#2360 - Caroline Fraser

Summary

The Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser

Release Date: August 5, 2025
Host: Joe Rogan
Guest: Caroline Fraser
Book Discussed: Murderland

---

Introduction

In episode #2360 of The Joe Rogan Experience, host Joe Rogan welcomes Caroline Fraser, author of the compelling book Murderland. The conversation delves deep into the unsettling connections between environmental pollution—specifically lead and arsenic—and the rise of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s.

---

Overview of "Murderland"

Caroline Fraser introduces her book, Murderland, which explores the prevalence of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and investigates the potential environmental factors contributing to this phenomenon.

[00:32] Caroline: “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.”

---

Environmental Pollution and Aggression

Fraser posits a strong connection between lead pollution from smelters and leaded gasoline and increased aggression and violence, potentially fostering an environment conducive to serial killers.

[06:35] Joe Rogan: “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?”

[06:47] Caroline Fraser: “Most of the research that’s been done has focused on aggression, juvenile delinquency, for example... delinquency and crime.”

She elaborates on studies showing how even low levels of lead exposure can lead to significant behavioral issues, including increased violent crime rates.

---

Historical Use of Lead and Arsenic

Fraser provides a historical backdrop, tracing the introduction of leaded gasoline in the 1920s and its widespread use until the 1990s. She highlights the role of large-scale smelting operations, such as Asarco in Tacoma and El Paso, Texas, in contributing to environmental lead contamination.

[12:05] Joe Rogan: “Oh, God.”

[12:06] Caroline Fraser: “It’s really almost unreal to think about the moral failure that this represents.”

Fraser discusses how corporations prioritized profits over human health, knowingly exposing populations to toxic levels of lead.

---

Case Studies: Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, Richard Ramirez

The discussion shifts to notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, both of whom grew up in Tacoma during the smelter's operation. Fraser suggests that their significant lead exposure may have influenced their violent behaviors.

[20:41] Joseph: “So that may have been his first murder.”

[21:00] Caroline Fraser: “I think it’s worth thinking about what lead contributed to crime during that period.”

Fraser connects environmental toxins to the psychopathology observed in these killers, emphasizing the lack of early behavioral signs typically associated with such crimes.

---

Broader Impacts on Crime Rates

Fraser presents data indicating a surge in violent crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s, correlating this rise with the peak periods of lead pollution.

[29:02] Caroline Fraser: “There was the Industrial Revolution, baby boom generation coming of age... toxins that were becoming really prevalent.”

[35:39] Caroline Fraser: “In 1973, children in Kellogg had an average of 50 micrograms per deciliter of blood lead. The CDC recommends 5 micrograms as a concern.”

She cites Rick Nevin's research in Lucifer Curves, illustrating how the decline of leaded gasoline directly correlates with decreases in violent crime rates.

---

Corporate Malfeasance and Government Responsibility

Fraser criticizes the role of corporations in perpetuating environmental pollution and the government's inadequate response in enforcing regulations. She highlights the actions of Asarco and the significant settlements required to address the extensive contamination.

[44:03] Caroline Fraser: “It was a debt controlled demolition.”

[47:56] Joe Rogan: “So listen to this... children living in Kellogg were screened for lead...”

Fraser underscores the government's reliance on Superfund programs to manage the aftermath of corporate negligence, which often falls short due to insufficient funding and enforcement.

---

Remediation Efforts and Challenges

The conversation explores the complexities of environmental remediation, detailing the efforts to clean contaminated sites like Tacoma and Coeur d'Alene. Despite significant financial settlements, Fraser points out the ongoing challenges in fully restoring these areas.

[73:18] Joe Rogan: “What makes a piece of land remediation like a five-acre plot poisonous?”

[77:35] Caroline Fraser: “They built condos on top of a giant plastic-lined garbage bag containing contaminated soil.”

Fraser emphasizes the long-term nature of environmental cleanup and the difficulties in fully eradicating entrenched pollutants from ecosystems.

---

Psychological Implications: Psychopathy in Corporate Behavior

Fraser draws parallels between the deceptive and harmful behaviors of serial killers and those of corporate executives responsible for environmental damage. She suggests that a lack of empathy and moral responsibility may be more pervasive than commonly acknowledged.

[62:23] Joe Rogan: “They lie.”

[62:24] Caroline Fraser: “They just want to get away with what they’re doing.”

This segment explores the psychological traits that enable both serial killers and corporate offenders to perpetrate significant harm without remorse.

---

Modern Issues: Fluoride, Plastics, Environmental Toxins

Beyond lead and arsenic, the discussion touches on contemporary environmental concerns such as fluoride in drinking water and microplastics in everyday products. Both hosts express skepticism about the safety and regulation of these substances.

[92:10] Joe Rogan: “There's a direct correlation between high levels of fluoride in the water and lowered IQs.”

[119:16] Joe Rogan: “Glass water bottles leach more chemicals into the water than plastic.”

Fraser concurs, highlighting the ongoing battle against industrial pollutants and the societal complacency that allows such practices to continue.

---

Conclusion

The episode culminates in a somber reflection on the pervasive impact of industrial pollutants on society and mental health. Caroline Fraser’s Murderland serves as a crucial narrative that intertwines environmental science with true crime, urging listeners to reconsider the hidden influences shaping human behavior.

[130:25] Joe Rogan: “I think you've done the world a great service.”

[130:25] Caroline Fraser: “I hope that my book encourages people to think about these issues in their lives.”

Rogan and Fraser emphasize the importance of awareness and proactive measures in addressing the long-term consequences of environmental negligence.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Caroline Fraser [00:33]: “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.”

• Joe Rogan [06:35]: “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?”

• Caroline Fraser [12:06]: “It’s really almost unreal to think about the moral failure that this represents.”

• Joe Rogan [21:05]: “Was this while he was killing or before he started?”

• Caroline Fraser [35:39]: “In 1973, children in Kellogg had an average of 50 micrograms per deciliter of blood lead. The CDC recommends 5 micrograms as a concern.”

• Joe Rogan [62:23]: “They lie.”

• Caroline Fraser [77:35]: “They built condos on top of a giant plastic-lined garbage bag containing contaminated soil.”

• Joe Rogan [92:10]: “There's a direct correlation between high levels of fluoride in the water and lowered IQs.”

• Joe Rogan [130:25]: “I think you've done the world a great service.”

---

Key Takeaways

1. Environmental Pollution and Crime: Caroline Fraser's research suggests a significant link between industrial pollutants like lead and arsenic and the rise of violent crime, including serial killings, in the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s and 1980s.

2. Corporate Negligence: Large corporations prioritized profits over public health, contributing to extensive environmental contamination while employing deceptive practices to mask the detrimental effects of their operations.

3. Psychological Impact: Exposure to heavy metals can impair brain development, particularly the frontal cortex, leading to increased aggression, impulsivity, and potentially psychopathic behaviors.

4. Regulatory Challenges: Remediation efforts are often hampered by insufficient funding, prolonged legal battles, and ongoing corporate malfeasance, leaving many communities grappling with the long-term consequences of pollution.

5. Modern Environmental Concerns: The discussion extends to contemporary issues such as fluoride in water, microplastics, and other environmental toxins, highlighting the ongoing struggle to balance industrial progress with public health.

6. Awareness and Action: Fraser emphasizes the importance of raising awareness about these hidden influences and encourages proactive measures to mitigate the impact of environmental pollutants on society.

---

Final Thoughts

The Joe Rogan Experience episode featuring Caroline Fraser provides a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection between environmental science and true crime. It underscores the profound and often overlooked ways in which industrial activities can shape human behavior and societal trends. Fraser's work serves as a crucial reminder of the need for vigilant environmental stewardship and ethical corporate practices to prevent such tragedies from recurring.

Transcript

[Caroline]

Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out.

[Joe Rogan]

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

[Caroline]

All day.

[Joe Rogan]

Thanks for doing this.

[Caroline]

Thank you for having me.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

The book's called Murderland.

[Caroline]

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. And there always had been this question, why are there so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest? And. 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 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 some issues with drug and alcohol addiction. And a few years ago, maybe 2008 or something like that, some people, a couple people were murdered down the street from me, and I live in a very peaceful neighborhood. That was something that really made me start thinking about the issue of maybe it might be a good idea to think of moving back to the Pacific Northwest, which I wanted to do anyway, because I have family up there. 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 I looked it up online and 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, 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 Ridgeway. 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 is. The smelter had been operating there since the 1880s, 1890s. So for a very long time I could see that a lot of news media had been devoted to looking at what had happened in this region. There was a whole map, a GIS map, geographic information systems that allowed you to, to look up individual houses, 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?

[Joe Rogan]

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?

[Caroline]

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, by the time they're teenagers or young adults? And they have shown a very strong association with problems with learning, ADHD and as I said, delinquency and crime.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

That's right, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

This episode is brought to you by the Farmer's Dog.

[Joe Rogan]

I think we can all agree that.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Eating highly processed food for every meal isn't optimal. So why is processed food the status quo for dog food? Because that's what kibble is, an ultra processed food. But a healthy alternative exists. The Farmer's dog. They make fresh food for dogs and what does it look like? Real meat and vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients and help avoid any the bad stuff that comes with ultra processing. And it's not just random ingredients thrown together. Their food is formulated by on staff board certified vet nutritionists. These people are experts on dog nutrition and they're all in on fresh food. The Farmer's dog also does something unique. They portion out the food to your dog's nutritional needs. This ensures that you don't overfeed them, making weight management easy. Research shows that dogs kept at a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer. Head to the farmersdog.com rogan to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. This offer is for new customers only. This episode is brought to you by Visible. I want to let you in on something your current wireless carrier does not want you to know about Visible. Because Visible is the ultimate wireless hack. No confusing plans with surprise fees, no nonsense, just fast speeds, great coverage without the premium cost. With Visible you get one line wireless wireless with unlimited data powered by Verizon's network for 25amonth, taxes and fees included. Seriously, 25amonth flat. What you see is what you pay. No hidden fees on top of that. Ready to see. Join now and unlock unlimited data for just 25amonth on the Visible plan. Don't think wireless can be so transparent. So Visible. Well now you know. Switch [e-mail] rogan terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.

[Caroline]

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. The companies. The corporations, the people who introduced it, Standard Oil, DuPont, et cetera, they knew the dangers of this. They were told by medical doctors who said. Yeah. Who said, this will expose everybody to more lead than human beings have ever had to deal with before. Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

And they just did it to stop the engines from knocking.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, God.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Caroline]

Yeah. And they did for decades. Because this began in the 20s and 30s.

[Joe Rogan]

So we can assume that the smelting thing, they probably didn't know. Correct. At least in the 1800s.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, boy. But they've done so much for art.

[Caroline]

Yeah. I mean, it's just.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what they like to do.

[Caroline]

Yeah. Yeah. It's a total kind of whitewashing the reputation. And they were among the earlier corporations to do that, and totally successfully.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

It has something to do with. With explosives.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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 ozone layer. Hole. The hole in the ozone layer.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, terrific.

[Caroline]

So, like, two of the most devastating discoveries, scientific discoveries in the 20th century are down to the sky. And he was awarded the highest medal from the American Chemistry association, which he still holds, even though he became really ill as a result. I think of working with this tetraethyl, it's called the substance that was added to leaded gas. And he 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 yes. And he developed something which was called polio. He became 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. So when you first started investigating, this was your interest in serial killers? You always had an interest in serial killers, which is always weird to me. How many women are interested in serial killers? Like, all of the top true crime podcasts. If you look at their demographics, it's a large chunk of it. It's women. And I know the women in my house love to watch those true crime shows and those serial killer, which disturbs the shit out of me. Like, my family was watching something on the Night Stalker on Richard Ramirez. And like, I can't watch this. I can't 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? I'm not, like, lumping you in with all women, but there is a weird thing with women in true crime podcasts.

[Caroline]

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 just a couple of miles from the places where Ted Bundy began abducting women in the summer of 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. 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 Lake Sammamish, which was about 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, she knew him.

[Caroline]

Yes. She worked with him at a rape crisis clinic in Seattle.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, he worked at a rape crisis clinic. Wow.

[Caroline]

He was very interested in doing research on rape.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Was this while he was killing or before he started?

[Caroline]

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 8 year old girl who was abducted in Tacoma in 1961. In August of 1961, Ann Marie Burr, and he was 14 at that time. He is now one of the principal suspects, I think, behind her abduction.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Caroline]

So that may have been his first murder. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

No, but one of the things that I think the FBI was discovering when they started doing all this, you know, investigation of the pasts, you know, the childhood of serial killers, was that this starts really young, that the fantasies and the obsessions with, you know, I mean, some of 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. They don't know their dad. They don't know who he is, maybe, or they have a very bad relationship with the parents. There's maybe abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. We don't know that about Ted Bundy in terms of the abuse factor. But he remains, I think, really puzzling to people for that reason, because you don't see some of the usual signs.

[Joe Rogan]

With him and because he refused to answer questions.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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 is it still hot.

[Joe Rogan]

So are there, like, undiscovered serial killers that are in that area, or maybe deaths that are attributed to unknown people?

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Dismemberment murders?

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

I remember that. That was fairly recently. Right. Am I thinking of the same thing?

[Caroline]

It may be another thing that you're thinking of. I think this Daisy, it was another thing.

[Joe Rogan]

It was like shoes that had a human foot in it.

[Caroline]

And they could have just been, you know, bodies of people who drowned. 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 the. 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 i5 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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 large in terms of its population density, 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 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, zinc is associated with aggression.

[Caroline]

I don't know that it's associated with aggression, but it's one of these things that was formed, 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 sick in all kinds of ways. You can get health, heart problems. It's now been associated with various forms of dementia, Alzheimer's, als. So there's a lot of things that lead can cause. But they have shown statistically that the increase in lead in the population, in the air in the mid-70s really may have contributed to a rise in violent crime.

[Joe Rogan]

What year did they start putting lead in gasoline?

[Caroline]

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, you know, rare to have one car, much less, you know, two or three. And then during the war, you had. I mean, the war. World War II is really interesting to look at in terms of lead, because I have a sort of little chapter about this, because during World War II, gasoline, of course, was rationed. They needed all of it for the war effort. But the war effort itself raised the amount of metals. All these metals, lead, copper, etc. Were needed so intensively for the war that they began to be produced more than at any other time in world history. And so the pollution from that, from producing all these 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 the 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 part of our environment. It becomes dust that is in people's houses or they're attics. And that, I think, is what people eventually started when after the war, people started driving lots more 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 en masse in history, in human history. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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 and grow a small garden. But he did some soil samples. He's a very, very intelligent guy. Did some soil samples and send it to university to get it tested. And it was just filled with lead. And he was like, what is this all about? And it was like, it's all from leaded gasoline. So this was in the 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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Join a car sharing club today.

[Joe Rogan]

That was during the gas rationing days.

[Caroline]

That was the craziest one.

[Joe Rogan]

But 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? Wagon? What is that? It's a bunch of soldiers. Soldiers. Oh, okay. Wow. So they were just. 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 and 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?

[Advertisement Speaker]

This is an ad for BetterHelp. 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 to a doctor. And if you're struggling with your mental.

[Joe Rogan]

Health, consult a credentialed therapist.

[Advertisement Speaker]

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 Better help. 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, better help can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with Better help. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at better help.comjre that's better. H E L P.comjre yeah, I mean.

[Caroline]

You, 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 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, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

That's right.

[Joe Rogan]

But there's contributing factors.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it's cost, like what you're talking about, Ted Bundy. There's a bunch of factors that lead this person to becoming that, but also lead.

[Caroline]

Yeah, I mean, you know, as I say, somewhere in the book, a little extra lead may have been something that 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. I think now they're really focusing on that 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Huge issue.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Of that not making great decisions. What you're doing.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So twisted.

[Caroline]

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. It was like taking the rocks from mines that were full of all these different metals, including arsenic. This is where the arsenic came from. But they were full of metals like 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, particulate pollution that was going up the smokestack. And they were. 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 a lead smelter in this town called Kellogg, which is right on i90. If you've ever driven on i90 from Missoula, Montana, or something like that to Seattle, you've driven through this place. And they built this giant smelter facility 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. That was 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Jesus.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, God.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

So it says here that after it destroyed, the fire broke out that destroyed the filters. So for the next year and a half, the smelter continued to operate and dust polluted with heavy metals rained down on the area. During that time, children living in the area were screened for lead by the State and the U.S. center for Disease Control, and the results were foreboding. Children in Kellogg, for example, average 50 micrograms per deciliter of blood. The CDC recommends 5 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?

[Caroline]

I don't know.

[Joe Rogan]

Dimer. Captocync 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.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

And look at this. It says, oh, my God. So listen to this. Slowly. Poison. As a teenager in Kellogg, Ohio, Flory, this person I talk 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, a fire broke out. And so this is the fire that we were talking about. Oh, my God. A light, glowing green color.

[Caroline]

Yeah. Fuck. I used to live in New Jersey, 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, 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 color not found in nature. And you just looked at it and thought, what is that? What's in that?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah, I mean, that's what happened with Asarco, you know, at. But 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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

This episode is brought to you by the Farmer's dog.

[Joe Rogan]

I think we can all agree that.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Eating highly processed food for every meal isn't optimal. So why is processed food the status quo for dog food? Because that's what kibble is, an ultra processed food. But a healthy alternative exists. The farmer's dog. They make fresh food for dogs and what does it look like? Real meat and vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients and help avoid any of the bad stuff that comes with ultra processing. And it's not just random ingredients thrown together. Their food is formulated by on staff board certified vet nutritionists. These people are experts on dog nutrition and they're all in on fresh food. The farmer's dog also does something unique. They portion out the food to your dog's nutritional needs. This ensures that you don't overfeed them, making weight management easy. Research shows that dogs kept at a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer. Head to the farmersdog.com rogan to get 50% off your first box. Plus free shipping. This offer is for new customers only. This episode is brought to you by shipstation. Managing an e commerce business is challenging enough. Without the added chaos of shipping and order fulfillment. It can feel like trying to herd cats on roller skates. That's where ShipStation comes in. With its simple dashboard. Shipstation lets you handle all your shipping needs in one place, automating tasks, securing the best shipping rates and even printing labels with a single click. Whether you're shipping a few packages a day or, or thousands, it grows alongside your business. Plus it integrates seamlessly with all the services and selling channels you already use so you can keep your existing workflow intact while making it even more efficient. Ready to bring calm to the chaos? Go to shipstation.com and use the code JRE to sign up for your free trial stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, we were talking about this the other day that you really shouldn't even eat freshwater fish because freshwater fish, the, the problem is because of all the pollutants that settle into these lakes when you don't have flowing water, freshwater fish is just sitting in all these chemicals and all these heavy metals and it's, it's, you know, it's really disturbing. 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.

[Caroline]

Yikes.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

And the thing is, 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.

[Caroline]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Joe Rogan]

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 the these children's lives, that is so disgusting. It's so hard to believe that that's how people operate, but yet I know they do.

[Caroline]

Yeah, I mean, it's murder. And that's why I called it Murderland. 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, 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 find, figure out how to prevent it, they shouldn't be operating.

[Joe Rogan]

Also, they lie.

[Caroline]

They lie.

[Joe Rogan]

Whatever they're going to tell us. I mean, we found this out from pharmaceutical drug companies that when they run studies, they'll run 10 studies that show damage, and they'll find one study that they can kind of manipulate into showing some sort of efficacy. And then they'll publish that one study and bury the other studies that show damage and then release a product and then have internal emails where they show that they know that this is going to cause problems. And this is the issue with the drug Vioxx that wound up killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000Americans. 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, but you also are going to 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.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

And probably nicely rewarded by the corporation for doing that. This is 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, 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.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

It's their M.O.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

They should have went for corporate America, should have worked for them, and they could have got away with it. They might have been fine, never got caught. I mean, I just. I wonder how many people who are working for these chemical corporations and how many. How many exhibit the exact same traits as serial killers. They just don't want to get intimate and actually physically cause the murder, but get some sort of a bizarre thrill out of knowing that they're doing this kind of damage to people for profit.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, we don't want to think about it. We don't want to think about sociopaths. We don't want to think about psychopaths and sociopaths and psychopaths. There's a lot of overlap. We don't want to think about what percentage of us exhibit these traits where we have zero empathy. 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? Is. Are we dealing with environmental toxins? Is there exposure to something at a young age? Like, what is it that causes that? Is it.

[Caroline]

Well, I think it can be brain damage. I mean, what happens to the frontal cortex of these kids who are exposed to lead and cadmium is that certain parts of the brain fail to develop correctly. 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. And they have shown now that the effects are worse in men than they are in women, that the, you know, 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, real effect that they're writing papers about.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah. I mean, it obviously is some, you know, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Advertisement Speaker]

Knowingly.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Calculated.

[Caroline]

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 comes along the 20th century and somehow these corporations are telling communities, including the community on Vashon island, oh, arsenic is really not a problem. The human body just excretes it naturally. All kinds of just crazy arguments were being put forward to justify what they were doing.

[Joe Rogan]

I found out at one point in time in my life that 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, right? Like that's where all the heavy metals accumulate.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

I was like, wow.

[Caroline]

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 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. 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 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 1,000 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 all these people had built houses and condos and things on top of where the arsenic kitchen had been, which that stuff was never cleaned up. And so they had to, you know, I think they had to buy those properties and remediate. So called.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, this term remediation. Like how does one remediate a piece of land, like a five acre plot of land that you plan on building a beautiful house on Vashon island on? Like, how do they do that? 5 acres of ground that's poisoned?

[Caroline]

Yeah. In Tacoma, what they did was that was where the worst of the pollution was because the smokestack was sitting right near the water. The smokestack was blown up in the 90s. Blown up? Yeah. They exploded the smokestack on purpose. Yeah, they closed the plant in 1986.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, so it's a debt controlled demolition.

[Caroline]

Yeah, so it was a. Yes, exactly.

[Joe Rogan]

Which also probably contributed greatly to more pollutants.

[Caroline]

They claimed that they cleaned the inside.

[Joe Rogan]

Of the smokestack before they blew it up.

[Caroline]

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 theyyou 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 they run out of money, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

But 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.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

This episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company, makers of the best, most sought after knives out there. The company is founded by my friend Josh Smith. He's been making knives since he was 11 years old and became a master bladesmith at just 19. Which is wild because there's only about 140 to 150 master bladesmiths in the world. Plus these knives are made right here in the usa, right in Montana. And they're designed, tested and built by hunters for hunters. I've been loving the magnacut Blackfoot 2.0. When Master Blade Smith, my friend Josh Smith launched Montana Knife Company, he set out to create the ultimate do it all knife. Small and light enough to pack on a goat hunt. Durable enough to completely field dress a moose and shape to gut, cape skin and debone with ease. He called this flagship knife the Blackfoot. And it remains his go to blade. And I love it as well. It's truly the only hunting knife you'll ever need. Although MKC is still a young company, the demand is already Crazy. Literally every time they drop a bash, they sell out in minutes. So if you want to be the first to know, sign up for SMS alerts for exclusive knife drops and their email newsletter to get notified about restocks or go to montanaknifecompany.com and see what's available.

Now, wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform? Well, now you can trade all in one place on Robinhood. That means you can trade individual stocks and ETFs and also buy and sell crypto using seriously powerful and intuitive tools at one of the lowest costs on average, without needing to manage multiple apps. Robinhood makes withdrawing and depositing crypto seamless. Send crypto to your Robinhood account or send crypto from your Robinhood account to other wallets without deposit or withdrawal fees from Robinhood. Trade all in one place. Get started now on Robinhood Trading. Crypto involves significant risk. Crypto trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto llc. Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Crypto held through Robinhood crypto is not FDIC insured or SIPC protected. Network fees may apply to crypto transfers. Crypto transfers may not be available to all customers. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Securities trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Financial LLC member sipc, a registered broker dealer.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Caroline]

So presumably, if the people who are buying condos there know anything about it, they probably. They probably think it's aware of the history, but they think it's. And in a sense, it has been cleaned up. I mean, but in a sense.

[Joe Rogan]

But also, doesn't it leak into the water table?

[Caroline]

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, you know, developed this whole little park on one end. 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. 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 on the shores to keep stuff from leaking out. And, like, if you live in one of those condos, you can't plant it. Anything that will be larger than a, you know, small shrub, in part because of the plastic liner thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Caroline]

Yeah, it's. It's wild.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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. They were 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.

[Caroline]

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 gonna do about it? There's nothing we could do. So, like, let's just pretend it's not happening.

[Joe Rogan]

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. I just. It just disturbs me. Human beings, their capacity to do things like this, either knowingly or unknowingly, and then to cover it up knowingly, and then to try to find some way to profit off of the removal of it or the treatment of these ailments that these people suffer, and then the obfuscating and the, you know, diverting the attention to some other thing, like calling it a disease or calling it something else.

[Caroline]

Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things in my mind when I kind of wanted to develop the whole thing about talking about serial killers and violence and aggression and where that might have come from, because 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 this 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. And I think people are interested in the history of how they might have been exposed. When I did a reading up in Seattle a month or so ago, everybody was talking about where they grew up in relation to the smelter, like how close they were to it and what they might have experienced as a result. And that I think is one of the interesting things about the Tacoma story is that many poor people were directly exposed. 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 I90. I90 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 I90 and it also was in the plume from the Tacoma smelter. And while I was growing up there, some weird shit.

[Joe Rogan]

Like what kind of shit?

[Caroline]

Well, I lived on a street that was close to I90 and was actually kind of ran over the top of a tunnel that enclosed I90 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Crime and that kind of crime and that kind of crime, and oddly enough, always men.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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?

[Caroline]

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 going on in terms of food fights and just a lot of stuff. 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 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. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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 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 5 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 justif 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 they might take their child to a doctor and have them tested and find out there's some, you know, if it's not zero, then what are we going to do about it?

[Joe Rogan]

And it's, you know, and who's liable.

[Caroline]

That's right.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Advertisement Speaker]

Why?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, because people are profiting off of putting fluoride in water. There's enormous corporations that are responsible for that fluoride, and they provide that fluoride to the drinking water. And under the guise of improving dental health, which is just crazy because you don't need it. Like, you could just brush your teeth and stop eating so much fucking sugar, which is really the culprit. That's really 100% the culprit. I mean, if you go back to ancient, ancient times, one of the things 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 because people weren't eating a lot of sugar. They weren't constantly eating candy and stuff that rots your fucking teeth out. It's. We don't need to stop. We don't need to put this neurotoxin into water. We need to stop eating poison. It's like really simple. You don't add a poison to make you better because there's more poison. Like, it's really crazy. And these are like hardcore facts. This is not something that's deniable. Like, if you look at the correlation between fluoride and lowered IQs, it's pretty undeniable. They know it's a fact. They know it's a neurotoxin, but yet they'll brush it off. Oh, but that's in high doses and low doses, like. Well, who's determining. Who's determining There has.

[Caroline]

There.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah, well, it is. I mean, they always say the dose makes the poison. Sure, I suppose that's. That. That, that's true.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, I'm 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. Why? Because it's got fluoride in it and fluoride is bad for you.

[Caroline]

Right?

[Advertisement Speaker]

So why are we putting it in.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

That's why they sell fluoride free toothpaste.

[Joe Rogan]

And they advertise it as such. If fluoride was the 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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Reading people that have gone outside the.

[Joe Rogan]

Mainstream narrative, that realize, like, this is not good for you. Not only is it not good for.

[Advertisement Speaker]

You, it probably should have been removed.

[Joe Rogan]

From our water supply a long time ago.

[Advertisement Speaker]

So who's responsible?

[Joe Rogan]

And then it gets into that. It gets into, like, these corporations that have been dumping fluoride into 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 that people are willing to do things that are just, they know, are bad, but they profit and they go.

[Advertisement Speaker]

This episode is brought to you by Rocket Money. Financial freedom, when you get down to it, is not worrying about money. But with prices these days, that's easier said than done. However, when you take control of your finances, when you know what's coming in and what's going out. When you properly manage and stay on top of your budget, that's when you can really start working towards your goals. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. And that's the key to financial freedom. If you've got something you'd like to save for, Rocket Money can analyze your accounts to find the best time each.

[Joe Rogan]

Month to put extra money aside.

[Advertisement Speaker]

And Rocket Money will even try to negotiate lower bills for you. The app automatically scans your bills to find opportunities to save and then goes to work to get you better deals. Discover financial freedom, cancel your unwanted subscriptions, and reach your goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com JRE today, that's RocketMoney.com JRE RocketMoney.com JRE this episode is brought to you by UberEats. Summer is here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with UberEats. What do I mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well groomed lawn delivered, but you can get chicken parmesan delivered. A day in the sun? No. A bottle of rum.

[Caroline]

Yes.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Uber Eats can definitely get you that for almost. Almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now for alcohol. You must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

[Caroline]

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, often decades ago. So they're old and they have old plumbing, they have lead pipes.

[Joe Rogan]

Lead paint. Lead paint, which is even crazier that they used lead and paint.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

And you're gonna 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.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

And what kind of.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Caroline]

And so they can't. You know, Estarco still exists, but it's now operating out of Mexico.

[Joe Rogan]

How convenient. Yeah, that's a whole series zone. Rogue World War I era battlefields that are still dangerous over a hundred years later.

[Caroline]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. So the red zone is a chain of former battlefields across north 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 the. How do you say that? Somme, Verdun and Vimy Ridge. While the size of the region has lessened over the hundred plus years since the end of the conflict, the area is still characterized by the scars and remnants of the Great War.

[Caroline]

Oh, so this is even World War I. All that chemical stuff that they were crazy using.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. That's when they first started using chemical warfare. People are gross.

[Advertisement Speaker]

They're awesome too.

[Joe Rogan]

Like a Lot of people. You're awesome. A lot of people are awesome. A lot of people are great. I love them. But like, in large groups, when they don't have responsibility for their actions, they're gross. It's, it's. It's very. You know, the more you read about these types of things like that 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 so disturbing. It's so disturbing that it just makes you. Like I said, 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 it really freaks me out.

[Caroline]

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, which. It is really disturbing stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Caroline]

So that was a good thing. We made some progress. And you know, again, this guy's graphs that he published show this.

[Joe Rogan]

Who's this guy again?

[Caroline]

Rick Nevin. And he wrote this book called Lucifer Curves.

[Joe Rogan]

See if you can find those for.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

That is crazy. Look at this graph. It's almost like it mirrors it. Yeah, all these graphs look exactly the same.

[Caroline]

There's like.

[Advertisement Speaker]

That's so crazy.

[Caroline]

Yeah, it's wild.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay, so look at this scroll. Go up a little bit first. So murder from 1900 to 1959 versus paint lead.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Look at that.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's correlation.

[Advertisement Speaker]

They're almost mirrored. And then aggravated assault versus gasoline lead. Same thing. It's like they follow the same path.

[Joe Rogan]

It's nuts.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Robbery versus gasoline lead. Look at the drop off with the drop off of gasoline lead. That is nuts.

[Caroline]

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 the serial killers. And now it's like 50 to 100. So I think there always have been serial killers throughout history. I mean, there's Jack the Ripper, but this guy talks about that whole period 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.

[Joe Rogan]

But it makes me really think about Peaky Blinders. You ever watched that show?

[Caroline]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

That show was like. It's almost like they filtered the whole show. They did an amazing job with that show. First of all, it's one of my favorite series of all time. It's so good. 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.

[Caroline]

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. I 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, gosh.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

It's almost like driving through fog.

[Caroline]

Yeah. And, you know, when I was a kid and read books about England 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. They paid kind of a terrible Price.

[Joe Rogan]

Look at that.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. That's what Peaky Blinders looks like. The whole series. It's almost like they did it. So this is the Thames river from 1952.

[Caroline]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Look at that guy. He's got a mask on.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah. There was a similar event in Pennsylvania. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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. And.

[Joe Rogan]

Which is really bad for you.

[Caroline]

Yeah. Which is.

[Joe Rogan]

Unfortunately, that's where coal comes from.

[Caroline]

Right, right.

[Joe Rogan]

And so when you buy charcoal, if you buy lump charcoal, that's what that is.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Because of air quality.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it has to be.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Everybody in the city of Austin heated their home in the winter with wood fires. It'd be a fucking disaster.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It'd be really bad if everybody in New York City, like, imagine. Well, you can't, because it's apartments, but if it was something where you had a chimney and everybody had wood fire. It would be terrible. It's great if you're camping, if it's just you, it's just you and your friends, 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, if you've ever been around a wildfire, it's terrible. The air quality is awful. You know, Los Angeles has had a bunch of those and many times when I was living in la, the entire city was covered in smoke. And you're just. You're breathing these wildfire. This wildfire smoke.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

It's so weird because you think of, like, oh, that's a comforting thing.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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 smokestack? Yeah, nothing good. I mean, if you have one smoker, I'm sure it's fine. It's no big deal. But if everybody's doing it, it becomes an issue, especially if you have stagnant air. Like you're talking about that trough.

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, it completely makes sense.

[Caroline]

Yeah. And I like cooking on gas, but I've been really concerned about what I'VE read. And also about the. Again, the industry suppression of evidence about this stuff. And, you know, just the whole thing of calling it natural gas.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

There's a lot of natural stuff that's terrible for you.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

And it's.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I mean, it's. It seems. Yeah, it's just this. Ugh.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. In our brains.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

And when we come up with solutions, make sure those solutions aren't even worse for you. Because one of the solutions was these damp 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. 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'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.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So our solutions have to be at least somewhat better.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

I haven't followed the metal.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Oh, my God.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. More than one person has died that way. Like, good Lord. Like, it's. If it's not one thing, it's another.

[Advertisement Speaker]

There's no end. Whenever we try to fix something, we.

[Joe Rogan]

Come up with a solution that's actually worse than the initial problem. Not always, but it's like a Root.

[Caroline]

Goldberg thing or something.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Caroline]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

I think 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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

And you have no chain of command.

[Joe Rogan]

You don't.

[Advertisement Speaker]

No one knows exactly how that water bottle was handled.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Okay, but what happened in the time.

[Joe Rogan]

That it was bottled in the factory to the time it got into your hands?

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, if it's plastic, there's a high likelihood that it's leaching some chemicals. Now, here's another disturbing thing that they found. You said, well, we should buy glass water. Yeah, buy a glass water bottle. That solves the problem.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Well, actually, it doesn't because of the caps. So the caps leach more because of the way they make these caps on.

[Joe Rogan]

These metal water bottles. Whatever the surface of the interior lining of those caps, it keeps water from leaking out leaches even more than it.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Does with a water bottle that's plastic.

[Joe Rogan]

So that what they found is that.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Glass water bottles leach more chemicals into the water than plastic, which is just crazy.

[Caroline]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that must be so make sure that's true.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Caroline]

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. Coated.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Well, they seem like they're metal.

[Joe Rogan]

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 previous, even exceeding those found in plastic bottles. This is largely due to microplastics originally 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 and beverages regardless of the container type. And we've talked about this, the dangers of plastics on this podcast. We before, because we had Dr. Shanna Swan from Harvard who wrote a book called Countdown. It's all talking about how the phthalates and these microplastics entering into women's bodies during the time where these children are developing. It's contributing to a bunch of different factors that are really dangerous to the endocrine system.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Camp.

[Joe Rogan]

It 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.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Terrific. There's no escape.

[Joe Rogan]

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?

[Caroline]

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 Ridgeway, you know, again, he grows up two miles from Sea Tac, from the airport, at a time when they were using lead in jet fuel. Jet fuel.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Caroline]

And so he's. And he's also right by two major highways. And what does he do when he grows up? He goes to work at a truck factory painting trucks.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, boy.

[Caroline]

With a spray gun. And that paint has lead components, so he's got it coming and going. His brother talked about how he used to. They used to play on a slag pile from the copper mine in Idaho. So I think he's a guy who clearly has to have come into contact with more lead than was good for him. Now, does that mean that's why he did it? 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 lead contributed to crime during that period. And I wanted to tell the story in a way that was kind of subjective 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 felt, was a way of, you know, in Murderland, of presenting this material in a way that people could kind of say, oh, you know, I didn't know about what happened with lead during World War II. I didn't know about what it could do to kids and how that might show up years later in their lives.

[Joe Rogan]

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 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?

[Caroline]

It's kind of overwhelming to see. See it suddenly kind of be in people's hands and they're reading it and they're asking you questions 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. It's your own private little playpen where you get to make all the decisions and make all the choices. And then editors get involved and all these other people at the publishing house and they start saying, well, what about this? What about that? 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. 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, that it's just out in the world doing its thing. And it's interesting. It's always sort of really interesting. I just heard from a woman who's the daughter of a guy who worked at the smelter in Tacoma. And I had been in touch with her briefly because her father was an incredible rabble rouser when he worked at the smelter. He was working for the union and did all this stuff to bring the whole arsenic thing to light, to show that the plant doctor, who he called the plant quack, was lying about the stuff. And he was sort of a hero in this whole story because he publish. He had this little newsletter that he published from his kitchen table. And he was so funny, so great, and he really cared about the guys that he worked with. And so he, I think, helped compile a whole list which was called the Death List. I found it. There's a copy of it in the Tacoma library, Asarco records that listed all the guys who worked at the smelter who died of various cancers pretty young, like at age 55 or something. So when you hear from somebody like that woman or other people who 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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 that I think, along the way, then they get this deeper understanding of this gigantic problem.

[Caroline]

I hope so. Yeah. I mean, that's the goal. To try to just. I mean, I hate to use the term raise awareness because it's such a cliche, but you do hope that people 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Caroline]

Well, I appreciate being here.

[Joe Rogan]

My pleasure. Jamie put the book up so people can see it. Murderland. Did you do the audio version of it?

[Caroline]

I did not.

[Joe Rogan]

But did someone else do it?

[Caroline]

Yeah, a woman.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah, his head solution.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Yeah, they did a great job on the COVID.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Thank you.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Caroline]

Great to be here.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank you.

[Caroline]

All right, bye, everybody.