What’s Wrong With Teddy?

David Kaczynski: 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 on my hand?

Dani Shapiro: That’s David Kaczynski, author of the book Every Last Tie, the story of the Unabomber and his family. David is the younger brother of Ted Kaczynski, a brilliant, troubled, reclusive former math professor who began sending bombs through the mail in 1978, killing three people and injuring 23 others. When the FBI finally closed in on Ted Kaczynski after a nationwide manhunt that spanned years. It was because they received the ultimate tip the Unabomber’s brother had turned him in. 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.

David: There were four of us in our family, mom and dad. Dad made sausages at his uncle’s deli. Mom was a stay at home mom, at least until I got to high school. My older brother Ted is 7 1/2 years older. You know, I idolized him. Was kind to me. But in addition, he seemed to exemplify the family’s values, which focused on integrity education. He was very, very smart. Skip 2 grades in school went to Harvard at the age of 16 on a scholarship. His IQ was tested at, I think 167 at one point, so you know, he represented everything that I wanted to be at that point in my life. And I never doubted for a moment that I was loved by. Any of my three family members, and I’m very, very grateful for that and I have to say, you know, our our parents values, they were there were two working class people, both of whom had to drop out of school. In high school, in order to support their families during the depression, they had to go to work, and then they finished their high school at night school sometime later. I think they actually met in a book discussion club. So there was this. Attraction to the life of the mind. A sort of very optimism, a belief that you know, by developing your mind, you’ve developed your spirit. Became someone who could really contribute. The world. So it was part of. It wasn’t only that I modeled myself on Ted. You know our family. Sort of had this framework of of values that was around the life of the mind, the arts.

Shapiro: But even David idealized and idolized Ted. There was also a sense that there was another side to Ted that had nothing to do with the family’s shared values or academic achievement.

David: There was a time, a little bit later when I asked my mom. Mom, what’s wrong with Teddy and she was a little taken aback. Know what do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with your brother. And I said, well, he doesn’t have any friends. Why is that? He like people. And sometimes he did seem to shy away from folks. You know, somebody would come over unannounced and he would sort of leave the room quickly, like he was upset that they arrived. A little frightened and. It was then that mom said that, you know, Ted hit had an experience as a child. Is at the age of nine months. He’d gotten sick. They took him to the hospital. Some kind of rash had covered his body, apparently an allergic reaction, but they couldn’t diagnose it and they kept him there for a week well over a week and. Her parents were only allowed to visit during regular visiting hours. Always faulted the hospital for for. And, you know, she felt that when they brought Teddy home from the hospital, he was a very different child, at least for a while. Didn’t smile anymore. He didn’t make eye contact and it was at that point that my mom had said to me, Dave, whatever you do in your life, don’t ever abandon your brother. Because that’s what he fears the most. And of course, I love Teddy. Fell. I love teddy. Never abandoned teddy. And I remember crying, thinking about the pain he had suffered this little baby. And I think there was another lesson that my mom sort of wove into that sort of teachable moment in the lesson was that, you know, take some compassion, empathy, to try to understand another human.

Shapiro: And how old were you when she imparted this lesson?

David: Exactly. Probably somewhere between 7:00 and 9:00 years old. Oh.

Shapiro: And when you said to your mom what’s wrong with Teddy, what was it beyond that? Didn’t seem to have any friends. What prompted you to say that? You think?

David: Oh, I don’t know if that has been asked that question and it’s an interesting one. I think the returns when Teddy just seemed like kind of shut down. Like something was bothering him that he wouldn’t express it. A strong sense of privacy. An introversion that was unusual, I think, at least in my experience.

Shapiro: And I I.

David: Tended to be a fairly social person. I mean, I had. I you know, it was natural for me to to be interested in people and to. Want to interact with people and? It was quite different, so probably I was trying to explore wire teddy and I differed in. Way.

Shapiro: Did you share A room?

David: We did for a while until I was maybe six or seven years old, and then our father. We had an attic that was. We had moved it, you know, from Chicago up to one of the suburbs when I was about 3 years old and. My father finished the attic and you know, a beautiful knotty pine just made it another story of the house. And then that became. Ted’s room so that he and I weren’t together in a small. Bedroom. You know, in some ways it was wonderful for Teddy. On the other hand, it became a very, very convenient escape for him. So on those occasions when he, you know, wanted to avoid company, he would just walk up the stairs up to his attic and I call it an attic. Wasn’t like it was, you know, some place of banishment. Was very, very nice. Nice room up there.

Shapiro: Ted goes to Harvard as a very young freshman. During his first year, he’s identified as a candidate for a psychological study, an experiment that Ted took part in for three years during his undergraduate career. The study, titled A Multi Form assessment of Personality Development Among gifted college men was masterminded by a famous psychologist named Henry Murray. And was meant to measure the effects of trauma on gifted male students. But here’s the thing. In order to study the trauma, first they had to inflict it. Students were berated emotionally and psychologically beaten down. Humiliated, these students chosen for their vulnerability and high degrees of social alienation. Were purposefully being traumatized and gaslit because they weren’t told the purpose of the experiment, so they had no idea why they were being treated so sadistically.

David: It’s a study that would never pass. Today, at least, I hope not. You know, there are institutional review boards at colleges and. I think that would look at a study like this and say no way this is unethical for various reasons. In fact, even if you go back before the time of the study, there was the Nuremberg Code that came out of World War 2 and part of the code was that people should not be harmed or deceived. And this study did both to my brother. He was asked by his defense attorneys. Why didn’t you drop out? Didn’t you? And he said, well, I wanted to prove I could take it, that I couldn’t be broken. And in some ways, this is so much. Ted, because. He has this kind of indomitable will this stubbornness. And yet what occurs to me is that in some ways, he he may have been broken without realizing it. At the very least, he was hardened. We didn’t know about it. Mom had had to sign a release because Ted was only 17 when he went into this study. And so he needed parental permission, and mom is thinking, oh he has some social adjustment. Maybe these nice psychologists could could help him. My gosh, it was just the opposite.

Shapiro: I think. A theme in a way running through. This story of misplaced trust in institutions in some way, you know the hospital at that time isolating a baby. I’m sure thinking that they were doing the right thing, but you know, with repercussions. And then Harvard itself, the idea that, you know, Ted would go to Harvard and find many other very high IQ individuals just like him. And it would be somehow. A soft and gentle place, which is.

David: A more accepting place.

Shapiro: A more accepting place. And then these psychologists under Harvard auspices, who run a study like that. Well, surely that’s going to be a good thing. Ted graduates and continues his academic rise. David goes off to college himself, and even though they’re very different young men, they have a really tight relationship for a period of time. They both love the woods and forest preserves, and they go on joint camping trips. But then the summer after David’s junior year, Ted decides that he’s going to quit his job as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley.

David: He wrote a letter to appearance saying that he’s decided to quit that. Know he did. Find mathematics fulfilling, but in addition to that he’d come to this conclusion that. Technology that most people celebrate kind of uncritically is actually has many, many negative consequences, and he did not like the mathematics supported technology, but also on a personal level he wanted to get as far away. It as. Secret. He wanted to go in and live in the woods someplace and. I remember at that. I don’t know if you’re old enough to. The. But you know, it wasn’t that uncommon. You know, I think there were Time magazine had cover stories about people dropping out, quote, dropping out or going back to nature. You know. Was a little bit of a movement to countercultural movement. The Ted you know what’s meant.

He wasn’t personally aligned with it, but we could understand where he was going and I remember hearing what he was planning to do and I thought, oh, this is fantastic. Wow. You know, I’ve always admired my brother, but this is even better. Mean how many people get to do what they really want to do in life instead of what other people expect them to do, and how many people have the courage to follow their own deepest instincts instead of sort of conforming with? The social. So I thought it was wonderful. Our parents, you know, were. They didn’t try to talk chat out of what he was doing, but I remember Mom saying to me at one point, you know, Dave, I just. I don’t really think this has a lot to do with technology. I’m I’m afraid that the problem is that that doesn’t doesn’t really know how to relate to people, and he’s running away from a society that he doesn’t know how to fit into. It gave me pause. Yes, that summer, Ted said he was going to go look for land up in Canada and Alaska. And did I want to join him in that? And so we spent a couple of months together camping in British Columbia. We got up to the Yukon. There was definitely a brotherly closeness. I remember we took one long hike and. I don’t know if it was something I ate or if it was altitude or something, and I got a very upset stomach. And we were like, four or five miles from the car, and Ted ran back to the car to get some Pepto Biscotti we had there and ran. Came all the way back to help me so that I could, you know, feel better. You know, there was a kindness in him toward me that I always sensed, but there will also be times when he was very shut down. And I didn’t know what to make of it. I REM. Remember sitting around the campfire 1 morning and. He just looking into the flames and he stopped talking and I asked him a few questions and he just didn’t. It was like a like stone there and that’s why I went off and took a walk. And by the time I got back he was back to talking again and I asked him, you know, what was that about and why wouldn’t you answer me? He says, oh, I. Just. Deeply thinking. So I accepted it. A couple of times when he was, you know, in a state that gosh, seemed close to what you would call catatonic. And I I sometimes wondered if. He was coming to terms with the idea that, you know, maybe Mom was right. Maybe this really wasn’t. The ants are just running away.

Shapiro: Both David and Ted are drawn as young men to living solitary lives. That, it seems, is where the similarity between them ends. Well, Ted seems to be pushing further and further away into a world that appears dangerously hermetic with nothing but the contents of his own mind. For company, David’s solitary time has more of a feeling of a pilgrimage. Ted’s in Montana. David’s in a small cabin in the Texas Desert. The brothers are both geographically, psychologically, and spiritually on very different paths. Ted is becoming angrier, more and more hostile. He’s written a series of terrible letters to their parents, blaming them for everything, cutting off all contact. David uses his time to arrive at a deep sense of self knowledge and eventually he comes to realize that he’s in love with his old friend from childhood Linda, and that he wants to marry her. And so David writes to Ted to tell him the good news.

David: At one point I told him that I was going to be leaving the desert. I said be happy for me. I finally found the person I want to get married to. It’s Linda Patrick, this girl I’ve known since. Elementary school and he just wrote this very cruel letter he’d never met. And yet he was saying it’s. Just David, just from your letter that she’s a horrible person, you know she’s going to take advantage of. But no, you never listen to my advice. So you know it’s just too painful for me to be your brother anymore. So. Don’t don’t contact. I don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore. It was just a shock and surprise to me. Although I had some precedent with his sort of out of the blue abusive letters to her parents, angry letters to her parents.

Shapiro: And also puts you in a situation where by choosing to love another person, you’re losing this person who you love deeply.

David: Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s kind of like, was Ted thinking that love is finite. You know that it’s like. Piece of. And if Linda gets a piece, he has less. Now, love isn’t like that. It’s. So it can expand. Amazingly, you know, I thought maybe he just didn’t understand that maybe he felt abandoned in some way. And again, my mother’s request that I never abandoned Ted came to mind at that point. But I was also pretty angry. Have to admit I. Mean thinking. How dare he and her parents were just, I think, lovely parents and kind to him and generous to him and hurt them terribly. Now he’s lashing out at another person that I love. As it turned out from his Diaries later, I never, course nobody ever read his Diaries until after he was arrested.

The defense team asked me to read through his Diaries. It was like 30,000 pages of Diaries. It was unbelievable. But it was like opening a window into a, you know, a tortured soul. Because I realized he had this tremendous longing for human contact, for companionship. But if like nothing better than to be married and to have a family.

Shapiro: David and Linda settle into married life. David works as an assistant director of a shelter for runaway and homeless youth. Is a professor of philosophy at a local college. He and Ted are completely estranged. David’s never even heard of the Unabomber. Remember, these are pre Internet days when news stories are run the old fashioned way. The literal actual newspaper, or if the story is big enough, the nightly. News David and Linda are living in Schenectady, NY, and it’s 1994, before the Unabomber story makes headlines near them after a mail bomb kills New Jersey advertising executive Thomas Mosser. At this time, the Unabomber contacts several national newspapers and asks them to publish what he refers to as his manifesto. He says that if his manifesto is published, the bombs will stop. So then Linda, who’s never met your brother, has this kind of lightning bolt of a thought and says to you, I think that Ted may be the Unabomber. And I was very moved by the way, that the two of you. Navigated. That whole period of time after the manifesto was published ‘cause your your initial response was that that was completely out of the question of which, of course it was. Course it was. But then you read the manifesto and somewhere within you. A tiny little sliver of doubt creeps in. There’s a phrase that I came across when I was writing my most recent book. It’s a psychoanalytic phrase, and it’s the unthought known what we what we know. But it’s a live wire. It’s way too dangerous to think. And so you’re somewhere in the territory of the unthought known, and you and Linda are. You know the manifesto looking for clues and at the same time it’s like played out against this backdrop of this. Profound, impossible choice. When you finally do reach the sense that it’s possible, you know that it’s possible that Ted is the Unabomber. I mean, can you talk a little bit about that?

David: Of course I talked a bit about my brother. A lot. Perhaps Linda had many questions why he didn’t come to the wedding. I hadn’t showed her the letter that Ted had written to me because it was so awful. But you know, I remember some years earlier, it was shortly after our father died, Ted reconnected with my mom briefly. She invited him to explain a little bit about why he had been so angry before, and then he wrote a letter that just sailed off back into that anger. Mom sent. The letter I showed it to Linda.

Shapiro: Remember, this is years before David or Linda have ever heard the term Unabomber.

David: Linda’s looking at this letter. This is in 1990s, so it’s shortly after we’re married. She’s looking at this letter and she says she looks up at me and she says, Dave, you know, your brother sick, don’t you? I mean, he’s mentally ill. And. I, I said. No, no, no. He’s really, really. He’s got a, you know, a genius IQ and this is the way he thinks. And Linda said, David, look at this passage, you know, people. Who are healthy in their minds? Don’t think like this. She actually persuaded me at that point to bring some of my brothers letters to a psychiatrist who we knew socially and. Viewpoint was that yes, Ted was sick. He said he couldn’t make a diagnosis based on some letters. But possibly it was schizophrenia which ends up being cuts eventual diagnosis.

Shapiro: So now we’re in the mid 1990’s. The Unabomber has been at it for years. Between 1978 and 1995, he placed or mailed 16 bombs that killed 3 people and injured 23 others. Linda reads his manifesto and she’s able to have the clarity of thought that this letter and the letter she read and had analyzed by the psychiatrist years earlier may well have been written by the same person.

David: Yeah, I mean it was. Dilemma in the sense that we realized that any decision we made. Could lead to somebody’s death. And my brother was the Unabomber. Of course, we didn’t know at this point, but if it turned out he was and another person was. We’d have to go through the rest of our lives knowing that someone had died because we had failed to. On the other hand, at this point in time, the Unabomber was like Public Enemy #1. And if he was sentenced to death and executed, 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? You know, ultimately we realized there was one thing we could control. Know we could save the next person’s life. We could set the violence. And then maybe since you know we had some evidence, we’d already gone to a. Maybe we could convince the Justice Department that Ted was mentally ill and that there was reason to mitigate the sentence of death. Maybe he could get a prison sentence instead. Anyway, that was the hope.

Shapiro: I’m struck again and again by the care and thoughtfulness David and Linda put into their impossible decision. They want to be certain, or at least as certain as possible. Linda’s oldest friend is a private detective and she submits one of Ted’s letters anonymously to an expert in forensic analysis of language. The expert comes back at 60%, but the author of the letter and the author of the Manifesto are one and the same person.

David: Her father was gone at this point, but Mom was still alive and we had another choice to make. We. Do we involve mom in? Do we tell her what’s going on? Do we ask her advice? Yes, certainly she was a stakeholder in this thing. But you know, my sense at the time was. Oh my God. I just. This could kill Mom. And what if Ted’s innocent? You know her, her pain, her sleeplessness would be for nothing. I don’t know if that was the right decision, but we decided to go forward without telling them.

Shapiro: But then ultimately, when it turns out that it is Ted and that’s been confirmed and it’s about to be public, you you go to your mom and she reacts. Remarkably.

David: Right, right. I mean, it’s probably my defining memory of my mother. I mean, of all the memories I have of her. But the moment that I I told her that I suspected Ted and that. I’d gone to the authorities. She looked at me for a moment, like she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing. And then she, you know, she got up and came up to me and put her arms around my. She was very short woman, like 5 feet tall and about 6 feet tall and she so she had to kind of pull me down and put a kiss. On my cheek. And then she said, David, I can’t imagine what you’ve been struggling with. But then she said, the thing that I most needed to hear, she said. David, I know that you love Ted. I know that. You wouldn’t have done this unless you truly felt that you had to. And that was that was the greatest relief I could have experienced at that moment. It was just amazing and in some sense it exemplified the family values, the values we were raised with to do the right thing.

Shapiro: So David and Linda do the right thing. They are promised they’ll be treated as confidential informants that their names not be revealed publicly, but then the opposite happens. Their suburban home is surrounded by reporters and camera crews. Their names and faces are plastered everywhere.

David: Someone in that huge chain of people who I guess had knowledge of this made a mistake at this. They had investigators planted in the woods around my brother’s camp and apparently, from what I understand, one of them revealed things they should not have revealed to a person. Media we were in a sense, barricaded in our house at 1:00. There was this reporter who got up on a little ladder and tried to film something inside our house through one of our windows, and then I remember Linda putting a. A blanket over all the lower floors. Windows to to block the media’s view of us. And you know, people were asking themselves questions. Like you know, what kind of a family would produce the Unabomber or what kind of a brother would turn in his own brother? But there was one of the late night comedians, I think, who I didn’t see this myself. I guess he thought he was being funny, but he says. Yeah. Think of this in one family. You’ve got the year to bomber and the unisnitch. And man, I thought that was called.

Shapiro: When the authorities surrounded an swarmed Ted’s cabin in the woods, any lingering doubts that David and Linda might have harbored about whether turning him in was indeed the right thing. Restoreclay addressed among the incriminating evidence found. Was another live bomb beneath Ted’s bed wrapped up, ready to be mailed to someone. But the one very hard part of this story is over. Ted is ianaboner. He’s now been arrested and can cause no more har. Another new, very hard part of this story has yet to unfold. A hard part. That eventually becomes a beautiful part. David and Linda begin reaching out to Ted’s victims. So does David’s mom. For a family who has always been set on trying to do the right thing, the ethical thing, it seems the next logical step, if anything here can be called logical. One of these victims is a man named Gary Wright. One February morning in 1987, Gary Wright pulled over the parking lot of a computer company he owned in Salt Lake City. A piece of lumber appeared to be in his way, and when he went to move it, a homemade bomb blew up, grievously injuring him. He went through three surgeries, spent three years in and out of casts and had 200 pieces of shrapnel removed. It was years before that bomb was connected to the Unabomber.

David: I gave him a call and you know, my heart’s kind of in my throat. And at this point I trying to think what am I gonna say? Don’t want it to be too. I want it to be natural and then I get this voice that says you have reached the right house at the wrong time. Please leave a message. So I wasn’t prepared for that, but I awkwardly let you know, said, you know, my name is David. I think you know who I am and I would like to talk to you if you’re open to that, I’ll try calling. That, and then a few days later, I called. And again, I didn’t didn’t get Gary directly. I think it was his daughter and I heard her say, dad, you know, somebody’s on the line for you. And then Gary came on the line.

Shapiro: Though most. Ted’s victims and their families wanted nothing to do with anyone named Kaczynski. Gary Wright had a very different response. I wanted to understand what was going through Gary’s head, how he was able to afford a sense of compassion for the brother of the man who nearly killed him. I’ve asked Gary Wright to join this conversation now, here on family secrets.

Gary: It was really kind of a test for both of us. Nervous dance, if you will. In the beginning, but I think I quickly got over it in that I had had quite a bit of time to process what I’d been through, whereas David and his family had much less time. So when we first began to speak, you know, Dave called and said, you know, I want to apologize on behalf of my family. For what had happened to you, and you know we’re really sorry. And I just told him. I said, look, David, everybody has someone in their. They probably want to apologize for and I know my family probably wants to apologize for me on a lot of fronts. Not at the same level, but you can’t carry that to the rest of your life. And we went back and forth a little bit and kind of chatted briefly, but I did let him know. Said, look, sometimes you might need to speak with someone outside of family, close friends or whatever. Just even if it’s to scream and get something off your chest. And I said, feel free to call me anytime.

David: I mean, Gary’s invitation to talk at any time, it’s like, wow. And believe me, he was incredibly helpful. But just the notion that you know the people affected in different ways could have something in common that we could not be divided by. Our relationship to Ted Gary was Ted’s victim. I was Ted’s brother. That if we. Build a bridge across this chasm, that abyss of human suffering. Then there was. And I really felt that deep in my heart.

Shapiro: The first time that David and Gary actually meet David is driving cross country after Ted enters an insanity plea in court in Sacramento, CA. The plea that will ultimately spare him the death penalty. David realizes that the drive will take him right through Salt Lake City, where Gary. And with that, first meeting begins an important friendship that David describes in his book as being like Virtual Blood. Brothers are bond forged through violence is as powerful and deep as any. He writes. Nothing can compensate me for losing Ted, but I find a poetic balance in having gained a new brother in Gary. Our choices end up reshaping the universe. At least the universe we know. I’m so struck by this beautiful idea that our choices end up reshaping the universe. We know that really could be the motto for this podcast.

David: I think something is very important when you take one of these risks to reach out to the know what people think of as the other side is is to do so without a lot of expectations. Like I couldn’t say I want this from Gary. I want XI want. Y. I guess with openness comes some vulnerability, but you have to just be open, I think, and drop the expectations.

Shapiro: David, you were describing what you and Linda were afraid of when the news broke and your house is surrounded. Are trying to like, you know, crawl in through every crevass in your house and you. Know it seems. From what I’ve read and watched that your friendship in both directions has been, I know I hesitate to use this word, but you know, a hearing one. Would you characterize it that way?

Gary: From my aspect, and I’m definitely one of the things I think that seems to be missing or has been pushed off to the side these days, just in regular day life is empathy and being able to visualize yourself. In someone else’s shoes, there’s so much of the inwardly focused or, you know, me, focused stuff out there that, I mean, there’s just not that time taken to look at what what would this be if it were me? And I think in my case, I feel like. The ability to be empathetic with what I had seen David and his family go through. And being open genuinely allowed for us to be able to have conversations and and believe me, we’ve had crazy conversations, but it’s really cuts Arctic in a way both on my end. And I won’t speak for David, but. It’s cathartic in that number one, you realize there’s a great human being on the other. Of a divide, right? The event doesn’t describe an entire family, even though some families are completely stigmatized by an event. That they had no control over. So he realized the human on the other side and the values. And you, you get the opportunity to dig into what really lies behind a family. And when you do that, that’s when the opportunity for friendship comes into play and friendship. In my case, you know, I I. Maybe on two hands who I call friends and David is one of those, right. If I called him up. And said, hey Dave, I need ABC or D if it was in within his power, he would do it. And if I needed him there and he could do it, he would be there.

David: Yeah, I’m thinking a little bit about, you know, the notion of trust and it’s been a bit of a theme of our conversation from the beginning. And where is that balance between, you know, sort of trust and self protection? I think if I’m going to air, I’d probably want to air on the side of trust.

Shapiro: David and Garry’s friendship deepened into the two men doing healing work together, appearing at speaking engagements to spread their message of trust, healing, and forgiveness.

Gary: David and I, he really gracious, invite me to a lot of events to speak. But one of the the things that has always stuck in my head from day one, the very first time we were ever asked to. Speak. I can still remember my thought process was if I can just shorten the amount of time that it takes a person to heal, then I’ll do this forever. It could be a room of 500, but if one person goes away and says, wow, you made me think differently or. I can incorporate some of what you’ve been through into my own personal space and develop my own path forward. That was pretty much my motivating factor. I feel sometimes I’m just a human experiment myself on my own Guinea pig, but happy to share the results.

Shapiro: Gary describes picking up the phone and taking David’s call as probably one of the top five decisions he’s ever made in his life. Remember when I said earlier that something beautiful would come out of all this violence, pain and horror? Just think what would have been lost if Gary or David either one or both of them had shut down, had either man allowed himself to be made smaller. Rather than larger by the circumstances, he found himself in, then the ripple effect of the peace and healing each of them together and separately, has brought into the world, would never have happened.

David: You know, we we live in a culture, maybe in a species where that has practiced a lot of violence. And I think, you know, violence looks powerful because you can pause on somebody else. Something that no, they can’t change and it may be irreversible. Violence has its illusion of power, but I think one thing that I feel I’ve truly learned is that violence is not powerful. It’s it’s weak. Is only destructive, it only makes. The world worse. Search love doesn’t look so. I mean it, it’s works in more subtle ways. Its results are not immediate awesome, but I think I’ve I’ve known through my parents through Linda, through Gary, through others, so many others that. Love is by far the more powerful force in this world, and the more we recognize that love is powerful and violence is weak. The better chance we’ll have to make this world a better place.

Shapiro: Many thanks to David Kaczynski and Gary Wright for speaking with me today. David is the author of every last tie, the story of the Unabomber and his family, and Gary is an activist and speaker. Find out more about the work Garry’s doing at GB right.com. Family Secrets is an I heart media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer. Julie Douglas and Beth Ann Macaluso are the executive producers. If you have a family secret you’d like to share, get in touch with us at listenermail@familysearchpodcast.com. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny writer, Facebook at FamilySearch Pod, and Twitter at Fansecretspod for more about my book inheritance, visit dannyshapiro.com.