Chapter 1: What chilling statistic about violence do the hosts reveal?
Hey, Latif here. I have now been working in podcasts for over 15 years. And one thing that still consistently surprises me about this industry is the enduring appeal of true crime podcasts. No judgment if you are a fan of true crime. I just personally have never really gotten into them. I feel like they just make me paranoid.
But I feel like the episode we are about to replay, which is one of the all-time top Radiolab episodes, is the closest thing Radiolab has ever done to a true crime episode. It's got crimes. They are gut-wrenching. They are true.
Chapter 2: How does the Milgram experiment challenge our understanding of human nature?
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 Lab episodes I was ever on. You can treat it like a little Sonic wears Waldo. Anyway, here it is. The Bad Show.
Chapter 3: Who was Fritz Haber and what moral dilemmas did he face?
Wait, you're listening.
Okay.
All right.
Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab.
Hello, David. Yes, hello. This is Pat. Oh, hi, Pat.
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Chapter 4: What shocking actions did Fritz Haber take during World War I?
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. My name is David Buss. Two S's. He's a psychology professor. At the University of Texas at Austin. And this particular story, it comes from a book that David wrote. Could you just tell me the little story that you begin your book with?
Okay, yes, this was one of the things that sparked my interest in the topic of murder.
Chapter 5: How does the story of Fritz Haber illustrate the duality of human nature?
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, the 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?
Chapter 6: What insights are gained from discussing the Green River Killer?
Like you walk into the room, what do you find? Well, he started fuming that his wife had dissed him. 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 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?
Chapter 7: How does the podcast explore the concept of evil through literature?
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 continue dinner partying for a while?
Yeah, I did.
Chapter 8: What unresolved questions linger about the nature of badness?
And he did too? Yes, and he did too. And then he seemed fine when I said goodbye to him. He seemed calm, and I left and went home. And then it was several hours 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. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Meanwhile, later that night on 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 Radiolab, and today we're going to get bad, so to speak. We've done a good show. This is a bad show. So you ask, like, why do people do bad things? It doesn't actually mean to be bad anyways. Like, how do you tell the real baddies from the rest of us? That's how it is. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Kovach. This is Radiolab. 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. By this point, David's moved on to a new university and he's teaching an introductory psychology class. And I devoted one...
class session 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 I 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.
Are you a little bit like horrified? Like, oh, my God, my students are murderers. Well, horrified is I was I was pretty stunned. And so I expanded the sample where we asked about 5000 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 fantasies, the streets would be running red. Yeah, but those are fantasies. Some of them actually seem like something more than just fantasies. From a woman.
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