In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast by day, I talk to author and author of the new book "Murderland" about serial killers in the Pacific Northwest, and the link between lead pollution and crime in the region.
00:00:36.000And 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.
00:00:47.000And there always had been this question, why are there so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest?
00:00:55.000And so that was the question I was really thinking about.
00:00:59.000And 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.
00:01:28.000leaded 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.
00:01:47.000So that was what emerged to me gradually over the years.
00:01:53.000I mean, I didn't know a lot about this when I started.
00:01:57.000I knew about the serial killers, but I didn't really know about the whole lead story.
00:02:03.000And that came about, you know, I learned about it in part because of some murders.
00:02:12.000I mean, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a lovely place.
00:02:19.000Unfortunately, New Mexico has a high rate of homicides.
00:02:26.000In 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.
00:02:39.000And a few years ago, maybe 2008 or something like that, some people, a couple people were murdered down the street from me.
00:02:50.000And I live in a very peaceful neighborhood.
00:02:55.000And 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.
00:03:15.000And a few years later, because of that, I was up in the Northwest and looking at real estate ads.
00:03:23.000And at this point, I didn't really know anything about the smelter, the lead issues.
00:03:30.000But I was looking at property on Vashon Island, which if you know anything about the Pacific Northwest, is in Puget Sound.
00:04:23.000And 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.
00:04:41.000And so Vashon received a lot of the pollution from that smelter.
00:04:48.000And so that began a whole process of kind of learning about what happened here, you know, what happened in this region.
00:04:59.000And 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.
00:05:16.000And 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.
00:05:38.000And I could see that a lot of news media had been devoted to looking at what had happened in this region.
00:05:49.000You 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.
00:06:07.000So 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.
00:06:19.000And 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?
00:06:35.000So this issue of lead pollution, is it just serial killers or is there an elevated amount of violent crime that goes along with it?
00:06:47.000Yeah, the issue of serial killers is one that I kind of introduced as the most extreme example.
00:06:58.000But most of the research that's been done has focused on aggression, juvenile delinquency, for example.
00:07:08.000There 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,
00:07:29.000and they have shown a very strong association with problems with learning, ADHD, and as I said, delinquency and crime.
00:07:46.000and 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?
00:07:57.000Yeah, 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.
00:08:13.000Yeah, 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.
00:08:35.000Obviously, 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.
00:08:48.000Although I think rural people were also exposed because of the kinds of machinery and stuff that's used on farms and so forth.
00:08:59.000So it was a terrible idea, and they knew that at the time.
00:09:05.000You know, the companies, the corporations, the people who introduced it, Standard Oil, DuPont, et cetera, they knew the dangers of this.
00:09:17.000They 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.
00:09:39.000And 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.
00:09:56.000And so all these corporations chose to do this.
00:10:17.000It'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.
00:10:31.000And they know that short term they can make a lot of money, and so they do it anyway.
00:10:37.000Yeah, and they did for decades because, you know, this began in the 20s and 30s.
00:10:43.000So we can assume that the smelting thing they probably didn't know, correct?
00:11:00.000But 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.
00:11:57.000The gentleman who the Nobel Prize is named after, they erroneously reported that he was dead in the newspaper.
00:12:05.000And they called him the merchant of death in the newspaper.
00:12:09.000And you were like, oh, my God, this is what people think about me because he invented dynamite.
00:12:13.000And so he's like, I've got to do something to clean up my reputation.
00:12:16.000So 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.
00:12:28.000So now when people hear the term Nobel, like, oh, he's a Nobel laureate.
00:13:09.000So like two of the most devastating discoveries, scientific discoveries in the 20th century are down to the sky.
00:13:18.000And he was awarded the highest medal from the American Chemistry Association, which he still holds.
00:13:29.000I 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.
00:13:48.000And he, you know, went to Florida to try and heal himself of this, which I don't think you can do.
00:13:56.000I mean, I don't think going to Florida heals lead exposure.
00:14:03.000But he, yes, and he developed something which was called polio.
00:14:08.000You 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.
00:14:22.000And eventually he strangled to death in this sort of harness thing, which it may have been suicide.
00:14:38.000So 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.
00:14:49.000Like all of the top true crime podcasts, if you look at their demographics, it's a large chunk of it.
00:15:20.000Why do you think women are so interested?
00:15:23.000I'm not lumping you in with all women, but there is a weird thing with women in true crime podcasts.
00:15:29.000Yeah, 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.
00:15:42.000It 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.
00:16:04.000So I think there's a whole gamut of experiences that women have had to one extent or another that feed into that.
00:16:15.000And 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.
00:16:34.000And everybody knew there was somebody out there.
00:16:37.000This is at a time when the term serial killer wasn't even really in use yet.
00:16:43.000People didn't really understand the phenomenon.
00:16:48.000It was still kind of an unusual thing.
00:16:56.000You know, women were disappearing from dorm rooms or their rooms at University of Washington.
00:17:02.000They were disappearing off the street.
00:17:05.000And then they weren't seen again for weeks, for months.
00:17:10.000You know, in the July of 1974, I was 13.
00:17:17.000And 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.
00:17:31.000And 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.
00:17:50.000So 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?
00:18:04.000Yeah, I never really wanted to write a book that was just about serial killers.
00:19:14.000And 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.
00:19:56.000Was there like a history of him torturing animals or anything along those lines?
00:20:04.000No, 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.
00:21:11.000Or they have a very bad relationship with the parents.
00:21:17.000There's maybe abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse.
00:21:21.000We 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.
00:21:40.000And because he refused to answer questions?
00:21:44.000Well, he talked a lot about, you know, various people were able to interview him.
00:21:51.000The detective in King County in Seattle, who was in charge of the investigation, he was actually quite young when he took this on.
00:22:03.000I think it was his first major case as a detective.
00:22:10.000He eventually was able to interview Ted Bundy in prison when he was on death row.
00:22:19.000Bundy, 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.
00:22:36.000How did he talk about it hypothetically in the third person?
00:22:40.000I mean, it was sort of like O.J. Simpson or something.
00:22:43.000He would say, well, if somebody was going to do this, here's what he probably would have done.
00:22:50.000And so there was a lot of that up until the very last days of Bundy's sojourn on death row.
00:23:02.000And 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.
00:23:24.000But that didn't convince the governor of Florida.
00:23:30.000So 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.
00:23:50.000Is there a disproportionate number of serial killers that come from that particular area?
00:23:57.000Yeah, there really are, as I discovered, a really kind of extraordinary number.
00:24:03.000And 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.
00:24:14.000So are there undiscovered serial killers that are in that area or maybe deaths that are attributed to unknown people?
00:24:22.000There are several cases that have never been resolved.
00:24:28.000There's something called the dismemberment murders that dismemberment murders.
00:24:33.000Yeah, up in the Northwest where various feet and things were found washing up on shore and nobody could figure out who they belonged to.
00:25:22.000But 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.
00:25:39.000And 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.
00:25:58.000And 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.
00:26:58.000Well, there are various theories that have been put forth.
00:27:01.000I 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.
00:27:21.000They'd entered the period when you're most likely to commit crimes, which is your 20s or 30s.
00:28:25.000I 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.
00:29:11.000It's now been associated with various forms of dementia, Alzheimer's, ALS.
00:29:22.000So 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.
00:29:42.000What year did they start putting lead in gasoline?
00:29:46.000Well, they invented this stuff in the 1920s, but just thinking back to those early decades, not that many people had cars.
00:29:56.000And there was a big depression, of course, in the 1930s.
00:29:59.000So there's not a lot of driving happening in terms of what we see now.
00:30:06.000I mean, yeah, it just wasn't as big of a deal.
00:30:12.000It was rare to have one car, much less, you know, two or three.
00:30:19.000And 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.
00:30:36.000You know, they needed all of it for the war effort.
00:30:40.000But 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.
00:31:00.000And 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.
00:31:26.000And so that's when a lot of the stuff started entering the environment.
00:31:32.000And once it's there, it's really hard to get rid of it.
00:31:41.000It just hangs around and becomes, you know, part of our environment.
00:31:49.000It becomes dust that is, you know, in people's houses or their attics.
00:31:56.000And 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.
00:32:08.000This country particularly was doing really well economically.
00:32:13.000And everybody was buying cars and driving them for the first time, you know, en masse.
00:32:23.000And so it really becomes, I think, a heavy pollutant around that time.
00:32:30.000And 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.
00:32:40.000I 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.
00:33:07.000So I think this was around 2012, 2013.
00:33:11.000And they had told him there's a few things that you could do.
00:33:14.000There'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.
00:33:24.000But his whole backyard was essentially lead poisoned.
00:33:28.000Yeah, it's when you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.
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00:35:57.000Yeah, I mean, you definitely see, you know, what happened in Tacoma is very well recorded now.
00:36:05.000Another 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.
00:36:26.000But 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.
00:36:46.000And a lot of the stuff was requisitioned for the war effort.
00:36:51.000So 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.
00:37:09.000And what I discovered, I thought, well, El Paso, that's interesting.
00:37:14.000But there were no serial killers in El Paso.
00:37:44.000So this association with these chemicals and violence, and so this is well known.
00:37:52.000And 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?
00:38:05.000Like, is it not just Pacific Northwest?
00:38:10.000Yeah, when you start looking up, okay, well, what's the crime rate, the violent crime rate in El Paso?
00:38:16.000And yes, that starts going up in the 1970s.
00:38:22.000And so there does seem to be an association with this.
00:38:25.000There'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,
00:38:42.000that 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.
00:39:02.000The 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.
00:39:22.000Is this also tied to the sexual revolution?
00:39:25.000And then also, when was birth control, like oral birth control, introduced?
00:39:31.000I think that was in the 1960s, early 60s, that that first becomes available.
00:39:53.000And 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.
00:40:02.000Well, it's like what you're talking about, Ted Bundy.
00:40:04.000There's a bunch of factors that lead this person to becoming that.
00:40:11.000I 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.
00:40:27.000In the 1950s, a lot of babies were delivered with forceps, which caused brain damage in a certain percentage of kids.
00:40:39.000So I think you're looking at a lot of different things that contributed to trauma to the brain.
00:40:46.000You know, I think now they're really focusing on that, you know, in terms of CTE and brain damage.
00:40:55.000We see that now in football players who've had head trauma repeatedly, that this causes, can cause violence and aggression.
00:41:10.000It'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.
00:41:20.000That you're just all it would take is like a slight percentage more of impulsivity.
00:41:27.000And then you would see a corresponding result of that.
00:41:31.000Not making great decisions about what you're doing.
00:41:35.000The gas thing, the lead and the gas thing, is just crazy.
00:41:38.000It's just crazy to know that that was all done because someone couldn't patent ethanol.
00:41:44.000They 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.
00:42:01.000You know, it may be worth mentioning or describing what a smelter does for people, because I think people are not familiar with that anymore.
00:42:12.000We don't have them in our cities anymore.
00:42:17.000But, you know, what these things were were these giant primary smelters to melt rock.
00:42:25.000You know, it was like taking the rocks from mines that were full of all these different metals, you know, including arsenic.
00:42:36.000But they were full of metals like, you know, lead and copper and silver and gold and melting those rocks in these giant furnaces.
00:42:47.000And all of this put off an enormous amount of pollution, you know, particulate pollution that was going up the smokestack.
00:42:55.000And 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.
00:43:10.000But one of the things that happened sometimes with these smelters is that they would kind of fail or the filters would fail.
00:43:19.000There's this horrifying example in Idaho.
00:43:24.000It was a company called Bunker Hill that was one of the largest silver mines, I think, in the world.
00:43:32.000And they had a lead smelter in this town called Kellogg, which is right on I-90.
00:43:39.000If you've ever driven on I-90, you know, from Missoula, Montana, or something like that to Seattle, you've driven through this place.
00:43:48.000And they built, you know, this giant smelter facility to handle all the stuff they were pulling out of the mines.
00:43:59.000And 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.
00:44:28.000And 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.
00:44:42.000But in fact, there wasn't, you know, it was just what the smokestack was putting out.
00:44:49.000But 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.
00:45:32.000And we know this because of the lawsuits that were ultimately filed because, you know, they did end up in court.
00:45:40.000And there were kids, there was a baby who was more lead poisoned than any human being that the doctors had ever seen.
00:45:52.000So 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.
00:46:05.000During 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.
00:46:13.000Children in Kellogg, for example, averaged 50 micrograms per deciliter of blood.
00:46:19.000The CDC recommends five micrograms high enough to warrant concern.
00:46:23.000And 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.
00:46:36.000Dimer, capo, succinct acid, either orally or intravenously to remove heavy metals from the bloodstream.
00:46:43.000Lead is a neurotoxin linked to schizophrenia, poor academic performance, low cognitive ability, an attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder.
00:46:52.000Once the metal gets into the blood, it concentrates in the brain, the kidneys, the liver, and the bones.
00:46:58.000In pregnant women, lead can cross into the placenta, poisoning their unborn babies.
00:47:18.000Slowly 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.
00:47:35.000It was, says Florey, a light glowing green color, sort of a glow, like a glow stick.
00:48:05.000Right by the Liberty State Park, which a bunch of the acreage of that was off limits to people because it was so polluted.
00:48:15.000And 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.
00:48:32.000And I mean, there was all this heavy industry there and pollutants.
00:48:36.000And you had to walk across this little wooden trail over a stream to get to the park.
00:48:58.000And this is in the United States of America where we have at least some kind of regulations.
00:49:05.000Just 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.
00:49:20.000I mean, that's what happened with Asarco.
00:49:23.000You 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.
00:49:36.000Because, I mean, imagine what it was like to work in these smelters.
00:49:42.000It just basically became illegal to operate them.
00:49:46.000And the companies could no longer afford to do it.
00:49:51.000So they all pretty much went out of business in the 1980s.
00:49:55.000But it is just an incredible sort of time in America because it was like, well, what's the trade-off here?
00:50:05.000You know, the profits are worth much more than people's lives.
00:50:10.000And that place, the Cordelline, you know, there's a town, city called Cordelline in Idaho, but there's also this giant lake, Lake Cordelline.
00:50:21.000And 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.
00:50:37.000And 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.
00:50:56.000And so it's really, really almost impossible to clean a lot of that stuff.
00:51:02.000Yeah, 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.
00:52:12.000PFAS found in high levels in freshwater fish with most concern for vulnerable communities.
00:52:19.000I 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.
00:52:32.000But when we were there, these people were fishing in this lake, really obviously very poor people, and just catching food in this lake.
00:52:43.000And I was like, oh, my God, like, what are these people eating?
00:53:08.000And the thing is, it's like 150 years ago, all that was pristine.
00:53:15.000It's just such a short amount of time.
00:53:17.000If 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.
00:53:35.000The 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.
00:53:56.000And that's why I called it murder land.
00:53:59.000You know, I think that the behavior of these corporate actors was as bad.
00:54:06.000I 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.
00:54:22.000I 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.
00:54:37.000And that, I think, is something that in a sane world would have to change.
00:54:42.000You know, we would have to look at what a corporation wants to do before they start doing it.
00:55:10.000I 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.
00:55:22.000And 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.
00:55:34.000And this is the issue with the drug Viox that wound up killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 Americans.
00:55:41.000And I know people don't like to equate those people with serial killers.
00:55:49.000What 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.
00:56:11.000Yeah, 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.
00:56:24.000Many of them had sort of, you know, people on staff whose job it was to put out false information.
00:56:33.000In 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.
00:57:03.000He said, you know, he said their deaths were from heart failure, which everybody dies of heart failure.
00:57:11.000You 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.
00:57:26.000And probably nicely rewarded by the corporation for that.
00:57:30.000This is just this issue of diffusion of responsibility when you have this obligation to your shareholders to continually make each quarter generate more income.
00:57:44.000And then you have to figure out how to do that.
00:57:46.000And then you realize, like, oh, I'm just a part of a big thing.
00:57:48.000I'm just going to do my job to get more money.
00:57:51.000I'm not going to think about the consequences.
00:57:53.000I'm just going to put blinders on and think about my vacation home that I'm going to get out of all this.
00:58:32.000I mean, I wonder how many people who are working for these chemical corporations and how many exhibit the exact same traits as serial killers.
00:58:41.000They 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.
00:58:53.000Yeah, I think that kind of psychopathy is maybe more common than we would like to think.
00:59:00.000Yeah, we don't want to think about it.
00:59:01.000We don't want to think about sociopaths.
00:59:03.000We don't want to think about psychopaths and sociopaths and psychopaths.
00:59:42.000You 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.
00:59:59.000And so, and you can see the deficits, the little holes that are supposed to be full of something that helps you make good decisions.
01:00:08.000You know, The part of your brain that helps you control yourself and control your behavior.
01:00:14.000That's kind of missing in some of these kids.
01:00:19.000And 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.
01:00:35.000And they can see this on the MRI scans.
01:00:39.000And 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.
01:00:52.000Well, it does take longer for men to develop their frontal cortex.
01:00:55.000That's why men are so stupid when they're young.
01:00:57.000And women are much more mature, younger.
01:01:00.000Like a 20-year-old woman is probably far more mature than a 25-year-old man.
01:01:07.000And a lot of that, they think, has to do with the frontal lobe.
01:01:12.000Yeah, 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.
01:01:33.000It's just so twisted when you think about the fact that this is all a fairly new thing.
01:01:41.000Like this chemical exposure, chemical exposure and pollutant exposure is a fairly new thing in terms of human history.
01:01:49.000As 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.
01:02:07.000And in this case, like in Idaho, knowingly.
01:02:13.000And one of the things that sort of blows my mind is that we've known for centuries, for eons, that these things are bad.
01:02:23.000I mean, the Romans and the Greeks knew that lead caused people to go crazy.
01:02:31.000I mean, they had people who worked with lead in foundries and things then, and they knew it was a problem.
01:02:38.000We've known that arsenic is a poison since forever.
01:02:43.000And 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.
01:02:59.000You know, the human body just excretes it naturally.
01:03:05.000You know, all kinds of just crazy arguments were being put forward to justify what they were doing.
01:03:13.000I found out at one point in time in my life that I had a disturbing level of arsenic in my system.
01:03:19.000I went to get blood work done, and my doctor said, You have a concerning level of arsenic.
01:03:25.000And he started asking me about my diet.
01:04:43.000And very heavily, you know, during the 40s and 50s, they were putting it all over apple orchards and cherry orchards and cotton crops.
01:04:58.000So those places were then contaminated with arsenic.
01:05:04.000And Washington State now has four plumes of this pollution.
01:05:10.000The big one was in Puget Sound from the smelter, which was like 1,000 square miles of Puget Sound that was contaminated.
01:05:20.000But 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.
01:05:38.000There's another plume up in Everett where there was what they called an arsenic kitchen.
01:05:45.000The Rockefellers used to own mines up in the Cascade Mountains.
01:05:52.000And they had a smelter in Everett that was then bought by the Guggenheims and they moved their arsenic kitchen to Tacoma.
01:05:59.000But it left all this pollution in Everett.
01:06:02.000And 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.
01:06:17.000And so they had to, you know, I think they had to buy those properties and remediate so-called.
01:06:25.000Yeah, 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?
01:07:25.000So, yeah, in Tacoma, they carted away tons of soil.
01:07:29.000They 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.
01:07:39.000And 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.
01:07:51.000But the EPA got an unprecedented environmental bankruptcy settlement out of Asarko, which was close to $2 billion.
01:08:05.000I think it was the highest settlement that they'd ever gotten from a corporation.
01:08:09.000But 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.
01:08:22.000But in Tacoma, they actually did replace the soil in many, many people's yards.
01:08:31.000I mean, I think on places like Vashon, a lot of that was on the southern part.
01:08:39.000I think you could request soil replacement in some of these places, but it wasn't necessarily guaranteed, depending on where you lived.
01:08:50.000Well, that's also so destructive to the ecosystem.
01:08:52.000So you're taking out everything that allows these plants to live, animals, mycelium, all the different, the network that connects all these plants together.
01:09:07.000You're pulling all that stuff out and introducing new soil.
01:09:11.000And you're not going to do it everywhere.
01:09:13.000You're not going to get all of it out.
01:09:15.000You're not going to be able to do the whole island.
01:09:17.000You're not going to be able to do every inch of Tacoma, all the land.
01:09:22.000Yeah, and of course they have to take that soil somewhere.
01:09:25.000So in Tacoma, they took it to some special landfill.
01:09:30.000But 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.
01:09:53.000And Asarko promised that they were going to take all that stuff and put it somewhere else.
01:10:03.000I don't know where they were going to put it, but they said they were going to take it.
01:10:06.000But then they went bankrupt, and so they didn't remove it.
01:10:11.000And 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.
01:10:28.000And they put it in a sort of super heavy-duty plastic-lined garbage bag, essentially.
01:10:36.000I 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.
01:10:44.000And 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.
01:11:03.000But behind the condos is this giant hump of contaminated stuff in a giant plastic garbage bag.
01:11:13.000Do they tell the people that live in these condos what they're dealing with?
01:11:18.000Well, 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.
01:11:53.000But also, doesn't it leak into the water table?
01:11:56.000Well, they have a lot of stuff that they've done.
01:11:59.000I mean, in the book, I talk about, you know, Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, he was from Tacoma.
01:12:08.000And 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.
01:12:30.000And 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.
01:12:47.000The slag is the stuff that's left over after you've pulled all the metal out of the rocks.
01:12:55.000There's the stuff that, once it's cooled off, looks like gravel, and it's called slag, but it isn't really gravel.
01:13:04.000I mean, it's contaminated with all the stuff.
01:13:20.000And the whole thing, I think, is developed in such a way that it's kind of lined with plastic.
01:13:27.000And there's a plastic liner on the shores to keep stuff from leaking out.
01:13:36.000And 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.
01:14:03.000And then there's the industrial pesticides.
01:14:09.000Have you ever read Dissolving Illusions?
01:14:12.000Suzanne 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.
01:14:38.000Like 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.
01:14:52.000Human-derived polio does not cross species.
01:16:11.000It 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,
01:16:38.000like calling it a disease or calling it something else.
01:16:42.000Yeah, 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.
01:16:57.000Because 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.
01:17:08.000But I did think it was a way to get people maybe to think about these issues who might not otherwise want to do that.
01:17:20.000And I think people are interested in the history of how they might have been exposed.
01:17:29.000When 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.
01:17:48.000And that, I think, is one of the interesting things about the Tacoma story is that many poor people were directly exposed.
01:17:59.000The people who worked at the smelter, they lived right around the smokestack.
01:18:07.000But 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.
01:18:24.000Or, you know, I think Paul Allen had a house there.
01:18:28.000And it was when I was a kid growing up there, it was a well-to-do, upper-middle-class place.
01:18:36.000And 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.
01:18:45.000That 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.
01:19:06.000I-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.
01:19:17.000And so Mercer Island had a lot of pollution from I-90, and it also was in the plume from the Tacoma smelter.
01:19:28.000And while I was growing up there, some weird shit happened.
01:19:34.000Well, 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.
01:19:48.000And 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.
01:19:58.000And in the 1990s, killed three women on the east side where Bellevue is.
01:20:07.000And so that is really kind of a striking fact.
01:20:14.000You know, you don't expect serial killers to come from that kind of a neighborhood.
01:20:20.000Not very far away from where Russell grew up.
01:20:25.000This 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.
01:20:46.000There 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.
01:21:11.000And there was another kid who went to my junior high who decided he was so depressed he was going to kill himself.
01:21:20.000And he drove his car at like 100 miles an hour.
01:21:25.000It was like his girlfriend's sister's Camaro or something.
01:21:29.000And he drove it at a million miles an hour into the wall of the junior high gymnasium and destroyed the gymnasium.
01:21:37.000So 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.
01:21:57.000Which are uniquely affected by these things.
01:22:01.000So what about the women that were there?
01:22:04.000Was there bizarre behavior that you might think could be attributed to these toxins?
01:22:12.000You know, I don't really know how to answer that.
01:22:14.000I 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.
01:22:41.000I 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.
01:22:58.000You know, they were growing up in the 90s, you know.
01:23:02.000And I think there is a little bit of that.
01:23:07.000I 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.
01:23:45.000And 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.
01:23:57.000And I think a lot of people are now much more aware of lead.
01:24:02.000I 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.
01:24:14.000And it really should be zero, you know, because there is no amount of lead that's safe in terms of exposure.
01:24:25.000I 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.
01:24:35.000And 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?
01:24:54.000That'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.
01:26:03.000I 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.
01:26:15.000You don't find a massive amount of tooth decay because people weren't eating a lot of sugar.
01:26:20.000They weren't constantly eating candy and stuff that rots your fucking teeth out.
01:26:25.000We don't need to stop, we need to put this neurotoxin into water.
01:27:50.000That's why they sell fluoride-free toothpaste, and they advertise it as such.
01:27:55.000If fluoride was the thing that was helping everyone with tooth decay, why the hell would anybody want to buy fluoride-free toothpaste?
01:28:01.000Well, 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.
01:28:12.000Not only is it not good for you, it probably should have been removed from our water supply a long time ago.
01:28:21.000It 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.
01:28:32.000And it's just one more piece of disgusting and disturbing evidence of human depravity.
01:28:41.000The people are willing to do things that are just they know are bad, but they profit.
01:28:47.000And 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.
01:29:04.000Public school buildings were built, you know, often decades ago, so they're old and they have old plumbing.
01:29:19.000And 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.
01:29:35.000And, you know, they have occasionally kind of tiptoed up to this.
01:29:40.000I think the Biden administration did say that they were going to spend millions of dollars to try and do work at schools.
01:30:16.000And 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.
01:30:26.000And all of our health is dependent upon them doing a really good job of sussing this stuff out.
01:30:34.000And it's the EPA that's responsible for the Superfund program, which is in large part responsible for cleaning this stuff up.
01:30:44.000But they're being defunded, you know, and so who's going to do that?
01:30:50.000Who'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.
01:31:03.000I mean, that stuff's been going on for decades and it's not finished.
01:31:08.000Well, there's an area in France that is the size of Paris that human beings can't go into all because of the war.
01:31:18.000And what kind of well, you can find it.
01:31:21.000Jamie, 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.
01:32:22.000So 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.
01:32:35.000The 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.
01:32:50.000While 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.
01:32:59.000Oh, so this is even World War I. Yeah.
01:33:02.000All that chemical stuff that they were using.
01:33:21.000But in large groups, when they don't have responsibility for their actions, they're gross.
01:33:29.000It'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.
01:34:30.000The fact that serial killers exist, that's disturbing.
01:34:33.000The fact that there might be some sort of an environmental effect or chemical effect that's causing some of this behavior to take place.
01:34:41.000But 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.
01:36:24.000And it's the same thing with serial killers.
01:36:26.000The 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.
01:38:00.000And coal includes a lot of compounds that are really dangerous to breathe.
01:38:07.000There 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.
01:38:24.000There was, you know, economically they were really struggling.
01:38:28.000And 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.
01:39:05.000And, 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.
01:39:17.000And I just thought fog, oh, that's from, you know, the ocean or something.
01:40:32.000Yeah, 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.
01:40:49.000And 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.
01:42:28.000If 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.
01:44:23.000What do you know, if anything, about gas, about natural gas cooking?
01:44:28.000Because this is one of the things during the Biden administration, they started talking about removing gas kitchens and gas stoves from people's homes.
01:44:38.000And people started freaking out, like, this is crazy.
01:44:41.000But 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.
01:44:54.000Yeah, 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.
01:45:07.000Yeah, 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.
01:46:06.000I 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.
01:46:15.000Yeah, well, it seems like it already has gotten on top of a generation.
01:46:20.000I 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.
01:46:39.000And all the stuff they're talking about now with plastics in the body.
01:46:44.000I 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.
01:47:51.000My 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.
01:48:04.000You're pouring hot liquid into what essentially looks like a condom.
01:48:08.000It's a plastic liner that lines the inside of these paper cups, which is why they can hold hot liquid in the first place.
01:49:18.000I 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?
01:49:27.000No, I think, well, this is the reason why we serve in the studio.
01:49:32.000We don't use plastic water bottles anymore.
01:49:39.000And 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.
01:49:49.000No one knows exactly how that water bottle was handled.
01:49:54.000No one knows how long it was sitting on a dock.
01:49:57.000No one knows how what was the temperature of the truck that it was delivered to the supermarket.
01:50:23.000Well, actually, it doesn't because of the caps.
01:50:26.000So the caps leach more because of the way they make these caps on these metal water bottles.
01:50:35.000Whatever 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.
01:51:01.000I read this whole article about it, but I want to be clear because this is pretty important.
01:51:09.000Yeah, 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.
01:51:20.000But I now wonder, you know, if those were sort of coated with that, well, they seem like they're metal.
01:51:26.000It seems like a metal-coated cap because there's something about the rigidity of it.
01:51:31.000Recent studies indicated glass bottles may contain significantly higher level of microplastics than previously thought, even exceeding those found in plastic bottles.
01:51:41.000This is largely due to microplastics originating from the bottle caps, specifically the paint used on them.
01:51:49.000While 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.
01:52:01.000And 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.
01:52:09.000It'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.
01:52:27.000Cabot 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.
01:52:41.000What has been the reaction to your book?
01:52:44.000Has there been any pushback by people that don't like your connecting serial killers to industrial contaminants?
01:52:56.000Yeah, 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?
01:53:06.000Which I think is kind of the wrong focus.
01:53:09.000I mean, I'm just trying to introduce a description of sort of the most extreme version of what might have happened.
01:53:19.000And again, I don't make those kinds of claims.
01:53:23.000I mean, we can't, for example, show that Ted Bundy did what he did because of lead.
01:53:32.000All I'm trying to show is that he was exposed to a significant amount of lead.
01:53:37.000And we know that from the testing of his house and his yard.
01:53:44.000And so I'm just saying, think about what that might have done.
01:53:47.000Think about what it might have contributed.
01:55:36.000I think it's worth thinking about what lead contributed to crime during that period.
01:55:44.000And I wanted to tell the story in a way that was kind of subjective, you know, and personal and not in an academic way.
01:55:55.000I mean, there are some great academic histories of lead exposure and the history of lead industries in this country.
01:56:05.000I didn't want to do that because it's been done.
01:56:09.000And 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.
01:56:22.000And 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.
01:56:37.000I didn't know about what it could do to kids and how that might show up years later in their lives.
01:56:49.000When you finish a book like this and then you release it, what does that feel like?
01:56:54.000Like, you're contributing, I think, greatly to this discussion.
01:56:59.000It'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.
01:57:16.000What does that feel like when you release a book like this?
01:57:22.000It'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.
01:57:32.000And 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.
01:57:44.000You know, it's your own private little playpen where you get to make all the decisions and, you know, make all the choices.
01:57:52.000And 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?
01:58:51.000It's always sort of really interesting.
01:58:53.000You know, I just heard from a woman who's the daughter of a guy who worked at the smelter in Tacoma.
01:59:03.000And I had been in touch with her, you know, briefly because her father was an incredible rabble-rouser when he worked at the smelter.
01:59:14.000He 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.
01:59:35.000And 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.
01:59:52.000And he really, you know, cared about the guys that he worked with.
01:59:57.000And so he, I think, helped compile A whole list, which was called the death list.
02:00:04.000I 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.
02:00:23.000And 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.
02:00:36.000I 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.
02:00:46.000Yeah, I think you've done the world a great service.
02:00:50.000Because I think it's difficult to compile all this stuff and put it into a digestible form.
02:00:56.000And 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.
02:01:11.000And because so many people are fascinated by serial killers and so many people are creeped out by it that it makes it more compelling.
02:01:20.000It makes it more interesting for people to read.
02:01:24.000And then I think along the way, then they get this deeper understanding of this gigantic problem.
02:01:33.000I 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,
02:01:52.000oh, 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.