1270: Jamie Mustard | Scientology's Secret World of Disposable Children

24:20That I still don't understand. Yeah, and the language is like that. If you know someone and you have to get something done, another person that you would go deal with is called a terminal. Go see that terminal and they'll help you with that. Wow. So this is very 1984 somehow. It is. And that's the irony of it when I read 1984 at 16, 17 years old, because I could read at a high level, even though I couldn't write from studying the doctrine. I remember reading that going, thank God I'm not in a situation like this. Wow. You totally were. Yeah. What's crazy about this, they're basically telling you that your childhood experience, your formative years don't actually mean anything.

24:58And if you're an adult, that's all fine and good. You join a cult and they tell you your formative years don't mean anything. You can erase your feelings and you can erase your trauma, you can erase your stress, whatever. But it's completely destructive for a child who's five years old and actually in those formative years of their life to have absolutely no mooring, no foundation whatsoever. And it almost sounds like those Romanian orphanages in the 70s and 80s were like they didn't have any touch and they didn't have any care because there was three nuns taking care of 400 kids or whatever it was.

25:30You know, it's just crazy. And we have sort of unfortunate science experiment that was run in Romania when they outlawed birth control, which is that the levels of psychopathy and social, antisocial behavior just like through the roof with those kids because they develop that way. By the age of five or six years old, I just basically started to go completely numb. At one point, I go to visit my grandmother in New York every couple of years, and she puts me in the tub, looks at my body, and I'm rushed in the emergency room because no one was looking at my body. The level of animalization is hard to describe.

26:02And then you're getting this training to not react. And then you're stigmatized if you're emotional or you get sick or you get into accidents. Really, to answer your questions, there's a really strong concept that you're hit with at three, four that's every day in Scientology of this concept of the greatest good for the greatest number. And it's very similar to communism. You sacrifice the individual for the will of the state. Yes, that's what it sounds like. So you're being told at four or five years old you're suffering when your mom comes to visit you once a week or once a month. And when she leaves, you basically break psychically.

26:34I would have these breakdowns where they would take three nannies to hold me back and then she would leave and then I would just break. You're being told that there's planetary salvation at the end of it. You're five, so you believe it. And it is like living in a Kafkaesque existential nightmare. But you don't know that because it's the only world you ever know. Yeah, this is some sort of weird combination between Mao's China and Pol Pot Cambodia and Romanian orphanage. Like, it's just actually crazy to me. It makes me sad because my son is six. He's basically still a baby, really. And I can't imagine little guys and gals being treated like that.

27:17It's just horrific. Getting him to clean up his Legos and take his shoes off at the door. Like, we're happy with that. We don't need him to be a motionless automaton. That's like the opposite of the thing that I want for him. And it makes me wonder, who's running Scientology back then? Who's running it now? Do you think that these people are believers or are they in on the joke that it's all a bullshit grift to get money and power? The current leader, I think, is both. But I think he is a believer on some level. There's a lot of debate among people that leave Scientology. They form these kind of communities on YouTube and other places.

27:49I don't really think they should. They call it a community. And what I always say is, if a bunch of people leave a mental institution, should they have a community? Well, I guess they could have a community, but should they have a community? One of the things people that leave Scientology do is everything is done with threat, threat of punishment, threat of brutalizing someone psychically, or through what they call disconnection. If you do something, you're shunned from the group. You can never talk to your friends or family again. That's always hanging over your head. And I find that a lot of people that leave Scientology, they do the same thing to each other for 20, 30 years for the rest of their lives after they leave it.

28:25They continue the behavior. And I'm not saying that as a judgment, because I have to constantly look at myself to make sure that I'm not doing that. The black and white thinking is intense. I remember I was talking to Dove Barron one time, and I was telling him it was the most sophisticated mind control system in history. And he said, more than Mao? And I said, yeah. He goes, well, I talked to a woman who grew up in Maoist China in the Maoist revolution, and Dove had asked her if Mao was handsome. And she said, very. But even that, when I read about other systems like these Romanian orphanages or I read about things like that, but I think that Scientology goes far further than Mao or Stalin or anybody else ever went.

29:09Yeah, they were trying to engineer a nation, but everybody still had to do like work and they had secret police and things like that. But it sounds like you were far less free than somebody growing up in Stalin's Russia. I'm on the streets of Hollywood and I'm completely a prisoner at the same time. I'm in slum neighborhoods on the streets of Hollywood and I'm a complete prisoner. There's a concentration camp in the paramilitary organization. And if you screw up, there's a child's concentration camp. It's called the Rehabilitation Project Force. There's one for children and there's one for adults.

29:41And if you screw up, you go to this thing and you can be on it for years. My brother at 16 was in a concentration camp run by this paramilitary down in Hollywood from 16 to 23, seven years for having sex with his girlfriend. And you're not allowed to walk. So he was on that thing for seven years. He did not walk for seven years. He slept in the tunnels or on these rooms exposed to the roof on like mats or old mattresses. He ate slop and was forced to do manual labor 10 hours a day. He's studying the doctorate five or six hours a day and then sleeping for six hours. You're not allowed to walk, meaning you run everywhere.

30:15You run everywhere and you're not allowed to speak unless spoken to. So say you're a mom or a dad and you're put on this thing. You won't be speaking to your child or your spouse for seven years or five years. And if say your kid sees you walking down what they call L. Ron Hubbard Way in the middle of Hollywood, North Berendo when I was a kid, and dad, he sees you running because you're on the concentration camp and you wear all black and you wear armbands for what your behavior is, like right out of Dachau or Auschwitz, okay? Your five-year-old says, Dad, unless your kid says something to you, you're not allowed to speak to your child.

30:51And so when I was seven years old, eight years old, maybe a year after I was in the FBI raid, the largest FBI raid in history because Scientology had committed the largest industrial spine campaign on the U.S. government in history, a year later, I hadn't seen my mom. She'd been off training. They said, oh, we're going to bring you to see your mom from the dormitories. And she was on this concentration camp. It was literally like a room with a bunch of card tables and everybody's wearing black. It was like a visiting room for a prison. All right, we'll get back to billion-year contracts in just a second.

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34:01come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again. It's all free at six minute networking dot com. Now back to Jamie Mustard. We got to talk about this FBI raid because, of course, people are like, wait, what? The largest FBI raid in history. How is that possible? So when I was seven years old, I was woken up at 11 or midnight. All of us kids were being jostled out of bed. That never happened before. And we were told that we all had to get up and go over to the main building because there were people that were visiting. They were going to come in to our bedrooms and they wanted to protect us from an inspection.

34:39I think they might have phrased it as an inspection. So they take us over to the big blue building that everybody sees on TV, which is an old hospital, very Orwellian with a big sign on top. And they put us into this place called Lebanon Hall, which is a big theater type room where they have speeches. And we're there and they're just holding us there, hundreds of kids. And then all of a sudden, these guys in suits start piling in. So they put us into the next room. And it was a 24-hour raid. It was the largest FBI raid in U.S. history. Scientology had infiltrated the U.S. government and had plants in all these different bureaucratic government institutions in the federal and state level.

35:17And there was a woman, again, this is all public records. I'm going to say something that's outrageous. It was called Operation Snow White. There's a woman named Pollack Cooper who in the 70s wrote a book called The Scandal of Scientology. They had framed her for bomb threats against the federal government. And she was about to go to prison for decades. She'd been indicted. She was suicidal. This woman also, Pollack Cooper, was a woman that as a baby had survived the Holocaust. We're talking about a Holocaust survivor. She was about to go to prison. In that FBI raid, and again, this is on Wikipedia, just Google Operation Snow White.

35:54Sounds crazy. They discovered that Scientology had framed her for these threats and she was exonerated. So yeah, they'd kept us out all night, moving us from room to room as agents poured into the room. I'm a seven-year-old. I'm seeing all this from the eyes of a seven-year-old child. And when I got older and I looked back on it, Hubbard's wife went to jail. Hubbard was an unindicted co-conspirator. Eight leaders of Scientology went to jail. The only reason Hubbard didn't go to jail was because they threatened her and said, if you don't say it was all you, you're going to be taken out of the will.

36:27There's going to be a consequence. So Mary Sue Hubbard's wife fell on her sword. And so Hubbard wasn't fully indicted, which was all lies. He was running everything. Because if you talk to people that were there at the time, they'll tell you he was running everything. And so when I got older and I looked back on it, they exonerated this woman. They found all these crimes. I grew up with shredding machines everywhere. We were constantly shredding documents for Scientology. We didn't even know what they were as kids. We'd walk into a room and there would be a room full of documents and we would spend days at a time shredding these things we couldn't even read.

37:01When I look back on it years later, Jordan, it kind of broke my heart that they weren't concerned about us. No, they weren't concerned about how these children were living, but the Scientology was very clever. The living conditions were animalistic and horrible. So they were very smart to remove us from the dormitories. So when the FBI went into the fountain building, as it's called, where we live, which was a tenement, they didn't see anybody there. They just saw these like dilapidated rooms with beds in them and they didn't have a context for it. Yeah, they didn't want to see a bunch of kids in there because then it's, oh, my God, you're running a human trafficking operation.

37:38Yeah. My God, this raid is wild. And the FBI saw all these kids and went, huh, nothing to see here. I don't understand how they didn't stop this practice. Even in the last month, my point of view has changed. When I got a little older, I started thinking, you know, the FBI really failed me. I almost died. And a lot of my friends, I've lost a lot of people. Yeah, of course. But honestly, I don't mean to be crude. You guys must have smelled absolutely terrible. So how does the FBI see a room full of kids with facial infections and rotten teeth that smell like a pile of dung and they just go, no problem here.

38:10Hey, you know that room upstairs with 80 bunk beds trapped into a 14-foot room? You see this bunch of kids here that are all of ill health and malnourished and have opportunistic infections? Anyway, what's for lunch? Yes, they failed you. Yes, they freaking failed you. What they did is every time the FBI would spread into a room, they would move us to another room. And I guess what they were telling the FBI is, we don't want the kids to see this while they were animalizing us. But also, like, too bad. We're the FBI. You don't get to decide who gets to see what. You're being raided. Shut up and sit down.

38:40Yeah, but they were rating them for the infiltration. Literally in the last month, as people have reached out to me and write me notes, one of the realizations I've had, and I love your take on this because I know you lived in L.A., is I feel like the city of Los Angeles failed me. Of course. Look, man, I lived on Hollywood Boulevard. There was this dumb museum they have where it's like the L. Ron Hubbard Museum. No one ever goes in there, and it's full of lies about what he did. And across the street, there's another thing where he wrote 8 ,000 novels about all the things he did. They have theatrical productions.

39:07I mean, I was surrounded by Scientology. and you see these kids that are like 18 maybe and they get on a bus and you can tell they're from like Idaho right and they're in the big city and they're scared and they're in this group and you're just like this is labor trafficking first of all it's labor trafficking and that's the part that I can see that's obvious and now you've got whistleblowers and firsthand accounts and you've surely you have building inspectors and utility inspectors and police officers that go do all these people live here? And it's like, yeah, that can't be legal, but that's not my job.

39:41That's none of my business. Yes, the city of L.A. failed and continues to fail. And it just doesn't make any sense to me at all that these people are allowed to work there and make no money. It's just insane to me that the whole thing even exists. One thing that I think you'll find really interesting, and this is not in the book, even though I was imprisoned, I was also free to go between the buildings. I was taking buses down Hollywood Boulevard at the age of seven. And it was my job to pick up my infant brother from the artist center, the celebrity center, which is a couple of miles away and bring him home.

40:12So I was going back and forth between the buildings a lot. And then some days if I wasn't being made to do labor, because I was doing crazy child labor. Didn't they have you doing literally dangerous specialty HVAC work at like age eight? Yeah. And sometimes I would go off into Griffith Park and I would climb to the Hollywood sign by myself. I would just go to the park to escape and, or Bronson Caves. And inevitably on those days, because I never went to school, I was being warehoused. It happened all the time that cops would see an eight-year-old boy by himself, like at the Bronson Caves or walking up past the Greek theater, and they would pull over and they would say, hey, kid, how come you're not in school?

40:53And I learned a magic word. And if I said this magic word, the cops would get in their car and just drive away and ask no more questions. And that magic word was Scientology. If I just told them I was a kid of Scientology, they would just go away. I guess Scientology, what, had some arrangement. We homeschool all the kids. Their hours are different. Oh, good enough for us. I know. I mean, Scientology had done this thing that Hubbard talks about in his intelligence doctrine called safe pointing. There's all this doctrine that teaches people how to go and make friends with the government so that they will be able to leverage the government if there's an issue over kids or other bureaucratic issues.

41:34So one of the things they do, and they just banned this for the first time in 30 to 40 years, they hire retired or off-duty police officers to be the security at those events. At the end of the year, they have a big celebrity event at the Artist Center across from Birds and La Pubelle and all those restaurants on Franklin called Christmas Stories. All that money, Jordan goes to the Police Activities League and you'd see Danny Masterson and he'd bring in Ashton Kutcher and they would do this cheesy play. And all that money is going to the Police Activities League. So in a lot of ways, the police were bought off.

42:09They're overpaying these guys when they're coming in for overtime. They're hiring retired police officers. So Scientology was deeply in bed with the LAPD and they call this in Scientology safe pointing the authorities. I don't even know how that's legal. Did they allow that? Look, I remember when I used to work security in Detroit, we would hire some off-duty cops and then we could all be strapped with guns. And he was like, hey, I don't see those hand warmers, guys. And we're like, yeah, we're committing felonies. LOL, you're making$30 an hour. That's what it was. It was crazy to me. Well, you know, it's only in the last year and a half with these non-Scientology protesters going crazy all over the world, but also crazy in LA.

42:48There's these non-Scientologist protesters, a couple kids that grew up within it that have been showing up at the LAPD police council meetings, the public works meetings, and giving them this information. For the first time in 30, 40 years, they're no longer allowing off-duty police officers to do security at Scientology events. In the last year and a half, one of the reasons I finally decided to speak out is I felt like we were aging out, Jordan, and our story had never been told. This happened to me as a child of the paramilitary over 40 years on four continents. Sydney, Australia, Southern England, Copenhagen, Denmark, inner city Los Angeles, Central Florida, and then satellite locations like Johannesburg, South Africa, and Mexico City.

43:33A lot of cults are like this, right? And people go, why international? And it's because when you are in the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and you have a lot of money, you can get away with stuff because you can bribe the government just like they're doing in LA. I'm not pointing at Brazil. Obviously, L.A. is thoroughly wrapped up in this, but it's easy to throw money around in a lot of places, including apparently the United States, where we should be better and not allow this. But I digress. Man, I'm telling you, in the book, folks, you talk about cleaning vents with chemicals as a kid because you can fit in there, not being able to read or write, going to public school and get straight F's.

44:06another failure. Like you're in public school, you can't read, you can't write, and you're like 10, and the school goes, guess he's dumb. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, hold on a second. That lasted about six to eight weeks, and then I was sent home. The school sent you home? Well, yeah, the first, Dan S. Elementary sent me home. I was in a class for dumb kids. They sent me home after six weeks in the class for dumb kids because I didn't have underwear. Never went back. Jeez, this is such a failure. And also, they would have noticed, hey, he's not dumb. He's actually very smart. He just can't read or write.

44:35There's a problem here. This is abuse, not a genetic failure. Here's the thing. If a kid shows up without underwear, you don't go, oh, what we're going to do is punish him because who doesn't have underwear? People who are being abused and or are homeless or are so poor, they should be able to get handouts that include underwear or money to get underwear. Sending a kid home is literally the opposite of what you need to do. That's just another failure of the system to notice this problem and address it in any way at all. Yeah. And we had chronic head lice. We would get head lice so bad that our hair would look old and white before they would treat it.

45:11We're talking about animalism. Even when I was a kid in the baby factory, I'm spending the first two and a half years of my life staring up at a ceiling with little to no human touch. There was one lady, and this was a generation after me, But they described as infants that we were kept inside so long that after six months when they would take us out, we were afraid of the sun. Geez. Imagine being afraid of the sun in Los Angeles. And this is all being a mile and a half from the Rampart Police Station, which historically is probably the most corrupt police station in U.S. history, but still. And so the human trafficking laws that would have saved my life didn't come into effect until the early 2000s.

45:54the child trafficking and human trafficking laws. But yeah, child labor. When I'm eight years old, we'd moved into this old hospital. Before it was blue, it was gray. And while it was still gray, they had these air vents that they wanted to clean. And they would put me in this oversized hazmat suit. And I would spend all day with this stuff called navel jelly, which is a highly toxic compound scrubbing out these vents. And at first it was like an adventure. You're going to go in and you're wearing like a space suit and you're going to save the planet. But after doing it for weeks, it became a torture.

46:23And then I would fall asleep in there. You would think it couldn't get worse than that. And then they would kind of leave me alone and I'd be taking care of my brother. And then I would get to be eight and a half. And this is at a time where my mother, she would disappear for years at a time to go train, to be a machine counselor. And then they said, they came over one day to the dormitories and they said, we need you to work on a project over at the main building and bring me up to a higher floor. And I walk in and I see something I've never seen before. I see all these rooms stripped down to the studs in the old hospital.

46:53And I see this kind of brown paper. And under the brown paper, there's tufts of stuff that looks like cotton candy. And they give me kitchen gloves. And they tell me that I'm going to be putting the cotton candy, what's called fiberglass, with just kitchen gloves and not even a mask into large industrial trash bags. And there were hundreds of these by the time we were done. And I would fill them up all day. By the time I was done, I quickly realized that I would have fiberglass in my mouth, my throat, and all over my eight-year-old body. And at that point, there were five of us living in like a tiny 100-square-foot studio apartment.

47:33My little brother and my stepfather, my mother slept on the bed. My older brother slept in the kitchen, or the kitchenette. It wasn't even a kitchen. And then I slept on the floor. There were so many roaches that every night that we slept in that room, I was out of the dorms for a little bit because they wanted me to take care of my little brother. I slept on a cushion and I would pull my shirt over my mouth so that cockroaches wouldn't crawl in my mouth. That's the level that we're talking about. But my parents wouldn't come home until 10 or 11. So I would do these scalding hot baths every night that I would come home from the fiberglass work.

48:06And then my pores would open up and the fiberglass would float out. And then I would go back and do it all again the next day. This is so hazardous. It's so crazy that this was allowed to happen. Oh, gosh, really disgusting. Now, part of the allure for people of Scientology is that there's all these celebrities involved. So did you at some point have a feeling like this Scientology stuff weren't true? All these famous, amazing celebrity people, they wouldn't be here. You got like Giovanni Ribisi or whatever and Tom Cruz in there. And, you know, what a Danny Masterson is now in prison forever. You've got these people there and for life, literally.

48:39Yeah. For all the things you did. Like you have these people in there and surely there's like the patina of legitimacy or like these people are smart. These people are successful. Surely they're seeing something that we're benefiting from. Is that in your mind at all? Or are you just like, whatever, let me get through another day of fiberglass removal because I'm eight and a half years old. First of all, they were very proud when I was a kid of John Travolta. One of the only movies my mother ever took me to when I was a kid was Saturday Night Fever. We walked from the Blue Building all the way to Hollywood Boulevard so that we could see this film.

49:11So with John Travolta. So I met Giovanni Ribisi for the first time before he was famous when I was 16 years old. But one of the things I'm most embarrassed about when you look back, it's funny what you're embarrassed and humiliated about. I had a hard time writing about this, was wearing full military whites in central Florida in like a resort town. When I think back on the at 19, but when I was there, That's where their most elite people go. It's called the Flag Land Base. And it's all in this hotel, this beautifully restored hotel called the Fort Harrison. And there, all the celebrities and successful people, most successful people in Scientology are coming from around the world.

49:48Tom Cruise has a condo there. I'm meeting famous artists, Gottfried Heldwein. I meet Chikoria, his manager, college professors, physicists, lawyers, academics, like from all over the world. And for sure, and I'm 18 years old. And for sure, Jordan, I was starting to feel like a slave. I was starting to have concepts. I didn't even know what a slave was because I'd never been educated and I couldn't write. I could read at a decent level just from studying the doctrine. But I started to have this concept of being controlled. And then every time I would meet some famous person, I met John Travolta when I was 18 or 19 for the first time.

50:23And he was nice. And you'd meet these really rich and successful people in every kind of like, again, academics, economics lawyers doctors and you'd say fried helen wine even neil gaiman's father neil wasn't neil gaiman yet i met him when i was 19 he was this incredibly impressive guy people don't know this neil gaiman's father not only was confidant of hubbard international spokesperson for scientology but ran uh scientology secret police for a period of time crazy that that even exists the secret police man i gotta ask about the celebrity thing because why do you think those people were even there?

50:58I mean, now that you know Scientology is 100 % bullshit and a cult that's, you know, authoritarian control cult, why are these people in it? What do they need from it? Tony Ortega talks about this, and I think he has it right. Up until two years ago, when I decided to write this thing, I've been living a double life, disconnected from myself, literally. And so I've been thinking a lot about that the last few months as the books come out, and I get all these notes. But Tony has said this, and I think he's right about this. This guy that writes a lot about Scientology. He's got a blog. It's all about you.

51:28You do this stuff called this machine counseling. Freud used it. Freud called it ab reaction therapy. It's similar to EMDR, which is evidence-backed, where you relive all the painful moments of your life to take away the emotional distress it's causing you. So there's something to that. And you do it with this machine. But how the machines works, they're lying to you in terms of what it does. Once you believe in the machine, they own you. But I think that it's all focused on you. The courses are all you. There's a very narcissistic, it's a you-based group. It is not a community group. You're getting rid of all of your past pain.

52:02The goal here with the Scientology ladder to do all the Scientology levels, okay? And a lot of these celebrities, Tom Cruise is level eight, the highest level you can do in Scientology. So is Greta Van Susteren. So is Judy Norton Taylor, who was the girl, Mary Ellen from the Waltons. And there's John Trollgel, I think he's gone to level five. Kelly Preston before she died was level eight. Kirstie Alley was level eight. But what you're trying to do is get rid of all these moments of past pain. And then you do this at a more and more kind of cosmology level. There's all these secret levels, but the only five or 3 % of Scientologists end up because it costs hundreds of thousands, if not a million bucks to do.

52:40And so very few people get to the secret levels where it gets really into this odd cosmology sci-fi. But you're trying to get rid of all this pain so that you could permanently get rid of your body and be returned to your godlike state. And it's all you based. Right. So that appeals to people whose lives revolve around their image and themselves. Yeah. And if you go to Celebrity Center, the way that Scientology caters to celebrities, Jordan, is like a level of... I've been on a lot of movie sets. I have friends that are famous actors that have nothing to do with Scientology. So I've been around that world.

53:13And I've seen the way that actors get treated on film sets, which is very nice. They They get paid a lot of money. But compared to how you as a famous actor would be treated at Scientology's Artist Center, like with Will Smith and Jada Smith, there's a secret celebrity parking lot, so they never have to see people. When you go to the parking lot below the building at the Celebrity Center or the Artist Center, there's a thing that's covered and you press another button if you're Will Smith, and then you go to a secret parking lot where you can go up a private tunnel to the president's office where you get your counseling in secret.

53:45Yeah, I've seen that entrance because there's all these weird security guys. And, you know, as a guy who used to work security in his 20s, I always make small talk with security guys because I'm like, what's going on? How's your day? It's really hot out here. The security guys at normal places like a bank, they'll be like, yeah, you know, one of those days because they're retired cops or something. The Scientology security guys are weird as shit, dude, especially at the celebrity center. And I quickly was like, this isn't a real security guy. This is like a cheap uniform. This guy's not in good shape.

54:13This isn't a retired cop. He's just like a schlep. And I don't know. You tell me. I suspect that they're just recruits like anyone else who are recruited from like Slovenia to come move to the big city in America. And they're like, your job is to stand outside for 11 hours a day in the sun wearing this vest. And they're like, OK, they're not on it. They're not vigilant. They don't have the security look. I can tell it's fake. So it's a mix like the internal security people that are part of the C group, the religious paramilitary group. They're very much like that. They're trained in Scientology security and they ride bikes.

54:45They don't look like or feel like security guards. They feel like a robot force. But when you go over to the Celebrity Center, the Artist Center, there's a lot of famous people. You got Isaac Hayes walking around. There's a lot of celebrities walking from Jeffrey Tambor, Will Smith, Beck, Jason Lee, who's now left. Oh, man, Jeffrey Tambor is a Scientologist. No, he's out now. He's out now. But he was in. But yeah, my mother was Jeffrey Tambor's counselor. I'm surprised they can leave because isn't the whole thing like, hey, don't leave. Maybe we'll blackmail you. Yeah. That's probably a huge part of what's happening with Cruz and Travolta.

55:16It's both. It's all about you. Plus, we have this shit on you. I'll tell you a crazy story that I've never told. Somebody very close to me, my close to me's kid was, there's a secret Scientology secret. There's a Scientology Hogwarts school in rural Oregon, about two hours from Portland, and it's called Sheraton, where rich Scientologists send their kids, called the Delphian school. And it's posh. And I have somebody close to me that his kid was going there in high school. And he started a relationship with Bella Cruz, Tom Cruz's kid. So they were in a relationship for a year or two. And that kid came over to my house one day.

55:55He said he was near my house when I was living at the Talmud near downtown LA and said he had his girlfriend with him. And I was talking to them in my living room for probably 20 minutes before I realized it was Tom Cruz's kid. And she told me some of the craziest stuff, which you should ask me about. But one day they were at the Celebrity Center and the Artist Center. They have retired cops there. And they just look, they're like hunched over, but they're packing heat. And a guy comes into the parking lot. And my friend's kid is with his girlfriend, Bella Cruz. And a guy starts approaching the cafe, which is what you walk into before you go into the entrance, with two katanas.

56:30All right. There's a guy who looks like an old man who's like slunched over, but really he's there to protect Bella. So he sees that this guy is walking and isn't stopping. So he walks closer to the guy because the guy's still in the parking lot. and now he's obscured. Like my friend and Bella can't see the guy, but they can still see the guy in the suit, the bad, crappy suit. And he yells to the guy, stop. Then he pulls out a gun and stop. Or I'll stop you. I'm paraphrasing. Shoots and kills the guy. Oh my God. Yeah. You know, it's Hollywood. It's still Hollywood. You're still, when you're at that place, only a few blocks from Hollywood Boulevard.

57:06What year was this? Early aughts. Okay, so I wasn't in LA yet. Tell me what Bella told you, if you think it's interesting enough for the show. You said, ask me about this. At that point, I had a foot in and a foot out. I was looking at all the blogs. I was looking at Anonymous, but I was trying to hold on to my friends and my family because I know if I say that I have doubts, if I say I'm against it, that I'm going to lose everyone I've ever known. So you find this middle ground where you're part of it, but you're not part of it. So I'm all over these anti-scientology sites. My mind is reeling, and I'm trying to be in this middle ground that's impossible to be in for very long.

57:41and one of the things that I read on one of these blogs was that they'd estranged Bella, and I've never talked about this publicly. When they expel you from Scientology, a yellow piece of paper comes out on goldenrod paper that calls you a suppressive person, like you're evil to like Charles Manson or Hitler. The minute Scientology sees your name on a paper like that, they literally believe they would see you as a Hitler character. Not, oh, we have to treat him like a Hitler character. No, that's how powerful the goldenrod is. They believe it, and they could have loved you the day before. And I'd read about this on blogs and I didn't believe it.

58:41It was one of the things that kept me in. So, imagine being told at age five that your childhood doesn't matter because you've lived past lives as an alien god. Cool. Totally healthy. We'll come back to that existential nightmare in just a moment. First, let's hear from folks who haven't built re-education camps. Probably. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Bull and Branch. We spend about a third of our lives in bed, which is kind of wild, so why are many of us sleeping on sheets that look like they've been through, I don't know, three breakups and a move? And here's the truth.

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1:00:20Therapy is like having someone help you sort the junk drawer in your brain. This belongs here, this doesn't, and wow, why have you been hanging on to that for so long? I've been untangling a few things on my own lately. Nothing dramatic, just the usual human stuff. And I'm not going to air out the old laundry here, but sticking with BetterHelp has helped me see patterns I never would have noticed on my own. That outside unbiased view is incredibly grounding. What I love is how simple they make the whole process. You answer a few quick questions, they match you with a licensed U.S. therapist using more than 12 years of matching experience, and you can switch anytime, no awkwardness.

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1:01:58We've done your homework. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email us. We're happy to surface that stuff for you. Yes, it's that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Jamie Mustard.

1:02:29you said there's a happy ending there's so much more in the book of course it's a long book but i'm going to skip ahead to the happy ending because at some point you end up at the london school of economics which is pretty unbelievable how did that even happen what would possess you jamie to apply to the london school of economics that's like being like hey now that i can read at fourth grade level i'm thinking about going to harvard like what yeah it was like that it was Kind of an impossible situation. At 19, I'm starting to really feel like a slave. I'm in Clearwater, Florida. I've been trafficked for punishments in the engine room of the Freewinds, where I'm forced to clean the bilge.

1:03:05And you can't clean a bilge. It's a Sisyphean task. It's a form of punishment. I'd end up in the infirmary with heat prostration. And I vow if they ever send me here for punishment again, I'm going to escape. Because I'm flying into Aruba the first time they send me there for punishment, where I'm weeks in the engine room. And everybody else is in Aruba mode. They're partying. And I know I'm about to be put through a physical labor gauntlet, being yelled and screamed at of almost torture in an injured room that's 110 degrees. And so I said, if they're ever going to send me back here again, I'm going to escape.

1:03:33I'm leaving. I'm not coming back here again. I felt like a slave. And so when they told me I was going back six months later, it's a very harrowing escape. Throw all my belongings at a sack. I'm pretending to do laundry. I had to switch cabs five times. I had to wait four days before I went to the airport because they'd be waiting for me there. This is like being a fugitive from the federal marshals or something like that. They've got people at the airport. They got people at all the bus stations. I mean, this is crazy. Yeah. I have a relative that had said to me when I was 16 that if I ever wanted to deal with my illiteracy, that I could come live with her, but I would have to be dealing with my illiteracy.

1:04:07And I could stay there as long as I wanted, even do more education as long as I was in school. It could be beauty school. You could be a plumber. You get free rent, a car, an allowance, and health insurance if you ever want to come here if you decide to deal with your illiteracy. To be illiterate at 16 years old, we moved to Oregon for two years, and I would sit at the back of these classes at South Eugene High School, unable to write, unable to do basic math. And it was just humiliating. So when we went back to the movement when I was 16, we moved there when I was 13. It was about two and a half years.

1:04:36We moved back when I'm 16. This relative flies me to New York and says, you can stay here under these conditions. It's hard to describe what adult literacy is like, Jordan. It's a weird place to live. But I could read, but I just couldn't write. So I said no, and I went. I'm escaping at 19. I call this relative after the escape from a hotel room where I've switched cabs five times. And I said, does the offer still stand? And she says, yes. And I said, send me a ticket. You can leave tomorrow. And I said, no, no, no, four days from now. I go to New York and I start doing remedial classes at a community college, learning to write, learning to do basic five-year-old math.

1:05:10It's brutal. I do that for a year and I go to a small private liberal arts school in Westchester County, New York. that's taking inner city kids without transcripts or any educational pass. They'll let you in. My relative hears this story. She's like, you should try because they're taking kids without pass. They'll take anyone. And you are anyone, my friend. So I get into a normal college through this back door. And I meet a girl within the first three weeks. And she sees that I can barely write. Right. At least she had your priorities straight. First thing I did was get a girlfriend. And she's like, you're not going to survive here.

1:05:42What she starts doing is for a year, she's rewriting my papers. And then six months into doing that, she's like, okay, you're going to write them and I'm going to correct. That's better. That's a better system. Yeah. So we go through this process. And then while I'm there, the only thing I'm ever good at, and I find this out at the community college is when I go into these like basic economics classes, it was really strange. I would go into these classes. I felt like someone that could just play the piano. I understood the charts. It was the first time in my life I ever just understood something.

1:06:12And my economics teacher comes to me, who's also the provost, the vice president of the college and the chairman of the economics department. And he says, James, you're getting 80 % on your economics exams. And I believe you have a little bit of a literacy problem. And I was like, where's he going with this? You probably should be getting 100, but you can't read all of the things on the test. And that might be an issue. So then he says to me, you can come to the castle. They had a castle as their administrative building to my office. and why don't you give me the tests verbally and see if your scores go up.

1:06:45That's interesting. When he said that to me, Jordan, I literally thought he was gay. Oh, no. I mean, he's married with kids. I think this guy is going to ask me to like go down on him. Oh, God. That's how worthless I felt. That's terrible. So this kid tells me about the London School of Economics. I applied to the special program at Georgetown. I applied to the London School of Economics. It was like a wing and a prayer. This girlfriend helped me prop up my GPA. And I got in this back tour just for a year-long program, I'm at the London School of Economics, which in Europe is equivalent to Harvard or Yale.

1:07:12And I'm there six weeks and I'm sitting in front of every class. There's no way I'm going to get through this place. And I'm taking furious notes. I'm religious about it because I'm going to do whatever I have to do to survive. This professor, Gareth Austin, who's not at Cambridge, he thinks that I'm just really in a rare American that's really interested in what he's doing. So he comes up to me about six weeks in. And he's like, listen, if you had somebody sponsor you and you were willing to transfer to the economic history department, you could be under academic probation and you could get in here.

1:07:43You could finish your education here. And I said to him, I have no one to do that. Maybe you don't understand. I grew up in a cult. I didn't have underwear, let alone a recommendation from a professor. Yeah. And they were stalking me in London. When I was in London, they sent me a bill for$90 ,000 for all of the courses that I did growing up. Oh, Scientology, not London School. I was like, London School of Economics sent you a bill for 90 grand? And that's even more expensive than I thought. Scientology faxed to the dorm a bill for$90 ,000 for all the courses I did growing up because I was a freeloader.

1:08:15My child labor didn't matter. So they're stalking me in London. And this guy says, hey, you can be on this academic probation. If you get a B-plus average, you can actually be at the London School of Economics. But in order to do that, you have to drop all these math classes that I was going to fail, econometrics and statistics. And I first thought, like, who would do that for me? He's like, I'm the chairman of the economic history department. I'm offering it to you because he thought I was interested. I wasn't interested, Jordan. I was desperate. There's a difference, but that's not your one with that.

1:08:45OK. And somehow, I don't know how I did it, but it was qualitative economics. You must have had serious imposter syndrome, like they're going to figure out I don't belong here. And for the first six to eight weeks when I'm walking to school every day, and this is literal, I'm like, when I get there today, there's going to be butlers or chaperones or some sort of. officials waiting for me at the university saying there was a mistake on the form and that I was going home. It was terrifying. When I was 19, a year and a half before I went to LSE, taking these remedial classes, I got there and five and a half years later, I graduate from Long School of Economics.

1:09:21Unbelievable. Not bad for a kid who couldn't read or write a few years beforehand. But I remember my grandmother coming in while I'm doing these remedial classes at Westchester Community College. This is the relative that gave me the opportunity. And she says, what's going on? I was like, I can't figure this comma thing out. You're not alone. Yeah. And he sits there for 45 minutes trying to explain a comma to me. And I was like, that's insane. I'll never do that. So the fact that I do what I do now, I mean, come April when I have one more graphic novel, I have one coming out this week, I have a graphic novel coming out in April.

1:09:49It'll be six books. That's incredible. Jamie, though, call me when you can use a semicolon, then I'm going to be impressed. Yeah. So one of the things that helped me at the London School of Economics is that I'm there. That school represents more countries than the United Nations. Yeah, it's really impressive. Really incredible. And then when you do your exams, someone outside of your department is grading your test. They don't know who you are. So they probably thought that my writing issue was because I was a kid from Beijing or Kuala Wampur. So there's lots of kids that probably are writing English in weird ways.

1:10:19So I think that helped me. Yeah, they're like, his writing is terrible. Is it as bad as the guy from North Korea? Nah, it's about the same. All right, fine. We'll figure this out. But I knew this stuff in that two years before I went. The application for this program at Georgetown and the London School of Economics, I thought for sure I was never going to get in, even though these people were rallying around me and encouraging me. I'm spending weeks applying for something and getting letters and all this stuff for something that is not going to go my way. So I'm basically gearing up to fail. I had a nervous breakdown when the applications went in because I was just like shoving my head in my own failure.

1:10:56And I ended up leaving the dorms and sleeping for 48 hours straight at my grandmother's house because I was trying to do something where I could never do it. So when I got into those places, even temporarily, I was shocked. In order to catch up, I would study for 15 hours a day and that would last a year. I literally feel like to this day, I have physiological problems in my body from this period of austerity studying in London because I would have to study 10 times. Yeah, I know the feeling. That's like law school. Look at all these smart kids and they study three hours a day. And I'm like, I did less in the 18 hour study day.

1:11:32And it's just you have to outwork everyone if you're not smarter than everyone. That's just how it works. Luckily, you had a bunch of years of cleaning fiberglass and vents with navel jelly or whatever it is. So nothing was going to be quite that bad, even some economics exams. But tell us about the fancy party you went to. I think this is a really good cap in the book. It's quite an illustration of how far you'd come. One of the big mistakes I made was not staying in New York. I get back from London. I decided to go back to L.A. to try to connect with my mother, who never gave crap about me. I mean, she'd throw me away like used toilet paper from the day I was born.

1:12:05That never changed. She always treated me like that. Unless I was doing something in Scientology that she liked, then there would be this like little carrot of crumb of validation. But I go back to L.A. and I get a job working for a documentary film company. And they're sending me to Cannes. They're not paying me a lot, but they're sending me to Cannes. And so two years after I graduate college, maybe a year, six years after escaping the movement, I'm walking down the street in Cannes working for this documentary film company. And this beautiful woman walks up to me and starts yelling at me in French.

1:12:35I must have been swearing or something. I mean, I'm the ugly American. I did something American she didn't like is what's going through my head. And eventually she starts going English, English. And she says, I know you. I said, lady, you don't know me. I'm here on work and there's no way we could possibly know each other. Wait, wait, wait. She's racking her brain. And then finally, she says, do you go to the London School of Economics? And then we go for a coffee. And then that night, she calls me at my hotel and she says, can you come to a party tomorrow? My mother is having a party and you're going to need a tuxedo.

1:13:01And I said, I have a black suit. She says, I won't do you need a tuxedo, but come here and we'll just figure it out. I get there at 10 o 'clock in the morning in Monaco, where the party is. She picks me up in a huge, shitty car and drives me to one of three houses in all of Monaco, because Monaco is all apartments. There's the palace and then one of these two houses. Her mother is a direct descendant of Napoleon, is the imperial princess of France. And they're having a party that night for French lifestyles of the rich and famous. Okay. And the Portuguese maid drives me, who doesn't speak English, drives me in another crappy car to town where I get fitted for a tuxedo that I walk out with.

1:13:40The house has got 40-foot frescoes and they're all preparing for this party. And then people live in the bottom of the house. and I put on my tux pants and I realized that everything fits perfectly. It's a perfect fit, except the guy didn't hem the pants and I'm panicking. I'm panicking. And this very beautiful older woman sees me in this like panic and I'm half dressed and all these musicians are getting dressed for the party. You have underwear at this point in your life, correct? Yeah, I've got underwear. Finally. Yeah. And I've got underwear. She's probably 50 and she starts tugging at my pants.

1:14:09And then I realized that she's offering to hem my pants. Okay. So I take my pants off. I've got underwear. And she goes away. And 15, 20 minutes later, this woman walks back. She kind of measures. And my pants are perfectly hemmed. We go up to the party, which is a series of 30, 40 tables. And there's a stage with this massive living room with 40-foot paintings. Everybody's in tuxes. Princess Stephanie, I think is her name. She's there. And the Imperial Princess of France, my friend's mom, Deborah, or what was her name? Deborah Noyon. She went to Juilliard. She comes out and plays this classical opening thing in piano.

1:14:44And then she invites the next musician on who she says flew in from Spain. I see. And there's a seven foot harp and the woman walks out to the harp and it's the woman that hemmed my pants. And she looks at me like I'm like three tables back. She looks at me, smiles and winks and then starts to play. Wow. That's the real, true incredibleness of my life is growing up in Mexican neighborhoods, worst kind of poverty you can imagine. And then all of a sudden I'm with the richest people in the world. And that's what's made my life kind of incredible. In writing a book, I thought my life was boring, but for the first time when I finished it, I was like, this is crazy because the stuff that I do now, I didn't even aspire to do.

1:15:28People thought I was ambitious. When I got in the London School of Economics, I remember being in my grandmother's living room. We got the second year in and I did not believe it. And we're sitting in her foyer, like right downstairs from her living room. Even at that point, she's confused. And she says, how are you doing this? And what I'm thinking is I'm f***ing desperate. Desperation. There's this anecdote in your book where a Frenchman at the party leans over and whispers, I envy you because you possess yourself. What do you think he meant by that? I think because I had grown up in this weird bubble.

1:16:06Maybe I was brave in the sense that I was always terrified and numb. I've had all these physical things happen to me that we haven't gotten to. But I was the kind of person that I would just throw myself into something, even if I thought I was going to feel like I almost had a nervous breakdown applying to a higher education. And when you grow up in L.A. in a sci-fi cult and you're around gang members, I'm dealing with gang members, I'm dealing with drug addicts, I'm dealing with the Armenian kids. There's all this kind of inner city stuff that I'm dealing with. My brother was involved with gangs when I was 10 or 11.

1:16:40And this gang from South Central, this kid he was involved with, threatens to shoot up where we're staying. We're staying with my stepfather in a tenement house across from the big blue building. And we had to spend two weeks sleeping on the floor of my mother's counseling room inside Scientology because this gang member was a credible threat against our lives. So when you grow up around that, and then you're also dealing with all the top celebrities in Scientology in Central Florida, and you're sent to Copenhagen, and you're living for a year in Southern England. But my first day in Southern England, I meet Woody Woodmansey, David Bowie's drummer from Spiders from Mars.

1:17:17So I had this kind of feeling of just being comfortable with every kind of person, because I'd just been around every kind of person. And I think that I had a sense of just carefreeness about people. I wasn't intimidated. The guy was an investment banker. He'd pulled up in a Lamborghini and I was situated next to him on purpose. He looked like James Bond. He was early 30s, rich, and was around a lot of people that had all just been bred for that and all acted a certain way. And he's seeing this guy that really doesn't fit into this environment, but he's dressed like him. and I'm telling stories.

1:17:55You know, they're asking me like, I'm from Hollywood, which everyone at the table is infatuated with. Well, I'm not from that part of Hollywood. And I think that I was just this exotic guy to him that was comfortable in this environment where there just wasn't anyone else like me. I mean, it was a very strange thing because I don't think I was that self-possessed, but I think I've always come across that way to people. Maybe I am brave. And if I am brave, it's because I've spent most of my life terrified and numb and I've tried anyway. You wrote, only when we can use our abilities in a theater big enough that we think we might drown in it do we find out who we really are.

1:18:31Tell me what you mean by that. I mean, it's emotional to hear it. When you read this thing, I had endured impossible pain. My friends, there was a kid who took his own life because he was listed in that red brick building and then he wanted to molest kids and he'd gotten married and had kids And I love that kid. And he couldn't live with the fact that he had the urge to do that. He didn't want to bring shame to his wife and his children. And he took his own life. And there's so many stories like that. I had been learning about my history. My grandparents, my mom, my grandmother, my grandparents were freed slaves.

1:19:09And they'd accomplished all these incredible things in America from 1865 to 1940, 75 years. My grandfather was a physician and a Tuskegee Airman. and my great-grandfather was a doctor in a black town where Alex Haley grew up. And I'm learning about this larger world that I didn't even know I was connected to. And I realized there was something bigger than me that I was plugging into. And it just made me want to try and do the impossible. I have a kid's book coming out on an imprint of Penguin Random House. Jeez, man, you have been busy. This is like the third, fourth book you're mentioning on the show.

1:19:43It'll be six books by April, but... Take a vacation already. Yeah, this book comes out at the end of fall of 2026, but it called a kid's book about the impossible, about how I did it. And I think that I just endured so much pain and I was so numb that I had made this equation in my head that illiteracy and poverty mean pain. So affluence and means and education must mean joy. I was wrong. But I just felt that the only way we grow in life, the only way we get bigger, the only way we get stronger, and again, I wasn't doing this intellectually. This is me looking back, is if we push ourselves to do things that we know we can't do.

1:20:26Not we don't wonder if we can do it, that we know we can't do it. And we try anyway. And if we do that a hundred times and a thousand times, and when we fail, we try different techniques because you're going to go backwards a lot. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. The definition that Einstein talked about failure being trying a thousand times or Edison trying a thousand times and still doing it again. What's the difference between that and insanity? In the case of Einstein, in the case of Edison, they're doing things differently. Every time they do something, they change it a little bit.

1:21:05And then they change it a little bit. So insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. Genius is doing something a different way over and over again until you get a different result. So I was willing to make a step, get punched in the face, slammed on the ground, go back five feet, get up and go another inch. And then go back again. But then three years later, I go forward six feet. Because I endured so much pain, if there's one thing I was good at, that was very painful, is I can endure pain like no one you've ever met. I can endure it. I can steal myself. I just think that if you are willing to slide back a lot and then try it slightly differently to the point where you're 10 years in and you know you're going to fail, but you change it just a little bit because you're analyzing and you're curious.

1:21:56you can do impossible things. Man, I know I'm dating myself with what I'm about to say, but you've come a long way, baby. Remember that slogan? Remember those billboards? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's surreal. You know, it's surreal and it doesn't feel like a victory. It feels there's a lot of survivor's guilt. People act like it's in my past. Like it's this thing that I conquered that's 40 years ago, but really Jordan, it's not in my past. This happened to thousands of kids on four continents over 40 years, and we're all aging out. And this is the story of the kids of the religious paramilitary.

1:22:31And even with Going Clear, and even with what Leah showed, Leah Remini, the story of the lost children of Scientology has never been told. And I really do believe if people knew what happened to us in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, what happened to us kids in that environment, they would stop it. I feel like Even if you looked at what just happened in Gaza, it was just too many dead kids that all these people that would never speak out against Israel, and I want to get to the politics of it, started speaking out against it. Why? Too many dead kids. It's like a tolerance for the suffering. There's a line for the suffering of children.

1:23:04And I felt that our story being hidden, the lost children of Scientology's paramilitary, these thousands of kids, they have autoimmune disease. They're all doing construction. Most of them, some of the more successful ones get lucky because they become contractors. But if people knew it would happen to us, the story, which is the story that I wrote, that people would stop. It would be the end. Is your mom still in the cult? Do you have any hope that you'll see her again? Or is it too little too late? No, I mean, my mother's still in the cult. You know, and this is what I'm talking about when it's still happening to me.

1:23:36You know, two to three months ago, there was a major story on me in the Daily Mail. They told me they were just going to do an excerpt of the book. Well, a couple weeks before the story was going to come out, the story ended up getting pushed over and over again. They said, we reached out to Scientology in England to see if they wanted to comment. What we got back was a declaration from your mother. One of the things that's incredible about that story is Scientology Secret Police was effective with whatever they responded with. The Daily Mail, they ended up only releasing the story in the United States and not Great Britain or Commonwealth countries.

1:24:04They have different libel laws in the UK where you can say someone libel slandered you and they're screwed. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the weirdest moments before the book came out was the Daily Mail contacting me and saying, we sent Scientology locally in England. We asked them if they wanted to respond to your allegations. And my response to them was like, what are you talking about? I'm not making any allegations. I said what happened to me. And like, so I thought it was weird the way they phrased it because I didn't think they were allegations. They said, we want to include their responses in the article.

1:24:31And I said, well, I think that's a good idea. I know what happened to me. OK. Too many kids around to corroborate it. Yeah, they're just going to say that you're delusional and made all the things up. Yeah. So here's one of the incredible things that was in my mother's declaration. Okay. I talk about in the book signing a billionaire contract when I'm five. That's one of my allegations. It's my story. My mother comes back and says, and this is all the denials are like this in that Daily Mail article. It's incredible. That's not true. I was there and he was seven and it was adorable. So he did sign the contract, except he got the year wrong and we all thought it was cute.

1:25:06Well, she saw me sign a contract when I was seven, not five for a billion years. I still believed in the Easter Bunny and the Sandman, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. This denial was not run by a PR expert. Hey, you might want to refute the core thing. No, we'll just change the number around. And that's not very persuasive. Yeah. So when you read Scientology's denials in that article, so they're still doing this to me. They're still doing psychological operations on me now. Scientology does not turn the other cheek. I don't know how much you know about that, but they have an intelligence wing.

1:25:35And anybody that goes against Scientology, they write a program to destroy your life. Leah, me, whoever you are. Yeah, that's really crazy. We've definitely gotten letters from them before, like, hey, these are untrue. And I'm like, well, I'll take it up with them. This is a media outlet. I read the book. We're not adjudicating that. And then they're like, take the episode down. No, I'm not going to do that. But if you really want to sue me, we can go to Discovery and I've got a list of documents I would love to subpoena from Scientology. Yeah, they will never allow Discovery in what happened to me or these other kids.

1:26:04No, it's, hey, if you really want to take this to the mat, then yeah, I don't want to do that, but sure, let's do Discovery. I bet I could find somebody to help me with that. Oh, wait, you want us to provide documentation now? Yeah, I'm going to get Jamie Mustard out there. I'm going to get Leah Remini out there. I got a couple other people that, if they ever do this, you got to call me the day that happens. And so I don't think that they're really interested in that. I think they're interested in scaring these stories away, which I can understand. Jordan, what they admit to in their denials in the Daily Mail article, is terrifying.

1:26:31It's an incredible thing. And it's a hard thing. I mean, I don't want to say that I'm afraid, but do I want to live my life? Whatever their plots are against me, whatever they're doing against me, they've contacted my brother and my mother who are still in, that they have said things to my family. My family's called me and is messing with me. They've called people that know me. They're messing with me. I feel like it's psychological operations. You know what? If what you were doing wasn't true and if what you were doing wasn't actually damaging them, they would just be ignoring you. So I think that signals that you are actually you have a win on your hands.

1:27:02The reason I never spoke out is what I write about that happened to me, it's humiliating. I don't want anyone to know any of the things that we've talked about today. I don't want people to know that I was standing in Florida at 19 wearing naval uniform and that was walking around Los Angeles like that. It's completely embarrassing to me. I'm released it now. Since the books come out, I'm starting for the first time in my life to be shame free. I've placed it where it belongs. Good for you, man. Child X by Jamie Mustard. There's a lot more where that came from, man. We skipped a lot of stories.

1:27:33I mean, we just didn't have time. We didn't have nine hours. I really appreciate you coming on the show. I really appreciate your vulnerability and you're a great storyteller. Thank you for your time and for coming on and being so open about everything. I think that's very admirable. I really appreciate you giving me the platform and the opportunity to tell this story that's never been told of the lost kids of the religious paramilitary of Scientology. That story needs to see the sunlight. You're an incredible interviewer. I can't believe everything we got through going. I really appreciate you going long.

1:28:01I'm going to have to go sleep for five hours after this. That's a high praise. I need a nap. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was a marathon. And I'm just really grateful to you, not just for the platform. And I'm grateful to you because that was a one hell of a exchange that you and I just had. I agree. And I really enjoyed it, man. Thank you. You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with actress and former Scientologist Leah Remini. there's a special department in the Scientology organization their sole job is to go after those speaking out against Scientology that's all they do day in day out one of the directives says by L.

1:28:39Ron Hubbard says find out what the person is seeking to protect and go after it and I'm quoting now if at all possible utterly destroy when you want to talk about oh it's like any other religion you need to get your head out of your fucking ass and really understand what the difference is between having faith and having an organization that has a price list and has an organization dedicated solely for the utter destruction of people who leave. Scientology's goal is to make 80 % of the planet Scientologists. Without Scientology, there's no hope for man. And that That is the extremist attitude of every Scientologist on the planet.

1:29:24The leader's wife has been missing for like years now. What do you think happened to her? Where is she? I don't know that Shelley's alive. I don't know where Shelley is. This is David Miscavige, the leader of Scientology, chairman of the board. This is Tom Cruise's best friend. Jordan, if you had a best friend that you knew had a wife that was with him all the time, wouldn't you say, bro, I haven't seen your wife? Like, I need to see her. I'm starting to worry that she's in a freezer somewhere. No one's done that. I have been the only person that has ever inquired about Shelley Miscavige. To learn more about the dangers of the cult of Scientology from Leah Remini herself, check out episode 485 on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:30:05Jamie's story is incredible. From a kid who couldn't read or write, who was told his childhood didn't matter, who signed nothing, yet owed everything, to graduating from the London School of Economics, standing in rooms with princes and billionaires and finally possessing himself. That's not just beating the odds. That's flipping them off on the way out. So congrats to Jamie for being able to do that. And for those of you listening, Jamie's new graphic novel, Hybrid, just came out. It is a sci-fi companion piece to Child X, which is the story you heard today. And it tells the story through a whole different lens.

1:30:35We'll link to that in the show notes if you want to go deeper. And remember, no guru, no ideology, no organization should ever ask you to give up your humanity, especially not your kids. All things Jamie Mustard will be on the website. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all on that website as well at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, is very practical, a fun read, two minutes a week. It'll affect your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

1:31:07It's a great companion to the show. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6minutenetworking.com. I am at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Tata Sadlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

1:31:39If you know somebody who's interested in cults, in redemption stories, in beating the odds, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.