Ed

Hey, all this is Ed.

Kara

And this is Kara.

Ed

And this is your day's dumpster fire.

Kara

Yeah, I don't really care. Audience, my dog is in the room and she has a squeaky toy. So if you hear an ominous like that.

Ed

Yeah, you're just gonna keep encouraging it.

Kara

I mean, I mean, I personally think it gives character to the episode.

Ed

Yeah, there we go.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

It's kind of like my uh we have our Amazon parrot that hangs out outside of my home office, and he goes off violently. And and you can you can hear it like, yeah, you're gonna hear there are there's some episodes coming up, guys, where I can't edit that out. It it is just so it's like a car alarm going off in in the background.

Kara

At least the squeaky toy isn't like that.

Ed

Yeah, no, the the squeaky toy is something that people can identify, whereas sometimes a parrot going absolutely nuts is not something that people can easily identify. So Yeah. Yeah, you're right. It adds a patina, it adds a a bit of charm to to the recording experience, which I I kinda kinda got some big news about charming up the website a little bit. So I was doing a little digging into Patreon, and I've never dealt with Patreon before, but I've been reading a ton of books on podcasting, and uh I've been listening to a lot of podcasts about podcasts and and all that kind of stuff, which is theurdiest thing I've heard all day. Uh yeah, like I that that's my thing. Like, like if for you guys out in the audience, like Kara's the kind of person that will read like one article on how to podcast, and then she's content for the rest of her life.

Kara

Correct.

Ed

Meanwhile, I'm the one who's like pouring over research and doing all these deep dives and looking up expensive microphone equipment and recording software, and yeah, and and then it it does pay off. I think there's a good balance between us two because both of us could be going down this rabbit hole where we're just bankrupting our families and and all that, but our audio is immaculate, or conversely, uh both of us could take the approach of meh, it is what it is, and like the audio quality doesn't improve. So I think having having both sides of it works out well, and not to mention, too, I kind of find this stuff interesting.

Kara

Yeah, that's totally fair.

Ed

Yeah, looking at little sound waves and the yeah, learning how to use software and stuff like that is is it's always kind of it, I don't know, it it picks my interest. But the problem is is that it does add up. Uh it like we have to pay uh a fair amount of money each month just to keep the podcast up. I thought it would be something like a you know, like a like a blog, right? You could go to Google and set up a blog for free. And you know, I thought it would be something like that. No, like you've gotta pay for the RSS feed, you've got to pay for the recording software, you've got to pay for the editing software, you've got to pay for the technology and all that stuff. So what I was thinking of is potentially setting up a Patreon account. And like at first it'll be kind of like a donation thing where hey, if you like what we're doing and you want to throw a few dollars out our way, if a few dollars to you is say four to five thousand dollars a month, we can work with that. We can, yes, we can work with that. If two dollars is what you got and you feel comfortable donating it to our cause, then that is equally appreciated. Uh I am also working on possibly funding more quieter squeaky toys for your dogs.

Kara

Aww, that's kind.

Ed

Uh, but yeah, we we also kind of want to start going down the path of creating like some extra episodes um for those that that feel like um you know that you want to contribute some more, and it'll also kind of help keep ads down. Because that's the other way that we could fund this is by piling on ads. And there's been some podcasts I stopped listening to it because it's like every eight minutes there's five minutes of ads.

Kara

Yeah, we don't want to do that to you guys.

Ed

No, that's just obnoxious, and it'll be funny because they'll have an ad on there that goes completely against what they're talking about in that episode. Like they could be talking about like a graphics card and how they're just railing on this make and model uh graphics card for for gaming purposes, and then the ad is the exact opposite. Like, buy this card, it's awesome, it's fantastic. Meanwhile, the hosts just five minutes ago were railing on it.

Kara

And it yeah, so in short, we don't want to do that, we want to give you extra content, we want to make sure that you guys are happy, um, and it also does help us run the podcast smoothly and efficiently. Uh, and that would be really helpful.

Ed

Yeah, yep. And uh I'm I'm not above groveling, so begging. Begging, pleading, yeah, hands and knees, just the whole thing groveling. So yeah, uh stay tuned for that. I don't I I I mean, uh we literally just discussed it uh about eight, nine minutes ago before we started to record. Uh, but I think it would be something interesting. Um, I think it would really help out a lot. And I and knowing our audience, because you know, we were kind of looking at the numbers, our audience is kind of exploding. It's uh it's growing all the time. And you know, if we've got people that are in a position to help out, help us, you know, keep going and coming up with more uh interesting topics and maintain things, that would be uh very greatly appreciated.

Kara

Yeah, that'd be wonderful. Anyway, we'll let you guys know when that's up and running.

Ed

Uh yeah.

Kara

And we will also let you know whenever we have new content coming out or extra stuff. I know we were talking about a Discord and we were talking about getting some art on there for you guys. I think the art would be a good candidate for extra Patreon stuff. So yeah, keep listening and and we'll get you more stuff to read and look at and listen to.

Ed

Yeah, we could also get transcripts up there. Show notes. Yeah, show notes. Uh we can set up a more advanced website.

Kara

I can get you guys a map of Thermopylae so you can understand what we're talking about.

Ed

Yeah, yeah, I kind of had to mention that when I uh put that on online. Like, hey, this thing, check out this link here. This will take you to where you need to go to figure out what's going on.

Kara

Yeah, here's a cool map.

Ed

So so yeah, uh hit us up on the on the old Instagrams. We are alive and kicking there. Uh we may try expanding out to like Twitter and some of the uh the other things out there. Uh I do know leaving comments. Uh I think most of our listeners are coming from Spotify. Uh, do you know off the top of your head if people can leave comments on on Spotify?

Kara

I believe they can. And actually, that reminds me, I'm gonna look up our little poll that I set up on Spotify. Oh, yeah. But um, yes, I am going to go back into the Spotify account and make us where you guys can be more engaging. You can leave ratings, I believe, and you can leave comments and all of that fun stuff. So stop there. Um, and also, if you're old-fashioned, you can also just uh send us a good old email at the daysdumpsterfire at gmail.com.

Ed

Oh yeah. Yeah, good old, good old fashioned email. It's funny how email is like turning into like snail mail.

Kara

I mean, if you really want to write us a handwritten letter, I would be super appreciative of it. I will give you the address to our place of employment and you can send it there.

Ed

Actually, I think we would probably want to set up a uh P.O. box.

Kara

Yeah, that's probably a better idea.

Ed

As opposed to having people show up at our uh at our uh place of employment.

Kara

Right. Yeah, better idea. Anyway, let's get the show on the road, yeah.

Ed

Yeah, speaking of content, uh let's let's yeah, I know you have a uh a uh pretty hard uh trash can fire.

Kara

Oh, it was it was glorious. All right, so um as you guys know, we're teachers, and I was setting up a lesson on the foundations of Rome, and I was setting up an archaeological dig, right? And we had this cool idea. We would make artifacts for their for the students to dig up, and we would bury it, and the artifacts would be in plaster, so they'd have to like chisel it out, right? So I think this is a wonderful idea. We get the plaster and all of that stuff, and I decided that I was going to go ahead and mix the plaster first and then get the artifacts later. And I also mixed the plaster in a metal bowl. So the plaster dries really fast.

Ed

Well, this is all while you're covering another teacher.

Kara

Correct. I was helping out another teacher in a different classroom that wasn't mine. I forgot the artifacts in my classroom. And on top of that, I mixed plaster in a metal bowl, so it's not like I could just take it out.

Ed

Yeah, like because you're just sitting there and all of a sudden it just like within minutes it just started to it's hard.

Kara

And I'm sitting there in this other teacher's classroom, and I don't have like tools or anything in this classroom because the children are younger. So I'm sitting here like hitting it with a pencil, and and I'm hitting the bottom of this metal bowl. It's not working. It was awful. So I finally I finally got back to my to my classroom, our classroom, and I walk in there and and Ed's like, what did you do?

Ed

Yeah, because you went like full Julius Caesar on it.

Kara

Like you were just Yeah, I found I found a chisel and I found a hammer and I just started wailing at the thing and finally came out.

Ed

Well it's funny because like you you you got like a a screwdriver chisel and then you just banged it and then like the whole thing just popped out.

Kara

Yeah, I I I chiseled enough to where I I hit the bottom of it and the whole thing popped out, which was great because it it was a metal pole and that was gonna be a nightmare if I couldn't In short it worked out, the archaeological dig thing was great, the kids loved it. I was able to successfully make the plaster after failing extremely well the first time.

Ed

Yeah, I know the kids really they had a blast with it. I I was a little surprised at how much they were how how much they were getting into it. Because I thought because we we had it set up so that they would kind of have to run around the whole school to get these clues and stuff like that. Uh I I you know you're always gonna have those kids that are like, this is boring. But we really didn't have that.

Kara

No, all of them were pretty into it.

Ed

Well, and they also got battle pigs.

Kara

That's true. We gave them some incentive.

Ed

Yeah, to uh to incentivize them to really get into it. We used a 3D printer and we found this little figurine of a pack pig. And because we're studying Roman history, and it just so happens that there's this little fat pig that holds like this harness with like potion bottles, a frying pan, it's got a keg on its back, and then it's got like a Roman helmet with the tuft thingy on the top of it.

Kara

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Ed

And yeah, we we printed up a bunch of those, and the kids absolutely loved it to the point where we printed up like a uh four or five inch model, like that's like our mascot now is our Roman battle pig. Yeah, so so yeah, we can uh we can add that to our Patreon account.

Kara

A battle pig. Yeah, we'll have to look. But yes, we'll we'll we'll look into it.

Ed

But yeah, no, that was that was a good little trash can fire. Uh plaster is hard.

Kara

Um plaster's hard, man.

Ed

Yeah, it um there's a learning curve to it. So I don't know.

Kara

Hold on. I gotta handle this.

Ed

Okay.

Kara

Alright, sorry. They finally killed the stuffed animal and the squeaky is gone.

Ed

Okay. Oh, that's funny.

Kara

Whenever they pull out the squeaker, they always fight over it to a point where it starts to get a little scary, so I had to take that away.

Ed

Yeah, it's a it's a little overly aggressive.

Kara

Yeah, it's a little much for a squeaky. For a squeak.

Ed

So okay, let's get into it. Uh so if you are first seeing this episode, you're going to want to backtrack an episode. Uh, reason being is that what you're listening to here is part two. And the first episode was I love the smell of lead, uh, part one. And this is I love the smell of lead part two.

Kara

Okay.

Ed

If you do recall the first part, uh let me kinda review real quickly what had happened. If you have no idea what I'm talking about whatsoever, any more than usual, I should say, uh, then go back and listen to the previous episode. I believe that would be episode 23. Uh, long story short, what America was dealing with in the early 1900s was gasoline cars, and these these cars were running, well, gasoline. But the issue with gasoline is that the pistons weren't firing when they were supposed to, right? The piston needs to come up and compress the air and and gasoline mixture to a very, very, very specific point, and then the spark plug fires, and then that's what makes the explosion that shoots the piston down, and you know, does that, you know, as many times as you need, times how many pistons, and that's how your car generates power. But let's say that piston was only up 50% of the way, and then it fired. Well, now you're taking it out of sequence, like it's that that's not when it's supposed to fire, and you still have other pistons that are trying to work their way up, or some of them are on the downstroke, and then there's a piston that fires halfway through, and it it what happens is is that the timing of the engine goes haywire, and in the process of that thing going haywire, the engine sounds horrible. It makes a very loud, rasping, knocking noise, and it there's like no way to control it. And the other issue is that these very early cars in the early 1900s, your starter would sit on the outside, like you would have to insert this hand crank into the front of your car, turn the hand crank until somebody could ignite the engine. But if you didn't take that hand crank out, then that hand crank is connected straight to the driveshaft, and then you get flung all over the place, or get your jaw ripped off, like one poor guy had. So, yeah, it's uh the whole gasoline thing, is it's kind of ironic because the first cars were actually electric.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

Ed

I find that interesting. Like the very, very first cars, automobiles that came out were intended to be electric. Yes. Uh, the only problem is like the batteries for these things were only good for it, I don't even think they were good for a mile.

Kara

But yeah, there's been a couple times in history where electric cars are actually on the up and up and was destroyed by oil and coal.

Ed

Yeah, well, and it and a lot of it too is this necessity. Like, yeah, if we had kept it from the 1890s to 1910, if we had just kept the uh the working on electric cars, right, it would have gotten there to the point where we are all driving electric cars to this day. But the necessity dictated that I need something that can go more than a mile or two, right? Like I need something that can go dozens of miles and then eventually hundreds of miles. And unfortunately, and you know, and I'm not saying gasoline is necessarily bad, I'm just saying that gasoline has a lot more stored chemical energy. And like if anybody's ever gone to like a uh top-fuel drag race, the ones with the cars, I'm not talking about the RuPaul's drag race, that that's a whole different thing. Um, like they they you know, you see these top fuel cars going down the the the racetrack, they're hitting like 330 to 350 miles an hour, and the first second, within the first second of them hitting go, these cars are firing at like 12 to 13,000 horsepower, and that first one second, they're up to 150 miles an hour, and it is the most incredible display of power that you could ever see, other than maybe seeing a space shuttle launch or something like that. And you go to these events, you go to these events for the sole purpose of experiencing that. We are actually taking our class to to one of these coming in April, and I can't wait. Because I'm gonna have my phone, I'm gonna have my camera, I'm gonna be recording the whole class uh for the first time they see a Tot-Fuel drag racer go down the road because it's so funny to watch the initial reactions.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

Yeah, people are crying, some people are speechless, it but but they also have another demonstration there of these high-performance electric cars. And now these are cool, like, don't get me wrong, these these things they hit like 275 miles an hour, and it's impressive. The engineering on it is incredible because these batteries dump all their power at once, and it and it's really cool. The problem is that it just goes and that's it. Fair, and you're like, oh, oh, okay. I mean, that's cool, but one of the top fuels coming back up. So yeah, there's there's a lot to be said for gasoline. The problem is that gasoline is obviously a multi-trillion dollar industry, and well, there was it's it's not perfect. It's not uh gasoline in its own right isn't it doesn't work well in cars.

Kara

Right.

Ed

So the hunt was on, and there was this guy by the name of Mudgley, Thomas, oh not Mudgley, Midgley. Thomas Midgley. Uh he was a he was an engineer with absolutely zero chemistry experience behind him, but he got hired on uh to work on figuring out a way to eliminate this engine knock. And his approach was to just find everything under the sun and let's just start throwing it in the gas, let's burn it in an engine and see what happens. Uh in Europe, Europe kind of fixed the issue by using up to 10% ethanol, which is a type of alcohol. They fixed it over there. They're like, yeah, just put some ethanol in there and that's fine. The issue is like General Motors and Standard Oil, right? They didn't want to use ethanol because that means they would have to go to farmers to produce the corn that had to be fermented and then turned into alcohol and then refined and then put it like to them, they didn't want to do that because they're gonna have to sacrifice a huge chunk of their profits for the sole purpose of reducing this engine knock. Well, Midgley figured out lead, right? You can use a substance called that that later became known as TEL or tetraethyled. Uh basically, you are mixing uh lead in with another substance that then you pour into your gas tank, and it's not a lot, it's not like for every one gallon you have a gallon of lead that you're dumping in. It's it's more like you have a thousand gallons of gas and you're putting in one gallon of tetraethyl lead. So it's not like it it it's really not a super dense ratio, but when you multiply that by thousands of cars running hours a day in cities, it it started to produce a lot of lead dust. And my grandfather remembered going into Chicago with his dad on a business trip, and he he was born in 1918, so he was he was a little boy, but he remembers seeing other kids going up and down the streets of Chicago sweeping up little pots. Piles of lead dust and other dust too, because you know it's a city. But yeah, he said like the streets were almost kind of shiny from all the lead that had been piling up on there. And um that's terrifying. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

That's actually really scary.

Ed

It is. It's just wild that history up to that point even knew that lead was bad.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Ed

Like people knew that we don't know how it messes you up, but man.

Kara

They knew it messes you up.

Ed

It does, yeah. And and to kind of just recap what what it can do to you, it's it's tricky at first to diagnose because you're it the the symptoms are normal for a million other things like high blood pressure, uh joint muscle pain. Uh you could have uh difficulties with memory or concentration, headache, abdominal pain, mood disorders, reduced sperm count, and abnormal sperm, if anybody is counting, I guess. Sure. Uh miscarriage, stillbirth, premature birth, and pregnant women, as opposed to non-pregnant women. Uh right. Sure.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

But yeah, like a lot of these symptoms are like they're they can be the symptoms associated with a million other things. You just don't look at somebody with high blood pressure and say, Oh, you've got lead poisoning.

Kara

Yeah, that's that's not right.

Ed

Yeah, it's the two monsters and the extra salty french fries that you just had for lunch is probably the cause of that high blood pressure, as well as the joint pain and difficulty remembering things and head count or a headache and abdominal pain and mood disorder.

Kara

So Yeah, that'll do it.

Ed

Uh yeah, yeah. Definitely not lead. Um, but now when you start getting to the acute symptoms, and and the thing about lead is that it gets into your system, your body has no way of removing it. It's kind of like uh kind of like calcium. When you consume calcium and milk or whatever, your body is like, ooh, we like calcium, we want to stick it to our bones. It works great. Lead kind of does the same thing, it says that your body doesn't know how to remove it, primarily because it doesn't react with too many things. And then it eventually makes its way into your brain, where there it can cause a lot of issues, like severe mood and personality disorders, it can cause organ failure, uh irreversible brain damage, seizures, uh, extreme brain development disorders in children. So, yeah, like it can't I don't know if it's if it can be passed on from mother to child, but if you've got a baby who because you know babies, they put everything in their mouth. Yeah, that's their if they can't find their foot, they'll shove it in their mouth.

SPEAKER_01

Correct.

Ed

Like everything goes in their mouth. So if you have a lot of lead paint in your house, uh they use the lead in white paint because lead oxide is actually a very brilliant white pigment. It's just really dangerous. Yeah, it can cause all sorts of brain development in in children, uh brain development issues in children, unconsciousness, and there's always death.

Kara

I mean, that's the next option.

Ed

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's irreversible death. It's when you've hit that point, then you've hit rock bottom when it comes to lead poisoning.

Kara

No coming back from it.

Ed

Nope. So so this is the thing. It like in in the 1920s, there was kind of a movement starting where people were like, yeah, I I just don't know, man. Like this this lead thing just isn't sitting well with me. And like we know that lead is bad, but the they actually uh the the guys who made up this TEL, the Tetroethy led, uh they obviously wanted to leave the lead part of it out of the name, and so they changed their company name to the Ethyl Corporation, and they had a picture. Like you look it up, there's a picture of like a beautiful woman holding this bottle of tetraethyl led. And you know, what what woman named Ethel could ever pose any harm to anybody?

Kara

Nobody, yeah.

Ed

I I've never heard of any ethyls out there killing or causing brain damage to people. Although, if I did find one, I I it would probably be in the podcast. Anyone with the sweet old name of Ethel should be uh should not be toxic to society. I agree. So they changed your name to Ethel Corporation, and and and keep in mind too, they also set up some plants, like manufacturing plants, to manufacture this stuff, and a lot of people were dying from lead poisoning there, just in the process of manufacturing it. And in typical American capitalism, if you die in a factory, it's your fault.

Kara

That sounds a lot like the the time and place of the years that this took place in.

Ed

Yeah, early 1900s industrialization. Um like, hey, look, I I I get it, you fell into that vat of acid, or that vat of acid exploded and it burned all your skin away. That's not our problem. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kara

You're fired, and then they hired a two-year-old to do it for them.

Ed

Uh yes.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

Or they hire more girls to keep painting dials with radioactive material.

Kara

Like I mean, whatever you want, child labor, women, radioactivity, they don't care. As long as the job gets done.

Ed

As long as the job gets done and it's just a modest amount of exploitation. That's just a little bit. Just a little bit, yeah. Um, so yeah, like if you ever wondered why, like anybody who's ever owned a business, if you ever wondered why it seems like there's so much red tape to everything. My my wife works in environmental sciences, and I call her red tape dispenser because this is her job is to make sure that people are in compliance with all this stuff. And it's like, oh my gosh, dude, that like you are you are holding back progress at this point. But when you look back in the 1920s and 30s and 40s and the really sketchy industrialization stuff that went down, I can kind of see it a little bit.

Kara

Yeah, there's there's a reason it's all there, whether we like it or not.

Ed

Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I signed for my house, I had to sign off a waiver saying that if my kid steps on a rusty nail left over from the manufacturing process, or if my kid eats a nail left over from the construction process, the manufacturer's not to be held accountable. And I'm just thinking, like, that had to been a lawsuit. Like, my daughter ate and ate a nail and now she's in the hospital, right? It it it yeah, and and I I feel like at this time though, it was always the employees' fault. And so they tried to clean things up and whatnot, but uh the companies were way better at manufacturing a way out of things. I wouldn't say manufacturing a way out, they were better at pointing the finger at at the victims and blaming them. That's because they could do it without any ramifications, exactly, and to them it was cheaper to do it that way, yeah. Rather than spend the money to do an overhaul or a proper investigation or whatever, to them, the easiest thing to do is just blame the victim because what do they know? It's just one person, you know. But but then it also can go the other way. Like, no, it's not just one person, it's now a lot of people. And a lot of people are speaking up, and a lot of people are saying, especially in 1925, that sorry, you know, the general consensus of of the public is saying that it is lead that is causing a lot of these health problems. So they had a convention, they all had to get together uh with a bunch of lawyers, the anti-led advocates, I guess you could call them, and a Dr. Arthur Kehoe, who ultimately changed environmental science in America and not for the better. So the lawyers in 1925, they're like, guys, how can you hold us accountable, the the producers of this tetraethyl led? How can you hold the producers of this stuff accountable for like how can you say we're breaking laws when the walls or the laws, yeah, the the laws, not walls, haven't even been created yet? Like, how can you hold me accountable for something that doesn't even exist? That's kind of a valid point. I hate to say it.

Kara

Yeah, I mean, it is as crappy it is as it is that that's a lawyer doing a lawyer job and doing it well.

Ed

Yes, yeah, that that's kind of what they're paid a lot of money to do. This Dr. Arthur Keyhoe, he came in and he put like the final nail in the coffin for quite some time. His argument was that if you're going to make vast claims, such as, you know, our product is causing all these health concerns, it's destroying the environment, then we will stop, but you've got to come up with compelling evidence. And again, he's not wrong. I understand that, but what he did is I think the heart of what he did wasn't designed to be what is best for the scientific community. Because it's true, if you're gonna make a bold claim in science, you really do have to have a lot of corroborated evidence that has been peer-reviewed and been replicated and all that stuff. Like, you've got to be able to prove all that. Conversely, if you are making a statement that something is harmful, then you've got to have an equal amount of evidence. And the logic behind it is sound. The issue is that Kehoe understood that for something like that to work, it takes decades. Meanwhile, they can just keep on manufacturing lead gasoline and burn it in most of the world, which by the time like the 30s and the 40s, it was burned everywhere. Like every country that was mechanized was utilizing leaded gasoline. So you fast forward into the 60s, like think about the millions and millions and millions of people all driving with leaded gasoline, all because of this Keyhoe idea. Basically, they were going to keep doing and keep going until somebody showed that there was a proper amount of evidence to indicate that the lead and gasoline is an actual thing. And it's like crap. He's not wrong.

Kara

Hard to argue with that.

Ed

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like a kick in the teeth, even though it's like, well, maybe if something runs the risk of potentially being harmful, maybe we should stop doing it until we can confirm that it is safe. But again, that takes decades. And it well, I mean, I I always tell this when I when I teach history to kids, it's like, guys, nothing in America happens unless there's money to be had from it. And that's exactly what's happening here. There is more money to be had producing what could potentially be a very, very, very dangerous substance in the long run versus making no money but doing what is right in the best interest ethically to people and the environment. You know, America is gonna side with making more money.

Kara

I think that's a fair deduction.

Ed

Yeah, yeah. So enter a nerd, and this guy is kind of a nerd's nerd. Uh Claire Cameron Patterson. That's right. First name is Claire, and it's a bro.

Kara

Okay.

Ed

I think his dad named him Claire so kids would make fun of him and make him stronger on the book. Yeah, like a boy, like Johnny Cash's boy named Sue. Yeah.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

I think that's what was going on there. But if you ever see pictures of this guy, he's uh let's just say he's more of a college scholar uh build rather than an athletic build or normal build, I should say. Claire Cameron Patterson, born June 2nd, 1922, and died in December 5th, 1995. Claire was a geochemist, and he kind of got his geochemistry chops, I guess you could say, by working on the Manhattan Project. If you saw Oppenheimer, which I'm pretty sure most of the world has seen by now, there's a scene there where they have like these two fishbowls, and there's marbles in those fishbowls. And you'll see periodically uh Oppenheimer, he'll throw a couple marbles in there, and what those marbles represent are the samples of the uranium and plutonium needed to make a nuclear bomb. And it's the the uranium that they needed and the plutonium that they needed just doesn't exist naturally. Uranium does, but the form of uranium they needed had to be manufactured in a very, very costly and complicated way. And it's not like you just place an order for uh, you know, 50 pounds of uranium and then it shows up the next day. It takes months to produce this stuff. And that is what Patterson did. Uh, he was the guy that used a whole bunch of expensive machinery and techniques to separate radioactive isotopes to make the uranium-plutonium cores for the nuclear bombs. And one of the ways that you uh you put kind of shield yourself from the radiation that comes out of this more advanced uranium-plutonium is lead. Lots and lots of lead everywhere.

Kara

Yay!

Ed

So this guy was already intimately aware of how lead works. And so after the war, uh, like a lot of scientists during the Manhattan Project, they just didn't want to be a part of this anymore. They didn't they did they didn't do this because they want to be responsible for killing thousands or in a time of the cold war, millions of people. Uh that it's just yeah, I I don't blame them. It's not something that you necessarily want to live the rest of your life contributing to World War III. So he didn't want to be in in high explosives anymore. So he went back to his original research advisor, Harrison Brown, and he dove into geochemistry. And the two of them tackled a problem. And this is one of these really weird cases where somebody trying to answer one question finds the answer to a completely different, unrelated thing altogether. Like Patterson and Brown, they were working together, they they weren't really paying any attention to the lead, uh lead of gasoline thing, they really weren't focusing on that. They were trying to figure out how old the planet Earth was, which I mean, you're a scientist, that's what you do.

Kara

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of your job.

Ed

You you yeah, you get these huge grants to go research kind of weird ideas, and and while most people probably could care less about Earth how old Earth was, these guys, it was it was a mission. And you know, at the time they thought that Earth was about 3.3 billion years old. However, there wasn't much conclusive evidence. It's not like it's not like they can just flip the globe over and look at the bottom and see the manufacturing date stamped in in Antarctica or something like that. Although that would be epic. That that would be really cool if somebody found like in Ar Antarctica, you know, made in you know China 4.5 billion years ago, or something like that. I that would be kind of cool. Or made by God, you know, just something just so or made by the Ebens in Gurgel Schluss 5 quadrant. Like, like, cool. Alright. Answers that question now. Let's get back to lead. So, yeah, there was no conclusive evidence, and Patterson's experience with mass spectroscopy, his experience with that could be helpful in dating rocks and minerals in the early 1950s. So keep in mind, uh, leaded gasoline had been around since the early 20s. So we're at almost 30 years of by now the 1950s, most of the world just pumping lead into the atmosphere. So, yep, 1950s. Thank you, Dr. Keho, for messing that up for everybody. Uh, in the early 1950s, the plan was to take a mineral called zircon and use it to figure out the age of Earth using mass spectroscopy. The idea is that radioactive materials generally break down to lead, right? If you take uranium, you take plutonium, you take an obtainum, or all the other, you know, all the nasty radioactive stuff that's out there, it all has a half-life, right? So let's say something has a half-life of 10,000 years. That means if you have, say, a pound of this stuff in 10,000 years, you'll have a half a pound of it. And then in another 10 years, you'll have 2.5 pounds of it. And then it goes down by half every 10,000 years. It's a really handy way to date stuff. I think for most archaeologists, they use carbon. Was it carbon 14?

Kara

I think I believe it is, yes.

Ed

Yeah, it's a very specific carbon that can only exist, uh, can only be manufactured high up in Earth's atmosphere. And they know that the carbon-14 has a very, very specific half-life, and they can use that to figure out to a pretty high degree of certitude how old certain organic compounds are. Uh, it's how they figured out what is it, the uh that Turing cloth or whatever it is, the it apparently has the body of Jesus. Like that's what they used to cover Jesus up after he was crucified.

Kara

Yeah, they carbon dated it or something.

Ed

Yeah, they carbon dated it and it went back to like the 1400s. They concluded that it was painted. It's very well done, mind you. Very, very convincing. But yeah, carbon dating. It's it's it's interesting, and that's kind of what they were doing here. But they needed something on a scale that could go to billions of years. And ultimately, they know that everything reverts back to lead eventually, and then from there it stops. Like you never find radioactive lead because one lead is a great absorber of radioactive particles, but you know, it's kind of inert. It's like um trying to swim through a pool made of of uh peanut butter. You just can't go anywhere.

Kara

No, imagine.

Ed

Although I I would try it.

Kara

I don't know if I would want to.

Ed

I I want to dive in. I would kind of like ease my way in.

Kara

At least give me a hair cap, you know, yeah. Like what swimmers wear.

Ed

Yeah, yeah, because having peanut butter in your hair that'd be horrible. And then you're gonna have every dog in the neighborhood.

Kara

Oh no. Terrible.

Ed

Where does zircon fit in all this? Well, zircon is a type of mineral that can be found everywhere on Earth. Okay, so that's cool. And you could find it all over the world, and Pederson noticed that the lead concentrations were so high that if accurate, that like if accurate based on you know uranium and everything breaking down, then yeah, it would be like the the results wouldn't line up. And the way that it works is that uranium decays that can be used to figure out, like, say if you pick up a piece of zircon and you see that, okay, there's this isotope of uranium in here mixed with this amount of lead, then you can calculate how old that piece of zircon is based on how much lead, right? If if you start off, say with so many particles of uranium, and now you have a much smaller amount of uranium, but you have a corresponding amount of lead sitting next to it, then you can figure out the age of a lot of things, if that makes sense. I I'm not sure if I lost you on that.

Kara

Um, kinda. Also, I'm having a little bit of a moment. Give me just a second.

unknown

Okay.

Kara

Okay, sorry. Chop ate most of that little stuffy toy. Now I'm a little bit worried about.

Ed

Okay, yeah, not a problem. The the the benefits of editing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Ed

So let me let me see if I can uh explain this in a in a different way. Let's see here. Okay, let's say we weigh you. Okay. Okay. And we weigh you very like down to a tiny fraction of a gram. And then you know, you you go about your day. Let's say you have one meal, but we don't know how much of that meal you ate. Okay. So what we do at the end of the day is we weigh you again, and we then compare that to uh I and I don't know why I'm using this analogy or why it popped into my head, but it's the only thing that makes sense to me right now, is we weigh your poop.

Kara

Okay. Sure.

Ed

If we weigh your poop, we weigh your pee, and then we weigh you just in in general, compared to how you started off the day, you can you can kind of get an estimate of how much food you ate.

Kara

Okay, that makes sense.

Ed

Yeah, because it's like some of it's gonna stick with you, some of it's not, like your body's gonna absorb it, some of it's not, and and all that stuff. Uh they actually did that during the in in the 50s, like in these nuclear missile silos, they had to keep track of what people were eating. Nice. Because these are enclosed systems, and so they basically like they weighed these officers before they sent them in the silos, and then they would weigh them afterwards and then weigh all the poop, and then they were able to figure out exactly how much food to keep inside of a silo. Okay, wouldn't you love to be that private that has to go into the toilets and scoop all that out and weigh it?

Kara

No, I'm good.

Ed

I'm good. Like, I don't know of any top general in the United States that ever started off their military career weighing poo and pee, but gotta start somewhere. Nasty. So that's kind of what's going on with Zircon. So Zircon will have uranium in it, and they know what the half-life of uranium is. And so if they pick up a sample of zircon and they're like, okay, this zircon has uranium in it, and it also has lead in it. So, based on how much lead is there, and they compare it to how much uranium there is, they can get an idea of how much of that uranium has pooped out lead, and they can figure out based off of Half-Lives, they can figure out how old that piece of zircon is.

unknown

Okay.

Ed

As long as they know the lead amount, and as long as they know that this is uranium in there, like, because you uh the uranium is gonna break down to a certain ratio of lead to uranium, right? If so, if there's more lead than uranium, then you can assume that that piece is older versus a piece where uh has a lot more uranium and very little lead, right? Then you would assume that's younger because it hasn't had that half-life cycle of like I can't remember what what it is, it's like five, ten thousand years or something like that. That was kind of the tricky part is to figure out okay, let's collect zircon samples all over the world and let's test it and let's see how old our planet is. There was a problem. Every single piece of zircon they were picking up and they were testing had way, way more lead in it than uranium. Okay, which means, like mathematically, the ratio to lead to uranium was so off-kelter in favor of lead that if you factor in the half-lives of uranium, Earth would have been older than the universe, which is about 13.4 billion years old.

Kara

Sweet. Good deal. This is great.

Ed

He's like, okay, uh, well, let's um let's keep testing. And so he collected more and more and more samples of zircon, and he he went all over the world and he just collected, you know, everything from China, Europe, Africa, like you name it. And he also had people go out and collect samples for him. I don't know what how many samples it was that he ultimately tested, but by today's standards, we've kind of figured out that Earth is about four, four and a half billion years old. But he was seeing a ratio that would have put Earth like three to four times older, meaning it would have been older than 13.4 billion years, which means Earth technically existed before the Big Bang.

Kara

Okay.

Ed

Everywhere he went, he could not find a ratio that would make sense. So since this was impossible, clearly Earth is not older than the universe. Uh, and he couldn't figure out why, but he had to the only conclusion that he could really draw is that this lead is being deposited from another source.

Kara

Okay.

Ed

So yeah, he decided that there they there would have to be other factors contributing to the massive amount of lead that he was finding everywhere because it eventually he kind of like backed away from trying to figure out the uh history or the the age of our planet. Uh he was just like, dude, there's lead everywhere. Like this, this is this is wild. And he couldn't figure out how lead was ending up everywhere. And he also noticed that uh in countries, especially countries that have been industrialized and and all that stuff, uh, the concentrations of lead were just absolutely insane. It was like this is not natural. And that Dr. Kehoe guy uh decades before said that lead does exist everywhere, lead is a natural part of the environment. Every human being has some degree of lead in them, and you know, that's one of the evolving things is that humanity grew and evolved with with the premise that lead is going to be a part of your life. Kind of like uh you may not realize it, but you are exposed to radioactive uh rays 24-7. It's coming from the ground. Like you are there's uranium in the ground, and it is as it comes to the surface, it blasts you with radiation, but your body is designed to handle it. Uh what Kiho left out was that there is such a thing as a toxic amount of lead, and such thing is too much. Yeah, yes, yeah. And so he kind of like just glossed over that. Like, yeah, don't we don't need to focus on that. Just know that guys, lead is natural, it's out there, it's organic, uh, it's it's fine. It's all fine. Now, this Patterson guy, he was like, This is weird. There's there's a lot more lead than what is natural. So he published his results, and he published the results under the conclusion that especially when you looked at the ratios uh or the amount of lead like near cities and developed nations, he's like, guys, there's it, there's just lead everywhere. It's like coating everything, versus say, like um middle of nowhere, right? Say, like uh, you know, the middle of Antarctica, there's still lead, it's just way, way less.

Kara

Nice.

Ed

And so he published his results, and he basically said that it has to do with using ethyl gasoline. He's like, that's the only other thing out there. Published results and theories that involved the use of lead and gasoline, consisting of a majority of the toxic levels of lead in the world. And of course, he immediately got pushback from the science community. He got busted or like accused from the industry. You know, he typical American fashion. If you say something that is unpopular, you will get roasted. Yeah, he immediately got pushed back from the science community, probably because he was critical of the methods that other scientists were using that appeared to be funded and produced by pro-led uh people. Like there were scientists out there that knew for a fact that lead was bad and it was contributing to a lot of problems, but they're making a grip of money to say otherwise. So they were taking like leading scientists and chemists out there, and like, here's a million dollars, go out there and tell everybody that it's safe. And they were taking it.

Kara

Grand.

Ed

Yeah, money, money like propels science, but boy, does it corrupt. It it can really yeah, it it is yeah, it's heinous. And again, it this propelled the whole lead issue for decades more. So the Ethel Corporation and other invested firms went on a smear campaign to torpedo Patterson's science career and managed to get the uh supposedly neutral U.S. public health service, they targeted Patterson. So in 1971, Patterson was excluded from the National Research Council on atmospheric lead contamination, even though he was the foremost expert on the subject. So all these independent scientific institutes were now rejecting Patterson. Like they weren't just saying no, we disagree with you, they were straight up like you can't even come here anymore.

Kara

Oh boy.

Ed

So that didn't stop Patterson uh pushing against lobbyists and the keyho thinkers because you know keyho is one of the chief scientists for the Ethic Corporation, and so we know where this guy stands. You know, the Keyhoe policy comes from the guy who is justifying that there's lead everywhere and it's okay, it's not gonna harm you.

Kara

It's fine.

Ed

This is fine, everything's fine. Patterson was skeptical of Kehoe's ideas about uh lead and it being a natural part of the environment. Uh, lead existed in nature and humanity has evolved around it to survive, therefore, all humans will have a normal amount of lead in their bodies. That's the problem, is what is normal. Like, everybody has gold in their bodies. Uh, this is something the Nazis investigated in in the Holocaust. Like, okay, you cremate all these bodies and you can extract out like a very minuscule amount of gold, but you multiply that by millions of people, yeah, you can make money off of this. Turns out that there's not that much gold in there, but there's a point where too much gold in your body can kill you. I mean, look at that Targaryen brother, Danny's brother from Game of Thrones.

Kara

Oh, the crown of gold, yes.

Ed

Yeah, yeah. Or uh Marcus Crassus getting gold poured down his throat.

Kara

Also an option.

Ed

Yep. Yep. So that would be an example of too much gold. And you can say the same thing with about having lead in your bodies. So Patterson's theory is that the high amounts of lead came from the recent events, because that's the other thing, too. It's just like, okay, we go out in the middle of Africa where there is no mechanization, and we can find an even spread of naturally occurring lead in the soil, and you know, we since nobody has lived here or has anything to do with this location, and it's so remote, we just it's like, okay, this is probably natural occurring lead. We'll say that's the baseline. But then why is it that when we go anywhere near an American city, it's in the trees, it's on the streets, like it is ten times more abundant in the cities than it is, say, out in the remote reaches of of Greenland. And that and that was kind of his argument. It's like, guys, that this pileup of lead isn't a evolutionary thing. This is not, we're not dealing with Darwinian timelines here. Darwinian timelines needs hundreds, if not you know, thousands or millions of years to show a change in something. This is and he was able to calculate it. He was able to calculate this, it goes back maybe 40, 50 years. It ain't natural. No, that ain't natural, especially around cities. So Patterson thought this was a uh this idea that this lead coming from Kehoe was such a natural thing. He decided to do his own research. And so he got samples from mummies before the Iron Age. Uh, he got samples from tuna from uh from what is it? P laid pr prelagic pre prelagic waters.

Kara

No idea.

Ed

And compared them to canned fish. He got samples from the bottom of the ocean about three to four kilometers down and compared them to samples on the surface. You know, to technically speaking, the you know, you go down to uh Titanic, there shouldn't be as much lead down there as there would be, say, like in the Bahamas, right? He went to Antarctica and he got ice cores. And he got ice cores so deep that it went back 300 years. That's kind of cool. Yeah, like I mean, I mean, I'm sure it just looked like normal ice, but it was it's a really ingenious idea. Not only is he collecting data, but he's collecting data from a wide range of locations that would be a clear indicator, be a good control to show that guys, before this time period, no lead. After this time period, tons of lead.

Kara

Hard to argue that.

Ed

Yeah, it's like on top of on top of the notion that you know, you know, go around these cities and there's lead everywhere, but you go around the to the you know bottom of the freaking ocean and you don't find anything. His conclusions were shocking. Uh when looking at anything in the past and then compared to the present, the increase of lead back then to the lead today was a thousand times higher.

Kara

Jeez.

Ed

By looking at time periods before there was leaded gasoline, like there was a very consistent, which would be a like a legitimate normal amount of lead in in the world, and then you look at it to the present, and it's thousands of times higher than what it was, and he even went back just like a hundred years, and he was able to conclude that no, this is a very recent thing. So this guy did his work. He uh I I I applaud this level of scientific commitment right here because I'm pretty sure by this time, I'm pretty sure like the leaded gasoline companies were like, Okay, fine, uh, we can't ruin your career, let's buy you off. And I'm pretty sure he was getting a mixed bag of people threatening him as well as bribing him. Yeah, that's a that's a tough spot. Like, when you spend your life being threatened for so long, and then you got a guy that's like, here's 80 million dollars, dude. Here's eighty million dollars, and like we'll stop with the threats, and you just stop with your investigation. Uh 80 million dollars, that's a lot of money. It I I mean, I would like to think I'd make the right decision, but I would have to pause and think a little bit.

Kara

It's enough money to pause and think, that's for sure.

Ed

Yeah, yeah. Thankfully, I don't have any skills that merit somebody coming to me to give me 80 million dollars, so I don't have to worry about making that kind of a decision. So I'm good to go there. That has knocked my soot all over the place.

Kara

Yay.

Ed

Okay. Furthermore, uh when he measured the lead absorption over time, the lead increase line stayed pretty consistent until the 1920s, where it spiked dramatically. Go figure. Given that Patterson legitimately used actual scientific methods compared to Keyhose, which were none of it was verifiable, none of it was consistent, none of it was actual scientific. It was just, oh, there's lead everywhere, and I came up with these abstract biological subs or samples that don't exist anymore that nobody has access to because everything's under lock and key. But trust me, it's okay to live in a world full of lead. But Patterson, he he was able to take his process and use that against the keyho way of thinking. In 1978, the National Research Council, the same group that like expelled him for his thoughts on uh TEL gasoline, accepted his work and brought him back into the fold.

Kara

Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

Ed

Yeah, like cool. Thanks for like ruining my career for a number of years, but hey, it's great to be back. So, aftermath, right? Because now this is the beginning of the end for leaded gasoline, and just as Kehoe tried to push for in 1925, it took decades to finally prove to the world that leaded gasoline is a problem. There were some who still pushed back on Patterson, but for the most part, America at least was listening and started to clean things up in the automotive side as well as other industries. By 1996, America and most of the world had banned leaded gasoline. So, what is that, 70 years that leaded gasoline was common?

Kara

Uh something like that, yeah.

Ed

Yeah, yeah, close enough. We round up, but it's fine. Uh, there were still uh quite a few countries left, mostly third world nations, that continued to use it. And a lot of it's because they just had huge stockpiles of it and their economy needed gasoline, so they were like, okay, fine, after we run out of this stuff, we'll go to the other stuff, but in the meantime, we're not gonna just dispose of this stuff, like we've got to use it. Some think that the rise of crime in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. So now we're starting to look at some of the long-term effects, right? If if you were committing crimes in the 70s, you were probably born in the 40s or 50s, where leaded gasoline was at its highest, or if you were committing crimes in the 80s or even 90s, you were born in that time window where the entire world was using gasoline. And it's true, if you look at crime reports, there's all these charts out there that that indicate like 70s, 80s, 90s, crime just skyrocketed. And if you overlay that with a map of lead or leaded gasoline production and usage, you know, 20 to 30 years prior, it lines up perfectly.

Kara

That's pretty interesting.

Ed

Yeah, it's one of the things that lead does to you is it it can mess with your your ability to make judgment calls.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

Uh, I know like my my mother, uh, she suffered from crippling depression and and all that. And I mentioned, I think I mentioned the last episode, but she uh she was pulled out of school when she was 16 to go work in the factories back in the the 70s, and she worked in a factory that dealt with a lot of lead products, and that factory actually got shut down because of all the health violations that were associated with it. But it wouldn't surprise me if that fed into a lot of my mom's mental issues as she got older, huh? So it kind of when and she did pass away, they did a blood analysis and they did find toxic levels of heavy metals in in her blood. So, and that's not something that you just picked up a week before. Yeah, heavy metals are something that you accrue through your entire life, right? Geez, so yeah, there's some say like there's there's an issue there, uh, especially like children that were being born in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and noticing that they were having lead-related issues. It's the reason why even when I when I'm my daughters were babies and I took them to the pediatrician, I would have to fill out a little survey like on lead. You know, have my kids ever lived in a home that was built in 1980 or before, or have they ever been exposed to lead gasoline and all that stuff? Like, yeah, every time I took them in, I had to fill out that little survey because it's still an issue to this day.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

Especially for children, because they're way more susceptible to the adverse effects of lead poisoning since their bones are still growing, like their bodies are trying to absorb as much calcium as possible. And since lead kind of behaves like calcium, uh, they could actually see parts of their bones where there's actual lead deposits inside of it, which yeah, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, it's believed that people born between 1940, 1975 lost about 2.6 IQ points, and those born between 1960, 1970 could have lost up to 5.9 IQ points.

Kara

Dang.

Ed

Lead kind of makes you a little dumber, it it slows things down. So, like the I I wonder if a lot of the social issues that we are seeing today, especially from like the baby boomer generation and all that, and and I don't want to get all political and point fingers, but the baby boomers were the ones that were like born and raised for decades in. And this whole lead thing compared to say parts of the world where people were born in the same time frame that were not in an industrialized nation, you know, is there a way to test that to see if if there is a relationship? I feel like that would be a very, very touchy subject, but it would be a fascinating uh research studying and and 5.9 IQ points, that's not that's not a little bit.

Kara

Yeah, that's not a little bit.

Ed

Yeah, that's uh especially in adulthood, like if you drop six IQ points compared to everybody else your age and and all that kind of stuff, that's gonna be a deficit. Like that will hold you back. So we got that. As many as 50% of the country has been negatively affected by lead. Uh, furthermore, there appears to be a correlation between the number of crimes committed per year and the concentration of lead in the atmosphere. And then lastly, according to the World Health Organization, over one million people die every year from lead poisoning, and that it is estimated that 100 million people have died from lead poisoning since the 1920s.

Kara

Jesus.

Ed

That is a significant number. And we're talking about people of you know, working age, uh, economically productive age, reproductive age. I mean, a hundred million people from 1920s to the present. I mean, that that would explain like worker shortage everywhere across the world. Like, it's suddenly what what Nidgley was doing seemed kind of harmless in the 1920s, has turned into one of the worst ecological disasters in in human history. And what's so sad is that Keho was right. After establishing the Keho rule, it took decades from the 1920s and 30s to finally phase out leaded gas. Algeria was the last country to stop using reserve supplies of leaded gasoline in 2021, which means that it will take until 2121 before the world won't ever have to deal with uh the health outcome of leaded fuel.

Kara

Can you imagine being that guy responsible for that issue? Like, I know he's dead and all, but that's that's a lot to be guilty for.

Ed

Well, midgly uh he uh this was like his first thing. The second thing that he created was the hole in the ozone layer. He's the guy that came up with CFCs, you know, the stuff that they used in like spray cans and hairsprays, uh was it chlorofluorocarbons or something like that? And he created this propellant that works beautifully, and for decades it was erasing the ozone layer down in Antarctica.

Kara

Nice.

Ed

And it's only until recently that that started to heal itself. So yeah, he's the guy responsible for that.

Kara

Good, very good. Excellent work, sir.

Ed

And then he's uh also I think he was also the guy that created Teflon, or better yet, we know him as forever chemicals. Good. So like it and and and here's the thing, it's like there's obviously no way of him knowing.

Kara

No, he had no idea. So it's hard to blame him, but still.

Ed

But still, it's just like, man, what a legacy. Now, the sad thing is is that he contracted polio and he invented a rig that would be like a a a series of uh pulleys and ropes and stuff that that he could pull to like move and you know, so he could still like do something while he was you know constrained to his bed, uh so like he could sit up and and all that kind of stuff. And it was actually kind of an ingenious rig. Unfortunately, one of the pulleys or one of the ropes or cables came undone from a pulley and it wrapped itself around his neck, and in the process of trying to like maneuver the pulleys and ropes to like undo the noose, he strangled to death as a result. Yikes, Jesus. Yeah, I think he was in his 50s when that happened. So talk about talk about a legacy.

Kara

Yeah, that's a lot.

Ed

So one thing I I I found a quote here from Benjamin Franklin that when I was doing the research really stood out to me. So that you'll observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it is generally received and practiced on. You will, it's amazing what you will hold on to as a truth until something challenges it. And you you as a human being can be susceptible to adhering to a very, very dangerous thing, and you could have that for most of your life.

Kara

Yeah, and you never know.

Ed

Yeah, and and it's like the part of your brain knows that it's bad. It's like uh it's like smoking cigarettes. You know that smoking is bad, but yet people are dying from soak smoking related cancers all the time.

Kara

Yeah, but people do it anyway.

Ed

Yeah.

Kara

I get that, yeah. That makes sense.

Ed

And then Frank Howard of Standard Oil. Uh, we do not feel justified in giving up what has come to the industry like a gift from heaven on the possibility that a hazard may be involved in it. Think about that quote. We cannot just give up on leaded gasoline, which has totally revolutionized the vehicle industry just because we think that there might be a hazard in it.

Kara

Like I think that one can be subjective and argued.

Ed

Yeah.

Kara

It's an interesting quote though.

Ed

Yeah, it it's a very capitalistic thing to say.

Kara

Yeah. Yeah.

Ed

Right. It it would be like, okay, we find the cure for cancer, right? Which obviously that's a whole nother animal altogether, but okay, you find a cure for cancer, and the only downside is that this cure will kill 0.0001% of cancer patients, but the 99.000009 other people will live and be completely cured of cancer. Do we axe that cure because of that tiny fraction of a percent?

Kara

Right. The other one it reminds me of is is uh nuclear power. Yeah, that's what it reminds me of.

Ed

Yeah, yeah. Do we get rid of all nuclear power because of three mile island and Chernobyl and Fukushima? Yeah, yeah, those three disasters were pretty gnarly, but compared to what else? Burning coal forever?

Kara

Like what's worse?

Ed

It's it and it's it's an engineering thing, it's a f it's like a philosophical engineering idea. And and I've got to imagine that there's people out there that are on the cusp of these incredible scientific discoveries, and yet like the thing that's holding them back is the prospect that there's a certain percent of harm that will come of it. And at what point do you have to what ratio is there like, okay, we can't proceed because there's too much harm, or we can proceed because there's not enough harm?

Kara

Yeah, it's weird.

Ed

I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know what because I think in Midgley's mind, when he was making lead and gasoline in the 20s, he's like, guys, it's we're talking like one gallon of this compound used for a thousand gallons. Like, how bad could it be? And I think he honestly believed that. And I also think he knew that lead is not good to breathe in, even though you remember at the very beginning of the episode last episode, he had just gotten back from Miami being treated for lead poisoning, and then he did that public display where he washed his hands in leaded gasoline, and he like breathed in the fumes for a while, uh, just to show that it's okay. It it's just it's a wild ride.

Kara

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.

Ed

Yeah, the whole leaded gasoline thing turned it that that to me it is the epitome of a dumpster fire. It's people thought it through. People thought this was going to be the greatest thing, and it turned out killing potentially a hundred million people over the past hundred years. And that is a story of Ethel. Poor Ethel. She gets a bed rap.

Kara

Poor Ethel. Well, thank you for that depressing and enlightening ending of an episode.

Ed

Do you have anything coming up?

Kara

I haven't decided. I do know that I am working with a friend on an episode about um some some smaller failures in music history, so that'll be fun. Um, I'm not sure when that will be done, truthfully.

Ed

Is that the one with uh Deja?

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

Okay.

Kara

So I've got that going on.

Ed

So yeah, I saw your text messages about that. So it'd be like a uh it'd be like a uh uh third person.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

Okay. I could see that being interesting. I don't know much about dumpster fires in music history, so I'll have to do some research.

Kara

There's a lot of funny ones that are small, like they're not huge dumpster fires, and we're like a bunch of little trash can fires. I think that's what we're going, that's what we're leading towards.

Ed

Um there's something a little more lighthearted versus millions of people dying. Like a singer threw up on stage once, and some really botched like national anthem performances and well, there's also the really controversial stuff where like Sinead O'Connor tearing up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live.

Kara

Yeah, there's a lot of them. I'm gonna keep with the funny ones.

Ed

Yeah, I'm curious to see what the funny ones are. I think that'd be that'll be a nice uh uplifting dumpster fire, if that's even a thing.

Kara

Yeah. So that's what that's what we're doing over here.

Ed

Okay. Yep, yep. Alrighty. Well, uh, for the rest of you guys out there, do us a huge favor. Tell your friends, tell your family. If you are carpooling, put on the podcast, make everybody listen to it. I challenge you to go find like three other people and tell them about the podcast. If you are finding people that like the show, or if you like the show, uh please, please, please, you could send us an email uh if you've got ideas for trash can fires or even dumpster fires that you know of in history. Yeah, that would be a good topic. Uh, let us know. We will try to get the whole Patreon thing figured out. And yeah, we'll keep you updated on that. And so, yeah, in the meantime, you know, keep it a hot mess. Thanks for listening. Bye.