Speaker 1: It's great to welcome back to the program today.
Mike Rinder, former senior executive of the Church of Scientology and the C organization,
also author of the new book A Billion Years My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks
of Scientology.
Mike, great to have you on again, as always.
Speaker 5: Thanks, David.
It's wonderful to be back.
Speaker 1: So, I mean, in the interests of treading some new ground right up front since
the last time you've been here, you know, a lot of things have happened in the world
that don't relate directly to Scientology.
I think there's this feeling among some that the Church of Scientology right now is somewhat
diminished, both in notoriety and maybe in strength, because it's not really in the news
as much as it once was.
Is that a fair assessment or do you disagree with that?
Speaker 5: Oh, no, I think that's a very fair assessment, David.
I think that Scientology has been dwindling as to its overall numbers and its influence,
primarily due to the Internet, also due to a lot of media coverage.
You know, information is the enemy of high control organizations and groups and cults,
and information is available to anybody that has a computer or a phone and can Google.
And, you know, these days, nobody buys a pair of shoes without Googling.
These are the best ones.
Yeah.
So it's very difficult for Scientology to.
Get new people in.
And so.
Their numbers are diminishing, but I wouldn't say that that is diminishing their revenues
yet, because what happens is you get organizations that are, you know, in a bubble of us versus
them mentality.
When the walls start closing in, the people inside feel more desperate that they have
to do more, give more money, but like become more active and involved in order to save
their particular cult from extinction.
So probably Scientology is still raking in, you know, millions and millions a week, but
that is an unsustainable model because eventually those people run dry and you have to have
new people coming in and that is not happening.
And, you know, you add to that the problems that have come up.
You know, there's been this political race for the mayor's office in Los Angeles, which
is turned into a mudslinging contest on who can spit on Scientology.
The biggest and the Danny Masterson trial now started.
A lot of things are looking pretty dark in the world of Scientology right about now.
Speaker 1: In terms of the numbers, you know, I in Lawrence Wright's book Going Clear, Wright
writes that internal claims often allude to millions of members.
I've read numbers as small as 30,000 globally, which which I don't even know.
It sounds very low, but maybe it is that low.
What's your sense of the membership at this point?
Speaker 5: Well, my estimate at this point is around 25,000.
Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
That's the lowest I've heard anyone even state.
Speaker 5: Well, there's a few others like who have that similar opinion.
Aaron Smith, Levin and Chris Shelton and Jeffrey Hawkins.
Jefferson Hawkins, all of whom are former Sea Org people, you know, high level executives
in Scientology who had access in one way or another to information about membership.
Scientology inflates their membership figures by claiming that anybody who has ever purchased
a Scientology or Dianetics book therefore becomes a member because we have them name
and address from when they purchased the book.
And over 50 years there's been millions of people who purchase them.
So ergo, there are millions of Scientologists.
But if you look and see things like.
Scientology claims to have 15,000 members in the Tampa Bay area or in Clearwater.
Right.
You know, the numbers vary.
But when Mark Bunker, who was a very avowed opponent of Scientology, ran for city council,
the Clearwater City Council.
He won with 5000 votes so they couldn't round up enough votes to prevent Mark Bunker in
the, you know, enclave of the highest concentration of Scientologists anywhere in the world.
So that pretty much put paid to any claim that they have millions of members.
They may never have had millions.
They may have had 100,000 or a couple of hundred thousand back in the seventies or the eighties.
But today, no way.
Speaker 1: You you escaped in 2007, if I recall correctly, which is roughly like 15, getting
closer to six years ago.
Do you think that you were still on the radar of the church?
Are you being tracked?
How closely do they I mean, like will people from the church see this interview, for example,
that we're doing right now?
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
David, you'll probably get a letter from a lawyer before you manage to put this up on
anything.
Oh, boy.
But but.
Speaker 1: Well, it didn't happen with the last one.
Hopefully.
Hopefully not this time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but now my book is out, so they're going a little crazy.
Yeah, they're.
They're paying for Google ads, so any search of my name shows up with a Scientology Google
ad putting up new smear videos and smear sites and sending legal threat letters and, you
know, all the usual shenanigans that Scientology gets up to.
I'm certainly not gone off their radar.
In fact, I came like right back into the center of it the day my book was released.
Speaker 1: One of the things I think is interesting about your story, and for people who want
the details of how you ultimately kind of changed your mind about the Church of Scientology
and ultimately left, we go into that in detail in our first interview.
One of the interesting conversations we're having now is generally about the deprogramming,
as the term sometimes is, of people who are in a cult.
It might not come as a shock to you that many in my audience believe that Trumpism is a
cult, and they see the people at the Trump rallies with impossible stories and contradictory
beliefs and an inability to ever kind of puncture the bubble in which they exist.
And the question is, okay, so like what can be done to accelerate or help people along
in in that process?
What have you learned in your experience about what can be done from outside the cult to
help people in it see the truth or something closer to the truth?
Speaker 5: Well, from my experience, it's very tough.
It is very tough to penetrate that barrier.
But in the case of Scientology, what I tell people to do is use the words of L. Ron Hubbard
as the entrance point to get them to look.
You know, Hubbard said a lot of things, many of which are contradictory.
And on one hand, he said, you know, do everything that I say and read and follow it.
Exactly.
On the other hand, he said, believe what?
You know what is true for you.
And look, don't listen and, you know, think for yourself, all of which are very contradictory
to the actual teachings of Scientology.
But if you quote those things to a Scientologist and say, look, Hubbard says, you've got to
think for yourself.
Hubbard says, you've got to look.
Don't listen.
Hubbard says what's real for you is what's real for you, not what someone tells you is
real.
So don't you have an obligation to follow what Hubbard says and actually look at information
outside of that bubble that has limited success?
Yeah, I don't know, David.
Anything that actually is a guaranteed silver bullet.
There's no no garlic for this vampire that works 100% of the time.
It just is sort of.
The one thing I do know that doesn't work is to tell them they're stupid.
Right.
Tell them that.
That they're completely ignorant and stupid and that they just are fools because that
plays into their own stereotype that the rest of the world are the ones who don't know what's
really going on.
Speaker 1: The other thing that outside not as applied specifically to Scientology, but
that's often mentioned by critical thinking folks and skeptics and this type of thing.
Is that just like bashing people over the head with facts also isn't very effective.
So like as applied to Scientology, that would be like explaining the scientific impossibility
of some of the origin story that's told or whatever.
Is your experience also that talking about the impossibility of that is not effective?
Speaker 5: Yes.
Of that that that is useless.
You can't approach someone who has beliefs and try and undermine their beliefs.
The only thing that I have seen that works is the demonstration of the acts in the real
world that are contradictory to those beliefs.
Hmm.
Like, if you take someone and say you can't believe that there is a virgin birth, then
you're going to have a real hard time with most Christians convincing them that there
is no such thing as a virgin birth because they believe that that is the case.
If you say that they're look, this this priest molested this child and has been convicted
of that and the church covered it up.
It's a much harder thing to overcome that and just go, well, I don't really care because
I believe in the Bible.
So you got to kind of find the things that are demonstrable in the real world that are.
And but, you know, even that doesn't work most of the time.
I mean, the justifications and explanations as to why things are the way they are or how
they're rationalized can be pretty, pretty out there.
I mean, I see these people and, you know, I watch your channel and a bunch of other
stuff and I see people the, you know, JFK Jr is alive and well and like, you know.
Yeah.
Like what?
Speaker 1: So one of the.
One of the things that's commonly told by people who were sucked into organized crime
is that the way that they ended up all the way in started relatively innocuously.
So it might start with, hey, can you just run this envelope across town for me?
And there's this kind of process through which your before you know it, you're much further
in than maybe you ever would have imagined yourself to be similarly, you know, to to
take Trumpism.
There's a lot of folks who in 2017, if you said, hey, you know, by 2020, this guy is
going to be suggesting injecting bleach to treat, you know, a disease that you haven't
even heard about yet.
A lot of people would have said that will never happen.
There's no way.
But slowly we get there.
We get there drawing on a hurricane map with a Sharpie, and it gets more and more and more
insane.
Do you find that that takes place with the recruitment of Scientologists?
Speaker 5: Oh, absolutely.
I mean, David, that's what my book is about.
My book is about my immersion into the the world of Scientology, to the point where I
was as dedicated and as convinced that Scientology was the only route, the only salvation for
all of mankind, as anybody could be.
I mean, I became the the international spokesperson of Scientology.
I was like the head of the dirty tricks department that dealt with the enemies of Scientology.
I was 100% convinced, not that I was doing bad, but I was doing good, that I was saving
the world, that I was saving every man, woman and child on planet Earth, and that this was
the most important thing that could possibly be done.
And I, I hope that anybody who reads the book will understand the parallels between my experiences
in Scientology and what they see with other people who act insane.
Speaker 1: What were some of the small asks that that they start with?
Speaker 5: Well, it really started for me when I was a child and my parents got involved
and they started saying to me, look, the solution to this problem.
Is contained in what Ron Hubbard says is the answer to this problem.
Do what Ron says and your world view becomes l.
Ron Hubbard solved every problem of every person on earth and all of mankind and laid
it all out for us.
And if we're too stupid or too lazy to find out what all those answers are and apply them,
then more fool us.
We need to be dedicated because he has come up with the answers for everything.
And as soon as you start down that path that there is one person who has got the answers
to everything.
You then go into some of the answers and those answers become themselves.
The next step in that immersion process.
You know, there are a lot of them in Scientology, a big one, a huge one, is that you have to
be responsible for your own condition.
And this is a, you know, a platitude that Hubbard came up with that has some applicability
and validity to it.
But when you take it to the extreme that it's taken to in the Hubbard's circumstance, it
means in Scientology, if you get run over by a car, it's your responsibility.
You are responsible for for the condition that you that you got yourself into.
And that means that at some previous time, you ran over someone else with a car.
Right.
In order to feel the need to be punished and punish yourself by getting run over by a car.
Right.
This is the ultimate in victim blaming and it is also the ultimate in no matter what
bad thing may happen to you in Scientology, that Scientology may cause or do to you, it's
your fault.
It's not Scientology's fault, right?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
And of course, those are the types of arguments that are completely falsifiable.
There's absolutely no way to argue that that it's untrue.
The book is A Billion Years My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology.
We've been speaking with the book's author, Mike Rinder.
Mike, really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 5: Thank you, David.
It's great to see you again.