Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Inventor of Those 'Troubled Teen' Wilderness Camps Where They Kill Kids

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Robert sits down with Mara Wilson to discuss the man behind those camps that kidnap teenagers and torture them in the desert. (2 Part Series) Sources: The rise and fall of Steve Cartisano - High Country News (hcn.org) Steve Cartisano - Bryan County Patriot Hell Camp: The sinister true story behind Netflix documentary - Dexerto MOTHER OF GIRL WHO COLLAPSED IN DESERT PRAISES CHALLENGER – Deseret News ‘Hell Camp’: Paris Hilton and the Troubled Teen Industry’s Abuse Epidemic (rollingstone.com) How Utah became the birthplace of the once-lucrative wilderness therapy industry for ‘troubled teens’ (msn.com) BYU alumnus sparks off lucrative, controversial wilderness-therapy industry - The Salt Lake Tribune (sltrib.com) Salt Lake Tribune | 2002-04-28 | Page 2 | | Utah Digital Newspapers Loving Them to Death -- The... (utah.edu) Boot Camps Proponent Becomes Focus of Critics - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Wilderness therapy programs for troubled teams began in Utah (sltrib.com) Troubled US teens left traumatised by tough love camps (bbc.com) EXPLAINER: The history behind 'parents' rights' in schools | AP News How Utah became the leading place to send the nation's troubled teens | APM Reports https://www.sltrib.com/news/2024/05/07/how-utah-became-birthplace-once/ https://www.deseret.com/1991/7/24/18932325/father-sues-challenger-over-daughter-s-death/ https://apnews.com/article/religion-education-gender-identity-0e2ca2cf0ef7d7bc6ef5b125f1ee0969 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG0vANHmMmM https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238102695_Examining_the_Effectiveness_of_Boot_Camps_A_Randomized_Experiment_with_a_Long-Term_Follow_Up https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/09/us/boot-camps-proponent-becomes-focus-of-critics.html https://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/test/ci_10438570https://www.farmerfuneralchapel.com/obituaries/larry-olsen See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CAUSER 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 are 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 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, which is hasn't always been the case. And so that's nice. Yeah. 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 gotta ask you this question. I'm sure you get asked it all the time. If you're arming an insurgent group to fight against a US backed military junta, what kind of detonators do you prefer on your improvised explosives? Are you, do you like a, like a bridge wire 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, I, I think I slept through that class. So, 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. All right. The very common subjects, Rocco's Modern Life or whatever. Sure. Yeah. Very common subjects, Rocco's Modern Life. I love that show. Building an EFP.

Yeah. So Mara, what do you know about the troubled team wilderness rehab industry? Oh, good God. I actually know more than I... I actually know a great deal about it because I have several friends who went through it and it is hell on earth. Yeah. Yeah.

So yes, this is actually something I'm very passionate about. So yeah. Yeah. 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 Utah or Montana. Yeah. Yeah. They are. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's kind of the standard for all, particularly Utah. Like 40% of all kids who cross state lines to go to one of these facilities wind up in Utah. And today we're gonna 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 into 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 Cartesano.

Can I actually have the script though? I sent it to you, Sophie. You did not. I so did. I do not have the script though? I sent it to you, Sophie. You did not. I so did. I do not have the script, the tubes ate it. I don't know what to do. Sophie, you could just intuit the script. I mean, 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. Well, 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. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a warm woman wikileaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into

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Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Morrie Teharry-Pore. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles,

two women did something no other woman had done before, tried to assassinate the president of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson, 26 year old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad free

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And I end up outside the mansion of the shoplifting queen herself. I hear the cops. Dude, I think we should go. Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. There's so much beauty in Mexican culture like mariachis, delicious cuisine, and even lucha libre. Join us for the new podcast, Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English

and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. And I'm your host Santos Escobar, Emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask on the iHeartReyo app, Apple podcasts, or whatever you stream podcasts. And we're back. And I have the script. Sorry about that, Mara. I sent it to you. Ah, wow.

It's very sibling between the two of you today. It's gotta be somewhere in the tubes, Sophie. No, 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?

Cause I'm not sure that sleepy. That means that the chance of thank you, Joe, are no more. Thank you Joe. I'm a lot less drugs than Joe Biden too. How do you feel about ice cream though? Do you have that in common? No, actually. No, he's not a sweet guy.

I'm not a sweet guy. He's not a sweet guy. I envy you so much. Every now and then I meet somebody who's not a sweet guy. I'm not a sweet guy. I'm not a sweet guy. I'm not a sweet guy. I'm not a sweet guy.

I'm not a sweet guy. I'm not a sweet guy. I'm not a sweet guy. I'm not a sweet guy. I'm not actually. No, he's not a sweets guy. I'm not an ice cream guy. He's not a sweets guy. I'm not one of those. 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 of 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- Oh, that's really good. It's no healthier than anything else. No, that's true.

That's true. I will 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, 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. It's just still, yeah. It's bread with salted butter or it's toast or it's crackers. So yeah, yeah, that's just how it is. That just makes you optimized for survival. Our ancestors made it through the frozen wasteland because they get- Look, it's, we're Eastern European,

we're Pale of Settlement Jews on one side and we're Irish Catholic on the other. So, yeah, some people who went through a lot of shit, I guess, yeah. Yeah, 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 Cargasano.

Jesus Christ, all right. That's kind of how one of his main tack, 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. Yeah, which is bad, I think. Yeah, 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 I it's sort of like the I always say 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 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? You act out. You might wind up smoking 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 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 were 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a few, but it turns out everyone who's been even tangentially 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 what to offer 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 it cracked on you know 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 Cartesano 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 campaign. 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, 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 completely done, she's done something, I don't know. I mean, 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 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 shovel that decade off into the sea and pretend none of us were making choices back then. No, the Gen Z and Gen Alpha people who wanna bring it back, I'm like, no, it was shit. It was bad. No, no, no, no. 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 time to be alive. No, do was shit. It was bad. Don't, don't. It's like when 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 time to be alive. Do you not know who the president was? Yeah. I 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 Cartasano was the guy we're gonna 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 who gets 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. 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, Olsen 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, then 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. Right. And so, yeah, so it does feel a little bit like refusing to learn to read, I think is. That is an interesting thing. Yeah.

Now we're gonna, and again, I also think he's probably smushing some stuff together here because it's too clean a story that's into 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 barely quite that smooth.

There's also this sort of like, I don't know what the term is for it exactly, but there is this fetishization, I think, of Native Americans that, you know, it's like Orientalism before, this sort of like noble savage idea. That's big probably around the time that he's talking about these things.

Yes. So especially, I think probably in Utah too, because they consider, yeah, they think that they're connected to the Native Americans. Well, the fact that they're all Mormon 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 he brings in a guy who is indigenous as his co-owner, largely so he can say, look, we're authentic. That happens a lot. Now that was a lot more common.

We're mostly talking these 70s, 80s, 90s. So he's not outside of outside of the cultural mate. Like the Boy Scouts are doing shit like that just as much, right? So. 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 muster today. Let me tell you that. No, it was, yeah. There's a lot of stuff where it's just like, Jesus Christ, these were. Oh boy.

Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't, yeah. And that was not that long ago. No, no, no. 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. Like. Yeah. Like. 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 was Utah's premier university and it is run and owned by the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints. The elders at the school are concerned at this point that a number of students are having trouble maintaining their academics. They're looking for a program they can use on kids who are having trouble and at risk of failing out of the school. 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 Crackauer 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 is 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 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 US 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. But then I- A lot of great places to do it. Yeah, I remember reading about 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 and 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. Which seems like a little log. Yeah, I like to shower like a little long. Yeah. I like to shower after a few days. You know, I, I, 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 the, like in 26 days, by the way, it's 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 it's important- That was 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. That is not a priority. That goes back to Queen Victoria, she hated kids. She loved sex with her- Keeps them away. 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. So it's important I note that Outward Bound is not the place, not the kind, they are not like 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 proved 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.

If you're asking me. No, that doesn't seem like it would even cover, I mean, even with inflation. 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 love working with teenagers, but, but yeah, nobody is paid enough to work with teenagers. I love 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 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 a hundred something kids. And these are all students. 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 Olsen, who was still in his twenties 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 gotta 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. 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 they'll be, they'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 this happens a lot where they'll be, they'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. Like things like isolation and feeling out of control and feeling lonely, like these are things that college kids go through

that make them, 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, 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 therapeutic benefit for that. No, it's true. Yeah, 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 definitely feel, so there definitely is something to that, but yeah, I know they're gonna take this and they're gonna make it much worse. Yeah, yeah.

They're going to, so, you know, BYU, I think actually does, cause we're gonna be, there's a lot to criticize the Mormon aspect of this whole industry. 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? So-

Probably some of them are married. Yeah, some of them presumably are married. Like Olsen's in his 20s and has multiple children. 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. The girls is very, yeah, that is a very telling phrase. What do you mean? I don't like your use of that word here.

Yeah, absolutely not. Yeah, there's girls. Girls is definitely one of those words that's a totally different word, depending on like inflection. Like if you're talking about like, I'm going out to the bar with the girls or whatever. With the girls, yeah, that's one thing.

Very different the girls than this the girls. I feel like I'd even hear people say like, oh yeah, he liked the ladies with the girls or whatever. With the girls, yeah, that's one thing. 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 that's- He liked the ladies, sure. That's what you say about an adult man. 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, exactly. Whereas you are open, you're leaving that door open when you're describing 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 wanna call it early, they don't want to send, they don't want to call it early. They don't want to take anyone back. So 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, cause a lady dies in his class, doesn't know how to deal with dehydration. 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- But also, it was this sort of like anti-establishment religion for a long time. They were very, yeah, fighting against the US governments are like kind of in there. 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 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's like, maybe we don't want you running our wilderness survival program anymore. You kind of failed the survival thing, right? At this point, two people have died. So 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 a lot of attention to the people who die in his programs. 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. Oh God, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So they're kind of like expensive summer camps. Very expensive. Very expensive for the time, yes. A summer camp that will cost you as much as like a nice used car. Right.

Yeah. Maybe a really nice used car. That kind of depends on your definition of 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.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel de Lilla. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Predenti and I'm Jeme Jackson-Gadston. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes! Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice.

And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Sanner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it, like, you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes

to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When most people think of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, they think of Richard Jewell, a security guard who was first painted as a hero by the media, but later became a suspect in the FBI's investigation. But in the summer of 1996, it was Eric Rudolph, a terrorist and dedicated

soldier in the white supremacist Christian identity movement, who executed the bombing and escaped into the night. And that's all most people know about him. What most people don't know about him is that before withdrawing from civilization, he also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub. What even fewer people know about him is that he eluded the authorities for five years in the mountains of North Carolina until his eventual capture in 2003. And what I didn't know about him was how our two lives were connected. From iHeart and Tinderfoot TV, I'm Cole Lacasio,

and this is Flashpoint. All eight episodes are available to binge now. Listen for free on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and join Tinderfoot Plus for an ad-free binge experience. They stroll in like regular shoppers. Did it ever occur to you that all these crazy shoplifting stories are actually connected?

The $8 million retail theft ring. I'm going deep undercover. It's hard to visualize you with hair. To connect the dots and expose this secret world. It's 100% human trafficking. So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting. Yeah. But she's 100% human trafficking. So you can make a thousand dollars a day shoplifting. Yeah. But she's just a worker bee. I actually confront the real shoplifting queen herself. Just wanted to see if you'd be interested in talking to me about charges and stuff.

A mother of three orchestrating all her crimes from a secluded hilltop mansion. Walking around the perimeter of the house now. I hear the cops. Dude, I think we should go. Let's roll. We're running from the cops. Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. Gosh, if I was one of those California girls, I'd be sweating. History is filled with strange, unusual, and unexpected stories. Stories about people who have accomplished extraordinary things. Pets that have gone above and beyond. Events that have defied explanation.

And I'd like to tell you about them. I'm Aaron Manke, and for the past six years, I've been sharing the most curious tales in history with millions of listeners around the world on my hit podcast, Cabinet of Curiosities. With well over 120 million downloads to date, listeners have been fascinated by such tales as the surprising country that invented the croissant, the stowaway turned hero who helped capture a Nazi spy, and the wrestling champ who went on to win the White House. And now, finally, nearly 200 of these amazing stories from the podcast have been gathered into one book.

Curious to know more? Pre-order Cabinet of Curiosities, available November 12th, wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Learn more over at GrimAndMile.com slash Curiosities. 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 Appleseed

of wilderness survival programs for teenagers, right? And you know, he also, he writes a popular survival book and if you've seen the movie, Jeremiah Johnson, he's the expert survival consultant for that movie, which- Oh, is that the movie that, with the GIF, right? Of the- Yes, yes, of the guy like nodding and smiling. Nodding, okay, I haven't seen it, but yes. It rules, it's a great movie.

And clearly he was good at the skills part, cause 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 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.

I think 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 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,

gets me to sleep at night. Oh, sorry, Kat just jumped on the keyboard, but everything's still good. 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 seventies and early eighties. Like it's just it's just like, you know, the Jesus freaks people who like, yep, the Jesus freaks, the myth of poetic men's movement, you know, yes.

And the RAs. 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 home staying 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 shots of him shirtless using rusted old tools, the wrong way,

the wood isn't positioned right on the sawhorse. And he just butchered a goat by cutting its head off with an ax, which is not how you butcher animals. It is not how you butcher animals. Unless it's like a chicken, but you don't- And even then, yeah. You don't cut their even then, yeah, it's, yeah. That's really.

You don't cut their head off with an ax. So much of this is cosplay, you know? So anyway, he worked on Jeremiah Johnson as like a. He's their consultant on like how to do all the 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 gotta be critical of Olsen because of the kids he got killed. I don't wanna 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 dissent to each other. And a big part of why-

And how old are these kids? I think these kids are like in their teens, like 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 Olson still, he's not one of these like you yell at the kids. His belief is that you present them with choices

and tools and 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 Cartesano. Steven Anthony Cartesano 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 gave him chiseled features and piercing eyes. On a Monday. On a Monday. On a Monday. Garfield would hate this man. More obituaries, yeah, more obituaries should be like, by the way, he was super exotically hot. He was fucking 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, cause I don't know, I'm not gonna 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 isn't technically a special forces job, but it's one of those gigs that 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 unit, right? 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. I didn't know that. Oh yeah, and 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 aviation is a big thing in our family. So I thought this was gonna be kind of like space camp but with airplanes, but it was very, very, very, very military based. So 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're out in the woods. Now I wonder if like maybe this guy- If that's good advice or not. Well, also I wonder, did this guy also have a hand in this?

Cause it wasn't that far from Modesto, California. He very well may have, because he winds up during his time in the military, he spends a period of time as an instructor at the Fairchild Air Force Base Survival School. Yeah, so I wonder if maybe he helped develop their curriculum. There's a good chance he did. 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, cause 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. Cause they just like, again, as somebody who,

who slaughters and butchers animals, like, I don't know how you fuck that up as a Marine. Like what are you guys doing? Oh my God. Yeah, definitely like, yeah, trauma, way to, yeah, way to traumatize everybody. Butch it children. I know they got a good, 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. So, yeah, he goes to, anyway, we're talking about Steve Cartesano.

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. Krakauer 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 married suit 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 gonna 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 have some crazy stories, you know? Oh yeah, you'll hear some shit from Montana Steve.

From Montana Steve, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Steve Montana, other people will tell you stuff about Steve Montana. Steve Montana just makes me think of Tony Montana. Like, will tell you stuff about Steve Montana. 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 Ritalin.

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 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. No, no, you have no relevant training here. No, it's like, yeah, there's nothing, there's no child development, there's no, yeah, there's none of these things. It's wearing them down because there's nothing, there's no child development. There's no, yeah, there's none of these things.

It's wearing them down because that's what's gonna 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 things. No, no, it's, yeah, it's very, it is very, I mean, I was gonna say it is very strange when people think that you can become an expert on just by but then I was like well, I probably shouldn't talk cuz

Fucking for a 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. 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 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 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 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.

Here's how John Krakauer described his educational tactics in an article for Outside. Cardisano 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 difference here?

It's just standardization of, yeah. Yeah, I hate the whole two, 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. Like don't complicate communication. It's hard enough as it is. Kids, if there's one, the famously eloquent teenagers, that's the thing. Teenagers are very, they literally have trouble expressing themselves. And now I'm having trouble expressing myself because thinking about this, expressing myself,

expressing myself because this pisses me off. Why don't we take a break and let our advertisers express themselves? Let's do it. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. 16th 2017 was murdered. My name is Manuel de Lilla. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks.

Tephany exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Prenti. And I'm Jeme Jackson-Gadston. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart podcasts.

When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl! Yes! Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Sanner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets

the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it, like you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep.

Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When most people think of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, they think of Richard Jewell, a security guard who was first painted as a hero by the media, but later became a suspect in the FBI's investigation. But in the summer of 1996, it was Eric Rudolph, a terrorist and dedicated soldier

in the white supremacist Christian Identity Movement, who executed the bombing and escaped into the night. And that's all most people know about him. What most people don't know about him is that before withdrawing from civilization, he also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub. What even fewer people know about him is that he eluded the authorities for five years in the mountains of North Carolina until his eventual capture in 2003. And what I didn't know about him was how our two lives were connected.

From iHeart and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Cole Acasio, and this is Flashpoint. All eight episodes are available to binge now. Listen for free on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And join Tenderfoot Plus for an ad-free bench experience. They stroll in like regular shoppers. Did it ever occur to you that all these crazy shoplifting stories are actually connected? An $8 million retail theft ring.

I'm going deep undercover. It's hard to visualize you with hair. To connect the dots and expose this secret world. It's hard to visualize you with hair. To connect the dots and expose this secret world. It's 100% human trafficking. So you can make a thousand dollars a day shoplifting. Yeah. But she's just a worker bee. I actually confront the real shoplifting queen herself. Just wanted to see if you'd be interested in talking to me about charges and stuff. No, I have no comment. A mother of three, orchestrating all her crimes from a secluded hilltop mansion.

We're walking around the perimeter of the house now. I hear the cops. Dude, I think we should go. Let's roll. We're running from the cops. Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Gosh, if I was one of those California girls, I'd be sweating.

History is filled with strange, unusual, and unexpected stories. Stories about people who have accomplished extraordinary things. Pets that have gone above and beyond. Events that have defied explanation. And I'd like to tell you about them. I'm Aaron Manke. And for the past six years, I've been sharing the most curious tales in history with millions of listeners around the world on my hit podcast, Cabinet of Curiosities. With well over 120 million downloads to date, listeners have been fascinated by such tales

as the surprising country that invented the croissant, the stowaway-turned-hero who helped capture a Nazi spy, and the wrestling champ who went on to win the White House. And now, finally, nearly 200 of these amazing stories from the podcast have been gathered into one book. Curious to know more? Pre-order Cabinet of Curiosities, available November 12th,

wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Learn more over at grimandmile.com slash curiosities. and mild.com slash curiosities. 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 bootcamp 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 bootcamp, that's what, if it works for the army, it's gotta work for small children, right? The thing is the army has, I mean, I guess in thing is the army has, 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- And they're all adults.

They're adults. Well, I mean, it hasn't always been that they joined voluntarily, but a lot of the people there are there because they want you 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, right? 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 beat up a bunch of captive children helps those kids in any way, right? 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 struggling child.

Yeah, give your child that thousand yard stare. That's what you want. What happens to the drill instructor, guys? Yeah, that's... It's also this kind of movie image that, again, a lot of conservatives latch onto of a boot camp where people are being thrown in the mud and shaken and screamed at and insulted in creative ways

by these 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, I mean, that,

how do you even, it's just, how do you justify that? It's just like, what was this? You 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, thankfully a large 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 Morecki was engaged in a training exercise for the rescue swimmer school program. This is part of the US Navy. This was a difficult test to pass. Only about half of the students did. Morecki 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. Morecki 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 bootcamp 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 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 institutions. Right, right, it also, it becomes a these are public institutions. Right. Right.

It also, it 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 bootcamp. 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, I think a lot worse. Well, it's also very American idea of if it's a private, you know, well, it's anything that's private, you know, sure, let them discriminate against these people.

Sure, let them do these. These are private groups. They can do whatever they want. Private businesses can do whatever they want, yeah. Yeah, 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 more.

That's when we'll be a free country. Make America march. Ben Franklin dreamed up. 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 swamp land in that area at that time.

Yeah, this was always the plan. Yeah. So when he starts Challenger, I think it's technically called Challenger 2, but fuck it, we're gonna call it Challenger. Steve's first major innovation was the idea that the entire process- Also, call it something Challenger, like a-

Not a great name in the 80s. Two years after, yeah, yeah. That's why you put the two on there. Right, like, yeah, this is a big thing. It's not, yeah, yeah. So Steve's first innovation when he started this is you gotta 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 gonna 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 pay me and I have some big armed men

kidnap your children? It was usually- He's the guy who invented this? Yeah, he is the guy who invented this. Did Synanon used to do this? This is specifically his innovation. 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- Oh, okay. And you can like- 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- 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 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 it's like six months ago, I went back and 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 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 unlike Southern, California, which is a lot of- Which is where I grew up, thank you. Same, me too, me too.

So yeah, a lot of people, yeah. As 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 a 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, that, that's why all of this, for one thing, that's why all of this, for one thing that's why all of this happens in Utah, but that's why there's a lot of Californians because California has stricter laws

that kind of limit parents more. That was the exact scenario. That's the laboratory of the states working as intended, or the laboratory of democracy working as intended. 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 Bowie 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 wanna 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 Cardasano's era, but it gives you an idea of how these kind of, this kind of add-on program worked. I was woken up at about 2 0 7 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. There 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 towards 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.

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 it like most of the time it happens when they're in the middle of the night when you're asleep

Yeah, how does that help? How does that help? You're disoriented you're not able to fight back as sure no no no I understand how it helps them But how does that help a child who's going? Oh, that's not the point fuck up but how does that help a child who's going through our- Oh, that's not the point. To fuck up, right? Right. Just fuck up their, any sense of calm or peace that they might have, yeah.

Yeah, no, no, no. The point, the last concern of everyone involved in this is what's best for the kids. I know. Yeah, it's pretty vile stuff. I do think a lot, because 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 had she had the money, I don't know 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 put them through bootcamp. Yeah, I think that,

I do think that there are a lot of parents who genuinely think, like I genuinely think this is the best thing for, for their kids. But, but yeah, but I just feel like, I, 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 have, and I know people who can honestly say, if I hadn't joined the military, I would have like killed myself, right? But with like drugs and out, like 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? 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 mean, 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 incredibly high.

And it is a lifelong trauma. Oh yeah. Like it stays with you. Yeah, yeah. And it's cool and good. So yeah, I wanna 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'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 have one where they film like this kidnapping. And I wanna 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. 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. Hi. I love you. We decided to give you some help and we're going to the Dr. Phil. Hi. And these people are here to help you. We decided to give you some help and we're going to the Dr. Phil. Oh! And these people are here to help you.

My name is Mike and this is Laura. No! Go away! And let me explain your situation. No! You've actually got a trip planned to Hollywood. No! We're going to Dr. Phil today. No!

So... Go away! Your family has decided that you need help. No! Go away! And screaming actually isn't gonna 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 trying to have a conversation Sure, I would be a lot a lot louder than this word saying no and hiding

One one like one like second of that's voice, and I come up shooting. That's how I'm responding. Whatever I can grab, man, you're going down. What the fuck? This is like, we were like the kids, like, we're probably, like, Robert, I think we're about the same age. Like, we were the children who were taught stranger danger.

Yes. Right. You know? Like, the first thing, a strange man- Don't go with the stranger. Yeah. Don't go with the stranger. Yeah, don't go with a stranger. A strange man comes into your bedroom at night. Getting some mixed signals from the boomers. I was like, no, this is like the nightmares I had

about like the Polly Claus kidnapping case. Like this is the, yeah, this is the kind of, exactly. So, but yeah, you see they're being very quiet and like, you know. Yes. This is the sanitized version of what really happens. And I wanna end by showing you video of what these camps were really like. And we are talking about challengers.

So this is actually Steve Cardasano'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. The link will be in our show notes along with all of other sources. But yeah, here's, 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. Hold them back now! Go! Get out! Get out of the way! Get out of the way now! Go! Move!

Move! Dazed, they gather around the bonfire and soon learn to show respect to those who will teach them how to survive here. My name is Horsehair. The next 63 days, you'll be under my care and my staff's care. You understand? Yes, sir! I can't hear you! Yes, sir! 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 guy's ponytail! He's not trained in child care? Yeah, a guy with a ponytail and a bowie knife. 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. Oh yes. Yes, major weapon. We'll talk about all of that. Yeah. Don't you worry. So yeah, I do want to chat a little bit about horsehair.

You know your rehab facility's quality place when the guy gets led by a man named Horsehair. His real name was Lance Paul Jagger. And he is the guy who Steve does not want to do any real teaching of children. For some reason, his first name being Lance just really helped. Lance? Really helped.

Yeah, of course Lance did this. Paul Jagger. I think that's a pretty cool name. Yeah. And he was like, you know what, let's go. It's better than horse hair. Horse hair. Yeah. 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's a cool name. Also horsehair 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. Is it literally your whole nickname just for the ponytail?

Is that become your identity horsehair? Yes, yes, very Samson. Yeah. 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. Especially once this makes a lot of money,

because in short order, in the first year or two, he's made a couple million dollars doing this. He doesn't want, because he's charging 15 grand per session. 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 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. And because these are rich parents, part of his program is he spends $2,000 a day renting a Lamborghini in order to like- Oh my God. That's what he's spending his fucking money on.

Now, obviously parents are gonna bulk at a price like this when especially in 1989 money, 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. 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? 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 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 gonna quote from John Krakauer's article in Outside Magazine here. Cardisano persuaded his good friend Oliver North

to put in an appearance during his Iran-Contra notoriety. I heard a publicist who booked him on time. Yeah, fucking Ollie North. Like NRA, Ollie North? How the fuck does Ollie North run up and wind up here? I was thinking like Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris. Like I was thinking Celebrity. This is right after Iran-Contra 2. Oh my God. There's not been a lot of distance I was thinking like Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris. Like I was thinking Celebrity.

This is right after Arundh 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. So I think that like, if I saw somebody driving a Lamborghini and hanging out with 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 know This guy knows all the north. You must know how to treat my kid Like you look at look at what cars teachers drive, you know? And it's like the shittiest, you know? Oh, Lambo, huh? Yeah, it's like the shittiest, like maybe they have like, you know, a Volvo.

Fucking. Or, you know. Fucking Steve Montana rolls up in a Lamborghini with Ollie North and says, hey, let me take your kids for 63 days. It'll be 20 grand. I'd be like, okay, no, like fucking drug dealers drive, you know, Lamborghinis, like not people, yeah.

Drug dealers hang out with Oliver North, I remember that. Exactly. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey.

Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Get your kid into some good business. Yeah. So he does appearances on all of the big daytime shows of the era, Sally, Jesse, Raphael, Geraldo, Donahue. Cardisano 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 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. But, ugh. It's just like, you're not gonna name like something, well, I mean, I guess people could do sometimes name things like a 9-Eleven Memorial this or that, but like, wouldn't that be just kind of like calling something like, you know, take your children to 9-Eleven school?

Because the challenge or explosion. Okay, now Mara, I operate the 9-Eleven 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, you know? We don't talk about that, Robert. I mean, we have to, Sophie,

if we're going to keep enrollment up, I'm gonna need to start, I need to get on like Oprah or something. You gotta pay for that Lamborghini, yeah. We don't talk about that. We don't talk about that. We don't talk about that. I would never let you get anywhere near Oprah Winfrey. That's actually almost certainly for the best.

I think I could do a lot of damage on 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, basically he 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 it 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 crack hour as the phones were ringing off the hook. Parents begged him to take their kids and 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 who's 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? That will eventually happen. And people get sued. Yeah, people are gonna get sued. And 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, "'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, "'Cartasano 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 like, and yeah, slugging in this,

like that can cause organ damage. Yes, yes. 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 starve to death in these programs, right? Like these are like kids who are,

when their bodies come back from the coroner, like are so skin, 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 wanna call the comparison, but we are not talking about like just slightly hungry.

They are prison camps, you know, they are prison camps. The kids are treated there as badly, you know, in many cases as people in prisons. Yes, yes, yeah. That's, I think, a much better comparison. Now, Steve, at this point, had a wife and four children. In the documentary, Hell Camp, his ex-wife claims that he told them the money he made from the business

was all being reinvested into it. And so 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 Christ. Steve Montana, baby. That's a classic Steve Montana caper. Yeah, I mean, this is legit. I don't know, like, 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.

We don't have money for you? Yeah. It's got 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 wanna slug this guy. I mean, he's dead, but I still wanna slug him. I wanna slug Steve Montana. Again, I would like to hang out with Montana Steve. Montana Steve seems like he would, you know, he'd have that sort of like Sam Elliott voice. Oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.

That's who I'm casting to play Montana Steve with my spec script. Yeah, I would say either Sam Elliott, maybe Jeff Bridges if he can get one of those long beards going again. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I, where is he buried?

Yeah, Jeff Bridges is already doing some show. Oh, and it's a show that's actually involves a very sketchy writer. So yeah, this is great. We could just move him right over to my program too. So where is Steve, what is Steve Montana's actual real name? Steve Cartesano. Steve Cartesano, okay.

Where is this guy buried? I'm not gonna do anything. Just so we know. You know what? I will 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, yeah, not a fit in distance. Out of the way of everything. That's the Oklahoma state motto. Mara, is there anything you wanna 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 Libro.fm and look up my name, you can find a lot of really awesome books that I have narrated. Awesome. Yeah. So go to Libro.com, look up Mara. Look up Mara's 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 Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearth the plot to to murder a one woman WikiLeaks.

She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a Mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Peretti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadston. And we're here to help you get started. And we're here to help you get started. And we're here to help you get started. And we're here to help you get started. And we're here to help you get started. And we're here to help you get started. your podcast. advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Morrie Tehary-Pore. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation,

then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In California, during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, tried to assassinate the president of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson, 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI, identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer, season on the new podcast, RIP Current.

Hear episodes of RIP Current early and completely ad free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to I Heart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts. I'm going deep undercover. It's hard to visualize you with hair. To expose the secret world of professional shoplifting. So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting.

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