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!
BEN KISSEL (singing) To live ya dump, to dump you live.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly your voice is sounding really good.
BEN KISSEL (laughs)
MARCUS PARKS It sounds great, yeah. You should be kinda sick all the time.
BEN KISSEL Oh, good.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could make that your third act as 'odd singer-songwriter'.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, that sounds fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like Levon Helm when he got throat cancer, that's when he was really good.
BEN KISSEL Ah, the constant drinking and smoking.
All right, Marcus. We have a huge announcement up to here, should we do this?
MARCUS PARKS Huge announcement.
BEN KISSEL Love is in the air! Big, fat, Henry Zebrowski... He's engaged to be married!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sorry ladies and dudes, I'm taken.
BEN KISSEL Congratulations, Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL You proposed to Natalie last evening. So when you put the ring on the bone marrow, did you
have Wendy deliver it to her?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was joking for a second about going to the vet and then just throwing up and x-ray in that the
ring was like deep in Wendy's guts. I was gonna be like, 'What's that?' And then have to like
fish through and find Wendy... No I actually tied it to Wendy with a ribbon and then Natalie
came in and the dog went up to her and I was like, 'The dog found something when it was
outside taking a shit.'
BEN KISSEL Aw. And what was it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was an engagement ring.
BEN KISSEL Wow! Henry Zebrowski, engaged. Off the market, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS Off the market totally.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I feel good!
BEN KISSEL You should, you look good!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She can't leave me now, legally. She needs a team of lawyers to leave me.
BEN KISSEL Right, and then she can take all of your money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, and it will happen.
MARCUS PARKS Oh not yet, you're still in the danger zone, my friend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, absolutely. This is the most volatile part of a relationship. I keep hearing and I've been
warned by several people who have been married already that the wedding planning section is
harrowing.
BEN KISSEL Good, good, good. Good for you. Everyone's getting married, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS Everyone's getting married.
BEN KISSEL All right, welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone, I am Ben Kissel, that's Marcus
Parks. Newly-engaged Henry Zebrowski, do you feel different?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel... Honestly I feel really good. I mean it feels very stable, it's stabilizing, it's really nice.
BEN KISSEL All right, all right. Well speaking of stabilizing and feeling good, Jim Jones at this point is
making everyone feel wonderful because they don't know the shit-storm that's about to come.
MARCUS PARKS Now, as we said last episode, Jim Jones was a control freak. And because Peoples Temple was
growing so fast, there just weren't enough hours in a normal human being's day to oversee it
all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like how I feel about Oprah. Or when a mom has a child and a dog and somehow also has a
job.
BEN KISSEL How do they do it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
BEN KISSEL I like it.
MARCUS PARKS (chuckles) But Jim Jones was no normal human being and he had to prove it. So instead of
delegating or just being happy with what he had, Jones decided to augment his performance
with drugs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I completely understand. After the last little touring jag, I'm getting the idea and loveliness of
cocaine.
BEN KISSEL Just total amphetamine abuse?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just something about feeling not how I feel.
BEN KISSEL Right. I was watching the Mike Judge thing on what was it, Cinemax? Marcus?
MARCUS PARKS Cinemax, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's amazing, all those old country stars full of amphetamines and what do they do? Create
amazing music.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, Tales from the Road. Which is pretty great when what's his name, Johnny Paycheck
shoots the guy in the head because they switch hats and for some reason that offended him.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Yes, and they call Johnny Paycheck the Charles Manson of country music. But Charles Manson
was the Charles Manson of country music! Give the guy some credit.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, Charles Manson was the Charles Manson of folk music. Very different things.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Well remember, this is important to know about Jim Jones. He wasn't just an administrator,
this guy had to put on multiple hours-long performances every week, sometimes multiple
shows a day, and he had to be on point for every single show. He could not appear to be
anything less than godlike.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There was an afternoon show, there was an evening show, and then they would have
meetings afterwards. And then he would also be traveling back and forth doing roadshows.
And honestly, each one is improvised and each one is slightly different depending on the
crowd because sometimes he's a little bit more socialist, sometimes he's talking a little bit
more about the bible. And so he's gotta keep his head on straight, and the only thing that can
fucking do that is some sweet, sweet cacayo.
BEN KISSEL Oh I see, cocaine!
MARCUS PARKS No, it was not cocaine. He was not a cocaine guy, he was just like... Bennys. Yellowjackets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah! Buzzers. Screamers.
BEN KISSEL I feel like there were more amphetamines in the 70s and 60s, weren't there?
MARCUS PARKS Well yeah, you could just get prescribed these amphetamines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI These were from a doctor, kind of like now where it's like with the opioid crisis where it's like,
it's a drug that's okay because I went to a doctor to get it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, of course, but opioids aren't creating the greatest art though, are they?
MARCUS PARKS No, they're creating nothing.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, exactly.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) And Jim Jones, when he was improvising these entire sermons, he'd just come up with
this wacky shit. Like one time he said something like, 'The only toothpaste that's gonna cover
you in a nuclear war is Philips toothpaste.'
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was obsessed with just randomly being like, 'I'm having a vision. I'm having a vision that
one of you will fall off of a bicycle if we don't all switch to Crest.' And that is real. He lost his
mind.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Okay, great marketer, though.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, and his people worked just as hard as he did, a lot of the time bragging about how
little they'd slept. And since they were in a socialist society, how hard they worked was pretty
much the only status symbol they could have by design.
BEN KISSEL Socialism doesn't sound fun.
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL Not thrilling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It sounds like it's hard. Capitalism is nice because I can have an Uber drive me to a place where
then I can have my phone send me FreshDirect, you know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Well, the nice thing about socialism, I'm so tall I always have to grab things off the
top shelf at the supermarket. In socialism there is nothing on the top shelf so it's all fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You are a human ladder.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You literally have to be used, also, as a land bridge. If there's a big wide creek, you have to lie
completely across it with your hands and your feet on either side.
BEN KISSEL I understand my role.
MARCUS PARKS Well, Jim Jones worked harder than any of these guys. So, he turned to amphetamines. As we
know, Jim Jones was naturally paranoid person. What we also know is that speedy shit can
turn an already paranoid person into an absolute monster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well Bill Cosby said that, R.I.P.-
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Bill Cosby said that in one of his famous bits about speed, where the only time he ever cursed
in one of his standup specials, where he turned to the guy and was like, (Cosby voice) 'What is
the deal with doing cocaine? Well, cocaine, it amplifies your personality.' And Bill Cosby, the
joke is, well what if you're an asshole? Which is is really funny, which is true though. Like how
many times have you been the only sober person in a room of people who are gacked out? It's
fucking awful.
BEN KISSEL The time I'm the only sober person in the room full of people gacked out... Let me just... Never
happened. That has never happened. I don't know who that sad sap is but I would never
wanna be them. Ever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) Well it's also... He is running every single part of the ministry. He is organizing, fucking,
the buses. He is getting people, he is going back and forth across the... Dealing with the
nursing homes, he's dealing with his own facilities in Mendocino, he's trying to arrange all the
road trips. So he's got a lot of shit going on.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and he's even going down to administrative work. His administrative work was actually
fantastic, they said that Jim Jones, what he did was that he had a knack for putting people in
the right place. Like there's this guy, Tim Carter, that was one of the biggest sources we have
for what went on in Jonestown, he was like a higher up worker bee. But he came in and Jim
Jones said, 'All right, you're in charge of putting together all the buses. You're in charge of
getting everybody there on time, you're in charge of all the timetables.' And it's like, I don't
know how to fucking do this. But then once he started doing it, he found he had a knack for
organization and he found that he was fantastic at it. And he said that Jim Jones, and that was
another way that Jim Jones bound his followers to him, was that he had a knack for helping
them do shit they didn't even know they knew how to do.
BEN KISSEL How many institutions is Jim Jones running at this point?
MARCUS PARKS Uh, at this point right here he's got his traveling roadshow, he's got Ukiah, he's not quite
starting to franchise yet, but he's also got nursing homes, they've got a laundromat, they've
got second hand stores-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the restaurant, and they do a bunch of-
BEN KISSEL They have a restaurant?!
MARCUS PARKS The free restaurant, the soup kitchen.
BEN KISSEL Ah, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So it's not as bad, but still, it costs money to put cameras in those toilets, like you have to
Chuck Berry it.
BEN KISSEL Lot of hard work.
MARCUS PARKS Well, starting in like 1971, Jim Jones would have to take speed to keep him going but when it
was time to sleep he had to take something for that as well so he took quaaludes to bring him
back down. And all that back and forth, of course, made ol' Jimmy's eyes pretty red, and
therein lies the mystery of the sunglasses.
BEN KISSEL What is that?
MARCUS PARKS His eyes were constantly red so he had to constantly wear the sunglasses to hide his eyes from
his followers so he didn't look like a drug-addled asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And not like normal red, not like you slept on your face red. Like crimson. He looked like Vlad
the Impaler. It was very disconcerting to be around him. And he'd be constantly tearing.
Imagine it's like, a man who looks like a human vampire bat who's also constantly crying. You'd
be like, put a bandana on! Do something else!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and he'd already been playing with the idea of the sunglasses, he kind of went on and
off, because sunglasses, something like that, an accessory, helps to set you apart from your
followers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also, it has, I think the very interesting psychological effect, is that sunglasses are reflective
surfaces. So when you look at Jim Jones in the eyes, you're literally only seeing your face. So
it's like you're beginning to associate him with you. What the cult leader's constant goal is is to
make you one with my own mind. And also, we have a positive connotation to our own face
and name, so the longer you spend looking at your own face the more you fall in love with the
person that reminds you of yourself.
BEN KISSEL Okay, powerful stuff.
MARCUS PARKS Very much so. But when the drugs came, the sunglasses went on almost permanently. But Jim
Jones' excuse for wearing the sunglasses all the time was that he said that he had reached a
holy state so powerful that if he were actually to look upon a person with his unfettered gaze,
they would be burned by the god-like energy emanating from his eyes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was like Cyclops from the X-Men but instead of flames, just total amphetamines flying from
his eyes into the audience's face.
MARCUS PARKS I also do think that he believed that. I think that when you're on that many amphetamines you
have a lot of big ideas about yourself.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And it was true that Jim Jones was extremely busy. In the early 70s the coffers of
Peoples Temple were large enough that they were able to buy a whole fleet of old,
decommissioned Greyhound buses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is that a humblebrag? I think that in the end it's just a bunch of old, stinky buses.
BEN KISSEL Can you imagine how disgusting... A decommissioned Greyhound bus from the 60s?
MARCUS PARKS Ugh. These were decommissioned in the 50s.
BEN KISSEL From the 50s? That is meat and potato poops. All over that Greyhound bus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just filling the pipes, just absolutely logjam with it. They don't decommission a Greyhound bus.
At least 7 infants have to die on a Greyhound bus for them to take it out of circulation.
BEN KISSEL I was on one Greyhound bus and I'm fairly certain whoever did whatever they did in the
bathroom decommissioned that Greyhound bus, it was disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) And these buses only got more disgusting as the Peoples Temple used them because
they used these buses to take road trips, because when Jim Jones showed up in town, it
wouldn't do for him to perform to an audience of just like 100 or 200, they brought like 3, 400
people. And in order to that, I think they were like 50 person capacity buses, so they would
jam 70 people into these buses. They would have people in the seats, people in the aisles,
they'd put the kids up in the luggage racks. And since, of course, they couldn't stop at a hotel
or anything like that, they had two drivers working on shifts. So while one driver was behind
the wheel the other driver would be on a mattress in the luggage compartment.
BEN KISSEL And the craziest thing is one of the drivers was Chris Farley from Billy Madison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (yelling) 'I will turn this bus around and ruin this precious little field trip!'
Also, when you're socialist, you begin to form grooves in your hips that allow you to be
stackable. It's an important factor, yes. You can always stack five socialists high.
BEN KISSEL Well, that's kind of fun.
MARCUS PARKS On these roadshows, Jones upped his healing game. Instead of using plants, he started forcing
unwitting people to be a part of the cancer scam. He'd still call someone out from the crowd,
telling 'em they had cancer, and he'd still use chicken guts, but instead of having them go to
the other room, he'd have one of the Peoples Temple members go out into the audience
dressed as a nurse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey, I'm a nurse, hey I'm a nurse. You got fucking cancer, buddy. Get up. Did you know you
had cancer? Get the hell up. You gotta raspy voice, what're you some kinda Levon Helm?
C'mon get up you fucking throat-ridden... You got a beautiful voice. You ever done radio, do
you podcast?
BEN KISSEL Do I have cancer?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You got cancer. C'mon, get the fuck up.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Jones would yell and cast out the cancer and such and at just the right moment the
nurse would somehow slide the chicken guts into the audience member's mouth, who would
then spit it back out again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You say it's like sleight of hand, but you know it was just being like, 'Get this in your fucking
mouth! Shut up, shut up. The lord wants this for you.'
BEN KISSEL The world's saddest Kentucky Fried Chicken. That is so disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and they called this 'passing a growth'.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could see it.
BEN KISSEL That's what the doctor said when I was born. 'Mrs. Kissel, you did pass a growth.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unfortunately, when we originally looked at the x-rays, we assumed the watermelon-sized
tumor had fused its way to the spine, but apparently it's a child.
BEN KISSEL It's a child.
MARCUS PARKS And if anyone got too close to the growth after it had already been spit up, cause they didn't
want anyone looking at this cause if you got close enough, it was obviously just chicken guts.
Whoever it was that was around, whatever Peoples Temple member that was around had to
gobble it up before people could get a look at it.
BEN KISSEL God.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) 'Hey there Mr. Jones, I'll do it.'
Sure thing, Johnny Garbage!
(elderly voice) 'There's nothing I like better than something stinky that falls on the ground.'
That's all right, get away from me, Johnny Garbage, we all hate ya. You got one service, and
that's why you're part of a socialist society, we're giving you a purpose.
BEN KISSEL That's a big purpose, gobbling up the chicken guts. In a socialist society, big time stuff.
MARCUS PARKS But people believed this shit. And when people believe, they give money. And Jim Jones had
plenty of ways for them to give it to him.
BEN KISSEL We're not talking a rich congregation here, either. Very impoverished for the most part, right?
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, you gotta nickel and dime 'em. The whole point is hitting 'em a little bit at a time.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, that's what I do in Atlantic City with my slot machines. Nickel and dime, baby.
MARCUS PARKS The most popular merch at the Jim Jones table was portraits. People could buy a picture of Jim
Jones for 5 bucks and with that picture in their possession, Jones would be able to protect
them from afar from illness, accident, or assault. And the more you bought, the more you
were protected.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was like those 'get out of jail free' cards you get if your family members with a cop.
BEN KISSEL Oh, yes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's with a man who will fuck your wife and your son.
BEN KISSEL Ah, unfortunately.
MARCUS PARKS Well one boy told a story about him laying a picture on the body of a dead bird and suddenly,
the bird sprung back to life!
BEN KISSEL Cool.
MARCUS PARKS All through the power of Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL Just a picture of him, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's it. I don't think it's real. I mean, I don't mean to toss a nay-no on it, but here's my nay-no
card.
BEN KISSEL Might be.
MARCUS PARKS And it was a creepy picture, too. What did you say the picture looked like? Cause someone
found a card and posted it online.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He looks like... Last episode I said that he looks like Sam the Eagle, which he does. But also, he
sort of looks like Tom Cruise in disguise trying to go to the mall. Like he's just covered with
prosthetics. He's got a big ol' monstrous head.
MARCUS PARKS Huge.
BEN KISSEL He really does. He looks like if Tony Clifton fucked George Jones.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes! Yes!
BEN KISSEL It is such a square, almost like the old man from Up if he was young.
MARCUS PARKS Now, while it may not seem like $5 a pop for these pictures wouldn't amount to much, Peoples
Temple would sometimes sell up to 600 in a single service. That's about $3000 per service and
every bit of that tax-free.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can we start doing this? What if I just said, and I honestly don't think it's a lie, that if you take a
picture of me and you leave it in a jar, in the morning sometimes nugs just appear overnight.
And the nuh gnomes come and they're just like, (inhaling) 'Oh fuck, did we drop the nugs like
we were supposed to last night in that fucking jar? Did we?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah, we did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (inhaling) 'I don't think we did, bro.' (exhales)
BEN KISSEL We smoked all of them.
MARCUS PARKS But while Jones was raking in the money, his followers were living true socialist lifestyles back
in Redwood Valley. And the funny thing was, a lot of the people who joined didn't actually
know they were joining a socialist group. That talk was saved until after they'd moved in.
Before you moved in, it had all been equality and doing good for others and you think that's
the sort of community that your joining. But after you joined, you're living in a shack with 12
other people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's like the idea of doing charity in L.A. where people assume it's like, (feminine voice)
'Oh, well then you go and you get mimosas and you go and I have an old sweater I don't like
and so I'm dropping it off at the shelter.' But then you show up and it's a bunch of people
being like, 'We're all sharing a bar of soap. It's Sonia's turn on the toilet this weekend, and she
gets it all weekend because she didn't get it for a month.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Right. 12 strangers living in a shack. One comes up with a pro wrestling character called The
Miz. And I watched The Miz last night, WWE RAW in Barclay's center! The Miz, new
intercontinental champion, beating Roman Reigns. A lot can happen with 12 people in a shack.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Does that really connect?
BEN KISSEL It's like the real world but with cameras and ultimate sadness.
MARCUS PARKS I think you were just trying to work in a way to tell everyone that you went to RAW 25 last
night.
BEN KISSEL It's pretty cool. Yeah, it was pretty cool, I Instagrammed the stories.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I saw that, yes, your Insta stories, the flurry and the blurriness of them look like as if my
mentally handicapped cousin got a hold of a cell phone and started, because he loved
wrestling.
BEN KISSEL Yes, yes, he was my cameraman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But a part of this is, the reason why they didn't know is again, remember Jim Jones used to mix
up the message wherever he was. So he'd tell you whatever it is that you wanted to hear that
you'd get out of the Peoples Temple and then you'd just show up. And I gotta say, it's gotta be
a hard ass surprise. A socialist surprise is the hardest surprise.
BEN KISSEL Were some people surprised by the religious aspect? Were some people brought in by the
socialist and be like, why the hell is he talking about god now?
MARCUS PARKS Well that was mixed in with the public sermons. Because in the private sermons, he mostly
talked about socialism. Because those private sermons, the ones that were for the Peoples
Temple members, those were locked door affairs. And they actually had security at the door to
make sure that there were no non-Peoples Temple members coming in.
BEN KISSEL But that's where he got to god, right? So it was god in private, in public it was-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, it was the opposite.
MARCUS PARKS It was the opposite. It was god in public and then it was socialism in private. It was god and
equality, but as we'll see later on, he did try going for the socialism in public a couple times but
it did not work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It doesn't mix even though the thing is that socialists are way more down to play ball. They
understand a little more, oh, we kinda gotta lie about the god shit to build our numbers and in
the end we're going to serve the community, we're gonna serve the human race, so who gives
shit if he's talking about god? But the problem is that god people don't feel the same way.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Of course, socialists are the only political party that lie about believing in god. That's the only
one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI None of the rest of them do. No, no.
MARCUS PARKS Now these camps, they weren't like Aum Shinrikyo camps or anything like that, they're not
being forced to wear diapers and being beat with reeds and things like that.
BEN KISSEL No cabbage, no cabbage.
MARCUS PARKS Not a cabbage society. Actually, I think they might not have been able to afford cabbage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cabbage is like 5 cents a head, okay. You could peel off some leaves if you see a lazy
marketeer, is that what you call somebody who runs a market?
MARCUS PARKS It wasn't that bad, but anytime someone even thought about complaining, either a member of
the Peoples Temple or Jones himself had one word to shut them up. Bourgeois.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which is an insult that doesn't cut me. You know what I mean? It just doesn't get to me, but I
understand.
BEN KISSEL Bourgeois. Does that mean they wanna have any kind of amenities in their life whatsoever?
MARCUS PARKS Hey man, you didn't like eating oatmeal for breakfast and peanut butter for lunch every day?
Bourgeois.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (French accent) Bourgeois pig! That's what you are!
BEN KISSEL I'm wearing a Jos. A. Bank jacket, how does that make me bourgeois?
MARCUS PARKS Don't like shitting in front of other people?
BEN KISSEL No!
MARCUS PARKS Bourgeois.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (French accent) Bourgeois pig! In the revolution, we'll take you down!
BEN KISSEL I just don't wanna feel like Charles Manson taking a bath.
MARCUS PARKS Don't wanna have sex with Jim Jones?
BEN KISSEL No.
MARCUS PARKS Bourgeois!
BEN KISSEL What?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (French accent) Hey you stinky butt! You get shit all over the father's dick? How dare you! You
know he likes a clean dipstick when he's put it there so that he can put it in his wife and he
doesn't get the shit in the pussy!
BEN KISSEL Well you know what, I actually feel better. For the first time I am part of the bourgeoisie.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and Jim Jones used that word to justify other sexual habits as well. When one of his
black followers asked Jim why he only slept with white women, Jim got super pissed off and
said it was because the white women needed to be snapped out of their bourgeois attitudes.
And since black people didn't have bourgeois attitudes, there was no reason to have sex with
them, see?
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Didn't that make sense?
BEN KISSEL The math adds up. I have no idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's sitting there being like, (muttering) 'Did I get away with that? Did I just do that?'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause you know nothing pounds the bourgeoisie out of a woman or a lost Vietnam vet man
quite like the 5 1/2 inch penis of Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL Jim Jones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he apparently, he was really packing.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Oh, yeah. Jim Jones had a honker.
BEN KISSEL Isn't that something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah he said it was enough for the entire proletariat.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones got people to go along with so much shit using the buzzword 'bourgeois'. So just
remember if you keep hearing the same words over and over and over again, like 'bourgeois'
or 'enemy' or 'freedom', there's something very wrong with where you are and what you're
doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't even know what you're talking about I've never heard anything like 'fake news', or like
anything that's constantly said over and over again that's a doctrine that's being constantly
sold from our government to our media companies to us, who are all mutually benefiting each
other by hypnotizing us into being a bunch of sheep robots.
BEN KISSEL Well I would've listened to you but I'm too busy eating my Weight Watchers. I actually get to
eat more and I lose weight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow, really? Can I check it out? How many points is that, is that a full leaf of prosciutto you're
eating?
BEN KISSEL Yeah! Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Are you on the freedom diet?
BEN KISSEL I am, I actually feel more free than ever.
MARCUS PARKS But Jones needed the word 'bourgeois' to solve one of his biggest problems. Now, to a lot of
his followers, being a part of Peoples Temple was a step up and a lot of 'em came from intense
poverty so a job and a roof over their head was about the best life they had.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like finding somebody that you just got out of a halfway house. They're really easy to get
into a solid relationship with because you just have to-
BEN KISSEL You give 'em a full house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All you have to do is give 'em just a slight tick up in lifestyle and you got 'em.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, naturally.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, but other followers were coming from middle and upper class backgrounds and they
were super educated. They were college boys and girls. And if they left, they were almost
guaranteed to be living a better left comfort-wise almost immediately. They didn't need
Peoples Temple.
BEN KISSEL Well why would they go there in the first place, then?
MARCUS PARKS Ideological reasons. Because this was the early 70s, late 60s, you know, you had Vietnam going
on, you got riots at every fucking city. I mean, leadership is failing at every level in America and
had been for a long time. People were lost. You've got cops on the streets in Birmingham
siccing dogs after people and hitting people with fire hoses. Shit's fucked up. People are
looking for a utopian society, they're looking for something better and Jim Jones is giving 'em
that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Something pure.
BEN KISSEL There were two decades in this country's history when you could just say anything and just get
away with it, just be like, 'It was the 60s.' Like why did you wear shoes on your hands? 'It was
the 60s.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (slurred) It was the 60s and if you remember the 60s and you weren't wearing shoes on your
hands then you weren't alive during the 60s and you weren't wearing shoes on your hands.
BEN KISSEL It was an excuse for everything, those 20 years of madness.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, oh it was 20 years of madness. And the 70s don't get enough credit for being a
particularly fucked up time in American history. It was possibly the worst decade we'd had
since the Civil War. Everything went wrong, leadership failed on every single level. And it only
got worse as things went on, especially like when 1978 came and Jonestown happened, people
were like, '900 people? Are you fucking kidding me?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah, this is my impression of the most positive Vietnam soldier of all time. 'Huh. Free Kool-
Aid.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, Kool-Aid. Wow. But also remember, what seems like a great idea on Wednesday, you
know what I mean, you're showing up being like, 'We're a part of this socialist world. It doesn't
really matter on Saturday when you have to give up your orchestra level tickets to Rush
because you have to go empty out the septic tanks cause you pulled the short straw.' Nah,
you're fucked! So all of a sudden you have all these upper class people showing up, quote
unquote "upper class people" that're like, 'Oh. Oh wow, this is what commitment to the cause
means.' And it's very difficult to keep them in play.
BEN KISSEL He's gotta make sure they're happy though, doesn't he?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well cause they are the money sources.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. He has to manipulate these people in a completely different way. So besides screaming
'bourgeois', Jim manipulated these people's arrogance and self worth. Jim, he played pretty
fast and loose with the facts. Somewhere in the late 60s Jones switched from Russia being the
evil empire that would destroy them all through nuclear weapons to saying Russia was a
socialist paradise. That was a possible escape plan for them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Then you just have to yadda, yadda, yadda all the millions of people that died in the purges
and the gulags and all the bullshit. But you can yadda, yadda, yadda your way out of that as
long as you have your sunglasses on, cause no one can see your eyes cross every single time
you do it because that's what happens.
BEN KISSEL Oh, can you imagine thinking Russia is a socialist paradise?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. That's what he told these people, and a lot of these people, they were uneducated. A lot
of these people, they didn't go to college, they didn't write a fucking paper on Stalin, they
didn't know. So for years he was talking about Lenin and he was talking about Marx and saying
that that's where it ended with Russia. But now he's saying like, 'Oh no, Stalin. Stalin's great.
He's awesome, he's doing all sorts of great things for Russia. And Khrushchev, yeah! Great
fucking guy.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But all of a sudden you have one person who's read a book who's like, 'Um, Mr. Jones... Uh,
why are you...? What about the millions of people that got murdered?'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, what about all these people that were murdered through all the purges? And he was
called out by this in one of these big public meetings. A guy raised his hand and said, 'Hey, I
don't think that's right.' And so Jones lost his shit, publicly humiliated the guy, but after the
meeting, Jones took the guy aside and said like, 'Hey listen. My followers, they're simple-'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (murmuring) 'Dude listen, they don't get it. They don't get it. So, to them, I'm feeding 'em
jellybeans. I'm feeding you broccoli. All right? You want broccoli? I know you do. Cause I like
the way you look. Side problem of this whole thing? You're thinking about it. You know what
you have to do? Don't think about it.'
BEN KISSEL Don't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause somebody like you that does think about it every once in a while, you? You gotta work
for me. You just got promoted. How does that feel? You just got promoted to putting the toilet
lids on the toilets!
BEN KISSEL I'm excited! It also sounds like he channeled his inner spokesperson for Men's Wearhouse.
MARCUS PARKS That's what he'd tell them, he'd say like, 'Hey, listen. You can't call me out on this shit in public,
but you can always come to me. Because I need a guy like you, I need a smart guy like you. In
fact, you're probably smarter than I am. So I need a guy like you on my side. But you can't do it
in public, but you can always come to me in private and you can straighten me out then.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So he would cherry pick the most troublesome ones, the ones that would... Cause doubt is like
a virus in these little groups. At some point, your cortisone levels are going crazy when you're
in a group of people, everybody's kind of all... You're in a hive mind. We work on a network as
a species, so you're in this place where everything's super harmonious and then if one
particular strong member of the group stands up and questions the whole thing, it's gonna
send a ripple throughout the whole thing. And he knows that. So he goes after the most
contentious ones and he just brings them closer.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. That reminds me of what Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton did in the hit film 9 to
5, which is an incredible movie about empowerment of females but also of anybody.
MARCUS PARKS And Happy Birthday to Dolly Parton.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Happy birthday.
BEN KISSEL Is it her birthday?!
MARCUS PARKS Not today, me and Dolly Parton share a birthday.
BEN KISSEL Really? Oh I love Dolly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Same waist, same butt size.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness, yes. Well, it's the opposite. Her breasts, his butt, both big. Interesting. Both
natural. We have to do a show in Dollywood. They would love us.
MARCUS PARKS I've been wanting to go to Dollywood since I was... Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, here I come!
BEN KISSEL Oh, man.
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones, he pulled these people closer. And this guy, Mike Cartwell, he was one of Jim's
adopted sons, he put it perfectly. He said, "Jim Jones gave you your five minutes and in return
you gave him your life."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He gave 'em the Bill Clinton finger trick, he did the same thing, like he looks right at you and...
Also this is the man who is now beginning to call himself god, right. Now imagine if god gives
you two minutes of one-on-one time. And he knew how influential that was, so he'd use it very
sparingly. And he knew when to turn his gaze onto somebody and in turn, not only did it
empower other people into thinking that he was god and bring them closer to them, but it also
brought himself closer to his own delusions of how much control I have over people.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. And I gotta say I'm happy we're breezing over that Bill Clinton finger trick, whatever the
heck that is. We're gonna move on.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Really, the Bill Clinton comparison is very apt because Jim Jones had that politician's
talent. They said about Bill Clinton is that he can go through on a campaign, he could go to a
small town in Minnesota and then he'd come back four years later and he would not only
know that person's name, he'd know their son's name, he'd know their wife's name, he'd
know what problem that person had last time he was through. He would know all these
personal details, and Jim Jones was that exact same way. If he heard a personal detail about a
person once, just once, heard their name just once, he'd know about that. And he was also at
the same time being informed the whole time. People are telling him like,'"Hey this is what's
going on with Patty. This is what's going on with Sarah.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's got spies all over the place. So he would use it in his congregation, which I think is very
interesting, and then he would use it for tricks during his preaching, and then he would also
use it on his own people.
BEN KISSEL But you know, not to discredit the talent there but I think back in the 60s and 70s there were
three names, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jim, John, Mary.
BEN KISSEL That was it. It's like this is my brother Darrell, this is my brother Darrell, this is my other
brother Darrell. The Newhart show. Classic, Bob Newhart. He's still alive, I think.
MARCUS PARKS Bob Newhart? Totally.
BEN KISSEL Is he really?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah!
BEN KISSEL That's amazing.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it is great, innit?
So with these college boys, Jones made them feel special, he'd stroke their ego, and he'd turn
them into confidantes. And the most important of those confidantes would be a young man
named Tim Stoen. See, Jones knew that if he wanted to truly expand Peoples Temple to the
size he knew it could be, he was gonna need a lawyer. Once you get to a certain size, you have
to have a lawyer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it's not even just a lawyer. He needed someone who was as capable as he was. He was
overseeing every single thing including the books, and it gets to a certain point where it's like
the amphetamines can only do some much. And he knew deep, deep, deep, deep inside that
he was still a guy. And even though he's been lying to even Marceline now, even to the closest
of the closest people, he now knows that he needs to bring somebody who is just as capable
as he is. And so he starts casting a line out and it's interesting how he put that intention out
into the universe and then Tim Stoen shows up.
BEN KISSEL So he had Joe McCarthy out there with Roy Cohn, right? That was his big guy, went to work
with Trump later on. But then, was this guy sort of his Cohn?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. This guy was absolutely, he was his right hand man.
BEN KISSEL Did McCarthy ever go after Jim Jones for socialism or I guess it was a different generation?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That was a different generation.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah that was the 50s. I can't remember... Actually, Jim Jones went straight up against it
because during McCarthyism, Jim Jones, I think, was right out of college and so he would go to
these communist meetings because there were still people that were trying to be a little
rebellious with it. And so Jim Jones would go to communist meetings and they'd have FBI
agents outside staking this shit out and Jim Jones would go up to each one of them, he would
introduce himself, say like, 'Hi, my name is Jim Jones. I live at such and such and such and such
address.' And he would taunt them, he would essentially be like, 'I am a communist. No one
fuck with me. I will never stop being a communist, I am a proud communist, this is just the way
shit is.'
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS So as far as Tim Stoen went, this guy... If Jim Jones needed a right hand man, he needed a guy
that not only believed in the cause but also believed in Jim Jones. Luckily for him, Tim Stoen
happened to be just in the neighborhood, he didn't even have to look far. Tim Stoen was an
assistant D.A. for Mendocino County where Redwood Valley was located. He was just right
there. And this guy, he took-
BEN KISSEL Powerful guy.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he took to the temple's message like a duck to water. Jones could not have
accomplished half of what he did in the years to come without Tim Stoen.
BEN KISSEL So this guy is an A.D.A, he's helping put people in jail.
MARCUS PARKS And he's a rising star, too. He's not just a guy that's sitting on the benches. Everyone around
knew like, Tim Stoen, that guy's got a future. And when he joined up with Peoples Temple,
people were like, 'what the fuck are you doing?'
BEN KISSEL Were people public about it?
MARCUS PARKS About Peoples Temple? Totally.
BEN KISSEL Yeah would this Stoen guy be like, 'I'm with this dude'?
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely. They had to be, that was a requirement. It wasn't something that you kept secret,
you had to be out and out with being a part of Peoples Temple, because they were actually
proud because they thought it was such a good thing. They didn't think they were in a cult,
they thought they were in a group that was working towards equality and just the general
betterment of man. They thought they were being an example and you can't be an example if
you don't tell everybody what your doing. How do they know you're a good person if you don't
tell 'em you're a good person, Ben?
BEN KISSEL Right, yeah, of course.
MARCUS PARKS Now, if the drugs were the secret ingredient to Jones' evil then Stoen was the secret ingredient
to his success. But with Tim Stoen came his wife Grace. And since Tim spent most of his time
with Jim, Tim's marriage started to fall apart. And since Grace was lonely, she started talking
about her problems to other Peoples Temple members. What she didn't know though, was
that Peoples Temple kept a huge database of handwritten note cards containing information
on every single member.
BEN KISSEL So who is taking all these notes?
MARCUS PARKS Everyone.
BEN KISSEL So everyone is just kind of snitching on everyone else.
MARCUS PARKS It's not like Scientology where people are doing audits and they're freely giving the
information. They would just report on each other in conversation. It was like Nazi Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It wasn't like Scientologists where they would sit in a room and they would confess this shit.
This stuff was done by tiny, cute, little old ladies that would sit there and ask you sweet
questions, where all of a sudden they're like, (elderly voice) 'So do you like chocolate or
vanilla?'
BEN KISSEL Chocolate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) 'Oh good, what's your deepest fear?'
BEN KISSEL Spiders?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) 'Yeah? Oh, is that, just spiders, just something simple like spiders, or...?'
BEN KISSEL I thought we were talking about ice cream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) 'No, no. What's something that shakes you to your core? Just curious, my dear.'
BEN KISSEL Just loneliness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) 'Yeah, loneliness, never having anything, dying alone, maybe never no one
support you. Tell me what's your favorite soup?'
BEN KISSEL (sighs) Split pea soup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) 'Oh that's good to know. Tell me, um, what's your deepest weakness?'
BEN KISSEL Just chocolate ice cream.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) So when Jones found out that Grace and Tim's marriage was on the rocks, he moved
in. Pretty soon, Grace was pregnant and the baby born from that illicit affair would be one of
the many catalysts that would end Peoples Temple forever.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just don't understand why he liked being a buck so much to the cucks.
BEN KISSEL What do you mean?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He just loved that, there was something about, I mean I guess obviously it's showing power
over his people, but he really did enjoy taking people's wives.
BEN KISSEL Oh, yes, I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS I mean it was all about power. A lot of times, him having sex with the dudes, it wasn't really
even that much about sex for pleasure, it was about dominance. I mean, Peoples Temple was
very primal at times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, especially it's group think at its very basest.
MARCUS PARKS So John Victor Stoen was born January 25, 1972 and this baby was special in the world of Jim
Jones. Since he was having so much illicit sex and did not enjoy condoms, abortions were
pretty common in Peoples Temple.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you think that's a positive thing, though?
BEN KISSEL No, I don't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I thought abortions are positive things. I don't understand.
BEN KISSEL You're misunderstanding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It seems like it'd be lucky for them to have a lot of abortions.
MARCUS PARKS No, it was forced abortions. These women did not want to have abortions, because if you look
at it, you're impregnated by god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Awesome, but then god makes you get an abortion. And god doesn't even drive you to the
clinic and god doesn't play Brick on the radio so that you can sit and feel something for a
second.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Oh my, bringing Ben Folds Five into this. That song 'One Angry Dwarf', I love it. And I'm tall!
But I always have. I relate to it.
MARCUS PARKS Jones got around this contradiction by saying that adding more people to the world was
contrary to socialist beliefs and since the purpose of the sex was to give Jones a release, a baby
was merely an inconvenient byproduct that had no real purpose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So then cum on the belly!
BEN KISSEL I dunno, he's just being selfish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do something, do something fun with it. Even do it on the leg.
MARCUS PARKS No dude, only gooshing inside is gonna give-
BEN KISSEL All right, that's enough, I don't wanna think about this disgusting guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't understand!
BEN KISSEL A slightly more fucked up George Jones.
MARCUS PARKS You don't want to think about a Jonesy creampie?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No (shuddering).
BEN KISSEL The fact that you even said it is just, ugh. Its disturbing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause you know his cum noises sound like an old man moving a wheelbarrow, that (grunts)
short and bad, being like, 'You're welcome.' Cause every single time he fucked you, he said,
'I'm doing this for you.'
BEN KISSEL At this point in the series, I'm gonna say that he's worse than L. Ron Hubbard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yes. Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely, of course he is. L. Ron Hubbard didn't murder 900 people! L. Ron Hubbard just
technically made money on a fantastic idea and a wonderful storyline. But Jim Jones, also, they
would show up in the bus number 7, it would come to be known, and it would reek of booze.
And they weren't allowed to have booze, and all of a sudden (plinking sounds) he's got a
smoking jacket on and you're like, 'We're not supposed to have different types of jackets, I
thought it was bourgeois to have jackets for specific types of activities.'
Just like, 'No, no, no, no. God has many jackets.'
MARCUS PARKS Well in John Victor Stoen, this illicit child, Jones saw something that he could use. Now while
Grace and Tim Stoen were listed on the birth certificate as the parents, as far as Peoples
Temple was concerned, the baby was Jim's. Because Jim Jones forced Tim Stoen to write a
humiliating statement declaring that Jim Jones was in fact the biological father. It read in part:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (reluctant voice) 'I, Timothy Oliver Stoen, hereby acknowledge that in April 1971 I entreated
my beloved pastor James W. Jones to sire a child by my wife Grace Stoen who had previously,
at my insistence, reluctantly but graciously consented thereto. James W. Jones agreed to do so
reluctantly after I explained that I very much wished to raise a child but was unable after
extensive attempts to sire one myself. And my reason for requesting James W. Jones to do this
is that I wanted my child to be fathered if not by me, by the most compassionate, honest, and
courageous human being the world contains.'
BEN KISSEL This is an A.D.A.
MARCUS PARKS This is an A.D.A.
BEN KISSEL Highly educated, powerful man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Powerful lawyer. Probably could've been a Robert Kennedy.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS This statement was partly so Jones would have something to take to the courts should the
Stoens defect, even though it wouldn't hold up in court. But it was also done to take Stoen
down a peg or two as his power in the cult was only increasing. He had to remind Tim Stoen of
his place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, he would do this a lot where he would essentially foster his own enemies and his own
conflicts within the church in order just to shut them down. And each time it made him harder.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And he also saw something to hold over Stoen should Stoen's loyalty waver in anyway
whatsoever. Little John-John, as the kid came to be known, was leverage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Tragedy always comes to kids named John-John.
BEN KISSEL John-John. Was it John-John?
MARCUS PARKS John-John.
BEN KISSEL That's the official name.
MARCUS PARKS Well, his name was John Victor Stoen but they called him John-John.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How do you get a name like a mentally handicapped farmhand is naming him? I don't
understand how you get these nicknames. I understand like, we call Wendy lumpy-lump and
all that kinda shit because it's a dog. You know what I mean, cause it's a dog, you come up with
weird various names for it at some point. But like a child? Where you be like, 'Aw, nooky-
shnooky.' Where it's like, it's not an oompa loompa.
MARCUS PARKS And as we'll see, using this child as leverage is gonna backfire spectacularly. Jones didn't stop
here either as far as using this pregnancy to his advantage. He had one more person to
humiliate, almost as an afterthought. Marceline.
BEN KISSEL His wife!
MARCUS PARKS Jones made his wife sign the aforementioned statement as a witness, publicly acknowledging
once again that Jones fucked whoever he wanted.
BEN KISSEL What was her state here, was she still chilling with all this? She was okay with all this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No!
MARCUS PARKS No, god no. And this little stunt, this was the last straw for Marceline. She decided after this,
like, 'Fuck this. I'm leaving. I met this very nice psychiatrist-'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why do married women always meet psychiatrists that look like Judge Reinhold from The
Santa Clause? Why do they always leave him for a man with weird sweaters that's always like,
'Me and Marcy have been talking and we feel, WE feel, it is in her best interest to leave.' They
can't fuck as good as Jim Jones, right?
BEN KISSEL Well they could cuddle up to that sweet, sweet sweater and sure, the guy has a micro like
Johnny Paycheck, it doesn't matter.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, sometimes you want Santa Claus but sometimes you need a man who loves his weenie
whistle.
BEN KISSEL That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're right, your right.
MARCUS PARKS The only problem was that Marcy leaving meant that her kids would go with her, or at least
that's what she wanted. 5 kids. She wanted all 5 of her kids to go with her because she knew
that Jim Jones was a fucking psycho. She didn't wanna leave her kids with him. So after
Marceline told Jones what she was gonna do, Jones called a family meeting. And after
Marceline held fast on her position, Jones tried intimidating her like he did his followers,
saying she would be met, quote, "by the avengers of death."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But at this point she's heard the god spiel from him for a while. And she's like, 'All right, all of
this is horseshit.' Of course, as we've said multiple times, Marcy was like his first follower and
his closest follower, and she's like, 'I know you're not gonna send fucking lightning after me,
you're not Thor. What're you gonna do?' And so finally Jim Jones was like, 'Well how about
we'll cut the angel shit and just say that I will kill you.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and doing it in front of the kids. They're in a family meeting, and Jim Jones was saying
like, 'Listen, your mother, she wants to take you away from me. She wants to take you out of
here.' And when the kids are like, 'Uh...well...' You know, they weren't really swayed by that,
they kinda thought about it cause they fucking love their mother, she was actually a good
mother. But after that, Jim Jones was like, 'Yeah, if you take them, I'm just gonna fucking kill
you.' And so after that... Because at this point he had a full fucking private army. A small one at
least. He had a crew, like fucking jack-booted thugs, they're fucking armed, they are fiercely
loyal. Marceline knew that he had the means and he had the will to do this, so she canceled
her plans and just settled into a life of dutiful misery.
BEN KISSEL So he's living like Gaddafi with the militant troupe all around him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This shit happened really subtly. One thing I want you to truly understand is the difference in
other cults that we've covered is that a lot of those changes kind of happened up top, like
Children of God and that stuff, it went wackity-schmackity like really, really fast, really, really
early. Same thing with Aum Shinrikyo. But the Peoples Temple was very subtle. This shit just
kind of naturally grew around him. His enforcers just sort of came out of the specific people
that came out of either the criminal rehab programs or the drug rehab programs, these people
kind of formed unofficial groups around them. And Marceline was watching this happen,
which is why she started getting an outside relationship and started trying to figure out a way
to get the kids out. But she didn't realize how fully closed the net had become.
BEN KISSEL Well that's what I was wondering. Is this officially, at this point, would you classify this as a
cult?
MARCUS PARKS It's close.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's getting there.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's very much getting... I mean, they've already got a little compound. Redwood Valley's
already pretty much a little compound. And the reason why Jones was able to do this so subtly
is because he had a reason for everything. As far as the security force goes, we're gonna see
later why he really beefed shit up and how he actually did it in such a way where all of his
followers said, 'Oh that makes sense.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like, oh fuck. But all of a sudden you've got the fringe members that're like, 'Whaaaaaaaat?
Um, check please!' And that's actually a way to get out of a cult, that's good for people to
know-
BEN KISSEL You can say 'check please'?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you need to get out of a cult-
MARCUS PARKS Legally (laughs).
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Legally. 'Check please'! Then you have to leave.
BEN KISSEL Look at that.
MARCUS PARKS Well, despite their mother's sad existence, most of the Jones kids, they were actually doing
pretty good due in no small part to their longtime buddy, Mr. Muggs.
BEN KISSEL Who's Mr. Muggs?
MARCUS PARKS Mr. Muggs was a full-grown chimpanzee whom temple members were told was saved from a
laboratory.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Woohoo! You know he's got one of those voice boxes built in still just being like, (robot voice)
'Run, children, run. Save yourselves. Save Muggs, save Muggs the monkey. Get the monkey
into police car.'
BEN KISSEL I love it. Honestly man, every kid wanted a monkey. The kids got a monkey!
MARCUS PARKS Well he even used the chimp as a way to build himself up again. They bought the chimp at a
fucking pet store. And I don't know what it was about the late 60s, early 70s, Jim Jones is
selling monkeys door to door, they're out in California and some pet store just has a fucking
chimp for sale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just different times, man, simpler times. Also for some reason they just thought they were
just like a dog except a dog can't rip your fucking arms off.
BEN KISSEL Yeah! It's like, we got a chinchilla, we got a pomeranian, we got a monkey, we got a mogwai,
we have an iguana. What do you want?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. How they kind of built themselves up with Mr. Muggs is that, oh no, he didn't buy him at
a pet store, Jim Jones saw him in a laboratory and he saved him because he could not bear to
see this beautiful creature suffering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (robot voice) Why are you wearing sunglasses inside? You are frightening me. Please stop
trying to make love to me. I will not douche. I will not douche.
BEN KISSEL Hey, why don't you shut up, Mr. Muggs. Why don't you shut up.
MARCUS PARKS Presumably named after the Tonight Show chimpanzee mascot J. Fred Muggs, Mr. Muggs
Jones would serve the same purpose for Peoples Temple. Mr. Muggs was like, oh yeah
everyone loves Mr. Muggs!
BEN KISSEL He's a mascot?
MARCUS PARKS He's the mascot!
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS They didn't put him on like, t-shirts, but...
BEN KISSEL Might as well!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (robot voice) Please merchandise me. You're leaving money on the table.
BEN KISSEL Also, there was a monkey mascot on the Tonight Show?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. J. Fred Muggs. I found this out by, like I googled 'Mr. Muggs chimpanzee' to see what
kind of Mr. Muggs stories I could get, and yeah he has his own Wikipedia page. A very long
Wikipedia page. He had his own spinoff show, the J. Fred Muggs show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So you mean to tell me they allowed a chimp to run an entire television show?
BEN KISSEL I guess so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And was it just canceled because it ripped Raquel Welch's face off? And then they're like,
'We've got to figure out a way to put it back on.'
BEN KISSEL Can you just imagine Ed McMahon getting slam-wasted with that monkey backstage?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (slurred) I tell you what, this chimp makes a lot of sense when he talks about immigration.
MARCUS PARKS Did you read Gump & Co.?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, we were talking about this.
BEN KISSEL What the hell's Gump & Co.?
MARCUS PARKS Gump & Co. Was the sequel to the book Forrest Gump.
BEN KISSEL I didn't even know it was a book.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, Forrest Gump was a book. And then after the movie came out and it was so big, the
writer wrote a sequel called Gump & Co. And in Gump & Co. of course he gets into a lot more
wacky adventures, and in the book Forrest Gump, Raquel Welch, and a chimp all go into space
together.
BEN KISSEL I totally woulda guessed it. I totally could've called that. What an easy plot.
I would love to hear the interview with the author of Gump & Co. being like, 'So how do you
describe the book?'
Well, it could be best described as a money grab. Like I'm trying to capitalize on-'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kind of like a scam, kind of like a thing that I don't even believe I wrote! A manuscript showed
up at my door and I believe I hired five Himalayan boys to do it.
MARCUS PARKS It was obviously written over a weekend.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But it was really fun because, you know, Raquel Welch, a chimp, and Forrest Gump in
space.
BEN KISSEL That's kind of fun.
MARCUS PARKS What's not great about that?
BEN KISSEL Go to space. If you're out of ideas, take your characters to space.
MARCUS PARKS Well, although J. Fred Muggs would survive until 2012, running out his days in Florida with his
girlfriend Phoebe B. Beebe-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who was a human being.
BEN KISSEL What?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Hold on. This is a whole B side to this story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She was riding him.
BEN KISSEL Phoebe Babeebee?
MARCUS PARKS Phoebe B. Beebe.
BEN KISSEL Phoebe BaBeebee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't think it actually was a human, Kissel.
BEN KISSEL Oh it wasn't, okay.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Even though J. Fred Muggs would live a long life, Mr. Muggs Jones would die in
Jonestown, most likely the first casualty of the mass suicide.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, of course! Everyone's dying and falling around, don't tell me the chimp is not going like,
(screaming). Just being like, 'He is disturbing my deathlike peace!'
MARCUS PARKS And this is absolutely fucking absurd to think about, that's why we bring it up. Cause it is
fucking absurd. But it really shows you what sort of planning went into that last day. Killing Mr.
Muggs was on the checklist.
BEN KISSEL Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS And either that or someone thought that, 'Oh fuck what about the monkey?' And just took
care of him in a last minute mercy. They shot him in the back of the head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (robot voice) I'll never tell what happened here.
BEN KISSEL Oh, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then they shot him like Che Guevara.
BEN KISSEL Ugh. Just let him go in the forest.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, they absolutely coulda. There were no chimps there, but you know what, those forests
in Jonestown were full of monkeys. They said that was actually... In the mornings monkeys
were their roosters. They'd wake up-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's terrifying.
BEN KISSEL That is kinda scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Monkeys are our roosters. (screaming)
BEN KISSEL Time to make the donuts.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) But long before all that happened, back in the early 70s, the Jones family was doing
pretty good, even though Jones constantly preached socialist ideals, he wasn't above taking a
few bucks from the kitty to take his family on expensive vacations all on the down low.
BEN KISSEL He's working very hard.
MARCUS PARKS He is working very hard, technically he's working extremely hard. But he's telling all of his
people, 'Hey, we're going on a secret mission.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a cool way to set up a vacation!
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's like, 'We're going on a secret mission, we'll be back in like a week.'
BEN KISSEL We're going to this place... Wally World. I hope it's open.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You better check if it's open first.
MARCUS PARKS Now, the only Jones child who didn't seem to be enjoying himself was Jim and Marceline's only
trueborn son, Stephan. Now whether it was because of depression or it was just a cry for help,
Stephan attempted suicide three times when he was 12. He himself said it was-
BEN KISSEL That's a lot! Just one year, three times?
MARCUS PARKS He said it was a cry for help.
BEN KISSEL Oh, of course it was.
MARCUS PARKS And since Jones was a hardcore drug addict, it was important for him to keep a large and
convenient stash of ludes around the Jones household at all times. And it was with these pills
that Stephan attempted suicide. And even after the second attempt, even after the third,
Jones still kept the pills readily available all for his own convenience, even though his son was
grabbing 'em and taking 'em whenever he could. Possibly even worse than that was the fact
that Jones didn't really seem to give a shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, in the end I imagine he thought that Stephan would learn to talk care of himself or not,
and also Jones, I can't imagine he really thought too much outside of himself and his own dick.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely not.
BEN KISSEL Is Stephan the oldest?
MARCUS PARKS Stephan, well no. There's a couple... No, Lou is older than him... I think it was Agnes, Lou, who
were both adopted kids... But Stephan was Jim and Marceline's only biological son. All the rest
of the kids were adopted.
BEN KISSEL Well isn't that stunning, he would have a love for ludes.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah, I mean, I think Jim Jones, he'd always talk big about how when he died,
Marceline was gonna take over and then when Marceline died, Stephan would take over after
that. But it think that deep down, he didn't give a shit about Stephan, he didn't give a shit
about Marceline, because I think that he always knew or at least hoped that when he died the
church was gonna die with him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think you see that over and over again, that sentiment is put into a lot of his speeches,
especially as it gets closer and closer to their move to Guyana. I think that's very true, and I
think that's the most dangerous thing, of course, because essentially like, 'Well if I die then you
all have to die, too.' You could see that algebra.
BEN KISSEL So it was a power thing.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely. Well it was arrogance, really. Nothing is gonna survive past this. And the death
tape, there's always one sentence that sticks out in my mind so much, and what you just said
really reminded me of that. He's talking and talking and talking and telling them everything
that he's done for them and there's this one sentence that just fucking lives with me. Jim Jones
says, "I am the best friend you will ever have."
BEN KISSEL Oof.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Remember his tombstone of his father? Everyone is my friend? It's very interesting, it's kind of
the same shit. It's weird how all these things, even unconsciously, feeds back into the end
moments.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, that's crazy. In the meantime, before any of that happened, Jim Jones kept his
congregation enraptured. Around 1970, Jones started really driving it home that he and he
alone was their salvation. And he slowly started replacing god in these people's lives with
himself. Here's a quote rom Raven by John Jacobs and Tim Reiterman:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "You prayed to your sky god and he never heard you prayers. You asked and begged and
pleaded in your suffering and he never gave you any food. He never gave you a bed, he never
provided you a home. But I, your socialist worker god, have given you all these things."
BEN KISSEL And in a lot of ways he did, right?
MARCUS PARKS People were getting results.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he's not god.
BEN KISSEL It's about results.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But again, he's not god.
BEN KISSEL But it's about results.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the big jump, he can say, 'I can gave you shit,' and they can be like, 'Yes you did.' But you
can't all of a sudden... The term 'socialist work god' seems to be a trigger where I'd be like,
'Check, please!'
BEN KISSEL Check, please!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They call you a taxi, you get in, they give you $100 and you can go buy a suit.
BEN KISSEL Right, right.
MARCUS PARKS And Jones followed this statement as he would many times after by throwing the bible across
the room and then he'd pick it up and he'd throw it again, and then he'd run over to it and
he'd jump up and down on it. And then the band would play a fanfare and he'd start dancing
on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And hit me! 1, 2, 3, 4, (drum beat) Get up! Get on up!
Him just dancing on like James Brown, and you gotta remember-
MARCUS PARKS The band was awesome.
BEN KISSEL But there's chicken guts... It's like Marilyn Manson meets James Brown. It sounds like a
Manson concert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes! But he'd pick up the bible, he'd throw it across the room, he'd jump up and down on it
and be like, 'If this fucking bible means anything, god, strike me dead.' And he sat there
waiting to die and then he'd be like, 'See? You see how there's no god?' And you remember,
the fundamentalist Christians that were involved, these Revivalist-era Christians that were
involved in the Peoples Temple, they believed that the word of god in the bible was
completely real. They thought it was a nonfiction book. And so the idea is that you watch it
happen. Even I've felt the tiniest twinge of something. I had an old school bible in my books
when I was moving out of my apartment here and I took it and I was just like, fuck this, and I
threw it in the garbage can. And there's always like a little magical moment where you're like,
'Agh, fuck. What'd I just do?' It's interesting how that can grip people, especially when they've
spent their whole lives believing that.
BEN KISSEL I get it. Of course, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS He prepped them for this. This was not something that was out of the blue, cause for years he
had been preaching about the contradictions in the bible where he would say like, 'Yes. There
are a lot of things going on in there, but the bible is a manmade object. This is something that
was written by men.' And he'd go through in his sermons and he'd point out all the
contradictions in the bible, and he'd be like, 'Well it says this in the Old Testament and it says
this in the New Testament, and it says this in Mark and it says this in Luke, and it says this in
Exodus and this in Deuteronomy.' And so people started listening, and since they were so
enraptured by Jim Jones and since they believed in Jim Jones so much they were like, 'Huh.
That makes sense, why is that? Why would there be those contradictions there?' And so by the
time he started throwing the bible across the room people are already thinking maybe this
bible is bullshit. And then after he threw it, after he called out on god to strike him down,
when nothing happened, Jones said there's no need to fear god because I am god and you are
god and we are all our own god.
BEN KISSEL And what was Mr. Muggs thinking this whole time?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (robot voice) Check, please. Check, please.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) But the emphasis and the implication was that even though they were all god, and
gods were equal, some gods are more equal than others.
BEN KISSEL Ooh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, interesting, like Animal Farm.
BEN KISSEL Animal Farm? The book, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God, you must've been such a difficult high school English student.
BEN KISSEL I dunno, man.
MARCUS PARKS What did you think about Animal Farm, Ben, I just wanna know.
BEN KISSEL Love pigs.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's not an opinion on that book.
BEN KISSEL No, Animal Farm, Charlotte with the web...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're talking about Charlotte's Web!
BEN KISSEL I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS You don't know what Animal Farm is, do you?
BEN KISSEL There's a series of animals that live on a farm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Didn't you get a degree in political science? It's like THE book-
BEN KISSEL We don't read books about pigs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not a book about pigs, it's not Babe!
MARCUS PARKS That's like 8th grade political science, is Animal Farm.
BEN KISSEL (sighs)
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Are people in the book?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No! It's Animal Farm! Well there's a farmer...
MARCUS PARKS There's a couple of people in the book, but-
BEN KISSEL So it's all lies. Because animals don't have political parties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god. Oh god.
BEN KISSEL Is it an analogy for something?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes!
MARCUS PARKS Yes, it's an allegory.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Some animals are more equal than others.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL All I know is-
MARCUS PARKS All animals are equal but some animals-
BEN KISSEL I don't care what the spider is spelling, I hate the web. Get it outta here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) I'm mad. I'm mad when he doesn't know.
BEN KISSEL No, I know the book, I know the book.
MARCUS PARKS The crowd ate this shit up, even the bible thumpers. After he'd already put in all the doubts in
their head, they were totally onboard with this. Now, with all of these followers and all of this
power, after Jim Jones saw that he could take little old ladies who had been clinging to the
bible for 60, 70, 80 years, he figured he was finally ready after 7 years of planning to take a
sincere run at Mother Divine.
BEN KISSEL Oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was definitely prepped for this and was thinking about this the entire time. He's just
starting to believe in the smell of his own shit and he's starting to really lovey love it. I feel like
he's got the chops where he could just show up and take the entire ministry that belongs to
Mother Divine.
MARCUS PARKS Well, yeah. Jealous Divine, Father Divine, he'd been dead for 7 years at this point. Jealous
Divine had died in 1965 and Mother Divine had been running it this entire time. And the whole
time Jim Jones was just biding his time because he's seen in this International Peace Mission
Movement, he's seen it this whole time is like, that's how I can double my followers right
quick. I can double my followers overnight. He seeing a huge shortcut here, and really, it's not
a bad plan. It's a dumb plan, but all this shit's dumb.
BEN KISSEL He wants to go steal another congregation, I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's sort of like the video game Civilization, I believe. I seem to remember that from Civ where
you could go and get other people's armies and shit.
MARCUS PARKS Oh no, you just invade another country and then once you take the capital city you get all of
the cities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a good game.
MARCUS PARKS Oh god, I love Civ so much.
BEN KISSEL It works every time, look what happened in Iraq. Loyal soldiers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were ready for us.
BEN KISSEL Totally ready, willing to fight for us.
MARCUS PARKS Now if you'll remember from our first episode, Mother Divine was the heir to the, as I said,
International Peace Mission Movement originally run by Father Divine who died and left it to
Mother in 1965. Jones' plan for this movement for all these years was to show up and say that
Father Divine had jumped bodies just as Mother Divine had oh so many years ago from
Penniniah to that Canadian girl.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can you imagine the look on Mother Divine's face, right, when he shows up and he says,
"Father Divine's jumped to my body." And she knows that the other story was horseshit too. I
just can't imagine Mother Divine standing in front of the congregation, turning to Jim Jones
being like, (Canadian accent) 'Well I don't know if that's the way it really went there. I don't
know if he really just jumped into your body there, eh.' And he's like, 'Oh, I think it did. I think
that's exactly how it happened.' And it's like, (Canadian accent) 'Oh no, no, no. See, it works
for some and not for others.' I became Irish.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Just a strange episode of Quantum Leap, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah where everybody's fucking each other.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, exactly.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and Jones' plan was that if he could convince Mother Divine that Father Divine had
jumped bodies into Jim Jones, if he could convince Mother Divine, then she would convince all
the rest of the followers. All he had to do-
BEN KISSEL That is such a crazy thing to have to convince somebody of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's because she knew the other story was bullshit too! He's gotta know that she knows that
that is bullshit.
MARCUS PARKS Well he's gotta hedge the bets. He's gotta think like, 'Okay. I believe in my bullshit pretty hard.
How hard does she believe in her bullshit?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's poker with bullshit!
BEN KISSEL Bullshit poker.
MARCUS PARKS It's liar's poker, yeah. It's like trying to see who's gonna break first. But he also thought besides
just convincing Mother Divine, he had to kind of sway the congregation as well with all this
shit. He had to make them a little wobbly so when he really ran at Mother Divine, she would
be a little wobbly as well and maybe feel like, 'Okay, I could merge these houses.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's kinda like the movie Fury or kinda like the movie with the brains... Scanners! It's like
Scanners, where you basically have two people... Cause it's not about her and him, it's that he
knows he's gotta flip her crowd and the way you do that is you have to mentally beat Mother
Divine in sort of like a staring contest in front of everyone, where you show up being like,
(calm voice) 'Who jumped bodies? Me or you? Who's jumping bodies now? Did I jump bodies?'
(Canadian accent) 'I don't know. I don't know if I did, I don't know if you did.'
(calm voice) 'I think that I know that you did and I think that I know that I did.'
And it'd have to be just a silent group of people just staring at them, being like, (whispering)
'Who's winning?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah what the hell is going on?
MARCUS PARKS This is how he tried to make this happen. He loaded about 200 of his most loyal followers and
drove them across the country to the Divine compound outside of Philadelphia. And he also
brought a few empty buses because he figured, this is how arrogant he was, he figured that in
about five, six days time he was gonna dazzle these people so hard that they were gonna be
bringing hundreds of people back with them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But remember, he has reason to believe this because this is how he's run his game for so long.
People would show up at his roadshows, they'd always have one empty bus or room in a
couple of the buses, and basically they'd whip up the music and be like, 'Woo! Praise Jesus!
Woo!' And jumping and dancing with 'em being like, 'Yeah! Woo! Oh look, is that soup? Wow,
soup! That's free soup! Woo! I'm dancing, I got Jesus in my feet! Woo!' All of a sudden you're
on the bus, 'Woo! Got my seatbelt on, isn't this funny, ah it's crazy I got my seatbelt on!' Bus
pulls off, 'Where... Where are we going?' You're in the Peoples Temple now. 'Oh shit.'
BEN KISSEL That reminds me of what I did to my friend Dave. At 2:00 in the morning we were very
intoxicated, I said, "We're going to South Dakota, going to Mount Rushmore." He's like,
"Okay."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (slurred) Yeah, sure thing Kissel. You're the funniest man I've ever met.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, and then I threw him in the car, 12 hours later he woke up, I was smoking Winstons, I
was like, "We're almost there!" And he was horrified.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, fuck! I gotta go to psych class!
BEN KISSEL He did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But that's not even a joke, it's like people would party their way onto the buses and all of a
sudden now you're in the Peoples Temple, now you're a part of a socialist community and
you're fucking stuck there cause you don't have any of your bullshit anymore, you don't have
any money or possessions-
BEN KISSEL Isn't that kidnapping? It's kind of like emotional kidnapping.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You kind of flip your mind. Because a part of it that we were talking about before is that you lie
to yourself, like you can handle the community part of it. You think that you're ready to join
something pure and crazy but then you show up being like, 'Oh, wow. How many bathrooms
are there? How much food is there?' The reality is shocking.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And when Jim Jones got to the International Peace Mission Movement and he started
talking, at first he was talking all nice and sweet being like, 'It's so great to be here, I love this
movement. (muttering) Father Divine is inside me now. He kinda jumped inside of me now.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He kinda jumped inside of me to the point where I did a reverse Fresh Prince and came from
California to Philadelphia.
MARCUS PARKS But people weren't really buying it and Mother Divine also was like, 'Uh, I don't know about
this.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah, no kidding!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who's this white man? Like legitimately just being like, 'Who's this white guy that just showed
up?'
MARCUS PARKS Even though Mother Divine was also white.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, I forgot. Canadian.
MARCUS PARKS You forgot that she was a white Canadian. That's why Jim Jones thought that he might be able
to flip it, because Penniniah went over to a white woman, so why wouldn't Father Divine go
over to a white man?
BEN KISSEL Well this started with Mr. Divine! Isn't he the one who started this whole idea of switching
bodies?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yep. Father Divine was the one that said Penniniah has gone over to a white woman now, so
we're all good.
BEN KISSEL (sighs) You know what? I just think they're not being reasonable. That's what I think.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Very, very astute.
MARCUS PARKS Well after, they didn't immediately reject him, they were just like, 'I don't know...' And then
Jim Jones' arrogance got the best of him. He got pissed off and he started telling them, 'The
way you guys are living your life, this is bullshit, this is not a socialist society, this is not what
Father Divine, I mean, this is not what I wanted. He, him, me, I think... You gotta come to
Peoples Temple, you've got to come or else you're going to hell.' He started straight up
threatening them, saying like you're gonna go to hell, your lives are gonna be destroyed if you
do not come with me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And you wanna know what you don't do?
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Threaten a group of people in Philadelphia. Groups in Philadelphia are highly dangerous and
very motivated.
BEN KISSEL They just rioted because they were happy! The Eagles won, they trashed the whole town!
MARCUS PARKS Except for the poles because they greased the poles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, they took it as a challenge!
BEN KISSEL They actually still did it, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They still did it.
BEN KISSEL American Ninja Warrior, Philadelphia Edition.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) So after Jim Jones started getting aggressive with them Mother Divine was like, 'Get
the fuck outta here. I don't ever wanna see you again, get outta here and never come back.'
And so on the way back, Jim Jones didn't say shit and nobody said shit to him. They said it was
a silent, tense bus ride all the way from Philadelphia back to California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it is really difficult, just the silence is so much more echoing when you're three to a seat.
BEN KISSEL Oh yes. So everyone understood this was a failure for him.
MARCUS PARKS Everyone understood but the thing is about Jim Jones though, there are no failures, it's always
someone else's fault. It's never truly a failure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love his excuse where he said that Mother Divine, they had a wonderful conversation and
then Mother Divine pulled him out of the room, ripped open her shirt and showed him her
quote unquote "sagging breasts"-
MARCUS PARKS Waved her sagging breasts.
BEN KISSEL Waved them?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, which I guess had the effect of... You know when a bird's got eyes on its wings and it's
supposed to scare bigger predators away? Like one of those things where I guess the breasts
were supposed to scare him and he goes, 'Ah! Oh, no! No, not the horrible pendulums!'
Basically he pulled the Brazil where he said, 'Oh, she wanted me to fuck her and I said no.'
BEN KISSEL Oh, I see.
MARCUS PARKS That's what kinda got me about it was he pulled the opposite of Brazil. Because in Brazil he
said-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, I got asked to fuck and he...
MARCUS PARKS Yeah in Brazil he said, 'She wanted to fuck me so I did it for the greater good, for the
orphanage, so she would give $5000 to the orphanage.' Arguably, this would be for even more
of a greater good because this is the cause, this is the whole cause. And if they can add
another thousand people to the congregation, that's a huge deal for the cause. But for some
reason this was not good enough for Jim Jones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, we're gonna see this play out later on too. He started talking about shit like this where
he's just like, 'I only put out for the prime talent.' He is very much so... You're gonna see his
taste escalate in women and then in men it stays exactly the same.
MARCUS PARKS But these failures, in a relative sense, were pretty small and Peoples Temple was still growing,
and with this growth came a greater need for control. And that control came in the form of the
'planning commission'.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now I see this as a direct result of these failures. I think what he realized is that when he went
out, because he became so confident of what he was doing in Ukiah and he thought he would
just go out and crush, crush, crush everywhere else. And when he didn't, he realized, oh, I
gotta take this out on my people a little bit more. So he invented this thing called the planning
commission, which was his little solid inner, inner core group, that would no be the most
innermost, it would be the second innermost, but he needed them to be his open mic night.
BEN KISSEL I see. It's what the mom did in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
MARCUS PARKS What are you talking about? I haven't seen this stupid fucking movie.
BEN KISSEL I don't wanna talk about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not a good film.
BEN KISSEL It is a good film!
MARCUS PARKS I mean I've watched a couple of minutes on TBS during Christmas when I was bored at my
parents' house, but it was obviously a bad movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not good, the Whos are physically deformed.
BEN KISSEL The mother Who is on the planning commission.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can I actually ask this? Do the Whos believe in Christ?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL They might.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is that why they like Christmas? Yeah it's just Christmas, like they like the presents, but do they
not believe in the theoretical beginnings of Christmas?
BEN KISSEL Ooh, we didn't get into that. They might've believed in Jim Jones as far as we know.
MARCUS PARKS I think it's kind of like Wookiee Life Day.
BEN KISSEL What's Wookiee Life Day?
MARCUS PARKS It's from the Star Wars holiday special. It's what the Wookiees celebrate. Cause if you watch it
there is a long, 10 minute segment of the Wookiees having a Christmas-like thing called
Wookiee Life Day with no subtitles. It's just 10 minutes of Wookiees growling at each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Wookiee noises) I also realized when we were watching Star Wars, I can't do a Wookiee noise.
BEN KISSEL It's tough to do.
MARCUS PARKS (growling)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (wailing)
MARCUS PARKS Ben, try.
BEN KISSEL (squeaking)
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Not good at it.
MARCUS PARKS Well this planning commission, there was an illusion of collaboration. Jim Jones said like, 'All
right, we're forming this thing, we're all gonna work together, this is how we're gonna take
Peoples Temple to the next level and all of you people, who are my most trusted, my most
special, are gonna be a part of it and we're all gonna do this together.' In reality, it was
completely all in Jim Jones' control.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it became known as the PC and what do we know about cults? Once acronyms get
started, there's gonna be problems. Once the acronyms start, you know it's bad. And this was
his testing ground. He would see what he could get away with with the planning commission.
And they would meet late at night after all of the meetings, there would be an afternoon
session, again, four or five hours long. There would be a night session four hours long. Then
they would have another meeting with just the PC where he would start his more
experimental ideas to see how people respond and then see how... Basically in a cult structure
you really have to incept them. You have to make them think that they are collaborating and
adding something to the group when in fact they're not. So they themselves, the second layer
of the cult would then go teach the outer layer of the cult to believe in the teachings straight
from the head. So basically, the only way you get the fringe people from saying, 'Check, please'
is they see the inner group people saying, 'No, it's a good idea.' So they then see people
reverberating the idea back and forth so it begins to make sense.
BEN KISSEL Little circle of trust, there.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah cause Peoples Temple is getting up into the thousands as far as membership goes. I think
by '73 they had about like 3000, and I think by the end it was like 7000.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Only a small fraction of Peoples Temple members actually went to Guyana. And I think Jim
Jones, it was definitely a way for him to put his ideas out there and have it go outside, but it
was also a toy for Jim Jones. Jim Jones played with the people in the planning commission the
way a serial killer plays with a dead body. Just seeing what he can do just for his own pleasure.
I mean, the thing did serve administrative purposes but it seems like the way most writers tell
it, the PC was used as more of a platform for abuse and humiliation all under the guise of
being a place where people could accomplish great things.
BEN KISSEL Interesting. He tried to make 'em little human zombies like Jeffrey Dahmer did.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and shit like that, yeah. And of course, most of the humiliation had to do with the thing
that's easier to use to humiliate someone, the sex. One of the main purposes of the PC was so
Jones could bring women he wanted to have sex with into his confidence. The PC was at its
largest about 100 members out of the thousands that Peoples Temple ended up having, and it
was only out of the PC that Jones would pluck his sexual conquests.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it wasn't quite in the Poison way of handing black roses to tell 'em in the front row to
come in, but it was kind of like that, where they would go-
BEN KISSEL The cultist bachelor?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah where they would bring people... This was his way of bringing them closer. And again,
every single time, if he had a smart ass asking a lot of questions he'd put 'em on the PC. If he
had a woman that he wanted to have sex with he'd put her on the PC.
BEN KISSEL Right. So was it a punishment or a reward?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Half and half. We're gonna learn that they are exactly the same.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah. I think that's one of the brilliant things about Jim Jones and also what a lot of cults
do is they blur the line between punishment and reward.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Think about this. A bunch of people bragging about how little sleep they got. That's the first
one. And that just shows again, the subtle build, the way people can be really flipped is once
you control their whole behavior. Cause it gets to a point where they view pain as pleasure
and then once that starts happening, they believe they deserve it and they believe it's the will
of god and that they're supposed to be like this. And then Jim Jones uses that to his own
advantage.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And taking the sex thing even further... Half the purpose of the PC, as far as their
meetings went and what they talked about, Jones just wanted a captive audience to listen to
him go on and on about how virile he was and how much he liked to fuck and who he was
fucking and who he had fucked in that room. He would actually make people write statements
describing their personal sexual experiences that would be read aloud to the entire PC. And
he'd make them do it in the middle of the meeting, like 'Hey, we fucked, right? Write about it.
Write a statement and then we're gonna read it.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wasn't there a statement read of one of them just being like 'I had a great time'. It was just
like, 'signed, Nancy'.
MARCUS PARKS My only lover has been J'.
BEN KISSEL That doesn't say a lot though, because honestly, that's technically not even good or bad, that's
just a fact.
MARCUS PARKS Now the other half of these planning commission talks were much more sinister.
BEN KISSEL That was the good part?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That was the good part, that was the fun part!
BEN KISSEL Oh, dang!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Basically you give up to 10 bed springs for his level of fuckingness where you just say 7/10,
loved it, could've used a little bit more feet-sucking. 2/10, I am a man and I did not enjoy this.
And he tears those up, he's like, 'I only take 6/10s.'
MARCUS PARKS Now the PC was also in charge of discipline. That's disciplining the entire congregation. Most of
the time the discipline was just counseling and that's by Jonestown survivor Tim Carter's own
admission. Tim Carter is, I mentioned him earlier, this guy is the biggest Jonestown critic, he's
the biggest Peoples Temple critic. He's the one that, we know so much about Peoples Temple,
the inner working of it, because of Tim Carter. And Tim Carter said 80% of the time it wasn't
really that bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, cause it worked. Cause the counseling just worked, they would talk people out. And they
had counseling programs with real counselors that ended up being part of the Peoples Temple
that they would do. But the problem is that once you got past like level 3 of counseling and
you were still not doing shit, that's when the verbal public humiliations would start.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and they called that 'catharsis'. That entailed them bringing people up to the front of the
church and they'd scream and yell at them, tell 'em what a big piece of shit they were, and
then at the end Jim Jones would go over and he'd give them a big hug and say, 'It's for your
own good.'
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that was punishing with one hand, comforting with the other hand. Shows them that not
only do I administer punishment but I care for you so much, I'm gonna make you feel better
afterwards. It's the abuse cycle, it's being in an abusive relationship where you're the source of
all stimulus.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And then there were the spankings.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS Started off as just a lick or two from the belt, which sounds relatively tame as far as cult
punishments go, especially when we compare it to some of the fucking Aum Shinrikyo stuff.
But this wasn't done in private. Usually this was done in front of a congregation of a thousand
members. These were the locked door meetings. But still, it was like a thousand people there,
and then they'd do it a hundred people at a time, all waiting in line to be spanked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They've been doing this in Congress a lot.
BEN KISSEL Is that right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is a senator-like activity, I feel.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, that's why they call it 'the majority whip'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) Ooh, Capitol steps, here comes your new member!
BEN KISSEL There it is. Real Henny Youngman.
MARCUS PARKS And then the belt escalated to a paddle which Jim Jones not-so-originally called 'the board of
education'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Aw, man, it's so fucking like The Wall, dude. It's Pink Floyd, dude.
MARCUS PARKS Every principal calls his paddle 'the board of education'.
BEN KISSEL Why do principals still have paddles?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't think they should...
MARCUS PARKS I guess probably not. I mean, up until I graduated in 2001, yeah, the principal had a paddle, the
superintendent had a paddle, some of the teachers had personal paddles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Did you have to wear those clay masks and pretend to fall into a sausage grinder?
MARCUS PARKS No but you got to sign the paddle after he spanked ya. After he gave you a few licks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh, stop with the licks!
BEN KISSEL The whole world is run by the mean people from Animal House. Negative people.
MARCUS PARKS Then the number of licks escalated. It started with 1, 2, 3, but then it got up to 25 and then it
got up to 50 and then it got up to 100. All in front of the congregation, sometimes with such
force that these people required medical attention for their butts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, excuse me, I'm a doctor for butts. Let me look at them, um... I'm not really a doctor I
probably should've said that before I started looking at your butt, but the one thing I will say is
you got two cheeks, you got one hole. Looking good.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Dr. Butts.
MARCUS PARKS And then there were the boxing matches.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Awesome!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean it's fucked up, but...
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I understand, I do understand Henry's immediate reaction to awesome but then I do
understand your rebuttal being like this is not awesome. Forced boxing is not good.
MARCUS PARKS No. The offender in question, usually just guilty of being bourgeois, would be forced into a
public boxing match against a member he or she had no chance of beating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Damn. And you know people are watching that shit, too.
MARCUS PARKS They're screaming, they're cheering. The congregation is fucking loving it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It must be so... Especially at this point, cause originally they were just singing and dancing in a
normal church. Remember again, two years ago they were just in a church singing and
dancing. Now you're at a point where you're like, (shouting) 'Get him Mrs. Henderson! Kick
him in the fucking nuts! Kick him in the fucking nuts!' You got Mr. Muggs being forced to box a
little old lady, like (robot voice) 'I don't want to kill you but I will, look at what I did to Raquel
Welch.'
BEN KISSEL The boxing ring is being built, huh?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and if the offender won, sometimes they'd have to fight opponent after opponent until
Jones figured they'd had enough. They'd pretty much have to fight until they lost.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS And sometimes he even made 'em do it naked. And sometimes they'd even put a little kid
against an old lady.
BEN KISSEL Who won?
MARCUS PARKS The kid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)
BEN KISSEL No, that's tough to say!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What I like, you were even saying the other day about the idea of they have to fight and fight
until they get up to Jim Jones himself. And then it's like Mike Tyson Knockout.
BEN KISSEL Yeah! Boss level! Yes! Did Jim Jones ever fight, himself? I assume not, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS No, of course not. No, no, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't knock his sunglasses off, he'd kill them with the power of his gaze.
MARCUS PARKS And some of these punishments, they weren't even that original. Like boxing matches, cause
honestly the boxing matches, that was kind of an original punishment, that took some
imagination.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would love to see them figure that out. Cause you know, honestly, they were sitting there
with a bunch of people fighting and then Jim Jones was like, 'Fight each other.' Or he was
watching Star Trek and saw the end of that episode, being like, 'You know what'd be kind of
sweet is you guys start whaling on each other.' And a couple of other guys were like, 'Yeah.
That would be pretty fucking sweet, wouldn't it? Fight Club! Fight Club! Fight Club!'
BEN KISSEL Uh oh, don't talk about it. So he intertwined punishment and entertainment.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, punishment and entertainment. And sometimes it was just gross, like one dude
they just puked and pissed all over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Eugh.
BEN KISSEL Totally out of ideas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's very Italian.
BEN KISSEL Very GG Allin of them.
MARCUS PARKS Why is that Italian?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's Roman, you know what I mean? It's technically Roman but I say Italian at the same time
because I think they were doing that shit in the Bunga Bunga rooms.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh! Berlusconi!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, but some of the punishments were straight up punishment and participation. He even
started using the live performances as a platform for discipline. But instead of using trusted
plants like they had back in the old days, being raised from the dead was now a punishment.
When Jones approached the offender, they were to fall to the ground as hard as they could
and lay there til Jones though they had suffered long enough, and then Jones would call on
'em to rejoin the ranks of the living.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So basically, you got a job as a part of the show if you fucked up, if you did something
bourgeois, he basically picks you. He then says he has to zap you in the sermon and then you
fall down dead, and at the same time he would touch your body, there was a bunch of people
standing around you, kind of kicking, feeling that you're dead. You have to lay completely still
cause you know that if you don't you're gonna be fucked. You're gonna be fighting Mr. Muggs
in the square circle. And so it's very interesting how, and I think this is a part of the cult
mentality and it grows and grows and grows, because Jim Jones can never be off, right, he
can't be off anymore, there's no off time, there's no time where he's just Jim, he is always the
father, he's always in charge. The show is now completely moved to every aspect of their lives.
They never know when they're not supposed to be on. When they're not supposed to be 'TPT'
The Peoples Temple. When it's like they can't just be hanging out. So it blurs your reality, it's
like taking the clocks out of a casino where you literally just have no clue what's going on or
what you're doing.
BEN KISSEL It's always winning time in a casino.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Blurring the lines between punishment and reward. I think the one thing that I could not
figure out whether this was a punishment or a reward or a privilege, I really thought about this
and I couldn't figure out which one it was, he started involving congregation in his own
personal stigmata. For those of you who don't know, stigmata is when a person's hands bleed,
their palms bleed, as a kind of sympathetic magic to mimic Jesus on the cross. It's supposed to
be a divinely-inspired process. But instead of just using food coloring and corn syrup or even
just like pig's blood or something like that, Jones demanded that human blood be used. And
instead of using his own, he'd make his congregation bleed themselves so he could use their
blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They are very, very disciplined.
BEN KISSEL Very committed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he should be so lucky. WE should be so lucky.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Well just use pig's blood. There's no reason...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, no, no. What if someone tests it?
BEN KISSEL Who's testing it?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The testers! The testers who come testing!
MARCUS PARKS No, he never allowed anybody to test anything. Cause he went back to Indianapolis once and
he did the cancer trick and the Indianapolis Star told him, like, "Listen, we'd love to believe this
is real, you're a hometown boy. Why don't you let us test the cancer?" And Jim Jones said,
"Absolutely not. Because if you test the cancer then our enemies might fake the test results."
BEN KISSEL Oh, I see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's right. He is right, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, is he?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He could've been right. No, I don't think he's right. I think that they're chicken guts. Also, what
I was reading about, I remember the one bit about how he started using cursing in his
sermons. Did you read about that? About how he wanted to start appearing to be more with it
and with the times and being like, "People curse. Say 'fuck'." And the audience would all look
at each other, and then he'd start big chants of "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"
BEN KISSEL Did he do the Carlin bit about 7 words you can't say, the 7 dirty words?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know who does the same shit is Tony Robbins.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Tony Robbins curses like a motherfucker during his talks and shit, cause he's just like, (deep
voice) 'It's because it allows me to connect to my audience.' He had a pituitary gland problem
which is why he's so big.
BEN KISSEL Smart guy.
MARCUS PARKS Well all this shit that Jones made people do that we were just talking about, this was all for
relatively minor infractions. Committing actual crimes sometimes earned pure fucking torture.
See Peoples Temple, like a lot of cults and like a lot of the more insular religions like the
Hasidics here in Brooklyn, they prefer to take care of punishment for serious crimes in-house.
They don't like to involve the police, even when the crime is something as abhorrent as
pedophilia. While priests and rabbis and youth pastors just tend to get shuffled around, if that,
after they fuck up, Peoples Temple took it a step further as they did in the case of pedophile
Peter Wotherspoon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh, it's a bad name, it's a bad name, I don't know. It's a chicken and the egg scenario with the
name.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, Wotherspoon. What happened to this clown?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he showed up and he's just like, (under his breath) 'I just wanna say thank you guys for
having me at Peoples Temple. Love the songs, love the dancing. I may have had sex with a
child... I'm just being upfront, but I promise, pinky swear, that I'll do it to any child in this room.
That I will never, EVER, never do it again. And you can take that, my word is bond.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Let's set up the boxing ring, shall we?
MARCUS PARKS Didn't work out.
BEN KISSEL Didn't work out for this guy, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. No.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, we'll bring him in through the power of god. He will never backslide, for is he is a part
of Peoples Temple then he shall be cured of his pedophilic urges.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not real.
BEN KISSEL But this is where they would invoke god, not socialism, to cure this man of pedophilia, okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, did not work out.
BEN KISSEL No kidding!
MARCUS PARKS Real fast, Peter Wotherspoon molested a 10 year old boy. But instead of taking him to the
police, Jack Beam took Wotherspoon to a tiny little windowless room where Wotherspoon was
instructed to plop his genitals out on a table.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which you'd think at that point you'd be asking a lot of questions.
MARCUS PARKS You'd think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Being like, 'So, what're we... Is this like a show and tell or is this just like a bird trying to entice
another mate, um...?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah. It's more of a show and scream, I think.
MARCUS PARKS And then Jack Beam whacked Wotherspoon's dick and balls with a rubber hose over and over
until they were so swollen they were unrecognizable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yikes. Check, please!
BEN KISSEL Check, please! Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah they had to take him to the hospital, he had to use a catheter for months.
BEN KISSEL My sympathy level is very low for him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, of course, yeah, yeah, he gets what he deserves. But how do you explain to the hospital,
being like, 'My dick and balls fell down the stairs.' You can't just wave off... Obviously it's got
hose marks on it.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah. They shoulda gone to the police. You don't take care of this shit in-house, you
never take care... Because you know, when you look at these communities, over and over
again, taking care of shit in-house only ends in tears. It usually ends in the person doing the
exact same shit as soon as they get better.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Now, as it is with all cults, there's always the question 'why don't you leave?'
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS It was-
BEN KISSEL Well, Marcus...
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL As it is with all cults, the question is... Why don't they leave?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah Marcus, why don't they leave?
MARCUS PARKS I'll tell ya.
BEN KISSEL Oh.
MARCUS PARKS See, most of the time the answer is simple. These people don't have anywhere else to go.
BEN KISSEL Ah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The Peoples Temple has all of your shit.
BEN KISSEL Oh, that's right.
MARCUS PARKS First of all-
BEN KISSEL The answer is so easy. That's right, they have everything.
MARCUS PARKS Well, first of all, when most people go into a cult, their families don't want them to go and so
they have to tell their families like, 'Uh, I'll see you later.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They have to tell their families, their parents to go fuck themselves! They have to burn a bunch
of bridges, they burn all their friends bridges, and then, 'Here's all my money, I'm gonna sign
the lease over to my house to you.' Like all of this shit's insane.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Or the people that join don't have any family to tell "fuck off". They don't have any
property to give, so when they come into Peoples Temple, Peoples Temple gives them
everything and if they leave then they have nothing again. And a lot of these people that were
given jobs through Peoples Temple, they got that job there because their boss is a Peoples
Temple. So if they leave Peoples Temple, they lose their job. And a lot of these people had
families, you know? And they'd given all their shit over to Peoples Temple, their tithing 25% of
their paychecks-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But remember this, what they started doing again, the old story of turning the temperature up
on the frog in the water is that the tithing started at like 10% and moved up to 25%. But then
he started making you write the amount of money you actually make on a piece of paper and
then he would slowly uptick to squeeze what he can out of you, slowly but surely you're giving
90% of your paycheck, and then that stuff is money that you got from them in the first place.
So essentially you're working for Peoples Temple jobs that then pay you money that then that
money's going back into the system. It's like the company dime, that same shit-
MARCUS PARKS It's the company store, it's working for Walmart.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And even if you did end up leaving, Jones made a decree that all former members had to live
at least a hundred miles away. And if they didn't, then Jones would send out his enforcers to
intimidate you into doing so.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS All this power was made possible by Jones' expansion from Redwood Valley south to
California's major cities. He planted a pretty good financial foothold in Los Angeles, but he
knew he could only go so far in that city. Los Angeles gave him money, Jim Jones wanted
power. He decided it was time to really put his stake in a city where he could insert himself
into the public arena in a way he only dreamed of in Indianapolis.
BEN KISSEL And he is going to Des Moines, Iowa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Pearl of Iowa!
BEN KISSEL (singing) Where dreams are made of!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) San Francisco!
BEN KISSEL Ah, San Francisco.
MARCUS PARKS Remember in San Francisco, it was built of a bunch of very different, wild groups. And the
neighborhoods themselves would kind of run themselves. Each part of San Francisco was it's
own little economy, it was its own little world that you can kind of manipulate.
BEN KISSEL There was like rival cult gangs over there. Weren't the Moonies over there at the time as well?
MARCUS PARKS Well, the Moonies were pretty well established at this point.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. At this time, San Francisco was a surprisingly conservative town but now the hippies had
moved in, and now it was the gays, and now the blacks had started to say like, 'Hey, we want
rights too.' Cause they were all pushed into this shitty neighborhood and they're like, 'Listen,
we need influence here. We actually need some change here.' And Jim Jones came in at just
the perfect point to be at the forefront of that movement. He would accomplish shit politically
that seems almost unbelievable if all you know about Jim Jones is Jonestown. This guy had
very real political power, working with and against people that are still making headlines
today. People that are senators now.
BEN KISSEL Who do we got? You wanna name names?
MARCUS PARKS I'm gonna leave it as a surprise.
BEN KISSEL Okay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You'll be excited.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, you'll love it. I'm gonna leave the senator as a fucking surprise.
BEN KISSEL Senator Bernie Sanders.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) But all that, that would take quite a bit of years and a lot of groundwork. Upon
arriving, Jones sought out an influential doctor named Carlton Goodlett who ran one of San
Francisco's biggest black newspapers. Using his mother as a Trojan Horse, Jones played the
dutiful-
BEN KISSEL (chuckles)
MARCUS PARKS I can use that metaphor.
BEN KISSEL It's just Ken Bone calling pregnant women 'human submarines'.
MARCUS PARKS (creepy voice) 'And those little human submarines.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause they were chalk full of semen! Yeah, that's kinda fun. All mothers are Trojan horses
cause they got people in 'em.
BEN KISSEL I see, oh my.
MARCUS PARKS But this was a metaphorical Trojan Horse. He went along to Dr. Carlton Goodlett's office and
he played the dutiful son by his mother's side.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Man, Mommy Jones did a really good job joining up and she is just as manipulative as her son.
She really fucking helps quite a bit.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, she's onboard.
BEN KISSEL So she was all in.
MARCUS PARKS She's onboard for everything.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and so-
BEN KISSEL Was she there during all of the humiliation stuff? And she was fine with it?
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, watching. Just watching. Oh yeah, just watching, loving it.
BEN KISSEL Happy with it, completely happy with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Proud of her son. Proud that her son is finally making money, like our mothers are finally
proud of us even though they still don't truly understand what it is that we do.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS All that Jim Jones' mother cared about was that Jim Jones was a great man. All she cared about
was that he had power, people were following him, and the ends justified the means in every
way whatsoever because the bigger Jim Jones got, the better she felt about her own life. It
boosted her ego.
BEN KISSEL Okay. Sure.
MARCUS PARKS So as Jim Jones was taking his mother to all these doctor visits, he started talking to the doctor
himself and started putting in these little hints, like, 'Yeah, I'm a pastor. Yeah, I do this socialist
church. Yeah, we have a big black membership.'
BEN KISSEL Is this during a proctologist exam?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, Mommy's getting her boobies splashed by the mammograms, how does that work? It's
like a squeezing machine where it goes like (robot sounds). And they're just sitting there,
talking over his mom's nude body.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Well, after they had a few conversations, this Carlton Goodlett guy was like, 'Fuck yeah, I like
the cut of your jib. Come on in, let's get you into San Francisco.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let me ask you something, Goodlett. Do you douche? Clean your butthole.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Do you ever think that Jim Jones was surprised that all this stuff worked?
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
BEN KISSEL He was just like, 'I got another one!'
MARCUS PARKS Very, very much so. He would sometimes, after he'd accomplished something particularly big,
people that were with him would look over at him and he'd just be like, (muttering) 'Jesus
Christ... God, okay. Fucking wow.'
BEN KISSEL Did he ever want this to stop?
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL No, because at some point he'd be like, 'I hope this one doesn't work cause I don't want to
expand anymore.'
MARCUS PARKS It would have to stop completely against his will. But the problem is, again, it's the other side is
that the difference between a normal human being and a cult leader is that a cult leader will
use all this as validation.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Eventually he starts saying, 'Oh, maybe all the bullshit that I'm saying that I know is bullshit,
maybe it's not. Maybe it's coming out of my and I'm actually channeling god.'
BEN KISSEL Is it sort of the double-edged sword where it's like, 'Well they must be right if they believe in
me, they gotta have something.'
MARCUS PARKS Yep. Stephan Jones said this exact same thing. He was quoted in Road to Jonestown saying
something like that. He said the most important thing in Jim Jones' life was how other people
thought of him. He based his entire personality on what other people thought of him. And
what Stephan Jones said is if you've got a thousand people telling you you're the cat's meow,
then you're gonna believe it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (meowing)
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Meow! It was a feedback loop.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS So the more they told him that he was fantastic, the more fantastic he thought he was, the
more powerful he thought he was, and the more they believed in him. So it was this huge
feedback loop that was just snowballing, to mix my metaphors.
BEN KISSEL It's like James Woods' Twitter account. He's such a lunatic.
MARCUS PARKS Well now that Jim Jones had some local cred in San Francisco, he started insinuating himself
into black churches giving guest sermons. And before the churches knew what hit 'em, Jones
had bought an 1800 seat venue and was slowly siphoning off members. Because at this point
when Jim Jones moved to San Francisco, the congregation was the white people in Mendocino
County in Ukiah, and then when he gets to San Francisco and Los Angeles, it starts going back
up towards a majority black congregation. And with that, Peoples Temple was franchised.
Three locations up and down California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah! And sometimes they have Filet-o-Fish. And it's important to franchise, this is where you
make your money, they're not in the church business they're in the real estate business.
BEN KISSEL Your love of Ray Kroc is problematic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Admiration.
BEN KISSEL It is horrible.
MARCUS PARKS It makes me question why I started a business with you.
BEN KISSEL Horrible person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, I'm gonna take us to the top or if not I'm gonna kill all of us.
BEN KISSEL Well... 1 billion served.
MARCUS PARKS As we know with cult leaders, if you don't up the ante, people drift, you gotta constantly be
bonding with your followers, and there's no better way to do that than with the shared hatred
of and fear from an enemy. And it was even better if the enemy was faceless.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah that would be totally scary if he was just a bone face.
MARCUS PARKS And what better way to create another boogieman than with yet another fake, but this time
public, assassination attempt.
BEN KISSEL Ooh.
MARCUS PARKS Even though San Fran and L.A. were becoming more established, the main base of Peoples
Temple was still down in Redwood Valley. It was also isolated enough where any suspicious
activities wouldn't draw the immediate attention of the police. One afternoon, right before
service was about to begin, as a couple hundred people were outside doing culty activities,
Jones was walking through the parking lot.
BEN KISSEL (chuckles)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just in unison, just folding things, making soups, that's all it is.
BEN KISSEL Playing cornhole for some reason.
MARCUS PARKS Actually I would see the Peoples Temple playing a lot of cornhole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a pretty low-impact game, a socialist game.
BEN KISSEL Are they allowed to drink alcohol?
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL Oh they're not.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely not, that is a huge rule. That's something you're gonna get 25, 50 spankings for.
BEN KISSEL Well, if you're drunk...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (slurred) You see, once you get a couple in you the spankings sound better and better.
BEN KISSEL Flip it!
MARCUS PARKS Well they're having kind of a little festival, the band's playing, everything's going great for
Peoples Temple, they're at a very happy moment. They're at a perfect moment to be broken.
BEN KISSEL They're simmering.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, you want people to be happy when the bad shit happens, cause when the people are
happy and the bad shit happens it really fucks with them.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS So Jones is walking across the parking lot, shot rings out, Jones clutches his chest and suddenly
blood is all over his shirt. And so Marceline and Jack Beam, they go up and they grab Jim Jones
and they prop him up. And the dog, Stephan's dog, goes running off in the direction of the
shot, but Jim Jones points everyone in a different direction, saying, "They went that way. Go
that way. Don't follow the dog."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They did a Looney Tunes.
MARCUS PARKS They went that-a-way. And so people went, ran in that direction and Jim Jones was carried
inside. About 30 minutes goes by, everyone's wailing outside-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're thinking he's gonna die-
MARCUS PARKS They're thinking he's dead. They're thinking he's already dead. They're wailing, they're thinking
everything's over. And then, miraculously, Jim Jones walks out of the front door, totally and
completely fine.
BEN KISSEL Ooh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, again, like James Brown with the cape when he falls down and it seems like he's all sick
and then he stands up and he starts dancing.
BEN KISSEL Also, Ronald Reagan, little technique there. Survive the gunshot wound.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, Jack Beam comes out, Marceline comes out, a nurse come out, and they all say he had a
fatal wound. The nurse says the wound was deep enough for me to stick my finger down in.
BEN KISSEL Well that doesn't seem very safe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why are you doing that? Don't hurt him like that, it's ridiculous.
BEN KISSEL Four finger bullet wound, right there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is a Bill Clinton-long gun wound.
MARCUS PARKS And Jim Jones said, "Fear not my people! For I have healed myself."
BEN KISSEL Aw.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What I love is this whole thing too, people were like, 'But the dog...I don't understand. It
seemed to go after one group of people but you pointed the other way.' And he said, 'I did it
on purpose to throw you off because I wanted to show mercy to the assassin.' And they're all
like, 'Oh. Okay.'
MARCUS PARKS Shouldn't we have probably caught that guy to keep him from taking another shot?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Problem is you're thinking about it. And what's the first rule I gotta tell ya is you gotta stop
thinking about it!
BEN KISSEL That's right. It also seems like you could segue this into a Flex Seal commercial.
MARCUS PARKS Wait a second, Flex Seal... Is that the one where they saw the boat in half?
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Yes it is. It's an incredible commercial.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) And to further drive the point home about this supposed miracle, the shirt Jones was
wearing became a temporary relic for the church. They built this big glass display case. Cause it
was a yellow shirt and it was splattered in blood, so it looked super cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He picked it on purpose.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's like, 'Ooh, yellow. That's really gonna show the red on it, and then it kinda becomes an
orange and orange is a fun color, it's like fire.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, they had to make it pop!
BEN KISSEL So it's like the Shroud of Turin-
MARCUS PARKS Like the Shroud of Turin.
BEN KISSEL Jim Jones.
MARCUS PARKS But then, Jones started hearing a rumor that that Mendocino County Sheriff's office had heard
about an assassination attempt, that a man had been shot-
BEN KISSEL Right, cause there is still a real world out there, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, and this is a tiny community, too.
MARCUS PARKS 15,000 people in this community. Word got out and then when Jim Jones heard the rumor that
the cops were gonna come out and ask him a couple of questions, that shirt went into storage
really fucking fast.
BEN KISSEL Oh. Convenient.
MARCUS PARKS But the whole point of this thing was to show the people that their enemies were real, their
enemies were everywhere, and that no place, not even their home base, was safe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, especially their home base. That's why he chose it, he chose it on purpose. Cause also
remember, he's been spending a lot of time on the road. He went to L.A., he went to San
Francisco, he's popping in and out and seeing people but he doesn't have the same day-to-day
effect at Ukiah that he used to. So now when he shows up it's especially like, 'Father's home!'
Everyone's really, really excited to see him and to get some on-on-one time with him. So it
happening here in the heart was very symbolic and very smart of Jim Jones.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And that is when Jim Jones' private security team grew even larger and scarier. The men
who surrounded Jones now wore uniforms, they had button-up shirts, ties, and berets. They
were all trained with guns, they were usually armed, and they all looked mean as fuck.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS And this worked on two levels-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can we get Travis in a uniform? Can we get him a little beret and a little suit?
BEN KISSEL Our one employee, you wanna militarize him?
MARCUS PARKS We got two employees now, we got Travis and Mary.
BEN KISSEL So you want to militarize Travis and Mary?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel like it would help their confidence if we gave them uniforms and we gave them guns and
badges. Right?
BEN KISSEL Guns. Actually it would help everyone's confidence, that is the point of a gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If we had jackets with stars on them and they had suits and berets and guns, we'd look pretty
good.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I will allow it, but we have to sing every time we talk.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love it! (singing) Oh, hello Ben you are my friend, I love to see you again!
BEN KISSEL That is fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do it!
BEN KISSEL No, I can't.
MARCUS PARKS This whole thing worked on two levels. One, it made Jim Jones intimidating to outsiders.
BEN KISSEL No kidding.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, outsiders saw this guy, like, 'Oh, wow-'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This guy's a big deal.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, this guy's a big deal. And it also made him intimidating to people on the inside like, 'Oh,
that guy has a small army. That guy has dudes with guns.' So threats are no longer existential.
Threats are no longer supernatural. Threats are now very real.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well also, planning commission's changed quite a bit because you're sitting there in these
meetings that used to be pretty informal, kind of a group setting, are now... He's standing
there with a group of armed... He's got his fucking whole entourage of people with guns, super
scary-looking. He's just laying on the couch, drinking soda, while everyone else has to stand or
sit on the floor, not allowed to go to the bathroom. It's pretty intense.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL So we can see the escalation here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh no, this is a big jump!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And the feedback loop works even more, because Jim Jones... The assassination
attempts have all been fake, but because he's making his people paranoid, they're feeding
back and making him paranoid as well to the point where he actually gets a body double. But
the body double, eventually starts to question like, 'Hey, if you can heal yourself whenever,
why do I gotta be here?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) 'Just um... The prosthetics are fine, they're itchy. Um, you have a 20 lb head Mr. Jones,
I mean father. Um, I love the suits and the sunglasses are difficult to see through. I honestly
don't particularly understand how you get around just on the day-to-day.'
Just take a bullet for me, Brian.
BEN KISSEL How the hell do you be a body double? Can you imagine that life? That's so crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, my body double on A to Z was a lovely man and he did very good. That's what his job
was, was that he was a double.
BEN KISSEL Yeah but they weren't gonna shoot you on A to Z, you never got to S.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, it depends if it had come down to that. I imagine at some point there is some stipulation
in a Warner Brothers contract somewhere that a stand-in for you is also required to die for
you. And sometimes I would feed him my food to see if he died.
BEN KISSEL (laughs) Greatest body double, the one in Veep. The one that Julia Louis-Dreyfus' daughter is
married to. That is such a funny storyline.
MARCUS PARKS I love it. But still, after all this stuff or possibly because of this stuff, people believed. And word
was getting around San Francisco that a new charismatic, raise-the-dead, heal-the-sick
preacher had showed up in town and was rapidly gaining followers. And that is when a
reporter for the San Francisco Examiner named Lester Kinsolving figured there might be a
story in this Jim Jones fella. By the time Lester was finished investigating, he had a story big
enough to spread over an 8 day series. Things is though, even though Jones freaked out at
first, the stories that were actually substantiated weren't really all that bad. Cause he hinted at
Jim Jones kinda being a scam, but he never came right out and said it. The whole thing was
pretty fucking tame.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also, that was the least, technically the least bad thing within the Peoples Temple at this point
was the healings being fake.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was the serial abuses and spankings and the boxing and the dick-mauling that was the shit
that you can't get to because you didn't know it was happening.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I like that, Darth Maul's father, Dick Maul.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Richard Maul, they all call me Dick.
MARCUS PARKS Well all that stuff was back-loaded. They back-loaded all that bad shit.
BEN KISSEL So he was gonna release that stuff later on-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just the stupidest shit, he'd never do that!
BEN KISSEL Buried the lead here, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS He buried the lead. All that shit was gonna come out in the end. So it seemed like the first four
days, it didn't need to be an eight day series. The first four days it was kinda tame stuff but by
day four, Jim Jones had made quite a big stink. And he's got this Tim Stoen on his side.
BEN KISSEL The lawyer.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah he's got the lawyer on his side. So the San Francisco Examiner, they decided on day four,
they're like, 'Listen, we're not gonna do 5, 6, 7, and 8.' And that's where the harassment, the
threats, the punishment, mostly from Whitey Firestone, that's where it all came from, that's
where it all was. But it was all unsubstantiated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the saddest thing too is that Whitey Firestone was such bad luck all the time that he
couldn't even get this article done. (sad voice) 'Oh I see you put it in article #7. That's not good.
I got my feet stuck in the chair. Honestly, I don't even know how I did it. A bird stole my
sandwich this morning, and then I got locked inside of a refrigerator. I don't know how that
happened, I thought they fixed that so you could get out of it, but... Well, I guess I'll just go
back to working at the nuclear power plant.'
BEN KISSEL Bye, Whitey! So Whitey was the source, here.
MARCUS PARKS Whitey was one of the sources, there were a few sources. But yeah, Whitey was one of 'em.
But the amazing thing about the Kinsolving articles was that it was actually great P.R. for
Peoples Temple. When people read about Jones' supposed healing powers, they didn't think
'oh my god, look at this bullshit.' They thought they'd found salvation!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Think about the articles on Facebook that say like all you have to do is read the three words in
the headline, you just see 'Healing Powers', you don't read 'unsubstantiated', you don't read
the stuff cause you're so desperate, you're like, 'Oh, fuck, that's where I'm gonna go to get rid
of my cancer.'
BEN KISSEL I would never fall for anything dumb like that. Anyway, I've gotta go take my tactical bath. I
bought it on InfoWars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh I love my tactical bath. It makes you bulletproof!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I heard that.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, after Kinsolving, temple membership only increased. This guy helped Jim Jones quite a
bit.
BEN KISSEL Very smart.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and it also bound Jim Jones' followers even closer because there was another enemy to
fight. Fake news.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh no... IT'S ALWAYS BEEN THERE!
BEN KISSEL If there was only an awards show...
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, if only. Now, the threats to their beliefs, they were coming from the outside. And it was
no longer vague, it wasn't faceless. They were now in print, tangible. Like he had something to
point at and say like, 'See? Look! They don't want me to accomplish the things that I wanna
accomplish. They don't wanna let us accomplish the things that we wanna accomplish. That's
fake news.' They even got a few people from the media on their side as well. There was this
one local TV reporter, his name was Michael Prokes, he read the Kinsolving articles and he
traveled down to Redwood Valley. He figured maybe there's a further story to this because he
read it and he was skeptical, like, 'Ah, this sounds kinda weird, let's go check it out.' But before
long, fucking Prokes was the press secretary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again, you hire 'em! All you gotta do is hire 'em! I will also put this on the magnetism of the
group of people at the Peoples Temple. The people there seem like they were so sweet and
genuine and nice. This is, to me, the saddest part about this story is that Aum Shinrikyo they
became brain dead fucking servers of Cobra, really, really intense and same with Children of
God, it was molesters and the molested. But this is good people that were a fun crowd. They
were just being used terribly.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now even though Jones was able to deflect bad press from the outside, he had his own
little rebellion brewing within. In 1973, Jones was faced with the Gang of Eight, which is where
we'll pick back up next time on part four of Jonestown.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness, all right. Well we are really getting through it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I gotta say check, please.
BEN KISSEL Check, please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) Just get outta there!
Try not to join a cult.
MARCUS PARKS Try not to join a cult.
BEN KISSEL So from Indiana to L.A., now he's in San Francisco.
MARCUS PARKS Indiana to Redwood Valley to L.A. to San Francisco.
BEN KISSEL Wow. All right. Whew. I mean, I understand, it seems like a slow burn, slow process to
becoming... I still try to remember how horrible this all ends.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We wanna get outta the bullshit, right? The concept is like everybody doesn't care about
anybody else and the world's in constant strife, we're in the middle of this right now. It seems
like in 2018 it's such a prime spot for cults, I imagine there's gotta be shit popping up that we
will hear about eventually, which god I'm excited for. I shouldn't be, but we'll see what
happens.
BEN KISSEL All right, so what do we have to do now? Should we thank people for Patreon?
MARCUS PARKS Thank you very much for giving to our Patreon. If you guys feel like we deserve a little
something extra, just got to patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft, we appreciate each and every
single one of ya.
BEN KISSEL Yep, I wanna thank everyone. I ran into a bunch of fans yesterday at the 25th anniversary of
RAW and it was so fun. So that was exciting to see everyone.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hell yeah. I wanna make a tiny correction. I was corrected, I said last week that the Scientology
drug rehab program was Al-Anon and it is not, it is Narc-Anon, I fucked up, I fucked up. Al-
Anon is actually a nice organization. Well it's fine, it's from Alcoholics Anonymous, depending if
you like it or not, there's some people that don't. And I don't care, you gotta do what you
gotta do.
BEN KISSEL There it is, corrections have been made!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I did it. So follow us on Twitter @henrylovesyou, @marcusparks, @benkissel. Follow us on
Instagram @drfantasty, @marcusparks, @benkissel1. And follow us on the horseshit
@lpontheleft.
BEN KISSEL All right. And make sure you listen to all of the shows here on the Last Podcast Network. Abe
Lincoln's Top Hat for everything political, Roundtable, we got a couple new episodes coming
out, Page 7, you know where. Just go to the website and peruse, we got some new shows
coming out, I think you'll enjoy them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan!
BEN KISSEL Hail yourselves, everyone!
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail me.
BEN KISSEL Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail love. It is real.
BEN KISSEL Congratulations on your engagement. Are you gonna get married before Holden does?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know if I can kill him like that, I don't know if I can go ahead and pull a Sweeps Week on
him like that.
BEN KISSEL (laughs) I think you could.