The Bad Show

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 radio episodes, is the closest thing radio lab 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 radio episodes

I was ever on, you treat it like a little sonic, whereas Waldo, anyway, here it is, the bad show. You're listening to radio lab, radio from WNY, hello David, hello this is Pat, let's begin with this story from our producer Pat Walters, Pat good, okay, so I heard this one from this guy named David bus, 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, could you just

“just tell me the little story that you begin your book with?”

Okay, yes, this is one of the things that sparked my interest in the topic of murder, the whole thing happened several years ago, I had a very good friend, another professor at the University, and I used to socialize with him and his wife, and one evening they were throwing a party, and invited me over, and so when I went to the party, a party was already in full swing and 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, in a rage, how like you walk into the room, what would

“you find? Well he started, he started fuming that his wife had had distant and what did she do?”

She expressed disapproval about his 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 publicly humiliated, and while David's sitting in the bedroom with this friend, the guy looks up at him and he says, "I'm going to kill her." How did he say it? Like quietly or like through his teeth, you know,

"I'm going to kill her." David had always known this guy to be pretty mild manner,

but he is a large, very strong man with a black belt in karate. I knew what he was capable of, so I suggested that we go out for a walk, and I basically spent the next half hour walking around with him trying to cool him off. 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. 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 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 going to do damage to her. And so he says that and you're like, "Okay, yes, come over now."

Like, yeah, exactly. Meanwhile, later that night and the other set of town, his wife went into hiding.

that he was going to kill her. This 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 Laban today. We're going to get back. So to speak, we've done a good show. This is a bad show. So you ask like, "Why do people do bad thing?" He's actually new to be bad anyways. Like, how do you tell the real baddies from the rest of us?

“That's how I'm. I'm Chad Abamran, I'm a poet. This is Radio Lab, the bad show.”

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. But at this point, David moved on to a new university and he's teaching an introductory psychology class. 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. 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 started reading these and I was just astonished to find page after page of yeses. And not just yeses, but these very vivid descriptions about who they would kill, where they do it,

“when the precise method, how many of them went into that kind of detail?”

I would say 75 or 80 percent. Wow. And you a little bit like horrified. Like, oh my god,

my students are murderers. I was pretty stunned and so I expanded the sample where we asked about 5000 people all of the world saying a poor hero, the UK, that same question. Have you ever thought about killing someone? And 91 percent of the men said yes and 84 percent of the women said yes. I've thought about killing someone. Yes, if any sizeable 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 a woman. Sure. Okay, this is a 20 year old female. We asked who do 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 and 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 in

ran away. When I asked how close she came to killing him, she estimated 60%. 16. I don't think I've ever had a fantasy of 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 away this one? It's being blackmailed. No, no one has ever sent about a sex tape that I've ever, no.

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? I will. Thanks. I think they'd have to be extremely extreme. Well,”

you know how my mother died. No. And you know what this actually brings us to our first stop of the

hour. So I mean, just to set it up, Robert, I'm going to give me this piece of paper here. What is this? So these are some word pairs, some read these words that were these words here. Yep, nice day, a fat neck. You said face. What is this soft hair? Yeah, I don't know what this is. You just word paired. I want you to commit them to memory. Commit them to memory, you know what?

electro-tastinger. There we go. There we go. There we go. Wait a second. Clear air.

“Okay, so give me the paper back. Already? Times up. So I'm just going to go into this other room over here.”

What, what? So I'm going to talk to you over this intercom. Okay. I'm going to give you a test. I'm not ready for this. To the best of your memory, which word was matched with nice, was it nice day? Nice sky? Nice job? Oh, nice chair. Answer please. I don't want ladies second. Just push the button that corresponds to the right word. Okay, I'm choosing job. Wrong answer is day. Sorry man. 285 volts. I have to give you a little

one. What if you just who? Just personal. Your drugs. 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. That experiment has been conducted in the elegant interaction laboratory at the University. That's Stanley Milgram talking about the

“experiment and it filmed in case you've never heard of this. Probably happened in case you haven't.”

Here's what you did. He recruited a bunch of subjects. The subjects of 40 males between the ages of

20 and 50s normal every day dudes. The subjects range in occupation from cooperation, presidents to good human men and plumbers. And he ran them through something like what you and I just did. You would have each subjects sit down at a table. I'll see you right here. I'm front of this really impressive looking machine. It had lots of switches on it. It generates electric shocks on your 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 was supposed to have memorized some words. And every time that guy got a word wrong, like you just did, you know, chap and constantly. And 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.”

The pilgrim staged the whole thing like it was some experiment about memory and punishment, but of course it wasn't about that. It was about how far with 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. This is a moment when human cruelty was on trial.

Quite literally. When I've stand before you judges of Israel in this court, to accuse Adolf Ichman, I do not stand alone. So Stanley Milgram actually begins these experiments the same year that Adolf Ichman goes on trial for Nazi war crimes. That's radio producer Ben Walker, he'll be our guide for the 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 in a lab at Yale University with a bunch of regular Americans. Like, is that something that's universal, or just an Ichman 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. We're willing to shock their fellow citizens over and over again.

Even past when they were screaming and paying. Even when they stopped screaming? Yeah, when they were maybe dead. We better check it out, I'm sure. You want to answer me or nothing. Please continue. Go on, please. They continue chalking their corpses. His 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 in you mainly 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, yeah. Like this guy did Alex Haslam, professor of psychology

at the University of Exeter. Then a different picture will emerge. Really. That story has been

told a million and one time. So the last 50 years we've just got to get out of here. Now what you

about the baseline study. The one that everybody knows, the so-called baseline. The 65 percent

“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 the same paradox. Stanley Milgram took electric shock to very seriously. He did this experiment a bunch of times in a bunch of different ways. It had all sorts of different things he would change where the shocker and the shock he sat. Yeah, 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, I've got in front of me. I've just got the, the data from the Milgram.

So let me just get that out. I mean. So again, the baseline study is the one where 65 percent of

volunteers go all the way. Highest dose of electricity. Exactly. 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. A vegan drops to about 40 percent. And an experiment number four when the

“teacher has to hold the learners hand down on a plate in order him to feel the shock?”

It drops to about 30 percent. Wow, experiment 14. If the experiment is not a scientist, but is an ordinary man not wearing a white coat. A vegan drops to 20 percent. Oh, really? Well, how low can we go? Okay. Here's another one. This 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 percent under those circumstances

go on. And then the final one, experiment 15. Of course, not me. You just have one experiment 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 over the world. Zero. Zero. Zero in that condition. You said zero. No, they're absolutely absolutely zero. That one person. No, no, not a salt. Exactly zero percent. Well, all right. I'm starting to feel a little bit better

about my fellow man. One second. Hey. Hey. Shh. Okay. Where is he? I'm in a closet. I'm in a closet. Because this room is echoey. And you know, there's nothing like a closet full of clothes to help balance that out. That's true. That's true. All right. So keep going. So you see, it's just in that one experiment that 65 percent 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. Continue using the last switch on the board, please. I'm not getting the answer. Please continue. The next word is white. They have debates with themselves. Thank you. You're looking on them, please. Debates with the experimenter. Not once we've started the experimenter. What if sometimes the man has to attack this off of that? The experiment requires that we continue to learn, please. Don't it, don't the man's

help mean anything? Whether the learner likes it or not, but he might be dead in there. What's interesting is that how all of these struggles all of them play out the same way. It's the experimenter, prodding the shockers along. For me, it's all about the prods. 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, the experimenter would break out prod number two. The experiment requires that you continue. Well, the experiment requires to mean, "I know it does serve, but I mean, he's up to $195." 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 tell a little bit more direct. It's a bit stronger, but it's not an order. Not quite. But the fourth prod, the critical, the critical fourth prod is an absolute order. The fourth prod

“is, "You have to know the choice teacher." You have no other choice teacher. You must 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 redonic 2006. Total disobedience. Total disobedience. Anytime the experimenter said you must continue, the shocker would say, "Hell, no, I don't." Here's another one. Here's another one. We have no other choice. You must try to have a choice.

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

That's my opinion. That's where I understand that. 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 if you ask university undergraduates, what does the milligrams study show? They will invariably say something like, they show that people obey orders. 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 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.”

Hi, let's go into our instructions. We will begin with this test. The participants are there in the study. They've got a very plausible, very credible, high status scientist in a high status scientific institution who is going to do this powerful piece of science. 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 worth while 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 think that science is worth pursuing, you say, okay, I'll go along with this. Seriously, they were 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, no sir, three bags full, sir. They're engaged with the”

task. They're trying to be good participants. They're trying to do the right thing. They're not doing something because they have to. They're doing it because they think they ought to. And that's all the difference in the world. Suddenly, I'm thinking, this is actually a darker interpretation. It's an original, absolutely darker. Is they are doing a no question about it? They have the agency. Yep. And they think it's right. Although clearly they're on some level, they know it isn't.

There's a sort of chilling comparison, which is a speech that him like gave to the SS, some SS leaders when they were about to commit a range of atrocities. And you 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 realise 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. Well, to them. Anyway, I'm almost done,

guys. Give me two more minutes. Two more minutes. So in the male groom case. Uh-huh. Well, if the idea is that people will do bad if they think it's good to 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. If the experiment had to be successful, it had to be carried on. The question is, they

filled out our part of the Milgram Archive at Yale. I'm 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 dupped. Research in any field is a must particularly in this day and age. Do you think that more studies of the sort should be carried out? Definitely, yes. We as ob-onlookers to the study, we have this kind of God-like sort of vision of like, well, of course, what they're doing is wrong.

But if it looked out from another perspective, there was no 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 going to be **** God. Because it's like we started with this experiment that we all

see as evidence of human's latent capacity for evil. 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. Yeah. Now you're saying, actually, you could read that. That very dark fact, as being actually evidence of something quite noble. Well, if you dress it up, and if you just had some mind of parents,

the paradigm, you could presumably make, you know, 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 were really were. I had to administer shocks to 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. So in the end, where do you come down? Do you leave this experiment in a light mood or in a dark mood?

I would say in a powerful mood, we're close to some really fundamental truths about human nature.

There's lots and lots of lessons here. But one is, I think, you know, when you're enjoying to do something for the greater good, maybe ask yourself the question, what is greater and what is good? Well, that right there have slaps some quotations around that. Thank you, Ben. And also, thank you to Alex Haslam professor of psychology at the University of Exeter. Big news. RadioLab is headed to the Try Becker Festival podcast stage for a special live show in NYC.

We'll be headlining the podcast program with this one night only live show at the festival's 25th anniversary.

“Come out on June 9th. I think I can safely promise that it will be sweeter than anything you have ever seen or heard.”

Tickets are available now at trybeckerfilm.com/audio. That's trybeckerfilm.com/audio. All right, 3, 2, 1. Hey, I'm Janabum Ron. I'm Robert Crowwich. This is RadioLab and today, evil? Although, I don't know if that's the right way 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 I heard about him from Science Riders 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? He was doing his great science work right around the turn of the 20th century. So, right around 1900, very distinctive looking man, bald on top, trim nice mustache,

“wore a little piece of nez. Is that how you say that?”

Is that even a clip? Prince Nez, right? 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. Just to put that in context, they bring a few other of our storytellers in. He comes from Brazelau, Germany. That's Fred Kaufman, reporter, which is a fairly small, you know, a small, sort of town. And so does Clara. That's Fritz Haber's wife. We're going to 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, he's put it in context. Dan Charles, he's historian. 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.

Fast forward, 10 years Fritz Haber 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. Do you 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 stars. So around the turn of the century for German scientists like Haber, this was the challenge. He is he wants to feed. He wants to feed Germany. 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. They needed more nitrogen. Nitrogen is an essential

part of amino acids and proteins. And when you stick a seed, like a weed seed in the ground, one of the reasons it grows is because it's sucking up all the nitrogen in the soils. 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 Kalmenur 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 Nasser. You know, this was like oil is today. Everybody was desperate for sources, new sources of nitrogen, and they make the problem even more 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

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. That's right. And part of the problem here, and although once again,”

we're getting a little head of ourselves, we'll be right back to that. But wait, wait, let's just finish this. Is that is that nitrogen is 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 calculation showed that it couldn't be done.

At least not without a tremendous amount of energy. More energy than seem like possible to make. Yeah, yes, but you know, being ambitious. Hover starts thinking, in order to do this, we need to 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 tag under extreme extreme pressure at high temperature. And then he forces hydrogen into the tank. Get in there. And you have a number of chemical reactions. And what happens is that you're you're elbowing the nitrogen apart from itself. And then forcing it to bond with the hydrogen in a new way. 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.

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

Bread from the air was the phrase, because Hover 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 a hundred million tons of synthetic fertilizer produced in Australia each year and that tonnages 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 Hover process.

No, it's really. And so in 1918, Fritz Hover gets a no-bill 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.

All right, just to back up for one second. After Hover'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 Stan Charles again. I mean, it's a pretty heavy thing for you know, Jewish kid from Brazil 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, but because he loves his country,

he loves the fatherland and he loves Germany. So when World War I 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 tri-valent bomb is so strong that when

it comes back together, at energy that's released, it could be used for life or death. In any case, back to World War I. There's trench warfare, it gets bogged down, and hobber has an idea. It goes straight to the German I command and he pitches this idea. He says, "Well, we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas."

"Clorine gas." Well, basically, bring it to the front, and 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,

and no one even had to ask. Text command of them partially. He travels to the front

“and on April 22nd 1950, a 1915. Haber finds himself in a little town in Belgium,”

called YPRES. Actually, the Americans called it "Yepes." Whatever you 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. Our friend, our friend, a friend of mine, for a toddler. Our friend. He's bald. He has a pot belly. He has these ponds,

and as spectacles, he's chomping on a Virginian cigar. He was always smoking these Virginians

cigars, and he's wearing a fur coat, really. And 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 6 p.m. on April 22nd, when the wind was just right, he says, "Hobbers, 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.

Just trying to imagine that. Is that 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 it. And it's moving in about one meter per second. In according to some accounts,

as it crept across no man's land, the leaves would just sort of shrivel, and the grass was turning to the color of metal. Birds would just fall from the air. Within minutes, the gas reached the ally side, and as soon as it did. So it just 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 fluids so quickly that you sort of drown in your own flam, so they were actually drowning. Literally drowning on land, while yellow mucus was throbbing out of their mouths. Those who could still breathe would turn blue. This is a description of hell. Yeah, but Hobber saw it as a wonderful success and wished

wished that the Germans and bid 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 a captain. And he goes home for a few days, a hero. But when he gets there, he has to contend with his wife, Clara, Emma, of our Clara. Also from Brazil, also from Jewish family, and also a scientist, unusually so in those times.

She was actually 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?" But Hobber 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. No, we don't actually 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, and that was what they had an argument. That's his story in Fritz Stern, who also happens to be Fritz Hobber's Godson. They had a quarrel. More than that. That's called it a fight. And later that night after the party, Hobber takes a bunch of sleeping pills, goes to sleep. And she takes his service

revolver. Fritz Hobber's pistol walks outside to the garden. And pulls the trigger.

“Shoes herself in the chest and is found by her son by her son. Yes, age 13, I think. And he”

finds there actually still alive with the life about to run out of her. Hobber, it's unknown what happens for the rest at evening, but it is a well-documented fact that the very next morning. On schedule, he goes back to the front of the eastern front. Leaving his son alone with his dead mother. That's cold, huh? Yeah. Heartless. It was a total moment. Did he run away? Was it duty? The son eventually, after he emigrates to America, kills himself.

I just want to take a shower, look, walk away. Yeah, near me too. You know, on the other hand, if you look at the grand Calculus people, he's helped her fed versus people. He's killed. I mean, he's built that 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, ultimately 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, "I think 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? Well, to keep going, story. Yeah. All right. So Sam, what happened to this guy after World War One? 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 sea water, which contains very small levels of gold, but over the entire ocean there's a lot of gold dissolved into the sea. And he spends five years in a few tile effort to distill gold from the ocean's waters. 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 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. Now, however was Jewish, but because he'd served in World War One, he technically would be exempt. But 75% of the people who worked for him in 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 they're grand parents for.

So he sends a letter to the Ministry of Education resigning and he leaves Germany.

“Telling a friend, he felt like he 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, a drift. 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 he dies. Now, there's a footnote to this that is very strange. I got a little, uh, my, my, my, my,

says my dorsal hair stood up when I read the end of this. Right. So during World War I, Hobber's institute had developed a formulation of, um, insect killing gas, called the Zyclan. Zyclan 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 a warning smell, 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 Zyclan stuff. And they asked for it to be reformulated to take out the warning smell and it becomes Zyclan B, the killing gas of the concentration camps. Did members of Hobber's family die in the concentration camps? Yeah. Members of his extended family did. Certainly friends of his did. There's something deeply, deeply wounding, distressing, upsetting at the thought that he had

anything to do with Zyclan B, but he did. The use of it, he could never imagine.

guy. Despite the chlorine gas, he didn't intend for that to happen. He could have never imagined

“that. No, but, but this part of me says, you know, here's a guy who just wanted to do everything”

better than he 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 immoral athleticism, you know. He does it without humility, without a lot of doubt. And, you know, it's a craft, but it's a craft with consequences. And to approach it with kind of crazy joy, I don't know. I would rather have scientists who carry doubt with them as they proceed. Yeah, I agree with them. Maybe it's all about doubt, and...

Thanks to all our great storytellers, Dan Charles, Sam Keen, Lattiff Nasser, Fred Kaufman,

and Fritt Stern, you can find out more information about all those guys on our website,

radiolab.org. Hi, Lulu here, and this episode is sponsored by Better Help. May is mental health awareness month, and as someone who reports on mental health, who likes talking to people about their mental health, and what they look to, in science, in the natural world, in faith, in friendship, but wherever it may be to help guide them through the rough patches of life, I just wanted to take a moment to say what seems to help people,

turn corners, find relief, get out of rats, and even flourish is having someone with you. As much as we can feel private about our mental health struggles, you do not have to go it alone. So this may, why not treat your mental health to a buddy, and who better to talk to, and a fully licensed mental health therapist, with over 30,000 therapists available. Better help as someone you can talk to available at pretty much any time that's convenient for you

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Big news. Radiolab is headed to the Tribeca Festival podcast stage for a special live show in NYC. We'll be headlining the podcast program with this one night-only live show at the festival's 25th

“anniversary, come out on June 9th. I think I can safely promise that it will be sweeter than anything”

you have ever seen or heard. tickets are available now at tribecafilm.com/audio. That's tribecafilm.com/audio. Hey, I'm Jada Boomron. I'm Robert Philwitt. This is Radiolab, 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 he's different from the rest of us. Can we really come to any kind of agreement with the hobby or thing? Yeah, I don't think we're quite in this hobby. 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 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 and Dronicus, there's a character by the name of Aaron the Moore. And there's a moment in the play where Aaron gets up on stage,

looks at the onions and says, let me just tell you the kinds of things I've been up to recently. Set deadly enmity between two friends, make poor men's cattle break their necks, set fire on bonds, and he stacks in the night, and bit the owners' quench them with the tears. Off, have I digged up dead men from their graves, and set them up right, have their dear friends door. Even even when their sorrows almost were forgotten. And on their skin,

it's 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. So he's bad. Yeah, but see, here's the interesting thing. According to James,

he is 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 him what they need to know. So there's a

“way in which is a touch of spark of humanity. Just a little glimmer. And he says, that's what”

people want it. They want it someone who was really thrillingly bad, but in the end was redeemed a bit.

play, you'd seen all the plays. In the 1500s, you could always go to a public hanging.

“And you'd go from much the same reasons. Those days, if you're convicted, male felon,”

you are, you know, strung up, but you're not allowed to hang until you're die. You're cut down before then. Morning. This next part's a little graphic. Then the executioner, cast rates 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 horribleness, there was often a moment that people waited for. And in a way, we wait for it still, 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, I, I, Harley, 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 piece with his maker before.

“He dies. That's what you do. And that's what Shakespeare did in all his plays.”

You would give all his baddies at least one moment where they could be understood. Except this one time. He is a soldier. He works for a general. The general's name is a fellow. They're supposedly chums, but general a fellow has no idea that he can't go. So he plans to destroy a fellow. And we don't exactly know why. There are hints of reasons, like maybe he thinks a fellow is sleeping with his wife. We're not sure, but the weird thing

is that he decides not just to take down a fellow, but everybody. He stirs up hatred between friends between lovers. He even schemes against his own wife. This is just somebody who's performing

“brain surgery with that anesthesia and other people. He's a master, platter. And as for wine, maybe”

a fellow was sleeping with Amelia. But as the play goes on, you begin to think that maybe that's just another lie. Eventually, I go convinces a fellow that his wife has been disloyal which he hasn't. And then a fellow goes and kills his own wife. Smothering her with a pillow. This is just had tsunami of evil or passes through the plant. And at the very end of the play, when everyone finds out what a yag goes down, a fellow asks him, "Why? Why did you do this?" Any yago? He refuses what

we fully expect in what everybody on stage at that moment fully expects from him. You know, what does he say? Demand mean 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 mortal order to the world and a mortal norm. What you know, you know. 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? What you know, you know, meaning what any idea was in his mind was he trying to make a commentary on

something that was he grappling with something, do we know? Damn it! The good yagos make you want to shower them and you leave the theater 'cause you are solid by them. Thank you to James Shapiro, who's most recent book is called "Contested Will." You know what, you know what, you know, I'm left to ask 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 yago 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 which 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, that comes to us from our reporter Aaron Scott. Alright, who is this guy here? This is Jeff Jensen and he's a reporter

in US history, Gary Lee on Ridgeway. The Green River Killer, the first victims of the Green River

“Killer were found in the summer of 1982. The Green River murders terrorized Seattle in the 1980s.”

In Seattle's a day a man called the Green River Killer, Ridgeway murdered at least 49 women. It's 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 kind of seem to have placed the bodies as if they were mannequins. And in January of 1994,

the Green River Task Force was formed. And my father was recruited to the task force. 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. In December of 2001, my father and his colleagues, make the arrest. DNA testing matched him to the crime. They arrest Gary Lee on Ridgeway. And on June 13th, 2003, Gary was secretly taken out

of his jail cell and brought to a sort of very non-descript concrete, ugly office building. And over the next six months from June to early December, who is Tom's job to get Gary to open up and give up the few details that they really need it to link him, certifiably, to all these crimes. There's data as June 17th. June 13th, 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 in the on Ridgeway and interrogate him.

“Yeah, what if you remember since we last talked to his audience?”

I've got those all out and I mostly moved to some that I remember picking her up. It immediately became apparent that there was going to be difficulties. It would deny things. He would obscure. He would dance around things. He didn't really want to cop to everything that he did. I got to tell you, I'm not totally comfortable

that you're providing all of the information, especially when it came to one particular fact. What my father and his colleagues know is that something was done to these body many of them after they were murdered. Did he, is he saying when I think he's saying? Yeah, Necrofelia. 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 interviewing him that was very, it's okay. It's okay if he did. Stunningly, shockingly empathetic. Nothing to be ashamed of.

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 need to know. The father's trying to like reach out to him. Okay. I know it was more than the first.

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

Okay, it's all right. We've got to know, yeah. That's one of the things we have to know. That's why it's okay to let him know. And he dies. Yes, I did lie about that. Detective Matson, I would back one time before, you know,

I'm in some of the, that I like to say that I've got to give it out. It can't keep hold of it.

No, 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. By the name of Carol Christian said, Chris, I gave her a couple of times three times two times before.

He brings her up as an example of a woman that he actually had strong feelings for. And as it happens, my father has very vivid memories of investigating the Carol Christian sin murder. Speaking with Carol's mom, Carol's little daughter. He'll her, she was, I knew she had a daughter.

And so, Gary starts going through this narrative of what he did to Carol. The last time she was in a hurry, she was allegedly in a rush. And she didn't, and like, it kind of like hurt his feelings.

She had something else in her mind.

“And a, you know, killer, a killer, a shelter with my arm.”

And way killer cared for because I dated her for, but just take, didn't turn 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.

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 going to happen. And you've done this, how many times before? 10, 10, 15, 20 times.

“You know what's going to happen, you should visit tomorrow.”

And you like, you're telling this always.

Yes. Get you to go into this individually. Knowing Paul well that it could end up in her death. And Gary just says, "Yes, that is true." When I picked them up, I was going to kill them.

Finally, acknowledging, "Yeah, that's true." There's a pause and my father just says, "Why? Why?" "Why did you do this?" "You need to kill." And that was a question that had haunted my father for decades.

Why? In that why and 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? Why?

And the answer is unsatisfying.

Yes, I did need to kill because he was out. 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.

That's it. 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, "Touch me." You've touched me, Gary.

You've touched me. I'm gonna take a break. Okay, we're going off to take now. So, in 1924 hours on June of 17th, year 2003. He walked out of the room and just started weeping.

They spent the next six months interrogating him. They brought in psychiatrists and friends, 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 on 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.

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.

“And why is it so important you think to understand the why behind such an evil act?”

Well, the thing that haunts me about the why question is that I'm reminded of like one of the oldest stories in the Bible, which is the story of Job. The story of Job is that one day God and Satan are having a conversation. And they're saying, "Have you checked out Job?" You know, I'm really proud of Job. He believes in me and he trusts me so much.

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 and the face of profound evil,

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.”

[Music]

Jeff Jensen's book is the green river killer at true detective story. It's a graphic

or an illustrated novel. Thanks also to reporter Aaron Scott for that story.

“This is Radio Lab. Thanks for listening.”

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