#1459 - Tom O'Neill

Tom O'Neill (0:00)

I'm ready.

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Okay. Tom, how are you?

Tom O'Neill (0:02)

Good, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Great to meet you.

Tom O'Neill (0:03)

You too.

Joe Rogan (0:04)

I've been deep into your book for the last two weeks, and 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 Sixties. And I think it's safe to say that everything that most people believe that happened during the Manson murders is 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 many years did it take you to do this?

Tom O'Neill (0:36)

Yeah, not obsessed by choice. It kind of happened, but in the end, exactly 20 years. We turned in the final manuscript, I think a day to the 20th year assignment.

Joe Rogan (0:48)

And this wasn't a personal obsession with yours. You were writing an article.

Let's fill people in.

Tom O'Neill (0:53)

Yeah, the beginning was, I was in between magazines and not working, and I got a call from an editor I'd worked with for years.

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, no thanks, never been interested. Hasn't the story been written for death?

And 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. Just trust me on that. And I think that if you look into it, you'll find an interesting story. I go, but what about the 30th anniversary? 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 year in March when we turned the manuscript in.

Joe Rogan (1:57)

That is so crazy that it took that long.

Tom O'Neill (2:00)

The magazine shut down five years later.

Joe Rogan (2:03)

So you never got anything printed in the magazine?

Tom O'Neill (2:06)

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. So I got it on the day after my 40th birthday, which is a time in any person's life where you're kind of re-evaluating things anyway. So I thought I needed the money and I needed a job. And I knew that I could get into Premier Magazine as a contributor on the masthead, which meant a yearly contract because all the people from my prior magazine had moved over.

And once I had a good story there, and this would have been the first, then I'd be set. So I agreed to do it. And long story, very long story short, 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, I had 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 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, 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.

Joe Rogan (3:31)

Because of you?

Tom O'Neill (3:32)

Well, that was kind of what was whispered around the offices. I never heard that, you know, that was ever substantiated. I'm a little worried that it had something to do with it. He went on to a career that was fine anyway, but when the new guy came in, he demanded the story right away. I mean, I understood that.

And at that point, I got a book agent through a friend, and my book agent got me out of my obligation to Premier.

Joe Rogan (4:00)

So Premier essentially paid for you to start your book.

Tom O'Neill (4:04)

Yeah, a lot of money.

Joe Rogan (4:05)

Oh my goodness.

Tom O'Neill (4:06)

Yeah, and that's, I'm actually, because it was resolved, not in the courts, but we all had to sign non-disclosures. So I didn't get entirely away with it for nothing, but at that point though, that was, I think, 2001, or late 2000, then I was on my own. I had to write a proposal and sell the proposal as a book. So that happened next, and finally in 2005 And when we took the proposal out, it was book length. It was 220 pages.