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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 my life with my brother's blood in my hands.
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 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 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 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 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.
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
I'm curious what struck you when you were listening to What's Wrong with Teddy?
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 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.
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 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 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 what happened to Teddy, both as an infant and then
as a very young freshman at Harvard. I was wondering how that struck you.
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
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. 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, 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
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 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 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 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 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.
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. It would have made things worse for a completely healthy person.
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 was being subjected to.
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?
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, 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, 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
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 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 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.
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 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, 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 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.
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.
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 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 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, 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, 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 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 gulf that descends upon the relationship. You know, it's so tragic.
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 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 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 they're getting married and they're going to spend their lives together, and he he says, was Ted thinking that love is finite?
Oh? That's interesting, I don't remember. I don't remember that phrase.
He uses the metaphor of like pieces of a pie.
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 really contribute to the world. But the mind was the portal, or the mind was the vehicle.
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 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 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 in in one third decade. But some of those kids, some of those kids.
Can learn to relate.
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, and he's worried, you know. And then and then she gives that beautiful response.
You know that I know what you're doing.
You're doing out of love.
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.
Oh, it's so moving, We'll be right back.
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
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 Glinda sees it.
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 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 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.
I don't ever want to.
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, and said, this could be your brother. You know. She sort of pulled him, kicking and screaming into looking at it.
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.
Yeah. They brought it to a psychiatrist, yeah.
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.
Like, this is what they need a eye for.
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.
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, 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.
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,
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, 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 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.
You know that it's it's like a just a a disgrace.
A disgrace, and that it and that it spreads like some kind of stain across a family.
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
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 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 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
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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, mentions at one point that he had two hundred pieces of shrapnel removed and had to have three surgeries.
And yeah, he had a computer store or something, and that Ted blew up. Right.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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, 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 with it is to face it, you know, so we could face it together and so but each of them are remarkable, Yeah.
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 and then he says, I'd rather err on the side of trust.
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. Is the kind of trust that he's talking about, a deeper trust in our shared humanity, I think, And.
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.
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, 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.
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.
Yeah, he says about violence.
Yes, yeah, you say it.
No, you say it, you got it.
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.
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.
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.
No I'm so glad you you brought me into it. It really was an important thing for me.
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