Listen to Episode

Read Episode Transcript

Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts? Hey guys, I'm Kaylee, short on my podcast. Too much to say. I share my thoughts on everything from music to martinis, social media, social anxiety, regrets to risky text, and so much more. I have been known to read my literal diary entries on my show, and sometimes I do interviews with my crazy group of friends, so if you guys want to tune in, you can hear new episodes of too much to say every Wednesday on the national podcast network available on the iHeartRadio. With Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to him. Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans, host of behind the ********. I don't have a fun lead in for the episode this week because Sophie is not here and she's she's thrown me off. So you should drag her on Twitter and and say why didn't Robert have a have a funny what's ex and my wife. You know, the real reason I didn't have a good intro is because I thrive on on shocking her with my new terrible introduction and with nothing terrible, no Sophie to shock. I have. I have nothing terrible to say. But I do have a great episode of behind the ******** the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And I have two great guests with me. I have Oz and Cara Co, hosts of the Sleepwalkers podcast. Very happy to have you here. Very happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you for having us. And how are you guys doing this week? How's how's everything Conking out in your end of the world? Well, we may ourselves be sleepwalkers fairly shortly. We we had quite a long one, but we're, we're very excited. We're midway through season one of sleepwalkers and you know it's amazing. We're kind of, we're getting more momentum and people are wanting to talk to us on the show, which is great. But you know, we're kind of recording interviews and and and pushing out live and the world of AI never sleeps, unlike sleepwalkers. So we're kind of we're, we're we're we're we're we're doing good, but we're we're we're we're, yeah we're at the end of a. Of a long Friday. In in sleepwalkers is kind of about, you know you picked the title because it's sort of about the kind of unintended and unforeseen consequences of AI of all these sort of algorithms and machines that we are increasingly handing over control of our lives to. Would that be would be an accurate summary? I would say so, yeah. And also I guess we're not too late, but there are definitely things that are already happening that we probably should have been focusing on a little while ago. So, you know, the point of the show is to equip people to not sleepwalk into the future. Well then, today is a perfect episode for us all to be talking about, because this this really is an episode. There's a ******* here, but more than anything, this is an episode about the unintended, unforeseen consequences of technology, of people adopting a cool new thing that has a lot of promise for the future, and not thinking about all of the all of the things that will change about the world. Have you ever heard of a fellow named Fritz Haber? Now, what do you what do you know about old fritzy? Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Oh, boy. I shouldn't have said yes because I know the name, but I really don't know what I'm going to. Everyone heard his name at some point in high school history class or whatever, but yeah, yeah, just tell me well. Fritz Haber is a number of things, so you would have heard of him for the Haber Bosch process, which is how we get nitrogen, the majority of the nitrogen that we get. But Fritz Haber is also the father of chemical warfare. Now that probably qualifies him as a bastion on its own, but unfortunately Fritz's legacy is a lot more complex than than just that, because if you were a human being who exists on this earth, like roughly 40% of. Of our listeners are then there's, there's between a 30 and 50% chance that you're only alive because of Fritz Haber. Fritz Haber was the beginning of chemical warfare, World War One. And the gas and the treasures. Oh yeah, yeah. So he's a German World War One scientist, basically. Yeah. And there's some, you could make some arguments, like Hannibal was said to have used psycho, chemically drugged wine to disrupt an army at one point like that. But Fritz is the first guy to really. Lock that **** down in a big way. He's an important dude, and you could you could very, very easily argue that he's among a small handful of like, we talked about people like Hitler and Stalin on the this podcast. He's in that tier of importance in terms of like, his impact on the world. So, you know, I think he's one of these guys. Until I started researching him, like you, he was someone whose name was familiar because I'd run across him in one of those little, like boxes in a history textbook that was like, oh, you should know about this guy. Today we're going to learn the rest. So y'all ready to bound on into this heedless, sleepwalk into this story. Yes, yes, yes. OK, Fritz Haber was born in Breslau, Prussia, to a moderately wealthy Jewish family. His father, Siegfried, was a successful small business owner, and his mother, who was also his dad's cousin, was named Paula. Now, their families were not supportive of this Union because, you know, they were very, very close relatives, but they were just kind of too DTF to be denied, so to speak. Now it turns out that marrying a very close cousin and then having a baby with them. Can can cause some complications, which it did. And Paula died three weeks after giving birth to Fritz, so their their families may have been kind of right about that not being a great idea. Processed. OK, got it. Yeah. Child chowder and the kind of like incest. That was more. I mean, it was a little weird at the time, like some amount of that was more normal back then, but like, this was one of those cases where everyone was sort of like, this is odd. That said, Siegfried and Paula were very clearly in love and and Fritz's father, Siegfried, was devastated by his wife's death. And so Siegfried threw himself into his business, which was essentially running a company that sold dies all around Prussia now. Today, Fritz's hometown of Breslau is part of Poland. But starting in 1871, when Fritz was three, it became part of a newly minted little country y'all may have heard of, called Germany. After Chancellor Bismarck brought all of the brought all the naughty local princelings to into unity. Yes, it was a a decision that would only have positive impacts on the world and would cause no problems. I haven't read history past 1914, so I assume it it worked out fine. So it was an exciting time, you know, the 1870s was an exciting time for the German people, but it would not have been an exciting or a fun time to be someone who lived in the Haber household. Sigfried was of course devastated by the loss of his wife, and to his credit, there's no evidence that he took his sorrow out on his son in a violent way, but he did kind of take it out on him by being a totally crap dad, and one family totally absent just threw himself into his business. Wasn't around. It was kind of too devastated by his wife's loss to, like, really stand looking at his son. So it was one of those kind of ****** dads, not like the drunken abusive, but just like Space Cadet was poor little Fritz. Was he kind of cut off from his cousins and other family members because of this, this cursed union in the 1st place? Or was he, was he kind of after his mother died? Was he welcomed back into the wider family? Oh yeah, he was. He was taken care of by the rest of the family. He had several aunts and they sort of raised him while his dad. Was it? As his family says, Dad was basically living from his memories and working 24 hours a day, so his aunts took care of him and he was kind of raised by his extended family. Now when Fritz was seven, in Germany was four. Sigfried finally fell in love again with the perfectly named Hedwig Hamburger, which is one of the best names I've encountered. Yeah, I always forget Hamburger is a totally suitable German last name. Yeah, yeah, it's I I can't not laugh at it. Which I. I'm sorry, hamburgers. Who might happen to be listening like McDonald is a last name and it makes me giggle. Yeah, yeah. It makes me think of of President Kennedy as well in in Germany in the 60s, saying it's been 9 Berliner, which means I'm Berliner, but also I'm a doughnut. So he had the whole crowd cracking up in his face. So a doughnut and a hamburger. Yeah. So they they get to laugh at us, too. For, like our things that we say that sound like that sound like food names. It's fair. So Siegfried and Hedwig had three daughters in quick succession, and by all accounts, Hedwig was a wonderful stepmom to the growing Fritz. So this isn't one of those stories where the special young boy grows up under an evil stepmother. He just, you know, his dad never really connected with him so young. Fritz had an eclectic set of interests. He liked the theater, and he also did well in philosophy and literature. His father was well off enough by this. Point for Fritz to attend the gymnasium, which was sort of the equivalent of a very high end private school in Breslau. Starting as a pre teen, Fritz spent lots of time in breslau's beer halls and Taverns. This was not abnormal at the time. It was pretty normal for 12 year old kids to go go to the bar at the end of a hard day of being 12 and tie a couple. Actually a very hard age. Yeah. Oh yeah, I mean middle school would have been a lot easier with a with a couple of pints at the end of some crystal meth. OK. Well, we had that in Texas. Now, as he grew older, Fritz fought increasingly with his father. One relative wrote that Siegfried was a born pessimist, and while his son was reckless, Fritz had a reputation among the family for having a lively sense of humor. And it kind of seems like he was into the what I would call the 1800s German equivalent of freestyle rap. That that's not ringing any bells to me. Yeah, it's it's. I have trouble picturing it, but I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote from the book mastermind by Daniel Charles, which is a biography of Fritz Haber. Quote Young Fritz developed a knack for the composition of rhyming verse, even on the spur of the moment. His teasing dog will become the centerpiece of the family's annual New Year's Eve celebrations. Fritz composed the verses and taught them to his sisters, who presented them dressed in costume. Our childhood and youth were illuminated by our brother's talents. She always came forth at the right moment, recalled Elsie, the oldest of the sisters. So that sounds a little bit like sounds just like being a Jewish kid. Is that A is very much that you learn routines and you make your younger siblings do them. I wanted to tie it to battle rap, but I guess it might be it might be a little older than that. And and as far as we know, did Fritz. Did Fritz take his show on the road with the local? Were the local ladies in Breslau impressed by his his ability to spit this doggerel? Or was it more of a another family affair? Should we say Fritz was not what you would call a player at this point in his life? Although he is like 14 right now, so probably shouldn't have been, although that was like 30 in. In. Based on the life span, yeah. So Fritz graduated from the gymnasium in 1886 at the age of 15. His grades were good, but not great in most subjects. His real standout came during his oral examination. It was clear at this age that Fritz's talent was in his ability to communicate rather than some innate mechanical genius. For it celebrated his graduation by getting ********* wasted all night with his friends in the local bars. He was still passed out the next morning when the family sat down for breakfast, so his father took his sisters. See, they're hung the **** over, brother, while Sigfried declared. Look, well, this is how the life of a drunkard begins, so get a sense of his dad's encouraging sympathetic. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's just tried just a simple 15 year old drunken graduation celebration. Should don't make a big deal of it, dad. Now, Siegfried wanted his son to apprentice as a dye seller and get into the family business, but Fritz was already fed up with his hometown and had no desire to take up that line of work. He wrote this in a letter to his friend, the also perfectly named Max Hamburger. Lot of hamburgers rolling around in Breslau. No buns, though. No buns. No buns. No buns. Just hamburgers. Keto bresca like a terrible, terrible Windies. Quote nothing. Absolutely nothing satisfying to do, no stimulation, only irritation and tedium. Having to watch out for this and that. I'm so disgusted with my entire life here that I could burst. It's the same feeling that makes both of us dissatisfied. The urge to extricate oneself from narrow surroundings, to abandon at all costs the harbor into which my father has withdrawn himself after arduously weathering the storms of life, to sail out into the limitless, limitless ocean of life in the future, guided by no other star than one's own will and striving so this 19th century equivalent of ****. Who died or is? Yeah, that's exactly what this is, the same letter that Justin Bieber wrote to Scooter Braun at 7 in Canada. Yeah, that's exactly what we just heard. Gonna get the hell out of this town and go do something and you're boring, dad. Yeah? Yeah, kids don't change. Although they sure had better vocabularies back then. Right now, Haber had been interested in chemistry for years, and one of his aunts had actually allowed him to use her spare room to conduct dangerous homemade experiments, which is a sign that Haber's extended family was pretty sweet. He received his father's permission to study chemistry after a long argument, and he first traveled to Berlin and then to Heidelberg, where he studied under Robert Bunsen, who you might know as the inventor of the Bunsen burner. Now, apparently, Bunsen was * ****. And was kind of bad at teaching. And so Fritz Haber didn't really take to chemistry at 1st and thought he might not be suited for the field. He definitely was not a genius in the subject, and he was frustrated by the fact that other people were better at the work than him. So he's kind of got that like, gifted kid thing where like you you grow up in your your school being told you're good at stuff, and then you like start actually getting into the field and meeting other people who are better. And he's like instantly turned away from wanting to get into the work as a result of that hate. Industry. Hmm. Yeah. That's that kind of thing for me. Yeah. But no, tell me because how much chemistry is involved in making dyes? Because I would think maybe Dad would think, OK, you know, Fritz wants to go and do chemistry. That's an important process in making in making good dyes. Maybe. Actually he's going to serve the family business when he comes back from Heidelberg. I think that was sort of the sort of the thought because it seems like his dad, he, he'll, he'll wind up sort of back in the family business briefly for a while. And he did look into. Like doing that sort of work, but I think he was kind of trying to just get get the hell away from home. Yeah, so he's going to tell his dad whatever he had to tell him to get out of there now. Fritz's studies were interrupted in 1888 when he was drafted into the military to do his mandatory term of service in the Prussian Army. He served in a field artillery regiment and he seemed to like it. Fritz attempted to become a reserve officer as a way of moving forward socially, now being a military officer in Germany at the time. Was like a big deal in a way that there's not really an equivalent in in the United States or in most modern countries. I think it actually might be most comparable to, like, being knighted in the UK. Like, it's a really big social deal. Like, even if you're not actively serving, being an officer is like, it was like a huge thing, but Fritz was not allowed to become a reserve officer because he was Jewish and it was Prussia in the 1880s. And yeah, so Haber. Was Jewish, but in a way in which, like his Judaism was more important to everyone around him because of how bigoted people were against Jewish folks back then than it was to him as a child. His family was not religious. He didn't grow up attending synagogue. His family celebrated Christmas, but they weren't religious about that either. It was just sort of like the thing to do. They were. They were secular, and they were kind of the first generation of European Jewish people who had the opportunity to really live that way. In 1812, the Prussian government had issued a special edict declaring that Jews should be treated as loyal citizens of the country, which was actually kind of revolutionary at the time, which gives you a hint for how my family's from. It's pressure. Yeah. Yeah. My grandfather. So 1812 is when pressure was like, all right, you guys can be loyal citizens. There's not officially government suspicion against you. So yeah, it's it's one of those things, like, people wonder about, like, how things got so bad in the 40s and, like, it wasn't that long ago that the government, like, had declared Jewish people were equal citizens. Like, you know, it was it. It was a long history of fighting to get to that point. And even like 70 years beyond that, Fritz still couldn't become an officer. No. Do you think background, do we think that Fritz had already encountered sort of anti-Semitism, low grade anti-Semitism around Breslau or do you think constantly, constantly. So it wasn't like a huge shock to him. Constantly he was like again. I would it would be probably comparable to like the kind of background racism that's really common in the United States today for for people of color where it's this sort of thing that you just grow up knowing certain roads are going to be more dangerous for you. Like there's there are all these churches in Germany. There's still some churches in Germany that have like stained glass reliefs of anti-Semitic conspiracies and stuff that date back to like the 1500s and stuff like there's that still exists in Germany and it was even more common back then, so. You know, he was he. He grew up in a time where Jewish people were starting to believe that they could advance in society and become equal German citizens. But it would not have been lost on him that that was a new opportunity. And he he seemed to be kind of focused on making the most of that opportunity. He converted to Christianity again, not out of he was not religious. He didn't go to church. He did it for, like, social reasons, because he wanted to be able to get jobs and stuff. So Fritz earned his doctorate. On May 29th, 1891, his grades weren't great and he almost flunked physics, but he did well enough to get to call himself doctor Fritz Haber, so that's cool. He set out to start working as a chemist and pretty much immediately got his **** kicked by the real world. He found himself outmatched by the other scientists he worked around, and was frustrated by the fact that every good idea he had was something that a better scientist was already working on. He felt unable to contribute to any work he found useful, and six months after graduating 23 year old, Fritz headed back to Breslau. Work at his dad's business. So with his tail between his legs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He comes running home. Not a lot of stick to itiveness at A at a lot of the young Fritz. So he says, dad, you're drunk. You're drunk. Sons back, you're drunk, son is back. And chemistry is not going to be the thing for me. Now what do you do when your first attempt at becoming a chemist fails and you wind up working at the family die selling business? You invent tie dye shirts. That's a good option. That's a good option. Fritz decided to try to be a disease profiteer. That was kind of, yeah, that was kind of his first move. So he was convinced, for reasons I'm not really clear about, that, a cholera epidemic was about to hit Germany. And so he badgered his dad to stockpile a huge amount of lime chloride, which was the common treatment of cholera at the day. And so his goal was to basically have a big pile of this stuff when the cholera epidemic hit so that he could sell it and, like, make money and make a name for himself. But how does that work? Is an anti cholera. Cholera is basically you drink, you drink water, bad water, right. And then you get diarrhea and you vomit, right. Gets you dehydration that you die. Yeah, exactly. Actual cure for that or is it like a kind of sort of, you know, I don't home remedy, should we say it was it was not a home remedy. It was a commonly prescribed remedy at the time. I don't think it's terrible. Yeah, I mean, they were given babies heroin for coughs at that point. So it's not, wasn't, wasn't the Golden Age of medical science and but, you know, fortunately for Germany, but unfortunately for Fritz, there was no cholera epidemic and his his dad's business took a massive hit and Fritz was forced to head back into the world of science to make his fortune. Stockpile. He had to sell it off for pennies on the dollar. It was. It almost wiped out the family business. So his attempt to profit off of a horrible illness did not succeed, which is a shame, you know? Yeah, yeah. Now we're going to talk some more about what Fritz did next and how he created the technology that allows, conservatively, around 3 billion of the world's population to eat. But first, Speaking of eating. These ads support the show and help us to eat. So it's an ad pivot. That's that's what's that's what's going on here. I'm sure you guys do more Polish once, but. It's happening products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant. Family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart, you love movies or maybe just Anita? Some recommendations on what new movies to watch next time you sit down in front of the TV? Well, I have the podcast for you. Hey, this is Mike D from movie Mikes movie podcast. Your go to source for all things movies and no matter the genre what you're into, whether it be comedies, romance, action, sci-fi, horror, superhero movies, I cover it all. I'm no critic, I'm just a guy who loves movies. Each episode explores a different movie. Topic plus spoiler free reviews on the latest new movies in theaters and on streaming. And yes, they're always spoiler free so you don't have to worry about anything getting ruined for you. Plus interviews with actors, directors, and writers covering the behind the scenes of your favorite movies. I also keep you in the know with all the latest movie news and movie trailers. Listen to new episodes of movie Mikes Movie podcast Every Monday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We're back. OK, so we're talking Fritz Haber. He's just tried to profit off of a cholera epidemic that sadly did not come. And so, you know, he goes back into the chemistry field, and this time he really commits himself. He gets a teaching job in physical chemistry. The exact field he taught in was something he had no experience with. But this time he pushed himself to just study all night until 2:00 in the morning. And he spent all of his days talking to other experts. And at this time, he was able to make inroads in the field. And in pretty short order, he'd gained an impressive expertise in his specific sort of niche in chemistry. But his sense of inferiority did not diminish, even as his actual value in his profession increased, according to the biography Mastermind quote. Like many outsiders, he developed a thin skin, a special sensitivity to slights, he feuded with other scientists, and when criticized, he responded sharply. When the bloc Habers new rival in Karlsruhe, spoke at faculty seminars, Haber regularly found the weakest point in the bloc's argument and publicly lated. There for all to see. Some resented his ambition and drive. The head of Carl's Ruse Chemical Institute was known to advise young students dryly that they should take their questions to Haber. He knows everything. In fact, he knows even more. He's a know it all. So he was good at his job. Yeah, not super well liked. He was also not super successful with the ladies. Hadn't he forgot? He forgot all that doggerel verse which which could have served him so well? Yeah, that did not serve him well. He did tell his friend Max Meyer. At this time, women are like lovely butterflies to me. I admire their colors and glitter, but I get no further so. What could be more creepy? He could have went to sleep with a butterfly. He can't see the butterfly. Yeah, right. I mean, you can do anything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's yes, it's anything's possible. In the early 1900s, science is advancing. I believe Fritz Haber could find a way to have a feeling. Romantic stuff. A butterfly. Yeah. I actually had the beginning of a horror movie in my mind when you're talking about butterflies. I thought it was gonna be the opening sequence. And there's gonna be one of those boxes of, like, dead butterflies, which have been preserved forever, and then it like, pan. To his face and the glint in his eye and he making this comparison of butterflies in women. But luckily, luckily, he didn't know that. Sneaking into the entomology department and forbidden love, yeah. Now, the woman Fritz would finally convince to love him was a lady named Clara Immerwahr. Now, Clara was in pretty much every way a more impressive person than Fritz. You know, he'd sort of managed to slouch his way into a doctor with with mediocre but acceptable grades. Clara earned a doctorate, too, but for her it was a way more difficult process. For one thing, schools like the gymnasium where Fritz had gone, did not admit female students. So Clara had to do all of her learning through private tutors. But private tutors don't give you the kind of degree. You need to be able to attend university. So she found a work around. Women were allowed to attend college lectures as guests if the professor gave their permission. So Clara slowly agonizingly convinced Professor after professor to let her sit in on their lessons. After a year in university, she took the 1890s equivalent of a GED examination and got a certification that gave her the same qualifications as a gymnasium graduate. And after all of this, she was able to actually start her university career. And she did well enough that in December 19. 100 she defended her dissertation in front of an enormous crowd at Breslau University. Wow, Claire. Yeah. Claire was the first women in Germany to receive a doctorate in in, like, a scientific field. She married this loser. Yeah, and she marries this guy. She to give you an idea of sort of the, the wokeness of the time, the Dean of the university, as he hands her her degree, says science welcomes each Persian irrespective of sex, confession, race or nationality, which is good, solid start. But then he added that he didn't want to see the dawn of a new era where women became scientists instead of homemakers. So, like, that was that was the level where they're like, OK, you did the work and we're we're woke enough that we'll like we'll let you be a doctor, but you should still probably. Just take care of some guys. House. What do you think? What do you think Claire had to do while he was spouting this? You think she's had to kind of stand next to him as smile and a nod as he said that he hoped that he wasn't going to see the dawn of a new era? I mean, yeah, I don't envy. I don't envy her standing on that stage next to that old *******. You are not going to envy her more through the course of the story. She gets pretty ****** over in this in this whole tale, so spoilers. So for a tragically short span of time, Claire worked as a chemist. She was quite good at it. There was no running away from the field when she realized she wasn't like instantly the best like we saw from dear Fritz. She was very good and she got better. But love makes fools of us all, and the person Clara Emma Ware fell in love with was a mediocre chemist named Fritz Haber. They married, and Clara moved to Karlsruhe to be a professor's wife and to keep her husband's household. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a bummer. She didn't give up her career in science immediately, but it seems to have slowly been kind of beaten out of her by the demands of keeping Fritz comfortable and eventually raising a family. She and her husband did collaborate on the textbook, and she would participate in conferences and symposiums, but now that she was a professor's wife, most of her colleagues just assumed she was parroting things that she'd heard from her husband, and Fritz did not strain himself to correct this misconception. So. Hmm. It's 1900. Yeah, yeah, we're still, do we have any, do we have any, like correspondence between her and her family? I mean, how's it going at this stage? Is she is she starting to feel like, Oh my God, I'm all this struggle. I did the private tutors, I got the professors to let me into the lectures. I got my, what they'll call in 150 years time my GED equivalent. And now I'm here and actually I'm a brilliant chemist and what I have to do is go to these parties. And except that everyone thinks that everything I have to say is parroting my husband. I mean, she must have just felt terrible. Yeah, she was not a happy person and we will. We read a little bit from some letters she wrote a little bit later. But yeah, this is not a a great story for Clara. Now, Clara and Fritz did have a baby boy, Herman and Fritz, as soon as he was born. Fritz instantly left his new wife alone with their baby to tour the United States as a spy for the German electrochemical society. So he's he's that kind of dude, you know, tale as old as time, you know, get a woman pregnant and then go spy on the American scientific infrastructure. We've all had that happen now. In Fritz returned to Germany, thoroughly inspired by what he had seen. He continued to ignore his family in order to do science, his wife wrote at the time, Francisco scattered. If I didn't bring him to his son every once in a while, he wouldn't even know that he was a father, so he's not a better dad than his dad was. I'll say that now. Clara grew increasingly unhappy and resentful of her husband during this. Surprise, most of Fritz's male scientist friends took his side, chastising Claire for being a bad wife and basically bumming everyone out. Their attitude. But not everyone felt this way. Paul Crossa was one of Haber's students, and he was also Claire's second cousin. He wrote quote she completely recognized the outstanding talents and personality of her husband, but it certainly was not easy for her to be the wife of a great man. She sacrificed her profession for him, and she never really found the necessary substitute for it in family life. She had no interest in playing a prominent social role, nor was she particularly good at it. But so this cousin, this second cousin of hers says that Faber is a brilliant scientist. So, so his reputation is starting to grow. It starts to grow during this. And his his brilliance is not in he's not one of these like Eureka. I've, I've come up with this conclusion sort of scientist who buries themselves in the work and then comes up with like genius new thing like he's he's a brilliant scientist in terms of his ability to manage teams of scientists and collate data between them and work toward solutions and be like, this is our goal. You need to do this. You need to do this. So you found this out that gives me this idea. Like, that's kind of what Haber's brilliant at. And so when he's just sort of working in a lab, he's nothing special. But once he starts to get enough of a position that he starts managing teams of people, his particular genius starts to become known. And that really starts happening. And like around 19 O four, it's a monstrous scale. Yeah, yeah, that's he's a he's what you would call like an industrial chemist, and he's a genius at that. He might be the best there ever was. Now, starting in 1904, Fritz receives a letter from the managers of the Austrian Chemical Works Company informing him that they had found traces of ammonia in their chemical plant. Now, this is significant because ammonia is the most potent source of nitrogen in in nature. Now, nitrogen is the primary building block of food. Plants and animals need it to grow fertilizer. It's mostly nitrogen, but nitrogen isn't an easy thing to come by in the natural world because there's only so much of it in the soil and it's depleted by growing crops now for thousands of years before this point, farmers would plant stuff like legumes and other nitrogen rich crops in order to plow them back into the soil to keep it fertile. But as the modern era dawn and the human population exploded, the earth started to run into a nitrogen crunch. Careful organic farming did not scale well to large populations, and the long standing strategy of abandoning farmed outland for new land stopped working. An area in which all of that land had already been settled and farmed. So in the early 1900s, prominent scientists start to realize that there's a massive famine on the way when the world's nitrogen stores are going to be depleted in the Earth's going to stop being able to support all of the people who live on it at the moment. In the early 1900s, farmers were able to replenish their soil with fertilizers derived from huge nitrogen deposits in Chile. But those deposits were set to run out in a couple of decades. So there's that bird poop. Yeah. Yeah. Bird poop is one of the major. Major sources of it, guano, saltpeter. So they've still got fertilizer for the time being, but everyone starts to realize in the early 1900s that like by 1930 or 40, everyone's going to be dying because we just can't keep growing food. So the fact that these Austrian industrialists had found ammonia created as a byproduct in their chemical plant could be a huge deal. It was common knowledge at that point that the air around us is filled with nitrogen, but nobody knew how to, like, get it out of the air. Anybody who could figure out how to do that would basically be able to create bread from the air, which is kind of like the scientific Holy Grail of the day. But of course, Fritz was not at all interested in this, and he did not get involved in fixing the nitrogen problem out of a desire to stop a famine. Instead, what got him involved was the fact that a guy he considered a rival, a scientist named Nernst, was also working on the nitrogen problem. So it was a it was * **** measuring sort of thing. And I should note that Nernst did not consider himself Haber's rival. Fritz thought this guy was his rival because Nernst discovered the third law of thermodynamics and Fritz really thought that he should have discovered the third law for thermodynamics. So he's the guy who failed physics? Yeah, yeah, he's he's just he's just ****** at this guy because he. Came up with it. Yeah. He figured this thing out, and Fritz didn't, and so he hated him. And so this guy starts working on the nitrogen problem and, for instance, like, well, I'm going to solve this problem so out of wounded pride rather than a desire to feed the world, Fritz Haber directs his considerable intellect to the problem of sucking nitrogen out of the sky. He gets a team on it and they start to make progress. And he works at a deal with a major German chemical company called BASF, and they agreed to fund his research if he can figure out a solution. And they give him 10% of the company's net profits from his discovery. So Fritz, you know, he he gets to work and he he does a really good job. Like his team blows through the numerous barriers and setbacks that beat other scientists like Nernst, and by March of 1909, they'd figured out how to suck nitrogen out of the air and produce ammonia. They showed off their new method. In front of the BASF. And then Hebrew threw a giant party in a local hotel where everybody got so drunk that, according to one of the scientists there, we could only walk in a straight line by following the streetcar tracks. So they do it. They figured out this. This would come to be known as the Haber Bosch process. And like I said, there's about a 50% chance that you're alive because of this. The world population without this tops out at somewhere around 3:00 or 4 billion people. What exactly? How? How did he do it? I mean, I'm not a I'm not a chemist. Yeah. That I wasn't gonna ask, but then I got interested. To them, it's what there's essentially a big machine that uses, I think they used uranium as a reagent in this big machine to, like, condense air into ammonium. And it would produce, like jars of ammonia, essentially. And then, you know, you can turn that into a fertilizer. So, like, yeah, that's what they do. And Fritz, Fritz would get a Nobel Prize for this in 1918, which, I mean, he really deserved. There's. 3 or 4 billion people who are eating right now because of the Haber Bosch process. It's one of those things that, like, it's kind of hard to imagine the modern world without without it. So this goes great for Fritz. It means not only that he's famous for solving the nitrogen problem, but it means that he's going to get rich as ****. But it was not a great thing for poor Clara Haber. She wrote a letter to one of her old scientific colleagues around the time saying what Fritz has achieved in these eight years I have lost and even more. And what's left fills me with deep dissatisfaction, even if external circumstances in my own particular temperament are partly to blame for this loss. What's mainly responsible, without a doubt, is Fritz's overwhelming assertion of his own place in the household and in the marriage it simply destroys any personality that's incapable of asserting itself against him even more ruthlessly. O. Wow. Clara Haber talking about her husband. Things are going from bad to worse in the in the Haber household. Yeah, and it it sounds like he's, you know, if you've ever worked in like a tech company with like someone who's a brilliant coder or engineer, but like a total *******. Fritz seems to be kind of that sort of personality where he knows now that he's kind of a prima Donna. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. Where he like he, he decides. And like Claire writes about that, she she wrote in another letter. Everyone has a right to live their own life, but to nurture one's quirks while exhibiting a supreme contempt for everyone else and the most common routines of life. I think that even a genius shouldn't be permitted such behavior except on a desolate island. I think Freud's quirk was cocaine. Yeah, and that's a better quirk. That is a better quirk. Yeah, Claire would have been. One of Kara's formative experiences was space. And I'm wondering, care if you encountered any *****? Well, I was going to, I was going to call them hybrids, but yeah, let's call them what they are. Future, I think future Haber, is probably where the kids at space camp, who knew all the answers when we were 11 years old because they had watched Apollo 13 too many times. Yeah. Yeah. And Fritz is is that kind of guy, which is it a lot of that his back story makes sense if you kind of view him through that lens, the whole. Yeah, exactly. So. Uh, Haber is incredible. Achievements led him to political power as a Jewish person. This was almost unprecedented Christian person. He was a Christian at this point, right? Not, I mean, what you actually say your religion is, is less important in Germany in the 1800s than your parentage, right? Sure, sure, sure, sure. It comes from a Jewish family, but he is like one of the first Jewish people in German history to ascend to a high level of political power. He was named a Gymrat, which is a counselor to the Kaiser's government, which was like a really big deal. So he's he's a trailblazer in that, James Frank, a researcher who worked under Haber and a future Nobel Prize winner himself. Told his boss. Power hungry quote. He knew what he was capable of, and his fingers were itching to do it. Now, the First World War would give Fritz Haber the opportunity to exercise all of the power he had ever dreamed of. Fritz was not a xenophobe. He didn't hate foreigners or seek war with them. But once the wheels of war started turning in August of 1914, he saw it as his duty to support the Kaiser. Absolutely and without question, this was something that one of here's best friends, a guy named Albert Einstein. You might have heard of did not understand. Einstein was outspoken about the fact that he had no loyalty to the German government and felt that it was basically madness to be loyal to any government anywhere, especially a government that was as anti-Semitic as the German one. However mean one, didn't Einstein also contribute materially to the creation of the atom bomb? Yeah, I mean, yeah, he did. He did during the war. But I think that was less about his loyalty to the government building the bomb and more about like, well. Look at how ****** ** things have gotten. Maybe this will be better than not doing it right. I can't judge a guy in 194344 for being like, yeah, maybe we need a giant bomb. But in 1914, Haber said this during peacetime a scientist belongs to the world, but during wartime he belongs to his country. So that's what Haber believes. This is amazing. I mean, this is amazing. It's an amazing story to me because this is Halo was born in in in Breslau in Prussia, which, as you say, is now part of Poland. And in this short time, after Bismarck had unified Germany, he was able to create such essential nationalism. This guy, this Fritz would say a scientist first duty to his country during wartime in his country. So how, how amazing that this myth of nationalism in the space of a couple of decades was able to be so strong that somebody who's previously a citizen of a different country felt this loyalty to Germany. Yeah. And I, I think you saw that a lot. There was a reputation in World War One that a lot of the most sort of fanatic German soldiers were were German Jewish. Because they were suddenly kind of getting like the first chance that their people had had to be considered equal citizens. And I think for a guy like Haber, with that background, there was almost more of an urge to prove yourself to the fatherland, to sort of reach that kind of acceptance that had been impossible 203040 years earlier. So I do think that's a part of it, and it's one of the the many tragedies of this story, because the things that happen after World War One don't end so well for Haber or his family. As a result of the fact that he was not really seen as an equal German citizen by a whole lot of Germans, so. Yeah, it's going to be a bummer, but, uh, first. Is sounding pretty dire, yeah. But you know what's not dire? The wonderful companies that support this podcast with their products and services. So why don't we all take a break, roll out to the lobby and listen to some ex. Beds. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant. Families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart, you love movies or maybe just Anita? Some recommendations on what new movies to watch next time you sit down in front of the TV? Well, I have the podcast for you. Hey, this is Mike D from movie Mikes movie podcast. Your go to source for all things movies and no matter the genre what you're into, whether it be comedies, romance, action, sci-fi, horror, superhero movies, I cover it all. I'm no critic, I'm just a guy who loves movies. Each episode explores a different movie. Topic plus spoiler free reviews on the latest new movies in theaters and on streaming. And yes, they're always spoiler free so you don't have to worry about anything getting ruined for you. Plus interviews with actors, directors, and writers covering the behind the scenes of your favorite movies. I also keep you in the know with all the latest movie news and movie trailers. Listen to new episodes of movie Mikes Movie podcast Every Monday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We're back. So at the point at which this story is World War One has just started now you guys probably heard a little bit about that one. It was a kind of a big deal at the time. People don't talk about it so much now because it's it's little brother was kind of a bigger deal. But I'm a big World War One fan. Well, what we're also interested in World War One and actually the reason our podcast is called Sleepwalkers is actually an illusion to World War One as a very kind of bring that up. There's a very famous book by historian called Christopher Clarke called. Sleepwalkers. How Europe stumbled into conflict, I think, is the subtitle. And the idea, basically is, as I suspect we're going to be talking about shortly, that all these new technological developments were happening at the same time. Rail telegraphs, Gatling gun, and they've never collided in this same way as they did when suddenly the major powers were stumbling towards this conflict that none of them actually wanted. But the technological infrastructure had its own logic and so this terrible, terrible, terrible conflict happened. Our show is sleepwalkers is not so pessimistic. But our point is if we don't study the artificial intelligence infrastructure which is being built around us and how it's guiding us towards certain conclusions we're at risk of, of sleepwalking ourselves into. Geopolitical outcomes, which we may we may not want and which are which nobody may want. Yeah. And I, I like that quote about sort of looking at Europe in this. As sleepwalking into the war because it's both accurate for World War One, but kind of accurate for every massive disaster in history. Like they they all have the same pattern, which is that a bunch of stuff changes all the people in power assume things still work the way that did when they were kids and like, it's. It's the same thing that happened in 2016 in terms of like the impact of social media and fake news and all of this stuff. We're like none of the people who were in, in charge in any of like the established parties and stuff. Knew how to use an e-mail server. Yeah, exactly. But if you're paying attention. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and by the way, today, you know, we're in the middle of this conflict about Huawei and between China and the United States, the founder of Huawei, who's a 74 year old, one of the biggest tech people in China, Ren Genfit. I think. Ren, I'm not sure it's turning, but when something he said after his daughter was arrested in Canada and after the United States and, you know, banned US corporations. Doing business with Huawei, he said. We expected conflict with the United States to come. We just didn't know. Be this soon. Yeah, I mean, nobody ever does. That's a bit scary. One of the things that kind of ties into the story of Fritz Haber, when you talk about the role that a company like Huawei has within the Chinese state, not just within the government, within the military infrastructure. And when you talk about in the United States, companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and how they tie into our defense infrastructure and the Pentagon and in and in that way. Like the executive branch and the government, Fritz Haber's kind of the guy who was partly responsible for inventing that world, the military industrial complex that did not exist, really, prior to World War One. And the Germans were the first people to start to figure it out in a really concrete way, because they had to. Because, like the the British Empire could afford to be inefficient, right? Because it it owns the whole world. France can even afford to be inefficient. They've got a lot of colonies. They've got a lot of space. Germany, in that war, would get annihilated. If they were inefficient and when the war started, industry and science weren't tied to defense soldier like generals and stuff would kind of every now and then except that, like, oh, we have to upgrade our guns. Oh, we have to upgrade, oh, we have to, like, take advantage of this new technology. But they were very slow. And in fact, one of the big fights prior to World War One between not just in Germany but British military leaders would argue about this too, is that it was a bad idea to give soldiers automatic weapons because they just waste bullets and it won't, it won't increase their efficiency. They're too dumb to know how to use more bullets. Well, and also the the, I mean, they insisted on the cavalry. I mean, the beginning of World War One, that the British were riding in Red Jackets on horses into German machine gunfire. Can you imagine? And the and the Germans. One of the things that was revolutionary about the Germans at the start of that war is that, like, they had kind of dark colored uniforms as opposed to like the blue pants the French were wearing and the Red Jackets and stuff. And it's like, oh, it turns out it's really good if you kind of can blend in. Yeah, people are shooting at you. But the idea that like you would Fritz Haber, was one of the guys when this war kicks off, who goes to the military command and says like, we have to tie industry and science and arms production. And the government altogether, otherwise we're not going to be efficient enough to win this war. And he based a lot of what he was doing, what was already happening in the United States at the time. Like, the like, that was kind of where some of it got inspired from because he saw these big endowments in the US that had been like Rockefeller and guys had funded that were then making new scientific equipment that was then going into like, the US state. And he was like, oh, if we could just do that more efficiently, we could stand a chance against these countries that have a lot more resources than us. So if you're looking at the start of the military industrial complex, it's not all down to Fritz Haber, but he's one of the very, very first handful of guys who sees where the future is going and is like all of these parts of the state need to talk to each other. And you can't just have industry and science divorced from the military. They have to be working together. Otherwise, we can't win this war now. When World War One started, the the kind of plan that the Germans had was to invade all of Europe simultaneously. That was their very ambitious plan for the start of the war. And the logic behind it was that Germany's not a really big country. And invading France, Russia and Belgium, like, well, it seems kind of crazy. They figured it was their only way to win, to, like, knock out France and Belgium as quick as possible and then sort of have a leisurely fight with the Russians. And one of them is the strategy in the Second World War, right? Yeah, yeah. Very similar to their strategy in the Second World War. And there was a really grim logic as to why because. Germany started World War One with six months of bullets and shells. And as you know, being British, y'all y'all ruled the waves. And so Germany couldn't get any more bullets anymore of the I mean, they can make bullets, but they couldn't make gunpowder because gunpowder relies heavily on nitric acid or nitrate, both of which are very nitrogen heavy compounds. And while you can make ammonia out of the air, there was no way to make nitrate. Out of the air at the start of the war. So who are they buying from? They were buying from like Chile, which obviously the British Navy is not going to let Germany keep taking gunpowder in when they're shooting at each other. Like that's not going to work. So the Germans start this war knowing like, we got six months at most before the bullet supply ends. So they've got to win this fast, and that's the hope in August of 1914. By October they know they're not going to win the war fast. It's turned into a gigantic **** show for everybody and Germany's eating through their stockpiles. Way faster than they thought they were. So they realized in October we've got like 6 to 8 weeks of bullets left and then that that's it for Germany. Like. So I've got a horrible premonition that you're going to say necessity was the mother of invention. In a minute it it sure as hell was. And and Fritz Haber was the midwife of invention, holding necessities hand as it gives birth to I I probably extended that. But yeah, he figured out how to derive nitrate using a variation of the process his scientists had already used to derive ammonium. Now, this had two major effects. The first of them is that it allowed Germany to keep making bullets and explosive shells even under the effect of the British naval blockade. The last three years of World War One would not have been possible. Without Fritz Haber. That war is done in like February, March at the latest of 1915. It's just over there. Just yeah. Just to say, I mean the Second World War does obviously get a lot more attention from everybody than the First World War. But in terms of the people who died on the battlefield in in World War One, what kind of numbers are we talking about and how many of those were after? It would have come to an end if it weren't for Haber. About 20 million dead in the war. Probably at least 16 to 18 million. That would have happened after the period Germany would have ran out of bullets without Fritz Haber. I mean, that is just astonishing. Yeah, it is a tremendous amount of of of human misery made possible by Fritz Haber's invention. And while that's horrible for the world and horrible for Europe and horrible for it, probably conservatively, about 14 to 16 million young men, it made Fritz Haber rich as ****. Because if you guys remember, he's still getting that 10% Commission on all of the sales the BASF makes from his discoveries. So 10% of every bullet fired by Germany and the greatest war in history goes right into Fritz Haber's pocket. So he's doing ******* great on this, on this thing. Like, it's a solid move. Just makes me think a little bit of the of the Purdue story we've been looking at recently. And. Yeah. Cycler family. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I I would say I would. I think it's less evil than that because Fritz didn't do this to get rich. That was a side effect of it. He did it because he was patriotic in his country, was at war. Like, it's one of those things you can say there was this horrific human toll to it, but also like. Would any scientist in America with the capability not have done the same thing if it meant the survival of our country? The country or yeah, or Britain. There's very little, yeah, I guess there's very little patriotism involved in the development of opioids. But, yeah, exactly. But but at the same time, the development of opioids was. Or ushered in a new wave of pain management that this, at least this country hadn't really seen. Yeah, at the expense of a number of lives, obviously, but. Similar in that, and it's certainly like anytime you're making millions of dollars off of a war, it's pretty messed up, right? Conscience, that is. Yeah. Overlooked, I guess. And that's the thing. We'll talk about this a little bit more, and actually just a second here. But that's the thing that Einstein fought with Fritz Haber over, because Fritz was like, no, it's my duty as a patriotic German to lend all of my talents to this war effort. And Einstein was like, **** countries, they're dumb, you're getting people killed. And was he a little bit of a self hating Jew? Possibly. Haber or Einstein? Haber? No. Oh no, I wouldn't. Or I guess he would. I guess he, but obviously he was quite intoxicated with the fact that he could be. Patriotic, yeah. I think he was intoxicated by that. And I think there was some subconscious desire to prove himself. I don't think he thought very much about Judaism, right. Day-to-day. Like, it just wasn't important to him. Like he was a German and that's what he thought. I think if you grow up. Ultimately being rejected because of your religion, even if you're not conscious of it that that this sort of allure of. Patriotism is is there later in life. Oh, absolutely. And it it definitely is also, like, he got rejected from being an officer in the military for being Jewish. And, like, now he's saved the whole war. So there's there that's got to have be playing a part in it. It's like I wasn't good enough for your army. Well, like, what would your army be doing without Fritz ******* Haber? It's not unlike the Kushners. Like you're going to prison. My dad. So now I'm going to punish the whole country. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's there's a little bit of that. New Jersey, NJ. New Jersey and a little fairness. Who among us hasn't wanted to punish New Jersey? That's right, one time or another. If you're seeing Chris Christie's plain outfit. He he he is punishing New Jersey with his sartorial style, yeah. Now, as the death toll rose from the tins to the hundreds of thousands and eventually into the millions, the scientists of Europe began to debate the ethics of lending their brilliance to the nation states that mainly seemed to want to use it to massacre young men. On the other side. Hebers friend Einstein landed on the side of don't do that. He called the War Madness and he blamed German faith in the Kaiser for causing it for its Haber. On the other hand, sign what came to be known as the manifesto of the 93 was a document signed by 93 German thinkers and scientists. Justifying their participation in the war effort now, the manifesto justified Germany's illegal occupation of neutral Belgium by saying that Germany's enemies had, quote, incited Mongolians and ******* against the white race, which. You may notice is not having anything to do with World War One. Where did the Mongolians come from? I I don't know that one. I assessed Kaiser Wilhelm hated Angle Asians. He had this phrase, the yellow peril. And this is one of those things before World War One. He's obsessed by the idea of Japan's tentacles reaching into Germany. Have no idea why, but he he's the *******. The **** I guess because of and they were dynastic power at a certain time, I think to a guy like Kaiser Wilhelm. Anybody? Further into Asia than Russia was a Mongolian, right? Like, a Korean guy could have said hi to him and even, like, look at Mongo like he was he was super racist. It was 1914, yeah, and he was the Kaiser. Not a not now New Yorkers feel about the middle states, I think, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And how everybody in the world feels about Texas. That's right. Now, according to the book Mastermind quote, Einstein watched with fascination and horror as fellow German scientists, Haber in the lead, laid their skills at the altar of Germany's war efforts. Our entire much play praised technological progress and civilization generally, Einstein wrote in 1917, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal. His friend Fritz Haber, meanwhile, as historian Fritz Stern put it, began to forge a more powerful axe. So Einstein's, like, don't let science be a weapon and Fritz is like, I'm going to make science into the best ******* weapon anybody's ever seen. That's that's the kind of dude he is. So most scientists **** I guess that's the point of this episode. Yeah. Yeah, that that's that's definitely the point of this episode. He doesn't he doesn't come across as great. And you you might think, having made it possible for your country to fight the war for three additional years and and literally saved the war effort on your own. You might be content to rest on your laurels if you were Fritz Haber and just sort of enjoy making the money and letting your country pull both bullets and bread from the air. But Fritz Haber was not done serving his nation. Oh yeah, and he is side of him. This is this is he's about to put out his the chain, like if if Fritz Haber is Fleetwood Mac, which of course, why wouldn't he be? So Fritz Haber looked at at the killing field that machine guns and heavy artillery had created, and he decided that what Germany needed to end the war was what he called a higher form of killing. Fritz Haber was about to invent chemical warfare. Now, poison gas had been banned under The Hague Convention, but all of the major powers in World War One had at least fiddled with the concept. Little attention had been devoted to chemical weapons, because they didn't seem to work very well. Germany's very rudimentary program was run by a scientist. You've gotten the job because he was related to a high-ranking officer. The gases he used were ineffective, and the artillery shells he tried to fire them with didn't really work. The program was widely considered to be a waste of money. It probably would have died on the vine if Fritz Haber hadn't decided that chemical warfare was a ******* sweet idea. According to Smithsonian magazine quote, Haber had a difficult time finding any German army commanders who would even agree to a test in the field. One general called the use of poison gas unchivalrous. Another declared that poisoning. Animate just as one poisons rats was repulsive, but if it meant victory that general was willing to do what must be done Haber. According to biographer Margate Zoli said. If you want to win the war, then please wage chemical warfare with conviction so Fritz. Haber is about to do just that you know, and then in the Second World War, the same logic was used in terms of ending the war in Japan with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I think again looking into the future as we're developing new. Lines of, you know, computer programs and cyber weapons. It doesn't take much encouragement once you're in an arena of conflict to say, let's let the dogs out of the pound and see what happens. And it's it's a, it's a mistake we repeated twice in the 20th century and it's one I'm I'm, I'm scared of in the 21st century. And it was, it was even if you look at the the creation of the Gatling gun that was the same, and the creation of dynamite. Like both in both weapons people were like, this is going to make war too bad for people to wage. And then 150 years later the descendant of the Gatling gun is one of the most popular products in the United States. People are like so in love with essentially like the most evolved form of the machine gun that like it's an incredibly popular multi $100 million industry because like it turns out that no weapon makes War Two terrible to to fight. We just wind up kind of worshipping the weapons. That's what people do. Which is not an optimistic line to go to an ad plug on. Sorry. But maybe it'll be a weapons company. Maybe Raytheon will, will be, will be sponsoring the next ad. I know a lot of my listeners need to buy guided missiles for the wars that they wage in Yemen. A lot of our listeners are are waging violent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. We have a lot of lot of lot of generals and dictators fans of the podcast. So hopefully it's a Raytheon ad. Here we go. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. Family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twist at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart, you love movies or maybe just Anita? Some recommendations on what new movies to watch next time you sit down in front of the TV? Well, I have the podcast for you. Hey, this is Mike D from movie Mikes movie podcast. Your go to source for all things movies and no matter the genre of what you're into, whether it be comedies, romance, action, sci-fi, horror, superhero movies, I cover it all. I'm no critic, I'm just a guy who loves movies. Each episode explores a different movie. Topic plus spoiler free reviews on the latest new movies in theaters and on streaming. And yes, they're always spoiler free so you don't have to worry about anything getting ruined for you. Plus interviews with actors, directors, and writers covering the behind the scenes of your favorite movies. I also keep you in the know with all the latest movie news and movie trailers. Listen to new episodes of movie Mikes Movie podcast Every Monday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We're back. We're back, and we're talking about Fritz Haber's obsessive desire to have chemical warfare become a thing now. There was a lot of resistance Fritz encountered to the idea of using chemical weapons, even from the German General Staff, as we already discussed. Fritz, however, did not understand the horror that people had for these tools. Saying death is death, however it is inflicted, which is not wrong, but kind of misses the point a little bit. He was eventually. Successful in convincing the German General Staff to let him create a chemical weapons corps, Fritz and his scientists set out immediately to find a chemical that would work for killing. This was not an entirely safe process. According to the biography Mastermind quote, on December 17th Fritz Haber stood nearby as two of his oldest friends at the Institute. Gerhard Justin, Auto Sacker, prepared to mix two such chemicals in a test tube. Then someone called from next door. He was needed in the mechanic shop. Moments after Haber left the room, the test tube erupted in a violent. Explosion, and the laboratory was splattered with blood. The blast blew off just sand, but he would survive. Sacker, who'd been looking directly at the mixture, laid dying horribly, mutilated. Haber came rushing back into the laboratory and, according to one account, collapsed in shock, speechless. Held in a colleague's arms, he could only shake his head as though refusing to believe the scene before him. Clara Haber also came running. She too, knew sacker well. Long ago in Breslau, he had been one of two students who tested her knowledge during the public awarding of her doctoral degree in chemistry. Claire approved to be very calm and courageous in the midst of crisis, ordering the institute's mechanic to cut open sackers collar so that he might breathe more easily. So Haber starts making these weapons. They blow up and kill one of his friends. He passes out in horror. His wife immediately runs in and starts doing first aid and, like, knows what **** needs to happen. So, so there's an explosion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. I think about chemical warfare in World War One. I think about poison gas, which is not explosive, right? Some of them are like the chemicals that you mix can be. Explosive, like they hadn't figured out the mixture yet and they were kind of ******* around and yeah, yeah. So Sacker did not survive his injuries, and Clara came to be revolted by her husband's work in weapons development. She called it a perversion of science and quote, a sign of barbarity corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life. Haber, however, was not at all dissuaded from chemical warfare by this deadly disaster or by his wife. Next, he had the brilliant idea to use chlorine gas as a weapon, mainly because it was. Easy and cheap to make in quantity, you only really needed salt, so since artillery shells were in short supply, he decided to use some of the 10s of thousands of empty metal canisters that were normally used to ship paint. He theorized that these canisters could be filled with liquid chlorine and placed all along the front in strategic locations. When opened, the chlorine would vaporize into gas and the wind would blow it into enemy trenches. Chlorine gas is heavier than air, so once it reached the trenches it would go down into them, rendering the safest spots on the battlefield uninhabitable. It's kind of genius when you think about it like he's not a dumb guy. It's a good it's a good plan. It worked. It's pretty horrifying. So you would leave paint cans. He really used paint cans. Yeah, yeah. Big paint. Not like what we recognize as modern paint cans, but like these big industrial paint canisters. Yeah. And they would bury them in thousands of them and then open the tops. Isn't there a famous phrase? Be careful what expression you make, because the wind might change. No, I've never heard that one. I think so I I think and I think my in in England I I seem to remember my parents saying like, don't make too many hideous faces because the wind might change. But I mean I I would think opening a bunch of paint cans full of deadly choking gas and next to where my soldiers were were, were camping might give me pause. Yeah, it's there's some danger in it. It's not. It's not. I mean, but it's the same thing you talk to any any soldier who was in a frontline position when artillery. Was firing. And they will tell you that **** often winds up hitting way too close, too. So do air strikes. So, like, there's always risks with this stuff. And it was considered a worthwhile risk. So Fritz spent months training a special corps of citizen soldiers or of scientists, soldiers whose job would be to place and deploy the new chemical munitions. They buried 6000 canisters around the stalemated battlefield of IPRA, and then settled in to wait for the wind to be right one fine evening in April 2015. To 1915, not 2015. It was Fritz Haber, leading his chemical core from the front, gave the order to deploy poison gas for the first time in warfare. He started the attack with the words God punish England. A cloud of sickly yellow gas drifted towards the allied lines, filled with soldiers who had barely gotten used to the idea of machine guns. The gas caused mass panic. Lance Sergeant Elmer Cotton, a Canadian who was gassed at IPRA, called the chlorine gas poisoning an equivalent death to drowning. Only on dry land the effects are there, a splitting headache and a terrific thirst to drink water is instant death, a knife edge of pain in the lungs and the coughing up of a greenish froth off the stomach and the lungs, ending finally and insensibility. And death. It is a fiendish way to die. Do you think he had tested the reaction? On well, I guess he had seen his friend die. He saw his friend die, he knew it killed. But I'm always curious about that. You just sort of, it's like black box. I mean I did he know the method of killing that, the way in which people would die when he implemented it? What he knew is what would happen chemically and what happened when the body. Yeah what happens chemically with chlorine gas is that when it enters your airway it reacts with the water in your like throat and lungs to produce hydrochloric acid. Ah, so it literally melts its victims from the inside out. Now, the 168 tons of gas that habers men released killed 5000 allied soldiers in a matter of minutes and horribly wounded another 10,000. It opened up a gap in the Allied lines that allowed the German army to advance more than a mile, which in World War One terms was an enormous gain. For that point in the fighting, Haber was quickly promoted to the rank of captain. He had finally achieved his lifelong goal of becoming a German officer, at the small cost of introducing a fresh new hell into the Annals of Human. Warfare. Cool. Yeah. You guys proud of him. Proud of him. I'm horrified. And yeah, you know, yeah. Unfortunately, Haber's destructive invention is, is, is. We're very much with us today in Syria. I mean, yeah, it's been used within days of us recording this podcast in Syria and Idlib. Yeah. I mean, you see these videos of these children in Syria choking with their parents around them and. It's so very, very horrific and and it's such an effective tool that that that Fritz Haber made. It's hard to imagine a time when it wouldn't be with us in the future, given how yeah, destructive it is, both of life, but also to morale and what it what it disgusting way to see somebody go somebody you love, somebody fighting next to you. I mean it. Really. I mean, it opens the bowels of hell into the world. Really? Yeah. That's a really good way to describe what he did. It's like he found a way to create a portal into hell in a place that was already hell, and make it just that much worse. It's pretty shocking. I've talked to some people who have been gassed with chlorine, some Golden Division soldiers in Mosul who got because ISIS deployed some cause. It's very easy to make chlorine gas, so these guys had gotten gassed and survived. But like, it's one of those things. Even if you're a really hardened veteran and you've been through some **** there's something about chemical weapons that is just unmanning, which is a term you'll hear a lot from soldiers in World War One. About their reaction to the gas that like people who could hold up under shell fire and machine gun fire would just psychologically break because it's just, it's such a a ******* nightmare. It shakes you to your foundation because the very air you breathe has been turned into poison. It's not like there's something as a bullet coming out your shell coming at you or it's it's it's literally this thing around you which is is overwhelming and I can't. I'm feeling uncomfortable just just thinking about. I mean look, drowning I think is probably. Exactly the right, the metaphor that drowning on land. Yeah, yeah, yeah, now. Y'all aren't the only people who are horrified by what Fritz Haber had done. On May 2nd, 1915, a couple of days after deploying chemical weapons for the first time, he returned home to Berlin to attend a giant party that was being thrown to celebrate his victory in his Commission as an officer. His wife, Clara, was there, and she was furious with him. She thought that his work was barbaric, and that the thousands of dead men simply proved to her that her husband was on the wrong side of history. Now, it's unclear, but there's also some evidence that Clara had caught Fritz. Eating on her around this time, we don't know exactly what happened, but we know they had a giant fight when he returned home and whatever went down on that fight. We know that after Fritz went to bed, Claire grabbed his service revolver, fired one test shot into the air, and then shot herself through the heart. Yeah, yeah. She killed herself, yeah. Probably largely due to the chemical weapons thing which. You know, an understandable reaction to your husband inventing chemical warfare. Hmm, yeah, I I I would say I can see that breaking someone, especially someone who's been through as much as she has, like. Kind of hard to imagine. Ever. Being OK with that. And you can't really divorce in 1915 Berlin. That's what I was thinking, actually. What do you do? How do you? How do you let him know how ****** ** what he's done is right. That's what this is what Claire chose to do. Now she left behind a suicide note. We don't know what it said because Fritz had hit, hidden and probably destroyed. The day after her suicide he left for the Eastern Front, leaving their pre adolescent son with her body to deal with the fallout. So again, dad of the year. Does anyone know does this? Is there an account of the son after he killed himself? Well, yeah. He killed himself as an adult, but he didn't live very long. Yeah, this. He found her body too. Like it's Fritz. It's just super ******. Yeah. It's hard. It's horrible. It's a horrible tale. Yeah, it's a really ****** ** story. Yeah, not a lot. Not a lot of room for levity ends up living the longest, I'm assuming. Not of his whole family, but I mean of his son and daughter and wife. No, no, he his son. Outlives. OK, much not by much. Now, under his direction, Fritz's direction, the German Chemical Warfare Corps developed several new species of poison gas during the war, including phosgene gas and the now infamous mustard gas, which is even worse than the first gas he had deployed. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed and injured by poison gas over the course of the long and brutal war, somewhere around 700,000 total casualties as a result of gas. Did it spark the British and the other allies to develop their own poison gas? Yeah, and and again, it's sort of. Evidence of how ****** kind of everyone is, general. I think David French, the leader of the British Expeditionary Force at the time when he hears that poison gas has been deployed, first thing he says is like, this is horrible and completely uncivilized and nightmarish. And then the next day is sins back home to say we need to make chemical weapons and start doing the same technology company escalation. That is so ****** ** we're going to do the same thing, but like, **** you for doing that, yeah. We're not very good as humans at putting Pandora's **** back in the box, are we? No, we're just closing the top even. No, we just keep, we make more boxes. We're like, oh, that's a ******* sweet box. I'm going to get me a box like that, yeah. Yeah, that's kind of the history of war, so World War One didn't go great for Germany didn't really go great for anybody except the United States kind of kind of went awesome for us. Actually, we made a lot of money that was the transition from the, The Sun never setting on the British Empire to the beginning of the American Empire. Really, yeah, yeah, it really was and on the subject of war profiteers. I think you can probably I had lunch with a Chinese friend yesterday and he said that in China. Dick Cheney is one of the great heroes of China because his oil interests are. Leaving the Iraq war, when America could otherwise have been focused on constraining China he thinks of opened the 21st century to be China's century. Well, thank *** **** Cheney, I mean, yeah, probably, like, there's so many other reasons to be angry at Dick Cheney. I'm not going to pick economic ones, but yeah, that's that seems like an accurate summation of events. So, World War One, not a great time for most people. Fritz Haber, however, would later recall the Great War as probably the best time in his life. Afterwards, he told a friend I was one of the mightiest men in Germany. I was more than a great Army commander, more than a captain of industry. I was the founder of industries. My work was essential for the economic and military expansion of Germany. All doors were open to me. Well, full time for Fritz. The British chemist JE Coates, who was friends with Fritz, wrote in 1937 that quote, the war years were for Haber, the greatest period of his life. In them he lived and worked on a scale and for a purpose that satisfied his strong or urge towards great, dramatic, vital things. To be a great soldier, to obey and be obeyed. That is, his closest friends knew was a deep seated ideal. Can I ask you a naive question? Yeah. Why do you need all kinds of different poison gases? Why? Why isn't just the first horrible chlorine enough? Well, you know. You make a horrible poison gas, and then people make gas masks. So then you gotta make a new gas that eats through the old gas mask and like, like, it's this, this. And also, like, can we kill more people? Can we make one that spreads better? Like, it's like a generative adversarial network. It's like you explained, oh, oh, he wants me to explain why it's like a generative adversarial network because once you develop a gas, and then there's a gas mask. You need a new gas that's going to breakthrough that gas mask and then there's going to be another gas mask and there's another gas that breaks through that gas mask, and that's basically how you train. An algorithm. That's how you train an algorithm. We even see evidence of that in nature outside of human beings. I think the Red Queen hypothesis is the is the name that they give for it. And like when you look at sort of chemical warfare between plants, how like one plant will develop, will evolve like a a set of whales that it releases that like attract bugs that help it or attract like even that like can spread and like warn other plants in the Grove that like zebras or whatever are coming to eat it and then other plants in that. Rope will start producing poison so that, like, too many of their leaves don't get eaten. And it's called the Red Queen hypothesis from like a lion and Alice in Wonderland with the Queens, you have to keep running as fast as you can in order to stay in place. So it's this thing that happens all throughout nature. Like animals are constantly like, that's nature red in tooth and claw. They're always evolving and changing to get an edge. And we do the same thing with guns and ****. And that's what we're looking at in sleepwalkers as well, is one of the big breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Currently has been this what Cara is talking about generative adversarial networks. So that's when you put two neural networks against each other and you have neural network one trying to trick neural network 2 until the output of neural network one is as close as possible to perfect. So that's how for example alpha go. The chess program not only beat the best human player, but beat the very best human programmed chess program which was called Stockfish. So Stockfish had learnt the history of every. Human game ever. And the rules of chess and could handily beat any, any human chess player. And then alpha go came along and all they did was teach. They told 2 algorithms to play chess against each other for a couple of hours. They played 10 million trillion games of chess in two hours, learning from each other all the time. And then within half a day the they blew out of the water the previous best chess program. So it's interesting, you know, it's nature of conflict, whether it's in the battlefield, whether between plants and nature, or now whether it's between. Computer algorithms is all about this Red Queen hypothesis or, you know, trying to beat each other and continually improve iteration. And that's also something celebrated on in Silicon Valley, right iterated design, whatever you call it. And I guess one of the few things that gives me hope about the future is how bad a lot of these systems still are and a lot of what they do like you can talk like, these algorithms are so advanced. AI's gotten so advanced, Facebook still can't ban the Nazis. Like it can't. It can't identify a lot of the equipment that and. I guess on like that parts not so optimistic, but like you talked to soldiers and stuff about like the these incredibly advanced quarter of $1,000,000 weapons systems. They're like, no, a lot of them are total **** and it doesn't work half the time and you wind up just like throwing rocks or whatever because like your big missiles not not functioning or like like as as as fancy. I don't know, I, I, I I take some hope in the fact that things still **** ** no matter because they represent the people who create them. That's why I mean especially in the case of Facebook, but. Yeah, yeah, it's it's bad. And it's also maybe what will save us from all of these things that we keep building or it'll kill us. Well, humanity will probably save us. Humanity will probably save humanity and its shortcomings. Not in how, not how in how advanced it is. Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably fair. So the years after World War One were a steady downward slide for Fritz. He had always battled with nerves, some as the result of his workaholic schedule, and some surely due to his sense of guilt over his wife suicide and all the things he saw during the war. His health suffered. And as Weimar Germany gave way to the Third Reich, so did his career for it slowly came to realize that the Germany that he had loved and served so well felt it owed him nothing. One by one, Fritz's political allies and business partners abandoned. As Germany's laws became more restrictive for Jewish people, he wound up, yeah, exactly none of what he had done for Germany. Into many loyalty from the new government, he wound up fleeing the country and bouncing around Western Europe, living out of hotels as his health gradually failed him. He died in 1934, miserable, nearly penniless and knowing that his nation had completely abandoned him due to his Jewish blood. And was he, I mean, so around the same time Freud left Vienna, for example, was he part of a community of sort of Jewish intellectual people in exile, or was he also exiled from that community because of what? Done in terms of the poison gas, you know oddly enough most of his he stayed good friends with Einstein his whole life and he was very like his scientist friends really liked him. He's supposed to be very generous. He's he would was very generous with his money to his friends and stuff over the years. But his best friends as an older man were French and British chemical weapons experts who'd been on the other side of the war from him. So all these guys who had made that sort of their their career, like they all got along. There was identity, I guess. He didn't really have one there was a period of time where he was considering going to Palestine to like help start a university down there. But like his health wouldn't really allow it and he couldn't formally immigrate away from Germany without giving up a bunch of his money and taxes because of some laws that the Germans had placed on Jewish people who were trying to leave so he just kind of got locked in a holding pattern until he died, so Einstein ended up being right. That Oh yeah, yeah, just Einstein was 100% right. Yeah, your patriotism means nothing. They will turn on you. Yeah. Yeah, in a dime. Don't trust countries. Yeah. Einstein was the smarter man. Or at least the man who understood human nature better. That might be more accurate to say, right? Probably why Einstein is more widely known. Yeah, that's probably a big part of it. And I will say Einstein saved Fritz's family. His children and his immediate family were rescued from Germany due to Albert Einstein's, like, putting in a word for them with the US government, basically, like smoothing that all over. So Einstein was a very good friend to his friend, even after his death. So you can say that for Albert and the. Well, I guess the US government couldn't fault his children. Fritz's children. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how could you. And. Also, like by this point, the US government was making shitloads of bombs and fertilizer using the Haber Bosch process. Like, it's not it's yeah, he he was a net good to the US. We didn't lose all that many guys in that war. And by the way, the US took in a bunch of Nazi scientists after the end of the Second World War. Two further worked against the Soviets. So when it when it comes to bad scientists, if they can serve the US national interest, I don't think there's no, there's no borders there. Yeah, we didn't have any issue with Werner von Braun, even after he reigned a whole bunch of rockets down on London. We were, we were fine with Verner. We'd probably hire a lot of ex Huawei guys. If they were, we'd take them. Yeah, ohh, sure. Yeah. All we care about is that you can do the thing. Yeah, right now, while Fritz's immediate family was saved by the Nazi death or saved from the Nazi death machine, most of his extended family were murdered in the death camps. And the final terrible irony of Fritz Haber's life is that the chemical weapon used to kill so many millions of his fellow Jews, Zyklon B, was the descendant of the lice disinfectant. Cyclon, which was developed by Fritz Haber's own lab and by scientists that he was managing so. That is the last terrible part of this story. He doesn't not remind me of Bernie Madoff. Just in terms of as a Jewish person who basically was selling dreams to middle and upper middle class Jewish people and organizations that were supposed to raise money for a number of Jewish causes. And including someone like Elie Wiesel who then ended up disenfranchising so many important post war Jewish organizations, foundations, people who had fled Germany during the Second World War, all because he wanted to be taken seriously in a financial industry. That in the eighty 70s and 80s was extremely anti-Semitic. You know, using, I guess, money instead of chemical warfare, but was intoxicated by it nonetheless. Yeah, a lot of the same psychological stuff going on. I mean, not this, yeah, Bernie Madoff didn't kill anybody, but no. But yeah, I would say Haber definitely had the more negative impact. Although this is this is where we get into the difficulty of of Fritz Haber. Legacy, because he's the father of chemical warfare and he invented the Zyklon chemical that was used to feel so much of the Holocaust. But can we blame him for inventing the cyclone chemical? I mean, that feels like we've given, we've given Fritz a good and well deserved beating in this show. But, I mean, you don't, you can't control the future. What happens to your inventions. And that's another big point in our podcast and sleepwalkers, which is, you know, technology is neutral. I mean, not neutral, but you build. Algorithm we build an application, you can't control what it's used for. So Google, for example, recently withdrew from Project Maven in the Pentagon. But the point is, when you're developing algorithms and artificial intelligence, it gets out into the wild. You don't get to say how it's used. Shakespeare doesn't get to say this is how you read Hamlet, and I don't think it's fair to say that Fritz is to blame for the use of like, Colombian in the Second World War. You're absolutely right. And it's also like, if you've got the stuff you can clearly blame him for is like chemical weapons development, allowing Germany to exist in World War One for an extra three years. Like, those are things where he knew what he was doing very clearly zyclone he was just trying to make a good way to clean up lice, which is a pretty reasonable thing to want as a scientist. In his like, his legacy is complicated also by the fact that most scientists agree that between two and four billion human beings are alive right now because of the Haber Bosch process. Although again, it's not like they otherwise would be dead. They would have been born, although a lot of people would have died because there would have been mass famines, particularly in Asia, yeah. Folia. Yeah. And ******* all of the ******* all of the ******* would have had real, real food troubles, you know. But it does raise some interesting point, which is that the whole if you're trained as a scientist and this is still the case today, you know, you're very results focused. If you if you can make something more efficient as an engineer or a scientist, like you've done a good job. And that's that's been the logic of science always. And it's very hard I think for for scientists to step back and say, I'm not going to invent that thing because a, it's counter to the training counters, the institution of science, but also. Like, it's a small world of very competitive people. I mean, as you said, Fritz Haber was trained by Bunson hanging out with Einstein. You know, all these other scientists, they want to naturally, they have this sort of competitive instinct and and it's it's really hard, I think, also for AI scientists today or AI engineers to think, like, should I not make that thing? Because I know if I don't, someone else will. Well, especially now with technology companies where you're also incentivized by huge amounts of money. I mean, just the sort of allure of being a Unicorn. Is so intoxicating. I think that it seems like a lot of the time it's like, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg, what did Chris Hughes say? He was like, we didn't know that we were going to create this kind of platform. We didn't even think about it at the time. They were, you know, sophomores at Harvard. So, no, I mean, he wanted to rate whether which girls he thought was hottest, precise, literally what he was going for. Yeah. I mean, and again, it's not sort of, I wouldn't compare, right. But I mean, at the same time, you know, the ability to broadcast. An act of domestic terror on a place that was created so that you could see how many hot girls went to Dartmouth, you know? It's it wasn't it wasn't their intention to create a platform for hate speech. It's my point, but. It happened, right? And part of what we're going to talk about in the last part of this episode is what happened. With Fritz habers. Invention, right? Because obviously chemical weapons are still being used, the Haber Bosch process is still being used, but there are some things that have happened as a result of the Haber Bosch process that Fritz Haber could never have guessed but we still have to live with. I found an article on a website called the Globalist that both declares Fritz the greatest industrial chemist who ever lived, but also notes this quote the transformation of Asia and the emergence of China and India as giant Modern 24 first century. Global economies would never have been possible without Norman Borlaug's miracle rice strains, but they could never have been grown had Haber not extracted bread from air. As his fellow Nobel laureate Maxwell Lao put it, borlaug's miracle strains of rice and grain require exceptionally vast inputs of the nitrate fertilizer that is still made from the process. For its Sabre discovered, these fertilizers also require enormous inputs of oil. This means the dream of an oil free world can never happen, even if eternal, ever renewable free energy could be harvest. Harvested from the sun or cosmic currents of space, A world of 7 billion people would still be desperately dependent on oil to make the nitrate fertilizer and to grow the crops. Those people need to survive. The 21st century, like the 20th century, therefore, will still be Fritz Haber's world. Well, so we are eternally dependent on oil as a result of the Haber Bosch process. And there's more. I'm gonna quote next from it was so during World War One, Germany topped out something like 100,000 tons of nitrogen per year. Using the Haber Bosch method worldwide, we currently extract something like 100 million tons of nitrogen out of the atmosphere every year, and this has had a profound impact on our biosphere. I'm going to quote now from that biography Mastermind quote leftover fertilizer is slowly killing streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the northern hemisphere. The changes are gradual, taking place over decades, so it takes a patient. I do notice long term studies, however, reveal dramatic changes. 50 years ago, for instance, eelgrass covered most of the Waquoit Bay and Massachusetts. Then came suburban development nearby, human sewage containing nitrogen from food taken from 1000 fields leached into the Bay and increasing quantities. Thick beds of seaweed began to grow, crowding out the eel grass and with it an entire web of natural life, from scallops to small fish, when nitrogen oxides in the air come into contact with droplets of water. The clouds nitric acid forms. It returns to the earth as acid rain, destroying forests and poisoning streams. At the same time, nitrogen rich rainfall also fertilizes the land, even land that doesn't need or want fertilizer. Every acre of the Netherlands, whether field or forest, now receives as much nitrogen from rainwater as North American farmers typically apply to their wheat fields on purpose. It is much more than most African farmers could dream of buying. Even smaller doses are enough to play ecological havoc in forests and wild grasslands. What species that thrive in the presence of nitrogen start growing uncontrollably, crowding out other plants and even animals that aren't used to such conditions? The result is a depleted ecosystem supporting a less rich and complex web of life. And that too is the world that Fritz Haber has left us. So. Complicated guy. Well, that's really, that's that's super, super interesting. I guess when did we start to realize how, how the presence of fertilizer throughout the ecosystem was such a? Such, such a terrible cost and burden to the earth. Was that like a 70s discovery? I mean, I don't know when I feel like that's when it started. And I don't think we really got a great handle on it until in the last like 20 or 30 years that like on a wide scale site to start to realize like, oh **** this is a problem. Like, yeah, we've got some issues here, guys. And we're sort of still in that. Oh **** this is a problem, but we don't really know what to do stage of it. So Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist who previously wrote a very good book in the in the 90s called from Beirut to Jerusalem, the history of the Middle East is very interested in in climate change. And he traces the origins of the Syrian civil war back to famine other while the rising, the climate change and the rising price of wheat, which sparked the first protests. Against Assad. And so the wheel comes full circle in Syria, with the Civil War kicked off by wheat prices and prosecuted using chemical gases. Yep. Thanks, Fritz. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. What a mess. Well. That's the episode. That's what I've got. You guys want to want to plug your, your plegables as we as we lead ourselves out. Yeah, so scared again. Love for you guys to check out Sleepwalkers podcast which covers really all things AI all the human touch points, healthcare, agriculture, love, creativity, food and and sleepwalkers is not quite as bleak as today's story. We we look at some of the positive potential of of new technology as well. I mean much like Fritz's, Fritz's dual use career which which launched both poisonous gases and fertilizers which fed the world. Little bit. And now poisoning the world AI technology which we talk about in sleepwalkers has profound potential to change our lives. The better is already doing so in terms of diagnostics, in terms of, you know, the ability, for example, of journalists to look through things like the Panama Papers and identify bad actors because the power of data processing is so much better. And at the same time, you know, these technologies without careful thought and constraint can push us into into into really hellish. Outcomes. And so, you know, we still live in a country which is democratic and we can through our votes at the ballot box and through public agitation, have some role in our own future. And so, you know, we, we think it's important to talk about potential bad outcomes and because if we, if we wake up and and take action, we can perhaps, you know, ensure a more safe and comfortable future for ourselves. Yeah, that's that's the optimistic point of view. And I, I, I like ending on the optimistic point of view, even though my episodes rarely inspire much optimism in people. So try to take that to heart, listeners and visit our website behindthebastards.com. Find us on Twitter and Instagram at ******** pod. You can find me on Twitter at I write OK and you can buy shirts on teepublic that have. Funny drawings and good guys on them. Cups and such. That's that's it. That's all I got. That's all I got for plugs at the at the end of the episode. So go home, enjoy some very nitrogen rich food because everything you eat is filled with nitrogen thanks to Fritz Haber. Maybe enjoy some explosives or chlorine gas. Don't enjoy some chlorine gas. Hug a cat or something. And yeah, have a good day. That's it. That's the episode. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Life on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts? Hey guys, I'm Kaylee, short on my podcast. Too much to say. I share my thoughts on everything from music to martinis, social media, social anxiety, regrets to risky text, and so much more. I have been known to read my literal diary entries on my show, and sometimes I do interviews with my crazy group of friends, so if you guys want to tune in, you can hear new episodes of too much to say every Wednesday on the national podcast network available on the iHeartRadio. With Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to him.