The Joe Rogan Experience - #2360 - Caroline Fraser

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

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

Thanks for doing this. Thank you for having me. So I've read about the premise of your book online and immediately I'm like, I got to talk to this lady. That sounds crazy. Please tell people what the premises is just so we get started with this. Yeah, well, I started thinking about this a long time ago. The book's called Murderland. 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 serial killers beginning to pop up. 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 or 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. And I came across a real estate ad that said,

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. And I was so curious about that, and 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 kind of learning about what happened here, you know, what happened in this region. And I also knew, because I'm sort of really interested in serial killers, as I mentioned and had been for a long time, reading about them and reading about Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway. 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 the smelter had been operating there since the 1880s, 1890s, so for a very long time. And I could see that a lot of news media had been devoted to looking at what had happened in this region. You know, there was a whole map, a GIS map, geographic 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. 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? So this issue of lead pollution, is it just serial killers or is there an elevated amount of violent crime that goes along with

it? Yeah. The issue of serial killers is one that I kind of introduced as the most extreme example. 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,

and as I said, delinquency and crime. 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? That's right, yeah. 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. Yeah, and the leaded gas is particularly tragic because that was essentially a kind of horrific experiment that was conducted on generations of kids in this country and

adults because everybody was exposed to that. Obviously, some people more than others, if you lived next to a major highway or something like that, you are 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. So it was a terrible idea, and they knew that at the time. You know, the companies, the corporations, the people who introduced it, Standard Oil, DuPont, etc., they knew the dangers of this.

They were told by medical doctors who said, yeah, who said this will expose everybody to, you know, more lead than human beings have ever had to deal with before. And... And they just did it to stop the engines from knocking. They did. And apparently there were alternatives, but the alternatives, which were like ethanol, were not something that could be patented and were not products that you could make money off of.

And so all these corporations chose to do this. Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, it's really almost unreal to think about the moral failure that this, I mean, failure doesn't even seem strong enough. It doesn't. It's so evil. It's so strange how many times that that has happened in human history and in fairly recent history where companies know what they're

putting out or what they're releasing or what they're prescribing or whatever it is, is going to damage people. And they know that short term they can make a lot of money and so they do it anyway. Yeah. And they did for decades because, you know, this began in the 20s and 30s. So we can assume that the smelting thing they probably didn't know, correct? Like at least in the 1800s. Yeah, in the 1800s 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 the smelter in Tacoma was

owned by a company called Asarco, which was the American smelting and refining company owned by the Guggenheim family. Oh boy. But they've done so much for art. Yeah. I mean, that it's just... That's what they like to do yeah, yeah, it's Kind of whitewashing the reputation. Yeah, and They were among the you know earlier corporations to do that and totally successfully

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? It has something to do with explosives, right? Yes. 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 he was 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 a Nobel Prize winner. And that's the origin of it. It was just a whitewashing operation. 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 leaded gas stuff. He also invented chlorofluorocarbons, you know, the stuff in refrigerants that caused the...

Trevor Burrus Ozone layer hole? Danielle Pletka The hole in the ozone layer. Trevor Burrus Oh, terrific. Danielle Pletka So, like, two of the most devastating discoveries, scientific discoveries in the 20th century are down to the sky. 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 became really ill as a result, I think, of working with this tetro,

you know, tetraethyl, it's called, the substance that was added to leaded gas. And he, you know, went to Florida to try and heal himself of this, which I don't think you can do. I mean, 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 lift himself out of bed and eventually he strangled to death in this sort of harness thing, which it may have been suicide, it may have been an accident, kind of unclear.

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 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 is women. And I know the women in my house love to watch those true crime shows. And those serial killer, which I, that disturbs the shit out of me. Like my family was watching something on the night stalker and Richard Ramirez and

like, I can't watch this. I can't watch, I get sick. I get sick. I can't watch it. They're like fascinated. Like, why is that? Why do you think women are so interested? Not like lumping you in with all women, but there is a weird thing with Women in True Crime podcast. 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 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 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 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 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 Mamish, which was about, you know, 10 minutes from my house. 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. 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?

Yeah, I never really wanted to write a book that was just about serial killers. I mean, I think that's been done. Lots of people have done that and done a good job. You know, I mean, Ann Rule, the woman who wrote the first book about Ted Bundy, who knew Ted Bundy. Oh, she knew him. Yes, she worked with him at a rape crisis clinic in Seattle. Oh my God.

He worked at a rape crisis clinic. Wow. Yeah. He was very interested in doing research on rape. Wow. 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. Wow. She gave him, you know, a ride to the Christmas party. Oh my God. Yeah. Was this while he was killing or before he started? 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. So that may have been his first murder. Yeah. Wow. Was there like a history of him torturing animals or anything along those lines? No. But one of the things that I think the FBI was discovering when they started doing all this investigation of the pasts, the childhood of serial killers, was that this starts really

young, that the fantasies and the obsessions with, you know, I mean, some of them famously do torture or kill the family pets and so forth. With Ted, that wasn't the case. I think with him, one of the things you see is that he never knew who his father was. He was born illegitimate at a foundling home in Vermont. And his mother left him there for a couple of months before she went back and kind of retrieved him. And that's a common factor with a lot of these guys. 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, I think, really puzzling to people for that reason because you don't see some of the usual signs with him. Trevor Burrus And because he refused to answer questions? 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

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. How did he talk about it hypothetically in the third person? I mean it was sort of like O.J. Simpson or something. He would say, well, if somebody was going to do this, 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.

Pete 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. What did you find? Is there a disproportionate number of serial killers that come from that particular area? 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. And 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? There are several cases that have never been resolved. You know, there's something called the dismemberment murders that, you know... Dismemberment murders? Yeah, 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. Oh, I remember that. That was fairly recently, right? washing up on shore and nobody could figure out who they belonged to.

Oh, I remember that. That was fairly recently, right? Am I thinking of the same thing? It may be another thing that you're thinking of. I think this dates back. Yeah, it's another thing. It was like shoes that had a human foot in it. And they could have just been, you know, bodies of people who...

Drowned. just been, you know, bodies of people 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 Northwest.

And it was famously the year when Bundy really kind of broke free of any restraints he might have once had and began abducting women, basically kind of like once a month during that year. 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. 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. Are there other factors? So there's leaded gasoline, which is a major factor.

But what other factors do you think in terms of environmental toxins and things? Why 1974? 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. 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. Zinc, manganese, all these things were being... Zinc. Yeah.

Zinc is associated with aggression? 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 of this stuff, you can be sickened 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. What year did they start putting lead in gasoline? Well they invented the stuff in the 1920s, but you know, just thinking back to those early decades, not that many people had cars.

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. I mean, yeah, it just wasn't as big of a deal. It was rare to have one car, much less 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. They needed all of it for 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 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. 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 addicts. And that, I think, is what people eventually started, you know, when after the war people start 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

You know in math and so That's right. And so it really becomes, I think, a heavy pollutant around that time. And so by the 70s, the kids who had been, you know, born in the 50s, they're starting to show the effects of lead poisoning. I have a friend who briefly lived in Brooklyn, and he had a very small backyard that he was going to try to grow some plants in, grow a small garden. But he did some soil samples, he's a very intelligent guy, did some soil samples and sent it to university to get it tested and it was filled with lead.

And he was like, what is this all about? And they were like, it's all from leaded gasoline. So this was in the 2000s. So I think this was around 2012, 2013. 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. But his whole backyard was essentially lead poisoned. Yeah, it's when you ride alone, you ride with Hitler. Join a car sharing club today. That was during the gas rationing days. Crazy. That was the craziest one. 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? A wagon? What is that? It's a bunch of soldiers in the back. Soldiers. Oh, okay.

Wow. So this was all just about gas rationing. Wow. Save fuel to make munitions for the battle. 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 is there an uptick in violence in these areas where they were making stuff for the war effort, where they would be polluting the area. This is an ad for better help. The internet is a breeding ground for misinformation. Even a simple search for ways to get rid of a headache can produce millions and millions of results from taking pain relievers to detoxes to

medication to cold compresses. It's overwhelming and even when you do find something that's true that works for other people it might not work for you. In some cases it's better to just ask a living breathing expert. If you have a headache that won't go away go talk talk to a doctor. And if you're struggling with your mental health, consult a credentialed therapist. You can learn a lot about yourself in therapy, like how to be kind to yourself and how to be the best version of you. Whether you want to learn how to better manage stress, improve your relationships, gain more confidence or something else. It starts with therapy. Try it for yourself with BetterHelp. Millions have benefited from their services and there's a reason people rate it so highly. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals

with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash JRE. That's betterH-E-L-P dot com slash JRE. 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 Asarco had another major smelter 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 price fixing and so forth to make it not possible for these companies to raise prices astronomically. And a lot of the stuff was requisitioned for the war effort. So in El Paso, by the 1970s, they were starting to discover that this whole area around the smokestack of the smelter was heavily lead contaminated. 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 Los Angeles because that's where he committed most of his murders, but he did not grow up there. 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, an uptick in serial killers? Like, is it not just Pacific Northwest? Is it around El Paso as well? Yeah, when you start looking up, okay, 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 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 rise in violent crime, the riseulsivity 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.

Yeah. And isn't now. Is this also tied to the sexual revolution? And then also, when was birth control, like oral birth control introduced? 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. There's a bunch of other factors. It's not like we can pin everything on lead and arsenic.

That's right. But there's contributing factors. 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. But it's like what you're talking about Ted Bundy. There's a bunch of factors that lead this person to becoming that. Right. But also, lead. 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 kids. So I think you're looking at 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. We see that now in football players who've had head trauma repeatedly

that this causes, can cause violence and aggression. And impulsivity. Right. It's a huge issue. Yeah. 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. Not making great decisions about what you're doing. 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, the same result in terms of not having gas making your engine knock, but wouldn't be as profitable for this person. So twisted. Yeah.

And I think, 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 is 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 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 happens sometimes with these smelters is that they would kind

of fail or the filters would fail. There's this horrifying example in Idaho, 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 filter

that was, you know, the thing that was supposed to keep lead from going up the smokestack. And there were kids in this town, there was an elementary school right across the street from the smokestack. Jesus. And the descriptions of that school are so horrifying because the teachers used to think that sometimes that the facility had caught fire because there was so much smoke. Oh, God. But in fact, 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 a piece. Oh, my God. And our profits are such that it makes more sense to keep operating regardless of what happens to these kids.

Oh my God. 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. So, it says here that after it destroyed the fire broke out that destroyed the filters. 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

US 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 administrating compounds like, I don't know how to say that word. How do you say that word? Dimer, capto, succinct 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. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a nightmarish thing. Look at this. It says, oh my God. So listen to this. Slowly poison. As a teenager in Kellogg, Ohio, Flory, this person I'm talking about, attended the Silver King School built in 1928

in the gulch between Bunker Hill lead smelter and zinc plant, an offshoot of the Coeur d'Alene River, flowed by the school. It was, says Flory, a light glowing green color, sort of a glow, like a glow stick. Oh God. In 1973 in 1973 a fire broke out and so this is the fire that we were talking about. Oh my god a light glowing green color Yeah, fuck. I used to live in New Jersey right by the in Jersey City. Oh, yeah, right by the...in Jersey City. Right by the Liberty State Park, which a bunch of the acreage of

that was off limits to people because it was so polluted. And I remember, you know, because you could actually walk from my apartment in Jersey City to Liberty State Park, but you had to go by this place that was crushing cars, one of those facilities where they compact cars. And I mean, there was all this heavy industry there and pollutants. And you had to walk across this little wooden trail over a stream to get to the park, and the water was that color. I mean, it was like this disgusting color not found in nature, and you just looked at it and thought, what is that? What's in that?

You know? 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 and they're bribing officials and just polluting everything. Yeah. I mean, that's what happened with the SARCO. Once the EPA had sort of got started and the various Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed and legislation about what you could do in the workplace, because I mean, imagine what it was like to work in these smelters.

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. But it is just an incredible sort of time in America because it was like, well, what's the trade-off here? The profits are worth much more than people's lives. And that place, the Coeur d'Alene, there's a town, city called Coeur d'Alene in Idaho, but there's also this giant lake, Lake Coeur d'Alene. And all that pollution from Bunker Hill, from the mines, from the smelter, it all went down river and is now sitting at the bottom of Lake Coeur d'Alene. And that's been a Superfund project for many, many years, but they really can't clean that up because it's the kind of thing where you try to remove

the sediment that's full of all the lead and stuff, and it stirs everything up, and so it's really, really almost impossible to clean a lot of that stuff. Yeah, we were talking about this the other day, that you really shouldn't even eat freshwater fish because freshwater fish, the problem is because of all the pollutants that settle into these lakes, when you don't have flowing water, freshwater fish is just sitting in all these chemicals and all these heavy metals.

And it's, you know, it's really disturbing. If you eat freshwater fish, your exposure to forever chemicals is like ridiculously high. Like what was the number? We pulled it up the other day, but it's akin to like eating one freshwater fish is akin to I believe it's like a year of exposure to forever chemicals. Yikes. 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. Oh my god. PFAS found in high levels in freshwater fish with most concern for vulnerable communities. 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. But when we were there, these people were fishing in this lake, really obviously very poor people 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. And you know, they had no choice. They needed food. And so they went there. They're poor. And who knows what kind of health consequences these poor people are suffering from. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely the poor communities that get the worst of all of this.

And the thing is, it's like 150 years ago, all that was pristine. It's such a short amount of time. Yeah. 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. For profit. Yeah, absolutely.

And they knew it, and that's what's sick. 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 it's so hard to believe that that's how people operate, but yet I know they do. Yeah, I mean it's it's murder. Yeah, and That's why I called it murder land. You know, I think that the behavior of these corporate actors 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. 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. 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.

Also, they lie. They lie. So 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 but you also are gonna make money and you decide let's do it anyway let's do it anyway let's make some money and 60,000 people die because of it. And then who knows how many people also survived but got strokes.

And it's a large number. 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 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 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. 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. 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, you know, that they lie about everything. They lie about stuff they don't even need to lie about. It's just, it's their... It's their MO. Yeah. It's, they're just so inured to it and they want to get away with what they're doing. They should have went for corporate America. Should have worked for them and they want to get away with what they're doing. They should have went for corporate America. Should have worked for them and they could have got away with it.

They might've been fine. Now we 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. Yeah, I think that kind of psychopathy

is maybe more common than we would like to think. 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.

Right. And there's a lot of people like that. There's zero, 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 always wonder, like, is that nature? Is that nurture?

Are we dealing with environmental toxins? Is there exposure to something at a young age? Like, what is it that causes that? Is it... Well, I think it can be brain damage, you know? I mean, what happens to the frontal cortex of these kids who are exposed to LID and cadmium is that certain parts of the brain fail to develop correctly. And so, and you can see the deficits, the little holes that are supposed to be full of something

that helps you make good decisions. The part of your brain that helps you control yourself and control your behavior, that's kind of missing in some of these kids. They have shown now that the effects are worse in men than they are in women, that the damage to the frontal cortex, the neurology is more marked in men, 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.

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. Yeah. I mean, it obviously is some incredibly important discovery, what they make of that and how it's all going to come out in the wash in terms of what can be

done to help kids who have these issues. That I think is another story. 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 a human race, this thing that we did where we introduced these insane chemicals into the brains of children. And in this case, like in Idaho, knowingly calculated.

And one of the things that sort of blows my mind is that we've known for centuries, for eons that these things are bad. I mean. The Romans and the Greeks knew that lead caused people to go crazy. They had people who worked with lead 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 corporations are telling communities, including the community on Vashem Island, you know, oh, arsenic is really not a problem. You know, the human body just excretes it naturally. You know, all kinds of just crazy arguments were being put forward to justify what they were doing.

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. So because sardines spend their time in the bottom of the ocean, like that's where all the heavy metals accumulate. And I was getting arsenic from eating cans of sardines spend their time in the bottom of the ocean, right? Like that's where all the heavy metals accumulate Yeah, 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. It's gone. Wow. Wow 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 whatever, it can build up. And I think that that form of arsenic is less toxic and less of a problem. You don't want it. You definitely don't want it. I mean, as your doctor said, don't do that.

It's just crazy. Yeah. But the stuff that they were producing at the smelter in Tacoma was what's called inorganic arsenic. And that's the stuff they used to poison rats. And they used it for insecticides and 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 orchards.

There's another plume there from those pesticides and insecticides. 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 Guggenheims, 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. And so they had to, you know, I think they had to buy those properties and remediate, so-called. 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? Well, in... Five acres of ground that's poisoned. Yeah, in Tacoma, what they 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 and and they

Yeah, they exploded the the smokestack On purpose. Yeah, they they you know, they closed the smokestack. On purpose? Yeah, they closed the plant in 1986. Oh, so it was a debt-controlled demolition? Yeah, so it was a, yes, exactly. Which also probably contributed greatly to more pollutants. They claimed that they cleaned the inside of the smokestack. Before they blew it up?

Yeah. All right. Yeah. So, yeah, in Tacoma, they carted away tons of soil. They took, you know, they went into people's yards, they tested all of the yards and told people, okay, you're going to have to replace the soil. 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. But they, you know, the EPA got an unprecedented environmental bankruptcy settlement out of ASARCO, which was close to $2 billion.

I think it was the highest settlement that they'd ever gotten from a corporation. But it had to clean up about 20 different superfund sites, including the one in Idaho, in Coeur d'Alene, which 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. But you know they run out of money. I mean I think on places like Vashon a lot of that was on the southern part. I think you could request soil replacement in some of these places, but it wasn't necessarily guaranteed, depending on where you lived.

Well, that's also so destructive to the ecosystem. So you're taking out everything that allows these plants to live, animals, mycelium, all the different, the network that connects all these plants together. You're pulling all that stuff out and introducing new soil. And you're not going to do it everywhere. You're not going to get all of it out. There's no way. You're not going to be able to do the whole island.

You're not going to be able to do like every inch of Tacoma, all the land. 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 smoke stack 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 Asarco 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 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, 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 the furnaces were, and they built condos on top of that. Oh my god. But behind the condos is this giant hump of contaminated stuff in a giant plastic garbage bag.

Did they tell the people that live in these condos what they're dealing with? Well, 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. You can see this. So presumably if the people who are buying condos there know anything about it, they probably are aware of the history.

But they think it's... And in a sense, it has been cleaned up. I mean, but... In a sense. But also, doesn't it leak into the water table? Well, they have a lot of stuff that they've done. I mean, in the book, I talk about, you know, Frank Herbert Herbert who wrote Dune, he was from Tacoma. And in fact, the stuff in Dune about the pollution and what has happened to the planet, you know,

that he dramatized, a lot of that came from his disgust with the smelter and, you know, a planet that had basically destroyed its whole environment. 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 the stuff.

It's contaminated with arsenic. And so they 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. Oh my God. Yeah, it's wild. That's so crazy. Whoa. 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 Humphreys 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. 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 want to hear something crazy. What percentage of polio do you think is asymptomatic? I've never heard that there's polio that's asymptomatic. 95% to 99%. 95% to 99% of actual polio is asymptomatic. So what they were calling polio was most likely DDT poisoning that was sprayed everywhere. That 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. Yeah, I think that the, you know, a lot of this environmental stuff has become so overwhelming to people that they kind of tuned it out. Yes. It's like, what are we going to do about it? There's nothing we could do. So like, let's just pretend it's not happening.

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

it something else. 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. And I think people are interested in the history of how they might have been, you know, exposed. When I did a reading up in Seattle a month or so ago, you know, everybody was talking about where they grew up in relation to this melter. Like how close they were to it 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 smokestack. 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 a 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.

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 in any way related to some of these things. We're talking about the rise in lead in the air from leaded gas because Mercer Island is crossed by I-90. I-90 comes down out of the cascades and crosses Mercer Island, which is sitting in the middle of Lake Washington, and ends up in Seattle. 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.

Like what kind of shit? Well, I lived on a street that was close to I-90 and was actually 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 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 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. So all this stuff is happening, you know, in a period of time, you know, and in a place that you wouldn't think would have that level of crime. Adam Sulewski And that kind of crime. Danielle Pletka And that kind of crime.

Adam Sulewski And oddly enough, always men. Danielle Pletka Yeah. Adam Sulewski Which are uniquely affected by these things. So what about the women that were there? Was there bizarre behavior that you might think could be attributed to these toxins? You know, I don't really know how to answer that. I mean, I think that there was one of the things that I remember about the high school, for example, was, you know, that there was a lot of kind of creepy behavior, you know, going on in terms of food fights

and just a lot of stuff you, I don't think you see as much now. I mean, this is completely anecdotal, so I can't support any of this, but it just, it felt to me like when my niece and nephew were growing up that they were less troubled as youths, you know, than we were in the 1970s. You know, they were growing up in the 90s, you know. And I think there is a little bit of that. I mean, there are – can't prove it, but I think that it may be true that, you know, the whole – all the jokes about the baby boomers being crazy because of lead exposure.

There may be a little bit of truth to that. I mean, it makes sense. If it does, 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. It does. 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 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 micrograms per deciliter of lead was the, they've now lowered

that to 3.5. 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 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 their sum. You know, if it's not zero, then what are we going to do about it? Right. And it's, you know. And who's liable.

That's right. 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'll try to distort facts and try to hide evidence and try to make it seem like this is a nothing burger, this is no big deal. Well, you see that with fluoride. 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, 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? Well because people are profiting for 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 so much 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 that I've seen, they find like skulls and dead people's teeth from hundreds of years ago. You don't find a massive amount of tooth decay because people weren't eating a lot of sugar. They weren't constantly eating candy and stuff that rots your fucking teeth out. 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 and low doses.

It's like, well, who's determining? Who's determining? There hasn't been a long history of human use of fluoride in drinking water. It's fairly recent. I believe it goes back into the early 20th century. It's crazy. Yeah. Well, it is, I mean, they always say the dose makes the poison. Sure. And I suppose that that's true. 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 have been actually paying attention and reading independent journalists and reading people that have gone outside the mainstream narrative that realize like this is not good for you. 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 in the water are justifying the use of Florida, 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 of human depravity. The

people are willing to do things that are just, they know are bad, but they profit. Danielle Pletka And the government is not, you know, completely blameless in all of this either because, you know, in terms of lead, for example, one of the places that I think people are really concerned about is the schools, you know, public schools. Public school buildings were built, 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.

Lead paint. Lead paint. Which is even crazier, that they used lead in paint. 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 so much money in order to do that. And they have occasionally kind of tiptoed up to this. I think the Biden administration did say that they were going to spend millions of dollars to try and do work at schools. Now I think that's all in question.

And so yeah, 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... I'm sure they've been compromised, but also someone should be looking into this. Yes. And you're going to need some sort of an environmental group that is responsible and just, that can look at these things and say, hey, this is a real

issue and all of our health is dependent upon them doing a really good job of sussing this stuff out. And it's the EPA that's responsible for the Superfund 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, 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. 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. And what kind of? Well, you can find it, Jamie can find it, so I don't wanna speak out of tune about this, but munitions, like unexploded munitions and just where things got bombed, where it's so toxic,

human beings can't live there. It's the size of Paris. It's like this enormous chunk of land. It's like it's ruined, probably forever. Yeah, I mean, and there's got to be some kind of, you know, government intervention, stuff like this. There has to be the responsibility because the corporations walked away. And so they can't, you know, Asarco still exists, but it's now operating out of Mexico. Pete Slauson How convenient. Danielle Pletka Yeah, that's a whole story. Pete Slauson Here it is. Zone Rogue, World War I-era battlefields that are still dangerous over

100 years later. Danielle Pletka Wow. Pete Slauson 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, Solm, 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.

Oh, so this is even World War I. Yeah. All that chemical stuff that they were using. Crazy. Yeah. using. Crazy. Right. Wow. That's when they first started using chemical warfare. People are gross. They're awesome too. A lot of people, you're awesome.

A lot of people are awesome. A lot of people are great. I love them. But in large groups, when they don't have responsibility for their actions, they're gross. It's very, you know, the more you read about these types of things, like you're describing in your book, and these horrible things that these corporations have done, the amount of pollution that they've caused and the amount of 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. 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 wind up getting up in the middle of the night and wandering around my house and just, it really freaks me out. Yeah.

I know a lot of people have said things to me, like how did you write this book? And I think they're talking about the serial killer part of it. Right, that's another part of it, yeah. Which, you know, it is really disturbing stuff. Yeah, all of it is 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. 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. So that was a good thing. We made some progress. And you know, again, this guy's graphs that he published show this. Who's this guy again?

Rick Nevin. He wrote this book called Lucifer Curves. It's even fine. Which contain all these different graphs that show this. And what he has shown is that there's one of them in my book that he let me reproduce. You know, the violent crime rate goes up and up in the 70s and 80s, and then when they remove,

yeah, when they remove the leaded gas, the crime rate falls off a cliff. That is crazy. Look at this graph. It's almost like it mirrors it. Yeah, all these graphs look exactly the same. That's so crazy. Yeah, it's wild. Okay, so look at this. Scroll, go up a little bit first. So, murder from 1900 to 1959 versus paint lead. Look at that. Yeah. It's correlation. They're almost mirrored. Yeah. And then aggravated assault versus gasoline lead. Same thing. It's like 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. And it's the same thing with serial killers.

The number of serial killers in the 70s and 80s and 90s goes up to the highest that we've seen, you know, about 700 operating in this country during that period. And then it just drops off. And that's why they call that the golden age of serial killers.

Wow. And now it's like, you know, 50 to 100. So I think there are always have been serial killers, you know, throughout history. I mean, there's Jack the Ripper. 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. And so Jack the Ripper may have had a little bit too much lead on top of whatever else was wrong with him. I mean, we don't even know who he was. But... It makes me really think about Peaky Blinders. You ever watch that show? That show is like it's almost like they filtered the whole show. They did an amazing job of that show First of all, it's one of my favorite series of all time. It's so good 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 Yeah, and coal includes a lot of compounds right that are really dangerous to breathe. There was a whole thing that happened in London in the 1950s where they got, I don't remember why this happened, but you know, I mean, it was a really difficult time for that country after World War II. There was a, you know, economically they were really struggling. And I think they got, during one winter in the 1950s, they got some really bad quality coal delivered to London, which caused this horrific smog event, essentially, that was so heavy that people were killed

just trying to cross the street because you couldn't see anything. Oh, God. Yeah, it was like there was a whole episode of The Crown that was devoted to this. It was while Winston Churchill was prime minister. So it was like driving through fog. Yeah. And you know, when I was a kid and read books about England in 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. And I think they paid kind of a terrible price. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah. That's what Peaky Blinders looks like. It's like the whole series. It's almost like they did it. So this is the Thames River from 1952. Wow. Wow.

Look at that guy. He's got a fucking mask on. Yeah, the Great Smog of 1952. That's what it was. And a lot of people who had asthma died, you know, because it was so terrible. The air was just so terrible. Wow. Two workers rested in an oxygen tent in Pennsylvania from 1948. Yeah, there was a similar event in Pennsylvania. Dendora, death

fog. Yeah. Two shocking events still in living memory from Queen Elizabeth's generation because the Clean Air Act reinforcement, reducing just one of the pollutants targeted by the Clean Air Act added 1.6 years to the average American life. Wow. Yeah, I think Puget Sound had a problem that was caused by sort of the geography of the area because, you know, Puget Sound is kind of a trough between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Mountains. 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, you know, Franklin stoves and stuff like that. Which is really bad for you. Yeah, which is That's where coal comes from right? Yeah, and so you buy charcoal if you buy lump charcoal. That's what that is 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. Wow. Because of the air quality. 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. So, I mean, that's just my experience. But I think it's true that the air quality is better. Well, it has to be. Yeah.

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

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 would be terrible. It's great if you're camping. 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 that are burning wood 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 breathing this wildfire smoke. Yeah.

I mean, it's just undeniable, I think now. And I think it's much, you know, people are really moving away from having wood stoves and fireplaces for that very reason. It's so weird because you think of like, oh, that's a comforting thing. Yeah. Nice fireplace. It's beautiful.

You know, 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 smoke snak? Not in 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're talking about that trough. 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. We're, you know, we stopped some, you know, putting lead in paint. We stopped the leaded gas. 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. 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.

Yeah, I mean, I am not an expert on this, but I am really concerned about what I've read in part because I have a gas stove. I mean, it completely makes sense. concerned about what I've read. In part because I have a gas stove. I mean, it completely makes sense. Yeah, and I like cooking on gas, but I've been really concerned about what I've read and also about the, you know, again, the industry suppression of evidence about this stuff. Right. And, you know, just the whole thing of calling it natural gas.

Right, right, right. Arsenic's natural, too. Yeah. I mean... Yeah, there's a lot of natural stuff that's terrible for you. Did we really fall for that? I mean, it's kind of heartbreaking if it turns out to have been, you know, as concerning as they're saying. And yeah. Well, you hear politicians talking about clean coal. I've heard that term before, which is a wild term to use, clean coal.

And it's bullshit. Yeah. I mean, it's total. It seems bullshit. Yeah. It's just, ugh. Yeah, I just, 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. 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, just a statistically significant correlation. 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.

Yes, yeah, in our brains. And it's like, well, that can't be good. 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 going to be in real trouble. 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 a paper straw able to support liquid without dissolving? Forever chemicals. Paper straws are way worse for you than plastic straws. Way worse. Yeah. Especially if you're dealing with hot liquids, which is another factor when you're dealing with coffee cups. 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 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 hot liquid in the first place. It doesn't even make any sense.

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. Yeah. So our solutions have to be at least somewhat better. Right. 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, they fucking don't trip. Jesus Christ, what are we saying here? I haven't and the metal straws go into their brain. Okay, they fucking don't trip. Jesus Christ, what are we saying here? I haven't followed the metal. 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. Oh my God. 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... It's like a Rube Goldberg thing or something. 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?

No, I think, 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. 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? Well, if it's plastic, there's a high likelihood that it's leaching some chemicals. And here's another disturbing thing that they found. They 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 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 what they found is that glass water bottles leach more chemicals into the water than plastic, which is just crazy. Yeah, I mean that must be... So 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 pretty important. Yeah, I remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember when they delivered milk, you know, in glass bottles to the house, and they had these little paper caps on them, but I

now wonder, you know, if those were sort of... Coated. Coated. Coated. 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 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 the dangers of plastics on this podcast before because we had Dr. Shanna 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.

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

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, 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. 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 SeaTac, from the airport, at a time when they were using lead in jet fuel. Oh, wow. And so 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. Nat. Oh, boy. Julie S. Hickman-Linan Oh, boy.

Julie S. Hickman-Linan With a spray, you know, gun, and that lead, that paint has lead components. So he's got it coming and going. I mean, his brother talked about how they used to play on a slag pile from the copper mine in Idaho. And 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 his whole history involves so many victims. 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 I think it's worth thinking about. That's what I'm saying. I think it's worth thinking

about what led 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, they want to be, they want to find something compelling and absorbing and learn something. And this, I thought thought was a way of you know in murder land 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 two

I didn't know about what it could do to kids and and how that might show up years later in their lives. When you finish a book like this and then you release it, what does that feel like? You're contributing, I think, greatly to this discussion that's a very important one, of 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? Katie Soule 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 then, you know, editors get involved and all these other, you know, people at the publishing house and they start saying, well, what about this, what about that? 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, you know, when you publish a book, people have really different responses than you even imagined, you know.

I mean, you can't control it anymore. It's just out in the world doing its thing. And it's interesting. It's always sort of really interesting to, you know, 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, you know, briefly because her father was an incredible rabble rouser when he worked at the smelter. He was working for the Union and did all the stuff to bring the whole arsenic thing to light, to, you know, show that the plant doctor, who he called the plant quack, you know, was lying about the stuff. And, you know, he was

sort of a hero in this whole story because he published, you know, he had this little newsletter that he published from his kitchen table. And he was so funny, so great. And he really, you know, 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, you know, like at age 55 or something. And so, you know, when you hear from somebody like, you know, that woman or other people who, you know, lived in Tacoma and remember this whole era, it's

really gratifying. 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. Yeah, I think you've done the world a great service. I really do. 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. I hope so. Yeah. I mean, that's the goal, you know, to try to, you know, just, I mean, I hate to use the term raise awareness because it's such a clich but you know you do hope that that people go come away from reading something like this and Think oh, you know maybe Maybe I should have my water tested or maybe I should you know

Be concerned about the playground where my kids are playing. Yeah 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. Well, I appreciate being here. My pleasure. Jamie, put the book up so people can see it. Murderland.

Did you do the audio version of it? I did not, but... but someone else do it. Yeah woman 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 his head is pollution Yeah, I mean his head. It's whoever the artist says did a great job of like Connecting kind of what we're talking about. Yeah, they did a great job on the cover. Well, thank you, Caroline. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. Really appreciate it. It was really good to

talk to you. Great to be here. All right. Bye, everybody.