#2360 - Caroline Fraser

Caroline Fraser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and editor. Her most recent book is "Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers." www.carolinefraser.net https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741809/murderland-by-caroline-fraser/ This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/JRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  Thanks for doing this.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:15Joe Rogan?

  So, I read about the premise of your book online and immediately I'm like, "I gotta talk to this lady. That sounds crazy." Please tell people what the premise is, just so we can get started with this.

• 0:28Speaker 01

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

• 0:32Joe Rogan?

  The book's called Murderland.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the book is Murderland. And I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, around the time when there were a lot of, you know, serial killers beginning to pop up. And there always had been this question, "Why are there so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest?" And so that was the question I was really thinking about. And the premise, as it emerged from the research that I did and from some of the facts that I learned about what was happening in the Northwest in this run-up to the 1970s, is

• 1:14Speaker 01

  that there may be a connection between the lead pollution that was prevalent in the area because of smelters and leaded gas and serial killers. Because lead, of course, as we, I think, most people now know, has a connection to heightened aggression and violence in the people who've been exposed to it. So, that was, you know, what emerged to me gradually over the years. I mean, I didn't know a lot about this when I started.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  I knew about the serial killers, but I didn't really know about the whole lead story. And that came about, you know, I learned about it in part because of some murders. I mean, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a lovely place. Unfortunately, New Mexico has a high rate of homicides.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  In part, it's because it's a poor state and doesn't have a big tax base and has, you know, some issues with drug and alcohol addiction. And a few years ago, maybe 2008 or something like that, some people, a couple of people were murdered down the street from me. And I live in a very peaceful neighborhood, you know, very. And that was something that really made me start thinking about the issue of maybe, you know, it might be a good idea to think of moving back to the Pacific Northwest, which

• 3:09Speaker 01

  I wanted to do anyway, because I have family up there. And a few years later, because of that, I was up in the Northwest and looking at real estate ads. And at this point, I didn't really know anything about the smelter, the lead issues. But I was looking at property on Vashon Island, which if you know anything about the Pacific Northwest is in Puget Sound. It's right across from West Seattle. Beautiful little, it was quite rural when I was growing up there, beautiful place.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  And I came across a real estate ad that said, and this is just for undeveloped property, and it said arsenic remediation may be necessary. And I thought, wow, what could possibly have caused so much arsenic pollution on Vashon Island that you would have to get it remediated? I mean, that just seemed crazy to me.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  And I was so curious about that, and I looked it up online. And, you know, within minutes, discovered that there had been an infamous lead and copper smelter in the city of Tacoma, which is just south of Vashon Island. And so Vashon received a lot of the pollution from that smelter. And so that began a whole process of, of kind of learning about what happened here. You know, what happened in this region.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  And I also knew, because I'm sort of really interested in serial killers, as I mentioned, and had been for, for a long time, reading about them and reading about Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway. And I knew that both Bundy and Gary Ridgway, who was the Green River Killer, had grown up in Tacoma. At the same time that this smelter is, you know, the smelter had been operated, operating there since the 1880s, 1890s, so for a very long time.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  And I could see that a lot of news media had been devoted to looking at what had happened in this, in this region. You know, there was a whole map, a GIS map, geographic, you know, information systems that allowed you to look up individual houses, you know, residential homes in Tacoma, and see how much arsenic and lead pollution was in the yards. So I discovered that you could actually look up the house where Ted Bundy grew up and see how much lead was in his front yard and his backyard.

• 6:19Speaker 01

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

• 6:35Joe Rogan?

  So this this issue of lead pollution, is it just serial killers? Or is there an elevated amount of violent crime that goes along with it?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, the the issue of serial killers is one that I kind of introduced as a, you know, the most extreme example.

• 6:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  But most of the research that's been done has focused on aggression, juvenile delinquency, for example. There are long-term studies that look at kids who were exposed to lead, including in relatively small amounts, and then what happens to them later. You know, by the time they're, you know, teenagers or young adults. And they have shown a very strong association with, you know, problems with learning, ADHD,

• 7:41Speaker 01

  and, and as I said, delinquency and crime.

• 7:45Joe Rogan?

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

• 7:55Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 7:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, decrease in IQ, a lot of factors that they can directly tie into just the lead from gasoline, which is significantly less than I would assume you'd get from a large-scale smelting operation. This episode is brought to you by the Mosquito Bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part, it's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat, where the stakes were life and death.

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• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the leaded gas is particularly tragic because that was essentially a kind of horrific experiment that was conducted on generations of kids in this country. Yeah. And adults, because everybody was exposed to that. Obviously, some people, more than others, if you lived next to a major highway or something like that, you were getting more of it than if you maybe lived somewhere else, although I think rural people were also exposed because of the kinds of machinery and stuff that's used on farms and so forth.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  So it was a terrible idea, and they knew that at the time. The companies, the corporations, the people who introduced it, Standard Oil, DuPont, et cetera, they knew the dangers of this. They were told by medical doctors. Really? Yeah, who said, "This will expose everybody to more lead than human beings have ever had to deal with before." Wow. And... And they just did it to stop the engines from knocking? They did, and apparently there were alternatives, but the alternatives, which

• 12:26Speaker 01

  were like ethanol, were not something that could be patented. Oh. And were not products that you could make money off of. And so all these corporations chose to do this. Oh, God. Yeah, I mean, it's really almost unreal to think about.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  The moral failure that this, I mean, failure doesn't even seem strong enough.

• 12:58Joe Rogan?

  It doesn't. It's so evil. It's so strange how many times that that has happened in, in human history and in fairly recent history where companies know what they're putting out or what they're releasing or what they're prescribing or whatever it is, is going to damage people. And they know that short term, they can make a lot of money and so they do it anyway.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they did for, for decades because, you know, this began in the, in the twenties and thirties.

• 13:26Joe Rogan?

  So, we can assume that the smelting thing, they probably didn't know, correct? Like, is, is at least in the eighteen hundreds?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, in, in the eighteen hundreds, they probably weren't thinking about stuff like that. They didn't have data on it. But by the time the companies really got up and running and, and the smelter in Tacoma was owned by a company called Asarco, which was the American Smelting and Refining Company, owned by the Guggenheim family.

• 14:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  And...

• 14:03Joe Rogan?

  But they've done so much for art.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that, it's just...

• 14:09Joe Rogan?

  That's what they like to do.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a total kind of whitewashing the reputation.

• 14:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  And they were among the, you know, earlier corporations to do that and totally successfully.

• 14:24Joe Rogan?

  It's so dark. My friend Peter Berg explained to me the origins of the Nobel Prize. Did you know the origins of the Nobel Prize?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  It has something to do with, with explosives, right?

• 14:38Joe Rogan?

  Yes, the, the gentleman who the Nobel Prize is named after, they erroneously reported that he was dead in the newspaper. And they called him the Merchant of Death in the newspaper. And you're like, oh, my God, this is what people think about me because he invented dynamite. And so he's like, I've got to do something to clean up my reputation. So he devised this strategy of awarding this prestigious award named after him to all the great scientists and Nobel Peace Prize and all these different things. So now when people hear the term Nobel, like, oh, he's a Nobel laureate. Oh, he's, he's a Nobel Prize winner. And that's the origin of it. It was just a whitewashing operation.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the same thing happened with the guy who invented the leaded gas formula, Thomas Midgley, who was really a terrible guy. He invented the, the leaded gas stuff. He also invented chlorofluorocarbons, you know, the stuff in refrigerants that caused the

• 15:48Joe Rogan?

  Ozone layer hole?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  The hole in the ozone layer.

• 15:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, terrific.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  So like two of the most devastating discoveries, scientific discoveries in the 20th century are down to this guy. And he was awarded the, you know, highest medal from the, you know, American Chemistry Association, which he still holds. I mean, even though he, he became really ill as a result, I think, of working with this tetra, you know, tetraethyl, it's called, the, the substance that was added to, to leaded gas. And he, you know, went to Florida to try and heal himself of this,

• 16:37Speaker 01

  which I don't think you can do. I mean, I, I don't think going to Florida heals lead exposure, but he, yes, and he developed something which was called polio. You know, he became, you know, unable to walk and he invented this whole bizarre kind of system of pulleys that he could use to, to lift himself out of bed. And eventually he strangled to death in this.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Sort of harness thing, which it may have been suicide, it may have been an accident, kind of unclear.

• 17:19Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So, when you first started investigating this, was your interest in serial killers? You always had an interest in serial killers, which is always weird to me, how many women are interested in serial killers? Like, all of the top true crime podcasts, if you look at their demographics, it's a large chunk of it, it's women. And I know the women in my house love to watch those true crime shows. And those serial killer, which disturbs the shit out of me, like, my family was watching something on The Night Stalker, on Richard Ramirez, and, like, I can't watch this. I can't wa- I get sick. I get sick and I can't watch it. They're, like, fascinated. Like, why is that?

• 18:03Joe Rogan?

  Why do you think women are so interested? I'm not, like, lumping you in with all women, but there is a weird thing with women in true crime podcasts.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that that has to do with the fact that women deal with fear, you know, fear of, and it may be very, you know, nebulous, it may be kind of unclear what, you know, but a lot of women have just had the experience of being afraid walking alone at night, or walking through a parking lot, or, you know, or they've had direct experience of, you know, some kind of, of male violence or aggression, you know, at home, domestic violence. So, I think there's a whole gamut of experiences that women have had, to one extent or another,

• 18:56Speaker 01

  that feed into that. And for me, it was growing up, you know, just a couple of miles from the places where Ted Bundy began abducting women in the summer of, you know, the, the winter and summer of 1974. And everybody knew there was somebody out there. This is at a time when the term serial killer wasn't even really in use yet. People didn't really understand the phenomenon. It was still kind of an unusual...

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Thing, and this was happening, you know, women were disappearing from dorm rooms or their rooms at University of Washington. They were disappearing off the street. And then they weren't seen again for weeks, for months. You know, in the July of 1974, I was 13. And on a really hot, you know, Sunday afternoon in 1974, two women disappeared from a crowded beach at Lakes of Mammoth, which was about, you know, 10 minutes from my house.

• 20:14Speaker 01

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

• 20:33Joe Rogan?

  So did you plan on writing a book about serial killers? Or was this understanding of the lead and the arsenic what led you down to write this book?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never really wanted to write a book that was just about serial killers. I mean, I think that's been done.

• 20:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Lots of people have done that and done a good job, you know? I mean, Anne Ruhl, the woman who wrote the first book about Ted Bundy, who knew Ted Bundy.

• 21:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, she knew him?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yes, she worked with him at a rape crisis clinic.

• 21:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  In Seattle, yeah.

• 21:12Joe Rogan?

  He worked at a rape crisis clinic? Wow.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  He was very interested in doing research on rape.

• 21:19Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Because, of course, he was something of an expert. So, yeah, yeah, that was why that book was such a phenomenon, because she knew him before anybody had identified, you know, anything in him. She liked him. She was friends with him.

• 21:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  She gave him, you know, a ride to the Christmas party.

• 21:43Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:45Joe Rogan?

  Was this while he was killing or before he started?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Well, the thing that we don't really know about Ted Bundy is when he started killing. He would never answer that question. And one of the cases that I talk about that really is part of what made me want to write this book is a case of an eight-year-old girl who was abducted in Tacoma in 1961, in August of 1961, Anne Marie Burr. And he was 14 at that time. And he is now one of the principal suspects, I think, behind her abduction.

• 22:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  So that may have been his first murder.

• 22:34Joe Rogan?

  14.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:39Joe Rogan?

  Was there like a history of him torturing animals or anything along those lines?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Um, no. But, but one of the things that I think the FBI was discovering when they started doing all this, you know, investigation of, of the pasts, you know, the childhood of serial killers, was that this starts really young, that the fantasies and the obsessions with, you know, I mean, some of, some of them famously do torture or kill the family pets and so forth. With Ted, that wasn't the case. I think with, with him, one of the things you see is that he never knew who his father was.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  He was born illegitimate at a founding home in Vermont, and his mother left him there for a couple of months before she went back and, and kind of retrieved him. And that's a common factor with a lot of these guys. They don't, they don't know their dad, they don't know who he is, maybe. Or they have, you know, a very bad relationship with the parents. There's maybe abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. We don't know that about Ted Bundy in terms of the abuse factor, but.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  He remains, I think, really puzzling to people for that reason because you don't see some of the usual signs with him.

• 24:22Joe Rogan?

  And because he refused to answer questions?

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Well, he talked a lot about, you know, various people were able to interview him. The detective in King County in Seattle, who was in charge of the investigation, he was actually quite young when he took this on. I think it was his first major case as a detective. He eventually was able to interview Ted Bundy in prison when he was on death row. Bundy, for a variety of reasons, wouldn't talk about anything that he did, except hypothetically

• 25:10Speaker 01

  in the third person, because he was still trying to work the legal system, and so he didn't want to admit to what he'd done.

• 25:19Joe Rogan?

  How did he talk about it hypothetically in the third person?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it was sort of like O.J. Simpson or something. He would say, "Well, if somebody was gonna do this..."

• 25:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  "...here's what he probably would have done." And so there was a lot of that up until the very last days of Bundy's sojourn on death row. And then he finally began confessing in the last two or three days, in an attempt, I think, to get the governor interested in perhaps extending his life because he could give information about where bodies had been left and so forth. But that didn't convince the governor of Florida.

• 26:11Joe Rogan?

  So when you saw this real estate and you found out that it needed to have arsenic removed from it, this began this sort of journey that you went on to try to connect this area with serial killers and toxins. And what did you find? Like, is there a disproportionate number of serial killers that come from that particular area?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, there really are, as I discovered, a really kind of extraordinary number. And it's hard to talk about these numbers simply because we don't know what a normal number of serial killers in a given population.

• 26:56Joe Rogan?

  And is some of them don't get caught? So are there like undiscovered serial killers that are in that area? Or maybe deaths that are attributed to unknown people?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  There are several cases that have never been resolved. You know, there's something called the dismemberment murders that, you know.

• 27:15Joe Rogan?

  Dismemberment murders?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, up in, up in the northwest where, you know, various feet and things were found washing up on shore and nobody could figure out who they belonged to.

• 27:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I remember that. That was fairly recently, right? Am I thinking of the same thing?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  It may be another thing that you're thinking of, but I think this dates back.

• 27:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's another thing. It was like shoes that had a human foot in it.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  And they could have just been, you know, bodies of people who

• 27:47Joe Rogan?

  Drowned.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Who drowned, because that's, I think, what happens in some cases. So I think that's a sort of question mark. There are a couple of others. There's one in Idaho that they've never solved. So there are those cases. But even aside from those, I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at the year 1974, because it seemed really active in terms of what was happening with serial killers around the country and in the, in the northwest. And it was the famously, the year when, when Bundy really kind of broke free of any restraints

• 28:30Speaker 01

  he might have once had and, and began abducting women, basically kind of like once a month.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  During that year, and in 1974, I found at least six active serial killers in Seattle or along the I-5 corridor, who were all kind of working at the same time.

• 28:54Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And that seems like a lot to me. And just looking at Tacoma, the rate of violent crime really skyrocketed in 1974 and in the mid-'70s. It's just started going up and up and up. And you see this, unfortunately, across the country. The rate of violent crime in the '70s and '80s rose to heights that had not been seen before in this country.

• 29:25Joe Rogan?

  Are there other factors? So there's leaded gasoline, which is a major factor. But what other factors do you think, in terms of like environmental toxins and things, like why 1974?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Well, there are various theories that have been put forth. I mean, people have pointed out that in the mid-'70s was when the baby boom generation, which was, you know, large in terms of its population density, that those people had started to kind of come of age. They'd entered the period when you're most likely to commit crimes, which is your 20s or 30s. And so there was that. There was a lot of economic uncertainty. There was a recession. Nixon, you know, was in the White House early on in the '70s. There was the Vietnam War.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  There had been a lot of violence during the '60s. And so people point to those factors as contributing to this as well. But I think also, you know, based on the science that's being done, you do need to look at the toxins that were becoming really, really prevalent. The lead, cadmium is another heavy metal that's very similar to lead in the body in terms of its association with aggression.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Zinc, manganese, all these things were being.

• 31:04Joe Rogan?

  Zinc?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:05Joe Rogan?

  Zinc is associated with aggression?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  I don't know that it's associated with aggression, but it's one of these things that was forming the exposure to particulate pollution, which is now associated with all kinds of health problems, you know, heart problems. I mean, lead is a toxin, it's a poison. And so you put it in the body and it becomes, you know, it's very easy for that to reach your brain. And what happens is that, you know, especially if you're exposed to a lot

• 31:48Speaker 01

  of this stuff, you can be sick in all kinds of ways. You can get health, heart problems. It's now been associated with various forms of dementia, Alzheimer's, ALS. So there's a lot of things that lead can cause, but they have shown statistically that the increase in lead in the population, in the air, in the mid 70s, really may have contributed to a rise in violent crime.

• 32:25Joe Rogan?

  What year did they start putting lead in gasoline?

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Well, they invented the stuff in the 1920s, but, you know, just thinking back to those early decades, not that many people had cars.

• 32:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  You know, and there was a big depression, of course, in the 1930s. So there's not a lot of driving happening in terms of what we see now.

• 32:49Joe Rogan?

  The van.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, it just wasn't as big of a deal.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  It was, you know, rare to have one car, much less, you know, two or three. And then during the war, you had, I mean, the war, World War II is really interesting to look at in terms of lead because I have a sort of little chapter about this because during World War II, gasoline, of course, was rationed, you know, they needed all of it for the war effort. But the war effort itself raised the amount of metals, all these metals, lead, copper, et cetera, were needed so intensively for the war that they began to be produced more

• 33:40Speaker 01

  than at any other time in world history. And so the pollution from that, you know, from producing all these, you know, tanks and vehicles and planes and everything that they needed was really going to form the basis of what would become the Superfund program. Because a lot of the Superfund sites in this country can be traced back to World War II. And so that's when a lot of this stuff started entering the environment. And once it's there, it's really hard to get rid of it. I mean, that's the problem with lead.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  It doesn't wash away, it doesn't go anywhere, it just hangs around and becomes, you know, part of our environment. It becomes dust that is, you know, in people's houses or their attic. And that, I think, is what people eventually started, you know, when, after the war, people started driving lots and lots more, you know, in the 50s and 60s. This country particularly was doing really well economically and everybody was buying cars and driving them for the first time.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  You know, en masse.

• 35:03Joe Rogan?

  In history, in human history.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  That's right. And so it really becomes, I think, a heavy pollutant around that time. And so by the seventies, the kids who had been, you know, born in the fifties, they're starting to show the effects of lead poisoning.

• 35:23Joe Rogan?

  I have a friend who briefly lived in Brooklyn, and he had a very small backyard that he was gonna try to grow some plants in, grow a small garden. But he did some soil samples, he's a very, very intelligent guy, did some soil samples and sent it to university to get it tested. And it would just fill with lead. And he was like, what is this all about? And it was like, it's all from leaded gasoline. So this was in the two thousands. So I think this was around two thousand twelve, two thousand thirteen. And they had told him, there's a few things that you could do. There's certain plants that you could grow that would remove some of it from the soil, other than completely excavating and replacing it with fresh soil.

• 36:07Joe Rogan?

  But his whole backyard was essentially lead poisoned.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's.

• 36:13Joe Rogan?

  When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.

• 36:18Joe Rogan?

  Join a car sharing club today. That was during the gas rationing days.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  Crazy. That was the craziest one, but.

• 36:26Joe Rogan?

  Have you really tried to save gas by getting into a gas club? They do it, so can we. Oh, clown cars? What is that?

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Uh, sorry, yeah.

• 36:34Joe Rogan?

  What is that?

• 36:34Speaker 03

  It's a bunch of soldiers in the back.

• 36:36Joe Rogan?

  Soldiers, oh, okay.

• 36:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So they were just, this was all just about gas rationing?

• 36:45Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Save fuel to make munitions for the battle.

• 36:47Joe Rogan?

  Wow. The daughter who heaped on the coal. Wow, they're mad at her, look at her. Oh, no, I'm trying to stay warm, stay alive. Wow. So, um, is there an uptick in violence in these areas where they were, um, making stuff for the war effort where they would be polluting the area?

• 37:15Joe Rogan?

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• 38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you definitely see, you know, what happened in Tacoma is very well recorded now. Another city where this happened was El Paso, Texas, because Osarco had another major smelter.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  In El Paso that had started in the 1890s and had been spewing this stuff out for decades. But all of the smelters during the war were kind of, they weren't taken over by the government, but the government introduced all kinds of, you know, price fixing and so forth to, to make it not possible for these companies to raise prices astronomically. And, and a lot of the stuff was requisitioned for the war effort. So in El Paso, by the 1970s,

• 39:38Speaker 01

  they were starting to discover that this whole area around the smokestack of the smelter was heavily lead contaminated. And what I, you know, I thought, well, El Paso, that's interesting. But there were no serial killers in El Paso. And so I Googled that. And like, you know, within a minute, I discover that Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, grew up in El Paso, not very far from the smelter. And, you know, we associate him now with

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Los Angeles because that's where he committed most of his murders. But he did not grow up there.

• 40:25Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So this association with these chemicals and violence, and so this is well-known. And is, if you could look at a map of the areas where this is the biggest problem, is there also a correlation with an uptick in violent crime and uptick in serial killers? Like, is it not just Pacific Northwest? Is it around El Paso? So as well.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you start looking up, OK, well, what's the crime rate, the violent crime rate in El Paso? And yes, that starts going up in the 1970s. And so there does seem to be an association with this. There's a guy named Rick Nevin, who was, who is an economist and social scientist, and he put together a paper about this, which was published online that includes about, you know, 45 graphs of all these different, you know, showing the

• 41:36Speaker 01

  rise in violent crime, the rise in teen pregnancies, which is sort of how women come into it. The impulsivity seems to have perhaps led to a real rise in teen pregnancies in the 70s and 80s, which, you know, if you remember, that was kind of a big thing then.

• 42:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  And isn't now.

• 42:04Joe Rogan?

  Is this also tied to the sexual revolution? I mean, and then also, when was birth control, like oral birth control, introduced?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  I think that was in the 1960s, early 60s, that that first becomes available. I can't tell you exactly what year. But yeah, I mean, I'm sure that there is some.

• 42:28Joe Rogan?

  There's a bunch of other factors. It's not like we can pin everything on lead and arsenic.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 42:33Joe Rogan?

  But there's contributing factors.

• 42:35Speaker 01

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

• 42:44Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's like what you're talking about Ted Bundy was a bunch. Factors that lead this person to becoming that.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:51Joe Rogan?

  Also, lead.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, as I say somewhere in the book, a little extra lead, you know, may have been something that, you know, maybe they had a lot of other factors to begin with, abuse, poverty. In the 1950s, a lot of babies were delivered with forceps, which caused brain damage in a certain percentage of of kids. So I think you're looking a lot of different things that contributed to trauma to the brain. You know, I think now they're really focusing on that, you know, in terms of CTE and, you know, brain damage.

• 43:37Speaker 01

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

• 43:49Joe Rogan?

  And impulsivity.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:50Joe Rogan?

  It's a huge issue.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:52Joe Rogan?

  It's fascinating that it also exists in women who have not had head trauma and the correlation between teen pregnancies and things along those lines, that you're just, just, all it would take is like a slight percentage more of impulsivity. And then you would see a corresponding result of that.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Not making great decisions about what you're doing.

• 44:18Joe Rogan?

  The gas thing, the lead in the gas thing is just crazy. It's just crazy to know that that was all done because someone couldn't patent ethanol. They couldn't patent other formulations that would lead to the same result, but, I mean, same result in terms of not having gas making your engine knock, but wouldn't be as profitable for this person.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:42Joe Rogan?

  It's so twisted.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  You know, it may be worth mentioning or describing what a smelter does for people because I think people are not familiar with that anymore. We don't have them in our cities anymore. But, you know, what these things were, were these giant primary smelters to melt rock. You know, it was like taking the rocks from mines that were full of all these different metals. You know, including arsenic, this is where the arsenic came from. But they were full of metals like, you know, lead and copper and silver and gold and

• 45:24Speaker 01

  melting those rocks in these giant furnaces. And all of this put off an enormous amount of pollution, you know, particulate pollution that was going up the smokestack. And they were, you know, the companies that ran these things were keeping all the valuable metals that they could for themselves, you know, the silver and the copper and all of that. And so they did have filters on them. But one of the things that happened sometimes with these smelters is that they would kind of fail or the filters would fail. There's this horrifying example in Idaho.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  It was a company called Bunker Hill that was one of the largest silver mines, I think, in the world. And they had a lead smelter in this town called Kellogg, which is right on I-90. If you've ever driven on I-90, you know, from Missoula, Montana, or something like that to Seattle, you've driven through this place. And they built, you know, this giant smelter facility to handle all the stuff they were pulling out of the mines.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  And in 1973, they had a fire in their filtration building that destroyed most of the filter that was trying, you know, the thing that was supposed to keep lead from going up the smokestack. And there were kids in this town. There were, there was an elementary school right across the street from the smokestack. Jesus. And, and the descriptions of that school are so horrifying because the teachers used to think that sometimes that the, that the facility had caught fire because there was so much smoke. Oh, God.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  But in fact, it wasn't, there wasn't, you know, it was just what the smokestack was putting out. But after that filter failed... That company, which was owned by Gulf and Western at the time, did a kind of back-of-the-napkin calculation of what those kids' lives were worth. Because they felt like, okay, we're going to get sued if we keep running the plant without filtration. But is that really going to matter? Because these kids' lives are probably only worth about $11 million apiece.

• 48:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 48:04Speaker 01

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

• 48:13Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  And we know this because of the lawsuits that were ultimately filed. Because, you know, they did end up in court. And there were kids, there was a baby who was more lead-poisoned than any human being that the doctors had ever seen.

• 48:35Joe Rogan?

  So it says here that after it destroyed the the fire broke out that destroyed the filters. So it says, "For the next year and a half, the smelter continued to operate, and dust polluted with heavy metals rained down on the area. During that time, children living in the area were screened for lead by the state and the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the results were foreboding. Children in Kellogg, for example, averaged 50 micrograms per deciliter of blood. The CDC recommends five micrograms, high enough to warrant concern. And children with levels above 45 micrograms are advised to undergo chelation therapy, which involves administering compounds like, I don't know how to say that word. How do you say that word?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 49:19Joe Rogan?

  Dimercaptosuccin acid, either orally or intravenously, to remove heavy metals from the bloodstream. Lead is a neurotoxin linked to schizophrenia, poor academic performance, low cognitive ability, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Once the metal gets into the blood, it concentrates in the brain, the kidneys, the liver, and the bones. In pregnant women, lead can cross into the placenta, poisoning their unborn babies." Holy shit.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was a nightmarish thing and.

• 49:54Joe Rogan?

  Look at this, it says, oh my god. It, it, and, so, listen to this. Slowly poisoned, as a teenager in Kellogg, Ohio, Florrie, this person I'm talking about, attended the Silver King School, built in nineteen twenty-eight in the gulch, gulch between bunker hill lead smelter and zinc plant, an offshoot of the Coeur d'Alene River, flowed by the school, it was, says Florrie, a light glowing green color. Sort of a glow, like a glow stick, oh god. In nineteen seventy-three, a fire broke out, and so this is the, the fire that we're talking about. Oh my god. A, a light glowing green color.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:37Joe Rogan?

  Fuck.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  I used to live in, um, New Jersey, right by the, um, in, in, um, Jersey City.

• 50:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 01

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

• 50:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 01

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

• 51:14Speaker 01

  compact cars, and I mean, there was all this heavy, heavy industry there and, and pollutants. And you had to walk across this little wooden trail over a, a stream, um, to get to the park, and the water was that color. I mean, it was like this disgusting, you know, color not found in nature, and you just looked at it and thought, what, what is that, what's in that?

• 51:41Joe Rogan?

  And this is in the United States of America where we have at least some kind of regulations. Just imagine what is happening when these companies are allowed to ship off to third world countries where there's no regulation.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  And they're bribing officials and just polluting everything. Yeah, I mean, that's what happened with the Sarko, you know, at, at, once the EPA had sort of got started and, and the various clean air and clean water acts were passed and, and legislation about what you could do in the workplace, because I mean, imagine what it was like to work in these smelters. Yeah. It was, it just basically became illegal to operate them and the companies could no longer afford to do it. So they all pretty much went out of business in the 1980s.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  But it, it, it is just an incredible sort of time in America because it was like, well, what's the trade off here? You know, the, the profits are worth much more than people's lives. God. And that place, the Cordelene, you know, there's a town, city called Cordelene in Idaho, but there's also this giant lake, Lake Cordelene. And all that pollution from Bunker Hill, from the mines, from the smelter, it all went down river and is now sitting

• 53:16Speaker 01

  at the bottom of Lake Cordelene. And that's been a superfund project for many, many years, but they really can't clean that up because it's, it's the kind of thing where you try to remove the sediment that's full of all the lead and stuff and it stirs everything up. And so it's really, really almost impossible to, to clean a lot of that.

• 53:44Joe Rogan?

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• 55:49Joe Rogan?

  Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Yeah, we were talking about this the other day, that you really shouldn't even eat freshwater fish. Because freshwater fish, the, the problem is because of all the pollutants that settle into these lakes. When you don't have flowing water, freshwater fish is just sitting in all these chemicals and all these heavy metals and it's, it's, you know, it's really disturbing.

• 56:33Joe Rogan?

  Like, if you eat freshwater fish, your exposure to forever chemicals is like ridiculously high. Like, what, what was the number? We, we pulled it up the other day, but

• 56:46Joe Rogan?

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

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Yikes.

• 56:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, BPAs and all these different disgusting things that are a part of our world that we didn't know until it was too late. Eating one freshwater fish equals a month of drinking forever chemicals water.

• 57:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god. PFAS found in high levels in freshwater fish with most concern for vulnerable communities. I, I remember we did this television show once and we were in Detroit. And Detroit, which is notoriously very poor and at one point in time was the third richest city in the world. Um, but when we were there, these people were fishing in this lake. Really, obviously very poor people. Um, and just catching food in this lake. And I was like, oh my god, like, what are these people eating? Like, this is clearly polluted water. And it was just outside of a plant.

• 57:55Joe Rogan?

  And, you know, they had no choice. They needed food. And so they, they went there, they're poor. And who knows what's, what kind of health consequences these poor people are suffering from.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely the, the poor communities that get the worst.

• 58:13Joe Rogan?

  And the thing is, it's like a hundred and fifty years ago, all that was pristine. It's such a short amount of time. If you think about how long those lakes existed, how long these river systems existed, and in a couple of hundred years, we've ruined everything essentially forever.

• 58:34Joe Rogan?

  For profit.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 58:37Joe Rogan?

  And they knew it, and that's what's sick.

• 58:40Joe Rogan?

  The thing you're telling me about this smelting plant and the fire in Idaho, and the fact that they knew and they made a back of a napkin calculation as to these children's lives. That is so disgusting. It's so hard to believe that that's how people operate, but yet I know they do.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's murder. And that's why I called it murder land. You know, I think that the behavior of these corporate actors was as bad. I mean, it's, you know, maybe pernicious to compare, but I think that, you know, people have come to see that the ways that corporations have behaved is murderous. You know, that they're not, I mean, aside from, you know, just the issue of taking responsibility, they're just going to go ahead with what they want to do and make the profits that they want and leave us to pay the price.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  And that, I think, is something that in a sane world would have to change. You know, we would have to look at what a corporation wants to do before they start doing it. You know, and figure out, okay, well, if they want to proceed with this, how do we prevent the damage that could occur? And if they can't figure out how to prevent it, they shouldn't be operating.

• 1:00:10Joe Rogan?

  Also, they lie.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  They lie.

• 1:00:13Joe Rogan?

  Whatever they're going to tell us. I mean, we found this out from pharmaceutical drug companies that when they run studies, they'll run 10 studies that show damage and they'll find one study that they can kind of manipulate into showing some sort of efficacy. And then they'll publish that one study and bury the other studies that show damage and then release a product and then have internal emails where they show that they know that this is going to cause problems. And this is the issue with the drug Vioxx that wound up killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 Americans. And I know. People don't like to equate those people with serial killers. But what else would you call that? What else would you call if you know that you're gonna kill people?

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Joe Rogan?

  But you're also gonna make money? And you decide, eh, let's do it anyway. Let's do it anyway. Let's make some money. And sixty thousand people die because of it. And then who knows how many people also survived but got strokes? And it's a large number.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's now very difficult to figure out how many people were directly and indirectly harmed by these smelters because of the destruction of evidence. Many of them had sort of, you know, people on staff who were whose b'job it was to put out false information. In Tacoma, there was a guy, a doctor at the smelter, who wrote false papers, saying that, oh, the workers aren't being harmed by exposure to arsenic, when in fact, his numbers showed that people who worked at the plant

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  were dying of an elevated percentage of lung cancer. And he suppressed that information. He said, you know, he said their deaths were from heart failure, which everybody dies of heart failure, you know? So he basically was falsifying the information from their death certificates and publishing papers, you know, designed to make it look like arsenic wasn't a poison.

• 1:02:30Joe Rogan?

  And probably nicely rewarded by the corporation for doing that. It's just this issue of diffusion of responsibility. When you have this obligation to your shareholders to continually make each quarter generate more income, and then you have to figure out how to do that. And then you realize like, oh, I'm just a part of a big thing. I'm just gonna do my job to get more money. I'm not gonna think about the consequences. I'm just gonna put blinders on and think about my vacation home that I'm gonna get out of all this.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, what you said about the lying is really true. And this is what you see in serial killers.

• 1:03:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  That they lie about everything.

• 1:03:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  They, they lie about stuff they don't even need to lie about. It's just, it's their...

• 1:03:21Joe Rogan?

  It's their MO.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, they're just so inured to it and they want to get away with what they're doing.

• 1:03:29Joe Rogan?

  They should have went for corporate America. Should have worked for them and they could have got away with it. They might have been fine.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Joe Rogan?

  Never got caught. I mean, I just, I wonder how many people who are working for these chemical corporations and how many, how many exhibit the exact same traits as serial killers. They just don't want to get intimate and actually physically cause the murder, but get some sort of a bizarre thrill out of knowing that they're doing this kind of damage to people for profit.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we don't want to think about it. We don't want to think about sociopaths. We don't want to think about psychopaths. And sociopaths and psychopaths, there's a lot of overlap. We don't want to think about what percentage of us exhibit these traits where we have zero empathy.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:19Joe Rogan?

  And there's a lot of people like that, that is zero. But, I mean, I know people like that, that have no empathy. They don't care if other people get hurt. And I don't understand it. But I don't have whatever is wrong with them. And I want, I always wonder, like, is that nature? Is that nurture? Is, are we dealing with environmental toxins? Is there's exposure to something at a young age? Like, what is it that causes that? Is it...

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think it can be, um, brain damage.

• 1:04:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, the, what happens to the frontal cortex of these, uh, kids who are exposed to, to lead and cadmium is that certain parts of the brain fail to develop, uh, correctly. And so, and you can see the, the deficits, the little holes that are supposed to be full of something that helps you make good decisions. You know, the part of your brain that helps you control yourself and control your behavior, that's kind of missing in, in some of these... Kids, and they have shown now that the effects are worse in men than they are in

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  women, that the, you know, the, the damage to the frontal cortex, the neurology is, is more marked in men, and they can see this on the MRI scans. And I think there's, you know, I don't know that they know why that's happening, but it does seem to be, you know, a real effect that they're writing papers about.

• 1:05:56Joe Rogan?

  Well, it does take longer for men to develop their frontal cortex. That's why men are so stupid when they're young, and women are much more mature, younger. Like a, you know, a 20-year-old woman is probably far more mature than a 25-year-old man, and a lot of that, they think, has to do with the frontal lobe.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it obviously is some, you know, incredibly important discovery, what they make of that, and, and how it's all gonna, you know, come out in the wash in terms of what can be done to help kids who have these issues. That, I think, is, is another story.

• 1:06:37Joe Rogan?

  It's just so twisted when you think about the fact that this is all a fairly new thing, like this chemical exposure. Chemical exposure and pollutant exposure is a fairly new thing in terms of like, human history. You know, as we're gaining this understanding of how the human brain develops, which is also a fairly new thing, we're also dealing with this thing that we did collectively as the human race, this thing that we did where we introduced these insane chemicals into the brains of children.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Joe Rogan?

  And, and in this case, like in Idaho, knowingly.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Joe Rogan?

  Calculated.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  And one of the things that sort of blows my mind is that we've known for

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Centuries for eons that these things are bad, you know? I mean, the Romans and the Greeks knew that lead caused, you know, people to go crazy. I mean, they had people who worked with lead, you know, in foundries and things then, and they knew it was a problem. We've known that arsenic is a poison since forever. And yet, you know, comes along the 20th century and somehow these, these corporations are telling communities, including the community on Vashon Island, you know, oh, arsenic is really not a problem, you know, the, the human body just excretes it naturally.

• 1:08:09Joe Rogan?

  Jeez.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:18Joe Rogan?

  I found out at one point in time in my life that I had a disturbing level of arsenic in my system. I went to get blood work done and my doctor said, you have a concerning level of arsenic. And he started asking me about my diet and I said, I eat a lot of sardines. He's like, stop doing that. He goes, how much do you eat? I like three or four cans a night. He's like, don't do that.

• 1:08:44Joe Rogan?

  So because sardines spend their time in the bottom of the ocean.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:48Joe Rogan?

  Like, that's where all the heavy metals accumulate.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:51Joe Rogan?

  And I was getting arsenic from eating cans of sardines. I stopped eating the sardines. I waited like a few months and went back, got more blood work and it's gone.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:09:02Joe Rogan?

  I was like, wow.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there actually are two kinds of arsenic. There's organic arsenic, which you can get from seafood. And if you're eating a lot of, you know, shrimp or sardines or, or whatever, it can build up. And I think that that form of arsenic is, is slight, is less toxic and less of a problem. You don't want it.

• 1:09:27Joe Rogan?

  You definitely don't want it.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  I mean, as your doctor said, don't, don't do that.

• 1:09:31Joe Rogan?

  It's just crazy.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the, the stuff that they were producing at the smelter in Tacoma was, was what's called inorganic arsenic. And that's the stuff they use to poison rats and they used it for insecticides and, and.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Very heavily, you know, during the 40s and 50s, they were putting it all over apple orchards and cherry orchards and cotton crops. So those places were then contaminated with arsenic. And Washington State now has four plumes of this pollution. The big one was in Puget Sound from the smelter, which was like a thousand square miles of Puget Sound that was contaminated. But also Wenatchee, which is over in eastern Washington where they have all these apple

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  orchards, there's another plume there from those pesticides and insecticides.

• 1:10:40Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  And there's a couple more. There's another plume up in Everett where there was what they called an arsenic kitchen. The Rockefellers used to own mines up in the Cascade Mountains. And they had a smelter in Everett that was then bought by the Guggenheim's and they moved their arsenic kitchen to Tacoma. But it left all this pollution in Everett. And so they discovered, you know, all these people had built houses and condos and things on top of where the arsenic kitchen had been, which, you know, that stuff was never cleaned up.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:11:30Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Well, in-

• 1:11:45Joe Rogan?

  Five acres of ground that's poisoned.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. In Tacoma, what they did, that was where the worst of the pollution was, because the smokestack was getting, sitting right, you know, near the water. The smokestack was blown up in the 90s. Um, and, and they

• 1:12:04Joe Rogan?

  Blown up?

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, they exploded the, the smokestack, which I'm

• 1:12:09Joe Rogan?

  On purpose?

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they, you know, they closed the plant in nineteen eighty six.

• 1:12:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so it's a debt control demolition?

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was a, yes, exactly.

• 1:12:18Joe Rogan?

  Which also probably contributed greatly to more pollutants.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  They claimed that they cleaned the inside of the smokestack, but

• 1:12:25Joe Rogan?

  Before they blew it up?

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, great.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, so, yeah, in Tacoma, they, they carted away tons of soil. Uh, they took, you know, they went into people's yards, they tested all of the yards and told people, "Okay, you're gonna have to replace the soil." Um, and, and so, yeah, they went in and they, by this point, Asarco had declared bankruptcy and the EPA eventually had to take over the whole thing. Um, but they, you know, the EPA got an unprecedented, uh, environmental, uh, bankruptcy settlement out of Asarco, which was close to two billion dollars.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Um, I think it was the highest settlement that they'd ever gotten from a corporation. But it had to clean up about twenty different, uh, superfund sites, including the one in Idaho, uh, in Cordillane, which they've, you know, they've been working on that for years and still haven't finished. But in Tacoma, they actually did replace the soil in many, many people's yards. Um, but, you know, they run out of money. I mean, I think on places like Vashon, um, a lot of that was on the southern part. Uh, I think you could request, uh, soil replacement, um, in some of these places, but it wasn't necessarily guaranteed, depending on where you lived.

• 1:13:54Joe Rogan?

  That's also so destructive to the ecosystem. So you're taking out everything

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Joe Rogan?

  that allows these plants to live, animals, mycelium, all, all the different, the network that can, connects all these plants together. You're pulling all that stuff out and introducing new soil.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Joe Rogan?

  And you're not gonna do it everywhere. You're not, you're not gonna get all of it out. There's no way. You're not gonna be able to do the whole island. You're not gonna be able to do, like, every inch of Tacoma, all the land. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick

• 1:15:01Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:41Joe Rogan?

  It's something the body already recognizes and it has hundreds of these specialized nutrients for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism, et cetera. I first noticed it working around training, especially workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still taking this. If you want to try, Armra is offering my listeners 30% off. Go to armra.com/rogan.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, they have to take that soil somewhere. So in Tacoma, they took it to some special landfill. But I mean, one of the really crazy things that happened as a result of closing the smokestack there was that they took that arsenic kitchen that I was talking about, the one that had been up in Everett, and some of the most contaminated parts of the buildings that were part of the whole smelter compound. And the...

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  A Sarko promised that they were going to take all that stuff and put it somewhere else. I don't know where they were going to put it, but they said they were going to take it. But then they went bankrupt, and so they didn't remove it. And instead, they created this very bizarre kind of pit with where they put all the worst stuff, including a bunch of the soil, the contaminated soil from Everett and the arsenic kitchen. And they put it in a sort of super heavy duty, plastic lined, you know, garbage bag, essentially. I mean, if you can imagine like the largest garbage bag in the world.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  They put all this stuff in it, and they capped it with soil. And that thing is sitting there, you know, still, even though they have now, you know, they cleared off the whole area where the compound was, where the factories and that the furnaces were, and they built condos on top of that.

• 1:17:44Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:55Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  So presumably, if the people who are buying condos there know anything about it, they probably are aware of the history.

• 1:18:27Joe Rogan?

  They probably think it's been cleaned up, though.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  But they think it's and in a sense, it has been cleaned up. I mean, but

• 1:18:33Joe Rogan?

  In a sense. But also, doesn't it leak into the water table?

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Well, they have a lot of stuff that they've done. I mean, in the, in the book, I talk about, you know, you know Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune?

• 1:18:47Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  And now they have, you know, developed this whole little park on one, you know, the condos are on one end of this, what used to be the smelter property, and then on the other end, on top of this slag land, the slag is the stuff that's left over after you've pulled all the metal out of the rocks. There's the stuff that, once it's cooled off, looks like gravel, and it's called slag, but it isn't really gravel. I mean, it's contaminated with all this stuff. It's contaminated with arsenic. And, and so they

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  built a park that's called Dune Park, and it's dedicated to Frank Herbert. And it's this little walking trail. And the whole thing, I think, is developed in such a way that it's kind of lined with plastic, and there's a plastic liner, you know, on the shores to keep stuff from leaking out. And like, if you live in one of those condos, you can't plant anything that will be larger than a, you know, small shrub, in part because of the plastic liner thing.

• 1:20:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's wild.

• 1:20:32Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:20:37Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's so disturbing. And then, there's so many factors too, right? There's the plants, and then there's the industrial pesticides. Have you ever read Dissolving Illusions? Suzanne Humphries wrote this book about, and one of the aspects of the book is about DDT, and the ubiquitous use of DDT, and how so many people in rural communities were coming down with, in air quotes, "polio," paralytic polio, that was directly correlated to the use of DDT.

• 1:21:20Joe Rogan?

  Like, the same areas where people, and it wasn't just human beings that were getting this polio, but it was also cows, and horses, and dogs, they were getting paralyzed as well, which, it doesn't cross species. Human-derived polio does not cross species. It's a very dark story. And, you wanna hear something crazy? What percentage of polio do you think is asymptomatic?

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  I've never heard that there's polio that's asymptomatic.

• 1:21:50Joe Rogan?

  Ninety-five to ninety-nine percent. Ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of actual polio is asymptomatic. So what they were calling polio was most likely DDT poisoning.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:22:04Joe Rogan?

  That was sprayed everywhere. It was sprayed everywhere for gypsy moths, and all sorts of different pests. They just, they didn't know. And then, once they did know, it was too late, and they were just trying to cover it up, and say, "No, we cured polio, we cured it, look." And these people that were, you know, getting, air quotes, "polio," were most likely getting poisoned by DDT.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that the, you know, a lot of this environmental stuff has become so overwhelming to people that they kind of tune it out.

• 1:22:37Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  It's like, what are we gonna do about it?

• 1:22:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  There's nothing we can do, so like,

• 1:22:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  let's just pretend it's not happening.

• 1:22:44Joe Rogan?

  I make sure that I don't read any of this stuff late at night. You know, when I, when I read stuff like this right at, late at night, I can't go to sleep. I just, I freak out. I just, it just disturbs me, human beings, their capacity to do things like this, either knowingly or unknowingly, and then to cover it up knowingly. And then to try to find some way to profit off of the removal of it, or the treatment of these ailments that these people suffer, and then the obfuscating and the, you know, diverting the attention to some other thing, like calling it a disease, or calling it something else.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things in my mind when I kind of wanted to develop the whole thing about, you know, talking about serial killers, and violence, and aggression, and where that might have come from, because I, you know, I wanted to talk about all that, and I didn't want to just use it as a kind of Trojan horse to introduce all the stuff about pollution. But I did think it was a way to get people maybe to think about these issues, who might not otherwise want to do that, you know, who, and I think people are interested in

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  the history of how they might have been, you know, exposed.

• 1:24:10Joe Rogan?

  True.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  When I, when I did a, a reading up in Seattle a month or so ago, you know, everybody was talking about where they grew up in relation to this meltdown, like how close they were to it.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  And, you know, what they might have experienced as a result. And that, I think, is one of the interesting things about the Tacoma story is that many poor people were directly exposed. You know, the people who worked at the smelter, they lived right around the smokestacks. So they got the worst of it. But there were a lot of other communities in the area, including Mercer Island, where I grew up, which is now kind of famously wealthy. You know, some of the, you know, Microsoft people have houses there. Or, you know, I think Paul Allen had a house there.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  And it was, when I was a kid growing up there, it was a well-to-do, upper-middle-class place. And one of the things I look at in the book is some of the really bizarre crime that happened on the island at that time, that you wonder, was this, you know, in any way related to, you know, some of these things we're talking about, the rise in lead in the air from, from leaded gas? Because Mercer Island is crossed by I-90. I-90 comes down out of the Cascades and crosses Mercer Island, which is sitting in

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  the middle of Lake Washington, and ends up in Seattle. And so Mercer Island had a lot of pollution from I-90. And it also was in the plume from the Tacoma smelter. And while I was growing up there, some weird shit happened.

• 1:26:14Joe Rogan?

  Like what kind of shit?

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Well, I lived on a street that was close to I-90 and was actually, it kind of ran over the top of a tunnel that enclosed I-90 on part of the island. And down the street from where I grew up was, growing up, another young guy named George Waterfield Russell, who turned out to be a serial killer. And in the 1990s, killed three women on the east side, where Bellevue is. And so that is really kind of a striking.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Fact, you know, you don't expect serial killers to come from that kind of a neighborhood. Not very far away from where Russell grew up. This other guy was also, who went to my high school, as did Russell, was growing up, who became one of the worst arsonists in Seattle history. When he burned down his parents' warehouse and killed several Seattle firefighters. So there were those two. There was a guy in my class at the high school who was obsessed with his ex-girlfriend

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  and went, he worked at a facility that used dynamite. And he stole some dynamite and blasting caps and he went and blew up her dorm building. And there was another kid who went to my junior high, who decided he was so depressed he was going to kill himself. And he drove his car at like 100 miles an hour. It actually wasn't his car, it was like his girlfriend's sister's Camaro or something. And he drove it, you know, at a million miles an hour into the wall of the junior high gymnasium and destroyed the gymnasium.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:32Joe Rogan?

  And that kind of crime.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  And that kind of crime.

• 1:28:34Joe Rogan?

  And oddly enough, always men.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39Joe Rogan?

  Which are uniquely affected by these things. But what, so what about the women that were there? Was there bizarre behavior that you might think could be attributed to these toxins?

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  You know, I don't really know how to answer that. I mean, I think that there was.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  One of the things that I remember about the high school, for example, was, you know, that they, there was a lot of, um, kind of creepy behavior, you know, going on, uh, in terms of food fights and just a lot of stuff you, I don't think you see as much now. Um, I mean, I, this is completely anecdotal, so I can't support any of this, but it just, it felt to me like when my niece and nephew were growing up, that, that they were less, um, troubled as youths, you know, than we were in the 1970s. You know, they were growing

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  up in the, um, 90s, you know, and, and I think there is a little bit of that. I mean, there, there, can't prove it, um, but I think that, uh, it may be true that, you know, the whole, all the jokes about the baby boomers being crazy because of, um, lead exposure, there may be a little bit of truth to that.

• 1:30:11Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it makes sense. If it, I mean, it totally makes sense. I mean, if there were elevated levels of all this lead, elevated levels of all these toxins, and we know that it affects human behavior. I mean, it only makes sense.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  It, it does, and, and I, you know, I hope that one of the things my book might be able to do is to encourage people to just think about this in their, you know, in their lives. And, um, I think a lot of people are now much more aware of lead. I mean, that thing that you were showing earlier about the bunker hill thing, it said that five, um, micrograms per deciliter of lead was the, they've now lowered that to 3.5. And, and it really should be zero, you know, because there is no amount of lead that's safe in terms of exposure. And they know that. I think it just, if the federal government

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  comes out and says it's zero, then that triggers all kinds of things that have to happen and it makes parents freak out because, you know, they might take their child to a doctor and have them tested and find out there's some...

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  You know, if it's not zero, then what are we, what are we gonna do about it?

• 1:31:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  And it's, you know.

• 1:31:34Joe Rogan?

  And who's liable?

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:31:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's what's so disturbing about all this stuff is that a lot of effort is put forth to make sure that whatever companies that may be liable, they, they'll try to distort facts and try to hide evidence and try to make it seem like this is just, this is a nothing burger, this is no big deal. Well, you see that with fluoride. You know, we've been putting fluoride in the water forever, supposedly to help people with tooth decay. And then you're seeing that there's a direct correlation between high levels of fluoride in the water and lowered IQs. And yet, there's still people out there that are saying, oh, we need, we, you're gonna have to see a bunch of tooth decay, we need to put the fluoride back in the water, we need to stop this. Why?

• 1:32:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, because people are profiting off of putting fluoride in water. There's enormous corporations that are responsible for that fluoride. And they provide that fluoride to the drinking water. And under the guise of improving dental health, which is just crazy. Because you don't need it, like, you could just brush your teeth and stop eating something with fucking sugar, which is really the culprit. That's really 100% the culprit. I mean, if you go back to ancient times, one of the things they've seen, they find, um, like, skulls and dead people's teeth from, you know, hundreds of years ago. You don't, you don't find a massive amount of tooth decay because people weren't eating a lot of sugar.

• 1:33:03Joe Rogan?

  They weren't constantly eating candy and stuff that rots your fucking teeth out. It's, we don't need to stop, we don't need to put this neurotoxin into water. We need to stop eating poison. It's like, really simple. You don't add a poison to make you better because there's more poison. Like, it's really crazy. And these are like hardcore facts. This is not something that's deniable. Like if you look at the correlation between fluoride and lowered IQs, it's pretty undeniable. They know it's a fact. They know it's a neurotoxin. But yet they'll brush it off. Oh, but that's in high doses. In low doses, like, well, who's determining?

• 1:33:47Joe Rogan?

  Who's determining? There hasn't been a long history of human use of fluoride in drinking water. It's fairly recent. It's, I believe it goes back into the early 20th century. It's crazy.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it is. I mean, they always say the dose makes the poison. And I suppose that that's true.

• 1:34:07Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I'm sure it's true, but I mean, zero amount is good for you. And this is not a smart thing for people to do. It's why you're not supposed to eat toothpaste that has fluoride in it. They tell you to spit it out. Why? Because it's got fluoride in it and fluoride is fucking bad for you. So why are we putting it in toothpaste in the first place? Like, help me out. You're just trying to clean teeth, right? Like, why do you have to use fluoride? Well, you don't. That's why they sell fluoride-free toothpaste and they advertise it as such. If fluoride was a thing that was helping everyone with tooth decay, why the hell would anybody want to buy fluoride-free toothpaste? Well, because people who've been actually paying attention and reading independent journalists

• 1:34:48Joe Rogan?

  and reading people that have gone outside the mainstream narrative that realize like, this is not good for you. Not only is it not good for you, it probably should have been removed from our water supply a long time ago. So who's responsible? And then it gets into that. It gets into like these corporations that have been dumping fluoride into water or justifying the use of fluoride, the politicians that have been doing it. Who's been getting paid? What's the paper trail? Like, what's going on? And it's just one more piece of disgusting and disturbing evidence.

• 1:35:21Joe Rogan?

  Of human depravity, that people are willing to do things that are just, they know are bad, but they profit.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  And, and they go.

• 1:35:30Joe Rogan?

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• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Herman does not, you know, completely blameless in all of this either because, you know, in terms of of lead, for example, one of the places that I think people are really concerned about is the schools, you know, public schools. Public school buildings were built, you know, often decades ago. So they're old and they have old plumbing. They have lead pipes.

• 1:37:57Joe Rogan?

  Lead paint.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Lead paint.

• 1:37:59Joe Rogan?

  Which is even crazier, that they use lead in paint.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:38:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  In order to do that. And, you know, they have occasionally kind of tiptoed up to this. I think the, you know, the Biden administration did say that they were going to spend, you know, millions of dollars to try and do work at schools. Now I think that's all in question. And so, yeah, it's a, it's a kind of a frightening period right now because the EPA is being defunded in a lot of ways. I'm sure the EPA is not a perfect agency. I'm sure they've made mistakes, but they're the ones.

• 1:38:56Joe Rogan?

  I'm sure they've been compromised, but also someone should be looking into this.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:00Joe Rogan?

  And you're going to need some sort of an environmental group.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:05Joe Rogan?

  That is responsible and just, that can look at these things and say, hey, this is a real issue. And all of our health.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:13Joe Rogan?

  Is dependent upon them doing a really good job of sussing this stuff out.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  And it's the EPA that's responsible for the super fund program, which is in large part responsible for cleaning this stuff up. But they're being defunded, you know, and so who's going to do that? Who's going to clean up, you know, the areas that have radioactive?

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  You know, legacy pollution from World War II, Hanford and all of that. I mean, that stuff's been going on for decades and it's not finished.

• 1:39:52Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  And what kind of?

• 1:40:04Joe Rogan?

  Well, you can find it, Jamie can find it, so I don't want to speak out of tune about this, but munitions, you know, like unexploited munitions and just where things got bombed, where it's so toxic, human beings can't live there. It's the size of Paris. It's like this enormous chunk of land that's like, it's ruined, probably forever.

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and, and there's got to be some kind of, of, you know, government intervention and stuff like this, that, that has to be the responsibility. Because the corporations walked away.

• 1:40:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  And so they can't, you know, Isarco is, still exists, but it's now operating out of Mexico.

• 1:40:51Joe Rogan?

  How convenient.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a whole story.

• 1:40:56Joe Rogan?

  Zone Rogue, World War I era battlefields that are still dangerous over a hundred years later.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:41:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. So, the Red Zone is a chain of former battlefields across northeastern France that the government has cordoned off due to the many dangerous ordinance that remains from the First World War. The area originally spanned over 460 square miles from Nancy through to Lille and incorporates such battlefields as this, how do you say that, Somme, Verdun and Vimy Ridge. While the size of the region has lessened over the hundred plus years since the end of the conflict, the area is still characterized by the scars and remnants of the Great War.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Oh, so this is even World War I, yeah, and all that chemical stuff that they were.

• 1:41:48Joe Rogan?

  Crazy, yeah.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  Using.

• 1:41:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:41:51Joe Rogan?

  That's when they first started using chemical warfare.

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Joe Rogan?

  People are gross.

• 1:41:59Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're awesome, too. Like, a lot of people, you're awesome. A lot of people are awesome. A lot of people are great. I love them. But like, in large groups, when they don't have responsibility for their actions, they're gross. It's, it's, uh, it's very, you know, the more you read about these types of things, like you're describing in your book, and these, um, horrible things that these corporations have done. The, the amount of pollution that they've caused and the amount of damage that they've done. And then, the effects on untold millions of human beings that have been exposed to these things. It's just, it's so disturbing.

• 1:42:42Joe Rogan?

  It's so disturbing that it just makes you, you know, like I said, I can't, I can't read this stuff at night. If I read this stuff at night, I can't sleep. I, I wind up getting up in the middle of the night and wandering around my house and just, it really freaks me out.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of people have said things to me, like, how did you write this book? Like, weren't, and I think they're talking about the serial killer part of it.

• 1:43:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  You know, that they're, um, which, you know, it is really disturbing stuff and, um...

• 1:43:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, all of it's disturbing. The fact that serial killers exist, that's disturbing. The fact that there might be some sort of an environmental effect or chemical effect that's causing some of this behavior to take place.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Well, but we did do the right thing in terms of, you know, now every country in the world that was selling leaded gas has taken it off the market.

• 1:43:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  So, that was a good thing.

• 1:43:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  We made some progress. And, you know, again, this guy's graphs that he published show this.

• 1:43:45Joe Rogan?

  Who's this guy again?

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Rick Nevin. Um, he wrote this, uh, book called Lucifer Curves.

• 1:43:52Joe Rogan?

  See if you can find those graphs.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  Which, which contain all these, these different graphs that show this. And, and what he has shown is that there's one of them in, in my book that he let me reproduce. You know, the, the violent crime rate goes up and up in the seventies and eighties. And then, when they remove, um, yeah, when they remove,

• 1:44:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Uh, the, the leaded gas, the crime rate falls off a cliff.

• 1:44:19Joe Rogan?

  That is crazy. Look at this graph. It's almost like it mirrors it.

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, all these graphs look exactly the same. There's like seven of them.

• 1:44:28Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's wild.

• 1:44:34Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so look at this, scroll, go up a little bit first. So murder from nineteen hundred and nineteen fifty-nine versus paint lead. Look at that.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:45Joe Rogan?

  It's correlation. They're, they're, they're, they're almost mirrored.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Joe Rogan?

  And then aggravated assault versus gasoline lead. Same thing, it's like they're, they follow the same path. It's nuts. Robbery versus gasoline lead. Look at the drop off. With the drop off of gasoline lead, that is nuts.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  And it's the same thing with serial killers. The number of serial killers in the seventies and eighties and nineties goes up to the highest that we've seen, you know, about seven hundred operating in this country during that period. And then it just drops off. And that's why they call that the golden age of serial killers.

• 1:45:31Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  And now it's like, you know, fifty to a hundred.

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  So I think there are always have been serial killers, you know, throughout history. I mean, there's Jack the Ripper.

• 1:45:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  But, you know, this guy talks about that whole period, you know, because that was the industrial revolution. That was a period when there was a lot of lead paint being produced in England.

• 1:45:58Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  And so Jack the Ripper may have had a little bit too much lead on top of whatever else was wrong with them. I mean, we don't even know who, who he was, but.

• 1:46:09Joe Rogan?

  It makes me really think about Peaky Blinders. You ever watch that show?

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46:13Joe Rogan?

  That show was like, it's almost like they filtered the whole show. They did an amazing job with that show. First of all, it's one of my favorite series of all time. It's so good. Um, but the show looks like it's in the middle of like coal fog. You know, like, everything is kind of gray and, and they did an amazing job of recreating what life was like after the war in that part of Europe. And that's what it looked like.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And coal includes a lot of compounds.

• 1:46:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  That are really dangerous to breathe. There was a whole, um, uh, thing that happened in London in the 1950s where they got, um, I don't remember why this happened, but you know, I mean, it was really difficult time for that country after World War Two. There was a, you know, economically they were really struggling. And I think they got, um, during one, uh, winter in the 1950s, they got some really bad quality coal delivered, um, to London, which caused this horrific, uh, smog event,

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  essentially, that was so heavy that people were killed just trying to cross the street because you couldn't see anything.

• 1:47:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like, there was a whole episode of The Crown that was devoted to this. Um, it was while Winston Churchill was, was, um, Prime Minister.

• 1:47:47Joe Rogan?

  So it was like driving through fog.

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, when I was a kid and read books about England and that, you know, in the earlier, like Charles Dickens or whatever, you know, we would talk about fog all the time in London. And I just thought fog, oh, that's from, you know, the ocean or something. But it's not. It was smog. And it was smog from industry and from coal fires.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  And I think they they paid kind of a terrible price.

• 1:48:19Joe Rogan?

  Look at that.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's what Peaky Blinders looks like. The whole series. They it's almost like they did it. So this is the Thames River from 1952.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:48:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow, look at that guy. He's got a fucking mask on.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, the great smog of 1952. That's what it was. And and a lot of people who had asthma died, you know, because it was so terrible. The air was just so terrible.

• 1:48:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Two workers rested in oxygen tent in Pennsylvania from 1948.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a similar event in Pennsylvania.

• 1:48:57Joe Rogan?

  Death fog.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:00Joe Rogan?

  Two shocking events still in living memory from Queen Elizabeth's generation because the Clean Air Act reinforced enforcement. Reducing just one of the pollutants targeted by the Clean Air Act added 1.6 years to the average American life. Wow.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think Puget Sound had a problem that was caused by sort of the geography of the area because, you know, Puget Sound is kind of a trough between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Mountains. And so it's a low area and during the, you know, certain times of the year, everybody used to heat their houses with wood, you know, fires with,

• 1:49:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  you know, Franklin stoves and stuff like that. And

• 1:49:46Joe Rogan?

  Which is really bad for you.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:48Joe Rogan?

  Unfortunately, that's where coal comes from.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  Right, right. And so

• 1:49:53Joe Rogan?

  When you buy charcoal, if you buy lump charcoal, that's what that is.

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so not as many people use that anymore. And like when I was a kid, I remember the skies being really gray a lot, you know, especially during the winter. And I think part of that was from the smoke kind of settling in that Puget Sound trough between the mountains. And they would tell people sometimes they would have a smoke, they'd have a fire ban. They couldn't use your wood stove.

• 1:50:24Joe Rogan?

  Wow, because of air quality.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  Because of the air quality. And now I go to, you know, the Northwest and to Puget Sound, and the air looks so much better. I mean, and it's like during the summer, it's just like, I don't remember it being like this.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  So, I mean, that's just my experience, but I think it's true that the air quality is better.

• 1:50:51Joe Rogan?

  Well, it has to be.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:53Joe Rogan?

  And that's a very disturbing thing for people. They don't want to hear. Like, you think of wood fire being natural, but it's actually really bad.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:04Joe Rogan?

  Like, if everybody in the city of Austin heated their home in the winter with wood fires, it'd be a fucking disaster.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:11Joe Rogan?

  It'd be really bad. If everybody in New York City, like, imagine, well, you can't because it's apartments, but if it was something where you had a chimney and everybody had wood fire, it'd be terrible. It's great if you're camping, if it's just you. If it's just you and your friends and it's a small wood fire, it's like relatively speaking, it's not going to cause too much damage. It's no big deal. But when you get a large group of human beings, they're burning wood.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:37Joe Rogan?

  And you're all breathing that. It's just like a fire. Like, have you ever been around a wildfire? It's terrible. The air quality is awful. You know, Los Angeles has had a bunch of those. And many times when I was living in LA, the entire city was covered in smoke. And you're just, you're breathing these wildfires, this wildfire smoke.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's just undeniable, I think, now. And, and I think it's much, you know, people are really moving away from having wood stoves and fireplaces for that very reason.

• 1:52:12Joe Rogan?

  It's so weird because you think of like, oh, that's a comforting thing. Nice fireplace. It's beautiful, you know? I, I cook over hardwood all the time, you know? It's like the best way. Like, you have a smoker, an offset smoker. Put a little bunch of oak in there, post oak, and you cook that way. But, you know, what's coming out of that smokestack?

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Joe Rogan?

  Nothing good. I mean, if you have one smoker, I'm sure it's fine. It's no big deal. But if everybody's doing it, it becomes an issue, especially if you have stagnant air, like you were talking about that trough.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so, you know, we are doing the right things in some respects. I mean, you know, we're moving away from heating houses with wood, where, you know, we stopped, you know, putting lead in paint, we stopped the leaded gas.

• 1:53:06Joe Rogan?

  What do you, what do you know, if anything, about gas, about natural gas cooking? Because this is one of the things during the Biden administration, they started talking about removing gas kitchens and gas stoves from people's homes, and people started freaking out, like, this is crazy, you can't do this, this is so. But there seems to be some real data that shows that having gas in your home is not just dangerous, but dangerous for the development of children.

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I am not an expert on this, but I am, I am really concerned about what I've read, in part because I have a gas stove.

• 1:53:49Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it completely makes sense.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I like cooking on gas, but I've been really concerned about what I've read and also about the, you know, again, the, the industry suppression of evidence about this stuff.

• 1:54:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  And, you know, just the whole thing of calling it natural gas.

• 1:54:11Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right. Arsenic's natural, too.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of natural stuff that's terrible for you.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  Did we really fall for that? I mean, it's kind of heartbreaking if it turns out to have been, you know, as, as concerning as they're saying. And, yeah.

• 1:54:31Joe Rogan?

  Well, you hear politicians talking about clean coal. I've heard that term before, which is a wild term to use, clean coal.

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  And it's bullshit.

• 1:54:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  I mean, it's total.

• 1:54:42Joe Rogan?

  It seems bullshit.

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:44Joe Rogan?

  It's just this, ugh.

• 1:54:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I just.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  I mean, and I think, you know, as homo sapiens, we're either gonna get on top of this stuff, or it's gonna get on top of us.

• 1:55:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, it seems like it already has gotten on top of a generation. I mean, like we're talking about the leaded gasoline contributing, especially in urban communities where you had to deal with a lot of this exhaust and the pollution, that there's a correlation between lowered IQs, statistically significant correlation.

• 1:55:22Speaker 01

  And all the stuff they're talking about now with plastics, you know, in the body. I mean, I read something this morning that said that we're walking around with the plastic accumulation in our brains of enough plastic to make a spoon.

• 1:55:39Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yeah, in our brains.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  And it's like, well, that can't be good.

• 1:55:44Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not an expert on the plastic stuff, but everything you're seeing about it is really alarming. And you just have to think that unless we stop using this stuff, unless we remove it from production, we're gonna be in real trouble.

• 1:56:05Joe Rogan?

  And when we come up with solutions, make sure those solutions aren't even worse for you, because one of the solutions was these damn paper straws. So what makes, what makes a paper straw able to support liquid without dissolving? Forever chemicals. Paper straws are way worse for you than plastic straws. Way worse.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Joe Rogan?

  Especially if you're dealing with hot liquids, which is another factor when you're dealing with coffee cups.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:34Joe Rogan?

  Like coffee cups, my friend Paul Saladino did this demonstration where he took a typical paper coffee cup and dissolved the outside of it and showed you what you're actually pouring hot liquid into. You're pouring hot liquid into what essentially looks like a condom. It's a plastic liner that lines the inside of these paper cups, which is why they can hold

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:59Joe Rogan?

  hot liquid in the first place. It doesn't even make any sense. Like, how is paper able to hold hot liquid without dissolving? Well, it has to have some sort of a surface inside of it that's a coating. And that coating is filled with forever chemicals. And it is fucking terrible for you.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Joe Rogan?

  So our solutions have to be

• 1:57:19Joe Rogan?

  At least somewhat better.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:21Joe Rogan?

  You know, and then there's people that say, well, metal, the problem with metal straws is people trip. And the metal straws go into their brain. Okay, you fucking don't trip. Jesus Christ, what are we saying here?

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  I haven't followed the metal.

• 1:57:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, a bunch of people have died because they're looking at their phone. Yeah. They're looking at their phone and sucking something through a metal straw and they trip and it goes into their head and kills them.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:57:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, more than one person has died that way. Like, good Lord. Like, it's, if it's not one thing, it's another. There's no end. Whenever we try to fix something, we come up with a solution that's actually worse than the initial problem. Not always, but.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  It's like a Rube Goldberg thing or something.

• 1:58:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  I mean, and it just makes you wonder, do we have to go back to some sort of really primitive form of existence, like everybody rides donkeys?

• 1:58:11Joe Rogan?

  No, I think the, well, this is the reason why we serve in the studio. We don't use plastic water bottles anymore. And we serve all of our guests, we use a steel cup. And this is why we have steel cups, because I realized a long time ago that plastic leaches into the water and you have no chain of command. You don't, you, no one knows exactly how that water bottle was handled. No one knows how long it was sitting on a dock. No one knows how, what was the temperature of the truck that it was delivered to the supermarket? When you get it, it's cold. Okay, but what happened in the time that it was bottled in the factory to the time it got into your hands?

• 1:58:54Joe Rogan?

  Well, if it's plastic, there's, there's a high likelihood that it's leaching some chemicals. And here's another disturbing thing that they found. You said, well, we should buy glass water. Yeah, buy a glass water bottle. That solves the problem. Well, actually it doesn't because of the caps. So the caps

• 1:59:13Joe Rogan?

  leach more because of the way they make these caps on these metal water bottles. Whatever the surface of the interior lining of those caps that keeps water from leaking out leaches even more than it does with a water bottle that's plastic. So that what they found is that glass water bottles leach more chemicals into the water than plastic. Which is just crazy. Yeah.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that must be like the-

• 1:59:42Joe Rogan?

  Make sure that's true. I'm pretty sure, 99% sure that's true. I read this whole article about it, but I want to be clear, because this is, this is pretty important.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember when they delivered milk-

• 1:59:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  You know, in glass bottles-

• 1:59:59Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  -to the house, and they had these little paper caps-

• 2:00:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  -on them, but I now wonder, you know, if those were sort of-

• 2:00:07Joe Rogan?

  Coated.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  Coated.

• 2:00:09Joe Rogan?

  Well, they seem like they're metal. It seems like a metal-coated cap, because there's something about the rigidity of it. Here, "Recent studies indicated that glass bottles may contain significantly higher level of microplastics than previously thought, even exceeding those found in plastic bottles. This is largely due to microplastics originating from the bottle caps, specifically the paint used on them. While glass is often seen as a safer alternative to plastic, these findings highlight a potential concern regarding microplastic contamination in beverages regardless of the container type." And we've talked about this, the dangers of plastics on this podcast before, because we had Dr. Shanna

• 2:00:50Joe Rogan?

  Swan from Harvard, who wrote a book called Countdown. It's all talking about how the phthalates in these microplastics entering into women's bodies during the time where these children are developing, it's contributing to a bunch of different factors that are really dangerous to the endocrine system. "Campit suggests that most of the microplastics in the body are ingested through food, particularly meat, because commercial meat production tends to concentrate plastics in the food chain." Terrific!

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:22Joe Rogan?

  There's no escape. What has been the reaction to your book? Has there been any pushback on, by people that don't like your connecting serial killers to industrial contaminants?

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there have been people who say, you know, "Well, you know, why isn't everybody in Tacoma a serial killer?" and things like that.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  Which I think is kind of the wrong focus. I mean, I'm just trying to introduce a description of sort of the most extreme version of what might have happened. And again, I don't make those kinds of claims. I mean, we can't, for example, show that Ted Bundy did what he did because of lead. All I'm trying to show is that he was exposed to a significant amount of lead. And we know that from the testing of his house and his yard. And so I'm just saying, think about what that might have done. Think about what it might have contributed.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  Probably wasn't the only reason. There was probably a whole suite of reasons why he did what he did. With all of these guys, that's true. But Gary Ridgway, you know, again, he grows up two miles from Sea-Tac, from the airport, at a time when they were using lead in Jet fuel. Jet fuel. Oh, wow. And so he's, and he's also right by two major highways. And what does he do when he grows up? He goes to work at a truck factory, painting trucks. Oh, boy. With a spray, you know, gun.

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  And that lead, that paint has lead components. So he's got it coming and going. I mean, his brother talked about how he used to, they used to play on a slag pile from the copper mine in Idaho. So I think he's a guy who clearly has to have come into contact with more lead than was good for him. Now, does that mean that's why he did it? You know, and he's, you know, his whole history involves so many victims.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  I mean, he pled guilty to something like 48 or 49 murders, but they've tied him to probably around 78 or 79. And that's probably an undercount. So.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  I think it's worth thinking about. That's what I'm saying. I think it's worth thinking about what lead contributed to crime during that period. And I wanted to tell the story in a way that was kind of subjective, you know, and personal and not in an academic way. I mean, there are some great academic histories of lead exposure and the history of lead industries in this country. I didn't want to do that because it's been done and because, you know, I think people, when they're reading something for, I wouldn't say entertainment, but, you know,

• 2:05:01Speaker 01

  they want to be, they want to find something compelling and absorbing and learn something. And this, I thought, was a way of, you know, in Murderland, of presenting this material in a way that people could kind of say, oh, you know, I didn't know about the, what happened with lead during World War II. I didn't know about what it could do to kids and how that might show up years later in their lives.

• 2:05:33Joe Rogan?

  When you finish a book like this and then you release it, what does that feel like? Like, you're contributing, I think, greatly to this discussion, that's a very important one, of the impact of these industrial pollutants, what these unknowing victims of this, not just the serial killers, but all the people that were probably damaged by this stuff. What does it feel like when you release a book like this?

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  It's kind of overwhelming, you know, to see it suddenly kind of be in people's hands and they're reading it and they're asking you questions, like, you know. And, yeah, I mean, the funny thing about writing a book is that while you're writing it and doing the research, it's kind of your own private Idaho. You know, it's your own private little playpen where you get to make all the decisions and, you know, make all the choices and... And then editors get involved and all these other people at the publishing house and they start saying, well, what about this? What about that?

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  And that's always sort of terrifying because you realize, oh, I haven't thought about all the ramifications. I need to do all this fact checking and make sure everything's right. And so that's a real hump to get over, to just make sure that you've gotten everything nailed down as much as you can. And that's all great, but then it enters people's hands and they're reading it. And sometimes when you publish a book, people have really different responses than you even imagined. I mean, you can't control it anymore. It's just out in the world doing its thing.

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  And it's interesting. It's always sort of really interesting. I just heard from a woman who's the daughter of a guy who worked at the smelter in Tacoma. And I had been in touch with her briefly because her father was an incredible rabble-rouser when he worked at the smelter. He was working for the union and did all this stuff to bring the whole arsenic thing to light, to show that the plant doctor, who he called the plant quack, was lying about

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  the stuff. And he was sort of a hero in this whole story because he published, he had this little newsletter that he published from his kitchen table.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  And he was so funny, so great. And he really cared about the guys that he worked with. And so he, I think, helped compile a whole list, which was called The Death List. I found it, there's a copy of it in the Tacoma Library, a SARCO records, that listed all the guys who worked at the smelter who died of various cancers, pretty young, like at age 55 or something. And so when you hear from somebody like that woman, or other people who lived in Tacoma

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  and remember this whole era, it's really gratifying. I mean, it's really great to know that you've put something on the record that will help people understand the history of this stuff.

• 2:09:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think you've done the world a great service. I really do.

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:09:35Joe Rogan?

  Because I think it's difficult to compile all this stuff and put it into a digestible form. And I think the connection that you've made to serial killers, which I think is a very valid connection, but also it's particularly exciting for people to pick it up. Because so many people are fascinated by serial killers, and so many people are creeped out by it. That it makes it more compelling. It makes it more interesting for people to read. And then, I think, along the way, then they get this deeper understanding of this gigantic problem.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  I hope so, yeah. I mean, that's the goal, to try to, you know, just, I mean, I hate to use the term raise awareness, because it's such a cliche, but you do hope that people go, come away from reading something like this and think, oh, maybe I should have my water tested. Or maybe I should be concerned about the playground where my kids are playing.

• 2:10:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think you did it. So, and I'm really happy that you came in here to talk about it. I really appreciate it.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate being here.

• 2:10:59Joe Rogan?

  My pleasure. Um, Jamie, put the book up so people can see it. Murder Land. Uh, did you do the audio version of it?

• 2:11:08Speaker 01

  I did not, but, um...

• 2:11:10Joe Rogan?

  Did someone else do it?

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, a, a, a woman.

• 2:11:14Joe Rogan?

  Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. I like how you have it all foggy, too. You know, where it makes it look like...

• 2:11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, his head is sort of...

• 2:11:23Joe Rogan?

  Pollution.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  Dissolving.

• 2:11:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, his head, it's, whoever the artist is, did a great job of like connecting kind of what we're talking about.

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did a great job on the cover.

• 2:11:37Joe Rogan?

  Well, thank you, Caroline. Thanks for coming in.

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:11:40Joe Rogan?

  Really appreciate it. It was really good to talk to you.

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  Great to be here.

• 2:11:42Joe Rogan?

  All right. Bye, everybody.

• 2:12:00Speaker 04

  With Truvia Sweeteners, it's simple to make sweetness part of your routine. From sweetening your creamy morning matcha to freshly baked blueberry scones, Truvia Sweeteners make it easy to enjoy the flavors you love with less sugar per serving. From everyday drinks to homemade favorites, they're made to fit right in. Because with Truvia, every moment tastes better. Find Truvia at your favorite local grocery retailer and bring better sweetness home.

• 2:12:28Speaker 02

  The Sharpie S Gel Pen in its new Canyon Fashion Barrel Color is where high performance meets stunning design. Canyon is a color that balances earthy warmth and muted sophistication, making it a must-add to your pen collection. Its no smear, no smudge, no bleed technology delivers vivid, consistent writing with smoother, older ink that dries quickly. A contoured rubber grip and sleek, modern design add comfort and style to every stroke. That's the impact of Sharpie in a gel pen. Shop now on Amazon.