Scientology defector Mike Rinder on his memoir ‘A Billion Years’

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike Rinder spent most of his life as a member of the Church of Scientology International. He joined as a child, and by the age of 18, he signed the organization's Sea Org contract, pledging loyalty and allegiance to the church, while committing all of his future lifetimes to it as well. But after years of emotional and physical abuse, he left the organization in 2007. “I didn't make it all the way through to the end, that's for sure,” he says. Now, Rinder discusses his just released memoir “A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology,” in which he exposes a harrowing account about the church that only someone of his former high rank could provide. But first, Netflix has made several adjustments recently due to competition. Kim Masters and Matt Belloni look into whether they will need to make more changes to survive.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is The Business.
0:05.6	As a former high-level Scientologist, Mike Rinder had a window into the close relationship between the group's top man and the top gun.
0:14.4	He says there's no doubt that Scientology's biggest star has a clear understanding of the group's dark ways.
0:22.0	David Moskevich was reviewing the rushes of Tom Cruise's movies
0:26.1	and giving him direction on what to do with them.
0:28.9	That is someone who understands the behaviors that are ongoing in the inner sanctum of Scientology.
0:37.7	Mike Rinder shares stories from his past and his memoir,
0:41.1	A Billion Years, My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology.
0:45.6	But first we banter.
0:46.8	Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.
0:50.6	I am joined by my colleague in banter, Matt Bellany.
0:53.7	Hello, Matt.
1:12.3	Hi there. So, you know, we kind of knew with the proliferation of streaming services and the proliferation of competition and spending on original content and all of that. We've talked about this a lot for a long time now. Sooner or later, Gravy Train had to slow its role.
1:18.2	And one sign that this is, in fact, happening is Netflix is changing its deal.
1:20.8	Netflix was like the comedy special place.
1:22.0	That was your dream.
1:29.1	It became like the Johnny Carson gig of the era where you got your comedy special. And they would pay a lot of money for the comedy special, and they would own the comedy special in perpetuity. But Netflix is now backing away
1:34.6	from that, because, as I say, that's, you know, it's the sign of the Times. Absolutely. And there was
1:41.0	a Wall Street Journal story this past week that noted that Netflix is now paying people $200,000 for a two-year license of a comedy special rather than these multi-million dollar figures that they were throwing at people to own the special. And that may seem like pretty minor. You know, this is just a comedy special,
2:01.7	like they're not that big on the service anyways. But what's interesting to me about this is
2:06.4	whether this is a canary in the coal mine situation, whether Netflix is going to apply this
2:11.7	strategy to other aspects of what it is doing. Because that was the initial Netflix model.
	...

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