Radiolab · WNYC Studios

The Good Show

December 19, 2025·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

Subway hero Wesley Autry leaves his two young daughters on the platform to lie on top of a stranger as a train passes overhead.

The question starts soft. Around the holidays, Latif Nasser notices the sudden bloom of niceness: gifts, charity, cookies, all the warm selfless stuff people like to believe in. Then the floor tilts. The show reaches back to a 2010 episode and finds Laura Shrake, file number and all, now living in Dubai. She was 21 then. In 1995, while driving through the country, she saw a woman on the ground being mauled by a bull in a pasture. Not a symbolic bull. A 950-pound Jersey bull was tossing the woman up and dropping her back down while Laura stood outside an electric fence. So there she is: safe on one side, with a violent animal and thousands of volts between her and someone who clearly needs help. The choice looks huge. Stay put, or climb through the fence toward a bull that could turn on her too. Laura climbs through anyway. She says she does not remember feeling the electricity, which is exactly the kind of detail Radiolab cannot leave alone. Then help arrives from the side. A neighbor throws her a piece of pipe, maybe about two feet long, and the woman, still conscious, tells Laura to hit the bull in the face and keep hitting. So Laura does. The pipe distracts the bull long enough for the woman to get out from under him and make it past the fence. The bull is still there, kicking the ground and snorting, very much unfinished. Then comes the harder question. In that split second, did Laura weigh the danger against the need? Her answer is simple. No, not really. Suddenly goodness feels less like a tidy virtue and more like a reflex with teeth.

As heard by us

A focused Radiolab story about altruism, built around one frightening rescue and the unnerving quiet of an instant decision.

Radiolab's "The Good Show" asks why people sometimes help when helping may hurt them. Latif Nasser opens with the holiday-season swell of gifts, cookies, and charity, then brings the question down to Laura Shrake, who was 21 in 1995 when she stopped after seeing a woman being…

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Why you'd press play

A 21-year-old college student saw a woman being mauled by a 950-pound bull, then climbed through an electric fence toward the pasture. No pause.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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