BEN KISSEL All right baby boys, let's get into her. Let's get it on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I love it when you say let's get into her. That's my favorite way to start the show when
you look at the two of us-
BEN KISSEL We're not starting with that. And then I burped immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. You look at us across the room and you say, 'Let's get into her.' It's like she's just there.
Let's get into that spread-eagle episode.
MARCUS PARKS And then I reflexively said let's get it on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let's get it on. Let's just get into her, boys. You need triple P. Honestly it's really incredible to
be here with my friends, we're in Boston.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this story...
BEN KISSEL We're gonna get into her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would say this story, it really puts the 'e' in meth.
BEN KISSEL There you go. Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone. I am Ben Kissel hanging out
with Henry and Marcus. In today's episode, I don't know what's about to go on, but apparently
it's about to get whack-a-doo. Is it a cult? Is it just a group of idiots? We'll get into it. Maybe it's
both, it's the Children of Thunder!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is one of those cults where they didn't attract any rocket scientists. You know what I
mean?
BEN KISSEL Oh that's too bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because they always say that with Heaven's Gate or Aum Shinrikyo. Being like no, you see
there's some learned people amongst this crowd of neutered, bowl-cutted weirdos. But no,
this one is just essential crew only.
BEN KISSEL All right, the Children of Thunder. Not to be confused with the Thunder Down Under which is a
fantastic male revue in Las Vegas.
MARCUS PARKS The Children of Thunder was a Mormon mini cult near the San Francisco bay area comprised of
exactly three people including the leader.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's all he needed.
MARCUS PARKS A guy named Taylor Helzer. In the summer of 2000, these cultists murdered five people and
dismembered three of them, dumping the dismembered remains into the California delta in
nine overstuffed duffel bags.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And while yes, we did just cover one of the craftiest predators known to American history.
BEN KISSEL One of the randiest, most disgusting people around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, Randy Kraft. These guys are quite the opposite.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where instead of their crimes being slow, under the radar, tête-à-tête with the police, one
ultimate villain versus a bunch of confused lawmen.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI These three morons get caught real hard, real fast.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But we're not even getting into murder of this episode.
MARCUS PARKS No, we're not.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Well comprised of two brothers named Taylor and Justin Helzer along with an easily
manipulated young woman named Dawn godman, the Children of Thunder believed that
Taylor Helzer was not Jesus Christ himself but rather the men who would usher in the second
coming of their Lord and savior.
BEN KISSEL How humble.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI His representative.
BEN KISSEL That's so nice, that's so humble of him. Unlike Roch Thériault who really believed he was a
god. He says I'm just here, I'm just a messenger, I'm just the gateway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also it's his lack of commitment that probably showed why they didn't succeed much
unlike Roch Thériault in his own way was successful, wasn't he?
BEN KISSEL In his own way.
MARCUS PARKS By following a series of highly convoluted schemes fueled by meth and ecstasy, the Children of
Thunder hoped to place Taylor at the head of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints by
way of extortion, kidnapping, and murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it's their ambition that makes them American.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I will say that's what Marcus and I were joking about over texts. Mormons are the closest
that americans get to Canadians. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL Sure, in a sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The most ambition they had was the idea that they could flip the more Mormon church from
the outside. It's apparently very difficult.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I think it is extremely difficult to overthrow an entire religion, yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well these schemes, which only got more complicated and stupid as the cult progressed,
they had big signposts for each step but no connective tissue between.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS And that of course killed each and every plan the Children of Thunder had before it even
began. As Henry said, it blows up on the runway every time.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. This is a cult that never got to take flight which makes this a true crime story and not a
cult story.
BEN KISSEL Is that right because Marcus was debating before the show is this a cult story or a true crime
store?
MARCUS PARKS It's somewhere between.
BEN KISSEL It's inbetween.
MARCUS PARKS It could be considered both. But I do agree with Henry that it's more of a true crime story.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A cult needs to be aloft for a bit.
MARCUS PARKS A cult needs infrastructure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How many times have I said this?
BEN KISSEL Herbalife. And also I think at least five people. You have to be able to play a pickup game of
basketball at any moment just to teach the kids how cool your cult is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You need to be able to play tag with the neighborhood of kids with your cult for it to count.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Well to that point, the Children of Thunder was not a cult of just three people by design.
Rather Taylor Helzer was sort of a wannabe Charles Manson.
BEN KISSEL Charles Manson didn't even want to be Charles Manson.
MARCUS PARKS But while Manson was in LA hanging out with the Beach Boys and cutting demos a big time
producers, Taylor Helzer was selling ecstasy at lame ass late 90s raves near but not in San
Francisco.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why Taylor Helzer gives me a lot of Paul Bernardo vibes because he is at that level of
total corniness.
BEN KISSEL Douchebaginess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely. But again, Paul Bernardo was an elite predator in his own way, he was somebody
that was a really dangerous person.
BEN KISSEL I really thought you were gonna say rapper. And then I was like, no, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, that's Vanilla Ice.
BEN KISSEL That's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But Taylor Helzer, I mean he would cause enough mayhem on his own but he doesn't really
have the X factor.
BEN KISSEL So he's the annoying guy at the 90s rave no one wants to be there. Why is he here? He's got
the drugs. That's it.
MARCUS PARKS Exactly, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS This lameness among many other reasons is why Taylor Helzer just couldn't get his sex and
drugs congregation off the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL If he would have just called it that it might have worked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was of the same lineage as Casey Anthony's roommate.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL What a nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS See while Taylor was told repeatedly throughout childhood and adolescence by his mother
and his Mormon spiritual leaders that he was destined for greatness on a prophet level, he
was in essence a painfully average human being.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That is the ultimate success in Mormonism though is a total, complete, just soaking in of
averageness. No one can even know you, they can't even see you.
BEN KISSEL If you are the greatest at being average, aren't you somewhat amazing? I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS Now he was charismatic to be sure but he just didn't have the it factor that's needed to
become a successful cult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, that noi-noi.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL What do you think it is? It's big dick energy, I think we can say that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Apparently he did have a big schlong, so he was using it wrong.
BEN KISSEL Oh okay. But he didn't have the energy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I believe, we'll get into this, I think what makes a true cult leader actually effective is that at
some point they have to believe their own garbage enough but have a long view.
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They have to have a long view. LRH obviously, I was thinking about this last night. Yes, he
created a cult, Scientology cult.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But more it's a world of IP that houses, it's a fantasy role playing game, it's a sci-fi universe that
LRH created that rules got inserted into. He had a long view. This guy was really just in it for he
thought that he could flip the Mormon church in like two weeks.
BEN KISSEL Not gonna happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL Of course it's also Scientology, a psychotic cult that preys upon failing actors. Which aren't
they the most vulnerable of all of us?
MARCUS PARKS I think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the most dangerous. Jim Jones truly did try to change Indiana from the inside out. He did,
he had a long view. Even Charles Manson, see that's why he is compared to Charles Manson-
BEN KISSEL Oh I don't think Charles Manson had a long view.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He did not, no. But Charles Manson was better at getting pussy.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And I think Charles Manson had a longer view than Taylor Helzer because Charles
Manson did have a plan and his plan was achievable. And I think that's the big difference is
that you've got to have an achievable plan because remember Charles Manson's whole plan
was to get a whole bunch of groovy 60s chicks out into the desert so he could fuck 'em and
have dune buggy races all day long.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he got it! He lived the dream. And that's all he needed to do, Marcus. And I feel like that's
a lesson all of you need to understand. Two birds in the ass are worth one outside of the
garage.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. And if you just don't gut and kill people, everything's fine. Everything is absolutely
fine. This is the difference when your cult leader is full of acid vs when your cult leader is full of
meth.
MARCUS PARKS True.
BEN KISSEL Not a lot of long term thinking.
MARCUS PARKS No, no. Even though Taylor Helzer did not have organizational skills, what he did have was a
sociopathic personality and he had just enough charm to ensnare exactly one ordinary person
and his socially awkward brother, Justin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Have you ever seen the show The Young Ones?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's Neil. Justin is Neil. We'll get deeper into what Justin's character was like but yes, he's the
sad sack pacifist.
MARCUS PARKS Yup. Now Taylor and Justin's relationship I think could most closely be compared to that of
Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. To wit it's highly doubtful that Justin Helzer
would have ever committed a violent act without the influence of his brother. Basically Justin
Helzer was an extraordinarily awkward, super weird goth kid who had an odd obsession with
juice and sometimes liked to eat meals on all fours like a dog.
BEN KISSEL Hold on a second. Are talking about aliens? Did you say juice?
MARCUS PARKS Juice.
BEN KISSEL Juice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Juice. And not even OJ. Not the man OJ.
BEN KISSEL What type of juice?
MARCUS PARKS Like mango or strawberry or lemonade.
BEN KISSEL So he based his personality upon the fructose corn syrup he liked to consume.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was largely silent, he loved juice, and they said that you could not be in a room with him
when he ate because he loved to eat with his entire face. And it is not an exaggeration when
they said he used to get on all fours and eat off a plate like a dog.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Of course. We all know Holden McNeely, Page 7, Round Tables.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL We've seen disgusting men eat. But this sounds next level.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It really is. And under the spell of his brother, Taylor Helzer became a brutal multiple
murderer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Talk about that story arc.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Before we get into the story, let's acknowledge our sources for today. We've got 'Unholy
Sacrifice' by Robert Scott as well as a highly entertaining episode of Wicked Attraction that
aired a few years ago on ID Discovery, which is good for facts even if it plays a little fast and
loose with the timeline.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I saw some other good documentary on it from England that was pretty good. But again,
that book really fills in all the blanks of just how dull all of these people truly are at their
center.
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
BEN KISSEL Most true crime stories don't have a full chapter on juice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Mango juice. Apple juice. Grape juice.
BEN KISSEL There's a lot of juices.
MARCUS PARKS Taylor Helzer was born in 1970 to two devout Mormons named Gerry and Carma, Both
average people who worked as an insurance salesman and a housewife. you can't get more
average than that. While Taylor was born in Michigan, his family soon relocated to the bay
area in California, just north of San Francisco. In childhood Taylor Helzer could be compared to
Jim Jones in that both Jones and Helzer could be considered religious and spiritual prodigies
because Taylor could memorize and recite scriptures from the Book of Mormon with ease
from a young age.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean they do say that recall is the basest sign of intelligence.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I guess it's good.
BEN KISSEL Yeah but does he understand what he's saying?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he was invested. As a little kid as soon as he got into Mormonism, as soon as he was
doing the reading parts he really loved it and I actually can kind of understand as a child that
was really into the Catholic church and was impressed by the Catholic church.
BEN KISSEL Well there's a lot of fun stories.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it's also the grandeur. It's the feeling of the presence of the man himself, the screaming
flayed god. All the kind of shit. It feels really real.
BEN KISSEL You get wine, you get robes. You get a whole series of other things that are illegal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And god's right here staring at you and in a place like the Catholic church or the Mormon
Temple you can feel it because they build it to be impressive. And it had an impression on him.
BEN KISSEL And I do want to point out there's no such thing as an average housewife or insurance
salesman. Thank you for what you do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Sure. Okay, wow.
BEN KISSEL Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you. Great.
MARCUS PARKS Well in addition, Taylor was bright, charismatic, empathetic, and helpful. Therefore his
magnetism combined with his passion and understanding of Mormonism caused both his
mother and his local bishop to constantly tell him that he was destined for great things in the
church.
BEN KISSEL Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But again when it's Mormon great things it means you'll be in charge of the bake sale, you're
going to be in charge of when we all wet ourselves later on today. You will see a couple of
secret ceremonies.
BEN KISSEL That's not fun. I don't want to be in charge of the dirty whites.
MARCUS PARKS And it wasn't just them either. Everyone loved Taylor and they constantly told him he was
special. And in this I think you've got the fatal flaw as to why Taylor failed so hard at being a
cult leader. He skipped the steps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Oh you can't skip the steps!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fucking yeah, Malcolm Gladwell's full of shit but there's something to the idea that you got to
put in the work.
BEN KISSEL You do have to put the time in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where other infamous cult leaders like Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, and Charles Manson
had to fight for attention to the point where their need for it was pathological, Taylor was
heavily indulged and more importantly heavily sheltered.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is where we get to Dogmeat's scribe about participation trophies
amongst cult leaders and how it's making them weak.
BEN KISSEL Everyone gets a trophy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't just give out awards. Oh you've raped the most little boys.
BEN KISSEL You've killed the most people.
MARCUS PARKS Well I'm just saying you gotta fucking earn it if you want to be on top.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Jim Jones is one of the most famous for a reason.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Of course infamous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Infamous.
BEN KISSEL Infamous.
MARCUS PARKS I'm not going to go with the idea of best cult leader, like my favorite cult leader.
BEN KISSEL No, the best cult leader is the president and a whole series of other people that aren't in
prison.
MARCUS PARKS The best cult leader is Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard. Those are the best.
BEN KISSEL Those are the two best?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, by far the most successful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, dude, hand in hand. LRH fucking died in his own bed. That's the most successful a
cult leader can be.
BEN KISSEL Pat Robertson. He's got a whole enterprise.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah but he doesn't get people to worship him specifically. He's part of the system.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I've been doing it all wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's the middle man for god.
BEN KISSEL You guys don't have your Pat Robertson crucifixes?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, I have my Pat Robertson buttplug I've been using. It's incredible.
BEN KISSEL It's really good, right?
MARCUS PARKS Well Taylor's mother believed that her son was a prophet of god sent to help save the world.
The boy could do no wrong. And because Carma believed in him so deeply, the rest of the
family followed suit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There also was a precedent amongst the family, we'll get into it. And Mormonism has that
caveat, it has this side thing, basically if you dream it, you can be it. Anybody can be a prophet
within the Mormon world if you can figure out how to time your prophecy correctly.
BEN KISSEL It's great if you're trying to make a baseball team out of ghosts but maybe it's not so good
when you want to kill 5 people.
MARCUS PARKS Well Taylor's brother Justin meanwhile was the exact opposite. Born two years later, looking
almost exactly like his older brother by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But dumpier.
MARCUS PARKS A little bit. I don't know, you put their mug shots side by side, you can't tell the difference.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS I thought they were identical twins for a little while.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the problem though. If you're kinda handsome and your brother is actually handsome,
you look ugly.
BEN KISSEL Story of my life.
MARCUS PARKS Justin had not a single ounce of Taylor's charisma. In fact the only thing people seemed to
remember about him during his formative years was that he was one of the tallest kids in
class, not even the tallest, just one of the tallest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's so sad.
BEN KISSEL That is like, what do you want in your high school yearbook? One of the tallest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm one of the tallest. Well his teacher also, that's the thing too, is like whenever a teacher
praises a child for it he's like, 'You know, he always was in class and he was obedient.' And I
was like oh, this is what we're going to be known for?
MARCUS PARKS In other words, Justin was a born follower and was perfectly content to live in his brother's
shadow. Justin spent his life looking towards Taylor for cues and the two formed the sort of
dominant-submissive relationship that charismatic sociopaths like Taylor Helzer so often
exploit for their own personal gain.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. You sure they're not stepbrothers? Because I've seen some footage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh. You've been watching stepbrothers too? Have you leaked over to just watching all of it?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you just watch every form of stepfamily sex?
BEN KISSEL I don't watch it.
MARCUS PARKS You don't watch it?
BEN KISSEL I don't watch it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well you talk about it a lot.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, you really do bring it up quite a bit.
BEN KISSEL No, I don't talk about it that much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI In the last month or two you have mentioned a stepmom getting stuck in the dryer once per
show.
MARCUS PARKS And not just on this show, on live shows as well you've been bringing it up a lot.
BEN KISSEL I actually did misspeak about the girl that was stuck under her bed. They were roommates.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
MARCUS PARKS All right, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now that you've looked at the documents, you've put it amongst peer review.
BEN KISSEL Yes, I put it on LexisNexis and I figured it all out.
MARCUS PARKS Well as far as other influences went concerning Taylor Helzer's upbringing, he and his brother
lived for a time with their maternal grandfather Doyle Sorenson. Showing exactly where his
daughter's fundamentalist beliefs came from, Doyle believed that he, like Mormon prophets
past, had actually spoken to Jesus in his front yard.
BEN KISSEL Yeah what did Doyle say to him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And would you believe? 6'1".
BEN KISSEL 6'1". Isn't that something. Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Pretty incredible. Just seen him right there, he was right there, he was standing right there. He
brought his own car magazines. He just sits right there and he's just like a normal guy hanging
out.
BEN KISSEL Normal guy. Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Now this was beyond just a vision. Doyle went into full Moroni mode and believed that Jesus
Christ had shown up in the flesh, claimed that he looked out his window, Jesus was out there-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hi! Hey, how you doing buddy? I just heard about the basketball! It's an incredible what you
guys made.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it's a stand your ground state so you're gonna want to get off my lawn, Jesus. Thank you
so much.
MARCUS PARKS He said he just went outside and had an hours long conversation with the man himself.
BEN KISSEL He didn't invite him in?
MARCUS PARKS No, Jesus didn't need to come in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I could fucking come in if I want to, bro. I'll fucking break down the door and walk through it,
dude. I got nailed to a fucking stick, bro.
BEN KISSEL I know, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll do whatever the fuck I want.
BEN KISSEL Please god, do whatever you want.
MARCUS PARKS Perhaps inspired by the confidence in which his grandfather talked about his own spiritual
experiences, Taylor believed to have begun receiving messages from either god Or the devil by
the age of 14. He wasn't quite sure which.
BEN KISSEL You're going to want to figure that out.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And since he was told by his mother and his spiritual leaders that he had the gift of revelation,
he saw those messages as reality.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he definitely learned from his grandfather that you can just say it.
MARCUS PARKS And you can sell it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And if you sell it, because that's really the key. The key is to never back down. Again, that's an
American lesson, just never show a crack in the facade and you can get through a lot of
different hurdles in life. He basically as a little boy understood I'm getting positive validation by
saying random shit.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And because you say mysterious stuff being like, I don't know if it was god or the devil, you get
all of this attention, everybody coming to discern, to look through, decipher your messages.
BEN KISSEL Sir this is a Mcdonald's, did you want the Big Mac meal or not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The devil's saying fries but god is saying that stupid fruit cup. Fuck you, god!
BEN KISSEL Yes, go with the devil. So the fries?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, please.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now to give you a quick refresher on Mormon revelation, Mormons believe that god speaks
directly to certain members of the church and gives them so-called revelations concerning
everything from personal decisions to the direction of the church at large.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what makes the Mormon church highly adaptable and moving forward into the future
because they understand it's the judo thing, use other people's energies, pass them by you,
absorb.
BEN KISSEL Not Steven Seagal footage. I know.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I mean this is how they're able to constantly pivot throughout their existence in order to
keep up with the times. That's what has allowed them to continue growing the most successful
modern cult in existence. I'm sorry Henry but Mormons are much more successful than
Scientologists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Scientology doesn't need the pressure.
BEN KISSEL Apparently a lot of the people who follow Scientology are currently at their cracking point but I
do love that the Mormon church has allowed the banana hammock. That's allowed now for
the magic undies. Isn't that nice?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
BEN KISSEL Banana hammock.
MARCUS PARKS So they no longer have to do the boxer briefs, they can now keep it tight?
BEN KISSEL No, they're just cozy and nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
MARCUS PARKS That's nice. The temple garments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh so you can make them sexy now?
BEN KISSEL I think they're allowed to now, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Am I doing the thing, am I applying a quality?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Can you wear one of those like Borat swimsuits?
BEN KISSEL You can do whatever you want as long as all of the men that are around you are aroused by
the fact that they can almost see your penis.
MARCUS PARKS Good, good, good, good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because I've seen some Mormon underwear and it's actually pretty see through, it's kind of
fun.
BEN KISSEL It's long!
MARCUS PARKS You've seen the Mormon underwear in certain documentary films.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why would they lie to me?
MARCUS PARKS For an example of a Mormon church pivot, they didn't accept black people as people until the
70s, partly because early Mormon church leader and shit-obsessed weirdo Brigham Young
helped legalize slavery in Utah, saying that black skin was the so-called mark of Cain placed on
Cain's descendants by god. It's the same justification a lot of people used to justify slavery.
BEN KISSEL How many people did Brigham Young assault again, like thousands upon thousands?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean if you just call qualify the way he led the church, straight up into the thousands.
BEN KISSEL Horrible person.
MARCUS PARKS But in 1978 after white people had just enough time to get a little more comfortable with
desegregation, church president Spencer Kimball declared that he'd had a revelation from god
that it was finally time to end restrictions on black membership.
BEN KISSEL See the thing is I love basketball and I just see where the tide is going, right. And so I just want
to be able to follow my favorite team.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just want to be able to baptize the Utah Jazz. It's true because it also shows that there's a
savviness there.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI While yes, we paint the Mormons as a bunch of plain goobers, there's a thing there where
they understand if we want to survive, we have to move. And so we create a rule system that
allows us to do that. But what does that do is that kind of in our so-called democracy,
whatever you call our government these days, the fact that you can have people that are truly
good at their jobs be a part of the system and then you can have people like Lauren Boebert
that can also just get up in there and she's just as valid as fucking anybody else.
BEN KISSEL Get up in there!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It's a republic.
MARCUS PARKS Now the power of revelation could ostensibly be seen as somewhat of a good thing because it
allows for progression. Although one could also argue that the biggest reason is it allows for
wider recruitment pools after their existing membership gets comfortable with something
new. For this example, see the churches ever softening stance on LGBT members. The LGBT, I
guarantee you gay people are going to be accepted in the Mormon church within 10-15 years.
BEN KISSEL As long as they get good at basketball. That's what it's all about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly though look at the Olympics, half of them are the Olympic teams. Did I just become
Linda?
BEN KISSEL You became your mother, yes.
MARCUS PARKS But in the hands of a dangerous psychopath like Taylor Helzer, the so-called gift of revelation
can be wildly perverted into the belief that one's thoughts, no matter how violent or immoral,
come from god and are therefore fair game for execution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And whether he believed it or not, he definitely used that validation for his crimes.
BEN KISSEL So he acted on it. So yeah, in a way.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now even though Taylor eventually tried starting a sex and drugs cult, he was astonished
by the amount of drinking, sex, and swearing he encountered when he joined the National
Guard at 17 in the year 1987.
BEN KISSEL Wait a second, he couldn't handle the National Guard?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he went and he heard the cursing and he was like, 'Oh ginger berries, I can't believe
what's happening here. They're saying f-words and not forward. I didn't even know what
they're saying. It rhymes with yuck!'
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But apparently also what they would do is they would stick porn into his gun manual.
MARCUS PARKS Actually, they did that to his brother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Naked ladies. They put naked ladies in his gun user's manual and they'd
be like, 'Hey Justin, you want to tell me how I can switch the scope on the 3.48 whatever
bullshit?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah sure, no problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And there would be boobies and he'd have to cover his eyes, going, 'Oh ginger berries!'
BEN KISSEL Fix or repair daily.
MARCUS PARKS Well after failing to convince even... What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ford. Ford.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, fix or repair daily. I'm a Chevy guy.
MARCUS PARKS I'm a Subaru boy.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're a Subaru lesbian.
BEN KISSEL Fantastic, I love it.
MARCUS PARKS After failing to convince even one of his fellow guardsmen that their behavior was ungodly,
Taylor ended his service for country and entered service to god, heading to Brazil for his 2 year
Mormon mission.
BEN KISSEL Oh that is actually a tough place to be with the temptation! It's a hard place to be biased.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's interesting because that was considered an elite get, right, to go down to Brazil, be a part
of it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause normally they'll send you to Cleveland.
BEN KISSEL Or North Dakota, not one bit of temptation there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No but you see Mormons in New York just covered in subway muck.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Watching them just broken and stuff, being like, 'Gotchu, bitch! You can't fucking handle the
city, bro.' That kind of shit. But down in Brazil, you went there, you're foreign there. So you're
kind of an object of mystery.
BEN KISSEL Sure, absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS In Brazil even back then, it's an emerging market, a lot of fucking people live in Brazil.
BEN KISSEL Well didn't Jim Jones spend some time there?
MARCUS PARKS He did. He absolutely did. Brazil was kind of what broke Jim Jones because when he was gone
down to Brazil, that's when he started getting super paranoid about people taking over his
church back in Indianapolis. And after he came back from from Brazil, that's when he became
Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL I don't know if I would have come back to Indianapolis from Brazil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would've just stayed there.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now from Taylor's journal entries during those 2 years in Brazil, you can see that his delusions
about the exceptionalism of his existence and his personal relationship with god were slowly
but surely getting the better of him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly I just thought pasties were a type of thing you could eat.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But apparently they jiggle quite often.
MARCUS PARKS Taylor wrote that he couldn't disobey the slightest whispering of the capital 'S' Spirit, which is
an important distinction from calling it 'the spirit'. The spirit is somewhat universal, it's
reverential, it's detached. It's like how we might refer to the president.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The shithead president.
MARCUS PARKS But to just call his connection to god 'Spirit' as if it's his close personal friend who whispers
directly to him and only to him, Taylor Helzer was setting himself up as an island of reason in a
sea of madness.
BEN KISSEL Right. Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's the example of just screaming at the world, 'The jury is wrong!'
BEN KISSEL The jury is wrong! Tell the jury they're wrong!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Every single time he had an idea and then he'd go and say like hey, this is my idea and
everybody around him would be like you're wrong, he'd be like, no you're wrong!
BEN KISSEL Whoa. See point, counterpoint.
MARCUS PARKS Now once Taylor arrived in Brazil, his missionary brother found that while Taylor Helzer was
indeed charismatic, his obsession with the Book of Mormon and his spirit became so intense
that Taylor began interpreting passages in unconventional ways.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Quote unquote "unconventional".
BEN KISSEL Taylor, just go to the beach. Just spend 5 hours at the beach, please god, there's more to this
world than the Book of Mormon.
MARCUS PARKS Specifically, Taylor Helzer became obsessed with the titular latter days, the end of everything.
He began to believe that technology would become useless in the last days and the church
leadership would coalesce into groups of warrior prophets who would defend the people and
their faith against the armies of Satan.
BEN KISSEL They're not gonna do very well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's fucking sweet, man. Honestly I like his version of what would happen. Mormonism has
never been so metal as it's been inside of the brain of Taylor Helzer.
BEN KISSEL If I was going to take a cult to fight, first of all there's only three people in this one so they're
gonna lose.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I do think at its peak, Jim Jones' people probably could have gotten pretty savage.
MARCUS PARKS There was a lot of old people, it was a lot of old people and a lot of young people.
BEN KISSEL Were there? I guess maybe Manson. Yeah, proof is in the pudding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Manson, they did actually kill.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well in essence the world that Taylor Helzer predicted was a combination of Mad Max, the
Book of Revelation, and the Book of Mormon all set in a sort of Lord of the Rings environment
where Satan plays Sauron, spreading evil through the Black Gate from the lands of Mordor.
BEN KISSEL Whoa, cool!
MARCUS PARKS Taylor I suppose take some kind of a Frodo type role.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think he saw himself as an Aragorn.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, that's it true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unfortunately.
BEN KISSEL Oh come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He viewed himself as the ultimate warrior priest that would have a substantial amount of
wives as well, that's also folded in. But you know, it's a very immature-
MARCUS PARKS Aragorn only had Arwen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, whatever.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I'm not sure who Aragorn is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They couldn't even fuck!
MARCUS PARKS What do you mean they couldn't fuck?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Didn't they only fuck the one time and the rest they were all talking through spirits? She'd play
a flute or something then he'd just look wistfully.
MARCUS PARKS Did you not watch the series to the end?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're in the middle of a rewatch, Marcus.
BEN KISSEL He's in a rewatch, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's in a rewatch.
MARCUS PARKS I'm not gonna spoil it for no one who's never seen Lord of the Rings but yeah, they fuck.
BEN KISSEL It's a 20 year old movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's like once.
MARCUS PARKS No, it's not once.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whatever, it could be more.
MARCUS PARKS They get married, she becomes his queen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Spoiler!
MARCUS PARKS She gives up immortality and refuses to go to the shores beyond so she can live a mortal life
with Aragorn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What a cuck.
BEN KISSEL I'm just gonna say this is a bit of a side quest and it is surprising that they have sex with each
other, they're not even related.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not by marriage or otherwise. But I feel that the obsession with the end of days, because I
remember when I was a kid I was also morbid and I was also into everything horror.
BEN KISSEL Oh you were morbid as opposed to now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah I know, it's strange.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I was into everything that was about the end of the world I was hyper fascinated with.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's an emotionally stunted view of the supposed Mormonism that you're attached to.
BEN KISSEL We're all going to die so in a way the world goes with us, doesn't it? My mother used to let me
stay home from school because the world was gonna end. So she would say, 'It doesn't matter,
Benjamin. Let's go to Piggly Wiggly.'
MARCUS PARKS It was a bad decision.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah it was.
BEN KISSEL It was a great decision.
MARCUS PARKS But in addition to his unorthodox reading of the Book of Mormon, Taylor also came upon the
same conclusion that many Mormonism-inspired cult leaders come upon. See as is evidenced
by the concept of revelation, Mormonism is very much a make-em-up religion. Joseph Smith,
founder of Mormonism, was by far the most successful religious con man of recent times. Even
more successful than L. Ron Hubbard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You keep pointing at me. I don't owe him any money, I'm not a part of Scientology.
BEN KISSEL You avoided all that.
MARCUS PARKS While Joseph Smith died before Mormonism really took off, his successors took Mormonism to
the next level through constant reinterpretation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a living document.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it truly is. And the only reason why I keep pointing at you because I kind of see L. Ron
Hubbard and Joseph Smith as like the Oasis and Blur of cult leaders. I'm more of a Blur guy
because I'm a Joseph Smith guy and you're more of an Oasis guy because you're into L. Ron
Hubbard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well I would flip it, bro. Because Blur didn't even get to America.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah it did. Song 2 is still played at fucking sports games everywhere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was a parody of Nirvana. It wasn't even supposed to be that big, it happened accidentally to
them.
MARCUS PARKS That's true but it still became a huge hit.
BEN KISSEL What's the name of that one band that had to kill themselves? That one lead singer had to kill
himself because he stole that riff from that one more famous band?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
BEN KISSEL You know what I'm talking about?
MARCUS PARKS Oh, oh!
BEN KISSEL Bittersweet Symphony?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, the dude from The Verve.
BEN KISSEL The Verve. Someone else is like The Verve there. Yeah, I like The Verve.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think the guy from The Verve is like The Verve.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, he's dead now.
MARCUS PARKS But the problem with this make-em-up nature is that any old Joe can go back to the starting
point of Joseph Smith and say that every interpretation of Mormonism after Joseph Smith's
death has been wrong. But as it happens that old Joe is just the revelation everyone needs to
set the church back on the correct path.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Most of the time this just means going back to polygamy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, seriously it always goes back to polygamy.
MARCUS PARKS 9 times out of 10. Yeah, 99 times out of 100 it's just going back. Yeah we should just all be
having a bunch of wives and we go live in Mexico or in a trailer park somewhere.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's all about revisionists and when the mean revisionists, they mean going all the way to
the very beginning.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS But every once in a while a man with a murderous rather than a horny mind latches onto this
idea and disaster always follows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We've seen this truly within any specific group, I think it's interesting that it keeps happening
within Mormonism.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Little tiny little cults break off from the top and kill everybody. They killed everybody involved,
they do a bunch of crimes, and then they quickly dissolve.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Or somebody like Warren Jeffs, they end up being in another whole level of systemic abuse
and that type of shit.
BEN KISSEL Exactly. The worst of the worst. I just watched a documentary on YouTube on Warren Jeffs, I
don't even know how I got there. But man, that guy's a demon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS Killing.
BEN KISSEL He's worse than a demon.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he really is. During Taylor's mission in Brazil, he took his ideas to the mission president
who told him that those ideas were wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Your ideas are wrong!
BEN KISSEL Excuse me, what was that?
MARCUS PARKS So Taylor began reading works by church leaders at a higher level. But when those writings
didn't match his ideas either, he decided that either nobody knew what they were talking
about or they were all liars hiding the truth.
BEN KISSEL Dumpy True Detective.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah. That's like that guy with the Punisher mask on, he had a Punisher face mask on and a
shirt that says 'This mask is as useless as Joe Biden' and he was at the desk and a flight was
delayed and he was screaming, 'It's because you won't tell us the truth!'
BEN KISSEL We just gotta get on this place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's delayed. There are clouds, I don't know what happened. They said there was something
wrong with the fuel gage.
BEN KISSEL See the clouds have gotten hard so we can't fly through them anymore.
MARCUS PARKS However at the same time Taylor was also a phenomenal missionary. Despite his unorthodox
beliefs, he got results when it came to recruitment and he was again lauded as a spiritual
leader.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well because the thing about him as we'll discover, the thing about Taylor is that he had no
guile or shame. He really could talk to anybody. And he was in Brazil, what was considered
maybe very interesting, let me know if that's incorrect but the idea of being a tall, attractive
white man in another country. You're the foreign person now and it's nice for people to see it.
And he really got an experience, the Brazilian people actually seem to really like him. And he
did set a bunch of records for recruits.
BEN KISSEL Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah me and Carolina were talking about this the other night while we were watching 90 Day
Fiance: The Other Way.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS But it does actually have some bearing on this because it's astounding sometimes the status
that we have purely by just being American.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS And specifically just by being American and white.
BEN KISSEL And it gets you kidnapped for ransom too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, it's not good.
MARCUS PARKS That's about status as well. Or at least perceived status.
BEN KISSEL I love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is from an American perspective so we don't really fucking know.
MARCUS PARKS No idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I also feel there's just as much people who hate us for the exact same reasons.
MARCUS PARKS Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's also that thing where if you are a Mormon, you're this little fresh-faced goober, it's
more disarming for somebody like him at the time period, especially to have people react to
him so positively.
BEN KISSEL Well I know during the Bush years and probably the Trump years, whatever it might be, a lot of
people would lie and say they're Canadian when they would go overseas. I never did it. I
always say I'm American and I deal with it.
MARCUS PARKS Cowards.
BEN KISSEL Because there was a woman in Australia that actively hated us.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's how it is. Yeah, absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS That's how it is.
BEN KISSEL Australia's more American than America and they don't even know it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, that's true.
BEN KISSEL It really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
MARCUS PARKS In America you gotta fucking deal with it, man. You got to fucking deal with it.
BEN KISSEL I know. Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS when you combined Taylor Helzer's success as a missionary with his disillusionment with the
Mormon church, what you got was a megalomaniac who believed that his way and therefore
his beliefs were correct. Because after all one of the biggest metrics of success in Mormonism
is recruitment.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the thing that we talk about with serial killers all the time, it's those little bits of
validation, it's the little things that you do that give you that feed and he saw it immediately,
being like I fucking gotta be right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It's just bizarre they want to recruit given their theory of heaven.
MARCUS PARKS Mormons?
BEN KISSEL It's very finite, the amount of people that can get in.
MARCUS PARKS No you're thinking of Jehovah's Witnesses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Are you sure?
MARCUS PARKS No with Mormonism, everyone gets their own planet after they die and the planets are
infinite.
BEN KISSEL Is that right?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're endlessly recruiting.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. No Jehovah's witnesses, they're the ones that say they only have 144,000 places in
heaven. Do you want to be one?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you want to be one?
BEN KISSEL All I know is Prince better be one, that's all I know. The greatest Jehovah's Witness of all time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm going to go on and say I don't think he was.
BEN KISSEL He was!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think that he should not have been in Jehovah's Witnesses and he should have just lived a
nicer life.
BEN KISSEL He loved it, he loved it.
MARCUS PARKS Now once Taylor returned to California he kept his belief that the end of days was coming and
they were coming rough.
BEN KISSEL Oh my.
MARCUS PARKS Therefore Taylor became a survivalist which conveniently fit in with his near fundamentalist
family's belief system. A lot of people in the Helzer family lived apocalyptically which only fed
into Taylor's belief in his own ideas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel like it's another way to kind of live life in a fantasy world.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what it is. You create this sense of stakes like everything's gonna be over soon and
everything matters so much more because you think everything's life and death.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where like well yes, everything is life and death, we do live and then die. It's this idea of living
in constant fear of the end. What does it do for you?
MARCUS PARKS Well I think what it does is it makes browsing on Amazon an adventure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Exciting.
MARCUS PARKS It makes going to the store a life or death situation where I am getting provisions to make sure
my family does not die when the end days come and they're coming any day now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're like, 'Campbell's is 5 for $9? It used to be 3 for $4!'
BEN KISSEL End of days. Absolutely. Maybe he loved rehydrated food.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, could be.
MARCUS PARKS I actually love astronaut ice cream. It's really good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I do too. I honestly like it too.
BEN KISSEL Is that Dippin' Dots?
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL Remember Dippin' Dots?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No it's when you pour whole milk into the asshole of a Russian, then you drink it out with a
spoon.
BEN KISSEL Nice.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Dippin' Dots are astronaut ice cream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Astronaut ice cream.
BEN KISSEL Oh I see, ass-tronaut. I get it. Dippin' Dots, the future of ice cream. They did not win the war.
MARCUS PARKS No. Taylor also returned to California to find that his little brother Justin had copied his path by
also going into the National Guard. And when Taylor came back preaching the apocalypse,
Justin believed in that apocalypse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah Taylor, you're right. That sounds great. Honestly National Guard, they were crazy naughty
over there.
BEN KISSEL I heard they swore quite a bit.
MARCUS PARKS Well together the two brothers became obsessed with the right wing survivalist named Bo
Gritz. Although it's spelled 'grtis' with a Z.
BEN KISSEL Bo Gritz!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Bo Gritz is an interesting character.
BEN KISSEL Bo 'Grites'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm calling him 'Grits'.
BEN KISSEL Call him 'Grits'!
MARCUS PARKS There's a future pun going that you're gonna wanna go with 'Grites'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And Gritz by the way loosely inspired the character of Hannibal on the A-Team.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah. One thing I read said that he inspired Rambo as well.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Gritz was a former Green Beret who served in Vietnam and eventually ran for president in
1992 on the Populist platform under the slogan 'God, Guns, and Gritz'.
BEN KISSEL There it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There it is. Triple G.
MARCUS PARKS And he supplemented his run with an isolationist political manifesto called 'The Bill of Gritz'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh now that's what we've been waiting for. That's the one.
MARCUS PARKS That's the pun. That's the pun. It doesn't work with the bill of 'Grits'.
BEN KISSEL Honestly it doesn't work at all. It's 'Grites'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We spent so much time in this house last week my grits bill was insane.
BEN KISSEL Oh absolutely nuts.
MARCUS PARKS Well right around the same time as his presidential run, Gritz was also involved in the Ruby
Ridge standoff. He was the guy who talked Randy Weaver into standing down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah dude. He also organized his own re-invasion of Vietnam to search for POWs on his own
time.
BEN KISSEL That's incredible.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Soon after, of course soon after Ruby Ridge, Gritz began conducting a survivalist training
program called SPIKE or Specially Trained Individuals for Key Events.
BEN KISSEL Nice.
MARCUS PARKS SPIKE.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wonder if he came up with Spike first and then had to fill it out.
MARCUS PARKS It sounds like he filled it out later, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What sounds like a dick but you can kill with it? It's not a dick. Everybody arguing with me, I
know you can kill with a dick.
MARCUS PARKS Not coincidentally, Bo Gritz had at one point also been a Mormon but had removed himself
from the membership roles of the church after saying that the LDS was more controlled by the
government than god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I will not allow the law to be inside this house.
BEN KISSEL And dare I say, that's not Gritz!
MARCUS PARKS Now that's a catchphrase. That's a punny catchphrase.
BEN KISSEL That's not Gritz!
MARCUS PARKS Now Gritz' exit from the church had more to do with his income tax return than actual
orthodoxy. But from Bo Gritz, Taylor and Justin Helzer took the phrase 'spiritual warrior'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Spiritual warrior!
MARCUS PARKS Which began to wrap Taylor's belief system in violence. Bo Gritz did not call for violence, he
absolutely did not, I want to make that clear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS But the phrase 'spiritual warrior', it definitely ding-dinged the violence bell in Taylor Helzer's
head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL It's supposed to be kind of a euphemism I think.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He also tried to commit suicide to get his wife back by shooting himself in the chest in a way
that he knew wouldn't kill him but would send a message to his wife. Because he wrote this
whole long thing, it's an interesting story. He shot himself in the chest.
BEN KISSEL Why aren't we just covering Bo Gritz?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know, I want to cover Bo Gritz at some point. But he shot himself in the chest and everyone's
like, 'If anybody knew how to commit suicide it would be that man, that's how I know he didn't
mean it.' And then afterwards Bo Gritz was like, 'Because I'll tell you what, every day I slept in
the muck of Vietnam, I knew my angel was home waiting for me. And every day I wake up to
fight the tyranny that is taxation in America, I would wake up and my wife would be there, that
angel would be there. And when I woke up in the morning to comfort me. And now to think
that I would not wake up with my beloved Beverly at my side.'
BEN KISSEL That's not Gritz. Did she come back to him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS Well speaking of marriage, around this time Taylor Helzer married a woman named Ann after
he convinced her to convert to Mormonism. But the marriage unraveled so quickly that the
couple went into counseling almost immediately after their honeymoon.
BEN KISSEL You should not have to convince someone to change their entire orthodoxy just to get married
to them.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well this is also just the kind of sad state of what it's like, I mean I feel for people who feel the
need to get married so early or think that they have to do it.
BEN KISSEL With the church approval also.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not even with that, it's just in general. Ann and him had like two conversations in high school
where she's like. 'He's handsome and nice.' And then he went and did all of this shit, he came
back. Obviously Taylor is not a nice man. And so when they met back up, she struck it back up
with him, she's like, 'Oh we should really get serious.' And he's like, 'You're not a Mormon, you
can't touch this dick.'
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And so I feel bad for her because she felt the need to have to be married and get up with this
dude immediately.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Generational thing also. A lot of people just getting married so they can bone zone but
you can just do that.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And just fucking goosh on the hip. Just don't make it count.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, sure.
MARCUS PARKS According to Anne, everything always had to be Taylor's way because Taylor was so goddamn
special, it was ridiculous to think that his way might not be the correct way and if you
challenged him at all he'd get angry and tell you that you just didn't get it.
BEN KISSEL Yeah of course it's totally normal to put ketchup on steak, okay. I put ketchup on steak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I also think the idea of 'you just don't get it', I don't know what about that response makes me
so fucking furious.
BEN KISSEL Unless it's like rocket science in which case I will agree about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't get it, I don't get that.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But that's different. But someone saying like, 'You don't get it. It's cause you don't get it.' It's
like what is this? This is real life, it's not the internet.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It's infuriating. Furthermore, out of his parents house and on his own in America for the
first time, Taylor was finding that the secular world was a hell of a lot more fun and interesting
than the Mormon shelter he'd been raised under. From what it sounds like it all began with
television. See Taylor had never been allowed to watch TV growing up. So when he moved in
with Ann and got cable, he'd spend all night every night watching show after show, saying
quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "There's so much great stuff on!"
BEN KISSEL Okay, what era is this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Literally the 24 hour news cycle. This is 1992?
MARCUS PARKS 93.
BEN KISSEL Okay so we're before the 24 hour news cycle. That was '96.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean I get it, I get it.
MARCUS PARKS He's not just watching cable news, he's watching all of cable.
BEN KISSEL Time-Life commercials.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you showed Benjamin Franklin MTV's The Grind before he wrote the constitution of
America, honestly I think this country would be different.
BEN KISSEL You could just see the dust coming off of his crotch as he gets hard for the first time.
MARCUS PARKS Oh my god, are you kidding me? Benjamin Franklin fucked all the time until the day he died.
BEN KISSEL I know.
MARCUS PARKS No one in this country fucked as much as Benjamin Franklin.
BEN KISSEL He would've loved a turkey, if she had been a turkey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He would have been at the fucking spring break house, h would have been there. The only guy
with no hair in the front and a ponytail in the back with the tiny glasses.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, they call me Spankin' Franklin.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, they really did man. When he used to go over to France, everyone got super excited
because they knew the good orgies were about to begin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL On Top Hat this week we talk about Madison Cawthorn saying that he was invited to some
orgies in Washington and he was none too pleased with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah I bet.
MARCUS PARKS Orgy.
BEN KISSEL Orgies with Chuck Grassley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, dot orgy.
MARCUS PARKS Well from there Taylor embarked on a kind of second adolescence, stopping off at arcades
after work for hours at a time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look at all the machines! Look at all the machines! He used to run around. Truly, she would
have to literally physically pull him out of the arcade because he was stuck on the machines.
BEN KISSEL He is acting like an alien.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, it's like Earth Girls Are Easy.
MARCUS PARKS He also discovered pornography and tried to get his wife to try every single thing he saw in the
video tapes and magazines he picked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think it's interesting when you see people talk about this because remember this is a
Mormon lens.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So everything you're looking at is through every various Mormon point of view. So this
woman, the way she described it, she was like, 'And the things he wanted me to do, I saw
some of the footage of it and it was absolutely reprehensible.' And you know the only thing
she's talking about is the butt.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's just anal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's all anal.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. That's the worst that it got.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unspeakable acts, I cannot believe. I was like no, it's pornography you could have bought off a
stand, it's butt.
BEN KISSEL Frozen dildos, I remember those. Fire and ice. There was a penthouse centerfold that I will
never forget, fire and ice, and I believe they had frozen dildos. So perhaps he wanted to use
some of those.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, there's some pee-pee play. I saw some Nugget magazines.
BEN KISSEL Nugget. It's always the one in the middle of the three pack that you steal from the store.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I always remember in one of those I got a club confidential that had this whole pregnant
woman breast milk spread. That was real weird.
BEN KISSEL See but I thought it was confidential. But that seems it was the opposite of confidential.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Marcus is gonna get sued.
MARCUS PARKS But even though Taylor was living the 13 year old's dream of unlimited cable, arcades, and
porn, he still managed to get a job at Morgan Stanley as a stockbroker through his wife's uncle
in 1993.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you've learned nothing from Wolf of Wall Street, you need to understand that stockbrokers
are not special. Anybody can be one.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. See even though Taylor had wacky religious beliefs, he was still a sociopath who could
turn on his shallow charm whenever he wanted and was therefore one hell of a salesman. He
actually enjoyed cold calling customers which personally I think you've got to be a sociopath to
enjoy cold calling.
BEN KISSEL It's a nightmare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey listen. Honestly my favorite hobby, hassling people.
BEN KISSEL Love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's my favorite.
BEN KISSEL You can just see him trying to bond with people on Wall street, just slipping them Nugget
magazine under the table.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Have you heard of pornography?
BEN KISSEL Have you heard of this? Have you heard of video games?
MARCUS PARKS Justin Helzer meanwhile had an uneventful run in the National Guard and went on an
uneventful 2 year mission. And without his brother's charisma, he got a job installing cable TV.
BEN KISSEL Oh! Nothing wrong with that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He is truly a pool noodle of a human being.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. He's worse than that, a pool noodle is at least fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, you have a function on it. Sometimes it slides between a woman's legs. But Justin Helzer
is a fucking useless human being.
BEN KISSEL Guys, are we kidding here? He installs cable. He's an American hero. That was back in the day,
that was a tough gig.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know but but the thing about them is I love our cable installers, if we have anybody who
listens is a cable installer.
BEN KISSEL I don't know if they're needed anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're not really. But the thing is that their moral compass was always off because you could
give a cable guy 100 bucks and he'll do whatever you want. Like he will just give you, he will fix
it all up. You can get the free pay per view and shit, they're very easily bribeable.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well you're also talking from like the 1992 perspective, it's not like that anymore.
BEN KISSEL You can't do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. But that's why I'm here now.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, you're in there, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No I tried to offer the guy. We did have cable put it in the house and I did, because it's like
what do you get? It's like now it's all corporate or whatever. Fuck that shit.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, you can't do it and they don't wanna get fired cause they're living paycheck to paycheck
and it's really hard out there.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah it is. Now Taylor branched out into the more salacious and adult corners of the secular
world after 3 years working at Morgan Stanley. And the whole time, 3 years, he's keeping his
vices to TV, porn, and arcades.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do we not know if this is just the plot to Big?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah!
BEN KISSEL It really sounds like it. That woman had sex with a 13 year old boy and at some point she does
need to be brought to justice.
MARCUS PARKS And at the end of it, even after she knew that she had sex with a 13 year old boy, she still had
this winsome look on her face. It wasn't horror, like absolute abject horror that it should have
been.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because that 13 year old boy had the dick of a man.
BEN KISSEL He did. He really did. The dick of Tom Hanks.
MARCUS PARKS Well in addition to all that, according to his wife Taylor also began dressing like a 15 year old
and speaking as someone who was almost 15 in 1997, it was not a good look.
BEN KISSEL Well let's not diss the JNCO.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I will put it this way. I don't know if it's specifically like a 15 year old cause I know I have
reached an era where I am dressing however I want because I never got to as a little kid. I
never got to buy the sneakers.
BEN KISSEL You don't have a conch shell necklace.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't.
BEN KISSEL That was needed.
MARCUS PARKS You don't have frosted tips tips.
BEN KISSEL Don't have frosted tips.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know. But again, this is a Mormon perspective. So I think when she says that he's dressed as a
15 year old, it's because he's not a businessman. He doesn't wear his suit to go to work and he
doesn't do all the shit, it's like he's wearing t-shirts that say Billabong on it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he's shopping at PacSun.
BEN KISSEL He's probably got some WWF gear, blood from a stone, it's a really cool Stone Cold Steve
Austin shirt. I had like 50 fucking wrestling shirts. It was really cool. I mean no one thought it
was cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You did.
BEN KISSEL I thought it was cool.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I thought my Stone Cold shirt was kind of cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah man, I had my fucking No Fear shirts.
MARCUS PARKS Fuck yeah.
BEN KISSEL Remember the Big Johnson shirts?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah but it wasn't allowed.
BEN KISSEL Those would get you in trouble.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, we had Bear Piss Beer. Those were fun, those were fun. Well leaving behind Ann and the
two children they had together, Taylor left his home for weeks at a time and started smoking,
drinking, and going out to nightclubs where he experimented with weed, cocaine, and
shrooms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But considering how this was 1997 and Taylor was also discovering the rave scene, his main
drug for a time was ecstasy.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh. What brought you here? Well I started with Street Fighter, then I played Street Fighter
II. Next thing you know man, I'm just here at this rave, selling you drugs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa, cool.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the best story I've ever heard.
BEN KISSEL Isn't that weird?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the thing is if you remember college, because I know I was like that.
BEN KISSEL That's a tricky question.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I did not do a lot of substances throughout high school, right. I smoked a little bit of weed but I
didn't really start hard drinking and smoking until I hit 18 and I went into college. And I really
think that those first moments of foraying into substances, you know who that guy is.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where he's just like, 'Hey man, have you tried shitting on weed?' Like that. That bullshit from
Half-Baked where it's like it became his entire personality was ecstasy and what does that
mean?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You are an insufferable human being.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I would almost say you're by definition a psychic vampire because these people on ecstasy,
they want to be happy but they have to steal your joy to do it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. As Taylor began to see just how much fun the adult non-Mormon world could be, he
conveniently also began to believe that he'd been betrayed by the church. His mission had
been a bust and his marriage was a bust. So therefore Taylor didn't feel like he had a true
place in the LDS.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this is all from like the first taste of a non-Mormon life.
MARCUS PARKS I mean he'd been out of it for like three years. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But seriously he escalated in those three years.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just kind of interesting cause he barely paid attention to his marriage and his kids and that
kind of shit.
MARCUS PARKS Oh of course. Some fucking kid slips him a joint at the arcade and it's all fucking over from
there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like what the D.A.R.E. people thought would happen.
BEN KISSEL Exactly. It's reefer madness.
MARCUS PARKS I mean I think that's what it is is that really that only happens with super sheltered kids.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS It really does. If you have parents that raise you like a normal person then you know it's not
that bad. But the sheltered kids really do fall down the cliff.
BEN KISSEL You have to be dirty as a kid, you know build up the immune system.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, do all the butt stuff. Roll around, suck dick, snowball, anything. Especially when you're a
kid, get it out of your system now.
BEN KISSEL Well I don't know about that but I was gonna say give your children small amounts of booze
young but that was also a bad idea.
MARCUS PARKS The French do it, that's fine.
BEN KISSEL what's that?
MARCUS PARKS the French do it. They give kids wine.
BEN KISSEL The French have some issues.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI In Italy it's legal to smoke when you're 9.
BEN KISSEL Is that right? Mandatory even.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS But I think the biggest reason why Taylor rebelled against the LDS and his marriage was
because his life was turning out to be extremely ordinary. See he'd been told for his entire
existence by both his family and the church that he was destined for greatness. Instead all he
had was a regular ass office job, a regular ass wife, and two regular ass screaming kids.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm supposed to have my own planet!
BEN KISSEL Where's the planet?
MARCUS PARKS He's not waiting till death for that planet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, he wants it now.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL That's nice. I guess I'm happy that my parents were just like, 'I hope he gets a job as a manager
at Burger King.' That's kind of nice to have lowered expectations too.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Less pressure I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If it's not put on you, the pressure's not put on you, then good. But a little ambition's nice.
BEN KISSEL Of course.
MARCUS PARKS A little ambition is nice, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Internally you have to have it yourself.
MARCUS PARKS Ironically, speaking to the ordinary point, even though the Bay Area club scene of the late 90s
might have seemed exotic and exciting to a former Mormon like Taylor Helzer, it was
ultimately just as ordinary as his own life. There's nothing special about doing X and dancing to
Moby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. It just takes sometimes a couple of years to understand that because for a while you're
like, 'This is the best time I've ever had in my life!'
BEN KISSEL We're doing it!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then it's just, you know what it is? It's a couple of years of waking up, leaving a place at
6am, and you come out to the light and then you go on to the subway and you see teachers or
construction workers and you're like a big old mess and you're feeling worse and worse and
worse and no one's digging you.
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like Taylor is not, it's not like he was a party promoter, like he wasn't at the center of the
action at Limelight, you know what I mean? He wasn't it studio 54. He's in the worst place in
the world.
MARCUS PARKS No, mine wasn't X. Mine was that same situation, it was cocaine and it was coming out of
Home Sweet Home in the Lower East Side at 6 in the morning and it's not fun.
BEN KISSEL I always kinda liked seeing people go to work because then I know I don't have to. I'm going to
bed, bye!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A lot of times it was because I had to wake up and then go do some type of work, it just wasn't
that work.
BEN KISSEL That was always horrible.
MARCUS PARKS But just as Taylor fell into the world of drinking and recreational drugs, so too did his brother
Justin. And both began doing both on the regular. This however wasn't what truly scrambled
the brains of the Helzer brothers. That can be placed squarely on the shoulders of a self help
course big with Mormons called Harmony, which sent both brothers down a destructive path
of amorality.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would not necessarily even say in any other type of show that we've done that this one thing
is what really shot him down the pipe, but it really was.
MARCUS PARKS It really was.
BEN KISSEL Is this like there's a show on CNBC, not to plug, it's called Business Bootcamp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah please don't.
BEN KISSEL And I watched it and it sucks and all they do is scream at you and they're like, 'This is gonna
make your business better!' But it's not, it's just there so I can watch you suffer. Is that kind of
what this is?
MARCUS PARKS Well let's get into it.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Harmony was a rip off of another self help program called Impact and it therefore shared
many of the same basic beliefs and techniques.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they're all a rip off of a thing called EST which was run by Werner Erhard and again, it's the
same thing. We covered this, Randy Kraft was a part of the original group of people. It's weird
how those synchronicities show up, right.
BEN KISSEL Jeez, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because the EST training is exactly the same as Impact and Harmony. They all stole from each
other. And nothing really in the end helped anybody.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS No. Now it's hard to find concrete information about Impact because quite tellingly the
founders of the program have gone to great lengths to actively expunge any information on
the internet that portrays them in a negative light.
BEN KISSEL Just tell them we're part of NXIVM.
MARCUS PARKS But when you look at the testimonies on ex-Mormon message boards, you can see that Impact
is somewhat of a combination of the business practices of Scientology and the light version of
the MK Ultra technique known as psychic driving. Concerning the former, Impact was a spinoff
of Life Spring which stemmed from Landmark Forum which came from Mind Dynamics which
is of course a component of Scientology.
BEN KISSEL Money laundering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's interesting because as we've said, there are certain things in the lower aspects of
Scientology that can be helpful.
BEN KISSEL As you've said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I have read an article, I was reading this massive, it was from the behaviorist perspective
about the idea of breaking down what EST is, EST training is. Because I want to know, when we
did the Scientology series, what exactly is the shit that they're talking about?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What happens when you go to Harmony training?
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And a part of what they do is it's a roast battle version of a Joel Osteen show where you write
like a testimony about who you are and then you go into a room and then they take the
information you gave and they break you down is using what you gave them.
BEN KISSEL To destroy you. Do they build you back up?
MARCUS PARKS It's exactly what they did to Ted Kaczynski. That was the fucking experiment that broke Ted
Kaczynski, was doing exactly that.
BEN KISSEL But then you have to do the build up part cause otherwise you just leave a crumbled upHENRY
ZEBROWSKI There is a build up part.
MARCUS PARKS We'll get to the build up part.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS That's what makes it similar to psychic driving and what makes it similar to an MK Ultra thing
of course because the Ted Kaczynski thing was related to MK Ultra. It comes back to MK Ultra.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also a lot of this was stolen from the tactics of Werner Erhard who LRH, he was so
offended by training that he sued him for theft of intellectual property.
BEN KISSEL He sued him? Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. In addition, Impact's tiered highly expensive system of escalating programs mirrors the
business model pioneered so many years before by L. Ron Hubbard. Starting at level one with
what's called Quest Training currently available for the low, low price of $725.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
MARCUS PARKS Impact starts with a four day retreat covering such vague concepts as relationship skills,
accountability, and leadership. In reality though, the quest training within impact was a highly
abrasive confrontational experience that supposedly broke down old beliefs. In these sessions
which started at 6am every day, a facilitator aggressively asked deeply personal questions then
insults the participant until they sometimes either cried or vomited.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're supposed to sit in a chair, not move. There's supposed to be a bathroom break every 4
hours and let them out, right. Then they can go.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The whole idea Marcus and Kissel, what you guys don't get is that it's all about can you even sit
with yourself for a goddamn minute?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I mean I was on a plane over here, it took me 6 hours to get here, I was all alone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah sure. Yeah, what you're doing man? Oh yeah, that's your act bro. You're playing into your
act, that's your act. You show up, the Kissel, the bumbling, beloved simpleton.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This man covered in grime and beer flecks, that's just the act. That's not you, right?
BEN KISSEL That's nice that you actually said that but I mean that's not even my act.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you're lying to everyone because actually that is you but your actual portrayalBEN
KISSEL (gagging)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, bitch!
MARCUS PARKS Well for example, as far as them asking questions and completely breaking them down, one
woman admitted to being sexually abused by her fathers and brothers. The facilitator called
her a slut.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's just for the first day.
BEN KISSEL Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's just what they're trying to do, come on. It's day one. You gotta warm me up.
BEN KISSEL 750 bucks, huh?
MARCUS PARKS $775.00
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS Back then in the early 90s it was like $325. So inflation has definitely caught up to Harmony.
BEN KISSEL Well by today's standards pump number 9, that's about 2500 bucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Three weeks going on.
BEN KISSEL Pump number 9.
MARCUS PARKS But on the third day after the participants are broken down, the facilitator switches to a more
loving tone just like they did with psychic driving, manipulating people into thinking that some
good had actually been done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well this is where they kind of get off and it's cool because it's technically a limited time period
that you're spending getting abused. Where Scientology, it's a whole lifetime that you're
signing up for and they keep moving the goalposts of what you have shown that you have
been effectively trained and that you have learned and you have grown. Where this is at least
it's one and done in a weekend. But a lot of people's lives are literally shattered by the
weekend.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it sounds horrible.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, what usually happened, they just stayed broken. But the thing about that is that they
became convinced that they can only be made right again through the higher levels, which
only got more and more expensive.
BEN KISSEL It's horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Welcome to the Zebrowski thought clinic, I can't wait to have everybody aboard.
BEN KISSEL I can't wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna be doing this. Toot toot, everybody get aboard the thought clinic train, bus, ship
because what I'm gonna do is get your thoughts and turn them into oughts because it's about
what you ought to do, not what you thought you should do.
BEN KISSEL I love it. I don't know what it was about the weekend but I really think sketch comedy has
potential and I feel like overall the Polish are one of the funnier people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly that clinic really showed me a lot of Henry's impressions are not as problematic as I
thought they were.
MARCUS PARKS As far as what sorts of manipulative activities these people participated in, they'd sometimes
play a game in which you and three other people all had to pretend that you're all in a ship
that's gonna sink. And one of you were given three popsicle sticks and whoever got those
sticks would be saved while the others would be left to die. And to make it even more
disturbing, the popsicle stick captain could also choose to keep one for themselves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Each person had to make an argument as to why they should live and the others should die.
And by the way this happens after you know everybody's deepest, darkest secrets. And more
often than not, the popsicle stick captain kept one for themselves regardless of the arguments
made by their imaginary shipmates.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause that's real, Dogmeat. And that's what you don't fucking get. Yeah I'm standing up
because it's fucking real. When it comes down to it because it's about what is is and what ain't
ain't. I'm deep in the research.
BEN KISSEL Thank you Bill Clinton. I just want to be the person who eats all the popsicles.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I guess you do gotta get the popsicles, don't you?
BEN KISSEL You do have to have a little fun with it. Pamela, you don't get one because you're a bitch. Bob,
you're a fucking bitch, you don't get one. Jerry, bitch, you don't get one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Perfect.
MARCUS PARKS Now while some people have said that Impact training destroyed them emotionally or led
family members to destroy their lives in the pursuit of its promised results, others like Taylor
and Justin's mother Carma loved it. After starting with Impact she switched to the rip off
program Harmony and brought her sons into the fold. And with Impact, Taylor Helzer found
both a cult leader roadmap and the justification he needed to bring his darkest sociopathic
urges to light.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause much like any other thought system, right, there are things that you can learn.
BEN KISSEL Take an improv class.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Truly.
BEN KISSEL Cause there are some good skills that you can learn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you can pick and choose and understand that some of these teachings are allegorical, I'm
supposed to learn by example and take this with me and it's maybe a life lesson and I'm
supposed to play out over time.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A lot of times these things are not supposed to be taken word for word literally.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because if you do you end up Hitler. It's that type of shit where it's like you can't just buy into
some kind of esoteric system wholeheartedly. It's about reflecting. More people should read
the Kybalion.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, that's right. And basically Impact and Harmony had a belief system close to the
objectivism of Ayn Rand in which the only thing that matters is the self. Additionally these
programs stress that the concepts of right and wrong do not exist or at least don't matter.
BEN KISSEL I mean they do when you're driving, you want to get to a place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, that's the idea.
MARCUS PARKS But what really matters is if something works or it doesn't. There's no right, there's no wrong,
it's does it work or does it not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I am not going to speak well of objectivism in any way, shape, or form, but the way I will
compare it to is because EST is kind of like what I said before, it's weaponized zen buddhism.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's this idea of destruction of the ego version of yourself, what you portray. The idea that what
you think and believe are not you, they actually have no bearing on what reality is. So there is
an objective reality at the very bottom of it that is us as individual souls floating around in
goop. That type of shit, right? And then it's all about trying to get to that, get to the real.
BEN KISSEL Now why would I wanna do that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. I honestly don't know because I like my thoughts. I'm kind of consumed my
thoughts, maybe that's a problem.
MARCUS PARKS I wanna get to the opposite of that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I like the opposite. But the thing is that it's interesting because that sentence is supposed to be
about not judging your judgments on a feeling that you have. It's all about kind of lessening
how hard you are on yourself for having conditioned responses to your own responses, right.
Like being mad about feeling guilty, feeling mad about being sad, like those types of things.
But he did it wrong.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I mean while other people saw Impact is something in which they participated, Taylor
Helzer saw it as an instruction manual on how to manipulate people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it is!
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. You break them down, you humiliate them, and you build them into something else that
you can use. And it's with this belief that right and wrong did not exist that Taylor Helzer began
to try and build a cult, using his brother Justin as his first disciple.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll tell you what Taylor, that sounds like a lot of fun, Taylor.
MARCUS PARKS That's just Jimmy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I'm just having a good time.
MARCUS PARKS The second member or at least the attempted second was a highly attractive waitress named
Keri Furman. In 1998, Keri was working as a server at the Peppermill restaurant in Concord,
California.
BEN KISSEL (singing) She used to work in a diner. You never saw a woman look finer. Remember that
song?
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL Neil Young?
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL She used to work in a diner, never saw anyone look finer?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS What's the name of the song? Can you name it?
BEN KISSEL Wendy's. I don't know the name of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow, we're just deep into, I don't know if this is an uncle corner. This like great uncle corner.
BEN KISSEL What? You guys don't know that song? Somebody knows it out there.
MARCUS PARKS I bet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, someone's yelling.
BEN KISSEL It's Harvest or something like that. Whatever.
MARCUS PARKS In the Peppermill restaurant in Concord, California, Taylor Helzer came in and chatted Keri up.
Keri thought he was handsome and charming, so when Taylor left a credit card instead of a tip,
leaving a note, 'buy yourself something nice', she was intrigued.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's so douchey.
BEN KISSEL It's obvious he doesn't have that much money on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But also it's just the thing that like a beautiful woman, things happened to her and sometimes
she's just like, thank you.
BEN KISSEL Buy yourself something nice.
MARCUS PARKS Well she admits that at this point it was a low point in her self esteem.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS And Taylor took full advantage of that. He completely abandoned his wife and kids and
manipulated Keri into moving in with him faster than you could say Charles Manson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Charles Manson!
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS That's fast.
BEN KISSEL And they're together now? Wow! How'd they get escrow to go so fast?
MARCUS PARKS Well soon the two of them moved into a rented house with two roommates named Olivia and
Brandon along with Taylor's brother Justin.
BEN KISSEL Just like the dream you told me all about with your brother and two roommates. This is great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah and they get to share a room with the brother.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, this is awesome. Thanks for the credit card.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now from what Keri said, Taylor was very loving and made her feel special and he had
that effect on a lot of people. He was very manipulative.
BEN KISSEL And rotisserie Tuesdays. It had a double meaning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS But soon after - no, he just watched.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he did just watch.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, oh god. Brother cuck?
MARCUS PARKS At his brothers at his brother's request, by the way. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Are you serious?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When you're going down on her I'm like, oh that's lunch. I wish I could share.
BEN KISSEL A lunch you wish you could share. That is so gross.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Maybe you have some, oh no. I made a phantom! I made a little ghost patch.
BEN KISSEL Yes, that's ejaculate. Ugh, god.
MARCUS PARKS Ghost patch. But soon after abandoning his family, Taylor began to believe that he was
destined for greater things and great men don't have office jobs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man, don't look at me bro. You can't get me back into an office unless I'm seeking my
revenge.
BEN KISSEL Very abstract.
MARCUS PARKS So embarking on his first of many schemes, Taylor began the process of scamming Morgan
Stanley into giving him disability payments by faking mental illness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it worked!
MARCUS PARKS He went days without shaving or showering and babbled about wild ideas openly in the office.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen. When we get rid of trains, right, fucking get rid of cabs.
BEN KISSEL You're gonna get rid of trains and cabs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey man, hey. Helicopters.
MARCUS PARKS You know what, man? They went with that shit. You know there's an Uber helicopter service in
fucking New York right now that you can take a fucking helicopter from your office building to
LaGuardia and JFK?
BEN KISSEL I'm not doing it unless it's Gallagher's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I have to start writing things down.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, that was Gallagher!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Gallagher's idea.
MARCUS PARKS And Keri Furman meanwhile played the part of the concerned girlfriend trying to save her
partner from the throes of mental illness. And sure enough it worked. And Taylor was soon
living on the easy street of fraudulent disability payments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's sad man. Easy street of disability payments?
BEN KISSEL That's what a real hero does.
MARCUS PARKS Once Taylor convinced Keri to help him out with his scheme, he talked her into taking the
same Harmony Impact courses that he'd taken. And since she was by her own admission highly
suggestive and vulnerable, she felt like she got a lot out of it. Now in the house where Taylor,
Keri, Justin, and the two other roommates lived, Taylor began ruling the place as an
authoritarian, copying what he learned from the Impact Harmony training.
BEN KISSEL Oh god, what an annoying prick.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah. And he also refused to pay rent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, because he was in charge.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm the conductor, okay? You see the conductor paying for violins? You think the conductor,
he's gotta fucking rent his baton?
BEN KISSEL Not me, not me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But no, it's a tiny room. And I just think about just how stupid this beginning is because the
other two roommates were not involved.
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were just normal ass roommates just being like, 'Yeah, I see you got the mini cult going
on here. If you guys can leave my mac and cheese alone. I'm gonna put my initials on it. Just so
you do that. Also the manager wants to know about the garbage disposal.' Meanwhile he's like
I am a child of light! And you're like all right.
BEN KISSEL Just leave the mac and cheese alone, we're fine.
MARCUS PARKS Well eventually Taylor convinced the quite attractive Keri to pose for nude pictures to try to
get her a spread in Playboy. I don't know what his endgame was with it, either he was trying to
see what he could convince her to do or he was just trying to make some quick money.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He kind of did the thing of what was it from Stepbrothers where the group they had was like
Events Worldwide, I forgot what their thing is. This is his beginnings of wanting to create a
hyper elite escort service.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We'll get into it but he definitely used her. He thought that like, see we've got a Playboy model
on the roster, it's gonna bump up all of our shit. And then Justin's like, 'Yeah, that would be
amazing, we need honestly maybe a couple of big hung guys, right? Couple big hung guys?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah. That's Carl Jung, yes. Yep. So this is also probably for his own status, right? So he could
be married to our dating a Playboy model.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, something like that. I mean he borrowed $2500 from his father for new boobs for Keri,
probably never paid it back either. But quite shockingly Keri got in.
BEN KISSEL Very good!
MARCUS PARKS She was a Playboy playmate, had one of those classic huge fake tits, soft focus, belt and
garters, 90s Playboy spreads.
BEN KISSEL Sable. You're talking about Sable from the WWE. Yes, absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Well Sable's spread was a little more in focus than the 90s Playboy really was most of the time.
The playmates always had a soft focus.
BEN KISSEL I remember it in focus. I think my eyes crossed pretty hard.
MARCUS PARKS I mean it's hard focus, like you got to see every single inch of Sable in that spread.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh, the look on your face, you're like an umpire.
MARCUS PARKS I spent a lot of time with that issue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But she did make it.
MARCUS PARKS Good for her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would put her on there as maybe, this is controversial to say, but probably most attractive
cult member of all time.
MARCUS PARKS You know what? I'm gonna go ahead and agree with that. Yeah, without a doubt.
BEN KISSEL I kinda like the Manson girls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh sure. Oh yeah, I wanna hang out with them.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean conventionally attractive.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely the only Playboy model to being a cult that we know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That we know of.
MARCUS PARKS There's probably a lot of Scientologist playboy models now that I think about it.
BEN KISSEL Oh I think there's a lot, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Going off this, Taylor pushed Keri further into the world of sex work, convincing her to dance
nude in the strip clubs of San Francisco while also acting as a backroom pimp who set Keri up
with oral sex gigs. Now in true pimp form, Taylor kept most of the money Keri earned from sex
work, saying that he needed it to invest money in a program of his own making that was going
to be similar to Harmony. Instead he invested that money into what was basically an escort
service called In 2 Me C.
BEN KISSEL I'm gonna kill myself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I hate it. I really, really hate it.
BEN KISSEL Can you say it again?
MARCUS PARKS In 2 Me C.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But hey, Kissel.
BEN KISSEL (gagging)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you say it fast it sounds like 'intimacy'.
BEN KISSEL Intimacy.
MARCUS PARKS Intimacy. In 2 Me C.
BEN KISSEL So gross, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's fucking handjobs.
BEN KISSEL I get it, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Taylor Helzer soon took on the pseudonym of Jordan Taylor and printed In 2 Me C business
cards that asked potential clients if they wanted better relationships, better sex, and more joy
in their lives.
BEN KISSEL If it's with you, Taylor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And a handjob?
MARCUS PARKS Well to further finance adventure, Taylor became an ecstasy dealer at the local raves and tried
forcing his brother to do the same, but this seems to be the only time Justin ever split from his
brother. Because while Taylor was a rave guy, Justin liked the goth clubs.
BEN KISSEL Okay, rave versus goth, how can they stay together?
MARCUS PARKS There's not that much difference.
BEN KISSEL Oh there's a little difference.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Maybe I'm wrong. Email sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. When I have met goths, they're normally
not simple, you know what I mean? Justin was a simple goth.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know if Justin was as simple as you're making him out to be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think he was.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know if he was. I think he was just a very submissive human being.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know, I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know either. I don't know, maybe I'm just giving him goth points.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think you're giving him points.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Maybe I'm giving him goth points. But that's the other thing too, there is a link between the
rave world and the goth world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Cyber goths.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes. Don't tell me. The cyber goth community is a complicated one.
BEN KISSEL Yep. I thought you were going to see the movie Blade.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL It works.
MARCUS PARKS But Justin was still under his brother's thumb in many ways. Sometimes, as I mentioned
before, he would watch his brother have sex with Keri at Taylor's request. And also as I
mentioned before, Justin was seen by his roommates on more than one occasion on all fours
eating from a plate on the floor while making loud smacking sounds.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. Henry might be right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look, look! I got it in my eyebrows!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I think Henry might be right. Why is he eating like a dog?
MARCUS PARKS I think he's just an impossibly weird human being. I don't think he's simple, I think it was just
weird.
BEN KISSEL Marcus have you ever eaten food like a dog?
MARCUS PARKS No but I'm not that weird. I'm not a weird person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure. Yeah, right. Okay, I'm sure, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS I'm really not. I'm a very normal person. I'm a normal human being. Don't give me that look,
they can't see the look you're making right now.
BEN KISSEL It's because this is my 'I'm not commenting' look. This is me 'we're keeping the business
together' look. You're totally normal, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Everyone loves dirt and bones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When you said, 'I've already got so many raccoon penises.'
MARCUS PARKS But that's not my doing, I didn't buy the raccoon penises. People are giving me the baculum.
BEN KISSEL You can still throw things away that you're given. But you know, whatever.
MARCUS PARKS That's the thing about on all fours eating like a dog, I don't know if that was his own doing or if
it was a request from his brother. Although admittedly I think it's the former. I think he did do
it because he liked it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's a weird goat. He's a weird guy.
MARCUS PARKS He's just a super weird guy.
BEN KISSEL I think you were right with goat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he's a goat, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now once the idea started flowing, Taylor evolved out of In 2 Me C and started brainstorming
an Impact-inspired project called Transform America.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're transforming America!
MARCUS PARKS Which was based on what Justin called his 12 principles of magic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Number one, always have coins. Number two, never killed a pigeon. Number three, girl's got
to be skinny if you want to cut her in half.
BEN KISSEL Monocle as well, always have a monocle.
MARCUS PARKS In these 12 principles he swiped ideas from Impact, like the idea of there being no right and
wrong. But he also added certain caveats that could justify any future actions he might take
because it was obvious from these principles that his future plans required some big
justifications.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, very much so. It is a justification guide.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause it's all like he will make sure that whatever he does is in the power of Christ, it's all this
kind of bullshit where no matter what he does, god willed it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he proclaimed himself perfect so he could do no wrong. His perceptions were deemed
always correct.
BEN KISSEL Isn't that something?
MARCUS PARKS And he decided that the only way to gain control was to lose control.
BEN KISSEL Well fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What does that mean?
BEN KISSEL It means that he is god.
MARCUS PARKS It means he can do as much meth as he wants.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what it means.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It's perfect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's meth. Again remember all of this has got little sprinkles of meth all throughout.
BEN KISSEL You can feel the meth. This is ecstasy.
MARCUS PARKS At this immediate point he's not quite into meth yet. He's seeing it around, he's wondering
what's that all about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What's that over there?
MARCUS PARKS Maybe I can check that out later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know my brother thinks he's a dog.
MARCUS PARKS Perhaps most important though was the principle that said that quote "spirit knows
everything" meaning that anything that came into his head could be seen as a revelation from
god. Because remember spirit talks to him. Meanwhile Taylor was still in the sex game and he
began pushing Keri into helping him build a new venture to fund Transform America called The
Feline Club. You fucking get it?
BEN KISSEL I don't really get it actually, what is it? The pussy club?
MARCUS PARKS Pussy club, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Is that what he's doing? He's making a pun? I get it now.
MARCUS PARKS It was essentially a high class escort service for rich men in the financial sector.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS This escort service however soon transformed into another truly harebrained scheme and
right here, this is when he starts doing meth.
BEN KISSEL Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS And ecstasy at the same time.
BEN KISSEL Fantastic methtasy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. You know what's like being unnaturally happy? Also being incredibly fast.
BEN KISSEL Love it.
MARCUS PARKS The basic idea was that Taylor would get attractive young women to pose as sandwich delivery
girls.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You already got my ear.
BEN KISSEL Wow, interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Those sandwich delivery girls would deliver sandwiches to Taylor's old Morgan Stanley office.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now ask them if they want a handjob.
MARCUS PARKS Not quite yet. First they would gain their trust and then they would lure them back to the
house for a handjob.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You want a handjob?
BEN KISSEL A handjob. I just want the sandwich.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can I get this sandwich please, ma'am?
BEN KISSEL Please.
MARCUS PARKS Once the men were in a suitably compromising position, Taylor would photograph the
stockbrokers with those sex workers and blackmail Morgan Stanley for $50 million.
BEN KISSEL Just don't mind me, and you see him to setup the 1920s camera, just stay still please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No because it's gonna blur, I need to see your face. Well it's because then he'd reveal, hey
guess what? She's 14! And then they would show her and then she'd have the braces back on
and be like, 'Sorry, I didn't know.'
BEN KISSEL Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you know who did this? Jeffrey Epstein.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So it's not that harebrained.
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was real.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it was real. I think the harebrained part was the $50 million blackmail, that was the
harebrained part.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think that the harebrained idea was that he could even get it together.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL So Morgan Stanley is like all right, we have two options. We can pay him $50 million bucks or
what if we normalize fucking teenagers?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let's get to the radios!
MARCUS PARKS By the way he was willing to settle for 20 million. His original like we asked for $50 million, we
get $20 million.
BEN KISSEL Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You start at $50 million, you get to $20 million.
BEN KISSEL He's so smart.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well to recruit possible sex workers, Taylor would go to raves and hand out true or false
questionnaires to gage the moral flexibility of potential minions in his far fetched scheme.
These questionnaires read quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Sex before marriage is wrong. True or false. I'm a powerful sexual person. True or false."
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "I'm a religious person. True or false. I don't do drugs. True or false. Lying is wrong. True or
false. Stealing is wrong. True or false."
BEN KISSEL Bro I gotta get to the bar, man. You are bumming me out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I have a pencil.
BEN KISSEL Oh my Lord.
MARCUS PARKS Now not surprisingly Taylor was not able to recruit a single woman successfully because no
one goes to a rave to fill out a questionnaire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unless you're getting free Camels.
BEN KISSEL That is true. And maybe a lighter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what he forgot.
MARCUS PARKS Oh my god, I got so many fucking free camels from those ladies in Motor City. So many.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL You're the luckiest guy around, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS I was. And they still sent literature to my family's home for years afterwards.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI For years! I remember that.
BEN KISSEL It only kills 1 in 10.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's it!
BEN KISSEL That's it.
MARCUS PARKS And Keri was starting to realize that Taylor was nothing more than a parasite and this actually
threw a bit of a wrench into Taylor's plans. See before Taylor even really got his ideas for
Transform America together, because if there's one phrase that can be used in conjunction
with Taylor Helzer it's 'jumped the gun', he figured he needed a core group of three people to
help him out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS His right hand man of course would be Justin and Taylor hoped Keri would be the third.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well that was a twist on a Mormon story, I forget the term, it's not a psalm, it's something like
that where Jesus chose three people to go with him to America. And so that's what his
justification.
MARCUS PARKS That's where it comes from. However soon after Keri's playboy spread was published, Playboy
offered her a full contract. So she moved to Los Angeles.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Peace! Bye! Theset itties are going places!
BEN KISSEL Nice.
MARCUS PARKS Never once looked back at the almost cult she almost joined.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now she just has to go watch Hugh Hefner masturbate.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL She dodged a massive bullet with not being a part of this cult, I'll tell you that.
MARCUS PARKS She was in a couple of videos.
BEN KISSEL No shit.
MARCUS PARKS Playmates Unzipped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh we do the research. This isn't like other true crime podcasts.
MARCUS PARKS That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We look at the tits.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL Unzipped.
MARCUS PARKS I definitely made sure I had full understanding of Keri Furman.
BEN KISSEL Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS There was however still the question of who was going to be the third. And Taylor found the
perfect mark in a 22 year old former meth user named Dawn Godman, who had left meth
behind after finding solace in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Now it's quite
possible that Justin and Taylor had realized that Keri hadn't worked out because she didn't
have the Mormon foundation. So they began trolling LDS singles functions beginning in 1998.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It really is pointed because I didn't think about that because at first I was like how did they get
Dawn? And then I realized they met her at a singles show, this is all they were doing. They
were just going looking to see who is the saddest one in the crowd.
BEN KISSEL Right. They were hunting. Predators.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And not only who is the saddest one in the crowd, who was going to approach them? He
did have some clever ideas.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because he would show up, I love this, because he'd show up in full rave gear, literally not
dressed like a Mormon at all. He has fucking fake dreads in and fucking shiny pants on and
then Justin would be in full goth, black, dressed like a fucking vampire. And they'd just like roll
in being like, 'What? What are you gonna do about it? We're a little different.' And they did
the head twist.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean this one was a murder mystery dinner. And this one time they both showed up in
all black because they're trying to go period. They dressed as 19th century preachers.
Everyone else by the way just dressed like Mormons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, they were in full costume.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. While everyone else laughed at the two obviously desperate Dickheads and did their
best to avoid them, Dawn was drawn to the pair because they looked like the meth heads she
used to hang out with back when she was a meth head. She's like, 'Oh man, I used to be a
meth head too, maybe I can talk about meth with those guys. They're Mormons. They're not
doing meth but they look like meth heads.'
BEN KISSEL That'll be a quick conversation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dawn viewed herself as an outsider, right, because she said that she was never properly loved
or paid attention to and she saw these men, they were being mocked by the rest of the tribe.
And yes, yes, they might be stinky and obviously begging for attention but I'll give them their
attention because no one gave me anything and I'm going to reach across and be the Mormon
land bridge for you to walk across.
BEN KISSEL Don't do it, Dawn.
MARCUS PARKS Now Dawn wasn't made the third member immediately, partly I think because Dawn was not
what you'd call attractive. Because Taylor had just lost a literal Playboy model.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just don't know if you're Transform America material. We kind of want to move a different
direction.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, Dawn wasn't particularly pretty. She was overweight and as we'll soon see she was a bit
of a dullard. She just was, I mean she participated in the murder of five fucking people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why we can rag on her. But yeah, she showed up and she was the dupe that needed to
be there.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, just full on dud I think is the best way to describe her.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS So Taylor Helzer continued trolling for possible recruits, not at Bay Area raves, he learned his
lesson there, but rather at church where he started holding informal study groups in the
parking lot after service was over.
BEN KISSEL If I'm a pastor I'm like, 'Yo brother, you gotta get out of here.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dude this is exactly what happened is that he started hosting his own. He'd be like, 'Yeah, you
guys are at the bible study? See you at the bible study after the bible study.' And then he'd
walk out to the fucking parking lot.
BEN KISSEL This is Benny's Burger Joint, you can't sell burgers right outside of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah well maybe you don't understand America and freedom and the fact that I brought a grill.
BEN KISSEL I paid for the parking lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can't own a parking lot because I watched Pocahontas.
MARCUS PARKS Well Taylor told people that the LDS had wildly veered away from what Joseph Smith had
originally taught saying that listening to the church was like listening to the wrong radio
station. One of them was evil and one of them was godly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're both DJs.
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS So through that study group, Taylor began convincing interested women to attend Harmony
Impact courses, probably thinking if Harmony Impact breaks them down first, I don't gotta put
in all the groundwork.
BEN KISSEL This is DJ Jesus Christ, here is another hit song. It's the same one I always play, The Age of
Aquarius.
MARCUS PARKS One of these women, a sometime follower named Kelly Lord, said that Taylor would often test
her loyalty by asking such meth-inspired questions as quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Hey, if I asked you to rob this Carl's Jr for me, would you be open to that?"
BEN KISSEL No, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know if you're Transform America material, we're gonna have to go.
BEN KISSEL But you can just buy it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're just gonna have to go.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS Kelly however saw right through Taylor and when she told him that he'd end up like David
Koresh if he wasn't careful, he tossed her aside, saying to her like he said to anyone who
disagreed with him, she wasn't on his level.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You don't get it. You don't get me, you don't get Transform America, so you don't get in.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh. Sometimes you don't get stuff because it's too stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No Kissel! No way.
MARCUS PARKS Another woman who came close to joining Taylor's fledgling cult was Debra McClanahan who
also knew Taylor and Justin from the LDS church. Now at first she was drawn to Taylor just like
all the rest and she would give both Taylor and Justin erotic massages to completion.
BEN KISSEL Whoa! Obviously you can't see it but Marcus did do the jerk off motion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, because I don't know if you talk about jerk off or are you talking about does she just
massage them and then sit on their face for 15 minutes.
BEN KISSEL We just don't know.
MARCUS PARKS We really don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We don't know.
MARCUS PARKS It was to ejaculation. The author of the book did very explicitly say to ejaculation, to make
them ejaculate.
BEN KISSEL And the book actually came with a little bit of come.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Additionally this woman, Debra McClanahan, she and future follower Dawn Godman who we
just mentioned, they had a threesome at Taylor's request with some dude they met at a bar
called Catfish Charlie's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Romance is in the air. And that apartment with the other two ass roommates just wondering
what the fuck they're doing, sitting around being like, 'Maybe we need to leave San Francisco. I
thought I was gonna be the prima ballerina, I guess I'm not because I'm 45 and I'm a polish
man.'
BEN KISSEL Maybe it's not for us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess we're all just gonna have to go, huh? While they're all trying to play Smash Brothers
while this cult is forming in the living room.
BEN KISSEL This was peak San Francisco right after The Real World, they got a little rub from that, a lot of
people thought San Fran was cool.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, this was peak San Francisco in 1997.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yum, yum, yum.
BEN KISSEL This was. Not the 70s.
MARCUS PARKS But again like most of the rest, the game didn't stick to Debra and she left Taylor to continue
her life as both a Mormon and a witch. She did both!
BEN KISSEL Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We contain multitudes.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. A Wormon.
MARCUS PARKS A Wormon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A Wormon!
BEN KISSEL A witch, a Wormon.
MARCUS PARKS Dawn Godman however had fallen for Taylor's schtick completely and attended Harmony
meetings with gusto. She said that her meeting was in a sealed off warehouse with no
windows and people couldn't even go to the bathroom without permission. And even if they
got permission, they had to go with one of the people in charge.
BEN KISSEL Well jokes on you, I'm going to the bathroom right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You just completed the program.
BEN KISSEL Yes!
MARCUS PARKS You got the shortcut.
BEN KISSEL Woo!
MARCUS PARKS The first day she said was constant verbal attacks perpetrated by a tall blond man named Dion
who talked in the same authoritarian tone that Taylor often used when he wanted to convince
someone to do something they didn't want to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey Dawn, guess what? You look like Louie Anderson now. Got you! Guys come on, she's got a
body like an orange but not the personality. Come on, guys.
BEN KISSEL Roast mode, roast mode. Gosh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You got gnome legs!
BEN KISSEL What? Can't believe you said that to me.
MARCUS PARKS The goal, Dawn later said in a moment of clarity, was to get her to a place with no fixed values,
a place where right and wrong didn't exist. And when she got to that point, she became a
willing if disappointing number three.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess we'll take her.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It really was that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS He wanted the Manson girls. He wanted the hot lady fucking cult.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS And it's just Dawn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just Dawn.
BEN KISSEL It's Dawn and his brother how eats like a dog.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is why it's just not an elite team. Dawn, she was mostly pulled in and this is true, she said
it was because Taylor would hug her no matter how long and how far she wanted it. She loved
to be hugged, she'd never been hugged.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She's just like, 'And you just wouldn't believe, Taylor he'd sit down on the couch with you and
he'd hug you for an hour.'
BEN KISSEL That's sad, she obviously was never loved or anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL That's too bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No it's sad obviously.
MARCUS PARKS It is sad. This is the part where you're like okay, she had a hard upbringing, I understand.
BEN KISSEL But then she kills 5 people.
MARCUS PARKS But then she kills 5 people and dismembers 3 of them and tosses their remains into a river
delta.
BEN KISSEL Maybe they should have given her a hug. We don't know that but we'll get to it, I'm sure.
MARCUS PARKS It's possible.
BEN KISSEL We'll figure it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this is the only time when the free hugs people could have saved someone else.
BEN KISSEL I love that. People offering free hugs, it's always the people you don't want to hug.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Don't touch me.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Eventually Taylor began bringing Dawn in on the ideas that he had for schemes that would
fund Transform America, even though he didn't really seem to have a good idea of what
Transform America would actually be just yet.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You don't get it. Okay? You're not with it. You don't get me. We're transforming America.
BEN KISSEL Actually here to listen. What do you think? What is it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI America is like this but what if it's like that?
BEN KISSEL Like that. Okay, great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS Well his whole thing is like we gotta fund Transform America first, we gotta get the money
before we can really figure out what Transform America is really all about.
BEN KISSEL Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this is truly an American flaw. This is because he's obsessed with capital, he is obsessed
with it and he didn't even think about you need a fundamental system first and then fund it.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
MARCUS PARKS One idea was to shoot out the windows in a bunch of fast food chains.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Then when the stock dropped, like say you shoot up a bunch of Taco Bells and Taco Bell stock
goes down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The fucking stock falls down, right? Right? (sniffs)
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No listen, you listen. Everybody's eating all those tacos, right, everybody's like there's a
revolution against tacos in this country, right.
MARCUS PARKS yeah. And then when the stock falls, you buy a bunch of it up and then you stop shooting the
windows out of all the Taco Bells, stock goes back up, you sell it, you make a fucking mint, bro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Boom, done.
BEN KISSEL Can I just get a hug?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes Dawn. Yes. How about I just wrap a sweater around you real tight?
BEN KISSEL That'll work.
MARCUS PARKS Well that's quite methy plan, like most of them, just never got off the ground. They never
actually tried it. It was just one of many spitballing ideas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, because it's fucking stupid.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL This is Fight Club.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is Fight Club.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Kinda. Meanwhile Justin was keeping a journal of his goals for the year which were just as
vague as they were pathetic because remember Justin also helped kill 5 people. Among others,
his three main goals were quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Number one, driver?" It's the word 'driver' with a question mark.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Number two, a sexual lover."
BEN KISSEL So he wants a driver and a sexual lover.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wanna be one.
MARCUS PARKS That's the thing, we don't know because number three does make a distinction.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Number three, I want to become a druid."
MARCUS PARKS It doesn't even say I'm going to become a druid, it just says "become a druid". They're very
confusing because it's like driver? What does that mean? Does that mean he wants a driver or
he wants to be a driver? Does he not know how to drive?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It'd be kinda fun to have a driver and honestly people don't understand when you read it, I
mean a golf club.
BEN KISSEL It's interesting. NASCAR was pretty hot in the 90s.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Number two is a sexual lover. I don't know if he wants a sexual lover or if he wants to be
a sexual lover.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He confessed to dawn that he did not have many partners in life.
BEN KISSEL No because he lived with his brother and kept on watching his brother have sex with a bunch
of women. It's difficult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he ate like a dog.
MARCUS PARKS He ate like a dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he didn't really have a thang. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS By the year 2000 Taylor began to trust both Justin and Dawn enough to tell them his ideas for
Transform America or more likely he finally got his meth and ecstasy addled thoughts together
enough to form a somewhat coherent idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You guys are gonna get this because you guys get me.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. He revealed that Transform America would basically be a training course that the whole
country would take.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And it would Transform America.
BEN KISSEL I get it. I got it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's transforming America.
MARCUS PARKS In order for this to work however, Taylor would need to first install himself as the head of the
Mormon church.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Of course.
BEN KISSEL Oh but that's like a huge thing.
MARCUS PARKS Details.
BEN KISSEL That's like the biggest detail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI My main thing is how I know I'm going to make in show business is I'm going to become Lorne
Michaels.
BEN KISSEL But Lorne Michaels is alive. You're gonna become the executive producer-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna go get him, I'm gonna become him, I'm gonna be that, I'm gonna do him.
MARCUS PARKS This is the same idea as when your mom asked you like, 'Henry, have you ever thought about
being on Broadway?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why aren't you ever in those television shows? This is what she hit me with last time I visited.
She's like, 'I don't understand, I saw that one show, why aren't you on that show?'
BEN KISSEL Why aren't you on Young Sheldon? That's her favorite show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know! I actually did audition for Young Sheldon.
BEN KISSEL Did you get it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I've been there for fucking years. Yeah, I'm the main character. Yeah. I play Come Lord.
It's incredible, I milk Young Sheldon. The whole show, I don't know if you've ever seen it, it's
about young Sheldon's relationship with an older man.
BEN KISSEL Oh I didn't realize that. That's why he becomes such a sociopath.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's incredible. Brave show.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS This is what I'm talking about with big sign post but no connective tissue where it's like number
one, I become head of the Mormon church. Number two, I transform America through a series
of training videos. Number three, Jesus Christ comes back. Boom. All the rest is details, bro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
BEN KISSEL Even Billy Blanks had a better business model than this.
MARCUS PARKS This plan however which did not yet have any shape or form would take a lot of money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Has to!
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS You gotta have a lot of money.
BEN KISSEL So it's the worst of all things.
MARCUS PARKS He knows that, that he's gonna need a lot of money for this.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Quite possibly he also needs, we might have to kill some people maybe.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS I don't know. I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But are you willing to go far enough do it?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Can I get a hug?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dawn, not right now. Okay?
BEN KISSEL That's not great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All right, all right. I'll steal all this as I'm hugging you, Dawn.
BEN KISSEL Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God you're hot. You're physically hot.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS A warm presence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Warm woman.
BEN KISSEL Yes I am. I'm currently going to the bathroom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know if the Harmony training really took hold.
MARCUS PARKS Well at first Taylor soft-pedaled the idea of murder. Just at first.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Maybe murder, murder, murder. Maybe we could sink them. Maybe we can get 'em wet.
BEN KISSEL You're just gonna sink people,?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what we'll do? Shoot 'em with a little squirt gun. Every time they do something
naughty, we'll shoot 'em with a squirt gun.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Well he told Justin and Dawn that killing was acceptable to god on certain occasions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is.
MARCUS PARKS Because even the bible and the Book of Mormon featured god murdering people when the
situation called for it. And even sometimes told someone to murder someone else. Got to.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Got to. Delegation!
BEN KISSEL I guess so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Obama killed millions!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. What? Millions?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Millions!
BEN KISSEL Millions. You can just say anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I have a microphone in front of my head.
MARCUS PARKS You really can just say anything. Yeah. And once Dawn and Justin agreed that murder was
indeed acceptable because there was no such thing as right and wrong, only results.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Taylor's mini cult spun out of control impossibly fast. And it's with the cult's resulting 5
murders that we'll continue our story next week.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS And you can't even imagine how fucking stupid their reasoning is for killing these 5 people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Somehow it just gets dumber.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But with the dumb comes absolute brutality as well.
BEN KISSEL That is the worst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that's a Last Podcast promise.
BEN KISSEL Thank god. So gold star in the next episode. Thank you all so much.
MARCUS PARKS I wouldn't say gold star but it is brutal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah they don't hack off dicks anymore. After doing Randy Kraft you start to understand there
really is a bridge, there's a barrier to what truly is a gold star.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would just say that it's a lot of murder for Dawn.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what I mean? It's because it's Dawn doing it you're like, well this is a lot.
BEN KISSEL Right. Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and it's a lot of hammers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A lot of hammers.
BEN KISSEL Well that sounds like it might be a gold star episode then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unless you're Bob Vila and that's how you want to do it. Remember?
BEN KISSEL All right everyone.
MARCUS PARKS What that he got beat to death by hammers? That's how he died? Yeah I remember that, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He would love that!
BEN KISSEL This old house that I'm buried under. Thank you all so much for listening, that's just a little
insight into Children of Thunder. For being such a dipshit cult, they have a really cool name.
MARCUS PARKS It's a cool name. It comes from a bible verse like the Sons of Thunder.
BEN KISSEL Okay. All right everyone, thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sons of Thunder is actually better than Children of Thunder.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he wanted women.
MARCUS PARKS But he got Dawn, it had to be Children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, of course. Yeah. You wouldn't want to get that wrong.
MARCUS PARKS You can't be like the Thunder Boys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thunder Boys!
BEN KISSEL Again, Thunder Down Under, check it out in Las Vegas. Male revue, they're all Australian and
my god are they packing. All right well thank you all so much for listening. We got Soul
Plumber out there. Last Comic Book on the Left.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS All 6 issues are out.
BEN KISSEL All 6 issues. Marcus, No Dogs has The Replacements they're covering.
MARCUS PARKS Yep, Replacements part two is out now.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. We're covering all the things you need to know about politics on Top Hat. Yeah,
we're busy little beavers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Spun, brand new, season two is back out there. Some Place Under Neith, it is out there.
They're covering a very compelling case right now, I'm really excited. And honestly they do
great work.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I've already seen a couple of the series coming up and they are really doing good work. I can't
wait.
BEN KISSEL Awesome. And yeah, thanks to everyone who is listening to our Sirius shows, that's every
Monday at 4pm PST and 7pm EST. That's been so fun. So thanks for calling in and just keep on
following all the things we do. And we had a fantastic time in Boston. We better have.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We fucking better have.
MARCUS PARKS Better have.
BEN KISSEL We'll see you on the road soon. Okay everyone, hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein.
BEN KISSEL Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail me!
BEN KISSEL Give someone a hug. Don't kill 5 people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, more hugs I guess. Ugh. Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe not. Maybe more hugs isn't the
best.
BEN KISSEL Well I think if you don't kill 5 people afterwards it's fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And don't eat like a dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Marcus, would you kill for me?
MARCUS PARKS Would I kill for you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Like if you asked me to?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whatever bro.
BEN KISSEL Who do you wanna kill?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll tell you later.