Travolta promoting Study Technology on Tavis Smiley show
Studytech.org

On January 14, 2005, John Travolta appeared as a guest on the Tavis Smiley show on PBS. Travolta promoted Scientology, specifically study technology, and explained the "three barriers to study". The full transcript is available online.
Now, speaking of education, you know, in Scientology, the first thing you're taught is the barriers to study, and it's a misunderstood word, basically. So dictionaries are very important in one's education. If you hear someone speak to you, and you don't understand a word, write it down, look it up later, remember what context it was said in. When you're reading a newspaper article or a magazine or--remember that if you have a misunderstood word, even if it's nomenclature, you will not grasp that subject matter. The other one is gradient. That's usually in the field of doing this--too steep a gradient. You know, if you're learning a dance step, you have to learn how to do this before you can do the next one--in sports, the same thing. You learn things on a physical gradient. The third would be the lack of mass itself on the subject matter. If you're studying--let's say jet engines--you must see a jet engine to understand the technicalities of how it works. So the misunderstood word, the gradients, and the lack of mass are the 3 barriers to study. If you just knew that, every area of knowledge would become much more interesting to you. And that's the gift that I had, soon after I got into Scientology, was the gift of any area was possible for me because I had a dictionary. Now, you have to take your time. Dictionaries are not a glib thing. There's derivations, and there's the basic, and there's the multi-definitions to any given word. I mean, most people don't know there's, like, 21 definitions of "the."

Tavis: So was Clinton right when he said, "It depends on what ‘is’ is"?

John: Yes. [Laughs]

Tavis: OK. I just love talkin' to John Travolta.

John: What's the 16th definition of "is"?

Tavis: Of "is," yeah. [Laughs]

John: You know what I mean?

Tavis: I would not have gone here, John Travolta, had you not raised it because I try to respect people's personal and spiritual space. But I won't surprise you when I say to you that there are critics of Scientology. I don't want to get into a debate about that, but I want to ask you, though, because when I listen to you talk about this and explain it, it makes perfect sense to me. What, then, do you think is most misunderstood about what you believe--Scientology?

John: Well, you know, if there is anything. I mean, lately, I think it's being much more understood because of the evolution of the reading on the subject matter, which is what I've always insisted on: read a book. But, moreover, I'm getting opportunities to give specific examples, like I just gave you with the misunderstood word, a very basic thing in Scientology. So if I ever get the opportunity to give examples, it's much better than not giving an example. But, at any rate, I don't know, it's going very well.