Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 302: Jonestown Part III - Check Please

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

On the third part of our series on Jim Jones, we cover the blossoming of Peoples Temple including the creation of the sex-obsessed Planning Commission and the harsh punishments that came along with it as well as the introduction of everyone's favorite chimpanzee, Mister Muggs.

The story must be told. The story must be told. Ooh, ooh, teacher, pick me! Yes, little Brandon, she wondered. He stood up and then pulled his eyes down as hard as he could. The white goo fell down his cheeks. That's the right answer, she said. Hey there, the story must be told Season 2.

Coming to Last Podcast Network January 30th. And lastpodcastnetwork.com. It's gonna get you. There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. Why fuck your glass? That's when the cannibalism started.

What was that? To live you dumb, to dump you live. Honestly, your voice is sounding really good. It sounds great. You should be kind of sick all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could make that your third act is Odd Singer Songwriter. Ooh, that sounds fun.

Like leave on helm when you got throat cancer. The constant drinking and smoking. Alright, Marcus, we have a big announcement up top here. Should we do this? Huge announcement. Love is in the air. Big. Fat.

Henry Zabrowski. He's engaged to be married! Sorry, ladies and dudes, I'm taking. Congratulations, Henry. You proposed to Natalie last evening, so when you put the ring on the bone marrow, did you give it to her? Did you give Wendy deliver it to her?

I was joking for a second about going to the vet and then just throwing up an x-ray and that the ring was like deep in Wendy's guts. I was like, what's that? I was like, what's that? No, I actually tied it to Wendy with a ribbon. And then Natalie came in and the dog went up to her and was like, the dog found something

and it was outside taking shit. And what was it? It was an engagement ring. Wow, Henry Zabrowski engaged. Off the market, Marcus. Off the market, totally. I feel good. You should, you look good.

She can't leave me now legally. She needs a team of lawyers to leave me. Right, and then she can take all of your money. Yes, and it will happen. Oh, not yet. You're still in the danger zone, my friend. Oh yes, absolutely. This is the most vulnerable part of a relationship.

I keep hearing and I've been warned by several people who've been married already that the wedding planning section is harrowing. Good, good, good for you. Everyone's getting married, Marcus. Everyone's getting married. All right, welcome to the last podcast on the leftover one.

I am Ben Kistel. That's Marcus Parks, newly engaged Henry Zabrowski. Do you feel different? I feel, honestly, I feel really good. I feel very, I mean, it feels very stable. It's stabilizing. It's really nice.

All right, all right. Well, speaking of stabilizing and feeling good, Jim Jones, at this point, is making everyone feel wonderful because they don't know the shitstorm that's about to come. Now, as we said last episode, Jim Jones was a control freak.

And because People's Temple was growing so fast, there just weren't enough hours in a normal human beings day to oversee it all. It's like how I feel about Oprah. Or when a mom has a child and a dog and somehow also has a job. How do they do it? I don't know.

But Jim Jones was no normal human being. And he had to prove it. So instead of delegating or just being happy with what he had, Jones decided to augment his performance with drugs. I completely understand. After the last little touring Jag, I'm getting the idea and loveliness of cocaine.

Of his total amphetamine abuse. It's just something about feeling not how I feel. Right. I was watching the Mike Judge thing. What was it? Max Marcus. It's amazing. All those old country stars full of amphetamines.

Oh my God. And what did they do? Create amazing music. Tales from the Road. Yeah. Which is pretty great. What's his name? Johnny Paycheck shoots the guy in the hat.

Johnny Paycheck shoots the guy in the head because they switch hats. And then for some reason that offended him. Yes. And they called Johnny Paycheck the Charles Manson of country music. But Charles Manson was the Charles Manson of country music.

Give the guys some credit. Oh, Charles Manson was the Charles Manson of folk music. All right. Well, remember this is important to know about Jim Jones. He wasn't just an administrator. This guy had to put on multiple hours long performances every week.

Sometimes multiple shows a day. And he had to be on point for every single show. He could not appear to be anything less than godlike. There was an afternoon show. There was an evening show. Right. And then they would have meetings afterwards. And then he would also be traveling back and forth

like doing road shows. And honestly, each one's improvised. And each one is slightly different depending on the crowd. Because sometimes he's a little bit more socialist. Sometimes he's talking a little bit more about the Bible. And so he's got to keep his head on straight. And the only thing that fucking can do that

is some sweet, sweet cacaio. Oh, I see cocaine. No, it was not cocaine. He was not a cocaine guy. No. He was just amphetamines. He was like Benny's. Yellow jackets.

Yeah, buzzers. I feel like there were more amphetamines in the 70s and 60s, weren't there? Well, yeah. You could just get prescribed these amphetamines. Yeah, these were from a doctor, kind of like now, where it's like with the opioid crisis, where it's a drug that's OK because I went to a doctor

to get it. Yeah, of course, everyone's done. But opioids aren't created the greatest art, though, are they? No, they're creating nothing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and Jim Jones, when he was improvising these entire sermons, he'd just come up with this wacky shit. Like one time, he said something like,

the only toothpaste that's going to cover you in a nuclear war is Philip's toothpaste. He was obsessed with just randomly being like, I'm having a vision. I'm having a vision that one of you will fall off of a bicycle if we all don't switch to crest. And then there's like, and that's that is real where he lost his mind.

Yeah. OK, great marketer, though. Oh, yeah, man. And his people worked just as hard as he did. A lot of times bragging about how little they'd slept. And since they were in a socialist society, how hard they worked was pretty much the only status symbol they could have by design.

Socialism doesn't sound fun. No, not thrilling. It sounds like it's hard. Capitalism is nice because I can have an Uber drive me to a place where then I can have my phone send me fresh direct. You know what I mean? Absolutely.

Well, the nice thing about capitalism or socialism, rather, I'm so tall, I always have to grab things off the top shelf at the supermarket. In socialism, there is nothing on the top shelf. So it's all fine. You are a human ladder. Yes. You literally have to be used also as a land bridge.

If there's a big wide creek, you have to lie completely across it with your hands and your feet on either side. I understand my role. Well, Jim Jones worked harder than any of these guys. So he turned to amphetamines. As we know, Jim Jones was a naturally paranoid person. What we also know is that speedy shit can turn an already paranoid person into an absolute monster.

Well, Bill Cosby said that. RIP. Bill Cosby said that it is one of his famous bits. It's about speed, where he was the only time he ever cursed in one of his stand-up specials, where he turned to the guy. He was like, I don't understand. It's like, I don't get what this deal we're doing cocaine. He said, well, cocaine, it amplifies your personality.

And Bill Cosby, the joke is, but what if you're an asshole? Which is really funny, which is true, though. It's like, how many times have you been the only sober person in a room of people who are gacked out? It's fucking awful. The time I'm the only sober person in the room full of people gacked out, let me just never happen. That has never happened.

I don't know who that sad sap is, but I would never want to be them, ever. But also, he is running every single part of the ministry. He is organizing fucking the buses. He is getting people, he is going back and forth across, dealing with the nursing homes. He is dealing with his own facilities in Menacino. He's trying to arrange all the road trips.

So he's got a lot of shit going on. Yeah, and he's even going down to administrative work. His administrative work was actually fantastic. They said that Jim Jones, what he did is, he had a neck for putting people in the right place. There's this guy, Tim Carter, that was one of the biggest sources we have for what went on in Jonestown. He was a higher-up worker, but he came in and Jim Jones said,

all right, you're in charge of putting together all the buses. You're in charge of getting everybody there on time. You're in charge of all the timetables. And he's like, I don't know how to fucking do this. But then once he started doing it, he found he had a neck for organization, and he was fantastic at it. And he said that like Jim Jones,

and that was another way that Jim Jones bound his followers to him, was that he had a neck for helping them do shit they didn't even know they knew how to do. How many institutions is Jim Jones running at this point? At this point right here, he's got his traveling road show. He's got Yukaya. He's not quite starting to franchise yet. But he's also, he's got nursing homes.

They've got a laundromat. They've got secondhand stores. And the restaurant. And they do a bunch of different things. They have a restaurant? The free restaurant. The soup kitchen. Oh, yes.

So it's not as bad as it was. But it's still, it costs a lot of work. Money to put cameras in those toilets. You have to Chuck Berry it. Well, starting in like 1971, Jim Jones would have to take speed to keep him going, but when it was time to sleep, he had to take something for that as well.

So he took quailudes to bring him back down. And all that back and forth, of course, made old Jimmy's eyes pretty red. And therein lies the mystery of the sunglasses. What is that? His eyes were constantly red. So he had to constantly wear the sunglasses to hide his eyes from his followers

so he didn't look like a drug-addled asshole. And not like normal red. Not like you slept on your face red. Like crimson. He looked like Vlad the Impaler. It was very disconcerting to be around him. And he'd be constantly tearing. Imagine it's like a man who looks like a human vampire bat

who's also constantly crying. He'd be like, put a bandana on. Do something else. And he'd already been playing with the idea of the sunglasses. He kind of went on and off because sunglasses, something like that, like an accessory, helps to set you apart from your followers. Also, I think a very interesting psychological effect

is that sunglasses are reflective surfaces. So when you look at Jim Jones in the eyes, you're literally only seeing your face. And so it's like you're beginning to associate him with you. What the cult leader's constant goal is, is to make you one with my own mind. And also we have a positive connotation to our own face and name. So the longer you spend looking at your own face,

the more you fall in love with the person that reminds you of yourself. Okay, powerful stuff. Very much so. But when the drugs came, the sunglasses went on almost permanently. But Jim Jones' excuse for wearing the sunglasses all the time was he said that he had reached a holy state so powerful that if he were to actually look upon a person with his unfettered gaze,

they would be burned by the godlike energy emanating from his eyes. He was like Cyclops from the X-Men, but instead of flames, just total amphetamines. Lying from his eyes into the audience's face. I also do think that he believed that. I think that when you're on that many amphetamines, you have a lot of big ideas about yourself. Right.

And it was true that Jim Jones was extremely busy. In the early 70s, the coffers of People's Temple were large enough that they were able to buy a whole fleet of old decommissioned Greyhound buses. Is that a humble brag? I think that in the end it's still just a bunch of old stinky buses. Can you imagine how just a decommissioned Greyhound bus from the 60s? These were the 50s. They were decommissioned in the 50s.

That is meat and potato poops all over that Greyhound bus. Just filling the pipes. Just absolutely log jam with it. They don't decommission a Greyhound bus. At least seven infants have to die on a Greyhound bus without taking it out of circulation. I was on one Greyhound bus and I'm fairly certain whoever did whatever they did in the bathroom decommissioned that Greyhound bus.

It was disgusting. And these buses only got more disgusting as the People's Temple used them because they used these buses to take road trips because when Jim Jones showed up in town, it wouldn't do for him to perform to an audience of just like 100 or 200. They brought like 300, 400 people. And in order to do that, they would jam, like I think they were like 50 person capacity buses.

So they would jam 70 people into these buses. They would have people in the seats, people in the aisles. They put the kids up in the luggage racks. And since they couldn't stop at a hotel or anything like that, they had two drivers working on shifts. So while one driver was behind the wheel, the other driver would be on a mattress in the luggage compartment. And the craziest thing is one of the drivers was Chris Farley from Billy Madison.

He ate everybody's lunch. He was the rest of his little field trip. Also, when you're a socialist, you begin to form grooves in your hips that allow you to be stackable. That's an important factor. Yes, you can always stack five socialists high. Well, that's kind of fun. Well, on these road shows,

Jones upped his healing game. Instead of using plants, he started forcing unwitting people to be a part of the cancer scam. He'd still call someone out from the crowd telling them they had cancer and he'd still use chicken guts. But instead of having them go to the other room, he'd have one of the people's temple members go out into the audience dressed as a nurse.

Hey, I'm a nurse. Hey, I'm a nurse. You got fucking cancer. Get up, buddy. I don't know how. Did you know you had cancer? Get the hell out. I don't have. You got a raspy voice. You some kind of leave unhelp? Come on, get up.

You fucking throw it ridden. You got a beautiful voice. Thank you. You ever done radio? Do you podcast? Do I have cancer? You got cancer. Come on, get the fuck up. Jones would yell and cast out the cancer and such. And just the right moment, the nurse would somehow slide the chicken guts

into the audience member's mouth who would then spit it back out again. You say it's like sleight of hand, but you know it's just been like, get this in your fucking mouth. Come on, shut up, shut up. The Lord wants this for you. The world's saddest Kentucky fried chicken.

That is so disgusting. Yeah, and they called this passing a growth. Yeah, yeah. I could say it. God. The doctor said when I was born, Mrs. Kissel, you did pass a growth. Unfortunately, when we rigidly looked at the X-rays,

we assumed the watermelon size tumor had fused its way to its spine, but apparently it's a child. It's a child. And if anyone got too close to the growth after it had already been spit out, because they didn't want anyone looking at this, because if you got close enough,

it was obviously just chicken guts. Right. Whoever it was that was around, whatever people's temple member that was around, had to gobble it up before people could get a look at it. God. Well, you didn't miss the Jones. I'll do it.

Sure thing, Johnny Garbage. That's something I like, but it's all made stinky. It falls on the ground. That's all right. Get away from me, Johnny Garbage. We all hate you. Oh. You got one service.

That's why you're part of a social society we're giving you a purpose. That's a big purpose. Gobbling up the chicken guts in a social society. Big time stuff. But people believe this shit. And when people believe, they give money. And Jim Jones had plenty of ways for them to give it to him.

We're not talking a rich congregation here either. Very impoverished in the most part. You've got a nickel and diamond. The whole point is doing like hitting them a little bit at a time. That's what I do in Atlantic City with my slot machines. Nickel and diamond, baby. The most popular merch at the Jim Jones table was portraits. People could buy a picture of Jim Jones for five bucks.

And with that picture in their possession, Jones would be able to protect them afar from illness, accident, or assault. And the more you bought, the more you were protected. It was like those get out of jail free cards you get if your family members were the cop. Oh yes. But it's with a man that will fuck your wife and your son. Unfortunately.

One boy told a story about him laying a picture on the body of a dead bird. And suddenly, the bird sprung back to life. Cool. All through the power of Jim Jones. Just a picture of him, huh? That's it. I don't think it's real. I mean, I don't mean to, I don't mean to toss a nano on it,

but here's my nano card. It might be. And it was a creepy picture too. What did you say the picture looked like? Because someone found a card and posted it online. He looks like, obviously, last time, last episode, he said he looks like Sam the Eagle, which he does. He's got a tip.

But also, he sort of looks like Tom Cruise in disguise trying to go to the mall. Like he's just covered with prosthetics. He's got a big old monstrous head. Huge. He does. He looks like if Tony Clifton fucked George Jones. He looks like yes.

It is like this. It's such a square, almost like the old man from up if he was young. Now, while it may not seem like five bucks a pot for these pictures wouldn't amount to much, People's Temple would sometimes sell up to 600 in a single service. That's about $3,000 per service,

and every bit of that tax-free. Can we start doing this? I just said, and I honestly don't think it's a lie, that if you take a picture of me, and you leave it in a jar in the morning, sometimes nugs just appear overnight, and the nug gnomes come, and they're just like... Oh fuck, did we drop the nugs?

We were supposed to last night in that fucking jar, did we? Yeah, we did. I don't think we did, bro. We smoked all of them. While Jones was raking in the money, his followers were living true socialist lifestyles back in Redwood Valley. And the funny thing was, a lot of the people who joined

didn't actually know they were joining a socialist group. That talk was saved until after they've moved in. Before you moved in, it had all been a quality and doing good for others, and you think that's the sort of community that you're joining. But after you join, you're living in a shack with 12 other people. Yeah, it's like the idea of doing charity in LA

where people assume, it's like, oh, well, then you go and you get mimosas, and then you go, and I have an old sweater I don't like, and so I'm dropping off at the shelter, but then you show up, and it's a bunch of people like, we're all sharing a bar of soap. It's Sonya's turn on the toilet this weekend, and she gets it all weekend because she didn't get it

for a month. 12 strangers living in a shack. One comes up with a pro wrestling character called The Miz, and I watched The Miz last night, WWE Rawr. At Barclays Center, The Miz new intercontinental champion beaten Roman Reigns. A lot could happen with 12 people in a shack. Is that really connected?

No, that's like the real world, but with no cameras and ultimate sadness. I think you were just trying to work in a way to tell everyone that you went to Raw 25 last night. Pretty cool. I saw your Instagram stories. Yes, your Instagram stories. The flurry and the blurriness of them look like

as if my mentally handicapped cousin got a hold of a cell phone and started because he loved wrestling. Yes, yes, he was my cameraman. But part of this is that the reason why they didn't know is because, again, remember Jim Jones used to mix up the message wherever he was. So he'd tell you whatever it is that you wanted to hear that you'd get out of the people's temple,

and then you'd just show up, and I gotta say, it's gotta be a hard ass surprise. A socialist surprise is the hardest surprise. People surprised by the religious aspect, where some people are brought in by the socialist aspect and be like, why the hell is he talking about God now? Well, that was mixed in with the public sermons, because in the private sermons, he mostly talked about socialism,

because those private sermons, the ones that were for the people's temple members, those were locked door affairs, and they actually had security at the door to make sure that there were no non-people's temple members coming in. But that's where he got to God, right? So it was God in private and public? No, no, no, it was the opposite. It was God in public, and then it was socialism in private.

It was God and equality, but as we'll see later on, he did try going for the socialism in public a couple of times, but it did not work. It doesn't mix, even though the thing is that socialists are way more down to play ball. They understand a little bit more, oh, we kinda gotta lie about the God shit to build our numbers, and in the end, we're going to serve the community

and we're going to serve the human race. So who gives a shit if he's talking about God? But the problem is that God people don't feel the same way. Of course, socialists are the only political party that lie about believing in God. That's the only one. That's it, that's it. No, no, no, no.

Now these camps, they weren't like Omshin-Rikio camps or anything. They're not being forced to wear diapers and being beat with reeds and things like that. No cabbage, no cabbage to be found. Not a cabbage society, because actually I think they might not have been able to afford cabbage.

Cabbage, you'd be surprised. That's up to five cents I have. Wow. All right, you got it. You could peel off some leaves if you see a lazy marketeer that would call somebody who runs a market. No, it wasn't that bad,

but anytime someone even thought about complaining, either a member of the People's Temple or Jones himself had one word to shut them up, bourgeois. Which is an insult that doesn't cut me. You know what I mean? It doesn't get to me, but I understand. Bourgeois, does that mean they just don't want to,

they want to have any kind of amenities in their life whatsoever? Amen. You didn't like eat no meal for breakfast and peanut butter for lunch every day? Bourgeois. Bourgeois pig. It's a joy.

I'm wearing a Jose Payne jacket. How does that make me bourgeois? Don't like shitting in front of other people? No. Bourgeois. Bourgeois pig. And the revolution will take you down. I just don't want to feel like Charles Manson taking a bath.

Don't want to have sex with Tim Jones? No. Bourgeois. What? You stinky butt. You get to shit all over the father's dick. How dare you? You know he likes a clean, deep stick

when he's bruised the dirt. So the dick he put it in his wave and he doesn't get any shit in your pussy. Well, you know what? I feel, I actually feel better. The first time I am part of the bourgeois age. Yeah, and Jim Jones used that word to justify other sexual habits as well.

When one of his black followers asked Jim why he only slept with white women, Jim got super pissed off and said it was because the white women needed to be snapped out of their bourgeois attitudes. And since black people didn't have bourgeois attitudes, there was no reason to have sex with them, see? Okay.

Yeah. Doesn't that make sense? The math adds up. I have no idea. He's sitting there being like, tonight get away with that. Did I just do that? Did I just do that?

Because you know nothing pounds the bourgeoisie out of a woman or a lost Vietnam vet man. Quite like the five and a half inch penis of Jim Jones. Jim Jones. He honestly, well, he apparently, he was really packing. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Jim Jones had a, had a hunker.

Isn't that something? Yeah, he said it was enough for the entire proletariat. Whoa. Jim Jones got people to go along with so much shit using the buzzword bourgeois. So just remember, if you keep hearing the same words over and over and over again, like bourgeois or enemy or freedom,

there's something very wrong with where you are and what you're doing. I don't even know what you're talking about. There's nothing like, I've never heard anything like fake news or like anything that's constantly said over and over again. Like it's a doctrine that's being sold from our government to our media companies to us

who are mutually benefiting each other by hypnotizing us into being much of sheep robots. Well, I would have listened to you, but I'm too busy eating my weight watchers. I actually get to eat more and I lose weight. Well, really? Can they check it out? How many points is that?

Full leaf of prosciutto you're eating? Yeah. Are you on the freedom diet? I am. I actually feel more free than ever. But Jones needed the word bourgeois to solve one of his biggest problems. Now, a lot of his followers,

being a part of people's temple was a step up and a lot of them came from intense poverty. So a job and a roof over the head was about the best life they had. It's like finding somebody that you just got out of a halfway house. They're really easy to get into a solid relationship with because you just have to...

Well, you give them a full house. All you have to do is give them just a slight tick up in lifestyle and you got them. Yeah, naturally. Yeah, but other followers were coming from middle and upper class backgrounds and they were super educated. They were college boys and girls.

And if they left, they were almost guaranteed to be living a better life comfort wise almost immediately. They didn't need people's temple. Well, why would they go there in the first place then? Ideological reasons, because this was the early 70s, late 60s. You got Vietnam going on.

You got riots in every fucking city. I mean, leadership is failing at every level in America and had been for a long time. People were lost. You've got cops on the streets in Birmingham, sick and dogs after people, and hitting people with fire hoses. Shits fucked up.

So people are looking for... They're looking for a utopian society. They're looking for something better. And Jim Jones has given them that. There were two decades in this country's history where you could just say anything and just get away with it and just be like, it was the 60s.

Like, why did you wear shoes on your hands? It was the 60s. It was the 60s. And if you remember the 60s and you weren't wearing shoes on your hands, then you weren't alive during the 60s and you weren't wearing shoes on your hands. It was an excuse for everything.

It was 20 years of madness. Oh, it was 20 years of madness. And the 70s don't get enough credit for being a particularly fucked up time in American history. I mean, it was possibly the worst decade we'd had since the Civil War. Everything went wrong.

Leadership failed on every single level. And it only got worse as the years went on, especially when like 1978 came and Jonestown happened. People were like, 900 people? Are you fucking kidding me? This is my impression of the most positive Vietnam soldier of all time.

Well, pretty cool, right? Cool, wow. But also remember, what seems like a great idea on Wednesday, you know what I mean? You're showing up. We're like, we're a part of the socialist world. It doesn't really matter on Saturday

when you have to give up your orchestra level tickets to rush because you have to go empty out the septic tanks because if you pulled the short straw, being like, no, you're fucked. So all of a sudden you have these upper class people showing up, quote unquote, upper class people that are like, oh, wow. Oh, this is what commitment to the cause means,

and it's very difficult to keep them in play. He's got to make sure they're happy, though, doesn't he? Well, it's because they have their fuck there, the money sources. Yeah, he has to manipulate these people in a completely different way. So besides screaming bourgeois, Jim manipulated these people's arrogance and self-worth.

Jim, he played pretty fast and loose with the facts. Somewhere in the late 60s, Jon switched from Russia being the evil empire that would destroy them all through nuclear weapons, which happens to saying Russia was a socialist paradise. There was a possible escape plan for them. Then you just have the yada, yada, yada, all the millions of people that died in the purges

and the gulags, all the bullshit. But you can yada, yada, yada your way out of that as long as you have your sunglasses on because no one can see your eyes cross every single time you do it because that's what happens. Can you imagine thinking Russia is a socialist paradise? Yeah, that's what he told these people, and a lot of these people, I mean, they were uneducated.

A lot of these people, they didn't go to college. They didn't write a fucking paper on Stalin. They didn't know. So for years he was talking about Lenin and he was talking about Marx and saying, and that's where it ended with Russia, but now he's saying like, oh no, Stalin. Stalin's great.

He's awesome. He's doing all sorts of great things for Russia. He was doing all sorts of great things for Russia. And I'm like, cruise ship, woo, yeah. Great, great fucking guy. You have one person who's read a book who's like, Mr. Jones, why are you, like, what about millions of people that got murdered?

Yeah, yeah, what about all these people that were murdered through all the purges? And he was called up by this in one of these like big public meetings, you know, a guy raised his hands and said like, hey, I don't think that's right. And so Jones lost his shit, publicly humiliated the guy, but after the meeting,

Jones took the guy aside and said like, hey listen, one of my followers, they're simple. Dude, listen, they don't get it. So to them, I'm feeding them jelly beans. I'm feeding you broccoli. You want broccoli? I know you do. Because I like the way you look.

The other side problem, this whole thing, you're thinking about it? You know what you have to do? Think about it. If it's somebody like you that does think about it every once in a while, you got to work for me. You just got promoted. How does that feel? You just got promoted to putting the toilet lids on the toilet. I'm excited.

It also sounds like you've channeled his inner spokesperson for men's warehouse. That's what he's telling me. Say like, hey listen, you can't call me out on this shit in public. But you can always come to me. Because I need a guy like you. I need a smart guy like you.

In fact, you're probably smarter than I am. So I need a guy like you on my side. But you can't do it in public, but you can always come to me in private and you can straighten me out then. So he would cherry pick the most troublesome ones, but the doubt is like a virus in these little groups. Because at some point your cortisol levels

are going crazy when you're a group of people. Everybody's kind of all in a, you're in a hive mind. We work on a network as a species. So you're in this place where everything's super harmonious. And then if you have one particular strong member of the group

stands up and questions the whole thing, it's going to send a ripple throughout the whole thing. And he knows that. So he goes after the most contentious ones and he just brings them closer. We have what Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton did in the hit film nine to five, which is an incredible movie about empowerment of females,

but also of anybody. And happy birthday to Dolly Parton. Happy birthday! No, not today. Me and Dolly Parton share a birthday. Really? Oh, I love Dolly. The same way, same butt size. Oh my goodness. Yes, well, it's the opposite. Her breasts, his butt, both big.

Interesting. Both natural. We have to do a show in Dollywood. Oh, they would love us. I want to go to Dollywood. Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, here I come. Oh, man. Well, Jim Jones, he pulled these people closer. And this guy, Mike Cartwell,

he was one of Jim's adopted sons. He put it perfectly. He said, Jim Jones gave you your five minutes and in return, you gave him your life. He gave him the Bill Clinton finger trick. He did the same thing. He looks right at you. And also this is the man who is now beginning to call himself God, right?

Now imagine if God gives you two minutes of one-on-one time and he knew how influential that was. So he used it very sparingly and he knew when to turn his gaze onto somebody and in turn, not only did it empower other people into thinking that he was God and bring them closer to them,

but it also brought himself closer to his own delusions of how much control I have of her people. And I got to say, I'm happy we're breezing over that Bill Clinton finger trick, whatever the heck that is. We're going to move on. Really, the Bill Clinton

comparison is very apt because Jim Jones had that politician's talent. They said about Bill Clinton is that he could go through on a campaign. He could go to a small town in Minnesota and then he'd come back four years later

and he would not only know that person's name, he'd know their son's name, he'd know their wife's name, he'd know what problem that person had through, he would know all these personal details and Jim Jones was that exact same way. If he heard a personal detail about a person once,

just once, heard their name just once, he'd know about that and he was also at the same time being informed the whole time. People are telling him, hey, this is what's going on with Patty, this is what's going on with Sarah. He's got spies all over the place and that's a part of it. So then he would use it

in his congregation, which I think is very interesting, that he would use it for trickstering his preaching and then he would also use it on his own people. But you know, not to discredit the talent there, but I think back in the 60s and 70s there were three names, right? Yes, Jim John Mary.

It's like, this is my brother Darryl, this is my brother Darryl, this is my brother Darryl, New Heart Show, classic Bob New Heart. He's still alive, I think. Bob New Heart, totally. Is he really? Yeah, it's amazing. It is great, isn't it? So with these college boys, Jones made him feel special, he'd stroke their ego and he'd turn

them into confidants. And the most important of those confidants would be a young man named Tim Stone. See, Jones knew that if he wanted to truly expand people's temple to the size he knew it could be, he was going to need a lawyer. Once you get to a certain size, you have to have a lawyer.

Well, it's not even just a lawyer. He needed someone who was as capable as he was. He was overseeing every single thing, including the books. And it gets to a point where it's like, the amphetamines can only do so much. And he knew deep, deep, deep inside that he was still a guy. Yeah.

And even though he's been lying to, even to Marceline now, even to the closest of the closest people, he now knows that he needs to bring somebody who is just as capable as he is. And so then he starts casting a line out and it's interesting how you put that intention out in the universe and then a Tim

Stone shows up. So we had Joe McCarthy out there with Roy Cohen, right? Roy Cohen. Roy Cohen, yeah. That was his big guy who went to work with Trump later on. But then was this guy sort of his cone? Yeah. This guy was absolutely, he was his right-hand man. Did McCarthy ever go after Jim Jones

for socialism? I guess it was a different generation. That was a different generation. That was the 50s. I can't remember. Jim Jones did have, actually, Jim Jones went straight up against it because during McCarthyism, Jim Jones, I think, was right out of college. And so he would go

to these communist meetings because there were so people that were trying to be a little rebellious with it. So Jim Jones would go to communist meetings and they'd have FBI agents outside like staking this shit out and Jim Jones would go up to each one of them. He would introduce himself, say

hi, my name is Jim Jones. I live at such and such and such and such address and he would taunt them. He would essentially he would like, I'm a communist. No one fuck with me. I will never stop being a communist. I am a proud communist. This is just the way shit is. Okay. So as far

as Tim Stone went, you know, this guy, if Jim Jones needed a right-hand man, he needed a guy that not only believed in the cause but also believed in Jim Jones. Luckily for him, Tim Stone happened to be just in the neighborhood. He didn't even have to look far.

Tim Stone was an assistant DA for Mendocino County where Redwood Valley was located. He was just right there. And this guy, he took, yeah, he took to the temple's message like a duck to water. Jones could not have accomplished half of what he did

in the years to come without Tim Stone. So this guy is an ADA. He's putting, helping putting people in jail. He's, I mean, and he's a rising star too. He's not, he's not like just a guy that's sitting on the benches. Like everyone around knew like Tim Stone, that guy's got a future. And when

he joined up with People's Temple, people were like, what the fuck are you doing? Were people public about it? About People's Temple? Yeah, would this stone guy be like, I'm with this dude? Absolutely. No, they had to be. That was a requirement. It wasn't something that you kept secret. Like you had to

be out and out with being a part of People's Temple because they were actually proud because they thought it was such a good thing. They didn't think they were in a cult. They thought they were a part of a group that was working towards equality and just the general betterment of man. They thought they were being an example and you can't be an example if you don't

tell everybody what you're doing. How do they know you're a good person if you don't tell them you're a good person, Ben? Right, yeah, of course. Now, if the drugs were the secret ingredient to Jones' evil, then stone was the secret ingredient to his success. But with Tim Stone came his wife, Grace.

And since Tim spent most of his time with Jim, Tim's marriage started to fall apart. And since Grace was lonely, she started talking about her problems to other People's Temples members. What she didn't know, though, was that People's Temple kept a huge database of handwritten note cards containing

information on every single member. So who's taking all these notes? Everyone. So everyone is just snitching on everyone else? It's not like Scientology where people are doing audits and they're freely giving the information. They would just report on each other in conversation.

It was like Nazi Germany. And it wasn't like Scientologists where they would sit in a room and they would confess this shit. This stuff was done by tiny, cute little old ladies. They would sit there and they'd ask you sweet questions where all of a sudden they're like, so do you like

chocolate or vanilla? Chocolate? Yeah, good. What's your deepest fear? Spiders? Yeah, oh, is that just that? Just spiders? Just something simple like spiders? I thought we were talking about ice cream. No, no, what's something that shakes you to your core? Just curious, my dear.

Yeah, loneliness never having anything dying alone. Maybe never knowing support you. Tell me, what's your favorite soup? Split peas? Oh, that's good to know. Tell me, what's your deepest weakness? It's just chocolate ice cream.

So when Jones found out that Grace and Tim's marriage was on the rocks, he moved in. Pretty soon, Grace was pregnant and the baby born from that illicit affair would be one of the many catalysts that would end people's temple forever. Okay. I just don't understand why he liked being a buck so much

to the cook. What do you mean? He just loved that. There was something about it. I mean, I guess obviously it's showing power over his people, but he really did enjoy taking people's wives. Oh, yes. I guess so. I mean, it was all about power. I mean, really, a lot of times him having sex with the dudes,

it wasn't really even that much about sex for pleasure. It was about dominance. Yeah. I mean, it was very, people's temple was very primal at times. Oh, yeah, especially the group thing at its very basis. Right. So John Victor Stone was born

January 25th, 1972 and this baby was special in the world of Jim Jones. Since he was having so much illicit sex and did not enjoy condoms, abortions were pretty common in people's temple. Do you think that's a positive thing, though? No, I don't.

I thought abortions are positive. No. I don't understand. I don't think you're understanding. But it just seems like it would be lucky for them to have a lot of abortions. I don't. No, this is, it was all traumatic. It was forced abortions. These women did not, they did not want to have

abortions because if you look at it, like I mean, you're impregnated by God, you know. Awesome. But then God makes you get an abortion and God doesn't even drive you to the clinic and God doesn't play brick on the radio so that you could sit and maybe feel something

for a second. Bringing Ben Fold's a five into this. That's one angry dwarf. I love it. Yeah. And I'm tall. But I always have. Interesting. I relate to it. Jones got around this contradiction by saying that adding more people to the world was contrary to socialist beliefs

and since the purpose of the sex was to give Jones a release, a baby was merely an inconvenient byproduct that had no real purpose. So then come on the belly. I know. He's just being selfish. Just do something else. Do something fun with it. Do it on the leg. Nah, dude. Only

Gooshin' inside is going to give him enough of it. I don't want to think about this disgusting guy. A slightly more fucked up George Jones. No, you don't want to think about a Jonesy cream pod? No, I don't want to think about it. In the fact that you even said that it's just disturbing. Because you know his cum noises

sound like an old man moving a wheel barrel that's like short and bad. You're welcome. Because every single time he fucked you, he said I'm doing this for you. At this point he's in the series. I'm going to say he's worse than L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Of course he did. L.

Ron Hubbard didn't murder 900 people. L. Ron Hubbard just technically made money on a fantastic idea. A wonderful storyline. But Jim Jones also they would show up in the bus number seven it would become to be known and it would wreak of booze and they weren't

allowed to have booze. And all of a sudden he's got a smoking jacket on. You're like we're not supposed to have specific types of jackets. I thought it was boozy water to have jackets with specific types of activities. He's like no, no, no, God has many jackets. In John Victor Stone, this

illicit child Jones saw something that he could use. Now, while Grace and Tim Stone were listed on the birth certificate as the parents, as far as people's temple were concerned, the baby was Jim's. Because Jim Jones forced Tim Stone to write a humiliating statement

declaring that Jim Jones was in fact a biological father. It read in part, I Timothy Oliver Stone hereby acknowledged that in April 1971 I entreated my beloved pastor James W.

Jones to Syrah Child by my wife Grace Stone who had previously at my insistence reluctantly but graciously consented there too. James W. Jones agreed to do so reluctantly

after I explained that I very much wish to raise a child but was unable after extensive attempts to sire one myself and my reason for requesting James W. Jones to do this is that I wanted my child to be fathered if not

by me, but the most compassionate, honest and courageous human being the world contains. This is an ADA. This is an ADA. This is a highly educated, powerful man. Powerful lawyer, but probably

could have been a Robert Kennedy. This statement was partly so Jones would have something to take to the courts should the stones defect even though it wouldn't hold up in court. But it was also done to take Stone down a peg or two as his power on the cult was only increasing.

He had to remind Tim Stone of his place. Well he would do this a lot where he would essentially foster his own enemies in his own conflicts within the church in order just to shut them down. And each time it made him harder. And he also saw something

to hold over Stone should Stone's loyalty waver in any way whatsoever. A little John-John as the kid came to be known was leverage. Tragedy always comes to kids named John-John. John-John. Was it John-John? John-John. That's the official name.

His name was John Victor Stone but they called him John-John. Okay. How do you get a name like it's someone like a mentally handicapped farm hand his name and I don't understand how you get these next names. I don't know. I understand like we call Wendy like lumpy

lump and all that kind of shit because it's a dog. You know what I mean? It's like a dog you come up with with your various names for it at some point. But like a child we be like oh nookie schnookie or it's like it's not an oompa loompa. And as we'll see the reason this child is leverage

is going to backfire spectacularly. Okay. Jones didn't stop here either as far as using this pregnancy to his advantage. He had one more person to humiliate almost as an afterthought. Marceline. His wife. Jones made his wife sign

the aforementioned statement as a witness publicly acknowledging once again that Jones fucked whoever he wanted. What was her state here? I mean she's still chilling with all this. She was okay with all this. No. God no. And this little stunt. This was the last straw

for Marceline. Okay. I mean she decided after this like fuck this I'm leaving. I met this very nice psychiatrist. Why do the married women always meet psychiatrists that look like Judge Reynolds from the Santa Claus? Yes. Judge Reinhold. He's great in the Santa Claus.

Why do they always leave it for a man with weird sweaters? It's always like me and Marcy have been talking and we feel we feel. It is in her best interest to leave. They can't fuck as good as Jim Jones, right? They can cuddle up to that sweet

sweet sweater and sure the guy has a micro like Johnny Paycheck. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Sometimes you want Santa Claus but sometimes you need a man who loves his weenie whistle. That's right. You're right. Now the only problem was is that Marcy Leven

meant that her kids would go with her or at least that's what she wanted. Five kids. She wanted all five of her kids to go with her because she knew Jim Jones was a fucking psycho. She didn't want to leave her kids with him. So after Marcy Leven told Jones what she was going to do, Jones called

a family meeting and after Marcy Leven held fast on her position Jones tried intimidating her like he did his followers saying she would be met quote by the Avengers of Death. But at this point she's heard the God spiel from him for a while and she's like all right

all of this is horse shit. Of course as we've said multiple times Marcy was like his first follower and his closest follower. She's like I know you're not going to send fucking lightning after me. You're not Thor. We're going to do like what are you

going to do? And so finally Jim Jones was like well how about cut the angel shit and just say I will kill you. And doing it in front of the kids like they're in a family meeting and Jim Jones is saying like listen your mother wants she wants to take you away from me.

She wants to take you out of here and when the kids are like well you know like they weren't really swayed by that like they kind of thought about because you know they fucking love their mother. She was actually a good mother but after that Jim Jones is like yeah I'm just going to if you take him I'm just going to fucking kill you

and so after that because at this point he had a full fucking private army a small one at least. He had a crew like fucking jack booted thugs they're fucking armed. They are fiercely loyal. Marshall knew that he had

the means and he had the will to do this so she canceled her plans and just settled into a life of dutiful misery. So he's living like Gaddafi with a militant troop all around him. But this shit happened really subtly. The one thing I want you to truly

understand is that the difference in other cults than we've covered is that a lot of that those changes kind of happened up top like children of God and that's like it went whackity shmackity like really really fast really really early same thing without Omshan Rikio but the people's temple was very subtle.

It was a this shit just kind of naturally grew around him. His enforcers just sort of came out of the specific people that came out of either the criminal rehab programs or the drug rehab programs. These people kind of like formed unofficial

groups around them and Marceline was watching this happen which is why she started getting an outside relationship and sort of trying to figure out a way to get the kids out. But she didn't realize how fully close the net had become. Well that's what I was wondering is this officially at this point would you classify

this as a cult at this point? It's close. Yeah. It's getting there. It's very much good. I mean they've already got a little compound. Redwood Valley's already pretty much a little compound and the reason why Jones was able to do this so subtly is because he had a reason for everything

you know and he as far as the security force goes we're going to see later like why he really beef shit up and how he actually did it in such a way where all of his followers said oh that makes sense. Oh fuck yeah but then all of a sudden you know then you have the fringe members that are like

what check please and that's actually a way to get out of a cult you can actually that's a good thing for people to know if you need to get out of a cult you can just go legally. Check please and then you have to leave. Look at that.

Well despite their mother's sad existence most of the Jones kids they were actually doing pretty good doing no small part to their long time buddy Mr. Mugs. Who's Mr. Mugs? Mr. Mugs was a full grown chimpanzee whom

temple members were told was saved from the laboratory. Do you know he's got one of those fucking voice boxes still built in just being like run children run save mugs save mugs the monkey get monkey into police car.

Honestly man every kid wanted a monkey. The kids got a monkey. Well he even used the chimp as a way to build himself up again because they bought the chimp at a fucking pet store. I don't know what it was about like the late 60's early 70's Jim Jones is selling

monkeys door to door. They're out in California some pet store just has a fucking chimp for sale. It's just different times and simpler times also if you for some reason they just thought they were just like a dog except a dog can't rip your fucking arms off.

Yeah it's like we got a chinchilla we got a palmarinia we got a monkey we got a Mogwai we have an iguana what do you want. Yeah and they told how they kind of built themselves up with Mr. Mugs is that like oh no he didn't buy him at a pet store. Jim Jones saw

him in a laboratory and he saved him because he could not bear to see this beautiful creature suffering. Why are you wearing sunglasses inside. Do you want you are frightening me. Please stop trying to make love to me I will not do it.

I will not do it. What's your shut up Mr. Mugs. Shut it up. Well presumably named after the tonight show chimpanzee mascot J Fred Mugs Mr. Mugs Jones would serve the same purpose for people's temple he was Mugs Mr.

Mugs was like oh yeah everyone loves Mr. Mugs. Who's the mascot. Oh my god. I know they didn't put him on like t-shirts but might as well. Please merchandise me you're leaving money on the table. I also there was a monkey mascot on the tonight show.

Yeah J Fred Mugs I found this out by like I googled Mr. Mugs chimpanzee to see what kind of Mr. Mugs stories I could get and yeah he has his own Wikipedia page a very long Wikipedia page. He had his own spin-off show the J Fred Mugs show. So you didn't tell me they allowed a chimp to run

an entire television show. I guess so. And was it just canceled because it ripped Raquel Welch's face off in the fan or like we've got to we've got to figure out a way to put it back on. Can you just imagine Ed McMahon getting slam wasted with that monkey I'll tell you what this chimp makes a lot

of sense when he talks about immigration. Did you read Gump & Company? No we were talking about that. Gump & Company. Gump & Company was the sequel to the book Forest Gump. I didn't even know it was a book. Yeah Forest Gump was totally a book and then a few after the movie came out and it was so big the

writer wrote a sequel called Gump & Company and in Gump & Company of course he gets into a lot more wacky adventures and in the book Forest Gump, Raquel Welch and a chimp all go into space together. I totally would have guessed it. Talk about

I could totally could have called that what an easy plot. I would love to hear the interview with the author of Gump & Company be like so how do you describe the book? Well it could be best described as a money grab as like I'm trying to capitalize kind of like a scam kind of like a thing

that I don't even believe I wrote a manuscript short about my door and I believed I hired five Himalayan boys to do it. It was obviously written over a weekend. Okay. Yeah but it was really fun because you know Raquel Welch chimp Forest Gump in space. That's kind of funny.

But it's not great about that. Go to space. If you're out of ideas take your characters to space. Well although Jay Fred Muggs would survive until 2012 running out his days in Florida with his girlfriend Phoebe BB who was a human being. What? No. Oh yeah

Hold on. This is a whole B size to this story. Alright Phoebe BB? Phoebe BB. Phoebe BB. I don't think it actually was a human. Oh it wasn't. Okay. Even though Jay Fred Muggs would live a long life Mr. Muggs Jones would

die in Jonestown most likely the first casualty of the mass suicide. Yeah of course. Everybody's dying and falling right at this. You gotta don't tell me the the the chimp is that going like It's been like he is disturbing my death like piece.

This is I mean this is absolutely fucking absurd to think about. That's why we bring it up because it is fucking absurd. But it really shows you what sort of planning went into that last day. Kill Mr. Muggs was on the checklist and either that or someone thought like oh fuck what about the monkey

and just took care of him in a last minute mercy. They shot him in the back of the head. I'll never tell what happened here. Oh man. And then they shot him like Che Guevara. Oh. Just let him go in the forest. Yeah they absolutely couldn't. I mean I don't know there were no chance there but you know what those forests in Jonestown

were full of monkeys. They said that was actually in the mornings monkeys were their roosters is that they'd wake up. That's terrifying. That is kind of scary. Monkeys are our roosters. Time to make the donuts. Well long before all that happened back in the early 70s

the Jones family was doing pretty good even though Jones constantly preached socialist ideals. He wasn't above taking a few bucks from the kitty to take his family on expensive vacations all on the down low. He's working very hard. He is working very hard. Technically he's working extremely

hard but he's telling all of us people like hey we're going on a secret mission. That's a cool way to set up a vacation. Yeah. He's like we're going on a secret mission. We'll be back in like a week. We're going to this place Walliworth.

I hope it's open. You better check if it's open first. The only Jones child who didn't seem to be enjoying himself was Jim and Marceline's only true born son Stephen. Whether it was because of depression or if it was just a cry for help Stephen attempted

suicide three times when he was 12. He himself said it was a lot. Just one year. He said it was a cry for help. Oh of course it was. Since Jones was a hardcore drug addict it was important for him to keep a large and convenient stash of ludes around the Jones household at

all times. And it was with these pills that Stephen attempted suicide. And even after the second attempt, even after the third, Jones still kept the pills readily available all for his own convenience even though his son was grabbing him and taking him whenever he could. Possibly even worse

than that was the fact that Jones didn't really seem to give a shit. In the end I imagine he thought that Stephen would learn to take care of himself or not. I can't imagine he really thought too much outside of himself in his own dick. Absolutely not. Is Stephen the oldest? Stephen, well no

there's a couple. No Lou is older than him. I think it goes I think it was Agnes Lou who were both adopted kids but Stephen was Jim Jones, Jim and Marceline's only biological son. All the rest of the kids were adopted. Well isn't that

stunning he would have a love for ludes. Yeah I mean I think Jim Jones like he'd always talk big about like how when he died Marceline was going to take over and then when Marceline took, when Marceline died Stephen would take over after that but I think like deep down

he didn't give a shit about Stephen. He didn't give a shit about Marceline because I think he always knew or at least hoped that when he died the church was going to die with him. I think you see that over and over again that that sentiment is put into a lot of his speeches especially as it gets

closer and closer to their move to Guiana and he is I think it's very true and I think that's the most dangerous thing of course because essentially like well then you if I die then you all have to die too. You could see how that algebra. So it was

it was a power thing. Oh yeah absolutely yeah it was just well it was arrogance really I mean it's like that nothing is going to survive past this and you know the Jones out the death tape there's always like one sentence that sticks out in my mind so much and I think what you

just said like really reminded me of that is he's talking and talking and talking and telling everything that he's done for him and there's this one this one sentence that just fucking lives with me is Jim Jones says I am the best friend you will ever have. You know and people and everyone. Remember his tombstone

of his father? Everyone is my friend. It's very interesting it's kind of the same shit it's weird how it's like all these things kind of go even unconsciously feeds back into the end moments. That's crazy but in the meantime

before any of that happened Jim Jones kept his congregation enraptured. Around 1970 Jones started really driving at home that he and he alone was their salvation and he slowly started replacing God in these people's lives with himself.

Here's a quote from Raven by John Jacobs and Tim Reiderman you prayed to your sky God and he never heard your prayers you asked and begged and pleaded in your suffering and he never gave you any food. He never gave you a bed he never

provided you a home but I your socialist worker God have given you all these things. And in a lot of ways he did right? He actually I mean people were getting results but he's not God it's about results but again he's not God

that's a big jump you can say I gave you shit and they'd be like yes you did but you can't all of a sudden once you start the term socialist worker God seems to be a trigger where I'd be like jet please jet please they call you a taxi

and then you get in they give you $100 and you can go buy a suit. Right and Jones followed this statement as he would many times after by throwing the Bible across the room and they'd pick it up and throw it again and they'd run over to it and he'd jump up and down on it and then the band would play a fanfare

and he'd start dancing on it. It hit me. One, two, three, four. Get up. Him just dancing on like fucking James Brown and you had to remember. But there's chicken gut it's like Marilyn Manson meets James Brown. It sounds like a Manson concert. But he would pick up the Bible

he'd throw it across the room he'd jump up and down on it and be like if this fucking Bible means anything God strike me dead and like he set their wing to die and then he'd be like see you see how there's no God and you remember the fundamentalist Christians that were involved. These are revivalist

era Christians that were involved in the people's temple. They believed that the word of God in the Bible was completely real. They thought it was a nonfiction book and so the idea is that you watch it happen because how many times I see people even I felt the tiniest twinge of something.

I threw out I had an old school Bible in my books when I was moving into my apartment here and I took it I was just like fuck this and I threw it in the garbage can and there's always like a little magical moment where they're like oh fuck what'd I just do but then you like you just it's it's interesting how that

can grip people especially when they spent their whole lives believing it. Of course yeah. He prepped them for this. This was not something that was out of the blue because for years he had been preaching about the contradictions in the Bible where he would say like yes the the Bible yes there are a lot of things going on there but the Bible

is a man-made object this is something that was written by men and he go through in his sermons and he point out all the contradictions in the Bible he's like well it says this in the Old Testament that says this in the New Testament and it says this in Mark and it says this in Luke and it says this in Exodus and this in Deuteronomy and

so people started listening and since they were so enraptured by Jim Jones and since they believed in Jim Jones so much they'd be like huh that makes sense why is that why would there be those contradictions there and so by the time he started throwing the Bible across the room people are already thinking like

you know maybe this Bible is bullshit and then after he threw it after he called out on God to strike him down when nothing happened Jones said there's no need to fear God because I am God and you are God and we are all our own God. And what was Mr. Muggs thinking this whole time?

Check please. Check please. But the emphasis and the implication was that even though they were all God and all gods were equal some gods are more equal than others. Oh interesting like Animal Farm.

Yes. Animal Farm. The book, huh? You God you must have been such a difficult high school English student. What did you think of Animal Farm Ben? I just want to know. Love pigs. That's not an opinion on that book. Animal Farm

Charlotte with the web. You talk about Charlotte's web you don't know what Animal Farm is do you? There's a series of animals that live on a farm. Did you get a degree in political science? We don't read books about pigs. It's not a book about pigs, it's not babe.

It's like eighth grade political science. Animal Farm. Are people in the book? No, it's Animal Farm. There's a couple of people in the book. So it's all lies. Because animals

don't have political parties. Oh my god. Is it an analogy for something? Yes. Yes, it's an allegory. Some animals are more equal than others. All animals are all animals are equal. I don't care what the spider is spelling. I hate the web.

I get it out of here. I'm mad. I'm mad that he doesn't know it. No, I know the book. I know the book. The crowd ate this shit up. You know even the Bible fumpers you know after he'd already put in all the doubts in their heads they were totally on board with this.

Now with all these followers and all this power after Jim Jones saw that he could take little old ladies who have been clinging to the Bible for 60, 70, 80 years he figured he was finally ready after seven years of planning to take

a sincere run at Mother Divine. Oh. He was definitely prepped for this and was thinking about this the entire time. And it really does. He's just starting to believe in the smell of his own shit. He's starting to really love it.

He's got the chops where you could just show up and take the entire ministry that belongs to Mother Divine. Jealous Divine, Father Divine, he'd been dead for seven years at this point. Jealous Divine had died in 1965. Mother Divine had been running it this entire time

and the whole time Jim Jones was just biding his time because he's seen this international peace mission movement. He's seen it this whole time. It's like that's how I can double my followers right quick. I can double my followers overnight. He's seeing a huge shortcut here

and really it's not a bad plan. It's a dumb plan but all this shit's dumb. He wants to go steal another congregation. It's sort of like the video game Civilization I believe. I think you could do, I seem to remember that from Sev where you could go and you could get other people's armies and shit. Oh no, you just defeat, you just invade

another country and then once you take the capital city you get all of the cities. That's a good game. It works every time. Look what happened in Iraq. Loyal soldiers. They were ready for us. Totally ready, willing to fight for us. Now if you remember

from our first episode Mother Divine was the heir to the, as I said, international peace mission movement originally run by Father Divine who died and left it to Mother 1965. Jones's plan for this movement for all these years was to show up and say that Father Divine had jumped bodies just

as Mother Divine had oh so many years ago from a peninaya to that Canadian girl. Can you imagine the look on Mother Divine's face when he shows up and he says Father Divine jumped to my body and she knows that the other story was horseshit too. I just can't imagine Mother Divine

standing in front of the congregation just turning to Jim Jones being like well I don't know if that's the way it really went there. I don't know if he really just jumped into your body there and he's like oh I think it did. I think it's exactly how it happened. It's like oh no no no

she had worked for someone not for authors. I became Irish. Just a strange episode of Quantum Leave huh? Yeah I mean where everybody's fucking each other. Yeah exactly. Yeah I mean Jones's plan is that if he could convince Mother Divine that

Father Divine had jumped bodies into Jim Jones. If he could convince Mother Divine then she would convince all the rest of the followers. All he had to do. That is such a crazy thing to have to convince somebody else. It's because she knew the other story was bullshit too. You can't send her a meal like oh wow is that

real? He's gotta know that he knows that that is bullshit. He's gotta hedge the bets you know and he's gotta think like okay I believe in my bullshit pretty hard how hard does she believe in her bullshit? It's poker

with bullshit. Bullshit poker? Yeah I mean it's like trying to see like who's gonna break first. Okay. But he also thought you know besides just convincing Mother Divine like he had to kind of sway the congregation as well with all this shit. Like he had to kind of put

the congregation a bit. He had to make him a little wobbly so when he really ran at Mother Divine she would be a little wobbly as well and maybe feel like okay like I could merge these houses. It's kind of like the movie either Fury or like the movie

with the brains because Scanners. It's like Scanners where you basically have two people because it's not about her and him it's that he knows he's gotta flip her crowd and the way you do that is you have to mentally beat Mother Divine and sort of like a staring contest in front of everyone where you show up

and be like who jumped bodies me or you? Who's jumping bodies now? Did I jump bodies? Like I don't know I don't know if I did I don't know if you did I think that I know that you did and I think I know that I did. And you have to be a bunch of people just a silent group of people just staring at them being like

who's winning? What the hell is going on? This is how he tried to make this happen He loaded about two hundred of his most loyal followers and drove them across the country to the Divine compound outside of Philadelphia and he also brought a few empty

buses because he figured this is how arrogant he was. He figured that in about five six days time he was gonna dazzle these people so hard that they were gonna be bringing hundreds of people back with him. But remember he has something

he has reason to believe this because this is how he's run his game for so long. He said people would show up on his road shows. They'd always have like one empty bus or like room and a couple of the buses and basically they'd whip up the music and you'd be like whoo! Praise Jesus whoo!

I'm jumping and dancing with everybody like yeah whoo! Yeah whoo! Look at that soup! I got Jesus in my feet whoo whoo! All of a sudden you're on the bus whoo whoo! Got my seatbelt on isn't this funny?

Bus pulls off. Where are we going? You're in the people's temple now. Oh shit! That reminds me of what I did to my friend Dave at two o'clock in the morning when we were very intoxicated. I said we're going to South Dakota

going to Mount Rushmore. He's like okay. You're the funniest man I've ever met. Yeah but then I threw him in the car and then 12 hours later he woke up. I was smoking Winston's. I was like we're almost there! I gotta go to psych class.

But that's not even a joke. People would part of the way onto their buses and all of a sudden now you're in the people's temple. You're part of a socialist community because you don't have any of your bullshit anymore. You don't have any money or recessions. Isn't it kidnapping? It's kind of like emotional kidnapping.

You kind of flip your mind. Because the part of it is what we were talking about before is that you lie to yourself like you could handle the community part of it. You think that you're ready to join something pure and crazy but then you show up and you're like oh wow how many bathrooms are there? How much food is there?

The reality is shocking. Sure. He just got to the international peace mission movement and he started talking like first he was talking all nice and sweet. It's so great to be here. I love this movement.

Fun or Divine is inside me now. He kind of jumped inside me to the point where I did a reverse Fresh Prince and came from California to Philadelphia. But people weren't really buying it and Mother Divine also was like ohhhh

I don't know about this. Who's this white man? Legitimately it's been like who's this white guy that just showed up? Even though Mother Divine was also white. Oh yeah I forgot. You forgot that she was a white Canadian. That's why Jim Jones thought

that he might be able to flip it because Penn and I went over to a white woman so I wouldn't bother Divine and go over to white man. This started with Mr. Divine. Isn't he the one who started this whole idea of switching bodies? Father Divine was the one that said

Penn and I have gone over to a white woman now. We're all good. You know what? I just think they're not being reasonable. That's what I think. Very astute. They didn't immediately reject him.

Everybody was like I don't know. It's crazy. This is arrogance got the best of him. He got pissed off and he started telling him the way you guys live in your life. This is bullshit. This is not a socialist society. This is not Father Divine.

I mean me. This is not what I wanted. He, him, me. I think you've got to come to people's temple. You have to come or else you're going to hell. He started straight up threatening them. You're going to go to hell. Your lives are over. You're going to be destroyed. You do not come with me.

You want to know what you don't do? Groups in Philadelphia are highly dangerous and very motivated. They just ride it because they were happy. No Eagles won. They trashed the whole town. Except for the Poles because they greased the Poles. They actually still did it.

They still made it. The American Ninja Warrior Philadelphia edition. So after Jim Jones started getting aggressive with them, Mother Divine was like get the fuck out of here. I don't ever want to see you again. Get out of here and never come back. And so on the way back,

Jim Jones didn't say shit and nobody said shit to him. They said it was a silent tense bus ride all the way from Philadelphia back to California. And it is really difficult. The silence is so much more echoing when you're three to a seat.

So everyone understood this was a failure for him. Everyone understood. But the thing is about Jim Jones though is that there are no failures. It's always someone else's fault. It's never truly a failure. I love his excuse where he said that Mother Divine,

they had a wonderful conversation and then Mother Divine pulled him another room, ripped open her shirt and showed him her quote-unquote sagging breasts. Waved her sagging breasts. Which I guess had the effect of when a bird's got eyes on its wings and it's supposed to scare bigger predators away.

Like one of those things where I guess the breasts were supposed to scare him and he goes oh no, not horrible it's just like, well he basically he pulled a Brazil where he said oh she's fuck, she wanted me to fuck her and I said no. That's what kind of got me about it

because he pulled the opposite of Brazil because in Brazil he said I got asked to fuck him. In Brazil he said she wanted to fuck me so I did it for the greater good, for the orphanage. So she would give $5,000 to the orphanage.

And really arguably this would be for even more of a greater good because this is the cause, this is the whole cause and if they can add another another thousand people to the congregation, like that's a huge deal for the cause, but for some reason

this was not good enough for Jim Johnson. Well we're going to see this play out later on too. He started talking about shit like this where he's just like I only put out for the prime talent. He's very much so like you're going to see his taste

escalate in women and then in men it stays exactly the same. But these failures in a relative sense were pretty small and people's temple was still growing and with this growth came a greater need for control and that control

came in the form of the planning commission. I see this as a direct result of these failures. I think what he realizes is that when he went out because he became so confident of what he was doing in Ukaia and that he thought that he would just go out and fucking crush, crush, crush

everywhere else and when it didn't he realized oh I gotta like fucking take this out on my people a little bit more. So he invented this thing called the planning commission which was like his little his solid inner inner core group that would not then be the most innermost it would be the second innermost

but he needed them to be his like open mic night. I see it's what the mom did in what was that the Grinch who stole Christmas. What are you talking about? I haven't seen this stupid fucking movie. I don't want to talk about it. It's not a good film. It is a good film. I mean I've watched a couple of minutes like on TBS during Christmas and I was bored at my

parent's house but it was obviously a bad movie. It's not good, the who's are physically deformed. The mother, the mother who is on the planning commission. Can I actually ask this, do the who's believe in Christ? They might, they believe in Christmas? Yeah it's just Christmas but they like the presents but do they not

believe in the theoretical beginnings of Christmas? They didn't get into that. They might like Jim Jones as far as we know. I think it's kind of like Wookie Life Day. What's Wookie Life Day? It's from the Star Wars Holiday Special. Oh yes. It's what the Wookie celebrate because if you watch it there is a long ten minute

segment of the Wookies having a Christmas like thing called Wookie Life Day with no subtitles. It's just ten minutes of Wookies growling at each other. I also realize, I can't do, I realize when we were watching Star Wars I can't do the Wookie noise. It's tough to do.

Ben try it. Not good at it. Well this planning commission there was an illusion of collaboration. Jim Jones said alright we're forming this thing we're all gonna work together. This is how we're gonna take people's temple to the next

level and all you people who are my most trusted, my most special are gonna be a part of it and we're all gonna do this together. In reality it was completely in Jim Jones' control. Well it became known as the PC and what do we know about cults once acronyms get started

there's gonna be problems. Once the acronyms started you know it's bad and he used sort of this, this was his testing ground. He would see what he could get away with with the planning commissions and they would meet late at night after all of the meetings there would be an afternoon session again four or five hours long. There would be a night

session, it would be like four hours long meeting with just the PC where he would start his more experimental ideas to kind of see how people respond and then see how basically in a cult structure you really have to kind of incept them.

You have to make them think that they are collaborating and adding something to the group when in fact they're not so that they themselves like the second layer of the cult will then go teach the outer layer of the cult to believe in the teaching straight from the head. Like so you basically

the only way you get the fringe people from saying check please as they see the inner group people saying no it's a good idea. So they then see people reverberating the idea back and forth so then it begins to make sense. Little circle of trust there. Yeah because we're getting people's temple is getting up into the thousands

as far as membership goes I think by 73 they had about like 3,000 and I think by the end it was like 7,000. Wow. Like there were only like only a small fraction of people's temple members actually went to Guyana. Okay. Yeah and I think Jim Jones

like it wasn't just it was definitely a way for him to like put his ideas out there and have it go outside but it was also a toy for Jim Jones. Yeah. It was like this guy Jim Jones played with the people and the people in the planning commission the way like a serial killer plays with a dead body just seeing

what he's gonna get away just seeing what he can do just for his own pleasure. I mean the thing did serve administrative purposes but it seems like the way most writers tell it the PC was used as more of a platform for abuse and humiliation all under the guise of being a place where people could accomplish great things.

Interesting and trying to make them little human zombies like Jeffrey Dahmer did. Yeah and shit like that. Yeah. And of course most of the humiliation had to do with the thing it's easier to use to humiliate someone is sex. One of the main purposes of the PC was so Jones

could bring women he wanted to have sex with into his confidence. The PC was at its largest about 100 members out of the thousands that People's Temple ended up having and it was only out of the PC that Jones would pluck his sexual conquest. And it wasn't quite in the poison way

of handing black roses to the talent in the front row to come in but it was kind of like that where they would go. The cultist bachelor. Yeah where they would bring people this was his way of bringing them closer and again in every single time well we would see it with the Vietta Smart asked a lot of questions he put them on

the PC. If he had a woman that he wanted to have sex with he put her on the PC. So was it a punishment or a reward? We're gonna learn that they are exactly the same. Yeah. Yeah I mean and that's I think that's one of the brilliant things about Jim Jones and also what a lot of cults do is they blur

the line between punishment and reward. A bunch of people bragging about how little sleep they got. That's the first one. Once you start and that just shows again the subtle build and the way people can be really flipped is once you control their whole behavior

because it gets to a point they view pain as pleasure and then once that starts happening they believe they deserve it and they believe that it's the will of God and they're supposed to be like this and then Jim Jones uses that to his own advantage. Yeah and taking the sex thing even further I have

the purpose of the PC as far as their meetings went what they talked about you know Jones just wanted a captive audience to listen to him go on and on about how virile he was and how much he liked to fuck and who he was fucking and who he had fucked in that room but he would actually

make people write statements describing their personal sexual experiences that would be read aloud to the entire PC and he'd make them do it like in the middle of the meeting was like why don't you we fucked right yeah we fucked write about it write a statement and then we're gonna read it.

Was there a statement of read one of them was to be like I had a great time it was just like signing Nancy my only lover has been Jay huh and that doesn't say a lot though no because honestly that's technically not even good or bad that's just a fact

the other half of these planning commission talks is much more sinister the PC that was the good part that was the good part basically you give up to 10 bed things for his level of fuckingness

where you just say like a 7 out of 10 loved it could have used a little bit more feet sucking 2 out of 10 I am a man and I did not enjoy this and he tears those up he's like I only take 6 out of 10s the PC was also in charge of discipline that's

disciplining the entire congregation most of the time the discipline was just counseling and that's by Jonestown survivor Tim Carter's own admission like Tim Carter is earlier this guy is the biggest Jim he's the biggest Jonestown critic he's the biggest people's

temple critic he's the one that we know so much about people's temple the inner workings of it because of Tim Carter and Tim Carter said 80% of the time it wasn't really that bad because it worked because the counseling just worked they would talk people out and they had counseling programs with real counselors

that ended up being parts of the people's temple that they would do but then the problem is is that once you got past level 3 of counseling and you were still not doing shit that's when the verbal public humiliations would start and they called that catharsis that entailed them

bringing people up to the front of the church and they'd scream and yell at them and tell them what big piece of shit they were and then at the end Jim Jones would go over and he'd give them a big hug say it's for your own good and that was punishing with one hand comforting with the other hand shows them not only do I administer punishment but I care for

you so much I'm gonna make you feel better afterwards it's the abuse cycle it's being an abusive relationship where you you're the source of all stimulus yeah and then there were the spankings started off as just a lick or two from the belt which sounds relatively tame as far as cult punishments go

especially when compared to some of the fucking Omsh and Rinkyo stuff but this wasn't done in private usually this was done in front of a congregation of like a thousand members these are the locked door meetings but still it was like a thousand people there and then they do it a hundred people at a time

all waiting in line to be spanked they've been doing this in Congress a lot I find like this is like a senator like activity idea that's why they call it the majority whip capital steps here comes your new member there it is real heady young men

and then the belt escalated to a paddle which Jim Jones not so originally called the board of education oh man it's so fucking like the wall dude oh every principal calls every principal calls his paddle the board of education why do you still have paddles

I don't think they should I guess probably not I mean up until I graduated in 2001 you had the principal at a paddle the superintendent had a paddle some of the teachers had like personal paddles did you have to wear those clay masks and fold and pretend to fall into a sausage grinder no but you got to sign

the paddle after he spanked you after you after he gave you a few licks the whole world is run by the negative the mean people from Animal House negative people then the number of licks escalated

you know it starts like one two three but then it got up to 25 and then it got up to 50 and then it got up to a hundred all in front of the congregation sometimes with such force that these people required medical attention for their butts excuse me

I'm a doctor for butts let me look at them I'm not really a doctor I probably should have said that before I started looking at your butt but the one thing I will say is you got two cheeks you got one hole looking good doctor butts and then there were the boxing matches

the offender this is not awesome I understand I do understand Henry said the reaction to awesome but then I do understand your butt will be like this is not awesome forced boxing is not good no, the offender in question

usually just guilty of being bourgeois would be forced into a public boxing match against a member he or she had no chance of beating damn and you know people are watching that shit too they're screaming, they're cheering the congregation is fucking loving it it must be so, especially at this point

because originally they were just singing and dancing in a normal church remember again two years ago they were just in a church singing and dancing now you're at a point where you're like get him Mrs. Henderson, kick him in the fucking nuts kick him in the fucking nuts you got Mr. Muggs just being forced to box a little old lady

I don't want to kill you but I will look up what I did Terakal Welch oh at some point the boxing ring is being melt yeah and even if the offender won sometimes they'd have to fight opponent

after opponent until Jones figured they had enough they'd have to pretty much fight until they lost and sometimes he even made them do it naked and sometimes they even put like a young kid against an old lady who won

the kid no that's tough to say you were even saying the other day about the idea of they have to fight until they get up to Jim Jones himself and then it's like Mike Tyson knock out yes did Jim Jones ever fight himself

no of course not he could knock his sunglasses off he could kill them with the power of his gaze and some of these punishments they weren't even that original because honestly the boxing matches that's kind of an original punishment I mean that took some imagination I would love to see them figured up

because you know honestly they were just sitting there and a bunch of people fighting and Jim Jones is like fight each other like where he was watching Star Trek episode you know what would be kind of sweet is you guys start whaling on each other and they're all like

there's a couple other guys who are like yeah that would be pretty fucking sweet wouldn't it yeah fight club fight club don't talk about it so he intertwined punishment and entertainment yeah punishment and entertainment and sometimes like the shit was just gross like one dude they just puked

and pissed all over totally out of ideas very Italian it's Roman technically Roman but I say Italian at the same time because I think they were doing that shit in the bunga bunga rooms but some of the punishments were

straight up punishment and participation he even started using the live performances as a platform for discipline but instead of using trusted plans like they had back in the old days being raised from the dead was now a punishment

when Jones approached the offender they were to fall to the ground as hard as they could and lay there until Jones thought they'd suffered long enough and then Jones would call on him to rejoin the ranks of the living so basically you got a job as a part of the show

if you fucked up if you did something bourgeois he basically picks you he then says like he has to zap you in the sermon and then you fall down dead at the same time he would like touch your body there's a bunch of people standing around you you have to like completely still

because you know that if you don't you're going to be fucked you're going to be fighting Mr. Mugs and the rounds fucking then the squared circle and so he it's very interesting how and I think this is a part of the cult mentality and it grows and grows and grows

because Jim Jones can never be off he can't be off anymore there's no off time there's no time for just Jim he is always the father the show is now completely moved to completely every aspect of their lives they never know

when they're not supposed to be on with they're not supposed to be capital T, capital P, capital T the people's temple when it's like they can't just be just hanging out and so it blurs your reality it's like taking the clocks out of a casino where you literally just have no clue what's going on and what are you doing

it's always winning time in a casino yeah and he also like was it yeah I mean blurring the lines between punishment and reward I think the one thing that I could not figure out whether this was a punishment or a reward or a privilege it was like I really thought about this

and I couldn't figure out which one it was he started involving congregants in his own personal stigmata you know for those of you who don't know like stigmata is when you know a person's hands bleed their palms bleed as a kind of like sympathetic magic to mimic Jesus on the cross

it's supposed to be a divinely inspired process but instead of just using like food coloring and corn syrup or even just like pigs blood or something like that Jones demanded that human blood be used and instead of using his own

he'd make his congregants bleed themselves so he could use their blood they are very very disciplined very committed and he should be so lucky we should be so lucky yeah just use pigs blood no no no what if someone tests it

who's testing it the testers the testers who come testing no he never allowed anybody to test anything because he went to Indianapolis went back to Indianapolis once and he did the cancer trick and the Indianapolis star told us like hey listen we we'd love to

we'd love to believe this is real you're a hometown boy why don't you let us test the cancer and Jim Jones said absolutely not because if you test the cancer then our enemies will not fake the testers he's right Marcus he could have been right

no I don't think he's right I also what I was reading about I remember the one bit about how he started using cursing in the sermons did you read about that about how he was like he wanted to start appearing to be more like with it and with the times and just being like he's like people curse

say fuck and the audience would all look at each other and be like let's start going and then you'd start big chance of fuck fuck fuck I've only been about seven words you can't say it in a seven word word you know who does the same shit as Tony Robbins Tony Robbins curses like a mother fucker during his like his talks

and shit because he's just like it's because what it allows me is to connect to my audience he's got a protruding gland problem which is why he's so big smart guy well all this shit that Jones made people do that we were just talking about like this is all for like relatively minor infractions

committing actual crimes and pure fucking torture see people's temple like a lot of cults and like a lot of the more insular religions like the Hasidic here in Brooklyn they prefer to take care of punishment for serious crimes in house they don't like to involve the police

even when the crime is something as abhorrent as pedophilia now while priests and rabbis and youth pastors just tend to get shoved around if that after they fuck up people's temple took it a step further as they did in the case of pedophile

Peter Wotherspoon ugh it's a bad name what happened to this? chicken in the egg scenario with the name Wotherspoon what happened to this clown? I just want to say

thank you guys so much for having me it's really been love the songs love the dancing I've had sex with a child I will do now I'm just I'm just being up front but I promise pinkie swear I'll do it to any child

in this room that I will never ever ever do it again and you can take that my word is bound let's set up the boxing ring shall we? didn't work out oh yeah we'll bring him in through the power

of God he will never backslide for if he is a part of people's temple then he shall be cured of his pedophilic urges so this is where God was but this is where they would invoke God not socialism to cure this man's pedophilia

did not work out real fast Peter Wotherspoon molested a 10 year old boy but instead of taking him to the police Jack Beam took Wotherspoon to a tiny little windowless room where Wotherspoon was instructed to plop his genitals out on a table

would you think at that point you'd be asking a lot of questions is this like a show and tell or is this just like a bird trying to entice another mate it's more of a show and scream I think and then

Jack Beam whacked Wotherspoon's dick and balls with a rubber hose over and over until they were so swollen they were unrecognizable yikes shit please they had to take him to the hospital

he had to use a catheter for months how do you explain my sympathy level is very low but at part of this how do you explain to the hospital I've been like my dick and balls fell down the stairs you can't just wave off my

obviously it's got a hose marks on it the point is they should have gone to the police all this stuff you take care of this shit in house you never take care of it because if you look at these communities over and over again taking care of shit in house

only ends in tears it usually ends in the person doing the exact same shit as soon as they get better now as it is with all cults there's always the question why don't you leave people's temple well Marcus as it is

with all cults the question is why don't they leave I'll tell you see most of the time the answer is simple these people don't have anywhere else to go the people's temple has all your shit oh that's right the answer is so easy

they have everything well first of all when most people go to a cult their families don't want them to go so they have to tell their families I'll see you later they have to tell their families their parents to go fuck themselves they burn a bunch of bridges

and then here's all my money I'm going to sign the lease over to my house to you all of this shit is insane or the people that joined don't have any family to tell fuck off they don't have any property to give so when they come into people's temple people's temple gives them everything

and if they leave then they have nothing again and a lot of these people that were given jobs through people's temple they got that job there because their boss is a people's temple member so if they leave people's temple they lose their job and people had families and they've given all their shit

over to people's temple they're tithing 25% of their paychecks but you remember this is what they started doing again the fucking old story of turning the temperature up on the frog in the water is that the tithing started at like 10% and moved up to 25% but then he started making you write

the amount of money you actually make on a piece of paper and then he would slowly up tick to squeeze what he can out of you slowly but surely you're giving 90% of your paycheck and then that stuff is money that you got from them in the first place so essentially you're working for

people's temple jobs that then pay you money that then that money is going back into the system where essentially everybody's like it's the company dime it's the same company it's the company store it's working for Walmart and even if you did end up leaving Jones made a decree that all former

members had to live at least 100 miles away and if they didn't Jones would send out his enforcers to intimidate you into doing so and all this power was made possible by Jones' expansion from Redwood Valley south to California's major cities he planted a pretty good

financial foothold in Los Angeles but he knew he could only go so far in that city Los Angeles gave him money Jim Jones wanted power he decided it was time to really put a steak in a city where he could insert himself into the public arena in a way he only

dreamed of in Indianapolis and he is going to Des Moines Iowa Pearl of Iowa where dreams are made of San Francisco San Francisco it was built of a bunch of different

varied, wild groups and the neighborhoods themselves would kind of run themselves each part of San Francisco was its own little economy its own little world that you can kind of use like rival cult gangs over there weren't the Moons over there at the time

the Moons were pretty well established at this point but at this time San Francisco was kind of a surprisingly a conservative town but now like the hippies had moved in and now it was the gays and now the blacks had started to say like hey we want

rights too because they were all pushed into this shitty neighborhood we need influence here we actually need some change here and Jim Jones came in just the perfect point to be at the forefront of that movement

and this guy I mean he would accomplish shit politically that seems almost unbelievable if all you know about Jim Jones is Jonestown this guy had very real political power working with and against people that are still making headlines today

people that are senators now who do we got you want to name names you know what man I'm going to leave it as a surprise really you'll be excited you'll love it I'm going to leave the senator as his fucking surprise Senator Bernie Sanders but all that

would take a lot of years and quite a bit of groundwork upon arriving Jones sought out an influential doctor named Carlton Goodlett who ran one of San Francisco's biggest black newspapers using his mother as a Trojan horse Jones played the dude

full so I couldn't use that metaphor she was a Trojan horse it's just Ken Bone calling women human submarines cause they were chock full of seam yeah that's kind of fun all mothers are Trojan horses cause they got people in them

but this was a metaphorical Trojan horse he went along to Dr. Carlton Goodlett's office and he played the dude full son by his mother's side and Dr. Jones did a really good job joining up and she's just as manipulative

as her son and she really fucking helps quite a bit so she was all in she's on board for everything and so was she there during all the humiliation stuff oh yeah just watching loving it happy with it completely happy with it

just proud of her son proud that her son is finally making money like our mothers are finally proud of us even though they still don't truly understand what it is that we do all Jim Jones' mother cared about was that Jim Jones was a great man all she cared about was that

he had power people were following him and the ends justified the means in every way whatsoever because the bigger Jim Jones got the better she felt about her own life cause it boosted her ego sure so as Jim Jones was taking

his mother to all these doctor visits he started talking to the doctor himself and started putting in these little hints like yeah I'm a pastor yeah I do this socialist church yeah we have a big black membership she's like doing a proctologist exam his mom is getting her boobies

splashed by the mammograms how's that work it's like a squeezing machine and they're just sitting there just talking over his mom's nude body alright well after that a few conversations this Carl and Goodluck guy was like fuck yeah I like the cut of your dib

like let's get you into San Francisco let me ask you something Goodluck do you douche do you think Jim Jones was ever surprised that all this stuff worked yes where he was just like I got another one very very much so like he would sometimes

like after he accomplished something like particularly big like people that were with him would like look over at him and he'd just be like Jesus Christ God okay do you get the feeling he wanted to stop no no at some point he'd be like I hope this one doesn't work

because I don't want to expand anymore it would have to stop completely against his will but the problem is that again it's the other side is that what the difference between a normal human being and a cult leader is that a cult leader will use all this as validation right eventually it starts saying like oh maybe all of the bullshit I'm saying

that I know is bullshit maybe it's not maybe it's coming out of me and I'm actually channeling on is it sort of the double-edged sword where it's like if they believe in me they gotta have something Steven Jones said this exact same thing he was quoted in Road to Jonestown saying something like that he said the most important

thing in Jim Jones's life was how other people thought of him he based his entire personality on what other people thought of him and what Steven Jones said is like if you've got a thousand people telling you you're the cat's meow then you're gonna believe it because meow

meow it was a feedback loop so the more they told him that he was fantastic the more fantastic he thought he was the more powerful he thought he was and the more they believed him so it was this huge feedback loop that was just snowballing and then it makes my metaphors

it's like James Woods twitter account he's amazing he's such a lunatic another Jim Jones had some local credit in San Francisco he started insinuating himself into black churches giving guest sermons and before the churches knew what hit him Jones had bought

an 1800 seat venue and was slowly siphoning off members because at this point when Jim Jones moved to San Francisco the congregation was you know like the white people in Mendocino County in Ucaya and then when he gets to San Francisco and Los Angeles

it starts going back up towards a majority black congregation and with that people's temple was franchised. Three locations up and down California. Yeah and sometimes they have filet of fish and it's important to franchise

this is where you make your money they're not in the church business they're in the real estate business. Your love of Ray Crock is problematic. It's discerning. It makes me question why I started a business with you. I'm going to take us to the top or if not I'm going to kill all of us.

One billion served. As we know with cult leaders if you don't up the ante people drift you got to constantly be bonding with your followers and there's no better way to do that than with the shared hatred of and fear from an enemy.

And it was even better if the enemy was faced. Yeah that would be totally scary if it was just a bone face. What better way to create another bogeyman than with yet another fake but this time public assassination attempt.

Even though San Fran and LA were becoming more established the main base of People's Temple was still down in Redwood Valley. It was also isolated enough where any suspicious activities wouldn't draw the immediate attention of the police. One afternoon right before service was about to begin as a couple hundred

people were outside doing cult activities Jones was walking through the parking lot. Just in unison just folding things, making suits just like that's all it is. Playing cornhole for some reason. Actually I would see the People's Temple playing a lot of corn. See that's a pretty low impact game, it's a socialist game.

Are they allowed to drink alcohol? No. Oh they're not. Absolutely not. No that is a huge role. That's something you're going to get twenty-five-fifty spankings for. Well if you're drunk. Well that's saying as soon as you get a couple any of the spankings are better and better. Well they're having like kind of a little festive.

The band's playing everything's going great for People's Temple. They're at a very happy moment. They're at a perfect moment to be broken. They're simmering. Yeah you want people to be happy when the bad shit happens. Sure. Because when the people are happy and the bad shit happens it really fucks with them. Sure. So Jones

is walking across the parking lot. Shot rings out. Jones clutches his chest and suddenly blood is all over his shirt. Uh oh. And so Marceline and Jack beam like they go up and they grab Jim Jones and they kind of prop him up and the dog, Steven's dog

goes running off in the direction of the shot. But Jim Jones points everyone in a different direction saying they went that way. Go that way. Don't follow the dog. They went that way. And so the people went

and ran in that direction and Jim Jones was carried inside. About 30 minutes goes by everyone's wailing outside. They're thinking he's going to die. They're thinking he's dead. They're thinking he's already dead. They're wailing. They're thinking everything's over and then miraculously

Jim Jones walks out of the front door totally and completely fine. Again, like James Brown with the cape when he falls down, he seems like he's all sick and then he sits up and starts dancing. Also a Ronald Reagan little technique there. Survive the gunshot wound.

Yeah, Jack beam comes out Marceline comes out, a nurse comes out and they all say he had a fatal wound. The nurse says the wound was deep enough for me to stick my finger down in. Well that doesn't seem very safe. Yeah, why are you doing that? I don't hurt him like that. It's ridiculous.

It's a four finger bullet wound right there. It is a bell-clicking long gun wound. And Jim Jones said, fear not my people for I have healed myself. What I love is this whole thing too is they were like, but I don't understand a dog

seem to go after 100 people. But you pointed the other way and he said I did it on purpose to throw you off because I wanted to show mercy to the assassin and they're all like Oh Okay. Shouldn't we have probably caught

that guy to keep him from taking another shot? The problem is you're thinking about it and what's the first rule I gotta tell you is you gotta stop thinking about it. That's right. It also seems like he could segue this into a flex seal commercial. What is it? A flex seal. Is that the one where they saw the boat in half? Yeah.

Yes it is. It's an incredible commercial. To further drive the point home about this supposed miracle the shirt Jones was wearing became a temporary relic for the church. They built this big glass display case because it was like a yellow

shirt and it was splattered in blood so he looked super cool. He picked it on purpose. Yeah. Oh yeah. It was like, oh yellow. That's really going to show the red and then it kind of becomes an orange and orange is a fun color. It's like fire. They had to make it pop. Sort of like a shroud of Turin. Like a shroud of Turin.

But then Jones started hearing a rumor that the Mendocino county sheriff's office had heard about an assassination attempt that a man had been shot. Right because there is still a real world out there. There is a tiny community too. 15,000 people

in this community were got out and then when Jim Jones heard the rumor that the cops were going to come out and ask him a couple of questions that shirt went in the storage real fucking fast. Convenient. But the whole point of this thing was to show the people that their enemies were real. Their enemies were everywhere and that

no place, not even their home base was safe. Well especially their home base. That's where he chose it and he chose it on purpose because he also remember he's been spent a long time on the road. He went to LA he went to San Francisco. He's popping in and out and seeing people but he's not, he doesn't have the same day to day effect at Ukiah

that he used to. So now when he shows up it's especially like father's home. Everyone's like really, really excited to see him and to get some one-on-one time with him. So it happening here in the heart was very symbolic and very smart of Jim Jones. And that is when Jim Jones' private security team grew even larger

and scarier. The men who surrounded Jones now were uniforms. They had button-up shirts, ties and berets. They were all trained with guns. They were usually armed and they all looked mean as fuck. And this worked on two levels. Can we get Travis

in a uniform? Can we get him a little beret? You want to militarize him? We got two employees now. We got Travis and Mary. So you want to militarize Travis and Mary. I feel like it would help their confidence if we gave them uniforms and we gave them guns

and badges, right? Actually it would help everyone's confidence that is the point of the gun. If we had jackets with stars on them and they had suits and berets and guns we'd look pretty good. Yeah, I will allow it but we have to sing every

time we talk. I love it. Hello Ben, you are my friend. I love to see you again. That is fun. Do it. No, I can't. This whole thing worked on two levels. One, it made Jim Jones intimidating

to outsiders. No kidding. Yeah, I mean outsiders saw this guy as like, oh. Oh, he's got a big deal. Yeah, this guy's a big deal. And it also made him intimidating to people on the inside like, oh, that guy has a small army. That guy has dudes with guns and so

threats are no longer existential. Threats are no longer supernatural. Threats are now very real. Well, also planning commissions changed quite a bit because you're sitting there at these meetings that used to be pretty informal but a kind of a group setting are now. He's standing there with a group of armed

he's got his fucking entourage of people with guns, super scary looking. He's just laying on a couch drinking soda while everyone else has to stand or sit on the floor not allowed to go to the bathroom. It's pretty intense. Yeah, so we can see the escalation here. Oh, no, this is

a big jump. Yeah, this is right. Yeah. And the feedback loop works even more because Jim Jones, he has the assassination attempts have all been fake, but because he's making his people paranoid they're feeding back and making him paranoid as well to the point where he

actually gets a body double. But the body double like, eventually started questions like, hey, if you can like heal yourself like whenever, why do I got to be here? I just, um, the prosthetics are fine, they're itchy.

You have a 20 pound head, Mr. Jones. I mean, father I love the suits and the sunglasses are difficult to see through. I honestly don't particularly understand how you get around just on the day to day. Just take a bullet for me, Brian. How the hell do you be a body double?

Can you imagine that life? That's so crazy. Honestly. My body double on A to Z was a lovely man. Yeah. And he did very good. That's what his job was, is that he was a double. Yeah, but they weren't going to shoot you on A to Z. You never got to S. It depends if we had

if it had come down to that. I imagine at some point and there is some stipulation in a Warner Brothers contract somewhere that a stand-in for you is also required to die for you. And sometimes I would feed him my food to see if he died. Greatest body double, the one in

Veep, the one that Julia Lewis-Dreyfus' daughter is married to. That's such a funny story line. I love it. But still, after all this stuff, or possibly because of this stuff, people believed and word was getting around San Francisco that a new charismatic raised the dead, healed the

sick preacher, had showed up in town and was rapidly gaining followers. That is when a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner named Lester King Solving figured there might be a story in this Jim Jones fella. By the time Lester was finished investigating he had a story big enough to spread over

an eight day series. Thing is though, even though Jones freaked out at first, the stories that were actually substantiated weren't really all that bad because he hinted at Jim Jones kind of being a scam but he never came right out and said it. The whole thing was pretty fucking tame.

Also, that was the least, technically the least bad thing in the people's temple at this point was the healings being fake. It was the serial abuses and spankings and the boxing and then the dick mauling that was the shit that you can't get to because

you didn't know it was happening. I like that Darth Maul's father, Dick Maul. Richard Maul, they all call me Dick. Well, all that stuff was back loaded. They back loaded all the bad shit. So he was gonna release that stuff later on. It was just this stupid shit. You'd never do that.

He buried the lead here. All that shit was gonna come out in the end. So it seemed like the first four days, they didn't need to be in a day series. The first four days it was kind of tame stuff but by day four, Jim Jones had made quite a big stink and he's got

this Tim Stone on his side. The lawyer. Yeah, he's got the lawyer on his side. So the San Francisco examiner, they decided on day four they're like, listen, we're not gonna do day six, seven and eight. And that's where the harassment, the threats,

the punishment, mostly from Whitey Firestone that's where it all came from. That's where it all was but it was all unsubstantiated. This is the saddest thing too is that Whitey Firestone was such bad luck all the time that he couldn't even get this article done. I mean it too. Oh, so you put it in the

article number seven. That's not good. I got my feet stuck in a chair. Honestly, I don't even know how I did it. I don't even know how did it. It does seem difficult to do. A bird sold my sandwiches for me. I got locked inside of

refrigerators. I don't know how that happened. I thought they fixed that so you could get out of it. Well, I guess I'll just go back to working out the nuclear power plant. By Whitey. So Whitey was the source here. Whitey was one of the sources. There were a few sources.

But yeah, Whitey was one of them. But the amazing thing about the Kinsolving articles was that it was actually great PR for People's Temple. When people read about Jones's supposed healing powers, they didn't think, oh my god, look at this bullshit. They thought they'd found salvation. Think about the articles

on Facebook that say like, all you have to do is read the three words in the headline. You just see healing powers. You don't read on substantiated. You don't read this stuff. You just see because you're so desperate. You're like, oh fuck, that's where I'm going to go to get rid of my cancer. I would never fall for anything dumb like that.

Anyway, I've got to go take my tactical bath. I bought it on InfoBoards. Oh, I love my tactical bath. It keeps, it makes you a bullet person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard that. Yeah. After Kinsolving, Temple membership only increased. This guy helped Jim Jones quite a bit.

Very smart. Yeah. And it also bound Jim Jones' followers even closer because there was another enemy to fight. Fake news. Oh no, it's always been there. There was only an award show. If only. Now the threats to their beliefs, they were coming from the outside

and it was no longer vague. It wasn't faceless. They were now in print, tangible. Like he had something to point at. Say like, see, look, they don't want me to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish. They don't want to let us accomplish the things that we want to accomplish. Right. That's fake news

that even got a few people from the media on their side as well. There was this one local TV reporter, his name was Michael Prokes. He read the tin-solving articles and he traveled down to Redwood Valley. He figured like, maybe there's like a further story in this because he read it and he was skeptical. It's like, ah, this sounds kind of weird.

Let's go check it out. But before long, fucking Prokes was the press secretary. Again, you hire him. Yeah. All you got to do is hire him. Right. I will also put this on the magnetism of the group of people at the People's Temple. The people there seem like they

were so sweet and genuine and nice. They would, this is to be the saddest part about this story is that Omsh and Rikio, they became like, brain-dead, fucking servers of Cobra. I mean, like, really, really intense and same in children of God. It was

molesters and the molested. But this is like, good people. Yeah. They were a fun crowd. And then all of a sudden, they were just being used terribly. No. Okay. Now, even though Jones was able to deflect bad press from the outside, he had his own little

rebellion brewing within. In 1973, Jones was faced with the Gang of Eight, which is where we'll pick back up next time on part four of Jones Town. Oh my goodness. All right. Well, we are really getting through it. I got to say check, please. I just get out

and just get out of it. Don't try not to join a cult. Try not to join a cult. So from Indiana to LA, now he's in San Francisco. Indiana to Redwood Valley to LA to San Francisco. So he's going to wow. All right. Yeah. Whoo. Yeah. I mean, I understand.

It seems like a slow burn. Slow process. It's a slow burn. I still try to remember how horrible this all ends. I just, I understand it's, we want to get out of the bullshit, right? You kind of like the concept is like everybody doesn't care about anybody

else and the world's in constant strife. We're in the middle of this right now. It seems like in 2018, it's such a prime spot for cults. I imagine there's got to be shit popping up that we even hear about that we will hear about eventually, which I'm kind of excited for. I shouldn't be. Who knows? Part of it's like

we'll see what happens. All right. So what do we have to do now? Should we thank people for Patreon? Thank you very much for giving our Patreon. If you guys feel like we deserve a little something extra, just go to patreon.com slash, slash podcast on the left. We appreciate every each and every single one of you. Yep. I want to thank everyone. I ran

into a bunch of fans yesterday at the 25th anniversary of Ron. It was so fun. So that was exciting to see everyone. I want to make a tiny correction. I was corrected. I said last week that the Scientology Drug Rehab Program was Alanon and it's not. It's Narcanon. Narcanon.

I fucked up Alanon. It's actually a nice organization. Well, it's fine. It's from Alcoholics Anonymous, depending on if you like it or not. There's some people that don't. I don't care. Whatever it is you got to do. There it is. Corrections have been made. I did it. So follow us on Twitter at Henry Loves You and Marcus Parks at Ben

Kissel, the number one and follow us on the horseshit at LP on the left. All right. And make sure you listen to all the shows here. The last podcast network able against top half for everything political round table. We got a couple of episodes, new episodes coming out. Page seven. You know where

just go to the website and peruse and we got some new shows coming out. I think you'll enjoy there. Hail site. Hail yourselves, everyone. Elgin. Hail me. Magustalation. Hail me. Magustalation. Hail love. It is real.

Congratulations on your engagement. Are you going to get married before Holden does? I don't know if I can kill him like that. I don't know if I could go ahead and pull the sweeps week on him like that. I think you're good.