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

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part Two – The Sordid Story of Nature Boy: The Instagram Cult Leader Who Hates Toilets

Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
Release Date: May 15, 2025

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Introduction to Nature Boy and the Conscious Community

In the second installment of "Behind the Bastards," Robert Evans and Katie Stoll delve into the unsettling rise and fall of Nature Boy, an Instagram cult leader whose bizarre ideology centers around hating toilets and forming intentional communities in Central America. The episode unpacks how Nature Boy capitalized on the conscious community subculture to amass followers, ultimately leading to manipulation, abuse, and his eventual downfall.

Early Influences and Misappropriation of Black Consciousness

Robert begins by contextualizing Nature Boy within the broader conscious community—a subculture blending black spiritualism, natural living advocacy, and alternative histories. He references David Peisner’s description:

"An ecosystem of black spiritualists, natural living advocates, herbalists, alternative historians, motivational speakers, and backpack rappers." ([04:28])

He highlights how Nature Boy distorts the principles of the Black Consciousness Movement, originally spearheaded by Steve Biko in apartheid-era South Africa, to promote toxic beliefs. Evans explains:

"A big part of black consciousness is the idea that we need to really get people to accept that being black is not an aberration. The toxic sort of way that's taken is like, no, having more melanin makes you inherently better." ([11:07])

Formation and Planning of the Movement

Nature Boy's journey begins with his obsession with Young Pharaoh, a once-prominent figure in the conscious community who spirals into erratic behavior and conspiracy theories. Evans recounts how Nature Boy idolized Young Pharaoh before his mental decline:

"Young Pharaoh used to make serious money discussing police brutality and white supremacy, but then he shifted to anti-Semitism and was banned from platforms." ([05:25])

Inspired by this figure, Nature Boy quits his job, isolates himself, and immerses in conspiracy theories, leading to significant behavioral changes. Evans notes:

"Nature Boy starts ranting about America, which he calls Babylon, and predicts its fall, but not for revolutionary reasons—he becomes fixated on hating toilets and adopting extreme fruitarianism." ([18:29])

The Move to Central America

Nature Boy's plan to establish a conscious community materializes when he responds to an offer of 30 acres in Honduras. However, his lack of preparation becomes evident:

"He immediately rejects Honduras in favor of a more unspecified South America destination, demonstrating poor planning and unrealistic expectations." ([26:53])

The initial meetup in Florida reveals a mismatch between Nature Boy’s expectations and reality, with only three men attending instead of the anticipated young women. This discrepancy foreshadows future difficulties in establishing the community.

Attempts at Building the Community

Upon arriving in Honduras, Nature Boy and his small group struggle to set up their intended village. They pivot to renting a house in Santa Fe, Honduras, instead of living off the land, contradicting their proclaimed ideals. Evans sarcastically comments:

"They camp in a landscaped city yard instead of forming an intentional community in the jungle, undermining their mission to 'drop out of Babylon.'" ([32:35])

As followers inundate the group, Nature Boy introduces polygamy, referring to his multiple partners as "directs." His convoluted explanations about DNA and knowledge transfer during sex further alienate members:

"My dick is a USB. Through sex, I'm transferring my knowledge directly into you." ([36:35])

Growing Recognition and Media Attention

The group's antics catch media attention, labeling them as a cult. The CBC and BBC produce documentaries highlighting their dysfunctional dynamics. A notable moment from the BBC documentary showcases Nature Boy addressing his followers:

"We really don't like using toilets. The soil belongs to the trees, and I'm in an abusive relationship with the tree." ([45:00])

These portrayals expose the shallow and manipulative nature of the group's beliefs, attracting further scrutiny and anti-cult sentiment.

Internal Struggles and Abuse

As the community's facade begins to crumble, internal conflicts and abusive behaviors surface. Nature Boy exerts increasing control, enforcing strict diets and punishing dissenters. Katie and Robert discuss instances of physical abuse and emotional manipulation:

"Nature Boy starts hitting women in the group, justifying it by saying, 'I've been programmed by European men to be weak.'” ([72:04])

Followers like Velvet Marquez and Janae Newell experience coercion and abuse, culminating in legal actions against Nature Boy for rape and revenge porn. These heinous acts highlight the cult's descent into toxicity and criminal behavior.

Downfall and Legal Consequences

The culmination of Nature Boy's manipulative tactics leads to his arrest and conviction. Despite rejecting a 30-year plea deal, he is ultimately sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus an additional 10 years. Evans reflects on the swift justice Nature Boy faced compared to longer proceedings seen in other cult cases:

"His cult collapses rapidly due to media exposure and internal dissent, unlike more resilient cults that persist over decades." ([77:31])

Comparison to Other Cults

Evans contrasts Nature Boy's cult with NXIVM, noting the latter's more sophisticated structures and longer period of influence. He emphasizes that Nature Boy's lack of preparation and purely self-serving motives made his downfall inevitable:

"Unlike NXIVM, which targeted wealthy and prominent individuals over years, Nature Boy's lazy and sloppy approach led to swift justice." ([81:19])

Conclusion and Reflections

The episode concludes with reflections on how social media has lowered the barriers to forming cults, enabling charismatic but unprepared leaders like Nature Boy to manipulate followers with minimal effort. Evans and Stoll discuss the importance of community vigilance and the role of media in dismantling such harmful movements.

"Social media has made it easier to start a cult with less effort, but increased visibility also means faster accountability and justice." ([83:58])

Notable Quotes

• Robert Evans ([04:28]): "Most people wouldn't know, but Steve Biko was a pivotal figure in the Black Consciousness Movement, pushing against the lies of white supremacy."

• Robert Evans ([11:07]): "The toxic sort of way that's taken is like, no, having more melanin makes you inherently better."

• Young Pharaoh ([15:48]): "My dick is a USB. Through sex, I'm transferring my knowledge directly into you."

• Courtney Townsend ([72:04]): "We'd end up having these meetings that would last six, eight hours, where he's explaining why he's locking Velvet in a room."

Final Thoughts

"Behind the Bastards" exposes the manipulative tactics and destructive consequences of Nature Boy's cult. Through detailed analysis and firsthand accounts, the episode underscores the vulnerabilities exploited by such leaders and the critical role of societal awareness in preventing similar tragedies.

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Note: Advertisements and non-content segments from the transcript have been excluded to maintain focus on the core narrative.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media. Oh, welcome back to Bastards behind the Stol. Katy Podcast Guest.

[Katie Stoll]

A what a title.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you can put that all. I believe in our audience. They can put it together. They can put it together. You know what I'm getting at?

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah, they get the gist.

[Robert Evans]

They get the gist. Come on, do I need to do everything for you people?

[Katie Stoll]

Presumably they heard part one.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, I'm just gonna record a podcast that's me reading most of the words and then re release it every week with a different bastard. And you can put it together in your head as like the right bad person.

[Katie Stoll]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Come on now, we gotta be able to meet in the middle here.

[Katie Stoll]

It's called compromise. I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. How we doing, Katie? How you feeling in the five minutes since we recorded part one?

[Katie Stoll]

Honestly, Great. I reheated my tea.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Katie Stoll]

Cuddled my dog.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Katie Stoll]

Feel refreshed.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Katie Stoll]

Waiting with bated breath to hear more about nature boy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, let's hear about nature boy. You're listening to an iHeart podcast.

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[Robert Evans]

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 both things. Again, this is a subculture, not a massive one, but not a small one either, that exists primarily through kind of a nexus of YouTube and podcasters and some rappers. Rolling Stone writer David Peisner describes it as, quote, an ecosystem of black spiritualists, natural living advocates, herbalists, alternative historians, motivational speakers, and backpack rappers. Having gone through a bit of related non culty content creators.

[Katie Stoll]

Wait, I'm sorry, backpack rapper?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, which I think is a term for like rappers who are kind of 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 rapper is an adjacent sort of thing. Right.

[Katie Stoll]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

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 in sort of experienced adjacent to some of the different like hippie ish, you know, communities I spent time in when I was in my late teens, early 20s, you know, the Rainbow Gathering people in the burner community. All these like different 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 manure and alternative living situations. And here's people who are actually trying to inform folks about important aspects of American history that have been covered up. And here's people who are telling you absolute nonsense about how you don't need vaccines if you eat enough zinc. And they're trying to get you to believe in, you know, whatever fucking bullshit.

[Katie Stoll]

Aliens piggybacking on another movement. That's one way to look at it. But yeah, it's a. It's a net that casts some good things and some bad things.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And kind of the big difference between a lot of where you know, this kind of. These kind of different sort of hippie ish descended movements that I spent time in and around when I was doing psychedelics a bunch. And this community which also focuses the conscious community, a lot of psychedelic usage is that there's much more of a focus on racial justice because this is much more of like a black subculture and a lot of education on the history of white supremacy. So again you get these real. The Tuskegee experiment, redlining, the move bombing and also like moon landing conspiracies, anti vax shit, you know, all that stuff. I found a write up in Medium by Anna Stensgard which gives a good idea of how people in this community like to describe themselves. And it focuses a lot on the concept of a conscious community, which is where the conscious community subculture takes its name, but is an older term for that goes back. You can find people talking about shit like this in like the 70s and 80s. This is. People would use the term to describe these kind of idealized, physical intentional communities formed along utopian lines, which is a thing people have done in America since the nation has existed. And this term is, you know, goes Back further than the subculture we're talking about now. Since forming real world breakaway communities is hard and usually a bad idea, very difficult to do, most people wind up hating each other. Most of these projects explode. The vast majority of people in this subculture, it's an aspirational thing, right? And they just kind of connect and talk about what they'd like to do via the Internet. Anna writes, quote, as it turns out, there's a parallel digital world teeming with conscious travelers. I discovered Facebook groups where conscious travelers or nomads share their experiences and curate lists of the best conscious hotspots worldwide. Furthermore, ChatGPT can serve as a valuable resource in your global exploration of conscious communities, offering guidance, insights and information to enhance your search for specific locations. So again, most of this isn't real. It's an aesthetic. People like the image of going back to the land of being conscious, of being enlightened, of being spiritual, but also all they really want to do is stay at a nice hotel. You know, 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 a guy named Steve Bicko. Biko was the first president of the South African Students Organization when it launched in 1969. And inspired by black thinkers like France Fanon, he began publishing articles that posited an ideology he called Black Consciousness. He described his goal as to, quote, demonstrate the lie that black is an aberration from the normal, which is white. Biko urged the black community to celebrate and take pride in their history and traditional cultural and religious practices as the indigenous people of South Africa, pushing people to decolonize both the state and their own minds. He was a cool guy, which is why the police murdered him. Per a very good article in. Well, we're talking about a black radical leader in 1969 South Africa. The odds are good he wound up getting murdered by the cops. Right. Like it's a bummer, but 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 Bico in 1973. The repressive practice of banning originated from the 1950 suppression of communism act, which regarded all political opposition as a communist threat. As a result, a banning order restricted a person's travel and social interactions, as well as preventing them from public speaking or distributing written material. In Biko's case, he was limited to speaking to one person at a time and forbidden from being a member of any political organizations. Several tactics were used to circumvent the strict measures of his band. Bicko 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 B's biography. When he was himself banned in 1977, Biko was arrested for traveling outside of and therefore breaking his banning order. He was severely beaten whilst in police custody and died of his injuries at just 30 years old. Again, literally banned from talking to more than one person at a time.

[Katie Stoll]

That is wild.

[Robert Evans]

Fuck that government.

[Katie Stoll]

It's very depressing.

[Robert Evans]

I bring this up not because Nature Boy is an inheritor of Bicko's tradition, but because the modern black consciousness subculture, or conscious community, and I've heard both names used for this same kind of amorphous subculture, is in some ways related to the black consciousness movement. And a lot of what Nature Boy is doing is kind of taking some of these things and pulling them in a toxic direction. For example, a big part of black consciousness is the idea that we need to really get people to accept that being black is not an aberration. Right. Like, it is just as normal as being white, which is a really important thing. Right. That, like, black is not an aberration from the normal and the toxic sort of way that's taken is like, no, no, no. Having more melanin is directly what makes you intelligent, and having more makes you an inherently better person. Right.

[Katie Stoll]

It's wild.

[Robert Evans]

Takes that.

[Katie Stoll]

A version of that sentiment today on Twitter. I will always.

[Robert Evans]

It's not just a nature bill. It's not just a Nature Boy thing. Right?

[Katie Stoll]

Sure. 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. So interesting is what we're talking about right now.

[Robert Evans]

It's just. Yeah, 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 of his story, but that is a huge part of actual people who were actual revolutionaries in the actual black consciousness movement. That is what happened to them. And he's kind of like stealing valor from them. While again, rather than trying to liberate people in bondage, all Nature Boy is trying to do is get a bunch of wives and convince them to poop outdoors, which is not revolutionary.

[Katie Stoll]

No, it doesn't sound an enlightenment.

[Robert Evans]

Not particularly enlightened, either. Yeah.

[Katie Stoll]

Or enlightened.

[Robert Evans]

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, 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 20 many such cases. And so he got from a bunch of places, and he never really recovered. Previously, prior to 2020, he had started out and started building his platform within the subculture by making a lot of videos about police brutality, white supremacy. And he did well enough that he started making serious money. I think he's making like 200 grand a year at one point. And he kind of switches in and around 2020. I think it starts sort of right before and starts singing a very different tune at a certain point. And it happens kind of in a way that makes me think it might be inorganic, where he'll start putting out videos about how the police aren't that bad. And actually, I've never had a bad interaction with the police. And I'm going to move to a white neighborhood because I think it's. It's going to be like, it's a lot of really weird. And he gets criticized by other people within the conscious community for this shift. Then he loses his mind over Covid and starts blaming it on the Jews, which is how he gets demonetized and banned from a bunch of stuff, which is why he sues Google and he loses and gets stuck with a force 40 grand bill. Most of the videos you'll find about Young Pharaoh today are made by other people. The top showings, when I typed his name into Google, while writing this are a documentary called the Rise and Fall of young Pharaoh. Another one is Young Pharaoh at airport crashes out and punches his girlfriend. And of course, Young Pharaoh explains why aliens abducted him seven times. Part seven.

[Katie Stoll]

Oh my goodness. Young Pharaoh, you've been asking me.

[Robert Evans]

He has gone in some directions.

[Katie Stoll]

I, I could not have guessed. Guessed what? The next word out of your mouth would be in that list, by the way.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Katie Stoll]

Woo.

[Robert Evans]

So I know you're all curious. Why did the aliens abduct him? And just to get an idea of this dude and his vibes, I'm gonna play you a quick clip of him, of him explaining this is from part seven of the series on why aliens abducted him seven times.

[Young Pharaoh]

I had a sixth grade teacher, name is Rosak. I said that to her. I wanted to go down to history like Malcolm X and make history, you know, and something in me just always wanted to leave a mark in history. So whatever that is in me and that spirit, I was connected to that. Maybe that's what the, 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. So that way, 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.

[Katie Stoll]

Well, that checks out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that seems that all scans to me. Can't see any reason why that wouldn't be true. Yeah. So he's, he's, he's, he's, he seems like he's, he's got his shit together, Right? So this is the first guy that Nature Boy is really going to vibe with. He reaches out to this dude based on his videos, 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 2015 here. So remember, he's not yet obviously a crank. Here he is mostly talking about police brutality and white supremacy and kind of a fairly prominent creator. And when I said I think there's something sketchy about how he changed suddenly to talking about how he likes the cops and you know, kind of going more right wing. He is invited at one point to speak at cpac. Now he gets disinvited right before because of the aforementioned anti Semitism. But something went on there, right?

[Katie Stoll]

Really? The anti Semitism did it?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. So back in 2015, young Pharaoh's blowing up. He's not so obviously a crank, and Nature Boy grows obsessed with his work, and he reaches out online. The two vibe, and they become Internet buddies. This is happening right as Nature Boy has quit his job at the barbershop in order to lock himself in his room and watch YouTube videos, which he said made him question, quote, the fabric of reality. His partner at the time, Maisha, and the mother of his son, says that he stopped sleeping almost entirely and describes what he watched as conspiracy theory videos. Quote, he rambled daily about America, which he called Babylon and how it was gonna fall and, you know, fall of America. Not super wrong in predicting that maybe, but I don't think he's predicting it for the same reasons. Mm.

[Katie Stoll]

Mm.

[Robert Evans]

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, well, it is evil. Yeah. Yeah. Again, he starts to become convinced that direct exposure to sunlight makes you smarter because it increases your melanin content. He becomes, he's briefly a back to Africa kind of black nationalist, right? Where he's like, we need to return to Africa. But around this time, his older sister Tanya dies. And Maisha had been close to her, like his partner had been close to his older sister. And so they go to the funeral, and she's kind of surprised because Nature Boy's really taciturn. He's, like, weirdly cold during the visit. But then when they return to Georgia, he goes through this really rapid, visible decline in his mental health. The first sign to outsiders is he stops bathing entirely. And he would angrily rant to anyone that you only need to bathe if you eat smelly foods. And he has, at this point, become a fruitarian, so he doesn't need to wash himself ever. Now, there's also some evidence that something diagnosable is happening here. 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 sort of barber. Yeah. In one video, talking about this time, he says, I had people like, dude, you good? They would come to drop the money off from the barber shop and see him with his hair all crazy, ranting about conspiracies in Babylon. And they were just like, I don't want to hear that. Yeah.

[Katie Stoll]

I mean, all of this is Somebody having some sort of mental break, being obsessive, locking yourself away, withdrawing, breaking down your consciousness. It's all alarming.

[Robert Evans]

It's all alarming. And, you know, not bathing. Not bathing.

[Katie Stoll]

You know what I mean?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. People are immediately aware, right? Like, it's not the kind of thing that's. So Maisha decides eventually she doesn't want to hear this either. And she takes her kids and the child that they share dumps his ass and moves to South Carolina, making the only good decision anyone will make over the course of these videos. Nature Boy is okay with this because it gives him more time to study what he has decided will be his next career, which is becoming a YouTube personality. Now, right after she leaves, Young Pharaoh gets invited to speak on a podcast in New York City. And Nature Boy, kind of brute, forces his way into, like, oh, I'll drive up there and be on it with you. Like, we'll hang out. We'll be on the show together, right? And as soon as I think Young Pharaoh kind of lets him. Cause they're buds. And Nature Boy, at the start of this thing, immediately elbows his friend out of the interview, basically to go on a rant. And you can see the moment here. Again, this is from the Hood Horrors video. The original video was deleted long ago, so it's really the only place I have to access this. But it's kind of a noteworthy moment to look at here. My brother Nature is here from Atlanta. First, I want to talk to my brother Nature. Why are you so infatuated, my brother?

[Calvin]

We're going back to Africa.

[Robert Evans]

Talk to the people. The tropical man belongs between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. What does that mean? If you look on the map? Yeah. So he kind of pushes his way in, and, you know, the other guy seems more interested in him, too. And this sparks the end of their appearance 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 is primarily. Primarily based on them having beef with each other.

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah, well, beef sells.

[Robert Evans]

Beef sells, right? That's. That's. That's biological, how all of this shit works right? Now it's interesting. He doesn't. This is his first, I believe, his first appearance anywhere, right. In terms of, like, social media as Nature Boy, at least as far as I can tell. And he starts his channel and begins building a following Pretty shortly after that. But before he does so he goes home and he continues to spiral a bit more. Right. Some of his first content. He's a militant fruitarian, but he's militant in terms of like, he hates vegans for eating plants, which he regards as being as cruel as hating animals. So he's very hard to get along with. Right.

[Katie Stoll]

This is a lot to like, you.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah. Wild fruitarian is also very hard to take seriously.

[Robert Evans]

Very hard to take seriously.

[Katie Stoll]

I don't mean to offend any fruitarians.

[Robert Evans]

Out there, but it's, it's. You're not. You're supposed to eat other things. You simply are. You simply are. There's a number of things. Now he starts the Nature Boy Facebook channel in I think late 2015. And his initial videos are, yeah, these kind of rambling streams where he will lay out his beliefs about not pooping or peeing inside, not bathing, eating fruit. And most importantly, he kind of, he makes a sharp break from this Return to Africa stance that he has earlier and instead starts advocating that people drop out of Babylon entirely and live in tune in nature. There's a video, I don't think we need to play it, but like, where he kind of makes the stance that like, there's too many wars in Africa so we should all go to Central or South America because there's a lot of sun exposure there, which will make us smarter. But it's not as dangerous. Right. That's kind of the reason why he changes his mind. Now, his videos are not highly produced at this stage, but he's good looking and he's charismatic and he starts to draw in thousands and then tens of thousands of subscribers. He has an Instagram, he has a YouTube. I think he's initially more of a Facebook and Instagram person. But his YouTube starts to build and they get like 100,000 or so followers, right? Each, which is nice. Not, he's not a massive star, but people are listening, right? And when you've got, you know, 100,000 or so people who are semi regularly watching your stuff, you can get some of them to send you money and you can get some of them who start to develop a really strong parasocial relationship with you, which is what starts to happen here. And he begins vowing that he is going to leave the United States, Babylon to South America, where he is going to start a conscious community. And he starts talking to his followers, like, you should follow me. We're going to, we're going to completely change the world. This is going to be the spark of the revolution. You know, I am going to end Babylon by beginning this movement, by getting everyone to start conscious communities in South America where again, people already live.

[Katie Stoll]

Right, I know people already live there.

[Robert Evans]

It's one of those things where I'm always like, okay, but like if, 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?

[Katie Stoll]

Ding, ding, ding.

[Robert Evans]

Why didn't that make all of our problems? Because maybe they're more complicated than just living in Peru. I don't know, man.

[Katie Stoll]

Maybe you haven't thought this one through.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

Ah, alright, so we're back. We're back from the pods. We're back talking. Okay, he decides he's going to leave for South America to start a conscious community. And the way this ultimately happens is very funny. He makes a video announcing, the day has come, I am going to leave Babylon to live off the land as God intended. His initial plan was to go to South America. He talks about Peru a lot, but as soon as he posts, I'm doing it, I'm making the plans, I'm leaving for South America. A fan of his reaches out and is like, hey, my brother lives in Honduras. That's where our family's from. And he's inherited like 30 acres that you can use. There's two old houses on the property that you would have to renovate first. To make it livable. But, like, you can go down there. So Nature Boy immediately is like, well, fuck South America. I'm meant to be in Honduras, right? And you know, to be honest, from what I can tell, I don't have detailed knowledge of this land. But from what I can see from what footage exists, this, it would have been a good setup for someone wanting to try and start assuming someone knew how to do all this. You've got houses that are in okay shape, they need some renovating. You've got 30 acres. You can support a good number of people on 30 acres. If you knew what was this scenario for a cult leader, you could do something here, right? If you had any intention of actually doing the things you were talking about. So he commits. He buys a plane ticket and he tells everyone first he's flying down to Florida. And if you want to leave Babylon too, everyone meet up with me in Florida. We're going to do a big meetup and we're going to fly down the Honduras together. And he shows off his camping gear in a backpack. He's got a life straw, which he clearly doesn't know how to use. He's got solar panels to keep his phone charged. He's got a brand new Cabela's backpack. And he tells everyone now that I'm going to nature, I'm going to build a village. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I know it's going to happen because I said it's going to happen. And again, that's a red flag because all of this is very complicated. And if people don't have any background experience, they're simply not going to succeed, which is indeed what happens. But the day of the meetup in Florida comes around and there's a very funny video where Nature Boy's like, well, my assumption was that nearly all of my followers were young women, so I was expecting a bunch of young ladies. But the only people who show up are three guys in their 20s.

[Katie Stoll]

Yikes. Sorry, nature Boy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's not really shocking. Their names are Key, Olmec and Starlight. Now, these are all dudes who are kind of in this community. They're interested in not just Nature Boy, but other stuff. Olmec in particular seems to have some, like, partic, 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, he was hoping they were all young women that he could have sex with. But he changes his mind When Starlight says he knows Spanish and has $20,000, Nature Boy immediately tells him, you're useful. Again, no one. He does not know Spanish. He did not plan on having anyone with him who knew Spanish to create community in Honduras. Not needed. Not important.

[Katie Stoll]

No.

[Robert Evans]

Now, at this stage, this is not a cult. This is some young men who have had their heads filled via YouTube with pretty ideas of living and Facebook with pretty ideas of living off the land. And you know how easy it is, Right. The instant they arrive at the actual property, they look at this house, which had been like the landowner's grandmother's house. And so it's filled with her old stuff. And, you know, it would take work to clean out and fix up, and he decides it's creepy. And so they immediately permanently scrap their plans to live in the jungle and start a village and instead get a hotel using Starlight's $20,000. And just instantly, oh, you gotta clean up a house. Nah, nah.

[Katie Stoll]

The thing that you were warned you would need to do.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And like a really minimal. Like, you're not talking about carving a home out of raw land. There are houses.

[Katie Stoll]

There are houses.

[Robert Evans]

You gotta clean them up a little. You gotta do some work. Yeah. You've got camping gear with you, and you're not willing to clean out a house. So after a little bit of time in a hotel, they find a house to rent in Santa Fe, Honduras. In a video at the time, Nature boy notes, that $20,000 sure came in handy. I'll bet it did.

[Katie Stoll]

Oh, my gosh.

[Robert Evans]

So you just spending this other guy's bunny renting places. Phoenix, the landowner joins them, and they start calling themselves Etherians and posting videos of people camping in the front yard and calling it an intentional community. Again, these people are camping in a city in front of the house that they are renting. There's a picture Sophie's gonna show you. It's just tents in a yard. It's just. It's simply just tents in a fairly well cultivated yard. This is not an intentional community. You are doing what, like third graders do. You are camping in your yard.

[Katie Stoll]

Looks like making forts.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Katie Stoll]

Tents.

[Robert Evans]

Decently landscaped yard. Yes. Clearly someone I'm sure it's not. Nature Boy is doing the landscaping.

[Katie Stoll]

Right out of frame is probably like a major road, major thoroughfare.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. This. This is again, in a city. Yeah, yeah, they're not. This is the. This is the opposite of off grid.

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now, this is all very silly, but what Nature Boy does next is actually pretty cunning, which is, you know, they've got this house they're renting, and some people live inside and some people camp in the yard. But they will go out because Honduras is Honduras. And they'll go to very pretty places that are like tourist hotspots where there's waterfalls and they will film themselves bathing under waterfalls and picking fruit from jungle trees and brag about how they're living this perfect back to nature, carefree lifestyle and, like, drop out of Babylon and join us. Look at how nice this is. This is our life every day. He says, this is not a vac. This is where we live. And you're more than welcome to stay. And again, this isn't where you live. You're going to. Honduras is a very beautiful place. You are driving for an afternoon to tourist hotspots and pretending your life is this, like, jungle paradise. Again, you live in a city, in a rental, right?

[Katie Stoll]

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

[Robert Evans]

There's like power lines in that photo.

[Katie Stoll]

Like, what are we talking about here?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, come on. You have cars. You're using gasoline all the time. Like, you have not escaped Babylon. You haven't walked away from Omelas. So that said, these videos, like this spread, Facebook loves showing people videos of, like, idyllic nature retreats and the like, and back to the land projects. All this stuff does fairly well. And people start coming, lots of them. So many that it, like the other three guys who had left with him, who he calls his warriors, start to feel overwhelmed and are like, we need to stop asking for more people to join. Right. Cause there's like dozens and dozens of them. But at this point, young women start showing up. Right?

[Katie Stoll]

That's the dream right there.

[Robert Evans]

That's Nature Boy is like, this is working. And you know what? We're polygamists now.

[Katie Stoll]

Oh.

[Robert Evans]

So very quickly, this turns from some slightly to moderately deluded hippie kids camping in a yard to Nature Boy telling multiple women that they are now his wives. And he also doesn't use the term wife. He calls them directs. They're his directs. So we've got a cult terminology starting to form, okay. In a video at the time, he explains, with polygamy, it's just for me, being with four female students that I'm dealing with very intimately. It's nothing more and nothing less than that. Sex for me is me plugging into a woman and sending my knowledge like a USB to a computer. And when I have sex, I am putting fluid in you. Inside the fluid is DNA on that DNA is all the knowledge that I know. And now you're getting a direct transfer from my file into your ribosome into your DNA. And if you do that enough, you can take me on long enough to the point where I'm inside of you.

[Katie Stoll]

Robert, I cannot believe you just read that.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Katie Stoll]

Jeff, that is.

[Robert Evans]

My dick is a usb.

[Katie Stoll]

Unbelievable. But also, thank you for reading that.

[Robert Evans]

Beautiful stuff. Beautiful stuff, yes.

[Katie Stoll]

Are they all shitting in that yard?

[Robert Evans]

They are all shitting. Katie, Everyone is shitting in every yard in this story. You have to add that they are all pooping in the yards.

[Katie Stoll]

It's not that big a yard.

[Robert Evans]

It's not that. Presumably burying it. But again, they're all shitting in these yards. Now, while he claims to be a guru bringing people back in touch with the natural world, he very quickly spends the entire 20 grand, not just on this rental, but primarily according to other people there, mostly on dirt pikes and iPads, which he's like, but I gave them away to other people in the group. You know, he calls himself, like, a real humanitarian for giving away all of these dirt bikes and iPads to other people who join. But it's like, it's not your money, bro.

[Katie Stoll]

Wild.

[Robert Evans]

So that 20,000 goes quickly, and soon everyone's scraping by. He's barely managing to cover rent and food with allegedly the $3,000 a month he is allegedly receiving from that guy. But just as soon as things are getting dire, his key, one of the other guys who had joined him in Florida has a loved one die, and he inherits $300,000. And he starts by giving Nature Boy to start, like, hey, man, you know, the group really needs 20 grand for this project. And he just keeps doing that over and over again until he gets all 300 grand, right?

[Katie Stoll]

I feel so bad for them. Although he made. He's making his choices.

[Robert Evans]

He's making his. I've read it. I've watched an interview with that guy after all this falls apart, where he's like, no, I don't regret it. Like, he was my teacher. He was my guru. Okay, man, I don't know. Fuck, whatever, bro. So they get robbed not long after this in Santa Fe because Nature Boy is buying everybody fancy gadgets and computers. At least that's what they say is like. They're in the middle of the street and these people take everything on them. They take. I think they get. It's Kind of unclear, but I think they get into the house because they get everyone's like, passports, a lot of their stuff, right?

[Katie Stoll]

Oh, that's bad.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Katie Stoll]

Right. Otherwise, why wouldn't you at least try to sell it?

[Robert Evans]

And this is based in part on the fact that I spent a lot of time in Central America and met a number of people doing things that aren't wildly different from this. And it's not uncommon for people, especially for the leaders of groups like this, to think, well, maybe I could move a little molly or something like that. And there's already people moving Molly in these areas, right?

[Katie Stoll]

You're stepping into territory.

[Robert Evans]

You should be scarier than you, Nature Boy. So anyway, they flee, leaving all of their shit behind, and he convinces everyone to move to Peru. But on their way, they visit Costa Rica. They're, like, going through Costa Rica. And like everyone who goes to Costa Rica, Nature Boy's like, oh, actually, this place rips and decides, no, no, no, we're gonna live in tune with nature here. Right?

[Katie Stoll]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

So they camp for a couple of nights and then they rent another house because, again, none of them know how to really live. It's also, Costa Rica's a country. They're not just gonna let you set up camp in the jungle randomly and start a village.

[Katie Stoll]

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

[Robert Evans]

You can't really do that here. You know, they continue producing videos from different gorgeous landmarks. And soon, you know, and people keep joining, right? You know, Costa Rica's even prettier in a lot of ways. And so they're posting all of these increasingly gorgeous videos about their idyllic lives outside of Babylon. And a young woman named Velvet Marquez joins the group, right? She is a freshman agricultural Student at Tuskegee University, she has some relevant experience to actual back to the land shit. She had volunteered at a local land use NGOs and felt like a natural fit for what she thought these people were doing. She recalls not even knowing that there was like, Nature Boy was the leader, right? Because the videos they publish, he's not making it all about him. He's constantly publishing these stories of other members. So it really does sound like to an outsider, there's this wonderful community, mostly made up of, like, black people who have dropped out of, you know, this fucked up country and are living this idyllic life in Central America. And so she decides to go join them. Now, when she arrives, she's immediately surprised to realize they are not growing food, they're not foraging, they're eating at restaurants and driving in cars just like everyone else. But. But she and Olmec kind of hit it off, right? And, you know, Nature Boy agrees that, like, he, she can be Olmec's direct. But Nature Boy is also not clearly happy with this because he wants to be with her. And so he keeps, like, hassling her and be like, are you sure you want to be with this other guy? Is she going to be with Olmec? Right? So that's going to continue to be a thing. Now, around this time, another young woman, Kayla Reed, shows up from Canada. And this is a white lady, right? From a family that's at least middle class or upper middle class. She again gets drawn to this the same way everyone else does. It looks pretty. It seems like a great way to unplug from this very toxic society. And she's useful to Nature Boy because, you know, he's in general trying to get as many young women around him as possible. But also she's white. And there's by this point, one or two other white people who he can put on camera and tell potential followers, this isn't a racist thing, right? Like, we accept everybody. He starts at this point changing his tune to, like, everyone is a shade of brown, right? So, you know, he softens all this and again, to try to get more people and more money. Now he's also cognizant of the fact that taking a young, rich white girl to his, like, cult in Central America could force the involvement of international law enforcement, right? So this is a kind of thing that he is aware from the beginning there's some upsides and some potential dangers. And soon enough those dangers make themselves clear because Kayla didn't tell her parents what she was doing. She is an Adult. But she lied and claimed that she was heading to a church camp and then just disappeared and never told anyone where she was.

[Katie Stoll]

That's some alarms.

[Robert Evans]

Her parents make a missing persons complaint, not even because they're specifically sketched out by this guy, but because they have no idea where she's gone. She goes on a church retreat and drops off the face of the world. It's a very normal parent thing to do, right?

[Katie Stoll]

One day it should be, yeah, find your child.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you're gonna wanna find your kid. And they are looking for her. This is an open question for at least weeks until someone sees her in an Instagram video with these people calling themselves Etherians and is like, oh fuck, I think she might have joined the cult. And this is the first time that this group before this Nature Boy and his followers would have were just a bunch of expats bumming around Central America like a lot of people have done, right? This is the first time they start being called a cult by the media and they start getting real attention. The cbc, which is kind of Canada's npr, starts reporting on these scant few details known about Nature Boy and the Etherians who have now rebranded themselves under the name Melanation. Right. That's kind of the YouTube brand for all of their videos. And again, this is kind of a reflection of all of his melanin based teachings which have gotten increasingly elaborate. Right. As this is all going on, the BBC sends a very irritating young reporter to Costa Rica to do a documentary called Searching for a Cult Leader in the Jungles of Costa Rica. I don't love this video, but it does capture the cult during a unique time. So I'm going to play a clip from it which shows Nature Boy giving his spiel to a group of followers. Well, we really don't like using toilets. Like what is the thing you hate so much about the toilet? The soil belongs to the trees and I'm in an abusive relationship with the tree. If I'm not giving it back, their community is cold. Melanie. Okay, so that's at least how followers are kind of describing their teachings at this point to a guy from the BBC. Now this BBC guy does a short documentary just on the cult and a slightly longer one reporting on several different kind of utopian living projects in Costa Rica. He spends a lot of his time online flirting with that Canadian lady in a way that makes me slightly uncomfortable, or at least that's my interpretation. Watch it, you may feel differently. Let's see, at one point he asks her if Melanation is a cult. And she gives him an answer that was clearly scripted and drilled into her head by Nature Boy. Canada is a cult. Like the US Is a cult. Everyone is a part of a cult. Culture is a group of people who believe have similar beliefs. Now, I say that. He clearly said that because a bunch of his videos, he uses the exact line that, like, well, the United States is a cult. And. 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.

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah, you're being slippery here.

[Robert Evans]

You're being a little slippery.

[Katie Stoll]

It's like, everything's a cult culture.

[Robert Evans]

I'm like, okay, well, yeah, not quite. That's not quite true.

[Katie Stoll]

There's a distinction. Are there cultural dynamics that we're talking.

[Robert Evans]

About here to nationalism? Does nationalism make people vulnerable to culture? Sure. That doesn't mean you get to make a cult.

[Katie Stoll]

Right, Right.

[Robert Evans]

So at this point, I think we've got what I'd call like a hybrid cult. Right. Nature Boy is starting to exert more and more control over members. It becomes a higher control group than it had been. But also a lot of people start leaving. Right. And there's not. He's not. Doesn't. This is not like the Church of Scientology, where he's got like a wing of folks dedicated to going after people who leave. And most of the people who come for a while are not crazy. They're not super dedicated. A number of them in that are interviewed in that BBC documentary have left and start their own land projects because they're like, well, Costa Rica rips and I actually want to farm or something like that. Right.

[Katie Stoll]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, like, 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 U.S. because, quote, the race thing was just really out of control. Ave is a black woman living in Texas and says, I just didn't think a child would be able to develop there. And I get it. And what's so interesting about Nature Boy is he's very much like doing a partial Jim Jones. Like, he is recruiting from marginalized people who See how fucked up life in the US Is, and are open to dropping out of society to find a better life. But Jones, you know, before getting everyone killed, they do start, like a town, right? Like, they've got a. They're doing. There's a lot of infrastructure they put together.

[Katie Stoll]

There's a lot more thought put into that, probably.

[Robert Evans]

They're pretty. They put a lot of work into it. And Jim Jones is not a lazy man. Right. What's interesting to me is nature boy talks a lot of Jim Jones shit, but he is so lazy and he completely refuses to use any of the money. And they have a lot at one point, enough that they could have started something and potentially with the knowledge, made an actual sustaining project. But he is almost violently opposed to the concept of farming, right?

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

When he obsessively talks about being back to the nature, he hates the idea of actually living off the land.

[Katie Stoll]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yes. That's what he's doing. And he's very. It's just such a lazy. And there's a couple of stories from former members who, like, show up and he tells everyone that, like, you know, we only go to the bathroom outside. And they're like, okay, so we're like, making our own manure to, like, grow things. And he says, absolutely not. Under no circumstances do we ever do anything. Like, he even tells one person, why would we grow our own food? There's markets. It's like, you are literally talking, preaching about the apocalypse, my dude. Like, yeah, fascinating. Fascinating cult for that reason. Now this doesn't do well again, a lot of people realize this is bullshit. Aave, 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 dumbfucks who adopt countercultural beliefs not because they have real criticisms of society, but because they want to feel special. And this clip from that BBC documentary of two of his followers taking this fucking reporter to a hot springs makes really, the narcissism in this belief system, the narcissism in this belief system incredibly evident. Are you. How old are you guys? I'm actually immortal. I don't die. Okay? Angie never dies. Albert Einstein says this. Define melanation. Living in human Nature. Yeah. Living a righteous path. Living the righteous path, then the narrow path. Would you say that you're part of Melanation or are you? We are Melanation. You are Melanation. Is this like a big movement?

[Unknown]

Do you think it's going to change?

[Katie Stoll]

It's going to be like, yeah, like beings from all around the world, like, are coming together.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. So again, the whole I'm never going to die, Albert Einstein said so thing, like it's, it's. Again, they're so lazy. These people like are not actually. This is not an ideology. These people have not. Are not thinking about anything. They are casually ingesting YouTube videos with pretty things and they just want to bum around and not do anything all the time. Right.

[Katie Stoll]

100%.

[Robert Evans]

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?

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah, that's. It's attracting that type of person. It's also attracting somebody that's potentially thinking, well, I want to be in those videos. I want to have.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I want to be. Photo of me hanging out under water. Yeah, exactly. The waterfall stuff, it's.

[Katie Stoll]

It's very poorly thought out.

[Robert Evans]

It's. So I keep thinking back to like Scientology. Evil. Stupid. Not a shallow belief system. Deep and labyrinthine and complex. Right. The Zizian. So we've talked about. Yes. Is everything silly nonsense? Is it all dumb as hell? Yes. But it's complicated and there's a lot of effort being put into this silly crazy belief system. Right. Everything. The more I learn about these fucking, you know, Melanation, the Etherians, all the different things they call themselves, the more I'm like, God, the. These people are so fucking lazy.

[Katie Stoll]

Like they don't actually. There's no actual ideology here.

[Robert Evans]

No. It's just a hot dude. Other than Instagram.

[Katie Stoll]

Other than pooping in a toilet.

[Robert Evans]

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. You know, put in, put in the work.

[Katie Stoll]

Miss the good old fashioned cult.

[Robert Evans]

I miss the good old fashioned cult. God, you know, back when.

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah. It's really selling me something.

[Robert Evans]

The cults these days. So lazy.

[Katie Stoll]

It's the problem with the Internet.

[Robert Evans]

Uh huh. Yeah. It's made everything too easy. Right. You don't have to really work because the scale of social media means you can just find some people who will buy into anything. Everything's falling apart because of the Internet. All right, sorry. So eventually the heat from Canadian authorities over this lady staying with them gets to be too much. And Nature Boy convinces Jasper, or she also goes by Sun Ray or whatever, to return home. She describes that as her making a choice to protect everyone by leaving. There is a video of him very clearly talking her into it. I think he just didn't have much use to her for her and, like, he wasn't into her and decided, like, this is more trouble than it's worth. Right?

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now he has rapidly developed more narcissistic cult leader traits by this point. One of his most common refrains is, what I'm doing is beyond Martin Luther King Jr. It's beyond Malcolm X. It's beyond all of that. And this is something his followers will repeatedly like, say, he's beyond Martin Luther King. He's beyond Malcolm X. And like, again, both of those guys, lot of work, very complicated, large organizations they ran that made serious impacts on the world, not just hanging out under waterfalls. Anyway, initially, he discourages his directs from getting pregnant, telling them that if they do get pregnant, it's a sign that they have been cursed by God. When a young woman named Pocahontas joins the group and he makes her his direct, he immediately impregnates her and kicks her out of the group a week later. So that's good. Now, he does eventually change his opinion on this, right? He has more kids with several of his followers. His kiddo Cyrus visits him and spends several months living with the cult in Central America. So that's not great. And there's some videos of him, like, yelling at this kid, making him, like, crawl around on the ground. And he's like, complaining that it hurts. And Nature Boy is like, you know, you just need to toughen up. You have to do it. He also, near the end of 2017, posts an important video which is described in that Rolling Stone article. I wanted my son to be so pure that he'd never know he was naked, says Bishop, who has four children. I take baths with my kids. I'm naked with my kids. I have sex in front of my kids. My son be breastfeeding. I'd be making love to his mom. That's how I get down around kids. He goes on like this for a minute or so. My son, I have sex with his mom after I'm done. I'm laying there chilling. He grabs my penis. He's playing with my penis. I let that happen. This is what really draws a lot of ire online, because people start accusing him of being a pedophile. And that's not an unreasonable thing to draw from that.

[Katie Stoll]

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.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and it's this kind of thing where, like, is it bad for kids to be around communities of people who are naked? Like, no. There's nothing inherently bad or sexual about being naked, depending on, like, how you do it. Is it bad for, like, people? Like, most people have been naked a significant amount of their lives in the history of the human race. It's not inherently bad for people. Likewise, is it bad for kids to be aware that their parents are having sex? Again, most human beings throughout history were broadly aware of the fact that, 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.

[Katie Stoll]

Or do you need to be?

[Robert Evans]

Nope.

[Katie Stoll]

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

[Robert Evans]

No, no, not really necessary. Then it's a kink. Then you've got a weird thing going on.

[Katie Stoll]

And I feel so bad for the woman in that situation who probably feels a little powerless because his cult.

[Robert Evans]

Weird. 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 are around pooping. He takes videos of his son pooping. Oh my God, it's weird. This is what draws the ire of the Costa Rican government. The governor of the province or whatever that his cult is camped out at actually is like, 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, do we really want this fucking weird pedophile hanging around?

[Katie Stoll]

This cult pops up in my neighborhood. I don't know, I don't want to be here.

[Robert Evans]

I don't want him around here. But like, so the governor has a, schedules a meeting with nature boy and nature boy posts some videos about. Obviously, you know, this is all taken out of context. I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm happy to have a meeting with this guy and show him that nothing we're doing is wrong or weird or bad. And then the day of the meeting, he has his followers load everything they own into vans and flee the country or flee the. Flee the state. Right. They don't quite leave Costa Rica, and in fact, in October, they get deported. After being detained at a checkpoint, most members are found to lack passports since a lot of them had 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 a lot of IDs or have overstayed their visas. And Nature Boy immediately, like, they detain them. And Nature Boy goes live on Facebook from the police barracks and claims he's being murdered by a government just like Malcolm X or mlk. And again, neither of them were murdered by Costa Rican immigration authorities. Quote, per Rolling Stone. We're live on Facebook right now. He shouted, everybody bring their cameras out. Make sure they record this, because if we're 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 to use violence. Moments later, police did such a piece of shit. It's just like the cops are even, like, we'll let you go. You gotta, like, sign some things saying, you know, you have to leave that. Like, you can't stay in Costa Rica.

[Katie Stoll]

No, but he's putting on a show.

[Robert Evans]

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 an out. Like, you're choosing now to occupy a police bus for no reason. I don't know. It's not the kind of civil disobedience that I really. Again, is there a massive ethical issue in Costa Rica putting American travelers on buses? I don't know. I don't think so. I think you had an out and you didn't take it.

[Katie Stoll]

I think it sounds like you had an out.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

So we're so back. We're so back. So this whole confrontation, which was totally avoidable and stupid, causes Nature Boy to go viral in the consciousness community subculture yet again. They spend several months back in the 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, Dalen Armstead around this time, who is a musician and an audio engineer like, gets into his YouTube content and spends a year or so not showering and pooping in the woods of Maryland before he finally leaves to join them. This is when they're back in the U.S. yeah, just preparing. He explained his mind state to Rolling Stone. If I didn't change the way I was living, I was going to suffer some kind of consequence from the universe. So I left in the middle of the night and didn't tell anybody. Now when he joins the group, he does it alongside a couple of other people with audio and video editing experience who have joined. This is like and none of them really lasts long, so they're all kind of handing off the baton to the other. But they start producing higher quality videos for the melanations, 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 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.

[Katie Stoll]

Did he do it as Nature Boy?

[Robert Evans]

He does some of it. He is not. There are other members who are actually somewhat popular who like have a following because they're more competent. He is kind of noted by everyone as not knowing what he's doing and he anytime someone says hey, that track sounded like shit, he gets angry. So he can't really make anything good. But he starts publishing books at this point and so he's going to show you a couple of the titles, there's a lot of them. Most of them are just a few pages. One of them is Divine Knowledge of the Self Spelled CLLF Study Guide. And that is intentional. CLLF is absolutely Cassells and stuff. He's wearing a Native American headdress in this, which is a thing he has started doing by this time. There's another one with an illustrated version of him called Master Chief Exposing the Food Industry rewind.

[Katie Stoll]

There is 15 reviews and it has 4. 15 reviews and it has 4.4 stars.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some good reviews. There's some bad ones, but you know, 4.4 stars. Some of his stuff just has like two or three.

[Katie Stoll]

Why is he wearing an indigenous headdress?

[Robert Evans]

Cause he starts doing that at this point. They have a lot of videos where they'll all dress as. Both as a mix of, like, Egyptians and like Native Americans and march around like soldiers. He loves doing that.

[Katie Stoll]

That's terrible. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

And again, they're living in, like, Mexico and Honduras and Costa Rica. Like, none of this is. Is. It's just what they're doing. Okay. It's just what they're doing. It's just what. It's just what they're doing. Okay.

[Katie Stoll]

Sophie. It's behind the bastards.

[Robert Evans]

It's. It's. Yes. He's like these. He sucks. So this does start to bring in more money. I don't think the books as much as the video content and the rats.

[Katie Stoll]

At least 14 sales.

[Robert Evans]

At least 14 sales. Which is good that they have more money because by this point, he has spent all of Keith's $300,000 inheritance. But the growing notoriety because he's putting out videos and they're getting some traction. He has followers, but the fact that he's more famous now that he's had these big scandals, it leads to someone digging up that gay porn he was in. And for several years, he will have to. He puts out a lot of videos denying it's him, even though it obviously is it's him. And there are videos where he's like, look, if it was me, would that be so bad? Just admit it, man.

[Katie Stoll]

Like, own it. You have managed somehow to make a lot of wild shit fly.

[Robert Evans]

So just. He does eventually admit it, but, like, it takes a wild amount of time. So he gets fed up with the States and he decides to fly everyone back to his Ignacio Belize to try his hand again at forming an intentional community. He's immediately recognized by the owner of an Internet cafe and run out of the country for being a pedophile so good work. Random Internet cafe guy in Belize. That was the right call.

[Katie Stoll]

Belize? Is that even Costa Rica?

[Robert Evans]

Out of Belize. Yeah.

[Katie Stoll]

This guy can't settle. He's always jumping around.

[Robert Evans]

No, it sucks.

[Katie Stoll]

His whole life.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So there's two good decisions right now. Although Maisha eventually does let him spend more time with his kid, which isn't a great call, but you know, her leaving and that guy in Belize being like, get the fuck out of my. Get the fuck out of this town. Great calls. Yeah. So he changes the group's name yet again, I think in part to try and, you know, lose some of the heat on them to carbonation. Right. And in the grand tradition of scammers and conmen for generations, it is at this point that he flees to Mexico. Several new folks have joined at this point and the oldest of them is a 59 year old mother of. She's got several kids. I think she might be a grand. It might have been a grandmother named Magdalena Sevilla. She had successfully raised several kids to adulthood. She 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 who had a lot of trauma and a feeling that her life was somehow incomplete. And she falls into this content. She sees all these young people living these blissful lives around these beautiful things of nature and is like, I want this in my life. Right. And so she quits her job and leaves everything behind. Her children who were interviewed for that Hood 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. Like she's 59, right? Like, what are we supposed to do now? She has a heart condition that she's been on medication on for like a decade at this point. Again, it's totally manageable. She is managing it. But nature boy hates medicine. And it's kind of. You could. Some of the accounts of people at the time. It is insinuated that he harasses her whenever she takes it. There are some reports that she felt afraid of him knowing that she needed medicine and that she was sick or that she was taking it. And she doesn't like quit cold turkey, but she starts rationing it and not taking it as often as she is supposed to. And eventually she runs out entirely. And in videos from later in her stay, she starts to look visibly unhealthy. Right. The group kind of travels around. They go back to Belize for a while and then move Back and then back to Mexico to a place called Palenque, where they rent a modern stone house. Although again, most cult members are camping in the yard and everyone is pooping, pooping in the yard. Now, at this point, Nature Boy has drawn in some cult members who are, you know, they're, they're better at editing and video. They've got like recording studios set up, they're putting out a lot of content, and some money is coming through with this. More money comes in from Nature Boy, requiring new members to hand over their debit cards and credit cards when they join. One former member claims he gave Nature Boy a card with a thousand dollars, his life savings on it, and Nature Boy immediately spent it all on a ping pong table. So gift not great at money. Near the end of 2018, Civila dies in the night in her tent due to a pre existing, now unmedicated heart condition. Velvet Marquez, who is still with the group at this point but will leave later, told a reporter he does not allow people to have medical attention. This is why Mama Dia, that's what they called her, passed away. Now by this point, Nature Boy is fully calling himself God. Now he has forced the whole cult on a strict diet where everyone can only eat at the same time. He gets hungry. He starts randomly forbidding men and women to speak with each other. And in true cult leader fashion, begin begins doling out unhinged punishments. When members displease him, they're made to do squats or stand in a corner. He also starts filming the sex that he has with followers and sometimes posting the videos online, sometimes as revenge porn, sometimes just as content. They make most of their money at the he sucks so bad. They make most of their money at this point from a social media app based in Singapore called Big O Lies, which pays people for streaming Shaka Calvin, one of his followers, claims that's when it would really get bad. Because Bishop Nature Boy started becoming a celebrity. They were all having to do things to get attention, to get money. And the things they do, they start instead of there being any kind of message, they start really focusing their content on we need to have reality show shit about everyone having fights and conflicts within the group. So he starts ordering people to fake fights and arguments for the sake of viral content. And he also start, yeah, beef sell. He also starts talking like a militant revolutionary, which is when they start really doing a lot of these videos where they're dressed as like pharaohs or Native Americans and they're marching like soldiers to again, kind of like again Stuff that he thinks is going to, like, shock people and go viral. As Dalen Armstead, the music engineer who joined recalled the Rolling Stone, working frequently with two other initiates, Armand Palmer, who went by Pisces, and Ishmael Goodwin, AKA Caliber, the guy 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 Negropian. The song's music features Musa and Palmer shirtless, decked out in feathered headdresses, tribal jewelry, 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.

[Katie Stoll]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

The stuff that actually does require some discipline is this right now. As time goes on, an increasing part of his message becomes domestic abuse, because Nature Boy has started seeing by this point. Velvet, who starts out as Olmec's direct, is now his direct, his prior, his main wife, and he has started hitting her. He's also hitting basically every other woman in the group. Former member Courtney Townsend claims, quote, we'd end up having these meetings that would last six, eight hours, where he's explaining why he's locking Velvet in a room, why he had to slap her. His explanation was that we've been programmed by European men to be weak little men so our women will never respect us. The women will respect him, and he's the guy slapping these girls, locking them in rooms. He actually does a live stream at one point with Velvet and her dad, where Velvet's dad asks, 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 bleeding profusely everywhere. I'm going to tell you this, Pops Bishop responds, when it comes to me, I'm a man. So again, like, he is. He is. This has become, like, the central. What started as like, we need to overthrow Babylon and go back to nature. It is now primarily what we need to do is hit women.

[Katie Stoll]

That's what the cult is for. His own desires, his own instincts that he doesn't want to work on or improve from. It's a place where he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

[Robert Evans]

And here's but part of what's extra gross about this. It's not even that. This isn't like, obviously he wants to do this, but there's another level that is very social media. To this that I find even sicker, which is that a lot of their viewers, and they're getting paid by viewers, whether or not those viewers like them are hate watchers. So a lot of why he's doing this is because it makes people angry and they share and repost and it gets him more traffic. Right?

[Katie Stoll]

He cracks that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Now, that said, this does get him reported to the Mexican police. In March of 2019, they get raided, which prompts them to flee the next day for Nicaragua. They eventually get raided there, and after about a month, they get deported and they go to Panama, where the same shit happens. They spend some time there. There are police reports, they get arrested, they get deported. This happens several times until Covid hits. Now, the plague is actually a lifeline for Nature Boy and Carbon Nation because again, he's making his followers hand over all of their money and everyone starts getting those Covid checks, right? In addition to being. It gets easier to get like on unemployment and stuff, and he starts taking that directly from them. And they have enough coming in now that he tries to set up in Hawaii on the Big island next. Now, if you remember, Hawaii has extremely strict Covid quarantine protocols at this time. I think it's like two weeks that you have to spend in a hotel room not leaving for any reason, but an absolute medical emergency. Right. If you want to spend any time on the island at all. Right? Like, that is my recollection of it. That's what I read in the article. They show up in Hawaii and immediately break quarantine and in fact post videos of themselves not just breaking quarantine, but like touching endangered turtles that you're not allowed to touch. So they get arrested by the Hawaiian government and they get deported. America as Americans. They get deported from Hawaii, which is not easy to do. You have to. 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 sex or involve giant dramatic fights between members. Less and less time is spent actually preaching any kind of ideology, but the parasocial bond formed by watching this stuff is strong enough that people keep joining, including Janae Newell, a 25 year old waitress at a raw vegan restaurant who by 2020 had come to consider Carbon Nation my frequency family. What was what he preached? People of like minds coming together on a common mission to elevate the consciousness of Earths. This is all, all again, just repackaged bullshit. I was hearing like this 20 years ago from fucking assholes on a more primitive chunk of the Internet. But like, yo, we're all frequency. No, you're fucking not. You're shitting in a yard and hitting women. Initially, she describes him as kind. But on March 22 or March 27, 2022, during a party at the DeKalb County House that they had started to rent because they're back in the continental U.S. at this point, Nature Boy had one of his other wives punch Newell repeatedly after an argument. She says, all right, well, I'm out of here. I'm leaving. But Nature Boy kind of sends people after her and convinces her to come back. And then he tries to coerce her into sex. She says no, repeatedly, and he keeps repeating, I'm not going to rape you. And then we should have sex one more time. And eventually he coerces her into having sex. Once she leaves, Nature Boy immediately posts revenge porn videos of them having sex. Newell goes to the cops, and she initially is not pressing charges for rape, just for the revenge porn. But the cops are like, this, actually, this is this. It has to be so bad for the cops to do this. The cops are like, this actually sounds like rape to us.

[Katie Stoll]

Like, that is an unheard of development. That is.

[Robert Evans]

And it's again, if this is a white cult leader, I don't think any of this happens in terms of, like, the legal consequences. That is a huge part of it, right? That he is a black cult leader is why the cops see this. But he is. This is rape, right?

[Katie Stoll]

He's doing a bad thing, all the bad things.

[Robert Evans]

So he gets arrested, he gets charged, he does bailout, and he's gonna spend, like the next two years almost fighting in court while his cult collapses around him. There had been a few dozen people at most at one point, and they're down to like, a half dozen hardliners. One of his followers, Amar Jawayd, flees with a bunch of money and hard drives that presumably included revenge porn. On March 6, 2023, he's found dead inside of a house that's on fire. It seems to be related to some gang stuff he was into, as opposed to Nature Boy. But I know, don't you know? It's not fully known, but it's one of those people who knew him will be like, it's because of Nature Boy's influence that he got into that stuff in the first place. Right? Because he joined when he was 18. And this dude had a real dark impact on him. I don't know, but those are the two deaths that are somewhat tied to this cult. The court case finally reached its conclusion earlier this year and it didn't go well for Nature Boy. One of his wives admitted to posting revenge porn when she was, like, trying to defend him. And in general, every time his remaining loyal followers got up on the stand, it was bad for him because the things he convinced them to do were bad. The state offered him a 30 year plea deal, which he rejected. So on March 1, he is convicted on all counts and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 10 years, which is where he is now. So.

[Katie Stoll]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Again, that is one of those.

[Katie Stoll]

Quite a story.

[Robert Evans]

It's both like, yeah, this guy sucked. I'm glad he's not out and free. But also like, well, there was only justice in this case because he's a black guy, Right.

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah, it's a little complicated.

[Robert Evans]

None of those things are true, you.

[Katie Stoll]

Know, and it's also complicated by the fact that, you know, if he's to be believed, which I think there's no reason not to believe the story of his childhood, it's incredibly traumatic. And you can see the through lines.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Katie Stoll]

Of how he got from point A to point B here and his aggression and constantly being moved around and abused and then. But that's no excuse.

[Robert Evans]

It's not an excuse.

[Katie Stoll]

This way.

[Robert Evans]

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 a lower effort version of Nexus Nexium. Right. And NXIVM 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 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. He's talking about saving the world. All he's really doing is being like, lounging around in nice hotels and houses and rental houses and having sex with a bunch of women who he also physically and mentally abuses. Ultimately, 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's just a couple of years. And it's in part because Nature Boy does not have, because of his background, the ability to kind of reach and, you know, influence the the level of wealth people that, that Ranieri does. And it's part because like, like just he immediately gets a lot more new, you know, shit. Right. Like he, he or he gets a lot more attention from law enforcement. He gets, it gets taken seriously because he's not a white guy. Right.

[Katie Stoll]

But he also. Yes, 100% what I'm about to say does not. It's not counter. Countering that. But like, to your own point, he's pretty lazy. He's pretty sloppy and lazy about how he's going about this, not preparing.

[Jana Kramer]

You.

[Katie Stoll]

Know, and really not even trying to keep up the facade of there being anything too intellectual or spiritual or. It's just about Instagram posting the videos, making money, chasing the clout. Oh, it's subs are dying down, going down. You gotta add fights, fabricate it like the reality TV show. And it's wild. Cause it's possible to do it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, that's part of what's interesting is because, you know, Ranieri did have to create a lot of, like, he had to build this curriculum around his cult in order to start getting the following that he eventually turns into like what it turns into when you've got the Internet and the way parasocial relationships work. If you're able to just get an audience with content that you're putting out hours of on a regular basis basis, you can really easily get enough people to kind of support you as a cult leader. You know, this isn't a massive cult, he's not a massive star, but a 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 get away with this. And it takes so much less effort. A guy like Ranieri, there is more background work that Raniere has to do to get some started, you know.

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So it is just one of these, like social media has made starting a cult a lot, take a lot less effort. And you can fuck up a bunch of people's lives doing that a lot more easily. That said, the cults don't tend to last as long. Maybe that's the upside. Right.

[Katie Stoll]

Well, they're more visible too. Yeah, they're more visible. What they're doing is on display. It's hard to obfuscate what's happening.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And that is. That is kind of worthwhile. But that a worthwhile side story here is that a lot of why this cult gets taken down is it's not just 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 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, this. And it also makes it harder for them to act and operate. So that is a plus side of it, right. Is that there is, like a community kind of defense aspect here. People realize, well, this is really, you know, up right. Like that hood horrors documentary is somebody who covers a lot of stuff within the subculture. Being like, people need to know how this happened and why. Right. So that's good, you know?

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah. The good with the bad. So easy to keep get swooped up in movements that you don't intend to the pipeline. There's much to be said about this. We know.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Much to say.

[Katie Stoll]

That's why this show exists.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. All right. Okay. Well, that's the episode. How you feeling, Katie?

[Katie Stoll]

I'm feeling great. Learned a lot about nature boy and colts. I'm gonna form my own cult, actually. I already have.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You know what? Yeah, Join Katie's cult. Where? I don't know, Katie. What. Which. What Central American nation do you think you're gonna wind up in?

[Katie Stoll]

Oh, that sounds like a lot of work. Can it just be based out of California?

[Robert Evans]

A lot of cults are, Katie. Good news about that. I mean, I feel like promised land. Yeah.

[Katie Stoll]

I'm just gonna come to your compound and start it there. No, my cult already exists. It's called some more news. You can support our Patreon.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm too tired. Colts. That seems like so much work. I'd rather I'm gonna play Age of Wonders four in my underpants alone. That's my plan. Yeah.

[Katie Stoll]

What a nice evening.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, sounds great. So we're not going to start that Colton in Curacao? Well, no, Sophie, you should start that Colton Curacao. We definitely still need a Colton Curacao, but primarily as a way to get money and as a way to purchase products without tariffs. That's really the benefit of having a cult of Curacao.

[Katie Stoll]

Yeah, that's a real big benefit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Katie Stoll]

You know, and I'll just move there with you. We don't even have to start a cult.

[Robert Evans]

Sounds good.

[Sophie]

You there?

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Katie Stoll]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio radio app, Apple Podcasts.

[Sophie]

Or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube.

[Robert Evans]

New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.

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[Robert Evans]

An I Heart podcast.