--:-- Marcus Parks: Live up your glade. That's when the cannibalism started.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Last update on the left. Oh, yeah!
--:-- Ben Kissel: Hey, folks. Hi. How you doing? How you doing, sir?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I mean, okay. Yeah, we can hear you great. How you doing today?
--:-- Ben Kissel: Doing fine. Thanks for letting me be on your show.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Dude, can I say before we can just a bottle, you're not going to hear from me again normally, because I'm the funny one. I stand here to the side. You are an extremely intelligent, good man. We love your work here. We are unabashed fans of your work. I've read a lot of your books. You're very smart. I'm the stupid one. So now I'm going to fade into the background.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Why do I think that might be a cruel trick?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, we're good here. This isn't a gotcha place. I'm such a huge fan. *Road to Jonestown*, *Go Down Together*. I'm a massive fan of your work. I really am.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: It's nice of you to say, I appreciate it guys.
--:-- Ben Kissel: Always butter them up first. That's what I've heard. And this book as well, this new Waco book, it's just... okay. So, we're going to be talking about that. And I'm still saving your Manson book for a special occasion. I don't know why, but I was like, one of these days I'm saving it for when I need it for my soul.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Well, Charlie hated it, so maybe that's a recommendation. I don't know. He actually posted my home address and contact information on the website his followers kept up for him. He was so pissed.
--:-- Ben Kissel: Wow. Was he offended?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Well, I found his sister and his cousin and was able to get a lot of information about his childhood that didn't match up with what Charlie tried to present as this poor blighted kid. So he sent me a letter telling me that better not get published. And when it did, he was unhappy. But it was a good thing in a way, because these books, sometimes people get mad about them. The Waco book is a good example. They will say something to the effect of, "Well, we know how to handle your kind." And I can say truthfully, "I've been threatened by Charlie Manson. Do you think you scare me?" That's a good intro.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And that's where we're gonna start this interview. Today we have with us one of our favorite authors. You've heard us talk about his books on this show again and again. We're so happy to have on the show Jeff Guinn, author of the new book, *Waco*. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's a real pleasure.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Thanks for letting me be on.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Of course. The books that you've written—you wrote *Road to Jonestown*, which I consider to be the definitive work on the Jonestown tragedy. You wrote a book about Bonnie and Clyde, *Go Down Together*. You've written books about Charles Manson. And of course, your new book is about Waco. What is it that makes you seek out these stories that are so big, so legendary, and most of all, so confusing to most people?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Well, I'm not actually attracted just to tragedy. I don't look for something that's got a lot of death, a lot of sadness involved. What I am interested in is things that happen, iconic events that take on a life of their own afterward and change the way we, as a country, as a society, tend to look at things. To a certain extent, the reaction to Jim Jones and Jonestown was based on what had happened with Manson some years ago. People had already decided: crazy cult, weird followers, kill people for no particular reason. And the word "cult" began taking on a much more horrific meaning to most people than it originally was intended to have.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: When you get to Waco and the events that happened there, as I researched it, the people in the FBI, in ATF, even some of the surviving Branch Davidians talked about the things that happened in Waco in part were based on folks thinking, "If we don't do something, it's going to be another Jonestown," when it would never have been that. But people equated all of them the same way. So having written about Manson, having written about Jim Jones, in modern American history there's sort of a big three here, deservedly or not. I thought the 30th anniversary, let's take a look at David Koresh in Waco. Let's try to see how much the past played into the things that happened there, the similarities with the Branch Davidians and their leader, and the differences between Jim Jones and People's Temple, Charlie Manson and the Manson family, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, because they are all very different.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, we know that David Koresh was much physically cuter than Jim Jones. If you were going to list him by hotness, I would put him above Jim Jones. That's one of my side realizations.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Yeah. Jim Jones was a little too much Roy Orbison. You may feel that way yourself, but Jim Jones would have thought he damn well knew better.
--:-- Ben Kissel: Can I ask you a dumb question before we get deeper into it? Is there a big difference? Obviously, you get into these stories that are now like in your own research, you seem to be revising them for us. These are big, important stories to you. You said these are important parts of American history, especially modern American history. What is the core difference between the way this information is portrayed and the information that people carry versus what actually happened? I feel like that's where you're butting up against it. They use Charles Manson's face to scare people, but you don't actually really know. He was actually a fully institutionalized, not very skilled cult leader. But he was this American boogeyman that ended the hippie movement on this bigger, broader scope.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: The thing that's always important to remember is that a lot of what many people consider to be history is just mythology. All of us, when something big happens, we put our own personal spin on it. As communications expand, technology expands, with the internet now, for just about any important activity or individual in modern history, any hour of the day or night, you can read something new from someone claiming, "Well, I know exactly what all this is about." A lot of people think they're experts.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: One of the things I always have going for me in my books—I say this and people think I'm joking, and I'm quite serious—I never want to write a book where I think I know everything that happened. Because if I do that, when I'm doing my research, I'm only going to be looking for things that reinforce what I already think. I'm lucky in that my ignorance is so wide. There are so many things I know I don't know about, from Manson to Jim Jones to Waco, that I can go in like a blank slate, and whatever I find is what I'm going to write. I never go in thinking I'm going to prove this, that, or the other thing. I'm just going to go in, get all the facts I can, and let the reader decide what he or she wants to think. My job is not to tell you what you have to think. My job is just to give you the information that helps you make an informed opinion.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's one of the reasons why I love you as a writer. And that's why you've been such a huge influence on this podcast as well, because we approach things much the same way. A lot of these stories, so much of them is unknowable. We can't really know what happened inside the Branch Davidian compound. We can't know what happened during a Charles Manson acid trip. We can't know a lot about what actually occurred in those last moments in Jonestown. We don't know what happened in the room before Jim Jones died. When you're writing these books, how do you discern what you want to put in that book? How do you discern what information you deem to be worth knowing, worth writing about?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: One of the advantages of writing narrative nonfiction is that I think any writer who's presenting something like this has the obligation not just to have the chapters themselves, but the chapter notes. I want to make certain that when anybody reads a book of mine and thinks, "Wait a minute, where's this coming from?" I want to make sure that they know it's not from the author's imagination. That's why in the notes to every chapter, everything I present as a fact in any chapter will be in those notes so a reader could go to the same place and look for themselves.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I always tell people who say—and for every book there will be people who say, "Well, I think you made this up. I don't think it actually happened that way." I always tell them, "You don't have to believe me. Look in the notes. You can see where I got this and you can look for yourself." Readers deserve to know that people who claim to be historians aren't just taking a few facts and making the rest up out of their imaginations. Of course, there's always some readers who won't believe it anyway. I once had a guy on a call-in show identify himself as "the gentleman from Tennessee." I said, "Do you have a question about my book?" This is the Waco book. He said, "I don't have a question. I have a statement." I thought, "Well, this is going to be fun." I said, "Okay, what's your statement?" He said, "Every page is full of lies. There's nothing but lies in that book. It's a disaster. It's horrible. Never should have been published." I said, "I'm really pretty careful in my books and in the chapter notes to say exactly where I got everything. So let's do this. Tell me one thing you read in my book that you're claiming I made up." He said, "Oh, I didn't read your book. I didn't have to."
--:-- Ben Kissel: Thank you, sir. Thank you for buying my book.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: No. I mean, just like, send him a free one.
--:-- Ben Kissel: Great. As long as he bought it, he can say what he wants.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Exactly. That's what I say. Live from your blade.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: When you're interviewing people with all these extreme situations or you're reading about stuff, obviously people lie to you. How do you just know that they're lying? Or do you print it anyway and say, "That's just what this person said"? How do you go about that?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I never take anyone's word for anything. When I talk to college writing courses about these books of mine, I say, "If your mama says you were born on a Friday, check, just in case." A lot of times you can't be sure. There are people in the same place at the same time who are claiming something completely opposite. What does that mean? Human nature is that if you're part of a group in a terrible, chaotic situation, any two people there are going to remember parts of it differently. When that happens, I try to say, "Okay, here are the conflicting reports. This is what each side says." Sometimes there's a third group.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: In the Waco book, ATF agents—and I talked to almost three dozen of them—everyone swears the Branch Davidians fired first. They have no doubt. The Branch Davidians. When I interview folks, I'm doing this over a period of years. I get to know them a little bit. Just like you guys, you've interviewed so many people, you can probably get a sense when somebody is BS-ing you after a while. You just feel like, "Yeah, maybe not." But I'm talking to people on both sides who I'm convinced truly believe what they're saying is right. So I put both sides of it in the book: who fired first, whether the helicopters fired or not. But I also talked to a half dozen members of the local media—reporters, TV cameramen—who were right there the whole way. Every one of them. I interviewed them separately, and in every interview, two people together so they reinforce each other's stories. Every one of those folks said the firing began from inside Mount Carmel. The Branch Davidians were firing first on ATF. What I ended up doing in the book was giving both sides, ATF and Branch Davidian, and then I point out that the third group, the ones who aren't affiliated with either side, are unanimous: the Branch Davidians fired first. But readers can make up their minds.
--:-- Marcus Parks: How many Branch Davidians survived after the incident?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Nine got out alive, all adults. There were some that had come out during the whole standoff. And there were a few others, Paul Fatta in particular, who was away at a gun show selling some of those illegal weapons that morning. Ultimately, about 20 people who had been Branch Davidians were either in there during the siege and barely escaped with their lives, or were affiliated with the Branch Davidians but didn't happen to be in there at the moment of the raid and didn't get trapped in there.
--:-- Marcus Parks: When you spoke to them, were they still in the group, or have a lot of them moved away from their belief system?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Here's something that's a little unique about people in this book. When I did the Manson book, I tracked members of the Manson family, including some of the convicted murderers who were still in prison. Every one of them said, "Oh my God, I was so stupid with Charlie Manson. I was a dumb kid." They were all out of drugs. "I spend every day thinking what a fool I was." I have spent so much time with former members of People's Temple, a couple of whom escaped that day in Jonestown, others who were in the Guyanese capital city and weren't in Jonestown that day. Every one of them said, "When I look back, how could I have been taken in by Jim Jones?" Though they stress—and it's a fact—that they were part of People's Temple not out of personal greed or looking for power, but because they were trying to help make the world a better place. They really did have a beautiful beginning. It just went wrong.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: But the Branch Davidians who survived... One of the big worries I had writing this book: while I was writing it, I found out about Cyrus Teed. I devoted months to tracking him, and I finally found documents in an archive in a little Florida college where he had written all the same prophecies and got published things about them that David Koresh would later say were his. What worried me when I talked to surviving Branch Davidians—they all still felt connected to David Koresh, every one of them. They might deplore one or two things he did, particularly involving 10 and 12-year-old girls, but in general, they felt that he had loved his followers, he believed what he was saying, and they believed him.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I made a deal with the archivists of Florida Gulf Coast University, which is where all those Teed documents are. Anybody watching this program who wants to know more about Cyrus Teed can read for yourself how he was Koresh before David Koresh, with the exact same prophecies. It's fascinating, even with the same name. Cyrus, you know, to Koresh. It's incredible.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: The thing I was worried about when I'm talking to these folks—Paul Fatta, Kathy Schroeder, all of them—I knew at some point I would have to tell them about Cyrus Teed. If they believe what I'm telling them, then this takes away the belief system they've had sustaining themselves all these years. They believe that everything they've gone through—and they've all gone through a lot—was something righteous, that David Koresh really is the Lamb, he's coming back just like Revelation said, and this is how they've withstood all these years afterward. So what I tried to do was first go interview them, and I didn't mention Teed yet until we'd really established a relationship where they'd had a chance to give their side of things. I felt confident that I would put what they said in the book the way they said it. Then I got back in touch with everybody because I wanted them to know in advance. I didn't want them to read the book afterward and say, "Hey, Jeff Guinn never told us that he thinks he proved David wasn't a real prophet, and there was this Teed guy."
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I contacted them and said, "Look, I found this out. I would not put it in the book if it wasn't something that could be verified, and I want you to know in advance." I told them about Cyrus Teed, and I made a deal with the archivists at Florida Gulf Coast University that if any former Branch Davidian contacted them to see whether these Teed materials were real, I would pay to have copies made of everything and sent to that Branch Davidian so they could see for themselves. But I got the same response every time: "Well, you may believe that, but we know better because we knew David. We don't have to see anything. It wouldn't matter what you showed us. We would know better." They weren't impolite. They weren't threatening.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Damn.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: In a way, can you blame them? This is what they stake their lives on. They lost spouses, friends, some of them lost children. All these years later, I couldn't expect they're going to say, "Well, thank you for proving we were absolutely wrong."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. We've come across that with Scientology too, where there's a lot of people after the fact that believe the core teachings of Scientology were just manipulated by David Miscavige, that L. Ron Hubbard was a pure being and there was stuff to learn from him. But you start to realize, no, as soon as you look at his storyline, it all falls apart. You've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. You've given up your family. You're living in Clearwater. Your whole life's over. What do you do then? I guess that's the sunk cost fallacy.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: The thing is, as hard as it is, we've got to always remember people's motivation, why they did the things they did. Because the FBI and ATF never bothered ahead of time to find out what Koresh taught or what the Branch Davidians believed, that was a big part of the tragedy that follows. There are so many thousands of pages of the negotiation tapes, and I read every page. Over and over, Koresh or Steve Schneider or some of the other Branch Davidians would be trying to explain in a very long, complicated way to the FBI, "This is what we believe. This is why we're doing this." And the FBI simply said, "It's all Bible babble." That's what they decided. So they never knew why the Branch Davidians thought they would be honored to die at the hands of Babylon. If they'd understood that—and talking to ATF people now, they agree with me—if they'd known that, they never would have done that kind of entry. They just would have surrounded the place and said, "Hey, come on out and talk when you feel like it." None of this had to happen.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: It wasn't entirely ATF's fault. It wasn't entirely FBI's fault. It wasn't even entirely the Branch Davidians' fault. But none of them thought it was necessary to understand the other side. Whenever we get that situation, tragedy is certain.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's one of the things about this entire story. To me, it just seems like a tragic comedy of errors over and over again. Just one thing after another keeps popping up. That makes me so mad and frustrated.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Yeah. And it's true, not just in this book, but pretty much all the ones that deal with tragedy. People don't want to understand the other side. As communication and the means of communication continue to increase in our culture, it's not bringing anybody together. It's dividing us further. For God's sake, look at America now.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: There was an article in the *New York Times* a couple years ago. This is a fact. Don't take my word for it, guys.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, we won't.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I'm glad. The *New York Times* published a story about certain evangelistic Christian leaders who are beginning to think that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of King Cyrus of the Old Testament and that he is the ordained one by God to lead us.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, it's Guy Fieri. If it was anybody, it was Guy Fieri. That's where they were wrong. Because Guy Fieri is joining everyone across the country in a love of thick sticks and like meals.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: But see, here's the thing. You guys can have your show and bring people on to talk. People like me can write books and try to say, "Look, these are the facts. Decide for yourselves." But you're always going to have those people who have what I think we need to call deliberate ignorance. "Let's not let the facts get in the way of what I believe." Particularly the group that says, "God puts in my heart what is right. Leave your facts out of it." But that also goes for in Waco, ATF and FBI saying, "All these people, they're just idiots. We don't need to understand what they think." So it cuts both ways.
--:-- Ben Kissel: Concerning what the ATF's motivations were, do you believe that—because there was the 60 Minutes story that was about to come out right before that in which there were going to be allegations of sexual abuse and sexual harassment within the ATF, and there was also the rumor that Bill Clinton was about to fold the ATF into the FBI, and the ATF needed to make a big splash—do you think that was the ATF's main motivation for what they did?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Don't forget Ruby Ridge. The fall of 1992, when ATF and FBI combined supposedly to get a dangerous white nationalist and ended up killing his wife and one of his sons. It was a horrible thing and gave the public the impression that these are two agencies of the government that will just go out there and start shooting people. ATF clearly saw Waco as an opportunity. "We can do this so well all by ourselves." They've got their budgetary hearings coming up in a couple months after that when they've got to go before Congress and convince them, "Don't take our money away. Don't fold us into the FBI." That's part of it. It's not something that puts them in a very good light. This is an opportunity. But it is also true that the Branch Davidians were breaking a very serious gun law by converting semi-automatic weapons to automatic illegally, and that they were, even among themselves, talking about using the weapons themselves in their battle against Babylon, and people had to die in order for David's prophecies to come true.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: ATF has always been a great punching bag. The NRA has basically made its reputation and millions for years ragging on ATF. But it's also true that how are they ever going to be popular? Any of you ever read a novel by a great writer named T. Jefferson Parker?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: If you haven't, remember his name. He writes some great mystery books. He has a hero in one of them who's actually an ATF agent. This guy, Charlie Hood, member of the ATF. Charlie realizes Americans hate ATF because ATF enforces rules involving alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. Almost all Americans like or love at least one among alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. So yeah, ATF screwed up, and I think that's in the book and there's no denying it. But the FBI screwed up. And by God, the Branch Davidian agenda, which was violent and meant people were going to have to die for them to achieve what they wanted—if the Branch Davidians hadn't done the things they did and left all the clues out there that they did, ATF never would have gotten involved.
--:-- Ben Kissel: The Branch Davidians, I remember reading in your book where you said that David Koresh at one point said, "1995 is going to be a big year. Something's going to happen in 1995." Do you think that David Koresh either consciously or subconsciously set up the conditions for something like this to happen? In other words, did he get what he wanted?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Let's talk about the one thing demagogues and prophets all have in common. When you're a prophet, when you're saying, "I have the powers beyond human ability, and this is going to happen at some point," it better happen, because prophets have to deliver. People are only going to follow them for a certain amount of time. Charlie Manson decided he better get this Helter Skelter deal going because he'd been promising his followers, and if it didn't happen, they were going to start to walk away. Jim Jones had to have his followers believing that the government was out to get them, just like Jones had said would happen someday. "You got to leave the comforts of America and come to the jungle in Guyana."
--:-- Jeff Guinn: David Koresh is keeping people in an absolute hellhole. All the surviving Branch Davidians talk about how Mount Carmel was a cruddy, huge shack on top of a barren hill infested with fire ants. They ate crappy food. They had to get up at the crack of dawn to listen to David Koresh preach. All the women had to submit sexually to Koresh. All the men had to give up their wives. All the time, Koresh is saying, "We're doing this because that's what God wants. Within a couple of years, finally, the apocalypse is going to come, the second coming, and we're going to be the ones who are exalted." Now, how many years are they going to sit around and have David say, "Any time now"?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, when's the exultation coming?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: So in 1992, he starts talking about, "Well, we can't exactly know the time, but I'm getting the sense that it might be around 1995." Three years is a while, right?
--:-- Ben Kissel: Yeah, it's a long time to maybe build up. You could kick that can.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I have to think, based on what I've learned about prophets and demagogues—and I've spent quite a few years of my life doing in-depth stuff on this—if the ATF doesn't come after David Koresh, and Child Protective Services already started an investigation about children being mistreated, and the FBI has already had complaints about people being held against their will... If it hadn't been the ATF and their investigation, something would have popped. And if it hadn't happened from an outside source, David Koresh—who I do think truly believed what he was spouting—then Koresh one morning would have woken up and decided God has put it in his heart that the Lamb and his followers have to take it to the Babylonians. And that would have happened.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I do want to ask because we've had this question. Maybe I'll get it from your head. We talk about cults. My favorite thing about a cult leader, specifically, maybe not even just a prophet, but a cult leader—they kind of have to keep one foot in the con game and maybe one foot half outside the con game because you're dealing with the logistics of running your cult. I think it's difficult. What point do you think that Jim Jones was a true believer in his own work? Do you think that he ever had any cracks in that? That he thought that what he was doing was not real, or if that's why the drugs came in?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Like, do you think that helps prop up somebody's... I mean, I know it helps my confidence. Drugs are great for that. So I don't know if Jim was just like that for him.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Any demagogue will usually use some fragment of truth and build it into something much greater. Jim Jones had this in common with Charlie Manson, with David Koresh, and with a certain political leader we might name but won't. They all have the same thing. The first thing they do is declare there is this awful problem and I am the only one who can solve it. You have to follow me because nobody else can possibly do it. Jones said that, as Manson did, as Koresh did.
--:-- The second thing they have to do is separate their followers from people who are going to say something different. The only voice the followers can hear is their own. For Manson, it was the Spahn Ranch. For David Koresh, it's Mount Carmel. For Jim Jones, it ends up being a compound in the Guyanese jungle. And guys, I have cut my way in there with a machete, and that is serious jungle, believe me. I don't know how these church people just went and made a town.
--:-- But then comes the next thing they do. Jim Jones did these things just like the other two. You begin by declaring the media to be your enemy. You can't read newspapers. You don't want to watch TV because it's all lies. I'm the only one telling you the truth. Then you separate the followers from their outside families who might be skeptical. You're either part of us or you're part of them. So you isolate the people, and then you have a deadline of some sort. This terrible thing is going to happen soon. And Jones's requests, Manson's, or Koresh's, get weirder and weirder, more bizarre.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's what we talk about when we talk about cults so much. You can always tell when a cult leader is slipping, that's when they up the ante. The cult leader always has to keep upping the ante. Sometimes the cult will up the ante for them, but there always is this escalation, right?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Yeah. Demagogues are part of everyday life in America and everywhere else. Every politician is at least in part a demagogue. "Here are these horrible things that are happening, and it's going to get worse unless you elect me, unless you vote for me. The opposition is ruining everything. I'm going to save you, but I need your vote now." In churches, religious leaders, to a certain extent, have to be demagogues. "I'm the one who's telling you exactly what God wants and the things you've got to do, unless you want to go to hell. Your soul's in jeopardy, but I'm here for you."
--:-- But then the Joneses ratchet it up more and more, and nothing is ever going to be enough. I heard one story about Jim Jones that stopped me dead in my tracks. By the time he gets to California, he's in Ukiah and the drugs are starting. He's getting weirder and weirder.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Was this the moment when Jim Jones really checked out? In terms of, "I believe we're making this a better world and trying to make the world a more equitable place"? Because he did amazing things in Indianapolis, which people tend to forget.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: If you've read *Road to Jonestown*, I talked a lot to a guy named Tim Carter, a Vietnam veteran who came and joined the temple. In Jonestown, he saw his wife and toddler son die in front of him from ingesting the Flavor Aid, and he would have died there himself, but Jones gave him a task of getting some money out and trying to get it to the capital city. I sat with Tim Carter in his apartment in the Northwest for a week while he told his story. He would break down sobbing, or he would start raging at himself. "How did I believe this? My wife, my little boy, why did I do it?" It was intense.
--:-- Then he said, "But there was this one weird thing." In San Francisco, People's Temple, the big building, the church they built there. Above the auditorium, there were some apartments where older members would live, a protected space for them. These were really elderly folks, most of them poor Black people who had been living in complete squalor. Being part of the temple meant they were respected, they had a clean place to live.
--:-- Jones's sermons would last for hours and hours. He had a little bucket he'd relieve himself in behind his pulpit now and then. But every once in a while, he'd let the choir take over and do a couple numbers, and he'd slip backstage to take a deep breath. Tim Carter, during one of these performances, was backstage doing something. Jim Jones ducks back behind the curtains for a minute. Carter's watching him, thinking, "What's he going to do? Sneak a cigarette? Have a drink?" Instead, there was this little staircase that led up to the apartments. A much older lady who was a member apparently had been out shopping. She's got a couple of heavy bags and she's starting up this staircase. Jim Jones sees her, rushes over, takes the bags from her, carries them upstairs, opens the apartment door, and gets her settled before he comes down. He didn't have to do that. Nobody was watching. And that's what makes Jim Jones such a contradiction. For all the horrible things he did, and they were horrible and unforgivable, every once in a while, there'd be this little glistening moment where there's no benefit to himself and he thinks no one's watching. He does something for one of his followers.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Do you think there's something in all three of these men, all three of these big cult leaders? There was a quote from the book, I think it's Kathy Schroeder. She said, "David was an asshole. He was arrogant, but he was not manipulative." How much truth do you think is in that statement, and how does that relate back to Jim Jones and what you just told us?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I think David Koresh plagiarized Cyrus Teed, but I don't think he knew he was doing it. He was nurtured by the previous leader of the Branch Davidians, Lois Rodin. It's documented that Lois cribbed from Cyrus Teed years before she even met Vernon Wayne Howe, who would become David Koresh. Lois is dying of breast cancer. She believes in the mission of the Branch Davidians, and her crazy son George looks like he's going to take over. Lois is praying that some savior will emerge. Here comes 21-year-old Vernon Wayne Howe, who by secular standards wasn't qualified to lead a one-man parade. Out of nowhere, this guy Vernon suddenly returns from Israel claiming he has been given these great visions. He's Phrush, the reincarnation of Cyrus. He's the Lamb from the Book of Revelation. He's going to lead his followers in the final battle against Babylon, and they'll be exalted for it. That's the exact same thing Cyrus Teed had been saying.
--:-- But if he believes that, and you've got to remember, he has believed from the time he's a kid that God is there with him, that God finally communicates with him every once in a while. If you have friends who are part of a fundamentalist church, you're going to see people who truly, honestly believe. If you put them on a lie detector test, it would say it was true that God has told them this or that. They've had this vision, and angels appeared. They believe it.
--:-- So Koresh was an asshole. Kathy's right. I've listened to tapes. He was the Lamb, everybody else was beneath him. If he wanted sex with your wife, the Bible said you have to honor the Lamb, so he gets sex. Nobody else can smoke, but the Bible said smoke emerged from God's nostrils, so he gets to smoke. All these different things. And yet, every time they challenge him, he finds something in the Bible and presents it to them in such a way that they decide they can't argue with him. It has to be right.
--:-- If you think they're ignorant, in this book I consulted three of the most esteemed biblical scholars in the country: Catherine Wessinger, James Tabor, and J. Philip Arnold. The last two actually got involved in the siege after a while. Every one of them, people who have studied the Bible their whole lives and written extensively on it, say David Koresh stunned them. He saw things in the Bible that they missed completely. Was he delusional? Yep. Was he a demagogue? Yep. Was he an idiot savant? Absolutely not. For whatever reason, he had that down cold, and that is what mattered.
--:-- Remember, all his followers came from the Seventh-day Adventist church, where the belief is that God sends human messengers from time to time. They have been imbued with this from childhood. Out of all the people they have heard, they think David Koresh fits it. They're not like those drug-addled kids with Manson. They're not even like the people in People's Temple who didn't really care about God one way or the other but were committed to social change. These are people who spent their whole lives trying to understand the Bible and learn what God wants them to do. Here is the man who can do it. So yeah, he's an asshole, but he never tries to trick them. He always uses the Bible and will talk with them until finally they see his side. He wasn't like Manson saying, "If you don't understand me, that's because you're not sophisticated and advanced enough to do it. It's your ignorance."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Do you think it helps that you're already born into that? I've been following the Chad Daybell, Lori Vallow case. What they say to each other is ludicrous. Talking about death percentages. The way Mormonism works is that it helps franchise little prophet franchisees to create their own little religions. If you have a base that believes all this is actually to the letter real, it's much easier to jump off of that material.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Everybody who followed David Koresh was predisposed to believe. He didn't so much play to that as focus on that. Because he did, because he lived pretty much what he preached, and because the Bible said you had to give honor to the Lamb, and that one of the Messiahs was going to be a sinful Messiah. Koresh told everybody, "I'm not perfect. I don't have any other powers. I can't turn water into wine. I can't raise the dead. All I can do is open the Seven Seals, bring about the end of days, and lead you to the glory of God. We're all going to get swept up in the wave sheaf, and we're going to be the exalted in the new thousand-year kingdom." These were people who, through their background and their own seeking and beliefs, it fit.
--:-- Marcus Parks: So fascinating. I think the last question I have for you does fit into belief. The fire, how the fire started. In the book, you present four different theories as to how the fire started. The Branch Davidians started it, the ATF started it. But this fourth, more theological theory I found fascinating. Could you talk about that for a little bit?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Sure. Waco, the subtitle of the book is *Legacy of Rage*. I write about how so much of what's dividing us today grew out of Waco. From Timothy McVeigh two years to the day blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, to the people who stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Their leaders originally got into the militia movement because of Waco. A big part of the visceral, angry reaction to Waco from a lot of people is that the government just decided to kill off some gun-owning Christians who hadn't gone out to bother anybody. They don't need to read anything that would tell them differently. They just know.
--:-- When we look at Waco, if everything had ended peacefully, would we be talking about it today? No. But it didn't. How it ended, there are only a couple possibilities. The first is that the FBI that last day just decided they're going to burn all these people up, get rid of them. That's easy for a lot of people to accept because it fits what they want, but it's absolutely ludicrous. For the FBI as well as ATF, particularly after Ruby Ridge only a few months before, the best way for this to end would be peacefully, absolutely no bloodshed. The FBI did so many stupid things, but no, they didn't do it because they would have had no reason to do it.
--:-- The second thing is it was a complete accident. You got tanks smashing into this rickety house, paving and parting the roof in. Electricity's off. They've got Coleman lanterns for warmth and light. A lantern gets knocked over. The place is a firetrap. Whoosh, up it goes. That's certainly possible.
--:-- Third possibility, the Branch Davidians themselves decided they were going to, as a group, die and translate up, because that fit what they believed. They're setting the fire, but they don't think of it as suicide, the end of their lives, but freeing them to go up and do the next thing.
--:-- Those were the three possibles I thought things were limited to, until I'm doing the research. I spent so much time with those biblical scholars I told you about. One of them, Phil Arnold, is an absolute genius. He said he thinks there was something that was never considered. David Koresh, right up to the end, believes he is the Lamb. He is the chosen of God. In the days coming up to this final end, he's writing about the Seven Seals. He's doing what the Lamb is supposed to do, revealing these things. As soon as it's all written, he'll get that passed out, and then he and his followers will come out. The FBI don't believe that.
--:-- If we look at the passages in the Bible that were favorites of Koresh, it's how God promises that He will save Jerusalem with a wall of fire where the believers will not be touched, or that God says He will protect His followers with fire and they will walk through unhurt. If you're David Koresh and you believe you're the Lamb and you're really in this spiritual mood and you're surrounded, one way or another, this is about to be over. Babylon's here. This is it, for better or worse. What's the best way? You know you're on TV. You know everybody in America is watching. What if there's a fire, but it's a holy fire, and God uses this wall of flames to protect them from the agents of Babylon?
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's fascinating. They would believe that could happen. They wouldn't be hurt. The fire would go and they'd walk out and be like, "See? It's all real."
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Absolutely. What's he got to lose?
--:-- Marcus Parks: When you put it that way, that almost seems like the most plausible thing. Either that or an accident.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I note in the book, if you look in the chapter notes, after three and a half years of working on this 24/7, after talking to hundreds of people, reading countless thousands of documents, and even reading the King James Version that Koresh used four times, I truly believe that at the last minute, Koresh thought it was going to be holy fire. He thought God was going to prove in this way that David Koresh was right and everybody else was wrong.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's fascinating. That's really interesting. I guess I'll just add, you don't have to answer this, but you could decide if you want to mull it over. What do you do with the critics who say that you got into writing non-fiction for the money and the sex?
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Well, I would say one out of two ain't bad. When I wrote a book called *The Last Gunfight* about the O.K. Corral and the gunfight that wasn't a gunfight and didn't happen in the O.K. Corral... I didn't get a great response from a lot of Wild West historians. Some of them are pretty sharp in their criticism, which is okay. One of the reasons I write these books is that I write about something I don't have a belief system about. But there are people who've devoted their lives to it. Maybe they work at Walmart during the week, but at night and on the weekends, they're researching Tombstone and the O.K. Corral for the great book they're going to write someday.
--:-- The Wild West is American mythology. Here comes this interloper, this outsider who never wrote about cowboy history before, trying to say Wyatt Earp wasn't a hero, and it wasn't a real gunfight. It pissed them off. There's a group called the Wild West History Association. These are nice folks devoted to that history. At their conventions, they like to dress up in saloon girl costumes and little cowboy stuff. They're all working on self-published books. I was asked to come in and talk to them about trying to write for a larger audience. I had the feeling this would not end well. I was right.
--:-- These are lovely people, gathered in a little New Mexico auditorium. They're the kind of folks who, if they pass you and your car has a flat on the side of the road, they're going to stop and want to help. I got introduced, and you could feel the hatred. I started to talk about how history is only made better by sharing it with people, and a lot of us when we write history make the mistake of just writing for ourselves and ten of our friends. There was grumbling. I didn't see any flaming torches lit yet, but the possibility was there. I just said, "Look, it's obvious that if I talk, I'm not going to say anything you want to hear. So let's talk with each other. What do you want to ask me?"
--:-- A guy stood up and said, "Do you deny that you write your books for personal financial reasons?" My answer was this: I love what I do. I would always want to pick some subject I want to know about, travel, spend years finding out, and write about it. I make enough money from my books that I get to do that. There probably are not 200 writers in America who make enough money from their books that they don't need a day job. I've been extremely lucky. I'm not a great writer, but I'm a lucky one. I've been able to spend the last 20 years doing nothing but picking subjects I want to know more about and going out and finding what there is to find. I said, "So yes, I don't apologize for it. And wouldn't you do the same thing if you could?" He muttered, "Fuck you," and that was it.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He's like, "Technically you're darn tootin', and I hate to admit it."
--:-- Jeff Guinn: I waved and said, "Well, take care, everybody get home safely," and I got the heck out of there.
--:-- Ben Kissel: They ran you out of town.
--:-- Marcus Parks: What a great conversation. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you so much, Mr. Guinn. We appreciate you so much. You're amazing. Everything about you.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Thank you for reading my books. Thank you for letting other people know about my books. I owe you guys. Take care, and I hope I keep writing things you enjoy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Oh yes, we will continue to use all of your imaginations.
--:-- Jeff Guinn: Same to you, buddy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I hope you Gwiniacs are satisfied, because you just got pure, unadulterated mainline Jeff Guinn. Can you handle it? Uncut.
--:-- Ben Kissel: I can't tell if I feel smarter or dumber.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: We're dumber. We are stupider than that man.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes, you may have been proved smarter, but we have all been proved dumber.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He's a thinker.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, he's incredible. He talks with the same amount of engagement that he writes with. I was hanging on every word. Every single word. He did fantastic stories. He did a lot of work. My God. That man has lots of patience.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I will say nothing as thoroughly as the author of the book *Speaking with the Sasquatch*, who told him about the actual nature of the Sasquatch through various meditative conversations with the Sasquatch projected to him. I understand what that guy's saying more, but Jeff's pretty good. Jeff's incredible.
--:-- Marcus Parks: This has been *The Last Podcast on the Left*, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. Go to patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft to watch full videos of our episodes. Check out all of our streams at twitch.tv/lpntv and watch everything after the fact on YouTube. And don't forget to go check out all our shows, all the places we're going to be playing this year. Go to lastpodcastontheleft.com to check out all of our North American, Australian, and European dates. Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hail Gein.
--:-- Ben Kissel: Hail Satan.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hell Guinn.
--:-- Ben Kissel: Hell Guinn.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah. Always.
