Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill

I'm ready.

Okay. Tom, how are you?

Good, Joe.

Great to meet you.

You, too.

I've been deep into your book for the last two weeks and, uh, we'll tell everybody what it's called right off the bat. It's called Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the '60s. And I think it's safe to say that everything that most people believe that happened during the Manson murders is a, a, a tiny fraction of what was going on behind the scenes, and this is what you have ... I mean, you've essentially been obsessed with this for ... How, how many years did it take you to do this?

Yeah, not obsessed by choice. It kinda happened.

(laughs)

But, uh, in the end, exactly 20 years. We turned in the final manuscript, uh, I think a day to the 20th year assignment.

And this wasn't a personal obsession with yours.

Never.

You were writing an article. L- l- let's fill people in.

The, yeah, the beginning was, uh, I was in between magazines, uh, and not working, and I got a call from an editor I'd worked with for years, um, and she was at Premier Magazine at that point, which was a monthly movie magazine. And she wanted me to do a story on the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Manson murders, which was 1999, happened in '69. And I was like, "Eh, no, no thanks." You know, never been interested, hasn't the story been written, you know, to death?

Right.

Uh, and, uh, she said, "Look, once we talk about it, you're gonna see Manson comes up much more often in popular culture than you're aware of. Uh, just trust me on that and I think that if you look into it, you'll find an interesting story." I go, "But, you know, what, what about the 30th anniversary? I, there, there's no angle." And she goes, "You've done it before. You'll find an angle." We had worked together a lot, and that began a spiral into kind of madness that finally ended last, last year in March when we turned the manuscript in.

That is so crazy that it took that long. (laughs)

I know. I know. The magazine shut down five years later.

So you never got the, you never got anything printed in the magazine?

Well, no. I mean, that's also a little bit of a complicated story, too. I got an assignment to do a normal feature, which is about three months, three and a half months, uh, so I got it on the day after my 40th birthday, which is a time in any m- person's life where you're kind of reevaluating things anyway, so I thought I needed the money (clears throat) and, uh, I needed a job and I knew that I could get into Premier Magazine as a contributor on the masthead, which meant a, a yearly contract because all the people from my prior magazine had moved over. And, uh, once I had a good story there, this would have been the first, then I'd be set. So I agreed to do it and long story, very long story short, uh, after a month or two when the story kind of started breaking open and I started finding holes in the official narrative and pursuing them, uh, I met with the editor-in-chief, Jim Miggs, and he agreed, once he saw all of the documentation I had and the evidence which was just, you know, a small portion of what I ended up having in the end, he agreed to blow the deadline for what would have been the anniversary issue of August '99 (clears throat) and he started contracting me by the month. And that continued for a year and a half. All I did was report the story on Premier's dime. He lost his job.