LPOTL (intro theme) There's no place to escape to. This is the Last Podcast on the Left. Rise from your
graves! That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Oh shit!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So first of all, I wanna 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 in the
plan. Because every father needs a mother when it comes to a cult, cause now we see,
because of Jonestown, we see how important it is that the First Lady has gotta be cutthroat,
intense, and in the pocket and be able to administer judgment.
BEN KISSEL Well, technically you can fit in her pocket, I think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the idea, I will be the attack dog. 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.
BEN KISSEL Well, I'll go when there's a good buffet happening. I'll check it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If there's gonna be something that's right about my cult, it is going to be the catering. And next
thing is is that everybody's getting 2-ply. That is something that I am giving to everybody.
BEN KISSEL Wow, that's the best cult we've covered yet, the 2-ply cult! Welcome to the Last Podcast on
the Left everyone. I am Ben Kissel, that's Marcus Parks-
MARCUS PARKS Hey, Ben.
BEN KISSEL Newly-engaged, he's off the market ladies, Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel good about it.
BEN KISSEL Good. You should.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I got whatever disgusting illness was inside you is now inside of me.
BEN KISSEL Yes, I got this horrible flu. It's a rough season, they say it's the worst in ten years.
MARCUS PARKS Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Did my father just walk into the room? That's weird.
BEN KISSEL Those are the kind of conversations you have when you're wearing new glasses!
MARCUS PARKS You do have nice glasses on.
BEN KISSEL Thank you, they're Ray-Ban. So you can imagine how nice Ray was of a guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You look like Dan Aykroyd right after he directed Nothing But Trouble, once he got into his
serious phase.
BEN KISSEL Which I watched, by the way. I watched it. All right, we're onto Jonestown Part IV ladies and
gentlemen, be warned. It gets a little brutal, we've got some clips coming up. Somebody sent
me a tweet being like, 'If you're gonna have these clips, can you warn me first?' So here's your
warning! There will be some controversial clips coming up.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, there's gonna be some stuff that you have never heard before coming up on this.
BEN KISSEL That's the reality.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's the reality, it's gonna be brutal, but we're gonna get into it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So we haven't heard it before, is this Irish EDM?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it could be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Irish singing)
BEN KISSEL (singing) It's the polka!
Watch the documentary on the Pennsylvania Polka King. Oh my god, it's the best.
MARCUS PARKS So when we last left Jim Jones, he was about to be confronted with his most high-profile
defectors yet. The Gang of Eight.
BEN KISSEL Ooh.
MARCUS PARKS The Gang of Eight was a group of students who were going to college on the Peoples Temple's
dime, made up of kids from some of the most prominent members of the church.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now remember, this was actually a good thing that Jim Jones was doing. The whole point is
that he wanted to show that we support our highest rated members. The people with the
brightest futures. These are kids that are a part of legendary family lines of the Jonestown
temple, the most loyal families, and these kids were like the upper echelon. It's a good mix of
very smart, very capable.
BEN KISSEL 5 star kids. These are the ones you gotta look out for.
MARCUS PARKS 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 Peoples 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 capitalist 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.
BEN KISSEL All right. Problematic.
MARCUS PARKS Well also, remember the whole point of this is he brings the people that he feels can benefit
him the most, closest. He's bringing them in closer cause he's trying to get cash outta them.
Everybody else he's 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.
BEN KISSEL Well, you know, it seems strange to me. I would prefer not to be in the inner circle.
MARCUS PARKS Inner circle's a bad place, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL I just wanna be on the outside. 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!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But also remember, the community of Jonestown, the Peoples Temple, at this point is getting
really intense, right. 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, like
live a life like the show Different Strokes. Not Different Strokes, what was the one where they
went to college?
BEN KISSEL Different World.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Different World! They were living in a different world and then the rest of them are like, 'Do
you understand what's happening here?' And the Gang of Eight gets perspective on that.
MARCUS PARKS And furthermore, word had gotten out to the Gang of Eight concerning Jones' sexual
proclivities inside the Planning Commission, specifically how members were only brought in so
Jones could fuck 'em. But they also hit on the subject of Jones' PC meetings. They wrote,
quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "All the Planning Commission does is call each other homosexual, asking if each other sucks
cocks, planning to plant dope on people. What a contribution to socialism." Y'all.
BEN KISSEL It's McCarthy. It's all Joseph McCarthy did too, basically. And it's also how they created the
constitution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, this is how it started.
MARCUS PARKS Calling each other homosexual?
BEN KISSEL You're gay!' 'No, you're gay!' 'Gimme that quill, you're gay. I have a constitutional right to say
that.' 'Let's write the 1st Amendment, you're gay.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I also view the Gang of Eight as sort of, do you remember the kids group from Burger King?
BEN KISSEL Of course.
MARCUS PARKS The Burger King Kids Club.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I was a member. Reluctantly they accepted me.
MARCUS PARKS Because of all this the Gang of Eight left Peoples 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 in
Spokane, the Eight drafted a manifesto and sent it to Peoples Temple.
BEN KISSEL It does sound kind of fun.
MARCUS PARKS They apparently had a great time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well they're obviously A 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, what we see now, the
pattern happening where he raises up his enemies and then he thought that he could just tell
them what to do and they'd snap back to attention.
MARCUS PARKS Well what he tried doing is he tried using honey instead of vinegar. He told all the members
forgiveness. If the kids wanna come back, let them back in. Don't berate them, don't call them
pieces of shit, just tell 'em that they should come back. Cause 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 echelon. So if the upper echelon goes against ya, then
something might be going wrong.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, he needs their cash.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's gotta 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 give a shit
what happens after he's dead. Technically this is the group of people that are gonna inherit the
whole thing and he had to have them just to save face. It's kind of like you can't continue
Family Matters without Urkel. But you can get rid of the mom. You know what I mean? The
mom can just disappear and be recast in a season 8 network switch.
MARCUS PARKS 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
18-20 hours days other members were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey guys. I gotta question. You guys ever heard of memory foam? There's some crazy shit out
there. You guys ever heard of Gushers? Man, they've got lemon-lime, they've got lime-lemon,
they've got raspberry-lime, they've got banana-lime. It all tastes like lime but it's Gushers.
BEN KISSEL Love Gushers. Science has really created some incredible things.
MARCUS PARKS It really has. The Gang of Eight, they had their mental faculties. They had their brains. And they
saw Peoples Temple, and by extension Jim Jones, for what they actually were. Bullshit. But
that's not 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, 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. And I'll tell you one thing, Guy Fieri is
actually doing some really 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.
BEN KISSEL Guy Fieri. Very good, good person. And he's opened up a new grill as a matter of fact. He did.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well obviously people were telling tales out of 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.
BEN KISSEL Ooh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's so dumb. It's so dumb to think that you could even do that and just have like a file of these
like, 'This'll stand up in court. Oh and this'll definitely work, all these signed papers.' It's like a
weird 15 year old is running a secret club.
BEN KISSEL If I ever have a kid, they're gonna sign a bunch of that. And I'm gonna say, 'Did you eat the
cookies? Cause dad wanted the cookies and they're frickin gone.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dad...why are you starting to wear sunglasses inside?
BEN KISSEL Glaucoma.
MARCUS PARKS The people pretty much knew that it wasn't gonna wash with the police. They weren't just
gonna got to the police and be like, 'Oh here's a signed confession saying that he beat his wife,'
or whatever. But if he went to the congregation with a signed confession that said this dude
beat his wife, the congregation's gonna fucking believe him, and those people are gonna
become pariahs. With some members he took it even further. One woman named Juanell
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 should she decide to shit talk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's so silly. My question is 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 down the line, there's something frozen,
childish almost in the way they do certain things. Like the way Jeffrey Dahmer believed, I mean
it made him very sick, but the idea that he could make these slaves and he could control them.
There's something in Jim Jones that thinks these 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, you kind
of believe it. But why does he act like a 13 year old?
MARCUS PARKS Well, I think that's what a lot of... I think you answered your own question. It's immaturity.
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.
BEN KISSEL He's also got a lot of leverage now, he can frame her for anything. Smokin' gun.
MARCUS PARKS (chuckles) Now, the reason why Juanell left was due to a particularly humiliating PC meeting,
although Juanell was not the target. Laurie Efrein 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 Juanell 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.
BEN KISSEL He's for Russia now, pro-Russia.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. He's telling them that Russia is a socialist paradise, that Russia's gonna save 'em all.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it's beautiful, I watch a lot of their, what's it called... Oh, road rage videos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, dash cam! All the dashcam shit.
BEN KISSEL The Russians have the greatest road rage.
MARCUS PARKS They're amazing.
BEN KISSEL And it's solved. By the end of every Russian video they're kind of hugging. I think they
somehow got drunk between, and it's really kinda sweet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well they've been drunk. They started drunk. And then dashcam footage has stuff where like
all of a sudden you'll see a bear driving a car and there's a giraffe with an AK-47 duct taped to
it on the side of the road. Russia seems wild.
BEN KISSEL I wanna visit. Not now, but...
MARCUS PARKS 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 the government was planning on rounding up all the black people in concentration
camps where they would subsequently be killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yikes.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, doesn't sound good.
MARCUS PARKS 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-
BEN KISSEL The irony is he's kind of doing that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god! I just had my Oprah 'aha' moment. Hope-rah, as I call her.
MARCUS PARKS Uh, dyst-hope-ria.
BEN KISSEL I know. We talked about it on Abe Lincoln's Top Hat, listen this week. But that's exactly what
he's doing. Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yep. Jones would take these people away to a place where they would be out of government
reach, although he would 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And Jonestown is great marketing. The name Jonestown is pretty, pretty great. I mean,
technically they named it completely after Georgetown, so it was kind of a no-brainer. But it's
important to remember, I think in terms of naming things and branding things, is if you can sell
it that quickly, it works for a group of people, it makes them kind of motivated.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. It also helps his last name wasn't like Glorbesky or something. Where it's like, 'Welcome
to Glorbeskyville'. Is it a sausage place, what's happening?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well also, he stole 'promised land'. That has been used in black churches across the country,
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. 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 and he's like, 'Now you're
gonna pick some oranges.' And they're like, 'Oh, I thought we were gonna be hanging out.' 'No,
no, no, no. This is promised to get a shit ton of work land.'
BEN KISSEL Ah, man. They didn't read the full pamphlet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the same shit's gonna happen when they get to Jonestown, we'll get to it, which is pretty
intense. But remember, again, every single cult leader does the same shit. Get 'em in one area
and get 'em tired.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and to use things that have already been used, those familiar things that people can
latch onto like those little weird familiar things... Even Aum Shinrikyo 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. The
same thing with Jonestown and the promised land. Because the promised land was something
that was talked about in black churches going back to slavery. 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 Jones used that idea and he used that name until he came up with the
name Jonestown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also in turn, it means that this life means nothing. And that this life can be discarded to move
onto the next one which is making altruistic suicide a constant thought.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And I think it speaks to his lack of creativity. Jonestown? Pretty easy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's great, man.
BEN KISSEL He didn't get there for a while. There's promised land, what could I call it... McDonald's, that's
taken. Uh...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We could call it Candyland.
BEN KISSEL No, I'm sorry sir, that's actually been copyrighted by Mattel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI WE WILL BURN MATTEL TO THE GROUND!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, dash cam! All the dash cam shit.
BEN KISSEL What was that?
MARCUS PARKS It's seems that even though Jones, by this time, had the pick of almost any woman or man he
wanted inside Peoples Temple, he still needed or at least wanted a little action on the side.
Something a little dirtier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Lil stankier.
BEN KISSEL Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sometimes you want something with a little stank on it, something where you just wanna get
out there. Like, he woke up on a Wednesday and he's like, 'You know what, Jim? Let's get
some shit on our dick tonight.' You're like what? And the dick was like, 'Oh, what is this,
Christmas?' And also, Marcus, when you say 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 a bunch of people clamoring.
MARCUS PARKS It absolutely was not. I did not mean to imply that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)
BEN KISSEL I'm thinking about Skid Row now. The band, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Remember that song-
MARCUS PARKS 18 and Life to go, yeah.
BEN KISSEL There's that one...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) We just gonna sit here naming Skid Row songs?
BEN KISSEL I could! I was thinking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't though! You only named the one.
BEN KISSEL No, well, Marcus named it. But I did have... (singing) 18 and life to go...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah that's the only song you know!
BEN KISSEL And then there's another one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's it! That's the only song anybody knows.
BEN KISSEL There is one other one but I'm blanking on it.
MARCUS PARKS Well, when Jim Jones decided he wanted something a little dirtier, he headed out to-
BEN KISSEL Oh, (singing) they call us problem childs...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Goddamnit.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL We are the youth gone wild! Is that 18-
MARCUS PARKS I think it is.
BEN KISSEL Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS So when Jim Jones wanted something a little dirtier, he headed on to Westlake Theater across
the street from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Now 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.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, like The Brambles.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah! That's exactly what it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Or like any Republican senator's vacation home.
BEN KISSEL Oh!
MARCUS PARKS Aha!
BEN KISSEL (laughs)
MARCUS PARKS So on the afternoon of December 13, 1973, Jim Jones wandered a mile and a half from the Los
Angeles Peoples Temple location over to the Westlake to attend a matinee screening of Dirty
Harry.
BEN KISSEL Ooh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 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.
BEN KISSEL Well, it is kind of an erotic name.
MARCUS PARKS It could've been any movie, it could've been Annie Hall.
BEN KISSEL You're saying this is not about the movie?
MARCUS PARKS This is not about the movie at all.
BEN KISSEL No, Dirty Harry's a man's man, he's got a big gun. 'Oh, what did you say to me, person? Ah,
you're being mean to me!' And then he's shooting people.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I remember that famous quote.
BEN KISSEL You're being mean to me!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 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 favorite quote.
BEN KISSEL It's symbolic of my dick, get it?
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones, sitting in the balcony, wearing a green coat to disguise himself, gave the ol' foot tap
to a fellow patron who took the cue and followed Jones to the bathroom.
BEN KISSEL What is with this Larry Craig foot tap thing?
MARCUS PARKS The foot tap. The foot tap is a long-held tradition in the cruising community.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's been around.
BEN KISSEL I was looking at people's feet on the subway the other day. Any tappers out there and I'm like,
what's going on? What secret morse code is happening?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 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 cause you go into the handicap bathroom accidentally, that's very
wide, and you really need to get your feet outside of it.
MARCUS PARKS Little did Jones know that the fellow patron was actually an undercover cop named Arthur
Kagele who was there at the behest of the theater who called in the cops to get their
bathroom situation under control.
BEN KISSEL Wow. What an interesting undercover cop day that is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 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 calling him, he's the cum guard.'
BEN KISSEL He comes home, puts his badge and gun on the table. 'Honey I had a hell of a day.' Slamming
whiskey down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honey, your shoes... Did you step in some ice cream?
Yeah. Yeah. And I gotta tell you, there's a lot of people out there who really scream for some
ice cream. Where is this pot roast!?
MARCUS PARKS 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.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, god.
MARCUS PARKS 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".
BEN KISSEL Possible hemorrhoids? What else could it be? I mean-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know when you've got 'em, I'll tell you what.
BEN KISSEL Yeah I've never heard someone be like, 'It's a possible hemorrhoid.' They're like, 'That's a
hemorrhoid.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Now 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 to slosh
the prostate loose.
BEN KISSEL (chuckles)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I have just never heard of this old Amish way of emptying your prostate.
BEN KISSEL Jump up and down.
MARCUS PARKS You guys know how sometimes when you see someone jumping up and down, you're like, 'Oh
I think that guy's masturbating!' But he's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When do you see people jump up and down? Nobody jumps up and down anymore, not in
2018, not in this economy.
MARCUS PARKS Eventually the charge was dismissed. Stoen covered the whole thing up and it surprisingly
never came back to haunt Jones, even after the bad press hit about five years later.
BEN KISSEL The cop didn't even get a conviction. I mean what a horrible... I cannot stop thinking-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI His life is garbage.
BEN KISSEL We need to do a whole episode about cops who have to go get dudes from jerking off in
theaters.
MARCUS PARKS This cop was so pissed off.
BEN KISSEL I'm sure!
MARCUS PARKS He really was because this really shows you 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 cops was like, 'What the fuck are you doing?! I caught him masturbating!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is completely true, because what happened is they got the whole case thrown out, cause
you don't understand. My dad would even talk about, when he used to give tickets, he's like,
'You just contest the ticket because cops hate to show up, because 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, 'Why
would you dismiss this?' Because he was covered up to his knees in unwelcome jizzum!
BEN KISSEL I 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 while I was on patrol.
MARCUS PARKS He didn't just see Jim Jones masturbate, Jim Jones masturbated at him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI At him!
MARCUS PARKS And for all that time, nothing. Jim Jones skated. And it never came out, it's now just an
embarrassing anecdote about Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL Well heard he had a possible prostate. Or hemorrhoid, rather. Possible hemorrhoid.
MARCUS PARKS 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-
BEN KISSEL I would think that asking a foreign country to have us establish a socialist commune would be
difficult.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely not!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not difficult.
MARCUS PARKS Well it would be in other circumstances, but in this circumstance, Peoples Temple was the
answer to Guyana's prayers.
BEN KISSEL If something like this happens easily, you should really look into this deeper. Because it
shouldn't happen this easily.
MARCUS PARKS See, Guyana had recently gained their independence from Great Britain.
BEN KISSEL Congratulations.
MARCUS PARKS Congratulations, Guyana.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Good work, guys.
MARCUS PARKS 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI According to The Road to Jonestown, their army was like a thousand people strong, made of
mostly teenagers that would just join the army looking for food and shelter. So you basically...
And Venezuela had a full-on fucking army, just being like, 'We're just gonna take all this shit.'
So what's a great way to introduce a wacky buffer for this?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) That 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 skullduggery in South America at the time,
particularly in Chile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The skullduggery was so thick... I would say up to a level 9 of skullduggery was happening in
South America. And it was pretty intense.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah we organized a fucking coup!
BEN KISSEL Fun way of saying supporting dictators, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 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
were saying Guyana was having a problem with the coast getting eaten up by the beach,
essentially 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 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 could 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 dig it out for them?
BEN KISSEL Well that's a disgusting way to describe it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're welcome.
BEN KISSEL I would love living in the jungle.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I bet you would.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No he would not! No you would not!
BEN KISSEL Yes I would! And you wanna know how I know that, Henry? Cause I eat bananas the right way.
Cause I am-
MARCUS PARKS Upside down. You gotta do it from the bottom up.
BEN KISSEL Yes, I eat it upside down, I did 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kissel, have you ever seen a picture of actual bananas, what bananas look like before we
manipulate them? They're like rocks. They're like black rocks 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.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When you get down there, you're gonna be dealing with a lot of Rosie O'Donnell bananas that
you are not gonna know how to handle.
BEN KISSEL I like Rosie. I like attitude banana. That's good, I'll figure it out.
MARCUS PARKS 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. Guyanese logic
went that if they established a successful settlement, that's the first step, they're already
gonna be moving their way inland and they're not gonna be stuck on these eroding coastlines
anymore. So when Jones and a few other Peoples Temple members showed up with the plan,
their request was almost immediately approved.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool.
MARCUS PARKS And pretty soon, a few dozen Peoples Temple settlers, along with Mr. Muggs, began work on
Jonestown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (robot voice) I don't have a good feeling about this.
BEN KISSEL Why not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (robot voice) Will someone please... I know not a lot of people take my opinion to heart
entirely because in fact I am a chimp, but I can think and I've been talking with the Gang of
Eight and I just...
And then they just put a syringe in him and he goes to sleep.
BEN KISSEL Oh, poor Mr. Muggs.
MARCUS PARKS He was one of the first residents of Jonestown.
BEN KISSEL He must've loved it.
MARCUS PARKS They kept him in a cage the whole time.
BEN KISSEL Why would they do that?
MARCUS PARKS Because then he'd just run away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because he's a fucking wild monkey!
BEN KISSEL (sighs)
MARCUS PARKS Yeah you can't just have a chimp wandering around!
BEN KISSEL I woulda put him in a little Fleetwood dress...
MARCUS PARKS Fleetwood Mac dress?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS You'd dress him up like Stevie Nicks?
BEN KISSEL Yes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sounds like you're trying to fuck this monkey. Like you're trying to make it your jungle wife!
BEN KISSEL No he's free!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hi hello, my name is Ben-JA-min Kissel. 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.
BEN KISSEL Stevie Nicks.
MARCUS PARKS 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 500 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 kinda guy, which is exemplified in how, before everything went to shit, he
became an actual player in San Francisco city politics.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is very interesting. This is where for some reason I think of LRH a lot in comparison to Jim
Jones.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS L. Ron Hubbard, you fucking idiot. Just say L. Ron Hubbard.
BEN KISSEL Who is LRH? You're like a fat David Miscavige over here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, but think about this. LRH wanted this more than anyone else. He wanted to have his
own country and 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 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.
BEN KISSEL You did all that to get to a cliché.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL You can't always get what... Isn't that something. Cause I was thinking, I can get what I want.
You're telling me I can't always.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Always! Sometimes you just might find you get what you need.
BEN KISSEL Oh, I see.
MARCUS PARKS I think that the huge difference between Jim Jones and L. Ron Hubbard, I refuse to call him
LRH-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All right.
BEN KISSEL It seems like a longer name than when you say L. Ron Hubbard. LRH does not roll of the
tongue.
MARCUS PARKS 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 is cause L. Ron Hubbard never got into
politics. Jim Jones got way the fuck into politics and it made him enemies. As it always does.
BEN KISSEL Okay. I believe it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It seems to be a really destructive career choice.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. One can 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-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm fired?
MARCUS PARKS I'm fired from the Reform Party?
BEN KISSEL You're not in it!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Good?
MARCUS PARKS Now 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. That's when Jim Jones said he knew he made it, when he made it into Herb Caen's
column.
BEN KISSEL This cult leader who loves sunglasses was found tapping his toes at a movie theater. Who
could it be?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) 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.
BEN KISSEL Willie Brown!
MARCUS PARKS And Brown was an ally of State Senator George Moscone, who was thinking of running for
mayor. See, 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 fuck, Ben, you're gonna love this. His primary opponent, Dianne
Feinstein.
BEN KISSEL She has been around... She is older than god. I cannot believe she's still a senator.
MARCUS PARKS Not just a senator, she's still doing shit! She's the one that stupidly released the fusion gps
testimony. She's right on the edges of pee pee-gate.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She's having problems with legal weed in California and I get so mad. If you try to take my
weed from me, that's when I'm getting guns.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Flip it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause that is me, all holed up in a bunker with weed plants.
BEN KISSEL From my cold, stoned hands! You take this miracle joint, this medical weed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's okay we'll just wait til he goes to sleep.
MARCUS PARKS Well, Moscone, he beat the shit out of Feinstein, that was a handy victory.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS But in the main mayoral election, Moscone was going up against this guy Barbagelata.
BEN KISSEL Barbagelata!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, Barbagelata.
BEN KISSEL Got butter for hands!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, these are some very Italian names.
BEN KISSEL Very much so.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. So Jones provided Moscone with just enough black votes to put him over the brink,
edging out Barbagelata by only 4400 votes, which in a major city mayoral election is razor thin.
BEN KISSEL 400 votes, you said?
MARCUS PARKS 4400. 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 reelected. And all three regularly
attended Peoples Temple services, if only for political reasons.
BEN KISSEL Good lord.
MARCUS PARKS 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.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Jones, he 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 see how Jonestown was
doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jesus Christ!
BEN KISSEL Yup, looks like a dump.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, this definitely sucks, do not invite me again, I've got to go.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, even governor Jerry Brown, who's once again governor, he even paid Jim Jones lip
service.
BEN KISSEL Unbelievable to think about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why did he want so much more than this? We'll talk about this more and more as we go, just
being like, you coulda just had a nice life in San Francisco.
BEN KISSEL Yes, and Guyana is not a dump, I was talking about the Jonestown area. What they were given.
MARCUS PARKS Jonestown was a super dump. Guyana is very beautiful.
BEN KISSEL Very beautiful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you. My home country, so it's just nice to hear you say that.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL I know, it's where the Zebrowski family comes from.
MARCUS PARKS Now, all this political influence only increased Jones' 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. Rosalynn Carter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god, she's gotta stop accepting invitations.
BEN KISSEL So, for those that don't remember, she also met John Wayne Gacy. What is going on with her?
She is married to the sweetest man that's ever lived and all she does is hang out with
sociopaths and serial killers.
MARCUS PARKS She just had the bad luck of being the First Lady in the late 70s.
BEN KISSEL Oh, that's a good point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, yes. The worst time to be in America. All he wanted to be was a peanut farmer. That's all
he wanted!
BEN KISSEL (elderly voice) So we have a function, Jimmy. Now who are the people I'm supposed to meet
with? Sirhan Sirhan?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) There's 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 a Jimmy Carter.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL No, it's good enough!
MARCUS PARKS And also, Dr. Doom is canonically more a villain of the Fantastic Four-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Go fuck yourself!
BEN KISSEL I don't even know, between LRH and this, I'm just... Where's a window?
MARCUS PARKS Well, Rosalynn Carter, she of course was going on a tour to try and get Jimmy Carter up in the
polls. This was his first election campaign. And Peoples 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 outta white people. So to have Rosalynn
Carter at this church that was kinda socialist and kinda in line with the Black Panthers but not
quite, it was very good for Rosalynn Carter to show up and take photos with Jim Jones. They
even started a little correspondence with each other.
BEN KISSEL Well, we talked about this on Top Hat this week too with the FBI, Cointelpro and all that stuff,
cracking down on the Black Panther Party. I guess Jim Jones, they never investigated him
though, huh?
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL Cause he had enough political power.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was a good one, and the group was really nice.
BEN KISSEL He's one of the good cult leaders?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 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. Also, man, celebrities were just more fun in the 70s. Cause you had all of 'em! Like
fucking Charles Manson was around. That kinda shit back in the 60s? It's kinda fun.
BEN KISSEL I miss the Marlon Brando, Johnny Cash days. I just wanna think about Native Americans all the
time. That's all that I want, still, they are in need.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and as soon as Rosalynn Carter left and they closed up the doors, Jim Jones was like, 'You
know she's gonna put you in concentration camps, right?'
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness. Rosalynn?
MARCUS PARKS That sweet old lady?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep, she had a gun in her pussy. You could tell by the way she walked.
MARCUS PARKS And Henry, you mentioned Charles Manson. Just like Charles Manson hobnobbed with famous
musicians like Dennis Wilson and super-producer Terry Melcher, Peoples Temple services were
attended and praised by political celebrities. They had Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Dennis
Banks, these guys that were the biggest revolutionaries of the 70s in all kinds of different
movements were going to Peoples Temple meetings and were fucking loving it and telling
everybody this Jim Jones guy was the real deal, he's the shit. Even Jane Fonda! The current star
of Netflix's Grace and Frankie, Hanoi Jane herself! She used to come to the temple services in
Los Angeles from time to time.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what, this just reminds me of the Golden Globes. Cause there's nothing I love better,
and I don't know about you, Dogmeat and Kissel, but I love watching celebrities just mix it up,
let their hair down, and just have fun. I look at them out there just having fun, being
themselves, just have fun with this one. Everyday they're just having fun and they're sipping
each other's champagne. Oh man, celebrities just dancing and laughing and playing lip sync
games.
BEN KISSEL Rich people giving awards to rich people pretending they care about poor people, I love
awards shows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love 'em! I love them.
BEN KISSEL Nothing says I care for my fellow man like holding up a piece of shit gold statue you got for
playing make pretend.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well all of this attention benefited Jones in two ways. It gave him outside cred, yes,
but more importantly it made shit real to the members of Peoples Temple. Particularly to the
longtime members.
BEN KISSEL Yeah! 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 belong in the same room as Jane Fonda. I'm serious!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)
MARCUS PARKS It's not that Barbarella was there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah it is! Yeah, it's exactly what it is!
MARCUS PARKS That is cool, that is super cool, I would love to go to church with Barbarella, that would be cool
as shit.
BEN KISSEL Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS But what meant more was people like Angela Davis and Huey Newton.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, Huey Newton.
BEN KISSEL Of course.
MARCUS PARKS Because Jones had been telling Peoples Temple for years that their time was coming. And now
they had nationally known figures that were considered heroes sitting right next to them in
services. It seemed like their time had come and on top of that, there's also the fucking
promised land.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, that's where the tragedy comes in even deeper, right? Where it's like, no other cult
leader had this type of validation where he came in, he had all of his influence, and you got
proven right. How gratifying must it be? I'm spending all my life, I'm wiping my ass with a fern
that I found because we ran out of toilet paper, we had to do all of this shit, we're sitting three
to a seat in a bus, and it's meaning something, we're getting somewhere. And there's more to
go, we're going to the promised 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 of this stuff
happening. So you're getting the cognitive dissonance of being like, well we gotta be doing
something right.
BEN KISSEL Right. So weird. Why didn't he just stop and just go get legit?
MARCUS PARKS Hubris. I mean, that's what defines these people.
BEN KISSEL So weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI HUBRIS!
BEN KISSEL Cause he's meeting all the right people, it seems as if he could be in line for a political position
himself.
MARCUS PARKS Well, that's what he was angling for. They say that-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why do we long to be the #3 comedy podcast on iTunes?
BEN KISSEL Right. If only we talked about MMA more.
MARCUS PARKS They said Jones, he was eyeing governor. This guy, he was looking at senator, he was looking
at governor. I mean it was mayor first, of course, but he was making moves. But the thing was
with Jim Jones, the skeletons in Jim Jones closet were quite a bit larger than most politicians
out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah and they're going like (wailing). It sounded like a fucking haunted crypt on the inside of
his brain. Where they're like, 'Do you guys hear chain rattling when Jim's around?'
BEN KISSEL Huh. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS To the public, Jim Jones is a very well-meaning, a little eccentric, yes, he wears his sunglasses
all the time and that's a little fucking weird and the red suits, that's a little weird too, but he's
doing good shit. But behind closed door, shit's just getting real grim at Peoples 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 60s. 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! Let's have a
party, everyone's gonna have a glass of wine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 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. If we could get some shoes or something.
BEN KISSEL You know it's funny because three bottles of wine split amongst like 20 people is actually very
sad. I would say no wine is more happy. I would be happier with that. You get a thimble's
worth of wine each.
MARCUS PARKS Now 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.
BEN KISSEL "I too drank the cognac." Remember that from Clue?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS And so the episode is complete now that we have our obligatory Clue reference.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (applause) I think this is the third episode in a row you've made a Clue reference.
BEN KISSEL I love that movie.
MARCUS PARKS In a nice little bit of pre-planned, badly acted theater, Patty Cartmell stood up, started
screaming, and ran for the door.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (screaming)
You know for a fact it was done very badly. But Patty Cartmell, at the same time, was sort of
like the girl that plays #4 Dancer in whatever musical, you're doing 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 and soul!' It's like,
'Patty, you're overselling it.' 'But I thought I was supposed to be dying.' 'Patty, you suck. I'm
gonna give it to somebody else.'
BEN KISSEL Aw, she wants it the most, though.
MARCUS PARKS Michael Prokes, the former newsman, was ready to play his part as well. He brought out a
pistol, pointed it 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 wanna make the same fate,
they should face death with dignity.
BEN KISSEL They should've also hired that guy to run the guns on the movie The Crow. So perhaps we
could still have Brandon Lee with us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Brandon Lee could be doing Cruise Goats IV, whatever talking goat movie is gonna come out
soon.
BEN KISSEL Exactly! One job. Don't put real bullets in the fake gun.
MARCUS PARKS No, in that time, in those 45 minutes, most of these people accepted death, while some said,
in Jones' post-suicide poll that they suspected all along that the whole thing was a test.
BEN KISSEL Oh, so we got Frank Luntz doing a poll at the end of this whole thing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, what is this like sprint?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Now, were you mostly convinced, kind of convinced, somewhat convinced, or not at
all convinced?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh I was fully convinced.
BEN KISSEL There's really no question on here like, 'why are you trying to kill us, Jim?' Can I ask that?
MARCUS PARKS Now, the only real lamentation was when someone said they were worried about the children
they were leaving behind, because Jim Jones was constantly telling 'em the CIA's gonna come
and get your kids!
BEN KISSEL Naturally.
MARCUS PARKS But Jones said there was nothing to worry about there, as he had a nuke in a van parked right
outside of town set to go off right as the 45 minutes were up, which would take care of both
the kids and San Francisco at large.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This was a whole side game that we did not know up until this point. That while this shit was
happening, Jim Jones was starting this storyline that he was gonna get ahold of a nuke, which
is making him into Aum Shinrikyo territory. Where he was like, we're gonna get a nuke to be
our fucking, that's gonna be our chip that we're gonna use against the government. And so
now, up to this point, you also have people in the cult, they just drank poison, that now are
just being informed that he also had a nuclear weapon. And meanwhile you're like, Rosalynn
Carter was just here!
BEN KISSEL Shoulda told her about the nuke. Isn't that the plot of that movie Red Eye?
MARCUS PARKS I don't know that movie.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and he said he got the nuke down in Mexico.
BEN KISSEL Oh, naturally. That's where you get nukes.
MARCUS PARKS You're gonna get a nuke in Tijuana.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't want to disparage Tijuana, but I don't think you should be buying your nukes from TJ. I
think that you can get your oxy from TJ, you could get a bunch of regs, a bunch or weed with
stems and seeds in it from TJ, but I wouldn't get a full-on operational war machine.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) But when the time came, Jones told 'em that it was all just a test to see if they were
willing to die for the cause.
BEN KISSEL Good lord.
MARCUS PARKS And once again, nobody said shit. Some of 'em even saw it as a beautiful experience. Cause
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.
BEN KISSEL I think I have referenced Jigsaw on this show before as well. It's so crazy to me that all of this
shit is making them like him more.
MARCUS PARKS It's making them like him more-
BEN KISSEL How?!
MARCUS PARKS One of the most important things about Peoples 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also, there's something about a sick motherfucker, especially with cults and shit like that,
where's it's you gotta be the most extreme dude in the room. Jim Jones is the leader of
basically he's making a beehive of psychopaths and what he is doing is being like, I'm the top
psychopath!' So he's doing extreme shit and everybody's doing it with him. So saying like,
'We're staying up all night, we're doing all this shit. Oh hell yeah we'll move to Guyana! Where
is it?' Cause this guy's up there just kind of talking the truth and so there's something about
you kinda feel like you're in good hands with this other guy who's willing to do whatever it
takes for the cause.
BEN KISSEL Times are definitely different now. Now to be an extreme pastor you just drink Monster and
say gays are allowed to be in love.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I skateboard for the lord!
MARCUS PARKS 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh! Weird.
BEN KISSEL I wonder what the secret mission was!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Huh. To have a baby?
MARCUS PARKS 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 over for the smallest shit!
BEN KISSEL Jim, this is very inappropriate to bring up a rape every time. I literally was just tired and I didn't
mean to complain, but...
MARCUS PARKS You joke but that's what they did! That's exactly what they did, they'd use shit like this. But in
reality, Jones had just knocked her up. Rather than Mexico, she'd been spending the previous
months in the comfort and ease of her parents' home until the baby was born.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jim Jones is under a lot of pressure, too. He's got Carolyn Layton being like, 'I wanna baby.'
Because Grace Stoen got to keep her baby and 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 known him,
right, so she got over the god shtick but she became a full-on devotee past where Marcy was.
Carolyn Layton was like really, really close to Jim Jones. And finally he's like, 'Okay, I'll give you
what you want, you can have a baby. You're going on a side quest though in our lore-building
part of this.' Where it's like, she had to 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 gotta do a Meet the Fockers, which I wanna see 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
gonna divorce Marcy and marry our daughter so you can properly raise the baby.' And he's
like, 'Marcy's sick, Marcy got turned into a giraffe by a witch. There's so many things
happening. I found a secret troll, I tell you what, truth is stranger than fiction, there's 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 things going on that you can't know about and you don't wanna know about.'
BEN KISSEL Oh, man. We need Ernest on this case.
MARCUS PARKS So when Carolyn Layton got back to Peoples Temple, she forced the guy who fired the fake
shots at Patty into a sham marriage, and thus the baby, Jim Jon Prokes, nicknamed Kimo, had a
place in Peoples Temple.
BEN KISSEL What? How do you get to the nickname Kimo-
MARCUS PARKS From Jim Jon?
BEN KISSEL Jim Jon...
MARCUS PARKS Prokes.
BEN KISSEL Prokes.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. Kimo. And also, you what's weird, is that I have an instinctual reaction when I
see... Cause it's J-O-N, and I'm being 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.
BEN KISSEL Yep, that's it. I think there was a UFC fighter, Kimo, back in the day. Very religious man himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the side quest was that she was buying a nuclear weapon. They said that she was in
Mexico buying a nuclear weapon but then she came back with a baby, which to me is the
ultimate magic bean story that I've ever heard.
MARCUS PARKS 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 Jon herself. Again, some are more equal than others.
BEN KISSEL Ah, goodness. These poor kids. I mean, how'd they turn out?
MARCUS PARKS I mean, some of the kids actually did turn out pretty good.
BEN KISSEL So we're not quite having a Ricky's story from Children of God?
MARCUS PARKS I think if John Victor had survived, he absolutely would've 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 just had to be like, 'Oh, that's little John-John. Oh he's such a
rascal'.
BEN KISSEL I see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you think he did the thing like in The Good Son where he grabs the guy on the ledge, just
being like, 'Do you think that maybe if you jumped off, that you could fly?'
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS Well, maybe one of the reasons why people accepted all of this shit is 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 he 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.
BEN KISSEL Oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But guess what? It didn't come from there! It came from the fucking A&P!
MARCUS PARKS He bought it at the store in Georgetown, because the fucking land in Jonestown was barren.
They hadn't figured it out. And it was very intense agricultural work. 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. This was supposed to take years upon years but Jim
Jones had to show his people something so he went to the store and bought a shitload of fruit,
went out to Jonestown and just posed in front of it with two big thumbs up.
BEN KISSEL Well I would plant the fruit, have 'em find it.
MARCUS PARKS You'd plant the fruit?
BEN KISSEL And then they can find it. And they'll be like, 'I didn't know apples grew in the ground.' And I'd
be like, 'They do.'
MARCUS PARKS In Jonestown they do. Cause that's the thing, the progress in Jonestown itself was extremely,
extremely slow.
BEN KISSEL I can imagine.
MARCUS PARKS This was dense, snake-infested, bug-ridden jungle. The wood of the trees was so hard it broke
their chainsaws.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They hired a bunch of indigenous people to help them, right. So as I imagine it this is 60
Indiana farmers that he thought could handle this shit. They go down to the jungle, bunch of
Indians are just watching them break shit with their chainsaws, the chainsaws are snapping.
And then they go up to 'em being like, 'You know these chainsaws never work.' And they're
like, '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 a man from Gary, Indiana. Bugs the size of his
granddaughter are alighting on his shoulders. It's very intense.
BEN KISSEL I would've gotten a bunch of beavers. I 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.
MARCUS PARKS Theoretically.
BEN KISSEL If it was a cartoon world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL If we were all animated and nothing was real.
MARCUS PARKS Well, Jim Jones was telling all these people that this is a tropical paradise, but in reality it was
green hell. It was almost inhospitable, but the people that were doing the work there, it's
amazingly impressive what they were actually able to accomplish. But not everyone was
buying the bullshit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So you got those people over there, this entire time there are constantly people there farming.
BEN KISSEL Constantly, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Working all day long. And then the first thing they got to do was a hundred yard trail through
the jungle just so they could get the work machines in to start really clearing it out, and that
took like 6 months of them working every single day. So we're looking at all this shit where
they are starting to hemorrhage money because he's throwing all of his money into
Jonestown, shipping all of this construction equipment down there, and it is insane.
BEN KISSEL He bought it at the store in Georgetown because the fucking land in Jonestown was barren.
They hadn't figured it out. And it was very intense agricultural work. 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. This was supposed to take years upon years but Jim
Jones had to show his people something so he went to the store and bought a shitload of fruit,
went out to Jonestown and just posed in front of it with two big thumbs up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, it is. It really is.
MARCUS PARKS So in 1976, Grace Stoen, Tim Stoen'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 Stoen was when she witnessed a 40 year
old women being beat by a dozen members for saying Jones turned everyone into robots.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS But I will say this. Raven is known for embellishing the truth just a little bit.
BEN KISSEL Yeah but it's such a perfect indication that that woman was telling the truth. They were like,
'No, we are not robots! We are not robots. We will systematically beat you now for calling us
robots.'
MARCUS PARKS (robot voice) It is normal for 12 men to beat a 40 year old woman.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, 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, and in fact some of the things
that it says in Raven, Road to Jonestown says the complete and total opposite. 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 Raven, you kinda take it with a bit of a grain of salt. I trust Road to Jonestown
more because it's written with the perspective of time and usually that's a lot more accurate.
But even though Raven might've been embellishing just a little bit, as we'll hear later from
recorded tapes, that probably isn't too far from the truth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The recorded tapes are wild and they are long, there's hours and hours of it, too.
MARCUS PARKS Now, Grace was not the first nor was she the last to leave children or even whole families
behind in the thrall of the Peoples Temple. Nor is this the sort of thing singular to Peoples
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 the husband
may be all in or the wife wants to get out, or vice versa. And this shit happens regularly. And
even some of the major religious sects that can be argued are just extremely successful cults
like Mormonism or Hasidism, people have to make this fucking decision every single day.
BEN KISSEL And it's gotta be so strange for these kids who rebelled, being like, 'Mom, Dad. I am going into
finance, okay? And you're not gonna stop me from going into finance and living in a nice
suburban home.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wait what happens when we have kids, what they're gonna fucking do. If we ever have kids,
what they will turn into. It's gonna be, well, technically very successful members of society. A
really good documentary to watch about hasidism that I thought actually illustrates this really
well is the documentary on Netflix called 'One of Us'. That covers it, it's very interesting.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah!
MARCUS PARKS It's great.
BEN KISSEL I was blessed by a rabbi during the campaign.
MARCUS PARKS Really?
BEN KISSEL Yes, he was very nice. I think he just wanted to stop talking to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)
MARCUS PARKS Well, most of the time this shit has no real consequence for the cult at large. Grace Stoen'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 Stoen's efforts, the boy
would never return to the United States alive.
BEN KISSEL Jeez, like what Garfield did to Nermal? What the hell is going on here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, if Nermal actually showed up in Abu Dhabi, Nermal would be a fleshlight.
BEN KISSEL Oh, no! I don't like that.
MARCUS PARKS Another significant defection was Joyce 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. And we all know about Jones' threats to people
who leave but instead of taking care of Joyce, it's 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.
BEN KISSEL This seems like a really nice place to rest here, being as it's a train track and kinda hard and
rigid, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know they say that a stiff surface is good for the back, but what about a rumbly one made
out of nails?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Now that's obviously bullshit. But luckily Bob Houston's dad was an AP photographer
and he happened to know a congressman named Leo Ryan.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS Now 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
Peoples Temple. Leo Ryan wasn't the only one that was hearing for the first time that bad shit
was going on. See, in addition to giving Jones the power he was striving for, his political
maneuverings made him some very powerful enemies, as political maneuverings usually do.
Ben, take note.
BEN KISSEL Noted! Noted!
MARCUS PARKS Chief among those enemies was John Barbagelata.
BEN KISSEL Barbagelata?
MARCUS PARKS Barbagelata.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Barbagelata's in the mix! Do you mean to tell me this soft mozzarella cheese is gonna cause
problems for Jim Jones?
BEN KISSEL What about Barbagelata.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What about Barbagelata?
BEN KISSEL I've said that before.
MARCUS PARKS Now, Barbagelata was still nursing his wounds over the lost mayoral election and Barbagelata
believed that a lot of the voters that Jones provided were illegitimate. Bussed-in.
BEN KISSEL Interesting, we've heard this before.
MARCUS PARKS 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 Peoples Temple's 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 troubled teens down there, ostensibly
for rehab but really for the raw physical labor they could provide.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, nothing like the power of teenage boys.
MARCUS PARKS 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.
BEN KISSEL Ah, he's horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well these motherfuckers needed as much money as they could get, cause know they're
handling all these things, everything's being paid for by Jonestown, they are 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, it's costing so much money that they're just
thinking of a lot of alternative sources of income.
BEN KISSEL It's just so much work for what's gonna happen. What's the point of all this? It's so weird to
me.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Exactly. And that wasn't the only lie they used to fund the settlement. Even though
Peoples Temple was hemorrhaging money, their assets, by the time Peoples Temple ended,
about $30 million.
BEN KISSEL Wow. I mean just go and own Montana. Like literally you can have this state.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, there's so much room and they don't give a shit! You just cannot walk into another
backyard in Montana because they will fucking kill you.
BEN KISSEL Oh, absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS 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. Peoples 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 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!
BEN KISSEL You're pushing the movie you did, what was that? 5, 6 years-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 5 years ago!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Now, outta that $30 million, the U.S. only recovered about $13 million after
Jonestown went down. The rest was lost with Jones' personal bible, which had all of the
accounts information written in the margins. And that bible, after Jonestown was getting
cleaned up, mysteriously disappeared.
BEN KISSEL Do we know where it is?
MARCUS PARKS We have no idea where it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I have it! I'm sorry, I shoulda kept that secret. Oh, man. Who got the money afterwards? I
wonder where that $13 million went.
MARCUS PARKS Well, part of it went to the enormous cleanup effort that had to happen after. I think that
ended up costing about $7 million-
BEN KISSEL That is disgusting, we'll get to that, I'm sure.
MARCUS PARKS We'll get to that. It's 908 bodies.
BEN KISSEL Anyway, we'll get to that portion of it. Not doing great.
MARCUS PARKS 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 Peoples Temple as far as how much money
Peoples Temple had milked 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 Peoples Temple. Lucky 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 Peoples 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 Kinsolving series from a few years before, these stories were accompanied by
photos of every former member who spoke out against Peoples Temple.
BEN KISSEL Okay, so it stuck more than the other one.
MARCUS PARKS Oh my god, it 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 Peoples Temple exodus to
Jonestown. Within just a few weeks, the population in Jonestown went from five dozen to 500,
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.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also, up to this, in the ramp up, remember at this time he also knew in order to hold
everything together it had to almost be the PC's idea to go to Guyana. So the inner inner circle,
they had already been doing this, things had 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 he would do was in these meetings he'd be like, (shouting) 'Who
wants to go with me to the promised land?' And he'd start counting the numbers and started
figuring out how many people are gonna go. Until finally, he basically kinda flipped it in a way
so 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
in America.
BEN KISSEL It's like if you're like, 'Let's go to the greatest Italian restaurant of all time!' And you take them
to Olive Garden. Everyone's just like, 'Yes, I love Italian food.' And you're there and you're like,
I can't have anymore soup. If I look at another bowl of soup I'm gonna cry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's better than gruel, thanks dad!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) In Jones' absence, he left behind a contingent of Peoples Temple members to run
affairs, otherwise known as the lucky ones. One year and three months later, that's all, that's
all it took, the vast majority of the ones who joined Jones in 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 that's something that needs to be understood here. Jim Jones,
it was not like he was a grand puppetmaster that was making it... It's kind of that thing like,
Hitler, he had Mengele. He had his Josef Goebbels.
BEN KISSEL He had his boys. He had his crew.
MARCUS PARKS 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. Now,
Katsaris had come into the picture when Layton was having the baby. Eventually, these two
would essentially run Jonestown. And Katsaris was just as homicidally loyal as Layton. Back in
the states, Katsaris had taken flying lessons just in case Peoples Temple wanted to load up an
airplane with members and crash it down into an empty field, taking no one with 'em, just
making a fucking point.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fuck! Shit yeah, dude, man, fucking metal as fuck!
BEN KISSEL It's not metal!
MARCUS PARKS It's very stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know that when this woman comes up with this idea though that Jones went like (slide
whistle sound) just being like, 'And that's why I'm fucking you, Maria, because you come up
with incredible ideas.' Because Maria, they said Maria was actually changed by Jim Jones. He
did the same thing, it was very similar to Marcy. Maria, they knew her as shy, 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. That's like my purpose in life.'
BEN KISSEL This is why you never wake the shy. I have found, shy people, it's not because they don't know
how to talk or they're scared to communicate, it's because when they do, they want you dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They want you dead! The introverts are scary. Introverts, all they do is sit and plot. They plot
and plot, I've looked at them sitting back at parties and they like to think that I don't know
what's going on, even though I'm running my mouth.
BEN KISSEL Jeffrey Dahmer was technically shy. He'd just sit at the bar, slam 18 PBRs and finally when he
got the courage to talk to someone he would just kill them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS 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.
BEN KISSEL Why were they brainstorming this?
MARCUS PARKS Total brainstorming sessions. One of them was like, "'Why don't we just line everybody up and
just shoot everyone in the head Nazi-style and just put them in a ditch?'
BEN KISSEL Sure. It's pretty simple to do, mass killing, if you really wanna do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, this was the most fun that they had, Kissel.
BEN KISSEL I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Don't take this from them. These were the fun meetings.
BEN KISSEL These were the fun ones?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, this was Jim Jones being like, 'Let's have fun with it today. We're gonna have fun with it,
let's just see what sticks to the wall.' This was them getting really creative.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But of course we know they eventually settled on poison. This would never have been
possible without another of Jim's main crew members, Dr. Larry Schacht. Schacht was a former
drug addict who had found salvation through the Peoples Temple rehab program. In Schacht,
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 Schacht's life but had improved it,
he was one of Jones' most loyal. And so, he was made the Jonestown doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This motherfucker. What a promotion it is to go from junkie to 'I'm a doomsday doctor for a
South American cult.' That's like big. That's a lot, that's kinda fun. Cause they teach doomsday
doctor classes in Mexican doctor schools.
BEN KISSEL I would never go to a Dr. Schacht. He sounds like a villain.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and he was the one who formulated the recipe for the Flavor Aid concoction, and it
wasn't last minute either. Schacht worked on that shit for months-
BEN KISSEL Are you telling me he did have a little taste like, (sip) 'Not quite.' And then one time he's just
like, 'That's out of bounds!'
MARCUS PARKS He was like a goddamn supervillain henchman in the jungle!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's him doing the Swedish Chef while cats are dying. And they're being like, 'I thought I was
supposed to be here for a chiropractor appointment with Dr. Schacht,' and he's like, 'Do you
want to see what heaven looks like?'
BEN KISSEL Did he just line-item veto the Hippocratic oath or something? This is ridiculous.
MARCUS PARKS In the end, all it took for Schacht's potion was a single pound of cyanide that Schacht ordered
for the measly sum of $8.85.
BEN KISSEL Jeez, that's all it cost to kill all those people?
MARCUS PARKS 8 bucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also what kind of always haunts me about cyanide is I know it's supposed to be vaguely
delicious, like it's supposed to taste like almond extract.
MARCUS PARKS It's supposed to taste like bitter almonds, it tastes like shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But think about this-
BEN KISSEL Henry does have a strange palate.
MARCUS PARKS That's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I do but the only thing that cleans me during Pretty Face is Bronner's soap. For the stuff that's
on my arms and hands I use Bronner's cause 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, cause I kept being like, 'Man, I smell
like almonds.' And I was like, 'Oh, this would be like if I just washed myself with cyanide.' And
because I was in a completely clear bathroom, it was like a sexy bathroom and Natalie would
be on the bed while I'm showering and I'm looking and... A lot of wires crossed.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Well there we go, and that's the portion of the show when Henry puts an image in our minds
we never wanted. There it is. You might be having a stroke also if you smell almonds, so make
sure to check that out.
MARCUS PARKS In Jonestown, there was only one reasonable way in or out. Port Kaituma. 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 was 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is how you know a place is dangerous is you can just say the term 'jungle cats are out
there', which means there are multiple types of jungle cat out there just waiting for you. And
there was one guy that worked on Jonestown when he was digging it out and he said the
thing about the jungle is that you can stand in place, do a 360 spin, and not know where the
fuck you are.
BEN KISSEL Well it seems like it's similar to being in the middle of the ocean.
MARCUS PARKS Kinda, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But with trees!
BEN KISSEL But with trees, oh that's fun.
MARCUS PARKS And even if you managed to make it through the jungle to the nearest railroad, about the only
chance you had was to hop a ride on a passing train. 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.
BEN KISSEL Uh huh. That is also how Chevy Chase and Demi Moore, that's how they escape the house in
Nothing but Trouble, but then they were brought back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm going to kill you.
MARCUS PARKS But Jonestown was not the only Peoples Temple 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.
BEN KISSEL Oh, shocking! Really?
MARCUS PARKS Jonestown itself, before Jones arrived in 1977 was, despite everything we're saying, a pretty
chill place to exist. The work was hard but people all got along with each other and they got a
very real sense of accomplishment for their labor. But when the population of 60 suddenly
became 600 which became almost 1000 in just a couple of months, the whole goddamn thing
broke down.
BEN KISSEL I can imagine, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Cause about 2/3 of those were either old people or kids. You have a third old people, a third
kids, and a third adults. And 2/3 of those people are pretty much useless in the work sense.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Get the kids out there, they can do a little work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The jungle cats are out there!
BEN KISSEL That's a fun story for the kid.
MARCUS PARKS And Jim Jones, he had something 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. But now he'd arrived as damn near a refugee. He'd been
run out of America on an avalanche of bad press that was only just beginning. And 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 breakup, they had to get that approved as well.
BEN KISSEL That's a lot of approval.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a lot of approval. And also, Jim Jones, at this point it was just hard enough building the
compound, but they even said they were having a good time doing it cause they didn't know
that the shit was going down in America. So they were 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 is gone for a week and all of a sudden he wants to go through, 'Oh,
you're not boxing the tapes up correctly.' And 'Uh, you need to saran wrap all these tapes.'
This comes from me when I worked at Hollywood Video and I was thinking about it.
MARCUS PARKS And since Jones was micromanaging so much, he needed even more drugs to keep him going.
And all of that was conveniently provided by Dr. Schacht.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I have this new shot here that will make you jump higher but also maybe turn you into the
most evil form of yourself!
BEN KISSEL I want it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think we shoulda made you go through more Mexican grad school, maybe cut some of this
evil villain work.
MARCUS PARKS But the difference in Jonestown is Jones was living among the people. He couldn't hide all this
drug use from 'em as well as he once could. And he gained a lot of weight too. He gained so
much weight they had to order new shirts from America for him.
BEN KISSEL I respect it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's gotta be a lot of food to be having that much amphetamines in your system and to be
gaining weight.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. In other words, the shine was rubbing off Jim Jones and that meant that 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 sawed-off shotgun with 'BOSS' painted on the side.
BEN KISSEL Ooh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS And all of that went into the possession of Jones' security team. Then there were the costs.
Food for almost 1000 people, two meals a day, cause they were socialists, they didn't get
three, but still two meal 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?
BEN KISSEL What?
MARCUS PARKS Flavor Aid.
BEN KISSEL Ooh!
MARCUS PARKS Now back in the day all these expenses would've 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 Peoples Temple like a hot potato. The only person who
stood by Jim Jones was Willie Brown and gossip columnist Herb Caen.
BEN KISSEL Willie Brown the politician?
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. Stood by Jim Jones until Jonestown, until the massacre.
BEN KISSEL Wow. Good judge of character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now that the Jonestown massacre happened, I'm so sorry for them, but honestly, it could have
been more people. We should think about it like that.
BEN KISSEL The bright side, I guess.
MARCUS PARKS So Jones had put 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 Peoples Temple had enough money in their bank accounts
to run Jonestown for up to 20 years, that wouldn't do for Jones' ego, cause the thing Jones
wanted more than anything was to be remembered as a great man. And if he were to bankroll
Jonestown-
BEN KISSEL (chuckles) Well he biffed that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I think it's fair to say he kind of mucked up that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess the saying 'if you reach for the moon, at least if you miss you'll land amongst the stars'
doesn't really work for Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL No not if you poison all of the stars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS 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 his shit.
BEN KISSEL Maybe parlay it into a reality show and actually be financially stable for the rest of his life? No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Smart, smart. This is why you get producers involved.
BEN KISSEL Uh huh.
MARCUS PARKS 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. 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've had to change everything about himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He would have to become real. If he really wanted to live there, he would have to strip down
all of the artifice 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 problem is that the sociopathic edge
to him was that the artifice and the fake version of Jim Jones was the more important one to
him. And so I'm with you. I think he was always gonna do it, I think he was always gonna make
them all do it or at least commit suicide himself and kill as many of 'em as he could going down
with him if they revolted against him. And I actually wonder which he wanted more, whether
he wanted them to willfully kill themselves or if he was kinda looking forward to the (machine
gun sounds) and taking everybody out in a fucking hail of gunfire, cause in the end, that would
fuel his amphetamine rush.
BEN KISSEL Who knows? Either way, you know what he wasn't doing? Thinking clearly.
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You gotta work smart, not hard. We talked about this last week.
BEN KISSEL 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.
MARCUS PARKS Well 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.
BEN KISSEL With what?
MARCUS PARKS The PC, the Planning Commission, when he'd had everyone drink the wine, yeah. He'd already
proved that he could do it.
BEN KISSEL Well, so that's evidence that he kind of intended to do it.
MARCUS PARKS I think it was evidence that he wanted it in his pocket. I think if things wouldn't have gone to
shit, it woulda gone on indefinitely.
BEN KISSEL 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I think so.
BEN KISSEL See if he could do it. Or how it made him feel, maybe.
MARCUS PARKS Not necessarily to see if he could go through with it, it was more a test to see if he could pull it
off.
BEN KISSEL Right. And then also, he must've gotten a rush when they all thought they were dying and he
knew that they weren't, he must've loved that, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS OH, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Of course he did! He was elated, they talked about the way he kind of preened. When he was
going from person to person like he was back in his element again. But this is again where the
main difference is between LRH and Jim Jones is that LRH never got his peenie involved. I think
that when you get your dingle dangle all wrapped up in these feelings, you're not gonna be
thinking as clearly. Where LRH had his eye on the money-
BEN KISSEL L. Ron Hubbard, I will say, I liked the corgi but I'm gonna have to go with Mr. Muggs.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) NO! You're choosing Mr. Muggs over the corgis?!
BEN KISSEL I'm sorry, if you're gonna be a cult leader... Mr. Muggs.
MARCUS PARKS Shit man, as far as cult mascots go, I'm gonna go with Mr. Muggs, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, wow! That's so interesting! I still go for the Source Family band. If we ever do the Source
Family band, you're gonna love 'em because they are fucking a smooth, African fucking lick, it's
got some 60s kind of like psychedelic on top of it, it's pretty jammy.
BEN KISSEL Was there music at Jonestown? The Jungle Bunch?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah! Dude, the Jonestown Express!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, buddy. Choo-choo! (honking sounds)
BEN KISSEL I'm just finding out who Sebastian Bach is, I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, the Jonestown Express, the Peoples Temple Choir... In fact, I think the Peoples Temple
actually recorded an album in the building where the Museum of Death is now in Los Angeles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS One of the guys gave me a tour once and I think he said they recorded an album there.
BEN KISSEL Okay!
MARCUS PARKS Museum of Death. Good people.
BEN KISSEL Check it out.
MARCUS PARKS Check it out, it's a wonderful time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm wearing their shirt right now actually, it's kind of interesting you would say that.
MARCUS PARKS In the meantime, Jim Jones only got more sadistic, and by extension his followers got more
sadistic. In Jonestown, the punishments got even more sever, 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.
BEN KISSEL All right. And we warned everybody, so not tweets being like, 'I can't believe you played it!'
This is it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
LPOTL (audio)
Woman 1: Why you giving us trouble, now?
Woman 2: 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.
Woman 1: Put your hands down. Put your hands down!
Woman 3: I don't see why you can't keep your mouth shut! [inaudible]
Woman 1: How come you can't keep your mouth shut and do your work, huh?
(beating, slapping, smacking sounds)
Woman 1: how come you can't keep your mouth shut and do your work? [inaudible]
BEN KISSEL God, it's so brutal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, dude.
BEN KISSEL It's just so strange to hear the voices of these people. Older women...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it just shows it can happen to you.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think always with cults, which is so fascinating to people and to us, to me specifically is that
you can go so close from being like this is a community of friends, this is a bunch of people I
love to all of a sudden you are cheering mass beatings.
BEN KISSEL I say every morning just do a little temperature check. Just be like, do we find that we're
getting more violent?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Check, please! Ready to get out.
BEN KISSEL Cause obviously this happened over a series of years.
MARCUS PARKS 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 Peoples Temple recorded almost every meeting for the entire
year that Jones was present. I didn't get to listen to a ton of them, I've been listening to a lot of
them.
BEN KISSEL Marcus, I want you to stop. I'm no doctor, but I think you've listened to just enough.
MARCUS PARKS Dude, they are fascinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well I tell you what, it's like one of those things that if you're feeling down, it's probably better
to toss on a 30 Rock than anything you hear over there.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Man, 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 about how he can't piss during meetings.
BEN KISSEL So he was angry with the kid or not angry?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We'll see. You'll hear.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, you'll hear. Check it out.
LPOTL (audio)
Young Man: Right, uh, it's just laziness, instead of walking to the bathroom I just go out there
and piss behind the tents.
Jim Jones: No more pissing. Get a container for me, no more pissing in the ground. I hope it
doesn't have a bad effect on your leader. You people all [track] me up, goddamn you sons of
bitches. Goddamn you! I sure as hell would gladly walk to the fucking toilet, but I don't have
the time to walk to the goddamn [tocket]. Son of a bitch. Pour liquid in to keep my urinary
system to function. There's nothing but liquid. But do you all gotta take so... Okay, okay. Now I
gotta piss in a pot and there won't be no pot, so I'll stay in it til the goddamn bladder bursts.
There won't be no pot. No, there won't be. Cause you sons of bitches, anything I do, you gotta
do! Goddamn ya. Why don't you work like I do, then? Why don't you take the burdens I do,
then?
(crowd murmurs, some applause)
Jim Jones: Son of a bitch, if I ever saw anything like this, I hate these goddamn meetings.
BEN KISSEL He sounds like Alex Jones' dad.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, he sounds like my father. It sounds likes my father trying to set up for the Superbowl
party. I remember one time he had a Superbowl party and he was trying to set up a TV in the
backyard and all I heard was, 'Goddamn (muttering)!'
BEN KISSEL You know they're pissed when they can't finish the curse word.
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones: No more pissing. Get a container for me, no more pissing in the ground. I hope it
doesn't have a bad effect on your leader. You people all track me up, goddamn you sons of
bitches. Goddamn you! I sure as hell would gladly walk to the fucking toilet, but I don't have
the time to walk to the goddamn tocket. Son of a bitch. Pour liquid in to keep my urinary
system to function. There's nothing but liquid. But do you all gotta take so... Okay, okay. Now I
gotta piss in a pot and there won't be no pot, so I'll stay in it til the goddamn bladder bursts.
There won't be no pot. No, there won't be. Cause you sons of bitches, anything I do, you gotta
do! Goddamn ya. Why don't you work like I do, then? Why don't you take the burdens I do,
then?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, he's all fucked up!
BEN KISSEL Also, I'm forgetting, he's only at the end 41. So here he was-
MARCUS PARKS He was actually older than that, he was 45 I think, maybe 46.
BEN KISSEL But he sounds like an 80 year old.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. He sounds like an old man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also remember too, before, he used to be on all the time, but even in Ukiah he had little
places where he could go. He could go to his shack, he could go on trips, so he could get away
from everybody. Now he is literally onstage, on his elevated platform all day long. This is
happening all day.
BEN KISSEL He's going through his 'shave my head, hit paparazzi with the umbrella' phase. The Brit-Brit
phase. Britney, by the way, is back in a big way.
MARCUS PARKS You say that every 6 months.
BEN KISSEL I love Britney.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love her, I've actually been following her on Instagram and she kinda seems like fun lady.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, she does.
BEN KISSEL She's great! Leave her alone.
MARCUS PARKS We all love Britney, here. We're a pro-Brit-Brit podcast, here.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Well, in the same speech as that one where he's talking bout the pissing, just a few minutes
later he starts casually talking about the isolation box as if it's the most normal thing in the
world.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS In Jonestown, the isolation box was a 6x4 sensory deprivation chamber where people could be
imprisoned for even the slightest offenses. This is a tape of a Peoples Temple follower
speaking to a woman named Barbara Walker while she was actually inside the isolation box for
the crime of quote "being hostile".
BEN KISSEL Okay.
LPOTL (audio)
Man: You seem to... Judging from the tone of your voice, though, you seem to be fairly mellow
right now. You feel that way generally?
Woman: [inaudible]
Man: [inaudible]
Woman: I said [inaudible] make a lot of noise.
Man: Yeah. By the way, we're really sorry that somebody threw a dirt clod and hit the side of
your box a while ago. We caught the culprits that were responsible for that. I find that really
very unexcusable. And I'm sorry it happened.
BEN KISSEL Uh, if you're really sorry here, let me the fuck out.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL So was that Jim Jones?
MARCUS PARKS No, that was just some guy.
BEN KISSEL Sounded kinda like Jim Jones.
MARCUS PARKS Sounded a lot like... I think his name was Grubs? Or something like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He sounds like a Grubs. It's also 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 believe it's for your own good.
BEN KISSEL You are right about really getting you to feel that mood. My goodness.
MARCUS PARKS This one right here, this one is... This next clip is ridiculous. This is psychological torture.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS 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.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
LPOTL (audio)
(noise from crowd)
Jim Jones: Okay. Give it to her, give it to her, give it to her. I'm sick of this shit. Let her deal
with the motherfucker, and if he wants to choke her to death, that's his [inaudible], I'm tired
of it.
(crowd shouting)
(woman wailing in fear)
Crowd Member: Shut up, shut up!
Woman: Please get me out of here!
Man in Crowd: You said the same thing the last time!
(crowd jeers)
(woman wailing, crying)
Jim Jones: Turn around look at the people, turn around look at the people. Talk to them, see if
they don't get this snake off your back.
(woman wailing, begging crowd)
Woman: ...someone please get...
Woman in crowd: There, there, there...
Woman: (crying) Please forgive me. Please forgive me. I won't do it again.
Jim Jones: Shit, nothing else works for this woman. Yet this only lasts six, seven days. If we fed
it to her, maybe that might-
Woman: I won't do it again.
Jim Jones: Okay.
(crowd shouting)
Jim Jones: Turn around.
BEN KISSEL It seems as if they were laughing.
MARCUS PARKS They were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, all were laughing.
MARCUS PARKS They were. That's the amazing thing about these tapes. This woman is losing her goddamn
mind to the point of not even being able to form clear sentences, like 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 other get hurt.
In Jonestown, Jim Jones turned these people into fucking monsters.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They used to be normal. It was like a normal group of people that just got flipped so hard.
BEN KISSEL That's crazy.
MARCUS PARKS 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.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what it is too, to me, that really haunts me? The tired tone of his voice. It reminds
me of a weird childhood thing, my parents were kind of like that. The weariness of you, how
you make me so tired listening to your problems... Something so dismissive about it that
makes it so much scarier cause this is when he's tired, not even when he's angry. This fucking
crazy, what you consider to be the worst punishment you'd ever received, is just like a thing,
he's like, 'I'm just so tired of dealing with you.'
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS We're doing it again. We did it to her this last 5, 6 days. In 5, 6 days we're gonna have to be
here again but this is the only thing that does it for her. So she's just gonna have to go through
all this again.
And he also, he just sets such a casual nature for all of this shit. And in setting the casual
nature, he keeps people off balance and he also has this weird... It's all paternal. Because first
of all, people have been calling him father for years, but in Jonestown, they start calling him
'dad'.
BEN KISSEL (shudder) 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.
MARCUS PARKS Well listen to this. This is him not two minutes later. After that woman had the snake taken off
of her, this is him holding the snake in his hands.
LPOTL (audio)
Jim Jones: Hi you little sweet fella. I like him. The more I see these fuckers, the more I like 'em,
yeah. Look at that. Look at that grip, that's a grip. You're a good guy. Boy, they love that snake
dance. She went through the snake dance in Georgetown, fantastic. She was fantastic, the
snake danced with her, head was out dancing with her.
(noise from the crowd)
Jim Jones: Oh, what'd he do, shit on her? Wouldn't you know it. He would shit on me.
Everybody else does. (laughs) Why didn't you shit on her, goddamnit? You... Huh?
Man: He shed his skin...
Jim Jones: I know but why didn't he shit on her?
Man: He shit on me, too.
Jim Jones: You little fart.
(laughter)
BEN KISSEL They have lost their fucking minds.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. They're exhausted! They're exhausted and now they're alone. They're exhausted and now
it is just this.
BEN KISSEL 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.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, get dark.
BEN KISSEL Yeah or get dark, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And immediately after that where he's like, 'You little fart,' he's screaming again. It is back and
forth and up and down and these meetings go on for hours upon hours, and-
BEN KISSEL They don't accomplish anything though!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No!
MARCUS PARKS And this meeting, this was like 1am that they're doing all this shit, and that's after they've
been working all day long and probably already gone to a meeting before that.
BEN KISSEL It's madness.
MARCUS PARKS It's absolute madness! These tapes are... It is absolute madness on tape.
BEN KISSEL It makes you feel like you've just done a bunch of drugs, that horrible after feel where you just
have your skin kinda crawl...
MARCUS PARKS I'm fucking keyed up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're taking pills just to stay up... I've had those nights. I dunno man, it
does. It's a lot of badness, lot of badness happening at once.
MARCUS PARKS We've all got specific memories that we're kinda running through our heads right now, those
weird fucking nights when you just start saying and doing weird shit.
BEN KISSEL And then your buddy actually brings out a snake and that happens in real life.
MARCUS PARKS That always happens when your buddy brings out a snake.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, goodness. Never have a friend that love amphibians too much.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL That's my warning to you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI As long as it's not an acoustic guitar, I'm fine with it.
BEN KISSEL Oh that's true, I could go for a little acoustic...
MARCUS PARKS Now, there were people in Jonestown who spoke out against this shit, but they were dealt
with in an entirely different way. 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 into submission, he just handed 'em over to
Dr. Schacht in what they called "the special care unit". There they would be drugged into
submission, essentially put on ice. And that went for any disobedience. One girl who refused
Jones' sexual advances was drugged and kept in a hut where she became Jim Jones' personal
sex slave until the day she died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God...
MARCUS PARKS Then in September of 1977, the White Nights began. And that's where we'll pick back up for
Part 5 of Jonestown!
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Shit, dog.
BEN KISSEL Is this a five parter?
MARCUS PARKS Gonna try to!
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS We got to, we have to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Marcus and I are dying.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) The dreams have started.
BEN KISSEL Yes, I'm worried that Marcus' brain in deteriorating and I'm worried you're getting ideas,
Henry. So we can't do the episode too much longer. Or the series, rather.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just gonna say that I'm getting motivated. It's not specific ideas it's just important to know
what you can get out of a lot of hard work and patience.
BEN KISSEL Uh, nothing but destruction, sadness, and mass suicide.
MARCUS PARKS Nothing but trouble, am I right?
BEN KISSEL Nothing but Trouble! Oh my god, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Goddamnit! Check, please! Just wake up today and hopefully you're not in a cult...
BEN KISSEL Or if you are, get on out of it. Scoot on back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess get out of it, but whatever you're liking. You know?
BEN KISSEL Good advice, Henry. All right, so we should follow everyone on social media, we've been told
to really ramp that up.
MARCUS PARKS Ramp it!
BEN KISSEL So this is us, were ramping it up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can follow me on Twitter @henrylovesyou, @benkissel, @marcusparks. Follow me on
Instagram @drfantasty, @marcusparks, @benkissel!. And follow Last Podcast on the Left on all
of the horseshit @lpontheleft. Also, if you feel like it, you can give to our Patreon. (Italian
accent) It's a nice!
BEN KISSEL And keep on supporting all the shows here on the Last Podcast Network, we got some new
shows coming out. We're gonna start advert-teasing those a little bit more-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Good term. Great term.
BEN KISSEL Thank you! So that'll be fun, we got a lot of great shows. Abe Lincoln's Top Hat, we might have
a special episode with Henry Zebrowski coming out soon we might share with all of ya, and-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We might just definitely have that. Because if we're booked to do it we'll do it.
BEN KISSEL That's right. Page 7, Sex and Other Human Activities, you know all the great shows here on the
network.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, Movie Sign with the Mads, and if you wanna go hear my music show go over to
mixcloud.com/marcusparks. Hear Milk & Peppers! Or you can listen live every Tuesday from 1-
3pm EST at kpiss.fm.
BEN KISSEL Nothing standard about that time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also watch my fucking ass on Crashing this week on HBO, if you got it, at 10:30pm Sundays
EST.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, and can we announce the official return on the stream? We've got the-
BEN KISSEL Yes we can!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah! February 13th, correct?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're back!
MARCUS PARKS Yep, we're gonna be back on February 13th, that Tuesday. Don't know exactly what time yet
but we shall announce that as well. But yeah, we're back with Last Stream on the Left.
BEN KISSEL Keep ya updated.
MARCUS PARKS That's adultswim.com.streams.
BEN KISSEL There it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you.
BEN KISSEL Hail yourselves everyone!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan, he would never do this to you. Know this for a fact that Satanism just wants you to
be your own person.
BEN KISSEL I don't know if that's true, snakes...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's actually completely true. It's actually 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.
BEN KISSEL It does seem like you're evangelizing a little bit though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, I like it when people do whatever the fuck it is they wanna do that doesn't include making
me do more work than I gotta do!
BEN KISSEL You sound like... Yeah, we have to end the Jim Jones series pretty soon, I think we have to start
spreading out our cult episodes.
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein and goodnight everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail me.
BEN KISSEL And a megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS Good Gein and goodnight.
BEN KISSEL That's not, you're...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I like it. I like it.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL But it doesn't really... It doesn't make any sense. Anyway...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)