The Bad Show

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.

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Episoder(652)

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people went about their daily lives with a worm or two (or fifty) in their guts. Only in the past century, with pharmaceuticals and sanitation practices, have we made signif...

15 Mai 46min

What is a Pig Worth?

In 2017, Wayne Hsiung and a crew of animal rights activists from Direct Action Everywhere broke into a Utah pig farm run by Smithfield Foods, one of the largest pork distributors in the world. They we...

1 Mai 42min

Forests on Forests

For much of history, tree canopies were pretty much completely ignored by science. It was as if researchers said collectively, "It's just going to be empty up there, and we've got our hands full study...

24 Apr 19min

The Resistance of a Cow

There’s something rotten in the cows of Denmark. And Minnesota. And Wisconsin. And Idaho. What could cause a previously thriving herd of majestic dairy cattle to stop drinking water and start drinking...

17 Apr 51min

The Builders

In an episode first aired back in 2025 on our sister show, Terrestrials, we take you on a musical journey all about beavers. Few mammals have a bigger positive impact on the planet than the beaver. Wi...

10 Apr 30min

Life in a Barrel

This week, in an episode we first aired in 2022, we flip the Disney story of life on its head thanks to a barrel of seawater, a 1970s era computer, and underwater geysers. It’s the chaos of life. Lati...

3 Apr 54min

Antibiotic Apocalypse

Doctor and special correspondent Avir Mitra takes Executive Editor Soren Wheeler, plus a live studio audience, on a journey from the operating room to inside the body to the farm to the sewers and bac...

27 Mar 1h 1min