Jonestown pt. 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Why we do what we do. Welcome
to Why we do what we do. I am your
reporting on the terrible news after the fact, Host Abraham.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I'm your hoping we can prevent this from ever happening.
And again, Host Shane.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
We are a psychology podcast. We talk about all the
things that humans and non human animals do. And this
is the second part, the conclusion to our two part
little series. Here we are conducting where we discuss what
happened during what is known as the Jonestown massacre. And
so if you did not hear the first part, we

(00:47):
essentially set up everything that led up to this part,
so they are pretty interconnected. We'll do a brief synopsis
in case you don't remember, or you do decide to
just listen to this part and not listen to the
last part, although I recommend I do recommend listening to
the first part. But yeah, we'll do a brief synopsis
and we'll give you a quick overview of what we

(01:08):
talked about last time, and then we will pick up
the story where we left off. But first I have
some things to say, which is that if you are
joining us for the first time, welcome again. I do
recommend you listen to the first part of this, but
I'll hope that you enjoy what you hear today no
matter what. And if you're returning listener, then welcome back.
I hope that you heard the last one and that
you were joining us for the second part. Yeah, to

(01:29):
hear this. Part two also called the bad part because
this is where the worst things happen, although we already
talked about some bad things happening.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yes, this is worse than the first part. For sure.
The first part's bad, but this is definitely worse than
the first part.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yeah, Yeah, this one's gonna be rough. We actually initial
in a PSA during the first discussion in which we
warned that there are some discussions violence, death, suicide, and
that includes murder of children, including infants. So that is
more relevant to this episode even than last episode. So
if that's something you struggle to hear, we'll try and

(02:06):
give some warnings when we're getting to the more graphic
descriptions of those We're not really planning to go particularly graphic.
That's not the point of this discussion, but if just
hearing that mentioned at all is tough for you, you
might want to set this one out or try and
to skip as soon as we're getting to those parts.
And again I'll try and warn you when we get there,
but wanted to let you know it can be tough
to hear those things. I understand it was tough to
read about them, Yeah, to assemble notes for this, so

(02:29):
it's not for everyone.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, and we're also not a true crime podcast, so
like we don't make the grizzly details where a psychology podcast,
So we're going to talk a little bit about like
where where well, you know, how people end up in
the space. But yeah, this is this is not a
true crime prodcast, So if you're looking for that type
of thing, go listen to one of the other podcasts
that are kind of talking about all the grizzly details.
We're not going to do that today.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah. Yeah, And just as you just said, for everyone
to know is that, like we are planning to talk
about understanding how this came to pass and what we
can do about it to prevent it from happening again
in the few dran the likelihood that it would happen
again in the future, So we'll get to all of
that as part of this discussion. But I also wanted
to say that, whether you are returning or a new listener,

(03:10):
if you would like to support us after you hear
this discussion, you can join us on Patreon, leave us
a rating and a review, pick up some merchant or
merch store like, subscribe, and I'll talk more about the
ways that you can support us at the end of
this discussion. But I also want to acknowledge that this
is coming out on January or not January. That was
a long time ago, July twenty third, And of course

(03:30):
that means that you should all. We just want to
acknowledge the fact that you're all probably celebrating this already.
But it is gorgeous Grandma Day.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yes it is. It is also hot enough for you day.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
It is hot enough. That is hot enough. It can be, yeah,
it can. It can turn down a little bit. It
is Mosquito Day. I hope they mean as in the
elimination of.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
I mean, bats are stoked that mosquitoes exist, I guess,
but like humans are like a tasty treat for them,
and we uh, I don't like mosquitos, especially here. The
mosquitos are huge here. I don't like it. Yeah, yeah,
it's National Vanilla ice Cream Day, which is nice and wholesome.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Sure, it is on the theme of flavors. I guess
peanut butter and chocolate Day.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Maybe the best combination, Like better than sunny and chare
better than holl of oats. I mean this is a
pretty uh, pretty good, pretty good combination.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
Wow, better than Simon and Garfunkle.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
That's what I'm saying. It's sprinkle Day. So if you
get peanut butter and chocolate ice cream, put sprinkles on it.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
If you like vanilla ice cream with peanut butter and
chocolate and sprinkles, it is like it is ice cream
Sunday Day, is what I'm getting from this.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
That's all I'm getting too.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
It is World Organs Day, I think is how you
might say that?

Speaker 2 (04:46):
Yeah, sure, Rits Shore grins, Shore grins.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
It's also YadA YadA YadA day.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
Well that helps make sense of the first thing that
we just said. It is Hemingway Book Alike Days. Cool.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yes, it is. So if you have a beard and
you're drinking a lot of rum and key West, you
are celebrating pretty hard. It's a National Independent Retailer's Day shopping.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
It is National Moth Week.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
It is It's National Parenting Gifted Children Week. We should
probably do an episode on the term gifted and what
that meant and how it got there and why we
don't really use that anymore.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah, yeah, that would be an interesting one, but it's
moving on speaking of gifted children. Maybe it is National
Triathlon Week.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Oh no, thanks, the one week year, just one week
of year that we're doing triathlons. It's National Zoo Keeper Week.
It should be you know, for the folks that care
and are taking care of taking care of those animals
and doing a good job of taking care of those animals.
You know, we want to celebrate them. Yeah, the mean ones,
they can go away indeed.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
And finally, it is Restless leg Syndrome Education and Awareness Week.
Do we ever talk about restless leg syndrome? I thought
that we meant to, but I'm not sure if we did.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
I feel like we did. It's definitely come up on
the show before. As a child of the nineties, I
remember so many commercials about this.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Okay, interesting, Well, yeah, I don't know. Maybe something they
talk about that is all the holidays to mention for
today as we get into a nice soft landing before
we segue to our topic du jour, which, as we said,
is a part two following up on what we talked about.
We're concluding the story of what happened at Jonestown in

(06:30):
the nineteen seventies, and so as a quick recap and
sort of overview of what we discussed, I'll start with
saying that, like this event that happened is very tragic.
It is that where we get the term drink the
kool aid, as it refers to sort of being sucked
into something fully and completely. And it starts with a

(06:51):
man named Jim Jones and the fact that in the
nineteen sixties, actually the nineteen fifties, he started his own
Christian church called the People's Temple in Indianapolis, although once
he started defrauding people and taking their money and their
property and getting in trouble with the government, he fled
across the country to San Francisco, saying instead that they

(07:15):
would be more they would be safer there from a
nuclear holocaust should one take place. Oh and I forgot
to mention he was also selling monkeys as pets while
he was starting his church for twenty nine dollars each.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yes, yes, door to door. Yeah, you know, at this
point in time he started his church. Over time, he
is becoming more and more paranoid. He is getting addicted
to stimulants. He moves out of Illinois to California and
starts growing his congregation, if you will, And then something
happens where he starts getting more and more paranoid, and
he decides that they're going to Guyana and they're going

(07:47):
to start their own space there where they can practice
free of government intervention. And so he sends some folks
down to start the Jonestown Camp down in Guyana. Now,
as a reminder to every this space that they go
to is a completely undeveloped area of rainforest yep in
South America. So it requires a lot of manual labor

(08:10):
to start building the camp, building the town, if you will,
and starting to build the infrastructures, which also includes clearing
out lots and lots and lots of jungle.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Yeah, and I think they had to even build like
their own sort of road like structures for them to
get to it because it was so out in the
middle of nowhere. Yes, and just to go back really quick.
The thing that had him leave California, there was a
lot of accusations against more fraud against abuse and sexual
abuse exploitation. He was blackmailing people. One thing that was

(08:41):
a little bit unique about him as he had a
pretty large number of black congregation members. He seemed to
be sort of praying on that population as part of this.
But yeah, once they may moved down to Jonestown, Well
Jones sound named after him, Jim Jones and the Guyana government.
They're sort of clearing theists that are growing their own crops.

(09:02):
And he sets up this this speaker system, this PA
system where he's basically either conducting sermons NonStop or like
otherwise spreading his message if you will, or he's playing
recorded messages that he did. But either way, he's got
people listening to his voice most of the day, all
day every day.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
It feels like, yes, and the People's Temple has acquired
so much property and materials from their congregation. And they've
done this through you know, so maybe we'll say coercive ways. Yeah,
they've had folks that have confessed. They're also signed false confessions,
so either like confessing to things they've done or false confessions,
having them sign it, having them record it. There's lots

(09:43):
and lots of tape of stuff. Yeah, and basically just
kind of like kind of blackmailing people into staying in
the congregation and giving up their properties. So over time
this became a real significant problem, but also kind of
gave that's where a lot of the People's Temple the
money came from, was having these properties, having these real estate,
having all this money come in from there. From there

(10:03):
the people that are celebrating. But at this point in time,
you know, we've got them coming into South America into Gayana, Guyana,
You've got Jonestown started, and you've got people that for
a little while, we're kind of celebrating the advocacy or
the self advocacy or the outspokenness of the of the
People's Temple and all that until a Democratic congressman named

(10:24):
Leo Ryan decides to show up. And he was kind
of already sympathetic to what you could describe as cults,
and he had a member of a we'll say a
church of you know, maybe a particular church that Tom
Cruise belongs to, and you know, we'll we'll kind of
leave it that and he was open to having conversations
with Jones, and so he had kind of started considering

(10:45):
visiting Jonestown and kind of moving in that space. And
that's kind of want to releave off is we've got
this Lea Ryan, who's gonna now go visit Jonestown and
uh and see what's going on.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yes, And that's that I think is the really important part,
is to understanding that like this is going to be
This is kind of the catalyst that segues to the
next big part that happens. But that gets U up
to speed. We're now at Jonestown. It is nineteen seventy
eight and Leo Ryan has just arrived, and with that

(11:16):
amount of recap and holidays and everything, we are good
to take a quick ad break and then have the
rest of our discussion.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yes we will.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Okay, so we're back. We just did our full recap,
so it is time now for actual content piece, which
that was more recap than I was planning to do.
But there's just so much context that's really I think
important in understanding how we got here, yes, and knowing
sort of the series of unfortunate events that led to

(11:54):
the most unfortunate of events. So yeah, okay, So in
nineteen seventy seven, Jonestown essentially starts. There's more than a
thousand people here now or around one thousand people. And
just after a year starting Jonestown, Leo Ryan, the Congressman,
and a small crew of people including some aids and
some news reporters, they flew down to Guyana and they

(12:14):
landed in Georgetown, which is the capital of Guyana. They
landed there on November fourteenth, okay, and from there Ryan
traveled to Jonestown. He arrived there three days later on
November seventeenth, nineteen seventy eight, and he wanted to have
an audience with Jim Jones. He wanted to talk to
some of the people who lived and work there, and

(12:35):
so he did talk with other people, and he everything
seemed kind of on the up and up. But it
was curious that a lot of the people were responding
to him using the exact same language that Jones himself
had been using in his propaganda proadcasts, implying that the
people when they were talking to Ryan, to Leo Ryan,

(12:57):
that they were sort of just reciting from a wrote script,
they weren't actually giving him real information, they were instead
espousing talking points. And also, it is one thing we
hadn't really mentioned, is is Jones had really set up
a culture and system of informing on one another. So
there was probably a good chance that people that were
talking to him were reciting this script believing that they

(13:18):
could not really communicate effectively with Ryan or anyone. And
another thing we hadn't mentioned is that a lot of
the correspondence they had was being censored, if it was
being senter all right outside, So like these people just
were not really able to recruit any help in any way.
So anyway Ryan is trying to interview these people, they're
essentially just giving him Jones's propaganda spiel. Ryan did actually

(13:41):
end up having a chance to meet with Jones, and
I think Ryan was expecting this to be kind of amicable.
But Jones, again, he's paranoid, he's hopped up on all
kinds of drugs, and he was not particularly friendly. Although
he wasn't really he also wasn't threatening or worrying. I mean,
this is a guy who's basically spent many years at
this point point just trying to manipulate people. He's kind

(14:04):
of just an an ongoing salesman, if you will, to
sell his ideas as promises whatever. Anyway, so he is
he's still at least somewhat charismatic, if not friendly. But
after this conversation Leo, Ryan is leaving and some of
the people who live there actually they approach him and
they say, we want to leave too, We want to
come with you, we want to go, and this obviously

(14:26):
Ryan wants. He's almost sympathetic to this, believing that people
should not be held here against their will and that
they should be able to leave if they want to,
and that would imply that this is a functioning worketing
system there. Anyway, they approach him with this, and that's
where we're at right now.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah, so Ryan accepts their requests, but he does note
that his plane is too small, can't hold very many people.
But when he is attempting to leave with the people
who are requesting or like what could be described as escapees,
he was stopped by armed guards and while talking with them,
he was attacked by someone with a knife. The attack
cut the hands of one of his aides, but Ryan
was uninjured. Although now very scared, obviously you're a you're

(15:07):
in a place where you're very isolated. Now you're being
attacked with a knife. I think being attacked with a
knife anywhere, no matter where you're at is already scary,
but in a place where there's very little help. Yeah, yeah,
when you're in a place where there's very little help,
it's it's a little bit scary too. Now, the attacker
was some dude, and Ryan and his team were allowed
quote unquote allowed to leave.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yes, so they're now leaving. They do have the people
with them still who requested to go. They're actually given
some sort of an escort to go with them, some
armed escort or whatever. But they leave and they're able
to make it to the airstrip at Port Kaituma, where
a plane waited for them. But as their truck approached
the plane, another truck with an open top flatbed but

(15:48):
high wooden walls so you couldn't see anything into the flatbed.
You could just see that had a large sort of
open top flatbed that also drives onto the tarmac sort
of nearby.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yes, so the group, Ryan's group again boarding the plane,
but as they were boarding, men with a variety of
non automatic guns stood up from the bed of the
truck with the trailer that we just talked about and
they started firing on Ryan and his group. So pretty
violent conflict right now.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, Yeah, this kind of came up pretty suddenly, a
little bit out of nowhere. Being fired at with a
gun in any situation is going to be absolutely terrifying,
particularly in this one where they this is almost like
a diplomatic mission and now they're being shot at. Yeah,
And so there they panic and they decide that they're
at least somebody decides, I think it's everyone. They decide

(16:34):
they're not going to be able to escape by plane,
like it just takes too long to get off the ground.
They already have too many people. So instead they start
running toward the jungle. However, of course, this they are
in the midst of a hail of gunfire. And that
is even when you have bad aim, which there's no
evidence to suggest that they did, you're in a rough
situation if you're being shot at in this way. And

(16:56):
so that that was able to those gun shots were
able to fell almost everyone, including Ryan, who of course
was the primary target. So Leo Ryan has now been
hit at least once by gunshot and his line on
the ground possibly dead at least significantly injured.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
This is where there's gonna be a little bit of
a graphic description here. So thank you for you are Yeah,
if you don't like this, go ahead and skip over
just just a few seconds. So the attackers fired on
Ryan's body repeatedly. So they found his body, they started
firing into his body, apparently just mutilating it with gunfire.
They were similarly brutal with the attempt to escape bees.

(17:34):
One of Ryan's aids, Jackie Spear sp Spear Spear spae
It's Spear Spear, was shot six times but managed to
survive and went on to serve as a congress person
from two thousand and eight to twenty twenty three. One
report suggested that two other people in the group survived
by playing dead and sneaking off to tall grass nearby
to care for one of the others. In the aftermath

(17:54):
of the attack.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah, so you've got some survivors. Some people did escape
successfully on into the jungle. Some people hid in the grass,
some people played dead, and a few of them were
able to come together after the attackers left and sort
of help each other. But yeah, a lot of people
did die, and then at least some people, even if
they were shot, they did end up surviving. Jackie being
one of them. Yeah, pretty incredible that she was able
to not only survive this, but went on to continue

(18:18):
to serve in a public role, I guess for a while.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
Yeah, and this is such a significant escalation compared to
where we were at up until this point. We had
people that were trapped there with some coercion, but we
were not talking about armed militias firing on civilians at
this point.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah. Yeah, And like there was like accusations of abuse
and sexual abuse, and probably all of that was relatively substantive,
but like, we never had anything quite like this. You know,
they attack and murder a congress person who's there as
like a diplomatic ambassador. Yeah, and this is wild. So
with this major, major event that happened, obviously the US

(18:53):
government is not going to just ignore the fact that
a member of Congress has been murdered, because remember this
is not twenty twenty four or twenty five, when something
like that would go unnoticed. This was back in the
nineteen seventies when something like that would be noticed. But anyway,
Jones knows at least does seem to recognize the significance
of what's happened. He announced to the people of Jonestown

(19:14):
that he had murdered the congress person Ryan Leo Ryan,
and what he essentially told them now was they would
soon be under full scale attack by authorities, like they
are coming for us. We kill the congress person, They're
coming for us, right, And he rationalized that the only
way that they could escape was through a mass suicide.
So we talked about in the last episode I forgot.

(19:36):
I don't know if we mentioned this, but they had
been practicing these like what he called white Knights, which
is where he would have them either practice. They basically
did rehearsals for like a mass suicide by ingesting cyanide,
usually with like a flavor drink of some sort. It
was unclear during those practices if he had told them
that they were actually laced with poison, or if they

(19:58):
told them it was just practice. Maybe it was a
mix of the those two things. Either way, they'd done
those practices, and so on November eighteenth, nineteen seventy eight,
he gathered everyone from Jonestown at the main pavilion and
had his followers administer flavor drinks laced with lethal doses
of cyanide.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yes, So we mentioned earlier how drink the kool aid
is as a common phrase that has come out of
the scenario. They actually didn't use kool Aid. They used
something called flavor Aid, which was like kind of an
off brand cool aid at the time. So that's just
something that like I think is not an important detail,
but like kind of a unique detail about the situation,
because we are talking about like something that's entered the
kind of the common lexicon of today's society, but as

(20:42):
actually kind of like you know, a distorted view of
like what actually happened.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Real quick, we're about to get into some much more
graphic violent I guess you'd call it violence, graphic deaths. Yeah,
probably for at least the next thirty seconds or so,
we're going to be talking about this, so you might
want to skip ahead until you hear us not talking
about that part.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yes, absolutely so. As this mass suicide event takes place,
one family for some reason decided to murder each other
by slitting each other's throats before drinking the cyanide laced.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Beverages instead of drinking them actually.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Instead of drinking yeah sorry, instead of instead of drinking it.
So first the family decided to do this to the
kids and then to one another. So it's an unfortunate situation,
but that happened before they were before they decided to
do that instead of the drinks.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah, okay, continuing on with the awfulness. If you skipped
ahead and you find yourself here, skip ahead again. Yep,
this is again some more graphic aspects of what happened. Okay,
So there are a wide range of ages of people
who are at Jonestown, as young as babies, as old
as elderly people, and they start by administering the cyanide
poison to the youngest ones first. To give this to babies,

(21:51):
they administered this by using a syringe in the mouth,
and then after all the kids had gotten that, the
adults consumed they're poisoned beverages as well. Either they drank
it or it was injected with a syringe, or they
were forced to take it at gunpoint by drinking it
or with a syringe. One way or another, they were
getting it in there. Apparently there's the story that one

(22:14):
of the survivors was a senior resident who had I
think probably had limited hearing, but they slept through the
whole thing. No one actually corroborated this, but I kind
of think they they maybe found like they thought this
person had like already consumed their drink, yeah, and that
they were like past. But anyway, they were sleep and

(22:35):
so they basically they fall asleep and then wake up
to every like this eerie quiet. Everybody's gone or not gone.
I mean they're all lying on the ground. But anyway,
that was kind of a thing that happened. So one
person slept through it. There were some people who escaped
to the woods. They were like, we really don't want
to be part of this. We're getting out of here,
and they ran, you know, they obviously a lot of

(22:57):
people tried to round up as many as they could,
but some people did run away. But the vast, vast
majority of habitants end up participating in or being subjected
to this event.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Right, and so this is where the phrase drink the
kool aid came from, right from this idea of this
quote unquote willingness to take one's own life after being
so bought into rhetoric of some cause. Like you're just
kind of like buying into some language, some rhetoric, some idea.
You're bought in so much so that you would be
willing to take your own life as a result. But
I think that it's offensive. It's like kind of like saying,

(23:28):
like some would argue that it's offensive, it's kind of
like saying, like flying a plane into a building, as
it might relate to suicide in the tragedy of nine
to eleven in the United States. But I do think
it's important to point out there's an important detail here
that I think it often goes overlooked when people talk
about this as a mass suicide. At the time this
is happening, Jim Jones is on the speakers, He's giving

(23:48):
a sermon the entire time that people are standing in
line getting their drinks, and you can hear audio of this,
and there's gunfire in the background, and there's lots of
bad things that are happening at the same time. It's
very unlikely that people were doing this willingly. Yeah, most
people were trained to do this because they were effectively
brainwashed into doing this as part of like be like

(24:09):
a coerced I should say, yeah. And if they were
doing it, they were being done at gunpoint. So it's
really better, like it's a better term or a more
accurate term I should say, to call this a mass
murder than to call it a mass suicide, just because
the amount of coercion that's involved.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
Yeah, and I want to talk more about like understanding
the sort of psychological variables and aspects of what happened
here in just a moment. But we had promised some ads,
and we shall deliver on those ads. Yes, And if
you have fast forwarded, we've mostly gotten through all the
most graphic parts of the discussion. So yeah, we'll be
back with some ads with some less graphicness. I guess, yes,

(24:53):
we're back. One thing, as you sort of mentioned alluding
to this, is that they had been recording like every
the whole time they were there. They had tons and
tons and tons of audio footage from Jonestown. They would
recorded his sermons, they recorded his propaganda, they recorded people's

(25:13):
confessions or false confessions, they recorded everything. And that meant
that they were even recording up to and through the
time that this mass murder event took place. The FBI
was able to assemble a fairly comprehensive and detailed narrative
of what played out at Jonestown up to the last
forty five minutes that everyone was still alive, and I

(25:35):
could not stomach listening to it for the purposes of this.
To me, it feels like that would be a haunting
experience that I would never be able to get out
of my mind. Yeah, it's probably worth it for people
who want to like really be in the know and
like the empathy for the victims of this, But I
just could not bring myself to do it. I apologize.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's harrowing. It's it's bad. It's
one of those things if you are somebody who is
interested in the history and want and really want to
know the details, it exists. But if you can live
without it, I would recommend living without it. It's not
an easy listen.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, I just I feel like it's not worth dwelling
on the horrible ways that humans have, not like really
experiencing the visceral, disgusting reality of people treating each other
the worst they've ever treated each other. Yeah, So, like
I just I didn't. But it is available, so for
people who, yeah, for that is important part of history
for them to understand in that way. I had no

(26:29):
judgment from me. I just couldn't do it myself, right,
So when.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
The Guyanese authorities arrived next day, they were prepared to
defend themselves, but they found instead an eerily quiet compound
and then hundreds and hundreds of bodies. Jones was found
dead with a gunshot wounded a head, which is believed
to be have been self inflicted, but scholars say they
cannot rule out homicide either, so it's kind of unknown
how he met his end.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Yeah, and I think you could take that a lot
of different ways. It's probably unfortunate he never had to
stand trial or face any kind of public scrutiny for
his crimes. And at the same time, it would have
been horrifying if he had gone on to continue, like
in some way later recruiting more people to his causes
because he was he was a charismatic guy who was

(27:15):
like good at doing that sort of thing, right, and
he knew how to prey on people. So okay. The
final death toll is most consistently numbered at nine hundred
and nine people almost one thousand people. Some people put
it at nine hundred and eighteen. It's possible that they're
counting as part of that Leo Ryan and his delegation.

(27:36):
Of the people who died, about a third of them
were children. About two thirds of all the people there
were black. Of the people who died, there were about
one hundred survivors. As I said, there were a little
over one thousand people at this encampment, if you will.
So this was actually the largest single intentional death of

(27:56):
civilians and American history until the terrorist attacks on World
Trade Center in two thousand and one. Afterward, there were
further investigations that alluded to the fact that Jones may
have also been involved in some other murders, in particular,
that he may have ordered some hits or murders during
his assent to power and influence when he had people
who were they going to run him out or who

(28:17):
are investigating him. There was at least a couple that
I saw, but it's possible he had more deaths than
even that nine hundred and potentially eighteen. But even still,
in my mind, one death attributed to something that you
have caused is too many.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yes, So nine.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Hundred and eighteen plus, however many else is way, way, way,
way too many right now.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
It took a long time to repatriate all the bodies
from of the Jonestown victims and to bring some sense
of closure to their families, and it was a grizzly effort.
Some survivors of Jonestown were arrested and tried for murder
to at least one more successfully than the other, although
both received some amount of time in prison. So, you know,
you've got folks that were part of it that ended
up being tried in the trials, like you just mentioned.

(29:01):
But really the biggest thing was you had nine hundred
and nine folks that had to get back to the
United States, that their bodies had to get back to
the United States, and that was in itself a major undertaking.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Yeah, And I mean they're out in the middle of
a tropical rainforest, and granted it is November, but I
mean also November in the southern hemisphere is hot. Yes,
So yes, all that is to say, without trying to
be very grisly about it, like they were not in
the best state by the time they got them back, right,
by the time they left, they weren't always in the

(29:31):
best state.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
Right.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
It was a huge undertaking to move that many bodies.
So okay, let's try then to dig in and understand
how this happened and use that ideally to try and
have it not happen again. So many social psychologists have
attempted to weigh in on this in an attempt to

(29:53):
understand how to how it was possible to influence behavior
to such a degree that people would take their own
lives and the lives of others, which I think is
an understandable inquiry in question to raise, Yeah, this was
a situation that feels like it should not have been
able to happen, but clearly it did, and that meant

(30:16):
that there were things about psychology that we just did
not really fully understand, or that we could try and
use this as a learning opportunity to understand them better.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Right, So, I think it's very easy to want to
blame on some level or at least put some responsibility
on the victims to degree that they got themselves involved
in this cult they bought in they didn't. You know,
there's lots of kind of like justifications for people going like, well,
you know, how did those people let themselves get caught

(30:46):
in that situation to argue how could they do that
to one another and then lean on the idea that
they were brainwashed? Right, But most of the social psychologists
point out that Jones used a lot of rhetorical strategies
that cowerce cooperation. He used passion, showmanship, performances, use a
lot of different things to dazzle and entertain people. He
was charismatic. He used faith, and he played on people's insecurities, vulnerabilities,

(31:10):
willingness to follow his command out of fear of punishment
in the afterlife, to use tricks and promises to make
them believe that he had supernatural powers. And we see
this time and time again, and cults like this. You
see this come up very often. He did not allow questions,
He didn't allow for skepticism or critical thinking. He punished
any versions of descent or anything that had the potential

(31:30):
to undermine his authority. He threatened more than punishment in
the afterlife. He delivered real punishment in the real world
and told people that it was their own fault, which
is a very common religious tactic. You see that quite often.
He quelled descent by incentivizing that people monitor each other
and turn one another in if descent was at or observed.
So he created a context of fear. He used fear,

(31:53):
specifically the fear of others and the terrible things that
will happen someday soon to manipulate people into listening to him.
He lied, he obviouscated, he misled, He told half truth
or outright falsehoods, behaved as if he were speaking the
truth quote unquote truth that anyone who didn't believe him
was the enemy and out to get them. He spoken hyperbole,
superlatives and quote told it how it is end quote,

(32:17):
and we've heard that phrase a few times, which appealed
to a lot of people at the time. He also
worked people so severely that they lacked the energy or
the will to oppose him. He oppressed this group of
people to such a degree they felt like they had
no other options.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
Yeah, and I feel like we see a lot of
those same characteristics. Those characteristics are part of the problem
of Jim Jones, and we see those in other people
directly today. You can guess who I'm talking about, or
you can or I can tell you at rhymes with dump.
But all this is to say that people here were

(32:55):
really not given a choice. This was not them choosing
some path, even if it looked like choosing, because again,
they had been manipulated, they had been coerced, they had
been lied to, they had been swindled. You don't blame
someone who was swindled for having been swindled by the swindler.
You blame the swindler, Like they're the ones who went

(33:17):
after some population that they thought they could get away with,
taking things from them that they didn't earn. Those are swindlers.
We don't blame the victims of the swindler. We blame
the person who's doing the bad deed here. And so
I think that's the way a lot of people they
want to point out, like it's not appropriate to call
this a choice. They didn't choose this. This is the
thing that happens to them. They were in the wrong

(33:39):
place and the wrong time, and someone came along knowing
how to manipulate and exploit those people, right, and he
just was a very good salesman at that sort of thing,
and it worked. So I think it is best conceptualizing
the people who died at Jonestown, maybe aside from Jim
Jones himself, as victims of Jim Jones.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yes, I think that's the best way to look at it.
I think it's important to reflect on who we blame
in these situations, because I think it's very easy to
blame certain people and not blame the people in power.
But it is almost entirely the people in power in
this situation. I mean, it really is truly it was
Jim Jones and Jim Jones and his contingent of people
that were in power that took advantage of those folks.
And I think it's important to reflect on that. I

(34:22):
think it's important to kind of like think about why
we want to blame the victims sometimes in those situations.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, well, I think you know, we could acknowledge that
like circumstances got Jim Jones to that point. Yeah, Like,
in a sense, it's not his fault if we consider
that we understand that there were contextual environmental variables that
led him to having the opportunity to do this in
the first place and gave him the skills to execute

(34:47):
on it, which is all true. We trace that history
so that we could understand that. And yet when it
came to this event, Jim Jones is the person who
then holds all the cards, He has all the contingencies,
he is doing all them in ulating despite how we
got there. He is the one who did this, you know.
And it's like assigning blame is not particularly useful. But

(35:08):
I do think that like understanding that when we have
power dynamics such as this one, ultimately, if that person
had not been in that position, this would not have happened, right.
He manipulated his way into that position. He did a
lot of shady things, and there are a lot of
reasons that that all sort of came to pass. But ultimately,
when we think about like who has the power here,

(35:30):
who can pull the strings and make things happen, it
was Jim Jones. And so understanding that, like if we
are to understand things like this, understanding who is the
person who is pulling the strings, who has the power, Like,
that's where we need to be looking to make the change,
because that's where the change is coming from.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Like that's the source, right, So I think probably there,
it's probably good time to take a quick gay break
just to kind of like again, just take a breath, reflect,
see where we're at, and then we're going to keep
diving into this.

Speaker 1 (35:59):
I was going to say, the same thing.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Okay, so we're talking about Jim Jones and how he
led these people to do this thing and kind of
like the how people end up in these spaces. Now,
some psychologists and some other folks will point out that
Jim jones tireless model of preaching day and night and
calling people out for praise or punishment actually reshaped how
they thought of and experienced the world. That is to say,

(36:29):
what can be accepted as true and untrue, what kinds
of actions align with values of good and bad, et cetera, etc. Right,
they came to see their own identity as belonging to
the group. This kind of framing uses language to rationalize
actions that then seem in line with the group's values
and goals. If their only escape is through suicide, then
they might take that escape. If the group collectively agrees

(36:50):
to participate, then participating is who you are because you
are a member of the group. That is a group, movement,
group behavior, group values in group thought. Right, And this
hypothesis also I fits neatly as part of the explanation
as to why most people seem quietly accepting of their fate.
Why people just kind of went, well, that's what the
group is doing, so of course I will go along

(37:11):
with this, Like, if it's what's best for the group,
it's what's best for me.

Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yeah, and I am I participate in this. I have
solidarity with these people. Yeah, we've been promised this boondoggle
in the afterlife. And furthermore, there's probably some sense of
guilt for existing in the first place, because they're all
treated as sinners and people who have inherent sin baked
into their being, and so death is ultimately what they deserve.

(37:37):
So they're just kind of speeding up the process a
little bit. So you can see how he sort of
rationalized his way to that and had people buy into
then believe that, right if that was sort of the
message they were getting. And there are a few more
circumstances that are worth pointing out. For the people who
lived in Jonestown here who were under Jim Jones's rule,
under his thumb, one is that they were so far

(38:00):
away from home in a foreign country and with no
money that even if they could escape, they might not
be able to. Like where would you go? Like if
you try it, Let's assume you could even leave the
compound without being chased down by other people of this
town and make it all the way to Georgetown. Like
you don't have any resources, what are you gonna do?
Like you can't buy anything, you can't get out of here.

(38:22):
You are so far from home, there is no way
for you to escape. So like, there that is one circumstance.
A lot of people there were facing. Another is they
were probably just chronically hungry, exhausted, and afraid because they
knew that like there was this culture of snitching on people,
they were constantly made to either admit to things they

(38:43):
had done or admit to things they hadn't done in
false confessions. And they worked all day every day without
any breaks. So like they were beaten down people, they
were worn out. A third reason here is that there
was some reason for them to believe that this them
following through with this group directive would grant them safe
passage to a blissful and better afterlife. Very common rhetoric

(39:07):
that's used in a lot of places to control people
is to have them believe that they make sacrifices for you,
or for the group, or for the church or for
the whatever, and that that means that good things happen
to them when they're dead, and that our language allows
for that sort of rationalization to make sense to us,
to some of us at least.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
But fourth one here is for those who had children
who had died first, it may have been easier to
take their own lives at that point, having done that
to their children, sure like, maybe it didn't even feel
like I don't know how to say this exactly, like
it didn't feel necessarily it was totally real or it
was totally happening or whatever. But then like the thing

(39:49):
actually happens and they're looking at what they've done and
they're like, oh, I am going to Yeah, you know,
I think that they at that point they had sunk
in so much and sacrifice so much so that there's
not way they're not going to get out of this
in any way that they could even live with. So
at that point, like, may as well follow the path
that had been set before them. I have three more

(40:11):
Do you want to take those? Or should I keep going?

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Nook, You're gone? You gone?

Speaker 1 (40:14):
Okay, okay, all right? The fifth one here again, Like
what I'm what I'm reiterating here in case people weren't falling,
is like these are some of the other factors and
variables to consider for the inhabitants of Jonestown and why
they may have been in a position where they did
follow the group sort of leadership and behavior here. So
reason number five, or contextual variable number five, I should say,

(40:36):
is should they make it to home, Like let's say
they did escape, Let's say they somehow found their way out,
they found their way home, they have reason to believe
that they would be social pariahs at best, possibly they
would be imprisoned or attacked by others at worst for
what they did or for their part in it. And
it's again being treated as perpetrators, not as victims. And

(40:58):
again also thinking about like there were a lot of
black people in this congregation already, people who have been
in the nineteen seventies, like they had still I mean,
look at where we are today. You know, there's still
a very marginalized group. They were still treated very horribly
by many people in the country. This wasn't all of them,
but that was a circumstance that they faced that like,
now they're going to leave this compound where a whole

(41:20):
bunch of people have died and they somehow survived and
go back to a place they already weren't welcome, Yeah, necessarily,
And they.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Were told over and over and over again that they
were an enemy of other people, so that they were
going to be attacked. That's the other side. Actually, like
they believed it because they were it was beaten into
them effectively that they were going to be imprisoned, attacked,
or killed as an enemy of whatever state or government.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
Great point. Yeah, that was actually that is a very
important that could be its own additional variabolt to like
include here, right, yeah, all right, contextual variable number six
as I have decided to outline these, This was not
a like a list that was listed out. I synthesized
this list so you could separate this. The more variables,
I think I collapsed some things together. I did get
some of these from other scholars and whether they wrote

(42:08):
about this and other places, but like a lot of
this was me taking the understanding and trying to distill
it down into I think critical points that people had
made enlisting them. So anyway, number six is a lot
of the people in Jonestown had sunk so much of
their resources, all of their resources in some cases into
this Jonestown community, and to Jim Jones specifically, that they

(42:31):
didn't have they had nothing left. They had nothing left.
If again, if they were to escape, they would escape
to nothing. That is a scary place to be, right.
There is not a lot of recourse for people who
walk back into the country with nothing at all for themselves.
So and then finally number seven here there was some

(42:51):
amount of correspondence between what they said they believed and
what their actions represented about their actual beliefs. And what
I mean by that is that they seemed to do
things that indicated that they did believe the things that
were being told, right, which makes a lot of sense.
We generally believe the things are being told because we're

(43:11):
generally being told information that we can act on that
is generally useful unless you watch ault right news, but
like generally speaking, like we receive news or information or
speech to us, and we treat that as if it's
something that we can we can behave with respect to
that as being useful information in some capacity, And so
it makes a lot of sense that like if they've

(43:32):
been hearing NonStop for years now, at least a year,
let's just say generously, they like joined right when Jonestown
just was established, and they were there for the full year,
but like that's still twelve months, which is a very
long time to just be hearing NonStop rhetoric. And then
their actions corresponded to the things that they had been

(43:52):
coached to believe. And so I think there is an
understanding there of how what they were told and how
they be with respect to that they corresponded to each other,
and that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean, and I think that you pointed
out this is this is such an excellent thing to
point out, right, is that there are a lot of
different reasons for a lot of people there. But as
many scholars have pointed out about the situation, their circumstances
were such that they had effectively been forced to carry
out these atrocities like they were in any situation where
it was they had nothing left to lose, and they
were really like except for their lives, and they were

(44:26):
willing to give that up because it was better than
the alternatives that they were facing. Right. They also argue
that Jim Jones tricked, manipulated, swindled, blackmailed, and otherwise coerce
people into an inescapable corner. Whether or not they felt
that way about their own situation was different. They were
fully in it. They were no more making autonomous decisions
than if they had a gun to their head the

(44:46):
entire time, effectively, they couldn't make a decision that was
going to benefit them except for the one that they
Ultima Milion made.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
Yeah, and I think that's a really good way to
think about it, is to think like, imagine someone doing
something horrible and they have some one with a gun
to their head, and you know, you realize at that moment,
if someone had a gun to your head, you might
also do horrible things. They have metaphorically had a gun
to their head the whole time, and it just stayed
there for a very long time, the threat ever present,

(45:14):
and so it was a long coercive scheme to manipulate people.
But social psychologists and other psychologists who have weighed in
on this argued that even the most rigid and callous
should be able to accept that at the very least,
the children could not have been considered to have consented,
and they should definitely be considered murder victims here. I mean,

(45:38):
really like children cannot consent it to things like this.
That's the reason that we have parents who signed consent
forms for children in places is because we cannot accept
that a child has not been coerced in such a
way that they are giving their freest consent, if you will, right,
And so, no matter how callous you are the children,
I think you can at least agree that the or
callous you are, I think that's that's quite judgmental. Matter

(46:00):
how hard a time you have buying that the people
here were also victims. You can at least, I think,
appreciate that the children were definitely victims. They were murdered, right, Okay,
right now. I think that again, psychologists and social psychologists
scholars who talk about this, they also suggest that we
should not talk of the rest of the people here
as having died by suicide, but having been murdered effectively

(46:22):
by Jim Jones, suggesting that they had those those inhabitants,
those residents of Jonestown, they had too little agency to
be making deliberate self directed choices.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Yeah, I think that's I think that's a fair way
to look at it. And I think that's I think
that's where I land is, Like, I don't think that
anybody could have made a decision fully free of coercion.
I think that at this point in time, everybody was
a victim there.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
Yeah, And I mean, yes, you did have people who
ran away and escaped, and like, great on them, Great
that that was whatever circumstances prevailed for them, that they
did feel that they had that kind of agency. But
that's just not going to be the case for all people, right,
And so I think it's still worth understanding like where
they were coming from. But yes, that's how I feel
about this is I think that we consider essentially a

(47:05):
perpetrator in Jim Jones and nine hundred and eighteen victims
that were there. And as I said, we can all
agree at least that the children were definitely victims.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Right, So I think with that we'll probably take a
quick gad break because we need to also ask the
question about let's about Jim jones psychology and how he
ended up in that space and what that looks like.
So let's take a quick gad break and then we'll
come back and talk about that. So we have I

(47:38):
think explained at this point in time, like we can't
really blame the folks that were at Jonestown for what happened,
which means that we kind of turn our focus on
Jim Jones himself. And we've already kind of talked about
his history and growing up. But let's talk about like
what it means when you have somebody who is in
this type of position of power. It seems to be
what happens in general when you have someone who wants

(47:58):
power just for power, or money for the sake of money,
or who uses religion as a vehicle to control people,
or for whom the end always justifies the mean. It
doesn't matter how we got there, It just matters that
we got there right. And Jim Jones stumbled across the
persuasive nature of religion and then got a taste of
real power and success when he started his own church,
and it just kind of snowball from there.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah, I mean this, We have seen this play out
this way for other people, Like they they just want
power for the sake of power. They just want money
for the sake of money. And they find a vehicle
that will manipulate people, and they exploit it, and they
manipulate a lot of people. Like there are some things
that kind of work to that end. If he had
never found religion, or maybe if he had started his

(48:42):
church but never really got it off the ground, maybe
he would have just gone back to medic school, become
a doctor, lived out the rest of his uneventful life
as a normal person just doing their thing. Perhaps not
we don't know, but like what we do, we do
know what did happen? And it's possible that because he
was so interested in and enamored with the power of religion,

(49:03):
to control large groups of people for whatever reason that
spoke to him. If he had just not had that exposure,
might he have had a different path in life. Probably,
I don't know what it would have been. Maybe he
still would have gone on to be a mass murderer,
but like where he ended up would have probably looked
somewhat different.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Right now, it is possible that Jones had some amount
of brain damage from contact with lead. Actually this was
pretty common around this time. Yeah, and actually one of
the things that people point to when it comes to
just the kind of like the general rise of serial
killers at the time.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
Though it's kind of like one of those things where
it's it's more of a theory than it is like
actually definitive proof.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
It's correlation. We can't prove causation, but the correlation is
a little bit astonishing how closely they map onto each other.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah. Yeah, Now he was in that golden area of
extreme lead exposure, so it makes sense. It's also possible
that is poor, unstable a stare upbringing made him desperate
for the ability to provide security for himself at any cost,
So he would have done anything in everything he could
to be safe and secure for himself. It didn't matter
who he walked on.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
And I think that, you know, we can look at
these and consider it's probably to some extent and combination
of all of those things and probably some things we
didn't even consider.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
Here.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
We know that his circumstances got him there and then
he started pulling the strings for others and that led
to tragic outcomes. But I think that like the things
that we know that can affect behaviors like this involve
your upbringing and involves your access and exposure to certain things,
and it involves your contact with the success or failure

(50:42):
in those systems, and all of those things aligned to
eventually result in this, And yeah, I do think it's
worth considered. I think you said Golden Area. It's Golden era.
I don't know if there was a particular location, but
like there was a this was a time in US
history in particular where there was a lot of exposure
and again it maps on pretty remarkably with the rise

(51:05):
in violent crimes that was also taking place. So anyway,
well that is to say that, like I think there
are biological, neurological, and contextual factors that were all at
play that likely had some contributing effect on the extent
to which he turned out the way he did and
ended up doing the things that he did. And I
think the ones that we've outlined make a lot of

(51:26):
sense in understanding what probably was the case. But you know,
he is gone, so it's not like we can do
a whole lot more studying of him.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Now, right exactly, So I think a big question that
we're kind of left with at the end of this
is like, could this happen again? Now, there were multiple
examples of cults forming and mass suicides, mass murders. There
there are examples of this happening, not to the extent
of Jonestown, but there are exams those.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
Only one, yeah, but one, this one was this one
was real bad.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
Yeah, significant for sure. But there's also, you know, examples
of milder is not the right term, but like less
intense situations, but people still being harmed because they get
sucked into the rhetoric of a cult. They get sucked
into the rhetoric of a group of people. And there
are harms that occur that don't have to be suicide
and murder. It can be sexual harms, it could be
financial harms, it could be emotional, psychological harms like there

(52:17):
are lots of ways that can show up. So the
question of could this happen again is effectively yes, but
let's talk about kind of what that looks like to
the degree that Jonestown, because we're basically saying, could another
situation like Jonestown happen again?

Speaker 1 (52:31):
Right? Yeah, that is the question. And many people, including
survivors of Jonestown, people who were there on the ground
experiencing those when it took place, they point out that
the rhetoric of the MAGA movement that Make America Great
Again movement feels eerily similar to James Jones rhetoric in

(52:52):
a lot of ways. It's the use of superlatives, of hyperbole,
the utter lack of concern with truth or facts, specifically,
criticisizing anyone who disagrees with them, silencing and threatening critics,
underhanded manipulation and exploitation of his followers, the abuse of power,
the addiction of prescription medication, the ends justify the means,

(53:13):
the use of fear to scare people into compliance, the
value of loyalty above all else. These are so close
between both Donald Trump and Jim Jones you probably didn't
even know which one I was describing during that little comparison.
And you know that if Donald Trump commanded his followers
to drink cyanide, at least some of them would do it.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
They started drinking bleach.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
Yeah, yeah, he got people to do equally dangerous things
during his first term. So, like I was describing all
of that, and as I said, like you heard that,
and you think some of you were thinking, Oh, he's
just talking about Jim Jones. Some of you were thinking, oh,
he's talking about Donald Trump. And the fact that I
could confuse you proves my point. Well, it doesn't prove it. It
supports my point, I think in the fact that there

(53:57):
is an alarming amount of overlap here, and that leads
us to the conclusion that not only could this happen again,
we're not so far away from it happening again as
we might want to believe.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
If there are conditions where you're being compared in the
same sentence to somebody like Jim Jones, there should be
a concern. Yeah, Like there shouldn't be confusion, Like somebody
shouldn't read your biography and confuse you with Jim Jones.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Yeah, yeah, I think at that point, like get done
picked up. Yeah, stop evaluate your life and make better decisions.
It's sort of like I was thinking about the other day.
I'm like, you know, there are real life Nazis in
the United States that were born after World War Two, Yeah,
that identify with Hitler and Hitler's movement and anti Semitism,

(54:44):
And I could pretty much get I would bet like
one hundred dollars that one hundred percent of the Nazis
in this country who voted voted for Donald Trump or
well yeah, yeah, they voted for Donald Trump, or they
can't vote. Oh they can't they say if they voted,
they voted for Donald Trump, or if they didn't vote

(55:05):
for Donald Trump, they did on accident vote for someone else. Right, Like,
I'm not saying that all Trump supports their Nazis, but
that's the team you're on, you know. And the same
is true for KKK, Like one hundred percent of them
voted for Donald Trump. That's the team that you are
sharing a side with, right, even if you don't necessarily
identify with them. So like, that's it again, that's just

(55:26):
for people who found themselves on that side of things. Yeah, So,
as you said, like, when you're being compared to the
likes of Hitler to David Duke to Jim Jones, the
worst people who have ever lived. Like you're doing something wrong.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Yeah, you missed the turn somewhere, Like you're supposed to
go to Albuquerque and you ended up in a clan rally.
Like it's that's not what's supposed to happen. I think
at the end of the day, people are quick to
forget that the past is really not the all too
distant past. I mean, we're talking about like this happened
during our parents' lifetime. Yeah, Like this isn't something that
happened like during our great grandparents or like you know,

(56:03):
Civil War. This happened during our parents' lifetime. This was
on the news, like on cable television, Okay, And we
often fail to connect events that are separated in time,
even when they have pretty direct cause effect relationships. There's
no reason to believe we couldn't end up with another
type of Jonestown massacre at some point in the future,
especially the near future, given the way the world is
going right now now.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
Of course, I would like to try and end optimistically
by saying, hopefully we can learn from the mistakes of
the past. I say that as we're reliving one of
our worst mistakes as a country currently, but hopefully we
can learn from the mistakes of the past. If we
can figure out how to hold people accountable for their lives,
for their false propaganda, for the spreading of misinformation, if

(56:45):
we can abandon magical thinking of particularly using religion as
a vehicle here that enables the mental gymnastics to facilitate
brutality toward one another. If we can value one another
as belonging to the same species and there for deserving
of love and respect, no matter what walk of life,
from what you hail, then hopefully we can prevent things

(57:07):
like this from happening again in the future. Hopefully.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
Yep, I one hundred percent agree with that sentiment. I
could not have said it better myself.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
I think that if we're going to agree to live
with one another in like a communal format where we
sort of share our resources, we share our land, we
work together to ensure that our species does the best
that it possibly can, then we just have we have
to be able to hold there are going to be

(57:37):
bad actors out there who want to exploit, manipulate people,
and take too much for themselves, and we have to
hold them accountable. We don't have to kill them, we
don't have to take like all their things away. We
just have to hold them accountable for it, make it
known that this is a thing that they have done,
prevent them from doing it again in the future, and
giving them an opportunity to learn and be better.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
Right.

Speaker 1 (57:57):
Like, that's I think where we need to be is
like it just just does not have to always result
in violence. But we also can't just let each other
get away with doing terrible things to one another, right,
So there's got to be a balance in there. It
seems like other countries have figured it out. I assume
the United States is capable of it at some point.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Yeah, I thin, I'm sure we're smart enough.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
Yeah, like we did have smart people here. There's still
a few, I think so. Anyway, that was a big
political rant.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Yeah, yeah, that's okay, it's worth it. It's worth it,
all right.

Speaker 1 (58:29):
Well, if you stuck with us through all of that,
well thank you. I hope that you got something out
of that and enjoyed what you heard here today. And
if you would like to support us, you can head
over to Patreon where you can get ad free episodes.
Early episodes, some bonus content. I sometimes get it up
on time. I sometimes get a little behind. I'm currently
a little behind, but I'll get caught up. I always do. Also,
there's a really cool group of people over there. We
have a discord server. You can talk to them, and

(58:51):
I always at the end of our full length discussions
shout out the wonderful people who have made such a
generous gift in helping support us and do the show
and just be good people. So I'd like to thank
Mike m Megan, Mike T, Justin, Kim Brad, Stephanie, Brian, Ashley, Kiara,
and Charlie for all of your ongoing and continued support.
We so appreciate you.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Yes, we love you so much.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Also, thank you so much for my team, to my
team of people writing and fact checking from Shane and myself.
Thank you for recording with me today. Shane Hey, thanks
for having me. Our social media coordinator is Emma Wilson,
and our audio engineer producer sound good guy is Justin Greenhouse.
Thank you Justin, and he's the best.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
He is.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
All right. You can head over to our merch store.
Currently the links are broken. I'm still working on repairing
those I'll get a rounds to fixing that for the
shopping cart things, but i will date. I'll actually I'll
stop shouting out the merch store until I've got that fixed.
I'll update people when that is repaired. If you leave
a rating and a review, that really helps, particularly if
you like our podcast and would like to say something nice.
That helps us the most find people. So if you

(59:53):
have something not so nice to say, then you should
email us directly. You can tell us your thoughts on
jonestown or the things we're about to recommend by emailing
us at info at wwdwwdpodcast dot com, and we look
forward to hearing from people when they have things to say.
We actually got a nice message from somebody who apparently
was using this for a class, which I'm now very
curious about. Yeah, anyway, those are ways you can support us.

(01:00:14):
Tell a friends go grab their stuff and subscribe it
to our podcast on their platform as well. Whatever. Those
are all things you can do. You can also reach
us if you want to talk to us on social media.
We're at Blue Sky. We're also on the meta sphere
if you will, Facebook, Instagram, that sort of thing. Am
I missing anything? I feel like I'm missing something.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
No, I think that covers it. We just got recommendations,
that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Yeah, So if you are joining us for the first
time and you made it all the way here, then
I hope that you enjoyed what you heard. At the
end of each of our discussions, we do something really fun.
At least I think it's fun where we recommend the thing,
and so we're gonna just recommend some fun stuff. This
is not related to Jonestown in any way, but just
some fun stuff. So stick around after this brief sponsor
break and we'll recommend some things. Okay, we are back recommendations.

(01:01:12):
I am recommending a brand new movie that just came out.
It is Superman, the brand new James gun movie that
just came out twenty twenty five. And I love this movie.
It was so much fun and I just I was
telling Shane before we recorded, James gunn just understands how
to make a comic book movie. Yes, it's like the

(01:01:34):
plot lines make sense. You kind of got a lot
of like beats that happen where you get some funds
action sequences, but they're actually all part of the main
plot building up to sort of a big final showdown,
et cetera, and it just it works super well. I
very very much enjoyed it. I would definitely put this
among my favorite of all the Superman films. And I

(01:01:55):
think the new actor David Corn corniswead maybe corn siewetet
Korn's corn sweat. Yeah, I thought he was great. And
all the actors, a lot of actors were pulled from
Guardians of the Galaxy cast as well as a suicide
squad when James Gunn directed that, So I thought it
was really fun, a really good time. You know, a

(01:02:16):
lot of these superhero movies, I feel like I have
to apologize in some way. I'm like, yeah, it's kind
of silly and dumb, but like it's still an entertaining time.
This one, actually, I think works really well. I think
it's very silly, but I don't think it's dumb, and
I do think that it is quite enjoyable and very
well written and just a super good time. So that's
my recommendation is the new twenty twenty five Superman movie

(01:02:37):
by James Gunn.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
I am so excited to see this. I think it
looks so good, So I'm so excited that it's like
getting good reviews.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Yeah, yeah, at least I loved it. I don't know,
probably other people won't, but I did.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Yeah, that's fine, all right. So my recommendation is an
experience experience that's good. It certainly is as child and
nineties grew up in the early aughts, like in really
finding formative music during those times. Jimmy World is one
of the names that came up often. Blead American came
out in two thousand and one, and it is an

(01:03:09):
incredible record. Like it's like one of the It's a
seminal record for folks that like grew up in the
ats and like are kind of learning pop punk MySpace era,
you know that type of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
Great album.

Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
Not my favorite of theirs, but a great album. Not
my favorite of theirs either, but incredible. I think I
like Futures more. I think Futures.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
Gonna say Futures that's my favorite one.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Yeah, yeah, that's oh so good. Anyway, though, I think
that it's one of those things where Jimmy World has
been around for some time. They're still playing, they're still
touring currently, they're touring opening for the Offspring, which is
like a wild tour. I just saw I just saw
them last night. It's Newfound Glory, Jimmy World and Offspring
playing together and that's all it's on the shows. It's
so excice. It's three bands and it's done early so

(01:03:48):
you can go and rest your back and you know,
take your nighttime meds and go to sleep, Grandpa. So
I gotta say though, I've never seen Jimmy World live,
and they are an incredible live band, like just dialed in.
They sound perfect, They do not miss a beat and
it's really no frills. Yeah, it's like they're there, they're playing,

(01:04:11):
they're thankful that you're there, and then they're off the
stage and it is really really they're just really good.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
They are.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
So I recommend if you ever get a chance to
se Jimmy World, please take the time to do it
because they you don't want to miss it. Like they're
like a sleeper hit band where it's like they got
their flowers.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
They're still putting out records which are really good. Yeah,
they are really good, but they're live. Their live show
is incredible, so you gotta go see it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:34):
I think for those of you who don't think you've
heard them, you've probably heard the really big song they
put out called sweetness or.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
The middle or the Middle?

Speaker 1 (01:04:43):
Yeah, how that one starts like are you listenin whoa Yep, Yeah,
that's a terrible delivery on my part. I butchered it. Sorry,
but anyway, Yeah, I agree with you. I second that completely.
That when I saw them live, I was like, I
was blown way how good they are. And honestly, I
think the way I would describe it is that it's

(01:05:04):
like their live songs are like the best version of
their already great songs. Yes, yeah, because as you said,
it's like it's not that they're putting on like a huge,
flashy show, it's just that their songs, like their live
performance delivery of them is so flawlessly good and energetic
and just beautifully played. Yeah, and like, yeah, this is

(01:05:26):
we tend to recommend a lot of punk and metal.
This is not. I would not put them in that category.
It's very melodic, but it's great rock music and they
have some sort of slower melodic parts as well or songs. Yeah,
but yeah, their live performance is just it's one of
the best live performance I've ever seen. They're not even
like my favorite band ever. I think they're great. I
have a huge amount of respect for them, and I
love a lot of their songs and albums, but their

(01:05:48):
live performance is among the best I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Yeah, same, same one. I like, I like. I would
not put them up in my top ten favorite bands,
but I have always enjoyed them and they are one
of the top ten live bands I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
Yeah, absolutely so, all right, great recommendations, Superman the New Movie,
and Jimmy Eat World live. If you can see them
that way, And if you don't know who we're talking about,
just look them up. Look up the Sweetness middle praise chorus, Yeah,
praise chorus. One of my favorites is the Kill Yeah.
And yeah, they're just a I think, just a really
wonderful band. So yeah, there's that agreed. Okay. I think

(01:06:26):
that's what we have to say about comic book movies
and Jimmy World as well as that closes out our
discussion about the Jonestown massacre that took place in nineteen
seventy eight. And again, you can reach out to us
to tell us your thoughts on those things. Are sure
your recommendations as well. We're happy to hear those things.
All right. Is there anything else that I miss or
that you'd like to add before we wrap this one

(01:06:47):
up today.

Speaker 2 (01:06:48):
Nope, nothing else on my end. Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
I actually just remembered one thing. If you remember when
we did our episode a few weeks back on chronic
traumatic and cephalopathy CTE. Yes, there's actually two comments to
address here. Is we made an ad segue where we
sort of had referred to someone who had been brutally murdered,
and we had an insensitive ad segue. Wanted to apologize
for that. Yeah, we were trying to in the moment

(01:07:12):
have an AD segue and I think we were not
being We're a little tone definite delivery of that segue.
So sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
Yeah, definitely missed opportunity and huge apology. We are course
correcting as we speak.

Speaker 1 (01:07:24):
Yes, Okay. Aside from that, the other comment was we
had talked about how when CTE was first discussed, they
called it it was like cutting paper dolls or something
like that. I actually heard from our audio engineer, Justin,
who decided he weighed in and he got to me
and he said that he told me what this meant
because I didn't really recommend it, and he had heard

(01:07:45):
of this and he said, it is an old expression
suggesting someone is insane or has lost their grip on reality.
It was used to invoke the image of someone in
a mental asylum who was spending their time meticulously cutting
out paper dolls, implying their inability to focus on any
real world matter. And I was like, where did you
find that? And he said he actually said that there
was like a video game that he had played that

(01:08:07):
had our Sumble game. I think it was a video game.
And he also found some from AI, even though I
also asked AI and they did not give me anything
because they were dumb sometimes. But yeah, those are the
two comments I had that I wanted to share about
CTE just to follow up.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
Yeah, thank you, all.

Speaker 1 (01:08:22):
Right, that is it. Then, thank you so much for
joining us. We will go ahead and let you get
about your day. This is Abraham, Missus Shane. Why We
Do What We Do is out.

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
So yeah, you've been listening to Why We Do What
We Do. You can learn more about this and other
episodes by going to WWD WWD podcast dot com. Thanks
for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day

(01:09:00):
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