The Bad Show

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

History, Science, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2026

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show from 2011 about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of us. Cruelty, violence, badness... in this episode we begin with a chilling statistic: 91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. Then, we reconsider what Stanley Milgram's famous experiment really revealed about human nature (it's both better and worse than we thought). Next, we meet a man who scrambles our notions of good and evil: chemist Fritz Haber, who won a Nobel Prize in 1918...around the same time officials in the US were calling him a war criminal. And we end with the story of a man who chased one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, then got a chance to ask him the question that had haunted him for years: why? EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Pat Walters and Latif Nasser Produced by - Pat Watlers with help from - Carter Hodge. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Lathif here.
0:03.6	I have now been working in podcasts for over 15 years.
0:08.8	And one thing that still consistently surprises me about this industry is the enduring appeal of true crime podcasts.
0:19.1	No judgment, if you are a fan of true crime.
0:21.9	I just personally have never really gotten into them.
0:23.8	I feel like they just make me paranoid.
0:25.7	But I feel like the episode we are about to replay,
0:30.1	which is one of the all-time top Radio Lab episodes,
0:33.0	is the closest thing Radio Lab has ever done to a true crime episode.
0:38.8	It's got crimes.
0:40.1	They are gut-wrenching.
0:41.4	They are true.
0:43.1	But the episode is really trying to do something, I think, bigger.
0:48.9	It's trying to grapple with these profound questions, like, what makes someone bad?
0:56.0	And are they different from the rest of us?
1:00.0	And how do you live in a world where people do bad things for seemingly no good reason at all?
1:07.2	Also, if you listen close, you'll hear a cameo from me.
1:09.8	This is one of the first radio Lab episodes I was ever on.
1:12.6	You can treat it like a little Sonic Where's Waldo?
1:15.2	Anyway, here it is, the bad show.
1:17.6	Wait, you're listening.
1:19.3	Okay.
	...

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