Killer Empathy

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Speaker 7 Yeah, I wish I could have been the guy who saved his wife's life. I'm just the guy who nearly cut his fingers off.

Speaker 3 Hey, Latifir.

Speaker 8 You heard that one.

Speaker 1 So this month, we're turning the spotlight to you all. We're talking to listeners and members of the lab.

Speaker 7 And like I said, I do have guys that I've worked with who have cut off fingers.

Speaker 1 We interviewed a guy who just heroically saved his wife's life after listening to our episode, literally called How to Save a Life.

Speaker 8 And this week.

Speaker 8 So amazing to talk to you. I'm not kidding.
You have been on my mind for, yeah, 15 years now.

Speaker 1 Lulu talked to Paul Tucker.

Speaker 7 I'm an old dog with a new trick.

Speaker 1 Who wrote to us actually about 15 years ago?

Speaker 3 Maybe first,

Speaker 8 would you be able to pull up that email and read us the initial email you wrote to us?

Speaker 7 I thought you might ask for that. The subject was the dangers of listening to Radio Lab.

Speaker 7 Dear Radio Lab,

Speaker 7 I have just declared my workshop a radio lab-free area.

Speaker 7 No one is allowed to listen to Radio Lab there, especially not me. I think you must warn the public about the dangers of listening to Radio Lab while trying to do other things.

Speaker 7 I'm a 54-year-old carpenter with my own woodworking shop. I've always been able to listen to music and NPR news while I'm working in the shop.

Speaker 7 Several years ago, with the advent of the iPod, I was able to listen even while running power power tools. Table saws, routers, bandsaws, etc.
So far, so good.

Speaker 7 I felt pretty confident around my machinery. Then came Radio Lab.

Speaker 3 Oh no.

Speaker 7 I don't think it was the first time I was listening to Radio Lab in my shop that I took a big saw curve out of my left thumb with the table saw.

Speaker 7 So I didn't put two and two together right away. Two weeks later, I cut one-third of the way through my middle finger with the bandsaw while I was listening to another Radio Lab podcast.

Speaker 7 In retrospect, it was quite stupid.

Speaker 7 Listening to Radio Lab is so overwhelmingly attention-grabbing, it should be done while strapped down in a comfy chair with all sharp objects placed safely out of reach.

Speaker 7 No doubt the vast majority of your listeners are much smarter than me in this respect.

Speaker 7 But in case I can save someone else the pain and embarrassment of a radiolab influenced injury, I hope this warning will prove its worth.

Speaker 7 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Paul Tucker.

Speaker 8 So here we are. It's now about 15 years after you sent that.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 8 And I remember, I truly, I remember when this email came in because I was kind of just starting out.

Speaker 8 On one hand, I felt horrible and I was worrying about your finger and your injuries and your ability to steal woodwork. But on the other end, this email like truly sort of became a North Star for me.

Speaker 8 I do not wish any digital injuries upon any more of our listeners, but to imagine I could create work that was so gripping that people might really lose a sense of where they are. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 8 I was like, that is the goal this whole way through. And then in the last decade and a half, with every choice choice I'm making.

Speaker 8 Like, I really authentically wanted to call you to say, first of all, thank you. Thank you for writing in, but also a very belated apology.
And I'm so sorry about those injuries.

Speaker 8 And how are you doing? How are your fingers doing?

Speaker 7 My fingers are fine.

Speaker 8 Are they really? Did the middle finger, though, a third of the way? I mean, that sounds like did bone go?

Speaker 7 Well, yes, but a bandsaw is a very thin blade. So it just took a very thin slice, but it it healed.
I can't even see the scar anymore.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 7 And the table saw, that was a thicker kerf. That's about an eighth of an inch thick.

Speaker 7 And that took some fingernail with it, too. But that all healed back up just fine.

Speaker 8 Wow. So did you stop listening to Radiolab when you're using saws? Yes.
You truly did?

Speaker 7 I truly did. I could listen to music, but I couldn't listen to Radiolab.

Speaker 8 And was that truly for the fear of danger?

Speaker 3 Yes. Wow.

Speaker 8 Because it felt that immersive to you? Yes. And, you know, it's now 15 years later.

Speaker 8 Do you still listen?

Speaker 7 I do. I was especially moved by the recent one on Henrietta Lacks.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, my...

Speaker 7 That got my tear ducts working a little bit.

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Speaker 3 Okay, here's the show.

Speaker 8 This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.

Speaker 1 And I'm Latv Nasser. And today we're rewinding way, way back to 2012.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 To bring you a story reported by this obscure up-and-coming reporter.

Speaker 3 Oh, wait. Wait, what does this say?

Speaker 1 Lulu Miller.

Speaker 8 It's a story from Baby Me.

Speaker 1 Have you re-listened to this?

Speaker 8 I just did. I just did.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't even remember having heard it the first time. So I feel like I heard it with totally fresh ears.

Speaker 2 Oh, good.

Speaker 1 It's sort of interesting because it's an earlier version of you, Lulu. It's an earlier version of the show.

Speaker 1 It sort of somehow feels younger, but it feels kind of like it's grappling with the big questions in a, in a very beautiful and earnest way.

Speaker 8 I guess what maybe part of what you're saying is like there's something young in wanting to ask big questions that maybe we grow up and are told we shouldn't ask anymore.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's very satisfying.
It's very emotionally satisfying.

Speaker 3 Oh, well, I'm glad you thought that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 8 Before we hit play, I should say there is some real violence in this episode, so it is probably not best for kids or anyone particularly sensitive to that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 Here is killer empathy reported by Muppet Baby Lulu Miller.

Speaker 10 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 3 You're listening

Speaker 3 to Radio Lab.

Speaker 3 Radio Lab from

Speaker 1 WNYC.

Speaker 8 Rewind.

Speaker 8 Can you introduce yourself?

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 10 award-winning author, fantastic husband.

Speaker 8 Dad of the Year. Dad of the Year.

Speaker 10 No, I'm Jeff Lockwood. I'm a professor at the University of Wyoming.

Speaker 8 Jeff is an entomologist.

Speaker 1 You like a bug guy?

Speaker 8 He's a bug guy, and mostly he studies crickets and grasshoppers. And this story involves a kind of cricket that's, well,

Speaker 8 different.

Speaker 8 The gorillas.

Speaker 10 Yeah, the gorilla crittids, yeah.

Speaker 8 And are they related to Katy dids?

Speaker 10 The way to think of a gorilla critid is like a cricket

Speaker 10 on steroids.

Speaker 10 Okay. Sort of like the Hulk Hogan of crickets.

Speaker 8 First of all, he says they're a little bulkier than your average cricket.

Speaker 10 And they tend to have very strong jaws. Very strong jaws.
And mandibles that are really sharp. Sort of like a serrated knife.

Speaker 8 And most of all, they're vicious.

Speaker 10 They all had to be caged separately. If you put them together, they would fight.

Speaker 8 To the death? Yeah.

Speaker 10 Wow. And so when I would go in in the mornings...

Speaker 8 And reach into one of their cages, as soon as they saw him coming, they'd fly into this rage.

Speaker 6 It's really sort of a showstopper.

Speaker 10 They'll sort of rear up on their hind legs, beat their abdomens on the ground, flare out their wings, and then...

Speaker 8 Clamp onto his fingers.

Speaker 10 They would draw blood.

Speaker 3 Whoa. Wow.

Speaker 10 So I used this glass probe on the big boy,

Speaker 10 at least until the point at which he snapped off the end of the glass rod. Holy moly.
So I ended up with the actually there are two that were very large.

Speaker 10 I would just take their cage when I went in and pop it in the refrigerator and go get a cup of coffee.

Speaker 10 And within 15 minutes, because insects are cold-blooded, they would be anesthetized by the cold and I could lift them out. That's cheating.
Well, that was my solution for them.

Speaker 10 The little guys, I could manage the big ones.

Speaker 10 A little bit of of chill in the morning is all it took.

Speaker 8 So the point is, these creatures were completely alien to him. There's like nothing about them he can relate to.

Speaker 8 But over time, the more he studied them, the more he started noticing things that made them seem way less foreign.

Speaker 10 See, I kept these in these.

Speaker 8 For example, as soon as he'd put one into a new cage, it would make itself a little nest.

Speaker 10 And once it has that little nest built, that's home.

Speaker 8 In a very real way, because by moving them around to different cages, he soon realized...

Speaker 10 That they could differentiate their nests.

Speaker 8 They can actually tell the difference between their nest and another.

Speaker 10 Wait, how do they do that? They secrete a pheromone, a chemical. And each cricket is able to self-identify its own odor.

Speaker 3 Whoa.

Speaker 10 It gave me the sense, and I think there's something to this, that they had a kind of capacity to recognize self. Oh, interesting.

Speaker 10 We don't see that much in insects, but they had what appears to be a capacity to say, this is mine.

Speaker 8 And then he began to think differently about that crazy rage, too. Because if you think about it, here's this creature.
It's completely vulnerable to attack.

Speaker 10 They really don't have a very good defense for themselves. They don't excrete nasty chemicals.
They don't sting. And it can't fly, so it's not going to go flying away either.

Speaker 8 So maybe that rage

Speaker 8 is their only strategy.

Speaker 10 Which, again, drew me into thinking that I understood them. Perhaps these little guys were more like me than many other insects that I had worked with.

Speaker 8 So he grew to really like them.

Speaker 8 But then one day I'd been working with this particular gorilla critid, trying to move him from one cage to another.

Speaker 10 And he was agitated and had decided to go on the offensive, which involved trying to come out of the cage. So he was scrambling up the side of the cage.

Speaker 8 And to keep him from getting out, Jeff slammed the lid down

Speaker 8 and caught him between the lid and the edge of the cage.

Speaker 10 And I, you know, quickly lifted the lid up and he fell back into the cage.

Speaker 10 And I looked down at him,

Speaker 10 and what had happened was I had ruptured his abdomen.

Speaker 8 A split right down his belly.

Speaker 10 Jeez.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 some of the viscera and

Speaker 10 kind of globule of yellow fat that was leaking out,

Speaker 10 oozing out of his body.

Speaker 10 I felt guilt and then, of course, I felt sorry for an animal. But what really struck me was what he did next, which was curl his head downward toward his abdomen, pause for a moment,

Speaker 10 and then began consuming his own innards.

Speaker 10 Consuming the viscera

Speaker 10 that was oozing out of his body.

Speaker 10 And so he was literally cannibalizing himself.

Speaker 1 Wow, that is disgusting.

Speaker 10 It was horrifying.

Speaker 10 I had sort of felt like I had come to know them.

Speaker 10 Then this,

Speaker 10 this was just so out of the imaginable.

Speaker 8 But the instant that word popped into his mind, unimaginable, he had this sort of Pavlovian reflex. And he thought of this guy, an old professor of his.

Speaker 10 Dr. Lafarge.
Lafarge. He was one of my mentors at Louisiana State University.
This was a teacher of his?

Speaker 8 Yep, insect behavior.

Speaker 10 He was one of the younger faculty members when I was there, mid-30s. Slight of build, but incredibly intense.

Speaker 8 He was kind of an expert in animal violence. And the thing he harped on over and over, the thing he was trying to pound into their brains, was objectivity.

Speaker 10 To separate one's emotions and interests from the object of study. And he had these wire-rimmed glasses, and I remember if

Speaker 10 he would ask you a question.

Speaker 8 Like, why does the gorilla crita do its crazy war dance?

Speaker 10 And you tried sort of reading in will, intention, mental states.

Speaker 8 Maybe because it's angry or scared.

Speaker 10 He would just drop his chin and look over the top.

Speaker 8 And tear you apart.

Speaker 10 His job in the classroom was to make us good objective observers.

Speaker 8 And Jeff, Jeff stayed in touch with him over the years.

Speaker 10 I wanted to be good at this.

Speaker 8 As he set up his own lab.

Speaker 10 You know,

Speaker 10 I had a stake in earning his respect.

Speaker 8 And so that day, as he's watching the Gorilla Critid consume its own guts, he's thinking, okay, what would Lafarge see in this?

Speaker 10 So my sense through my research is that what this Gorilla Critid had done was perhaps to have detected the odor of its own fats.

Speaker 10 It sort of drew the conclusion that this must be something good to eat without sort of grasping that it was was its own self.

Speaker 10 The smell of its own fat triggered a feeding behavior that that's highly adaptive.

Speaker 10 You know, to feed on fat, fats are very hard to get hold of out in the world. And so, when you smell fats, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's like us in donuts, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, go for it.

Speaker 10 It triggers feeding, yeah. It triggers feeding.
So clearly, these things don't quite have a sense of self. Right.
So, so maybe they're not just like me.

Speaker 8 Which was always Lafage's point. Don't put the creature in your box.
It doesn't want to be there.

Speaker 10 It's sort of a moral danger almost. To sort of not allow the organism to be what it is.

Speaker 10 It's almost to sort of possess it or to own it. And to really treat the insects sort of with

Speaker 10 a deep respect, right, is oddly enough to treat them objectively.

Speaker 10 You know, he was one of the professors who actually engendered a kind of good fear.

Speaker 10 And he was the kind of person

Speaker 10 who you wanted to please.

Speaker 8 But then years later, something happened that tested Jeff's ability to do this, to be the kind of scientist that Lafarge wanted him to be. That's right after the break.

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Speaker 8 Radiolab Lulu, just before the break, Jeff was trying to be the kind of scientist that his professor Lafarge wanted him to be. The kind that looked objectively at the behavior of insects.

Speaker 3 We're recording over here.

Speaker 8 Something was about to challenge that. A little louder?

Speaker 3 Yeah, maybe a tiny bit.

Speaker 12 Is that okay?

Speaker 8 Oh, that's great.

Speaker 3 Great. Great.

Speaker 8 And there's really only one person who can tell us this part of the story. Will you introduce yourself? Okay.

Speaker 12 My name is Tamara Carboni.

Speaker 8 Tamara is actually not a scientist. She worked for the Louisiana State Museum.
And back in 1989, she and Dr. Lafarge, whose first name is also Jeff, were working together on this termite problem.

Speaker 8 The termites were getting really bad in the French quarter, and it was her job to preserve the historic homes. And Jeff was studying the termites.

Speaker 12 I never imagined that I would be fascinated by termites, but I was.

Speaker 3 So he made it.

Speaker 12 Fascinating. Yeah, fascinating.

Speaker 8 But then one night in July, July 25th, they met for dinner to talk about how the project was going.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 we were walking home.

Speaker 12 Well, he was walking me to my house around 10, 10.30 at night. And I think it must have been

Speaker 12 raining or there was a threat of rain because Jeff was carrying an umbrella. And I could hear footsteps behind us, very determined-sounding footsteps.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 we got to a corner across from my house. And at that point, this person came around us in front of us.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 he said,

Speaker 12 close your eyes. And in the process of closing my eyes, I saw the gun.

Speaker 8 So she closed her eyes. And a second later, she felt a tug on her purse.

Speaker 12 I could feel him take hold of the straps. And I was not going to resist.

Speaker 12 And as I felt him do that, I could hear Jeff say, don't do that.

Speaker 8 At that instant,

Speaker 12 I don't remember the shot at all.

Speaker 12 You know,

Speaker 12 I felt Jeff move. And I guess at that point, I opened my eyes.
This guy had already run. Never took my purse.
I

Speaker 12 saw Jeff running toward my house. And I just ran after him.
I had no idea he was shot. But he got onto the porch and he

Speaker 12 collapsed

Speaker 12 on his back

Speaker 12 and at that point he was gushing blood.

Speaker 12 And I was trying to get Jeff to understand that help was coming and I kept saying

Speaker 12 you're gonna be okay. They're on their way.

Speaker 8 And did he say

Speaker 10 anything?

Speaker 12 He couldn't talk.

Speaker 12 He just, he had this kind of stare.

Speaker 12 And I just watched him die.

Speaker 10 The news came by a phone call. And it just seemed, you know, it was, you know, it's kind of one of those classic unreal moments.
Something about this, you know, must be wrong. It wasn't Dr.
Lafarge.

Speaker 10 He wasn't really killed. It seemed particularly hard.

Speaker 12 to grasp. You know, one minute I'm with this vital person and the next minute he's dead.

Speaker 10 Sadness, anguish, confusion. It was hysterical.

Speaker 3 Crying.

Speaker 10 I was in shock. They never found his killer.

Speaker 8 Never found out anything about him. Who he was.
Why he would do this.

Speaker 10 It was just this seemingly senseless act.

Speaker 8 And that's how Jeff understood it for years, that it was senseless. But over time...

Speaker 8 Something odd started to happen.

Speaker 8 Like with those gorilla critids, Lafage started appearing in his brain. Senseless, senseless, senseless.
Telling him that that word wasn't good enough. And he began to ask himself again,

Speaker 10 how would Dr. Lafage want me to think about this?

Speaker 8 How would he think about his own death? Okay, so I wonder if you do have the essay with you.

Speaker 8 So he writes an essay. Will you read the last four paragraphs of the essay?

Speaker 8 I will. One, two, three, four.
Right.

Speaker 10 The year after I left Louisiana and came to Wyoming as a freshly minted PhD, the first thing he does is he takes Lafage's attitude on violence.

Speaker 10 That violence is the baseline strategy for most encounters between and indeed within species.

Speaker 8 That it's not some evil

Speaker 8 outlying thing, but instead a baseline strategy for all animals.

Speaker 8 And in that light, he looks at the actions of that night sort of dispassionately.

Speaker 8 First, he figures this kid was probably mugging them because he was poor.

Speaker 10 Hopeless, poor, angry, and scared. The woman became tangled in the straps.

Speaker 8 Dr. Lafage, having his own instinctual reaction, stepped between them.

Speaker 10 Said, don't hurt her. You can have the purse.
I can picture him doing this.

Speaker 8 But perhaps that action itself scared the kid.

Speaker 10 The young man drew a gun and fired point blank.

Speaker 8 I showed the essay to Tamra.

Speaker 12 Yeah, well, no, that's not.

Speaker 12 I mean, I don't think... And I don't know if he stepped forward or not.
You know, again, my eyes were closed. I could feel some kind of movement.

Speaker 12 I certainly don't think he stepped between there wasn't enough space for him to step between us.

Speaker 8 For Tamara, who's been over the event a million times in her head, it doesn't add up so easily. First of all, when Dr.

Speaker 12 Lafarge spoke to the kid, it wasn't exactly a command, it was more like, don't do that. It was like, don't be an idiot, don't do that.

Speaker 8 It wasn't really threatening. It was more like,

Speaker 8 look, logically, Let's not do this.

Speaker 12 And while she gets that the kid might have been scared and had not been intending to shoot, if he never, ever could imagine himself shooting somebody, he wouldn't have had a loaded gun.

Speaker 12 I can't relate to this person. I can't imagine doing violence to another human being or killing them.

Speaker 12 I can't relate to that at all.

Speaker 8 And over the years, her friends and family, coworkers tried all different kinds of ways to help her make sense of it. Nothing really helped.

Speaker 12 But there was someone that I worked with, my boss actually, who had been in Vietnam,

Speaker 12 and he took me aside and he said, you know,

Speaker 12 you'll never understand this.

Speaker 8 You're not going to understand it.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 8 Like, don't even try.

Speaker 12 I don't think there's any sense to be made out of it.

Speaker 10 If we just stop there, then it's to say that it's somehow

Speaker 10 unnatural or inhuman. And in fact, in a weird kind of way, it's profoundly human.

Speaker 12 There's no way I can understand it.

Speaker 8 In the end, the essay itself kind of falls short. And Jeff admits that.

Speaker 10 It just isn't sufficient.

Speaker 8 But he says there is a way of understanding this event. He just hasn't gotten there yet.
But it is out there. Yeah.

Speaker 8 It has to be.

Speaker 10 And Dr. Lafarge would have, I think, said this as well.

Speaker 10 But for the moment, I think I can say that I

Speaker 10 understand

Speaker 10 another being's eating its own leaking entrails

Speaker 10 at a level that I can't understand one of my fellow beings,

Speaker 10 you know, pulling the trigger and

Speaker 10 killing the man that I love.

Speaker 13 Hi, I'm Parisa and I'm from Ottawa, Canada. And here are the staff credits.
Radio Lab was created by Jad Abu Murad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Laptiff Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 13 Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 13 Harry Fertuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyana Sambandam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandbach, Anissa Vitsa, Arian Wax, Pat Wolters, and Molly Webster.

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