Episode 362: The Source Family | Morbid

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Rules and restrictions apply. Hey, you weirdos.

I'm Alayna. I'm Ash. And this is Morbid.

Can I call you out for a second? Uh, yeah.

In like a good way. It's like a silly thing.

Anytime you do the Hey Weirdos, you outstretch your arms.

I do, I really. Every single time you hit record and you go, Hey Weirdos.

And it's like, you're like lifting them all.

You're kind of like a cult leader. Oh, I'm on theme today.

You are. We're talking about a cult today, but that is.

I didn't know that. I just watched you do it and I've like thought about it before but not said anything and I just had to say it.

I kind of love that I do that and I didn't even realize.

Yeah. You're a cult leader and you didn't know it.

I'm a cult leader and I had no idea. That's funny.

Look at that. I go, that's funny. That is funny.

Ha ha ha. um so what's everybody watching on tv anybody watching good tv out there oh anybody are you yes okay actually i was watching um the real housewives of beverly hills and okay i love the housewives and i know i know the recipe you get us super fucking hyped for an episode and then all the goddamn all the gd drama happens in the last five minutes and they're like wait for next week and you're So they've been really hyping up this fucking Aspen episode.

And I was so excited. I'm watching it last night.

All at the end. All at the end. And now I'm dying to know what happens.

And I just want to say, Team Sutton. Oh.

I just want to say that. I'm a Beverly Hills, like, I've gone in and out.

Yeah, you haven't. I haven't been in. Girl.

But I know Sutton. Yeah. And I'm interested to see why your team's Sutton.

I feel like Sutton is one of my souls. Honestly, Sutton is getting, like, bullied this season to the point where it's actually hard to watch.

That happens a lot on these shows. Mm-hmm.

It's funny because when you watch it, like at a certain point, I think we've all kind of maybe it's like the Internet or something.

We've all kind of reached a point where we're like, oh, yeah, that's not cool.

Like all of a sudden you're just like, oh, shit.

Like what I thought was fun drama before you're like, hmm.

Yeah, that's really mean, actually. There's still like fun drama.

Like I love the fun drama, but there's an element.

Yeah. And sometimes it just gets tea. I love that this is a Housewives podcast.

Yeah, you know, I would fucking love that.

But sometimes it just gets taken to a point where you're like, too far.

Yeah, too far. I don't need to watch that.

I don't want to watch Sutton crying because somebody's calling her a cunt.

I don't want to watch that. Sometimes there's parts of reality shows where you're like, I feel weird that I'm being allowed to watch this.

Yeah. Like, I don't think I should be allowed to watch this moment.

Maybe it's like it comes with age or something that you're just like, I'm not gaining the same kind of entertainment that I gained from watching somebody be upset about something.

It's just not what I'm into anymore. Because a lot of people are talking about like, I don't want to like say names, but there's like some like, honestly, there's so much drama going on on TikTok.

And I know one person is like breaking down on TikTok and everyone's talking about it.

And I'm like, we're not supposed to watch people break down on the internet.

Yeah, you're not supposed to watch that for like entertainment value.

Yeah, it just really is one of those things that like, there's no way and I saw somebody talk about it that there's no way the human brain was made.

Yeah, it was a guy that was taking a break from TikTok.

Yeah, to just like scroll through and watch somebody like going through cancer treatments and like losing their, you know, their loved one to this horrible disease.

And like you watch their story and you get so upset and you cry and then you scroll five seconds later and you're watching someone do a dance that makes you laugh.

And then you scroll again and it's somebody's dog on their last day of life eating delicious food and you scroll again.

And it's like, yeah, there's no way our brains are.

And I know we're like, fuck the Internet right now.

But like... aren't we it's getting to a point where it's just like like i love tiktok i fucking love my tiktok is a very it's my for you page is a fun place honestly mine is really all happy it's just making me laugh and like making and giving me like thought provoking things and a lot i don't have a lot of sad oh a lot of stranger things i have a lot of eddie munson on my for you page which is fine with me But it's a lot of like, I don't get any of the sad stuff, I think, because I'm like, I'm not interested.

You actually go and click the not interested button.

But like, it's true that there's just like a lot of, there's a lot of like, I've seen a lot of creators that are having like a really hard time right now.

And I hope everybody's doing okay. Like one of my favorite creators, and I know you really love her too, Mikaela.

I mean, you just have to say Mikaela. Oh, yeah.

On TikTok, like people are being awful to her.

And I'm like, she just seems like that. Like, I don't know her personally, but she is a Gemini.

So like, boom. And she's a Boston girl. And she's a Boston girl with like a full-blown Boston accent.

She's the best. But how are you being mean to her?

All she wants to do is show you how to do your fucking makeup like a boss.

Yeah, she's just bringing joy. And it's just like...

I don't know. It's easy from another position to be like anybody talking shit at somebody like that is clearly a very unhappy person.

And that's where they get their positive little jollies out is by taking someone else into their darkness with them.

And then even that makes me sad to a degree.

See, that doesn't make me sad because I'm like, get the fuck off the Internet if that's what you're doing.

But I'm like... It's easy for someone else... You can say it to someone else.

It's easy to look in on some other creator and be like, I promise you this is what these people are.

But when it's happening to you, it's like, you can't see that.

You can't see through it. And it's just all-encompassing.

And when I watched her videos, like, guys, follow her because she's fucking amazing.

And because she does amazing makeup. And she's just a... God, she's a joy.

She's a light. She's a joy. She really is.

That's the thing. Like, I feel like... I've been meditating so much lately and I know that I'm fucking crazy.

And we're also going to get like into meditation in this episode.

We're just, we're teeing up this episode is what we're doing.

But I feel like I'm just thinking a lot more about like light and like the light inside of people and like what people project out into the world.

And I'm not like, I'm not just like saying light.

I'm just saying like who you are and like karma and all that stuff.

And I just don't understand why when people see somebody shining so fucking brightly, you have to take it upon yourself to try to tear that down. that and that's the i i think we've all like the internet is a scary place and it brings out the worst in people it also brings out the best in people like the con kid that's it so it's like there's some really great things and it's like i wish everybody would just lean more that way of like lifting people up yeah and we've all like you know everybody's had moments where you've been a dick and of course and it's like but just it's a it's fine just grow.

Right. Just grow as a person. Once you say, cause I think you and I are, we've been saying it a lot.

We've been saying it for the last like couple of years, I think on this podcast that we're just like, you know what?

I just decided it's just like, not, I don't, I don't find joy in watching, you know, public breakdowns and shit.

It's just not something I like to, it's like, I remember when like Amanda Bynes, when that whole thing was happening, everybody was watching it and we all were.

I was going to say, I was going to say, And I look back now and I'm like, that wasn't funny.

No. Like that wasn't funny. It's just like, I know it was like, it's so fun.

It's weird to see the difference when you start growing and looking at that stuff.

Like how different you can feel about a situation.

It's growth. And it's like when you, I just, I want everybody just to like, that's why I just want to like, you know, shout out podcasts and like shout, like tell you to go listen to these things and go read these books because like, let's just fucking lift cool people up.

Right. And that's all. Like the thing is, it feels good.

If you're putting hate out into the world, you're getting it back.

Yeah. That's why you're miserable. That's why you're unhappy.

You got to start speaking good shit into existence.

It's true. You got like you don't compliment somebody because you want something out of it.

No. But like. Do it because it feels good.

And it does. It really does. It does. It feels a lot.

Everybody talks shit with their friends.

Of course. We still talk shit. I'm a Gemini.

Of course I'm out here talking shit. We're not sitting there being like, don't say anything mean about anybody.

No, of course not. You can talk shit with your friends, whatever you want.

Yeah. I think it's when it goes public and when, like, it just becomes this bullying thing.

Like, when I saw Michaela so upset, it just, I was like, dude.

Yeah. And I've seen so many creators like that lately.

Like, some of them are leaving TikTok and stuff.

And I'm like, man, it's a bummer. And that's the other thing.

I'm like, you are going to sit here, all these haters, and, like, comment mean shit on this video.

But then you're going to be the first person pissed off when that person is like, I'm not creating anymore.

Yeah, exactly. So it's like, just remember that there's humans behind there.

Like, and we're not talking about it. We're not even talking about ourselves.

Honestly, you guys are fucking awesome. You guys are honestly... We have a great community.

Like, I talked about, like, the book unboxing the other day, and you guys, like, literally made me have, like, almost tears.

Like, if I was a human, I would have had tears in my eyes.

Right. Because I... Also, I just have to say this because one positive positive to another positive positive.

This bitch's waist was snatched in that video.

You look beautiful. Your face is gorgeous.

That goes without saying. And I'm so happy you wrote a book.

But your waist was snatched. I was like, oh, my God.

Look at this girl. Thank you. You're welcome.

It was the jeans. No, it's you. I appreciate that.

It's you wearing the jeans. The jeans weren't wearing you.

You know what? You look fucking phenomenal and your lashes are to die.

Oh, my God. Go to Slaley Taylor. The fact that I... Kaylee's like, you've been shouting me out on the podcast so much lately.

I'm like, I know. You're like, I love you.

I know. It's... It's due. It's women supporting women.

That's right. Women supporting women. That bitch put glitter eyelashes in my eyelashes.

See? For a concert that I'm going to. Everybody's great.

I love life. But you guys are seriously fucking awesome.

And we just like, we gotta like give you pats on the back because you make us happy.

Yeah. And you make us excited to make you content.

And you guys rule. We really do. And that's why when I see other creators having so many issues, I'm like, oh, no.

Can I give you some of my amazing community?

And we are. And that's why I wanted to, because I'm like, you guys are so fucking amazing.

Yeah. And you lift us up all the time. So I'm like, can you?

Here you go. Give her the baton. love to like other people too yeah because you guys are just fucking awesome like you were so sweet on that unboxing video and like i just want to hug you all yeah just and i don't even like hugs i fucking hate hugs so we're both not huggers even like i i didn't know what to caption my picture the other day and i just been thinking lately that i want more tattoos so i just made it i need some more tattoos tattoos and so many of you guys were like i'm a tattoo artist here like i would love to tattoo you like cool you like that's cool like that's spreading awesome yeah you just you guys are great and i just we just we want to let you know whenever we can how fucking great you are and that we appreciate you right now we're love bombing you because we want you to join a cult no i'm just kidding but we are going to talk about a call and we should probably get into it now because that was kind of like my attempt at a segue so there you go so and you know this we just brought it old school for a second with like a 10 minute tangent in the beginning yeah it's But I thought it was important.

It's just talking about like everybody be psyched.

Yeah, exactly. So we'll just high five each other and tell each other, good job.

Great job. You're doing great today. You look great.

You look great. You're going to have a great day today.

And if anybody feels like shit right now and you're having like a bad day, you're going to have a fucking great day.

Make it. You look great. You know what?

I can tell from over here that you smell great.

You do smell very good. You are projecting wonderful vibes.

You're having a wicked good hair day. You're having an amazing hair day.

Your face is radiant. And you know what?

Yeah. You're a wonderful human inside. And your coffee or tea or beverage of choice today is going to be so good.

What was I going to say? I was going to tell you something else about yourself.

Wow. Wow, that just flew right out of my head.

Maybe it'll pop in your head randomly in the middle of the episode.

Oh, it's back. There it is. Our principal from high school.

Oh, yeah. Make it a great day or not. The choice is yours.

There you go. All right, so let's get into the story.

Now that we've wooed and vibed all over you.

It's a whole bunch of woo, so it was really on brand.

It's really on brand. Something that I didn't realize I do is like I am one of those people where I eat my stress away.

So I've realized it lately because I've been a lot more stressed.

But if I'm really, really stressed out, I'm filling my face at a rate that is just I can't even talk to you about.

But ever since I've used Noom, I kind of started realizing that I was doing that.

And, you know, realizing something just gets you one step closer to kind of like rectifying that situation.

And the Noom Weight app has some of the nicest coaches on the planet.

And once I realized this was something I was doing, I talked to my coach about it and she was like, all right, so what you're going to do is you're going to sit there and try to figure out, am I eating because I'm stressed or am I eating because I'm hungry and kind of differentiating between the hunger cues.

And that's why I love the Noom Weight app because there's no judgment involved.

Like they're just people and they're just trying to help you.

With their psychology first approach, Noom Weight empowers you to build more sustainable habits and behaviors.

And let me tell you, once you realize, again, what's going on in your psychology up here in your brain, those habits are going to be so much easier to change.

The behaviors are going to be so much easier to change.

And the thing is, every journey is different.

So your daily lessons are maybe not going to be the same as mine because they're personalized to you and your goals.

This program is based on scientific principles like cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, which is literally the therapy that I actively do.

And then I'm actively doing it on Noom because it helps me understand my relationship with food.

Here's the thing too, whatever your health goals are, because again, everybody's are going to be different, but the flexible non-restrictive program that Noom uses focuses on progress instead of perfection.

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That's noom.com slash morbid to sign up for your trial today.

All right. Well, today's story, honestly, it has like a little bit of everything.

We've got true crime. We've got murder acquittals.

We've got yoga. Of course. And astrology.

Wow. And most importantly, there's cults.

Of course. I do have to give a little shout out to my friend, not Kaylee, but Kayla.

We were talking a couple weeks ago about how we would have absolutely mistakenly joined a cult back in the 70s.

Definitely would. And Kayla was like, Ash, like you always say you would have gotten on the bus with Charlie Manson.

Unknowingly, of course. Of course. And she was like, I don't know if that's the cult we would have ended up in.

I think we might have ended up in the source family.

Wow. So that's what I'm going to be talking about.

Okay. So I start looking into this. Like, she's like, oh, there's this documentary.

It's literally called The Source Family.

I think it's on Amazon for free. There's commercials, though.

But it's OK. I know how you guys feel about it.

It's OK. I'm just kidding. But I was like, I started looking into this.

I'm like, I have to cover this on Morbid because I think the last cult that I did personally was the Blackburn cult.

Wow. And that was one of my favorite episodes you've done.

Oh, thank you. That was also when we discovered fucking Johnny and Tyler from That's Spooky.

Oh, my God. Yes. Because they had covered it.

And I listened to their episode after. I was like, ooh, maybe did I get everything?

And then I listened to their episode. And I said, these boys are great.

I love them. I love them. And then she told me, she said, That's Spooky.

You got to listen to it. And I said, ooh.

They're on a fucking network. And they're the best.

We love them. I think we're going to go do like a collab with them in the next couple of months.

So check your eyes out for that. Yippee.

Don't check your eyes out. But yes. And I also then I saw some of you suggest this case.

OK, so we're with all that being said, all of the fucking shit.

We got to get into the source family cult.

And it all begins with a man named James Jim Edward Baker.

Yes. OK, so there is really limited information on his early life.

There's limited information on this case all around.

But I did some newspapers dot com action.

And we love newspapers dot com. It just helps you like piece the puzzle together.

Yeah. It's not an ad. We just genuinely, like, this is organically, we just fucking love newspapers.com.

I truly do. So I was able to find out that Jim was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 4th, 1922.

Oh, the roaring 20s. That's what I was literally going to say.

So his father left when he was really young and he was raised primarily by his mom, Cora, which really pretty name.

Hmm. Now, from a young age, he was super fascinated with health and wellness, and he ended up growing up in the same neighborhood as Paul Bragg.

Do you know who Paul Bragg is? That sounds very familiar.

You're going to realize it because I realized it, and I was like, I literally have his shit in my cabinets.

Oh. You probably don't, but it's a little woo.

Oh. That only put like growing up in the same neighborhood as Paul Bragg only put more of an emphasis on Jim's fascination because Paul Bragg actually became very well known over the years as kind of like an alternative health food advocate.

OK. And he believed he had like these wild beliefs for back then that in order to lead a healthy lifestyle, which it's going to sound funny now because these are things that I think a lot of people kind of implement into their lives now.

Fasting. Like I know a lot of people are into intermittent fasting.

He was all about that. He was about no meat, like avoiding meat and having a regular exercise routine.

Yeah. Which we're not saying any of these things are things you should do or not or not do.

No, I literally don't have a regular exercise routine and I never fast.

Yeah. Do what you want to do. And talk to a doctor first.

So he was also one of the first people to make juicing popular.

And eventually he would go on to have his own brand.

And it all started with apple cider vinegar.

Bragg's apple cider vinegar. Oh, OK. He thought that it had like really revitalizing ingredients that would promote a healthy gut and had all these other like health benefits.

People love an apple cider vinegar moment.

They do. I don't know a lot about apple cider vinegar, but I do know that it helps with my heartburn.

And then I realized that the soy sauce alternative that I use is actually Bragg's brand.

Oh, that's funny. Just sitting in my cabinet this whole time.

That's wild. It's called Liquid Aminos. But he was also one of the first people to open a health food store.

I think it was opened in 1912. Wow. It was kind of like a Whole Foods Trader Joe's kind of place.

But anyway... Paul became a really big part of Jim's life and he really became like a father figure because remember his father just up and left.

So they would go hiking together all the time and they'd, you know, Paul was talking to Jim about this like alternative health lifestyle and Jim was already interested.

So I think that kind of planted the seed early on.

Yeah. And I think it's where a lot of Jim Baker's foundation came from.

And he would later take his conversations with Paul Bragg and other people and different things he learned through his own studies of health and wellness to open his own health food stores and restaurants.

But he had a few things to do before he got there.

So when he was 12 years old, he was apparently named America's Strongest Boy.

Oh, just casual. That's a thing? I don't know if it still is anymore.

I don't know if you can sign your boy up for that.

Sign your boy up. Sign your boys up for the America's Strongest Boy contest.

What's the age range there? Great question.

I didn't look too much into it because I was just like, wow, cool.

I'm good knowing just that amount of information.

I'm glad. He took that though. He took that title and ran with it.

Hell yeah. Because as he was growing up, he was like really active.

He took archery lessons. He played different kinds of sports.

But the main thing that really spoke to Jim was judo.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. Of course. Um, it's unclear where exactly his mother worked.

I really tried to figure out where she was working and I couldn't, but she was said to have worked with an inmate.

So I'm assuming like some kind of like prison system.

Um, and this inmate was a judo master before he became incarcerated.

And this judo master was the one to teach Jim all about it.

Okay. And then Jim basically became a judo master.

Wow. Like through the teachings of this man.

It's very karate kid. Very, very wax on wax off. oh my God, I wanted to write that.

And then I was like, is that too silly? No, never.

Never. So once he became somewhat of his own judo master, Jim, he either enlisted or he was drafted into the Marines just in time for the start of World War II.

Oof. And he was in the front lines. Like, he saw hand-to-hand combat, they said.

And he was said to bring home a silver star for his courageous behavior after a ship that he was on was attacked.

I will point out that his name doesn't appear on the list of men who did bring home silver stars over the years.

So the thing about Jim is, like... He becomes a cult leader.

Spoiler alert. So he's a tall tale teller.

He's a tall tale teller. And then all over the years, like his followers have heard these stories and it's like a game of telephone.

Of course. You don't really know what's true and what's not all the time.

That's a requirement for being a cult leader.

Absolutely. Sorry if you just heard my chair squeak.

I had to readjust. But so, yeah, I didn't see his name on that list.

But if you do watch the documentary, the source family documentary, they flashed this newspaper headline and I paused and unpaused a million times so I could read it.

And basically it said that Jim was aboard the ship called the Chicago and it was attacked.

And he seemed to like fight off the enemy.

And then the ship that he was on sunk and he floated in the water for hours, I guess, waiting to be picked up.

And that was all while he was still in training.

Wow. Allegedly. So he has a time in the war.

He does some wild, crazy stuff. And then he comes home and he gets married to this woman named Margaret.

And they have a daughter named Peggy. And Jim is trying to adjust to family life.

And he opens up a fitness center that he named after himself.

It was called Baker's Gym. But that really only lasted a short while because a main theme in this story is that Jim was always looking for his purpose, right?

He never felt like he was fulfilling his purpose.

So he was like, I don't know. I feel like there's more out there for me.

So he kind of like William Desmond Taylors it and abandons his wife and child to go find what's out there for him.

So he's a shithead. Yeah, exactly. I also love that he did Baker's Gym because his name is Jim Baker.

Yeah, yeah. That is fun. It's also like, would you go to Baker's Gym?

No. Do they have cookies there? Probably not.

I hope so. It's like when Planet Fitness used to give out the free pizza, and I'd be like, isn't this kind of counterintuitive?

But it's like, no, fuel up. I love pizza.

Fuel up for your workout. I would go for the free pizza all the time, and then I'd be like, oh, I'm going to hop on this machine for four minutes.

Bye. Yeah, there you go. You did a workout.

Yeah, four minutes is great. It's more than zero.

It's more than I'm doing right now, so. You moved your shoulders.

That's exercise. There you go. So he ends up, so he leaves.

He abandons his family, his young baby child.

It's fun. And he ends up where everybody goes when they're trying to find themselves.

Say it with me. California. Yeah, it worked out.

We were on the same page. We were there.

As soon as it counts, like, whoops, you saved the whole state.

I forgot. Okay. That really worked out.

So he tried acting for a bit, obviously.

Of course, that's what you do when you abandon your family.

Always got to go for the acting. He screen tested for the role as Tarzan, but he didn't make the cut.

I think this was before he grew all or was before he grew all of his hair.

So I guess I get it. He didn't have a long flowing mane and have the mane.

That's not Tarzan brand. No way. So he was like, all right, that didn't work out.

So then he was like, you know what I'll do?

I think I want to become a stuntman. Yeah.

So he tried his hand at that. Unclear, really, how that turned out.

It doesn't seem like too much came of it, though.

And there was still more that Jim felt like he should be doing.

Yeah. He didn't know what it was, but he was like, like, none of this is right.

It doesn't feel right. So while he's trying to figure out his life's purpose, he opens up a sandal shop. okay that's the obvious next step in your life's journey he was like uh good with leather like he was like a leather worker so i think it was okay like how he made the sandals sweet and he starts making sandals for this group called the nature boys i had never heard of the nature boys had you no they're apparently faint like like famous like well known oh so uh jim would like make shoes for them they also would like hang out on the beach because they lived off the land So the Nature Boys, they wore like white robes and sandals.

They only ate fruits and vegetables, and they lived off of like very little money.

Okay. They lived, like I just said, strictly outdoors and all about living off the land.

So one of the Nature Boys, one of the very first, his name was Eben Abez, and he wrote the song Nature Boy that Nat King Cole later made famous.

Oh, okay. It's actually like a really beautiful song.

Yeah. I love it. Just like a little aside about him.

I started reading more about him as soon as I got into this.

One of his main main beliefs was to give love and receive love is the greatest gift that one could ever get or give in life.

Yeah. Just ask Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge.

Oh, my God. When they play Nature Boy and they and he says that exact thing.

I haven't seen that movie in so long and now I want to watch it.

He says to love and be loved is the greatest thing of all.

It is. And that's what Eben said. Eben said it too.

He did also believe that no human should capitalize the first letter in their name or like their last name, like no capital letters in your name because God and infinity were the only two things that were worthy of that much honor.

I'm glad you explained that because my next question was going to be like, why though?

Yeah, because you're not worthy of that.

I mean, I'm doing it. Well, I don't know if you're worthy.

Sorry. I don't know. I mean, I'm also doing that.

Yeah. I'm going to continue to. You should.

Yeah. I like it. So all that to say that Jim would really start to think a bit more about his conversations with the nature boys and then think back to his conversations with Paul.

And I think the holistic, natural way of life really, really started speaking to him because he's getting older now.

He's like nearing his 30s. Yeah. So by the time he's decided to act on those beliefs by opening his very own natural food restaurant, he had met and married another woman.

I love, by the way, that you said he's getting older now, nearing his 30s.

Like, any 20-year-old is old. Like, that was wild.

I'm really sorry. You're like, he was like 27.

Like it? I feel very old. I'm not, but I feel it.

Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just, that was wild.

How dare you? Well, I did insult you a little bit.

So like, I do apologize. I do apologize.

Elder millennials. It's okay. I feel fine about it.

I can't wait to turn 30. Turning 30 is great.

I think you figure a lot out in your 30s.

I think that I'm like approaching it a little sooner than like I would because I got you.

Yeah, your 30s is definitely when you're like, oh, that's how things work.

Okay. Yeah, I'm starting to feel that way.

Yeah. But yeah, so he's old and he's an old 20 year old.

He meets another woman. He marries her. Her name is Elaine.

Beautiful name. And so he does all that.

And also by the time he opened his restaurant, he had killed a man.

Oh, yeah. You heard that right. We went from like a lot of peace, love, health, hippie ideals.

And then we just went straight up murder.

That came out of nowhere. Was it murder, though, Elena?

Or was it self-defense? You decide. I don't know.

I wasn't there. Well, you weren't there.

But also, I'm going to tell you about it.

So maybe you can make an inference. Cool.

All right, cool. I love the word inference.

That's a great word. So the year was 1955, and he's 33.

Yeah. So 33-year-old Jim Baker was living in Topanga Canyon.

Topanga. Thank you. You're welcome. He had a neighbor that he was friendly enough with.

This guy's name was Edward A. Bollinger, I believe.

Edward was a mechanic, and Edward had a dog named Candy.

Yep. I love that. I was like, yep, he did.

Correct. But he had run into a bit of trouble with the law.

It seems like he was driving with a suspended license.

I don't know. He was. I don't know if there were like previous charges that basically he had to go to jail.

He was going to be spending some time in the big house.

Oh, no. And because of that, he was like, I'm going to be gone.

But like, I can't bring candy with me. Obviously, they do not let you bring your puppy to jail.

No. So he said, hey, Jim, would you mind watching candy while I'm gone?

Like, would you take her in? And Jim's like, yeah, no problem.

He takes the dog in. Edward heads off to jail.

I think it was a short stint because he, you know, hadn't killed anybody.

Yeah. But when he gets back, he's fucking pissed at Jim.

Oh, no. Because he finds out that Jim wasn't letting Candy stay inside at night.

Oh, no. He was, like, keeping her tied up outside, which I know some people do, you know.

No judgment. No. But Edward had judgment.

It was his dog, so he can. Exactly. He was pissed.

He was like, what the fuck? So this big fight ensues and Edward ends up dead.

Oh, no. And the way that Jim later explained it, he said...

He explained to the San Bernardino County Sun, that newspaper, what happened.

He said, Edward was, quote, incensed and kept screaming at me.

Suddenly, he spun around and I caught a glimpse of metal.

Without even thinking, I grabbed his arm in a judo hold and hurled him over a 20-foot embankment.

What? He survived. He still had his knife in his hand when he started to get up again.

I leaped at him and used another judo hold.

I meant to disarm him, not to kill him. So that's what he says happened.

And when the police arrived on scene, they did find Edward's body right next to an eight inch hunting knife.

And Jim's wife, Elaine, was there. She corroborated the story, Jim's story.

So he ends up getting off of murder charges and the attack was attributed to self-defense.

Oh, my. So he has killed one man. Oh, man.

Yeah. Now, I found a couple of interesting tidbits in that San Bernardino County Sun article, too.

One of which was Jim explaining to the interviewer that his father was a Chicago detective who was killed by gangsters.

Literally any other source I could find about his father said that he just left when Jim was still a baby.

So I think that was a little fib. That was a little cult leader moment.

Yeah, I think he was just embellishing. And then the other tidbit is almost like a little bit of foreshadowing for something later in the story.

So I'm just going to tell you right now and you can hold on to it.

You can... Put it in your back pocket. Woo!

The article mentions that Jim won a world judo championship in 1948 against opponent Wild Bill Zim of Argentina.

Wow. Like, how could I not tell you that?

Yeah, you got to tell us that. He wins the championship against wild Bills.

You win anything against a wild Bill or a wild anything for that matter.

A wild Thornberry. You've you've earned it.

Yeah. But he so he wins that. And he says, quote, However, that was my last match.

I collapsed with a broken back right after the match.

Oh, I was hospitalized for more than six months from the injury.

It's a very deadly weapon referring to judo.

But now I wish I had never heard of it. Oh.

You heard it here first. That was certainly not Jim's last judo match.

And it's very interesting that he broke his back at one point in his life.

That is very interesting. He'll come back later.

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So with all that, you know, murder for now behind Jim, he decided that he was going to focus on making improvements to his life.

Yeah, of course. He and his wife decided together that they were going to open a restaurant and that it was going to be one of the first of its kind in the California area.

So their plan was to serve like super organic, whole foods, very health conscious.

And they decided that they were going to name the place the Aware Inn.

Cool. Was he going to invite his old family to come?

Yeah, I don't think so. No? No. Just checking.

I think Peggy and Margaret said, fuck you.

Would decline that invitation. Yeah, I think they were like, I'm good.

We're going to go eat cheeseburgers together because you left us and that's comfort food.

Fuck that. The original Aware Inn opened up in 1957 at 8828 Sunset Boulevard.

And there were like quotes painted on the walls that said things like, food should be selected with confidence, eaten with pleasure and digested with ease.

Yeah, like so motivational. And from the start, actually, the Aware Inn was a huge success.

A lot of celebrities were going there to order carrot juice, hoping that it would restore their youth or something.

For sure. And there's a misconception that the Aware Inn only served vegetarian food.

They didn't. They served meat. There were dishes like burgers, beef stroganoff, things like that.

So they had a little bit of everything, but it was a health conscious way of doing it.

Okay. in their opinion uh so with the aware in becoming so popular so quickly and with the business bringing in a really good amount of money the baker said you know what let's open a similar restaurant down the street a little bit and they opened up this restaurant and it was called the old world i like the names i do like yeah there was that one there ended up being another one called the discovery and like they're just like fun they're pretty good at like those like adventurey Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So this restaurant, The Old World, had pretty much all the same values that the Aware Inn had, just with like a slightly different menu.

And it was a little farther down Sunset Boulevard.

All was well and fine. Business was booming.

The bakers even had a couple of kids by now.

I think they had two. But Jim still wasn't satisfied.

Yeah. He can't get no satisfaction. No, he can't.

Now, it appears during this time he had at least two affairs on his wife.

The first that we're going to talk about actually ended up with Jim killing another man.

Oh. Yeah. So one of the actresses that frequented his restaurants and hung out on the beach with him from time to time was Jean Ingram.

Okay. She's best known for movies throughout the early 60s.

I don't know if any of these sound familiar to you or anybody listening.

She was in Three Came to Kill in 1960, Burke's Law in 1963, and Sergeant Deadhead in 1965.

Oh, that sounds familiar. The last one sounded familiar to me as well.

But back to 1963 for a second, because that is when Jim actually killed Jean's estranged husband over his restaurant, The Aware Inn.

Wow. Yeah, wonderful, huh? Okay. So from the sounds of the setup, there was an apartment above the restaurant.

And on January 29th, 1963, Jean's husband, Robert, showed up while Jim was at his apartment.

And Robert demands that Jim shows him where Jean is hiding.

He's like, I know she's in here. I know what's going on between the two of you.

You have fought. Like, let me know. Let me not tell you the whole thing right away.

Jean honestly very well could have been coming and going to that apartment.

And I don't doubt that Robert probably did see her venture into there at some point.

But on that particular day, she was not there.

So they had actually been together, Jim and Jean, the day before.

And Robert ran into them. And allegedly the day before, he had threatened to kill Jim when he saw him next.

He said, the next time I see you... shit's going down yeah he said i know gene's messing around on me i know you're the the guy and i'm literally gonna kill you he said one of these days when you least expect it i'm gonna put a bullet through you oh boy according to jim this is messy it's so messy So the next day, when Jim told Robert that Jean was not hiding anywhere in his apartment, Robert did not believe him.

So Robert pulls out a gun and he says, you have five seconds to produce her or I'm going to make good on my promise from yesterday.

And according to Jim, that is when he personally lost it.

He would later tell reporters and the police that he had a horrible temper and that as soon as Robert pulled out the gun, he, quote, knew he was going to kill him one way or the other.

Okay, well, that's pretty damning. That's called malice of forethought, Jim.

Yeah, it certainly is. So he later elaborated on the temper thing, saying, I have a horrible temper, and it doesn't come up very often.

But when it does, I just go berserk. Oh, no.

I'm like, that's not good. You should talk to someone about that.

Maybe we should look at that self-defense thing a little harder.

Yeah. Yeah, probably. I'm like, you literally hurled a man over a 20-foot embankment.

Was that the berserk you were referencing?

Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, self-defense, huh?

So when he later recalled the events, he said that Robert Flash the Gun got him, after Robert Flash the Gun, excuse me, Jim got him in some kind of judo hold, of course.

The judo holds. He loves a good judo hold.

And the two of them ended up on the ground at one point and started wrestling.

Now, when Jim had the upper hand, like when Robert was below him... jim said that he used two judo chops to robert's neck as a way to disarm him um i guess that i've never wrestled a gun out of anybody's hands before but like why wouldn't you judo chop his arm versus anything else yeah like if you judo chop his arm my thought is like his hand will kind of raise and like the gun will fall at least like hurt and he might loosen his grip right like i don't know why you need to judo chop his throat but you know i wasn't there and i don't know how to judo chop anything me neither so yeah once jim got the gun he got the gun after he judo chopped him in the throat and he shot robert in the head geez he would first say that he shot from about three feet away he said he was like further across the room um the coroner said no no i disagree sir it was more like three inches away oh close range that is a big difference Now, so that's what the coroner said.

And then the coroner also said he couldn't determine what had actually killed Robert.

It could have been the gunshot wound to the head, but it also could have been the fact that when Jim judo chopped Robert to the throat, he crushed his windpipe.

Oh, my God. I have to take a deep breath just saying.

I would go out on a limb and say that was probably going to be the cause of death if the gunshot wound didn't happen.

That's the thing. Exactly. Damn. Crushed his windpipe.

He's like, that's not disarming someone.

No. That's killing someone. Murdering someone.

Yeah. And here's the thing. Jim tries to say that this is self-defense.

No. Which... Maybe it started off that way.

But then you literally just told us as soon as things started, you knew you were going to kill him one way or the other.

Yeah, and that's not self-defense. Right.

It's not I knew I was going to incapacitate him or I knew I was going to disarm him.

Right. No, you said you wanted to kill him.

Exactly. It doesn't make any sense to me.

Come on, Jim. So his trial begins pretty quickly.

Interestingly enough, I don't know how often this happens.

I thought that juries had to be like closer to even between men and women.

His jury was made up of 11 women and one man.

Oh, wow. That's crazy. Yeah, isn't that kind of crazy?

Just like an interesting fun fact. So he explains to this jury that his relationship with Jean was simply platonic and that the murder of Robert Ingram was in fact, you guessed it, self-defense.

Of course. He did admit, he said, yep, Jean and I actually did kiss on one occasion, which just so happened to be the one time where Robert caught us.

Oh. Yeah, that's so coincidental. So crazy.

And he said that's when Robert's jealous obsession began.

Yeah. I would argue that, like, many people might become jealous and obsessed with you if you kiss their wives.

Yeah. I don't think you should do that. Yeah, I don't think you should do that.

No. No. But he did tell the jury that Jean was not the type of girl to enter a love affair so callously.

Oh. He said, she's not that kind of gal.

No. And Jean was actually called to testify for the defense.

And she told them that she and Robert had actually been separated for the last two years and that at the beginning of that separation or shortly into it, they had made the agreement to function as though they were divorced.

Oh. But I'm like, that's you saying that.

Yeah. I don't know. He's not here to say whether or not that's the case.

Exactly. And she, according to her, Robert didn't take that separation lightly, which doesn't sound like it.

How could you? You know, that's sad. That's a bummer.

So she said, though, that he not only threatened to kill Jim, but also he had threatened to kill her on many occasions and any man that she ever went on to date.

She echoed Jim's same explanation. That's very possessive.

She echoed Jim's same explanation of their relationship.

She said they were not romantically involved and that their relationship, Elena, was more of a spiritual attraction.

Oh, boy. She said their conversations consisted of philosophy, religion, nature.

Yeah. We just love to talk about the world, man.

Oh, for sure. Peace. That's what I saw. Honestly, I feel like that's like my essence.

I was going to say you love this. I do. Yeah.

Yeah. So moving on, though, Jim's wife actually stuck by him throughout the trial and also believed that there was like nothing going on between him and Gene.

And mind you, they still have children at this point.

So this poor woman had to go through a trial that was basically like, is this guy having an affair?

And is that why he murdered this actress's fucking wife?

And they did smooch once and he's going to admit it in court and you have to sit there and hear it.

This is bad. Like that sucks. Bad news bears.

That really sucks. So I give her a lot of credit for sticking by him.

For sure. So on July 3rd, 1963, just one day before Jim's 41st birthday, he was sentenced to, I don't know why, I just thought that I said sentenced wrong.

You did not. He was sentenced to spend one to ten years in prison after he was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

Damn. It's only one to ten. It's like, Jesus.

Isn't that insane? Oh, just wait. Oh, God.

And, you know, I really don't think his comment about making up his mind that he was going to kill Robert one way or the other didn't, you know, I don't think it helped the self defense thing.

No, I don't think that helped at all. Now, even still, his lawyer, Maurice Harwick, immediately filed an appeal saying that Jim hadn't received a fair trial.

I don't know on what grounds he was trying to say that he didn't, because I just saw this in newspapers.com that he was like, I'm filing an appeal.

Yeah, they always try. Yeah. But the Honorable Kurtz Kaufman, what a fucking name.

Kurtz Kaufman. Kurtz Kaufman. And it's Kurtz with a Z at the end.

Oh, yeah, it is. That's how I saw it in my head.

Better be. He disagreed. He was like, I don't think so.

And like, your appeal can go fuck itself.

He denied it. So... Jim gets led away to go to prison and his wife is standing there crying and she's able to give him a kiss before they take him away.

And she yells after him, like, if you need me to do anything, you just call me, which is so sad.

I feel really bad for her. I do, too. Now, ultimately, Jim did not end up spending that much time in jail because he did appeal his sentence again.

And this time he won. I don't know on what grounds he appealed it.

I couldn't figure it out. But he ended up only spending its sources vary on how long he spent in jail from or how long he spent in jail, excuse me, from one to five months.

OK, but a matter of literally nothing. It's a sneeze.

It's essentially a matter of days, really, when you look at it.

So Jim stayed quiet for a bit after he got out of prison.

But then right around 1965, so about three, two, yep, three.

No, I don't know. A couple of years after he got out of jail is kind of right when like the hippie movement was starting to become a thing.

Like it was really starting to become more mainstream.

Yeah. And he meets this young hippie chick named Dora.

He's 43 when they meet, and she's 19. It's legal, but Jim, you're supposed to be staying out of trouble.

I don't know if hooking up with a 19-year-old is the best bet for you.

Yeah, I'm just going to stay over here. You have a wife and children.

Yep, there's that. You probably shouldn't be hanging out with 19-year-olds.

Can you imagine if your 43-year-old husband came home one day and was like, I met this 19-year-old hippie?

I didn't even say John. I'm just like, imagine another alternate universe.

Yeah, another alternate man. I could not imagine.

She's also from France, so she's like, cool.

I'd be like, who's this young French girl that you're hanging out with?

Yeah, I'm going to stay quiet over here about what I do.

Oh, I know. Castration. I'm totally kidding.

So Dora was from France. Like I said, she was fully immersed in the hippie lifestyle.

She was doing loads of acid, smoking tons of pot, experimenting with other drugs that I don't really think people realized back then would lead to some serious fucking issues.

Yeah. And looking back on the time that he met Dora, Jim said he had plenty of money because the restaurants were still doing well.

But even though he had all that success and fortune, he was still absolutely miserable.

He started drinking really heavily. And he said by the time he met her, he was an alcoholic who was bored of everything.

But that all changed when he met her. He was like, oh, this is exciting.

Like, I want to hang out with you. Now, it's unclear whether or not he was separated from his wife at this point in time.

I don't think they were separated. And I think this might have been a big tipping point in their relationship.

He's so annoying. He's the most annoying.

Because, listen, I'm all about finding yourself.

Like, I feel like I'm kind of finding myself a little bit right now.

I'm 26 and I don't have children. That's the thing.

Stop producing children and getting married if you're not sure of yourself.

Yeah, you're like you already abandoned one family and now you're on your way to abandon another.

And there's children, like you just said, involved in these scenarios.

I feel like you're always finding yourself in some way.

Right. But like he's doing in such destructive ways and hurting everybody around him and like pulling his family that he's creating together.

Into these situations. And it's like, dude, fuck off into the desert and do it by yourself.

But stop having kids and stop getting married.

Like, this guy's so fucking annoying. I just want to like, oh, he gets increasingly more annoying as the story goes on.

Your scowl is going to turn into a scowl.

Yeah, I'm just like, ugh. Like, every time you bring—he just brings this 19-year-old and is like, yeah, you're just, like, so much fun.

Like, fuck off. And you're for—like, you're having— Sir, you're having a midlife crisis.

Yeah, like, please leave. You've also literally just got let out of jail for killing the second man that you've killed in your lifetime.

I think we should focus on the business.

Yeah, you need to, like—he's consistently having a midlife crisis, and it's really annoying.

Since he was, like, in his 20s. Yeah, and I'm over it now.

Same. I'm over it. And you know who else is over it?

His damn wife. Good. So Dora and Jim, they start spending a lot of time together.

And he said he wanted to know more about these flower children and what they were all about.

Shut up. And he certainly starts finding out rather quickly.

So he starts, remember, he's an alcoholic at this point.

And then he starts smoking pot with Dora and her friends.

And then he makes his way to acid. And then eventually he tries and gets really, really hooked on speed.

And back then, this is like even a different kind of speed because back then, I'm sure you've heard of it.

There was a different form of speed, excuse me, that was known on the street as black beauties.

Yep. Instead of just the powder that people would inhale nasally most of the time, Black Beauty's were a pill taken orally that would give you the same effects or even deeper effects.

Because the two main ingredients in a Black Beauty pill are amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, both of which are scheduled to controlled substances, meaning they are both extremely, extremely addictive and habit-forming.

Yeah. So I guess their effect essentially creates kind of like a buzz, hence the name speed.

But when they're taken long term, they can lead to some serious psychological side effects like depression, anxiety, aggressive or violent behavior, which Jim already is displaying.

Yeah. And then I bolded these next couple of them. unrealistic ideas of power, confidence, and strength.

And in some cases, the psychological effects could also be hallucinations and complete psychosis.

So this is just like a recipe for a cult leader.

It's the recipe for a cult leader. Unrealistic ideas of power, confidence, hallucinations, and eventually complete psychosis.

Like bake for 20 minutes and let cool on the counter.

Like, you know, I don't know if you know it, but like you people, you know, like the opening scene of the Powerpuff Girls where he's like sprinkling in sugar and spice and all that shit.

No, but that makes sense. They were. That's what they do when they make a cauldron of cult.

There you go. They sprinkle in unrealistic ideas of fucking hallucinations and a heavy dose of confidence.

Yeah. All of it. I literally can't. So yeah, Jim, he was really into black beauties.

And sadly, like I said, he became very addicted.

And then he starts dipping into the restaurant profits to be able to afford more and more of this.

And to make up for the lost money. This is wild that there's not any fucking information on this.

I don't know if it's true. I don't know if it's not true.

He would later say that to make up for the money he was dipping into from the restaurants, that he robbed between two and 11 banks.

Between 2 and 11? It was about 2. It was kind of like 11.

Like, could have been 3, could have been 8.

Between 68 and 412. Vastly different numbers, my dude.

What? What? I mean, he was on speed, so, like, I guess I understand why you can't create a timeline.

That's wild. I'm also like, were there a lot of banks being robbed at this point?

Yeah, like, was this reported? Yeah. No, no, but nothing that I could find.

Okay. Yeah. Um, he was never caught, so I don't know if it's true or not, but he sure talked about it a lot.

And it's one of the first things in that documentary that you'll hear either way though, the investors in the restaurants were like, yeah, you need to fucking stop doing this because, um, we're not making any money.

You can't just keep robbing banks about it if that's even what you're doing.

So they're like, yeah, we're going to cut you out of all of this.

Like you're done. You're done. You're done.

You're done. And they basically pushed him out of the restaurants to save them.

Good. They told that they told him to fuck off into the desert.

They certainly did. So Elaine would go on to run the aware in for the next some odd years.

Good for her. She and Jim officially divorced in 1969.

Good for her. She said, I'm going into the 70s and you're not invited.

Yeah, I'm not bringing you into the 70s with me.

No, no, no. No way. So, yeah, he's literally completely, like, moved on now.

Just abandons that entire family. Cool. You're the worst.

Yeah. Like, even William Desmond Taylor only abandoned one family.

That's a joke. That is a joke, in case it was not clear.

That is a joke. You've pressed an incorrect button.

So in the time between meeting Dora and getting divorced, Jim dove headfirst into a life that, like I've said, he seemed to be curious about since he was younger.

Dora introduced him into the world of yoga.

And it seems like at some point he kind of got off the hard shit.

I'm not sure. He definitely still smoked weed.

I'm sure he did some acid about it. So, like, I don't know.

He was doing a little bit better. But again, he abandoned another family.

So how good is he really doing? Yeah. But again, he's really getting into the study of different religions.

Uh-oh. So you see where we're headed. It's like normal people when you want to study that stuff.

Like, sure. Yeah. This guy. I don't know.

We're on a path. We are on a freaking path.

And he's getting more and more into like mysticism.

Like, did I say that right? Yeah. Go ahead.

Good. Good. And he gets the itch. He's like, you know what?

I've been cut out of all of these restaurants.

So he gets the itch to open another restaurant.

And this is the wildest story. And this is reported the same in many different sources.

So I think this happened. Oh, man. So one day he meets this guy on a hike and he's talking to this guy.

He's like, I got all these great ideas for this new restaurant I want to open.

I have a ton of experience as a restaurant owner.

You might have heard of me like for my other restaurants.

And he like left out the part where he got cut out of those deals.

Yeah. Um, and he said, I learned a lot over the years about cooking and about the body and how it breaks down food.

And I really want to take that wisdom and open up a new restaurant.

That's going to incorporate the values of healthy eating wellness, and also the secret teachings of Jesus Christ as revealed through the essence gospel or the scene gospels of peace.

Okay. Um, it's, it's a restaurant. I love a cool vibe in a restaurant.

I love different lighting. I love when the walls are a cool color.

I don't know if you need to think this deeply into it.

Yeah, I mean, you're going to have a certain clientele.

You're going to limit your clientele a little bit by really... only focusing on that but yeah but you know like that's on you man go off jim you have not been killing it so far so this does not shock me that you are already narrowing down that customer base right from the jump I think a lot of times when you're stuck in this kind of like loop of frustration, you really start to focus on problems and like everything that's going wrong instead of what you can do to fix it, aka a solution.

I've been there before. I've been like, I really hate this person.

I don't want to be around them. I'm just, I hate it.

Oh my God. But like, what was I going to do about it?

I went to therapy. That's what I did. It can be tough to train your brain to stay in problem solving mode when you're faced with a challenge or multiple challenges in life.

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That's betterhelp.com slash morbid. The thing is, I'm confused about the whole like secret teachings of Jesus Christ part of it, because that really, I don't think that became a huge part of the restaurant at all.

Well, it was a secret. Yeah, yeah, you're right.

So maybe you didn't hear about it. Maybe it was like just secret ingredients.

Yeah, it's like the secret teachings. You don't know about it.

I don't. I don't need to. So this guy that he's on the hike with just fucking shooting the shit.

His name is Ray Feldman. Excuse me. He's like, I think you're the bee's niece.

I think you're even the cat's pajamas. And you know what?

I want to invest in your restaurant. Sounds like a great opportunity.

He's like, I also want to mix chicken bolognese with the secret teachings of Jesus Christ.

Don't we all? Yes. My favorite part of the entire exchange is that this restaurant literally didn't even exist yet.

And he's like, I want to invest in that.

And he's like, take my money. Like, wow.

Talk about a startup. Wow. So I don't know if it happened on the trail or like when they made their way back down, but he just hands this man a $35,000 loan.

Oh, this is a cult leader. Right? He's a cult leader already.

He just got somebody to hand him $35,000 with just the idea of a restaurant that mixes food and religion.

Yeah, and like hippie ideals. What? And just, you know, I did the conversion.

$35,000 back then. This is like 1969. Today, that would be like handing somebody $300,000.

Wow. Sir. That's a lot. That's cult leadership.

That's the thing. He was said to be super, super charismatic.

Yeah, he has to be. Obviously. Charismatic.

I know. I said that super weird. So with that, the source was born.

All right, let's go. The source restaurant.

So the source had a very, I'm sure you're shocked to hear it, hippie feel to it.

What? Unlike the restaurants that he'd opened with his ex-wife, the source was 100% vegetarian.

Apparently the salads were really to die for.

I did look at the menu and some of it looks absolutely fucking delicious.

Get out of here. They had like a secret sauce, too.

Yeah, I'm sure they did. I wonder what was in that shit.

A lot of secrets up in here. It's so big.

It's full of secrets. Yeah, anytime there's too many secrets in a restaurant, I don't want to be a part of it.

But fucking get this, dude. This restaurant, like he's really good at opening a restaurant.

I don't know what it is. Like he knows. He knows what makes people tick.

And it started getting a very notable clientele.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were like obsessed with this place.

They were frequent flyers. Makes sense. I'm not shocked at all.

Goldie Hawn loved it there. Joni Mitchell, Marlon Brando, Greta Gabo.

Wow. All these people are frequenting this restaurant.

It also was actually featured in the movie Annie Hall.

I've never seen that movie. But Alvy orders at the restaurant alfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast.

Oh, that's weird. Mm-mm-mm. So the thing is, though, the celebrities were not the only people stopping by.

The source really ended up being kind of like this hot spot in town for a lot of like lost younger kids and their pre and early teens to just hang out.

And Jim was given jobs to the youth. The youths, excuse me.

There's just something about him again, like with all call leaders, something about him that just felt really comforting to them.

And by this time he had started dressing exclusively in like white robes from head to toe.

You know? Yeah, of course. Of course. He's a cult leader.

He's been a cult leader his whole life. He very much is.

I've been waiting. He was born with a robe on.

I was just waiting for it to come out. That's the thing.

A lot of times, too, he'd wear like kind of like a really long tunic style top and like loose white pants.

Just, you know, very cult leader chic. You have to dress the part.

No, but the weird thing is like he like you look like a cult leader, sir.

But I don't think the younger people hanging around the source really got the impression that this is what he was going to become.

What many people say is that he became like more of a father figure to these kids because they are young and impressionable.

Well, and it's good that he was fathering somebody.

Yeah, not his own kids. Yeah. We'll get to that.

But a lot of these kids, I think, were lacking this at home because you have to think this is like the late 60s, early 70s.

I think during that period, most dads weren't super mushy, gushy with their kids.

There was a lot of untreated PTSD going on from the war years, a lot of stress because of the general shape of the world at this point.

And I think it wasn't considered manly to be home and hanging out with your kids on that time.

Shitty, but that's how it kind of was. And this is exactly what you need to start a cult.

It's people in a vulnerable. They're going to listen.

They're going to be gullible. They're going to be looking for love.

They're going to be looking for attention.

They're going to be looking for some kind of comfort.

It's the perfect source. It is. And of course, I just want to note that, like, I'm generalizing there.

I'm sure your dad from the 70s was fucking awesome.

I'm sure your dad fucking ruled in the 70s.

I mean, my grandpa ruled in the 70s. It's true.

So there's that. My dad was just like born in the 70s, I think.

So he was ruling. He was ruling. But all these preteens and teens, they start hanging out at the source.

And Jim is teaching them all about spiritualism and wellness.

And he starts teaching yoga classes. And the kids are just kind of not leaving.

They're getting jobs there. And then they're kind of like... like moving in sleeping in the apartments above the restaurant setting up camp outside living and working at the source 24 7 with jim serving as a zaddy wow so around this time again still 1969 jim meets another young woman and her name is robin and oh my god she is absolutely fucking stunning if you see a picture of her like retroactively i want to be like what What the fuck are you doing?

Yeah. You have the world at your fingertips, Robin.

Get out of here, Robin. I also was just thinking, when you said the source and you started talking about preteens and everything, I was like, what am I thinking of?

The Boy Meets World episode when John joins the center.

This sounds exactly like that. I think it's probably based off of this loosely.

I was going to say, it feels like this might be based on it.

I need somebody to go through our episodes and listen how many times we have referenced that one specific episode.

Oh, yeah. It's iconic. I love that episode.

I also, um, which is off topic. I also recently watched the Thanksgiving episode.

That'll change. That's a great one. You know, like the one with like where Sean's family joins Corey's family.

Of course. But love the one with the center when Mr. Hunter, or excuse me, when Mr. Matthews.

Yes. pushes him against the wall and the best wow and then when i know i was he became a zaddy when mr feeney says you can't have sean i was like oh mr it's it's a lot that's a great episode it is it's a great episode boys meets world boys boys boy boy only cory singular boy meets world honestly it should have been boys though because it was cory sean and eric yeah but it's really just it's following cory yes yes yes but i lost my train of thought it was just a great show but anyways you're right very very similar to the center so he meets gorgeous gorgeous robin and i it's honestly unclear what happens to dora i don't know if she just kind of faded off in an acid trip or like what happened but she was gone She got out of here.

And Jim really sets his eyes on Robin. And he keeps telling her, like, you got to come by.

You got to take one of my yoga classes. Because by now, again, he's teaching regular night yoga classes at the source once the restaurant's, like, closed for the day.

Yeah, of course. So Robin didn't really seem interested at first and she kept brushing off the invitations.

And to be fair, Jim really loves 19 year olds.

Robin's also 19. Jim needs to go away. He needs to go far, far away.

She's 19 years old at this point. And she's like, why is this like old man trying so hard to take for me to take his yoga class?

Like, this is kind of weird. Get out of there.

But finally, one night, she's like, you know what?

Let me just go see what this is all about.

Like, I do like the source restaurant. I'll like, sure, I'll take a yoga class.

Like, she's into the hippie ideals. And this night was Friday, August 8th, 1969.

A date that might sound familiar to some regarding another cult.

Hmm. So Robin blows off plans with her friend Sharon and heads to the source to see what Jim's yoga classes are all about.

Now, she loved the class. She thought it was awesome.

And the two of them start talking after class and they actually, it was like this sudden like switch, like they really start to hit it off. again there's just something about jim people couldn't put their finger on it but he's got this charm he's got this charisma he knows how to talk and as she was leaving that night robin was like i kind of like i feel like there was like a reason i was supposed to meet jim and the next morning that feeling would overwhelm her entire being because the next morning robin's friend sharon that she had canceled plans with that previous night was found murdered in her home wow sharon tate Whoa.

Had she gone to Sharon's home that night?

Whoa. She would have been killed. Okay. When you said that date, that popped into my head, but I wasn't thinking it was going to connect in any way.

I thought it was going to be like a, oh, that happened and it made them like form more into a cult kind of thing.

Yeah. I had. Wow. I tried to be like she blew off plans with her friend Sharon.

And I could tell I wasn't. I was not connecting.

Was not. Wow. So she blew off plans that night.

And I didn't realize this in the original.

I want to actually redo the Manson episodes.

I think I could do them a lot better now.

Yeah, that's what we've been doing that with a couple of them just like further into stuff.

I didn't realize the day that Saturday, so he was murdered on a Friday, technically a Saturday because it was like in the early morning hours.

The next day was supposed to be her baby shower.

Oh, I had no idea. I didn't know that either.

Oh, that's awful. I found out like when I was researching this part.

Oh, that's terrible. Awful. But so then like she's already thinking I was supposed to meet Jim and then this happens.

Of course, you're going to line those two events up and be like, no, I was supposed to meet him.

Well, and what a traumatic event that's going to push you further into looking for meaning somewhere.

Exactly. Here's the meeting. I was supposed to meet him.

Exactly. Yeah. So everything shifted for Robin in that moment.

Like you just said, losing a friend and coming to terms with the fact that she could have been killed, it only made her lean closer into Jim.

And pretty quickly, the two of them started falling in love.

Now, Robin later recalled that she said, I'd never been loved the way that Jim loved me.

She called him her knight in shining armor.

She recalled that he really opened up her mind.

She said, he opened me up to a world that was filled with light and love and protection and consciousness.

Okay. And from that day forward, the two of them became inseparable.

And by 1970, they were married. That's what I say about John.

I was like, he just opened me up to a, what was it?

Light, love, protection, and consciousness.

There it is. That's what I say. I always forget.

I always forget what I say. I would say that Drew opened me up to light, love, protection, and consciousness too, actually.

It sounds great. It's beautiful when your man's a cult leader.

That's wonderful. Yeah. And another thing that you should watch the documentary, I don't want to like tell you everything about it.

But one thing I will mention is Robin had been really sick in her childhood.

She was like a very sickly child. And I guess she almost died.

Oh, wow. And Jim obviously gets her on this like holistic kind of venture.

And you know, that can sometimes turn things around.

So she was in like the best health of her life, she felt in that moment.

Yeah. So I think that was like another thing that made her lean into him.

Of course. Now, so they get married and then, you know, Jim loves religion and theology and all this stuff.

So they start talking about that and meditation and yoga and all of it.

And around this time, Jim really starts falling in love with the teachings of Yogi Bhajan.

So Yogi had his own following and he taught Kundalini yoga.

Okay. Which was something that Jim would later use in his own teachings.

Kundalini, I think, is just like all about like energy.

It's like some energy that sits at the base of your spine and the yoga practice brings it throughout your body.

I don't know a lot about it. That's why you toot during yoga, sitting at the base of your spine and it's got to leave.

You're not wrong. Nevermind. But yeah, so he kind of takes that and brings it into his own teachings later on.

And actually Robin and Jim went out to meet Yogi as well as many other prominent spiritual leaders.

And they finally said to each other after meeting with all these different people, potential cult leaders, that they want to start their own religion.

But they're not looking at this as like, we want to start a cult.

They're like, we want to start our own beautiful religion.

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like 100% of the time when you say that, you're looking for a cult.

Yeah. That's just me. I'm going to say that Jim probably was thinking of it more from a cult-like perspective.

I think to Robin, she was like a young hippie.

Oh, yeah. These are like young people that are being, I'm blaming him completely.

She was abused by him. Yeah. He 100% was looking to form a cult.

Absolutely. 100%. I believe he was. The only reason I said that was because I don't think Robin was.

No, I can definitely get behind that. She was just kind of brought in, especially in like a traumatic part of her life.

And 19 years old, you're fucking. I was a wreck.

You don't know it, but you are like at 19 years old.

I was making the worst decisions of my life.

Oh, like I was doing things that now I look back on and I'm like, what the fuck were you doing?

Like I can see why she followed him into the dark because like I was following someone into the dark at 19.

So I can totally understand that. I was a miserable human at 19.

Same. Not not good. But him definitely was looking to start a college.

He's like freaking 47 by this point. Like, what are you doing, Jim?

Starting a cult. Literally. So Robin explained that after carefully studying each religion, she and Jim, she said they cherry picked the best parts of separate religions and they worked them into their own philosophies like many, many cult leaders do.

Exactly. To the kids who never left the source, Jim became their earthly spiritual father.

Of course he did. And Robin became known as Mother Aum.

I love that. Yeah. Jim, who later also became known as Father Yod or Yehoah, said of starting his own religion, I realized I had to do it on my own.

I had to get my own children because I believed that he was prevailing through me and that's what he wanted me to do.

I left, never went back. Jim, you have several children.

You have, I believe, three children. At least three that we know of.

Yeah, there's probably more. What the fuck?

I had to get my own children. Yeah, you have to get your own children.

Oh, my God. Fuck off into the sun. This guy can get fucked.

Yeah, he does. Ew. You're going to be so happy.

No, I shouldn't say you're going to be so happy at the end, but you're going to be like...

You're going to be like, yeah, I'll make that sound.

I'll make sure to do it. You should. So eventually 140 members of the Source family, they become known as the Source family.

Yeah. Move into Jim's home in the Hollywood Hills.

I'm not shocked by this. 140 of them. It was a rented home from the Chandler family who were very famous for owning a ton of newspaper companies and like kind of building and developing a lot of different areas like the San Fernando Valley and the Hollywood Hills.

Now, Harry was the patriarch of that family, but he had died in 1944, and his wife still ran his estate.

And in 1972, she rented out to Jim Baker, or as we will now call him, Father.

Father. And he paid $1,000 a month, which does not sound like a lot if you're renting a one-bedroom somewhere now that is, like, way more than that.

But today, that $1,000 would be like paying $7,087 for rent.

So a pretty penny. Damn. Yeah. And the home was massive.

It was a mansion. It had been built in 1914.

There were 24 rooms inside. There was a guest house outside, eight bedrooms, four bathrooms, a library, a solarium, a huge room.

So solarium sounds cool. I think all a solarium is, is a sunroom.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. It just sounds really cool.

Yeah. I thought it was somewhere where you looked at the stars.

Yeah. I mean, you can. Yeah. Just don't look at the sun.

Yeah, don't do that. No, it also had a huge pool.

It had a four-car garage that father used to store beautiful cars.

The main one that he really loved, his baby car, was a white Rolls Royce.

Wow. Motherfucker. I'm just putting it out there.

If you're natural, holistic, only fill my body with greens and carrot juice and give yourself unto me, your earthly spiritual father who is whipping around a Rolls Royce, you're in a fucking cult.

You're in a fucking cult. Also, if you're co-living with 140 members of a quote unquote family that you're literally not actually related to in a giant house and all of you co-own all of your earthly possessions because you're not supposed to have any of your own but father can, he doesn't subscribe to the co-owning of possessions.

It's a cult. You are so totally officially a cult.

Like, I remember there was a UFO episode we did where it was like, you've been probed.

You've been culted. You are an occult. You're an occult.

That's like, it's just the way it is. He is making you give up all your possessions, but he's whipping you around in a Rolls Royce.

Yeah. And, like, maybe you think that, like, you co-own that Rolls Royce with him.

You don't. Whose name's on the title, baby?

Yeah, that's his. Whose name's on the title?

That's his Rolls. So the New Source family, they didn't yet feel like this was a cult.

And they said it was just like a family of like-minded people.

They had a goal of spreading good throughout the world.

And while they were in this first house, a cult, yes.

While they were in this first house, they started referring to it as the mother house.

Yeah. They started talking amongst themselves while they were spending more and more time at the mother house.

And this is when they decided that they really wanted to unite their ties together.

And they said, what better way to become a real family than have the same last name?

Yeah. So they settled on the surname Aquarian.

Because it was the age of Aquarius. I was just going to say it's the age of Aquarius.

Yes, exactly. I don't know. I tried to look into like what the age of Aquarius is.

And I felt like I was joining a cult a little bit.

I was going to say it's basically when, you know, the Manson family happens.

It's very deep. It's very hard to explain.

It's interesting to look into, but just don't go too far.

Be careful. They decided, yeah, they were going to change their name to Aquarian.

And many of them made their their name changes official with the Social Security Office.

Like they they made this official. Wow. And pretty much all of them changed their own first names to things like orbit, electricity, heaven, harvest moon, and sunflower, et cetera, et cetera.

I like harvest moon. I love harvest moon.

That's pretty metal. I also love that song.

Harvest moon aquarium. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah.

Harvest moon went through some shit. Yeah.

So Father Yod set up a list of 10 commandments to follow, and I got them right here for you.

Also, if anybody sets up a list and says these are the commandments that you are to follow, you're in a cult.

One, obey and live by the teachings of your earthly spiritual father because you're in a cult.

Yeah. Number two, love your earthly spiritual father more than yourself because this is a cult.

Culty cult cult cult. Number three, harm not one of your body parts either by neglect, food, drink, or knife.

That's just a good rule of thumb. Yeah. Four, allow each vibration to complete its own cycle without interference.

You're in a cult. I don't even know what that means.

It's culty. Number five, possess nothing you do not need and share all you have.

C-U-L-T, cults. Also, I'd be like, so who, like, do I get to deem if I need it or not?

No. Because I do be needing my Botox and I do be needing my car and I do be needing a lot of things.

No, you don't because you're in a cult. Share all you have.

Yeah. Number six, the man and his woman are one.

Let nothing separate them. I want you to listen to that one again.

Number six, the man and his woman are one.

Let nothing separate them. Okay, wonderful.

A union. I love it. Maybe Jim should subscribe to his own rule of thought.

I was like, but... We'll get there. But Jim...

Number seven, squander not by creative force and lust, but come together only when three vibrations of the physical, the mental and emotional are in harmony with spiritual love.

You're in a cult. Number eight, each morning, join your vibration with the ascending currents of the universal life energy using the keys that your earthly spiritual father has taught you.

Because I don't know if you've realized this yet, but like you're in a cult.

You're in a cult. Number nine, do every act energetically, intelligently, truthfully, and lovingly.

That's not humanly possible. No. Number 10, when these commandments are mastered, leave the house.

Leave the house of your earthly spiritual father.

Get the fuck out after this. And do the work of your heavenly father.

Oh. No. Okay. You're in a cult. So father also set up a morning routine that was called spiritual boot camp.

Okay. Yeah. Those two things seem like conflicting notions, but let's go.

Boot camp is not spiritual. Let's go. I mean, I've never done a boot camp.

Well, I've done like an exercise boot camp and nothing about it was spiritual.

Well, I was like, I have done the boot camp.

Like, actually. It's really, I haven't done boot camp.

Now, everybody in the family for the spiritual boot camp would wake up at four in the morning and upon waking, they were to take a deep breath.

Ready? And then they were to exhale the word, Yahuwah.

Father told them that this was God's name, Yehoah.

And he was the son of God who went by the same name because he was like equally as good as God.

Oh. So do that. Oh, okay. Then they were to either say aloud or in their head, just like whatever feels good to you that day.

You still have like one or two choices left.

Be still and know I am God. But I thought the other guy was God and I thought that you were the son.

So, like, why do I have to wake up and say that I'm God?

What? I just like, like, be still. I like to wake up and say, where's the fucking coffee?

Yeah. I like to wake up and text Elena coffee question mark.

Yep. I just wake up to my youngest being like, can I go downstairs?

No, she says, can I watch Stinky and Dirty?

Is it morning? Not yet. And she's like, I want to watch Stinky and Dirty!

Yeah, and you're like, oh, good morning.

Stinky and Dirty is a great show. It is.

Now, once they were finished with, you know, their personal moments of I am God and Yahuwah, they were ready for the boot camp of it all.

So they would all file out into the backyard and they would get into the pool.

No matter what the temperature was, you were to get into the pool because, you know, you have to rid your body of all sleep and negativity.

No, I'm out already. Bye. Once that was finished, they had to do an exercise routine that included pull-ups, dips, a little jog, and push-ups on their fingertips.

But why, though? Like, can anybody even... I was just going to say, is that possible?

Apparently. Wow. The routine was referred to as star exercise.

And the whole point was to, quote, tune yourself into the universal energy currents of the morning.

Okay. Meanwhile, the morning universe is like, what the fuck are you all doing?

Like the morning universe is like, I'm not doing that.

And your neighbors are annoyed. Yeah. For me, like I love a good coffee.

I love a breakfast sandwich. And if I'm really feeling one with myself in the universe, some morning affirmations.

There you go. But that's really it. So once the star exercises were completed, they were to take one six second inhale of uh marijuana and this practice seconds don't you feel like that's long i i know everyone always yells at me because i like know nothing about drugs like i'm the worst drug person ever but yeah like i don't that feels like a lot right i smoke a lot of weed and can you count yeah no yeah i haven't even gotten to six yet that's a long inhale as far as i'm concerned whenever i've talked about like smoking weed on the podcast before people are like you don't even know anything that has to do with anything so maybe this is a very normal inhale but it feels real long it feels long to me i also had childhood asthma and i'm a little overweight so like leave me alone But this practice, and the stoner people will love this.

I thought this was really funny. This practice was referred to as the sacred breath.

The sacred breath. Which, like, agreed. So for the most part.

Everybody actually seemed really happy at the motherhouse.

Like, they were happy to do star exercise.

They were real stoked about the sacred breath.

Yeah, sure. I mean, people said, though, like you wake up and you do that crazy routine and then you take this wild, in my opinion, inhale of weed.

There was one guy in the documentary that was like, you don't understand.

Like when you're in that frame of mind and then you get like high, like right after that, you feel like you're tripping balls.

Oh, I'm sure. He was like, I felt like I was on LSD.

I didn't feel like I was high from like weed.

Because it's like a mixture of just like adrenaline and like all the dopamine and all the things.

Yeah. Yeah. And then you're like your body's trying to like chill out from it.

It can't. It's all different things. So you just start tripping and then you go right into like morning meditation and like some crazy shit and like chanting and like all the wild stuff.

So it's a lot. But everybody seemed happy at the motherhouse for the most part.

But there were some run ins with the police from time to time because a lot of underage girls were on that property.

And a lot of them had fathers and mothers that were like, hey, I think they're with the source family and like we're not too cool with that.

So the police were like, yeah, you're going to be in some serious hot water if this keeps happening.

Like you got to get you got to send these girls home.

Yeah. You can't you can do what you want, but you can't do what you want unless they're 18 with underage children.

Precisely. Totally fine, guys. Father has a solution.

It's not to tell them all that they need to go home, however.

He just married off all the underage girls to older boys in the community.

So it's legal because they're married. He is so gross.

He's fucking disgusting. He's so fucking foul.

He's disgusting. Crisis averted, though, am I right?

Yeah, totally. So when this thing happened, a couple or I don't know how many in general, but like some of the family members were concerned that this might be a catalyst to more power moves in the future.

This might be a cult. So I think that's when people started like kind of realizing, but it wasn't a big awakening.

I think it was just like some people left, but it was like not a very big amount.

So those people died. They were on to something because sure enough, there were more power moves to be made.

What is it? What is it? Why is it one of the first things that a cult leader does when he starts to realize all the power he has, especially over the women connected to him?

What does he do? He says, plural marriage rules.

Of course. Always. I love plural marriage.

It's just the first thing. Always. Always.

Like get a new playbook. Always. Honestly, honestly, try something new.

Father goes to Robin or Mother Aum one day and he says to her, you know, I'm thinking of taking more wives.

And she's like, hey, what about commandment number six where like the woman and his, the woman and her husband are one and you should do nothing to come in between that.

Yeah. And he was like, yeah, I don't count.

I don't count. I don't count. I'm the earthly spiritual father.

Of course. So she said he's sitting there talking to her about this and her blood is boiling because she's like, I didn't sign up for this.

Well, that's the problem. It's like if you guys went into this relationship and you were like, we are going to have multiple kids.

Right. Wives and husbands, whatever it is that you want to do, like, that's fine.

You just have to be as long as you are both consenting to it and our adults and everything is on the up and up on that situation.

Whatever. Do what you want to do. Nobody gives a shit.

I mean, I don't. And but it's like when you enter into a marriage and then like years into it, you're like, I think I'm going to marry a few more gals.

It's like, no, I didn't enter into this.

And if I if she's not cool with it, it's like she's not.

That's not cool, man. Bye. Because her whole thing, she was like, those were not the vows we took.

No. We took vows for each other. Yeah. And so she said, he's like sitting there explaining that she's getting pissed.

And he's like, what do you think? And she tells him, I think you're a dirty old man on a lust trip.

That's what I think. Right. she literally said that but she's absolutely crushed and she feels cheated and lied to and she goes through this like really terrible period where she's just in front of everybody like crumbling you know it's awful and she's trying to figure out if she should leave but she's also like i don't know where i'm gonna go how am i gonna explain this to my family can i even divorce him like yeah i love him i love the people here it's it's awful According to crime data, the average home break-in lasts between 8 and 10 minutes.

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So she stays. And eventually father goes on to take 13 wives in total.

My God. 13 wives in total. And when that started happening, there was like another shift and some more people left the family because they were like, what about commandment six?

Yeah, like what the fuck, dude? And it's like that is the hallmark of a cult.

The hallmark. The hallmark. It's like suddenly.

No, no, no. We haven't gotten to the full hallmark yet.

That's like that's like the hall. And then the mark is because this is the thing.

I'm like so hyped that I'm stuttering. It would have been one thing if he was pairing up with women of age.

Oh, God. And deciding to make them his second, third, fourth and 13th wife.

He's taking on underage girls as wives. Yeah, he's a disgusting, foul beast.

He's a pig. Yeah. And one of them in the documentary, she said when she was asked to become his wife, she was only just about to turn 17.

Oh, my God. You're a 16-year-old, and this man's, like, 50 at this point.

Ew. Or, like, in his late 40s. That's... not okay no that's not okay nope so people were like yeah like you're bringing underage girls and marrying them like we're out but there were still people that stuck around of course so and then father he starts taking his wives out he parades them around town they're dressed in any picture you see of them they're all dressed like very glamorous hippies like it was very hollywood Yeah.

And they're just outspreading the good word, you know, but really things were not going so well at the mother house as we can very much tell now.

And also because this was the time that all the Manson family trials were going on.

And obviously, we know how public that was and how fucking crazy it got.

Yeah. So the public gets very, very nervous about cult activity in general.

And most of the neighbors close by to the source family mother house were like, yeah, I don't really want 140 cult members living so close by because like I do feel like I might get murdered about that.

Yeah. So they start calling the landlord of the home and urging her to get them out of there.

So when the lease is up at the mother house, father was told that the property was actually being sold and they were not going to be able to renew the lease.

Like you got to get out of here. Yeah. I also wonder if she said anything to him.

Like, I also don't remember you adding 139 other people's names to this lease.

Like, I don't know if that was talked about.

But now, instead of finding another mansion to live in, because remember, the Source family restaurant still exists and is doing very well by all accounts.

Like, he has money. That's so wild. He's driving around with fucking Rolls Royce.

I'm looking at pictures of this while you're talking.

Isn't it crazy? Yeah, it's wild. So the source family had to move into a much smaller home at this point.

This home had three bedrooms and three bathrooms, which would have been great for like a small family, but not very ideal for the large source family.

They moved into this house in 1973. Only three years were spent in the original mother house, and that's how much it changed.

Oh, wow. So this house was named the father house.

And I just feel like, I don't know if I'm just in a place of deep and like reflection.

But isn't it so interesting how it started off with the mother house?

Oh, yeah. Some people had this pure idea going into it of how beautiful this was going to be.

And then slowly it starts to fade out and they get they can't stay at the mother house and the next place is the father house the father house so when you that's the thing and like you think about the first house being named the mother house you think of who robin is yeah and it makes sense that things started off beautifully and then we move on to the father house and let me tell you it was a steady fucking decline once they got into the father house In the father house, the family started doing jam band sessions.

And father would sing, you could call it that.

And the band would, I played some of it for you.

Yeah, you did. It's a lot. You are correct.

The band would play this like really far out psychedelic music.

Personally, I love the music of it. The singing, not so much.

Today, their records, their recordings, excuse me, actually are like really heavily sought after by like collectors.

That makes sense. And they're really hard to come by, I guess.

Yeah. I like really want one of them. Like, I just want to have that.

I just want it. I want it. So the band started like traveling together.

And of course, father is the front man. And they're going to different high schools and colleges to play their music, which is a very pointed exercise.

I was going to say, of course. You're trying to spread the message to young people to join the family.

And father, he would do these performances.

And, you know, he's singing on stage. And then like, you know, like the singer talks to you in the middle of it.

Yeah. He'd go into these spiels and he'd be like, come join us.

Have a morning meditation. Find out what the source family is all about.

Youth of America. No, thank you. It was wild.

No, thank you. He's like bringing all these people in.

And all in all, they actually ended up recording over 65 albums.

And I don't know if it was the music or perhaps some drug use that led to what happened next.

I'm sure maybe it was a combination of the two.

But around this time, Father got really into sex magic.

You did hear that correctly. Sex magic. Sex magic.

Blood Sugar Sex Magic. That's a Red Hot Chili Peppers album.

Correct. There you go. You had to participate, though, in the sex magic ceremonies that were being held.

No, thank you. It was not a voluntary thing.

Yeah, it was mandatory. You had to go. And the goal, you had to go because the goal was to bring everybody's consciousness to a higher level. and to quote-unquote bond together on a molecular level.

No, thank you. Like, there's some people that I just don't want to be bonded to molecularly.

Oh, there's a whole host of people that I don't want to be bonded to in any way.

There's a plethora of people that I don't want to be bonded to molecularly.

They believed that after these sex magic sessions, the energy that you created during the ceremony would lead you to possessing some kind of magic afterward that you could then use in the world to probably like cultify things even more.

We could just do a spin class together and create a lot of energy.

It started off with morning meditation. Was it wild morning meditation?

For sure. But like, just leave it there.

Just gather. Vibe. Don't make people do sex magic if they don't want to.

If you want to do sex magic, that's great.

By all means. But like, don't make underage girls participate.

No, don't make anyone participate in any kind of sexual magic.

That's called abuse. Yeah. And actually, it's sexual abuse.

Oh, excuse me. I skipped a line. At this point, people really started to believe that father was God.

He was not the son of God anymore. He was God himself.

So people had left in the past, like I said, this was when there was a big exit of members from the family because they were like, I don't want to do this.

I don't want to do this alongside children.

I'm good. Right. Like, this was not what I signed up for.

Not at all. So they left, but again, still plenty of people that stuck around.

Those who did stick around did not realize that they were nearing the end of this journey with Father, the end of this earthly spiritual journey.

Oh, boy. So he's going out into town, like I said, more often in his Rolls Royce with a whole slew on both arms of women all around him.

He's going out into public being like, hi, I'm a fucking cult leader.

Yeah, he's like, I have this gaggle of women.

Yeah. And the whispers about the family become louder and the gossip about them is spreading pretty much all around California and probably Arizona, too.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they were trying to prove that the family was harboring runaway juveniles.

They were violating labor laws. They were keeping a place where minors were sheltered without a license.

Like, that's all illegal. And eventually, child services got involved and started their own investigation because they're having children with this family now.

And they don't believe in modern medicine.

Ooh. Yeah. There were also building inspectors that started coming out and ensuring that like the living conditions were up to code.

So father sees what's going on here. Oh, yeah.

It's closing in. Yeah. And for obvious reasons, he's not a fan of the sudden interest in his family.

No. And he starts talking about what all cult leaders talk about when they get desperate.

Say it with me. Armageddon. I was going to say the end of the world, so we're close.

That's the next word, the end of times. Nuclear wars between nations.

It's all coming. Oh, it's all coming. Just all the things that nightmares are made of.

And he decides abruptly, we're selling the restaurant.

We got to get out of here. Oh, no. So the restaurant, like I said, it was doing incredibly well.

Just to tell you how well it was doing, it was bringing in a reported $300,000 a year back then.

Wow. I think I forgot to do the conversion on that one.

That's okay. It's a lot. Yeah, math. Yeah.

But he decides to sell the restaurant and he says, we're moving to Hawaii.

Oh. Yes. My birth land. I was going to say.

I really was born there. So they use the money that they got to sell the source to fund their trip to also buy a large boat.

Essentially, it was like a really big boat.

I don't know what classifies a yacht, but it was big.

Like a yacht. And they also got an airplane because their plan was to live off the land in Kauai and make their living as fisher people.

And the airplane was so that they could spot the fish.

Oh, yeah. I don't know if like every beginning fisher people take that route.

Yeah, I don't think that's how that's done.

But okay. Also, they wanted to open a spa.

Okay. Yeah, obviously. Yep, yep. So the only problem is that once they got there, everyone on the island was like, get the fuck out.

Out of here. We don't want this here. They were like, do not disrupt our existence up here.

At this point, there were already other kind of like cult-like things and people settling on the island that they didn't want there.

Like Taylor Camp had moved in on that island before and they were like, yeah, we're done with this.

Like, we're not going to keep doing this.

We've had our fill of cults. We don't need anymore.

Yeah, we're set. Yeah. They were just not into it.

And nobody would hire anybody on the Source family at all.

They weren't able to get jobs. And the locals were especially worried that this Manson-like family had just settled on their island.

So members of the family, they said later on that people started shooting toward the home that they had set up.

And police were intimidating them, like tailing them wherever they went.

Basically, they were trying to chase them off the island.

Yeah, of course. But it's like there's kids in there.

Exactly. Yeah, you gotta think of that. So father was incredibly stressed about this whole thing.

And he tried to defend the family by stationing men at different points throughout the camp.

But there were men that had never shot guns.

Yeah, they're like, I don't know how to do this.

Like, what are you talking about? It all becomes way too much.

So one day, during morning meditation, there was a bowl passed around of beautiful magic mushrooms.

And everybody is on shrooms and they decide to go for a nature walk.

Oh, no. And on this walk, father says to them, I gotta tell you something.

I'm not God. I don't have any power, and I don't know what the fuck we're gonna do.

He told them. That their entire belief system that he has sold them for years is complete bullshit while they were all tripping balls on mushroom.

But they were like, no, you are the earthly spiritual father.

And he's like, no, you've got to listen to me.

I'm not. I don't know what's happening. I'll show you my social security card.

It does not say God. I am not God. I'm literally a man named Jim.

Jim Baker. I'm Jim. Just Jim. Like, not even Jim from the office.

Just Jim. I am not Jim Halpert. I am Jim.

Just Jim. If your name is Jim, sorry that we just like did that.

No, we love a wonderful name. I love the name James.

I mean, come on. Yeah. So they're like, no, yohala, father, you are God.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And shortly after that day, there was another regularly scheduled morning meditation.

This day was August 25th, 1975, and it had only been about six years of this cult.

And father said to the family, I feel like going flying today.

And they said, what? What he really meant was that he wanted to try hang gliding.

But that was something that he had never done before.

And all of his wives were like, I would prefer if you didn't try to learn how to fly in the state that you're currently in.

Maybe we could take a couple lessons first.

And one of the main wives at this point, I think she was kind of like the head wife, was Makushla.

And she was wearing black that morning. And she said she never wore black.

She usually always wore white. And when she came down for morning meditation, father told her that she was dressed appropriately.

And she, and there's a recording of this morning meditation.

It's actually so haunting. The documentary, Hyping Up Docs.

Hyping it up. Hyping it up. And so after, so he says to her like, oh, you're dressed so appropriately.

And she screams in response and you can hear her scream.

And she said, I don't know why I did that.

It was just, there was this certain energy in the air and it was like off.

And my own, that was like a release. Okay.

So she was like, I don't know, something didn't feel right.

But we had we wanted to do as father said, we still thought he was the earthly spiritual father.

And if he wants to climb up a mountain and hang glide off of it, then so be it.

Yeah. Now looking back, everybody agreed that it was incredibly windy that day.

The weather just seemed to be perfect for hang gliding.

I think you need wind for that. But there was still like this weird energy in the air.

And as they climb the mountain, they pass this woman who's like on a hike.

She's just living her life. And father speaks in Latin to her.

And in English, the translation was, we who are about to die today salute you.

Oh, yeah. So they make it to the top of the mountain and there's this huge gust of wind just as father gets launched off the side of the cliff.

But as soon as that wind came, it fucking went.

And he just ended up falling like I don't even know how many like many, many, many, many, many feet crashed on the ground below.

Oof. So everybody makes their way down to him.

He's still alive. He did not die on impact.

Oof. And they're like, what can we, like, what do we do?

And he just keeps telling them. And there is recordings of this because I forget her name.

If you watch the documentary, you'll know it.

But there was this one woman who was, like, the journalist of the, or not, like, she took all the pictures and, like, all the videos of everything.

Like, there's, like, a home birth even. But just be warned, you will see the entire thing.

So if you don't want to see that, fast forward.

It's a lot. But he keeps telling them, transmute the pain, transmute the pain.

Transmute the pain? Like, make it, like, move the, shift the energy.

Yeah, like, bring it somewhere else. Bring my Kundalini back to normal.

Yeah. So at one point, someone says, like, I think we don't really have another option.

Like, we should go to the hospital. Yeah, because we don't know how to actually transmute pain.

Like, you just fell from the sky, sir. You also literally told us that you're not God.

So, like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do if you're not God, because I'm simply Makushla.

Yeah, I do not know. But then so somebody was like, I think we should go to the hospital.

But like I said, hospitals and modern medicine were against their belief system.

In fact, I think one of the reason one of the main reasons why CPS had shown up was because a member had left in the past because his young son, like he was like a toddler, almost died of an ear infection, because they were trying to like shine all these different colored lights on him and stuff.

But You need antibiotics for that. Yeah, an infection will kill you.

It certainly will. It's just like the way it is.

They wouldn't give him medicine. So then his dad was like, we're out.

So they were like, no, we can't go to the hospital.

They decide against the hospital visit. And they all carry... He fell out of the sky.

Straight up fell out of the sky. And they're like, no.

So they all carry father back to the house.

And he... It's unclear. Some sources say he like survived for like a couple more days.

Others say only hours. I saw five days and then I saw nine hours.

He ends up dying. And some sources say that he had no broken bones, no fractures, no nothing.

He just died. Others say that he broke his back that day, which I'm going to go ahead and believe those ones.

Yeah, I would go ahead and believe that.

His body simply couldn't handle the amount of pain he was in, and he died.

Wow. And I'm sure, at least in my opinion, and I think you would probably share the same belief, he probably had some internal bleeding after falling that far and that hard.

Yeah. And if he did have something, that an infection can happen.

Yeah. You don't get it treated. Exactly.

So he passes away. And shortly after father passes, there was this really strange phenomenon, which this happened, and it is kind of crazy.

A new star, like a nova, appeared in the sky over Hawaii.

It's like literally reported on. I found a newspaper article about it.

And the members of the family took this as a sign that father, in his energy...

Had simply shifted into that star. You can believe what you want.

I can tell you what I believe. A star happened.

A star was born. That a star was born. And that he's an asshole.

Uh-huh. He's a murderer. Yeah, he's gross.

And he did not turn into that wonderful star over Hawaii.

That did not happen. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really want to believe that Jim Baker is shining over my birth plan personally.

He's not, so you don't have to worry about it.

Yeah. Because he's not. No. I can tell you with 100% certainty, I'm here to break the news.

Breaking news. Boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo. nope it was just a star not him not him a star was not born no or it was it wasn't jim so that happened and i that just like solid like you imagine that happening in your article and you think all this is real so his body was later cremat cremat his body was later cremated and his ashes were spread along a beach in hawaii it literally says a beach i'm more hoping the water yeah i hope it's not actually you're not just like throw that in with the sand but like okay but cool Now, the family went on to stay together for about two more years.

And Makushla was, like, the head of the family for a while.

But it slowly started to fade apart. Yeah.

And some people actually went on to keep their Aquarian names and lived off the grid.

Like, there was people at the end of the documentary that were like, I still fully believe in his teachings.

I practice them to this day. And, you know, all the power to them as long as you're not involving underage children.

Okay. other people just moved on completely there was one guy that ended up like founding some corporation that made him a millionaire all right wild but you know that's the source family wow and at the end of it one thing is for sure jim baker was one wild fucking cult leader yeah like call it like you see it that's a cult he was a cult leader yes fucking crazy that was a wild ride a wild ride indeed that ended with a star being born isn't that crazy and i think i had said it before to put it in your back pocket he had broken his back previously yeah so isn't that kind of crazy that that's how he died yeah he was like i was done with judo and like after that match but then he ends up going on and killing a man and he's like with judo Wow.

Maybe that, I don't know. Maybe that, I don't know.

You know, you believed in karma, Jim. I know, that's, oof.

Isn't that kind of weird? Oof. Isn't that kind of weird?

What sound was I supposed to make? Or something like that?

I don't remember. I forget what it says.

People are yelling it at you. Yeah, they are, and I'm sorry about it.

I think it was that. I think it was that.

Yeah, that's what it was. That's what it made that sound.

Cuckoo nuts bananas. Wow. Yeah, we hadn't done a cult in a while, so I figured I'd bring you a gnarly one.

You know what? Your friend was 100% right when she said that you probably would have joined this family.

Yeah, it's true. I would have left when things got weird in the beginning.

Like I would have left like probably really early on.

But you would have been there. I do love a yummy salad.

And I do love like natural holistic ideals and meditation and stuff like that.

So you love a hippie moment. I just I do.

But I also don't want to share my possessions.

No, like that would be 140. I think that would be when you dip.

Yeah, I'd be like, you can get fucked. Yeah.

This is mine. Don't touch it. This is mine.

I'm an only child, kind of, so. People are like, what?

I know. That just threw everybody into oblivion.

Is she your fucking cousin? Is she your sister?

You're an only child? How? Don't worry about it.

It's fine. And with that, we hope you keep listening.

And we hope you keep it weird. But that's everything.

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[The Rise and Fall of the Source Family: A Cult Leader's Twisted Journey]-[Episode 362: The Source Family]

📋 Summary

The Twisted Tale of Jim Baker and the Source Family

The Making of a Cult Leader

The Birth of the Source

Life Inside the Mother House

The Decline and Final Flight

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript