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

Cool zone media.

Welcome back for Behind 24 From with Behind the Bastards, a podcast.

You know what it's about.

Bad people.

We tell you all about them.

I'm Robert Evans, and back once again on the show is Arch Guest, Ace Guest,

Katie Stoll.

How are you doing, Katie?

Oh, wonderful.

Bad.

Fine.

I don't know.

Pick a word.

I'm doing it.

All of the emotions all at once.

It's just really hard

to understand my emotions these days, but I'm here and I'm happy to be here.

Yeah,

I'm generally like terrible.

Okay.

That's kind of the way I feel.

It's like I'm bad, but there's a lot of people that are getting it a lot worse.

So I'm fine.

Yeah, there you go.

Bad, other people are worse.

Everything's good.

Or bad.

I don't know how everything is.

Everything's so dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Yeah,

we used to have that as a theme song.

And then things got even dumber.

You know what I love it?

When people say, boy, you should still be doing your podcast because the years just get worse.

But obviously, ever since Senator Sanders

came after us, you know, there's, there's, we simply can't anymore.

Yeah, it's too much liability.

Too much liability after that massive, massive lawsuit.

Well, that's what happens, I guess, when you out someone is

killing JFK before the files are released.

That's right.

Obviously, the files that just got released, look them up, completely vindicate us.

But you know, yeah, but it is what it is.

It's unfair.

It's unfair.

You all lost a podcast, and Katie and I both lost out on purchasing

our yachts.

So that's a bummer.

By yachts, I mean an exact replica of the boat from Jaws.

Yeah.

But like a miniature version.

Yeah, very small, very small.

Like the Lego-size one.

Yeah.

Want a dream, though, someday, Robert.

Robert, why did you not warn me about the images I'm going to have to show Katie in this podcast?

I just scrolled and it's...

You sort of warned me.

So

we don't do stuff like that because then you wouldn't be surprised.

And that's a big part of me enjoying the podcast that we do.

i know

i had to watch like fucking so many hours of this of motherfucking online documentaries about this guy because all of his stuff has been pulled off the internet katie we're doing a cult leader today we're doing a

we're doing a new cult leader we're like i mean this guy's a little older than me but the cult is very much like gen z like it's a very modern like social media driven cult and it's kind of one of the most

you know there was that document about those twin flames people that was a very like modern online cult.

But this guy is like, this is a Facebook and Instagram cult leader that we're talking about today.

That's how he builds everything.

Okay.

Our the new school cult leader.

I like it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cause like in back in the day, we've always had cults, but we used to have a lot fewer because it was harder.

Like two, three thousand years ago, if you wanted to start a cult, you had to just sit down and talk to a bunch of people and convince them of shit.

And like, you know, maybe if you got really good, a couple of your followers would be good at talking and you could get them to travel around and like talk.

And, but that's you delegate that part.

Yeah, and that's hard, you know,

and it's slow.

And usually you get killed by the Romans

before all of that works its way out, right?

Which is why Jesus was never able to buy the Green Bay Packers, which if you've read the Bible properly, you'll understand was his ultimate goal.

Absolutely.

Yeah, as it is mine.

I'd be a good owner for the Packers.

Katie.

Robert, are you the second coming of Jesus?

No, I'm the second coming of whatever guy was good at coaching the Packers.

Okay.

I couldn't speak to that.

I don't know.

I just like the hats.

I don't know much about the team.

Anyway.

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This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

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I didn't feel real at all.

More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.

We're still fighting.

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

I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7.

Zone 7 ain't a place.

It's a way of life.

Now, this ain't just any old podcast, honey.

We're going to be talking to family members of victims, detectives, prosecutors, and some nationally recognized experts that I have called on over the years to help me work these difficult cases.

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I knew I wanted to obey and submit, submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.

For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the Turning River Road.

In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.

But in 2014, the youngest escaped.

Listen to The Turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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As time has gone on, cult leaders have always been on the bleeding edge of technology, right?

Because the key thing in terms of making it possible for cult leaders to spread more effectively and for there to be more cults is that there are more ways with low barriers for people to reach large numbers of other human beings.

You know, thousands of years ago, you had to like get an elite following and hope some of those guys would be really good at talking and really loyal and would go spread the message, right?

And that's just fucking difficult.

Then,

you know, if you, if you want to look at it this way, I think this is the right way to look at it.

Cults are a lot like pornography in that they're always on the bleeding edge of technology because that's the only way they can stay profitable, right?

Like, porn will always adopt the new technology that's going to be kind of the future before like mainstream Hollywood, right?

Because Hollywood's got

margins, you know, that which is why you see, you know, 300 million dollar movies every year that flop and the industry doesn't quite go under because, like, well, you know, we have the ability to take some gambles here.

Porn can't afford to gamble like that, right?

So they really have to be

thinking.

That's true.

You got to be adaptable in the porn industry.

Absolutely.

You know, Robert, I've heard you share a lot of hot takes, but this might be my favorite one.

Yeah, this comparison between Colts and the porn industry.

Yes.

Edge of technology.

Always on the edge of technology, right?

And so, you know, Colts, the printing press, huge for cults, right?

Colts immediately figured out how to like, oh, we can now just put out our writing material or reading material, however the fuck we want, right?

And then you get, you know, you get your Mormon churches and stuff like that, in part as a result of the fact that it's a lot easier to print stuff now.

The radio makes it a lot easier to spread stuff.

And obviously television, boy howdy, that really supercharges things, you know?

And then you start getting all these, I mean, among other things, like the prosperity gospel, these different sort of like quote unquote Christian churches that are all about, if you give me money to buy a jet, God will make your wildest dreams come true.

You can't do that.

That doesn't work very well through like a magazine, right?

Oh, definitely not.

You're not getting the same kind of return on investment there.

It's the same thing with like, if you have, if you have a, a creator that you listen to way too much, that person will probably be, have an unfair influence on you because they're in your ears a hundred hours a week, right?

And if you're attending one of these like big cult churches and doing it two or three times a week and they're constantly talking about how you need to give them money to go to heaven, you'll probably do it, right?

I would, I'm easily manipulated.

Yeah, yeah, we all are actually

the real answer behind why do people do the things that they do.

Well, we're kind of stupid and it's easy to fuck with us.

You're selling me a dream.

I want that dream.

Idiot.

Look, we've all bought steaks from some guy's car at a certain point in our lives, right?

Who among us?

Who among us?

If you were ever dumb enough to buy a frozen steak or speakers from a guy's car, you are dumb enough to have fallen for something at some point, right?

Especially on this guy.

That's why we need better education.

Yeah.

And, you know, you're kind of getting to where we are now, which is like, yeah, the printing press, the radio, TV, all of that increased the reach different cults and cult leaders could have.

But the internet, and most particularly social media, that has really given these people unprecedented power.

And And it's why we now live in a day and age where they basically run a lot of stuff, right?

If not everything, right?

Everything's kind of a cult these days because cults work, among other things, like there's this talk right now about the tariffs and people being like, oh my God,

finally, his base is going to leave him because of the tariffs.

And I'm like, I don't know if you guys have read about like the different cults where a guy would tell everyone the world's ending on this day and then it wouldn't.

And then still a big chunk of the loyal core of the the of the cult would be like, I guess we'll wait around for the next one.

I don't know what else to do with my life.

Yeah, they're in too deep at this point.

They still put out clothes.

Yeah, that's the way it always is.

They're not leaving the cult even when, you know, they've been starving.

They can't afford fake

cult collapsed.

They still put out clothes for L.

Ron Hubbard.

Well, and they should, because he's coming back.

We all know that, Sophie.

I've been saying

cancel L.

Ron.

No, not LRH.

I can.

And he would have loved TikTok.

That man would have been the best at TikTok.

He would have had such a good TikTok.

Honestly, we've all missed out.

That could have been a beautiful thing for everyone.

That's really the great, like, what if of history?

Yeah.

Screw these people.

Like, what if Hitler had been killed?

No, what if L.

Ron Hubbard had had access to TikTok and a billion people?

I think he would have bought TikTok.

I think he would have bought TikTok.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

What a time.

What if LRH had had TikTok and Ozimbic?

Nothing would have stopped him.

So the internet and most particularly social media has presented these would-be cult leaders of our day with a tool of unprecedented power.

The power, if we talked about back in the day, stochastic terrorism, right?

Which is trying to incite just random large groups of people in the hope that some amount of them actually carry out attacks.

Well, stochastic messaging for cult leaders means that even if a cult leader of middling charisma and skill can get a platform that reaches thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions or more people, the vast majority of those people, in any case, aren't going to actually do more than watch or read him.

But if a percent of a percent does, that's more than enough to build the kind of following that can take care of you, right?

Sure.

It's just a numbers game.

Now, this week, we're going to tell the story of a cult leader who got his start, dozens of followers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, all thanks to Facebook and Instagram.

Our subject for this week is interesting in part because he's not very talented.

Like, as a cult leader, like LRH, we joke about, but Hubbard was really good at some things.

And that's part of what makes his story really fun is that, like, you are watching a man who knows his business fuck up the world, right?

This guy is not very good at anything.

I don't think he's particularly bright, and I don't think he would have succeeded at creating a cult in any other period.

This is a tale of a cult made possible by social media um and if your ambition is to start a cult of your own i think these episodes would be a pretty good guide on how to do that and you should do that go start a cult right there's very rarely consequences this these episodes do end with consequences for this guy but most of the time it doesn't you know hopefully we can learn from his mistakes and how to do it more successfully learn from his mistakes and remember your goal should be the presidency not an isolated compound where you have many many sister wives

One of those ends better than the other historically.

We'll see.

We'll see.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Still a lot of time for playing sister wife to be proven the wisest.

Yeah, that's right.

All right.

So our bastard for this week is a guy named Elizio Bishop.

He was born in Harlem, New York in 1982.

Probably, like most cult leaders, he lies constantly and hard details about his early life are thin on the ground.

The best and most expansive piece of traditional journalism about the man is an article Rolling Stone published earlier this year.

Here's how it describes his earliest years.

Bishop was born in Harlem in 1982 and said that he was a crack baby.

The story of his upbringing he lays out in his social media videos is troubled.

Efforts to get in touch with family members were unsuccessful.

Now, this is...

Like, to fact-check it?

Yeah, yeah.

To be like, is any of this true, right?

Rolling Stone is like, we tried and we couldn't talk to them.

I do like this article and I respect it for providing like reasonably good good context on a guy who's had basically nothing written about him beyond a few short news articles.

And those are all

focused on, like, you know, there's a couple of specific crimes that he's involved in.

And so they're all very much like focused on those points in time.

The Rolling Stone article

covers those points, but it also tries to give a more detailed account of Bishop's life.

And as a result,

it's, you know, one of our better sources.

But I will say it still gets some stuff wrong, you know, and particularly the paragraph that I just read, I think is an example of

why we can't use that as our primary source.

And so the best source I found on this guy, weirdly enough, is a YouTube channel called Hood Horrors, which has a little more than 4,000 subscribers.

This is not a big channel.

It seems to focus primarily on shady characters from what's called the conscious community or black consciousness community, which is a subculture online that we'll discuss a bit later.

And Hood Horrors did a 17-part series on Eligio on Eligio that is very fairly well edited and written and includes original interviews as well as extensive documentation of hundreds of hours of videos posted by his cult that have now been deleted.

So it's the only place to get at least glimpses of a lot of the first-hand sources on this stuff.

And I think they're coming at him from a more sympathetic angle than I am because he's kind of a shady member of the broader community they're a part of, but they do a really good job of, I think, giving you details on his life.

And it's, I got to say, no shade on the, on Rolling Stone, because their article was useful too, but it's the best single source on this guy.

And they play audio of Eligio talking where he claims that he was born addicted to heroin as opposed to crack, which is what the Rolling Stone claimed.

I don't know whether he was born addicted to heroin or crack or both.

It's not impossible.

Both are basically true.

And they're both bad.

Let's be real.

It sucks to be born addicted to anything.

Yeah, because then you don't get all the fun of starting to do a drug.

You know, that's the real tragedy here.

And then there's if your tolerance is already high as a baby, where do you think?

I know, you're gonna, shit's gonna be so expensive by the time you're 30.

Jesus,

sure, sure, sure.

Lay out the parents.

Just think about the fact that his life, he's gonna always be trying to chase a bigger high.

Right.

That's how he got here.

Yeah, that is essentially this story here.

So we've got one picture of his mom and dad.

I don't even have his father's name, but as you can see from the photo, he was a lot older than her.

Like

there's a sizable age gap between these two people.

And he dies of a heart attack right after Bishop is born.

Sure, he looks like he's right on the cusp.

He looks like he's right on the edge.

Yeah.

Now, so after he dies, Patricia and her kids live in government housing.

And one of Bishop's older sisters, who's about seven years old at this time, said this about her recollections of their childhood.

It wasn't all good memories, but it was a lot of good memories there.

So, you know, he has kind of a weird situation with his dad.

Money's not super,

you know, common for them, but they have a pretty loving household, at least according to several of his siblings.

Now,

and this is where part of why I think Eligio is able to identify with Gin Z.

Like Gin Z, he comes into the world too late to have any recollections of the good times, you know?

Like

there's a period of time in which his parents are doing well, and he misses that entirely.

A few months before his second birthday, CPS takes him and his siblings away from their mother.

She had been a user of hard drugs for quite a while, and her use had escalated to the point where friends of the family had called the government about it.

They were like, she can't be alone with those kids, right?

And she overdoses fatally months after this.

One of Alicio's later sisters, older sisters later said, she was street, and that's why she died so young.

She died at 33.

You can't be doing nothing but the street if you died at 33.

So that's what the family says about this kid's mom.

It is kind of worth noting that that's the account that he gives in videos years later, or that's the account that a member of his family gives in videos posted years later.

He will claim to have no memory whatsoever of either of his parents.

Although there's some allegations that this is basically a defense mechanism, right?

Stop himself from feeling what happened to them as much.

Perhaps.

Makes sense.

He and his siblings all become wards of the state after this.

He's separated from all of his sisters, but he and his younger brother, Leo, get to stay together for a while.

They bounce from foster home to foster home, but they are repeatedly kicked out of each for fighting.

So they get found by foster homes.

He and his younger brother are taken in, and then they'll just beat the shit out of each other and get kicked out.

Which, first off, if you're a foster family taking in two young brothers, they're going to beat each other up.

Yeah.

Like,

you got, you got to do that.

You got to take less issue with than if you're assaulting the foster parents or something.

But yeah, you're two little boys.

They're two little boys.

They're going to fight.

So this is enough of a problem, though, that when Bishop is seven, the state finally separates him from his brother, and he gets sent to a foster house in Queens that's run by a couple, Mr.

and Mrs.

Pope.

And his younger brother, Leo, isn't there.

Now, he will later claim that he was sexually abused while in this foster home.

He alleges that he was molested and forced to engage in sexual behavior with other foster kids while Mr.

Pope took pictures of them.

Statistically, this is not unheard of.

An estimated 40% of foster kids endure some sort of abuse during their time in the system.

And at least 4-5% of foster kids are sexually abused while in the system, a rate that raises significantly above the background level.

And Bishop isn't the only witness here,

but I don't see a whole lot of

gain for him to have lied

about this, right?

Which, and the way this usually comes up is he's being interviewed on his own backstory for podcasts and YouTube streams by other creators within this consciousness subculture.

And he'll talk a lot about his dad mentally and sexually abusing him.

He claims that as a result of the abuse, he began acting out,

humping both boys and girls in school with his clothes on.

At another point, he claims to have let a dog lick his penis, saying, I don't regret it either.

Which is, you know, I mean, first off, you don't got to tell people that story, man.

Yeah, that's why you can keep buttoning.

You can take that bad boy to the grave with you.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Yep.

There's plenty of things that don't need to be shared.

First sympathy or shock or what have you.

But that's a thing he said.

Okay.

Kids do a lot of weird things.

And I try to be like, yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of kids do weird shit, but like, you don't need to tell anyone that.

That didn't need to be known.

That didn't mean to be known.

Born with a penis.

I don't know if that is something

boys do.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, boys do stuff, but not that.

Well, I'm going to say, obviously, he's not the first boy to do that, right?

Like, that's a specific joke about like kids putting peanut butter on their junk.

Sure.

It's also, it's not common, you know, of all of all of the weird, fucked up things I knew other young dudes to do with their junk, none of them did that because it's a little weird.

A little weird.

I, you know, a little boy.

Okay.

There's going to be plenty of things in this

boy.

A small boy.

He's not, he can't be blamed for it, right?

Like a small boy just like experimenting in a way that's weird.

Like you should, you should, you need to talk to him.

You need to be like, hey, that's not something you could do.

That's not something you could do to a dog.

It's not something you should be doing to yourself.

There's some guidance needed, but guidance is necessary.

If we were to believe the story that he's laid out from his life, I will acknowledge that this is a very traumatic start to your not a lot of good guidance for this

guidance.

Yeah.

And, you know,

again, it's this, it's this situation where a lot he he frames this as a result of and reaction to the abuse he's feet he's experiencing from Mr.

Pope, right?

Yeah.

And after some period of time, he works up the courage to report Mr.

Pope to a social worker.

And to the foster system's credit, which I won't say often here, he gets sent to live with someone else very quickly, right?

Now, the next family he's sent to is a foster family in the Bronx who had also adopted his younger brother, Leo.

Okay.

And yeah, so first off, the brothers are back again.

That seems good.

These people are stable.

They live in the suburbs.

They've got a large house and they have at least an upper middle class amount of money.

And so he's pretty happy there at first, right?

He describes later, it was beautiful nature out there.

Things are looking up, right?

Maybe we've got our little orphanannie story coming together, you know?

The sun's come up.

It's It's tomorrow.

Except for no, it is not.

As Bishop and Leo would both complain, it's still like this house with these people who had access to, you know, a lot more resources, they still weren't very nice or nurturing.

Per Elisio, they wouldn't let me use a washing machine.

We had to wash clothes by hand.

He couldn't let me have my lights in my room.

Like there was no light in my room.

It was just a dresser in darkness.

He has stated in other videos that one of his new foster parents told him it was because I was dark-skinned, I was dirty.

Ooh.

Yeah.

Woo-hoo.

Okay.

Don't love any of that.

Don't love any of that.

No.

In interviews published by Hood Horrors.

Leo has claimed that around this time, he and his brother were both diagnosed with learning disorders, including ADD.

Bishop claims that he was put on Ritalin, and Leo states that both brothers were moved to special ed because of all this.

Where stories diverge is that Elysio is later going to claim that this is all the result of a con done by his foster mother to get additional checks from the government for taking in two disabled boys.

I don't think this is true.

Foster parents do get a stipend that can increase if their kid has higher costs due to a disability, and these stipends cap out at a fairly low level.

Although, as rates vary from state to state, it's hard for me to say exactly how it goes.

The general consensus online seems to be that there are no real stipends that will defray the cost in a super massive way.

Yeah.

It's just not going to happen.

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside and he's he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

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Oh, we're back.

So

we're talking about how, you know, our boy here, Elijio Bishop,

has been taken to

he's had a rough upbringing, right?

His parents are both dead.

He's been moved to one

foster foster home where he was sexually abused.

And then he's been finally moved to another, which is a step up.

It's with his brother, right?

These people live in the suburbs in a large house.

They've got some amount of money and he's happy at first, recalling in a later interview, it was beautiful nature out there, which I guess if you grew up in, you know, central New York City, the suburbs qualify as nature.

Sure.

Yeah.

It's more nature.

It is a lot more nature.

There's some trees out there, right?

Yeah.

However, as both he and his brother would later complain, it still wasn't what you'd call a nice or nurturing environment.

Per Eligio, they wouldn't let us use a washing machine.

We had to wash clothes by hand.

He wouldn't let me have lights in my room.

Like there was no light in my room.

It was just a dresser in darkness.

Bishop has stated in other videos that one of his new foster parents told him this was, because I was dark-skinned, I was dirty.

And I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, yeah,

it's and, you know, this is, this is not like, again, he's not the only person who's expressed things like this about

his upbringing, you know.

You can find stories like this a lot, not just connected to the foster system, but connected to the foster system, which has a lot of issues with it.

Absolutely.

In interviews published by Hood Horrors, Leo, his brother, has claimed that around this time, they were both diagnosed with learning disabilities, including ADD.

Eligio claims that he was put on Ritalin, and Leo states that both brothers were moved to special ed because of all of this.

That all seems seems pretty cut and dry.

Where stories diverge is that Eligio, who's again our subject this week, the guy who becomes a cult leader, later claims that the ADD diagnosis and being moved to special ed is the result of a con by his foster mother to get added checks from the government for taking in two disabled boys.

From what I have been able to read, this seems unlikely.

There are stipends that you get for having a kid with a disability as a foster parent.

But from everything people say online, these stipends cap out out at a fairly low level.

And although rates do vary from state to state, the general consensus online seems to be that the best these stipends do is somewhat mitigate the cost of taking in a child who needs extensive medical care.

And it's worth noting, the things that these boys are being claimed of as having aren't the things that get you the highest dollar health.

That was going to be a significant thing.

It's like it's just ADD, right?

ADD doesn't, that's not.

We're talking.

It's not a disability.

You know, maybe a learning disability.

It's a learning disability.

Sure.

Yeah.

But it's not that it's not a, it's that when you're talking about like the higher amounts of money that you can get as a stipend, it is for something like your kid needs constant, life-saving medical care, a wheelchair to move on their own.

And even then, it's not much money, right?

It doesn't cover the cost of their actual health care.

So it's the idea that like his, especially since if you watch enough videos with this guy, I'm not surprised he's got ADD or, you know, ADHD probably now is what he'd get diagnosed with.

I'll just say, I have ADD.

It's not uncommon.

Yeah.

I don't, there's a lot about his background that I don't feel any need to question because it happens to a lot of kids.

I don't think he's being accurate about this conspiracy around him being given Riddlein.

I'm not a good design of this.

Early 90s, maybe we can't say that.

I feel like an early 2000s development.

Based on my memory of the late 90s, more of my people, my friends and family members were on Riddle in than weren't.

So again, the idea that this had to be a conspiracy, I'm just not buying, right?

Like, it's just not super rare for kids to have been on Riddle and back then, right?

Right.

So, I

anyway, but this is a story.

This is his

at least what he's gonna claim.

Yeah, well, I will, but I'm gonna wait to see

our job.

His brother doesn't make his brother's just like, yeah, we had ADD.

Yeah,

what I'm not sure yet, because we're gonna see where this is building.

All of this is valid, horrifying, and this stuff happens.

And I don't know how much this cult leader is milking or

not milking, but

leaning into something for the story of his personality.

And that's why you have to go.

I try to, when trying to determine how reliable different claims he makes are, I have to go to the evidence, right?

About 40% of kids in foster care will experience some kinds of abuse, right?

So the fact that he claims he was abused in foster care, I don't feel that he needed to be like, well, I don't know, right?

That said, I found found a lot of reporting on how inadequate the support supplemental income is for foster parents with disabled kids.

And this all does vary from state to state, but like one article I found via Stat News quotes a foster mother in Missouri who says, It is about it being these payments is about a third of what is actually spent out of pocket on taking care of a child, right?

So, again, I just don't see the evidence that this is a particularly likely scam.

No, you don't get rich taking in disabled foster kids, really.

There are some weird scams you'll hear about people get in a bunch of kids and, in fact, to like make them work for him, which we'll talk about in a second.

But yeah.

So, and again,

I'm not saying like this, these kids didn't both experience abuse.

Like, given the number of families they passed through, it would be almost impossible for them not to have experienced a good number of abuse, a good amount of abuse, right?

Exactly.

And just the fact, even outside of that being passed from home to home, the chaos of this is incredibly incredibly traumatic.

So, yes.

I try to have like an open mind about this both because I've read a lot of articles from foster parents who seem to be people of really good will talking about how inadequate the system is.

And I've made over the course of the last 10 years of my life, a lot of friends who were in foster care from an early age, none of whom like the system or feel good about it.

All of whom feel very, very bad about how the system works.

This is not, I'm not going to, I don't,

I'm not going to pretend this is a comprehensive look at it, but like it's really opened my eyes up to like, I'm not going to say this is a good thing that's being unfairly slandered.

So

I'm going to try to look at sort of what seems likely based on the evidence, you know, vis-a-vis his claims.

And he does make some other allegations about this foster family, which will be he and his brother's last, that are more credible.

He claims his foster mom used him for free labor, making him work for hours in her garden and around the house as a quote-unquote slave.

Leo's account comports somewhat with his brothers, although he doesn't compare it to slavery.

He just says they were strict and they had to do a lot of chores, right?

Yeah.

But it's not hard to find cases of foster parents using foster kids as unpaid labor.

The most shocking recent example of this is a case that just concluded in West Virginia.

A couple, Jean K.

Whitefeather and her husband Donald Lance, were convicted of forcing their five adopted children, all of whom were black, to work as slaves on their farm.

They had started adopting kids from a shelter for vulnerable youths in Minnesota and then moved to Washington State and finally West Virginia in 2023.

They were ultimately reported to the Kanawha County Sheriff after a neighbor spotted Lance locking a girl and her brother in the shed, in a shed.

Per NBC News, the sheriff's office said the two children in the shed had no running water or bathroom and had been deprived of adequate hygienic care and food.

The children said they slept on the concrete floor and had been locked inside for 12 hours before they were found.

Another girl was found inside the home.

An indictment alleged that the couple targeted the children for forced labor because of their race.

They were charged with human trafficking, child neglect, forced labor, and other crimes.

And in a happy-ish ending, they were convicted and sentenced to 215 and 160 years in prison, respectively.

So that is a happy-ish ending.

That's a happy-ish ending.

Like, yeah, that seems like about 200 years worth of prison.

Yeah.

Okay, that's fair.

Sure.

Oof.

So again, I don't know if Elizio is telling the truth about this family, but it's not like this doesn't happen, right?

Being like forced to work an unreasonable amount because you're a fought, particularly a black foster kid, you can find more stories than the one I quoted here, right?

Now, it's also worth noting that this last couple that they live with owns a church, right?

And so these brothers are forced to go to Bible study and attend church regularly.

And there's this mix of things where Eligio clearly learns how to be a preacher a lot about how people talk about religion.

And it's going to make him very effective at talking.

uh about religion at at conversion at the kind of shit a cult leader needs to do right he gets kind of a crash Speaking in general, talking about religion, but also speaking to a group of people, being charismatic,

drawing them in.

And when you see him talk, if you like me, have just spent way too much time looking at different evangelical, like, you know, fringe sects and stuff.

It's like, oh, yeah, no,

I get where this comes from, right?

You know, again, folks, watch the movie Marjo if you want a little more of an education on that.

Eligio claims that he was told several times he was a demon and that he became scared of his reflection in the mirror.

You hear this a lot from kids who are stuff like this a lot from kids who are raised evangelical.

So I feel no need to like question that claim.

Yeah.

So he has also alleged that his, these last foster parents physically, although not sexually, abused him.

His younger brother feels a little differently.

And I think this may just be them both interpreting the same thing differently because his brother Leo has acknowledged that they were both spanked regularly when they misbehaved.

But he doesn't describe this as abnormal or extreme.

And it may may not have been right there's a lot like we

it's always bad to hit kids you know also it's pretty normal to spank kids right yeah and so the fact that eligio calls this abuse and leo doesn't i don't see it necessarily as a discrepancy in what happened i don't either uh that's up for interpretation also leo's little brother leo he was already in this house prior right he went in a little earlier and also a younger so maybe his experience was different or again maybe he's leaning into the story for the narrative of his life.

Either way.

Yeah, or maybe it's the kind of thing where, yeah, they were both spanked.

And that's not good.

You shouldn't hit kids for any reason.

But also, like, Eligio's kind of upselling it to have, because having the super right and like, he doesn't need to.

His background's very sad, right?

It's the narrative, but I also understand that there's room for different interpretations, and the older child might have

more of a brunt, too.

Absolutely.

My, like, I can't, like, I wouldn't, i wouldn't qualify what i did as like particular again it was not excessive for the time but i definitely got spanked more than my brother because during the time when i am older than my brother and during the time when i was a kid it was more normal right and my parents changed as society changed on that matter right like i got by the way that people do

more because i was an angel right you were perfect of course we were always talking about this katie

no it's because it changed the baby like they didn't by the time i was around they didn't feel as good about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it, you know, there's, there's a number of things that are possible here, but I don't see any reason for him to be not.

And we do have to, like, I'm not trying, like, you do have to litigate a cult leader's backstory, even when it is this sad, because, like, they lie about a lot of stuff.

They're cult leaders, you know?

Like, so I think we've, I'm hoping that we're doing like a fair enough job of being like, this is probably true.

This one, there's less evidence for, you know.

Elysio says that the abuse he endured is what inspired him to begin committing petty crimes and running away.

He would periodically be gone for days at a time during which he would do stuff like just steal cars for the hell of it, commit petty robberies, burglarize houses and cars.

I have relatives who had severe ADHD who did stuff like this.

So, again, I like this does all seem pretty consistent.

He was arrested several times.

Quote, I got locked up for everything.

I was so young.

I was committing so many crimes.

And again, this is the kind of thing, if you're white, if your parents have money, this doesn't last on your record.

He's not, you know, although his parents do have some money.

After this cycle repeated itself a few times during his adolescence, he was finally convicted and sentenced to five years of juvenile detention, which is where he spends the remainder of his time as a child, right?

The rest of his, the last five years of his childhood, I mean, and his first year of adulthood, really, he spends incarcerated.

At age 16, he is sent from a juvenile detention area to East Jersey State Prison.

So they're like, well, at 16, you're ready for the adult prison.

And this we can absolutely verify happens, right?

And this is

deeply abusive by the system, by the state.

No, kids should not go to prison.

I don't really think ever.

Like 16-year-olds aren't adults.

You shouldn't treat them that way.

Even when they do horrible stuff, you know,

even when they're committing murders, they're still not adults, you know?

But this is the way the government is.

Yeah.

You can do a whole episode on that.

We have done several.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The juvenile, the juvenile offender system is just bastards all the way down.

It's like a fucking hedgerow of evil.

It is disgusting.

You couldn't drive a fucking tank through it.

So this is where he's going to spend the rest of his childhood.

He describes this as a desperate and miserable time during which he repeatedly tried to kill himself.

He was transferred to the prison psych ward for some time as a result.

I have no trouble believing this.

This is an extraordinarily common story.

Suicide is at large, just among all young people in the United States, the third leading cause of death, and being a youth in custody substantially increases your odds of attempting suicide or succeeding at it.

Incarcerated children complete suicide between two and four times as often as youth in the general population.

It is worth noting the evidence suggests that the kind of kids who wind up in custody are also likelier to have struggled with suicidal ideation before incarceration.

More than one-third of juvenile detainees report thinking of suicide in the six months prior to detention, and that number is almost 50% for female detainees.

Wow.

None of that's shocking.

No, no, it's worth, it's always worth bringing up, right?

People should always have this, be reminded of this, but yeah, it's not at all.

If you are casually aware of how any of this works, you're like, yup.

Yeah.

He's ultimately released in 2001 after his 19th birthday.

He goes back.

So again, by the time he is an adult in the free world, quote unquote, for the first time, He spent about a quarter of his life behind bars.

So, not great, slightly more than a quarter, if I'm remembering my tipping math, which is the only math I know how to do.

Eligio goes back to live with his family for a while, this foster family for a while, but for what should be obvious reasons, that doesn't go well, right?

He's ultimately kicked out.

At least that's his story.

Maybe it was more of a, he, there's some, I've heard some versions of it that like he chose to leave.

I don't know.

I don't think it matters all that much.

Thankfully, he has made contact with several of his siblings at this point, from which he's been estranged since he was very young, right?

The sisters and stuff.

Yeah, his sisters.

And they seem to, they're doing their best.

for their little brothers, right?

That's the, that's the feeling I get because he couchsurfs with several of them for different periods of time.

It never lasts.

He is very hard to live with.

And he is, I, just given based on what happens later, I have no trouble believing a pretty abusive person to live with.

They really are trying, it sounds like, based on both his account and the accounts that you get from other members of the family, that like they do attempt.

He couchsurfs with his sisters for a while.

He couchsurfs with an old friend.

And kind of between the two of them, he is able to gradually, over several months, make his way from New York City down to South Philly.

This is where he gets his first adult job as a security guard.

And he seems to feel good enough about this that he decides the army is a good place for me, which

a lot of people make a decision like this.

And, you know, outside of the whole problem of what the army does, you know, imperialism, all that good stuff, I do know a lot of people who will tell you quite out both, I don't recommend other people join the army, and I would have killed myself if I hadn't joined the army or the Marine Corps or whatever.

I would have wound up dead, right?

That's a very just

for them.

It's an

something to go do, but yeah, you wouldn't.

It's something to go do.

And I know people who, like, because their parents, because they, they had no, no one who told them how to be an adult,

like finally, like being in the military and having older people as mentors who are like, here is how you exist in the world as a person was something they desperately needed.

Right.

So sometimes it does work out to people for people.

This is.

Yeah.

So he's, this is post-2000, 2001.

It's not a great

time to join the army.

One of the worst times.

I don't know that it would have begone well for him, but he's not allowed allowed to stay.

And I'm going to quote from that right up in Rolling Stone: quote: He has said he completed basic training, but was discharged when the army learned of his psychiatric treatment.

Okay.

And this is probably, again, if he had tried a few years later, they probably would have kept him because during like the surge, right, they were letting a lot of dudes with sketchy histories like, yeah, we just need bodies.

You want to take a samurai sword and a share?

Fuck it, go.

Like, that's a literal thing that happened.

That's an actual guy.

That said, you know, if you are unable, if the army won't take you in like 2002, you probably don't have a lot of jobs you can get hired for, right?

Like, that's just a reality.

And he's going to spend the next several years of his life on the verge of homelessness, desperately pivoting from one gig and location to the next.

He signs up with the Job Corps, but he leaves very quickly.

He hooks back up with his little brother Leo, who's an adult now, and they move to New York City with one of his older sisters for a while until she kicks him out or they have a fight and they leave.

They wind up in Augusta, Georgia next, where they crash with another sister.

And again, just a shatteringly common story for people who come from this kind of society,

who are orphaned, who grow up super poor, who wind up in the foster system.

Stuff like this is not.

Right now, there's a lot of people who have had experiences like this, and most of them don't become abusive cult leaders like Alicio, right?

Important context.

He gets his next full-time job at this point, working six days a week at a slaughterhouse.

Probably not good for his mental health.

One of the worst jobs you can do.

I say this is someone who slaughters animals.

Like slaughterhouse work is just a fucking nightmare, right?

He starts drinking and smoking weed constantly as a coping mechanism for how traumatizing doing this job is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's about, I mean, my mom used to, because she had a donut shop that, you know, bankrupted the family.

But like,

that's some of my earliest memories.

And she would deliver to the Tyson Chicken Plant near Idabelle, Oklahoma.

And that, you could smell that place from a half hour away, right?

Like, I can't eat, like, and she always just left after delivering it looking haunted.

It's just a bleak thing to have to do.

Absolutely.

You, you won't catch me anywhere near a slaughterhouse.

No,

avoid factory farmed meat, people, if you can,

which, you know, often you can, although everything's getting more expensive.

I don't know.

Do whatever you can do.

Do what you need to do.

I'm not your life.

Just do your best.

It's miserable work.

So he starts taking drugs a lot more.

You get the feeling, I think this might be a guy who is schizotypal.

I don't know that he's been diagnosed with that.

It's just because of some of the things that happened later.

Either way, the fact that he starts smoking weed is not going to be good for him.

Neither is the drinking.

He increasingly has issues controlling his anger.

During one argument with his older sister, he punches her in the face and she kicks him, but not his little brother, out of the house.

So again, this is a guy.

I don't know if this is the first physical violence that he uses on someone close to him, but this is the first kind of documented case.

It's going to be a pattern in his life.

And so Bishop's going to spend the next several weeks living on the street.

He's outright homeless now until a friend of his, and it's kind of unclear from the interviews I've heard.

A lot of this comes from interviews pieced together.

by that hood horrors YouTube channel, which again, you should check out.

This guy doesn't have a lot of followers, but but is very good at what he's doing.

I really recommend.

It's like a 17-part series.

So

by far, I've done my best.

That Rolling Stone article is good.

The Hood Horrors piece is by far the most detailed history of this guy.

If you find yourself really interested in everything that's happened with this cult, but it is a long, it's like nine or 10 hours of content.

Yeah.

So again, he gets invited by this friend of his to come crash in Atlanta.

He manages to get work as a barber.

And one of the things that you're getting from this in addition to the bad stuff is that he must be pretty charming to a lot of people because he does keep getting invites with people to stay with him and crash with him a lot of folks including people who aren't his blood relatives try to help him right yeah um that's what i was thinking all these people that let him couch surf or crash there's got to be a reason yeah there's got to be a reason right this isn't this isn't a guy who is like a purely toxic force to the people in his life otherwise he wouldn't be getting these opportunities right So he gets some work as a barber for the first time during this period, and he's able to like make a living at it.

He has some skill at this, but barbering doesn't pay a lot, or at least the way he's doing it, he's not making good money.

Obviously, I know some people do quite fine with it.

So he starts basically flirting,

being a sugar baby for women who have more money than him, which is basically every woman.

He has almost no money at this point.

He says, quote, I used my body, I used my looks in order to get money and access to cars from various women.

He also starts selling weed to supplement his lifestyle.

And as you'll see, you know how some people are just kind of naturally jacked?

Like they have to work out some, but like working out a fairly minimal amount, eating an okay diet, they're just shredded.

He's one of those people, right?

Being jacked comes fairly easily to him, you know?

He's never doing well enough to afford his own place at this point.

Or and this is me reading in between the lines a little bit.

I think it might be more that he is unwilling to spend any of his money on rent.

So he's always living with someone, usually a girlfriend, who he inevitably cheats on constantly.

And this is how he winds up for the third time homeless, um, and because he gets kicked out of the house for cheating.

Uh, the desperation of this situation convinces him to take an offer that he had been given by someone else to start stripping at a gay strip club.

He describes himself as going gay for pay.

And, you know, I'm Sophie will show you some photos here.

There's documented evidence of him at this point as a dancer, as a stripper, and a sex worker.

He claims, quote, I was the number one dancer that was hosting the shows in every arena in Atlanta.

I can't verify this, but like, yeah, so how did you describe this guy looking from those, what Sophie's showing?

Like, he's pretty hot.

He's pretty hot.

Like, he's, he's, he's yoked, you know, he's a good-looking guy.

That does look like bone structure in his face.

Yeah.

Works out, oiled up.

He knows how to dress.

Like, he looks pretty good

see people throwing some dollars i could i can see

i when he it's one of those things i don't know if he was the number one male stripper in atlanta but like yeah i could see him doing gay male stripper i could be like i can see him doing pretty well yeah

um i don't have trouble believing that he's this is something he's able to like do quite well uh at uh his stripper name is tyson for tyson beckford i forgot i got forgot one image oh what's that oh is it the naked one where he's holding the water bottle over his cock Okay.

Why'd you forget that one?

Yeah, because I mean, that's a good one.

It was on a sec.

It was on a separate page.

Yeah.

Well, you'll pull that up.

There we go.

There we go.

Yeah.

Looks like a lot of people's Tinder profile right there.

Yeah.

If you're lucky, Jesus.

If you're lucky.

You'll see the T pendant he's wearing.

That's because his stripper name is Tyson for Tyson Beckford, who is a Jamaican-American actor and model who hosted two seasons of Make Me a Supermodel and was one of Ralph Lauren's big male models for years?

I don't know much about the model industry, but what I read casually says he's one of the rare male models who is like as big as some of the biggest female models, right?

In terms of like his income.

I've heard that name before.

He's very big.

He's a big deal.

Elagio suggests, insists that he was and is entirely straight and that this was a purely mercenary arrangement for him.

That said, he doesn't actually seem to be like homophobic or transphobic.

So there's that, I guess.

There's that.

Good for him.

Yeah.

Completely rotten inside.

That's cool.

Yeah.

He's just not, I don't think he has any personal care about that whatsoever.

He's certainly not a super judgmental guy when it comes to that stuff.

Yeah.

Speaking of people who won't judge you, our sponsors will never judge you.

They would never, they would never dream of it.

They're the only people who love you and the only people you can trust.

I think we can all agree on that.

Certainly.

No argument from me.

No argument from anyone.

Why would you argue?

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Subject to change.

Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside, and he's shaking, and he just looks like he's seen a ghost, and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied.

A true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

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

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We're back and we're talking about this fucking guy.

This fucking guy.

Things are starting to go well for him.

He's making good money.

He also continues serially dating women, and he gets one of these ladies pregnant with a child,

Elizio Jr.,

and he seems to have no further contact with this kid beyond naming him.

Soon after this, he gets another lady pregnant, Maisha.

Maesha has two kids prior to meeting him.

They get together and start living in the same home, and he names their son Osiris, and he does spend some time with this kid, trying to parent him.

And he'd been doing pretty well, okay, at least financially before, but now he is effectively taking care of both, you know, this first kid that he seems to, I think, he sends some money to.

I'm sure he's not totally up on his child support.

He's supporting this second kid and he's helping Maisha support her other kids.

And he finds himself strapped, right?

The stripper money is not alone enough for this.

So he starts working as a like an escort, right?

A gay escort.

And like, you know,

he's now having sex for for pay, right?

And he also stars in at least one pornographic film.

I suspect there are more knowing how that industry works, but we have documentation of at least one.

This is not easy for him.

He begins drinking more heavily.

And when he gets drunk, he is often physically violent.

This comes to a head in 2011.

And I want to play a segment of Maisha and Eligio both discussing the incident, which is part of that Hood Horrors documentary.

There were other videos where this was related, but they've been pulled from the internet.

So this documentary is the only place I can find it.

Again, I really do recommend watching the rise and fall of nature boy Elisio Bishop,

which is like 17 parts at this moment.

But yeah, here's a brief clip of them talking about this incident.

Look out the window.

He's stabbing my tires to my car.

So I go to the door.

He's like, come outside.

I'm like, nah, like, you've been drinking.

I know you.

I don't do you with an alcohol.

Like, go ahead.

He pulls me outside and I was holding on to the door.

So when I held onto the door, I closed it.

Then he grabbed me, dragged me down the stairs.

He got on top of me.

He was beating my face.

And I don't know how the police just pulled up in the yard.

They put him on top of me and they pulled him off of me.

When I was hitting her, a cop came out of nowhere.

A cop pulled me off her because I'm trying to,

I'm trying to fucking murder her.

Wow.

Yeah.

So not great.

Well, I hate it.

Yeah, not great.

He gets arrested

for for aggravated battery.

Sounds like fair charges based on, you know, what they say and what he says.

Because he was trying to fucking kill her.

Yeah.

And the police report notes that Maesha had severe swelling over her left eye, the size of a fist,

a laceration behind her left ear, marks on her upper body, and her pajama pants were torn.

He faced 20 years in prison, but by the time it took about a year for the case to come around to trial, by which point Maisha and him had reconciled.

She writes the letter, a judge in his favor.

Bishop takes a plea deal that includes probation and a thousand dollar fine, but no prison time.

And again, it's this thing where, like, they make up, he apologizes.

He says that he had promised the universe that if it got him off for these charges, quote, I would never hit another woman.

I should note that in this is, he says this in a live stream years later.

And in that live stream, he immediately adds, I lied,

because he becomes very convinced that

men abusing women is an important thing philosophically.

But that's in the future.

At this point, Maisha takes him back.

They're still living together.

He does make some changes after this, although I don't know how you'd categorize these.

He claims, and again, these are his allegations that are not verified.

He claims he befriended a wealthy biblical scholar named Dr.

Mike Brown.

Dr.

Mike Brown is a real person with a Wikipedia and everything.

He is a Messianic Judaism guy, which is people who

believe

it's like they think that they're a kind of Jews that accept Jesus as the Messiah.

It's a very problematic thing.

I'm not going to get into it.

He's a major Christian Zionist.

He does have a real PhD in Bible stuff.

He's got a pretty messy history in terms of shit he said.

He's held anti-pride rallies.

He has claimed

homosexuality is caused by childhood trauma.

He has in the past supported conversion therapy and Uganda's criminalization of homosexuality.

He's also claimed not to be anti-gay,

but I don't know if this is an example of him having softened or just

lying.

I don't know.

You know, it's, it's, he definitely has said some really fucked up shit.

He has been accused of sexually inappropriate behavior by a female employee, and he denies these allegations.

Eligio has apparently claimed that the two had a clandestine relationship and that for years, Dr.

Brown paid him $3,000 a month as an allowance and also fronted him the money he needed to start his own barbershop.

He starts his own barbershop around this time.

He has money from somewhere.

I have no, I'm saying this because This is a thing you can get sued over, and I absolutely do not want to be misreporting this.

There is no outside verification or confirmation of any kind that his allegations against against Dr.

Brown are true, nor have I come across similar allegations against Brown.

Again, the allegations against him are that he is abusive to a female colleague, right?

Not that he's hiring male prostitutes or doing a sugar boy.

Those are not allegations I hear anywhere else from him.

So I am telling you this because these are the things that Eligio claims, not because there's outside verification of this.

I don't know

Robert, you guys.

He's doing his best.

Really trying to state what the actual known facts are here.

What we do know is that he gets enough money to start a barber shop.

It is not a small shop.

He hires a team of barbers.

Photos make it look like more than a dozen shares in the shop.

And it does fairly well.

It seems to be a pretty successful business.

He starts to make good money during this.

And he's, you know, this business is supporting a decent number of people.

He lets his little brother live in the back.

He won't let him be a barber, but he'll let him sweep up after.

I don't know why.

Interesting.

Leo seems pissed about it.

So things are going pretty well, but this is a grind.

You know, running a small business is not easy.

I've never heard anything that makes it sound like a barbershop is an easy kind of business to run.

And he grows exhausted with the grind and starts getting obsessed with the idea of living closer to nature and dropping out of society.

Who amongst us, right?

Common, common thing to desire.

Yes.

Yeah, not a weird story.

Unfortunately, he starts to explore this by meeting a bunch of like hippies on the internet and watching YouTube videos from different creators in the black consciousness community, which we'll talk about in more detail,

but it essentially mixes, this is a subculture, the black consciousness or conscious community.

Online is a subculture, just sort of a collection of YouTubers.

There's some podcasters, some rappers who have this mix of like very standard, hippie, back to the land style ideology, with also an education on like the history of racism in the United States that is unfortunately mixed with stuff that gets scammier, like quote unquote natural health and astrology.

And from what I can tell,

it's a broad subculture.

So depending on who you get obsessed with as a creator in this, you might wind up learning about both like, you know, organic farming and making human manure and stuff, all of which are wonderful things.

And alongside like the destruction of Black Wall Street and Tulsa and the move bombing, right?

Very real conspiracy theories.

But there's also a sizable chunk of this community where you will learn some very not real conspiracy theories, right?

It's so tough.

There's a slippery slope and there's different communities.

It's like, yeah, I want to take that, but not that.

You,

this, but

it's difficult when like so much of it is about like, this is a, this is a largely black community talking about like the history of racism against and and like institutionalized bigotry against black people in the United States.

There's so many real conspiracies.

And it's also once you hear about those easy for a lot of people to get pulled into the stuff that's not so real.

He gets really interested in black Israelite stuff, which is basically black people are the lost.

13th tribe of Israel or whatever.

He gets into a lot of anti-vaccine stuff, which is adjacent to a lot of, you know, to to at least elements of this subculture.

Eligio's loved ones at the time mostly describe him obsessively watching videos about conspiracy theories and natural health.

And particularly when Maisha talks about this, she always says he's watching conspiracy theory videos.

Okay.

He buys an RV.

Never a good sign.

Never a good sign.

If your friend drops out of social interactions, spends months watching YouTube videos, and then buys an RV, you need to intervene.

He's about to do something bad.

These are red flags.

These are red flags.

That said, in this particular case, this is more a sign of where things are going.

The RV itself doesn't end too badly.

He and Maesha live on the road for a month and try to just let other people run the barbershop, but they're bad at it.

And so he's forced to come back from Florida to stop it from going out of business.

Once he's back to try to keep himself interested in the barbershop, he sets up a stage there, which initially he's like, so local acts can play, right?

People can do stand-up or, you know, musicians musicians can do stuff.

He like gives out liquor and beer and stuff, which is not super uncommon for a barbershop.

So he's trying to like make it into a community space.

But that becomes him primarily using that stage to give speeches that are like rants about his different pet theories.

And at this point, he's embraced a couple of specific theories.

One of them, and this is an older pre-existing theory, is the idea that higher amounts of melanin in the skin can correlate directly to higher IQ, right?

The more melanin you have, the smarter you are.

And kind of what goes with that is exposing yourself to the sun by spending as much time nearly naked outdoors as possible makes you smarter, right?

Okay.

He also starts to believe that bathing is bad for you.

You don't need to bathe if you eat only fruit or other foods that don't make you smell.

This is a thing Steve Jobs believed.

No one else agrees with this.

And he also.

And as a reminder, Steve Jobs washed his feet in the toilet.

Yes, yes.

Now, that is something Elizio would not do because Elizio believes toilets are evil.

He comes to insist and believe very strongly that pooping and peeing indoors is one of the greatest evils you can perpetuate because they make you, they are, by doing that, you are robbing nature, right, of your critical, you know, of nutrients and stuff.

I want to play a clip of him talking that was republished by Hood Horrors.

This is from all of his stuff has been taken off the internet after the things that we'll talk about in part two happened.

So it's hard to find a lot of this.

These different kinds of documentaries online about him are some of the only sources remaining, which is why I'm going back to this documentary.

I do want to, again, continue to, you know, shout out the rise and fall of nature boy Eligio Bishop on Hood Horrors.

It is a really good piece of work.

But here is him talking years later, explaining his theories about poop.

So this gives you an idea.

This is filmed later, but it gives you an idea of like the kind of shit he's saying in his rants at this barbershop.

They showed me like where

to use the bathroom, which we all use the bathroom in the backyard.

this is not shit

poop none

it's very sacred when you eat right and you eat the right thing you eat from the earth it is no longer toxic waste

it is organic

it is soil you get the fruit you eat the fruit it eats the soil this is how you get back

The government is taking this and putting it in the toilet and stealing it and disconnecting you from the universe

and stealing it stealing it yes the government stealing the government stealing your poop by making you think you need a toilet

to disconnect you from the universe so you don't realize you know the evil schemes they're perpetuating i guess key words and phrasing in there of like this is sacred sacred you know the the government and the it's just leaning into the conspiracy of it and the and the religious and and here's the thing like i actually have a lot of friends and have spent a lot of time myself using stuff like composting toilets, right?

I lived on and I have spent a lot of time on, you know, in properties where people are like very close to a closed loop.

I have known and know people who do the very close to zero impact environmentally.

Like they produce all their own food.

They turn all of their own waste.

It is possible.

It's a lot of work.

It is much more complicated.

And I want to, and I say that because I want to make it very clear.

He is not saying you should make your poop into human manure.

He is not an advocate for utilizing any of this waste in any way.

He just thinks you should only shit in the backyard.

Yeah.

That is very important for you to understand.

It's a big difference.

And

I don't know that much about it, but there are some hygiene issues here.

There's lots of why we have plugins.

We would all die if society did this.

I know that there are better places to poop in nature than others.

Yes.

That it can't,

it can have negative consequences.

If our whole society committed to like a functional extensive humane program Sure, that would be better than what we do But if everyone just pooped in the yard We would all get sick and die because it's bad to just poop in the yard

and in general probably

you're bad for the bad for the yard the bad for the yard It's not good for to just shit everywhere for the environment either.

Yes.

Also, if it's not toxic when you eat all the

I don't know that none of this is accurate After one of these rants where he's just talking about how the government's stealing your poop, a former regular at the barbershop asks him, hey, man, you used to just give us drinks when we came to get a haircut.

What happened to the drinks?

This is changing.

He is not happy at the barbershop.

The barbershop's not super happy with him.

And in short order, he works at a deal to basically give away, sell his ownership of the barbershop in exchange for an ongoing interest in the business to somebody.

He's already committed himself to begin copying the conscious community figureheads he'd grown obsessed with, and he'd even thought up a new name for himself.

And from this point forward, he no longer goes by Elysio Bishop.

He now uses a new name, Nature Boy.

And we will be talking about that and his growth into a significant figure within the conscious community in part two.

How are you feeling so far, Katie?

I'm feeling great.

I'm excited to hear what happens to Nature Boy.

I'll tell you one thing: a lot of people pooping in backyards.

That's the stuff.

There we go.

Beatles song.

Yeah, that's right.

Wait, is that a Beatles song?

I don't know.

There's a lot of Beatles song.

I don't know.

I just think it is Mother Nature's Son.

Mother Nature's Son.

Different.

It's a little bit different.

I just think of a former side character on Behind the Bastards, Ric Flair, the Nature Boy.

That's right.

Oh, yeah.

Ric Flair, the Nature Boy, also, I think, pissed on a chair or something at one point in that story, if I'm remembering right.

So, you know, similar guys, man.

I was thinking of when he was part of that.

Or maybe someone pissed on his chair.

Well, he was part of the, he was one of the ones that was in the adoption scandal where he was just kidnapped.

Oh, yeah, he was stolen as a baby.

Yes.

Yeah, some grew lines here for sure.

Yes, he was definitely stolen as a baby.

Flare comes back, is what I'm saying.

Yes.

All right, everybody.

Katie, you want to plug your pluggables here real quick?

Oh, sure.

Well, you can

find me over at Some More News with Cody Johnston.

We now have three episodes a week.

Well, we've got two podcasts and then the main shell, the YouTube show.

And you can check us out there.

We've got a Patreon.

We've got all the things.

That's it.

Go do that.

Yep.

All right.

Well, everybody.

Go poop in your backyard.

Don't do that.

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