Fritz Haber, a Jewish scientist who converted to Christianity, invented the Haber-Bosch process that saved billions from famine yet fueled WWI chemical warfare. His belief that scientists belong to their country during war led him to deploy chlorine gas at Ypres, extending the conflict and causing 16 to 18 million additional deaths while his wife Clara committed suicide. Ultimately, Haber's legacy is a tragic irony: his fertilizers sustain modern humanity, yet his lab's derivatives enabled the Holocaust, illustrating how dual-use technology and human flaws drive history forward regardless of intent. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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An In-Depth Conversation00:03:58
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
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Hey, everybody.
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
I don't have a fun lead-in for the episode this week because Sophie is not here and she's thrown me off.
So you should drag her on Twitter and say, why didn't Robert have a funny what's X in my wise?
You know, the real reason I didn't have a good intro is because I thrive on shocking her with my new terrible introduction.
And with nothing terrible, no Sophie to shock, I have nothing terrible to say.
But I do have a great episode of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
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I have Oz and Kara, 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 everything conking out in your end of the world?
Well, we may ourselves be sleepwalkers fairly shortly.
We've had quite a long one, but we're very excited.
We're midway through season one of Sleepwalkers.
And, you know, it's amazing.
We're kind of getting more and more momentum and people are wanting to talk to us on the show, which is great, but we're kind of recording interviews and pushing it out live.
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And Sleepwalkers is kind of about, you know, you pick 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.
The World of AI Never Sleeps00:15:12
Would that 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 really is an episode.
There's a bastard 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 things that will change about the world.
Have you all ever heard of a fellow named Fritz Haber?
Yes.
Now, what do you know about old Fritzi?
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.
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 bastard on its own.
But unfortunately, Fritz's legacy is a lot more complex than just that.
Because if you're a human being who exists on this earth, like roughly 40% of our listeners are, then 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 I and the gas in the trenches.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So he's a German World War I scientist, basically.
Yeah, and there's some, you could make some arguments, like Hannibal was said to have used psychochemically drugged wine to disrupt an army at one point.
But Fritz is the first guy to really lock that shit down in a big way.
He's an important dude, and you could very, very easily argue that he's among a small handful of, like we talk about people like Hitler and Stalin on this podcast.
He's in that tier of importance in terms of like his impact on the world.
So 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?
So to speak?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
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 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 cause some complications, which it did.
And Paula died three weeks after giving birth to Fritz.
So their families may have been kind of right about that not being a great idea.
So Fritz.
Okay, got him.
Yeah, child, child, 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 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 dyes 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 naughty local princelings into unity.
Yes, it was 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 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.
Siegfried 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 of the family totally absent.
Just threw himself into his business, wasn't around, was kind of too devastated by his wife's loss to really stand looking at his son.
So it was one of those kind of shitty dads, not like the drunken, abusive, but just like space cadet.
And was poor little Fritz, was he kind of cut off from his cousins and other family members because of this cursed union in the first place?
Or was he kind of, after his mother died, was he welcomed back into the wider family?
Oh, yeah, 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, as his family says, his 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 and Germany was four, Siegfried 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.
I can't not laugh at it, which I'm sorry, hamburgers who might happen to be listening.
Like McDonald is a last name.
And it makes me giggle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it makes me think of President Kennedy as well in Germany in the 60s saying, Ich bien ein Berliner, which means I'm a Berliner, but also I'm a donut.
So he had the whole crowd cracking up in his face.
So a doughnut and a hamburger.
Yes, yeah.
So they get to laugh at us too for like our things that we say 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 preteen, 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 to the bar at the end of a hard day of being 12 and tie a couple of hours.
It's actually a very hard age.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, middle school would have been a lot easier with a couple of pints at the end of.
Some crystal math.
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.
Wow, what on earth is that?
That's not ringing any bells for me.
Yeah, it's I have trouble picturing it, but I'm going to 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 doggerl 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 brothers' talents, which always came forth at the right moment, recalled Elsie, the oldest of the sisters.
That sounds a little bit like just like being a Jewish kid.
Oh, is that a matter of time?
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 a little older than that.
And as far as we know, did Fritz take his show on the road?
Were the local ladies in Breslau impressed by his ability to spit this doggerel, or was it more of another family affair, shall 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 1886, based on his lifespan.
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.
Fritz celebrated his graduation by getting shithouse 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 to see their hung the fuck over brother, while Siegfried declared, look well, this is how the life of a drunkard begins.
So get a sense of his dad.
Encouraging.
Sympathetic.
Yeah, exactly.
He's just a simple 15-year-old drunken graduation celebration.
Don't make a big deal of it, Dad.
Now, Siegfried wanted his son to apprentice as a die 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.
There's a lot of hamburgers rolling around in Breslau.
No buns, though.
No buns.
No buns.
No buns, just hamburgers.
Keto Breslau.
Like a terrible, terrible Wendy's. 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 ocean of life in the future, guided by no other star than one's own will and striving.
So is this the 19th century equivalent of fuck you, dad?
Yeah, that's exactly what this is.
This is the same letter that Justin Bieber wrote to Scooter Braun at seven in Canada.
What did I say?
Exactly what we just heard.
Yeah.
I want to 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.
That's 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 is the inventor of the Bunsen burner.
Apparently, Bunsen was a dick and was kind of bad at teaching.
And so Fritz Haber didn't really take to chemistry at first 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 you grow up in your school being told you're good at stuff, and then you start actually getting into the field and meeting other people who are better.
And he's instantly turned away from wanting to get into the work as a result of that.
Hate chemistry.
Yeah.
It's that kind of game.
But tell me, because how much chemistry is involved in making dyes?
Because I would think maybe dad would think, okay, you know, Fritz wants to go and do chemistry.
That's an important process 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 thought because it seems like his dad, he'll wind up sort of back in the family business briefly for a while, and he did look into doing that sort of work.
But I think he was kind of trying to just get the hell away from Holly.
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 the United States or in most modern countries.
I think it actually might be most comparable to 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.
Right.
And it was Prussia in the 1880s.
And yeah.
So Haber was Jewish, but in a way in which 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 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 Prussia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes, my grandfather.
So 1812 is when Prussia was like, all right, you guys can be loyal citizens.
There's not officially government suspicion against you.
So, yeah, that's one of those things, like, what people wonder about how things got so bad in the 40s.
Like, it wasn't that long ago that the government had declared Jewish people were equal citizens.
Like, you know, it was a long history of fighting to get to that point.
And even 70 years beyond that, Fritz still couldn't become an officer because of his background.
Do we think that Fritz had already encountered sort of anti-Semitism, low-grade anti-Semitism around Breslau?
Or do you think constantly?
A Jewish Kid in Prussia00:04:03
So it wasn't like a huge shock to him.
Constantly.
Again, yeah, it would be probably comparable to the kind of background racism that's really common in the United States today 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 are all these churches in Germany.
There's still some churches in Germany that have stained glass reliefs of anti-Semitic conspiracies and stuff that date back to like the 1500s and stuff.
That still exists in Germany.
It was even more common back then.
So, you know, 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 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 Dr. Fritz Haber, so that's cool.
He set out to start working as a chemist and pretty much immediately got his butt 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 to work at his dad's business.
With his tail between his legs?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He comes running home.
Not a lot of stick-to-itiveness out of the young Fritz.
So he says, Dad, your drunk son's back.
Your 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.
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.
So lime chloride, how does that work as an anti-cholera?
Cholera is basically you drink water, bad water, right?
And then you get diarrhea and you vomit.
Yeah, and I get so dehydrated, you die.
Yeah, exactly.
Is lime chloride an actual cure for that, or is it like a kind of sort of, you know, I don't know.
Home remedy, shall we say?
It was not a home remedy.
It was a commonly prescribed remedy at the time.
Sure, also had terrible side effects.
Yeah, I mean, they were given babies heroin for coughs at that point.
So it's not, 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 dad's business took a massive hit, and Fritz was forced to head back into the world of science to make his fortune.
What happened to the lime chloride stockpile?
He had to sell it off for pennies on the dollar.
It almost wiped out the family business.
So his attempt to profit off of a horrible illness did not succeed, which is a shame.
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.
Selling Lime Chloride Stockpiles00:04:01
That's what's going on here.
I'm sure you guys do more polished ones.
No.
It's happening.
Products.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and I'm Mostly Human.
I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
Balancing Career and Family00:07:45
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back!
Okay, 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 two in the morning, and he spent all of his days talking to other experts.
And 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 LeBlanc, Haber's new rival in Karlsruhe, spoke at faculty seminars, Haber regularly found the weakest point in LeBlanc's argument and publicly laid it bare for all to see.
Some resented his ambition and drive.
The head of Karlsruhe's 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.
He forgot all that doggerel verse, 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.
It could have been more creepy.
He could have.
You can't sleep with a butterfly.
You can't sleep with a butterfly.
Yeah.
I mean, you can do anything, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's, yes, anything's possible in the early 1900s.
Science is advancing.
I believe Fritz Haber could find a way to have a fulfilling romantic reaction.
Shht up a butterfly.
I actually had the beginning of a horror movie in my mind when you were talking about butterflies.
I thought it was going to be the opening sequence.
And there's going to be one of those boxes of dead butterflies that have been preserved forever.
And then it would pan up to his face and a glint in his eye making this comparison of butterflies and women.
But luckily, sneaking into the entomology department and forbidden love.
Yeah.
Now, the woman Fritz would finally convince to love him was a lady named Clara Immelwar.
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 doctorate 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 that you need to be able to attend university.
So she found a workaround.
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 1900, she defended her dissertation in front of an enormous crowd at Breslau University.
Wow.
Yeah, Clara was the first woman in Germany to receive a doctorate in a scientific field.
And she married this loser.
Yeah, and she marries this guy.
And she, to give you an idea of sort of the wokeness of the time, the dean of the university, as he hands her her degree, says, science welcomes each person, 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 the level where they're like, okay, you did the work, and we're woke enough that we'll let you be a doctor, but you should still probably just take care of somebody's house.
What do you think Clara had to do while he was spouting this?
You think she had to kind of stand next to him and smile and 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 her standing on that stage next to that old bastard.
You are not going to envy her more through the course of this story.
She gets pretty fucked over in this whole tale.
So spoilers.
So for a tragically short span of time, Clara worked as a chemist.
She was quite good at it.
There was no running away from the field when she realized she wasn't 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.
The star is born.
Yeah, 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 a 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.
It's 1900.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, do we have any correspondence between her and her family?
I mean, how's it going at this stage?
Is she starting to feel like, oh my God, after all this struggle, I did the private tutors.
I got the professors to let me into the lectures.
I got 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 accept 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'll read a little bit from some letters she wrote a little bit later.
But yeah, this is not 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 that kind of dude.
Tale is old as time.
Get a woman pregnant and then go spy on the American scientific infrastructure.
We've all had that happen.
Now, when 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, Fritz is so 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.
Solving the Nitrogen Problem00:12:31
I'll say that.
Now, Clara grew increasingly unhappy and resentful of her husband during this period, surprise.
Most of Fritz's male scientist friends took his side, chastising Clara for being a bad wife and basically bumming everyone out with her attitude.
But not everyone felt this way.
Paul Crossa was one of Haber's students, and he was also Clara'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 his reputation is starting to grow.
It starts to grow during this period.
And his brilliance is not in, he's not one of these like Eureka, I've come up with this conclusion sort of scientists who buries themselves in the work and then comes up with like genius new things.
Like he's a brilliant scientist in terms of his ability to manage teams of scientists and coalate data between them and work towards solutions and be like, this is our goal.
You need to do this.
You need to do this.
Oh, 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 in like around 1904.
He's a master of scale.
Yeah, yeah.
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 nature.
Now, nitrogen is the primary building block of food.
Plants and animals need it to grow.
Fertilizer is 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 dawned 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-out land for new land stopped working in an era 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 and 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.
Is 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 dick 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 of thermodynamics.
He's the guy who failed physics.
Yeah, yeah.
He's just pissed at this guy because he came up with the, 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 Fritz is 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 agree 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 gets to work and 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 Haber 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 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 or 4 billion people.
What exact, how did he do it?
I mean, I'm not a chemist.
Yeah, I wasn't going to ask, but then I got interested.
There's essentially a big machine that uses, they used uranium as a reagent in this big machine to condense air into ammonium, and it would produce jars of ammonia, essentially.
And then, you know, you can turn that into fertilizer.
So, like, yeah, that's what they do.
And Fritz would get a Nobel Prize for this in 1918, which, I mean, he really deserved.
There's three or four 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 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 shit.
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 and 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.
So Clara Haber talking about her husband.
Things are going from bad to worse in the Haber household.
Yeah, and 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 asshole, Fritz seems to be kind of that sort of personality, where he knows now that he's kind of a prima donna.
Mark Zuckerberg?
Yeah, yeah, a little bit, where he like he decides, and like Clara writes about that.
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.
Clara would have been one of Cara's formative experiences with Space Camp.
And I'm wondering, Cara, if you encountered any dicks.
Well, I was going to call them Habers, but yeah, let's call them what they are.
Future.
I think future Habers probably were 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 that kind of guy.
Which is a lot of his backstory makes sense if you kind of view him through that lens.
Yeah, exactly.
So Haber's incredible achievements led him to political power.
As a Jewish person, this was almost unprecedented.
Well, a 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.
He 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 Geheimrat, which is a counselor to the Kaiser's government, which was like a really big deal.
So he's a trailblazer in that.
James Frank, a researcher who worked under Haber and a future Nobel Prize winner himself, called 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 Haber's best friends, a guy named Albert Einstein, who 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, 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 fucked up things have gotten.
Maybe this will be better than not doing it.
Right.
I can't judge a guy in 1943, 44 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 an amazing story to me because this is.
Haber was born 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 a sense of nationalism that this guy, this Fritz, would say a scientist's first duty to his country during wartime is his country.
So, how amazing that this myth of nationalism in the space of a couple of decades was able to be so strong that somebody who was previously a citizen of a different country felt this loyalty to Germany?
Yeah, and I think you saw that a lot.
There was a reputation in World War I that a lot of the most sort of fanatic German soldiers were German Jewish men 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 20, 30, 40 years earlier.
So I do think that's a part of it.
And it's one of the many tragedies of this story because the things that happen after World War I 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 first, it's 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 ads.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
Next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Wonderful Companies Supporting Us00:03:22
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Industry Meets Science and Arms00:14:55
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you get a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
So, at the point at which this story is, World War I has just started.
You guys probably heard a little bit about that one.
It was kind of a big deal at the time.
People don't talk about it so much now because it's Little Brother was kind of a bigger deal.
But I'm a big World War I fan.
Well, we're also interested in World War I.
And actually, the reason our podcast is called Sleepwalkers is actually an allusion to World War I. I'm going to bring that up.
There's a very famous book by a historian called Christopher Clark 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'd 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 as 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 sleepwalking ourselves into geopolitical outcomes which we may not want and which nobody may want.
Yeah, and I like that quote about sort of looking at Europe in this period as sleepwalking into the war because it's both accurate for World War I, but kind of accurate for every massive disaster in history.
Like 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 it's the same thing that happened in 2016 in terms of the impact of social media and fake news and all of this stuff where none of the people who were in charge in any of like the established parties and stuff knew how to use an email server.
Yeah, exactly.
None of them were 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 Zhenfe, I think, Ren, I'm not sure his turn, but Ren, something.
Yeah, you're right.
I think you're right.
He said after his daughter was arrested in Canada and after the United States banned U.S. corporations from doing business with Huawei, he said, we expected conflict with the United States to come.
We just didn't know it would be this soon.
Yeah.
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 that way, like the executive branch and the government, Fritz Haber's kind of the guy who was partly responsible for inventing that world.
Really?
The military-industrial complex.
That did not exist really prior to World War I.
And the Germans were the first people to start to figure it out in a really concrete way because they had to.
Because the British Empire could afford to be inefficient, right?
Because 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 accept that, like, oh, we have to upgrade our guns.
Oh, we have to upgrade.
Oh, we have to take advantage of this new technology.
But they were very slow.
And in fact, one of the big fights prior to World War I 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 increase their efficiency.
They're too dumb to know how to use more bullets well.
And also that, I mean, they insisted on the cavalry.
I mean, the beginning of World War I, the British were riding in red jackets on horses into German machine gun fire.
Can you imagine?
And the Germans, one of the things that was revolutionary about the Germans at the start of that war is that 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 when people are shooting at you.
But the idea that you would, Fritz Haber was one of the guys when this war kicks off who goes to the military command and says, we have to tie industry and science and arms production and the government all together.
Otherwise, we're not going to be efficient enough to win this war.
And he based a lot of what he was doing on what was already happening in the United States at the time.
Like that was kind of where some of it got inspired from because he saw these big endowments in the U.S. that had been like Rockefeller and guys had funded that were then making new scientific equipment that was then going into like the U.S. 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's 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 I started, 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 is 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 the things that...
Very similar to 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 I with six months of bullets and shells.
And as you know, being British, y'all ruled the waves.
And so Germany couldn't get any more bullets, any more of the.
I mean, they could 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 shit show for everybody.
And Germany's eating through their stockpiles way faster than they thought they were.
So they realize in October, we've got like six to eight weeks of bullets left.
And then that's it for Germany.
So I've got a horrible premonition that you're going to say necessity was the mother of invention in a minute.
It sure as hell was.
And Fritz Haber was the midwife of invention holding necessity's hand as it gives birth to...
I probably extended that.
But I got it.
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 I would not have been possible, full stop, without Fritz Haber.
That war is done in like February, March at the latest of 1915.
It's just over.
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 World War I, 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 human misery made possible by Fritz Haber's invention.
And while that's horrible for the world and horrible for Europe and horrible for probably conservatively about 14 to 16 million young men, it made Fritz Haber rich as shit.
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 in the greatest war in history goes right into Fritz Haber's pocket.
So he's doing fucking great on this on this thing.
Like, it's a solid move.
This makes me think a little bit of the Purdue story we've been looking at recently in the Zeichler family.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I would say, 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 and 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 Britain.
There's very little.
Yeah.
I guess there's very little patriotism involved in the development of opioids.
Yeah, exactly.
But at the same time, the development of opioids was ushered in a new wave of pain management that at least this country hadn't really seen.
Yeah.
At the expense of a number of lives, obviously.
Yeah, and it's 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.
Well, there's a conscience that is overlooked.
And that's the thing.
We'll talk about this a little bit more in 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, fuck 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.
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 his Judaism on the 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, the sort of allure of patriotism is there later in life.
Oh, absolutely.
And 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 that's got to 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 fucking Haber?
It's not unlike the Kusha.
Yeah.
Like, you're going to imprison my dad, so now I'm going to punish the whole country.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a little bit of that.
New Jersey.
Now I'm going to punish New Jersey.
And in all fairness, who among us hasn't wanted to punish New Jersey at one time or another?
That's right.
If you've ever seen Chris Christie's plane outfit.
He is punishing New Jersey with his sartorial style.
Now, as the death toll rose from the tens 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.
Haber's 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.
Fritz Haber, on the other hand, signed what came to be known as the Manifesto of the 93.
It 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 Negroes against the white race, which you may notice is not having anything to do with World War I. Where did the Mongolians come from?
I don't know that one.
He's obsessed.
Kaiser Wilhelm hated Mongolia.
He had this phrase, the yellow peril.
And it's one of those things before World War I.
He was obsessed by the idea of Japan's tentacles reaching into Germany.
I have no idea why, but he hated.
But the Mongol, I guess, because of dynastic power at a certain time.
I think to a guy like Kaiser Wilhelm, anybody further into Asia than Russia was a Mongolian.
A Korean guy could have said hi to him and he'd have been like, look at that Mongolian.
He was super racist.
It was 1914.
And he was the Kaiser.
That's how New Yorkers feel about the Middle States, I think.
Inventing Chemical Warfare00:04:46
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And how everybody in the world feels about Texas.
That's right.
Yeah.
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 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 fucking weapon anybody's ever seen.
That's the kind of dude he is.
So most scientists...
Oh, so he's a dick.
I guess that's the point of this episode.
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely the point of this episode.
He doesn't come across as great.
You might think, having made it possible for your country to fight the war for three additional years 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.
He had a great album.
Oh, yeah.
Left his side of him.
He's about to put out his the chain.
Like, if Fritz Haber is Fleetwood Mac, which, of course, why wouldn't he be?
Yeah.
So Fritz Haber looked out 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 I 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 who'd 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 fucking 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 the enemy 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 Margit Sazoli, 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 kinds 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 a mistake we've repeated twice in the 20th century.
And it's one I'm scared of in the 21st century.
Well, and it was even if you look at the creation of the Gatling gun, that was the same in 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 the most evolved form of the machine gun that it's an incredibly popular multi-hundred million dollar industry because like it turns out that no weapon makes war too terrible to fight.
We just wind up kind of worshiping the weapons because 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 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 waging violent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.
We have a lot of generals and dictators, fans of the podcast.
So hopefully it's a Raytheon ad.
Here we go.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
Worshiping Weapons of War00:04:25
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come.
Look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
The Nightmare of Gas Canisters00:14:17
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 Just and Otto 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's hand, but he would survive.
Sacker, who'd been looking directly at the mixture, lay 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'd tested her knowledge during the public awarding of her doctoral degree in chemistry.
Clara proved to be very calm and courageous in the midst of crisis, ordering the Institute's mechanic to cut open Sacker's 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 shit needs to happen.
So there's an explosion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because when I think about chemical warfare in World War I, 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 fucking 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.
He only really needed salt.
So since artillery shells were in short supply, he decided to use some of the tens 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 plan.
It worked.
It's pretty horrifying.
So you would leave paint cans?
He really used paint cans?
Yeah.
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?
I've never heard that one.
I think so.
I think in England, I seem to remember my parents saying, like, don't make too many hideous faces because the wind might change.
But, I mean, I would think opening a bunch of paint cans full of deadly choking gas next to where my soldiers 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 soldier who was in a frontline position when artillery was firing, and they will tell you, that shit often winds up hitting way too close, too.
So do airstrikes.
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 scientist soldiers, whose job would be to place and deploy the new chemical munitions.
They buried 6,000 canisters around the stalemated battlefield of Ypres, and then settled in to wait for the wind to be right.
One fine evening in April 2015, or 1915, not 2015, it was.
Fritz Haber, leading his chemical corps 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 Ypres, 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 in 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 Ba.
I mean, did he know the method of kill that the way in which people would die when he implemented it?
What he knew is what would happen chemically.
And what happened chemically?
Yeah, what happens chemically with chlorine gas is that when it enters your airway, it reacts with the water in your throat and lungs to produce hydrochloric acid.
So it literally melts its victims from the inside out.
Now, the 168 tons of gas that Haber's men released killed 5,000 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 I 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 anals of human warfare.
Cool.
You guys proud of him?
Proud of him?
I'm horrified.
And unfortunately, Haber's destructive invention is very much with us today in Syria.
Yeah, it's been used within days of us recording this podcast in Syria and Idlib.
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 it's such an effective tool that Fritz Haber made.
It's hard to imagine a time when it wouldn't be with us in the future, given how destructive it is both of life but also to morale.
I mean, what a 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 chlorine, because 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 shit, there's something about chemical weapons that is just unmanning,
which is a term you'll hear a lot from soldiers in World War I about their reaction to the gas, that like people who could hold up under shellfire and machine gun fire would just psychologically break because it's just such a fucking nightmare.
Well, 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 at you or a shell coming at you or a it's it's it's literally this thing around you which is overwhelming.
I can't I'm feeling uncomfortable just just thinking about it.
I mean drowning I think is probably exactly the right metaphor that can be done.
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 and 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 cheating 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 in that fight, we know that after Fritz went to bed, Clara grabbed his service revolver, fired one test shot into the air, and then shot herself through the heart.
What?
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 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 okay with that.
And you can't really divorce in 1915 Berlin.
That's what I was thinking, actually.
So what do you do?
Yeah.
How do you let him know how fucked up what he's done is?
Right.
This is what Clara chose to do.
Now, she left behind a suicide note.
We don't know what it said because Fritz had it hidden and probably destroyed.
But 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, is there an account of the son after?
He killed himself.
He also killed himself.
Yeah, he killed himself as an adult, but he didn't live very long.
Yeah, he found her body, too.
Like, Fritz is super fucked.
Yeah.
This is a horrible tale.
Yeah, it's a really fucked up story.
Not a lot of room for love.
Fritz 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, his son outlives Outlives.
Not by 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 again, as sort of evidence of how shitty 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 sends back home to say, we need to make chemical weapons and start doing the same thing.
It's a smaller technology company.
Escalation.
That is so fucked up.
We're going to do the same thing, but like, fuck you for doing that.
Yeah.
We're not very good as humans at putting Pandora's shit 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 fucking 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 I didn't go great for Germany.
Didn't really go great for anybody except the United States.
Kind of went awesome for us, actually.
We made a lot of money off of it.
That was the transition from the sun never setting on the British Empire to the beginning of the American Empire, really.
Yep.
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 driving the Iraq war when America could otherwise have been focused on constraining China, he thinks have opened the 21st century to be China's century.
Well, thank you, Dick Cheney.
I mean, yeah, probably.
There's so many other reasons to be angry at Dick Cheney.
I'm not going to pick economic ones.
Yeah, that seems like an accurate summation of events.
So, World War I, 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.
Oh.
Cool time for Fritz.
The British chemist J.E. 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 urge towards great dramatic vital things.
To be a great soldier, to obey and be obeyed.
That, as his closest friends knew, was a deep-seated ideal.
The Red Queen Hypothesis00:03:01
Can I ask you a naive question?
Yeah.
Why do you need all kinds of different poison gases?
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've got to make a new gas that eats through the old gas mask.
And 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.
How's it going?
It's like you...
Explain.
Oh, he wants me 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 break through 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 trade algorithms.
We even see evidence of that in nature outside of human beings.
I think the Red Queen hypothesis is the name that they give for it.
And when you look at sort of chemical warfare between plants, how like one plant will develop, will evolve like a set of oils 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 grove 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 line in Alice in Wonderland where the queen says 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 and truth and claw.
They're always evolving and changing to get an edge and we do the same thing with guns and shit.
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's talking about generative adversarial network.
So that's when you put two neural networks against each other and you have neural network one trying to trick neural network two until the output of neural network one is as close as possible to perfect.
So that's how, for example, AlphaGo, 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 human chess player.
And then AlphaGo came along and all they did was teach, they told two 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, they blew out of the water the previous best chess program.
So it's interesting, you know, the nature of conflict, whether it's in the battlefield, whether it's between plants in 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 I celebrate a lot in Silicon Valley, iterated design, whatever you call it.
Living with Haber-Bosch Consequences00:14:12
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 at 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 identify a lot of the equipment that, and I guess on like that part's not so optimistic, but like you talk to soldiers and stuff about like the these incredibly advanced quarter of a million dollar weapon systems.
They're like, no, a lot of them are total shit and it doesn't work half the time.
And you wind up just like throwing rocks or whatever because like your big missile's not functioning or like as as fancy, I don't know.
I take some hope in the fact that things still fuck up no matter how much.
Because they represent the people who create them, that's why.
I mean, especially in the case of Facebook.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's bad, and it's also maybe what'll 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 in its shortcomings.
Not in how advanced it is.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's probably fair.
So, the years after World War I 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's 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.
Fritz 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 him as Germany's laws became more restrictive for Jewish people.
He wound up, yeah, exactly.
None of what he had done for Germany earned him any 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.
Wow.
Yeah.
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 he'd 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 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 career, like they all got along.
Well, that became his identity, I guess.
He didn't really have one.
There was a period of time where he was considering going to Palestine to help start a university down there, but 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.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Just Einstein was 100% right.
Your patriotism means nothing.
It will be a lot of people.
Because your country will turn on you.
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.
Which is 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 putting in a word for them with the U.S. government and basically 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 I guess the U.S. government couldn't fault his children, Fritz's children.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, how could you?
And also, like, by this point, the U.S. government was making shitloads of bombs and fertilizer using the Haber-Bosch process.
He was a net good to the U.S.
We didn't lose all that many guys in that war.
And by the way, the U.S. took in a bunch of Nazi scientists after the end of the Second World War to further their war effort against the Soviets.
So when it comes to bad scientists, if they can serve the U.S. national interest, I don't think there's no borders there.
Yeah, we didn't have any issue with Wernher von Braun even after he rained a whole bunch of rockets down on London.
We were fine with Werner.
We'd probably hire a lot of ex-Wawe guys if they were.
Oh, we'd take him.
Oh, sure.
All we care about is that you can do the thing.
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 Zyklon, 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, including someone like Elie Weisel, 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 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.
Yes.
I mean, not yeah.
Bernie Manoff didn't kill anybody, but.
No.
Yeah.
But yeah, I would say Haber definitely had the more negative impact.
Definitely.
This is where we get into the difficulty of Fritz Haber's legacy because he's the father of chemical warfare and he invented the Zyklon chemical that was used to fuel so much of the Holocaust.
But can we blame him for inventing the Zyklon chemical?
I mean, that feels like we've given Fritz a good and well-deserved beating in this show.
Yeah.
But I mean, you can't control the future of what happens to your inventions.
And that's another big point in our podcast in Sleepwalkers, which is, you know, technology is neutral.
I mean, it's not neutral, but you build an algorithm, when you build an application, you can't control what it's used for.
So Google, for example, recently withdrew from Project Maven and 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 Zyklon B 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 I for an extra three years.
Like those are things where he knew what he was doing very clearly.
Zyklon, he was just trying to make a good way to clean up lice, which is a pretty reasonable thing to want as a scientist.
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 never have been born.
Although a lot of people would have died because there would have been mass famines, particularly in Asia.
Right.
Yeah.
In Mongolia.
Yeah, in the Mongols.
Mongols, all of the Mongols.
All of the Mongols would have had real, real food troubles.
You know, but it does raise an interesting point, which is that if you're trained as a scientist, and this is still the case today, you know, you're very results focused.
If you can make something more efficient as an engineer or a scientist, like you've done a good job.
And that's been the logic of science always.
And it's very hard, I think, for scientists to step back and say, I'm not going to invent that thing.
Because A, it's counters 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 Bunsen, hanging out with Einstein, you know, all these other scientists.
They want to, naturally, they have this sort of competitive instinct.
And 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 which girls he thought was hottest.
Precisely.
That's literally what he was going for.
I mean, and again, it's not sort of, I wouldn't compare this.
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 wasn't their intention to create a platform for hate speech, is 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 Haber's 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 21st 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 Max von Lau 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 Fritz Haber 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 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.
So we are eternally dependent on oil as a result of the Haber-Bosch process.
And there's more!
I'm going to quote next from during World War I, 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 eye to notice.
Long-term studies, however, reveal dramatic changes.
50 years ago, for instance, eel grass covered most of the Wakwa Bay in Massachusetts.
Then came suburban development nearby.
Human sewage containing nitrogen from food taken from a thousand fields leached into the bay in 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 in 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.
Plant 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.
Wow.
So complicated.
That guy.
Wow, that's really super, super interesting.
I guess when did we start to realize how the presence of fertilizer throughout the ecosystem was 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, scientists start to realize like, oh, shit, this is a problem.
Like, yeah, we've got some issues here, guys.
And we're sort of still in that, oh, shit, this is a problem, but we don't really know what to do stage of it.
Climate Change Costs00:05:45
Well, Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist who previously wrote a very good book in the 90s called From Beirut to Jerusalem, The History of the Middle East, is very interested in climate change.
And he traces the origins of the Syrian civil war back to famine, well, the rising, climate change, and the rising price of wheat, which sparked the first protests against Assad.
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 plug your pluggables as we lead ourselves out?
Yeah, so it's Kara again.
We'd love for you guys to check out Sleepwalker's podcast, which covers really all things AI, all the human touch points, healthcare, agriculture, love, creativity.
Yeah, food.
And Sleepwalkers is not quite as bleak as today's story.
We look at some of the positive potential of new technology as well.
I mean, much like Fritz's dual-use career, which launched both poisonous gases and fertilizers, which fed the world, albeit and are now poisoning the world.
AI technology, which we talk about in Sleepwalkers, has profound potential to change our lives for the better.
It's already doing so in terms of diagnostics, in terms of 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.
At the same time, these technologies without careful thought and constraint can push us into really hellish outcomes.
And so 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 we think it's important to talk about potential bad outcomes because if we wake up and take action, we can perhaps ensure a more safe and comfortable future for ourselves.
Yeah, that's the optimistic point of view.
And 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 at BastardsPod.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
And you can buy shirts on TeePublic that have funny drawings and googas on them, cups and such.
That's it.
That's all I got.
That's all I got for plugs 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 Aber.
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.
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