Name: What Lawrence Wright Learned About Jim Jones By Talking to His Sons
Uploaded: 2021-01-05T22:19:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Lawrence Wright Learned About Jim Jones By Talking to His Sons' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Lawrence Wright Learned About Jim Jones By Talking to His Sons' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-05. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
Well, what you said made me think of one of the hardest stories I ever did.
I did an article for The New Yorker about the sons of Jim Jones.
And not everybody died in Jonestown.
He had three sons. Two of them were adopted.
And they were playing a basketball tournament in Georgetown, Guyana.
And this story took place when I...
You remember the Branch Davidians?
Yeah.
Now that you're a Texan, you know, just up the road.
Waco.
Yeah.
My editor at The New Yorker at the time was Tina Brown.
And she asked me to go, you know, write about the Branch Davidians.
And I said, "Tina, there are more reporters than Branch Davidians up there
right now."
And I couldn't, you know, but what I was, had been watching the news coverage.
And just before, the place was called Rancho Apocalypse, which has turned out
to be really appropriate.
But they sent, before the conflagration, they sent out a van with children, you
know, who had grown up in this community.
And these kids, you know, as they drove past the ATF and the FBI lines and then
the media line, and you could see these children looking out the windows.
They were leaving behind everybody they knew.
They were leaving behind the only world they knew.
And they were going into what?
And I thought, what happened to those kids?
This must have happened.
You know, what will happen to those?
It must have happened to children elsewhere.
And so I started doing some investigation.
And I found out that, you know, Jones had these three kids.
Three young boys.
Well, they were young men.
And there was Jim Junior, who was black.
And then there was Steven, who was the natural son.
And then there was Tim Jones.
And for whatever reason, they hadn't talked to anybody, and they agreed to talk
to me.
Wow.
And perhaps it had to do with, you know, the Branch Davidian thing that was
going on at that same time.
So this was in the early '90s?
Yeah, it was 15 years after Jonestown.
It was actually almost exactly 15 years.
And there's a cemetery in Oakland where many of, most of the 900 bodies were
buried.
And they took an earth mover and took a hill down, you know, half of a hill.
And then they stacked all the caskets up and covered it again.
But it still has this distortion.
And you can see, you know, what remained of the Jonestown followers.
But it was interesting to me that the people who joined the Jones cult were all
good people.
They were all, you know, it was started in Indianapolis and then it moved to
the Bay Area.
And they were largely, you know, largely black.
Jones was very, very progressive, you know, on race.
But, you know, a lot of good-hearted people involved in it.
And he was a big figure in San Francisco at the time politically.
You know, his support was sought after.
You know, he was admired as a community leader.
But he was totally crazy and paranoid and suddenly decided he had to remove the
entire group.
And you can't tell your family.
You know, you can't tell anybody.
You know, he sent his sons down to Guyana to clear the jungle so they could
make this village.
And then overnight they moved, you know, nearly a thousand people to South
America.
And leaving behind all their friends, their jobs and stuff like that.
One day, you know, they've been, you know, removed.
They've been raptured, you know, off to South America.
And so I was interested, you know, in learning more about it.
But these, you know, young men were totally haunted.
But you would certainly relate to Tim Jones.
He was physically very powerful.
You know, he curled, you know, 100 pounds with either hand.
You know, but he couldn't get on an elevator.
The last time he tried to do an airplane flight, I mean, this had been years
ago.
I don't know if it's changed for him now.
But he was he's made the airplane turn around and drop him off at the gate,
which is hard to do.
But when you're, you know, as physically overpowering as Tim was, you know, he's
a he's kind of a formidable figure.
And so he just had all sorts of anxieties.
So I went to talk to him and he he said, I'll do it on one condition.
We have to do it in a public place, you know, a restaurant someplace where I
won't cry.
And I want my wife there because I never told her about it.
And wow, it's a little hard for me to tell this story because we went to a
restaurant.
And within five minutes, he was crying, you know, and pounding the table.
And the waiter was keeping his distance.
People in the restaurant were, you know, frightened.
And he told the story of going back.
He's the one who had to identify 900 people, his his natural birth parents, his
adopted parents.
He had a wife and children.
Then, too, they were all dead.
Everybody was dead.
And I've never forgotten the power of a religious belief in a personality like
Jim Jones, who could persuade all those people to stay with him, train them in
this, you know, suicide drills night after night, you know.
And then one day it's real.
And, you know, the boys felt guilty because they thought if they had been there,
they might have been able to stop it.
But probably not.
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