PAUL TUCKER: Yeah. I wish I could have been the guy who saved his wife's life. I'm just the guy who nearly cut his fingers off.

LATIF NASSER: Hey, Latif here.

LULU MILLER: You heard that one?

LATIF: So this month we're turning the spotlight to you all. We're talking to listeners and members of The Lab.

PAUL TUCKER: And like I said, I do have guys that I've worked with who have cut off fingers.

LATIF: We interviewed a guy who just heroically saved his wife's life after listening to our episode, literally called "How to Save a Life." And this week ...

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

LATIF: ... Lulu talked to Paul Tucker.

PAUL TUCKER: I'm an old dog with a new trick.

LATIF: Who wrote to us, actually about 15 years ago.

LULU: Maybe first, would you be able to pull up that email and read us the initial email you wrote to us?

PAUL TUCKER: I thought you might ask for that. The subject was, "The Dangers of Listening to Radiolab."

LULU: [laughs]

PAUL TUCKER: Dear Radiolab, I have just declared my workshop a Radiolab-free area. No one is allowed to listen to Radiolab there—especially not me. I think you must warn the public about the dangers of listening to Radiolab while trying to do other things. I'm a 54-year-old carpenter with my own woodworking shop. I've always been able to listen to music and NPR news while I'm working in the shop. Several years ago, with the advent of the iPod, I was able to listen even while running power tools—table saws, routers, band saws, et cetera. So far, so good. I felt pretty confident around my machinery. Then came Radiolab.

LULU: Oh, no.

PAUL TUCKER: I don't think it was the first time I was listening to Radiolab in my shop that I took a big saw kerf out of my left thumb with the table saw. So I didn't put two and two together right away. Two weeks later, I cut one third of the way through my middle finger with the bandsaw while I was listening to another Radiolab podcast. In retrospect, it was quite stupid. Listening to Radiolab is so overwhelmingly attention grabbing, it should be done while strapped down in a comfy chair with all sharp objects placed safely out of reach. No doubt the vast majority of your listeners are much smarter than me in this respect, but in case I can save someone else the pain and embarrassment of a Radiolab-influenced injury, I hope this warning will prove its worth. Thank you, Paul Tucker."

LULU: So here we are. It's now about 15 years after you said that.

PAUL TUCKER: Yes.

LULU: And I remember—I truly—I remember when this email came in because I was kind of just starting out. On one hand, I felt horrible, and I was worrying about your finger and your injuries and your ability to still woodwork. But on the other end, this email, like, truly sort of became a North Star for me. I do not wish any digital injuries upon any more of our listeners, but to imagine I could create work that was so gripping that people might really lose a sense of where they are ...

PAUL TUCKER: Oh, yeah.

LULU: I was like, that is the goal this whole way through. And then in the last decade and a half, with every choice I'm making, like, I really authentically wanted to call you to say, first of all, thank you. Thank you for writing in. But also a very belated apology, and I'm so sorry about those injuries. And how are you doing? How are your fingers doing?

PAUL TUCKER: My fingers are fine.

LULU: Are they really? Did the—the middle finger, though? A third of the way! I mean, that sounds like—did bone go?

PAUL TUCKER: Well, yes. But a band saw is a very thin blade, so it just took a very thin slice, but it healed. I can't even see the scar anymore.

LULU: Wow!

PAUL TUCKER: And the table saw, that was a thicker kerf—that's about an eighth of an inch thick.

LULU: Oof!

PAUL TUCKER: And that took some fingernail with it too, but that all healed back up just fine.

LULU: Wow! So did you stop listening to Radiolab when you're using saws?

PAUL TUCKER: Yes.

LULU: You truly did?

PAUL TUCKER: I truly did.

LULU: [laughs]

PAUL TUCKER: I could listen to music, but I couldn't listen to Radiolab.

LULU: And was that truly for the fear of danger?

PAUL TUCKER: Yes.

LULU: Wow. Because it's—it felt that immersive to you?

PAUL TUCKER: Yes.

LULU: And, you know, it's now 15 years later. Do you still—do you still listen?

PAUL TUCKER: I do. I was especially moved by the recent one on Henrietta Lacks.

LULU: Oh, yeah.

PAUL TUCKER: Oh, my. That was—that got my tear ducts working a little bit.

LULU: For someone who has never heard Radiolab, how would you describe it?

PAUL TUCKER: I think it's storytelling that grabs a hold of you and doesn't let go.

LULU: And sometimes chops off your fingertips.

PAUL TUCKER: And sometimes chops off your fingers.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: We really, really hope that you've never had a Radiolab-caused injury, but maybe you have had this feeling of getting lost in a Radiolab story. Maybe you've been pulled into someone else's life while listening. Maybe our show has made you feel like the world is a little bit bigger than you thought—or a bit stranger. If that's the case, if Radiolab's meant something like that for you, we'd love if you considered supporting us. You can do that through The Lab, our membership program. If you join right now—you might have heard—you can get a cool, artsy tote bag referencing our "Cheating Death" episode. And you get other perks: Ad-free listening, bonus content, and the knowledge that you are what makes it possible for us to keep making these kinds of stories. If you're already a member of The Lab, we are so grateful for you. Thank you. If you're not and you want to check it out, you can do that at Radiolab.org/join. That's Radiolab.org/join. Okay, here's the show.

LULU: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF: And I'm Latif Nasser. And today we're rewinding way, way back to 2012.

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: To bring you a story reported by this obscure, up and coming reporter. Oh, wait. Wait, what does this say? Lulu Miller.

LULU: [laughs] It's a story from baby me.

LATIF: Do you—have you relistened to this?

LULU: I just did. I just did. Yeah.

LATIF: I don't even remember having heard it the first time, so I feel like I heard it with totally fresh ears.

LULU: Oh, good!

LATIF: It's sort of interesting because it's an earlier version of you, Lulu. It's an earlier version of the show. It sort of somehow feels younger, but it feels kind of like it's grappling with the big questions in a very beautiful and earnest way.

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

LATIF: Yeah. It's very satisfying. It's very emotionally satisfying.

LULU: Oh! Well, I'm glad you thought that.

LATIF: Yeah.

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

LATIF: Here is "Killer Empathy" reported by Muppet baby Lulu Miller.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Can you introduce yourself?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Award-winning author, fantastic husband.

LULU: Dad of the year.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Dad of the year. No, I'm Jeff Lockwood, I'm a professor at the University of Wyoming.

LULU: Jeff is an entomologist.

JAD ABUMRAD: You mean, like a bug guy?

LULU MILLER:He's a bug guy, and mostly he studies crickets and grasshoppers. And this story involves a kind of cricket that's, well, different.

LULU: The Gryllas ...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Yeah, the gryllacrididae, yeah.

LULU: And are they related to katydids?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: When you think of it, a gryllacrididae is like a cricket on steroids.

LULU: Okay.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Sort of like the Hulk Hogan of crickets.

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

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And they tend to have very strong jaws, very strong jaws.

LULU: And mandibles that are really sharp.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Sort of like a serrated knife.

JAD: Oh.

LULU: And most of all, they're vicious.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They all had to be caged separately. If you put them together they would—they would fight.

LULU: To the death?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Yeah.

LULU: Wow.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And so when I would go in in the mornings ...

LULU: And reach into one of their cages, as soon as they saw him coming they'd fly into this ...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Rage. It's really sort of a show-stopper. They'll sort of rear up on their hind legs ...

LULU: Beat their abdomens on the ground.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Flare out their wings.

LULU: And then clamp onto his fingers.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They would draw blood.

LULU: Wow!

JEFF LOCKWOOD: So I used this—this glass probe on—on the big boy. At least until the point at which he snapped off the end of the glass rod.

JAD: Holy moly!

JEFF LOCKWOOD: So I ended up with—actually there were two that were very large. I would just take their cage when I went in and pop it in the refrigerator and go get a cup of coffee. And within 15 minutes, because insects are cold-blooded, they would be anesthetized by the cold and I could lift them out.

LULU: That's cheating! [laughs]

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Well, that was my solution for them. The little guys, I could manage. The big ones, a little bit of chill in the morning is all it took.

LULU: So the point is these creatures were completely alien to him. There's, like, nothing about them he can relate to. But over time, the more he studied them, the more he started noticing things that made them seem way less foreign.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Because I kept these ...

LULU: For example, as soon as he put one into a new cage, it would make itself a little nest.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And once it has that little nest built, that's home.

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

JEFF LOCKWOOD: That they could differentiate their—their nests.

LULU: They can actually tell the difference between their nest and another.

JAD: Wait, how do they do that?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They secrete a pheromone, a chemical. And each cricket is able to self-identify its own odor.

LULU: Whoa!
JEFF LOCKWOOD: It gave me the sense, and I think there's something to this, that they had a kind of capacity to recognize self.

LULU: Oh, interesting.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: We don't see that much in insects, but they had what appears to be a capacity to say, "This is mine."

LULU: And then he began to think differently about that crazy rage too, because if you think about it, here's this creature, it's completely vulnerable to attack ...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They really don't have a very good defense for themselves. They don't excrete nasty chemicals, they don't sting. They can't fly, so it's not gonna go flying away either.

LULU: So maybe that rage is their only strategy.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Which again, drew me into thinking that I understood them.

LULU: Perhaps these little guys were ...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: More like me than—than many other insects that I'd worked with.

LULU: So he grew to really like them. But then, one day ...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: I'd been working with this particular gryllacrididae.

LULU: Trying to move him from one cage to another.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And he was agitated, and had decided to go on the offensive, which involved trying to come out of the cage, so he was scrambling up the side of the cage.

LULU: And to keep him from getting out, Jeff slammed the lid down.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Because he was just at the edge.

LULU: And caught him between the lid and the edge of the cage

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And I, you know, quickly lifted the lid up and he fell back into the cage. And I looked down at him, and what had happened was I had ruptured his abdomen.

LULU: A split right down his belly.

JAD: Geez.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And some of the—the viscera and—and kind of globule of yellow fat that was leaking out, oozing out of his body. I felt guilt, and then of course I—I felt sorry for an animal. But what really struck me was what he did next, which was curl his head downward toward his abdomen, pause for a moment, and then began consuming his own innards. Consuming the viscera that—that was oozing out of his body. And so he was literally cannibalizing himself.

JAD: Wow, that is disgusting.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It was horrifying. I had sort of felt like I had come—I had come to know them.

LULU: Yeah.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Then this. This was just so out of the imaginable.

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

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Dr. LaFage.

LULU: LaFage.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: He was one of my mentors at Louisiana State University.

JAD: This was a teacher of his?

LULU: Yep, insect behavior.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: He was one of the younger faculty members when I was there. Mid 30s, slight of build, but incredibly intense.

LULU: He's kind of an expert in animal violence, and the thing he harped on over and over, the thing he was trying to pound into their brains was ...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Objectivity. To separate one's emotions and interests from the object of study. And he had these wire rim glasses, and I remember if—if he would ask you a question ...

LULU: Like, why does the gryllacrididae do its crazy war dance?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And you tried sort of reading in will and tension, mental states ...

LULU: Maybe because it's angry, or scared?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: He would just drop his chin and look over the top ...

LULU: And tear you apart.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: His job in the classroom was to make us good, objective observers.

LULU: And Jeff, Jeff stayed in touch with him over the years.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: I wanted to be good at this.

LULU: As he set up his own lab.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: You know, I had a stake in—in earning his respect.

LULU: And so that day, as he's watching the gryllacrididae consume its own guts, he's thinking okay, what would LaFage see in this?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: So my—my sense, through my research is that what this gryllacrididae had done was perhaps to have detected the odor of its own fats. It sort of drew the conclusion that this must be something good to eat without sort of grasping that it was its—its own self. The smell of its own fat triggered a feeding behavior that that's highly adaptive, you know to feed on. Fats are very hard to get hold of out in the world, and so when you smell fats it's—you know, it's—you know it's like us and doughnuts, right?

LULU: [laughs] Yeah, go for it.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It triggers feeding, yeah. It triggers feeding.

JAD: So clearly these things don't quite have a sense of self.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Right, so—so maybe they're not just like me.

LULU: Which is always LaFage's point: Don't put the creature in your box. It doesn't want to be there.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It's sort of a moral danger almost to sort of not allow the organism to be what it is. It's almost to sort of possess it or to own it, and to really treat the insects sort of with a—with a—with a deep respect, right, is oddly enough to treat them objectively. You know, he was one of the—one of the professors who actually engendered a kind of a good fear, and he was the kind of person who you—who you wanted to please.

LULU: But then years later, something happened that tested Jeff's ability to do this, to be the kind of scientist that LaFage wanted him to be. And that's right after the break.

LULU: Radiolab. Lulu. Just before the break, Jeff was trying to be the kind of scientist that his professor LaFage wanted him to be, the kind that looked objectively at the behavior of insects.

TAMRA CARBONI: We're recording over here?

LULU: But something was about to challenge that.

TAMRA CARBONI: Is that better? A little louder?

LULU: Yeah, maybe a tiny bit.

TAMRA CARBONI: Is that okay?

LULU: Oh, that's great.

TAMRA CARBONI: Great.

LULU: And there's really only one person who can tell us this part of the story.

LULU: Will you introduce yourself?

TAMRA CARBONI: Okay, my name is Tamra Carboni.

LULU: Tamra is actually not a scientist. She worked for the Louisiana State Museum, and back in 1989, she and Dr. LaFage, whose first name is also Jeff, were working together on this termite problem. The termites were getting really bad in the French Quarter, and it was her job to preserve the historic homes, and Jeff was studying the termites.

TAMRA CARBONI: I never imagined that I would be fascinated by termites, but I was. [laughs]

LULU: He made it ...

TAMRA CARBONI: Fascinating, yeah. Fascinating.

LULU: But then, one night, in July.

TAMRA CARBONI: July 25.

LULU: They met for dinner to talk about how the project was going.

TAMRA CARBONI: And we were walking home. Well, he was walking me to my house, around 10, 10:30 at night. And I think it must have been raining or there was a threat of rain because Jeff was carrying an umbrella. And I could hear footsteps behind us, very determined sounding footsteps. And we got to a corner across from my house, and at that point this person came around us in front of us. And he said "Close your eyes." And in the process of closing my eyes I saw the gun.

LULU: So she closed her eyes, and a second later she felt a tug on her purse.

TAMRA CARBONI: I could feel him take hold of the straps, and I was not gonna resist. And as I felt him do that I could hear Jeff say, "Don't do that."

LULU: At that instant ...

[gunshot]

TAMRA CARBONI: I don't remember the shot at all. You know, I—I felt Jeff move, and I guess at that point I opened my eyes. This guy had already run. Never took my purse. I saw Jeff running toward my house, and I just ran after him. I had no idea he was shot. But he got onto the porch and he collapsed on his back. And at that point he was gushing blood, and I was trying to get Jeff to understand that help was coming, and I kept saying, "You're gonna be okay. They're on their way."

LULU: And did he say anything?

TAMRA CARBONI: He couldn't talk. He just had this kind of stare. And I just watched him die.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: The news came by a phone call, and it just seemed—you know, it was—you know, it became one of those—those classic unreal moments. Something about this, you know, must be wrong. It wasn't Dr. LaFage, he wasn't really killed. It seemed particularly hard to grasp.

TAMRA CARBONI: You know, one minute I'm with this vital person, and the next minute he's dead.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Sadness, anguish, confusion.

TAMRA CARBONI: I was hysterical, crying. I was in shock.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: They never found his killer.

LULU: Never found out anything about him. Who he was, why he would do this.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It was just this seemingly senseless act.

LULU: And that's how Jeff understood it for years. That it was senseless.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Senseless.

LULU: But over time, something odd started to happen. Like with those gryllacrididae, LaFage started appearing in his brain, telling him that that word wasn't good enough. And he began to ask himself, again, how would ...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: ... Dr. LaFage want me to think about this?

LULU: How would he think about his own death?

LULU: Okay, so I wonder if—if you do have the essay with you ...

LULU: So he writes an essay.

LULU: Would you read the last four paragraphs of—of the essay?

JEFF LOCKWOOD: I will. One, two, three, four. "The year after I left Louisiana and came to Wyoming as a freshly minted PHD ..."

LULU: The first thing he does is he takes LaFage's attitude on violence.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: "That violence is the baseline strategy for most encounters between and indeed within species."

LULU: That's not some evil, outlying thing, but instead a baseline strategy for all animals. And in that light he looks at the actions of that night sort of dispassionately. First, he figures this kid was probably mugging them because he was poor.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Hopeless, poor, angry.

LULU: Scared.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: The woman became tangled in the strap.

LULU: Dr. LaFage, having his own instinctual reaction, stepped between them.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Said, "Don't hurt her, you—you can have the purse." I could picture him doing this.

LULU: But perhaps that action itself scared the kid.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: The young man drew a gun and fired point blank.

LULU: I showed the essay to Tamra.

TAMRA CARBONI: Yeah, well no. That's not—I don't think—I don't know if he stepped forward or not. You know, again my eyes were closed. I could feel some kind of movement. I certainly don't think he stepped—there wasn't enough space for him to step between us.

LULU: For Tamra, who's been over the event a million times in her head, doesn't add up so easily. First of all, when Dr. LaFage spoke to the kid ...

TAMRA CARBONI: It wasn't exactly a command, it was more like, "Don't do that." He was like, "Don't be an idiot. Don't do that."

LULU: It wasn't really threatening, it was more like, look, logically let's not do this. And while she gets that the kid might have been scared, and not been intending to shoot ...

TAMRA CARBONI: If he never ever could imagine himself shooting somebody, he wouldn't have had a loaded gun. I can't relate to this person, I can't imagine doing violence to another human being or killing them. I can't relate to that at all.

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

TAMRA CARBONI: But there was someone that I worked with, my boss actually, who had been in Vietnam, and he took me aside and he said, "You know, you'll never understand this."

LULU: You're not going to understand it.

TAMRA CARBONI: Yeah.

LULU: Like, don't even try?

TAMRA CARBONI: I don't think there's any sense to be made out of it.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: If we just stop there, and it—it's to say that—that it's somehow unnatural or inhuman, and in fact in a weird kind of way, it's profoundly human.

TAMRA CARBONI: There's no way I can understand it.

LULU: And in the end, the essay itself kind of falls short. And Jeff admits that.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: It just isn't sufficient.

LULU: But he says there is a way of understanding this event, he just hasn't gotten there yet. But it is out there.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: Yeah.

LULU: It has to be.

JEFF LOCKWOOD: And Dr LaFage would have, I think, said this as well.

LULU: But for the moment ...

JEFF LOCKWOOD: I think I can say that I—I understand another being eating its own leaking entrails, at a—at a level that I can't understand one of my fellow beings, you know, pulling the trigger and—and—and killing a man that I love.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Farisa, and I'm from Ottawa, Canada. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

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

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