Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastard's 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 Marrow 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. That's close enough, right, Yeah, yeah, Mara, you are I mean, if you were a person listening to this who is roughly my age, Marrow was in I don't know about like thirty percent 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.
I do a bit of writing and voice acting and things like that, and I love it. I'm I'm I'm lucky. I've been doing things that I actually really like for a job.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's always exciting.
Yes, which yeah, which which is hasn't always been the case?
And yeah that's nice.
Yeah. Now, speaking of of of jobs, you know, I got to do the thing. I'm sorry. I know this is like the stereotypical reporter, you know, celebrity interview thing, but I got to ask you this question. I'm sure you get asked it all the time. If you're arming an insurgent group to fight against a US backed military junta, what kind of the detonators do you prefer on your improvised explosives? Are you do you like 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 but yeah, no, I I think I slept through that class.
Unfortunately, It's okay. We've got some standard literature we send all of our guests on detonators, so we'll get that into the mail to you.
Or maybe like my dad gave it to me in a really boring lecture and I just zoned out and just thinking about, you know, I don't know whatever it was I was thinking about at the time, like Roco's Modern life or whatever.
Sure, yeah, very common subjects. Roco's Modern Life. I love that ef. Yeah. So, Mara, what do you know about the Troubled Team wilderness rehab industry?
Oh? Good God, I actually know more than I actually know a great deal about it because I have several friends who went through it and it is hell on Earth. Yeah yeah, so yes, this is actually something I'm very passionate about.
So yeah, so yeah, I'm glad to hear it me too. This is actually like back kind of ten years ago. Much earlier in my career as a journalist, I wrote a number of articles with sources who had been to different troubled teen rehab facilities around the country, most of which wound up being based in like Utah or Montana.
Yeah yeah, they are.
Yeah, yeah, So that's that's kind of the standard for all particularly Utah. Like forty percent of all kids who cross state lines to go to one of these facilities wind up in fucking Utah. And you know today we're going to talk about the reason why that is because it all starts with a single guy. And he's not just the guy who like started doing these troubled teen rehab facilities because kind of versions of that had existed
for a while. He's the guy who decided, you know what, we need to add to rehab programs for kids armed men busting into their houses in the night and abducting them. Right, Yeah, that's who we're talking about today. And yeah, so I guess let's get into this piece of shit. His name was.
I actually had the script though.
I sent it to you. I so did.
I do not the script?
The tubes ate it. I don't know what to tell Sophie. You could just intuit the script.
I mean, like, sometimes my thoughts are in your voice, but no, you.
Know, do this with a Oija board. Okay, anyway, you should have the script now.
Sophie, someday perhaps Yeah, yeah, maybe not.
I don't. That's my fault then. Oh, also my fault forgetting that we do cold opens. Now cold open's done, it's time for the hot open and we're back. And I sent it to you.
It's very sibling between the two of you.
Did It's got to be somewhere in the tube, Sophie. I got it. It's up to the tubes.
Now we did it, Joe, I have the scripts.
Thank you? Does that make you the kamala? Because I know I'm not sure I like this. I'm not nearly that sleepy.
That means that the chance of thank you Joe are no more thank you.
I'm a lot less drugs than Joe Biden too.
How do you feel about ice cream though?
Coming No, Actually.
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?
Now?
I am like baked goods and ice cream all of the way.
Yeah, the way I do like a nice You know what my favorite thing is. It's just like a big slice of friend bread with fucking salted amish butter on it. That's like, oh that's really good to It's no healthier than anything else.
Oh that's true. That's true. Well, sometimes I say less than a sweet tooth, I have more of a carb tooth.
Yeah.
Yeah, Like give me some bread or like crackers, and 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 it's bread with salted butter.
Or it's you know, it's toast, or it's crackers. So yeah, yeah, it just mouthes.
Out optimized for survival. You know, our ancestors made it through the frozen wasteland because it gets you know.
We're Eastern European, you know, we're pale of settlement Jews on one side, and we're you know, Irish Catholic on the other. So so yeah, some some some people who went.
Through a lot of shit, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the carbs make sense. Yeah, starvation is a relevant topic here because a lot of children wind up get starved because of its kind of what of his main tech 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.
Yes, I think, yeah, it's well. I went to so I went to an arts boarding school. This is how, this is how I spent my movie money. I went to boarding school to study theater and and I.
I, it's it's sort of like the I always say it.
It's a bit like the Far Side cartoon of like the kids who run away from the circus to join corporate America. I ran away from Hollywood to do community theater.
So like I ran away.
To to to UH to a boarding school, and a lot of the kids there had gone through these programs. 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, might smoke in a pot or a little bit, you know.
Exactly, So like these kids would be maybe they would be depressed, or they would have an eating disorder, or they would smoke weed, or they would start drinking young and then you know, where are they sent off to. Inevitably, they are always sent off to these places. And 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 like, kids who are essentially in the foster program or don't have a stable living environment end up in these places. It happens a lot. So tell me about the bastard who started this, because.
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 want to oper 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, 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 Cartazano, 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 hole. We should stop doing this, Kida.
But she she really is, she's been.
It's it's very funny to me to think about, like the kids I know who you know, would talk about how much they loved or hated Paris Hilton, and a lot of them, you know, in that era when I was meeting a lot of these kids who've been sent there. And now she's like, yeah, she's she's completely done. She's done something I don't know. I mean, like, like, say what you will about the way that she was in the two thousands.
She does seem to be passionate about this.
Yeah, look, you know what she's she's done the right thing here. And I don't think any of us should be judged by what we did in the two thousands. We need to just let's just let's just shovel that decade off into the sea and pretend none of us, none of us were making choices back then.
No, the gen Z and jen Aalfa, people who want to bring it back, I'm like, no, it was shit, it was don't It's like how I thought the eighties were cool when I was you know when I was then, and then I was like, oh no, this was the worst, do you know.
To was.
Like, I'm very glad that I don't remember most of the eighties.
There's never been a good decade.
There hasn't been. There hasn't been.
Yeah, So Steve Cartesano is the guy we're going to mostly be talking about these episodes, but as I noted earlier, the whole troubled teen Wilderness Camp industrial complex is bigger than him, and so before we start talking about him, we've got to start a couple of decades earlier with the childhood of a man named Larry Dean Olsen Larry, and Larry is one of the guys who gets like quoted as a good guy in this He was an expert on running children's rehab facilities, and whenever one of
the bad facilities would kill a kid, the news would talk to Larry, and so he's always depicted in those articles as like, well, he's the responsible kind of guy who does this. You know, this is a man who really understands how to take care of children. As we'll talk about, that's not really totally accurate to who Larry was. But he was born in Wendell, Idaho, on January twenty third,
nineteen thirty nine, 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 refuse to learn to read, was struck by the stone. It changed my life. I took it to school, and my teacher gave me a book about the Indians who made that arrowhead. I took
that book home and taught myself to read. And I don't know how much I believe that it's possible, given what else he does in his life, that this is like literally what happens to him. I do think we're missing some details about his childhood. The whole I was refusing to read as a child thing.
Yeah, it's I mean, they didn't really they didn't understand things like you know, dyslexia or ADHD or even just kids who learned differently, not necessarily like schools were very much about conformity, and so yeah, so it does feel a little bit like refusing to learn to read.
I think, is that 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 rarely quite that smooth.
There's also this sort of like it's I don't know what the term is for it exactly, but there is this fetishization I think of Native Americans that you know, it's it's like like orientalism, but for the 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, they rejuice is a big part of this, or a lot of them are Mormon, the fact that they and like, yeah, Native American appropriation is huge. Like later in life, Larry is going to co own a camp that's like named after the Anasazi, and I think it's the kind of thing where like he brings in a guy who is Indigenous as his like co owner largely so he can say like, look, we're authentic, you know, like that happens a lot. Now that was a lot
more common. We're mostly talking like these seventies, eighties, nineties, so he's not like an outside of the cultural mate. Like the Boy Scouts are doing shit like that just as much, right, I mean.
My public high school before I went off to my arts boarding school. Yeah, our mascot was the Indians until I think twenty twenty.
We did some shit in the Boy Scouts when I was like fourteen years old that would not pass mustard today. Let me tell you that.
No, it was.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff where it's just like Jesus CHRISTO. Yeah, yeah, it wouldn't. Yeah, and it was not that long ago.
No, no, No, It's like it's like watching like an eighties movie that's like set in Cowboy Times and being like, well, all of these people playing in Native Americans are very clearly Italian.
Yeah, yeah, So whatever the truth about Olsen's childhood, we don't get a whole lot of good details on him until nineteen sixty six, when in his like kind of late twenties, he winds up at BYU.
Now, if you are aware, BYU was Utah's premier university, and it is run and owned by the Church of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, and the elders at the school are concerned at this point that a number of students are having trouble maintaining their academics, so they're like looking for a program they can use on kids who are having trouble and at risk of
kind of like failing out of the school. Now, at the time, there's no real industry for like taking kids out into the woods, like particularly young adults, and like giving them wilderness therapy. You've got like the boy Scouts. But outside of that, kind of the closest thing to the modern industry is this company called Outward Bound, which had been started back in the UK by this Welsh
guy back during World War Two. Author John Krackauur 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, or India is trying to go. In nineteen sixty two, Outward Bound had moved to the United States, where it offered a twenty six 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. Twenty six days is much longer than I want to spend on any kind of course. Yeah, I remember.
Reading about them when I was a kid and I was I was like a pretty we were like a pretty outdoorsy family.
You know.
We went camping all the time. I loved it, 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 had to do it. Yeah.
I remember reading about that and hearing like, you're like fourteen, 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, like a little log.
Yeah, I like to shower after a few days, you know, I'd like, that's that's a bit. You know, you don't even have doctor Browner's with you. That's that's too much.
Yeah, I think all of the like in twenty six 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 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.
Queen Victoria, she hated kids. She loves sex the way. Yeah, she loved sex with with with Albert.
And she hated kids.
Yeah, and and add outward Bound. Those are their two. There are two primary guiding principles is sex with Prince Albert and uh not having kids near their parents. Yes, so it's important I note that outward Bound is not the place, not the They are not like these the facilities that we started the episode talking about. They're not kidnapping kids, they don't torture children. They're pretty much just like summer camp type programs, right, and they prove to
be very in demand. And it's kind of like looking at outward Bound and a couple of like copycat camps, some of the people running BYU start talking like, maybe we should have a program like this, And that's where Larry Olsen comes into the picture. Olsen 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 ninety dollars to take seventy kids out into the bush for like days at a time, which is not enough money to do that.
Like it would even cover I mean even with.
For the food.
Yeah, okay, okay, but still, but still, I worked with teenagers for you know, I work with teenagers, and yeah, you nobody has paid enough to work with teenage I love working with teenagers, but but yeah, nobody has paid enough to work with teenagers.
I would need ninety dollars an hour in nineteen seventies money to take care of seventy kids in the woods.
Yeah yeah, I've worked with Yeah no's that's not in the woods now.
So they eventually expand to paying him like two hundred bucks each course to teach like a month long course to one hundred something kids. And they these are all students, these are so these are all like young adults really eighteen nineteen years old, who are having trouble in college, and they noticed that, like, the program seems to really help.
According to a two thousand and eight 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 please the student's parents.
So university officials hatched a plan with Olson, who was still in his twenties and struggling to support a growing family that would eventually include ten children, that developed a course that offered failing BYU students a shot at readmission if they learned survival skills and went on a month long backpacking trip through the Utah Desert. So that's what happens,
and he does this for a couple of years. And the reason why he gets treated as a heroic figure by folks in the industry who want to separate themselves from the bad programs that like get kids killed is they think, fundamentally, there's got to be something to this idea of if kids are troubled, you send them out into the wilderness for several weeks and they'll come back better.
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 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 that where they struggle a lot, like probably they would have been just as well, Like it didn't necessarily have to mean they were going out to the desert.
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, and like wilderness skills and like being out in the woods, like there can be a therapy.
No, it's true, Yeah, that is that is true. I do think like for me personally, like I feel like much calmer when I like take a walk and there's lots of trees and you know, go to the park or you know, go camping, Like I definitely feel so there definitely is something to that. But yeah, I know they're going to take this and they're going to make it much worse.
Yeah, yeah, they're going to so you know, b yu, I think actually does because we're going to 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 thirty days in the wilderness doing this thing?
So wobably some of them are married.
Yeah, and some of them presumably are married. This be this right is like Olsen's in his twenties and has multiple children, children. Yeah, yeah, and he gets 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 at John Krackour and his reporting for Outside magazine claims that he left quote following allegations of this mismanagement and sexual impropriety, and then sites of 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 in 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.
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 world word depending on like inflection, like if you're talking about like I'm going out to the bar with the girls.
Girls. Yeah, that's very different the.
Girls than this. The girls.
I feel like i'd even hear people say like, oh, yeah, he liked the.
Ladies, like like the ladies. Sure that feels say you say.
About these ladies, but that is you know, like, Okay, that guy's sleazy, but he is not, you know, a monster.
He's not a pedophile. Right, Yeah, yeah, you're open. You're leaving that door open when you're described 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 nineteen seventy four, at a program he established for Idaho State University, a twelve 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 nineteen seventy five, the next year, a woman in one of Olsen'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 on.
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 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 sen they don't want to call it early, they don't want to
take anyone back. So they they push people, right, they do it either in a nice way or a mean way, but they always push people. And they don't have like Larry's I'm sure great at starting fires and like whittling arrowheads or whatever, but Larry does not have functional medical training and does not clearly because a lady dies in his class, doesn't know how to deal with dehydration.
Yeah, I mean, Mormonism kind of started out as like a this all hiking Yeah, well, yes, very it was this sort of like anti establishment religion for a long time, you know, they were very Yeah, fighting against the US governments are like kind of in there. Yeah, that's that's a big part of their history.
You could say Larry is carrying out in the best traditions of the Mormon Church. Hiking and having sexual improprieties with very young women. Is definitely doing a Joe Smith.
Well Brigham young, Brigham young and 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 that, you know, mass murder of people.
So that's right, I for one, and 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 that they're doing.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Anyway, it was a true crime bit folks. So yeah, he gets some people killed, Larry does, and byus 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 Larry bounces, but he's able to escape any sort of blame for his role in these deaths. And I think part of this is just the media environment at the time. There's not like a lot of attention to the people who die in
his programs. It doesn't they don't become big stories. They're kind of just framed as like, well, you know, sometimes when people are out in the wilderness, bad things happen, right, So he doesn't get kind of tarred by the same brush as the people who come later are going to.
And he establishes several wilderness therapy programs elsewhere in the United States, charging like five hundred bucks for a thirty 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 some yeah. Yeah, And so they're kind.
Of like expensive summer camps.
Very expensive summer camp as much as like a nice used car, right, yeah, maybe maybe a really nice used car. That kind of depends on your definition of a nice used car. A nice used car, speaking of used cars. You know, who will sell you a car? Maybe our sponsors. There's no way to know, not not on our end. I hope, I hope it's a car. And we're back, Mara. So we left off. Larry has has bounced and he
is kind of seeding the country. He's becoming the Johnny apple Seed of doing his 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 is that the movie that with The Gift, right of the.
Ya of the guy like nodding and smiling.
Okay, I haven't seen it.
It's a great movie, and he was good at the skills part because that movie gets it all pretty right.
Yeah, I haven't. I haven't seen that movie. I've only seen The Gift. But I know, like, this is the seventies, right, I know there was a movie around that time called Buffalo Rider, which was a true story about a guy who went riding along on a buffalo. There was I think I feel like there was a lot of movies like that. Yeah, the seventies.
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 the there was this thing, and this is something that you know, doesn't gets me gets me to sleep at night. Oh sorry, cat just jumped on the keyboard. But everything's still good. It's it's kind of like one thing that helps me sleep at night is knowing that a lot of the like you know, return shit is like a lot of stuff that we saw in like the seventies and early eighties.
Like it's just.
It's just like you know, the Jesus Freaks, people who like.
Yeah, the Jesus Freaks, the Mythopoetic Men's movement, you know, yes, and the ras yeah 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, for getting through it now.
James on our staff is having like a Twitter fight with this want to be influencer who's tried to do like back to the land home steading, like you need to be using nonpowered tools in order to make sure you're really you know, self reliant and he he films these like shots of him shirtless using like rusted old tools, like the wrong way, like the wood isn't positioned right in the saw horse, and like he just butchered a goat by cutting its head off with an axe, which
is not how you butcher ails. It is not how you but unless it's like a chicken, but like you don't even then yeah, it's it's yeah, you don't cut their head off with an axe.
So much of a play, you know. So So anyway he was, he was He worked on Jeremiah Johnson as like as like a.
He's their consultant on like how to do all the ship that Jeremiah Johnson's doing. Okay, yeah, and then he launches his own nonprofit, the Anasazi Foundation, which is where he continues teaching survival skills to struggling children. Now, I will say again, because we're going to talk about the much more violent sort of descendants of his courses. Every source I found agrees the Anasazi Foundation is like pretty tame. I've even found a number of kids on Reddit who
went talking about it as a positive experience. So I don't want to well, we got to be critical of Olsen because of the kids he got killed. I don't want to like make it look like these are in the same basket as everything we're talking about today. They're just kind of in a line of dissent to each other. And a big part of why these kids I think these kids are like in their teens, like you know, twelve to eighteen generally.
Okay, so younger than the BYU kids.
But younger than the BYU kids. We've gone down a step in age. But Olsen still he's not one of these like you yell at the kids. He's 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 to nineteen eighties. Larry's method of pedagogy is going to be replaced by a very different set of tactics that will come to dominate the industry that springs
up afterwards. And that brings us back to Steve Cardasano. Stephen Anthony Cartersana 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.
In August fifteenth, nineteen fifty five in Modesto, California. A. 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 can give who gave him chiseled features and piercing eyes on a Monday, On a Monday. Garfield would hate this.
Many more obituaries, Yeah, more obituaries should be like, you know, by the way, he was super exotically fucking hot.
Yeah, just four paragraphs on his cum gutters. By the way, here's your fucking way kiss. So I will also note here because I don't know. I'm not going to get into the hole 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 fabuloust and liar, right, And I mean that about every aspect of his child 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 seventeen. Was pretty consistent about saying that his home life with his dad was not nice. And in nineteen seventy four he decides to enlist in the Air Force. He becomes a parachutist with the one hundred and twenty ninth Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Group. And this isn't like technically a special Forces job, but it's one of those gigs that, like, very very few people qualify for. You're doing incredibly difficult,
physically and mentally demanding stuff. It's not easy to be in this.
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 providence of such sources I found that one in the Brian 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 ten or eleven because my whole family they're big into aviation. They love planes. I oh, yeah, and my dad. My dad has a pilot's license and wasn't a commercial pilot or anything that could fly a plane. And my grandfather did too, and and like, aviation is a big thing in our family. So I thought this was going to be kind of like space camp but
with airplanes. But it was very, very, very very military based. So we were on we were on like an old Air Force base, and we got a lot of propaganda and I was but my favorite part of it by far were the survivalist parts. Yeah, and so I can still remember some of it. I still know, like which berries to eat if you know you're out in the woods. Now, I wonder if like maybe this that's kind or not.
Well.
Also, I wonder, like, did this guy also like have a hand in this, because it wasn't that far from an host California.
He very well may have because he winds up during his time in the military, he spends a period of time as the instructor and instructor at the fair Child Air Force Base survival school.
Yeah, so I wonder if maybe he like helped develop their curriculum.
There's a good chance he did. Survival stuff is interesting because you have two kinds of people who teach survival class. You have the people who really know their ship and you have the people who are convinced they know their ship and don't. And you, as the student, until you've spent a lot of time in the woods, really can't
know which they are. My little brother because he grew up on a military base in Okinawa, did a survival course that was like taught by the Marines on base and at one point they, I don't know why you keep coming back to goats, but they like slaughter a goat to like walk you through had a butcher and animal, and they like fuck up killing it and traumatiz all these kids because they just again as somebody who's who slaughters and butcher's animals, Like, I don't know how you
fuck that up as a marine. What are you guys doing?
Oh my god, yeah, definitely like yeah, trauma, Yeah, we to traumatize everything budget children.
I know, they they got the experience right one way or the other. They're learning about survival.
They learned 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, uh man uh childhood so speak. 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 drops out a couple of years in. But before he drops out, like every maniac
we cover, he tries his hand breaking into Hollywood. Crackowes 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 very soon himself with a fucking Indiana Jones ass name. Oh man, it would be better if you'd pick Montana. Steve Monta Steve, Yeah, yeah, Montana. Steve sounds like a guy who's going to teach me where to find water in the desert.
Steve. Steve Montana is going to sell me bills at a truck stop.
Yes, exactly. There's there's a difference between the two of them. One of them seems like he might actually be fun, like, yeah, have some crazy stories, you know.
Oh yeah. The other you'll hear some shit from Montana. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Steve Montana. Other people will tell you.
Of Tony Montana.
Like that.
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 pil So Steve leaves the Air Force in eighty four, 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 current 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 Elsen, who left not that far before to start the Anastazi 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 nineteen eighty eight, 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.
So this is something too, is these people never have any experience.
With child development here.
No, it's it's 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 because that's what's going to stop the crack epidemic is wearing children down.
Yeah. Day five of the Air Force Rescue training does not like break in order to teach you how children's minds work.
And it's nice, it's it's yeah, it's it's very it is very strong. I mean, I was gonna say, it's 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 because I'm a fucking forward child actor with a BFA and drama and I'm talking like I'm an expert on shit, and you know I'm not. But at least I'm not trying to break children down.
I think you don't have to be an expert to be like, well, if you're taking children into the desert for weeks at a time, you should probably know something number one about children and number two about wilderness medicine. Those two things should probably be something you have a formal skill in, as opposed to just kind of winging it well.
Also, if you work with kids, you learn very quickly that the ones who are acting out, You learn very quickly that there are different reasons why kids act out. Yeah, and I mean I think that that it should be common sense, but it's not like I worked with kids and I knew very quickly. Who are the kids who were spoiled and entitled and expected, you know, the world zoo bend to their will? Who are the kids who
are going through a lot of difficulties at home. Who are the kids who maybe just learned a little bit differently. Who are the kids who you know just were trying to make everybody laugh. Who are 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, their myriad and you can't just break them all down because what works with disciplining.
One kid is not going to discipline the other.
No, but that's very much the that's very much the attitude that this program is going to have, which is like all kids who are bad need the same thing, and that thing is to be screamed at in the desert by a man who could get literally no other job than screaming at children in the desert. Right, I'm not really exaggerating there. Here's how John Krakauer described his
educational tactics in an article for Outside. Cardisato 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 kalmanure all day in her backpack. A boy caught eating raw oatmeal instead of cooking it would have his oatmeal
ration taken away. Good behavior for challenger students was rewarded with canned peaches, raisin, or cinnamon.
It's just like the specificity of it. I apologize, Yeah, I apologize instead of I'm sorry.
Like, what's the what's what's the difference here?
It's just it's just standardization of yeah.
Yeah. I hate the whole to the like, no, don't say you're sorry, say you apologize, and like, here's my fucking witty reason for why you shouldn't say sorry, Like I don't give a shit, man, you know what the kid meant? Yeah, exactly, the complicate communication. It's hard enough as it is.
Kids.
If there's one man the famously you know, famously eloquent teenagers, you know, that's the thing. Teenagers are very they are having they literally have trouble expressing themselves. Now I'm having trouble expressing myself because thinking about this, expressing myselves, well, expressing myself, because this piss me off.
Why don't we take a break and let our advertisers express themselves.
Let's do it.
Ah, 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 this tacit understanding, this widespread belief that, like, if children are misbehaving and traditional methods won't work, forcing them into something that mimics military discipline will fix their bad behavior.
I had a cousin who got sent to like a military boot camp style school, and as a spoiler, it did not stop them from doing the things that got them sent there. These programs don't actually tend to work very well, but there's this like magical belief that, like, because it's a boot camp, that's that's what. If it works for the army, it's got to work for small children.
Right.
The thing is, the army has a I mean, I guess in some ways, the army has a purpose or a goal. Like there are people there who I mean are either they're all adults, they're adults. Well, I mean, it hasn't always been that they joined voluntarily, but people a lot of the people there are there because they want you to make money.
Yes, or 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 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 two thousand and five analysis of several studies on the efficacy of boot camp style programs that noted no significant differences and
recidivism from students subjected to mock military programs. There is zero rigorous data showing that hiring a bunch of x cons and former addicts and having them pretend to be ari ermy and like beat up a bunch of captive children helps those kids in any way, right, doing a 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 us struggle with your child.
Yeah, give your child that thousand yard stare.
That's 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 a boot camp where like people are being thrown in the mud and like, you know, shaken and screamed at and insulted in creative ways by these like incredibly harsh and utterly humorless men like It is debatable as to whether or not that works very
well for soldiers. Over the years, there have been repeated incidents where brutal training methods, always justified by the need to ensure discipline for units going into combat, has instead gotten trainees killed. The best known of these was the Ribbon Creek incident from nineteen fifty six, 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 how do you even it? Just how do you justify that? It's just like, what was this that was just wanted to?
Yeah, that was a major question that was asked because there was a lot of people who defended this within the military as like, well, this is the only way to do it, and a lot of a lot of thankfully a lot arge 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, will train better soldiers.
On March second, nineteen eighty eight, nineteen year old Lee Mareki was engaged in a training exercise for the Rescue Swimmer School program. This is part of the US Navy. This is a difficult test to pass. Only about half of the student sudents did. Mareki 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. Mareki 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 these are two military boot camp incidents in which the brutality of training leads to people dying, and they both lead to both and immediate severe backlashes and changes to the way that training
is done. Because number one, the military has a degree of accountability both to like civilian leadership, and you've got officers and people who are overseeing these programs. And in the military, when you see we're killing people with our training, there are responsible people who are generally like, well, we should make some alterations to.
It, right, Well, these are public, these are public institutions.
Right right. It also it becomes a media nightmare for them. Yeah, 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, you know,
problems in boot camp. My point is that the military does something when shit like this happens, and there's going to be significantly less oversight for these programs that only children are parts of, right, which is also the.
American idea of if it's a private you know, well it's it's anything that's private, you know, sure, let them, you know, discriminate against these people. Sure, let them do these These are private groups, you know, business 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.
When a free country makes dreamed up make Americans march into swamps again. Exactly.
Just Thomas Jefferson's 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.
So when he starts Challenger, I think it's technically called Challenger too, but fuck it, we're gonna call it Challenger. Steve's first major innovation was the idea that the entire process.
So call it something challenger like a like.
Not a great names. Yeah yeah, that's why you put the two on.
There, right, like, yeah, that's that's that's a this is a big thing, it's not. Yeah. Yeah.
So Steve's first innovation when he starts this is you've got to be really hostile to these kids. Now, this starts before the course eventually begins, because he's the one who comes up with the idea of and basically he starts as an upsell. Hey, parents, you've decided you're going to send your troubled kid this wilderness rehab program. They're going to spend months alone in the desert where they will be miserable. They're not going to want to go. You don't want to just like break this to them
at dinner days ahead of time. They're going to be angry, they might run away from home, they might flip out. You don't want to have to drive them to it because they'll be pissed at you the whole time. It'll be a miserable drive. What if you let what if you pay me and I have some big armed men kidnap your children.
He's the guys the guy who invented this.
Yeah, he is the guy who invented this, specifically his innovation.
Huh.
I remember I.
Thought I heard that Synanon used to do this too.
Well, Synanon did this to like members of the coult But you're not going and.
You can not actual children.
Yeah, not that I am aware of actual children.
So he's the bastard that invented this ship.
He's the master that invented the ship for these camps. Right where you are kidnapping a kid to take them to a wilderness rehab facility.
Yeah, that's usually in the middle of the night.
Yeah, no, this.
I'm like sitting silently during this episode. This happened to my child, her best friend, and I didn't know, and I didn't know where she was. I did not know where she was. Her parents would not answer any of my messages. It took almost a year before I figured out that that's what had happened to her. And she was my closest friend when I was a teenager, and I have no idea where she was, and I 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, yeah, this.
Guy is also personally responsible for destroying the teenage yeers of people I know as well. So seriously, fuck this guy.
He specifically had a devastating impact on like southern California, which is where a lot.
Of it, which is where I grew up think you say 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 too, but it's 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, 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'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 like Californians because California has like stricter laws that kind of limit parents more.
It was the exact scenario.
That's the laboratory of the States working as intended, the laboratory of democracy working as intended. Yeah again, our beautiful founding fathers dreamed all of this up. So Steve's plan is we cut out, you know the problem of parents having to confront their kids about what they're doing to them by allowing and again when I say these are armed men. The particular guy he had do a lot of this was nicknamed Horsehair and always carried like a fourteen 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 want to first play you an account from a modern attendee of one of these schools. This is from the TikTok account of the Misfit Heroes podcast, which is where I found this, And this is just someone who went to one of these schools, obviously after Steve Cartazano'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 two oh seven am 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 toward our back door, and 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 I exactly what happened to my friend.
Yep, yeah, it's I can't imagine. I don't know.
I do think that a lot of parents are kind of brainwashed in this too. They don't necessarily and I mean some of them, I think just don't give a shit. And some of them, I think, do honestly believe that this is the best thing for their child. But like I can't imagine like letting somebody like man handle like I don't even have children, But if somebody were man handling like a child that I care about, like a friend's kid or my nieces and nephews, like I would want to fucking murder them.
Also, the trauma, like most of the time it happens when they're in the middle of the night, when you're step Yeah, how does that help? How does that help?
You're disoriented, you're not able to fight back?
Is no, no, no, I understand how it helps them, But how does that help a child who's going on That's not the point up any sense of calm or peace that they might have.
Yeah, yeah, no, no. The point the last concern of everyone involved in this is what's best for the kids. Yeah, it's it's it's pretty vile stuff. I do think a lot because my mom was certainly not against physical punishment, right, Like she was a spanker for sure, And uh, I don't know if she would have done something like this for I think the only reason I know that she wouldn't have is just because of the expense. We never
would have had the money for these programs. But like, had she had the money, I don't know that if this is something she would have ruled out. I think because she did fun the mentally believe if kids are misbehaving, the best thing to do is like put them through boot camp.
Yeah, I think that.
I do think that there are a lot of parents who genuinely think like I, that genuinely think this is the best thing for 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 hip and I know people who who can honestly say, if I hadn't joined the military, I would have like killed myself, right but with like drugs and that, like I was, I was on a bad road and like I got my life in order
as a result of that. The thing is, I also I think because I've known a lot more soldiers than most people I know, just as many people who committed suicide during train 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, the uh, 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.
Was sure we'll get to I'm sure we'll get to this later.
But like the rate of people who've attempted suicide after going through these programs is just anecdotally, you know it from people I've known, it's you know, it's it's incredibly high. And it is a lifelong trauma.
Oh yeah, like it is.
It stays with.
You, yeah yeah, and it's cool and good. So yeah, I want to show you guys next kind of what the kidnapping process is, like, how they kind of when these programs kind of make like their 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 kidnapp And then I'm going to have Sophie play you a segment from the Doctor Phil Show. Until a bunch of kids died
and their parents sued these facilities. Doctor 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 want to be clear here I played the kid's 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 Doctor 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 three thirty 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 Anna Lisa. She's on her way to the Doctor Phil show.
That I love you, decided to get you some help and we're.
Going to the Doctor Phil.
My name is Mike and this is Laura, And let me explain your situation. You've actually got a trip planned to Hollywood. We'll go into Doctor Phil today. Your family has decided that away and screaming actually isn't going to help this one.
So you see what they're You see what they're doing here, right, They're they're portraying this is 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, Doctor 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 become a conversation a lot, a lot louder than this gird saying.
Is very one like one like second of that guy's voice and I come up shooting. That's how I'm responding.
Whatever I can grab man, you're going down.
This is like we were like the kids, like like like we're probably like like Robert, I think we're about the same age, Like we we were the children who were taught stranger danger. Yes, right, you know like the first thing, a strange man. Yeah, don't go with a stranger A strange man comes into your bedrooms.
Mixed signals from the boomers.
I was like, no, this is like the nightmares I had about like the Polyclause kidnapping case, Like this is the yeah, this is the kind of exactly so. But yeah, you see they're being they're being very quiet, and like you know, yes.
This is the sanitized version of what really happens. And I want to end by showing you video of what these camps were really like. And we are talking about challengers. So this is actually Steve Cartizano's camp. This is a video filmed in nineteen eighty nine 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 fifteen minutes long. You can find this footage on YouTube.
Now.
A 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 thirty 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 maddening.
No, no, yah, a problem movement.
You're now so woo.
Dazed.
They gather around the bonfire and soon learn to show respect to those who will teach them how to survive here.
Why, of course there next sixty three days, you'll be out of my care, my saft hair.
You understand, I can't.
The so called counselors are not trained child therapists.
They are survival.
They're not Look at this guy.
Look at this man.
He's not trained in childcare.
Yeah, a guy with a with a ponytail and a.
Ponytail and a boonie 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 to humiliate, humiliation.
Yes, oh yeah, like major weapon. We'll talk about all of that, don't you worry. So, yeah, I do want to chat a little bit about horse hair. You know your you know, your rehab facilities quality place. When the guy gets led by a man named horse hair, his real name was Lance Paul Jagger, and he is the guy who Steve Steve does not want to do any real teaching of children for some reason.
His first name being a Lance just really really old Jagger.
Is that's a pretty cool name.
I mean you you know what horse hair?
Yeah, Lance Jaggers.
Actually, yeah, that's that's what you name the protagonist in your dog shit spec script about a fucking Air Force rescue unit. Lance Jagger is a cool name.
Also, horse hair can mean something that's like very coarse, but it could also mean, I mean, that guy did have kind of a pony like ponytail.
Literally, is your whole nickname just for the ponytail? Is that your identity? Horse hair?
You're more than their samson?
Yeah.
So you know, Steve starts teaching these courses like when he does the first few runs, but again they're spending sixty three days at a time out there with these kids. He doesn't. He doesn't want to, especially once this makes a lot of money, because in short order, in the first like year or two, he's made a couple million dollars doing this. He doesn't want because he's trying araging fifteen grand per session, like, he has no fucking desire
to spend all of his time out there. He wants to spend the money that he's making, so he has Horsehair do the actual training along with a couple of other guys, usually former military, usually dudes who like weren't
really employable anywhere else but fancied themselves as survivalists. Although none of these guys have relevant wilderness medical training, there is and was at this point, there is like an actual professional certification you can get for wilderness first responder right as a wilderness first responder that teaches you how to deal with stuff like keatstroke 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 manner 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 fifteen grand kid often more because you're sometimes they're running through the program twice. There's add ons that can make it more like twenty grand. He's like meeting individually sometimes with parents to convince them
because these are rich parents. Like, part of his like program is he spends two thousand dollars a day renting a Lamborghini in order that's what he's spending his fucking money on.
Now.
Obviously, parents are going to bulk at a price like this when, especially in nineteen eighty nine money, you know, fifteen grand twenty grand is an insane amount of money. And when they would, he would say, well, this is the only thing that could save your kid. Right, if they're already smoking pot, they are on a road that will inevitably lead to their death. Every kid who smokes
pot winds up dying of a heroin overdose. That's just how things work in nineteen eighty nine, right, cool, So if those are the stakes, isn't it worth re mortgaging your house to make sure your kid gets the care they need, you know, in order to reach as many clients as possible, Steve leveraged his one celebrity connection into a series of daytime TV appearances. And when I found out who the celebrity connection to this guy was, like how he got into daytime TV, I had a beautiful reaction.
This makes so much sense. I'm gonna quote from John Krakauer's article in Outside Magazine. Here, Cardisano persuaded his good friend Oliver North to put in an appearance during Variety who booked a month?
Like, like, NRA, how the fuck.
Does all in North run wind up?
Here? I was thinking like Stephen Segal or Chuck Norris, like I was thinking celebrities.
This is right after around Contra too. Has not been a lot of distance. You know, we're not talking like warst stories with Oliver North on Fox, Ollie. We're talking like just committed trees and Oliver North. Odd, God, that's funny. I see.
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, to drink my kid.
Well, yes, like you look at look at what cars teachers drive, you know, and it's like it's like the shittiest. Yeah, it's like the shittiest, like like like maybe they have like, you know, a volvough fu. You know.
Fucking Steve Montana rolls up in a Lamborghini with all Leigh North and says, hey, let me take your kids for sixty three days. Grand I'd be like.
I'd be like, okay, no, Like fucking drug dealers drive, you know, Lamborghini is like not not people, Yeah, not right.
Dealers hang out with all of her.
I remember that.
Yeah, 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 Roaldo, Donahue, Cardasana would later say they loved me. I'd go on TV with kids who had been through the program. These beautiful fourteen to fifteen year old girls. Don't say that. Don't call them 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.
So yeah, that's fair.
It's just like you're not gonna name like like something well, I mean, I guess people could do sometimes name things like a nine to eleven memorial this or that, but like that, wouldn't that be just kind of like calling something like, you know, here's good good you know, take your children.
To nine to eleven schools the Challenger.
Okay, now, now, Mara, I operate the nine to eleven school, which is a sixty three day summer program for children. We don't get them off of drugs, but we do get them on the new drugs. They are in the desert for a lot 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.
We don't talk about that. I would never let you get anywhere near Oprah.
Winfrey almost certainly for the best. I think I give you a lot of damage on Oprah's With Oprah's platform, so speaking of a lot of damage, Steve is doing a lot of damage to a lot of children thanks to daytime television. He is like, 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 a programs that exist to scare mothers particularly, and then offering them a solution, and it works really fucking well, right. One of his former employees described the scene to Crack Hour. As the phones were ringing off the hook, parents begged him to take their kids. An incredible amount of money started rolling in. Now there was a problem with Steve's brilliant business plan, which had
worked up to this point. And the problem is that these are mostly rich kids and rich parents. You have some middle class kids 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, Yes,
people are going to get you get sued. Right yes. In an interview Without Side magazine, former Kine County Sheriff Max Jackson, who was the law enforcement officer who got called because the camp is in his county, claimed quote, we pulled one kid from the program who was so bruised and scarred he looked like he'd been at Auschwitz. When another kid tried to run away, Cardsano 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 ye, yeah, then being beaten up on top of a mountain by Steve Martana.
Yeah, that's that's like. And and yes, slugging in this like becking cause organ dam 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 starved to death in these programs, right, Like these are like kids who are when they when their bodies come back from the coroner, like are so skited, like thin you can see like their hip bones, you know, like the children are getting emaciated to a terminal degree
in these programs. So like, I don't know how appropriate you want to call the comparison, but we are not talking about like just slightly hoping.
They are prison camps.
You know, they are prison camps. Yeah, people, the kids are treated there as badly, you know, in many cases as people in prisons.
Yes, yes, yeah, that's 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 money lived on a tight but 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 charging sixty five thousand dollars to it before she realized what was happening. Z Steve Montana. Baby, it's a classic Steve Montana caper.
Yeah, I mean this is such a I don't know, like he's so he lives, he lives in a mansion and is renting Lamborghini's but is telling his children, we don't.
Have to 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. Steve Montana. Well that's all for part one. How are you feeling, Marra?
Oh yeah, I I I want to slug this guy.
I mean he's dead, but I still want to slug him.
I want to slug Steve Montana again. I would like to hang out with Montana. Steve Montana.
Steve Montana.
Steve seems like he would, you know, he'd have that sort of like like Sam Elliott voice.
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, that's that's who I'm casting to play Montana Steve when my specscript.
Yeah, I would either Sam, Sam Elliott, maybe Jeff Bridges if you can get one of those long beards going again. Yeah yeah, so yeah, I I uh.
Jerse j already doing some show. Oh and it's a show that's actually involves a very sketchy writer. So yeah, this is this is great. We could just could just move him right over to my program.
So where is Steve? What is what is Steve Steve Montana's actual real name.
Uh, it's Steve Carano.
Steve Cartasana. Okay, where is this guy buried? I'm not going to do anything, you know, just.
Figure that out for part two, Mara, when we come back, I will let you know where Steve Cartersano's grave is located. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it's Oklahoma. So is that worth the vengeance?
I mean yeah, it's a bit out of the way.
So so out of the way of everything. That's the Oklahoma state motto.
Is there anything.
Let's see I I've been I've been right. 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 dot fm and look at my name, you can find a lot of really awesome books that I have narrated awesome.
So go to Libra dot com. Look up Mara, look up Libram Wonderful, Libra dot f f Jesus Christ. I almost fucked it up, look up maris 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.
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