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 This is gonna come out sometime after the news of this weekend, but I think it's nice for
Hawaii to feel some panic.
BEN KISSEL Ah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because they are so relaxed.
BEN KISSEL You think that's right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All the time.
BEN KISSEL Do you really wanna say that on camera? On microphone?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah, this is gonna come out like a full week after the Hawaii thing.
BEN KISSEL Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS I think the Hawaii thing's already out of the news.
BEN KISSEL It's totally out of the news.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Agh.
BEN KISSEL Welcome to the show everyone, I am Ben Kissel and this is the Last Podcast on the Left, but
you already heard an intro, so you know that already. But per my contract I will remind you.
MARCUS PARKS Thank you.
BEN KISSEL This is the Last Podcast on the Left.
MARCUS PARKS And who am I?
BEN KISSEL You are Marcus Parks.
MARCUS PARKS And who are you?
BEN KISSEL I am Ben Kissel like I already stated.
MARCUS PARKS And who's out there in Atlanta?
BEN KISSEL And that is Atlanta's Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's cold in here. It is very cold inside of this apartment. But honestly, wouldn't it be nice, you
have 30 minutes, you think you're about to get blown up by a fucking nuclear bomb, you could
say whatever you want.
BEN KISSEL Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then technically you'll have to deal with it a half an hour later.
BEN KISSEL Is that what you're concerned with? It's like the nuclear missile comes and all you're
concerned about is getting out of free speech jail?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah! Obviously. It's my one shot!
BEN KISSEL (laughs) Well I'm sorry what happened to your Atlanta Falcons there over the weekend as well,
speaking of destruction oh my goodness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI MY Atlanta Falcons?
BEN KISSEL All right, speaking of free speech, some guy took full advantage of it and it lead to the death of
a lot of people, Jim Jones, Jonestown Part II, this is intense.
MARCUS PARKS So when we last left Jim Jones he had just founded Peoples Temple, giving a name to an
organization whose membership would fluctuate from dozens to thousands over its 23 year
existence. But in 1955, Jonestown was still a long ways away. It would taker years for Jim Jones
to build it. But as we talked about last episode, he'd already figured out the basics by 1955, he
just needed to take it to the next level.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Remember this when you start your cult, the big thing is patience.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You have to drop seeds early. It takes a long time, you gotta build in generations. This is why
things last a long time, this is why Scientology's still going on is because it's deep-seated, it
takes... So just give it that mmm, give it that slow cook.
BEN KISSEL And remember, time keeps on ticking into the future a little faster than you might expect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you. I almost forgot about Steve Miller.
MARCUS PARKS I almost forgot those sage words from Steve Miller Band.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. But don't make your doomsday date too early. That's what Aum Shinrikyo made
the mistake of. '92 was right around the corner, they should've pushed that to like 2025.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Push it into the future, build it up and say there's gonna be a lot of shit.
BEN KISSEL That's right.
MARCUS PARKS Well that was actually one of the genius things of Jim Jones is he never actually put a
doomsday date on his own cult, he put doomsday dates around him, but he never put one on
the cult itself. With him, as we'll see, if you follow Jim Jones, you avoid the doomsday date.
Now one thing that's important to know is that a large part of the Peoples Temple
membership always was and always would be elderly women.
BEN KISSEL He's rolling in it. At some point, do you think Jim Jones looked out at the crowd and was just
like, "I've done it."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Finally. Look at all of this crepe paper skin, I love looking at every single human being here
whose arms I could break if I flicked their wrists with the strength of flicking a sugar packet.
BEN KISSEL Oh god, you just reminded me of that story of my friend who worked in the nursing home and
the patients would get their skin snagged on random, like, I don't know why there were nails
hanging out and stuff, but it would just peel right off their body like, yeah, just as you said,
paper-mâché.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So many congressmen and senators are in their 70s right now, it would be so easy to just take
'em out of the White House by just getting a Zamboni and just driving through congress, just
sweeping 'em up with the sweepers. They'd fall apart, they'd literally turn into like pulled pork.
BEN KISSEL That would be a good scene from Scream Queens which people reminded me of on Twitter.
MARCUS PARKS Well all of this, this all owed to the way Jim Jones was able to ingratiate himself with old
people. And so one of the Peoples Temple's first altruistic projects was taking elderly
congregants into the personal home of Jim and Marceline. And eventually that endeavor grew
to several nursing home facilities, incorporation size!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were good! They were good nursing homes, they worked really hard at making them
super high quality.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, they were quality nursing homes, and this worked-
BEN KISSEL It's like Jim Jones is to nursing homes was Magic Johnson was to car washes. That's what I
wanted to say. He franchised.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also a very convenient aspect of the nursing home angle is that what he would do with these
old people is he would get them to give them the leases to their homes, and then he would
take their homes and absorb all their assets. So it's a really fast way to get money, is to just
adopt an old woman, especially like 95-97, she's not gonna be around for that long, she's not
even gonna know you're not wiping her ass anymore, you leave her up in the closet until she's
gone and then you get all her stuff.
BEN KISSEL Oh that's not good, did you learn nothing from Billy Madison? That's Ben Stiller's approach.
MARCUS PARKS Happy Gilmore, not Billy Madison.
BEN KISSEL Happy Gilmore! I'm sorry, oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well that's one of the ways that this whole nursing home thing worked for Jim Jones.
The other ways was that they took care of the elderly and so they gained the community's
trust, and three, it gave members of the Peoples Temple jobs. Together these three things, the
money, the jobs, and the community care, would be integral to the development of Peoples
Temple both in Indianapolis and beyond. Jim also founded a soup kitchen-type café called The
Free Restaurant which served about 2800 people every week, he organized clothing drives,
and he put together youth programs that kept kids off the streets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Huh. He was doing a lot of good work, and it was a lot of hard work, and he realized this. So
that's where these games start playing out, right. Where in the end, again, this looks totally
kosher, this looks great, like he's trying to help humankind, and he is helping humankind, and a
lot of it is genuine, but the problem is it's so small. It's just a small amount of people he's
reaching and it's just shitty Indy, you know what I mean? He needs to figure out-
BEN KISSEL I don't think that's the official slogan of Indianapolis, 'Shitty Indy'?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Not for me, we had a great time in Indianapolis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We loved the city.
MARCUS PARKS We loved Indianapolis, we went to CrimeCon there, it was wonderful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was actually surprisingly beautiful.
MARCUS PARKS It was a beautiful town. But you know, yeah, as positive as all this was, as Henry said, this was
all small fries. Jim actually wanted political influence, and the person to help him there was
Marceline.
BEN KISSEL So you're telling me the way to get political power in this country is not embracing older
African-American women? That's not the road to the White House in this country?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It doesn't seem like it, yeah. Serving free soup doesn't get you there, except for Bernie Sanders
who just ate a lot of free soup.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, a lot of it. And it is now, by the way, look at Alabama, we won't go into it.
MARCUS PARKS See, at first Jim Jones didn't necessarily have a talent for civics. He was a little coarse, he didn't
necessarily know how to move in those social circles but luckily for him, his wife had grown up
in a politically active family.
BEN KISSEL That's right.
MARCUS PARKS She was sent as a scout to various civic meetings across Indianapolis, taking notes on policy,
decorum, and who the local movers and shakers were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, I honestly believe that he specifically chose Marceline as his wife because of this fact.
Back in the day it seemed more like, oh they were in love, she was kinda the hot nurse, he was
the fun nurse that made sponge baths fun. But he saw those qualities I think, and knew that
she came from a civic background, and as all these things kind of came together he was like ah
yes, your purpose has been revealed to me, and then she just fit right in, because I think she
was excited to be a part of the entire movement. She liked all of the volunteering, she liked
the nursing home, she personally was in charge of a lot of this.
BEN KISSEL Like June and Johnny Cash. June the establishment, Johnny the rebel. But who did the
audience relate to? Mr. Cash.
MARCUS PARKS So after Marceline went to all these meetings, she'd report back to Jones. And then when Jim
Jones himself showed up to the next meeting days or weeks later, he knew what to say, how
to say it, and who to say it to, instantly giving him credibility. But politics wasn't the only place
where Jim Jones had his attention in the mid to late 50s. That's when he discovered Father
Divine a.k.a. The Messenger a.k.a. Reverend Major Jealous Divine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Is he a WWE manager?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He does, you know, cause you have to be... To name yourself 'Jealous Divine' you have to be
very, very, confident.
BEN KISSEL (laughs) I love it!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, his logic for calling himself Jealous was "I am a jealous god". And so he said that god's
name is Jealous and so if god's name is Jealous then my name is Jealous, you call me Reverend
Major Jealous Divine.
BEN KISSEL Why do I have a feeling this guy has an assistant solely to rub butter on his feet?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL I feel like this is-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Someone come rub butter on my feet. You know I call 'em loaves for a reason. So hard, how I
punish these big, cracked feet by jamming 'em into these shoes.
BEN KISSEL How does this get me closer to god again, Mr. Jealous?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Rub the feet and you'll see, my friend.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Jim Jones pretty much stole Father Divine's entire act and repackaged it sort of like
what Elvis did with black R&B stars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI With what a lot of white people did with a lot of black people stuff.
MARCUS PARKS That is true.
BEN KISSEL And what Orion did to Elvis. Remember Orion? Very famous.
MARCUS PARKS Orion was great, but Orion... It was different.
BEN KISSEL It was different, yes, it was different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I really think it's true where Jim Jones sort of was, I mean, Jim Jones obviously is the garage
rock of cult leaders. He has taken all of these things-
MARCUS PARKS No...
BEN KISSEL Is that a bad thing or a good thing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a good thing! Well, for cult leaders. So it's a bad thing for the rest of us. But he was a guy,
he invented a lot of stuff we're gonna see became the trope of the cult leader, but what we're
actually gonna see is that most of those turns, the classic cult leader turns, he stole from
Father Divine. Like Father Divine was doing this since the 20s and he figured out a long time
ago how to manipulate a group of people into doing things that they didn't want to do.
BEN KISSEL He's taking it to the next level though, perhaps.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah, Jim Jones is the Elvis of cult leaders. This guy took it worldwide. Everyone knows who
Jim Jones is just like everyone knows who Elvis is.
BEN KISSEL I heard that!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Very good, Marcus.
BEN KISSEL I heard that!
MARCUS PARKS So yeah, since 1919, Father Divine, he'd run the kind of figurehead-centric, black and white
integrated kind of cult that Jim Jones was aspiring to. And Divine, he ran a tight ship on his
compound, he had successfully convinced his followers that he was god on earth, and he had
his pick of female followers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nice.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS Divine had such a hold on his congregation that when his wife, Peninniah, called-
BEN KISSEL Wait what was that?
MARCUS PARKS Peninniah.
BEN KISSEL Peninniah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Peninniah sounds like a cool name.
BEN KISSEL Peninniah sounds like you gotta go to the doctor. Sounds like a diagnosis, that name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Very funny, Kissel. Very, very funny.
BEN KISSEL I've never heard that name before!
MARCUS PARKS I think it's Peninniah, it's either Penin-aya or Penin-eea.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Or it's Pen-IN-eea.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) It's not Pen-IN-eea.
BEN KISSEL (laughs) I have no idea.
MARCUS PARKS Well they called her Mother Divine, and when she died in 1942, Father Divine replaced her
with a 21 year old Canadian named Edna Ritchings, saying that his wife had jumped bodies
from an elderly black woman to a supple young white one, and nobody said anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You have to be pretty good at talking to do that.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Especially talking to that Edna girl who's just like, (Canadian accent) 'So I'm who now?'
You're my wife. It's like the spirit jumped into you and now you're my wife. You know what I'm
saying?'
(Canadian accent) 'No I don't, but I'm just happy to be someplace that's not backwards-ass
Canada.'
BEN KISSEL (laughs) Oh my god. It's like the movie Little Nicky. Jumping bodies.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well she was his personal secretary. And so I think that they possibly had a
relationship going on before Mother Divine died and then when Mother Divine died that's
when she jumped bodies over to this other girl Edna, and Edna got the name of Sweet Angel
Divine.
BEN KISSEL Cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just gonna say I hope that Travis understands that one day when Marcus leans over, after
maybe sometime passed and be like, 'You know Travis, I had a dream that Carolina jumped
into you.' I don't really understand the sleeping with your secretary...
BEN KISSEL Yes, Travis of course a longtime producer here at the Last Podcast Network.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Now this whole thing, this whole path to success for Father Divine, it was not
particularly smooth nor was it easy, but Father Divine was living proof that a man could gain
and keep followers and it could all be done relatively peacefully.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Jones, he saw something to aspire to and he learned everything he could from Father Divine
who, like most cult leaders, enjoyed having his ego stroked. So he was all... Cause Jim Jones
came in, he had been running successful integrated church in Indianapolis, he was a young
dude, and he came into Father Divine's compound, Father Divine saw somebody that he could
brag to, essentially.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But also remember this, when he was doing the beginnings of this church, it was very socialist
and it was very, very personal. He dealt with his congregation very closely, Jim Jones. And he
dressed like shit. He dressed like hand-me-down clothes, his house was filled with rundown
furniture, everywhere, he walked the walked, that's what he was basically saying was that like,
we shirk all luxuries, we live a life of service and chastity and a lack of money and all this stuff.
Then he walks into Father Divine's mansion where he has got a full-on harem of women with
their nipples visible, full like crazy-
BEN KISSEL (chuckles) I think you may be adding a little bit here...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nipples just... Maroon disks...
BEN KISSEL Well I don't know about the nipples everywhere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You don't know about the-
MARCUS PARKS He can infer that there were nipples out.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nipples! And then you walk in the house, nice furniture. He's got like a chaise lounge, like he's
got a full couch that's just for lying because you ate too much organ meat. And then, but this is
true, Father Divine dressed in beautiful clothes, beautiful suits, and obviously Jim Jones walked
in there and was like, 'Oh man. I've really been fucking this up.'
BEN KISSEL (laughs) Well that's what I was thinking too, we talk about ego. Retirement homes, old folks
homes, and soup kitchens. He's not living the high life at all.
MARCUS PARKS No, not at all. He is living the true socialist ideal, he's walking the walk like Henry said. But I
think one of the most important things that Jim Jones learned from Father Divine was the skill
of improvisation.
BEN KISSEL Ooh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause the first thing, he sat down there and they said, 'Zip! (nonsensical blather) Zip! You say
Zap, I say Zop.'
BEN KISSEL I do what now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's called Zip Zap Zop. We're gonna take this, we're gonna form a ball of energy, I'm gonna
toss it to you and you're gonna pretend to catch it.
BEN KISSEL But there's not gonna be a real ball?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, no, it's improv! We're gonna do a thing called Big Booty, we're all gonna sing a song
where everybody goes, 'Big booty, big booty, big booty. Uh uh, a big booty.' Then we all give
each other numbers.
BEN KISSEL This sounds stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah! It's improv!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's the thing with improv, everything is imaginary including the money in your bank
account. It's not a way to make a living. It is not, it is a tool to use.
MARCUS PARKS So as I said, Father Divine's wife Peninniah had died of cancer back in the 40s. This was despite
Divine's promises to both her and his congregation that he was gonna heal her of the cancer
and everything was gonna be fine. And this failure put into question whether or not Divine had
any powers at all. But when he found Edna, renamed her Sweet Angel Divine, he was able to
say that Peninniah had just taken another form. So in essence he had cured her because she
wasn't really dead.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Excuse me, Mr. Father Divine, now much like Sweet Mother Divine, not to malign her at all,
ugly as shit and old and fat and dumpy, so if I just...Close your eyes, now. Close your eyes,
Rogerette. Close your ears. If I just smother my wife to death in her sleep, I can just replace
her with a younger one and just tell everyone that she's the younger one?
BEN KISSEL Yes. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL That seems dangerous. Slippery slope, that's what I say.
MARCUS PARKS In other words, what Jim Jones learned from Father Divine was side-steppin' bullshit. And in
these cults people kind of have to just go with it.
BEN KISSEL I think that was also an Elvis song. Side-Steppin' Bullshit? Pretty sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sounds more like a Waylon Jennings song.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's true.
MARCUS PARKS So these people in these cults, they have to lie to themselves and say like, 'Oh of course! That
totally makes sense, how could I have ever doubted this guy?' Because as we always say with
cults, to question the leader is to question every decision you've made up to that point since
joining up. Scientology being the obvious example of this.
BEN KISSEL Right. I mean, Scientology specifically cause you put in 75,000 bucks, 100,000 bucks, so yeah,
it's a horrible decision.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's always about money, and Jim Jones is already set the... Even just joking around is that he
did plant the seed at the very beginning of doing the 'Money's not important, money's not
important, just give me your money. Just give me your money, money's not important, I must
have it though.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and that's the thing is that at first all that money did go back into the coffers, it did go
back into the socialist principles. But as they started getting more and more money and as
they started really getting big, that money suddenly stopped going back into the socialist
people's coffers. There was a ceiling on how much the people got, but I think when Jonestown
finally went down they found all of the different bank accounts that Jim Jones had been
holding, I think it was somewhere around 10 million dollars that they had in their coffers.
BEN KISSEL Wow! And still Flavor Aid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Still Flavor Aid.
BEN KISSEL Just give them Gatorade!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But think about this, that's how what's his name, who's the guy who looks like a big white
testicle with the hair on top of it? The billionaire?
BEN KISSEL Steve Forbes?
MARCUS PARKS Oh, uh, Sheldon Adelson?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Warren Buffet. All of them look exactly the same. But Warren Buffet gets the same breakfast
sandwich everyday for $2.49 from Hardy's.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's how billionaires keep their money.
BEN KISSEL Just a common man like you and I.
MARCUS PARKS Well as far as seeing people who had already said yes to the bullshit, Jim Jones saw that in
Father Divine's people, and also in that he saw a shortcut. He saw a very easy way to build his
own congregation. See, Father Divine was getting on up in the years, so Jim's plan was to wait
until Father Divine died and when he did, he'd first convince Sweet Angel Divine that just like
her, Father Divine had jumped bodies! But this time he jumped to Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL Brilliant. Look at that. Why wouldn't he want to be inside of a stinky, creepy guy who runs
soup kitchens?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. That's easy! And he was gonna do that but unfortunately he met the same fate as Jim
Carrey did in Liar Liar.
BEN KISSEL What was that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wasn't he cursed? Or did he flip a coin, how did he get that curse?
BEN KISSEL His son made a birthday wish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what happened.
BEN KISSEL Cause that's what happens when your father isn't there if you make a wish on a birthday
candle, it comes true. But in reality it doesn't.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. Not once.
MARCUS PARKS But that's the thing is that if Jim Jones got Sweet Angel on his side, then Peoples Temple would
absorb the Divine-run International Peace Mission Movement and-
BEN KISSEL That rolls off the tongue.
MARCUS PARKS International Peace... That's the problem man, that's why we know Peoples Temple but when
don't know the International Peace Mission Movement. You trip over it every time.
BEN KISSEL We have bran muffins or bran muffins, do you want a bran muffin or we have a bran muffin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's magical thinking that also works with advertising. It's about a thing that just punches.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But that opportunity would not come for a few years yet. Father Divine still had a little
life yet and Jim was nowhere near ready to take something like that on, he hadn't proved
himself yet. He was still building his team. Now, what's telling about the followers of Jim Jones
is that a lot of the people who ended up being the most loyal, the ones who essentially served
the Flavor Aid, had joined up in those early Indianapolis years. These were the people who saw
Jim Jones at his best, before the dark times, and I think even up til the end they were still
expecting that person who started soup kitchens in Indianapolis to come back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what it was? In my estimation, that we'll get into later when we obviously cover
Guyana... But when they talk about the congregation of Peoples Temple, they were a fun
group of lively, sweet people. And I think a lot of what kept these people in the fold was the
crowd that Jim Jones had built. It's weird how far you can go for a congregation, like really
belonging to a group of people. That's like one thing that us, kind of people like me, as a
satanist, you know, satanist don't hang out. You know what I mean? It's not like a fun time to
hang out-
BEN KISSEL Well it requires a series of friends to form a community.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Crushing loneliness is what you're describing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, basically. Satanists all just sit around and correct each other on their grammar and talk
about how mad they are about statues. And it is very, very difficult, I could see why you'd
wanna stay in.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it's also like being a bad relationship where it's like, 'I knew him when he was good.'
BEN KISSEL Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, yeah. A cult can... We've talked about this in pretty much every cult we've talked about.
Being in a cult is like being in an abusive relationship.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And these people, you know when Henry talks about the good times, there's this fantastic
resource on the internet, The Jonestown Project, where it's run by an historian that's put
together all of these different stories from all of these different former members of Peoples
Temple. And I read a lot of these testimonials and a lot of them will make these lists of like,
these were the good times.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it's like being a New York Giants fan. You just think about the Superbowls, and you just
think about beating the Patriots, meanwhile you're just staring at a three-win season.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah and Eli Manning just happened to be sort of like a Rudy.
BEN KISSEL He was!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was like the Forrest Gump of football, where just good things just happened to him.
BEN KISSEL Boom! Henry Zebrowski, hot football takes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Thank you. Thank you, I'm getting better.
BEN KISSEL It was good, it's accurate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is it accurate?
BEN KISSEL Yes, cause the guy is Gumpy. Let's be honest. And every time he won anything he was ass-
backwards and stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just him going, 'Huh. Some people's lucky.' And Peyton just grinding his teeth, every night
he just wakes up screaming being like, 'I was the best quarterback who ever lived!'
MARCUS PARKS Well perhaps the most fervent of all those early followers was Patty Cartmell. She was a
woman looking for an apocalypse and found it in Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL A woman looking... That's a hell of a Tinder profile. A woman looking for an apocalypse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, but you spell it 'a-pack-o-lips'.
MARCUS PARKS (delayed laughter)
BEN KISSEL Oh!
MARCUS PARKS Well what she would do is she would drag her family to Revivals all around her area, looking
for that guy, that spiritual leader that was finally gonna tell her what to do and was gonna tell
her how she could be saved. And then when she saw Jim Jones, that was it. He was her guy.
BEN KISSEL All right. Such a strange thing to actively seek out, but I guess...
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And this woman, she would be Jones' most devout follower. She would be
unquestioning and obviously smitten with Jim Jones, even after Jim Jones later put her in
charge of what he called his 'fuck schedule'.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness, what is that about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He said that she was too heavy for him to sleep with, she was a very large woman. He said that
she was too heavy for him to sleep with, and he said, 'So instead of having sex with you, I'm
gonna give you even a better thing, you're gonna be in charge of all the women I fuck.'
BEN KISSEL Well how is that a better thing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She loved it.
BEN KISSEL I gotta say, this guy had something going for him, the same as Guy Fieri. Watch Triple D, and
when he interviews female cooks, they look at him, they look through his soul. They love Guy
Fieri.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the opposite, I feel like they're fine with it. You know what surprised me was Guy's Big
Project, was him dealing with the new Food Network stars, he's very in control of what he
does, and he could give very solid, constructive notes to those people.
BEN KISSEL Yes he does. Eat, Sleep, Barbecue. Pretty good show.
MARCUS PARKS While Jim was building his team he also brought his mother along. She showed up and
immediately got a job as a prison guard at the local women's prison. And over the years she
would talk to anyone who would listen about the early days of Jimba.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (deep voice) Jimba.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL It's a perfect name now, in hindsight.
MARCUS PARKS And she would die in Jonestown prior to the mass murder, still believing that her drug-addled,
paranoia-fueled son had grown into a great man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Another good thing about The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn was the way they kind of
explained how churches work. The more learning about how congregations are made, where
it's like... Again, we went from Revivals are open mics to him having his own show at his own
church. But then what you wanna do is get that church affiliated to a bigger netwrok of
church, like joining union, where essentially you wanna be able to join another network of
churches that then you can say are also connected to your church so that you get more
legitimacy and that you can become an official pastor. So that's what he did, he was on his way
to being an official pastor, but he had to get a bachelor's degree. And another thing they said
was that your whole personal life is garbage, you need to figure out, you need a better image
because he was trying to join up to a higher network. And so he's like, fuck, I gotta get my
mom back into play. So he hadn't talked to his mom for years and she showed up and she's
like, 'Oh, you're a celebrity? Let me show up!' She was like Fanning. She was like a Dakota
Fanning's mom.
BEN KISSEL Is he trying to do what Ray Kroc did with McDonald's? Is he franchising his cult?
MARCUS PARKS That doesn't come until later, but yeah, that's eventually what he tries to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You mean one of the best businessmen to ever exist, Ray Kroc?
BEN KISSEL "We're in the real estate business, not the burger business." What?! That's that whole frickin'
stupid movie, by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love that movie!
MARCUS PARKS I love that movie.
BEN KISSEL I hate him so much. He's such a prick.
MARCUS PARKS I hate him but I love the movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I rooted for him.
BEN KISSEL And he put the real McDonald's brothers out of business.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was the only smart person in that whole fucking-
BEN KISSEL No, they were just nice people! They just figured out how to put ketchup on five burgers at
once, and then he just destroyed their lives for no reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. He did what businessmen do. You have to fucking shoot for the... What do you think
Oprah has done? Who will soon be president.
BEN KISSEL Uh, by the way, Hope-rah is what I'm calling her. She's the only hope we got.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So brave. So brave.
BEN KISSEL We'll talk about it later.
MARCUS PARKS We are marching even further towards dystopia!
BEN KISSEL Hope-rah.
MARCUS PARKS Dyst-hope-ria, that's what I call it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ooh, dyst-hope-riah!
BEN KISSEL Whatever you wanna call it, as long as Oprah's involved.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well as far as joining up with the bigger church went, he did get there. He joined up
with, I think they were called the First Disciples of Christ. Eventually he did join up with them.
But even more than just legitimizing him in the eyes of his congregants, it also got him that
ever-elusive tax-exempt status.
BEN KISSEL Ah! That's the crazy thing, Henry you mentioned getting a bachelor's degree. Do you think that
god, if you are going to be the spokesperson for him, is gonna be like, 'You have to get your
education'? Do you think that he cares about the college, the university system?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh he's not gonna take an AA because anybody can get an AA, half the people you see at the
7/11 have an AA, you know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL I guess.
MARCUS PARKS Well, in building up his image, Jim and Marceline also started building their own family, even
though he and Marceline had already failed at taking care of a child. Back in 1952 Jim Jones
had unsuccessfully tried to adopt Marceline's 11 year old cousin, Ronnie. Ronnie had come
from a broken home but had always hoped to return one day, but Jim decided Ronnie now
belonged to him and that Jim could raise him better than anyone else could. So Jim started
gaslighting the kid, telling him that his mother didn't love him anymore, he could never return
home, they didn't want him there, so you need to stay with me. But the kid dint buy it, he was
smart enough to see through Jim Jones' bullshit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (kid voice) Uh, Papa Jim, I just wanna say, number one, love what you're doing, love the house,
love being here, love the bed, love the food. But I'm not a free agent. I don't know if you don't
know that kids are like just waiting to be adopted, they can't just be randomly-ass adopted.
Like I've got a mom, you know, I'm gonna go back.
BEN KISSEL So the kid rejected him.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and when Ronnie finally decided to leave, Jim took it as an ultimate betrayal, as he
would anytime anyone tried to leave him over the years. He always took it personally, and he
always got real fucking mean about it. In the later years in Jonestown, he'd put guns up to
people's heads.
BEN KISSEL Yup.
MARCUS PARKS So that home stayed childless for another six years until the Jones' adopted their first child, 10
year old Agnes.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Now, Agnes is an interesting character in this story not because of what she did, but because
of how absent she seems to be for most of it. Cause Agnes just never really fit into the whole
Jones scene for some reason, and all throughout the story all you get from Agnes is pretty
much, 'Oh and also Agnes was there.'
BEN KISSEL And she was at Jonestown during the tragedy?
MARCUS PARKS That's one of the saddest things about it is that even though she was never truly a part of it,
her and her brother Lou were the only two of the five Jones children to die at Jonestown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She was a real Jan Brady. An unfortunately I believe Jan Brady also committed suicide. I think
that there's a later on Brady Bunch where Jan Brady committed suicide, which is pretty dark.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Well it's tough to combine families like that.
MARCUS PARKS Well the kids that survived were Jim's biological son Stephan, which is spelled Steph-awn...
BEN KISSEL We're talking P-H?
MARCUS PARKS We're talking P-H-A-N, yeah. Well the reason why his name was Stephan was because they
had adopted another little girl named Stephanie but she died in a car crash.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also for a while he was really, really nerdy, but he invented this crazy machine where he could
go down into it and he popped out, he was all cool. And so at first it was Stephan, but as soon
as he came out of the machine he was Steph-awn.
BEN KISSEL Families do matter, don't they? Laura!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) And the other kids that survived were the adopted sons Tim and Jim Jr. Now, Jim Jr
was the first black child adopted by a white couple in Indiana, that white couple-
BEN KISSEL Really?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Jim Jones and Marceline, first white couple to adopt a black kid in Indiana in Indiana's
entire history. And along with the Korean Lou and the Native American Agnes, Jim Jr was the
last edition to what the Jones' called their "rainbow family".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly-
BEN KISSEL It's like the United Nations! I love this in theory.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Technically it wasn't really a rainbow family, it was mostly a lot of beiges and browns, it looked
more like a Kardashian's closet because beiges and browns are really on trend right now. A
true rainbow family is on Sesame Street, because you've got purples and you've got blues and
you've got yellows and you've got oranges.
BEN KISSEL But it is another example though, and I have to give some credit here, he's walking the walk.
MARCUS PARKS He is absolutely walking the walk, yeah.
BEN KISSEL He really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean, he's doing it on the surface. He's making political choices. A part of this got to be
because they had an open conversation, him and Marceline, said they wanted the picture of
their family, like when they take a picture for it to look good. Which is, again, when you're
making these hollow choices on some level it's great because just literally very shallowly you're
doing really wonderful things, you are, and then actively becomes really nice and good and
forward-thinking, but in the end he's only doing it for the picture.
BEN KISSEL But he's still doing it, and also that picture matters. Look what happened when Mike Huckabee
and his family was photographed together. That derailed everything.
MARCUS PARKS Well that was their own fault for wearing the matching shirts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They also need to wear fitted pants. Better pants! Cover the gunt. You don't wanna show your
whole fuckin' FUPA, I don't need my leader of the free world to have a 25 pound FUPA, this
isn't the 1920s anymore.
MARCUS PARKS So by 1961, Jim Jones had formed a pretty good crew. He had loyal followers, he was a family
man and he was gaining political influence. And with those followers' help, Jim Jones got to
work on the system itself, grassroots-style. And through careful manipulation of business
owners, administrators, and local government officials, Jim Jones almost single handedly
began the peaceful desegregation of restaurants, hospitals, and the workforce in Indianapolis.
That is true.
BEN KISSEL Incredible.
MARCUS PARKS Very demonstrable progress.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was interesting how he did it too. He'd go to the businesses, he'd say, 'So you're gonna
desegregate your restaurants...' He would come in with black people, and he'd be like, 'Okay,
we're gonna sit at the table that you always give me, because you know me from around the
community.' And they said, "Well no, we can't sit them." And he'd just like, no, you have to sit
them down and be like, 'Well you're embarrassing me, I'm a pinnacle, I'm a part of the society,
like people are watching me get kicked out of this restaurant.' And then he'd go back and be
like, 'Listen, we're gonna make an arrangement here. You're gonna desegregate this and I'm
gonna fill this whole restaurant.' So okay, so he'd go away, he'd come back with half the
congregation and just blow out the place. Fill it up. And he did that again and again.
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS And he'd do it at 3pm, he'd do it at off hours, so he'd do it in the times when these people
weren't making money anyway. So he'd do it in the off hours and he'd pay for all the meals of
the people that he brought along.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS So everybody was winning. And then after that they would put up flyers around in the black
neighborhood saying this business is friendly towards you, you can go to this business and
have a meal.
BEN KISSEL That's how crazy racism is that these business owners are staring at empty restaurants but
they're like, 'At least it's white ghosts.' That's how dumb they were or how blinded they were,
it's like, fill it up man!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But also remember, the Temple was not paying for them, the Temple was not paying for their
meals, they were actually paying for their meals because they had given every single thing that
they owned to the temple.
BEN KISSEL Right, of course. Just a bizarre middle manager for life.
MARCUS PARKS But that's the thing though, it wasn't like Jim Jones was just doing all this out of the goodness
of his heart, it was that in part, but none of this came without a price. In exchange for all he
did for his congregation, Jim Jones demanded their unwavering loyalty. And this wasn't just
loyalty to him, it was loyalty to socialism as well. If a member was acting in a manner that was
selfish or materialistic, then they were to be reported directly to Jim Jones himself.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And by 'selfish and materialistic' they mean like going to see a movie or buying a new shirt.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I see. So really kind of isolating them now.
MARCUS PARKS Very much so. Now back in those days, the punishment was pretty tame. They'd pretty much
just be stood up in front of everyone and yelled at a lot.
BEN KISSEL That's a lot though!
MARCUS PARKS It sucks, but it is nothing compared to the rubber hoses and boxing matches that came later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kind of fun. In a way it does sound fun.
BEN KISSEL Isn't most of his congregation elderly women?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. It'd be kinda fun!
BEN KISSEL Did he put them in a boxing ring?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Think about this: you get a couple of 80 year old women, you tape a couple of uh, the stove
gloves?
BEN KISSEL Sure, oven mitts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oven mitts! You duct tape 'em to her hands, and they gotta slap each other til the first one
falls? First fall win? That's a show. I would like that.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Honestly, the fact that you just said it and suggested it to the world, I believe it probably is a
show right now on TLC right after My 600-lb Life.
MARCUS PARKS Well it wasn't mostly elderly women, it was just-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Slappin' grannies!
MARCUS PARKS A large part of it was elderly women, yes, but there were a ton of people in it that were just
regular folks.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Fighting elderly women.
BEN KISSEL I like it, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now surprisingly, Jim Jones, who was a legitimate leader of integration, didn't have that many
enemies. You'd think he would, but he really didn't and in fact most people seemed to enjoy
him. But another thing Jones learned from Father Divine is that a leader is nothing if he does
not have enemies.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And since nobody else was gonna take the first shot at Jones, he had to take it himself, staging
what was to be the first of many fake assassination attempts.
BEN KISSEL Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, man. And this first one was pretty simple. From what it sounds like, he just walked out
his front door, fired a bullet into one of the pillars on his front porch and ran back into the
house yelling that someone had taken a shot at him.
BEN KISSEL God I wish I could see the footage of that.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God. What a great liar. Cause you know what it's about that lie too is that obviously it's a bad
lie, but it's kinda fun that he just did it. And they probably watched him walk out of the house
because it was filled with people, the house was both a nursing home and the house which
was filled with kids. He just walked out of it, shot the pillar, then (panting) ran inside. Jut like,
'Ah, we're getting shot at!' And they're like, 'You have a gun on you.' 'Oh! He put the gun in my
hand! He must've been Nightcrawler.'
BEN KISSEL Always blaming the X-Men.
MARCUS PARKS And when the cops showed up, it was very obvious to them what he'd done. They were like,
'Yeah, you just shot it, right?' But then when Jim went to church that Sunday he had a new
story to tell. He had a new urgency to the cause, he had a new enemy, a faceless enemy and
he had proof that god was protecting him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And twofold. Not only did a stranger try to shoot me but also the cops didn't do anything
about it. So now you have two new enemies that you can go blink-blink. He stole his whole
fuckin' act from Father Divine.
BEN KISSEL I see. I can see why this is compelling.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And not only did the cops not do anything for me, but they didn't do anything for me
just like they never do anything for you.
BEN KISSEL Right, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Bam Bam, clickety-clack! Bringing it back around. Call back, learn how to do improv. This is
techically him doing herald work.
BEN KISSEL Right. Bring it back, circle it around.
MARCUS PARKS Well Jim at this time also got a new enemy overseas, but this one was more of an all-
encompassing unstoppable monster.
BEN KISSEL Who's... Godzilla? What's going on?
MARCUS PARKS Russia!
BEN KISSEL Russia? How are the Russians involved?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No...
MARCUS PARKS This was the early 60s! Cold War is in full swing, man. And Jones, like a lot of Americans-
BEN KISSEL Ugh, I miss the Cold War. The good old days.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're about to get a new one, don't worry Kissel. It'll be fun!
BEN KISSEL Hide under you desk when the bomb comes! That'll work.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Oh yeah, so, have you guys had the conversation with your significant other, the
planning conversation?
BEN KISSEL No plans happening in my house! As soon as anything looks unstable... Rampage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Don't worry, whatever is the rickety crate of bombs that they put on the raft that they push
from North Korea towards L.A., once it arrives to the beach then I'll be upset. Then I'll be very
scared.
MARCUS PARKS Well, Jim Jones, like a lot of Americans, got pretty obsessed with the possibility of nuclear war
with the Ruskis.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Pretty soon, word around Peoples Temple was they had to get outta Indy and they needed to
do it yesterday.
BEN KISSEL I heard it was called 'Shitty Indy' by somebody.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Now, I agree with Jeff Guinn in The Road to Jonestown when he says that Jones' fear
of nuclear war was genuine. Oh yeah, he was a naturally paranoid person and this fed into that
perfectly. Now this wasn't like Charles Manson talking about helter skelter and the race war
and all that so he could convince a bunch of young girls to move out to the desert and ride
dune buggies with him all day because that was his best possible life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, it was. It was an incredible idea and he fucked it up. He didn't do it right and it all coulda
been great.
BEN KISSEL But this stuff, I mean this is what InfoWars is based on.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL This is why Alex Jones sells a tactical bath, which is evidently a weapons-grade bath soap that
you can use.
MARCUS PARKS God I love tactical bath.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I tell you what, whatever makes me look like him, I'm buying. I'm about to get that protein
powder.
MARCUS PARKS Well Jones wasn't bullshitting like Manson.
BEN KISSEL His protein powder actually had semen-killing properties in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Great.
BEN KISSEL It had to be recalled. The vitality pills on InfoWars, the ultimate irony is it kills you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's great! You can fuck and fuck and fuck and you don't have to have a child.
MARCUS PARKS Well unlike Manson who was lying about all this shit, Jones had a very really fear here. He said
that he had a prophetic vision, which me and you would probably just call a nightmare, that
Indianapolis would be destroyed in a nuclear blast on an undetermined date at either 3:09am
or 3:09pm. And he knew it was 3:09!
BEN KISSEL Very good specifics.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, good specifics without being specific at all.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now, because of this Jim Jones started scouting new locations for Peoples Temple. And this is
when he took his first trip to Guyana. And that's what I found out, it's actually pronounced
Guy-Anna, not Gi-awna. Guyana. The reason why he went to Guyana was because Guyana was
gonna be a socialist country. It was right down in South America, but the thing was is that it
was still new, it was unstable, and so Jones decided that the time wasn't quite right for that,
but he kept it in his thoughts.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS So Jim Jones was going to Guyana as far back as 1961.
BEN KISSEL Scoutin' it out.
MARCUS PARKS Scoutin' it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Live your dreams!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and Jim Jones was coming up empty with ideas but luckily, he was an Esquire reader.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, Esquire!
MARCUS PARKS In 1962, they published an article that named nine locations in the world that would most
likely escape destruction or fallout in the event of a nuclear war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And even back in 1962 they still had Gerard Butler on the cover of Esquire Magazine. He is the
only person allowed on the cover of that magazine.
BEN KISSEL Strange article, How To Kill Your Followers. Esquire.
MARCUS PARKS Even though Eureka, California, which was on the list, was just a hop skip and jump away
relatively speaking, Jim decided that he'd wanna take his chances down in Brazil. And so he left
the church in the care of his associate pastors and took his family to Belo HOrizante.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Latin accent) It does sound like this.
I'm not really sure, anytime I listen to Portuguese stuff, Portuguese stuff sounds so fun and
fancy. Just like, (Latin accent) 'Hello! (gibberish)'
But that's cause it's a different thing than just normal Spanish. And I don't get it, it's like alien
Spanish.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's Portuguese. It's a totally different language.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know but it's just like-
BEN KISSEL German is the weirdest sounding Russian.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know enough Spanish so that I can read it and recognize it, I hear some and understand it,
but then with Portuguese it's like, I don't understand any of this. It's like Burger King menu in
Brazil. I know what these sandwiches look like, but none of them are spelled with this many
'U's and 'Z's at home.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it was on House Hunters International, it was Brazil. I'm intimidated. I can't go. Everyone
is so beautiful, you gotta have a beach bod!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We do not belong in Rio. We are not built for Rio.
MARCUS PARKS I could handle Brazil because I got a big butt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (sighs)
BEN KISSEL Yes, you've got a big butt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But they would use him for it.
BEN KISSEL But you have a Texas-size stomach, you're very-
MARCUS PARKS My stomach's flat!
BEN KISSEL Oh, it's getting there.
MARCUS PARKS It's getting there.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It would just be Kissel walking around, because technically you have to wear a full white linen
suit and a white fedora, and you'd be walking around pointing at other elderly, seemingly-
foreign men, some Central-European men, that would tip their hat to you and you'd tip your
hat back, being like, (whispering) 'Secret's safe. Secret's safe with me, I won't tell anyone
you're here.'
BEN KISSEL Oh I see, you're making a Nazi joke.
MARCUS PARKS Guten Morgen mein Fräulein!
BEN KISSEL I get it. Took me a second, but I just figured, oh, it's another one of those.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well Jones figured with as many poor people as Brazil had, he could pull off the same
trick he'd done in Indianapolis. But when he got there, he found that the missionary business
in Brazil had a bit of a glut.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, that's like I'm starting to do some cardio work on the trampoline and then all of a
sudden be like, 'I think I'm ready for top of the ceiling aerials.' Like when you go down to Brazil,
the poor communities of Brazil are not the same as Indianapolis.
BEN KISSEL Right, right. I would assume much more economic in need.
MARCUS PARKS Well there's a lot more economic in need but there's also so many fucking missionaries. It's
like trying to move to L.A. to be an actor, but not knowing anybody in L.A. and also not being
able to speak English.
BEN KISSEL That's right, that's why I say if you're an actor, stay in Greenbay, Wisconsin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Stay there.
BEN KISSEL Big fish, small pond.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You could be in Music Man every year when they do the Music Man every single year.
MARCUS PARKS Well yeah, there were too many people there. Jones couldn't get a foothold and he didn't even
speak Portuguese.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, there's no way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No it's easy to speak Portuguese, you just put 'U's and 'Z's in normal Spanish.
BEN KISSEL I think that's a Polish version of Portuguese which isn't actually Portuguese.
MARCUS PARKS The only thing that Jones seemed to gain from his time in Brazil was a good yarn.
BEN KISSEL What do you mean?
MARCUS PARKS A good story.
BEN KISSEL He got one!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He did. It's a very good story.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And in a story he told many times over the years as proof of the kinds of sacrifices he
was willing to make for the greater good, Jones said that while he was in Brazil, a diplomat's
wife approached him with an indecent proposal of sorts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll give you one million dollars to sleep with your dog.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL What? Excuse me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh... I'll take 50 thousand! Oh no...
MARCUS PARKS Jones said that at first he refused to acquiesce to her sexual demands but eventually he
agreed, only under the condition that she donate five thousand dollars to the local orphanage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yup. That's how good his dick was.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL But again, that's good!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, well-
BEN KISSEL Kids don't care where it came from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not true, Kissel!
MARCUS PARKS It's not true!
BEN KISSEL You don't think that's true?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI NO!
BEN KISSEL Tell it to the kids who just got 5000 bucks at a local orphanage in Brazil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No woman ever has to offer $5000 to sleep with a pasty-faced, Sam the Eagle-looking
motherfucker who shows up, no no no no no. She coulda been with a Brazilian man with a six
inch tongue whose hips can swivel like he's an action figure.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that's a good point, like a He-Man action figure.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and every time Jim Jones told this story he never failed to make sure that everyone knew
that he delivered no less than pure physical ecstasy, a job well done for a job well paid.
BEN KISSEL I believe it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't think so. I think that if he had sex, he had sex like a jackhammer, like you see those big
weird Russian pornstar guys that're like bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam, then it's over in
30 seconds.
BEN KISSEL Yeah they all look like Rusev from the WWE.
MARCUS PARKS Well the point of this story is that sometimes you have to bend your morals for the greater
good. And not only was it okay but it was almost more impressive if you got your hands dirty,
because in sacrificing your morals you were sacrificing yourself, which is a very convenient
idea to plant in the mind of your cult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also the idea the individual does not matter in their society. The individual, what one person
does doesn't matter. But I think this story comes out of the fact that he went to Brazil and he
came up cock-up. Like he showed up to Brazil and then he was like, 'Oh shit. I fucked up.'
MARCUS PARKS He spent two years there.
BEN KISSEL Right. Okay. But he still has a wife here at this point, right?
MARCUS PARKS The whole family is in Brazil! Yeah, yeah, yeah. They went from Belo Horizante and then
eventually they went up to Rio for a little while and they had no luck there either. So yeah,
they'd been there for two years and back in Indy Peoples Temple was falling apart. Because it
wasn't really the message that brought people there and kept peopl there, it was Jim Jones.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And without that charisma there was nothing to hold the church together. Infighting split the
whole thing up, associate pastors took congregants elsewhere, and when Jones returned to
Indianapolis, Peoples Temple membership was a fraction of what it once had been. And
furthermore, desegregation in the city had continued along just fine without him. And a lot of
people had taken up where he'd left off in the community outreach area. In other words,
when Jim Jones came back to Indianapolis, he was out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this drove him fuckin' nuts.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I honestly almost understand, cause he did a lot of fucking hard work, and when he showed up
and the city was getting desegregated he was trying to get back on the Human Rights
Commission which is what he was doing for a while in the city, and when he showed back up
they were like, 'Oh, we don't need you.' They just took all his work and jumped with it, so he
was left with nothing. And this is to me, we've talked about this and we'll talk about this too, I
really do think this was like a turning pint for him when he came back.
MARCUS PARKS Oh! I absolutely agree that this was the turning point. Because the one thing that we know
about Jim Jones and the one thing we'll definitely learn a lot for later on is that he could not
accept failure. And he could never admit that he was wrong. And in fact, you could possibly say
that's why Jonestown ended the way it did, because he could not accept that he had failed.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also the feelings that came up... I think that a lot of times as people, you probably understand
this where it's like, you know when something happens and you don't understand why you
have a certain reaction? It was like when for some reason I involuntarily cry to the song Baker
Street. That song Baker Street-
BEN KISSEL What is it? (humming tune) That one?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I cry at that song all the time. And obviously there's something in there that I don't know why.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So when Jim Jones showed up and the temple had fallen apart, his rage spoke to him. Because
he showed up and realized, 'Oh fuck, I can't stand watching anybody else share in the
leadership or in the credit of this association. I did so much work with my fucking blood, sweat,
and tears. Also saying that I'm wrong, also the fact that I'm not in control.' Seeing somebody
else at the pulpit made him a fucking crazy person.
BEN KISSEL I understand, yeah, it makes sense. He built it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he absolutely built it. And as far as admitting he was wrong, the only reason why he was
able to come back from Brazil to the United States was because JFK got shot in the fucking
head. He used that as an excuse, he said, 'All right, things are going real bad back in the United
States, I need to get back, I need to be with my congregation.' If he wouldn't have had that
excuse, he might've languished in Brazil until Peoples Temple just disintegrated because he
was not about to just come back with his tail between his legs and say, 'Hey guys, I'm sorry, I
failed.' Because in order for Jim Jones to work as Jim Jones, he had to be infallible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that's why the speech that he gave, or the sermon that he gave after the JFK assassination
was entitled 'Big If True'. And he went in and he really broke it all down, I think Ted Cruz'
father was named.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah, I mean Jim Jones failed on a lot of different levels. He failed to build a
community in Brazil, he failed to keep his congregation together back home, and he failed to
keep his place as a civic leader. And so from that point on he controlled everything. And he'd
always been a control freak, but now he truly had a say in every decision no matter how small.
And all of this was fueled by his paranoia, because control and paranoia go hand in hand. A lot
of times, I know one of the reasons why I can be a control freak sometimes is cause I'm a very
paranoid person. I get where he's coming from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I get it.
BEN KISSEL Wow, we're really learning a lot about you guys today.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Henry Zebrowski weeps like a child when it comes to 80s romance ballads and Marcus is a
control freak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We are though, that's a part of what you do. Imagine this, I think that's what's important
about this story too. What is your worst quality blown up to it's edges? That's what a cult
leader kind of embodies. Where Jim Jones' need for control, his psychopathic need for control
is what's gonna change everything, it's gonna change the world.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And as far as-
BEN KISSEL I get it though.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I totally get it.
BEN KISSEL Everyone failed him.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And even more than that, not only did they fail, they'd actually taken members away
from him, they betrayed him. They had stolen people away from his congregation and he
would never let that happen again. And that anger fueled him from then on. See, before he
left he had an afternoon radio show from 4:45 to 5pm on WIBC.
BEN KISSEL Uh, it was a 15 minute radio show? 15 minutes?
MARCUS PARKS Well, he paid for it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This was like his podcast.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah!
BEN KISSEL Right, right, right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he had a podcast.
BEN KISSEL It was daily?
MARCUS PARKS I think, yeah. I think it was daily. 4:45-5pm.
BEN KISSEL I like that, in and out!
MARCUS PARKS In and out.
BEN KISSEL Get the message in, take it out.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and it was mostly positive before he left for Brazil, and then when he left one of his
associate pastors took it over, kept the fires warm. But when Jim Jones came back he wetn
straight for socialism, cut out the bible all together, and started hinting that he just might be a
prophet.
BEN KISSEL Oh.
MARCUS PARKS Most people did not buy tht bullshit and Jones had his show taken away from him because he
was starting to get a little aggressive.
BEN KISSEL I heard he might be a prophet.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) So really, it was starting to become obvious to even Jones himself that he'd worn out
his welcome in Indianapolis.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS And so, he returned to the same Esquire article he'd ran to for answers before. (chuckles) His
trusty Esquire!
BEN KISSEL Is it just on the back of his toilet, just like waiting? It's like the golden Esquire, what is going
on?
MARCUS PARKS He checked that out and he took another look at Eureka, California, which I'm surprised they
didn't take a look at that before they went to Brazil.
BEN KISSEL You'd think so.
MARCUS PARKS You'd think they'd send someone out there. But they looked at Eureka, California and just a
little south of that between Eureka and San Francisco, Jones found a little town called Ukiah.
The scouting mission gave intel that the location was perfect, and so Jones started convincing
his followers to take their first Exodus. He gave them three reasons to go. Fear, opportunity, or
guilt. If you weren't afraid of being killed in a nuclear blast-
BEN KISSEL I'm not.
MARCUS PARKS Then you'd at least be living a better life in sunny California.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, I want that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's nice in California!
MARCUS PARKS And if you were already living a good life in Indianapolis-
BEN KISSEL I am.
MARCUS PARKS Then it was because of Jim Jones and you owed him.
BEN KISSEL I do.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It all works! I've done the math and it checks out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This was also a complete lift from Father Divine again, because Father Divine had got into a lot
of trouble in New York and moved the entire congregation to Philly, and also it is the first
allowance of total control to Jim Jones. As soon as you enter into greyhound bus with 70 other
farting elderly people-
BEN KISSEL You're in it. Yup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI To go across the country, you're already fucked.
MARCUS PARKS It's their first compound. They are officially in the cult territory. 1965, Jim Jones took about
100 people, little less, and moved 'em all to Redwood Valley right outside of Ukiah.
BEN KISSEL If I was making this a movie I would have him read the article and then turn the page in
Esquire and it would be an advertisement for big ol' sunglasses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL He'd buy those and then Back In Business starts playing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well that's almost true because after meeting Father Divine he started dressing better and he
started wearing the sunglasses-
BEN KISSEL Oh so now we're in glasses territory!
MARCUS PARKS Not quite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not quite.
MARCUS PARKS He's going back and forth with the sunglasses. After Father Divine he started like, 'Hey, I kinda
like these sunglasses a little bit.' But we're not in sunglass territory just yet, we're about 5
years away from sunglasses.
BEN KISSEL Oh wow. All right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the thing was about Ukiah is there wasn't really much for Jim Jones to
actually do. See, with Indianapolis he had a population in need, and for that matter, he had a
population. Ukiah had only about 15,000 people and most of those people were white and
wanted nothing to do with Peoples Temple, who at this time were mostly black.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it is very isolationalist. Where they moved out was in the middle of the Redwood forest.
They went out there, and it's gorgeous, it's really nice but it's fucking isolated. And these are
also people, these are pro-Vietnam war people, this is very deep Trump country in Northern
California. Then they just roll in with these buses filled with black people, and they're like,
'Whoa.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and these are also black people that are looking for equal shake in the country and all
these people in Ukiah were all looking at them and thinking like well black people who
complain, they're just not grateful for what they got. And so they were not welcome in Ukiah
at all.
BEN KISSEL It's a big state, California, it's not all L.A.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And Jones, he got a few more people to come along from Indianapolis by actually setting
a date for nuclear destruction, July of 1967, but that only brought about 50 more people. And
to keep them there, he doubled down on nuclear destruction. He even told them that he had a
special cave up in the hills all ready to go when the inevitable happened, not unlike Charlie
Manson's hole in the ground where his followers would go to wait out the race war.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS What was in the hole in the ground? It was an underground city, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's like (Manson voice) 'Don't you worry, you get down there and there's a 7/11 down
there. I haven't checked it out personally but I heard the taquitos are fresh every other day.'
BEN KISSEL Ooh, roller taquitos!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Caves have a big hold on the human mind. There's something about-
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It's primal! It's in our DNA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's been used forever, the idea 'we'll go hide in a cave', it sounds kind of fun cause in my mind
I imagine Looney Tunes, I imagine cuddly bears in the cave.
MARCUS PARKS I imagine the Herculoids.
BEN KISSEL What are those?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (adorable alien noises)
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you know what the reality of the cave is? It's slimy. It's not dry in a cave, it's wet.
BEN KISSEL Yes, bugs eating dung. I hate it.
MARCUS PARKS But you know who didn't have a cave?
BEN KISSEL Who?
MARCUS PARKS Indianapolis.
BEN KISSEL They didn't?
MARCUS PARKS No caves in Indianapolis.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You have to have a cave installed.
BEN KISSEL Maybe there's an adult entertainment club called The Indianapolis Cave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh.
BEN KISSEL Do not go.
MARCUS PARKS Even though the people who came with Jones had devotion, the one thing they didn't have
was money. Now, sure, they gave everything they had and a lot of them sold their houses and
gave all the money they made to Peoples Temple when they moved, naturally. But that wasn't
enough. So Jim Jones shifted his recruiting pool from black and poor to rich and white. After
all-
BEN KISSEL What a shift! Really 180'd that one.
MARCUS PARKS And knew how to do it. Because after all, man has a compound to pay for now!
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS So Jones started recruiting those people who had become disillusioned with society. Educated
people who wanted something more fair and just. These were people who didn't really have
problems but they recognized that others did and they wanted to help. Cause none of these
people were idiots. The black members need help and they got it, and the white members
wanted to help and they gave it. And in the process they became a truly integrated community
and for a time they were happy.
BEN KISSEL Oh, that's good.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, cause again, when they showed up, these were the fun times. They kind of talk about
this like... People afterwards, members of the cult were saying this was probably the happiest
they were. It was really hand to mouth, they didn't have a lot to eat and they were not the
most physically comfortable but everyone was kinda having a good time. They sang in a bus
together across the fucking country. You have to really like a bunch of people. When we sit in
an airplane going across the country, we sit silently in the seats just staring at our phones.
BEN KISSEL You can look at people and be like, 'I think he's thinking about talking. And if he fucking opens
his mouth on this damn plane, I will freak out.' Yeah, that's true.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah, and it was also very small at this time. This was before the scene got big.
BEN KISSEL Oh, I see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's when it was cool. This is when it was cool.
MARCUS PARKS Well the thing is about these members is everyone who came in was carefully screened. The
didn't just let anybody in, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Oh really? Extreme vetting.
MARCUS PARKS Extreme vetting (chuckles). But what would happen is perspective members would be invited
to a function and would be kindly interrogated without these people ever really knowing what
was happening. This one guy said that they always get taken to a second location where he
would meet up with one of these people, with Peoples Temple, at like a service or something
like that and be like, 'Hey, we're gonna go to this sock hop that we're chaperoning, it's like a
teenage dance party. So why don't you come along with us, you know, just hang out?' 'Oh,
okay, cool. I'll go and hang out.'
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And then they go and hang out there and they talk to 'em a little bit further and then if they
pass the test, if they gave Jim Jones the okay, then Jones would swoop in and scoop 'em up
with a highly connective, personal conversation. It's like when people talk about Bill Clinton,
cause Bill Clinton, they say he can talk to you in a room full of people and make you feel like
y'all are the only two people on the face of the planet. Jim Jones was exactly like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also, remember this shit's being done by kindly 70 year old women. So they're talking to you
all, being like, (elderly voice) 'Oh, you gotta try some of the cookies, you've got to, I made
them at home. Also, what are you gonna do in the event of a nuclear apocalypse?'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (elderly voice) 'You got the fucking stones to have the AK to fight the secret police?'
You know, and you have to be like, whoa!
BEN KISSEL I like that they sort of transitioned to Dr. Evil at some point in the conversation of giving
cookies to the nuclear apocalypse.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It was older people as well, but it was also a lot of young people, and these were all
college-age people, these were all people in their 20s and 30s and this was like the mid-60, so
a lot of the people were doing that whole 'back to the country' type of thing. It was like, 'We're
getting out of the cities, the cities are corrupt, they're full of racism and crime and there's so
much injustice there, we've gotta get back to the country and we gotta start over,' essentially.
And that's what Jim Jones offered a lot of these young people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he had to do it, they did have to start over.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and Jim Jones, he was very smart about who he let in. People had to have the right
attitude. But that's not to say they didn't let in people who could be considered undesirable,
because they actually needed those people too. They took in drug addicts, troubled teens,
criminals, they helped 'em clean up their act and they turned their life around for 'em. Jim
Jones used those types of people to his advantage because those people felt like they owed
Jim Jones their lives, because in a way they did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that's exactly what Scientology does with Al-Anon, and Crim-Anon, and all of those side
groups, how many people Scientology gets simply because they got them clean.
BEN KISSEL Right. It's also exactly what Jigsaw does.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Because he's not about torture, it's about learning a lesson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Learning a lesson.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah, and Jim Jones, he used that loyalty to essentially turn these people into soldiers,
eventually giving them uniforms and arming them.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, because these people were the drug addicts, these were like the hardened street
people, so-
BEN KISSEL Arm 'em. Yep.
MARCUS PARKS Well, I mean, these were people who had a more violent past.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS So he took them and he molded them into essentially weapons that he could use.
BEN KISSEL Are you susceptible to impulsive thinking? Here's a gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah. And these people, the people that he took off the streets and molded them into
something else, molded them to essentially weapons, those were the ones that were lining the
pavilion in Jonestown.
BEN KISSEL That's right, I always forget this ends in unbelievable pools of blood and mass tragedy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why it's an incredible story. It just shows anything built on a foundation of lies is gonna
lead to bad shit. No matter what the lies are, no matter what you think it is that you're headed
towards, if you live a life on that shaky foundation, it's gonna sink.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, not just lies but allowances as well.
BEN KISSEL Right. Now they seem to be giving him a lot more.
MARCUS PARKS They're giving him a lot more and there is a lot more to give. Now, as far as arming people
goes, it's not to say that Jim Jones was militant, he wasn't, at least at that point. The closest
they got to militancy at this point is that in Redwood Valley they trained a bunch of teenagers
in a little fun militia thing, and the teenagers' job was that when the bombs dropped they had
to get all the old people up to the cave.
BEN KISSEL That's nice!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Its fun. It's the same thing with Aum Shinrikyo, how much fun that must've been, doing the
drills. Because at some point your feeling it, it's like The Goonies, it's like Stranger Things!
These kids go up there with flashlights, they're in charge of the old people, if they don't fall in
line you know they were given a secret directive just being like, you can hit 'em with the
flashlight. Like if they struggle, you can start popping 'em a couple times.
MARCUS PARKS The kids didn't have guns but they all had crossbows.
BEN KISSEL Cool!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's fun, it's like the dune buggies. You have to have activities. It's like doing group-tripping, as
long as there's fun activities, pool noodles, one of those big bouncy flat things you jump off of
a crane, you know those big safety bags that you jump off the high dives onto?
BEN KISSEL Yes. I've seen people have fun on those.
MARCUS PARKS Well I think with cults it's important for us to also talk bout the good times. It's important for
us to tell you that no one knows they're joining a cult. No one knows, no one joins these things
thinking like, 'Wow, this shit is awful. I better stick around.'
BEN KISSEL Well now you got me thinking Chumbawamba, I'm think Tubthumping. You gotta think about
the good times.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, you never walk into it thinking, 'This is awful, I'm gonna stay.' You always go into it
because people are happy and people are having a good time. And then eventually, later on,
that's when the hate comes, that's when the paranoia comes. And Jim Jones was great at
injecting that into his followers in very subtle ways.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like when we keep drinking the way we're drinking til we're 60. Cause then it's sad
alcoholism, and now we're good time guys, we have good times.
MARCUS PARKS I mean, we're on the cusp here. All of us are kinda staring down 40 pretty hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Ugh. It's becoming a real issue for me. Yeah, I'll tell you that.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well, as far as taking the paranoia down to the micro area, every once in a while Jim
Jones would say that everyone in the congregation had entered what he called and 'accident
cycle'. That meant that everyone had to be extra careful because Jim Jones had had a vision
that one of them was gonna get into a deadly accident, and the only way they could avoid it
was if they believed in him.
BEN KISSEL If someone could only market to the population, maybe like dummies, like crash test dummies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Dummies.
BEN KISSEL Someone to just inform us but entertain us when it comes to driving safety.
MARCUS PARKS The person to take the fall for one of those accident cycles was a man named Whitey
Firestone.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what happens when you name yourself after a racial slur.
MARCUS PARKS And a tire.
Hi everyone, my name is Cracker Goodyear!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love Cracker Goodyear. I like a Cracker Goodyear, I trust somebody named Cracker Goodyear.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Whitey was one of Jim's trouble members. Seemed like Whitey was always fucking up in one
way or another and was always being called up front for a good tongue lashing.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I feel really sad about Whitey Firestone cause he reminds me of Philip Seymour Hoffman from
Boogie Nights.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's just always the bad luck dude. He's always around, he's just kind of a bummer, he fucks
shit up-
MARCUS PARKS (weepy voice) 'Fucking idiot. Fucking idiot, I'm a fucking idiot...'
BEN KISSEL R.I.P! I'm gonna give an R.I.P. out there.
MARCUS PARKS Well, one night after a particularly rough dressing down in front of the whole congregation,
Whitey accidentally drove his entire family over a cliff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Quote unquote "accidentally". I honestly do believe that it's not an actual suicide but it was
like a thing, like he just kinda willed it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I think it was... Whitey Firestone was like, 'I'm fine with this.' He can kinda let his driving
hands get a little looser. Cause they were actually in a valley, so these roads were actually very
dangerous.
BEN KISSEL Of course! You think he did it on purpose?
MARCUS PARKS I dunno if he did it on purpose but I think he was fine with it.
BEN KISSEL Huh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (weepy voice) 'Hey family, you ever see just how easy it would be to just jerk the wheel?'
Yeah daddy, and I'm gonna say as the son of the group, none of us like the talk.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well after they went over a fucking cliff, Jim Jones heard about it, he sped down to
the scene, climbed down the ravine, and found the car crushed. And one of Whitey's kids did
actually die in this accident.
BEN KISSEL Oh I thought they all died, I assumed they all had passed away.
MARCUS PARKS Nope, one died but the rest survived.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, they got to live in sadness. He lived in a straight-up two arm slings and a leg cast, just being
like, (weepy voice) 'I'm just... I just shouldn't be the driver. Um, guys, whatever is going on, I
should probably be riding in the back. You guys going to get ice cream? No one takes me on
trips to the city anymore, but...'
BEN KISSEL Sad life for poor Whitey.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But Jim Jones, when everyone else survived besides just that one kid, Jim Jones said it
was because he healed them, and that gave Jones a double hit. First, his prophecy came true,
and he got to heal people in the same swoop.
BEN KISSEL What did the kid do that died? What did he do to piss off Jim Jones?
MARCUS PARKS It was an accident cycle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, accident cycle.
BEN KISSEL (pause) All right.
MARCUS PARKS But that sort of thing makes people even more afraid, because that's the thing, now your kids
are in trouble as well. You're kids are also in danger because Whitey didn't believe, because
Whitey wasn't good enough at being a socialist, he didn't die but his kid did. So if you don't
believe, then your kid could die as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (weepy voice) 'I don't think we need to keep rubbing it in about how much I don't believe. I
can't scratch my own dick and balls, so if someone could just please bring the soup to me. You
know I gotta drink it with a goddamn straw. You guys are just... I'm getting sick of this!'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) But that whole thing almost backfired on Jim as well, cause one of his most devout
followers, a woman named Joyce Sweeney, died in a car wreck on the way home from a late
Peoples Temple meeting. And Jim spun this one, though, by saying he'd in fact had a vision,
and he had seen it coming, and he had warned Joy. He told her that before she drove off that
she needed to stop and meditate for two minutes, but she just brushed him off. And because
she did not listen, she was dead. So you'd better do every stupid little goddamn thing that I tell
you to do if you don't wanna end up like Joyce.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I tell you what, nothing says rebel like a 60 year old woman named Joyce.
BEN KISSEL Yup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nobody shirks the rules more than elderly Joyce who then said like, (elderly voice) 'Fuck your
meditation, I'm gonna go catch some dick.' And then she hopped on her motorcycle and
vroom-vroomed her way to heaven.
BEN KISSEL Yep. James Dean had nothing on her.
MARCUS PARKS Well those little bullshit things, I mean, that's how Jim Jones got even more control over them.
Cause meditating for two minutes... He told them, 'Yeah, if Joyce had just meditated for two
minutes, she'd be alive right now. Because she didn't, she's dead. So if I have something stupid
that you don't understand, that you think you shouldn't be doing or that you think is an idiotic
thing to do, you better do it or you could die.'
BEN KISSEL You're thinking about it. Don't think about it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, so again, he flipped it and reversed it and he gained even more control. But actually for
the most part, all this supernatural stuff at this time in Redwood Valley was taking a backseat.
Since the recruitment was focused almost solely on disaffected whites, socialism and equality
took the lead. But that's not to say that all that supernatural shit disappeared altogether. One
of the things that seemed to be an almost universal opinion among former Peoples Temple
members was that Jim Jones was anything you wanted him to be. I mean, even Jim Jones
himself said that.
BEN KISSEL What if I wanted him to be a gremlin and I feed him after midnight?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It would be cute, that would be cute to do but it's not gonna physically happen, Kissel.
MARCUS PARKS Is there anything else you want him to be?
BEN KISSEL Hmm... Just a gremlin.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You have to have more imagination, you have to have more imagination.
BEN KISSEL Oh. Treasureball.
MARCUS PARKS Well if you wanted Jim Jones to be a socialist leader, you got it. If you wanted a supernatural
daddy, you got it.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, don't Nixon this whole thing. God, 'daddy' is the... Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS Daddy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Daddy.
MARCUS PARKS Aw, Jim Jones you're my daddy!
BEN KISSEL Ugh, I'm gonna vomit.
MARCUS PARKS When they got to Jonestown they called him 'dad'.
BEN KISSEL They did, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And 'father'. They called him father. Formally they called him father but comfortably they
called him daddy.
MARCUS PARKS If you listen to the death tape, a couple of people, cause they go up and they give these
testimonies of why they should die, and they casually refer to Jim Jones as dad. Like, "I
followed dad down here." And speaking of that, if you wanted god himself from Jim Jones, you
got that too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And you know who said the same shit was Charles Manson. You know, "If you look up at me
you see god, if you look down at me you see the devil, you look straight at me you see
yourself." They understand what they do, and later on his sermons are gonna get so rambly
because there's thousands of people in the congregation and he's just saying a like a
paragraph for each person that's there for a different reason. And so people just don't
remember the shit that didn't pertain to them, they just remember the stuff that they agreed
with.
BEN KISSEL So he's got a whole quilt work going on here. Different needs for different people, and he
addresses them.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, huge quilt work and it doesn't matter what contradictions he had.
BEN KISSEL I have to say, I don't think anyone referred to Charles Manson as daddy, because he does not
exemplify fatherhood.
MARCUS PARKS He's not a paternal figure in any way whatsoever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. No. No, no, no, no. He probably even went, (Manson voice) 'Ew. Ew, don't call me dad,
ugh. Ew.'
MARCUS PARKS Well, in this way Jim Jones is a politician in that he can contradict himself so many different
times-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, like a liar, like all politicians are professional liars.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, exactly. He can sit there and contradict himself but as soon as the follower or the person
that believes in him, the person that follows him, as soon as he talks to them, as soon as he
talks about their problems, what they believe in, then they forget about everything else. They
don't think about the contradictions at all, all they think about is that he's got my back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Kissel, I'll put it to you. On the politicians-as-liars scale, you did good. I'd give you a 7.5. you
never said anything specific-
BEN KISSEL Yeah that's why I only got 8000 votes! That's the ultimate irony. But that's the thing, once you
understand, people need their own interests addressed and at the end of the day we are all in
it for our own best interest, at base human quality, that's what you play on. So once you
understand that you can really do anything.
MARCUS PARKS And there's another side to that. The other side to that is that all of these people that were in
that room, even though they may have been there for different reasons, they all had the same
enemy. They all had one cause to fight against. It's actually a few different things, but you can
roll that entire ball into one word. The system.
BEN KISSEL Ah!
MARCUS PARKS Because he railed against the CIA, the FBI, the government, racists, bigots, all of this was 'the
system'.
BEN KISSEL Right, right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and all of that could also be balled up in one other word. Satan. Satan was the system,
the system was Satan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Always maligning him. Always attacking him, he never gets to tell his side of the fucking story.
And again, if he's bad to them, he can't be all that bad really. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL I don't like it, I hear he's part of the system.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, he is not. Urgh... Imma put up a statue!
MARCUS PARKS He could also bring in both sides by saying Satan. If he said Satan then he brought in the bible
thumpers but he could also bring in everyone else that wasn't religious, bring them in by
saying like, 'You know, yes, it is Satan,' and then turn around to them on the other side of his
face and be like, 'You know I'm talking about Satan as just like a metaphor, right?' And then
he'd turn over to the bible thumpers and say like, 'The Satan of the bible,' and then turn back...
It was the exact same thing he was just saying it in two different ways, and everyone was
buying it.
BEN KISSEL He's the mayor from, um... A Christmas...
MARCUS PARKS Nightmare Before Christmas.
BEN KISSEL Nightmare Before Christmas. The mayor from Nightmare Before Christmas, great character.
MARCUS PARKS But even while all this was going on, Peoples Temple struggled in stagnation for about three
years. Small growth was happening but it was very slow going. It wasn't until another
assassination happened that Jones saw another opportunity. Because this man knew how to
take advantage of a situation. So about two weeks after Martin Luther King Jr was
assassinated, one of San Francisco's biggest black churches held a memorial service open to
the public. Jones caught wind and brought damn near his whole congregation in a caravan of
busted up cars and vans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He knew his people really, really well. And because he had such an intimate relationship with
them and he knew that number one, they would love this, and it was a part of the
community... And I actually think it was twofold. He knew that it would help him down the
road and it also was a thing that he wanted to be in the center of. It was a huge thing, he
wanted to be in the pictures at a massive memorial for Martin Luther King.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I was thinking of also Bobby Kennedy but I guess it was MLK.
MARCUS PARKS Bobby Kennedy was a whole different thing for them.
BEN KISSEL And that plays perfectly into what you're talking about with the system, cause the rumors with
Hoover's FBI being involved, the CIA killing him, that started right away.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, Cointelpro was real and that all got vindicated in the end.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And the people of Peoples Temple were genuinely compassionate, the were genuinely
moved and saddened by the death of Martin Luther King Jr, and they skewed a lot heavier
towards the white side, so when they showed up at this service they stood out. But they were
also genuine and they were compassionate and they were welcomed as brothers and sisters in
god. And after the service, Jim Jones and his people started talking about all the good they
were getting down to up in Ukiah and invited veryone there to visit anytime they wanted. So,
the San Francisco people figured why the hell not. And when they got there, they were met
with a two-pronged attack of racial equality and actual religion along with a few healings
thrown in fro good measure.
BEN KISSEL It's strange to think about weaponized goodwill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Wow, that's a damn good way of putting it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what it is, is that he got exactly what he wanted. And then every single time he flipped
somebody he got pleasure out of it. I think that's kind of what we're talking about here is with
allowances that we talk about with serial killers, for him it's the slow acquisition of humans.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and he'd thrown in a few healings as well, mostly mind-reading type of healings-
BEN KISSEL Did he ever get to Whitey or he just kind of stamped an envelope?
MARCUS PARKS Well, I think they put Whitey in the back, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (weepy voice) 'My cast is really starting to itch, if somebody could get me a hanger... You
cannot just pretend like I'm not here. Guys...'
MARCUS PARKS But this time with the mind-readings it wasn't Jim Jones that was eavesdropping on the crowd
for information. It was Patty Cartmell.
BEN KISSEL Ooh.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, she'd go around the crowd, she's listen in and report back to Jim Jones with pertinent
details. Now you might think all this shit might raise a few eyebrows in the new non-religious
types that Peoples Temple had just recruited, but they were told again and they believed again
that all this was just a means to an end. We just had to get people in. Yes, we have to lie to
them. Yes, we have to do these healings. Yes, we have to have a bible-centric service this time
and every time these people come but it's all for the cause. It's to get 'em in and then once
they get in, then we can get the real work done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI His constant reasoning was numbers. He's like, 'We can't make really change unless we have
the numbers that we need.' In order to put butts in the seats, which is true, honestly, we've
seen it on our own tiny level as a podcast is that until you have the numbers where you can
show up to a meeting being like, 'Well this many people follow me...' It's easier to give that
person money that way. His was also about power, though.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, can you imagine if Dave Chappelle's last special had an empty audience? It wouldn't
have quite the same impact.
MARCUS PARKS So after the San Francisco crowd was impressed with the message, Jones repeated what had
worked so well in Indianapolis and brought back the notion of a church where you get
something now. He started doing the exact same thing where they would help them out with
government forms, programs, getting them jobs, all kinds of shit like actually making their lives
better. And because of all this, Peoples Temple started to grow again. At their lowest point, in
1966, they had 86 members. By the end of the 60s they had 500, by 1973 they had almost
3000.
BEN KISSEL It's almost like they're about to serve over a billion burgers.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL This guy is Ray Kroc-ing it all over town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again, smart businessman, great lover, knew what the McDonalds' needed to get to the top.
BEN KISSEL That is the worst love story in movie history, by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's pretty great.
BEN KISSEL What's it called, The Founder, that movie? Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS The Founder. I just watched it this weekend, it's great.
BEN KISSEL That love story is disgusting, Ray Kroc is disgusting. Its an affair.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, the love story's awful. Ray Kroc is a terrible person.
BEN KISSEL Thank you!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Uh, he was incredibly necessary. Those guys woulda been nothing without him, they didn't
know, they were squandering everything.
BEN KISSEL The only good thing about Ray Kroc and McDonald's is it is slowly killing our president. And I
don't know if I can legally say that but that is the long game for Ray Kroc.
MARCUS PARKS C'mon, Ray Kroc, this man is responsible for the way the world is. He's a-
BEN KISSEL I know it's horrible! The world's horrible!
MARCUS PARKS It's awful. I know that's what I'm saying! I'm talking to Henry here! Ray Kroc is not a good man,
Ray Kroc is the fucking devil.
BEN KISSEL Henry loves him, Marcus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's very important. I see what he says as he did his job. He was around all these people that
were pathetic, they didn't know how to make their business good, and he went in there and
they should be thankful for the money that they got.
BEN KISSEL And this is what Jim Jones told his followers as well. Be thankful for what you got.
MARCUS PARKS They were hardworking, honest Americans.
BEN KISSEL Honest Americans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They didn't have the guts to take it to the top. And sometimes you gotta have the chutzpah to
really kick it to next gear.
MARCUS PARKS I did not realize you were such an evil capitalist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (evil laughing)
BEN KISSEL Now I kinda like it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (plinking noise) Sorry that's the coins falling out of my shirt.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well those members, when they were first starting to build up their membership,
those people were hard fought. And once Peoples Temple had decided you were right for
them, once they had chosen you, they would do everything they could to get you and keep
you. There was this one girl, she told this story of how she arrived at Peoples Temple after
escaping from an abusive home and she'd been taken in by a couple. Now, she said she was
grateful but she wasn't sure that she would stick around just yet. She'd written letters to her
family but she hadn't gotten any replies, so she started drifting towards Jim. One night, he
cornered her and told her personal information that she hadn't even told her hosts, so as far
as she was concerned, Jim Jones was a mind reader. And these people were very kind, they
had taken her in, so she joined Peoples Temple. It was only later that she found out that her
host family had been stealing her mail, reading it, and passing along the information to Jim
Jones.
BEN KISSEL Talk about the system.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like the movie The Visit. It's like all of these super cute old people and they're just stealing
your fucking mail. She was saying she was sitting in there and she thought that her family had
left her. Basically what Jim Jones did was what he couldn't do with Ronnie, where he just cut
her off and made sure that she couldn't get any word from her parents. And so she thought
that she was just sent adrift, but she was getting letters and sending them back and forth and
they just kept them away from her.
BEN KISSEL Oh that's very sad.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and Jim had a name for this, for doing shit like this. He called it 'situational ethics'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I honestly think, Kissel, you said the same thing to me about 4:30 in the morning in a hotel
somewhere in the middle of this country. We were both 19 bourbons in and you were like,
(slurring) 'Situational ethics,' as you were taking stuff from the hotel and putting it in your
bags.
BEN KISSEL Well that's is actually fine because you're paying for the room and what's inside of it, other
than the bed and of course the television.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and his followers, they went along with it, and they also started going along with other
crazy shit that Jim Jones was starting to say. In 1968 he started claiming that in past lives he'd
been Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, and somehow both Lenin and Marx.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's cause he's working on the Scientology timelines where you could be two people at
once.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and these sermons, which Peoples Temple, by the way, they didn't call their sermons
'sermons' or 'services' or anything like that, they called them 'meetings'. And these meetings
would go on forever and most of the time the doors would be locked so nobody could take any
sort of bathroom breaks. And these were of course for people who'd already joined. They
didn't do this shit for people that were just visiting. And these meetings would go on for so
long and would be so exhausting that one former member said he saw a grown man pass out
and piss himself in the middle of one.
BEN KISSEL A grown man.
MARCUS PARKS Grown man! Pass out and piss himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also, remember, in order to keep people focused he wouldn't have chairs. So you'd have
to stand or you'd have to sit on the ground because he wanted people completely enraptured.
But what he would do is he would stand behind the pulpit, number one, what he had was a
couch that no one else could sit on that he could lay on during the meetings and he was also
allowed to go to the bathroom if he wanted to. But in the very beginning, in order to keep up
his image, he would have a special apparatus rigged up behind the pulpit.
BEN KISSEL Like a catheter-type thing?
MARCUS PARKS I think it was just a bucket.
BEN KISSEL He had a bucket. "A special apparatus". It's a bucket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He used to piss in a bucket.
BEN KISSEL Oh, okay. That's also reasonable.
MARCUS PARKS Pissed in a bucket that was behind a pulpit.
BEN KISSEL Okay, all right.
MARCUS PARKS But let's just hear an excerpt from one of these Redwood Valley meetings. This is just the sort
of shit that he would do to fill time.
LPOTL (audio)
Jim Jones: I was thinking the other day, just a few services back or last week, one of my
brothers came to me to show you that there's nothing else lost in this consciousness. My
brother John, back there, you were concerned about something that was lost. You were
concerned, you lost it miles and miles away. Well my spirit retrieved it for you, today. Come,
take it.
(crowd cheering)
Jim Jones: There's nothing lost.
(crowd cheering)
Jim Jones: I just wanted every now and then to show you that it can be done.
(music playing)
Jim Jones: I knew where you lost it and I retrieved it. [inaudible] I'm just doing a little shock
work to keep you mesmerized with the socialist issue.
(singing and applause)
BEN KISSEL It's like Rage Against the Machine with ragtime music.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL And a preacher. It's very interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So much fun, honestly, I wish I could do a lot more on this show of being like, 'And that's when
her pussy fell off and (singing) oh yeah, we found it in the river! We found it in the river!' Like I
wanna go a lot more transitioning into gospel songs.
BEN KISSEL What was he even talking about? I heard socialism in there...
MARCUS PARKS So, if that didn't read at all, what he was doing is he was just talking about how one of his
members had lost something and he found it.
BEN KISSEL He found it. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS He found it. He's like, 'And here it is!' And it was like a card or something like that, and then
the person came up, got it from him, and he was like, 'Yeah I've got a lot of things that I've
found, I just found that. I just found it and I gave it to him, I've got a whole lot of other things
that I've found but I'll give it to you after the service, but until then I'm just mesmerizing you
with socialism (singing).'
BEN KISSEL So this small little miracle for them, quotations "miracle", is just as big as anything else.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I tell you what if that's a miracle, Natalie does like five miracles a day for me. I've slowly slid
into the father's disease, every dad's disease where it's just being like, 'Where are my keys?
Where is my bullshit?' She just finds them.
BEN KISSEL (whispering) Marcus, don't tell Henry that father's disease is alcoholism.
MARCUS PARKS (whispering) Also, don't tell him that he's not a father just because he has a dog.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, that's up for debate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I am a daddy! I am a daddy! She needs me.
MARCUS PARKS Well, Jim Jones also started giving bizarre orders. He'd order people to drink a glass of warm
water mized with vinegar every morning.
BEN KISSEL Ugh. Was he just thinking, like, do you think they'd do this dumb shit?
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
BEN KISSEL What if I say this, if they do this...
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, that's exactly what it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I honestly think that a part of it, yes, is that it's subtly indoctrinating them. I think it's half
on purpose, half not. But I think every single time he did it, boop, the penis would shift. Every
single time somebody would do something completely against their will, he would love it, even
if it's something dumb.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And this is just tests to see what they would do, how far they would go. And it started off
really small, shit like that, like warm water and vinegar. It's like, 'Oh, you did that? Great.' In
1969 he started taking it further. One guy ho left the cult in 1970 said that he'd been present
at one of the first poison tests.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS At a small gathering, Jim Jones served lime Kool-Aid, not Flavor Aid-
BEN KISSEL They saved they good stuff for his private group.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, yeah. He toasted everyone, they all had a drink, then Jim Jones told them it was
poison just to see how everybody would react. Then he'd watch everyone, see, okay, that
person freaks out, that person takes it calmly, that person doesn't believe me and thinks that
they're just kidding, and then he'd laguh and say like, 'Nope. It was all just a test, I just wanted
to see what you people would do. Now everyone go to bed, have fun.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this is my friend Ashton Kutcher, he came all the way from Los Angeles. Ashton, tell them
what it was like on That 70s Show. (singing) Oh Lord, well you gotta take 'em down to the
river! Now this is the seventh song about rivers that we will sing today.
BEN KISSEL That '70s Show is the closest my hometown ever came to having a TV show based off of it. It's
called Point Place and I'm from Stevens Point, and it's Wisocnsin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
BEN KISSEL And I'll mention Mimi Bobeck once again. Also from Stevens Point, Wisconsin from The Drew
Carey Show.
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones would do these Kool-Aid tests, sometimes he'd do it with champagne, but he'd do it
again and again and again over the years, preparing everyone for that final moment. And it
wasn't like that last moment everyone thought, 'Oh, this is just another test.' No, they knew it
was real. They looked around, they saw everyone dying, because there was a long line, they
saw all-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI By then things had gotten really serious. By then they'd already fired weapons, we'll get to
that. They'd already been militarized. Jonestown was pretty intense.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, yeah. Brutal.
MARCUS PARKS They knew it was real that time but by that time they'd gotten used to the idea.
BEN KISSEL Right, so he's grooming 'em here.
MARCUS PARKS He's grooming 'em. He'd been doing that for almost ten years by the time Guyana came. But
even thought Jim Jones was doing all this wacky shit, people were still joining in droves. But
while things were going pretty fantastically for Peoples Temple, things weren't going so great
in the Jones household.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It can't all be awesome, okay? It's always like, your career is going great, your house is not
going good. There's always something and its hard to keep a personal life going when you're a
cult leader.
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. Now, outside of Marshall Applewhite, whose cult seemed to be built so he could
get the thought of fucking dudes out of his head, cult leaders across the board tend to be
obsessed with sex on some level or another.
BEN KISSEL Well Applewhite, I don't think he ever got it out of his head, there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, no. I don't think he did. He did cut his fucking penis off.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I think it's in the forefront of his mind.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he did cut his dick and balls off so he wouldn't think about dudes anymore.
BEN KISSEL Just imagine being that angry at part of your body.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I have been upset at it but it needs to be there. I have to have it, it's the only thing I can trust.
MARCUS PARKS Well, for some cults like Children of God, sex was the whole point.
BEN KISSEL Oh, god. They were gross.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Good, Kissel, you're right. They were gross. Oh, how icky it was, it was super icky sicky over
there.
BEN KISSEL It was icky, Henry. I'm sorry I don't have a calloused soul like you do. Ill still say it was gross.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, everything centered around sex to a disgusting degree and all the members took part,
again, to a disgusting degree. For other cults it was more about gratifying the man up top and
the man up top alone, and Peoples Temple was definitely more this variety. We all know that
Jim Jones had always been a horny little devil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he has been. He is a naughty little papi, isn't he? A hot daddy. You know what it is too
about the sexual impulse, for me, it's almost like cult leaders are even a more practical version
of a serial killer, where it's very similar to Leonard Lake, Charles Ng, keeping a woman in a jail
cell to do whatever, or like how Jerry Brudos wanted to keep women in a cave so they can do
whatever they want for them, but they didn't have the work ethic to create an organization
where you can do just that. Where it's actually like an 11 year old boy's impulse of being able
to just take clothes off of toys and shit.
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm.
BEN KISSEL Different kind of 11 year olds.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You didn't do that?
BEN KISSEL No, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I put clothes on 'em, weapons... Pro wrestlers.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah but you never had any girls around so you didn't have any Barbies around.
BEN KISSEL No we had some Barbies around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So you never stripped the clothes off the Barbies and kissed the breasts?
BEN KISSEL We didn't have that many Barbies around, no. I guess there wasn't a lot of girls. We did have a
missionary couple stay with us, they had a daughter. But we would play Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles vs. Barbies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When you say missionary couple I just imagine they're always inside each other.
BEN KISSEL No, they're not. They were helping, they were spreading the good word-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they're just riding, the woman's riding him around like he's a horse.
BEN KISSEL But I understand it's a very common idea.
MARCUS PARKS Well, speaking of sex like that, during sermons Jim Jones would casually just talk about how
he'd bang Marceline up to five times in a single night, such was the power of his virility. But in
reality, their sex life was almost nonexistent.
BEN KISSEL Are you telling me a man is lying about how good he is in bed?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Shocking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Weird.
MARCUS PARKS See Marceline, through no fault of her own, had a bad back, which byt the late 60s had made
sex impossible. That's when Jim Jones took a preacher's daughter named Carolyn Layton as his
lover, who is described in The Road to Jonestown as having had a quote, "grim Pentecostal
essence".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL I want to marry her. I love that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He picked this lady because of her qualities. It is very similar to L. Ron Hubbard. With her,
again, same reason why he picked Marceline. It wasn't necessarily like she was the hottest of
the group or she was the most willing, she was the one with the skills that he needed to back
him up.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I mean, she didn't just replace Marceline as a lover, she replaced her as what Patty
Cartmell's son might call 'Jim's go-to guy'.
BEN KISSEL Go-to guy.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, I think it's because Jim thought that Marceline didn't have the stones for what he
actually wanted to do. Cause Marceline, she was a good woman.
BEN KISSEL But you know what, I'm just gonna throw this out there. It also takes courage not to kill 900
people.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well that's what I mean, she didn't have the evil stones. Cause there are good stones
and there are evil stones and what Marceline had, she had the good stones.
BEN KISSEL All right. You're a doctor, aren't you? I knew it this whole time Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS (Brooklyn accent) You know, like Marceline, she don't got like evil stones, like Marceline, she
got like good rocks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Brooklyn accent) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell him how the stones work, yeah. You know how it
goes. He's a doctor which means he goes around grabbing girls by the breasts saying, 'Hey you
want a free mammogram?' Oh, I seen it, it's fun.
BEN KISSEL Uh huh. I like your deflecting. Oh this is how Italians speak, not Texans. Very interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Well Marceline, as far as having the courage to stand up-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're not gonna say 'the stones' again?
MARCUS PARKS Not gonna say 'the stones', I'm gonna say 'the courage'. I'm gonna say 'the courage' cause I'm
about to turn into something serious here.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
MARCUS PARKS I got a serious point to make here.
BEN KISSEL All right, serious.
MARCUS PARKS All right. You fuckers ready?
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS All right (laughs). Marceline, she had the courage when the Flavor Aid was being passed out,
she had the courage to stand up and try to stop it. She had to actually be restrained when they
were giving it to the kids. And we have evidence of it, it's in the tape.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS So let's listen right now to Jim Jones trying to calm her down.
LPOTL (audio)
(children screaming)
Jim Jones: Mother, mother, mother, mother, mother, please. Mother, please. Please, please.
Don't... Don't do this. Don't do this. Lay down your life with your child but don't do this.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, god. You hear those babies screaming and, again, you have to remember. I always, as we
talk about the episode we forget, or I mean at least it's important to remember how horrible it
was there.
MARCUS PARKS And that's how Marceline reacted. But Carolyn Layton? She helped stir the vat.
BEN KISSEL Good lord.
MARCUS PARKS Now this affair, it started with Marceline's full knowledge as well as with the knowledge of
their whole family. Jim Jones actually sat down their kids and told them that he and mommy
weren't having sexual relations anymore so he had to take Carolyn, who you should all think of
as a special friend, to fill his needs.
BEN KISSEL Just what every-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because she is father's most special friend. Because... Let me teach you this lesson. Imagine
semen is a bunch of prisoners inside of a horrible, wrinkled prison and that Carolyn is freeing
them from jail, all over her beautiful vacation spot that is known as her breasts. And that is a
thing called a pearl necklace. Kids, it's not just jewelry.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Just cut to them, just horrified faces. Poor kids.
MARCUS PARKS Now, as I said last episode, I think of Marceline as the first follower of Jim Jones and I think
Marceline, a lot of the time, became a test case for Jim to see what he could get away with.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also, it's a test case for Jim Jones. We talk a lot about Carolyn Layton, but she had a husband
named Larry Layton who, if he was a bird, would be a Cuckatiel. He had his wife taken from
him and then what he did was be like, 'Okay, what I'm gonna do though is, I know you're
upset. We're doing this for the temple. You seem really upset. I'm gonna give you a hotter
wife.' So he chose another lady from the congregation that was hotter, that he said was
hotter, he gave him to her being like, 'That's your new wife,' and then like six months later he's
like, 'I'mma be taking that hot wife back because now it's mine.'
BEN KISSEL You can't do that!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL That's not allowed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, and Larry Layton's just like, 'All right, well, they seem to be enjoying it, whatever it is you
do.'
BEN KISSEL Horrible stuff happening.
MARCUS PARKS Well as far as Carolyn Layton went, really his followers at large didn't know about the whole
situation. But Jim Jones figured that if he could convince his wife that he needed to get laid to
keep his special powers going, then he could convince his followers of anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine sitting your girlfriend down and being like, 'This
is for the good of the podcast. I have to have my balls drained by many, many people, many
different people, even a horse. It's my burden actually, it's a thing that I wish I didn't have it.'
BEN KISSEL Right. He flipped it, huh?
MARCUS PARKS Right. And as far as how he got Carolyn Layton into the situation, Jim sent Patty Cartmell to
convince her. Patty told Carolyn that Marceline was mentally and physically unfit and that Jim,
in order to keep on being Jim-
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS Needed to have a physical release. And Carolyn had been chosen to give that to him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it's really sad because honestly, Patty straight up said, "I'll do it."
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause they had this meeting, it was a meeting because he did everything with his committee.
So they had the committee and he would talk about how I need to fuck more, I can't do this.
And Patty was like, (garbled voice) 'I'll do it.' And he's like, 'God has a different plan for you.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Aw, poor Patty.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, poor Patty, man, yeah. Cause he was like, 'God has a different plan for you. You, my
child, shall be in charge of my fuck schedule.'
BEN KISSEL That's right.
MARCUS PARKS And she was never put on there herself.
BEN KISSEL She shoulda put herself in the game! She shoulda just written her name in there!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI C'mon!
BEN KISSEL It's what everyone who goes in the production side, who is also an entertainer, who just
happens to be onscreen a lot more.
MARCUS PARKS Well Carolyn, she was told that she'd been chosen to give Jim the release. Carolyn was the first
to be told that but she was by no means the last. Jim would tell women that by having sex with
him they were supporting him, supporting themselves, supporting the cause, and boosting
their self-esteem all at the same time.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Why do I feel that this is a Bobby Flay move?
BEN KISSEL (laughs) Beat Bobby Flay. I found out a little information on Bobby Flay. Good barbecuer, not a
great chef.
MARCUS PARKS Really?
BEN KISSEL And that's why he often does lose on Beat Bobby Flay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Interesting. He makes good oils, the chili oils were really good when he was selling them, really
good.
BEN KISSEL But not famous for his cooking.
MARCUS PARKS Jim Jones, he wasn't just sleeping with women. This is a Jonestown survivor Tim Carter's
recollection of a Jim Jones proposition.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
LPOTL (audio)
Tim Carter: I'd been in the temple for just a few months. I was sent backstage in Los Angeles to
get something for somebody, I don't remember what, and Jones happened to be coming out
of his room. And he said, "Hi, Tim, how are you doing, how's it going, how do you like
everything so far?" And, "Oh, I like it a lot, it's really cool." I don't remember exactly. And he
reached up and kind of patted the back of my neck and he said, "I'll fuck you in the ass if you
want." And I just kind of stammered, "Uh, no..." You know, no. And he said that if you ever
want that, that's... That's okay, you know, just let me know and we'll do that.
BEN KISSEL That sounds like the story of every staffer who works for Louie Gohmert! Which is a deep cut
politically, it's a horrible, horrible politician out of Texas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, it just sounds like Jim Jones is about to be in that wonderful film American Beauty.
Just such a really good actor. That takes a really good actor to pull it off, kind of like a Kevin
Spacey. Like a really, really good one.
BEN KISSEL Ah, dang it, American Beauty was a great movie!
MARCUS PARKS It was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was fine. It was fine.
BEN KISSEL I mean, a little bit heavy on the paper bag floating nonsense, but...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And I still do that joke to the dismay of my family
every time I see a plastic bag going down the street.
BEN KISSEL Yep, you got to.
MARCUS PARKS Now, Jones didn't have sex with his male followers as much as he did the female but he did it
enough where older followers gave advice to newcomers. The Road to Jonestown quoted one
follower as saying to a younger one:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "If you ask father to fuck you in the ass, take a douche." That's just word from an old
grandfather to a young man. It's called disgusting advice. I write a column every week for the
newspaper of the congregation.
BEN KISSEL That's either an elder in Jim Jones' church or a grip who worked on the Andy Dick show, talking
of course about Andy Dick.
MARCUS PARKS Well it's straight up because Jim Jones would get really mad if you got shit on his dick. And that
is true.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If YOU got it on HIS dick. Cause that's what it is. You got it on his dick.
BEN KISSEL If you're working on cars you're gonna get greasy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh (gagging). Do you say that? Have you ever said that to a loved one?
BEN KISSEL Just feels like why is he mad at me? I told you going into this, Jim. It's been a rough weekend.
Anyway.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Now you'd think that all of this would translate into Jones having a progressive view
on homosexuality.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS But true to form it was anything but.
BEN KISSEL Really?
MARCUS PARKS This is another clip from that PBS documentary.
LPOTL (audio)
Woman: Jim said that all of us were homosexuals. Everyone except, he was the only
heterosexual on the planet, and that the women were all lesbians and the guys were all gay.
And so anyone that showed any interest in sex was just compensating.
BEN KISSEL He sounds like a South Park character.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL That's the most juvenile thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I will say this. Gay guys don't say that. You know what I mean? He's straight-
BEN KISSEL I'm the most heterosexual guy of all time?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That guy is straight, and you can tell he's straight because he says "I'm the only straight one".
You could say that everybody else is gay and they're just forcing him. Cause that's really what
it is, he has all these followers... It's the butthole runs. They walk around with their buttholes
completely open, in a plank position, just shuffling back and forth on their elbows and knees,
just begging for it. They call it the vase walk.
BEN KISSEL Oh my. He reminds me of that shithead kid from World's Greatest Dad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS Oh yeah!
BEN KISSEL Just calls everyone gay and it's just like, what is wrong with you? 'I don't listen to heavy metal
music, it's gay'. Why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's gay.
MARCUS PARKS So in the late 60s, Jim Jones wasn't much different than hundreds of thousands of spiritual
leaders and politicians who had come before.
BEN KISSEL Yeah I'm actually surprised by this anti-gay thing, I didn't think that that would be with the
unity, with all this stuff. He's very progressive on certain things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it's because he is gay, because he's at least bi and he's trying to fight it.
MARCUS PARKS He's very much bi. I think he's very much bi. It was kinda weird because one of his followers
who was gay and wanted to live in an open gay relationship, Jim Jones was like, 'Nah, nah, nah,
nah, you can't do that. But what you can do is just go down to San Francisco, go down to a bar
and get fucked every once in a while. It's fine. If you want, I can fuck ya. It's fine, but we can't
have it. We can't have it here in the community.'
BEN KISSEL Wait, so you'll fuck me but I can't have a husband?
MARCUS PARKS Can't have a husband.
BEN KISSEL Hmm.
MARCUS PARKS So, I think at this point Jim Jones is like a mashup of Billy Graham, Bill Clinton, with a little, tiny
sprinkling of Charles Manson.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Like just a little bit. But around 1970, the secret ingredient that turned Jim Jones from just a
personally shitty person into a full blown monster came onto the scene.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh. What happened?
MARCUS PARKS Amphetamines!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, that'll do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god. You mean the world wasn't better after amphetamines came onto the scene?
BEN KISSEL That'll do it.
MARCUS PARKS And that's where we'll pick back up next episode!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hell yeah, man.
BEN KISSEL All right. That's exactly what I want Jim Jones to have, just more energy. That's what I've
always said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well you have to be... It makes you very productive. I've heard that's one thing about
amphetamines-
MARCUS PARKS At first.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was reading a thing about meth, they were talking about crystal meth. One thing about it, the
reason why it's such a tricky drug is that when you first start doing it you feel incredible and
you just start doing like chores around the house. And you're just like, man I get so much shit
done and I don't need to sleep. And then eventually your teeth start falling out and you're
having sex Jim Jones-style underneath a highway saying I'm sorry if you got shit on your dick.
Because you're looking for money.
BEN KISSEL Then you write a beautiful song under the bridge about your addiction and you're Anthony
Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you're rich, you're famous...
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. I don't think that's how it works.
BEN KISSEL I have no idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't think so.
BEN KISSEL No, please do not. No meth. How clean does your house have to be? That's what I always say.
Um, all right everyone, that's fascinating stuff. Part II, this'll be. We got a couple more coming
up here.
MARCUS PARKS We've got at least a couple more, maybe three more.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, fascinating stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I love this fucking... I mean obviously, of course I love this story.
MARCUS PARKS I love it. It's probably gonna end up being five parts, yeah. Cause if we did five on Jack the
Ripper, yeah we gotta do five on... Because each of these episodes, yo know, I'll write a huge
script for it and we usually don't even get to the end of it because we're almost already at two
hours here.
BEN KISSEL It's amazing. And we're not even onto the sunglasses yet! Does he have the sunglasses?
Amphetamines and sunglasses, this is starting to come together now.
MARCUS PARKS Is it starting to make sense?
BEN KISSEL It's all making sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah it'll start to make sense.
BEN KISSEL I get it now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What I'd like to point out for this episode though, and honestly in Jim Jones in general, up to
this point it just shows the power of hard work. And for me, my horoscope for Taurus said
2018's gonna be the year of hard work and I believe that this year I'm gonna start sowing the
seeds for my own cult. Because retirement's not gonna last for us and the stock market's
gonna go down, so this is my retirement plan. And I'm gonna come out and say it so that none
of you are confused when it goes down. We're not gonna kill ourselves. We're not. I promise.
BEN KISSEL You get to keep all of your genitalia?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, everybody fucks.
MARCUS PARKS Do we have to be a part of this?
BEN KISSEL I'm not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You'll be officers in front of the special committee.
BEN KISSEL I'm an officer?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're gonna be a part of a special committee, we'll talk about this off air.
MARCUS PARKS Oh we're gonna be the PC? We're gonna be the planning committee? You're just taking fucking
shit out of Jim Jones page book.
BEN KISSEL I wanna be the guy in The Big Lebowski who's just in the pool.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL But I wanna have my shirt on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what that's called? Recreational Admiral. And that's what you are, Kissel,
congratulations. You're the admiral of-
MARCUS PARKS What do I get to be?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Security... I'd say Security Lieutenant.
MARCUS PARKS It kinda sounds like I'm just doing all the work again.
BEN KISSEL (laughs) Yes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well no... Think about what you're good at, Marcus. It's really just about-
BEN KISSEL Work. Henry and I have had this conversation in private many times, we say Marcus loves to
work. He needs to work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He loves to work. He's so good at it.
MARCUS PARKS If he doesn't have work to do then he just goes crazy, so you just need to give him more work.
BEN KISSEL Put him to work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Every time he's sad, just put him to work.
BEN KISSEL Well that's good, I'm sure you can keep people up to date on your cult here on all the shows
on the Last Podcast Network. We should plug and thank people, thank you for the Patreon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, one thing too we're gonna talk about, I wanna open broach this, there's been a lot of
problems with our YouTube page and we have some fan videos, and we have no clue what's
happening. That's a YouTube bot, apparently, we started talking to them and apparently
they're trying to do a big sweep of people posting copywritten material. But we're gonna say
right here, we love fan videos. I don't give a fuck. As far as I'm concerned it's free advertising
every single time you do something cool with our name on it.
MARCUS PARKS We love it!
BEN KISSEL Yeah. We're not changing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We don't give a shit. So we're actively working to fix it.
BEN KISSEL I feel like 'We're not changing!' But we really aren't changing, so if you see anything that's just
like, oh that doesn't seem in character with these dudes who we've known for 7, 8 years on a
series of different shows... We just would not do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, we are too lazy and drunk to get half of these things done.
BEN KISSEL Thank you all for creating the great content, we love the content!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah! Of course we do, yeah. This isn't us, we're not doing it and we're taking steps to make
sure that this type of shit doesn't happen. This is all YouTube doing it on our behest, even
though we didn't fucking ask 'em to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the same thing with the Patreon stuff, it's like, I dunno. The world is just weird and
everyone is coming up with ideas and they're all fucking with us.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, they're all bad. No upgrade has ever been good. Absolutely not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're just trying to make stupid podcasts. That's all we care about. That's really all we...
BEN KISSEL We have no discernible talent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL This is all we know how to do. So please, I promise you, we love you all very much we would
not mess with stuff like that.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and speaking of Patreon, thank you so much to everyone that has given. Patreon.
com/lastpodcastontheleft. We're gonna get to shout-outs, I know we've been bad on shout-
outs. We got a big ol' envelope full and we're gonna get back to them soon. But yeah, thank
you all so much. Go and listen to all of the other shows on Last Podcast Network, we've got a
ton of 'em over there. Go listen to my new music show, Milk & Peppers, you can find it on
mixcloud.com/marcusparks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hell yeah. I'm so excited for you, honestly I'm so excited for you, the show seems like a lot of
fun.
MARCUS PARKS It's great!
BEN KISSEL K-PISS.
MARCUS PARKS K-PISS! You can listen live every Tuesday on KPISS.fm, I'm on at 3pm.
BEN KISSEL Can we announce that were gonna bring that thing back that we were doing for adultswim.
com?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes. So I believe that we're definitely gonna be bringing the stream back, it's gonna be coming back soon. I'm shooting Pretty Face right now so once I'm off of Pretty Face, we'll be able to do
that. Season 4 also, for Pretty Face, will be coming out sometime in October. And check me
out on Crashing on HBO at 10:30 on Sundays, which is now happening.
BEN KISSEL There it is, very cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So do that and then follow us on all of the suicide machines, that technically we need to fucking get off of but it's good for now, we need the numbers. @henryloves you on Twitter,
@henrylovesyou, @marcusparks, @benkissel. On Instagram @drfantasty, @marcusparks,
@benkissel1. And follow us for Last Podcast on the Left and all your fucking Last Podcast needs
@lpontheleft.
BEN KISSEL There it is and thanks for all of your support in all of our endeavors as we branch out a little bit
as well. So you guys are awesome and it's great having people come with us, you know.
MARCUS PARKS It's wonderful, I love it.
BEN KISSEL Its very, very fun. Hail yourselves, everyone!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail me. Please.
BEN KISSEL And a megustalations.