Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh, welcome back to Bastards Behind the Stole Katie podcast.
Speaker 2: Guest a, what a title. Yeah, you can put that all.
Speaker 2: I believe in our audience they can put it together.
Speaker 2: They can put it together. You know, you know what
Speaker 2: I'm getting at.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they get the gist.
Speaker 2: They get the gist. Come on, do I need to
Speaker 2: do everything for you people?
Speaker 3: Presumably they heard part one?
Speaker 2: So yeah, I'm just going to record a podcast that's
Speaker 2: me reading most of the words and then re release
Speaker 2: it every week with a different bastard and you can
Speaker 2: put it together in your head, is like the right
Speaker 2: bad person.
Speaker 3: But do you expect them to do all the work
Speaker 3: for you?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Come on, now, we got to be able to
Speaker 2: meet in the middle here.
Speaker 3: It's called compromise.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Yeah, how are we doing, Katie? How
Speaker 2: are you feeling in the five minutes since we recorded
Speaker 2: part one?
Speaker 3: Honestly?
Speaker 4: Great?
Speaker 3: I reheated my tea, great, cuddled, great, feel refreshed. Great,
Speaker 3: Waiting with baited breath to hear more about Nature Boy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, let's hear about nature Boy. The boy Nature
Speaker 2: that's the name he's picked up at the start of
Speaker 2: this episode, and we should start today by talking a
Speaker 2: little bit more about the conscious community or the Black
Speaker 2: consciousness community. I've heard it described as bost things. Again,
Speaker 2: this is a subculture, not a massive one, but not
Speaker 2: a small one either, that exists primarily through kind of
Speaker 2: a nexus of YouTube and podcasters and some rappers. Rolling
Speaker 2: Stone writer David Peisner describes it as quote an ecosystem
Speaker 2: of black spiritualists, natural living advocates, herbalists, alternative historians, motivational speakers,
Speaker 2: and backpack rappers. Having gone through a bit of related
Speaker 2: non culty content creators, I'm sorry, backpack, yeah, which I
Speaker 2: think is a term for like rappers who are kind
Speaker 2: of not not massive, you know, they travel around and
Speaker 2: do a lot of like local shows and stuff kind
Speaker 2: of you know that, Like, yeah, probably do a lot
Speaker 2: of I think SoundCloud wrapper is an adjacent sort of thing, right, Okay.
Speaker 2: Having gone through a bit of related non culty content
Speaker 2: creators in this space, a lot of what I see
Speaker 2: in this community reminds me of stuff that I saw
Speaker 2: and was kind of had sort of experienced adjacent to
Speaker 2: some of the different like hippyish, you know, communities I
Speaker 2: spent time in when I was in my late teens
Speaker 2: early twenties, you know, the Rainbow Gathering people in the
Speaker 2: Burner community, all these like different sort of where you
Speaker 2: would encounter this mix, this wide mix of everything from like,
Speaker 2: here's people who are actually really interested in you know,
Speaker 2: aquaponics and human maneuver and alternative living situations. And here's
Speaker 2: people who are actually trying to inform folks about important
Speaker 2: aspects of American history that have been covered up. And
Speaker 2: here's people who are telling you absolute nonsense about how
Speaker 2: you don't need vaccines if you eat enough zinc, and
Speaker 2: they're trying to get you to believe in you know whatever,
Speaker 2: fucking bullshit.
Speaker 3: Alien piggybacking on another movement. That's a one way to
Speaker 3: look at it. But yeah, it's a net that casts
Speaker 3: some good things and some bad things.
Speaker 2: Yes, And the kind of the big difference between a
Speaker 2: lot of where you know, this kind of these kind
Speaker 2: of different sort of hippyish descended movements that I spent
Speaker 2: time in and around when I was doing psychedelics a
Speaker 2: bunch and this community, which also focuses the conscious community
Speaker 2: a lot of psychedelic usage, is that there's a much
Speaker 2: more of a focus on racial justice because this is
Speaker 2: much more of like a black subculture and a lot
Speaker 2: of education on the history of white supremacy. So again
Speaker 2: you get these real the Tuskegee experiment, redlining, the move bombing,
Speaker 2: and also like like moon landing, conspiracies, anti vaxshit, you know,
Speaker 2: all that stuff. I found a write up in medium
Speaker 2: by Anna stands Guard which gives a good idea of
Speaker 2: how people in this community like to describe themselves and
Speaker 2: it focuses a lot on the concept of a conscious community,
Speaker 2: which is where the conscious community subculture takes its name,
Speaker 2: but is an older term for that goes back. You
Speaker 2: can find people talking about shit like this in like
Speaker 2: the seventies and eighties. This is people would use the
Speaker 2: term to describe these kind of idealized, physical, intentional communities
Speaker 2: formed along utopian lines, which is a thing people have
Speaker 2: done in America since the nation has existed. And this
Speaker 2: term is you know, goes back further than the subculture
Speaker 2: we're talking about now. Since forming real world breakaway communities
Speaker 2: is hard and usually a bad idea, very difficult to do,
Speaker 2: most people wind up hating each other. Most of these
Speaker 2: projects explode. The vast majority of people in this subculture.
Speaker 2: It's an aspirational thing right, and they just kind of
Speaker 2: connect and talk about what they'd like to do via
Speaker 2: the internet, Anna writes, quote, as it turns out there's
Speaker 2: a parallel digital world teeming with conscious travelers. I discovered
Speaker 2: Facebook groups where conscious travelers or nomad share their experiences
Speaker 2: and carrate lists of the best conscious hotspots worldwide. Furthermore,
Speaker 2: jat GPT can serve as a valuable resource in your
Speaker 2: global exploration of conscious communities, offering guidance, insights, and information
Speaker 2: to enhance your search for specific location. So again, most
Speaker 2: of this isn't real. It's an aesthetic. People like the
Speaker 2: image of going back to the land, of being conscious,
Speaker 2: of being enlightened, of being spiritual. But also all they
Speaker 2: really want to do is stay at a nice hotel.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: That's really a lot of this, right, So yeah, I
Speaker 2: do want to talk about another influence in this community,
Speaker 2: and kind of where a lot of the name comes
Speaker 2: from is an actual movement called the Black Consciousness movement,
Speaker 2: which is a real thing that comes out of the
Speaker 2: black radical history in apartheid era South Africa, and specifically
Speaker 2: a guy named Steve Bicko. Bicco was the first president
Speaker 2: of the South African Students Organization when it launched in
Speaker 2: eighteen sixty nine, and inspired by black thinkers like France Fannon,
Speaker 2: he began publishing articles that posited an ideology he called
Speaker 2: black consciousness. He described his goal as to quote demonstrate
Speaker 2: the lie that black is an aberration from the normal,
Speaker 2: which is white. Biko urged the black community to celebrate
Speaker 2: and take pride in their history and traditional cultural and
Speaker 2: religious practices as the indigenous people of South Africa, pushing
Speaker 2: people to decolonize both the state and their own minds.
Speaker 2: He was a cool guy, which is why the police
Speaker 2: murdered him for a very good article in well we're
Speaker 2: talking about a black radical leader in nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 2: South Africa. The odds are good. He wound up getting
Speaker 2: murdered by the cops, right like it's a pummer, Yeah
Speaker 2: it is. Yeah. I'm going to quote from a very
Speaker 2: good article on Biko in the Retrospect Journal. Quote. The
Speaker 2: apartheid government regarded black consciousness as a growing threat and
Speaker 2: placed a banning order on Biko in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2: The repressive practice of banning originated from the nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: Suppression of Communism Act, which regarded all political opposition as
Speaker 2: a communist threat. As a result, a banning order restricted
Speaker 2: a person's travel and social interactions, as well as preventing
Speaker 2: them from public speaking or distributing written material. In Bicco's case,
Speaker 2: he was limited to speaking to one person at a
Speaker 2: time and forbidden from being a member of any political organizations.
Speaker 2: Several tactics were used to circumvent the strict measures of
Speaker 2: his band. Bicco struck up a close friendship with the
Speaker 2: white liberal editor of The Daily Dispatch, Donald Woods. Over time,
Speaker 2: Woods became more educated about the plights of black South Africans,
Speaker 2: secretly writing Bicco's biography when he was himself banned. In
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy seven, Bicco was arrested for traveling outside of
Speaker 2: and therefore breaking his banning order. He was severely beaten
Speaker 2: whilst in police custody and died of his injuries at
Speaker 2: just thirty years old. Again literally banned from talking to
Speaker 2: more than one person at a time.
Speaker 3: That is wild.
Speaker 2: Fuck that government, ummm, very supressing. I bring this up
Speaker 2: because not because nature Boy has Any is a an
Speaker 2: inheritor of Bicco's tradition, but because the black conscience, the
Speaker 2: modern black consciousness subculture or conscious community, and I've heard
Speaker 2: both names used for this same kind of amorphous subculture
Speaker 2: is in some ways related to the Black consciousness movement,
Speaker 2: and a lot of what Nature Boy is doing is
Speaker 2: kind of taking some of these things and pulling them
Speaker 2: in a toxic direction. For example, a big part of
Speaker 2: Black consciousness is the idea that we need to we
Speaker 2: need to really get people to accept that being black
Speaker 2: is not an aberration, right, Like it is just as
Speaker 2: normal as being white, which is a really important thing,
Speaker 2: right that, Like, black is not an aberration from the normal.
Speaker 2: And the toxic sort of way that's taken is like no, no, no,
Speaker 2: having more melanin is directly what makes you intelligent, and
Speaker 2: having more makes you an inherently better person. Right, Your
Speaker 2: boy takes it, right.
Speaker 3: See that a version of that sentiment today on Twitter.
Speaker 2: It's not just a nature build, it's not just nature
Speaker 2: Boy thing, right.
Speaker 3: But it's interesting that I just saw that an hour
Speaker 3: ago and I went huh, And I was really trying
Speaker 3: to get to the bottom of what this guy was
Speaker 3: even saying, but it took me aback.
Speaker 2: So interesting.
Speaker 3: There's like what we're talking about right now, it's.
Speaker 2: Just yeah, it's it's you can see, it's important to
Speaker 2: understand kind of some of the history and like the
Speaker 2: term that these people are aping. And also in a way,
Speaker 2: it's also important to understand what Nature Boy a big
Speaker 2: part of. Once he becomes like a media influencer, he's
Speaker 2: constantly going to be talking about how he's being targeted
Speaker 2: for murder, how the police are trying to kill him
Speaker 2: for his revolutionary actions. That's not at all a part
Speaker 2: of his story, but that is a huge part of
Speaker 2: actual people who were actual revolutionaries in the actual Black
Speaker 2: consciousness movement, right, that is what happened to them, and
Speaker 2: he's kind of like stealing valor from them. While again,
Speaker 2: rather than trying to liberate people in bondage, all Nature
Speaker 2: Boy is trying to do is get a bunch of
Speaker 2: wives and convince them to poop outdoors, which is not revolutionisty.
Speaker 3: No, it doesn't sound in enlightenment in the lighten not
Speaker 3: particularly enlightened either, Yeah or enlightened. I don't think Steve
Speaker 3: Bicko would have been super into this. Yeah, Okay, So
Speaker 3: when nature Boy gets into the conscious community, the first
Speaker 3: figure within it that he finds himself drawn to is
Speaker 3: a guy who goes by the name Young Pharaoh. Now,
Speaker 3: when I first started looking Young Pharaoh up, I was
Speaker 3: kind of surprised because he's talked about in these documentaries
Speaker 3: about what happens as a pretty big figure, and Nature
Speaker 3: Boy talks about him as a big figure. He's only
Speaker 3: got like a thousand followers on Instagram and a little
Speaker 3: more on YouTube. But then I looked into it, it turns
Speaker 3: out he used to be much bigger and have a
Speaker 3: much larger platform, and he lost his mind during twenty
Speaker 3: twenty many such cases.
Speaker 2: And so many such of places, and he never really recovered. Previously,
Speaker 2: prior to twenty twenty, he had started out and started
Speaker 2: building his platform within the subculture by making a lot
Speaker 2: of videos about police brutality, white supremacy, and he did
Speaker 2: well enough the making serious money, and he's making like
Speaker 2: two hundred grand a year at one point. And he
Speaker 2: kind of switches in and around twenty twenty, and it
Speaker 2: starts sort of right before and starts singing a very
Speaker 2: different tune at a certain point, and it happens kind
Speaker 2: of in a way that makes me think it might
Speaker 2: be inorganic, where he'll start putting out videos about how
Speaker 2: the police aren't that bad and actually, I've never had
Speaker 2: a bad interaction with the police, And I'm going to
Speaker 2: move to a white neighborhood because I think it's going
Speaker 2: to be like it's a lot of really weird. And
Speaker 2: he gets criticized by other people within the conscious community
Speaker 2: for this shift. Then he loses his mind over COVID
Speaker 2: and starts blaming it on the Jews, which is how
Speaker 2: he gets demonetized and banned from a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 2: which is why he sues Google, and he loses and
Speaker 2: gets stuck with a forty grand bill. Most of the
Speaker 2: videos you'll find about Young Pharaoh today are made by
Speaker 2: other people. The top showings when I typed his name
Speaker 2: into Google while writing this are a documentary called The
Speaker 2: Rise and Fall of Young Pharaoh. Another one is Young
Speaker 2: Pharaoh at airport, crashes out and punches his girlfriend, and
Speaker 2: of course Young Pharaoh explains why aliens subducted him seven
Speaker 2: times part seven.
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness, Young Pharaoh journey.
Speaker 2: He has gone in some directions.
Speaker 3: I could not have guessed what the next word would be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, whoo. So I know you're all curious why did
Speaker 2: the alien subduct him? And just to get an idea
Speaker 2: of this, dude and his vibes. I'm gonna play you
Speaker 2: a quick clip of him of him explaining this is
Speaker 2: from part seven of the series on why Alien subducted
Speaker 2: him seven times.
Speaker 5: I just grade teacher name is Rosac. I said that
Speaker 5: to him. I wanted to go down the history like
Speaker 5: Malcolm X and make history. You know, it's something to me.
Speaker 5: He just always wanted.
Speaker 4: To leave a market history. So whatever that is in me,
Speaker 4: in that spirit, I was connected to that. Maybe that's
Speaker 4: what they saw. On top of the fact, you know,
Speaker 4: from what I was told during one of my interactions
Speaker 4: is that I was super intelligent, so it was easier
Speaker 4: for me to for me to receive a neurological upgrade,
Speaker 4: so that way I could like channel or process information
Speaker 4: faster because I already had the ability to retain it,
Speaker 4: you know. So it was just it just made sense,
Speaker 4: you know, to utilize me.
Speaker 3: Well that checks out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems that all scans to me can't see
Speaker 2: it here reason why that wouldn't be true. Yeah, so's
Speaker 2: he's he's he's he seems like he's he's got his
Speaker 2: shit together, right, So this is his This is the
Speaker 2: first guy that Nature Boy is really going to Vibe
Speaker 2: with he reaches out to this dude based on his videos.
Speaker 2: They become close friends. At least that's how nature Boy
Speaker 2: describes it. This is not going to be a long
Speaker 2: lasting friendship. So again, those videos I played were that
Speaker 2: video that Sophie played was recent. I got to go
Speaker 2: back to twenty fifteen here, so remember he's not yet
Speaker 2: obviously a crank. Here he is mostly talking about police
Speaker 2: brutality and white supremacy and kind of a fairly prominent creator.
Speaker 2: And when I said, I think there's something sketchy about
Speaker 2: how he changed suddenly to talking about how he likes
Speaker 2: the cops and you know, kind of going more right wing.
Speaker 2: He is invited at one point to speak at Seapack.
Speaker 2: Now he gets disinvited right before because of the aforementioned
Speaker 2: anti semitism. But something went on there, right, really yeah.
Speaker 3: And the anti semitism did it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah. So back in twenty fifteen, Young Pharaoh's blowing up.
Speaker 2: He's not so obviously a crank, and Nature Boy grows
Speaker 2: obsessed with his work and he reaches out online. The
Speaker 2: two vibe and they become Internet buddies. This is happening
Speaker 2: right as nature Boy has quit his job at the
Speaker 2: barber shop in order to lock himself in his room
Speaker 2: and watch YouTube videos, which he said made him question
Speaker 2: quote the fabric of reality. His partner at the time,
Speaker 2: Maisha and the mother of his son, says that he
Speaker 2: stopped sleeping almost entirely, and describes what he wants watch
Speaker 2: as conspiracy theory videos. Quote. He rambled daily about America,
Speaker 2: which he called Babylon and how it was gonna fall
Speaker 2: and you know, fall of America. Not super wrong in
Speaker 2: predicting that, maybe, but I don't think he's predicting it
Speaker 2: for the same reasons. Yeah. So Nature Boy, for his part, says,
Speaker 2: I started studying what America was, what money was, breaking
Speaker 2: my reality down to a molecule, and again that all
Speaker 2: could lead you in a good direction, but it mostly
Speaker 2: leads him to get very angry about the toilet. He
Speaker 2: begins again, is evil? Yeah, yeah, again. He starts to
Speaker 2: become convinced that direct exposure to sunlight makes you smarter
Speaker 2: because it increases your melanin content. He becomes he's briefly
Speaker 2: a back to Africa kind of black nationalist right where
Speaker 2: he's like, we need to return to Africa. But around
Speaker 2: this time, his older sister Tanya dies and Maisha had
Speaker 2: been close to her, like his partner had been close
Speaker 2: to his older sister, And so they go to the
Speaker 2: funeral and she's kind of surprised because nature was really taciturn.
Speaker 2: He's like weirdly cold during the visit. But then when
Speaker 2: they return to Georgia, he goes through this really rapid
Speaker 2: visible decline in his mental health. The first sign to
Speaker 2: outsiders is he stops bathing entirely, and he would angrily
Speaker 2: rant to anyone that you only need to bathe if
Speaker 2: you eat smelly foods. And he has at this point
Speaker 2: become a fruitarian, so he doesn't need to wash himself ever.
Speaker 2: Now there's also some evidence that something diagnosable is happening here.
Speaker 2: Maisha says that he starts to suffer serious memory lapses,
Speaker 2: often forgetting what day it is. He stops cutting his hair,
Speaker 2: which was for him a major red flag. Again, this
Speaker 2: guy is like a fairly skilled barber. Yeah. In one
Speaker 2: video talking about this time, he says, I had people like, dude,
Speaker 2: you good. They would come to drop the money off
Speaker 2: from the barber shop and see him with his hair
Speaker 2: all crazy, ranting about conspiracies and Babylon and they were
Speaker 2: just like, I don't want to hear that, so get it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean all of it is somebody having some
Speaker 3: sort of mental break, being obsessive, locking yourself away, withdrawing,
Speaker 3: breaking down your consciousness. It's all alarming.
Speaker 2: It's all alarming, and you know, not bathing, not bathing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: people are you know what I mean? Yeah, people are
Speaker 2: immediately aware, right, Like it's not the kind of thing
Speaker 2: that's hideable. So Mayishi decides eventually she doesn't want to
Speaker 2: hear this either, and she takes her kids and the
Speaker 2: child that they share, dumps his ass and moves to
Speaker 2: South Carolina and making the only good decision anyone will
Speaker 2: make over the course of these videos. Nature Boy is
Speaker 2: okay with this because it gives him more time to
Speaker 2: study what he has decided will be his next career,
Speaker 2: which is becoming a YouTube personality.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: Right after she leaves, Young Pharaoh gets invited to speak
Speaker 2: on a podcast in New York City, and Nature Boy
Speaker 2: kind of brute forces his way into like, oh, I'll
Speaker 2: drive up there and be on it with you, Like
Speaker 2: we'll hang out, we'll be on the show together, right
Speaker 2: And as soon as I think Young Pharaoh kind of
Speaker 2: lets them because they're buds, and Nature Boy at the
Speaker 2: start of this thing immediately elbows his friend out of
Speaker 2: the interview basically to go on a rant, and you
Speaker 2: can see the moment here. Again, this is from the
Speaker 2: Hoodharr's video. The original video was deleted long ago, so
Speaker 2: it's really the only place I have to access this,
Speaker 2: but it's kind of a noteworthy moment to look at.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 2: My brother Nature is here for Milana. First, I want
Speaker 2: to talk to my brother Nature. Why are you so
Speaker 2: infatuated my brother? We're going back to Africa talk to
Speaker 2: the people. The tropical man belongs between the tropic of
Speaker 2: Cancer and the tropic of Capricorn. What does that mean
Speaker 2: if you look on to Matlok. Yeah, so he kind
Speaker 2: of kind of pushes his way in, and you know,
Speaker 2: the other guy seems more interested in him too, and
Speaker 2: this sparks the end of their appearance, right of their friendship, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: because he kind of pushes Young Pharaoh out of this thing.
Speaker 2: Now they will be in several videos talking about their
Speaker 2: beef because again, this is a YouTube subculture, right, so
Speaker 2: this isn't the end of their relationship, but now it
Speaker 2: is primarily primarily based on them having beef with each
Speaker 2: other beef cells. Right, that's uh, that's that's how all
Speaker 2: of this ship works, right.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: It's interesting he doesn't this is his first I believe,
Speaker 2: his first appearance anywhere, right in terms of like social
Speaker 2: media as nature boy. Uh, at least as far as
Speaker 2: I can tell. And he starts his channel and begins
Speaker 2: building a following pretty shortly after that. But before he
Speaker 2: does so, he goes home, and he continues to spiral
Speaker 2: a bit more right, some of his first content. He's
Speaker 2: a militant fruitarian, but he's militant in terms of like
Speaker 2: he hates vegans for eating plants, which he regards as
Speaker 2: being as cruel as hating animals. It's very hard to
Speaker 2: get along with. You can only eat wants to be eaten,
Speaker 2: but like you can't eat like otherwise eat plants because
Speaker 2: that's hurting the plants.
Speaker 3: Yeah, wild fruitarian is also very hard to take.
Speaker 2: Seriously, very hard to take seriously.
Speaker 3: Don't mean to offend any fruitarians out there.
Speaker 2: But it's it's you're supposed to eat other things. You
Speaker 2: simply are You simply are. There's a number of things.
Speaker 2: Now he starts the nature boy Facebook channel in I
Speaker 2: think late twenty fifteen and his initial videos, so yeah,
Speaker 2: these kind of rambling streams where he will lay out
Speaker 2: his beliefs about not pooping or peeing inside, not bathing,
Speaker 2: eating fruit, and most importantly, he kind of he makes
Speaker 2: a sharp break from this return to Africa stance that
Speaker 2: he has earlier and instead starts advocating that people drop
Speaker 2: out of Babylon entirely and live in tune in nature.
Speaker 2: There's a video. I don't think we need to play it,
Speaker 2: but like where he kind of makes the stance that, like,
Speaker 2: there's too many wars in Africa, so we should all
Speaker 2: go to Central or South America because there's a lot
Speaker 2: of sun exposure there which will make us smarter, but
Speaker 2: it's not as dangerous, right. That's kind of the reason
Speaker 2: why he changes his mind. Now, his videos are not
Speaker 2: highly produced at this stage, but he's good looking and
Speaker 2: he's charismatic, and he starts to draw in thousands and
Speaker 2: then tens of thousands of subscribers. He has an Instagram,
Speaker 2: he has a youtubebe I think he's initially more of
Speaker 2: a Facebook and Instagram person, but his YouTube starts to
Speaker 2: build and they get like one hundred thousand or so
Speaker 2: followers right each which is not he's not a massive star,
Speaker 2: but people are listening, right. And when you've got you know,
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand or so people who are semi regularly
Speaker 2: watching your stuff, you can get some of them to
Speaker 2: send you money, and you can get some of them
Speaker 2: who start to develop a really strong parasocial relationship with you,
Speaker 2: which is what starts to happen here. And he begins
Speaker 2: vowing that he is going to leave the United States
Speaker 2: Babylon to South America, where he is going to start
Speaker 2: a conscious community. And he starts talking to his followers
Speaker 2: like you should follow me. We're going to We're going
Speaker 2: to completely change the world. This is going to be
Speaker 2: the spark of the revolution. You know, I Am going
Speaker 2: to end Babylon by beginning this movement by getting everyone
Speaker 2: to start conscious communities in South America, where again people
Speaker 2: already live, right.
Speaker 3: People already live there.
Speaker 2: It's one of those things where I'm always like, okay,
Speaker 2: but like, if it was as simple as just like
Speaker 2: we all need to go live on the land in
Speaker 2: fucking Peru or whatever, why didn't all of the people
Speaker 2: living on the land in Peru stop anything? Why Why
Speaker 2: didn't that make all of our problem because like maybe
Speaker 2: they're more complicated than just living in Peru.
Speaker 3: I don't know, man, Like, maybe you haven't thought this
Speaker 3: one through.
Speaker 2: Maybe you haven't. Maybe people living in Peru have a
Speaker 2: lot of issues that like it's just it's just very
Speaker 2: all of our problems are more complicated than that. But you, like,
Speaker 2: this is not about really solving problems again, it's going
Speaker 2: to be about being able to take videos of yourself
Speaker 2: in a very pretty place. And speaking of being able
Speaker 2: to take videos of yourself in a very pretty place,
Speaker 2: I don't know how that relates to our advertisers. Here
Speaker 2: you go. Ah, all right, so we're back. We're back
Speaker 2: from the pods, We're back talking. Okay. He decides he's
Speaker 2: going to leave for South America to start a conscient community,
Speaker 2: and the way this ultimately happens is very funny. He
Speaker 2: makes a video announcing the day has come. I am
Speaker 2: going to leave Babylon to live off the land as
Speaker 2: God intended. His initial plan was to go to South America.
Speaker 2: He talks about Peru a lot, but as soon as
Speaker 2: he posts, I'm doing it, I'm making the plans. I'm
Speaker 2: leaving for South America. A fan of his reaches out
Speaker 2: and it's like, hey, my brother lives in Honduras. That's
Speaker 2: where our family's front and he's inherited, like thirty acres
Speaker 2: that you can use. There's two old houses on the
Speaker 2: property that you would have to renovate first to make
Speaker 2: it livable, but like, you can go down there. So
Speaker 2: Nature Boy immediately is like, well, fuck South America, I'm
Speaker 2: meant to be in Honduras, right, And you know, to
Speaker 2: be honest, from what I can tell, I don't have
Speaker 2: detailed knowledge of this land, but from what I can see,
Speaker 2: from what footage exists, this it would have been a
Speaker 2: good setup for someone wanting to try and start, assuming
Speaker 2: someone knew how to do all this. You've got houses
Speaker 2: that are in okay shape, they need some renovating. You've
Speaker 2: got thirty acres. You can support a good number of
Speaker 2: people on thirty acres there. If you knew what.
Speaker 3: It's scenario for a cult leader, you.
Speaker 2: Could do something here, right, if you had any intention
Speaker 2: of actually doing the things you were talking about. So
Speaker 2: he commits. He buys a plane ticket and he tells
Speaker 2: everyone first he's flying down to Florida, and if you
Speaker 2: want to leave Babylon two everyone meet up with me
Speaker 2: in Florida. We're going to do a big meetup and
Speaker 2: we're going to fly down the Honduras together. And he
Speaker 2: shows off his camping gear in a backpack. He's got
Speaker 2: a life straw, which he clearly doesn't know how to use.
Speaker 2: He's got solar camp panels to keep his phone charge.
Speaker 2: He's got a brand new Cabella's backpack, and he tells
Speaker 2: everyone now that I'm going to nature I'm going to
Speaker 2: build a village. I don't know how I'm going to
Speaker 2: do it, but I know it's going to happen because
Speaker 2: I said it's going to happen. And again that's a
Speaker 2: red flag because all of this is very complicated, and
Speaker 2: if people don't have any background experience, they're simply not
Speaker 2: going to succeed, which is indeed what happens. But the
Speaker 2: day of the meetup in Florida comes around and there's
Speaker 2: a very funny video where Nature Boy's like, well, my
Speaker 2: assumption was that nearly all of my followers were young women,
Speaker 2: so I was expecting a bunch of young ladies, but
Speaker 2: the only people who show up are three guys in
Speaker 2: the twenties.
Speaker 3: Ya sign boy, M.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's not really shocking. Their names are Key, Olmec
Speaker 2: and Starlight. Now, these are all dudes who are kind
Speaker 2: of in this community. They're interested in not just nature Boy,
Speaker 2: but other stuff. Olemech in particular seems to have some
Speaker 2: like particular like a degree of knowledge about how to
Speaker 2: like farm and stuff and is really interested in trying this.
Speaker 2: Nature Boy is skeptical about all of them because again
Speaker 2: he was hoping they were all young women that he
Speaker 2: could have sex with. But he changes his mind when
Speaker 2: Starlight says he knows Spanish and has twenty thousand dollars,
Speaker 2: Nature Boy immediately tells him, you're useful. Again. No one
Speaker 2: he does not know Spanish. He did not plan on
Speaker 2: having anyone with him wh knew Spanish to create a
Speaker 2: community in choice, not needed, not important. No, Now, at
Speaker 2: this stage, this is not a cult. This is some
Speaker 2: young men who have had their heads filled via YouTube
Speaker 2: with pretty ideas of live and Facebook with pretty ideas
Speaker 2: of living off the land. And you know how easy
Speaker 2: it is. Right the instant they arrive at the actual property,
Speaker 2: they look at this house which had been like the
Speaker 2: landowner's grandmother's house, and so it's filled with her old
Speaker 2: stuff and you know it would take work to clean
Speaker 2: out and fix up, and he decides it's creepy, and
Speaker 2: so they immediately permanently scrap their plans to live in
Speaker 2: the jungle and start a village and instead get a
Speaker 2: hotel using starlights twenty thousand dollars and me just instantly, Oh,
Speaker 2: you got to clean up a house?
Speaker 3: Nah? Nah, you know you were warned you would need
Speaker 3: to do Yeah.
Speaker 2: And like a really minimal Like you're not talking about
Speaker 2: carving a home out of raw land. There are houses
Speaker 2: you can you got a clean up, You got to
Speaker 2: do some work. Yeah, you've got camping gear with you
Speaker 2: and you're not willing to clean out a house. So
Speaker 2: after a little bit of time in a hotel, they
Speaker 2: find a house to rent in Santa Fe, Honduras. In
Speaker 2: a video at the time, nature Boy notes that twenty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars here came in handy, my gosh, So you
Speaker 2: just guy's bunny renting places. Phoenix. The landowner joins them,
Speaker 2: and they start calling themselves ethereans and posting videos of
Speaker 2: people camping in the front yard and calling it an
Speaker 2: intentional community. Again, these people are camping in a city
Speaker 2: in front of the house that they are renting. There's
Speaker 2: a picture Sophie's going to show you. It's just tins
Speaker 2: in a yard. It's just it's simply just tints and
Speaker 2: a fairly well cultivated yard. This is not an intentional community.
Speaker 2: You are doing what like third graders? Do you are
Speaker 2: camping in your yard?
Speaker 3: Looks like making sports.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tense, decently landscaped yard.
Speaker 2: Yes, clearly someone I'm sure it's not Nature boy is
Speaker 2: doing the landscaping.
Speaker 3: Right out of frame is probably like a major road.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is again in a city. Yeah, they're not.
Speaker 2: This is this is the opposite of off grid. Now,
Speaker 2: this is all very silly, but when Nature does next
Speaker 2: is actually pretty cunning, which is, you know, they've got
Speaker 2: this house they're renting, and some people live inside and
Speaker 2: some people camp in the yard, but they will go
Speaker 2: out because Honduras is Honduras, and they'll go to very
Speaker 2: pretty places that are like tourist hotspots where there's waterfalls,
Speaker 2: and they will film themselves bathing underwaterfalls and picking fruit
Speaker 2: from jungle trees and brag about her. They're living this
Speaker 2: perfect back to nature, carefree lifestyle and like drop out
Speaker 2: of Babylon and join us. Look at how nice this is.
Speaker 2: This is our life every day, he says, This is
Speaker 2: not a vacation. This is where we live, and you're
Speaker 2: more than welcome to stay. And again, this isn't where
Speaker 2: you live. You're going to. Honduras is a very beautiful place.
Speaker 2: You are driving for an afternoon to tourist hotspots and
Speaker 2: pretending your life is this like jungle paradise. Again, you
Speaker 2: live in a city in a rental.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: Also, I don't know if you are leaving Babylon. You're
Speaker 3: not connected in uploading videos.
Speaker 2: There's like power lines in that photo, Like what are
Speaker 2: we talking about here? Yeah, come on, you have cars,
Speaker 2: You're using gasoline all the time, Like, you have not
Speaker 2: escaped Babylon, you have walked away from omelas. So that said,
Speaker 2: these videos like this spread Facebook love showing people videos
Speaker 2: of like idyllic nature retreats and the like and back
Speaker 2: to the land projects. All this stuff does fairly well,
Speaker 2: and people start coming, lots of them, so many that
Speaker 2: it like the other three guys who had left with him,
Speaker 2: who he calls his warriors, start to feel overwhelmed and
Speaker 2: like we need to stop asking for more people to join, right,
Speaker 2: because there's like dozens and dozens of them. But at
Speaker 2: this point, young women start showing up. Right that's the
Speaker 2: dream right there, that's Nature Boy is like, this is working,
Speaker 2: and you know what, we're polygamists now. So very quickly,
Speaker 2: this turns from some slightly to moderately diluted hippie kids
Speaker 2: camping in a yard to Nature Boy telling multiple women
Speaker 2: that they are now his wives. And he also doesn't
Speaker 2: use the term wife. He calls them directs. They're his directs.
Speaker 2: So you've got a cult terminology starting to form.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: In a video at the time, he explains with polygamy,
Speaker 2: it's just for me being with four female students that
Speaker 2: I'm dealing with very intimately, it's nothing more and nothing
Speaker 2: less than that. Sex for me is me plugging into
Speaker 2: a woman and sending my knowledge like a USB to
Speaker 2: a computer. And when I have sex, I am putting
Speaker 2: fluid in you. Inside the fluid is DNA. On that
Speaker 2: DNA is all the knowledge that I know. And now
Speaker 2: you're getting a direct transfer from my file into your ribosome,
Speaker 2: into your DNA. And if you do that enough, you
Speaker 2: can take me on long enough to the point where
Speaker 2: I'm inside of you.
Speaker 3: Robert I cannot believe you just read that.
Speaker 2: I know, I know. That's one of my That's one
Speaker 2: of my favorite pieces of cult leader nonsense I've come
Speaker 2: across on this jet. Is my dick is a usb unbelievable.
Speaker 3: But also thank you for reading that.
Speaker 2: Beautiful stuff. Beautiful stuff.
Speaker 3: Yes, are they shitting in that yard?
Speaker 2: They're all shitting, Katie. Everyone is shitting in every yard
Speaker 2: in this story. You have to add that they are
Speaker 2: all pooping in the yards.
Speaker 3: It's not that big a yard.
Speaker 2: It's not that presumably burying it. But again, they're all
Speaker 2: shitting in these yards. Now, while he claims to be
Speaker 2: a guru bringing people back in touch with the natural world,
Speaker 2: he very quickly spends the entire twenty grand not just
Speaker 2: on this rental, but primary, according to other people there,
Speaker 2: mostly on dirt pikes and iPads, which he's like, but
Speaker 2: I gave them away to other people in the group,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm He calls himself like a real humanitarian
Speaker 2: for giving away all of these dirt bikes and iPads
Speaker 2: to other people who join. But it's like, it's not
Speaker 2: your money, bro Wild. So that twenty thousand goes quickly,
Speaker 2: and soon everyone's scraping by he's barely managing to cover
Speaker 2: rent in food with allegedly the three thousand dollars a
Speaker 2: month he is allegedly receiving from that guy. But just
Speaker 2: as soon and as things are getting dire, his key,
Speaker 2: one of the other guys who had joined him in Florida,
Speaker 2: has a loved one die and he inherits three hundred
Speaker 2: thousand dollars, and he starts by giving Nature Boys to
Speaker 2: decide like, hey, man, you know, the group really needs
Speaker 2: twenty grand for this project, and he just keeps doing
Speaker 2: that over and over again until he gets all three
Speaker 2: hundred grand, right.
Speaker 3: I feel so bad for them, although he is making
Speaker 3: his choices.
Speaker 2: I've read it. I've watched an interview with that guy
Speaker 2: after all this falls apart where he's like, no, I
Speaker 2: don't regret it. Like he was my teacher, he was
Speaker 2: my guru, okay, man, I don't know. Fuck whatever, bro.
Speaker 2: So they get robbed not long after this in Santa
Speaker 2: Fe because Nature Boy is buying everybody fancy gadgets and computers.
Speaker 2: At least that's what they say. Is like they're in
Speaker 2: the middle of the street and these people take everything
Speaker 2: on them. They take that. I think they get kind
Speaker 2: of unclear, but I think they get into the house
Speaker 2: because they get everyone's like passports, a lot of their stuff, right.
Speaker 3: That's bad.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I have some suspicions that what actually
Speaker 2: happened is that nature Boy was trying to subsidize this
Speaker 2: community by also moving some substances right there. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but the way people describe this makes it sound like, no,
Speaker 2: they were targeted, and maybe it's because they had pissed
Speaker 2: people off. Yeah, And part of why I think this
Speaker 2: is once they are robbed, this was just a mugging,
Speaker 2: they wouldn't do what they did next, which is leave
Speaker 2: immediately the country and leave most of their stuff behind
Speaker 2: in the house, including several vehicles that they own, like
Speaker 2: vans that they own, right Like, they leave a lot
Speaker 2: of money and stuff behind. And that makes sense to
Speaker 2: me if you're like, oh, somebody told you need to
Speaker 2: leave or you're going to get fucking murdered.
Speaker 3: Right right, there's otherwise why wouldn't we try to sell it?
Speaker 2: I just and this is based in part of the
Speaker 2: fact that I spent a lot of time in Central
Speaker 2: America and met a number of people doing things that
Speaker 2: aren't wildly different from this, and it's not uncommon for people,
Speaker 2: especially for the leaders of groups like this, to think,
Speaker 2: well maybe I could move a little molly or something
Speaker 2: like that. And there's already people moving malli in these areas, right,
Speaker 2: you're studying scarier than you, nature boy. So anyway, they flee,
Speaker 2: leaving all of their shit behind, and he convinces everyone
Speaker 2: to move to Peru. But on their way they visit
Speaker 2: Costa Rica. They're like going through Costa Rica and like,
Speaker 2: you know, like everyone who goes to Costa Rica, nature
Speaker 2: boys like, oh, actually this place rips and decides no, no, no,
Speaker 2: we're gonna live in tune with nature here, right, Okay,
Speaker 2: So they camp for a couple of nights and then
Speaker 2: they rent another house because again, none of them know
Speaker 2: how to really like live off the land. It's also,
Speaker 2: Costa Rica is a country. They're not just gonna let
Speaker 2: you set up camp in the jungle randomly and start
Speaker 2: a village.
Speaker 3: The same way. They don't let us do it here.
Speaker 2: The same way. You can't really do that here. You know.
Speaker 2: They continue producing videos from different gorgeous landmarks, and soon
Speaker 2: you know, and people keep joining adjoining, right, you know,
Speaker 2: Costa Rica is even prettier in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: And so they're posting all of these increasingly gorgeous videos
Speaker 2: about their idyllic lives outside of Babylon. And a young
Speaker 2: woman named Velvet Marquees joins the group.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: She is a freshman agricultural student at Tuskegee University. She
Speaker 2: has some relevant experience to actual back to the land shit.
Speaker 2: She had volunteered at a local land use in goos
Speaker 2: and felt like a natural fit for what she thought
Speaker 2: these people were doing. She recalls not even knowing that
Speaker 2: there was like nature Boy was the leader, right because
Speaker 2: the videos they publish, he's not making it all about him.
Speaker 2: He's constantly publishing these stories of other members. So it
Speaker 2: really does sound like to an outsider, there's this wonderful
Speaker 2: community mostly made up of like black people who have
Speaker 2: dropped out of you know, this fucked up country and
Speaker 2: are living this idyllic life in Central America. And so
Speaker 2: she decides to go join them.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: When she arrives, she's immediately surprised to realize they are
Speaker 2: not growing food, they're not foraging. They're eating at restaurants
Speaker 2: and driving in cars just like everyone else. But she
Speaker 2: and Olmec kind of hit it off, right, and you know,
Speaker 2: nature Boy agrees that like she can be no Omec's direct.
Speaker 2: But nature boys also not clearly happy with this because
Speaker 2: he wants to be with her, and so he keeps
Speaker 2: like hastling her. I'd be like, is sure you want
Speaker 2: to be with this other guy? Is she want to
Speaker 2: be with olmec?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 2: So that's going to continue to be a thing. Now.
Speaker 2: Around this time, another young woman, Kayla Reid, shows up
Speaker 2: from Canada, and this is a white lady, right, from
Speaker 2: a family that's at least middle class or upper middle class.
Speaker 2: She again gets drawn to this the same way everyone
Speaker 2: else does. It looks pretty, it seems like a great
Speaker 2: way to unplug from this very toxic society. And she's
Speaker 2: useful to nature Boy because you know, he's in general
Speaker 2: trying to get as many young women around him as possible.
Speaker 2: But also she's white, and there's by this point one
Speaker 2: or two other white people who he can put on cameras,
Speaker 2: so in tel potential followers, this isn't a racist thing, right,
Speaker 2: Like we accept everybody. He starts at this point changing
Speaker 2: his tune to like everyone is a shade of brown, right,
Speaker 2: So you know, he softens all this and again to
Speaker 2: try to get more people and more money. Now he's
Speaker 2: also cognizant of the fact that taking a young, rich
Speaker 2: white girl to his cult in Central America could force
Speaker 2: the involvement of international law enforcement. Right, so this is
Speaker 2: a kind of thing that he is away from the beginning.
Speaker 2: There's some upsides and some potential dangers, and soon enough
Speaker 2: those dangers make themselves clear because Kayla didn't tell her
Speaker 2: parents what she was doing. She is an adult, but
Speaker 2: she lied and claimed that she was heading to a
Speaker 2: church camp and then just disappeared and never told anyone
Speaker 2: where she.
Speaker 3: Was, and her parents alarms.
Speaker 2: Her parents make a missing person's complaint, not even because
Speaker 2: they're specifically sketched out by this guy, but because they
Speaker 2: have no idea where she's gone. She goes on a
Speaker 2: church retreat and drops off the face of the world.
Speaker 2: It's a very normal parent thing to do, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it should be, yeah, find your child. Yeah, you're gonna
Speaker 2: want to find your kid. And they are looking for her.
Speaker 2: This is an open question for at least weeks until
Speaker 2: someone sees her in an Instagram video with these people
Speaker 2: calling themselves ethereans and is like, oh fuck, I think
Speaker 2: she might have joined the cult. And this is the
Speaker 2: first time that this group. Before this, Nature Boy and
Speaker 2: his followers would have were just a bunch of expats
Speaker 2: bumming around Central America like a lot of people have done. Right,
Speaker 2: This is the first time they start being called a
Speaker 2: cult by the media and they start getting real attention.
Speaker 2: The CBC, which is kind of Canada's NPR, starts reporting
Speaker 2: on these scant few details known about Nature Boy and
Speaker 2: the Atherians, who have now rebranded themselves under the name
Speaker 2: melan Nation. Right, that's kind of the YouTube brand for
Speaker 2: all of their videos. And again, this is kind of
Speaker 2: a reflection of all of his melanin based teachings, which
Speaker 2: have gotten increasingly elaborate. Right, as this is all going on,
Speaker 2: the BBC sends a very irritating young reporter to Costa
Speaker 2: Rica to do a documentary called searching for a Cult
Speaker 2: Leader in the jungles of Costa Rica. I don't love
Speaker 2: this video, but it does capture the cult during a
Speaker 2: unique time. So I'm going to play a clip from
Speaker 2: it which shows nature Boy give his spiel to a
Speaker 2: group of followers.
Speaker 4: Well, we really don't like who's in toilet?
Speaker 3: It's like, what is the thing you hate so much
Speaker 3: about the toilet.
Speaker 2: The soil belongs to the trees, and I'm in an
Speaker 2: abusive relationship with the tree if I'm k not given
Speaker 2: in it back. The community is cold, Melanie. Okay, so
Speaker 2: that's that's at least how followers are kind of describing
Speaker 2: their their teachings at this point to a guy from
Speaker 2: the BBC. Now he does this. BBC guy does a
Speaker 2: short documentary just on the cult and a slightly longer
Speaker 2: one reporting on several different kind of utopian living projects
Speaker 2: in Costa Rica. He spends a lot of his time
Speaker 2: online flirting with that Canadian lady in a way that
Speaker 2: makes me slightly uncomfortable, or at least that's my interpretation.
Speaker 2: Watch it, you may feel differently. At one point, he
Speaker 2: asks her if Milanation is a cult, and she gives
Speaker 2: him an answer that was clearly scripted and drilled into
Speaker 2: her head by nature. Boy, Panna is a cult. Like
Speaker 2: the US as a cult, everyone is a part of
Speaker 2: a cult.
Speaker 5: Culture is a group of people who have similar beliefs.
Speaker 2: Now, I say that he clearly said that because a
Speaker 2: bunch of his videos he uses the exact line that,
Speaker 2: like well, the United States is a cult. And you know,
Speaker 2: there's a lot to be said about cultic aspects of nationalism,
Speaker 2: but as a general rule, when you are saying that,
Speaker 2: you're saying that to be like, so it's fine for
Speaker 2: me to have a cult too, as opposed to we
Speaker 2: shouldn't have cults.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank slippery here. Also it's like everything's a cult culture.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, yeah, not quite that's not quite true. Are
Speaker 2: there culture dynamics that we're talking about here to nationalism?
Speaker 2: Does nationalism make people vulnerable to cults? Sure? That doesn't
Speaker 2: mean you get to make a cult, right, So at
Speaker 2: this point, I think we've got what i'd call like
Speaker 2: a hybrid cult. Right nature Boy is starting to exert
Speaker 2: more and more control over members. It becomes a higher
Speaker 2: control group than it had been. But also a lot
Speaker 2: of people start leaving, right And there's not he's not
Speaker 2: does that. This is not like the Church of Scientology
Speaker 2: where he's got like a wing of folks dedicated to
Speaker 2: going after people who leave. And most of the people
Speaker 2: who come for a while are not crazy, they're not
Speaker 2: super dedicated. A number of them in that are interviewed
Speaker 2: in that BBC documentary have left and start their own
Speaker 2: land projects because they're like, well, Costa Rica rips and
Speaker 2: I actually want a farm or something like that.
Speaker 3: Right, these people aren't actually doing the thing I wanted to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, oh this was bullshit. But this place is
Speaker 2: pretty rad, you know. Now we get some good context
Speaker 2: on the kind of people drawn to Nature Boy in
Speaker 2: that BBC documentary, which talks to a former member named Ave,
Speaker 2: who got involved because she had a kid and she
Speaker 2: wanted to raise this kid in a place that wasn't
Speaker 2: the US because quote, the race thing was just really
Speaker 2: out of control. Ave is a black woman living in
Speaker 2: Texas and says, I just didn't think a child would
Speaker 2: be able to develop there. And I get it. And
Speaker 2: what's what's so interesting about Nature Boy is he's very
Speaker 2: much like doing a partial Jim Jones, Like he is
Speaker 2: recruiting from marginalized people who see how fucked up life
Speaker 2: in the US is and are open to dropping out
Speaker 2: of society to find a better life. But Jones, you know,
Speaker 2: before getting everyone killed, they do start like a town, right,
Speaker 2: like they've got there. There's a lot of infrastructure they
Speaker 2: put together, a.
Speaker 3: Lot more thought put into that.
Speaker 2: Jim pretty they put a lot of work into it
Speaker 2: and Jim Jones is not a lazy man.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: What's interesting to me is nature Boy talks a lot
Speaker 2: of Jim joneshit but he is so lazy and he
Speaker 2: completely refuses to use any of the money. And they
Speaker 2: have a lot at one point enough that they could
Speaker 2: have started something and potentially, with the knowledge, made an
Speaker 2: actual sustaining project, but he has He is almost violently
Speaker 2: opposed to the concept of farming, right. Yeah, obsessively talks
Speaker 2: about being back to the nature. He hates the idea
Speaker 2: of actually living off the land.
Speaker 3: Well, I think we've seen nature Boy throughout his life. Yeah,
Speaker 3: start a lot of things and quit them. He didn't
Speaker 3: like the amount of work that the barber shop required.
Speaker 3: It's a you know, looking for an easy way to
Speaker 3: make money and fuck women. You can say fuck women,
Speaker 3: I think so.
Speaker 2: Yes, And he's very it's just such a lazy And
Speaker 2: there's a couple of stories from former members who like
Speaker 2: show up and he tells everyone that, like, you know,
Speaker 2: we only go to the bathroom outside, and they're like, okay,
Speaker 2: so we're like making our own manure to like grow things,
Speaker 2: and he says, absolutely not. Under no circumstances do we
Speaker 2: ever do anything like he even tells one person, why
Speaker 2: would we grow our own food? There's markets. It's like
Speaker 2: you are literally talking and preaching about the apocalypse, my dude,
Speaker 2: Like yeah, fascinating, fascinating cult. For that reason, now this
Speaker 2: doesn't do well. Again, a lot of people realize this
Speaker 2: is bullshit. Ave who has a kid leaves right away, right,
Speaker 2: But it goes off like gangbusters among people who are
Speaker 2: deeply insecure or who are the kind of narcissistic dumb
Speaker 2: fucks who adopt countercultural beliefs not because they have real
Speaker 2: criticisms of society, but because they want to feel special.
Speaker 2: And this clip from that BBC documentary of two of
Speaker 2: his followers taking this fucking reporter to a hot springs
Speaker 2: makes really the narciss system in this belief system, the
Speaker 2: narcissism in this belief system incredibly evident.
Speaker 4: Are you how old are you?
Speaker 2: Guys?
Speaker 4: I'm actually immortal. I don't die.
Speaker 2: Okay, you never die, Alberts says, define, yeah, living a
Speaker 2: righteous path, living from the righteous path, then the narrow path.
Speaker 3: Would you say that your positive melanation or are you.
Speaker 2: Is this like a big movement?
Speaker 3: Do you think it's going to it's going to be
Speaker 3: like you know, like do you get from all around
Speaker 3: the world, like are coming together?
Speaker 2: Okay, so again the whole I'm never going to die
Speaker 2: Albert Einstein said, so thig Like it's it's again, it's
Speaker 2: so lazy. These people like are not actually, this is
Speaker 2: not an ideology. These people have not are not thinking
Speaker 2: about anything. They are casually ingesting YouTube videos with pretty things,
Speaker 2: and they just want to bum around and not do
Speaker 2: anything all the time, right, Like, there's no real belief here.
Speaker 2: There's no commitment to overthrowing an unjust system, there's no
Speaker 2: commitment to learning how to survive. It's just it's so
Speaker 2: it's such a fundamentally narcissistic thing. So I guess I'm
Speaker 2: not surprised this is a cult that forms through Facebook
Speaker 2: and Instagram, Right, yeah.
Speaker 3: That's it's attracting that type of person. It's also attracting
Speaker 3: somebody that's potentially thinking, well, I want to be in
Speaker 3: those videos.
Speaker 2: I want to have hang yeah exactly, the waterfall stuff.
Speaker 2: It's it's very It's so I keep thinking back to
Speaker 2: like scientology, evil stupid, not a shallow belief system, deep
Speaker 2: and labyrinthine and complex. Right the Zizyan So we've talked about. Yes,
Speaker 2: is everything silly nonsense? Is it all dumb as hell? Yes,
Speaker 2: but it's complicated and there's a lot of effort being
Speaker 2: put into this silly, crazy belief system, right everything. Every
Speaker 2: as I the more I learn about these fucking you know, melanation,
Speaker 2: the ethereans, all the different things that call themselves and
Speaker 2: oh, oh my god, therese was so fucking lazy, like.
Speaker 3: You don't actually there's no actual ideology here.
Speaker 2: No, it's just a hot dude, Instagram and toilet. Other
Speaker 2: than not pooping in a toilet, it's such like a man.
Speaker 2: I guess I'm appreciating all the cults that put in
Speaker 2: the actual hours, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, put put in the word good old fashion.
Speaker 2: Missed the good old fashioned cult? God you know that when.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really selling me something.
Speaker 2: The colts these days so lazy.
Speaker 3: It's the problem with the Internet.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, it's yeah, it's made everything too easy, right,
Speaker 2: you don't have to really work because the scale of
Speaker 2: social media means you can just find some people who
Speaker 2: will buy into anything. Everything's falling apart because of the Internet,
Speaker 2: all right, Sorry. Eventually, the heat from Canadian authorities over
Speaker 2: this this lady staying with them gets to be too much,
Speaker 2: and Nature Boy convinces Jasper Or She also goes by
Speaker 2: sun Ray or whatever to return home. She describes it
Speaker 2: as her making a choice to protect everyone by leaving.
Speaker 2: There is a video of him very clearly talking her
Speaker 2: into it. I think he just didn't have much use
Speaker 2: to her for her and like he wasn't into her
Speaker 2: and decided like this is more trouble than it's worth. Right, Yeah, Now,
Speaker 2: he has rapidly developed more narcissistic cult leader traits by
Speaker 2: this point. One of his most common refrains is what
Speaker 2: I'm doing is beyond Martin Luther King Junior. It's beyond
Speaker 2: Malcolm X. It's beyond all of that. And this is
Speaker 2: something his followers will repeatedly like say, he's beyond Martin
Speaker 2: Luther King, is beyond Malcolm X. And like, again, both
Speaker 2: of those guys a lot of work, very complicated, large
Speaker 2: organizations they ran that made serious impacts on the world,
Speaker 2: not just hanging out under waterfalls anyway. Initially, he discourages
Speaker 2: his directs from getting pregnant, telling them that if they
Speaker 2: do get pregnant, it's a sign that they have been
Speaker 2: cursed by God. When a young woman named Pocahontas joins
Speaker 2: the group and he makes her his direct He immediately
Speaker 2: impregnates her and kicks her out of the group a
Speaker 2: week later. So that's good now, he does eventually his
Speaker 2: opinion on this right. He has more kids with several
Speaker 2: of his followers. His kiddos. Cyrus visits him and spends
Speaker 2: several months living with the cult in Central America. So
Speaker 2: that's not great. And there's some videos of him like
Speaker 2: yelling at this kid, making him like crawl around on
Speaker 2: the ground, and he's like complaining that it hurts, and
Speaker 2: nature boy is like, you know, you just need to
Speaker 2: toughen up. You have to do it. He also, near
Speaker 2: the end of twenty seventeen, posts an important video which
Speaker 2: is described in that Rolling Stone article. I wanted my
Speaker 2: son to be so pure that he'd never know he
Speaker 2: was naked, says Bishop, who has four children. I take
Speaker 2: baths with my kids. I'm naked with my kids. I
Speaker 2: have sex in front of my kids. My son be breastfeeding,
Speaker 2: I'd be making love to his mom. That's how I
Speaker 2: get down around kids. He goes on like this for
Speaker 2: a minute or so. My son, I have sex with
Speaker 2: his mom, after I'm done, I'm laying there chilling. He
Speaker 2: grabs my penis. He's playing with my penis. I let
Speaker 2: that happen. This is what really draws a lot of
Speaker 2: ironline because people start accusing him of being a pedophile.
Speaker 2: And that's not an unreasonable thing to draw from that.
Speaker 3: No, it's not at all. And for someone who has
Speaker 3: talked about sexual abuse in his own childhood, you would
Speaker 3: think there'd be some connection about how destructive and confusing
Speaker 3: that would be.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's this kind of thing where like, is
Speaker 2: it bad for kids to be around communities of people
Speaker 2: who are naked? Like, No, there's nothing inherently bad or
Speaker 2: sexual about being naked. Depending on how you do it,
Speaker 2: is it bad for people? Like most people have been
Speaker 2: naked a significant amount of their lives in the history
Speaker 2: of the human race, It's not inherently bad for people. Likewise,
Speaker 2: is it bad for kids to be aware that their
Speaker 2: parents are having sex? Again, most human beings throughout history
Speaker 2: were broadly aware of the fact that adults around them
Speaker 2: had sex because you had a one room shack everyone
Speaker 2: lived in, or you were all out basically camping all
Speaker 2: the time. Right, None of that is inherently toxic. Should
Speaker 2: your kid be playing with your dick? No? No, Or
Speaker 2: do you need to be nope?
Speaker 3: Does your kidney to be breastfeeding while you have sex?
Speaker 2: Oh? Not really necessary. Then it's a kink. Then you've
Speaker 2: got a weird thing going on.
Speaker 3: And I feel so bad for the woman in that
Speaker 3: situation who probably feels a little powerless because it's his
Speaker 3: cold weird.
Speaker 2: Yes, weird, and he's like telling you, like, no, this
Speaker 2: is again, this is the thing that we're doing that's
Speaker 2: destroying Babylon. No, it's not. You've just got like a
Speaker 2: bunch of weird kinks, most of which you're around pooping.
Speaker 2: He takes videos of his son pooping. My god, it's weird.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: This is what draws the ire of the Costa Rican government,
Speaker 2: the governor of the province or whatever that his cult
Speaker 2: is camped out at. Actually is like there's enough of
Speaker 2: a local uproar about this guy because the stuff online
Speaker 2: goes that viral that like people in Costa Rica are
Speaker 2: like talking to the government being like, what do we
Speaker 2: really want this fucking weird this.
Speaker 3: Colt pops up in my neighborhood. I don't know, I
Speaker 3: don't want to know.
Speaker 2: I don't want to here, but like ah, so the
Speaker 2: governor has a it schedules a meeting with Nature Boy,
Speaker 2: and Nature Boy put posts some videos about obviously, you
Speaker 2: know this is all taken out of context. I'm not
Speaker 2: doing anything wrong. I'm happy to have a meeting with
Speaker 2: this guy and show him that nothing we're doing is
Speaker 2: what wrong or weird or bad. And then the day
Speaker 2: of the meeting, he has his followers load everything they
Speaker 2: own into vans and flee the country, or flee flee
Speaker 2: the state. Right, they don't quite leave Costa Rica, and
Speaker 2: in fact, in October they get deported after being detained
Speaker 2: at a checkpoint. Most members are found to lack passports
Speaker 2: since a lot of them have been robbed, many had
Speaker 2: overstayed their visas. Costa Rican officials were clearly kind of
Speaker 2: just trying to figure out what was happening because there's
Speaker 2: these vans full of like mostly Americans who don't have
Speaker 2: a lot of IDs or have overstayed their visas, and
Speaker 2: Nature Boy immediately like they detain them, and Nature Boy
Speaker 2: goes live on Facebook from the police barracks and claims
Speaker 2: he's being murdered by a government, just like Malcolm X
Speaker 2: or MLK, and again neither of them were by Costa
Speaker 2: Rican immigration authorities. Quote per Rolling Stone, we're live on
Speaker 2: Facebook right now. He shouted, everybody bring their cameras out,
Speaker 2: make sure they record this, because if we're gonna die,
Speaker 2: we're gonna die. Just like this is going down. An
Speaker 2: immigration officer boarded the bus and offered to let everyone
Speaker 2: go once they signed some paperwork. We're not signing nothing,
Speaker 2: Bishop yelled, we're standing up for humanity. If you don't
Speaker 2: stand for something, you're gonna fall for anything. Bishop insisted
Speaker 2: they wouldn't get off the bus. You're going to have
Speaker 2: to use violence. Moments later, police did some piece of shit.
Speaker 2: It's just like the cops are even like we'll let
Speaker 2: you go, you got to like sign some things saying
Speaker 2: you know you have to leave that like you can't
Speaker 2: stay in coach nobody.
Speaker 3: He's putting on a show.
Speaker 2: He's putting on a show, right And like there's this
Speaker 2: audio and it sounds bad like the cops beat them up.
Speaker 2: But like again you had a you head an out,
Speaker 2: like you're choosing now to occupy a police bus for
Speaker 2: no reason. I don't know. It's not the kind of
Speaker 2: civil disobedience that I really again, is there a massive
Speaker 2: ethical issue in Costa Rica putting American travelers on buses.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't think so. I think you
Speaker 2: had an out and you didn't take it.
Speaker 3: I think it sounds like you had an out.
Speaker 2: Speaking of people who have outs, you can break free
Speaker 2: of our evil, abusive society by participating in it. Be
Speaker 2: a purchasing product. I don't know. Here's some ads. Uh,
Speaker 2: we're back, So we're so back. So this whole confrontation,
Speaker 2: which was totally avoidable and stupid, causes nature Boy to
Speaker 2: go viral in the consciousness community subculture. Yet again. They
Speaker 2: spend several months back in the US pooping in the
Speaker 2: backyards of airbnbs. Now, not all of nature Boy's followers leave,
Speaker 2: you know, as soon as they get into his content
Speaker 2: to join immediately. One guy, David Armstead around this time,
Speaker 2: who's a musician and an audio engineer, gets into his
Speaker 2: YouTube content and spends a year or so not showering
Speaker 2: and pooping in the woods of Maryland before he finally
Speaker 2: leaves to join them. This is when they're back in
Speaker 2: the US. Yeah, just preparing, he explained his mind state
Speaker 2: to Rolling Stone. If I didn't change the way I
Speaker 2: was living. I was going to suffer some kind of
Speaker 2: consequence from the universe, so I left in the middle
Speaker 2: of the night and didn't tell anybody. Now, Okay, When
Speaker 2: he joins the group, he does it alongside a couple
Speaker 2: of other people with audio and video editing experience who
Speaker 2: have joined. This is like and none of them really
Speaker 2: lasts long, so they're all kind of handing off the
Speaker 2: batage of the other. But they start producing higher quality
Speaker 2: videos for the melanation's different accounts, and Nature Boy kind
Speaker 2: of starts turning the cult into a media powerhouse, or at
Speaker 2: least a low level one. They release some very mid
Speaker 2: rap songs that are nonetheless competently produced. Right, Like, I
Speaker 2: wouldn't say the lyrics are very good, but like the
Speaker 2: sound quality is fine. They're clearly made by someone who
Speaker 2: knows how to produce a song.
Speaker 3: Did he do it as Nature Boy?
Speaker 2: He does? Some of it is not they have there
Speaker 2: are other members who are actually somewhat popular, who like
Speaker 2: have a following because they're more competent. He is kind
Speaker 2: of noted by everyone is not knowing what he's doing,
Speaker 2: and anytimes someone says, hey, that track sounded like shit,
Speaker 2: he gets angry, so he can't really make anything good.
Speaker 2: But he starts publishing books at this point. And so
Speaker 2: if he's going to show you a couple of the titles,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of them. Most of them are just
Speaker 2: a few pages. One of them is Divine Knowledge of
Speaker 2: the Self spelled CLLF, Study Guy, and that is intentional.
Speaker 2: CLF is absolutely causelles and stuff. He's wearing a Native
Speaker 2: American headdress in this, which is a thing he has
Speaker 2: started doing by this time. There's another one with it
Speaker 2: with an illustrated version of him, called Master Chief exposing
Speaker 2: the food industries struy Wine.
Speaker 3: There is fifteen.
Speaker 2: Reviews, and it has fifteen reviews.
Speaker 3: And it has four point four stars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some good reviews. There's some bad ones,
Speaker 2: but you know, four point four stars. Some of his
Speaker 2: stuff just has two or three. Is he wearing an
Speaker 2: indigenous headdress because he starts doing that at this point.
Speaker 2: They have a lot of videos where the all dresses
Speaker 2: both as a mix of like Egyptians and like Native
Speaker 2: Americans and march around like soldiers.
Speaker 3: He loves to. That's terrible, okay.
Speaker 2: And again they're living in like Mexico and Honduras in
Speaker 2: Costa Rica, like, none of this is is it's just
Speaker 2: what they're doing. Okay, it's doing it's just what it's
Speaker 2: just what they're doing. Okay, So it's behind the bastards.
Speaker 2: It's yes, he's like he sucks. So this does start
Speaker 2: to bring in more money. I don't think the books
Speaker 2: as much as the video content and the rap least
Speaker 2: fourteen sales. At least fourteen sales. Which is good that
Speaker 2: they have more money because by this point he has
Speaker 2: spent all of keys three hundred thousand dollars inheritance. But
Speaker 2: the growing notoriety because he's putting out videos and they're
Speaker 2: getting some traction. He as followers, but the fact that
Speaker 2: he's more famous now that he's had these big scandals,
Speaker 2: it leads to someone digging up that gay porn he
Speaker 2: was in and for several years he will have to
Speaker 2: he will do. He puts out a lot of videos
Speaker 2: denying it's him, even though it obviously is him, and
Speaker 2: their videos where he's like, look if it was me,
Speaker 2: would that be so bad? Just admit it, man, own it.
Speaker 3: You've made You have managed somehow to make a lot
Speaker 3: of wild shit flies.
Speaker 2: So just just he does eventually admit it, but like
Speaker 2: it takes a wild amount of time. So he gets
Speaker 2: fed up with the States and he decides to fly
Speaker 2: everyone back to his Ignacio Believe to try and again
Speaker 2: to try his hand again at forming an intentional community.
Speaker 2: He's immediately recognized by the owner of an internet cafe
Speaker 2: and run out of the country for being a pedophile.
Speaker 2: So good work, random internet cafe guy in Belize. That
Speaker 2: was the right call. Believe is that even freak out
Speaker 2: of Bullize.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the sky can't settle. No, always jumping sucks his
Speaker 3: whole life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's two good decisions right now. Although you know,
Speaker 2: Mayosha eventually does let him spend more time with his kid,
Speaker 2: which isn't a great call, but you know, her leaning
Speaker 2: and that guy in Belize being like, get the fuck
Speaker 2: out of my get the fuck out of this town
Speaker 2: great calls. So he changes the group's name yet again,
Speaker 2: I think, in part to try and you know, lose
Speaker 2: some of the heat on them to carbon nation, right,
Speaker 2: and in the grand tradition of scammers and common for generations.
Speaker 2: It is at this point that he flees to Mexico.
Speaker 2: Several new folks have joined at this point, and the
Speaker 2: oldest of them is a fifty nine year old mother
Speaker 2: of She's got several kids. I think she might be
Speaker 2: a grand I might have been a grandmother named Magdalena Sevilla.
Speaker 2: She had successfully raised several kids to adulthood. She had managed,
Speaker 2: was the manager of a store. She's a person who
Speaker 2: lived a very complete adult life, like a functional member
Speaker 2: of society. But she also was someone had a lot
Speaker 2: of trauma and a feeling that her life was somehow incomplete,
Speaker 2: and she falls into this content. She sees all these
Speaker 2: young people living these blissful lives around these beautiful things
Speaker 2: of nature, is like, I want this in my life, right,
Speaker 2: And so she quits her job and leaves everything behind.
Speaker 2: Her children, who were interviewed for that Hood or that
Speaker 2: a Hood Horrors documentary express being like really surprised by this,
Speaker 2: but are like, at least for a while she seems happy.
Speaker 2: So we were like, I don't know, maybe like I like,
Speaker 2: she's fifty nine, right, Like, what are we supposed to
Speaker 2: do now? She has a heart condition that she's been
Speaker 2: on medication on for like a decade. At this point, again,
Speaker 2: it's totally manageable. She is managing it, but nature Boy
Speaker 2: hates medicine, and it's kind of you could some of
Speaker 2: the accounts of people at the time, it is insinuated
Speaker 2: that he harasses her whenever she takes it. There are
Speaker 2: some reports that she felt afraid of him knowing that
Speaker 2: she needed medicine and that she was sick, or that
Speaker 2: she was taking it, and she she doesn't like quit
Speaker 2: cold turkey, but she starts rationing it and not taking
Speaker 2: it as often as she is supposed to, and it
Speaker 2: eventually she runs out entirely, and in videos from later
Speaker 2: in her stay, she starts to look visibly unhealthy. Right,
Speaker 2: the group kind of travels aro. They go back to
Speaker 2: Belize for a while and then move back and then
Speaker 2: back to Mexico to a place called Pelinke where they
Speaker 2: rent a modern stone house, although again most cult members
Speaker 2: are camping in the yard and everyone is pooping in
Speaker 2: the yard. Now at this point, Nature Boy has drawn
Speaker 2: in some cult members who are you know, they're better
Speaker 2: at editing and video. They've got like recording studios set up.
Speaker 2: They're putting out a lot of content and some money
Speaker 2: is coming through with this. More money comes in from
Speaker 2: Nature Boy requiring new members to hand over their debit
Speaker 2: cards and credit cards when they join. One former member
Speaker 2: claims he gave Nature Boy a card with one thousand
Speaker 2: dollars his life savings on it, and Nature Boy immediately
Speaker 2: spent it all on a ping pong table, so again
Speaker 2: not great at money. Near the end of twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: Civilid dies in the night in her tent due to
Speaker 2: a pre existing now unmedicated heart condition. Velvet Marquez, who
Speaker 2: is still with the group at this point but will
Speaker 2: leave later, told a reporter he does not allow people
Speaker 2: to have medical attention. This is why Mamada, that's what
Speaker 2: they called her, passed away. Now by this point, Nature
Speaker 2: Boy is fully calling himself God. Now he has forced
Speaker 2: the whole cult on a strict diet where everyone can
Speaker 2: only eat at the same time. He gets hungry. He
Speaker 2: starts randomly forbidding men and women to speak with each other,
Speaker 2: and in true cult leader fashion, begins doling out unhinged punishments.
Speaker 2: When members displease him. They're made to do squats or
Speaker 2: stand in a corner. He also starts filming the sex
Speaker 2: that he has with followers and sometimes posting the videos online,
Speaker 2: sometimes as revenge porn, sometimes just as content. They make
Speaker 2: most of their money. He sucks so bad. They make
Speaker 2: most of their money at this point from a social
Speaker 2: media app based in Singapore called big O Live, which
Speaker 2: pays people for streaming Shaka. Calvin, one of his followers,
Speaker 2: claims that's when it would really get bad because Bishop
Speaker 2: Nature Boys started becoming a celebrity. They were all having
Speaker 2: to do things to get attention, to get money, and
Speaker 2: the things they do, they start instead of there being
Speaker 2: any kind of message, they start really focusing their content
Speaker 2: on we need to have reality shows, shit about everyone
Speaker 2: having fights and conflicts within the group. So he starts
Speaker 2: ordering people to fake fights and arguments for the sake
Speaker 2: of viral content, and he also starts yeah beef sell.
Speaker 2: He also starts talking like a militant revolutionary, which is
Speaker 2: when they start really doing a lot of these videos
Speaker 2: where they're dressed as like Pharaoh's or Native Americans and
Speaker 2: they're marching like soldiers to again, like again, stuff that
Speaker 2: he thinks is going to like shock people and go viral.
Speaker 2: As Daylon Armstead, the music engineer who joined recalled the
Speaker 2: Rolling Stone, working frequently with two other initiates, armand Palmer,
Speaker 2: who went by Piss and Ishmael Goodwin aka Caliber. The
Speaker 2: group's musical output accelerated. Loving the money and Hating the
Speaker 2: System is loving the warden and hating the prison. Palmer
Speaker 2: raps with an eerie synth hook looping behind him and
Speaker 2: one song called negro Pian. The song's music features Musa
Speaker 2: and Palmer's shirtless decked out in feathered headdresses, tribal jewelry
Speaker 2: face paints, stalking around vivid jungle landscapes. The message was
Speaker 2: a product like cocaine, Musa says, we were there to
Speaker 2: package it and get it out again. These are all
Speaker 2: like members who are like handling the actual entertainment portion
Speaker 2: of things, the stuff that actually does require some discipline.
Speaker 2: Is this right now? As time goes on and increasing,
Speaker 2: part of his message becomes domestic abuse because nature Boy
Speaker 2: has started seeing by this point, Velvet, who starts out
Speaker 2: as Olmec's direct, is now his direct, is probably his
Speaker 2: main wife, and he has started hitting her. He's also
Speaker 2: hitting basically every other woman in the group. Former member
Speaker 2: Courtney Townsend claims, quote, we end up having these meetings
Speaker 2: that would last six eight hours where he's explaining why
Speaker 2: he's locking a velvet in a room, why he had
Speaker 2: to slap her. His explanation was that we've been programmed
Speaker 2: by European men to be weak little men, so our
Speaker 2: women will never respect us. The women will respect him,
Speaker 2: and he's the guy slapping these girls, locking them in rooms.
Speaker 2: He actually does a live stream at one point with
Speaker 2: Velvet and her dad where Velvet's dad asks like, why
Speaker 2: do you keep hitting my daughter? And Nature Boy says,
Speaker 2: because I was upset with her, and her dad responds,
Speaker 2: she made you bust her in the face, her nose
Speaker 2: bleeding profusely everywhere. I'm going to tell you that, pops,
Speaker 2: Bishop responds when it comes to me, I'm a man,
Speaker 2: so again, like he is, is this has become like
Speaker 2: the central What started as like we need to overthrow
Speaker 2: Babylon and go back to nature, it is now primarily
Speaker 2: what we need to do is hit women. That's what's
Speaker 2: the cled his circle for.
Speaker 3: His own desires, his own instincts that he doesn't want
Speaker 3: to work on arm through from it's a place where
Speaker 3: he can do whatever the fuck he wants.
Speaker 2: And here's what part of what's extra gross about this.
Speaker 2: It's not even that this is into like obviously he
Speaker 2: wants to do this, but there's another level that is
Speaker 2: very social media to this that I fight even sicker,
Speaker 2: which is that a lot of their viewers and they're
Speaker 2: getting paid by viewers, whether or not those viewers like
Speaker 2: them are hate watchers. So a lot of why he's
Speaker 2: doing this is because it makes people angry and they
Speaker 2: share and repost, and it gets him more traffic right
Speaker 2: up that yeah, yeah, Now that said, this does get
Speaker 2: him reported to the Mexican police. In March of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: they get rated, which prompts them to flee the next
Speaker 2: day for a day Garagua. They eventually get rated there
Speaker 2: and after about a month they get deported and they
Speaker 2: go to Panama, where the same shit happens. They spend
Speaker 2: some time there, there are police reports, they get arrested,
Speaker 2: they get deported. This happens several times until COVID hits.
Speaker 2: Now the plague is actually a lifeline for nature Boy
Speaker 2: and carbon Nation because again he's making his followers hand
Speaker 2: over all of their money and everyone starts getting those
Speaker 2: COVID checks right in addition to be it gets easy
Speaker 2: to get like on unemployment and stuff, and so he
Speaker 2: starts taking that directly from them, and they have enough
Speaker 2: coming in now that he tries to set up in
Speaker 2: Hawaii on the Big Island next. Now, if you remember,
Speaker 2: Hawaii has extremely strict COVID quarantine protocols at this time.
Speaker 2: I think it's like two weeks that you have to
Speaker 2: spend in a hotel room, not leaving for any reason
Speaker 2: but an absolute medical emergency, right, if you want to
Speaker 2: spend any time on the island at all. Right, Like
Speaker 2: that is my recollection of it. That's what I read
Speaker 2: in the article. They show up in Hawaii and immediately
Speaker 2: break quarantine and in fact post videos of themselves not
Speaker 2: just breaking quarantine, but like touching in dangered turtles that
Speaker 2: you're not allowed to touch. So they get arrested by
Speaker 2: the Hawaiian government and they get deported America. As Americans.
Speaker 2: They get deported from Hawaii, which is not easy to do.
Speaker 2: You have to really suck some horrible shit to get
Speaker 2: deported from Hawaii as an American citizen. Now, while all
Speaker 2: this is going on, Carbon Nation has become a YouTube
Speaker 2: production house, putting out videos that are mostly either sexual
Speaker 2: or involve giant dramatic fights between members. Less and less
Speaker 2: time is spent actually preaching any kind of ideology. But
Speaker 2: the parasocial bond formed by watching this stuff is strong
Speaker 2: enough that people keep joining, including Jane Newell, a twenty
Speaker 2: five year old waitress at a raw vegan restaurant who
Speaker 2: by twenty twenty had come to consider carbon Nation my
Speaker 2: frequency family. What was what he preached, people of like
Speaker 2: minds coming together on a common mission to elevate the
Speaker 2: conciousness of Earth. This is all again, just repackaged bullshit.
Speaker 2: I was here and shit like this twenty years ago
Speaker 2: from fucking assholes on a primitive chunk of the Internet,
Speaker 2: but like y the same frequency. Now you fucking not,
Speaker 2: You're shitting in a yard and hitting women. Initially, she
Speaker 2: describes him as kind, but on March twenty second March
Speaker 2: twenty seventh, twenty twenty two, during a party at the
Speaker 2: Decalb County house that they had started to rent because
Speaker 2: they're back in the continental US. At this point, Nature
Speaker 2: Boy had one of his other wives punched Newell repeatedly.
Speaker 2: After an argument, she says, all right, well, I'm out
Speaker 2: of here. I'm leaving, but Nature Boy kind of sends
Speaker 2: people after her and convinces her to come back, and
Speaker 2: then he tries to coerce her into sex. She says
Speaker 2: no repeatedly, and he keeps repeating I'm not going to
Speaker 2: rape you, and then we should have sex one more time,
Speaker 2: and eventually he coerces her into having sex. Once she leaves,
Speaker 2: Nature Boy immediately posts revenge porn videos of them having sex.
Speaker 2: Newell goes to the cops, and she initially is not
Speaker 2: pressing charges for rape, just for the revenge porn. But
Speaker 2: the cops are like, this, actually, this is this. It
Speaker 2: has to be so bad for the cops to do this.
Speaker 2: The cops are like, this actually sounds like rape to us.
Speaker 3: Like development that is, And it's this again.
Speaker 2: If this is a white cult leader, I don't think
Speaker 2: any of this happens in terms of like the legal consequences.
Speaker 2: That is a huge part of it. Right, That he
Speaker 2: is a black cult leader is why the cops see this.
Speaker 2: But he is this is rape.
Speaker 3: Doing a bad thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all the things. So he gets arrested, he gets charged,
Speaker 2: he does bail out, and he's going to spend like
Speaker 2: the next two years almost fighting in court while his
Speaker 2: collapses around him. There had been a few dozen people
Speaker 2: at most at one point, and they're down to like
Speaker 2: a half dozen hard liners. One of his followers, amar
Speaker 2: Ja Wied flees with a bunch of money and hard
Speaker 2: drives that presumably included revenge porn. On March sixth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, he's found dead inside of a house that's
Speaker 2: on fire. It seems to be related to some gang
Speaker 2: stuff he was into as opposed to Nature Boy. But
Speaker 2: I don't, you know, it's not fully known, but it's
Speaker 2: one of those people who knew him will be like,
Speaker 2: it's because of Nature Boy's influence that he got into
Speaker 2: that stuff in the first place, right because he joined
Speaker 2: when he was eighteen, and this dude had a real
Speaker 2: dark impact on him. I don't know, but those are
Speaker 2: the two deaths that are somewhat tied to this cult.
Speaker 2: The court case finally reached its conclusion earlier this year,
Speaker 2: and it didn't go well for Nature Boy. One of
Speaker 2: his wives admitted to posting revenge porn when she was
Speaker 2: like trying to defend him, and in general, every time
Speaker 2: his remaining loyal followers got up on the stand, it
Speaker 2: was bad for him because the things he convinced them
Speaker 2: to do were bad. The state offered him a thirty
Speaker 2: year plea deal, which he rejected. So on March first,
Speaker 2: he is convicted on all counts and sentenced to life
Speaker 2: in prison without the possibility of parole plus ten years,
Speaker 2: which is where he is now. So wow, yep, again,
Speaker 2: that is one.
Speaker 3: Of those squidest story.
Speaker 2: It's both like, yeah, this guy sucked. I'm glad he's
Speaker 2: he's not out and free, but also like, well, there
Speaker 2: was only justice in this case because he's a black guy. Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a little cause those things are true, you know,
Speaker 3: And it's also complicated by the fact that you know,
Speaker 3: neeeds to be believed, which I think there's no reason
Speaker 3: not to believe the story of his childhood. It's it's
Speaker 3: incredibly traumatic, and you can see the through lines, yep,
Speaker 3: of how he got from point A to point B
Speaker 3: here his aggression and constantly being moved around and abused
Speaker 3: and then but that's no excuse. It's not an excuse
Speaker 3: just this way.
Speaker 2: It's it's interesting if you want to look at like
Speaker 2: the cult that has a very that takes the cult
Speaker 2: that kind of I think about a lot when I
Speaker 2: read about this, because he's kind of the lower effort
Speaker 2: version of nexium, right, and nexium is a higher effort
Speaker 2: version in part because you've got this guy Keith Ranieri,
Speaker 2: who gets his start doing other kind of cons is
Speaker 2: targeting a higher level of wealth individual is targeting people
Speaker 2: who are more prominent, and he's doing a lot of
Speaker 2: When you get right down to it, it's the same.
Speaker 2: They're not he's talking about saving the world. All he's
Speaker 2: really doing is being like lounging around in nice hotels
Speaker 2: and houses in rental houses and having sex with a
Speaker 2: bunch of women who he also physically and mentally abuses. Right, Ultimately,
Speaker 2: both cults are doing the same thing. Ranieri makes millions
Speaker 2: and millions of dollars and is adjacent to a lot
Speaker 2: of very powerful people for years and years and years
Speaker 2: and years, like like a long time before he gets justice.
Speaker 2: Nature Boy, it just a couple of years. And it's
Speaker 2: in part because Nature Boy does not have, because of
Speaker 2: his background, the ability to kind of reach and you know,
Speaker 2: influence the level of wealth people that Ranieri does. And
Speaker 2: it's part because like just he immediately gets a lot
Speaker 2: more new uh you know shit, right, Like he he
Speaker 2: gets a lot more attention from law enforcement. He gets it.
Speaker 2: It's taken seriously because he's not a white guy, right, but.
Speaker 3: He also, yes, what I'm about to say does not
Speaker 3: it's not counter countering that, but like to your own point,
Speaker 3: he's pretty lazy. He's pretty sloppy and lazy about how
Speaker 3: he's going about this, not preparing, uh, you know, and
Speaker 3: really not even trying to keep up the facade of
Speaker 3: there being anything to intellectual or spiritual or uh. It's
Speaker 3: just about instagram posting the videos, making money, chasing the clout. Oh,
Speaker 3: it's subs are dying down, going down. You gotta add
Speaker 3: fights fabricate it like the reality TV show, And it's
Speaker 3: wild because it's possible to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, that's part of what's
Speaker 2: interesting is because you know, when Neier, he did have
Speaker 2: to create a lot of like he had to he
Speaker 2: had to build this curriculum around his cult in order
Speaker 2: to start getting the following that he eventually turns into,
Speaker 2: like what it turns into when you've got the Internet
Speaker 2: and the way parasocial relationships work, if you're able to
Speaker 2: just get an audience with content that you're putting out
Speaker 2: hours of on a regular basis, you can really easily
Speaker 2: get a number enough people to kind of support you
Speaker 2: as a cult leader. You know, this isn't a massive
Speaker 2: could he's not a massive star, but one hundred thousand
Speaker 2: or so regular listeners. You can get a dozen or
Speaker 2: two people who will come out and live with you
Speaker 2: at any given time, and enough money that you can
Speaker 2: get away with this. And it takes so much less
Speaker 2: effort a guy like Ranieri. There is more background work
Speaker 2: that Ranieri has to do to get started, you know.
Speaker 2: So it is just one of these like social media
Speaker 2: has made starting a cult a lot take a lot
Speaker 2: less effort, and you can fuck up a bunch of
Speaker 2: people's lives doing that a lot more easily. That said,
Speaker 2: the cults don't tend to last as long. Maybe that's
Speaker 2: the outside right, Well, they're.
Speaker 3: More visible too. Yeah, they're doing is on display. It's
Speaker 3: hard to confuscate what's happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that is that is kind of worthwhile. That
Speaker 2: that the worthwhile side story here is that a lot
Speaker 2: of why this colde gets taken down is there's it's
Speaker 2: not just you know, the racism of the police. It's
Speaker 2: also that there's a lot of people watching and following
Speaker 2: this online and saying this is wrong and taking effective
Speaker 2: action to both scare other people. A number of a
Speaker 2: lot of people both get out because people are making
Speaker 2: a stink about how fucked up this is and don't
Speaker 2: join who might otherwise have joined because of all of
Speaker 2: the people who are trying to stop this, and it
Speaker 2: also makes it harder for them to act and operate.
Speaker 2: So that isn't a pus side of it, right, is
Speaker 2: that there is like a community kind of defense aspect
Speaker 2: here if people realize this is really, you know, fucked up,
Speaker 2: right like that Hood Horrors documentary is somebody who covers
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff within the subculture, being like, people
Speaker 2: need to know how this happened and why?
Speaker 3: Right, So that's good, you know, yeah, the good with
Speaker 3: the bad good so easy to get swooped up in
Speaker 3: movements that you don't intend to the pipeline. There's much
Speaker 3: to be said about this, we know, yes, much to say.
Speaker 3: That's why the show exists.
Speaker 2: Ye all right, okay, Well that's the episode. How you feeling, Katie.
Speaker 3: I'm feeling great. Learned a lot about nature Boy and Colts.
Speaker 3: Yeah for my own cult actually already have.
Speaker 2: Yeah you know what, Yeah, joined Katie's cult where I
Speaker 2: don't know, Katie, what which what Central American nation do
Speaker 2: you think you're going to wind up in?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: That sounds like a lot of work. Can it just
Speaker 3: be based out of California?
Speaker 2: A lot of colts are Katie? Good news about that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm just going to come to your compound and
Speaker 3: start it there. Michael already exists. It's called some More News.
Speaker 3: You can support our Patreon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm I'm I'm too tired. That seems like so
Speaker 2: much work. I'd rather I'm going to play Age of
Speaker 2: Wonders four in my underpants alone. That's my play. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what a nice evening. Yeah, sounds great. Sore.
Speaker 1: So we're not going to start that cult on in Curasu.
Speaker 2: Well, no, Sylvie, you should start that Culton curasw. We
Speaker 2: definitely still need a cult and Curasu, but primarily as
Speaker 2: a way to get money and as a way to
Speaker 2: purchase products without tariffs. That's really the benefit of having
Speaker 2: a cult and curra.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a real big benefit. Yeah, you know, And
Speaker 3: I'll just move there with you. We don't even have
Speaker 3: to start a cult.
Speaker 2: Sounds good to there. Yep.
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