So we are looking at a stack of documents today
that they really outline one of the most improbable
just chaotic, and frankly cinematic lives of
the 20th century. Oh, absolutely. I mean, honestly,
if you submitted the true biography of L. Ron
Hubbard as a screenplay to a Hollywood studio,
say, in the 1950s, it would have been rejected.
It would have been tossed right in the trash
for being too unrealistic. Just too much happens.
You can't have a protagonist who is a pulp fiction
writer, a naval commander, a black magician,
an explorer, and the founder of a global religion.
It breaks all rules. It completely defies the...
The laws of narrative structure. And yet here
we are. We're looking at the life of L. Ron Hubbard.
And I think for most people, he exists as this
this kind of caricature. He's the Zinu guy or,
you know, the guy who jumped on the cat. Wait,
no, that was his follower. Right. That was Tom
Cruise. But Hubbard himself is this looming shadow.
He's a figure of just immense contradictions,
depending on which version of history you read.
He's either the source. And that's with a capital
S of all wisdom, a man who cracked the code of
the human mind or or. Or he is perhaps the greatest
con artist to ever breathe air. But the mission
today isn't to debate the theology of Scientology.
We're not here to decide if Zeno is real. We're
here to look at the man. The documented man.
We've got military records, court transcripts,
his own private journals, and the letters he
wrote when he thought no one was looking. Exactly.
We're trying to separate the hagiography, which
is that polished, you know, that saint -like
biography the church presents from the messy
reality. Yeah. But I think the real hook here,
the thing I really want to explore with you,
is the central tension of his psychology. Which
is what? How does a man who spent the 1930s writing
stories about Superman and... Galactic Federations
and just impossible feats of survival. How does
he manage to pull those fictions off the page
and turn them into a reality that millions of
people bought into? That's the key right there.
He didn't just write science fiction. He engineered
a way to live inside a science fiction novel.
Precisely. And he dragged the rest of us, or
at least his followers, into the plot with him.
So let's start where every good superhero origin
story starts. The early years. And if you look
at the official church materials, Hubbard was
basically Indiana Jones from the moment he could
walk. The myth -making started incredibly early.
I mean, right from the beginning. Hubbard claimed
that his grandfather, a man named Lafayette Waterbury,
was a wealthy cattle baron in the American West.
A cattle baron? Yeah. He painted this picture
of a frontier childhood breaking horses, riding
the range, owning these massive tracts of land.
A real John Wayne type of upbringing. And the
reality? The reality was a bit more mundane.
His grandfather was a veterinarian. a local small
town vet. He wasn't poor by any means, but he
certainly wasn't a cattle baron. But you see
what he's doing there, right? He's tapping into
the zeitgeist. Oh, for sure. He's borrowing the
cultural currency at the time. In the early 20th
century, the West was the place of heroes. It
was the American myth. He wanted to be a cowboy
king. It's about building a persona. And this
leads to the Blood Brother claim. This is one
of those stories that gets repeated so often
in the lore, it just becomes fact for his followers.
Right. Hubbard claimed he was made a blood brother
of the Blackfeet tribe. Which sounds very, you
know, noble and impressive. It does. He claimed
he was honored by the tribe, that he was given
their secret knowledge the whole nine yards.
It fits that chosen one narrative he was building.
But when historians looked into it... Well, a
couple of problems emerged. First of all, the
Blackfeet tribe didn't practice blood brotherhood
ceremonies. It just wasn't a thing they did.
So the ritual he described, it didn't exist in
their culture. Not in that way, no. And then
there's the simple matter of geography. Hubbard
lived over 100 miles away from the reservation.
So unless he was commuting, you know, three hours
by horse every day to hang out, it's highly unlikely
he had any significant deep contact. Why tell
that specific lie? It seems so easily checkable.
In the 1950s, maybe not so much. But more importantly,
it establishes him as having access to ancient
wisdom. If you want to sell a new religion later,
you need to show that you are a bridge between
the ancient world and the modern. I know the
secrets of the indigenous elders. It's a credential.
Okay, so he's got the Western hero credential.
And then he tries to get the Eastern wisdom credential,
too. He travels to Asia as a teenager. He does,
yeah. And this part is true. His father was in
the Navy and was posted to Guam. So young Ron
hops on a transport ship. He visits Grom. He
sees some Chinese ports. This actually happened.
But in his retelling, this isn't a kid tagging
along with his dad on a work trip. Not at all.
In his later writings, he describes traveling
deep into Manchuria, meeting holy men in the
hills of China, learning the secrets of the mind
from Buddhist monks. He frames it as his years
in the wilderness, like Jesus or Buddha. I looked
at the diaries from this trip. They are... Let's
just say they're underwhelming. That's putting
it very politely. They are the diaries of a bored,
slightly xenophobic American teenager. Yeah,
that's what I got from it. He complains about
the heat. He complains about the smells. He complains
about the locals. There is zero introspection.
There are no aha moments about the human soul.
It's just a kid who's bored in Guam. It's amazing
to see the gap between the primary source, that
diary, and the biography he wrote for himself
later. He was rewriting his own history in real
time. He was editing his life. And that brings
us to his education. Because if you're going
to found a science of the mind Dianetics, you
need scientific authority. You can't just be
a cowboy mystic. You need to be a scientist.
And this is a big one. He called himself a nuclear
physicist. I've seen the interviews where he
says it plain as day. I am a nuclear physicist.
He leaned on that heavily. And you have to remember
the context. This is the atomic age, the 1950s,
and nuclear physics was the highest form of knowledge.
If you understood the atom, you were a wizard.
You were a genius. So what does the university
transcript say? Well, he enrolled at George Washington
University in 1930. He was studying civil engineering.
And he did take a class on atomic and molecular
physics. It was an intro course. And how did
he do in that class? He failed it. He failed
the class. He got an F. And it wasn't just that
class. His grades were poor across the board.
He dropped out in his second year after being
placed on academic probation. He never graduated.
He has no degree in physics, no degree in engineering,
nothing. But he took the vocabulary from that
one class. That's the real insight here. He didn't
learn the physics, but he learned the language.
He learned words like fission, reaction, energy,
matter. And he realized that if you use those
words to describe human emotions, you sound like
a genius to people who don't know any better.
So he's a college dropout. He's back in the world.
It's the 1930s, the Great Depression. And he
finds his true calling. The one thing he was
actually legitimately good at. Pulp fiction.
We have to pause here because I don't think people
realize the sheer volume of what this man wrote.
He wasn't just a writer. He was a factory. He
was a machine. You have to understand the pulp
market back then. These were cheap magazines
printed on rough paper argosy. Astounding science
fiction. They paid a penny a word. So if you
wanted to eat, you didn't write good sentences.
You wrote many sentences. I read somewhere that
he was clocking 100 ,000 words a month at his
peak. Oh, easily. There are stories that he used
a typewriter with a continuous roll of paper
so he wouldn't have to stop to change sheets.
He would just type and type. He wrote westerns
under one name, detective stories under another,
sci -fi under a third. What does that do to a
person's brain to spend 12 hours a day every
single day just inventing imaginary worlds from
scratch? I think this is crucial for understanding
Scientology. When you write that much, that fast,
you stop fact -checking. You rely on flow. You
learn that if you say something with enough confidence
and enough narrative drive, the reader will just
go along with it. He was training his brain to
believe that creation is truth. If I write it,
it becomes real. And there's a specific incident
in 1938, the Excalibur incident, that feels like
the prequel to everything that comes later. Yes.
This is the moment the prophet is born. And it
starts, of all places, at the dentist. The dentist.
He's under nitrous oxide laughing gas for a procedure.
And he has a hallucination, a near -death experience.
He claims he died, went to the other side, and
was given the secrets of the universe. In a dental
chair. In a dental chair. And when he wakes up,
he rushes home and writes this manuscript called
Excalibur. He was absolutely manic about it.
He wrote a letter to his wife saying he had...
High hopes of smashing my name into history so
violently that it will take a legendary form.
Smashing my name into history. That's not the
goal of a researcher who wants to help people.
That is the goal of a man who wants to be immortal.
Exactly. It's pure, unadulterated ego. He tried
to get Excalibur published, but the publishers
all rejected it. They said it was incoherent,
unreadable. But the core idea in that book, that
the primary drive of all life is simply to survive.
That became the foundation of Dianetics a decade
later. He had to shelve the idea, but he never
forgot it. So then the war comes, World War II.
And if the nuclear physicist's claim was an exaggeration,
his military record is. Well, it's a tragedy
of errors. It is a dark comedy. It really is.
He joins the Naval Reserve in 1941. And to his
credit, he manages to get a command. He captains
a patrol boat, the YP -422, and later a subchaser,
the USS PC -815. Now, in the Scientology version
of this movie, he's a war hero. He's hunting
subs, taking fire, leading men into battle. Right.
So let's look at the Battle of the Submarine.
It's May of 1943. He's off the coast of Oregon.
And Hubbard claims his sonar picks up a Japanese
submarine. Which would have been a huge deal
at that time. Massive. A Japanese sub off the
U .S. West Coast. He goes to general quarters
for 68 hours. That's nearly three full days.
He is waging war. He's dropping depth charges.
He's maneuvering the ship. He's radioing for
backup. He claims he sees oil slicks, debris.
He claims he sank the sub. What about the crew?
Were they seeing all this, too? This is the power
of suggestion, which Hubbard was an absolute
master of. If the captain is on the bridge screaming,
submarine, submarine, the terrified 19 -year
-old on the sonar starts seeing blips everywhere.
It becomes a. collective delusion. And what did
the Navy's post -action analysis find? Brutal.
Rear Admiral Brace did analyze the sonar logs,
the ocean floor charts, everything. And the conclusion
was there was no sub. Hubbard had spent three
days bombing a known magnetic deposit on the
ocean floor. He fought a rock. He fought a rock.
And the rock won. Essentially, yes. He depleted
all his ammunition fighting a magnetic anomaly.
But he refused to accept it. To the end of his
life, he claimed he sank a sub and the Navy covered
it all up. And then almost immediately after
this, this incident, he heads south and decides
to do some unsanctioned target practice. Right.
It gets worse. He's off the coast of Baja, California.
He orders his men to test the ship's guns. So
they start shelling an island. The Coronado Islands.
Which happened to belong to Mexico. Yeah. A U
.S. ally. So he is literally shelling the territory
of a friendly nation. The Mexican government
lodges a formal protest. The U .S. Navy is, as
you can imagine, fortified. And that was it for
his command. That was the end of it. He was relieved
of command. The report filed by his superiors
is just scathing. It says he is lacking in the
essential qualities of judgment, leadership,
and cooperation. They basically said, this man
is a liability. Do not give him a ship. But here
is where the narrative pivots again. Because
in the 1950s, when he's building Dianetics, he
needs a comeback story. He claims he was crippled
and blinded in the war. He needed a hero's journey.
You can't be a great healer if you haven't healed
yourself from something terrible. He claimed
he was machine gunned in the back. He claimed
he was the first American casualty of the Pacific
War. He claimed he was blind. And crucially,
he claimed he used his own mental techniques,
the early version of Dianetics, to fix himself.
Right. That's the sales pitch. I cured my own
blindness with the power of the mind. What did
the medical records say? The actual VA file.
We have his full file. He was never wounded in
combat. He never received a Purple Heart. He
was hospitalized for ulcers, malaria, and I'm
not making this up, active conjunctivitis. Pink
eye. Pink eye and a sore stomach. So the war
wounds that crippled and blinded him were ulcers
and pink eye. Yes. but just think about the audacity
of that to take pink eye and turn it into blinded
in combat it requires a level of narcissism that
is almost impressive he wasn't just lying to
get a pension he was lying to build a mythology
and that mythology gets weirdly dark right after
the war we enter what's known as his occult period
and this is the part of the story that always
surprises people They know about the sci -fi
stuff, but they don't know he was hanging out
with rocket scientists and doing sex magic. It's
one of the strangest crossovers in American history.
Hubbard ends up in Pasadena living in this big
mansion owned by a man named Jack Parsons. And
Jack Parsons isn't just some nobody. No, not
at all. Parsons is a legitimate genius. He's
one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
JPL. There is literally a crater on the dark
side of the moon named after him. But Parsons
had a secret life. He was a devout follower of
Aleister Crowley, the infamous British occultist.
He ran a magical lodge, the Ordo Templi Orientis,
out of his house. And Hubbard just moves in.
How did these two even get along? Parsons was
completely mesmerized. He wrote a letter to Crowley
saying Hubbard was a gentleman with red hair
and green eyes who possessed an unbelievably
high intelligence. He thought Hubbard was a natural
magician. And they start performing these rituals
together. the babylon working the babylon working
it was a series of complex sex magic rituals
intended to summon a goddess or a moon child
to earth to manifest her in physical form in
these rituals parsons would be the magician and
hubbard acted as the scribe the scribe what does
that mean he would sit there and allegedly channel
messages from the astral plane while parsons
did the more physical work of the ritual. Hubbard
would go into a trance and dictate poetry and
commands from some supposed entity. It sounds
like he was just improvising sci -fi dialogue
in a dark room with candles. That's probably
exactly what he was doing. He was role -playing.
He was using his pulp fiction skills in a new
context. But Parsons took it deadly seriously.
And then, in classic Hubbard fashion, the con
turns personal. He steals a girl. He starts sleeping
with Parsons' girlfriend, a woman named Sarah
Northrup. And then he convinces Parsons to hand
over his entire life savings, about $20 ,000,
which is a huge amount of money in 1946 to invest
in a business venture. They called it Allied
Enterprises. And what was the business? They
were going to buy yachts on the East Coast and
sail them to California to sell them for a profit.
Let me guess. The yachts never arrived. Hubbard
and Sarah took the money, bought one boat, and
just tried to sail away together. Parsons literally
had to perform a banishing ritual and then file
a lawsuit to chase them down in a storm off the
coast of Florida to get a fraction of his money
back. He fleeced a rocket scientist. He did.
But the most important document from this era
isn't the lawsuit. It's a private journal known
as the Affirmations. This is a document that
Hubbard wrote for himself and the church fought
for years to keep it hidden. I've read excerpts
of it. It's a very uncomfortable read. It's a
window into a fracturing mind. These are self
-hypnosis scripts he wrote to read to himself.
He's trying to program his own brain. He writes
things like, you are gallant and dashing, you
are the guardian, your eyes are brilliant. But
he also admits to his own lies in it. That's
the smoking gun. He writes, your stomach trouble
you used as an excuse to keep the Navy from punishing
you. He admits in writing to himself that the
war wounds were fake. He writes things like,
masturbation does not injure you. which shows
he's fighting these deep feelings of sexual insecurity
and guilt. It sounds like he's trying to brainwash
himself into becoming this character he wants
to be. He is, and this is the missing link. He
developed these techniques, repetition, commands,
overriding memory to fix his own broken psyche,
and then he had the realization, if I can sell
this to myself, I can sell it to the world. Which
brings us to 1950, the Big Bang, the publication
of Dianetics. He pivots. He realizes the occult
is too weird for the mainstream. Pulp fiction
doesn't pay enough. But mental health. That is
a goldmine. America in 1950 is full of traumatized
WWII vets. Everyone is anxious about the bomb.
It's the perfect market. So he repackages all
his ideas as a modern science. He publishes Dianetics.
the modern science of mental health. And we should
probably explain what the Enneagram is because
this is the core product he's selling. So what's
an Enneagram, according to Hubbard? He used a
mechanical analogy, which was very smart for
the time. He said the mind is like a computer.
The analytical mind is the perfect conscious
computer. But when you are unconscious knocked
out under anesthesia or even, he claimed, in
the womb, the analytical mind shuts off and the
reactive mind turns on. And the reactive mind
is basically a tape recorder. Exactly. A crude
tape recorder that records everything. The pain,
the smells, the words spoken around your unconscious
body. This recording is what he called an Enneagram.
And later in life, these Enneagrams act like
corrupt code. If someone uses a phrase that's
in your Enneagram, your body replays the pain.
So his example was, if a doctor says he's a hopeless
case while you're under anesthesia for a surgery,
later in life, if your boss says the word hopeless,
you might get depressed or even feel a pain in
your side. Yes. Or you get asthma. Or arthritis.
He claimed all psychosomatic illness came from
these Enneagrams. And the cure was auditing.
You sit with a partner, you go back to the memory,
you rerun it over and over, and you erase the
tape. And if you erase all your tapes... You
become clear. And being clear wasn't just being
happy or well -adjusted. He was promising actual
superpowers. Oh, absolutely. He promised a perfect
memory, total recall, a super high IQ, immunity
to the common cold. He even claimed a clear could
heal their own broken bones just by thinking
about it. And people just ate it up. It was a
mania. It was a national craze. Dianetics was
a... A massive bestseller. Dianetics clubs sprang
up in living rooms all across America. It was
really the first biohacking movement. But then
the Shrine Auditorium happens. Yeah. And this
is a scene that feels like the climax of the
first act of the movie of his life. August 1950.
Hubbard is the king of the world. He rents the
Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. 6 ,000 people
pack the place. They want to see it clear. They
want to see the proof. So he brings out his prize
student, his proof of concept. A young woman
named Sonia Bianca. He introduces her to the
roaring crowd as the world's first clear. He
tells them she has full, perfect recall. And
the crowd starts to test her. Someone shouts
out, what did you have for breakfast on Tuesday?
She answers, simple memory stuff. Then someone
asks a critical question. What color is Mr. Hubbard's
tie? Hubbard had his back to her, so she couldn't
see it. A simple test of perfect recall. She
froze. She couldn't remember. She guessed. She
got it wrong. Then people started asking her
physics formula she was supposed to know perfectly.
She blanked on those two. The atmosphere in that
room must have just turned on a dime. It went
from worship to mockery. In seconds, people started
laughing. Hundreds of people got up and walked
out. It was a public relations disaster of the
highest order. It proved right there on stage
that the superpowers were fake. And his life
just spirals after this. The money dries up.
The Dianetics Foundation goes bankrupt. And his
personal life, well, calling it messy is a massive
understatement. This is the villain origin story
moment. His wife, Sarah Northrup, wants to leave
him. She's convinced he's gone insane. She threatens
to have him committed to a psychiatric institution.
So what does the mental health expert do in response
to this? He kidnaps their infant daughter, Alexis.
He flees to Havana, Cuba. He then calls Sarah
and tells her that he has killed the child and
cut her up into little pieces. He later claimed
he was just testing her reaction. But imagine
the sheer cruelty of that. While he's in Cuba,
he's drinking heavily and he's writing these
paranoid letters to the FBI. And this is the
ultimate irony. He writes to the FBI telling
them that Sarah is a communist spy. He tries
to use the Red Scare to destroy his wife so she
can't have him committed. So he's cornered. He's
broke. He's a laughingstock. His marriage is
collapsing. Most people would quit at this point.
But Hubbard reinvents the entire game. 1952.
He loses the rights to the name Dianetics in
bankruptcy court. He literally can't teach Dianetics
anymore. It's not his intellectual property.
So he needs a new product. Fast. Enter Scientology.
He shifts the entire focus. Dianetics was about
the mind. Scientology, he decides, is about the
soul. He invents the concept of the thetan. The
mortal spirit. Right. He says, you aren't your
body. You are a thetan who has lived for trillions
of years. And by moving the whole thing into
the spiritual realm, he does two brilliant things.
First, he avoids medical regulation because now
it's a religion. And second, he opens up the
timeline to include past lives. A whole new universe
of problems to sell cures for. An infinite number
of problems. And this is where the E -meter comes
in. This little box with the two tin cans you
hold. The electro -psychometer. It's just a simple
galvanometer. It measures the electrical resistance
of your skin, basically how much your hands are
sweating. It's a component of a modern polygraph,
a lie detector. But Hubbard presented it as this
piece of mystical... high -tech equipment. It
gave the auditors, the priests, a prop. It made
it look scientific. Exactly. It creates the illusion
of science. You hold the cans, the needle on
the dial floats. The auditor asks, are you hiding
something from your wife? You get a little nervous.
Your hands sweat microscopically. The needle
jumps. The meter sees your innermost thoughts.
It is a lie detector test being used as a confessional
booth. And once he unlocked past lives, the stories
he told. just went completely off the rails.
This is the space opera era. He writes a book
called Scientology, A History of Man, and he
starts detailing all the traumatic events we've
experienced in our past lives on the whole track.
The clam. We have to talk about the clam incident.
Tuckles. It's my favorite part. It is absolutely
astounding. He claimed that in our evolutionary
history, on our way to becoming human, we were
all clams. And the trauma of being a clam, you
know, the sand getting in the shell, the struggle
to open and close the hinge, is still affecting
us today. He really said this. He wrote it down.
He said if you talk about clams to a person who
is being audited, their jaw might start to hurt
because the somatic memory of the clam hinge
is being triggered. He also talked about the
sloth period. being a piltdown man, which was
a known scientific hoax at the time. It was pure
stream of consciousness improvisation. He was
taking his rejected sci -fi plots and selling
them as divine theology. And because he was the
source, nobody could question him. If you questioned
him, that was just proof that you had a reactive
mind and you needed more auditing. It's a perfect
closed loop. The only cure for doubt is to buy
more of the product that's causing the doubt.
Precisely. And the product got more and more
expensive and the stories got grand. which leads
us to the ultimate story, the crown jewel of
his space opera, the Xenu story, OT3. The Wall
of Fire. This was released in 1967. Hubbard is
now living at sea. We'll get to that in a minute.
And he releases the secret upper level material.
He tells his followers that if they read this
material before they are spiritually ready, they
will die. Literally die. Yes. He said the information
was so powerful and so traumatic, it would give
an unprepared mind a fatal case of pneumonia.
Fluid in the lungs. You'd just drop dead. Which
is a brilliant marketing tactic. It's genius.
It makes the information... utterly irresistible.
So what was the secret that was so powerful it
could kill you? It's the plot of a bad 1950s
B -movie. He wrote that 75 million years ago,
a galactic dictator named Xenu, the head of the
Galactic Confederacy, decided to solve an overpopulation
problem. So he rounded up billions of aliens
from other planets, froze them in a mixture of
glycol and alcohol, flew them to Earth, which
he called TGIC, in space planes that looked exactly
like Douglas DC -8s, stacked the frozen bodies
around the bases of volcanoes, and then blew
them all up with hydrogen bombs. And the souls
of those billions of murdered aliens. Those are
the bombs. body thetans. They are now stuck to
us. He claimed that you right now have hundreds
of these confused, traumatized alien ghosts attached
to your body and they are the secret cause of
all your fears, your anxieties, your self -doubts.
So high level Scientology is basically just ghost
busting. It is telepathic exorcism. The goal
of O .T. Thur is to audit each body thetan individually,
tell them the story of Xenu and get them to detach
and go toward the light. It sounds completely
ridiculous to us now. But people paid tens, hundreds
of thousands of dollars for this. Because by
the time you get to OT the third, you have spent
years and a fortune inside the system. You've
been isolated from critics. You've been groomed
to accept Hubbard's reality. If he says aliens,
you just say, how many do I have and how much
does it cost to get rid of them? Well, he's writing
all this. He's living out another one of his
Pulp Fiction fantasies. He's not just a writer
or religious leader anymore. He's a Commodore.
Section six, the Sea Org. In 1967, facing increasing
legal heat in the UK and the US, he buys a fleet
of three ships. The flagship is the Apollo. He
puts on a naval uniform he designed himself.
He designs different uniforms for all the crew.
He creates his own private navy. A navy where
he is the absolute dictator. They sailed the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic port to port for
years. And life on that ship was, well, distinct
is a very diplomatic way of putting it. From
the accounts I've read, it sounds like a floating
prison camp. For the crew, it was brutal. It
was hard physical labor, 18 -hour days, swabbing
decks, chipping paint, and the punishments were
medieval. Overboarding. This was a common punishment
ritual. If you messed up... Let's say you served
Hubbard's coffee cold or you forgot to polish
a brass railing. You were hauled before the entire
crew on the deck and Hubbard would point at you
and order you overboard. And they would just
throw you off the ship. Literally, they would
pick you up and throw you off the side of the
ship into the harbor, sometimes from 30 feet
up. It was incredibly dangerous. People could
hit the dock or drown in polluted water. But
it was all about public humiliation and terror.
And the chain locker. That's the darkest part.
The chain locker is the small, lightless compartment
in the bow of the ship where the anchor chain
is stored. It's dark, it's wet, it's full of
rats, and it stinks of rust and bilge water.
Hubbard would order people, adults and children,
locked in there for days on end as punishment.
He did this to children. Yes, there is a very
well -documented case of a young deaf child being
locked in the chain locker for days. It just
shows the total erosion of empathy. He wasn't
a savior anymore. He was a tyrant. And he surrounded
himself with a very specific kind of personal
guard, the Commodore's messengers. The CMO. This
is the visual that really sticks with me from
that era. He stopped trusting the adults on the
ship. He thought they were all spies or just
incompetent. So he created a personal detail
of teenage girls, mostly between the ages of
12 and 15. And they were dressed in? White hot
pants and halter tops. That was their uniform.
They were his Praetorian guard. They lit his
cigarettes. They would follow him around and
catch his ash in an ashtray so it wouldn't hit
the floor. They carried his verbal orders to
the rest of the ship. have this old man screaming
orders and a 13 -year -old girl in hot pants
has to run to the engine room to relay them to
a grown man. And the grown men on the ship were
terrified of these girls because they spoke with
Hubbard's voice. If a messenger showed up and
said, the Commodore is very displeased with the
state of this engine, you were in mortal danger
of being sent to the chain locker. It was like
Lord of the Flies on a boat. But the paranoia
wasn't just contained to the ship. He believed
the whole world was out to get him. And to be
fair, by this point, Various governments were
investigating him. True. But his response was
completely disproportionate. He created his own
internal intelligence agency, the Guardian's
Office. This was his version of the CIA. And
he wrote the infamous fair game policy. Could
you quote that for us? It's chilling. He wrote
that any enemy of Scientology may be deprived
of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist
without any discipline of the Scientologist,
may be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.
Destroyed. He gave his followers moral permission
to commit any crime they wanted against people
he labeled as enemies. And they did. This policy
leads directly to Operation Snow White in the
1970s. It sounds like a Disney fairy tale, but
it was the largest infiltration of the United
States government in history. What was their
goal? What did they do? Hubbard's wife, Mary
Sue, ran the whole operation. They sent Scientologists
to get jobs inside government agencies, the IRS,
the Justice Department, the DEA. They broke into
government offices at night. They bugged conference
rooms. They stole thousands and thousands of
documents. All to do what? To scrub Hubbard's
record. Exactly. To find and steal every negative
file the government had on him and on Scientology
and to destroy them. They were literally trying
to purge history. And they got caught. In 1977,
the FBI conducted a massive coordinated raid
on church offices in L .A. and D .C. They found
the stolen documents, the bugging equipment,
everything. Mary Sue Hubbard went to prison.
Eleven top Scientologists were convicted. Hubbard.
He was named an unindicted co -conspirator. He
let his wife take the fall for him. He vanished.
And this is the final act. The king in exile.
He ends up hiding out in the California desert.
Creston, California. A small, isolated ranch.
He lived there in total seclusion for the last
few years of his life in the 80s. And the descriptions
of him in these final years are just haunting.
He grew a long stringy beard, long hair. His
fingernails were curled and yellow. He became
terrified of germs. Like a Howard Hughes figure.
Very much so. A total recluse. He was screaming
at his young assistants about dust particles.
He was still auditing himself for hours a day
trying to clear away the last of his body thetans.
And interestingly... He went back to his first
love. He went back to writing fiction. Battlefield
Earth. Mission Earth. He wrote millions of words
of science fiction in those last years. It's
almost poignant in a way. When everything else
fell away, the ships, the uniform, the family,
the power, he went back to the only thing that
was ever really real for him, the typewriter.
But the God complex remained. There's the Antichrist
story that comes out of this period. This is
disputed by the church, of course, but there
are strong sources, including his own son, Nibs,
and a retracted upper -level document called
OT8. The claim is that Hubbard came to believe
he was the Antichrist. Not the devil in a satanic
sense, but the actual figure. prophesied in the
book of revelation who was meant to end the current
civilization and start the new one he thought
he was in a cosmic duel with jesus christ himself
he really truly thought he was the main character
of the entire universe to the very end and then
in january of 1986 he dies of a stroke a very
human very mundane death But the church couldn't
admit that. They held this huge event for the
followers and announced that Ron had dropped
his body. Dropped his body. They said he had
learned everything he could in this physical
form and had chosen to move on to a higher plane
of existence to continue his research. They spun
his death into a final act of spiritual mastery.
They turned a stroke into a voluntary ascension.
And he left behind a vault, a time capsule. Tremontina
Base in New Mexico. They dug a massive tunnel
deep into a mountain. They took all of Hubbard's
writings, etched them onto stainless steel plates,
put them in titanium capsules filled with inert
gas, and buried them in this nuclear -proof vault.
To survive the nuclear holocaust. Designed to
last for thousands of years. He literally carved
his words into the planet. So we look at this
whole arc. The boy who lied about being a blood
brother. the writer who pumped out pulp fiction,
the naval captain who fought Iraq, the religious
leader who built a global empire. It's a tragedy
in a way, a tragedy of talent misused. He had
immense charisma, immense drive, immense creativity,
but he lacked the one thing that keeps most of
us grounded, a connection to objective truth.
It really leaves us with a disturbing thought
about the nature of reality itself. We can laugh
at the Xenia story. We can laugh at the nuclear
physicist claim. But Hubbard proved something
fundamental and kind of scary. That reality is
negotiable. Yes. If you tell a story with enough
confidence and you build a high enough wall around
your audience so they can't hear the outside
world, you can completely override objective
truth. He built a hermetically sealed world where
she was God. And thousands of people agreed to
live in it. He treated the world like a blank
page in his typewriter. He wrote the characters.
He wrote the plot. And he forced everyone else
to act out their parts in his story. That's exactly.
So the question isn't just, was he a con man?
The question that I think we're left with is,
what fictional narratives are we all currently
accepting as truth? Just because the storyteller
is confident enough. That's the thought I'm stuck
with. A very dangerous legacy indeed. We'll get
you on that. Thanks for diving deep with us.
Always a pleasure.