The Bad Show

Introduction

0:00hey 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

0:37crime episode it's got crimes they are gut-wrenching they are true 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

Profound Questions

1:03things 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 yeah wait you're listening okay all right okay all right you're listening to radiolab radio from wnyc hello david yes hello this is pat oh hi pat how are you let's begin with this story from our producer

1:43pat walters pat go ahead okay so i heard this one from this guy named david is david buss two s's he's a psychology professor at the university of texas at austin and this particular story it comes from a book that david wrote um could you just just tell me uh the little story that you begin your book with okay yes um this is one of the things that's uh this was one of the things that sparked my interest in the topic of murder the whole thing happened several years ago i had a very

Friend's Story

2:14good friend another professor at the university and i used to socialize with him and and his wife and one evening they were throwing a party and invited me over and so uh when i went to the party party was already in full swing and i got there uh walked in and asked his wife uh where this friend of mine was and uh 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 you know in a rage in a rage uh how like you

2:48walk into the room what what do you find well he started he started fuming that his wife had had dissed him and what did she do uh she uh expressed disapproval about his uh clothing choices she made fun of his shirt or something but did it in publicly in front of her friends so it was a kind of he felt

Threat to Kill

3:09publicly humiliated and while david's sitting in the bedroom with this friend the guy looks up at him and he says i'm gonna kill her how did he say it like quietly or like through his teeth you know uh i'm gonna kill her david had always known this guy to be pretty mild mannered but he is a uh a large very strong man um with a black belt in karate i knew what he was capable of so i suggested

Cooling Down

3:45that we go out for a walk and i basically spent the next half hour walking around with him trying to cool him off and eventually he did he just calmed down and did you go back to the party then and like continue dinner partying for a while yeah i did and he did too 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

4:15later in the middle of the night that i got the call and it was his friend and he says can i come over and sleep on your couch uh if i don't leave my house right now i'm going to kill her he was in

State of Fury

4:30this um a state of fury he said and um 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 and and so he says that and you're like okay yes come over now like yeah exactly meanwhile later that night on the other side of town his wife um went into hiding literally disappeared for six months and

5:04didn't tell anyone where she was because she was terrified that he was gonna kill her

Human Nature

5:09this story made us wonder is david's friend is he unusual or does everybody at some point have something dark in them that just tiptoes out just from time to time yeah this is radio lab and today we're gonna get bad so to speak we've done a good show this is a bad show so you ask like why do people do bad things things actually mean to be bad anyways like how do you tell the real baddies

5:40from the rest of us that's how i'm i'm jad abumran i'm abu kowich this is radio lab the bad show

Milgram Experiment

5:46okay uh 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's moved on to a new university and he's teaching an introductory psychology class and i devoted one class session

6:17to the topic of homicide and why people kill and i designed a little questionnaire where i simply asked the students you know have you ever thought about killing someone and they would circle yes or no then he left some space at the bottom for them to elaborate if they said yes and you know 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 to find page after page of yeses and not just yeses but these very vivid

6:51descriptions about who they would kill where they do it when the precise method how many of them went into that kind of detail uh i would say 75 or 80 percent wow um are you a little bit like horrified like oh my god my students are murderers i was i was pretty stunned and so i expanded the sample where we asked about 5 000 people all over the world singapore peru the uk that same question have

7:24you ever thought about killing someone and 91 of the men said yes and 84 of the women said yes i've thought about killing someone yes if any sizable fraction actually acted on their homicidal fantasies the streets would be running running red yeah but that's just those are fantasies some of them actually seem like well here's one something more than just fantasies from uh a woman sure okay this is

7:54a 20 year old female uh we asked who did you think about killing and she said my ex-boyfriend um we lived together for a couple 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

8:25thing 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 that would 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

8:56him in the chest repeatedly until he was dead i actually did the first thing but he saw my intentions and ran away uh when we asked how close she came to killing him she estimated 60 percent

9:1160 i don't think i've ever had a fantasy that that anatomically specific where i would see the part of the other person that i was going to stab or plan it like that well have you ever been blackmailed the way this woman was being blackmailed no no one has ever sent about a sex tape that i've ever you know 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 i think they'd have to be extreme in the extreme well you know how mild mattered i am no and you know what this actually brings us to our first stop of the hour so let me just

9:45to set it up robert i'm gonna give you this piece of paper here what is this so these are some word pairs so read these words that you see these words here yep nice day uh-huh fat neck yeah sad face what is it soft hair i don't know what this is these are just word pairs i want you to commit them to memory commit them to memory you know and while you're doing that just give me your finger i'm gonna connect this little electrode finger there we go there just wait a second clear air okay so give me the paper back already time's up so i'm just gonna go into this other room over here

10:23can you hear me what what all right so i'm gonna talk to you over this intercom okay okay i'm gonna give you a test i'm not ready for this attention to the best of your memory which word was matched with nice was it nice day nice sky nice job or nice chair

10:44answer please i don't know wait a second just push the button that corresponds to the right word go okay i'm choosing job wrong answer is day sorry man 285 volts i'm gonna have to give you a little what did you just do 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 may have heard about it is may 1962 done by this guy an experiment is being conducted in the elegant interaction laboratory at

11:18university 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 the subjects are 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50 normal everyday dudes the subjects range in occupation from corporation presidents to good humor men and plumbers and he ran them through something like what you and i just did he would have each subject sit down at a table in front of this really impressive looking machine this machine that had lots of switches on it generates electric shocks

11:49when you press one of the switches all the way down the learner gets a shock and in the other room there was a guy who he called the learner who is supposed to have memorized some words and every time that guy got a word wrong wrong like you just did which happened constantly the volunteer 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 milgram staged the whole thing like it was some experiment about memory and punishment but of course it wasn't about that continue please it was about

12:23how 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 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 prosecution the attorney general this was a moment when human cruelty was on trial quite literally when i stand before you judges of israel in this court to accuse adolf eichmann i do not stand alone so stanley milgram actually begins these experiments

13:02the same year that adolf eichmann goes on trial for nazi war crimes that's radio producer ben walker he'll be our guide for this segment and in the trial when the prosecutors essentially ask him how you came to commit genocide he would say over and over again it was not my personal affair i was just following orders i had to do what i was ordered and it's this defense this is basically what stanley milgram set out to test 285 volts in a lab at yale university with a bunch of regular americans

13:38like is that something that's universal yeah or just an eichmann thing yeah he figured maybe one percent of these men would keep flicking the switches up to the highest voltage but that's not what he found 65 percent continue please were willing to shock their fellow citizens over and over again even past when they were screaming in pain something's happened to that man there even when they stopped screaming yeah when they were maybe dead you better check in on him sir he won't answer me or nothing

14:13please continue go on please they continued shocking their corpses

14:21his experiment remains one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century in 1962 stanley milgram shocked the world with his study on obedience it is still trotted out to explain everything from hazing to war crimes what is there in human nature to gang behavior that allows an individual to act inhumanely genocide harshly it's like a downloadable from the internet instant defense for doing wrong but if you look at milgram's work closely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like this guy did alex

14:56haslam professor of psychology at the university of exeter then a different picture will emerge 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 over here now what you need to understand about alex haslam is that he hates it when interviewers only want to talk about the baseline study the one that everybody knows the so-called baseline the 65 one the one we just talked about yeah so there's more there's more to it yeah because actually he studied between 20 and 40 different variants of this same paradigm stanley milgram took

15:30electric shocks very seriously he did this experiment a bunch of times and in a bunch of different ways had all sorts of different things he would change where the shocker and the shocky sat he had women participants he had an experimenter who wasn't a scientist but was a member of the general public and every scenario produced a different result really yep let me i mean i'm just uh i've got in front of me i've just got the uh the data from the milgram so let me just get that out i mean so again the baseline study is the one where 65 of the volunteers go all the way highest dose of

16:04electricity but in experiment number three if they put the shocky in the same room with the shocker so the shocker could actually see the person that he's shocking obedience drops to about 40 percent and in experiment number four when the teacher has to hold the learner's hand down on a plate in order him to feel the shock it drops to about 30 percent wow experiment 14 if the experimenter is not a scientist but is an ordinary man not wearing a white coat obedience drops to 20 percent oh really

16:38well how low can we go okay here's another one this variant experiment 17 there's you and there's two other participants both actors if those two participants refuse to go on like saying like i don't want to kill a guy only 10 under those circumstances go on and then the final one experiment 15 of course normally you just have one experimenter who's giving you these instructions but if you put two experimenters in the room and they start disagreeing with each other and this one you get zero percent going all zero zero in that condition you said zero no one go right to the absolute zero not one

17:12person no one no not a soul exactly zero percent well all right i'm starting to feel a little bit better about my fellow man one second hey hey okay where is he i'm in a closet closet because this room is echoey and you know there's nothing like a closet full of clothes to like help balance that out that's true that's all right so keep going 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

17:45yes even when they go along with the experiment as you can see in the film they struggle continue using the last switch on the board please i'm not getting no answer please continue the next word is white they have debates with themselves you think you should look in on them please debates with the experimenter not once we've started the experiment but what if something's happened there may have had an attack or something there the experiment requires that we continue go on please don't it don't demands help mean anything whether the learner likes it or not we might be dead in there what's interesting is that how all of these struggles all of them please continue play

18:19out the same way it's the experimenter you go on please probing the shockers along you're going to keep giving what 450 volts every shot now that's correct for me it's all about the prods next word this is what totally pulled me into this story the prods stanley milgram had four scripted prods that he wrote out for his experimenters for when the subjects didn't want to continue yep the first one was please go on continue please and if they didn't go on if they resisted i don't know the experimenter

18:50would break out prod number two the experiment requires that you continue well the experiment requires i mean i know it does sir but i mean he's up to 195 volts and if they still were resisting or struggling they'd get prod number three it's absolutely essential that you continue it's absolutely essential that you can it's a little bit more direct it's a bit stronger it's not an order not quite but the fourth prod really the the critical the critical fourth prod is an absolute order the the fourth prod is you have no other choice teacher you have no other choice teacher you

19:24must continue that is definitely an order exactly but every time the experimenter pulled out the fourth prod and this was confirmed when the experiment was redone in 2006 total disobedience total disobedience any time the experimenter said you must continue the shocker would say hell no i don't you had no other choice teacher i have a choice i'm not going to go ahead with it

19:56well we'll have to discontinue the experiment then i'm sorry here's another one we had no other choice you must have a choice that is if you don't continue uh we're going to have to discontinue the experiment we'll have to 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 wow so the subjects seem willing to shock another human being but as soon as you say it's an order they don't do it now that's important it's very important because

20:29if you ask university undergraduates what does the milgram studies 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 big thing to miss isn't it really so wait if it doesn't show that people are just obeying orders yeah then what does it show okay i think it looks it's like this all right let's go on to our instructions we will begin with this test the participants are there and in the study each pair of words they've got a very

21:02plausible very credible high status scientist in a high status scientific institution yale who is going to do this powerful piece of science direct your voice toward that microphone 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 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 like shocking an innocent stranger over and over but if you think that's the right thing if you

21:35think that science is worth pursuing you say okay i'll go along with this so you're saying they're shocking these people because they thought it was worthwhile look the participants you know they're not it's not it's not just blind obedience oh you tell me so yes sir no sir three bags full sir they're engaged with the task they're trying to be good participants are you all right 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 120 volts

22:12suddenly i'm thinking this is actually a darker interpretation it's the original absolutely darker because they are doing it no question about it they have the agency yep and they think it's right although clearly on some level they know it isn't there's a sort of chilling comparison which is a speech that himla 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

22:42you're doing is for the good of germany and this is necessary in order to advance our noble cause wow so then hey wait i'm almost done guys give me two more minutes two more minutes so in the milgram case uh-huh well if the idea is that people will do bad if they think it's good it's a good noble cause well what's the noble cause in this case science science you can see this in the surveys that the men filled out after the experiments were over this was exactly what was on my mind of the experiment

23:13if 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 we as as onlookers to the study we have this kind of

23:45god-like uh sort of vision of like well of course what they're doing is wrong but if it looked at from another perspective there is a sense in which you could celebrate what they're doing you're 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 god because it's like we started with this experiment that we all see as evidence of humans latent capacity for evil you tell us actually no

24:16under 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 yeah now you're saying actually that you could read that that very dark fact as being actually evidence of something quite quite noble well if you dressed it up and if you just had some minor variants the paradigm you could presumably make you know make this out these are these are people who are incredibly noble they are i mean it's the fact of course that they're administering pain to a stranger that's what's horrifying about it but imagine they were administering pain themselves

24:48imagine they really were had to administer shocks themselves or something but if they were prepared to do that when i suspect a lot of them would um 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 a great the greater good so in the end where do you come down do you leave this experiment in a light mood or in a dark mood uh i i i overall 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

25:18that 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 well that right there i've slapped some quotations around that yeah

25:43thanks to ben walker thank you ben and also thank you to alex haslam professor of psychology radio lab 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

26:11i'm alex honol professional rock climber and founder of the honol foundation i want to let you know about a brand new season of the planet visionaries podcast in partnership with the rolex perpetual planet initiative this is the podcast exploring bold ideas and big solutions from the people leading the way in conservation join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion mark ruffalo biologist and photographer christina middermeyer and one of the most successful conservations of our time chris tompkins join us on planet visionaries wherever you get your podcasts wnyc studios is supported by odoo when you buy business software from lots of vendors the costs add

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27:20hear about the mental health impact of stress climate change immigration and more i'm angela davis join me for conversations with people managing hardship and experts seeking solutions from american public media comes call to mind listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast app

27:44oh okay they're gonna record it over there i mean i'm gonna record it here too all right three two one hey i'm jad abumran i'm robert krillwich this is radio lab and today evil although i don't know if that's the right word for this next thing yeah because it's sort of more complicated when you call someone evil then you're kind of done with them but there's been a fellow i've been thinking about him for a better part of the year as you know he's such a puzzle to me i can't quite place him though it's very fun to try and uh i heard about him from science writer sam keen well let's talk about fritz haber so so first of all could you just like uh when did he live and what did he look

28:18like and that kind of stuff uh he was doing his his great science work right around the turn of uh the 20th century so right around 1900 very distinctive looking man bald on top trim nice mustache wore a little um peas nez is that how you say that is that i think i call it prince nez so i'm not sure okay one of those very tiny old-fashioned uh pair of glasses that would pinch on your nose and he was someone who had very big ambitions just to put that in context

28:52uh to bring a few other of our storytellers in he comes from breslau germany that's fred kaufman reporter which is a fairly small you know a smaller sort of town and uh so does clara that's fritz harper's wife we're gonna meet her later right clara comes from the same town and they're both secularized jews this was a moment in german history he says when jews had a decent amount of freedom and this is the difference between kaiser wilhelm and of course hitler's germany yeah put it in context dan charles he's a historian his was the first generation when a young jewish boy could

29:24truly imagine that he could just be a regular part of that society he could do anything and he believed it fast forward 10 years fritz harper is a professor small university he's working with chemicals it's about 1880 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 million people however that leaves behind 20 million germans

29:55you mean they're looking at 20 million people going hungry that's what we're heading towards i mean you have to remember it during the during the crimean war in the 1850s europe starves

30:08so around the turn of the century for german scientists like harper this was the challenge he is he wants to feed he wants to feed germany 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 and everyone thought well we know the solution yeah we just need a whole lot more of one simple element nitrogen nitrogen nitrogen nitrogen they needed more nitrogen nitrogen is an essential part of amino acids and proteins and when you stick a seed like a wheat seed in the ground one of the reasons it grows is

30:43because it's sucking up all the nitrogen in the soil to make it sell walls without nitrogen you don't have life now of course you could find some nitrogen out in the world natural deposits would be like seaweed or manure was one you know you could find it in cow manure or wano which was basically bat poop and seagull poop which made that poop valuable and actually two nations in south america went to war literally over bat you could say people were bat crazy by the way that's reporter latif nasir you

31:16know this was like oil is today this is everybody was desperate for sources new sources of nitrogen and to make the problem even more annoying the most common source of nitrogen is in the air around us uh it makes up four out of every five or so molecules that we breathe so it's very a lot yes 80 percent of the air is nitrogen atoms so all the nitrogen you'd ever need was right there but you can't like throw that air onto a plant they couldn't deploy it they couldn't deploy it meaning they couldn't capture it

31:52that's right and and part of the problem here and although once again we're getting a little ahead of ourselves we'll be right back to hopper but wait wait let's just finish this is that is that nitrogen is trivalent trivalent trivalent in other words nitrogen has really strong attachments to itself 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 his calculations showed that it couldn't be done at least not without a tremendous

32:25amount of energy more energy than seemed like possible to make yeah yes but you know being ambitious habber starts thinking in order to do this we need to uh pressure this we need to put it under a lot of pressure 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 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

32:58a number of chemical reactions

33:02and 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 and when hydrogen and nitrogen bond together the thing you get is ammonia a liquid that has captured the nitrogen right out of the air you literally get a drip drip drip of ammonia

33:39it is it is arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all bread from the air was the the phrase because hopper had figured out a way to take nitrogen from the air put it into the barren ground and grew wheat this has allowed the world to have seven billion people this is what's driving the world towards 10 12 by 2050 now we're seeing about 100 million tons of synthetic fertilizer produced industrially each year and that

34:18tonnages 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 hopper process no she really and so in 1918 fritz hopper gets a nobel prize but this is why this is such an interesting guy around this same time officials in the u.s government are calling him a war criminal

34:51all right just to back up for one second after hopper's nitrogen discovery he was promoted you know he takes over the leadership of this institute in berlin and he starts hobnobbing with a whole different level of society that's dan charles again i mean it's a pretty heady thing for you know 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 and not just because he was vain which everyone agrees he was

35:25but because he loves his country he he loves the fatherland and he loves germany so when world war one begins 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 to make explosives because the thing that you put into the ground to grow more food is also the thing you can explode to make a bomb that's correct because it takes such energy and pressure to separate it this trivalent bond is so strong that

35:56when it comes back together that energy that's released it could be used for life or death in any case back to world war one there's trench warfare it gets bogged down and hobber has an idea he goes straight to the german high command and and he pitches this idea he says well we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas chlorine gas we'll basically bring it to the front and when

36:28the when the wind is right we'll just spray it but the generals were not all that convinced no they just didn't like it a lot of them were like this is not how you fight a war it's like playing dirty yeah sort of unsportsmanly but he organizes soldiers he organizes whole gas units and nobody even had to ask takes command of them partially he travels to the front and on april 22nd 1950 1915 harber finds himself in a little town in belgium called ypres ypres actually the americans called it yips whatever

36:59you call it this was one of the bloodiest arenas on the western front the germans were on one side the french the canadians and the british on the other and they're behind the german lines is our our our friend our frenemy uh fritz hauber our friend 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 really in what is basically like the baghdad of his time but nobody had done what he was

37:33about to do on the scale that he was about to do it so basically at 6 p.m on april 22nd when the wind was just right he says hobbers gas troops uh on unscrew they open the valves

37:48on almost 6 000 tanks containing 150 tons of chlorine that's like an adult blue whale of chlorine just trying to imagine that is that like a like a green cloud 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 one meter per second and according to some accounts as it crept across no man's land the the leaves would just sort of shrivel and the grass was turning to the color

38:20of metal birds would just fall from the air within minutes the gas reached the allied side and as soon as it did soldiers began to convulse they were gagging they were choking hundreds of them were falling to the ground what is the gas doing to them exactly i think what it's doing is it's uh 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 so they were actually drowning literally drowning on land

38:55wow yellow mucus was frothing out of their mouths those who could still breathe would turn blue

39:04this is a description of hell yeah but harber 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 and he is celebrated for it he gets promoted to the rank of captain and he goes home for a few days a hero but when he gets there he has to contend with his wife clara imervar clara also from breslau also from a jewish family and also a

39:40scientist unusually so in those times she was actually uh sort of a genius herself she was one of the first women to earn a phd in her country and shortly after his return clara allegedly confronts him and says look you are morally bankrupt how could you um but haber just kind of ignored her and according to legend he actually threw a dinner party in celebration of the big victory invited his friends over now we don't

40:11actually know if he threw a party i consider that apocryphal 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 especially because she found out he was leaving the next day to direct more gas attacks and they probably had an argument yeah undoubtedly they had an argument that's historian fritz stern who also happens to be fritz harber's godson they had a quarrel more than that let's call it a fight and later that night after the party harber takes a bunch of sleeping pills goes to sleep um and she takes a service revolver

40:44fritz harber's pistol walks outside to the garden and

40:51pulls the trigger shoots herself in the chest and is found by her son by her son yes age 13 i think uh and he finds her actually still alive with the life about to run out of her uh harber it's unknown what happens for the rest that evening but it is a well-documented fact that the very next morning on schedule he goes back to the to the front to the eastern front leaving a son uh alone with his dead mother that's

41:25cold huh yeah heartless it was a terrible moment did he run away was it duty the son eventually after he emigrates to america kills himself

41:52see now around this point i just don't want to have anything to do with this guy this is uh i just want to take a shower walk away yeah yeah me too

42:02you know on the other hand i mean if you look at the grand calculus people he's helped are 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 you wouldn't though would you really would you really think that this guy's a good guy honestly yeah you know just because of a mathematical summing up we're talking billions of people he's standing there on the front pushing the gas into the lungs of other human beings admittedly it's a war but still then he goes and

42:35you know and celebrates that and then walks away from his child and his wife dead in the garden and says more of that please 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 got to ask is the world better with him or without him i think you got to answer it with him right

43:01well should we keep going with the story yeah all right so sam what happened to this guy after world war one he actually was very humiliated uh 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 um uh very small levels of gold but you know over the

43:38entire 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 it sounds insane on the other hand if anyone could do it he was trying to repeat this master stroke needless to say he fails it was actually a crushing blow for him and then things really take a turn 1933 comes and hitler takes over and one of the first acts that the nazis do is to basically issue an order that says there shall be no jews in the civil service

44:13now hopper was jewish but because he'd served in world war one he technically would be exempt but 75 percent of the people who worked for him at the institute they were jewish and they would have to be dismissed so he decides to take a stand and says this is intolerable i'm going to resign he says that he's always been hiring people based on how smart they are and not who their grandparents were so he sends a letter to the ministry of education resigning and he leaves germany telling a friend he felt like

44:44he'd lost his homeland and then he starts this period of roaming he eventually goes to england but in a famous incident one of england's leading scientists refuses to shake his hand and he is basically homeless at this point you know he's a man adrift meanwhile his health is failing in 1934 he takes a trip to switzerland to a sanatorium but before he can get there his heart fails and uh he dies

45:16now there's a footnote to this that is very strange um i got a little uh my this is my dorsal hair stood up when i read the end of this right so during world war one harber's institute had developed a formulation of insect killing gas called zyklon zyklon a which was originally just a pesticide once again another nitrogen compound it was developed in his institute he knew about it in fact his chemists had given this particular pesticide a smell it was it was a warning

45:50smell so that people didn't inadvertently breathe it in and get sick but after the nazis take over this is after he died 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 did members of harber's family die in the concentration camps yeah members of his

46:21extended family did certainly friends of his did there's something deeply deeply

46:28wounding distressing upsetting at the thought that he had anything to do with zyklon b but he did it the use of it he couldn't have imagined so how do you feel about him now because i don't know i can't help but feel bad for the guy

47:11despite the chlorine gas like he didn't intend for that to happen he could have never imagined that no but 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 and he does and he does but he does it with a kind of uh a moral athleticism you know he he does it without humility without without a lot of doubt and you know it's a craft but it's a craft with consequences and to approach it

47:42with a 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 thanks to all our great storytellers dan charles sam kean latif nasir fred kaufman and fritz stern you can find out more information about all those guys on our website radiolab.org

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49:24call to mind we hear about the mental health impact of stress climate change immigration and more i'm angela davis join me for conversations with people managing hardship and experts seeking solutions from american public media comes call to mind listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast app hey i'm jad abumran i'm robert krolwitz this is radio lab and today we're talking about well we're trying to think about what goes on in the mind of a bad person yeah what makes a bad person so bad that

49:59he's different from the rest of us and we didn't really come to any kind of agreement with the hopper thing yeah i don't think we quite know 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 in titus andronicus there's a character by the name of aaron the moore 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

50:32been up to recently 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 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 oh 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

51:12so he's bad 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 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 just a little glimmer and he says that's what people wanted they wanted someone who was really thrillingly bad

51:43but in the end was redeemed a bit yeah this wasn't just a theater thing 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 you'd go for much the same reasons in those days if you're a convicted male felon you are you know strung up but you're not allowed to hang until you die you're cut down before then warning this next part's a little graphic 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 but even with all that gore and

52:17horribleness there was often a moment that people waited for and in a way we wait for it still even now we want what elizabethans got at the scaffold which was a confession before the guy is cut to shreds he's allowed to confess you know i i i hardly you know 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 and that's what shakespeare did in all his plays

52:51he would give all his baddies at least one moment where they could be understood except this one time so will i turn her virtue into 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 i hate hates him

53:22so 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 he stirs up hatred between friends between lovers he even schemes against his own wife this is just somebody who's performing brain surgery without anesthesia on other people uh he's a master plotter and as for why maybe

53:58othello was sleeping with amelia but as the play goes on you begin to think that maybe that's just another lie eventually iago convinces othello that his wife has been disloyal which she hasn't and then othello goes and kills his own wife smothering her with a pillow this is just a tsunami of evil that passes through the place and at the very end of the play when everyone finds out what

54:29iago's done fellow asks him why why did you do this and iago he refuses what

54:41we fully expect and what everybody on stage at that moment fully expects from him you know what does he say um demand me nothing what you know you know

55:02from this time forth i never will speak word

55:10i'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

55:23what you know you know

55:29if this is the singular moment in shakespeare where he gives you an un-understandably evil man no motives no reason what any idea what the hell he was intending

55:43what you know you know meaning i mean what any idea what was in his mind was he trying to make a commentary on something was he grappling with something do we know no no you know damn it

56:02the good iagos make you want to shower the minute you leave the theater because you are sullied by them thank you to james shapiro whose most recent book is called contested will you know what you know what i'm left he has you there 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 we should say that this next section of the program has some references

56:32which are extremely graphic and not to everybody's taste so we have kids in the in the room maybe this is a time to tell them to go brush their teeth or something yeah yeah it comes to us from our reporter erin scott yes jeff jensen nice to meet you nice to meet you all right so who is who is this guy you'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 u.s history gary leon ridgeway the green river killer the first victims of the green river killer were found in the summer of 1982 the green

57:06river murders terrorized seattle in the 1980s in seattle today a man called the green river killer ridgeway murdered at least 49 women so-called green river killer but it's suspected that it could be upwards of 75 making him the most prolific serial killer in american history all the victims were prostitutes he buried them or left their bodies in these little clumps in the woods the killers seem to have placed the bodies as if they were mannequins and um in january of 1984 the green river task force was formed and my father was recruited at the task force so jeff wrote this book because his

57:40father tom jensen was one of the lead detectives tracking gary ridgeway he ultimately spent 17 years searching for this man in december of 2001 my father and his colleagues um make the arrest dna testing matched him to the crime they arrest gary leon ridgeway and on june 13 2003 gary was secretly taken out of his jail cell and brought to a sort of very nondescript concrete ugly office building

58:11and um over the next six months from june to early december it was tom's job to get gary to open up and give up the few details that they really needed to link him certifiably to all these crimes uh today's date is uh june 17th year 2003 the time now is 08 36 hours so every day they would bring him into this conference room this is a continuation of an interview with gary leon ridgeway and interrogate him yeah why don't you just what did you remember since we last talked yesterday uh i got those all

58:48in at night mostly um most of some but uh i remember picking her up at um it immediately became apparent that there was going to be difficulties as far as i know i don't know if i did or not he would deny things he would obscure he would dance around things he didn't really want a 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

59:24these bodies many of them after they were murdered does he is he saying what i think he's saying yeah 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 mattson they start using a line of a tact of of interviewing him that was very it's okay it's okay if you did stunningly shockingly empathetic nothing to be ashamed of thousands of people have done it for

1:00:01you you're not the first one you know you're not the first person that's ever done this you're not going to be the last one you won't be the last that's one of the things that we that we need to know the father's trying to like reach out to him okay i know it was more than a urge it's okay to admit this you need to admit this okay it's all right but we've got to know that that's one of the things we have to know and that's why it's okay to let him and he does uh yes i did lie about that

1:00:34but that's when i was uh i went back one time before you know on some of the that i like i said i gotta i gotta give it out it's i can't keep holding it holding up this is a major breakthrough so he ends up admitting it in graphic detail and it gets even more disturbing for my father as the conversation suddenly pivots to another victim other than one

1:01:02that was real close to me by the name of carol christensen christensen i dated her several times three times two times before he brings her up as an example of a of a woman that he actually had strong feelings for you like this you like this girl i really liked her she was good to you she was good to me 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 killed her she was uh i knew she had a

1:01:33daughter and so in the last one gary starts going through this narrative of what he did to carol the last time she was uh in a hurry she like was allegedly in a rush and she didn't and like it kind of like hurt his feelings wasn't satisfying me it made me mad because she was very much in a hurry she had something else in her mind and i you know killed her i choked her with my arm

1:02:09and the way killer uh cared for because i dated her before but just didn't turn out right 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 let's back up let's look back up a little bit the fact

1:02:39that he kept on doing it over and over and over again was like come on you've been through this a lot of times before and she's already told you she's in a hurry you knew what was going to happen and you've done this how many times before 10 10 15 20 times you know what's going to happen if she pisses you off and you like her you're telling us always yes yet you go into this anyway knowing full well that it could end up in her death yeah and gary just says yes that is true when i picked

1:03:14them up i was going to kill them finally acknowledging yeah that's true there's a pause and my father just says why why um why did you do this did you need to kill and that was a question that had haunted my father for decades why 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

1:03:46take these women off the streets and want to destroy them why why

1:03:53and the answer

1:03:58is

1:04:01unsatisfying yes i did need to kill 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 yeah you know i just wanted to kill them i just needed to kill them in that moment my father he stands up and he says touched me you've touched me gary you've touched me

1:04:39take a break okay we're going off tape now it's zero nine 24 hours on june 17th year 2003. he walked out of the room and just started weeping

1:04:54they 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 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

1:05:27that 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 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 and um why is it so important do you think to understand the why behind such an evil act

1:06:03well 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

1:06:33wife his children all his material possessions 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 gonna question me like you know who are you 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

1:07:04himself 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

1:07:34so so so ¶¶

1:08:15Jeff Jensen's book is The Green River Killer, a true detective story. It's a graphic or an illustrated novel. Thanks also to reporter Aaron Scott for that story. This is Radiolab. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soran Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

1:08:47Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Modgauker, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitsa, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Anjali Mercado, and Sophie Semayi.

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