The Bad Show

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Terms and conditions apply. I'm Robert Krollich. Radio Lab is supported by Audible. So as we begin this episode of The Bad Show, check out The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language in the mind.

Go to Audible.com slash Radio Lab or text Radio Lab to 500-500 for a free 30-day trial and a free audio book. Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Okay, here we go. Ready?

Robert? Yes. I'm Jad Abelrod. Robert Krollich.

I feel like we haven't you and I sat together and said our names in quite some time. That's because Mollie's been in the chair. Mollie's been killing it with the GONAT series. That was for those of you who haven't heard it yet.

This is a kind of a rush through sex reproduction. What makes boys, boys and girls, girls and the infinity of gray spaces in between. And now that we're sort of just on the other side of that, we thought that maybe as we turn a corner ourselves, we should refresh, but in an odd sort of way. I mean, you know, it's just one of those things we've been bringing back shows that we think are just vibrating still in the world.

So at a time when there are people all over our country, I'm other people all over our country and thinking, she's bad. He's bad. You're bad. I'm good.

You're bad. There's a lot of black and white thinking happening right now. Yeah. And so we've decided that it's time to go back to something we did once upon a time when we were wondering about good and bad.

We did a show called The Bad Show. We're sort of asking these questions. Like, what makes a person inherently good or bad? Is there a way to explain why some people act the way they do?

No one has a monopoly on bad. But we thought we would play this show about the little bit of bad that is in all of us. And the really, really bad that is in some of us. Yeah.

Hello, David. Yes. Hello. Hi, Pat.

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

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 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 do you find?

Well, he started he started fuming that his wife had had dised him. And what did she do? She expressed disapproval about his clothing choices. She made fun of his shirt or something.

But did it publicly in front of her friends? So it was 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 mannered. 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 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.

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 Lab and today we're going to get bad.

So to speak, we've done a good show. This is the bad show. So we asked like, why do people do bad things? This is actually mean to be bad.

Anyways, like how do you tell the real baddies from the rest of us? That's not how I'm Janibamran. I'm probably just this 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. 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%. Wow. Are you a little bit like horrified? Like, oh my god, my students are murders.

Horrified. 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.

I've thought about killing someone. Yes. If any sizable fraction actually acted on their homicidal fantasy, the streets would be running red. Yeah, but those are fantasy.

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 when 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 laughing legently so that he wouldn't suspect anything. I thought about grabbing him life 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 I asked how close she came to killing him, she estimated 60%. 60. I don't think I've ever had a fantasy that anatomically specific, where I would see the part of the other person that I was going to stab or plan it like that.

Well, have you ever been blackmailed the way this woman was being blackmailed? No, no one has ever sent about a sex tape that I've ever known. 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 think I think they'd have to be extreme in the extreme. Well, you know how my planet I am. No, no. And you know what, this actually makes us to our first stop of the hour.

So let me just set it up. Robert, I'm going to give you this piece of paper here. What is this? These are some word pairs.

Some read these words. These words here. Yep. Nice day.

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

You just wear it. I want you to commit them to memory. Commit them to memory. You know what you're doing that.

Just give me your finger. I'm going to connect this little electro taster. There we go. Wait a second.

Clear air. Give me the paper back. Already? Hands up.

So I'm just going to go into this other room over here. What? Alright, so we're going to talk to you over this intercom. Okay.

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. Nice chair. Answer please.

I don't want to let you just push the button. The corresponds to the right word. Okay, I'm choosing job. Wrong.

Answer is day. Sorry, man. 285 volts. You have to give you a little.

What did you just know? First of all, your drums. Obviously no need to be alarmed. That was not a real shock.

We were just enacting an old, very famous experiment you may have heard about. It is May 1962. Done by this guy. An experiment is being conducted in the elegant interaction laboratory at Yale University.

That's Stanley Milgram talking about the experiment in the film. In case you've never heard of this, it probably happened. In case you haven't. Here's what we did.

You recruited a bunch of subjects. The subjects are 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50. It's normal every day. Dude.

The subjects range in occupation from cooperation to good humor man and plumbers. And you ran them through something like what you and I just did. You would have each subject sit down at a table. I was too far here.

In front of this really impressive looking machine. This machine. It had lots of switches on it. I was generating electric shocks on it.

I was just switching all the way down to the learner. It gets a shock. 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 don't have to be constant. The volunteer was instructed to shock that guy. We hired a higher voltage.

Now the volunteer couldn't see the guy he was shocking. But he could definitely hear him. The yolgram 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 would these people go? How many times would they shock that sad sap in the next room just because they were being told? 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 stand before you, judges of Israel in this court to accuse a dog's eichmann, I do not stand alone. So Stanley Milgram actually begins these experiments the same year that Adolf Eichmann 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.

285 volts in a lab at Yale University with a bunch of regular Americans. Like is that something that's universal? Yeah, we're just like nothing. 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.

Even when they stopped screaming? Yeah, when they were maybe dead. They continued shocking 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 their inhuman nature? The gang behavior that allows an individual to act innuemingly.

Genocide. It's like a downloadable from the internet instant defense for doing wrong. But if you look at Milgram's work closely, 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 times for the last 50 years. We've just got to get everywhere.

Now what you need to understand about Alex Haslam is that he hates it when interviewers only want to talk about the baseline study. The one that everybody knows is the so-called baseline. The 65% one. The one we just talked about.

There's more. There's more. There's more to it. Yeah.

Because actually he studied between 20 and 40 different variants of this same paradigm. Stanley Milgram took electric shocks very seriously. He did this experiment a bunch of times in a bunch of different ways. He had all sorts of different things.

He would change where the shocker and the shock he sat. He had women participants. He had an experiment who wasn't a scientist but was a member of the general public. And every scenario produced a different result.

Really? I mean, I'm just quite in front of me. I've just got the data from the Milgram. So let me just get that out.

So again, the baseline study is the one where 65% of volunteers go all the way. Highest dose of electricity. But in experiment number three, if they put the shock in the same room with the shocker, so the shocker could actually see the person that he's shocking. A beading stops to about 40%.

And in experiment number four, when the teacher has to hold the learner's hand down on a plate in order him to feel the shock. It drops to about 30%. Wow. Experiment 14.

If the experimenter is not a scientist but is an ordinary man not wearing a white coat. A beading stops to 20%. Oh, really? Hello, can we go?

Okay. Here's another one. This variant. Experiment 17.

There's you and there's two other participants. Both actors. If those two participants refuse to go on, like saying like, I don't want to kill a guy. Only 10% under those circumstances go on.

And then a final one. Experiment 15. Of course, normally 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 0% going all the way.

Zero in that condition. You said zero. No one goes right to the end. No one.

No one. No one. Not assault. Exactly zero percent.

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

Okay. Where is he? Am I in a closet? In a closet?

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

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

Continue using a last switch on the board, please. I'm not going to answer. Please continue. The next word is white.

They have debates with themselves. Do you think you're looking at a place? Debates with the experimenter. Not once we started the experimenter.

What if some type of man had attacked or something there? The experiment requires that we continue. The one who don't have those demands help me in any way. Whether the learner likes it or not.

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. You're not going to give them what 450 volts? Every shot now?

That's correct. For me, it's all about the prods. This is what totally pulled me into the story. Prods.

Stanley Milgram had four scripted prods that he wrote out for his experimenters. But when the subject 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 at 195 volts.

And if they still were resisting or struggling, they'd get prod number three. It's absolutely essential what you continue with. It's absolutely essential. It's a little bit more direct.

It's a bit stronger. It's not an order. But the fourth prod, the critical, the critical fourth prod is an absolute order. The fourth prod is...

You gotta know what 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 redone in 2006, total disobedience. Total disobedience. Any time the experimenter said you must continue, the shocker would say, hell no I don't.

You don't know what the choice teacher. You don't have a choice. I'm not going to go ahead with it. Well, we'll have to discontinue the experimenter.

I'm sorry. Here's another one. We had no other choice. You must have?

You don't have a choice. Those of you who don't continue, we're going to have to discontinue the experiment. You'll have to each just cut it out. After all, you know what he can stand.

That's my opinion. That's what I understand. 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 a Milgram 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, then what does it show? Okay, I think it looks like this. The participants are there in the study.

They've got a very plausible, very credible high-status scientist in a 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, they're worthwhile doing, and 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.

So you're saying they were shocking these people because they thought it was worthwhile? Look, the participants, you know, they're not, it's not just blind obedience. Oh, you tell me. So yes, there's no, so three bags of all said.

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 think this is actually a darker interpretation of the original. Absolutely darker.

Because they are doing a no question about it. They have the agency. And they think it's right. Although clearly on some level, they know it is.

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. And 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. Wow. So then- Hey, wait, I'm almost done, guys.

Give me two more minutes. Two more minutes. So in the Milgram case, with the ideas that people will do bad, if they think it's good, the 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. 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. willing to help in a worthwhile experiment. And it's kind of surprising. A lot of them are really positive, even though they've just been told that they were duped.

Research in any field is a must, particularly in this day and age. Do you think that more studies of this sort should be carried out? Definitely, yes. We, as onlookers to the study, we have this kind of god-like vision of, well, of course, what they're doing is wrong.

But if it looked out 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 can see that's a good thing. I mean, I'm giving you a ****.

God, 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. Now you're saying, actually, you could read that.

That very dark fact as being actually evidence of something quite noble. Well, if you dressed it up and if you just had some mind of errands of the paradigm, you could presumably make this out. These are people who aren't quite a noble. They are.

I mean, it's the fact, of course, that they're administering pain to a stranger. That's what's horrifying about it. But imagine they were administering pain themselves. 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 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?

Overall, I would say in a powerful mood. We're close to some really fundamental truth about human nature. And my view is about human nature that it affords infinite potentials for lightness and dark. There's lots and lots of lessons here.

But one is, I think, when you're enjoying to do something for the greater good, maybe I'll ask you self the question, what is greater and what is good? Oh, that right there. Slap some quotations around that. Thanks to Ben Walker, who's podcast.

He has a podcast. That's a good one. It's called Too Much Information. Yes, it's awesome.

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

Okay, here goes. Take one. My name's Benjamin Walker, and here are some radio lab. Radio lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P.

Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. For more information about Sloan at www.sloane.org. I'm going to talk about him from a better part of the year.

He's such a puzzle to me. I can't quite place him. It's very fun to try. And I heard about him from Science Writer Sam Kean.

Well, let's talk about Fritz Haber. First of all, can you just, 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. Balled on top, trim, nice mustache, wore a little piece of Nez. Is that how you say that? I thought I thought it was Prince Nez.

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 Breslau, Germany. That's Fred Kaufman, reporter.

Which is a fairly small, you know, smaller sort of town. And so does Clara. That's for Tupper's wife. We'll get a meter later.

Right? Clara comes in 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. You know? Put it in context.

Dan Charles, he says 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.

That's for 10 years for its hubbers professors. Small University. He's working with chemicals. It's about 1880.

And he's wasn't 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. 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 Crimean War in the 1850s. Europe starves. So around the turn of the century for German scientists like Haber, this was the challenge.

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

And everyone thought, well, we know the solution. Yeah. We just need a whole lot more of one simple element. Nitrogen.

Nitrogen. Nitrogen. Nitrogen. Nitrogen.

Nitrogen. Nitrogen. Nitrogen is an essential part of amino acids and proteins. And when you stick a seed, like a wheat seed in the ground.

One of the reasons it grows is because it's sucking up all the nitrogen in the soil. To make it sell walls without nitrogen, you don't have life. Now, of course, you could find some nitrogen out in the world. Natural deposits would be like seaweed or manure was one.

You could find it in cow manure or wano. Which was basically that 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 Lata Finoster. You know, this was like oil is today.

This is everybody was desperate for sources and new sources of nitrogen and to 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 a lot.

Yes, 80% of the air is nitrogen atoms. So all the nitrogen you ever need was right there. 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, we'll be right back to that.

But wait, wait, wait. Let's just finish this. Is that nitrogen is trivalent? Trivalent.

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

His calculations showed that it couldn't be done. At least not without a tremendous amount of energy. More energy than seemed like possible to make. Yeah, yes, but you know.

Being ambitious. Hobber 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 tank. Under extreme, extreme pressure. At high temperature.

And then he forces hydrogen into the tank. Get in there. And the 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.

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 arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all.

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

Now we're seeing about 100 million tons of synthetic fertilizer produced in industrial 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 hobber process. No, she really.

And so in 1918, Fritz Hobber gets a Nobel Prize. But this is my such an interesting guy around the same time officials in the US government are calling him a war criminal. All right, just a backup for one second. After Hobber's nitrogen discovery, he was promoted.

You know, he takes over leadership of this institute in Berlin and he starts hobnobbing with a whole different level of society. That's Dan Charles again. I mean, it's a pretty heady thing for, you know, Jewish kid from Breslau to be hobnobbing with the emperor and cabinet ministers. He's part of the club and he really, really relished it.

And not just because he was vain, which everyone agrees he was, 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-veiling bond 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 hopper has an idea. It goes straight to the German icon and any pitches this idea. He says, well, we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas. Chlorine 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 are like, this is not how you fight a war.

It's like playing dirty, sort of unsports them in life. But he organizes soldiers, he organizes whole gas units. And nobody even had asked. It takes command of them partially.

He travels to the front and on April 22nd, 1915. In 1915. Haber finds himself in a little town in Belgium called YPRES. Actually, the Americans called it Yeeeps.

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 there behind the German lines is our friend, our friend of me, Fertsauber.

He's bald, he has a pot belly, he has these poncenese spectacles, he's chomping on a Virginian cigar, he was always smoking his Virginian cigars, and he's wearing a fur coat, really. And what is basically like a backdad 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 win was just right, he says, Haber's gas troops unscrew, they opened the valves on almost 6,000 canes, containing 150 tons of chlorine. That's like an adult blue whale of chlorine. I'm 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. And it's moving at about one meter per second. 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 allied side and as soon as it did, soldiers began to convulse. They were tagging, 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, 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 glounding your own flam.

So they were actually drowning? Literally drowning on land while yellow mucus was frothing out of their mouths. Those who could still breathe would turn blue. This is a description of health.

Yeah. 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. 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 Imvar of Arco Clara, also from Breslow, also from a 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 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. And we don't actually know if he threw a party?

I consider that a parker fault. 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 an argument. That's his story in Fittster, and who also happens to be Fittster, they had a quarrel more than that. Let's call it a fight.

And later that night, after the party, Haber takes up sleeping pills to sleep. And she takes the service revolver. Fittster walks outside to the garden and pulls a traitor. She shoots herself in the chest and is found by her son.

By her son. Yes, age 13, I think. And he finds her actually still alive with a wife about to run out of her. Haber, it's unknown what happens for the rest of 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. It was a terrible moment. Did he run away?

Was it duty? The son, eventually, after he emigrates to America, kills himself. So you know, around this point, I just don't have anything to do with this guy. I just want to take a shower and walk away.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, on the other hand, if you look at the Grand Calculus people, he's helped or fed versus people he's killed. I mean, he's got 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 think that this guy's a good guy? Honestly, yeah.

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. That's middle of the 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 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 him with him, right?

Well, should we keep going? Sorry. Yeah. All right.

Well, Sam, what happened to this guy after World War I? 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 over the entire ocean, there's a lot of gold dissolved into the sea. And he spends five years in a futile effort to distill gold from the ocean's waters. 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 for him. And then things really take a turn. 1933 comes and Hitler takes over.

And one of the first acts that the Nazis do is to basically issue an order that says there shall be no Jews in the civil service. Now, how about Jewish, but because he'd served in World War I, 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 their grandparents were. 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.

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, my dorsal hair stood up when I read the end of this. Right.

So during World War I, Haber's Institute had developed a formulation of insect killing gas called Zichlung. Zichlung A, which was originally just a pesticide. Once again, another nitrogen compound. It was developed in his institute.