Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 303: Jonestown Part IV - The Box

Episode Date: February 3, 2018

On the fourth part to our series, we cover the improbable political career of Jim Jones, the beginnings of Jonestown, and just how awful things got once Peoples Temple arrived in full force along with their exiled leader. ​ Thatched Huts Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Secret of Tiki Island Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://cr

So first of all I want to thank all the listeners for the copious amounts of love I've received about my engagement to Natalie Jean. It has been very, very nice, but I will say it all fits into the plan because every father needs a mother when it comes to a cult. Because of Jonestown, we see how important it is that the first lady has got to be cut throat, intense, and in the pocket and be able to administer judgment. Well technically you can fit in her pocket I think. I will say this, I would be in the pocket, honestly Natalie would be a great leader

of the cult, I would be a great enforcer of the protocol and that's what I would call myself. Well I'll go when there's a good buffet happening. Oh yes, if there's going to be something that's right about my cult that is going to be the catering. Oh! And the next thing is is that everybody's getting two-ply, that is something I'm giving to everybody.

Wow, that's the best cult we've covered yet, the two-ply cult! Welcome to the last podcast, on the left everyone I am Ben Kissel, that's Marcus Parks. Hey Ben. I'm Ben Gage, she's off the market ladies, Henry Zabrowski. I feel good about it. Good, you should. I got whatever disgusting illness was inside you is now inside of me. Yes, I got this horrible flu, it's a rough season, they say it's the worst in ten years.

Oh my god. Did my father just walk in the room? That's weird. Those are the kind of conversations you have when you're wearing new glasses. You do have nice glasses on. Thank you, they're Ray Ban, so you can imagine how nice Ray was a guy. You look like Dan Aykroyd, right after he directed Nothing but Trouble, like when he got into his serious face.

I watched it. Alright, this is, we're on to Jonestown, part four. Ladies and gentlemen, be warned, it gets a little brutal, we got some clips coming up, so just let, somebody sent me a tweet, be like, if you're going to have these clips, can you warn me first? So here's your warning. There will be some controversial clips coming up. Yeah, there's going to be some stuff that you have never heard before coming up on this.

That's the reality. Yeah, it's the reality, it's going to be brutal, but we're going to get into it. So we haven't heard of it before, is this Irish EDM? Yeah, it could be. Hide it, hide it, hide it, hide it, hide it, hide it, hide it, hide it, hide it, hide it. It's the poke guy. You gotta watch the documentary of the Pennsylvania Poker King. Oh my god, it's the best.

So when we last left Jim Jones, he was about to be confirmed with his most high-profile defectors yet, the gang of eight. The gang of eight was a group of students who were going to college on the people's temple's dime, made up of kids from some of the most prominent members of the church. Now remember, this is actually a good thing that Jim Jones was doing. The whole point is that he wanted to show, like, we support our highest, like, rated members, like the people with the brightest futures. These are kids that are part of like, legendary family lines of the Joan Sound Temple, the

most loyal families, and these kids were like the upper echelon. It was a good mix, a very smart, very capable. Five-star kids. These are the ones you gotta look out for. But since these kids weren't really involved as much in the temple's day-to-day, they had a different perspective from those on the inside. See, the thing about people's temple was that while Jim Jones preached racial equality, even going so far as to say that black people were better than white people and that white

people had no potential, his inner circle was all white, except for one guy named Archie who was token at best, and the gang of eight saw that much like in a capitalistic society, the members who had the most individual economic influence, i.e. the white people, were elevated to inner circle status, while the black members who still gave quite a bit of money to the church collectively were relegated to the rank and file regardless of their potential. Alright, problematic. Well, also, we're remembering the whole point of this is that he brings the people that he feels can benefit him the most closest.

He's bringing them in closer because he's trying to get cash out of them. Everybody else, he's gonna kind of like, let really gravitate around the rim of the cult because these are people that he needs. He has to have this money, which is very ironic being a fucking socialist society. Well, you know, it seems strange to me, I would prefer not to be in the inner circle. Inner circle's a bad place. Inner circle's a bad place. Yeah.

I would just want to be in the outer circle. So that's how you get through life, outskirt it. And when they start to panic in the middle, slowly back up, and then you're gone. But also remember, the community of Jonestown, the People's Temple at this point, is getting really intense. It's getting really, really heavy all the time and really kind of manic. So the gang of eight, they got to get a break. They get to go walk out and go to normal school and live a life like the show Different

Strokes, not Different Strokes. What was the one where they went to college? Different World. Different World. They lived in the different world. And then the rest of them are like, oh, do you understand what's happening here? And the gang of eight gets perspective on that. And furthermore, word had gotten out to the gang of eight concerning Jones's sexual proclivities

inside the planning commission, specifically how members were only brought in so Jones could fuck them. But they also hit on the subject of Jones's PC meetings. They wrote, quote, All planning commission does is call each other homosexual, asking of each other sucks cocks, planning to plant dope on people. What a contribution to socialism, y'all. It's just, it's McCarthy.

Yeah. It's all Joseph McCarthy did too, basically. And it's also how they created the Constitution. What? Yeah. This is how it started. Calling each other homosexual? You're gay.

Yeah, you're gay. Give me that quill. You're gay. I have a constitutional right to say that. Let's write the first amendment. You're gay. I also view the gang of eight as sort of like, do you remember the kids group from Burger King?

Of course. With wheels in it. The Burger King kids club. Yeah. I was a member. Reluctantly they accepted me. Because of all this, the gang of eight left People's Temple. They hit the road together and over the course of a two month adventure in which they camped

out in Montana and got jobs and spoke hand, the eight drafted a manifesto and sent it to People's Temple. It does sound kind of fun. They apparently had a great time. Well there's also obviously eight students. They got together instead of doing drugs and going to clubs. They wrote a manifesto so they are nerds. But also it's what Jim Jones had always done.

We've seen now the pattern happening where he raises up his enemies and then he thought that he could just like tell them what to do and they would snap back to attention. What he tried to do is he tried using honey instead of vinegar to get him back. He told all the members forgiveness. If the kids want to come back, let them back in. Embrace them. Don't call them like pieces of shit. Just tell them that they should come back.

Because usually when people left, when defectors left, he immediately vilified them. Immediately they were the worst people on earth. They were traitors. They were enemies. I always knew they were an enemy. I always knew something was wrong with them. But with these kids, he couldn't do that because they were parts of prominent families and they were very popular among the other kids.

These people, like Henry said, these were the upper echelons. So if the upper echelon goes against you, then something might be going wrong. Yeah, he needs their cash. He's got to have their influence on the church. He needs these kids. These kids are supposed to be the future of the church even though he has no really wherewithal ... he doesn't really give a shit what happens after he's dead. Technically this is the group of people that are going to inherit the whole thing.

He has to have them just to save face. It's kind of like when you can't continue family matters without... you can get rid of the mom. The mom could just disappear and be recast in a season eight network switch. But the kids never came back. And in this, Jones learned another important lesson. The kids had seen through his bullshit because they'd gotten a taste of the outside world. Furthermore, they were students.

They weren't worker bees like everybody else. They weren't working the 18 to 20 hour days other members were. Hey guys, I've got a question. You guys ever heard of memory foam? There's some crazy shit out there. Have you guys ever heard of gushers? Man, they got lemon lime. They got lime lemon.

They've got raspberry lime. They've got banana lime. It all tastes like lime, but it's gushers. Love gushers. Sciences really created some incredible things. It really has. In the gang of eight, they had their mental faculties. They had their brains.

And they saw people's temple and by extension Jim Jones for what they actually were. Bullshit. But that wasn't the only lesson Jones learned. All that sex stuff was supposed to be kept secret or at least confined to the planning commission. This was not something that was supposed to be common knowledge among the rank and file. It's hot gossip. I read blind items revealed every single day.

And blind items, they get out there. Everything you think is a secret is out there. I didn't tell you one thing. Guy Fieri is actually doing some very nice things in the private sector and I have to applaud him. There's a lot of kind mentions of him in the blind items. Guy Fieri. Very good, good person.

I don't know. And he's opened up a new grill as a matter of fact. He did. Well, obviously people were tell and tales at a school, so Jones figured out ways to tighten the leash. The first thing he did was have PC members sign blank confessions that could be filled in with whatever Jones wanted. It's so dumb.

It's so dumb to even think that you can do that and just have like a file of these, like this will stand up in court. Oh, and this will definitely work all these signed papers. It's like a weird 15 year old is running a secret club. If I ever have a kid, they're going to sign a bunch of that. And I'm going to say, oh, what did you, oh, did you eat the cookies? Because dad wanted the cookies and they're freaking gone. Dad, why are you starting to wear sunglasses inside?

Glaucoma. Well, the people pretty much knew that it wasn't going to wash with the police. You know, they weren't just going to go to the police and say like, oh, here's a sign confession saying that he beat his wife or whatever. But if he went to the congregation with a sign confession that said this dude beat his wife, congregation's going to fucking believe him. And those people are going to become pariahs. With some members, he took it even further.

One woman named Juan L. Smart said that when she left, Jones made her hold a gun, which was then placed in a plastic bag for a possible frame job. She decided to shit-talk. It's so silly. And my question is like, why do you, why do you think he ran like this? Do you feel like it is in a way like we see with serial killers and their predilections and like down the line, there's something frozen, childish, almost like in the way they do certain things.

Like the way like Jeffrey Dahmer believed, I mean, it made him very sick, but the idea is that he could make these slaves and he could control them. There's something in Jim Jones that thinks these like little kid ways of holding sway over people will work. And then because we're now all locked into his mindset in this little group, like you kind of believe it. But why does he act like a 13 year old? Well, I think that's what a lot, I mean, I think you had your own question.

It's immaturity. I mean, these people that are in these situations, they're immature, they don't really know how the world works. And at the end of the day, it's all about fantasy. And if your entire life is about fantasy, then your fantasy world is going to be immature because real life doesn't work that way. He's also got a lot of leverage now. He can frame her for anything.

Smoke and gun. The reason why Wannell left was due to a particularly humiliating PC meeting, although Wannell was not the target. Laurie Efren was a loyal Jones follower and like Patty Cartmell, she longed to be on Jones' fuck schedule. But since Laurie, also like Patty, wasn't Jones' type, Jones decided he needed to humiliate her just for the crime of a crush. During a meeting, Jones ordered her to stand up and tell everyone what she thought that

she possibly had to offer him sexually. Then he made her strip naked and he told her every reason, one by one, why he would never, ever have sex with her. And after he was done, he made her sit down and endure the rest of the hours long meeting totally naked. But the thing was, outside of Wannell's smart, nobody said a goddamn thing. Jones' allowances were getting bigger and bigger. But still, Jones knew he needed a backup plan in case he finally lost control and if the

gang of eight taught him anything, it was that isolation was the key. And Jones already knew how to do it. He'd done it before in Indianapolis, using nuclear war as an excuse to get people to move out to California with him. Problem was, by this time, Jones had done a complete 180 on Russia, so that was no longer an option. He's for Russia now. For Russia.

Yeah, he's telling them that Russia is a socialist paradise, that Russia is going to save them all. Yeah, it's beautiful. I watch a lot of their, oh, what's it called, road rage videos. Yeah. Yeah, dash cam. All the dash cam shit. The Russians have the greatest road rage.

They're amazing. And it's solved. And at the end of every Russian video, they're kind of hugging. I think they somehow got drunk in between. And it's really kind of sweet. Well, they've been drunk. They started drunk. Yes.

And then what also is like when you can, like, dash cam footage has stuff like all of a sudden you'll see a bear driving a car and there's like a giraffe with an AK-47 duct tape to it on the side of the road. Russia seems wild. It seems like, I want to visit, not now, but. Well, Jones needed to make America itself completely undesirable to make every corner a terrifying place. And so using a technique that's still in use today, Jones started telling his followers

that the government was planning on rounding up all the black people in concentration camps where they would subsequently be killed. Yikes. Yeah. Doesn't sound good. No, not at all. But luckily for Jones' followers, plans were in motion to make sure that this never happened. Jones would take these people away to a place.

Wait, the irony is he's kind of doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. I just had my Oprah Aja movement. Oprah Aja moment. Oprah, as I call her. Uh, dystopia.

I know. We talked about an enabling and stop at listen this week, but that's exactly what he's doing. Yep. Wow. Jones would take these people away to a place where they would be out of government reach, although he'd go back on that claim of being invincible from the government near the end.

In 1973, Jones only referred to it as the Promised Land, but within a couple of years, people would know it by a different name. Jonestown. And Jonestown is great marketing. Yeah. The name Jonestown is pretty, pretty great. I mean, technically, they'd named it completely up to Georgetown, so it was like, it was kind of a no-brainer.

But it's important to remember, I think in terms of naming things and branding things, is that it's, if you can sell it that quickly, it works for a group of people, makes them kind of motivated. It also helps his last name wasn't like Glorbesky or something. Yes. It's like, welcome to Glorbeskyville. Glorbeskyville, yeah. It doesn't really, is it a sausage place, what's happening?

Well, so he stole Promised Land from, I mean, that has been used in black churches across the country. This could, the concept of it, and Father Divine specifically used the Promised Land. In his own teachings, they had all of these things called the Promised Land Farms, that they would go out and he would have people work. And basically, he flipped his own people by being like, I'm taking you to the Promised Land, and then they show up at the Promised Land, he's like, now you're going to pick some oranges.

And they're like, oh, I thought we were going to be hanging out. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is promised to get a shit ton of work. Oh, man, didn't read the full pamphlet. And the same shit's going to happen when they get to Johnstown, we'll get to it, which is pretty intense. But you remember, like again, every single cult leader does the same shit, to get him in one area and get him tired.

And to use things that have already been used, those familiar things that people can latch on to, like those little weird familiar things, like even Omshinrikyo did it, but with sci-fi. They used Asimov's The Foundation as a part of their entire cosmology. And so the people that were already into nerdy shit could already have something that they could glom onto. Same thing with Johnstown and the Promised Land, because the Promised Land was something that was talked about in black churches going back to slavery. Like the idea was that this life is not good.

This life will never be good. This life will never be what we want it to be. But there is the Promised Land in our future. One day we shall have the Promised Land, and that is where things will be okay. And so Johnstown used that idea, and he used that name until he came up with the name Johnstown. Also in turn, it means that this life means nothing, and that this life can be discarded. And to move on to the next one, which sets more and more, it's making altruistic suicide a constant thought.

Yeah. And I think it speaks to his lack of creativity. Johnstown's pretty easy, but it's great man. He didn't get there for a while, there's Promised Land, what could I call it? McDonald's, that's taken. We could call it Candy Land. No, I'm sorry sir, that's actually been copyrighted by Mattel. We were burned Mattel to the ground!

That same year that Johnstown started talking about the Promised Land, his own reckless sexuality would come close to collapsing the entire endeavor before it even truly began. And in the same time period that Jones was seriously scouting Johnstown, he was arrested in Los Angeles for lewd conduct. What was that? It seems that even though Jones by this time had the pick of almost any woman or man he wanted inside people's temple, he still needed, or at least wanted, a little action on the side, something a little dirtier.

Uh oh. A little stankier. Yeah. Sometimes you want something a little better, well something stankier, something you just want to get out there. Like, he woke up on a Wednesday and he's like, you know what Jim? We can get some shit in our dick tonight. They're like, what?

Dick was like, oh, what is this Christmas? And also, when you, Marcus, when you say that he had the pick of almost any woman or man, you make him sound like a Sebastian Bach, when I don't think it was like it was a bunch of people clamoring. It absolutely was not. I did not mean to imply that. So I'm singing about Skid Row now. That's the band, right?

Yes. Remember that song? 18 In Life To Go, yeah. There's that one? We're just going to sit here naming Skid Row songs? Good, I was thinking, you can't though, you only named the one. I know, well, Marcus named it, but I did have 18 In Life To Go, that's the only song you know.

There is another one. That's the only song anybody knows. No, there is one other one, but I'm blanking on it. Well, when Jim Jones decided he wants something a little dirtier, he had it out. Oh, they call this problem, child. Damn it. We are the youth gone wild. Is that 18?

I think it is. So, when Jim Jones wanted something a little dirtier, he headed on to Westlake Theater across the street from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Along with the park itself, the Westlake was well known to be a cruising hotbed, i.e., a place where gay men could go for anonymous no strings attached sex. Yeah, like the brambles. Yeah. It's exactly like any Republican Senators vacation home.

So, on the afternoon of December 13, 1973, Jim Jones wandered a mile and a half from the Los Angeles people's temple location over to the Westlake to attend a matinee screening of Dirty Harry. And I think the most telling thing is that he did it on a razor scooter, which is the most proper transportation to take to do some cruising. Also, I don't understand what makes you horny about Dirty Harry except for the name. Well, it is kind of an erotic name. It could have been any movie.

It could have been Annie Hall. You're saying this is not about the movie? This is not about the movie at all. Dirty Harry's a man's man. He's got a big gun. Oh, what did you say to me, person? You're being mean to me. And then he shoot people.

I remember that famous quote. You're being mean to me. You're being mean to me and I don't like it. This gun doesn't like it either because this gun's my best friend. I remember that famous quote. It's symbolic of my dick. Get it? Jim Jones sitting in the balcony wearing a green coat to disguise himself gave the

old foot tap to a fellow patron who took the cue and followed Jones to the bathroom. What is with this Larry Craig foot tap thing? The foot tap. The foot tap is a long held tradition in the cruising community. It's been around. I was looking at people's feet on the subway the other day and there was any tapers out there and I'm like, what's going on? What secret Morris code is happening?

It's just whenever you see a 60 year old man in a suit practicing splits anywhere, you know he's trying to hit, especially because you go into the handicap bathroom accidentally. That's very wide. Yes, I know. And you really need to get your feet outside of it. Little did Jones know that the fellow patron was actually an undercover cop named Arthur Kigeli who was there at the behest of the theater who called in the cops to get their bathroom situation under control.

Wow. What an interesting undercover cop day that is. Do you think he enjoyed that? Do you think that he was happy when he got the, you get old, cum guard. That's what we're called him. He's the cum guard. He comes home, puts his badge and his gun on the table. Honey, I had a hell of a day.

Slamming whiskey down. Honey, your shoes. Did you step in some ice cream? I'm on it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to tell you, there's a lot of people out there who really scream for some ice cream.

Who's this pot roast? So when the cop walked through the door to the latrine, he found Jones already inside with dick in hand masturbating and walking towards him. Jones was arrested and taken to the police station where he, despite his later claims, reported that his only physical malady was quote unquote, possible hemorrhoids. Mm-hmm. What else could it be? You know when you got him, I'll tell you what.

Yeah, I've never heard someone be like, it's a possible hemorrhoid. They're like, that's a hemorrhoid. This is significant because when Jones went in front of the judge, he brought along a note from a urologist which said that Jones had an inflamed prostate which impeded urination. So Jones was not in fact masturbating, but was just jumping up and down and sloshed the prostate loose. I have just never heard of this old Amish way of emptying your prostate. Just jump up and down.

Yeah, you guys know how like sometimes when you see someone jumping up and down, you're like, oh, I think that guy's masturbating, but he's not. When are you seeing people jump up and down? Nobody jumps up and down anymore, not in 2018, not in this economy. Eventually the charge was dismissed, Stone covered the whole thing up, and it surprisingly never came back to haunt Jones, even after the bad press hit about five years later. The cop didn't even get a conviction. I mean, it's just what a horrible idea on something.

His life is garbage. He did a whole episode on cops that have to go get dudes from jerking off at theaters. This cop was so pissed off. He really was because, you know, this really shows you like how much legal power and how much pull Jim Jones had because he managed to get the charge dismissed, he managed to get the records destroyed, and the cop was like, what the fuck are you doing? I caught him masturbating. This is completely true because what happens, they got the whole case thrown out and then

because you don't understand, because my dad, we even talk about like when he used to give tickets, he's like, you just contest the ticket because cops hate to show up because it's like it sucks. You have to go over to the courthouse, you're not getting billed half the time. And so this cop went out of his way three times to show up at court and then filed a protest against the judge saying, you have, let's be like, why would you dismiss this? Because he was covered up to his knees in an unwelcome jizzom. Just picture him coming into the courtroom with exhibit A, judge, just sloppy shoes,

exhibit B, you'll notice my folded up pants that I was wearing that day on when I was on patrol. He didn't just see Jim Jones masturbate, Jim Jones masturbated at him. And for all of that time, nothing, Jim Jones skated and it never came out. It was just, now it's just an embarrassing anecdote about Jim Jones. Well, I heard he had a possible prostate, a hemorrhoid rather, a possible hemorrhoid. But Jones, he had more important shit to deal with this time, namely Guyana. And though you might think that convincing a foreign country to let you establish a socialist

commune would be difficult, I would think that asking a foreign country to have us establish a socialist commune would be difficult. Absolutely not. It's not difficult. Well, it would be in other circumstances. But in this circumstance, people's temple was the answer to Guyana's prayers. If something like this happens easily, you should really look into this deeper. Because it shouldn't happen this easily.

See Guyana had recently gained their independence from Great Britain. Congratulations. Congratulations, Guyana. Good work, guys. But since they were no longer a part of the British Empire, they no longer had British military protection. And directly north of Guyana was Venezuela, who had been engaged in a border dispute with Guyana for years.

And since Guyana had no real army to speak of, there would be nothing to stop Venezuela from taking as much of Guyana as they wanted. According to the road to Jonestown, their army was like a thousand people strong, made of mostly teenagers that were just to just join the army looking for food and shelter. So you basically, and Venezuela had a full on fucking army, just been like, we're just going to take all this shit. So what's a great way to introduce a wacky buffer for this? Wacky buffer is a shitload of Americans looking for religious freedom or at the very least

socialist freedom. Because Guyana knew that if those Americans were sitting there on the border, Venezuela would not dare to invade, lest they risk the wrath of the Americans who were already involved in all kinds of covert Skull Duggery in South America at the time, particularly in Chile. Skull Duggery was so thick. I'm saying like up to a level nine of Skull Duggery that was happening in South America. And it was pretty intense. Yeah, we organized a fucking coup.

But also, they talk about what's great about getting all these new hungry white people in there from America is that it's all just thick jungle everywhere. And they live on the coast. They're saying Guyana was having a problem with the coast getting eaten up by the beach. And essentially like there was, they were losing land, they were losing beach land. And so they needed to start making way into the jungle and a bunch of people that are used to fucking houses and having like a normal life were trying to be convinced by the Guyanese government, being like, oh, you should go chop down that jungle and you guys go live

in there. And they're like, no, no, no, I like my toilet and I like having the bed and I like having an already built house. And so why not have these guys go pop the jungle's cherry to go like dig it out for them. That's a disgusting way to describe it. You're welcome. I would love living in the jungle.

Yeah, I bet you would. No, you would not. Yes, I would. And you want to know how I know that, Henry, because I eat bananas the right way. Because I saw upside down. Yes. I eat it the other day and I looked at some plebe who did it the human way. And I was like, that's not how you do it.

That's not how you eat a banana. Kissel, have you ever seen a picture of actual bananas with bananas look like before we manipulate them? What are they like rocks? They're like black rocks with that is just thick black seeds filled with yellow material like mucusy shit. The bananas we get are changed. They're like the Pamela Anderson of bananas.

No, no, you can't. When you get down there, you're going to be dealing with a lot of Rosie O'Donnell bananas. I like roses. You're not going to know how to handle them. Oh, I like attitude banana. That's good. I'll figure it out. Well, this was perfect for Guyana because not only would someone go out there, clear

out the jungle, establish a settlement, but they were going to pay Guyana to do it. And Guyane's logic went that if they establish a successful settlement, that's the first step. They're going to be moving their way inland and they're not going to be stuck on these road and coast lines anymore. So when Jones and a few other people's temple members showed up with the plan, their request was almost immediately approved. And pretty soon a few dozen people's temple settlers along with Mr. Muggs began work on

Jonestown. He was one of the first residents of Jonestown. He must have loved it. They kept him in a cage the whole time. Why would they do that? Because he just ran away because he's a fucking wild monkey. You can't just have a chimp wandering around. I would have put him in a little like Fleetwood dress, Matt, Fleetwood, Matt dress.

Yeah. I would dress him up like Stevie Nicks. Yes. Sounds like you're trying to fuck this monkey. Like he should be your jungle wife. No, he's free. Hello. My name is Ben Jomin, I changed my name to a jungle name when I got here.

And this is my wife Tina. She used to be a monkey, but now she's a woman. Stevie Nicks. No, the idea of Jonestown was to prove that a truly socialist society could exist outside of the capitalist system, but it was supposed to be a long-term project. It wasn't supposed to be ready for full capacity for about 10 years, and even then full capacity was supposed to be no more than about five or 600 people. But due to circumstance, Jonestown would have nearly twice the people that it was supposed

to in half the time, making it unsustainable, chaotic, and ultimately uncontrollable. It was too much, too soon, which wasn't the way of Jim Jones. He was a long game kind of guy, which is exemplified in how, before everything went to shit, he became an actual player in San Francisco city politics. All right. This is very interesting. He was like, because it shows, this is where, for some reason, I think about LRH a lot in comparison to Jim Jones.

He's a hovered you fucking idiot. Just say L. Ron Hover. Who's LRH? His name, yeah. Well... You're like a fat David Miss cabbage over here. Yeah. But, think about this, LRH wanted this more than anything else.

He wanted to have his own country in a place where he could live, and he didn't get it. But then Scientology went on to be an incredibly lucrative, very successful entity for him, and he got to die comfortably in his bed. Like, he just got to die a normal life and be a director of films, which was something that Jim Jones, technically, also wanted to do, which I think is interesting. But Jim Jones, technically, I guess it just shows, you can't always get what you want. That way you got, you did all that to get to a cliche. I think that...

You can't always get what isn't that something, because I was thinking, I could get what I want. Well, then you're telling me I can't always get what I want. You just might find, you get what you need. I see. I think that the huge difference between Jim Jones and L. Ron Hubbard, I refuse to call him LRH. All right.

The big difference... It seems like a longer name than when you say L. Ron Hubbard. LRH does not roll off the tongue. I think part of the reason why L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology were so successful and the reason why Jonestown eventually fell the way it did, because L. Ron Hubbard never got into politics. Jim Jones got way the fucking into politics, and it made him enemies, as it always does. It seems to be a really destructive career choice.

Yeah, one could argue. I'm a vice chair, by the way, for the reform party, so you're fired. You're fired. I don't know what to do. I'm fired? I don't know what to do. I'm fired from the reform party. You're not in it.

Good. By the mid-70s, Jim Jones' political power was increasing, in addition to him becoming a well-known local character, even showing up positively in the gossip columns from time to time. Jim Jones said he knew he made it, when he made it in the Herb Cain's column. This cult leader who loves sunglasses would found tapping his toes at a movie here. Who could it be? But Jones wouldn't have gotten there if not for the support of one man, California State

Assemblyman and future San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown. Willie Brown! And Brown was an ally of State Senator George Moscone, who was thinking of running for mayor. Moscone was a progressive, more in line with San Francisco's changing demographics. But he knew that the only way he could win was with the support of the black population. And who should have the ear of the black vote? But Jim Jones!

Moscone's first hurdle was the primary, and you're gonna love this. His primary opponent, Diane Feinstein! She has been around. She is older than God. I cannot believe she's still a senator. But just a senator, she's still doing shit. She was the one that stupidly released the fusion GPS testimony. She's right on the edge as a pee-pee gate.

She's having problems with legal weed in California, and I get so mad. It's just unbelievable. If you try to take my weed from me, that's when I'm getting guns, because that is me. I'll hold up in a bunker with weed plants. For my cold, stoned hands, you take this miracle joint, this medical weed. It's okay, we'll just wait till he goes to sleep. Well, Moscone, he beat the shit out of Feinstein. That was a handy victory.

Oh, right. And in the main mayor election, Moscone was going up against this guy, Barbe Galata. Barbe Galata? Yeah, Barbe Galata. Oh, you got butter for hands. Honestly, these are some very Italian names. Pretty much so. So Jones provided Moscone with just enough black votes to put him over the brink, edging

out Barbe Galata by only 4,400 votes, which in a major city mayor election is Razor Thin. Well, 400 votes, you said? 4,400. 4,400. That is Razor Thin. And Moscone wasn't the only one Jones got elected. He also helped sweep in the new district attorney, and he got the sheriff re-elected. And all three regularly attended people's temple services, if only for political reasons.

Good lord. But all these people, I mean, this is San Francisco. Jim Jones, he has the mayor, he has the district attorney, he has the sheriff, and all of these people owe him. Right. Jones even had people in the state office. He was so close to the lieutenant governor that the lieutenant governor actually went with Jim Jones to Guyana to check out, to see how Jonestown was doing.

Yep. Looks like a dump. Okay. Yep. Yep. Yep. This definitely sucks. Do not invite me again.

I've got to go. Even Governor Jerry Brown, who's once again governor, he even paid Jim Jones lip service. Unbelievable to think about. Why did he want so much more than this? He could have lived. We'll talk about this more and more as we go, just being like, you just could have just had a nice life in San Francisco. Yes, and Guyana is not a dump.

I was talking about the Jonestown. Jonestown was a... What they were given. Yeah. Jonestown was a super dump. Yes. Guyana is very beautiful. Very beautiful.

Thank you. My home country. So it's just nice to hear something good. I know. It's where the Zabrowski family comes from. All this political influence only increased Jones's reputation with the Guyanese government, whose entire population was considerably less than San Francisco's alone, and Jones had other connections as well, although this one he played up a bit.

Rosalind Carter. Oh my God. Oh my God. She's got to stop accepting invitations. So for those that don't remember, she also met John Wayne Daisy. Yeah. What is going on with... She is married to the sweetest man that's ever lived, and all she does is hang out with

sociopaths and serial killers. She just had the bad luck of being the first lady in the late 70s. Oh, that's a good point. Yes. Yes. The worst time to be in America. All you wanted to be was a peanut farmer. Jimmy Carter.

I told you I wanted... So we have a function, Jimmy. Now, who are the people I'm supposed to meet? What's this? Sirhan Sirhan. There's just another man he calls himself Dr. Doom. He seems to be the enemy of a man named Captain America, but I'd like to hear his side of the story.

I can't really do it, Jimmy Carter. I love it. It's good enough. Also, Dr. Doom is canonically more a villain of the Fantastic Four. Go fuck yourself! I don't even know. Between LRH and this, I'm just... Where's a window?

Well, Rosalind Carter. She of course was going on... It was a tour to try to get Jimmy Carter up into the polls. This was his first election campaign. And people's temple, they were a nice friendly black church because it was a time when the Black Panthers were really starting to gain prominence in America and the Black Panthers scared the shit out of white people. So they have Rosalind Carter at this church that was kind of socialist and kind of in

line with the Black Panthers, but not quite. It was very good for Rosalind Carter to show up and take photos with Jim Jones. They even started like a little correspondence with each other. We talked about this on top at this week too with the FBI COINTELPRO and all that stuff cracking down at the Black Panther Party. I guess Jim Jones, they never investigated him though, huh? No. Because he had enough political power.

Yeah. He was a good one. The group was really nice. He's one of the good cult leaders. Yeah. Well... Yeah, at the time too, they were showing what you can do with socialist thought. They were doing really good things.

They had between the nursing homes and all the community outreach. They were doing good stuff because no one had any clue what was happening on the inside. I also, man, celebrities were just more fun in this episode. Oh my God. Because you had all of them. You had like fucking Charles Manson was like around. You know what I mean? It's like kind of shit back in the 60s.

That's kind of fun. I miss the Marlin Brando, Johnny Cash days. I just want to think about Native Americans all the time. That's all that I want, like they are in need. I love them. Yeah. And as soon as Rosalind Carter left and they closed up the doors, Jim Jones was like, you know she's going to put you in concentration camps, right?

No. Oh my goodness. Rosalind? That sweet old lady? Yep. Yep. She had a gun in her pussy. You can tell by the way she walked.

Henry, you mentioned Charles Manson. Just like Charles Manson hobnob with famous musicians like Dennis Wilson and super producer Terry Melcher, people's temple services were attended and praised by political celebrities. They had like Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Dennis Banks. These guys that were like the biggest revolutionaries of the 70s, you know, in all kinds of different movements were going to people's temple meetings and were fucking loving it and telling everybody this Jim Jones guy is the real deal. He's the shit.

That's incredible. Even Jane Fonda, the current star of Netflix's Grace and Frankie, Henry Jane herself. That's what some call her. She used to come to the temple services in Los Angeles from time to time. Wow. You know what? I'm going to remind you of the Golden Globes because there's nothing I love better and I don't know about you dog meat and guisle, but I love watching celebrities just mix it

up with their hair down and just have fun. I look them out there just like having fun, be themselves, be it just, oh, just have fun with this one. Every day and they're just having fun and they're sipping each other's champagne. It's great. Oh man, celebrities just dancing and laughing and playing lip sync games. Rich people, rich people, giving awards to rich people pretending they care about poor people.

I love award shows. I love them. I love them. Nothing says I care for my common man like holding up a piece of shit, gold statue you got for playing make pretend. Well, all of this attention benefited Jones in two ways. It gave him outside credit, yes, but more importantly, it made shit real to the members of people's temple, particularly to the longtime members.

Oh my God, if I look across the room and I see Jane Fonda, I'm like, I'm in the right place. Of course, I'm along in the same room as Jane Fonda, I'm serious, you're totally, it's not that Barbarella was there like that's not what that is, okay, that is super cool that Barbarella. I would love to go to church with Barbarella. That's a cool chip. Thank you.

But what meant more was people like Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Yes, of course. Yeah, like these guys, because Jones had been telling people some of the years, their time was coming. Right. And now they had nationally known figures that were considered heroes. Yeah. Sitting right next to them in services, it seemed like their time had come and on top

of that, there's also the fucking promise land. Honestly, that's where Jim Jones kind of, that's where the tragedy comes in even deeper, right? Where it's like no other cult leader had this type of validation, whereas he came in, where he had all of this influence and you got proven right. How gratifying must it be that I'm spending all my life, I am wiping my ass with a fern that I found because we ran out of toilet paper, we have to do all of this shit, we're sitting three to a seat in a bus, we're doing this whole, and it's meaning something, we're

getting somewhere. Right. And there's more to go. We're going to the promise land. Meanwhile, in the meetings, on the inside, all this wonderful stuff's happening on the outside. And then on the inside, there's these public beatings and humiliations and all this stuff happening.

So you're getting the cognitive dissonance of being like, well, we've got to be doing something right. Yeah. Right. Right. I mean, why didn't he just stop and just like go get legit hubris, I mean, that's, that's what defines these hubris because he's meeting all the right people. It seems as if he could be, you know, in line for a political position himself.

Well, I mean, that's what he was angling for. Yeah. I mean, they say, why do we long to be the number three comedy podcast on iTunes? Yeah. I mean, they say that we talked about MMA more Johnson. They said that Jones, like he was eyeing governor, like this guy, he was looking at senator. He was looking at governor. Like he was, I mean, it was mayor first, of course, but you know, he was, he was making

moves. But the thing was that Jim Jones, the skeletons in Jim Jones's closet were quite a bit larger than most politicians out there. Yeah. And they're going real like, oh, it sounded like a haunted crypt on the inside of his brain where they're like, you guys hear chain rattling when Jim's around? Yeah. Yeah.

Behind closed doors. I mean, to the public, like Jim Jones is like, he's a very well-meaning, except a little eccentric. Yes. He wears the sunglasses all the time. That's a little fucking weird in the red suits. That's a little weird too. But he's doing good shit, right?

But behind closed doors, shit's just getting real grim at people's temple. Now, as we said on the second episode, it was rumored that Jim Jones was pulling the whole poison flavor aid switcheroo as far back as the late sixties. But in 1975, Jones would try it on a much larger scale during a PC meeting. Jones told the Planning Commission members during one of their meetings that even though alcohol was usually forbidden, Redwood Valley had produced enough grapes that year for a few bottles of wine. So let's have a little indulgence.

Wow. Let's have a little party. Everyone's going to have a glass of wine. Can I just say a controversial opinion? I don't really trust us to make wine because I've seen some of these people's feet and socialist feet shouldn't be crushing all these grapes. I mean, honestly, we could get some shoes or something. You know, it's funny because three bottles of wine split amongst like 20 people is actually

very sad. Yes. I would say no wine is more happy. I would be happier with that. You got a thimble's worth of wine each. As everyone drank from their cups, Jones wandered around the room. And after he was satisfied that everyone had taken a drink, he announced that the wine had been poisoned and they all had 45 minutes to live.

I too drank the cognac. Remember that from Clues? Yes. Yes. I love the grapes. And so the episode is complete. Now that we have our obligatory clue reference. I think this is the third episode in a row you've made a clue reference.

I love that movie. In a nice little bit of pre-planned, badly acted theater, Patty Karpmell stood up, started screaming and ran for the door. You know for a fact it was done very badly, but Patty Karpmell at the same time was sort of like the girl that plays like number four dancer in whatever musical like, you know, you do a music man and all she wants to be is in the drama club. And so she's like, I'll do it with all my heart. So like Patty, you're overselling it, but I thought I'm supposed to be dying like Patty,

you suck. I'm going to give it to somebody else. She wants it the most though. Michael Prokes, the former newsman, was ready to play his part as well. She brought out a pistol pointed at Patty and fired, but it was just loaded with blanks. Patty fell to the floor, started moaning, and Jones informed everyone that if they didn't want to meet the same fate, they should face death with dignity. They should have also hired that guy to run the guns on the movie The Crow.

So perhaps we could still have Brandon Lee with us. Brandon Lee could be doing cruise goats for whatever talking goat movie is going to come out soon. One job. Don't put real bullets in the fake, just don't put real bullets in the fake gun. Now in that time, in those 45 minutes, most of these people accepted death, while some said in Jones's post-suicide poll that they suspected all along that the whole thing was a test.

So we got Frank once doing a poll at the end of this whole thing? Yeah, what is this like, Sprint? Now, were you mostly convinced, kind of convinced, somewhat convinced, or not at all convinced? I was fully convinced. There's really no question on here like, why are you trying to kill us, Jim? Could I ask that? No, the only real lamentation was when someone said they were worried about the children they were leaving behind, because Jim Jones was constantly telling them the CIA is going

to come and get your kids. Naturally. But Jones said, there's nothing to worry about there, as he had a nuke in a van parked right side of town that was set to go off right as the 45 minutes were up, which would take care of both the kids and San Francisco at large. This was a whole side game that we did not know up until this point. So while this shit was happening, Jim Jones was starting the storyline that he was going to get a hold of a nuke, which is making them into home Shinrikyo territory, where he was

like, we're going to get a nuke to be our fucking like, that's going to be our chip that we're going to use against the government. And so now to this point, you also have people in the cult that he just drank poison that now are just being informed that he also had a nuclear weapon. Right. Isn't that the plot of the movie? And they're like, Roswell Carter was just here. Should have told her about the nuke.

Isn't that the plot of that movie, Red Eye? I don't know that movie. Okay. Yeah. And he said that he got the nuke down in Mexico. Oh, naturally. That's where you get news. Where are you going to get a nuke with Tijuana?

I don't want to disparage Tijuana, but I don't think you should be buying your nukes from TJ. I think that you could get your oxy from TJ, you could get a bunch of regs, bunch of weed with stems and seeds in it from TJ, but I wouldn't get a full on operational war machine from him. Right. But when the time came, Jones told him that it was all just a test to see if they were willing to die for the cause.

Good Lord. And once again, nobody said shit. Some of them even saw it as a beautiful experience because look, all of us are willing to die so easily for the cause. We're all willing to follow father wherever he may go. Isn't this beautiful? Look at the society that we've created. I think I have referenced Jigsaw on this show before as well, but that's what it's so crazy

to me that all of this shit is making them like him more. It's making him like him more. How? One of the most important things about people's temple, as to why people didn't get out, one of the most important things, I think it was Tim Carter that said this, is everybody loved each other, everybody respected each other. So if you see your friend accepting what Jim Jones is doing, you respect your friend and you respect everybody else around you because you're all doing great work, you're all doing

good things, you're really helping everybody out. So since you're all doing good things and if you see your friend accepting it, then you think, well, if he accepts it and she accepts it and she accepts it and he accepts it, then I should accept it too. Obviously, there's something I'm not getting here. Also, there's something about a sick motherfucker, especially with cults and shit like that, where you gotta be the most extreme dude in the room. So Jim Jones is the leader of what he's basically, he's making a beehive of psychopaths and what

he is doing, they've been like, I'm the top psychopath. So he's doing extreme shit and everybody's doing it with him to say like, we're staying up all night. We're doing all this shit. We're like, oh yeah, hell yeah, we'll move to Guyana. Where is it? They're even saying, get this up or it's like, this guy's up there just kind of talking the truth.

And so there's something about like, you kind of feel like you're in good hands with this other guy who's willing to do whatever it takes for the cause. Times are definitely different now. Now to be an extreme pastor, you just like drink monster and say gays are allowed to be in love. I skateboard for the Lord. Yeah. Yeah.

Not saying shit was the law of the land. Like how nobody said shit when Carolyn Layton, Jones' right hand woman, disappeared for months on a quote unquote, secret mission and showed back up with a baby. Oh, I wonder what the secret mission was. To have a baby? The official story was that she had gone to Mexico where she'd been raped in prison, which conveniently made her a martyr for the cause. Someone to point to, if anyone complained about anything, it's like, oh, you're working

three shifts? Well, Carolyn got raped. It was something that they would bring up over and like for the smallest shit. Jim, this is really, this is very inappropriate to bring up her rape every time. I literally was just tired and I didn't mean to complain, but you joke, but that's what they did. Wow. That's exactly what they did.

They'd use shit like this. Right. But in reality, Jones had just knocked her up. Yeah. Rather than Mexico, she'd been spending the previous months in the comfort and ease of her parents' home until the baby was born. Remember all this, think about though, Jim Jones is under a lot of pressure too. He's got Carolyn Layton who's start being like, I want a baby because the other woman

got to gray stone, got to keep her baby. And now at this point, Carolyn's had to have a couple of abortions from being pregnant from Jim Jones. And finally she was like, she had now had known him, right? So she got stick of, she got over the God stick, but she became a full on devotee past where Marcy was. Oh yeah. So Carolyn Layton was like really, really close to Jim Jones.

And finally he's like, okay, I'll give you, I'll give you what you want. You have a baby. We're going to make up. We're going to, you're going on a side quest though, in our lore building part of this where it's like she had to go and go and do some secret mission in Mexico. And then she had to go stay with her parents and have this baby. Meanwhile, he's got to do a meet the Fockers, which I want to see. I want to see this, this scene out one day of Jim Jones showing up to Carolyn Layton's

family's house with the baby. And they're like, so you're going to divorce Marcy and marry our daughter so you could properly raise the baby. And he's like, Marcy's sick, Marcy got turned into a giraffe by which there's so many, there's so many things happening, there's so many, there's so many, I found a secret troll. I tell you what, truth is stranger than fiction. There's a troll that put a curse on me that said that if I marry your daughter, I turn

into a lamppost. There's a lot of, there's a lot of things going on that you can't know about and you don't want to know about. Oh man, we need earnest on this case. So when Carolyn Layton got back to People's Temple, she forced the guy who fired the fake shots at Patty into a sham marriage. And thus the baby, Jim John Prokes, nicknamed chemo, had a place in People's Temple. Wait, how do you get to the nickname chemo from Jim John?

Jim John Prokes. I don't know, chemo, and also, you know what's weird is that I have an instinctual reaction when I see the, because it's J-O-N, and I'm gonna be like, so you think you're better than guys named John, J-O-H-N, and then I think, why am I angry, I'm angry about something else. Yeah, that's it. I think there was a UFC fighter, chemo, back in the day, very religious man himself. But the side quest was that she was buying a nuclear weapon, they said that she was in

Mexico buying a nuclear weapon, but that she came back with a baby, which to me is the ultimate magic bean story that I've ever heard. And true to form, while every other woman had to give up her baby to be raised communally, Carolyn Layton was allowed to raise Jim John herself. Again, some are more equal than others. Oh goodness, these poor kids, I mean, how'd they turn out? Well, I mean, some of the kids actually did turn out pretty good. So we're not having a Ricky story from a children of God?

I think if John Victor had survived, he absolutely would have become a Ricky, because they were already in Jonestown, they were calling this kid the child god. They let him do whatever he wanted at any time, and everyone had to just be like, oh, that's little John John, oh, that's such a rascal. I see. Do you think he would, he did the thing like in the good son, where he grabs the guy and the legend, like, do you think that maybe if you jumped off that you could fly? Oh my God.

Well maybe one of the reasons why people accepted all this shit was because Jones was still producing results as far as they knew. Because Jones was coming back from Guyana with more and more positive news. He was going back and forth all these years, and every time he came back, it was like, you guys cannot fucking believe what they're accomplishing down in South America. After one trip, he returned with pictures of him posing in front of a bounty of fruit, supposedly cultivated from Jonestown land. Oh.

But guess what? What? It didn't come from there. No. It came from the fucking A and P. He bought it at the store in Georgetown, because the fucking land in Jonestown was barren. They hadn't figured it out, like it was very intense agricultural work, like they're having, they are completely uprooting a fucking jungle and trying to turn it into farmland.

The soil was extremely thin, they had to do a shitload of crop rotation, like this was supposed to take years upon years, but Jim Jones had to show his people something, so he went to the store, bought a shitload of fruit, went out to Jonestown, and just posed in front of it with two big thumbs up. Well I would plant the fruit, have him find it. You plant the fruit? Yeah, and then they can find it. And they'd be like, I didn't know that apples grew in the ground, they'd be like, they do.

In Jonestown they do. Why not? Yeah, because that's the thing, the progress in Jonestown itself was extremely, extremely slow. I can imagine. This was dense, snake infested, bug-ridden jungle, the wood of trees was so hard it broke their chainsaws. Wow.

They had to go, they hired a bunch of indigenous people to help them, right? And they basically, so as I imagine it, this is 60, like, Indiana farmers that he thought could handle this shit. They go down to the jungle, a bunch of Indians are just watching them break shit on their, with their chainsaws. The chainsaws are just snapping, and they go up to me like, you know these chainsaws never work. And they're like, well what do you, so what do we do?

He's like, age old method, where you grab the super dense trees one by one and rock them back and forth until you can pull them out of the ground. Meanwhile, the ground is covered with vines and thorns, and it's completely mud. It's two feet of mud underneath the thorns. And this is just like a man from Gary, Indiana. Right. Bugs the size of his granddaughter are lighting on his shoulders. It's very intense.

I would have gotten a bunch of beavers, and they would say, release the beavers, and then the beavers would theoretically eat the trees, and they would also make homes. And then you could use those homes for yourself. Theoretically. If it was a cartoon world. Yes. If we were all animated and nothing was real. Well, Jim Jones is telling all these people that this is a tropical paradise, I mean,

but in reality it was green hell. Yeah. Like it was almost inhospitable, but the people that were doing the work there, like it's amazingly impressive what they were actually able to accomplish. But not everyone was buying the bullshit. So you got those people over there, this entire time, there are constantly people there farming. Constantly. Yeah.

Working all day long. And then the first thing they got to do was a 100-yard trail through the jungle just so they could get the work machines in to start really clearing it out. And that took like six months of them working every single day. They're hiring things. So you were looking at all this shit where they are starting to hemorrhage money. Because he's throwing all this money into Jonestown shipping, all these construction equipment down there.

And it is, it is insane. It seems like a job even too difficult for Chip and Joanne Gaines from Fitzerova. Yes, it is. It really is. I love them. Okay. So in 1976, Grace Stone, Tim Stone's wife and the mother of Jim Jones' son, snuck off with a lover on July 4th while everyone else was distracted by the fireworks, leaving

her son behind. Now it's said in Raven that the last straw for Grace Stone was when she witnessed a 40-year-old woman being beat by a dozen members for saying Jones turned everyone into robots. But all this other is, Raven is known for embellishing the truth just a little bit. Yeah, but it's just such, it's such a perfect indication that that woman was telling the truth. Yeah. We're like, no, we are not robots.

We are not robots. We will systematically beat you now for calling us robots. It is normal for 12 men to beat a 40-year-old woman. Absolutely. Not robots, men. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, Raven is a great read.

It is very entertaining. It was written just a few years after the Jonestown massacre, but there are a ton of inconsistencies in it. In fact, some of the things that it says, and Raven, wrote to Jonestown says the complete and total opposite. Okay. And Raven gets very simple shit wrong, like when it says that Jim Jones was found dead in his hut.

He was not found dead in his hut. He was found dead on the pavilion. There's a picture of him laying on the pavilion. So there's, I mean, Raven, you kind of take it with a bit of a grain of salt, because I trust, wrote at Jonestown more because it's written with the perspective of time. And usually that's a lot more accurate. But even though Raven might have been embellishing just a little bit, as we'll hear later from recorded tapes, it probably isn't too far from the truth.

The recorded tapes are wild. Yeah. And they are long. There's hours and hours of it, too. Now Grace was not the first nor was she the last to leave children or even whole families behind in the thrall of the people's temple, nor is this the sort of thing singular to people's temple. Part of the problem with the cult existing for this long is that a lot of times the

members kids are raised in it, so they don't know anything else. Or sometimes a husband might be all in, but the wife wants to get out or vice versa. And this shit happens regularly. And even some of the major religious sex that could be argued are just extremely successful cults like Mormonism or Hasidism. People have to make this fucking decision every single day. And it's got to be so strange for these kids who rebelled be like, mom, dad, I am going into finance.

Okay? And you're not going to stop me from going into finance and living in a nice suburban home. Well, wait, what happens when we have kids, what they're going to fucking do, if we ever have kids or what they will turn into, it's going to be technically very successful members of society. I mean, if a really good documentary to watch about Hasidism that I thought it would actually illustrates this really well as a documentary on Netflix called One of Us, that covers it

is very interesting. I was blessed by a rabbi during the campaign. Really? Yes, he was very nice to you. I think you just wanted to stop talking to me. Well most of the time this shit has no real consequence for the cult at large. Grace Stone's defection and the subsequent custody battle for the child she had with Jones would be one of the many things to push Jones over the edge.

Soon after Grace left, Jim Jones shipped their son off to Jonestown and the boy, despite Grace's and eventually Tim Stone's efforts, the boy would never return to the United States alive. Geez, like what Garfield did to Nermal? What the hell is going on here? Yeah, if Nermal actually showed up in Abu Dhabi, Nermal would be a flashlight. Oh no, I don't like that. Another significant defection was Joy Shaw, not necessarily because of who she was, but

rather how Jim Jones decided to handle the defection, allegedly. See Joyce's husband, Bob Houston, stayed in the temple when Joyce left. We all know about Jones's threats to people who leave, but instead of taking care of Joyce, it suspected that Jim Jones took care of her husband instead. The official line was that Bob Houston, while at work in the train yard, laid down on some tracks, quote unquote, fell asleep and was cut in half by a train. This blows like a really nice place to rest here, being in a train track and kind of hard and rigid.

Oh, you know the sayers said a stiff surface is good for the back, but what about a rumbly one made out of nails? That's obviously bullshit. But luckily, Bob Houston's dad was an AP photographer, and he happened to know a congressman named Leo Ryan. Uh-oh. As most of you probably already know, if you've studied Jonestown at all, Leo Ryan was the congressman who went to investigate Jonestown in November of 1978.

That investigation was the final catalyst for the massacre. And this was Leo Ryan's first real introduction to people's temple. Leo Ryan wasn't the only one who was here for the first time, the bad shit was going on. But maybe in addition to giving Jonestown the power he was striving for, his political maneuverings made him some very powerful enemies, as political maneuverings usually do. Then take note. Noted.

Noted. The chief among those enemies was John Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata is in the mix. Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata.

Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata. Barbagalata.

Barbagalata was still nursing his wounds over the lost mayoral election. And Barbagalata believed that many of the voters that Jones provided were illegitimate. Bust in. Interesting. We've heard this before. We've heard it before. And it may have been true, but it was very hard to prove. The juicier rumor was about the foster kids in people's temples care.

See at first Jonestown was populated by what they called the pioneers, mostly made up of former farmers from Indiana and California. Then Jones got the bright idea to send trouble teens down there, ostensibly for rehab, but really for the raw physical labor they could provide. Yeah, nothing like the power of teenage boys. But the thing was, a lot of these boys were foster kids. That meant that the families who were supposedly taking care of them got a government check every month.

But instead of going to the kids, those checks were now going to Jonestown. Well, these motherfuckers needed as much money as they could get because now they're handling all of these. Everything's being paid for by Jonestown. They're cooking their books as much as possible. Jim Jones is going on all of the trips back and forth from South America trying to build fucking Jonestown is costing so much money that they're thinking of a lot of alternative sources of income.

It's just so much work for what's going to happen. What's the point of all this? Yeah. It's so weird to me. Exactly. It's the only lie they used to fund the settlement. Even though People's Temple was hemorrhaging money, their assets, by the time People's Temple ended, about $30 million.

Wow. I mean, just go and own Montana. Like, literally, you could have the state. You could have the state. There's so much room and they don't give a shit. You just cannot walk into another backyard of Montana because they will fucking kill you. Absolutely.

Well, even though they had that much money, Jones insisted in services that everyone give even more than they were already giving, right down to their wristwatches. Oh, God. Well, People's Temple had so much money that members were sent down to Panama with cash taped to their bodies so it could be deposited into foreign accounts and none of that money was ever recovered. Much like a scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, which is available for rent on iTunes. Go ahead and give it a rent on iTunes.

You know what I mean? The point you were pushing the movie you did, what was that? Five, six years? Five years ago. Now, out of that 30 million dollars, the U.S. only recovered about 13 million after Jonestown went down. The rest was lost with Jones's personal Bible, which had all the accounts information written in the margins.

And that Bible, after Jonestown was getting cleaned up, mysteriously disappeared. Do we know where it is? We have no idea where it is. I have it. I'm sorry. I should have kept that secret. Oh, man, well, who got the money afterwards? I wonder where that 13 million went.

Well, part of it went to the enormous cleanup effort that had to happen after. I think that ended up costing about $7 million. And that is disgusting. We'll get to that. We'll get just, Matt, it's 908 bodies. Yeah, and they're quite old. Anyway, we'll get to that portion of it. We'll get to that portion.

Not doing great. Yeah, a lot of it went to the cleanup. Some of it went to the families because people started near the end. They started making claims against People's Temple as far as how much money People's Temple had built out of them, certain people going for damages, lost family members. I think they ended up making claims of like $2 billion. So because of all these rumors, the fraud, the money, the kids, two reporters named Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy started looking into People's Temple.

For them, defectors were now numerous enough and were pissed off enough to talk on record. In a devastating article in the monthly magazine New West, Marshall and Tracy took down People's Temple with accounts of brutal punishments, fake healings, sexual misconduct, and misappropriation of funds. In one day, everything Jim Jones tried to keep secret came out all at once in a respected news magazine, and unlike the Ken Solving series from a few years before, these stories were accompanied by photos of every former member who spoke out against People's Temple. So it's stuck more than the other one.

Oh my god, it's stuck. This was the final straw, but it seemed as if Jim Jones had already seen the writing on the wall. He knew that these defectors were talking. It was getting back to him. A month before the article was released, Jim Jones ramped up the People's Temple exodus to Jonestown. Within just a few weeks, the population in Jonestown went from five dozen to five hundred.

And when the New West article was released on August 1, 1977, Jim Jones was already on a plane to Guyana, never to return to the United States. All right. But also, up to this, in this ramp-up, you remember, at this time he also knew in order to hold everything together, it had to almost be the P.C.'s idea to go to Guyana. So the inner-inner circle, they had already been doing this, things have been shipped to Guyana, things were on the move in Guyana. There was a bunch of people who didn't even know that Guyana was the Promised Land.

And so what you do is in these meetings, you'd be like, who wants to go with me to the Promised Land? You start counting the numbers and start figuring out how many people are going to go. Until finally, he basically kind of flipped it in a way, until finally they're all like, we've all decided to go to Guyana, Guyana's where the Promised Land is. And so he's doing all of this shit as the air is leaving the fucking balloon of Jonestown, America. It's like if you're like, let's go to the greatest Italian restaurant of all time and

you take him to Olive Garden. Everyone's just like, yes, I love Italian, and then you're there and you're like, I can't have any more soup. This is fine. If I look at another bowl of soup, I'm going to cry. It's better than gruel, thanks, Dad. In Jones's absence, he left behind a contingent of People's Temple members to run affairs, otherwise known as the Lucky Ones.

One year and three months later, that's it. That's all it took. The vast majority of the ones who joined Jones and Guyana would be dead on his command. It took just a little over a year for this to completely go off the rails. But Jones did not do it alone. And I think that's something that needs to be understood here. Jim Jones, it was not like he was a grand puppet master that was making it. It's kind of like that thing.

Like, Hitler, he had Mengele, you know? He had his Joseph Goebbels. He had his boys. He had his crew. And Jim Jones had his fucking crew as well. He had a whole cast of characters that were both willing and loyal. First, he had the two main ladies, Carolyn Layton and Maria Katsaris. Katsaris had come into the picture when Layton was having the baby.

Eventually, these two would essentially run Jonestown. And Katsaris was just as homicidely loyal as Layton. Back in the States, Katsaris had taken flying lessons just in case People's Temple wanted to load up an airplane with members and crash it down into an empty field, taking no one with them, just making a fucking point. Oh, okay. Shit. Yeah, dude, man.

Fucking metal as fuck. Very stupid. But you know when this woman comes up with this idea, though, that Jonestown went like bleep, it's been like, and that's why I'm fucking you, Maria, because you come up with incredible ideas. Because Maria, they said, Maria actually was changed by Jim Jones. He did the same thing. It was very similar to Marcy, where he, Maria was very, they knew her as shy, like a very

quiet person. And when Jim Jones slipped it in, she blossomed in a weird way where she was like, oh, I'm supposed to be a cult leader's girlfriend. This is why that's like my, my purpose of life. You never wake the shy, just let them, I have found shy people. It's better. It's not because they don't know how to talk or they don't, they're scared to communicate. It's because when they do, they want you dead.

They want you dead. They're, they're, they're introverts are scary. Oh my God. Introverts, they only do sit and plot. All day. They plot and plot. I've looked at them sitting back in parties and you liked it. They like to think that you're fucking like, I don't know what's going on, even though I'm

running in my mouth. Jeffrey Dahmer was technically shy. He would just sit in the bar, slam 18 PBRs and finally we had the courage to talk to someone. He would just kill them. Yep. Well, that airplane going up and down idea, that was just one of the many mass suicide ideas put forth during inner circle brainstorming sessions.

Why are they brainstorming this? Total brainstorming sessions. Like one of them was like, no, why don't we just line everybody up like and just shoot them eat, shoot everyone in the head, Nazi style. And just put them in a ditch. Sure. There's a series and it's pretty simple to do mass killing. Honestly, this was the most fun that they had, Kissel.

I guess. Don't take this from them. These were the fun meetings. These were the fun ones. These were the, yes, these were, this was Jim Jones being like, let's have fun with it today. We're going to have fun with it. Let's see.

Let's do it. Six of the wall. You know what I mean? Like it's, this was them getting really creative. Yeah. All right. Yeah. But of course we know they eventually settled on poison.

This would never have been possible without another one of Jim's main crew members, Dr. Larry Shocked. Shocked was a former drug addict who had found salvation through the people's temple rehab program. In shock, Jones saw potential. So Jones sent him to medical school also in Mexico, all on the temple's dime. So since Jones had in a very real way, not only saved Shock's life, but had improved it, he was one of Jones's most loyal.

And so he was made the Jonestown doctor. This motherfucker, what a promotion it is to go from junkie to I am a doomsday doctor for a South American Colt. That's like big. That is like, that's a lot. That's kind of fun because they teach doomsday doctor classes in Mexican doctor schools. I would never go to a doctor shock and see sounds like a villain. Yeah.

And he was the one that formulated the recipe for the flavorate concoction. Oh, man. It was not last minute either. Shocked worked on that shit for months. Are you telling me he was like, he did have a little taste of the not quite. Not at all. And then one time he's just like, that's out of bounds. He was just, he was like a goddamn super villain henchman in the jungle.

Jesus. Like he had his little... Here, here, here, here, here, here. It's him doing the sweetest chef. Well, she's just cats are dying. They'd be like, I think the doctor is, I thought I was supposed to be here for a chiropractor appointment with Dr. Shocked and he's like, do you want to see what heaven looks like? Yeah.

What do you use? Line item veto, the Hippocratic oath or something. How did, you know, this is ridiculous. In the end, all it took for Shaq's potion, single pound of cyanide that Shocked ordered for the measly sum of $8.85. Jeez. That's all it costs to kill all those people? Eight bucks.

Also, what is kind of always haunts me about cyanide is that I know it's supposed to be vaguely delicious. Like it's supposed to taste like almond extract. It's supposed to taste like bitter almonds. It tastes like shit. But I think about this. I was... He's a strange palate.

That is true. I do. But I got the almond centered, like the only thing that cleans me during Pretty Face is brawner soap, like I can use it for the stuff that's on my arms and hands, like I use brawners because it takes out the oils in whatever the alcohol makeup is. And I got the almond scent because the mint scent has got the kind of refreshing thing to it where it makes you all cold. But it is alarming because it kept me like, man, I smell like almonds.

I was like, oh, this would be like if I just washed myself with cyanide. Because I was in a completely clear bathroom. Like it was like I could see the shower was like in a sexy bathroom and like Natalie would be on the bed like while I'm showering and I'm looking and it just was a lot of wires crossed. Well, there we go. And that's the portion of the show where Henry puts an image in our mind. We never want it.

There it is. You might be having a stroke also if you smell almonds. So make sure to check that out. Now, Jonestown, there was only one reasonable way in or out. Port Caituma. Once you were at the port, you could either fly or take a boat to Georgetown, the capital. But that's only if you got past the armed guards at the Jonestown gate. The unreasonable way out was through the jungle, which is almost impossible to navigate.

Even if you managed to sidestep the poisonous snakes and the jungle cats, the canopy was so thick that the sun could barely get through and disorientation was almost guaranteed. This is how you know a place is dangerous. If you could just say the term jungle cats are out there, which means there are multiple types of jungle cats out there just waiting for you. And there was one guy that worked on Jonestown when he was digging out and he said, the thing about the jungle is that you can turn 360 and stand in place, do a 360 spin and not know where the fuck you are.

Well, it seems like it's similar to being in the middle of the ocean. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. But with trees. And even if you managed to make it through the jungle to the nearest railroad, but the only chance you had was to hop a ride on a passing train. And as far as we know, only one group of 11 people managed to do that.

And that was on the very last day. It was on the morning of the last day. That is also how Chevy Chase and... I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill you. So they escaped the house. There's nothing but trouble, but then they were brought back. But Jonestown was not the only people's simple outpost in Guyana.

They also had an embassy of sorts in the capital, Georgetown. That embassy would be sorely needed in the coming year, as things would not go smooth diplomatically for Jim Jones. Oh, shocking. Really? Now, Jonestown itself, before Jones arrived in 1977, was, despite everything we're saying, a pretty chill place to exist. I mean, the work was hard, but the people all got along with each other and they got a very

real sense of accomplishment from their labor. But when the population of 60 suddenly became 600, which became almost 1,000, in just a couple of months, the whole goddamn thing broke down. I can imagine. Because about two-thirds of those were either old people or kids. Right. You had a third old people, a third kids, and a third adults. And two-thirds of those people are pretty much useless in the work sense.

Right. Yes. And, you know, get the kids out there. They can do a little work. No, they can do a little work. The jungle cats are out there. Jungle cats. That's a fun story for the kid.

And Jim Jones, he had something to prove. Had he the time, he might have established something self-sustaining in Jonestown. Something he could go visit and show to the world that his socialist vision was possible. Right. But now, he'd arrived as damn near a refugee, a refugee. He'd been run out of America on an avalanche of bad press that was only just beginning. Right. The mood in Jonestown reflected the mood of Jim Jones.

And shit got real dark, real fast. Once Jones arrived, he started to micromanage every single aspect of his followers' lives, right down to romantic relationships. If two people wanted to get together, they had to apply to Jones. And then they had to go through a probationary period. And then if it was approved and they wanted to break up, they had to get that approved as well. That's a lot of approval.

It's a lot of approval. And also, Jim Jones, think about it, at this point, it was just hard enough building the compound. But they even said they were kind of having a good time doing it, because they thought that they didn't know that the shit was going down in America. So they were just kind of like, it was working really hard, but living a kind of peaceful life, celebrating Christ, and doing all this shit. And then Jim Jones shows up.

It's like when your boss has gone for a week, and all of a sudden he wants to go through, oh, you're not boxing the tapes up correctly, and oh, you need to saran wrap all these tapes. This comes for me when I worked at Hollywood Video. It sounds like it. And I was thinking about it. And since Jones was micromanaging so much, he needed even more drugs to keep him going. And all that was conveniently provided by Dr. Shocked. Uh-oh.

I have this new shot here that'll make you jump higher, but also maybe turn you into the most evil form of your set. I think we should have paid you go through a more Mexican grad school, maybe cut some of this evil villain work. The difference in Jonestown was Jones was living among the people. He couldn't hide all this drug use from him as well as he once could. And he gained a lot of weight, too. So much.

He gained so much weight that he had to order new shirts from America for him. I respect it. How did you? That's gotta be a lot of food to be having that much amphetamine in your system and to be gaining weight. Right. Yeah. The first time was rubbing off Jim Jones, and that meant the control was more important

than ever. That's where the guns came in. Dozens of weapons were smuggled into Jonestown from pistols to rifles to a sawdash shotgun with boss painted on the side. Awesome. And all that went into the possession of Jones's personal security team. Then there were the costs. Food for almost a thousand people, two meals a day, because they were socialists, they

didn't get three. But still, two meals a day. That's not cheap. So most of the time, these people just ate rice and they drank. If they were lucky, guess what? What? Flavorade. Ooh.

Now, back in the day, all these expenses would have been covered by contributions from congregants back in the States. But since the New West article came out, thousands of the more casual members had dropped people's temple like a hot potato. The only person who stood by Jim Jones was Willie Brown and gossip columnist, Herb Kane. Willie Brown the politician. Oh, look at that. Stood by Jim Jones and tell Jonestown and tell the massacre.

Wow. Good judge of character. Now that the Jonestown massacre happened, I'm so sorry for that, but honestly, it could have been more people. We should think about it like that. The bright side, I guess. So Jones put up the Redwood Valley and the Los Angeles temples up for sale. And even in their stronghold of San Francisco, contributions had gone from thousands of dollars

per service to hundreds. Even though people's temple had enough money in their bank accounts to run Jonestown, for up to 20 years, that wouldn't do for Jones's ego, because I think Jones wanted more than anything was to be remembered as a great man. And if you were to bankroll Jonestown- Well, he biffed that one. Yeah. I think it's fair to say he kind of mucked up that.

Yeah? Fuck that up real good. I guess the saying, if you reach for the moon, at least if you miss, you land amongst the stars. Does it really work for Jim Jones? No, not if you poison all the stars. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so if Jim Jones were to bankroll Jonestown for 20 years with nothing to show for it,

then he'd be nothing more than an eccentric San Francisco personality who'd fucked off to the jungle when people called him on a shit. Maybe parlay it into a reality show and actually be financially stable for the rest of his life. No, don't do that. Smart. Smart. But this is why you get producers involved.

Uh-huh. The way things were going, the most common word people would use in relation to Jim Jones was failure. If they even talked or thought about him at all. Right. Now, it's hard to know whether or not Jim Jones went to Guyana with the explicit intent of mass suicide. It was in his pocket, absolutely.

But personally, I think Jim Jones treated Jonestown like his own personal plaything until it was finally time to pull the trigger. I think by the time he got to Jonestown, he was tired. Building a self-sustaining society in the isolated jungles of a South American country was not easy. To make that shit work, Jim Jones would have had to change everything about himself. He would have to become real. Yeah.

If he really wanted to live there, he would have to strip down all of the artifacts that he's built up around himself. He would have to be like, you know what, I am just Jim. I'm here with you guys doing this and we could build together this local little community. We'll live like this. We'll live simply. But the promise is that what we learned, I think the sociopathic edge to him was that the artifacts and the fake version of Jim Jones was the more important one to him.

So he knew in the end, I'm with you. I think he was always going to do it. He was always going to make them all do it or at least commit suicide himself and kill as many of them as he could going down with them if they revolted against him. I actually wonder what you wanted more, whether he wanted them to willfully kill themselves or if he was kind of looking forward to the, I'm like taking everybody out in a fucking hail of gunfire because in the end that would, that would fuel his like amphetamine rush. Who knows?

Either way, you know what he wasn't doing? Thinking clearly. No. You got to work smart, not hard and we talked about this last week. That's it. I'm also a little bit angry that he never got into bedazzled clothing because usually that would go with someone who wears glasses and does as many amphetamines as he does bedazzled things.

I love a good bedazzled thing. What wouldn't require Jim Jones to change anything? And what he already knew how to do was mass suicide. In a sense, he'd already done it once. With what? The whole, the PC, the planning commission, when he had everyone drink the wine. Yeah. He'd already proved that he could do it.

So that's evidence that he was kind of intended to do it. I think it was evidence that he wanted it in his pocket. I think if things wouldn't have gone to shit, it would have gone on indefinitely. So it was just as much of a test for him as it was for the people that took the fake poison at that time. Yeah, I think so. See if he could do it. Yeah, see if he could.

Well, not necessarily to see if he could go through with it. It was more as test to see if he could pull it off. Right. And then also he must have gotten a rush when they all thought they were dying and he knew that they were working. Of course he did. He must have loved that. He was elated.

They talked about the way he kind of preened. Like when he was like he was going from person to person, like he was back in his element again. Where I think the main differences between LRH and Jim Jones is that LRH never got his peeney involved. I think that when you get your dangle dangle all wrapped up in these feelings, you're not going to be thinking this clearly, where LRH had his eye on the money. L. Ron Hubbard, I will say I liked the corgi, but I'm going to have to go with Mr. Mugs.

No! You're choosing Mr. Mugs over the corgi? I'm sorry if you're going to be a call leader. Shit man, as far as cult mascots go, I'm going to go with Mr. Mugs. Yeah. Oh wow! It's so interesting. I still go for the Source Family Band, which if we ever do the Source Family Band, you're

going to love them because they're fucking a smooth African fucking lick. It's got some sixties kind of like psychedelic on top of it. It's pretty jammed. Was there music at Jonestown? Yeah. The Jonestown Express. Yeah buddy. Chew Chew.

I'm just finding out who Sebastian Bach is, I don't know. Yeah, Jonestown Express, the Jonestown or the People's Temple Choir, in fact, I think the Jonestown, the People's Temple actually recorded an album in the building where the Museum of Death is now in Los Angeles. Oh. Yeah, because one of the guys gave me a tour once and I think he said they recorded an album there. Okay.

Museum of Death, good people. Check it out. Check it out. There's a shirt right now actually. It's got pictures like you would say that. In the meantime, Jim Jones only got more sadistic and by extension, his followers got more sadistic. In Jonestown, the punishments got even more severe, although some of the same tactics of simple public beatings still existed.

This is a tape of a woman being beaten by another woman during a meeting at the Jonestown Pavilion for the crime of talking too much. All right, and we warned everybody so no tweets being like, don't, I can't believe you played it. This is it. Yeah. I must be losing track of it. I thought I was doing better.

I tried to hold my tongue, but it wasn't good enough. I don't see why you can't. Keep your mouth shut. I don't know what you're saying. You can't keep your mouth shut and do your work. Huh? Huh? Come you can't keep your mouth shut and do your work and stick off of it.

God, it's so brutal. Yeah, dude. It's just so strange to hear the voices of these people. Yeah. Older women. But it just shows it can happen to you. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like a thing where you, I think that's what always with cults, which is so fascinating to people and to us, to me specifically, is that like, man, you can go so close from being like, this is a community of friends. Right. There's a bunch of people I love to all of a sudden you are cheering mass beatings. I say every morning just do a little temperature check and just be like, do we find that we're getting more violent? Sure, please.

Yeah. Just like, check, please. We're ready to get out. Because obviously this happened over a series of years. Yes, it did. That tape was provided by the Jonestown Institute, which is a fantastic website made up of contributions by Jonestown survivors and through various files and recordings that were provided through the Freedom of Information Act by the FBI.

One little known fact is that the infamous death tape is by no means the only one recovered from Jonestown. There are hundreds of hours of footage as People's Temple recorded almost every meeting for the entire year that Jones was present. All right. And so, I mean, I didn't get to listen to a ton of them. I've been listening to a lot of them. Marcus, I want you to stop.

I'm no doctor, but I think you've listened to just enough. Dude, they are fascinating. Well, I tell you what, there's not really like, it's like one of those things where if you're kind of feeling down, it's probably better to toss on like a 30 rock than anything you hear over there. Absolutely. But man, I mean, they are fascinating, but they are terrifying. You get a mood for Jonestown, particularly how Jim Jones set the tone for everything.

This is him losing his temper over an argument over whether or not a kid should get in trouble for pissing on the ground, which Jones, of course, turns into a gripe session for about how he can't piss during meetings. So he was angry with the kid or not angry? We'll see. Yeah, you'll hear. Yeah, you'll hear. Yeah, yeah, check it out.

Right. It's just laziness. Instead of walking to the bathroom, I just go out there and piss behind the tents. No more pissing. Get a container for me. No more pissing in the ground. Now, I hope it doesn't have a bad effect on your leader. You people all tighten me up, god damn you, sons of bitches, god damn you.

I sure as hell would be glad to walk to the fucking toilet, but I don't have the time to walk to the goddamn talket. Son of a bitch. Pour liquid in to keep my urinary system to function. It's nothing but liquid, but you all got to take, so, okay, okay, now I got to piss in a pot. There won't be no pot. No, no, no, the goddamn bladder burst.

There won't be no pot. No, it won't be, because you sons of bitches, anything I do, you got to do. God damn you. Why don't you work like I do then? Why don't you take the burdens I do then? Son of a bitch, I ever saw anything like this. I hate these goddamn meetings. Sounds like Alex Jones' dad.

Honestly, he sounds like my father. It sounds like that. My father trying to set up for the Super Bowl party. I remember one time he had a Super Bowl party and he was trying to set up a TV in the backyard and all of a sudden he was like, goddamn, you know they're pissed when they can't finish the curse word. One of the interesting things about that tape is that before Jonestown, Jim Jones was extremely well spoken when he was talking to his congregation.

You never heard him slip up a word. You never heard him flustered, but now all of a sudden, like, notice, he didn't say toilet, he said talket. You know what I'm saying? He's all fucked up. You know what I'm saying? Also, I'm forgetting, he's only, at the end, 41, so here's what I'm trying to say. He was actually older than that.

He was 45, I think. Maybe 46. But he sounds like he's lived, he sounds like an 80-year-old. Yeah, he sounds like an old man. Also remember too, before, he used to be on all the time, but even in Ukaya, he could go, he had like a little place where he could go, like he could go to a shack, he could go on trips, so he could get away from everybody. Now he is literally on stage on his elevated platform all day long.

This is happening all day. He's going through his Shave My Head hit paparazzi with the umbrella phase, the Brit Brit phase. Brittany, by the way, is back in a big way. You say that every six months. I love Brittany. I love her. I've actually been following her on Instagram, but she kind of seems like a fun lady.

She's great. She does. Leave her alone. We all love Brittany. I love the Brit Brit podcast here. In the same speech as that one, where he's talking about the piss, just a few minutes later, he starts casually talking about the isolation box as if it's the most normal thing in the world.

Oh my God. In Jonestown, the isolation box was a six-foot by four-foot sensory deprivation chamber where people could be imprisoned for even the slightest offenses. This is a tape of a people's temple follower speaking to a woman named Barbara Walker while she was actually inside the isolation box for the crime of, quote, being hostile. Okay. You seem to, uh, judging from the tone of your voice, though, you seem to be fairly mellow right now.

Do you feel that way generally? Yeah. Except I miss a lot about it. Except you wish? Except I miss a lot about it. Yeah. By the way, we're really sorry that somebody threw a dirtclaw and hit the side of your box a lot ago, that we've caught the culprits that were responsible for that.

I find that really very unexcusable, and I'm sorry it happened. If you're really sorry here, let me the fuck out. So this was that Jim Jones, no, that was just that was just some guy sounded kind of like Jim Jones. Sounded a little like a thing. Like grubs or something like that. Okay. He sounds like a grubs.

It's like, it's a very interesting how again, the mixture of the two of this, I'm saying I'm sorry that someone interrupted your punishment, which is putting you in a weird spot mentally where you just have to be like, you know, you believe it's for your own good. You are right about really getting you to feel that mood. My goodness. This one right here. This one is, this next clip is, it's ridiculous. This is psychological torture.

It wasn't just physical stuff. This clip is of a woman who had a paralyzing fear of snakes. She was forced to have a boa constrictor, a small one, but still a boa constrictor crawl all over her body, obviously not for the first time. Okay. Give it to her, give it to her, give it to her, I'm sick of this shit. Let her deal with it, motherfucker, if he wants a choker to death, that's his benefit. I'm tired of it.

You said the same thing the last time. Turn around and look at the people, turn around and look at the people. Talk to them. See if they will get the snake off your back. Nothing else works for this woman, getting this on the last six, seven days. Turn around. It seems as if they were laughing. They were.

Yes, they were laughing. They were. That's the amazing thing about these states. This woman is losing her goddamn mind to the point and not even be able to form clear sentences. She's out, she's completely out. The audience is laughing at her and this is not an isolated incident on these tapes. I've heard them cheer while people are being beaten, they shout suggestions on how the

people should be beaten, they verbally berate each other, they laugh when others get hurt. In Jonestown, Jim Jones turned these people into fucking monsters. They used to be normal. Yes. They were like a normal group of people that just got flipped so hard. But that's the thing is that these people believed they were doing good. They thought they were doing these people favors. They think they're actually helping them because that is what Jim Jones is telling

them they're doing. You know what it is to me that really haunts me is the tired tone of his voice. It reminds me of like a weird childhood. It's like a childhood thing. My parents were kind of like that or it's like the weariness of you, how you make me so tired, like listening to your problems or it's just like you just, something so dismissive about it that makes it so much kind of scarier because this is when he's tired. Now even when he's angry, this fucking crazy, would you consider be the worst punishment

you've ever received is just like a thing that and he's just like, I'm so tired of dealing with you. Right. We're doing it again. This last five, six days, five, six days, we're going to have to be here again, but this is the only thing it does it for. So she's just going to have to go through all this again and he also, he just sets such a casual nature for all this shit and in setting the casual nature, he keeps people

off balance and he also has this weird, you know, it's all paternal because I mean first of all, people have been calling him father for years, but in Jonestown, they start calling him dad. Yes. It is in this strange Lord of the Flies type world, it's a form of entertainment. It seems like a version of fear factor for them or something. That reaction from the crowd was really what got me. Well, listen to this.

This is him not two minutes later after that woman had the snake taken off over. This is him holding the snake in his hands. Hi, you sweet fellow. I like it. I see these fuckers and I like them. Yeah. Look at that. Look at that grip.

That's a grip. You're a good guy. Well, they love that snake dance. She went through the snake dance in Jonestown. Fantastic. She went fantastic. The snake dance with her head was out dancing with her. Oh, what do you do?

Shit on her? Wouldn't he know it? He would shit on me. Everybody else does. Why didn't you shit on her? God damn it. You, you, you, you. Huh?

You should have been standing up to these guys. I know, but why didn't you shit on her? I didn't shit on me too. You little fart. They have lost their fucking minds. Yeah. Yes. They're exhausted.

They're exhausted and now they're alone. They're exhausted and now it is just this. Good. It's like when you hang out just a little too late in the morning after doing some drugs and everyone starts to go nuts. Yeah. Oh, get dark. Yeah, or get dark.

Yeah. And immediately after that where he's like, you little fart, he's screaming again. Good. And it's just back and forth and up and down. And that's how these meetings, these meetings go on for hours upon hours. It doesn't, they don't accomplish anything though. Yeah. And this meeting, this was like a 1 a.m. that they're doing all that shit.

And that's after they've been working all day long and probably already gone to a meeting before that. It's madness. It's absolute madness. Like these tapes are, they are, it is absolute madness on tape. It makes me feel, it does make you, it makes you feel like you've just done a bunch of drugs. That horrible after like feel where you just have your skin kind of crawl.

I'm fucking keyed up. Yeah. You're taking a bunch of like, you're taking pills just to stay up. It's like I had those nights and you're just saying, I don't know man, it does. It brings back all, it's a lot of. It's gross. It's a lot of badness. Yeah.

We're a lot of badness after all this. We've all got specific memories that we're kind of running through our heads right now, those weird fucking nights where you just start saying and doing weird shit. And then your buddy actually brings out a snake and that happens in real life. Yeah. It always happens when your buddy brings out a snake. Goodness. Never have a friend that loves amphibians too much.

That's my warning to you. As long as it's not an acoustic guitar, I'm fine with it. Oh, that's true. I can go for a little acoustic. There were people in Jonestown who spoke out against this shit, but they were dealt with in an entirely different way. Now, as far as we know, there were no outright murders in Jonestown before the massacre. That's because they didn't need to murder anyone.

If there was a dissenter that Jones couldn't silence or beat in a submission, he just handed them over to Dr. Shock in what they called the special care unit. There they would be drugged in a submission, essentially put on ice. And that went for any disobedience. One girl who refused Jones's sexual advances was drugged and kept in a hut where she became Jim Jones's personal sex slave until the day she died. Then, in September of 1977, the White Knights began. And that's where we'll pick back up for part five of Jonestown.

Oh my goodness. All right. Shit, dog. Is this going to be, is this a five parter? Got to try to. All right. So there we are. Yeah, we got to.

We have to. I'm done. Marcus and I are dying. Yes. Well, I think the dreams have started. Yes. I'm worried that Marcus's brain is deteriorated and I'm worried you're getting ideas, Henry. So we can't do the episode too much longer.

I'm just going to say I'm getting motivated. Yeah. It's not specific ideas. It's just important to know what you can get out of a lot of hard work and patience. Nothing but destruction, sadness, and mass suicide. Nothing but trouble, am I right? Nothing but trouble. Oh my God.

All right. What are we going to do here? Check, please. We are, well, just, just wake up today. Hopefully you're not in a cult. Or if you are, get out of it. Scoot on back. I guess get out of it.

But I mean, whatever, whatever you're liking, you know. Good advice, Henry. All right. So we should follow everyone on social media. We've been told to really ramp that up. So this is us ramping it up. We're ramping it up. We're ramping it up.

You can follow me on Twitter at Henry Loves You at Ben Kissle at Marcus Parks. Follow me on Instagram at Dr. Fantasty at Marcus Parks at Ben Kissle, the number one, and follow us podcast on the left on all of the horseshit at LP on the left. Also, if you feel like it, you can give to our Patreon. Yes. It's a nice. And keep on supporting all the shows here on the last podcast network. We've got some new shows coming out.

We're going to start advertising those a little bit more. Good term. Good term. Thank you. So that'll be fun. We've got a lot of great shows. Abling and Toppat. We might have a special episode with Henry Zabrowski coming out soon.

We made sure with all of you. We might just definitely have that. Because if we're booked to do it, we'll do it. We'll do it. That's right. Page seven, Sex and Other Human Activities. You know all the great shows here on the network. Oh yeah.

Movies Sound with the Mads. If you want to go hear my music show, go on over to mixcloud.com slash Marcus Parks. Hear Milk and Peppers. Oh. Or you can listen live every Tuesday from one to three p.m. eastern standard time at kpis.fm. Nothing standard about that time. Also watch my, watch my, my fucking ass on crashing this week on HBO.

If you got a 10 30 p.m. Sundays eastern standard time. Yep. And we can we announce the official return of the stream? We've got the. Yeah. February 13th, correct? We're back. Yep.

We're going to be back on February 13th. There it is. That Tuesday. Don't know exactly what time yet, but we shall announce that as well. But yeah, we're, we're back with last stream on the left. Keep it. Keep you updated. That's adultswim.com slash streams.

There it is. Thank you. Hail yourselves, everyone. Hail Satan. He would never do this to you. Know this for a fact that Satanism just wants you to be your own person. I don't know if that's true. It's snakes.

That is completely true. And I've actually had a lot of people ask me recently on Twitter about me trying to get people into Satanism, but it is not an evangelistic thing. It does seem like you're evangelizing a little bit though. No, I like it when people do whatever the fuck it is they want to do that doesn't include making me do more work than I got to do. You sound like. Yeah, we have to end the Jim Jones series pretty soon.

I think we have to start spreading across, uh, spreading out our cult episodes. Hail again and good night, everyone. Hail me. And I'm a goose deletions. Thank you. Good gene and good night. That's not your pets. I like it.

I like it. It doesn't really make any sense anyway.