The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out!

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day!

00:00:12.000 Thanks for doing this.

00:00:13.000 Thank you for having me.

00:00:15.000 So I read about the premise of your book online, and immediately I'm like, I've got to talk to this lady.

00:00:21.000 That sounds crazy.

00:00:24.000 Please tell people what the premise is, just so we can get started with this.

00:00:28.000 Yeah, well, I started thinking about this a long time ago.

00:00:32.000 The book's called Murderland.

00:00:34.000 Yeah, the book is Murderland.

00:00:36.000 And I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, around the time when there were a lot of, you know, serial killers beginning to pop up.

00:00:47.000 And there always had been this question, why are there so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest?

00:00:55.000 And so that was the question I was really thinking about.

00:00:59.000 And the premise, as it emerged from the research that I did and from some of the facts that I learned about what was happening in the Northwest in this run up to the 1970s, is that there may be a connection between the lead pollution that was prevalent in the area because of smelters and lead pollution.

00:01:28.000 leaded gas and serial killers because lead, of course, as we I think most people now know, has a connection to heightened aggression and violence in the people who've been exposed to it.

00:01:47.000 So that was what emerged to me gradually over the years.

00:01:53.000 I mean, I didn't know a lot about this when I started.

00:01:57.000 I knew about the serial killers, but I didn't really know about the whole lead story.

00:02:03.000 And that came about, you know, I learned about it in part because of some murders.

00:02:12.000 I mean, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a lovely place.

00:02:19.000 Unfortunately, New Mexico has a high rate of homicides.

00:02:26.000 In part, it's because it's a poor state and doesn't have a big tax base and has, you know, some issues with drug and alcohol addiction.

00:02:39.000 And a few years ago, maybe 2008 or something like that, some people, a couple people were murdered down the street from me.

00:02:50.000 And I live in a very peaceful neighborhood.

00:02:55.000 And that was something that really made me start thinking about the issue of maybe it might be a good idea to think of moving back to the Pacific Northwest, which I wanted to do anyway because I have family up there.

00:03:15.000 And a few years later, because of that, I was up in the Northwest and looking at real estate ads.

00:03:23.000 And at this point, I didn't really know anything about the smelter, the lead issues.

00:03:30.000 But I was looking at property on Vashon Island, which if you know anything about the Pacific Northwest, is in Puget Sound.

00:03:40.000 It's right across from West Seattle.

00:03:43.000 Beautiful little, it was quite rural when I was growing up there, beautiful place.

00:03:49.000 And I came across a real estate ad that said, this is just for undeveloped property.

00:03:57.000 And it said, arsenic remediation may be necessary.

00:04:02.000 And I thought, wow, what could possibly have caused so much arsenic pollution on Vashon Island that you would have to get it remediated?

00:04:16.000 I mean, that just seemed crazy to me.

00:04:20.000 And I was so curious about that.

00:04:23.000 And I looked it up online and, you know, within minutes discovered that there had been an infamous lead and copper smelter in the city of Tacoma, which is just south of Vashon Island.

00:04:41.000 And so Vashon received a lot of the pollution from that smelter.

00:04:48.000 And so that began a whole process of kind of learning about what happened here, you know, what happened in this region.

00:04:59.000 And I also knew, because I'm sort of really interested in serial killers, as I mentioned, and had been for a long time, reading about them and reading about Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway.

00:05:16.000 And I knew that both Bundy and Gary Ridgway, who was the Green River killer, had grown up in Tacoma at the same time that this smelter is, you know, the smelter had been operating there since the 1880s, 1890s, so for a very long time.

00:05:38.000 And I could see that a lot of news media had been devoted to looking at what had happened in this region.

00:05:49.000 You know, there was a whole map, a GIS map, geographic, you know, information systems that allowed you to look up individual houses, you know, residential homes in Tacoma and see how much arsenic and lead pollution was in the yards.

00:06:07.000 So I discovered that you could actually look up the house where Ted Bundy grew up and see how much lead was in his front yard and his backyard.

00:06:19.000 And the more I read about lead pollution and lead, the association with aggression and violence, the more I wondered, is there a story to be told here about this issue?

00:06:35.000 So this issue of lead pollution, is it just serial killers or is there an elevated amount of violent crime that goes along with it?

00:06:47.000 Yeah, the issue of serial killers is one that I kind of introduced as the most extreme example.

00:06:58.000 But most of the research that's been done has focused on aggression, juvenile delinquency, for example.

00:07:08.000 There are long-term studies that look at kids who were exposed to lead, including in relatively small amounts, and then what happens to them later, by the time they're teenagers or young adults,

00:07:29.000 and they have shown a very strong association with problems with learning, ADHD, and as I said, delinquency and crime.

00:07:46.000 and they've even shown that in places that don't have smelters where people are just dealing with leaded gasoline that was used up until the 1990s, right?

00:07:56.000 That's right, yeah.

00:07:57.000 Yeah, decrease in IQ, a lot of factors that they can directly tie into just the lead from gasoline, which is significantly less than I would assume you'd get from a large-scale smelting operation.

00:08:13.000 Yeah, and the leaded gas is particularly tragic because that was essentially a kind of horrific experiment that was conducted on generations of kids in this country and adults because everybody was exposed to that.

00:08:35.000 Obviously, some people more than others, if you lived next to a major highway or something like that, you were getting more of it than if you maybe lived somewhere else.

00:08:48.000 Although I think rural people were also exposed because of the kinds of machinery and stuff that's used on farms and so forth.

00:08:59.000 So it was a terrible idea, and they knew that at the time.

00:09:05.000 You know, the companies, the corporations, the people who introduced it, Standard Oil, DuPont, et cetera, they knew the dangers of this.

00:09:17.000 They were told by medical doctors who said, yeah, who said this will expose everybody to more lead than human beings have ever had to deal with before.

00:09:34.000 Wow.

00:09:35.000 And they just did it to stop the engines from knocking.

00:09:39.000 They did.

00:09:39.000 And apparently there were alternatives, but the alternatives, which were like ethanol, were not something that could be patented and were not products that you could make money off of.

00:09:56.000 And so all these corporations chose to do this.

00:10:01.000 Oh, God.

00:10:03.000 Yeah.

00:10:03.000 I mean, it's really almost unreal to think about the moral failure that this, I mean, failure doesn't even seem strong enough.

00:10:16.000 It doesn't.

00:10:16.000 It's so evil.

00:10:17.000 It's so strange how many times that that has happened in human history and in fairly recent history where companies know what they're putting out or what they're releasing or what they're prescribing or whatever it is is going to damage people.

00:10:31.000 And they know that short term they can make a lot of money, and so they do it anyway.

00:10:37.000 Yeah, and they did for decades because, you know, this began in the 20s and 30s.

00:10:43.000 So we can assume that the smelting thing they probably didn't know, correct?

00:10:49.000 Like at least in the 1800s.

00:10:52.000 Yeah, in the 1800s, they probably weren't thinking about stuff like that.

00:10:58.000 They didn't have data on it.

00:11:00.000 But by the time the companies really got up and running, and the smelter in Tacoma was owned by a company called Asarco, which was the American smelting and refining company owned by the Guggenheim family.

00:11:18.000 Oh, boy.

00:11:20.000 But they've done so much for art.

00:11:24.000 Yeah, I mean, it's just.

00:11:26.000 That's what they like to do.

00:11:28.000 Yeah.

00:11:29.000 It's a total kind of whitewashing the reputation.

00:11:29.000 Yeah.

00:11:33.000 Yeah.

00:11:34.000 And they were among the earlier corporations to do that and totally successfully.

00:11:42.000 It's so dark.

00:11:43.000 My friend Peter Berg explained to me the origins of the Nobel Prize.

00:11:50.000 Did you know the origins of the Nobel Prize?

00:11:53.000 It has something to do with explosives, right?

00:11:56.000 Yes.

00:11:57.000 The gentleman who the Nobel Prize is named after, they erroneously reported that he was dead in the newspaper.

00:12:05.000 And they called him the merchant of death in the newspaper.

00:12:09.000 And you were like, oh, my God, this is what people think about me because he invented dynamite.

00:12:13.000 And so he's like, I've got to do something to clean up my reputation.

00:12:16.000 So he devised this strategy of awarding this prestigious award named after him to all the great scientists and Nobel Peace Prize and all these different things.

00:12:28.000 So now when people hear the term Nobel, like, oh, he's a Nobel laureate.

00:12:32.000 Oh, he's a Nobel Prize winner.

00:12:35.000 And that's the origin of it.

00:12:37.000 It was just a whitewashing operation.

00:12:40.000 Yeah, I mean, the same thing happened with the guy who invented the leaded gas formula, Thomas Midgley, who was really a terrible guy.

00:12:55.000 He invented the leaded gas stuff.

00:12:58.000 He also invented chlorofluorocarbons, the stuff in refrigerants that caused the hole in the ozone layer.

00:13:08.000 Oh, terrific.

00:13:09.000 So like two of the most devastating discoveries, scientific discoveries in the 20th century are down to the sky.

00:13:18.000 And he was awarded the highest medal from the American Chemistry Association, which he still holds.

00:13:29.000 I mean, even though he became really ill as a result, I think, of working with this tetra, you know, tetraethyl, it's called, the substance that was added to leaded gas.

00:13:48.000 And he, you know, went to Florida to try and heal himself of this, which I don't think you can do.

00:13:56.000 I mean, I don't think going to Florida heals lead exposure.

00:14:03.000 But he, yes, and he developed something which was called polio.

00:14:08.000 You know, he became, you know, unable to walk and he invented this whole bizarre kind of system of pulleys that he could use to lift himself out of bed.

00:14:22.000 And eventually he strangled to death in this sort of harness thing, which it may have been suicide.

00:14:33.000 It may have been an accident.

00:14:35.000 Kind of unclear.

00:14:37.000 Wow.

00:14:38.000 So when you first started investigating this, was your interest in serial killers you always had an interest in serial killers, which is always weird to me how many women are interested in serial killers.

00:14:49.000 Like all of the top true crime podcasts, if you look at their demographics, it's a large chunk of it.

00:14:57.000 It's women. 1.00

00:14:58.000 And I know the women in my house love to watch those true crime shows. 1.00

00:15:03.000 And those serial killer movies, which disturbs the shit out of me.

00:15:07.000 Like my family was watching something on The Night Stalker on Richard Ramirez.

00:15:12.000 And I'm like, I can't watch this.

00:15:14.000 I can't wait.

00:15:15.000 I get sick.

00:15:16.000 I can't watch it.

00:15:17.000 They're like fascinated.

00:15:19.000 Like, why is that?

00:15:20.000 Why do you think women are so interested? 1.00

00:15:23.000 I'm not lumping you in with all women, but there is a weird thing with women in true crime podcasts. 1.00

00:15:29.000 Yeah, I think that that has to do with the fact that women deal with fear, you know, fear of, and it may be very, you know, nebulous.

00:15:42.000 It may be kind of unclear what, you know, but a lot of women have just had the experience of being afraid walking alone at night or walking through a parking lot or, you know, or they've had direct experience of, you know, some kind of male violence or aggression, you know, at home, domestic violence.

00:16:04.000 So I think there's a whole gamut of experiences that women have had to one extent or another that feed into that.

00:16:15.000 And for me, it was growing up, you know, just a couple of miles from the places where Ted Bundy began abducting women in the summer of, you know, the winter and summer of 1974.

00:16:34.000 And everybody knew there was somebody out there.

00:16:37.000 This is at a time when the term serial killer wasn't even really in use yet.

00:16:43.000 People didn't really understand the phenomenon.

00:16:48.000 It was still kind of an unusual thing.

00:16:54.000 And this was happening.

00:16:56.000 You know, women were disappearing from dorm rooms or their rooms at University of Washington. 1.00

00:17:02.000 They were disappearing off the street.

00:17:05.000 And then they weren't seen again for weeks, for months.

00:17:10.000 You know, in the July of 1974, I was 13.

00:17:17.000 And on a really hot, you know, Sunday afternoon in 1974, two women disappeared from a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish, which was about, you know, 10 minutes from my house.

00:17:31.000 And so having had that experience of being around at that time, it was incredibly, you know, it was both really disturbing, but also I just really wanted to understand what was happening.

00:17:50.000 So did you plan on writing a book about serial killers, or was this understanding of the lead and the arsenic what led you down to write this book?

00:18:04.000 Yeah, I never really wanted to write a book that was just about serial killers.

00:18:09.000 I mean, I think that's been done.

00:18:11.000 And lots of people have done that and done a good job.

00:18:15.000 I mean, Anne Rule, the woman who wrote the first book about Ted Bundy, who knew Ted Bundy.

00:18:22.000 Yes, she worked with him at a rape crisis clinic in Seattle.

00:18:22.000 Oh, she knew.

00:18:29.000 Yeah.

00:18:30.000 He worked at a rape crisis clinic.

00:18:32.000 Wow.

00:18:33.000 He was very interested in doing research on rape.

00:18:37.000 Wow.

00:18:37.000 Because, of course, he was something of an expert.

00:18:41.000 So, yeah, that was why that book was such a phenomenon, because she knew him before anybody had identified, you know, anything in him.

00:18:53.000 She liked him.

00:18:54.000 She was friends with him.

00:18:55.000 Wow.

00:18:56.000 She gave him, you know, ride to the Christmas party.

00:19:00.000 Oh, my God.

00:19:02.000 Was this while he was killing or before he started?

00:19:02.000 Yeah.

00:19:06.000 Well, the thing that we don't really know about Ted Bundy is when he started killing.

00:19:12.000 He would never answer that question.

00:19:14.000 And one of the cases that I talk about that really is part of what made me want to write this book is a case of an eight-year-old girl who was abducted into coma in 1961, in August of 1961, and Anne-Marie Burr.

00:19:35.000 And he was 14 at that time.

00:19:39.000 And he is now one of the principal suspects, I think, behind her abduction.

00:19:47.000 So that may have been his first murder.

00:19:52.000 Yeah.

00:19:56.000 Was there like a history of him torturing animals or anything along those lines?

00:20:04.000 No, but one of the things that I think the FBI was discovering when they started doing all this investigation of the pasts, the childhood of serial killers, was that this starts really young, that the fantasies and the obsessions with, you know, I mean, some of them famously do torture or kill the family pets and so forth.

00:20:34.000 With Ted, that wasn't the case.

00:20:37.000 I think with him, one of the things you see is that he never knew who his father was.

00:20:43.000 He was born illegitimate at a foundling home in Vermont.

00:20:51.000 And his mother left him there for a couple of months before she went back and kind of retrieved him.

00:20:59.000 And that's a common factor with a lot of these guys.

00:21:05.000 They don't know their dad.

00:21:06.000 They don't know who he is, maybe.

00:21:11.000 Or they have a very bad relationship with the parents.

00:21:17.000 There's maybe abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse.

00:21:21.000 We don't know that about Ted Bundy in terms of the abuse factor, but he remains, I think, really puzzling to people for that reason because you don't see some of the usual signs with him.

00:21:40.000 And because he refused to answer questions?

00:21:44.000 Well, he talked a lot about, you know, various people were able to interview him.

00:21:51.000 The detective in King County in Seattle, who was in charge of the investigation, he was actually quite young when he took this on.

00:22:03.000 I think it was his first major case as a detective.

00:22:10.000 He eventually was able to interview Ted Bundy in prison when he was on death row.

00:22:19.000 Bundy, for a variety of reasons, wouldn't talk about anything that he did except hypothetically in the third person because he was still Trying to work the legal system, and so he didn't want to admit to what he'd done.

00:22:36.000 How did he talk about it hypothetically in the third person?

00:22:40.000 I mean, it was sort of like O.J. Simpson or something.

00:22:43.000 He would say, well, if somebody was going to do this, here's what he probably would have done.

00:22:50.000 And so there was a lot of that up until the very last days of Bundy's sojourn on death row.

00:23:02.000 And then he finally began confessing in the last two or three days in an attempt, I think, to get the governor interested in perhaps extending his life because he could give information about where bodies had been left and so forth.

00:23:24.000 But that didn't convince the governor of Florida.

00:23:30.000 So when you saw this real estate and you found out that it needed to have arsenic removed from it, this began this sort of journey that you went on to try to connect this area with serial killers and toxins.

00:23:48.000 And what did you find?

00:23:50.000 Is there a disproportionate number of serial killers that come from that particular area?

00:23:57.000 Yeah, there really are, as I discovered, a really kind of extraordinary number.

00:24:03.000 And it's hard to talk about these numbers simply because we don't know what a normal number of serial killers in a given population caught.

00:24:14.000 So are there undiscovered serial killers that are in that area or maybe deaths that are attributed to unknown people?

00:24:22.000 There are several cases that have never been resolved.

00:24:28.000 There's something called the dismemberment murders that dismemberment murders.

00:24:33.000 Yeah, up in the Northwest where various feet and things were found washing up on shore and nobody could figure out who they belonged to.

00:24:45.000 I remember that.

00:24:46.000 That was fairly recently, right?

00:24:48.000 Am I thinking of the same thing?

00:24:50.000 It may be another thing that you're thinking of.

00:24:54.000 I think this data is.

00:24:55.000 That was another thing.

00:24:56.000 It was like shoes that had a human foot in it.

00:24:59.000 And they could have just been bodies of people who drowned because that's, I think, what happens in some cases.

00:25:10.000 So I think that's a sort of question mark.

00:25:13.000 There are a couple of others.

00:25:15.000 There's one in Idaho that they've never solved.

00:25:20.000 So there are those cases.

00:25:22.000 But even aside from those, I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at the year 1974 because it seemed really active in terms of what was happening with serial killers around the country and in the Northwest.

00:25:39.000 And it was famously the year when Bundy really kind of broke free of any restraints he might have once had and began abducting women basically kind of like once a month during that year.

00:25:58.000 And in 1974, I found at least six active serial killers in Seattle or along the I-5 corridor who were all kind of working at the same time.

00:26:11.000 And that seems like a lot to me.

00:26:16.000 And just looking at Tacoma, the rate of violent crime really skyrocketed in 1974 and in the mid-70s.

00:26:28.000 It's just started going up and up and up.

00:26:30.000 And you see this, unfortunately, across the country.

00:26:34.000 The rate of violent crime in the 70s and 80s rose to heights that had not been seen before in this country.

00:26:43.000 Are there other factors?

00:26:44.000 So there's leaded gasoline, which is a major factor.

00:26:49.000 But what other factors do you think in terms of environmental toxins and things?

00:26:55.000 Like why 1974?

00:26:58.000 Well, there are various theories that have been put forth.

00:27:01.000 I mean, people have pointed out that in the mid-70s was when the baby boom generation, which was large in terms of its population density, that those people had started to kind of come of age.

00:27:21.000 They'd entered the period when you're most likely to commit crimes, which is your 20s or 30s.

00:27:28.000 And so there was that.

00:27:31.000 There was a lot of economic uncertainty.

00:27:33.000 There was a recession.

00:27:35.000 Nixon was in the White House early on in the 70s.

00:27:39.000 There was the Vietnam War.

00:27:40.000 There had been a lot of violence during the 60s.

00:27:47.000 And so people point to those factors as contributing to this as well.

00:27:54.000 But I think also, based on the science that's being done, you do need to look at the toxins that were becoming really, really prevalent.

00:28:07.000 lead.

00:28:08.000 Cadmium is another heavy metal that's very similar to lead in the body in terms of its association with aggression.

00:28:16.000 Zinc, manganese, all these things were being Yeah.

00:28:23.000 Zinc is associated with aggression?

00:28:25.000 I don't know that it's associated with aggression, but it's one of these things that was forming the exposure to particulate pollution, which is now associated with all kinds of health problems, heart problems.

00:28:45.000 I mean, lead is a toxin.

00:28:47.000 It's a poison.

00:28:48.000 And so you put it in the body and it becomes, you know, it's very easy for that to reach your brain.

00:28:59.000 And what happens is that, you know, especially if you're exposed to a lot of this stuff, you can be sicken in all kinds of ways.

00:29:08.000 You can get health heart problems.

00:29:11.000 It's now been associated with various forms of dementia, Alzheimer's, ALS.

00:29:22.000 So there's a lot of things that lead can cause, but they have shown statistically that the increase in lead in the population in the air in the mid-70s really may have contributed to a rise in violent crime.

00:29:42.000 What year did they start putting lead in gasoline?

00:29:46.000 Well, they invented this stuff in the 1920s, but just thinking back to those early decades, not that many people had cars.

00:29:56.000 And there was a big depression, of course, in the 1930s.

00:29:59.000 So there's not a lot of driving happening in terms of what we see now.

00:30:06.000 I mean, yeah, it just wasn't as big of a deal.

00:30:12.000 It was rare to have one car, much less, you know, two or three.

00:30:19.000 And then during the war, you had World War II is really interesting to look at in terms of lead because I have a sort of a little chapter about this because during World War II, gasoline, of course, was rationed.

00:30:36.000 You know, they needed all of it for the war effort.

00:30:40.000 But the war effort itself raised the amount of metals, all these metals, lead, copper, etc., were needed so intensively for the war that they began to be produced more than at any other time in world history.

00:31:00.000 And so the pollution from that, you know, from producing all these, you know, tanks and vehicles and planes and everything that they needed was really going to form the basis of what would become the Superfund program, because a lot of the Superfund sites in this country can be traced back to World War II.

00:31:26.000 And so that's when a lot of the stuff started entering the environment.

00:31:32.000 And once it's there, it's really hard to get rid of it.

00:31:35.000 I mean, that's the problem with lead.

00:31:38.000 It doesn't wash away.

00:31:40.000 It doesn't go anywhere.

00:31:41.000 It just hangs around and becomes, you know, part of our environment.

00:31:49.000 It becomes dust that is, you know, in people's houses or their attics.

00:31:56.000 And that, I think, is what people eventually started, you know, when after the war, people started driving lots and lots more, you know, in the 50s and 60s.

00:32:08.000 This country particularly was doing really well economically.

00:32:13.000 And everybody was buying cars and driving them for the first time, you know, en masse.

00:32:21.000 And human history.

00:32:22.000 That's right.

00:32:23.000 And so it really becomes, I think, a heavy pollutant around that time.

00:32:30.000 And so by the 70s, the kids who had been, you know, born in the 50s, they're starting to show the effects of lead poisoning.

00:32:40.000 I have a friend who briefly lived in Brooklyn, and he had a very small backyard that he was going to try to grow some plants in, grow a small garden.

00:32:50.000 But he did some soil samples.

00:32:53.000 He's a very, very intelligent guy.

00:32:55.000 Did some soil samples and sent it to university to get it tested.

00:32:58.000 And it was just filled with lead.

00:33:00.000 And he was like, what is this all about?

00:33:02.000 And they were like, it's all from leaded gasoline.

00:33:05.000 So this was in the 2000s.

00:33:07.000 So I think this was around 2012, 2013.

00:33:11.000 And they had told him there's a few things that you could do.

00:33:14.000 There's certain plants that you could grow that would remove some of it from the soil other than completely excavating and replacing it with fresh soil.

00:33:24.000 But his whole backyard was essentially lead poisoned.

00:33:28.000 Yeah, it's when you ride alone, you ride with Hitler. 0.89

00:33:36.000 Join a car sharing club today.

00:33:38.000 That was during the gas rationing of the day.

00:33:40.000 That's crazy.

00:33:42.000 That was the craziest one.

00:33:43.000 Have you really tried to save gas by getting into a gas club?

00:33:46.000 They do it.

00:33:47.000 So can we.

00:33:48.000 Oh, clown cars?

00:33:49.000 What is that?

00:33:50.000 Wagons?

00:33:51.000 What is that?

00:33:51.000 It's a bunch of soldiers.

00:33:52.000 Soldiers.

00:33:53.000 Oh, okay.

00:33:55.000 Wow.

00:33:56.000 So this was all just about gas rationing.

00:34:02.000 Save fuel to make munitions for the battle.

00:34:02.000 Wow.

00:34:04.000 Wow.

00:34:06.000 The daughter who heaped on the coal.

00:34:09.000 Wow, they're mad at her.

00:34:10.000 Look at her.

00:34:12.000 Oh, no.

00:34:12.000 I'm trying to stay warm and stay alive.

00:34:15.000 Wow.

00:34:17.000 So is there an uptick in violence in these areas where they were making stuff for the war effort where they would be polluting the area.

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00:35:57.000 Yeah, I mean, you definitely see, you know, what happened in Tacoma is very well recorded now.

00:36:05.000 Another city where this happened was El Paso, Texas, because Osarko had another major smelter in El Paso that had started in the 1890s and had been spewing this stuff out for decades.

00:36:26.000 But all of the smelters during the war were kind of, they weren't taken over by the government, but the government introduced all kinds of price fixing and so forth to make it not possible for these companies to raise prices astronomically.

00:36:46.000 And a lot of the stuff was requisitioned for the war effort.

00:36:51.000 So in El Paso by the 1970s, they were starting to discover that this whole area around the smokestack of the smelter was heavily lead contaminated.

00:37:09.000 And what I discovered, I thought, well, El Paso, that's interesting.

00:37:14.000 But there were no serial killers in El Paso.

00:37:17.000 And so I Googled that.

00:37:19.000 And like, you know, within a minute, I discover that Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, grew up in El Paso, not very far From the smelter.

00:37:32.000 And, you know, we associate him now with Los Angeles because that's where he committed most of his murders, but he did not grow up there.

00:37:42.000 Wow.

00:37:44.000 So this association with these chemicals and violence, and so this is well known.

00:37:52.000 And if you could look at a map of the areas where this is the biggest problem, is there also a correlation with an uptick in violent crime and an uptick in serial killers?

00:38:05.000 Like, is it not just Pacific Northwest?

00:38:07.000 Is it around El Paso as well?

00:38:10.000 Yeah, when you start looking up, okay, well, what's the crime rate, the violent crime rate in El Paso?

00:38:16.000 And yes, that starts going up in the 1970s.

00:38:22.000 And so there does seem to be an association with this.

00:38:25.000 There's a guy named Rick Nevin who is an economist and social scientist, and he put together a paper about this, which was published online,

00:38:42.000 that includes about 45 graphs of all these different showing the rise in violent crime, the rise in teen pregnancies, which is sort of how women come into it.

00:39:02.000 The impulsivity seems to have perhaps led to a real rise in teen pregnancies in the 70s and 80s, which if you remember, that was kind of a big thing then.

00:39:22.000 Is this also tied to the sexual revolution?

00:39:25.000 And then also, when was birth control, like oral birth control, introduced?

00:39:31.000 I think that was in the 1960s, early 60s, that that first becomes available.

00:39:39.000 I can't tell you exactly what year.

00:39:42.000 But yeah, I mean, I'm sure that there is some.

00:39:45.000 There's a bunch of other factors.

00:39:47.000 It's not like we can pin everything on lead and arsenic.

00:39:50.000 That's right.

00:39:51.000 But there's contributing factors.

00:39:53.000 And of course, people, you know, always point out, well, you know, not everybody in Tacoma and El Paso became a serial killer, which, of course, is true. 0.83

00:40:02.000 Well, it's like what you're talking about, Ted Bundy.

00:40:04.000 There's a bunch of factors that lead this person to becoming that.

00:40:08.000 Right.

00:40:08.000 Also, lead.

00:40:10.000 Yeah.

00:40:11.000 I mean, you know, as I say somewhere in the book, a little extra lead, you know, may have been something that, you know, maybe they had a lot of other factors to begin with, abuse, poverty.

00:40:27.000 In the 1950s, a lot of babies were delivered with forceps, which caused brain damage in a certain percentage of kids.

00:40:39.000 So I think you're looking at a lot of different things that contributed to trauma to the brain.

00:40:46.000 You know, I think now they're really focusing on that, you know, in terms of CTE and brain damage.

00:40:55.000 We see that now in football players who've had head trauma repeatedly, that this causes, can cause violence and aggression.

00:41:06.000 And impulsivity.

00:41:07.000 Right.

00:41:08.000 It's a huge issue.

00:41:09.000 Yeah.

00:41:10.000 It's fascinating that it also exists in women who have not had head trauma and the correlation between teen pregnancies and things along those lines.

00:41:20.000 That you're just all it would take is like a slight percentage more of impulsivity.

00:41:27.000 And then you would see a corresponding result of that.

00:41:31.000 Not making great decisions about what you're doing.

00:41:35.000 The gas thing, the lead and the gas thing, is just crazy.

00:41:38.000 It's just crazy to know that that was all done because someone couldn't patent ethanol.

00:41:44.000 They couldn't patent other formulations that would lead to the same result, but I mean, the same result in terms of not having gas making your engine knock, but wouldn't be as profitable for this person.

00:41:59.000 Yeah.

00:42:00.000 So twisted.

00:42:01.000 You know, it may be worth mentioning or describing what a smelter does for people, because I think people are not familiar with that anymore.

00:42:12.000 We don't have them in our cities anymore.

00:42:17.000 But, you know, what these things were were these giant primary smelters to melt rock.

00:42:25.000 You know, it was like taking the rocks from mines that were full of all these different metals, you know, including arsenic.

00:42:33.000 This is where the arsenic came from.

00:42:36.000 But they were full of metals like, you know, lead and copper and silver and gold and melting those rocks in these giant furnaces.

00:42:47.000 And all of this put off an enormous amount of pollution, you know, particulate pollution that was going up the smokestack.

00:42:55.000 And they were, you know, the companies that ran these things were keeping all the valuable metals that they could for themselves, you know, the silver and the copper and all of that.

00:43:08.000 And so they did have filters on them.

00:43:10.000 But one of the things that happened sometimes with these smelters is that they would kind of fail or the filters would fail.

00:43:19.000 There's this horrifying example in Idaho.

00:43:24.000 It was a company called Bunker Hill that was one of the largest silver mines, I think, in the world.

00:43:32.000 And they had a lead smelter in this town called Kellogg, which is right on I-90.

00:43:39.000 If you've ever driven on I-90, you know, from Missoula, Montana, or something like that to Seattle, you've driven through this place.

00:43:48.000 And they built, you know, this giant smelter facility to handle all the stuff they were pulling out of the mines.

00:43:59.000 And in 1973, they had a fire in their filtration building that destroyed most of the filter that was the thing that was supposed to keep lead from going up the smokestack.

00:44:18.000 And there were kids in this town.

00:44:21.000 There was an elementary school right across the street from the smokestack.

00:44:26.000 Jeez.

00:44:28.000 And the descriptions of that school are so horrifying because the teachers used to think that sometimes that the facility had caught fire because there was so much smoke.

00:44:42.000 But in fact, there wasn't, you know, it was just what the smokestack was putting out.

00:44:42.000 Oh, God.

00:44:49.000 But after that filter failed, that company, which was owned by Gulf and Western at the time, did a kind of back-of-the-napkin calculation of what those kids' lives were worth because they felt like, okay, we're going to get sued if we keep running the plant without filtration.

00:45:13.000 But is that really going to matter?

00:45:15.000 Because these kids' lives are probably only worth about $11 million apiece.

00:45:21.000 Oh, my God.

00:45:22.000 And our profits are such that it makes more sense to keep operating regardless of what happens to these kids.

00:45:31.000 Oh, my God.

00:45:32.000 And we know this because of the lawsuits that were ultimately filed because, you know, they did end up in court.

00:45:40.000 And there were kids, there was a baby who was more lead poisoned than any human being that the doctors had ever seen.

00:45:52.000 So it says here that after it destroyed the fire broke out that destroyed the filters, so it's for the next year and a half, the smelter continued to operate, and dust polluted with heavy metals rained down on the area.

00:46:05.000 During that time, children living in the area were screened for lead by the state and the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the results were foreboding.

00:46:13.000 Children in Kellogg, for example, averaged 50 micrograms per deciliter of blood.

00:46:19.000 The CDC recommends five micrograms high enough to warrant concern.

00:46:23.000 And children with levels above 45 micrograms are advised to undergo chelation therapy, which involves administrating compounds like, I don't know how to say that word.

00:46:34.000 How do you say that word?

00:46:35.000 I don't know.

00:46:36.000 Dimer, capo, succinct acid, either orally or intravenously to remove heavy metals from the bloodstream.

00:46:43.000 Lead is a neurotoxin linked to schizophrenia, poor academic performance, low cognitive ability, an attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder.

00:46:52.000 Once the metal gets into the blood, it concentrates in the brain, the kidneys, the liver, and the bones.

00:46:58.000 In pregnant women, lead can cross into the placenta, poisoning their unborn babies.

00:47:04.000 Holy shit.

00:47:08.000 Yeah.

00:47:09.000 Yeah.

00:47:09.000 I mean, it was a nightmarish thing.

00:47:11.000 Look at this.

00:47:12.000 It says, oh, my God.

00:47:16.000 So listen to this.

00:47:18.000 Slowly poison, as a teenager in Kellogg, Ohio, Florey, this person I talked about, attended the Silver King School built in 1928 in the gulch between Bunker Hill lead smelter and zinc plant, an offshoot of the Cordelaine River, flowed by the school.

00:47:35.000 It was, says Florey, a light glowing green color, sort of a glow, like a glow stick.

00:47:42.000 Oh, God.

00:47:44.000 In 1973, a fire broke out, and so this is the fire that we were talking about.

00:47:48.000 Oh, my God.

00:47:50.000 A light glowing green color.

00:47:53.000 Yeah.

00:47:54.000 Fuck.

00:47:56.000 I used to live in New Jersey, right by the in Jersey City.

00:48:04.000 Oh, yeah.

00:48:05.000 Right by the Liberty State Park, which a bunch of the acreage of that was off limits to people because it was so polluted.

00:48:15.000 And I remember, you know, because you could actually walk from my apartment in Jersey City to Liberty State Park, but you had to go by this, you know, place that was crushing cars, one of those facilities where they compact cars.

00:48:32.000 And I mean, there was all this heavy industry there and pollutants.

00:48:36.000 And you had to walk across this little wooden trail over a stream to get to the park.

00:48:45.000 And the water was that color.

00:48:48.000 I mean, it was like this disgusting, you know, color not found in nature.

00:48:53.000 And you just looked at it and thought, what is that?

00:48:57.000 What's in that?

00:48:58.000 And this is in the United States of America where we have at least some kind of regulations.

00:49:05.000 Just imagine what is happening when these companies are allowed to ship off to third world countries where there's no regulation and they're bribing officials and polluting everything.

00:49:20.000 Yeah.

00:49:20.000 I mean, that's what happened with Asarco.

00:49:23.000 You know, once the EPA had sort of got started and the various clean air and clean water acts were passed and legislation about what you could do in the workplace.

00:49:36.000 Because, I mean, imagine what it was like to work in these smelters.

00:49:42.000 It just basically became illegal to operate them.

00:49:46.000 And the companies could no longer afford to do it.

00:49:51.000 So they all pretty much went out of business in the 1980s.

00:49:55.000 But it is just an incredible sort of time in America because it was like, well, what's the trade-off here?

00:50:05.000 You know, the profits are worth much more than people's lives.

00:50:10.000 And that place, the Cordelline, you know, there's a town, city called Cordelline in Idaho, but there's also this giant lake, Lake Cordelline.

00:50:21.000 And all that pollution from Bunker Hill, from the mines, from the smelter, it all went down river and is now sitting at the bottom of Lake Cordelline.

00:50:37.000 And that's been a super fund project for many, many years, but they really can't clean that up because it's the kind of thing where you try to remove the sediment that's full of all the lead and stuff, and it stirs everything up.

00:50:56.000 And so it's really, really almost impossible to clean a lot of that stuff.

00:51:02.000 Yeah, we were talking about this the other day, that you really shouldn't even eat freshwater fish because freshwater fish, the problem is because of all the pollutants that settle into these lakes, when you don't have flowing water, freshwater fish is just sitting in all these chemicals and all these heavy metals.

00:51:23.000 And it's really disturbing.

00:51:29.000 If you eat freshwater fish, your exposure to forever chemicals is like ridiculously high.

00:51:36.000 Like, what was the number?

00:51:38.000 We pulled it up the other day.

00:51:39.000 But it's akin to like eating one freshwater fish is akin to, I believe it's like a year of exposure to forever chemicals.

00:51:51.000 Yikes.

00:51:52.000 Yeah, BPAs and all these different disgusting things that are a part of our world that we didn't know until it was too late. 0.99

00:52:02.000 Eating one freshwater fish equals a month of drinking forever chemicals water.

00:52:09.000 Oh my God.

00:52:12.000 PFAS found in high levels in freshwater fish with most concern for vulnerable communities.

00:52:19.000 I remember we did this television show once and we were in Detroit and Detroit, which is notoriously very poor and at one point in time was the third richest City in the world.

00:52:32.000 But when we were there, these people were fishing in this lake, really obviously very poor people, and just catching food in this lake.

00:52:43.000 And I was like, oh, my God, like, what are these people eating?

00:52:45.000 Like, this is clearly polluted water.

00:52:48.000 And it was just outside of a plant.

00:52:51.000 And, you know, they had no choice.

00:52:53.000 They needed food.

00:52:54.000 And so they went there.

00:52:56.000 They're poor.

00:52:57.000 And who knows what kind of health consequences these poor people are suffering from.

00:53:03.000 Yeah, it's definitely the poor communities that get the worst.

00:53:03.000 Yeah.

00:53:08.000 And the thing is, it's like 150 years ago, all that was pristine.

00:53:15.000 It's just such a short amount of time.

00:53:17.000 If you think about how long those lakes existed, how long these river systems existed, and in a couple of hundred years, we've ruined everything essentially forever.

00:53:30.000 For profit.

00:53:30.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:53:32.000 And they knew it.

00:53:33.000 And that's what's sick.

00:53:35.000 The thing you're telling me about this smelting plant and the fire in Idaho and the fact that they knew and they made a back of a napkin calculation as to these children's lives.

00:53:46.000 That is so disgusting.

00:53:49.000 It's so hard to believe that that's how people operate.

00:53:52.000 But yet I know they do.

00:53:53.000 Yeah.

00:53:54.000 I mean, it's murder.

00:53:56.000 And that's why I called it murder land.

00:53:59.000 You know, I think that the behavior of these corporate actors was as bad.

00:54:06.000 I mean, it's, you know, maybe pernicious to compare, but I think that, you know, people have come to see that the ways that corporations have behaved is murderous.

00:54:20.000 You know, that they're not.

00:54:22.000 I mean, aside from, you know, just the issue of taking responsibility, they're just going to go ahead with what they want to do and make the profits that they want and leave us to pay the price.

00:54:37.000 And that, I think, is something that in a sane world would have to change.

00:54:42.000 You know, we would have to look at what a corporation wants to do before they start doing it.

00:54:49.000 Yeah.

00:54:50.000 You know, and figure out, okay, well, if they want to proceed with this, how do we prevent the damage that could occur?

00:55:00.000 And if they can't figure out how to prevent it, they shouldn't be operating.

00:55:06.000 Also, they lie.

00:55:07.000 They lie.

00:55:08.000 Whatever they're going to tell us.

00:55:10.000 I mean, we found this out from pharmaceutical drug companies that when they run studies, they'll run 10 studies that show damage and they'll find one study that they can kind of manipulate into showing some sort of efficacy.

00:55:22.000 And then they'll publish that one study and bury the other studies that show damage and then release a product and then have internal emails where they show that they know that this is going to cause problems.

00:55:34.000 And this is the issue with the drug Viox that wound up killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 Americans.

00:55:41.000 And I know people don't like to equate those people with serial killers.

00:55:46.000 But what else would you call that?

00:55:49.000 What else would you call if you know that you're going to kill people, but you're also going to make money and you decide, let's do it anyway.

00:55:58.000 Let's do it anyway.

00:56:00.000 Let's make some money.

00:56:01.000 And 60,000 people die because of it.

00:56:05.000 And then who knows how many people also survived but got strokes?

00:56:09.000 And it's a large number.

00:56:11.000 Yeah, it's now very difficult to figure out how many people were directly and indirectly harmed by these smelters because of the destruction of evidence.

00:56:24.000 Many of them had sort of, you know, people on staff whose job it was to put out false information.

00:56:33.000 In Tacoma, there was a guy, a doctor at the smelter who wrote false papers saying that, oh, the workers aren't being harmed by exposure to arsenic, when in fact his numbers showed that people who worked at the plant were dying of an elevated percentage of lung cancer.

00:57:01.000 And he suppressed that information.

00:57:03.000 He said, you know, he said their deaths were from heart failure, which everybody dies of heart failure.

00:57:11.000 You know, so he basically was falsifying the information from their death certificates and publishing papers, you know, designed to make it look like arsenic wasn't a poison.

00:57:26.000 And probably nicely rewarded by the corporation for that.

00:57:30.000 This is just this issue of diffusion of responsibility when you have this obligation to your shareholders to continually make each quarter generate more income.

00:57:44.000 And then you have to figure out how to do that.

00:57:46.000 And then you realize, like, oh, I'm just a part of a big thing.

00:57:48.000 I'm just going to do my job to get more money.

00:57:51.000 I'm not going to think about the consequences.

00:57:53.000 I'm just going to put blinders on and think about my vacation home that I'm going to get out of all this.

00:57:58.000 Yeah.

00:57:59.000 I mean, it's, you know, what you said about the lying is really true.

00:58:05.000 And this is what you see in serial killers, you know, that they lie about everything.

00:58:11.000 They lie about stuff they don't even need to lie about.

00:58:14.000 It's just, it's their own.

00:58:18.000 Yeah, they're just so inured to it and they want to get away with what they're doing.

00:58:24.000 They should have went for corporate America.

00:58:27.000 Should have worked for them and they could have got away with it.

00:58:29.000 They might have been fine.

00:58:30.000 No one got caught.

00:58:32.000 I mean, I wonder how many people who are working for these chemical corporations and how many exhibit the exact same traits as serial killers.

00:58:41.000 They just don't want to get intimate and actually physically cause the murder, but get some sort of a bizarre thrill out of knowing that they're doing this kind of damage to people for profit.

00:58:53.000 Yeah, I think that kind of psychopathy is maybe more common than we would like to think.

00:59:00.000 Yeah, we don't want to think about it.

00:59:01.000 We don't want to think about sociopaths.

00:59:03.000 We don't want to think about psychopaths and sociopaths and psychopaths.

00:59:06.000 There's a lot of overlap.

00:59:08.000 We don't want to think about what percentage of us exhibit these traits where we have zero empathy.

00:59:14.000 And there's a lot of people like that.

00:59:14.000 Right.

00:59:16.000 There's zero.

00:59:17.000 I mean, I know people like that that have no empathy.

00:59:19.000 They don't care if other people get hurt.

00:59:21.000 And I don't understand it.

00:59:22.000 But I don't have whatever is wrong with them.

00:59:25.000 And I always wonder, like, is that nature?

00:59:29.000 Is that nurture?

00:59:30.000 Are we dealing with environmental toxins?

00:59:32.000 There's exposure to something at a young age.

00:59:34.000 Like, what is it that causes that?

00:59:42.000 You know, I mean, what happens to the frontal cortex of these kids who are exposed to lead and cadmium is that certain parts of the brain fail to develop correctly.

00:59:59.000 And so, and you can see the deficits, the little holes that are supposed to be full of something that helps you make good decisions.

01:00:08.000 You know, The part of your brain that helps you control yourself and control your behavior.

01:00:14.000 That's kind of missing in some of these kids.

01:00:19.000 And they have shown now that the effects are worse in men than they are in women, that the damage to the frontal cortex, the neurology is more marked in men.

01:00:35.000 And they can see this on the MRI scans.

01:00:39.000 And I think there's, you know, I don't know that they know why that's happening, but it does seem to be a real effect that they're writing papers about.

01:00:52.000 Well, it does take longer for men to develop their frontal cortex.

01:00:55.000 That's why men are so stupid when they're young. 0.93

01:00:57.000 And women are much more mature, younger.

01:01:00.000 Like a 20-year-old woman is probably far more mature than a 25-year-old man.

01:01:07.000 And a lot of that, they think, has to do with the frontal lobe.

01:01:12.000 Yeah, I mean, it obviously is some incredibly important discovery, what they make of that, and how it's all going to come out in the wash in terms of what can be done to help kids who have these issues.

01:01:30.000 That, I think, is another story.

01:01:33.000 It's just so twisted when you think about the fact that this is all a fairly new thing.

01:01:41.000 Like this chemical exposure, chemical exposure and pollutant exposure is a fairly new thing in terms of human history.

01:01:49.000 As we're gaining this understanding of how the human brain develops, which is also a fairly new thing, we're also dealing with this thing that we did collectively as the human race, this thing that we did where we introduced these insane chemicals into the brains of children.

01:02:07.000 And in this case, like in Idaho, knowingly.

01:02:11.000 Yeah.

01:02:11.000 Calculated.

01:02:13.000 And one of the things that sort of blows my mind is that we've known for centuries, for eons, that these things are bad.

01:02:23.000 I mean, the Romans and the Greeks knew that lead caused people to go crazy.

01:02:31.000 I mean, they had people who worked with lead in foundries and things then, and they knew it was a problem.

01:02:38.000 We've known that arsenic is a poison since forever.

01:02:43.000 And yet, you know, comes along the 20th century, and somehow these corporations are telling communities, including the community on Vashon Island, you know, oh, arsenic is really not a problem.

01:02:59.000 You know, the human body just excretes it naturally.

01:03:05.000 You know, all kinds of just crazy arguments were being put forward to justify what they were doing.

01:03:13.000 I found out at one point in time in my life that I had a disturbing level of arsenic in my system.

01:03:19.000 I went to get blood work done, and my doctor said, You have a concerning level of arsenic.

01:03:25.000 And he started asking me about my diet.

01:03:28.000 And I said, I eat a lot of sardines.

01:03:31.000 He's like, stop doing that.

01:03:33.000 He goes, how much do you eat?

01:03:34.000 Like three or four cans a night.

01:03:35.000 He's like, don't do that.

01:03:38.000 Wow.

01:03:39.000 So because sardines spend their time in the bottom of the ocean.

01:03:43.000 Right.

01:03:44.000 Like, that's where all the heavy metals accumulate.

01:03:46.000 Yeah.

01:03:46.000 And I was getting arsenic from eating cans of sardines.

01:03:50.000 I stopped eating the sardines.

01:03:51.000 I waited like a few months.

01:03:54.000 I went back, got more blood work, and it's gone.

01:03:56.000 Wow.

01:03:57.000 I was like, wow.

01:03:58.000 Yeah.

01:03:59.000 I mean, there actually are two kinds of arsenic.

01:04:02.000 There's organic arsenic, which you can get from seafood.

01:04:06.000 And if you're eating a lot of, you know, shrimp or sardines or whatever, it can build up.

01:04:14.000 And I think that that form of arsenic is less toxic and less of a problem.

01:04:21.000 You don't want it.

01:04:22.000 I mean, as your doctor said, don't do that.

01:04:26.000 That's crazy.

01:04:28.000 Yeah, but the stuff that they were producing at the smelter in Tacoma was what's called inorganic arsenic.

01:04:37.000 And that's the stuff they used to poison rats. 0.97

01:04:39.000 And they used it for insecticides.

01:04:43.000 And very heavily, you know, during the 40s and 50s, they were putting it all over apple orchards and cherry orchards and cotton crops. 0.92

01:04:58.000 So those places were then contaminated with arsenic.

01:05:04.000 And Washington State now has four plumes of this pollution.

01:05:10.000 The big one was in Puget Sound from the smelter, which was like 1,000 square miles of Puget Sound that was contaminated.

01:05:20.000 But also Wenatchee, which is over in eastern Washington where they have all these apple orchards, there's another plume there from those pesticides and insecticides.

01:05:37.000 And there's a couple more.

01:05:38.000 There's another plume up in Everett where there was what they called an arsenic kitchen. 0.88

01:05:45.000 The Rockefellers used to own mines up in the Cascade Mountains.

01:05:52.000 And they had a smelter in Everett that was then bought by the Guggenheims and they moved their arsenic kitchen to Tacoma.

01:05:59.000 But it left all this pollution in Everett.

01:06:02.000 And so they discovered all these people had built houses and condos and things on top of where the arsenic kitchen had been, which that stuff was never cleaned up.

01:06:17.000 And so they had to, you know, I think they had to buy those properties and remediate so-called.

01:06:25.000 Yeah, this term remediation, like how does one remediate a piece of land, like a five-acre plot of land that you plan on building a beautiful house on Vashon Island on?

01:06:37.000 Like how do they do that?

01:06:40.000 There's five acres of ground that's poisoned.

01:06:43.000 Yeah, in Tacoma, what they did, that was where the worst of the pollution was, because the smokestack was sitting right near the water.

01:06:54.000 The smokestack was blown up in the 90s.

01:07:00.000 Yeah, they exploded the smokestack.

01:07:05.000 On purpose?

01:07:06.000 Yeah, they closed the plant in 1986.

01:07:09.000 Oh, so it was a debt control demolition?

01:07:11.000 Yeah, so it was a, yes, exactly.

01:07:13.000 Which also probably contributed greatly to more pollutants.

01:07:17.000 They claimed that they cleaned the inside of the smokestack.

01:07:21.000 Before they blew it up?

01:07:22.000 Yeah.

01:07:23.000 Yeah.

01:07:25.000 So, yeah, in Tacoma, they carted away tons of soil.

01:07:29.000 They took, you know, They went into people's yards, they tested all of the yards and told people, okay, you're going to have to replace the soil.

01:07:39.000 And so, yeah, they went in and they, by this point, Asarko had declared bankruptcy, and the EPA eventually had to take over the whole thing.

01:07:51.000 But the EPA got an unprecedented environmental bankruptcy settlement out of Asarko, which was close to $2 billion.

01:08:05.000 I think it was the highest settlement that they'd ever gotten from a corporation.

01:08:09.000 But it had to clean up about 20 different super fund sites, including the one in Idaho in Cordeline, which they've been working on that for years and still haven't finished.

01:08:22.000 But in Tacoma, they actually did replace the soil in many, many people's yards.

01:08:29.000 But they run out of money.

01:08:31.000 I mean, I think on places like Vashon, a lot of that was on the southern part.

01:08:39.000 I think you could request soil replacement in some of these places, but it wasn't necessarily guaranteed, depending on where you lived.

01:08:50.000 Well, that's also so destructive to the ecosystem.

01:08:52.000 So you're taking out everything that allows these plants to live, animals, mycelium, all the different, the network that connects all these plants together.

01:09:07.000 You're pulling all that stuff out and introducing new soil.

01:09:11.000 And you're not going to do it everywhere.

01:09:13.000 You're not going to get all of it out.

01:09:14.000 There's no way.

01:09:15.000 You're not going to be able to do the whole island.

01:09:17.000 You're not going to be able to do every inch of Tacoma, all the land.

01:09:22.000 Yeah, and of course they have to take that soil somewhere.

01:09:25.000 So in Tacoma, they took it to some special landfill.

01:09:30.000 But I mean, one of the really crazy things that happened as a result of closing the smokestack there was that they took that arsenic kitchen that I was talking about, the one that had been up in Everett, and some of the most contaminated parts of the buildings that were part of the whole smelter compound.

01:09:53.000 And Asarko promised that they were going to take all that stuff and put it somewhere else.

01:10:03.000 I don't know where they were going to put it, but they said they were going to take it.

01:10:06.000 But then they went bankrupt, and so they didn't remove it.

01:10:11.000 And instead, they created this very bizarre kind of pit where they put all the worst stuff, including a bunch of the soil, the contaminated soil from Everett and the arsenic kitchen.

01:10:28.000 And they put it in a sort of super heavy-duty plastic-lined garbage bag, essentially.

01:10:36.000 I mean, if you can imagine the largest garbage bag in the world, they put all this stuff in it and they capped it with soil.

01:10:44.000 And that thing is sitting there, you know, still, even though they have now, you know, they cleared off the whole area where the compound was, where the factories and the furnaces were, and they built condos on top of that.

01:11:02.000 Oh, my God.

01:11:03.000 But behind the condos is this giant hump of contaminated stuff in a giant plastic garbage bag.

01:11:13.000 Do they tell the people that live in these condos what they're dealing with?

01:11:18.000 Well, there's a very small historical display with some photographs and materials about the smelter that's in one of the buildings on the way to the public bathroom.

01:11:35.000 Oh my gosh.

01:11:36.000 So presumably if the people who are buying condos there know anything about it, they probably aren't aware of the history.

01:11:45.000 But they think it's – In a sense.

01:11:53.000 But also, doesn't it leak into the water table?

01:11:56.000 Well, they have a lot of stuff that they've done.

01:11:59.000 I mean, in the book, I talk about, you know, Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, he was from Tacoma.

01:12:08.000 And in fact, the stuff in Dune about the pollution and what has happened to the planet, you know, that he dramatized, a lot of that came from his disgust with the smelter and, you know, a planet that had basically destroyed its whole environment.

01:12:30.000 And now they have, you know, developed this whole little park on one, you know, the condos are on one end of this, what used to be the smelter property, and then on the other end, on top of this slag land.

01:12:47.000 The slag is the stuff that's left over after you've pulled all the metal out of the rocks.

01:12:55.000 There's the stuff that, once it's cooled off, looks like gravel, and it's called slag, but it isn't really gravel.

01:13:04.000 I mean, it's contaminated with all the stuff.

01:13:07.000 It's contaminated with arsenic.

01:13:10.000 And so they built a park that's called Dune Park, and it's dedicated to Frank Herbert.

01:13:17.000 And it's this little walking trail.

01:13:20.000 And the whole thing, I think, is developed in such a way that it's kind of lined with plastic.

01:13:27.000 And there's a plastic liner on the shores to keep stuff from leaking out.

01:13:36.000 And if you live in one of those condos, you can't plant anything that will be larger than a small shrub in part because of the plastic liner thing.

01:13:47.000 Oh, my God.

01:13:48.000 Yeah, it's wild.

01:13:50.000 That's so crazy.

01:13:54.000 Whoa.

01:13:57.000 It's so disturbing.

01:13:58.000 And then there's so many factors, too, right?

01:14:02.000 There's the plants.

01:14:03.000 And then there's the industrial pesticides.

01:14:09.000 Have you ever read Dissolving Illusions?

01:14:12.000 Suzanne Humphries wrote this book about, and one of the aspects of the book is about DDT and the ubiquitous use of DDT and how so many people in rural communities were coming down with, air quotes, polio, paralytic polio that was directly correlated to the use of DDT.

01:14:38.000 Like the same areas where people, and it wasn't just human beings that were getting this polio, but it was also cows and horses and dogs that were getting paralyzed as well, which it doesn't cross species.

01:14:52.000 Human-derived polio does not cross species.

01:14:55.000 It's a very dark story.

01:14:57.000 And you want to hear something crazy?

01:15:00.000 What percentage of polio do you think is asymptomatic?

01:15:04.000 I've never heard that there's polio that's asymptomatic.

01:15:08.000 95 to 99 percent.

01:15:10.000 95 to 99 percent of actual polio is asymptomatic.

01:15:15.000 Wow.

01:15:17.000 So what they were calling polio was most likely DDT poisoning that was sprayed everywhere.

01:15:24.000 It was sprayed everywhere for gypsy moths and all sorts of different pests.

01:15:28.000 They just didn't know.

01:15:31.000 And then once they did know, it was too late.

01:15:34.000 And they were just trying to cover it up and say, no, we cured polio.

01:15:38.000 We cured it.

01:15:39.000 Look.

01:15:40.000 And these people that were, you know, getting air quotes polio were most likely getting poisoned by DDT.

01:15:48.000 Yeah, I think that a lot of this environmental stuff has become so overwhelming to people that they kind of tuned it out.

01:15:55.000 Yes.

01:15:56.000 It's like, what are we going to do about it?

01:15:58.000 There's nothing we can do.

01:15:59.000 So like, let's just pretend it's not happening.

01:16:02.000 I make sure that I don't read any of this stuff late at night.

01:16:05.000 You know, when I read stuff like this late at night, I can't go to sleep.

01:16:09.000 I just, I freak out.

01:16:11.000 It just disturbs me, human beings, their capacity to do things like this, either knowingly or unknowingly, and then to cover it up knowingly and then to try to find some way to profit off of the removal of it or the treatment of these ailments that these people suffer and then the obfuscating and the diverting the attention to some other thing,

01:16:38.000 like calling it a disease or calling it something else.

01:16:42.000 Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things in my mind when I kind of wanted to develop the whole thing about talking about serial killers and violence and aggression and where that might have come from.

01:16:57.000 Because I wanted to talk about all that and I didn't want to just use it as a kind of Trojan horse to introduce all the stuff about pollution.

01:17:08.000 But I did think it was a way to get people maybe to think about these issues who might not otherwise want to do that.

01:17:20.000 And I think people are interested in the history of how they might have been exposed.

01:17:29.000 When I did a reading up in Seattle a month or so ago, everybody was talking about where they grew up in relation to the smelter, like how close they were to it and what they might have experienced as a result.

01:17:48.000 And that, I think, is one of the interesting things about the Tacoma story is that many poor people were directly exposed.

01:17:59.000 The people who worked at the smelter, they lived right around the smokestack.

01:18:04.000 So they got the worst of it.

01:18:07.000 But there were a lot of other communities in the area, including Mercer Island, where I grew up, which is now kind of a famously wealthy, you know, some of the Microsoft people have houses there.

01:18:24.000 Or, you know, I think Paul Allen had a house there.

01:18:28.000 And it was when I was a kid growing up there, it was a well-to-do, upper-middle-class place.

01:18:36.000 And one of the things I look at in the book is some of the really bizarre crime that happened on the island at that time.

01:18:45.000 That you wonder, was this, you know, in any way related to, you know, some of these things we're talking about, the rise in lead in the air from leaded gas, because Mercer Island is crossed by I-90.

01:19:06.000 I-90 comes down out of the Cascades and crosses Mercer Island, which is sitting in the middle of Lake Washington, and ends up in Seattle.

01:19:17.000 And so Mercer Island had a lot of pollution from I-90, and it also was in the plume from the Tacoma smelter.

01:19:28.000 And while I was growing up there, some weird shit happened.

01:19:32.000 Like, what kind of shit?

01:19:34.000 Well, I lived on a street that was close to I-90 and was actually, it kind of ran over the top of a tunnel that enclosed I-90 on part of the island.

01:19:48.000 And down the street from where I grew up was growing up another young guy named George Waterfield Russell, who turned out to be a serial killer.

01:19:58.000 And in the 1990s, killed three women on the east side where Bellevue is.

01:20:07.000 And so that is really kind of a striking fact.

01:20:14.000 You know, you don't expect serial killers to come from that kind of a neighborhood.

01:20:20.000 Not very far away from where Russell grew up.

01:20:25.000 This other guy was also who went to my high school, as did Russell, was growing up, who became one of the worst arsonists in Seattle history when he burned down his parents' warehouse and killed several Seattle firefighters.

01:20:44.000 So there were those two.

01:20:46.000 There was a guy in my class at the high school who was obsessed with his ex-girlfriend and went, he worked at a facility that used dynamite, and he stole some dynamite and blasting caps, and he went and blew up her dorm building.

01:21:11.000 And there was another kid who went to my junior high who decided he was so depressed he was going to kill himself.

01:21:20.000 And he drove his car at like 100 miles an hour.

01:21:24.000 It actually wasn't his car.

01:21:25.000 It was like his girlfriend's sister's Camaro or something.

01:21:29.000 And he drove it at a million miles an hour into the wall of the junior high gymnasium and destroyed the gymnasium.

01:21:37.000 So all this stuff is happening, you know, in a period of time, you know, and in a place that you wouldn't think would have that level of crime.

01:21:50.000 And that kind of crime.

01:21:51.000 And that kind of crime.

01:21:52.000 And oddly enough, always men.

01:21:55.000 Yeah.

01:21:57.000 Which are uniquely affected by these things.

01:22:01.000 So what about the women that were there?

01:22:04.000 Was there bizarre behavior that you might think could be attributed to these toxins?

01:22:12.000 You know, I don't really know how to answer that.

01:22:14.000 I mean, I think that there was one of the things that I remember about the high school, for example, was that there was a lot of kind of creepy behavior, you know, going on in terms of food fights and just a lot of stuff I don't think you see as much now.

01:22:41.000 I mean, this is completely anecdotal, so I can't support any of this, but it just, it felt to me like when my niece and nephew were growing up that they were less troubled as youths, you know, than we were in the 1970s.

01:22:58.000 You know, they were growing up in the 90s, you know.

01:23:02.000 And I think there is a little bit of that.

01:23:07.000 I mean, there can't prove it, but I think that it may be true that, you know, the whole all the jokes about the baby boomers being crazy because of lead exposure, there may be a little bit of truth to that. 1.00

01:23:29.000 I mean, it makes sense.

01:23:31.000 I mean, it totally makes sense.

01:23:33.000 I mean, if there were elevated levels of all this lead, elevated levels of all these toxins, and we know that it affects human behavior.

01:23:41.000 I mean, it only makes sense.

01:23:44.000 It does.

01:23:45.000 And I, you know, I hope that one of the things my book might be able to do is to encourage people to just think about this in their, you know, in their lives.

01:23:57.000 And I think a lot of people are now much more aware of lead.

01:24:02.000 I mean, that thing that you were showing earlier about the Bunker Hill thing, it said that five micrograms per deciliter of lead was the, they've now lowered that to 3.5.

01:24:14.000 And it really should be zero, you know, because there is no amount of lead that's safe in terms of exposure.

01:24:24.000 And they know that.

01:24:25.000 I think it just, if the federal government comes out and says it's zero, then that triggers all kinds of things that have to happen.

01:24:35.000 And it makes parents freak out because, you know, they might take their child to a doctor and have them tested and find out there's some, you know, if it's not zero, then what are we going to do about it?

01:24:51.000 And it's, you know.

01:24:52.000 And who's liable?

01:24:53.000 That's right.

01:24:54.000 Yeah.

01:24:54.000 That's what's so disturbing about all this stuff is that a lot of effort is put forth to make sure that whatever companies that may be liable, they'll try to distort facts and try to hide evidence and try to make it seem like this is just a nothing burger.

01:25:13.000 This is no big deal.

01:25:14.000 Well, you see that with fluoride.

01:25:16.000 You know, we've been putting fluoride in the water forever, supposedly to help people with tooth decay.

01:25:22.000 And then you're seeing that there's a direct correlation between high levels of fluoride in the water and lowered IQs.

01:25:28.000 And yet there's still people out there that are saying, oh, you're going to see a bunch of tooth decay.

01:25:33.000 We need to put the fluoride back in the water.

01:25:35.000 We need to stop this.

01:25:36.000 Why?

01:25:37.000 Well, because people are profiting off of putting fluoride in water.

01:25:40.000 There's enormous corporations that are responsible for that fluoride.

01:25:45.000 And they provide that fluoride to the drinking water.

01:25:48.000 And under the guise of improving dental health, which is just crazy because you don't need it.

01:25:56.000 Like, you could just brush your teeth and stop eating so much fucking sugar, which is really the culprit.

01:26:01.000 That's really 100% the culprit.

01:26:03.000 I mean, if you go back to ancient times, one of the things they've seen, they find like skulls and dead people's teeth from hundreds of years ago.

01:26:15.000 You don't find a massive amount of tooth decay because people weren't eating a lot of sugar.

01:26:20.000 They weren't constantly eating candy and stuff that rots your fucking teeth out.

01:26:25.000 We don't need to stop, we need to put this neurotoxin into water.

01:26:31.000 We need to stop eating poison.

01:26:33.000 It's like really simple.

01:26:34.000 You don't add a poison to make you better because there's more poison.

01:26:40.000 Like it's really crazy.

01:26:42.000 And these are like hardcore facts.

01:26:46.000 This is not something that's deniable.

01:26:48.000 Like if you look at the correlation between fluoride and lowered IQs, it's pretty undeniable.

01:26:56.000 They know it's a fact.

01:26:57.000 They know it's a neurotoxin.

01:26:59.000 But yet they'll brush it off.

01:27:00.000 Oh, but that's in high doses.

01:27:02.000 And low doses.

01:27:03.000 It's like, well, who's determining?

01:27:04.000 Who's determining?

01:27:06.000 There hasn't been a long history of human use of fluoride in drinking water.

01:27:12.000 It's fairly recent.

01:27:14.000 I believe it goes back into the early 20th century.

01:27:17.000 It's crazy.

01:27:18.000 Yeah.

01:27:19.000 Well, it is, I mean, they always say the dose makes the poison.

01:27:23.000 And I suppose that that's true.

01:27:25.000 Oh, I'm sure it's true, but I mean, zero amount is good for you.

01:27:29.000 And this is not a smart thing for people to do.

01:27:32.000 It's why you're not supposed to eat toothpaste that has fluoride in it.

01:27:36.000 They tell you to spit it out.

01:27:37.000 Why?

01:27:38.000 Because it's got fluoride in it, and fluoride is fucking bad for you.

01:27:41.000 So why are we putting it in toothpaste in the first place?

01:27:43.000 Like, help me out.

01:27:45.000 You're just trying to clean teeth, right?

01:27:47.000 Like, why do you have to use fluoride?

01:27:49.000 Well, you don't.

01:27:50.000 That's why they sell fluoride-free toothpaste, and they advertise it as such.

01:27:55.000 If fluoride was the thing that was helping everyone with tooth decay, why the hell would anybody want to buy fluoride-free toothpaste?

01:28:01.000 Well, because people who have been actually paying attention and reading independent journalists and reading people that have gone outside the mainstream narrative that realize like this is not good for you.

01:28:12.000 Not only is it not good for you, it probably should have been removed from our water supply a long time ago.

01:28:18.000 So who's responsible?

01:28:20.000 And then it gets into that.

01:28:21.000 It gets into like these corporations that have been dumping fluoride into water are justifying the use of fluoride, the politicians that have been doing it.

01:28:28.000 Who's been getting paid?

01:28:29.000 What's the paper trail?

01:28:30.000 Like, what's going on?

01:28:32.000 And it's just one more piece of disgusting and disturbing evidence of human depravity.

01:28:41.000 The people are willing to do things that are just they know are bad, but they profit.

01:28:47.000 And the government is not, you know, completely blameless in all of this either, because, you know, in terms of lead, for example, one of the places that I think people are really concerned about is the schools, you know, public schools.

01:29:04.000 Public school buildings were built, you know, often decades ago, so they're old and they have old plumbing.

01:29:12.000 They have lead pipes.

01:29:13.000 Lead paint.

01:29:14.000 Lead paint.

01:29:15.000 Which is even crazier.

01:29:16.000 They use lead in paint.

01:29:17.000 Yeah.

01:29:19.000 And so there's, you know, there are real questions about how much the government is going to be on the hook for replacing all of this stuff that has to happen, which is, you know, so much money in order to do that.

01:29:35.000 And, you know, they have occasionally kind of tiptoed up to this.

01:29:40.000 I think the Biden administration did say that they were going to spend millions of dollars to try and do work at schools.

01:29:50.000 Now I think that's all in question.

01:29:53.000 And so, yeah, it's a kind of a frightening period right now because The EPA is being defunded in a lot of ways.

01:30:03.000 I'm sure the EPA is not a perfect agency.

01:30:08.000 I'm sure they've made mistakes, but they're the ones.

01:30:12.000 I'm sure they've been compromised.

01:30:13.000 But also, someone should be looking into this.

01:30:15.000 Yes.

01:30:16.000 And you're going to need some sort of an environmental group that is responsible and just that can look at these things and say, hey, this is a real issue.

01:30:26.000 And all of our health is dependent upon them doing a really good job of sussing this stuff out.

01:30:34.000 And it's the EPA that's responsible for the Superfund program, which is in large part responsible for cleaning this stuff up.

01:30:44.000 But they're being defunded, you know, and so who's going to do that?

01:30:50.000 Who's going to clean up, you know, the areas that have radioactive, you know, legacy pollution from World War II, Hanford, and all of that.

01:31:03.000 I mean, that stuff's been going on for decades and it's not finished.

01:31:08.000 Well, there's an area in France that is the size of Paris that human beings can't go into all because of the war.

01:31:18.000 And what kind of well, you can find it.

01:31:21.000 Jamie, you can find it, so I don't want to speak out of tune about this, but munitions, like unexploded munitions, and just where things got bombed, where it's so toxic, human beings can't live there.

01:31:34.000 It's the size of Paris.

01:31:36.000 It's like this enormous chunk of land.

01:31:39.000 It's like it's ruined, probably forever.

01:31:44.000 Yeah, I mean, and there's got to be some kind of, you know, government intervention and stuff like this.

01:31:53.000 There has to be the responsibility because the corporations walked away.

01:31:58.000 Right.

01:31:58.000 And so they can't, you know, Isarko still exists, but it's now operating out of Mexico.

01:32:07.000 How convenient.

01:32:10.000 Yeah, that's a whole story.

01:32:12.000 It's zone rogue, World War I-era battlefields that are still dangerous over 100 years later.

01:32:19.000 Wow.

01:32:20.000 Yeah.

01:32:22.000 So the Red Zone is a chain of former battlefields across northeastern France that the government has cordoned off due to the many dangerous ordinance that remains from the First World War.

01:32:35.000 The area originally spanned over 460 square miles from Nancy through to Lille and incorporates such battlefields as this, how do you say that, Somme, Verdun, and Vimy Ridge.

01:32:50.000 While the size of the region has lessened over the 100-plus years since the end of the conflict, the area is still characterized by the scars and remnants of the Great War.

01:32:59.000 Oh, so this is even World War I. Yeah.

01:33:02.000 All that chemical stuff that they were using.

01:33:06.000 Right.

01:33:06.000 Wow.

01:33:07.000 That's when they first started using chemical warfare.

01:33:09.000 Yeah.

01:33:11.000 People are gross.

01:33:14.000 Oh, they're awesome, too.

01:33:16.000 Like a lot of people, you're awesome.

01:33:18.000 A lot of people are awesome.

01:33:19.000 A lot of people are great.

01:33:20.000 I love them.

01:33:21.000 But in large groups, when they don't have responsibility for their actions, they're gross.

01:33:29.000 It's very, you know, the more you read about these types of things, like you're describing in your book, and these horrible things that these corporations have done, the amount of pollution that they've caused, and the amount of damage that they've done, and then the effects on untold millions of human beings that have been exposed to these things.

01:33:55.000 It's so disturbing.

01:33:58.000 It's so disturbing that it just makes you, you know, like I said, I can't read this stuff at night.

01:34:03.000 If I read this stuff at night, I can't sleep.

01:34:06.000 I wind up getting up in the middle of the night and wandering around my house.

01:34:10.000 It really freaks me out.

01:34:12.000 Yeah.

01:34:13.000 I know a lot of people have said things to me like, how did you write this book?

01:34:18.000 And I think they're talking about the serial killer part of it.

01:34:21.000 Right.

01:34:21.000 That's the partner.

01:34:22.000 Yeah.

01:34:24.000 Which, you know, it is really disturbing stuff.

01:34:27.000 And yeah, all of it is disturbing.

01:34:30.000 The fact that serial killers exist, that's disturbing.

01:34:33.000 The fact that there might be some sort of an environmental effect or chemical effect that's causing some of this behavior to take place.

01:34:41.000 But we did do the right thing in terms of, you know, now every country in the world that was selling leaded gas has taken it off the market.

01:34:50.000 Right.

01:34:51.000 So that was a good thing.

01:34:53.000 Yeah.

01:34:54.000 We made some progress.

01:34:56.000 And, you know, again, this guy's graphs that he published show this.

01:35:01.000 Who's this guy again?

01:35:02.000 Rick Nevin.

01:35:04.000 He wrote this book called Lucifer Curves.

01:35:08.000 See if you can find those ones.

01:35:09.000 Which contain all these different graphs that show this.

01:35:13.000 And what he has shown is that there's one of them in my book that he let me reproduce.

01:35:20.000 You know, the violent crime rate goes up and up in the 70s and 80s.

01:35:25.000 And then when they remove, yeah, when they remove the leaded gas, the crime rate falls off a cliff.

01:35:35.000 That is crazy.

01:35:36.000 Look at this graph.

01:35:38.000 It's almost like it mirrors it.

01:35:40.000 Yeah, all these graphs look exactly the same.

01:35:44.000 That's so crazy.

01:35:46.000 Yeah.

01:35:47.000 It's wild.

01:35:50.000 Okay, so look at this.

01:35:51.000 Scroll, go up a little bit first.

01:35:53.000 So murder from 1900 to 1959 versus paint lead.

01:35:59.000 Look at that.

01:36:00.000 Yeah.

01:36:01.000 It's correlation.

01:36:04.000 They're almost mirrored.

01:36:05.000 Yeah.

01:36:06.000 And then aggravated assault versus gasoline lead.

01:36:10.000 Same thing.

01:36:10.000 It's like they follow the same path.

01:36:14.000 It's nuts.

01:36:15.000 Robbery versus gasoline lead.

01:36:17.000 Look at the drop-off with the drop-off of gasoline lead.

01:36:21.000 That is nuts.

01:36:24.000 And it's the same thing with serial killers.

01:36:26.000 The number of serial killers in the 70s and 80s and 90s goes up to the highest that we've seen, you know, about 700 operating in this country during that period.

01:36:40.000 And then it just drops off.

01:36:42.000 And that's why they call that the golden age of serial killers.

01:36:47.000 Wow.

01:36:48.000 And now it's like, you know, 50 to 100.

01:36:52.000 So I think there always have been serial killers, you know, throughout history.

01:36:57.000 I mean, there's Jack the Ripper.

01:37:00.000 But, you know, this guy talks about that whole period, you know, because that was the Industrial Revolution.

01:37:08.000 That was a period when there was a lot of lead paint being produced in England.

01:37:15.000 And so Jack the Ripper may have had a little bit too much lead on top of whatever else was wrong with them.

01:37:22.000 I mean, we don't even know who he was.

01:37:25.000 It makes me really think about Peaky Blinders.

01:37:27.000 You ever watch that show?

01:37:28.000 Yes.

01:37:29.000 That show Was like, it's almost like they filtered the whole show.

01:37:33.000 They did an amazing job of that show.

01:37:35.000 First of all, it's one of my favorite series of all time.

01:37:37.000 It's so good.

01:37:40.000 But the show looks like it's in the middle of like coal fog.

01:37:46.000 You know, like everything is kind of gray.

01:37:50.000 And they did an amazing job of recreating what life was like after the war in that part of Europe.

01:37:58.000 And that's what it looked like.

01:37:59.000 Yeah.

01:38:00.000 And coal includes a lot of compounds that are really dangerous to breathe.

01:38:07.000 There was a whole thing that happened in London in the 1950s where they got, I don't remember why this happened, but you know, I mean, it was a really difficult time for that country after World War II.

01:38:24.000 There was, you know, economically they were really struggling.

01:38:28.000 And I think they got during one winter in the 1950s, they got some really bad quality coal delivered to London, which caused this horrific smog event, essentially, that was so heavy that people were killed just trying to cross the street because you couldn't see anything.

01:38:52.000 Oh, God.

01:38:53.000 Yeah, it was like there was a whole episode of The Crown that was devoted to this.

01:38:58.000 It was while Winston Churchill was prime minister.

01:39:03.000 So it was like driving through fog.

01:39:04.000 Yeah.

01:39:05.000 And, you know, when I was a kid and read books about England and that, you know, in the earlier, like Charles Dickens or whatever, you know, we would talk about fog all the time in London.

01:39:17.000 And I just thought fog, oh, that's from, you know, the ocean or something.

01:39:22.000 But it's not.

01:39:23.000 It was smog.

01:39:24.000 And it was smog from industry and from coal fires.

01:39:31.000 And I think they paid kind of a terrible price.

01:39:35.000 Look at that.

01:39:35.000 Yeah.

01:39:36.000 Yeah, that's what Peaky Blinders looks like.

01:39:38.000 It's like a whole dull series.

01:39:40.000 It's almost like they did it.

01:39:42.000 So this is the Thames River from 1952.

01:39:46.000 Wow.

01:39:48.000 Wow.

01:39:48.000 Look at that guy.

01:39:49.000 He's got a fucking mask on.

01:39:52.000 Yeah, the great smog of 1952.

01:39:54.000 That's what it was.

01:39:55.000 And a lot of people who had asthma died, you know, because it was so terrible.

01:40:02.000 The air was just so terrible.

01:40:04.000 Wow.

01:40:05.000 Two workers arrested in an oxygen tent in Pennsylvania from 1948.

01:40:10.000 Yeah, there was a similar event in Pennsylvania.

01:40:13.000 Death fog.

01:40:14.000 Yeah.

01:40:16.000 Two shocking events still in living memory from Queen Elizabeth's generation because the Clean Air Act reinforce enforcement. 0.91

01:40:23.000 Reducing just one of the pollutants targeted by the Clean Air Act added 1.6 years to the average American life.

01:40:30.000 Wow.

01:40:32.000 Yeah, I think Puget Sound had a problem that was caused by sort of the geography of the area because, you know, Puget Sound is kind of a trough between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Mountains.

01:40:47.000 And so it's a low area.

01:40:49.000 And during the, you know, certain times of the year, everybody used to heat their houses with wood, you know, fires with, you know, Franklin stoves and stuff like that.

01:41:02.000 Which is really bad for you.

01:41:04.000 Yeah, which is unfortunately.

01:41:05.000 And that's where coal comes from. 0.68

01:41:08.000 Right.

01:41:09.000 And so when you buy charcoal, if you buy lump charcoal, that's what that is.

01:41:13.000 Yeah, so not as many people use that anymore.

01:41:16.000 And like when I was a kid, I remember the skies being really gray a lot, you know, especially during the winter.

01:41:24.000 And I think part of that was from the smoke kind of settling in that Puget Sound trough between the mountains.

01:41:33.000 And they would tell people sometimes they would have a smoke, they'd have a fire ban that you couldn't use your wood stove.

01:41:40.000 Wow.

01:41:41.000 Because of air quality.

01:41:42.000 Because of the air quality.

01:41:44.000 And now I go to, you know, the Northwest and to Puget Sound, and the air looks so much better.

01:41:52.000 I mean, and it's like during the summer, it's just like, I don't remember it being like this.

01:42:00.000 So, I mean, that's just my experience.

01:42:03.000 But I think it's true that the air quality is better.

01:42:07.000 Well, it has to be.

01:42:08.000 Yeah.

01:42:09.000 And that's a very disturbing thing for people.

01:42:12.000 They don't want to hear.

01:42:13.000 Like, you think of wood fire being natural, but it's actually really bad.

01:42:19.000 Yeah.

01:42:19.000 And I think everybody in the city of Austin heated their home in the winter with wood fires.

01:42:25.000 It'd be a fucking disaster.

01:42:26.000 Yeah.

01:42:27.000 It'd be really bad.

01:42:28.000 If everybody in New York City, like imagine, well, you can't because it's apartments, but if it was something where you had a chimney and everybody had wood fire, it would be terrible.

01:42:38.000 It's great if you're camping.

01:42:40.000 If it's just you.

01:42:41.000 If it's just you and your friends, and it's a small wood fire, it's like relatively speaking, it's not going to cause too much damage.

01:42:46.000 It's no big deal.

01:42:48.000 But when you get a large group of human beings, they're burning wood and you're all breathing that.

01:42:53.000 It's just like a fire.

01:42:55.000 Like have you ever been around a wildfire?

01:42:57.000 It's terrible.

01:42:58.000 The air quality is awful.

01:43:00.000 Los Angeles has had a bunch of those.

01:43:02.000 And many times when I was living in LA, the entire city was covered in smoke.

01:43:07.000 And you're breathing these wildfire, this wildfire smoke.

01:43:13.000 Yeah, I mean, it's just undeniable, I think, now.

01:43:17.000 And I think it's much, you know, people are really moving away from having wood stoves and fireplaces for that very reason.

01:43:28.000 It's so weird because you think of like, oh, that's a comforting thing.

01:43:31.000 Yeah.

01:43:32.000 Nice fireplace.

01:43:33.000 It's beautiful.

01:43:34.000 You know, I cook over hardwood all the time.

01:43:38.000 You know, it's like the best way.

01:43:39.000 Like you have a smoker, an offset smoker, put a little bunch of oak in there, post-oak, and you cook that way.

01:43:47.000 But, you know, what's coming out of that smokestack?

01:43:49.000 Yeah.

01:43:50.000 Nothing good.

01:43:52.000 I mean, if you have one smoker, I'm sure it's fine.

01:43:54.000 It's no big deal.

01:43:55.000 But if everybody's doing it, it becomes an issue, especially if you have stagnant air.

01:43:59.000 Like you're talking about that trough.

01:44:02.000 Yeah, I mean, so, you know, we are doing the right things in some respects.

01:44:09.000 I mean, you know, we're moving away from heating houses with wood.

01:44:14.000 We're, you know, we stopped, you know, putting lead in paint.

01:44:20.000 We stopped the leaded gas.

01:44:23.000 What do you know, if anything, about gas, about natural gas cooking?

01:44:28.000 Because this is one of the things during the Biden administration, they started talking about removing gas kitchens and gas stoves from people's homes.

01:44:38.000 And people started freaking out, like, this is crazy.

01:44:40.000 You can't do this.

01:44:41.000 But there seems to be some real data that shows that having gas in your home is not just dangerous, but dangerous for the development of children.

01:44:54.000 Yeah, I mean, I am not an expert on this, but I am really concerned about what I've read in part because I have a gas stove.

01:45:05.000 I mean, it completely makes sense.

01:45:07.000 Yeah, and I like cooking on gas, but I've been really concerned about what I've read and also about the, you know, again, the industry suppression of evidence about this stuff.

01:45:20.000 Right.

01:45:22.000 And, you know, just the whole thing of calling it natural gas.

01:45:27.000 Right, right, right.

01:45:28.000 Arsenic's natural, too.

01:45:29.000 Yeah.

01:45:30.000 I mean, there's a lot of natural stuff that's terrible for you.

01:45:33.000 Did we really fall for that?

01:45:34.000 I mean, it's kind of heartbreaking if it turns out to have been, you know, as concerning as they're saying.

01:45:44.000 And yeah.

01:45:47.000 Well, you hear politicians talking about clean coal.

01:45:51.000 I've heard that term before, which is a wild term to use, clean coal.

01:45:55.000 And it's bullshit.

01:45:55.000 Yeah.

01:45:56.000 I mean, it's bullshit.

01:45:58.000 Yeah.

01:45:59.000 That's just.

01:46:01.000 Ugh.

01:46:02.000 Yeah.

01:46:03.000 I just.

01:46:06.000 I mean, and I think, you know, as Homo sapiens, we're either going to get on top of this stuff or it's going to get on top of us.

01:46:15.000 Yeah, well, it seems like it already has gotten on top of a generation.

01:46:20.000 I mean, Lecor was talking about the leaded gasoline contributing, especially in urban communities where you had to deal with a lot of this exhaust and the pollution, that there's a correlation between lowered IQs.

01:46:35.000 Statistically significant correlation.

01:46:39.000 And all the stuff they're talking about now with plastics in the body.

01:46:44.000 I mean, I read something this morning that said that we're walking around with the plastic accumulation in our brains of enough plastic to make a spoon.

01:46:55.000 Yes.

01:46:56.000 In our brains.

01:46:57.000 And it's like, well, that can't be good.

01:47:00.000 No.

01:47:01.000 I mean, I'm not an expert on the plastic stuff, but everything you're seeing about it is really alarming.

01:47:08.000 And you just have to think that unless we stop using this stuff, unless we remove it from production, we're going to be in real trouble.

01:47:21.000 And when we come up with solutions, make sure those solutions aren't even worse for you.

01:47:26.000 Because one of the solutions was these damn paper straws.

01:47:30.000 So what makes a paper straw able to support liquid without dissolving?

01:47:37.000 Forever chemicals.

01:47:39.000 Paper straws are way worse for you than plastic straws.

01:47:43.000 Way worse.

01:47:44.000 Especially if you're dealing with hot liquids, which is another factor when you're dealing with coffee cups.

01:47:49.000 Yeah.

01:47:49.000 Like coffee cups.

01:47:51.000 My friend Paul Saladino did this demonstration where he took a typical paper coffee cup and dissolved the outside of it and showed you what you're actually pouring hot liquid into.

01:48:04.000 You're pouring hot liquid into what essentially looks like a condom.

01:48:08.000 It's a plastic liner that lines the inside of these paper cups, which is why they can hold hot liquid in the first place.

01:48:16.000 It doesn't even make any sense.

01:48:17.000 Like, how is paper able to hold hot liquid without dissolving?

01:48:20.000 Well, it has to have some sort of a surface inside of it that's a coating.

01:48:25.000 And that coating is filled with forever chemicals.

01:48:28.000 And it is fucking terrible for you.

01:48:30.000 Yeah.

01:48:31.000 So our solutions have to be at least somewhat better.

01:48:36.000 You know, and then there's people that say, well, metal, the problem with metal straws is people trip.

01:48:36.000 Right.

01:48:41.000 And the metal straws go into their brain.

01:48:43.000 They fucking don't trip.

01:48:45.000 Jesus Christ.

01:48:46.000 What are we saying here?

01:48:47.000 I haven't followed the metal.

01:48:49.000 Yeah.

01:48:49.000 A bunch of people have died because they're looking at their phone.

01:48:53.000 They're looking at their phone and sucking something through a metal straw and they trip and it goes into their head and kills them.

01:48:53.000 Yeah.

01:48:59.000 Oh my God.

01:49:00.000 Yeah, more than one person has died that way.

01:49:02.000 Like, good lord.

01:49:04.000 Like, if it's not one thing, it's another.

01:49:07.000 There's no end.

01:49:09.000 Whatever we try to fix up, they would come up with a solution that's actually worse than the initial problem.

01:49:14.000 Not always, but.

01:49:15.000 It's like a Rube Goldberg thing or something.

01:49:17.000 Yeah.

01:49:18.000 I mean, and it just makes you wonder: do we have to go back to some sort of really primitive form of existence like everybody rides donkeys?

01:49:27.000 No, I think, well, this is the reason why we serve in the studio.

01:49:32.000 We don't use plastic water bottles anymore.

01:49:34.000 And we serve all of our guests.

01:49:37.000 We use a steel cup.

01:49:39.000 And this is why we have steel cups because I realized a long time ago that plastic leaches into the water and you have no chain of command.

01:49:49.000 No one knows exactly how that water bottle was handled.

01:49:54.000 No one knows how long it was sitting on a dock.

01:49:57.000 No one knows how what was the temperature of the truck that it was delivered to the supermarket.

01:50:03.000 When you get it, it's cold.

01:50:04.000 Okay, but what happened in the time that it was bottled in the factory to the time it got into your hands?

01:50:10.000 Well, if it's plastic, there's a high likelihood that it's leaching some chemicals.

01:50:15.000 And here's another disturbing thing that they found.

01:50:18.000 You said, well, we should buy glass water.

01:50:20.000 Yeah, buy a glass water bottle.

01:50:22.000 That solves the problem.

01:50:23.000 Well, actually, it doesn't because of the caps.

01:50:26.000 So the caps leach more because of the way they make these caps on these metal water bottles.

01:50:35.000 Whatever the surface of the interior lining of those caps that keeps water from leaking out leaches even more than it does with a water bottle.

01:50:44.000 That's plastic.

01:50:45.000 So what they found is that glass water bottles leach more chemicals into the water than plastic, which is just crazy.

01:50:55.000 Yeah.

01:50:56.000 Yeah, I mean, that must be.

01:50:58.000 So make sure that's true.

01:50:59.000 I'm pretty sure, 99% sure that's true.

01:51:01.000 I read this whole article about it, but I want to be clear because this is pretty important.

01:51:09.000 Yeah, I remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember when they delivered milk in glass bottles to the house, and they had these little paper caps on them.

01:51:20.000 But I now wonder, you know, if those were sort of coated with that, well, they seem like they're metal.

01:51:26.000 It seems like a metal-coated cap because there's something about the rigidity of it.

01:51:31.000 Recent studies indicated glass bottles may contain significantly higher level of microplastics than previously thought, even exceeding those found in plastic bottles.

01:51:41.000 This is largely due to microplastics originating from the bottle caps, specifically the paint used on them.

01:51:49.000 While glass is often seen as a safer alternative to plastic, these findings highlight a potential concern regarding microplastic contamination in beverages regardless of the container type.

01:52:01.000 And we've talked about this, the dangers of plastics on this podcast before because we had Dr. Shanna Swan from Harvard who wrote a book called Countdown.

01:52:09.000 It's all talking about how the phthalates and these microplastics entering into women's bodies during the time where these children are developing, it's contributing to a bunch of different factors that are really dangerous to the endocrine system.

01:52:27.000 Cabot suggests that most of the microplastics in the body are ingested through food, particularly meat, because commercial meat production tends to concentrate plastics in the food chain.

01:52:36.000 Terrific.

01:52:38.000 There's no escape.

01:52:38.000 Yeah.

01:52:41.000 What has been the reaction to your book?

01:52:44.000 Has there been any pushback by people that don't like your connecting serial killers to industrial contaminants?

01:52:56.000 Yeah, I mean, there have been people who say, you know, well, you know, why isn't everybody in Tacoma a serial killer and things like that?

01:53:06.000 Which I think is kind of the wrong focus.

01:53:09.000 I mean, I'm just trying to introduce a description of sort of the most extreme version of what might have happened.

01:53:19.000 And again, I don't make those kinds of claims.

01:53:23.000 I mean, we can't, for example, show that Ted Bundy did what he did because of lead.

01:53:32.000 All I'm trying to show is that he was exposed to a significant amount of lead.

01:53:37.000 And we know that from the testing of his house and his yard.

01:53:44.000 And so I'm just saying, think about what that might have done.

01:53:47.000 Think about what it might have contributed.

01:53:51.000 Probably wasn't the only reason.

01:53:53.000 There was probably a whole suite of reasons why he did what he did with all of these guys.

01:54:00.000 That's true.

01:54:03.000 But Gary Ridgway, you know, again, he grows up two miles from SeaTac, from the airport, at a time when they were using lead in jet fuel.

01:54:16.000 Oh, wow.

01:54:17.000 And so he's, and he's also right by two major highways.

01:54:22.000 And what does he do when he grows up?

01:54:26.000 He goes to work at a truck factory painting trucks with a spray gun.

01:54:35.000 And that lead, that paint has lead components.

01:54:40.000 So he's got it coming and going.

01:54:43.000 I mean, his brother talked about how they used to play on a slag pile from the copper mine in Idaho.

01:54:55.000 And so I think he's a guy who clearly has to have come into contact with more lead than was good for him.

01:55:05.000 Now, does that mean that's why you did it?

01:55:09.000 You know, and he's, you know, his whole history involves so many victims.

01:55:15.000 I mean, he pled guilty to something like 48 or 49 murders, but they've tied him to probably around 78 or 79.

01:55:28.000 And that's probably an undercount.

01:55:31.000 So I think it's worth thinking about.

01:55:35.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:55:36.000 I think it's worth thinking about what lead contributed to crime during that period.

01:55:44.000 And I wanted to tell the story in a way that was kind of subjective, you know, and personal and not in an academic way.

01:55:55.000 I mean, there are some great academic histories of lead exposure and the history of lead industries in this country.

01:56:05.000 I didn't want to do that because it's been done.

01:56:09.000 And because, you know, I think people, when they're reading something for, I wouldn't say entertainment, but, you know, they want to find something compelling and absorbing and learn something.

01:56:22.000 And this, I felt, was a way of, you know, in Murderland of presenting this material in a way that people could kind of say, oh, you know, I didn't know about what happened with lead during World War II.

01:56:37.000 I didn't know about what it could do to kids and how that might show up years later in their lives.

01:56:49.000 When you finish a book like this and then you release it, what does that feel like?

01:56:54.000 Like, you're contributing, I think, greatly to this discussion.

01:56:59.000 It's a very important one of the impact of these industrial pollutants, what these unknowing victims of this, not just the serial killers, but all the people that were probably damaged by this stuff.

01:57:16.000 What does that feel like when you release a book like this?

01:57:22.000 It's kind of overwhelming, you know, to see it suddenly kind of be in people's hands and they're reading it and they're asking you questions.

01:57:32.000 And yeah, I mean, the funny thing about writing a book is that while you're writing it and doing the research, it's kind of your own private Idaho.

01:57:44.000 You know, it's your own private little playpen where you get to make all the decisions and, you know, make all the choices.

01:57:52.000 And then, you know, editors get involved and all these other, you know, people at the publishing house and they start saying, well, what about this?

01:58:02.000 What about that?

01:58:03.000 And that's always sort of terrifying because you realize, oh, I haven't thought about all the ramifications.

01:58:10.000 I need to, you know, do all this fact-checking and make sure everything's right.

01:58:15.000 And, you know, so that's a real hump to get over to just make sure that you've gotten everything nailed down as much as you can.

01:58:29.000 And that's all great.

01:58:31.000 But then it enters people's hands and they're reading it.

01:58:34.000 And sometimes, you know, when you publish a book, people have really different responses than you even imagined.

01:58:42.000 You know, I mean, you can't control it anymore.

01:58:45.000 It's just out in the world doing its thing.

01:58:48.000 And it's interesting.

01:58:51.000 It's always sort of really interesting.

01:58:53.000 You know, I just heard from a woman who's the daughter of a guy who worked at the smelter in Tacoma.

01:59:03.000 And I had been in touch with her, you know, briefly because her father was an incredible rabble-rouser when he worked at the smelter. 1.00

01:59:14.000 He was working for the union and did all this stuff to bring the whole arsenic thing to light to show that the plant doctor who he called the plant quack was lying about the stuff.

01:59:35.000 And he was sort of a hero in this whole story because he published, he had this little newsletter that he published from his kitchen table.

01:59:49.000 And he was so funny, so great.

01:59:52.000 And he really, you know, cared about the guys that he worked with.

01:59:57.000 And so he, I think, helped compile A whole list, which was called the death list.

02:00:04.000 I found it, there's a copy of it in the Tacoma Library, a Sarco records, that listed all the guys who worked at the smelter who died of various cancers pretty young, you know, like at age 55 or something.

02:00:23.000 And so, you know, when you hear from somebody like, you know, that woman or other people who, you know, lived in Tacoma and remember this whole era, it's really gratifying.

02:00:36.000 I mean, it's really great to know that you've put something on the record that will help people understand the history of this stuff.

02:00:46.000 Yeah, I think you've done the world a great service.

02:00:49.000 I really do.

02:00:50.000 Because I think it's difficult to compile all this stuff and put it into a digestible form.

02:00:56.000 And I think the connection that you've made to serial killers, which I think is a very valid connection, but also it's particularly exciting for people to pick it up.

02:01:11.000 And because so many people are fascinated by serial killers and so many people are creeped out by it that it makes it more compelling.

02:01:20.000 It makes it more interesting for people to read.

02:01:24.000 And then I think along the way, then they get this deeper understanding of this gigantic problem.

02:01:31.000 I hope so.

02:01:32.000 Yeah.

02:01:33.000 I mean, that's the goal, you know, to try to, you know, just, I mean, I hate to use the term raise awareness because it's such a cliche, but, you know, you do hope that people come away from reading something like this and think,

02:01:52.000 oh, you know, maybe I should have my water tested or maybe I should, you know, be concerned about the playground where my kids are playing.

02:02:03.000 Yeah.

02:02:06.000 Well, I think you did it.

02:02:08.000 So, and I'm really happy that you came in here to talk about it.

02:02:12.000 I really appreciate it.

02:02:13.000 Well, I appreciate being here.

02:02:15.000 My pleasure.

02:02:17.000 Jamie, put the book up so people can see it.

02:02:20.000 Murderland.

02:02:22.000 Did you do the audio version of it?

02:02:24.000 I did not.

02:02:25.000 Did someone else do it?

02:02:27.000 Yeah, a woman. 1.00

02:02:30.000 Crime and bloodlust in the time of serial killers.

02:02:34.000 I like how you have it all foggy, too.

02:02:37.000 You know, where it makes it look like evolution.

02:02:40.000 Does all things happen?

02:02:41.000 Yeah, I mean, his head, whoever the artist is, did a great job of connecting kind of what we're talking about.

02:02:49.000 Yeah, they did a great job on the cover.

02:02:53.000 Well, thank you, Caroline.

02:02:54.000 Thanks for coming in.

02:02:55.000 Thanks.

02:02:55.000 Really appreciate it.

02:02:56.000 It was really good to talk to you.

02:02:57.000 Great to be here.

02:02:58.000 Thank you.

02:02:59.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 05, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser

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