Stuff You Should Know - The Unabomber: Misguided to say the least

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

The Unabomber was one of the most notorious and longest lasting cases in the history of the FBI. Just because the manifesto reads like he was a fortune teller doesn't make his actions any less deplorable. Learn all about this fascinating case in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

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

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Boop, boop, boodoo, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boodoo. We're coming to a land down under, oh, I get it. Chuck, we're going to Australia. And New Zealand. And New Zealand, that's right.

Oh man, like, we are really excited. This has been years in the making. We're finally pulling the trigger. In September, we are doing shows on September 1st at the Aster Theatre in Perth. Sunday, September 2nd at ICC in Brisbane. Which heads up down there to you guys. That's spring for you, not fall.

All right, well, September 3rd, Monday at Goldfields Theatre in Melbourne. Sure. We're really getting around. Thursday, the 6th of September at the Inmore Theatre in Sydney. And then, man, we are going to wrap it up. Friday, September 7th at the Bruce Mason Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand.

I cannot wait for that one. Yep, you can go to S-Y-S-K-Live.com to get info and to buy tickets, which are on sale April 17th. We will see you in September at Australia and New Zealand. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant with Jerry Rowland. Three of us put together, put us in some Ray-Ban aviators,

put a gray hoodie sweatshirt on us. You got Stuff You Should Know. I know, I like your costume today. I thought I would dress up to really kind of drive home the idea that I have, I know what we're going to be talking about. Yeah, you know what's funny is that today, all these years later, when you see someone in aviators in a hoodie

with the hood up, you say, jeez, what's up, Unabomber? It's part of the social fabric these days. Really, yes. Like, I ran across some, I guess, an article from the late 90s or whatever that was talking about that famous sketch and how it made its way under coffee mugs and keychains and t-shirts.

And it became like a pop culture icon. Oh, yeah, I'm sure it was on some t-shirt design at that terrible store. Spencer's. Wow, no, that one's great. No, Urban Outfitters. Oh, wait, so you're a Spencer's fan, huh? Sure.

OK, Spencer's over Urban Outfitters. I guess that's the great divide, you know? Well, Michigan, Ohio State, Spencer's, Urban Outfitters. Urban Outfitters is just trendy stuff that they think is clever, but it's not. Spencer, you could go in and get a poster of a bikini lady on a Ferrari, some incense, and a giant rubber penis.

Right. Like, that's a great store. I guess it is. You know, everything you need under one roof. I can't remember what I was in there for the other day, but they have like the most extensive selection of tasteless shot glasses I've ever seen in my life. That's Spencer?

Yeah, which it's like, there's people collecting these, you can tell. I want to know who Spencer is. Spencer doesn't want you to know who he is. OK, that's why I called his store Spencer. Yeah, his real name is Jackson McClain. Oh, wow, nice work, Jackson, through me. You sniffed me off the case.

Nice, that was a good save, Chuck. Thanks. Speaking of good saves, I'm going to bail us out of this intro. Let's do it. Take us back, way back, to 1979. Eight. I'm a little seven-year-old, Chuck. Sorry, Chuck, we're going to go back one more year.

1978. Yeah, I was seven. Oh, so you knew I had got it wrong. OK, well, in 1978, in the Chicago land area, there's a university called Northwestern University. Go Wildcats. I didn't look this one up. I think it is the Wildcats.

That's what we're going with. And there was a security officer named Terry Maker, who opened a suspicious-looking package. I couldn't find why Terry Maker opened it. So I should say, everybody, I'm making the assumption here that it was deemed suspicious. And they were like, go get the security guard. But Terry Maker opened this package, and it exploded.

He got some minor cuts and burns. I don't see too many people counting him as a victim of the unabomber, although I think Terry Maker would probably take issue with that. But he was, by all accounts, the first person to come into contact with the unabomber or one of the unabombers bombs. Yeah, he was number one in 1978 that would go on to be 15

more bombs over the 17-year killing spree. Well, in a way, he killed three people in the end, wounded many more. And we won't go through all of the targets, but they ranged from American Airlines Flight 444 to the president of United Airlines, Percy Wood, to a Vanderbilt University secretary, to a timber industry lobbyist, to an advertising executive.

Part of the reason why it was so maddening for so many years was because there was no rhyme or reason, seemingly, to the victims of the unabombers wrath. No, the one thing that they all shared in common, and the unabomber also wrote letters to newspapers during this whole time, the thing that they had in common was that they had something to do with technology or the advancement of technology or the destruction

of nature, one of those two. Right. And so these people, like, that was it. That was all you had to be doing to be a target of the unabomber. He was extremely indiscriminate in picking who lived or died by his hand. And you have to understand, all of these bombs,

none of these bombs were sent to scare people. Every single one of these bombs, whether they killed somebody or not, were intended to kill somebody. Who they killed, the unabomber didn't much care. And you can tell by the kind of insoucian attitude he had toward who was targeted. Like, he would get names wrong.

Yeah. His last victim, a guy named Gilbert Brent Murray, he was a timber industry lobbyist. He opened the package because he was the president of the timber industry lobby, even though the package was addressed to his predecessor. The reason it was addressed to his predecessor was because the unabomber had picked the name

out of a directory and it was an out-of-date directory. So this guy died as a result of the bomb, you know? That's a very unabomber thing to do. It really was. And I think the unabomber, if you talk to the unabomber today, which you could, apparently he's very easy to get in touch with this and become a pen pal of,

he would tell you, totally fine. Like, I don't care who died. Like the head of this timber lobby died. That was ultimately what I was going for. So he was killing people who were associated with an idea, a cause and the cause that he was opposed to was the destruction of nature and the advancement of technology.

Right, so we're talking obviously about Ted Kaczynski. It was the man's real name. And early on in 1979, right after these attacks started happening, the Postal Service, the ATF and the FBI got together, formed a task force, and that's where they came up with the name. Unabom, UNABOM stood for University Airline Bombings

because those were the first bombs that were sent. And I guess the name of the case was by the FBI, but the name unabomber was made up by the media covering it, right? Yeah, that's usually the case. In the end, it would become the longest running at the time. I don't know if it's been outdone yet, but longest running and most expensive FBI investigation

in history, eventually had 150 full-time employees on the case, which is amazing. And he was tough to get, and he had no forensic evidence left behind. He was very careful. He used bombs that were made out of materials that were easy to find.

He couldn't track them. He made all of them by hand, painstakingly? Yeah, made them all by hand. Like we said, the victims were chosen seemingly at random. And had it not been for his manifesto, they may still be on the lookout for this guy. Yeah, and even still, the way that they were able to connect these things

was because during the 17-year campaign, he would write letters to the editors of newspapers around the country claiming responsibility for these crimes. And then I think half of the bombs had the inscription FC on parts that were recovered. And FC stood for Freedom Club. Because the Unabomber,

he didn't call himself the Unabomber. Again, that was the media. All of these things, including the manifesto, was signed the Freedom Club. The Club of One. Right, but he always wrote about we whenever he was referring to himself. Yes.

So the whole thing came to a head in 1996 when Ted Kaczynski was arrested in his cabin in Lincoln, Montana. He was known to his neighbors as the Hermit on the Hill. And he'd lived there for years and years and years. I think since the early 70s, I believe. Yeah, I mean, it was a little primitive cabin off-grid. Inside, they found about 40,000 pages worth of journals

describing all his crimes. They found bomb parts. They found a bomb ready to be mailed. And they knew they had their guy thanks to his brother, David, turning him in, essentially, after reading this manifesto. He was eventually arraigned in Sacramento, which is where the final murder took place.

And he was hit to jail, initially said, no, I don't want to plead insanity. That's a big, big point. Yeah, because I don't think he would have admitted something like that. But he tried to kill himself in early 1998 in his jail cell. That triggered a psychiatric evaluation. And he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which

triggered a plea bargain that basically said, you can avoid the death penalty now if you take this plea bargain. He did. And in January of 1998, he pleaded guilty, accepted the eight life sentences with no parole, and is now living with quite a few other famous bombers at the Florence, Colorado, Alcatraz of the Rockies,

the ADX there, which that place in and of itself is crazy. I looked into it. Yeah, I feel like it's come up in plenty of other episodes before, because it certainly sounds familiar. So I was looking into, there's this fascinating article called Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber by a guy named Alston Chase, who I think wrote a book on it. But in this article, it was so good.

He, you read it too? Oh, yeah. So he really kind of lays out a pretty great case, based on evidence that he compiled from interviews and things like that, that it's definitely not a slam dunk diagnosis that the unabomber has schizophrenia. And he also, I don't know if he says it outright, but he at the very least intimates

that it was Ted Kaczynski's brother David and his legal team that created the public persona of the unabomber as a person with schizophrenia to keep him from getting the death penalty. This is much, much, much to the chagrin of the unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who eventually did cop to this plea bargain, because it became clear to him that if he went to trial, his defense team was going to put in an insanity defense,

whether he liked it or not. And he was denied the ability to represent himself. So he was presented with the choice. Either go to trial, plead insanity, maybe get a lesser defense, but in the meantime, his manifesto would be painted as the ramblings of a madman, because he would be deemed insane,

or plead guilty and not insane, defend his sanity, and then in his hopes, also by extension, defend his manifesto and the ideas in it. Yeah, so he is still in prison in Colorado. Apparently, like you said, he's got a lot of pen pals, because he lived in a tiny little primitive cabin for so many years. By all accounts, he has adapted pretty well to prison life.

Being in a small room is no big deal to him. Apparently not. And you can actually go to the, and I'm gonna totally check this out. I don't know if I can do it on this upcoming tour, but you can go see that original cabin at the museum in Washington, DC. And I've looked up pictures,

and it's kind of all right there, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, the whole thing is just right there in the museum. Yeah, so he was a brilliant guy. Like you said, he went to Harvard. He's a national merit finalist. He was a math prodigy, started Harvard at 16, had an IQ, or has an IQ of 167, and was just a, is just a brilliant, brilliant guy.

And I think we should take a break. All right, I'm getting a tingle. And we'll come back and we'll talk, well, I guess we should talk about the manifesto. Let's. All right, ready for this. ["The Nineties"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, The Nineties,

called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey Dude, The Nineties, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, and we're back, and we kind of left it off on, well, we promised we were about to talk manifesto. So let's talk manifesto. Yeah, and after reading the Cliffs notes of this thing, in a few different places, one thing is clear, is it's not the ramblings of a madman, A. B, he has, and I hate saying this,

but he has a lot of very salient points about where society is headed due to technology. Or where it was headed back in the 90s, where it fully is now. Yeah, very much ahead of his time thinking-wise. The way he went about correcting this was abhorrent, obviously, but when you read parts of this thing, the Industrial Revolution and its consequences,

like here, let me pull this one, for instance. Here's one pull quote. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but even more,

the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. Does it sound like anything that everyone carries in their pocket every day? Exactly, and he also points out that the way that this happens, this dependence on technology, it comes about because new technology seem good and helpful and useful, and then we eventually adapt ourselves to fit them better.

We change our behavior, we change the way we see things, we change the way we think and interact with stuff to fit the technology, and his whole idea was that that is the inevitable outcome from the Industrial Revolution, that ever since the Industrial Revolution, our society has been in a stranglehold at the service of technology,

and the people who serve technology, and society has been restructured and reshuffled to the detriment of the individual human, to local communities as a whole, and that the only way that this is so ingrained now in our world, the only way to stop this is to violently overthrow the current system. And he has a very laissez-faire attitude

about what comes after. He said that we have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new ideal form of society. Our goal only is to destroy the existing form of society. That was it. And that was the whole reason for his campaign, was to be one of the provocateurs of this revolution that upended technological society.

Yeah, here's another summation of another part of the manifesto about the social infrastructure that he says is dedicated to modifying our own behaviors. This infrastructure includes an array of government agencies with ever-expanding police powers, an out-of-control regulatory system that encourages the limitless multiplication of laws, an education establishment that stresses conformism,

ubiquitous television networks whose fare is essentially an electronic form of volume, and a medical and psychological establishment that promotes the indiscriminate use of mind-altering drugs. So, again, I don't want this to come across that I look up to this guy in any way, but when you read some of this stuff, you think, man, if this guy had only reigned it in,

he could have done good. Yeah, I can't remember what the turning point was, but there was some potential path that he was on where he could have done this peacefully and he pulled back and went a violent way. And I think quite rightly that if he were not locked up for the rest of his life, he would keep sending bombs out, he would not stop

because he's not a moral agent, he is a rational agent, and he sees this as a rational end to his means, which is taking out people who may or may not be in a position to advance technological society. Well, yeah, and that's where the line, the delineation occurs where he's such a smart person, but that's such a dumb, like there's,

blowing someone up is not gonna halt any innovations or change the course of where we're headed as a society. It was just, I mean, to call it misguided is the understatement of the year. So, and forgive me for armchair psychologicalizing here, but now you start to get into the idea of whether or not he was fulfilling or indulging his own desire to kill.

Well, you never know. Because if he is thinking about things like this, and he is such a rational person, surely there would have been other ways to do this that were either more productive or on the other hand, more destructive, right? Sending a bomb that might take out one or two or three people is not, and by making these bombs,

pains taking away by hand over the course of months and probably years sometimes, that's not a very productive way of achieving this goal. So, it makes you wonder, did this guy just wanna kill people? And that coupled with this view of technological society to form what we know as the unabomber. Well, I think that was probably the case is,

he was angry at where things were headed and he wanted to take it out on somebody. Yeah, but again, I wanna go back to this idea that he is schizophrenic. There is a, that is not necessarily the case. He was given a temporary or provisional or conditional schizophrenic diagnosis of schizophrenia by a court ordered psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist.

And that was it. I don't believe she ever went back and made an official diagnosis. Other people in the media, other psychiatrists were basically diagnosing him from afar. Some psychiatrists met with him, but they didn't officially examine him. So basically just based on his actions in his manifesto

and what was contained within, he was largely given this diagnosis of schizophrenia. And I couldn't find anything that said that he's being treated for schizophrenia now. Which is kind of a big deal because it's a two full big deal. One, it says it dismisses him as just a complete madman who is delusional, but it also does a tremendous disservice to people with schizophrenia

because it says this is what people with schizophrenia do. They send bombs to people. They go and live in like Montana alone for 30 years and send bombs to people the whole time. Yeah, that's a good point. Doing that same armchair psychologicalizing that I was doing is it's worse if you're an actual psychiatrist, you know?

Yeah. All right, well, I think we should talk a little bit about how this manifesto came to be in public view because it's a super interesting sub-story in itself. The great, great article from the Washington Post where I got most of this part, but they make the point in this article is super interesting to me that the time that this happened

in the mid to late 90s, it was a transitionary time in technology in and of itself and that the internet was around, but it wasn't ubiquitous and it's not where everyone went for everything, including news. So the fact that this publishing of the manifesto in the Washington Post, which we'll talk about in a second, it says here it was perhaps the last one,

the last newsworthy document to appear only in print. Right. And it's very ironic considering what he was railing against was that it was before everyone was getting their news from the internet. So the fact that they actually, it was an era that was being forgotten,

the newspaper print in print. And that's how he got his message out finally by sending packages containing this manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post in June of 1995. Yeah, so they each one got a package one day after the other and the one to the post had a return name

and address Boon Long Ho, 3609 Renoso Court, San Jose, California 95136. And it turns out that that address and that person, it was a, he was a CFO of a Thai circuit board maker whose headquarters were in San Jose. That was the address for that. So they, you can imagine that Boon Long Ho was pretty nervous because rather than being

like the recipient of a bomb, he was supposedly the sender of this manifesto to the Washington Post. But the FBI investigated and quickly cleared Boon Long Ho and the post and the Times suddenly had a decision to make because in this package with this manifesto was a letter that said, if you publish this, I will stop killing people. If you don't, I'm gonna start

or we will start making our next bomb. Yeah, so they obviously got in touch with the FBI. The FBI took one look at the letter and said, I think this is from the Unabomber. They went, duh, of course it is. There is no, well, actually they didn't know at the time how many people were sending these bombs. But they met with, they had three meetings, I think,

with the FBI's director at the time, Lewis Free and the task force. And then two out of those three meetings, Attorney General Janet Reno came. That is like such a 90s meeting. Oh, so 90s. Lewis Free and Janet Reno? Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.

So they said, listen, we're not in the safety business. We're not experts on this. You tell us what you think we should do and then we'll make our mind up what we should do. Basically, everyone said you should probably publish this because A, we can maybe tag and track newspapers in Northern California where we think he might be. B, maybe someone will recognize this guy

and come forward. Was there a C? No, it was just A and B. Okay. And so this is a note to all potential manifesto writers. Yeah. If you are trying to keep your identity a secret, you're probably refrained from publishing

your 35,000 word manifesto. Because you're going to out yourself and that's exactly what happened with Ted Kaczynski. The Washington Post and the New York Times agreed to do this. Actually, the New York Times is like, why don't you do it? We'll just half the cost of printing and distribution.

Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting. I'm surprised they didn't both want to. But the Post said, we'll do it. If you go havesies, which is adorable. And they did. And then they said, here's what we'll do though. We're not going to just put it in the newspaper. We're going to print it in a special section

with its own typeface and it became a sensation. Like people wanted copies of this thing, like extra copies for themselves. Wrote the newspaper and they're like, we don't have any other copies. And like we said, this was the last time that this was sort of a viable, like now anyone can throw anything on the internet.

So it was a really interesting time in the course of humanity that this thing came out. As far as like mad bombers go, having the Washington Post print your 35,000 word manifesto is pretty prestigious, especially at that time. I can't decide whether it'd be more prestigious today because anybody can just put it out on the internet. Probably so.

But yeah, but I think at the time, I mean like newspapers were at, still at the height of their influence, you know? Yeah. Who knows, but at the very, you can imagine Ted Kaczynski's surprise and delight when the Times published this thing. And like you said, it was a sensation,

but it made its way into the hands of Linda Patrick, who was actually a childhood friend of David Kaczynski and now his wife. And she noticed this, or she read this manifesto and said, this sounds an awful lot like your brother, Teddy, to David and he read it and he said, oh no. Should we take a break? Yeah.

All right, that's it. Man, what a cliffhanger. Nice work. Thanks. ["Hey Dude, The 90s"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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

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

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

on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, good cliffhanger. Thank you. I feel like we're dangling by our fingernails. So where we left off was Linda Patrick, a wife of, well, sister-in-law of the Unabomber, wife of David, who was the younger brother,

said, take a look at this, David read it, and said, this sounds very much like my brother. In fact, there was a term. What was the term that he used that was sort of a dead giveaway? Cool-headed logicians. Yeah, that's not something you hear every day. I don't use that very frequently.

Yeah, so he saw that. And I think I can imagine just the stomach churning, sinking feeling that he got, when he saw those three words especially. Yeah, like you said, that was the dead giveaway. I think if you put the whole thing together though, he and his family had been receiving, actually he hadn't, leading up to I think 1989,

he had been receiving letters from his brother about the same stuff. So I think even without that term, he probably would have been pretty convinced. But he was convinced enough to go, his wife, Linda, contacted a friend, who was an investigator for a lawyer. And this woman kind of took charge of this

and hired like a criminal profiler who looked at the letters from Ted and then the Unabomber Manifesto and said, I'm pretty sure this is the same guy. They hired another lawyer who represented the family and they went to the FBI and said, we think we know who the Unabomber is. Yeah, I thought that was interesting

and that he didn't go right to the FBI. Like he took, it seems like, I don't know how much time, but- It said weeks? Yeah, I went through a lot of effort privately to suss out whether or not they thought it was legit. I mean, I think he didn't, I mean by all accounts he didn't want to do this.

And he was even worried what his mother would think. And finally the mother did say, she took his head in her hands and kissed him. And basically it was like, I know you love Ted and you had to do this basically. She said, I knew it was you, Fredo. Yeah. So now we should jump back in time

and sort of explain the relationship with David and Ted and how they got here because they were estranged for 20 years before this. Interestingly, we talked about had he not decided to start sending bombs, he could have led a more productive life. Oh, easily. But David was sort of cut from the same cloth.

Like they bought this land together in Montana. Hold on, I wanna say something here, Chuck. You just said that he could have led a more productive life. I said that he could have been more productive earlier too. Do you realize what we're talking about? Is we're saying that he could have better fit into the technological system that he was railing again. Well, or not,

or maybe you've been an outspoken advocate in a productive way on Facebook. Shit, there you go. Sorry for interrupting, I just had to point that out. No, that's all right. So they originally had bought this land in Montana together. They both had these sort of similar ideals about removing themselves from society.

For David though, it was like back to nature, getting out of the rift, the hustle and bustle of the world. To find himself. To find himself, like a spiritual journey. For Ted, it seems very much like I don't like people. Yeah. He was a bit of a misanthrope and they even have stories dating back to when

he was like seven years old, when David asked mom, like what's wrong with Teddy? Like when people come over to visit, he runs to the Attican Hides, something's wrong. And his mom said, you know what? When he was a baby, he was hospitalized for a few days with a rash and being separated from us for those few days

is what caused this. So, and then she says, so don't ever abandon Teddy. Yeah. That's what he fears the most, right? Yeah, not quite true actually. So she lays that on this kid. This is like his older brother

that she's talking to him about, you know? But he said that as they grew up, he was kind of like Ted's entree into socialization. David would go to parties and I get the impression that Ted would kind of tag along, even though he was the older brother. But that's not to say that David didn't, he says that he looked up to Ted.

And Ted was just this whiz kid wonder boy genius when it came to math. You said he went to Harvard at 16. Like say that again, man. He went to Harvard at age 16. Yeah, I think he got like in master's and his PhD in math by the time he was like 20 or 21 or something. Okay, yeah.

So this guy was a mathematical genius who from what the Atlantic article by Alston Chase says, kind of lays a lot of this at his dad's feet for pushing him at a very early age to become like to go to Harvard, to jump a couple of grades in school, that kind of stuff. So he was already, you could say misanthropic, potentially socially maladjusted.

Who knows? He wasn't like the most easy going kid on the block. But supposedly once you got to know him, especially if you were a grownup and not one of his peers, he was very easy to be around actually. Yeah, so little brother David, he looks up to Ted. He tries to go to Harvard, is rejected. And then like I said, they bought this land together.

Ted builds this cabin. David later on says, well, can I build a cabin? You know, I want to build a cabin on this land too. Ted was like, no way, dude. This is my cabin and my land. So David, I'm sure was very disappointed. He goes, finds his own land in West Texas, builds his cabin and they corresponded for many years,

a thousand miles apart about their journeys toward living off grid and getting back to nature. Yeah, I think he lived just like Ted did for at least eight years, I believe. And then he said his brother disowned him when he sent a letter saying that he was moving out of the Forbidden Zone into upstate New York to go marry Linda Patrick, right?

Yeah, I think he thought he was a sellout basically. That's what I get too. He sent him like a, I think a blistering 20 page letter saying, I'm done with you, we're done. And that was it. That was the last contact that he had had aside from one letter after their dad was diagnosed with lung cancer, that was the only contact he'd had.

So he hasn't spoken to his brother, corresponded really with his brother since 1989. Yeah, they had this system worked out where if there was a family emergency, then David was to put a line, draw a line under the stamp of the letter. And that's the only thing that he would open. If you send me any other letters, I'll burn them.

And if you take advantage of this system and fool me by putting a line under it and it's not an emergency, then I'm never gonna open a letter again. So he did send that one letter with a line under the stamp about his father. Ted didn't even reply, except to say thank you for sticking to our system.

And he didn't even mention the fact that their father was dying. Right. So that was the last time they corresponded. And that was in 1994. But that was it for the correspondence from basically from 89 onward. David and Ted were estranged.

And so come 1995, David's already not spoken with his brother for six years. And now he suddenly is faced with this idea of turning his brother in, knowing that he's probably gonna get the death penalty. So when they finally did go to the FBI and the FBI had their own linguistic analysis done on these letters.

And they said, yeah, this is the guy. David started this campaign to paint his brother as mentally ill in order to thwart the federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty. So apparently they told him that they wouldn't. And then they reneged on that. And he felt extremely betrayed.

So much so that he's apparently a crusader for an anti-death penalty activist now based on that betrayal from the federal prosecutors. Yeah, this is amazing. He works, he's the head of the New Yorkers against the death penalty group. And get this, I know you know this, talking to everyone else.

Oh, okay. His closest friend, his bestie is Gary Wright, who was one of the computer store owners in Utah, who was a victim of Ted. Yeah, they became good friends, best friends. He had 200 pieces of shrapnel lodged in his body from one of Ted's bombs. And now he and David Kaczynski are best buds.

And one of, so also from that same bomb, that was 1987, one of, is it Gary Wright? Gary U.S. Bonds? No, Gary Wright? Yeah, I think so. Okay, Gary Wright's employee is the woman who saw the Unabomber and gave that description to the sketch artist.

Wow. I know, there was a turning point in a bunch of people's lives right there. Yeah, that sketch didn't even look like him really though. I've seen people be like, gosh, it's the spinning image of him. It's like, no, once you have oversized aviators on, it doesn't look like anybody.

Yeah. So, David turns on his brother, Ted Kaczynski's arrested on April 3rd, 1996. He pleads guilty in 1998, and he's been serving his eight consecutive life sentences ever since. And recently there was a big furor, I think in 2012 or 13,

when the, 2012, I guess, because it would have been his 50th class reunion. Yeah. Harvard, the people running his class and publishing the class directory, reached out to him like they did everybody else in the class. That's crazy.

And sent him a form to fill out. And he filled it out and sent it back in and they published it. Yeah, he said his job was prisoner. And that he listed his, was it eight life sentences as awards? Yeah, and gave his address at the Florence, Colorado, Supermax facility.

And it was a huge, obviously it was a huge embarrassment for Harvard because they were not paying attention. And a bit of a scandal too. I think Ted Kaczynski probably thought it was hilarious. Yeah, should we, should we finish with a little de neumas about this weird Harvard experiment?

Only if you say de neumas again. All right, so going back in time once again to fall of 59 through spring of 1962, there was an experiment at Harvard University led by psychologist Henry Murray. And how they describe it here in this article is a disturbing and what would now be seen as ethically indefensible experiment on 22 undergrads.

They, each undergrad that took part, Ted Kaczynski, was one of them had a, had a code name for the purposes of anonymity. And ironically, Ted Kaczynski's was lawful, was his code name. So basically what would happen is, is they would get, it was, it was interrogation is what they would go through.

So they would go into a room, they would go downstairs to this basement room and then a voice would say, you know, enter the room, they would enter the room, they would sit down and be faced with a spotlight that would blind them in an otherwise dark room. And then they would sit in front of a board of inquisitors that would order them to do things,

kind of start slow and then eventually build up to where they're screaming and yelling at these kids. These, in Ted's case, I guess like 16, 17 years old and berating them basically. And this was, this was not just like you, you dressed like a slob or, you know, your mother's meatloaf is terrible. Like part, the step one of all this was that you're,

you were supposed to talk about some of your most deeply held beliefs and most treasured beliefs and values and views on things. And then these inquisitors who were actually like, law student, graduate students would harangue over your beliefs and explain to you why they were so stupid and why you were such a useless human being

for holding these beliefs. And the whole point of this, the entire point was to find out the psychological limits for humiliation. And stress brought on by humiliation and when people would crack. And this is not a one-time thing that he went and did for extra credit. This was carried out over three years.

Again, the kid's 16 at the time. He's already socially awkward. He's already isolated from his peers just by the virtue of his intelligence, let alone his personal choices at being isolated from everybody. And he's being harangued by like these people about his most deeply held beliefs.

As brother David said in another article, he doesn't believe that that had anything to do with creating the unabomber. Plenty of other people are like, no, I'm not so sure about that. Well, here's what I think. And what was the name of the article from the Atlantic? Did Harvard create the unabomber?

Harvard and the making of the unabomber. Yeah, it certainly didn't help, especially when he had this core belief system that was so firmly entrenched for to sit in a room for three years off and on and be criticized and screamed at and called a liar and denigrated like that. I'm sure it did not help.

Yeah, supposedly he wasn't a very relativistic person. It was things were black and white. And if you believe something was right, it was right. So to have it assailed like that. Yeah, surely it had some effect somewhere. It just couldn't. Well, I mean, Kaczynski or Ted Kaczynski later said that Harvard were the worst years of his life.

Yeah. So in some small way, I guess he got him back by getting that published in the directory and embarrassing the class. Yeah. Yeah. Prevention is a meal best served cold through a tiny slot and a metal door.

Doing eight life sentences. Yeah. If you got anything else? I got nothing else, man. That was a good one. It really was. And again, I think it bears repeating. Nothing about what we've said that agreed

with the unabomber and his theories has anything to do with agreeing with violence of any kind, especially indiscriminate random killing of people with bombs through the mail. It's probably the most cowardly way you could injure or hurt anybody. So we don't agree with that at all. It's fine to say it one more time.

Yeah, for sure. If you want to know more about the unabomber, it's all over the place. You can go type that word, U-N-A-B-O-M-B-E-R in your favorite search bar and it will bring up lots of stuff. In the meantime, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Subway episode.

Remember, we released our selects on Saturdays. And I believe this, I don't know, was this one of your picks? No. I guess it was mine then, on Subways. So it's an old episode, but a recent re-release. Hola, Josh and Chuck. I'm in Andrea from Mexico.

I've been listening to your podcast for a bit over a year now, but it's the first time I'm writing in. I listen to Subways, and even though it's a re-run, I really wanted to comment because I have some fun facts. As you mentioned in the episode, sometimes digging for Subways has led to curious discoveries. In case of Mexico City, the digging of the Metro led to the discovery of a lot of the remains

of the Aztec City, even though it was common knowledge that the Spanish city had been built over the ruins of... Ooh, here we go. Tina Tietzan. That was pretty much it. Close. It was only when excavation started in the 60s that they could uncover a whole underground world.

Since then, they have uncovered more than 20,000 archeological objects and continue to find new things to this day. If you have a chance to walk around the city center, you may find the templo mayor right beside the Spanish cathedral. Who else can say their everyday commute includes walking by the altar of Ejecatal.

Nice. God of wind. Anyway, I think these are very interesting, fun facts that I wanted to share with you. And the fellow listeners, maybe one day you can do a show on how Mexico City works episode. The history of the city is super interesting. I think it's amazing.

You can literally see the layers of time in the city today. And she attaches some pictures. And this is Andrea Gonzalez. And, man, we should do a show in Mexico City. Sure, man. I bet you we could get a thousand people. We'll find out. Into a room.

I know we haven't delved outside of English speaking countries before, but I bet you of all the cities, we could probably do so in Mexico City. Yeah, if Morrissey does good in Mexico City, I'm sure we could too. That's kind of, we try and model our career after Maz. Did you see that picture she sent? Yeah.

Of the altar of the wind god? I'm like, humans were sacrificed on that. That's insane that you just walked past that on your way to the subway every day. I know. It's pretty interesting. Well, if you want to tell us about your interesting commute, we always want to hear stuff like that.

You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast or at Josh Ohm-Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or at Stuff You Should Know, the Facebook page. You can send us an email with stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

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