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

Nature Boy is now in Central America, where he weaponizes the power of Instagram's algorithm to trick rubes into flying out to join him and handing over all their money.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh, welcome back to Bastards Behind the Stole Katie podcast.
Guest a, what a title. Yeah, you can put that all.
I believe in our audience they can put it together.
They can put it together. You know, you know what
I'm getting at.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Yeah, they get the gist.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
They get the gist. Come on, do I need to
do everything for you people?

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Presumably they heard part one?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
So yeah, I'm just going to record a podcast that's
me reading most of the words and then re release
it every week with a different bastard and you can
put it together in your head, is like the right
bad person.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
But do you expect them to do all the work
for you?

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah? Come on, now, we got to be able to
meet in the middle here.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
It's called compromise.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
I don't know. Yeah, how are we doing, Katie? How
are you feeling in the five minutes since we recorded
part one?

Speaker 3 (00:55):
Honestly?

Speaker 4 (00:55):
Great?

Speaker 3 (00:56):
I reheated my tea, great, cuddled, great, feel refreshed. Great,
Waiting with baited breath to hear more about Nature Boy.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yeah, well, let's hear about nature Boy. The boy Nature
that's the name he's picked up at the start of
this episode, and we should start today by talking a
little bit more about the conscious community or the Black
consciousness community. I've heard it described as bost things. Again,
this is a subculture, not a massive one, but not

(01:30):
a small one either, that exists primarily through kind of
a nexus of YouTube and podcasters and some rappers. Rolling
Stone writer David Peisner describes it as quote an ecosystem
of black spiritualists, natural living advocates, herbalists, alternative historians, motivational speakers,
and backpack rappers. Having gone through a bit of related

(01:51):
non culty content creators, I'm sorry, backpack, yeah, which I
think is a term for like rappers who are kind
of not not massive, you know, they travel around and
do a lot of like local shows and stuff kind
of you know that, Like, yeah, probably do a lot
of I think SoundCloud wrapper is an adjacent sort of thing, right, Okay.

(02:13):
Having gone through a bit of related non culty content
creators in this space, a lot of what I see
in this community reminds me of stuff that I saw
and was kind of had sort of experienced adjacent to
some of the different like hippyish, you know, communities I
spent time in when I was in my late teens
early twenties, you know, the Rainbow Gathering people in the

(02:34):
Burner community, all these like different sort of where you
would encounter this mix, this wide mix of everything from like,
here's people who are actually really interested in you know,
aquaponics and human maneuver and alternative living situations. And here's
people who are actually trying to inform folks about important
aspects of American history that have been covered up. And

(02:55):
here's people who are telling you absolute nonsense about how
you don't need vaccines if you eat enough zinc, and
they're trying to get you to believe in you know whatever,
fucking bullshit.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Alien piggybacking on another movement. That's a one way to
look at it. But yeah, it's a net that casts
some good things and some bad things.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yes, And the kind of the big difference between a
lot of where you know, this kind of these kind
of different sort of hippyish descended movements that I spent
time in and around when I was doing psychedelics a
bunch and this community, which also focuses the conscious community
a lot of psychedelic usage, is that there's a much
more of a focus on racial justice because this is

(03:38):
much more of like a black subculture and a lot
of education on the history of white supremacy. So again
you get these real the Tuskegee experiment, redlining, the move bombing,
and also like like moon landing, conspiracies, anti vaxshit, you know,
all that stuff. I found a write up in medium
by Anna stands Guard which gives a good idea of
how people in this community like to describe themselves and

(04:01):
it focuses a lot on the concept of a conscious community,
which is where the conscious community subculture takes its name,
but is an older term for that goes back. You
can find people talking about shit like this in like
the seventies and eighties. This is people would use the
term to describe these kind of idealized, physical, intentional communities
formed along utopian lines, which is a thing people have

(04:22):
done in America since the nation has existed. And this
term is you know, goes back further than the subculture
we're talking about now. Since forming real world breakaway communities
is hard and usually a bad idea, very difficult to do,
most people wind up hating each other. Most of these
projects explode. The vast majority of people in this subculture.

(04:46):
It's an aspirational thing right, and they just kind of
connect and talk about what they'd like to do via
the internet, Anna writes, quote, as it turns out there's
a parallel digital world teeming with conscious travelers. I discovered
Facebook groups where conscious travelers or nomad share their experiences
and carrate lists of the best conscious hotspots worldwide. Furthermore,
jat GPT can serve as a valuable resource in your

(05:08):
global exploration of conscious communities, offering guidance, insights, and information
to enhance your search for specific location. So again, most
of this isn't real. It's an aesthetic. People like the
image of going back to the land, of being conscious,
of being enlightened, of being spiritual. But also all they
really want to do is stay at a nice hotel.

Speaker 5 (05:28):
You know.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
That's really a lot of this, right, So yeah, I
do want to talk about another influence in this community,
and kind of where a lot of the name comes
from is an actual movement called the Black Consciousness movement,
which is a real thing that comes out of the
black radical history in apartheid era South Africa, and specifically

(05:52):
a guy named Steve Bicko. Bicco was the first president
of the South African Students Organization when it launched in
eighteen sixty nine, and inspired by black thinkers like France Fannon,
he began publishing articles that posited an ideology he called
black consciousness. He described his goal as to quote demonstrate
the lie that black is an aberration from the normal,

(06:13):
which is white. Biko urged the black community to celebrate
and take pride in their history and traditional cultural and
religious practices as the indigenous people of South Africa, pushing
people to decolonize both the state and their own minds.
He was a cool guy, which is why the police
murdered him for a very good article in well we're
talking about a black radical leader in nineteen sixty nine

(06:36):
South Africa. The odds are good. He wound up getting
murdered by the cops, right like it's a pummer, Yeah
it is. Yeah. I'm going to quote from a very
good article on Biko in the Retrospect Journal. Quote. The
apartheid government regarded black consciousness as a growing threat and
placed a banning order on Biko in nineteen seventy three.
The repressive practice of banning originated from the nineteen fifty

(06:58):
Suppression of Communism Act, which regarded all political opposition as
a communist threat. As a result, a banning order restricted
a person's travel and social interactions, as well as preventing
them from public speaking or distributing written material. In Bicco's case,
he was limited to speaking to one person at a
time and forbidden from being a member of any political organizations.
Several tactics were used to circumvent the strict measures of

(07:19):
his band. Bicco struck up a close friendship with the
white liberal editor of The Daily Dispatch, Donald Woods. Over time,
Woods became more educated about the plights of black South Africans,
secretly writing Bicco's biography when he was himself banned. In
nineteen seventy seven, Bicco was arrested for traveling outside of
and therefore breaking his banning order. He was severely beaten
whilst in police custody and died of his injuries at

(07:40):
just thirty years old. Again literally banned from talking to
more than one person at a time.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
That is wild.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Fuck that government, ummm, very supressing. I bring this up
because not because nature Boy has Any is a an
inheritor of Bicco's tradition, but because the black conscience, the
modern black consciousness subculture or conscious community, and I've heard
both names used for this same kind of amorphous subculture

(08:12):
is in some ways related to the Black consciousness movement,
and a lot of what Nature Boy is doing is
kind of taking some of these things and pulling them
in a toxic direction. For example, a big part of
Black consciousness is the idea that we need to we
need to really get people to accept that being black
is not an aberration, right, Like it is just as

(08:33):
normal as being white, which is a really important thing,
right that, Like, black is not an aberration from the normal.
And the toxic sort of way that's taken is like no, no, no,
having more melanin is directly what makes you intelligent, and
having more makes you an inherently better person. Right, Your
boy takes it, right.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
See that a version of that sentiment today on Twitter.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
It's not just a nature build, it's not just nature
Boy thing, right.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
But it's interesting that I just saw that an hour
ago and I went huh, And I was really trying
to get to the bottom of what this guy was
even saying, but it took me aback.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
So interesting.

Speaker 3 (09:15):
There's like what we're talking about right now, it's.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Just yeah, it's it's you can see, it's important to
understand kind of some of the history and like the
term that these people are aping. And also in a way,
it's also important to understand what Nature Boy a big
part of. Once he becomes like a media influencer, he's
constantly going to be talking about how he's being targeted
for murder, how the police are trying to kill him
for his revolutionary actions. That's not at all a part

(09:39):
of his story, but that is a huge part of
actual people who were actual revolutionaries in the actual Black
consciousness movement, right, that is what happened to them, and
he's kind of like stealing valor from them. While again,
rather than trying to liberate people in bondage, all Nature
Boy is trying to do is get a bunch of
wives and convince them to poop outdoors, which is not revolutionisty.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
No, it doesn't sound in enlightenment in the lighten not
particularly enlightened either, Yeah or enlightened. I don't think Steve
Bicko would have been super into this. Yeah, Okay, So
when nature Boy gets into the conscious community, the first
figure within it that he finds himself drawn to is
a guy who goes by the name Young Pharaoh. Now,

(10:23):
when I first started looking Young Pharaoh up, I was
kind of surprised because he's talked about in these documentaries
about what happens as a pretty big figure, and Nature
Boy talks about him as a big figure. He's only
got like a thousand followers on Instagram and a little
more on YouTube. But then I looked into it, it turns
out he used to be much bigger and have a
much larger platform, and he lost his mind during twenty

(10:44):
twenty many such cases.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
And so many such of places, and he never really recovered. Previously,
prior to twenty twenty, he had started out and started
building his platform within the subculture by making a lot
of videos about police brutality, white supremacy, and he did
well enough the making serious money, and he's making like
two hundred grand a year at one point. And he
kind of switches in and around twenty twenty, and it

(11:08):
starts sort of right before and starts singing a very
different tune at a certain point, and it happens kind
of in a way that makes me think it might
be inorganic, where he'll start putting out videos about how
the police aren't that bad and actually, I've never had
a bad interaction with the police, And I'm going to
move to a white neighborhood because I think it's going
to be like it's a lot of really weird. And
he gets criticized by other people within the conscious community

(11:31):
for this shift. Then he loses his mind over COVID
and starts blaming it on the Jews, which is how
he gets demonetized and banned from a bunch of stuff,
which is why he sues Google, and he loses and
gets stuck with a forty grand bill. Most of the
videos you'll find about Young Pharaoh today are made by
other people. The top showings when I typed his name
into Google while writing this are a documentary called The

(11:53):
Rise and Fall of Young Pharaoh. Another one is Young
Pharaoh at airport, crashes out and punches his girlfriend, and
of course Young Pharaoh explains why aliens subducted him seven
times part seven.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
Oh my goodness, Young Pharaoh journey.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
He has gone in some directions.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
I could not have guessed what the next word would be.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah, whoo. So I know you're all curious why did
the alien subduct him? And just to get an idea
of this, dude and his vibes. I'm gonna play you
a quick clip of him of him explaining this is
from part seven of the series on why Alien subducted
him seven times.

Speaker 5 (12:35):
I just grade teacher name is Rosac. I said that
to him. I wanted to go down the history like
Malcolm X and make history. You know, it's something to me.
He just always wanted.

Speaker 4 (12:44):
To leave a market history. So whatever that is in me,
in that spirit, I was connected to that. Maybe that's
what they saw. On top of the fact, you know,
from what I was told during one of my interactions
is that I was super intelligent, so it was easier
for me to for me to receive a neurological upgrade,

(13:07):
so that way I could like channel or process information
faster because I already had the ability to retain it,
you know. So it was just it just made sense,
you know, to utilize me.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Well that checks out.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah, that seems that all scans to me can't see
it here reason why that wouldn't be true. Yeah, so's
he's he's he's he seems like he's he's got his
shit together, right, So this is his This is the
first guy that Nature Boy is really going to Vibe
with he reaches out to this dude based on his videos.

(13:44):
They become close friends. At least that's how nature Boy
describes it. This is not going to be a long
lasting friendship. So again, those videos I played were that
video that Sophie played was recent. I got to go
back to twenty fifteen here, so remember he's not yet
obviously a crank. Here he is mostly talking about police
brutality and white supremacy and kind of a fairly prominent creator.

(14:07):
And when I said, I think there's something sketchy about
how he changed suddenly to talking about how he likes
the cops and you know, kind of going more right wing.
He is invited at one point to speak at Seapack.
Now he gets disinvited right before because of the aforementioned
anti semitism. But something went on there, right, really yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
And the anti semitism did it?

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah? Yeah. So back in twenty fifteen, Young Pharaoh's blowing up.
He's not so obviously a crank, and Nature Boy grows
obsessed with his work and he reaches out online. The
two vibe and they become Internet buddies. This is happening
right as nature Boy has quit his job at the
barber shop in order to lock himself in his room
and watch YouTube videos, which he said made him question

(14:51):
quote the fabric of reality. His partner at the time,
Maisha and the mother of his son, says that he
stopped sleeping almost entirely, and describes what he wants watch
as conspiracy theory videos. Quote. He rambled daily about America,
which he called Babylon and how it was gonna fall
and you know, fall of America. Not super wrong in
predicting that, maybe, but I don't think he's predicting it

(15:14):
for the same reasons. Yeah. So Nature Boy, for his part, says,
I started studying what America was, what money was, breaking
my reality down to a molecule, and again that all
could lead you in a good direction, but it mostly
leads him to get very angry about the toilet. He
begins again, is evil? Yeah, yeah, again. He starts to

(15:37):
become convinced that direct exposure to sunlight makes you smarter
because it increases your melanin content. He becomes he's briefly
a back to Africa kind of black nationalist right where
he's like, we need to return to Africa. But around
this time, his older sister Tanya dies and Maisha had
been close to her, like his partner had been close

(16:03):
to his older sister, And so they go to the
funeral and she's kind of surprised because nature was really taciturn.
He's like weirdly cold during the visit. But then when
they return to Georgia, he goes through this really rapid
visible decline in his mental health. The first sign to
outsiders is he stops bathing entirely, and he would angrily
rant to anyone that you only need to bathe if
you eat smelly foods. And he has at this point

(16:24):
become a fruitarian, so he doesn't need to wash himself ever.
Now there's also some evidence that something diagnosable is happening here.
Maisha says that he starts to suffer serious memory lapses,
often forgetting what day it is. He stops cutting his hair,
which was for him a major red flag. Again, this
guy is like a fairly skilled barber. Yeah. In one

(16:45):
video talking about this time, he says, I had people like, dude,
you good. They would come to drop the money off
from the barber shop and see him with his hair
all crazy, ranting about conspiracies and Babylon and they were
just like, I don't want to hear that, so get it.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
Yeah, I mean all of it is somebody having some
sort of mental break, being obsessive, locking yourself away, withdrawing,
breaking down your consciousness. It's all alarming.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
It's all alarming, and you know, not bathing, not bathing. Yeah,
people are you know what I mean? Yeah, people are
immediately aware, right, Like it's not the kind of thing
that's hideable. So Mayishi decides eventually she doesn't want to
hear this either, and she takes her kids and the
child that they share, dumps his ass and moves to
South Carolina and making the only good decision anyone will

(17:32):
make over the course of these videos. Nature Boy is
okay with this because it gives him more time to
study what he has decided will be his next career,
which is becoming a YouTube personality.

Speaker 5 (17:43):
Now.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Right after she leaves, Young Pharaoh gets invited to speak
on a podcast in New York City, and Nature Boy
kind of brute forces his way into like, oh, I'll
drive up there and be on it with you, Like
we'll hang out, we'll be on the show together, right
And as soon as I think Young Pharaoh kind of
lets them because they're buds, and Nature Boy at the
start of this thing immediately elbows his friend out of
the interview basically to go on a rant, and you

(18:05):
can see the moment here. Again, this is from the
Hoodharr's video. The original video was deleted long ago, so
it's really the only place I have to access this,
but it's kind of a noteworthy moment to look at.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
Here.

Speaker 2 (18:17):
My brother Nature is here for Milana. First, I want
to talk to my brother Nature. Why are you so
infatuated my brother? We're going back to Africa talk to
the people. The tropical man belongs between the tropic of
Cancer and the tropic of Capricorn. What does that mean
if you look on to Matlok. Yeah, so he kind

(18:37):
of kind of pushes his way in, and you know,
the other guy seems more interested in him too, and
this sparks the end of their appearance, right of their friendship, right, yeah,
because he kind of pushes Young Pharaoh out of this thing.
Now they will be in several videos talking about their
beef because again, this is a YouTube subculture, right, so
this isn't the end of their relationship, but now it

(18:58):
is primarily primarily based on them having beef with each
other beef cells. Right, that's uh, that's that's how all
of this ship works, right.

Speaker 5 (19:09):
Now.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
It's interesting he doesn't this is his first I believe,
his first appearance anywhere, right in terms of like social
media as nature boy. Uh, at least as far as
I can tell. And he starts his channel and begins
building a following pretty shortly after that. But before he
does so, he goes home, and he continues to spiral
a bit more right, some of his first content. He's

(19:31):
a militant fruitarian, but he's militant in terms of like
he hates vegans for eating plants, which he regards as
being as cruel as hating animals. It's very hard to
get along with. You can only eat wants to be eaten,
but like you can't eat like otherwise eat plants because
that's hurting the plants.

Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah, wild fruitarian is also very hard to take.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Seriously, very hard to take seriously.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
Don't mean to offend any fruitarians out there.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
But it's it's you're supposed to eat other things. You
simply are You simply are. There's a number of things.
Now he starts the nature boy Facebook channel in I
think late twenty fifteen and his initial videos, so yeah,
these kind of rambling streams where he will lay out
his beliefs about not pooping or peeing inside, not bathing,
eating fruit, and most importantly, he kind of he makes

(20:21):
a sharp break from this return to Africa stance that
he has earlier and instead starts advocating that people drop
out of Babylon entirely and live in tune in nature.
There's a video. I don't think we need to play it,
but like where he kind of makes the stance that, like,
there's too many wars in Africa, so we should all
go to Central or South America because there's a lot
of sun exposure there which will make us smarter, but

(20:43):
it's not as dangerous, right. That's kind of the reason
why he changes his mind. Now, his videos are not
highly produced at this stage, but he's good looking and
he's charismatic, and he starts to draw in thousands and
then tens of thousands of subscribers. He has an Instagram,
he has a youtubebe I think he's initially more of
a Facebook and Instagram person, but his YouTube starts to

(21:04):
build and they get like one hundred thousand or so
followers right each which is not he's not a massive star,
but people are listening, right. And when you've got you know,
one hundred thousand or so people who are semi regularly
watching your stuff, you can get some of them to
send you money, and you can get some of them
who start to develop a really strong parasocial relationship with you,

(21:24):
which is what starts to happen here. And he begins
vowing that he is going to leave the United States
Babylon to South America, where he is going to start
a conscious community. And he starts talking to his followers
like you should follow me. We're going to We're going
to completely change the world. This is going to be
the spark of the revolution. You know, I Am going

(21:44):
to end Babylon by beginning this movement by getting everyone
to start conscious communities in South America, where again people
already live, right.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
People already live there.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
It's one of those things where I'm always like, okay,
but like, if it was as simple as just like
we all need to go live on the land in
fucking Peru or whatever, why didn't all of the people
living on the land in Peru stop anything? Why Why
didn't that make all of our problem because like maybe
they're more complicated than just living in Peru.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
I don't know, man, Like, maybe you haven't thought this
one through.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Maybe you haven't. Maybe people living in Peru have a
lot of issues that like it's just it's just very
all of our problems are more complicated than that. But you, like,
this is not about really solving problems again, it's going
to be about being able to take videos of yourself
in a very pretty place. And speaking of being able
to take videos of yourself in a very pretty place,

(22:42):
I don't know how that relates to our advertisers. Here
you go. Ah, all right, so we're back. We're back
from the pods, We're back talking. Okay. He decides he's
going to leave for South America to start a conscient community,
and the way this ultimately happens is very funny. He

(23:03):
makes a video announcing the day has come. I am
going to leave Babylon to live off the land as
God intended. His initial plan was to go to South America.
He talks about Peru a lot, but as soon as
he posts, I'm doing it, I'm making the plans. I'm
leaving for South America. A fan of his reaches out
and it's like, hey, my brother lives in Honduras. That's
where our family's front and he's inherited, like thirty acres

(23:24):
that you can use. There's two old houses on the
property that you would have to renovate first to make
it livable, but like, you can go down there. So
Nature Boy immediately is like, well, fuck South America, I'm
meant to be in Honduras, right, And you know, to
be honest, from what I can tell, I don't have
detailed knowledge of this land, but from what I can see,
from what footage exists, this it would have been a

(23:45):
good setup for someone wanting to try and start, assuming
someone knew how to do all this. You've got houses
that are in okay shape, they need some renovating. You've
got thirty acres. You can support a good number of
people on thirty acres there. If you knew what.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
It's scenario for a cult leader, you.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
Could do something here, right, if you had any intention
of actually doing the things you were talking about. So
he commits. He buys a plane ticket and he tells
everyone first he's flying down to Florida, and if you
want to leave Babylon two everyone meet up with me
in Florida. We're going to do a big meetup and
we're going to fly down the Honduras together. And he
shows off his camping gear in a backpack. He's got
a life straw, which he clearly doesn't know how to use.

(24:25):
He's got solar camp panels to keep his phone charge.
He's got a brand new Cabella's backpack, and he tells
everyone now that I'm going to nature I'm going to
build a village. I don't know how I'm going to
do it, but I know it's going to happen because
I said it's going to happen. And again that's a
red flag because all of this is very complicated, and
if people don't have any background experience, they're simply not
going to succeed, which is indeed what happens. But the

(24:47):
day of the meetup in Florida comes around and there's
a very funny video where Nature Boy's like, well, my
assumption was that nearly all of my followers were young women,
so I was expecting a bunch of young ladies, but
the only people who show up are three guys in
the twenties.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Ya sign boy, M.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah, that's not really shocking. Their names are Key, Olmec
and Starlight. Now, these are all dudes who are kind
of in this community. They're interested in not just nature Boy,
but other stuff. Olemech in particular seems to have some
like particular like a degree of knowledge about how to
like farm and stuff and is really interested in trying this.
Nature Boy is skeptical about all of them because again

(25:26):
he was hoping they were all young women that he
could have sex with. But he changes his mind when
Starlight says he knows Spanish and has twenty thousand dollars,
Nature Boy immediately tells him, you're useful. Again. No one
he does not know Spanish. He did not plan on
having anyone with him wh knew Spanish to create a

(25:46):
community in choice, not needed, not important. No, Now, at
this stage, this is not a cult. This is some
young men who have had their heads filled via YouTube
with pretty ideas of live and Facebook with pretty ideas
of living off the land. And you know how easy
it is. Right the instant they arrive at the actual property,
they look at this house which had been like the

(26:08):
landowner's grandmother's house, and so it's filled with her old
stuff and you know it would take work to clean
out and fix up, and he decides it's creepy, and
so they immediately permanently scrap their plans to live in
the jungle and start a village and instead get a
hotel using starlights twenty thousand dollars and me just instantly, Oh,

(26:28):
you got to clean up a house?

Speaker 3 (26:29):
Nah? Nah, you know you were warned you would need
to do Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
And like a really minimal Like you're not talking about
carving a home out of raw land. There are houses
you can you got a clean up, You got to
do some work. Yeah, you've got camping gear with you
and you're not willing to clean out a house. So
after a little bit of time in a hotel, they
find a house to rent in Santa Fe, Honduras. In

(26:56):
a video at the time, nature Boy notes that twenty
thousand dollars here came in handy, my gosh, So you
just guy's bunny renting places. Phoenix. The landowner joins them,
and they start calling themselves ethereans and posting videos of
people camping in the front yard and calling it an
intentional community. Again, these people are camping in a city

(27:18):
in front of the house that they are renting. There's
a picture Sophie's going to show you. It's just tins
in a yard. It's just it's simply just tints and
a fairly well cultivated yard. This is not an intentional community.
You are doing what like third graders? Do you are
camping in your yard?

Speaker 3 (27:36):
Looks like making sports.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Yeah, tense, decently landscaped yard.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yes, clearly someone I'm sure it's not Nature boy is
doing the landscaping.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Right out of frame is probably like a major road.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yes, this is again in a city. Yeah, they're not.
This is this is the opposite of off grid. Now,
this is all very silly, but when Nature does next
is actually pretty cunning, which is, you know, they've got
this house they're renting, and some people live inside and
some people camp in the yard, but they will go
out because Honduras is Honduras, and they'll go to very

(28:11):
pretty places that are like tourist hotspots where there's waterfalls,
and they will film themselves bathing underwaterfalls and picking fruit
from jungle trees and brag about her. They're living this
perfect back to nature, carefree lifestyle and like drop out
of Babylon and join us. Look at how nice this is.
This is our life every day, he says, This is
not a vacation. This is where we live, and you're

(28:31):
more than welcome to stay. And again, this isn't where
you live. You're going to. Honduras is a very beautiful place.
You are driving for an afternoon to tourist hotspots and
pretending your life is this like jungle paradise. Again, you
live in a city in a rental.

Speaker 5 (28:46):
Right.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
Also, I don't know if you are leaving Babylon. You're
not connected in uploading videos.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
There's like power lines in that photo, Like what are
we talking about here? Yeah, come on, you have cars,
You're using gasoline all the time, Like, you have not
escaped Babylon, you have walked away from omelas. So that said,
these videos like this spread Facebook love showing people videos

(29:16):
of like idyllic nature retreats and the like and back
to the land projects. All this stuff does fairly well,
and people start coming, lots of them, so many that
it like the other three guys who had left with him,
who he calls his warriors, start to feel overwhelmed and
like we need to stop asking for more people to join, right,
because there's like dozens and dozens of them. But at

(29:38):
this point, young women start showing up. Right that's the
dream right there, that's Nature Boy is like, this is working,
and you know what, we're polygamists now. So very quickly,
this turns from some slightly to moderately diluted hippie kids
camping in a yard to Nature Boy telling multiple women

(29:59):
that they are now his wives. And he also doesn't
use the term wife. He calls them directs. They're his directs.
So you've got a cult terminology starting to form.

Speaker 3 (30:08):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
In a video at the time, he explains with polygamy,
it's just for me being with four female students that
I'm dealing with very intimately, it's nothing more and nothing
less than that. Sex for me is me plugging into
a woman and sending my knowledge like a USB to
a computer. And when I have sex, I am putting
fluid in you. Inside the fluid is DNA. On that

(30:30):
DNA is all the knowledge that I know. And now
you're getting a direct transfer from my file into your ribosome,
into your DNA. And if you do that enough, you
can take me on long enough to the point where
I'm inside of you.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
Robert I cannot believe you just read that.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
I know, I know. That's one of my That's one
of my favorite pieces of cult leader nonsense I've come
across on this jet. Is my dick is a usb unbelievable.

Speaker 3 (30:55):
But also thank you for reading that.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
Beautiful stuff. Beautiful stuff.

Speaker 3 (30:59):
Yes, are they shitting in that yard?

Speaker 2 (31:02):
They're all shitting, Katie. Everyone is shitting in every yard
in this story. You have to add that they are
all pooping in the yards.

Speaker 3 (31:11):
It's not that big a yard.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
It's not that presumably burying it. But again, they're all
shitting in these yards. Now, while he claims to be
a guru bringing people back in touch with the natural world,
he very quickly spends the entire twenty grand not just
on this rental, but primary, according to other people there,
mostly on dirt pikes and iPads, which he's like, but

(31:33):
I gave them away to other people in the group,
you know, I'm He calls himself like a real humanitarian
for giving away all of these dirt bikes and iPads
to other people who join. But it's like, it's not
your money, bro Wild. So that twenty thousand goes quickly,
and soon everyone's scraping by he's barely managing to cover
rent in food with allegedly the three thousand dollars a

(31:55):
month he is allegedly receiving from that guy. But just
as soon and as things are getting dire, his key,
one of the other guys who had joined him in Florida,
has a loved one die and he inherits three hundred
thousand dollars, and he starts by giving Nature Boys to
decide like, hey, man, you know, the group really needs
twenty grand for this project, and he just keeps doing
that over and over again until he gets all three

(32:17):
hundred grand, right.

Speaker 3 (32:18):
I feel so bad for them, although he is making
his choices.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
I've read it. I've watched an interview with that guy
after all this falls apart where he's like, no, I
don't regret it. Like he was my teacher, he was
my guru, okay, man, I don't know. Fuck whatever, bro.
So they get robbed not long after this in Santa
Fe because Nature Boy is buying everybody fancy gadgets and computers.
At least that's what they say. Is like they're in

(32:42):
the middle of the street and these people take everything
on them. They take that. I think they get kind
of unclear, but I think they get into the house
because they get everyone's like passports, a lot of their stuff, right.

Speaker 3 (32:53):
That's bad.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
I don't know. I have some suspicions that what actually
happened is that nature Boy was trying to subsidize this
community by also moving some substances right there. I don't know,
but the way people describe this makes it sound like, no,
they were targeted, and maybe it's because they had pissed
people off. Yeah, And part of why I think this

(33:14):
is once they are robbed, this was just a mugging,
they wouldn't do what they did next, which is leave
immediately the country and leave most of their stuff behind
in the house, including several vehicles that they own, like
vans that they own, right Like, they leave a lot
of money and stuff behind. And that makes sense to
me if you're like, oh, somebody told you need to
leave or you're going to get fucking murdered.

Speaker 3 (33:36):
Right right, there's otherwise why wouldn't we try to sell it?

Speaker 2 (33:40):
I just and this is based in part of the
fact that I spent a lot of time in Central
America and met a number of people doing things that
aren't wildly different from this, and it's not uncommon for people,
especially for the leaders of groups like this, to think,
well maybe I could move a little molly or something
like that. And there's already people moving malli in these areas, right,
you're studying scarier than you, nature boy. So anyway, they flee,

(34:05):
leaving all of their shit behind, and he convinces everyone
to move to Peru. But on their way they visit
Costa Rica. They're like going through Costa Rica and like,
you know, like everyone who goes to Costa Rica, nature
boys like, oh, actually this place rips and decides no, no, no,
we're gonna live in tune with nature here, right, Okay,
So they camp for a couple of nights and then
they rent another house because again, none of them know

(34:28):
how to really like live off the land. It's also,
Costa Rica is a country. They're not just gonna let
you set up camp in the jungle randomly and start
a village.

Speaker 3 (34:40):
The same way. They don't let us do it here.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
The same way. You can't really do that here. You know.
They continue producing videos from different gorgeous landmarks, and soon
you know, and people keep joining adjoining, right, you know,
Costa Rica is even prettier in a lot of ways.
And so they're posting all of these increasingly gorgeous videos
about their idyllic lives outside of Babylon. And a young
woman named Velvet Marquees joins the group.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
Right.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
She is a freshman agricultural student at Tuskegee University. She
has some relevant experience to actual back to the land shit.
She had volunteered at a local land use in goos
and felt like a natural fit for what she thought
these people were doing. She recalls not even knowing that
there was like nature Boy was the leader, right because
the videos they publish, he's not making it all about him.

(35:27):
He's constantly publishing these stories of other members. So it
really does sound like to an outsider, there's this wonderful
community mostly made up of like black people who have
dropped out of you know, this fucked up country and
are living this idyllic life in Central America. And so
she decides to go join them.

Speaker 5 (35:45):
Now.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
When she arrives, she's immediately surprised to realize they are
not growing food, they're not foraging. They're eating at restaurants
and driving in cars just like everyone else. But she
and Olmec kind of hit it off, right, and you know,
nature Boy agrees that like she can be no Omec's direct.
But nature boys also not clearly happy with this because
he wants to be with her, and so he keeps

(36:08):
like hastling her. I'd be like, is sure you want
to be with this other guy? Is she want to
be with olmec?

Speaker 5 (36:12):
Right?

Speaker 2 (36:14):
So that's going to continue to be a thing. Now.
Around this time, another young woman, Kayla Reid, shows up
from Canada, and this is a white lady, right, from
a family that's at least middle class or upper middle class.
She again gets drawn to this the same way everyone
else does. It looks pretty, it seems like a great
way to unplug from this very toxic society. And she's

(36:35):
useful to nature Boy because you know, he's in general
trying to get as many young women around him as possible.
But also she's white, and there's by this point one
or two other white people who he can put on cameras,
so in tel potential followers, this isn't a racist thing, right,
Like we accept everybody. He starts at this point changing
his tune to like everyone is a shade of brown, right,

(36:55):
So you know, he softens all this and again to
try to get more people and more money. Now he's
also cognizant of the fact that taking a young, rich
white girl to his cult in Central America could force
the involvement of international law enforcement. Right, so this is
a kind of thing that he is away from the beginning.
There's some upsides and some potential dangers, and soon enough

(37:16):
those dangers make themselves clear because Kayla didn't tell her
parents what she was doing. She is an adult, but
she lied and claimed that she was heading to a
church camp and then just disappeared and never told anyone
where she.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
Was, and her parents alarms.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Her parents make a missing person's complaint, not even because
they're specifically sketched out by this guy, but because they
have no idea where she's gone. She goes on a
church retreat and drops off the face of the world.
It's a very normal parent thing to do, right, Yeah,
it should be, yeah, find your child. Yeah, you're gonna
want to find your kid. And they are looking for her.
This is an open question for at least weeks until

(37:53):
someone sees her in an Instagram video with these people
calling themselves ethereans and is like, oh fuck, I think
she might have joined the cult. And this is the
first time that this group. Before this, Nature Boy and
his followers would have were just a bunch of expats
bumming around Central America like a lot of people have done. Right,

(38:15):
This is the first time they start being called a
cult by the media and they start getting real attention.
The CBC, which is kind of Canada's NPR, starts reporting
on these scant few details known about Nature Boy and
the Atherians, who have now rebranded themselves under the name
melan Nation. Right, that's kind of the YouTube brand for
all of their videos. And again, this is kind of

(38:36):
a reflection of all of his melanin based teachings, which
have gotten increasingly elaborate. Right, as this is all going on,
the BBC sends a very irritating young reporter to Costa
Rica to do a documentary called searching for a Cult
Leader in the jungles of Costa Rica. I don't love
this video, but it does capture the cult during a
unique time. So I'm going to play a clip from

(38:57):
it which shows nature Boy give his spiel to a
group of followers.

Speaker 4 (39:03):
Well, we really don't like who's in toilet?

Speaker 3 (39:04):
It's like, what is the thing you hate so much
about the toilet.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
The soil belongs to the trees, and I'm in an
abusive relationship with the tree if I'm k not given
in it back. The community is cold, Melanie. Okay, so
that's that's at least how followers are kind of describing
their their teachings at this point to a guy from
the BBC. Now he does this. BBC guy does a
short documentary just on the cult and a slightly longer

(39:27):
one reporting on several different kind of utopian living projects
in Costa Rica. He spends a lot of his time
online flirting with that Canadian lady in a way that
makes me slightly uncomfortable, or at least that's my interpretation.
Watch it, you may feel differently. At one point, he
asks her if Milanation is a cult, and she gives
him an answer that was clearly scripted and drilled into

(39:48):
her head by nature. Boy, Panna is a cult. Like
the US as a cult, everyone is a part of
a cult.

Speaker 5 (39:55):
Culture is a group of people who have similar beliefs.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Now, I say that he clearly said that because a
bunch of his videos he uses the exact line that,
like well, the United States is a cult. And you know,
there's a lot to be said about cultic aspects of nationalism,
but as a general rule, when you are saying that,
you're saying that to be like, so it's fine for
me to have a cult too, as opposed to we
shouldn't have cults.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, thank slippery here. Also it's like everything's a cult culture.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
Okay, yeah, yeah, not quite that's not quite true. Are
there culture dynamics that we're talking about here to nationalism?
Does nationalism make people vulnerable to cults? Sure? That doesn't
mean you get to make a cult, right, So at
this point, I think we've got what i'd call like
a hybrid cult. Right nature Boy is starting to exert
more and more control over members. It becomes a higher

(40:43):
control group than it had been. But also a lot
of people start leaving, right And there's not he's not
does that. This is not like the Church of Scientology
where he's got like a wing of folks dedicated to
going after people who leave. And most of the people
who come for a while are not crazy, they're not
super dedicated. A number of them in that are interviewed
in that BBC documentary have left and start their own

(41:05):
land projects because they're like, well, Costa Rica rips and
I actually want a farm or something like that.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
Right, these people aren't actually doing the thing I wanted to.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, yeah, oh this was bullshit. But this place is
pretty rad, you know. Now we get some good context
on the kind of people drawn to Nature Boy in
that BBC documentary, which talks to a former member named Ave,
who got involved because she had a kid and she
wanted to raise this kid in a place that wasn't
the US because quote, the race thing was just really
out of control. Ave is a black woman living in

(41:33):
Texas and says, I just didn't think a child would
be able to develop there. And I get it. And
what's what's so interesting about Nature Boy is he's very
much like doing a partial Jim Jones, Like he is
recruiting from marginalized people who see how fucked up life
in the US is and are open to dropping out
of society to find a better life. But Jones, you know,

(41:54):
before getting everyone killed, they do start like a town, right,
like they've got there. There's a lot of infrastructure they
put together, a.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
Lot more thought put into that.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
Jim pretty they put a lot of work into it
and Jim Jones is not a lazy man.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
What's interesting to me is nature Boy talks a lot
of Jim joneshit but he is so lazy and he
completely refuses to use any of the money. And they
have a lot at one point enough that they could
have started something and potentially, with the knowledge, made an
actual sustaining project, but he has He is almost violently
opposed to the concept of farming, right. Yeah, obsessively talks

(42:36):
about being back to the nature. He hates the idea
of actually living off the land.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
Well, I think we've seen nature Boy throughout his life. Yeah,
start a lot of things and quit them. He didn't
like the amount of work that the barber shop required.
It's a you know, looking for an easy way to
make money and fuck women. You can say fuck women,
I think so.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
Yes, And he's very it's just such a lazy And
there's a couple of stories from former members who like
show up and he tells everyone that, like, you know,
we only go to the bathroom outside, and they're like, okay,
so we're like making our own manure to like grow things,
and he says, absolutely not. Under no circumstances do we
ever do anything like he even tells one person, why
would we grow our own food? There's markets. It's like

(43:21):
you are literally talking and preaching about the apocalypse, my dude,
Like yeah, fascinating, fascinating cult. For that reason, now this
doesn't do well. Again, a lot of people realize this
is bullshit. Ave who has a kid leaves right away, right,
But it goes off like gangbusters among people who are
deeply insecure or who are the kind of narcissistic dumb
fucks who adopt countercultural beliefs not because they have real

(43:44):
criticisms of society, but because they want to feel special.
And this clip from that BBC documentary of two of
his followers taking this fucking reporter to a hot springs
makes really the narciss system in this belief system, the
narcissism in this belief system incredibly evident.

Speaker 4 (44:01):
Are you how old are you?

Speaker 2 (44:02):
Guys?

Speaker 4 (44:03):
I'm actually immortal. I don't die.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Okay, you never die, Alberts says, define, yeah, living a
righteous path, living from the righteous path, then the narrow path.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
Would you say that your positive melanation or are you.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
Is this like a big movement?

Speaker 3 (44:28):
Do you think it's going to it's going to be
like you know, like do you get from all around
the world, like are coming together?

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Okay, so again the whole I'm never going to die
Albert Einstein said, so thig Like it's it's again, it's
so lazy. These people like are not actually, this is
not an ideology. These people have not are not thinking
about anything. They are casually ingesting YouTube videos with pretty things,
and they just want to bum around and not do

(44:55):
anything all the time, right, Like, there's no real belief here.
There's no commitment to overthrowing an unjust system, there's no
commitment to learning how to survive. It's just it's so
it's such a fundamentally narcissistic thing. So I guess I'm
not surprised this is a cult that forms through Facebook
and Instagram, Right, yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
That's it's attracting that type of person. It's also attracting
somebody that's potentially thinking, well, I want to be in
those videos.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
I want to have hang yeah exactly, the waterfall stuff.
It's it's very It's so I keep thinking back to
like scientology, evil stupid, not a shallow belief system, deep
and labyrinthine and complex. Right the Zizyan So we've talked about. Yes,

(45:43):
is everything silly nonsense? Is it all dumb as hell? Yes,
but it's complicated and there's a lot of effort being
put into this silly, crazy belief system, right everything. Every
as I the more I learn about these fucking you know, melanation,
the ethereans, all the different things that call themselves and
oh, oh my god, therese was so fucking lazy, like.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
You don't actually there's no actual ideology here.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
No, it's just a hot dude, Instagram and toilet. Other
than not pooping in a toilet, it's such like a man.
I guess I'm appreciating all the cults that put in
the actual hours, right.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
Yeah, you know, put put in the word good old fashion.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
Missed the good old fashioned cult? God you know that when.

Speaker 3 (46:26):
Yeah, it's really selling me something.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
The colts these days so lazy.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
It's the problem with the Internet.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Uh huh, it's yeah, it's made everything too easy, right,
you don't have to really work because the scale of
social media means you can just find some people who
will buy into anything. Everything's falling apart because of the Internet,
all right, Sorry. Eventually, the heat from Canadian authorities over
this this lady staying with them gets to be too much,
and Nature Boy convinces Jasper Or She also goes by

(46:56):
sun Ray or whatever to return home. She describes it
as her making a choice to protect everyone by leaving.
There is a video of him very clearly talking her
into it. I think he just didn't have much use
to her for her and like he wasn't into her
and decided like this is more trouble than it's worth. Right, Yeah, Now,
he has rapidly developed more narcissistic cult leader traits by

(47:16):
this point. One of his most common refrains is what
I'm doing is beyond Martin Luther King Junior. It's beyond
Malcolm X. It's beyond all of that. And this is
something his followers will repeatedly like say, he's beyond Martin
Luther King, is beyond Malcolm X. And like, again, both
of those guys a lot of work, very complicated, large
organizations they ran that made serious impacts on the world,

(47:38):
not just hanging out under waterfalls anyway. Initially, he discourages
his directs from getting pregnant, telling them that if they
do get pregnant, it's a sign that they have been
cursed by God. When a young woman named Pocahontas joins
the group and he makes her his direct He immediately
impregnates her and kicks her out of the group a
week later. So that's good now, he does eventually his

(48:00):
opinion on this right. He has more kids with several
of his followers. His kiddos. Cyrus visits him and spends
several months living with the cult in Central America. So
that's not great. And there's some videos of him like
yelling at this kid, making him like crawl around on
the ground, and he's like complaining that it hurts, and

(48:21):
nature boy is like, you know, you just need to
toughen up. You have to do it. He also, near
the end of twenty seventeen, posts an important video which
is described in that Rolling Stone article. I wanted my
son to be so pure that he'd never know he
was naked, says Bishop, who has four children. I take
baths with my kids. I'm naked with my kids. I
have sex in front of my kids. My son be breastfeeding,
I'd be making love to his mom. That's how I

(48:43):
get down around kids. He goes on like this for
a minute or so. My son, I have sex with
his mom, after I'm done, I'm laying there chilling. He
grabs my penis. He's playing with my penis. I let
that happen. This is what really draws a lot of
ironline because people start accusing him of being a pedophile.
And that's not an unreasonable thing to draw from that.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
No, it's not at all. And for someone who has
talked about sexual abuse in his own childhood, you would
think there'd be some connection about how destructive and confusing
that would be.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
Well, and it's this kind of thing where like, is
it bad for kids to be around communities of people
who are naked? Like, No, there's nothing inherently bad or
sexual about being naked. Depending on how you do it,
is it bad for people? Like most people have been
naked a significant amount of their lives in the history
of the human race, It's not inherently bad for people. Likewise,

(49:38):
is it bad for kids to be aware that their
parents are having sex? Again, most human beings throughout history
were broadly aware of the fact that adults around them
had sex because you had a one room shack everyone
lived in, or you were all out basically camping all
the time. Right, None of that is inherently toxic. Should
your kid be playing with your dick? No? No, Or

(49:59):
do you need to be nope?

Speaker 3 (50:01):
Does your kidney to be breastfeeding while you have sex?

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Oh? Not really necessary. Then it's a kink. Then you've
got a weird thing going on.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
And I feel so bad for the woman in that
situation who probably feels a little powerless because it's his
cold weird.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
Yes, weird, and he's like telling you, like, no, this
is again, this is the thing that we're doing that's
destroying Babylon. No, it's not. You've just got like a
bunch of weird kinks, most of which you're around pooping.
He takes videos of his son pooping. My god, it's weird.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
This is what draws the ire of the Costa Rican government,
the governor of the province or whatever that his cult
is camped out at. Actually is like there's enough of
a local uproar about this guy because the stuff online
goes that viral that like people in Costa Rica are
like talking to the government being like, what do we
really want this fucking weird this.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
Colt pops up in my neighborhood. I don't know, I
don't want to know.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
I don't want to here, but like ah, so the
governor has a it schedules a meeting with Nature Boy,
and Nature Boy put posts some videos about obviously, you
know this is all taken out of context. I'm not
doing anything wrong. I'm happy to have a meeting with
this guy and show him that nothing we're doing is
what wrong or weird or bad. And then the day
of the meeting, he has his followers load everything they
own into vans and flee the country, or flee flee

(51:21):
the state. Right, they don't quite leave Costa Rica, and
in fact, in October they get deported after being detained
at a checkpoint. Most members are found to lack passports
since a lot of them have been robbed, many had
overstayed their visas. Costa Rican officials were clearly kind of
just trying to figure out what was happening because there's
these vans full of like mostly Americans who don't have

(51:44):
a lot of IDs or have overstayed their visas, and
Nature Boy immediately like they detain them, and Nature Boy
goes live on Facebook from the police barracks and claims
he's being murdered by a government, just like Malcolm X
or MLK, and again neither of them were by Costa
Rican immigration authorities. Quote per Rolling Stone, we're live on

(52:06):
Facebook right now. He shouted, everybody bring their cameras out,
make sure they record this, because if we're gonna die,
we're gonna die. Just like this is going down. An
immigration officer boarded the bus and offered to let everyone
go once they signed some paperwork. We're not signing nothing,
Bishop yelled, we're standing up for humanity. If you don't
stand for something, you're gonna fall for anything. Bishop insisted
they wouldn't get off the bus. You're going to have

(52:27):
to use violence. Moments later, police did some piece of shit.
It's just like the cops are even like we'll let
you go, you got to like sign some things saying
you know you have to leave that like you can't
stay in coach nobody.

Speaker 3 (52:40):
He's putting on a show.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
He's putting on a show, right And like there's this
audio and it sounds bad like the cops beat them up.
But like again you had a you head an out,
like you're choosing now to occupy a police bus for
no reason. I don't know. It's not the kind of
civil disobedience that I really again, is there a massive
ethical issue in Costa Rica putting American travelers on buses.

(53:05):
I don't know. I don't think so. I think you
had an out and you didn't take it.

Speaker 3 (53:08):
I think it sounds like you had an out.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Speaking of people who have outs, you can break free
of our evil, abusive society by participating in it. Be
a purchasing product. I don't know. Here's some ads. Uh,
we're back, So we're so back. So this whole confrontation,

(53:30):
which was totally avoidable and stupid, causes nature Boy to
go viral in the consciousness community subculture. Yet again. They
spend several months back in the US pooping in the
backyards of airbnbs. Now, not all of nature Boy's followers leave,
you know, as soon as they get into his content
to join immediately. One guy, David Armstead around this time,
who's a musician and an audio engineer, gets into his

(53:53):
YouTube content and spends a year or so not showering
and pooping in the woods of Maryland before he finally
leaves to join them. This is when they're back in
the US. Yeah, just preparing, he explained his mind state
to Rolling Stone. If I didn't change the way I
was living. I was going to suffer some kind of
consequence from the universe, so I left in the middle
of the night and didn't tell anybody. Now, Okay, When

(54:14):
he joins the group, he does it alongside a couple
of other people with audio and video editing experience who
have joined. This is like and none of them really
lasts long, so they're all kind of handing off the
batage of the other. But they start producing higher quality
videos for the melanation's different accounts, and Nature Boy kind
of starts turning the cult into a media powerhouse, or at
least a low level one. They release some very mid

(54:36):
rap songs that are nonetheless competently produced. Right, Like, I
wouldn't say the lyrics are very good, but like the
sound quality is fine. They're clearly made by someone who
knows how to produce a song.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
Did he do it as Nature Boy?

Speaker 2 (54:49):
He does? Some of it is not they have there
are other members who are actually somewhat popular, who like
have a following because they're more competent. He is kind
of noted by everyone is not knowing what he's doing,
and anytimes someone says, hey, that track sounded like shit,
he gets angry, so he can't really make anything good.
But he starts publishing books at this point. And so
if he's going to show you a couple of the titles,

(55:10):
there's a lot of them. Most of them are just
a few pages. One of them is Divine Knowledge of
the Self spelled CLLF, Study Guy, and that is intentional.
CLF is absolutely causelles and stuff. He's wearing a Native
American headdress in this, which is a thing he has
started doing by this time. There's another one with it
with an illustrated version of him, called Master Chief exposing

(55:34):
the food industries struy Wine.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
There is fifteen.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Reviews, and it has fifteen reviews.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
And it has four point four stars.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some good reviews. There's some bad ones,
but you know, four point four stars. Some of his
stuff just has two or three. Is he wearing an
indigenous headdress because he starts doing that at this point.
They have a lot of videos where the all dresses
both as a mix of like Egyptians and like Native
Americans and march around like soldiers.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
He loves to. That's terrible, okay.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
And again they're living in like Mexico and Honduras in
Costa Rica, like, none of this is is it's just
what they're doing. Okay, it's doing it's just what it's
just what they're doing. Okay, So it's behind the bastards.
It's yes, he's like he sucks. So this does start
to bring in more money. I don't think the books

(56:24):
as much as the video content and the rap least
fourteen sales. At least fourteen sales. Which is good that
they have more money because by this point he has
spent all of keys three hundred thousand dollars inheritance. But
the growing notoriety because he's putting out videos and they're
getting some traction. He as followers, but the fact that
he's more famous now that he's had these big scandals,

(56:44):
it leads to someone digging up that gay porn he
was in and for several years he will have to
he will do. He puts out a lot of videos
denying it's him, even though it obviously is him, and
their videos where he's like, look if it was me,
would that be so bad? Just admit it, man, own it.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
You've made You have managed somehow to make a lot
of wild shit flies.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
So just just he does eventually admit it, but like
it takes a wild amount of time. So he gets
fed up with the States and he decides to fly
everyone back to his Ignacio Believe to try and again
to try his hand again at forming an intentional community.
He's immediately recognized by the owner of an internet cafe
and run out of the country for being a pedophile.

(57:29):
So good work, random internet cafe guy in Belize. That
was the right call. Believe is that even freak out
of Bullize.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
Yeah, the sky can't settle. No, always jumping sucks his
whole life.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
Yeah, so there's two good decisions right now. Although you know,
Mayosha eventually does let him spend more time with his kid,
which isn't a great call, but you know, her leaning
and that guy in Belize being like, get the fuck
out of my get the fuck out of this town
great calls. So he changes the group's name yet again,
I think, in part to try and you know, lose

(58:07):
some of the heat on them to carbon nation, right,
and in the grand tradition of scammers and common for generations.
It is at this point that he flees to Mexico.
Several new folks have joined at this point, and the
oldest of them is a fifty nine year old mother
of She's got several kids. I think she might be
a grand I might have been a grandmother named Magdalena Sevilla.

(58:30):
She had successfully raised several kids to adulthood. She had managed,
was the manager of a store. She's a person who
lived a very complete adult life, like a functional member
of society. But she also was someone had a lot
of trauma and a feeling that her life was somehow incomplete,
and she falls into this content. She sees all these
young people living these blissful lives around these beautiful things

(58:52):
of nature, is like, I want this in my life, right,
And so she quits her job and leaves everything behind.
Her children, who were interviewed for that Hood or that
a Hood Horrors documentary express being like really surprised by this,
but are like, at least for a while she seems happy.
So we were like, I don't know, maybe like I like,

(59:13):
she's fifty nine, right, Like, what are we supposed to
do now? She has a heart condition that she's been
on medication on for like a decade. At this point, again,
it's totally manageable. She is managing it, but nature Boy
hates medicine, and it's kind of you could some of
the accounts of people at the time, it is insinuated
that he harasses her whenever she takes it. There are

(59:35):
some reports that she felt afraid of him knowing that
she needed medicine and that she was sick, or that
she was taking it, and she she doesn't like quit
cold turkey, but she starts rationing it and not taking
it as often as she is supposed to, and it
eventually she runs out entirely, and in videos from later
in her stay, she starts to look visibly unhealthy. Right,

(59:58):
the group kind of travels aro. They go back to
Belize for a while and then move back and then
back to Mexico to a place called Pelinke where they
rent a modern stone house, although again most cult members
are camping in the yard and everyone is pooping in
the yard. Now at this point, Nature Boy has drawn
in some cult members who are you know, they're better
at editing and video. They've got like recording studios set up.

(01:00:21):
They're putting out a lot of content and some money
is coming through with this. More money comes in from
Nature Boy requiring new members to hand over their debit
cards and credit cards when they join. One former member
claims he gave Nature Boy a card with one thousand
dollars his life savings on it, and Nature Boy immediately
spent it all on a ping pong table, so again
not great at money. Near the end of twenty eighteen,

(01:00:44):
Civilid dies in the night in her tent due to
a pre existing now unmedicated heart condition. Velvet Marquez, who
is still with the group at this point but will
leave later, told a reporter he does not allow people
to have medical attention. This is why Mamada, that's what
they called her, passed away. Now by this point, Nature
Boy is fully calling himself God. Now he has forced

(01:01:05):
the whole cult on a strict diet where everyone can
only eat at the same time. He gets hungry. He
starts randomly forbidding men and women to speak with each other,
and in true cult leader fashion, begins doling out unhinged punishments.
When members displease him. They're made to do squats or
stand in a corner. He also starts filming the sex
that he has with followers and sometimes posting the videos online,

(01:01:26):
sometimes as revenge porn, sometimes just as content. They make
most of their money. He sucks so bad. They make
most of their money at this point from a social
media app based in Singapore called big O Live, which
pays people for streaming Shaka. Calvin, one of his followers,
claims that's when it would really get bad because Bishop

(01:01:47):
Nature Boys started becoming a celebrity. They were all having
to do things to get attention, to get money, and
the things they do, they start instead of there being
any kind of message, they start really focusing their content
on we need to have reality shows, shit about everyone
having fights and conflicts within the group. So he starts
ordering people to fake fights and arguments for the sake
of viral content, and he also starts yeah beef sell.

(01:02:10):
He also starts talking like a militant revolutionary, which is
when they start really doing a lot of these videos
where they're dressed as like Pharaoh's or Native Americans and
they're marching like soldiers to again, like again, stuff that
he thinks is going to like shock people and go viral.
As Daylon Armstead, the music engineer who joined recalled the
Rolling Stone, working frequently with two other initiates, armand Palmer,

(01:02:32):
who went by Piss and Ishmael Goodwin aka Caliber. The
group's musical output accelerated. Loving the money and Hating the
System is loving the warden and hating the prison. Palmer
raps with an eerie synth hook looping behind him and
one song called negro Pian. The song's music features Musa
and Palmer's shirtless decked out in feathered headdresses, tribal jewelry

(01:02:52):
face paints, stalking around vivid jungle landscapes. The message was
a product like cocaine, Musa says, we were there to
package it and get it out again. These are all
like members who are like handling the actual entertainment portion
of things, the stuff that actually does require some discipline.
Is this right now? As time goes on and increasing,
part of his message becomes domestic abuse because nature Boy

(01:03:15):
has started seeing by this point, Velvet, who starts out
as Olmec's direct, is now his direct, is probably his
main wife, and he has started hitting her. He's also
hitting basically every other woman in the group. Former member
Courtney Townsend claims, quote, we end up having these meetings
that would last six eight hours where he's explaining why
he's locking a velvet in a room, why he had
to slap her. His explanation was that we've been programmed

(01:03:37):
by European men to be weak little men, so our
women will never respect us. The women will respect him,
and he's the guy slapping these girls, locking them in rooms.
He actually does a live stream at one point with
Velvet and her dad where Velvet's dad asks like, why
do you keep hitting my daughter? And Nature Boy says,
because I was upset with her, and her dad responds,
she made you bust her in the face, her nose

(01:03:57):
bleeding profusely everywhere. I'm going to tell you that, pops,
Bishop responds when it comes to me, I'm a man,
so again, like he is, is this has become like
the central What started as like we need to overthrow
Babylon and go back to nature, it is now primarily
what we need to do is hit women. That's what's
the cled his circle for.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
His own desires, his own instincts that he doesn't want
to work on arm through from it's a place where
he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
And here's what part of what's extra gross about this.
It's not even that this is into like obviously he
wants to do this, but there's another level that is
very social media to this that I fight even sicker,
which is that a lot of their viewers and they're
getting paid by viewers, whether or not those viewers like
them are hate watchers. So a lot of why he's
doing this is because it makes people angry and they

(01:04:44):
share and repost, and it gets him more traffic right
up that yeah, yeah, Now that said, this does get
him reported to the Mexican police. In March of twenty nineteen,
they get rated, which prompts them to flee the next
day for a day Garagua. They eventually get rated there
and after about a month they get deported and they

(01:05:05):
go to Panama, where the same shit happens. They spend
some time there, there are police reports, they get arrested,
they get deported. This happens several times until COVID hits.
Now the plague is actually a lifeline for nature Boy
and carbon Nation because again he's making his followers hand
over all of their money and everyone starts getting those

(01:05:27):
COVID checks right in addition to be it gets easy
to get like on unemployment and stuff, and so he
starts taking that directly from them, and they have enough
coming in now that he tries to set up in
Hawaii on the Big Island next. Now, if you remember,
Hawaii has extremely strict COVID quarantine protocols at this time.
I think it's like two weeks that you have to
spend in a hotel room, not leaving for any reason

(01:05:50):
but an absolute medical emergency, right, if you want to
spend any time on the island at all. Right, Like
that is my recollection of it. That's what I read
in the article. They show up in Hawaii and immediately
break quarantine and in fact post videos of themselves not
just breaking quarantine, but like touching in dangered turtles that
you're not allowed to touch. So they get arrested by
the Hawaiian government and they get deported America. As Americans.

(01:06:13):
They get deported from Hawaii, which is not easy to do.
You have to really suck some horrible shit to get
deported from Hawaii as an American citizen. Now, while all
this is going on, Carbon Nation has become a YouTube
production house, putting out videos that are mostly either sexual

(01:06:36):
or involve giant dramatic fights between members. Less and less
time is spent actually preaching any kind of ideology. But
the parasocial bond formed by watching this stuff is strong
enough that people keep joining, including Jane Newell, a twenty
five year old waitress at a raw vegan restaurant who
by twenty twenty had come to consider carbon Nation my
frequency family. What was what he preached, people of like

(01:06:57):
minds coming together on a common mission to elevate the
conciousness of Earth. This is all again, just repackaged bullshit.
I was here and shit like this twenty years ago
from fucking assholes on a primitive chunk of the Internet,
but like y the same frequency. Now you fucking not,
You're shitting in a yard and hitting women. Initially, she

(01:07:18):
describes him as kind, but on March twenty second March
twenty seventh, twenty twenty two, during a party at the
Decalb County house that they had started to rent because
they're back in the continental US. At this point, Nature
Boy had one of his other wives punched Newell repeatedly.
After an argument, she says, all right, well, I'm out
of here. I'm leaving, but Nature Boy kind of sends
people after her and convinces her to come back, and

(01:07:41):
then he tries to coerce her into sex. She says
no repeatedly, and he keeps repeating I'm not going to
rape you, and then we should have sex one more time,
and eventually he coerces her into having sex. Once she leaves,
Nature Boy immediately posts revenge porn videos of them having sex.
Newell goes to the cops, and she initially is not
pressing charges for rape, just for the revenge porn. But

(01:08:03):
the cops are like, this, actually, this is this. It
has to be so bad for the cops to do this.
The cops are like, this actually sounds like rape to us.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Like development that is, And it's this again.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
If this is a white cult leader, I don't think
any of this happens in terms of like the legal consequences.
That is a huge part of it. Right, That he
is a black cult leader is why the cops see this.
But he is this is rape.

Speaker 3 (01:08:28):
Doing a bad thing.

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
Yeah, all the things. So he gets arrested, he gets charged,
he does bail out, and he's going to spend like
the next two years almost fighting in court while his
collapses around him. There had been a few dozen people
at most at one point, and they're down to like
a half dozen hard liners. One of his followers, amar
Ja Wied flees with a bunch of money and hard
drives that presumably included revenge porn. On March sixth, twenty

(01:08:52):
twenty three, he's found dead inside of a house that's
on fire. It seems to be related to some gang
stuff he was into as opposed to Nature Boy. But
I don't, you know, it's not fully known, but it's
one of those people who knew him will be like,
it's because of Nature Boy's influence that he got into
that stuff in the first place, right because he joined
when he was eighteen, and this dude had a real

(01:09:14):
dark impact on him. I don't know, but those are
the two deaths that are somewhat tied to this cult.
The court case finally reached its conclusion earlier this year,
and it didn't go well for Nature Boy. One of
his wives admitted to posting revenge porn when she was
like trying to defend him, and in general, every time
his remaining loyal followers got up on the stand, it
was bad for him because the things he convinced them

(01:09:36):
to do were bad. The state offered him a thirty
year plea deal, which he rejected. So on March first,
he is convicted on all counts and sentenced to life
in prison without the possibility of parole plus ten years,
which is where he is now. So wow, yep, again,
that is one.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
Of those squidest story.

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
It's both like, yeah, this guy sucked. I'm glad he's
he's not out and free, but also like, well, there
was only justice in this case because he's a black guy. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:10:06):
Yeah, it's a little cause those things are true, you know,
And it's also complicated by the fact that you know,
neeeds to be believed, which I think there's no reason
not to believe the story of his childhood. It's it's
incredibly traumatic, and you can see the through lines, yep,
of how he got from point A to point B
here his aggression and constantly being moved around and abused

(01:10:33):
and then but that's no excuse. It's not an excuse
just this way.

Speaker 2 (01:10:38):
It's it's interesting if you want to look at like
the cult that has a very that takes the cult
that kind of I think about a lot when I
read about this, because he's kind of the lower effort
version of nexium, right, and nexium is a higher effort
version in part because you've got this guy Keith Ranieri,
who gets his start doing other kind of cons is

(01:11:00):
targeting a higher level of wealth individual is targeting people
who are more prominent, and he's doing a lot of
When you get right down to it, it's the same.
They're not he's talking about saving the world. All he's
really doing is being like lounging around in nice hotels
and houses in rental houses and having sex with a
bunch of women who he also physically and mentally abuses. Right, Ultimately,

(01:11:21):
both cults are doing the same thing. Ranieri makes millions
and millions of dollars and is adjacent to a lot
of very powerful people for years and years and years
and years, like like a long time before he gets justice.
Nature Boy, it just a couple of years. And it's
in part because Nature Boy does not have, because of
his background, the ability to kind of reach and you know,

(01:11:43):
influence the level of wealth people that Ranieri does. And
it's part because like just he immediately gets a lot
more new uh you know shit, right, Like he he
gets a lot more attention from law enforcement. He gets it.
It's taken seriously because he's not a white guy, right, but.

Speaker 3 (01:12:03):
He also, yes, what I'm about to say does not
it's not counter countering that, but like to your own point,
he's pretty lazy. He's pretty sloppy and lazy about how
he's going about this, not preparing, uh, you know, and
really not even trying to keep up the facade of

(01:12:24):
there being anything to intellectual or spiritual or uh. It's
just about instagram posting the videos, making money, chasing the clout. Oh,
it's subs are dying down, going down. You gotta add
fights fabricate it like the reality TV show, And it's

(01:12:47):
wild because it's possible to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, that's part of what's
interesting is because you know, when Neier, he did have
to create a lot of like he had to he
had to build this curriculum around his cult in order
to start getting the following that he eventually turns into,
like what it turns into when you've got the Internet
and the way parasocial relationships work, if you're able to
just get an audience with content that you're putting out

(01:13:11):
hours of on a regular basis, you can really easily
get a number enough people to kind of support you
as a cult leader. You know, this isn't a massive
could he's not a massive star, but one hundred thousand
or so regular listeners. You can get a dozen or
two people who will come out and live with you
at any given time, and enough money that you can

(01:13:32):
get away with this. And it takes so much less
effort a guy like Ranieri. There is more background work
that Ranieri has to do to get started, you know.
So it is just one of these like social media
has made starting a cult a lot take a lot
less effort, and you can fuck up a bunch of
people's lives doing that a lot more easily. That said,

(01:13:52):
the cults don't tend to last as long. Maybe that's
the outside right, Well, they're.

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
More visible too. Yeah, they're doing is on display. It's
hard to confuscate what's happening.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
Yeah, and that is that is kind of worthwhile. That
that the worthwhile side story here is that a lot
of why this colde gets taken down is there's it's
not just you know, the racism of the police. It's
also that there's a lot of people watching and following
this online and saying this is wrong and taking effective
action to both scare other people. A number of a

(01:14:25):
lot of people both get out because people are making
a stink about how fucked up this is and don't
join who might otherwise have joined because of all of
the people who are trying to stop this, and it
also makes it harder for them to act and operate.
So that isn't a pus side of it, right, is
that there is like a community kind of defense aspect

(01:14:45):
here if people realize this is really, you know, fucked up,
right like that Hood Horrors documentary is somebody who covers
a lot of stuff within the subculture, being like, people
need to know how this happened and why?

Speaker 3 (01:14:56):
Right, So that's good, you know, yeah, the good with
the bad good so easy to get swooped up in
movements that you don't intend to the pipeline. There's much
to be said about this, we know, yes, much to say.
That's why the show exists.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):
Ye all right, okay, Well that's the episode. How you feeling, Katie.

Speaker 3 (01:15:18):
I'm feeling great. Learned a lot about nature Boy and Colts.
Yeah for my own cult actually already have.

Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
Yeah you know what, Yeah, joined Katie's cult where I
don't know, Katie, what which what Central American nation do
you think you're going to wind up in?

Speaker 1 (01:15:38):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:15:39):
That sounds like a lot of work. Can it just
be based out of California?

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
A lot of colts are Katie? Good news about that?

Speaker 3 (01:15:49):
Yeah, I'm just going to come to your compound and
start it there. Michael already exists. It's called some More News.
You can support our Patreon.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
Yeah, I'm I'm I'm too tired. That seems like so
much work. I'd rather I'm going to play Age of
Wonders four in my underpants alone. That's my play. Yeah,
what a nice evening. Yeah, sounds great. Sore.

Speaker 1 (01:16:11):
So we're not going to start that cult on in Curasu.

Speaker 2 (01:16:15):
Well, no, Sylvie, you should start that Culton curasw. We
definitely still need a cult and Curasu, but primarily as
a way to get money and as a way to
purchase products without tariffs. That's really the benefit of having
a cult and curra.

Speaker 3 (01:16:28):
Yeah, that's a real big benefit. Yeah, you know, And
I'll just move there with you. We don't even have
to start a cult.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
Sounds good to there. Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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(01:17:01):
Behind the Bastards