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 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 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

it would take you to do this?

Yeah, not obsessed by choice, it kind of happened, but in the end exactly 20 years.

We turned in the end exactly 20 years we turned in the final manuscript I think a day to the

20th year and this wasn't a personal obsession with yours you were writing an article

let's fill people in.

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 a 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.

You know, never been interested, hasn't the story been written, you know, to death.

And she said, look, once we talk about it, you're going to 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 you know 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 last year in March when we turned the manuscript in

That is so crazy that it took that long

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