The Bad Show

Summary

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Radiolab — "The Bad Show"

Host: WNYC Studios (Lulu Miller & Latif Nasser)
Date: May 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this classic Radiolab episode, the show dives headfirst into one of humanity’s most vexing questions: What makes someone "bad"? With stories that range from ordinary people’s murderous thoughts, to infamous psychological experiments, to real-life historical figures and literary villains, the episode explores whether "badness" is a matter of circumstance, personality, or something deeper.

Latif Nasser notes in the opening that this is perhaps the closest Radiolab ever got to a true crime episode, but its real ambition is to ask:

“What makes someone bad? 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?”
(00:32, Latif Nasser)

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Universality of "Bad" Thoughts

• Story from David Buss (Psychology Professor):
  • Recounts a personal incident where a mild-mannered friend, feeling publicly humiliated by his wife, confessed murderous rage. (03:16)
  • The episode asks if this level of anger is unusual, or if we all have such darkness inside.
• Buss surveys students, discovering that a vast majority (91% of men, 84% of women) have fantasized about killing someone. (07:01–08:03)

  "Page after page of yeses, but also these very vivid descriptions about who they would kill... the precise method..."
  (07:15, David Buss)

  • Many described their fantasies in shocking anatomical detail.
  • Commentary: Fantasies are common, acting on them is rare.

Notable Quote:

“If any sizable fraction actually acted on their homicidal fantasies, the streets would be running red.”
(08:05, David Buss)

2. Why Do People Do Bad Things? The Milgram Obedience Experiments

• Enactment of Milgram’s famous "shocking" experiment as a setup for the segment.
• Key Fact: In the original ("baseline") experiment, 65% of participants "shocked" the learner to a fatal level under orders from an authority figure. (14:12)
• Historical Context: The Milgram study coincided with Adolf Eichmann’s trial for Nazi war crimes—the central question: How could ordinary people participate in atrocities? (13:20–13:54)

New Interpretations:

• Psychologist Alex Haslam disputes the simple "people blindly obey" narrative.
  • Milgram ran dozens of variations, which show obedience rates dip dramatically under various circumstances (higher contact with the victim, lack of authority, others disobeying):
    • Same room: obedience drops to 40% (16:45)
    • Physical touch required: 30%
    • Experimenter is not a scientist: 20%
    • Peers refuse: 10%
    • Two experimenters disagree: 0%
• Most important finding:

  “The one thing that the study really doesn’t show is that people obey orders.”
  (21:06, Alex Haslam)

  • Rather than blind obedience, participants believed they were serving a "higher cause" (science).

  “They're doing it because they think they ought to. And that's all the difference in the world.”
  (22:14, Alex Haslam)

• Dark insight:
  The real danger isn’t mindless obedience, but willful cruelty for a perceived good.

Notable Quote:

“When you’re enjoined to do something for the greater good, maybe ask yourself: what is greater and what is good?”
(26:02, Alex Haslam)

3. The Moral Equation: Fritz Haber’s Legacy

• Profile of Fritz Haber, German chemist whose discovery (fixing atmospheric nitrogen) enabled fertilizer—and fed billions—but also powered explosives and chemical weapons.
  • Bread from the air saved millions (34:10).
  • He also pioneered poison gas in WWI (38:05), leading to massive battlefield deaths, and his invention later evolved into Zyklon B for Nazi gas chambers (46:19).
• Tragic personal fallout: His wife Clara, also a chemist, opposed his wartime innovations and died by suicide after his first gas attack (41:15). The family further suffered under Hitler's regime.
• Debate: Is Haber "good" for feeding billions, or "evil" for enabling mass death?

  “Is the world better with him or without him? I think you gotta answer it with him.”
  (43:06, Jad Abumrad) “He does it with a kind of amoral athleticism... I would rather have scientists who carry doubt with them as they proceed.”
  (47:52, Robert Krulwich)

4. Shakespeare’s Bad Men: The Puzzle of Pure Evil

• Expert James Shapiro (Columbia):
  • Discusses how even the "bad" characters in Shakespeare, like Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, are ultimately given a motive or moment of humanity. (50:44)
  • The only exception: Iago in Othello, who refuses a motive for his malice.

    “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”
    (55:00, James Shapiro)

• Public executions and confessions: society seeks to restore moral order by hearing a reason, a "why," even for horrific acts.

5. When There Is No "Why": The Green River Killer

• Reporter Aaron Scott tells the story of detective Tom Jensen (through his son/writer Jeff Jensen) interviewing serial killer Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. (57:07)
  • Despite months of interrogations and expert interviews, Ridgway gives no satisfying explanation for his crimes, only:

    “I just needed to kill them.” (64:41)

  • Jensen is left haunted by the lack of meaning, relating it to the biblical story of Job, in which horror and loss are inflicted without explanation. (66:14)
  • The quest for "why" in the face of evil may be a search for order and meaning—but sometimes, none exists.

Notable Moment:

“In that moment, my father, he stands up and says, ‘You’ve touched me, Gary. Let me take a break.’ He walked out of the room and just started weeping.”
(64:55–65:07, Tom Jensen/Aaron Scott)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On universal homicidal thoughts:

  “91% of the men said yes, and 84% of the women said yes, I’ve thought about killing someone.”
  (07:43–08:03, David Buss)

• On Milgram’s "orders":

  “Anytime the experimenter said, ‘You must continue,’ the shocker would say, ‘Hell, no, I don’t.’”
  (20:09, Ben Walker)

• On the moral ambiguity of science:

  "Half of each of our bodies contains nitrogen from the Haber process."
  (34:20, Fred Kaufman)

• On the unbearable absence of a true "why":

  “Sometimes when we ask why in the face of profound evil, I kind of wonder if what we’re doing is... daring God to show himself... what we want out of the why is meaning.”
  (66:21, Tom Jensen)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening & the "Murder Fantasy" Survey: 02:06–08:14
• Milgram Obedience Experiments: 10:06–26:13
• Fritz Haber — Science Hero and Villain: 28:13–48:14
• Shakespeare and the Concept of Evil: 50:27–56:31
• The Green River Killer & The Search for Why: 57:02–68:41

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Conclusion

"The Bad Show" is a sweeping exploration of moral ambiguity, human nature, and the boundaries of evil. By tracing the spectrum of “badness”—from momentary rage to mass murder—the episode ultimately grapples with the unsettling question: Is "evil" always explainable, and what happens to us when it isn’t? Through storytelling, psychology, science, literature, and true crime, Radiolab invites us to confront not just the darkness in others, but in ourselves—and to consider whether understanding badness is really about restoring meaning to a chaotic world.

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Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

Then, Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird.

[Alex Haslam]

What is this, your first date?

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, no.

[Jad Abumrad]

We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Jad Abumrad]

Anyways, get a [e-mail] or with your local agent. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[Latif Nasser]

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. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, you're listening.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from wnyc.

[Ben Walker]

Rewind.

[Pat Walters]

Hello, David?

[David Buss]

Yes, hello, this is Pat.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Oh, hi, Pat.

[Latif Nasser]

How are you?

[Robert Krulwich]

Let's begin with this story from our producer, Pat Walters.

[Jad Abumrad]

Pat, go ahead.

[Pat Walters]

Okay, so I heard this one from this guy named David.

[David Buss]

His name is David Buss, two S's.

[Pat Walters]

He's a psychology professor at the University

[David Buss]

of Texas at Austin.

[Pat Walters]

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?

[David Buss]

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

[Pat Walters]

The whole thing happened several years ago.

[David Buss]

I had a very good friend, another

[Pat Walters]

professor at the university, and I used

[David Buss]

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, a Party was already in full swing when I got there. 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.

[Pat Walters]

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

[David Buss]

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

[Pat Walters]

What did she do?

[David Buss]

She expressed disapproval about his clothing choices.

[Pat Walters]

She made fun of his shirt or

[David Buss]

something, but did it publicly in front of her friends to. So it was a kind of. He felt publicly humiliated.

[Pat Walters]

And while David's sitting in the bedroom with this friend, the guy looks up

[David Buss]

at him and he says, I'm gonna kill her.

[Pat Walters]

How did he say it? Like quietly or like through his teeth,

[David Buss]

you know, I'm gonna kill her.

[Pat Walters]

David had always known this guy to

[David Buss]

be pretty mild mannered, but he is a. 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. And eventually he did, he just calmed down.

[Pat Walters]

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

[David Buss]

Yeah, I did.

[Pat Walters]

And he did too?

[David Buss]

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 and it was his friend and he says, can I come over and sleep on your couch? If I don't leave my house right now, I'm going to kill her. 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.

[Pat Walters]

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

[David Buss]

Yeah, exactly.

[Pat Walters]

Meanwhile, later that night on the other

[David Buss]

side of town, 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 going to kill her.

[Robert Krulwich]

This story made us wonder, is David's

[Jad Abumrad]

friend, is he unusual?

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, this is Radiolab, and today we're gonna get bad, so to speak. We've done a good show, this is a bad show.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you ask, like, why do people

[Jad Abumrad]

do bad Things actually mean to be bad anyways. Like, how do you tell the real baddies from the rest of us?

[Ben Walker]

That's how.

[Jad Abumrad]

I. I'm Jad Abumran.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Hoich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab, the Bad Show.

[Pat Walters]

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's moved on to a new university and he's teaching an introductory psychology class.

[David Buss]

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, you know, have you ever thought about killing someone? And they would circle yes or no.

[Pat Walters]

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

[David Buss]

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

[Pat Walters]

page after page of yeses. And not just yeses, but these very

[David Buss]

vivid descriptions about who they would kill,

[Fred Kaufman]

where they do it, when, the precise

[Pat Walters]

method, how many of them went into that kind of detail?

[David Buss]

I would say 75 or 80%.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Pat Walters]

Were you a little bit like horrified, like, oh my God, my students are murderers, or horrified?

[David Buss]

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

[Pat Walters]

I've thought about killing someone.

[David Buss]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, but that's just. Those are fantasies.

[Pat Walters]

Some of them actually seem like.

[David Buss]

Well, here's one.

[Pat Walters]

Something more than just fantasies from a woman. Sure.

[David Buss]

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 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 it that yet. And I'm terrified that he'll do what he says. Then suddenly the thought occurred to me 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 asked how close she came to killing him, she estimated 60%.

[Jad Abumrad]

60.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 gonna stab or plan it like that.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

No. No one has ever sent about a sex tape that I've ever.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Robert Krulwich]

I think they'd have to be extreme. In the extreme? Well, you know how mild mannered I am.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, no. And you know what? This actually brings us to our first stop of the hour. So let me just to set it up. Robert, I'm going to give you this piece of paper here.

[Ben Walker]

What is this?

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

But these words here.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nice day, fat neck, sad face. What is this? Soft hair. I don't know what this is.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Commit them to memory.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait a second. Clear air.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so give me the paper back already. Time's up. So I'm just gonna go into this other room over here.

[Fred Kaufman]

Can you hear me?

[Robert Krulwich]

What?

[Jeff Jensen]

What?

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm gonna give you a test.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm not ready for this.

[Jad Abumrad]

Pay attention to the best of your memory. Which word was matched with nice? Was it nice day, nice sky, nice job or nice chair? Answer please.

[James Shapiro]

I don't know.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait a second.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, I'm choosing job.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Wrong answer is day.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sorry, man.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

285 volts.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm gonna have to give you a little.

[Robert Krulwich]

What did you just do you just burst my eardrums.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

It is May 1962. An experiment is being conducted in the Elegant Interaction Laboratory at Yale University.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Just normal, everyday dudes.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

I have a seat right here in

[Jad Abumrad]

front of this really impressive looking machine. This machine that had lots of switches

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

on it generates electric shocks. And when you press one of the switches all the way down, the learner gets a shock.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

Which happened constantly.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Answer his neck.

[Jad Abumrad]

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. Oh, man.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Continue, please.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 let

[Ben Walker]

me out of here.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Israel in this court to accuse Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone.

[Ben Walker]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Ben Walker]

And in the trial, when the prosecutors essentially ask him how you came to commit genocide, he would say over and

[Aaron Scott]

over again, it was not my personal affair.

[Ben Walker]

I was just following orders.

[Jad Abumrad]

I had to do what I was ordered.

[Ben Walker]

And it's this defense. This is basically what Stanley Milgram set out to test in a lab at Yale University with a bunch of regular Americans.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like, is that something that's universal or just an Eichmann thing?

[Ben Walker]

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.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Something's happened to that man in there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Even when they stopped screaming.

[Ben Walker]

Yeah. When they were maybe dead.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

You better check in on him, sir. He won't answer me or nothing. Please continue. Go on, please.

[Ben Walker]

They continued shocking their corpses. His experiment remains one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Ben Walker]

It is still trotted out to explain everything from hazing to war crimes, what is there in human nature to gang

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

behavior that allows an individual to act inhumanely.

[Ben Walker]

Genocide, harshly, severely. It's like a downloadable from the Internet, instant defense for doing wrong. But if you look at Milgram's work closely.

[Alex Haslam]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Walker]

Like this guy did.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Ben Walker]

Then a different picture with.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Ben Walker]

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

[Alex Haslam]

knows, the so called baseline, the 65%

[Jad Abumrad]

one, the one we just talked about.

[Ben Walker]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

So there's more, there's more to it.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Ben Walker]

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

[Alex Haslam]

He had all sorts of different things.

[Ben Walker]

He would change where the shocker and the shocky sat.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Ben Walker]

And every scenario produced a different result.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Ben Walker]

Yep.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Ben Walker]

I mean, so again, the baseline study is the one where 65% of the volunteer is go all the way highest dose of electricity X, X, X. But in experiment number three, if they put the shock ee in the same room with a shocker so the shocker could actually see the person that he's

[Alex Haslam]

shocking, obedience drops to about 40%.

[Ben Walker]

And in experiment number four, when the teacher has to hold the learner's hand down on a plate in order him

[Alex Haslam]

to feel the shocks, it drops to about 30%.

[Ben Walker]

Wow.

[Alex Haslam]

Experiment 14, if the experimenter is not a scientist, but is an ordinary man not wearing a white coat, obedience drops to 20%.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, really?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, how low can we go?

[Ben Walker]

Okay, here's another one. This variant, experiment 17, there's you and

[Alex Haslam]

there's two other participants, both actors. If those two participants refuse to go

[Ben Walker]

on, like saying like, I don't want

[Alex Haslam]

to kill a guy, only 10% under those circumstances, go on.

[Ben Walker]

And then the final one, experiment 15.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Ben Walker]

But if you put two experiments, experimenters

[Alex Haslam]

in the room and they start disagreeing with each other, and this one you get zero percent going all the way.

[Jeff Jensen]

Zero.

[Alex Haslam]

Zero.

[Jad Abumrad]

In that condition, you said zero.

[Alex Haslam]

Non, go right to the end.

[Jad Abumrad]

Zero.

[Latif Nasser]

Not one person, no one, not a soul.

[Alex Haslam]

Exactly. Zero percent.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, all right, I'm starting to feel a little bit better about my fellow man.

[Ben Walker]

One second.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

[Ben Walker]

Okay, where is he? I'm in a closet.

[Jad Abumrad]

In a closet.

[Ben Walker]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

That's true, that's true. Alright, so keep going.

[Ben Walker]

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.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Continue using the last switch on the board, please. I'm not getting no answer. Please continue. The next word is wait.

[Alex Haslam]

They have debates with themselves.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

You think you should look in on them? Please.

[Alex Haslam]

Debates with the experimenter.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Not once we've started the experimenter. But what if something's happened to the man, hadn't attacked or something in there? The experiment requires that we continue. Go on, please don't. Don't the man's health mean anything? Whether the learner likes it or not, we might. Well, he might be dead in there.

[Ben Walker]

What's interesting is that how all of these struggles, all of them play out the same way. It's the experimenter.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Go on, please.

[Ben Walker]

Prodding the shockers along.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

You're gonna keep giving what, 450 volts every shot? Now that's correct.

[Ben Walker]

For me, it's all about the prods.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

The next word is white.

[Ben Walker]

This is what totally pulled me into this story.

[Jad Abumrad]

The prods.

[Ben Walker]

Stanley Milgram had four scripted prods that he wrote out for his experimenters for

[Jad Abumrad]

when the subjects didn't want to continue.

[Ben Walker]

Yep. The first one was, please go on.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Continue, please.

[Ben Walker]

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

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

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

[Ben Walker]

volts, and if they still were resisting or struggling, they'd get Prod number three.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

It's absolutely essential that you continue.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's absolutely essential that you continue. It's a little bit more direct.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Not quite.

[Alex Haslam]

But the fourth prod, really, the critical. The.

[Ben Walker]

The critical fourth prod is an absolute order. The fourth prod is.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

You have no other choice, teacher.

[Ben Walker]

You have no other choice, teacher.

[Alex Haslam]

You must continue.

[Jad Abumrad]

That is definitely an order.

[Alex Haslam]

Exactly.

[Ben Walker]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Total disobedience.

[Ben Walker]

Anytime the experimenter said, you must continue, the shocker would say, hell, no, I don't.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

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

[Ben Walker]

I'm sorry, here's another one.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Well, you have no other choice. You must be.

[Tom Jensen]

Yes, I have a chance.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

That is, if you don't continue, we're going to have to discontinue the experiment. We'll have to.

[Unknown Advertiser Voice]

He says cut it out.

[Jad Abumrad]

After all, he knows what he can stand.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

That's my opinion. That's why I'm going to stand on it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. So the subjects seem willing to shock another human being, but as soon as you say it's in order, they don't do it. Huh?

[Alex Haslam]

Now, that's important. It's very important, because if you ask university undergraduates what does the Milgram study show, they will invariably say something like, they show that people obey orders.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Alex Haslam]

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?

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Alex Haslam]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then what does it show?

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

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

[Alex Haslam]

The participants are there in the study. They've got a very plausible, very credible, high status scientist in a high status scientific institution, Yale, who is going to do this powerful piece of science, direct

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

your voice toward that microphone.

[Ben Walker]

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

[David Buss]

I really want to do a good job.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Ben Walker]

hard, like shocking an innocent stranger over and over.

[Alex Haslam]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Alex Haslam]

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, please. 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.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

420 volts.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Ben Walker]

Absolutely darker.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because they are doing it.

[Ben Walker]

No question about it.

[Jad Abumrad]

They have the agency.

[Ben Walker]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Alex Haslam]

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. And 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.

[Ben Walker]

Wow. So then, hey wait, I'm almost done guys. Give me two more minutes. Two more minutes.

[Jad Abumrad]

So in the Milgram case.

[Ben Walker]

Uh huh.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Ben Walker]

Science.

[Jad Abumrad]

Science.

[Ben Walker]

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. If the experiment, if the experiment had to be successful, it had, 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.

[Alex Haslam]

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 it looked at 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, I'm giving God

[Jad Abumrad]

because it's like we started with this experiment that we all see as evidence of humans latent capacity for evil. Can 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.

[Alex Haslam]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Alex Haslam]

Well, if you dressed it up and if you just had some minor variants, the paradigm, you could presumably make this out. 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 to themselves. Imagine 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, 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?

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Alex Haslam]

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 that it affords infinite potential 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?

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Alex Haslam]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Thanks to Ben Walker.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Latif Nasser]

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.

[Alex Honnold]

I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation. I wanted 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 Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservations of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts.

[Odoo Representative]

WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O o dot com. That's O D O O dot com.

[Planet Money Narrator]

Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a what happens if we refund tariffs? Why are groceries so expensive? At npr, we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts and start seeing how the economy really works. Oh, okay, they're gonna record it over there.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, I'm gonna record it here, too. All right, three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krilwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. And today, evil. Although I don't know if that's the right word for this next thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

though it's very fun to try.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Sam Kean]

He was doing his great science work right around the turn of the twent, so right around 1900. Very distinctive looking man, bald on top, trim, nice mustache, wore a little PIs. Nez. Is that how you say that?

[Robert Krulwich]

I call it Prince Nez. I'm not sure.

[Sam Kean]

Prince Nez, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Fred Kaufman]

He comes from Breslau, Germany.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's Fred Kaufman, which is a fairly

[Fred Kaufman]

small, you know, smallish sort of town. And so does Clara.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's Fritz Haber's wife.

[Robert Krulwich]

We're gonna meet her later.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[Fred Kaufman]

Clara comes from the same town and they're both secularized Jews.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Fred Kaufman]

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

[Alex Haslam]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

To put it in context, Dan Charles, he's a historian.

[Dan Charles]

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 and he believed it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Fast forward 10 years.

[Robert Krulwich]

Fritz Haber is a professor, small university.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

And he throws himself at one of the central issues facing Germany at that time.

[Fred Kaufman]

Germany has a problem, a big problem. It has enough, what they used to call then solar energy, you know, energy

[Robert Krulwich]

from the sun to grow crops to

[Fred Kaufman]

feed about 30 million people. However, that leaves behind 20 million Germans.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Fred Kaufman]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

So around the turn of the century, for German scientists like Haber, this was the challenge.

[Fred Kaufman]

He wants to feed, he wants to feed Germany.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

And everyone thought, well, we know the solution.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Fred Kaufman]

Nitrogen.

[Latif Nasser]

Nitrogen.

[Sam Kean]

Nitrogen. Nitrogen.

[Robert Krulwich]

They needed more nitrogen.

[Fred Kaufman]

Nitrogen is an essential part of amino acids and proteins.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

the soil to make its cell walls.

[Fred Kaufman]

Without nitrogen, you don't have life.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Sam Kean]

Natural deposits would be like seaweed or manure was one.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, you could find it in

[Robert Krulwich]

cow manure or guano, which was basically

[Latif Nasser]

bat poop and seagull poop, which made that poop valuable.

[Sam Kean]

And actually, two nations in South America went to war, literally over bat.

[Latif Nasser]

You could say people were bat crazy.

[Jad Abumrad]

By the way, that's reporter Latif Nasser.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Sam Kean]

annoying, the most common source of nitrogen is in the air around us. It makes up four out of every five or so molecules that we breathe. So it's very.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's a lot.

[Sam Kean]

Yes. 80% of the air is nitrogen atoms.

[Robert Krulwich]

So all the nitrogen you'd ever need was right there.

[Fred Kaufman]

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. That's right. And part of the problem here, and although, once again, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves.

[Robert Krulwich]

We'll be right back to Hopper.

[Jeff Jensen]

But wait, wait.

[Fred Kaufman]

Let's just finish this, is that nitrogen is trivalent. Trivalent. In other words, nitrogen has really strong attachments to itself.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Fred Kaufman]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

More energy than seemingly, like, possible to make.

[Fred Kaufman]

Yeah. Yes. But, you know, being ambitious, Haber starts thinking, in order to do this, we need to pressure this. We need to put it under a lot of pressure.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Fred Kaufman]

iron tank under extreme, extreme pressure at high temperature.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then he forces hydrogen into the tank.

[Jad Abumrad]

Get in there, and you have a

[Fred Kaufman]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

And when hydrogen and nitrogen bond together,

[Fred Kaufman]

the thing you get is ammonia, a

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Fred Kaufman]

You literally get a drip, drip, drip of ammonia. It is arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all.

[Dan Charles]

Bread from the air was the phrase,

[Robert Krulwich]

because Hopper had figured out a way to take nitrogen from the air, put it into the barren ground, and grow wheat.

[Fred Kaufman]

This has allowed the world to have 7 billion people. This is what's driving the world towards 1012 by 2050. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

No.

[Robert Krulwich]

And so in 1918, Fritz Haber gets a Nobel Prize. But. And this is why this is such an interesting guy, around this same time, officials in the US Government are calling him a war criminal.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, just to back up for

[Robert Krulwich]

one second, after Haber's nitrogen discovery, he was promoted.

[Dan Charles]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

That's Dan Charles again.

[Dan Charles]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Fred Kaufman]

fatherland, and he loves Germany.

[Jad Abumrad]

So When World War I begins, he

[Dan Charles]

signs up immediately, sends a letter volunteering

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Fred Kaufman]

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

[Dan Charles]

In any case, back to World War I, there's trench warfare. It gets bogged down, and Haber has an idea.

[Latif Nasser]

He goes straight to the German High Command and he pitches this idea.

[Dan Charles]

He says, well, we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas, chlorine gas.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Dan Charles]

But the generals were not all that convinced. No, they just didn't like it.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Latif Nasser]

It's like playing dirty, sort of unsportsmanlike.

[Dan Charles]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

April 22, 1915, 1915, Haber finds himself in a little town in Belgium called Ypres.

[Latif Nasser]

Y P R E s. Actually the Americans called it Ypres.

[Robert Krulwich]

Whatever you call it, this was one

[Latif Nasser]

of the bloodiest arenas on the Western Front.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Latif Nasser]

our friend, our frenemy, Fritz Haber. 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 about to do on the scale that he was about to do it. So basically, at 6pm on April 22,

[Jad Abumrad]

when the wind was just right, he

[Latif Nasser]

says Haber's gas troops unscrew. They open the valves on almost 6,000 tanks containing 150 tons of chlorine. That's like an adult blue whale of chlorine.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Latif Nasser]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Within minutes, the gas reached the Allied side. And as soon as it did, Soldiers began to convulse.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

What is the gas station doing to them exactly?

[Latif Nasser]

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. So they were actually drowning, literally drowning on land. Yellow mucus was frothing out of their mouths. Those who could still breathe would turn blue.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is a description of hell.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Dan Charles]

But Haber saw it as a wonderful success and 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.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Dan Charles]

Clara, also from Breslau, also from a Jewish family, and also a scientist. Unusually so in those times.

[Sam Kean]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Sam Kean]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Dan Charles]

I consider that apocryphal.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Sam Kean]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

And they probably had an argument. Yeah, undoubtedly they had an argument.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Sam Kean]

They had a quarrel.

[Jad Abumrad]

More than that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Let's call it a fight.

[Sam Kean]

And later that night, after the party,

[Latif Nasser]

Haber takes a bunch of sleeping pills, goes to sleep, and she takes his

[Robert Krulwich]

service revolver, Fritz Haber's pistol, walks outside to the garden and

[Latif Nasser]

pulls the trigger,

[Fred Kaufman]

shoots herself in the chest and is found by her son.

[Robert Krulwich]

By her son, yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Age 13, I think.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Fred Kaufman]

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

[Sam Kean]

morning on schedule, he goes back to

[Dan Charles]

the front, to the eastern front, leaving

[Jad Abumrad]

a son alone with his dead mother.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's cold, huh?

[Pat Walters]

Yeah.

[Dan Charles]

Heartless.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was a terrible moment.

[Dan Charles]

Did he run away? Was it duty?

[Fred Kaufman]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

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 away.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Honestly? Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Just because of a mathematical summing up.

[Jad Abumrad]

We're talking billions of people.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 celebrates that and then walks away from his child and his wife dead in the garden. And says, more of that, please.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, there's something distasteful about the fact that he was too into it, but 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 it with him. Right. Well, should we keep going with the story?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Sam Kean]

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.

[Fred Kaufman]

And he spends five years in a futile effort to distill gold from the ocean's waters.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sounds insane. On the other hand, if anyone can

[Dan Charles]

do it, he was trying to repeat this master stroke.

[Robert Krulwich]

Needless to say, he fails.

[Dan Charles]

It was actually a crushing blow for him.

[Jad Abumrad]

And then things really take a turn.

[Dan Charles]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, Haber was Jewish, but because he'd

[Dan Charles]

served in World War I, he technically would be exempt.

[Jad Abumrad]

But 75% of the people who worked for him at the Institute, they were

[Dan Charles]

Jewish, and they would have to be dismissed.

[Jad Abumrad]

So he decides to take a stand

[Dan Charles]

and says, this is intolerable. I'm going to resign.

[Fred Kaufman]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Dan Charles]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Dan Charles]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

But before he can get there, his

[Dan Charles]

heart fails and he dies.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, there's a footnote to this.

[David Buss]

This.

[Robert Krulwich]

That is very strange. I got a little. My dorsal hair stood up when I read the end of this.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[Dan Charles]

So, During World War I, Haber's institute had developed a formulation of insect killing gas called Zyklon, Zyklon A, which was

[Jad Abumrad]

originally just a pesticide.

[Fred Kaufman]

Once again, another nitrogen compound.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Dan Charles]

But after the Nazis take over, this

[Jad Abumrad]

is after he died, they reach back

[Dan Charles]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Dan Charles]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

There's something deeply, deeply wounding, distressing, upsetting at the thought that he had anything to do with Cyclone B. But he did. The use of it, he could never match. 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he does.

[Robert Krulwich]

And he does. But he does it with a kind of amoral athleticism, you know, 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 with a kind of crazy joy. I don't know. I would rather have scientists who carry doubt with them as they proceed.

[Jad Abumrad]

I. Yeah, I agree with that. Maybe it's all about doubt and the end. Thanks to all our great storytellers, Dan Charles, Sam Keane, Latif Nasser, Fred Kaufman, and Fritz Stern. You can find out more information about all those guys on our website radiolab.org

[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is supported by Strawberry Me. As a Radiolab listener, chances are you're a curious person who asks how things work and why people do what they do. Trying to make sense of the world around you. But what about turning that same curiosity inward, especially when it comes to your work? Because so many people know what it feels like to show up every day, get through the to do list and still wonder things like is this what I really want? Could this be different? Maybe you felt stuck or restless or just quietly ready for something more but aren't sure what that looks like or how to get there. That's where Strawberry Me comes in. Strawberry connects you with a thoughtful career coach who helps you step back and reflect on what motivates you, what's missing, and what kind of work can actually fit the life you want. Think of it as bringing the same curiosity you have about the world to your own career. Explore your path forward at Strawberry meradiolab and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's Strawberry Meradiolab.

[Planet Money Narrator]

Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a what happens if we refund tariffs? Why are groceries so expensive? At npr, we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts and start seeing how the economy really works.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumran.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krolwood.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab, and today we're talking

[Robert Krulwich]

about, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

We didn't really come to any kind of agreement with the Haber thing. I don't think we quite but, you know, we ended up walking this question around to different people.

[James Shapiro]

We want to talk about bad people in Shakespeare.

[Jad Abumrad]

And oddly enough, we came got a really interesting take on on the true nature of badness from this guy, James

[James Shapiro]

Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he said to start, you want

[Odoo Representative]

to know about bad?

[Jad Abumrad]

I'll give you bad.

[Robert Krulwich]

In Titus Andronicus, there's a character by

[James Shapiro]

the name of Aaron the Moor.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[James Shapiro]

Set deadly enmity between two friends, make poor men's cattle break their necks, set fire on bonds and haystacks in the night, and bit the owners, quench them with their tears. Oft 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, as 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Whoa.

[Robert Krulwich]

So he's bad.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[James Shapiro]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

This wasn't just a theater thing.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

No.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[James Shapiro]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Warning, this next part's a little graphic.

[James Shapiro]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[James Shapiro]

Even now, 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, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

understood, except this one time.

[Latif Nasser]

So will I turn her virtue into bitch.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Latif Nasser]

I don't know what he did, what, what lies.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[James Shapiro]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

And as for why.

[James Shapiro]

Maybe Othello was sleeping with Emilia.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[James Shapiro]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Taste that mortals Dead, tasted more, is dead. 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? And Iago, he refuses.

[Tom Jensen]

What

[James Shapiro]

we fully expect and what everybody on stage at that moment fully expects from him. You know, what does he say? Demand me nothing. What? You know, From this time forth, I never will speak word. 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. What? You know, you know,

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[James Shapiro]

What? You know. You know,

[Robert Krulwich]

Meaning.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[James Shapiro]

You know, damn it. The good Iagos make you want to shower the minute you leave the theater. Cause you are sullied by them.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

You know what I'm left.

[Robert Krulwich]

He had you there.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Pat Walters]

Yeah.

[Aaron Scott]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

That comes to us from our reporter, Aaron Scott.

[Tom Jensen]

Aaron?

[David Buss]

Yes.

[Tom Jensen]

Jeff Jensen.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nice to meet you.

[Alex Haslam]

Nice to meet you.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, so who is this guy we're hearing?

[Aaron Scott]

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 Lee on Ridgeway, the Green River Killer.

[Tom Jensen]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

The Green river murders terrorized Seattle in the 1980s.

[David Buss]

In Seattle today, a man called the Green River Killer.

[Aaron Scott]

Ridgeway murdered at least 49 women, the

[Planet Money Narrator]

so called Green River Killer.

[Aaron Scott]

But it's suspected that it could be upwards of 75, making him the most

[Tom Jensen]

prolific serial killer in American history. All the victims were prostitutes.

[Aaron Scott]

He buried them or left their bodies in these little clumps in the woods.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

The killers seem to have placed the

[Jad Abumrad]

bodies as if they were mannequins.

[Tom Jensen]

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

[Aaron Scott]

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.

[Tom Jensen]

In December of 2001, my father and his colleagues make the arrest.

[Jad Abumrad]

DNA testing matched him to the crime.

[Tom Jensen]

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. And over the next six months, from June to early December, it was Tom's

[Aaron Scott]

job to get Gary to open up

[Tom Jensen]

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

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Today's date is June 17, year 2003.

[Jad Abumrad]

The time now is 0836 hours.

[Aaron Scott]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

This is a continuation of an interview

[Aaron Scott]

with Gary Leon Ridgeway and interrogate him.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Yeah.

[Tom Jensen]

What did you remember since we last talked yesterday?

[Jeff Jensen]

I got those all night mostly, but I remember picking her up.

[Aaron Scott]

At this point, it immediately became apparent that there was going to be difficulties.

[Jeff Jensen]

As far as I know, I don't know if I did or not.

[Aaron Scott]

He would deny things, he would obscure, he would dance around things he didn't

[Tom Jensen]

really want a cop to, everything that he did.

[Jad Abumrad]

I gotta tell you, I'm not totally

[Tom Jensen]

comfortable that you're providing all the information,

[Aaron Scott]

especially when it came to one particular fact.

[Tom Jensen]

What my father and his colleagues know is that something was done to these bodies, many of them after they were murdered.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is he saying what I think he's saying?

[Aaron Scott]

Yeah.

[Tom Jensen]

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 attack of. Of interviewing him. That was very.

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

Stunningly, shockingly empathetic.

There's nothing to be ashamed of. Thousands of people have done it for you.

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

You're not gonna 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 an urge.

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

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 it out.

And he does.

[Jeff Jensen]

Yes, I did lie about that. But that's when I was. I went back one time before

[Tom Jensen]

that.

[Jad Abumrad]

I.

[Jeff Jensen]

Like I said, I gotta give it out. I can't keep holding it.

[Tom Jensen]

No. It's building up.

This was a major breakthrough.

[Aaron Scott]

So he ends up admitting it in graphic detail.

[Tom Jensen]

And it gets even more disturbing for my father as the conversation suddenly pivots to another victim other than one.

[Jeff Jensen]

Dad was really close to me by

[Tom Jensen]

the name of Carol. Carol Christensen.

[Jeff Jensen]

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

[Tom Jensen]

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

You like this girl?

[Jeff Jensen]

I liked her. She was good. She was good to me.

[Tom Jensen]

And as it happens, my father has very vivid memories of investigating the Carol Christiansen murder, speaking with Carol's mom. Carol's little daughter killed her.

[Jeff Jensen]

Shoot was. I knew she had a daughter.

[Tom Jensen]

And.

And so Gary starts going through this narrative of what he did to Carol the last time.

[Jeff Jensen]

She was in a hurry.

[Tom Jensen]

She, like, was allegedly in a rush, and she didn't. And, like, it kind of, like, hurt his feelings.

[Jeff Jensen]

Wasn't satisfying me. It made me mad because she was very much in a hurry. She had something else on her mind, and it killed her.

[Ben Walker]

Kill her.

[Jeff Jensen]

I choked her with my arm. And my killer cared for her because I dated her before but just didn't turn out.

[Tom Jensen]

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.

Back up, just back up a little bit.

The fact that 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 coming 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 all this.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Yes.

[Tom Jensen]

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

And Gary just says, yes, that is true. When I pick them up, I was going to kill them. Finally acknowledging, yeah, that's true, there's a pause, and my father just says, why?

[Jad Abumrad]

Why?

[Tom Jensen]

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 take these women off the streets and want to destroy them?

Why?

[Jad Abumrad]

Why?

[Tom Jensen]

And the answer is unsatisfying.

[Jeff Jensen]

Yes, I did need to kill. I need to kill her because of that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, what?

[Aaron Scott]

I just needed to kill because of that. And then he just trails off.

[Jad Abumrad]

I need to kill because of that. That's it.

[Tom Jensen]

You know, I just wanted to kill him. 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 touched me. Let me take a break.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, we're going off tape now. It's 09.24 hours on June 17th, year 2003.

[Tom Jensen]

He walked out of the room and just started weeping.

[Aaron Scott]

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 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.

[Tom Jensen]

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? 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And

[Aaron Scott]

why is it so important, do you think, to understand the why behind such an evil act?

[Tom Jensen]

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. 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? 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. 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.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Sa.

[Robert Krulwich]

Jeff Jensen's book is the Green River Killer A true detective Story. It's a graphic or an illustrated novel.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks also to reporter Aaron Scott for that story.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is Radiolab.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening.

[Gabby Santos]

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. Soren 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. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz, Gutierrez Sindhu, Naina Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Margauker, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitze, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angeli Mercado, and Sophie Semay.

[Stanley Milgram (voice in reenactment)]

Hi, this is Evan. I'm calling from Menlo Park, California. Leadership support for Radiolab. Science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Science Sandbox, a Simons foundation initiative, and the John Templeton foundation foundational support. Support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

[Unknown Advertiser Voice]

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[Jad Abumrad]

Prices and participation vary.

[Unknown Advertiser Voice]

Now at McDonald's, a McDouble is 250, so you can get your gym gains on or just get lunch for only 250. Get more value on the under three dollar menu.

[Jad Abumrad]

Limit time only.

[Dan Charles]

Prices and participation may vary.

[Robert Krulwich]

Prices may be higher for delivery.