Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASYtDNoaeHo
the jurogan experience well what you said made me think of one of the hardest stories i ever did i did a an article for the new yorker about the sons of jim jones oh and uh not everybody died in jonestown uh he had three sons two of them were adopted and they were playing a basketball tournament in georgetown gianna and um this this story took place when i you remember the branch davidians yeah now that you're a texan you know just up the road yeah uh my editor at the new yorker at the time was tina brown and she uh 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 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 is 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 they drove past the atf and the fbi lines and in 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 they were well they were young men um and there was jim jr who was black uh and then there was stephen and uh who was the natural son and there was tim jones and um for whatever reason they hadn't talked to anybody and they agreed to talk to me wow uh 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 there's they took a earth mover and and took a hill down you know half of a hill and then they stacked all the caskets up and covered again but it still has this distortion and you can see you know what remained of the 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 it was largely a you know largely black jones was uh very very progressive you know on race and uh but you know a lot of good hearted people involved in it and he was a a big figure in san francisco at the time politically you know his 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 were going just to you know he sent his sons down to guiana to clear the jungle so they could make this village and uh and then overnight they move 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 they've been you know removed they've been uh raptured you know off to south america and so i was interested you know that you know learning more about it but uh these these you know young men were totally haunted but you would you would certainly relate to tim
jones he was physically one of the very powerful you know he curled you know 100 pounds with either hand you know he but he couldn't he couldn't get on an elevator uh 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 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 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 catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly
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