Pod Insights Radiolab The Bad Show About this episode 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.
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Transcript 11,919 words · 8 speakers
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0:56 Speaker 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.
1:37 Speaker 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.
2:12 Speaker 03 Yep, wait, you're listening.
2:15 Speaker 03 Alright. Okay.
2:18 Speaker 03 Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From... WNYC.
2:25 Speaker 04 See?
2:27 Speaker 04 Rewind.
2:31 Speaker 05 Hello, David.
2:32 Speaker 06 Yes, hello.
2:33 Speaker 05 This is Pat.
2:34 Speaker 06 Oh, hi, Pat.
2:35 Speaker 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.
2:42 Speaker 06 My name is David Bus.
2:44 Speaker 05 Two S's. He's a psychology professor.
2:46 Speaker 06 At the University of Texas at Austin.
2:48 Speaker 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?
2:58 Speaker 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.
3:06 Speaker 05 The whole thing happened several years ago.
3:08 Speaker 06 I had a very good friend.
3:10 Speaker 05 Another professor at the university.
3:11 Speaker 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.
3:41 Speaker 05 In a rage, how? Like, you walk into the room, what do you find?
3:45 Speaker 06 Well, he started fuming that his wife had dissed him.
3:50 Speaker 05 What did she do?
3:52 Speaker 06 She expressed disapproval about his clothing choices.
3:58 Speaker 05 She made fun of his shirt or something?
3:59 Speaker 06 But did it publicly in front of her friends. So it was a kind of a-- he felt publicly humiliated.
4:05 Speaker 05 And while David's sitting in the bedroom with this friend, the guy looks up at him and he says--
4:11 Speaker 06 "I'm gonna kill her."
4:14 Speaker 05 How did he say it? Like, quietly or?
4:17 Speaker 06 Like, through his teeth, you know? "I'm gonna kill her."
4:22 Speaker 05 David had always known this guy to be pretty mild-mannered.
4:26 Speaker 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.
4:48 Speaker 05 And eventually, he did.
4:50 Speaker 06 He just calmed down.
4:53 Speaker 05 And did you go back to the party then and like continue dinner partying for a while?
4:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, I did.
4:59 Speaker 05 And he did too?
5:00 Speaker 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.
5:13 Speaker 05 And it was his friend?
5:14 Speaker 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.
5:24 Speaker 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.
5:45 Speaker 05 And so he says that and you're like, okay, yes, come over now, like?
5:49 Speaker 06 Yeah, exactly.
5:51 Speaker 05 Meanwhile, later that night on the other side of town-
5:53 Speaker 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.
6:06 Speaker 07 This story made us wonder, is David's friend-
6:09 Speaker 06 Is he unusual? Or-
6:12 Speaker 07 Does everybody at some point have something dark in them that just tiptoes out, just from time to time?
6:19 Speaker 06 Yeah.
6:21 Speaker 06 This is Radiolab and today, we're gonna get bad, so to speak.
6:26 Speaker 07 We've done a good show.
6:27 Speaker 06 This is a bad show.
6:28 Speaker 07 So you ask, like, why do people do bad things?
6:31 Speaker 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.
6:38 Speaker 07 I'm Adam Kowicz.
6:39 Speaker 06 This is Radiolab.
6:40 Speaker 07 The Bad Show.
6:49 Speaker 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.
7:09 Speaker 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.
7:26 Speaker 05 Then he left some space at the bottom for them to elaborate if they said yes.
7:31 Speaker 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.
7:39 Speaker 05 To find page after page of yeses and not just yeses.
7:45 Speaker 06 But these very vivid descriptions about-
7:48 Speaker 05 Who they would kill, where they'd do it, when-
7:51 Speaker 06 The precise method.
7:52 Speaker 05 How many of them went into that kind of detail?
7:55 Speaker 06 I would say 75 or 80%.
7:58 Speaker 05 Wow. Were you a little bit horrified, like, oh my god, my students are murderers?
8:04 Speaker 06 Well, horrified is, I was pretty stunned. And so I expanded the sample where we asked about 5,000 people.
8:15 Speaker 05 All over the world.
8:16 Speaker 06 Singapore, Peru, the UK.
8:18 Speaker 05 That same question.
8:19 Speaker 06 Have you ever thought about killing someone? And 91% of the men said yes and 84% of the women.
8:26 Speaker 05 Said, "Yes, I've thought about killing someone."
8:30 Speaker 06 Yes. If any sizable fraction actually acted on their homicidal fantasies, the streets would be running red.
8:38 Speaker 07 Yeah, but that's just a, those are fantasies.
8:40 Speaker 05 Some of them actually seem like-
8:43 Speaker 06 Well, here's one-
8:43 Speaker 05 Something more than just fantasies.
8:46 Speaker 06 From a woman.
8:48 Speaker 05 Sure.
8:48 Speaker 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
9:31 Speaker 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%.
10:06 Speaker 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.
10:16 Speaker 06 Well, have you ever been blackmailed the way this woman was being blackmailed?
10:20 Speaker 07 No, no one has ever sent about a sex tape that I've ever, you know-
10:23 Speaker 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?
10:31 Speaker 07 I think they'd have to be extreme in the extreme.
10:34 Speaker 06 Well-
10:34 Speaker 07 Because you know how mild-mannered I am.
10:36 Speaker 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.
10:44 Speaker 07 What is this?
10:44 Speaker 06 So these are some word pairs. Read these words that you see there.
10:47 Speaker 07 What, these words here?
10:48 Speaker 06 Yep.
10:48 Speaker 07 Nice day.
10:50 Speaker 06 Uh huh.
10:50 Speaker 07 Fat neck.
10:51 Speaker 06 Yep.
10:51 Speaker 07 Sad face. What is this, soft hair? I don't know what this is.
10:55 Speaker 06 These are just word pairs. I want you to commit them to memory.
10:58 Speaker 07 Commit them to memory? You know I have them.
10:59 Speaker 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.
11:06 Speaker 07 Wait a second. Clear air.
11:08 Speaker 06 Okay, so give me the paper back.
11:09 Speaker 07 Already?
11:10 Speaker 06 Time's up. So, I'm just gonna go into this other room over here.
11:18 Speaker 03 Can you hear me?
11:18 Speaker 07 What, what?
11:19 Speaker 03 Alright, so I'm gonna talk to you over this intercom. Okay?
11:22 Speaker 07 Okay.
11:22 Speaker 03 I'm gonna give you a test.
11:23 Speaker 07 I'm not ready for this.
11:24 Speaker 03 Pay attention.
11:25 Speaker 07 Alright.
11:26 Speaker 03 To the best of your memory, which word was matched with nice? Was it nice day, nice sky, nice job, or nice chair?
11:38 Speaker 03 Answer please.
11:39 Speaker 07 I don't know, wait a second.
11:40 Speaker 03 Just push the button that corresponds to the right word. Go.
11:44 Speaker 07 Okay, I'm choosing job?
11:47 Speaker 04 Wrong. Answer is day.
11:49 Speaker 03 Sorry, man.
11:49 Speaker 04 285 volts.
11:51 Speaker 03 I'm gonna have to give you a little, uh...
11:55 Speaker 07 What did you just do?
11:57 Speaker 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.
12:06 Speaker 04 It is May 1962.
12:09 Speaker 06 Done by this guy?
12:10 Speaker 04 An experiment is being conducted in the Elegant Interaction Laboratory at Yale University.
12:14 Speaker 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.
12:22 Speaker 04 The subjects are 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50.
12:25 Speaker 06 Just normal, everyday dudes.
12:26 Speaker 04 The subjects range in occupation from corporation presidents to good humor men and plumbers.
12:31 Speaker 06 And he ran them through something like what you and I just did. He would have each subject sit down at a table.
12:36 Speaker 04 I'll sit right here.
12:37 Speaker 06 In front of this really impressive-looking machine.
12:40 Speaker 04 This machine...
12:41 Speaker 06 That had lots of switches on it.
12:42 Speaker 04 Uh, generates electric shocks. So when you press one of the switches all the way down, the learner gets a shock.
12:47 Speaker 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...
12:55 Speaker 04 Wrong.
12:55 Speaker 06 Like you just did.
12:56 Speaker 07 Yep.
12:56 Speaker 06 Which happened constantly.
12:57 Speaker 04 Answer is neck.
12:58 Speaker 06 The volunteer...
12:59 Speaker 04 300 volts.
13:00 Speaker 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.
13:10 Speaker 06 Milgram staged the whole thing like it was some experiment about memory and punishment, but of course it wasn't about that.
13:17 Speaker 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?
13:28 Speaker 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.
13:38 Speaker 06 This was a moment when human cruelty was on trial. Quite literally.
13:42 Speaker 04 When I stand before you, judges of Israel, in this court, to accuse Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone.
13:53 Speaker 02 So Stanley Milgram actually begins these experiments the same year that Adolf Eichmann goes on trial for Nazi war crimes.
14:01 Speaker 06 That's radio producer Ben Walker. He'll be our guide for this segment.
14:04 Speaker 02 And in the trial, when the prosecutors essentially ask him, "How you came to commit genocide?", he would say, over and over again.
14:14 Speaker 04 It was not my personal affair.
14:16 Speaker 02 I was just following orders.
14:18 Speaker 04 I had to do what I was ordered.
14:21 Speaker 02 And it's this defense. This is basically what Stanley Milgram set out to test
14:28 Speaker 02 in a lab at Yale University with a bunch of regular Americans.
14:33 Speaker 06 Like, is that something that's universal?
14:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:35 Speaker 06 Or just an Eichmann thing?
14:37 Speaker 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.
15:00 Speaker 06 Even when they stopped screaming?
15:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, when they were maybe dead.
15:09 Speaker 02 They continued shocking their corpses.
15:16 Speaker 02 His experiment remains one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century.
15:21 Speaker 07 In 1962, Stanley Milgram shocked the world with his study on obedience.
15:26 Speaker 02 It is still trotted out to explain everything from hazing to war crimes.
15:31 Speaker 04 What is there in human nature?
15:33 Speaker 02 To gang behavior.
15:34 Speaker 04 That allows an individual to act inhumanly.
15:36 Speaker 02 Genocide.
15:37 Speaker 04 Harshly.
15:38 Speaker 02 It's like a downloadable from the internet instant defense for doing wrong. But if you look at Milgram's work closely.
15:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:49 Speaker 02 Like this guy did.
15:50 Speaker 03 Alex Haslam, professor of psychology at the University of Exeter.
15:54 Speaker 02 Then a different picture will emerge.
15:56 Speaker 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.
16:02 Speaker 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.
16:10 Speaker 03 The one that everybody knows, the so-called baseline.
16:12 Speaker 02 The 65% one.
16:14 Speaker 06 The one we just talked about.
16:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:16 Speaker 06 So there's more? There's more to it?
16:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, because actually he studied between 20 and 40 different variants of this same paradigm.
16:24 Speaker 02 Stanley Milgram took electric shocks very seriously. He did this experiment a bunch of times and in a bunch of different ways.
16:32 Speaker 03 He had all sorts of different things.
16:33 Speaker 02 He would change where the shocker and the shockee sat.
16:36 Speaker 03 He had women participants. He had an experimenter who wasn't a scientist but was a member of the general public.
16:42 Speaker 02 And every scenario produced a different result.
16:46 Speaker 06 Really?
16:47 Speaker 02 Yep.
16:47 Speaker 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.
16:54 Speaker 02 So again, the baseline study is the one where 65% of the volunteers.
16:57 Speaker 03 Go all the way.
16:59 Speaker 02 Highest dose of electricity.
17:00 Speaker 03 XXX.
17:01 Speaker 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.
17:10 Speaker 03 Obedience drops to about 40%.
17:13 Speaker 02 And in experiment number four, when the teacher has to hold the learner's hand down.
17:17 Speaker 03 On a plate.
17:18 Speaker 02 In order him to feel the shock.
17:19 Speaker 03 It drops to about 30%.
17:22 Speaker 02 Wow. Experiment 14.
17:24 Speaker 03 If the experimenter is not a scientist but is an ordinary.
17:28 Speaker 06 Not wearing a white coat. Obedience drops to 20%. Oh, really? Well, how low can we go? Okay.
17:35 Speaker 02 Here's another one.
17:35 Speaker 06 This variant.
17:36 Speaker 02 Experiment 17.
17:37 Speaker 06 There's you and there's two other participants.
17:41 Speaker 02 Both actors.
17:41 Speaker 06 If those two participants refuse to go on.
17:45 Speaker 02 Like saying like, I don't want to kill a guy.
17:47 Speaker 06 Only 10% under those circumstances go on. And then the final one.
17:51 Speaker 02 Experiment 15.
17:52 Speaker 06 Of course, normally you just have one experimenter who's giving you these instructions.
17:55 Speaker 02 But if you put two experimenters in the room and.
17:58 Speaker 06 They start disagreeing with each other. And this one, you get 0% going all the way.
18:02 Speaker 02 Zero?
18:03 Speaker 06 Zero in that condition.
18:04 Speaker 02 You said zero.
18:05 Speaker 06 None go right to the end. No, no, not one person.
18:07 Speaker 02 No one.
18:08 Speaker 06 Not a soul. Exactly 0%. Well, all right, I'm starting to feel a little bit better about my fellow man.
18:14 Speaker 02 One second. Hey, hey, hey, hey! Shh. Okay.
18:18 Speaker 06 Where is he?
18:19 Speaker 02 I'm in a closet.
18:20 Speaker 06 In a closet?
18:21 Speaker 02 Because this room is echoey and, you know, there's nothing like a closet full of clothes to like help balance that out.
18:26 Speaker 06 That's true. That's true. All right, so keep going.
18:30 Speaker 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.
18:45 Speaker 04 Continue using the last switch on the board, please. I not get no answer. Please continue. The next word is white.
18:51 Speaker 06 They have debates with themselves.
18:53 Speaker 04 You think you should look in on them, please?
18:55 Speaker 06 Debates with the experimenter.
18:57 Speaker 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.
19:09 Speaker 02 What's interesting is that how all of these struggles, all of them,
19:13 Speaker 04 Please continue.
19:14 Speaker 02 Play out the same way. It's the experimenter
19:17 Speaker 04 You go on, please.
19:18 Speaker 02 Prodding the shockers along.
19:20 Speaker 04 You're gonna keep giving what, 450 volts heavy shot now? That's correct.
19:23 Speaker 02 For me, it's all about the prods.
19:25 Speaker 04 The next word is white.
19:26 Speaker 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.
19:35 Speaker 06 For when the subjects didn't want to continue?
19:37 Speaker 02 Yep. The first one was, please go on.
19:40 Speaker 04 Continue, please.
19:41 Speaker 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.
19:50 Speaker 03 Well, the experiment requires you to continue. I know it does, sir, but I mean, he's up to 195 volts.
19:55 Speaker 02 And if they still were resisting or struggling, they'd get prod number three.
19:59 Speaker 03 It's absolutely essential that you continue.
20:01 Speaker 02 It's absolutely essential. It's a little bit more direct.
20:05 Speaker 07 It's a bit stronger, but it's not in order.
20:06 Speaker 02 Not quite. But the fourth prod.
20:08 Speaker 07 Really, the critical, the critical fourth prod.
20:10 Speaker 02 Is an absolute order. The fourth prod is.
20:14 Speaker 03 You had no other choice, teacher.
20:16 Speaker 02 You have no other choice, teacher.
20:19 Speaker 07 You must continue.
20:21 Speaker 02 That is definitely in order.
20:22 Speaker 07 Exactly.
20:24 Speaker 02 But every time the experimenter pulled out the fourth prod, and this was confirmed when the experiment was redone in 2006, total disobedience.
20:34 Speaker 07 Total disobedience.
20:35 Speaker 02 Anytime the experimenter said, "You must continue," the shocker would say, "Hell, no, I don't."
20:42 Speaker 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.
20:55 Speaker 02 Here's another one.
20:56 Speaker 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.
21:13 Speaker 02 Wow, so the subjects seem willing to shock another human being, but as soon as you say it's in order.
21:19 Speaker 07 They don't do it.
21:21 Speaker 02 Huh.
21:21 Speaker 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?
21:41 Speaker 02 So, wait, if it doesn't show that people are just obeying orders.
21:46 Speaker 07 Yeah.
21:47 Speaker 02 Then what does it show?
21:48 Speaker 07 Okay. I think it looks it's like this.
21:49 Speaker 03 All right, let's go into our instructions. We will begin with this test.
21:52 Speaker 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.
22:01 Speaker 06 Yale.
22:02 Speaker 07 Who is going to do this powerful piece of science.
22:06 Speaker 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.
22:14 Speaker 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.
22:25 Speaker 06 Like shocking an innocent stranger over and over.
22:27 Speaker 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.
22:35 Speaker 06 So you're saying they were shocking these people because they thought it was worthwhile?
22:39 Speaker 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.
23:07 Speaker 06 Suddenly, I'm thinking this is actually a darker interpretation than the original.
23:10 Speaker 02 Absolutely darker.
23:11 Speaker 06 Because they are doing it.
23:12 Speaker 02 No question about it.
23:13 Speaker 06 They have the agency.
23:14 Speaker 02 Yep.
23:15 Speaker 06 And they think it's right, although clearly on some level they know it isn't.
23:19 Speaker 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.
23:44 Speaker 06 Wow. So then.
23:46 Speaker 02 Hey, wait, I'm almost done, guys. Give me two more minutes. Two more minutes.
23:50 Speaker 06 So in the Milgram case.
23:51 Speaker 02 Uh huh.
23:52 Speaker 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?
23:58 Speaker 02 Science.
24:00 Speaker 06 Science.
24:00 Speaker 02 You can see this in the surveys that the men filled out after the experiments were over.
24:04 Speaker 06 This was exactly what was on my mind. If the experiment, if.
24:08 Speaker 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.
24:36 Speaker 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,
25:01 Speaker 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.
25:21 Speaker 07 Yeah.
25:22 Speaker 06 Now you're saying, actually, that you could read that, that very dark fact as being actually evidence of something quite noble.
25:28 Speaker 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?
26:00 Speaker 06 So in the end, where do you come down? Do you leave this experiment in a light mood or in a dark mood?
26:05 Speaker 07 Uh, I,
26:06 Speaker 06 Overall?
26:07 Speaker 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?
26:27 Speaker 06 Oh, that right there. I've slapped some quotations around that.
26:31 Speaker 07 Yeah.
26:38 Speaker 07 My thanks to Ben Walker.
26:39 Speaker 06 Thank you, Ben. And also thank you to Alex Haslam, Professor of Psychology at the University of Exeter. We'll be right back.
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28:01 Speaker 06 That's O-D-O-O dot com.
28:05 Speaker 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.
28:17 Speaker 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.
28:50 Speaker 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.
28:54 Speaker 07 I'm Robert Krulwich.
28:55 Speaker 06 This is Radiolab, and today...
28:57 Speaker 07 Evil?
28:58 Speaker 06 Although, I don't know if that's the right word for this next thing.
29:01 Speaker 07 Yeah, because it's sort of...
29:02 Speaker 06 More complicated.
29:03 Speaker 07 When you call someone evil, then you're kind of done with them.
29:05 Speaker 06 Yeah.
29:05 Speaker 07 But there's been a fellow, I've been thinking about him for a better part of the year, as you know.
29:09 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
29:09 Speaker 07 He's such a puzzle to me. I can't quite place him.
29:14 Speaker 06 Though it's very fun to try.
29:15 Speaker 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?
29:27 Speaker 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...
29:44 Speaker 07 I think I call it prinznes, so I'm not sure.
29:47 Speaker 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.
29:57 Speaker 06 Just to put that in context, and to bring a few other of our storytellers in...
30:01 Speaker 07 He comes from Brezlau, Germany.
30:02 Speaker 06 That's Fred Kaufman, reporter.
30:04 Speaker 07 Which is a fairly small, you know, a smaller sort of town. And so does Clara.
30:10 Speaker 06 That's Fritz Haber's wife.
30:11 Speaker 07 We're going to meet her later, right? Clara comes from the same town. And they're both secularized Jews.
30:16 Speaker 06 But this was a moment in German history, he says, when Jews had a decent amount of freedom.
30:20 Speaker 07 And this is the difference between Kaiser Wilhelm and, of course, Hitler's Germany.
30:24 Speaker 05 Yeah. To put it in context...
30:25 Speaker 06 Dan Charles, he's a historian.
30:27 Speaker 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.
30:36 Speaker 06 And he believed it. Fast forward 10 years, Fritz Haber is a professor.
30:40 Speaker 07 Small university.
30:41 Speaker 06 He's working with chemicals. It's about 1880.
30:43 Speaker 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.
31:02 Speaker 06 You mean they're looking at 20 million people going hungry?
31:05 Speaker 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.
31:14 Speaker 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.
31:21 Speaker 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.
31:32 Speaker 07 And everyone thought, well, we know the solution.
31:34 Speaker 06 Yeah, we just need a whole lot more of one simple element.
31:37 Speaker 07 Nitrogen.
31:38 Speaker 02 Nitrogen.
31:38 Speaker 05 Nitrogen. Nitrogen.
31:39 Speaker 07 They needed more.
31:40 Speaker 06 Nitrogen.
31:41 Speaker 07 Nitrogen is an essential part of amino acids and proteins.
31:45 Speaker 06 And when you stick a seed, like a weed seed in the ground.
31:47 Speaker 07 One of the reasons it grows is because it's sucking up all the nitrogen in the soil.
31:52 Speaker 06 To make it sell walls.
31:54 Speaker 07 Without nitrogen, you don't have life.
31:59 Speaker 06 Now, of course, you could find some nitrogen out in the world.
32:01 Speaker 07 Natural deposits would be like seaweed or...
32:04 Speaker 06 Uh, manure was one. You know, you could find it in cow manure or...
32:07 Speaker 02 Wano.
32:07 Speaker 07 Which was basically...
32:08 Speaker 02 Bat poop and seagull poop.
32:10 Speaker 06 Which made that poop...
32:11 Speaker 07 Valuable.
32:12 Speaker 06 And actually, two nations in South America went to war. Literally over bat [BLEEP].
32:18 Speaker 02 You could say people were bat [BLEEP] crazy.
32:21 Speaker 06 By the way, that's reporter Latif Nasr.
32:22 Speaker 02 You know, this was like oil is today. This is...
32:25 Speaker 07 Everybody was desperate for sources, new sources of nitrogen, and to make the problem even more annoying.
32:31 Speaker 02 The most common source of nitrogen is in the air around us.
32:37 Speaker 02 It makes up four out of every five or so molecules that we breathe, so it's very...
32:43 Speaker 07 So it's a lot.
32:44 Speaker 02 Yes, 80% of the air is nitrogen atoms.
32:48 Speaker 07 So all the nitrogen you'd ever need...
32:50 Speaker 06 Was right there.
32:51 Speaker 07 You can't like throw that air onto a plant. They couldn't deploy it. They couldn't deploy it.
32:57 Speaker 06 Meaning they couldn't capture it.
32:59 Speaker 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.
33:10 Speaker 06 Trivalent.
33:11 Speaker 07 Trivalent. In other words, nitrogen has really strong attachments to itself.
33:18 Speaker 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.
33:28 Speaker 07 His calculations showed that it couldn't be done. At least not without a tremendous amount of energy.
33:33 Speaker 06 More energy than seemed like...
33:35 Speaker 07 Possible to make. Yeah, yes, but, you know.
33:38 Speaker 06 Being ambitious.
33:39 Speaker 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.
33:46 Speaker 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.
33:54 Speaker 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.
34:09 Speaker 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.
34:23 Speaker 06 And when hydrogen and nitrogen bond together, the thing you get?
34:27 Speaker 07 Is ammonia.
34:29 Speaker 06 A liquid that has captured the nitrogen right out of the air.
34:33 Speaker 07 You literally get a drip, drip, drip of ammonia.
34:45 Speaker 07 It is arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all.
34:52 Speaker 05 Bread from the air was the phrase.
34:55 Speaker 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.
35:17 Speaker 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?
35:45 Speaker 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
35:56 Speaker 07 are calling him a war criminal.
36:04 Speaker 06 All right, just to back up for one second.
36:05 Speaker 07 After Haber's nitrogen discovery...
36:07 Speaker 06 He was promoted.
36:09 Speaker 05 You know, he takes over the leadership of this institute in Berlin, and he starts hobnobbing with a whole different level of society.
36:15 Speaker 07 That's Dan Charles again.
36:16 Speaker 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.
36:29 Speaker 06 And not just because he was vain, which everyone agrees he was, but because he loves his country.
36:34 Speaker 07 He loves the Fatherland, and he loves Germany.
36:37 Speaker 05 So...
36:37 Speaker 06 When World War I begins...
36:39 Speaker 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..."
36:48 Speaker 07 To make explosives?
36:51 Speaker 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?
36:56 Speaker 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...
37:07 Speaker 06 That energy that's released, it can be used for life or death.
37:14 Speaker 05 In any case.
37:15 Speaker 06 Back to World War I.
37:16 Speaker 05 There's trench warfare, it gets bogged down, and Haber has an idea.
37:21 Speaker 02 He goes straight to the German high command and he pitches this idea.
37:25 Speaker 05 He says, "Well, we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas."
37:30 Speaker 06 Chlorine gas.
37:31 Speaker 02 We'll basically bring it to the front, and when the wind is right, we'll just spray it.
37:36 Speaker 05 But the generals were not all that convinced.
37:39 Speaker 02 No.
37:39 Speaker 05 They just didn't like it.
37:40 Speaker 06 A lot of them were like, "This is not how you fight a war."
37:43 Speaker 02 It's like playing dirty.
37:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
37:44 Speaker 02 Sort of unsportsmanlike.
37:45 Speaker 05 But he organizes soldiers, he organizes whole gas units.
37:50 Speaker 02 And nobody even had to ask.
37:51 Speaker 05 Takes command of them partially, he travels to the front.
37:55 Speaker 07 And on April 22nd.
37:56 Speaker 06 1915?
37:57 Speaker 02 1915.
37:58 Speaker 07 Haber finds himself in a little town in Belgium called Ypres.
38:03 Speaker 02 Actually, the Americans called it Yeps.
38:05 Speaker 07 Whatever you call it.
38:06 Speaker 02 This was one of the bloodiest arenas on the Western Front.
38:11 Speaker 07 The Germans were on one side, the French, the Canadians, and the British on the other. And there, behind the German lines, is...
38:18 Speaker 02 Our friend, our frenemy, Fritz Haber.
38:21 Speaker 06 Our friend.
38:21 Speaker 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.
38:32 Speaker 06 Really?
38:33 Speaker 02 In what is basically like the Baghdad of his time.
38:36 Speaker 06 But...
38:37 Speaker 02 Nobody had done what he was about to do on the scale that he was about to do it.
38:43 Speaker 02 So basically, at 6:00 PM on April 22nd.
38:46 Speaker 06 "When the wind was just right," he says.
38:48 Speaker 02 Haber's gas troops unscrew, they open the valves
38:55 Speaker 02 on almost 6,000 tanks containing 150 tons of chlorine. That's like an adult blue whale of chlorine.
39:04 Speaker 06 I'm just trying to imagine that, is that like a green cloud?
39:06 Speaker 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.
39:18 Speaker 06 And according to some accounts, as it crept across no man's land.
39:22 Speaker 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.
39:32 Speaker 06 Within minutes, the gas reached the Allied side. And as soon as it did,
39:39 Speaker 06 soldiers began to convulse.
39:41 Speaker 02 They were gagging. They were choking. Hundreds of them were falling to the ground.
39:45 Speaker 06 What is the gas doing to them exactly?
39:47 Speaker 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.
39:58 Speaker 06 So they were actually drowning?
40:00 Speaker 02 Literally drowning on land.
40:01 Speaker 06 Wow.
40:02 Speaker 02 Yellow mucus was frothing out of their mouths. Those who could still breathe would turn blue.
40:10 Speaker 06 This is a description of hell.
40:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:14 Speaker 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.
40:28 Speaker 02 And he is celebrated for it. He gets promoted to the rank of captain.
40:34 Speaker 07 And he goes home for a few days a hero. But when he gets there, he has to contend with his wife.
40:41 Speaker 05 Clara Immervar.
40:42 Speaker 07 Clara.
40:43 Speaker 05 Also from Breslau, also from a Jewish family. And also a scientist.
40:47 Speaker 07 Huh.
40:47 Speaker 05 Unusually so in those times.
40:49 Speaker 02 She was actually sort of a genius herself. She was one of the first women to earn a PhD in her country.
40:57 Speaker 07 And shortly after his return, Clara allegedly confronts him and says, "Look, you are morally bankrupt. How could you?"
41:06 Speaker 02 But Haber just kind of ignored her and...
41:09 Speaker 06 According to legend...
41:10 Speaker 02 He actually threw a dinner party in celebration...
41:14 Speaker 06 ...of the big victory.
41:15 Speaker 02 ...invited his friends over.
41:17 Speaker 06 Now, we don't actually know if he threw a party.
41:19 Speaker 05 I consider that apocryphal.
41:20 Speaker 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.
41:26 Speaker 02 Especially because she found out he was leaving the next day to direct more gas attacks.
41:31 Speaker 06 And they probably had an argument.
41:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:33 Speaker 06 Undoubtedly, they had an argument.
41:34 Speaker 07 That's historian Fritz Stern, who also happens to be Fritz Haber's godson.
41:38 Speaker 02 They had a quarrel.
41:38 Speaker 06 More than that.
41:39 Speaker 07 Let's call it a fight.
41:40 Speaker 02 And later that night... After the party, Haber takes a bunch of sleeping pills, goes to sleep. And she takes his service revolver...
41:50 Speaker 06 Fritz Haber's pistol.
41:52 Speaker 07 Walks outside to the garden.
41:54 Speaker 02 And...
41:57 Speaker 02 Pulls the trigger.
41:58 Speaker 03 Shoots herself in the chest. And is found by her son.
42:03 Speaker 07 By her son?
42:05 Speaker 03 Yes.
42:05 Speaker 06 Age 13, I think.
42:07 Speaker 02 And he finds her actually still alive with the life about to run out of her.
42:12 Speaker 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.
42:18 Speaker 05 On schedule.
42:19 Speaker 02 He goes back to the, to the front.
42:21 Speaker 05 To the eastern front.
42:22 Speaker 06 Leaving his son alone with his dead mother. That's...
42:31 Speaker 07 Cold, huh? Yeah. Heartless.
42:34 Speaker 06 It was a terrible moment.
42:36 Speaker 07 Did he run away? Was it duty?
42:39 Speaker 03 The son eventually, after he emigrates to America, kills himself.
42:58 Speaker 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.
43:04 Speaker 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.
43:24 Speaker 07 You wouldn't though, would you really? Would you really think that this guy's a good guy?
43:27 Speaker 06 Honestly, yeah.
43:28 Speaker 07 Just because of a mathematical summing up?
43:32 Speaker 06 We're talking billions of people.
43:33 Speaker 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.
43:48 Speaker 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?
44:07 Speaker 07 Well.
44:08 Speaker 06 Should we keep going with the story?
44:10 Speaker 07 Yeah.
44:11 Speaker 06 All right.
44:12 Speaker 07 So Sam, what happened to this guy after World War I?
44:14 Speaker 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.
44:53 Speaker 06 It sounds insane. On the other hand, if anyone could do it...
44:57 Speaker 05 He was trying to repeat this master stroke, needless to say.
45:00 Speaker 06 He fails.
45:01 Speaker 05 It was actually a crushing blow for him.
45:03 Speaker 06 And then, things really take a turn.
45:06 Speaker 05 1933 comes, and Hitler takes over. And one of the first acts that the Nazis do is to...
45:15 Speaker 07 Basically issue an order...
45:16 Speaker 05 That says, "There shall be no Jews in the civil service."
45:19 Speaker 06 Now, Haber was Jewish, but because he'd served in World War I...
45:23 Speaker 05 He technically would be exempt.
45:25 Speaker 06 But 75% of the people who worked for him at the institute, they were Jewish.
45:29 Speaker 05 And they would have to be dismissed.
45:32 Speaker 06 So, he decides to take a stand.
45:34 Speaker 05 And says, "This is intolerable. I'm going to resign."
45:37 Speaker 07 He says that he's always been hiring people based on how smart they are, and not who their grandparents were.
45:43 Speaker 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.
45:52 Speaker 05 And then, he starts this period of roaming. He eventually goes to England.
45:57 Speaker 06 But in a famous incident, one of England's leading scientists refuses to shake his hand.
46:03 Speaker 05 And he is basically homeless at this point. You know, he's a man adrift.
46:09 Speaker 06 Meanwhile...
46:10 Speaker 05 His health is failing. In 1934, he takes a trip to Switzerland to a sanatorium.
46:15 Speaker 06 But before he can get there...
46:17 Speaker 05 His heart fails, and he dies.
46:22 Speaker 07 Now, there's a footnote to this that is very strange. I got a little...
46:31 Speaker 07 My dorsal hairs stood up when I read the end of this.
46:34 Speaker 05 Right. So during World War I, Haber's Institute had developed a formulation of insect-killing gas called Zyklon.
46:44 Speaker 07 Zyklon A.
46:45 Speaker 06 Which was originally just a pesticide.
46:47 Speaker 07 And once again, another nitrogen compound.
46:48 Speaker 03 It was developed in his institute. He knew about it.
46:52 Speaker 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.
47:00 Speaker 05 But after the Nazis take over.
47:01 Speaker 06 This is after he died.
47:03 Speaker 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.
47:23 Speaker 07 Did members of Haber's family die in the concentration camps?
47:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, members of his extended family did. Certainly friends of his did.
47:30 Speaker 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.
48:11 Speaker 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.
48:22 Speaker 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.
48:33 Speaker 06 And he does.
48:34 Speaker 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.
48:46 Speaker 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.
49:11 Speaker 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.
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52:39 Speaker 03 Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
52:40 Speaker 07 I'm Robert Krulwich.
52:41 Speaker 03 This is Radiolab, and today we're talking about...
52:43 Speaker 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?
52:51 Speaker 03 And we didn't really come to any kind of agreement with the Hopper thing.
52:54 Speaker 07 Yeah, I don't think we quite...
52:55 Speaker 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."
53:13 Speaker 07 In Titus Andronicus, there's a... Character by the name of Aaron the Moor.
53:17 Speaker 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."
53:24 Speaker 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."
54:03 Speaker 07 So he's bad.
54:04 Speaker 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.
54:14 Speaker 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.
54:28 Speaker 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."
54:37 Speaker 07 Yeah.
54:37 Speaker 06 This wasn't just a theater thing.
54:38 Speaker 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.
54:44 Speaker 06 And you'd go for much the same reasons.
54:46 Speaker 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.
54:55 Speaker 06 Warning, this next part's a little graphic.
54:57 Speaker 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.
55:06 Speaker 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.
55:14 Speaker 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.
55:40 Speaker 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.
55:47 Speaker 07 Except this one time.
55:50 Speaker 06 So will I turn her virtue into bitch.
55:55 Speaker 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.
56:06 Speaker 06 I hate.
56:09 Speaker 07 Hates him.
56:12 Speaker 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.
56:31 Speaker 07 He stirs up hatred between friends, between lovers. He even schemes against his own wife.
56:36 Speaker 04 This is just somebody who's performing brain surgery without anesthesia on other people.
56:45 Speaker 04 He's a master plotter.
56:47 Speaker 07 And as for why?
56:48 Speaker 04 Maybe Othello was sleeping with Amelia.
56:53 Speaker 06 But as the play goes on, you begin to think that maybe that's just another lie.
56:57 Speaker 07 Eventually, Iago convinces Othello that his wife has been disloyal, which she hasn't. And then Othello goes and kills his own wife,
57:07 Speaker 07 smothering her with a pillow.
57:08 Speaker 04 This is just a tsunami of evil that passes through the play.
57:17 Speaker 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?"
57:26 Speaker 06 And Iago?
57:27 Speaker 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?
57:43 Speaker 04 "Demand me nothing.
57:47 Speaker 04 What you know, you know."
57:53 Speaker 04 From this time forth, I never will speak word.
58:00 Speaker 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.
58:14 Speaker 04 What you know, you know.
58:19 Speaker 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?
58:33 Speaker 04 What you know, you know.
58:39 Speaker 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?
58:46 Speaker 04 What you know, you know.
58:49 Speaker 06 Damn it!
58:52 Speaker 04 The good Iago's make you want to shower the minute you leave the theater because you are sullied by them.
58:58 Speaker 07 Thank you to James Shapiro, whose most recent book is called Contested Will.
59:03 Speaker 06 You know what?
59:04 Speaker 07 He had you there.
59:06 Speaker 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?
59:20 Speaker 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.
59:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
59:32 Speaker 07 That comes to us from our reporter, Aaron Scott. Yes, Jeff Jensen.
59:35 Speaker 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.
59:52 Speaker 05 The first victims of the Green River Killer were found in the summer of 1982.
59:56 Speaker 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.
1:00:13 Speaker 05 All the victims were prostitutes.
1:00:15 Speaker 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.
1:00:22 Speaker 05 And in January of 1984, the Green River Task Force was formed. And my father was recruited to the task force.
1:00:29 Speaker 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.
1:00:39 Speaker 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.
1:01:02 Speaker 03 Over the next six months.
1:01:04 Speaker 05 From June to early December.
1:01:07 Speaker 03 It was Tom's job to get Gary to open up.
1:01:09 Speaker 05 And give up the few details that they really needed to link him certifiably to all these crimes.
1:01:18 Speaker 04 Today's date is June 17th, year 2003. The time now is 08:36 hours.
1:01:23 Speaker 03 So every day, they would bring him into this conference room.
1:01:26 Speaker 04 This is a continuation of an interview with Gary Leon Ridgeway.
1:01:30 Speaker 03 And interrogate him.
1:01:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, what did you remember since we last talked yesterday?
1:01:38 Speaker 04 I got those all at night mostly.
1:01:43 Speaker 04 But I remember picking her up at.
1:01:48 Speaker 03 It immediately became apparent that there was going to be.
1:01:50 Speaker 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.
1:02:18 Speaker 06 Is he saying what I think he's saying? Yeah.
1:02:20 Speaker 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...
1:02:41 Speaker 05 It's okay. It's okay if you did.
1:02:44 Speaker 04 Stunningly, shockingly empathetic.
1:02:47 Speaker 05 Nothing to be ashamed of. Thousands of people have done it before you. You're not the first one.
1:02:53 Speaker 04 You know, you're not the first person that's ever done this.
1:02:56 Speaker 05 You're not gonna be the last one.
1:02:58 Speaker 04 You won't be the last?
1:03:00 Speaker 05 That's one of the things that we, that we need to know.
1:03:02 Speaker 04 Father's trying to like, reach out to him.
1:03:04 Speaker 05 Okay, I know it was more than marriage.
1:03:07 Speaker 04 It's okay to admit this. You need to admit this.
1:03:10 Speaker 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.
1:03:18 Speaker 04 And he does. Yes, I did lie about that.
1:03:24 Speaker 04 But that's when I was, I went back one time before and I, um, some of the, that I,
1:03:33 Speaker 04 like I said, I gotta, I gotta give it out. It's, I can't keep holding it.
1:03:37 Speaker 05 No, it's just building up.
1:03:39 Speaker 04 This was a major breakthrough.
1:03:41 Speaker 06 So he ends up admitting it.
1:03:42 Speaker 04 In graphic detail. And it gets even more disturbing for my father.
1:03:46 Speaker 05 As the conversation suddenly pivots to another victim.
1:03:50 Speaker 04 Other than one, that was real close to me.
1:03:55 Speaker 05 By the name of Carol Christensen.
1:03:57 Speaker 04 And I Christensen, I dated her several times, three times, two times before.
1:04:01 Speaker 05 He brings her up as an example of a, of a woman that he actually had strong feelings for.
1:04:07 Speaker 04 You like this, you like this girl? Well, I liked her. She was good to you. She was good to me.
1:04:12 Speaker 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.
1:04:21 Speaker 04 Killed her. She was, I knew she had a daughter and.
1:04:25 Speaker 05 And so.
1:04:26 Speaker 04 And the last one.
1:04:27 Speaker 05 Gary starts going through this narrative of what he did to Carol.
1:04:32 Speaker 04 The, the last time she was in a hurry.
1:04:37 Speaker 05 She like was allegedly in a rush.
1:04:38 Speaker 04 And she didn't.
1:04:40 Speaker 05 And like it kind of like hurt his feelings.
1:04:43 Speaker 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.
1:05:08 Speaker 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.
1:05:28 Speaker 04 Let's back up, let's all back up a little bit.
1:05:30 Speaker 05 The fact that he kept on doing it over and over and over again was like, come on.
1:05:33 Speaker 04 You've been through this a lot of times before and she's already told you she's in a hurry.
1:05:38 Speaker 05 You knew what was gonna happen.
1:05:39 Speaker 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.
1:05:52 Speaker 01 Telling us all this.
1:05:53 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:05:54 Speaker 01 Yet you go into this anyway, knowing full well that it could end up in her death.
1:06:00 Speaker 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.
1:06:12 Speaker 05 There's a pause and my father just says.
1:06:15 Speaker 01 Why?
1:06:16 Speaker 05 Why?
1:06:18 Speaker 05 Why did you do this?
1:06:20 Speaker 01 Did you need to kill?
1:06:22 Speaker 05 And that was a question that had haunted my father for decades.
1:06:26 Speaker 01 Why?
1:06:27 Speaker 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?
1:06:39 Speaker 01 Why?
1:06:40 Speaker 05 Why?
1:06:43 Speaker 05 And
1:06:46 Speaker 05 the answer
1:06:49 Speaker 05 is
1:06:51 Speaker 05 unsatisfying. Yes, I did need to kill. I needed to kill her because
1:07:00 Speaker 06 of that.
1:07:03 Speaker 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.
1:07:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, you know, I just wanted to kill them. I just needed to kill them.
1:07:20 Speaker 05 In that moment, my father, he stands up and he says.
1:07:24 Speaker 01 Touched me.
1:07:26 Speaker 05 You've touched me, Gary.
1:07:27 Speaker 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.
1:07:39 Speaker 05 He walked out of the room and just started weeping.
1:07:45 Speaker 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.
1:07:54 Speaker 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.
1:08:18 Speaker 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.
1:08:43 Speaker 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.
1:09:26 Speaker 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?
1:09:45 Speaker 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.
1:09:57 Speaker 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.
1:11:06 Speaker 07 Jeff Jensen's book is The Green River Killer: A True Detective Story. It's a graphic or an illustrated novel.
1:11:14 Speaker 06 Thanks also to reporter Aaron Scott for that story.
1:11:17 Speaker 07 This is Radiolab.
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