Jonestown

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With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N-A. Member FDIC. If you're going to San Francisco or Seattle, you should come to our live shows. SPEAKER_06: That's right. Well done, Chuck. We are still selling tickets to our live shows on January 24th and 26th. On January 24th in Seattle at the Paramount Theater and on January 26th in San Francisco at Sydney Goldstein Theater. Tickets are still available to come see us. Hats off to Portland for selling out our show at Revolution Hall already and sorry to everybody who got shut out. SPEAKER_09: That's right. So where can they get tickets at our website, right? Stuffyoushouldknow.com. Yeah. Or linktree slash s-y-s-k. We'll see everybody then. SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_06: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. The three amigos, the twa musketeers, the tres bleches, all that back together again in a brand new year. 2024. SPEAKER_09: That's right. In our time, this is our first recording after our increasingly long Christmas break, which is just wonderful. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I feel like Jerry sucked us in that first week quite a bit. It was like a quasi work week that we weren't supposed to have, which I'm still a little mad about. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, but not recording. So it's a nice long break, but I always feel like we have to kick, or at least I have to kick the rust off a little bit. SPEAKER_06: Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. I think we're going to do great though because it doesn't feel rusty. I'm sure we'll be rusty, but it doesn't feel like we're going to be. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Oh, can I say a quick thing too? Yeah. This is something that it didn't occur to me until we were on the break. We always like to thank people around the holidays for support and stuff, but I think we should specifically thank people who operate as our back getters and our quasi quality control people because all the time we get letters from people that say, or emails that say like, Hey, you misspelled this word in the podcast release. Oh yeah, sure. Or, this ad is really offensive, so maybe you guys want to double check that. SPEAKER_07: SPEAKER_09: That kind of thing. Like it just feels good. People are always really kind and alert us to things that we should be paying attention to because sometimes things slip through. And I just want to say thanks for everyone looking out for us. SPEAKER_06: Man, when did that occur to you? How long have you been hanging on to that one? SPEAKER_09: Not, I mean, it was over the break when I think we got a couple of things about either an ad or something and I was like, you know what? We should thank people for getting our back and alerting us to stuff. SPEAKER_06: So that's what triggered it. Some emails you didn't just like sit bowl up right in the middle of the night and think, Oh God. SPEAKER_09: No. Well, that was nice of you, Chuck. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I know you feel the same way. Yeah, we'll just start adopting that at the end of the year, the holidays or something SPEAKER_06: like that. SPEAKER_09: How about that? Nope. That's the only time we'll ever do it. SPEAKER_06: Oh, okay, cool. I'm fine with that too. So we're talking today about something I've been avoiding for a while. I started to look into this and start researching it and I was going to suggest it a couple of years ago and I was like, this is one of the bleakest things that's ever happened SPEAKER_06: outside of war in history. It's up there for sure. And it really sucks you in in the grimmest possible way when you have to like really dive in and research because we're talking about Jonestown and for anybody who's even everyone is at least passingly familiar with the word Jonestown, the name Jonestown, or you might've heard the phrase drinking the Kool-Aid, like you've really bought into something that you might even be brainwashed. That came out of Jonestown, true or not. And when you talk about it though, it's not something you can talk about flipply. SPEAKER_06: It's not something you can just kind of breeze through. Like you really have to get in there and understand what the heck was going on because it's such a bizarre, horrible event that it just really kind of sucks you in and when you get in there, it's grim. It was a grim research event for me. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I mean, it's so grim that a band named themselves after it with a pithy pun attached. Yeah, one of the great band names of all time, Brian Jonestown Massacre. SPEAKER_06: Do you think that is? SPEAKER_09: Oh yeah, I think it's a great name. I have a hard time with pun band names, especially the sort of beginning, middle, end ones. SPEAKER_09: Like Kathleen Turner Overdrive? SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I don't know. SPEAKER_06: I'm with you. I'm with you on the Kathleen Turner Overdrive. It's clever, but it's one of those ones you hear once and you're like, that's funny. I think the difference between those two bands though is the Brian Jonestown Massacre actually like hardcore musicians that have like a bleak enough outlook that they could take that name and it's not just like a elbow you in the ribs kind of joke. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and Brian Jones, like another classic musician, whereas Kathleen Turner, I love Kathleen Turner, but I don't know. It just seemed a little extra pithy. She can't even play the spoons. SPEAKER_09: Are you kidding? She's a great spooner. SPEAKER_06: Not only did Brian Jonestown Massacre name themselves that, they also have a song called The Ballad of Jim Jones. Have you heard that one? Oh, no. SPEAKER_06: It's got harmonica. It's real kind of Bob Dylan-y. Interesting. Yeah, it's really something. It's something to go check out. I don't know if everybody's going to like them, but some people probably will. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and we should also point out this is the stuff you should know 45-ish minute overview. SPEAKER_09: This could be way, way longer and multi-episodes long if we really got into all the sort of ups and downs of Jim Jones through his odd life. Yeah, that's a good idea. SPEAKER_06: I wonder if anyone's ever done a multi-part podcast on Jonestown. SPEAKER_08: Okay, I thought you were being serious. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, no, totally. I mean, yeah, but I'm glad you said that because it is true. There's a lot, a lot about this and we'll try to get everything we talk about right though, right? SPEAKER_09: That's right. So, can we get a grabster for the help on this one? SPEAKER_06: Yeah, for sure. Way to go grabster. And we should probably say just a, I don't even know if we need to give an overview of what happened. We could probably just jump in and start and talk about Jim Jones, the guy at the center of this whole thing, right? SPEAKER_09: Well, I think people get mad when we do that, assuming that people know. Okay. So maybe just the quickest of spoilers is that on November 18th, 1978, more than 900 SPEAKER_09: people died in Guyana at the hands of a sadistic cult leader named Jim Jones. And now we can start. SPEAKER_06: Right. Well, the big twist to all that is he didn't personally kill them physically. He used his power to get them to kill themselves. It's as weird and twisted as that. SPEAKER_06: So Jim Jones is the kind of person, or he was the kind of person who could actually make something like that happen. He was a very, very rare individual. I've seen him diagnosed retroactively as psychopathic. And then I think his personality disorders got a little more nuanced. I've seen much more recently that he was a malignant narcissist. There was something wrong with that guy. Religion was wrong with Jim Jones from start to finish, but it seems to have gotten way, way worse over time. But one thing that he showed a real penchant for early on in life was preaching, not religion. He was not, it turns out, a religious person. He doesn't seem to have believed in much of any of the stuff he was preaching. But preaching was his way of funneling attention, adoration, money, importance to himself, he figured out very early on. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, he was on record that he was not so into religion, even though he was tied to various churches over the years, including the one he started, the People's Temple, which we'll talk about in greater detail later. But one thing he was, which is, I didn't know a ton about the guy sort of pre-Jones town. SPEAKER_09: And I was surprised to learn that he was a sort of a socialist slash communist, anti-segregationist, SPEAKER_09: who actually did a lot of, you know, I hate to characterize it as good work, but it was good work because it's, you know, it's hard. He was such an awful human. But he led a lot of desegregationist causes in Indiana very successfully for a number of years. SPEAKER_06: I saw someone on Reddit say that had he died on the way to California, we would remember him today as one of the early civil rights leaders. Yeah, I mean, that's true. SPEAKER_06: It is true. And I get what you're saying, your reticence to like, praise him in any way, shape or form, but he definitely did walk the walk. He fought for integration at a time when white people were not doing that. Jim Jones is white, we should say. But he mostly learned that he was best preaching generally toward black congregants. And that kind of just drove his desire to integrate even further. So much so that as he got a little more power, one of the first things he did was become the kind of the civil rights czar for Indianapolis. And he actually, it wasn't like just a label that he went around and introduced himself as he went to work and started integrating places and like penalizing places that hadn't integrated yet in Indianapolis. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, absolutely. Initially, he was involved with the Methodist Church. He was involved with them, even though they were not necessarily anti-segregationist, did not necessarily want their congregations to be of mixed race. But they were apparently supportive of his sort of socialist communist leanings. And this was in the very early 1950s. And we should point out he was married by this point. He got married in 1949 to a woman named Marceline Baldwin, who was a hospital orderly and love SPEAKER_09: bombed her apparently. And a couple of years later, they moved to Indianapolis where that's when he got involved with the Methodist and, you know, started sort of spreading his anti-segregationist word. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So, after, I don't know what happened with the Methodist, but eventually they got sick of him and pushed him out of the church. And he moved over to evangelicalism, what he called apostolic socialism. Because one of the things about him, not only did he figure out that preaching was a way SPEAKER_06: to attract people, he figured out that religion was a way, it was like a Trojan horse to get people to start thinking about socialism. Because there's so many parallels between ideal socialism and Christian teaching, ideal Christian teaching, I should say, that it's pretty easy to get people who are already predisposed toward following Jesus and his Christian teachings to start thinking about taking care of your fellow downtrodden humans too. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, for sure. And he would eventually get involved in, like you were talking about, the evangelicism? Is that the word? SPEAKER_06: Evangelicism, yeah. Yeah, you're right. And he would fall into the camp of the Pentecostals. SPEAKER_09: And even more so, there was a group of, I just call it, I guess, Pentecostal Plus, which was the Latter Rain movement. And that was like, they spun it off from the Pentecostal church because they were even more sort of out there than the Pentecostals were as far as like, hey, we get prophecies SPEAKER_09: directly from God. Some of us have supernatural powers. They would use sort of sometimes good old-fashioned traveling show vaudeville medicine man style SPEAKER_09: stage magic to look like they knew what they were talking about. SPEAKER_07: And it was pretty out there, but he found that that was a pretty good audience for himself. SPEAKER_09: And what he called, I mean, he basically said, through the manifested sons of God, which is a doctrine in the Latter Rain movement, like, hey, God picks out certain special people SPEAKER_09: that he gives, like basically the powers of Jesus Christ, and I'm one of them. SPEAKER_06: Right. Yeah, this group of elites will prepare the world at end times for Jesus's return. And they are essentially Jesus just divided up into different human forms. And Jim Jones is like, I'm one of those guys too. Check me out. So that was like a weird way to go. But it was also sensible if you look at him from the lens of strictly a huckster who was taking advantage of people. Of course, he's going to go into like, I'm Jesus, by the way. It's just such a lazy way to take advantage of people. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And, you know, like he was able to do that because like most cult leaders, he was very charismatic. He was also a strange person. Ed dug up this one story that I had never heard that at one point in his life, he was like, you know what, I'm not going to take place in a conversation with anyone unless I initiate it. So literally people would come up and address him and talk to him and he just wouldn't answer SPEAKER_06: back. Yeah, if they were really persistent, it'd be like, I can't hear you. SPEAKER_09: Very strange thing, but just sort of an example of what an odd duck he was. A lot of people did find him sort of creepy and off-putting, but he did have that charisma. You don't get cult followers unless you're a charismatic dude. And he was that. He had that jet black hair and sideburns. He had a sort of Elvis-y look. Mm-hmm. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. SPEAKER_09: Well put. SPEAKER_09: Yep. Which by the way, is still a thing. I went to Memphis, which is where my mom grew up and where I used to go as a child with my mom and Emily and Ruby. And there are still those dudes walking around Memphis that are like in their seventies now and have these big sideburns and pompadours like these sort of Memphis mafia-looking guys. Yeah. It's really interesting. I was like, oh wow, of course Memphis still has those guys. SPEAKER_06: For sure. Where else are they going to go? What else are they going to do? Nothing. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. SPEAKER_06: That's what they do. That's what you can do in Memphis. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: So anyway, he was one of those guys, you know, later in life he was very well known for wearing those steel rim sort of squarish, I guess they were sunglasses or were they also reading glasses? SPEAKER_06: I think they were like early transitions lenses, it looks like almost. They were just constantly in the in-between state. SPEAKER_09: Well, listen, we could debate Jim Jones's eye diagnosis all day long. SPEAKER_06: I'm guessing they were reading glasses because I read an account of him looking over them at people in the room. So it probably was reading glasses. SPEAKER_08: Which is also an intimidating move, I think. SPEAKER_06: For sure. I get also the impression that he was wearing those kind of in-between sunglasses because at some point in the 60s, he started taking drugs, maybe even earlier than that, but definitely by the 60s, he was taking speed and then later on like sedatives and quaaludes and stuff. And as the 70s started to wear on, he was really getting into those. So he probably needed those glasses on some days so that you couldn't see what his eyes looked like in the middle of the afternoon, you know? SPEAKER_09: There's a lot of Elvis in this story, actually. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, for sure. SPEAKER_09: Should we take a break? SPEAKER_06: For sure. SPEAKER_09: All right, we'll be right back, everybody. SPEAKER_05: What's up, everybody? 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SPEAKER_12: It's a Wonderful Life is one of the most popular movies ever, but it has more to offer you than you ever thought. You know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? SPEAKER_14: In this world where there's a lot of hopelessness, people need this movie. SPEAKER_12: George Bailey was never born. Join the many partaking in this one of a kind podcast experience. Listen to all 10 episodes available now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Savegeorgebailey.com. Subscribe now. SPEAKER_09: All right. So Jim Jones has been sort of involved in several different denominations and churches, worn out as welcome in most of them, and eventually is like, you know what? I'm going to start my own church, which is step one if you're going to form a cult. Actually that's not true. There were plenty of cults without churches, but that was his route. So he started the People's Temple in 1955 and was really successful with it. He had no trouble recruiting members. And by the early 1960s, he was so popular and he had such a following that he was able to continue his work desegregating businesses and other, you know, this wasn't like a national movement. He kind of was one of those think local guys. SPEAKER_09: Like you mentioned earlier, in 1960, the mayor of Indianapolis said, all right, you're the director of our Human Rights Commission. SPEAKER_06: Right. And like I said, he took that and ran with it and started to really kind of rack up more and more interest. And I'm not exactly clear on some of the documentaries you see about like his rise to power and influence. The early stuff takes place in like a traditional church. It looks like a church. You can tell it's a church. It's just, you know, what do they call it? I guess charismatic churches where people are like dancing and everything and clapping and he's healing people. I'm not sure what point it started. It could have been Indianapolis. It probably was. But he started to just say more and more like bizarre stuff over time. SPEAKER_06: And one of the first bizarre things that he said that had a really big impact on the history of the people's temple was that there was going to be a thermonuclear war. On July 15, 1967, the bombs were going to drop, I think is how he put it. And he apparently got the six and the seven transposed because what he meant was July 15, 1976, the bombs were going to drop. SPEAKER_06: But he convinced his congregation or a lot of his congregation, I think at least a hundred families from Indianapolis to move to rural Northern California to basically set up a safe haven, a little kind of commune for the people's temple. It was his first really truly big show of power over other people's lives. Because just think about it for a second. SPEAKER_06: You go to church, right, and you go and you listen to the sermon and everything and you have some friends at church or whatever, and then you come home and church is done for the week for a lot of people. Maybe you go one other day. That's about it. Imagine being so into church that you move your family across the country because your preacher is telling you there's going to be a thermonuclear war and we all need to go to Northern California. That takes a real level of intuiteness from congregants and it was a real show of faith and a test of faith for people. He was very successful with it and I think that did nothing but just embolden him further. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, absolutely. By this time, we should point out too that he had started quite a large family with Marceline at her suggestion and apparently he was super into it as well. She wanted to have a rainbow family, so they adopted quite a few kids of all different nationalities and ethnicities. They had one Native American child they adopted, several Korean kids, a black child. I believe one of his adopted daughters was killed by a drunk driver in 59 and then they SPEAKER_09: adopted her younger sister, which is pretty amazing. SPEAKER_09: And then they also had their sole biological child in 1959, Stephan Gandhi Jones. SPEAKER_09: If you look him up, you will see lots of – he's very active in his – I was about to say his father's legacy today, but not obviously supporting his dad's legacy, but during the 2018 commemoration of the Jonestown massacre, I guess – is it a massacre or just mass deaths? What would you even call that? SPEAKER_06: It just depends on your perspective, but yeah, I think you could get away calling it a massacre for sure. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, but he led that ceremony and also acknowledged that, you know, hey, listen, it's a can of worms that I'm doing this to begin with and people have things to say about me or don't agree with certain things I say, then like let's please have that conversation. But he's pretty vocal and public to this day. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, he wasn't just a kid at the time, like toward the end of the People's Temple. He was the head of the security force at the time when they were in Guyana, which we'll talk about soon. Yeah, he's in a really strange way very brave for like showing his face in public as you know who he is. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, another interesting thing happened that's pretty key to the story. Before he said, hey everybody, let's move to California, he moved just his family to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil because of this supposed impending nuclear disaster. And on the way there, he stopped in a country in South America called Guyana and just got a little taste of what life was like there and that definitely planted a seed. So he's, I believe, in 1964, he's planning this move a couple of hours north of San Francisco to Yucia, California. And at that point, he has already at least visited and preached in Guyana. SPEAKER_06: Right, that's a great setup. So when he gets to Brazil, he's basically like left and taken his family, like you said, to get away from thermonuclear war, but he's been like, but you guys, you know, you stay back here and keep the temple going. And apparently there was no one there with his strength or charisma because the temple fell apart almost immediately or it started to, it threatened to. SPEAKER_06: So just after even a couple of months, he had to go back and like get everything back in line and back in order and ended up staying there, staying in California again for a while. I guess for several more years, I think, do you remember when it was he moved to Brazil at first? SPEAKER_09: Oh, okay. So yeah, he came back to Indianapolis, I guess is what it was. SPEAKER_06: This would have been pre-California. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and in California, he found, you know, obviously Northern California, he would find in the 1960s quite a few people in that area that were into his message of socialism, pretty ripe for recruiting. And he would eventually move into San Francisco itself and did pretty well there, like so well that he had a lot of followers who had a lot of, and had a lot of sway over them. So local politicians started saying, hey, we need to get in line with this guy because he has a lot of influence at the voting booth, like Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone SPEAKER_09: were, you know, like actively courting him. I think they named him, or at least the mayor named him chairman of the San Francisco's Housing Authority Commission. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, because he basically took credit for Moscone's win as mayor. He barely eked out a victory. And Jim Jones had delivered several hundred, if not a couple thousand votes toward Moscone and he said, you owe me. And he became the public housing director or a member of the board. And apparently, just to kind of show his influence and his clout and how great he was at those housing meetings, his followers would come, members of the People's Temple would come and cheer him on and clap and applaud, sometimes give him a standing ovation when he would give a little speech about public housing or something like that. It was really weird. But by this time in San Francisco, late 60s, early 70s, people like that were a dime a dozen. SPEAKER_06: He was politically connected to people who were like, this guy, like you said, he can deliver the goods. SPEAKER_06: So much so that whenever there was like unfavorable press about him, and we'll talk about some of the stuff they were writing about him in a second, he could actually get it stifled. He had the connections to be like, this article is going to come out on me. Can you make sure it doesn't come out? So he could stifle like dissent and oppress any outsiders who were criticizing him. So he was very powerful in San Francisco. And that was actually the reason he moved everybody to San Francisco. They went Indianapolis to Ukiah, California, Northern California. He figured out that was like Hicksville, USA, and he couldn't actually develop any real power down there. So he moved the whole thing to San Francisco, set up the People's Temple in San Francisco, and essentially had what was a Pentecostal black congregation that so emphasized civil SPEAKER_06: rights that they were just also bringing in tons of liberal, younger, middle-class white people too who wanted to support that cause, who might have never been in a Pentecostal service in their life, and now all of a sudden they're like singing and clapping and dancing. So he had all these different streams of people that he was just bringing in, bringing in and eventually trapping in his church, the People's Temple. SPEAKER_09: He's like, I love the Grateful Dead, but I've never handled a rattlesnake. This is amazing. So things are also, you know, as this is going along, things are just becoming more and more culty. It was sort of a slow burn toward, you know, fully fledged cult. But by this time he was, you know, right out of the playbook. He was, and we have a, you know, a lot of cult content in our history, one on cults, one on deprogramming. I think we covered some other cults as well. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I feel like we have, surely, but I can't bring it into mind. SPEAKER_09: I mean Manson, of course. Oh, yeah, yeah. But he is, right out of the cult leader playbook, he's starting to isolate members from friends and family. SPEAKER_09: He's starting to say, you know, when you join my church, you got to turn over all your possessions SPEAKER_09: to us. They ended up having a lot of money. I saw at one point toward the end, they had like 11 million bucks in a bank account. Yeah, that's like 1978 money, right? SPEAKER_09: Yeah, totally. And he started, you know, doing that thing where you're saying, you know, outside people are going to want to pull you out of here. They're going to want you to defect. Your family might even. He would spread lies about them. He would say he's getting prophecies that if you disobeyed and tried to defect, then you would suffer some kind of tragedy. So things are getting more and more culty, and that's when, like you said, he started getting some press coverage, which, I mean, what's really like one of the most astounding things about all this is so many cults you hear about after the fact. But this was actively going on and being reported on by the press, like while it was happening. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, because he was getting like wild and bizarre and abusive enough toward his congregation that he was, there were defectors, there were people who were like, what the, what is this? I'm getting out of here. And they would go start to talk publicly about this. But yeah, he had enough clout to like get any real unfavorable coverage or any widespread SPEAKER_06: unfavorable coverage stamped out. But one of the things you've mentioned that I think he really started to ratchet up around this time was isolating his congregation by creating a us versus them mentality and creating a siege mentality among the people who were members of the people's temple, especially the hardest core members that the US government wanted them shut down. People were spreading lies about them. Like if an article did get out, he could point to how this is like lies and propaganda against the people's temple and use it as evidence about how there really was a siege. And at some point, the people's temple in San Francisco actually burned down. I saw that they think it was white supremacists. Jim Jones blamed it on the Nation of Islam. Somebody burned the temple down and all that did was feed that paranoid sensibility that just isolated the members of the people's temple even further and pushed them even closer toward Jim Jones, who just used stuff like that to his advantage at every turn. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, he was also like things got a little more violent and militaristic. He got his inner most circle together and named them the planning commission. They were his sort of internal security team and things, you know, he would start saying, okay, you congregants have to have sex with each other. You congregants are getting married to one another. SPEAKER_09: There were starvation diets. There was forced labor. Sometimes if they, you know, if a congregation member stepped out of line, they might be stripped and marched around in front of the other temple members. SPEAKER_09: So things are full on swinging cult at this point when he is being written about in the press and like you said, getting most of it stamped out. But something happened in 1973 that like where the walls really started to close in on him. SPEAKER_09: And that was a, I mean, I guess sort of a sting operation. He was bisexual. That was not out. And in fact, later on in like sort of the, not the last days, but sort of while he was in Guyana and living there, which we'll get to, he told all the congregation, you're all SPEAKER_09: homosexual and I'm the only heterosexual here. So he made a big deal about that. But he was definitely bisexual because he would abuse both men and women within the temple. Some accusations that they were underage, of course. And in late 1973, in December, he was at a movie theater in Los Angeles and an undercover cop. I read the police report. Apparently Jones like signaled to him like, hey, meet me up in the balcony. SPEAKER_09: And the cop instead went to the bathroom and motioned for him to come in there. And when he got to the bathroom, Jim Jones pulled his pants down and started to masturbate in front of him. The cop left and had his partner come in there and arrest him. And he got out of it. SPEAKER_06: He apparently, I didn't see this anywhere, but Ed said that he found that his defense was that he was jumping up and down massaging his prostate, which was hurting him at the time. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, he had a doctor's letter, dude. SPEAKER_06: I also saw that he used his political connections to get him out of it. SPEAKER_09: Well, it's hard to tell what happened because the judge, and I don't know, this seems weird. Maybe that kind of thing happened a lot though. The judge ordered the arrest records destroyed and then the file was sealed. So I don't think a lot of people really know exactly why he was released. But he had a doctor's note and the doctor went to bat for him and said, yeah, I mean, this is what it might look like when he's trying to work up a urination in the bathroom. Right. SPEAKER_06: Just really, just stay with me here. It said in the note. Right. So that was a big turning point. Like you said, that was December of 1973. And Jim Jones started to get the message that his, the direction he was taking his congregation in was too bizarre for San Francisco, maybe even too bizarre for the United States. And he remembered Guyana at the time and sent some people down there to start scouting out and setting up a compound, a place, I guess, an additional place for the people's temple outside of the oversight of the United States government and the United States press and all that. And while they were off doing that, there was something he did back in San Francisco that was enormously important. And I say, maybe we take a break and we'll come back and talk about it. SPEAKER_09: Ooh, our first cliffhanger of the year. That's right. We'll be right back. SPEAKER_00: Businesswoman and leader. Women are shattering glass ceilings that once limited their ability to dream, grow and change the world. 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SPEAKER_06: So um, 1974 he's sent some people down to Guyana Guyana to start setting up a new compound for the people's temple down there. SPEAKER_09: Socialist country, by the way, at the time. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, which makes sense because by this time, Jim Jones has been identifying himself to his congregation as their socialist God. Over time, he slowly stripped away the concept that that Jesus is God, or that he was Jesus and replaced himself to his followers as God. Like they started toward the end following him as God. They called him father. They called him dad. He was he was very much like their religious figure on earth, way more than just their reverend or their pastor, or even the head of their cult. Like he was a supernatural religious figure in the most ardent of believers eyes. So look like Elvis. Exactly. So he tried something with them that proved to be the first of a couple of attempts or a couple of practice runs for what happened in Guyana in San Francisco at the people's temple. He handed out cups and he said, Hey, I know we all steer clear of alcohol, or by me. But our one of our vineyards has produced a really great wine and I want everybody to try it. So he passed out cups, made sure everybody tried the wine. He circulated among everyone as they were drinking it. And then after everyone had finished, he went back to the pulpit and he said, that was poisoned. SPEAKER_06: You're all going to die in about the next 10 minutes or something. We're all going to die together. And he gauged their reaction. And apparently the reaction was a combination between stunned silence and acquiescence. Like okay, that there wasn't people screaming. People weren't running for the doors. Everybody tried to beat him up or kill him. It was just he saw they would actually do this. Like I think if I actually asked them to do it and didn't just trick them into it. And he said, this is all just a test of your loyalty. You all passed way to go. But that was not the only time that he did that to those poor people. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, he started. Well, let's back up a sec. In 1974 is when about 50 temple members went to Guyana to start setting it up. And they did that for about three years. And a magazine article came out in New West Magazine in 1977 that really exposed him for what he was. And he was like, okay, like the jig is up. I have to get out of here now. So he moved with his family to Guyana. Apparently, the facilities could only support about 200 people. In May of 77, 600 more came. And then the ensuing months, another 400 people came. SPEAKER_09: A lot of these were kids. A lot of these people were elderly or infirmed. And so there weren't enough people there to work and sustain it really. They worked 12 hours a day, the people that could work. It was brutal. When they weren't working, they were listening to his sermons and his lectures. SPEAKER_09: They were watching Russian communist propaganda films. And abuse allegations started to come out. And he got super paranoid. And that's when he started leading more and more of those dry runs. He called them white knights, where he would have these trial runs for mass suicide. SPEAKER_09: Sometimes they would meet in the pavilion and his security team would like fire guns from the jungle over their heads. One of them lasted for six days. It was called the six-day siege. And they were just all these dry runs for killing themselves. And I think they just routinely got used to it. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. But every time, it was just a test of their loyalty. It was a drill to practice for when the United States military inevitably invaded. Because that siege mentality had gotten even more paranoid. Apparently, he was just off his rocker on speed. Would give hours and hours and hours long marathon sermons into the night. And you mentioned that the bulk of the building of Jonestown fell on the shoulders of not like a minority, but far fewer people than there were to support. Yeah. And so those people were working day and night and eating black-eyed peas and rice and bananas. SPEAKER_06: And it's kind of nice. It is nice. You're eating and you're working hard labor hours and hours a day. And then when you get off of hard labor, you go sit and listen to an hours long sermon till 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. Then you have to get up at 5 or 6 the next morning and start all over again. Even the people who were at Jonestown who weren't like, I would kill myself for Jim Jones believers, were too tired and sleep deprived to give any kind of problems to Jim Jones in the direction he was taking everybody. So that was actually like part of the plan apparently or at the very least it was a happy byproduct for Jim Jones that the people were either totally committed to him or they were so overworked and under slept that they just couldn't put up any kind of protest. SPEAKER_09: Yeah for sure. So things are happening in Guyana at Jonestown. Finally you know press is still writing about this stuff back in the States. And in late 1978 a California congressman named Leo Ryan who had been following this story and this is one of the more remarkable parts of this whole story. A congressman flew to Guyana with a small group like some NBC camera people and reporters SPEAKER_09: and journalists and stuff on a fact finding mission. They actually went to the camp at Jonestown and met in the pavilion. While they were there a temple member named Vernon Gosney passed a note to a reporter that was meant for Leo Ryan that said please help me and my wife leave. They got out of there and took 15 temple members that were defecting with them and Jim Jones is like they can go it's fine people are free to go if they want to. There was some brief incident with Ryan where he was held at knife point or there was an attempted stabbing. Things got pretty chaotic and they got the heck out of there and went to this airstrip while they were waiting on their couple of planes to get ready. And the Red Brigade which was the new name of his security team by this point who were really really militaristic at this point showed up at the airfield and just opened fire on them. SPEAKER_06: Yeah and just to kind of rewind for one second when Leo Ryan showed up he was showing up to investigate this cult that he'd heard nothing but bad things about. His reception and the banquet that was thrown for him and the music that was played and the services that he witnessed were so enthusiastic and upbeat that he actually gave a speech to them saying it's very clear that for most of you this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to you. And the place just erupts in like cheers. They've won this guy over like maybe they'll be left alone from now on. It was like a jubilant, you can tell Congressman Ryan is like into it too. He's like this is great. And it goes from that to all of a sudden the truth of the matter is just kind of exposed like a little rotten core of an apple that you thought was just totally bright and shiny and it must have been stomach turning to have your perceptions just turned on end like that when that note was handed to that cameraman. And Leo Ryan was like oh these people are totally brainwashed and I was almost duped and then it became tense then he was held at knife point and then he ended up dying on that on the airstrip. Yeah, actually we did one on brainwashing too. SPEAKER_06: We totally did. We also did one on roundabouts people who like roundabouts. SPEAKER_09: So remarkably part of this exists on film. The NBC camera person Bob Brown was filming some B-roll there when this shootout breaks out and it wasn't much because he actually was shot and killed and his camera was shot up as well. So you only had a few seconds of this attack but Ryan was killed, that cameraman Bob Brown was killed, NBC reporter Don Harris was killed, there was a photographer from the Examiner in San Francisco named Greg Robinson that was killed and one of the defectors, Patricia Parks was killed. And in the second airplane, this is a little Cessna so there weren't even that many people on it, there was a defector there that was pretending to defect, pulls out a gun inside SPEAKER_09: that tiny plane and opens fire, somehow doesn't kill anyone, he wounds three of them and the SPEAKER_09: people that survived just booked it into the jungle and it is, I mean this is the beginning of a very quick end. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, two of the people who were attacked on the airstrip survived by pretending they were dead, Jackie Speier who was Leo Ryan's assistant and Steve Sung who was a sound guy I think for NBC, they pretended they were dead and I think Jackie Speier said she was shot point blank, like they came up to make sure she was dead and didn't manage to kill her. I read Chuck, this is really important, I read that they laid there, that Jackie Speier SPEAKER_06: reported laying there for 22 hours before help came, okay, so she's laying there pretending she's dead on the tarmac for 22 hours and just put that in your bonnet and save it for later. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, 22 hours after the attack, help finally came for Jackie Speier. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, back at the temple, Jim Jones, he knows this is it, like the walls have fully closed and they've committed multiple murders here and he knows there's no way out, so he's like the military is going to be coming for us, the US military, Revolutionary Suicide is the only way out and there is a recording that's very disturbing, I mean big trigger warnings, I'm not going to get too involved in it, it's called the death tape, but you can listen to the Revolutionary Suicide process unfold on this tape. Did you listen to it? SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I listened to the whole thing. SPEAKER_09: I had to scrub through some of it because it's really hard to listen to, there are parts SPEAKER_09: where people are standing up and saying no, this is not what we want, there are people that are just unsure, there are, and this is very triggering obviously, but there were the sounds of children crying all over the place in the background and a woman saying they're not in pain, it's just a bitter taste in their mouth, no one's feeling any pain, and it's just incredibly disturbing and remarkable that this exists in the world and that you can listen to this, but then at the 42 minute mark, it just goes quiet and it's haunting. Yeah, I think from what I understand, it's really easy to take it like that's the end SPEAKER_06: of Jonestown, but I believe what the death tape covers is the beginning of the whole thing, the killing of the children, that's why you're hearing the children screaming, they're dying from being forced to drink cyanide, and as it gets quiet, that's because the kids have died. It's just as eerie, that doesn't make it any less eerie, but apparently after that, the tape runs out is when the adults really started drinking, because at the end, he's like bringing the vat with the flavor aid in it so that the adults can start drinking, that's toward the end of the tape. But you mentioned somebody standing up, a woman named Christine Miller was the sole SPEAKER_06: person who challenged Jim Jones directly, she went to the mic and was like, isn't there SPEAKER_06: any other way, like you told us Soviet Union would take us, is it too late for that? I think she said, as long as there's life, there's hope, we shouldn't do this. And then she also said, I think the children would want to live, they should be able to live. SPEAKER_06: And she ended up getting shouted down by other members, but she tried really hard. And apparently she was one of the people who was found at Jonestown later on with a puncture SPEAKER_06: mark in her arm, and that she was probably killed, that she was murdered. She didn't drink the Kool-Aid or the flavor aid herself, she was probably injected with cyanide, that's almost certainly how she died. But she was extremely brave for trying to save all those people, and it was useless, because Jim Jones knew there was no other way out for him, he was going to kill himself, and that he couldn't very well leave these people alive without him, and he specifically says, you're going to do this, you want to do this. There's no life without me, and I'm going to die, so we all need to die together. And he's encouraging them outright, encouraging them, Chuck, on this tape, you can hear him, SPEAKER_06: how he gets them to take their own lives and kill their own children. It's like that's, it went from like, bleak research to just like, I can't believe this actually happened. Like my brain kept like, repelling from wrapping itself around it. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it was, like I said, I couldn't even listen to it all the way through, I had to kind of just skip ahead. But you did mention, and this is, you know, this is a fact that most people know by now, because usually that guy at every party likes to point out that it was not actually Kool-Aid, drink the Kool-Aid has become a euphemism, but it was grape flavor aid, in fact. And it had a bunch of stuff in it, it had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different, you know, various sedatives and anti-psychotics. And there was one malaria medication in there for some reason, I'm not sure why, Valium, SPEAKER_09: but cyanide was ultimately what, you know, did everyone in. And like you said, they killed the children first by putting it in a syringe and shooting SPEAKER_09: it in their mouth. And then other people took it willingly. And then like you said, in the case of Christine Miller, that she was injected, like other people were obviously against her will. And a lot of people thought it was another white knight rehearsal, so they went along with it, maybe not knowing that they were really going to die. SPEAKER_09: And in the end, 918 people died in Guyana, 907 from the poisoning, then Annie Moore and Jim Jones either killed themselves with their own gun or had one of the Red Brigade do it. I'm sorry, 276 of these victims were kids. And then there were people that went out into the jungle, other people died later. There was this really sort of sad, bizarre story of this woman named Sharon Amos, who was a Temple member who was in Georgetown, Guyana, who got the message that you need to kill yourself. And so she killed her two young kids. And then her third, her 21-year-old daughter, Leanne Harris, apparently they looked at each other and either slit each other's throats or their own throats. There were two other people in the bathroom, a 10-year-old named Stephanie Brown and a 43-year-old man named Charles Beekman. He was charged with her attempted murder because he cut her, but he told her, hey, I have to Apparently he was trying to help her live, and he said, I have to cut you to make it look real. And he got off on five years because she corroborated that story in court. So he didn't get a full conviction. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, there's a lot of really weird, bizarre stories about what people did when faced with this. You know? Yeah. One of the things from that tape, one more thing about the tape that really got me was that somebody, like people were testifying. People were coming up and getting the mic and thanking Dad, thanking Jim Jones for, one guy goes, thank you, Dad, for giving me life. And then as an afterthought, he's like, and death. They were thanking him for this, right? So one person came up to the mic and said, all you people along the wall crying over there, this is not a time to be sad. This is something to be happy for. And the fact that there were people crying along the wall, to me, those were the people SPEAKER_06: who knew they didn't have any way out. Not because the US military was coming to kill everyone and torture the children, but because Jim Jones's people were not going to let them leave. It was either try to get away and be killed, shot, or drink the Kool-Aid yourself and be part of the Revolutionary Suicide. And they were scared to death. They didn't want to die. They were literally grieving their own death right before they died. SPEAKER_06: And that was the choice. Like you weren't allowed to leave. You had to drink the flavoring. But a couple of people did get away. These survivors who literally escaped the tent that the people were killing themselves in and got away and snuck off into the jungle. And those people are like really important sources of information for what happened because they saw people dying. They didn't leave right before. They left like during this whole thing at the height of it. SPEAKER_06: And they came back and they did all sorts of terrible things. They had to identify bodies. They had to explain what was going on. One guy named Charles Clayton, he was a really important source for a lot of the documentaries you'll see. He slipped away and got away unnoticed. And that whole identifying the bodies thing, I know I sound like I'm rambling, but there's just so much to talk about. But we probably should go to that part about the aftermath because I mentioned that Jackie Spears was alone on the airstrip a couple of miles away from Jonestown for 22 hours. And the people of Jonestown killed themselves within an hour and a half, maybe two hours of the assassination of Leo Ryan and those people. So that meant that it was just this totally quiet, eerie village of the dead for a good 20 hours before any outsiders came in and saw what had happened. SPEAKER_09: Terrible. Can you imagine? SPEAKER_06: It was horrifying. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. It still is. One more kind of little add-on, that was the worst civilian casualty of American civilians in history. And it remained that way until 9-11. But the first responders who came, who were responsible for getting these Americans, their bodies back home so that their families could claim them, over the course of a terrible week in the heat, in the storms and all that, they were largely from the Air Force. And the Air Force conducted a study on how that experience impacted them. And it turned out to be the first study of how something like that, how first responders are affected by the things they see and have to do from mass casualty events in history. And it really kind of created that whole field of study, essentially. SPEAKER_07: Oh, wow. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. You got anything else? SPEAKER_09: Yeah. There's one more odd little fact that you dug up that is fairly remarkable because the Congress person, Ryan, who was sadly killed that day, didn't his daughter end up in a cult? SPEAKER_06: Not just a cult, the cult that was featured in Wild Wild Country, that Netflix documentary, she was a member of that cult and ended up being married by that guru in the ranch in Oregon a couple years after her father died. And they actually had a bottle of champagne that said, the guru, I can't remember the guru's name, can turn even grape Kool-Aid into wine. Wow. So they even made a joke about it at the wedding. SPEAKER_06: It's nuts, man. I just thought that I couldn't believe it. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. That's a fantastic nugget to end on. SPEAKER_06: Thanks a lot. Well, since Chuck said that was a fantastic nugget, of course, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. SPEAKER_09: All right. This is about the Christian heavy metal band, Striper. Of course, what a better way to finish out this episode. Hey guys, grew up in the middle of the Canadian prairies in the 70s and 80s and was 14 when Striper's Soldiers Under Command came out and 15 when To Hell With The Devil hit me SPEAKER_09: like a ton of bricks. On this rock was built much of who I still am. I learned how to play drums along with Robert Sweet, but unlike Chuck, never had the opportunity to see them live as they rarely played Canada. They broke up in the early 90s and that I thought was that even though they got back together in 2005, I never managed to catch them live the few times they snuck across the border until that is this summer when I was down in Vancouver visiting the in-laws and they were playing Seattle and I drove the three hours to see them. It was an amazing show. They're no longer playing the giant stadiums of course, but I don't know if they ever played giant stadiums, but being able to stand 10 feet from guitarist Oz Fox, who can still shred after all these years was an amazing experience. They still got all the hair and vocalist Michael Sweet can still hit those high notes, though not as many as he used to, but after 40 years, they are very, very good at making music. They're doing an acoustic tour this year, 2024, called To Hell With The Amps. SPEAKER_09: They're kicking off down in Georgia playing Mad Life and Woodstock. I haven't heard of that venue. This is May 30th and I bet Chuck would have a hell of a time, who knows, they might even play a couple of songs he recognizes. That is from Trent. You gonna go? And I don't know, only if you go with me. Oh boy, I wasn't expecting that. SPEAKER_06: We'll see, we'll talk about it offline. SPEAKER_09: So no, we're not going. SPEAKER_06: That was Trent, huh? That's Trent. Thanks a lot, Trent. That was a great email. Appreciate the update on Striper and if you have one on the guy who did Life is a Highway, it turns out to be Tom Cochran. I don't remember if you said that in the episode or not. We would appreciate that too. I don't know. SPEAKER_06: Right? I would. If you want to be like Trent, you can get in touch with us at stuffpodcast.com. SPEAKER_03: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. SPEAKER_13: Mothers and daughters, it's always a complicated relationship. At that moment, I fell in love with heroin. Like I spent so much of my life trying so hard not to be like you. Oh my God. I don't want to do this right now. Join me for some raw and honest conversations with my mom. This is Crumbs. It's a show about the things we settle for and the bits of ourselves that make us who we are. Listen to Crumbs season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_10: Hey there, I'm Maya Shunker and I'm a scientist who studies human behavior. Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything. A moment that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, I talk to people about how they've navigated exactly these moments. Because as we all know, the only constant is change. So let's make the most of it. Listen to A Slight Change of Plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_15: Hey, this is Justin Richmond, host of the Broken Record Podcast. Join me along with co-host Leah Rose as we sit down with the artists you love to get unparalleled creative insight. You'll hear revealing interviews with some of the most legendary figures in music like Paul Simon, Usher, Pete Townsend, Damon Albarn of the Gorillas, and Missy Elliott. And you'll hear from up and comers like jazz artist Leve who told me about her fast rise to fame during the pandemic. Listen to Broken Record on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.