Latest / NO FILTER / Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser

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Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser · NO FILTER

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Joe Podcast.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Check it out The Joe Logan Experience Train by Day,
• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Joe Rogan Podcast, by Night, all Day. Thanks for doing this,
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. So I've read about the
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: premise of your book online and immediately I'm like, I
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: gotta talk to this lady. That sounds crazy. Please tell
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: people what the premise is, just so get started with this. Yeah.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Well, I started thinking about this a long time ago.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Book's called Murderland.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the book is Murderland. And I grew up in
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: the Pacific Northwest in the nineteen seventies, around the time
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: when there were a lot of, you know, serial killers
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: beginning to pop up, and there always had been this question,
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: why are there so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: And so that was the question I was really thinking
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: about the premise as it emerged from the research that
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: I did and from some of the facts that I
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: learned about what was happening in the Northwest in this
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: run up to the nineteen seventies, is that there may
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: be a connection between the lead pollution that was prevalent
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: in the area because of smelters and leaded gas and
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: serial killers. Because lead of course, as we I think
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: most people now know has a connection to heightened aggression
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: and violence in the people who've been exposed to it.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: So that was what emerged to me gradually over the years.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, I didn't know a lot about this when
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: I started. I knew about the serial killers, but I
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: didn't really know about the whole lead story. And that
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: came about, you know, I learned about it in part
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: because of some murders. I mean, I live in Santa Fe,
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: New Mexico, which is a lovely place. Unfortunately, New Mexico
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: has a high rate of homicides. In part it's because
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: it's a poor state and doesn't have a big tax
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: base and has, you know, some issues with drug and
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: alcohol addiction. And a few years ago, maybe two thousand
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: and eight or something like that, some people, a couple
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: of people were murdered down the street from me and
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: I live in a very beeatiful neighborhood, you know, and
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: that was something that really made me start thinking about
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: the issue of maybe, you know, it might be a
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: good idea to think of moving back to the Pacific Northwest,
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: of which I wanted to do anyway, because I have
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: family up there. And a few years later, because of
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: that I was up in the Northwest and looking at
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: real estate ads, and at this point I didn't really
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: know anything about the smelter or the lead issues, but
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: I was looking at property on Vashon Island, which, if
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: you know anything about the Pacific Northwest, is in Puget Sound.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: It's right across from West Seattle. Beautiful little it was
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: quite rural when I was growing up there. Beautiful place.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: And I came across a real estate ad that said
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: this is just for undeveloped property, and it said arsenic
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: remediation may be necessary. And I thought, Wow, what could
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: possibly have caused so much arsenic pollution on Vashon Island
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: that you would have to get it remediated? I mean,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: that just seemed crazy to me. And I was so
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: curious about that, and I looked it up online, and
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: you know, within minutes, discovered that there had been an
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: infamous lead and copper smelter in the city of Tacoma,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: which is just south of Vashon Island, and so Vashon
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: received a lot of the pollution from that smelter. And
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: so that began a whole process of kind of learning
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: about what happened here. You know, what happened in this region.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: And I also because I'm sort of really interested in
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: serial killers, as I mentioned, and had been for a
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: long time reading about them and reading about Ted Bundy
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: and Gary Ridgeway. And I knew that both Bundy and
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Gary Ridgeway, who was the Green River Killer, had grown
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: up in Tacoma at the same time that this smelter is.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: You know, the smelter had been operated operating there since
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties, so for a very long time.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: And I could see that a lot of news media
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: had been devoted to looking at what had happened in
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: this in this region. You know, there was a whole map,
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: a GIS map, geographic, you know, information systems that allowed
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: you to look up individual houses, you know, residential homes
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: in Tacoma and see how much arsenic and lead pollution
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: was in the yards. So I discovered that you could
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: actually look up the house where Ted Bundy grew up
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: and see how much lead was in his front yard
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: and his backyard. And the more I read about lead
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: pollution and lead the association with aggression and violence, the
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: more I wondered, is there a story to be told
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: here about this issue?
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: So this this issue of lead pollution, is it just
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: serial killers or is there an elevated amount of violent
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: crime that goes along with it.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the issue of serial killers is one that I
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: kind of introduced as a, you know, the most extreme example.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: But most of the research that's been done has focused
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: on aggression juvenile delinquency. For example, there are long term
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: studies that look at kids who were exposed to lead,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: including in relatively small amounts, and then what happens to
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: them later, you know, by the time they're you know,
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: teenagers or young adults, and they have shown a very
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: strong association with you know, problems with learning, ADHD and
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: as I said, delinquency and crime.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: And they've even shown that in places that don't have smelters,
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: where people are just dealing with leaded gasoline that was
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: used up until the nineteen nineties, right, that's right, Yeah,
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: a decrease in IQ a lot of actors that they
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: can directly tie into just the lead from gasoline, which
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: is significantly less than I would assume you'd get from
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: a large scale smelting operation.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and the leaded gas is particularly tragic because that
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: was essentially a kind of horrific experiment that was conducted
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: on generations of kids in this country and adults, because
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: everybody was exposed to that. Obviously some people more than others.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: If you lived next to a major highway or something
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: like that, you were getting more of it than than
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: if you maybe live somewhere else, although I think rural
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: people were also exposed because of the kinds of machinery
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: and stuff that's used on farms and so forth. It
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: was it was a terrible idea, and they knew that
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: at the time. You know, the companies, the corporations, the
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: people who introduced it, standard oil, DuPont, et cetera. They
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: knew the dangers of this. They were told by medical
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: doctors who said, yeah, who said, this will expose everybody
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: to you know, more lad than human beings have ever
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: had to deal with before.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: Wow. And they just did it to stop the engines
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: from knocking.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: They did, And apparently there were alternatives, but the alternatives,
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: which were like ethanol, were not something that could be patented,
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: and we're not products that you could make money off of,
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: and so all these corporations chose to do this. Oh God, yeah,
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's really almost unreal to think about the
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: moral failure that this, I mean failure doesn't even seem
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: strong enough.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: It doesn't. It's so evil. It's so strange how many
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: times that that has happened in human history and in
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: fairly recent history, where companies know what they're putting out
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: or what they're releasing or what they're prescribing or whatever
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: it is, it's going to damage people, and they know
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: that short term they can make a lot of money,
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: and so they do it anyway.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and they did for decades because you know, this
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: began in the twenties and thirties.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: So we can assume that the smelting thing they probably
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: didn't know correct, like at least in the eighteen hundreds.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, in the eighteen hundreds, they probably weren't thinking about
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: stuff like that. They didn't have data on it. But
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: by the time the companies really got up and running,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: and and the smelter in Tacoma was owned by a
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: company called a Sarco, which was the American smelting and
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: refining company owned by the Guggenheim family.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: But they've done so much for art. Yeah, I mean
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: that it's just that's what they like to do.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's it's a Tide was kind of whitewashing
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: the reputation, and they were among the you know, earlier
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: corporations to do that and totally successfully.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: It's so dark. My friend Peter Berg explained to me
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: the origins of the Nobel Prize. Did you know the
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: origins of the Nobel Prize.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: It has something to do with with explosives.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: Yes, the gentleman who the Nobel Prize is named after,
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: they erroneously reported that he was dead in the newspaper
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: and they called him the Merchant of Death in the newspaper.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: And you're like, oh my god, this is what people
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: think about me because he invented dynamite, and so he's like,
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: I've got to do something to clean up my reputation.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: So he devised this strategy of awarding this prestigious award
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: named after him to all the great scientists and Nobel
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: Peace Prize and all these different things. So now when
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: people he had the term Nobel, like, oh, he's a
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: Nobel laureate, Oh he's a Nobel Prize winner, and that's
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: the origin of it. It was just a whitewashing operation.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, the same thing happened with the guy
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: who invented the leaded gas formula. Thomas Midgley, who was
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: really a terrible guy. He invented the leaded guest stuff.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: He also invented chloro florocarbons, you know, the stuff in
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: refrigerants that caused the the hole theos layer. So like
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: two of the most devastating discoveries scientific discoveries in the
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: twentieth century are down to the sky. And he was
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: awarded the highest medal from the you know, American Chemistry Association,
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: which he still holds. I mean, even though he became
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: really ill as a result. I think of working with
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: this tetro you know, tetra ethyl it's called the substance
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: that was added to leaded gas, and he you know,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: went to Florida to try and yield himself of this,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: which I don't think you can do. I mean, I
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: don't think going to Florida heels let exposure. But he yes,
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: and he developed something which was called pulio. You know,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: he became, you know, unable to walk, and he invented
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: this whole bizarre kind of system of pulleys that he
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: could use to lift himself out of bed, and eventually
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: he strangled to death. In this sort of harness thing
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: which it may have been suicide, it may have been
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: an accident, kind of unclear.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: Wow, So when you first started investigating this was your
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: interest in serial killers? You always had an interest in
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: serial kills, which is always weird to me. How many
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: women are interested in serial killers. Like all the top
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: true crime podcasts, if you look at their demographics, it's
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: a large chunk of it it's women. And I know
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: the women in my house love to watch those true
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: crime shows and those serial killer which I it disturbs
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: a shit out of me. Like my family was watching
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: something on the night's talker on Richard Ramirez and like,
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: I can't watch this. I can't watch I get sick.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: I get sick. I can't watch it. They're like fascinated,
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: Like why is that? Why do you think women are
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: so interested? Not like lumping you in with all women,
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: but there is a weird thing with women in true
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: crime podcasts.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that that has to do with the
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: fact that women deal with fear, you know, fear of
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: and it may be very you know, nebulous, it may
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: be kind of unclear what you know, but a lot
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: of women have just had the experience of being afraid
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: walking alone at night, or walking through a parking lot,
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: or you know, or they've had direct experience of you know,
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: some kind of of violence or aggression you know, at home,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: domestic violence. So I think there's a whole gamut of
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: experiences that women have had to one extent or another
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: that feed into that. And for me, it was growing up,
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: you know, just a couple of miles from the places
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: where Ted Bundy began abducting women in the summer of
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: you know, the winter and summer of nineteen seventy four,
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: and everybody knew there was somebody out there. This is
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: at a time when the term serial killer wasn't even
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: really in use yet. People didn't really understand the phenomenon.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: It was still kind of an unusual thing. And this
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: was happening. You know, women were disappearing from dorm room
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: or their rooms at University of Washington. They were disappearing
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: off the street, and then they weren't seen again for weeks,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: for months, you know. In the July of nineteen seventy four,
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: I was thirteen and on a really hot you know,
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Sunday afternoon in nineteen seventy four, two women disappeared from
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: a crowded beach at Lake Samamish, which was about, you know,
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: ten minutes from my house. And so having had that
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: experience of being around at that time, it was incredibly
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: you know, it was it was both really disturbing, but
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: also I just really wanted to understand what was happening.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: So did you plan on writing a book about serial
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: killers or was this understanding of the lead in the
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: ARSA what led you down to write this book.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I never really wanted to write a book that
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: was just about serial killers. I mean, I think that's
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: been done, you know, and lots of people have done
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: that and done a good job, you know. I mean
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Anne Rule, the woman who wrote the first book about
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: Ted Bundy, who knew Ted Bundy.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: Oh, yes, she.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Worked with him at a rape crisis clinic in Seattle.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, she worked at a rape crisis clinic. Wow.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: He was very interested in doing research on rape. Wow,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: because of course he was something of an expert. So yeah, yeah,
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: that was why that book was such a phenomenon, because
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: she knew him before anybody had identified, you know, anything
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: in him. She liked him, she was friends with them.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: She gave him you know, ride to the Christmas party age.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: Oh my god. Yeah, was this while he was killing
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: or before he started?
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Well, the thing that we don't really know about Ted
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Bundy is when he started killing. He would never answer
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: that question. And one of the cases that I talk
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: about that really is part of what made me want
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: to write this book is a case of an eight
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: year old girl who was abducted Intocoma in nineteen sixty one,
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: in August of nineteen sixty one, and Anne Marie Burr,
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: And he was fourteen at that time, and he is
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: now one of the principal sub suspects I think behind
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: her about Wow, so that may have been his first
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: for murder. Yeah.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Was there like a history of him torturing animals or
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: anything along those lines. No.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: But but one of the things that I think the
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: FBI was discovering when they started doing all this you know,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: investigation of the pasts, you know, the childhood of serial killers,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: was that this starts really young. That the fantasies and
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: the obsessions with you know, I mean, some of them
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: famously do torture or kill the family, pets and so forth.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: With Ted, that wasn't the case. I think with him.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: One of the things you see is that he never
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: knew who his father was. He was born illegitimate at
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: a founding home in Vermont and his mother left him
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: there for a couple of months before she went back
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: and kind of retrieved him. And that's a common factor
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: with a lot of these guys. They don't know their dad,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: they don't know who he is, maybe, or they have,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: you know, a very bad relationship with the parents. There's
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: maybe abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. We don't know that
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: about Ted Bundy in terms of the abuse factor, but
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: he remains I think, really puzzling to people for that reason,
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: because you don't see some of the usual signs with him.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: And because he refused to answer questions.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Well, he talked a lot about you know, various people
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: were able to interview him. The detective in King County
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: in Seattle, who was in charge of the investigation, and
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: he was actually quite young when he took this on.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: I think it was his first major case as a detective.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: He eventually was able to interview Ted Bundy in prison
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: when he was on death row. Bundy, for a variety
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: of reasons, wouldn't talk about anything that he did accept
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: hypothetically in the third person, because he was still trying
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: to work the legal system, and so he didn't want
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: to admit to what he'd done.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: How did he talk about it hypothetically in the third person?
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: I mean it was sort of like O. J. Simpson
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: or something. He would say, Well, if somebody was going
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: to do this, here's what he probably would have done.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: And so there was a lot of that up until
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: the very last days of Bundy's on death row, and
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: then he finally began confessing in the last two or
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: three days in an attempt, I think, to get the
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: governor interested in perhaps extending his life because he could
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: give information about where bodies had been left and so forth.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: But that didn't convince the governor of Florida.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Sure, So when you saw this real estate and you
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: found out that it needed to have arsenic removed from it,
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: this began this sort of journey that you went on
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: to try to connect this area with serial killers and toxins.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: And what did you find, Like, is there a disproportionate
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: number of serial killers that come from that particular area?
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there really are, as I discovered a really kind
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: of extraordinary number. And it's hard to talk about these
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: numbers simply because we don't know what a normal number
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: of serial killers in a given.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: Doculation, So are there like undiscovered serial killers that are
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: in that area, or maybe deaths that are attributed to
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: unknown people.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: There are several cases that have never been resolved. You know,
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: there's something called the dismemberment murders that you know, yeah,
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: up and up in the Northwest, where you know, various
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: feet and things were found washing up on chore and
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: nobody could figure out who they belonged to.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: Remember that that was fairly recently, right am I thinking
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: of the same thing.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: It may be another thing that you're thinking of. I
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: think this day is another thing.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: It was like shoes that had a human foot in it, and.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: They could I've just been you know, bodies of people
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: who drowned, who drowned, because that's I think what happens
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: in some cases. So I think that's a sort of
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: question mark. There are a couple of others. There's one
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: an Idaho that they've never solved. So there are those cases.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: But even aside from those, I mean, I spent a
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: lot of time looking at the year nineteen seventy four
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: because it seemed really active in terms of what was
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: happening with serial killers around the country and in the Northwest.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: And it was the famously the year when Bundy really
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: kind of broke free of any restraints he might have
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: once had and began abducting women basically kind of like
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: once a month during that year. And in nineteen seventy four,
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: I found at least six active serial killers in Seattle
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: or along the I five corridor who were all kind
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: of working at the same time. And that seems like
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: a lot to me. And just looking at Tacoma, the
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: rate of violent crime really skyrocketed in nineteen seventy four,
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: and in the mid seventies it's just started going up
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: and up and up, and you see this unfortunately across
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: the country. The rate of violent crime in the seventies
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: and eighties rose to heights that had not been seen
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: before in this country.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: Are there other factors? So there's leaded gasoline, which is
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: a major factor, But what other factors do you think
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: in terms of like environmental toxins and things like why
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: nineteen seventy.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: Four, Well, there are various theories that have been put forth.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, people have pointed out that in the mid
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: seventies was when the baby boom generation, which was you know,
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: large in terms of its population density. That those people
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: had started to kind of come of age, they'd entered
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: the period when you're most likely to commit crimes, which
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: is your twenties or thirties, and so there was that,
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: there was a lot of economic uncertainty, There was a recession. Nixon,
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: you know, was in the White House early on in
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: the seventies. There was the Vietnam War, There had been
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: a lot of violence during the sixties, and so people
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: point to those factors as contributing to this as well.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: But I think also, you know, based on the science
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: that's being done, you do need to look at at
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: the toxins that were becoming really, really prevalent. The lead,
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: Cadmium is another heavy metal that's very similar to lead
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: in the body in terms of its association with aggression, Zinc, manganese,
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: all these things were being.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, luck is associated with aggression.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: I don't know that it's associated with aggression, but it's
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: one of these things that was forming the exposure to
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: particular particulate pollution, which is now associated with all kinds
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: of health problems, you know, heart problems. I mean, lead
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: is a toxin it's a poison, and so you put
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: it in the body and it becomes you know, it's
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: very easy for that to reach your brain. And what
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: happens is that, you know, especially if you're exposed to
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff, you can be sick and
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: in all kinds of ways, you can get health, heart problems,
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: it's now been associated with various forms of dementia, Alzheimer's als.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: So there's a lot of things that lead can cause.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: But they have shown statistically that the increase in lead
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: in the population in the air in the mid seventies
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: really may have contributed to a rise in violent crime.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: What year did they start putting lead in gasoline.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: Well, they invented the stuff in the nineteen twenties. But
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: you know, just thinking back to those early decades, not
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: that many people had cars, you know, and there was
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: a big depression of course, in the nineteen thirties, so
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: there's not a lot of driving happening in terms of
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: the what we see now. I mean, yeah, it just
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: wasn't as big of a deal. It was rare to
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: have one car, much less, you know, two or three.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: And then during the war you had i mean, the
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: World War two is really interesting to look at in
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: terms of lead, because I have a sort of little
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: chapter about this because during World War Two, gasoline, of
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: course was rationed. You know, they needed all of it
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: for the war effort, but the war effort itself raised
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: the amount of metals. All these metals, lead, copper, et cetera.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: Were needed so intensively for the war that they began
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: to be produced more than at any other time in world.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: And so the pollution from that, you know, from producing
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: all these you know, tanks and vehicles and planes and
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: everything that they needed was really going to form the
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: basis of what would become the Superfund program. Because a
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: lot of the Superfund sites in this country can be
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: traced back to World War Two, and so that's when
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff started entering the environment. And
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: once it's there, it's really hard to get rid of it.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's the problem with lead. It doesn't wash away,
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: it doesn't go anywhere. It just hangs around and becomes
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: you know, part of our environment. It becomes dust that is,
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: you know, in people's houses or their addicts. And that
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: I think is what people eventually started, you know, when
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: when after the war people started driving lots and lots more.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: You know, in the fifties and sixties, this country particularly
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: was doing really well economically, and everybody was buying cars
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: and driving them for the first time, you know, and
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: mass and.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: History in human history, that's right.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: And so it's really becomes i think a heavy pollutant
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: around that time. And so by the seventies, the kids
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: who had been you know, born in the fifties, they're
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: starting to show the effects of lead poisoning.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: I have a friend who briefly lived in Brooklyn and
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: he had a very small backyard that he's going to
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: try to grow some plants and grow a small garden.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: But he did some soil samples. He's very very intelligent guy,
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: did some soil samples and sent it to university get tested,
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: and it was just filled with lead. And he was like,
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: what is this all about. There was like, it's all
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: from leaded gasoline. So this was in the two thousands,
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: so I think this was around twenty twelve, twenty thirteen,
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: and they had told him there's a few things that
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: you could do. There's certain plants that you could grow
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: that would remove some of it from the soil, other
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: than completely excavating and replacing it with fresh soil. But
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: his whole backyard was essentially lead poisoned. Yeah, it's when
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: you ride alone, you ride with Hitler, join a car
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: sharing club today. That was during the gas rational day.
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: It's crazy. That was the craziest one. Have you really
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: tried to save gas by getting into a gas club?
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: They do it? So can we? Oh clown cars? What
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: is that wagon? What is that? A bunch of soldiers?
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: Oh?
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: Okay? Wow, so they were just this was all just
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: about gas ration. Wow. Say if youel to make munitions
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: for the battle. Wow? The daughter who heaped on the coal, Wow,
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: they're mad at her? Look at her. Oh no, I'm
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: trying to stay warm and stay alive. Wow. So is
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: there an uptick in violence in these areas where they
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: were making stuff for the war effort, where they would
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: be polluting the area. This is an ad for better help.
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• 35:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you definitely see. You know. What happened
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: in Tacoma is very well recorded now. Another city where
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: this happened was El Paso, Texas. Because Asarco had another
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: major smelter in El Paso that had started in the
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: eighteen nineties and had been spewing this stuff out for decades.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: But all of the smelters during the war were kind
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: of they weren't taken over by the government, but the
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: government introduced all kinds of you know, price fixing and
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: so forth to make it not possible for these companies
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: to raise prices astronomically, and a lot of the stuff
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: was requisitioned for the war efforts. So in El Paso,
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: by the nineteen seventies, they were starting to discover that
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: this whole area around the smokestack of the smelter was
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: heavily lead contaminated. And what I you know, dis guys,
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: I thought, well, El Paso, that's interesting. But there were
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: no serial killers in El Paso, and so I googled
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: that and like, you know, within a minute, I discover
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: that Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, grew up in El Paso,
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: not very far from the smelter. And you know, we
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: associate him now with Los Angeles because that's where he
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: committed most of his murders, but he did not grow
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: up there.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: Wow. So this association with these chemicals and violence, and
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: so this is well known, and is if you could
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: look at a map of the areas where this is
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: the biggest problem, is there also correlation with an uptick
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: in violent crime and an uptick in serial killers? Like
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: is it not just specific Northwest? Is it around El
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: Paso as well?
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, when you start looking up, okay, well what's the
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: crime rate the violent crime rate in El Paso? And yes,
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: that starts going up in the nineteen seventies, and so
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: there does seem to be an association with this. There's
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: a guy named Rick Nevin who was who is an
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: economist and social scientist, and he put together a paper
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: about this thing, which was published online that includes about,
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: you know, forty five graphs of all these different you know,
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: showing the rise in violent crime, the Rizantine pregnancies, which
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: is sort of how women come into it. The impulsivity
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: seems to have perhaps led to a real rise in
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: teen pregnancies in the seventies and eighties, which you know,
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: if you'll remember, that was kind of a big thing then, and.
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: It's also tied is also tied to the sexual revolution,
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: I mean, and then also when was birth control, like
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: oral birth control introduced.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: I think that was in the nineteen sixties early sixties
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: that that first becomes available. I can't tell you exactly
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: what year, but yeah, I mean I'm sure that there
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: is some.
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: There's a bunch of other factors. It's not like we
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: can pin everything on lead and arsenic that's right, but
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: there's contributing factor.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: And of course people you know always point out, well,
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: you know, not everybody in Tacoma and El Paso became
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: a serious killer, which of course is true.
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: But it's also like what you're talking about Ted Bundy,
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: there's a bunch of factors that lead this person to
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: becoming that. But right also lead, Yeah, I mean, you.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: Know, as I say, somewhere in the book, a little
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: extra lead, you know, may have been something that you know,
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: maybe they had a lot of other factors to begin with, abuse, poverty.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: In the nineteen fifties, a lot of babies were delivered
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: with forceps, which caused brain damage and a certain percentage
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: of kids. So I think you're looking a lot of
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: different things that contributed to trauma to the brain.
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: I think now they're really focusing on that, you know,
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: in terms of CTE and you know, brain damage. We
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: see that now in football players who've had head tron
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: repeatedly that this causes can cause.
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: Violence and aggression and impulsivity rights a huge issue. It's
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: fascinating that it also exists in women who have not
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: had had trauma. And the correlation between teen pregnancies and
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: things along those lines that you're just just it all
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: would take is like a slight percentage more of impulsivity,
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: and then you would see a corresponding result.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: Of that not making great decisions what you're doing.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: The gas thing, the lead in the gas thing is
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: just crazy. It's just crazy to note that that was
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: all done because someone couldn't patent ethanol. It couldn't patent
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: other formulations that would lead to the same result. But
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: I mean the same result in terms of not having
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: gas making your engine knock, but wouldn't be as profitable
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: for this person. Yeah, and I twisted.
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: You know, it may be worth mentioning or describing what
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: a smelter does for people, because I think people are
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: not familiar with that anymore. We don't have them in
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: our cities anymore. But you know what these things were
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: were these giant primary smelter is to melt rock. You know.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: It was like taking the rocks from mines that were
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: full of all these different metals, you know, including arsenic.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: This is where the arsenic came from. But they were
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: full of metals like you know, lead and copper and
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: silver and gold, and melting those rocks and these giant
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: furnaces and all of this put off an enormous amount
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: of pollution, you know, particular pollution that was going up
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: the smokestack. And they were, you know, the companies that
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: ran these things were keeping all the valuable metals that
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: they could for themselves, you know, the silver and the
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: copper and all of that, and so they did have
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: filters on them. But one of the things that happened
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: sometimes with these smelters is that they would kind of
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: fail or the filters would fail. There's this horrifying example
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: in Idaho. It was a company called Bunker Hill that
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: was one of the largest silver mines I think in
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: the world, and they had lead smelter in this town
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: called Kellogg, which is right on I ninety. If you've
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: ever driven on I ninety, you know, from Missoula, Montana
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: or something like that, to Seattle, you've driven through this place.
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: And they built, you know, this giant smelter facility to
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: handle all the stuff they were pulling out of the mines.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: And in nineteen seventy three they had a fire in
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: their filtration building that destroyed most of the filter that
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: was trying, you know, the thing that was supposed to
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: keep lead from going up the smokestack. And there were
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: kids in this town. There was an elementary school right
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: across the street from the smokestack, and the descriptions of
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: that school are so horrifying because the teachers used to
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: think that sometimes that the facility had caught fire because
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: there was so much smoke, but in fact it was
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: there wasn't you know. It was just what the smokestack
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: was putting out. But after that filter failed, that company,
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: which was owned by Gulf and Western at the time,
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: did a kind of back the napkin calculation of what
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: those kids' lives were worth because they felt like, Okay,
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: we're going to get sued if we keep running the
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: plant without filtration, But is that really going to matter,
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: because these kids' lives are probably only worth about eleven
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: million dollars apiece, and our profits are such that it
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: makes more sense to keep operating regardless of what happens
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: to these kids?
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: Oh my god. And we know this.
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: Because of the lawsuits that were ultimately filed, because you know,
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: they did end up in court, and there were kids.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: There was a baby who was more lead poisoned than
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: any human being that the doctors had ever seen.
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: So it says here that after it destroyed, the fire
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: broke out that destroyed the filters. So it's for the
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: next year and a half the smelter continued to operate
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: and dust polluted with heavy metals rained down on the area.
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: During that time, children living in the area were screened
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: for lead by the state and the US Center for
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: Disease Control, and the results were foreboding. Children in Kellogg,
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: for example, averaged fifty micrograms per desolt of blood. The
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: CDC recommends five micrograms high enough to warrant concern, and
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: children with levels above forty five micrograms are advised to
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: undergo keelation therapy, which involves administrating compounds like I don't
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: know how to say that word. How do you say
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: that word? Dimer captose succinc acid, either orally or intravenously
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: to remove heavy metals from the bloodstream. Lead is a
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: neurotoxin link to schizophrenia, poor academic performance, low cognitive ability,
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Once the metal gets into
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: the blood, it concentrates in the brain, the kidneys, the liver,
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: and the bones, and pregnant women lead can cross into
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: the placenta, poisoning their unborn babies. Holy shit.
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it was a nightmarish thing.
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: And look at this, it says, Oh my god, So
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: listen to this, slowly poisoned. As a teenager in Kellaug, Ohio, Flory,
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: this person I talking about attended the Silver King School,
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: built in nineteen twenty eight in the gulk gulch between
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: Bunker Hill lead smelter and zinc plant. An offshoot of
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: the Cordelaine River flowed by the school. It was, says Floory,
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: a light glowing green color, sort of a glow like
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: a glow stick. Oh god. In nineteen seventy three a
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: fire broke out, and so this is the fire that
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: we were talking about. Oh my god, a light glowing
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: green color. Yeah. Fuck.
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: I used to live in New Jersey right by the
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: in Jersey City, right by the Liberty State Park, which
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: a bunch of the acreage of that was off limits
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: to people because it was so polluted. And I remember,
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: you know, because you could actually walk from my apartment
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: in Jersey City to Liberty State Park, but you had
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: to go by this, you know place that was crushing cars,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: one of those facilities where they compact cars. And I
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: mean there was all this heavy industry there and pollutants
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: and you had to walk across this little wooden trail
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: over a stream to get to the park. And the
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: water was that color. I mean it was like this disgusting,
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: you know, color not found in nature, and you just
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: looked at it and thought, what is that? What's in that?
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: And this is in the States of America, where we
• 49:01
  Speaker 2: have at least some kind of regulations. Just imagine what
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: is happening when these companies are allowed to ship off
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: to third world countries where there's no regulation and they're
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: bribing officials and well that's polluting everything.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's what happened with a sarco.
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: At once the EPA had sort of got started and
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: the various Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed,
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: and legislation about what you could do in the workplace,
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: because I mean, imagine what it was like to work
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: in these smelters. It was it just basically became illegal
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: to operate them, and the companies could no longer afford
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: to do it, so they all pretty much went out
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: of business in the nineteen eighties. But it is just
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: an incredible sort of time in America because it was like, well,
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: what's the trade off here? You know, the profits are
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: worth much more than people's lives. And that place, the Cordeline.
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: You know, there's a town city called Cordeline and Idaho,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: but there's also this giant Lake Cordeline, and all that
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: pollution from Bunker Hill, from the mines, from the smelter,
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: it all went down river and is now sitting at
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: the bottom of Lake Cordeline. And that's been a super
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: Fund project for many, many years. But they really can't
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: clean that up because it's the kind of thing where
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: you try to remove the sediment that's full of all
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: the lead and stuff, and it stirs everything up, and
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: so it's really really almost impossible to clean a lot
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: of that stuff.
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we were talking about this the other day that
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: you really shouldn't even eat freshwater fish because freshwater fish
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: the problem is because of all the pollutants that settle
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: into these lakes when you don't have flowing water. Freshwater
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: fish is just sitting in all these chemicals and all
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: these heavy metals, and it's you know, it's really disturbing.
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: If you eat freshwater fish, your exposure to forever chemicals
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: is like ridiculously high. Like what was the number, We
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: pulled it up the other day, But it's akin to
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: like eating one fresh water fish is akin to I
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: believe it's like a year of exposure to forever chemicals nikes, yeah,
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: BPA's and all these different disgusting things that are a
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: part of our world that we didn't know until it
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: was too late. Eating one freshwater fish equals a month
• 52:05
  Speaker 2: of drinking forever chemicals water. Oh my god. Pfas found
• 52:14
  Speaker 2: in high levels in freshwater fish with most concern for
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: vulnerable communities. I remember we did this television show once
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: and we were in Detroit, and Detroit which is notoriously
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: very poor and at one point in time was the
• 52:29
  Speaker 2: third richest city in the world. But when we were there,
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: these people were fishing in this lake, really obviously very
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: poor people and just catching food in this lake. And
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: I was like, oh my god, like, what are these
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: people eating? Like this is clearly polluted water and it
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: was just outside of a plant, and you know, they
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: had no choice. They needed food and so they went.
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: They're poor, and who knows what kind of health consequences
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: these poor people are suffering from.
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely the poor communities that get the worst.
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: And the thing is, one hundred and fifty years ago,
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: all that was pristine. It's such a short amount of
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: time if you think about how long those lakes existed,
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: how long these river systems existed, And in a couple
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: of one hundred years, we've ruined everything essentially forever for profit.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, and they knew it, and that's what's sick. The thing.
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: And you're telling me about this smelting plant and the
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: fire in Idaho and the fact that they knew and
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: they made a back of a napkin calculation as to
• 53:44
  Speaker 2: these children's lives. That is so disgusting. It's so hard
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: to believe that that's how people operate, but yet I
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: know they do. Yeah.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: I mean it's it's murder yeah, And that's why I
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: called it murder Land. You know, think that the behavior
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: of these corporate actors was as bad. I mean, it's
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: you know, maybe pernicious to compare, but I think that,
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: you know, people have come to see that the ways
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: the corporations have behaved is murderous.
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: You know that.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: They're not I mean, aside from you know, just the
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: issue of taking responsibility. They're just going to go ahead
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: with what they want to do and make the profits
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: that they want and leave us to pay the price.
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: And that I think is something that in a sane
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: world would have to change. You know, we would have
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: to look at what a corporation wants to do before
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: they start doing it, you know, and figure out, okay, well,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: if they want to proceed with this, how do we
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: prevent the damage that could occur? And if they can't
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: figure out how to prevent it, they shouldn't be operating.
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: Also, they lie, they love whatever they're gonna tell us.
• 55:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, we found this out from pharmaceutical drug companies
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: that when they run studies, they'll run ten studies that
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: show damage, and they'll find one study that they can
• 55:19
  Speaker 2: kind of manipulate into showing some sort of efficacy, and
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: then they'll publish that one study and bury the other
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: studies that show damage and then release a product and
• 55:28
  Speaker 2: then have internal emails where they show that they know
• 55:33
  Speaker 2: that this is going to cause problems. And this is
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: the issue with the drug ViOS that wind up killing
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty thousand Americans. And I
• 55:41
  Speaker 2: know people don't like to equate those people with serial killers,
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: but what else would you call that? What else would
• 55:49
  Speaker 2: you call if you know that you're going to kill people,
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: but you also are going to make money, and you decide,
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: let's do it anyway. Let's do it anyway. It's make
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: some money, and sixty thousand people die because of it,
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: and then who knows how many people also survived but
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: got strokes, and it's a large number.
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's now very difficult to figure out how many
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: people were directly and indirectly harmed by these smelters because
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: of the destruction of evidence. Many of them had sort
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: of you know, people on staff who were whose bejob
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: it was to put out false information. In Tacoma, there
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: was a guy, a doctor at the smelter who wrote
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: false papers saying that, oh, the workers aren't being harmed
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: by exposure to arsenic when in fact his numbers showed
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: that people who worked at the plant were dying of
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: an elevated percentage of lung cancer, and he suppressed that information.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: He said, you know, he said their deaths were from
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: heart failure, which everybody dies of heart failure, you know,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: So he basically was falsifying the information from their death
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: certificates and publishing papers, you know, designed to make it
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: look like arsenic wasn't a poison.
• 57:26
  Speaker 2: Probably nicely rewarded by the corporation for rank. Just this
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: issue of diffusion of responsibility when you have this obligation
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: to your shareholders to continually make each quarter generate more income,
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: and then you have to figure out how to do that,
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: and then you realize like, oh, I'm just a part
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: of a big thing. I'm just going to do my
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: job to get more money. I'm not going to think
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: about the consequences. I'm just going to put blinders on
• 57:54
  Speaker 2: and think about my vacation home that I'm going to
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: get out of all this.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's you know, what you said about
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: the lying is really true. And this is what you
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: see in serial killers. You know that they lie about everything.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: They lie about stuff they don't even need to lie about.
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: It's just it's there. Yeah, it's they're just so inured
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: to it and they want to get away with what
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: they're doing.
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: They should have went for Corporate America, should have worked
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: for them, and they could have got away with it.
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: They might have been fine. Now you got caught. I mean,
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: just I wonder how many people who are working for
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: these chemical corporations and how many exhibit the exact same
• 58:39
  Speaker 2: traits as serial killers. They just don't want to get
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: intimate and actually physically cause the murder, but get some
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: sort of a bizarre thrill out of knowing that they're
• 58:49
  Speaker 2: doing this kind of damage to people for profit.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that kind of psychopathy is maybe more
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: common than we would like to think.
• 59:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't want to think about it. We don't
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: want to think about sociopaths. We don't want to think
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: about psychopaths and sociopaths and psychopaths. There's a lot to overlap.
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: We don't want to think about what percentage of us
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: exhibit these traits where we have zero empathy, right, and
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of people like that, there's zero, But
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: I mean I know people like that that have no empathy.
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: They don't care if other people get hurt, And I
• 59:21
  Speaker 2: don't understand it, but I don't have whatever is wrong
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: with them, And I always wonder is that nature is
• 59:29
  Speaker 2: that nurture? Are we dealing with environmental toxins? There's exposure
• 59:33
  Speaker 2: to something at a young age, Like, what is it
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: that causes that? Is it?
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: Well? I think it can be brain damage, you know.
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: I mean that what happens to the frontal cortex of
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: these kids who are exposed to lid and cadmium is
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: that certain parts of the brain fail to develop correctly,
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: and so you can see the deficits, the little holes
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: that are supposed to be full of something that helps
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: you make good decisions, you know, the part of your
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: brain that helps you control yourself and control your behavior.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: That's kind of missing in some of these kids. And
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: they have shown now that the effects are worse in
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: men than they are in women. That the you know,
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: the damage to the frontal cortex, the neurology is more
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: marked in men, and they can see this on the
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: MRI scans, and I think there's you know, I don't
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: know that they know why that's happening, but it does
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: seem to be, you know, a real effect that they're
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: writing papers about.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: Well, it does take longer for men to develop their
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: frontal cortex, so our men are so stupid when they're young,
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 2: and women are much more mature young like a you know,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: a twenty year old woman is probably far more mature
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: than a twenty five year old man. And a lot
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: of that they think has to do with the frontal lobe.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, obviously is some you know, incredibly important discovery.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: What they make of that, and how it's all gonna
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: you know, come out in the wash in terms of
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: what can be done to help kids who have these issues,
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: that I think is another story.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: It's just so twisted when you think about the fact
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: that this is all a fairly new thing. Like this
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: chemical exposure, chemical exposure and pollutant exposure is a fairly
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: new thing in terms of like human history. You know,
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: as we're gaining this understanding of how the human brain develops,
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: which is also a fairly new thing, we're also dealing
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: with this thing that we did collectively as the human race,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: this thing that we did where we introduced these insane
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: chemicals into the brains of children, and in this case
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 2: like in Idaho, knowingly yeah, calculated, and one of.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: The things that sort of blows my mind. Is that
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: we've known for centuries, for eons that these things are bad,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: you know, I mean the Romans and the Greeks knew
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: that led caused you know, people to go crazy. I
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: mean they had people who worked with lead, you know,
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: in foundries and things then, and they knew it was
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: a problem. We've known that arsenic is a poisoned since forever,
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: and yet you know, comes along the twentieth century and somehow,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: these these corporations are telling communities, including the community on
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: Vashon Island, you know, oh, arsenic is really not a problem.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: You know, the the human body just excretes it naturally.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: You know, all kinds of just crazy arguments were being
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: put forward to justify what they were doing.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 2: I found out at one point in time in my
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: life that had a disturbing level of arsenic in my system.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 2: I went to get blood work done and my doctor said,
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 2: you have a concerning level of arsenic. And he started
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: asking me about my diet and I said, I eat
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: a lot of sardines and he's like, stop doing that.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: He goes, how much do you eat? I like three
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 2: or four cans a night. He's like, don't do that
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: so because sardines spend their time at the bottom of
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 2: the ocean, like that's where all the heavy metals accumulate.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: And I was getting arsenic from eating cans of sardines.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 2: I stopped eating the sardines. I waited like a few
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: months and went back, got more blood work. It's gone.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: I was like, wow. Yeah.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, there actually are two kinds of arsenic. There's
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: organic arsenic, which you can get from seafood, and if
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: you're eating a lot of you know, shrimp or sardines
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: or whatever, it can build up. And I think that
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: that form of arsenic is less toxic and less of
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: a problem. You don't want it, I mean, as your
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: doctor said, don't do that crazy.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: But the stuff that they were producing at the smelter
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: in Tacoma was what's called inorganic arsenic, and that's the
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: stuff they used to poison rats, and they used it
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: for insecticides and very heavily at you know, during the
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: forties and fifties, they were putting it all over apple
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: orchards and cherry orchards and cotton crops. So those places
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: were then contaminated with arsenic. And Washington State now has
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: four plumes of this pollution. The big one was in
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: Puget Sound from the smelter, which was like a thousand
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: square miles of Puget Sound that was contaminated. But also Winnatchi,
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: which is over in eastern Washington where they have all
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: these apple orchards, there's another plume there from those pesticides
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: and insecticides. And there's a couple more. There's another plume
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: up in Everett where there was what they called an
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: arsenic kitchen. The Rockefellers used to own mines up in
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: the Cascade Mountains, and they had a smelter in Effett
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: that was then bought by the Guggenheims and they moved
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: their arsenic kitchen to Tacoma, left all this pollution in Everett.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: And so they discovered, you know, all these people had
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: built houses and condos and things on top of where
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: the arsenal kitchen had been, which you know, that stuff
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: was never cleaned up, and so they had to you know,
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: I think they had to buy those properties and remediate
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: how so called.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this term remediation, Like how does one remediate a
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: piece of land, like a five acre plot of land
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 2: that you plan on building a beautiful house and Vashon
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 2: Island on like, how do they do that? Well, in
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 2: five acres of ground that's poisoned.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, in Tacoma, what they did that was where the
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: worst of the pollution was because the smoke stack was
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: getting sitting right, you know, near the water. The smoke
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: stack was blown up in the nineties and yeah, they
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: exploded the.
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: Smokestack, which on purpose.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they they you know, they closed the plant in nineteen.
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: Eighty six control demolition. Yeah, so it was, yes, exactly,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: which also probably contributed greatly to more pollutant.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: Yes, they claimed that they cleaned the inside of the smokestack.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: Before they blew it up.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, over but yeah, so yeah, in Tacoma, they they
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: carted away tons of soil. They took you know, they
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: went into people's yards, they tested all of the yards
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: and told people, Okay, you're going to have to replace
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: the soil. And so, yeah, they went in and they
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: by this point, Asarco had declared bankruptcy and the EPA
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: eventually had to take over the whole thing. But they
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: you know, the EPA got on un precedented environmental bank
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: cruptcy settlement out of the SARCO, which was close to
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: two billion dollars. I think it was the highest settlement
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: that they'd ever gotten from a corporation. But it had
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: to clean up about twenty different super fun sites, including
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: the one in Idaho in Cordeline, which they you know,
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: they've been working on that for years and still haven't finished.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: But in Tacoma, they actually did replace the soil in many,
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: many people's yards, but you know, they run out of money.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think on places like Vashon, a lot
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: of that was on the southern part. I think you
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: could request soil replacement in some of these places, but
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: it wasn't necessarily guaranteed depending on where you lived.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: Well, that's also so destructive to the ecosystem. So you're
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 2: taking out everything. Yeah, that allows these plants to live, animals,
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: my celium, all the different the network that connects all
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 2: these plants together. You're pulling all that stuff out and
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 2: introducing new soil, and you're not going to do it everywhere.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: You're not going to get all of it out. There's
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 2: no way. You're not going to be able to do
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: the whole island. You're not going to be able to
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 2: do like every inch of Tacoma, all the land.
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course they have to take that soil somewhere,
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: so in Tacoma they took it to some special landfill.
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: But I mean, one of the really crazy things that
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: happened as a result of closing the smokestack there was
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: that they took that arsenic kitchen that I was talking about,
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: the one that had been up in Everett, and some
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: of the most contaminated parts of the buildings that were
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: part of the whole smelter compound. And the SARCO promised
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: that they were going to take all that stuff and
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: put it somewhere else. I don't know where they were
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: going to put it, but they said they were going
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: to take it. But then they went bankrupt and so
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: they didn't remove it, and instead they created this very
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: bizarre kind of pit with where they put all the
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: worst stuff, including a bunch of the soil, the contaminated
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: soil from Everett and the arsenal kitchen, and they put
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: it in a sort of super heavy duty plastic lined
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: you know, garbage bag essentially. I mean, if you can
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: imagine like the largest garbage bag in the world, they
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: put all this stuff in it and they capped it
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: with soil, and that thing is sitting there, you know,
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: still even though they have now you know, they cleared
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: off the whole area where the compound was, where the
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: factories and that the furnaces were, and they built condos
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: on top of that.
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: Oh my god.
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: But behind the condos is this giant hum of contaminated
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: stuff in a giant plastic garbage bay.
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: Do they tell the people that live in these condos
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 2: what they're dealing with?
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: Well, there's this there's a very small historical display with
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: some photographs and materials about the smelter that's in uh,
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: you know, in one of the buildings on the way
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: to the public bathroom. So presumably if the people who
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: are buying condos there know anything about it, they probably
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: they wear in the history. But they think it's and
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: in a sense it has been cleaned up, I mean.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: But but also doesn't it leak into the water table?
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: Well, they have a lot of stuff that they've done,
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, in the in the book I talk about
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: you know, you know Frank Herbert who wrote Dune, he
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: was from Tacoma, and in fact, the stuff in Dune
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: about the pollution and what has happened to the planet,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: you know that that he dramatized. A lot of that
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: came from his disgusted with the smelter. And you know,
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: a planet that has basically destroyed its whole environment, and
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: now they have, you know, developed this whole little park
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: on one you know, the condos are on one end
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: of this what used to be the smelter property, and
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: then on the other end on top of this slag land.
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: The slag is the stuff that's left over after you've
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: pulled all the metal out of the rocks. There's the
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: stuff that, once it's cooled off, looks like gravel and
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: it's called slag, but it isn't really grasvel. I mean,
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: it's contaminated with all the stuff. It's contaminated with arsenic
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: and and so they built a park that's called Dune
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: Park and it's dedicated to Frank Herbert and it's this
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: little walking trail and the whole thing, I think is
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: developed in such a way that it's kind of lined
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: with plastic and there's a plastic liner, you know, on
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: the shores to keep stuff from leaking out. And like
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: if you live in one of those condos, you can't
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: plant anything that will be larger than a you know,
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: small shrub in part because of the plastic liner thing.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: Oh my god, yeah, it's it's wild. That's so crazy. Oh,
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 2: it's so disturbing. And then it's there's so many factors too, right,
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 2: there's the plants and then there's the industrial pesticides. Have
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 2: you ever read Dissolving Illusions? Susanne Humphries wrote this book
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 2: about and one of the aspects of the book is
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 2: about DDT and the ubiquitous use of DDT and how
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: so many people in rural communities were coming down with
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 2: in air quotes, polio, paralytic polio that was directly correlated
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 2: to the use of DDT, like the same areas where
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 2: people and it wasn't just human beings that were getting
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: this polio, but it was also cows and horses and
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 2: dogs they were getting paralyzed as well, which it doesn't
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 2: cross species. Human derived polio does not cross species. It's
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 2: a very dark story. And you want to hear something crazy.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 2: What percentage of polio do you think is asymptomatic.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: I've never heard that there's polio that's asymptomatic.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: Ninety five to ninety nine percent, ninety five to ninety
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: nine percent of actual polio is asymptomatic, so what they
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: were calling polio was most likely DDT poisoning. Wow, that
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: was sprayed everywhere. There was sprayed everywhere for gypsy moths
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 2: and all sorts of different passive They just they didn't know.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 2: And then once they did know, it was too late,
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 2: and they were just trying to cover it up and say, no,
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 2: we we cured polio. We cured it. Look and these
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: people that were, you know, getting air quotes polio were
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: most likely getting poisoned by DDT.
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that the you know a lot of
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: this environmental stuff has become so overwhelming to people that
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: they kind of tuned it out. Yes, it's like, what
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: are we going to do about it? There's nothing we
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: could do, so like, right, let's just pretend it's not happening.
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 2: I make sure that I don't read any of this
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 2: stuff late at night. You know, when I when I
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: read stuff like this rate and late at night, I
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 2: can't go asleep. I just freak out. I just it
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: just disturbs me human beings, their capacity to do things
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 2: like this, either knowingly or unknowingly, and then to cover
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 2: it up knowingly, and then to try to find some
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 2: way to profit off of the removal of it or
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 2: the treatment of these ailments that these people suffer. And
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 2: then the obfuscating and the you know, diverting the attention
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 2: to some other thing, like calling it a disease or
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 2: calling it something else.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that was one of the things in
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: my mind when I kind of wanted to develop the
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: whole thing about you know, put talking about serial killers
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: and violence and aggression and where that might have come from,
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: because I, you know, I want wanted to talk about
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: all that, and I didn't want to just use it
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: as a kind of trojan horse to introduce all the
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: stuff about pollution. But I did think it was a
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: way to get people maybe to think about these issues
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: who might not otherwise want to do that, you know who.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: And I think people are interested in the history of
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: how they might have been, you know, exposed. When I
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: did a reading up in Seattle a month or so ago,
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: you know, everybody was talking about where they grew up
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: in relation to this melter, like how close they were
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: to it, and you know, what they might have experienced
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: as a result. And that I think is one of
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: the interesting things about the Tacoma story is that many
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: poor people were directly expelled, you know, the people who
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: worked at the smelter, they lived right around the smokestack,
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: so they got the worst of it. But there were
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: a lot of other communities in the area, including Mercer Island,
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: where I grew up, which is now kind of a
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: famously wealthy you know, some of the you know, Microsoft
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: people have houses there, or you know, I think Paul
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: Allen had house there, and it was when I was
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: a kid growing up there, it was a well to do,
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: upper middle class place. And one of the things I
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: look at in the book is some of the really
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: bizarre crime that happened on the island at that time
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: that you wonder, was this, you know, in any way
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: related to you know, some of these things we're talking
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: about the rise in lead in the air from let
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: in gas because Mercer Island is crossed by I ninety.
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: I ninety comes down out of the Cascades and crosses
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: Mercer Island, which is sitting in the middle of Lake
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: Washington and ends up in Seattle, and so Mercer Island
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: had a lot of pollution from I ninety and it
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: also was in the plume from the Tagma smelter. And
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: while I was growing up there some weird chit.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 2: Like what kind of share Well, I lived.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: On a street that was close to I ninety and
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: was actually it kind of ran over the top of
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: a tunnel that enclosed in ninety on part of the
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: island and down the street from where I grew up
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: was growing up another young guy named George Waterfield Russell,
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: who turned out to be a serial killer and in
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties killed three women on the east side
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: where Bellevue is And so that is really kind of
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: a striking fact. You know, you don't expect serial killers
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: to come from that kind of a neighborhood, not very
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: far away from where Russell grew up. This other guy
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: was also who went to my high school as did
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: Russell was growing up, who became one of the worst
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: arsonists in Seattle history when he burned down his parents'
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: warehouse and killed several Seattle firefighters. So there were those two.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: There was a guy in my class at the high
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: school who was obsessed with his ex girlfriend and went
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: he worked at a facility that you dynamite, and he
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: stole some dynamite and blasting caps and he went and
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: blew up her dorm building. And there was another kid
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: who went to my junior high who decided he was
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: so depressed he was going to kill himself, and he
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: drove his car at like one hundred miles an hour.
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: It actually wasn't his car, It was like his girlfriend's
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: sister's Camaro or something, and he drove it, you know,
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: at a million miles an hour into the wall of
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: the Junior High gymnasium and destroyed the gymnasium. So all
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: this stuff is happening, you know, in a period of time,
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: you know, and in a place that you wouldn't think
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: would have that level of.
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 2: Crime and that kind of crime and that kind of crime.
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: And oddly enough, always men, yeah, which are uniquely affected
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 2: by these things. So what about the women that were there?
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: Was there a bizarre behavior that you might think could
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: be attributed to these toxins?
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: You know, I don't really know how to answer that.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think that there was. One of the
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: things that I remember about the high school, for example,
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: was you know that there was a lot of kind
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: of creepy behavior, you know, going on in terms of
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: food fights and just a lot of stuff I don't
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: think you see as much now I mean, this is
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: completely anecdotal, so I can't support any of this, but
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: it just it felt to me like when my niece
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: and nephew were growing up, that they were less troubled
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: as youths, you know, than we were in the nineteen seventies,
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: you know, they were growing up in the nineties, you know.
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: And I think there is a little bit of that.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: I mean, there can't prove it, but I think that
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: it may be true that, you know, the whole all
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: the jokes about the baby boomers being crazy because of
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: lead exposure, there may be a little bit of truth
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: to that.
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 2: I mean, it makes sense if it doesn't, I mean,
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 2: it totally makes sense. I mean, if there were elevated
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 2: levels of all this lead, elevated levels of all these toxins,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: and we know that it affects human behavior, I mean,
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 2: it only makes sense.
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: It does. And I you know, I hope that one
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: of the things my book might be able to do
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: is to encourage people to just think about this in
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: their you know, in their lives. And I think a
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: lot of people are now much more aware of lead.
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: I mean that thing that you were showing earlier about
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: the Bunker Hill thing, it said that five micrograms per
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: desoleader of lead was the they've now lowered that to
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: three point five, and it really should be zero, you know,
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: because there is no amount of lead that's safe in
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: terms of exposure, and they know that. I think it
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: just if the federal government comes out and says it's zero,
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: then that triggers all kinds of things that have to happen.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: And it makes parents freak out because you know, they
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: might take their child to a doctor and have them
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: tested and find out there's some you know, if it's
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: not zero, then what are we going to do about it?
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 2: And it's you know, who's liable, that's right. Yeah, That's
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 2: what's so disturbing about all this stuff, is it a
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 2: lot of effort is put forth to make sure that
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 2: whatever companies that may be liable, they'll try to distort
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 2: facts and try to hide evidence and try to make
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 2: it seem like this is just this is a nothing burger,
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 2: this is no big deal. Well, you see that with fluoride.
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 2: You know, we've been putting fluoride in the water forever
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 2: supposedly to help people with tooth decay, and then you're
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 2: seeing that there's a direct correlation between high levels of
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: florid and the water and lowered IQs. And yet there's
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 2: still people out there that are saying, Oh, we need
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 2: You're gonna have to see a bunch of tooth decay.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 2: We need to put the fluoride back in the What
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 2: we to stop this? Why? Well, because people are profiting
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 2: of of putting fluoride in water. There's enormous corporations that
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 2: are responsible for that fluoride and they provide that fluoride
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 2: to the drinking water and under the guise of improving
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 2: dental health, which is just crazy because you don't need it,
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 2: Like you could just brush your teeth and stop eating
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 2: so much fucking sugar, which is really the culprit. That's
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 2: really one percent the culprit. I mean, if you go
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 2: back to ancient times, one of the things they've seen
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: that they find, like skulls and dead people's teeth from
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 2: you know, hundreds of years ago, you don't you don't
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 2: find a massive amount of tooth decay because people weren't
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 2: eating a lot of sugar. They weren't constantly eating candy
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 2: and stuff that rots your fucking teeth out. It's we
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 2: don't need to stop we don't need to put this
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 2: neurotoxin into water. We just stop eating poison. It's like,
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 2: really simple. You don't add a poison to make you
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 2: better because there's more poison. Like, it's really crazy, and
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 2: these are like hardcore facts. This is not something that's deniable.
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 2: Like if you look at the correlation between fluoride and
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 2: lowered IQs, it's pretty undeniable. They know it's a fact,
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 2: they know it's a neurotoxin, but yet they'll rush it off.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 2: Oh but that's in high doses a low dose. It's like, well,
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 2: who's determining. Who's determining. There hasn't been a long history
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 2: of human use of fluoride and drinking water. It's fairly recent.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: It's I believe it goes back into the early twentieth century.
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 2: It's crazy, Yeah, well it is.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: I mean they always say the dose makes the poison. Sure,
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: and I suppose that that that's true.
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 2: I'm sure it's true, but I mean, it's zero amount
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 2: is good for you. And this is not a smart
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 2: thing for people to do. It's why you're not supposed
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 2: to eat toothpaste that has florid in it. They tell
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 2: you to spit it out. Why Because it's got florid
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 2: in it, and floride is fucking bad for you, So
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 2: why are we putting it in toothpaste in the first place? Like,
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 2: help me out, You're just trying to clean teeth, right,
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 2: Like why do you have to use fluoride? Well you don't.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 2: That's why they sell fluoride free toothpaste, and they advertise
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 2: it as such. If florid was a thing that was
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 2: helping everyone with tooth ocake, why the hell would anybody
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 2: want to buy floor ride free toothpaste. Well, because people
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 2: who have been actually paying attention and reading independent journalists
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: and reading people that have gone outside the mainstream narrative
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 2: that realize, like, this is not good for you. Not
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 2: only is it not good for you, it's probably should
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 2: have been removed from our water supply a long time ago.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 2: So who's responsible? And then it gets into that, it
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 2: gets into like these corporations that have been dumping Florida
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: into the water are justifying the use of floria, the
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 2: politicians that have been doing it, who's been getting paid,
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 2: what's the paper trail? Like, what's going on? And it's
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 2: just one more piece of disgusting and disturbing evidence of
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 2: human depravity, that people are willing to do things that
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 2: are just they know are bad, but they profit.
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: And the government is not you know, completely blameless and
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: all of this either because you know, in terms of lead,
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: for example, one of the places that I think people
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: are really concerned about is the schools.
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 2: You know, public schools.
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: Public school buildings were built you know, often decades ago,
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: so they're old, and they have old plumbing, they have
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: lead pipes.
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 2: Lead paint, lead paint which is even crazier paint.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and so there's you know, there are real questions
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: about how much the government is going to be on
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: the hook for replacing all of this stuff that has
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: to happen, which is you know, so much money in
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: order to do that, and you know, they have occasionally
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: kind of tiptoed up to this. I think the you know,
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: the Biden administration did say that they were going to
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: spend you know, millions of dollars to try and douce
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: work at schools. Now, I think that's all in question,
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: and so yeah, it's a it's a kind of a
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: frightening period right now because the EPA is being defunded
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. I'm sure the EPA is
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: not a perfect agency, you know, I'm sure they've made mistakes,
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: but they're the one sure.
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 2: They've been compromised. But also someone should be looking into this, yes,
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 2: and you're going to need some sort of an environmental group,
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 2: right is responsible and just that can look at these
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: things and say, hey, this is a real issue and
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 2: all of our health is dependent upon them doing a
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 2: really good job of sussing this stuff out.
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: And it's the EPA that's responsible for the Superfund program,
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: which is in large part responsible for cleaning this stuff up.
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: But they're being defunded, you know, and so who's going
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: to do that? Who's going to clean up you know,
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: the areas that have radioactive you know, legacy from World
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: War two, Hanford and all of that. I mean, that
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: stuff's been going on for decades and it's not finished.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 2: Well, there's an area in France that is the size
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: of Paris that human beings can't go into all because
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 2: of the war. And what kind of well you can
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 2: find it, Jamie can find it. So I don't want
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 2: to speak out of tune about this, but munitions, you know,
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 2: like unexploded munitions, and just where things got bombed, where
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 2: it's so toxic. Human beings can't live there. It's the
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 2: size of Paris. It's like this enormous chunk of land.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 2: It's like it's ruined probably forever.
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and there's got to be some kind
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: of of you know, government.
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 2: Intervention and stuff like this.
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: There has to be the responsibility because the corporations walked away, right,
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: and so they can you know, Esarco still exists, but
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: it's now operating out of.
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 2: Mexico, of convenient.
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a whole story.
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 2: Is Zone Rogue World War One Arab battlefields that are
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 2: still dangerous over one hundred years later. Well, yeah, So
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 2: the Red Zone is a chain of former battlefields across
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: northeastern France that the government is cordoned off due to
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 2: the many dangerous ordinates that remains from the First World War.
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 2: The area originally spanned over four hundred and sixty square
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 2: miles from Nancy through to lell and incorporates such battlefields
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 2: as this, how do you say that, solme Verdun and
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: Vimy Ridge. While the size of the region has lessened
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 2: over the one hundred plus years since the end of
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 2: the conflict, the area is still characterized by the scars
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 2: and remnants of the Great War.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: This is even World War One. Yeah, all that chemical
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: stuff that.
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 2: They were crazy using, right, Wow, that's when they first
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 2: started using chemical warfare. People are gross. Oh they're awesome too,
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 2: like a lot of people. You're awesome. A lot of
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 2: people are awesome. A lot of people are great. I
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 2: love them, but like in large groups, when they don't
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 2: have responsibility for their actions, they're Gross's uh, it's very
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 2: you know, the more you read about these types of things,
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 2: like you're describing your book and these horrible things that
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 2: these corporations have done, the amount of pollution that they've caused,
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 2: and the amount of damage that they've done, and then
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 2: the effects on untold millions of human beings that have
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 2: been exposed to these things, it's just it's so disturbing.
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 2: It's so disturbing that it just makes you know, like
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 2: I said, I can't read this stuff at night. If
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 2: I read this stuff at night, I can't sleep. I
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 2: wind up getting up in the middle of the night
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 2: and wandering around my house and it really freaks me out.
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people have
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: said things to me like how did you write this book?
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: And I think they're talking about the serial killer part
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: of it.
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 2: You know that they're.
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: Which you know, it is really disturbing stuff.
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 2: And yeah, all of it is disturbing the fact that
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 2: serial killers exist. That's disturbing the fact that there might
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 2: be some sort of an environmental effect or chemical effect
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 2: that's causing some of this behavior to take place.
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: Well, but we did do the right thing in terms
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: of you know, now every country in the world that
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: was selling letted gas has taken it off the market,
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: so that was a good thing. We made some progress.
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: And you know, again, this guy's graphs he published show
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: this guy Rick Nevin, and he wrote this book called
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: Lucifer Curves, which which contain all these these different graphs
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: that show this. And what he has shown is that
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: there's one of them in my book that he let
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: me reproduce. You know, the violent crime rate goes up
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: and up in the seventies and eighties, and then when
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: they remove, yeah, when they remove the leaded gas, the
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: crime rate falls off a cliff.
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 2: That is crazy. Look at this graph it's almost like
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 2: it mirrors it.
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: All these graphs look exactly the same.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 2: There's like, oh, that's so crazy.
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild.
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 2: Okay, so look at this scroll go up a little bit. First,
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 2: So murder from nineteen hundred and nineteen fifty nine versus
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 2: paint lead. Look at that.
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's correlation.
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 2: They're almost mirrored. Yeah. And then aggravated assault versus gasoline lead.
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 2: Same thing. It's like they follow the same path. It's nuts,
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 2: robbery versus gasoline lead. Look at the drop off with
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 2: the drop off of gasoline lead. That is nuts.
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: And it's the same thing with serial killers. The number
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: of serial killers in the seventies and eighties and nineties
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: goes up to the highest that we've seen, you know,
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: about seven hundred operating in this country during that period,
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: and then it just drops off. And that's why they
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: call that the Golden Age of serial killers. Wow, and
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: now it's like, you know, fifty two one hundred. So
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: I think there are always have been the serial killers,
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: you know, throughout history. I mean there's Jack the Ripper,
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: but you know, this guy talks about that whole period,
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: you know, because that was the Industrial Revolution. That was
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: a period when there was a lot of lead paint
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: being produced in England, and so Jack the Ripper may
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: have had a little bit too much lead on top
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: of whatever else was wrong with them. I mean, we
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: don't even know who he was, but it.
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: Makes me really think about Peaky Blinders. You ever watched
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 2: that show? That show was like it's almost like they
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 2: filtered the whole show. They did an amazing job of
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 2: that show. First of all, it's one of my favorite
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 2: series of all time. It's so good. But the show
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 2: looks like it's in the middle of like coal fog,
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 2: you know, like everything is kind of gray. And they
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 2: did an amazing job of recreating what life was like
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: after the war in that part of Europe, and that's
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 2: what it looked like.
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and coal includes a lot of compounds, right that
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: are really dangerous to breathe. There was a whole thing
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: that happened in London in the nineteen fifties where they
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: got I don't remember why this happened, but you know,
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: I mean it was really difficult time for that country
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: after World War Two. There was you know, economically, they
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: were really struggling, and I think they got during one
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: winter in the nineteen fifties, they got some really bad
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: quality coal delivered to London which caused this horrific smog event.
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: Essentially that was so heavy that people were killed just
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: trying to cross the street because you couldn't see anything.
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 2: Oh cool.
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like there was a whole episode of
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: the Crown that was devoted to this. It was while
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: Winston Churchill was Prime Minister.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 2: It was like driving through fog.
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know when I was a kid and
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: read books about England and that, you know in the earlier,
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: like Charles Dickens or whatever. You know, we would talk
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: about fog all the time in London and I just
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: thought fog, Oh, that's from you know, the ocean or something.
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: But it's not. It was smog, and it was smog
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: from industry and from coal fires. And I think they
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: paid kind of a terrible price.
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 2: Look at that. Yeah, yeah, that's what Peaky Blinders looks like.
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 2: It's like the whole Dull series. It's almost like they
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 2: did it. So this is the Thames River from nineteen
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 2: fifty two. Wow. Wow, look at that guy, he's got
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 2: a fucking mask on. Yeah.
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: The Great Smog of nineteen fifty two, that's what it was.
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: And a lot of people who had asthma died because
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: it was so terrible. The air was just so terrible.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 2: Wow. Two workers rested an oxygen tent in Pennsylvania from
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 2: nineteen forty eight.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a similar event in Pennsylvania death fog.
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, two shocking events still living memory from Queen Elizabeth generation.
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 2: Because the Clean Air Act reinforcement enforcement reducing just one
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 2: of the pollutants targeted by the Clean Air Act added
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 2: one point six years to the average American life. Wow.
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I think Puget Sound had a problem
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: that was caused by sort of the geography of the area,
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: because you know, Puget Sound is kind of a trough
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Mountains, and so
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: it's a low area and during the you know, certain
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: times of the year, everybody used to heat their houses
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: with woods, you know, fires with right of you know,
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: Franklin stoves and stuff like.
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 2: That, and which is really bad for you, Yeah, which is.
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 2: And so that's where coal comes from, right right, And
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 2: so you buy charcoal, if you buy lump charcoal, that's
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 2: what that is. Yeah.
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: So not as many people use that anymore. And like
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: when I was a kid, I remember the skies being
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: really gray a lot, you know, especially during the winter,
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: and I think part of that was from the smoke
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: kind of settling in that Puget Sound trough between the mountains,
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: and they would tell people sometimes they would have a smoke,
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: they'd have a fireband. They couldn't use your wood stove.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 2: Wow, because because.
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: Of the air quality. And now I go to you know,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: the northwest into Puget Sound, and the air looks so
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: much better. I mean, and it's like during the summer.
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: It's just like I don't remember it being like this, So,
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: I mean that's just my experience. But I think it's
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: true that the air quality is better.
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 2: Well it has to be, yeah, And that's a very
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 2: disturbing thing for people. They don't want to hear. Like
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 2: you think of wood fire being natural, but it's actually
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 2: really bad. When I think everybody in the city of
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 2: Austin heated their home in the winter with wood fires,
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 2: it'd be a fucking disaster. Yeah, it'd be really bad
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 2: if everybody in New York City, like imagine, well you
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 2: can't because it's apartments, but if it was something where
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: you had a chimney and everybody had wood fire, it
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 2: would be terrible. It's great if you're camping and I
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 2: it's just you, it's just you. And your friends. And
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 2: it's a small wood fire. It's like, relatively speaking, it's
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 2: not going to cost too much damage. It's no big deal.
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 2: But when you get a large group of human beings
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 2: they're burning wood and you're all breathing that, it's just
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 2: like a fire. Like if you've ever been around a wildfire,
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 2: it's terrible. The air quality is awful. You know. Los
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 2: Angeles has had a bunch of those, and many times
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 2: when I was living in LA, the entire city was
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 2: covered in smoke and you're just you're breathing these wildfire
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 2: this wildfire smoke.
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's just undeniable, I think now, and
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: I think it's much. You know, people are really moving
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: away from having woodstoves, yeah, and fireplaces for that very reason.
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 2: It's so weird because you think of like, oh that's
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 2: a comforting thing. Yeah, nice fireplace, it's beautiful. You know,
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 2: I cook over hardwood all the time. You know, it's
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 2: like the best way. Like you have a smoker, an
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 2: offset smoker, put a little bunch of oak in there,
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 2: post oak, and you cook that way. But you know
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 2: what's coming on that smoke snock? Yeah, nothing good. I mean,
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 2: if you have one smoker. I'm sure it's fine, it's
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 2: no big deal. But if everybody's doing it, it becomes
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 2: an issue, especially if you have staggered air. You're talking
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 2: about that trough.
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so you know, we are doing the
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: right things in some respects. I mean, you know, we're
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: moving away from heating has us with wood where you know,
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: we stopped so you know, putting lead and paint, we
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: stopped the leaded gas.
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 2: What do you know if anything about gas about natural
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 2: gas cooking, because this is one of the things during
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 2: the Biden administration, they started talking about removing gas kitchens
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 2: and gas stoves from people's homes, and people start freaking out,
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 2: like this is crazy, you can't do this. But there
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 2: seems to be some real data that shows that having
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 2: gas in your home is not just dangerous, but dangerous
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 2: for the development of children. Yeah.
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, I am not an expert on this, but
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: I am I'm really concerned about what I've read in parcas.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 2: I have a guest of I mean, completely makes sense.
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I like cooking on gas, but I've been
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: really concerned about what I've read, and also about the
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: you know, again, the industry suppression of evidence about this stuff,
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: and you know, just the whole thing of calling it natural.
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 2: Guests right right right natural to a lot of natural
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 2: stuff that's terrible for you.
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: Did we really fall for that? I mean, it's kind
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: of heartbreaking if it turns out to have been, you know,
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: as as concerning as they're saying.
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 2: And yeah, when you hear politicians talking about clean coal,
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 2: I've heard that term before, which is a wild term
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 2: to use clean coal, and it's bullshit. Yeah, I mean
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 2: it's bullshit. Yeah, that's your says. Oh yeah, I just.
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, and I think, you know, as Homo sapiens,
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: were either going to get on top of this stuff
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: or it's going to get on top of us.
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like it already has gotten on top of a generation.
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 2: I mean, like we're talking about the leaded gasoline contributing
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 2: especially in urban communities where you had to deal with
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 2: a lot of this exhaust and the pollution that there's
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 2: a correlation between lower o qu's statistically significant correlation.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: And all the stuff they're talking about now with plastics
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: in the body. I mean, I read something this morning
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: that said that we're walking around with the plastic accumulation
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: in our brains of enough plastic to make a.
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 2: Spoon, yes, yeah, and our brains.
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: And it's like, well, that can't be good.
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not an expert on the plastic stuff,
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: but everything you're seeing about it is really alarming, and
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: you just have to think that unless we stop using
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: this stuff, unless we remove it from production, we're going
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: to be in real trouble.
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 2: And when we come up with solutions, make sure those
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 2: solutions aren't even worse for you. Because one of the
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 2: solutions was these damn paper straws. So what makes a
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 2: paper straw able to support liquid without dissolving forever chemicals?
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 2: Paper straws are way worse for you than plastic straws,
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 2: way worse, especially if you're dealing with hot liquids, which
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 2: is another factor when you're dealing with coffee cups. Like
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 2: coffee cups, my friend Paul Saladino did this demonstration where
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 2: he took a typical paper coffee cup and dissolve the
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 2: outside of it and showed you what you're actually pouring
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 2: hot liquid into. You're pouring hot liquid into what essentially
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 2: looks like a condom. It's a plastic liner that lines
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 2: the inside of these paper cups, which is why they
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 2: can hold hot liquid in the first place. It doesn't
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 2: even make any sense, Like, how is paper able to
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 2: hold hot liquid without dissolving? Well, it has to have
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 2: some sort of a surface inside of it that's a coating,
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 2: and that coating is filled with forever chemicals and it
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 2: is fucking terrible for you. Yeah, so our solutions have
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 2: to be at least somewhat better, right, you know. And
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 2: then there's people that say, well, metal, the problem with
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 2: metal straws is people trip and the metal straws go
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 2: into their brain. Okay, they fucking don't trip. Jesus Christ,
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 2: what are we saying here.
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: I haven't followed the metal Yeah.
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 2: A bunch of people have died because they're looking at
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 2: their phone. Yeah, they're looking at their phone and sucking
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 2: something through a metal straw and they trip and it
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 2: goes into their head and kills them.
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: Oh my god.
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, more than one person has died that way. Like,
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 2: good Lord, Like it's if it's not one thing, it's another,
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 2: there's no end. Whatever we try to fix up, they
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 2: would come up with a solution that's actually worse than
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 2: the initial problem. Not always, but it's.
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: Like a real goldberg thing or something. Yeah, I mean,
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: and it just makes you wonder, do we have to
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: go back to some sort of really primitive form of existence,
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: like everybody rides donkeys.
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 2: No. I think this is the reason why we serve
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 2: in the studio. We don't use plastic water bottles anymore,
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 2: and we serve all of our guests we use a
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 2: steel cup. And this is why we have steel cups
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 2: because I realized a long time ago that plastic leeches
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 2: into the water, and you have no chain of command.
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 2: You no one knows exactly how that water bottle was handled.
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 2: No one knows how long it was sitting on a dock.
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 2: No one knows how was the temperature of the truck
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 2: that it was delivered to the supermarket. When you get it,
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 2: it's cold, okay, But what happened in the time that
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 2: it was bottled in the factory to the time it
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 2: got into your hands. Well, if it's plastic, there's a
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 2: high likelihood that it's leeching some chemicals. And here's another
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: disturbing thing that they found. You said, well we should
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 2: buy glass water. Yeah, buy a glasswater bottle. That solves
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 2: the problem. Well, it actually it doesn't because of the caps.
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 2: So the caps leech more because of the way they
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 2: make these caps on these metal water bottles, whatever the
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 2: surface of the interior lining of those caps, it keeps
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 2: water from leaking out leeches even more than it does
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 2: with a water bottle that's plastic. So that what they
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 2: found is that glass water bottles leach more chemicals into
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 2: the water than plastic, which is just crazy.
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that must be.
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 2: To make sure that's true, I'm pretty sure, ninety nine
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 2: percent sure that's true. I read this whole article about it.
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 2: But I want to be clear because this is this
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 2: is pretty important.
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: when they delivered milk. Oh yeah, you know in glass
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 1: bottles to the house, and they had these little paper
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: caps yeah on them. But I now wonder, you know,
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: if those were sort.
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 2: Of coded coded. Well, they seem like they're metal. It
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 2: seems like a metal coated cap because there's something about
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 2: the rigidity of it. Here are recent studies indicated glass
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 2: bottles may contain significantly higher level of microplastics than previously thought,
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 2: even exceeding those found in plastic bottles. It's just largely
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 2: due to microplastics originally originating from the bottle caps, specifically
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 2: the paint used on them. Well, glass is often seen
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 2: as a safer alternative to plastic. These findings highlight a
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 2: potential concern regarding microplastic contamination and beverages, regardless of the
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 2: container type. And we've talked about this, the dangers of
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 2: plastics on this podcast before because we had doctor Shanna
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 2: Swan from Harvard who wrote a book called Countdown. It's
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 2: all talking about how the thalates and these microplastics entering
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 2: into women's bodies during the time where these children are developing.
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 2: It's contributing to a bunch of different factors that are
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 2: really dangerous to the endecan system. And Campet suggests that
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 2: most of the microplastics in the body are ingested through food,
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 2: particularly meat, because commercial meat production tends to concentrate plastics
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 2: in the food chain. Terrific. Yeah, there's no escape. What
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 2: has been the reaction to your book? Has there been
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 2: any pushback by people that don't like your connecting serial
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 2: killers to industrial contaminants?
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there have been people who say, you know, well,
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: you know, why isn't everybody in Tacoma serial killer? And
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: things like that, which I think is kind of the
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: wrong focus. I mean, I'm just trying to introduce a
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: description of sort of the most extreme version of what
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: might have happened. And again, I don't make those kinds
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: of claims. I mean, we can't, for example, show that
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: Ted Bundy did what he did because of lead. All
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to show is that he was exposed to
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: a significant amount of lead, and we know that from
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: the testing of his house, in his yard. And so
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: I'm just saying, think about what that might have done,
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: think about what it might have contributed. Probably wasn't the
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: only reason. There was probably a whole suite of reasons
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: why he did what he did with all of these guys.
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 1: That's true. But Gary Ridgeway, you know again, he grows
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: up two miles from SeaTac from the airport at a
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: time when they were using lead in.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 2: Jet fuel jet fuel, oh wow.
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: And so he's and he's also right by two major highways.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: And what does he do when he grows up. He
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: goes to work at a truck factory, painting trucks. Oh boy,
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: with a spray you know, gun, and that lad that
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: paint has led components. So he's got it coming and going.
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, his brother talked about how he used to
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: they used to play on a slag pile from the
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: copper mine in Idaho. And so I think he's a
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: guy who clearly has to have come into contact with
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: more lead than was good for him. Now does that
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: mean that's why you did it? You know? And he's
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: you know, his whole history involves so many victims. I mean,
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: he pled guilty to something like forty eight or forty
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: nine murders, but they've tied him to probably around seventy
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: eight or seventy nine, and that's probably an undercount. So
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: I think it's worth thinking about That's what I'm saying.
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: I think it's worth thinking about what led contributed to
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: crime during that period. And I wanted to tell the
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: story in a way that was kind of subjective, you know,
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: and personal, and not in an academic way. I mean,
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: there are some great academic histories of lead exposure in
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: the history of lead industries in this country. I didn't
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: want to do that because it's been done, and because
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: you know, I think people when they're reading something for
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't say entertainment, but you know, they want to
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: be they want to find something compelling and absorbing and
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: learn something. And this I thought was a way of,
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: you know, in Murderland, of presenting this material in a
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: way that people could kind of say, oh, you know,
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: I didn't know about what happened with lead during World
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: War Two. I didn't know about what it could do
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: to kids and how that might show up years later
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 1: in their lives.
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 2: When you finish a book like this and then you
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 2: really it, what does that feel like like you're contributing,
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 2: I think greatly to this discussion that's a very important
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 2: one of the impact of these industrial pollutants. What what
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 2: these unknowing victims of this, not just the serial killers,
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 2: but all the people that were probably damaged by this stuff.
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 2: What does it feel like when when you release a
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 2: book like this.
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: It's kind of overwhelming, you know, to see it suddenly
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: kind of be in people's hands and they're reading it
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: and they're asking you questions like you know and yeah,
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: I mean. The funny thing about writing a book is
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: that while you're writing it and doing the research, it's
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: kind of your own private ido. You know, it's your
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 1: own private little playpen where you get to make all
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: the decisions and you know, make all the choices and
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: and then you know, editors get involved and all these
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: other you know, people at the publishing how they start saying, well,
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: what about this? What about that? And that's always sort
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: of terrifying because you realize, oh, I haven't thought about
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: all the you know, ramifications. I need to you know,
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: do all this fact checking and make sure everything's right.
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: And you know, so that's a real you know hump
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: to get over to just make sure that you know,
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: you've gotten everything nailed down as much as you can.
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: And that's all great, but then it enters people's hands
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: and they're reading it, and sometimes, you know, when you
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: publish a book, people have really different responses than you
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: even imagined, you know. I mean, you can't control it anymore.
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: It's just out in the world doing its thing, and
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: it's interesting. It's always sort of really interesting to you know.
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: I just heard from a woman who's the daughter of
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: a guy who worked the smelter Intocoma, and I had
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: been in touch with her, you know, briefly, because her
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: father was an incredible rabble rouser when he worked at
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: the smelter, he was working for the union and did
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: all this stuff to bring the whole arsenic thing to
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 1: light to you know, show that the plant doctor, who
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: he called the plant quack, you know, was lying about
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: the stuff. And and you know, he was sort of
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: a hero in this whole story because he published, you know,
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 1: he had this little newsletter that he published from his
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 1: kitchen table, and he was so funny, so great, and
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: he really, you know, cared about the guys that he
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: worked with, and so he I think helped compile a
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: whole list which was called the death List. I found
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: that there's a copy of it in the Tacoma Library,
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: a Sarco records that listed all the guys who worked
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: at the smelter who died of various cancers pretty young,
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: you know, like at age fifty five or something. And
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: so you know, when you hear from somebody like you
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 1: know that woman or other people who you know lived
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: in Tacoma and remember this whole era, it's really gratifying.
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's really great to know that you've put
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: something on the record that will help people understand the
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: history of this stuff.
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you've done the world of great service.
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 2: I really do, because I think it's difficult to compile
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 2: all the stuff and put it into a digestible form,
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 2: and I think the connection that you've made to serial
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: which I think is a very valid connection, but also
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 2: it's particularly exciting for people to pick it up. And
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 2: because so many people are fascinated by serial killers and
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 2: so many people are creeped out by it, that it
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 2: makes it more compelling, It makes it more interesting for
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 2: people to read. And then I think along the way,
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 2: then they get this deeper understanding of this gigantic problem.
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 2: I hope.
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I mean that's the goal, you know, to
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: try to, you know, just I mean, I hate to
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: use the term raise awareness because it's such a cliche,
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: but you know, you do hope that people go come
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: away from reading something like this and then oh, you know,
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: maybe maybe I should have my water tested, or maybe
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: I should you know, be concerned, learned about the playground
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: where my kids are playing.
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think you did it so and I'm
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 2: really happy that you came in here to talk about it.
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate being here.
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 2: My pleasure. Jamie put the book up so people can
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 2: see it. Murderland. Uh did you do the audio version
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 2: of it?
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 1: I did not, but do it? Yeah, A woman.
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 2: Crime and blood lust and the time of serial killers.
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 2: I like how you have it all foggy too, you
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 2: know where it makes it look like, ye, his head, yeah,
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 2: I mean his head, it's whoever. The artists did a
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 2: great job of like connecting kind of what we're talking about.
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they did a great job on the cover.
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you, Caroline, thanks for coming in. I thank you,
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 2: really appreciate it. It was really good to talk to you.
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: Great to be