:17:51.990 --> 00:17:55.109 He claimed all psychosomatic illness came from 00:17:55.109 --> 00:17:57.769 these Enneagrams. And the cure was auditing. 00:17:58.220 --> 00:18:00.420 You sit with a partner, you go back to the memory, 00:18:00.559 --> 00:18:03.059 you rerun it over and over, and you erase the 00:18:03.059 --> 00:18:05.559 tape. And if you erase all your tapes... You 00:18:05.559 --> 00:18:07.680 become clear. And being clear wasn't just being 00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:10.380 happy or well -adjusted. He was promising actual 00:18:10.380 --> 00:18:12.920 superpowers. Oh, absolutely. He promised a perfect 00:18:12.920 --> 00:18:17.420 memory, total recall, a super high IQ, immunity 00:18:17.420 --> 00:18:20.180 to the common cold. He even claimed a clear could 00:18:20.180 --> 00:18:22.220 heal their own broken bones just by thinking 00:18:22.220 --> 00:18:24.519 about it. And people just ate it up. It was a 00:18:24.519 --> 00:18:27.400 mania. It was a national craze. Dianetics was 00:18:27.400 --> 00:18:30.029 a... A massive bestseller. Dianetics clubs sprang 00:18:30.029 --> 00:18:31.930 up in living rooms all across America. It was 00:18:31.930 --> 00:18:34.109 really the first biohacking movement. But then 00:18:34.109 --> 00:18:37.009 the Shrine Auditorium happens. Yeah. And this 00:18:37.009 --> 00:18:39.009 is a scene that feels like the climax of the 00:18:39.009 --> 00:18:41.950 first act of the movie of his life. August 1950. 00:18:42.730 --> 00:18:45.349 Hubbard is the king of the world. He rents the 00:18:45.349 --> 00:18:48.710 Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. 6 ,000 people 00:18:48.710 --> 00:18:50.750 pack the place. They want to see it clear. They 00:18:50.750 --> 00:18:53.170 want to see the proof. So he brings out his prize 00:18:53.170 --> 00:18:55.930 student, his proof of concept. A young woman 00:18:55.930 --> 00:18:58.660 named Sonia Bianca. He introduces her to the 00:18:58.660 --> 00:19:01.599 roaring crowd as the world's first clear. He 00:19:01.599 --> 00:19:04.500 tells them she has full, perfect recall. And 00:19:04.500 --> 00:19:06.519 the crowd starts to test her. Someone shouts 00:19:06.519 --> 00:19:08.440 out, what did you have for breakfast on Tuesday? 00:19:08.599 --> 00:19:11.420 She answers, simple memory stuff. Then someone 00:19:11.420 --> 00:19:15.119 asks a critical question. What color is Mr. Hubbard's 00:19:15.119 --> 00:19:17.940 tie? Hubbard had his back to her, so she couldn't 00:19:17.940 --> 00:19:20.079 see it. A simple test of perfect recall. She 00:19:20.079 --> 00:19:22.700 froze. She couldn't remember. She guessed. She 00:19:22.700 --> 00:19:24.740 got it wrong. Then people started asking her 00:19:24.740 --> 00:19:26.680 physics formula she was supposed to know perfectly. 00:19:27.289 --> 00:19:29.450 She blanked on those two. The atmosphere in that 00:19:29.450 --> 00:19:31.569 room must have just turned on a dime. It went 00:19:31.569 --> 00:19:34.190 from worship to mockery. In seconds, people started 00:19:34.190 --> 00:19:36.190 laughing. Hundreds of people got up and walked 00:19:36.190 --> 00:19:38.369 out. It was a public relations disaster of the 00:19:38.369 --> 00:19:40.970 highest order. It proved right there on stage 00:19:40.970 --> 00:19:43.720 that the superpowers were fake. And his life 00:19:43.720 --> 00:19:46.000 just spirals after this. The money dries up. 00:19:46.079 --> 00:19:49.059 The Dianetics Foundation goes bankrupt. And his 00:19:49.059 --> 00:19:51.920 personal life, well, calling it messy is a massive 00:19:51.920 --> 00:19:54.119 understatement. This is the villain origin story 00:19:54.119 --> 00:19:56.960 moment. His wife, Sarah Northrup, wants to leave 00:19:56.960 --> 00:19:59.799 him. She's convinced he's gone insane. She threatens 00:19:59.799 --> 00:20:01.940 to have him committed to a psychiatric institution. 00:20:02.359 --> 00:20:04.680 So what does the mental health expert do in response 00:20:04.680 --> 00:20:07.640 to this? He kidnaps their infant daughter, Alexis. 00:20:08.039 --> 00:20:11.799 He flees to Havana, Cuba. He then calls Sarah 00:20:11.799 --> 00:20:13.559 and tells her that he has killed the child and 00:20:13.559 --> 00:20:17.160 cut her up into little pieces. He later claimed 00:20:17.160 --> 00:20:19.740 he was just testing her reaction. But imagine 00:20:19.740 --> 00:20:22.579 the sheer cruelty of that. While he's in Cuba, 00:20:22.680 --> 00:20:25.019 he's drinking heavily and he's writing these 00:20:25.019 --> 00:20:27.579 paranoid letters to the FBI. And this is the 00:20:27.579 --> 00:20:30.000 ultimate irony. He writes to the FBI telling 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:32.880 them that Sarah is a communist spy. He tries 00:20:32.880 --> 00:20:35.099 to use the Red Scare to destroy his wife so she 00:20:35.099 --> 00:20:37.460 can't have him committed. So he's cornered. He's 00:20:37.460 --> 00:20:39.960 broke. He's a laughingstock. His marriage is 00:20:39.960 --> 00:20:41.880 collapsing. Most people would quit at this point. 00:20:41.960 --> 00:20:45.319 But Hubbard reinvents the entire game. 1952. 00:20:45.879 --> 00:20:48.799 He loses the rights to the name Dianetics in 00:20:48.799 --> 00:20:51.619 bankruptcy court. He literally can't teach Dianetics 00:20:51.619 --> 00:20:53.200 anymore. It's not his intellectual property. 00:20:53.420 --> 00:20:56.940 So he needs a new product. Fast. Enter Scientology. 00:20:57.099 --> 00:21:00.039 He shifts the entire focus. Dianetics was about 00:21:00.039 --> 00:21:02.839 the mind. Scientology, he decides, is about the 00:21:02.839 --> 00:21:06.640 soul. He invents the concept of the thetan. The 00:21:06.640 --> 00:21:08.920 mortal spirit. Right. He says, you aren't your 00:21:08.920 --> 00:21:12.099 body. You are a thetan who has lived for trillions 00:21:12.099 --> 00:21:14.619 of years. And by moving the whole thing into 00:21:14.619 --> 00:21:17.240 the spiritual realm, he does two brilliant things. 00:21:17.829 --> 00:21:20.890 First, he avoids medical regulation because now 00:21:20.890 --> 00:21:23.430 it's a religion. And second, he opens up the 00:21:23.430 --> 00:21:26.890 timeline to include past lives. A whole new universe 00:21:26.890 --> 00:21:29.349 of problems to sell cures for. An infinite number 00:21:29.349 --> 00:21:31.089 of problems. And this is where the E -meter comes 00:21:31.089 --> 00:21:33.910 in. This little box with the two tin cans you 00:21:33.910 --> 00:21:36.009 hold. The electro -psychometer. It's just a simple 00:21:36.009 --> 00:21:38.049 galvanometer. It measures the electrical resistance 00:21:38.049 --> 00:21:40.069 of your skin, basically how much your hands are 00:21:40.069 --> 00:21:42.410 sweating. It's a component of a modern polygraph, 00:21:42.549 --> 00:21:45.509 a lie detector. But Hubbard presented it as this 00:21:45.509 --> 00:21:48.319 piece of mystical... high -tech equipment. It 00:21:48.319 --> 00:21:51.579 gave the auditors, the priests, a prop. It made 00:21:51.579 --> 00:21:54.180 it look scientific. Exactly. It creates the illusion 00:21:54.180 --> 00:21:56.599 of science. You hold the cans, the needle on 00:21:56.599 --> 00:21:59.119 the dial floats. The auditor asks, are you hiding 00:21:59.119 --> 00:22:01.319 something from your wife? You get a little nervous. 00:22:01.339 --> 00:22:03.339 Your hands sweat microscopically. The needle 00:22:03.339 --> 00:22:06.539 jumps. The meter sees your innermost thoughts. 00:22:06.839 --> 00:22:09.779 It is a lie detector test being used as a confessional 00:22:09.779 --> 00:22:13.420 booth. And once he unlocked past lives, the stories 00:22:13.420 --> 00:22:15.849 he told. just went completely off the rails. 00:22:16.009 --> 00:22:18.670 This is the space opera era. He writes a book 00:22:18.670 --> 00:22:21.670 called Scientology, A History of Man, and he 00:22:21.670 --> 00:22:23.730 starts detailing all the traumatic events we've 00:22:23.730 --> 00:22:26.390 experienced in our past lives on the whole track. 00:22:26.670 --> 00:22:29.410 The clam. We have to talk about the clam incident. 00:22:29.609 --> 00:22:31.890 Tuckles. It's my favorite part. It is absolutely 00:22:31.890 --> 00:22:34.269 astounding. He claimed that in our evolutionary 00:22:34.269 --> 00:22:36.569 history, on our way to becoming human, we were 00:22:36.569 --> 00:22:40.490 all clams. And the trauma of being a clam, you 00:22:40.490 --> 00:22:42.769 know, the sand getting in the shell, the struggle 00:22:42.769 --> 00:22:45.130 to open and close the hinge, is still affecting 00:22:45.130 --> 00:22:47.990 us today. He really said this. He wrote it down. 00:22:48.109 --> 00:22:50.430 He said if you talk about clams to a person who 00:22:50.430 --> 00:22:53.269 is being audited, their jaw might start to hurt 00:22:53.269 --> 00:22:55.910 because the somatic memory of the clam hinge 00:22:55.910 --> 00:22:57.789 is being triggered. He also talked about the 00:22:57.789 --> 00:23:01.940 sloth period. being a piltdown man, which was 00:23:01.940 --> 00:23:04.539 a known scientific hoax at the time. It was pure 00:23:04.539 --> 00:23:07.200 stream of consciousness improvisation. He was 00:23:07.200 --> 00:23:10.019 taking his rejected sci -fi plots and selling 00:23:10.019 --> 00:23:13.059 them as divine theology. And because he was the 00:23:13.059 --> 00:23:16.160 source, nobody could question him. If you questioned 00:23:16.160 --> 00:23:18.160 him, that was just proof that you had a reactive 00:23:18.160 --> 00:23:20.839 mind and you needed more auditing. It's a perfect 00:23:20.839 --> 00:23:24.160 closed loop. The only cure for doubt is to buy 00:23:24.160 --> 00:23:26.039 more of the product that's causing the doubt. 00:23:26.180 --> 00:23:27.660 Precisely. And the product got more and more 00:23:27.660 --> 00:23:31.250 expensive and the stories got grand. which leads 00:23:31.250 --> 00:23:34.069 us to the ultimate story, the crown jewel of 00:23:34.069 --> 00:23:37.990 his space opera, the Xenu story, OT3. The Wall 00:23:37.990 --> 00:23:41.599 of Fire. This was released in 1967. Hubbard is 00:23:41.599 --> 00:23:43.160 now living at sea. We'll get to that in a minute. 00:23:43.259 --> 00:23:46.140 And he releases the secret upper level material. 00:23:46.440 --> 00:23:48.460 He tells his followers that if they read this 00:23:48.460 --> 00:23:50.539 material before they are spiritually ready, they 00:23:50.539 --> 00:23:53.980 will die. Literally die. Yes. He said the information 00:23:53.980 --> 00:23:56.680 was so powerful and so traumatic, it would give 00:23:56.680 --> 00:23:59.140 an unprepared mind a fatal case of pneumonia. 00:24:00.160 --> 00:24:03.440 Fluid in the lungs. You'd just drop dead. Which 00:24:03.440 --> 00:24:05.519 is a brilliant marketing tactic. It's genius. 00:24:05.660 --> 00:24:08.430 It makes the information... utterly irresistible. 00:24:08.430 --> 00:24:10.690 So what was the secret that was so powerful it 00:24:10.690 --> 00:24:14.089 could kill you? It's the plot of a bad 1950s 00:24:14.089 --> 00:24:17.349 B -movie. He wrote that 75 million years ago, 00:24:17.450 --> 00:24:20.109 a galactic dictator named Xenu, the head of the 00:24:20.109 --> 00:24:23.130 Galactic Confederacy, decided to solve an overpopulation 00:24:23.130 --> 00:24:26.049 problem. So he rounded up billions of aliens 00:24:26.049 --> 00:24:28.210 from other planets, froze them in a mixture of 00:24:28.210 --> 00:24:31.329 glycol and alcohol, flew them to Earth, which 00:24:31.329 --> 00:24:34.230 he called TGIC, in space planes that looked exactly 00:24:34.230 --> 00:24:37.049 like Douglas DC -8s, stacked the frozen bodies 00:24:37.049 --> 00:24:39.009 around the bases of volcanoes, and then blew 00:24:39.009 --> 00:24:41.289 them all up with hydrogen bombs. And the souls 00:24:41.289 --> 00:24:44.150 of those billions of murdered aliens. Those are 00:24:44.150 --> 00:24:46.170 the bombs. body thetans. They are now stuck to 00:24:46.170 --> 00:24:48.829 us. He claimed that you right now have hundreds 00:24:48.829 --> 00:24:51.849 of these confused, traumatized alien ghosts attached 00:24:51.849 --> 00:24:53.910 to your body and they are the secret cause of 00:24:53.910 --> 00:24:55.950 all your fears, your anxieties, your self -doubts. 00:24:56.029 --> 00:24:58.670 So high level Scientology is basically just ghost 00:24:58.670 --> 00:25:02.190 busting. It is telepathic exorcism. The goal 00:25:02.190 --> 00:25:05.170 of O .T. Thur is to audit each body thetan individually, 00:25:05.529 --> 00:25:08.309 tell them the story of Xenu and get them to detach 00:25:08.309 --> 00:25:10.529 and go toward the light. It sounds completely 00:25:10.529 --> 00:25:14.089 ridiculous to us now. But people paid tens, hundreds 00:25:14.089 --> 00:25:16.130 of thousands of dollars for this. Because by 00:25:16.130 --> 00:25:18.150 the time you get to OT the third, you have spent 00:25:18.150 --> 00:25:21.849 years and a fortune inside the system. You've 00:25:21.849 --> 00:25:24.109 been isolated from critics. You've been groomed 00:25:24.109 --> 00:25:26.690 to accept Hubbard's reality. If he says aliens, 00:25:26.950 --> 00:25:29.190 you just say, how many do I have and how much 00:25:29.190 --> 00:25:31.009 does it cost to get rid of them? Well, he's writing 00:25:31.009 --> 00:25:32.609 all this. He's living out another one of his 00:25:32.609 --> 00:25:34.589 Pulp Fiction fantasies. He's not just a writer 00:25:34.589 --> 00:25:37.150 or religious leader anymore. He's a Commodore. 00:25:37.450 --> 00:25:42.799 Section six, the Sea Org. In 1967, facing increasing 00:25:42.799 --> 00:25:45.980 legal heat in the UK and the US, he buys a fleet 00:25:45.980 --> 00:25:48.799 of three ships. The flagship is the Apollo. He 00:25:48.799 --> 00:25:50.619 puts on a naval uniform he designed himself. 00:25:50.920 --> 00:25:52.940 He designs different uniforms for all the crew. 00:25:53.099 --> 00:25:55.500 He creates his own private navy. A navy where 00:25:55.500 --> 00:25:58.059 he is the absolute dictator. They sailed the 00:25:58.059 --> 00:26:00.259 Mediterranean and the Atlantic port to port for 00:26:00.259 --> 00:26:03.559 years. And life on that ship was, well, distinct 00:26:03.559 --> 00:26:05.859 is a very diplomatic way of putting it. From 00:26:05.859 --> 00:26:07.519 the accounts I've read, it sounds like a floating 00:26:07.519 --> 00:26:10.630 prison camp. For the crew, it was brutal. It 00:26:10.630 --> 00:26:14.230 was hard physical labor, 18 -hour days, swabbing 00:26:14.230 --> 00:26:16.950 decks, chipping paint, and the punishments were 00:26:16.950 --> 00:26:20.549 medieval. Overboarding. This was a common punishment 00:26:20.549 --> 00:26:24.329 ritual. If you messed up... Let's say you served 00:26:24.329 --> 00:26:26.849 Hubbard's coffee cold or you forgot to polish 00:26:26.849 --> 00:26:29.670 a brass railing. You were hauled before the entire 00:26:29.670 --> 00:26:32.269 crew on the deck and Hubbard would point at you 00:26:32.269 --> 00:26:34.210 and order you overboard. And they would just 00:26:34.210 --> 00:26:35.910 throw you off the ship. Literally, they would 00:26:35.910 --> 00:26:37.730 pick you up and throw you off the side of the 00:26:37.730 --> 00:26:40.230 ship into the harbor, sometimes from 30 feet 00:26:40.230 --> 00:26:42.849 up. It was incredibly dangerous. People could 00:26:42.849 --> 00:26:45.950 hit the dock or drown in polluted water. But 00:26:45.950 --> 00:26:48.529 it was all about public humiliation and terror. 00:26:48.789 --> 00:26:50.990 And the chain locker. That's the darkest part. 00:26:51.599 --> 00:26:54.380 The chain locker is the small, lightless compartment 00:26:54.380 --> 00:26:56.579 in the bow of the ship where the anchor chain 00:26:56.579 --> 00:26:59.940 is stored. It's dark, it's wet, it's full of 00:26:59.940 --> 00:27:02.700 rats, and it stinks of rust and bilge water. 00:27:03.240 --> 00:27:05.460 Hubbard would order people, adults and children, 00:27:05.539 --> 00:27:08.000 locked in there for days on end as punishment. 00:27:08.200 --> 00:27:11.250 He did this to children. Yes, there is a very 00:27:11.250 --> 00:27:14.490 well -documented case of a young deaf child being 00:27:14.490 --> 00:27:17.009 locked in the chain locker for days. It just 00:27:17.009 --> 00:27:20.009 shows the total erosion of empathy. He wasn't 00:27:20.009 --> 00:27:22.369 a savior anymore. He was a tyrant. And he surrounded 00:27:22.369 --> 00:27:24.990 himself with a very specific kind of personal 00:27:24.990 --> 00:27:28.990 guard, the Commodore's messengers. The CMO. This 00:27:28.990 --> 00:27:30.990 is the visual that really sticks with me from 00:27:30.990 --> 00:27:33.470 that era. He stopped trusting the adults on the 00:27:33.470 --> 00:27:35.369 ship. He thought they were all spies or just 00:27:35.369 --> 00:27:38.309 incompetent. So he created a personal detail 00:27:38.309 --> 00:27:40.910 of teenage girls, mostly between the ages of 00:27:40.910 --> 00:27:43.529 12 and 15. And they were dressed in? White hot 00:27:43.529 --> 00:27:45.730 pants and halter tops. That was their uniform. 00:27:45.950 --> 00:27:48.349 They were his Praetorian guard. They lit his 00:27:48.349 --> 00:27:50.730 cigarettes. They would follow him around and 00:27:50.730 --> 00:27:53.269 catch his ash in an ashtray so it wouldn't hit 00:27:53.269 --> 00:27:55.529 the floor. They carried his verbal orders to 00:27:55.529 --> 00:27:57.769 the rest of the ship. have this old man screaming 00:27:57.769 --> 00:28:00.089 orders and a 13 -year -old girl in hot pants 00:28:00.089 --> 00:28:02.170 has to run to the engine room to relay them to 00:28:02.170 --> 00:28:05.069 a grown man. And the grown men on the ship were 00:28:05.069 --> 00:28:07.910 terrified of these girls because they spoke with 00:28:07.910 --> 00:28:10.289 Hubbard's voice. If a messenger showed up and 00:28:10.289 --> 00:28:12.509 said, the Commodore is very displeased with the 00:28:12.509 --> 00:28:14.890 state of this engine, you were in mortal danger 00:28:14.890 --> 00:28:17.089 of being sent to the chain locker. It was like 00:28:17.089 --> 00:28:19.690 Lord of the Flies on a boat. But the paranoia 00:28:19.690 --> 00:28:21.769 wasn't just contained to the ship. He believed 00:28:21.769 --> 00:28:24.190 the whole world was out to get him. And to be 00:28:24.190 --> 00:28:26.700 fair, by this point, Various governments were 00:28:26.700 --> 00:28:29.559 investigating him. True. But his response was 00:28:29.559 --> 00:28:32.380 completely disproportionate. He created his own 00:28:32.380 --> 00:28:34.900 internal intelligence agency, the Guardian's 00:28:34.900 --> 00:28:37.960 Office. This was his version of the CIA. And 00:28:37.960 --> 00:28:41.079 he wrote the infamous fair game policy. Could 00:28:41.079 --> 00:28:43.200 you quote that for us? It's chilling. He wrote 00:28:43.200 --> 00:28:45.579 that any enemy of Scientology may be deprived 00:28:45.579 --> 00:28:49.039 of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist 00:28:49.039 --> 00:28:51.319 without any discipline of the Scientologist, 00:28:51.500 --> 00:28:54.259 may be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed. 00:28:54.480 --> 00:28:57.279 Destroyed. He gave his followers moral permission 00:28:57.279 --> 00:28:59.579 to commit any crime they wanted against people 00:28:59.579 --> 00:29:02.799 he labeled as enemies. And they did. This policy 00:29:02.799 --> 00:29:05.740 leads directly to Operation Snow White in the 00:29:05.740 --> 00:29:09.299 1970s. It sounds like a Disney fairy tale, but 00:29:09.299 --> 00:29:11.599 it was the largest infiltration of the United 00:29:11.599 --> 00:29:13.559 States government in history. What was their 00:29:13.559 --> 00:29:15.940 goal? What did they do? Hubbard's wife, Mary 00:29:15.940 --> 00:29:19.259 Sue, ran the whole operation. They sent Scientologists 00:29:19.259 --> 00:29:22.440 to get jobs inside government agencies, the IRS, 00:29:22.660 --> 00:29:25.490 the Justice Department, the DEA. They broke into 00:29:25.490 --> 00:29:28.170 government offices at night. They bugged conference 00:29:28.170 --> 00:29:30.910 rooms. They stole thousands and thousands of 00:29:30.910 --> 00:29:33.690 documents. All to do what? To scrub Hubbard's 00:29:33.690 --> 00:29:36.630 record. Exactly. To find and steal every negative 00:29:36.630 --> 00:29:39.130 file the government had on him and on Scientology 00:29:39.130 --> 00:29:41.990 and to destroy them. They were literally trying 00:29:41.990 --> 00:29:45.089 to purge history. And they got caught. In 1977, 00:29:45.390 --> 00:29:48.250 the FBI conducted a massive coordinated raid 00:29:48.250 --> 00:29:50.970 on church offices in L .A. and D .C. They found 00:29:50.970 --> 00:29:52.569 the stolen documents, the bugging equipment, 00:29:52.789 --> 00:29:54.589 everything. Mary Sue Hubbard went to prison. 00:29:54.809 --> 00:29:57.509 Eleven top Scientologists were convicted. Hubbard. 00:29:57.589 --> 00:30:00.269 He was named an unindicted co -conspirator. He 00:30:00.269 --> 00:30:01.970 let his wife take the fall for him. He vanished. 00:30:06.400 --> 00:30:09.799 And this is the final act. The king in exile. 00:30:10.099 --> 00:30:12.539 He ends up hiding out in the California desert. 00:30:12.920 --> 00:30:16.619 Creston, California. A small, isolated ranch. 00:30:17.240 --> 00:30:19.680 He lived there in total seclusion for the last 00:30:19.680 --> 00:30:22.579 few years of his life in the 80s. And the descriptions 00:30:22.579 --> 00:30:24.819 of him in these final years are just haunting. 00:30:25.019 --> 00:30:28.559 He grew a long stringy beard, long hair. His 00:30:28.559 --> 00:30:30.779 fingernails were curled and yellow. He became 00:30:30.779 --> 00:30:33.079 terrified of germs. Like a Howard Hughes figure. 00:30:33.240 --> 00:30:36.740 Very much so. A total recluse. He was screaming 00:30:36.740 --> 00:30:39.059 at his young assistants about dust particles. 00:30:39.420 --> 00:30:41.819 He was still auditing himself for hours a day 00:30:41.819 --> 00:30:44.019 trying to clear away the last of his body thetans. 00:30:44.180 --> 00:30:46.849 And interestingly... He went back to his first 00:30:46.849 --> 00:30:49.190 love. He went back to writing fiction. Battlefield 00:30:49.190 --> 00:30:52.190 Earth. Mission Earth. He wrote millions of words 00:30:52.190 --> 00:30:54.190 of science fiction in those last years. It's 00:30:54.190 --> 00:30:56.230 almost poignant in a way. When everything else 00:30:56.230 --> 00:30:58.150 fell away, the ships, the uniform, the family, 00:30:58.230 --> 00:30:59.809 the power, he went back to the only thing that 00:30:59.809 --> 00:31:02.369 was ever really real for him, the typewriter. 00:31:02.589 --> 00:31:05.829 But the God complex remained. There's the Antichrist 00:31:05.829 --> 00:31:07.960 story that comes out of this period. This is 00:31:07.960 --> 00:31:09.880 disputed by the church, of course, but there 00:31:09.880 --> 00:31:13.279 are strong sources, including his own son, Nibs, 00:31:13.279 --> 00:31:15.980 and a retracted upper -level document called 00:31:15.980 --> 00:31:19.400 OT8. The claim is that Hubbard came to believe 00:31:19.400 --> 00:31:22.900 he was the Antichrist. Not the devil in a satanic 00:31:22.900 --> 00:31:26.160 sense, but the actual figure. prophesied in the 00:31:26.160 --> 00:31:28.440 book of revelation who was meant to end the current 00:31:28.440 --> 00:31:31.339 civilization and start the new one he thought 00:31:31.339 --> 00:31:33.799 he was in a cosmic duel with jesus christ himself 00:31:33.799 --> 00:31:36.240 he really truly thought he was the main character 00:31:36.240 --> 00:31:38.640 of the entire universe to the very end and then 00:31:38.640 --> 00:31:43.700 in january of 1986 he dies of a stroke a very 00:31:43.700 --> 00:31:47.140 human very mundane death But the church couldn't 00:31:47.140 --> 00:31:48.740 admit that. They held this huge event for the 00:31:48.740 --> 00:31:50.940 followers and announced that Ron had dropped 00:31:50.940 --> 00:31:52.839 his body. Dropped his body. They said he had 00:31:52.839 --> 00:31:54.180 learned everything he could in this physical 00:31:54.180 --> 00:31:56.759 form and had chosen to move on to a higher plane 00:31:56.759 --> 00:31:59.460 of existence to continue his research. They spun 00:31:59.460 --> 00:32:02.160 his death into a final act of spiritual mastery. 00:32:02.460 --> 00:32:04.720 They turned a stroke into a voluntary ascension. 00:32:04.839 --> 00:32:08.059 And he left behind a vault, a time capsule. Tremontina 00:32:08.059 --> 00:32:11.019 Base in New Mexico. They dug a massive tunnel 00:32:11.019 --> 00:32:13.559 deep into a mountain. They took all of Hubbard's 00:32:13.559 --> 00:32:15.859 writings, etched them onto stainless steel plates, 00:32:16.119 --> 00:32:18.319 put them in titanium capsules filled with inert 00:32:18.319 --> 00:32:21.180 gas, and buried them in this nuclear -proof vault. 00:32:21.420 --> 00:32:23.579 To survive the nuclear holocaust. Designed to 00:32:23.579 --> 00:32:26.380 last for thousands of years. He literally carved 00:32:26.380 --> 00:32:28.880 his words into the planet. So we look at this 00:32:28.880 --> 00:32:31.480 whole arc. The boy who lied about being a blood 00:32:31.480 --> 00:32:34.089 brother. the writer who pumped out pulp fiction, 00:32:34.250 --> 00:32:37.150 the naval captain who fought Iraq, the religious 00:32:37.150 --> 00:32:40.170 leader who built a global empire. It's a tragedy 00:32:40.170 --> 00:32:43.529 in a way, a tragedy of talent misused. He had 00:32:43.529 --> 00:32:46.589 immense charisma, immense drive, immense creativity, 00:32:46.910 --> 00:32:49.750 but he lacked the one thing that keeps most of 00:32:49.750 --> 00:32:52.309 us grounded, a connection to objective truth. 00:32:52.549 --> 00:32:54.470 It really leaves us with a disturbing thought 00:32:54.470 --> 00:32:57.589 about the nature of reality itself. We can laugh 00:32:57.589 --> 00:32:59.490 at the Xenia story. We can laugh at the nuclear 00:32:59.490 --> 00:33:02.250 physicist claim. But Hubbard proved something 00:33:02.250 --> 00:33:05.250 fundamental and kind of scary. That reality is 00:33:05.250 --> 00:33:08.990 negotiable. Yes. If you tell a story with enough 00:33:08.990 --> 00:33:12.029 confidence and you build a high enough wall around 00:33:12.029 --> 00:33:13.769 your audience so they can't hear the outside 00:33:13.769 --> 00:33:17.410 world, you can completely override objective 00:33:17.410 --> 00:33:20.230 truth. He built a hermetically sealed world where 00:33:20.230 --> 00:33:23.170 she was God. And thousands of people agreed to 00:33:23.170 --> 00:33:25.089 live in it. He treated the world like a blank 00:33:25.089 --> 00:33:27.670 page in his typewriter. He wrote the characters. 00:33:27.849 --> 00:33:30.970 He wrote the plot. And he forced everyone else 00:33:30.970 --> 00:33:33.849 to act out their parts in his story. That's exactly. 00:33:34.069 --> 00:33:36.089 So the question isn't just, was he a con man? 00:33:36.190 --> 00:33:37.829 The question that I think we're left with is, 00:33:37.890 --> 00:33:41.009 what fictional narratives are we all currently 00:33:41.009 --> 00:33:43.170 accepting as truth? Just because the storyteller 00:33:43.170 --> 00:33:45.890 is confident enough. That's the thought I'm stuck 00:33:45.890 --> 00:33:48.519 with. A very dangerous legacy indeed. We'll get 00:33:48.519 --> 00:33:50.400 you on that. Thanks for diving deep with us. 00:33:50.519 --> 00:33:51.180 Always a pleasure.