#2360 - Caroline Fraser

36:35With a diverse variety of expertise talk it out with better help our listeners get 10 % off their first month at better help dot com slash J R E that's better H L P dot com slash J R E. Yeah I mean you definitely see you know what happened in Tacoma is is very well recorded now another city where this happened was El Paso Texas because a sarco had another major smelter in El Paso that had started in the 1890s and had been spewing the stuff out for decades. But all of the smelters during the war were kind of they weren't taken over by the government but the government introduced all kinds of you know price fixing and so forth to to make it not possible for these companies to raise prices astronomically and and and a lot of the stuff was requisitioned for the war effort so in El Paso by the 1970s they were starting to discover it.

37:53So I think it's a great thing to have a look at the fact that the whole area around the smokestack of the smelter was heavily led contaminated and what I just got 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. I 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 and violent crime and uptick and serial killers like is it not just specific northwest is it around El Paso as well.

39:05Yeah 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 there does seem to be an association with this there's a guy named Rick Nevin who was who is an economist and social scientist and he put together a paper about the black and white. So I think that's 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 rise in teen pregnancies the which is sort of how women come into it the the impulsivity seems to have perhaps led to the crime.

40:05So I think that's 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 you know and is also tied is also tied to the sexual revolution I mean and then also when was birth control like oral birth control introduced. I think that was in the 1960s really 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 factor and of course people you know always point out well you know not everybody in Tacoma and El Paso became a serial killer.

40:56Which of course is true. But it's like what you're talking about Ted Bundy was a bunch of factors that lead this person to becoming that right 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 four steps which caused brain damage and certain percentage of kids. So I think you're looking a lot of different things that contributed to trauma to the brain you know I think now they're really focusing on that you know in terms of CTE and you know brain damage we see that now in football players who've had had trauma.

41:56Repeatedly that this causes can cause violence and aggression and impulsivity right huge issue yeah it's fascinating that it also exists in women who have not had had trauma and the correlation between teen pregnancies and things along those lines that you're just just it all would take is like a slight percentage more of impulsivity and then you would see a corresponding. Result of not making great decision 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. It couldn't patent other formulations that would lead to the same result but I mean same result in terms of not having gas making your engine knock but.

42:51It wouldn't be as profitable for this person 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 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're full of metals like you know lead and copper and silver and gold and melting those rocks in these giant furnaces.

43:43And all of this put off an enormous amount of pollution you know particular pollution that was going up the smokestack and they were you know the companies that ran these things were keeping all the valuable metals that they could for themselves you know the silver and the copper and all of that and so they did have filters on them but. One of the things that happened sometimes with these smelters is that they would kind of fail or the filters would fail there's this horrifying example in Idaho it was a company called bunker hill that was one of the largest silver mines I think in the world and they had lead smelter in this town called Kellogg which is right on I 90 if you've ever driven on the on I 90 you know from Mazzullo Montana or something like that to Seattle you've driven through this place and they built you know this this giant smelter facility to to handle all the stuff they were pulling out of the mines and in 1973 they had a fire in their filtration building that destroyed most of the filter.

45:07That was trying you know the thing that was supposed to keep lead from going up the smokestack and there were kids in this town there were there was an elementary school right across the street from the smogstack. Jesus yeah and and the descriptions of that school are so horrifying because the teachers used to think that sometimes that the that the facility had caught fire because there was so much smoke. But in fact it was there wasn't you know it was just what the smokestack was putting out but after that filter failed that company which was owned by golf and western at the time. Did a kind of back of the napkin calculation of what those kids lives were worth because they.

46:02They 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 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 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 that ever see. So it says here that after it destroyed the fire broke out the destroyed the filters so it's for the next year and a half the smelter continued to operate and dust polluted with heavy metals rained down on the area 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 and Kellogg for example average 50 micrograms per desolator of blood the CDC recommends five micrograms high enough to.

47:18That's why I want concern and children with levels above 45 micrograms are advised to undergo. Keylation 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 let is a neurotoxid 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 and pregnant women lead can cross into the placenta poisoning their unborn babies holy shit.

48:04Yeah, yeah, I mean it was a nightmare thing and look at this says oh my god. So listen to this slowly poison as a teenager in Kellogg Ohio or a florey this person to talk about attend to the silver king school built in 1928 in the gulch gulch between the bunker hill lead smelter and zinc plant and offshoot of the cordolane river flowed by the school it was says florey a light glowing green color sort of a glow like a glow stick. Oh god in 1973 a fire broke out and so this is the fire that we're talking about. Oh my god a light glowing green color. Yeah, fuck. I used to live in New Jersey right by the in in Jersey City.

49:00Oh yeah right by the Liberty State Park which a bunch of the acreage of that was off limits to people because it was so polluted. Yeah, and I remember you know because you could actually walk from my apartment in Jersey City to Liberty State Park but you had to go by this you know place that was crushing cars one of those facilities where they compact cars. 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 you know color not found in nature and you just looked at it and thought what is that what's in that.

49:54And 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 robbing officials and just polluting everything. Yeah I mean that's what happened with the sarco you know at 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.

50:52But it is just an incredible sort of time in America because it was like well what's the trade off here you know the profits are worth much more than people's lives. And that place the cordoline you know there's a town city called cordoline in Idaho but there's also this giant lake cordoline 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 cordoline. And that's been a super fund project for many many years but they really can't clean that up because it's the kind of thing where you try to remove the sediment that's full of all the lead and stuff and it stirs everything up.

51:52And 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 fresh water fish because fresh water fish the problem is because of all the pollutants that settle into these lakes when you don't have flowing water fresh water fish is just sitting in all these chemicals and all these heavy metals. And it's really disturbing. If you eat fresh water 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 fresh water fish is akin to I believe it's like a year of exposure to forever chemicals.

52:47Yeah, 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 fresh water fish equals a month of drinking forever chemicals water. Oh my god. PFAs found in high levels in fresh water 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.

53:46And you know they had no choice they needed food and so they they went there their poor and who knows what's 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 us. 150 years ago all that was pristine. It's such a short amount of time. If you think about how long those lakes existed how long these river systems existed and in a couple of hundred years we've ruined everything essentially forever. 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 an napkin calculation as to these children's lives that is so disgusting.

54:44It's so hard to believe that that's how people operate but yet I know they do. Yeah I mean it's murder and that's why I called it murder land you know I think that the behavior of these corporate actors was as bad. I mean it's you know maybe pernicious to compare but I think that you know people have come to see that the ways that corporations have behaved. Is murderous you know that they're not I mean aside from you know just the issue of taking responsibility they're just going to go ahead with what they want to do and make the profits that they want and leave us to pay the price. 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.

55:46Yeah. You know and figure out okay well if they want to proceed with this how do we prevent the damage that could occur. And if they can't figure out how to prevent it they shouldn't be operating. They'll 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, the 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.

56:30And this is the issue with the drug viox 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 going to kill people? Yeah. But you also are going to make money and you decide let's do it anyway. Let's do it anyway. Yeah. 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.

57:20Many of them had sort of, you know, people on staff who was a 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 designed to make it look like arsenic wasn't a poison.

58:22You probably nicely rewarded by the corporation for that. Right. 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 going to do my job to get more money. I'm not going to think about the consequences. I'm just going to put blinders on and think about my vacation home. Then I'm going to get out of all this. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, what you said about the lying is really true.

59:01And this is what you see in serial killers. Yeah. You know that they lie about everything. Right. They lie about stuff they don't even need to lie about. It's just, it's their... It's their ammo. Yeah. They're just so in your 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've got to go away with it. They might have been fine. Now you got caught. I mean, I just 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.

59:41But 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. They have no empathy. They don't care if other people get hurt.

1:00:17And I don't understand it. But I don't have whatever is wrong with them. And I always wonder. 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? 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. You know, the part of your brain that helps you control yourself and control your behavior, that's kind of missing in some of these kids.

1:01:15And 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.

1:02:04And a lot of that, they think, has to do with the frontal lobe. Yeah, I mean, it obviously is some, you know, incredibly important discovery, what they make of that and how it's all going to, you know, come out in the wash in terms of what can be done to help kids who have these issues. That, I think, is 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 pollute exposure, is a fairly new thing in terms of, like, human history. You know, as we're gaining this understanding of how the human brain develops, which is also a fairly new thing, we're also dealing with this thing that we did collectively as the human race, this thing that we did where we introduced these insane chemicals into the brains of children.

1:03:02And in this case, I know 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. You know, I mean, the Romans and the Greeks knew that lead caused, you know, people to go crazy. I mean, they had people who worked with lead, you know, in foundries and things then. And they knew it was a problem. We've known that arsenic is a poison since forever. And yet, you know, comes along the 20th century and somehow these corporations are telling communities, including the community on Vashon Island. You know, oh, arsenic is really not a problem.

1:03:55You 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 my life had had a disturbing level of arsenic in my system. I went to get blood work done and my doctor said, you know, 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.

1:04:42Yeah. And I was getting arsenic from eating cans of sardines. I stopped eating the sardines. I waited like a few months. I went back, got more blood work. It's gone. Wow. That was like, 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 don't want it as your doctor said, don't do that. It's crazy. Yeah. But the stuff that they were producing at the smelter in Tacoma was what's called inorganic arsenic.

1:05:33And 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.

1:06:32And there's a couple more. There's another plume up in Everett where there was a 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 Gugin Himes 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.

1:07:20So 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 and a vash on island on? Like how do they do that? Well, in the five acres of ground that's poisoned. Yeah, in Tacoma, what they did, that was where the worst of the pollution was because the smoke stack was getting sitting right, you know, near the water. The smoke stack was blown up in the 90s. And they exploded the smoke stack, which I'm on purpose. Yeah, they closed the plant in 1986. Also the debt control demolition. Yeah, so it was a yes, exactly, which also probably contributed greatly to more pollutants.

1:08:13Yeah, they claimed that they cleaned the inside of the smoke stack before they blew it up. Yeah, but 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, a sarco 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 the sarco, which was close to $2 billion. I think it was the highest settlement that they'd ever gotten from a corporation.

1:09:06But it had to clean up about 20 different superfund sites, including the one in Idaho and Cordelene, which they've, you know, they've been working on that for years and still haven't finished. But in Tacoma, they actually did replace the soil in many, many people's yards. 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.

1:10:03You'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 Smokes Deck, there was that they took that arsenic kitchen that I was talking about, the one that had been up in Everett.

1:10:41And some of the most contaminated parts of the buildings that were part of the whole Smelter compound. And the the sarco promise 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 garbage bag.

1:11:32Essentially, I mean, if you can imagine like the largest garbage bag in the world, they put all the stuff in it. And they capped it with soil. And that thing is sitting there. You know, still even though they have now, you know, they cleared off the whole area where the compound was, where the factories and that the furnaces were and they built condos on top of that. 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 one of the buildings on the way to the public bathroom.

1:12:32So presumably if the people who are buying condos there know anything about it, they probably are aware of the industry. And in a sense, it has been cleaned up. 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 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 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.

1:13:39On 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.

1:14:32And 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.

1:14:52Whoa. 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 Humphrey wrote this book about, and one of the aspects of the book is about DDT. And the ubiquitous use of DDT and how so many people in rural communities were coming down with air quotes polio, paralytic polio that was directly correlated to the use of DDT. Like the same areas where people, and it wasn't just human beings that were getting this polio, but it was also cows, horses, and dogs. They were getting paralyzed as well, which it doesn't cross species.

1:15:48Human 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 say symptomatic. 95 to 99 percent. 95 to 99 percent of actual polio is asymptomatic. So what they were calling polio was most likely DDT poisoning. There was sprayed everywhere. There was sprayed everywhere for gypsy moths and all sorts of different pests. They didn't know. And then once they did know, it was too late. And they were just trying to cover it up and saying, no, we cured polio. We cured it.

1:16:35Look, and these people that were getting air quotes polio were most likely getting poisoned by DDT. Yeah, I think that a lot of this environmental stuff has become so overwhelming to people that they kind of tuned it out. 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. 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.

1:17:38Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things in my mind when I kind of wanted to develop the whole thing about, you know, talking about serial killers and violence and aggression and where that might have come from, because I, you know, I wanted to talk about all that and I didn't want to just use it as a kind of Trojan horse to introduce all the stuff about pollution. But I did think it was a way to get people maybe to think about these issues who might not otherwise want to do that, you know, who, who, and I think people are interested in the history of how they might have been, you know, exposed.

1:18:24When 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 filter, like how closely 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, you know, the people who worked at the smelter, they lived right around the smogstock. 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 house there.

1:19:25And it was, when I was a kid growing up there, it was a well -to -do upper middle class place. And one of the things I look at in the book is some of the really bizarre crime that happened on the island at that time. That you wonder, was this, you know, in any way related to, you know, some of these things were talking about the rise in lead in the air from, from leaded gas, because Mercer Island is crossed by I -90. I -90 comes down out of the cascades and crosses Mercer Island, which is sitting in 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.

1:20:24And 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.

1:21:21This 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 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 a hundred miles an hour.

1:22:20It actually wasn't his car. It was like his girlfriend's sister's come arrow or something. And he drove it, you know, 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. And that kind of crime. And that kind of crime. And oddly enough, old, always men. Yeah. 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?

1:23:08You 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 you. You know, then 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.

1:24:03I mean, there can't prove it. But I think that it may be true that, you know, the whole, all the jokes about the baby rumors being crazy because of lead exposure. There may be a little bit of truth to that. I mean, it makes sense. If it, I mean, it totally makes sense. I mean, if there were elevated levels of all this lead, elevated levels of all these toxins. And we know that it affects human behavior. I mean, it only makes sense. 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.

1:24:53And 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 desolate are 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 there's some, you know, if it's not zero, then what are we, what are we going to do about it?

1:25:47And it's, you know, who's liable? That's right. Yeah. That's what's so disturbing about all this stuff is it. A lot of effort is put forth to make sure that whatever companies that may be liable, they'll try to distort facts and try to hide evidence and try to make it seem like this is just a, this is a nothing better. This is no big deal. But you see that with fluoride, you know, we've been putting fluoride in the water forever, supposedly to help people with tooth decay. And then you're seeing that there's a direct correlation between high levels of fluoride in the water and lower die cues. And yet there's still people out there that are saying, oh, we need, we're going to have to see a bunch of tooth decay.

1:26:29We need to put the fluoride back in the water. What we just stop this? Why? Well, because people are profiting of putting fluoride in water, there's enormous corporations that are responsible for that fluoride. And they provide that fluoride to the drinking water. And under the guise of improving dental health, which is just crazy. Because you don't need it, like you could just brush your teeth and stop eating 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 they've seen, they find like skulls and dead people's teeth from, you know, hundreds of years ago, you don't, you don't find a massive amount of tooth decay.

1:27:14Because 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 just 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 lower IQs, it's pretty undeniable. They know it's a fact. They know it's a neurotoxin. But you have to brush it off. Oh, but that's in high doses.

1:27:58And low dose is like, well, who's determining? Who's determining? There hasn't been a long history of human use, of fluoride and 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. I suppose that that's true. Oh, I'm some sure it's true. But I mean, it's 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. Because it's got fluoride and it fluoride is fucking bad for you.

1:28:37So 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 should probably should have been removed from our water supply a long time ago.

1:29:14So who's responsible? And then it gets into that. Against into like these corporations that have been dumping fluoride into water or justifying these fluoride, the politicians that have been doing it. Who's been getting paid? What's the paper trail? Like what's going on? And it's just one more piece of disgusting and disturbing evidence of human depravity. The people are willing to do things that are just they know are bad, but they profit. And the government is not completely blameless in all of this either because in terms of lead, for example, one of the places that I think people are really concerned about is the public schools.

1:30:00Public 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 than they used lead and 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, you know, so much money. Right. In order to do that and, you know, they have occasionally kind of tiptoed up to this. I think the Biden administration did say that they were going to spend, you know, millions of dollars to try and do work at schools.

1:30:46Now 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 assessing 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.

1:31:41But 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 want to speak out too much about this, but munitions, you know, like unexploded munitions and just where things got bombed, where it's so toxic, human beings can't live there.

1:32:30It's a size of Paris. It's like this enormous chunk of land that's like it's ruined, probably forever. Yeah, I mean, and there's got to be some kind of, you know, government intervention. It's stuff like this that has to be the responsibility because the corporations walked away. And so they can't, you know, Asarco is still exists, but it's now operating out of Mexico. How convenient. Yeah, that's a whole story. There was zone rogue World War I Arab battlefields that are still dangerous over a hundred years later. Well. Yeah. So the red zone is a chain of former battlefields across northeastern France that the government is cordoned off due to the many dangerous ordinance that remains from the First World War.

1:33:31The area originally spanned over 460 square miles from Nancy through to Leal and incorporate such battlefields as this, how do you say that, Somme, Verdun and Vimmy 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 has even World War I and all that chemical stuff that they were. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's when they first started using chemical warfare. Yeah. People are gross. I mean, they're awesome too. Like a lot of people, you're awesome. A lot of people are awesome.

1:34:15A lot of people are great. I love them. But like in large groups, when they don't have responsibility for their actions, they're gross. It's very, you know, the more you read about these types of things, like you're describing your book, and these horrible things that these corporations have done. The amount of pollution that they've caused and the amount of damage that they've done. And then the effects on untold millions of human beings that have been exposed to these things. It's just so disturbing. It's so disturbing that it just makes you, you know, like I said, I can't read this stuff at night.

1:34:59If 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 the part of it. Which, you know, it is really disturbing stuff. Yeah, all of it is disturbing. The fact that serial kills exist, that's disturbing. The fact that there might be some sort of an environmental effect or chemical effect that's causing some of this behavior to take place.

1:35:36Well, but we did do the right thing in terms of, you know, now every country in the world that was selling letted gas has taken it off the market. Right. So that was a good thing. We made some progress. And, you know, again, this guy's graphs that he published show this. That's right, Rick Nevin. And he wrote this book called Lucifer Curves. 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 violin crime rate goes up and up in the 70s and 80s. And then when they remove, yeah, when they remove, the letted gas, the crime rate falls off a cliff.

1:36:31That is crazy. Look at this graph. It's almost like it mirrors it. All these graphs look exactly the same. Oh, 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.

1:37:36And 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 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 them. I mean, we don't even know who he was. It makes me really think about Peaky Blinders.

1:38:23You ever watch that show? Yes. That show was like, it's almost like they filtered the whole show. They did an amazing job with that show. First of all, it's one of my favorite series of all time. It's so good. But the show looks like it's in the middle of like coal fog. You know, like everything is kind of gray. 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 that are really dangerous to breathe. There was a whole thing that happened in London in the 1950s where they got...

1:39:14I don't remember why this happened, but you know, I mean, it was really difficult time for that country after World War II. There was, 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, good. Yeah, it was like there was a whole episode of the crown that was devoted to this. It was well, Winston Churchill was prime minister.

1:39:59So 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.

1:40:45Look at that guy. He's got a fucking mask on. Yeah, the great smog of 1952. Wow. 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 oxygen tent in Pennsylvania from 1948. Yeah, there was a similar event in Pennsylvania. And more of a death fog. Yeah. Two shocking events still living memory from Queen Elizabeth's generation because a clean air act reinforced, enforcement. Reducing just one of the pollutants targeted by the clean air act added 1 .6 years to the average American life. Wow. Yeah, I think I think Puget Sound had a problem that was caused by sort of the geography of the area because, you know, Puget Sound is kind of a trough between the Olympic mountains and the Cascade mountains.

1:41:43And 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 unfortunately. And that's where coal comes from. Right. Right. And so when 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 sky is 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.

1:42:29And 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. 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.

1:43:15Yeah. And I think 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, it's a small wood fire. It's like relatively speaking. It's not going to cost too much damage. It's no big deal. But when you get a large group of human beings, they're burning wood. Yeah. And you're all breathing that.

1:43:50It'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 L .A., the entire city was covered in smoke. And you're just you're breathing these 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. A nice fireplace. It's beautiful. You know, I cook over hardwood all the time.

1:44:34You know, it's like the best way. Like, you have a smoker and offset smoker. Put a little bunch of oak in there, post oak. And you cook that way. But, you know, what's coming on that smokestock? Yeah. 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 stagging air. Like, are you talking about that trough? Yeah. I mean, so, you know, we are doing the right things in some respects. And, you know, we're moving away from heating houses with wood. We stopped, you know, putting lead in paint. We stopped the letted gas.

1:45:19What 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. Yeah.

1:46:03And 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. I mean, arsenic's natural, too. Yeah. I mean, 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.

1:46:51And it's bullshit. Yeah. I mean, it's called... It seems bullshit. Yeah. It's just as... Ugh. Yeah. I just... I mean, and I think, you know, as homo sapiens, we're either going to get on top of this stuff or it's going to get on top of us. 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 lower IQs, statistically significant correlation. And all the stuff they're talking about now with plastics, you know, in the body.

1:47:40I 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. And... And it's like, well, that can't be good. No. 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 damp paper straws.

1:48:26So 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. Yeah. 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's 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.

1:49:12It doesn't even make any sense. Like how is paper able to hold hot liquid without dissolving? Well, it has to have some sort of a surface inside of it that's a coating. And that coating is filled with forever chemicals. And it is fucking terrible for you. Yeah. So our solutions have to be at least somewhat better. 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. Oh, god, you 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.

1:49:49Yeah, 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, if it's not one thing, it's another, there's no end. Whatever we try to fix up, they would come up with a solution that's actually worse than the initial problem. Not always, but... It's like a root gulper thing or something. Yeah. 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...

1:50:25Well, 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 leeches 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. But what happened in the time that it was bottled in the factory to the time it got into your hands?

1:51:06Well, if it's plastic, there's a high likelihood that it's leaching some chemicals. And here's another disturbing thing that they found. You said, well, you should buy glass water. Yeah, buy a glass water bottle. Well, that solves the problem. Well, actually it doesn't. Because of the caps. So the caps leech more because of the way they make these caps on these metal water bottles. Whatever the surface of the interior lining of those caps, it keeps water from leaking out. Leech is even more than it does with a water bottle. That's plastic. So what they found is that glass water bottles leech more chemicals into the water.

1:51:48Then plastic, which is just crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that must be right. 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. Oh, yeah. 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. Well, they seem like they're metal. It seems like a metal coated cap because there's something about the rigidity of it. Here, the recent studies indicated glass bottles may contain significantly higher level of microplastics and previously thought.

1:52:34Even exceeding those found in plastic bottles. It's just largely due to microplastics originating from the bottle caps, specifically the paint used on them. Well, glass is often seen as a safer alternative to plastic. These findings highlight a potential concern regarding microplastic contamination and beverages regardless of the container type. And we've talked about this, the dangers of plastics on this podcast before because we had Dr. Channis Wahn from Harvard who wrote a book called Countdown. That's all talking about how the phallates and these microplastics entering into women's bodies during the time where these children are developing.

1:53:17It's contributing to a bunch of different factors that are really dangerous to the endocrine system. And the camp that 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. Tourific, 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, serial killer and things like that.

1:54:02Which 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.

1:54:57That's true. But Gary Ridgeway, you know, again, he grows up two miles from C -Tack from the airport at a time when they were using lead.

1:55:12And so he's, and he's also right by two major highways. And what does he do when he grows up? He goes to work at a truck factory painting trucks with a spray gun. And that lead, that paint has lead components. So he's got it coming and going. I mean, his brother talked about how he used to 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 you 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.

1:56:24And that's probably an undercount.

1:56:29So I think it's worth thinking about. That's what I'm saying. I think it's worth thinking about what lead contributed to crime during that period. And I wanted to tell the story in a way that was kind of subjective, you know, and personal and not in an academic way. I mean, there are some great academic histories of lead exposure and the history of lead industries in this country. I didn't want to do that because it's been done. And because, you know, I think people, when they're reading something for, I wouldn't say entertainment, but, you know, they want to be, they want to find something compelling and absorbing and learn something.

1:57:19And this I thought was a way of, you know, in murderland of presenting this material in a way that people could kind of say, oh, you know, I didn't know about the, what happened with lead during World War II. I didn't know about what it could do to kids and how that might show up years later in their lives. When you finish a book like this and then you release it, what does that feel like? Like you're contributing, I think, greatly to this discussion. That's a very important one of the impact of these industrial pollutants. What, what these unknowing victims of this, not just the serial killers, but all the people that were probably damaged by this stuff.

1:58:12What does it feel like when, when you release a book like this? It's kind of overwhelming, you know, to see it suddenly kind of being in people's hands and they're reading it and they're asking you questions.

1:58:30And, 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 play pen where you get to make all the decisions. And, you know, make all the choices. And then, you know, editors get involved in all these other people at the publishing house and they start saying, well, what about this? What about that? And that's how it's sort of terrifying because you realize, oh, I haven't thought about all the ramifications I need to, you know, do all this fact checking and make sure everything's right.

1:59:12And, you know, so that's a real, you know, hump to get over to just make sure that, you know, 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.

1:59:59And 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 this 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 long. And he 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 up from his kitchen table. And he was so funny, so great. And he really, you know, cared about the guys that he worked with.

2:00:53And so he, I think, helped compile a whole list, which was called the Death List. I found that there's a copy of it in the Tacoma library, a Sarko 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 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.

2:01:45I 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. And because so many people are fascinated by serial killers and so many people are creeped out by it. That it makes it more compelling. 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 cliche.

2:02:41But, you know, you do hope 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 murder land. Did you do the audio version of it? I did not, but, um, someone else do it. Yeah. A woman. Prime and blood less than the time of serial killers.

2:03:30I like how you have it all foggy too. You know, where it makes it look like his head solution. Yeah, I mean, his head, whoever the artist is 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.