Episode Transcript: #835 - Louis Theroux

thanks nice to be back uh i was saying before the podcast started that you sent me down a

scientology rabbit hole last night my friend i've been down those before but last night knowing that

you were going to be on and looking forward to it eagerly i uh i watched a lot of stuff uh and

you know i spent three years down that rabbit hole and uh it's a weird one it's a weird one

were you on the internet were you just clicking around yeah just there's a lot on youtube but

there's various uh very very well resourced websites there's one called clam bake i've been to that one

yeah and then there's all the tony ortega stuff i mean there's just there's just whole worlds and

actually i mean i know there's a lot to talk about but perhaps the biggest obstacle to making a

documentary about scientology is the overabundance of material you know because there's just so many

ways to come in on it and it's you can just chase intriguing leads and then months go by and you're

no nearer to filming anything i had a lot of thoughts on this and one of the thoughts when i was really

trying to uh unpack it all is that i feel like one of the reasons why a lot of these people defend

scientology i think there's several reasons one because it's their team and once you become a part

of a team it becomes something that you identify with it becomes very important to you and then you

want to you want to defend that so i think there's that um but also i think some people take some

benefit in what l ron hubbard created because uh if you uh have you read going clear yes when i read

going clear i watched the documentary and then i read the book and one of the things that was more

fascinating about the book was the the fact that he was essentially trying to diagnose and treat himself

and he was essentially a really nutty guy he was very damaged yeah he he had a lot going on and um