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The Jordan Harbinger Show
1270: Jamie Mustard | Scientology's Secret World of Disposable Children
01:31:57
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- [00:00]
Jordan Harbinger
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- [00:38]
Jamie Mustard
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- [00:41]
Jordan Harbinger
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Jamie Mustard
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Jordan Harbinger
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- [01:08]
Jamie Mustard
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- [01:18]
Jordan Harbinger
And for delivery coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show, I was groomed.
- [01:23]
Jamie Mustard
To sign my first billion year contract when I was five. I believed in the Easter Bunny, in Santa Claus and the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy. And this is a time where I'm going to believe anything anyone says to me. So when they tell me that I'm signing this contract and the reason I'm not seeing my mother is because she has to save the planet. And if I just allow myself to suffer, then I'll see her in a year and we'll get on a spaceship and go save another planet. I believe that as much as I believe in the kind of brick, oppressive building with no air conditioning that I'm living in.
- [01:58]
Jordan Harbinger
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our Mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional arms dealer, drug trafficker or rocket scientist. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, social engineering, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. My guest today has had a very interesting childhood. And by interesting, what the heck did I just read? That is what I said when I put that book down. He grew up inside the cult of Scientology, not as an adult who wandered in looking for answers, but as a kid who never really had a choice. Baby factories, kid barracks, children policing children. A literal billion year contract, which I don't get this. You're not allowed to sign up for Instagram yet. But sure, go ahead and sign away your soul until the heat death of the universe or whatever. No school, no parents, no reading, no writing. Just labor punishment and the psychological equivalent of Lord of the Flies, but with better branding. This is Jamie Mustard and his story arc is bananas, man. You've had just a very interesting childhood, I'll give you that. Your story arc is something else.
- [03:38]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah, I mean, on the day of my birth, I was handed over to a religious paramilitary organization, high control authoritarian group, whatever you want to call it, on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles in a slum tenement where I spent the first two and a half years of my life with little to no human touch. And that would be the beginning of pretty much a 20 year gauntlet where I wouldn't go to school and I would literally be animalized.
- [04:07]
Jordan Harbinger
Hell of an opener, Jamie. But no exaggeration. I mean, the book starts with the Baby Factory and we link to the book in the show notes. So folks, if you buy books from the show, which you should, please use our links. It supports the show. The book starts with the Baby Factory, as you call it. Tell me about that one. It sounds gross, not to mention, you know, illegal, but tell us how that works.
- [04:25]
Jamie Mustard
Well, in this group, the basic belief system is that we're all trillion year old fallen gods that have had millions and billions of lifetimes before. So you're not really a baby. You're a fallen God, complete adult that's been an adult millions and millions of times in a baby body. So you don't really need to be treated like a baby or a toddler. You just need to remember, just the idea is that time is running out to save the planet. If we don't get rid of everyone's reactionary mind, we're going to die in nuclear fire. We have a limited time, so kids are a distraction and they need to be penned over here like livestock until they're 10 or 12 years old and we can put them to work. They spent no money on the facilities because we weren't useful, we weren't contributing. The least important people. The people that they couldn't put on real jobs were the people that were made, the, quote, nannies or caregivers.
- [05:18]
Jordan Harbinger
I see. I guess I wondered about that because in Scientology once you don't make any money from a day job or you can't volunteer for a 16 hour workday doing something else. Like what if you're 75 years old? Are those the people that they're saying, hey, you're taking care of a bunch of kids now?
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Jamie Mustard
Oh man, that's such a good question. Because it's changed. A lot of the people that were kind of adults when I was a kid are now aging out and they're putting them in like these kind of really cheap old folks facilities. And that has its own set of new abuses connected to it. But it was the crazy people from the 70s that did too much acid and oh, we can't have those people in this organization or around the public. Let's put them around the kids. So it was a brutal experience. And what's so crazy about it was just how long it lasted. And then I'm still standing because so many of the kids I grew up with, they have autoimmune disease. There's suicides, there's drug overdose, there's drinking yourself to death from just the stress of it. But one of the doctrines was emotion is kind of looked down upon. They call it hdnr, Human emotion and reaction. So if you're four years old, you trip the fall, you're bleeding, they would do some kind of thing to maybe stop the pain, like this laying of hands thing that they do. But they would also say, stop the human emotion reaction. Knock it off. And so emotion is not allowed and you're looked upon as a leper. If you hurt yourself, you're labeled a potential trouble source pts. And so you get this horrible scarlet letter and stigma. If you get sick or you get hurt. So you learn as a little kid to hide being sick or hide being hurt so that you won't be punished or treated like an outcast.
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Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that does not sound healthy. So what was your barracks like? Or what was your sort of kid dorm situation at the baby Factory, which.
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Jamie Mustard
Was not far from MacArthur park, if anybody knows downtown Los Angeles, which is full of junkies, and the Rampart police district, that was just like a really rundown tenement building with peeling paint. And one of the stories that I talk about in the book, that a caregiver reached out to me. When I first started doing interviews two years ago, it was a seven year old girl that was taking care of me. I'd been in this woman's head for 45 years or something.
- [07:21]
Jordan Harbinger
A seven year old girl was taking care of you? And how old were you?
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Jamie Mustard
A baby? Three months old, six months old.
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Jordan Harbinger
Unbelievable.
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Jamie Mustard
And I stuck in this woman's head who's now in her 60s, and she said to me, do you remember how they bathed you? And I said, no, what are you talking about? And I kind of remember staring up the ceiling as my earliest memories, if they're real. But she said that there would be 40 kids to one or two caretakers. So they would run a hot bath once every week or so, and they would take off your diaper, dip you in, wipe all the stuff off, hand you to the person that would then dry you off, and then they would dip the next baby without cleaning the water. So I was basically being dipped in feces for the first two years of my life. So that was 811 Beacon street which was kind of just a weird old massive Hollywood house that had just cotton run down and was a tenement right on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles. Then we went to the place that was really the worst place of all of the experiences, which we called the Melrose Building. The red brick building, which was carpeting that hadn't been cleaned in 50 years. So it was like a dirt color shag with steel bunk beds stacked three high. I moved there when I was three and I was on the third bunk, constantly falling. And there would be 14 of these things crammed into a small room. There wouldn't be a lot of room to walk between the bunks. And then a kid stacked three high on each bunk.
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Jordan Harbinger
Oh my God. What are they doing with you? Like waiting for you to be old enough to work or something? Is that kind of the idea?
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Jamie Mustard
You know, it's interesting. When I first started talking about the book and I was telling people about the living conditions. People would ask me, they would say, why would they even do that? It seems like they're going through trouble to put you in these conditions. And I had never really thought about it, even in writing the book, like, why did they do that? And so when I reverse engineered it and I looked at their doctrines, they have doctrines that intimate this. It's kind of like if you, Jordan, had got a baby pig that you were never going to keep. It was like an economic gift that your neighbor farmer gave to you. You wouldn't eat that pig tomorrow. You would put that pig in the pig pen with the least amount of resources as possible, grow it for 10 years till it's a giant 300 pound pig for slaughter. So we weren't looked at as anything of value until we could work or contribute labor. So I never went to school. At the age of 20, I could barely write characters and I didn't know how to use a comma or construct a sentence or a paragraph.
- [09:48]
Jordan Harbinger
Okay, to be fair, that's most Internet commenters, uh, but my audience is a little more sophisticated, so we could relate.
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Jamie Mustard
But we were like livestock. We had no value. And we were being penned. And this is why I didn't speak out. I was so ashamed and embarrassed by what had happened to me. I'm connected to this like, love boat sci fi cult. And I was very embarrassed. It was up until two years ago, it was almost like I was living a double life. No one knew, my agents didn't know, my publishers didn't know. I mean, I had to do this kind of walk of shame when I decided to talk about it and call all my people and tell them about this really exotic past that I'd have. It was a very strange couple of weeks for me. I'm being literal when I say this. I feel like I was being raised in captivity.
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Jordan Harbinger
Absolutely. Yeah.
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Jamie Mustard
And because I was never going to write the story during COVID I wrote this. And I don't want to feel like I'm hawking it, but I want people to know about it because it actually comes out now. I wrote this kind of sci fi book, which is this like, future adjacent version of Los Angeles called Hybrid. And I wrote it because I was never going to tell my story. So I wrote it as this, like, sci fi story. So instead of Hollywood, it's called Follyland. And I tell the story of what happened to me, but there's supernatural powers and it's all in this weird alternate universe. I kind of made it During COVID And I thought because I was never going to write my story. And then after I wrote Child X, someone bought the sci fi book and wanted to put it out. So now it's coming out. Yeah.
- [11:18]
Jordan Harbinger
Child X is the memoir that I read that we're talking about. And I got to say, man, do you have any sense of the irony? As a kid raised in Scientology, which is a cult slash religion started by a guy who wrote a sci fi book about stuff like aliens or whatever, turns it into a religion, turns that into a cult. You get in, you escape. Spoiler alert. And write a sci fi book about. I'm like, what's your next move here? Mustard. Come on, bro.
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Jamie Mustard
That's fine. I never really thought about it like that. But when you say it like that, Jordan, it's bananas when you say it.
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Jordan Harbinger
We're watching you, Jamie. I got my eye on you, man.
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Jamie Mustard
Yeah, I don't think they've ever probably dealt with somebody like me, you know, I'm kind of a unique animal because I was never going to write about it. And I built this life and I was living this kind of strange guilt. I get a lot of messages from around the world of people, congratulations. And I always take it as like, congratulations on not dying. That's how it feels.
- [12:19]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that's what it is. But it is also congratulations on making it out the other side. And I want to talk a little bit more about this. Of course. So kids are raising you. And here's the thing, it sounds a little Lord of the Flies. Ish. Like a 7 year old is taking care of a 3 month old and then who's taking care of a 7 year old? A 12 year old. Is it like a military hierarchy of young kids or does it eventually sort of graduate to adults? But you even said that the adults they have taking care of you in air quotes. Taking care of you are like the people they don't want the public to see. Which I will say is somebody who lived in Hollywood for several years near all the Scientology buildings. They're not exactly taking the choicest specimens putting them out on Hollywood Boulevard either. So, like, the bar must be pretty low for child caretaker if those are the people they don't want outside hawking. What is that thing called? They're like, hey, sir, do you want to test your stress levels? And I'm like, no thanks. I know I'm stressed. Get out of my face, you weirdo.
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Jamie Mustard
Yeah, the electro psychometer.
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Jordan Harbinger
Yes, exactly. Like, those people are already kind of weird and they're standing Outside in the heat and a shirt and tie, trying to rope people in and you're like, what are you doing? So the people that are taking care of you. I guess my question is it sounds like kids controlling other kids, but military Lord of the Flies combo, it's like.
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Jamie Mustard
You were there, Jordan. It's both. So you have these. We called them nannies, ironically, even if they were dudes, but they were just middle aged guys that had done too much acid and they're wearing military uniforms. And also within that is this kid thing. And I hate to use Hubbard's words because A, it's an ugly language and B, because I don't want to validate the language because he has a lot of fancy words to describe horrible tenement, disgusting, grotesque things. But the official term for the kid organization in these orphanage type environment where I grew up was called the Cadet Organization. So it almost sounds like ROTC and they're putting us in little military uniforms. I was groomed to sign my first billion year contract when I was five.
- [14:18]
Jordan Harbinger
So you're five and they're like, sign this billion year contract. And you're like, dude, I'm not even old enough to sign up for an Instagram account, but I can sign my soul away for a billion years. A number which by the way, a five year old cannot usually say correctly or spell or know exists.
- [14:33]
Jamie Mustard
No. I believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and the sandman and the Tooth Fairy and this is a time where I'm going to believe anything anyone says to me. Yeah. So when they tell me that I'm signing this contract and the reason I'm not seeing my mother is because she has to save the planet. And if I just allow myself to suffer, then I'll see her in a year and we'll get on a spaceship and go save another planet. I believe that as much as I believe in the kind of brick oppressive building with no air conditioning that I'm living in.
- [15:02]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah. It's as real to you as anything else in your life?
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Jamie Mustard
Yeah, absolutely. And so within this structure of these nannies, adults, we have this thing called the Cadet Organization. And there's a 16 year old kid and I call him Bill in the book, and he's running like a little military organization with the kids and it was exactly like Lord of the Flies. You'd go to eat at the galley and the food wasn't very good and there's sometimes there wasn't enough so you had to protect your food.
- [15:28]
Jordan Harbinger
Wow. Like prison or something.
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Jamie Mustard
My older brother, for Years. And even maybe the last time I saw him, 10 years ago, if we sat down to eat, he would put his arm around, like his plate, like he was eating like that well into his adulthood.
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Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, sure. Yeah. That's a survival instinct. At that point.
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Jamie Mustard
We're being fed this doctrine. It has a huge punishment context to it. And there's all these kind of labels, like if you're not happy enough, your downtone. They call spiritual happiness theta, because they call the soul theta. If you're crying or you're making a problem, then you're in disturbed theta. And so you're trying to avoid all these terms. But Hubbard's doctrine is very brutal.
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Jordan Harbinger
L. Ron Hubbard is the guy who wrote Dianetics, which is the founding book of Scientology. So he was the founder of Scientology. For people who are like, not clued in on this.
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Jamie Mustard
And in the commanding officer of the cadet organization's office, there was a little brown box where you could write him letters even as a little kid. And he would write you back and it would be signed by him.
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Jordan Harbinger
Wow. So that must have been kind of cool at that point. It's like writing to Santa Claus and you get a response.
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Jamie Mustard
Yeah, you're writing to the Commodore, and he called himself the Commodore. Kind of like Gaddafi called himself a colonel. Right. And money letters were what a 5 year old kid would write, hey, I miss my mom. And then he would write back and say, you're doing your job. It was just very strange. But, yeah, I mean, we were brutal to each other. I mean, I talk about this, these public spankings. Hubbard had a doctrine called head on a pike. And if people weren't listening and they weren't being ethical, then you would put a head on a pike to scare everybody into line.
- [16:56]
Jordan Harbinger
Not actually ethical because these parents have ditched their kids. And I'm sorry for saying this, these idiot parents have ditched their kids, joined a cult, and they're not taking care of their own children because they're going to something alien spaceship, universe, whatever. And it's just. That's not ethical. There's no sort of normal society that would ever condone most of this behavior. So ethical, according to Scientology, where it's the upside down, everything is backwards.
- [17:20]
Jamie Mustard
Like Jordan, once again, Like, I never went to school. I never learned to brush my teeth. I didn't have underwear, I didn't have bed sheets. We slept on congealed, oily mattresses. In the 1970s drought of Los Angeles, where they entered the swimming pools, and that's where bowl skating was invented. Because of the drought. There's a book called Introduction to Scientology Ethics. And if you read that book. Yeah, you're making a really good point. In Scientology Ethics is whatever protects Scientology is what's ethical. And so that's what you're taught and indoctrinated with as a very young age. So you're being brutalized, and then you're being taught that is good and ethical. And then so many of the kids. There were kids that were sexually abused in the buildings because there was no one looking out for us. We were vulnerable. And the amount of friends that I've lost, it's really hard to describe. The animalization. And if our rooms or our dorms got too dirty, they would put, like, a sign on the door that we were dirty, called pigs birthing or pig's room, that we were pigs. So they raised us like pigs, and they treated us like pigs. The way I would describe it is say I was in a trench in World War I, and I was with my two best friends on each side of me, and one of them takes a bullet to the center of the helmet. And I look over, and he's dead. And then I hear. And I look to the left, and there's a bullet in the center of his helmet. He falls over dead. And then I feel my helmet, and there's a hole in it. And I take off my helmet. There's a hole right through the center of my helmet. And I'm feeling around, and somehow I don't have a wound. And then I get to go home. I get to go back home. And so you get this incredible feeling of a, shame, and then B, how did I live through this?
- [19:03]
Jordan Harbinger
It's called survivor's guilt, I think, isn't it?
- [19:05]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah. So the military organization called the Cadet Org, or Cadet Organization, the cadets, where we're wearing little lanyards and little military uniforms, and we have a status and we're treating each other in this military structure and we're calling each other sir, and there's ranks was very Lord of the Flies. And if you were a higher rank, then you were brutalizing the kids of a lower rank. And it was just. That was what it was.
- [19:32]
Jordan Harbinger
I think a lot of people are wondering, why did the parents sort of stop caring about their kids? Like, what is happening there?
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Jamie Mustard
I think the time that they were living in is a part of it. Like, they were coming out of the 60s, which was all of these assassinations. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, rfk, jfk, and Medgar Evers. And then you had The Cuban missile crisis and nuclear proliferation, Vietnam. That time was just. The world is going to burn into fire. And so at the end, the 60s, these kids just dropped out. And they. They joined thousands of these cults all over the world, all over the United States and communes, and they were just done. And it was like, we just need drugs and sex. Because they'd grown up under this pressure. And then they had these post World War II parents who weren't the most sympathetic people in the world, right? The quiet, the silent generation, they just checked out. And then there was a lot of illegitimate children being born. And so all of a sudden they're looking for these groups. They were ripe for the picking and they got caught up in these ideas of these groups that they could save the world and turn it all around. And it wasn't just Scientology. I mean, I think Scientology is the worst one. I think Hubbard created the most sophisticated mind control. I don't know about brainwashing. I don't even know if I know what that is. But he definitely traded the most sophisticated mind control system probably in the history of the human species.
- [20:57]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, it certainly seems quite effective. I mean, it's huge. So I want to explore this detachment a little bit more. On the one hand, it's like you have these past lives, right? So you're a billion lives before, a billion lives afterwards. What does that feel like? On the one hand, you're kind of free, right? Because nothing matters, because you have a zillion lives. But on the other hand, you have absolutely no reason to live well or live at all, because nothing matters. You have a bazillion lives. Where do you fall on this?
- [21:26]
Jamie Mustard
It's such a great question, and I'll kind of answer it in a way to show you how numb and disconnected I was. When I was around 11, 10 or 11, there was a public kid. So his parents didn't work for the inter religious military like my parents did where I lived on campus in these tenements. So I was able to go with this kid for the weekend. And we didn't go with his mom, who was in Scientology. We went with his dad, who was a Christian, and he took us to church. That was the first time I'd ever been in a Christian church. And I'm watching this and there's all this talk about you can suffer now for the afterlife. And I remember thinking, this is just my child mind. I'm not commenting on religion, but I remember thinking these people are crazy, that they're going to have this crazy, bad, horrible Life now for some heaven that may or may not exist. These people are bananas. That's what I was thinking in my mind, when in reality, I'm living the exact same thing. I'm suffering. I've got massive medical neglect. I'm having these near death experiences because no one's looking at my body. I'm hiding infections. There was one point where I got into a dental accident and my mouth was basically maimed. And I'm thinking, I'm doing this so that we can save the planet. Right. So I'm actually living the exact same belief system. But you have to understand that the first two things that you do in Scientology after you do this kind of weird drug rehabilitation thing that everyone does, it's not scientifically backed, called the purification.
- [22:57]
Jordan Harbinger
It's a drug rehab. This. I don't understand. What is this?
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Jamie Mustard
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You do this thing called the purification, or the purification rundown, where you. For three to four weeks, some people are on it for months. You take large amounts of vitamins and you jog. And then you sit in a sauna for five to seven hours a day to sweat out the drugs. And you can't get off of it until you've had some realization that all the drugs are out of you. So that includes medical drugs because of medical neglect. I'd had an ear surgery when I was six. So I did this thing, this purification, for the first time, where I was sitting in a sauna five to seven hours a day. And then the first thing you do in Scientology, what I was doing before the purification, run out, these things called training routines, I call them non reactionary durals, where you're forced to sit in a chair first with your eyes closed, staring at another kid at four or five years old for two hours. And if you move or fidget or blink at all, you fail, and you have to start again. Then you have to do it with your eyes open. If you blink, you fail.
- [23:51]
Jordan Harbinger
So everyone fails.
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Jamie Mustard
Yeah. They're telling you that you're learning to control yourself so that when things happen in front of you in the real world, you have the stoic ability to not react. You're training yourself not to react. But what they're actually doing is they're systematically removing your empathy. Right? They're systematically training you to not listen to your nervous system. You're uncomfortable not blinking. You're uncomfortable not moving for two hours. You're five. So you're training yourself to be comfortable being highly uncomfortable. And then they do a drill right after you do the Thing where you're staring at people and can't blink, where they get to mock you, homosexual humor, sex humor, five, six, seven years old, Every kind of thing to get you to react. And if you react, you fail. So you basically learn not to react. Then you go out in the regular world, you see a child being hit, you see a child not going to school, you're seeing fallible, harmed. You've turned off your reaction. So that's the training routines. Then right after that, you do a thing. And this is important, because I think it'll blow your mind, as I said, the most sophisticated mind control system in history. Then right after that, you're doing this thing called the objectives. It's the second thing you do in Scientology, and where you basically, for dozens, if not hundreds of hours, you let someone control you, walk you around a room, and tell you to do things, and you do exactly as you're told for dozens, if not hundreds of hours till you have the end phenomenon and you can finish. They're telling you you're doing this because in order to control your environment, you need to learn to be controlled. I would love your take on this, but they're grooming you to be controlled.
- [25:26]
Jordan Harbinger
I mean, it just sounds like they're trying to create robot humans that just don't think about anything, don't question anything, and ideally don't even feel anything, so that they can just be controlled completely for whatever purpose that I still don't understand.
- [25:41]
Jamie Mustard
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.
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Jordan Harbinger
Wow. So this is very 1984.
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Jamie Mustard
Somehow it is. And that's the irony of it. When I read 1984 at 16, 17 years old. Cause 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.
- [26:09]
Jordan Harbinger
Wow. You totally were.
- [26:10]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah.
- [26:11]
Jordan Harbinger
What's crazy about this? They're basically telling you that your childhood experience, your formative years don't actually mean anything. And 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. And 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 5 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 where, 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. You 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 antisocial behavior are just, like, through the roof with those kids, because they develop that way.
- [27:04]
Jamie Mustard
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 to the emergency room because no one was looking at my body. The level of animalization is hard to describe. And 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 3, 4. 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.
- [27:43]
Jordan Harbinger
Yes, that's what it sounds like.
- [27:45]
Jamie Mustard
So you're being told at 4 or 5 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. I 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 it's Kafkaesque existential nightmare. But you don't know that because it's the only world you ever know.
- [28:18]
Jordan Harbinger
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. It'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 emotionless. 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?
- [28:58]
Jamie Mustard
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. I 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, they 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.
- [30:29]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, 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.
- [30:41]
Jamie Mustard
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, there's one for adults, and 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 doctrine five or six hours a day, and then sleeping for six hours.
- [31:33]
Jordan Harbinger
You're not allowed to walk, meaning you run everywhere.
- [31:35]
Jamie Mustard
You 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 Burrindo, 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. And 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 spying campaign on the US 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 like a. Literally, like a room with a bunch of card tables and everybody's wearing black. It was like a visiting room for a prison.
- [32:36]
Jordan Harbinger
All right, we'll get back to billion year contracts in just a second, but first, a quick break. Because unlike Scientology, our sponsors don't demand your eternal soul. Just 60 seconds of your attention. This episode is sponsored in part by Northwest Registered Agents. Some of you have emailed me and asked, how do I start an llc? Because it's one of those things that sounds simple until you're buried in forms like, wait, what's an operating agreement? And that's why I recommend Northwest Registered agent. You can get access to thousands of free guides, tools, and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business all in one place. They're focused on your business identity like operating agreements, meeting minutes, compliance paperwork, all that unsexy stuff that actually keeps you legit. Northwest has been helping entrepreneurs for nearly 30 years. They're the largest registered agent and LLC service in the US plus they've got over 1500 corporate guides. Real people who know your local laws and can actually help you without sending you into an automated phone tree nightmare. And with Northwest, privacy is automatic. They never sell your data and everything is handled in house. So don't wait. Protect your privacy, build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com jordanfree and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent@northwestregisteredagent.com jordanfree this episode is also sponsored by CAPE. We all know the big mobile carriers have been in the headlines forever for data breaches, shady tracking, selling your personal info to data broker as well. We can use VPNs, encrypted apps, private browsers. But none of that changes the fact that your phone number is still running on a cell network that was designed decades ago, back when security was not a concern at all. And that's where really nasty stuff happens. SIM swaps, metadata leaks, silent surveillance. The things that happen under the hood when your apps can't protect you. And that's why Kape exists. In plain English, it's the security upgrade your cell service should have had all along. It's a premium mobile carrier built by experts in telecom, cybersecurity, national security, and they designed it around privacy from day one. They collect almost no personal information when you sign up. They protect your number with a 24 word phrase so nobody can SIM swap you, not even CAPE. And they encrypt things like voicemail. Plus they tokenize payments so your billing info is not just sitting in some database waiting to get leaked. If you want to stop giving your carrier free access to your digital Life, check out Cape Co Jordan Harbinger and use code JORDAN33 for 33% off for six months. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these incredible thinkers, creators, authors, etc. Every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like and trust. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself for free over@6minutenetworking.com. It's great for business, it's great for personal. It's great if you're new to the job market. It's great if you're retired in six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again. It's all free at sixminute networking. Com. Now back to Jamie Mustard. We gotta talk about this FBI raid. Because of course people are like, wait, what? The largest FBI raid in history? How is that possible?
- [35:39]
Jamie Mustard
So when I was seven years old, I was woken up at 11 or midnight. All of his kids were being jostled out of bed. That had 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. I 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 are 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 US history. Scientology had infiltrated the US government and had plants in all these different bureaucratic government institutions in the federal and state level. And there was a woman. Again, this is all public record, so I'm going to say something that's outrageous. It was called Operation Snow White. There's a woman named Paulette 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, Paulette 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. Sounds 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. 8 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. There'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, that 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. When I looked back on it years later, Jordan just. 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, it 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.
- [38:51]
Jordan Harbinger
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.
- [38:58]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah.
- [38:58]
Jordan Harbinger
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.
- [39:07]
Jamie Mustard
Even in the last month, my point of view has changed. When I got a little older, I started thinking of the FBI. Really failed me. I almost died. And a lot of my friends. I've lost a lot of people.
- [39:16]
Jordan Harbinger
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. Hey, 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 they have opportunistic infections. Anyway, what's for lunch. Yes, they failed you. Yes, they fricking failed you.
- [39:44]
Jamie Mustard
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.
- [39:54]
Jordan Harbinger
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.
- [40:00]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah, but they were raiding 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, I love your take on this because I know you lived in la, is I feel like the city of Los Angeles failed me.
- [40:12]
Jordan Harbinger
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. I 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 first hand 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. That's none of my business. Yes, the city of LA 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.
- [41:14]
Jamie Mustard
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 miles away, and bring him home. So I was going back and forth between the buildings a lot. And then some days, if I wasn't Being made to do labor. Cause I was doing crazy child labor.
- [41:39]
Jordan Harbinger
Didn't they have you doing literally dangerous specialty H vac work at like age 8?
- [41:44]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah. 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 8 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? And 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.
- [42:28]
Jordan Harbinger
I guess Scientology, what, had some arrangement. We homeschool all the kids. Their hours are different. Oh, good enough for us.
- [42:34]
Jamie Mustard
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. So 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 Pue Bell 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. They'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.
- [43:42]
Jordan Harbinger
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.
- [44:01]
Jamie Mustard
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. There'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.
- [44:53]
Jordan Harbinger
A lot of cults are like this, right? And people go, why international ones? Because when you are on 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 LA 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 Fs, that's another 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, hold on a second.
- [45:34]
Jamie Mustard
That lasted about six to eight weeks, and then I was sent home.
- [45:36]
Jordan Harbinger
The school sent you home?
- [45:38]
Jamie Mustard
Well, yeah, the first Dan S elementary sent me home. I was at 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.
- [45:46]
Jordan Harbinger
Geez, 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. There'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. Like, that's just another failure of the system to notice this problem and address it in any way at all.
- [46:23]
Jamie Mustard
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. We'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. Jeez, 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 US History. But still. And so the human trafficking laws that would have saved my life didn't come into effect until the early 2000s, the child trafficking and human trafficking laws. But, yeah, child labor when I'm 8 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 spacesuit, and you're going to save the planet. But after doing it for weeks, it became a torture. And then I would fall asleep in there. You would think it couldn't get worse than that. 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 when 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. They 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 hold hospital, and 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. My little brother and my stepfather. My mother slept on the bed. My older brother slept in the kitchen, or the kitchenette 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. Cause 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 till 10 or 11. So I would do these scolding hot baths every night that I would come home from the fiberglass work, and 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.
- [49:31]
Jordan Harbinger
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 Cruise in there. And you know what? A Danny Masterson who's now in prison forever. You've got these people there for life.
- [49:59]
Jamie Mustard
Literally.
- [49:59]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah. 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 are 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.
- [50:17]
Jamie Mustard
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. So with John Travolta. So I met Giovanni Ribisi for the first time before he was famous, when I was 16 years old. Right. 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 that's got 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. Tom Cruise has a condo there. I'm meeting famous artists, Scott Freen held wine. I meet Korea, 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. And he was nice. And you'd meet these really rich and successful people in every kind. Like, again, academics, lawyers, doctors, and you'd say, freed Helnwein. 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 Scientology secret police for a period of time.
- [52:11]
Jordan Harbinger
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? I mean, now that you know Scientology is 100% bullshit and a cult that, you know, authoritarian control cult. Why are these people in it? What do they need from it?
- [52:27]
Jamie Mustard
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. You do this stuff called this machine counseling. Freud used it. Freud called abreaction 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. Okay. 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. The goal here with the Scientology ladder, to do all the Scientology levels. Okay? And a lot of these celebrities. Tom Cruise is level 8, the highest level you can do in Scientology. So is Greta Van Susteran. So is Judy Norton Taylor, who was the girl? Mary Ellen from the Waltons. And there's John Travolta. I think he's gone to level five. Kelly Preston, before she died, was level eight. Kirsty 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 5 or 3% of Scientologists end up because it costs hundreds of thousands if not a million bucks to do. And 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.
- [54:16]
Jordan Harbinger
Right. So that appeals to people whose like lives revolve around their image and themselves. Yeah.
- [54:20]
Jamie Mustard
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 and I've seen the way that actors get treated on film sets, which is very nice. 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, 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.
- [55:04]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, 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, ah, what's going on? How's your day? It's already 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. This isn't a retired cop. He's just like a shot 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.
- [55:55]
Jamie Mustard
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. They 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. 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.
- [56:20]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, man. Jeffrey Tambor is a Scientologist.
- [56:23]
Jamie Mustard
No, he's out now. He's out now, but he was in. But, yeah, my mother was Jeffrey Tambor's counselor.
- [56:29]
Jordan Harbinger
I'm surprised they can leave, because isn't the whole thing like, hey, don't leave. Maybe we'll blackmail you?
- [56:33]
Jamie Mustard
That's Probably a huge part of what's happening with Cruz and Travolta. It'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, but 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 Cruise, Tom Cruise's kid. So they were in a relationship for a year or two. And that kid came over to my house one day. He 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. Before I realized it was Tom Cruise's kid. And she told me some of the craziest stuff, which you didn't 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. All right, There's a guy who looks like an old man who's, like, smudged 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.
- [58:18]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, my God.
- [58:19]
Jamie Mustard
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.
- [58:26]
Jordan Harbinger
What year was this?
- [58:28]
Jamie Mustard
Early aughts.
- [58:29]
Jordan Harbinger
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.
- [58:35]
Jamie Mustard
I Had a foot in and a foot out. I was, like, 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, like, 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, you know, And I'm trying to be in this middle ground that's impossible to be in for very long. And 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 was one of the things that kept me in is like, the media is lying. And Bella, who doesn't even know me, starts telling me about how her mother, Nicole Kidman, who she hasn't seen in 10 years, is a suppressive person and that the church calling it a church. I don't want to insult. Sometimes I say, I don't call it a cult because I don't want to insult cults, okay? But they had convinced her as a little kid that her mother was evil and suppressive.
- [59:57]
Jordan Harbinger
Right? That's so sad.
- [59:58]
Jamie Mustard
That's why Bella and Connor don't have a relationship with Nicole.
- [60:03]
Jordan Harbinger
So imagine being told at age 5 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 Bolan 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. Not all bedding is created equal. Some sheets feel fine at first, then they get scratchy, they trap heat, or they just don't hold up after a few washes. But once you sleep on truly good linens, you notice the difference immediately. It's hard to go back. That's why we love Bol and Branch. We use their stuff across the board, the headboard that is sheets, towels, blankets, the whole thing. Their signature sheets are made from 100% organic cotton. They are buttery, soft and breathable in a way you can feel at first sight. And the best part is they get softer with every wash. We also use the Waffle Bed blanket, which is what it sounds it's like a soft, springy, near weightless warmth blanket. You can layer up without feeling heavy or overheating. Try bowl and branch with a 30 night worry free guarantee. Discover a softness beyond your wildest dreams with bowl and branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bowlandbranch.com Jordan with code Jordan that's bull and branch B O L L A N D branch.com Jordan code Jordan to unlock 15% off. Exclusions apply. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Every new year, people start acting like they need a total personality makeover, but really, most of us just need to clear out some of the mental clutter that's been piling up. Therapy 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 OL 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 US therapist using more than 12 years of matching experience and you can switch anytime, no awkwardness. BetterHelp is huge, by the way. Over 30,000 therapists, 5 million people served, and live sessions average 4.9 out of 5 stars across 1.7 million reviews. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp. Com jordan that's better. H e l p.com jordan I've got homes.com as a sponsor for this episode. Homes.com knows when it comes to home shopping, it's never Just about the house or the condo, it's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location. It's the neighborhood. If you got kids, it's also schools, nearby, parks, transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in depth information they need to find the right home. It's so hard not to say home every single time. And when I say in depth information, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood, complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know, all in1place.homes.com. we'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@jordanharbinger.com 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. You said there's a happy ending. There's so much more in the book. Of course, it's a long book, but I'm gonna skip ahead to the happy ending because at some point you end up at the London School of Economics, which is pretty unbelievable. Like, 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 a fourth grade level, I'm thinking about going to Harvard. Like, what?
- [64:11]
Jamie Mustard
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 Free Winds, where I'm forced to clean the bilge. And 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 boat. 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 ever going to send me back here again, I'm going to escape. I'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.
- [65:10]
Jordan Harbinger
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 station. I mean, this is. This is crazy.
- [65:18]
Jamie Mustard
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 and that 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 can 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, we 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 illiteracy 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. It's brutal. I do that for a year and I go to a small private liberal arts school in Westchester County, New York. This taking inner city kids without transcripts or any educational paths, 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.
- [66:46]
Jordan Harbinger
And you are anyone, my friend.
- [66:49]
Jamie Mustard
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.
- [66:56]
Jordan Harbinger
Right. At least you had your priorities straight. First thing I did was get a girlfriend.
- [67:00]
Jamie Mustard
And she's like, you're not going to survive here. What 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 them.
- [67:12]
Jordan Harbinger
That's better. That's a better system.
- [67:14]
Jamie Mustard
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. And 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?
- [67:49]
Jordan Harbinger
You probably should be getting 100, but you can't read all of the things on the test. And that might be an issue.
- [67:54]
Jamie Mustard
So then he says to me, you can come to the castle. They had a castle as their administrative billing to my office and why don't you give me the tests verbally and see if your scores go up.
- [68:04]
Jordan Harbinger
That's interesting.
- [68:05]
Jamie Mustard
When he said that to me, Jordan, I literally thought he was gay. Oh, no, he's married with kids. I think this guy is going to ask me to like, go down on God. That's how worthless I felt.
- [68:14]
Jordan Harbinger
Ah, that's terrible.
- [68:15]
Jamie Mustard
So this kid tells me about the London School 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, the London School of Economics, which in Europe is equivalent to Harvard or Yale. 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, 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, you could finish your education here. And I said to him, I have no one to do that.
- [69:07]
Jordan Harbinger
Maybe you don't understand. I grew up in a cult. I didn't have underwear, let alone a recommendation from a professor.
- [69:13]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah, and they were stalking me in London. While I was in London, they sent me a bill for $90,000 for all of the courses that I did.
- [69:21]
Jordan Harbinger
Scientology, not London School. I was like, london School of Economics sent you a bill for 90 grand. That's even more expensive than I thought.
- [69:27]
Jamie Mustard
Scientology faxed to the dorm a bill for $90,000 for all the courses I did growing up because I was a freeloader, my 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, I'm like, who? No one 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.
- [70:02]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, there's a difference. But that's not the problem with that, okay?
- [70:06]
Jamie Mustard
And somehow I don't know how I did it, but it was qualitative economics.
- [70:09]
Jordan Harbinger
You must have had serious imposter syndrome. Like, they're going to figure out I don't belong here. And you know, for the first six.
- [70:16]
Jamie Mustard
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 that 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 graduated from London School of Economics.
- [70:41]
Jordan Harbinger
Unbelievable. Not bad for a kid who couldn't read or write a few years beforehand.
- [70:44]
Jamie Mustard
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 is like, I can't figure this comma thing out.
- [70:54]
Jordan Harbinger
You're not alone.
- [70:55]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah. And she 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. It'll be six books.
- [71:10]
Jordan Harbinger
That's incredible. Jamie, though, call me when you can use a semicolon. Then I'm going to be impressed.
- [71:14]
Jamie Mustard
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.
- [71:21]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, it's really impressive. Really incredible.
- [71:23]
Jamie Mustard
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 Lumpur. So there's lots of kids that probably are writing English in weird ways. So I think that helped me.
- [71:41]
Jordan Harbinger
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.
- [71:49]
Jamie Mustard
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, 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. And 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.
- [72:45]
Jordan Harbinger
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. And 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.
- [73:12]
Jamie Mustard
One of the big mistakes I made was not staying in New York. I get back from London, I decided to go back to LA to try to connect with my mother, who'd been. Who never gave crap about me. I mean, she'd throw me away like used toilet paper from the day I was born. And that 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 LA 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. 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. I 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 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. And I said, I have a black suit. She says, that 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 used 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 Boholian, is the imperial princess of France. And they're having a party that night for French Lifestyles of the Rich and famous.
- [74:49]
Jordan Harbinger
Okay?
- [74:50]
Jamie Mustard
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. The 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.
- [75:21]
Jordan Harbinger
You have underwear at this point in your life, correct?
- [75:23]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah, I've got underwear. Got underwear finally. Yeah, and I've got underwear. She's probably 50 and she starts tugging at my pants. And then I realize 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 and 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 the 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. People 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 you're 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 desperate. Desperation.
- [77:11]
Jordan Harbinger
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?
- [77:20]
Jamie Mustard
I think because I had grown up in this weird bubble, maybe I was brave in the sense that I was always terrified and numb. I'd 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 fail. Like, I almost had a nervous breakdown applying to higher education. And when you grow up in LA 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. And 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. My first day in southern England, I meet Woody Woodmansee, David Bowie's drummer from Spiders from Mars. So 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. You 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.
- [79:44]
Jordan Harbinger
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. Tell me what you mean by that.
- [79:52]
Jamie Mustard
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 molested in that red brick building. And then he wanted to molest kids. And he had 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. And 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. And 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.
- [80:59]
Jordan Harbinger
Geez, man, you have been busy. This Is like the third, fourth book you're mentioning on the show.
- [81:03]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah, it'll be six books by April.
- [81:04]
Jordan Harbinger
But take a vacation already.
- [81:06]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah. This book comes out at the end of fall of 2026, but 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, not 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, and 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 steel 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. You can do impossible things, man.
- [83:18]
Jordan Harbinger
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?
- [83:25]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah. I mean, 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. And even with going clear and even with what Leah show 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 into 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. And 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.
- [84:45]
Jordan Harbinger
Is your mom still in the culture? Do you have any hope that you'll see her again? Or is it too little, too late?
- [84:51]
Jamie Mustard
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. You 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 to 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.
- [85:24]
Jordan Harbinger
They have different libel laws in the UK where you can say someone libel slandered you, and they're screwed. Yeah.
- [85:30]
Jamie Mustard
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. And I said, well, I think that's a good idea. I know what happened to me. Okay. Too many kids around to cooperate. It.
- [85:56]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, they're just going to say that you're delusional and made all the things up. Yeah.
- [86:00]
Jamie Mustard
So here's one of the incredible things that was in my mother's declaration. Okay. I talk about in the book, signing a billion year 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 7, and it was adorable.
- [86:22]
Jordan Harbinger
So he did sign the contract, except he got the year wrong, and we all thought it was cute.
- [86:26]
Jamie Mustard
Well, 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.
- [86:35]
Jordan Harbinger
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.
- [86:43]
Jamie Mustard
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, and anybody that goes against Scientology, they write a program to destroy your life. Leah, me, whoever you are.
- [87:02]
Jordan Harbinger
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. And it's, 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.
- [87:21]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah. They will never allow discovery and what happened to me or these other kids.
- [87:24]
Jordan Harbinger
No. 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, we're 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.
- [87:47]
Jamie Mustard
Jordan. What they admit to in their denials in the Daily Mail article is terrifying. It'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.
- [88:12]
Jordan Harbinger
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.
- [88:22]
Jamie Mustard
The 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 I was walking around Los Angeles like that. It's completely embarrassing to me. I've released it now. Since the book's come out. I'm starting for the first time in my life to be shame free. I've placed it where it belongs.
- [88:47]
Jordan Harbinger
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. I 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.
- [89:04]
Jamie Mustard
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 Sori 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. I'm going to have to go sleep for five hours after this.
- [89:23]
Jordan Harbinger
That's a high praise. I need a nap.
- [89:25]
Jamie Mustard
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was a marathon. And I'm just really grateful to you. Not just for the platform, but I'm grateful to you because that was a one hell of a exchange that you and I just had.
- [89:36]
Jordan Harbinger
I agree, and I really enjoyed it, man.
- [89:38]
Jamie Mustard
Thank you.
- [89:40]
Jordan Harbinger
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 Scientology organization. Their sole job is 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. Ron 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 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 is the extremist attitude of every Scientologist on the planet. The 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 Shelly'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? Well, I haven't seen your wife. Like, I need to see 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 Shelly 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. Jamie'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 this story through a whole different lens. We'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@jordanharbinger.com deals please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser is very practical. A fun read, two minutes a week. It'll affect your decisions, your psychology or relationships in under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking as well over at sixminetworking.com. i am JordanHarbinger 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 Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, 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. If 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.