The Jordan Harbinger Show
1270: Jamie Mustard | Scientology's Secret World of Disposable Children
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What are the living conditions of children in Scientology's Sea Organization?
Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.
I was groomed to sign my first billion-year contract when I was five. I believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and the Sandman and the Toot 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.
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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.
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Chapter 2: How does signing a billion-year contract at age five affect a child?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What was the impact of Operation Snow White on Scientology's practices?
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 HGNR, human emotion and reaction.
So if you're four years old, you trip to 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 and 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.
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 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 run-down 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. A seven-year-old girl was taking care of you. And how old were you? A baby, three months old, six months old. Unbelievable.
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.
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Chapter 4: How does Scientology use psychological tactics to control families?
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 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 had. 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. Absolutely. Yeah.
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.
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 it.
I'm like, what's your next move here, Mustard? Come on, bro.
That's funny. I never really thought about it like that, but when you say it like that, Jordan, it's bananas when you say it like that.
We're watching you, Jamie. I got my eye on you, man.
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, I'm not dying. That's how it feels.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Jamie face when escaping Scientology?
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. Yeah, the electrician. 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, right?
It's like 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.
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.
No, I believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and the Sandman and the Toot 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.
Yeah, it's as real to you as anything else in your life.
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Chapter 6: How did Jamie Mustard rebuild his life after leaving Scientology?
I never learned to brush my teeth. I didn't have underwear. I didn't have bedsheets. 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 pig's 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 a gadoong, and I look to the left, and there's a bullet in the center of his helmet, and he falls over dead. And then I feel my helmet, and there's a hole in it.
And I take off my helmet, and 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? It's called survivor's guilt, I think, isn't it? 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.
I think a lot of people are wondering, why did the parents sort of stop caring about their kids? Like, what is happening there?
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 Edgar Evers. And then you have the Cuban Missile Crisis and nuclear proliferation. Vietnam, that time was just the world is going to burn into fire.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the FBI raid in relation to child welfare?
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 contributed the most sophisticated mind control system probably in the history of the human species.
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 zillion lives. Where do you fall on this?
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.
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. 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 a purification. It's a drug rehab? This I don't understand.
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Chapter 8: What lessons does Jamie share about resilience and overcoming adversity?
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.
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.
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