Scientology debacle: Rent comes due on the double life of Aaron Kyro

[Aaron Kyro the Scientology staffer, and Aaron Kyro the skateboard mogul]

For this morning’s exercise, we want to contrast two statements made four years apart by someone we’ve been intrigued by, a 40-year-old who for more than a decade has been leading a pretty interesting and unique double life.

His name is Aaron Kyro. On the one hand he’s a 20-year staff member of Scientology’s San Francisco “Ideal Org” and a “Silver Meritorious With Honors” donor to the IAS. But in his other life he’s the proprietor of Braille Skateboarding, a YouTube empire with nearly 6 million subscribers known for its videos helping beginners learn their first kick-flips and ollies.

For several years we’ve wondered how Kyro has managed to keep those two very different activities going at the same time, and this week, it looks like he’s hit some major trouble with it.

First, let’s remember what we know about Kyro from our previous reporting. We pointed out in 2019 that he was featured in Impact magazine for a pretty heady milestone (especially for a staff member, who is paid little, at least by Scientology). He was named “Silver Meritorious With Honors,” which means he had reached a cumulative amount of $750,000 in donations to the International Association of Scientologists, the church’s membership organization. (Note: In 2021, we also reported that Impact magazine indicated Kyro had reached “Gold Meritorious,” meaning that he had upped his $750,000 donation to a full $1 million.)

A year later, one of our readers happened to be present when Kyro gave a presentation in 2020 at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre about his history in Scientology in order to motivate other Scientologists to recruit new members to the organization. Our reader said it was actually the best example of that kind of motivational presentation that he’d ever seen. Here again are that reader’s notes about Kyro’s talk…

After confirming that most of the people in the audience had seen his Scientology TV episode about the beneficial effect of Scientology on his business, Kyro spoke about how he personally benefited from being on full-time Day staff for the past fourteen or fifteen years. Interspersed throughout his talk were slides containing L. Ron Hubbard quotes that were of particular importance to him.

His story started with him taking the Oxford Capacity Analysis test and scoring abysmally low (e.g., one percentile) in three or four areas including being insecure, withdrawn and critical. This was consistent with him, in fact, being a loser at the time. He showed a slide of his OCA graph. To anyone who had ever interpreted an OCA graph, it was gruesome.

Kyro started in Scientology with the old, massive PE (personal efficiency) course. He repeatedly stressed that he tested every Scientology datum, and being low-toned and critical tried to prove each datum wrong…

A staff member explained what a Thetan was, that he was a Thetan, and what Thetans were capable of. Kyro wanted to know, “OK, what happened?” The staff member gave him a copy of A History of Man. Kyro was blown away by the book. He put up a slide with the first sentence of the book, “This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last 76 trillion years.”

Kyro joined staff after training as a public for two years. (He showed a slide of the signature page from his first staff contract from 2004.) He trained as a supervisor at Flag for two or two-and-a-half years. He eventually passed the supervisor test by recovering thirty students, training them under RTC observation and having RTC approve his CSW to complete. He then returned to San Francisco Day.

His sales pitch was that being on staff all of those years, immersed in Scientology, overseen by a Products Officer, and subject to the “no case on post” rule made him a stronger and better person. (Doing on-the-street Dianetics book sales and E-Meter pinch tests every day for three years really toughened him up. Someone threw a Bible at him.) One of his last slides contained the LRH quote, “Above case gain is competence.” He has now done Super Power, all of the Ls, and has been on OT 7 for three years. His business is thriving. He ended by stressing that, contrary to common opinion, he was not a person who made money prior to joining Scientology who then paid for the Bridge with his prior earnings. On the contrary, it was training and being on staff that caused him to be successful. Kyro was personable and dynamic. His speech was very well-received. I personally have never heard a more effective recruitment speech, and I’ve heard many.

In the flier for the event. Kyro was identified as “PES of the San Francisco Org,” which means he was Public Executive Secretary. Today, we understand that he’s been promoted to ED Day, the Executive Director, the top boss, of the daytime operations of the org. And like so many other high-level staffers around the country, that has meant spending time in Clearwater, Florida at the Flag Land Base, where church leader David Miscavige insists that staffers get special “admin” training that, when they return, will greatly increase the success of their orgs. (There is no evidence that this is true, however. The orgs remain slow, even with staffers who have spent years getting this special training.)

If Kyro has been spending so much time in Clearwater, how has he been able to keep his San Francisco-based skateboarding empire going?

Not very well, apparently.

Braille Skateboarding fans were stunned when they learned that on July 5, Kyro had suddenly cleared out the Braille skate headquarters that had been located for a decade in a warehouse. And when some of Braille’s best known skate heroes publicly asked questions about what was going on, Kyro blocked them on social media.

Then, three days ago, Kyro finally made a statement. He recorded himself talking for 19 minutes, apologizing that he had so abruptly pulled the plug on the warehouse, without telling fans what was going on or giving his employees a final day to skate and record on the elaborate ramps and fixtures in the place before they were torn down.

Besides apologizing, Kyro spent a lot of time explaining the long trajectory that had brought him to this moment. He reviewed Braille’s history and that it was supposed to be a friendly, inclusive community to encourage beginners so they could learn new tricks without judgment or negativity. A team of skateboarding pros were not only paid by commission for decks they sold, but also an hourly rate, which Kyro claimed was not industry standard. And all of it happened because of the success of their long-form YouTube videos, which were added every day.

But then, Kyro explains, TikTok changed everything. YouTube had to react to the challenge and began its own emphasis on short videos, and the longer videos that Braille put out steadily began to bring in less and less revenue. Meanwhile, rent on the warehouse only increased, and videos often weren’t being shot there anyway. In recent months, revenue from YouTube was down to $14,000 a month, and it just wasn’t enough to cover the warehouse rent and the salaries he was paying employees. Something had to give. When attorneys told him he had to be out of the warehouse by July 5 or be on the hook to rent it through 2026, Kyro said he panicked and had the warehouse cleaned out without telling fans or his own employees what was going on. That, he says, was a mistake.

But losing the warehouse is not the end of Braille, and Kyro implored fans to stick around because this was actually giving him a burst of new creativity and he has lots of new ideas for the future.

The video gets very repetitive after a while, but that’s the gist of what we got from it.

And what we found really pretty remarkable about it was that he had gone the entire 19 minutes without uttering a single phrase that sounded anything like Scientology. Believe us, that’s pretty amazing discipline for a 20-year staffer.

So, what Kyro wants his viewers to take away is that this was just a business decision, brought on by market changes and nothing more, and that he is apologizing for how the change was handled.

But it’s not going down well with a lot of fans and some of his employees. A few of them have created their own videos saying Kyro has “disconnected” from them in the Scientology manner when they tried to ask him about what was going on. Others are stunned that so much important material, like unique donated skateboards, were simply trashed when Kyro cleaned out the warehouse, when they could have been auctioned off.

And comments at Kyro’s video have been brutal, with viewers asking about that $750,000 Kyro had given Scientology — wouldn’t that have come in handy when things got lean? And was it really TikTok’s fault that Braille was hurting, or was it Kyro spending so much time away getting “Golden Age of Admin” training at the Flag Land Base in Florida that had something to do with it?

We probably won’t get answers to those questions from Kyro. But we do know this: Watching his apology video, we are struck yet again what a talented and intelligent man Kyro is, and how much compassion he has for young kids getting into the thing he himself loves to do, ride a skateboard. How does toxic, extortionate Scientology have its hooks so deep into a person like that?

It’s a mystery.

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

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