The Bad Show

With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show from 2011 about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of us. Cruelty, violence, badness... in this episode we begin with a chilling statistic: 91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. Then, we reconsider what Stanley Milgram's famous experiment really revealed about human nature (it's both better and worse than we thought). Next, we meet a man who scrambles our notions of good and evil: chemist Fritz Haber, who won a Nobel Prize in 1918...around the same time officials in the US were calling him a war criminal. And we end with the story of a man who chased one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, then got a chance to ask him the question that had haunted him for years: why? EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Pat Walters and Latif Nasser Produced by - Pat Watlers with help from - Carter Hodge. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:56Speaker 02

  Hey, Latif here. I have now been working in podcasts for over 15 years. And one thing that still consistently surprises me about this industry is the enduring appeal of true crime podcasts. No judgment if you are a fan of true crime. I just personally have never really gotten into them. I feel like they just make me paranoid. But I feel like the episode we are about to replay, which is one of the all-time top Radiolab episodes, is the closest thing Radiolab has ever done to a true crime episode. It's got crimes, they are gut-wrenching, they are true.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  But the episode is really trying to do something, I think, bigger. It's trying to grapple with these profound questions like, what makes someone bad? And are they different from the rest of us? And how do you live in a world where people do bad things for seemingly no good reason at all? Also, if you listen close, you'll hear a cameo from me. This is one of the first Radiolab episodes I was ever on. You can treat it like a little Sonic Where's Waldo. Anyway, here it is, The Bad Show.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Yep, wait, you're listening.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Alright. Okay.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From... WNYC.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  See?

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Rewind.

• 2:31Speaker 05

  Hello, David.

• 2:32Speaker 06

  Yes, hello.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  This is Pat.

• 2:34Speaker 06

  Oh, hi, Pat.

• 2:35Speaker 05

  Let's begin with this story from our producer, Pat Walters. Pat, go ahead. Okay, so I heard this one from this guy named David.

• 2:42Speaker 06

  My name is David Bus.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Two S's. He's a psychology professor.

• 2:46Speaker 06

  At the University of Texas at Austin.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  And this particular story, it comes from a book that David wrote. Could you just tell me the little story that you begin your book with?

• 2:58Speaker 06

  Okay, yes. This is one of the things that's-- this was one of the things that sparked my interest in the topic of murder.

• 3:06Speaker 05

  The whole thing happened several years ago.

• 3:08Speaker 06

  I had a very good friend.

• 3:10Speaker 05

  Another professor at the university.

• 3:11Speaker 06

  And I used to socialize with him and his wife. And one evening, they were throwing a party and invited me over. And so when I went to the party, the party was already in full swing when I got there. I walked in and asked his wife where this friend of mine was. And she got a disgusted look on her face and said that he was up in the bedroom. And so I went up to the bedroom to find him, and he was in a rage.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  In a rage, how? Like, you walk into the room, what do you find?

• 3:45Speaker 06

  Well, he started fuming that his wife had dissed him.

• 3:50Speaker 05

  What did she do?

• 3:52Speaker 06

  She expressed disapproval about his clothing choices.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  She made fun of his shirt or something?

• 3:59Speaker 06

  But did it publicly in front of her friends. So it was a kind of a-- he felt publicly humiliated.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  And while David's sitting in the bedroom with this friend, the guy looks up at him and he says--

• 4:11Speaker 06

  "I'm gonna kill her."

• 4:14Speaker 05

  How did he say it? Like, quietly or?

• 4:17Speaker 06

  Like, through his teeth, you know? "I'm gonna kill her."

• 4:22Speaker 05

  David had always known this guy to be pretty mild-mannered.

• 4:26Speaker 06

  But he is a large, very strong man with a black belt in karate. I knew what he was capable of. So I suggested that we go out for a walk. And I basically spent the next half hour walking around with him, trying to cool him off.

• 4:48Speaker 05

  And eventually, he did.

• 4:50Speaker 06

  He just calmed down.

• 4:53Speaker 05

  And did you go back to the party then and like continue dinner partying for a while?

• 4:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I did.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  And he did too?

• 5:00Speaker 06

  Yes, and he did too. And then he seemed fine when I said goodbye to him. He seemed calm and I left and went home. And then it was several hours later in the middle of the night that I got the call.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  And it was his friend?

• 5:14Speaker 06

  And he says, can I come over and sleep on your couch? If I don't leave my house right now, I'm gonna kill her.

• 5:24Speaker 06

  He was in this state of fury, he said, and instead of hitting his wife, he smashed his fist into the bathroom mirror and then realized that he had to leave the house or he was gonna do damage to her.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  And so he says that and you're like, okay, yes, come over now, like?

• 5:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  Meanwhile, later that night on the other side of town-

• 5:53Speaker 06

  His wife went into hiding, literally disappeared for six months and didn't tell anyone where she was because she was terrified that he was gonna kill her.

• 6:06Speaker 07

  This story made us wonder, is David's friend-

• 6:09Speaker 06

  Is he unusual? Or-

• 6:12Speaker 07

  Does everybody at some point have something dark in them that just tiptoes out, just from time to time?

• 6:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 06

  This is Radiolab and today, we're gonna get bad, so to speak.

• 6:26Speaker 07

  We've done a good show.

• 6:27Speaker 06

  This is a bad show.

• 6:28Speaker 07

  So you ask, like, why do people do bad things?

• 6:31Speaker 06

  They actually mean to be bad anyways. Like, how do you tell the real baddies from the rest of us? That's how I am. I'm Jad Abumrad.

• 6:38Speaker 07

  I'm Adam Kowicz.

• 6:39Speaker 06

  This is Radiolab.

• 6:40Speaker 07

  The Bad Show.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  Okay, so what happened to David that night with his friend got him really curious about murder and badness and all these things we're thinking about. But it wasn't until a few years later that he learned something that really put what happened that night into context. By this point, David moved on to a new university and he's teaching an introductory psychology class.

• 7:09Speaker 06

  And I devoted one class session to the topic of homicide and why people kill. And I designed a little questionnaire where I simply asked the students, have you ever thought about killing someone? And they would circle yes or no.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  Then he left some space at the bottom for them to elaborate if they said yes.

• 7:31Speaker 06

  And the class ended and I went back to my office and I just sat at my desk and I started reading these and I was just astonished.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  To find page after page of yeses and not just yeses.

• 7:45Speaker 06

  But these very vivid descriptions about-

• 7:48Speaker 05

  Who they would kill, where they'd do it, when-

• 7:51Speaker 06

  The precise method.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  How many of them went into that kind of detail?

• 7:55Speaker 06

  I would say 75 or 80%.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  Wow. Were you a little bit horrified, like, oh my god, my students are murderers?

• 8:04Speaker 06

  Well, horrified is, I was pretty stunned. And so I expanded the sample where we asked about 5,000 people.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  All over the world.

• 8:16Speaker 06

  Singapore, Peru, the UK.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  That same question.

• 8:19Speaker 06

  Have you ever thought about killing someone? And 91% of the men said yes and 84% of the women.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  Said, "Yes, I've thought about killing someone."

• 8:30Speaker 06

  Yes. If any sizable fraction actually acted on their homicidal fantasies, the streets would be running red.

• 8:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, but that's just a, those are fantasies.

• 8:40Speaker 05

  Some of them actually seem like-

• 8:43Speaker 06

  Well, here's one-

• 8:43Speaker 05

  Something more than just fantasies.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  From a woman.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 8:48Speaker 06

  Okay, this is a 20-year-old female. We ask, "Who did you think about killing?" And she said, "My ex-boyfriend. We lived together for a couple of months. He was very aggressive. He started calling me a whore and told me he didn't love me anymore. So I broke up with him. Then a few months later, he started calling me, trying to get back together, but I didn't want to. He said that if I ever had a relationship with another man, he was going to send videos of us having sex to all the people in my university. The thing is that I do have a new boyfriend, but my ex-boyfriend doesn't know that yet, and I'm terrified that he'll do what he says. Then suddenly, the thought occurred to me

• 9:31Speaker 06

  that my life would be much happier without him in existence." And then she said, "I actually did this. I invited him for dinner, and as he was in the kitchen, looking stupid, peeling the carrots to make salad, I came up to him laughingly, gently, so that he wouldn't suspect anything. I thought about grabbing a knife quickly and stabbing him in the chest repeatedly until he was dead. I actually did the first thing, but he saw my intentions and ran away." When we asked how close she came to killing him, she estimated 60%.

• 10:06Speaker 07

  Wow, 60. I don't think I've ever had a fantasy that anatomically specific, where I would see the part of the other person that I was going to stab or plan it like that.

• 10:16Speaker 06

  Well, have you ever been blackmailed the way this woman was being blackmailed?

• 10:20Speaker 07

  No, no one has ever sent about a sex tape that I've ever, you know-

• 10:23Speaker 06

  So you don't know? It is a fair question to ask, what are the conditions under which you, or me, or any of us could do awful things?

• 10:31Speaker 07

  I think they'd have to be extreme in the extreme.

• 10:34Speaker 06

  Well-

• 10:34Speaker 07

  Because you know how mild-mannered I am.

• 10:36Speaker 06

  No, no. And you know what? This actually brings us to our first top of the hour, so- Let me just to set it up. Robert, I'm gonna give you this piece of paper here.

• 10:44Speaker 07

  What is this?

• 10:44Speaker 06

  So these are some word pairs. Read these words that you see there.

• 10:47Speaker 07

  What, these words here?

• 10:48Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 10:48Speaker 07

  Nice day.

• 10:50Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 10:50Speaker 07

  Fat neck.

• 10:51Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 10:51Speaker 07

  Sad face. What is this, soft hair? I don't know what this is.

• 10:55Speaker 06

  These are just word pairs. I want you to commit them to memory.

• 10:58Speaker 07

  Commit them to memory? You know I have them.

• 10:59Speaker 06

  And while you're doing that, just give me your finger. I'm gonna connect this little electrode to your finger. There we go. There, just kinda.

• 11:06Speaker 07

  Wait a second. Clear air.

• 11:08Speaker 06

  Okay, so give me the paper back.

• 11:09Speaker 07

  Already?

• 11:10Speaker 06

  Time's up. So, I'm just gonna go into this other room over here.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Can you hear me?

• 11:18Speaker 07

  What, what?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Alright, so I'm gonna talk to you over this intercom. Okay?

• 11:22Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  I'm gonna give you a test.

• 11:23Speaker 07

  I'm not ready for this.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Pay attention.

• 11:25Speaker 07

  Alright.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  To the best of your memory, which word was matched with nice? Was it nice day, nice sky, nice job, or nice chair?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Answer please.

• 11:39Speaker 07

  I don't know, wait a second.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Just push the button that corresponds to the right word. Go.

• 11:44Speaker 07

  Okay, I'm choosing job?

• 11:47Speaker 04

  Wrong. Answer is day.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Sorry, man.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  285 volts.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  I'm gonna have to give you a little, uh...

• 11:55Speaker 07

  What did you just do?

• 11:57Speaker 06

  He just burst my eardrums. God. Obviously, no need to be alarmed. That was not a real shock. We were just enacting an old, very famous experiment that you might have heard about.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  It is May 1962.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  Done by this guy?

• 12:10Speaker 04

  An experiment is being conducted in the Elegant Interaction Laboratory at Yale University.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  That's Stanley Milgram talking about the experiment in a film. In case you've never heard of this, probably have, but in case you haven't, here's what he did. He recruited a bunch of subjects.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  The subjects are 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50.

• 12:25Speaker 06

  Just normal, everyday dudes.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  The subjects range in occupation from corporation presidents to good humor men and plumbers.

• 12:31Speaker 06

  And he ran them through something like what you and I just did. He would have each subject sit down at a table.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  I'll sit right here.

• 12:37Speaker 06

  In front of this really impressive-looking machine.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  This machine...

• 12:41Speaker 06

  That had lots of switches on it.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Uh, generates electric shocks. So when you press one of the switches all the way down, the learner gets a shock.

• 12:47Speaker 06

  And in the other room, there was a guy, who he called the learner, who was supposed to have memorized some words. And every time that guy got a word wrong...

• 12:55Speaker 04

  Wrong.

• 12:55Speaker 06

  Like you just did.

• 12:56Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  Which happened constantly.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Answer is neck.

• 12:58Speaker 06

  The volunteer...

• 12:59Speaker 04

  300 volts.

• 13:00Speaker 06

  Was instructed to shock that guy. With higher and higher voltage. Now, the volunteer couldn't see the guy he was shocking, but he could definitely hear him.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  Milgram staged the whole thing like it was some experiment about memory and punishment, but of course it wasn't about that.

• 13:17Speaker 06

  Continue, please. It was about how far would these people go? How many times would they shock that sad sap in the next room just because they were being told to?

• 13:28Speaker 06

  The guy yelling, of course, was an actor and the shocks weren't real, but the questions in the air at the time were very real.

• 13:38Speaker 06

  This was a moment when human cruelty was on trial. Quite literally.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  When I stand before you, judges of Israel, in this court, to accuse Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  So Stanley Milgram actually begins these experiments the same year that Adolf Eichmann goes on trial for Nazi war crimes.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  That's radio producer Ben Walker. He'll be our guide for this segment.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  And in the trial, when the prosecutors essentially ask him, "How you came to commit genocide?", he would say, over and over again.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  It was not my personal affair.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  I was just following orders.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  I had to do what I was ordered.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  And it's this defense. This is basically what Stanley Milgram set out to test

• 14:28Speaker 02

  in a lab at Yale University with a bunch of regular Americans.

• 14:33Speaker 06

  Like, is that something that's universal?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:35Speaker 06

  Or just an Eichmann thing?

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. He figured maybe 1% of these men would keep flicking the switches up to the highest voltage, but that's not what he found. 65% were willing to shock their fellow citizens over and over again, even past when they were screaming in pain.

• 15:00Speaker 06

  Even when they stopped screaming?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, when they were maybe dead.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  They continued shocking their corpses.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  His experiment remains one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century.

• 15:21Speaker 07

  In 1962, Stanley Milgram shocked the world with his study on obedience.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  It is still trotted out to explain everything from hazing to war crimes.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  What is there in human nature?

• 15:33Speaker 02

  To gang behavior.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  That allows an individual to act inhumanly.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Genocide.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Harshly.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  It's like a downloadable from the internet instant defense for doing wrong. But if you look at Milgram's work closely.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Like this guy did.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Alex Haslam, professor of psychology at the University of Exeter.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Then a different picture will emerge.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Really? That story has been told a million and one times for the last 50 years. We've just got to get, got to get everywhere.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Now, what you need to understand about Alex Haslam is that he hates it when interviewers only want to talk about the baseline study.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  The one that everybody knows, the so-called baseline.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  The 65% one.

• 16:14Speaker 06

  The one we just talked about.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 06

  So there's more? There's more to it?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, because actually he studied between 20 and 40 different variants of this same paradigm.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Stanley Milgram took electric shocks very seriously. He did this experiment a bunch of times and in a bunch of different ways.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  He had all sorts of different things.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  He would change where the shocker and the shockee sat.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  He had women participants. He had an experimenter who wasn't a scientist but was a member of the general public.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  And every scenario produced a different result.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  Really?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Let me, I mean, I'm just, I've got in front of me, I've just got the, the data from the Milgram study. Let me just get that out. I mean.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  So again, the baseline study is the one where 65% of the volunteers.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Go all the way.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Highest dose of electricity.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  XXX.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  But in experiment number three, if they put the shockee in the same room with the shocker, so the shocker could actually see the person that he's shocking.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Obedience drops to about 40%.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  And in experiment number four, when the teacher has to hold the learner's hand down.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  On a plate.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  In order him to feel the shock.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  It drops to about 30%.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Wow. Experiment 14.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  If the experimenter is not a scientist but is an ordinary.

• 17:28Speaker 06

  Not wearing a white coat. Obedience drops to 20%. Oh, really? Well, how low can we go? Okay.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Here's another one.

• 17:35Speaker 06

  This variant.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Experiment 17.

• 17:37Speaker 06

  There's you and there's two other participants.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Both actors.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  If those two participants refuse to go on.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Like saying like, I don't want to kill a guy.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  Only 10% under those circumstances go on. And then the final one.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Experiment 15.

• 17:52Speaker 06

  Of course, normally you just have one experimenter who's giving you these instructions.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  But if you put two experimenters in the room and.

• 17:58Speaker 06

  They start disagreeing with each other. And this one, you get 0% going all the way.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Zero?

• 18:03Speaker 06

  Zero in that condition.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  You said zero.

• 18:05Speaker 06

  None go right to the end. No, no, not one person.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  No one.

• 18:08Speaker 06

  Not a soul. Exactly 0%. Well, all right, I'm starting to feel a little bit better about my fellow man.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  One second. Hey, hey, hey, hey! Shh. Okay.

• 18:18Speaker 06

  Where is he?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  I'm in a closet.

• 18:20Speaker 06

  In a closet?

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Because this room is echoey and, you know, there's nothing like a closet full of clothes to like help balance that out.

• 18:26Speaker 06

  That's true. That's true. All right, so keep going.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  So you see, it's just in that one experiment that 65% of people are willing to go all the way. But in all of these other scenarios, they don't. And even when they do say yes, even when they go along with the experiment, as you can see in the film, they struggle.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Continue using the last switch on the board, please. I not get no answer. Please continue. The next word is white.

• 18:51Speaker 06

  They have debates with themselves.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  You think you should look in on them, please?

• 18:55Speaker 06

  Debates with the experimenter.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Not once we've started the experiment. What if something's happened and a man had been attacked or something in there? The experiment requires that we continue. Go on, please. Don't demands help mean anything? Whether the learner likes it or not, we must. But he might be dead in there.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  What's interesting is that how all of these struggles, all of them,

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Please continue.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Play out the same way. It's the experimenter

• 19:17Speaker 04

  You go on, please.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Prodding the shockers along.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  You're gonna keep giving what, 450 volts heavy shot now? That's correct.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  For me, it's all about the prods.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  The next word is white.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  This is what totally pulled me into this story, the prods. Stanley Milgram had four scripted prods that he wrote out for his experimenters.

• 19:35Speaker 06

  For when the subjects didn't want to continue?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yep. The first one was, please go on.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Continue, please.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  And if they didn't go on, if they resisted. The experimenter would break out prod number two. The experiment requires that you continue.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Well, the experiment requires you to continue. I know it does, sir, but I mean, he's up to 195 volts.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  And if they still were resisting or struggling, they'd get prod number three.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  It's absolutely essential that you continue.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  It's absolutely essential. It's a little bit more direct.

• 20:05Speaker 07

  It's a bit stronger, but it's not in order.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Not quite. But the fourth prod.

• 20:08Speaker 07

  Really, the critical, the critical fourth prod.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Is an absolute order. The fourth prod is.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  You had no other choice, teacher.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  You have no other choice, teacher.

• 20:19Speaker 07

  You must continue.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  That is definitely in order.

• 20:22Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  But every time the experimenter pulled out the fourth prod, and this was confirmed when the experiment was redone in 2006, total disobedience.

• 20:34Speaker 07

  Total disobedience.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Anytime the experimenter said, "You must continue," the shocker would say, "Hell, no, I don't."

• 20:42Speaker 03

  You had no other choice, teacher. I have a choice. I'm not gonna go ahead with it. Well, we'll have to discontinue the experiment then. I'm sorry.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Here's another one.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  You had no other choice. You must go ahead. Yes, I have a choice. That is, if you don't continue, we're gonna have to discontinue the experiment. Well, after he says, "Cut it out." After all, he knows what he can stand. That's my opinion. That's where I'm gonna stand on it.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Wow, so the subjects seem willing to shock another human being, but as soon as you say it's in order.

• 21:19Speaker 07

  They don't do it.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 21:21Speaker 07

  Now, that's important. It's very important, because if you ask university undergraduates, "What does the milligram study show?", they will invariably say something like, "They show that people obey orders." Okay, well, actually, the one thing that the study really doesn't show is that people obey orders. And it's a pretty big thing to miss. It's a pretty [bleep] big thing to miss, isn't it, really?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  So, wait, if it doesn't show that people are just obeying orders.

• 21:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Then what does it show?

• 21:48Speaker 07

  Okay. I think it looks it's like this.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  All right, let's go into our instructions. We will begin with this test.

• 21:52Speaker 07

  The participants are there in the in the study. They've got a very plausible, very credible, high status scientist in a high status scientific institution.

• 22:01Speaker 06

  Yale.

• 22:02Speaker 07

  Who is going to do this powerful piece of science.

• 22:06Speaker 06

  So they sit down in the chair thinking, wow, this is really important. I'm about to help this quest for knowledge. I really want to do a good job.

• 22:14Speaker 07

  Now, as we sort of know in life, lots of things that we do, if they're worthwhile doing, are not always easy. And you find yourself in a situation where you've got to do something that's hard.

• 22:25Speaker 06

  Like shocking an innocent stranger over and over.

• 22:27Speaker 07

  But if you think that's the right thing, if you think that science is worth pursuing, you say, OK, I'll go along with this.

• 22:35Speaker 06

  So you're saying they were shocking these people because they thought it was worthwhile?

• 22:39Speaker 07

  Look, the participants, you know, they're not it's not it's not just blind obedience. Oh, you tell me, sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full, sir. They're engaged with the task. They're trying to be good participants. They're trying to do the right thing. They're not doing something because they have to. They're doing it because they think they ought to. And that's all the difference in the world.

• 23:07Speaker 06

  Suddenly, I'm thinking this is actually a darker interpretation than the original.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely darker.

• 23:11Speaker 06

  Because they are doing it.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  No question about it.

• 23:13Speaker 06

  They have the agency.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:15Speaker 06

  And they think it's right, although clearly on some level they know it isn't.

• 23:19Speaker 07

  There's a sort of chilling comparison, which is a speech that Himmler gave to the SS, some SS leaders, when they were about to commit a range of atrocities. He said, look, this is what you're going to do is, of course, you don't want to do this. Of course, nobody wants to be killing other people. We realize this is hard work. But what you're doing is for the good of Germany, and this is necessary in order to advance our noble cause.

• 23:44Speaker 06

  Wow. So then.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Hey, wait, I'm almost done, guys. Give me two more minutes. Two more minutes.

• 23:50Speaker 06

  So in the Milgram case.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 23:52Speaker 06

  Well, if the idea is that people will do bad if they think it's good, the good noble cause. Well, what's the noble cause in this case?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Science.

• 24:00Speaker 06

  Science.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  You can see this in the surveys that the men filled out after the experiments were over.

• 24:04Speaker 06

  This was exactly what was on my mind. If the experiment, if.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  The experiment had to be successful. It had to be carried on. The questionnaires they filled out are part of the Milgram archive at Yale. Willing to help in a worthwhile experiment. And it's kind of surprising. A lot of them are really positive, even though they've just been told that they were duped. Research in any field is a must, particularly in this day and age. Do you think that more studies of this sort should be carried out? Definitely, yes.

• 24:36Speaker 07

  We, as onlookers to the study, we have this kind of godlike sort of vision of like, well, of course, what they're doing is wrong. But if we look at it from another perspective, there is a sense in which you could celebrate what they're doing. I mean, I'm not suggesting one should, but I'm just saying there is a sense in which these people are prepared to do something that's very painful to them and to someone else because they want to promote science. Well, you know, you can see that's a good thing. I mean, you know,

• 25:01Speaker 06

  What a mind. God, because it's like, we started with this experiment that we all see as evidence of humans' latent capacity for evil. And you tell us, actually, no, under some circumstances, we don't do the bad thing we're told to do because, here's another flip, we don't have to be told. In fact, we hate being told, but we will do it on our own if we think it's good.

• 25:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 06

  Now you're saying, actually, that you could read that, that very dark fact as being actually evidence of something quite noble.

• 25:28Speaker 07

  Well, if you dressed it up and if you just had some minor variance to the paradigm, you could presumably make this out. These are people who are incredibly noble. They are. I mean, it's a fact, of course, that they're administering pain to a stranger. That's what's horrifying about it. But imagine they were administering pain to themselves. Imagine they really were, had to administer shocks to themselves or something. But if they were prepared to do that, and I suspect a lot of them would, then we'd say, these are people who really believe in science. And isn't this a good thing that we have people in our society who are willing to make sacrifices for the greater good?

• 26:00Speaker 06

  So in the end, where do you come down? Do you leave this experiment in a light mood or in a dark mood?

• 26:05Speaker 07

  Uh, I,

• 26:06Speaker 06

  Overall?

• 26:07Speaker 07

  I would say in a powerful mood. We're close to some really fundamental truths about human nature. And, you know, my views about human nature are that it affords infinite potentials for lightness and dark. There's lots and lots of lessons here. But one is, I think, you know, when you're enjoined to do something for the greater good, maybe ask yourself the question, what is greater and what is good?

• 26:27Speaker 06

  Oh, that right there. I've slapped some quotations around that.

• 26:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 07

  My thanks to Ben Walker.

• 26:39Speaker 06

  Thank you, Ben. And also thank you to Alex Haslam, Professor of Psychology at the University of Exeter. We'll be right back.

• 26:51Speaker 03

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• 27:16Speaker 06

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• 28:01Speaker 06

  That's O-D-O-O dot com.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Stay tuned for a trailer and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rattman, Executive Director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:50Speaker 06

  Oh, okay. They're going to record it over there. I mean, I'm going to record it here, too. All right, three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

• 28:54Speaker 07

  I'm Robert Krulwich.

• 28:55Speaker 06

  This is Radiolab, and today...

• 28:57Speaker 07

  Evil?

• 28:58Speaker 06

  Although, I don't know if that's the right word for this next thing.

• 29:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, because it's sort of...

• 29:02Speaker 06

  More complicated.

• 29:03Speaker 07

  When you call someone evil, then you're kind of done with them.

• 29:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 07

  But there's been a fellow, I've been thinking about him for a better part of the year, as you know.

• 29:09Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:09Speaker 07

  He's such a puzzle to me. I can't quite place him.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  Though it's very fun to try.

• 29:15Speaker 07

  And I heard about him from science writer Sam Keen. Well, let's talk about Fritz Haber. So, first of all, could you just, like, when did he live and what did he look like and that kind of stuff?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  He was doing his great science work right around the turn of the 20th century, so right around 1900. Very distinctive-looking man. Bald on top, trim, nice mustache, wore a little pizzenes, is that how you say the...

• 29:44Speaker 07

  I think I call it prinznes, so I'm not sure.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Prinznes, okay. One of those very tiny, old-fashioned pair of glasses that would pinch on your nose. And he was someone who had very big ambitions.

• 29:57Speaker 06

  Just to put that in context, and to bring a few other of our storytellers in...

• 30:01Speaker 07

  He comes from Brezlau, Germany.

• 30:02Speaker 06

  That's Fred Kaufman, reporter.

• 30:04Speaker 07

  Which is a fairly small, you know, a smaller sort of town. And so does Clara.

• 30:10Speaker 06

  That's Fritz Haber's wife.

• 30:11Speaker 07

  We're going to meet her later, right? Clara comes from the same town. And they're both secularized Jews.

• 30:16Speaker 06

  But this was a moment in German history, he says, when Jews had a decent amount of freedom.

• 30:20Speaker 07

  And this is the difference between Kaiser Wilhelm and, of course, Hitler's Germany.

• 30:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. To put it in context...

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Dan Charles, he's a historian.

• 30:27Speaker 05

  His was the first generation when a young Jewish boy could truly imagine that he could just be a regular part of that society. He could do anything.

• 30:36Speaker 06

  And he believed it. Fast forward 10 years, Fritz Haber is a professor.

• 30:40Speaker 07

  Small university.

• 30:41Speaker 06

  He's working with chemicals. It's about 1880.

• 30:43Speaker 07

  And he throws himself at one of the central issues facing Germany at that time. Germany has a problem. A big problem. It has enough, what they used to call then, solar energy. You know, energy from the sun to grow crops. To feed about 30... 3 million people. However, that leaves behind 20 million Germans.

• 31:02Speaker 06

  You mean they're looking at 20 million people going hungry?

• 31:05Speaker 07

  That's what we're heading towards. I mean, you have to remember, during the, during the Crimean War in the 1850s, Europe starves.

• 31:14Speaker 07

  So around the turn of the century, for German scientists like Haber, this was the challenge. He is, he wants to feed. He wants to feed Germany.

• 31:21Speaker 06

  And actually, this wasn't just a German thing. A lot of people were beginning to worry that with about a billion and a half people on the planet at that point, that maybe we were maxing out, that the Earth couldn't support this many people.

• 31:32Speaker 07

  And everyone thought, well, we know the solution.

• 31:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, we just need a whole lot more of one simple element.

• 31:37Speaker 07

  Nitrogen.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Nitrogen.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  Nitrogen. Nitrogen.

• 31:39Speaker 07

  They needed more.

• 31:40Speaker 06

  Nitrogen.

• 31:41Speaker 07

  Nitrogen is an essential part of amino acids and proteins.

• 31:45Speaker 06

  And when you stick a seed, like a weed seed in the ground.

• 31:47Speaker 07

  One of the reasons it grows is because it's sucking up all the nitrogen in the soil.

• 31:52Speaker 06

  To make it sell walls.

• 31:54Speaker 07

  Without nitrogen, you don't have life.

• 31:59Speaker 06

  Now, of course, you could find some nitrogen out in the world.

• 32:01Speaker 07

  Natural deposits would be like seaweed or...

• 32:04Speaker 06

  Uh, manure was one. You know, you could find it in cow manure or...

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Wano.

• 32:07Speaker 07

  Which was basically...

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Bat poop and seagull poop.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  Which made that poop...

• 32:11Speaker 07

  Valuable.

• 32:12Speaker 06

  And actually, two nations in South America went to war. Literally over bat [BLEEP].

• 32:18Speaker 02

  You could say people were bat [BLEEP] crazy.

• 32:21Speaker 06

  By the way, that's reporter Latif Nasr.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  You know, this was like oil is today. This is...

• 32:25Speaker 07

  Everybody was desperate for sources, new sources of nitrogen, and to make the problem even more annoying.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  The most common source of nitrogen is in the air around us.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  It makes up four out of every five or so molecules that we breathe, so it's very...

• 32:43Speaker 07

  So it's a lot.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Yes, 80% of the air is nitrogen atoms.

• 32:48Speaker 07

  So all the nitrogen you'd ever need...

• 32:50Speaker 06

  Was right there.

• 32:51Speaker 07

  You can't like throw that air onto a plant. They couldn't deploy it. They couldn't deploy it.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  Meaning they couldn't capture it.

• 32:59Speaker 07

  That's right. And, and part of the problem here, and although, once again, we're getting it a little ahead of ourselves. We'll be right back to Haber, but wait, wait, let's just finish this. Is that, is that nitrogen is trivalent.

• 33:10Speaker 06

  Trivalent.

• 33:11Speaker 07

  Trivalent. In other words, nitrogen has really strong attachments to itself.

• 33:18Speaker 06

  What he means is that when nitrogen atoms are just free-floating in the air, they will cling to each other. These little nitrogen atoms will fiercely hold together, and it's almost impossible to pry them apart.

• 33:28Speaker 07

  His calculations showed that it couldn't be done. At least not without a tremendous amount of energy.

• 33:33Speaker 06

  More energy than seemed like...

• 33:35Speaker 07

  Possible to make. Yeah, yes, but, you know.

• 33:38Speaker 06

  Being ambitious.

• 33:39Speaker 07

  Haber starts thinking, in order to do this, we need to, uh, pressure this. We need to put it under a lot of pressure.

• 33:46Speaker 06

  So he starts experimenting. He figures out a way to take a lot of air that's filled with these little nitrogen bonds clinging to each other and pump it.

• 33:54Speaker 07

  To a big iron tank. Under extreme, extreme pressure. At high temperature. And then he forces hydrogen into the tank. Get in there! And you have a number of chemical reactions.

• 34:09Speaker 07

  And what happens is that you're, you're elbowing the nitrogen apart from itself and then forcing it to bond with the hydrogen in a new way.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  And when hydrogen and nitrogen bond together, the thing you get?

• 34:27Speaker 07

  Is ammonia.

• 34:29Speaker 06

  A liquid that has captured the nitrogen right out of the air.

• 34:33Speaker 07

  You literally get a drip, drip, drip of ammonia.

• 34:45Speaker 07

  It is arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all.

• 34:52Speaker 05

  Bread from the air was the phrase.

• 34:55Speaker 07

  Because Haber had figured out a way to take nitrogen from the air, put it into the barren ground, and grow wheat. This has allowed the world to have 7 billion people. This is what's driving the world towards 10, 12 by 2050.

• 35:17Speaker 07

  Now, we're seeing about 100 million tons of synthetic fertilizer produced industrially each year. And that tonnage then moves into our food source. Our food source then moves into our bodies. And the rough statistics are that half of each of our bodies contains nitrogen from the Haber process. No, really?

• 35:45Speaker 07

  And so in 1918, Fritz Haber gets a Nobel Prize. But this is why this is such an interesting guy. Around this same time, officials in the US government

• 35:56Speaker 07

  are calling him a war criminal.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  All right, just to back up for one second.

• 36:05Speaker 07

  After Haber's nitrogen discovery...

• 36:07Speaker 06

  He was promoted.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  You know, he takes over the leadership of this institute in Berlin, and he starts hobnobbing with a whole different level of society.

• 36:15Speaker 07

  That's Dan Charles again.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  I mean, it's a pretty heady thing for, you know, a Jewish kid from Breslau to be hobnobbing with the emperor and cabinet ministers. He's part of the club, and he really, really relished it.

• 36:29Speaker 06

  And not just because he was vain, which everyone agrees he was, but because he loves his country.

• 36:34Speaker 07

  He loves the Fatherland, and he loves Germany.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  So...

• 36:37Speaker 06

  When World War I begins...

• 36:39Speaker 05

  He signs up immediately, sends a letter volunteering for duty, saying, "You know, the process that I use to make food, well, I can use that same process..."

• 36:48Speaker 07

  To make explosives?

• 36:51Speaker 05

  Because the thing that you put into the ground to grow more food is also the thing you can explode to make a bomb?

• 36:56Speaker 07

  That's correct. Because it takes such energy and pressure to separate it, this trivalent bond is so strong that when it comes back together...

• 37:07Speaker 06

  That energy that's released, it can be used for life or death.

• 37:14Speaker 05

  In any case.

• 37:15Speaker 06

  Back to World War I.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  There's trench warfare, it gets bogged down, and Haber has an idea.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  He goes straight to the German high command and he pitches this idea.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  He says, "Well, we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas."

• 37:30Speaker 06

  Chlorine gas.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  We'll basically bring it to the front, and when the wind is right, we'll just spray it.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  But the generals were not all that convinced.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  No.

• 37:39Speaker 05

  They just didn't like it.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  A lot of them were like, "This is not how you fight a war."

• 37:43Speaker 02

  It's like playing dirty.

• 37:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Sort of unsportsmanlike.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  But he organizes soldiers, he organizes whole gas units.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  And nobody even had to ask.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  Takes command of them partially, he travels to the front.

• 37:55Speaker 07

  And on April 22nd.

• 37:56Speaker 06

  1915?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  1915.

• 37:58Speaker 07

  Haber finds himself in a little town in Belgium called Ypres.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Actually, the Americans called it Yeps.

• 38:05Speaker 07

  Whatever you call it.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  This was one of the bloodiest arenas on the Western Front.

• 38:11Speaker 07

  The Germans were on one side, the French, the Canadians, and the British on the other. And there, behind the German lines, is...

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Our friend, our frenemy, Fritz Haber.

• 38:21Speaker 06

  Our friend.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  He's bald, he has a pot belly, he has these pince-nez spectacles, he's chomping on a Virginian cigar. He was always smoking these Virginian cigars, and he's wearing a fur coat.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  Really?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  In what is basically like the Baghdad of his time.

• 38:36Speaker 06

  But...

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Nobody had done what he was about to do on the scale that he was about to do it.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  So basically, at 6:00 PM on April 22nd.

• 38:46Speaker 06

  "When the wind was just right," he says.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Haber's gas troops unscrew, they open the valves

• 38:55Speaker 02

  on almost 6,000 tanks containing 150 tons of chlorine. That's like an adult blue whale of chlorine.

• 39:04Speaker 06

  I'm just trying to imagine that, is that like a green cloud?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Some people describe it as a cloud, and then others describe it as this kind of 15-foot wall kind of hugging the land, and it's just sort of approaching. And it's moving at about 1 meter per second.

• 39:18Speaker 06

  And according to some accounts, as it crept across no man's land.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  The leaves would just sort of shrivel, and the grass was turning to the color of metal. Birds would just fall from the air.

• 39:32Speaker 06

  Within minutes, the gas reached the Allied side. And as soon as it did,

• 39:39Speaker 06

  soldiers began to convulse.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  They were gagging. They were choking. Hundreds of them were falling to the ground.

• 39:45Speaker 06

  What is the gas doing to them exactly?

• 39:47Speaker 02

  I think what it's doing is it's, if you breathe it in, it sort of irritates your lungs to the extent that they sort of fills up with fluid so quickly that you sort of drown in your own phlegm.

• 39:58Speaker 06

  So they were actually drowning?

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Literally drowning on land.

• 40:01Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Yellow mucus was frothing out of their mouths. Those who could still breathe would turn blue.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  This is a description of hell.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 05

  But Haber saw it as a wonderful success and wished, wished that the Germans had been better prepared to exploit it. Because he felt like they really could have made a terrific advance if they had had more confidence.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  And he is celebrated for it. He gets promoted to the rank of captain.

• 40:34Speaker 07

  And he goes home for a few days a hero. But when he gets there, he has to contend with his wife.

• 40:41Speaker 05

  Clara Immervar.

• 40:42Speaker 07

  Clara.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  Also from Breslau, also from a Jewish family. And also a scientist.

• 40:47Speaker 07

  Huh.

• 40:47Speaker 05

  Unusually so in those times.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  She was actually sort of a genius herself. She was one of the first women to earn a PhD in her country.

• 40:57Speaker 07

  And shortly after his return, Clara allegedly confronts him and says, "Look, you are morally bankrupt. How could you?"

• 41:06Speaker 02

  But Haber just kind of ignored her and...

• 41:09Speaker 06

  According to legend...

• 41:10Speaker 02

  He actually threw a dinner party in celebration...

• 41:14Speaker 06

  ...of the big victory.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  ...invited his friends over.

• 41:17Speaker 06

  Now, we don't actually know if he threw a party.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  I consider that apocryphal.

• 41:20Speaker 06

  Dan doesn't think so. But what's clear is that he saw no reason to question what he had done, and that infuriated Clara.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Especially because she found out he was leaving the next day to direct more gas attacks.

• 41:31Speaker 06

  And they probably had an argument.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 06

  Undoubtedly, they had an argument.

• 41:34Speaker 07

  That's historian Fritz Stern, who also happens to be Fritz Haber's godson.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  They had a quarrel.

• 41:38Speaker 06

  More than that.

• 41:39Speaker 07

  Let's call it a fight.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  And later that night... After the party, Haber takes a bunch of sleeping pills, goes to sleep. And she takes his service revolver...

• 41:50Speaker 06

  Fritz Haber's pistol.

• 41:52Speaker 07

  Walks outside to the garden.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  And...

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Pulls the trigger.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Shoots herself in the chest. And is found by her son.

• 42:03Speaker 07

  By her son?

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:05Speaker 06

  Age 13, I think.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  And he finds her actually still alive with the life about to run out of her.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Haber, it's unknown what happens for the rest of that evening, but it is a well documented fact that the very next morning.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  On schedule.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  He goes back to the, to the front.

• 42:21Speaker 05

  To the eastern front.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Leaving his son alone with his dead mother. That's...

• 42:31Speaker 07

  Cold, huh? Yeah. Heartless.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  It was a terrible moment.

• 42:36Speaker 07

  Did he run away? Was it duty?

• 42:39Speaker 03

  The son eventually, after he emigrates to America, kills himself.

• 42:58Speaker 07

  See now, around this point, I just don't want to have anything to do with this guy. This is, I just want to take a shower, walk, walk away.

• 43:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, me too. You know, on the other hand, I mean, if you look at the grand calculus people he's helped or fed versus people he's killed, I mean, he's fed billions of people. I don't know that you could entirely call him bad. I might even tilt towards saying he's a little good, to be honest.

• 43:24Speaker 07

  You wouldn't though, would you really? Would you really think that this guy's a good guy?

• 43:27Speaker 06

  Honestly, yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 07

  Just because of a mathematical summing up?

• 43:32Speaker 06

  We're talking billions of people.

• 43:33Speaker 07

  He's standing there on the front, pushing the gas into the lungs of other human beings. How admittedly, it's a war, but still. Then he goes and, you know, and celebrates that and then walks away from his child and his wife dead in the garden and says, more of that, please.

• 43:48Speaker 06

  Well, there's something distasteful about the fact that he was too into it. But like, I do think on some level, you have to divorce the man from his deeds and you gotta ask, is the world better with him or without him? I think you gotta answer with him, right?

• 44:07Speaker 07

  Well.

• 44:08Speaker 06

  Should we keep going with the story?

• 44:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:11Speaker 06

  All right.

• 44:12Speaker 07

  So Sam, what happened to this guy after World War I?

• 44:14Speaker 03

  He actually was very humiliated that Germany had lost, and especially humiliated over the fact that they had to pay enormous war reparations to other countries. So he decided he was going to invent a process to pay for these reparations by himself. And what he decided to do is go into the ocean, into seawater, which contains very small levels of gold. But, you know, over the entire ocean, there's a lot of gold dissolved into the sea. And he spends five years in a futile effort to distill gold from the ocean's waters.

• 44:53Speaker 06

  It sounds insane. On the other hand, if anyone could do it...

• 44:57Speaker 05

  He was trying to repeat this master stroke, needless to say.

• 45:00Speaker 06

  He fails.

• 45:01Speaker 05

  It was actually a crushing blow for him.

• 45:03Speaker 06

  And then, things really take a turn.

• 45:06Speaker 05

  1933 comes, and Hitler takes over. And one of the first acts that the Nazis do is to...

• 45:15Speaker 07

  Basically issue an order...

• 45:16Speaker 05

  That says, "There shall be no Jews in the civil service."

• 45:19Speaker 06

  Now, Haber was Jewish, but because he'd served in World War I...

• 45:23Speaker 05

  He technically would be exempt.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  But 75% of the people who worked for him at the institute, they were Jewish.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  And they would have to be dismissed.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  So, he decides to take a stand.

• 45:34Speaker 05

  And says, "This is intolerable. I'm going to resign."

• 45:37Speaker 07

  He says that he's always been hiring people based on how smart they are, and not who their grandparents were.

• 45:43Speaker 06

  So he sends a letter to the Ministry of Education, resigning, and he leaves Germany, telling a friend he felt like he'd lost his homeland.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  And then, he starts this period of roaming. He eventually goes to England.

• 45:57Speaker 06

  But in a famous incident, one of England's leading scientists refuses to shake his hand.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  And he is basically homeless at this point. You know, he's a man adrift.

• 46:09Speaker 06

  Meanwhile...

• 46:10Speaker 05

  His health is failing. In 1934, he takes a trip to Switzerland to a sanatorium.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  But before he can get there...

• 46:17Speaker 05

  His heart fails, and he dies.

• 46:22Speaker 07

  Now, there's a footnote to this that is very strange. I got a little...

• 46:31Speaker 07

  My dorsal hairs stood up when I read the end of this.

• 46:34Speaker 05

  Right. So during World War I, Haber's Institute had developed a formulation of insect-killing gas called Zyklon.

• 46:44Speaker 07

  Zyklon A.

• 46:45Speaker 06

  Which was originally just a pesticide.

• 46:47Speaker 07

  And once again, another nitrogen compound.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  It was developed in his institute. He knew about it.

• 46:52Speaker 07

  In fact, his chemists had given this particular pesticide a smell. It was a warning smell, so that people didn't inadvertently breathe it in and get sick.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  But after the Nazis take over.

• 47:01Speaker 06

  This is after he died.

• 47:03Speaker 05

  They reach back to the shelf and they find this Zyklon stuff. And they ask for it to be reformulated to take out the warning smell. And it becomes Zyklon B, the killing gas of the concentration camps.

• 47:23Speaker 07

  Did members of Haber's family die in the concentration camps?

• 47:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, members of his extended family did. Certainly friends of his did.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  There's something deeply, deeply wounding, distressing, upsetting at the thought that he had anything to do with Zyklon B. But he did. The use of it, he couldn't have imagined.

• 48:11Speaker 06

  So, how do you feel about him now? Because, I don't know, I can't help but feel bad for the guy. Despite the chlorine gas, like, he didn't intend for that to happen. He could have never imagined that.

• 48:22Speaker 07

  No, but, but there's part of me that says, you know, here's a guy who just wanted to do everything better than it had ever been done before, whether it was feeding or killing.

• 48:33Speaker 06

  And he does.

• 48:34Speaker 07

  And he does. But he does it with a kind of, uh, a moral athleticism, you know? He does it without humility, without, without a lot of doubt. And, you know, it's a craft.

• 48:46Speaker 06

  But it's a craft with consequences. And to approach it with kind of crazy joy? I don't know. I would rather have scientists who carry doubt with them as they proceed. I Yeah, I agree with that. Maybe it's all about doubt in the end.

• 49:11Speaker 06

  Thanks to all our great storytellers, Dan Charles, Sam Keen, Latif Naas, Fred Kaufman, and Fritz Stern. You can find out more information about all those guys on our website, radiolab.org.

• 49:25Speaker 06

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• 49:50Speaker 06

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• 50:55Speaker 03

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• 52:32Speaker 03

  Visit an AT&T store for details.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

• 52:40Speaker 07

  I'm Robert Krulwich.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  This is Radiolab, and today we're talking about...

• 52:43Speaker 07

  Well, we're trying to think about what goes on in the mind of a bad person. What makes a bad person so bad that he's different from the rest of us?

• 52:51Speaker 03

  And we didn't really come to any kind of agreement with the Hopper thing.

• 52:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't think we quite...

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Let's go, guys. But, you know, we ended up walking this question around to different people. We want to talk about bad people in Shakespeare. And oddly enough, we came, got a really interesting take on the true nature of badness from this guy. James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University. And he said, to start, "You want to know about bad? I'll give you bad."

• 53:13Speaker 07

  In Titus Andronicus, there's a... Character by the name of Aaron the Moor.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  There's a moment in the play where Aaron gets up on stage, looks at the audience and says, "Let me just tell you the kinds of things I've been up to recently."

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Set deadly enmity between two friends. Make poor men's cattle break their necks. Set fire on barns and haystacks in the night and bid the owners quench them with their tears. Off have I digged up dead men from their graves and set them upright at their dear friend's door. Even, even when their sorrows almost were forgot and on their skins is on the bark of trees, have with my life, with my knife carved in Roman letters, "Let not your sorrows die, though I am dead."

• 54:03Speaker 07

  So he's bad.

• 54:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, but see, here's the interesting thing. According to James, he's not the baddest in Shakespeare or in life because ultimately the play offers up a reason for his nastiness.

• 54:14Speaker 04

  The reason why he's telling all this stuff is because he has cut a deal. They will spare his son if he fesses up and tells them what they need to know. So there's a way in which there's a touch, a spark of humanity.

• 54:28Speaker 06

  Just a little glimmer. And he says, "That's what people wanted. They wanted someone who was really thrillingly bad, but in the end was redeemed a bit."

• 54:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 06

  This wasn't just a theater thing.

• 54:38Speaker 07

  No, because if you couldn't afford a ticket for a play, you'd seen all the plays. In the 1500s, you could always go to a public hanging.

• 54:44Speaker 06

  And you'd go for much the same reasons.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  In those days, if you're a convicted male felon, you are strung up, but you're not allowed to hang until you die. You're cut down before then.

• 54:55Speaker 06

  Warning, this next part's a little graphic.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Then the executioner castrates you, cuts you open and takes out your internal organs and then separates your head, which is put on a post.

• 55:06Speaker 07

  But even with all that gore and horribleness, there was often a moment that people waited for. And in a way, we wait for it still, even now.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  We want what Elizabethan's got at the scaffold, which was a confession. Before the guy is cut to shreds, he's allowed to confess. You know, "I heartily regret the fact that I killed the young maiden or defamed the king," whatever it is. The expectation is somebody is made to make his peace with his maker before he dies. That's what you do.

• 55:40Speaker 06

  And that's what Shakespeare did in all his plays. He would give all his baddies at least one moment. Where they could be understood.

• 55:47Speaker 07

  Except this one time.

• 55:50Speaker 06

  So will I turn her virtue into bitch.

• 55:55Speaker 07

  Iago. He is a soldier. He works for a general. The general's name is Othello. They're supposedly chums, but General Othello has no idea that Iago.

• 56:06Speaker 06

  I hate.

• 56:09Speaker 07

  Hates him.

• 56:12Speaker 06

  So he plans to destroy Othello. Now, we don't exactly know why. There are hints of reasons, like maybe he thinks Othello's sleeping with his wife. We're not sure. But the weird thing is that he decides not just to take down Othello, but everybody. I don't know what he did. What? What? Lie.

• 56:31Speaker 07

  He stirs up hatred between friends, between lovers. He even schemes against his own wife.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  This is just somebody who's performing brain surgery without anesthesia on other people.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  He's a master plotter.

• 56:47Speaker 07

  And as for why?

• 56:48Speaker 04

  Maybe Othello was sleeping with Amelia.

• 56:53Speaker 06

  But as the play goes on, you begin to think that maybe that's just another lie.

• 56:57Speaker 07

  Eventually, Iago convinces Othello that his wife has been disloyal, which she hasn't. And then Othello goes and kills his own wife,

• 57:07Speaker 07

  smothering her with a pillow.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  This is just a tsunami of evil that passes through the play.

• 57:17Speaker 06

  And at the very end of the play, when everyone finds out what Iago's done, Othello asks him, "Why? Why did you do this?"

• 57:26Speaker 06

  And Iago?

• 57:27Speaker 04

  He refuses what we fully expect and what everybody on stage at that moment fully expects from him. You know, what does he say?

• 57:43Speaker 04

  "Demand me nothing.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  What you know, you know."

• 57:53Speaker 04

  From this time forth, I never will speak word.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  I'm not saying a word. I'm not going to give you what you want. I'm not going to give you... I'm not going to help restore the sense that there is a moral order to the world and a moral norm.

• 58:14Speaker 04

  What you know, you know.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  If this is the singular moment in Shakespeare where he gives you an un-understandably evil man, no motives, no reason, any idea what the hell he was intending?

• 58:33Speaker 04

  What you know, you know.

• 58:39Speaker 06

  Ending mystery. Meaning, I mean, any idea what was in his mind? Was he trying to make a commentary or something? Was he grappling with something? Do we know?

• 58:46Speaker 04

  What you know, you know.

• 58:49Speaker 06

  Damn it!

• 58:52Speaker 04

  The good Iago's make you want to shower the minute you leave the theater because you are sullied by them.

• 58:58Speaker 07

  Thank you to James Shapiro, whose most recent book is called Contested Will.

• 59:03Speaker 06

  You know what?

• 59:04Speaker 07

  He had you there.

• 59:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, you know what I'm left thinking, though, is like, if you could somehow... I mean, that was make-believe, but if you could somehow get a real Iago in the room and subject that person to questioning and really get them to sort of fess up as to why they did it, would that make a difference?

• 59:20Speaker 07

  We should say that this next section of the program has some references which are extremely graphic and not to everybody's taste. So if you have kids in the room, maybe this is a time to tell them to go brush their teeth or something.

• 59:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:32Speaker 07

  That comes to us from our reporter, Aaron Scott. Yes, Jeff Jensen.

• 59:35Speaker 06

  Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. All right, so who is this guy we're hearing? This is Jeff Jensen, and he's a reporter in LA. And he wrote this graphic novel that I read about one of the most prolific serial killers in US history. Gary Leon Ridgeway. The Green River Killer.

• 59:52Speaker 05

  The first victims of the Green River Killer were found in the summer of 1982.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  The Green River murders terrorized Seattle in the 1980s. In Seattle today, a man called the Green River Killer. Ridgeway murdered at least 49 women. The so-called Green River Killer. But it's suspected that it could be upwards of 75. Wow. Making him the most prolific serial killer in American history.

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

  All the victims were prostitutes.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  He buried them or left their bodies in these little clumps in the woods. The killers seemed to have placed the bodies as if they were mannequins.

• 1:00:22Speaker 05

  And in January of 1984, the Green River Task Force was formed. And my father was recruited to the task force.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  So Jeff wrote this book because his father, Tom Jensen, was one of the lead detectives tracking Gary Ridgeway. He ultimately spent 17 years searching for this man.

• 1:00:39Speaker 05

  In December of 2001, my father and his colleagues make the arrest. DNA testing matched him to the crimes. They arrest Gary Leon Ridgeway. And on June 13th, 2003, Gary was secretly taken out of his jail cell and brought to a sort of very nondescript, concrete, ugly office building. And.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Over the next six months.

• 1:01:04Speaker 05

  From June to early December.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  It was Tom's job to get Gary to open up.

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  And give up the few details that they really needed to link him certifiably to all these crimes.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  Today's date is June 17th, year 2003. The time now is 08:36 hours.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  So every day, they would bring him into this conference room.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  This is a continuation of an interview with Gary Leon Ridgeway.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  And interrogate him.

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, what did you remember since we last talked yesterday?

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  I got those all at night mostly.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  But I remember picking her up at.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  It immediately became apparent that there was going to be.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  It's gonna be difficulties. As far as I know, I don't know if I did it or not. He would deny things, he would obscure, he would dance around things. He didn't really want to cop to everything that he did. I gotta tell you, I'm not totally comfortable that you're providing all the information. Especially when it came to one particular fact. What my father and his colleagues know is that something was done to these bodies, many of them, after they were murdered.

• 1:02:18Speaker 06

  Is he saying what I think he's saying? Yeah.

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  Necrophilia. Gary is dancing around this topic. Gary had denied this to his own lawyers. So my father and the other interviewer in that room that morning, Detective John Matson, they start using a line of, a tact of interviewing him that was very...

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  It's okay. It's okay if you did.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Stunningly, shockingly empathetic.

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  Nothing to be ashamed of. Thousands of people have done it before you. You're not the first one.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  You know, you're not the first person that's ever done this.

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

  You're not gonna be the last one.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  You won't be the last?

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  That's one of the things that we, that we need to know.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  Father's trying to like, reach out to him.

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  Okay, I know it was more than marriage.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  It's okay to admit this. You need to admit this.

• 1:03:10Speaker 05

  Okay, it's all right. But we've gotta know that. That's one of the things we have to know. And that's why it's okay to let it out.

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  And he does. Yes, I did lie about that.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  But that's when I was, I went back one time before and I, um, some of the, that I,

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  like I said, I gotta, I gotta give it out. It's, I can't keep holding it.

• 1:03:37Speaker 05

  No, it's just building up.

• 1:03:39Speaker 04

  This was a major breakthrough.

• 1:03:41Speaker 06

  So he ends up admitting it.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  In graphic detail. And it gets even more disturbing for my father.

• 1:03:46Speaker 05

  As the conversation suddenly pivots to another victim.

• 1:03:50Speaker 04

  Other than one, that was real close to me.

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  By the name of Carol Christensen.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  And I Christensen, I dated her several times, three times, two times before.

• 1:04:01Speaker 05

  He brings her up as an example of a, of a woman that he actually had strong feelings for.

• 1:04:07Speaker 04

  You like this, you like this girl? Well, I liked her. She was good to you. She was good to me.

• 1:04:12Speaker 05

  And as it happens, my father has very vivid memories of investigating the Carol Christensen murder. Speaking with Carol's mom, Carol's little daughter.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  Killed her. She was, I knew she had a daughter and.

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  And so.

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  And the last one.

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  Gary starts going through this narrative of what he did to Carol.

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  The, the last time she was in a hurry.

• 1:04:37Speaker 05

  She like was allegedly in a rush.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  And she didn't.

• 1:04:40Speaker 05

  And like it kind of like hurt his feelings.

• 1:04:43Speaker 04

  Wasn't satisfying me. It made me mad because she was in very much in a hurry. She had something else on her mind and I killed her. I killed her? I choked her with my arm and by killer, I cared for her because I dated her before, but this didn't turn out right.

• 1:05:08Speaker 05

  Up until that point, Gary refused to say that from the minute I picked these women up, I wanted to kill them. He claimed they were in the middle of a sex act. He would get distracted. Something would happen. He just kind of went crazy. He had snapped and almost like blaming the victims. And my father wasn't buying it.

• 1:05:28Speaker 04

  Let's back up, let's all back up a little bit.

• 1:05:30Speaker 05

  The fact that he kept on doing it over and over and over again was like, come on.

• 1:05:33Speaker 04

  You've been through this a lot of times before and she's already told you she's in a hurry.

• 1:05:38Speaker 05

  You knew what was gonna happen.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  And you've done this how many times before? Ten, ten, fifteen, twenty times. You know what's gonna happen if she kisses you on. And you like her.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Telling us all this.

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Yet you go into this anyway, knowing full well that it could end up in her death.

• 1:06:00Speaker 05

  And Gary just says. Yes. That is true. When I picked them up, I was going to kill them. Finally acknowledging, yeah, that's true.

• 1:06:12Speaker 05

  There's a pause and my father just says.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:06:16Speaker 05

  Why?

• 1:06:18Speaker 05

  Why did you do this?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Did you need to kill?

• 1:06:22Speaker 05

  And that was a question that had haunted my father for decades.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:06:27Speaker 05

  In that why, in that one simple why that he asked Gary, there was a lot of questions he was asking. Why did you inflict all this suffering on them, on us? Why did you take these women off the streets and want to destroy them?

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:06:40Speaker 05

  Why?

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  And

• 1:06:46Speaker 05

  the answer

• 1:06:49Speaker 05

  is

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  unsatisfying. Yes, I did need to kill. I needed to kill her because

• 1:07:00Speaker 06

  of that.

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  Wait, what? I just needed to kill because of that. And then he just trails off. I need to kill because of that. That's it? It just, that's.

• 1:07:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, I just wanted to kill them. I just needed to kill them.

• 1:07:20Speaker 05

  In that moment, my father, he stands up and he says.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Touched me.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  You've touched me, Gary.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  You've touched me. Let me take a break. Okay, we're going off tape now. It's zero nine twenty-four hours on June seventeenth, year two thousand and three.

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  He walked out of the room and just started weeping.

• 1:07:45Speaker 06

  They spent the next six months interrogating him. They brought in psychiatrists and forensic psychologists to try to get an answer. Gary says, I needed to.

• 1:07:54Speaker 05

  Kill and they go, why? And he says, because of the rage. And well, why the rage? And because women have stepped on me all my life. Well, why can't you deal with it in a normal way? Each answer just begs another why. And even though in the end, they got him to confess to these 49 murders, they never really get any closer to an answer than this first one.

• 1:08:18Speaker 05

  That afternoon, he gets in his car, goes home. He finds my mom on the deck, sits down next to her. She says, what happened today? And my dad said, I don't want to talk about it. And to this day, they have not talked about that day. And he hasn't talked about it with anyone until I interviewed him for the book.

• 1:08:43Speaker 05

  And why is it so important, do you think, to understand the why behind such an evil act? Well, the thing that haunts me about the why question is that I'm reminded of like, one of the oldest stories in the Bible, which is the story of Job. The story of Job is that one day, God and Satan are having a conversation. And they're saying, have you checked out Job? You know, I'm really proud of Job. He believes in me and he trusts me so much. And he has such great faith in me. And Satan is like, I bet I can change his mind. And so Satan basically systematically destroys Job's life, takes away his wife, his children, all his material possessions.

• 1:09:26Speaker 05

  What follows is this ongoing conversation between Job and his friends about why does this happen? Why does God allow this to happen? Only then does God speak up and kind of say, like, you're going to question me? Like, you know, who are you?

• 1:09:45Speaker 05

  My point is, sometimes when we ask the why in the face of profound evil, I kind of wonder if what we're doing is that we're daring God to show himself.

• 1:09:57Speaker 05

  And I think what we want out of the why is meaning, meaning to life, to reveal itself in a way that restores order and gives us hope that all of this isn't just meaningless chaos.

• 1:11:06Speaker 07

  Jeff Jensen's book is The Green River Killer: A True Detective Story. It's a graphic or an illustrated novel.

• 1:11:14Speaker 06

  Thanks also to reporter Aaron Scott for that story.

• 1:11:17Speaker 07

  This is Radiolab.

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• 1:12:02Speaker 06

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