In the winter of 2024, we sat down with New York Times bestselling author Tom O’Neill in the backyard of our Laurel Canyon house – a stone’s throw from the site of his infamous book about some dirty rotten hippies.

Tom recounted his time driving carriages through Central Park, writing plays for a small off broadway theatre on 92nd street, and falling down a two-decade research rabbit hole that eventually led to his wildly successful book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. Tom’s book is important to us at Chuck because it shows two things. One, whoever controls the narrative controls the order of history. And two, it’s proof good things take time.

We didn’t know it then, but Tom would become a close friend. A few months after this interview, we ended up together on South Beach in Miami, drinking rum and tonics in a hurricane of our own making. Through our time with Tom he’s proven to be relentless, meticulous, hilarious and driven by only one thing: Truth. Tom is someone who knows it takes everything. Tom is a writer’s writer. He often says if you want the answers, “turn every page” and that’s exactly what he did. He spent 20 years sifting through thousands of binders worth of testimony and transcript, chasing something that was never guaranteed to be there. He chased the story, through lawsuits, concern over his well being, and threats to his own life. What was intially a magazine article to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Mason murders became an endless pursuit that resulted in a book that changed the narrative forever.

We have learned a great many lessons from Tom. Beautiful things require patience, we asked for a lot of it from him, honestly much more than Tom initially agreed to. But then again, we stole his greatest trick – good things take time, great things take longer. We’re sorry this took so long Tom, give us another 20 years and maybe we’ll figure you out.