Mara Wilson and the host dissect the dark history of Utah's "troubled teen" wilderness camps, tracing their origins to Larry Dean Olson's Anasazi Foundation and Steve Cardesano's Challenger Foundation. They detail how untrained survivalists like "Horsehair" utilized starvation, isolation, and midnight kidnappings to break children, while Cardesano leveraged celebrity connections to market $20,000 programs to wealthy parents despite lacking medical oversight. Ultimately, the episode exposes these facilities as unregulated death traps that prioritized profit over child safety, contrasting them with reformed military boot camps and highlighting the industry's systemic abuse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Behind The Bastards Intro00:03:38
Cool zone media.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where you never know if I've sent Sophie the script prior to actually starting the episode like I'm supposed to.
Maybe it's caught in the tube, Sophie.
You remember that?
You remember when that guy, that guy in Congress called the internet a series of tubes and we all laughed at him?
And then years later, we were all like, actually, that's not a bad way to describe the internet, to be honest.
Yeah.
Yeah, you remember that?
Anyway, what I remember is that we have a special guest today, and that guest is the great Mara Wilson.
Mara, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
And yeah, you're right.
It kind of is a series of tubes.
Yeah, yeah, that's more or less.
That's close enough, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mara, you are, I mean, if you're a person listening to this who is roughly my age, Mara was in, I don't know, about like 30% of the movies that made up a huge part of your childhood.
And you have recently written a memoir, Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame, which has been named a best book of the month by Goodreads and Entertainment Weekly.
Mara, happy to have you on the show.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do a bit of writing and voice acting and things like that.
And I love it.
I'm lucky.
I've been doing things that I actually really like for a job.
So yeah.
Yeah, that's always exciting.
Yes, which, yeah, which hasn't always been the case.
And so it's nice.
Yeah.
Now, speaking of jobs, you know, I got to do the thing.
I'm sorry.
I know this is like the stereotypical reporter, you know, celebrity interview thing, but I got to ask you this question.
I'm sure you get asked it all the time.
If you're arming an insurgent group to fight against the U.S.-backed military junta, what kind of detonators do you prefer on your improvised explosives?
Are you, do you like a bridgewire cap or are you more of like a slapper detonator type?
You know, I think it's really whatever the situation calls for, perhaps, you know.
I probably should know more about this kind of thing.
I come from a family of electronics engineers, but yeah, no, I think I slept through that class, unfortunately.
It's okay.
We've got some standard literature.
We send all of our guests on detonators.
So we'll get that into the mail to you.
Or maybe like my dad gave it to me in a really boring lecture and I just zoned out and was thinking about, you know, I don't know, whatever it was I was thinking about at the time, like Rocco's Modern Life or whatever.
Sure.
Yeah.
Very common subjects, Rocco's Modern Life.
I love that.
Doping in a VFP.
Yeah.
So Mara, what do you know about the troubled team wilderness rehab industry?
Oh, good God.
I actually know more than I actually know a great deal about it because I have several friends who went through it and it is hell on earth.
So yes, this is actually something I'm very passionate about.
So yeah.
I'm glad to hear it.
Me too.
This is actually like back kind of 10 years ago, much earlier in my career as a journalist.
I wrote a number of articles with sources who had been to different troubled teen rehab facilities around the country, most of which wound up being based in like Utah or Montana.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's that's kind of the standard for all, particularly Utah.
Script Chaos And Hell On Earth00:04:34
Like 40% of all kids who cross state lines to go to one of these facilities wind up in fucking Utah.
And, you know, today we're going to talk about the reason why that is, because it all starts with a single guy.
And he's not just the guy who like started doing these troubled teen rehab facilities because kind of versions of that had existed for a while.
He's the guy who decided, you know what we need to add to rehab programs for kids?
Armed men busting into their houses in the night and abducting them.
Right.
Yeah.
That's who we're talking about today.
And yeah, so I guess let's get into this piece of shit.
His name was Steve Cartesian.
I actually have the script, though.
I sent it to you, Sophie.
I so did.
I do not have the script.
The tubes hate it.
I don't know what to do.
Sophie, you could just intuit the script.
I mean, like, sometimes my thoughts are in your voice, but no.
Get a Ouija board.
You know, do this with a Ouija board.
Okay.
Anyway, you should have the script now, Sophie.
Someday, perhaps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe not.
If you don't, that's my fault then.
Oh, also my fault forgetting that we do cold opens now.
Cold opens done.
It's time for the hot open.
Yeah.
This is an iHeart podcast.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
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I doctored the test once.
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10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
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I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
And we're back.
And I have a script.
I sent it to you.
It's very sibling between the two of you today.
It's got to be somewhere in the tube, Sophie.
Boy Scouts And Conformity00:15:38
Oh, I got it.
It's up to the tubes now.
We did it, Joe.
I have the scripts.
Thank you.
Does that make you the Kamala?
Because I'm not sure I like this.
Oh, no.
I'm not nearly that sleepy.
That means that the chance of thank you, Joe, are no more.
Thank you.
I'm on a lot less drugs than Joe Biden, too.
How do you feel about ice cream, though?
Do you have that in common?
No, actually.
You know what?
You know what I'm saying?
I'm a sweet guy.
No, no, you're not a host.
I envy you so much.
Every now and then I meet somebody who's not a sweets person and I'm like, God damn, how did I end up?
No, I am like baked goods and ice cream all of the way.
All the way.
I do like a nice, you know what my favorite thing is?
It's just like a big slice of French bread with fucking salted Amish butter on it.
That's like it's no healthier than anything else.
No, that's true.
That's true.
Well, sometimes I say less than a sweet tooth.
I have more of a carb tooth.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like give me some bread or like crackers and I will go nuts.
And it's true, actually.
Even after like I eat something sweet, I'm like, I need something else to like balance it.
And I'll eat something salty, but it's just still carbs.
Yeah.
It's just still, yeah, it's, it's bread with salted butter or it's, you know, it's toast or it's crackers.
So yeah, yeah, just bounces out.
It's optimized for survival.
You know, our ancestors made it through the frozen wasteland because look, it's, you know, we're, we're, we're Eastern European, you know, we're pale of settlement Jews on one side and we're, you know, Irish Catholic on the other.
So, so yeah, some some people who went through a lot of shit, I guess.
Yeah.
The carbs make sense.
And you know, starvation is a relevant topic here because a lot of children wind up getting starved because of Steve Cardesano.
That's kind of how one of his main tactics and really even within the parts of the troubled teen industry that are like respectable and accredited, all of them use starving kids as like a tool for discipline.
They do.
They use that, I think.
Yeah.
It's well, I went to, so I went to an arts boarding school.
This is how, this is how I spent my movie money.
I went to boarding school to study theater.
And it's sort of like the, I always say it, it's a bit like the far side cartoon of like the kids who run away from the circus to join corporate America.
I ran away from Hollywood to do community theater.
So like I ran away to to to uh to a boarding school and a lot of the kids there had gone through these programs.
Yeah.
And because it turns out that if you're, you know, sometimes if you're like a sensitive artistic kid, you know, people don't quite know what to do with you.
So, you know, what do you do?
When you actually smoke in a pot or a little bit, you know, exactly.
So like these kids would be, maybe they would be depressed or they would have an eating disorder or they would smoke weed or they would start drinking young.
And then, you know, where are they sent off to?
Inevitably, they are always sent off to these places.
And, and sometimes it was even worse.
Like I knew one girl there who basically she didn't have a stable living environment.
So she ended up in one of these schools in Utah because like kids who are essentially in the foster program or don't have a stable living environment end up in these places.
It happens a lot.
So tell me about the bastard who started this because there's a few, but it turns out everyone who's been even tangenti involved in this industry is kind of a monster.
Like even the good guys who get quoted when the monsters kill a kid.
If you look into the good guys, they also kind of suck.
It may just not be a thing that good people do is want to operate desert camps where you torture children.
I don't know.
Perhaps that's not a nice guy kind of thing.
Anyway, so I wanted to I wanted to figure out.
I'd always, you know, I've been covering this as a journalist for years and years.
I wrote stuff at cracked on this.
And I've been wondering like, who in the hell was the guy who did this?
And the partial answer to that question is Steve Cartasano.
And Steve kind of came into the public eye recently.
There's a documentary on Netflix that I think is produced by Paris Hilton, who as we'll talk about is a big voice in the whole, we should stop doing this kid.
Yeah, she really is.
She's been, it's very funny to me to think about like the kids I know who, you know, would talk about how much they loved or hated Paris Hilton.
And a lot of them, you know, in that era when I was meeting a lot of these kids who'd been sent there and now she's like, yeah, she's, she's completely done.
She's done something.
I don't know.
I mean, like, like, say what you will about the way that she was in the 2000s, she does seem to be passionate about this.
Yeah.
Look, you know what?
She's, she's done the right thing here.
And I don't think any of us should be judged by what we did in the 2000s.
We need to just, let's just, let's just shovel that decade off into the sea and pretend none of us, none of us were making choices back then.
No, the Gen Z and Gen Alpha people who want to bring it back.
I'm like, no, it was shit.
It was.
It's like how I thought the 80s were cool when I was, you know, when I was then.
And then I was like, oh, no, this was the worst.
Do you know how to be a president was?
Like, I'm very glad that I don't remember most of the 80s.
There's never been a good decade.
There hasn't been.
There hasn't been.
Yeah.
So Steve Cardesano is the guy we're going to mostly be talking about these episodes.
But as I noted earlier, the whole troubled teen wilderness camp industrial complex is bigger than him.
And so before we start talking about him, we've got to start a couple of decades earlier with the childhood of a man named Larry Dean Olson.
Larry, and Larry is one of the guys who gets like quoted as a good guy in this.
He was an expert on running children's rehab facilities.
And whenever one of the bad facilities would kill a kid, the news would talk to Larry.
And so he's always depicted in those articles as like, well, he's the responsible kind of guy who does this.
You know, this is a man who really understands how to take care of children.
As we'll talk about, that's not really totally accurate to who Larry was.
But he was born in Wendell, Idaho on January 23rd, 1939, to Dean and Lola Olson.
In most casual bios of his life, he is described as a farm boy who got admitted to Brigham Young University and found primitive survival education programs there, which set him off on his path in life.
And that leaves out some key details, like the fact that Larry was illiterate for most of his early childhood.
I found this quote in an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Quote, Olson traces his own wilderness transformation to the childhood day he found an arrowhead while cleaning out his uncle's irrigation ditch.
The somewhat defiant youth who had refused to learn to read was struck by the stone.
It changed my life.
I took it to school and my teacher gave me a book about the Indians who made that arrowhead.
I took that book home and taught myself to read.
And I don't know how much I believe that it's possible, given what else he does in his life, that this is like literally what happens to him.
I do think we're missing some details about his childhood, the whole I was refusing to read as a child thing.
Yeah, it's, I mean, they didn't really, they didn't understand things like, you know, dyslexia or ADHD or even just kids who learned differently.
Not necessarily like schools were very much about conformity.
And so, yeah, so it does feel a little bit like refusing to learn to read, I think is that's that is an interesting thing.
Yeah.
Now, we're gonna, and again, I also think he's probably smooshing some stuff together here because it's too clean a story that's too marketable a story.
Like I saw this arrowhead and I read this book about Native Americans and that created my whole life passion and everything.
Real life is rarely quite that smooth.
There's also this sort of like, it's, I don't know what the term is for it exactly, but it's, there is this fetishization, I think, of Native Americans that, you know, it's, it's like Orientalism, but for this sort of like noble savage idea that's big probably around the time that he's talking about these things.
So especially, I think probably in Utah too, because they consider, yeah, they, they think that they're connected to the Native Americans.
Well, the fact that they're all Jews is a big part of this, or a lot of them are Mormon.
The fact that they, and like, yeah, Native American appropriation is huge.
Like later in life, Larry is going to co-own a camp that's like named after the Anasazi.
And I think it's the kind of thing where like he brings in a guy who is indigenous as his like co-owner, largely so he can say like, look, we're authentic, you know, like that happens a lot.
Now that was a lot more common.
We're mostly talking like the 70s, 80s, 90s.
So he's not like outside of the cultural mate.
Like the Boy Scouts are doing shit like that just as much, right?
I mean, my public high school, before I went off to my arts boarding school, yeah, our mascot was the Indians until I think 2020.
We did some shit in the Boy Scouts when I was like 14 years old that would not pass mustard a day.
Let me tell you that.
No, it was, yeah, there's a lot of stuff where it's just like, Jesus Christ, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it was not that long ago.
No, no, no.
It's like, it's like watching like an 80s movie that's like set in cowboy times and being like, wow, all of these people playing in Native Americans are very clearly Italian.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So whatever the truth about Olson's childhood, we don't get a whole lot of good details on him until 1966, when in his like kind of late 20s, he winds up at BYU.
Now, if you aren't aware, BYU is Utah's premier university and it is run and owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
And the elders at the school are concerned at this point that a number of students are having trouble maintaining their academics.
So they're like looking for a program they can use on kids who are having trouble and at risk of kind of like failing out of the school.
Now, at the time, there's no real industry for like taking kids out into the woods, like particularly young adults and like giving them wilderness therapy.
You've got like the Boy Scouts.
But outside of that, kind of the closest thing to the modern industry is this company called Outward Bound, which had been started back in the UK by this Welsh guy back during World War II.
Author John Krackauer notes that this was done to, quote, help stiffen the sagging spine of the British Empire based on the logic that like, we're just not hiking enough.
That's why all these countries keep leaving.
Hike faster.
India's trying to go.
In 1962, Outward Bound had moved to the United States where it offered a 26-day course that included multi-day hikes, rock climbing, and other high-adventure stuff.
And one of the things that strikes me about all these, I like the outdoors.
I like hiking and camping.
26 days is much longer than I want to spend on any kind of course.
Yeah, I remember reading about them when I was a kid.
And I was, I was like a pretty, we were like a pretty outdoorsy family.
You know, we went camping all the time.
I loved it.
And but we were, but we were out like, if you grow up, I think on the West Coast of like the U.S. and probably Canada and possibly Mexico too, you kind of like probably anywhere in North America on the West Coast, you get very into like, let's go into the woods, let's go into the desert, let's do this.
A lot of great places to do it.
Yeah, I remember reading about that and hearing like, you're like 14, you have to spend the night alone in the forest by yourself.
And yeah, you go for weeks at a time.
And I was just like, for a second, I was like, oh, that would be so cool to do.
And then I was like, no, actually, that would be miserable.
It's just like a little long.
Yeah.
I like to shower after a few days.
You know, I'd like, that's, that's a bit, you know, you don't even have Dr. Bronner's with you.
That's, that's too much.
Yeah, I, I, I think all of these, like, in 26 days, by the way, is like very short for these courses.
Like, they're all just going to get longer to the extent because like, I mean, we'll get to that, but a big part of the point is like keeping your kids away from you for as long as possible.
Now, that's a big thing in the British, that's a big thing in British history, too.
The thing British people are least interested in during the imperial period is raising their children.
I mean, that's not a problem.
That wasn't Queen Victoria.
She hated kids.
She loved sex with Albert.
Yeah, she loved sex with Albert and she hated kids.
Yeah.
And at Outward Bound, those are their two primary guiding principles is sex with Prince Albert and not having kids near their parents.
Yes.
So it's important I note that Outward Bound is not the place, not the kind.
They are not like these, the facilities that we started the episode talking about.
They're not kidnapping kids.
They don't torture children.
They're pretty much just like summer camp type programs, right?
And they prove to be very in demand.
And it's kind of like looking at Outward Bound and a couple of like copycat camps.
Some of the people running BYU start talking like maybe we should have a program like this.
And that's where Larry Olson comes into the picture.
Olson had only gotten more interested in primitive skills as an adolescent and a young man.
And by the time he's in college, he's teaching survival courses like on the weekends and stuff to local hunters around Salt Lake City to pay his way through college.
So people at the administration find this out and they're like, hey, you seem like a perfect person to like figure out how to do this program for us.
So he starts off just kind of taking students into the desert for a few days at a time and teaching them survival skills, like how to build shelters and start fires.
And when these classes prove popular, BYU offers to pay him $90 to take 70 kids out into the bush for like days at a time, which is not enough money to do that.
No, that doesn't seem like it would even cover.
I mean, even with instructions.
I'm sure they're paying for the food.
Yeah, okay, okay, but still, but still, I worked with teenagers for, you know, I worked with teenagers.
And yeah, you, you, nobody is paid enough to work with teenagers.
I loved working with teenagers, but yeah, nobody is paid enough to work with teenagers.
I would need $90 an hour in 1970s money to take care of 70 kids in the woods.
Yeah, yeah.
I've worked with, yeah, no, that's, that's not in the woods.
No.
So they eventually expand to paying him like 200 bucks each course to teach like a month-long course to 100-something kids.
And they, you know, these are all students.
These are, so these are all like young adults, really, 18, 19 years old, who are having trouble in college.
And they noticed that like the program seems to really help.
According to a 2008 article for the Salt Lake Tribune by Brian Mathley, quote, Olson soon was leading outings that lasted several days and BYU deans began noticing changes in the students who went.
Unexplained improvement in school performance and better manners at home pleased the students' parents.
So university officials hatched a plan with Olson, who was still in his 20s and struggling to support a growing family that would eventually include 10 children.
They developed a course that offered failing BYU students a shot at readmission if they learned survival skills and went on a month-long backpacking trip through the Utah desert.
So that's what happens.
And he does this for a couple of years.
And the reason why he gets treated as a heroic figure by folks in the industry who want to separate themselves from the bad programs that like get kids killed is they think fundamentally there's got to be something to this idea of if kids are troubled, you send them out into the wilderness for several weeks and they'll come back better.
Wilderness Survival Gone Wrong00:07:31
And I feel like people always kind of get the wrong idea.
Like they always look at the like, I feel like this happens a lot where there'll be, there'll be like one thing and people will be like, oh, well, it's this specific part of it.
And it's like, well, maybe a lot of these kids felt kind of overwhelmed and out of control.
And maybe you taught them some skills that made them feel confident, you know, or more in control, or maybe they were with a group and they bonded.
Yeah.
Like things like isolation and feeling out of control and feeling lonely.
Like these are things that college kids go through that make them that where they struggle a lot.
Like probably they would have been just as well.
Like it didn't necessarily have to mean they were going out to the desert.
Probably like, I don't know, you could have taught them like backgammon or something and they would have been like, oh, awesome.
You know?
Yeah.
And I think that's part.
Yeah.
I think that's true.
I also think like there's nothing like there's a lot of benefit potentially in like wilderness skills and like being out in the woods, like there can be a therapy benefit for that.
Yeah, that is, that is true.
I do think like for me personally, like I feel like much calmer when I like take a walk and there's lots of trees and you know, go to the park or, you know, go camping.
Like I, I definitely feel.
So there definitely is something to that.
But yeah, I know they're going to take this and they're going to make it much worse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're going to, so you know, BYU, I think actually does, because we're going to be, there's a lot to criticize the Mormon aspect of this whole industry.
And but I think initially it comes from a pretty good place.
And initially, it's not a punishment.
It's more of a, hey, we've noticed you're struggling.
We can like, we will basically give you a kind of school credit if you do this program.
It's helped a lot of other people.
And like, these are also adults, right?
So these are people who are like able to make a decision.
Do I want to spend 30 days in the wilderness doing this thing?
Probably some of them are married.
Yeah.
Some of them presumably are married.
Like Olsen's in his 20s and has multiple children.
He has multiple children.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he gets treated again as a heroic figure in this industry who talk about this as like, well, he had this beautiful dream and it started from a really good place.
And all of those recitations of events tend to ignore why Larry had to leave BYU.
John Krakauer in his reporting for Outside Magazine claims that he left, quote, following allegations of his mismanagement and sexual impropriety, and then cites a BYU colleague saying, Larry liked the girls a little too much.
Now, I don't know.
Does that mean the girls that he was taking out into the woods alone for weeks at a time?
Because as a spoiler, that happens in every single one of these programs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
More on the abusive side than what I would call impropriety, but it's not clear to me that what Larry did was not on the abusive side, right?
Yeah, I mean, the girls, especially the girls is very, yeah, that is a very telling phrase.
I don't like your use of that word here.
Yeah, absolutely not.
Yeah, there's girls is definitely one of those words that's a totally different world word depending on like inflection.
Like if you're talking about like, I'm going out to the bar with the girls.
With the girls, yeah, that's very different the girls than this, the girls.
I feel like I'd even hear people say, like, oh, yeah, he liked the ladies.
Like, the ladies.
Yeah, that feels very 70s or 80s.
But that is, you know, and like, okay, that guy's sleazy, but he is not, you know, a monster.
He's not a pedophile, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whereas you are open.
You're leaving that door open when you describe it this way.
Yeah.
Now, I should note that sexual impropriety, and again, this is a married man with multiple children.
Sexual impropriety is not the only reason Larry has to leave BYU.
In 1974, at a program he established for Idaho State University, a 12-year-old boy died of dehydration because the staff Larry had were not trained and didn't know how to recognize the warning signs of dehydration.
In 1975, the next year, a woman in one of Olson's BYU classes died on a hike again from dehydration.
As a spoiler, basically everyone who dies in these programs dies from dehydration.
If you're going out into the desert, one of the first things you want to do is like note the signs of dehydration.
Yes.
And if you're teaching wilderness skills, yeah, if you're teaching wilderness skills, you one of the first, yeah, that's one of the first things I would think.
Yeah, how do you not that?
How do you not know that?
So there's this big belief, and some of this does come from the Mormon aspect of it all.
There's this big belief in like that the value of this program is not just that you're learning wilderness skills and that you're spending time in nature, it's that you are away completely from society for weeks at a time.
So there's this real, real, they don't want to send, they don't want to call it early, they don't want to take anyone back.
So they they push people, right?
They do it either in a nice way or a mean way, but they always push people and they don't have like Larry's, I'm sure, great at starting fires and like whittling arrowheads or whatever, but Larry does not have functional medical training and does not clearly, because a lady dies in his class, doesn't know how to deal with dehydration.
Yeah.
I mean, Mormonism kind of started out as like a this almost a lot of hiking.
Yeah, well, yes.
A lot of hiking in the early, it was this sort of like anti-establishment religion for a long time.
You know, they were very, yeah, fighting against the U.S. governments are like kind of in there.
Yeah.
That's that's a big part of their history.
You could say Larry is carrying out in the best traditions of the Mormon church, hiking and having sexual improprieties with very young women.
He is definitely doing a Joe Smith.
Well, Brigham Young, Brigham Young did some pretty violent things too.
Yeah.
Although there's, let's be real, there's lots and lots of colleges in the United States named after people who did mass murder of people.
So that's right.
I, for one, I've always been supportive of just renaming UCLA after the Green River Strangler.
I think we might as well lean into it, you know?
Why not?
It'll be great for the new podcast class that they're doing.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Anyway, that was a true crime bit, folks.
So, yeah, he gets some people killed.
Larry does.
And BYU is like, maybe we don't want you running our wilderness survival program anymore.
You kind of failed at the survival thing, right?
At this point, two people have died.
So Larry, Larry bounces, but he's able to escape any sort of blame for his role in these deaths.
And I think part of this is just the media environment at the time.
There's not like a lot of attention to the people who die in his programs.
It doesn't, they don't become big stories.
They're kind of just framed as like, well, you know, sometimes when people are out in the wilderness, bad things happen, right?
So he doesn't get kind of tarred by the same brush as the people who come later are going to.
And he establishes several wilderness therapy programs elsewhere in the United States, charging like 500 bucks for a 30-day outing in most cases.
So not a crazy amount of money, not cheap, but like you're not looking at like someone mortgaging their house for these programs, which is where things are going to end up.
Subsequent programmes.
So they're kind of like expensive summer camps.
Very expensive.
Very summer camp that would be a lot of fun.
Media Silence On Deaths00:04:52
They cost you as much as like a nice used car.
Right.
Yeah.
Maybe, maybe a really nice used car.
That kind of depends on your definition of a nice car, a nice used car.
Speaking of used cars, you know who will sell you a car?
Maybe our sponsors.
There's no way to know.
Not on our end.
I hope it's a car.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Some lights the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marincini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver 40-caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
Police Fraud And Consequences00:16:06
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
They scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
Mara, so we left off.
Larry has bounced and he is kind of seeding the country.
He's becoming the Johnny Apple seed of wilderness survival programs for teenagers, right?
And, you know, he also, he writes a popular survival book.
And he, if you've seen the movie Jeremiah Johnson, he's the expert survival consultant for that movie, which is that the movie that with the with the gif, right?
Of the guy like nodding and smiling.
Nodding.
Okay, I haven't seen it then.
It's a great movie.
And clearly he was good at the skills part because that movie gets it all pretty right.
Yeah, I haven't seen that movie.
I've only seen the GIF, but I know like this is the 70s, right?
I know there was a movie around that time called Buffalo Rider, which was a true story about a guy who went riding along on a buffalo.
There was, I think, I feel like there was a lot of movies like that in the 70s.
Yeah.
Probably not disconnected to this, actually.
Like this kind of moment in the culture may have a lot to these things may be somewhat interconnected.
It's kind of, there was this thing, and this is something that, you know, doesn't keep gets me, gets me to sleep at night.
Oh, sorry, Kat just jumped on the keyboard, but everything's still good.
It's, it's kind of like one thing that helps me sleep at night is knowing that a lot of the like, you know, return shit is like a lot of stuff that we saw in like the 70s and early 80s.
Like it's just, it's just like, you know, the Jesus freaks, people who like the Jesus freaks, the mythopoetic men's movement, you know, yeah, the unification church, like a lot of that, you know.
So, so I remind myself, like, okay, we got through, you know, we got through it then, you know, we're getting through it now.
James on our staff is having like a Twitter fight with this wannabe influencer who's trying to do like back to the land homesteading.
Like, you need to be using non-powered tools in order to make sure you're really, you know, self-reliant.
And he films these like shots of him shirtless using like rusted old tools like the wrong way.
Like the wood isn't positioned right on the sawhorse.
And like he just butchered a goat by cutting its head off with an axe, which is not how you butcher animals.
It is not how you butcher animals.
Unless it's like a chicken, but like you, you don't.
Even then, yeah.
It's it's yeah.
That's really you don't cut their head off with an axe.
So much of this is cosplay, you know.
So so anyway, he was he was he worked on Jeremiah Johnson as like a, as, as like a he's their consultant on like how to do all this shit that Jeremiah Johnson's doing.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then he launches his own nonprofit, the Anasazi Foundation, which is where he continues teaching survival skills to struggling children.
Now, I will say, again, because we're going to talk about the much more violent sort of descendants of his courses, every source I found agrees the Anasazi Foundation is like pretty tame.
I've even found a number of kids on Reddit who went talking about it as a positive experience.
So I don't want to, well, we got to be critical of Olson because of the kids he got killed.
I don't want to like make it look like these are in the same basket as everything we're talking about today.
They're just kind of in a line of descent to each other.
And a big part of why I think these kids are like in their teens, like, you know, 12 to 18 generally.
Okay.
So younger than the BYU kids, but younger than the BYU kids.
We've gone down a step in age, but Olsen's still, he's not one of these like you yell at the kids.
He's, he's, his belief is that you present them with choices and tools in education and you let them like make their own decisions to build confidence and self-reliance.
So anyway, that's his program.
Now come the 1980s.
Larry's method of pedagogy is going to be replaced by a very different set of tactics that will come to dominate the industry that springs up afterwards.
And that brings us back to Steve Cardasano.
Stephen Anthony Cardesano was born on Monday, Monday, I guess.
August, I don't know why I put the day in there.
I usually don't do that.
August 15th, 1955, in Modesto, California.
I have found several variants of his obituary, and they all want the reader to know he was, quote, born to a Cherokee mother and Italian-American father who could give him chiseled features and piercing eyes.
On a Monday.
On a Monday.
Garfield would hate this man.
More obituaries.
Yeah, more obituaries should be like, you know, by the way, he was super exotically hot.
Yeah, just four paragraphs on his cum gutters.
By the way, here's where the fucking wake is.
So I will also note here, because I don't know, I'm not going to get into the whole like litigating are people indigenous or not?
Because that is a whole messy can of worms.
I will note generally with everything he says about his childhood, take everything this guy says with a grain of salt because he's a professional fabulist and liar, right?
And I mean that about every aspect of his childhood, including what I am about to quote next from his obituary.
His childhood in Modesto, California, he has reported, was not happy.
One parent was addicted to heroin.
The other beat him.
He said his tormented youth motivated him to make a career of helping troubled teens.
And again, I don't know if that's true or not.
It certainly has been some people's life experiences.
A Times article I read noted that his mother, who was the one who was addicted to heroin, died in a car accident when he was 17.
He was pretty consistent about saying that his home life with his dad was not nice.
And in 1974, he decides to enlist in the Air Force.
He becomes a parachutist with the 129th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Group.
And this is, this isn't like technically a special forces job, but it's one of those gigs that like very, very few people qualify for.
You're doing incredibly like difficult, physically and mentally demanding stuff.
It's not easy to be in this business.
And there's proof that he actually was in it.
Yes, yes.
He did this.
He did this very much for real.
And he was one of a very small number of people who were qualified to do this kind of job.
Multiple sources I have found note that Steve was, quote, one of the best trained survivalists in the military.
Although the provenance of such sources, I found that one in the Bryan County Patriot makes me suspect that this quote may have come directly from Steve himself.
So I don't know if he was actually one of the best survivalists in the military.
So I actually went, okay, this is a weird fact about me.
So I went to something called Aviation Challenge when I was 10 or 11 because my whole family, they're big into aviation.
They love planes.
Oh, yeah.
And my dad, my dad has a pilot's license and wasn't a commercial pilot or anything, but could fly a plane.
And my grandfather did too.
And like aviation is a big thing in our family.
So I thought this was going to be kind of like space camp, but with airplanes, but it was very, very, very, very military based.
So we were on, we were on like an old Air Force base and we got a lot of propaganda.
And I was, but my favorite part of it by far were the survivalist parts.
Yeah.
And so I can still remember some of it.
I still know like which berries to eat if, you know, you're out in the woods.
Now I wonder if like maybe this guy.
Well, also I wonder like, did this guy also like have a hand in this?
Because it wasn't that far from Medusta, California.
He very well may have because he winds up during his time in the military.
He spends a period of time as the instruct and instructor at the Fairchild Air Force Base Survival School.
Yeah.
So I wonder if maybe he like helped develop their curriculum.
There's a good chance he did.
Survival stuff is interesting because you have two kinds of people who teach survival classes.
You have the people who really know their shit and you have the people who are convinced they know their shit and don't.
And you as the student, until you've spent a lot of time in the woods, really can't know which they are.
My little brother, because he grew up on a military base in Okinawa, did a survival course that was like taught by the Marines on base.
And at one point, I don't know why I keep coming back to goats, but they like slaughter a goat to like walk you through how to butcher an animal.
And they like fuck up killing it and traumatize all these kids.
And again, as somebody who slaughters and butchers animals, like, I don't know how you fucked that up as a Marine.
What are you guys doing?
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Definitely like, yeah, trauma.
Way to, yeah, way to traumatize everybody.
Butcher children.
I know.
They got the experience, right?
One way or the other.
They're learning about survival.
They learn what not to do by watching, you know, horrific animal abuse.
The lesson today was don't trust a man about survival just because he's a Marine.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Oh, man.
Childhood.
So I guess this all kind of goes to buttress the point that these guys, there's cool people who teach kids survival, but there's always going to be a high ratio of like maniacs in that profession too.
Which I think all of my friends who teach primitive skills would agree with that statement.
Absolutely.
So, yeah, he goes to, anyway, we're talking about Steve Cardasano.
So, he gets out of the Air Force after possibly setting up the program that Mara Wilson will use years later.
And he makes friends with another airman who's a Mormon and converts him to the Mormon church.
So, he is a Mormon convert and he moves to Utah to attend BYU.
Now, he is not a good student.
This is not a guy who was made for classrooms.
And he drops out a couple of years in.
But before he drops out, like every maniac we cover, he tries his hand at breaking into Hollywood.
Crack Hauer writes, quote, he studied film and wrote a screenplay about the exploits of a crack Air Force rescue squad whose hero was a part Italian, part Cherokee Mormon adventurer named Steve Montana.
Steve Montana.
He marries sued himself with a fucking Indiana Jones ass name.
Oh, man.
It would be better if you'd picked Montana Steve.
Montana Steve, yeah, yeah.
Montana Steve sounds like a guy who's going to teach me where to find water in the desert.
Steve Montana is going to sell me bills at a truck stop.
Yes, exactly.
There's a difference between the two of them.
One of them seems like he might actually be fun and like have some crazy stories, you know?
Oh, yeah, you'll hear some shit from Montana Steve.
From Montana Steve.
Yeah.
Steve Montana.
Other people will tell you.
Steve Montana just makes me think of like of Tony Montana.
Like that's, you know, that's where my mind goes.
Tony Montana's like discount Kirkland brand brother.
Yes, exactly.
He's not into Coke, but he's got a big pile of riddlein.
So Steve leaves the Air Force in 84.
And this is a time when the United States is kind of sailing through one of our semi-regular, we've talked about all of the different things that are just kind of recurrent waves in American culture.
Well, this is when we're really hitting a big stride in our moral panic about drugs and youth delinquency.
Now, from what I can tell, Steve was a conservative guy.
He converts to the Mormon church, and he is a believer in the idea that this country is headed to hell in a handbasket because children aren't disciplined properly.
So while attending BYU, he had become aware of the legacy of Larry Olson, who'd left not that far before to start the Anastasi Foundation.
Steve started studying his program, Outward Bound, and other similar wilderness schools that existed in the Salt Lake area.
And he concluded they all had a massive problem.
None of them abused children.
In 1988, Steve launched the Challenger Foundation, a wilderness school with an educational syllabus patterned directly off of what Steve could remember from his own experiences at boot camp.
The goal, in his words, was to wear kids down, quote, until they're good again.
Jesus Christ.
So this is the thing, too, is these people never have any experience with child development.
There's no relevant training here.
No, it's it's it's like, yeah, there's, there's nothing, there's no child development.
There's no, yeah, there's, there's none of these things.
It's wearing them down because that's what's going to stop the crack epidemic is wearing children down.
Yeah, day five of the Air Force rescue training does not like break in order to teach you how children's minds work and how they learn.
No, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's very, it is very strange.
I mean, I was going to say, it is very strange what people think that you can become an expert on just by, but then I was like, well, I probably shouldn't talk because I'm a fucking forward child actor with a BFA in drama and I'm talking like I'm an expert on shit.
And, you know, I'm not, but at least I'm not trying to break children down.
I think you don't have to be an expert to be like, well, if you're taking children into the desert for weeks at a time, you should probably know something number one about children and number two about wilderness medicine.
Those two things should probably be something you have a formal skill in, as opposed to just kind of winging it.
Well, also, if you work with kids, you learn very quickly that the ones who are acting out, you learn very quickly that there are different reasons why kids act out.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think that it should be common sense, but it's not.
Like I worked with kids and I knew very quickly who were the kids who were spoiled and entitled and expected, you know, the world to bend to their will.
Who were the kids who were going through a lot of difficulties at home?
Who were the kids who maybe just learned a little bit differently?
Who were the kids who, you know, just were trying to make everybody laugh?
Who were the kids who, you know, didn't like doing their own work, but liked helping other people.
Like the different reasons that kids are, quote, bad are, you know, they're myriad and you can't just break them all down because what works with disciplining one kid is not going to discipline the other.
No, but that's very much the, that's very much the attitude that this program is going to have, which is like all kids who are bad need the same thing.
And that thing is to be screamed at in the desert by a man who could get literally no other job than screaming at children in the desert.
Right.
I'm not really exaggerating there.
Michael Marancine Apology00:06:33
Here's how John Krakauer described his educational tactics in an article for Outside.
Cartesano applied what he liked to call street smarts to problem kids, strip searches and military haircuts.
He adopted a drill sergeant style of speech, which required yes, sir, answers.
Rules were strict and heavily enforced.
A girl caught saying, I'm sorry, instead of, I apologize, would be punished by carrying a football-sized chunk of cow manure all day in her backpack.
A boy caught eating raw oatmeal instead of cooking it would have his oatmeal ration taken away.
Good behavior for challenger students was rewarded with canned peaches, raisin, or cinnamon.
It's just like, the specificity of it, I apologize.
Yeah, I apologize instead of I'm sorry.
Like, what's the, what's, what's the difference here?
It's just, it's just standardization of, yeah.
Yeah, I, I, yeah, I, I hate the whole to the like, no, don't say you're sorry.
Say you apologize and like, here's my fucking witty reason for why you shouldn't say sorry.
Like, I don't give a shit, man.
You know what the kid meant.
Yeah, exactly.
Don't complicate communication.
It's hard enough as it is.
Kids, you know, there, if there's one, the famously, you know, famously eloquent teenagers, you know, that's, that's, that's the thing.
Teenagers are very, they, they are having, they literally have trouble expressing themselves.
And now I'm having trouble expressing myselves because thinking about this, expressing myselves.
Well, expressing myself because this pisses me off.
Why don't we take a break and let our advertisers express themselves?
Let's do it.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Military Boot Camp Secrets00:15:13
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He allegedly was a victim of flatmail.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, my goodness.
They really had a lot to say.
Mostly about why you should buy a Chevy, you know?
Chevy, are you drunk enough for a Chevy?
Anyway, we're back.
So let's talk a little bit about boot camps, right?
Thanks to cultural touchstones like the film Full Metal Jacket, the term boot camp has kind of a magic effect on the minds of a certain type of American.
There's this tacit understanding, this widespread belief that like if children are misbehaving and traditional methods won't work, forcing them into something that mimics military discipline will fix their bad behavior.
I had a cousin who got sent to like a military boot camp style school.
And as a spoiler, it did not stop them from doing the things that got them sent there.
These programs don't actually tend to work very well, but there's this like magical belief that like because it's a boot camp, that's that's what if it works for the army, it's got to work for small children, right?
The thing is, the army has a, I mean, I guess in some ways the army has a purpose or a goal.
Like there are people there who, I mean, are either they're adults.
Well, I mean, it hasn't always been that they joined voluntarily, but people, a lot of the people there are there because they want to make money.
Yes.
Now, at least today, they're generally making a choice.
They get misinformed about aspects of that.
Like recruiters lie a lot, but like generally an informed choice or at least semi-informed.
Semi-informed.
Yeah.
The other thing about it is that like boot camps don't work for the military quite the way conservatives often think they do.
First off, when it comes to how these programs work in general, I found a 2005 analysis of several studies on the efficacy of boot camp style programs that noted no significant differences in recidivism from students subjected to mock military programs.
There is zero rigorous data showing that hiring a bunch of ex-cons and former addicts and having them pretend to be RE ERMI and like beat up a bunch of captive children helps those kids in any way, right?
Doing a, for one thing, if you watch Full Metal Jacket, the movie does not end with that program working out great.
Like the point of that is not, wow, this is a great way to help a struggle.
Yeah, give your child that thousand-yard stare.
That's what happens to the drill instructor, guys.
Yeah, that's, that's, yeah.
It's also this kind of movie image that, again, a lot of conservatives latch onto of a boot camp where like people are being thrown in the mud and like, you know, shaken and screamed at and insulted in creative ways by these like incredibly harsh and utterly humorless men.
Like it is debatable as to whether or not that works very well for soldiers.
Over the years, there have been repeated incidents where brutal training methods, always justified by the need to ensure discipline for units going into combat, has instead gotten trainees killed.
The best known of these was the Ribbon Creek incident from 1956, in which a staff sergeant trying to punish a poorly behaved platoon marched them into a swamp where six of them drowned.
Oh my God.
You're not very combat ready if you're dead, guys.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's this is, yeah, I mean, that, that, how do you even, it just, how do you justify that?
It's just like, what was this that was just wanted to, yeah.
That was a major question that was asked because there was a lot of people who defended this within the military as like, well, this is the only way to do it.
And a lot of a lot of, thankfully, a larger number of people who are like, well, no, clearly we have made a mistake if we have drowned six Marines by making them walk into a swamp.
This is not good training.
And this does, that disaster leads to the first big visual professionalization of the process of like training Marines.
This is where they start like the modern drill instructor system, right?
And this is also, there starts to be more of an emphasis on utilizing psychology and leadership dynamics as opposed to pure physical coercion.
This is not an evenly successful effort, but this is kind of when you start getting a lot of people in the military being like, actually, maybe if we try to understand our recruits and the ways in which they're different and like the ways in which people respond to leadership rather than just like beating them, we'll train better soldiers.
On March 2nd, 1988, 19-year-old Lee Marecki was engaged in a training exercise for the Rescue Swimmer School Program.
This is part of the U.S. Navy.
This was a difficult test to pass.
Only about half of the students did.
Marecki failed the test the first time, re-entered the training area the next day, and failed again.
At which point, his instructors forced him back into the water to try again and held him down while his fellow recruits were ordered to turn around and sing the national anthem.
Marecki drowned, and his death created another legal nightmare for the Navy, which again instituted changing to their training methods in order to prevent the same thing from happening again.
Now, I bring these incidents up because it's worth seeing that like these are two military boot camp incidents in which the brutality of training leads to people dying.
And they both lead to both an immediate severe backlashes and changes to the way that training is done.
Because, number one, the military has a degree of accountability, both to like civilian leadership and you've got officers and people who are overseeing these programs.
And in the military, when you see we're killing people with our training, there are responsible people who are generally like, well, we should make some alterations to it.
Right.
Well, these are public, these are public institutions.
Right.
Right.
It also becomes a media nightmare for them.
And so you have to have some sort of like public example of how we've altered the program.
All of that's going to be absent from these wilderness rehab facilities.
They are.
My point is not the military does such a great job of not of like fixing problems in boot camp.
My point is that the military does something when shit like this happens.
And there's going to be significantly less oversight for these programs that only children are parts of, right?
Which is also the great American idea of if it's a private, you know, well, it's anything that's private, you know, sure, let them, you know, discriminate against these people.
Sure, let them do these.
These are private groups.
You know, they can do whatever they want.
Private businesses can do whatever they want.
Yeah.
When we privatize the army, finally, finally, military contractors will be free to march recruits into the swamp again.
That's when we'll be a free country once again.
That's when we'll be a free country.
Make Americans.
Franklin dreamed up.
Yeah.
Make Americans march into swamps again.
Exactly.
Just Thomas Jefferson sketching pictures of drowning Marines as a tear rolls down his cheek.
I mean, there was a lot of swampland in that area at that time.
This is always the plan.
Yeah.
So when he starts Challenger, I think it's technically called Challenger 2, but fuck it.
We're going to call it Challenger.
Steve's first major innovation was the idea that the entire process also calling something Challenger like a like not a great name.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's why he put the two on there.
Right.
Like, yeah, that's that's this is a this is a big thing.
It's not, yeah.
Yeah.
So Steve's first innovation when he starts this is you got to be really hostile to these kids.
Now, this starts before the course eventually begins because he's the one who comes up with the idea of, and basically he starts as an upsell.
Hey, parents, you've decided you're going to send your troubled kid to this wilderness rehab program.
They're going to spend months alone in the desert where they will be miserable.
They're not going to want to go.
You don't want to just like break this to them at dinner days ahead of time.
They're going to be angry.
They might run away from home.
They might flip out.
You don't want to have to drive them to it because they'll be pissed at you the whole time.
It'll be a miserable drive.
What if you let, what if you pay me and I have some big armed men kidnap your children?
He's the guy.
He's the guy who invented this.
Yeah.
He is the guy who invented this.
Did Synodon?
This is specifically his innovation.
Huh?
I remember, I thought I heard that Synanon used to do this too.
Well, Synanon did this to like members of the cult, but you're not really like, and you can, but not actual children.
Yeah, not that I'm aware of actual children.
Like there were.
So he's the bastard that invented this shit.
He is the bastard that invented this shit for these camps, right?
Where you are kidnapping a kid to take them to a wilderness rehab facility.
Yeah, this is usually in the middle of the night.
Yeah, no, this.
I'm like sitting silently during this episode.
This happened to my childhood best friend and I didn't know, and I didn't know where she was.
I did not know where she was.
Her parents would not answer any of my messages.
It took almost a year before I figured out that that's what had happened to her.
And she was my closest friend when I was a teenager and I had no idea where she was.
And I, it's like six months ago, I went back and like looked at our old Facebook messages and it's just me being like, where are you?
Where did you go?
Why did you leave?
So fuck this guy.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
This guy is also personally responsible for destroying the teenage years of people I know as well.
So seriously, fuck this guy.
Yeah.
He specifically had a devastating impact on like Southern California, which is where a lot of things.
Yeah.
Same.
Me too.
Me too.
So a lot of people.
Yeah.
Because we'll talk about, we'll talk about some of this in part two, but a big part of it, why Southern California particularly is California has fairly strict laws on what you as a parent can do to your kid and what kind of programs you can put them in and what kind of discipline you can subject them in through like a program, right?
Like there are, there's strict limitations on like what sort of facilities you can send your kid to against their will in California.
Those laws don't exist in Utah.
So you get the kid out and you know, that's why all of this for one thing, that's why all this happens in Utah.
But that's why there's a lot of like Californians because California has like stricter laws that kind of limit parents more.
That was the exact scenario.
That's the laboratory of the states working as intended.
Oh, the laboratory of democracy working as intended.
Yeah.
Again, our beautiful founding fathers dreamed all of this up.
So Steve's plan is we cut out, you know, the problem of parents having to confront their kids about what they're doing to them by allowing, and again, when I say these are armed men, the particular guy he had do a lot of this was nicknamed Horsehair and always carried like a 14-inch buoy knife on his belt and looked like a character from Jeremiah Johnson.
And to give you an idea of like how this kind of went down, I want to first play you an account from a modern attendee of one of these schools.
This is from the TikTok account of the Misfit Heroes podcast, which is where I found this.
And this is just someone who went to one of these schools, obviously after Steve Cardazano's era, but it gives you an idea of how these kind of pro this kind of add-on program worked.
I was woken up at about 2.07 a.m. to my dad turning on my light and telling me that it was time to leave.
I remember rolling over and looking at him and immediately thinking that he was trying to get me up for school and like starting to come up with excuses why I should be allowed to stay home.
was a woman on the side of my bed who pulled me up and told me that it was time to get dressed and put on my shoes and go.
They basically dressed me and each one grabbed one of my arms and started walking me out my door and up the stairs toward our back door.
And the entire time I couldn't see my dad again and I was yelling for him and one of them told me, your dad isn't going to respond to you anymore.
And I asked why and why this was happening.
And they said that they were taking me because I didn't deserve to be with my family anymore.
And as I was being dragged out the door, I remember looking over my shoulder and seeing my dad standing at our kitchen sink with his back to me, just staring out the window, completely ignoring me.
Yeah.
That's exactly what happened to my friend.
Yep.
Yeah.
It's, I can't imagine.
I don't know.
I do think that a lot of parents are kind of brainwashed in this too.
They don't necessarily.
And I mean, some of them, I think, just don't give a shit.
And some of them, I think, do honestly believe that this is the best thing for their child.
But like, I can't imagine like letting somebody like manhandle.
Like, I don't even have children, but if somebody were manhandling like a child that I care about, like a friend's kid or my nieces and nephews, like I would want to fucking murder them.
Also the trauma, like most of the time, it happens when they're in the middle of the night when you're asleep.
How does that help?
How does that help?
You're disoriented.
You're not able to fight back.
Sure.
No, no, no.
I understand how it helps them, but how does that help a child who's going through our family?
That's not the point.
Right.
Any sense of calm or peace that they might have.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
The point, the, the last concern of everyone involved in this is what's best for the kids.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's pretty vile stuff.
I do think a lot, because my, my mom was certainly not against physical punishment, right?
Like she was a spanker for sure.
And I don't know if she would have done something like this.
I think the only reason I know that she wouldn't have is just because of the expense.
We never would have had the money for these programs.
But like, had she had the money, I don't know that if this is something she would have ruled out.
I think because she did fundamentally believe if kids are misbehaving, the best thing to do is like put them through boot camp.
Yeah, I think that I do think that there are a lot of parents who genuinely think like I that genuinely think this is the best thing for for their kids.
But but yeah, but I just feel like I yeah, I don't know.
I just I just don't I feel like how can you see that and not think this is fucked up?
It's because they all hip and I know people who who can honestly say if I hadn't joined the military, I would have like killed myself, right?
But with like drugs and like I was I was on a bad road and like I got my life in order as a result of that.
The thing is, I also, I think because I've known a lot more soldiers than most people, I know just as many people who committed suicide during training, in some cases, during training, and in some cases, as just as a result of their service, right?
Right.
So I certainly wouldn't say the military is a great way to get your life in order.
It's just like, yes, some number of people, the discipline is helpful.
But when you're looking at the kind of roulette wheel that is putting someone through that and how it winds up for them, it's certainly not something I would want to like spin on a bunch of children, right?
Kidnapping Experience Reality00:15:16
I'm sure there are some kids who this got them out of a bad loop, but I don't think that number of kids is higher than the number who died and were traumatized forever.
Right.
And I just kind of mean that.
I'm sure we'll get to, I'm sure we'll get to this later, but like the rate of people who've attempted suicide after going through these programs is just anecdotally, you know, just from people I've known.
It's, you know, it's, it's incredibly high.
And it is a lifelong trauma.
Oh, yeah.
Like it is, it stays with you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's cool and good.
So, yeah, I want to show you guys next kind of what the kidnapping process is like how they kind of when these programs kind of make like their media ploy to parents, like this is how they depict the parents.
I want you to keep in mind what that kid just said about the experience of being kidnapped.
And then I want to, I'm going to have Sophie play you a segment from the Dr. Phil show.
Until a bunch of kids died and their parents sued these facilities, Dr. Phil loved sending children to these wilderness camps.
He was a major public advocate for how well these worked.
And he did a lot of, he had a lot of segments where he would send kids to these camps.
And so they, they, they have one where they film like this kidnapping.
And I, and I want to, I want to be clear here.
I played the kids' experience of this, which I think was pretty ugly first because that's the reality of the experience.
What you're seeing here is how they dress up the kidnapping for Dr. Phil's audience, right?
So keep in mind, this is an advertisement, right?
This is not as clean as the real process was.
It's just after 3:30 in the morning, we're down the street from the family home.
We've been texting with April and she's ready for us to come.
It's a big day for Annalisa.
She's on her way to the Dr. Phil show.
Honey, wake up.
I love you.
We decided to get you some help.
And we're going to the Dr. Phil.
And these people are here to help you.
My name is Mike and this is Laura.
Go away.
And let me explain your situation.
You've actually got a trip planned to Hollywood.
We're going to Dr. Phil today.
No!
So go away!
Your family has decided that you.
Go away.
And screaming actually isn't going to help this one.
No.
So you see what they're doing here, right?
They're portraying this as like you've got like the calmest guy you can in here and he's trying to have a conversation.
Like they're really playing up like how out of control this girl is.
She really needs, you know, Dr. Phil and then this intervention that Phil's going to send her to, right?
If a man came into my bedroom in the middle of the night and I was saying, trying to have a conversation with her.
I'm pretty sure I would be a lot, a lot louder than this saying no and hiding is very good.
One like one like second of that guy's voice and I come up shooting.
That's how I'm responding.
Whatever I can grab, man, you're going down.
This is like, we were like the kids, like, like we're probably like, like Robert, I think we're about the same age.
Like we, we were the children who were taught stranger danger.
Yes.
Right.
You know, like the first thing, a strange man.
Yeah, don't go with a stranger.
A strange man comes into your bedroom at night.
Mixed signals from the boomers.
I was like, no, this is like the nightmares I had about like the Polyclaus kidnapping case.
Like this is the, yeah, this is the kind of exactly.
So yeah, you see they're being very quiet and like, you know, this is the sanitized version of what really happens.
And I want to end by showing you video of what these camps were really like.
And we are talking about challengers.
So this is actually Steve Cartasano's camp.
This is a video filmed in 1989 for a local media segment called The Reporters.
I don't know what fucking network it was through, but you can find, it's like 15 minutes long.
You can find this footage on YouTube now.
A link will be in our show notes along with all of our other sources.
But yeah, here is a bunch of kids arriving at the boot camp in the wilderness.
This is what it looked like.
Come midnight, they are driven over 30 miles into the wilderness to disorient them so they won't be able to find their way back out.
A raging bonfire is blocking the road.
The vans stop and two apparitions come galloping out of the darkness.
They are screaming and pounding the windows like madmen.
Dazed, they gather around the bonfire and soon learn to show respect to those who will teach them how to survive here.
Next 63 days, you'll be under my care, my staff care.
You understand?
I can't hear you.
The so-called counselors are not trained child therapists.
They are survivalists.
Of course they're not.
Look at this guy.
Look at this man.
Look at this man.
He's not trained in childcare.
Yeah.
A guy with a ponytail and a bowie.
A ponytail and a bowie knife?
Oh, man.
That's funny.
I know that these places used, would also, I mean, they used a lot of horrible things.
I know they also used humiliation.
Yes.
Oh, yes.
Major weapon.
We'll talk about all of that.
Don't you worry.
So yeah, I do want to chat a little bit about Horsehair.
You know your rehab facility quality place when the guy's led by a man named Horsehair.
His real name was Lance Paul Jagger.
And he is the guy who Steve, Steve does not want to do any real teaching of children.
For some reason, his first name being Lance, just really helped me.
Yeah, of course Lance did this.
Paul Jagger.
I think that's a pretty cool name.
I mean, he's like, you know what?
It's better than horse hair.
Lance Jagger is actually, yeah, that's what you name the protagonist in your dog shit spec script about a fucking Air Force rescue unit.
Lance Jagger is a cool name.
Also, horse hair can mean something that's like very coarse, but it could also mean, I mean, that guy did have kind of a pony-like ponytail.
It literally is your whole nickname just for the ponytail.
Is that the identity horsehair?
Yes.
You're more than that.
Samson.
So, you know, Steve starts teaching these courses like when he does the first few runs, but again, they're spending 63 days at a time out there with these kids.
He doesn't, he doesn't want to, especially once this makes a lot of money, because in short order, in the first like year or two, he's made a couple million dollars doing this.
He doesn't want, because he's charging 15 grand per session.
Like he has no fucking desire to spend all of his time out there.
He wants to spend the money that he's making.
So he has Horsehair do the actual training along with a couple of other guys, usually former military, usually dudes who like weren't really employable anywhere else, but fancied themselves as survivalists.
Although none of these guys have relevant wilderness medical training, there is and was at this point.
There is like an actual professional certification you can get for wilderness first responder, right?
As a wilderness first responder that teaches you how to deal with stuff like heat stroke and dehydration.
None of these guys have those qualifications.
So Horsehair and another adult leader, Bill Henry, who'd gotten his start in scouting, handled the actual wilderness instruction while Steve used his new gotten wealth to buy a manor in Provo that had once been owned by a famous golfer.
He focused his time marketing challenger to wealthy parents with problem children.
One of his chief ways of doing this, because he would like meet in person with, again, it's like 15 grand a kid, often more, because sometimes they're running through the program twice.
There's add-ons that can make it more like 20 grand.
He's like meeting individually sometimes with parents to convince them.
Because these are rich parents, like part of his like program is he spends $2,000 a day renting a Lamborghini in order to that.
That's what he's spending his fucking money on.
Now, obviously, parents are going to bulk at a price like this when, especially in 1989 money, you know, 15 grand, 20 grand is an insane amount of money.
And when they would, he would say, well, this is the only thing that could save your kid, right?
If they're already smoking pot, they are on a road that will inevitably lead to their death.
Every kid who smokes pot winds up dying of a heroin overdose.
That's just how things work in 1989, right?
Cool.
So if those are the stakes, isn't it worth remortgaging your house to make sure your kid gets the care they need?
You know?
In order to reach as many clients as possible, Steve leveraged his one celebrity connection into a series of daytime TV appearances.
And when I found out who the celebrity connection to this guy was, like how he got into daytime TV, I had a beautiful reaction.
This makes so much sense.
I'm going to quote from John Krakauer's article in Outside Magazine here.
Cardesano persuaded his good friend Oliver North to put in an appearance during his Iran Contra notoriety.
Yeah, when Ollie North, like NRA, Ollie North.
How the fuck does Ollie North wind up here?
I was thinking like Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris.
Like I was thinking celebrities.
This is right after Iran-Contra, too.
There's not been a lot of distance.
You know, we're not talking like war stories with Oliver North on Fox Ollie.
We're talking like just committed treason, Oliver North.
Oh my God.
God, that's funny.
See, I think that like if I saw somebody driving a Lamborghini and hanging out with Oliver North, like I would probably be like, I don't know.
I think I would be suspicious if like, if somebody makes too much, like, you know, you'll be like, this guy knows Ollie North.
He must know how to treat my kid.
Well, like, you look at, look at what cars teachers drive, you know?
And it's like, it's like the shittiest deal.
Yeah.
It's like the shittiest, like, like, like, maybe they have like, you know, a Volvo fucker, you know.
Fucking Steve Montana rolls up in a Lamborghini with Ollie North and says, hey, let me take care of your kids for 63 days.
It'll be 20 grand.
I'd be like, I'd be like, okay, no, like fucking drug dealers drive, you know, Lamborghinis, like not, not people.
Yeah, not drug dealers hang out with Oliver North.
I remember that.
Yeah, get your kid into some good business.
So he does appearances on all of the big daytime shows of the era: Sally, Jesse, Raphael, Geraldo, Donahue.
Cardesano would later say, they loved me.
I'd go on TV with kids who had been through the program.
These beautiful 14 to 15 year old girls, don't say that.
Don't call them that.
Who'd talk about how they'd been out on the streets stealing and doing drugs and turning tricks until Challenger changed their ways?
Boy, I don't trust the way he described them.
Again, the name Challenger, like I wince every time you say it because it's like, there's a lot to wince about here, Sophie.
Yeah, that's fair.
It's just like, you're not going to name like something.
Well, I mean, I guess people could do sometimes name things like a 9-11 memorial, this or that, but like, wouldn't that be just kind of like calling something like, you know, here's, you know, take your children to 9-11 school.
That's the Challenger explosion.
Okay, now, Mara, I operate the 9-11 school, which is a 63-day summer program for children.
We don't get them off of drugs, but we do get them onto new drugs.
They are in the desert for a long time.
We don't talk about that, Robert.
I mean, we have to, Sophie, if we're going to keep enrollment up, I'm going to need to start.
I need to get on like Oprah or something.
You got to pay for that Lamborghini.
Yeah.
We don't talk about that.
We don't talk about that.
I would never let you get anywhere near Oprah Winfrey.
Almost certainly for the best.
I think I could do a lot of damage on Oprah's with Oprah's platform.
So speaking of a lot of damage, Steve is doing a lot of damage to a lot of children thanks to daytime television.
He is like, he basically comes on and he's kind of leaning into the fear of drugs and delinquency that are super common.
And these are, these shows are all every week they'll have a segment where like, here's a kid who's out of control.
They're on drugs.
You know, they overdosed or something like that.
So Steve is like going into programs that exist to scare mothers particularly and then offering them a solution.
And it works really fucking well, right?
One of his former employees described the scene to Crack Hour as the phones were ringing off the hook.
Parents begged him to take their kids.
An incredible amount of money started rolling in.
Now, there was a problem with Steve's brilliant business plan, which had worked up to this point.
And the problem is that these are mostly rich kids and rich parents.
You have some middle-class kids whose like parents are really sacrificing for this, but these are mostly well-off people's children, right?
And the folks he's hiring to take care of these kids don't know what they're doing and tend to be violent and abusive.
This means you have rich kids that are getting abused.
And when rich kids get abused, the cops at some point are going to get called, right?
Yeah, people are going to get sued.
You will get sued.
Right.
Yes.
In an interview with Outside Magazine, former Kane County Sheriff Max Jackson, who was the law enforcement officer who got called because the camp is in his county, claimed, quote, we pulled one kid from the program who was so bruised and scarred, he looked like he'd been at Auschwitz.
When another kid tried to run away, Cardasano got in a helicopter, found him, flew him up to the top of a mesa, and slugged him in the gut a couple times.
Steve.
Yeah, I mean, being chased down by a helicopter is fucking terrifying enough, but yeah.
Then being beaten up on top of a mountain by Steve Montana.
Yeah, that's that's like, and and yeah, slugging in this, like that can cause organ damage.
Like this is, yeah.
And it's one of those things.
Very rarely are the comparisons to like concentration camp and mates valid, but you have children starved to death in these programs, right?
Like these are like kids who are when they when their bodies come back from the coroner, like are so skit, like thin that you can see like their hip bones, you know, like the children are getting emaciated to a terminal degree in these programs.
So like, I don't know how appropriate you want to call the comparison, but we are not talking about like just slightly hungry.
They are, they are prison camps, you know, they are prison camps.
Yeah.
People, the kids are treated there as badly, you know, in many cases as people in prisons.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's a, that's, I think, a much better comparison.
Prison Camp Comparisons00:06:46
Now, Steve at this point had a wife and four children.
In the documentary Hellcamp, his ex-wife claims that he told them the money he made from the business was all being reinvested into it.
And so the money lived on a tight, the family lived on a tight budget while Steve was doing shit like renting Lamborghinis.
He was also cheating constantly, which got tied up into the business because at one point he started cheating on his wife with the parent of one of his students.
He then talked this parent into loaning him a Visa gold card and charged $65,000 to it before she realized what was happening.
Jesus.
Steve Montana, baby.
That's a classic Steve Montana caper.
Yeah, I mean, this is such a, I don't know, like he, he's, so he lives in a mansion.
He lives in a mansion and is renting Lamborghinis, but is telling his children we don't have enough money.
It's got to all go back into the business now.
Excuse me while I start a secret family with this lady's credit card.
Oh, Steve Montana.
Well, that's all for part one.
How you feeling, Mara?
Oh, yeah, I, I, I want to slug this guy.
I mean, he's dead, but I still want to slug him.
I want to slug Steve Montana.
Again, I would like to hang out with Montana Steve.
Montana Steve, Montana Steve seems like he would, you know, he'd have that sort of like, uh, like Sam Elliott voice.
Oh, yeah.
You know?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's, that's who I'm casting to play Montana Steve with my spec script.
Yeah, I would say either Sam, Sam Elliott, maybe Jeff Bridges, if he can get one of those long beards going again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I, I, uh, uh, yeah, Jeff Bridges is already already doing some show.
Oh, and it's a show that's actually involves a very sketchy writer.
So, yeah, this is, this is great.
We could just, we could just move him right over to my program, too.
So, where is what is what is Steve, Steve Montana's actual real name?
Uh, it's Steve Cartesano.
Steve Cartesano.
Okay, where is this guy buried?
I'm not going to do anything.
Just, you know, you know what?
Just let me know.
We'll figure that out for part two, Mara.
When we come back, I will let you know where Steve Cartesano's grave is located.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it's Oklahoma.
So, is that worth the vengeance?
I mean, yeah, it's a bit out of the way.
So, so out of the way of everything.
That's the Oklahoma state motto.
Mara, is there anything you want to plug?
Let's see.
I've been writing some articles for The Guardian recently about psychology.
I wrote one recently about why we find people annoying.
I'm both an annoyed and annoying person, so that was very fun for me to write.
I'm also working a lot in the audiobook world these days.
And if you go to Libra.fm and look at my name, you can find a lot of really awesome books that I have narrated.
Awesome.
So go to Libra.com, look up Mara, look up wonderful.
Libra.fm.
Jesus Christ.
I almost fucked it up.
Look up Mara's excellent book, Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame.
And most importantly, slash all of the tires in the parking lot.
You know?
Have a good day, everybody.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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