Stuff You Should Know - How Cult Deprogramming Worked

Episode Date: September 22, 2015

The fear of cults in the 1970s drove Americans to look the other way on kidnappings, abuse and torture of cult members by deprogrammers - but did it even work? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and the always wacky Jerry.

So this is Stuff You Should Know. Once again, the 60 seconds preceding the record button being pressed is the gold. Wish we could sell that stuff. Yeah, sell it on the street. People be hooked on it. You know what the street value of that minute is? What?

About five bucks. That's not bad. Chuck, have you ever been in a cult? No. Not technically? Not at all. Remember we've done episodes on cults? Yeah.

On brainwashings? This is pretty much the natural extension of that progression. Yeah, we talked a little bit about the programming and the cults one and brainwashing probably, but this one, it turns out, has a lot of interesting history I didn't know about. Yes, man, it is a crazy history.

A dark spot on America's recent past. Yet again, yet another one, because apparently the powers that be really got everybody so scared over things like the communist threat or nuclear weapons or what have you, that America is basically like a herd of spook cattle for many decades and 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 brownly 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 a parent loving their child in the harshest extreme way.

Man, it's crazy what people went through. Unbelievable. So the whole thing we should say, like America did lose its mind collectively for many years. Yes. And it happens from time to time. Started in good old Salem before there wasn't even in America. It's a long tradition here in this country

of everybody collectively. Yeah, going crazy. And like I said, this is the case of it, but this case did coalesce around certain things. It wasn't just out of the blue. It wasn't out of nowhere. To start off with in the late 60s, early 70s, there was a real division between generations

in the United States. He huge. There was the parents who still remember the 50s, were raised in the 50s, born in the 50s maybe, but definitely were a little more buttoned up and up with Ike than their kids were. Yes. 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. And they're still wearing boots and smoking pot and listening to the Beatles. Right, or they start wearing bow ties and like quoting scripture to you. Wouldn't you be like, well, that's a little weird. This is a little odd. Something's going on here with my kid.

My kid who's 20 underwent like a serious religious conversion that has never been seen before in our family. That's a little weird. 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. Yeah, sex. Right, with a C-T. Sex, yeah. And these groups are basically, at the time, they were all termed cults. And usually when you think cult, especially United States,

it's like some sort of Eastern religion or something like that. But it turns out that the cult movement of the early 70s, late 60s, and into the 80s were actually, for the most part, Bible-based, like Christian cults. But they took Christian beliefs and teachings and went really far out there with them.

Yeah. Or there was a huge influx of Eastern thought and Eastern religion into the United States too. And anybody who joined this group joined a cult. But today, if you call them a cult, it's not very nice. You call them a new religious movement or a sect, right? Yeah, 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. Well, yeah, sure, by those definitions. Right, at the time. Yeah, I'd call them a commune now. Okay.

Probably had a band and a charismatic, hand-gliding frontman. Right, the charismatic thing is a huge thing. That's usually the one thing that is the commonality in all new religious movements. They are centered around a central figure. Yeah. But as the guy who wrote this article,

which is a pretty good article, I have to say. This is not the Grabster, was it? No. It was a newbie. He should be mad. A newbie. This newbie has taken the Grabster's stuff. Yeah.

It should have been the Grabster. Well, the Grabster's gotten a serious focus on all things Dungeons and Dragons these days over at I09. Oh, good for him. Yeah, he's moved on and up. But anyway, the author of this article points out that it's just a very slippery word. It has like an in-group, out-group kind of sentimentality

attached to it. Sure. The point is, over the years, this whole idea of your kid undergoing a religious conversion and then just kind of becoming different, it was bothersome and worrisome to the parents. But then Jonestown happened.

And all of a sudden, any kind of semblance of law or religious freedom or anything like that went right out the window. Sure. Because it was shown, and even before that, thanks to the Manson family, but really with Jonestown, it was shown that these cults that supposedly,

up to that point, people thought were harmless or even helpful could be very destructive. Over 900 people died. 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. Right.

So, what do you do? Well, you could hire someone to kidnap and torture and beat them and yell at them into submission, AKA deprogramming, AKA brainwashing, or I guess they would call it reverse brainwashing. Right. So, this is kind of the key, is this idea that you are combating this conversion

to a new religious movement or a cult group or whatever, 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 and a guy named Ted Patrick, who we'll talk about right now, the Cult Awareness Network was formed.

And Ted was, there were many deprogrammers, well, I don't know about many, but there were a handful of deprogrammers in this time period, but Mr. Patrick sort of led the way. He was born in the red light district of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and apparently had a really bad speech impediment such that he couldn't even communicate with people.

Right. He dove into religion and what he said was, quote, it wasn't long before I could think of was hellfire and damnation. And so, he had a bad experience with religion growing up and then had an opportunity in the early 70s to go and save somebody's kid who fell into what they called a cult.

Well, it was. He's offered a job. So there, it was a scriptural based Christian group called the Children of God, now called the International Family. And apparently 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 whose children were in this, what they called a cult. So yeah, he infiltrated it and said, you know what? They were brainwashed and I'm the guy that can fix it for a fee. Yeah, which is weird because so Ted Patrick

and somebody named Mia Donovan came out with a documentary recently called Deprogrammed. Ooh, I'd like to see that. Yeah, apparently it's very tough to find and get your hands on, but it's out there somewhere. And it's all about Ted Patrick. Ted Black Lightning Patrick is his name. Yeah.

And 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. Yeah. He was a high school dropout. Like you said, he had had his own experiences

with scripture and Bible beating and all of that kind of stuff. And he, I guess, his heart was in the right place from what I understand. But he did some really, really questionable stuff over the years after he formed the cult action or awareness network. You think his heart was in the right place? That's how Mia 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. Boy, he went the other way pretty quickly. Yeah.

Because at one point he was charging up to 25 grand, which would be the equivalent of about $120,000 for each case today to deprogram, to kidnap and deprogram your child. Yeah. A lot of money. Right. So he basically at the very beginning said,

you know what, 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 by proxy be affiliated as an accomplice because it's their children. Yeah. And you can't kidnap your own child in 1971?

No, you can't. And so that worked at the time, 21 was the federal age for minors, right? Or for an adult. Anything below 21, you were a minor, unless the state had gone in and rewritten law and said, no, it's actually 18 or 19 or whatever. Yeah.

So that covered like a pretty decent amount of the 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 press charges. So they'll be delighted. Right, exactly.

They're brainwashed. Right. All we have to do is unbrainwash them. The other way that he figured out they could be protected by law was if the member, the cult member was an adult, they could apply for what's called a conservatorship. Yes.

And this is basically based on that old kind of law where a husband could have his hysterical wife committed if he didn't like her 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 hired a cult deprogrammer, all you had to do was also shell out 500 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 parent, even though this person's an adult. And once that power was granted to the parent, the parent could extend that power to the cult deprogrammers who would then go and kidnap the cult member

and then begin the process of deprogramming. Yeah, and they wouldn't even make any attempts to assess their mental state. It was just sort of, I don't know about grandfathered in, but it was sort of lumped in under the umbrella of the conservatorship. Yeah. Thank you again, psychology.

Way to go. So, should we talk about some of his greatest tips? Well, let's take a break first. Okay. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, 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 to do the kidnapping. He would just pay dudes that were tough, ruffians as they were called to abduct these kids. You know, like with, um, whenever you hear like 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.

Sure. These are the kind of people that were hired by the Colt Awareness Network. That's right. Uh, and he, uh, eventually was joined by, uh, someone named Sandra Sacks, who was a housewife, uh, whose son was deprogrammed and from, I believe, the Harry Krishnas. And then he got, uh, think of a guy named Goose. I'm not sure of Goose's real name, but he was his, became ultimately his like big henchman. Right.

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 handcuff them to a bed for a week. Yeah. 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, uh, company to be programmer. Yeah. I guess, or reprogrammer back into the Greek Orthodox church. It was two girls, two daughters. And, uh, their quote at the end of this ordeal was, there was nothing to deprogram.

Right. We just left the church for another one. Yeah. Yeah. There's another woman, an English professor out in California in San Francisco named Sarah Wirth and she had become an anti-nuke activist, civil rights activist as well. Yeah. Her, her mother back in Pennsylvania thought that, that just was very unbecoming.

So she hired the cult awareness network to deprogram her 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 is 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's based on. That there are groups, insidious groups out there who are recruiting and brainwashing our kids. And what's to become of America if all of our kids are running around as Hare Krishna's or Bible Thumpers or what have you? Yeah. 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 cult awareness network who are 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 ultimately the communists

who are 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 Hare Krishna, and the judge is convinced that you have been brainwashed by the Hare Krishna's, 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 10 days and another time for 60. Yeah. There was one famous case, Stephanie Reithmiller in Ohio. Her parents hired Patrick in his crew because she was a lesbian. Well they suspected she was a lesbian. Was she in fact? Yes.

Okay. So they paid $8,000 which would be 21 grand today to kidnap her. She was 19 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 subdue her. She was driven to Alabama from Ohio and over the course of the next seven days was raped once a day by a guy named James Rowe who was one of the henchmen that worked with Patrick.

Right. In order to get her back into the heterosexual mindset, right? Yeah. Which we're going to do a whole podcast on gay deprogramming at some point because that's a whole different thing. But that has its roots in something like this obviously. But the trial, because this did go to trial, 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 pincer. Like this is very unbecoming. She has a very overbearing style. What they were trying to prove was that the roommate had brainwashed her into becoming a lesbian. Right. And just look at her with her boots and her pickup truck. Right.

Eventually it goes to trial and the judge, Hamilton County Judge Simon Leis, L E I S. He was not very sympathetic at all of her lifestyle, of course. He said homosexuality was immoral. And 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 he 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.

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? 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 to 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. Right. 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 ever 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. Yeah. One of them's Joe Azuzu for God's sake. I know. He's America's sweetheart.

Well, he should have been beaten up for that. So there was this, it was a joke, obviously, but it definitely pointed out this whole sentiment that America had toward cults at the time, which was like, 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 Hari Krishna 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 which has never been even proven like how do you mind control somebody?

It's crazy. But this is like the kind of the sentiment that was going on at the time. Right. Yes. And so you could be if you were a member of a 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 may send him. And they take you, throw you in a van, drive you several states over, maybe to your parents' house. I think they frequently use 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 abuse you physically, emotionally, verbally. They would starve you. They would deprive you of sleep. 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 had no training whatsoever in any kind of brainwash techniques. Now, there is no training. Right. 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 the whole goal of it, as far as he was concerned, was to create, to snap somebody

out of it. Right. And when somebody snapped, they basically gave into your will in that they were no longer resisting. They were no longer saying, my right to be a Hare Krishna 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 Hare Krishna anymore. That could be snapping. It could also be something that was a lot closer in 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 worked because there are a lot of people who are deprogramming said, this is a great thing for me. That 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 taken 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 agreed to come back home.

So maybe that was the reason for this snapping. Yeah, and sometimes they would fake it altogether to get out of that prison, which is the case which we'll talk about right after this break of Jason Scott. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Jason Scott, this was not a Patrick affair. This was a guy named Rick Ross, uh, and another guy, uh, two guys named Mark Workman and Charles Simpson.

Yes, but they were referred by the cult awareness networks. That's right. C.A.M. was involved. Well, yeah, they were referred, but this wasn't Patrick heading out this operation. Uh, and this is a guy named Jason Scott and he was kidnapped and, uh, brought to, uh, out in the boonies in Washington state and he was held there for days against his will, uh, physically abused, all the stuff that we've been going over, uh, because they wanted him to leave this, uh, Pentecostal church that he was in, uh, with his, uh, 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 deprogram him, um, it, 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, uh, 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, uh, 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 elite council by the church of Scientology. So now Scientology is getting involved.

They, they end up bankrupting through this court case. They awarded $875,000 in compensatory damages, a million in damages of punitive nature against the cult awareness network and 2.5 million against Ross himself. It ended up bankrupting them and then the church of Scientology buys out the cult awareness network in bankruptcy court, buys their assets, buys their logo, buys their name, renames it the new cult awareness network and now it's 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 50 that were brought at the time through Scientology lawyers. This just happened to be the one that stuck. Yeah. It went all the way to the Supreme court, uh, where they denied the appeal and in the end, Scott only got about $5,000 and 200 hours of professional services from Ross, which I didn't understand. No, 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 lawyer. Yeah. He hired a different lawyer after that. I guess he felt a little fleeced maybe by the Scientologist or used, I should say, and

ended up being chummy with Rick Ross. So he sold Rick Ross his settlement, which should have been $3 million for five grand and 200 hours of his services, of deprogramming services, right? To deprogram, I think his daughter or something like that. I don't know. That's what I couldn't find. Yeah. So, um, Rick Ross is still at it.

He's an exit counselor and he, if you listen to him talk, it's really weird, man, approaching this from the outside, like there was a war that was going on that is still being fought here or 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 Catholic League, First Amendment people like the ACLU on another side. So there's this weird, like, this battle that went on and Scientology ultimately won just

because they bled the anti-cult movement out in the courts. But like I said, Rick Ross is still at it. What he's doing now is exit counseling. And if before deprogramming was coercive brainwashing, then 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 who you're trying to counsel, I guess, involved, and they all agree to meet

and they talk to them about what they were doing and they explain to them about the harmful practices of that cult or not cult, depending on what it is. And essentially it's a really intensive therapy, group therapy, with your family. But again, not coercive, supposedly voluntary, and the proper way to go about it. Still expensive though. Right. But like a normal intervention or like a drug related intervention, like it'll probably be a surprise to the cult member.

But in an exit counseling seminar session or whatever, that person has to agree to stick around and listen. Yeah. Like they can leave at any point in time. There's no more kidnapping and duct taping. Right. So that's the state of affairs now. And it's really weird again because this is the remnants of this info war that went on

between the anti-cult movement and the cult movement or the new religious movement movement. And 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 deprogrammers who say, if it weren't for those guys, I'd probably still be in a cult right now. Sure. And I'm really grateful to my parents for shelling 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 destroy people's lives and kill people. But what you can't do is just, I think the problem came 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, I mean, if this was going on today with the way things are? Well, it kept going until 1995 was when that judgment came down that bankrupted cult awareness network. I'm talking about 2015. Yeah. Like with the way things are, I could see, I could see wackos 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 80s too. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, that documentary deprogrammed 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 heavy metal. We should do one on the PMRC and backmasking that whole, we'll just call it like 80s satanic

panic or something. Let's do it. That'd be a good one. Okay. There's a book, Ted Patrick wrote a book called Let Our Children Go. There's an exclamation point in the title. That's right because you're better. In 1976, and here was one quote of something, he bragged a lot about some of these things.

Yeah. He said, he's somewhat Wes, one of the people he deprogrammed. He said, Wes had taken up a position facing the car with his hands on the roof and his legs spread eagled. 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 Wes'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 head first into the backseat of the car and piling in on top of him. Then Jason Scott, I think, was duct tape put face down in a van and this 300-pound guy sat on him. That can kill you. Yes, it can. Pretty kooky stuff, man. Yeah.

It's how to combat brainwashing by brainwashing. I love pretty neat. Looking back in America's recent past to see how crazy it's been from time to time. Every once in a while, it just goes nuts. We just go crazy. Yeah. Let's see. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. If you want to know more about deprogramming, you can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. Hey guys, just finished listening to your Hot Air Balloon's podcast. I'm calling this Hot Air Balloon email. I jumped the gun. I've been working for a Hot Air Balloon company for two years in Napa Valley where I grew

up. I worked on the ground crew, the chase crew, as we called it. The company I worked for in Napa Valley Balloons has balloons that can fit two people all the way up to 20 people. The envelope, although it looks like, can weigh in excess of 600 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 a arduous process that was.

I can imagine. 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. I'm going to call this Josh's worst nightmare fortune. The balloon kept going south and what was supposed to be an hour 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. We try not to land somewhere without permission, but in this case, it was an emergency. The pilot left with the customer, so we had to contact the owner of the land and had to be let onto the property to get our balloon. Understandably, the owner was angry, but we gave him a bottle of champagne, as you said. They still do that and offered to pay for the damages to his crops while most flights

had no issues whatsoever. This one sticks out in my mind because it was a particularly exciting day. Nice. That is Ryan from Washington, D.C., the Anapa Valley. I like the part about champagne. Sure. I like the part where the pilot left with the customers really quickly after he landed. Right.

Who was that? Ryan. Thanks, Ryan. That was a good story. Again, I like the champagne part. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us and tell us all of your champagne wishes and caviar dreams, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90's called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90's.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90's called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with a Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.