LPOTL (intro theme) There's no place to escape to. This is the Last Podcast on the Left. Rise from your
graves! That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Oh shit!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna say, if you ever see a news report that says 'Henry Zebrowski dies in fiery car crash',
it's because Free Bird came on at the wrong time.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because in Atlanta I bring the fucking heat to the driving.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I drive ten miles faster than everybody else. I'm fucking gunning it-
BEN KISSEL I've driven with you before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You've seen it. But here I've got my Kia Seamist. So as soon as it hits 62, the car starts shaking.
So I'm like driving an old rickety Model T. But I'm going 75 miles an hour, Free Bird kicks in, all
of a sudden I'm driving through police barricades in my mind. And today I did the same thing. I
missed the off-ramp to exit so I was just... Cause the fucking solo was kicking in (electric guitar
sounds) I fucking went across four lanes of traffic just like screaming Free Bird, and I was like
what am I doing? I was out of control.
BEN KISSEL Right, yeah. You're like the ugliest member of the Firefly family. That's the end of Devil's
Rejects, I believe you just described that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm the funny one!
BEN KISSEL (laughs) Alright this is the Last Podcast on the Left. It's Firefly family, right?
MARCUS PARKS Firefly, yeah.
BEN KISSEL (southern accent) Firefly!
BEN KISSEL All right, this is the Last Podcast on the Left. I am Ben Kissel, we have Marcus Parks.
MARCUS PARKS Hey hey!
BEN KISSEL And then soon to be in a ball of flames Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I can't wait to be gone.
BEN KISSEL Oh yes, we all are on the same boat on that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Guys, what does the number 300 represent for everyone? For me, Ed Larsen's weight.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, that's actually my weight too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is it your weight?
BEN KISSEL I'm losing weight but it currently is sitting at a healthy 300.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would say a downtrending 300.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But yeah, 300's big!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah this is the 300th episode!
BEN KISSEL 300th episode! (applause) Couldn't have done it without all of you, hail yourselves, thank you
all so much. And now I'm thinking about those muscular people in that movie 300. Ooh, the
tall one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. I AM Sparta. I think that's from that. I AM Sparta.
BEN KISSEL I AM... W AM BC Sparta. Well, speaking of crazy cults, somehow I found the way to get there,
300 episodes in, we are finally fully covering... Marcus Parks your brain must be in a strange
place right now... Jim Jones!
MARCUS PARKS Oh, we're covering Jim Jones. We're covering Jonestown. This is an episode that I have been
wanting to do for years and years and years. We covered Jonestown very briefly on like
episode 4, back before we had any idea what we were doing.
BEN KISSEL Yeah I think we focused more on the death tapes and things like that.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah we absolutely focused more on those aspects of it, but I'm extremely excited to fully
tackle Jonestown in a four-episode series.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Remember this first of all. Peoples Temple, no apostrophe. And I wanna start this now. Before
we're corrected on the internet. Peoples Temple, no apostrophe.
BEN KISSEL Why isn't... It's not the people's temple?
MARCUS PARKS No, because People's Temple with the apostrophe implies ownership. And this was a socialist
temple.
BEN KISSEL Oh ho ho, don't get me going. Where's McCarthy when we need him? He could've stopped all
this from happening!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) So Jim Jones, known as Jimba to his mother, was a murderous cult leader who led 913
people to their death and ordered the execution of a further 5 all on the same day in 1978,
either in or around his cult's compound, Jonestown, located in Guyana in South America.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now Jimba, normally you'd imagine you'd find somebody named Jimba at the animal actors
show at Universal.
BEN KISSEL Right. He does seem a little bit Lion King character-esque.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (deep voice) Jimba.
MARCUS PARKS His cult, known as Peoples Temple, was somewhat unique in that it was more rooted in a
political ideology than in any sort of far out religious theology. The members of Peoples
Temple, as I said, were ardent socialists.
BEN KISSEL So these are the kind of people that are for bike lanes, for example. When you say 'political
ideology' I'm like bike lane or anti-bike lane? What are you? There are only two options.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is a very interesting group. What we know mostly about Jonestown is the end result. But this
cult, this group, started in the 1950s, and it's kind of interesting to see the long form cults.
Cause this is sort of similar to me to a Children of God or a Scientology, where this was a long
time coming. So that's kind of fun, to take Kissel's phrase, about these episodes is that you
already know the tip of the iceberg and it's kind of fun to go down to the stanky balls of the
iceberg.
BEN KISSEL Is that what they have down there, is that what the Titanic hit? 'We hit it's balls.' But were
they ever registered as a religion? I'm sorry to-
MARCUS PARKS They were at one point a part of a larger religious group. So they were absolutely-
BEN KISSEL So the government recognized them?
MARCUS PARKS They had tax-exempt status.
BEN KISSEL Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS They absolutely did. But like all cults, the ideology that those people shared centered around a
single figure, Jim Jones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the 40 year saga of crawling into one dude's mind.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause that's really what it is, is that, what have we learned about cults from the cults we've
already covered? Is that basically it's getting a group of people into one, normally, dude's
brain. And so you're just living Jim Jones' life.
BEN KISSEL Well, I mean, dudes, unless you're looking at Charles Manson... And the most important thing I
learned from a cult? You can lift yourself up with your butt. Remember when he did that?
Remember in Aum Shinrikyo when he levitated with just his butt? What a guy.
MARCUS PARKS Now the thing to keep in mind this entire series is that what happened in Jonestown was not
mass suicide. It was mass murder, and it was not a sudden event. Jones spent years preparing
these people for that moment, manipulating them the entire time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well kind of like this, imagine the cult is all inside the brain of one man. It's like when the one
man chooses to commit suicide, he then murders everybody else.
BEN KISSEL It's like a deleted scene from that movie, what was it, Inside Out or something? What was the
name of the movie? Animated film where-
MARCUS PARKS The movie with all the child's emotions in his head? (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just like that.
BEN KISSEL Is it like that? What was the name of that movie?
MARCUS PARKS Inside Out, yeah. It's a great movie.
BEN KISSEL Inside Out.
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones didn't know exactly when he was gonna initiate the suicide, he was always ready for
the inevitability though, kind of like a guy who carries around a wedding ring in his pocket all
of the time to wait for the right moment to pop the question.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the next Kay's commercial, absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Now for those of you who don't know, on the final day of Peoples Temple, Jim Jones either
directed or forced 908 people to drink grape Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid, mixed with cyanide,
putting them all through a slow, agonizing death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So now you can effectively, obnoxiously correct anybody who says, 'Oh I guess he drank the
Kool-Aid' loudly and in front of many people in front of your friends.
MARCUS PARKS (sniveling voice) Well, actually, back in Jonestown it was actually Flavor Aid.
Now, many people dutifully did what they were told, but those that didn't drink voluntarily
were held down and stuck with syringes full of poison or they were just shot in the head by
armed guards that surrounded the pavilion where the Flavor Aid was served. It is estimated
that up to a third, 300 people, involuntarily met their end in one of these two ways. And that's
the absolute highest estimate. That means that at least 600 did this of their own volition. Now
the question is, how did Jim Jones manage to make this happen?
BEN KISSEL I gotta ask, how did Jim Jones manage to make this or allow this to happen?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) I'm gonna tell ya.
BEN KISSEL Oh, wow.
MARCUS PARKS First, though, let's look at mass suicide throughout history, because mass suicide is not singular
to Jonestown. Most mass suicides throughout history were committed to avoid the wrath or
rule of advancing armies. Like in 1803 when 50 women and children threw themselves over a
cliff to escape enslavement at the hands of Ottoman invaders. Now others were done out of
despair, like the mass suicides in 1945 in Germany after the Nazis lost WWII. Rather than face
defeat, 7000 people in Berlin alone took their lives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like a bunch of cucks.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS And these people were mostly civilians. They were not high-ranking Nazis that were looking to
avoid punishment. These were people who just could not handle their way of life ending. They
couldn't handle being wrong.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again, we have covered this in cults again and again, we've talked about this. As soon as you
realize your entire life has been wrong, you've allowed a certain thing to exist for so long, you
never spoke up, you were just a part of it, you kind of just kept going... Once you admit at
some point, oh wow, this is crazy, I'm not gonna commit suicide, that means you've negated
years of your life. And so there are people, it's so much easier, and it's fucked up, by that point
to commit suicide than to change.
MARCUS PARKS Then there's the religiously-motivated mass suicides, the most famous of which being
Heaven's Gate. For those of you who don't know, in 1997, 39 people followed a self-made
castrato named Marshall Applewhite-
BEN KISSEL You wore his shirt on New Year's Eve and we have a great Instagram video on @benkissel1.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) That was a Christmas gift from Carolina. It was a wonderful Christmas gift.
BEN KISSEL Oh, very nice.
MARCUS PARKS So that man led 39 people into death after he promised them that killing themselves was the
only way they could ride in a spaceship that was for sure riding the tailwind of a comet named
Hale-Bopp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can I ask this question? Do you think it's easier to get a bunch of people to commit suicide if
they don't have penises?
BEN KISSEL I guess. I think he thought that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because my penis is like a reason to stay around. Like I'm fine with my... My penis gives me
enough enjoyment to myself, even if it's tiny.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL If you wanna know exactly what it looked like there, the last days of the Applewhite gang,
Desperate Living. Remember that, when she gets the penis? And then she doesn't get it, and
then she gets it cut off, cause she cuts it off. But the other thing with Heaven's Gate, they used
the Green Bay Packers 'G', which was very confusing for me as a child.
MARCUS PARKS They did. Still use it to this day.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is very difficult to create your own font.
MARCUS PARKS Now Jonestown is unique in that it's somewhat of a combination of all three of these. But the
only thing of those three that were actually real and not a manipulation of Jim Jones was the
despair that things just didn't work out. See, Peoples Temple was not made up of people
looking for a reward in the afterlife like Heaven's Gate. The best Jones promised them was
reincarnation, and even then it was more of an afterthought than anything. And they were not
supervillains like Aum Shinrikyo, they did not want to rule the world or force others to live life
like they lived life. The only thing a lot of the members of Peoples Temple wanted was to be an
example to the rest of us. These were people who were honest-to-god trying to make life
better for themselves and for other people. They truly believed in the goodness of their way of
life, because at its core, the message of Peoples Temple was positive.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it definitely started positive, that was the whole point. The whole point of it is that he...
Again, that's how you find yourself in the middle of a mass suicide, is that for so long you were
doing the right thing. You were genuinely a part of a community that was helping other
communities. And I also think there's and inherent difference between something like Aum
Shinrikyo, which was cool as fuck and metal and trying to take over the world, and then this is
kind of closer, again, to a Children of God/Scientology. Where Scientology, what kept that
thing together, what kept L. Ron Hubbard together, was the fact that in the end it was about
money. He was trying to make money. And it's weird having that other side goal is what keeps
it alive and keeps it going today. Where Jim Jones, again, what happened was...
I think the central question of all these episodes are gonna be... How does someone go from
somebody who is genuinely trying to help society into maniacal, power-hungry cult leader?
That now, which is Kissel, you're gonna have to watch out for with your fucking future in
politics, because that's where this shit always goes!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah. And there's no way it's not gonna go great, not hundreds and hundreds of episodes
of my voice being recorded on this show alone that could sink any political career despite any
amount of charm.
MARCUS PARKS Well these people, a lot of them did believe in Jim Jones, yes. But a lot of the others only
believed in his message and they let Jim Jones get away with a lot of shit because of that. They
believed in racial equality and they believed in social justice, even though that term has
become loaded in recent years. But either way Peoples Temple did great things in the 25 years
they were in existence and made the lives of many of their members and many of the
members in those people's communities better.
BEN KISSEL All right!
MARCUS PARKS But at the center of it all was a man who could have walked the path of the righteous but
eventually chose evil. As an example of where Peoples Temple and Jim Jones started and
where they ended, let's compare excerpts from two of Jim's speeches. Here's an earlier
sermon made in a Peoples Temple church in San Francisco to hundreds of smiling people. You
look out at the crowd, everyone's smiling, hugging each other, you actually feel a love in the
room when you watch this.
BEN KISSEL Do you think it's drug related?
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL This is a sober bunch.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely sober, except for Jim Jones himself, yes. A staunchly sober bunch, like it was a huge
rule.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like the difference between looking at footage of the studio audience from when the Cosby
Show was filmed then, and now if you get a group together and show episodes of the Cosby
Show now.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Different reaction, hindsight 20/20.
MARCUS PARKS Now let's hear this first one.
LPOTL (audio)
(cheering)
Jim Jones: Now will each of you give a very fond embrace, a salutary kiss, a greeting to your
neighbor. Let's fill this atmosphere with warmth and love.
MARCUS PARKS All right, that's the first one.
BEN KISSEL All right, very nice.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It's very nice, it's very positive, everyone in the crowd is hugging each other.
BEN KISSEL Kind of a Bing Crosby Christmas special feel to it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He is, he is. And this is before the sunglasses! And that's also how you know when things go
wrong in a friend's life, if they start wearing tinted sunglasses inside. That is always a very bad
sign.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Now here is Jim Jones in his very last speech made about a decade later. After the mass
suicide, the mass murder in Jonestown had already begun.
LPOTL (audio)
Jim Jones: You will regret this very day if you don't die. You'll regret it if you don't die, you'll
regret it.
Woman: ...you've saved too many people.
Jim Jones: I've saved them, I've saved them, but I made my example, I made my confession, I
made my manifestation and the world was ready, not ready for me. [inaudible] a man born out
of due season, I've been born out of due season just like all we are, and the best testimony we
can make is to leave this goddamn world.
BEN KISSEL It's like the spiritual version of one of those pre-meth/post-meth billboards, but the drug for
Jim Jones was power and it just slowly rotted out his teeth.
MARCUS PARKS No, the drug for Jim Jones was also amphetamine.
BEN KISSEL Oh, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, yes. That was him high as fuck. Because at that point, you know... because in the
beginning he was really clean, almost too clean, he was sober to a point where I think it's
disarming.
BEN KISSEL Obnoxiously sober, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI By this point it's the opposite, where he saw, his teeth are all fucked up, he's there screaming.
I also will say Jim Jones is very similar to L. Ron Hubbard and I wonder if there is a thing to it,
where they have a sort of feminine aspect to them. Where Jim Jones, once he started dressing
up all the time, and he started doing his hair, doing all these things, kind of the weird affected
speech that started happening later on in his life, very similar to L. Ron Hubbard. I wonder if
there's something about the baphometic duality that these guys have that attracts people to
them as well, where they have kind of feminine aspects and masculine aspects and that makes
them very attractive to people.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's a good point.
MARCUS PARKS Well I think the affect-
BEN KISSEL Get you a guy who can do both. That's what I always say. Get you a leader who can do both.
MARCUS PARKS Well I think the affected way of speech, the more feminine affected way of speech that Jim
Jones took on, I mean, we're gonna see exactly why later on, but he started to make an
affectation where he tried to speak like an old black woman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) Yes, that's right, he did.
MARCUS PARKS I am 1000% serious when I say that that is one of the affectations that he made and we're
gonna see exactly why he did that later on in the series.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I would get in trouble for this.
BEN KISSEL You don't get in trouble for that. You've done that!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would get in trouble.
BEN KISSEL You're putting yourself in free speech jail? Because no one's put you in free speech jail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I am already upset.
BEN KISSEL Ah, the victim in all of this is Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI As it is. It always... It all comes down, it all trickles down to me!
BEN KISSEL Uh-huh.
MARCUS PARKS See, as we said, I think the biggest mistake about Jonestown that people make, and we've
been guilty of this ourselves in our past episodes, is to only examine the end. You look at the
end and you wonder how people got there. But, most of us don't take the time to understand
it. And just like all cults, to understand it, we've got to understand the person behind it.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS By this point it's the opposite, where he saw his teeth are all fucked up, he's there screaming. I
also will say Jim Jones is very similar to L. Ron Hubbard and I wonder if there is a thing to it
where they have a sort of feminine aspect to them. Where Jim Jones, once he started dressing
up all the time and he started doing his hair, doing all these things, kind of the weird affected
speech that started happening later on in his life, very similar to L. Ron Hubbard. I wonder if
there's something about the baphometic duality that these guys have that attracts people to
them as well, where they have kind of feminine aspects and masculine aspects and that makes
them very attractive to people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, which is great. I like having these two perspectives. We've both learned a lot. 'The Road to
Jonestown' is a wonderful book. And also the documentary 'Deceived' is pretty wonderful,
cause that's from a Christian perspective of the Peoples Temple, and it's literally just pastors
going, 'What the fuck happened?' But also a part of it's them... I can see the jealousy, being
like, 'This guy? This is the guy you like?' It's like the fans of Dane Cook. It's the fans of Patton
Oswalt looking at the fans of Dane Cook being like, 'This guy?!'
BEN KISSEL They're all the same to me.
MARCUS PARKS So, please, if you wanna know more about this story go buy these books and support the
authors. That's The Road to Jonestown and Raven. So, without further ado, let's get into the
life of Jim Jones and try to figure out how and why Jonestown ended the way it did.
James Warren Jones was born in Crete, Indiana on May 13, 1931.
BEN KISSEL His father wasn't a Flavor Aid magnate, was he?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Because that would be amazing if he was birthed into the Flavor Aid, into that entire hierarchy,
that theocracy that is the Flavor Aid company. Their only god is Flavor Aid.
MARCUS PARKS Oh no, he was the son of a wildly bizarre couple named Lynetta and James Thurman Jones,
although Lynetta was not his mother's birth name. She was born Lunnett Putnam in 1902.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think it's Loo-nett.
MARCUS PARKS It's probably Loo-nett.
BEN KISSEL But I like Lunnett better.
MARCUS PARKS I mean, spelling-wise there's no 'e' at the end of it, it's just L-U-N-N-E-T-T, so...
BEN KISSEL You give her some barbells, she squats, she knows how to do squats. Lunnett.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (deep voice) Where do you want me to put the keg?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) It was probably Loo-nett, yes. But she was what could be described as a lifelong pain
in the ass. Her marriage to Big Jim was actually her fourth, having already exhausted three
men by the time she was a hair over 25.
BEN KISSEL Well if they can't keep up, get outta here!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well when she was 25 she was also described as an 'old maid', which is a fun thing about the
time period.
BEN KISSEL That's the patriarchy talking.
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones' father James was a WWI veteran who had had his lungs ruined in a German gas
attack, essentially weakening him physically and mentally for the rest of his life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That was something I wanna get more into at some point, about the gas victims of WWI.
Because those guys, it was a whole ruined generation of people, cause they were deeply
debilitated.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah we talked about it a little bit in our Edgewood series, about the effects of these gases on
men and what it actually does to 'em. But you know, a lot of people who came back from that
war and a lot of people who had these sort of respiratory problems, they go past it and they
live full lives. But James Jones was not that type of man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was a bit of a pussy.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh!
MARCUS PARKS Well he was just a non-figure.
BEN KISSEL I wanna say pussies are very strong, so we'll say he's a bit of a dick, Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you Kissel. Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah, he was a non-figure, he was unimpressive and unambitious from cradle to
grave. But he was a member of a prominent and rich family.
BEN KISSEL To be fair, you can't be ambitious in the cradle. You're a baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, you can be ambitious in the cradle.
BEN KISSEL What can you do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was a baby, sitting there just doing pull-ups on the crib, trying to make my penis longer,
wrapping it around the bars of the crib just leaning back, leaning back, just being like, 'I will be
a man about town!' Saying that to myself.
MARCUS PARKS Well, the thing is about James Jones was that he was a member of a prominent and rich family
which is exactly why Lynette glommed onto him, despite being damn near old enough to be
her father. Now, the townsfolk called him Big Jim to distinguish him from our little Jimmy, but
by the time this guy reached his fifties he was so beaten down and defeated that they'd taken
to calling him Old Jim instead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sad.
BEN KISSEL Not clever with the nicknames. Pretty much on the nose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he looked like a thinner Steve Bannon. Cause he was just haggard, just sitting on a stool,
just wasting away at the card house, because it was a dry county that they lived in so he
couldn't even booze it up. Like these are people during the prohibition, they kept the
prohibition going after the prohibition had already been rescinded. So he just sat there,
fucking sober, playing cards til he died.
MARCUS PARKS Well, cards and pool.
BEN KISSEL That's fine to do. What's wrong with that? That's a great way to end it all.
MARCUS PARKS Just sitting there... No, the last 20 years of his life it was just drinking coffee and soda at the
pool hall. And a lot of the times he wouldn't even play, he would just sit there.
BEN KISSEL I don't know if you guys understand what living your best life looks like, because I think that
that might be it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Technically that is self care. That would be a self care Saturday nowadays.
BEN KISSEL Yes. But he was not happy, you don't think?
MARCUS PARKS No. He was just whatever. He just coasted through life not really doing much of anything.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS So Lynetta claimed that when she was about to be pregnant with Jim, she saw a vision of
quote, "the Egyptian river of death."
BEN KISSEL That's not a good omen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL That's horrifying!
MARCUS PARKS Then she saw herself dying on the cross as Lynetta had a pinch for the dramatic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She was a character.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I like her.
MARCUS PARKS She said that she was then visited by the spirit of her mother who told her that it was not her
time yet, as she still had to fulfill her destiny of giving birth to a great man. Now, knowing what
we do about Lynetta, this is probably horseshit. This woman was constantly telling lies to make
herself more impressive than she really was and could be best described as a woman who
never quite grew out of her snotty rebellious teenage years.
BEN KISSEL I like her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well cause you know what it is, it's true, right? Part of it is she did defy the conventions of her
time, she wore pants, she liked to swear a lot, she smoked in public, she was kind of an in your
face kind of person. The problem was she was just difficult for the sake of being difficult. But at
the same time, but you could also see her bumping against a society that didn't understand
that she wanted more from life, but the problem is that she didn't put the work in.
MARCUS PARKS No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI To make some changes.
BEN KISSEL She was like my grandmother, very difficult, the times were difficult, everyone had to be
difficult, everything was hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Your grandmother was a part of the problem.
BEN KISSEL No, my grandmother who grew up in Minnesota, not my Oma who was part of the solution to
a problem. They were very active against the Nazi party.
MARCUS PARKS Ben, I think you need to be real careful about how you use the word 'solution' right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Solution. I think 'solution' is a very troubled term.
BEN KISSEL My grandfather, once again, started labor unions all across this world, in Africa, he was a
globalist, he considered himself a man of the world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, like he was constantly apologizing. He was constantly being Matt Damon.
BEN KISSEL Well he could have committed suicide, and then I wouldn't be here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well let's get into an example of the difficult-ness of Lynetta Jones. First of all, her
constantly changing names. She was born Lunnett, but then she changed that to Lynette, and
then she changed that to Lynetta. Only thing is, she didn't tell anybody she wanted to be called
Lynetta.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So she got super fucking offended when people didn't call her goddamn Lynetta.
BEN KISSEL Well, you gotta call her Lynetta!
MARCUS PARKS She took it as a personal offense. Cause when she first met Big Jim's family, she was going as
Lynette, but the she wanted to be start calling Lynetta but they didn't know that so they just
kept calling her Lynette, so she took personal offense to that.
BEN KISSEL You gotta find the game within the game. They didn't have Sirius XM, there was nothing else
to do. The only thing they had to do was find ways to become upset to feel emotion. So this
was her approach.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's like showing up saying that my name's Puff Daddy now but I was just calling you Sean
two weeks ago.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And she also had, apparently, a filthy mouth. But this was Indiana on the 30s so it sounds like
their standard for a filthy mouth for a woman was just saying 'damn' a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She spit a lot too, she liked to spit.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And she wore pants! Disgusting.
BEN KISSEL I feel like we're being a little harsh on this woman who was just trying to survive in the 1930s
in Indiana!
MARCUS PARKS She wasn't trying to survive, this was a person who constantly... Like she would so much rather
say she was a great person rather than actually being a great person.
BEN KISSEL You have to say it first. Michael Jordan said it, "I will be the best" and then he became the
best. And you know what? Jim Carrey wrote himself a cheque for a million dollars and now
he's got a hundred times that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We know this. We all know the goddamn story and now he's deeply troubled, now he's fucking
gone.
BEN KISSEL He's an egomaniac.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That documentary was terrible.
BEN KISSEL Oh, I thought it was good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I get it, you're from Indiana. A part of this whole, they keep talking about in The Road to
Jonestown, is that in Indiana the whole thing is conformity. At this time.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, 'go along to get along' is what they say.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, keeping up with the Jones', you're in there, you're part of a machine, you're a part of a
neighborhood, you're a part of a community. So a part of it's like, yes, I think it would've been
interesting if she... I mean, we're making judgment calls now fucking 70 years later, 100 years
later, whatever that time period is. But it's like, we're making these judgment calls now but at
the time, it's like if you wanted to be different you should've moved to goddamn New York.
BEN KISSEL Not everyone can just pick up and move to New York, not in the 1930s! That was still the Pony
Express era, am I wrong?
MARCUS PARKS Hey man, back in the 30s there were thousands of strong independent women who took life
by the fucking horns and made it for themselves. Lynetta just wanted to sound big, she just
wanted to be different, that's all she wanted. She didn't wanna be great, she just wanted to be
different. For example, she was a big believer in destiny and reincarnation, and she said that in
a past life she'd been a successful writer, a great woman, but in this life her destiny had been
ruined by pettiness and jealousy.
BEN KISSEL She already did it in a past life! I like this approach to it like, 'Been there, done that. Now I'm
onto my Cheeto phase and I think I'm gonna get some Flavor Aid.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're looking at the seeds that are getting planted into Jimba Jones.
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI These are the little... (deep voice) Jimba.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's all of these lessons from his mother and a part of it is that constant blaming of other
people. And waking up with this idea of being, she said, "I was chosen by god to give birth to a
great son." Which is a part of what she had retrofitted for herself to make her feel normal
about herself having a child, was that she put it all into Jim. And now he's gotta live up to his
mother's expectations which are gonna haunt him for the rest of his life.
BEN KISSEL As far as mother issues go amongst sociopaths, she's not the worst mom that we've ever
covered in these series here.
MARCUS PARKS She absolutely is not.
BEN KISSEL In the podcast.
MARCUS PARKS Well, I mean, if you wanna compare her to a serial killer's mom, you can kinda compare her to
Jeffrey Dahmer's parents, because even though she was saying that Jim Jones was gonna be a
great man and her son was gonna be a great man, she was constantly telling her son that he
was gonna be a great man, she didn't actually wanna put in the work of actually raising her kid.
So she pretty much ignored him for most of his upbringing. In fact, when he was born, she
dismissed him by saying he resembled, quote, "an ugly eskimo."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I am not going to say that she is wrong. She definitely had a bit of a Heidi Klum moment
with that by calling him an ugly eskimo, but she is correct.
BEN KISSEL I just picture her buying him sunglasses, huge aviators, when he's like six months old and just
slowly watch him grow into them. But that's not what happened, but that's what I fantasize. If
it was a Pixar movie.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah and Jim's dad wasn't any help either. Like we said, he spent all his time over at
the pool hall drinking coffee and soda. In other words, Jim Jones was left to his own devices to
do whatever he wanted and what little Jimmy wanted to do was almost exclusively abnormal
shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. He got right into the weird shit very fast.
MARCUS PARKS So for some reason Lynetta would never let Jimmy into the house if she wasn't there, as at the
time she was on the assembly line over at the old Winchester glass factory.
BEN KISSEL Alright.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI See it was a part of the arrangement with the Jones family was that because James couldn't
get his shit together enough to have a job, he couldn't keep a job, he couldn't stay on his feet...
A part of it is he had a lack of spirit, right, they say a brittle spirit, he had a it again and again.
It's like a thing that he suffered from, so the family took them in saying we'll buy you a house
and we'll take care of you, but a part of this is that once we have you set up, Lynetta's gonna
have to get a job to cover all of this shit. She'd gonna have to cover at least half of the house
expenses and we'll take care of everything else. But she didn't want to. She felt deep
resentment about it.
BEN KISSEL Well, yeah, she should though! Because her husband's playing cards, he's not even drinking. I
honestly think if he was getting sauced up I'd be like, well okay, he's got a card and an alcohol
problem. She's out there working in the factory, I kind of understand why she's constantly
pissed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a 50/50 problem. Cause she also thought she was better than having a job.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she also refused to talk to anybody in town, they'd try speaking to
her and she'd turn her nose up at 'em because they didn't talk about the great things that she
wanted to talk about.
BEN KISSEL She's a Roosevelt!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and I kinda get that, but she also never made any real effort. It was always her being
better than everybody else and her building herself up. For example, at the Winchester glass
factory, she was just an assembly line worker but years later she told everyone that she was a
labor union leader, that she had led everyone in an uprising to have the workers treated well.
It was not true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She didn't do anything!
MARCUS PARKS She didn't do jack-shit. She did nothing.
BEN KISSEL Alright. She made glass. That's good.
MARCUS PARKS So while she was working, Jimmy wandered the neighborhood and was eventually taken in by
a sweet old Nazarene preacher's wife named Myrtle Kennedy which is, by the way, the perfect
name for a woman who talks about church all the time.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, Myrtle!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) You want some thin cookies?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, love 'em.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) I made 'em specifically so you wouldn't like 'em.
BEN KISSEL Alright.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She was a part of the Nazarene community, and a part of the Nazarene community is that if
you join the church you can't go to other churches. It's very devout, they're very sweet but
they were the only group in this small Indiana town that evangelized. Everybody else didn't, at
the other churches people would just come and go as they please.
BEN KISSEL Yeah I know the Nazarenes.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah they were 'god-botherers', as people called them. They believed that if you did not go
to the Nazarene church, you were going to hell. Bar none.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS So, in Jim Jones... because the Jones family didn't go to church at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which fucked up the whole town. Because that's what people did, cause the town knows
everybody's fucking business, everybody's on top of each other's bullshit, so everybody does
the same shit. On Wednesday they all go see the movie in the town square, which is what they
actually did, they all go shopping on Saturday and on Sunday everybody goes to church. And
when you don't go to church you stick out. But little Jimmy Jones started doing it and he was
weird about it.
BEN KISSEL But this is good, so he's understanding religion is a social construct used for economic means,
for jobs, for relationships. Nothing to do with god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah! And guess what he does? He twists it til he kills 900 people. That's what he did.
BEN KISSEL Well he only killed 300 and then the 600 did self-kill.
MARCUS PARKS No, he killed them. He murdered all of them. Once again, Jonestown was not a mass suicide, it
was a mass murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) Immediately rolling back, every time. (Midwest accent) 'Oh no, that is a good point, oh
yeah.'
BEN KISSEL Scale it back.
MARCUS PARKS So Myrtle Kennedy saw in Jim Jones a soul to save. So she started taking Jimmy to church
every single Sunday, and Jim loved every single second of it. He immediately took to church
and in fact, he was starting to quote scripture back to her, even as a young child, long passages
of scripture, he immediately had a knack for this. And pretty soon though, he started to get
curious about other churches. So every Sunday Jim Jones would bounce from church to church
to church taking notes the entire time. Sometimes he'd go to one church for about an hour
and then head to another church to catch the end of that one.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So Myrtle Kennedy saw in Jim Jones a soul to save. So she started taking Jimmy to church
every single Sunday and Jim loved every single second of it. He immediately took to church
and in fact he was starting to quote scripture back to her, even as a young child, long passages
of scripture, he immediately had a knack for this. And pretty soon though he started to get
curious about other churches. So every Sunday Jim Jones would bounce from church to church
to church taking notes the entire time. Sometimes he'd go to one church for about an hour
and then head to another church to catch the end of that one.
BEN KISSEL The quilt work, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He doesn't feel emotions. It's like when a friend starts becoming a craft beer person.
BEN KISSEL Oh, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All of a sudden now they're all about craft beer and all they ever talk about is hops.
BEN KISSEL And the worst is when they start brewing it themselves and you have to taste it and be like
(hesitating) 'That's good... That's good.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL So do we know what he was feeding the dogs? Why were they following him, any ideas on
that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You'll see, you'll see.
BEN KISSEL Okay. So he's going around church to church almost like someone at a comic-con.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Just going to find out all the different exhibits and really trying to learn.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he was learning the entire time, and like Henry said, he was absolutely obsessed and
that obsession had a huge effect on his behavior and how he thought about things. And since
it was obvious he had weirdness in his blood, he started doing weird shit that freaked all the
other kids out. Now even as a child, Jim Jones was obsessed with death. One night, he took a
bunch of other kids on a field trip to the local casket factory.
BEN KISSEL Cool job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Awesome job.
MARCUS PARKS And the local casket factory, like everyone else in town, left their doors unlocked so the kids
were able to just walk right in.
BEN KISSEL Huh. Different time.
MARCUS PARKS And once they got inside, Jim directed all the kids to lie down in the coffins so they could all
feel like what it was like to be dead.
BEN KISSEL Cool.
MARCUS PARKS And he didn't do it just once, he did this multiple times. And every time he did it, fewer and
fewer kids came along with him.
BEN KISSEL They didn't wanna meditate. It could be very relaxing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, it is very relaxing to just mime the sweet release of death. But he'd also just go, it's true,
they said they would eventually watch him go by himself.
BEN KISSEL What are we talking here, 12, 13, 14 years old?
MARCUS PARKS No, he's pretty young, he's not quite 10.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is like 9, 10.
BEN KISSEL Oh okay, so he's a savant of the-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, of the disgusting, morbid, yeah. Of dictators...
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and then there were the animal funerals. Jim would trawl the town looking for the
corpses of small animals and once he found them, he'd invite other kids along and he'd hold
elaborate funeral services, sometimes in the middle of recess.
BEN KISSEL This guy, I mean, he coulda just been a very successful, wealthy televangelist. He's got a Joel
Osteen vibe-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was! He was.
BEN KISSEL Well, obviously we'll get into the dark turn here, but at this point there's some good things
that you could carve into a good person.
MARCUS PARKS He could've been a lot of things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was trying to be like the heavy metal version of a preacher for a while being like, 'I walk the
walk, I don't go...' We'll get into this, but he didn't like the idea of personal flashiness.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and so when those funeral services started freaking out the older kids and they stopped
coming, just like they stopped coming along with him to the casket factory, Jim got the bright
idea to make the younger kids attend. And those younger kids were just happy for the
attention of an older boy at first, but when they tried to leave, Jim would bully them into
staying. And then after that, Jim Jones was introduced to who seems to be his very first hero,
Adolf Hitler.
BEN KISSEL Oh, wrong choice! Ah Jim, you made the wrong choice!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wrong choice there. Well cause all the other kids, cause at the time they're showing all these
newsreels of WWII, and all the other kids love playing Americans, running around being all, 'Oh
yeah, I'm here to save all the concentration camps!' 'What are concentration camps, little
Billy?' 'I don't know, but we're gonna find out soon, I bet.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Liberate 'em. But he didn't ever believe in the ideology that Hitler was spewing? He just liked
the presence.
MARCUS PARKS It was the style.
BEN KISSEL It was the style. He never, he didn't go Nazi or anything.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely not. No, in fact Nazi beliefs were kind of the opposite of his beliefs. He just loved
the pageantry, he loved the style. He watched Adolf Hitler, he watched how the man
commanded a crowd and the way he commanded the crowd; the way he'd go real low and
he'd talk real low then get louder and whip the crowd up and then bring 'em back down again.
He took notes the entire time, and he saw in Adolf Hitler someone to emulate. And he loved
Hitler so much that he formed his own little squad of Nazis and he pretended to be the Führer
instead of a member of the Allies like all of the reasonable kids did. And when kids his own
age, again, wouldn't participate, Jim Jones drafted the younger ones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It is really, really difficult to get those bigger, older kids into the bunker.
BEN KISSEL It does seem like a very strange Peanuts strip. You know, like I can see Snoopy just really
getting into Hitler and just like leading a whole tribe...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Pea-nazis, with fucking Charlie Brown-skeinkinschkleischkin.
MARCUS PARKS Jim would take these kids out to a secluded area and direct them to goose step while Jim
pretended to be Hitler like they were at a Nuremberg rally.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS And when the kids screwed up, Jimmy would hit 'em in the calves with a branch. He was about
14 when he was doing this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He would've been an incredible record producer. Honestly if he wanted to be.
BEN KISSEL Maybe.
MARCUS PARKS He was! Eventually the Peoples Temple recorded some pretty good albums.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They always do. They always do and they're always fine. The Source Family, which we'll do at
some point, that was the best fucking cult album I've ever heard. It's all jammy and it's got that
African (steel drum sounds). It's great.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. I think my favorite cult musicians of all time, The Partridge Family. They don't get
enough credit for what a crazy cult they were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I wanna real quick dive into this concept of his interest in the stylistics and the approach of
Hitler. I think that a part of this has go to do with it's a weird form of either sociopathy or what
would turn into some sort of behavior, he is always off. To me, there's something even more
nefarious about separating the style from the substance of Hitler than just being a Nazi. Yes
you can hate and buy the ideas behind Nazism and fill with this hate and eventually either
release it or be proven wrong or live your whole life as a person filled with hate. But there's
something else about somebody that cherry picks something, like the idea of his speech style
or the pageantry, he cherry picks that off the top of one of the worst ideologies that existed,
the Nazi ideology, and he uses it to his own advantage. And in some weird way it's almost like
fucked up in a worse way, where it's just like he uses the quote unquote, "the good stuff" from
the Nazis and then he'll use it later on, too.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah he completely... I mean, of course he's also a child when he's watching this so he doesn't
have a very developed mind, but he's not looking at what Hitler's doing, he's just looking at
how he's doing it. He sees how Hitler is getting these people all riled up but he doesn't look at
what that sort of style does to people. He's not paying attention to that at all.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The shallowness of his style, right. So they talk about that's the thing with Ted Bundy we see
all the time and that weird thing about serial killers, like even the ones that they said had
emotions, it's that shallowness that I think is weird, it's the banality of evil kind of. It's like a
kind of thing where people view it from a detached point of view.
BEN KISSEL But isn't that normal, though? That's how you learn, you emulate and then you're just a
shadow, you're a shell of who you're emulating and then you fill it with your own personality,
your own ideas, and your own ideology, right?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah-
BEN KISSEL So it's smart in a way. It's how humans learn.
MARCUS PARKS Actually I think in a way, Jim Jones, as we're gonna see, if he hadn't have done evil, it's actually
a pretty good example of how to be successful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. No, it's true.
MARCUS PARKS How to live your life. It very much is. Jim Jones, if he's anything else, he was a successful
person.
BEN KISSEL Yep.
MARCUS PARKS But he just chose to use that success for evil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unfortunately.
MARCUS PARKS Rather than good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was never enough for him and that was the problem.
MARCUS PARKS Yep. And with these young kids that he made play Nazi, since an older kid was paying attention
to 'em, the younger kids mostly put up with it. They put up with him hitting 'em with a switch.
And this was one of the most important lessons Jim Jones learned and he learned it as a
teenager. If the kids your own age don't want to play with you, then you find the ones no one
else is paying attention to and you play with them.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Or you go way old and hang out with 75 year olds.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) And he did that too!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He did that too.
BEN KISSEL He is on fire with finding friends.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he learned that all you have to do is just give 'em a little bit of attention and they'll
follow you anywhere.
BEN KISSEL Yep.
MARCUS PARKS See, unlike most of the serial killers we cover, cult leaders tend to be lethally clever. These
people are brilliant.
BEN KISSEL Well they're politicians and serial killers combined into one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's politicians, serial killers, and then business people. Cause then you're essentially
forming a company, like what it ended up being, especially this, he has to bring people in and it
becomes a money thing, because then he becomes obsessed with money too.
BEN KISSEL I love the idea of Jim Jones like, 'I need to LLC.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) He did do that!
BEN KISSEL So what's your product exactly? 'Like a... Like a death cult.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well, their most impressive skill, cult leaders, is always that of manipulation. Jim Jones
learned it very early on in life. But like serial killers, Jim was also into a bit of animal mutilation.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS According to the book Raven, Jim once tried to sew a chicken leg onto a duck with a string just
to see what would happen.
BEN KISSEL It's against god, Jim. You don't wanna do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't like it, but if I saw it on Food Network...
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'd be like slide it over.
BEN KISSEL That's outta bounds! Flavor overload.
MARCUS PARKS But true to the duality of Jim Jones, he tried to take care of animals as well, he just wasn't very
good at it. He kept carrier pigeons and would send them on secret missions, but they all
inevitably died and each one got a funeral.
BEN KISSEL Suicide bombers, huh? Kamikaze pigeons.
MARCUS PARKS But them again, he would also arbitrarily shoot his friend Don Foreman with a BB gun.
BEN KISSEL That is fun.
MARCUS PARKS My brother used to do that to me! It sucks!
BEN KISSEL My brother used to do that to me and I used to shoot him right back and we had great BB gun
wars, all in the basement, all across the home. And all across the neighborhood, and they
looked like real guns. Nowadays, I would just be shot by the police, but back in the 90s we had
freedom.
MARCUS PARKS Well he wouldn't just shoot him with a BB gun, he'd take actual guns, like .22s, and he's just
point 'em at his friend and just smile and smile. And one time, he actually shot at his friend
Don, and this is very telling of Jim Jones. Don was hanging out at Jim Jones' house and he was
like, 'All right, well you know I gotta go, I've gotta go do my chores,' and Jim Jones was pissed
off that he would leave, that he would even think about leaving before Jim Jones let him go. So
as Don was walking away, Jim pointed a .22 at him and shot it in his general direction and hit a
tree right next to the guy and hit close enough where bark flew off and hit his friend.
BEN KISSEL Not good.
MARCUS PARKS But it's definitely a part of his own weird... His ego was so fragile that he could not do an
activity that other people weren't into. If he was doing something and he was really into it, if
somebody rejected it, it's like they rejected him. Because you didn't like what I was doing, I'm
taking personal offense because that means you're rejecting me. No, he just didn't wanna play
with the fucking chicken leg attached to the duck.
BEN KISSEL Well, it seems like a fun thing to do but...
MARCUS PARKS This is something throughout his entire life. If someone didn't wanna go along with what Jim
Jones did, he would consider it a personal betrayal, and that would happen every time
someone tried to leave his church, because people were coming in and out a lot, and every
time someone tried to leave he took it as a personal betrayal.
BEN KISSEL Did he sew a chicken leg to a turkey every time he was upset?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then eventually Guy Fieri picked it up.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what happens, it turns into... That's the first lazy version of the turducken.
BEN KISSEL Guy Fieri, yes. By the way, R.I.P. American Grill, I went there the final day, December 31st, and
you could tell the waitstaff was happy to be done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, yes.
BEN KISSEL It was sad, it was sad.
MARCUS PARKS Then again, from a young age, Jim Jones seemed to have a genuine interest in equality and
social justice. As a teenager, he'd go over to the side of town where all the black people lived,
he'd stand on a street corner and preach about everyone being equal in god's eyes. And
people listened. Cause remember this is Indiana in the mid-40s, there weren't a whole lot of
white people coming over to the black side of town for any reason.
BEN KISSEL It was and I believe still is the Klan capital of the country.
MARCUS PARKS It's pretty fucking awful. And it wasn't just a white person coming over to their side of town, it
was also a white person coming over to preach racial equality. And while I do think Jim Jones
truly believed in racial equality as many of his followers did, as all of his followers did, I think
Jim Jones may also have seen in this a path to power. He saw injustice, yes, but he also saw
people that nobody else was paying attention to.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was very smart, he realized both. It was like his own personal politics mixed with this, and
then what is a stronger game than a thing that you do believe in yourself? It's not horseshit. So
the very bottom of it's not horseshit, you don't have to spin horseshit, you do believe in what
you're doing, but at the same time it's gonna help your bottom line.
BEN KISSEL You find a market, yep. Under-exploited market.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And that's one of the biggest complications in the story of Jim Jones. I do think he had
good in him, I do think he did. At times in his life, he genuinely cared about others and helped
them in astonishing ways, especially when it came to race relations. But, considering how
things eventually played out, you gotta ask yourself. Did Jim Jones truly try to follow his good
intentions but still lost to evil, or was he always a sociopath who just saw a situation to
manipulate?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I think that's the question we'll wrestle with this entire series, but I think it's very
interesting. I don't think people that are good all the way through ever really end up here. I
think in the end it's got something to with the shallowness of his choices to begin with, and
we'll get into this.
BEN KISSEL Well, I'm interested to see when the turn came because at this point, yeah, it seems like we
had potential for an actual good leader.
MARCUS PARKS So much potential on him, he is a very disappointing figure. So let's get back to Jim's childhood
weirdness. He somehow had an extensive knowledge of sex which joined religion as pretty
much the only two things he talked about, although no one really knows how he got the sexual
information or if any of it was correct.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel like it may have come from his mom. Cause his mom was super into sex and talking
about uncomfortable subjects, so I think maybe it came from her, which has gotta really fuck
you up later down the line when your mom's making you all horny, you know what I mean? It's
the David Berg shit.
BEN KISSEL I don't think you're supposed to get aroused when you have the conversation with your
parents about sex.
MARCUS PARKS I don't think you're supposed to, but as Henry just said with David Berg, sometimes you do...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He did like it a little bit more than the rest do.
BEN KISSEL Maybe they were talking about it in church also, sometimes church broaches the subject.
MARCUS PARKS God, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (barfing sounds)
BEN KISSEL They used to in my church, we had sex ed, it was very weird. Very weird.
MARCUS PARKS Well what Jeff Guinn said about Indiana in The Road to Jonestown was that this was farming
community, sex was everywhere. You saw animals having sex with each other all the time-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah! Chickens fucking dogs, dogs fucking cats, cats fucking people, crows fucking crows cause
they are racist.
BEN KISSEL I love crows.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and these are houses with very thin walls, sometimes houses with mom and dad in the
same room as the kids. So sex was definitely heard, it was definitely seen, but it was not talked
about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well yeah, and it definitely wasn't Red Shoe Diaries level, with a guy named Father Ted being
like, (deep voice) 'All right Mary. Roll over.' (grunting) (sigh)
BEN KISSEL Credits. And that's the credits! That's an entire Red Shoe Diary, and if you go back David
Duchovny was in it, I forget the name, was it Shannon Tweed? She was a regular on the Red
Shoe Diaries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel like on the farm it's called Red Hoof Diaries.
BEN KISSEL Could be. You're on fire.
MARCUS PARKS Well Jim Jones also, according to childhood friends quoted in Raven, had a real big honker
going.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I can see it.
BEN KISSEL What do you mean? Wait a minute, hold on a second. What?
MARCUS PARKS Big honker.
BEN KISSEL He had a real pig's hog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he had a set on him.
MARCUS PARKS And Jim would also convince the other kids to have literal pissing contests. But Jim always
won, and it was said he could pinch his peen in such a way as to get the stream up over a
rooftop.
BEN KISSEL Now Lunnett, is it Lunnet? Loo-nett? Your child, I've never seen a child urinate the way that
your child urinates, he's gonna be a leader.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I told ya my son's a great man. You know when the doctor first showed me to him I said let's
check this out. And I could fit a whole dime in his urethra.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) His weirdness continued on into high school where he took his mother's example in
bad social habits and wouldn't speak to anyone unless he spoke to them first.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS He was also one of those weird kids who wore his Sunday best to school every single day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was the school character. It's that same thing where it's very similar to Jeffrey Dahmer,
where he got his attention any way that he could. So he would dress up every single day like
he was going to church, he would hold funerals during recess, and he would talk about Jesus
all the time.
BEN KISSEL Honestly, another situation where I would've been friends with him at this point.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Without a doubt, I would've just been like what can I do, Jim? He'd be like, 'Stand there and
look fat.' And I'd be like I can do that, Jim! Jim, I can do that! That's what I do best. Now did he
wear one outfit or multiple Sunday outfits? Because that makes a big difference.
MARCUS PARKS It was slacks and a white shirt. I'm sure he had more than one because he was always clean, he
wasn't like a dirty kid who just wore the same shit over and over again.
BEN KISSEL Also dressing like a Target employee? Did Target look at that and be like, 'That's gonna be how
we dress all of our employees.'
MARCUS PARKS And sports-wise, Jim was terrible but he'd always be down for coaching a team, and he did
have a knack for organizing. At 14 he put together a basketball league involving all of the
surrounding towns, he took stats, everybody loved being a part of it, and it was successful for a
while until Jimmy led a puppy to a trapdoor and let it fall to its death during a league meeting.
BEN KISSEL Well... What the heck...
MARCUS PARKS No one really knows why. They were all hanging out, they were having a league meeting, and
then Jim was like, 'Check this out, guys.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey guys, look. You ever seen an episode of Mr. Bean? You know Mr. Bean can live through
anything. He can do absolutely anything. And you ever ask yourself, can a puppy live through
anything? I named him Mr. Bean. Now let's see if he survives this episode, Mr. Bean Falls
Down the Stairs.
BEN KISSEL I'm just here to learn pivots and how to shoot a basket...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he also, he's kind of like Rushmore.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just kind of trying to do whatever, you know.
BEN KISSEL Oh, all right.
MARCUS PARKS But after he pushed a puppy down a trapdoor, no one wanted to play for Jimmy anymore.
BEN KISSEL What's the point of these trapdoors? You always hear about trapdoors, why? Is it a goof?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI For trickery.
BEN KISSEL What's the point of a trapdoor?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Trickery, and if you gotta get rid of a bunch of pumpkins in one go, like the pumpkin sale didn't
go well. What are we gonna take them out the front door? No, no, put 'em through the
trapdoor. I don't know where that trapdoor goes.
BEN KISSEL We've heard about trapdoors our whole life, I've no idea what's the point of a trapdoor.
Anyway...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Trickery!
BEN KISSEL For what?
MARCUS PARKS Trickery, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah but why?! Why build it in?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Bandits! Bandits come in, you've gotta have a place to go.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS This whole time, Jim was still focused on church if not the Lord. Although he was fascinated by
all the different services, he was most attracted to the Apostolics. Now Apostolics are one of
the crazier sects known for laying the hands and speaking in tongues.
BEN KISSEL Apos-to-licks sounds like an adult... It sounds like a XXX film set to Bethlehem and wise men
are involved...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the Apos-TOL-icks.
MARCUS PARKS Ah, Apostolics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Apostolics.
BEN KISSEL Apos-to-licks is a totally different... Yeah, that's very strange.
MARCUS PARKS Well, I've never heard the goddamn word said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You did great. You did great.
BEN KISSEL No, I think you were right. Yeah. I like where you took it.
MARCUS PARKS Well, they were extremely-
BEN KISSEL That's a Red Shoe Diaries I would watch, with the Apos-to-licks.
MARCUS PARKS Well the Apostolics put on extremely theatrical services. And in these I think Jimmy found the
kind of service that combined the messages he enjoyed from the churches with all the
excitement and crowd participation of a Nazi rally. But the biggest contradictions was Jim was
never really all that interested in the concept of god itself. Like I said, he was not concerned
with the 'why' of preachers and churches, he was more interested in the 'how'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it's because his mom was an atheist, and she was a very rare atheist at the time, too. And
because his father said nothing, she just pumped this kind of stuff into him, so he came out...
And I love this concept of he hates 'the sky god'.
MARCUS PARKS Ugh, yeah. That's what he would say was that he "didn't care about this sky god," he was
extremely condescending with all of this shit. You know exactly who this guy is.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, of course!
MARCUS PARKS He would've done great in college in 1997.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, Christopher Hitchens and he could get along and talk a lot. I loved Hitchins.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, he'd spend a lot of time on Reddit these days.
BEN KISSEL Yes. Bit of a war hawk, Christopher Hitchens, other than that I really appreciated him.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well, Jim Jones, he was more interested in the actual teachings of Jesus. Helping the
poor, sharing and living equally, in other words the inherently socialist nature of Christianity.
BEN KISSEL Sure, sure.
MARCUS PARKS In fact, Jim Jones, he was an atheist as well, which was one of the reasons why he took a little
detour before becoming a man of god. And while on that detour, he would meet his wife
Marceline.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Marceline seemed nice.
MARCUS PARKS Marceline seemed very nice.
BEN KISSEL That's a great name, I like Marceline. I don't think I've ever heard that as a name before.
MARCUS PARKS I haven't either, it's a very nice name. And she was a nice woman.
BEN KISSEL Okay, good.
MARCUS PARKS So in 1947, Jim's father died of respiratory failure. And by this time, Jim and his mother had
already moved on the Richmond, Indiana, leaving Old Jim behind as if he never meant a thing
to 'em, and he probably hadn't.
BEN KISSEL And the saddest thing is his father died the same day he finally got four aces.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Four aces in one hand and he passed away that day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And Kenny Rogers was actually playing the game with him and he went, 'Oh!' And then he
started scribbling down with a quill, and he went, 'What you writing, Kenny?' 'The best song in
the world about doing dumb shit.'
BEN KISSEL How suicidal is Kenny Rogers having to sing that song? Or do you think he's come full circle
now where he appreciates the millions and millions of dollars it's brought him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He loves that song.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He loves that song, unironically, he knows. It paid for his entire puffy face. It's just filled with
stem cells.
BEN KISSEL It is good, they gotta know when to fold 'em.
MARCUS PARKS Now, neither Jim nor Lynetta attended Old Jim's funeral and in the last years of Old Jim's life,
Lynetta took multiple lovers. But even so, Old Jim still got a big tombstone with his wife's
name etched next to his in the vain hope that although she left him in life, she'd join him in
death.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS She did not.
BEN KISSEL She did not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. They literally just acted like he didn't exist. As soon as they both left town they were just
like fuck it, and then he just died alone at the pool hall.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah his epitaph is for some reason one of the saddest I've ever read. It just says-
BEN KISSEL You gotta know when to hold 'em. You gotta know when to fold 'em.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I didn't know when to hold them.
MARCUS PARKS No, it just says, 'Everyone in the world is my friend'.
BEN KISSEL That's so sad! That's so sad, but it's also sweet. If everyone was his friend then it would be
really nice.
MARCUS PARKS It's very sweet, but-
BEN KISSEL If it was like, Bob Barker's tombstone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, because he had many friends!
BEN KISSEL Did Bob Barker die?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He died, right?
MARCUS PARKS I think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think he committed suicide by cop, I'm not really sure. He did something weird.
BEN KISSEL Oh I don't know about that. Over the Plinko?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he just sat at the bar alone, he had no real friends, and that kind of reminds me of... You
remember the movie Barfly?
BEN KISSEL Of course.
MARCUS PARKS That's based off the life of Charles Bukowski?
BEN KISSEL Oh, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI With what's his name, I forget, Mickey Rourke plays him, and he goes, (slurred voice) "This
one's for my friends! This one's for my friends!" Just pointing out to the whole bar and
everyone's just trying to avoid eye contact with him.
BEN KISSEL Yep, yep. There's always one of those sad guys at the old bar.
MARCUS PARKS One thing they did do though, they did not bring Lynetta back to Indiana, cause she did die in
Jonestown before the mass murder, but she did die in Jonestown, but still for some reason,
they still etched her date of death on the tombstone that she shared with Old Jim.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI An analogy for how shallow the entire Jones family was.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the only thing that makes a gravedigger sad is an empty, unwritten-on tombstone. He has
to do something. Like I handle bones and corpses all day long, I will not see a tombstone with
writer's block.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) So when Jim and Lynetta arrived in Richmond, they were no longer getting financial
help from Old Jim's family as they once were. So, Jim had to get a job alongside Lynetta, and
he got a job as an orderly at Reid Memorial Hospital. And he turned out to be surprisingly
fantastic at this job and seemed to relish in taking care of the most disgusting aspects, like
cleaning up vomit, moving around dead bodies, and disposing of amputated limbs.
BEN KISSEL Someone's gotta do it!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, someone's gotta do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely, and he saw the gap of being like, if I go do this with a smile on my face, I'm gonna
work my way up really high in this hospital.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and Jeff Guinn, he wrote that Jim would even make things like changing adult diapers and
giving sponge baths, he'd make 'em fun! He'd just have fun with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm gonna say this. Honestly, in any other context, I don't ever really want an orderly who
makes sponge baths fun.
BEN KISSEL Why not?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like having a funny dentist, I don't need a funny dentist.
BEN KISSEL I like a funny dentist.
MARCUS PARKS I hate a funny dentist.
BEN KISSEL It can be fun, the experience, you should have a laugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Once I'm so fully debased that I am in a warm bath and my family is no longer involved with
me and they are cleaning shit from my hole, I don't want any fucking yucks. I want this to be a
business-like procedure that is done as fast as fucking possible. I don't want you running your
late night tight five on me while I can't feel my goddamn feet anymore and no one's here to
take care of me.
BEN KISSEL And I know for a fact you are going to love it. You are going to-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (growling voice) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like how red it is? Cause I've been eating a lot of
beets. Yeah, I like to change the color of it and I can do it by anything I eat. I'm making this fun!
I'm the one who makes baths fun!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL A nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS And speaking of just having fun with it, Jim also managed to get a job for his childhood friend
Don Foreman, although this was not fun for Don. Jim picked right back up where he left off in
torturing his old friend. He knew Don was deathly afraid of the dark so Jim made sure to assign
him shifts in the darkest depths of the hospital.
BEN KISSEL Conquer your fears.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) I don't know, man.
BEN KISSEL At this point I have learned only, other than the small animal mutilation, but at this point he's
not the worst guy on earth!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess-
BEN KISSEL His mom isn't that bad, I feel worse for his father. He's married, he's taking care of the elderly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (small voice) 'Jim, I just gotta say, it's been a long time, been a long time, been friends a long
time. Um, it's really been great just being around you, thanks so much for the job but um, I feel
like maybe we could do with a little bit less of the punkin', a little bit less of the prankin', and
maybe we could just be like normal friends, you know.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (loud voice) 'Shut the fuck up Donny.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL See that light switch over there, why don't you go turn that light switch, just turn it to off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (small voice) 'But, I kinda said somethin' here Jim, I said how like maybe I don't really wanna
do somethin' like that, you know what I mean? Cause sometimes I get the heebie-jeebies
about being the dark, so...'
BEN KISSEL Just turn it off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (small voice) (whimpering) 'I don't really understand what I'm supposed to be doing here,
Jimba. I don't really understand.'
BEN KISSEL Gotta go!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (wailing)
MARCUS PARKS And another time, Jim made Don go into the room of an old man who had elephantiasis of the
scrotum just to make him squirm. These balls were so big they drug the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (small voice) 'Now listen, Jim, I wanna say just straight up top again, thank you for the job, it's
been again, very long time friends, it's fun to be around ya, you really know how to yuck it up,
you dress nice, but um... I'm not really comfortable in front of an old man with regular balls. I
don't really wanna be in front of a man with big, grotesque, deformed balls. That's just me,
maybe I'm being difficult, maybe I'm being judgemental...'
BEN KISSEL Yeah. You see that light switch? Yeah, turn it off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (small voice) 'No! Anything can happen to me now, as soon as it's dark.'
BEN KISSEL Elephantiasis, oh my god. There's that BBC show, I think it's called Strange Bodies, it is, I saw
an elephantiasis of the balls and my god that looks painful.
MARCUS PARKS It looks extremely painful.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS But even though Jim spent a lot of time fucking with his friend, he was fantastic with old
people. Jones was excellent at bedside manner and could make even the most difficult patient
smile. Years later he would use these skills to attract elderly people to his congregation, as
elderly people actually made up a large part of Peoples Temple. See, Jim Jones took every
single experience in his life, paid particular attention to his strengths, and used every single
one of them. He was constantly learning what worked and what didn't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Almost like a sociopath, which is the reason why they talk about CEOs of companies showing
signs of psychopathy and psychopathology is cause you have to be so good at commercial...
You can't be wrapped up in emotions and shit, in order to do stuff like this all the time. He was
so capable that it's scary.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, absolutely. This guy, he turned out to be evil, he absolutely did and that's one of the
tragedies of Jim Jones is that using these skills he could have very easily been a great man.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it seems like he's doing some good service at this point.
MARCUS PARKS He really is. So, it's while working at the hospital that Jim met his first and only wife. And
although she would be far from his last lover, he would be her first and last as far as we know.
BEN KISSEL That's all she needed.
MARCUS PARKS Now, Marceline Baldwin came from a stable Christian family that was often involved in local
politics and civic matters which Marceline would use to great advantage later on.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS She did have a bit of a wild streak in her, but again, in Indiana all that meant was she once, as
Guinn writes, shocked her family by saying she was going to vote a straight Democratic ticket.
BEN KISSEL Oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa!
BEN KISSEL Oh, my heart! Oh, my heart.
MARCUS PARKS She also seemed to not show much interest in boys, that is until she met Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL He's the man.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) See Marceline was a nursing student and on night she was tasked with preparing the
body of a woman for the undertaker. And which orderly should help her but Jim Jones? So
perhaps somewhat prophetically, Jim and Marceline Jones, who would together lead 909
people to their death, met over a corpse.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, and he just made it fun.
MARCUS PARKS He did!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause he'd go up to the corpse and be like, 'Oh look, it's like she's alive!' And then he'd pick
her up and dance her around, he's like, 'Oh, it's like that Tom Petty song. Oh, look, look, look.'
And she's like, 'Jim, you are the living end. Am I partnered with Kevin Hart? Because you've
just made this fun.'
BEN KISSEL And then The Undertaker came in and piledrived her and tombstoned her.
MARCUS PARKS See, but Marceline, she's an extremely complicated woman as well, as we'll see. Unlike Jones,
Marceline did not want all of this to end in death and in fact she tried to stop him in the end.
She believed in the message, and she believed in Jim Jones. What impressed her most that first
night was how kind and gentle Jim was with the family of the dead girl. I think when Marceline
saw how Jim acted that night left such an impression on her that she figured anybody who had
that sort of compassion had to be good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's almost like Jim Jones instinctively knew that about everybody and he knew that people
would therefore believe anything that he said as long as he did some of the most, very intense
and personal care at the hospital. And he would learn that later on too, is being like, so by
leading by example he can then also get everybody to trust and do whatever the fuck it is that
he wanted.
MARCUS PARKS So because of that moment, Marceline essentially became the first follower of Jim Jones. And
despite his many glaring flaws, Marceline always followed him, even when she didn't agree
because she believed in the message.
BEN KISSEL Now, is it like Fight Club where the big boobied Bob... Did the guy with elephantitis for balls,
did he follow second?
MARCUS PARKS He died.
BEN KISSEL He did die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he died, he died. But also he was being like, 'Marceline, I can't help but see you're dating
ol' Jim there. I'm gonna say, there's a lot to be said with a man who's got basketballs for
testicles. Cause you know what they say.'
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI By the size of a man's testicles, if he's got big testicles, he's gonna need bigger pants. I'm
looking for an in here, Marceline. Just please, can you just date me? Just date me, shit's gonna
go bad, I know it's gonna go bad.'
MARCUS PARKS So Jim manipulated Marceline just like everyone else and she was extra susceptible because
she had no experience with men at all. He told stories and lies to build himself up into
something great just like his mother did. Jim told Marceline that he quit the high school
basketball team because the coach was racist, even though Jones was never a part of the
basketball team. He also said that he walked out of a barbershop with half his hair cut for the
exact same reason.
BEN KISSEL All right, he's a hero.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well no, that's what he did. Again, when your relationship's formed on a lie, and then this shit
wouldn't come out until years into their relationship. Then she started seeing that all those
stories were horseshit.
BEN KISSEL Ah, yes.
MARCUS PARKS Marceline's family, however, was not as impressed with Jim Jones as Marceline was. He'd get
into screaming arguments with her family at the slightest provocation. He had the mouth of a
sailor and he just generally gave off a weird vibe. Almost everyone in Marceline's life, from her
family to her friends, looked at Jim and said, "Why him?"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Listen to your family when it comes to your partner. And I really do believe, I believe this
wholeheartedly, if everybody around you is saying this person's a problem, because we, you
know, Last Podcast on the Left, we've always been on the idea that serial killers and these
people are never the quiet ones, you never not see it coming. You always see it coming.
They're always weird. If they're gonna do fucked up shit, they've been fucked up forever, they
just got finally the weird green light to do the fucked up shit.
BEN KISSEL So it wasn't healthy arguing though, it wasn't like healthy debate. He was just angry.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely not, it was just, he'd just fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. Yeah, like
Henry said, if your family says he's bad, if your friends say he's bad, or she, he or she, if they
say that this person is bad, listen to them.
BEN KISSEL 99.9% of the time, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But back then, what Marceline's family and friends thought was if she saw something in
him, because she was such a good person, she was so sweet, if she saw something in him then
there must be something there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're wrong! Tell the court they're wrong!
BEN KISSEL Tell the jury they're wrong!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) While the two of them were dating, Jim decided he wanted to be a hospital
administrator, because he was very good at being an orderly and he didn't really wanna go to
med school. But he figured that one day he could work his way up into running a hospital. He
couldn't be a doctor, so he'd be the guy that told the doctors what to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then when he's like 75 and he's in one of those rooms being taken care of by another
nurse, he can be like, 'I finally made it to the top of the food chain.'
BEN KISSEL Finally did it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now I am the one being taken care of!
MARCUS PARKS So in order to get there, Jim Jones started taking classes at Indiana University in Bloomington.
BEN KISSEL Hoosiers!
MARCUS PARKS Hoosiers!
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS And while there, his roommate said he woke up one night from a spot in the top bunk with a
sharp pain in his back. Jim Jones was on the bottom bunk. And at first, the guy on the top bunk
thought it was just a loose wire in his mattress, but then he heard this weird hissing sound
coming from the bottom bunk. And when he looked down there he saw Jim Jones working a
hatpin in and out of the mattress going, "Hiss...Hiss..."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (whispering) Go to sleep. Go the fuck back to sleep.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. It is very PCU.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Um, Jim, honestly I just uh, I got a big test tomorrow, and...
MARCUS PARKS (hissing)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again, this is... Ow, ow! Ow! It is not cool, it is not fun for me. It's a little fun, I see that you're
smiling.
BEN KISSEL So he's using his roommate like a pincushion, we don't know why.
MARCUS PARKS No idea why.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS No idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's having fun!
BEN KISSEL He's having fun.
MARCUS PARKS He's just having fun.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now, all this shit did not deter Marceline and the two were married on June 12, 1949 in one of
those weird double weddings that people used to do.
BEN KISSEL Double wedding?
MARCUS PARKS Double wedding! They used to do-
BEN KISSEL Who else got married?
MARCUS PARKS Marceline's sister, I think her name was Edith.
BEN KISSEL Oh, really? Okay. Double wedding.
MARCUS PARKS After the two got married, Marceline found that Jim was not quite the Christian that she
thought that he was. As we said earlier, Jim Jones was an atheist, and a dickhead one at that.
But Marceline, who was a devout Methodist, didn't know that. It wasn't until after they were
married that Jones told her that he could not believe in a loving god who allowed so much
suffering in the world.
BEN KISSEL Well why didn't this conversation be broached, you think they would've gotten to this on the
first or second date.
MARCUS PARKS He lied to her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He lied to her!
MARCUS PARKS He straight up lied to her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS And he was such a dick about it, and you know what kind of guy I'm talking about here.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, there's nothing worse than an evangelical atheist.
MARCUS PARKS He was such a Bill Maher about it, I'd say.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, god.
MARCUS PARKS Marceline started considering divorce pretty soon into the marriage. But as this was the 50s,
her mother talked her out of it. The terrible thing is, had Marceline left Jim Jones, if she would
not have been by his side every step of the way, especially in these early years, it's almost
certain that Jim Jones would not have gotten anywhere near as far as he did.
BEN KISSEL She had the power, right? She's the political fam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She helped him out. The lessons that she gave, we'll get into it. The civic lessons that she gave
him helped him endlessly.
MARCUS PARKS The woman behind the man.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS So if Jim Jones was an atheist, why did he become a preacher? The answer-
BEN KISSEL It's almost like preachers are liars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No!
BEN KISSEL No!
MARCUS PARKS No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No way, Kissel!
MARCUS PARKS Well, the answer is socialism. Jim Jones was a socialist in that he believed all things should be
shared by all people, but wasn't so much of a socialist in that he thought the decisions
shouldn't be made by anyone but him.
BEN KISSEL Right. That's a common theme.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he's a socialist, everyone should be sharing everything, but I'm gonna be the one who
tells you how to share it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Exactly, but the Methodist church changed, it's very interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, what eventually turned Jim back to the pulpit was the new stance by the Methodist
church. In 1952 the Methodist church reformed to a more progressive creed. They wanted,
quote, "the alleviation of poverty, the right of collective bargaining, free speech, prison
reform, full employment, and racial integration."
BEN KISSEL Which is a lot of great things!
MARCUS PARKS Great attitude for a church to have! Hell, back when I had the faith, I was a Methodist, httas
what my family was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this is what he realized, cause they said he saw the hole. Like he sees it everywhere, he
figured out where to go, which is that his problem with church and a lot of people's problem
with church is that you go, you get a bunch of talk about god but you get nothing out of it. You
don't actually receive any pragmatic, anything from church. So he realized that we gotta create
a place that we call a church, that really what it is is a place where you come to me with
problems, and we figure out together how to fix the problems.
BEN KISSEL Right. What if we call it, like, the Young Men's Club of America? The YMCA!
MARCUS PARKS See, Jim, he saw in the Methodist church, in this new creed, he saw a path to the socialistic
society he'd always wanted and it didn't matter that he had to use god to get there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which again showed the shallowness of the choice. Of just being like, oh I'll just be a preacher.
Which in the end, you are supposed to believe inherently that the preacher believes in this shit
the most.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So just taking that, what I'm gonna say is that central lie, which is a lie in the hearts of many of
these fucking piece of shit priests and preachers, is that gradual separation between the
person you're pretending to be and the person who you are is what's gonna cause massive
fucking problems for you no matter what, and it's gonna make you inherently a corruptible
and bad person.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. So in trying to find his voice as a preacher, Jim started visiting black churches. And he
liked what he saw, he loved the energy, the singing, the fact that there was no time limit, the
welcoming atmosphere, everything about it. It's what he had always wanted in a church. And
again, he saw something he could take advantage of, but the time wasn't quite right just yet,
he still had more to learn, and where should he learn it but the Revival circuit?
BEN KISSEL All right!
MARCUS PARKS Now, even though they don't really exist in America in the form or size that they once did,
Revivals were an important part of American Christianity for decades.
BEN KISSEL Oh, yes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, this is where the whole evangelical megachurches come from.
BEN KISSEL This is where they push you over and they're like, 'The spirit did it.' But I know, I had to do
that, I had to fall over, and he pushed me over!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God, that must've been so hard, where he pushed you once and you're like 300 lbs just staring
at him being like, 'Why you push me?' And he's like, (through gritted teeth) 'Fall over. Fall over,
Benjamin, you just gotta pretend. It's like wrestling. It's like wrestling, Ben.'
BEN KISSEL That's exactly how I thought of it and then my parents were very pleased.
MARCUS PARKS Back in the day, Revivals usually consisted of traveling preachers either setting up outdoor
tents or renting out large halls to preach the lord and they tended to be a hell of a lot more
exciting than your regular Sunday services. This was entertainment but also entertainment in
the name of the lord.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS One of the main features of a Revival was faith healing. The preacher would find person with
an ailment, call 'em up to the front, yell at 'em a lot, and poof! The person would be cured.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If that could happen, no one in my home would ever suffer a sickness, if we could just yell it
out-
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL It would be terrible for the pharmaceutical and hospital industries.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And Jones picked up on all this right away. Now of course these healings aren't real,
sometimes a person might be quote unquote "cured" but in all cases it's psychosomatic and
most often it's temporary.
BEN KISSEL You get an adrenaline rush cause you're onstage, you're meeting your idol-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah you're onstage!
BEN KISSEL And a lot of time they get more hurt because they're not supposed to be friggin walking!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Of course not, they're jumping up and down!
MARCUS PARKS If it's a big healing like a person standing up from a wheelchair and zooming around the room,
that person's a plant.
BEN KISSEL Oh yes. That's all nonsense.
MARCUS PARKS But in the beginning of Jim's career, he had no accomplices so he had to find another way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, dude. And he realized this shit early on, he did it like A Leap of Faith, the Steve Martin
movie.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would use his talent of memorization. Before the Revival, Jim would mill
around in the crowd, he'd listen for names and complaints, and when he heard someone
talking about their ailment he'd pay close attention. Then, when he went onstage he'd wait
until just the right moment, then call out the person's name along with whatever it was that
was bothering 'em. He wouldn't be able to quote unquote "heal" at first, but pretty soon,
wherever he went he left behind stories of the amazing mind-reading preacher. And all of this
shit, you know, when he was listening to people and was calling them out from the audience
with their ailments and all that, this was a skill he eventually perfected. This is him doing the
same trick in one of his sermons about a decade later.
BEN KISSEL All right.
LPOTL (audio)
Jim Jones: Sister Ingram, you're concerned about the losing... The losing of your sight.
(child wailing)
Jim Jones: You've told me nothing about your condition, is that correct?
Woman: No, I haven't.
Jim Jones: You're not able to see me clearly. Things just blur to you, you have to stumble
around lately through crowds and are not able to see even people's faces close up to you
clearly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what I think is interesting too, what the book kind of made me realize, cause I never
really thought about the relationship between the Revival churches and the legit churches, is
that when he went to go work for the Methodists, cause he wanted to be a Methodist pastor,
he didn't have the juice to get it going. Basically what they say is you have to go build your own
congregation and then bring it to the church and then we essentially buy it like a Burger King.
You do one of those installment companies. And it's like Revivalist church is kinda like the open
mic for standups.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like you go and learn your bit doing the Revivalist churches and then you take it to legit
church, that's what you're supposed to do.
BEN KISSEL Right, like what we did with the podcast!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Absolutely. But the Methodist church, I mean, the establishment did not want Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL They didn't like him.
MARCUS PARKS Because it was always on his terms. Everything was always on Jim Jones' terms.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, cause that's the thing, all this spectacle, it did not sit well with the Methodist church.
Now we don't know exactly why he was kicked out. The Jones' said it was cause they were
trying to integrate and the Methodists just weren't receptive to it, the Methodists say that it
was because Jim Jones was stealing from the collection plate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You see these little whispers in the beginning that Jim Jones was kind of
taking money to do some shit that he says is for the church, and there's a lot of rumors coming
his way, but he covers it with saying that they just don't want to integrate fast enough.
BEN KISSEL Well was he using the money for good? Did he have a Robin Hood type complex going here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He may have been, because he did do that for a while.
MARCUS PARKS Well, Jeff Guinn actually makes a pretty good point in that neither one of these are probably
true. Yeah, it was probably just kind of an amicable ending but, of course, everybody-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He wasn't a maid.
MARCUS PARKS Well, the thing was, Jim Jones and Marceline Jones, they said that at first, of course, to save
face, and then it wasn't until decades later when the FBI really started looking into Jonestown
that the Methodist church said like, 'Oh yeah! He was stealing. He's a bad person.'
BEN KISSEL Ah, I see.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it wasn't-
BEN KISSEL Unlike the church. They don't steal.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He just didn't have the juice. He didn't have the juice. He showed up and he just wasn't well
enough... It's politics. Every institution is politics, so you have to be around. Your face has to be
in the mix for a while until you're pulled into being the head of a church.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But either way, Jim Jones parted ways with the Methodist church and struck out on his
won to the impoverished inner cities of Indianapolis, opened up a storefront church, and
named it Community Unity.
BEN KISSEL All right! Is that a rhyme? That's a rhyme.
MARCUS PARKS Community Unity, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Community Unity.
MARCUS PARKS And because Community Unity was in the inner city, Jones' congregation was almost entirely
black. Now, Indianapolis in the 1950s was not a violent place racially speaking, but it definitely
wasn't progressive either. Separate but equal was the law of the land in Indianapolis and while
white people didn't actively harass black people like they did in say, Alabama, they didn't
particularly want 'em around, nor did they give a shit about their well being either. Now, white
leaders of the city would at least meet with black community leaders, mostly pastors, and the
white community leaders would give lip service and tell them, 'We'll see what we can do,' but
nothing ever changed.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS I think the term was "access does not equal accountability", that was the kind of thing. They
basically would just give them access and be like, 'See, we listen to you,' and then not do
anything.
BEN KISSEL Right, which is almost worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And so essentially they needed someone to come from inside the system out to fix their shit.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and Jim Jones to this respect, I gotta give him credit. You know, whether it was for truly
altruistic reasons or not, Jim Jones did a hell of a lot on behalf of the black community in
Indianapolis during his time there, even though it did start off small at first. This is how he built
his congregation. He'd start off the sermon by asking people what was bothering them. The
example Jeff Guinn gives in The Road to Jonestown was of an old woman who was having
trouble getting service from the electric company. Even though she was paying all of her bills
on time, she could never get anyone to come out to fix the blackouts she was having. So Jim
Jones sat down with her and the rest of the congregation and they outlined all of her
grievances in a letter. And you might not think that this would be much, just writing a letter
might not do a lot, but sure enough, when the woman came back the next week, her lights
were on.
BEN KISSEL Boom.
MARCUS PARKS And then he did this with another person and another and another and another.
BEN KISSEL He's a community organizer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this was his whole thing, is that you come to church and you come away with something.
And then he realized, like, you give something.
BEN KISSEL But because he's an atheist he's not selling 'em a false bill of goods, he's actually-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He is though.
MARCUS PARKS He is. He absolutely is not.
BEN KISSEL No but what he did give this woman is a tangible gift. She has lights now.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah but he's still saying that he's a man of god. He's not telling them he's an atheist.
BEN KISSEL No, I know, but the people who claim to be all up into god, that's the only thing they give ya.
But I mean this guy is giving tangible rewards and tangible gifts which, as you just said, is
something we have to, uh, that's an accomplishment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he's still doing it with a lie. Right? So right now it's great. But as things grow we're gonna
see how that lie makes things really complicated.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah. And pretty soon in the community, word started to spread about this guy and, as
Jim Jones himself said, heaven was all well and good but there was really no reason to wait
until you died to get your reward, to get justice.
BEN KISSEL In other words, is heaven a place on earth?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Ooh baby, you know what it's worth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also, Tiffany must've been a member of the original Community Unity.
BEN KISSEL Maybe she was!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. What Jim Jones said was Community Unity was a church where you get something now.
BEN KISSEL I like that.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And to a community that was used to never getting anything, that was extremely
appealing. But since it was just a small church at first, Jim Jones had to do something to make
ends meet.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones... (chuckles)
BEN KISSEL Where's this going?
MARCUS PARKS This is completely true...
BEN KISSEL If this has anything to do with dancing erotically at night, I'm not gonna be happy.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Better than that. He sold spider monkeys door to door for 29 bucks each.
BEN KISSEL Honestly whatever he did later in his life is kind of... This is adorable.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Two things here. Number one, $29 is quite a bit for the 1950s.
MARCUS PARKS It was-
BEN KISSEL It's a spider monkey! How many were there?
MARCUS PARKS No, I checked out the inflation calculator, it was like 260 bucks. That's cheap for a spider
monkey.
BEN KISSEL That's worth it!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think it's a lot to spend on any sort of spider monkey. It's choosing to spend it for the spider
monkey.
BEN KISSEL Oh, it's cute.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also, second of all, how does the spider monkey supply get to you? Who are the... Where
do you get your product from? How do you go and... How do they transport it? How difficult is
it to keep it in your house? Where do you keep these spider monkeys?
BEN KISSEL The world's itchiest underground dealer is just lined with spider monkeys. He's just like, 'Come
into this alley, I got something to show ya.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just sell these fucking spider monkeys and get them off my hands! That's the sales pitch, being
like, 'Hey hello! Hello, thank you for having me in your home. There is 50 spider monkeys in my
Volvo. I need you to get them the fuck out of this Volvo, please for the love of god.'
BEN KISSEL You are covered in scratches and scabs, sir.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They are everywhere! They thought my balls were a pile of grapes. I need to get these out of
my hands.
BEN KISSEL I'll take 'em all!
MARCUS PARKS Well, even the spider monkeys ended up gaining Jim Jones new followers.
BEN KISSEL Of course!
MARCUS PARKS This is the testimony from a woman from the PBS documentary about Jonestown.
LPOTL (audio)
Woman: First time I met Jim Jones was Easter 1953. My mother-in-law, Edith Cordell, had a
monkey and it hung itself. And she wanted to replace the monkey, so she looked in the
Indianapolis Star, and in that Indianapolis Star was Jim Jones' ad that he had some monkeys to
sell. So it was through that that she met Jim Jones and came back saying that he'd invited her
to church this next Sunday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Never do anything your monkey salesman tells you to do.
BEN KISSEL Also, I gotta say, if you're Jim Jones and you're selling monkeys, you gotta ask, 'So what
happened to your other monkey? Oh it hung itself? What are the conditions of your home that
aren't good enough for a monkey to want to live?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're just handing monkeys out to anybody! You drove a monkey to suicide and now you're
just gonna get another one? This is like my mother with the dog!
BEN KISSEL Did it befriend a spider? Did the spider make a noose out of its web? How did the monkey
hang itself?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's so difficult.
BEN KISSEL So difficult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Number one, for it to learn eternal despair.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Then for it to Robin Williams itself in order to get out of the house.
BEN KISSEL Just had to go. So sad.
MARCUS PARKS Now, besides just the monkeys, to further supplement his income Jim Jones continued on the
Revival circuit where he was becoming a fairly well known name as a healer, as he'd improved
his act quite a bit from the simple mind reading days.
BEN KISSEL So he's a healer and a monkey salesman. I'm so on... Right now I'm about to go to C-Town and
get Flavor-Aid.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL This sounds good.
MARCUS PARKS Now there was such a buzz that in Cincinnati, Jim Jones drew a crowd 1000 strong and still 200
people had to be turned away.
BEN KISSEL Wow!
MARCUS PARKS And eventually, Jim Jones started picking up true believer followers. Among the first were Joe
and Clara Phillips who were convinced that Jim had cured their son's heart defect, although it
was most likely just an early misdiagnosis. They were joined by Edith Cordell, the monkey
woman, who believed Jones also had cured her arthritis.
BEN KISSEL Hey, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) Also, I needed a direct line to those sweet, sweet, monkeys.
MARCUS PARKS But it wasn't just people who were healed who were drawn to Jim Jones. A lot of 'em were
attracted by his message of racial equality. Jack Beam and his wife Rheaviana joined Jim Jones
in 1954 after their church rejected integration. And to give you an idea of how dedicated these
people were, both Jack and Rheaviana died by Jim Jones' side in Jonestown 24 years later.
BEN KISSEL By their own volition.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, very much by their own volition.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because they believed that he was doing good. And that's how you get 'em. In the end, that's
what, the whole thing got twisted in the 60s.
BEN KISSEL At this point it seems like he is doing some good. These bigoted churches, he's the only one
reaching out, he's selling monkeys, once again. So there is a lot of positive things happening.
MARCUS PARKS He's doing a lot of good and even his best work is still ahead of him at this point. I mean, these
people, you know, Jack Beam-
BEN KISSEL This is the strangest cult leader though, cause I don't recall having... Like legitimately a person
trying to do good.
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
BEN KISSEL Like everyone else was more fraudulent in some ways.
MARCUS PARKS More fraudulent, a lot of them were just interested in sex, they were just interested in power.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So there was something very altruistic.
BEN KISSEL He's doing means justify the end stuff though since the very beginning.
MARCUS PARKS Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was. He was. And so it did technically start that way.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And these people, they were good people. They believed in him because they believed
that he was doing good. And even when he was lying and cheating, they told themselves this
was all for the greater good. And this started in the earliest days. They started making the
allowances immediately.
BEN KISSEL They're giving a little every week, huh?
MARCUS PARKS Immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah cause you forget all the healing shit is bullshit. All the healing stuff is not real.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and that's the thing is that people like Jack Beam and Rheaviana, the cancer removals.
They saw, they knew all of the healing and all that shit, they knew everything he did at the
Revivals was total bullshit. But now that he had dedicated followers that followed him for a
totally different reason, he had plants.
BEN KISSEL But even if it's psychosomatic though, if you do feel better, there is something to that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a lie. It is a lie. It's still a lie. It never really worked.
BEN KISSEL The mind is an interesting thing.
MARCUS PARKS No, people will their pain away sometimes. Like psychosomatic, like placebos... Placebos will
work sometimes even though it is a placebo. The power of the mind is an amazing thing.
BEN KISSEL That's true but when it comes down to a straight up lie you get that cheque in the end. That's
what I believe. You're just kicking the can, dude.
MARCUS PARKS So Jim had plants. But the thing is about plants is you just can't give a hobo $20 and hope he
can act.
BEN KISSEL No, you need a performer!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And not just that, but in order for people to actually believe it, you can't have someone
that just shows up, gets healed, and leaves. You have to have someone that the congregation
knows and that the congregation trusts.
BEN KISSEL This is tough to do.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now first, Jim would take two people into his confidence and let 'em know the plan
ahead of time. But he never asked the godly folk, it was always those that thought the god
stuff was just a means to an end who were in on the plan.
BEN KISSEL Well, you know, sometimes in order to entice people into a restaurant, you gotta have fake
food on the outside. And the food inside is very real.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I want real food! I wanna see the real food, I don't go to restaurants that have fake food on the
outside.
BEN KISSEL But the outside food is what brings you in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's Olive Garden! No, you're talking... We have Applebee's.
MARCUS PARKS Ooh, Olive Garden sounds good.
BEN KISSEL Olive Garden's great, yeah. Unlimited breadsticks, unlimited soups. Although how many
breadsticks and soup can you have? And they do cut you off, by the way. I learned that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, Carrabba's is technically the higher quality chain and then if you really wanna go to break
the bank, Maggiano's. Ooh Maggiano's.
MARCUS PARKS So during the sermon, after Jim had already gone over this plan with two people, he'd call out
one of their names, say, "You got cancer!" And have the second plant escort them to the
bathroom. Jones would then tell them to essentially take a dump, and he would work his
magic from onstage.
BEN KISSEL I would not be able to help. Actually taking a shit.
MARCUS PARKS And after a plausible amount of time, the duo would come back with a bloody, smelly mass
wrapped up in a napkin and were told that the congregate had passed the cancer.
BEN KISSEL That's not how it works.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL You don't crap cancer.
MARCUS PARKS Well if Jim Jones is in charge of your congregation, you do. And they said that that bloody mass
was the evidence.
BEN KISSEL I would've stood up and I would've said, 'That's dooky, Jim!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's dooky.
BEN KISSEL Actually, then Jim would've been like, 'Do you want a spider monkey?' And I'd be like, 'I will sit
down and I will shut up and I will take my spider monkey.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Let me help the organization, please.
MARCUS PARKS Well, what the mess was, it was chicken guts.
BEN KISSEL Oh!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And they'd allowed the chicken guts to just rot a little so it smelled terrible. But the way
they took care of people not looking at it too close was saying that the passed cancer was
highly infectious and nobody should get close to it. And as far as the person who was carrying
it around went, it was taking Jim Jones, taking every bit of his power, to make sure that that
person was not infected. But nobody else, I cannot protect all of you! I can only protect my
man, Jack.
BEN KISSEL Oh I like this guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He coulda taken one of my dumps from this morning, I had a bunch of foie gras last night. I tell
you what, it's nice going in but going out... It is what it is.
BEN KISSEL Ugh. It's not even nice going in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah it is. It's all nice, it's meat butter.
BEN KISSEL (shudder)
MARCUS PARKS So the combination of working these supposed miracles on the road while actually helping
people out with their problems back in Indianapolis meant that Jim's congregation was rapidly
growing.
BEN KISSEL Naturally.
MARCUS PARKS And eventually, he needed a bigger space. And so, in 1956, Jim Jones bought a former Jewish
place of worship. The word 'temple' was carved on the wall outside, and since the church was
to be a socialist endeavor, Jim Jones gave his church a new name. Peoples Temple. And that's
where we'll pick back up next week with Jonestown Part II.
BEN KISSEL All right, laying interesting groundwork here, no idea about this guy. How did they get to be as
big as they are? It's fascinating to learn the origin story, here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I will say, a lot of crooked hard work. That's where we're gonna see, it's weird how in the end,
same thing weirdly with Scientology, these guys kinda go into kind of the idea of getting a
quick buck or a way to scam the world and get things going for themselves. But in the ned, a
life of trickery is so much more work!
BEN KISSEL Well it is but at some point I do have to imagine that he looked at his wife and said, 'Honey,
we're gonna need some more chicken guts.' Movin' on up!
MARCUS PARKS Well Jim Jones was an extremely hard worker. When he was in college he never slept, and that
eventually caught up to him but for many years Jim Jones, from dawn to dusk and beyond, he
was always, always working.
BEN KISSEL Bill Clinton was like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're all like that.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah. But that's why the amphetamines came in. But we're gonna get to that.
BEN KISSEL All right!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, thank you for listening. All of these episodes are going to be about this long. But yeah-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is gonna be a very exhaustive... This is very intense, we're really going in there, because I
feel like we've never done something to this level. We love cults, I personally in the end, it's
strange over time-
BEN KISSEL We love to study them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just love to study cults even more than serial killers.
MARCUS PARKS Me too. Cults are my favorite, these are my favorite. Cult episodes are always my favorite
episodes. And we're gonna in the future, you know we fucking biffed Heaven's Gate, we're
gonna take a serious run at Heaven's Gate here very soon.
BEN KISSEL I wouldn't say it was a biff.
MARCUS PARKS It was a biff.
BEN KISSEL It was not a biff.
MARCUS PARKS Our first 60 or so episodes were just... There was a lot of biffs.
BEN KISSEL Happy 300!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Happy 300! We did it. I AM Sparta. What about Barb?
BEN KISSEL What about Barb?!
MARCUS PARKS What about Barb!
BEN KISSEL Did they ever talk about What about Barb?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No!
BEN KISSEL Oh, they shelved it, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We could actually maybe tell that story sometime, cause we've been saying that forever and
nobody has any clue-
BEN KISSEL I think we talked about it on the livestream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah maybe. I think legally I'm not allowed to talk about it.
BEN KISSEL I think that show is so dead and gone that you can talk about What about Barb.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah I think What about Barb was put on the shelf.
BEN KISSEL The remake of What About Bob that they were trying to create for television because they're
out of ideas. Idiots.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. Yes they are. They are out of ideas. They are definitely out of ideas.
BEN KISSEL What about Bo-arb? What About Barb!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We make it a lady! Which I think is actually very progressive but it's-
BEN KISSEL It's stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It'll be fine, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS It's dumb.
BEN KISSEL All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening, what do we wanna say here? We wanna thank
you everyone who has donated to the Patreon.
MARCUS PARKS Of course, yeah.
BEN KISSEL There was just someone on Twitter who reached out regarding the Patreon, thank you so
much.
MARCUS PARKS Yes, thank you so much to all the people who give, patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft is where
you can go. We appreciate each and every one of ya no matter how much you give, thank you
so much and we're gonna keep going! We got a lot going on this year-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (growling) We're gonna keep going!
MARCUS PARKS We have a lot of shit coming.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, it was @phillyphilly, Phillip Berth, I believe is his name. Thank you Phil for reaching
out on Twitter. You can always find me on Twitter @BenKissel and I'll respond to you there, I
know some people say they want more shoutouts and stuff and we try to give it. But you can
just find us and I will respond to you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah you can always find us. Kissel loves to respond, he always responds.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I try to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I respond to the funny ones.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I respond to the nice ones and the funny ones, no snarky comments because that don't
fly on my Twitter.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You don't understand, guys. One thing I will say is we're part of a weird phenomenon that's
called being a tiny internet celebrity. And then when you are a part of this, we are three
people that do not really know how to navigate this. And we're doing our best. So follow us on
Twitter @henrylovesyou, @marcusparks, @benkissel. Follow us on Instagram @drfantasty,
@marcusparks, @benkissel1. And follow us for whatever the fuck it is that you get your
breaking news on @lpontheleft.
BEN KISSEL (laughs) Yes. And I made my first Instagram video, a little scene from Friday the 13th Part III
yesterday, so I think I'm going to do it-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (applause) Welcome.
BEN KISSEL It's scary the first time. So I broke the ice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm proud of you man. It's super, super trill of you.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Crazy trill that you joined Insta stories, I think it's trill, I think it's of the moment, you're on-
trend.
BEN KISSEL Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS Well go listen to all of our other shows over at lastpodcastnetwork.com. We've got a ton of
stuff to listen to over there, and also check out my new music show Milk & Peppers.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) You can listen live every Tuesday at kpiss.fm, I do it out of KPISS FM out there in
Bushwick. It's 1-3pm every single Tuesday, but if you can't make it you can always go and listen
to all the episodes at mixcloud.com/marcusparks. I'm gonna be posting every single episode
there every single week. We only got one so far, but you can go listen to that and all the other
Lucky Bone Shows that I've done, there's a lot of content out there. Thank you to everyone
who has listened so far.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, and I wanna thank everyone. I go on these television news networks and I get a lot
of hate from a lot of people, but thank you all so much for the kind ones-
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Because it's great, they defend me, and it's sweet, you make really make everything worth it.
And I'll keep on trying to stand up for you the best I can, and let me know how I'm doing. Like
Ed Koch, 'How am I doin'?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How am I doin'?
BEN KISSEL And then like, 'You're doing terrible!' And he's like, 'Well but how am I doin'?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) Hail Satan.
BEN KISSEL Hail yourselves!
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail me (growls).
BEN KISSEL And honestly guys, happy 300th episode, we've done it, and it's all because of our audience
and it's because of us three.
MARCUS PARKS That's it.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Because of our refusal to quit.
BEN KISSEL There it is. It's almost like we have no other discernible talents!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Megustalations everyone.
BEN KISSEL Megustalations!
MARCUS PARKS Megustalations. Thank you.