SYSK Selects: How Cult Deprogramming Works

The fear of cults in the 1970s drove Americans to look the other way on kidnappings, abuse and torture of cult members by deprogrammers – but did it even work? Find out in this classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning Stuff you should know listeners. This is one
of your faithful co leaders, Charles W. Chuck Bryant, here
to tell you about cult de programming. This is my
Saturday Select pick for the week. It's from September two
thousand fifteen. You know that Josh and I love to
talk about cults really fascinate us. But here's the flip
side cult deep programming. After you leave the cult, you

(00:24):
can't just walk out of there. It takes a lot
of a lot of effort to normalize yourself back into society,
and cult de programming is how you do it. So
here you go. Check it out right now. Welcome to
Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh

(00:50):
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. I'm not always whacky Jerry,
So this is stuff you should know once again. Sixty
twos preceding the record button being pressed is the gold.
I wish we could sell that stuff, sell it on
the street. People be hooked on. You know what the

(01:10):
street value of that ment it is? What right about
five bucks? And it's not bad? Yeah? Uh Chuck, Yes,
have you ever been in a cult. Um. No, not technically,
not at all. Remember we've done episodes on cults, on brainwashings. Uh,

(01:32):
this is pretty much the natural extension of that progression. Yeah.
And we talked a little bit about deep programming and
the cults one probably, but this one, it turns out,
has a lot of interesting history I didn't know about. Yes, man,
it is Are You Crazy? A dark spot on America's
recent path yet again, yet another one because apparently the

(01:53):
powers that be really got everybody so scared over things
like the communist threat or new clear weapons or what
have you that America is basically it's like a herd
of spook cattle for many decades, and they they we
channeled our anxieties out on anything other or different, and

(02:13):
this is a great case of that. Yeah, and the
courts will get to this. But they said roundly that
you can kidnap and torture and rape people as long
as it's out of love, as long as those people
are weirdos. Yeah, as long as it's apparent loving their
child in the harshest extreme way. Man, it's a good
imagine crazy what people went through. So um, the whole

(02:37):
thing we should say, like America did lose its mind
collectively for many years. And it happens from time and time.
Started in a good old Salem before there wasn't even
in America. It's a long tradition here in this country
of everybody, yeah going crazy. Um. And like I said,
this is a case of it. But this case did

(02:59):
coalesce or round certain things. It wasn't just out of
the blue. It wasn't out of nowhere, um for the
to start off with. In the late sixties, early seventies, um,
the there was a real division between generations in the
United States. Huge. There was the parents who still remember

(03:22):
the fifties, were raised in the fifties, born in the
fifties maybe, but definitely we're a little more button buttoned
up and up with ike. Then their kids were. Okay,
So imagine if you have kids and they're going through
this rebellious phase and they're smoking pot and they're like
wearing motorcycle boots and rocking out to the Beatles and

(03:43):
like flipping you off every time you look at them.
And then all of a sudden, this weird tranquility comes
over them and they start wearing robes and they shave
their head. Except for there's a long ponytail in the back,
or they're still wearing boots and smoking pot listen to
the beetles right, or or they start wearing bow ties
and um, like quoting scripture to hear. Wouldn't you be like, well,

(04:07):
that's a little weird. This is a little odd. Something's
going on here with with my kid. My kid who's
twenty underwent like a serious religious conversion that has never
been seen before in our family. That's a little weird
and that's not one I approve of. Yeah. So there's
these groups that at the time were called cults, but
today if you read sociology texts or studies or whatever,

(04:31):
they're called new religious movements sex right with the ct
Y Yeah, um, And these groups are basically at the
time they were all termed cults. And you usually when
you think cold especially United States, it's like, um, some
sort of Eastern religion or something like that. But it

(04:51):
turns out the cult movement of the early seventies, late
sixties and into the eighties we're actually um, for the
most part, Bible based like Christian cults, but they they
took Christian beliefs and teachings and went really far out
there with them, um or there was a huge influx

(05:11):
of Eastern thought, in Eastern religion into the United States too,
and anybody who joined this group joined a cult. But
today if you call him a cult, it's not very nice.
You call him a new religious movement or a sect, right,
or in the case of the Source Family, which I've
talked about as being my favorite cult, Yeah, they just
like to have sex and do drugs a lot, the Source, right,

(05:36):
they were a cult though, Uh well yeah, sure by
those definitions right at the time. Yeah, I'd call him
a commune now probably that had a band and a
charismatic hang gliding frontman. Right. The charismatic thing is a
huge thing. That's usually the one thing that is the
commonality and all new religious movements they are centered around

(06:00):
um a central figure. But as the guy who wrote
this article, um, which is a pretty good article, I
have to say, this is not the Grabster, was it. No,
it was a a newbie. This newbie has taken the
Grabster's stuff. Yeah it should have been the Grabster. Well,
the Grabster has gotten a serious focus on all things

(06:21):
dungeons and dragons these days over I Ohn nine. Yeah,
he's moved on and up. But anyway, the author of
this article points out that cole is it's a very
slippery word. It has like an in group out group
kind of sentimentality attached to the point is over the

(06:42):
over the years. Um. This whole idea of your kid
going undergoing a religious conversion and then just kind of
becoming different. It was a bothersome and worrisome to the parents.
But then Jones Town happened, and all of a sudden,
any kind of semblance of law or religious freedom or

(07:05):
anything like that went right out the window because it
was shown and even before that, thanks to the Manson family,
but really UM, with Jonestown, it was shown that these
cults that supposedly, up to that point people thought were
harmless or even helpful, um, could be very destructive. Over
nine people died. Uh. So you know, I get it.

(07:29):
I get why people would be upset about perhaps their
children joining something that in any way, shape or form
resembles Jonestown. So what do you do? Well, you could
hire someone to kidnap and torture and beat them and
yell at them into submission a k A D D
programming a k a uh brainwashing or I guess they

(07:55):
would call it reverse brainwashing. Right. That was kind of
the key is this idea that, um, you were combating
this conversion to a new religious movement or a cult
group or whatever, um, based on the idea that your
kid couldn't possibly have undergone this conversion and joined this

(08:16):
group based on his or her own free will. That's right.
So thanks to that mindset, UH and a guy named
Ted Patrick we'll talk about right now, the Cult Awareness
Network was formed, and Ted was There were there were
many D programmers, well I don't know about many, but
there were a handful of D programmers in this time period,

(08:39):
but Mr Patrick sort of led the way. Uh. He
was born in the Red Light District of Chattanooga, Tennessee,
and apparently had a really bad speech impediment such there
that he couldn't even communicate with people. So he dove
into religion and what he said was, quote, it wasn't
long before I could think of was health are in

(09:00):
damn nation? And um. So he had a bad experience
with religion growing up and then had an opportunity in
the early seventies to uh go and save somebody's kid
who fell into what they called a cult. Well, it
was offered a job. Yes, so there it was a

(09:21):
scriptural based um Christian group called the Children of God
now called the International Family, and apparently, um they had
tried to recruit Ted's son and nephew out on the
beach in San Diego and Ted was like, what do
you mean some group tried to recruit you. I guess

(09:43):
I'll just go infiltrate this group. Yeah. Well he was
also approached by parents who's children were in this what
they called a cult. So yeah, he Infiltrateed and said
you know what, Uh, they were brainwashed and I'm the
guy that can fix it for a fee. Yeah, which
is weird because um so, Ted Patrick and somebody uh

(10:04):
named Mia Donovan came out with a documentary recently called
Deprogrammed to see that. Uh yeah, apparently it's very tough
to find and get your hands on, but it's out
there somewhere, um, and it's all about Ted Patrick. Ted
black Lightning Patrick is his name, and he um. He
was an unlikely candidate to become the face and the

(10:28):
leader of what was an anti cult movement that had
arisen in the United States thanks to Jonestown and thanks
to the fact that kids were joining cults left and right. Um,
he was a high school dropout, Like you said, he
was a he had had his own um experiences with
scripture and Bible beating and all of that kind of stuff,

(10:49):
and he, I guess was his heart was in the
right place from what I understand, But he did some
really really questionable stuff over the years after reform. The
COLT Action or Awareness network. Do you think it start
was in the right place. That's that's how MEA. Donovan
puts it. Really. I think he's trying to make money.

(11:09):
So that was another thing too. Supposedly he was working
not for profit, that his expenses were paid and he
wasn't really pocketing the money himself. But he went the
other way pretty quickly because at one point he was
charging up to grand which would be the equivalent of
about a hundred and twenty dollars for each case today

(11:32):
to uh to deprogram, to kidnap and deprogram your child. Yeah,
a lot of money. Uh so he uh, he basically
at the very beginning said you know what, uh, how
do we get away with this? And he said, I
think if we are working with the parents, then we
won't be prosecuted for kidnapping because it's their own kid.

(11:55):
So I won't buy proxy beat affiliated an accomplice because
it's their children. Yeah, you can't kidnap your own child
in ninete, No, you can't, UM, And so that worked
at the time. Twenty one was the federal age for miners,
right or for an adult. Anything below twenty one you

(12:17):
were a minor unless the state had gone in and
rewritten law and said now it's actually eighteen or nineteen
or whatever. So that that covered like a pretty decent
amount of the UM emerging cult population. Yeah, and he
also figured that I won't get in trouble because once
we have freed these people and deprogrammed them, they won't

(12:38):
breast charges. It's like they'll be delighted, right exactly there,
they're brainwashed. All we have to do is on brainwashed them.
The other way that he figured out UM they could
be protected by law was if if the member, the
cult member was an adult, they could apply for what's
called the conservatorship. Yes, and this is basically UM based

(13:01):
on that old kind of law where uh husband could
have his hysterical wife committed if he didn't like our attitude,
that kind of thing where there's a very very loose
burden of proof on demonstrating that the person was out
of their mind, so much so that in this point
in time in America, if you were um high, if

(13:23):
you hired a cult deep programmer, all you had to
do was also shell out five dred bucks or something
for a psychologist who would come in and say, the
very fact that they're a member of this cult demonstrates
that they are mentally ill, and therefore power over them
should be granted to their parents, even those persons an adult.
And once that power was granted to the parent, the

(13:44):
parent could extend that power to the cult deep programmers,
who would then go and kidnap the cult member and
then begin the process of deep programming. Yeah, and they
wouldn't even make any attempts to assess their mental state.
It was just sort of I don't know about grandfather Inn,
but it was just sort of lumped in under the
umbrella of the conservatorship. Yeah, thank you again. Psychology Where

(14:05):
to go? So, well, should we talk about some of
his greatest hits? Well, let's take a let's take a
break first. Okay, alright, so Patrick, the first thing he

(14:45):
did when he first started doing this was because he
didn't really have a shop set up or a staff
at this point. He hired um thugs street thugs too
do the kidnapping. He would just pay dudes that, look,
we're tough Ruffians as they were called, you know, how
to abduct these kids, you know, like with UM. Whenever

(15:05):
you hear like of a UM a private investigator making
air quotes like is also involved in like a jewel
heist or something like that, where there's that real like
gray area that's occupied by some people who are maybe
working on the side of the law, but really they're
doing really unlawful things to achieve those ends. These are

(15:26):
the kind of people that were hired by the Cult
Awareness Network, that's right. Uh And he uh eventually was
joined by someone named Sandra Sachs, who was a housewife
whose son was deprogrammed, and from I believe the Harry Chrishnas.
And then he got to think of a guy named Goose.
I'm not sure of Goose's real name, but he was

(15:48):
his became ultimately his like a big henchman. So they
were sort of the three heading up the network early
on at least. So one of the things he did,
UM it wasn't always uh religious cults even he was
hired basically anytime a parent didn't like what their kid
was doing, they could hire him to kidnap them and

(16:09):
scream at them and handcuffed them to a bed for
a week until they said they didn't want to do
what they were doing, whether it was being a lesbian
or just being a converted Catholic. Yeah. There was one
case that he got in trouble for for false imprisonment
I believe, out in denver Um where a woman had

(16:30):
left the Greek Orthodox Church to go live her own life,
and her parents didn't like that, so they hired Ted
and his company two deep programmer yeah I guess or
reprogrammer back into the Greek Orthodox Church. There was two girls,
two daughters, and uh. Their quote at the end of
this ordeal was there was nothing to deep program, right,

(16:54):
we just left the church for another one. Yeah. Yeah.
There's another woman, an English professor out in California and
Sam this go named Sarah Worth, and she had become
an anti nuke activist, civil rights activist as well. Her
her mother back in Pennsylvania thought that that just was
very unbecoming, so she hired the Cult Awareness Network to

(17:15):
deprogramm or daughter. That's right, this is going on, and
it was legal, well not I don't know about legal,
but it was protected. Here's the thing, so let's talk
about why this was legal or quasi legal at the time. Again,
America has really really scared that there's this cult movement
going on, that the youth of America is losing its

(17:36):
free will. This is what the whole thing is based on,
that there are groups, insidious groups out there who are
recruiting and brainwashing our kids. What's to become of America
If all of our kids are running around its harrid
Christnas or Bible thumpers or what have you. They're the future.
So we have to fight this. And if they're being brainwashed,
you need to de brainwash them. So not only was

(17:57):
it groups like the Culti Earnest Network who were thinking
these things, they were also like drumming up a lot
of publicity as well. Yeah, they thought it was a
big conspiracy. Yeah, a communist conspiracy is what a lot
of people said too, that this is the Ultimately the
Communists were behind it. So not only is it this
obscure fringe group that knows how to work the media,

(18:18):
who believes this. It's also the people reading the newspaper
like parents, cops, judges, juries, and if you take someone
to court for kidnapping you and beating you up until
you agree to stop being a harrid Krishna, and the
judge is convinced that you are have been brainwashed by

(18:39):
the Harry Christmas, the judge is not going to rule
in your favor. And therefore, this whole technique, this whole
method that was used for more than a decade was
quasi legal. For as many times as he was dragged
into court, Ted Patrick was only imprisoned twice, one time
for like ten days and another time for sixty. Yeah,

(18:59):
there was one famous case, uh Stephanie Ryth Miller in Ohio. Um,
she her parents hired her or hired Patrick and his
crew because, uh, well because she was a lesbian. Well,
they suspected she was a lesbian, Yes, was she in fact? Yes?
So they paid eight thousand dollars which would be twenty

(19:20):
one grand today to kidnap her. She was nineteen years old.
She was walking on the street with her friend on
the sidewalk. They pull up in a van, They mace
her friend, and they throw her in the back of
the van and uh, you know, subdue her. She was
driven to Alabama from Ohio. Uh and over the course
in the next seven days, was raped once a day

(19:42):
um by a guy named James Row who was one
of the henchmen that worked with Patrick right in order
to get her back into the heterosexual mindset, right yeah. Uh.
Which we're going to do a whole podcast on gay
d programming at some point, um, because that's a whole
different thing, but that has a roots and something like
this obviously, Uh. At the trial, they um, because this

(20:05):
did go to trial, Um, the defense attacked her roommate
who was gay and said, you know, look at her
boots and her pickup truck, and she has a Doberman
pincher like this is very unbecoming. Uh, she has a
very over overbearing style. Where they were trying to prove
was that the roommate had brainwashed her into becoming a

(20:27):
lesbian and just look at her with her boots and
her pickup truck. So eventually goes to trial and the judge, UM,
Hamilton County Judge Simon Lese l e I s he
was not very sympathetic at all of her lifestyle of course. Uh.
He said homosexuality was immoral and uh. Even he told

(20:49):
the jury that the lifestyle was an issue, but I'm
not going to represent to you that I approve of
the sexual preference. And she called it unnatural. So eventually
he said what the parents did was wrong, but I
don't think there's any question that they did was totally
done out of love for their daughter. Uh. And he
described the tactics, even the rape, as to detract, like

(21:11):
you said, from her lesbianism and attractor to heterosexual activity. Lord.
So he got off with that one, huh uh yeah,
And I don't think he was actually in the room
like it was. There was a lot of back and
forth on like what he knew and what he didn't
know about this case. But the guy who raped her
got away with it. And this was I mean, that
was again he was dragged a court over and over again,

(21:33):
and it wasn't a lot of the cult groups did
not fight back, and in some cases because they didn't
want to open their books from what I understand, which
they may have had to had they fought anything like
this in court, but also because America as a whole
was against them, Like have you remember airplane the original one.

(21:53):
I just watched it the other day where he just
beats up a bunch of moonies in the airport who
are trying to like offer him a free flower. Yeah,
one of them is Joe Iszuzu. For God's sake, he's
America's sweetheart. He should have been beating up for that. So, um,
there was this this It was a joke, obviously, but
it it definitely pointed out this whole sentiment that America

(22:13):
had towards cult at the time, which was like they
it was open season, man, they were fair game inside
and outside of court. There's an indictment in New York
where they indicted some Harri Christna leaders for using mind control.
In an indictment in a court of law, the words
mind control were used to indict somebody for a crime

(22:35):
which whis never been even improven, Like, how do you
mind control somebody? It's crazy. But this was like the
kind of the sentiment that was going on at the time, right,
And so you could be if you were a member
of what was considered a cult group and your parents
were well healed enough to afford the cult awareness network,

(22:56):
you could be sitting there hanging out in the commune
one day, playing your acoustic guitar, what have you thinking
about consciousness and the universality of it? And all of
a sudden, the door gets kicked in and Ted Patrick
and some of his henchmen enter grab you. Your buddy
stands up to be like, hey man, you can't do that,

(23:17):
and they mace him and they take you, throw you
in a van, drive you several states over, maybe to
your parents house. I think they frequently used the parents
house because it added like an extra sense of legality
to it. And then they would keep you there for
as long as they wanted to. They would beat you.
They would um abuse you physically, emotionally, verbally um. They

(23:41):
would starve you, they would deprive you of sleep um,
and you weren't allowed to leave. You were berated constantly.
They would take shifts, they would have your family come
in and berate you. And all of this was completely
made up out of whole cloth by Ted Patrick, Like
he he had no training. What's however, in any kind
of brainwash techniques, Well, there is no training, right he

(24:04):
but he just kind of intuitively got that, like if
you deprive someone of sleep or food, they'll start to
do what you want them to and Um, the whole
goal of it, as far as he was concerned, it
was to create um, to snap somebody out of it.
And when somebody snapped, they basically gave into your will

(24:24):
and that they were no longer resisting. They were no
longer saying, uh, my right to be a hard Christian
is protected by the First Amendment. You have kidnapped me.
I want to go, Please leave, Please leave me alone.
They just said, fine, you're right, I don't want to
be a hard Christian anymore. That could be snapping. It
could also be something that was a lot closer um

(24:46):
and complexion to something like that religious conversion, but it
would be like a conversion back where they'd start crying
and weeping. And these are the ones that were frequently
pointed to as proof positive that deprogramming actually work, because
there are a lot of people who are d programmed.
You said, this is a great thing for me, um,
But it has been explained time and time again as

(25:09):
basically a lot of kids who joined cults did so
because they felt like they weren't accepted at home or
by their families or whatever. And they would see once
they were kidnapped and and take them back to their
parents house that maybe their parents actually did care about
them more than they realized. They were willing to spend
some money and hire Black Lightning to come beat me
up until I agree to come back home. So maybe

(25:33):
that was the reason for this this snapping. Yeah, and
sometimes they would fake it all together to get out
of that prison, which is the case which we'll talk
about right after this break of Jason Scott. All right,

(26:13):
So Jason Scott, this was not a Patrick affair. This
was a guy named Rick ross H and another guy,
two guys named Mark Workman and Charles Simpson. Yes, but
they were referred by the cult Awareness Networks, that's right,
was involved. Well, yeah, they were referred, But this wasn't
Patrick heading up this operation. Uh And this is a

(26:34):
guy named Jason Scott, and he was kidnapped and brought
to uh out in the Booney's in Washington State and
he was held there for days against his will, physically abused,
all the stuff that we've been going over because they
wanted him to leave this Pentecostal church that he was
in with his brothers. I think his mom was in

(26:55):
it at one point, but she left. The sons decided
to stay and she was like, I don't like what's
going on over there, so she hired them uh to
to de program him. Um it failed in that Scott
eventually um faked that he was after four days of torture.
He faked it and said, I don't believe that stuff anymore.

(27:18):
He broke down in tears and said he completely rebuked
everything that he had stood for. And so they said, well,
this is great. It worked. Let's go out for a
celebration dinner with your family and um he was allowed
to use the bathroom at the restaurant by himself for
the first time in a week, and he ran to
the police and the police arrested these guys. Um, there

(27:42):
were there was a civil suit filed. This is where
it gets really interesting. There was a civil suit filed
on Jason Scott's behalf by counselor for the Church of Science,
lead counsel by the Church of Scientology. So now Scientology
is getting involved. They they end up bank erupting through
this court case. They awarded eight hundred seventy five dollars

(28:04):
in compensatory damages, a million and damages a punitive nature
against the Cult Awareness Network and two point five million
against Ross himself. It ended up bankrupting them, and then
the Church of Scientology buys out the Cult Awareness Network
in bankruptcy court, buyser assets, buys your logo, buys your name,

(28:25):
renames it the new Cult Awareness Network, and now it
is run by the Church of Scientology. Right, So, if
you're looking for help to get your kid out of
a cult, including Scientology, the helpful people there will explain
to you how great Scientology is. What's funny, though, is
that like this this Um Jason Scott case was one
of about fifty that were brought at the time through

(28:46):
Scientology lawyers. This this just happened to be the one
that stuck. Yeah, it went all the way to the
Supreme Court where they denied the appeal and in the
end Scott only got about five thousand dollars and two
hundred hours of profess sational services from Ross, which I
didn't understand. I'll explain it to you. So, um, they
became buddies. Apparently they did become buddies. So apparently Jason

(29:10):
Scott did. He forgave his mother. He also forgave Rick Ross.
He broke from the Scientology Um lawyer. He had a
different look after I guess he felt a little fleeced
maybe by the Scientologists or used, I should say, and
ended up being chummy with Rick Ross. So he sold
Rick Ross his settlement, which should have been three million

(29:33):
dollars for five grand and two hundred hours of his
services of deep programming services right to deep program I
think his daughter something like that. I don't know. That's
what I couldn't find. Yeah, so, um, Rick Cross is
still at it. He's a he's an exit counselor um
and he if you listen to him talk, it's really weird. Man.
While approaching this from the outside, like there was a

(29:56):
war that was going on that is still being fought
here there, but the average person wouldn't know about it
in the media. Between the anti cult movement, which is
headed up by people like Ted Patrick and Rick Ross
and the Cult Awareness Network the old version of it,
and the I guess cult movement, which has as disparate

(30:19):
members as the Church of Scientology, the the Catholic League
First Amendment people like the a c l U on
another side. So there's this weird like this battle that
went on in Scientology ultimately one just because they bled
the anti cult movement out in the courts. But like

(30:41):
I said, Rick Cross is still at it. What he's
doing now is exit counseling. And if before de programming
was coercive brainwashing, then UM exit counseling is the opposite
of that. It's basically like a drug intervention, but as
far as cults are concerned. Yeah, the idea is that

(31:03):
you get the whole family involved, You get the person
you're trying to UH counsel I guess involved, and they
all agree to meet and they talk to them about
what they were doing, and they explained to them about
the harmful practices of that cult or not cult, depending
on what it is and UM essentially involved. It's a

(31:26):
it's a really intensive therapy group therapy with your family,
but again not coerced, supposedly voluntary and the proper way
to go about it. It's still expensive though, right, But
like a normal intervention or like a drug related intervention,
like it'll probably be a surprise to the UM the

(31:46):
cult member UM, but in a in a exit counseling
seminar session or whatever, that that person has to agree
to stick around and listen, like they can leave at
any point in time. There's no more kidnapping and duct taping.
So that's the state of affairs now. And it's really

(32:06):
weird again because this is the remnants of this this
info war that went on between the anti cult movement
and the cult movement or the New Religious Movement movement,
and um, it's really kind of the whole thing is
muddy morally speaking, because there are people walking around, including

(32:29):
ones that were abducted and beaten up or mistreated or
abused or tortured by Cult Awareness Network or other d programmers,
who say, if it weren't for those guys, I'd probably
still being a cult right now. And I'm really grateful
to my parents for showing out the money to have
these guys kidnap me because I was really I was
lost in life and very vulnerable at the time, and

(32:53):
this really helped get me back on track. Well yeah,
and cults can be destructive and in uh, destroy peoples
lives and kill people. Um, but what you can't do
is just I think the problem can when everything was
lumped together in one big under, one big umbrella called
cult Exactly. That's exactly right, because who was Ted Patrick

(33:13):
or anybody else the great decider of what made acceptable
religious beliefs and non acceptable religious beliefs? Like where was
that dividing line? And who gave him the right to
do it? Man, could you imagine if this was going
on today with the way things are. Well, it kept
going until was when the judgment came down to that
bankrupted Cult Awareness Network. Yeah, I mean, with the way

(33:37):
things are, I could see I could see Wacko's left
and right hiring people to abduct their children and set
them straight. Yeah. You know, well, supposedly they made out
pretty well in the Satanic Panic of the eighties too.
That that documentary D program is largely about the director's stepbrother,

(33:57):
who was deprogrammed by Ted Patrick because their parents thought
that he was a Satanist or whatever. Because he listened
to me, we should do one on the p MRC
and backmasking that whole We'll just call it like eighties
Satanic panic or something. Let's do it. It would be
a good one. Uh. There's a book. Ted Patrick got
a book called let Our Children Go. There's an exclamation

(34:18):
point in the title. That's right, because you better, uh,
in nineteen seventy six, and here was one quote, uh
something he bragged a lot about some of these things.
He said, Uh, he's so him out West, one of
the people he d programmed. He said. West had taken
up a position facing the car with his hands on
the roof and his legs spread eagle. There was no
way to let him inside while he was braced like that.
I had to make a quick decision. I reached down

(34:40):
between West's legs, grabbed him by the crotch and squeezed hard.
He let out a howl and doubled up, grabbing for
his groin with both hands. Then I hit, shoving him
headfirst into the back seat of the car and piling
in on top of him. And then the Jason Scott
I think was you know duct tape put face down
in a van and like this three pound guys sat

(35:02):
on him and that can kill you. Yes, I can
pretty cookie stuff, man. Yeah, let's uh how to combat
brainwashing by brainwashing? I love pretty looking back in America's
recent path to see how crazy it's been from time
to time. Every once in a a while it just goes nuts.
We just go crazy. Yeah. Um, let's see you got

(35:25):
anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to
know more about deep programming, you can type those words
in the search bar how stuff works dot com. And
since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
Hey guys, just finished listening to your Hot Air Balloons podcast.
I'm calling this Hot Air Balloon email. I jumped the

(35:45):
gun having worked for a hot air balloon company for
two years in Napa Valley, where I grew up. I
worked on the ground crew, by the chase crew, as
we called it. The company I worked for a Napa
Valley balloons as balloons that can fit two people all
the way up to twenty people. The envelope, although it
looks like, can weigh an excess of six hundred pounds,
and the basket is easily twice that, if not more.

(36:06):
And he wrote a lot about the getting all the
hot air out and what an arduous process that was.
And then he has another good little story here. One
day after we launched the balloons from just north of Napa,
the wind picked up and one of the pilots couldn't
find a safe place to land. Uh. I'm gonna call
this Josh's worst nightmare of fortune. The balloon kept going
south and what was supposed to be in our flight

(36:28):
was getting close to two hours. The balloon got so
far south that it was approaching the San Francisco Bay,
and if it got over the bay, the balloon wouldn't
have enough fuel to make it to land again. So
the pilot made an emergency landing in a wheat field
that was the last land before the bay. He tried
not to land somewhere without permission, but in this case
it was an emergency. The pilot left with the customers,

(36:48):
so we had to contact the owner of the land
and had to be let onto the property get our balloon. Understandably,
the owner was angry, but we gave him a bottle
of champagne as you said, they still do that, uh,
and offered to pay for the damages to US crops.
While most flights had now wishes whatsoever, this one sticks
out of my mind because it was a particularly exciting day.

(37:09):
Nice That is Ryan from Washington, d C. The Napa Valley.
I like the the part about champagne, sure. I like
the part where the pilot left with the customers really
quickly after you landed, right. Who is that Ryan? Thanks Ryan,

(37:30):
that was a good story. Again. I like the champagne part.
The monk. If you want to get in touch with
us and tell us all of your Champagne wishes and
Kavr dreams. You can tweet to us at s y
s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot
com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
an email to stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot
com and has always joined us at our home on

(37:51):
the web, Stuff you Should Know dot Calm. Stuff you
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