 Introducing Lawrence Wright tonight will be Lois Kim, the new executive director of the Texas Book Festival, who comes to us in her second full week in the job. So be kind. An immigrant from Seoul, Korea, Lois grew up outside of Buffalo, New York, but arrived in Austin in the early 1990s as a student in UT's Graduate English Program. In 2002, she earned a PhD in English Literature, focusing on Shakespeare and early modern drama and history. She continued on at the university for the next decade, coordinating outreach programs, conferences, and serving in key administrative roles at UT's Division of Continuing and Innovative Education. Please welcome Lois Kim. Hi, good evening, everyone. Thank you. I'm honored to be here with you all tonight in the LBJ Museum and Library, and to be joining the team at the Texas Book Festival, part of a community that includes not just our small staff, but dedicated board members, sponsors, an army of volunteers, and of course avid readers and brilliant authors. Speaking of authors, everyone in the room knows we have great writers in our midst here in Austin. Chief among them is our guest tonight, Lawrence Wright. Wright is an author, playwright, screenwriter, musician, and staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine. While that list inevitably makes the rest of us feel like underachievers, the benefit we get are the products of Wright's searching, imagination, exhaustive research, and clear voice. I'm just gonna talk about a couple of his accomplishments. Wright's one-man play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, played to sold-out shows in New York City before being made into a documentary that aired on HBO, and his other one-man play, The Human Scale, had runs in both New York City and Tel Aviv. He, I've just learned as a new play, Camp David, that will be playing at the arena stage in Washington, D.C. next March. So you can all book your flights now. He is the author of eight books, including, as Mark mentioned, his 2000 book, The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-Eleven. Which one, of course, swept the awards that year and also won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. We're so excited at the book festival because Larry will also be coming up to Highland Park on Saturday for the Highland Park Centennial Anniversary Literary Festival where he'll be talking about going clear as well as the re-release of his 1987 memoir In the New World, Growing Up in America, 1964 to 1984. For his new book, Going Clear, Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, Wright conducted more than 200 personal interviews of former and current Scientologists in the course of his investigation and delved into droves of archives. The book is a fearless and in-depth look into the world of Scientology. Let's learn more about it. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lawrence Wright and Mark Uptigrove. Welcome. Thank you, Mark. It's good to be here. It's good to have you. You have taken on many daunting subjects in your literary works. What led you to take on Scientology and going clear? Well, I've always been interested in why people believe one thing rather than another, especially in America where you can believe anything. You know, it's not every country's like that. In many countries I've been in, you can only believe one thing. You can believe it more or less, but you really, the menu is not very big. But here, you have this smorgasbord of beliefs. If you don't see something, you can invent something. So, and why do people gravitate to these different beliefs? And what does it say about them? So, I've written a lot about religion in my career. I've written about the Mormons and the Amish and Satanists, even Madeleine Marie O'Hare, the atheist who used to live here. Many, many different religions. And of course in my last book before this one, Radical Islam in the Looming Tower. So, but Scientology seemed especially intriguing because it's so bizarre. Esoteric and then you have all these notable personalities who lend their prestige to what is the most stigmatized religion in the country. And you know, I don't think that they get anything out of being affiliated with Scientology publicly. In fact, I think they suffer a kind of public relations martyrdom for their religious beliefs. So, why? Why did they do this? That's what led me into it. I think there was a question that most people had about Scientology. So, the Church of Scientology is well known for being wealthy, defensive and litigious. Did you fear reprisals, legal and otherwise, in your investigating Scientology? Well, we thought about it. I mean, I talked to the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, several years ago about my interest in writing about Scientology. And we were aware of the reputation of the Church. You know, there was one really notable example in 1991, Time Magazine published an exposé Richard Bayer was a reporter. And the Church sued Time Magazine and Bayer individually. And they hired private investigators to go through his mail and his telephone records and follow him around. But the Church lost at every stage along the way, all the way up to the Supreme Court, it took 10 years to resolve. It was the most, even though Time Magazine won, it cost them more than any suit in their history. And so that was a caution. I think the whole press was, after that, was chastened by the example. So we thought about it. And then Paul Haggis dropped out of Scientology. He was a two-time Academy Award winner. And he was very much in that world that I was intrigued by. And it was too good. It was too good to pass up. And so when he agreed to the interview, I figured that this was my real chance to finally write something about why people like Paul Haggis, an intelligent, skeptical, creative, intriguing human being. Where did he go in order to surrender himself to the tenets of the Church of Scientology? We'll get back to Paul Haggis in a moment, but I'm wondering, has the Church rattled legal sabers over this? Oh yeah, we had innumerable legal threats. And fortunately, very stalwart, I had the magazine and when you're working for the New Yorker, you're surrounded by great people. And eventually we had seven fact-checkers on that story. And one attorney, I was a little worried about that because when the Scientologists came to our magazine to confront us about what we were about to write, they brought four lawyers. And they have lots and lots of lawyers. But four lawyers and 47 white binders, as I recall. That's right. We had sent 971 fact-checking queries. That was the first volley. And it was like dead quiet for a while. And then suddenly, I had been trying to get them to talk to me and they wouldn't talk to me. So suddenly this delegation, the Church's chief spokesperson, Tommy Davis, and his wife and assistant. And these four lawyers came with these legal binders and they stretched out seven linear feet. And these were supposed to be responses to our 971 queries. And I don't know if they thought they were gonna drown me in information, but you can't drown a reporter in information. It's like pouring water on a fish. It's like, I couldn't believe it. I was so full of joy. When the meeting was finally over, I got a dolly and I took all those binders down to this disused computer room in the New Yorker offices. And I lined them all up on the desk and I just looked at them, just with such pleasure. Because I knew that inside there, just as during this epic meeting is kind of legendary now at the New Yorker. During a bathroom break, David Remnick pulled me aside and said, well, you know what you got here, you schmuck. You got a book. Yeah. Yeah, David, I know. Well, speaking of books today just so happens to be the 63rd anniversary of the publication of Dianetics, which spawned the whole Scientology movement. It was written by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church, this very idiosyncratic, esoteric Church, as you mentioned. Talk about L. Ron Hubbard and how he came to found Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard was born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska and raised in Montana. But he's the most interesting person I think I've ever had the chance to write about. For one reason, there's all these contradictions in these two narratives that have sprung up around his life. L. Ron Hubbard's narrative, the one the Church endorses and defends, is that he was a very adventurous young man. And there's no question about that. He was. He was maybe a little less adventurous than he appeared to be because he embellished his stories. But he went off on expeditions and then became a famous pulp fiction writer during the 30s and 40s in America, and especially in science fiction. And this was an era when the pulps paid a penny a word. So he had to write a lot of words to make a living. And he wrote a lot of words, 100,000 words a month. And he had a roll of butcher paper that he would roll into his IBM Selectric. And then he would just type so fast that one of his close friends said he would physically perspire. And then he'd come to the end of the story, take a T-square, rip it out, and roll in the next one. And out of that discipline, he has become the Guinness Book of World Records title holder for the most number of books published, more than 1,000. So he went off to war in the Navy. And he came back, and according to the church's narrative, he was a hero in the war. And he was badly wounded, blinded, and crippled. Medicine couldn't help him. He was in the Oakland Naval Hospital. And he began to treat himself with these techniques that he later developed into dianetics. And he left the, he became part of a magic circle in Southern California, a black magic circle, and ran off with the chief magician's girlfriend. And then he and that girlfriend got married. And he was already married, however. He didn't inform her of that. And then he went up to New Jersey. And in 1950, he wrote dianetics, a book of more than 450 pages, in a month. And it was published almost immediately. And it dominated the New York Times bestseller list. In fact, it actually, in some ways, created the category of self-help books that became so popular after World War II. It was 1950 when it was published. 1950. And dianetics clubs, this is kind of a self-help therapy that he had invented. And these clubs started up all over America and in other countries. And it was kind of similar and contemporaneous to the hula hoop. They just, you know, everybody did it. And so, but then he got immensely wealthy. And within a couple of years, he lost all his money, even lost the rights to the name dianetics. And he told many people that the way to make real money is by starting a church. So in 1954, in Los Angeles, he started the Church of Scientology. And he chose Los Angeles for good reason. He had depressions to understand that one thing Americans really do worship is celebrity. And in addition to the church, he created the celebrity center in Hollywood. In fact, now the church is one of the main landlords in all of Hollywood. And they would go out and try to bring in famous people. And the church published a roster of prospective Scientologists. And they were Walt Disney, Bob Hope, Marlene Dietrich, Howard Hughes. I mean, some of the most famous people ever. But they wanted the celebrity pitchman. They actually did have, for Gloria Swanson, her papers are over here in the HRC. And the correspondence between her and Hubbard is very intriguing. But she was a faded star of silent movies and Rock Hudson came in for a while. In those early, early days, there were many other celebrities that followed. But from the very beginning, they targeted famous people because they knew that if they could draw them in and have these celebrity pitchmen, then people would pay attention to Scientology. And he was right about that. Now the problem with the church's narrative and Elron Hubbard's narrative is that I got all of his medical records and his military records. He was never injured in the war. He had ulcers and conjunctivitis. But he was not blinded and crippled. And the stomach problems and pink eye don't care. At that meeting at the New Yorker, I was asking Tommy Davis about the discrepancies. And because the official records say one thing, you say something else. And he said, well, we wondered about that, too. And so if you were seeing JFK, the Oliver Stone movie, I said, sure. You know Mr. X? Yes, I remember Mr. X. You know, it's a mystery. Well, we hired him. And he, Fretcher Prowdy, and he explained to us that there were actually two sets of records. And the records were sheep dipped. There was a term I had never run into before. But that means that there was another set of records somewhere that had the real actions of Elron Hubbard, the intelligence agent. And so they sent me a release from the military. And it listed all these medals that he had won and ships he had served on. And one of the first things that gave it away was that it said that he had had four years of schooling at George Washington University, but he dropped out after two. But we started when I got, we sent an intern down to St. Louis where the military archives are kept. And we filed a freedom of information suit. And we got 900 pages of all of his military records. And I found the original discharge. And it was a completely different document. And he had several medals, none for Valor, just service medals. And here on the one the church gave me was choked with all these medals from some from foreign countries. Some of the medals hadn't even been created yet. And they sent me a photograph of the medals that didn't correspond to the ones. It was a transparent fraud. And yet out of that, I mean, one of the things that Tommy said at the meeting was if it's true that Elron Hubbard was never injured in the war, then Dianetics is a lie. And Scientology is based upon a lie. The fact is that Elron Hubbard was a hero. And that's the narrative the church still believes. How does one get pulled into the Church of Scientology typically? Is there kind of a pattern that you see where people get sort of absorbed into Scientology? Yeah, there are different kinds of pathways. But characteristically, you have people who are seekers, people who are looking for something. And if they were to walk across the drag and go into the Church of Scientology, they would be possibly they'd be given a personality assessment or an intelligence test. But they would be asked, what is ruining your life? What is your ruin, as they say? What's standing in the way of your personal, professional, emotional, spiritual happiness? And there'll be something. And well, we can help you with that. We have a menu of courses that you can take. And people are helped by these things. Like Jerry Seinfeld still credits a communications course he took at Scientology with helping him have the nerve to be a stand-up comedian. I'm not disputing that people can be helped by taking courses that address their needs. You'll also be offered auditing, which is the form of Scientology therapy. And what's different from regular therapy is that between you and your therapist who's called an auditor, there is what's called an e-meter. And an e-meter is two tin cans. They used to be Campbell's soup cans with the labels scraped off. And a wire that connects you to a meter that your auditor is looking at. And a small, indetectable current passes through. Now, what's going on with that? Scientologists say that it's measuring the mass of your thoughts. Well, there's no evidence thoughts have mass. But what we know that it measures is your galvanic skin response. It's 1 third of a lie detector. And just imagine if you were in a therapeutic situation with the lie detector. It does change the equation. But it's also very persuasive instrument. Because if you believe in its accuracy, and Hubbard thought it could see just below the level of consciousness. In other words, it knew more about you than you did. Then what you say in this meeting is verified by this meter becomes very powerful. And oftentimes in the Scientology auditing, people are asked, if you had a fight with your wife, you'll be asked, can you remember an experience when you were younger? Yeah, my mom scolded me just like that. Or can you go back further? And every once in a while, people say, well, I can't go back any further. But well, what was that? The needle just moved on the meter. I don't know, I just had an image of a barn. Well, go back into that barn. And what do you see? And then walk outside. What does it look like? Well, it looks like 18th century France. This is a real memory. The meter says it's real. And really? What do you see? And well, there are soldiers. And now if you've had the experience of suddenly discovering that you've lived before, this is good news. You know, you've lived before, you'll live again. This is one of the things that Scientology promises, that you're an eternal spirit called a theton. And you will always live. And what Scientology does is it discloses the truth of your immortality so that you don't forget it in another lifetime. And we want to break the cycle, because what mankind does is continually gain this greater level of technical ability and then destroy the planet, and we have to start all over again. And so Scientology's mission is to clear the planet, make everybody aware of these truths that Hubbard discovered. And that way, we won't go through that cycle again. It seems like one of the goals is to remove obstacles from your life, including what are called SPs or suppressive purses. Can you talk a little bit about that? If you go into Scientology and you say, what is ruining your life? I'm just not getting ahead in my job. And my wife is constantly making me feel like I should be doing better. Well, maybe she's part of the problem. And sometimes there are people who suppress what is really you. And you have to keep your distance from them. Now, one way that you become suppressive really quickly is if you say, don't go to the Church of Scientology. And if your child or your spouse or somebody close to you goes into the Church of Scientology, and you say, I think you should keep your distance. Sooner or later, it's very likely that that person who's been issuing these warnings will be declared a suppressive person. And if it's your child, you're not going to be allowed to speak to your mother. I just got a call this morning from a woman whose son disconnected from her. And I mean, I can't tell you how many tears are in this story, because these are really tragic events. She hadn't seen her son for years. And it happens he's working here in Austin in a motorcycle shop. And she found out where she was, and she went and surprised him. And I hope that there can be a reconciliation. But what he wants her to do is go back to the Church. These forcible separations are just heart wrenching. And I don't know how nobody really knows how many Scientologists there are. The figures they put forward are made up. They say 8 to 10 million. Census data and poll data in the US show about 25,000 people who identify themselves in Scientologists, which is half the number that say they're Rastafarians. But there are so many instances of families broken apart that I'm convinced the scale of this is much larger than that poll data shows. But they are disproportionately wealthy as a religion, indisputably, no matter how many members they have. It just seems they have accrued enormous wealth. How has that wealth built up over time? Well, it started actually after that time suit. They needed a war chest. And Scientology, back in the 80s, Elron Hubbard had decided not to pay taxes. And so by 1993, the Church owed $1 billion in back taxes. And it didn't have $1 billion at that time. So they faced an existential moment. They had to be given a tax exemption by the IRS. Or they'd go out of business. So the way that David Miscavige, the current leader of the church, went about it was to file 2,400 lawsuits against the IRS and individual agents, to hire private detectives to follow IRS agents out of town conventions to see who is drinking too much or fooling around and then publishing material about that. And whatever the merits of the case was, part of the deal the IRS made with the Church of Scientology was that they would drop all those lawsuits and call off the private investigators. So they forgave the billion dollars. And they declared the Church of Scientology a religion. And therefore it's entitled to all the vast protections of the First Amendment guarantees. One of the changes of the Church came out of that experience thinking we need more money. And so they began building up their war chest for defending themselves in such cases. And now they've amassed, according to former executives, well over $1 billion in liquid assets, mostly in offshore accounts. So it'd be hard for the Catholic Church to come up with a billion dollars in cash right now. But Scientology is disproportionately wealthy and overrepresented by competent attorneys. One of the most alarming revelations in the book is the existence of reeducation camps, which, upon reading this, reminded me of Russian gulags, talk a little bit about those reeducation camps. You mentioned the word heart-wrenching earlier. And you read the accounts of those who are in those camps, and they are indeed heart-wrenching. This all started when Elron Hubbard was looking. He was under indictment in France. And he was being chased out of several countries. So he had to go find some place to hide. And where would that be? The high seas. So he created a little Scientology navy. They sailed in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. But for punishment, he would assign people, he'd put even children in the chain locker where the anchor chain was kept. And sometimes he'd keep them in these kids in there for weeks at a time and for infractions. And so the idea of punishment started with Hubbard. But under Muscavige it's become much more severe. And an example is called the Rehabilitation Project Force. But there is, just to go back to that little navy he created, the people that he brought along with him, the young people who were mostly never been to the sea or anything like that, they were called a sea organization or sea org. And they became the clergy. And their headquarters is in this 500 acre desert compound in Southern California. And in 2007, 2006, Muscavige, there were a couple of double wide trailers that he married together that were an office complex. And so he cleared out all the furniture and he began confining his top executives there in more than a hundred after a while. And they slept on the floor. They were only allowed out for a shower once a day. They ate slop out of a bucket. And they spent their day in this sort of criticism, self-criticism, sort of remind you of the Chinese communists. And a lot of physical abuse, people were beaten up frequently. One executor was made to mop the bathroom floor with his tongue, just unbelievable instances of degradation. And one night, just to show you how stark this is, the president of the church, it's a nominal post, but he's an elderly man named Hebert Jench. He's been in there for seven years. So one night, Muscavige comes down with a jam box and he has chairs brought in. And he says, we're gonna play musical chairs. And the last person sitting gets to stay. Everybody else, you're out of here. Husbands and wives are gonna be separated. You'll be kicked out or else you'll be sent to some distant post. He actually had airline tickets printed up in the Scientology Travel Office to give reality to all of this. And so there were a hundred people. The song that he was playing was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. And whenever he would stop it, fight for the chairs, as a number of chairs diminished and the circle got smaller, fistfights broke out, chairs were broken, clothes were torn. And what's so striking about this, to me, those people were fighting to stay there. That's what's so mysterious, not just about Scientology, but beliefs are powerful. And if you had taken the people that were there fighting each other to sit down in the chair for the last chair and rewind their lives 10 years before and say, can you imagine people doing that? I could never imagine that. And there they are. And that's what's so compelling about writing about religious faith because it takes people into territory they never thought they'd go. Children in the Church of Scientology frequently signed a billion year contracts, which essentially amount to indentured servitude. How does that possible in the United States of America that we can condone the existence of a church that allows that? It's a good question, Mark, but it's been tested in the courts. And the courts say that this is a religious practice. And now, I think it's galling. And a lot of these, when I talk about that desert compound, everybody there signed the billion year contract. And if life is eternal a billion years, not that much. But so they don't, many of them feel like, well, this is just a small sacrifice that I'm making. But children as young as six or seven joining this, and I talked to this young man, Daniel Montalvo, who, he joined, I think he was seven when he signed the contract. And first thing that happens is you forfeit your education. There is some kind of schooling, but it's like half a day on Saturday. And mostly what you're doing is memorizing Elron Hubbard text. The year impoverished, because the pay now was $50 a week. And you don't know very much about the outside world. You may not have a driver's license. Your family is probably all in. So the thought of leaving means you'd leave everybody you know and love. And go into a world you really don't understand. So it's not just the fence around the compound that keeps them in. There are other considerations. But Daniel, one of the first things that he was asked to do was to go to the Clearwater base in Florida, which is the spiritual headquarters of the church and help renovate this old hotel, the Fort Harrison Hotel, notable in history because that's where satisfaction was written for the Rolling Stones. Small detail, but meaningful. But anyway, Daniel helped clean out all the asbestos without any protective gear. And while he was there, Tom Cruise was there taking some upper level courses. And Daniel was a page there that helped him. I just wonder sometimes if Mr. Cruise ever noticed these children who are around him and wondered where their parents are and why they're not in school. Anyway, he went eventually to LA to the main headquarters and he worked two jobs night and day. And his night job was, he was 16 by this time. Or it might have been 13. But anyway, he was working at a printing plant that Scientology publishes. These very deluxe books. And typically they have thumb notches in them like you see in an unabridged dictionary and so his job was taking this heavy equipment, you know, his blade and running this book through and he cut off a finger. And so they took him to a hospital and not the hospital that was next door, but one, you know, some distance away and had him to say it was a skateboarding accident. And you know, I've read the child labor laws in Florida and California. And, you know, children are not supposed to be around heavy machinery and they're supposed to be in school. So, you know, I think the answer to your question, Mark, is there's a lot of ambivalence in this country about taking on anything that is cloaked in religion. You mentioned Tom Cruise, who for all practical purposes is the face of Scientology to most Americans. And you talked about Elron Hubbard and his exploiting celebrity to grow the church, but what is in it for the celebrities? The Tom Cruise's, the John Travolta's, the Kirstie Alley's, what's in it for them? Well, this is what drew me in to writing this book to start with because it's a mysterious, you know, why would you do that to yourself? Now, there are several answers to that question. One is cultural. If you're a movie star, you know, unless you're Mel Gibson, you know, you're not gonna go off in some really weird religious thing. You probably won't become a holy roller and, you know, you try to keep the other thing trimmed down. So, lots of movie stars are religious in one way or another, but they don't advertise it that much. But here is a religion that has been built for you. And, you know, if you're a young actor in Hollywood, trying to make it, one thing you'll do is go to central casting. There really is such a place. Wednesday afternoons, aspiring actors line up to get parts as extras. And there in the line will be people passing out brochures to say how to get ahead in the business, how to get an agent, you know, come to the celebrity center, you know, and many people do. There was a notable acting school, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, run by Milton Ketselis, who has taught so many of the great stars, you know, Al Pacino, George Clooney, you know, just many, many. I'm not saying those are not Scientologists that I know of, but many, many of the greatest stars came through his. And he was a very high level Scientologist. And typically in this school, there would be someone who was actually a church member. You know, if you go in for a little counseling about how I can get ahead in the acting business, well, you should take this course at the celebrity center. And Milton got 10% of whatever his students paid to the celebrity center. So it was a funnel. And so it was constantly pushing young people who wanted to make it in the industry into Scientology. Now, people do feel rewarded by their involvement in Scientologists, not just celebrities. Celebrities are treated really well. They have their own entrances, their love bombed is a term that the church uses. They're just, they're treated like they think celebrities ought to be treated. And that's gratifying, because it's not always true. And, but you know, what religions typically offer in Scientology also offers, hope, community, a sense of salvation, purpose, you know, all of these. And in the old days, fun. That's been mostly replaced by fear. But you know, those were all qualities that drew people into Scientology and made it a nexus for, especially for entertainers. You mentioned Paul Haggis earlier, who's the direct, the Academy Award winning director of Crash and writer of Million Dollar Baby. And he was a big catch for Scientology, but he was the one who also 30 years after joining the church got away. Talk about that story a bit, which is at the center of the book. Well, Paul, he, when I, the way I got to interview Paul, I, when he dropped out, I was busy doing some Malkita stuff. So I didn't really, I just, it was like a pin. You know, I'm gonna go back to that. So some months had passed. He had not talked about it at all. You know, he had dropped out. Everybody knew about it. It was a big, you know, hoo-ha, but you know, he would not comment. And so I, you know, went back to the New Yorker and I floated this idea of, to the executive editor and my editor, and you know, and Remnick walked in and the executive editor, and we're talking about Paul Haggis. You know, he dropped out of Scientology and Remnick says, Paul Haggis? What was he doing in Scientology? Everybody said, that's the story, you know. So yeah, we'll do it. So I tried to find out how to get in touch with Paul and the only contact I had was, I got the number of his business manager. So I called his business manager. This is Lawrence Wright with the New Yorker. I'd like to do a profile of your client, Paul Haggis, apropos of his decision to leave the Church of Scientology. Are you kidding? We would never do that. Get the fuck off my phone. The whole conversation. Huh. So then the next day I got Paul's email address and I wrote him a note and I said, I spoke to your business manager yesterday and he said this wasn't the best time for you to talk, but if there's ever an opportunity, you know, when you'd like to talk about your intellectual and spiritual development, I'd be honored to tell your story. 20 minutes later, this email comes back very flattered. Let's have lunch on Tuesday. So I fly up to New York, have lunch. He's in the editing room with his movie the next three days with Russell Crowe. So we watch some of that and then go out on the sidewalk where he wants to smoke a cigarette and I say, you know, of course, you know, this is occasioned by your decision to leave the Church and his eyes got a little wide, but we continued to talk and it was months later after I'd spoken to him so many times that he admitted it had never occurred to him that I was going to write about Scientology. He was just so flattered that New Yorker was going to do a profile. He didn't want to think about it. So I was really fortunate. He, you know, when I write a story about a really complicated obscure world such as Scientology, I like to have a central figure that the reader will identify with and care about. And I call that- Oh, you're donkey, right? Yes, my donkey. You're donkey. Yeah, and because a donkey is a very serviceable beast of burden and it can carry a lot of information on its back and all this information that if I were just writing about Scientology in general, you know, your eyes would glaze over and you think, what, are you kidding? But if you have a figure that you really care about and are intrigued by and you think, I could be like that. You know, in other words, it's not so easy to say, this could never happen to me. If you are reading about someone who is as smart as you, as skeptical as you, as, you know, as good as you, all these qualities that, you know, you identify with, then the fact that you're a little scared adds something very powerful to the narrative. He broke with the church. Talk a little bit about why he broke and what the ramifications were of somebody's so high profile splitting off. Well, it was a public relations disaster for the church. It was a catastrophe and because he was extremely valued member and, you know, very close to all the inner circle. The fact that he, he did it over the issue of homosexual marriage, gay marriage. He has two gay daughters and it turned out, you know, Proposition Eight was a California initiative opposing gay marriage and one of his daughters discovered that the church, one of the churches in California had signed this petition in favor of that proposition. And so Paul wrote a letter to Tommy Davis and said, you know, we gotta change this and oh my God, we didn't know anything about it. You know, we'll change it right away and they didn't and Paul kept hectoring him saying, you know, it's not enough just to say, you know, retract it. You know, we have to make a public declaration but the church never did anything about it. And I think they felt that he was just gonna go away and he did become quiet after a while and what he was actually doing is something that is so rare in the church. He began investigating it for himself. Ironically, you know, the movie he was working on the next three days, Russell Crow plays a college professor who's trying to find a way to break his wife out of prison. And so he goes on the internet and learns all this and while Paul who as a Scientologist honestly spent very little time on the internet, it's discouraged, the church actually provides these internet nannies to its members that block certain words, you know, like Xenu and, you know, highly charged words that, so, but he, you know, got into the internet and he started looking around for things that had been said about Scientology and he had been in the church for 34 years and he didn't know any of this stuff, you know, about the physical abuse, for instance, about the tax stuff, about Operation Snow White where, you know, 5,000 Scientology operatives were deployed to infiltrate the American government and foreign governments and newspapers and so on. He didn't know any of that and that's typical of Scientologists. You're told not to read it and typically they don't. So he was shocked and he was especially shocked by the experience of children in Scientology and some of the young people who had escaped from the church, one of them was the niece of David Miscavige, Jenna Miscavige Hill, who has her own memoir out now. They started a website and just started collecting stories and Paul was aghast. He had done a lot of charity work in Haiti and he said, this is no different from the child slaves in Haiti. You mentioned earlier that celebrities joined the church even though it could be a PR liability and Tom, that's certainly the case with Tom Cruise that we talked about earlier. If Tom Cruise were to break with the church, what would the pressure be on him from the church to come back into the fold? What would that look like? Have you any view into that? Well, I've thought a lot about how the church might be changed, how it could be reformed because churches, I mean, religions do evolve. They change all the time. You know, I've written about the Mormons who were the most stigmatized religion in the 19th century. They, you know, they were so hated, there was a bill in Congress to exterminate the Mormons. You know you've pissed people off. And George Custer, by the way, was the lead of a cavalry unit and he bivouacked over here on 19th Street and in that alumni building, the I-35 and 19th Street. He was on his way to Utah and the Mormon church changed. It decided it no longer, you know, there was a revelation from God but no longer needed to have polygamy. No longer wanted to build a theocracy in the territory of Utah. We want to be a part of America. And in the last election, you have 150 years later, two Mormons contending for the Republican nomination, one winning and Mormonism not being a real issue in the campaign at all. So Scientology can survive but not if it doesn't change. And how could that happen? One would be that the IRS would reconsider that tax exemption but after its last experience, I don't see any evidence that has the appetite for that. And the other is for a few key celebrities who are the face of Scientology to actually demand an accounting. And I see Tom Cruise as being the pivotal figure and the one who bears the greatest moral burden because unlike any other member of this church of Scientology, he gets special treatment above and beyond what most celebrities do. These Seorg members, these many children, impoverished people have built him a hanger for his airplane collection, have built him a limousine, have cleaned up his house, renovated his properties, done countless tasks for him, free of charge for him. And it's another mysterious, I mean there is a federal law, a tax law called a Neuroman where one member should not be gaining an outsized amount of benefit from something that calls itself a religion and is given a 501c3 status. But it's one of those anomalies that religions are very, very difficult. There's only been one case, Tammy Fay and Jim Baker. That's the only case that I know of where there has actually been a prosecution under that. Right. So in your view, what is the future of Scientology? Well if they actually do have an accounting and a reformation, they've got that billion dollars. They've got their lawyers which will protect that nest egg. It's been very carefully, Chinese walls have been built around it so it's very difficult to attack legally. But they're hemorrhaging members. There will be no future for them if they don't change. No matter how much money they have, no matter how many lawyers. But if they do make a change, then there is conceivably a future. Lawrence is consented to take questions. So if you can start queuing up and I'll just ask a couple more unrelated to this because you are enormously prolific. We showed the covers of all your book rotating on the wall before you arrived and you were incredibly prolific. You said recently to the New York Times you wanna either work on something that's really important or really fun. So what are you doing right now that's really important and what are you doing that's really fun? Well it's great when they meet. But I decided years ago that life offers you many things to choose from and how do you select what to do? And money sometimes gets left out of the equation. But in the important category, I've been working on theater recently and I just closed a play in Berkeley about Oriana Follacci, the famous Italian journalist. But I've written a play about Camp David, the Carter-Bagin-Sedot Summit for the arena stage in Washington that'll be up next March. And that was great, it was fascinating. I went to talk to Carter and his wife and I went to Israel and Egypt and talked to the surviving members of the negotiating teams. And after I finished writing the play, I thought I'd like to write a book about it. There's never really been a discrete book about Camp David and it's the one peace treaty in the Middle East that survived. And it's the basis for everything that we do in the Middle East right now. And it's always in jeopardy but it's a fascinating story too. So I'm working on that and in the fun category, I'm in a band. And for those of you who don't play music, start. There's just nothing more fun than learning. I took up the piano when I was 38 and a half in order to play Great Balls of Fire on my 40th birthday. And I'm still taking lessons and I need to. But it's just a blast. And it's a way of living in Austin, Texas that it's like learning the language for the first time because if you're in the music business, you really see Austin in a way that, it's a privilege in many respects but also the last, our former kind of club was Hovitas which was closed down as a heroine. We're scouting for a new spot now that maybe has more legitimate business interests. Let's take some questions. We'll begin over here on the left. His mother is Ann Archer, an actress who has, I understand, put a lot of money into the Church of Scientology and she has Austin connections. But he has moved from Clearwater to Austin, Texas and my question is, do you have any idea what his motivation for that would be? Why he moved to Austin? His wife, Jessica, had been ill and her mother lives here. So I think that the reason they came here is she probably wanted to be close to her mother. I went to visit Tommy after he moved here. I wrote him and I called and he didn't respond so I went and knocked on his door. He was not happy to see me. He said, I think you should know my views haven't changed at all. But I, it's notable to me, they're not in LA, they're not in the, they don't seem to be in the sea or again any longer. Jessica's now a realtor here in Austin. Next question. Yeah, thank you so much for writing your books. We have learned so much and appreciated them. I told you earlier, my son's in the Air Force and they read the Looming Towers at the Academy. Would you speak to the events that have unfolded in the Middle East since you published that book? Especially the Arab Spring and the Muslim Brotherhood Rising to Power. Could you just give us your thoughts on how things are working out now? Well, it's been really, it's been exciting and wrenching to watch the changes in the Middle East. I was making a speech in, let's see, Obama ran first time in 2008. Right, so it was 2008 in the primary season and I was making a speech, I made one at American University in Cairo which is where my wife Roberta and I taught for a couple of years. And also at the Cairo University which is where Obama would eventually go make that big speech of his. And I think it was at the Cairo University and that I was asked, by the way, I was asking the kids in the audience, who would you vote for if you were able to vote in the American election and all these women in his job said for Hillary. And you know, there was one McCain supporter which was, but Obama was very popular. And someone, one of these young women said, what's wrong with Egypt? Why can't we progress? And I said, when I taught here, 30 something years ago, Egypt was about on the same level as China, India, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil. These were developing countries and they were all in the same basket, struggling. And since then, those countries have rocketed off and Egypt has not. And what I said to her is, I think it takes a generation. My father's generation, he came out of the dust bowl and was part of the World War II generation that really made America the wealthiest country in the world, in world history. And that was a whole generation's effort. And there are generations now in South Korea and India in places like that that are transforming those countries. It's gonna take a generation in Egypt. And I didn't realize, I was talking to the generation that was going to be out there in Tahrir a couple of years later. And so what have they wrought? You know, those were the kids that really made the revolution. The Muslim brothers did not. I got my first job covering race relations, race relations reporter in Nashville. And the civil rights movement, there's a plaque in Montgomery, Alabama that has the names of the martyrs of the civil rights revolution which has transformed our country. Greatest thing that ever happened. 40 names on that list. And Emmett Till and Martin Luther King the little girls in the Birmingham church. Most of the names you don't know, but 40 names. In the 17 days of the Cairo revolution, 840 people died. And so it was a huge trauma. And I'm not even talking about Syria at this point which has gotten so bloody. But this was a revolution that was wrought largely by young people who were demanding change and then were unable to take control of the government when the change was actually made. There was only one entity in the country that had the apparatus and the organization and the experience to do that. And as the Muslim brothers, the problem with that is that they are essentially an underground opposition movement. And they're impoverished in terms of their political ideas. For many years, their only real idea was to put the women in his job. And then Sharia, we want Islamic law in the courts. But that was a problem such as education and employment and these sorts of things, they will come along in Jala. But they don't come along if you don't have a serious government that's ready to make the kinds of structural changes and then reach out. Now, I think of this as being, first of all, it could be that anybody who came to power in Egypt right now would fail. It's a struggle that has catastrophic dimensions. But it was also inevitable that the Muslim brothers would have a period where they were going to be in power. And this, I think, could be the end of the Muslim brothers because it's not succeeding. Unless there is, it will stay in power as long as there's not a developed opposition to it. And that's something that is very slow to come. I would like to see Egypt succeed in this transformation. And other countries have done a better job. Even Libya has done a better job. But it hasn't slid into being Syria yet. And he's gonna be a very painful transition but something had to happen. The Arab countries could not continue to be ruled by tyrants forever. And the status quo was also very dismal. So I'm hopeful for change but I think it's gonna take a long time for good changes to come along. It's been six years since the Looming Tower was published. Are you more or less concerned about al-Qaeda than you were then? Well, I'm less concerned about al-Qaeda in general. But I don't think that that means that terrorism is something that's gonna be a part of our past. What bothers me about al-Qaeda is the example it sets. A small group becomes highly empowered by the use of modern technology and fervent belief systems. So willing to die for their causes. Well, that's a very powerful model. It gives you an outsized amount of influence and any group can take that up. And there'll be groups in the future that will adopt the al-Qaeda model and they'll have much more powerful means of destruction at their hands. They're biological weapons. Right now they're high school kids making computer viruses. But right now and soon very much so, they'll be able to make real viruses. Mixing things up at home that can be unbelievably damaging. There's a young man here at UT who just made a plastic gun. Well, that's very empowering too. If you can equip an army with just a bunch of plastic in a 3D printer and you can move around undetected with that on airplanes and so on, we're gonna see a lot more technology involved in terrorism, both in counter-terrorism which means that our privacy is gonna be incredibly more constricted than it was. And we'll also see novel uses of technology employed to advance obscure political goals. We are lucky in Austin, Texas to have in our community a number of very prominent writers and musicians. And I'm grateful to this writer and musician for being with us tonight. Thank you so much for being around. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this. I really enjoyed it.