Last Update on the Left - Episode 17 - The Road to Jonestown: An Interview with Jeff Guinn

Jeff Guinn returns to the show! This week on Last Update, the boys sit down with the acclaimed author of The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple to revisit the legend of cult leader Jim Jones, the rise & fall of the Peoples Temple, and the horrifying events that led to the Jonestown massacre.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  That's when the cannibalism started.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Last update on the left.

• 1:16Marcus Parks?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to Last Update on the Left. My name's Marcus Parks. I'm here with Henry Zebrowski. And

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Ed Larson.

• 1:24Marcus Parks?

  And today

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Ready to join.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Don't, hey, not automatically hear it out first.

• 1:33Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, hear the pitch. And our guest today is a returning guest. So far, the biggest response we've got from a guest on Last Update on the Left. Welcome back, Jeff Guinn. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  Thanks, it's good to be back on the show.

• 1:50Marcus Parks?

  So last time we talked to you about Waco and your new book about Waco. But many years ago, over almost 300 episodes ago, we did a five-part series on Jonestown. And your book, Road to Jonestown, I think it had been released a year before, was an invaluable resource to us. And it's still honestly, one of my favorite nonfiction books. It's one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. So thank you very much for that book.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 2:21Marcus Parks?

  Incredible.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  You talking about, I'll always remember you describing the idea of him believing that laser beams would like come out of his eyes. Like Jesus energy was coming out of his face. And it was like, he does have a lot of face.

• 2:34Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, that's why he had to wear sunglasses.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  Well, that was the excuse anyway.

• 2:41Marcus Parks?

  But of course, it was to hide the red eyes from the uppers and downers he was constantly taking.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:47Marcus Parks?

  But let's start with the macro. Big questions. So in looking at like mass suicides, it seems like there are kind of like three different reasons why mass suicides happen. And I know that Jonestown was much more of a mass murder than a mass suicide. But you know, it seems to be it's some of them are to avoid wrath. It's to avoid approaching armies, to avoid, you know, a fate worse than death. Some of them are suicides of despair, like how so many people in Nazi Germany committed suicide after, you know, the Nazis lost. And then, of course, there's religiously motivated suicide when it comes to like, say, like Heaven's Gate.

• 3:29Marcus Parks?

  Like which of these three do you think loomed largest over Jonestown in the eventual, you know, end?

• 3:37Speaker 04

  I had a lot of trouble trying to figure that out. And I finally decided, and it took months really, that to try to say there was one overriding reason just didn't work in this case. And that's what makes this whole thing so unique. There really hasn't been anything like it that we can say, what happened in Jonestown is especially like what happened at such and such a place. The reason that isn't the case is that by the time over 900 people are in Jonestown in November 1978, they're no longer there for any one specific reason.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  They don't all have one reason in common. Jim Jones, a lot through basic instinct, more than anything else, understood that if he was gonna have a big following, he was never gonna sell everybody on any one aspect of what he was trying to do. So you've got people in Jonestown, a number of them, who were there because they believe Jim Jones is more than human, that there's some godlike aspect to him, and that they are joining him in some great sort of moment, that there will be a wonderful life beyond.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  And in this case, they're doing exactly what a greater-than-human leader wants them to do. So there are some people like that. There are people who have been convinced by Jim Jones as they're out here in the jungle for a long time, no other communication, that the American government is coming to kill them all. We're dangerous to the government. They're coming to get us. If we let, if we let them come and we fight them and they're gonna kill us and they'll take our children off and they'll do terrible things to the children. So we're avoiding that. And then you had at least a couple hundred people

• 5:46Speaker 04

  who had been living out in the damn jungle for so long. And I have been there, guys. I used a machete and I cut my way into the place this was. And it was in the monsoon season, triple-decker canopy, so the sun hardly gets through in most places, snakes everywhere, biting insects. They've cleared a few hundred acres of land. And they work it like slaves every day. And the hours are 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM. And they're physically exhausted. And there's not enough food and they're half-starved. And they just decide, screw it. He says, we've all gotta die, let's just get this crap over with.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  So you're right, there are three different reasons for this kind of mass death. But to say only one was predominant misses the whole point. Jones was selling all kinds of things to different people. And that was part of his allure. He could convince anybody. Let's say you three, each one of you, Jones might have convinced you need to be part of People's Temple for an entirely different reason. You had something to ask, I'm sorry.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  That was actually a big question in my mind is what was the X factor? Is it just because he gave a good enough answer to each unique person's like predicament? And he was like multifaceted, like he was a mirror? I know that Charles Manson said that, right? Famously, that, you know, you look down on me, I'm the devil, you look at me, I'm God.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  But see, here's the difference.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Charlie Manson, at his best, could only convince a couple dozen drug-addled kids.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  They needed to do what he said. Jim Jones created People's Temple out of a whole conglomerate of humanity.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  From elderly, get black ghetto dwellers to white Indiana farmers, to great intellectuals out in California who were lawyers, who were accountants, who were really brilliant people, who were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And I, there are probably right now, if you guys are feeling brave, three or 400 hours of Jim Jones's recorded sermons at People's Temple.

• 8:13Marcus Parks?

  I've listened to many of them.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're fascinating.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Well, then you know. And I have listened, as part of my book, I felt obligated. I listened to everyone that's out there.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Woo.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Thousands of hours of sitting up here in the same room I'm talking from now, listening to Jim Jones. And at first, you just think, my God, it's a mess. It's rambling, it makes no sense. But then you start to pick some things out. And this man had an inherent oratorical brilliance. And what he would do in the course of these five-hour marathons is he would touch on all different kinds of approaches. He'd spend 20 minutes talking to the true Bible believers, quoting scripture, being dramatic as hell.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Then he'd talk to the atheists, the ones who didn't believe in God at all. And he'd make fun of a sky god who says he's gonna do all these wonderful things and never does. And he'd throw the Bible on the floor and stamp on it. And then he'd talk for 20 minutes about all the social injustice in America. And you guys are much younger than me. But I promise you, in the 1960s to mid 70s, when all the racial discrimination, the hatred, the holding down of women's rights, the whole economic disparity, it's coming up. It's being discussed in public for the first times.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  And Jim Jones touches on that. And he has people following him who don't care about religion at all. They're interested in socialism. Everybody getting a fair chance. So that's why everybody who followed Jim Jones, every sermon he preached, they would hear something that seemed to speak directly to them. And it worked. I mean, you say you've heard a lot of these tapes, right?

• 10:23Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Didn't you, after a while, start picking up that, wait a minute, we're getting something for everybody?

• 10:29Marcus Parks?

  Well, I mean, I think he himself even said, I can be all things to all people. I can be whoever you want me to be. He came out and said it. He said the quiet part out loud to people.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  There was no quiet part.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was never quiet.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  So in listening to this for all those hours, like what did he say that you were like, oh, that makes sense, I'm with that? Like what, what, where did he get, what did he get you on?

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Okay, here's the scary thing. I have written about a lot of controversial subjects. My books usually look at iconic events where things happened that have affected us ever since, right? And I never, ever, in spending three years researching Charlie Manson, thought, gee, I'd wish I'd been out at Spahn Ranch.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Doom buggies are awesome.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  I never, in three years of studying Waco and the Branch Davidians, thought for a moment there was anything to David Koresh that would interest me, that would make me willing to do anything. But Jim Jones was out in Greyhound buses, traveling around the country with his followers, going to different college towns, talking to different college audiences, and challenging the college kids. What, how many of you think racial discrimination is wrong? How much of you think misogyny is wrong, that women aren't treated fairly in America? How many of you think there's too many poor people in America where they don't have to be?

• 12:10Speaker 04

  Well, why do you think you're gonna change it, sitting around on a college campus, listening to professors give you lectures? You come with us right now, and tomorrow, we will have you out, in that part of America where help is so desperately needed, and you can actually do something.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  And I'm, I'm in college, University of Texas in Austin, these years he's going out there. And he gets into Texas, he gets to Houston a few times, never seems to get to Austin, and I'm glad he didn't. Because I was very socially conscious in college. I wanted to do something. I wanted to help make a difference. And I can just see myself, 20 years old, hearing about this Jones guy, going to see him, hearing him say that, and jumping on the Greyhound bus. I wouldn't do it now, I wouldn't do it when I was old enough, maybe to have a better sense of balance, but I could see myself at that point in my life going, yeah, I want to do

• 13:15Speaker 04

  this, I'll give up everything, and I'll follow you.

• 13:19Marcus Parks?

  Well, that was one of our biggest questions when we were doing the Jonestown series, is that, you know, Jim Jones accomplished some pretty impressive things. He desegregated Indianapolis. He, and that was one of our biggest questions, is that, like, did Jim Jones believe in these things, or did he just see this as a path? Did he just see it as, these people, no one is paying attention to these people here, and I can manipulate these people and hold power over them?

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Again, the things you're saying are the things I thought I was probably gonna find.

• 13:51Marcus Parks?

  Right.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  When I started looking. And when I say I spent three years, I really did. I went everywhere Jim Jones had been, where he grew up, where he had his first church, storefront church in Indianapolis, followed him all over the damn world, right, right to Guyana. And I heard something when I was in Indiana, that just shocked me. I'm in Lynn, the little farm town where he grows up, right? He's the weird kid.

• 14:19Marcus Parks?

  I've been there.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, see, he had funerals for animals. I mean, he was, he was the weird guy in a community where everybody else wants to conform.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  And he was like a preacher fanboy, right? Like, he would go and kind of watch, yeah, church.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Five churches in this little town. Jim, when he's a kid, goes to all five, because he's picking up on what the different preachers are doing. But here's the thing, every Saturday, Lynn, Indiana, he's a poor kid, right? And he's got maybe one nice shirt and pair of pants. Every Saturday, he gets on the bus, and he goes about 30 miles to the town of Richmond, which is the big town in the area. And Richmond is so socially and racially segregated, there's just no believing it almost. I mean, the white people tolerate black people in town because you need gardeners, you need

• 15:17Speaker 04

  maids, you know, they, they know we're not equals. And a lot of black hobos would be in Richmond in every, any given time, because they're coming in on the train, they're riding the rails, and they hop off in Richmond because the big towns are where you might be able to beg a few, a few coins and get something to eat. Jim Jones, 15, 16, 17, every Saturday, takes that bus into Richmond, and he goes to this place by the tracks, where white people do not go. And he preaches. He stands up and he talks about, we are all equal, your life isn't fair, but we're going

• 16:02Speaker 04

  to change that. And the only thing he ever got from that was beaten up a few times. What would, could he possibly be getting out of that? When he's in Indianapolis, almost single-handed, he desegregates a major city. Nobody else is trying it, Jim Jones does it. So that was the good part. I got in trouble with the Trump administration. Somebody from a magazine, I believe it was Rolling Stone, called me when the book came out, and said, hey, it sounds to us like you're saying Donald Trump is a lot like Jim Jones.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  And I said, that absolutely is not true, because a few times in his life, Jim Jones things that were, did things that were good for people.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Can I ask, like, maybe, this is not a, this is not about just helping me, but the idea of, where does the line, you think, obviously, we're all armchair psychiatrists, of the line between...

• 17:09Speaker 04

  We all are.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Yes, of pathological confidence into, like, some form of, like, I would call what he has, like, some form of souped-up antisocial personality disorder, but he, it's like the opposite of it. Like, he has a, he's like an ultimate people reader that had bad intentions. So, like, where does that, did you think that it's, it's like a mental disorder? Like, something like that?

• 17:35Speaker 04

  I think there are always going to be people who have tendencies towards megalomania. I am great, I am special, I am going to do amazing things. And we've all met people like that.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  And most of them don't do jack.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  But then you get someone like him. He's got all these crazy dreams that a poor farm kid in rural Indiana, I mean, it's never gonna happen. And then, in this first ministry of his, in Indianapolis, he actually makes some things happen. And he gets followers, people who have seen him do this, who absolutely believe everything he does is perfect. Oh, tell us more, you can do nothing wrong. And you get isolated from the kinds of things the rest of us have to deal with every day that remind us, we may think we're great, the rest of the world is not agreeing with that. So that starts to build.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  He goes out to California because he wants to be even more important, and damned if he doesn't pull it off again, but now he's using drugs. And he's using drugs all the time. And again, as a child of the 60s and early 70s, I saw people who were, you know, 24/7, usually taking uppers so they'd get all worked up, and then if they want to go to sleep, they gotta take a handful of downers to do that. And you start losing more contact with the real world, with real balance. And by the time he's in Guyana, he's got 900 people in this remote jungle outpost.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  They have nowhere to go. If they wanted to leave, you gotta get through the jungle. And folks, there are big cats in that jungle that will eat you, there are poisonous snakes that will kill you with one strike. They're stuck there with him, and they have, they're doing whatever he says, and he goes completely out of it. So, yes, he, he always had tendencies, like, hopefully, very few people completely succumb to, that I am better, there is something about me that is better.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know anything about that, we just live in Los Angeles.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  I've never met any of these, anybody that you described.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  The rest of us just hope. When I was eight, I knew I was gonna play for the San Francisco Giants with my hero, Willie Mays, and then somebody threw me a curveball.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  And I realized it ain't happening. I better learn how to write books because I can't hit decent pitching.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  But Jim Jones never has that. It's always, wait a minute, they said this couldn't be done.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  And I did it.

• 20:38Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  They said it in Indianapolis, they said it in California, and he did it. You mix that with drugs and with literally thousands of followers, including attractive women, who are going to do whatever you ask and think it's an honor. And like every other demagogue with any sort of even religious following, yes, Jim Jones had sex with his followers. That's almost inevitably part of it. But was he crazy from the get-go? Well, I don't know, but if he was, then at least for a while, that craziness resulted in some real social justice for people.

• 21:24Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, and concerning his followers, like I, I know that there were a few that followed him from Indianapolis and were there on that last day in Guyana. Like, do you think that some of those people were still on that last day waiting for the good man who desegregated Indianapolis to come back?

• 21:45Speaker 04

  When I say what, when I answer that question, please understand, I'm not answering it through second or third-hand information. There are a few people who survived that day.

• 21:57Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  And one of them in particular, Tim Carter.

• 22:01Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  Shared everything with me and in all the years since that book of known Tim and some of these other folks, survivors, and I have come to truly respect them. So I can tell you, when I tell you that on this last day,

• 22:20Speaker 04

  there actually were people who thought that great young pioneer still stood before them.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Maybe Father had a little problem with too many drugs.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Maybe Father was screwing a few women besides his wife. And maybe Father sometimes said some pretty stupid things when he's up there. But he is also the man who said 30 years ago,

• 22:52Speaker 04

  "Help me and we will change Indianapolis." And he did it. "Come with me to California and in some of the great cities in that state, San Francisco particularly, we are going to bring social justice to the downtrodden." He not only did that, these people who'd come from Indiana saw some of the most famous California show business folks and the top politicians coming to People's Temple to testify how wonderful Jim Jones is. So you're damn straight, there were some people who still believed, okay, maybe he's gotten a little weird as the years have gone by,

• 23:37Speaker 04

  but still, when he says we're gonna do some great thing, we do it.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  I find it so interesting that cult leaders all accidentally, they follow like very similar roadmaps. Like now we're seeing the ironic cult leader like Keith Raniere, who is up, he seems to, his cult, like NXIVM was a, an entire sort of amalgamation of, he stole from LRH, he stole from this, he stole from various things.

• 24:04Marcus Parks?

  LRH is, by the way, he's, he is L. Ron Hubbard. He likes to call L. Ron Hubbard.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  As he would appear, as he would approve of.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  You know, it's interesting, I, I did get some, some messages from some of your fans and, and audience members after I was on the show. And they each seemed to love each of you guys for different reasons.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Yes, very much so.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  One of you in particular, I'm not gonna say who, they were going, "That's the guy you better watch out for."

• 24:35Speaker 01

  I'm not doing anything bad. I've been nothing but good. I've been good. I've been good.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  I'm not naming names, fellas.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  But see, here, I, I agree with you completely that almost all these demagogues are gonna find so many things in common, including Jones, who stole liberally from, from other people, particularly Father Divine. But here is the one difference, the one damn difference that I cannot get past. I counted up and so far spent 14 years of my adult life researching and writing about cults.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Okay? Now, every other example I've seen, people end up following a demagogue, a false leader, because they believe they're getting something great for it. Manson said, "We're gonna have helter-skelter and you're gonna help me rule the world." David Koresh promised, "We're going to lead the fight at the end of the world against Babylon, and we are gonna be in the foremost of God's army, and then we're gonna help rule this thousand kingdom of God." Only People's Temple. Nobody ever joined People's Temple because they were promised, "You're gonna get rich.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  God's gonna love you, you're all gonna, you've got a ticket to heaven if you follow me." Anyone who joined People's Temple gave, rather than God, all their possessions. But they didn't see their possessions turned into the leader having a mansion and fancy cars and $10,000 suits. They saw their possessions go to secondhand stores and get sold and all that money be used for free meals for starving people. Free clothing outlets, come in, pick what you need, no questions asked. And to me, the most amazing thing,

• 26:44Speaker 04

  People's Temple took teenagers in the ghetto, kids whose only future was crime in the streets, and they sent them to college, they paid everything. Not just tuition and books, they bought houses they turned into dormitories. I met people while I'm writing this book who said, "If it weren't for Jim Jones and People's Temple, I'd have been dead long ago." And instead, I've got this. And they mean it. They, that doesn't mean they forgive the horrible things that end up happening. That's inexcusable, and I'm not trying to say Jim Jones is a misunderstood saint.

• 27:24Marcus Parks?

  No, no.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  But to understand him, to understand People's Temple, the crucial thing to get is that the people who are joining this, and it's unique, pretty much.

• 27:39Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  Are doing it because they wanna help other people.

• 27:45Marcus Parks?

  It's incredible.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's using their best quality against them.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  Well, see, that's the thing. Jim Jones is attracting people because of good qualities.

• 27:55Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  We can all think not just of religious demagogues, but political leaders who get followings because they appeal to people's bad side. Be your worst. It's good.

• 28:09Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  And here you've got somebody who's gonna do these awful things that culminate in one of the greatest mass murders

• 28:19Speaker 04

  in history. And yet, the core of it, the beginning of it, were things that, in retrospect, seem impossible that they could have been achieved in that time and place, and yet, people benefited. That's why it's so troubling. That's why there's, it's so multi-dimensional.

• 28:41Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it's the question of, you know, was this a man who always had good intentions and he just fell to his, his worst side? Or if this is all just opportunism from the start? I mean, that's an impossible question to answer, I know, but it's the one that always comes up in my mind when I think about Jim Jones.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Well, of course it does. And that's another reason why all these years later, we're still talking about it.

• 29:09Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, do you think that he had the capacity to be a great man?

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Well, in some ways, he was a great man for a while. I mean, we have to accept that. I wrote in the book that if, on those Greyhound buses, they were taken from Indiana to California, Jim Jones had died in a highway wreck, he would be remembered today as one of the first early pioneers of the civil rights movement.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, he'd have, there'd be like a statue of him in Indianapolis.

• 29:41Speaker 04

  Deservedly.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  I mean, I've talked, I've talked to the black people in Indianapolis who first joined his church, Community Unity, in a little storefront. And he started this church, him and his wife, Marcelline, in the worst of the ghettos. And there were lots of people trying storefront churches. You'd rent a store, you'd put up some folding chairs, you'd hand out leaflets, you'd see if some of these black folks would come in, and maybe some of them would for a couple of weeks because it was different. But then they'd wander off.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Jim Jones did it differently. He gets a storefront church. He goes to a Quaker missionary in town named Ron Haldeman. And I met Ron and talked with him for a long time. And told Haldeman, I want to do something for black people. I'm going to go right into the heart of the ghetto. And I'm not only going to tell those folks there's hope, but I'm going to do something for them. He promised, and these are his exact words. I am going to give those poor black people a church that gives them something now. Not promises, well, you're suffering and nobody's fair, but someday you'll go to heaven and live in paradise.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  Haldeman described what would happen at one of these storefront gatherings. He goes there maybe a month after Jones has started the thing. And Jones said, well, you know, we've got a couple dozen people that are coming back. Haldeman wanted to see for himself. And so instead of a church service, Jones comes walking up to the front and said, who's got a problem? And Haldeman said, this little elderly black lady, very frail, kind of waves her hand. And she says, the electric company is hurting me. I pay all my bills, but they say they didn't get my payment last time. And I got a family, I got baby grandchildren living with me in my little apartment.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  And they've turned off my power. And the little ones are cold because we got no heating. I can't cook them any food. I don't know what to do. And Jones says, we're going to fix that. Let's write a letter right now. What should we put in the letter? What are the ideas? And he asks everybody to suggest some things. And they write the letter. Jones said, today's Sunday. Tomorrow, I'm taking this letter to the power company. We're going to fix this. I'm back next Sunday. And everybody comes back, you know, to see how he'd screwed up. And he asked the little lady, tell them. And she said, the power company people came out.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  They said they made a mistake. The power's back on. And she then starts crying and praising everybody there, saying, all of you did this, you know? You, God led me here to all of you and you fixed it. And Pastor Jones, most of all. And Jones says, see this crew something. We're a family. We're in it together. And not only are we in it together. We change things. See, keep coming. You'll get things that you deserve. And he did, and he built on that. Now, tell me, guys, any one of you three, you're used to studying demagogues who are defrauding people, faking them out and everything.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  If you'd been in that storefront church and seen what Ron Haldeman saw, would you start thinking that maybe this Jim Jones guy has some kind of special ability?

• 33:33Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Of course. That's the ideas that you're looking for, especially if you're already in the spot. Right? You're there. You're looking for an answer. You are here to, you are obviously in trouble. We're now at this spot where you're, you've already heard that other people went to this place and they got helped. And then you go and you see that he does this. And whatever it was that he did, because he probably just got the gift of gab like nobody's business.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  He probably went in and bitched his supervisor until just to get rid of him.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  You're like, alright, yeah, that's what my mom taught me.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Well, and that's the other thing is when you're poor and you get so desperate, you feel so powerless. You know, you think that a hundred dollars is $20,000, you know? And it's just like, you get so beat down and destitute and you see this dude come in and get results, of course you're going to follow.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Look at Mr. Beast.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  And also remember, they've been going to other churches in Indianapolis, usually with black ministers, who are saying to them, this is God testing us, but someday you're going to be in paradise. Well, if you're a little old lady who's got hungry grandchildren who are shivering, and here's this white guy. And so what the black people I talked to, the old timers in Indianapolis would tell me is he preached like a black man and he got stuff done like a white one. That was the combination.

• 35:01Marcus Parks?

  I mean, these are, I mean, we're talking a lot about like Jim Jones's like big qualities, the, the things that, that they, that his followers saw. But one, one of the things that I loved about your book is that you really painted a picture of just how incredibly weird Jim Jones was, like personally, a very, very strange person. You mentioned the animal funerals earlier from when he was a child, just these strange things that he did. Like, did his followers see those as just like mere eccentricities? Because at the same time that he's, you know, getting people's lights turned back on, he's selling spider monkeys door to door.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Oh, more than that. He, he's faking all kinds of miracles and revival meetings to get donations to keep the straight church going. What he, what he was able to sell to his followers was not spider monkeys. But what he could sell was this philosophy. Sometimes we have to do things that will keep the church financially viable. That will make people curious enough to come in. That's why I have to do certain things. I have to act a certain way. But it's to recruit people in just to get them interested. And once they hear our real messages,

• 36:30Speaker 04

  they're going to want to be with us and they're going to want to do the right things. So say people who've been with him from Indiana all the way to Jonestown. I mean, it's been three decades that they're accepting the idea, yeah, Jim's weird. And he does some weird things, but a lot of it is just an act he's putting on to make people pay attention.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  When he was, by that point, I guess like I remember from the book, when they were looking at him, like Jim Jones at that style. Because I know like he got more and more separated from kind of the main body of the people, but there were the old people, weren't there people there that were kind of there from the beginning that knew him as like not father, but like you knew him as Jim more so?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  Oh, very much so.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Like, what were those, like, were those the people in the end, like, to the very, very end, from the survivor's perspective? Like, did they know what was coming was real bad? Or they knew that, like, you know, like, how do you get locked in that hard? I guess. That's what I'm trying to say. Where it's like, you don't look at him like he's a god. You know him as Jim. And you're like, how the fuck am I, how the fuck are they still there?

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Here's, here's the best answer to that. And I got this, Tim Carter first said it to me. But I, I talked since to Jones's surviving sons. I talked to a guy who's my age now, seventies, who was part of Jones's Indiana entourage when he was just 15, 16 years old. And I would ask the question. I can see where when you first start with him and you see some of these great things happen and you think it's wonderful. But then come on, some of this is just too bizarre. And Tim Carter told me this first, but I tested it on the others.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  And they all said, yeah, that's exactly it. And Tim said, it's this, it's the analogy of the frog in a pot of water. You put the frog in a pot of lukewarm water with the flame a little low and he'll just sit there and you turn up the flame gradually. And he'll sit there till he's getting boiled alive and didn't realize it, and then he can't get out. He said, that's the way Jim Jones worked. A little weird? Okay, we accept that. Look at this great thing. Weirder? Okay, here's a great thing. Weirder? And it built up until finally what you've done. You're sitting in the goddamn jungle and guys, please understand,

• 39:05Speaker 04

  this ain't like those Tarzan movies where the trees are real separated and there's nice little monkeys and beautiful birds. They are in this jungle. They can't get away. They've given away all their possessions. They've told their family and friends, I don't want anything to do with you ever again because you don't understand Jim. And pride is involved. There's no place left to go.

• 39:35Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  What are you going to do? Are you going to stand there in Jonestown and admit to yourself, I was wrong the whole time? And look where it got me? That's not human nature. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Jim Jones Jr., a wonderful, wonderful guy. I mean, I can't think of too many people I like more than Jimmy. Wonderful guy. And I asked him, you know, all these years later, we're just sitting at his house in California. On the day that Jones said, we're all going to do this together. And they didn't drink Kool-Aid, of course. It was Flava Aid with cyanide. But tell them they're going to do that.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  Jimmy and some of the others are across the jungle in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. And of course, terrible things happened to them there. But they're not dying right then. And I said, Jimmy, if you had been there in Jonestown with your young wife, you're just married, with your mom and siblings and nieces and nephews and your dad and people you love. And you're being told, line up, drink this stuff, die. Would you have done it? And he thought about it a while. He said, you know,

• 41:01Speaker 04

  I can't definitely say that I would have, but I, I can't say I wouldn't. I was feeling so worn out by then. I'd seen all the good stuff, but boy, I'd seen the crazy stuff. And I think it might've been that I just would've looked at him and said, I'm tired of this shit. Give me your damn poison.

• 41:24Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. I mean, at the end of it, you know, when, as we all know, you know, the catalyst for the massacre came when Congressman Leo Ryan came to, and, and I don't know if you know this, but we just did a long series on Patty Hearst and Leo Ryan was actually one of the main people that was trying to get, you knew about this, that he wrote the note, hang in there?

• 41:47Speaker 04

  Oh, Leo Ryan got into a lot of things.

• 41:49Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  He, of course, I couldn't interview him, but I interviewed Jim Wright, who was Speaker of the House at the time. And, and he said, well, you know, Leo originally promised that he was going to go over there with a number of other members of Congress to show that the problem with People's Temple was more than just his California district, but nobody would go with him. And I said, why? They said, well, Leo was a master of getting the media to talk to him. Any other member of Congress who went would have been his supporting cast and their egos weren't going to accept that.

• 42:29Marcus Parks?

  Well, I, well, speaking of like, now that we're kind of on the subject a little bit of Patty Hearst, like we just did, we really got into the Symbionese Liberation Army.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:39Marcus Parks?

  And the thing that, the thing that both the SLA and the People's Temple share is that they would use one word to get people to do shit that they didn't want to do. Bourgeois. What do you think in, in that if people didn't want to shit with the door closed in SLA? Bourgeois. You know, if you didn't want to eat mung beans every day? Bourgeois. And I know in Jones, or at least, I mean, going even back to Ukiah, they would use that excuse. Like, what did you think the power of that word was with People's Temple?

• 43:15Speaker 04

  We tend to look at past events from the perspective of the moment we're living in now.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  Uh, it helped when I wrote this book that I was young and impressionable and hopeful about the time Jim Jones was, was doing this stuff. I wouldn't have joined the Symbionese Liberation Army because those guys would have scared the shit out of me. So that wasn't going to happen. But there were so many of us from all different kinds of backgrounds. I'd been a poor kid myself, so that made a difference. But I knew a lot of rich kids who felt guilty.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  And that was, that was ploy that could always work.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  You just don't want to give up all these things that you've got, all these comforts, when there are people who are suffering so greatly. If you close that door when you're on the toilet, if you won't give one of your fellow SLA members a blowjob, that means that you think you're too good to do this. Fine, get the hell out of here. We need real people who care. And as you can see, I mean, with the SLA, it worked. Some, you know, some people, pretty well off people who became famous sports agents and other things later, you know, in their lives.

• 44:48Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Got swept up in it. You get Patty Hearst, the poor little rich girl. And of course, you know, People's Temple was involved in all that too. You may, you may remember.

• 45:00Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. With the, the food programs.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  Jim Jones wanted to play it both ways. He told his members, well, we really sympathize with SLA.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  But if we offer Mr. Hearst some money, just say, we're with you, we're going to try to help, then that would make us look good to the newspapers he runs. So again, there's Jones saying, we're doing one thing to further the cause in another way and getting people to buy into that. Yeah, you'll suck up to Hearst and the Hearst family, but that's because that'll make the newspapers treat us more favorably and we can help needy people even more.

• 45:42Marcus Parks?

  Sure. And so during that time in San Francisco, like I know that Jim Jones, um, he ran the Flavor Aid test twice, right? Like where he told every-

• 45:55Speaker 04

  He ran it once, once in San Francisco.

• 45:57Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Uh, he had a committee of the, of church leaders and locked them away with him and had them all drink something instead of poison, you're going to die in 45 minutes. And he had a couple, uh, players there too. One of them pretended to try to run out of the room and was shot by a gun with blanks. Another, well, I can feel, I can feel my limbs are starting to go numb, which made a lot of the other ones go, oh my God, I feel it too. Then he told them, well, this was just a test and you passed it. Then in Guyana, he has what they call white nights.

• 46:33Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  And the reason they called it white night is it's a night of tragedy, but people always say black is bad and white is good. So he flips it around. So a terrible night is going to be a white night. And he gathers everybody and said, you know, you need to drink this stuff. And then he tells them they've been poisoned and he's testing. What this shows him is that for whatever reason, most, not all, but most of the people there would do this. And he thinks about it. And after that, he tells the doctor, Dr. Larry Schott, who himself is a great, interesting guy.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  And Schott sends out for one pound of cyanide, powdered cyanide, enough for 1,800 lethal doses. It costs $8.85.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  And after that, Jim Jones, with him, it's not a matter of will he at some point really do it? It was a matter of when.

• 47:41Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  And Leo Ryan gave him that moment. But if it hadn't been Leo Ryan, it would have been something. Jones was sort of at the end there in Guyana. He thought maybe they could move to Russia. The Russians weren't going to take him. The Guyanese were getting kind of antsy about the whole thing. It was possible that US legalities for some of the children that were in Jonestown were going to get those kids out of there. And that was Jones's big hold on so many of his followers.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  He just wants the time to make this one big, final dramatic statement. And he does.

• 48:21Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  It definitely, it definitely feels like sometimes with one of these organizations, the group is in the head of the leader. Like they're all like in his head. And then when he decides to die by suicide, it's almost like he, that's what the action is. I could see what you say about Jimmy Jones Jr. saying, I was just so tired. Like when you hear his final speeches and he's just being like, and he's even saying, and being like-

• 48:51Marcus Parks?

  He says, I'm tired.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  I'm tired. I'm tired. You know, he's doing that thing and you're like, he was looking for a reason.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  Well, any demagogue sooner or later is going to lead his followers to disaster. It is inevitable, whether it's religious, whether it's political, push, push, push, and then you're going to hit that point and it's going to turn to hell. That's what's happened with all of them. That's what happened to Jim Jones. But the horror of that day, when we hear it firsthand from the couple of people who survived it, Jones announces, the time has come. The congressman's dead.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  Any minute now, the United States Army, along with the Guyanese Army and mercenaries are going to be parachuting in here. They're going to slaughter us. They're going to take our children off. We can't have that. We're going to do what they did at Masada. We're going to, we're not, we're not in any way committing suicide. What we're doing is we're giving a dramatic statement. We're showing our defiance. And he has them bring out the barrels, the buckets, the trash cans of Flavor Aid with the cyanide mixed in. And first they're going to take the little babies.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  And some of the mothers line up with their children, others are hanging back. And surrounding this group of people are Jones's bodyguard that day, and they've got guns. His real bodyguard, most of the basketball team with his sons that are in Georgetown, and they might have said no. But now the ones that are there with the guns are the true believers. And so the nurses there get syringes and they suck up this poison and they squirt it into the babies' mouths. And as they do, Jim Jones is telling his followers, it's very peaceful, it's just

• 51:06Speaker 04

  like going to sleep. But you guys know what cyanide poisoning does.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  And these children start to suffocate horribly, these little babies. They're writhing and they want to scream, but they're gurgling and it's horrible and their eyes are bulging and people are seeing how horrible it is. And Jones is saying the whole time, oh, no, no, it's just because it tastes, it tastes bitter. Don't worry about it. And they're lining people up now and he's saying, it's only fair that we let the parents die with their babies. So now you get the grownups. And now some of the people are trying to edge away. When I went to Guyana, I spent time in Jonestown.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  And I talked to some people and it was interesting, but I was allowed to get copies of the coroner's reports. And the coroner's reports said that of these 900 who died, maybe 650 of them are adults. At least a third and maybe as many as half of the adults did not die by drinking the poison. They were held down and forcibly injected and they had the bruise marks on their necks

• 52:33Speaker 04

  or their legs or their backs where the needles had gone in. Marcelline Jones, Jim Jones's wife, and again, this isn't secondhand, we know this happened. She's standing away from the stage he's on, she's screaming, you can't do this. You can't do this. And he's saying, and it's on tape, anybody here listen to that final tape?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  Mother, mother, mother. Don't say this, you know, be with your children. Mother, he's talking to Marcelline. And the people who believe in him are going up there and they're almost in a religious fervor. This is it. This is the big thing. What an honor. And you're getting people who are dragged there, kicking and screaming and they're being murdered. It is murder. And you're getting others who are just so fed up. God damn it, it's come to this. Screw you, screw everything. Let's get it over with.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Now, the next day, and I met with the leader of the Guyanese army that went in the next day, and he talked about what they discovered. And they go in the next morning and it's monsoon season, it's very humid. And they're approaching Jonestown, these soldiers with their guns carefully because ground fog is coming up and they can't really see where they're going. But they're getting into Jonestown, they don't hear anything, but then they start stumbling and they think, maybe they've put logs down for us to trip over. And then the soldiers start screaming because they're tripping over bodies.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  And as the sun comes up and the fog burns off, they think there are probably 250 people laying in just this huge heap. And they bring in different crews and the next day or two, they're starting to try to pull everybody out. And they realize there's a second layer underneath the first one. All adults, where are the children? And under that layer, there's a third layer, and that's the babies and the children who died first.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  Think of it, a three-layer mountain of decaying bodies, that's what there was. And that's what demagogues can do. And that even those demagogues who do accomplish some good things in the beginning and along the way. Because any demagogue ultimately is looking for power, is looking for self-glorification. Maybe not at first, but it grows and it grows till it takes hold. And finally, there's disaster. Only two, two bodies out of all of them did not die by poison.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  One was Annie Moore, Jim Jones's personal nurse, who died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And Jim Jones, who died of a gunshot wound, and this is the thing I hate about that son of a bitch. He put all his followers through unimaginable agony. And then at the last minute, the asshole couldn't even go ahead and drink the damn poison himself. He took the chicken shit way out and had his nurse shoot him and then so she could have the honor of shooting herself and dying the way he did. That was to me, the ultimate betrayal.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  And every time I start thinking, well, Jim Jones never gets a fair shake because of the good things he did, which is true. Then I think about that moment when he was willing to let everybody else have the horrible death, but oh no, not for him.

• 56:41Marcus Parks?

  I mean, I was gonna ask about Mr. Mugs, but that sounds like a pretty good way to end this.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like we'll get back to Mr. Mugs.

• 56:48Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, eventually.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  We'll talk back. That was very, man, it's so great to talk to you. It's so good to get these, get these contacts from us. This is something that endlessly, obviously Marcus is very devoted to the subject, but this is something I find endlessly interesting and illuminating.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Marcus, there is so much. Don't ever think that any one book, mine included, is the definitive be all, end all book.

• 57:11Marcus Parks?

  Of course.

• 57:12Speaker 04

  There's always so much more every time. And one of the things I always do with, with all my books, when I finish up, I've got boxes and boxes of documents and copies of interviews I've done and everything else. And I always try to give them to some museum or some public group where the next person who wants to write on that subject can have complete access to everything I had and then hopefully will think of things I didn't think of and find people I didn't think of. Why don't you write the next book? You could do it. You could do it better than I did it.

• 57:47Marcus Parks?

  Oh, thank you. That's nice. No, I, I mean, I, you know, I read Raven and, you know, I was able to speak with Fielding McGeehee quite a bit. Yeah, Fielding, yeah, I spoke with him quite, he was a, another person, just an incredible resource.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  And he's been, he's become a, a close friend of mine. I mean, there are good people who are associated with all this. But really, never, ever think one person's written the perfect book because there isn't one. We all think we're doing it when we do it.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  But then we look at the book afterwards and think, maybe I should have done more here, I should have looked more there. So maybe you'll be the one who takes it the next step. I hope you are.

• 58:28Marcus Parks?

  I mean, I'd, you know, help, me and my wife actually went on, we went on a Jonestown vacation.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  For their anniversary, they went to go look at all the highlights of Jonestown.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  And your wife stayed with you?

• 58:41Marcus Parks?

  It was my wife's idea.

• 58:43Speaker 04

  Oh, you married a special woman.

• 58:46Marcus Parks?

  I have.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  She didn't have a lot of fun as a girl.

• 58:49Marcus Parks?

  No, we went, yeah, we went to Lynn, we visited his, we found the tiny cemetery where his father is buried.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:57Marcus Parks?

  Which, yeah, it's a, I mean, it is endlessly, for me, an endlessly fascinating subject. But thank you so much for coming in. We can't wait for, I mean, we hope to have a trifecta with you and, and bring you back to talk about Charles Manson.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yes, please.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I'll, I'll be always glad to talk to you guys. Right now, I'm just starting a new three-year work on, on a new project and I'll be in and out a lot, but I'll always be glad to hear from you.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Is it something light or are you gonna be, is it about like Tostino's, like the source of pizza rolls?

• 59:33Speaker 04

  As much as I enjoy writing books that don't involve tragedy, and I've written some of those, I think of them as my vacations.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  You know, I'm 73, I don't know how many books I've got left considering the time it takes me and the, the footwork I put in to do these things. And so I've decided that for whatever time I've got left, I'm gonna try to look at current America. And I'm gonna look at issues that I think are critical and maybe haven't been addressed the way they should. And I'm gonna try to focus on those. So I decided this time, I'm gonna pick something right now that really bothers me. An issue I think continues that shouldn't, that it's horrific, we're letting it happen, and try to write a book about some incident related that maybe will get people looking at it in a different way.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  So that's what I'm doing this time.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  That's really neat. Yeah, we're all sad that Red Lobster is going. We're all sad that Red Lobster is.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  I like to laugh, but what I'm working on now is I've decided school shootings.

• 1:00:38Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Are one of the most horrible afflictions and nobody's doing jack.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  About it.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  So what do you mean? The kids get to wear body armor and they get to have, like, they get to learn how to make the big body shields with their desks and stuff. Isn't that fun for them?

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  My buddy's a teacher, they gave him a hammer in case there's an attack, so that's good.

• 1:00:58Marcus Parks?

  My God. I mean, yeah, I mean, the three of us, we, we're, you know, we're part of the Columbine generation, you know, we were all in high school when Columbine happened, so we were there to see the, that was the beginning of it.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  Can you, could you have imagined, and I'm gonna use a figure that's gonna stun you, could you imagine that since Columbine, there have been in the United States of America over 1,100 shooting incidents and deaths in schools in this country?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:01:28Marcus Parks?

  My God.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  We hear about the occasional monster one. We don't hear about the one in a parking lot between two students who got in a fight or something like that. We talk about how horrible Columbine was.

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  But that was a fairly comfortable suburb, right? You know, teenage white boys who were kinda alienated and video gamed it and decided to get some guns and and make a name for themselves. You get Sandy Hook. We talked about that one, maybe.

• 1:02:02Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  But I decided to pick one that would involve little poor kids. And a community that was certain it had done everything it had to do to protect its children.

• 1:02:15Marcus Parks?

  Geez.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  And so I'm spending a lot of time right now in Uvalde.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Well, we would, oh, wow. Yeah, we would love to know. We would, whenever you are ready to present anything like that, we would love to talk about it on the show.

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  Well, I'll tell you what, if you guys really want to, why don't you meet me in Uvalde for a couple of days on one of my research trips? Join me. Talk to some of these people. See for yourselves the real tragedy, not at arms length, but right there.

• 1:02:42Marcus Parks?

  I would love to. I would absolutely, I would absolutely love to do that.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  Think about it carefully. It's one thing to go on a Jonestown trip where it happened all those years ago.

• 1:02:53Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  It's another to look in the eyes of a mother whose child was slaughtered.

• 1:02:58Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 04

  And wonders why nobody's done anything to stop it happening to other kids.

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  So that's what we're right about, particularly why, why in this country it's so easy to get guns when guns are used for such awful reasons.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  So the NRA is not gonna be a fan.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  Anyway, that's the next project. Isn't it gonna be cheerful?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  No, well, hey, it's, that sounds like you could add a really good insight to something.

• 1:03:25Speaker 05

  How close were you to the shooting at University of Texas? Cause you said you went there.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  It was the year before I got there.

• 1:03:32Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  You know, I got there thinking about, wow, the tower, except it locked it off so you couldn't get up in there again. I have a friend I went to college with. His name was Kinky Friedman.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Speaker 05

  And RIP.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  Who we called Richie Friedman.

• 1:03:49Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  A long time friend of mine. He wrote The Ballad of Charles Whitman.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  And later, when my son went to University of Texas, he stayed at the same apartment complex that Charlie Whitman lived in.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  And Kinky told me, your boy's the next one.

• 1:04:08Marcus Parks?

  Oh, hell, yeah. Vote, vote Kinky.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  So anyway, if you guys ever decide you ought to actually get your feet wet and see some of this.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  I would love to.

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm definitely in for this.

• 1:04:20Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  You're gonna have to be respectful to people, though.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  I've done these kind of things before. I've been down to the border and I've seen, I've been into different, I've done, done shows and jails and stuff like that.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:04:31Speaker 05

  It's very intense.

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  Think about it.

• 1:04:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  But think about it carefully, cause once you get there, it's, it emotionally grabs you by the throat.

• 1:04:39Marcus Parks?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:04:39Speaker 05

  It's insane, yeah.

• 1:04:40Marcus Parks?

  I would imagine so.

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  Well, on that high note, thank you for letting me be on your show. I always enjoy it.

• 1:04:47Marcus Parks?

  So much.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Mr. Gwen. We'll talk to you very soon.

• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  Take care, guys.

• 1:04:52Marcus Parks?

  One more question for, for you. Where are you from? I'm also from Texas. Um, Texas Tech, oh six.

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  Lubbock.

• 1:04:59Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, well, that's where I went to college. I, I grew up north of Abilene.

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  Really? Where?

• 1:05:05Marcus Parks?

  Uh, called Rochester.

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah. I'm in Fort Worth.

• 1:05:09Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  But I've spent a lot of time in West Texas, so.

• 1:05:15Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  Okay, we'll go, we'll go eat some great Mexican food, guys.

• 1:05:18Marcus Parks?

  That sounds fantastic, yeah.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. All right, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:05:21Marcus Parks?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  Take care.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 1:05:24Marcus Parks?

  Bye.

• 1:05:24Speaker 06

  Live from York Road.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. He's a, he seems, he's a very wise man.

• 1:05:31Marcus Parks?

  He's an extraordinarily wise man.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  We learn things from wise men.

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  Well, you gotta get dirty, you know?

• 1:05:38Marcus Parks?

  You really do?

• 1:05:38Speaker 05

  You do, if you really wanna learn. I mean, you know, people love listening to us, but we just, you know, we have researchers and.

• 1:05:45Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah, buddy. We read, we read the books and, and it's really, it really is people like Jeff Guinn, they're like, do the real, they do the real work out there. They do the, the, the real stuff. They really get in there and, and do what is necessary to bring these stories, um, to light, which is just, I mean, Uvalde, my God. I, and I would, I'd love to do that. I'd absolutely love to do that.

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  More than in, you know, that's, that's what got me into staying in the comedy, to be honest with you, is work like that. And I would have minded doing some more with you fellas.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  That'd be very, very interesting. Well, thank you, guys, for listening. We're updated, aren't we?

• 1:06:21Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  And now it's time for you to go to Patreon.com. You could give us money. Last Patreon.com slash Last Podcast on the left. TikTok, Instagram, we're on that. At LP on the left, social media.

• 1:06:34Speaker 05

  Are you have trouble breathing or are you?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  I get burps. LastPodcastLeft.com. You wanna come out, uh, see us live. We're about to be in Australia. It's gonna be amazing. Uh, check it all out. Uh, and, uh, that was, uh, that was very good.

• 1:06:48Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, that was very good. That was very intense, as it always is, Mr. Guinn. My God, what a storyteller.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Can you imagine just being a little filly while he's saddling up to you on the bar, telling you these long stories?

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  We talked about it last time, how hard it was for him to work with all the sex.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  How many people lived in Jonestown?

• 1:07:07Marcus Parks?

  Uh, it was nine hundred and thirty, uh, some odd, you know, cause there were, cause the basketball team, uh, survived, cause they were, they were at an away game.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:18Marcus Parks?

  And they were in, uh, the, they were in the town and, and his, uh, Steven, his son.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Marcus Parks?

  Was involved, was on the basketball team, and that's why he survived. And there was.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Hey, guys, we could do, we could do these Jonestown talks for the rest of our lives, boys. We can ask him questions all next week.

• 1:07:36Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, uh, yes. Uh, so, yeah, I think there was, I mean, everyone who was there, the only people who survived that I, I really wish I would have asked him about was Mark Lane.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Uh, there's plenty of time. We can do this again.

• 1:07:47Marcus Parks?

  I know.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  We can go ahead and do it one more time.

• 1:07:49Marcus Parks?

  But like the, the dude who like wrote the fucking, the first JFK assassination book was there.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Much as the next person does.

• 1:07:57Marcus Parks?

  Ah.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Well, I'm gonna get some Kool-Aid.

• 1:08:00Marcus Parks?

  Okay.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  That's brand misidentification.

• 1:08:03Marcus Parks?

  Flavor Aid.

• 1:08:09Speaker 07

  There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still? Not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now, we're here to help you keep going further. Capella University. What can't you do? Visit Capella.edu to learn more.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

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