Killer Empathy

0:02Yeah, 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. Hey, Latif here. You heard that one? So this month, we're turning the spotlight to you all. We're talking to listeners and members of the lab. And like I said, I do have guys that I've worked with who have cut off fingers. We interviewed a guy who just heroically saved his wife's life after listening to our episode, literally called How to Save a Life. And this week... So amazing to talk to you. I'm not kidding. You have been on my mind for, yeah, 15 years now. Lulu talked to Paul Tucker.

0:42I'm an old dog with a new trick. Who wrote to us actually about 15 years ago. Maybe first, would you be able to pull up that email and read us the initial email you wrote to us? I thought you might ask for that. The subject was the dangers of listening to Radiolab. Dear Radiolab, I have just declared my workshop a Radiolab-free area. No one is allowed to listen to Radiolab there, especially not me. I think you must warn the public about the dangers of listening to Radiolab while trying to do other things. 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.

1:33Several years ago, with the advent of the iPod, I was able to listen even while running power tools. Table saws, routers, band saws, etc. So far, so good. I felt pretty confident around my machinery. Then came Radiolab. Oh no. I don't think it was the first time I was listening to Radiolab in my shop that I took a big saw curve out of my left thumb with the table saw. 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 Radiolab podcast. In retrospect, it was quite stupid. listening to Radiolab 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 no doubt the vast majority of your listeners are much smarter than me in this respect 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 Thank you, Paul Tucker.

2:53So here we are. It's now about 15 years after you said that. Yes. And I remember, I truly, I remember when this email came in because I was kind of just starting out. 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. 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. I was like, that is the goal this whole way through.

3:36And then in the last decade and a half with every choice I'm making, 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. And how are you doing? How are your fingers doing? My fingers are fine. Are they really? Did the middle finger, though, a third of the way, I mean, that sounds like, did bone go? Well, yes, but a bandsaw is a very thin blade. So it just took a very thin slice, but it healed. I can't even see the scar anymore. And the table saw, that was a thicker kerf.

4:21That's about an eighth of an inch thick. And that took some fingernail with it, too. But that all healed back up just fine. Wow. So did you stop listening to Radiolab when you're using saws? Yes. You truly did? I truly did. I could listen to music, but I couldn't listen to Radiolab. And was that truly for the fear of danger? Yes. Wow. Because it felt that immersive to you? Yes. And, you know, it's now 15 years later. Do you still listen? I do. I was especially moved by the recent one on Henrietta Lacks. Oh, yeah. Oh, my. That got my tear ducts working a little bit. For someone who has never heard Radiolab, how would you describe it?

5:11I think it's storytelling that grabs a hold of you and doesn't let go. And sometimes chops off your fingertips. And sometimes chops off your fingers.

5:28We really, really hope that you've never had a Radiolab-caused injury. but maybe you have had this feeling of getting lost in a Radiolab story. Maybe you've been pulled into someone else's life while listening. Maybe our show has made you feel like the world is a little bit bigger than you thought or a bit stranger. If that's the case, if Radiolabs meant something like that for you, we'd love if you considered supporting us. You can do that through The Lab, our membership program. If you join right now, you might have heard, you can get a cool artsy tote bag referencing our cheating death episode.

6:08And you get other perks, ad-free listening, bonus content, and the knowledge that you are what makes it possible for us to keep making these kinds of stories. If you're already a member of the lab, we are so grateful for you. Thank you. If you're not and you want to check it out, you can do that at radiolab.org slash join. That's radiolab.org slash join. Okay, here's the show.

6:36This is Radio Lab. I'm Lulu Miller. And I'm Latif Nasser. And today we're rewinding way, way back to 2012. Yeah. To bring you a story reported by this obscure up-and-coming reporter. Oh, wait, wait, what does this say? Lulu Miller. It's a story from baby me. Have you re-listened to this? I just did. I just did. Yeah. I don't even remember having heard it the first time, so I feel like I heard it with totally fresh ears. Oh, good. It's sort of interesting because it's an earlier version of you, Lulu. It's an earlier version of the show. It sort of somehow feels younger, but it feels kind of like it's grappling with the big questions in a very beautiful and earnest way.

7:22I guess 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. Yeah. It's very satisfying. It's very emotionally satisfying. Oh, well, I'm glad you thought that. Yeah. 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. Here is Killer Empathy reported by Muppet Baby Lulu Miller. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC.

8:09Rewind. Can you introduce yourself? Oh, award-winning author. Fantastic husband. Dad of the year. Dad of the year. No, I'm Jeff Lockwood. I'm a professor at the University of Wyoming. Jeff is an entomologist. You're like a bug guy? He's a bug guy, and mostly he studies crickets and grasshoppers. And this story involves a kind of cricket that's, well, different. The gorillas. Yeah, the gorilla critteds, yeah. And are they related to katydids? The way you think of a gorilla critted is like a cricket.

8:47on steroids. Okay. Sort of like the Hulk Hogan of crickets. First of all, he says they're a little bulkier than your average cricket. And they tend to have very strong jaws. Very strong jaws. And mandibles that are really sharp. Sort of like a serrated knife. And most of all, they're vicious. They all had to be caged separately. If you put them together, they would fight. To the death? Yeah. Wow. And so when I would go in in the mornings... and reach into one of their cages, as soon as they saw him coming, they'd fly into this rage.

9:24It's really sort of a showstopper. They'll sort of rear up on their hind legs. Beat their abdomens on the ground. Flare out their wings. And then... clamp onto his fingers. They would draw blood. Wow. So I used this glass probe on the big boy at least until the point at which he snapped off the end of the glass rod. Holy moly. So I ended up with, actually there are two that were very large. I would just take their cage when I went in and pop it in the refrigerator and go get a cup of coffee. And within 15 minutes, because insects are cold-blooded, they would be anesthetized by the cold and I could lift them up.

10:03That's cheating. Well, that was my solution for them. The little guys, I could manage. The big ones, a little bit of chill in the morning is all it took. So the point is, these creatures were completely alien to him. There's, like, nothing about them he can relate to. But over time, the more he studied them, the more he started noticing things that made them seem way less foreign. For example, as soon as he put one into a new cage, it would make itself a little nest. And once it has that little nest built, that's home. In a very real way, because by moving them around to different cages, he soon realized that they could differentiate their nests.

10:48They can actually tell the difference between their nest and another. Wait, how do they do that? They secrete a pheromone, a chemical. And each cricket is able to self-identify its own odor. Whoa. 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. We don't see that much in insects, but they had what appears to be a capacity to say, this is mine. 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. They really don't have a very good defense for themselves.

11:29They don't excrete nasty chemicals. They don't sting. And they can't fly, so it's not going to go flying away either. So maybe that rage is their only strategy. 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. So he grew to really like them. But then, one day... I'd been working with this particular gorilla critter. Trying to move him from one cage to another. 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.

12:06And to keep him from getting out, Jeff slammed the lid down. As he was just at the edge. And caught him between the lid and the edge of the cage. And I, you know, quickly lifted the lid up and he fell back into the cage. And I looked down at him and what had happened was I had ruptured his abdomen. A split right down his belly. Jeez. and some of the viscera and the kind of globule of yellow fat was leaking out, oozing out of his body. 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, paused for a moment, and then began consuming his own innards.

13:06Consuming the viscera that was oozing out of his body. And so he was literally cannibalizing himself. Wow, that is disgusting. It was horrifying. I had sort of felt like I had come to know them. Yeah. Then this. This was just so out of the imaginable. 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. Dr. LaFage. LaFage. He was one of my mentors at Louisiana State University. This was a teacher of his? Yep, insect behavior. He was one of the younger faculty members when I was there, mid-30s, slight of build, but incredibly intense.

13:56He's 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. To separate one's emotions and interests from the object of study. And he had these wire-rimmed glasses, and I remember if he would ask you a question. Like, why does the gorilla critter do its crazy war dance? And you tried sort of reading in will, intention, mental states. Maybe because it's angry or scared. He would just drop his chin and look over the top. And tear you apart. His job in the classroom was to make us good, objective observers.

14:36And Jeff, Jeff stayed in touch with him over the years. I wanted to be good at this. As he set up his own lab. You know, I had a stake in earning his respect. And so that day, as he's watching the Gorilla Critid consume its own guts, thinking, okay, what would LaFage see in this? 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. It sort of drew the conclusion that this must be something good to eat without sort of grasping that it was its own self. The smell of its own fat triggered a feeding behavior that's highly adaptive.

15:16You 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 like us in donuts, right? Yeah, go for it. It triggers feeding, yeah. It triggers feeding. So clearly these things don't quite have a sense of self. Right. So maybe they're not just like me. Which was always LaFage's point. Don't put the creature in your box. It doesn't want to be there. It's sort of a moral danger almost to sort of not allow the organism to be what it is. it's almost to sort of possess it or to own it and to really treat the insects sort of with a deep respect, right, is oddly enough to treat them objectively.

15:59You know, he was one of the professors who actually engendered a kind of good fear. And he was the kind of person who you wanted to please.

16:19But 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.

16:34Radiolab 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. But something was about to challenge that. Is that okay? Oh, that's great. And there's really only one person who can tell us this part of the story. Will you introduce yourself? Okay. My name is Tamara Carboni. Tamara is actually not a scientist. She worked for the Louisiana State Museum. And back in 1989, she and Dr. LaFage, whose first name is also Jeff, Jeff and Jeff were working together on this termite problem.

17:13The 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. I never imagined that I would be fascinated by termites, but I was. He made it... Fascinating. Yeah, fascinating. But then one night in July... July 25th. They met for dinner to talk about how the project was going. And we were walking home. Well, he was walking me to my house around 10, 10.30 at night. And I think it must have been 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.

18:01and we got to a corner across from my house and at that point this person came around us in front of us and he said, close your eyes and in the process of closing my eyes I saw the gun. So she closed her eyes and a second later she felt a tug on her purse. I could feel him take hold of the straps, and I was not going to resist. And as I felt him do that, I could hear Jeff say, don't do that. At that instant, I don't remember the shot at all. You know, I felt Jeff move. And I guess at that point, I opened my eyes. this guy had already run, never took my purse. I saw Jeff running toward my house, and I just ran after him.

19:06I had no idea he was shot, but he got onto the porch, and he collapsed on his back, and at that point, he was gushing blood,

19:23and I was trying to get Jeff to understand that help was coming and I kept saying, you're going to be okay, they're on their way. And did he say anything? He couldn't talk. He just, he had this kind of stare and I just watched him die. the news came by a phone call and it just seemed you know it was you know it's kind of one of those those classic unreal moments something about this you know must be wrong it wasn't dr la fire she wasn't really killed it seemed particularly hard to grasp you know one minute i'm with this vital person. And the next minute he's dead. Sadness. Anguish. Confusion. It was hysterical.

20:14Crying. I was in shock. They never found his killer. Never found out anything about him. Who he was. Why he would do this. It was just this seemingly senseless act. And that's how Jeff understood it for years. That it was senseless. But over time something odd started to happen. Like with those gorilla critted, LaFage started appearing in his brain, telling him that that word wasn't good enough. And he began to ask himself again, how would Dr. LaFage want me to think about this? How would he think about his own death? Okay, so I wonder if you do have the essay with you. So he writes an essay. Will you read the last four paragraphs of the essay?

21:02I will. One, two, three, four. Right. 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. That violence is the baseline strategy for most encounters between and indeed within species. That's not some evil outlying thing, but instead a baseline strategy for all animals. And in that light, he looks at the actions of that night sort of dispassionately. First, he figures this kid was probably mugging them because he was poor. Hopeless, poor, angry. Scared. Dr. LaFage, having his own instinctual reaction, stepped between them.

21:46Said, don't hurt her. You can have the purse. I can picture him doing this. But perhaps that action itself scared the kid. The young man drew a gun and fired point blank. I showed the essay to Tamara Yeah, well, no, that's not 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 I certainly don't think he stepped between there wasn't enough space for him to step between us For Tamara, who's been over the event a million times in her head doesn't add up so easily First of all, when Dr. LaFage spoke to the kid It wasn't exactly a command it was more like, don't do that And I was like, don't be an idiot.

22:27Don't do that. It wasn't really threatening. It was more like, look, logically, let's not do this. 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. I can't relate to this person. I can't imagine doing violence to another human being or killing them. I can't relate to that at all. And over the years, her friends and family, co-workers, tried all different kinds of ways to help her make sense of it. Nothing really helped. But there was someone that I worked with, my boss actually, who had been in Vietnam.

23:15And he took me aside and he said, you know, you'll never understand this. you're not going to understand it. Yeah. Like, don't even try? I don't think there's any sense to be made out of it. If we just stop there, then it's to say that it's somehow unnatural or inhuman. In fact, in a weird kind of way, it's profoundly human. There's no way I can understand it. In the end, the essay itself kind of falls short, and Jeff admits that. It just isn't sufficient. But he says there is a way of understanding this event. He just hasn't gotten there yet. But it is out there. Yeah. It has to be. And Dr. LaFage would have, I think, said this as well.

24:12But for the moment... I think I can say that I understand another being's eating its own leaking entrails at a level that I can't understand one of my fellow beings, you know, pulling the trigger and killing a man that I love.

24:41Hi, I'm Parisa and I'm from Ottawa, Canada. And here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lila Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niana Sambandam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Vietse, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact trackers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

25:26Hi, this is Evan. I'm calling from Menlo Park, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.