Historically High - Ted Kaczynski: The Unabomber

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

We are finally here. Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber. Insane IQ. Graduated high school at 15. Had a run-in at Harvard with a professor who worked for the OSS. Youngest associate professor at Cal Berkeley. Left academia for a shack in the Montana woods. Ted Kaczynski had a strong belief that technology was ruining humanity. In 2026, I'm not so sure we disagree. What we do disagree with was sending bombs in the mail to get the attention of the masses. If you don't know, you're about to find out. Join us as we get Historically High on The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh and get enrolled for some fun extra content Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh boy, oh boy. Is it Psychopath Week? I was able to circumvent the solo serial killer episode and get you back in. Yeah. This was, I mean, this doesn't just classify as a serial killer. This created a type of like mania. Not like as far as copycats, but this had everybody concerned about trash and mail. but apparently at a certain point

not concerned enough and I have questions about that we'll dig into a little bit later like at what point do people quit poking around at shit they don't realize what it is if it's not yours

and you don't remember ordering it should you open it well see now I'm going to ask you the question of when all of these bombing surprises Ted Kaczynski Unabomber when all the bombings were happening because they were also spaced apart so there was a cooling off period

during some of these but as they're progressing, are they not announcing to keep the investigation contained? Are they not really announcing like where these bombs are coming from or how they're getting there? So people aren't aware that like, hey, if you see something that looks like trash or has a weird address or is a package that you're not familiar with, don't touch it. Or are they keeping that shit to themselves? And so the public is just like, oh, la da da. I think a lot of it is how hard is it to break a natural habit?

Like, also. Dumb curiosity. Dumb curiosity. But if you hear that professors and presidents of organizations are being bombed, and you work a nine to five at the paper factory, or are you really ever going to think twice? I mean, you're not on the list. That's true.

Also, the sporadic nature, because I want to say this was 17 years that this spree goes on. Yeah. 16 bombs, one a year, it's going to be a big deal. We only have three casualties really in this episode. So it's a big deal because there are bombs going through the mail, while at the same time it's so sporadic and so inconsistent and not like after the first few not concentrated to one area. There's just, there's so many things that make it less important.

Doing the research, I don't know. I don't like how cats. they would refer to like the non-fatal bombings. Yep. And they'd be like, this just happened. They just had like 100 shards of metal embedded in their face and chest and like, you know, lost fingers and everything like that, but they didn't die. And it's just like, that's still being horribly maimed.

And then spending the rest of your life with PTSD from opening a package and having it explode in your face. Yeah. The mental toll as well as the physical toll is so scary about this episode. but at the same time, it's, you get to watch an evolution of a madman on paper while at the same time watching him get better at making these bombs. Because make no mistake,

from the first bomb that Ted Kaczynski drops off to the last bomb that doesn't ultimately ever get delivered and we don't know where it was going, the technology and the lethality of these bombs just grew exponentially. The other thing too, when we're talking about Ted Kaczynski, we talked about other people who have done bombings, the Oklahoma City bomber. Who else have we done? Bombing-wise?

I guess just in the general sense of like Waco, I realize that's not bombing or anything like that, we're talking about someone who is an evil genius. Yeah. And so this is a prime example of what happened. when somebody has that genius gene, but then at the same time has that propensity for a complete lack, I guess you would say, of empathy or like just lack of value of human life.

This might be our first evil genius now that you say that. Yeah, I think so. A genius he was. Unfortunately, the evil outweighs the genius. And this is going to be kind of a tough episode because there is a lot of stuff that Ted Kaczynski said that isn't crazy, that I don't necessarily disagree with

and that do sound in the time of AI and flock cameras. Yeah. It doesn't sound that bad. It's the messaging is good. The implementation of how to present that messaging was very, very bad. Messenger was a horrible person. Yes.

And a stinky person. Great mission statement, horrible PR department. Or whatever. ever like execution department. All right. Patreon.com slash historically high. Go get all the bonus content. We've last week, I think, or whenever this one releases,

we got to release the red scare and the lavender scare right after that. We're going to be coming out with another episode. I'm not sure if it's going to be released at this point where it's going to have a companion bonus episode with it as well. K2, get excited about that. Yeah, and if that's already released, we hope you loved it. Yeah, exactly. The mystery of a schedule that's not nailed down.

Yeah, keep those ratings rolling in. Five stars, make our heart smile. Reviews, love seeing them, keep subscribing. If we are to 30,000, congratulations on being a part of a 30,000 person group that is subscribed to historically high. If we aren't there yet, why don't you want to be a part of something? Yeah, exactly. And also, thanks for the love on TikTok. and everything. I know I'm kind of lazy and getting those out, but I'm going to try to do it a little more often.

So you want to introduce this, Psycho? Palms away. Theodore John Kaczynski. Not John Krasinski. It's so close. I know. So, so close. How often did you have to look up the spelling of this guy's name?

I've been into him for long enough on kind of a surface level. On a very casual, impersonal level. Uh-huh. The ZYN, I mean, it's a crazy name when you look at it because you just don't say the C. But he's this interesting product, and we'll talk about the day that he's born here. But just to catch you up on what else is going on in the world on May 22nd, 1942, this is the day that Mexico declares war on all of the Axis powers after German U-boats sank two cargo ships that were of Mexican origin right outside of Mexico. So he's born in the thick of World War II.

At a time when all of a sudden, because there's always that scare about the eastern seaboard being susceptible to attack, now you got right underneath us. Yeah. The ship's getting suck. Yep. So May 22nd, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois, John Cazinsey, is born to Wanda and Turk. I only know one other Turk, and it's his last name, and he's on Scrubs. So this was Theodore, I believe it was James, but they just call him Turk. Yeah, exactly, Turcleton.

His brother David would be born in 1949 when John, or when, Jesus, this is going to be. fun already. When Ted was seven years old, before David was born, Ted has this odd allergic reaction. He's like nine months old. Very, very young baby, very small boy.

I heard varying reports. There's a lot of variance in a lot of his young childhood stuff. He was taken into the hospital and he was there for a period. I heard 10 days. I heard 30 days. I heard 10 days more. Did you?

It says, several weeks. So it's this allergic reaction. He gets this severe case of hives. And the way the hospital was set up due to the protocols, it like had really strict limitations on parental visits, which is insane for like where kids are and everything. But he's there for several weeks with his parents only able to see him like a few hours a week. And there's this known, I can't remember the fucking medical term for it. But there is this type of mental, condition, I guess you would say. Like kids are not supposed to be separated from their parents, like within their first

couple years. And just even several weeks at nine months old, his mother said what left was like a happy, very like responding to stuff type like baby to this withdrawn kind of cold, didn't make a lot of eye contact or anything like that. And that was at nine months. I'm sure that that's the child-parent connection is very important. I think maybe the more important thing was because he had hives and they were administering topical rubs on him to try to get rid of these hives.

They were splinting his arms and his legs so he couldn't reach it to scratch or wipe it off. So you have a nine-month-old baby that now has their arms and straight splints and their legs in straight splints and they're basically tied into their crib. Yeah. Not being able to move all of your motor skills that are developing at that sort of a young age. Nine months is like insanely young. Like incapable of really doing anything. And to just have simple human contact when it's only on like a feeding schedule to come in and you're kind of stuck.

Like you said, kind of like stuck there. People that you do not know, I think that I'm not, this isn't going to be like, oh, it was all because of when he got hives when he was young. I don't think this has anything to do with it. Not anything to do with it, but what I'm saying is it's like death by a thousand paper cuts. It's not just one event in this guy's life that leads to it. It's a series of events that this turns him into a certain type of like toddler or infant or whatever. That then makes him less socially, you know, comfortable when he's older, which then leads to other stuff and leads to other stuff. This guy's a snowball rolling downhill, just gathering fucking shit with it.

Yeah. And he was just a mind that was built to do great things while continuously having the social kind of parasycial skills that he was supposed to be developing. Yeah. Stunted it pretty much every single term. And I mean, and it's not the fault of the parents because their kid has to be in the hospital to get these hives taken care of. They're told they can't be there. I don't know what you do at that point. but in elementary school from not a social standpoint

but from an intellectual standpoint his parents start to notice that he is very intelligent they have him tested and I think he has somewhere between it raises you know it goes up as he gets older but he tests it like a 167 IQ score when he's in elementary school fifth grade yeah 167

well he skips fifth grade I think it's fourth grade I think he's he skipped six 6th. Okay. Because he went into junior high. And then he skips another one a little bit later, correct? Yeah. This right here is another thing. This is why this is so fucking, this is a study in what, like, can fuck up a kid that you don't realize we'll fuck up a kid.

But it's also, his parents didn't do anything wrong. No. And this is, it's a situation where that, that boy who lost the light in his eyes, as he's growing up through elementary school while they're living in Chicago, he is starting to make friends. He is starting to kind of create a little bit of a social life. He ends up getting tested. They find out that he's an exceptional genius at this point in time. They skip him sixth grade. At the same time, right around there, they end up moving out to Evergreen Park, which happened in 1952.

So right around the age of 10. All of that social capital and all of that confidence that he just built up in Chicago is now taking away because he has. has to start over again in Evergreen. And not only does he have to start over again in Evergreen, he also is now skipping a grade. So he's physically smaller. He's less emotionally adept, I guess, to deal with kids that are only a year older. Think of how much you emotionally mature in a year throughout those years of adolescence.

Yeah, in a brand new place. His brother said that kind of right around this time, there were just less and less friends that were coming to the house to see him and he starts to kind of pull away from any social interactions. So I thought about this a lot. Talking about how the parents didn't do anything wrong, 100%. If I'm looking at it from the perspective now of having hindsight for all of that stuff, knowing what we know now about how important it is for kids to grow up,

around people that are of the same kind of level they are for emotional intelligence. things like that, to have a sense of normalcy of fitting in, if you're a kid and your parents are like, oh my God, we're going to give you advantages by moving you forward. You're going to be able to study more. You're going to be able to maybe graduate earlier and then you can go and live up to your potential. That is a very rational thought for a parent. But from a child's perspective, what real advantage is there to that? I had a girl in high school that during, right when we got into high school, she skipped eighth grade and was a freshman with us. And I remember, regardless of the fact that she was only a year younger and everything like that, she was definitely treated differently

because everyone was looking being like, oh, you're so, there was always that thought of like, you probably think you're better because you're so smart that you're here before you technically should be and before all of us got here or whatnot. When he gets into that situation, he's now in middle school too. So it's not even if he has those younger kids, that he knew, even if he would have stayed in the same place he was. Now he's in a completely new place where they're like, you're pretty small for your age. He's like, well, I skipped.

Oh, so you're smarter than me? And so you're smarter than me? Oh, yeah. But you have none of the support system around you. Just to kind of lay this out, 167 is in the 99.99th percentile of intelligence. I believe they said 99.996. this is a similar range kind of estimations

for Einstein and then for Stephen Hawking the requirements to get into Menta Menta is a wonderful organization that's been a running joke in my family for a very long time. None of us have ever gotten into Menta I can tell you that much. I think my

first introduction into MENSA would have been from me, myself, and Irene. Yeah. The Sons? Yeah. They have their own specific tests because there's a million IQ tests out there. But their minimum required range is 130 and up. And he was 167 on the test that he took.

So he would have been a mental level boy had they tried to push him in that direction. But again, you're talking about a fifth grader that's a sixth grade age that's now in seventh grade. And intelligence is important. While at the same time, it can only take you as far as your social skills can carry you. There's a reason why incredibly intelligent people like Bill Gates and a few of those other super geniuses have such a hard time connecting to people. They're awkward as far. Yeah. Because they're so smart that those social skills don't tend to keep up at the same rate because of the acceleration that their intelligence is taking them on.

being physically smaller and just shy was such a bad thing for junior high he did join the marching band he was a trombonist just played that bone like crazy as if come on what it you listen it's gonna get worse here's the thing too i was the same age of all my classmates i was i was younger in the sense that my birthday was in the summer yeah so but i was small even in that situation it was fucking hard man but what's weird is usually that forces you to develop some type of like sense of humor to try to lack you know for the lack of the other things he just withdrew completely I would say that he tried

he was also a member of the German club which I can't imagine would be super popular in the 50s in America he was a part of the coin club the biology and mathematics club somebody who takes my class Maybe that... You know what it was for?

Oh, shit. I bet... Okay, think of it. You need people, you need spies in East Germany, right? Yeah. What better way to do that than to be training kids

to take German and then you have a supply of people to recruit into like the CIA and shit? Possibly. Coin Club is a tough club to flounder in, I think. I say that as a guy who now just high as can be gets on eBay and buys all sorts of crazy coins.

Yeah. It's amazing, though. 1950 coin from West Germany. Maybe the toughest thing to get over is he was a member of a group called the briefcase boys. Because the briefcase boys all throughout high school did not carry bagpacks. They carried around briefcases. And again, in the 50s, I don't know how normal that.

was no still probably pretty similar reaction as it would have been in the 90s mm-hmm to carrying around briefcase as it relates back to my schooling days I do remember the kids that carried briefcases had a lot harder time oh my god man see here's the thing too having an older sister I also had a little bit of wherewithal to not work against myself already had enough working against me I had to have regular backpack not I bought a pair of Jinkos one time and that was about the worst decision I ever made

those were never worn again Did she have the wear with all to tell you first? You got to be beige at that point. Just blend. Yeah. Just blend. No crazy fits that you're trying to get off or anything like that.

Still just smart as a whip. He ends up skipping eighth grade. He attends summer school. He ends up graduating high school by the age of 15. If I haven't heard of a fast track before, and I was told this, I would call this the fastest track that I could imagine. 15 years old graduating high school. So smart.

He ends up being accepted to Harvard and receives an academic scholarship in 1958. He lands on Harvard's campus before he gets his driver's license at the age of 16. Now, in high school, Teddy did show a pretty intense interest in chemistry. So along with a couple other probably friends that were considered like outcast at the time and everything, began kind of like playing around with making like homemade gunpowder and small explosives. Probably what you would consider at that point fireworks. Something fun. Yeah, like making M80s and shit like that in his family's garage.

So, you know, foreshadowing. So he gets to Harvard at 16. He lives in the dorms that are specially made for the kids that are like, young prodigies. So you don't even get to blend in with any of the other students. You're coming out of the dorm that everyone is looking at being like, okay, again, these are the people that are better than us and everything. So it does kind of set you apart already. And he ends up living this really solitary life on campus.

He did practice his trombone, I believe, in his room. So he kind of continued with that a little bit. He kept that as a hobby, but rarely spoke to roommates or classmates. the only thing or the only thing I can think of when I hear trombone is when the Saints go marching in and I just imagine walking by Ted's room

and you see her but like a jazzy version like you hear in Nalins a little bit when they like spice it up a little bit the Harvard campus immediately has to be difficult because before he's in high school he's just around kids that are his age

he's around kids that are going to school just to go to school Harvard's never been a school where somebody goes to school just because their parents told well actually I take that back I'm sure there's a lot of kids that go to Harvard because their parents told them that they had to go

but as far as being there it's a different level of stress that you're putting on to your trying to get the best grades possible and if you're 15 or I guess if you're 16 going on 17 at that time you don't have to have

like a 16 year old doesn't have to have a strict regiment schedule. If you're 16 at Harvard, I feel like your scheduling has to be completely different. I love, like, not realizing I'm coming into topics like this when you suggest them. I think just like fucking nuts to nose, this is literally the most fascinating just like thing to study about this because, okay, he goes to Harvard at 16, which means he's away from home. at 16. Just from an emotional maturity standpoint, I mean, come on.

And now you have the pressure of trying to succeed at Harvard. I was hiding liquor bottles under my bed at 16. Okay. So now, now here's the thing. Are we ready for the plot to thicken even more? So just after his freshman year, when he's out of that, younger student dorm. He spends the next three years in residential housing on campus with everybody else.

He's with all the Harvard Normies at this point in time. He's still fucking 17, man. Yeah. He's still very, very young. He, in a lot of his writings, this guy, I want to say that there was,

when they end up raiding his cabin, spoiler alert at the end, if you haven't heard this story, spoiler alert at the end, they find something like 50,000 pages of writings that they just find in the cabin. When you hear the size of the cabin, And you're going to be like, the fuck? Was it all paper?

Was it made of paper that he wrote on? But he has journals and diaries, things like that that were at his family's house that have been combed over and read trying to figure this guy out because he's just, he's endlessly interesting to figure out how he does what he does. But he has all of these different journal diary entries that are talking about how he would see a girl on campus. And he won't want nothing more than to go over and talk to her. but he didn't know the correct way to do it. And he's breaking it down analytically as far as pulling it out saying,

I could go over, I could talk to her, I could give her my number, but then she doesn't necessarily have to call me. If I can get her number from her and then I can call her, I can kind of control the situation. Not understanding that that's never a way to speak to a girl. Well, here's the thing too. he's like 17 he's like 17 or 18

he's never done this before and he's already at this inherent disadvantage because do college girls want to date younger guys I don't know I was I took a run at some older girls in college when I was If you're going to be a young guy

you've got to be a smooth motherfucker like yourself right If you walked up to them with the TED playbook on how to talk to them It's not going to work for you No Being the size of a full grown adult help too. He has these disadvantages to even make these very simple things. I mean, if he would have just been able to go up and start a conversation normally, it would have come out like, well, how old are you?

Well, like, I'm seven, oh my God, you must be super something. And then they could just talk. But he would build it up in his head so much of all the things that could go wrong because he had never been in those situations, really, that he wouldn't even attempt it. in cell to me has obviously a very negative connotation because they just don't like women I can't say that ted was necessarily an in cell because we will talk about some events later on that start to lean more in cell but at this point in time it's he's just scared he's a child

and he's having all of these totally normal emotions for a 16 year old at Harvard at a 17-year-old at Harvard. And it's going to be a pattern that follows him throughout his life because his brother David that we haven't talked about a whole lot, he's no slouch in the IQ department. He was a very smart kid too. Their parents were so focused on these progressive, teach them everything,

you're going to learn all about the world, that David's very smart as well. And when we talk about some of the similarities between these two brothers, you're going to maybe kind of see that there's a pattern that we might have had two unabomers, had David been put through the same things that I think Ted had to go through. Yeah. And one of those things that is very distinct between Ted and David is while Ted is at Harvard,

he becomes involved in this, not at the time, but come to find out a very controversial psychological study that once we talk about it, there is no way that I think you can believe that it had no psychological impact on. him as he claims. So the study at Harvard at this time was being led by this guy named Henry Murray. Now, Henry Murray had his previous employment in the OSS during World War II, or maybe not immediately previous, but during that time he served with the OSS. He left Harvard, he went to the OSS, became a lieutenant colonel, and spent his time with them before coming back to teach Harvard. So this was a Harvard

professor of psychology that was walking into the OSS at a time when we were at war. And what was it that the OSS turned into? CIA. That's right. Yes. And the CIA ran a series of studies, whatever experiments, heinous shit at Harvard. So Kaczynski participated in MK Ultra.

Is that, that's not fucking tinfoil hatty. You don't, it's not a far leap. I just, I shuddered when we talked about some of the other shit that happened during MK Ultra. Because I don't think that he was radicalized. I think that he was tortured. So I don't think it's necessarily the brainwashing stuff.

I think MK Ultra was a, had a lot of different buckets. I think they were looking into any and every single option and they were doing it at different spots. Yeah. Just to round out Murray's time in the OSS, he was actually tapped to complete a personality analysis on Adolf Hitler. That was how much his opinion was weighted that they needed this personality sketch. And in this personality sketch, it is pointed out that if Adolf is cornered and he sees no way of getting out or winning, he will kill himself. So the accuracy of this thing, I mean, they said some other pretty wild shit about Hitler, which is hard to say.

I kind of feel like that's a pretty... There's two guesses there. He's going to try to escape or he's going to kill himself. At the same time, surrender still has to be on there. I don't. That guy, come on. Yeah. Along that time, too, he helped develop OSS interrogation strategies.

And that, I think, is more so away from why. I would say it's not MK Ultra Because these interrogation strategies are kind of the precursor They're the first step before you start drugging them, I believe No, no, I got that, but it was still funded by MK Ultra It was funded by the CIA Yes So it's a behavioral

Like it's a It's not something where they're coming out And being like, this is what you're entering into Just as far as like us talking about Manson and to freeze though if we're to go down that same MK Ultra Road, those were people that they potentially turned into sleepers. We have found so many, come on. But we've talked about the horrible shit.

We talked about Hoover. We've talked about, like, I don't think it's a huge leap of, you don't have to suspend your, you know, disbelief or anything to say, like, the CIA was up to some really heinous shit. They were. I just kind of have to tell myself that there's no way that it could have been that bad just to keep sanity. Well, at the same time, those guys were revolutionaries that they trained to go out and do some shit. I think this was, he fell into a situation where they were trying to figure out how far it took to tear somebody down. Yeah.

To find a way to manipulate. Like, this was a precursor to them actually getting into their minds, even though this is what happens. Just because it's not the most fuck-up things that they did. it doesn't mean it's not fucked up. True. Yeah. During this time, so this experiment was aimed to measure

how human beings handled extreme stress. So Ted and some of the other undergraduate subjects were basically asked, hey, write this essay, I want you to put your deepest personal beliefs, your philosophies, what you want to be, what you've accomplished,

what you think you're going to, you know, go on to do, be completely truthful. This is to bear your soul. and Ted's code name during this testing was lawful. When they went back and what the only things, you know, we're going to talk about what they're able to find about this stuff. Most of this stuff, what, like 99.999999 is sealed. There's like one video they were able to find and then some of this information.

These students were then placed in this room under bright lights, hooked up to electrodes that were able to like monitor their reactions and like heart rate and everything like that. and then basically a professional interrogator that Murray had actually probably worked with within the OSS and then the CIA. Mr. C. Yes. Would come in and just verbally attack these people using all of the information he had studied in these essays of knowing everything about their aspiration, their fears, all of this stuff, and would just brutally attack them to just humiliate. them and like you said deconstruct basically somebody to see what they could get them down to

some of our listeners are in college don't take offense to this a college kid talking about their forming views and opinions on the world is a very hard person to they don't take criticism well at that point in time they're very passionate about it they haven't been run down by society and hearing a million different people attack them for what they believe. They also have an established a way to articulate or to really, you can have a belief and it can be the right belief, whatever, but you may not be able to articulate it correctly against someone who's a trained professional in literally countering everything you're trying to say. Regardless of what they're saying makes sense, the way that they're saying it, the way that they're

interrupting you, the way that the room is set up, everything is, working against you. And it's a situation where this video that we have with Ted and Mr. C, pretty much right out of the gate as they sit down and begin their conversation, Mr. C makes reference to how he doesn't, or how he could see that this is how Ted looks after reading his philosophies that he didn't think very much of. there's a personal attack on physical appearance during this interview where Mr. C says, do you grow that beard because the nonconformists have beards?

Are you trying to conform with the conformist? And you hear Ted speaking back to him very clearly and very passionately saying, I'm not trying to conform with the nonconformist. This isn't even really a beard. And Mr. C goes, I agree. That's not a beard. just these little physical denigrations too that may not be questioning his beliefs

but belittling him to the fact of trying to put him on the defensive that's what I'm saying is just breaking them down from any and every angle and what's the worst thing that you could do after that how many hours total did he um I believe it was like 300 I'm pretty sure that I wrote it down I think I had 200 So let's even just low ball it and say 200. Yes, 200 hours, you're right.

He went through 200 hours of this just mind-fuckery. Over three years, they were meeting weekly. Ted said that this wasn't what happened every single time, but it would be a situation where there would be weeks where they would just do it back and forth with the 22 participants. And it would almost build them up a little bit of confidence because they were speaking to people kind of on their level that weren't trying to be contradictory immediately.

When they were done, they would have them come in like fucking players on a Tuesday to watch game film and basically force the students to watch the playbacks of their own anger, humiliation, their emotional outbursts,

and their reactions and everything like that. For that to then be picked apart. Not to say that we're overplaying this because in Murray's own words, he described this as a vehement sweeping, personal, abusive attack. Yeah. That's how he described these interviews.

So this wasn't something that he was trying to hide to make this ethical. We haven't even gotten to the Stanford Prison Experiment yet. Unethical experiments on college campuses are happening left and right. This wasn't some kind of secret operation that they were trying to hide behind it. This was something that was very publicly known on campus. So jumping ahead a little bit, when we get to his trial, again, spoiler, part of what they're going to try to do is get an insanity plea. And one of the things they're going to try to point back to, which would be a cause of that, is going to be this. He has, in all the times that he's spoken, people and everything, denied the fact that this had any type of impact on him.

that these 200 fucking hours of just getting belittled and berated about stuff they know it's landing because you told them about it. To say that that didn't have a psychological, that's like somebody saying that because then they know that it's going to be something where it would be like, of course, this had, if you admit that that has an impact on you, that's just going to lead to them being able to say, yes, you are insane. this is my school of thought on it. He's too smart to not understand what this did to him. But regardless of him knowing that this messed him up a little bit or a lot of bit or whatever, at the time that he has to defend this as far as it not hurting him, he's already put out his manifesto. No, no, I understand that.

So that's what I'm saying is he cannot, for his manifesto to be taken seriously. It can't describe it. be the ramblings of a insane person. It is the ramblings of an insane person because there is no way that you do what he did. At that age. Going through this stuff, but then also the bombings and everything and not be an insane person. But there is a very clear cut part of his life three years that he's part of this study where the entire point of the study is just to fuck someone up.

mentally. Make them question every belief that they've ever had. Make them question every thought that they've ever had. And what is that going to do when these people coming in? It was a figure of authority. It was a professor that was running these experiments. For someone to put you through that,

any and other symbol of authority or figure of authority is now going to be someone that is going to fuck you. That same professor from 1960 to I believe 1963 also oversawp just to maybe wrap up the MK Ultra part of this. Timothy Leary, who is a psychologist that's a world-renowned drug user, was doing research

into psychedelic drugs on the Harvard campus that included mushrooms and LSD. So LSD, something that we talked about that was used during MK Ultra experiments, was being tested on the same Harvard campus. I'm not saying that Ted Kaczynski ever took LSD. we can't confirm that or even really get close to it but it is in the periphery of what's going on we talked about this pre-episode i'm glad you brought that up so this is also at a time where you have someone coming back

that was with the os s that's getting all of the documentation for all of the experiments that the fucking nazis were doing at concentration camps for all of like megalay and all that shit sodium pentothal truth serum was being used in the 1940s as a way for interrogation tactics so that led you know that they were exploring chemical ways of trying to control someone to get a, you know, a specific behavior. If they're already doing this on the Harvard campus, there's a very easy to get to step. Yep.

That says the stuff was there. Why wouldn't it have been maybe introduced, not even in all the subjects? Because again, you want a base and you want different sample sizes and stuff. but what's to say that you didn't introduce this in a sample size of people? Yeah. We can't definitively say that it happened, so we can't say that it happened, but we can make... Connect the two dots? 1962, Ted graduates from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.

He then enrolls at Michigan for his master's and Ph.D. programs for those tracks. Michigan wasn't his first choice, but it was the only choice that was going to pay him basically a stipend to be there for teaching assistants, teaching aides type work as well. I believe it was Cal Berkeley, which we'll talk about here very shortly, and there was another school that I can't remember. But Michigan being your third choice, say what you will about Michigan fans, Michigan's a pretty prestigious school. Oh, yeah. And he ends up getting his master's and his Ph.D. respectively, 1964 and then 1967.

During this time at Michigan, Ted has some serious questions that I can't help but think were probably related to the testing that he had done at Harvard. So while he was there, he specialized in this really complex branch of, like, it's called geometric function theory because it's a branch of mathematics. It was called boundary functions. the professors that, you know, at Michigan, had noted that his thesis was so advanced and complex that there were like a handful of people in the entire country who would actually be able to read and

understand it. So, I mean, he is operating from an intellectual academic perspective at a very, very high level. But then again, like you said, kind of in the mid-60s, he has this period of time where he hasn't had really any relationships or anything like that. He is still coming off a time where mid-60s, man, he's only come out of Harvard. Like you said, 62. It's only been a couple years. Like, he's not talking to anybody.

He hasn't gone and seen, you think he's ever going to see a fucking therapist or a psychiatrist at this point? Anyone that's going to try to have him open up or talk about anything? He did. So in 1966, he had scheduled a point with a psychologist because he was seriously questioning his gender identity. No, no, sorry.

I meant to talk about what had happened to him at Harvard. Oh, no, not at Harvard, but I think the fallout from Harvard. Correct is what brings him to this. Sorry, I meant to specify that. Okay. No, go ahead. Yeah. While he's sitting in the waiting room of this psychiatrist office,

he needs to discuss these super intense sexual fantasies that he's having. he has a desire to undergo a gender transition and right before he's called into the office he basically has this little mini breakdown and starts feeling all of this shame for thinking of this and he walks into the psychiatrist's office and brings up nothing that he ever wanted to talk about it was just filler time because he was too scared to leave

but he was too scared to talk about the things that were going on had he brought any of this stuff up I don't know if that's a lane that they could have got to a point to talk about what happened at Harvard. But at the same time, he's four years removed from this program that tried to break down every single belief that he had.

I'm pretty sure it did. Yeah. Oh, I'm sure it did too. He has all of these writings again at Michigan that are just scattered all over his time there of these failed attempts to speak to women. And he's so he's questioning his gender while at the same time he's still,

feels these deep desires to speak to women. And he can't do that, which is then reinforcing that maybe he's not going after the right prey or that he's not in the right body because he can't successfully do what he believes a male should be doing. Yeah. And while seeing everybody do it around him. And you got to imagine that during that time at Harvard in that experiment, you're at some point, if they go after breaking you down your entire identity, part of that has to be going after the gender-specific identity that you're identifying with at the time.

Do you ever have a girlfriend? No. You're gay? No. You're a woman. Buddy, are we sitting right smack dab in the red scare and the lavender scare? Yeah. During this time?

Yeah, 60s. We're there. We're in the middle of it. We've kind of left the red scare, but the lavender scare is continuing on. Time marches on with the lavender scare until fucking Bill Clinton. And so I think this leading to this sense of like, I don't know what my identity is. I'm trying this identity that I'm doing right now,

and it is not working for me. Maybe I need to try the other, you know, something else. Anything else. He's so like, how can you say that this person is not just like, and rightfully so, so fucked up in the head? Yeah, and again, we're not making any excuses for anything that he did later. Regardless of all of this kind of stuff, there were still 21 other people that were in that experiment that didn't go bomb people.

Like it's No, no, 100%. I'm sure those people are pretty fucked up too. But at the same time, are those like 22 and 23 year olds maybe? They all. But again, your brain's so close or not close to being fully formed that anything like that's going to wreck you. Yeah. I don't understand what in the world geometric function theory is.

But like you said, this guy was a master of. his craft in mathematics. And by late 1967, Ted accepts his position is an acting assistant professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley. The Ivy League of the West, UC Berkeley.

He's the youngest assistant. Wait, isn't Harvard? No, Stanford is Ivy League and it's in California. Berkeley's cooler than Stanford. Yeah, I do believe that, yeah, I've been to Berkeley before. Berkeley campus is way cooler. Real quick before he gets that, because he wrote this in his diary.

So following that, you know, when he went into that psychological office and everything, he writes about how he was feeling so much like internal conflict and hatred toward himself that manifesting that into like a rage. And basically then as like this murderous like these murderous thoughts toward like the psychiatrist and everything. And going back in his journals, this is like a specific point that he mentions as this crazy like emotion. turning point that pretty much just convinced him of this isolationism and this general kind of just, I guess you would say apathy. That's, I think the best word for it is he just has apathy for any sort of human interaction or anything that falls outside of the concrete belief that he had to form to try to get through fighting that experiment.

That was my last chance to fix it. I didn't fix it, so this is not my lot. And I won't let anybody change my mind about anything from here on out. Yeah. And that's really how his life goes. As this assistant professor at Harvard, he is... Or Cal Berkeley. Or, yeah, in Cal Berkeley, he ends up, like I said, the youngest professor in the history of the university at Berkeley. Pretty good feather in your cap.

September of 1968, he's formally appointed the assistant professorship that puts him on a track for 10 years. So he's already on the track after being there for two years. to be tenured at Berkeley, he wasn't a good professor. And I think that plays into the apathy of everything. We're questions that were asked in class. He wasn't ever going to answer. He opened the book.

He taught everything straight out of the book. And for somebody with an IQ of 167 that only a handful of people can understand the thesis that got him's doctorate? They think 187 at this point now. It can raise? Yeah. I didn't know that.

Yeah. As he progressed and got smarter, he was able to, answer harder questions that would then indicate higher intelligence. Okay, so this lens, again, more to the Flowers for Charlie Always Sunny theory

about Charlie getting smarter as he was guessing his IQ. Yes. He says that if he doubles up the medication, he might be able to double up his IQ. It's possible. Same idea, I guess. Yes. In that world, yes. In the Always Sunny verse. As far as the

like at the end of the semester, when the students would rate him, he was pretty much always getting ones or zeros. Nobody really ever took a liking to him. And he never really took a liking to anybody at Berkeley. He was such a loner at that point because what you were talking about, those writings in his diary where he becomes this stone cold loner that has no care or feelings for anybody else. While at the same time, there's still something inside of him, it has to, because it's in everybody, this desire to find someone or something that makes sense. The only thing that's made sense to Ted throughout his entire life, really, I think, is nature.

Yes, he was introduced like his father and his brother used to go out. He had a huge appreciation for, you know, nature and everything like that. Looking back, just kind of him teaching at Cal Berkeley, he's 25, right? Yeah. Yeah. So there's other students there that are still taking classes that are 23, 24, 25. I feel like this just goes back to him being advanced in grades. and everything, and now he's the youngest, which should be incredible.

You'd think he would have so much confidence. You'd be like, fuck yes, I'm going to kill this job. He's not good at interacting. I think at that point, because he wasn't really interested in interacting with women anymore, he just wasn't interacting with anybody. He wouldn't talk to his students after class. But he did, like, can you mention what that kind of person that has, like, students looking at him being like, why are you fucking teaching here?

Like, this isn't at a time when someone's like, oh this very prestigious guy that we've heard of so much is now teaching us it's like no you we just know you're really are you the TA so like he's in these crazy circumstances because of his intelligence but he is not in like an age range where he or has the emotional intelligence i think to really handle him that's the other thing too is 1968, he's teaching at Berkeley. He's still in his 20s. He is in the easiest place, I believe, in the span of time to get laid.

You're the young professor in the mathematics. Listen, there are going to be some hot nerds there that are going to be very interested if you can carry on a three-sentence conversation. Yeah. And just not be weird. But here's the thing. He can't not be weird. You take it right across the bay into San Francisco.

Buddy. They're throwing it at you. It's like Marty Groffy. I understand that. He's just like he's so fucked up in the head. Yeah. I also don't think you would know what to do if he ever got it either. Yeah.

I don't think the mechanics of sexual intercourse or something that he was probably practicing at that point in time. Which if you're professor. doesn't know how to bang yeah. Probably not a good professor either. There's just a lot working against this guy, man. Something that I didn't know could happen and that kind of

scares me to believe that you can be this smart, but by the end of the 60s, Ted Subfield of math had kind of ceased to exist because most of the questions that it pondered had been answered. At that point in time, it was like, we're good. We've already

figured out everything that we can glean from this mathematical field. You've answered all the questions. Everybody else has answered all the questions. We can't take this math any further that's going to be beneficial for any sort of advancement. So it's like an author that finishes his book, his like masterpiece. And then they're just like, well, the book's over now. Well, what do you mean? There's no other stories to tell. It's over. Good. Great job. You did it. You wrote the masterpiece. You did it.

And now you're just kind of like, this is just what I've been doing with my whole life. This is the only thing that has been progressing in my life. It's not something that Ted loved. He wasn't in love with math. No. It was something that he liked and something that he kept getting results in. And it was purpose.

Yeah. It's purpose. Exactly. It was a steadying thing in his life that was his purpose to go on. And are you going to start over in another mathematical field? Are you smart enough to do it? 100%. Unquestioned, you could figure out all the math problems and anything.

But you're not the guy. Uh-uh. You're no longer used to be the guy. But now you're on the bottom. You've got to put in work. And at that point in time, Ted ends up resigning his position. He moves back with his parents to Lombard, Illinois. Two years later, in 1971, he purchased his land outside of Lincoln, Montana,

where he would build this small 10 by 12. I think they said 10 by 13 from the outside measurements of this cabin. But in this two years, he invites David to go on this camping trip up into Canada. And David, again, very interesting guy. David will eventually in this story end up going down to the Texas desert and the hillland and basically digging himself a larger than average grave and living out of that for months before he ends up building himself a cabin out. in the desert. Yeah, you know, it's kind of like, you have a tree, right?

And there's like two similarly crazy apples on the tree. Sometimes when they fall, one can hit like a route and go farther away from the tree. Sometimes it just lands directly under the tree. So David and Ted were up on this camping trip in the Canada Wilderness. I believe they said it was during the summer in this kind of two-year period. and there were days that David said that he would wake up and come out and talk to Ted and Ted would just be sitting on a log staring into the fire and David could say anything in the world that he wanted to

and he could never get a reaction out of Ted and then a couple hours later in the afternoon Ted would come over and they would talk and he'd say did you hear anything that I said to you this morning and he goes I was thinking I couldn't stop thinking long enough to listen to you And he goes, what are you thinking about? And it would be about how technology has ruined this kind of primitive lifestyle that he feels so much joy and happiness in the solitude. And David would listen. And they would kind of argue things back and forth.

But I guess discuss things back and forth. But David started to realize that there was never a time when Ted would relent off of his position. if they were differing on something and that basically David was always wrong and David loved his brother so much that he would take being told that he was wrong all the time because he knew how smart his brother was he had no idea what happened at Harvard or anything like that

but they would also talk about relationships and David had made kind of this high school sweetheart that he had fallen in love with and he says in interviews that this woman that he falls in love with, I think her name's Linda. We'll talk about her here in a little while. Oh, sweet Linda.

That he said that he could never feel love again after they broke up. And Linda would go on to marry somebody else before they were able to get back together. Yeah, fuck you, Linda, sorry. The feelings that David had, again, not healthy feelings toward a woman and love and all that kind of stuff, but for a while there, when David didn't feel like he could love anybody else,

him and Ted were on the pretty similar wavelengths when it came to women because Ted wasn't a real go-getter with the ladies himself. And so they did find kind of that understanding in each other that they were in this virginity packed together. And later on when he does end up marrying Linda, there's a further separation of the brothers. But yeah, just to get back to Lincoln, Montana. a small 10 by 12 cabin. Oh, hold on, hold on. Because there is a little bit of a falling out that ends up happening while he's actually working with his brother.

Oh, is that coming up? 76, I believe. Okay. So Ted's out in the woods. His plan basically at this point is to live a simple life away from technology. He wants to become self-sufficient. The cabin that they find has all of these, not necessarily. how to guides or manuals, but wilderness survival. He's trying to teach himself the only way that

he knows how, and that's through trying it and reading about it. He has this old bike that they said most of the time a tire was flat when he would enter into the city of Lincoln, and he would come in on a pretty regular basis to visit the library. There were volunteers at the library that remarked that he had a pretty traditional schedule of when he was coming in for long periods of time, and then there would be weeks or months that they wouldn't see him. He's checking out all of these kind of liberal philosophers and their beliefs on nature. And there, again, attacks on technology that had been going on way before Ted Kaczynski wrote his manifesto. And he's sort of building onto his ideology with what was going on in the past and seeing what people were saying back.

then and putting two and two together and saying, well, these were firsthand sources that were writing about this or secondhand sources because they lost their first hand in a machine. Yeah. But it's just hardening his ideology that this back to nature is the best way to live. And in doing so, this cabin had a wood burning stove in it. It had no power. It had no running water. He had a bucket to shit in.

He had a loft that was up kind of, I guess, in the roof area where he was. He would store things, but it wasn't in an order of like any sort of order besides the fact that it was like the fossil record were the first things that he was writing were at the bottom. Oh, got you. The next year and the next year and the next year. Gotcha. So eventually when they do raid the cabin, they can see like this, these most recent extreme writings that he was doing. And then progressively see like the buildup in reverse. Oh, that's like reading the end of the book first.

Yeah, just crazy how they go through this kind of stuff. So that was 71 when he actually bought that little, it was like a one, almost one and a half acre plot of land that was just outside Lincoln. Yep. As closest neighbors were a family of three named the Garrig's. Butch Garrig was the father of the family. In the documentary that I watched, he just had a hat on that said Butch across it. He was an interesting fella.

he owned a logging company that he was working from their land and he was about four years into this time of the wilderness. Ted is unhappy with all of the sounds of the modern world that are encroaching on his piece. The industrialization of his area. He's hearing this sawmill on Garrig's property cutting up all of this lumber that he's then going in and taking and selling. Well, here's the thing too, and not saying that this is going to, be an allowance for what he's going to end up doing. But he's like full on survivalists. Like he's grown his own vegetables.

He's hunting wild game. Gathern berries. He's again, reading books by candlelight. He's learning how to and he learned kind of how to as a kid, but he's progressing on identifying local plants, living entirely off the grid. So in his eyes,

he's trying to get away from everything. It's encroaching on him. And at the same time, it does, because he's not really working. Like he gets money sent to him like his family also was kind of supporting him at this point a little bit But his survival is also about going out and trying to find animals and if like there's noises scaring that stuff off That's gonna piss him off even more being like I can't fucking eat anything you guys are scaring this shit off with all your logging and shit I think it's the break in the peace

Because he was after that kind of silence and quiet And he was his The area of wilderness that they were in he was going really really far away to do a lot of like his hunting and stuff. So I mean, that definitely could play a factor in it. But I do think that it was just he wanted to go somewhere where he could only hear birds. He wasn't seeing anybody.

And when you constantly have a sawmill going or you have a path where people are riding dirt bikes down or anything of that nature that's breaking up the quiet that he hears from the moment he wakes up to the quiet he hears from when he goes to sleep. And he's only got a little one and a half acre. That's not a lot for surrounding area. what usually happens after you clear an area for timber and stuff like that is that's when other cabins go in, that's when developments go in.

So he's also kind of seeing the writing on the wall. And he's not in any position to be like, I can just move further into the wood. No. He bought his paw to land. He used what little money he had at the time. And he goes a little nuts. At one point in time, he sanded or I think he said he sugared, Butch Garing's sawmill. So he snuck on to Garing's property.

And listening to, they talked. to Butch before he ends up dying. And I guess we'll say that for the bomb part. But But Butch says that he knows what happened. He's not willing to go over and confront him about this because he can't prove that he did it. But at the same time, he knows that he's a little bit weird. He's setting up trip wires along some of these paths, not at knee length or knee height, not at tire height.

He's setting them up at neck height for trying to catch anybody on a dirt bike. that's coming by. So he's actively setting up these traps garot wires. Yeah, to try and decapitate people. And just like you were talking about, as these forest clear and these people are building these seasonal cabins up in this area

to try to get away from the grind of the city, when they're leaving, he's taking his axe and just by hand chopping down the walls of the sides of these cabins. These people are coming back to their cabins months later and seeing

that their shit is just completely destroyed. Didn't he break into someone's office and shit in their bathtub or their shower or something? Yeah. Um, God, I don't remember who it is, but I do remember that story. Most disrespectful thing that you can do. I have it written as B and E and S-H-I-T. That was pretty clever when I did that.

Very classy. Do we want to do a bathroom break before we get into any more of Ted's craziness? Yeah. The even crazier shit? Oh, yeah. All right. Well, hello. Listen, while we had to the rest of the rest of,

restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it. If you want to keep up with this, our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram, which is historically high pod, P-O-D. You can also head over to it's Twitter, it's X, it's Twitter, come on, at historically high and that's high, H-I-like, hi. If you have

any recommendations, you want to get to us, just want to reach out and say hello, you can hit us up on our email at historically high podcast, H-I-G-H-G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-G-H-G-H-Legh. All right, and with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. All right, what did you tell me we were smoking? I figured it was the right

occasion to finish up our bomb-sauce-stash. Okay, uh, yeah, Grown vegetables. We were just talking about the toilet situation. So probably a bucket. But you realize that there are those buckets that you can put like,

you don't camp a lot, I forgot. So they have toilet, they have toilet seats that clamp onto a five-gallon Home Depot Lowe's bucket and you can line those with a trash bag and you can shit in those. I think he probably designed

something similar. I would hope in the summer he would move it out away from the house maybe under a little set of brain is there lean to. But in the winter, yeah, I assume that thing was inside. I'm worried about the time that I don't know when this whole idea of the five-gallon plastic bucket was invented in 1967 by William Roper.

There were other, there were other buckets. I would assume smaller buckets. He could have been shitting in a cut and a half 55-gallon drum. You know, when you're industrious, you can kind of find anything to shit in. thinking about it. And if you're even more industrious, how do you use that shit? You would use it for fertilizer. So you pointed out he was eating shit tomatoes. Here's the other thing too. Toilet paper. Scarce up there, I'm sure. So that's got to be something that you don't. Even when you're like a survivalist like that, you got to be using the little bit of money you have to buy toilet paper,

right? Or you just go in like you have, there's no running water. So do you just go to like dunk your in the creek. Hope there's running water on your property. Oh, fuck. Where was he getting water? A lumberjacks bidet. I think there were streams on the property. Or at least close to the property. Yeah. I mean, it's, we're going to leave Ted out in the wilderness for right now. We are going to transfer ourselves over to Chicago. May 25th, 1978, a passerby in the parking lot of the University of a

God damn it, do you realize if we had a video component, a green screen? We could just put the Chicago skyline on the background. Flash right to it, baby. I would rather do the skyline than show this parking lot. I'm sure it's a lot less exciting. University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus, there's a package that's found that's addressed and stamped. The package, the name on the delivery portion of the package was a person that was listed.

We'll talk about him in a second. but it's an address that's all the way in New York. The return address was of a Northwestern professor in Evanston, which is I think it's very close to Chicago, a professor named Buckley, Chris Jr. Knowing that he never sent the package, when this package gets returned to him, because it had all of the stamps and everything on it,

all of the postage had been canceled out, it was supposed to be in New York, Whoever found it in that parking lot assumed, okay, I'll give it to the return address because he's just over in Evanston, calls up the campus, says, hey, I have this package, I need to get it to you. And Chris says, I never sent a package. So eventually the package is procured. It's brought in. Buckley says, I never sent this package. I'm sure of it.

Calls campus security. His campus security shows up and opens this up. Security officer, Terry Marker. becomes the first victim of the unibomber. This bomb was very, very crude. It had a wooden trigger on it, and at the end of the pipes, two wooden plugs were used.

It contained smokeless powder. Its ignition device was as the trigger was flipped, as the box was open, the matchheads would then strike along. The matchheads would then light the smokeless powder. The reason that Terry was able to survive this and walk away with pretty much, minimal wounds is because of the construction of the bomb.

Because those two wooden plugs in the end of the pipe blew everything out that direction. Yeah. So... They're the points of easiest resistance, less resistance. So we'll see later on as these bombs start to get more sophisticated, he's using steel caps or iron caps on the outside of this tube, which is going to create the effect of actually blowing the pipe up, creating shrapnel. Same principle as a hand grenade. Remember the ones that looked like pineapples? Don't all hand grenades look like pineapples?

No, the modern ones look like more of an actual baseball. Really? Yeah. I don't know if I've seen a modern. But like Schwarzenegger style hanging commando on the vest, they were looking like a little pineapple or whatever that had the segments in it. Yeah. So the reason it had that is that was where the metal was thinnest, I believe.

And so when it exploded, it would launch that all into pieces and make sure it fragmented. That's terrifying, but awesome. I didn't know that. Yeah. Huh. So Marker is going to suffer minor cuts and burns, but again, he's going to survive. No one else has heard at this point in time. The name that was supposed to be the receiving part of the recipient of this package was an engineering professor at this university called Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

His name was E.J. Smith. these two professors E.J. Smith and Chris have maybe one of the weirdest connections that I I mean throughout this episode everything is fascinating this is the shit that got me

confused the most but also so in name of the most so there was a student of E.J. Smith at RPI his name's Greg So where's RPI? RPI's in New York. Okay, in New York, just in New York. So I'm following along yeah. RPI in New York

Evanston is where this Northwestern professor, Christ, was. So this RPI student from Chicago named Greg, don't give his last name because he refused to give his last name, and I totally understand why. Greg was a student at VD. Smith at RPI. Greg's mother was the secretary for the Material Science Department that employed Christ. Greg had come home three weeks early from RPA.

because he wanted to get a head start on his summer job. He had finished every single class that he had had's final except for E.J. Smith's class, and he ended up taking an incomplete. Baum goes off at a college. The ATF starts looking at this. The ATF is looking at who the professor was that was supposed to receive this, and the professor that was the one that supposedly sent it on the return address. So this is then looking for people that.

would hold a grudge looking for suspects. So someone that had just, you know, you would think if you've just failed someone or gave someone an incomplete, that person would have a grudge. They were there. They had the connection between the two people. Yeah. And is the ATF is questioning Greg and they're asking him why he left early from RPI, why he had an incomplete in E.J. Smith's class. He's saying Smith was a bad professor. He was somebody that wouldn't listen to his students. He just was, he sounded very Kaczynski-like in his teaching methods at least. And then they asked Greg if he knows that his mother works for Christ, the man that was on the receiving address.

And he goes, well, I know that she works in the material science department. What does this have to do with anything? And they say, well, there was a bomb that exploded that was labeled for Smith said by Chris, can you explain how you have a connection to both of these people and were at Chicago where the bomb was originally found? and he's just absolutely flummoxed by this. Now, as one would be, you have literally no knowledge of the events that are occurring. For sure.

So Greg is a part of this friend group in Chicago. I believe there was eight of them. And they called themselves the North Shore General Staff. Are you about ready to hit me with the part that you've been getting me excited for this week? The North Shore General Staff was a collection, it was a collection, it was a, a D&D group. Yes. And not only was it a D&D group, they would LARP.

They would get dressed up in different uniforms. They would perform battles. They had their own armies of figures that they would go through and hand paint for whatever their side was. And they would have mock battles like playing war on a board. So this is like a combination of both D&D and kind of like warcraft of like painting your own stuff. Yeah.

I don't know what the fuck. Tabletop RPGs, things like that. No. in this situation I mean seem like the kind of kids that you'd want to look at and be like

you probably were dropping bombs right are you know you're doing the same shit that they railroaded those fucking three kids in the West Memphis three you're doing that same shit right now it again

I'm going to do everything it is a harmless community I can tell already that Chris is going to want to dive into this for a Patreon episode I don't know how we're going to get a lot of material I'm going to withhold a lot of questions because I know that that's going to be something I'll force you into. This isn't a story that's really been told because there's not a lot of stories about the suspects that weren't Ted Kaczynski that were accused.

And of that we're talking, I want to say, the numbers like 2,400 different suspects that went into this. So. In this first one, right? Yeah. No, no, into the whole Unabomber case. Oh, into the whole, there was a lot more than that because Ted was up there. Maybe it was 4,000 that I'm thinking. It was more than that. I got the number written down when we get to it.

But while he's being interviewed by the ATF, they understand that he has these other friends around and they're trying to figure out what's going on. They go and speak to a second friend. Once he gets done with his ATF interview, he comes over to Greg's house wanting to say, holy shit, holy shit, what's going on? Why is the ATF interviewing me about you and your mom's work?

Yeah. And then this professor. And as he gets there, the ATF agents are still there talking to Greg. So they see him show up and they bring him inside too. And as they're questioning Greg, his friend is getting more and more angry with the line of questioning. And it comes to a point when he starts accusing them of saying,

well, you guys play all these fantasy role games about, you know, killing people and that kind of stuff. Could you have created this bomb? And the friend says, if we were going to kill people, that's not the way that we would kill people. And immediately the ATF looks. at him and they say, well, how would you kill people? And this interaction along with all these people, these, this group of eight say or stays the first

eight suspects in the Unabomber case throughout the entire thing up until the 90s before they're cleared. So as they're getting different pieces of information, is they're getting these different typewritten letters from the Unabomber? They're going through in investigating these kids. and at one point in time, one of these kids... And they're growing up. Yeah.

And becoming adults while still being a suspect in this. And that's part of what they were talking about was how hard it was because every time you met a girl, you could get to the point of going to meet her parents. And they would have to tell the parents of the girl that they're dating. Hey, if you get a call from the FBI asking questions about me because I'm still a part of this active unabomber investigation, just understand that it wasn't me and I didn't do it. Okay. These people have done like interviews and stuff, right?

Right? Yeah, I'm assuming. Okay. Okay. We can't talk too much. I listen to an hour-long podcast about these guys and was just enamored. Okay. So there's certain parts of this evidence that lines up against some of these kids. There's a typewriter that has the exact same model and typeface that was used to type out some of Kaczynski's letters. But it's was such a common typewriter. But again, they're looking for anything and everything. If a suspect that somebody you believe has the same typewriter, it's going to be.

going to throw up so many more red flags. I understand that. What I'm saying is once they look at the ones Kaczynski had to realize this is a very common, like again, this stuff only comes to light when they get to, you know, Kaczynski. Yeah. It's just there's so many things that point back to these kids. And unfortunately, it breaks up this group of friends because they've all kind of either not turned on each other, but stop trusting each other because the other one might have said

something about the typewriter or a letter that they found when they were going through a friend's desk because they were concerned. Stop doing this to me. It's a crazy wild story. Oh, real quick. So what kind of led to this, there has to be a certainly between I'm just going to be a guy that's really pissed off

out in the woods to I'm going to start actively trying to kill people and cause some shit. And that kind of shift happened in his mindset. He says during a hike to, he had this favorite pristine wild spot. And as he gets a little bit, it's there, he finds out that the developers had cut a road right through the middle of it. And at that point, he writes down in his journal that that moment broke his heart so much

and just replaced it with absolute, just blind rage. He comes to the conclusion that at that point, it's impossible to escape what he considered the industrial technology system and that it was something at that point that had to be fought and let ground to a halt. So he decides peaceful protest is out the fucking window and that only acts of violence are going to force society to basically pay attention to his at that point would have become an anti-technology belief system. You want a direct quote from the manifesto? I do.

If we had never done anything violent and it submitted the present writings to a publisher, they would probably not have been accepted. If they had been accepted, they would not have been attached or attracted much attention. Because it's more fun to watch the entertainment on TV than to read a serious essay to get our message out before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression we've had to kill people Because he's writing it as he's one of the what will become known as the Freedom Club The FC, yeah, the FC. So that's what Chris is talking about when he finally makes this decision to what this peaceful protest to the manifesto, he mails off towards the end of his run.

That was how far he went down the line of, I can't do anything peaceful anymore, I have to get violent too. We've had to kill people to get this message across. You're not paying attention. And I mean, during the entire time that he's in the cabin years and years and years, he's keeping like meticulous journals,

but they're all insanely encoded with like multiple types of encryption that he's developed like alpha numeric systems for ciphers to basically prevent anyone that discovers these from being able to understand them. Which if anybody listened to the Zodiac Killer episode, we give a talk about Ted Kaczynski and there being a potential suspect.

Because of these ciphers that he's writing his journals in that the Zodiac Killer used to encrypt his messages that he sent to public to the newspapers. All right. On to number two? Number two. Number two, didn't happen to the, the cabin. It happened May 19th,

1979, this time at the Northwestern University campus. There was a cigar box that had been wrapped up. I saw differing things. It was either in a trash room or in kind of a computer room. One of the

students, Josh Harris, ends up opening it because he sees this cigar box and wants to put his shit inside of it and it's been left. And as he opens a cigar box, it triggers an explosion. It ends up, again, minor injuries, burns, but at the same time, he's able to, this wasn't a package. This was just something that was left in a computer lab at Northwestern University.

So we haven't even gotten to the point to where things are in the mail yet, which we talk about. He was sitting all the way over in Montana when this stuff is happening, right? Correct. Wrong. Oh, yeah. Well, I was going to say during the investigation, they used this and the location that this was and the connection to the first one when they're kind of building up their case and come to the conclusion that because these were the first locations, that he was actually someone from Chicago. Again, this is stuff that happens. It's not chronological like this is coming to light. But this, like, they're able to use this information. It takes them fucking forever because, again, this is 17 years. But they're pretty spot on about. certain things of the profile that they build on him, despite his just ability to evade them. Other things in the profile were wildly off. But at the same time, it's very, like, the bones of the profile were pretty correct.

It was when they started taking shots at family status and things like that that were just so far into left field, which is really bad because when you put that criminal profile in a newspaper, or as they will eventually, you're going to get a million different tips from people that read the profile and think, well, I know that guy when Kaczynski is sitting off in a cabin

by himself in the woods. And the thing about the first initial thoughts is this is somebody that is not, it's someone that's clever and educated in the sense that they can build a bomb, but they're not going to first go to, oh, this is an academic. This is someone insanely smart.

It takes them a long time, unfortunately, to kind of pick and choose and find their way to that. It blows me away to say this because I don't think it would happen. I think I get way more news coverage now. But at this point in time, the FBI hasn't stepped in. The ATF has gone because it was a bomb that was used on a campus, and the ATF is checking it out. But it would take all the way until November 15th, 1979. An American Airlines flight 444 has a bomb explode and its cargo hold.

It was a small bomb that was in a... mail sack because commercial airliners passenger travel takes mail places too along the baggage still does um as this happens thankfully there was just a minor fire uh there was a safe landing there would be 12 injuries from smoke inhalation this bomb was rigged with an altimeter yeah so this bomb was set up to raise to a certain altitude in the air which is going to to trigger the explosion in hopes that it's going to be mid-flight when it blows the side of the aircraft. Correct. The intent is to destroy the aircraft, and it would have actually destroyed it, but the bomb didn't fully detonate. They said that the way that it was able to disperse is why the fire occurred, but it had limited the amount of, like, the explosive damage they would do.

It filled the cabin with smoke. They did do, like you said, the emergency landing. 12 passengers ended up suffering smoke inhalation and had that actually brought down an airliner, this would be an entirely different situation that we're talking about. And a wholly different episode. Yes. Because that would have instantly, at this point no one's been killed, you're about ready to kill possibly, what, 70 people?

And here's the thing that they were noticing. about these bombs. Now, the way that they were built, to avoid a paper trail, he never purchased what they consider commercial bomb components. Your shit from Home Depot, all that kind of stuff,

basically that people would use now. He used salvaged scrapwood, copper pipes, plumbing fixtures, old nails, and matchheads. And he would sometimes get this shit by raiding the junk from other people around the area, their shops and shit,

like that to be able to build this. You mean from Butch Garing's junk pile? Yeah. That he had been caught in numerous times by people that were walking down and seeing him pilfering through. Butch at one point in his interview says, I had so much wiring back there that I wouldn't be surprised if every single one of his bombs I supplied the wire unknowingly. And I mean, he's putting like old nails in there to work a shrapnel.

Eventually, yes. And we talked about the, one of them got set off by matches, striking something when you're opening it. So I mean, they're primitive at this point. But he went as far as like melting down and being able to smelt his own washers and then also carve like you said wooden switches. He manufactured his own black powder and then would, you know, just he had an abundant supply of all of his casings that he was building because it was wood and everything like that. There's also the fact that if you're building one small bomb at a time, you're not going to be purchase it. Like, you're not going to be trying to get a hundred pounds of salt

Peter or anything like that. Exactly. And at this point, they're not super strong. And he hasn't figured out how to make them, I guess, effective at this point. Deadly. And part of it's also based upon, hey, why did you wait so long between these? Honestly, like, I just couldn't find any good junk. There's a learning curve to making these bombs. Yeah, people weren't thrown out the good stuff. No, he's a genius, though. So eventually these things do get very deadly. Well, and one thing that's consistent between these, is he would stamp or etch in the letters FC into the metal components of the bomb

to ensure that they would actually be found. It was a calling card that wouldn't have any ties to him, but he wanted to have that common connection to let them know it was the same person or group doing that. I think in his mind, just based upon what we find out later, I think he kind of did think he was a part of a group. I don't...

I initially thought that this was more of him trying to throw them off dissent. But based upon where he is mentally, I think that he might have believed that he was a part of a bigger purpose. So when you say it like that, do you mean in the sense that he was actually part of a thing called the Freedom Club? Or do you think he was kind of like you have a group of people that have a common ideology or a common belief that technology is progressing? It's becoming too invasive, whatever. Do you think he saw himself as the representative, that the Freedom Club was the representative and that all these people, despite not wanting membership,

we're also part of the Freedom Club for sharing these types of beliefs as well. I think that. I also think that, I think for like the second time in the last three or four recordings we're going to refer to this, Tony Perkis,

when he's sitting in the jail cell and he goes, I'm not stupid, they're stupid, this isn't my fault, this is their fault, this is their fault. How you doing little Tony? Bad. Why I do it? Because no one will do anything.

It's their fault. It is your fault. I think this is what's kind of going on in Ted's mind to where he's in this cabin alone. You think we have a Gollum Smeagel situation going on right now. It's like, what are we going to do, Ted? The chainsaws are everywhere. I don't know. We need to bomb them.

I think that this is some shit that he has going on. And we'll find out later as he actually gets an official diagnosis that maybe some of that sort of falls in line. Since this is the FAA and since this has changed from just bombing on universities, this is when the FBI begins their investigation in full. We're going to get more partners in here shortly, but they create kind of this pro pro bona, or this proto Unibom, the university and airline bombing group.

Hey, who's head of the FBI right now? Oh, this is Edgar, huh? Yeah. This episode plays a part. It's nuts when we lay out stuff like the Red Scare, and we've talked about these other bombings, and then you just put another layer of the Ted Kaczynski Unabomber on top of it and just realize where we were as a country at the time.

Yeah. Like, we'll talk about this run in the 90s that's just... The United States was in a pretty funny place that both of you and I were alive for. Don't remember it, really. Because there was like a string of shit. shit that wasn't it like we talked about it waco oklahoma city ruby ridge all of them happened within how ruby 92 i believe it was waco 93 or no ruby 92

united or the world trade center bombing in 1993 i believe it was waco in 1993 oklahoma city bombing in 1996 unabomber conclusion later in 1996. Okay. And that's a string of basically... When was Ruby? Five years.

Ruby, I believe, was 90... It was right. It was after... No, it was before... Waco. Before Waco. So, Ruby, I think, might have been 1992.

Close. Yeah. So everything... Fuck. Everything in that time frame was just so in flux. And at the same time... Wasn't it simpler when we had terrorists trying to just destroy the country

instead of the government trying to destroy the country. So while in Chicago in 1978, because Ted needs to make a little bit of money, he's got an itch. Yeah, he's got a scratch it. He needs, I need spare change for wires. So he's living in Chicago in 1978 when the first bomb has dropped off

the University of Chicago campus. Doesn't have to be mailed. He's living in Chicago when the bomb at Evanston shows up on Northwestern's campus. That doesn't need to be made. mailed. This

American Airlines flight leaves out of Chicago. So even if he did mail it, he could have mailed it somewhere locally

to get it there. Ted's working at a foam factory with his brother. He ends up taking a liking to a manager

named Ellen Tar Michael. I don't know how he finally pulls this off or why he chooses Ellen. Didn't look up

Ellen. I don't know if she was just so hot that he couldn't figure it out. Or maybe she was attainable

and that's what gave him a little of confidence. But either way, this dude lands... Hi, Ellen. You smell nice today. What did you do? Dinner, do you eat dinner? Would you do this summer, Ted?

I skinned an elk, and then I wore the skin. I made clothes out of the skin. And I hung the mane. Forget I said skin. You're saying skin a lot, Ted. Ellen, Ellen, you do have nice skin. I don't know about this, Ted. They end up going out on a few dates.

Supposedly there was one kiss that was shared between them. Ellen, when asked about this later, it was like, there was no romantic relationship. We hung it outside of work a couple times. I didn't kiss him. Ellen eventually, after this third or fourth date, whatever it was, says that they're better off his friends. And Ted did not take that as well as he should have.

Judging by the writings that he's had about women. The writings were literally on the wall. Yeah. obtaining a woman or a girlfriend, I don't think you ever got to the point of what happens if that woman leaves and what I'm going to do afterwards. Yeah, I never saw, oh my God, I've never got this far before. Ted's response to was to write these limericks out

and set them up in the break room, basically just disgusting limericks pointing to all of these bad things about Ellen. I gave it a good 20, 25 minutes trying to find these things and just couldn't come up with anything. Well, I think what happened, And I heard that David, because David was the manager, like the head guy, came in. He was one of the first ones in after Ted hung this up and tried to get as many of them down. And I'm sure literally as soon as someone saw one, and I was like, the fuck as this and went and told him, he probably took him down as quickly as he could.

Yeah. David confronts Ted about these because who's going to be the one guy that's writing nasty limericks about Ellen? And he tells Ted, if you wouldn't fuck me. You went on three days. You talked about skin for three hours. Yeah, I'd fuck me. David gives him an ultimatum. He says, you put another one of these up, I'm going to fire you.

And the very next day, Ted walks in with another limerick written, and he walks up to David, and he hands it to him. He goes, what do you think of this? Are you going to fire me now, David? Just slaps it on the wall right in front of him. And so David goes and talks to Ellen, who is actually the overseer of Ted's area, and says, I need to fire me.

fire my brother because of these limericks he's writing about you and she's like yeah i think that's a pretty good idea so ted not being a man to give up on anything goes ahead and writes ellen this insane letter that goes on to have sections that we're talking about how he was so angry at ellen that he could kill her but over the last couple days of thinking about things the desire to kill her went away uh that that needs to be an edit see what you got to do is if you're going back and you're writing this at a time when you no longer have those feelings, you don't put that in the, but he was meticulous about the notes.

Yeah. So I see why the letter would also follow kind of the same. You're living with mom and dad. You got a lot of paper. Just start over. Maybe don't put the I could kill you part in there. But regardless, this is something.

I could, and then you see him crumpled up and throw it into the waistband that's full of other ones. And you can just see kill, kill written on the page. The one time that he gets close enough to a woman And it just turns so badly so quickly Ted quit fucking touching my skin June 10th, 1980

Ted had sent out I had heard kind of this pre-functory letter To the president of United Airlines Percy Wood It said that there would be a book That would be mailed to him that he believes that he needs to read Any good leader of an organization should be reading this book I don't know if this came on top of the book or if it came earlier, I heard both versions.

Did you hear... I just heard the book was titled Ice Age, and it ain't the kiddie movie. Wasn't it Ice Brothers? I thought it was Ice Age. Maybe. Disney would probably not have gone with Ice Age if... Did you know it was called that?

I mean, what I'm saying is beforehand. I thought it was Ice Brothers. No, they were just... Here, I'll look it up. They were trying to take it back. They're like, for too long, has Ice Age been in the... terrifying grasp of Ted Kaczynski. We will put lovable characters in with it.

And John Leggwazamo as a sloth. Yep, he'll be in there for sure. Supposedly, this is a World War II book about a group of sailors that get stranded until they form their Ice Brothers. As that book gets there, Percy Wood goes to open that book up, and as soon as he opens the book up, it had been hollowed out, and there was an explosive inside. This triggers the explosion that caused severe cuts and burning over major

parts of Woods body, puts him into the hospital. And it was such a just a nasty explosion that he had brought it into the kitchen. You're right, Ice Brothers. Oh, was it Ice Brothers? The explosion had taken out a part of the wall behind Percy, like not the full wall, but the drywall had been blown in. So

bomb number four that we can attribute to Ted Kizzi. because his writings that had been deciphered by using the key in the cipher writings that he had made where he admits to all of this going on because again he's going through and he's reading all of these newspaper clippings about what happens this is when the postal service gets involved because this is going through the mail did they find an fc at percy wood right yep so they knew it was attributed to him as well and they also start to wonder is there a pattern here You want to hear a fucked up thought? Huh. It's probably pretty likely that in some of these instances, because there's 16 bombings. I believe so. That the FC portion had to be pulled out of somebody, right? Yeah, I could, yeah.

Sometimes it was on N caps. Sometimes it was on shrapnel. It was on washers. It all becomes shrapnel at that point, man. True. Yeah. They're starting to notice a pass. You have a switch in components of the first bomb that are made out of wood.

You have a wooden trigger in the second bomb that also contains wood in a wooden cigar box. You have an ultimatar bomb inside of the airline that had wood components. And now we have a bomb that's showing up to a man named Percy Wood's house. I don't know why they got so hot and heavy on this whole idea that wood had to be connected to this in some way, but they thought that he might have been some sort of a forestry person because of his connection to wood and all of these bombs. He was the president of the United Airlines. The Unabomber.

Oh, gotcha, that the Univore had some heart. He had a heart on. He used wooden bombs and then he bombed a guy named Wood. Gotcha. I guess they're just throwing shit at the wall at this point. You would, but, and my brain goes to, no, he literally just tried to. blow up a plane. So he's obviously got something against the airline industry.

Unless there was wood on the plane. And it was an American, oh, it was an American airline. American Airlines. And this was United. He was the president of United. Yeah. So, I mean, he's not, he's taken no prisoners for the airlines. No one's safe.

Yeah. Except Spirit Airlines. October 8th, 1981, there's a bomb that was found in the business building of the University of Utah campus with a return address of BYU, professor of electrical engineering Leroy Wood bernson hilarious rivalry uh what's the time frame between those uh June 10th 1980 to October 8th 1981 okay so this is in the news then he's reading about himself and everything do you think he's picking up the wood thing or do you think he's purposely fucking with them or do you think he's leaning into it and just gaslighting him

being like they think it's this wood thing. I'm going to keep fucking playing into this. I can't see that being a real problem. Because what he's doing essentially and what they've kind of figured out is that he is, and we'll see later on when we talk about some of the subsequent victims, he's biking into town, he's going

into the library, he's looking up these people's names in either things that they've done to push their fields or awards that they've been given. He could also be looking at like who's in the field of industrial realization or something like an engineer or something like that. Yeah. And he's looking down the list and he's like, would fucking perfect.

It worked out. Well, and this is even to the point of him building a bomb that's being taken to the, or that is, yeah, being found at the University of Utah business building. And he has the name of a BYU professor is the return address. So he understands that he can put these two things close together and kind of create their own loop because BYU and you of you are so close and they're so interconnected, if he finds a

wood there and he hears that they're leaning into this wood aspect, he's like, it doesn't matter who this guy is, he just happens to be an electrical engineer. Yeah. So, luckily, at this point in time, they realized that this is something that's played out on other campuses before. It was brought to

campus security. The bomb squad showed up. They successfully defuse this bomb and no one's injured. You would assume, hopefully, that if shit was happening on Northwestern, this had been a pattern on college campuses, that there would have been some type of like alert or notifications sent out from the FBI to universities around the United States saying,

tell your security to go ahead and be heads up. Any suspicious packages, don't do shit. Yeah. Call us first. Anything that anybody turns in is suspicious, let us take a look at it. This is a pretty big score for the FBI, though, because every other bomb that they had to investigate had been exploded. Catch 22. They can investigate it to a degree where it's maybe not moved

because they don't know what's going to set it off because it's been different things every time. So they end up having to detonate this thing because that's the only way to get, like, to actually do anything with it. I thought this was the one they defused. Oh, did they defuse this one? I'm pretty sure they defuse this one. Okay.

There's another one that gets found later on at Boeing, I think. think that that's what happens to it. So they're able to pull this thing apart and what do they find again? The fucking nuts on whoever did that. Completely unknown what could be getting ready to set this thing off and it's just... They had Kevlar at that point, but a 1981 bomb suit, I don't know what that looks like. Yeah. So you have to be very careful of what you do.

How developed was more bomb squads? I don't know. Yeah, 81's a It's pretty far away They again find a metal tag Inside of this unexploded ordinance All the telltale signs FC

FC is back again There was a board in one of the documentaries That I was watching that had like all of the different things All the different beliefs that they thought FC stood for And it was like Fighters congregation And there was close there was like freedom centennial

different shit like that, putting it together. There's no way someone's calling this the Freedom Club, right? None of these boards did they find any of this? Following that, you have about a year, May 5th, 1982, Vanderbilt University. The chair of computer science, Professor Patrick Fisher, has mailed the sixth bomb. It's open by, I don't, uh, maybe not the sixth,

maybe the fifth. It's opened by his secretary, Janet Smith. Both of them received severe burns and shrapnel to the chest, arms, and face. She was the sole beneficiary of this one. I jumped ahead a little bit. She ends up surviving, but this is the first bomb where we're seeing shrapnel employed. He's figuring out that not only if he can make this pipe explode, he's started gluing different things to the outside to create more of a blast.

Yeah. He's stepping up his game. He's figuring out the sauce to the recipe here. What's just like really morbid but just makes perfect sense is he's like, they're not killing anyone. Got to do something different. Got to make him deadlier. Well, nobody's put the pieces together that all these people that are getting hit are engineers, their computer scientists, they're... It's still pretty random.

They're still gathering evidence while this happens, too, trying to make connections. The other thing too is when he's constructing these, he's not testing them because he can't be out in the woods, lighting off explosives and not have loggers or developers or someone trying to figure this out. And then someone pieces two and two together being like, sounds like that guy's lighting off explosives. Oh, the crazy guy's got explosives. Old Teddy Boombooms over there. He's trying some stuff out. He's trying to figure out how to hunt with dynamite, I guess. Old Teddy Three Fingers.

July 2nd, 1982, UC Berkeley, Professor of Electrical Engineering, so we have another electrical engineer. Diogenes and Jalakos. Proud Greek man, I'm sure. Maybe the Harriest Knuckles on the campus at that point in time. This is during, no, it's during the 80s. He definitely had the Harry's knuckles.

Suffers severe burns and shrapnel to the face from a package bomb that was left in the faculty lounge. Now, just to lay out roots of the Greyhound buses that traveled, there was a bus that traveled from Montana all the way down to Salt Lake City, from Salt Lake City, all the way up to San Francisco. So this pattern on the Greyhound bus now includes Montana, where Kaczynski lives, Salt Lake City, where there's already been one bomb dropped, and San Francisco that all follow this exact same line.

But according to anybody that's aware of it at that time, it's just Salt Lake City and San Francisco. At one point in time... So he's traveling with these on a bus. What the gairor... Yeah, the garing neighbors said was they wouldn't see Ted for months at a time. And before Ted would end up leaving, and he wrote this in his diaries, that he would shave and clean up and look like a normal member of society,

go drop these bombs off, return, not leave the cabin for a month or two after he gets back, and by the time somebody sees him again, he has the full beard. Like frisly fucking Adams. Yeah, he hasn't showered in two months. He's going to stink like shit. And eventually after two months,

I don't know if you can get stinkier. So I got to think maximum stink is hidden. So he's able to hide this. the times that he's going outside, but now he's back in his old stomping grounds. He's back on the Berkeley campus. How much easier is it going to be to drop a bomb off in the faculty lounge in a building if you know the exact layout of the campus? They point to that too when they go back and look at one of the Chicago ones.

Like how would somebody know their way around like an engineering department or a computer lab or something? So that's when they start to also put some pieces together. One thing about him traveling as well is a lot of this is not because it's still an active investigation. A lot of the details or suspicions aren't coming out because then that gives the suspect reading it a lead on what they need to change. So to his neighbors that, yeah, they see him disappearing clean, shave and everything. This is also someone that has had this cabin before and just went off to Chicago to work for his brother for a while to do that kind of stuff. So when he comes back, if there are any questions, he's just like, oh, no, I took a job.

I needed some more money and now I'm back. He's got a good cover. He's, I'd like to think of the 80s as a time that we got out of the, you could kill somebody and then move to another town and get away with it. I'm willing to bet that Montana in the 80s was pretty remote enough, that nobody was looking for anybody that- Probably not. Bomb somewhere in San Francisco all the way up in Montana.

We have a little bit of a layoff, May 15th, 1985, another Berkeley bombing. grad student John Houser grabs a package that was left in a computer room. It explodes as he opens it. It injures his right hand in the right side of his body. He loses four fingers and loses vision in his right eye. Yeah, you're like, I mean, these are intended to kill. He's not doing this to maim. There's no way.

He's like, I'm just making maim bombs. No, he's trying. And so he's actively making these things more powerful. and it's just somewhat luck that he hasn't mastered it yet. But this is still like, yeah, he's just fucking people up. I've never made a bomb beyond a crude teenage bomb. What's a crude teenage bomb? You've never taken like a two-liter and crumpled up tinfoil and shoved it inside of it

and then poured drain cleaner in it and put the cap on it? No. Well, the drain cleaner eats away the tin foil and it creates a bunch of... So, I mean, this is a Mentos thing. If you can get the lid on it and then let it explode, except this is more of a... It's a fuzz bigger than... Volatile chemical reaction. I mean, I fire bottle rockets and shit like that at people, but no, I don't think I ever created like an explosive.

Okay. Well, I hope the statute of limitations... Hey, different strokes, buddy. Different strokes. This is why you don't grow up sheltered in the Mormon religion because it leads to this kind of... Yeah, no, we do goofy shit like that. We have friends that also grew up in there that I bet if I mentioned it to, and they'd be like, oh, yeah, works bombs.

Okay. We did that too, because that was the drain cleaner that allegedly somebody probably would have purchased from the dollar store had they been making these bombs. Again, I'm saying that now, because I don't know if there's a statute on this. I mean, no one got hurt. Everyone's still got the digits, right? Yeah, there's a couple whistle pigs that didn't enjoy things. But this is a situation where you have to pack as much lethal out.

only in the size of a package that you can transport on a greyhound bus. And not like a rice, you know, suspicion or anything like that. Or not fuck up and drop it because it's so heavy and have it explode. Can you imagine like he's getting off the bus and like someone runs by and steals his bag? And then like Jostles later does something to it. And there's just an explosion right there. That was my anti-theft device. He fell for it.

This is when we need. needed like a mugger to come and steal this just to point it toward this guy. Yeah. June 13th, 1985, so very quickly after this, you're talking about May 15th to June 13th. There's a package that's mailed to the Boeing facility in a place that's fairly close, Auburn, Washington. Devices successfully detonated, as you were talking about, they brought in the bomb squad, they detonate it. It has all the same hallmarks. You have the FC that's inside of it somewhere.

we've seen United be attacked, we've seen American be attacked, now he's gone straight to the tap, he's gone to the airline manufacturer. Yeah, November 15th. Now you shut down Boeing and airplane production? Small bomb. I do wonder, I didn't look enough

at the newspapers to kind of see, but I do wonder if there was enough of a following that anybody could have started putting the pieces together. Like somebody that's in the general public that can say, okay, electrical engineer, airlines. I don't think this was I think this was at a time when it was really easy to keep

stories under wraps. Maybe more localized news too, but yeah. I think it was much easier to keep that information from the public. Boeing bombing's probably getting a pretty good run. It is. And because of the string of them, people probably are aware that it's the same person. But then at the same time, there's only so much information that's being released.

Well, we also forgot to throw an OJ in our 90s timeline of when the news cycles changed. Yeah, exactly. So we have to wait until 1994 for this round-the-clock new cycle to really hit. November 15th, 1985. So, again, we have three strikes in the same year. There's a package that's mailed to a Michigan professor of psychology and biology named James McConnell. I don't really know if there is a connection here But kind of interesting that he went and saw a psychiatrist

It's under the psychology field at Michigan And didn't talk to him about what he actually wanted to talk to him about So now he's coming after a professor of psychology And James McConnell Yeah Is there a connection there? I don't know Yes I'm throwing darts

Well I believe that he was like Some sort of like a zoologist under the psychology field who's like an animal biologist and a, I don't fucking know. I, it's tough. The connection is still there enough for them to be able to start tying stuff together eventually. Well,

and it just too kind of seems like everything else has been geared towards like mechanical shit. Yeah. And this is the first really straight on attack at somebody that's dealing with the mind. But what's crazy is he's doing this at places where he had a significant portion of his life spent. Yep. You got Berkeley and you got Michigan. Two places that he, frequented as a student and as a teacher now having two bombs at Berkeley and one bomb at Michigan.

December 11th, 1985, Sacramento, California, a hand-delivered package to the alley of a parking lot. And this one's going to be pretty important of a computer repair store. Computer Mart. This is at a time when computers are first getting popular. When you walked into the store and they've been like, let me tell you what this baby does for you. They would show your Pong or Solitaire and all that kind of stuff. This thing is going to change your life. And Hugh Scrutton is the one that was changing people's lives

until he went out to the parking lot behind his business and spotted the bag that had been left by Ted. I wish it was just a flaming bag of dog shit. It wasn't. It looked like basically discarded lumber. I thought it was a bag. I think it was like kind of wrapped a little bit to where he, couldn't see, but it looked like it was like some lumber that was visible from where he could.

This bomb was made up of essentially nails and wooden splinters. The interesting thing about Hugh Scroton being 38 years old and younger than Ted Kaczynski is he was a former Berkeley student. So I can't quite say for sure that these two may not have had a run in at some point in time. on campus if this was a personal grudge maybe that's totally possible here's the thing he's when when you piece it together when you're just kind of talking about it before you have an idea who it is it seems very random yeah but when you know what the connection is a repair shop in sacramento correct it's very thought out it could have been someone like you're saying that could have been one of those people that was

having a discussion with him and wouldn't let him win or something like that about how computers are going to be the future. He's very anti-that. It does make sense. He put that name in the vault eventually when he was looking for a new target. He looked him up. He found out... You looked up an alumni record for people that had graduated computer sciences. May not have even known the guy, but just, again, down a list, you're my guy. Yeah. As he goes to pick up this bag or whatever the contraption was, the explosion happens, sending nails and wood splinters through Hughes' body. And he, he becomes the first death attributed to the Unabomber.

In Ted's writings, he says that he didn't intend to kill Hugh, but he is more than okay with killing Hugh. There was also a point in time, I don't know when it was that he was coming back, but he said that he did stop off at one of the Greyhound stations and go into the bathroom and pull pubs off of one of the toilet seats and then take them back and put them in a hoping to throw it off. Somehow not thinking that pubes would survive the incineration of an explosion. He's learning.

Next time he'll try butt shavings or something. I don't know. This guy might have an IQ of 200 at this point in time and he can't figure out that pubs aren't going to burn or that pubs are going to burn. You know what? Again, it's not a mathematical thing. So maybe. Yeah, yeah, 16-year-old may. Pubes burn.

Yeah. It happens. You ever try to light a fart on fire? Everything down there burns. Yeah, we have the right off of the blue dart, the first death. We would have a little bit of a layoff again, February 20th, 1987, when a man and a hooded sweatshirt and aviator glasses. So almost two years. It's just about two years, which, again, they've done extensive psychological profiles on this guy.

not really sure what the reason is for that, but a lot of it's to be thought that this was the first time that he had actually killed someone. And because of the heat, the additional attention that was going to draw, it scared him into waiting for a little bit, but also maybe the psychological toll of trying to process him killing someone,

seeing what the reaction was going to be before kind of being, you know, reconciling with that and then being ready to do it again. him saying okay with it instead of I was happy that he died shows that there might have been some sort of remorse in this yeah a man in a hooded sweatshirt and aviator glasses is seen by a store employee leaving a piece of lumber nail side up in the parking lot of a computer sales store in Salt Lake City

Cam's computer store spelled CAAMS because I believe that is a play on computer lingo Oh, really? I think so. Huh. That's a very niche joke, especially back then. But I guess the guys that are going into buy computers at that point in time would probably get it. I don't know.

Yeah, because that's a place you're going into buy components and things like that. Gary Wright was the owner of this store. And as things get busy, the store employee doesn't go outside and thankfully doesn't try to figure out why the piece of lumber was left out in the parking lot. front. Gary, however. Yeah, not fortunate for Gary. No, no, Gary doesn't know anything about this as he pulls up as he's walking up. He sees this piece of wood with these nails sticking straight up out of it.

He thinks that it's pretty weird because these nails are shined up, which if you've ever sunk a nail and a piece of wood, they're not super shiny eventually when you go to pull them out. As he walks up to pick up this piece of wood, it explodes. it causes some sickening severe damage. They pulled at least 200 pieces of shrapnel out of his body. And that was initially. Gary in interviews said that there would be times when he would be going to shave

and he would feel a bump in his face. And he would actually go back into the doctor and they were still pulling pieces of wood out of his skin like years later. like extensive nerve damage. He lost movement in his left arm. But again, this yields the only eyewitness sighting. And this is what creates that iconic sketch

that whether you know it or not, you've seen the sketch at some point or another on TV of him wearing the man in the hoodie with the aviator glasses, which I was technically tempted to throw on my hoodie but I don't have a pair of aviators in here. Your Zinsky look? Mm-hmm.

Go Fulzinski. never go Fulzinski. Never go Fulzinski. So this close call and the fact that they actually had a sketch of him may have prompted a bit of a hiatus. I think he kind of sees her see him too as he's going down. She's across the street in another business opening up and she just like locks eyes with him or at least he's facing her. And then he just turns and starts scooting. Pretty close call.

This could have been not close enough. No, it could have been a major turning point in this. But yeah, he goes. I was on hiatus for, I believe it's six years. And during this time off in his cabin, he kind of continues to spiral. He's still corresponding intermittently with his brother. When are we going to kiss again? He's having these correspondences with his family, or his correspondence with his family,

where he's being very combative. He doesn't want to see his family anymore. He's fucking still livid at his brother for firing him. Yeah, I imagine that, but also his, I don't know if he has resentment or what it is geared towards his family, who again, his parents have investments and they are making money off these investments and still sending him and David's stipends every single year. He's getting letters from his mother with these care packages that are being sent to the cabin where he's complaining to her and telling her never to send these certain items again because he doesn't. like them and she should know that he doesn't like them. He doesn't even want him in the cabin. This guy is shitting in the woods. There's no room. It's all filled up of crazy writings and bomb parts in a bed in a shit bucket. There's no room, but if you have a choice between eating

tree bark or some food that you don't like, you're probably still going to be grateful that there's food instead of tree bark, right? You're trying to understand the palate of Ted Kaczynski? Yeah, maybe he liked tree bark. I don't know. He was a pretty woodsy guy. He might have been able to grow his own food pretty good at that point. These shit tomatoes are delicious. I do wonder, though, because obviously he's back in Salt Lake City during this. He was in Sacramento to drop that bomb off. He's making these trips to Berkeley.

How much is he really there tending his stuff? I mean, granted, getting back to this six years of the hiatus, he has time when he's there. So here's my thing. He's in a place that doesn't have, like, irrigation and everything. I'm guessing he has designed a way to have this stuff, you know, being, taken care of himself or something like that. A proto drip system or some sort of a flooding. Listen, this is a man building his own explosive devices.

I think he's watered his plants all right. Maybe. Yeah, you're probably right. Well, and he's been out in the woods for so long. And if he hasn't figured out now, he's never going to figure it out. Yeah. So, yeah, that's true. I think this scared him pretty bad because he starts to write more.

He tries to, this is crazy. Not only is he refining the bomb-making process, so he's still going down that road. He also has these crazy-ass plans where he thinks that he's going to return to school for journalism. He actually ends up reapplying, not reapplying at Montana and gets accepted to go back to school while he's also meeting with a psychologist to talk to him about different. ways, or I guess he had plans to meet with a psychologist to talk about different ways to reenter into society. So he's killed somebody. He almost got caught directly after he almost killed somebody. And he's sort of thinking about.

Trying to kill another person. Yeah. Yeah. He's sort of thinking about trying to get out of the game. And I don't know if it's a little bit of conscience at that point. I'll flip side that for you. What if it is something to where he wants to make. make himself be able to blend in more.

Potentially, yeah. To make himself seem less like a psychopath. True. Of being a prime suspect of the guy up in the woods that goes missing for long stretches of time. He wants to try to be someone that like, no, not that guy. That guy helped me with my trash. Every, you know, pull my trash cans to the road. Yeah.

Yeah. I definitely. I mean, reintegration in society. I had it right. He did go see a psychologist in Montana. Also kind of weird that he bombed a psychologist and then would trust a psychologist enough to go back and talk to one. Not sure how much he trusted them.

Yeah, I mean, talking about reintegrating into society feels like a pretty big step. So he does get accepted at the University of Montana and ends up pulling out just a few weeks before the term started. He just can't do it. He can't take that step back in. He talks about... Nope, fuck it. Back to bombing. He talks about being in a store and buying jeans and seeing this beautiful woman across the way from him. And this is kind of where you can see that his psyche may have changed from his little trist with Ellen is he goes through the process again of saying, I could go up and talk to her, I could get her phone number, we could go out on dates.

Maybe this could potentially be something that I could see a future with this woman. And then it trails off into, but ultimately she's going to leave and what am I going to do after that? So there was something that he had made note of or had come up during conversations with him. where when he was younger and he, you know, was still living at home and everything, there was an older woman that was, like, friends with his mom or something like that, that had always told him,

like, you're so handsome. He had a Stifler's mom situation? No, no, not in the sense of, like, ever attractive, but like, oh, my gosh, you know, you're so handsome and everything. It could have been completely harmless, but you don't know what the psyche of, you know, a fucking 15-year-old boy who's just like,

oh, my God, someone thinks I'm good looking. Especially him. They kind of lean into this, thing about maybe that gave him a weird expectation at a certain point of getting rejected so much. He's like, but this woman thought I was so handsome. Like, I'm so handsome. Like, why is this not working? And then that just kind of compounded on itself. Got to drive somebody crazy. Yeah. To just not be able to put together the full puzzle. And now he's even self-degradation saying she will leave eventually. Yeah. And then what do I do after that? When I show her the cabin,

she's going to freak out, man. I'll hide the bombs. Yeah, it'll be okay. I'll dig a bomb hole next to the shit hole, and I've just got to make sure not to confuse the two. I'll take her back to my remote 10 by 12 cabin in the woods. She won't be freaked out by any of this. Not in the least.

Not at all. During this period, during this hiatus, he just runs into an incredible family tragedy. And again, I can't put any blame on either one of his parents for this. There's just, there's no way that it's on them at all. but in 1990 his father gets a terminal cancer diagnosis and ends up taking his own life because he knew that he had terminal cancer. Along with that, in 1990, his brother David ends up marrying Linda. And Linda Patrick is somebody who she never got to really meet Ted ever, but at the same time they knew of each other because of these letters that are going back and forth.

Oh yeah, she heard a lot of Ted's thoughts. She read a lot of Ted's thoughts. There were also letters that Ted had found when him and David had met back up. And this is when Linda was married, whereas he was reading through these letters. He was seeing that he just hated Linda because it was somebody that David was writing these love letters to kind of drawing his interest away. And when David wrote the letter to Ted to ask him to come back for his father's future, funeral, Ted said no. David sends the letter to ask him to come to the wedding that him and Linda are having.

Ted launches into this tirade about, do you need me to buy you a wedding gift? What size is your next so I can buy you the collar that Linda's going to drag you around by for the rest of your life? You got to come out here to Lincoln and the furry like me. And this isn't a tug, like I say. It'll be the bomb. Ted's living in a cabin up in Montana. Yeah, but he's got it figured out according to him. Well, David's living in a cabin that he built in the desert in Texas.

These two aren't that different. They're not that opposite. They have the same views on so much stuff. Is this where you're going to present your vaginal hypothesis that it was just the simple, it was the love of a woman that kept David from doing something similar? I mean, if I'm going to be honest with you, that's really a side of the same. Hold on. The woman and the crazy three years of mental fuckery that he experienced.

Two, I'll give you the, who knows? 50-50 maybe. Pussy started wars, man. It has. There have been lands that have been overthrown. It's ended wars. It is united empires. It is broken apart empires.

I can't help but think that that could have changed some things. Maybe we could have, like I say, we might have had two unabomers if Linda's sweet, sweet love. didn't penetrate or I guess get penetrated. If Ted wasn't so fucking weird, yeah, maybe. It was a chance. So obviously, Ted doesn't show up to David's marriage. Linda would kind of tell David and again, I don't know if this really fits into what Ted said,

and I wonder if this maybe played a little bit on David. Linda was still teaching at the time, and of course David doesn't have a job because he's living out in the middle of bum-fuck, Texas. Linda says, I'm still teaching, I'm not retired, I'm not close to retire, and I love teaching. you're going to have to move back up to New York and live in my house.

And David's comments about living in New York was there sure was a lot going on. They were in upstate New York away from everybody else. It's not all one big city. No, a very rural part of New York and he's still like too much happening. Don't know if I like this.

They didn't even have a computer and that's going to play a part coming up later on. But regardless of all this stuff that's going on in his personal life, he's still refining bombs. He's still making bombs. And eventually, this cold streak's going to end.

This hiatus is going to go on hiatus. Do you know when when they got married? His brother. 1990. So three years after. Three years after. So three years of rage bomb building. Yeah. June 22nd, 1993. Geneticist Charles Epstein.

Hey, Dr. Charles Epstein. This is my problem with this. Ted could have scored a couple points. He bombed the wrong Epstein. That's why I'm saying Epstein. Because I feel like this guy is not that, so you feel like he even got to differentiate it that much more? My issue is that he stopped at the Cs and he didn't get down to the Jays.

Yeah. If he was going through a phone book. And then maybe aim it Far East. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine that little St. James could have gotten mail. and should have gotten mail, I would contend, when Ted was around. Charles Epstein is severely injured, losing several fingers after opening a bomb that exploded in his kitchen.

Just moments before this happens, Epstein's wife and daughter are in the kitchen with him. And it was that close to them being collateral damage and something that he was sending towards a geneticist. and this goes back to the whole theory that Ted has about how technology is ruining humanity. Yeah. And we're talking about a geneticist, somebody that's going in and studying the human genome and trying to figure out if there's things that they can delete to basically engineer human beings. Yeah. And I mean, and Ted could have just looked at it and maybe not known what even filled of genetics or genetics it was. Regardless, this also shows an advancement in like the sophistication of his bombs because this thing is like concealed inside. a padded postal envelope that as soon as he starts to slide whatever it is out, that's what actually triggers it.

So I think it was partial loss of hearing, three fingers missing, and then like severe abdominal injuries, because when you're opening something, it's right there kind of against you. That's where it's up. Yeah. But apparently he's back at it again because quite literally the next day

in fucking New Haven, Connecticut, a guy named Dr. David, is it Geltner? Geltner, right? He's a computer sciences professor at Yale University. A mail bomb. Again, he's now starting to mail everything. Do you think he mailed it at the same time because it was the same day? Or do you think this guy's was mailed first? Something we would fix it on, I guess. I think you're right, because you're talking about going to Epstein in California, I believe, is where that bomb was mailed. Yeah. And Yale, take an extra day, maybe two, to get to New York. I bet they were probably mailed together. And this was, I'm guessing, pretty similar. If he's designing this, I don't know if he makes any differences in the bombs,

but this one is actually delivered to his university office where he opens it there. The explosion destroyed his right hand, caused critical injuries to his eyes and his chest, and he nearly bled to death before he was able to get emergency medical attention. It was so bad that he ends up bailing out of his office because nobody was around heading down a flight of stairs before he finds somebody. When the medical professionals get to him and they get him in stable condition, they said that had he just called 911 and stayed in that position, he would have bled out and died. It was that close. Is this the guy that was going to go for astronaut training? Might have been.

I know that there was one of them, but I don't remember which. one it was. Okay. He takes a little bit of time off after this one. Again, the last two haven't had the desired effect. His message at this point, like, it's not really, like, no one knows what the

message is at this point. They just know at this point, what is that, like higher education, like university professors, because that's what he's kind of going after at this point. Well, at the same time, the airlines industry? Yeah. And I mean, he's only really branched out if you're looking at it. He's still in California, Salt Lake, Tiberon, California is where Epstein was. Okay.

And then now he's branching off. And this is the first one, is this the first one on the East Coast? I believe so, because the first one was E.J. Smith in New York, but it detonated in Chicago. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, he's branching out. I guess Michigan was the furthest one east before that. just a crazy amount going on and I guess this one goes no it doesn't go further I guess

a Burleson more stellar executive an ad agency basically I guess a what would you call it an image a PR firm oh a PR firm perfect that's what I was missing his name is Tom Moser he ends up opening a mail bomb in his home in North North Caldwell, New Jersey. The explosion is so great that it killed him. It sent drywall nails through pots that were hanging behind him. It was disguised as a package of like video cassettes. There used to exist this, these things called video cassettes before DVDs.

It was a videotape. And so, yeah, a stack of them just hollowed out. And then it was reinforced with heavy metal to basically maximize the lethal pressure that it built up. inside we talked about this during the Manhattan Project episode you want to contain that until it has to break out it has the most pressure

and yeah didn't really his family was nearby thankfully none of them were killed or anything like that but yeah he was killed instantly this one's a tough one for me because again we're talking about the loss of life and his tragic

I don't think it's going to take too much because he does explain why he does this most or work for Exxon to rehab their image after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. So a guy who's a, I got a problem with this because in his writings, and maybe I'll pull him up and share just a couple of quotes here to try to explain just how crazy this dude was. One of his quotes that he writes in his manifesto is, the leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because deep inside he feels like a loser.

pretty hard on leftists, pretty hard on that sort of ideology. They push anarchists towards a far-left kind of crazy liberal type person. He's bashing against the left. He's an anarchist. That's the thing, is he has to be labeled that. He's bashing the left. While at the same time, he says, the conservatives are fools. They whine about the decay of traditional values,

they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently, it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of society as well. And that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values. So this is a guy... That's 100% accurate. Well, it's one of those things where this is a guy who's bashing the left, he's bashing the right, while at the same time he's talking about traditional values

and he's mailing bombs to people to kill them. Yeah. Like I just, he's an anarchist. 100% because it's full of conflicting ideologies. While at the same time separated those ideologies, you're just kind of like, yeah, I mean A to B to C, that's kind of what ends up happening. But at the same time, there's an acceptance

that technology drives. innovation and some type of evolution and society to simply change and adapt. What his gripe is is he's wanting to set his feet in the sand and just say, no, none of that. He tried to move away from it. It came and found him. And his response is such an over-exaggerated response that it's almost like he has such an intellect that I'm trying to figure out

ways that he could have just kind of like I guess he felt at this point that his intellect was useless his intellect in the sense of trying to enact change that he wanted to see was simply not possible because the machine was too big and he wasn't going to be able to stop it so at that point the only thing he could do is like he said earlier and like you read earlier was that violence was necessary was the only way he was going to get the message heard but the thing is it's still not going to work like I don't

he's seeing that it's not going to work. He's going after the guy at the PR firm. That person is so far removed from that. He didn't go after an oil executive. He didn't go after the guy that fell asleep on the ship. He went after somebody that he was like, this person will not be expecting it. This person probably doesn't really get a lot of hate mail.

Oh, I think that he went after the guy that was trying to cover for Exxon. I think that he thought that this was a man who was trying to cover for an evil empire that just dumped a shitload of oil into the ocean. I believe he believed that. What I'm saying is that... You don't think you did? Huh? You don't think this guy did? Yes.

But at the same time, if you're... What is the goal of that to stop PR companies from sticking... That's not going to stop the spill from happening. That's not... He's too far from the source to really try to, like... get people to get his message. Yeah. Yeah, we'll talk about some of these writings where I think you're,

your spot on with what his, I'm not going to say you and him share to mind, but that's kind of the train of thought that some of his manifesto lines out, is he's not taking down an industry. He's bringing attention to that industry so the population can take it down, and we can be happier without that issue. Okay. So he's trying to disrupt it to draw attention,

so everyone jumps on the same. bandwagon and disrupts it. Yep. Trying to bring attention to why people shouldn't like it. And again, I mean, the ad agency, it sounds so off the beaten path, but when you're thinking

about it, it's pretty logical that if he wants to protect the environment, he's going to go after somebody that's associated with somebody that just destroyed the environment. 100%. I just think there could be some confusion, because what if this guy also was a guy that campaigned for like Coca-Cola? And he's like, oh, my God, what's he going after?

Is it the Valdez? Is it for Coca-Cola? I mean that jokingly, because maybe he just hated Coke. He might have. He was... With the industrialization of the sugar? A very chaste man. Yeah.

David said that he always believed that Ted was going to outlive him because he didn't drink. He didn't smoke. He took very good care of his body. He thought that he was going to be the longest living member of the Kaczynski family. And the death of the lineage, because... David, although he's gotten married, I don't think you ever had kids. And Ted is the furthest thing away from... Might be the best for those children, which never existed.

Yeah. Could you imagine being little Bobby Kaczynski and going to school? You wouldn't be Bobby Kaczynski. You'd be Bobby whatever mother's maiden name is. It'd be Bobby... After that first year where people connected the dots. Yeah. Probably pretty bad.

Talking about the miscommunications and that he was just grasping Strauss at some point in time, April 24th, 1995, the president of the California Forestry Association is killed by a mail bomb that's sent to his office. This bomb was intended for the former President William Denison, who had retired the year before that. The package was opened by the current president, a guy named Gilbert Murray, and it kills him instantly. This is the largest, the most powerful bomb, mail bomb that Kaczynski ever built. He had packed it in like a heavy shoebox sized package. And Murray ends up opening this thing in the reception area of like their lobbying group headquarters.

They said that it killed him instantly, blew out office windows, stripped the wallpaper, and also caused structural damage to the building. So this thing is fucking big. And the wrong guy opened it up. So this is 95. This is the third, the third kill, right? And this is bomb number 16. This is the last one. Okay.

but his information was so outdated that when he found out his target and the reason that he says that he targets him is because he believed that Denison was working with private lumber contractors to clear-cut forests that he should have been protecting. So again, we go from the PR guy for Exxon to a guy that's helping to clear-cut forest. but the information is so old that that guy has since retired and there's somebody else that's taken his place that then takes the brunt of the bomb. The new guy's like, I'm going to change this. I'm actually against clear cutting, setting it in the right direction.

Boom. And that also goes into the investigation of them looking into, well, where's this guy? Where could this guy be getting his information? If it was addressed to this guy, it was intentionally, but that guy hadn't been there for a year and a half. What hasn't been updated for a year and a half? or where could someone be pulling that information from?

Got to be an old newspaper, got to be somebody that's not getting the latest. An old index or something like that, yep. So this is the final bomb that would be exploded that's attributed to the unabomber. As we talked about before, all of these 16 bombs included the initials FC on either shrapnel or the bomb that itself.

The investigators believe that this is the name of A group that's responsible for this. June 1995, 10 sends letters to media outlets, these typewritten letters from group FC. So he's even using the title of FC. Again, I don't know if this is a tactic to throw them off the scent or if he really believes that he's the head of this freedom group. It would be hard to say for certain. During the span of the bombing, the FBI, the ATF, and the U.S. Postal Service inspection group or whatever, whatever it was, had formed this massive joint task force that was headquartered in San Francisco.

So like at its peak operational timeframe, it included like 150 full-time investigators. This is the biggest and most expensive investigation for one instance, like one person that I think has ever occurred, correct? That's what they said. I just, I have such a hard time believing that. Really? There was so much money that was, we talked about it. I mean, the time. Tylenol murders. That's something that's never been solved to go into all of the

inspections of the Johnson and Johnson factories and everything like that. I mean, buddy, they were searching in all of these cities. They had these task force that were in three different governmental agencies. I could see that. Yeah, I guess Zodiac

would have been contained to California. This is a Nate, yeah. At this point, it's a nationwide thing. Well, Green River Killer, also at the same time, it's compact up there. And it went, for, I think, from like, what do we say, 74 to like 2001. And again, this is at its peak.

So there were times during these five or six year lulls that he was having where it would get reduced down to like maybe a skeleton crew and then something would happen. They'd have to bring on all new investigators because time had lapsed and people had moved on to stuff. And so that also hampered investigations. Also, they spent like a decade completely obsessed with that composite sketch, the hoodie and glasses. and because he had grown out a heavy bear during that, you know, those longer hiatuses, it actually hindered the search,

basically pointing people towards someone that didn't look like him. Did you see the thing about the, I guess we'll talk about what we're talking about the letters. He's, you've got to think, as soon as they heard about the bombings in 1993 at the World Trade Center, this had to perk everybody. up, right? Could he have gone from mailing bombs to trying to take down a world trade center?

He always went bigger on the hiatusis, so maybe they figured that he was advancing this. I mean, also early on, the profilers had incorrectly guessed that he was either an uneducated like blue-collar aircraft mechanic because of the focus on the aircraft industry or a disgruntled, like, academic dropout. So they weren't looking for someone who had graduated or who'd gone to Harvard when he was fucking 16 or anything like that. They were looking for somebody that had a very apparent grudge against some type of academic institution. Strawberry blonde hair.

Ted Kaczynski has brown hair in that sketch. So there are details that they're getting wrong and there's going to be a profile that they publish in the papers after the manifesto was published. And it talks about family who has a father figure or a son that has part of the house or the garage that only he can get access to. Yeah. So they're not assuming that this is a loner in a 10 by 12 cabin up in Montana. Suspect is going to be a family man with a room that nobody else is allowed into.

Yeah. They think that this is a suburban guy that's living in society that's doing this, and they couldn't be any further away from who is actually doing it. Well, when he promised, like the publication or the, he ended up writing into a few different like newspapers in 95 and was like, hey, listen, all quit killing people. This is FC. All quit killing people if you publish our 35,000 word manifesto called Industrial Society and its future. And it took a little bit of time, but the director of the FBI at that point, because Hoover had kicked the bucket named Lewis Free. And then Attorney General Janet Reno approved the, um, it to be actually be sent out.

Did you hear about the alternative? Well, I know there was someone, so they were kind of against it first. I know there's someone that was there that pushed for it and they were like, we don't have shit. Before that. Okay. The alternative that they put forth and I don't know how they were communicating with him, I don't know how it got across.

The owner of Penthouse magazine. Mm-hmm. The dirty porno magazine that define, I'm going pretty deep into my youth here, that define my youth, offers to publish the manifesto in his magazine. The counter to that, and again, I don't know how they were communicating. Ted says, if it's published in Penthouse, I will do one more bombing. That was the working back and forth of what this deal was going. to be. Like I say, I don't know how they got that message from penthouse back out to them.

But it feels like trading penthouse publishing that for one more bomb. He's like, that's not a bargaining chip, right? You're not going to have the federal government be like, okay, you get one more and then we're good, right? He had also been in like previous communication, I want to say, with certain newspapers. There might have been one in San Francisco and then was it one in New York or right? Yep, the Chronicle and the New York Times. Okay. So it was June 1999 when those typewritten letters go out from FC.

The two letters that request the papers published, the 35,000 word manifestos Chris was talking about. There's a letter that sent June 27th just to the San Francisco Chronicle that states that there's an imminent bombing attack that's going to target a plane leaving LAX. This sends them into straight panic. And part of the reason that he says that he did this in his diaries was because part of his manifesto, said that the services that are given to the public aren't for the public. If a service is truly for the public, taking away the monetary aspect is going to not change the way that that service runs. As this bombing is happening at LAX, they have to shut it down. They're shutting it down and Kaczynski is saying, you see, this was something that wasn't going to make them money.

so they shut it down. Yeah. This wasn't for fear of the public or any sort of safety like that. This is because if something happened, it was going to hurt their bottom line when no one flew. And immediately upon getting this letter, they end up rerouting all the mail that was going to be carried at the airport to a separate sorting facility, which had to have people with the tightest butt holes of anybody in the United States at that point in time. Can you imagine, you realize that's all bomb squad people probably. Yeah.

Having to go through and how long it took them to go through those packages or to run them through X-rays or to do what they needed to do. There's not a Newman in there. So when it came time to make this decision, one of like the higher-up investigators or lead investigators in this basically came out and was like, listen, we are throwing darts in the dark at this point. We have some ideas.

We have some ideas about him being from Chicago, being an academic, anything like this. this, but it's still like half the male population in the country that could potentially be a suspect in this. Why don't we use the public as our investigators? It's going to get a lot of stuff coming in, but at this point, a lot is better than the trickle of stuff. We can try to try to end this. And so they end up posting this in the paper. And I mean, how long is it before they, I mean, they get a whole bunch of stuff coming in and people again, blaming their neighbors. neighbors. This guy leaves his fucking trash cans out an extra day during the week. He's the unabomber.

Ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends. But just to put a weird little bow on this, I don't know why he did this. I feel like this was Ted maybe taking a little victory lap at some point because days later is when another letter comes through claiming that the bombing was a hoax, that it was a prank that he had just pulled on them. This is when he talks about you guys shut the whole system down because you were scared of the bottom line not to try to protect you. protecting people. Yeah. You rerouted all the mail when I said the bomb was going to be in the mail, but you didn't let the passengers continue to fly.

You shut everything down. And it's, why wouldn't you just let that fear continue to hang over them for the entire time? He knows that he didn't send a bomb unless you want to mess with them. That would be the only reason that you would send a letter saying it was a prank. I was never going to do this. And you know they were still searching through the mail. And you know they continued to have to search through that.

And they didn't find anything. What's better than a prank? Prank and the prank. And continuing to do what you were going to do. It's so interesting once this manifesto was published. The New York Times and the Washington Post both published the manifesto September 9th, 1995. Hottest fucking selling tickets in town. It goes crazy.

And like you were saying, the response to the tips at the FBI, Thousands of tips pour in in the beginning days. The profile that we were given or that we were talking about of the suspect was so far off. So this just broadens the pool of tips that are going to be coming in that are clogging the system. David and Linda are on holiday over in France. Linda sees excerpts in a French newspaper of the manifesto. And Linda starts reading these excerpts in she, she starts seeing some

consistencies with the letters that she's seen Ted has written to David. Starts telling David and she's like, hey, some of this stuff sounds kind of along the same lines eerily similar to some of the letters that I've read from your brother. And he's kind of like, yeah, well, people will write all kinds of stuff. He's not the only person with these beliefs, all that kind of stuff. And eventually, he sits down and actually, he sits down and actually,

actually reads. I believe it's when they get back. He's able to read the full manifesto or how it was published. They go back to Schenectady, New York, which is where they live. Assuming Schenectady is not a large town, they can't find any newspapers that are around that had the manifesto. Like, you said, they were a hot ticket item. Everybody bought them up. So they end up have no computer.

They have to go down to the public library, and they end up pulling up the first couple pages. Linda says that she's not looking at the screen. She's just staring at David. She wants to see his reaction and she sees his jaw drop, like physically fall off of his face. And she goes, what do you think? And David kind of looks at her and he goes, I'm not sure. I can't be positive. There are some things that look familiar. I'm going to give it a one and a thousand chance. well he ends up going home and pulling out some of ted's old college essays some of the letters and basically and this isn't like uh i saw some similar beliefs this is like exact phrasing and that's so perfect that you say that because there's a line in this manifesto that says

it would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences now out of that sentences, is there one word that really sticks out? Stinking. Yeah. As David's going back and looking at one of the last letters that he had gotten from Ted, Ted's exact phrasing was, I want nothing to

do with this stinking family that I was born into. That's not a normal turn of phrase that you hear people use on a daily basis. Stinking instead of fucking is such a very niche thing to do. And

those are the patterns that he's seeing inside of some of these. There was one, too, that it was, it's a common proverb. You know, it's as far as like, let them eat cake. Well, one of the things that he said was a play on that, a change of it, that he also had stated in one of either his essays or a letter or something like that. And he said, as for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society, well, you can't eat your cake and have it too. There's a lot there.

And so that was something also that had matched up. And just to give you a little taste, this is going to be a fuzz long, but we're going to try to get through it pretty fast. This is an excerpt that I look at in it, I don't know. No one get fucking radicalized. Yeah. It's something that I see the merit in, but also at the same time, there are leaps that feel like there's not a lot of historical study behind it. So it says, the Industrial Revolution and its consequences. have been a disaster for the human race.

They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those who lived in advanced countries, but have destabilized society and have made life unfulfilling and have subjected human beings to indignities. They have led to widespread psychological suffering in the third world to physical suffering as well, and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation it will certainly subject human beings to the greater indignities

and inflict greater damage on the natural world. It will probably lead to the greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering, even in advanced countries. You read that like a man who identifies with it. I mean... You're just a great order, buddy, I'm kidding.

I'm going with... It's going to inflict greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world. Sounds like AI, or it sounds like data centers are pretty bad for the environment. Fuck yeah. Lead to widespread psychological suffering. Sounds like what social media can do to children.

That and just normal office fucking jobs, man. That's psychological torture in itself. Yeah. There's so many things in there that I feel, are not terribly off, but at the same time, I can see the argument for the industrial revolution making people's lives worse. While at the same time,

I would say that pre-industrial revolution was still pretty bad before that. Here's the thing too, though. What you consider bad or good is all dependent on your system of values, what you actually value above other things. If you like the technology and I find it fucking useful,

and I just, I'm one of those people that it's like, like it's the time we fucking live in. I'm not going to do a podcast. Yeah, I'm not going to fucking fight against it because that's just going to be me fucking pushing against the immobile object. But for somebody that has it in their head,

you can't do anything about the Industrial Revolution. He's just, he's talking. And so when his priorities and his values are about the natural world and this more naturalist society, of course, those are going to be the greatest threats to that. But for somebody else, it's not. So, I mean, it just depends on what side.

Now, I'm living up in the area that we do and everything, I love the fucking mountains. I love the trees and everything like that. I do get pissed off if I even hear the word data center. It's fucking ridiculous. I realize that's necessary for technology and everything like that, but still, there's a less evil fucking way to go about it. Yeah, do we need it? I don't. Maybe we don't.

I'm good here. You just want to pause technology? Yeah, I'd be in. I'm good with that. We have enough. Keep producing me PlayStation. I don't really need much to get better. I don't even need that.

It's advanced enough. We're there already. Yeah, I need some type of differentiation. Yeah, that's very true. Let's just pause technology right here. It's good. And I'm sure that sounds like an old person's take. There's those fucking Japanese jerk-off machines that hold your phone and then you just hold it with a hand.

And it just like what we're way beyond what the Jetsons predicted. We're good. Pause it. maybe give it 15, 20 years for people to kind of catch up psychologically with all the stuff that we have. And then at that point, maybe we proceed further depending on how society's gone. And we found better, healthier, safer ways to do it. Yes. Instead of just piling in data centers and taking up electricity.

I'm smelling a presidential run. Is that what it is? I think that's what it is. That's what we stand on business for. The token ticket. I don't even care. Do you want to be president? I'll be VP.

No, I'm more suited for VP. Okay, but then you're going to have to step up and be president after. Okay. I was going to say, I don't want you to die, but yeah, I guess in the grand scheme of things. Like after my two terms. After eight years. Everything, then, yeah, you'd be the natural progression for another. God, think of all the good stuff we could do with 16 years.

I think about all the work we have to dare ourselves out of. I don't give a shy to I attempt it. After they've finally just really, I guess maybe. since David's accepted this. David to me, out of any of the victims of the bombing, those people are the true victims. David is a victim in such a different way

because David's having to come to grips with the brother that he's always looked up to and always loved and looked for that acceptance and that adoration with is going to be somebody who he's looking at having to turn into the police and fully knowing that there's a good chance that they could take his life.

And at the same time, knowing that if he's doing nothing, he could cost more people their lives afterwards. So here's the thing. David hires a PI to basically act as like an intermediary. This PI was Linda Patrick's childhood friend. That's how close they were to this situation. Her name was Susan Slim Swami. Simmons, Slappin, Sampson.

Samsonai. Way off. Oh, by the way, guess who just ordered adult luggage? Yeah? Yeah. Congratulations. Hardshell or? My wife was less enthusiastic.

Hard shell. Yeah. That's a way to go. Buddy, I'm making plans for what we got. Exactly. Yeah. I like that idea. We're going to be two hard shell boys and that at the airport.

So Susan Swanson, this P.I. is checking the writings against the letters that are found. by this point in time David had traveled back to his mother's home and in going through some of Ted's stuff he finds this 24 page kind of proto manifesto that Ted had sent his mother earlier and it looks a whole lot like what was published in the paper and this is kind of like he's reading the first chapter or something like that this is kind of the final straw to where they tell Swanson we need to get this figured out. Swanson finds it's not linguistics writing. No, no, that is. Yeah, so basically it was linguistics. So a linguistics expert, and they go over it and they say there's like a 60% chance that this all matches up. And so once David hears that, he goes from one in a thousand to 50-50 to now there's a 60% chance that this is him.

And I think that's just like a, like, independent person that's matching that up. Because as soon as David provides the FBI through this intermediary, he still hasn't, he provides this. His PI provides it to the FBI. The FBI linguists are like, oh, yeah, this is like a perfect match. And this is where I, FBI's got a bad track record at this point. They've done some pretty stupid shit. This one had, they're still digging themselves out of a Hoover hole. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, this one has some potential to do some extremely dumb shit because they hire this lawyer named Tony Biggs, Bisagli, I don't know, Tony. After they send these letters into the FBI, I'm feeling skinny, Tony. Lawyer Tony, they send this information into an FBI agent named Molly Flynn. Now, Molly Flynn takes a look at this. She says, yeah, there's some times there. When she's being interviewed in this documentary that I watched, she says, I think this was the documentary on Netflix that this happens.

She says that as she's holding Ted's letters to David in the manifesto, and she's reading back and forth, she almost loses track of which one is the manifesto and which one is the letter. They're so close. She goes ahead and forwards along to the FBI headquarters in San Francisco that's taking over this. and a couple weeks go by, she doesn't hear anything. Molly ends up calling over there, and the person that she's speaking to, she says,

hey, did you get that letter that I faxed over to you? He goes, yeah, our fax machine doesn't work sometimes. And she goes, well, there's this letter, so he's going through the evidence log for what they have. And he goes, oh, the typewriter expert went ahead and dismissed that because that first little proto manifesto, whatever that you sent over, wasn't the same typeface as the typewriter that produced the manifesto. So they don't think that it's connected at all.

How would you have these older writings? But I guess they couldn't identify if the writings were older, right, than the actual manifesto. It could have been... They knew that when it was the original one that was sent to the mother. They knew that that one was older than the manifesto that had been sent in there. but at the same time he just has to buy a new typewriter

like it's not it could have gone out he was he was typing a lot in his journals he probably had gone through multiple iterations of typewriters so mollie ends up telling him

that I'm going to send you this over I'm going to fax you this call me back in five minutes if you haven't gotten this manifesto I'm going to need you to read over this And he says, okay, and they sit and they wait. Once he finally gets it and he reads it, he says, even though this isn't the same typeface, this looks, we're there.

I'm reading sentences and then skipping to the other one, and it's making, it's incoherent because it's rambling, but the sentence structure and everything like that matches up for the thoughts. Here's the thing, too, with, like, them having, they had suspects. It was a huge list. apparently there were some D groups on there. But at the same time, Ted Kaczynski was on that list. He was just, I think, like, 2,400 and change.

2,416. On that list. So he was there. But again, that's so far down the list that they would have to have evidence show up that dismissed all those other people. But the fact that they were able to track it to him and he was on the list is still pretty impressive, right? This is what puts him on the list.

he wasn't on their suspect list until they brought him up wait what before the manifest I thought he was someone that they had nope oh shit he goes on the suspect list because of this and to get back to your d and d boys the d and d boys were one through eight

four suspects in this Chicago sub k area yeah Ted Kaczynski is number 653 oh shit so they've gone through wait how does Ted not immediately move up the list when this matches so much. So the list is in order of like the suspects that they get. Oh, gotcha.

So it's not moving up the list as far as like rankings. It's just that many people. Gotcha. Okay. So just in the Chicago area alone, they've gone through 653 and he was the last member of the Chicago list because obviously they figured out pretty quickly. But yeah, 200 or 2,416 on the suspect list for the FBI. And I believe I think you were right.

I think there were over 4,000, so they still continue to look afterwards, but they circle it's pretty good because eventually there's an FBI profiler named James Fitzgerald that sees all of these linguistic similarities that they talked about, and he comes to conclusion that these authors have to be the same. Eventually, the head of the operation, his name is Terry Turchy, ends up signing off to apply for the search warrant on the cabin. This is kind of going to be a touchy subject, because the FBI doesn't have a great record with cabins in the woods and people surviving.

They don't. It's not great. They do not. Especially not in this area of the country. No, yeah. Yeah, the western half of the country, it's bad. Bad news. Northwest is pretty bad.

The letters that David had provided helped kind of establish a timeline of whereabouts for where Ted was during some of these bombings, because Ted would send a letter off from... Sacramento that would have a cancel stamp because it's leaving there and they would be able to kind of look at it and say, okay, well, this bombing happened six days later. It's likely that he was there in the area for a while. He sent this letter out to David at that point in time.

So it puts him in a window that this is all possible. This is them trying to compile enough evidence to then give them this warrant to have a case built up by the time they get this guy. Exactly, because you're going to, take a warrant application to a judge. And when they say, well, what's the evidence that you can use to justify this warrant? And they say, this guy's letters look a whole lot like the manifesto.

Yeah. Are you sure that it's him? This guy's letters look a whole lot like the manifesto. You have to have. You have to be able to say we have, you know, we have evidence that points them in the vicinity or the area during the times or around the times that the bombings are happening. there is a pattern to their travel during those time frames. You know, you're just trying to build anything and everything you possibly can because if you were issued a warrant that doesn't cover certain things

or that comes into question, anything you then sees by serving that warrant and during that seizure can then be questioned. And you truly don't know what you're going to find in this cap. No, you're fucking shit. You realize that if they're like, hey, we're going to the, mountain cabin of the guy that's been building bombs. They're like, this fucking place is

sabotaged. Like there's traps. There's got to be traps all over. How are we going to get this guy to come out to where we can actually like get him in cuffs and then be able to try to look in here? They were in communication with the Garing family. One of the things that the FBI

had asked to do pre-raid is they asked Butch Gering to see if he could film the areas around the cabin so they knew kind of where they could get people hidden how to approach it and all that kind of stuff. I think they did like an 18 day like advance kind of stakeout to try to build something up before stuff started to kind of get leaked to the news that there was like some focus being paid to this little place in Montana. And so it almost like accelerated their plans

of having to try to get this guy to the point where they have to go to Gering. I think it was. and being like, hey, we need you to like get us to the front door. And the garrings were kind of a staging center for what's going to happen. And like you say, the media is finding out about this. Two of David's big holdups were if I'm going to help you, you're not going to sentence him to death. You're going to take, excuse me, the death penalty off the table. I don't want my brother's blood on my hands,

which regardless of what Ted Kaczynski did, I would never want to put that on a brother. Yeah. Like that's a familial bond is just, that's bad. And the second thing is, is David didn't want any indication that he was the one that helped find Ted. He said that if Ted's going to find out

that I helped get him arrested, I need to be the one that can tell him to his face. Which I'm not going to do. I'm sure. Eventually, no, no, eventually. never come out. Once he understood how they, because he had to be shown the evidence when he was reviewing with his lawyer.

Yeah. As soon as he found out, hey, how did they get this? Someone turned, well, the only people that had access to this were my family. Well, I think he's hoping that before they get the evidence in the trial phase that maybe he can have a meeting with them. But at the same time, they cut off communication. They hadn't seen each other. And I want to say it was like 10 years.

So he. He didn't know really what position Ted was in. And one of the things that they had asked him to do was to write, um, Ted a letter. And they were going to coach him through what they wanted him to ask in the letter. Yeah. And David told them that he wouldn't participate in a sting option or operation against his brother. So at that point, I feel like you've done.

Yeah. He provided anything they needed to even, you know, he, he pointed them to the person. Their job at that point was to. take that person. Mm-hmm. Morning of April, I guess the night before April 2nd, 1996, the FBI in, I believe it was the San Francisco squad team surround the property that night. And this is, again, this is April 3rd in the mountains of Montana.

There's still snow. It would have been nice to maybe have, you know, some power, maybe some cameras. not some tin cans on a string or anything that can keep these guys warm. Ted said, and this is from this interview that he does after he's been arrested, that that afternoon on April 3rd, he hears these three men that are walking around outside of his cabin. He hears somebody yelling, is anybody inside, is anybody inside? And he pokes his head out. And he sees these three guys that he says, we're dressed like.

normal people. I always thought when FBI agents came to your door it was going to be some young, strong man in a suit. None of these guys were young. They're just like playing clothes, but they were... They showed up as like mining consultants.

I think they were from a timber company and they were trying to the whole ruse was that they needed to find out where his property stakes or where his property lines were because that's where they were going to start cutting and they didn't want to cut into his property all.

And he basically tells him like they're very clearly, like I'm the type of person that very clearly marks my property. Wherever you see the signs that say, fuck off, that's my property on the other side of those signs. The shots that he takes at these FBI agents, you can just tell that he still has something underneath because he's like, they weren't young,

they weren't in suits, they weren't shape, two of them were old and one of them had a punch on his belly. He had, yeah, because you're not, if you see guys looking physically able to like, yeah, you had to sell the fact that these were guys making lumber decisions. They weren't out there chopping the fucking trees down. And is Ted says, all right, let me go back inside. I need to grab some shoes and a coat.

The man that was closest to Ted reaches in and wraps him up and pulls him out and Ted begins to struggle. And finally the guy says, I'm an FBI agent. and the FBI agent said that as soon as he told Ted that Ted just kind of relaxed. He stopped tensing up. He realized that he was caught at this point. I think one of the dudes, so it was Max Knoll or Noel, he was an FBI agent. Tom McDaniel was also an agent. Jerry Burns was a U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer.

He was somebody, I believe, that Ted had known before because he was the guy that was in that area. So it wasn't an uncommon. sight for Ted to see him somewhere up around the area. So they needed him to do that to get them close. And he's the one that actually grabbed him. After Ted's arrested, there's, I don't know if this was just Ted's personality, but he asked the, McDaniel was the second one that you said. He asked him, he goes, am I under arrest?

And he goes, no, you're being held right now as we conduct the search warrant for questioning. And he goes, okay, can I get up? And he goes, no. And he goes, can you take the cuffs off? And he goes, no. He goes, well, am I free to leave? And he says, no. He goes, it sounds like I'm under arrest then.

They're sitting inside the cabin. And before they start their search, it's so cold up there that they're going to start a fire in his stove, which I'm sure they search first. and as they're building the fire and trying to get it going Ted's sitting on the other side in a chair and the shack starts to fill a smoke and Ted says

can that guy build does that guy know how to build a fire McDaniel goes why don't you tell him how to do it Ted Ted goes open the flu and as soon as the flu's open the fire starts everything gets sucked out of it so he's still like taking jabs

at these FBI agents knowing that he's in custody knowing that as they're going through and they're searching his cabin, they're finding that loft that I was telling you about that has this like fossil record of all of his writings. They end up finding, I believe it was 50,000 pages that he had written. And they said that that was... That's a lot of weight. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. He had to have built this cabin pretty strong. In a 10 by 12 space. Yeah. That's... You don't have room for much. They see his bed.

And one of the agents said that along the wall that his bed was on, you could see the outlines of where he had been sitting because of all the grease and body oil that he had had on him. He had worn stain patterns into the wall where his bed was. Jesus. A lot of the agents that were on site that entered the cabin or that had anything to deal with Ted said that they could smell the odor of. Ted for the next couple days afterwards. That was how just ungodly and bad it was. So as they're going through and they're looking, this is where things, it was 40,000 pages, sorry, they're finding all of this bomb making equipment.

They're finding all of these writings that look like the manifesto and kind of pre rough drafts that are matching up. and then I believe it was a day or two later as they're back searching the cabin they end up pulling out this silver box yeah from under the bed right from under the bed that's when you have that's when it's like the area is secured everyone get the fuck out with the bomb guys go in there the agent I guess picked it up and turned around and as he turns around both of the agents that were standing behind him said put it down and let's all leave and the guy puts it down in the middle and they all slowly walk out of the cabin.

Why are you even touching it? Would you think that he had a live bomb sitting underneath his bed? They suspected that he had bombs all over the place. Yeah. They'd been warmed that like at this point, do you not suspect that this guy does not want to be taken alive and that he could detonate like a fucking bomb inside the cabin that he had if he got to a switch? Maybe. He knew it was he was caught.

like he knew he was going to get caught. I see that as somebody that's not with his cavalry or like. He was going to get caught? No, no, at that point. Oh, yeah. If he goes back in there, what if that bomb had been ready to go and he could have set it off and took everyone, destroyed a bunch of the evidence and everything like that? I mean, I feel like someone that has that much apathy toward other people's lives

really isn't concerned about taking some people with him. True. they end up uncovering these ciphers that he used kind of in certain points of his writings and they end up decoding in ciphered I guess is the word that you use for that sections of these writings that had talked about the bombings

and so now they see that he has full knowledge of all of these bombings because he was writing his reactions and the processes that he was using building up to it. They also recover this old Smith Corona portable typewriter that was used to write the Industrial Society and its future. Pretty much sealing that

connection right there. Same typeface, same everything. It all matches up. So, once he's taken into custody, he is given a psych evaluation after his arrest. It concludes that Ted suffers from schizophrenia.

And like I was talking about earlier, there's a couple things that hit as far as this being severe mental illness that is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, in this disorganized thinking. There's two things in there

that I see. I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, he was probably hallucinating. He probably had delusions. Disorganized thinking, the manifesto does make sense, but it does ramble on for 32,000 words. But it also does have contradictory ideologies in it as well. So that could be construed as disorganized because you're not, you don't have one clear kind of message.

Your message from possibly page to page or chapter to chapter could contradict each other. It's a situation where schizophrenia can be something that's genetically, I mean, or genetics. It could be in your family history. We don't know if he had any family history of this. I don't think with the shit that he went through that even if there was a slight chance it was in the family history, that definitely would have brought to the forefront. And even if you didn't have it in the family history, I think it mind-fuck like that could maybe

create a case of it. Well, genetically, you can have a vulnerability to schizophrenia. Yeah. And one of the environmental triggers that can set this off is high stress. You might experience it. You might never experience it just depending on what happens in your life. Yeah. If you have severe life stress, childhood trauma, I mean, I still don't think the baby thing had much to do

of it, but childhood trauma being 17-year-old. old and being berated for your beliefs. You're still in there. And so do I believe that he had schizophrenia? I would tend to say that this was a pretty solid diagnosis. Pretty apt diagnosis. I think they said paranoid

schizophrenia, which again, paranoia is going to play a big factor in thinking that the world is going to be destroyed by technology. I also understand that that's a sense of paranoia that I do share with Ted. Yeah. Teddy doesn't like this. Teddy ends up getting two

public defenders, one of them would go on, I forgot to write her name down, is like one of the top anti-death penalty lawyers in the country. And when they see this psych evaluation, they start to form this plan for an insanity plea because they're trying to avoid the death penalty. And Ted hates that idea. Because just as we were talking about earlier, Ted just published this manifesto. and if he gets declared mentally insane, it's going to... What does that do to the validity of that manifesto? Exactly.

All of his, any of his credibility goes out the window when he's put in that position. So he fights tooth and nail to try to get these lawyers off of the case. January 8, 1998, Ted tries to fire his lawyers the day that the trial is supposed to start. In their place, he wants to hire a guy named Tony Sarah as somebody who he thinks is going to be more of a consultant, and he's going to take on the case himself. Sarah agrees not to use the insanity plea, so he's got a guy that's on his side. And part of this is he has to have another psych evaluation to see if he's competent enough to...

To make that decision to get rid of his. Well, and to defend himself. Gotcha. So he ends up being declared able to defend himself. The lawyer ends up rejecting his attempt because he says that the trial has already moved so far in. I think the judge also says that. Is that? Yeah.

Is that what I said? No. He said the lawyer says that. Okay. Yeah, no, the judge, you're right. It says that the trials move too far along. It's going to throw everything in a wrench. And in response to that, as Ted goes to.

his jail cell that night, he tries to hang himself with his own underwear. And I guess one of the bailiffs the next day is he showed up to court said that Ted showed up not wearing any underwear. So this was something that got around. Of course, that's going to trigger another psych evaluation because he has to be fit to stay in trial. Yep. So by January 21st, he's declared fit to stay in trial. And the insanity plea never really makes any sense to me. I don't think it ever would have even gone through because the insanity plea is kind of based on not being in a correct mental state

to understand the gravity of what you're doing. Yeah. Whereas Ted was writing about this. Ted was clearly in these windows of clarity to where he knew what he was doing. He knew that it was wrong. He had a reason for doing it. It was so sophisticated. You had to be pretty lucid while you were putting this.

stuff together and building a fucking bomb and everything. And that kind of makes me wonder if the schizophrenia thing was a little bit of a an easy diagnosis. I definitely think that that probably contributed to it. So in order to avoid now having to keep his public defenders and go through it to insanity plea, he agrees to plead guilty to all charges to accept a life sentence without parole, but no death penalty. later of course I think that's in the news maybe regionally for us he later tries to withdraw this

guilty plea and the judge rejects it yeah and I mean he he does that because he's trying to avoid becoming like a public spectacle because if it ends up getting televised or reported on the things that he's being questioned on the standabout he knows that he's going to come off as a fucking crazy person as a loon and the judge even tells him that. He says that it's not a valid defense to try to say that technology is wrecking humanity and you are trying to

stop that. That's an opinion. Yeah. It's not something that you can build concrete evidence around. I mean, we all can see it, but at the same time that's not something to where you can point to it and say, this does this, this does this, this does this. So during the trial, the actual cabin, 10 foot by 12 foot cabin, is loaded on to a

flatbed truck and transported to an Air Force base in California to be stored as evidence. so they just take the whole thing so they can just smell and all it's it's 10 by 12 it's not tough to load up and take out but grease stains and all yeah you gotta tie that thing down quite a bit I think if you're gonna be moving it yeah so I think

it's in it ends up getting alone to this place called the museum in Washington DC in 2008 and then was it before that that the auction went up to try to like sell stuff to actually go toward like the people that were impacted by it. 2006.

Capital items are sold on an internet auction netted $15 million. $15 million. I think they said the manifesto sold for like almost $18,000 and then the hood and aviator glasses got about $17,000.

That's a collector of things that we've talked about. I can't see. I guess it's going to a good cause, but I can't feel like having the Unabomers aviators is good juju for the house. Yeah, that's like a Hitler's teacup situation.

You don't want that. That's not good, not good karma. No, not comfortable with that. Eventually, once the museum closed, the actual cabin was transferred to the FBI headquarters, museum storage in Virginia. It's no longer publicly available for display. So I think it might have spent a little time in the Smithsonian. I'm not sure on that.

But it might have been there. At the same time, you have Wanda, Ted's mother still trying to reach out. Ted never writes to his family again. David's writing in multiple letters just trying to explain what's going on and what happened. And he never writes back. He becomes a pretty popular pen pal in jail. There's a lot of people that are writing to him. up spending his time in ADX Florence, which is known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies.

It's this, it's the highest security prison in the United States. And just to, to line this up, there was an area in Florence called Bombers Row. Bombers Row consisted of Ramsey Youssef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, 1995 Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the unabomber Ted Kaczynski When they would be let out of their cells Apparently these three started to get together And talk about

A what they did But then they said that guards overheard a lot of talk About religion and politics Which feels pretty weird To have those three guys that killed tons of people Yeah, it seems pretty on brand It's just, it's so, so weird. Ted found himself a love interest in a pen pal,

and he had another friend that was on the outside that he had met through the pen pal program. He, I guess he, I don't know, created, designed, wrote a trombone concerto. Okay. For the woman, sent that out to a guy. had him record it and then play it for her as this everlasting sign of love to this woman A trombone piece

Is your sign of love? It's an underrated romantical instrument That's true Of course, 2011 We talked about it during the Tylenol murders episode Ted gets pinned and gets some DNA taken from him to see if they could match up to any of the DNA that they had in the Tylenol murders case.

1962, Harvard sends out a 50th reunion invite to all of its graduates looking to confirm addresses. 1962? Oh, the 6250th for you that occurred in 2002. So, yeah, 2002 is when that comes in. Oh, wait, 2012. Yeah, 2012.

When that comes rolling through the door, somehow, I don't know how they got his address at ADX. Maybe that was somebody at Harvard being like, ha ha, this would be funny. We'll see if he's sent it to him. He actually fills this out. And in the getting to know you portion of it, in his occupation, he writes prisoner. And in his accomplishment section, he writes eight life sentences. So clearly this is a guy who's not sad about what he did. I guess during victim statements, he was pretty happy with himself writing down all

of these different things that these people were saying. And the guy that got blown up by the piece of wood at the computer store, Tony, whatever his name was. As he gets up on the stand, he looks. Or does Gil die? Anyway. Yeah, it was an hour and a half, what feels like. He gets up on the stand and he looks straight directly at Ted and he goes, I've forgiven you for what he's. you did. I will carry the scars of what happened on me for the rest of my life. I'll remember you

always, but at the same time, I've forgiven you for the evil that you've given to me. And everybody in the courtroom said that this was the one time that Ted just stopped writing and looked up at the guy and kind of took in the moment of what was going on. There had been another anarchist that had been in contact with Ted and I guess had some executive privileges were whenever he would go in to meet Ted before the trial, Ted would, his lawyers would be in there. So anything that him and this other anarchist discussed would be under attorney-client privilege.

So they could discuss any incriminating evidence or anything like that. And Ted writes to this guy after, and he basically says, well, that was a little much that they did the victim statements, right? And even this guy that was an ardent supporter of Ted Kaczynski and understood what he did and fully believe what the manifesto said,

He ends up writing a bag. He's like, well, yeah, they were victims of bombings. You tried to kill these people. Of course they're going to feel something and want to say something. Yeah. Ted never ends up responding to that. He just has zero empathy. That's what I'm saying.

He doesn't possess that. Like, that's the part of the brain that just turned off at some point. And it never, ever got close to turning back on. The guy that ends up forgiving Ted gets a call. I believe they said it was like six or seven years later. and David does end up getting the million dollars reward. Yeah.

Yeah. And he ends up donating it to the victims. Yeah. So David ends up calling this guy that got blowed up in front of the computer store and they've become lifelong friends. Ted said that he considers him the second brother that he never had. You mean David?

Or David considers him the second brother that he never had. That was tried to, his other brother tried to kill. That's how I believe that this guy truly forgave Ted Kaczynski because he ends up becoming best friends and basically brothers with David Kaczynski. Yeah. Just a truly weird. Weird friendship that comes out of that.

March 2021, old Teddy is diagnosed with rectal cancer. I don't wish cancer upon anybody. But if Ted's going to get cancer, rectal cancer feels like a fitting punishment. He ends up getting moved to a medical facility. I believe it was in North Carolina. And on June 10th, 2023, he is found hanging from a handicap rail with a shoe lace. Let the guard down too much. Yeah.

And I don't know if it's poetic that his dad got a terminal cancer diagnosis and ended his life. Well, that's why he ended up getting rectal cancer is for that reason. And Ted ends up getting a cancer diagnosis. It's not good. And he takes his own life, too. Crazy fucking person. just insane. A horrible fucking person, but like, you know when you try to track back, like, what fucked up this person? Like you meet a fucked up person. You're like, I wonder what fuck

them up in life. This one, you're just like, oh, that fucked them up in life. A combination of... A cocktail. Of just dangerous, fucking harmful shit. Like we said before, it's tough not to put a whole lot of emphasis on these things that happened to them at Harvard. Again, there's 22 other participants that didn't go on to bomb anybody or that we know of caused really any societal damage.

I don't know. That could be wrong. Maybe there was another murderer that was involved. Maybe we'll run across somebody else that was in this. But at the same time, you can't really discredit it because it is something that was a big part of... But you don't know how something fucks up a person individually. It's only a matter of time. maybe the odds are in that experiment

out of 23 people there was a one in 23 chance we were going to create a fucking terrorist and humans are complicated people yeah especially fucking young ones like that was it was the it was the crazy perfect cocktail to create a evil genius

and regardless it still will never come close to justifying any of the actions no matter how on it he was no matter how many times we see technology impeding on our freedoms and on our space, it's still... It's...

What's crazy is it still goes back to the point. I'm not saying it was a direct creation, but we have made several discoveries about fucked up government programs creating monsters. And this at least had a hand in it, so... It definitely didn't not have a hand. Exactly, yeah. All right, you got anything else about Theodore? Not that I can think.

of. Okay. Well, thanks for joining us on this episode. Hope you guys goddamn, three hours and 20 minutes. It's a lot of TED. That's a big TED talk. Didn't see that coming. All right. Thanks for joining us. We'll catch you next week.

Peace.