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A listener note, this episode contains adult content

and is not suitable for everyone.

Please be advised.

Thank you. suitable for everyone. Please be advised. In early December, I was at home when the news broke. A young man shot and killed the CEO of a major health insurance company outside a hotel

in Midtown Manhattan.

Within days, someone found what he had written before he did it, and the internet did

what the internet does now. Some people call him a hero.

Luigi Mangione, 26 years old, Ivy League educated, by every external measure, a young man with

every advantage. And yet, I have spent a career inside the darkest corners of the human mind,

and when I read what Mangione had written, when I saw the profile, brilliant, young, educated, ideologically

furious, convinced that violence against a symbol of a broken system was not just justified, but necessary.

Something in me went cold. Not surprise, recognition. We have seen this before. 30 years ago,

almost to the day, I sat alone in a log cabin in the mountains of Montana

with a man who believed the same thing, that his cause was right, that killing was justified,

that history would vindicate him.

I looked into his eyes. I fed him a candy bar. I draped my son's

ski jacket over his shoulders while the FBI searched his bomb factory. His name was Ted

Kaczynski. And 30 years later, after his death, after his ideas were taken up by a new generation,

after the man who shot a healthcare CEO left a glowing review of Kaczynski's Manifesto

...