Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser
Uploaded: 2025-08-05T17:00:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2360 - Caroline Fraser

The Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day
Thanks for doing this
Thank you for having me. So I've read about the premise of your book online and
immediately
I'm like I gotta talk to this lady. That sounds crazy
Please tell people what the premise is just so we get started with this
Yeah, well I started thinking about this long time ago looks called murder land.
Yeah, the book is murder land and
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s around the time when there were
a lot of
You know serial killers beginning to pop up and there always had been this
question
Why are there so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest?
And so that was the question I was really thinking about and the 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
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 and the people who've
been exposed to it
So that was you know what emerged to me
Gradually over the years. I mean, I didn't know a lot about this when I started
I knew about the serial killers, but I didn't really know about the whole lead
story and
That came about
You know, I learned about it in part because of some murders. I mean I live in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a lovely place
Unfortunately, New Mexico has a high rate of homicides
And in part it's because it's a poor state and
Doesn't have a big tax base and has you know some issues with
Drug and alcohol addiction and few years ago, maybe
2008 or something like that
Some people couple people were murdered down the street from me and I live in a
very
Peaceful neighborhood, you know very and
And that was something that really made me start thinking about
The issue of maybe you know, it might be a good idea to think of moving back to
the Pacific Northwest
I wish I wanted to do anyway because I have family up there and
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
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
You know within minutes discovered that there had been
An infamous
Lead and copper smelter in the city of Tacoma
Which is just south of Vashon Island and
So Vashon received a lot of the pollution from that smelter and
So that began a whole process of kind of learning about
What happened here? You know what happened in this region?
And I also knew because I'm
Sort of really interested in serial killers as I mentioned and had been for a
long time
Reading about them and reading about Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway
And I knew that both Bundy and Gary Ridgeway who was the Green River killer
Had grown up in Tacoma
At the same time that the smelter is you know the smelter had been operated
Operating there since the 1880s 1890s, so for a very long time
And I could see that a lot of
News media had been devoted to looking at
What had happened in this in this region, you know there was a
Whole map a GIS map geographic, you know information systems that allowed you
to look up individual
Houses, you know residential homes in Tacoma and see how much arsenic and lead
pollution
Was in the yards so I discovered that you could actually look up the house
where Ted Bundy grew up
And see how much lead was in his front yard and his backyard and
The more I read about lead pollution and lead
The association with aggression and violence the more I wondered is there a
story to be told here about this issue?
So this
This issue of lead pollution is it just serial killers or is there an elevated
amount of violent crime that goes along with it?
Yeah, the the issue of serial killers is one that I
Kind of introduced as a you know the most extreme
Example right, but most most of the research that's been done has focused on
Aggression juvenile delinquency for example, there are long-term studies that
look at
kids who were exposed to lead
Including in relatively small amounts
And then what happens to them later?
You know by the time they're you know teenagers or young adults and
They have shown a very strong association with
You know problems with learning
ADHD
And and as I said delinquency and and crime and what they've even shown that in
places that don't have smelters where people are just
Dealing with leaded gasoline that was used up until the 1990s, right?
That's right. Yeah
Decrease in IQ
A lot of factors that they can
Directly tie into just the lead from gasoline, which is significantly less
Than I would assume you'd get from a large-scale smelting operation
Yeah, and the the lead and gas is
Particularly tragic because that was essentially a kind of
horrific
Experiment that was conducted on generations of kids in this country
Yeah, and adults because
Everybody was exposed to that
Obviously some people more than others if you lived next to a major highway or
something like that
You are getting more of it then yeah
Then 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 and so forth so
It was it was a terrible idea and they knew that at the time, you know the
companies the corporations the people who introduced it
Standard Oil, DuPont, etc.
They knew the dangers of this they were told by
Medical doctors who said yeah, who said
this will
expose everybody
to you know more lead than than human beings have ever had to deal with before
Wow and and they just did it to stop the engines from knocking
They did and apparently there were alternatives, but the alternatives which
were like ethanol
We're not something that could be patented
We're not
Products that you could make money off of and so all these corporations chose
to do this
Yeah, I mean it's it's really almost unreal to think about
The the moral
Failures that this I mean failure doesn't even seem strong enough
It doesn't it's so evil
It's so strange how many times that that has happened in in human history and
in fairly recent history
where companies know what they're putting out or what they're releasing or what
they're prescribing or whatever
It is is going to damage people and they know that short-term they can make a
lot of money and so they do it anyway
Yeah, and they did for four decades because
you know this began and the in the 20s and 30s, so
We can assume that the smelting thing they probably didn't know correct like us
at least in the 1800s
Yeah, and 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 and
the
Smelter in Tacoma was owned by a company called a sarco, which was the American
smelting and refining company
Owned by the Guggenheim family. Oh boy, and
But they've done so much for art
Yeah, I mean that it's just that's what they like to do
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a totally kind of whitewashing the reputation
Yeah, and they were among the you know earlier
Corporations to do that and totally successfully
It's so dark. Um my friend Peter Berg
explained to me the
Origins of the Nobel Prize
Did you know the origins of the Nobel Prize?
It has something to do with with explosives. Yes, the the gentleman who the
Nobel Prize is named after
they erroneously reported that he was dead in the newspaper and
They called him the merchant of death in the newspaper and you like oh my god
This is what people think about me because he invented dynamite and so he's
like
I've got to do something to clean up my reputation so he devised this strategy
of
Awarding this prestigious award named after him
to all the great scientists and Nobel Peace Prize and all these different
things so now when people hear the term Nobel like oh
He's a Nobel laureate. Oh, he's he's Nobel Prize winner and
That's the origin of it. It was just a whitewashing operation
Yeah, I mean this the same thing happened with
the guy who invented the leaded gas
formula Thomas Midgley
Who was really a terrible guy
He invented the the leaded gas stuff. He also invented
chlorofluorocarbons, you know the stuff in
Refrigerants that caused the ozone layer hole the hole in the ozone layer
Oh, terrific
So like two of the most devastating
Discoveries scientific discoveries in the 20th century are down to the sky and
he was awarded the you know highest metal from the
You know American chemistry
Association which he still holds I mean even though he he became really ill
as a result I think of working with this
Tetro you know tetra ethyl it's called the the substance that was added to the
leaded gas and
He you know went to Florida to try and heal himself
Of this which I don't think you can do I mean I I don't think going to Florida
heals
Lead exposure, but he yes, and he developed something which was called polio,
you know, he became
You know unable to walk and he invented this whole bizarre
kind of
System of pulleys that he could use to to
Lift himself out of bed and eventually he strangled
to death in this
Sort of harness thing
Which that it may have been suicide it may have been an accident
Kind of unclear Wow
So when you first started investigating this was your interest in serial
killers
You always had an interest in serial kills, which is always weird to me. How
many women are interested in serial killers?
Like all the top true crime podcasts if you look at their demographics
It's a large chunk of it is women and I know the women in my house love to
watch those true crime shows and
those serial killer which I did the disturbs the shit out of me like my family
was watching something on the night stalker and
Richard Ramirez and
Like I can't watch this. I can't what I get sick. I get sick. I can't watch it.
They're like
Fascinated like why is that? Why do you think women are so interested not like
lumping you in with all women?
But there is a weird thing
With women in true crime podcast yeah, I think that that has to do with the
fact that women deal with
fear you know fear of
and it may be very you know nebulous it may be kind of unclear what you know,
but a lot of women have just had the experience of
being afraid walking alone at night or
Walking through a parking lot or you know, or they've had direct experience of
you know, some kind of of
male violence or aggression, you know at home domestic violence, so
I think there's a whole gamut of
experiences that women
Have had to one extent or another
That feed into that and for me it was growing up
You know just a couple of miles from
the places where Ted Bundy began
abducting
Women in the summer of you know the 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 a an unusual
Thing and and this this was happening, you know women were disappearing from
Dorm rooms or their rooms at University of Washington
They were disappearing off the street
And then they weren't seen again
For weeks for months, you know in the July of 1974
I was 13 and
On a really hot, you know Sunday afternoon
In 1974 two women disappea