September 21, 2023 • 38 mins
As part of this special bonus series, Dani and great mind Dr. Mark Epstein explore the powerful themes that underscore a memorable Family Secrets story from our third season.
Listen to David Kacyznski's episode, 'What's Wrong With Teddy?' here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It was an impossible dilemma in the sense that we
realized that any decision we made could lead to somebody's death.
We'd have to go through the rest of our lives
knowing that someone had died because we had failed to act.
On the other hand, I had to ask myself, what
would it be like to go through the rest of
(00:28):
my life with my brother's blood in my hands.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
That's David Kazinski, author of the book Every Last Tie,
The Story of the Unibomber and his Family. David is
the younger brother of Ted Kaczinski, a brilliant, troubled, reclusive
former mauth professor who began sending bombs through the mail
in nineteen seventy eight, killing three people and injuring twenty
(00:55):
three others. When the FBI finally closed in on Ted
Kazini after a nationwide manhunt that spanned years, it was
because they received the ultimate tip the Unibomber's brother had
turned him in. In this special bonus episode, I speak
(01:18):
with the therapist and writer Mark Epstein, whose work in his
many wonderful best selling books, explores the interface between psychiatry
and Buddhist philosophy. Mark, and I will delve into the
themes and ideas that present themselves in this absolutely extraordinary episode.
If you haven't listened to What's Wrong with Teddy, which
(01:39):
first dropped in season three, I hope you'll go back
and listen, either before or after this conversation. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept
(02:01):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. Mark Epstein, it's such a
pleasure to have you on Family Secrets. Thanks for joining me.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
I'm curious what struck you when you were listening to
What's Wrong with Teddy?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, the first thing that struck me was, oh, my god,
you're asking me to listen to this episode about Ted Kaczynski.
I had no idea when you reached out to me
that that's what it was going to be. And I
thought the episode was extraordinary, and the humanity of the
brother is what struck me. The vulnerability and honesty and
(02:45):
courage of the brother, you know, really impacted me. And
then the story itself was fascinating. I really had no
idea I had read one newspaper article about the brother
turning him in, but I hadn't read his book, and
I had never heard and talk, and so you know,
I was I was very into it right from the beginning.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I think his David's humanity and his sort of extraordinary
spirit of say, generosity toward his I mean, there's just
not an ounce of blame even or bitterness or anger.
I heard none of that. I felt like, this is
somebody who really really struggled with his brother's mental illness
(03:31):
and was coming to terms with understanding that his brother
was mentally ill, and then you know, discovering that, you know,
coming to realize who his brother was, which is such
an extraordinary part of the story. But I don't want
to get ahead of ourselves. He really gets into Ted's
early life, and you know, the title refers to David
(03:53):
saying to his mother as a kid, you know, as
maybe a seven or eight year old kid, what's wrong
with Teddy? And David idolized him? And I wonder in
some of the detail which was all kind of new
to me that I learned when he and I were
having this conversation, but about his early life, and then
(04:15):
what happened to Teddy, both as an infant and then
as a very young freshman at Harvard. I was wondering
how that struck you.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Well, I thought all of that, all that material in
the first the first half maybe of the conversation where David,
who's seven years younger than Ted, is talking about their
early life, Ted's early life and the incipient signs of
what probably was schizophrenia in Ted. You know, I'm wary
(04:50):
of the diagnosis and too much labeling. But one of
the things that I learned really in becoming a psychiatrist,
working in patient units in psychiatric hospitals for a number
of years in my training was that schizophenia is or
real disease, you know, and some people really have it,
and you can be a brilliant person and still have it.
(05:12):
And it has the feel I mean, we don't understand.
Science hasn't penetrated it, but it has the feel of, oh,
this must be a genetic, organic, biological thing, because the
symptoms are so distinctive. But what David describes is that
you know, his older brother, who, as you say, he idolized,
(05:34):
got progressively more weird, more withdrawn, less social, more preoccupied,
as he moved into his like laid adolescens you know,
were mid to late adolescents as I remember it, and David,
who you know, they went camping together, they did all
(05:55):
kinds of stuff together. But at a certain point he
becomes conscious of Ted having no friends and being kind
of sullen and withdrawn and isolated and sometimes weirdly angry.
I think, and says, you know, has that conversation that
you quote with his mom, his loving mom. He makes
a point, you know, they grew up in a love
(06:16):
and household, and intellectual household, a house full of love
and books and good relationships, you know. But somehow Ted
starts to drift off a little bit. And I think
he goes to Harvard at sixteen or something. He's got
an IQ of one hundred and sixty seven. You know,
he's a math genius. He's clearly brilliant. And then he
(06:38):
gets to Harvard and he becomes part of a study,
one of these social psychology studies that was popular in
the early sixties. There are some famous ones, Philip Zimbardo,
California and so on. But this guy, Henry Murray, who's
a legendary figure in the education and psychology department at
(07:00):
Harvard when I got there in the seventies, he was
still around. He was doing a study to see how
very brilliant Harvard undergraduates reacted to being brutalized basically made
fun of. That's how I remember it, anyway, And Ted
agrees to be part of the study and stays with
(07:21):
it even when he's being tortured, made fun of and
so on, because he wanted to prove that he that
he could handle it.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, that was a really haunting thing that he said.
Where he later when he was on trial as the
unibomber and that study came up, and the abusiveness of
that study and the trauma and the gaslighting, and he says,
I wanted to prove that I couldn't be broken. Maybe
he was already broken. Certainly it would have made things worse.
(07:53):
It would have made things worse for a completely healthy person.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Yeah, I don't think it's enough to explain the skit, Sophia,
if that's what he had. People who are vulnerable can
maybe be you know, the illness seems to have a
life of its own. But maybe some people can be
tipped over if they're if they're in the wrong environment
and that was certainly a toxic environment that Ted Kaczynski
(08:19):
was being subjected to.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah. I mean, when I was preparing for this conversation,
I remembered that you had gone to Harvard and I
didn't do the math, But were you there when Henry
Murray was there?
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Henry Murray was it? Yeah, I never took courses from him.
I was there from seventy one to seventy five. I
was an undergraduate. I majored in psychology, but they called
it social relations there and a graduate student teachers of
mine had studied with Henry Murray, and so I knew
of him. He was a you know, a foundational figure,
(08:57):
and he had no reputation as being any kind of problem,
you know, So I was totally unaware of these kinds
of studies. There were a couple of famous studies, one
where a psychologist got college students to give electric shocks,
painful electric shocks to students to see who would keep going,
(09:19):
you know, they were instructed to keep going even when
the subjects were expressing terrible pain. And there was another
famous study that several movies were made of it in
the past few years. Philips embardo that I referred to
before where students were divided up into like prisoners and guards,
and the guards students became increasingly sadistic when given room
(09:44):
to act out on the prisoner students. And there were
no checks and bounces on these social psychology experiments in
those days that the researchers were sort of free or
much freer to concoct these kind of processes, you know,
and their famous experiment because they showed how relatively good
(10:07):
hearted normal people can with just a little bit of
environmental encouragement, be turned into Nazi guards or there's a
lot of implications for what happened, you know, in the
war in Iraq and so on. So we learned from
those studies, but the people who were the subjects certainly
was not a good thing. In those same times, those
(10:31):
same days, you know, Timothy Leary was giving LSD to
prisoners and so on in Massachusetts, there was a kind
of freedom for the psychologists to see what kind of
information they could elicit from these kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
One of the heartbreaking things about that chapter in Ted's
story is that he was under age. He was in eighteen,
and so the school actually had to get permission from
his parents, and his parents seemed really, as you said,
really loving, thoughtful of people, and yeah, and his mom
(11:10):
had this feeling of, well, maybe this will be good
for him, and he doesn't have any friends, and maybe
this will help him, and of course it's Harvard, so
maybe all of this will be a good thing, and
that's why she gave permission. And there also seems like
there's so much as the story progresses, as David narrates it,
(11:33):
that has to do with a kind of a very
loving second guessing that goes on in the family. Their
mother also says to David when he's quite young that
she thinks that one of the reasons why Teddy is
the way that he is is because he had been
hospitalized as a nine month old and unable to see
(11:54):
his parents, and that when he came back from that
hospital visit, he was changed and he stopped making eye contact.
And it seems like there's throughout the story a sense
of a kind of almost gentle personal culpability in a way,
like thinking, well, maybe it was this, maybe it was that,
maybe I shouldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Yeah, well that you know. I mean, when he was
nine months old, he had a rash Teddy and he
went to he was in the hospital for a week,
and then when he when he came back, he seemed different.
But lots of kids, lots of kids have to be
in the hospital and when difficult things happen, when illness strikes.
(12:37):
When One of the things I learned when I was
in medical school from a very good family doctor at
Mass General was the thing called attribution theory, you know,
which is that we may when things happen, when we
get sick, or when someone that we love gets sick,
we make stuff up about what the cause is when
we don't know, you know. And doctors used to call
(13:01):
every everything they didn't understand psychosomatic, you know, they were
just they did the same thing. If you had an ulcer,
it was psychosomatic until they discovered that it was a
bacteria that caused the ulcer. You know. But people do
that too when accidents happen, when someone gets cancer, when
you know, it's like, oh, it must have been this,
it must have been that. And I think you hear
(13:24):
that in this in this story, not that a week
in the hospital for a nine month old it wasn't
traumatic for the parents and for the child. But you know,
David talks in the podcast about the mother making him
promise in the aftermath of that, you know, don't don't
ever abandon your brother. That's what he fears the most,
(13:46):
you know, when when David was seven. So the mother
had obviously been really affected by that, that first separation
from her baby. And you can't blame her, but I
see it more as they you know, the first tiny
signs of what might have blossomed into schizophrenia, which usually
doesn't show itself until late adolescent, you know, your late teens,
(14:12):
early twenties, the symptoms usually start to come, and that
seems to have been the case with Ted Kaczynski. You know,
one of the things that struck me in the whole
story for David was that there were these series of
losses where he's very close to the brother, and then
(14:33):
the brother retreats even from David and from the parents,
and sends letters to the parents saying, you know, I
don't ever want to speak to you again, et cetera.
And so they lose contact and then the whole thing
of the reveal that maybe he's the unibomber. So there's
one loss, two losses, you know, each time there's another
(14:54):
gulf that descends upon the relationship. You know, it's so tragic.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, and makes it all the more extraordinary the way
that he has absorbed and metabolized this life, this family,
this life, this brother into his life as an adult.
So the break that happens between David and Ted, that
(15:20):
is really the permanent break, is when David, who has
been living a kind of monastic life himself, he describes
it as a pilgrimage, and his solitude is very much
in the direction of wanting to know himself better, whereas
Ted's is in the direction of getting angrier and hostile
and blaming. But then David falls in love with a
(15:42):
childhood friend, and that, for Ted is a total break
in the relationship and he cuts things off. He says,
I don't want to have anything to do with you anymore.
And there's this moment that also really struck me, and
I wonder what you thought of it, where David makes
this very gentle inquiry because he's now with Linda and
(16:04):
they're getting married and they're going to spend their lives together,
and he he says, was Ted thinking that love is finite?
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Oh? That's interesting, I don't remember. I don't remember that phrase.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
He uses the metaphor of like pieces of a pie.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Yes, I do remember, yes, yes, yes, the whole story
of David. I mean, that's the other fascinating thing in
the podcast. I did a little research on the side
after listening to it. David goes to Texas and digs
a hole and covers it with like metal sheeting and
lives in the hole for like for a couple of years.
(16:39):
I mean, Dave David is emula after going camping in
the Yukon with Ted, you know, they have this real
the two of them go and and really bond and
are living in the wilderness, and then they each go
Ted goes to Montana or wherever, and David goes to
Texas and digs the hole, and that somehow comes out
(17:01):
of that realizing that he wants to marry this girl
who he knew when he was eleven and tracks her
down and marries her and then tells Ted, and Ted
responds as your as you're describing, like it's almost like
David was his accolyte, you know, and now he's rejected
the Guru and found another, you know, somebody else to
(17:25):
bond with, and Ted, as you say, you know, writes
him off, and the woman that David marries is because
is into Buddhism, and I think becomes or was already
a professor of religious studies and a Buddhist practitioner in
upstate New York at Union College. And I think you
(17:46):
can hear in that phrase, is love finite maybe David's
later embrace of kind of spiritual understanding that he wasn't
brought up and they were brought up in a very academic, intellectual,
non religious, non spiritual kind of environment, similar to the
(18:08):
one that I was brought up in. But then I
think you discover something about the infiniteness of love that
would be very different from the way that Teddy is thinking.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
I love that phrase, the infiniteness of love, and it feels,
you know, I'm going back to something that David said
early in our conversation, which was that his family's core
value was the life of the mind, and that part
of that core value was that by developing your mind,
you could develop your spirit and become someone who could
(18:43):
really contribute to the world. But the mind was the portal,
or the mind was the vehicle.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, well, I think they were definitely humanists, and you know,
I grew up in an academic environment in New Haven.
My father was a professor of medicine at Yale, and
so I really understand that, you know, that belief in
the life of the mind as being fundamental. But I've
had the experience, you know, as a practicing therapist with
(19:11):
parents who have these brilliant, brilliant but asocial kids. You
know where the hope is, Oh, my kid is so brilliant.
You know, he's got an IQ of one hundred and
fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred and seventy. He's doing math,
you know, he's doing calculus in fifth grade kind of thing.
And there's such a veneration of intelligence that it's easy
(19:37):
to overlook, you know, what's missing and to try to
get the help that those kind of brilliant but remote
kids need. And I don't know that you can head
off a psychotic illness, you know that's destined to come
(19:59):
in in one third decade. But some of those kids,
some of those kids.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Can learn to relate.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
You can hear in David's talking about his mom how
much his mom was wishing for that for her older
son and hoping that it could be David who could
help him, could be Harvard, that could help him, you know.
And then at the end, at the end, David is
scared to tell the mom that he thinks that Teddy
is the unifomber. He waits to tell her until it's proven,
(20:31):
and he's worried, you know. And then and then she
gives that beautiful response.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
You know that I know what you're doing.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
You're doing out of love.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Basically, Yeah, that was extraordinary. I mean, I'm hoping that
people listening to our episode will go back and listen
to What's wrong with Teddy.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Oh, it's so moving, We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
I mean, there's a part of me that wants to
talk about every single aspect of it, and part of
me that wants to leave some of the surprises in
there as surprises. But I think I do want to
say for listeners that might not know the unibomber story,
first of all, one of the way that ultimately Teddy
(21:21):
was caught is that he writes a manifesto. He's already
been killing people with these bombs that he sends through
the mail, and he writes a manifesto and he contacts
newspapers and asks them to publish it and says, if
you publish my manifesto, I won't send any more bombs,
and so the manifesto is published, and somehow that's how
(21:45):
Glinda sees it.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Yeah, he had sent sixteen bombs between nineteen seventy eight
and nineteen ninety he'd sent sixteen bombs, killed three people,
injured twenty three people. And then he writes to the
New York Times on the Washington Post and says, if
you publish my entire thing, I'll stop. And it was
I remember when that when it was published, and it
(22:07):
was like like how you know, it was like a long,
long thing, and they had big debates at the newspapers
whether to publish it or not because it was a
sort of extortion, but they decided, you know, if they
could save lives, it was worth doing. And the story
that's told in the podcast is that David wasn't really
(22:27):
paying that much attention to the unibomber or to the
manifesto or anything, but his wife read it, and his
wife had never met Ted, but had read the letter
that Ted had sent to David saying I don't want
to be your brother anymore.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I don't ever want to.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Talk to you again. You know, when he was breaking
off contact with both the parents and with David, and
she recognized in the syntax, in the in the sort
of drivenness of the prose, recognized that there was a similarity,
and she like woke David from his torpor, you know,
(23:09):
and said, this could be your brother. You know. She
sort of pulled him, kicking and screaming into looking at it.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And it struck me how careful they were from that point,
from the point where where Linda says to him, I
think that this could be your brother, they're very careful.
I mean, they have experts look at it.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
Yeah. They brought it to a psychiatrist, yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, And they then brought it to a forensic expert
who tells them that he thinks that there's a sixty
percent chance that these letters were written by the same person,
whatever that is, whatever that is. It's sort of a
terrible number because it's it's you know, if it were
like ninety nine point nine percent or if it was
like three percent, but sixty percent is.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Like, this is what they need a eye for.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Oh boy, just tipping it to a I would have
solved this. And then David decides to go forward without
telling his mom, and as you mentioned, and the reason.
The reason is, well, what if he's wrong, and why
put her through that? I mean, every step of the way,
there's an incredible amount of compassion and care.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Well and a real ethical dilemma. That's what struck me,
you know, because he's deciding should I turn in my
brother in order to save you know, potentially save lives
like which is worse, you know, like squealing on the
brother who could potentially be face to death penalty, you know,
(24:41):
or allowing him to continue and possibly kill other people.
And he makes the decision to turn him in with
the hope that he can save him from the death penalty.
You know. That's sort of the fasting and bargain that
he makes with himself and doesn't go so smoothly. Let's
just put it that way.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yeah, you know, I found myself thinking about the flip
side of compassion, if it's a flip side, which is
cruelty because there were things that went on, you know,
Promises were made to David and Linda that they were
going to be kept out of it, that they they
would remain anonymous, and the opposite of that happens, and
it's it's a media circus and they have to you know,
(25:26):
hide from from the media. And there's a moment that
he talks about it's only it's the only time I
heard a hint of anger in anything that he had
to say completely understandably, which is that there was a comedian,
there's a popular comedian at the time who made some
just really terrible joke about you know, these two brothers,
(25:46):
and one was the unibomber and the other one was
you know, I'm not even going to say it. And
there's this feeling I wonder if you could speak to
about when something happens in a family, you know, throughout
this podcast, you know, we're now working on the ninth
season of this podcast. It means I've had like ninety
deep dive conversations about secrets with guests, and it seems
(26:11):
like shame is such a huge and universal feeling among
among people who have either kept a secret, had a
secret kept from them, or had something happen in a
family that is, you know, in Jewish terms, a shanda.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
You know that it's it's like a just a a disgrace.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
A disgrace, and that it and that it spreads like
some kind of stain across a family.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what it reminded me of,
and it's sort of it's more like an association than
than a direct comparison. But in my family, when I
was maybe seven eight nine years old, I was playing
scrabble with my mom and she had an old Webster's
dictionary with a blue cover that she kept with the
(27:07):
scrabble scent. And I was looking up a word and
I opened up the dictionary and I noticed in my
mom's handwriting her name Cherry with a different last name
that either then her maiden name or her married name.
It was like Scherry Steinbeck or some name like that,
which was not her maiden name. And I was like,
what's this. And it turns out my mother was married
(27:30):
when she was in her twenties before she met my dad,
and her husband died had a heart attack when he
was like twenty eight twenty nine years old, and I
never knew and my father apparently never wanted to talk
about it, and so because it was sort of, you know,
made him feel bad, I think. And it wasn't until
(27:51):
my father died, which was like fifteen years ago, that
my mom, who was in in her eighties, in the
aftermath of my father dying, started talking about the death
of her first husband and she had had to keep it,
you know, like totally quiet. She gave the wedding pictures
to her sister to keep after her husband died, when
(28:13):
she met my father and so on. So this the
need and the family to preserve the secret, you know,
for the sake of somebody, because to you know, face
it head on. The Buddha I've I've been really helped
by Buddhist psychology and Buddhist meditation, the Buddha's first noble truth.
You know, when he said that life, it's usually translated
(28:35):
as life is suffering, but the word that he used, duka,
actually means hard to face. So he was saying, you know,
there's something always in all of our lives that's hard
to face, and when we when we turn away, when
we try not to look at it, that perpetuates our suffering,
you know. So I think all the stories that you're
(28:56):
sharing are often, if not all, is about what finally
happens when we confront the secrets, you know exactly, and
that unlesia, what that unleashas is that kind of infinite
love feeling that that David is talking about in this interview.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I'm curious with your mother. Was there that feeling? I
mean that it was she was finally, finally in her eighties,
you know, able to you know, to share and talk
about this, this this story she talked.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Think I think it it opened up a nice portal
between us. Now she's ninety nine. And what happened was
that I got a package of photographs in the mail
from an from a college friend of my mom's from
that time who had pictures of her and the husband
and their friends that he had been holding ever since
(29:48):
her husband had died. And I put him in touch
with my mom. And you know, I was hoping for
a lot more, for more of a flow of love
that would come out of it all, and my mom
was more like it was so long ago, you know
what I knew this for. But it was nice. It
helped her more and my dad. You know, I think
(30:10):
the damned up grief from the first loss, to let
that flow a little bit helped her to talk with
her kids, me and my siblings, you know, about my dad,
and I think it all needed to happen the way
it happened.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
So this episode is the only one I've ever done
where I had two guests on, and the second guest
who comes on this episode is a man named Gary Wright.
(30:49):
And I just found that one of the most moving
parts of this whole story is that in the wake
of Ted's conviction and David does succeed in Ted not
receiving the death penalty, both David and Linda and David's
mom start reaching out to Ted's victims as I don't
(31:14):
know a kind of you know, something like a not
a reparation or you know, like there's it's just something
that they have to do, they are absolutely compelled to do.
And Gary Wright, who was a victim of one of
Ted's bombs, whose life was completely altered by his injuries,
(31:35):
mentions at one point that he had two hundred pieces
of shrapnel removed and had to have three surgeries.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
And yeah, he had a computer store or something, and
that Ted blew up. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
But when David calls Gary Wright, and when eventually they connect,
Gary has such a passionate response so easily could have
gone another way, you know, that feeling of it's almost
(32:09):
it's biblical in a way, right, It's like it's well,
if it's if it was your brother, then it might
as well have been you. I don't want have anything
to do and many of many of the victims did
have that response, I don't want to have anything to
do with anybody named Kazinski. From a Buddhist philosophy perspective,
I kept on thinking about the ways in which they
(32:29):
end up interacting, becoming like virtual blood brothers. At one point,
David says, but Gary's Gary's initial response to him is,
this must be a tremendous burden for you, and there
probably aren't many people that you can talk to about
it who are sort of intimate with the situation and
feel free to call me anytime.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Yeah. Well, that whole thing is remarkable, not just from
a Buddhist perspective, but I would say also from a
psychodynamic perspective. One of the things that I realized is
that you know, Ted is convicted, saved from the death penalty,
goes to maximum security prison, where he writes and writes
and you know, sends his stuff out, becomes friends with
(33:13):
the Oklahoma City bomber and with one of the World
Trade Center bombers, and so on, But he won't talk
to David. You know, his whole letees. He just died
a year or two ago. The entire time he refused
to have contact with David. So then that I'm glad
you use that blood brother phrase, you know, because the
(33:34):
thing in David not just from a humanist, humanistic perspective,
but also from such a personal place. He lost the
brother once, he lost the brother twice, and then he
feels he feels compelled to reach out to the brother's victims,
you know. And also you know, he was given a
big reward for turning the brother in, and he used
(33:59):
that money. He made a fund with that money to
help the victims. So it's even more than Gary. But
Gary was one of these rare souls who could hear
where the overture was really coming from, I think. And
we just responded like like, you didn't make this happen,
and I didn't make this happen. And in a way,
(34:20):
we're both victims, and in that way we're bonded together,
you know, And so let's talk and this is. This
has been hard for me, but I know it's been
hard for you too, And so life is. Life has
this potential for suffering, and the only way to deal
(34:40):
with it is to face it, you know, so we
could face it together and so but each of them
are remarkable, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
They really are. And together there's just some kind of
mystical sense of being unstoppable. Together for the good, David
says so eloquently to the end of our conversation. He
talks about the balance between trust and self protection, and
(35:08):
and then he says, I'd rather err on the side
of trust.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, he's making himself so vulnerable reaching out
to all of those victims of the Brothers bombs, you know,
and the urge towards self protection would really inhibit those overtures,
you know. And and the trust in the in some
of those people's abilities to hear where he's coming from.
(35:34):
Is the kind of trust that he's talking about, a
deeper trust in our shared humanity, I think, And.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
There's so much to be learned from it. It's the
it's the opposite of circling the wagons, it's the opposite
of hungering down.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Well, that kind of trust, that kind of trust is
what brings people to therapy also, you know, because why
would why would you come to a therapist and open
yourself up to this person who you really don't know,
you know, and it's sort of a miracle in our
in our world that that that forum exists. You know,
(36:08):
two people coming together to say, to say everything, everything
that they're willing to share. You know, it's the same
kind of vulnerability. Really.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Yeah, no, that's that's that's really true. That's beautiful. At
the very end of the episode, or very close to
the end of the episode, David says, and it really
made me think about, you know, these times that we're
living in. And I mean, this is a conversation that
took place several years ago, but these words feel even
truer to me now.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Yeah, he says about violence.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yes, yeah, you say it.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
No, you say it, you got it.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
He says, violence looks powerful, but violence is weak and destructive.
Love doesn't look so powerful, but is by far the
more powerful force in the world.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Yeah. I thought that that was like the dalilaw coming
right through him. You know, violence is weak, Love is powerful,
and we have to you know, each of our our
agenda can be to get rid of our own inner violence,
you know, and that's how to less than the outer
violence that we're all having to cope with.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Mark, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been
an honor and really just wonderful digging into this amazing
episode with you and.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
No I'm so glad you you brought me into it.
It really was an important thing for me.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It was an impossible dilemma in the sense that we
realized that any decision we made could lead to somebody's death.
We'd have to go through the rest of our lives
knowing that someone had died because we had failed to act.
On the other hand, I had to ask myself, what
would it be like to go through the rest of
(00:28):
my life with my brother's blood in my hands.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
That's David Kazinski, author of the book Every Last Tie,
The Story of the Unibomber and his Family. David is
the younger brother of Ted Kaczinski, a brilliant, troubled, reclusive
former mauth professor who began sending bombs through the mail
in nineteen seventy eight, killing three people and injuring twenty
(00:55):
three others. When the FBI finally closed in on Ted
Kazini after a nationwide manhunt that spanned years, it was
because they received the ultimate tip the Unibomber's brother had
turned him in. In this special bonus episode, I speak
(01:18):
with the therapist and writer Mark Epstein, whose work in his
many wonderful best selling books, explores the interface between psychiatry
and Buddhist philosophy. Mark, and I will delve into the
themes and ideas that present themselves in this absolutely extraordinary episode.
If you haven't listened to What's Wrong with Teddy, which
(01:39):
first dropped in season three, I hope you'll go back
and listen, either before or after this conversation. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept
(02:01):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. Mark Epstein, it's such a
pleasure to have you on Family Secrets. Thanks for joining me.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
I'm curious what struck you when you were listening to
What's Wrong with Teddy?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, the first thing that struck me was, oh, my god,
you're asking me to listen to this episode about Ted Kaczynski.
I had no idea when you reached out to me
that that's what it was going to be. And I
thought the episode was extraordinary, and the humanity of the
brother is what struck me. The vulnerability and honesty and
(02:45):
courage of the brother, you know, really impacted me. And
then the story itself was fascinating. I really had no
idea I had read one newspaper article about the brother
turning him in, but I hadn't read his book, and
I had never heard and talk, and so you know,
I was I was very into it right from the beginning.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I think his David's humanity and his sort of extraordinary
spirit of say, generosity toward his I mean, there's just
not an ounce of blame even or bitterness or anger.
I heard none of that. I felt like, this is
somebody who really really struggled with his brother's mental illness
(03:31):
and was coming to terms with understanding that his brother
was mentally ill, and then you know, discovering that, you know,
coming to realize who his brother was, which is such
an extraordinary part of the story. But I don't want
to get ahead of ourselves. He really gets into Ted's
early life, and you know, the title refers to David
(03:53):
saying to his mother as a kid, you know, as
maybe a seven or eight year old kid, what's wrong
with Teddy? And David idolized him? And I wonder in
some of the detail which was all kind of new
to me that I learned when he and I were
having this conversation, but about his early life, and then
(04:15):
what happened to Teddy, both as an infant and then
as a very young freshman at Harvard. I was wondering
how that struck you.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Well, I thought all of that, all that material in
the first the first half maybe of the conversation where David,
who's seven years younger than Ted, is talking about their
early life, Ted's early life and the incipient signs of
what probably was schizophrenia in Ted. You know, I'm wary
(04:50):
of the diagnosis and too much labeling. But one of
the things that I learned really in becoming a psychiatrist,
working in patient units in psychiatric hospitals for a number
of years in my training was that schizophenia is or
real disease, you know, and some people really have it,
and you can be a brilliant person and still have it.
(05:12):
And it has the feel I mean, we don't understand.
Science hasn't penetrated it, but it has the feel of, oh,
this must be a genetic, organic, biological thing, because the
symptoms are so distinctive. But what David describes is that
you know, his older brother, who, as you say, he idolized,
(05:34):
got progressively more weird, more withdrawn, less social, more preoccupied,
as he moved into his like laid adolescens you know,
were mid to late adolescents as I remember it, and David,
who you know, they went camping together, they did all
(05:55):
kinds of stuff together. But at a certain point he
becomes conscious of Ted having no friends and being kind
of sullen and withdrawn and isolated and sometimes weirdly angry.
I think, and says, you know, has that conversation that
you quote with his mom, his loving mom. He makes
a point, you know, they grew up in a love
(06:16):
and household, and intellectual household, a house full of love
and books and good relationships, you know. But somehow Ted
starts to drift off a little bit. And I think
he goes to Harvard at sixteen or something. He's got
an IQ of one hundred and sixty seven. You know,
he's a math genius. He's clearly brilliant. And then he
(06:38):
gets to Harvard and he becomes part of a study,
one of these social psychology studies that was popular in
the early sixties. There are some famous ones, Philip Zimbardo,
California and so on. But this guy, Henry Murray, who's
a legendary figure in the education and psychology department at
(07:00):
Harvard when I got there in the seventies, he was
still around. He was doing a study to see how
very brilliant Harvard undergraduates reacted to being brutalized basically made
fun of. That's how I remember it, anyway, And Ted
agrees to be part of the study and stays with
(07:21):
it even when he's being tortured, made fun of and
so on, because he wanted to prove that he that
he could handle it.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, that was a really haunting thing that he said.
Where he later when he was on trial as the
unibomber and that study came up, and the abusiveness of
that study and the trauma and the gaslighting, and he says,
I wanted to prove that I couldn't be broken. Maybe
he was already broken. Certainly it would have made things worse.
(07:53):
It would have made things worse for a completely healthy person.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Yeah, I don't think it's enough to explain the skit, Sophia,
if that's what he had. People who are vulnerable can
maybe be you know, the illness seems to have a
life of its own. But maybe some people can be
tipped over if they're if they're in the wrong environment
and that was certainly a toxic environment that Ted Kaczynski
(08:19):
was being subjected to.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah. I mean, when I was preparing for this conversation,
I remembered that you had gone to Harvard and I
didn't do the math, But were you there when Henry
Murray was there?
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Henry Murray was it? Yeah, I never took courses from him.
I was there from seventy one to seventy five. I
was an undergraduate. I majored in psychology, but they called
it social relations there and a graduate student teachers of
mine had studied with Henry Murray, and so I knew
of him. He was a you know, a foundational figure,
(08:57):
and he had no reputation as being any kind of problem,
you know, So I was totally unaware of these kinds
of studies. There were a couple of famous studies, one
where a psychologist got college students to give electric shocks,
painful electric shocks to students to see who would keep going,
(09:19):
you know, they were instructed to keep going even when
the subjects were expressing terrible pain. And there was another
famous study that several movies were made of it in
the past few years. Philips embardo that I referred to
before where students were divided up into like prisoners and guards,
and the guards students became increasingly sadistic when given room
(09:44):
to act out on the prisoner students. And there were
no checks and bounces on these social psychology experiments in
those days that the researchers were sort of free or
much freer to concoct these kind of processes, you know,
and their famous experiment because they showed how relatively good
(10:07):
hearted normal people can with just a little bit of
environmental encouragement, be turned into Nazi guards or there's a
lot of implications for what happened, you know, in the
war in Iraq and so on. So we learned from
those studies, but the people who were the subjects certainly
was not a good thing. In those same times, those
(10:31):
same days, you know, Timothy Leary was giving LSD to
prisoners and so on in Massachusetts, there was a kind
of freedom for the psychologists to see what kind of
information they could elicit from these kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
One of the heartbreaking things about that chapter in Ted's
story is that he was under age. He was in eighteen,
and so the school actually had to get permission from
his parents, and his parents seemed really, as you said,
really loving, thoughtful of people, and yeah, and his mom
(11:10):
had this feeling of, well, maybe this will be good
for him, and he doesn't have any friends, and maybe
this will help him, and of course it's Harvard, so
maybe all of this will be a good thing, and
that's why she gave permission. And there also seems like
there's so much as the story progresses, as David narrates it,
(11:33):
that has to do with a kind of a very
loving second guessing that goes on in the family. Their
mother also says to David when he's quite young that
she thinks that one of the reasons why Teddy is
the way that he is is because he had been
hospitalized as a nine month old and unable to see
(11:54):
his parents, and that when he came back from that
hospital visit, he was changed and he stopped making eye contact.
And it seems like there's throughout the story a sense
of a kind of almost gentle personal culpability in a way,
like thinking, well, maybe it was this, maybe it was that,
maybe I shouldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Yeah, well that you know. I mean, when he was
nine months old, he had a rash Teddy and he
went to he was in the hospital for a week,
and then when he when he came back, he seemed different.
But lots of kids, lots of kids have to be
in the hospital and when difficult things happen, when illness strikes.
(12:37):
When One of the things I learned when I was
in medical school from a very good family doctor at
Mass General was the thing called attribution theory, you know,
which is that we may when things happen, when we
get sick, or when someone that we love gets sick,
we make stuff up about what the cause is when
we don't know, you know. And doctors used to call
(13:01):
every everything they didn't understand psychosomatic, you know, they were
just they did the same thing. If you had an ulcer,
it was psychosomatic until they discovered that it was a
bacteria that caused the ulcer. You know. But people do
that too when accidents happen, when someone gets cancer, when
you know, it's like, oh, it must have been this,
it must have been that. And I think you hear
(13:24):
that in this in this story, not that a week
in the hospital for a nine month old it wasn't
traumatic for the parents and for the child. But you know,
David talks in the podcast about the mother making him
promise in the aftermath of that, you know, don't don't
ever abandon your brother. That's what he fears the most,
(13:46):
you know, when when David was seven. So the mother
had obviously been really affected by that, that first separation
from her baby. And you can't blame her, but I
see it more as they you know, the first tiny
signs of what might have blossomed into schizophrenia, which usually
doesn't show itself until late adolescent, you know, your late teens,
(14:12):
early twenties, the symptoms usually start to come, and that
seems to have been the case with Ted Kaczynski. You know,
one of the things that struck me in the whole
story for David was that there were these series of
losses where he's very close to the brother, and then
(14:33):
the brother retreats even from David and from the parents,
and sends letters to the parents saying, you know, I
don't ever want to speak to you again, et cetera.
And so they lose contact and then the whole thing
of the reveal that maybe he's the unibomber. So there's
one loss, two losses, you know, each time there's another
(14:54):
gulf that descends upon the relationship. You know, it's so tragic.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, and makes it all the more extraordinary the way
that he has absorbed and metabolized this life, this family,
this life, this brother into his life as an adult.
So the break that happens between David and Ted, that
(15:20):
is really the permanent break, is when David, who has
been living a kind of monastic life himself, he describes
it as a pilgrimage, and his solitude is very much
in the direction of wanting to know himself better, whereas
Ted's is in the direction of getting angrier and hostile
and blaming. But then David falls in love with a
(15:42):
childhood friend, and that, for Ted is a total break
in the relationship and he cuts things off. He says,
I don't want to have anything to do with you anymore.
And there's this moment that also really struck me, and
I wonder what you thought of it, where David makes
this very gentle inquiry because he's now with Linda and
(16:04):
they're getting married and they're going to spend their lives together,
and he he says, was Ted thinking that love is finite?
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Oh? That's interesting, I don't remember. I don't remember that phrase.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
He uses the metaphor of like pieces of a pie.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Yes, I do remember, yes, yes, yes, the whole story
of David. I mean, that's the other fascinating thing in
the podcast. I did a little research on the side
after listening to it. David goes to Texas and digs
a hole and covers it with like metal sheeting and
lives in the hole for like for a couple of years.
(16:39):
I mean, Dave David is emula after going camping in
the Yukon with Ted, you know, they have this real
the two of them go and and really bond and
are living in the wilderness, and then they each go
Ted goes to Montana or wherever, and David goes to
Texas and digs the hole, and that somehow comes out
(17:01):
of that realizing that he wants to marry this girl
who he knew when he was eleven and tracks her
down and marries her and then tells Ted, and Ted
responds as your as you're describing, like it's almost like
David was his accolyte, you know, and now he's rejected
the Guru and found another, you know, somebody else to
(17:25):
bond with, and Ted, as you say, you know, writes
him off, and the woman that David marries is because
is into Buddhism, and I think becomes or was already
a professor of religious studies and a Buddhist practitioner in
upstate New York at Union College. And I think you
(17:46):
can hear in that phrase, is love finite maybe David's
later embrace of kind of spiritual understanding that he wasn't
brought up and they were brought up in a very academic, intellectual,
non religious, non spiritual kind of environment, similar to the
(18:08):
one that I was brought up in. But then I
think you discover something about the infiniteness of love that
would be very different from the way that Teddy is thinking.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
I love that phrase, the infiniteness of love, and it feels,
you know, I'm going back to something that David said
early in our conversation, which was that his family's core
value was the life of the mind, and that part
of that core value was that by developing your mind,
you could develop your spirit and become someone who could
(18:43):
really contribute to the world. But the mind was the portal,
or the mind was the vehicle.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, well, I think they were definitely humanists, and you know,
I grew up in an academic environment in New Haven.
My father was a professor of medicine at Yale, and
so I really understand that, you know, that belief in
the life of the mind as being fundamental. But I've
had the experience, you know, as a practicing therapist with
(19:11):
parents who have these brilliant, brilliant but asocial kids. You
know where the hope is, Oh, my kid is so brilliant.
You know, he's got an IQ of one hundred and
fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred and seventy. He's doing math,
you know, he's doing calculus in fifth grade kind of thing.
And there's such a veneration of intelligence that it's easy
(19:37):
to overlook, you know, what's missing and to try to
get the help that those kind of brilliant but remote
kids need. And I don't know that you can head
off a psychotic illness, you know that's destined to come
(19:59):
in in one third decade. But some of those kids,
some of those kids.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Can learn to relate.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
You can hear in David's talking about his mom how
much his mom was wishing for that for her older
son and hoping that it could be David who could
help him, could be Harvard, that could help him, you know.
And then at the end, at the end, David is
scared to tell the mom that he thinks that Teddy
is the unifomber. He waits to tell her until it's proven,
(20:31):
and he's worried, you know. And then and then she
gives that beautiful response.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
You know that I know what you're doing.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
You're doing out of love.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Basically, Yeah, that was extraordinary. I mean, I'm hoping that
people listening to our episode will go back and listen
to What's wrong with Teddy.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Oh, it's so moving, We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
I mean, there's a part of me that wants to
talk about every single aspect of it, and part of
me that wants to leave some of the surprises in
there as surprises. But I think I do want to
say for listeners that might not know the unibomber story,
first of all, one of the way that ultimately Teddy
(21:21):
was caught is that he writes a manifesto. He's already
been killing people with these bombs that he sends through
the mail, and he writes a manifesto and he contacts
newspapers and asks them to publish it and says, if
you publish my manifesto, I won't send any more bombs,
and so the manifesto is published, and somehow that's how
(21:45):
Glinda sees it.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Yeah, he had sent sixteen bombs between nineteen seventy eight
and nineteen ninety he'd sent sixteen bombs, killed three people,
injured twenty three people. And then he writes to the
New York Times on the Washington Post and says, if
you publish my entire thing, I'll stop. And it was
I remember when that when it was published, and it
(22:07):
was like like how you know, it was like a long,
long thing, and they had big debates at the newspapers
whether to publish it or not because it was a
sort of extortion, but they decided, you know, if they
could save lives, it was worth doing. And the story
that's told in the podcast is that David wasn't really
(22:27):
paying that much attention to the unibomber or to the
manifesto or anything, but his wife read it, and his
wife had never met Ted, but had read the letter
that Ted had sent to David saying I don't want
to be your brother anymore.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I don't ever want to.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Talk to you again. You know, when he was breaking
off contact with both the parents and with David, and
she recognized in the syntax, in the in the sort
of drivenness of the prose, recognized that there was a similarity,
and she like woke David from his torpor, you know,
(23:09):
and said, this could be your brother. You know. She
sort of pulled him, kicking and screaming into looking at it.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And it struck me how careful they were from that point,
from the point where where Linda says to him, I
think that this could be your brother, they're very careful.
I mean, they have experts look at it.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
Yeah. They brought it to a psychiatrist, yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, And they then brought it to a forensic expert
who tells them that he thinks that there's a sixty
percent chance that these letters were written by the same person,
whatever that is, whatever that is. It's sort of a
terrible number because it's it's you know, if it were
like ninety nine point nine percent or if it was
like three percent, but sixty percent is.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Like, this is what they need a eye for.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Oh boy, just tipping it to a I would have
solved this. And then David decides to go forward without
telling his mom, and as you mentioned, and the reason.
The reason is, well, what if he's wrong, and why
put her through that? I mean, every step of the way,
there's an incredible amount of compassion and care.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Well and a real ethical dilemma. That's what struck me,
you know, because he's deciding should I turn in my
brother in order to save you know, potentially save lives
like which is worse, you know, like squealing on the
brother who could potentially be face to death penalty, you know,
(24:41):
or allowing him to continue and possibly kill other people.
And he makes the decision to turn him in with
the hope that he can save him from the death penalty.
You know. That's sort of the fasting and bargain that
he makes with himself and doesn't go so smoothly. Let's
just put it that way.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yeah, you know, I found myself thinking about the flip
side of compassion, if it's a flip side, which is
cruelty because there were things that went on, you know,
Promises were made to David and Linda that they were
going to be kept out of it, that they they
would remain anonymous, and the opposite of that happens, and
it's it's a media circus and they have to you know,
(25:26):
hide from from the media. And there's a moment that
he talks about it's only it's the only time I
heard a hint of anger in anything that he had
to say completely understandably, which is that there was a comedian,
there's a popular comedian at the time who made some
just really terrible joke about you know, these two brothers,
(25:46):
and one was the unibomber and the other one was
you know, I'm not even going to say it. And
there's this feeling I wonder if you could speak to
about when something happens in a family, you know, throughout
this podcast, you know, we're now working on the ninth
season of this podcast. It means I've had like ninety
deep dive conversations about secrets with guests, and it seems
(26:11):
like shame is such a huge and universal feeling among
among people who have either kept a secret, had a
secret kept from them, or had something happen in a
family that is, you know, in Jewish terms, a shanda.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
You know that it's it's like a just a a disgrace.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
A disgrace, and that it and that it spreads like
some kind of stain across a family.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what it reminded me of,
and it's sort of it's more like an association than
than a direct comparison. But in my family, when I
was maybe seven eight nine years old, I was playing
scrabble with my mom and she had an old Webster's
dictionary with a blue cover that she kept with the
(27:07):
scrabble scent. And I was looking up a word and
I opened up the dictionary and I noticed in my
mom's handwriting her name Cherry with a different last name
that either then her maiden name or her married name.
It was like Scherry Steinbeck or some name like that,
which was not her maiden name. And I was like,
what's this. And it turns out my mother was married
(27:30):
when she was in her twenties before she met my dad,
and her husband died had a heart attack when he
was like twenty eight twenty nine years old, and I
never knew and my father apparently never wanted to talk
about it, and so because it was sort of, you know,
made him feel bad, I think. And it wasn't until
(27:51):
my father died, which was like fifteen years ago, that
my mom, who was in in her eighties, in the
aftermath of my father dying, started talking about the death
of her first husband and she had had to keep it,
you know, like totally quiet. She gave the wedding pictures
to her sister to keep after her husband died, when
(28:13):
she met my father and so on. So this the
need and the family to preserve the secret, you know,
for the sake of somebody, because to you know, face
it head on. The Buddha I've I've been really helped
by Buddhist psychology and Buddhist meditation, the Buddha's first noble truth.
You know, when he said that life, it's usually translated
(28:35):
as life is suffering, but the word that he used, duka,
actually means hard to face. So he was saying, you know,
there's something always in all of our lives that's hard
to face, and when we when we turn away, when
we try not to look at it, that perpetuates our suffering,
you know. So I think all the stories that you're
(28:56):
sharing are often, if not all, is about what finally
happens when we confront the secrets, you know exactly, and
that unlesia, what that unleashas is that kind of infinite
love feeling that that David is talking about in this interview.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I'm curious with your mother. Was there that feeling? I
mean that it was she was finally, finally in her eighties,
you know, able to you know, to share and talk
about this, this this story she talked.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Think I think it it opened up a nice portal
between us. Now she's ninety nine. And what happened was
that I got a package of photographs in the mail
from an from a college friend of my mom's from
that time who had pictures of her and the husband
and their friends that he had been holding ever since
(29:48):
her husband had died. And I put him in touch
with my mom. And you know, I was hoping for
a lot more, for more of a flow of love
that would come out of it all, and my mom
was more like it was so long ago, you know
what I knew this for. But it was nice. It
helped her more and my dad. You know, I think
(30:10):
the damned up grief from the first loss, to let
that flow a little bit helped her to talk with
her kids, me and my siblings, you know, about my dad,
and I think it all needed to happen the way
it happened.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
So this episode is the only one I've ever done
where I had two guests on, and the second guest
who comes on this episode is a man named Gary Wright.
(30:49):
And I just found that one of the most moving
parts of this whole story is that in the wake
of Ted's conviction and David does succeed in Ted not
receiving the death penalty, both David and Linda and David's
mom start reaching out to Ted's victims as I don't
(31:14):
know a kind of you know, something like a not
a reparation or you know, like there's it's just something
that they have to do, they are absolutely compelled to do.
And Gary Wright, who was a victim of one of
Ted's bombs, whose life was completely altered by his injuries,
(31:35):
mentions at one point that he had two hundred pieces
of shrapnel removed and had to have three surgeries.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
And yeah, he had a computer store or something, and
that Ted blew up. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
But when David calls Gary Wright, and when eventually they connect,
Gary has such a passionate response so easily could have
gone another way, you know, that feeling of it's almost
(32:09):
it's biblical in a way, right, It's like it's well,
if it's if it was your brother, then it might
as well have been you. I don't want have anything
to do and many of many of the victims did
have that response, I don't want to have anything to
do with anybody named Kazinski. From a Buddhist philosophy perspective,
I kept on thinking about the ways in which they
(32:29):
end up interacting, becoming like virtual blood brothers. At one point,
David says, but Gary's Gary's initial response to him is,
this must be a tremendous burden for you, and there
probably aren't many people that you can talk to about
it who are sort of intimate with the situation and
feel free to call me anytime.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Yeah. Well, that whole thing is remarkable, not just from
a Buddhist perspective, but I would say also from a
psychodynamic perspective. One of the things that I realized is
that you know, Ted is convicted, saved from the death penalty,
goes to maximum security prison, where he writes and writes
and you know, sends his stuff out, becomes friends with
(33:13):
the Oklahoma City bomber and with one of the World
Trade Center bombers, and so on, But he won't talk
to David. You know, his whole letees. He just died
a year or two ago. The entire time he refused
to have contact with David. So then that I'm glad
you use that blood brother phrase, you know, because the
(33:34):
thing in David not just from a humanist, humanistic perspective,
but also from such a personal place. He lost the
brother once, he lost the brother twice, and then he
feels he feels compelled to reach out to the brother's victims,
you know. And also you know, he was given a
big reward for turning the brother in, and he used
(33:59):
that money. He made a fund with that money to
help the victims. So it's even more than Gary. But
Gary was one of these rare souls who could hear
where the overture was really coming from, I think. And
we just responded like like, you didn't make this happen,
and I didn't make this happen. And in a way,
(34:20):
we're both victims, and in that way we're bonded together,
you know, And so let's talk and this is. This
has been hard for me, but I know it's been
hard for you too, And so life is. Life has
this potential for suffering, and the only way to deal
(34:40):
with it is to face it, you know, so we
could face it together and so but each of them
are remarkable, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
They really are. And together there's just some kind of
mystical sense of being unstoppable. Together for the good, David
says so eloquently to the end of our conversation. He
talks about the balance between trust and self protection, and
(35:08):
and then he says, I'd rather err on the side
of trust.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, he's making himself so vulnerable reaching out
to all of those victims of the Brothers bombs, you know,
and the urge towards self protection would really inhibit those overtures,
you know. And and the trust in the in some
of those people's abilities to hear where he's coming from.
(35:34):
Is the kind of trust that he's talking about, a
deeper trust in our shared humanity, I think, And.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
There's so much to be learned from it. It's the
it's the opposite of circling the wagons, it's the opposite
of hungering down.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Well, that kind of trust, that kind of trust is
what brings people to therapy also, you know, because why
would why would you come to a therapist and open
yourself up to this person who you really don't know,
you know, and it's sort of a miracle in our
in our world that that that forum exists. You know,
(36:08):
two people coming together to say, to say everything, everything
that they're willing to share. You know, it's the same
kind of vulnerability. Really.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Yeah, no, that's that's that's really true. That's beautiful. At
the very end of the episode, or very close to
the end of the episode, David says, and it really
made me think about, you know, these times that we're
living in. And I mean, this is a conversation that
took place several years ago, but these words feel even
truer to me now.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Yeah, he says about violence.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yes, yeah, you say it.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
No, you say it, you got it.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
He says, violence looks powerful, but violence is weak and destructive.
Love doesn't look so powerful, but is by far the
more powerful force in the world.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Yeah. I thought that that was like the dalilaw coming
right through him. You know, violence is weak, Love is powerful,
and we have to you know, each of our our
agenda can be to get rid of our own inner violence,
you know, and that's how to less than the outer
violence that we're all having to cope with.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Mark, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been
an honor and really just wonderful digging into this amazing
episode with you and.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
No I'm so glad you you brought me into it.
It really was an important thing for me.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
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