The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II

Summary

Summary of "Stuff You Should Know" Podcast Episode: "The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Stuff You Should Know
• Host/Author: iHeartPodcasts
• Episode: The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
• Release Date: March 27, 2025

Hosts:

• Josh Clark
• Chuck Bryant

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1. Introduction

In Part II of their two-part series on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant delve deeper into the investigation that followed King's murder, focusing on the manhunt for the assassin, James Earl Ray. They aim to uncover the complexities and controversies surrounding the case, including potential conspiracy theories and the impact of the assassination on American society.

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2. The Investigation and Manhunt

Timestamp: [01:12] – [08:35]

After the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI launched what is possibly the largest manhunt in its history to capture his assassin. The investigation cost millions of dollars and involved approximately 3,500 investigators. Notably, the FBI had been surveilling King since 1956 under a program ironically named "Racial Matters," which primarily focused on "matters of race" rather than racial issues themselves.

Key Points:

• FBI Surveillance: The FBI tracked King for 12 years, beginning in 1956, raising questions about their intentions and methods.

• J. Edgar Hoover's Hostility: The long-time FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, notoriously disliked King, publicly labeling him "the most notorious liar in the country" during a press conference ([02:23]).

  Chuck Bryant: "He called the most notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know, weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans." ([02:23])

  Josh Clark: "I read Martin Luther King's cool response to J. Edgar Hoover calling him the most notorious liar. No, no, he said that J. Edgar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to have said such a thing. Like he was sympathetic." ([02:50])

• Gun Evidence: The FBI found a .30-06 rifle believed to be the murder weapon. Although they couldn't conclusively link the bullet to the gun due to fragmentation, they traced the rifle's serial number to Aeromarine Supply in Birmingham, Alabama, which had sold it to Ray ([03:02]).

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3. James Earl Ray's Background

Timestamp: [18:40] – [37:00]

James Earl Ray emerged as the prime suspect due to fingerprints matching those on the rifle and his status as an escaped convict from Missouri. Ray's criminal history painted him as a petty criminal rather than a mastermind, raising suspicions about his sole responsibility in the assassination.

Key Points:

• Escaped Convict: Ray had escaped from a Missouri prison in 1967, where he was serving a 20-year sentence for multiple offenses, including armed robbery and mail fraud ([20:02]).

• Criminal Behavior: Ray's history was marked by bungled crimes, such as:

  • Dropping his ID during robberies.
  • Returning to previously robbed locations.
  • Committing unsuccessful robberies in London, including a bank robbery where he only acquired £100 and a jewelry store he failed to loot ([21:26] – [22:38]).

  Chuck Bryant: "He was a bungling petty gunman and burglar whose life of crime has mostly been one fizzle after another." ([20:13])

• Capture: Ray was apprehended in London when authorities noticed he possessed two passports under different aliases, leading to his identification as James Earl Ray ([11:05] – [12:00]).

  Chuck Bryant: "He was quickly identified as James Earl Ray. He had a .38 caliber pistol tucked in the back of his pants. Going to board a plane." ([11:57])

• Attempted Escape and Recantation: Shortly after pleading guilty to avoid the death penalty, Ray recanted his confession, asserting he was part of a larger conspiracy. He attempted to escape prison in 1977 but was recaptured and remained incarcerated until his death in 1998 ([17:17] – [37:00]).

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4. Capture and Trial

Timestamp: [06:52] – [18:34]

Following his flight to Toronto and subsequent travels to London and Lisbon, Ray was captured in London due to his possession of two conflicting Canadian passports. Upon his arrest, authorities found a .38 caliber pistol in his possession, which further solidified his role as the assassin.

Key Points:

• Fleeing the Scene: After assassinating King, Ray fled to Canada using forged passports, obtaining them by falsely claiming Canadian citizenship ([07:16] – [08:31]).

• Capture Mechanism: The presence of two passports under different aliases alerted authorities, leading to his swift arrest by London police without the need for advanced security measures like metal detectors prevalent today ([11:05] – [12:00]).

  Josh Clark: "As long as you didn't shoot it off because you were excited during takeoff in the plane, then they didn't really care." ([11:57])

• Legal Proceedings: Ray pleaded guilty on May 7 to avoid the death penalty, receiving a 99-year prison sentence. His attorney, Percy Foreman, advised this plea to circumvent a likely death sentence due to the high-profile nature of the crime ([17:17] – [18:34]).

  Chuck Bryant: "He was taken into custody, and on July 19, was flown back to the US to stand trial." ([12:10] – [12:34])

---

5. Conspiracy Theories and Civil Trial

Timestamp: [23:14] – [37:00]

Despite the apparent evidence against him, skepticism remained regarding Ray's sole responsibility for the assassination. Various conspiracy theories emerged, suggesting involvement from multiple parties, including government agencies and the Mafia.

Key Points:

• Culpability Doubts: Ray's relatively minor criminal background led many to question how he could orchestrate such a high-profile assassination alone ([24:06] – [25:12]).

• Conspiracy Theories:

  • Lloyd Jowers' Claims: In the late 1990s, Jowers, owner of a Memphis tavern located near the assassination site, alleged a conspiracy involving the FBI, Mafia, and local authorities, claiming he was orchestrated to kill King for financial gain ([33:06] – [35:12]).

    Chuck Bryant: "Lloyd Jowers said that just him alone was offered $100,000 to basically project manage the contract killing." ([34:22])

  • House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978): The committee acknowledged a likelihood of conspiracy but did not substantiate involvement from specific individuals like Raul ([25:45] – [27:17]).

  • Civil Trial Outcome: MLK's family sued Ray and Jowers for wrongful death. Represented by the same conspiracy-minded attorney, William Pepper, the family won the civil trial, with the jury finding Jowers and others responsible for King's death ([34:37] – [35:12]).

    Josh Clark: "The jury did decide that Jowers and others, including government agencies, had been responsible for King's death." ([35:12])

• Justice Department's Stance: A subsequent investigation by the Justice Department in 2000 deemed the conspiracy claims unfounded, attributing them to personal vendettas and unverified testimonies ([36:32] – [36:58]).

  Chuck Bryant: "Percy Forman, the original attorney for James Earl Ray, as far as he was concerned, he thought Ray acted alone." ([36:58])

• Financial Support: Investigations revealed Ray had access to funds, potentially through prison corruption, enabling him to sustain his flight and subsequent activities ([37:00] – [37:52]).

  Josh Clark: "One of them claimed that he was able to smuggle out $6,500 from the prison. And in today's money, that's about $60,000." ([37:30])

---

6. Impact and Legacy

Timestamp: [37:00] – [44:33]

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination had profound and immediate effects on American society, shifting public opinion and influencing legislative actions.

Key Points:

• Shift in Public Opinion: Polls indicated a significant increase in favorable views of King following his assassination. For instance, a survey showed alignment with King's views rose from 36% to 50% among university trustees within weeks of his death ([39:07] – [40:27]).

  Josh Clark: "Before the assassination, 36% of the respondents said that they held similar views to King. After the assassination, that rose to 50%." ([40:09])

• Legislative Impact:

  • Fair Housing Act of 1968: Leveraging the national mourning and shifted sentiments, President Lyndon B. Johnson successfully passed the Act, which had previously failed ([41:05]).

  • Federal Holiday: The campaign for a federal Martin Luther King Jr. Day began shortly after his death. Despite initial resistance, notably from Arizona, the holiday was established in 1983 and first observed in 1986 ([44:27]).

    Chuck Bryant: "The national holiday. The campaign for that federal holiday began just a few days after he was killed in 1968, and it would be installed in 1983." ([44:27])

• Potential Trajectory Had He Lived:

  • Continued Civil Rights Advocacy: King likely would have continued his work, potentially expanding into LGBTQ rights, influenced by his close association with Bayard Rustin.

  • Political Landscape: His ongoing activism might have influenced political dynamics, especially regarding the Vietnam War and other social issues. However, historians largely agree he would not have pursued a presidential run ([43:31] – [44:33]).

    Josh Clark: "From what I saw, most historians say probably not. That was never an aspiration of his." ([43:36])

• Legacy: King's assassination solidified his status as a martyr for civil rights, intensifying his influence on subsequent generations and social movements.

---

7. Conclusion

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. remains a pivotal moment in American history, marked by an extensive FBI investigation, the capture of an unlikely assassin in James Earl Ray, and enduring conspiracy theories questioning the true motives and collaborators behind the act. The event not only reshaped public opinion and legislative agendas but also cemented King's legacy as an enduring symbol of the fight for civil rights and social justice.

Notable Quote:

Josh Clark: "It was happening in real time. And we know that thanks to that poll." ([40:26])

This quote underscores the immediate and tangible impact King's assassination had on societal attitudes and the legislative process in the United States.

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Note: The episode includes various advertisements and promotions for other podcasts and sponsors, which have been excluded from this summary to maintain focus on the core content regarding the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck. And this is part two of our two parter on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Where we left off with part one was the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. And we're going to pick up now with the investigation and the manhunt. And while we're talking about that, we might as well go ahead and say it's still perhaps the largest manhunt in FBI history, depending on who you ask, cost a couple of million bucks in those dollars. 3,500 investigators. And it was all just a bit awkward because as we all know, or maybe some people don't know this, but the FBI had been tracking Martin Luther King Jr. Since 1956, so for 12 years under a program called Racial Matters. Racial Matters.

[Josh Clark]

And I don't think they meant like matters like race Matters.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I think they meant the other way, like the matters of race.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then in 1963, they started tapping his phones under the Communist Infiltration Program. And J. Edgar Hoover was still around at the time because it seems like he was there for 300 years.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he didn't like Martin Luther King Jr. He called the most notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know, weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans. And so Hoover didn't like the guy yet he was the guy kind of at the top of this huge investigation.

[Josh Clark]

I read Martin Luther King's cool response to J. Edgar Hoover calling him the most notorious liar.

[Chuck Bryant]

Get bent.

[Josh Clark]

No, no, he said that J. Edgar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to have said such a thing. Like he was sympathetic.

[Chuck Bryant]

Geez, talk about the high road, man.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so the FBI gets ahold of that.30 06 rifle that was determined to be the murder weapon. They couldn't actually conclusively link that bullet to the gun. Cause the shell had been fragmented. But it was the same caliber. And everybody was like, come on, it's the gun. Can we all just agree to that?

[Josh Clark]

How many rifles do you guys have just laying around in Memphis that day?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Dumped minutes after by a guy who sped away in a Mustang.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Hundreds of. Just 100ft or so away from the murder scene. So, yeah, they couldn't conclusively link that to the gun, but they were able to trace the serial number and they traced it back to a sporting goods store in Birmingham, Alabama, called Aeromarine Supply. And they confirmed that it had been purchased just a few days before MLK was assassinated.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, along with a scope and a gentleman who said that he was going hunting on a hunting trip with his brother.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Because. Yeah, you have to be like, that's believable. Right. When you're buying a gun, you gotta have a cover story.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And under an alias under the name Harvey Lohmeyer.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So two weeks after the killing, they figured out that the prints on the gun matched those of a guy named James Earl Ray. And at the time, James Earl Ray had been an escaped convict from a state prison in Missouri. For basically a year, he'd been on the run. So now we had a suspect and we had photos. And they started circulating it around to people who had putatively interacted with James Earl Ray. Including the guy at the Aeromarine supply store who sold him the gun.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So he was like, that's the guy. There were witnesses we mentioned earlier in Part one at the Bessie Brewer boarding house. They also looked at pictures and they were like, yeah, that's the guy we saw running away. And they went to the hotel clerk or the boarding house clerk, and they said, yeah, this guy signed in. That's him for sure. Under the name John Willard. So he had multiple aliases. And that portable radio that they found in the bundle had a scratched out ID number. And they eventually figured out that that was his prison radio. It had his. His inmate number on it. So he escaped. Prison was like, I'm taking my radio.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It seems pretty conclusive that James Earl Ray would have been the shooter, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So they issued an indictment for his arrest for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. On May 7, a couple months after. Or no, a month after MLK was murdered and an international manhunt began. I know the FBI was definitely concentrating on the United States, but they didn't rule out the possibility that he had started to go abroad. And so they issued it far and wide. A wanted poster with his. His data and his photos on it.

[Chuck Bryant]

So the FBI started tracking his movements. He's got all these aliases in that year that he was on the lam. After the shooting, he was into politics for a little while, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace, his presidential campaign. He was in LA for a little while. He took dance lessons. He went to bartending school. He lived in Mexico for like a month or so, trying to become a pornography director under the name Eric Salvo Galt. That didn't work out. So he left Mexico, came back to the States, and apparently in like, the month or so before the assassination, he had been stalking King and had followed him from Atlanta to Memphis.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So it seemed like the month before he murdered Martin Luther King Jr. He suddenly got that idea in his head because none of his movements suggested that he had even focused on Martin Luther King at all up to that point. After the assassination, James Earl Ray fled to Toronto. It's eventually where he landed first.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think you mean Toronto.

[Josh Clark]

Sorry. I'm sorry, Tarana. I know that, too. Thanks, Chuck. So at the time, apparently, if you were an American criminal in Canada, they were very, very trusting at the time. They basically said, if you swear that you're a Canadian citizen, you give us your name, we'll send you a passport. And that's what crooks would do. They would go to Canada when they were on the run. They would look up old newspapers at, like, the library and find birth announcements from about the same time that they were born, finding people who were their age. And they would get their name, they would get their mother's maiden name sometimes, and apparently you didn't even need that. You just fill out this form, say your name, say, yes, I swear I'm a Canadian citizen, and mail off for a passport which would be mailed back to you. Toot suite. And now you had a fraudulent but official and legitimate passport that you could use to travel the world with under a new alias.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And this time his alias Was because, you know, it was a real dude. In fact, the guy was a cop. Pretty ironic. But his name was Raymond George. I guess. Sneed S N E Y D. I.

[Josh Clark]

Heard sneyd from somebody once.

[Chuck Bryant]

Snaid.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know if that was definitive.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, well, it's good that we spelled it out. Cause that'll come into play in a minute here. But from Toronto, he went to London. He was actually in London a couple of times. He passed through London on his way to Lisbon after that first flight from Canada. And he was going to Lisbon because he was hoping to go to Africa before the murder. And then afterward, his long term plan was to go to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Because in 1965, a 5% white minority there had assumed independence from the UK. And he was like, I'm gonna go to Rhodesia and I'm gonna integrate into this small white minority and become a paid mercenary.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So I mean, he went to Lisbon hoping to secure passage to Africa. And while he was there, he's like, I got a great idea. Surely that people are on my trail. The feds are on my trail now. And they might even know my alias. So I need a new alias. I'm going to go to the Canadian consulate here in Lisbon. I'm going to tell them that they misspelled my name on my passport. So he went there and he told the Canadian consulate there that his last name actually is spelled with an A, not a D. And they're like, okay, whatever, here's your new passport with your last name spelled correctly. And he had a new alias, Ramon George Sneh Ya instead of Snade. So there was one letter change. And apparently that satisfied James Earl Ray that he had a new alias now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And we'll get to who Ray was a little bit. But the one takeaway from everything that I've read is he was not a very smart person.

[Josh Clark]

Not a criminal mastermind. He was no brain from Pinky in the Brain.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. Also because he did not throw that first passport away. And that would be his undoing. Like we said, he could not secure that passage to Africa. So he went back to London to figure out what his next move was. He called. This is sort of a weird part of the story. He called a reporter named Ian Colvin at the Daily Mail's foreign desk. And I don't know if this guy had written articles about it, mercenaries or something.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know either.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's the only thing I can figure out because he called this random reporter and said, hey, you Got any contacts for these mercenaries? Colvin was like, no, but if you're. I guess if you're looking to get into that kind of thing, check into Brussels, because that's where you might have better luck. It's a very strange little side part of this story, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

It really is. So James Earl Ray was like, thank you much, and starts booking a flight to Brussels from London. And it was in London, on his way to Brussels, that he finally got nabbed, but not because somebody noticed his mugshot or wanted poster and saw that he was him, but because he had those two Canadian passports. And he had them in the same wallet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Two different names.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And the passport checker noticed that he had two passports and asked him about it. And I guess a cop was standing nearby and stepped over and was like, hey, why don't you join us in the back room? We've got some questions for you. And that was it for Ramon George Snade Sneha. Yeah. He was quickly identified as James Earl ray. He had a.38 caliber pistol tucked in the back of his pants. Going to board a plane.

[Chuck Bryant]

You could do that back then because they didn't even have metal detectors.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. As long as you didn't shoot it off because you were excited during takeoff in the plane, then they didn't really care.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So he was confirmed as James Earl Ray. He was taken into custody, and on July 19, was flown back to the US to stand trial. And that seems like a great place for our first break. Sonoro and iHeart's Mike Cultura podcast Network present the Setup, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Guillen and Christian Navarro.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

But when the perfect man walks into his life. Well, I guess I'm saying I like you, you like me. He actually is too good to be true.

[Josh Clark]

This is a con.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm conning you to get the Delano painting. We could do this together. To pull off this heist, they'll have to get close and jump into the deep end together. That's a huge leap, Fernando, don't you think? After you, Chulito. But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take. Fernando's never going to love you as much as he loves this job. That painting is ours. Listen to the Setup as part of the Mike Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Clark]

Welcome to Pod of Rebellion, our new.

[Chuck Bryant]

Star Wars Rebels Rewatch podcast. I'm Vanessa Marshall.

[Josh Clark]

Hi. I'm Tia Sircar.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm Taylor Gray. And I'm Jon Lee Brody.

[Josh Clark]

But you may also know us as Harris Syndulla's Specter 2, Sabine Wren, Specter.

[Chuck Bryant]

5, and Ezra Bridger, Specter 6 from Star Wars Rebels.

[Josh Clark]

Wait, I wasn't on Star Wars Rebels.

[Chuck Bryant]

Am I in the right place?

[Josh Clark]

Absolutely. Each week we're going to rewatch and discuss an episode from the series and.

[Chuck Bryant]

Share some fun behind the scenes stories. Sometimes we'll be visited by special guests like Steve bloom voices Zaborillio, Spectre 4, or Dante Bosco voices Jaquel and many others.

[Josh Clark]

Sometimes we'll even have a lively debate.

[Chuck Bryant]

And we'll have plenty of other fun surprises and trivia too.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, and me? Well, I'm the lucky ghost crew Stowaway.

[Chuck Bryant]

Who gets to help moderate and guide the discussion each week. Kinda like how Kanan guided Ezra in the ways of the Force. You see what I did there?

[Josh Clark]

Nicely done, John.

[Chuck Bryant]

Thanks, Tia.

[Josh Clark]

So hang on cause it's gonna be a fun ride. Cue the music.

[Chuck Bryant]

Listen to Potter Rebellion on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm having conversations with some interesting folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reach the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use. I'll be joined by innovative leaders like chairman and CEO of Health Beauty, Tarang Amin. The way I approach risk is constantly try things and actually make it okay to fail. I'm sitting down with legendary singer, songwriter and philanthropist Jewel. I wanted a way to do something that I loved for the rest of my life. We're also hearing how leaders brought their businesses out of unprecedented times, like Stephane Bonsel, CEO of Moderna. It becomes a human decision to decide.

[Josh Clark]

To throw by the window your business.

[Chuck Bryant]

Strategy and to do what you think.

[Josh Clark]

Is the right thing for the world.

[Chuck Bryant]

Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever important creative spark, the magic. Listen to math and magic stories from the frontiers of Marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so James Earl Ray's been taken into custody and he's flown back to the United States on July 19th to stand trial. And the whole world is watching. They want to know why the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr did that, why he murdered MLK why? What was the point? What was the reason? They also wanted to know if he had been working with other people, because from the outset, people were. The public was just openly skeptical that there was some conspiracy that had resulted in MLK's murder. And the world got none of that because James Earl Ray pled guilty instead of going to trial. And. And there was a paper reporting on the case who was at this hearing where he pled guilty and said that it brought a shockingly swift ending to the case. And everybody was like, what just happened? And that was essentially that there was no trial ever and there were no facts presented. So it was just like, yep, I did it. Send me to jail.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. His attorney at the time, Percy Foreman, said, well, you know, if you go to a jury trial, you're probably gonna get a death sentence because of, you know, because of the murder and its impact on the country, basically, like, you're not going to avoid the electric chair. So if you plead guilty, you can get the maximum life sentence, which is 99 years in prison in Tennessee. And he said, that's probably the right route to take. So Ray took it. It was a two hour affair in court. No one got the satisfaction of hearing any of the evidence. It also meant he wouldn't be eligible for parole for 30 years, whereas if he had gotten a life sentence and not the 99, he could have gotten out in 12 and a half. But just three days after he pleaded guilty, he recanted and tried for the rest of his life to get a new trial. Tried to escape. He did escape. In fact, if you listen to our Barclay marathon episode, he escaped successfully for three days in 1977 and was picked up in Brushy Mountain, where that race takes place. But he would eventually die in prison in 1998 at the age of 70, which would also been the year he was first eligible for parole.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And you said earlier that we were going to talk a little bit about James Earl Ray and his criminal career.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

So he was born in Illinois, but mostly grew up in Missouri. And he was the oldest of nine kids. And his family was impoverished. His father was a convict himself who didn't work very often. His mother was, as James Earl Ray put it, a woman of very limited intelligence, barely able to communicate. And she also drank very heavily. And there was a report card from grade school that said his attitude toward regulations was that he violates all of them. This was him as a kid, and he didn't improve very much as an adult. He dropped out of high school at 16, worked for a while, and then he joined the Army.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he joined the Army. Yeah. He dropped out of high school at 16. King was in college at 15. So just contrast the two situations. In 46, he joined the army after being laid off from his civilian job in the Army. He was charged with drunkenness, with breaking arrest. He served three months in the Army. Clink. Hard labor for that. He was discharged less than honorably for, quote, ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service in 1948. So just a couple of years in the army and then was a drifter and a. And a petty criminal who was in and out of jail over and over.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And he was serving a 20 year sentence for robbery in Missouri. He started it in 1960. When he broke out in 1967 and began that year on the lamb. That culminated in the assassination of MLK.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know, it was really a 20 year prison sentence for everything. Cause it was a pretty small, like, robbery at Kroger that wouldn't have gotten a 20 year. But he had other armed robbery convictions. He had mail fraud convictions and escape attempts. So it was like, hey, we're just gonna try and put you away for a while.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And if you're curious how he escaped, he hid in a bread delivery truck that was leaving the prison.

[Josh Clark]

I heard that too. Yeah, you would have found me eating loaves of bread, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

With your little portable radio. Prison radio.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. Just snapping my fingers with a mouthful of bread. So his criminal history. Just because you're a lifetime criminal doesn't mean you're good at it. And James Earl Ray is an excellent example of that. Time magazine described him back in 1977 as a bungling petty gunman and burglar whose life of crime has mostly been one fizzle after another. And they weren't lying. Because some of his greatest hits that they went on to cite was that at one crime scene, he dropped identification. He dropped his id.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

One holdup in a neighborhood. He got lost as he was making his getaway. Ended up back driving back into the neighborhood where he just robbed somebody and was caught by the police who'd arrived on the scene by then.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Who are apparently surprised. I imagine they were like, oh, wait a minute, is that him coming back?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Get a load of this guy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Another time he came back to rerob a place he had already robbed. Re entered the window to get more stuff.

[Josh Clark]

That is a no, no. That is crime 101.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Like, get out of there. I'm Not a criminal, but I would get out of there.

[Josh Clark]

So even when he was in London too, when he was on the run after assassinating mlk, he carried out not one, but two bungled robberies.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's crazy.

[Josh Clark]

One was a bank and he managed to only get £100 from a bank.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

The other was a jewelry store where he got nothing because the owner knocked the gun out of his hand and pressed the alarm. So James Earl Ray ran away.

[Chuck Bryant]

And these are Londoners, they're not used to knocking guns out of hands. And this guy still managed to do it.

[Josh Clark]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. He just was not a very good criminal. Even though he tried it over and over again and he was successful. I mean, like he did successfully rob people and break into places and all that. But if you put it all together, he didn't have like a violent criminal rap sheet. He was just kind of this petty criminal. That's how he supported himself in life, as, as a criminal who went from that to murdering one of the most important Americans in history in one single action, seemingly overnight. And a lot of people say that just doesn't add up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know, we don't lend our show and ourselves to conspiracy. We're not conspiracy minded generally.

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

But you don't have to be to look at this and say he probably didn't act alone. It just doesn't add up, like you said. So there have been congressional committees over the years. There have been family members of Martin Luther King Jr. That said, yeah, this was part of a conspiracy. There's never been any solid agreement on what kind of conspiracy and who else was behind it. And we're not gonna get into the nitty gritty of all the. There's a lot of. There's a lot of discounted stuff and stuff that rabbit holes you shouldn't even go down. So we're not going to get into those, but we are going to talk about the legit idea of a conspiracy and who could have been involved. For real.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because again, how did this petty criminal plan an assassination that he successfully carried out? And then also panic, in a panic, drop this, the murder weapon, and ran off in a place where it would be found within a minute or two.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Where did he get the funding that he would need to support himself for a year on the lam and then to travel abroad to flee after the assassination? These are just a few of the questions people have come up with. And the obvious solution is that he had help in some way, shape or form. But another really big question that I think that a lot of people overlook is why, like, why did he murder Martin Luther King Jr. He wasn't known as a fanatic. He was a racist. And like we said, he supported George Wallace for his segregationist presidential bid. But he wasn't like a fanatic. And also, like, he didn't have any particularly deep emotions one way or another for mlk. He just was his murderer, and it just does not make a lot of sense.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So after he retracted that confession, just days after his conviction, he started saying, I was set up, and I was set up by a guy named Raul. So supposedly he had a lot of interactions with this Raul guy, but he went from describing him as a Latino with blonde hair to a French Canadian with red hair. Nobody ever witnessed him with anyone that looked like either one of those people. A lot of people think there is no Raul at all, but he still could have had help from someone else.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So you mentioned congressional committees that concluded that there was some sort of conspiracy. One of them was House Select Committee on assassinations in 1978. And they said that there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. King, but they didn't think like Raul was involved or anything like that. It was much more pedestrian and mundane and in my opinion, than much more likely as far as the conspiracy theories go. But they put it on two prominent but shady St. Louisians. I'm pretty sure that's what you call people from St. Louis. One was a former stockbroker who became a motel owner. His name was John R. Kaufman. The other was a patent lawyer in town named John H. Sutherland. Both of them were dead by the time the committee hearings were held in 1978. But they supposedly put a bounty on MLK's head. And James Earl Ray, whose brother was a tavern owner in St. Louis at the time, heard about this bounty and decided that he would go ahead and murder MLK and collect on the bounty. And I also saw that he probably believed that as a white man, he would never be convicted of murdering a black man in the South. And even if he did, George Wallace was definitely going to win the 1968 election and George Wallace would pardon him. So if you put all that together, it really seems like a pretty legitimate explanation for the whole thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. As far as Martin Luther King, Jr's widow, Coretta Scott King, she always thought the FBI might have had something to do with it. She knew that they had been surveilled and their phones had been tapped. She thought they were possible bad actors. This is sort of startling. And in fact, it startled the country in the late 90s. But they came around to believing James Earl Ray. Dexter Scott King, one of his sons, visited James Earl Ray in prison. They pushed for him to get an appeal. He apparently asked him point blank, like, did you kill my father? And James Earl Ray said, no, I didn't. No. And then apparently he also said, but like I say, sometimes these questions are difficult to answer. Sometimes you have to make your own evaluation and maybe come to the conclusion. I think that could be done today, but not 30 years ago.

[Josh Clark]

Which is.

[Chuck Bryant]

None of that makes any sense.

[Josh Clark]

No. Because it isn't difficult to say you either did or you did not commit murder.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. But as shocking as this meeting was, they got on board and said, I don't think you did this. I think you were Patsy. I think you were set up. And a lot of Americans were confused and a lot were offended. Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. David Garrow, said that Dexter King's support of Ray was egregious and embarrassing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I say we take a break and we come back and kind of stick with the late 90s because they were kind of. The 90s were a big decade for conspiracy theories and the ML Kate assassination. How about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Josh Clark]

Welcome to Pod of Rebellion, our new.

[Chuck Bryant]

Star Wars Rebels Rewatch podcast. I'm Vanessa Marshall.

[Josh Clark]

Hi, I'm Tia Sircar.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm Taylor Gray. And I'm John Lee Brody.

[Josh Clark]

But you may also know us as.

[Chuck Bryant]

Harrison Dula, Spectre 2, Sabine Wren, Specter 5, and Ezra Bridger, Specter 6 from Star Wars Rebels.

[Josh Clark]

Wait, I wasn't on Star Wars Rebels.

[Chuck Bryant]

Am I in the right place?

[Josh Clark]

Absolutely. Each week we're going to rewatch and discuss an episode from the series and.

[Chuck Bryant]

Share some fun behind the scenes stories. Sometimes we'll be visited by special guests like Steve Bloom voices Zabarelio's Spectre 4, or Dante Bosco voices Jaquel and many others.

[Josh Clark]

Sometimes we'll even have a lively debate.

[Chuck Bryant]

And we'll have plenty of other fun surprises and trivia too.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, and me, well, I'm the lucky ghost cruise stowaway who gets to help.

[Chuck Bryant]

Moderate and guide the discussion each week. Kind of like how Kanan guided Ezra and the ways of the Force. You see what I did there?

[Josh Clark]

Nicely done, John.

[Chuck Bryant]

Thanks, Tia. So hang on.

[Josh Clark]

Cause it's gonna be a fun ride. Cue the.

[Chuck Bryant]

Listen to Potter Rebellion on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm having conversations with some interesting folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reach the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use. I'll be joined by innovative leaders like Chairman and CEO of Health Beauty, Tarang Amin. The way I approach risk is constantly try things and actually make it okay to fail. I'm sitting down with legendary singer, songwriter and philanthropist Jewel.

[Josh Clark]

I wanted a way to do something.

[Chuck Bryant]

That I loved for the rest of my life. We're also hearing how leaders brought their businesses out of unprecedented times, like Stephane Bonsell, CEO of Moderna. It becomes a human decision to decide.

[Josh Clark]

To throw by the window your business.

[Chuck Bryant]

Strategy and to do what you think.

[Josh Clark]

Is the right thing for the world.

[Chuck Bryant]

Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math and the ever important creative spark, the magic. Listen to math and stories from the frontiers of Marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey.

[Josh Clark]

We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcase a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like, he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives.

[Chuck Bryant]

Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit adoptuskids.org to learn more. Brought to you by Adopt Us Kids, the U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. So there's an attorney named William Pepper who is a very conspiracy theory minded attorney. He became James Earl Ray's attorney eventually. And he's not someone that a lot of people thought a lot of. In his career, he'd been described as disgraceful by some, the most gullible person I've ever met by someone else. He was readily and willing to just malign innocent people to get his theories out there. And I remember this happening. I didn't watch it, but on the 25th anniversary of King's murder. So I guess somewhere in the mid-90s, he sold HBO on producing and broadcasting a mock trial TV special of James Earl Ray in which Ray was acquitted by the mock jury.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and so that was, you know, ooh, that's crazy. But it's a mock trial on HBO and it's a mock jury. It doesn't mean anything. It just basically promoted William Pepper and his theories. But after that special was aired, conspiracy theories about the MLK assassination got a real boost because a guy named Lloyd Jowers came forward. He said he was inspired to come forward by the series and come clean, essentially, after all of these years. And he owned a tavern in Memphis called Jim's Grill, which just happened to be located beneath Bessie Brewer's boarding house, where the fatal shot that killed MLK was fired from. And Lloyd Jowers said that he was part of a big, giant conspiracy to murder MLK that included the Memphis police, the FBI, the Mafia himself, and some other just tangential players who were all coming together to kill King in order to collect on a bunch of money. Lloyd Jowers said that just him alone was offered $100,000 to basically project manage the contract killing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I feel like if you're floating a conspiracy about an assassination, if you just throw out, like, local cops and Mafia, then you're probably halfway there.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Oh, definitely. That'll get everybody's attention.

[Chuck Bryant]

So Martin Luther King Jr. S family sued him for wrongful death in civil court. Again, this is not a criminal trial or anything. They didn't want money. They wanted a hundred bucks. They basically wanted to get all these claims heard in court and have it out in public. And this is sort of shocking as well. The family was represented by that attorney, William Pepper, who had represented James Earl Ray. The jury did decide that Jowers and others, including government agencies, had been responsible for King's death. So they actually won that civil trial.

[Josh Clark]

They did. And I read two things. I read that Dexter King basically said, like, we did this so that, you know, to prove that the investigation needed to be reopened. And then he also said, regardless of whether it gets reopened or not, this is like the period on the sentence for us like this. This just basically supports everything we've always said.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

The Justice Department, their civil rights division, had simultaneously launched an investigation into Lloyd Jowers claims. I guess they seemed legitimate enough. But also, this investigation entailed claims made by a former FBI agent named Donald Wilson. And Wilson said that he had been, I guess he had been one of the people who had searched through the Mustang that James Earl Ray got away in and that he had found some papers in this Mustang that had info about the JFK assassination. Okay. I think Donald Wilson was like, how can I get people to listen? Jfk. He also said that the name Raul was mentioned in it as well in these papers. And so the Justice Department starts looking into it, and they concluded in a report in 2000 that this is all just kind of BS, to paraphrase.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, basically, he was out for a book deal is what they concluded. Percy Forman, the original attorney for James Earl Ray, as far as he was concerned, he thought Wray acted alone. His biographer, William Bradford Huey, also said, yeah, I think he acted alone. And he was trying to just become a bigger criminal and, like, impress larger criminals that he was a valuable guy to work with.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

There was an investigative reporter, too, who investigated James Earl Ray, as investigative reporters do. His name was George McMillan. He interviewed a bunch of Ray's fellow prisoners from the Missouri prison that he broke out of in 1967. And they were like, yeah, he was a huge drug dealer in prison. Like, he was rolling in it. One of them claimed that he was able to smuggle out $6,500 from the prison. And in today's money, that's about $60,000.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So that alone, if true, satisfies that really big question about how could he's this petty criminal, support himself for a year on the lam? 60k can go a long way, especially if you're committing other crimes. But, yeah, it sounds like he blew a lot of it on bartending school and dance lessons. Still, you could live for a year on 60K, no problem.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And he had to buy some of that camera equipment because he tried to be a porn director in Mexico.

[Josh Clark]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So I guess we're at the point now where we can kind of talk a little bit about had the sliding doors gone another way and had that march gone forward on April 4, and maybe James Earl Ray doesn't get that shot. What would have happened had King been around? I guess we'll talk at first about what happened since that did occur was that he was an instant martyr. For all practical purposes. He was sainted in that moment. It was just so sudden. It was so violent. And the polling. We talked about polling in episode one about how white Americans felt about him. In 1966, people polled, 36% of all Americans had a favorable opinion of King, 27% of white America. And in 2011, that number had gone to 93% of white Americans had a favorable view of King, and 81% of all American adults said he had a positive impact on the US so that's from 66 to 2011. But that was also happening at the time, like in the days and months before and after. There was a stark difference, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. There was an almost immediate Change in opinion of him after he died. It was like the band Cinderella said, you don't know what you got till it's gone.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

There was this just complete happenstance study that had been carried out in February and March of 1968, where they sent 10,000 surveys to college and university trustees, I guess, to take a pulse on the university and college trustee subculture that asked, among other things, how they felt about Martin Luther King, how they felt about his views, how much they aligned with their own views. And after MLK was assassinated, they went through and they separated the surveys that they'd received before his death and after his death. And there was a stark difference. Before he was assassinated, 36% of the respondents said that they held similar views to King. After the assassination, that rose to 50%. This is within a couple weeks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Before the assassination, 30%. More than 30% said that King's views were very unlike theirs. Afterward, it dropped down to 19%.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So it was happening in real time. And we know that thanks to that, that poll.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And it's really hard to overstate the effect, the immediate effect that his assassination had on the conscience of the United States. I think it really made a lot of probably everyday racist Americans really rethink themselves. You know, that at the time, you could dislike Martin Luther King Jr. He was alive, he was railing against Vietnam and going on about poor people and everything. But now he's gone, murdered. And just something like that can really shock people into focusing more on themselves and on their viewpoints than otherwise you would.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, one thing that definitely came out of this was Lyndon Johnson kind of used this to get the Fair housing Act of 1968 passed. It had failed in 66 and 67, so it wasn't a bill that looked like it had an immediate future. So he kind of did the same thing with the Civil Rights act of 64 right after JFK was assassinated. So very politically savvy to kind of get these things passed through when the nation would have been more on board with that and politicians would have been more on board, maybe wouldn't have been able to get it passed through in 68. And then he had already announced that he wasn't running for reelection before the assassination. So given what happened with Nixon and then Reagan coming in, if King had lived, it's doubtful that he would have had the kind of relationship that he had with Johnson with those two guys.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But remember also that he and Johnson had already had a rift because of MLK's. More open, vocal stance against Vietnam. And, you know, he would have definitely kept railing against Vietnam, so that rift would have widened even further. And also general Americans opinions of him probably would have declined even further because, remember, after that 1967 Vietnam speech, his popularity, especially among white Americans, just plummeted in part because he called the US Government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. That's a pretty direct shot against, you know, the government. And if you are all about the government and this, you know, black civil rights leaders saying stuff like that, you're going to take your angst out on the black civil rights leader who's saying it, rather than stopping and questioning whether he's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. A lot of people point out that, like the. The he would have continued to work for civil rights for black Americans. Americans, but also may have started championing the cause of the LGBTQ rights as a community. Coretta Scott King vocally supported this stuff after his passing. And Martin Luther King Jr. Worked very closely with a gentleman named Bayard Rustin, an openly gay civil rights advocate who could have kept himself in the closet, but very much was out. And so people think that, yeah, King probably would have taken up that cause as well later on.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. We did an episode from 2015 on the march on Washington. We talked about Bayard Rustin a lot.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

He's also often compared to Nelson Mandela. Had MLK live, people say, like he might have followed some sort of trajectory similar to Nelson Mandela's, but Mandela became president of South Africa, would MLK have ever run for president? From what I saw, most historians say probably not. That was never an aspiration of his. And in fact, he actually turned down an offer to run on a third party ticket, the People's Party ticket, for the 1968 election with pediatrician, the author of the very famous baby book, Dr. Benjamin Spock, who had turned anti war activist as his vice president. So he probably would not have ever run for president, but he still would have remained a very potent, powerful voice for civil rights for everybody. But had he not been assassinated, I don't think his legacy would be anything like it is today.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. How great, though, would it have been to be able to Source a King Spock 68T shirt or bumper sticker?

[Josh Clark]

I guess somebody dummied that up or else it got far enough that somebody made buttons, because I saw an image of that on the Internet. I don't know if it was made up or not. You can't tell these days.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know, you can't and then this all culminated finally with Martin Luther King, Jr. The national holiday. The campaign for that federal holiday began just a few days after he was killed in 1968, and it would be installed in 1983. Took a little while. Representative John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, reintroduced that legislation every single year with the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus, which he helped found. And it was denied every single year until 15 years later, when President Ronald Reagan signed that bill, making the third Monday in January a federal holiday. And then it was first observed in 1986 by everybody very famously, except for Arizona. They were the last holdout. And I remember this happening very well.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, me too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Mainly because of the great, great song, by the Time I Get to Arizona by Public Enemy. That came out. So we got that out of it, which is pretty great. But the NFL was like, you know what? You're not getting the Super bowl in 1993. And then after that, they said, all right, we'll get on board so we can have a Super Bowl.

[Josh Clark]

Whatever it takes by any means necessary.

[Chuck Bryant]

Arizona, get it together.

[Josh Clark]

They did. That was way back in 1993. Those policymakers are all dead and gone by now.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. I lived in Arizona. I love that place.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, that's right. Yuma, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Did you ever take the 310?

[Chuck Bryant]

No. No trains.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Well, since I made Chuck laugh, I think that we should end on a high note here and say that it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. By pointing out a Josh math error.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, great.

[Chuck Bryant]

So sorry.

[Josh Clark]

Let's do it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, guys. I always laugh when hearing when you quickly correct yourselves before the emails start. I didn't hear that one today, though. And I'm sure you'll get more than just this email. Actually, Andrew, we didn't. You were the only one that caught this.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, nice. Way to go, Andrew.

[Chuck Bryant]

This was in the. What would this have been? Gps, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, by the way, I never posted that. That. That. What do you call it when things intersect? The Venn diagram that I sent you that said. Bingo. I need to put that on our Instagram.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, please, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'll do it. Hey, guys. When Josh was describing the 2D trilateration circles and distance from Denver, he said to draw a circle around the named city with a diameter of distance described. But that would be a circle half too small. You need a circle with a radius for that distance or a diameter of twice that radius. Your compass would be set to the width of the distance you are from the city. And you draw that circle, which would give you a circle around a city where every point on that circle is that described distance from city center point.

[Josh Clark]

That makes sense.

[Chuck Bryant]

And this is from an electrical engineer in Knoxville, Tennessee, Andrew White, who said, it makes me happy to listen and learn from you all each day. So I. I trust you, Andrew, because you're an electrical engineer.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Andrew White, the fastest compass in Tennessee. Thanks a lot, Andrew. I totally get that. That was very well explained. Better than I explained it, for sure. And if you want to be like Andrew and correct my math, there's not really much sport in it, but you can still do it anyway by sending us an email to stuffpodcasteartradio.com.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, sis, it's Dr. Joy from Therapy for Black Girls.

[Josh Clark]

We've had 400 episodes of Conversations, Growth and Healing, so we're celebrating. Join us for a special episode with.

[Chuck Bryant]

Internationally recognized yogi Chelsea Jackson Roberts as she shares wisdom on mindfulness, movement and motherhood.

[Josh Clark]

I waited later to have children, and I still have exactly what I knew that I wanted. You don't want to miss this special episode. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on.

[Chuck Bryant]

The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

[Josh Clark]

You get your podcasts. Why would you do that to me?

[Chuck Bryant]

Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere.

[Josh Clark]

And promises to make all my dreams come true.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance.

[Josh Clark]

But my dreams soon turned into a Nightmare.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm Caroline D'Amore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a con, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, you're listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty, and today my guests are none other than C. Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco.

[Josh Clark]

What I felt for Benny, it was. Everything about him was honest. He'll tell me anything that he's feeling, and it made me feel like I could do the same.

[Chuck Bryant]

If we would have met each other when we were younger, it would have never worked.

[Josh Clark]

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

[Chuck Bryant]

On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or.

[Josh Clark]

Wherever you get your podcasts.