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