The Hermit of Gully Lake

Hey, true weirdos, thank you so much for listening. Because of your support, we have picked up some more awards in this past year, including three W3 awards, a gold for writing, one for history episode, and also best in show for the episode The Living Corpse. We also picked up a silver signal award for best independent podcast.

And be sure to subscribe, rate, and review on whatever platform you listen to us. It helps in discovery. And tell a friend if you like it. And thanks again for your support. We've got a sure enough hermit here in Hendricks County, Indiana. His name is John Moon. Everybody in central Indiana has heard of old John Moon.

November 1892. He's about 75 years old and has been living in a little log hut in a lonely part of the county for more than 40 years. Old John boasts that he has never rode on a railway train or wore a pair of shoes in his life. He wears the same old patched jeans year after year. He raises chickens, has a little garden, and shoots small game.

He is reckoned the best rifle shot in Indiana. When he's in need of tobacco or a few dimes, he digs sassafras root and takes it to town to sell. Some people just want to be left alone. They get labeled with words like recluse and hermit. Because humans are social creatures and we think it's kind of weird when one of our own doesn't want to live and work among us.

Sometimes we call those people crazy. Sometimes we call them visionary. We call them hermits. They just wish we didn't call them at all. He jumped the train in 41 as it took the troops to war. Was not his wish that he should die on a far off foreign shore. He made his choice that fateful night to run away and hide. So he ran by day and he ran by night looking for a safe abide.

The mountain somewhere on his trail desertion was a crime. He knew if ever he was found he'd have to do the time. He found his place of solitude in the woods near Galilee. That quiet man who meant no harm whose life was left to me. The man crooning that tune is a retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A Mountie singing a tune.

He was inspired to write about a man he'd never met. A legendary hermit from Nova Scotia named Willard MacDonald. Willard's story began in late 1944 when he was drafted into the Canadian military and packed off to fight in World War II. Except Willard didn't want to go to war. He didn't want to be a soldier. So he leapt from a moving troop train bound for Halifax and disappeared into the Nova Scotia wilderness.

That's a wilderness to be reckoned with. Rugged hilly old growth forest home to all kinds of critters including moose. Which unlike their cartoon mascot Bullwinkle aren't exactly a good time. They're huge and unpredictable and have no fear of people and they don't mind a fight. Which is why they're best avoided. Those were the woods Willard disappeared into where he remained for nearly 60 years.

You hear the word hermit and you almost can't help but picture an old man in ragged clothing, wild hair, untamed beard, his gaze either supremely untroubled or blazing with madness. Sometimes it's a burning religious fervor that drives a person away from the world into a life of solitude. Like the first Christian hermit St. Paul of Thebes who they say fled to the Egyptian desert and remained there for 97 years dying at age 113.

Legend has it that Paul lived in a cave not far from a spring with a palm tree nearby. He clothed himself in leaves from the palm and subsisted entirely on its fruit for almost 30 years. He was 43 years old the day the first raven appeared toting bread with its beak. A half loaf like a hallucination or a miracle. The raven brought Paul bread every day after that for the rest of his long life.

Paul of Thebes was the first religious hermit but it was a vocation destined to survive the centuries right up to now. We're not talking about people in far-off lands or cloistered communities. Some of the people choosing the solitary life of a hermit were once just like you. They fought traffic and corporate politics.

They scrolled Instagram and looked for stuff to watch on Netflix. They went through every motion of modern life in all its exhausting 24-7 intensity. And then came the day when they just couldn't. Not anymore. I cook for the monks here in St. Anselms and I've been here for nine years. And I am taking early retirement.

I'm going to be retiring and taking vows as a hermit in a few weeks. I'm not going to be a canonically consecrated hermit at this point. I'm taking private vows. I'm an oblate here at St. Anselms. But my little community here pretty much recognizes it. In the secular world, they called her Regina. For her new vocation as a religious hermit, she chose the name Felicity.

Learning to do without a lot of things is really essential both spiritually and just, you know, practically to be able to live this life without a job. Have to learn what you can happily live without. Our entire economy and way of life is based on consumption. When you think about it that way, what could be more radical than refusing to consume?

When you think of a person who rejects the American way of life, are you picturing anger, disgust, a maladjusted loner who can't get along, can't buck up, shut up, and put up? That's not what you find. For hermits like Regina, now Felicity, the world is just too painfully loud. It drowns out the one thing they seek, the quiet voice of God.

I'm grateful for it. I'm very grateful for my vocation and for the opportunity to embrace it. The name Felicity, it means happiness. I honor St. Felicity the martyr, but she doesn't have anything to do with why I'm choosing the name Felicity. It's because I'm so happy. Sometimes, though, it's fervor of a secular variety that drives a person away from the world into a life of solitude.

The most notorious hermit of the modern era died at age 81 on June 10, 2023. At 47, he quit his job and moved to a primitive cabin in Montana. He didn't have electricity or running water, which suited him just fine. It was nature he was after. Trouble was, others were after that same nature, not for peaceful contemplation, but to develop it, exploit it, and extract its resources.

There was no serenity to be had, no escaping the scourge of industrialization. It had followed him straight into the wilderness. And in his bitter fury, he came to believe there was only one way to fight what they called progress, a bomb. We don't call Theodore John Kaczynski a hermit. We call him a domestic terrorist because that's what he was, and a murderer.

We dubbed him the Unabomber. But long, long before the FBI was on his trail, Ted Kaczynski was a mathematics prodigy, a deeply troubled genius who'd wrestled with his own mental health, a boy wonder who may have unwittingly volunteered for his own unraveling. There's a theory about Kaczynski that suggests his participation in an experiment while he was an undergrad at Harvard caused his psychological breakdown, turned a brilliant student into a haunted, paranoid shell of his former self.

The experiment, run by a professor named Dr. Henry Murray, was presented as a test of personality and coping mechanisms, which sounds very bland and benign. Except in reality, Murray's experiment subjected his student test subjects to humiliation, harsh attacks, and profound emotional stress. From Murray's own notes. Get about 80 sophomores.

Administer a series of scales or questionnaires dealing with various dimensions of personality. Pick 25 subjects, some extremely high, some extremely low, and some in the middle on each of these scales. Study these 25 subjects over a three-year period by the multiform method of assessment. Oh, boring, so dry and dull.

Researchers gave the volunteers almost no information about the experiment in which they would participate. Each was simply asked to answer yes to the following question. Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems, parts of an ongoing program of research in the development of personality, by serving as a subject in a series of experiments, or taking a number of tests, average about two hours a week, through the academic year at the current college rate per hour?

Sounds okay, I guess. But it didn't sound okay at all to the young Ted Kaczynski, who later said he was pressured into participating in Murray's study, which at first consisted of a battery of psychological tests, including ones we've all heard of, like the Rorschach tests. You know, those abstract inkblots that allegedly reveal some of the subject's unconscious thought patterns.

The students were required to write essays about their own life histories, about their thoughts on everything from toilet training to erotic fantasy, all with the goal of developing a full psychological portrait of each subject. All very standard stuff, all leading up to Murray's real agenda, something he called the dyadic confrontation.

First, you're told you have a month in which to write a brief exposition of your personal philosophy of life, an affirmation of the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live. Second, when you return to the annex with your finished composition, you are informed that in a day or two, you are a talented young lawyer who will be asked to debate the respective merits of your two philosophies.

It was a setup. The talented young lawyer wasn't there to debate anything. He was there to aggressively attack the subject. The goal being, according to Murray, to catch them by surprise, to deceive them, to brutalize them. The room the students were brought to for this debate was bathed in extremely bright, harsh light.

There were large movie cameras noisily rolling. Electrodes were attached to each subject, and the students could see movement behind the large two-way glass. It was hot under the lights, and the so-called talented young lawyer took a tone that was mocking and sarcastic. The students would be subjected to this again and again, sometimes being made to watch the films of themselves, little horror movies showing their impotent rage, or their shame, or their tears.

During these replays, you will see yourself making numerous grimaces and gestures, uttering incongruent, disjunctive, and unfinished sentences. It was a protocol very much like what the predecessor to today's CIA, the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, used to use to stress test potential operatives, you know, spies, people who'd applied for that job or had been recruited, people who understood that one possible workplace hazard of being a spy might be an unpleasant or even brutal interrogation.

Murray's cohort of test subjects were college students, some of whom, like Ted Kaczynski, had signed up for the experiment because they needed the money they'd be paid as participants. The worst part of this is how unethical and half-assed it all was. Of course, back then, in 1959, when Murray's experiment began, using human beings as test subjects wasn't even a little bit illegal.

It'd be the 1970s before America looked around and said, Oh, maybe experimenting on people is a little bit, you know, wrong-ish. Murray himself wasn't really clear as to his own reasons or goals. At times, he suggested that his intent was merely to gather as much raw data as possible about one interpersonal event, which could then be used in different ways to help develop a theory of dyadic systems.

At other times, he recalled the idealistic goal of acquiring knowledge that would lead to improving human personality development. At still other times, his language seemed to suggest a continued interest in stressful interrogations. Sounds like Murray was basically operating a choose-your-own-adventure plan where his research was concerned.

Sometimes, Murray suggested that his research might have no value at all. Cavalier? Crazy? Or a man who was doing the CIA's bidding, using unwitting college students to figure out how to best break down a subject in interrogation. Whatever else he was, Dr. Murray was a right proper capitalist, framing his work in terms of productivity and return on investment.

Or, hey, maybe we're being unfair. Maybe Dr. Murray did a deal with the Central Intelligence Agency, thinking himself a man who could ride that tiger, only to realize that the CIA tiger doesn't tolerate anything on its back. Perhaps Murray had some regrets about that partnership, regrets he expressed using the most careful language he could.

The language of money and man-hours, not ethics or morality. There's been speculation over the decades that Murray's research at Harvard included something else that the CIA of that era was very keenly interested in. LSD. Turns out that Dr. Murray shared that enthusiasm, and Priscilla Siben, too. In fact, it wasn't long after this experimental program involving students began that the godfather of LSD himself, Timothy Leary, bounced back to Harvard to study magic mushrooms with Dr. Murray's full approval.

Murray himself even volunteered as a test subject for that one, becoming one of the first faculty members at Harvard to eat shrooms under Timothy Leary's guidance. Oh, it's a delicious theory, isn't it? That the Unabomber wasn't born, but made in the Ivy League. Although Ted Kaczynski himself didn't think he'd been given LSD.

There's no evidence to support the idea that he or the other students were dosed. But with or without hallucinogens, seemingly no one argues that the nature of the experiment caused lasting trauma to the subjects. 10, 15, 25 and more years after their experience ended, the students in Murray's cohort still lived with vivid, intrusive memories of electrodes and wires and cameras and blinding lights and aggressive interrogators pushing and pressuring them. The word attacked comes up over and over.

One question jumps out, and it's now almost impossible to answer. If these students came out of the experiment damaged, what was their mental and emotional state going in? How were these individuals screened by Murray? You have to ask, is it ethical to experiment on a person who isn't emotionally stable to begin with?

The answer to that is no. And remember, the subjects in Murray's Harvard study have been recruited with the promise of a paycheck. In Ted Kaczynski's case, here was a prodigy, a boy genius who'd skipped grades, picked up his high school diploma at age 15, and then went to Harvard before he was even old enough to get a driver's license.

He was younger than his peers and coming from a working class family. His father was a sausage maker. He was significantly poorer than his classmates as well. He didn't fit in. How could he? The Kaczynskis didn't use the word summer as a verb. There was no family crest, no legacy of distinguished ancestors whose wealth meant their names were carved on buildings around the campus.

Which is true for most of us, right? We don't turn into domestic terrorists, but there's no getting around the basic fact that a young, unworldly math prodigy who'd been severely bullied in childhood may not have been equipped to spend 200 hours in a psychological experiment that was little more than an investigation into techniques for mind control.

Knowing this, is it really all that surprising now? That Kaczynski chose to trade society and people for a shack in the woods for the life of a hermit? By most accounts, Theodore John Kaczynski was a classic hermit. He lived for two decades in a one-room cabin without electricity on the outskirts of Lincoln, Montana, an isolated outpost of fewer than 1,000 people in the rugged Rocky Mountains.

Alone, isolated, described as being withdrawn though unfailingly polite when approached in town. A place he visited only four or five times a year, peddling in on an old bicycle with those high chopper handlebars that were all the rage in the 1970s. He'd buy groceries, stuff like vitamins and canned meat. He was shy, they said, but you could sometimes get him talking, especially about his garden.

He'd hit the library where one assistant librarian was struck by his choices. Oh yeah, yeah, he was very highly educated. Way beyond a level of anything I would read. He read literary works. A lot of the books he wanted had to be ordered because they were extremely intellectual works. He would bring back his books and I would ask him, you can read and understand this stuff?

I couldn't. His presence wasn't at all remarkable in Lincoln. The area had a way of attracting loners. Folks who preferred a tent in the wilderness with no companion other than their own thoughts. People can feel called to a life of solitude or maybe their circumstances can shift in a way that pushes them out of the circle of warmth and light that is the tribe.

That distance can start off so small and then grow and grow until you're out of the habit of people. Out of the habit of being jostled by bodies, by voices, by the way your fellow humans insist on being seen and heard and attended to. The Grinch nailed it. All that noise, noise, noise. For most people, that noise is, well, it's life.

It's the sound of the one thing that a hermit has no real need for. Relationships. We exist in a web, a network of relationships. We depend on those relationships for our survival. The complex dance of trading time, skill, and labor for food, clothing, and shelter. Negotiating safety and belonging for ourselves and our offspring.

Finding power and identity. Exercising control and authority. Over people, places, and resources. We're born, we live, and we die in and with the crowd. Most of us. On July 4th, 1845, an earlier Harvard graduate gave teaching a try. Just like Ted Kaczynski would 124 years later. But found, like Kaczynski, that it didn't suit him.

Then he tried his hand as a pencil maker in the family business. What he really wanted from life was to live it. Experience life fully. Freed from frivolous distractions. From manufactured pressures to get and have and spend. He didn't call himself a hermit. He was a thinker. A philosopher. A man engaged in the grandest of all experiments.

His name was Henry David Thoreau. He built a small hut on a piece of land owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. The hut hugged the shore of a little glacial lake in Massachusetts called Walden Pond. Once settled, Thoreau commenced to the business of contemplating life. Emerson, his mentor and landlord, was a poet, essayist, philosopher, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in America.

It's a homegrown philosophy, 100% made in America, that sprang up in New England in the early 19th century. Think 1820s, 1830s. In a nutshell, the Transcendentalists were all about individual and personal freedom. That's super oversimplified, of course. The Transcendentalists had beef with society and institutions. Politics, organized religion.

These could only corrupt the individual. Self-reliance and independence were the real cornerstones of community. Nature was the thing to be prized and revered. It was the dream of an idyllic, undisturbed natural world. Which meant that adherents to Transcendentalism were no fans of capitalism or industry or the whole westward hove fever dream of manifest destiny.

Unlike today's tech fanboys, who are every bit as fired up about individual freedom, you know, for themselves, not you. While taking a giant dump on the same natural world that the Transcendentalists so revered. Henry David Thoreau spent his mostly solitary days on Walden Pond crafting a collection of essays that would go on to be printed in nearly every language on Earth.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. To front only the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life. Living is so dear. Nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. To live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life. To cut a broad swath and shave close. To drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms. And if it proved to be mean, why then to get to the whole genuine meanness of it and publish its meanness to the world?

Or, if it were sublime, to know it by experience and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. Fun fact, the great philosopher out there on Walden Pond had many of his meals and all of his laundry handled by his mothers and sisters. But let's don't nitpick. Ted Kaczynski had a bike and a library card.

Just because a hermit chooses a solitary life doesn't mean he or she can't have a few conveniences, a few small comforts, and maybe even a mom busy folding shirts and sheets. It was about a 20-minute walk from hut to homestead. Easy stroll for the old girl. After all, invisible unpaid female labor is the secret engine that drives the whole wide world even there on Walden Pond.

So many coincidences between these two men born 125 years apart. Maybe, though, not so coincidental at all. Both men shared a deep resentment of technology and government influence and interference. Both men prized self-sufficiency, retreating to their solitary cabins for reasons that are weirdly similar. One man is revered by history.

One is reviled. One used his words to gently encourage. The other used his bombs to maim and kill. Kaczynski's cabin is a close approximation to the famous one Thoreau built at Walden Pond in the 1840s. Its general appearance is the same. Nestled among trees, it is a simple one-room board structure with a loft and a cellar.

The dimensions are similar. Kaczynski's cabin is 10 feet by 12 feet. Thoreau's cabin, according to his description in the masterpiece he wrote there, was 10 feet wide by 15 long. Where Thoreau's writing was gentle, the meditations of an individual engaged in deep and thoughtful reflection, Kaczynski's was incendiary. Less a meditation than a rumination.

Two men who chose solitude. One who chose violence. Did you know there's a link between high intelligence and a preference for being left the hell alone? When one's brain is wired to solve complex, abstract problems, social rituals can feel like a distraction. Emily Dickinson, Nikola Tesla, Beethoven, Einstein, Da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Stanley Kubrick, Howard Hughes, all craved solitude, preferred it, lived it whenever possible.

All brilliant minds, but on that list, there's only one name that fits the collection of stereotypes that describe a hermit. Howard Hughes. Handsome, charming, insanely rich. A Hollywood power player. A titan of aviation. A man with one gorgeous movie star after another on his arm. A man beset by demons. He struggled with his mental health.

He battled chronic pain, the result of multiple airplane crashes. He had obsessive compulsive disorder and a near paralyzing fear of germs. Hughes disappeared from the public eye. He'd grown addicted to codeine, kept bottles full of urine in his home and would allow his hair and nails to be trimmed just once a year. He took to living in hotels, first in Las Vegas, always the penthouse.

In his mind, a luxury hotel was an easier environment to keep sanitized than a private home. Sometimes whole months would go by as Hughes binged TV in one air-conditioned hotel suite or another. Blackout drapes drawn, meals delivered. Howard Hughes not stepping a foot outside. By the time he died in April 1976, the once dashing aviator was gone, standing six feet four inches and weighing only 90 pounds.

His hair was ragged and wild. His nails were long and unkempt. He looked so much like a hermit from a cartoon and so little like himself that the FBI was called in to identify the body using fingerprints. When it comes to certain behaviors, certain people, mental health is whatever we say it is. For example, we call a person who piles up newspapers and empty soda cans a hoarder.

We call them crazy. But a person who piles up wealth while their employees live in their cars, we call them captains of industry. We make them heroes and role models. It's the same with hermits, that handful of people who won't or can't live among us. Wrap a hermit in wealth and status and you get a philosopher or seer or guru.

The worst label they might get slapped with is eccentric. Think Henry David Thoreau or Yoda, wisdom honed in solitude and nature. A hermit without wealth or status gets called a recluse, a loner, a weirdo. Think Ted Kaczynski or the Grinch, misanthropes sourly nursing a grudge against the very society they rejected. But what about those souls who don't ever become famous or infamous?

The people who just quietly remove themselves from the herd. They have their reasons, like the man we began with, the Canadian hermit Willard MacDonald. Group projects are one price of living in society. And war was a group project that MacDonald simply could not, would not do. At first, his hermitage, a crude makeshift hut in the Nova Scotia wilds, was a hiding place.

Jumping from that troop train was a crime. MacDonald didn't want to go to prison any more than he wanted to go to war. But that simple hut became a sanctuary for MacDonald, one he refused to leave even after the Canadian government offered amnesty in 1950 for military deserters. This is from the 2007 documentary called Willard, the Hermit of Gully Lake.

How do you think he ever survived all those years? I think he had some tough ones. But he picked a good spot. You know, there was trout and eels in the lake, and there was moose and deer all around him. And he done some trapping. He got some fur. He sold a bit of fur years ago. He made a few ex-handles, and they were pretty crude sometimes.

I was in there once, the lady from Truro, and she bought an ex-handle from him and gave him a very good price for it. And I'm sure it made his day. Yes, he was happy. On one occasion, we went down to the store with him. He just got a little bag of flour. Now, in his cabin, he'd have an old bucket of sourdough, you know.

And you know what he'd do with the flour? He added that to the sourdough. And how he cooked that on his stove, I don't know. If he put it on top of the stove, I suppose it'd be hard tech. And if he made it in the hubcap, fit right into the top of his stove. He had to have a hole cut to the top of the stove that Frankie had made for him.

And the hubcap fit right into that. And that was ideal for his cooking his food. McDonald was never lost. He was never forgotten. He was the subject of rumor for sure. People were curious. People were fascinated by the very idea of an old man living by his wits out there in the woods. And it was hard to say what kept him out there long after he was free to return to the world without fear of being arrested as a deserter.

In 1991, he spoke to a newspaper reporter saying that, you know, he never did like the idea of war or the thought of shooting people. Nowadays, he knows he wouldn't be arrested and he says he might like to leave, but he still has lots of fears and no money, but won't fill out the old age pension forms. He said he didn't even know where he'd go at this point.

His hovel is barely more than two meters square. That's just over four and a half feet by four and a half feet for us Americans. Just enough room for him to stretch out on the ledge that serves as bed and chair. He can barely stand without banging his torn red toque on the plastic covered roof. The only window is also the door covered in clear plastic.

A rickety tin stove half buried in the ground keeps it warm. McDonald has no radio, television or newspapers, and he comes out only about once a month trudging about 12 kilometers. That's about seven and a half miles. To buy supplies from the Earltown General Store. He never sees a doctor or a dentist, yet he exudes energy and health.

Dale Monroe and Glenn McMeekin share their story of the hermit. Plus, his mother went in there too and visited him once a month or so. And you know, she was bringing stuff. All right. She was bringing stuff in. Yeah. You know, plus the plus the toothaches. Wonder how he pulled his teeth. He had none. He didn't have very many, so he must have pulled them, right?

I guess. You know what he put in there. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. No teeth, but a guitar he'd made himself. Among the many curious folks who wanted a peek at the old hermit were musicians who brought their own guitars and fiddles and violins for jam sessions out in the forest. Visitors were amazed by his tiny cabin, by his diet, by the sheer wonder of how this increasingly elderly man managed to survive on his own in a forbidding wilderness, especially during the frigid, punishing Canadian winter.

On foot in good weather, on snowmobiles in winter, they came, each bringing their own set of expectations, each searching for, for what? A sage who discovered the meaning of life? Or a kook ranting at no one and everyone, a mishmash of grievances and insanity? A guru or a freak? What they found, though, was just a man with a gift for music and a shy sense of humor, a man who'd stepped out of the game and then stayed out long enough that he no longer knew how to return.

He had some family, a mother who'd looked after him as best she could until her own death. There were folks who called him their friend because despite his choice to live in complete physical isolation, he enjoyed people, just not so much in the enormous doses that most of us accept or even crave. As he aged, though, there was more and more concern for his well-being.

Then two things happened that accelerated McDonald's inevitable decline. The first was a forest fire in 2003. McDonald lost all of his meager but treasured possessions, his homemade guitar, his pile of battered, dog-eared books that he read and re-read by the light of a kerosene lantern, his collection of writings and his rifle.

All were destroyed in the blaze that swallowed his tiny cabin. He wasn't homeless for long. The county built him a new cabin using pension funds he was entitled to but had never applied to receive. By this point, his health was failing. He refused to seek medical help, though. Some friends, well-intentioned, sent for help anyway.

McDonald panicked and fled. Perhaps he was afraid that he might end up in a hospital or nursing home surrounded by too bright lights and too loud machines and too many strangers. That was the last time anyone saw the hermit of Gully Lake alive. On June 27, 2004, a search party hunting for McDonald came upon his remains.

He was 86 years old when he passed. We're wired to grieve the way he died, you know, all alone out there in the trees. But there's another way to see it. And that's through his eyes. He died as he had chosen to live, in solitude, sunlight flickering through the canopy, not alone at all, but surrounded by a wild profusion of life, a cacophony of birds and insects, a bustle of kits and cubs and fawns being born into the world, an explosion of greenery and wildflowers.

Spring in the North knows her time is a brief and spectacular interlude, so she really puts on a show. And Willard McDonald, who'd wrapped himself in that land and sheltered in its arms, well, he had the best seat in the house. About 13 years before he drew that last breath, McDonald said that he'd read once that the world is a puzzle with a piece missing, that he'd set out to try to find his missing piece.

He knew, he said, that he might never succeed, but that the search gave him a little something to do. Which, when you think about it, is kind of the job for all of us. It's just that most of us choose to do it in a crowd. Next time on True Weird Stuff. When a kernel of truth grows into a tall tale, you end up with a legend.

A story that folks love to tell to maybe scare the kids or teach a lesson. Give it enough time and the truth grows doubtful. Nah, that never happened. That's what folks say about Alexander Bean and his dreadful family. They say there was never, ever a clan of incestuous cannibals terrorizing the coast of Scotland. You know, unless there was.

The terrible tale of Sonny Bean on the next True Weird Stuff. Our voice talents on this episode were Sam Moore, Erin Cox, Kary "Doc" Bowser and Don Morgan. Um, there's a couple things about this that just spring to mind. I love this at the end where you said McDonald had read once that the world is a puzzle with a missing piece.

And I think all of us like to feel that we're a puzzle piece that fits in, you know, somewhere. But the other part of this is something somebody said to me a long time ago. And they said, you come into this world by yourself and you leave this world by yourself. Yeah. And yes, you can have family, you can have this, you can have all those things.

But really, life is in a lot of ways a very individual journey. These guys just sort of accepted. And and I don't want the other people to. I understand that. And I don't want other people. You know, it's such, um, uh, you know, when I said when I when we when we put this one together, I mean, I was just thinking to myself because the world is feels very crowded and I mean, Max and I, we live in a city and we feel pressed on all sides.

Right. By cars, people, houses, traffic. And I was I found myself thinking a lot about how status dictates whether or not you're a weirdo or a philosopher. Status can status can shape that. And I am not defending the actions of Theodore John Kaczynski. Although I have to tell you that if you're if you spend any time online, Kaczynski is getting a bit of a historical glow up and a little bit of a revision, because when you read the manifesto, the man is beside himself over the way technology is dehumanizing our experience of life.

And he's not wrong, right? Like, I mean, you feel that yourself some days, don't you? Certainly. Yeah, you do. Can I get may I please talk to a human representative? Representative representative. No, I this is I don't want to change my password again. And like, no, I don't want to be interviewed by an AI bot for this job.

Like for for say it for Ted Kaczynski, though, I will say that there is a part of him that feels diminished by it because something that he could so easily do with his computer like brain was now actually being done by a computer. And he he bristled at that some because up until then, he had been the boy wonder. But I didn't know about the experiments at Harvard.

I this was all I knew that he had mental health problems. I mean, obviously, he had issues, but I didn't know about this. And I would say, you know, a person who is fragile to begin with, put in this situation, it's just awful. And another example of some irresponsible stuff that was being done back like the 1940s, 1950s, 1930s that we've talked about so frequently on this podcast.

Well, I do think so. This episode is kind of all over the place because I didn't I didn't mean to do a Unabomber episode, right? I really was thinking about, like, what does it mean to step out of society? And why do we why do we call some of those people visionaries and some of those people lunatics? Right. And and the thing with Ted Kaczynski, so and again, what his actions were violent and and unspeakable, and he transgressed morality and decency and the agreement that we all have to live together with each other.

I'm not defending him, but there's some things about Ted Kaczynski you may not know. He was a prodigy. And you have to ask yourself knowing all the things you know now about children and adolescents and when the frontal lobes come online and all of it. We took a we took a kid, took a little boy, and we skipped him a bunch of grades and accelerated him through and sent him to Harvard at 15.

He is he's a poor kid from a working class family. He's got some social developmental stuff going on because, again, he has he's been skipped grades. So he's not been in classrooms with his age appropriate peers. Developmentally, you know, when you're 35 and you're hanging out with people that are 45, cool. Yeah. But when you're eight and hanging out with people that are 14, not cool.

No, not cool. So from a developmental standpoint, he rolled into Harvard very emotionally and socially immature and poor as dirt. And suddenly he finds himself, you know, in the very throne of the empire, the heart of the empire of privilege, wealth and access. And he's surrounded by students that are much older. 18, 19 is a big difference between 15.

Yeah. And these these are kids who come from generational wealth in many cases. So he's already way behind the eight ball, just just walking in to Harvard and he's poor. I mean, he's shit eating poor. So when the ad goes up in the building looking for some people, students to volunteer and to be paid, would you ever in a million years think I probably shouldn't do this because it might be funded by the CIA and it might be mind control and I might never be right again?

And by the way, there's a whole cohort of students that were in that program with Kaczynski. Most of them didn't fare well. They didn't turn out to be the Unabomber. So their pain was private and concealed from public view. But many of those students grew up to struggle mightily as adults because what Murray did to them was the equivalent of the early days of lobotomy, where we just stuck an ice pick into your eye and swished it around in your brain and then waited to see what happened.

Like we could have just I could have thrown everything else out the window and just stayed with Dr. Murray. But the truth is nothing that you heard about, even though you didn't know about Kaczynski's Harvard experience, there was nothing you heard about that CIA funded experiment that was new to you, right? LSD, psilocybin, interrogation, mind control.

I mean, how many times? And you know what I love? And I don't disagree with it. Let me tighten the tinfoil hat. I love when people say, hey, Project MKUltra never ended because I agree. I don't think it ever did. And we even had the episode. It was on the Cursed Bread episode where we watched Sidney Gottlieb order MKUltra files to be destroyed.

That's right. And they were. We did. You know, we just sat there. We sat there and watched the cover up in real time. So I think that first of all, as you all know, I think that reality is far more strange and unexpected than we're prepared to wrap our heads around. And I think that what was happening at Harvard was happening in a lot of places.

And if you're a True Weird Stuff listener, you know that because we've been to those places. Yeah, because now that we've been down this path before, it's not at all surprising. And it's not at all surprising that the CIA had a strong connection to Harvard either. Oh, not even a little bit. And, you know, I never like to defend these people because their choices in the moment were really monstrous kind of choices.

Like, you look at Dr. Murray and you go, oh, dude, come on. A young person in scouting, girl or boy scouting would have more ethics here than you do. Like, you know, you know what you're doing is wrong. Yeah, you do. But when this experiment was conducted, we were decades away from the ban on human subjects. And we also, you know, psychology was a pretty new science in a lot of ways.

It was. You know, not psychiatry. You know, we had Freud. But this was sort of a modern age of that during that time. I mean, I think we were evolving with that. Freud laid a lot of the groundwork for that. I don't think we knew very much. I think we thought we knew more than we did. And we were operating on some interesting, flawed assumptions about the human brain.

Like, when you think about a month ago, the news hit the headlines that the human brain was actually two organs that had evolved to function as one. Right. Breathtaking science, breathtaking discovery about who we are and how we're constructed, right? Of course, they didn't know this back then. It's funny when you say that our brains, everything about us are just absolute marvels.

And the way we treat ourselves with so many things, you go, I've taken this miraculous, marvelous thing, and I'm giving it French fries. Oh, I'm even worse. I'm like, I'm like, my brain is a miraculous bundt cake of goo. Let me give it some Delta 9. What in the world? So I want to say, not in defense of what happened to those Harvard students, because there were plenty of jacked up experiments involving human subjects where you can at least look at the way the experiment was constructed and go, well, they didn't know what we know today, but there was some attempt here to be coherent and ethical.

Murray didn't know from one minute to the next what it was he was doing by his own admission. I might be doing this or I might be doing that or I might not be doing anything at all. Sherry, it's amazing how many of these people it was always so haphazard, you know, you know, you talked about before about the lobotomies.

And then there was the guy with the mental health and the teeth in that episode that we talked about. They just sort of were spitballing. And you would think that this would be under under the yes, under the, you know, the best of conditions that we're conducting these experiments with a real goal. And he's just going, I think we can jerk these people around with a little mind control and a little LSD and a little of this and a little of that.

And and I think that you presented it very well. Here you take Ted Kaczynski, who was a guy who brilliant, socially socially not adaptable, it's very more maladaptive. There are so many things that are that are wrong here. You know, it was always interesting about Ted. Ted was discovered because he had this manifesto that he had written that they published in the paper in the hopes that someone would see it and go, you know, I think this might be somebody I know.

And in fact, David, his brother, is the one who discovered him. And he is the reason that they ended up catching him. Otherwise, he might have gone for years undetected. He might have died in that cabin. He might have completely. And it would be completely unknown that he had been the Unabomber. And I always thought that it was interesting that David, his brother, was a social worker and is a very thoughtful and kind individual.

And Ted was this guy sending bombs out to people because he had this problem with industry and technology. I you know, when so Ted Kaczynski, like I had so many thoughts. I read the manifesto in the process of working on this one. I didn't include any of it in the episode for a lot of reasons. One, because, you know, this is not the winds of war and we can't have six hour long episodes.

Right. But two, because when you pull chunks of it out of context, it's not it's not appropriate. Right. It has to be read in context because it's really easy to pull a couple of random sentences here or there and make the case for what utter madness. But it's a manifesto. And so it's very it's an emotionally intense document to read.

But he's not wrong about some stuff at all. His methodology was wrong, but his his feelings about the dehumanization of technology and the rape of the natural world. Hello, folks. We're living in it. OK, he was not wrong. But I don't I want to be careful to not be a Unabomber revisionist, because even if I read his work and I look at his early life and I have nothing but compassion for that scared boy trying to fit in in the Ivy League.

Um, even as I can do all that, I can still stand here and tell you. And yet we cannot our activism cannot extend to sending people pipe bombs. Right. That's the that's where the line gets crossed. So you can you can grant him his humanity and feel compassion for the boy that he was and still condemn the the way that he chose to express his discontent.

Fair. Yes, fair. His cabin. So there used to be a museum in Washington called the Newseum, which has since closed. And his cabin is now with the FBI in Washington. So I don't know that you can see it now, but there was a time that you could actually see Ted Kaczynski's cabin. This is I think and I climbed inside Dr. Murray's head and rummaged around a little bit and took my liberties there.

But I really think here's what I think about Dr. Murray. I think and this is this applies to each of us, right? Angel on one shoulder, devil on the other. I think Dr. Murray probably started out life and career with very noble principles and ambitions. You know, you don't you don't go to the effort of becoming a doctor.

You don't go to through all that schooling and all that rigorous training and end up on the faculty of Harvard because your clown shoes. Yeah, I think he I think he probably started out with as noble a goal as anybody could have. But then some his ego got activated because the CIA basically when they would fund these experiments and we've had many episodes with different CIA funded programs, when they would fund these experiments, it was like a bottomless pot of money and and you were free to build the experiment as you saw fit.

I think that that was a kind of temptation that led Murray down the wrong path. You know, we have a tendency to laud people with great intellectual ability and stand in wonder of them. But less so about their ethics and their morality. Do you know what I mean? And so we go, but they're so smart. But then you find them doing things that you go, well, that I wouldn't do that.

Well, of course, you wouldn't. You're not as intellectual as they are. But of course, you wouldn't because you have ethics and you have morality. Well, and we get this weird transactional mindset where we say things like, well, the CIA, it was very important that we didn't let the Russians win. Pause for irony, pause, pause, pause.

OK, we can't let the commies, we can't let the Red Menace, we can't let the Soviets, we can't let we can't lose the Cold War. So all bets are off in terms of ethics, morality and the rule of law. Well, Max, pause for irony, pause. OK, apparently, yeah, the ends justify the means. And a lot of people, a lot of good, decent, kind, honest people will agree with you that, well, yeah, the ends justify the means.

Well, do they, though? Do they? And is there any blood on Murray's hands for the people that were maimed and killed by Ted Kaczynski's weapons? Is there any culpability on the part of Harvard? No, no, we just here's what we did. We didn't know the rest of the story. We didn't know the enormous amount of institutional influence.

So we turned around and said, crazy old hermit in the woods eating parsnips and shit himself. Mm hmm. But when we do that, when we do that, we let the institutions off the hook, don't we? We don't hold them accountable. We don't we don't hold the educational institution accountable. We don't hold the government accountable.

We we hold Ted Kaczynski accountable. And we should because he certainly did have free will when he got on his little bicycle with the chopper handles and mailed the bombs. Yes, he did. But he didn't spring out of a vacuum. You know, he didn't drop in from outer space. We made him and we have made others like him is what I'm saying.

Well, I mean, we can look at Thoreau because everybody had to study that in school. But I think when you when you think about Thoreau and I imagine that there's there's always a little part of me that goes, what would it be like if I lived and I didn't have to worry about a car and I didn't have to worry about this and I didn't have to worry about the deadlines and some of this other stuff?

You know, what would that life be like? And would I be happy with that life? Because because when you look at it, it looks like, well, that would be simple and that would be good. But there's too many of the conveniences of being in the fray that I like. So I could never do that. I could never be a hermit. Well, I I don't want to disrespect Henry David Thoreau.

And Walden is is a masterpiece. OK, and what didn't didn't you find a lot of what you learned about Henry David Thoreau here today kind of interesting? Yes. But let me just say we have romanticized Thoreau. Thoreau had a lot of privilege. He had the opportunity. You know, Emerson was like, yeah, watch. Come on down and live on Walden Pond.

OK, and he was within a stone's throw of his family home. So his mother and sisters cooked and cleaned and did his laundry. They don't get mentioned anywhere. That's why I threw them in today. And I'm glad you did, because that was not something that I was aware of. Yeah. You know, imagine what greatness might be possible if you had an invisible labor force quietly beavering away in the background.

Oh, I'd like that. Sure. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you though? Yeah. It's funny because the ESPN 30 on 30 series has they covered the former coach for Alabama. Oh, Nick Saban. Yeah. Also the coach for LSU. And there's some other place he was before that. So what I know about football, you could fit onto the head of a pin.

But I watched I like Nick Saban's TV commercials. And I always liked watching him on the field. He was very like, you know, emotional and dramatic and demonstrative. So I watched this Nick Saban documentary. And I was just absolutely fascinated by the man. So I'm driving with my husband a couple nights ago. And I said, I want to talk to you about something about this Nick Saban story that I can't get out of my head.

So I didn't know what coaches did in the offseason. Apparently they do quite a bit. Who knew? Right? Oh, yeah. And what I learned from this Nick Saban documentary on ESPN is that he spent most of his career in airplanes and helicopters recruiting players. Oh, yeah. To build these great dynasties. And yeah, okay. Yeah, sure.

I said, Hey, Kevin, none of that. His life, his beautiful family and his grandchildren and his loving wife and his home here and his home there and his long, like upstanding whole family thing. None of that's possible without Mrs. Nick Saban. He married someone and they formed an incredible partnership together because all those nights, and I am not taking anything away from him.

But hear me, all those nights when he's jumping in and out of airplanes, talking to the ball players, who's putting the kids to bed? Who's making sure the electric bill is paid? Who is running, managing and crafting the empire that is Coach Saban's real life? That invisible female labor thing traps my nuggets a little bit.

Because I think that we don't credit it enough. We don't call it out and credit it enough. Without Mrs. Saban, there's no Coach Saban. Without Thoreau's mother and sisters, the great philosopher has less time to ponder his deep thoughts, does he not? Because he has to deal with the mechanics of living. He's got to pump water from the well.

He's got to build a fire. He's got to make a stew. He's got to beat his clothes on the rocks for God's sake. Now, Ted Kaczynski, in his tiny cabin, which was just a couple of feet smaller than Thoreau's, had no invisible labor source other than the town librarian who was getting books transferred in from Stanford for him, because there was nothing in that town's library.

And he worked at a gas station for a period of time. Yeah, a brief period. In there, in Montana, yeah. So, you know, excuse my crazy rant about invisible female labor, but in my house, it's not invisible. You know why that is? Because I loudly announce it when it's happening. It's important to get credit, Sherry. I'll agree with you there.

It's important to get credit. I am. I am making this dinner for you. I'm just not in there suffering in silence. So, and the CIA piece, the Ted Kaczynski, LSD, CIA, MKUltra piece, um, it's very speculative, except for the parts that aren't. So you'll, you'll, you'll bring this up to someone and they'll go, they never proved that.

They never proved that the CIA messed with Ted Kaczynski. Well, okay. But that's, that's if you go ahead and accept at face value that the CIA didn't fund Murray's Harvard experiments. Okay. But the thing about this is, if you look at this, if you say, all right, fine. Can you think of the most fragile person, you know, that you personally know you take the most fragile person, you know, and you take them and you put them into Murray's experiments and think about that.

You think that person could be pushed over the edge by what's going on with these crazy experiments, including possible LSD use. You think about that and what, how that would affect that person. Certainly is not going to make that person better. If they are emotionally and mentally troubled, right? Well, this is what I brought up in the episode.

When those students signed up for this Murray program, I don't think he vetted them. I think he just, he needed 40. And when he had 40 signups, he pulled the sheet off the wall and began. What do you want to bet that Ted Kaczynski was the youngest person? There's no question. I mean, he would have, he was, he would have been the youngest person there because if he, if he went to Harvard at 15, that he still would have been a teenager if he was a senior.

So, yeah, he was a, he was a teenager. And they didn't want seniors. They wanted freshmen and sophomores. Yeah, because they were going to, that's right. Sophomores. They wanted to follow these students for more than a semester. This was a long program. And I don't know, did it, did the horror of it register on you? The, they would sit these kids, kids.

They would sit Kaczynski down in a wooden chair under blinding movie lights with a camera rolling and begin confronting and attacking him. And then they would make him watch that film in another session, watch his own shame and degradation, and they would study his reaction to that. Yeah, you can't, you can't defend it.

You can't, I mean, you can defend it, but you would be wrong because you can't defend it on any scientific or moral principles. So you would just be defending it to be contrary lies. Well, and there was the vetting process. I mean, I personally, according to his brother, David, Ted was damaged. As a child, he had, I don't know if it was a flu or something that happened to him as a child.

And he was, he said he was never quite the same after that. So there was no vetting process for it. Is this an already damaged person and would this cause more harm to him in this experiment? So I think he came in damaged and I can't see how this didn't make him worse. I, there were so many things, but again, you know, in defense of the people of the past, there were things that they didn't know yet about, especially about like early child development and the human brain and adolescence and all of it.

Ted, Ted came from a very poor working class family. Right. He did. And he's weirdly brilliant. Like what the what? He's like, it's Sheldon, it's Sheldon Cooper. It's young Sheldon. And he, he clearly blew the doors off any sort of testing or academics in regular school. And his brother was no slouch, but you can be very smart and not the level of genius that this kid was.

There's a difference between real super smart kid and a prodigy. Right. So he was a weird, peculiar little guy and he was bullied relentlessly. And the grade skipping kids are, kids can be very cruel. So you're in second grade and they skip you to fifth grade. Hey, good luck to you. Good luck to you. And there were no, there was no program in the school at the time.

There was no staff counselor. Like he literally was like, well, he's smart enough. He can do the work, move them up. And there's a part of you that goes, hey, this guy's from a working class family and he's smart enough to go to Harvard as a 15 year old. Send him off. There's no, it's like he's got a chance for a better life.

To Kaczynski's parents. It was a, it was an unimaginable opportunity. And here, you know, they, they birthed up this odd little brilliant genius and he doesn't fit in anywhere. By the time he rolled into Harvard at age 15, he was a battered, bullied child who had not had the opportunity to grow and develop in age appropriate and socially appropriate ways because he was not with his peers.

He was with kids that were much older. And I'm so sorry if you don't have children, you may not realize how cruel they can be to each other. Did you not go to school? Is this your first day on earth? And if so, thanks for finding true weird stuff. You know, kids, kids can be vicious. And this little guy was a hot mess by the time he got to Harvard.

He is the last candidate for a program like Murray was running. Yeah. So where's the institutional culpability here? Well, it doesn't exist. It didn't exist then and you're never going to get it now. So we do, but we have to ask ourselves, well, what did we learn from this? What did we learn? Well, we learned that when you take people that are fragile, whose emotional and mental health is fragile and vulnerable, and you really screw with them, you make monsters.

We made a monster. I think so. And Kaczynski's parents and brother, you've seen the interviews, you've read the interviews with David Kaczynski. David Kaczynski is almost the grief. But the grief this family feels, the responsibility this family feels, right? The pain they carry. I think David was very concerned. He was very concerned when he was relating this information to the FBI.

I think this is my brother because David did not want him shot and killed, you know, because he felt responsible for his brother. I can remember, Max. Can you remember when it all came to light that it was David Kaczynski who went to the Do you remember how a lot of people judged him so harshly? Yeah, there were a lot of people that did.

How could you do that? That was my brother. I would never. David Kaczynski, he was healthy in all the ways that his brother wasn't. He may not have had Ted's IQ, but he had all that that EQ, all that emotional intelligence and all that deep, empathetic compassion. And he did. He did what he believed. And I think what we all agree was the right thing.

But boy, was it the hard thing because he loved his brother. And yet he knew he knew his most of his life that there was something deeply, deeply wrong. Also, he had sent money to his brother to help him. And then David was horrified to think I sent him money and he made bombs with the money that I sent him. Yeah, yeah.

There's so much pain in this story. All of the families of the people that were maimed and killed by the Unabomber, so much pain. There's so much pain in the Kaczynski family, so much pain. And and it stays there, right? Yeah. Because the people, the public, we don't realize. We don't know what we don't know. We don't realize that Ted, the Unabomber, wasn't just born.

He was built. Mm hmm. Brick by brick in Dr. Murray's lab. You won't you won't argue me out of that. Yeah, you just won't. And and if you and you can say, well, the other the other students didn't grow up to be the Unabomber. Well, the other students were 18, 19 and 20 years old. They did not roll into Harvard, battered, bullied, beaten and confused.

Right, right. Like it's not apples and apples here. It's apples and boulders like it's completely different things. And the blame here, I think that the responsibility here falls on Murray and his colleagues who did not vet these kids before launching them into what what can only be really described as a batshit mind control MKUltra experiment.

It's exactly right. And I think you had said somewhere that some of the other people that were involved with it did have their struggles as a result of that. Normally. Oh, they did. Yeah, people are not going to be as extreme as the Unabomber. But at the same time, you know, these kinds of struggles which impacts your personal life, your work life, all all aspects of it.

They weren't OK. And you can follow some of the I mean, there were some real tragic outcomes for some of these kids and some of them some of them fared better than others because and we said this in the episode. It's not just what comes out of the experiment. It's what went in. So if you went in reasonably well adjusted with solid functional mental and emotional health, you probably came out reasonably OK, but with nightmares.

They all had nightmares, by the way. All of the men in this cohort had nightmares for decades, but you probably fared a little better than some of your classmates. No one, no one in that cohort was was even close to Ted Kaczynski for being inappropriate for this study. And I'll tell you something else that I'm sitting here thinking about.

Why did Ted do it? Ted did it because he needed money. How many of those people that are at Harvard need the money? Most of them not. So you're also taking people that are desperate to who need the money in order to do the experiment. Did you ever? Well, you probably didn't. So when I was at Temple every once in a while, there would be, you know, an ad would go up on a bulletin board or whatever.

They would be looking for students for an experiment and it was very benign stuff. So I made a little bit of money as a college student, you know, filling out questionnaires and I never got to do anything really fun like zap somebody or be zapped or locked up in a box or, you know, the Stanford prison experiment. I didn't get to do anything fun like that.

I did a lot of, you know, sort of questionnaire kind of things and you'd get paid 40 bucks here, 50 bucks there, which, you know, I was like Ted Kaczynski. I was as broke minus the brains. And so you're like, yeah, 40 bucks, man. That's a lot of money for a college student. So you're right, Max, that the the pool of subjects in Murray's experiment were not like representative, you know, of the student population on campus as a whole, because these were all sophomores and they were all kids who did it for the money.

And I'll switch gears just for a minute here and just say that for me, the solitude of hiking on a trail and slowing down my life enough to be able to notice things like the little creatures on the ground, the little caterpillars and the little flowers that are close to the ground and to be able to just stand and feel the wind and feel the sunshine and not have any place that I'm going to or any place that I need to be.

I feel closer to God when I'm able to do those things. So I understand the idea of I need to get out and to be quiet and to be in nature, because to me, there's great mental and emotional benefit to that. And when I don't do that, when I get too busy and I'm editing this and I got a deadline for that, I'm all over the place, I can tell that I get into an internal turmoil.

And when I get out and I'm able to do that and breathe and feel all that, I am a much happier person to be around. Don't you think that if you'd been born at a different time, you would have made one heck of a good transcendentalist? When I looked at that, yeah, I would I would say, yeah, because you know, you and Ralph Aldo Emerson knocking around the pond with Henry David waiting for his mom to bring some stew like that would have been you would have been I think I think you would have been a great transcendentalist.

Because I've always had a spiritual thirst, a spiritual longing, and it does seem to be satisfied by that. I'm not saying that I can't get it by going to church or those sorts of things. I'm not one of those people that says, no, that's my church and I can have both. Do you know what I mean? But but there is something very special, especially and as you said at the beginning, we we live in the city where there's traffic and there's noise and there's just all this stuff around all the time.

When I get out and do that, I can feel it. I can feel it down to my very core. I can feel it in my soul. And I go, what was I what was I in such a dither about? I'm just oh, yeah. All right. OK, and when you find that I'm able to find better find that missing puzzle piece, because there's a part of me that thinks that missing puzzle piece is I have to be this guy on this show.

I have to be producing this podcast. I have to be this person for these people over here. I have to be over here doing a play and I'm doing it. And that's my missing puzzle piece, you know, and I mean, as long as I'm doing that and then I realize that while all of that stuff may have its place, that's not who I am at my core.

And a lot of that has a lot of ego connected to it that when I get down to my core is not there. And to me, that's when I find God. So you're you make me think of the character in the Whitman poem when I heard the learned astronomer. So he's in the lecture hall at the university and the famous astronomer. Oh, so brilliant.

He's got all of his charts with him, you know, and his graphs and all of his facts. And in there, excuse me. Do you need some water? Do you need? Are you OK? I just get. Yeah, I just I'm allergic to everything and I love Walt Whitman. I thought you were getting choked up at Walt Whitman. I am. Yeah. So so he's in the university lecture hall and he's he's becoming hot and queasy and increasingly uncomfortable and he can't concentrate.

And he's there to learn, you know, about the stars. But it's just so bright and crowded and there's so many people. So he slips out of the lecture hall and he goes outside and he lies down on the grass and he looks up into the night sky. And that's how he learns about the stars. That's you. That I mean, let me just as as awful as it as hard as it is to give this man any grace.

That was Ted Kaczynski. He was in line for an absolutely brilliant career as a mathematician, charts and graphs and lecture halls crowded with students and fame, if not fortune, because fortune doesn't tend to flow in the direction of brilliant mathematicians. But at least a life that he could. Yeah. And he found that he couldn't and he had to leave that and go out into the into nature in perfect silence and solitude.

So, you know, many of us have some of those you have some of those same impulses. And I think that since I've known you since the Kaczynski story broke, I can't say like Max had sympathy for the Unabomber. That's not putting it the right way. No. But Max had a curiosity about and a need to know more about who this person was, because I think you intuited a fellow traveler like here's someone that is choked out by the noise of living in the crowd.

Just minus the the violence and the mental illness, the bubbling anger, the mental illness, the violence, all that stuff. And so you have to ask yourself and it's impossible to know. Right. But you have to ask yourself, how might everything be different if he had not spotted that notice on the bill on the bulletin board about Murray paying students to participate?

I wonder. I really. I I think just a guess, but I I don't think he would have had a happy life in any case because he was in so much pain from a very early age. But I don't think he would have been driven to the extremes that he was had we not climbed inside that boy's brain and started around. Yeah, with or without. Oh, by the way, with or without hallucinogens, because the the Murray Harvard experiments with Theodore John Kaczynski are documented fact, you will not have a hard time finding or proving that what what's speculative is the presence of LSD and psilocybin.

But I would argue that what they did to those kids and to take Kaczynski was bad enough without throwing LSD into the mix. Sherry, the CIA, given people LSD on the sly, she would. They would never happen. I think I think that that's a matter of fact as well. They would never. Oh, they would never accept all the times they did all the times they did.

So so, you know, one of the our fellow tinfoil hat team come close. One of the hard things about being us, in addition to the foil on our heads, is that we can see so clearly what's happening. We can see the strings and the levers and the gears and the mechanisms. And when we point them out, people say we're nuts or conspiracy theorists or crackpots or crazy or whatever.

And that's what drives people like Kaczynski and Willard McDonald and throw into the woods because when you can see it so clearly and everyone else is like, oh, I don't see that. Oh, come on. Oh, come on. After a while, you separate yourself from the herd. Or they or they separate you from themselves because you're a weirdo.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And a freak and all of those things. So, yeah. So just remember that when you have wealth and whiteness, you can head off into the wilds and do any damn thing and you might get eaten by by cannibals looking at you, David Rockefeller, or you might be lauded as a great philosopher and genius looking at you, Henry David Thoreau.

Now, Max, you've got the whiteness, but not the wealth. So you're going to have to be real careful when you step into your shack in the woods about managing image and perception. If you want to be viewed as a great visionary and not a Looney Tunes. Sherry, I am wealthy in whiteness. You have so much whiteness. Let me tell you people, this man, this is a tall man.

This is a big man. This is a white man. He's got a lot of extra white and he's got enough whiteness for two. But not enough wealth, even for himself. So it's an embarrassment of riches in the whiteness. Yes. But, you know, and when I say that people go, but, you know, it's true, right? Oh, can I just know it's true. Can I just say when we mention all of these famous hermits, including the Umbomber, it's always great to see that a Warner Brothers cartoon character will show up in an episode.

And we're talking about the Grinch, because I think it was Chuck Jones who was from Warner Brothers, who was the one that sort of came up with the cartoon part of it, of course. Well, let me ask you this, white man without wealth. Let me ask you this. Yoda and the Grinch. They're both green. They're both loners, right?

They both live in solitude in nature. One of them is the fount of all wisdom, and the other is the asshole that stole Christmas from the Hoos. But, but he, you know, he was redeemed, but he was redeemed when he got. And let's let's talk about how he was redeemed. What redeemed the Grinch, everybody? What redeemed the Grinch?

What was it that made the Grinch's heart grow three sizes? Was it an IPO? Was it an increase in shareholder value? Was it the discovery that he'd won the scratchies? What returned that green, angry, wretched loner to the bosom of society? It was the realization that people could take care of each other and be good to each other, even when they had nothing.

It was human community that redeemed the Grinch. And that human community is the very thing that sent the Grinch into his mountaintop lair. Because, see, the Grinch, it's one of those childhood things that is actually like a perfect little egg of human wisdom, because it shows us that the very thing that we fear and hate the most is often the thing we need the most in order to survive.

And by the way, I do know that the Grinch was a Dr. Seuss character, just so anybody, but the cartoon was Chuck Jones. Was done by Chuck Jones. Okay, so I just I know somebody's going, no, it was Dr. Seuss, you know. So Henry David Thoreau, his cartoon avatar is Yoda. And Theodore John Kaczynski, his cartoon avatar is the Grinch.

Only and unlike the Grinch, Kaczynski never got redemption because he chose violence. And I don't think he did. I don't think he went to prison and realized the error of his way. I don't think that he ever there was ever any part of him that says, you know, I did the wrong thing. And now I think differently. And real quick, before we wrap this episode up, just in the same way that the people in the nearby towns had a soft spot and they looked out for and cared for the Canadian hermit Willard McDonald, the people in that little town in Montana felt that way toward Kaczynski.

Yeah, he was he was the subject of gossip. I mean, of course he was. We got some hermit riding around on a chopper bike, but they people spoke well of him. They spoke of him with kindness. The library, the librarian in this episode, this young woman who couldn't make heads or tails out of this guy on the bicycle. But there was a gentleness there.

So, yeah, the same society that gave us Dr. Murray and his awful experiments also gave that wealth of people who looked kindly upon him and treated him well near his shack in Montana. There are so good people outnumber the bad people by a country mile, but the bad people have so much energy and they they need attention so desperately.

The good people are too busy being good people to be out there chasing notoriety. But the bad people. Yeah, it's a different that we may outnumber the bad people, but they are they are very productive. The bad people, they get they get a lot done and they have better press agents to better press agents. And you know what?

You know, that's saying we all have the same 24 hours. I got to tell you, the evil really maximize their time in a way that you and I simply have not figured out how to do. All right. So on the next episode of True Weird Stuff, oh, it is the legend or maybe not a legend that the trouble with stories like Alexander Bean is finding is digging through all the layers to find that one kernel of truth, because either a clan of incestuous cannibals terrorized the Scottish coastline in the 16th century.

Or it didn't, but based on what the people say, let's just put it this way, you wouldn't want to be terrorized by a clan of incestuous cannibals. I can think not the terrible tale of Sonny Bean on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

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