Name: Joe Rogan Experience #835 - Louis Theroux
Uploaded: 2016-08-23T06:51:54.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #835 - Louis Theroux' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-08-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #835 - Louis Theroux' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-08-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #835 - Louis Theroux

shine yeah we feel professional with headsets on and we're live welcome back
louis oh thank you
yeah thanks nice to be back uh i was saying before the podcast started that you
sent me down
a scientology rabbit hole last night my friend i've been down those before but
last night knowing
that you were going to be on and looking forward to it eagerly i uh i watched a
lot of stuff uh
and you know i spent three years down that rabbit hole and uh it's a weird one
it's a weird one were
you on the internet were you just clicking around yeah just there's a lot on
youtube but there's
various uh very very well resourced websites there's one called clambake i've
been to that one yeah and
then there's all the tony ortega stuff i mean there's just there's just whole
worlds and actually
i mean i know there's a lot to talk about but perhaps the biggest obstacle to
making a documentary
about scientology is the overabundance of material you know because there's
just so many ways to come
in on it and it's you can just chase intriguing leads and then months go by and
you're no nearer
to filming anything i had a lot of thoughts on this and one of the thoughts
when i was really trying to
unpack it all is that i feel like one of the reasons why a lot of these people
defend scientology
i think there's several reasons one because it's their team and once you become
a part of a team it
it becomes something that you identify with it becomes very important to you
and then you want to
you want to defend that so i think there's that um but also i think some people
take some benefit in
what l ron hubbard created because uh if you uh have you read going clear yes
when i read going clear i
watched the documentary and then i read the book and one of the things that was
more fascinating about
the book was the the fact that he was essentially trying to diagnose and treat
himself and he was
essentially a really nutty guy he was very damaged yeah he he had a lot going
on and um
he was a guy who was trying to sort of sort it out himself and in the process
brought a lot of people
in and then created this thing and some people they they get some benefit from
this thing because
like i was watching like some of these people that are upset with you like that
woman that there's a
trailer where this woman was uh upset at you because you were in i haven't seen
the documentary yet it
comes out in america in january um but you were on a road you had a permit for
and she was telling
you you're on private land and that's right i'm looking at this woman i'm like
this is it seems
like a reasonable intelligent assertive confident woman that would probably if
she didn't get into
scientology she would have been successful in the corporate world right i'm
sure but here she is
her corporation is written by a nutty science fiction writer who wrote more
fiction than any human
that's ever walked the face of the planet he made up more he wrote down more
things that never happened
than anyone who's ever lived and they don't have a problem with that they're
like i i mean you've said
about 10 different things that i could uh break down and analyze i mean i
basically on the same page as
you i think there's the first thing to acknowledge about scientology is that it's
a religion and that all
religions have a very high portion of um you know i'm trying to put it politely
but just bogus
fallacious clearly nonsensical material right and scientology is is is is the
same as all of those
i think there's a lot of people who've had who've derived a lot of benefit from
scientology i think
people probably there's people whose lives have been saved by it kirsty alley
will say at any opportunity
that it was scientology that got her off drugs but i think a lot you have to
sort of take the whole
package and uh as far as hubbard goes he was an only child he was a fantasist a
lonely guy who uh was
also a narcissist and i think as a writer i mean you can't one of the things
intriguing things about
scientology is created by a sci-fi writer right there's not most other
religions are created by sort of
desert mystics or warriors or people introspective people but a modern day sci-fi
writer who's writing
things about aliens taking over foreign galaxies that's really that accounts
for a lot of its um
it's very bizarre inflection do you know what i mean yeah well not only that i
don't think he wrote a
second draft ever no he didn't have time he was just churning it out i think a
lot of the stuff that
they say he wrote he didn't write like because he was married three times and
at least one of his
wives took credit for writing some of his stuff i think even some stuff of
scientology may be written
by his second wife who he then he subsequently disavowed said he was never
married to but um
the guy was uh he lied about so many things he was also um abusive to his wife
wives i think plural
so physically he he was um abusive to them he was very very troubled and
suicidal one of the most
intriguing things in going clear is reading this list of uh i i think they call
them affirmations
which when he was in after the second world war he was wracked with self-doubt
he thought he was a
failure he was embarrassed about his sexual urges urges his compulsive masturbation
and so on and so
forth and he wrote down a list of things do you remember this section of it
where it says
you you you do not feel compelled to masturbate 24 times a day i mean it's not
literally i was like
right you are you were not a disgrace to the military you were you acquitted
your service in the navy
very creditably it was all these sort of lies he was telling himself to reassure
himself that he was
actually to feel okay about himself it's a very humanizing document because you
just see all his neurotic
uh inclinations laid bare that then subsequently informed his lifelong attempt
to as you say sort of
therapeutically heal himself and i think there's other people that identify
with those
self sort of damaged thoughts these these thoughts where they don't like their
past they don't like
who they are they don't like the pattern that they're on and they seek to try
to change that and improve
upon their position and improve upon their their understanding and their
acceptance of themselves
and i think that's where scientology does benefit a lot of people and so it is
tricky like many things
in this life it's not that black and white i mean is it black and white that it's
a cult and that
there's a lot of damaging aspects of that yes absolutely it's pretty clear when
you see the people
that have tried to leave it and you know and and tell the truth about their
experiences in it and what
how they've been harassed and hounded and yeah that's all pretty black and
white but i think we can um
in some ways we can sympathize with some of the people that are in it and time
yeah oh yeah i mean
but the other thing to say is because you started by asking what was it that
made some people
defend scientology and is it loyalty to their team but i also think that um
on the outer periphery like there are concentric rings of commitment to scientology
and in the inner
inner circle it is extremely uh demanding and i would argue abusive and uh and
and cult-like
on the outer circles as you get further from the center i think it can be
relatively benign and
especially if you're a vip or a celebrity in which you're exposed only to the
best sorts of treatment
you're given kind of platinum card treatment you go to the celebrity center
they roll out the red carpet
for you and i think those people feel immensely indebted to scientology i think
that explains a lot
about tom cruise um that he's only ever been treated like a prince when he's
been in scientology so he
he feels so grateful for everything that they've done for him yeah i think his
experience when when he
talks about them if he's being honest i mean if if everyone had that experience
scientology would be
amazing you know when you see him when they had the happy birthday thing for
him and he's dancing and
everybody's cheering like imagine if you just people treated you like that all
the time oh my goodness
auditioning actors like female actors to see if they were going to be your
girlfriend did you read that
whole i mean imagine if they rounded up uh the most attractive young female
actors in hollywood uh to see
whether they would go on a date with you yeah that would make life very simple
if you weren't married
as i am would it though would it god i don't know man i mean it's just dealing
with a bunch of nutty
people that are willing to go through that process yeah and actually because it
would be like
i'm almost king midas thing where you wouldn't trust any of your instincts you
would feel as though
people were erecting potemkin villages everywhere you went do you know what i
mean yes nothing would feel
quite real right that's a good point also like imagine your wife today if you
found out that your
wife today was one of the people that had auditioned to be tom cruise's wife i
mean if you don't make
the cut you're damaged goods for the rest of your life that's interesting you're
a nutty broad who is
willing to go and sign up to become tom cruise's new wife well to be fair they
didn't know that was the
job they were going in for right to be fair yeah that's true so so they were
just being they just
thought they were up for some gig i mean do you know you know what i mean maybe
a sitcom or something
essentially they were yeah and then there's also all of the this is a different
thing to skirt around
but the scientology treatment of homosexuals where they sort of shield them
from the press or hide
their activity and and sort of you know what a beard is i do yeah they hire beards
um you know that's
i mean that's a great point and i think actually that's another one that you
know i guess we've you
know we as a society have evolved a lot over the last 50 years to some extent
hubbard was a creature
of his times in his attitudes towards homosexuality the trouble is because they're
saying it's a
religion that's been enshrined as scripture and so there are there are there is
l ron hubbard's
scripture that dictates that homosexuals gays are perverts they're 1.1 on the
tone scale which
is the same as journalists oddly enough but it's very very low basically you
are a kind of broken
deceitful uh devious character journalists are 1.1 on the tone same as perverts
but and actually i think
quite explicitly explicit i mean i could go down and that explains a lot about
why it's so hard to
make a documentary in practical terms why they don't cooperate with
documentaries they they just see
you as a pervert you know you're someone who's dedicated to the to the abasement
of humanity in
essence someone who's holding humanity back from being what it should be that's
just incredible that he's
managed to define journalists under that category the very people that we rely
upon to investigate
the truth and and and express that truth things disseminate that truth to the
general public those
people are perverts and and um yeah and that's scripture as well you know what
i mean so so it's
not like you can argue against it in their time i mean one of the big things
they're up against is any
attempt most uh kind of uh kind of malfunctioning regimes whether it's a
corporate entity or something
else you you know you say this isn't working let's try something else so much
of what happened in
scientology this was explained to me by one of our sources in the in the film
um a guy called marty
rathbun who was very high up in scientology he said something could be working
extremely badly inside
scientology but if it came out of hubbard then you couldn't really change it
hubbard apparently once said
oh the best way to wash windows is using uh vinegar you're like don't use windex
use vinegar and because
of that whenever they washed windows in the sea org in the inner sanctums of
scientology they had to
use vinegar 