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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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, 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 the web, Stuff you Should Know dot Calm. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. 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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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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, 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 the web, Stuff you Should Know dot Calm. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. 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