70: The Unabomber Saga: The Life and Ordeal of Ted Kaczynski (Part 1) | Red Thread
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In the deep, mossy woods of Montana, long before Pickle Rick screamed, I turned myself into a pickle, Morty! to avoid family therapy, there was another man, dodging society's group hug, Ted Kaczynski. Except, instead of turning himself into a pickle, he turned himself into a manifesto-writing recluse with a PhD and a typewriter yelling at technology like Rick yelling at a bunch of rats in a sewer. Imagine Pickle Rick, but instead of outsmarting a gang of racks...

Oh, this is so internet-y. Now, that's quite a pickle riff. LAUGHTER

Hello and welcome to Red Thread. I don't know why I'm doing the intro. I'm so glad. That's the first time I read it out with many, many glaring errors. Nonetheless, I have to say, Jackson, this is my finest work. I wrote that one, obviously. That's why I wrote it out. It was all you. It was all me. Oh, man.

I just wanted to make you say a bunch of Pickle Rick references to make you regret your decision of coming onto this show. Do you think you can become a host of Red Thread, not without the ordeal of Pickle Rick, my friend? Really? Okay, is that part of the hazing process, is it? Just a bunch of Epstein and Pickle Rick references. We're 15 episodes in now to your employment on the show, let's call it.

So yeah, now is the appropriate time to haze you, appropriately so. Oh, and the initiation has only begun now. Yeah, there's going to be way more Pickle Ricks. Welcome to the show, everyone. This week we are tackling the concept of Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. A very interesting fellow with some very interesting ideas.

For some reason, I thought of Rick and Morty while reading his work, let's say, as well as reading about his life. So I felt it was appropriate this week to go on a little Rick and Morty side adventure. But other than that, no, it's a very serious case of domestic terrorism and nothing to do with Pickle Rick's and Sue's. So apologies for the...

You know, the misdirection there. I'm joined by Jordan, of course, as we just said. Hello. You're like 15 episodes in now. Wow. You might have been here longer by this point than some of the previous hosts. So...

That's not true! I don't know, it might be. It's flown by, though. You are such a great co-host. Love having you join us each week because you add so much colour, so many Rick and Morty-style references and charm to the show. Yeah, I think because of that one intro, I've added one Pickle Rick reference per episode so far. The average is now blown out of proportion. I'm just kidding.

Sure. No one else on planet earth could do that. So obviously I am adding something very unique and you're welcome. Everybody watching. No, it's honestly, and this is sincere to the audience out there. The show has felt so fun these last few weeks, more so than I think it ever has not disparaging or my co-hosts or anything, but I just, I just love talking to you. You take everything on board and you run wild with it. So it's a, it's fantastic to have you here. Oh,

Oh, well, can I just say, guys, likewise as well, really enjoy doing it. But I think that that's mostly because my entire life is more or less working at the, I don't know what the equivalent is in America where you get your driver's license. Like, it's just my job is very government-y.

Yes, very, very. I hate it. And then just hanging out with you guys and you're just fun. And it's a merry time had by all, usually while laughing at serial killers, which I never. Who would have ever suspected that? I don't know. That would be the highlight of your week. Yeah.

But I've really got to say, I have said this publicly before, but I will reiterate it. I think that you've nailed the podcast format. And I think that privately, some of the guests that we have come off have said, very impressive, very impressive.

Laughing and learning. Yeah, trying to combine the two of them into one beautiful edutainment package. Love having you all here. Big thank you to everyone for showing up. The support, you know, those of you that still watch the show, really means a lot. We're joined, of course, by the head researcher in the Red Thread Department of Investigations, Kira. As per usual, she's here with us. Hi.

Thank you as well for all of your hard work turning these around in very short time. The documents are linked below so you can go read about the life and ordeal of Ted Kaczynski as Kira has authored it herself. It's her very own little manifesto in fact. She inserts a lot of very dangerous opinions in there. Terrifying opinions. Yeah, so go read that. Go enjoy her work because for certainty we will not do it justice in this episode, short

Jordan and I, we will be joking about a lot of things, I assume, as is our tradition. And that's probably why you show up in the first place. So, you know, you're welcome. Jordan, have you ever heard of the man Ted Kaczynski? Oh, look, like most first year uni students, yes.

Actually, you were the one that suggested this for an episode. Yeah. I think it was because I was rereading his manifesto because it's touching on things that I'm going to be doing on my next stand-up show. Yeah, which will be... You know what it will be? It'll basically just be titled The Man Had a Point, the show. LAUGHTER

Reading through it myself. So we both read it in preparation for this episode. We won't be tackling the manifesto in this episode. This is focused exclusively on the upbringing and the crimes of Ted Kaczynski. But we will be doing a two-part to this episode where we do dive into the manifesto. Just because there's so much here and so much in the manifesto to go over that speak to who Ted is as a human being.

But yeah, reading through the manifesto in preparation for this week was kind of very elucidating and scary. Why did it freak you out? Why did it freak me out? Because it was so accurate. Yeah, I think that's it. So you're on board with it, yeah? He's pretty much described the modern age down to a T. To a T. Yeah, very, very... I mean, and it's terrifying the implications of it as well, of course. Like he is speaking of a...

Not just a society-ending kind of outlook, but just a humanity-ending outlook. Because he does call for the revolution of society itself. So obviously society would end in some capacity as the only solution to what he speaks of. But the outcome of that, if it's unsuccessful, if we do not change or deviate from the course or the path, is terrifying. Yeah.

Obviously, I'm not saying that everything in there was correct. Like you said, it's probably more apt to say Ted Kaczynski had a point. And I don't think anyone could dismiss that. He certainly had a point that he argued vehemently. But yeah, there's definitely a lot in there that kind of does seem to be an accurate portrayal of how society itself is heading.

Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I think that, honestly, when you read other people that aren't as bloodthirsty as Ted Kaczynski that is talking about the future of humanity and where it's leading, they are more or less drawing the same conclusions as him. I think that Kaczynski's is a little more hippie, probably because of the time that it was made.

Well, you mean hippie as in kind of resorting to kind of laying a foundation of returning to nature? Yeah, returning to nature. The environment is being destroyed. There's other people that you read that sort of reach the same conclusions that say that humanity sort of has gotten to the point where, and there's going to be like a rough transition phase into this, but I honestly do see it going this way more, where...

Nature no longer really exists. It's more just the world is a national park that we kind of keep running and generating to just keep ourselves alive. It's just like, you know, nature and the wild is no longer wild. It's all just park. Yeah. And I think that that like, you know, that that's sort of the point of his story.

that I sit there and think, you know, there's some arguability there. But the general turnaround of it being that human beings are basically becoming more and more mechanized and therefore more and more obsolete by the system that they are themselves generating and perpetuating and aren't really aware that they're doing it while they're doing it. It's like, you know, all you have to do is look outside your window and that's all the proof you need. Right.

Don't you think? Like, you can literally just look outside and see a well-cultivated road with, like, council workers cleaning it up and then apartments next to it and think, yeah, look, he's right. Anyway, sorry, go on. I was going to say, I think one of the most, like, I can't remember the verbatim line, and we're going a bit deep into the manifesto already, but it is such an interesting topic. But that's why we're doing a part two. But yes, go on. Yes. I was going to say, at a base level, one of the most, like,

scary lines in there, I think. And again, not verbatim. It was something like, initially, humanity designed the system, but we are approaching the point where the system will design humanity. And that was...

That was terrifying to me to imagine something out of our control kind of orchestrating our future. Yes. That's terrifying. It is terrifying. 100% that's terrifying. It is terrifying, but I think that it also brings up the question of when was that illusion not prevalent? I think that, okay, for instance, human beings cultivating wheat, for instance, at that point, at some point in that relationship, wheat started cultivating us, you know?

I think that that's just sort of the natural... Obviously, this is on a much grander... He's talking about AI and all that kind of stuff, but it's... Well, no, just also how society functions itself. Even if you just strip away the AI argument there, it's about how kind of dependent humanity is of...

on the systems that it has designed to the point where there is no reversal. There is no way out of, out of the system. Yeah. It has become a beast that cannot be tamed necessarily by humanity. Yeah. I don't know what, like, are you trying to scare me about wheat now? I'm already in a vulnerable stage of my life right now. Do you want to be red pilled about wheat? Do you want to be red pilled? Don't take sourdough away from Kira. I know that Kira does with a sourdough session at the moment.

No, you just want to live in your little fantasy world. No, you just bake your bread, Kira. Go back. Go back to being asleep. Sheeple. Both of you are sheeple. All right, we should stop. We're getting way into the weeds about the manifesto. We'll save that for next week.

Okay. All right. All right. Well, part three, we chat. Separating the chaff, the pod. The broad concept of the manifesto, though, in how it ties into Ted Kaczynski is it's about kind of...

and how he is kind of against technology, I guess. We could sum it up as that, essentially. Against all technology. He wants to revert us to basically to a natural stage in human existence where we kind of were very self-reliant and we had purpose in our lives that revolved around that. He feels that is now missing. So that is just the fundamental key thesis of what he's

what he wants for society. So that's all we're going to touch on the manifesto really for this episode. We're actually going to talk more about Ted Kaczynski as a person, as well as the things that he did throughout his life. And then next week we will tackle the manifesto itself, which should be a very sourdough heavy episode where we discuss wheat a lot, apparently. So if you are a, if you're a sourdough nut, just like Kira,

Join up for that one. It'll certainly be fun. We'll bring references and quotes and stuff, I'm sure.

Okay, so chapter one, A Monster is Born. Theodore John Kaczynski, more commonly known as Ted Kaczynski, was born in Chicago, Illinois on May 22nd of 1942 to his Polish-American parents, Wanda and Theodore Kaczynski. Ted was the oldest of two, his younger brother David, born on October 3rd of 1949. Ted was a sickly newborn, brought into the hospital by his parents with awful rashes over his skin.

He was taken to a care unit while doctors attempted to figure out what was wrong with Ted.

and he was then kept in the hospital for a few weeks. The hospital only allowed Ted's parents to visit him two times a week for two hours, despite them petitioning for more. According to Wanda and Theodore, when Ted finally returned home, he was different. He did not need or depend on his parents' comfort. He stopped smiling, and he became more detached, even as a younger baby. It was seemingly the start of abandonment and attachment issues for Ted.

That's kind of interesting because Ted certainly obviously has a lot of social issues throughout his life. He does not fit in to the neat box that society is, which is why he does go down the road that he does go down. He doesn't feel connected to humanity in a very, you know, I guess the close kind of like in an, what would you call it? I guess the closest diagnosis you could give is probably like autistic, right? Like an autistic person.

kind of separation from society. He definitely has that, which I think makes it so that, yeah, he is... Don't you think that when you read his writings, it struggles with relating, but as a result of that, it...

It's hard to use these words because I just don't think that they exist. But he seems to write with an objectivity that very few people do. Well, I was actually talking to Kira about that, and I think we will dive into it deeper next week. I think he's able... Because he is talking fundamentally about society, which is obviously a social construct, with...

Without the ability to actually relate to people that well, he's able to afford himself a level of objectivity that I don't think most people would have when looking at society. Because he's able to look at it from the outside in. Whereas if you are actually socially kind of...

you know, socially adept or you exist in that social framework, you're looking from the inside. And that's a much more difficult task of actually looking at things objectively, I think. Yeah. No, I agree. By looking from the outside...

There's obviously inherent and an enormous amount of bias in his writing and everything, just regardless. But I think when he's looking from the outside in at society, he's able to do so with a very analytical perspective.

which is why a lot of his predictions obviously are rather true because he's just, he's just not, he's not biased in the way that most people would be. No. And honestly, that's the kind of baby that I would imagine would produce that sort of writing.

Well, I was going to say, I wonder if, like, is the argument in this paragraph or the message of this paragraph that he developed these social issues because he was abandoned from an early age in his mind?

if his parents didn't like dropped him off at a hospital and basically didn't show up for a few weeks at a very early developmental period in a baby's life, could that potentially be a reason why he's then able, unable to relate to people later on? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the whole thing about a bunch of babies dying in the 19th century, because they thought that you should probably hold them with sterile gloves. And because there was just no stimulation with hands of other human beings, they died.

They died from what? Not being touched by human bodies. Yeah, but what did they actually die from? I can't remember what they actually died from. Is the idea that they just were not able to socially adjust correctly, so therefore they eventually died from... Look, there is actually a scientific explanation for it, but the dumbass version of it is that there was no...

There was no human care. Like, the baby couldn't register that there was, like, something looking after it, so it died. I think that's, like, the explanation of it. How long ago is this? I've never heard of it. Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure this was, like, a phenomenon in the 19th century.

Wow, okay. And it was just conducted as an experiment? No, it's just they thought, well, you know, it was just when they started to learn about germs and things, and they thought, yeah, we should probably just not give them germs. And so, look, it's very obvious. You see it all the time in early childhood development constantly. Oh, yeah, when parents are more absent. Every single second matters. When parents are absent from a child's upbringing, it obviously has consequential consequences.

outcomes on that child. Yeah. Oh my God, man, I can't wait. It's going to be so scary having kids, but I'm definitely going to be reading a bunch about early childhood development. And as a result, probably just knowing too much and fucking it up as a result of that. That'll probably be the problem. I think you have to probably like, yeah,

except that we have some level of human instinct to caring for children. It's kind of probably over many, many thousands of years imprinted in our DNA. And I think the modern society influence there is the overthinking aspect of it. Just like they apparently overthought about wearing gloves when handling babies, which led to deaths. Yeah. It's kind of insane. Totally. That's kind of my point though. Like they overthought it and then they ended up doing more damage to the child.

I think when you have children, you probably have to afford yourself a little bit of intuition. Yes, but it's also that thing of, man, don't you think that you can tell when you can just tell by meeting someone if they had good parents or not? I reckon like almost immediately off the mark.

It's definitely a scale though, right? It's not binary. It's not binary. Some people could have parents where there are some flaws to them and it doesn't affect them as much personally. But then those same flaws in another set of parents could affect that child quite drastically differently. There's too many variables. There is too many variables. There's definitely too many.

All right. It's probably just easier to say you can tell when someone had like a difficult upbringing as opposed to somebody that had like a pretty normal upbringing as opposed to somebody who had like an exceptionally good mum, I reckon. That type of person, I think, always has like a level of security around them. It's just like they're just much less insecure than the other people.

And so, yeah, I'm fully on board with the theory that that guy purely just from that would have started morphing his brain. I think that that's absolutely plausible. Especially at a development stage like that very early on where, like you said, babies are apparently able to die just due to not touching human skin.

If that's the case, then a baby or toddler, when he expects to see his parents' faces at certain times and doesn't, and then that inner feeling of kind of abandonment festers, I can imagine that actually does create long-term issues in the development of that child.

Yep. Three years later, when Ted was 10 years old, the family moved to the more suburban area of Evergreen Park. In his early school years at Sherman Elementary School, Ted had been described as healthy and well-adjusted, and the family was active and well-liked by their neighbors and peers. He was moved to Evergreen Park Central Junior High School and skipped sixth grade due to his high IQ score of 167. Jesus. What are you getting into Mensa for? 150? Yeah. Kira?

Kira, our local Minster resident. Yeah. What's your IQ? As the person with the highest IQ here, Kira. Wait, you did have a high IQ, didn't you? You had triple digits, whereas me and Jordan, Jordan and I, there we go, immediately fucking it up. Just scraping the high doubles. Yeah, boys, almost at average. IQs grow over time, right? I've still got a chance. Yeah. Yeah.

Wait, was that the case? You did the IQ test, didn't you, Kira? No, I don't think I have. Oh, okay. I'm thinking of a completely different person. Disregard. I'm scared to. All right, all right. Now just guess what your IQ is. What do you think it is?

Well, I've taken an IQ test before. I don't know how accurate they ever are. Online or an actual one? It was like an online one. Okay. All right. I'll listen to this bullshit thing that was obviously trying to get you to buy penis supplement pills. It came out with 254. What?

No, I can't remember what it was. And only a genius would buy this gamer chair. And you are a genius, aren't you, sir? Kira, can you find out what Einstein's IQ was reported to be? Yeah, so first, it seems like the minimum to get into Mensa is 132. Oh, that low. And then...

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I was going to say, I'm pretty sure like what the website told me. And again, I don't know how reputable the website was. I think like 130. You got 130. I think it was around that. Yeah. Well, look, two things. One, I wouldn't actually be surprised if you just scraped not getting into Mensa. That wouldn't surprise me. The other thing that wouldn't surprise me as well is that that test is a complete and utter bullshit test. But, you know.

Yeah. Sorry. It seems, after a bit of Googling as well, it seems that Albert Einstein was around 160. There we go. He's smarter than Einstein. He's smarter than Einstein. There you go. Wow. There you go. Well, I hope that's a message for all you young, budding parents out there. Leave them abandoned at the hospital for a week. I'll tell you what. I know from talking to teachers, they always say the same thing. Do you...

Children that are that smart are never well-adjusted. I reckon that that's, like, well-adjusted for the 60s. I reckon now... But, dude, up until, like, 2010, I guess, there was just misbehaving children. There was no such thing as ADD or anything, you know? Yeah. Very new development. It's a new development, and it's, like, obviously way overdeveloped. Everyone has ADD now, but that...

The idea that a child is well-adjusted back then, I think it could be just a thing of the fact that he's so smart that he's able to play the game very easily. Holy shit. Now, even just hearing the fact that that guy has basically 170 IQ...

Man, his manifesto, again, is making a lot more sense to me. It really is. It's again, it's detachment. It's undeniable. Even if you disagree with his writing and his core messages, which I don't know how you necessarily could, other than the idea that we should revert to

essentially a naturalism or, you know, going back to living in forests. Like you can disagree with that element for sure. Like we definitely have it a lot better now than we did during those times, which I fundamentally disagree with his messaging about that, where he argues that, you know, if we all just go live out in the woods on our own in small communities, we will be better than we are now, which is just, I think categorically wrong. But like beyond that, even if you disagree with certain messaging, um,

of his manifesto, he is undeniably like a genius. He's very intelligent. It just comes across in his writing. It comes across in all the experiences and all of the biography of him, essentially. Like he's an incredibly intelligent person that can't be kind of dismissed. No. He's very smart.

And this is something that I read. I can't remember which book it was now, but it was just talking about the tech giants, right? And the founders of it. So you have Zuckerbergs and your musks and all this kind of stuff. And it keeps saying over and over again, these kids were abnormally intelligent as children. And eventually what happens with abnormally intelligent children is they figure out the rules of school. They figure out the rules of just everything that they're in faster than the actual teacher can.

And so they start thinking, well, I should be entitled to create my own rules. Or like, you know, I'm going to re... Basically, their game becomes reinventing what the actual game is. That's what they start doing. They get bored of the game. They get bored of the game. Yeah. Sorry. I was also going to say that when they describe him as healthy and well-adjusted, that could literally just mean that he is like...

Like, who knows what that meant in the 50s, really? That's what I think that that could mean. I honestly just think it means this guy understands the rules of the game and can play it well. And so that's just marked off as healthy and well-adjusted. Yeah. And plus, a big component of life back in the 40s and 50s was literally just being obedient, right? Just fitting into the societal norms properly. Yeah. Which, I mean...

There's nothing that precludes him from doing that. He definitely doesn't come across in that early stage as anything like trend breaking. Like he did his studies. He did it diligently. He acted with respect. There's nothing there that isn't well adjusted by the societal norms of that time. They're probably not going to be grading him on his sociability or anything like that at that point. No, no, no.

And again, back then, I don't know if they even really had much of an idea of what like autism or ADD was really, generally speaking. Probably not. I don't even know if they knew it existed back then. Who knows? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know when it was kind of more thought of. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, as normal as the family appeared, some noticed that Ted was a little bit different, especially compared to his brother, David. Ted was less social and did not have many friends. He was more introverted. So that's probably the extent of like the differentiation really was just that he was maybe a little bit more shy and less outgoing than his brother. Mm-hmm.

While well-intended, this move to skip sixth grade severely impacted Ted. Socializing did not come as natural to him as it did for his brother. He still fit in with his peers at his previous grade, and he was able to semi-comfortably socialize. When he skipped ahead, Ted felt completely out of place and was bullied by his peers. Ted later wrote that this was a pivotal moment in his life. One of the layers that led him on the path he walked. In high school, Ted joined a number of different clubs. The marching band,

mathematics, biology, German, and more. He had a short association with a group of boys who were interested in similar academic classes named the Briefcase Boys because they would carry around briefcases to class.

Did you have anything like that at your school where there was just kind of a group that did the... There actually was a group of people in high school for me where they would take any opportunity to wear suits, which was kind of cool looking back. But back then it was kind of like, what are you doing, you douche? Lame. Yeah. Very lame. What were they called? Business boys or something? No, I don't think they gave themselves a name. They're just like suits. They just really love suits.

And I'm sure that those suits were shitty suits as well. Probably, yeah. You can't look cool as a 17-year-old in a suit. You're too gangbanger. No, it's the whole thing where it kind of just looks like, you know, when a boss baby wears adult clothes or anything like that, it just looks like a kid in oversized clothes. Absolutely.

You wait until you start sagging and there's a bit of disappointment of unfulfilled dreams in your eyes. Then you can slap a suit on there to hide the insecurity. There was also another situation. I think it was a group of girls who would like guard. You might remember this, Kira. A group of girls who would like guard the library and pretend to be vampires. Yeah.

I was thinking of that. You were thinking of that as well? Kira, come on. You were part of that group. Sure. Yeah, you were one of the vampire girls. Absolutely not. One of the bloodsuckers. Wait, were they in your guys' year? No, I think they were older. They were older. Okay. Did you interact with them at all, Kira? No. Not at all? You were scared of them?

I was because I came into our high school later than Hugh Jackson a few years. So I was very intimidated. By everyone, not just the vampires. Yeah. Oh, my God. But no, they were scary. I wouldn't go to the library because anytime we'd go near them, you'd hear like kissing from behind the bushes. Oh, my God. Yeah.

So they were hunting children. Well, yeah, I don't know if there was any actual abductions or anything, but there was certainly some intimidation at the library. They pretended to be, are you sure they pretended to be vampires? It was either vampires or werewolves. It was some kind of, it was at the time that Twilight was super popular. So that's so good. This was high school too. Did they dress differently? Were they kind of gothic? I don't remember. We had a school uniform, didn't we?

Yeah, we had a school uniform. Yeah, but you know there's always that group of girls that have shit dyed hair. It's never dyed well. It's always they've done it at home. They certainly, they probably attempted to dress the part, like look goth or whatever, but I don't remember too much, honestly. I just remember the hissing. It's weird, these little groups that you guys had. I've never heard those before. There's usually just the guys that wear the jock 50s jackets. We had that too. And the nerdlingers. Yeah.

Yeah, we had the nerd group, which we were probably a part of mostly. And then we also had the sporty people, the jocks and such, but no like leather jackets or whatever. No like Americanized...

you know, jock types. Leather jackets have been pushing it by about half a century, I'm guessing at that point. Something along those lines, some Fonzies. It's interesting. There's the school mainstays that you always have at every school, pretty much like you said, like the nerd group or the sporty group and stuff. I just assumed that the vampire group was...

more popular across the board. It's just the vampire group to me sounds just like a deviation of the goth group or the emo group. Yeah, probably was, but they just took it a bit far. Yes. Okay. Yeah.

So nothing academic at school was a problem for Ted. And he went on to also skip 11th grade. So we skipped two grades. He graduated high school at the young age of 15. Looking back at Ted in high school, former peers have mused on Ted and how he was more seen by everyone as an incredibly intelligent walking brain, more so than a person, which I get. I'm assuming they meant that as a compliment, but Jesus Christ, that's mean. Is it? I think so. Being referred to not as a person, but a walking brain.

It's a bit dehumanizing, is it not? A little bit, but it's also... Like, what makes you a human is the brain. It's kind of just discarded the rest of it. Is it? Is that what makes you a human? Is it? I don't think so. What, the thumbs? Do you reckon the thumbs make us human? No. Yeah. Yes. Our nutsacks. And what? Our nutsacks.

This is getting dumber. We are actually going back in IQ now. Dogs have brains.

Yeah, but they don't have human brains, do they? Okay, so what makes a human a human is a human brain. Yeah, man, come on. It's like way more impressive than a dog's brain. It just is. No, the ability for us to create society is what makes us human, I think. And part of creating society is being a person. No, not thumbs.

We could create society without thumbs. There's an argument to be made that we never would have reached this point if we didn't have thumbs, I'm sure. But, like, it's more so... I'm actually changing my vote to the thumbs now that I think about it. You can be a giant squid or a whale. I remember hearing that there's possibly that sperm whales might potentially have more complicated language than we do. But that's all well and good. You've got annoying little flippers.

Yeah, you don't have thumbs, therefore. You can't even scratch yourself. You have to go to the bottom of the ocean and drag your stomach along the sand instead of just, like, doing a little chimp scratch on the stomach. I'm doing it right now. What if- That's satisfying. Okay, argument, argument. What if you get your thumbs cut off? Yeah, then you're no longer a person and you should be thrown in a zoo. LAUGHTER

And the chimps should be let out and put on hilarious clothes with backwards hats and be taught at your school. Yeah, put them in business suits. They can join the suit club. Jesus.

I mean, you wouldn't have anything against it, would you? Hell no. I mean, what's the difference? At 15, he applied and was accepted into Harvard University, which I think is pretty impressive. Yeah. He started the following year of 1958 on a scholarship. Harvard's the good one, right? That's the one they all love. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yale's the nippo baby one. Yeah. Yeah. Green. I think that's another one. Berkeley. Um,

There's the also rants, but Harvard seems to be the Peter Van Dam Hoogan van of academia. What's the big one? Oxford. Oxford's the big one in England, right? Yeah. Now, I just want to, if there's anyone that's British that listens to this, and I don't know why you would, it's just not classy enough for you, but Oxford or Cambridge, which one's bigger? Not bigger, better. You're putting that out there to the UK audience to let us know? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, I'm going to go Cambridge. Actually, no, Oxford.

I don't know. It's just they both have a dictionary. Well, think about it. There's a suit store over here in Australia, a suit store chain where they sell business suits. It's called Oxford. Yeah, that really... You really were much like Kaczynski imprinted by your early formative high school years, weren't you? Yes. You seem to just really cartoonishly equate a suit with success. It doesn't matter about the... I mean, it's a mall brand.

Oxford is not Westfield. Yeah, but it's not, I don't know, there's no like a... It's not Tara Cash. Okay, yeah. It's not like tradies getting ready for the races suits. That's true. That's actually where I got my suit for my formal from was fucking like Lowe's or something. I'm pretty sure. You got it from Lowe's. Yeah. Oh, that is low.

That felt bad. Oh, my God. That felt bad. Yeah, that's for footy players going to court. It didn't feel good. Didn't feel good coming out of that changing room. It can't feel good. It's got to be the most ill-fitting suit there is. I don't know what the- That cost like 50 bucks. It was not expensive. I'm pretty sure we got a deal as well. It was on sale.

I don't know what that is in American terms. What's like a super low... Low suit. Yeah. Low is lows. It's like the budget clothing store over here in Australia for like you said, like tradies basically. Like people working on job sites.

I am amazed that it's called Lowe's. It's incredible. It's pretty apt. And then you get your shoes then from Payless Shoes, which would be next door. So what we're saying is Oxford is in, I don't know what the American equivalent is, but Oxford is in the quote-unquote fancy mall. This is what I'm saying. It's no wonder that I'm impressed by Oxford. Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. If I'm coming from Lowe's. Yeah. No, it's a huge step up. You're right. I'm trying to rationalize my existence right now.

Ted was so young, he didn't yet have his driver's license. Whoa. Again, this move was well-intended by those around him, but it adds another layer to the person he would become and the pressures he would face. Why'd you say whoa? It's just incredible that you're at Harvard and you can't drive.

I'm assuming that he just stayed on Harvard. Like, why would he need to drive anyway? Plus, he's 15. Where's he going to go? No, Jackson, yes. I get physically that, like, he could do this. But it's just incredible that he can't even get his driver's license and he's at the most esteemed university in the world, basically. Yeah, he's probably intelligent enough to know exactly how a car works and functions down to its very minute mechanical details. Yeah. And yet he's not allowed to drive one.

I'd probably trust him more on the road than anyone else, honestly. Yeah. It's just, look, it's, it's really, I'm glad we're going through his formative years, but sorry, go on, Jackson. He,

He quickly proved himself a highly intelligent student, even at this level. He was, by all accounts, a prodigy, way ahead of anyone else in his classes, particularly mathematics. Yeah, he was very good at mathematics. In Ted's second year, he joined and participated in a psychology study headed by a professor named Henry Murray.

This particular part of Ted's university experience has been discussed a lot over the years and also in his subsequent trials, as the study has been reported as possibly being a part of the secret CIA mind control experiments, MKUltra, which we have already covered in a previous episode.

episode so murray was the director of the harvard psychological clinic in the late 1930s but he left to work for the office of strategic services also known as the oss this would later become the central intelligence agency also known as the cia if you're keeping up to date on the lingo on his return to harvard in 1947 as a chief researcher he began to conduct

in quotation marks, or experiments that might have been backed or influenced by the CIA itself. The participants, students in this case, were asked to write essays and reports on their own beliefs and worldviews. They would then bring their essays in and be seated in a room and their beliefs and essays would be torn and picked apart in vehement, sweeping, and

and personally abusive interrogations, according to Murray's own words. They wanted to look at interrogation techniques and how far they could push someone and tear down their ideas until they broke and changed their own mind on what they believed. That's a pretty incredible connection. Isn't it? Isn't it incredible? Did the CIA create Ted Kaczynski? What do you reckon?

Guys, you've got to let me know. What do you think? I think they probably did do experiments out of their own hubris. I don't think they were intending to create a guy who was going to become hyper-radicalized about tearing down the very society that the CIA existed in. I don't see what benefit there would have been for that on the CIA's part. So it probably didn't have its intended output or outcome. But...

They probably did. What's this fucking university again? Harvard. It's Harvard. I'm assuming the CIA was up to stuff at Harvard at some point, surely. Possibly. What do you think? Isn't it weird? You know what I'm thinking is just like the CIA from specifically those decades just did like a lot of wacky things, didn't they?

I think it was just a lot of, like, guys just sitting around in boards going, what do you reckon? Just freak out some eggheads, see what happens? Yeah, yeah, let's just try that for a bit. Yeah, why not? It was after World War II. Let's give this guy acid and see if he can astral project into the Soviet Union. It's really, like... Again, it was...

It's so, I was just the other day, again, this is going to have no impact on our audience because you don't know who John Howard is, but John Howard is kind of our Margaret Thatcher, our Ronald Reagan, just a right down the line guy. Just so quote unquote conservative. You know, he's one of those guys goes to church straight laced, straight laced as I was looking at photos of him. No way. Yeah.

It would be absolutely sacrally true. It would be a travesty. It would be on the front of the Sydney Morning Herald. But he's not a toff either. He's not a toff. He wouldn't be shopping at Oxford. Not the heady days of that. But, you know. There's a middle ground somewhere. There's got to be. Again, I'm telling you, it's YD. There you go. And then he's... I was looking at photos of that guy from the 70s and he has sideburns.

What the... It's like you can't escape the acid trip that was this period. Yeah. It's just there and it's going through everything. So even these extremely, you know...

really down the line agency, like the height of seriousness is the CIA. They're still doing wacky things like this. And wait, so sideburns as well? You don't believe that? You don't? Oh, okay. All right, fine. Look, now I'm starting to realize that what I thought was like extremely stupid and I'm feeling very defensive about it. Okay.

I mean, yes, the CIA did wacky shit in the 70s. Don't you think that wearing sideburns is wacky and you would never expect someone like John Howard to have sideburns? Kira's face palming in the back. I know. I think the audience can see her. She's actually just face palming. What did I sign up for? What? I've got nothing here. All right, fine. She's like, I wrote this beautiful script and they're talking about fucking sideburns because of the CIA. I want to go back to making sourdough.

Look, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I think there's something to it. I swear to God. The sideburn connection. Yeah, okay. Maybe society's crazy. LAUGHTER

Yeah, but no, the CIA did wacky shit. It was after World War II, so they were feeling confident, but they also had the new goal of, you know, the Soviet Union. So they were just throwing shit at the wall. And the Soviets were too. It was just intelligence at the time. They were trying these new different ideas and concepts. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, it was a very...

God, I just don't think that they do that stuff these days. Maybe because of these experiments, they've just got like a long, you know, playbook that they can play off. I don't know. I don't know if they... I mean, I really doubt they don't do stupid stuff still. I would imagine they do stupid things, but I would imagine it would be an era in...

you know, trying to make a coup happen or something. I don't... Yeah. I still don't think... I don't think the CIA is sitting there being like, do you reckon that we can splice the DNA of a man with a walrus and make a walrus man? Is that... I don't think they're doing that anymore. One of my favourite example, I don't remember the exact operation, it actually might have been part of MKUltra now that I think about it, where they got the...

the woman in a flooded house with a dolphin and they were just doing LSD constantly in order to try to train the dolphin. Communicate with the dolphin? To communicate with them. And it ended up just turning into a giant drug trip for week on week and in an effort to make the dolphin more comfortable, they made the... I think it might have been the woman scientist who decided to do this, but she ended up giving the dolphin a handy J.

Oh, really? Yeah. Did you not know that? She gave a dolphin a handjob. I think they were all high off acid. But yeah, she gave the dolphin a handjob in order to try to better facilitate communications between the humans and the dolphin people. All right. Well, now you've piqued my curiosity. Did it hail? No. It just made a really horny dolphin.

In a very uncomfortable situation afterwards, I'm assuming. Okay, so there was nothing to be gained from giving this dolphin a hair job. Well, there was certainly something to be gained from the dolphin's perspective. Well, there's something to be gained from him. Yeah, true. There was nothing. They didn't learn anything from this experiment at all? Nothing? No, no. That's usually the case, isn't it? Most of the CIA-sponsored operations.

So Ted spent over 200 hours in the study over three years under the codename Lawful. We know it occurred. Oh, we do know it occurred. Okay. We know it occurred, but most of the records are still locked and unavailable to the public. Seemingly not likely to be released as the Murray Center has locked the file up for good, apparently. It's hard not to think that these experiments did not have an impact on Ted and his life.

and this life anyway, it certainly seemed to inflict some sort of psychological trauma that he carried with him. For three years, this young teenager who already struggled socially was abused and berated about his viewpoints every week where they were then picked apart and influenced by outside force in an attempt to scientifically manipulate him as part of these experiments. But to what effect that would have on his eventual...

Outlook on life? I'm not sure. Again, I'm not really sold on the idea that the CIA, as a conspiracy, would supplant revolutionary ideas of tearing down the system in a potential Harvard student for some reason. I don't really see what they have to gain from that.

If it was just brainwashing him to be more obedient to the state or to the system, I could see that. But why would they want to create an adversary? A highly intelligent Einstein-level adversary? Like, why? Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's a weird one. The only thing that I think is that maybe they were doing it not really to brainwash them into thinking anything, but seeing what happens when you just really pick apart someone's beliefs. Well, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't think they had a motive in mind. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no motive. That's a shorter way of saying it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so chapter two, Killer Fantasies.

Right after he graduated, he went to the University of Michigan...

where he got his master's and doctoral degrees in mathematics. Realistically, he could have gone anywhere. He enrolled and was accepted into places like Berkeley, but Michigan went in the further step of offering a grant, which was approximately $2,400 in today's money, and also offered him a teaching position. Ted

Ted's professors were stunned at his drive, focus, and intelligence for his work with one of his previous math professors, a man by the name of Peter Duren, saying, quote, he was an unusual person. He was not like the other graduate students. He was much more focused about his work. He had a drive to discover mathematical truth, end quote.

It was around then, at this time in Michigan University, that Ted experienced what he would describe as a big turning point in his life. We know all of his life that he struggled socially, and this certainly included talking to women.

Those around him thought, to their knowledge, that Ted liked women but was uncomfortable around them. In 1966, however, he began to experience gender dysphoria, experiencing fantasies of being a female. For weeks, Ted would write down his feelings, believing that he was transgender. He reached out to a psychiatrist to talk about undergoing gender transition. He made it to the appointment, but as he sat down, he changed his mind, feeling like this was all wrong. Ted got up, left, and

became overwhelmed with the feeling of rage. He began to write down his feelings and expressed that he wanted to kill the psychiatrist that he saw. Many psychiatrists with experience in the field of gender transition do not believe Ted was actually transgender, coming to the conclusion by looking over his writings and how they focus on mainly sexual fantasies. They believe that it was likely just an outlet for Ted's sexual frustrations. What do you think about that?

Look, honestly, it just sounds to me like a nerd that finds it hard to talk to women. That's pretty much it. Yeah, I'm trying to rationalize it somehow in his brain. Like, maybe I suck at talking to women.

sexually because i am a woman or maybe yeah maybe that's why the dysphoria presented itself that way or like they describe it sounds honestly like your original theory sounds sounds pretty autistic you know like he sounds like quite an autistic guy you really don't like i think that you just can't be that smart and not have some level of autism there has to be or okay at the very least

You can't be that smart and not be like severely socially impeded. Socially handicapped, yeah. Don't you think? It's a bit like everyone would have that experience, right? When you're just talking to a real der, you think, what's the point of even communicating with this person? You can't. You can't. You can't communicate with them. They're just not on your level. Yeah.

By der, you mean an idiot? Yeah, just an idiot. Just a run-of-the-mill dumbass that you're speaking to. It's not... There's no gain either way here. There's no gain. What's the point? There's nothing really to level with them. So you think that's how Ted might have felt about society? Everyone that he would have met, obviously. You hear it over and over again with people that are hyper-intelligent. What?

Yeah, like we said at the start, there's no way to relate to society if you feel like, like you just said, like communicating with them, there's no like kind of back and forth or anything. You're basically talking to a stupid wall. That's a lot of conjecture. I don't know. I don't know what exactly...

uh ted experienced i don't know if he i certainly can't diagnose him as autistic or pretend to otherwise but there does seem to be like a behavioral issue there um that i think would probably be seen as autistic in this day and age i'm not sure though i'm not an expert that's true and don't also do you guys ever have this have you ever spoken to someone that's

clearly far more intelligent than you and you're just naturally a bit intimidated speaking to them well as a man that scored 128 in the online iq test it has been far and few yeah no yeah of course like a lot of a lot of my friends have done incredible things that are very like you feel like you have to put on airs talking to them because they're clearly so intelligent

One of my friends is actually a physicist. He graduated from university. He's currently in the process of getting his doctorate in physics. Works in AI safety at the moment. And yeah, just talking to him, it's very clear that we have fundamental differences in intelligence. So yeah, it's quite confronting. I would just imagine, yeah, that that's...

isolating faction of intelligence. It's that no one is on your level. But you're at a universe... You're at Oxford? Was it Oxford? No, Harvard. You're at Harvard. You're surrounded by what I assume would have to be highly intelligent people. Is it because their intelligences span in different...

I'm going to look this up because I would imagine that 167 would have to be... Yeah, yeah. I'm sure he's still far more intelligent than most people at Harvard even then.

So maybe it's a case that even the hyper-intelligent aspects of society are still not intelligent enough for him and he still feels disconnected. Like, look at this. This is from very reputable source Quora, but it basically says that 0.003% of the population have an IQ of 170 or above. Yeah, so how can you relate to people at that level? To anyone.

Like, I'm sure there was a couple of those in Harvard. Maybe he was friends with them, maybe he didn't get on with them. That's the other thing as well. Even if you have people that are of your, like, general intelligence stature, which I would imagine is one of the big things that determines who you're friends with. I think intelligence would- like, intelligence level would probably be there. And then on top of that, there's other determining factors such as, are they annoying? Yeah. And then that might just get rid of it. Which-

Which very smart people usually are. Usually are, yeah. Because it's confronting for us stupid people. Why can't you just talk to me like I'm an idiot? Yeah, it's dumb it down, egghead. Yeah, no, it's true though. I could absolutely see that as being a contributing factor. Just his raw level of brain power, like just, yeah, his intelligence. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's a quote here from the psychiatrist, or sorry, from Ted writing about seeing the psychiatrist. I'm going to read it out loud. Quote, as I walked away from the building afterwards, I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope.

I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me. I felt I wouldn't care if I died. And so I said to myself, why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate?

What is important is not the words that ran through my mind, but the way I felt about them. What was entirely new was the fact that I really felt I could kill someone. My very hopelessness had liberated me because I no longer cared about death. I no longer cared about consequences. And I said to myself that I really could break out of my rut in life and do things that were daring, irresponsible, or criminal. End quote. So there were two paths for him. Either, I guess, become transgender or become a...

domestic terrorist I guess that's the height of human intelligence right there damn he self radicalized basically through his own social deconstruction maybe you do just radicalize at that point or become like a massive recluse yeah

So Ted finished his doctoral dissertation in 1967. It was 75 pages long and it was titled Boundary Functions. He won the Sumner B. Myers Prize for the best mathematics dissertation of the year and the academics around him were highly impressed. Mathematics and experts in the field to this day regard this dissertation as something that not many people will actually be able to read or understand. Wow. That's fucking cool. That is cool. Imagine being that much of a maths boss.

Yeah, no one numbers and shit. Then other people that are just into maths can't read it. Don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, I don't think I'd be able to read the intro. I would be so fundamentally destroyed by that. Like, what the fuck are numbers? A member of the dissertation. Sorry, I was just thinking about, you know, I remember I was once trying to read one of Stephen Hawking's less accessible books. I can't even remember what it was called.

And I just picked up the page. Like I opened the book at some point in the bookstore and laughed because I didn't understand like 40% of the words on the page. It may as well be a different language. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, continue. But yeah. And then you threw the book on the ground in frustration.

I don't understand the frustration. Yeah, the book scared me. It was like reading Goosebumps, you know. It really was. A member of the dissertation committee, Maxwell Reed, said, quote, I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it. Jesus. There we go again. Yeah. Ted dunking on us all, making us feel stupid. With literally facts and logic. Yeah.

Ted was, for all extents and purposes, a bona fide genius. He had proved that at every opportunity throughout his academic life. So the world was Ted's oyster at this point. Who knows how the story will end?

Hmm.

That may answer the question as to why he resigned without any explanation the following year, only two years into his teaching career. The school knew he was shy and socially awkward, but they found his resignation to be, quote, out of the blue, end quote. Yeah, I mean, again...

Yeah, hyper intelligent, but that doesn't mean that you're good with people. Evidently so. No, Christ, no. Yeah, so. And then, I mean, come on, just look at this next chapter. He's done the classic. He's a meme. He built a cabin in the woods and fucked off. He's probably what created the meme. Maybe. Yeah, he's that OG, isn't he? Yeah, he is. Chapter three, building a solitary life.

Ted went back and moved in with his parents in Lombard, Illinois, where he worked odd jobs to build up enough cash to purchase his own property. Ted wanted to live away from people and told his family his dream was to be self-reliant and he wanted to live a simple life. He found a remote bit of land in Lincoln, purchasing the 1.4 acres in 1971, and on it he built his own small cabin with his brother David. Here he kept to himself. He was called Teddy the Hermit by neighbors around him. Classic dunce behavior, by the way.

Calling the hyper-intelligent Einstein-level character Teddy the Hermit. Just to dehumanize him in any way that he can. I really like it. Teddy the Hermit. There goes that 180 IQ having stupid idiot. Yeah, more of like he's a bar fly or something. You know how you always give something, like a guy that comes to the bar constantly, like some nickname, like the Admiral or something. Sounds like he's that. Well, that's cooler. The Admiral.

Oh, you know, in a very sarcastic tone. No one who spends their life at a bar and their nickname is The General. No one thinks that guy's a king. I'd salute. With no car. I'd stand at attention. I don't get sarcasm. Wow, that many beers, eh? He is a general.

Again, I do come from Lowe's background. With no car, occasionally Ted would bike into town for necessities that he needed. But the true dream was to be completely self-sufficient and self-reliant. He began to grow his own fruit and vegetables, forage plants, and hunt animals. The few neighbors he did have, even though far away, were still bothersome to Ted. He would write angrily about dirt bikes nearby and other things he found offensive. Thank you.

I doubt, surely he used a hammer or something. Like, how self-reliant and self-sufficient can you realistically even be? What do you mean? Well, like, did he make his own hammer out of stuff that he found in the woods? Did he make his own buzzsaw? So clearly he didn't, like, I don't know, create the metal roof there in this cabin on his own. Nah, his goal is to try and be as much of an island as he can.

I get that idea, but he's literally calling for the downfall of human society in his manifestos eventually. But if you're going to go to that level, you really do need to be that self-reliant and self-sufficient where you do not rely on absolutely any real inventions of society.

Where's the line for technology that is acceptable to Ted? Well, he's a staunch anti-technologist. So he believes that all technology eventually leads to our downfall just in the natural progression of things. Which again, that's another thing that I push back on with Ted. That idea, I think...

I think inventions or technology, sorry, technology is as natural as the natural world. Realistically, it is a creation of the natural world and it is in human nature. It's something that can't be undone basically, or not done. We will continue to keep inventing as we did at the very beginning. It's not like you can just stop technology.

Oh my God. Have you heard the theory that great apes are going through their stone age now? We need to keep them back. We need to take away their tools. We need to stop doing those cute little YouTube videos where we hand them tools and stuff and go, oh, look at him. He's swinging the hammer around and actually doing stuff. We need to get the tools away from them. Are you saying planet of the apes?

Yeah, I know. It does freak me out. It does. Especially with their natural strength. That's way more of a scary manifesto than this. Imagine if a chimp could go to Harvard. It's so terrifying. It's game over. Game over, man. Isn't it? Because they're just like, oh my God. That's all we have. If they get to our technological level. We're their nerds and they're our jocks. Yes, exactly. If they get to any level of technological innovation where they can't-

kind of step into the realm of sentience we are fucked there's no way we can wrestle a silverback yeah i don't know even if they get to like the napoleonic era i don't like our chances even there we don't we don't have that dog in us i'm afraid that is that's not a fight we'll win that is a no the apes is a far scarier manifesto yeah i mean look it does for whatever reason even though it's like such a dumb storyline

Genuinely, you do think, oh my god, but what if that did happen? It actually is just the stupid first manifesto, really. Like, it's what we're scared of when everyone intelligent probably is more scared. Actual things. Yeah, Ted's manifesto. Oh my god, did you see the newest episode of Star Wars? What if? Yeah, look, I...

He never really delved into your point, did he? What point? I'm sure he did at some point. Just your thing of, look, at what point are you going to revert us back to being a great ape? What point do you stop? Well, and also, what does that look like? Like...

what period of time are you aiming for? Are we able to use hose, for example, not, not hose in the derogative sense for women or what, anything like that. I meant like gardening. Are we able to use gardening hose, for example, or do we have to make them from the ground up? Or does that count as technology in and of itself? That's so good. Yeah, it's right. It's just pimp Jackson. If that was what he was on this podcast, that would be his first concern. What about the hose? Yeah.

Am I still allowed to have hoes? It is funny that your immediate go-to is just a gardening hoe. Yeah, well, I don't know why. I was thinking of corn and wheat and stuff and how you would prepare that, which is what you would need to do. I told you, dude, you're cucked by corn. This was the whole beginning of this. You are a wheat simp. It's fine. So am I.

I'm really not Kira Kira is the biggest fucking weed simp out of all of us Yeah Kira Defend your position You're a weed simp Jackson so are you, you love a steak sandwich Yeah but the steak is the key point there actually The bread does That's all the difference If it's on tip top it's just not going to be as good

No, I do have it on TikTok. Oh my God, really? Fuck, such a Lowe's boy. Jesus. You even have the Lowe's of bread. No, okay. I'll support Jackson on this. It is cheap bread, but it's the fresh baked in coals ones. It's not the branded ones. Okay, it's not? Yeah, I can pay that. That's probably pretty good. So it's not like sourdough or anything. Well, it's definitely not sourdough. It's just white bread.

Which I think is still seen as like pub in online communities now, isn't it? Everyone's gone team sourdough. I'm asking for help here. Someone, please. I don't know. You're asking the wrong guy here. I was waiting for Kira. Kira? I don't think so. Okay. So I'm safe? No, I think you're good. And the fresh in-store baked ones are pretty nice. Yeah. I've never had it before, but...

They do good work. They do good work. You don't have bread? What do you eat? Oh, yeah, basically I don't have bread at all. Really? No, Christ, no. I mean, I've had it in my life. I'm not Ted Kaczynski. But I'm just saying, like, anything that you ever get at Coles that is there in store, like, man, have you ever had their roast pork before? I hate pork. Oh, really? Yeah, I hate pork. So, no, not me. But Kira, have you?

No, I haven't. Is it good? Well, I don't know. They chicken. Do you think their chicken's all right? I think it's good. Honestly, the in-store stuff that they do is pretty damn good. Yeah, it's good. It's fine. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, the roast chickens are good, especially when you put them in your own like pie and stuff. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Good stuff.

Anyway. Back to this. Don't get me started on cooking. There's no way that we could exist in Ted Kaczynski's universe, is there? No. Just sitting there talking about how awesome supermarkets are. Well, that's what I'm also saying about his manifesto, why part of it is so inherently scary. The only really options that he identifies is literally going back to the time period or the existence where...

you know, diseases would wipe out most people constantly. And also like you had no creature compass of today. And also life was very hard and miserable and depressing or humanity just ends and dies out due to over-reliance on technology. Those are the only two options that he really identifies. And that's terrifying. Hmm.

So Ted had been building a negative outlook and attitude to the world and technology for years, crediting reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul in 1971 or 1972 as a moment where his perspective on the world clicked together. Okay. This book...

Sorry? Sorry, I'm just going to write that down for my own use. Sorry. To further radicalize yourself. Yeah, your ideas intrigue me, Mr. Kizint. Go on. I need further reading. The book from a French philosopher from the 50s depicted what he himself had been wanting to say for years. Through his life, he had read many books on human prehistory, as well as the concept of living a primitive lifestyle. And Ted realized he didn't just want to read it, he wanted to live it.

So it's interesting. He really wanted to spread this message to society to resort back to this lifestyle. He went about it in the worst way possible. I really feel like, and again...

This is actually a downside to him not being in the right technological time period. If he had just waited 20 years, he could have made some great YouTube videos about this and really spread his message. Oh my God, you're so right. Can you imagine that? Because what is one of the biggest YouTube channels online at the moment, or at least in recent years, is that primitive technology. Exactly. There's a real fascination from people

broadly speaking, to go back to that lifestyle and learn about those levels of sustainable living that he really could have spoken to eventually. And what made it possible for him to do that? Technology. Yeah. Kind of... Ironic, isn't it? Yeah, interesting irony to that. That if he just waited, maybe he could have actually spread his message in a positive way. He probably wouldn't have been very good at it because, again, very highly intelligent and not good at talking to people.

But, you know, potential option. That didn't involve bombing people. Yes. YouTube probably has shielded the world from a lot of psychotic behavior by giving, like, psychos an outlet.

like us right now, you know, just, I was going to say, it's also led to a lot of insane people though. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Look, this is only an answer to something that God could answer, but it would be nice to know if it was a net benefit or not. If God was real, wubba lubba dub dub, Rick and Morty reference. Damn! He's come back with the, fuck! Pickle Rick! I wasn't expecting a Pickle Rick right there. I haven't seen it in forever. No,

I haven't seen Rick and Morty in forever. Is there a new series out or not? I don't know. Yeah, me neither. Remember, like, Justin Roiland, the creator, like, got accused of something and then disappeared and then they replaced him and stuff. And I don't know what happened. Pickle Rick might have been the last episode I saw, honestly. Might have actually, yeah. Sorry?

I think I might be on the same boat, but go on. How the fuck did Pickle Rick become such a gigantic cultural phenomenon? Well, that is Szechuan sauce. I remember that. Szechuan sauce was also a massive cultural phenomenon. And show me what you got. Nah, nah. Nowhere near the Pickle Rick. That was just a titan of our time. Well, I think it's just because it's fun to say even outside of the show. I love saying Pickle Rick.

Oh my God, I had the most annoying ringtone the other day. I was like, I do not want to be friends with this person. What? I heard this on a bus or something, just, I pick a rig! I pick a rig! Like, oh! Society was a mistake. Did you imagine having a conversation with that person? Ted was right. We need to go back. We need to. We have to. It's too far. It's so good.

So the cabin that Ted had built had no electricity or running water. So he was unable to watch new episodes of Rick and Morty as well. Ted was happy living this recluse life. He said in a later interview, quote, one thing I found when living in the woods was that you get so that you don't worry about the future. You don't worry about dying. If things are good right now, you think, well, if I die next week, so what? Things are good right now.

I think it was Jane Austen who wrote in one of her novels that happiness is always something that you are anticipating in the future, not something that you have right now. This isn't always true. Perhaps it is true in civilization, but when you get out of the system and become readapted to a different way of life, happiness is often something that you have right now. So yeah, there's always this, he makes his argument in his manifesto that, you know, we will be far happier living that life.

living the recluse, not the recluse life, but the self-sustainable life of our ancestors. And again, that's something I push back on because I think if you gave a typical serf from the 700s or whatever, like a long time ago, thousands of years ago maybe even, if you gave them the choice between living then and now, I think they'll make the obvious choice. Do you? Yes. You don't think they'd be too freaked out?

Okay, yes. I mean, they'd be terrified, obviously, but if they had a fundamental understanding of what life was like now, the creature comforts afforded, the health benefits, the longer lifespan, everything from the ground up being... Okay, so you get to explain that to them. Yes. Well, I'm saying, okay, certainly you would prefer to live now than then. Yeah, but I'm me. This is the problem. All I'm basing this off of, I'll tell you this.

There was this Fijian... I can't remember what his job was, but my dad knew someone that worked with tribes in Fiji. This was before it was developed. This was, like, 50s. And he...

had this chief tribesman that was always begging please can i go to australia i want to see what it looks like because he'd tell him stories about it and he'd say i just i just want to look at it please can you go so anyway one day he forked up a ticket for him and it was like the 50s or the 60s or whatever it was a lot of money and the chiefman got on the plane landed on the tarmac of australia and refused to get out he had to just fly back to fiji

Because he was so scared of how advanced Australia was. He's just never experienced anything like it. Like, the plane, even the plane obviously scared the shit out of him when he was going on there. And that was, like, off, like, a dirt plane.

road and then it lands on tar back and then you've got an actual airport there and airplanes going two and four and a bunch of cars driving around everywhere. It freaked him out. He couldn't hack it. So maybe it's the same thing with medieval peasants. I mean, again, I think they would be terrified, but I think...

It's such a hypothetical anyway. It's so hard to quantify what their feelings would be. I would certainly prefer to live now. That's all I can really say. Even with me agreeing with a lot of what Ted is saying, I think we undeniably have it a lot better now than we did 100, 200, 300, 500,000 years ago. That's true.

Although, actually, the guy that wrote Homo Deus, he actually makes the point, it's like, what would you rather be? Because levels of happiness are much higher in, say, Costa Rica, which is a lot less economically developed than, say, Singapore. And Singapore, your standard of living is a lot higher than it is Costa Rica. Yeah. You know, which one's better at the end of the day? If he's just saying that you're constantly happy in the woods. Which I don't think is true of everyone. Yeah, okay, maybe, maybe. Again, because he is a psycho.

Well, not just a psycho. It's just like we are different people of different life experiences and opinions. But he just removed the individuality regardless. He's arguing for on a societal level. He thinks that we will as humanity be better for returning to that time period, which is a totally different argument, of course. So...

In the same interview, in this same interview, Ted talked about inventing forest gods for himself. Nevermind, he isn't saying. He laughed that he didn't believe that these were real, but tied them to feelings that he had. Like when he would follow snowshoe rabbits and lose their tracks without knowing where the rabbit went. He dubbed a mysterious entity called Grandfather Rabbit, who was responsible for all the other rabbits. And he also had the ability to simply disappear into thin air. There was also another he called Will-o'-the-Wisp,

or Wings of the Morning, which was something he described as a time in the morning where it felt as though you could just walk endlessly in the forest. Ted truly believed that this was a living, this was, sorry, he truly believed that this was living away from people, technology, politics, all of the distractions that he believed was leading to loss of fulfillment and well-being for people living in civilization. People living nearby to Ted saw him as a shy but harmless guy, but behind closed doors, thoughts he was having around violence began to become louder and louder.

The dirt bike riders he was angry with for their noise pollution were the targets of an attack on their bikes and property, as well as stringing up wire to create traps in the forest. A sawmill that was close by was lit on fire and construction equipment around the forest would be destroyed in what seemed to be an act of sabotage.

Ted actually contemplated killing the three-year-old daughter of the man who owned the sawmill, seeing her as fair game due to the sawmill owner destroying the woods he called home. He saw her in the woods and pointed a gun, but then realized her mother was also around and decided not to. No one at this point thought all of this was Ted, again because they thought he was relatively harmless and kept to himself most of the time.

Actually, I want to throw it over to you for a sec. Would you prefer to go live in the woods in a little wood cabin? You want to do that? In a cabin like his? Yeah, no electricity, nothing. We have to make it work. You and I, we have to do everything. How would I bake my sourdough? You'd be able to bake your sourdough. You'd have a lot of time to do that. Yeah, that would be an all-day task. I need an oven.

We'd create it from stones and then we'd make a fire. You'd have like a stovepipe oven. I'll tell you this. I'll tell you this. Your sound would taste better. Why? Because it was made with a lot of effort? Because it's like made with a fire. It absolutely made it taste better. Okay, you're selling Kira. She's nodding in the background. You won't drag me away from my Nintendo Switch 2. I'm not leaving. Yes.

I'm not leaving. I like my TV. Yeah. I want to watch my shows and my footy. Ted Kaczynski covered that in his manifesto. He said that entertainment exists exclusively to null your senses and keep you trapped in here, away from the woods.

As he lived out in the wilderness, his initial plan was to be self-sufficient and keep to himself as he lived this new lifestyle. However, as the forest began to shrink and more homes were popping up around the exterior of his property, Ted began to abandon that vision. His interest began to turn in different directions, further than destroying neighboring dirt bikes and construction equipment. He wanted to impact and change the technology and society that he had identified as being the root cause of all of his misery, a society he felt that he did not belong in.

For this, he needed money. So far, he had been living off money from his parents. So Ted moved back in with his parents and got a job working as a supervisor thanks to his brother, David. Here, Ted also met a woman and for what was probably the first time in his life, went out on a few dates. Yeah, this is getting sexy. Ted opened up a little bit to receiving affection from a woman. What would that have looked like? Was it a kiss, Kira? Was it a handshake? What's his level of...

Okay, yeah, so I read about this. They went on a few dates and they did share a kiss. Ooh, my man. My man. Nice. How old is he, 40 at this point? Go Teddy. Maybe 20s. Oh, that's not bad. Yeah, that's all right. I mean, for like 180 IQ, that's really not bad. No, no, he figured it out. You knew exactly what to say. Yeah.

The equation of kissing. Probably that kiss probably saved a few people, honestly. You know what? You could be absolutely right about that. Do we know anything about this lady? Kira? Yeah, there are some writings about it online, like coming from Ted in his journals and stuff like that.

But he didn't feel too kindly to her, as you'll see. Moving on. Did he ever write smut? Like, were there any sex notes? I mean, he went into how they kissed, but that was about it. That's not sexy enough. Ted opened up a little bit to receiving affection from a woman, but soon after she decided that it weren't a match and broke it off.

Damn.

In Ted's diary, he described the date where the woman told him she didn't want to go out with him again as humiliating, and he wrestled between wanting to cry and wanting to kill her. He wrote, quote,

I was so upset by this that for the next two nights, I was unable to sleep more than four hours a night. And what was worse, I was exhausted by nervous tension. That date was Sunday. Monday, I did nothing about it because I was exhausted and had no time to think things over.

But after work, I did think things over. I had an overwhelming need for revenge and I decided to get it by persistently needling and insulting her at work. End quote. This was in a letter to David. Sorry, in a letter to David, Ted revealed that he had wanted to viciously beat her and scar up her face, although he didn't do these things, thank God.

thankfully. Ultimately, these experiences of social isolationism, repeated writings of inner turmoil and rage, as well as an already existing willingness to commit crimes, were all leading Ted Kaczynski in only One Direction.

Thank you for the echo there. Why did you say that at the same time? I don't know. It's just because of the band One Direction. That was it. Oh, right. Well, yeah. Much like technology only goes in one direction, so too does Ted Kizinski. Oh, yes. So too does the band One Direction. One Direction. God, I miss those guys.

Wait, one of them just recently died, didn't he? Did he? Yes. Oh, man. Which one was that? Zane. Liam. Liam. I think he fell from a building, right? Look, this is... Yeah. Fell from a building? Yeah, he fell from a balcony. Okay, he was high, surely. Yeah, I think he might have been under the influence. Yeah, he thought he could fly. Acid?

Potentially. What were we doing? Yeah, he had multiple substances in his system, including pink cocaine, crack, another thing. Crack. Crack. Now that's a Lowe's drug, isn't it? Yeah. You don't have that if you're a One Direction guy. What was the other one though? Pink what? Pink cocaine? What's that? Does that do a different thing than normal cocaine?

Yeah, what the hell is pink cocaine? It contains a mixture of different psychoactive substances. Oh, really? Most commonly found in a pink dyed powder. So it's like a designer cocaine? What the fuck is... It's got a whole bunch of shit in it. Why can't you just do cocaine? Why do you have to level it up? Dude. That's not a suggestion for our audience. Typically for juices. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah. What's wrong with regular good old-fashioned cocaine? You stick to that. I mean, look, honestly, it is...

It produces mind-altering hallucinogenic effects and it's cocaine. Yeah, that's a bad mix. That is a bad mix. Isn't it? Evidently. Okay, I have no idea about that, but yes, continue on. Yeah, that letter to his ex-girlfriend was a bit confronting. It's definitely insult-like. It's very insult-like, yeah.

There was quite a lot of writings about this whole situation and he wrote letters to her and he would flip between one of the letters was quite like angry and just rambling on her. And then the next one was very apologetic and he was kind of flipping and the limericks that he would write were really nasty too, really gross and about her body and stuff like that. What about her body?

Can you go into detail? I'm asking you important questions here. No, but I, like, what, like, about, I don't know, her weight or whatever, like, was it degrading? Yeah, it was degrading gross things about her body and, like, sexually and stuff like that. Oh, okay. Yeah, so very in Sally then.

Writing lyrics too, Jesus. Yeah, in Selly, but artistically so. Chapter four, the bombings. Ted was fired from this job, the one he had only wanted to get a bit of cash out of for his aspirations to go live in the woods. But now even more anger and humiliation was added as fuel to this fire. To make matters worse, it was his own brother that had fired him. It was this very same year. Oh my God. Yeah, I know, it's sad, isn't it? Oh, that's brutal. Go on.

It was this very same year in 1978 that Ted would send his first bomb, which began a reign of terror that lasted nearly two decades, which killed several and injured many

many more. Bombing 1 May 25th 1978 Northwestern University at Illinois. A mail package was found in the parking lot of Northwestern University near a mailbox but too big to fit inside it. The mail had a return address written on it with the name of a professor at the university. A campus security officer, one Terry Marker found the package and as he looked at it the package exploded in his hands. Luckily Marker only suffered minor cuts and burns. The

The poor design of the pipe bomb and not enough pressurization saved him from further harm. Investigators weren't able to gather any leading evidence and came to the conclusion that it was, at the time, a singular event. Hit me with bombing too, Jordan. Almost a year. What? Sorry, what? I said don't hit me with a bombing, but hit me with talking about it. Oh, man. Jackson, if I could, you'd be the first. Yay. And I wish to learn this man's techniques.

And then you live in fear for the rest of your life. Well, it kind of sucks in it, to be honest, most of it. Yeah, it does actually. I'll find it from someone else. Someone else will probably be better at it. Look, I'll look up Al-Qaeda or something. Don't do that. Just Googling that, Al-Qaeda bombing techniques.

Almost a year later, Ted attacks Northwestern again. This time a graduate student named John Harris saw the mysterious package and went to pick it up. It was located in the second floor study room of the Technological Institute. The bomb was disguised as a cigar box. Very clever. And Harris noticed the lid was taped down.

When he pulled at it, the bomb exploded. The blast started a fire put out by a nearby teaching assistant who heard the commotion and came to help. They noticed thousands of matchsticks across the floor, wires and flashing batteries. Luckily, similarly to last, Harris only suffered minor cuts and bruises, released from hospital in around an hour. Again, Ted used the mailing. Oh, no, wait, that's the third one. There we go.

That's what happened on the second. Wow, dude, this guy, for a super genius, this guy sucks. Well, it's his first, well, this is his second attempt. It's his second attempt, and he had a year to think about where he went wrong. But also, remember, it is Ted Kaczynski. He probably made all of these mechanics by himself. He probably had to research it himself because he can't use technology or whatever. So, you know, from the ground up, there are experiments. I couldn't make a bomb. Could you make a bomb?

Well, I've got the internet. I suppose he doesn't again because he doesn't exist in that time. And you are looking up how to do it from actual terrorists. I suppose, yeah. Dude, this guy's giving himself a real handicap, isn't he? He knows the concept of bombs exist and then everything he has to fill in the blanks from there on in himself. Exactly. It's pretty impressive. So, yeah, knowing his limitations, what did he target next, Kira?

So his third target was the American Airlines flight 444 in Illinois. So wait, he really jumped a pretty big leap there, right? Like he went from minor bombings at graduate students at some university to now targeting a full flight filled with people. Yeah, it's crazy.

It happened on November the 15th in 1979, so six months after the last. Again, Ted used the mailing system to send this bomb. It was normal at the time for packages to actually be put onto passenger flights. And the bomb he created was set to go off with an altimeter. Altimeter. Altimeter, thank you.

When the target height was hit, in this particular bombing, Ted was targeting an entire plane with this bomb, which is obviously an enormous escalation given the previous two bombings were small ones directed at university facilities.

Fortunately for the passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 444, the bomb actually malfunctioned. The explosive charge did not go off, so the bomb produced just a lot of non-lethal smoke, but it did not explode. Oh, my God. Man, like, looking at these just endless failures, you kind of just...

What a loser terrorist. I know. I mean, it's good. That would have been a fucking horrible bombing if it succeeded. So thankfully he sucks at bombing at this point. He didn't do it, but it's just like he's Wile E. Coyote and the society is Roadrunner. He doesn't get a shit. He was trying to kill people at this time, right, Kira? He wasn't just...

planned around or anything yeah okay um in his journals ted showed no remorse or guilt for what he was doing he was focusing on building better bombs and working on future plans he actually wrote in his journals reflecting on this event saying late october i mailed the package from chicago as priority mail so it would go by air unfortunately plane not destroyed bomb too weak

Newspaper said low power device surprised me. I didn't calculate this. I've been foiled again. He's like the world's most incel supervillain for some reason. He's just in a shack. He's just in a random log shack out in the wilderness creating shitty bombs, sending them out and then writing in his journal about how he's constantly foiled again.

What a loser. Do you think that he's got any links to any creations of Batman supervillains? I mean, he's very recent compared to when those were created. You mean like modern villains? Maybe. I don't know. Is Ted Kaczynski a source of... There's probably Batman villains that use bombs. Kira, would you like to keep reading? Yep.

So when investigators began to look at the bomb, it was noted to be similar to the previous two, leading them to believe that they were connected. The bombs were made out of wood, more wood than what they would normally see in similar devices, as well as scrap and salvaged metal. Of course, this made sense with Ted living out in the woods. He would rummage for spare car parts and other scrap that he would use to make the bombs.

But the investigators who at this point thought it was someone from a suburban town making bombs in their homes and, you know, garages and things like that thought this was a bit of a strange detail.

And this wasn't just a singular attack on a university anymore, as a full plane of passengers nearly died. The FBI launched a more intense investigation, delegating more manpower to hunting down the university and airplane bomber, or now called the Unabomber. Yeah, I had no idea why the Unabomber was called the Unabomber until I read this script. I have no idea why I didn't look that up.

But yeah, apparently Unabomber, for those that don't know, stands for University and Airplane Bomber. So UNA. Maybe everyone already knew that. Did you know that, Jordan? Yep. Okay, sweet. I was aware. I didn't. I didn't know that.

It makes perfect sense. I've only ever seen pictures of Ted Kaczynski looking very disheveled and homeless almost, so I thought that he might have had a unibrow, and that's why they called him the Unibower. That was my genuine theory. Dude, that's so good!

Oh, that's hilarious. Holy shit. That's not even a joke. I thought it just meant like... Unibrowed bomber. Oh, man. Because it's kind of just a bit like Bluebeard or, you know, Pegleg or something. It harks back to Pirates of Yore. It's not bad. It's just, again...

Jackson has quite a five-year-old mindset in certain ways. He loves Lego, dinosaurs. It's quite innocent. It's very naive and sweet. I like it. It's very nice. It's very endearing that he's just like, is it because he has a unibrow? I'm glad my mental deficiencies bring you joy. It does. It makes me happy. LAUGHTER

Bombing number four, June 10th, 1980, Lake Forest, Illinois. The following year, Ted sent out his next bomb with the target this time being the president of American Airlines, Percy A. Woods. That's a very presidential name. The bomb was sent to his home and placed at his front door. Percy picked it up and he opened the mail, finding inside a book called Ice Brothers by Sloane Wilson with a note to read it.

When Percy opened the book, all of the pages had been hollowed out and inside it contained a pipe bomb that exploded in Percy's kitchen. He suffered horrible cuts and lacerations to his face, left hand and left leg, but luckily, as with the others, he ultimately survived. Take us away from Bombing 5, Jordan.

For the first time yet, Ted planted a bomb outside of Illinois, this time at the University of Utah. This attack wouldn't succeed at all. Oh, what a surprise. It is kind of funny to just keep laughing at him failing at this until he actually starts succeeding and then it's like, oh no, oh no. That's so many attempts.

I swear to God. All right. Well, it's also been how many years now? It's been like three years, right? Yeah, exactly. Three years is a long time. Yes, this is 81 who sent his first in 78. Yeah. Okay. That's a lot of time to, you know, refine your craft. I know. I honestly feel like give me three goes, I would have done it for sure. Not even the internet.

Oh, I don't know about that. Just give me the general concept of a bomb. I'll figure it out. I could make it out of Lego, but I don't know about actually including explosives. What? Okay, so you're saying that you could make something that looks like a bomb out of Lego. Is that what you're saying? In three goes. In three goes. Yeah, you try. It's hard.

Let's have a Lego building competition between you and I. Why? Just so you can feel good about yourself. I don't think I'd be very good about it. I only build off the plan, off the documents. I'm not a free builder. Oh, really? You're not? Yeah. When I have ever done Lego, yeah. I've never done it. Like just clicking pieces together to make something. All right. I don't even know if this is going to hit with American audience, but I just got to know out of curiosity. Do you like Lego Masters?

Never watched it. Oh my God. That's the one where they like, it's like a building competition, right? How are you ignorant about this? This should be your favorite show. Because Lego is a joke. I did it as like a hobby for a little bit there. I don't actually sit around loving Lego, doing it a lot. It's just, I wanted decorations for my room that, you know, meant something to me, I guess. And then, so I built a few sets.

And that's it. And then you're just done after that. Okay. I severely misunderstood what you were talking about then, because I thought that you were one of those guys that wastes every spare cent you have on rare models. No, not at all. Okay. Well, all right. Fair enough. Then maybe Lego Masters isn't for you. Have you tried the block? Reality TV in general is not for me.

I know. God. So bad. What a format. Hey. Yeah, it just does make you feel really dumb. Again, so does reading about this guy now. So does building Lego. Building Lego does not make you feel dumb. Oh, it does. Does it? Yeah. Maybe it's just because the last time I did it, I was 12. And so it felt like it was very intellectual. This is highbrow shit. Highbrow.

I'm number five, aren't I? As universities were already on high alert from the previous bombings, the strange parcel was found outside a Milton Binion Hall classroom and reported by a maintenance worker, leading to it being defused. Now that a bomb had been found and defused, investigators could fully examine the design in its original form and how they were being put together and exactly what kind of scrap metal, like car parts,

the perpetrator was using to build them. The investigators were able to connect this bomb to a previous due to a little engraving on a piece of the metal in the bomb, which had two letters FC. At the time, they did not know what it meant or stood for, but we now know what it meant. Freedom Club.

Hell yeah. That's pretty hype. I'd join that club. Freedom Club? Yeah, and it sounds like it's like a high-end fashion label as well. Oh, yeah. Designer Bombs. Designer Bombs. Totally. A subsidiary of Polo Ralph Lauren, don't you reckon? Freedom Club Bombs. Something like that. Yeah, Freedom Club Bombs. They don't work. It's just fashion. Oh, dude, that is so true. Yeah, actually. All style, no substance. Yeah, totally. Diffusing Diffusion.

Ted used the term freedom club to make what he was doing look like it was work for a group or a club in an attempt to try and trick or mislead investigators. Oh, I'm sure it worked. It did actually work. Oh, okay. You can be condescending about his bomb making abilities, but he was actually pretty good at hiding and obfuscating what he was doing. Okay, so that's where all his intelligence went. Yeah, he put all the points in that. Kira, bombing six.

So it happened on May the 5th, 1982 at Vanderbilt University in Utah again. Vanderbilt. It was the following year and Ted sent another bomb to the University of Vanderbilt in Utah. It was intended for Dr. Patrick Smith, a professor, but it landed in the hands of his secretary who moved it into her office, which caused the package to explode. She survived.

He's desperate. He's getting very frustrated, I'm sure.

Bombing 7, July 2nd, 1982, the University of California, Berkeley. That's where he came. Did he work at Berkeley? No. Oh, he did. Okay.

Previously, Ted had been waiting several months up to a year to send off his next bomb in an attempt to throw off investigators. He also believed that for him to be successful, people would need to fall into complacency again before he bombed them again, which is why he had routinely waited long periods of time between bombings. This time, however, Ted threw a spanner in the works and did away with his typical MO and sent off another one just two months after the previous one.

The target for this bomb was Ted's previous place of employment, the University of California, Berkeley. The victim, engineering professor Diogenes J. Angelikos, suffered bad injuries to his face and hands and had to undergo surgery to save two of his fingers. He survived the attack, but these bombs were becoming deadlier and more fatal as Ted was refining his work. Ted was creating more powerful bombs that could now kill someone if they were holding it a particular way.

Yeah, that's still living up a lot up to chance, surely. He was perfecting his craft at creating the perfect deadly bomb and as time was going on and people were getting injured but not dying, he was getting very frustrated and desperate and he wasn't the only one. As on the other side of the fence, the FBI were also stumped. Initial theories of the one behind the bombs being an airline mechanic were falling apart. The closest thing they had...

unknowingly were getting right, that they were unknowingly getting right, was assuming that there was a loose connection to nature in these crimes, just due to the way the bombs were made, I believe. But other than that, they were lost. Ted was meticulous in his attempts to remove all forensic evidence. Sorry, not only the way the bombs were made, because they were made out of a lot of wood and stuff like that, but also the fact that a few of the targets had been like airlines and airline executives who had obviously damaged the environment through jet fuel and things like that.

And yeah, so...

But other than that, they were lost. Ted was meticulous in his attempts to remove all forensic evidence. There were no fingerprints and the primitive tools and materials used in construction meant that it was impossible to track any lead down. He even stripped down any identifying details on the batteries. It was also impossible to assign motive at this point as Ted carried out these attacks without making any public or private demands, claims of responsibility, or even ideological statements. He was entirely anonymous and investigators had no idea who was behind the bombings,

or why? Give it to us, Jordan. Ted took three years of break where he would gather up more materials. Jesus Christ. So wait, we're going from 1982. The Stone Age is so slow. Yeah. 1982 to 1985. So yeah, three year break now. This next one. Just keep thinking about like one of those age of empires builder gatherers just going on a spit, you know, when it just starts like malfunctioning.

It seems like that's his life. He's just out there foraging for new material to make his bomb. Yeah. You know how it just kind of just like doesn't decide whether to move or not when it like gets caught behind a bush and some gold or something. It seems to be him. Uh,

He spent the time planning his next attacks. These attacks would be a blitz of four bombs in the space of eight months. The first was again sent to the University of California, Berkeley. It was found in a computer lab by a graduate student named John Hauser, who was actually a captain in the Air Force. He was severely injured, losing sight in one of his eyes.

Losing multiple fingers and an artery in his arm was... I really don't want to read that sentence. An artery in his arm was severed. He lost multiple fingers. Why is that one worse? The artery in the arm? Yeah. Just sounds really important.

The fingers, I guess they're important as well. He lost sight in one of his eyes. He's 50% blind. Yeah, but that's just my entire life, so I don't have any sympathy for him there. Are you blind? Huh? Are you blind? Yeah, I'm blind in one eye. Cats scratched me when I was like 10 months old. Oh, yeah, that's right. You told me about that. You don't look blind in one eye. Oh, sometimes I do. I can assure you that.

Do you have contacts or something? No, it's just sometimes my eye decides to wander away and see what's happening elsewhere. What the fuck? That sounds terrifying. It is. It looks like I'm having a vision of the future in one eye. Oh my god, that's so cool, actually. It's really not. It's just... Does it hurt? Do you have to snap it back into place? Putting it back into place hurts, I'll tell you that.

It's just basic eye exercises. As long as you do them every day, it'll stay on track. But other than that, it gets bored. What the fuck? You're an alien. I'm an alien. There's no beating around it. Are you completely blind in one eye? Is it completely blind? It's not completely blind. It's like, look, if I shut off my good eye and I stare out now, everything's just blurry. That's what it's like.

There's no definition. Like, I can't read the screen at all. Huh? The cat would have had to have scratched pretty deep. Oh, and she did. It was a very good shot, Bubba. No wonder you don't like cats. All right, I get it. No, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Can you blame me? I'd still get one of those weirdo Sphinx cats, but mostly for the freak show. Yeah, they're great. You like? Yeah, we have two of them. You know that. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's you. For whatever reason, I just saw another influencer that had them.

And so I must have just mistaken. That's right. And so, yeah, you're a big fan of them. Yeah, I love our girls. But we also have a normal cat too. So we're just cat people. Yeah, but that other cat, come on, you're just not as fond of. Come on, let's be honest. No, we are. Don't say that. No, that other cat, she's my soul animal. I have a tattoo. Soul animal? Why? Yeah. I don't know. So the other two naked Sphinx freaks aren't? No, I love them all. She's a good cat.

She was a rescue. The first, yeah, she was our first one. A quick off topic. She was a rescue and I saw her in an RSPCA cage and we locked eyes and I turned to Jackson and I said, we're not leaving without her. Like, she is mine. I was like, fuck. Why? Because you were there being like, I wanted to pair it. Yeah.

What, you wanted a different cat, did you, Jackson? No, we were just there to pick up, like, I don't know what we were there for. We were getting food for something else, like pet food for something else, I think. Your mum's cat or something. Oh, yeah, yeah. We were picking up, like, cat food for my mum's animals or something like that. And then I wasn't expecting it at the time, let's just say that. Was that cat a psycho or no? No. No, she's lovely. She's great. They're all lovely.

They've all got beautiful natures. You just had a bad experience with cats. No, no, it's not so much that. It's also, yes, definitely, I'm very jaded, and I'm literally seeing it through a foggy lens. But I will say this. I would imagine that most pound animals would have some feral in them.

So if you didn't get one, you're quite lucky. Yeah, definitely. I think she was a kitten at the time, right? She was about one years old. And yeah, she is not feral at all. We got very lucky. She's beautifully natured. She's just timid. She just hides a lot. Yeah, she's timid and shy. But yeah, she's great. Where were we? 11th bombing, I think. No, I think it's me, 9th. Is it you, Kieran? 9th.

Yeah. Okay, go for it. So many bombing attempts. Fuck. Go on, yeah. So this time, just under a month later, June 13th, 1985, Ted attacked the Boeing company in Washington. To Ted's frustration, this bomb was picked up by two supervised workers who noticed it as being suspicious and the building evacuated and the bomb was again defused.

Everyone was on high alert at the time. Investigators were able to thoroughly look at this bomb and compare it to earlier ones, noting that whoever was making them was becoming more precise and creating fail-safes to ensure the bomb would create destruction.

Ted was also continuing to toy with authorities by creating false leads. When he sent off these bombs, he would hop on a bus and first stop at things like gas stations and other places, and he would actually go to the bathroom and collect DNA-like hair and put them inside or on the bombs so if it was ever found and tested, it would indicate that a different person was responsible, not him. See, that's pretty smart. It would lead him in the wrong direction. Yeah, that's smart. I respect it.

Bombing number 10, November 15th, 1985, the University of Michigan in Michigan. Ted's next target was a psychologist at the University of Michigan named James McConnell, but instead it was opened by a worker for him named Nicholas Swino. They were in relatively close proximity when the bomb went off.

And James got off rather lightly with some deafness and ringing in his ears. But Nicholas instead suffered from bad cuts and burns to his body. Ted was furious that still no one had died from his bombs. He couldn't understand. I'd be furious at this stage too. Far out. He couldn't understand why no one was dying. Unfortunately. Why isn't anyone dying?

My beautiful bums are not working. My beautiful bums. Unfortunately, that would change, Jordan. Unfortunately. Which is your turn. Alright. Bombing 11, December 11th, 1985, Sacramento, California. Yeah. Ted traveled out to Sacramento, California, where he set his eyes on a computer shop. Ring Tech Computer Rentals. He attached his bomb to some wood.

So much nature. And left it outside in the back to store where a man by the name of Hugh Campbell Scrutton, a worker, went out to the back into the parking lot where he moved the junk, as he thought it was, and touched it. And the device exploded. Hugh flew 10 feet, could be heard crying, oh, my God, help me.

That's incredible. There's so many moments in this podcast that is someone humorously getting smacked or shot or exploded midair.

That seems to be a real recurring theme of this. Huh? When has it happened before? Remember Frogman jumping into the river and getting shot in the ear? I'll never forget that. I didn't think Frogman would be making an entrance into this episode's lore, but yeah. Yeah, and yet here he is. What is with this?

It's like quite cartoonish. I didn't realize that these things happen, that you can explode and then yell, help me. What do you think a bomb's going to do? Of course, that's the case. Yeah, but like flying midair and yelling, oh my God. Well, yeah, he sucks at making bombs. Of course, it's not going to kill him immediately. Which is incredible. You know what he should be? This man should be hired in Hollywood to make fake bombs.

That's like he's basically created an involuntary stunt man. Well, I don't think he's going to be hired anymore, given he's now dead. Yeah, I know. What a wasted talent, eh? It's exactly what you said. YouTuber and stunt coordinator extraordinaire. There were different paths for Ted. If only he believed. As he lay with lacerations across his entire body, having taken the full brunt of the bomb to his chest.

Oh, he later died in hospital. Ted killed this hardworking family man and he was pleased by it. Yeah, now don't you feel bad about joking about his last lines? Yeah, look, I do feel bad. Look, I feel bad. Plus, look, he's a nice looking dude. He had his whole life ahead of him. He was just a worker at a fucking computer shop as well. Like, I don't know how you can take the moral high ground when you're just killing part of the masses that you claim to want to be helping.

I don't know. I don't understand how that... He's not the one making the computers or the technology. You're just killing someone. Some guy. Yeah. Like, I could kind of understand the justification for, like...

I don't agree with it, obviously, but the justification on Ted Kaczynski's part for going after people like Boeing executives and things like that, sure. Like, you're trying to take a stand against the system. They are an integral part of the system. Sure. What the fuck? A part-time employee at Rentech Computer Rentals is not part of the system. He's not even adjacently, like, relative to the system. I think he's just, like, killing, right? Yeah, it's... At the end of the day, it seems like he was getting desperate. Yeah, there's a big...

Yes, there's a big intellectual justification over his insanity, but it seems like that that's what he wants to do. And actually, from his perspective, I think that he's saying that everybody is a tacit player in that system. And so it doesn't really matter. It's actually a pretty Marxist way of looking at things, really, as in a CEO or something like that is really just playing a role within that system. There's no real... No, I really feel like he... He...

He was just a hate-filled individual, as made evident by his constant... Whenever he was rejected, there would be constant limericks and very hateful messages and stuff. Clearly, a very angry person. Yes. And his own insecurities, which he identifies himself in his manifesto. He identifies his own inner turmoil pretty aptly in the manifesto about how he feels powerless.

He doesn't directly say that, but it's very clear that it applies to him as well, that he is incapable of feeling fulfilled. And so he's rage-filled, he's hate-filled, he wants to kill people, he wants to harm people. But he's also intelligent enough to know that he needs to be able to justify it to some certain degree for him to be able to live with himself. Oh, okay.

Yeah, sorry. Go on. That's not a bad theory. Go on. Well, I'm just saying, like, that's why he targets people who he claims are part of the system. But I think if he was 50 IQ points lower, let's say, I think he would have been targeting people like Hugh Campbell Scruton from the very beginning, perhaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, okay. No, look.

It's starting to add up. It really is. It's really strange that I still don't get the link between intelligence and what are we on? Like, attempt 11. Attempt number 11. Bombs are hard. I'm just going to boil it down to that. Bombs are hard. I don't know how to make bombs. Okay. I just thought that they wouldn't be that hard. Because, like, you get, like, libs in the western suburbs just being like, bro, I've got the fertilizer. Let's go. Like, it just...

I just can't imagine it being that difficult. Yeah, I don't know. I have no clue anything about bombs. The Bali bombings just had one go and away they went. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it is. I don't know. Maybe... I don't know. I don't know. Previously, the targets of Ted made sense of his twisted way of thinking. He was angry at professors and the companies for disrupting nature and getting in the way of the true meaning of living. But Hugh, a computer rental shop...

This seemed out of pattern for him. As the investigators noted, was Ted becoming more manic and desperate? Later journal entries found writing that described the bombing that killed Scrutton as a successful operation. He also wrote in a coded journal, excellent humane way to eliminate somebody. Excellent humane way. That's the, it's, he fucking exploded in the air, screaming out, God, please help me. That's not humane. Yeah. And then dying in hospital. I don't know why you would,

I mean, if you're really up to the bombs, oomph, then yeah. Not at his level. Even then. Really? If he wanted a humane way of killing people, surely he would just, like, overdose them somehow. Oh, I reckon going in an explosion would be pretty damn good if you're right in the blast zone, right? I have no clue. There's too much opportunity for it to go wrong and just be permanently kind of incapacitated. Yes, yes. Um...

He probably never felt a thing, but I'm pretty sure Ted felt a thing. I'm pretty sure. You mean, what's his name, Ted? No, not Ted. Hugh. Hugh. Hugh Scruton. $25,000 reward offered, rather flattering in a long... He is like a supervillain. So that was a quote by him. The quote reads, excellent, humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a thing. $25,000 reward offered, rather flattering, end quote.

What a fucking super villain. Again, it's very super villainy. That's what I was saying. Surely there's a Marvel, but there's not because he's just so unsuccessful. He's really not a super villain. He's just a villain. He's really not good at his craft. Yeah, true. But then again, all super villains aren't, are they? They always lose. True. Um,

In a log of the bombing experiments found in his cabin, Kaczynski described the bomb and noted, the device denoted with very good results. Denoted with very good results. His words, not mine. What an idiot. Yeah, he sucks. Kira?

So this is the 12th bomb on February the 20th, 1987 at Salt Lake City in Utah. He waited just over a year from his successful last bombing and had now felt it was safe to target another. He traveled out to Salt Lake City in Utah, leaving the bomb this time in front of another computer shop owned by Gary White.

Gary picked up the disguised explosive when it then went off in his hands. Lucky for Gary, the way he was holding the device meant that he survived, but he suffered terrible nerve damage to his arm and later had over 200 pieces of metal shrapnel removed from his body. Gary actually became a motivational speaker and teacher later in his life, talking about the unique, difficult and complex emotions and trauma he endured.

It's a very interesting fact that Gary actually formed an unlikely friendship with Ted's brother, David. Oh, really? Whoa. In 1998, so this is later on, David reached out and apologized on behalf of his family for what Ted did. And Gary replied, Ted's crimes don't represent the values of the entire Kaczynski family. You're not responsible to carry the burden of your brother's actions. Wow.

You love motivational speakers, don't you? Oh, yeah. Massively. They're my favorite people on earth. Why? They get me through my tough, awful life. Basically, though. That's pretty much actually the reason. Did they get you through your actual own experience with bombings?

My own bombing experiences. Yes, I was the 13th non-victim of Ted Kaczynski. You have been bombed. Firebombs are still bombs. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I suppose it technically counts, doesn't it? It really, like, again, it's just like, look, is a Molotov cocktail a bomb? That's what I'd like to know. Is it?

It's called Firebomb. Yes. All right, all right. Yes, I suppose that is the... Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Maybe not in like... Yeah, it's a scale, but I think it still counts as a bomb. When you throw a Molotov cocktail, it also explodes, right, because of the ignition between the fluid and the flame. That creates an explosion. Yeah. It's an explosion that spreads the flames around. See, this is why Ted's got to be a dumbass. Like, if you really wanted to inflict damage, just chuck cocktails everywhere. Yeah.

It's so easy. This just in, firebombing victim describes how more people should firebomb. Yeah, take my advice, dude. It works. It terrified me.

Holy fuck. Yeah, honestly, that's incredible. I have some pointers for this dead man post-humus lit. I really do. It's just like he's really overthinking it. That's his problem, I think. Too much of a genius. Trying to re-scramble the egg. Can't do it. Just do what works. Maybe Molotov cocktails are harder to create from scratch without any knowledge. He has to make alcohol. He has to make the glass.

Oh, actually, okay. Yeah, that's a lot of manufacturing involved in that. Yeah, that's too much. Too much. Easy to make a bomb from scratch, I guess. Kira? Okay, so something monumental actually occurred during this particular bombing. For the first time in all of these years, someone, a worker inside the shop, actually saw Ted place the bomb down in front of Gary's computer. Oh, he's getting sloppy. Sloppy, Ted.

The only reason Gary went out to collect the package was because the worker remarked that someone had delivered it. This was a big break in the case as the investigators waited no time and created wanting posters drawn from sketches and identifiable information the woman shared with them.

Well, she got most of the information right. Like he was a white male, proximate age and things like that. She did get his hair color wrong saying it was blonde reddish when Ted actually had brown hair.

Sloppy witness. Sloppy witness. This may have caused some general level of confusion when possibly identifying Ted, but it certainly indicated that he was beginning to possibly make mistakes and become a little bit complacent himself. Beginning to make mistakes? He's used 12 bombs and only one of them has worked. He's made quite a few mistakes. Yeah. Yeah.

We have that infamous sketch. Yeah, here's the sketch of him. Infamous, like Kira just said. Tim in a hoodie wearing glasses. I have heard that this is a very popular Halloween costume for people. That's incredible. That's so good. Especially because, look, it's a pretty easy one to do. I can pretty much pull that off right now with the tools in front of me. And also... Just like Ted would. Just like Teddy. It's also...

It's also very, look, he's really missed his calling in life. I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails. He looks like a guy that would throw Molotovs. Stop endorsing Molotov cocktails. So weird for me to be doing it. Bombing 13, June 22nd, 1993 at Tiburon, California.

Teddy goes west. Being spotted at the crime scene must have scared Ted because he waited six years before striking again. The public were probably feeling complacent. The police, who really were no closer to catching Ted, thought that his spree might finally be over. But Ted, even with the scare from years earlier, still wanted more. He continued life as normal during this time. No one that he regularly encountered...

the people near him, the people at the local nearby town suspected anything. During this period of time, he wrote about feeling burned out and he questioned if the actions he was making were actually making a difference at all. He described being nervous and how the sightings had shook him and made him feel exposed, which explains the six-year break.

During this break, though, he also began intensely writing and articulating his anti-technology philosophy, which would later become the famous manifesto he is now known for, well, in addition to the bombings, which was called Industrial Society and Its Future.

He began to see ideological warfare through rioting as possibly more impactful than just bombing alone. He was also becoming more withdrawn from his family, however. During this time, his brother David actually got married to a woman named Linda. Ted sent them numerous awful and aggressive letters explaining how much he hated Linda...

And that they should not get married. But he never actually even met her. He simply saw it, the marriage, as the ultimate betrayal that David got to experience happiness and Ted did not. After David and Linda got married, there was an almost complete communication cut off by Ted.

During this six-year period of time, Ted's father was also diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. It was 1990 at the time of the cancer diagnosis, and a family meeting was held, minus Ted. Only a few short months later in the same year, Ted and David's father took his own life.

And then we have a legal analyst, Liz Whale, weighing in on Ted and David here. Quote, it was seen as a total abandonment of the brotherhood. And that was really hard on the younger Kaczynski who looked up to his older brother. So Ted's the older one, right, Kira? Ted's the older one. There really seemed to be a big sense of brotherhood between the two. Because even though... Well, they lived together in the cabin for a while there at the start, I believe.

They were building it together. Yeah. Right. They worked together. I think, yeah, they worked together. David, you know, even throughout the life and he knew Ted was a bit different, but he still admired him. He still loved him and he had that sense of brotherhood and loyalty. And then Ted also relied on, I think, David's love for him and maybe use that to his own benefit, right?

But I think, and like manipulation and, you know, he'd ask David for money and things like that. Yeah. And I think that him getting married, it was really, yeah, it was like the ultimate betrayal for him. Because his brother got to experience happiness and stuff, whereas he's out in a- Log cabin. In the woods, yeah, in a log cabin making depressing bombs that don't actually do anything. Yeah.

Not just that, though. I think it's also... A relationship was more important than their brotherhood. Right. Oh, okay. Left behind, yeah. I think there was also that, like... Abandonment again. There was someone who was more important and now is going to be put first over him and their relationship that they had, I think. Yeah, that makes sense. What's always funny to me... Well, not funny, but what's interesting to me is Ted speaks about how...

The living on your own out in the woods obviously makes you extremely happy. And like self-sustainability and all that makes you very happy. I'm going to ask you guys, does Ted seem like a happy guy? To me, he seems pretty miserable. Not happy. The woods, I don't think are doing the trick, really. I don't think that he...

really is experiencing happiness. As he says, there was a quote from above where he talked about, I think, uh, was it Jane Austen, the author who described how happiness, uh, is in the pursuit of, yeah, yeah. But I don't, I really don't think he's happy in the pursuit of anything. And I don't think he's happy experiencing anything at the time. I think he's just a manic depressed person trying to rationalize his own, uh, hateful, uh,

mood swings, basically. Manic depressive. Now that's something that I didn't think about before, but maybe, maybe. Well, I think there was some claims that he was schizophrenic as well, but I don't know if that was actually proved or anything. Yeah. I don't know how schizophrenia works. I don't know how anything works. I don't know how bombs work. I don't know how mental illness works. You barely seem to know how Lego works and whether you like it or not.

There's a lot of holes in your story, I've got to say. Pretty much all that we've gathered is that Kira likes fucking sourdough bread and you like cats, and that's about it. Hey, I also love cats. And you want to encourage more people to firebomb. More firebombings, less manufacturing sophisticated bombs. Just go back to the basics, everyone. You want to talk about primitive technology, fuck me, it doesn't get more primitive than that. That's my advice.

And I'll see you next week. Thank you, guys. After six years, Ted was ready to strike again with renewed focus and a strategic shift. On the 22nd of July, 1993, Ted mailed a bomb to the home of Charles Epstein. Why does this keep happening? Why does he keep showing up in every single... How? Even when it's not...

Ted mail the bomb to the home of Charles Epstein no apparent relation but there is an interesting conspiracy theory that Ted Kaczynski was Jeffrey Epstein's math teacher though we couldn't find any evidence of this zero evidence yeah it is literally just very interesting I found it on r slash conspiracy like people talking about it and claiming that he was his math teacher oh yeah well it's gotta be true

Yep, that's enough evidence for me. It's incredible that Epstein keeps showing up even when I don't write an intro about it. Yeah, you're trying! I know, it's crazy. There was an episode, I think MKUltra, he also just showed up randomly in the story. He just keeps popping up. Charles, an American geneticist, survived the explosion but lost multiple fingers and caused injury to his abdominal and also he received partial hearing loss from the explosion. Jordan? Bombing 14.

Two days later, another bomb was sent to Yale University in Connecticut on the other side of the United States. It was addressed to David, some foreign name, who was the director of the undergraduate studies in computer science. It's not even foreign. Galernter. Galernter. Galernter. All right. Where do you think Galernter's from? It's not that hard to say, though. I don't know why you glossed over it. Like Hungary or some shit.

I don't want to see this R next to this N. Pick one. He was opening up the mail at the office. The bomb exploded in his hands. He suffered severe cuts and burned his face, chest, abdomen, and hands. Ted spent six years reworking his bomb designs. Oh, my God. So much effort for so little reward. It's incredible that smart people can be so stupid.

There's got to be more efficient ways to do these things. Moving away from the pipe bomb concept and now using a more reliable deadly chemical bomb that was now smaller. Yeah, all right. See, there we go. He's moving towards the Molotov model. The pressure on the police was now renewed. He took your advice. Good on him. Finally, it took you a while, Teddy. 14 attempts. Jesus. As the public immediately became fearful that any package could be from a Unabomber.

It's then at this point in the timeline that Ted first contacted the media. A letter only one page long in length was sent to the New York Times, typed on a typewriter. Ted made it sound like the letter was coming from an anarchist group called

the FC Freedom Club, which had been kept a secret by investigators publicly until now. The New York Times was alarmed and contacted investigators who took the letter and did a thorough investigation, and they didn't find anything except for it would turn out to be another red herring. Ted had left an imprint on the letter by using another piece of paper on top and writing a message down that said...

Call Nathan R. Wednesday, 7 p.m. His trick worked, and this little message sent to the police down a rabbit hole that didn't exist. They were trying to call every Nathan R. in the city at 7 p.m. on Wednesdays.

It's just like if the guy from Seven was just, you know, playing mad pranks. See, there's elements of his intelligence poking through there, though. Yeah, true. Like he made it look like it wasn't. Like if he didn't just write it on the letter or anything, he like wrote it in invisible ink, basically, like it had been written on a letter above that letter so that it seemed like it was an accident. That is actually pretty smart. An accidental forensic clue left behind. Yeah.

He's not an engineer, is he? For all his maths. He's got a twin with people. That's about it. There was something else too. Pretty good Limerick writer. There was something else too. A secret code that he would use when he'd write again so that the police and the media knew that it was the Unabomber sending a letter. Of course, yeah. It was pretty impressive. Alright, Kira.

So, bomb 15th on the 10th of December 1994 in North Caldwell, New Jersey. It was a year later when he sent another bomb, this time to the home of advertising executive Thomas Mosser. Thomas wasn't necessarily well liked as he was involved with salvaging the image of Exxon after their significant damage to the environment with the 1989 oil spill.

Mosser was home with his family when he stepped into his office to open the package and the bomb went off and Mosser died instantly. Luckily, his wife and his two children aged 13 and 15 months at the time survived.

Four months after this attack, another letter was sent to the New York Times. Ted, still disguised as FC or the Freedom Club, told the media that if they published his now infamous but then unknown manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, he would stop his reign of terror, though he purported that he would still ultimately attack property.

So he's saying, if you release my manifesto to the people, I will stop killing people, but I'll still attack property. Yeah, I mean, fair. Fair. Bombing 16, April 24th, 1995, Sacramento, California. This would be Ted's final attack. But it has all come to the penultimate. Wait, penultimate's the one before the final one, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

No, never mind. The ultimate attack. Ted sent a bomb to the recently retired president of the California Forestry Association, Bill Denison. I don't know who that is. Ted most likely... What? Yeah. What the fuck? I thought it was going to be like the president or something. Like he's perfected his craft. He's now made bombs that can kill Bill Denison, I guess. Recently retired. Recently retired. Yeah.

What a target. Ted most likely did not know he was not the current president. When the package arrived at the office, a lobbyist named Gilbert Murray opened the package. A different female employee was originally opening the package, but Gilbert offered to help her, ultimately leading to a huge explosion and his death.

Ted's bombs had at this point been perfected and he was now an enormous danger to those he sent mail to took 16 bombs he was now responsible for three deaths but this would fortunately in the end be his final bomb oh Ted he finally actually started to make bombs but he ran out of time hmm

Chapter 5 The End for the Unabomber A few weeks after this attack Ted sent another letter to the New York Times He wanted to incite as much fear as he could in an attempt to get what he desperately wanted The letter said that he planned to blow up a random passenger plane leaving New York around the 4th of July weekend Ted did not actually plan on doing this but his threat worked and sent law enforcement into a justified panic with the US mail service even suggesting that packages could stop being sent by air to try to eliminate the risk

They didn't stop airmail, but extra manpower was invested in searching and checking everything prior and throughout the 4th of July, which came and went without any explosion. Typical prankster Ted. Just wanted to goof around. Five versions of the manifesto were typed out by Ted and sent to different media outlets, again repeating that the terror would be over if they simply just published it.

The FBI were left with a bit of a dilemma here as they knew that bending to a terrorist demands often never ended well. However, they had very little information to go on and were truthfully no closer to catching the Unabomber than they were when the attacks first started. But this manifesto that they now had written by a man or group as they thought at the time that they needed to catch was now seen as an opportunity.

If it was published, someone might recognize the style of writing or thinking and it may result in a solid and truthfully only lead. Thus publishing the manifesto actually served both the investigators and Ted Kaczynski now. There was a lot of weighing the pros and cons, but in the end and due to very little other investigative options at their disposal, the FBI decided to publish the manifesto in the hopes that it could lead to the Unabomber's capture.

On September 19th, 1995, the New York Times and Washington Post published a 35,000 word manifesto. The manifesto talks about the destructive effects of technology, how it destroys freedom, how it leads to psychological and physical suffering, and how it has unresolved

ultimately harmed us as human beings. He talks about the industrial revolution, the terrible effects on the human race, creating a system that inhibits freedom and destroys nature. Ted also briefly talks about politics and his intense dislike for leftism, which he identified as being a symptom of a society in collapse. This manifesto is still read and debated today. For example, in 2017, the Rolling Stones said, quote, "...we give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society's standards."

That, and we're too plugged in. We're letting technology take over our lives willingly, end quote. So yeah, I mean, like we were saying at the start, there's a lot about the manifesto to agree with, right, Jordan? Oh, totally. Absolutely. Yeah. Yes. Sorry, you had a thought that you would like to finish? I was going to say there's a gut reaction, rightfully so, that whenever you see a manifesto,

from a guy that has sent 16 bombs and killed a bunch of people, injured way more, that you just vehemently want to disagree with whatever he has to say, just because, obviously, detestable person. But even detestable people can be correct sometimes and make salient points, which I think is important to understand. No, yes. Well, I think that that's very much a...

product of their times. Is there any mass murderers or serial killers since these days that really have done it? I think that the other one... Luigi Mangione. Luigi Mangione? Well, he's not a mass killer. He did one. I suppose it still matters because he's making a political statement. Yeah, and he was caught before. Well...

They're very of their time, aren't they? All of them. They're all making statements around their time. So he's just like making a statement about the healthcare system. Unabomber's making a statement about the technological system. Charles Manson, same thing, trying to like bring upon like this new age of enlightenment, man. It's really weird. They all kind of use whatever is in the zeitgeist at the time.

as an intellectual justification for the violence. Yeah. Or maybe we don't see it as much these days. I don't know if we do or not. I haven't seen the stats. But maybe the system has just got better at dealing with it. Oh, identifying it before they get to that point. Exactly. Maybe. Which is a point to what Ted Kaczynski is saying and said earlier.

about how the state or the system will naturally throughout time as it evolves and levels up and gets better will become more insurmountable. Oh my God. Yeah. It's again, it's just one of those things of like the Unabomber, unlike any other serial killer that I've ever come across, uh,

He has such... Correct me if I'm wrong in the comments. What's another serial killer that has a very cogent worldview that's hard to poke holes in? Yeah, it's not like insane ramblings. No. Absolutely not. It's not like those losers that we watched before that were just... Yeah, the rationalists. Fuck, that was an annoying episode. Holy hell. Oh.

Go watch that if you want to hear us get frustrated at rationalism. So the FBI were understandably nervous. They had agreed to release this incendiary manifesto to the public with the hope that it would lead, well, it would end up with a lead. Fortunately for them, it did. Ted's manifesto led to his capture and it came from close to home.

David was conflicted when it came towards Ted. He

He still wanted his older brother's love and he still cared for Ted no matter how much he disagreed with him. Neither of the two were even aware of the Unabomber. Did I say Unabomber? I think you did, yes. I'm pretty sure you said Unabomber. Can we call him the Unabomber? New character added. It is a Unabomber at this point. Honestly, he deserves to be a Unabomber more than a bomber. He was much more successful at being a bomber. He really was.

So I think you fucking nailed it, inadvertently. You're absolutely right. I don't know why he isn't called that. Instinctually, I was correct. Neither of the two were even aware of the uni-bomber at all up until this point. It wasn't until it began to come up in the newspaper when he returned from his six-year hiatus in 1993 that they learned of this destructive bomber terrorists.

Linda, a professor in philosophy, heard about the manifesto. After reading it, a growing sense of worry filled her gut. Phrases stuck out to her as similar to what Ted would write to David. Things such as, quote, technology has always made it possible for us to live as physical independent beings, end quote.

These ideas and writings were too similar for her to shake the suspicious feeling. So Linda went to David and said that she thought the Unabomber was his brother. David, she asked, has it ever occurred to you, even as a remote possibility, that your brother might be the Unabomber?

At first, David denied this possibility. He could not imagine that his brother could commit horrible and violent acts like this. Still thinking it was absurd, he caved and began to read the manifesto, where he almost immediately recognized that the thoughts and ideas belonged to his brother. This was undeniably written by Ted. Fuck.

And this is a quote from David on first reading the manifesto. Quote, I thought I was going to read the first page of this, turn to Linda and say, see, I told you so. But on an emotional level, it just sounded like my brother's voice. You know, it sounded like the way he argued, the way he talked, the way he expressed an idea. End quote. David went to see... What if it was David all along and he just framed poor Ted Kaczynski? I mean, look...

I don't even want to know what that guy's IQ would be if that's the case. That's just very clever. You thought Ted was smart. Yeah, I know. This guy went out of his way. Yeah, David actually has a 280 IQ where he made shit bombs on purpose to make Ted look stupid. Man, it's really taking sibling rivalry to another level. Maybe you should give it up. Yes, yes, he got to play the Nintendo more as a kid.

David went to see their mother who had kept many of Ted's old writings in storage. There were letters, journals, reports, all echoing the same thoughts and feelings written in the manifesto. Why he hated technology and where it was heading, some sentences were almost word for word. This was surely heartbreaking for David who always looked up and admired his older brother.

He knew Ted struggled socially and had some strange views and even put his foot down and fired Ted when he overstepped boundaries in the workplace. But David did not know how far along this path Ted had gone and knew despite loving his brother, he needed to do the right thing. David and Linda hired a private investigator, Susan Swanson, to keep an eye on Ted and his movements while they hired an attorney to begin talking to the FBI.

There was a $1 million reward for helping capture the Unabomber, so Ted and Linda knew that the FBI was probably going through thousands of sent-in tips, so they hoped their attorney would make it easier for them to get in contact. But when the FBI compared Ted's earlier writings to the manifesto, it was almost certain that they were written by the same person. David really wanted to remain anonymous throughout the whole ordeal, telling the FBI he would help them, but he didn't want to...

he didn't want it to leak who put the tip in on Ted. The FBI were now working to gather more evidence against Ted when the story got leaked to SBS News in 1996. CBS alerted the FBI that they were going to run the story and everything was whipped up into an immediate frenzy. The FBI knew that Ted

would most likely run when he saw the story, so they told SBS that they needed one day or 24 hours to get into position to capture him. Things kicked into action immediately with the FBI pressuring a Montana judge to sign a search warrant. Upon receiving the warrant, a full task force was sent to the area to apprehend Ted. They had been slowly surveying the area, checking the woods for explosives, and getting neighbors to take photos of Ted's property so they could assess the situation before invading his homestead.

Especially, I'm pretty sure Ruby Ridge was before this as well. There were a lot of different situations in America where the FBI, the ATF, things like that had invaded people's houses to arrest them. But the operations had gone horribly and they had inadvertently killed a bunch of innocent people in the process. They were probably very nervous about this situation.

On April 3rd, 1996, hidden FBI agents surrounded the forest while a sheriff and two agents in plain clothes walked to Ted's property and knocked. The apprehensive Ted opened the door, peeking out at them with suspicious eyes. They told Ted they were from a drilling company that were dealing with a property line dispute and required his help outlining his property. As soon as he stepped outside, he was grabbed and arrested. Nice cover, boys. Yeah, that was pretty easy. Why don't you do that every single time?

Yeah, it was so much... Far out. Everybody was just so much dumber back then, weren't they? Well, this was in... Like, bombers, cops... This was approaching 2000. Yeah. This was 1996. Yeah, now that I'm looking at the photos, that does make sense. The first one looks kind of 70s. Yeah. The second one, on the other hand, I do like the disguise. It does look like in that cowboy hat is a hidden camera. LAUGHTER

They're very good Especially like that guy Looks like a cartoon of a cowboy Yeah he looks cool He fits the role perfectly He looks cool as fuck I wish I was that I want to be that eventually Yeah and then the other guy just looks like a pedo Don't you reckon As soon as someone has the deer hunter hat No not Ted Kaczynski Ted looks like what he is Which is a madman He looks like a nut Yeah he looks crazy and very unwashed Oh yeah

And also, you know what else he looks like? Sideshow Bob. Yeah, on that left picture there, I'm very confused. Is it a wig? Yes. His hair is crazy. Is it not a wig? No.

And the nose. He's also got Sideshow Bob's nose. Yeah, he looks like a cartoon character there. Yeah. They all do. All three of them do. What is reality? Except the pedo. I'm getting confused. What is this? This is a made-up world that we're looking into right now. It really is. Of cartoon characters. Yeah. I suppose that's really what happens, though. Look, I know this from experience. You meet a lot of cops and they are kind of cartoony. I suppose it's just entering the criminal world.

It's all fun and games. Yeah, it's all fun and games. Yes. All fun and games. All of it. And then, like, God, it's really strange looking at that photo.

I really can't get over it. It's just like these are people that fit their roles perfectly in life. Yeah, crazy person. Couldn't have been anything else. Sheriff cowboy. Sheriff cowboy. And a pedo with pedo glasses. Pedo with pedo glasses. But, you know, probably, yeah, disguised pedo. Disguised as a pedo. Oh, right, yeah. Yeah, it's incredible.

So in Ted's cabin, they found numerous bomb-making materials, thousands and thousands of journal pages, some written in English and some even Spanish, and also a special code. On top of this, a live bomb was also found in the cabin. Why was he living with a live bomb?

Just in case. I guess. No, it was getting ready to send on. Oh, right. So because he lied when he said that they published a manifesto, he wouldn't send a bomb. He was lying. Yeah, so he was still making bombs. But live bomb means that it's ready to explode, right? That's what live means. Yeah, they had to defuse it.

So he was just living with a live bomb. Like surely making it live is like one of the last things you do before you then send it. You don't just like sleep with a live bomb in your house. Surely. Right. Maybe that's just how close they got to him sending it off. Maybe. Yeah. True. Good point.

Yeah, okay. So the next day, the story ran and after 16 years of fear and a $50 million search later, the public finally knew the Unabomber's identity. Unfortunately, however, they also found out who put the little tip in as David's name also got leaked. Oh man, he did the right thing and you do that to David? That's fucked up.

He immediately got swarmed with media and onlookers. When Ted was told it was David who turned him in, he did not believe it at first, declaring that it couldn't have been his brother as his brother loved him. Man, that's sad. Oh, really? Is that what he said? Do you have a brother? No. Do you have a sister? No. Not to my knowledge. I mean, my dad slept around a lot, so I'm not sure. You're not going to rule anything out. Yeah, not ruling anything out. What are our brother and sister counts between you two?

I have one brother. I have three. And Kira. You've got three brothers. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus, were you a Mormon or something? No, I was a surprise. Huh? I was a surprise. They're all a lot older than me. Oh, okay. It was a we didn't know we could still make babies kind of situation. You proved them wrong. Oh, no.

Ted was changed. Ted was charged with 13. He was changed out of his diapers. Fuck. I mean, maybe he looks like it. Definitely.

Ted was charged with 13 federal charges. 10 of these charges were based around bomb-related activities and three to the murders themselves. Ted's lawyers believed that his best chance was to plead insanity, but Ted was adamantly against this, maintaining that he was completely sane. A lot of this also came down to Ted wanting his manifesto and writings to be taken seriously, believing correctly that if he took the insane route, they would lose credibility. Despite this, his lawyers still attempted to put in an insanity plea. I didn't think they could do that.

Like don't you have to follow what your client says? Like if your client wants to just declare themselves guilty, they can do that. That's their right. I think so. I don't know.

Maybe if they are insane, there's different rules. Yeah, true. Maybe. I don't know. I'll look into that later. Or the comments can tell me. Educate me, please. I love being educated. When discovered, Ted tried to get them dismissed and represented himself or by another lawyer who had similar views, but this was also unsuccessful. Angry and frustrated, Ted attempted to end his life by hanging on January 9th of 1998. However, he was found before he died.

Ted was in the end deemed sane and competent for trial. And on January 22nd, 1998, he pleaded guilty to everything and accepted life in prison without any possibility of parole. David, the brother has spent a lot of his time advocating for Ted's victims and giving them financial aid and compensation. He did get the $1 million award from the police, but he vowed to split it and give it away to the victims. He was ordered that items in Ted's home, excluding bomb making materials,

were to be auctioned in 2006 and the money was raised to give to Ted's victims. This auction raised around $15 million or about $24 million today. Oh, come on. Keep the million then. Geez. No. Why would you want money for that? For betraying your brother? Yeah. I don't know. It's a million bucks. It's a lot of money. And you did a public service. You earned it. Yeah. I feel like I think it's the right.

Right. It's definitely the right thing to do. I will say this, though. I would not begrudge you for keeping it, especially if you auctioned it off and you got $15 million and you said, there you go, that's the rest of it for you.

Yeah. Then again, though, like, you know, a million bucks, what is that anymore? It's like half a house. Yeah. What are you going to do? That's going to last you. Oh, it's going to last you a while. It's even worse then because then it's like one of those cheap 530 game shows where it's just like, yeah, because your dad's dead, you have won $50,000. It's just not great.

Ted began his life in prison where he was sent to ADX Florence, which is a Supermax prison in Colorado. Why a Supermax? He can't make bombs in prison. He poses like no risk. He wasn't even good at making bombs in the first place. No, someone that looks like Sideshow Bob and is a supervillain has to go to a Supermax. I'm sorry. It's aesthetically right.

He made friends with other bombing perpetrators. Oh, really? Yeah. I always wonder how like clicky prison is. Like do the bomb makers hang out with the bomb makers? The bomber boys hang out. Sure. I know the, I know the chomos hang out with other chomos. What's a chomo? Child molester. Oh, do they hang out? Yeah. But that's probably just because of a lack of options. Yeah. It's survival. But chomos hang out in their own little prisons, don't they?

Or little wings of prisons. Yeah, I think they have like protected wings for people that will get shanked and killed in, you know, open incarceration. And so Unabomber was safe? Well, yeah, he wasn't. He didn't do that kind of stuff. He probably got a lot of respect in there, honestly, from other bomb makers. He made friends. Yeah, he made friends with other bombing perpetrators and would write back not to media or reporters, but to people who had similar views.

There is a section in the University of Michigan Special Collections Library that has letters from Ted corresponding with over 400 people after arrest, which remains to this day very popular. In 2012, he was sent an inquiry from Harvard about the 50th reunion of the class of 1962. Will you make it? RSVP. What? Ted Kaczynski.

He responded and listed his occupation as prisoner and his life sentences as his rewards. Oh, my God. King. Holy hell. Dude, who does that? What a pimp move to write to Harvard. It'd be like, my greatest accomplishment was my life imprisonment. Yeah. What did you end up being? Evil genius. It's not a bad title. I mean, how many people can say that?

I mean, a lot of people, but they all live in the same place. The same super max prison. Yeah. In March of 2021, Ted was diagnosed with rectal cancer. That took a turn. Oh, what a way to go. And he was... That's not a very supervillain way of going. It's really not, eh? Rectal cancer. And he was moved to a federal medical center.

prison by December, where he then received regular chemotherapy. By March 2023, Ted requested that all of the medical interventions stop as the side effects were becoming unbearable and not worth the pain when it was clear that he was going to die regardless. The oncologist reported that Ted was seemingly slipping into a depression. The following month, on 10th of June 2023, at 12.23am, Ted was found in his cell, dead from using his shoelace to hang himself.

No way. No way. I have to say that. How strong was the shoelace? How the fuck? Is that common? Hanging by shoelace. That's got to be weird. It gave me the lifeline Australia. Of course it would. I don't. I'm not trying to do it. I just want to know. How did he do it? Like they're just showing shoes that he has. Maybe he was a genius. His greatest magic trick of all time. Shoelace hanging. How's it done?

It can't be. Did you confirm that, Kira? Is it a joke? Ed Kaczynski shoelace hanging. I'm not seeing it. It's not coming up. At around midnight on June 10th, 2023, he was found to have hung himself from a handicap rail in his room with shoelaces. Okay. That is insane, isn't it? Am I just easily impressed or is that insane? No, I'm pretty impressed. Like a shoelace, that...

It has to support your entire weight. And they're not that long, I thought. No. Well, I mean, some are quite long. So it could have, I don't know. But man, he's wearing sneakers. Also, it doesn't have to be that long. Like he would pop his head through and then, you know, tie it up. And I don't know. Yeah, sure. I guess. I guess it could be strong enough to just.

Stop your neck from breathing. Plus, he's an 80-year-old cancer patient at this time, too. Which actually is even more impressive. How the fuck did he manage to put himself in this position where he's able to get up with the energy to orchestrate this? I don't know. I don't know many questions about that, hey? I just want to see it. I don't think they took photos. I don't think they want to see the hanging laces. Actually, no, they probably did take photos. Yeah.

After attempting to resuscitate him unsuccessfully, Ted was declared officially dead at 8.07 a.m. at the age of 81 years old. And that is going to do it for part one of this two-parter on the life and ordeal of Ted Kaczynski. Yeah, a massive one. Do you have anything to add? I'm pretty much done. I think I've gone over everything throughout the episode. My thoughts and feelings. Yeah, Kira, do you have anything to add?

No. No? I think we exhausted everything. There we are. I mean, it was a pretty damn extensive one. We probably understand more about Ted Kaczynski than his brother does at this point. I reckon we've got more memory of him. That was incredible. Very good effort. I really understand why there is a part two. We'll see if there is an appetite for it. That's another question. But... We're really going out on a limb here. We really are.

Ordering a sequel before the first is released. Exactly. But no, I want to dive into the manifesto and go over and relate it back to Ted Kaczynski. So we're going to do that next week on the next episode of Red Thread. So yeah, keep around, keep tuned for that. Also,

As we wrap up here, official.men, seven-day free trial over there. It's our membership platform where you can sign up. Seven-day free trial and you get early access, ad-free access to all of our shows. That's the official podcast, Criminally Stupid, Rebellion,

red thread. And we're also, Jordan and I, as well as another Australian friend of ours, Connor, we do bad movie nights. There's already an episode up about that. So you can go watch that exclusively over there on official.men. It was a lot of fun. We watched Octoman and Clash of the Warriors. It was fucking awful, excruciating. So bad. And for some reason, people really liked us not enjoying our time. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you also want to enjoy us not enjoying our time, it's a lighter story than most of the red thread topics. So if you like that idea, head on over to official.man, sign up using the seven day free trial and check it out. Maybe you'll like it. It'll be public eventually way down the line, but now it's going to remain Patreon and official.man exclusive.

Other than that, Jordan also has tickets available, linked below, for his live show over here in Australia where he talks about aliens. You're still doing that, right? Oh, yes, I am. And I don't know where I'm going next. I think all of Perth is sold out, but there's other ones. Yeah, go see that. Linked below. You'll find out. Also, check out his channel, his content.

He's got a channel, Jordan Shanks, where he does self-help videos, motivational, but also talks about a bunch of other stuff as well. So go check it out. If you love Jordan, which you should, then go check it out because it's hilarious and great content. So it'll keep you giggling. Yeah.

Yeah. We also, if you sign up for official.men, you get to ask us questions, which we're going to do right now. Cooper Hip asks, do you believe the Unabomber actually believed in his ideals or did he just use them as an excuse to carry out attacks on the people he blamed in his life? Well, I personally thought that he absolutely believed in his ideals.

And now after reading about his life, I'm not as sure anymore. What are your guys' thoughts on that? I think he believed in them, but potentially not. I don't think it was the motivating factor for his acting out the way that he did. I think he believed in the things that he spoke about, but he used his beliefs as justification for what he really wanted to do, which was hurting other people. Yes. Sarah?

I agree with you, Jack. Yeah. Yeah, Jack's summed it up well, but Cooper, very good question. Great question. Tristan, do you think his brother was right to turn him in? Yes. I mean, what? No, I think he should have just sat around and waited. Appellation, but he's your brother. Where's the honour? Yeah, where's the honour? It's actually, it was interesting to read. David has been pretty open about

how hard, obviously he knew it was the right thing to do, but how hard it was. Of course. In that time of his life and how guilty he feels, you know, to his brother and to the victims. Well, not just that. He seems like a really good guy. Yeah, I'm sure he is. Also, I feel like he would have been kicking himself in the first place for years.

All of the missed opportunities, like not being there to help him onto the right path, perhaps. He would have maybe felt partially to blame, as you would for family members doing bad things. Is it the right thing to do, to turn him in? Of course. It led to less people dying, obviously. And yeah, I mean, just obviously the right thing to do. But it doesn't make it any easier to actually do it. No, definitely not.

Doop and Blorp asks, question, if you could mail the Unabomber one thing, what would it be? Can't be a bomb. I'll tell you what, with all of those possessions in line, I'd just be saying like, dude, did you have a shed? I just want to know, do you have any other possessions that I can hawk off on eBay? Please.

Look, if you're going to hang yourself with your shoelaces, can I have the other shoelace? Yeah, I was going to say, I'd send him maybe something a bit stronger than a shoelace, maybe something easier for him in his final moments. Oh, man, you're a very nice pre-start. You're just helping him pass. Yeah. Yeah, all right. I mean, I'm pretty okay with how things turned out. He killed three people. That's fine. But, yeah, I mean, Kira?

Maybe a piece of paper that says bombs are bad. Yeah, very persuasive. Is that what you said? Oh, man. What a zinger. Yeah, I'm sure you would have convinced this 170 IQ man with your facts and logic. But you convinced him after he's already in prison. I'm assuming we were mailing it to him while he's in prison, right? Oh, I don't know. Man, how much better is this letter? Just write this. Bombs are bad. Change my mind. Ooh.

Damn, dude. I wonder if he could. I wonder. I mean, I suppose he did. That was his whole point of just posting things to the New York Times, wasn't it? Well, yeah, he definitely changed people's minds. Justifying Bobby. Some people's minds. Did he change some people's minds? Yeah. Like, again, his manifesto was littered with truth and honest introspection on society. Damn, bombs and truth bombs. Isn't it incredible? Yeah.

All right. GuitarGuy115 asks, made a question for Kira, as long as she's comfortable answering. How do you go about researching the topics for each episode? My stupid ass would just use Wikipedia for the only source, but you seem to go fairly in depth with multiple sources, especially impressive for only having about one week to prepare each document. More like three days, but yeah, I've given you the credit you deserve. Thank you. God, I won't ramble for too long, but...

ChatGP too. Lots of YouTube videos. Things like Wikipedia can be good to get a general idea, but then I like to go into the sources there and kind of jump to other sources and other sources and other sources. So do you use Wikipedia as kind of an initial source of sources, for example? It's good to read over and get a general grasp and then...

go to the source section and see what they've linked and then go from there. And then it kind of very easily kind of goes on and on and on. Even doing things like picking up words and quotes and putting them into Google and seeing what sort of resources come up that have even more information. Additional context. Yeah. And YouTube videos are good too. Yeah. So you just kind of jump around to different sources. It's kind of like a natural progression.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. You do a fantastic job as per usual. Again, everyone in the audience, if you want to read through the documents, they are included in the link in the description of each video, as well as on audio platforms. You can go down and click on the link. It'll take you to the Google document and there are sources linked down at the bottom. So you can see the sources directly used. I'm looking at them right now. There's a bunch down here. So go check them out.

Your sir C asks a request. Can you guys read his manifesto prior to recording? It's a short read and I think it'll elevate the conversation. We did. Mission accomplished. Is that why you told me to read it, Jackson? Yeah. I mean, well, it's relevant. See, that's the extra mile that you go to if you sign up for membership. Yeah, I'll do whatever you say on there. Jackson demanded I do extra homework.

It was on my ass. You read it already, though. Yeah, I'd already read it, but I was just coincidentally rereading it in the car. So that was, wow. That was all for you, Sia. Yeah, good on you. That's for you, buddy. Yeah.

This one goes out to you. $5 worth it. The Box Trot asks, you reckon Redditors would have been able to solve the case like how they perfectly solved the Boston bomber case with no issues whatsoever? No, Redditors can't do anything. As soon as it becomes groupthink, it's ruined. 4chan, on the other hand. Oh, yeah.

They would have to get to the bottom of it. Reddit would have inadvertently somehow bombed even more people or made his bombs more successful. They would have accidentally made him more dangerous. Absolutely. Ryan asks, and final question, how do we know that the Unabomber didn't time travel to firebomb Mr. Geordi's? Good point. Yeah. See, I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. When did he die again? 2019? Yeah.

No, 2021. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he could have done it. He could have.

About two years. He didn't even need to try and travel. All he needed to do was escape maximum security super prison. As an old cancer. Yeah, as an old 83-year-old. Get over to Australia with rectal cancer and also then firebomb your house. A person he had no idea who he was because he hasn't had YouTube for the last 40 years and hates technology. Yeah, and hates technology.

Nonetheless, he's added to the list of suspects. Nonetheless, it was personal. Yeah, but like, what if? Yeah, exactly. What if? I can't prove otherwise. Have you been firebombed since he died? No. See, that's why it goes up on the list as well. That's his suspect number two.

All right, guys, it's been a long episode. We're going to wrap it up there. We thank you very much for your continued support. If you could, yeah, definitely check us out over at official.men. Get that seven-day free trial, but also just share it with a friend, anyone you think who needs to learn more about Ted Kaczynski and listen to two Australian guys in a

beautiful Australian woman, ramble endlessly, please send it to them. It would mean the world to us to kind of spread it that way. So thank you very much if you do. And hello to those of you who have joined us from other friends who have sent you this link. Your friends are good people. Other than that, we'll see you next time. Bye. Stay red. Bye. See ya. Oh, you sound so sad when we end. I am sad.