Part Two: The Sordid Story of Nature Boy: The Instagram Cult Leader Who Hates Toilets

Cool zone media.

Oh, welcome back to Bastards Behind the Stole Katie podcast.

Guest A.

What a title.

Yeah, you can put that all.

I believe in our audience.

They can put it together.

They can put it together.

You know,

you know what I'm getting at.

Yeah, they get the gist.

They get the gist.

Come on.

Do I need to do everything for you people?

Presumably they're heard part one.

So

I'm just going to record a podcast that's me reading most of the words and then re-release it every week with a different bastard.

And you can put it together in your head as like the right bad person.

But do you expect him to do all the work for you?

Yeah, come on now.

Uh, we got to be able to meet in the middle here.

It's called compromise.

I don't know.

Yeah.

How are we doing, Katie?

How are you feeling in the five minutes since we recorded part one?

Honestly, great.

I uh reheated my tea.

Great.

Cuddled my my dog.

Great.

Feel refreshed.

Great.

Waiting with bated breath to hear more about Nature Boy.

Yeah.

Well, let's hear about Nature Boy.

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The boy, Nature.

That's the name he's picked up at the start of this episode.

And we should start today by talking a little bit more about the conscious community or the black consciousness community.

I've heard it described as Boast Things.

Again, this is a subculture, not a massive one, but not a small one either, that exists primarily through kind of a nexus of YouTube and podcasters and some rappers.

Rolling Stone writer David Peisner describes it as, quote, an ecosystem of black spiritualists, natural living advocates, herbalists, alternative historians, motivational speakers, and backpack rappers.

Having gone through a bit of related non-cultie content creators, I'm sorry, backpack rapper?

Yeah, which I think is a term for like rappers who are kind of not, not massive, you know, they travel around and do a lot of like local shows and stuff.

Kind of, you know, that, that like, yeah,

probably do a lot of, I think SoundCloud rapper is an adjacent sort of thing, right?

Okay.

Having gone through a bit of related non-culti content creators in this space, a lot of what I see in this community reminds me of stuff that I saw and was kind of had and sort of experienced adjacent to some of the different like hippie-ish, you know, communities I spent time in when I was in my late teens, early 20s, you know, the rainbow gathering people in the burner community, all these like different sorts of where you would encounter this mix, this wide mix of everything from like, here's people who are actually really interested in, you know, aquaponics and human manure and alternative living situations.

And here's people who are actually trying to inform folks about important aspects of American history that have been covered up.

And here's people who are telling you.

absolute nonsense about how you don't need vaccines if you eat enough zinc.

Yeah.

And they're trying to get you to believe in, you know, whatever fucking bullshit aliens are.

Piggybacking on another movement.

That's one way to look at it.

But yeah,

it's a net that casts.

some good things and some bad things.

Yes.

And the kind of the big difference between a lot of where, you know, this kind of, these kind of different sort of hippie-ish descended movements that I spent time in and around when I was doing psychedelics a bunch, and this community, which also focuses, the conscious community, a a lot of psychedelic usage, is that there's a much more of a focus on racial justice because this is much more of like a black subculture and a lot of education on the history of white supremacy.

So again, you get these real, the Tuskegee experiment, redlining, the move bombing, and also like

moon landing conspiracies, anti-vac shit, you know, all that stuff.

I found a write-up in Medium by Anna Stensgaard, which gives a good, gives a good idea of how people in this community like to describe themselves.

And it focuses a lot on the concept of a conscious community, which is where the conscious community subculture takes its name, but is an older term for that goes back.

You can find people talking about shit like this in like the 70s and 80s.

This is, people would use the term to describe these kind of idealized, physical, intentional communities formed along utopian lines, which is a thing people have done in America since the nation has existed.

And this term is, you know, goes back further than the subculture we're talking about.

Now, since forming real-world breakaway communities is hard hard and usually a bad idea, very difficult to do, most people wind up hating each other.

Most of these projects explode.

The vast majority of people in this subculture, it's an aspirational thing, right?

And they just kind of connect and talk about what they'd like to do via the internet.

Anna writes, quote, as it turns out, there's a parallel digital world teeming with conscious travelers.

I discovered Facebook groups where conscious travelers or nomads share their experiences and curate lists of the best conscious hotspots worldwide.

Furthermore, ChatGPT can serve as a valuable resource in your global exploration of conscious communities, offering guidance, insights, and information to enhance your search for specific locations.

So, again, most of this isn't real.

It's an aesthetic.

People like the image of going back to the land, of being conscious, of being enlightened, of being spiritual, but also all they really want to do is stay in a nice hotel.

You know, that's the, that's, that's really a lot of this, right?

Um,

so, yeah, I do want to talk about another influence in this community and kind of where a lot of the name comes from

is an actual movement called the Black Consciousness Movement, which is a real thing that comes out of the Black radical history in apartheid era South Africa, and specifically a guy named Steve Biko.

Biko was the first president of the South African Students Organization when it launched in 1969.

And inspired by Black thinkers like Frantz Fanon, he began publishing articles that posited an ideology he called black consciousness.

He described his goal as to, quote, demonstrate the lie that black is an aberration from the normal, which is white.

Biko urged the black community to celebrate and take pride in their history and traditional cultural and religious practices as the indigenous people of South Africa, pushing people to decolonize both the state and their own minds.

He was a cool guy, which is why the police murdered him.

Per a very good article in Rep.

Well, we're talking about a black radical leader in 1969, South Africa.

The odds are good he wound up getting murdered by the cops, right?

Like it's a bummer.

Yeah.

It is.

Yeah.

I'm going to quote from a very good article on Biko in the Retrospect Journal.

Quote, The apartheid government regarded black consciousness as a growing threat and placed a banning order on

Biko in 1973.

The repressive practice of banning originated from the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act, which regarded all political opposition as a communist threat.

As a result, a banning order restricted a person's travel and social interactions, as well as preventing them from public speaking or distributing written material.

In Biko's case, he was limited to speaking to one person at a time and forbidden from being a member of any political organizations.

Several tactics were used to circumvent the strict measures of his ban.

Biko struck up a close friendship with the white liberal editor of the Daily Dispatch, Donald Woods.

Over time, Woods became more educated about the plights of black South African, secretly writing Biko's biography when he was himself banned.

In 1977, Biko was arrested for traveling outside of and therefore breaking his banning order.

He was severely beaten whilst in police custody and died of his injuries at just 30 years old.

Again, literally banned from talking to more than one person at a time.

That is wild.

Fuck that government.

It's very depressing.

I bring this up because, not because Nature Boy has any, is

an inheritor of Biko's tradition, but because the

the modern Black consciousness subculture or conscious community, and I've heard both names used for this same kind of amorphous subculture, is in some ways related to the Black consciousness movement.

And

a lot of what Nature Boy is doing is kind of taking some of these things and pulling them in a toxic direction.

For example, a big part of Black consciousness is the idea that

we need to really get people to accept that being Black is not an aberration, right?

Like it is just as normal as being white,

which is a really important thing, right?

That like black is not an aberration from the normal.

And the toxic sort of way that's taken is like, no, no, no, having more melanin is directly what makes you intelligent and having more makes you an inherently better person, right?

That's why Nature Boy takes it, right?

See that, a version of that sentiment today on Twitter.

I will always say that.

It's not just a nature build.

It's not just a nature boy thing, right?

Sure.

But it's interesting that I just saw that an hour ago and I, I went, huh.

And I was really trying to get to the bottom of what this guy was even saying, uh, but it, it took me aback.

So interesting.

There's, there's like what we're talking about right now.

It's just, yeah, it's, it's, you can see it's important to understand kind of some of the history and like the term that these people are aping.

And also in a way, it's also important to understand.

Nature boy, a big part of once he becomes like a media influencer, he's constantly going to be talking about how he's being targeted for murder, how the police are trying to kill him for his revolutionary revolutionary actions.

That's not at all a part of his story, but that is a huge part of actual people who were actual revolutionaries in the actual black consciousness movement, right?

That is what happened to them.

And he's kind of like stealing valor from them.

While, again, rather than trying to liberate people in bondage, all Nature Boy is trying to do is get a bunch of wives and convince them to poop outdoors,

which is not revolutionary.

No, it doesn't sound an enlightenment.

An enlightened particularly enlightened either, yeah.

Or enlightened.

I don't think Steve Bico would have been super into this.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

when Nature Boy gets into the conscious community, the first figure within it that he finds himself drawn to is a guy who goes by the name Young Pharaoh.

Now, when I first started looking Young Pharaoh up, I was kind of surprised because he's talked about in these documentaries about what happens as a pretty big figure.

And Nature Boy talks about him as a a big figure.

He's only got like a thousand followers on Instagram and a little more on YouTube.

But then I looked into it.

It turns out he used to be much bigger and have a much larger platform.

And he lost his mind during 2020.

Many such cases.

And so he had been in from a bunch of places and he never really recovered.

Previously, prior to 2020, he had started out and started building his platform within the subculture by making a lot of videos about police brutality, white supremacy.

And he did well enough that he started making serious money.

I think he's making like 200 grand a year at one point.

And he kind of switches in and around 2020.

I think it starts sort of right before.

and starts singing a very different tune at a certain point.

And it happens kind of in a way that makes me think it might be inorganic, where he'll start putting out videos about how the police aren't that bad.

And actually, I've never had a bad interaction with the police.

And I'm going to move to a white neighborhood because I think it's going to be like, it's a lot of really weird.

And he gets criticized by other people within the conscious community for this shift.

Then he loses his mind over COVID and starts blaming it on the Jews, which is how he gets demonetized and banned from a bunch of stuff, which is why he sues Google and he loses and gets stuck with a 40 grand bill.

Most of the videos you'll find about Young Pharaoh today are made by other people.

The top showings when I typed his name into Google while writing this are a documentary called The Rise and Fall of Young Pharaoh.

Another one is Young Pharaoh at Airport Crashes Out and Punches His Girlfriend.

And of course, Young Pharaoh explains why aliens abducted him seven times.

Part seven.

Oh, so my goodness, young Pharaoh.

He has gone in some directions.

I could not have guessed what the next word out of your mouth would be in that list.

Oh man, yeah, whoo.

So I know you're all curious.

Why did the aliens abduct him?

And just to get an idea of this dude and his vibes, I'm going to play you a quick clip of him explaining.

This is from part seven of the series on why aliens abducted him seven times i had a sixth grade teacher name is rozak i said that to her i wanted to go down to history like malcolm x and make history you know and something in me just always wanted to leave a mark in history

so whatever that is in me and that spirit that was connected to that maybe that's what the f they saw on top of the fact you know from what i was told during one of my interactions is that

I was super intelligent so it was easier for me to, to, to, for me to receive a neurological upgrade, so that way I could, like, channel or process information faster because I already had the ability to retain it, you know?

So it would just, it just made sense, you know, to utilize me.

Well, that checks out.

Yeah, that seems, that all scans to me.

Can't see any reason why that wouldn't be true.

Yeah, so

he's, he's, he's, he's, he seems like he's, he's got his shit together, right?

Um,

so this is his, this is the first guy that uh Nature Boy is really going to vibe with.

He, he reaches out to this dude based on his videos.

They become close friends.

Uh, at least that's how Nature Boy describes it.

This is not going to be a long-lasting friendship.

So again, those videos I played were, that video that Sophie played was recent.

I got to go back to 2015 here.

So remember, he's not yet obviously a crank here.

He is mostly talking about police brutality and white supremacy and kind of a fairly prominent creator.

And when I said, I think there's something sketchy about how he changed suddenly to talking about how he likes the cops and, you know,

kind of going more right-wing, he is invited at one point to speak at CPAC.

Now he gets disinvited right before because of the aforementioned anti-Semitism, but something went on there, right?

Really?

Yeah.

And the anti-Semitism did it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So back in 2015, young young Pharaoh's blowing up.

He's not so obviously a crank.

And Nature Boy grows obsessed with his work and he reaches out online.

The two vibe and they become internet buddies.

This is happening, right?

As Nature Boy has quit his job at the barbershop in order to lock himself in his room and watch YouTube videos, which he said made him question, quote, the fabric of reality.

His partner at the time, Maesha, and the mother of his son, says that he stopped sleeping almost entirely and describes what he watched as conspiracy theory videos.

Quote, he rambled daily about America, which he called Babylon, and how it was going to fall.

And, you know, fall of America, not super wrong in predicting that, maybe.

But I don't think he's predicting it for the same reasons.

Yeah.

So

Nature Boy, for his part, says, I started studying what America was, what money was, breaking my reality down to a molecule.

And again, that all could lead you in a good direction, but it mostly leads him to get very angry about the toilet.

He begins

again.

Toilet is evil.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Again, he starts to become convinced that direct exposure to sunlight makes you smarter because it increases your melanin content.

He becomes, he's briefly a back to Africa kind of black nationalist, right?

Where he's like, we need to return to Africa.

But around this time, his older sister, Tanya, dies.

And Maisha had been

close to

her, like

his partner had been close to his older sister.

And so they go to the funeral, and she's kind of surprised because Nature Boy is really taciturn.

He's like weirdly cold during the visit.

But then when they return to Georgia, he goes through this really rapid, visible decline in his mental health.

The first sign to outsiders is he stops bathing entirely, and he would angrily rant to anyone that you only need to bathe if you eat smelly foods.

And he has, at this point, become a fruitarian, so he doesn't need to wash himself ever.

Now, there's also some evidence that something diagnosable is happening here.

Mayisha says that he starts to suffer serious memory lapses, often forgetting what day it is.

He stops cutting his hair, which was for him a major red flag.

Again, this guy is like a fairly skilled barber.

Yeah.

In one video talking about this time, he says, I had people like, dude, you good?

They would come to drop the money off from the barber shop and see him with his hair all crazy, ranting about conspiracies in Babylon.

And they were just like, I don't want to hear that.

So get it.

Yeah.

I mean, all of this is somebody having some sort of mental break,

being obsessive, locking yourself away, withdrawing, breaking down your consciousness.

It's all alarming.

It's all alarming.

And, you know, not bathing.

Not bathing.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

People are immediately aware, right?

Like it's not the kind of thing that's hideable.

So Maisha decides eventually she doesn't want to hear this either.

And she takes her kids and the child that they share, dumps his ass and moves to South Carolina, making the only good decision anyone will make over the course of these videos.

Nature Boy is okay with this because it gives him more time to study what he has decided will be his next career, which is becoming a YouTube personality.

Now, right after she leaves, Young Pharaoh gets invited to speak on a podcast in New York City.

And Nature Boy kind of brute forces his way into like, oh, I'll drive up there and be on it with you.

Like, we'll hang out.

We'll be on the show together, right?

And as soon as I think young Pharaoh kind of lets him because they're buds, and Nature Boy, at the start of this thing, immediately elbows his friend out of the interview, basically to go on a rant and you can see the moment here again this is from the hood horrors video the original video was deleted long ago so it's really the only place i have to access this but it's kind of a noteworthy moment to look at here

my brother nature is here from atlanta first i want to talk to my brother nature why are you so infatuated my brother we're going back to africa talk to the people The tropical man belongs between the tropic of cancer and the tropic of Capricorn.

What does that mean?

If you look on the map, yeah, so he

kind of pushes his way in, and you know, the other guy seems more interested in him too.

And this sparks the end of their appearance, right?

Of their friendship, right?

Yeah, because he kind of pushes young Pharaoh out of this thing.

Um, now they will be in several videos talking about their beef because, again, this is a YouTube subculture, right?

So, this isn't the end of their relationship, but now it is primarily primarily based on them having beef with each other.

Yeah, well, beef sells, beef sells, right?

That's that's that's

how all of this shit works, right?

Um, now it's interesting.

He doesn't, this is his first, I believe, his first appearance anywhere, right?

In terms of like social media as Nature Boy,

at least as far as I can tell.

And he starts his channel and begins building a following pretty shortly after that.

But before he does so, he goes home and he continues to spiral a bit more, right?

Some of his first content, he's a militant fruitarian, but he's militant in terms of like he hates vegans for eating plants, which he regards as being as cruel as hating animals.

So he's very hard to get along with, right?

This is a lot to explain.

Like, you can only eat fruit because fruit wants to be eaten, but like you can't eat, like, otherwise eat plants because that's hurting the plants.

Yeah, wild.

Fruitarian is also very hard to take seriously.

Very hard to take seriously.

I don't mean to offend any fruitarians out there, but it's, it's, you're not, you're supposed to eat other things.

You simply are.

You simply are.

There's a number of things.

Um now he starts the Nature Boy Facebook channel in I think late 2015.

And his initial videos are, yeah, these kind of rambling streams where he will lay out his beliefs about not pooping or peeing inside, not bathing, eating fruit.

And most importantly, he kind of makes a sharp break from this return to Africa stance that he has earlier and instead starts advocating that people drop out of Babylon entirely and live in tune in nature.

There's a video, I don't think we need to play it, but like like where he kind of makes the stance that like, there's too many wars in Africa.

So we should all go to Central or South America because there's a lot of sun exposure there, which will make us smarter, but it's not as dangerous, right?

That's kind of the reason why he changes his mind.

Now, his videos are not highly produced at this stage, but he's good looking and he's charismatic and he starts to draw in thousands and then tens of thousands of subscribers.

He has an Instagram, he has a YouTube.

I think he's initially more of a Facebook and Instagram person, but his YouTube starts to build.

And they get like 100,000 or so followers, right?

Each, which is not, he's not a massive star, but people are listening, right?

And when you've got, you know, 100,000 or so people who are semi-regularly watching your stuff, you can get some of them to send you money and you can get some of them who start to develop a really strong parasocial relationship with you, which is what starts to happen here.

And he begins vowing that he is going to leave the United States, Babylon, to South America, where he is going to start a conscious community.

And he starts talking to his followers, like, you should follow me.

We're going to completely change the world.

This is going to be the spark of the revolution.

You know,

I am going to end Babylon by beginning this movement, by getting everyone to start conscious communities in South America, where, again, people already live.

Right.

I know.

People already live there.

It's one of those things where I'm always like, okay, but like, if it was as simple as just like, we all need to go live on the land in fucking Peru or whatever, why didn't all of the people living on the land in Peru stop anything?

Like, why didn't that make all of our problems?

Because like maybe they're more complicated than just living in Peru.

I don't know, man.

Like maybe you haven't thought this one through.

Maybe you haven't.

Maybe people living in Peru have a lot of issues that like it's just, it's just very, all of our problems are more complicated than that.

But you like, this is not about really solving problems.

Again, it's going to be about being able to take videos of yourself in a very pretty place.

And speaking of being able to take videos of yourself in a very pretty place,

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You better listen.

That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon.

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That is your Capricorn talking.

Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ah, all right.

So we're back.

We're back from the pods.

We're back talking.

Okay.

He decides he's going to leave for South America to start a conscious community.

And the way this ultimately happens is very funny.

He makes a video announcing the day has come.

I am going to leave Babylon to live off the land as God intended.

His initial plan was to go to South America.

He talks about Peru a lot.

But as soon as he posts, I'm doing it.

I'm making the plans.

I'm leaving for South America.

A fan of his reaches out and is like, hey, my brother lives in Honduras.

That's where our family's from.

And he's inherited like 30 acres that you can use.

There's two old houses on the property that you would have to renovate first to make it livable, but like you can go down there.

So Nature Boy immediately is like, well, fuck South America.

I'm meant to be in Honduras, right?

Um,

and you know, to be honest, from what I can tell, I don't have detailed knowledge of this land, but from what I can see from what footage exists, this it would have been a good setup for someone wanting to try and start, assuming someone knew how to do all this.

You've got houses that are in okay shape, they need some renovating.

You've got 30 acres, you can support a good number of people on 30 acres.

If you knew this is a dream

scenario for a cult leader, you could do something here, right?

If you had any intention of actually doing the things you were talking about.

So he commits, he buys a plane ticket and he tells everyone first he's flying down to Florida.

And if you want to leave Babylon too, everyone meet up with me in Florida.

We're going to do a big meetup and we're going to fly down the Honduras together.

And he shows off his camping gear in a backpack.

He's got a life straw, which he clearly doesn't know how to use.

He's got solar panels to keep his phone charged.

He's got a brand new Cabela's backpack.

And he tells everyone, now that I'm going to nature, I'm going to build a village.

I I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I know it's going to happen because I said it's going to happen.

And again, that's a red flag because all of this is very complicated.

And if people don't have any background experience, they're simply not going to succeed, which is indeed what happens.

But the day of the meetup in Florida comes around, and there's a very funny video where Nature Boy's like, Well, my assumption was that nearly all of my followers were young women, so I was expecting a bunch of young ladies.

But the only people who show up are three guys in their 20s.

Yikes.

Sorry, Nature Boy.

Yeah, that's not really shocking.

Their names are Key, Olmec, and Starlight.

Now, these are all dudes who are kind of in this community.

They're interested in not just Nature Boy, but other stuff.

Olmec in particular seems to have some like particular degree of knowledge about how to like farm and stuff and is really interested in trying this.

Nature Boy is skeptical about all of them because, again, He was hoping they were all young women that he could have sex with.

But he changes his mind when Starlight says he knows Spanish and has $20,000, Nature Boy immediately tells him, you're useful.

Again, no one, he does not know Spanish.

He did not plan on having anyone with him who knew Spanish to create a community in Honduras.

That is wild.

Not choice.

Not needed.

Not important.

No.

Now, at this stage, this is not a cult.

This is some young men who have had their heads filled via YouTube with pretty ideas of living and Facebook with pretty ideas of living off the land and, you know, how easy it is, right?

The instant they arrive at the actual property, they look at this house, which had been like the landowner's grandmother's house.

And so it's filled with her old stuff.

And, you know, it would take work to clean out and fix up.

And he decides it's creepy.

And so they immediately permanently scrap their plans to live in the jungle and start a village and instead get a hotel using Starlight's $20,000.

And immediately, just instantly, oh, we got to clean up a house.

Nah, nah.

The thing that you were warned you would need to do yeah and like a really minimal like you're not talking about carving a home out of raw land there are houses you can

you gotta clean them up a little you gotta do some work yeah you've got camping gear with you and you're not willing to clean out a house so After a little bit of time in a hotel, they find a house to rent in Santa Fe, Honduras.

In a video at the time, Nature Boy notes, that $20,000 sure came in handy.

I'll bet it did.

Oh my God.

So he's just spending this other guy's money renting places.

Phoenix, the landowner, joins them and they start calling themselves Ethereans and posting videos of people camping in the front yard and calling it an intentional community.

Again, these people are camping in a city in front of the house that they are renting.

There's a picture Sophie's going to show you.

It's just tents in a yard.

It's just, it's simply just tents in a fairly well-cultivated yard.

This is not an intentional community.

You are doing what like third graders do.

You are camping in your yard.

Looks like making forts.

Yeah.

Decently tents, decently landscaped yard.

Yes, clearly someone, I'm sure it's not Nature Boy, is doing the landscaping.

Right out of frame is probably like a major road or major surrogate there.

This is again in a city.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're not, this is the, this is the opposite of off-grid.

Yeah.

Now, this is all very silly, but what Nature Boy does next is actually pretty cunning, which is, you know, they've got this house they're renting and some people live inside and some people camp in the yard, but they will go out because Honduras is Honduras and they'll go to very pretty places that are like tourist hotspots where there's waterfalls and they will film themselves bathing under waterfalls and picking fruit from jungle trees and brag about how they're living this perfect back-to-nature carefree lifestyle and like drop out of Babylon and join us.

Look at how nice this is.

This is our life every day.

He says, this is not a vacation.

This is where we live and you're more than welcome to stay.

And again,

this isn't where you live.

You're going to Honduras is a very beautiful place.

You are driving for an afternoon to tourist hotspots and pretending your life is this like jungle paradise.

Again, you live in a city and a rental, right?

Also, I don't know if you are leaving Babylon, if you're not connected and uploading videos.

There's like power lines in that photo.

What are we talking about here?

Yeah, come on.

And you have cars.

You're using gasoline all the time.

Like, you have not escaped Babylon.

You haven't walked away from Omalas.

So that said,

these videos like this spread.

Facebook loves showing people videos of like idyllic nature retreats and the like and back to the land projects.

All this stuff does fairly well.

And people start coming, lots of them.

So many that it like the other three guys who had left with him, who he calls his warriors, start to feel overwhelmed.

They're like, we need to stop asking for more people to join, right?

Because there's like dozens and dozens of them.

But at this point, young women start showing up, right?

That's the dream right there.

That's Nature Boy is like, this is working.

And you know what?

We're polygamists now.

So very quickly, this turns from some slightly to moderately deluded hippie kids camping in a yard to Nature Boy telling multiple women that they are now his wives.

And he also doesn't use the term wife.

He calls them directs.

They're his directs.

So we've got a cult terminology starting to form.

Okay.

In a video at the time, he explains, with polygamy, it's just for me being with four female students that I'm dealing with very intimately.

It's nothing more and nothing less than that.

Sex for me is me plugging into a woman and sending my knowledge like a USB to a computer.

And when I have sex, I am putting fluid in you.

Inside the fluid is DNA.

On that DNA is all the knowledge that I know.

And now you're getting a direct transfer from my file into your ribosome, into your DNA.

And if you do that enough, you can take me on long enough to the point where I'm inside of you.

Robert, I cannot believe you just read that.

I know.

I know.

That's one of my, that's one of my favorite pieces of cult leader nonsense I've come across on this jet.

That is.

My dick is a USB?

Unbelievable.

But also thank you for reading that.

Beautiful stuff.

Beautiful stuff.

Yes.

Are they all shitting in that yard?

They are all shitting.

Katie, everyone is shitting in every yard in this story.

You have to add that they are all pooping in the yards.

It's not that big a yard.

It's not that presumably burying it, but again, they're all shitting in these yards.

Now, while he claims to be a guru, bringing people back in touch with the natural world, he very quickly spends the entire 20 grand, not just on this rental, but primarily, according to other people there, mostly on dirt pipes and iPads.

Which he's like, but I gave them away to other people in the group.

You know,

he calls himself like a real humanitarian for giving away all of these dirt bikes and iPads to other people who join.

But it's like, it's not your money, bro.

Wild.

So that 20,000 goes quickly.

And soon everyone's scraping by.

He's barely managing to cover rent and food with.

allegedly the $3,000 a month he is allegedly receiving from that guy.

But just as soon as things are getting dire,

his key, one of the other guys who had joined him in Florida, has a loved one die and he inherits $300,000.

And he starts by giving Nature Boy to start like, hey, man, you know, the group really needs 20 grand for this project.

And he just keeps doing that over and over again until he gets all 300 grand, right?

I feel so bad for them.

Although he made, he's making his choices.

He's making his choice.

I've read it.

I've watched an interview with that guy after all this falls apart.

Where he's like, no, I don't regret it.

Like, he was my teacher.

He was my guru.

Okay, man.

I don't know.

Fuck.

Whatever, bro.

So they get robbed not long after this in Santa Fe because Nature Boy is buying everybody fancy gadgets and computers.

At least that's what they say is like they're in the middle of the street and these people take everything on them.

They take, I think they get, it's kind of unclear, but I think they get into the house because they get everyone's like passports, a lot of their stuff, right?

That's bad.

I don't know.

I have some suspicions.

that what actually happened is that Nature Boy was trying to subsidize this community by also moving some substances, right?

I don't know, but the way people describe this makes it sound like, no, they were targeted and maybe it's because they had pissed people off.

Yeah.

And part of why I think this is once they are robbed, if this was just a mugging, they wouldn't do what they did next, which is leave immediately the country and leave most of their stuff behind in the house, including several vehicles that they own, like vans that they own.

Right.

Like they leave a lot of money and stuff behind.

And that makes sense to me if you're like, oh, somebody told you you need to leave or you're going to get murdered right right there's otherwise why wouldn't you at least try to sell it i just and this is based in part on the fact that i spent a lot of time in central america and met a number of people doing things that aren't wildly different from this and it's not uncommon for people in especially for the leaders of groups like this to think well maybe i could move a little molly or something like that and there's already people moving molly in these areas right you're stepping into territory scarier than you

nature boy

So anyway, they flee, leaving all of their shit behind.

And he convinces everyone to move to Peru.

But on their way, they visit Costa Rica.

They're like going through Costa Rica.

And like, you know, like everyone who goes to Costa Rica, Nature Boy is like, oh, actually, this place rips and decides, no, no, no.

We're going to live in tune with nature here.

Right.

Okay.

So they camp for a couple of nights and then they rent another house because, again, none of them know how to really like live off the land.

It's also Costa Rica's a country.

They're not just going to let you set up camp in the jungle randomly and start a village.

The same way they don't let us do it here.

The same way you can't really do that here.

You know, they continue producing videos from different gorgeous landmarks.

And soon, you know, and people keep

joining, right?

You know, Costa Rica is even prettier in a lot of ways.

And so they're posting all of these increasingly gorgeous videos about their idyllic lives outside of Babylon.

And a young woman named Velvet Marquez joins joins the group, right?

She is a freshman agricultural student at Tuskegee University.

She has some relevant experience to actual back-to-the-land shit.

She had volunteered at a local land use NGOs

and felt like a natural fit for what she thought these people were doing.

She recalls not even knowing that there was like Nature Boy was the leader, right?

Because the videos they publish, he's not making it all about him.

He's constantly publishing these stories of other members.

So it really does sound like to an outsider, there's this wonderful community, mostly made up of like black people who have dropped out of, you know, this fucked up country and are living this idyllic life in Central America.

And so she decides to go join them.

Now, when she arrives, she's immediately surprised to realize they are not growing food.

They're not foraging.

They are eating at restaurants and driving in cars just like everyone else.

But she and Olmec kind of hit it off, right?

And, you know, Nature Boy agrees that like he, she can be Olmec's direct, but Nature Boy is is also not clearly happy with this because he wants to be with her.

And so he keeps like hassling her and be like, are you sure you want to be with this other guy?

You sure you want to be with Olmec, right?

So that's going to continue to be a thing.

Now, around this time, another young woman, Kayla Reed, shows up from Canada.

And this is a white lady, right?

From a family that's at least middle class or upper middle class.

She, again, gets drawn to this the same way everyone else does.

It looks pretty.

It seems like a great way to unplug from this very toxic society.

And she's useful to Nature Boy because, you know, he's in general trying to get as many young women around him as possible.

But also she's white.

And there's by this point one or two other white people who he can put on camera and tell potential followers, this isn't a racist thing, right?

Like we accept everybody.

He starts at this point changing his tune to like, everyone is a shade of brown, right?

So, you know, he softens all this.

And again, to try to get more people and more money.

Now, he's also cognizant of the fact that taking a young rich white girl to his like cult in Central America could force the involvement of international law enforcement, right?

So this is a kind of thing that he is aware from the beginning.

There's some upsides and some potential dangers.

And soon enough, those dangers make themselves clear because Kayla didn't tell her parents what she was doing.

She is an adult, but she lied and claimed that she was heading to a church camp and then just disappeared.

and never told anyone where she was.

That's kind of raised some alarms.

Her parents make a missing persons complaint, not even because they're specifically sketched out by this guy, but because they have no idea where she's gone.

She goes on a church retreat and drops off the face of the world.

It's a very normal parent thing to do, right?

Yeah, it should be.

Yeah.

Find your child.

Yeah, you're going to want to find your kid.

And they are looking for her.

This is an open question for at least weeks until someone sees her in an Instagram video with these people calling themselves Ethereans and is like, oh, fuck.

I think she might have joined the cult.

And this is the first time that this group, before this, Nature Boy and his followers would have, were just a bunch of expats bumming around Central America, like a lot of people have done, right?

This is the first time they start being called a cult by the media and they start getting real attention.

The CBC, which is kind of Canada's NPR, starts reporting on these scant few details known about Nature Boy and the Ethereans, who have now rebranded themselves under the name Melanation, right?

That's kind of the YouTube brand for all of their videos.

And again, this is kind of a reflection of all of his melanin-based teachings, which have gotten increasingly elaborate.

Right as this is all going on, the BBC sends a very irritating young reporter to Costa Rica to do a documentary called Searching for a Cult Leader in the Jungles of Costa Rica.

I don't love this video, but it does capture the cult during a unique time.

So I'm going to play a clip from it, which shows Nature Boy giving his spiel to a group of followers.

Well, we really don't like using toilets.

What is the thing you hate so much about the toilet?

The soil belongs to the trees, and I'm in an abusive relationship with the tree if I'm not giving it back.

Their community is cold, Melanie.

Okay, so that's that's at least how followers are kind of describing their teachings at this point to a guy from the BBC.

Now, he does, this BBC guy does a short documentary just on the cult and a slightly longer one reporting on several different kind of utopian living projects in Costa Rica.

He spends a lot of his time online flirting with that Canadian lady in a way that makes me slightly uncomfortable.

Or at least that's my interpretation.

Watch it.

You may feel differently.

At one point, he asks her if Melanation is a cult, and she gives him an answer that was clearly scripted and drilled into her head by Nature Boy.

Canada is a cult, like the U.S.

is a cult.

Culture is a group of people who have similar beliefs.

Now, I say that he clearly said that because a bunch of his videos, he uses the exact line that, like, well, the United States is a cult.

And, you know, there's a lot to be said about cultic aspects of nationalism.

But as a general rule, when you are saying that, you're saying that to be like, so it's fine for me to have a cult too, as opposed to we shouldn't have cults.

You're being slippery here.

You're being a little slippery.

Also, it's like, everything's a cult.

Culture.

I'm like, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not quite.

That's not quite true.

There's a distinct

dynamic that we're talking about here.

To nationalism, does nationalism make people vulnerable to cults?

Sure.

That doesn't mean you get to make a cult.

Right.

So at this point, I think we've got what I'd call like a hybrid cult, right?

Nature Boy is starting to exert more and more control over members.

It becomes a higher control group than it had been, but also a lot of people start leaving, right?

And there's not, he's not, doesn't that, this is not like the Church of Scientology where he's got like a wing of folks dedicated to going after people who leave.

And most of the people who come for a while are not crazy.

They're not super dedicated.

A number of them in that are interviewed in that BBC documentary have left and start their own land projects because they're like, well, Costa Rica rips and I actually want a farm or something like that.

Right.

Right.

These people aren't actually doing the thing I wanted to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, oh, this was bullshit, but this place is pretty rad.

You know, um, now we get some good context on the kind of people drawn to Nature Boy in that BBC documentary, which talks to a former member named Ave who got involved because she had a kid and she wanted to raise this kid in a place that wasn't the U.S.

because, quote, the race thing was just really out of control.

Um, Ave is a black woman living in Texas and says, I just didn't think a child would be able to develop there.

And I get it.

And what's so interesting about Nature Boy is he's very much like doing a partial Jim Jones.

Like he is recruiting from marginalized people who see how fucked up life in the U.S.

is and are open to dropping out of society to find a better life.

But Jones, you know, before getting everyone killed, they do start like a town, right?

Like they've gotta, they're doing all, there's a lot of infrastructure they put together.

There's a lot thought put into that.

They're pretty, they put a lot of work into it.

And Jim Jones is, is not a lazy man, right?

What's interesting to me is Nature Boy talks a lot of Jim Jones shit, but he is so lazy.

And he completely refuses to use any of the money.

And they have a lot at one point, enough that they could have started something and potentially with the knowledge.

made an actual sustaining project, but he has, he is almost violently opposed to the concept of farming, right?

He obsessively talks about being back to the nature.

He hates the idea of actually living off the land.

Well, I think we've seen Nature Boy throughout his life start a lot of things and quit them.

He didn't like the amount of work that the barbershop required.

It's,

you know, looking for an easy way to make money and fuck women.

You can say, fuck women.

I think so.

Yes, that's what he's doing.

And he's very, it's just such a lazy.

And there's a couple of stories from former members who like show up and he tells everyone that like, you know, we only go to the bathroom outside.

And they're like, okay, so we're like making our own manure to like grow things.

And he says, absolutely not.

Under no circumstances do we ever do anything.

Like he even tells one person, why would we grow our own food?

There's markets.

It's like, you are literally talking, preaching about the apocalypse, my, my dude.

Like, yeah.

Fascinating, fascinating cult for that reason.

Now, this doesn't do well.

Again, a lot of people realize this is bullshit.

Ave, who has a kid, leaves right away, right?

But it goes off like gangbusters among people who are deeply insecure or who are the kind of narcissistic dumb fucks who adopt countercultural beliefs, not because they have real criticisms of society, but because they want to feel special.

And this clip from that BBC documentary of two of his followers taking this fucking reporter to a hot springs makes really the narcissist

in this belief system, the narcissism in this belief system incredibly evident.

Are you how old are you guys?

I'm actually immortal.

I don't die.

Okay.

You never die.

Albert Einstein says this.

Define Melanation.

Living in human nation.

Yeah.

Living from the righteous path,

the narrow path.

Would you say that you're part of Melanation or are you

a melanation?

Is this like a big movement?

Do you think it's going to change?

It's going to be like,

you know, like beings from all around the world are coming together?

Okay,

so

again, the whole I'm never going to die Albert Einstein said so thing like it's it's

again they're so lazy.

These people like are not actually this is not an ideology.

These people have not are not thinking about anything.

They are casually ingesting YouTube videos with pretty things and they just want to bum around and not do anything all the time, right?

100%.

Like there's no real belief here.

There's no commitment to overthrowing an unjust system.

There's no commitment to learning how to survive.

It's just, it's so, it's such a fundamentally narcissistic thing.

So I guess I'm not surprised this is a cult that forms through Facebook and Instagram, right?

Yeah, that's it's attracting that type of person.

It's also attracting somebody that's potentially thinking, well, I want to be in those videos.

I want to have this sick photo of me.

Hanging out under fucking water.

Yeah, exactly.

The waterfall stuff.

It's

very poorly thought out.

It's so,

I keep thinking back to like Scientology.

Yeah.

Evil, stupid, not a shallow belief system, deep and labyrinthine and complex, right?

The Zizian.

So we've talked about, yes, is everything silly, nonsense?

Is it all dumb as hell?

Yes, but it's complicated and there's a lot of effort being put into this silly, crazy belief system, right?

Everything, every, as I, the more I learn about these fucking, you know, Melanation, the Ethereans, all the different things they call themselves, the more I'm like, God, these people are so fucking lazy.

Like,

they don't actually, there's no no actual ideology here no it's just a hot dude with an instagram right and a toilet other than not pooping in a toilet it's such like a

man

i guess i'm appreciating all the cults that put in the actual hours right yeah you know put in put in the work-fashion miss the good old-fashioned cult god you know

back when

Yeah, it's really selling me something.

The cults these days, so lazy.

It's the problem with the internet.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, it's made everything too easy, right?

You don't have to really work because the scale of social media means you can just find some people who will buy into anything.

Everything's falling apart because of the internet.

All right.

Sorry.

So eventually...

The heat from Canadian authorities over this lady staying with them gets to be too much.

And Nature Boy convinces Jasper, or she also goes by Sunray or whatever, to return home.

She describes that as her making a choice to protect everyone by leaving.

There is a video of him very clearly talking her into it.

I think he just didn't have much use for her and like he wasn't into her and decided, like, this is more trouble than it's worth, right?

Yeah.

Um,

now he has rapidly developed more narcissistic cult leader traits by this point.

One of his most common refrains is: What I'm doing is beyond Martin Luther King Jr.

It's beyond Malcolm X.

It's beyond all of that.

And this is something his followers will repeatedly

say, He's beyond Martin Luther King, he's beyond Malcolm X.

And like, again, both of those guys, a lot of work, very complicated, large organizations they ran that made serious impacts on the world, not just hanging out under waterfalls.

Anyway,

initially, he discourages his directs from getting pregnant, telling them that if they do get pregnant, it's a sign that they have been cursed by God.

When a young woman named Pocahontas joins the group and he makes her his direct, he immediately impregnates her and kicks her out of the group a week later.

So that's good.

Now, he does eventually change his opinion on this, right?

He has more kids with several of his followers.

His kiddo Cyrus visits him and spends several months living with the cult in Central America.

So that's not great.

And there's some videos of him like yelling at this kid, making him like crawl around on the ground.

And he's like complaining that it hurts.

And

Nature Boy is like, you know, you just need to toughen up.

You have to do it.

He also, near the end of 2017, posts an important video, which is described in that Rolling Stone article.

I wanted my son to be so pure that he'd never know he was naked, says Bishop, who has four children.

I take baths with my kids.

I'm naked with my kids.

I have sex in front of my kids.

My son be breastfeeding.

I'd be making love to his mom.

That's how I get down around kids.

He goes on like this for a minute or so.

My son, I have sex with his mom.

After I'm done, I'm laying there chilling.

He grabs my penis.

He's playing with my penis.

I let that happen.

This is what really draws a lot of ire online because people start accusing him of being a pedophile.

And that's not an unreasonable thing to draw from that.

No, it's not at all.

And for someone who has talked about sexual abuse in his own childhood, you would think there'd be some connection about how destructive and confusing that would be.

Well, and it's this kind of thing where like,

is it bad for kids to be around communities of people who are naked?

Like, no, there's nothing inherently bad or sexual about being naked, depending on like how you do it.

Is it bad for like

people, like most people have been naked a significant amount of their lives in the history of the human race.

It's not inherently bad for people.

Uh,

likewise, is it bad for kids to be aware that their parents are having sex?

Again, most human beings throughout history were broadly aware of the fact that adults around them had sex because you had a one-room shack everyone lived in, or you were all out basically camping all the time, right?

None of that is inherently toxic.

Should your kid be playing with your dick?

No,

no, or do you need to be

nope?

Does your kid need to be breastfeeding while you have sex with his mom?

No, no, no, not really necessary.

Then it's a kink.

Then you've got a weird thing going on.

And I feel so bad for the woman in that situation who

probably feels a little powerless because

his cold.

Weird.

Yes.

It's weird.

And he's like telling you, like, no, this is, again, this is the thing that we're doing that's destroying Babylon.

No, it's not.

You've just got like a bunch of weird kinks, most of which are around pooping.

He takes videos of his son pooping.

Oh, my God.

It's weird.

This is what draws the ire of the Costa Rican government.

The governor of the province or whatever that his cult is camped out at actually is like, there's enough of a local uproar about this guy because the stuff online goes that viral that people in Costa Rica are like talking to the government, being like,

Do we really want this fucking weird pedophile?

This cult pops up in my neighborhood.

I don't know.

I don't want him

around here, but like, ah, so the governor has a meeting, schedules a meeting with Nature Boy.

And Nature Boy posts some videos about, obviously, you know, this is all taken out of context.

I'm not doing anything wrong.

I'm happy to have a meeting with this guy and show him that nothing we're doing is wrong or weird or bad.

And then the day of the meeting, he has his followers load everything they own into vans and flee the country or flee the state, right?

They don't quite leave Costa Rica.

And in fact, in October, they get deported after being detained at a checkpoint.

Most members are found to lack passports since a lot of them have been robbed.

Stolen.

Many had overstayed their visas.

Costa Rican officials were clearly kind of just trying to figure out what was happening because there's these vans full of like mostly Americans who don't have a lot of IDs or have overstayed their visas.

And Nature Boy immediately, like they detain them and Nature Boy goes live on Facebook from the police barracks and claims he's being murdered by a government, just like Malcolm X or MLK.

And again, neither of them were murdered by Costa Rican immigration authorities.

Quote per Rolling Stone.

We're live on Facebook right now, he shouted.

Everybody bring their cameras out.

Make sure they record this because if we're going to die, we're going to die just like this is going down.

An immigration officer boarded the bus and offered to let everyone go once they signed some paperwork.

We're not signing nothing, Bishop yelled.

We're standing up for humanity.

If you don't stand for something, you're going to fall for anything.

Bishop insisted they wouldn't get off the bus.

You're going to have to use violence.

Moments later, the police did.

Such a piece of shit.

It's just like the cops are even like, we'll let you go.

You got to like sign some things saying, you know, you have to leave that like you can't stay in Costa Rica.

No, but he's putting on a show.

He's putting on a show, right?

And like, there's this audio and it sounds bad.

Like the cops beat them up.

But like, again, you had a, you had an out.

Like you're choosing now to occupy a police bus for no reason.

I don't know.

It's not the kind of civil disobedience that I really, again, is there a massive ethical issue in Costa Rica putting American travelers on buses?

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I think you had an out and you didn't take it.

I think it sounds like you had an out.

Speaking of people who have outs, you can break free of our evil, abusive society by participating in it via purchasing products.

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Ah,

we're back.

So

we're so back.

So this whole confrontation, which was totally avoidable and stupid, causes Nature Boy to go viral in the consciousness community subculture yet again.

They spend several months back in the U.S., pooping in the backyards of Airbnbs.

Now, not all of Nature Boy's followers leave, you know, as soon as they get into his content to join immediately.

One guy, Daly Armstead, around this time, who is a musician and an audio engineer, like gets into his YouTube content and spends a year or so not showering and pooping in the woods of Maryland before he finally leaves to join them.

This is when they're back in the U.S.

Yeah, just preparing.

He explained his mind state to Rolling Stone.

If I didn't change the way I was living, I was going to suffer some kind of consequence from the universe.

So I left in the middle of the night and didn't tell anybody.

Now, when he joins the group, he does it alongside a couple of other people with audio and video editing experience who have joined.

This is like, and none of them really last long, so they're all kind of handing off the baton to the other, but they start producing higher quality videos for the Mellon Nation's different accounts.

And Nature Boy kind of starts turning the cult into a media powerhouse, or or at least a low-level one.

They release some very mid-rap songs that are nonetheless competently produced, right?

Like, I wouldn't say the lyrics are very good, but like the sound quality is fine.

They're clearly made by someone who knows how to produce a song.

Did he do it as Nature Boy?

He does some of it.

He is not.

They have, there are other members who are actually somewhat popular, who like have a following because they're more competent.

He is kind of noted by everyone as not knowing what he's doing.

And anytime someone says, hey, that track sounded like shit, he gets angry.

So he can't really make anything good.

But he starts publishing books at this point.

And Sophie's going to show you a couple of the titles.

There's a lot of them.

Most of them are just a few pages.

One of them is Divine Knowledge of the Self, spelled CLLF study guide.

And that is intentional.

CLLF is absolutely cassells and stuff.

He's wearing a Native American headdress in this, which is a thing he has started doing by this time.

There's another one with an illustrated version of him called Master Chief: Exposing Exposing the Food Industry.

Rewind, there is 15 reviews and it has 15 reviews.

And it has 4.4 stars.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's some good reviews.

There's some bad ones, but 4.4 stars.

Some of his stuff just has like two or three.

Why is he wearing an indigenous headdress?

Because he starts doing that at this point.

They have a lot of videos where they'll all dress as both as a mix of like Egyptians and like Native Americans and march around like soldiers.

He loves doing that.

That's terrible.

Okay.

And again, they're living in like mexico and and honduras and costa rica like none of this is is it it's just what they're doing okay it's just what they're doing it's just what it's just what they're doing okay so if it's behind the bastards it's it's yes he's like these he sucks um so this does start to bring in more money i don't think the books as much as the video content and the rap uh at least 14 sales at least 14 sales um which is good that they have more money because by this point he has spent all of keys $300,000 inheritance.

But the growing notoriety, because he's putting out videos and they're getting some traction, he has followers.

But the fact that he's more famous now that he's had these big scandals, it leads to someone digging up that gay porn he was in.

And for several years, he will have to, he will do, he puts out a lot of videos denying it's him, even though it obviously is.

It's him.

And there are videos where he's like, look, if it was me, would that be so bad?

Just admit it, man.

Like,

own it.

You've made, you you have managed somehow to make a lot of wild shit fly.

So

just

he does eventually admit it, but like it takes a wild amount of time.

So he gets fed up with the states and he decides to fly everyone back to his Ignacio, Belize, to

try his hand again at forming an intentional community.

He's immediately recognized by the owner of an internet cafe and run out of the country for being a pedophile.

So good work, random internet cafe guy in Belize.

That was the right call.

Belize.

Is that even Costa Rica?

Out of Belize.

Yeah.

This guy can't settle.

He's just always jumping around.

Sucks.

His whole life.

Yeah.

So there's two good decisions right now.

Although, you know, Maisha eventually does let him spend more time with his kid, which isn't a great call.

But, you know, her leaving and that guy in Belize being like, get the fuck out of my, get the fuck out of this town.

Great calls.

Yeah.

So he changes the group's name yet again, I think in part to try and, you know, lose some of the heat on them to Carbon Nation, right?

And in the grand tradition of scammers and conmen for generations, it is at this point that he flees to Mexico.

Several new folks have joined at this point, and the oldest of them is a 59-year-old mother of, she's got several kids.

I think she might be a grand, it might have been a grandmother named Magdalena Sevilla.

She had successfully raised several kids to adulthood.

She had was the manager of a store.

She's a person who lived a very complete adult life, like a functional member of society.

And she, but she also was someone who had a lot of trauma and a feeling that her life was somehow incomplete.

And she falls into this content.

She sees all these young people living these blissful lives around these beautiful things of nature and is like, I want this in my life.

Right.

And so she quits her job and leaves everything behind.

Her children who were interviewed for that hood or that hood horrors documentary expressed being like really surprised by this, but are like, at least for a while, she seems happy.

So we were like, I don't know, maybe like I like, she's 59, right?

Like, what are we supposed to do?

Now she has a heart condition that she's been on medication on for like a decade at this point.

Again, it's totally manageable.

She is managing it, but Nature Boy hates medicine.

And it's kind of, you could, some of the accounts of people at the time, it is insinuated that he harasses her whenever she takes it.

There are some reports that she felt afraid of him knowing that she needed medicine and that she was sick or that she was taking it.

And she, she doesn't like quit cold turkey, but she starts rationing it and not taking it as often as she is supposed to.

And it eventually she runs out entirely.

And in videos from later in her stay, she starts to look visibly unhealthy, right?

The group kind of travels around.

They go back to Belize for a while and then move back and then back to Mexico to a place called Pelinque where they rent a modern stone house.

Although again, most cult members are camping in the yard and everyone is pooping in the yard.

Now, at this point, Nature Boy has drawn in some cult members who are, you know, they're better at editing and video.

They've got like recording studios set up.

They're putting out a lot of content and some money is coming through with this.

More money comes in from Nature Boy requiring new members to hand over their debit cards and credit cards when they join.

One former member claims he gave Nature Boy a card with $1,000, his life savings on it, and Nature Boy immediately spent it all on a ping-pong table.

So again, not great at money.

Near the end of 2018, Sevilla dies in the night in her tent due to a pre-existing, now unmedicated heart condition.

Velvet Marquez, who is still with the group at this point, but will leave later, told a reporter he does not allow people to have medical attention.

This is why Mama Dia, that's what they called her, passed away.

Now, by this point, Nature Boy is fully calling himself himself God now.

He has forced the whole cult on a strict diet where everyone can only eat at the same time he gets hungry.

He starts randomly forbidding men and women to speak with each other, and in true cult leader fashion,

begins doling out unhinged punishments.

When members displease him, they're made to do squats or stand in a corner.

He also starts filming the sex that he has with followers and sometimes posting the videos online, sometimes as revenge porn, sometimes just as content.

They make most of their money at the, he sucks so bad.

They make most of their money at this point from a social media app based in Singapore called Big O Live, which pays people for streaming.

Shaka Calvin, one of his followers, claims that's when it would really get bad because Bishop Nature Boy started becoming a celebrity.

They were all having to do things to get attention, to get money.

And the things they do, like they are, they start, instead of there being any kind of message, they start really focusing their content on, we need to have like reality show shit about everyone having fights and conflicts within the group.

So he starts ordering people to fake fights and arguments for the sake of viral content.

And he also starts, yeah, beef sell.

He also starts talking like a militant revolutionary, which is when they start really doing a lot of these videos where they're dressed as like pharaohs or Native Americans and they're marching like soldiers to again kind of like, again, stuff that he thinks is going to like shock people and go viral.

As Dalen Armstead, the music engineer who joined, recalled the Rolling Stone, working frequently with two other initiates, Armin Palmer, who went by Pisce, and Ishmael Goodwin, aka Caliber, the group's musical output accelerated.

Loving the money and hating the system is loving the warden and hating the prison, Palmer raps, with an eerie synth hook looping behind him and one song called Negropean.

The song's music features Musa and Palmer shirtless, decked out in feathered headdresses, tribal jewelry, face paint, stalking around vivid jungle landscapes.

The message was a product like cocaine, Musa says.

We were there to package it and get it out.

Again, these are all like members who are like handling the actual entertainment portion of things.

Wow.

The stuff that actually does require some discipline is this, right?

Now, as time goes on, an increasing part of his message becomes domestic abuse because Nature Boy has started seeing by this point, Velvet, who starts out as Olmec's direct, is now his direct,

his main wife.

And he has started hitting her.

He's also hitting basically every other woman in the group.

Former member Courtney Townsend claims, quote, we'd end up having these meetings that would last six, eight hours where he's explaining why he's locking a Velvet in a room, why he had to slap her.

His explanation was that we've been programmed by European men to be weak little men, so our women will never respect us.

The women will respect him, and he's the guy slapping these girls, locking them in rooms.

He actually does a live stream at one point with Velvet and her dad, where Velvet's dad asks, Why do you keep hitting my daughter?

And Nature Boy says, Because I was upset with her.

And her dad responds, She made you bust her in the face, her nose bleeding profusely everywhere.

I'm going to tell you this, Pops.

Bishop responds, when it comes to me, I'm a man.

So again, like he is, he is, this has become like the central, what started as like we need to overthrow Babylon and go back to nature.

It is now primarily what we need to do is hit women.

That's what the cult is doing.

It's a vehicle for his own desires, his own instincts that he doesn't want to work on or improve from.

It's a place where he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

And here's what part of what's extra gross about this.

It's not even that this is like, obviously he wants to do this, but there's another level that is very social media to this that I find even sicker, which is that a lot of their viewers and they're getting paid by viewers, whether or not those viewers like them are hate watchers.

So a lot of why he's doing this is because it makes people angry and they share and repost and it gets him more traffic, right?

He cracks that up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now that said, this does get him reported to the Mexican police.

In March of 2019, they get raided, which prompts them to flee the next day for Nicaragua.

They eventually get raided there.

And after about a month, they get deported and they go to Panama where the same shit happens.

They spend some time there.

There are police reports.

They get arrested.

They get deported.

This happens several times until COVID hits.

Now,

the plague is actually a lifeline.

for Nature Boy and Carbon Nation, because, again, he's making his followers hand over all of their money and everyone starts getting those COVID checks, right?

In addition to being, it gets easier to get like on unemployment and stuff.

And so he starts taking that directly from them.

And they have enough coming in now that he tries to set up in Hawaii on the big island next.

Now, if you remember, Hawaii has extremely strict COVID quarantine protocols at this time.

I think it's like two weeks that you have to spend in a hotel room, not leaving for any reason, but an absolute medical emergency, right?

If you want to spend any time on the island at all, right?

Like that is my recollection of it.

That's what I read in the article.

They show up in Hawaii and immediately break quarantine.

And in fact, post videos of themselves, not just breaking quarantine, but like touching endangered turtles that you're not allowed to touch.

So they get arrested by the Hawaiian government and they get deported

as Americans.

They get deported from Hawaii, which is not easy to do.

You have to really suck some horrible shit to get deported from Hawaii as an American citizen.

Now, while all this is going on, Carbon Nation has become a YouTube production house, putting out videos that are mostly either sexual or involve giant dramatic fights between members.

Less and less time is spent actually preaching any kind of ideology, but the parasocial bond formed by watching this stuff is strong enough that people keep joining, including Janae Newell, a 25-year-old waitress at a raw vegan restaurant who by 2020 had come to consider Carbon Nation my frequency family.

What was what he preached?

People of like minds coming together on a common mission to elevate the consciousness of Earth.

This is all, again, just repackaged bullshit.

I was hearing shit like this 20 years ago from fucking assholes on a more primitive chunk of the internet, but like, yo, we're all in the same frequency.

No, you're fucking not.

You're shitting in a yard and hitting women.

Initially, she describes him as kind, but on

March 27th, 2022, during a party at the DeKalb County house that they had started to rent, because they were back in the continental U.S.

at this point,

Nature Boy had one of his other wives punch Newell repeatedly after an argument.

She says, all right, well, I'm out of here.

I'm leaving.

But Nature Boy kind of sends people after her and convinces her to come back.

And then he tries to coerce her into sex.

She says no repeatedly.

And he keeps repeating, I'm not going to rape you.

And then we should have sex one more time.

And eventually he coerces her into having sex.

Once she leaves, Nature Boy immediately posts revenge porn videos of them having sex.

Newell goes to the cops and she initially is not pressing charges for rape, just for the revenge porn.

But the cops are like, this actually, this is, this, it has to be so bad for the cops to do this.

The cops are like, this actually sounds like rape to us.

Like, you know,

development.

That is.

And it's, this is, again, if this is a white cult leader, I don't think any of this happens in terms of like the legal consequences.

That is a huge part of it, right?

That he is a black cult leader is why the cops see this, but he is, this is rape.

He's doing a bad thing.

Yes.

All the bad things.

So he gets arrested.

He gets charged.

He He does bailout.

He's going to spend like the next two years almost fighting in court while his collapses around him.

There had been a few dozen people at most at one point.

And they're down to like a half dozen hardliners.

One of his followers, Amar Jawaid, flees with a bunch of money and hard drives that presumably included revenge porn.

On March 6th, 2023, he's found dead inside of a house that's on fire.

It seems to be related to some gang stuff he was into as opposed to Nature Boy, but I don't, you know, it's not fully known.

But it's one of those people who knew him will be like, it's because of Nature Boy's influence that he got into that stuff in the first place, right?

Because he joined when he was 18 and this dude had a real dark impact on him.

I don't know.

But those are the two deaths that are somewhat tied to this cult.

The court case finally reached its conclusion earlier this year, and it didn't go well for Nature Boy.

One of his wives admitted to posting revenge porn when she was like trying to defend him.

And in general, every time his remaining loyal followers got up on the stand, it was bad for him because the things he convinced them to do were bad.

The state offered him a 30-year plea deal, which he rejected.

So, on March 1st, he is convicted on all counts and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 10 years, which is where he is now.

So,

wow.

Yep.

Again, that is

quite a story.

It's both like, yeah, this guy sucked.

I'm glad he's, he's not out and free, but also like, well, there was only justice in this case because he's a black guy, right?

Yeah, it's a little complicated.

Those things are true, you know.

And it's also complicated by the fact that

you know, if he's to be believed, which I think there's no reason not to believe the story of his childhood, it's it's incredibly traumatic, and you can see the through lines

of how he got from point A to point B here and his aggression and

constantly being moved around and abused.

And then, but that's no excuse.

It's not an excuse.

It's just like this way.

It's interesting if you want to look at like the cult that has a very that takes the cult that kind of I think about a lot when I read about this, because he's kind of the lower effort version of Nexium, right?

And Nexium is a higher effort version in part because you've got this guy, Keith Ranieri, who is gets his start doing other kind of cons,

is targeting a higher level of wealth individual, is targeting people who are more prominent.

And he's doing a lot of, when you get right down to it, it's the same.

They're not, he's talking about saving the world.

All he's really doing is being like lounging around in nice hotels and houses, in rental houses, and having sex with a bunch of women who he also physically and mentally abuses, right?

Ultimately, both cults are doing the same thing.

Rani makes millions and millions of dollars and is adjacent to a lot of very powerful people for years and years and years and years, like a long time before he gets justice.

Nature Boy, it's just a couple of years.

And it's in part because Nature Boy does not have, because of his background, the ability to kind of reach and

influence

the level of wealth people that Ranieri does.

And it's part because like just he immediately gets a lot more new

shit, right?

Like

he gets a lot more attention from law enforcement.

He gets, it gets taken seriously because he's not a white guy, right?

But he also, yes, 100%.

What I'm about to say does not, it's not counter, countering that.

But like, to your own point, he's pretty lazy.

He's pretty sloppy and lazy about how he's going about this, not preparing,

you know, and really not even trying to keep up the facade of there being anything too intellectual or spiritual.

Or

it's just about

Instagram, posting the videos, making money, chasing the clout.

Oh, it's subs are dying down, going down.

You got to add fights, fabricate it like the reality TV show.

And it's wild because it's possible to do it.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, that's part of what's interesting is because, you know, Ranieri did have to create a lot of like, he had to have, he had to build this curriculum around his cult in order to start getting the following that he eventually turns into, like what it turns into.

When you've got the internet and the way parasocial relationships work, if you're able to just get an audience with content that you're putting out hours of on a regular basis, you can really easily get a number, enough people to kind of support you as a cult leader.

You know, this isn't a massive cult.

He's not a massive star.

But 100,000 or so regular listeners, you can get a dozen or two people who will come out and live with you at any given time and enough money that you can get away with this.

And it takes so much less effort.

A guy like Ranieri, there is more background work that Ranieri has to do to get started, you know?

Yeah.

So it is just one of these like social media has made

starting a cult a lot take a lot less effort.

And you can fuck up a bunch of people's lives doing that a lot more easily.

That said, the cults don't tend to last as long.

Maybe that's the upside, right?

Well, they're more visible too.

Yeah.

But the upside is that what they're doing is on display.

It's hard to obfuscate what's happening.

Yeah, and that is, that is kind of worthwhile.

That

the

worthwhile side story here is that a lot of why this cult gets taken down is there's a, it's not just, you know, the racism of the police.

It's also that there's a lot of people watching and following this online and saying this is wrong and taking effective action to both scare other people.

A number of, a lot of people both get out because people are making a stink about how fucked up this is and don't join who might otherwise have joined because of all of the people who are trying to stop this.

And it also makes it harder for them to act and operate.

So that is a plus side of it, right?

Is that there is like a community kind of defense aspect here if people realize Liz is really, you know, fucked up, right?

Like that hood horrors documentary is somebody who covers a lot of stuff within the subculture being like, people need to know how this happened and why, right?

So that's good.

You know?

Yeah, the good with the bad.

Good with the bad.

So easy to get swooped up in movements that you don't intend to

the pipeline there's much to be said about this we know yes much to say that's why this show exists yep all right okay well that's the episode how you feeling katie i'm feeling great learned a lot about nature boy and cults i'm gonna yeah form my own cult actually i already have Yeah, you know what?

Yeah.

Join Katie's cult.

Where, I don't know, Katie, what, what Central American nation do you think you're going to wind up in?

Oh,

that sounds like a lot of work.

Can it just be based out of California?

A lot of cults are.

Katie, good news about that.

I mean,

the promised land.

Yeah.

I'm just going to come to your compound and start it there.

No, my cult already exists.

It's called Some More News.

You can support our Patreon.

Yeah,

I'm too tired.

Cults, that seems like so much work.

I'd rather, I'm going to play Age of Wonders Wonders 4 in my underpants alone.

That's my plan.

Yeah.

What a nice evening.

Yeah, sounds great.

So we're not going to start that colt in Curacao?

Well, no, Sophie, you should start that Colt in Curacao.

We definitely still need a Colt in Curacao, but primarily as a way to get money and as a way to purchase products without tariffs.

That's really the benefit of having a Colt in Curacao.

Yeah, that's a real big benefit.

You know, and I'll just move there with you.

We don't even have to start a Colt.

Sounds good.

See you there.

Yep.

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