Unlike last year, this year saw a lot of podcasts covering the subject. Part of this was due to the creation of new podcasts and part was due to the author utilizing a new podcatcher which found more episodes. In fact, I had to have a cutoff date for episodes, or I’d still be here at my desk with my headphones on.
Some of this year’s shows are multi-episodic, and some are just one-and-done, but as I stated two years ago, one-and-done shows can bring new people to the topic, so they have their uses. There has been a growing number of true crime and comedy podcasts, and Peoples Temple was not spared this trend. Humor is subjective, and what I found funny and not funny may be different from your tastes. There is your content warning.
As always, there is no particular order as to how these are presented.
Why We Do What We Do (7/16, 7/23/2025)
I was initially excited about this one because it promotes itself as being about psychology and why people do the things that they do. Well, it does do that, but only in the last 36 minutes of more than two hours of content. Host Dr. Abraham jumps around in the timeline. At some points, I didn’t know if I was in the 1970s or 1965. He also claims there is gunfire on the “Death Tape,” which I’ve never heard or mentioned by anyone else. When he finally gets to the “why” part, he mentions how Jones tricked people with the fake healings, how he used punishment to stop any critical thinking, and how group values replaced individuals’ values. These are all true points, but they have been brought up in other shows that made fewer mistakes in the narrative.
One interesting theory that was brought up is the question of whether Jones was damaged by exposure to lead while growing up. If Jones had not been cremated, this could still be tested. If this episode had focused on what the show’s description described, it could have been worth hearing.
Drink about Something (7/11, 7/18, 7/25, 
08/01/2025)
A true crime podcast about stories so “shocking that you just may need a drink after or during.” The two main hosts are Lindsey and Jesse, who I think are married or are long-term partners. Lindsey, who was raised in a faith-healing tradition, provides the content and context, and Jesse provides the color commentary while becoming increasingly shocked as the story grows progressively worse. Part of the appeal of this show, for me anyway, was hearing Jesse become increasingly freaked out. Jones’ antics shock him and Jim’s “fuck schedule” sent him over the edge with laughter and disbelief.
Even though this is a comedy podcast, it is one of the better researched shows this year, with sources including Raven, The Road to Jonestown, and the tape recordings. The Temple’s civil rights work is discussed, and there is agreement that Jones did some good work early in his ministry. There are some occasional errors which I’m going to blame on the heavy drinking that goes on during the recording. These errors include:
- Reporter Tim Reiterman is misidentified as “Jim”
- Jonestown survivor Tim Carter is misidentified as “Jack”
- Temple member Bob Houston was “gunned down” on November 18, whereas he died in a railway yard accident in San Francisco two years earlier (although some dispute it was an accident)
- Rep. Leo Ryan is misidentified as a Senator
- The “live music” described on the Death Tape is actually the recordings on a previously-used tape
Part three and four open with clips from Jones’ sermons and – eventually – the Death Tape. The only thing I found tasteless was that for the fourth episode – which covers Jonestown and November 18th – they bought some Flavor Aid and used it to make cocktails. Is it redeemed by both hosts being in tears at the end? Decide for yourself. There is a fifth episode, it’s a wrap up, you can skip it. Despite the occasional tastelessness, this was entertaining and informative.
Dawn of Mantis (14 episodes running from 4/11 – 7/11/2025)
I’m not sure what the title of this podcast means. Mantis is a bug, and the word itself has a Greek origin meaning “prophet or seer” and sometimes the bug is a symbol of patience or stillness. Anyways.
Promoting itself as “a comedic journey through the mysteries of true crime,” Joe and Ivan’s fourteen episodes take the deepest dive into Peoples Temple that came out this year. Keeping in mind that humor is subjective, the funniest bit I found is when they discuss Jim’s gigolo career in Brazil where allegedly some rich woman paid him thousands of dollars for sex. The discussion then tries to guess how much Jim made per minute and whether he reported the income on a 1099 when he filed his taxes that year. They also have a great deal of merriment talking about when Jim “fiddled his gigglestick in front of a cop.”
They are respectful of the early Temple involvement with civil rights and of the commitment to making a better world that the membership had, at least until sometime in the 1970s. They don’t list their sources, but I can detect Raven and The Road to Jonestown in there. Be forewarned that the hosts’ understanding of socialism is somewhat limited. They are more freaked out by the COVID restrictions we endured than by anything that Donald Trump has done as president. But this is only brought up in Episode 2. There are a few minor mistakes here and there, but I think beers were involved and sometimes when you’re riffing on comedy, you slip up on a fact or two. Other than that, this is finely researched podcast and does a good job.
Conspirashy (09/17/2025)
That’s how it’s really spelled. Another comedy podcast with an unusual format. Ashi, who is British, does a quick 30-minute history then gets to the conspiracies. His main conspiracy is that when the CIA’s MK-ULTRA shut down in the US, it went to Guyana. Evidence:
- Jones used the same techniques including sleep deprivation, starvation, and drugs to manage people.
- The clean-up teams showed up way too fast not to have been already in place.
- The CIA shot and killed Jones.
In part three, he compares Conspirashy versus scientific reality, the latter being what most of us believe happened at Jonestown. In the end, he chooses conspiracy. Nothing new here, but the format is fun, and I got a few chuckles out of the comedy bits.
The Paranormal Lovers (08/24, 08/27/2025)
In addition to the podcast format, these two episodes appear on YouTube which is good because you can speed it up and get it the hell over with. It’s hosted by the husband-and-wife team of Felicia and Ian, with Felicia presenting the story while Ian says “Right” or – for a variation – “All right.” Their sources include Wikipedia, an AMC True Crime blog, and a website article on how starvation affects the brain. While they hit the right beats of the story, there are moments where I just wanted them to stop:
They think that Jim, based on how he looked, has some Black ancestry but “we’ll never know.”
Couldn’t Stephan’s DNA show us that?
They don’t know who Mao Tse-Tung is.
Aren’t you literally sitting in front of a computer connected to Google?
Jim had dinner with the governor of California at his apartment.
What?
Names are mispronounced, people are invented (who is Stacy Stoen????), Jonestown had a baseball team, and Jones had regular correspondence with Rosalyn Carter when it was one letter. Oh, and there are audio problems throughout the first episode. I think you can skip this.
American Loser (09/25/2025)
This podcast “puts the spotlight on second place.” And the subject is Leo Ryan. Why is Ryan in second place? Is it because Jones outlived him by a few hours? The reasoning is never explained.
It does describe Ryan as a congressional hero and focuses on his work before he got involved with Peoples Temple. The teaching job after the Watts riots (which the host had never heard of), the week spent in Folsom Prison, and the attempt to rein in America’s intelligence agencies are all covered before shifting to the final trip to Guyana and the tragic end. Is this worth listening to? On the one hand it is solely dedicated to Leo Ryan, but the host also says that Guyana is in Africa. I overlooked it because I heard worse this year. Your experience may differ.
Graveyard Grumbler (04/28, 5/19/2024)
The host is really, really, overly enthusiastic about the topic. He admits that he has not read any books about the topic (always a bad sign) and that someone else wrote the script, which I’m not sure he read before he started recording, since there are times when he pauses and says, “let me be sure I’m reading this right.”
He does bring up some novel points. Jim’s home life as a child might have been more stable if Big Jim – Jim Jones’ father – had been properly compensated for his war wounds. He questions whether Jim, an unsupervised and barely dressed small child was ever sexually assaulted in Lynn, which would explain some things.
These good points are tempered by the overall tone of the show. Maybe it’s my age, but he is annoying. The singing, the attempt at humor, the singing, the mispronunciations, and did I mention the singing! Then there are the mistakes. Based on the slang he uses, he thinks Jim was using cocaine. He doesn’t know that Jim’s rape of men was about power and dominance, not sex. Then comes the absolute lowest moment of this year’s crop of shows.
The third hour is a full playing of the “Death Tape” which he says brings him “nothing but joy” to present to his listeners, and he says “I love it”. You can hear children dying on that tape and he “loves it” and it brings him “joy” to present it to people. Every other podcast that mentions the “Death Tape” tells people not to listen to it and when they use clips, they warn people to skip ahead if it’s too much. In all the conversations I’ve had about Peoples Temple, I’ve never told anyone that the “Death Tape” even exists, much less told them to go listen to it. Go listen to Tim Carter talk about that day and let me know how much “joy” that brings you. Between the uber-creepy enthusiasm and the sloppy research, I think this one can be skipped.
Red Handed (12/12, 12/19/2024)
I love the British accents of these Hannah and Suruthi, I love the cadence and tone of their speech. They put Peoples Temple into the context of the civil rights movement and discuss that people, especially “good intelligent people” interested in “equality” want to belong to a group that is doing good work and that humans have evolved to want to belong to a community. They use Bible verses when discussing apostolic socialism, and they discuss the difference between religions and cults. (The latter involves a leader who can never admit mistakes and becomes a deity to his followers.) Nothing new is presented but the discussion is intelligent and there are few attempts at humor. However…
They totally screw up the Port Kaituma shootings. Here’s how it goes. The shooting starts while Leo Ryan and the defectors are still on the truck going to the airport. They are somehow not shot, and board the planes. The planes go down the runway but the tractor with the Red Brigade pulls in front of the planes, and they cannot take off. I guess they deplane – it’s never explained – and then they are shot.
I think when the positive aspects of this show are added up, it outweighs this mistake and overall, it’s worth a listen.
The Supernaturals (8/20, 8/27/2025)
Jake and Cal present two episodes but there isn’t a lot of information given beyond the basic story everyone else has told. The word “banal” appears more than once in my notes, so much so that I welcomed their mispronunciations as a distraction from the banality. The only new thing was a comparison of Peoples Temple to Heaven’s Gate. I guess every crime podcast has to cover Jim Jones. They did. Check the box and move on, fellas.
What’s Wrong with Us (7/13/2023)
This was an interesting premise in that they were reviewing the various documentaries about Peoples Temple that have come out over the last quarter century: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple, Jonestown: Paradise Lost, and Terror in the Jungle. They generally agree that Terror in the Jungle is the best one, although one of the hosts says that the jungle cinematography is so beautiful that it distracts the viewer from the terrible things being said in the narrative. They also postulate that if someone like Jim Jones were to start today, they would probably use Instagram or Twitch to try and build their following.
Unfortunately, a discussion of a film called The Sacrament, a barely fictionalized Peoples Temple ripoff, leads to a discussion about why they don’t like Eli Roth movies, which then leads to a discussion of why they don’t like Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and a discussion of Roman Polanski. They do come back to the original topic, but it never gets going again. Which is a shame, because no podcast has ever talked about Peoples Temple documentaries, although there have been reviews of them in print, including (shameless self-promotion) some by this author.
Borrowed Bones (04/01/2025) 
Hosted by Sarah and Cole, this podcast series about “family dynamics gone sideways,” builds on Cole’s previous articles done on Shirlee Fields for MLive and this website. They picked Shirlee because she was from Bay City, Michigan, where the hosts now live. They interviewed Shirlee’s classmates, none of whom knew what had happened to her, and pored through documents and tapes on this website to put together the best audio-biography they could. Since this is what is said to be the first of many Peoples Temple episodes, they also include the standard Peoples Temple overview from the 1950s until 1978. I liked that this told the story of rank-and-file members, I am hoping there will be more episodes about Peoples Temple members, but that future episodes won’t tell the entire Peoples Temples story again, that they can just tell listeners to listen to episode number 6. I’m interested in hearing where they go next.
History Dweebs (04/07/2025)
Another true crime and comedy podcast, this is second of two podcasts that focused on Leo Ryan’s story this year. I cannot review this because I wrote it and I only wrote the script, not the banter or the jokes. Maybe one of you can write a review and send it to me.
(Jason Dikes holds a degree in broadcast communications from Stephen F. Austin State University, an MA in history from the aforementioned institution, and an MLS from The University of North Texas. He currently is an adjunct professor American history at Austin Community College and a cataloging librarian for the City of Round Rock. His complete collection of articles for this site may be found here. He may be reached at jdikes@austincc.edu.)